business is getting very, very attracted to design

Let’s start by looking at the shapes this movement has taken. According to a survey of 400+ companies, startups are very likely to have CEOs or CXOs to influence design decisions, and those businesses appear to quantifiably benefit from design.

But top management can go further than being involved in design, and actually invest in it. In 2016, General Electric, an icon of US industry, announced a new headquarters, three-fourths of whose employees would be “digital industrial product managers, designers, and developers”. For a corporate office, that number shows an unprecedented proportion for the design function, broadly defined, and its unusual proximity to the power centre of an industrial company.

Or it could actually invite designers to the top. Most of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) 2016 list of most innovative firms has designers and design in positions of power: the likes of Apple, Google, Tesla, Samsung regularly feature on it. Several have designers in the founder group (Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, Pinterest’s Evan Sharp) or as CEOs. Yet other companies have designations like Chief Design Officer (3M, Apple, PepsiCo, Philips) or Executive Creative Officer, or just Chief Creative.

But good businesses have always used design, if not its language. IBM was a design leader decades before today’s design darling, Apple was born. What has changed? An accelerated rise in design consciousness, and concomitantly, its visibility. One can speculate on the causes and the period of this change.

Design has countered commoditisation since at least the 18th century: consider Wedgwood’s famous china ware, a manufactured product carefully designed to meet a series of precise design objectives. To be sure, the same forces of commoditisation keep pace with the thousands of products that appear, washing over them, and making innovation the most prized attribute of modern business. No industry typifies this like information technology.

The top ten of BCG’s innovation list concentrates these prodigies in a tight cluster. These companies either make the tools, like Apple or Google, or embed them into their services so completely that firms like Amazon or Uber may be better seen as technology companies than as supermarket or taxi businesses.

Deep Design’s speculation is that this digital breed has given design this status by employing it in a manner that other industries seek to imitate. Design is now seen by the admirers of these digital wunderkind as a synonym or a precursor to the holy grail, innovation. (While there are overlaps, design and innovation are not identical, but more another time).

Design is now seen by the admirers of these digital wunderkind as a synonym or a precursor to the holy grail, innovation.

In this hypothesis, the digital breed was driven to develop an explicit vocabulary for design to enable its minting as a currency of business, which is now cashable in the boardroom. The vocabulary comes from the field now called user experience or UX. Of course that is, in some sense, what designers have always done. But labels matter: UX points to an outcome, while ’design’ appears to refer more to the activity than the result. The new label expands, and makes more tangible, the older rubrics, ‘usability’ and ‘human computer interface’.

But labels matter: UX points to an outcome, while ’design’ appears to refer more to the activity than the result.

Of course, it’s not wordsmithing alone. UX lays out its methods like a recipe. It makes the tacit knowledge of designers explicit, and re-frames designers’ instincts as a series of steps. It commandeers research from psychology’s cognitive sides. (Both the NASDAQ and Apple’s market cap have more than doubled since Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 bestseller Thinking Fast, and Slow, which made cognitive biases part of every executive’s gab book. And since Kahneman’s 2001 Nobel, Apple’s worth has grown 180 times).

This totally rational emphasis made UX, read design, acceptable to engineers, who actually build the stuff, and may see designers as exotic anarchists. It gave business managers (a good many of them from engineering backgrounds) faith in the predictability of the design outcomes and a means to participate in the process. Design’s mystical ‘black box’ has been broken open, and made to serve new masters. Further this association with technology and business confers approval in a uniquely modern way. This all may apply only to the digital domain, but to business, what else has mattered more in the last two decades?

Increasingly, businesses become more and more virtual, less physical. This makes experience, which is at heart a messy, psychological concept, easy to contain in the palm of your hand, viewed as episodes, each leaving a data trail amenable to analysis.

Design and business have followed the suits. In current design speak, UX defines customer journeys that map how a user (previously: consumer) interacts with a brand. Experience is a universal paradigm; it’s intuitive, from user experience, to imagine customer experience, the emergent new face of marketing. PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer, Mauro Porcini, exemplifies the new argot: people “don’t buy, actually, products anymore, they buy experiences”.

Experience is a universal paradigm; it’s intuitive, from user experience, to imagine customer experience, the emergent new face of marketing.

Boardrooms have adopted design in two ways. The first is to improve design buying, making the company’s investments in, say, product design or communication, more effective. The second is to spread design culture across the company, in the role of a new approach to solving problems or seeing opportunities. To do either, designers will have to face a boardroom, peopled by stalwarts of an ancient regime, so to speak. The qualities they will need in these waters and their experiences thus far will make for a fascinating study.

____________________

First published in a slightly modified form ‘Visionary Position: Design on Top’ in Business Standard, 25 November, in Deep Design, a monthly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

The post Visionary Position: Design on Top appeared first on ICD | Blog.

“The 20th century was the Age of advertising,“ said the Undisputed Strategic Panjandrum, known with awe as USP, “right up to the Great Shift or the digitisation of everything.”

Digital advertising? I asked. Not quite, said the USP kindly.

We sat in his penthouse, piled high with books standing in counterpoint to the housing towers outside. On one pile sat our glasses: whisky for me, sparkling water for the famously teetotal advertising-marketing legend from the late Age. He took a slow sip and began.

In the Age, USP intoned, great brands were built by advertising. It delivered a consistent message, dramatised by an emotional connect, ideally with a claim of product difference. It created a personality you could ‘sense’, and also registered a distinct brand identity—logos, taglines, colours—and packaging, so consumers could recall it at the shop, and ka-Ching!, said USP, dropping an ice-cube into his glass.

In the Age, great brands were built by advertising. It delivered a consistent message, dramatised by an emotional connect.

A certain resistance to, and even distrust of advertising, said the USP, is putting the focus back on the product or service itself. But for some, it was always thus. Take banks, whose brand rests more on the quality of its customer relationships and the service than anything else.

Remember those nationalised banks with their dreary offices? Gandhiji, on the wall, saying “the customer is the purpose of our business”, while account holders queued up before officious, unhelpful staff. Though the odd genial branch manager did help, if you knew one.

A certain resistance and even distrust of advertising, is putting the focus back on the product or service itself.

The Great Shift wasn’t so much the crawling ‘computerisation’ of banks from the 1980s but the entry of private banks after 1994. The new big bank brands of today were built on polite service and pleasant branches, but crucially, on the convenience and empowerment offered by better technology (account statements on demand!), which changed consumer banking.

The biggest of these, web-based banking, has made for many more satisfied customers, at the cost of a reduced relationship with the human and physical elements that make up a brand.

web-based banking, has made for many more satisfied customers, at the cost of a reduced relationship with the human and physical elements that make up a brand.

So much so that many customers find dealing with people less desirable (and some remember old bank staff fondly). In part, it’s because your ‘relationship manager’ also pushes ‘products’, and so seems less of a banker. The mobile app has accelerated the shift, forcing extreme simplicity and giving the ultimate in granular, transactional satisfaction—human-free.

There’s a science to this, called user experience, or UX, a white-hot profession at the moment. These people build journey maps, and study how people figure out what to do, in very fine detail. How to invisibly lead them to their goals, while keeping them informed, re-assured—and thus, happy. Less is better; and anticipating what the user will want next, is best. And to do it all with a certain charm.

What this means, said USP, is that this software driven experience, is the vehicle of service, and thus the relationship that we have with it. One can say that UX is the brand. Branding? Now there’s an app for that.

One can say that UX is the brand. Branding? Now there’s an app for that.

There’s a great opportunity for brands like banks, to build themselves around superb interactions. But UX goes beyond digital and so should banks. My favourite mall is a pleasure to park in, with thoughtful, quality signage, clear visibility and all the details that let me effortlessly navigate it with assurance, convenience and even pleasure. It makes it likelier I’ll shop there.

Everything else ought to support this app-like UX, said USP, whether web sites, bank branches, staff behaviour and even advertising. While several banks have designed their web/app UX well, none has let it into the brand’s core.

While several banks have designed their web/app UX well, none has let it into the brand’s core.

Banks’ home pages still lead with advertising imagery and messaging, with interchangeable, well-worn themes. If your bank “cares for family prosperity”, let the interaction itself demonstrate it, in a few clicks. An interaction is, well, just that! You can ‘talk’ to the customer to learn and fulfil his needs. It’s salesmanship in clicks.

The best banks already have the best experiences, but there’s a lot of room for them, and follower brands, to be the fastest mover who will win in the medium term at least.

In the long run though, there are limitations. First, the logic of UX will lead to the same ‘best’ UX for all banks, which can (and should) be copied. In an ultimate, theoretical sense, UX isn’t strategic, but a moving horizon, an operational imperative that all brands must move towards.

In the long run though, there are limitations. The logic of UX will lead to the same ‘best’ UX for all banks.

Second, personality and differentiation, two pillars of the Age, are hard to own, because banking is so transactional. So where, asked USP, raising two thick eyebrows, will preference arise from, and what will you creative types do? I hid behind a raised glass.

The answer, said USP, is in the axioms of UX. Brands should sense and respond to what people want (or yearn) to do, rather than be sources of one-sided, static messaging. Interaction is about what the brand and customer can do together, not about what the brand says. The pervasiveness of the mobile is a huge gift-—not just for its reach, or to glean data. But to integrate the experience. Join up the mobile UX to the branch visit and the staff interactions.

Brands should sense and respond to what people want, rather than be sources of one-sided, static messaging. It should be about what the brand and customer can do together, not about what the brand says.

Ultimately these experiences will develop into a story, or a concept that forms through community consensus about a company’s journey and destination. Google has set out to organise, simplify (or own) the world’s information (or the world itself). Harley Davidson’s HOGs (Harley Owners Groups) license a sort of communal freedom.

These ideas are rooted in culture, in different ways. Even when they advertise! Culture means it’s back to people; just like it always was. Perhaps it’s time to bring back the genial brand manager and see where that goes?

And enough of USP, he said, draining his glass with an air of finality. I took my first sip of whisky and let it sink in.

The post Brand Is UX, Or Something Like That appeared first on ICD | Blog.

It Ain’t Necessarily So

Josh Constine of Techcrunch has successfully argued that the Facebook app has dropped the cryptic three-line menu bar from the top navigation and got better results. Contrarily, other research also shows that the mobile content consumer is totally aware of the hamburger menu, its functionality and its position on the phone and desktop.

It’s another matter that in its conception stage it could have been designed to read ‘ALL’, with a downward arrow, rather than the three lines.

It’s another matter that in its conception stage it could have been designed to read ‘ALL’, with a downward arrow, rather than the three lines. But for now it’s as much of a habit as the ‘pinch-to-increase’ icon on images.

When to Drop it, Move it or Keep it

Case 1. Apps or sites where the user is already signed in and has a specific content goal; like to get and give latest updates.

Here, the hamburger can move from the left top corner to another corner or become ellipses instead (the right-left-bottom debate isn’t over yet either).

These apps have recognised the user engagement pattern and placed the two or three most important things to do on top, with descriptive icons.

Note that mostly every icon is now supported with text. If only the hamburger did that in the first place.

Note that mostly every icon is now supported with text. If only the hamburger did that in the first place.

Case 2. The user may or may not sign in, and therefore you have no way to record the user preferences and customise the experience.

Here, the hamburger icon is a lifeline. You cannot always successfully predict the three most important things for every user; drop it and you risk alienating many users. The fear of alienating users makes it necessary to reveal the entire bouquet at a glance.

The fear of alienating users makes it necessary to reveal the entire bouquet at a glance.

How to do it is another subject. Here are some initial thoughts.

The challenge is for the content team to make what comes under these three lines as meaty as the patty, as crisp as lettuce and as satisfying as mayonnaise (okay, that’s going too far).

Even Facebook hasn’t killed the hamburger. It survives in the tab bar, now labelled ‘more’ and packs the world inside it.

Context Matters

It’s best to first weigh the merits of each use case to your application, before we join the campaign against the delicious hamburger, or move it from the familiar top-left corner to top-right or bottom right corner, per the dictates of phone ergonomics. Or calling it another name with another icon and starting this debate all over again, in say 3 months/years.

The post The Hamburger is an Important Part of My Web Diet. Don’t Kill it Just Yet. appeared first on ICD | Blog.