Design is Central to Value Creation

There is a common misconception that design is just about aesthetics and therefore its strategic and economic importance is often dismissed. Design is not just about how a product looks or behaves, but the overall mission and vision of the company. It could serve as a strategic differentiator. Unlike rare cases where the customer pain is so deep that they are willing to put up with a bad design, in most cases, it should be an essential part of how your product solves problems. Here is a few examples of how/why design is critical in building a successful company:

1. Creates trust and engagement

Through eloquent design, you can create product experiences that trigger and nurture the right emotional reaction that influences behavior. A new breed of healthcare providers such as Livongo and Omada Health in diabetes management are achieving success by designing care delivery models with a human-centric lens of empathy for their patients. Their mission and business plan are predicated not on an especially novel technology, but in creating empowering experiences that puts patients in charge of their health outcome. From smart scales and connected glucometers or blood pressure cuffs, to intuitive mobile interfaces, they’ve created a holistic, easy-to-use tool that fits into people’s lives and engages them to create lasting behavior change. Data science or devices don’t drive the value in patient care interactions without thinking deeply about human emotions and behaviors.

Users don’t care much about what’s underneath a product or service, but they do care about what they see, feel, and experience. A well-thought-out design brings a unique combination of creativity, aesthetic sense and deep customer understanding that embraces the full user experience which will lead to higher engagement.

If patients don’t love and trust the experience enough to sustain engagement over long periods, many of these therapies — and products — will fail.

2. Communicates the value

The interface is your initial pitch to the user and regardless of how useful the app, a poor design immediately tells the user it has little value. Let’s look at one of my favorite apps, Calm, the leading app for sleep and meditation. They truly understand the psychological needs of their users. For people who never meditated, there was nothing gratifying about mediation, until Calm came around and changed the experience. Upon opening the app, before the user enters any information about themselves, they’re greeted with soothing nature sounds and a scenic background with minimal elements. Many users allow the nature video to run in the background and never sign up for the app at all. They just use Calm’s onboarding screen to block out other distractions from their device, and that’s enough.

The app directs the user through as fast as possible without overwhelming or confusing them with superfluous features. The whole experience, including the selected colors and imagery, evokes tranquility and a sense of peace in a user.

3. Serves as a strategic advantage which will drive adoption and usage

Product design is all about trying to link customer needs to product attributes, therefore providing value and a delightful experience for the customers. Let’s look at Bolt, a checkout platform designed to optimize the shopping experience by bundling all the tools retailers need under its roof. It offers a frictionless checkout experience by:

a. Creating a UX that intuitively and efficiently directs users along the purchase process, prompting them for information along the way, which leads to higher checkout rates.

b. Reducing the number of fields customers generally have to fill in to complete the purchase — something that reduces the cart abandonment rates and encourages users to complete the purchase.

c. Adopting a post-checkout (as opposed to pre-checkout) registration model, meaning a customer can choose to sign up for an account after they’ve entered their payment information. (other models could lead up to 40% dropoff rate because customer second guess their purchase).

By offering a user devoted and frictionless experience, on top of a differentiated technology, Bolt has helped its customers gain 100%+ checkout conversion rate and has reached an annualized payment processing volume of more than $1 billion!

So, if you’re building something,

1. Start with users, not specs (embrace the full user experience and potential sources of delight). Build empathy for the people you’re designing for.

2. Understand the underlying needs of potential users, in their own environments, and what could change their behavior (motivation, ability, prompt, etc.)

3. Design with and for your most extreme, hard-to-engage users.

4. Design as little as possible and don’t burden the interface with non-essentials. Good design is all about purity and simplicity. Don’t optimize for something strange that doesn’t happen that often.

5. Assess design performance with the same rigor as you track your revenue and cost

I’d love to hear your thoughts so feel free to email me at pourya@thinkplus.vc.

This post has been published on www.productschool.com communities