What is Design Strategy? And why does it matter? (A Design Talk)
So yesterday (or this morning), I gave an online talk with Women Talk Design alongside some amazingly talented women. Having now joined my 3rd start-up (from scratch), I have found myself re-living some typical first-hand ‘strategy’ questions and experiences with founders, as we try to answer ‘What is our plan?’.
This audience consisted mainly of designers, so the talk was aimed to help other designers moving into their first strategic design role, or being the first or main design hire in a start-up. However, having spoken with others, I found it could also be useful for founders, product managers, tech leads, head of product, marketing, and engineers working closely with designers and struggling to understand why there could be a disconnect.
So, here are some key things I gave away in my talk and my take on why design strategy matters:
What is design strategy?
To put it simply.
Design Strategy is choosing what to do and what not to do when creating your product, brand or service.
It is not: deciding what pictures, styles, materials and colours to use. The brand name, tone of voice or logo. These are areas in design that form sub-parts of the design strategy in the form of a Design Style Guide, Design DNA, or Visual Brand Language Guide.
Design Strategy is having a plan and focus for creating something based on making hard decisions and trade-offs. It involves asking yourself (or the team) ‘what needs to be done or agreed for things to happen?’ and ‘where is best to focus our efforts’. Really, it refers to, what are we designing and why, and once clearly answered, it then focuses on considering how it should be executed.
Both business strategy and design strategy work together for success. However, individually they focus deeper on different areas. Business strategy relates to core business objectives such as, the business model, commercialisation strategies, price points, number of products and services a company should offer to compete in the market, etc. Whereas design strategy builds on this thinking to create a ‘plan’ that aims to focus everyone on creating the right product, brand or service which people will connect with, use and are willing to pay for.
OK. Why is it useful to me?
Well, if you are already a designer, it forces you to ask more purposeful value and improvement questions upfront, before jumping into crafting a solution. Questions like “What kind of conversion/sales rate increase do you hope to see after a re-design” or “Why do you need a design, what are you hoping to achieve?”. This saves you a lot of wasted time and design effort with answers to these types of questions providing you, and others with a benchmark to judge ideas against.
A second reason is, it naturally gives you a language to discuss or ‘sell design’ to other non-designers. As you can also begin to explain ways of how you are going to measure the designs' success for the business. “At the end of the day, Strategy is what drives decisions in business”, so to take part in it at the business level — you need to understand it. This is how the value of design (and your design work) is communicated and understood by everyone else around that isn’t a designer.
“Design is not just about what the end customer wants, its also about selling things”. John Maeda
A third reason is, when we as designers begin to think strategically, instead of purely tactically, our skill set becomes much more of a tool to design a solution for future business opportunities. And, in return, we become much more focused on problem-solving and promoting a proactive collaborative team behaviour. As you start to realize, that actually, everyone is pushing towards the same end goal.
OK, but I’m not a designer, why is it useful to me?
Well, wouldn’t it be nice to speak the same language when reviewing designs? This gives you that benefit, as it builds that verbal and communication relationship between design and business. You will find that in fact, you spend less time thinking about ‘how can I communicate this to the designer?’ and much more time on, ‘what do we need to discuss today to move forward’.
I usually hear stories from non-designers with issues of designers being so focused on creating something to win a design award or add to their portfolio, that they didn’t quite get where they were coming from in a discussion. Or, a designer that couldn’t quite explain, how this great design this was going to help meet the business objectives.
So actually, being aware that there is such a thing called ‘Design Strategy’ and there is a difference of this awareness amongst designers is already a good starting point to avoid you going insane!
OK. So why does Design Strategy matter?
Well, if it still isn’t fully clear:
“It matters because it is a way to bridge the gap from design to business”.
It is the way you figure out your current target audience or businesses situation and what they need, and how to use design as a tool to help them get to their desired situation. Here is a great quote I slightly tweaked from Darian Rosebrook’s Marvel blog post:
“When you understand what a business, user or brand is trying to accomplish, you can propose a solution that answers the business problem with creativity.” — Douglas Davis, Creative Strategy and the Business of Design
Got it! Ok, so how do you do it?
Here’s the tough part! In a nutshell a loose rough framework I have found is this:
- Define your big vision / problem / challenge
- Specify your goals
- Research — identify where your competitive advantage actually is
- Measure results & review success
As with most things, you need a clear vision right! So decide or find out what the reason is as to why something needs to be ‘designed’. What problem will it solve for the business or the end user? This may be more difficult than you think, as sometimes what is perceived as ‘a problem’ or ‘cool idea that everyone would want’ is not actually true.
Then, build some crude hard factual end goal/s you want to reach or achieve? These don’t have to be deep emotional user goals. They can be as simple as: getting a customer to purchase a can of soup, if you happen to have a soup shopping website, retails store or app. If you can’t specify what these goals are, then essentially you’re just setting yourself up for a never ending project. Or even worse, a project that can easily change direction at a whim.
Once set, research properly into your market area. Find out anything and everything that may impact your designs and the business’s success. A lot of the time, people are so excited by a new idea or an opportunity to re-design something, that they skip or skim this part and fail to be fully aware of what else is going on around them. You need to understand the needs and wants of your target audience and how they can be influenced by alternative offerings, trends, or any social or economic factors coming their way.
Then, as you work through the project, you will need to find a way to constantly keep measuring your success, to know if you are on track to reaching your goals. In ‘business speak’ this is done by quantifiable measurable indicators such as ‘Key Performance Indicators’, ‘Success/Fail Percentage Rates’ etc. In creative speak this is done by assessing things such as, measurements of ‘time to complete a task’, ‘customer pleasure/ satisfaction/engagement’ or ‘customer advocacy level of a new product’. But there is no one size fits all approach, this will very much depend on your goals and type of business or project you are working with.
Thanks for reading. I’m a Design Leader, writer and speaker interested in design strategy. I help to create complete experiences for end-consumers and businesses.
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