Design is becoming the most important part of a company's business strategy — here's why

21/03/2017
This post was written by Ashley Still, VP of Adobe's Creative Cloud for Enterprise.

All it takes is a single swipe for a smartphone user to end a budding relationship — or uninstall a mobile app. Large, decades-old, publicly traded companies from transportation to banking to retail are now competing head-to-head with Silicon Valley startups. New technologies come and go at a blistering pace.

Companies that want their brand to stay relevant longer than a Snapchat message must prioritize customer experience — with design at the core of that experience.

Why does design matter for the digital age?
Visually appealing, consumer-friendly interfaces are essential to making physical and digital products useful and delightful, and well-designed content is the keystone to any marketing campaign. In fact, companies that invest in design outperform their peers. Over a ten-year span, the stock price of firms that placed a premium on design excellence outpaced the S&P Index by almost 220 percent. According to Forrester data, companies that prize creativity exceed their design-negligent competitors in market share by a factor of 1.5.1

Case in point: Airbnb. Early on, a company audit of the brand's website revealed ugly, amateur photos alongside descriptions of available properties. In a smart design move, the company stopped letting users upload photos themselves and flew three photographers out to New York to take beautiful pictures for the site. Within a week, the new pictures doubled the company's weekly revenue.2

Second, a strategic focus on great design is the best form of digital competitiveness. No modern business can afford to be out of touch with its customers or its differentiated brand value. Great design requires an understanding of how your brand uniquely solves customer needs. Uber, for example, harnessed the power of experience design to give customers exactly what they wanted: fast cab-hailing anytime, anywhere. Uber built a complex logistics and routing infrastructure but only became successful by designing a simple, intuitive mobile app that empowers consumers.

Leading CEOs recognize the importance of design and elevate it to the C-Suite. Nike's CEO has design credentials, and venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, Accel, and Greylock are increasingly hiring design partners for the companies they invest in.3 But there's room for improvement. In 2014, only 13 of the Fortune 125 companies had executive design officers or CEO-supported design departments.

The rest of the Fortune 500 are in for a rude awakening.
According to a former Blockbuster employee, the company missed obvious opportunities to redesign its retail experience. Blockbuster could have paired well-designed social networks with knowledgeable employees, branding itself as a local movie expert. Or it could have designed a movie distribution platform with a master movie search engine.4 As the former employee lamented, "Digital content distribution didn't kill the video store. We did it to ourselves."5

Netflix, with its intuitive search capabilities and ready recommendations, simply out-designed the competition, thus offering a binge-worthy experience.

Or consider Yahoo!. The company famously struggled to articulate a clear identity to customers and advertisers once Google started to win the search wars. In early 2016, the company unveiled a revamped homepage in hopes of catching its competitors.6 But the resulting site was a hodgepodge of search features and media experiences, proving that if you are not clear about your core value, no one will buy it.

As Yahoo! and Blockbuster learned the hard way, design is far more than cosmetic; great product and marketing design are critical parts of the modern business.

Any business that hopes to stay relevant must employ design to create useful, meaningful experiences and leave lasting impressions.

Fonte:http://www.businessinsider.com/sc/design-is-important-to-customer-experience-2017-3?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BISelect&pt=385758&ct=Sailthru_BI_Newsletters&mt=8&utm_campaign=BI%20Select%20%28Tuesday%20Thursday%29%202017-03-21&utm_term=Business%20Insider%20Select%20-%20Engaged%2C%20Active%2C%20Passive%2C%20Disengaged&IR=T

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