The business impact of great design

I’ve spent a lot of my career championing the value of good design and the positive impact it can have on an organization. In these turbulent times, it has never been more important to ensure businesses are doing everything they can to attract and maintain their customers.

Taking an empathic viewpoint

Being able to see or understand challenges from someone else's perspective is fundamental in user-centric design and design thinking. Understanding the challenges, the opportunity, the ecosystem, what drives value, the motivation, the barriers to entry, and how to act on these insights is key to problem-solving and translating ideas into amazing experiences.

Consumers have never had more choice and their expectations around digital services have never been higher. To understand and design for them, we must take a holistic, contextual multidimensional view which includes both quantitative and qualitative data and insight. It’s one of the reasons we’ve launched our Design Hustles, which I’ll explain in greater detail later.

But first, I wanted to share some insights on how great design can – and will – impact your business.

Improving conversion rates

According to Forrester research, better UX design can yield conversion rates up to 400%. It’s a staggering figure, but not a surprising one – especially if you work in the design sector.

It can also make a huge difference to pivotal factors like revenue, valuation, and time. The graph below, from the InVision New Design Frontier report, shows there is a direct correlation between the business benefit that design drives and the degree of organizational adoption of design best practice.

You can also see in the same graph that companies that view design as business strategy generate four times more revenue than those who view design simply as a way to make a product look good. Cost savings improve five-fold and speed to market is boosted by six.

The report, with more than 2,200 designers interviewed around the globe, also found that 42% of the companies surveyed improved revenue with design, 35% improved conversions, and 30% made cost savings. The list goes on.

There’s now so much data out there that proves just how important design is for building successful products and services, it’s impossible to ignore it. If you take website design as just one small but vital example, more than half (52%) say that a poor mobile experience will make them less likely to engage with a company. In fact, judgments on a company’s credibility are reportedly 75% based on the company’s website design.

Experience is number one

As we all know, we’re in unusual times and businesses and industries must respond quickly to new challenges and opportunities as they present themselves. There’s a need for speed like never before.

But it’s not just the need for huge strides to be taken quickly. Today, we’re also seeing the age-old focus of design is shifting. Experience is becoming the key driver of user engagement and retention over profitability.

So much so, that a study led by the Temkin Group found that companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within three years of investing in customer experience.

How we unlock design potential for our clients

I could preach for far longer than the word count allows about the importance of incorporating design into your business strategy. Instead, let’s focus on how we move that theory to practice.

Read on to find out how we work with our sport and entertainment clients to ensure their organizations reach their full potential with the help of great design.

1. Design Hustles

To ensure our design thinking process begins with a true understanding and appreciation of the challenge, we run ‘Design Hustles’ for our clients (as well as internal teams) to identify and solve problems in a structured and systematic way. The workshops are led by a specialized squad of our design experts to form and shape ideas, uncover insights, and make things that are otherwise intangible, tangible. I explained more about our Hustles in a recent article, you can read the piece here.

Whilst the range of challenges we have tackled using our Design Hustles is vast, the process always follows a similar pattern. Whereby we run a series of rapid design sprints to help unstick a particular challenge or uncover specific insights. What makes our Design Hustles so successful is that it doesn’t matter how big or small your challenge is as we can repeat this cycle until the objective is achieved.

They can help:

• Identify opportunities for product innovation
• Define a product vision and strategy
• Align stakeholders on a product vision
• Test the viability of a concept or product
• Accelerate vision through prototyping and validation
• Reinvigorate in-market products
• Identify areas to drive engagement and loyalty

2. Product Creation

Ultimately, we’re all here to create great products that resonate with our users. When appropriate, following our Design Hustle stage, we move into Product Creation mode, where we work together to design, prototype, and deploy fan-first services.

This helps our clients to:

• Enhance organizational adoption
• Simplify the experience and product and service offering
• Increase brand perception and customers’ lifetime value
• Improve operational efficiency and reduce costs
• Ramp up the competitive advantage
• Embrace and support cultural change
• Increase business growth and value – both functional and financial

The result is measured, tailored, and intelligent that delivers on-point business impact every single time.

Why choose us to develop your design strategy

If we’re sounding like the business to help push your own forward in these challenging times, then read on to find out a little more about us.

1. Focused

We’re fixated on one thing – on delivering the most cutting-edge sport and entertainment experiences to viewers across the globe, across all devices. All 1,000+ of our employees live and breathe this world and never ‘settle’ for anything other than excellence.

2. Proven

Our 30-year history means we’ve seen it all. We know what works, what doesn’t, and understand better than anyone how to solve client problems through design.

3. Data-led

There’s a time and a place for gut instinct – it doesn’t have a place in our work. As previously mentioned, we let quantitative and qualitative data guide our decision-making across all aspects of the design process.

4. Global

Every culture is different. We work with a broad range of global businesses, understanding the nuances within each. We’re firm believers that diversity is the core of creativity and innovation.

5. Progressive

No company in the world is as immersed in the world of sport and entertainment as we are. Working alongside our own in-house Innovation Lab, we have our finger on the pulse of the latest trends in video consumption and understand what motivates end-users.

6. Trusted

In live sport and entertainment, there’s no margin for error. Products have to launch on time, scale in the moments that matter most, and stand out from a market that’s never been more crowded. We’ve proven time and time again our ability to deliver.

As always, if you’d like to find out more about how we can bring this design thinking to your organization, we’d love to hear from you.

Do you have any questions about the business impact of great design? Let us know on Twitter or LinkedIn.