At AIGA: The fastest ways to get your business to invest in design

[Music] designers need to become business minded if we don't we will become irrelevant eight years of pattern recognition of hiring designers suggests to me that this is not obvious to us yet and it really really really should be our survival our industry's survival the design industry survival depends on us understanding this concept Michael Beirut is a hero in these parts I mean AIGA you know that's this is Michael Beirut it's what it's all about right he's a he's a design savant for many decades he he's designed work for the New York Times MIT Media Lab the Billboard magazine for Hillary Clinton's campaign he's renowned and his work captures the imagination and this past year he puts out this book and it's a really good book has anyone here read read how to great a few hands go up it's a really good book you should get it but here's this renowned amazing designer who picks a really peculiar title for his book how to use graphic design to sell things explain things make things look better make people laugh make people cry and every once in a while changed the world that's the title of his book I love the title of the book you know as designers in the design community the thing that I've seen I've been designing now for 14 years and the thing that I see is we index really really highly on changing the world that's the stuff you love talking about right that's that's why we get into design in the first place that's what makes design so special being able to use our craft our tools and our mindset to create products that change the world but I'd like to suggest that the word sell you know it's no mistake that the word sell comes before all of these things our ability to sell that's the primal part of design and we'll go through some of the Masters and and their thoughts around selling in design here in a second but I decided to reach out to Michael and I really wanted to know you know this guy not necessarily known for selling things but known for creating these amazing experience these amazing pieces of art almost I wanted to ask him and I did ask him how did you know to start the title of your book with the word sell it almost feels a little crass it even feels a little crass you know standing here at AIGA this prestigious graphic design conference I'm talking about money in business and selling feels a little weird it's my first time speaking here but feels a little bit weird I feel a little bit out of place it's an imminent conversation I promise you we are way ahead of the curve in about a year year and a half from now I think this will be the topic being discussed business and design anyway I reached out to Michael I said how did you know to use the word cell in your in your book title and his and I tweeted him and you guys can google the tweet but I loved his response he said I figured and start with the obvious one it's not obvious it's just not obvious but of course to him he's been doing it for so long he's a master it is obvious with experience it becomes obvious that takes time it's not something we're taught in schools it's definitely not something we celebrate at work we don't celebrate talking about business we celebrate all the other stuff around design but making people laugh and the feelings and the change in the world this other quote I came across this quote five or six years ago and I read a lot of books and I love quotes just you learn a lot just from a little snippet anything that won't sell I don't want to invent it's sale is proof of utility and utility is success Thomas Edison a man who could have invented anything it seems right decided to focus his energy his life's work the body of everything he created on delivering utility that's what he was all about delivering utility and again it it suggests the very primal part of design with clear purposefulness in making an object that you've design or a widget or service you design fit very clearly in someone's life that is the the first order of what it is we do as designers the functionality of it the deliberateness of it the reliability of it and then eventually we get to the beautiful state but that's the last thing we got to first it needs to be purposeful and needs to it needs to it needs to fit in people's lives in a very meaningful purposeful way I did a video series and I'm gonna play a couple of videos from the video series the video series is called high resolution unlikely that anyone here is watched it but if you have raise your hands if you guys heard of high resolution literally three hands amazing so I'm getting a new audience here I did this video series with a friend of mine Jared or on do also Dan tastic designer and we sat down with 25 masters of the design industry you go to youtube.com slash higher resolution you can look at all 25 episodes and John Maeda is one of the one of the people that we we spoke to and every guest that we spoke to on the series we opened with exactly the same question what's one thing about design that's clear to you that isn't clear to other people and almost every guest gave us a very verbose thorough answer but not John John gave us a very quick answer we weren't expecting it I'm gonna play his answer for you and then we're gonna talk about it a little bit it's great to have you about to be here so the first question what's one thing about design that's clear to you that is not so clear to other people designs about a customer update just a user designs always been about selling things even back to the era of the Bauhaus but somehow design became disconnected from its capitalistic sort of frame okay design is about the customer not just the user design has always been about selling things throughout high resolution as we film these episodes you know I learn to look for the simple ideas and we talked we went deep on data we went deep on customer journeys we went deep on business creating teams hiring that sort of thing we spread the gamut of everything we come to think of when we think about design but I look for the simple ideas you know Daniel burka one of it in his episode he talks about design being the scientific method of a business and I love that framing but it's a simple I did very easy to overlook Gentry Underwood talks about naive obviousness and then John Maeda comes around and says design is about the customer not the user and I will say I confess in the moment when he said that I was a little annoyed I really wanted something more and it was after the episode aired after a few weeks of me watching it really trying to understand it that I finally kind of got it he's so poignant so clear with the delivery said earlier says it's not about the users it's about the human well human in a business context is the customer and that simple idea when it finally framed for me which is why by the way this talk as a prototype I've never done this talk before I'm framing it around this idea around not users but customers and the implications of it not just for the customer purchasing it purchasing your product but also for the business who wants to create value for the customer this next video is a gentleman by the name of Phil Gilbert over at IBM will play his video and then we'll talk about him in a second and I think is practiced in most places is it's practiced as an other it's practice as design capital D and that almost precludes to some degree design ever actually having a seat at the business hmm it's it it's too often not positioned as a business thing its positioned as a design thing because if you don't have a seat at that business table over long periods of time I'm talking decades your influence will wane because there are other things that will take top-of-mind design is too often not positioned at positioned as a business thing this is coming from a man at IBM who leads a team of many thousands of designers four years ago IBM wasn't even thinking about design the way they do think about design today and it all happened because the CEO Ginni she came to Phil and said you need to bring design this thing called UX design you've got to bring it to IBM and Phil an experienced entrepreneur and an experienced designer you know takes takes the lead on bringing design to IBM not by designing beautiful experiences but by showing the change in sales and NPS scores and customer satisfaction and return customers he focused the entire vocabulary of design in words that the business understood and four years later hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested into design at IBM and they're really starting to lead the way on design thinking IBM design thinking it's actually some school that they've established at IBM because of a lot of the effort on getting designers to start thinking about the business I kind of hope every company can make that level of investment in design but I think a lot of people in the business probably need to make they need something between the design and the making leap to the investment of designer that something is showing the business how design can drive value I want to let this slide sit for a second the long road to design relevance in your company is paved in bricks of business awareness the Masters have already figured this out the masters stay relevant for decades because they figured out how to sell it's not just because their work was great their work was great because we were sold we were converted to believe that the work was great they've been selling the entire time designs capacity to survive is tied to selling but it is up to us to create something of utility not just beauty how many people in this room are students okay we've got about fifteen percent or so of the room how many people practice UX today actually practice it at work how many people are looking to practice UX Wow okay so we've got about a 25 25 15 and then the rest is I guess you guys are just learning about UX right you know I've been as I said I've been designing for 14 years I gotta say the people getting into UX design and and and and coming out of school today the world is just different eight years ago we didn't have this Cambrian explosion so to speak of what is happening today in the UX world I mean think about it there are products coming out every feels like every quarter we've got adobe of course amazing sponsor we've got envision we've got figma and we've got principal and we've got framer and every quarter there's something new coming out that helps us understand the user experience helps us frame the user experience on a screen we've gotten so good at using these tools that we can actually fake what good design looks like right that's the the whole dribble ization of design but you have to ask yourself if we're mastering user experience to what end are remastering it I spent some time asking businesspeople you know I used to be a we work I LED digital design for we work for a few years I have my own company now for the past few years have really been trying to understand how business people think about user experience and these are some of the words that come to mind apps interface interaction and motion look and feel architecture flows these are the the words business people use when they think of user experience you know five six years ago CEOs didn't care about user experience now everyone suddenly cares about user experience but they care about it in the context of these words and if you really start to drill down and if you look at a job board you're gonna start to notice a correlation between these words and the jobs that are on the market for designers you know you think of a word like apps it's a product designer so even a business person thinks apps they think product design interface UI designer interaction and motion prototype or interaction designer right look and feel a visual designer architecture and flows information architect right our roles have been designed and fragmented to the words that business people tend to use when they think about user experience design and all these all of these these roles converge into one thing one outcome to create a widget the best possible widget that you can I'm a user experience designer and I think creating widgets with user experience design mindsets using all every aspect of what user experience designers do from the research to the copywriting the microcopy the the information architecture and the visual design all of it matters all of that matters but you have to ask yourself to what end certainly can't be just about creating a widget that can't be the terminus and I say started putting this presentation together something became really clear to me a user seems of the the word user seems like a few layers abstracted from what actually matters which is the customer the customer is how businesses think about human beings what do you think of a user you're thinking about someone using your product but there's there's an entirely different set of preconditions that lead to someone deciding to download or buy your product that's the human aspect of it that's where the real innovation needs to happen and that's the big opportunity for design and has just become clear to me that all these roles that we fragmented away from from what design is has has caused us to to layer away to abstract the way the human being behind it because when I'm a motion designer I'm thinking about motion I'm not thinking about the customer I'm thinking about flows I'm thinking about flows I'm not thinking about the customer and so I think the the real problem is that specialized roles in design are a roadblock to business progress and and roadblocks will always be diminished to near irrelevance Jared spool has a has a great article where he talks about he talks about the role of or the binary working relationship between specialized designers and generalized designers where specialized designers are almost always either over utilized and overworked or underutilized and businesses tend to think of you as a loss when you're underutilized when you're not being used in the design process because of yours your specialty is not being back in for a specific part of the design process you are a cost center to the business and so I'm gonna skip through this real quick and so what we want to impose on you is that generalize design skills that's the new breed of designer that we need not a motion designer but a general user experience and customer experience designer that's what brings us closer to the customer and that's what brings us closer to the business and I'll explain how user experience design one small subset of the customer experience almost every other subset in the customer experience is business-related it is not designed related finance sales operations support these are not designed fields and by no means will these ever be under the auspices of design design is not going to lead business strategy and pricing they're not going to lead the support center it's just not gonna happen so the real art then is for design to forge or designers to forge an intentional and specific customer experience through diplomacy across the business for us to speak the language of the business as I said earlier the customer experience precedes the user experience it is our job as designers to use what we know about design to set the stage for what people will experience in our products and then to use user experience to resolve the stage that we set in the first place some of the words that business people use when they think about the customer value created value transfer pricing margins time conversions this is the vocabulary we should be designing in this is these are the words we should be using inside of companies if you want businesses to care and invest in design these are the words they care about but of course if we kind of take ourselves out of the situation we think about the business side there's a flipside to the business side which is a customer side everything the customer is asking all the questions that they're asking before they ever experience your user experience and use your product you know is this for me can I afford this what else is there do I really need this now our job is design is to use that diplomacy in the business to influence the answers to these questions it's not to determine them but certainly to influence them I promise you I'm gonna run through this very quickly now simple order of operations I'm just going to read slide by slide because I'm not gonna be able to improvise better than what I've written on these slides designs relevance to a business is a direct correlation to the value transfer from the customer to the business money transfer money is never going to go out of style guys it's not crass it's good you make money you finance design you don't make money design becomes irrelevant money is tied to this the numbers are tied to design being able to sell is tied to design the customers are more likely to transfer value when your company thinks about the entire customer experience not just the products experience the customer experience cannot be deliberately designed without an upfront understanding of the business and people who run it our job as designers for the next few decades will be to learn the business language to understand businesspeople to partner with them and to use the design mindset to drive differentiated outcomes for our customer and to drive value that way not creating the beautiful thing not creating widgets it's tying these relationships inside of the company so that the customer experience can be changed not just the product flow you'll know you're doing your job when your customers love to buy your product when your customer buys your product your company makes money this is all part of the order of operations and this is the last slide down and when your company makes money all your diplomatic work comes home to roost more money is invested into design and design in designs influence grows but ultimately of course why do we do that why is that important because when designs influence grows customer wins it's all about said so what do you do if your design team is thinking that way but your sort of business side of the business or the company that you work for doesn't understand that value I know it sounds really up but I think you know like do you mean like they don't get why we think that's important to know the customer in that way yeah two pieces of bad news the first is it doesn't matter the first piece it doesn't matter that the business does not know that of course the business does not know that the designers don't know that and that's the second piece of bad news and if the designers do know that there's a really simple way of showing the business reliably that designs value is to the business not just to create widgets which is being able to drive numbers there are very simple ways to show that you can tie your widget outcome to a numbers outcome on the business side it requires that we reach across the aisle and that we talk to people on the business side always they don't know what we do it's a lot simpler than you think but like but it also doesn't matter the business people don't care they'll sell either way with or without us we need the business more than the business needs us to be completely honest with you and that'll flip it'll flip soon enough we're just not there yet a couple years ago there was a quiz going around that was like choose a or b it was two layouts of like a checkout page for a website choose as a designer which one do you think had a higher conversion rate a or B and then you choose often I was wrong because you'd you know choose the one that objectively or subjectively looked better no it was better designed but the uglier one converted higher is the uglier one's still good design yes because beauty is is is the last order of what design is this is a very good question and a very important question our job as designers is to create functionality and deliver that functionality through utility reliably and if we can also do it beautifully then we win but the business doesn't win because a beautiful design the business wins because of the utility that we deliver so uglier design might be ugly to you and I because we're designers but you know what the user the user is God the customer is God they've decided hi I'm seeing a huge upswing with especially large corporation fortune 500 companies that they really hone in on a specialized you know either your interaction design on your motion or your visual and they're very specific on that whereas I agree with your opinion that we need to be journalist of design what are your thoughts on becoming so general that you then become a master of nothing or how do you navigate around those waters with these big companies like is there a way to make them see what we see because it's a huge roadblock and they're missing out on fantastic designers because of their mindset it's it's such an important question and such a great framing that you have there I skip past this slide because I ran out of time but um Jared spool you know I mentioned one of his articles earlier he has another article where he talks about he talks about doctors and we tend to think of you know specialized doctors who want a cardiologist working on your on your heart when you have heart problem except that every doctor who specialized has to first become a general doctor you study general medicine before you pick your specialty I worry that designers aren't doing that I worry that designers are picking their specialty too soon without understanding the gamut and spectrum of what it is their job is and what on what actual tools and skills they need to perform their role as a single general purposeful designer on a team you know businesses don't know that businesses don't know that they need a general designer they're just they're they're cheap I hate to say there's cheap the design mature companies understand this you know when you're in a design mature company you can afford to hire specialists because there's so much good work happening at the specialized level when you start think of tech companies like Google and Facebook they need the specialist right but 99.9% of companies out there they don't fall into that category we need to stop telling ourselves this lie that being a specialist makes us more you more useful in the market the real use is us understanding the entire spectrum of design and generalizing in that field and even if your business box is you as a motion designer or a copywriter you're not really boxed you're boxed by your job description but you're not really boxed because you can still think at the customer experience level you could still you know an org structure does not map to a communication structure you know just because you have three layers of bosses above you you could still skirt all that and go to the head of Finance and ask him or her how they make the decision about pricing why did you pick $99 for this product with this 80% gross margin that's insane we should be triple you know we should be charging half that I don't need to be too greedy right you can have those conversations even if you're if you're secluded and boxed into a role that you don't love and then you work your way out of that box but the work the impetus is on us the impetus is not on the business the onus is on us it's not on the business and that's the bad news and the good news that is the opportunity and that's what's so exciting about it it's entirely within our control if we decide to make that mindset shift all these dots I agree 100% but we feel like how do we prove it every quarter I mean that's where we're getting pinned in any advice on that you know public company yes okay that makes ax was publicly tend to think in tend to think in quarters that's tech company fantastic um how do you prove it every quarter well there's if you're in a public company there's a stock price if you're in a private company it's a little bit harder but I don't you I don't think you need to play the quarters game to be honest with you absolutely I don't think you need to even you know business has to operate out you know on a quarterly schedule I mean you guys know this there every year businesses do for earnings calls happens at the end of every single quarter and if you miss your sales margins and you missed the the sales numbers your stock drops you know in the verse is also true so you know what Phil Gilbert said design having a seat at the business table is a decade's long game I'm not gonna have the magic bullet answer for you for the next quarter what I can suggest though is you can start building those relationships now and you can start spending time with the business people now and those chickens will come home to roost I guarantee it relationships is the end game it's the end Paul Rand you know Paul rands quote on what you know someone asked him what do you think design is design is about relationships our relationship to a product a person's relationship to another person a company's relationship to its competitor design is about relationships so we need to focus at the relationship level and it's not gonna happen next quarter and if your business wants you to prove in the next three months that design is a valuable asset and a competitive advantage of the company they're there they're out of their mind and they're wrong it's not possible it's just not possible and I would urge you to maybe leave maybe but that's such a great question thank you I don't want to take up any more time I think I mean I'm Way over time [Applause] [Music]

Channel: High Resolution

Views: 40,827

Rating: 4.9382238 out of 5

Keywords: aiga, design, design thinking, user experience, ux, customer experience, cx, phil gilbert, john maeda, daniel burka, ibm, business, strategy, thomas edison, michael beirut, michael bierut, apps, tech, technology, app design, web design, sales, bobby ghoshal, business design

Id: nGX70EOI6f0

Length: 28min 0sec (1680 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018