Category: Business Design

Sharon Reier’s piece on design management consulting tunes into what I’m working on these days…

These firms operate quite differently from traditional strategy consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain, which work mainly with top management and use the concepts and techniques inculcated at top business schools. At the design firms, there is a “richer engagement that designers have as a starting point,” Seidel [a lecturer at the Said Business School at Oxford University] said, “because they have worked on projects together with different parts of the company and they know their capabilities.” What’s more, the designer’s visual capability gives “the capacity to expand rather than just reflect,” he added.

Just finished ready Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, a wonderful, powerful critique of modern architecture. At one point he describes how the International Style was killing demand for craftmanship, replacing Beaux-Arts architecture with glass boxes.

…to those who complained that International Style buildings were cramped, had flimsy walls inside as well as out, and, in general, looked cheap, the knowing response was: “These days it’s too expensive to build in any other style.” But it was not too expensive, merely more expensive. The critical point was what people would or would not put up with aesthetically.

We can see parallels today in design. Once a product has been Wal-Mart’ed, people feel it should be had inexpensively. It requires reinventing the product (e.g. Oxo) to change people’s minds.

I have to wonder if the same will be true with relocated design and development (the term offshored doesn’t seem appropriate, since so much of it is enabled by place-less telecommunications). Will those that craft a visual design, that believe code is poetry, go the way of the bronzeurs, marble workers, and model makers once that work is made permanently inexpensive?

Organizations that have hired talented designers don’t always produce good designs. For those of us who are designers, there are many, sometimes frustrating reasons. For organizations, there is a complex interworking of goals, communications, organizations, processes, tools, and relationships that may or may not positively influence the quality of design.

In the past ten years I’ve designed well over 30 digital products. Reflecting on all the people and companies I’ve worked with, the design work was only a fraction of what I actually did. For example, recently I’ve written about how I’ve been helping companies refine their goals, sharing the lessons of established disciplines, and approaching design from the business perspective.

So I’ve decided to deliberately do all of this, beyond designing products, to help organizations improve their design capabilities. I’ve resigned my full-time position and will soon start consulting with this new focus. It’s about achieving the innovation that comes from integrating design practices on the strategic level, managing products, and building the right teams and processes to reach business goals. If you head an organization and would like to improve how you manage design, email me: victor at victorlombardi.com.

These are wicked problems that can’t be solved by applying someone else’s best practices or installing yet another software package. They get to the core of how people work together to make great design possible. And I’m pretty damn excited to do it.

Kevin Potts has a short and sweet article about Better Invoices in the new ALA. Highlights of the doc format:

• The word Invoice
• Tax ID #
• All names and addresses
• Date the invoice was sent
• List of services with dates
• Terms (he has a good example showing carrots and sticks for timing, to which I would add dates to be more clear)
• Mailing is better than emailing
• Include a thank you note
• Send within 48 hours after, never before, the milestone
• Don’t time it to arrive on a Friday
• Accounts Payable needs a nice, big number at the bottom

There’s some good tips in the comments too…’If you have become ‘friends’ (I use the word very loosely) with your clients they will feel obligated to pay you on time. Try joking with them or getting just a little personal. I find sending links to pictures of a recent addition to my home helps out greatly.‘

Recently I read a project brief that nicely summarized the problems with a web-based ordering system. They were able to see the connection — which is often indirect — between good design and innovation. The brief admitted the product both looked esthetically poor and was hard to use. As a result potential customers were lost to competitors (in this case, the product was poor enough that the delta between it and the competition was brutally clear).

Often the design argument would end there: the product wasn’t designed well and was resulting in poor sales, so design work is needed, period. But here’s where they were able to see deeper into their business, connecting quality with operations and even strategy. Because the product wasn’t being used, they weren’t able to gather valuable data about what their customers do, and so they didn’t have the data they needed to inform product innovation efforts. Qualities that were previously perceived as unimportant such as navigation and visual design were ultimately hindering their ability to develop one product into a product line, and to place development emphasis on the products customers really wanted.

Given this connection, we could (and, arguably, should) approach the problem from the other direction. If a company is getting beaten up by competitor’s products, we need to know why. In other words we need to gather data about the situation. In product strategy the challenge is not knowing which of the possible alternatives is the best, and the best data to inform this decision is only gathered after the product is in the marketplace. But if, as in our example, the product is already in the marketplace, it can be less expensive to improve it and get the needed feedback rather than costly experiments with new products. This is, of course, subject to relative development costs of each approach as well as opportunity costs.

‘Markets don’t buy products, customers do.‘ —Tom Peters

A great argument for complementing marketing with design.

Karl Long posted his new DMI article, Customer Loyalty and Experience Design in eBusiness: ‘I’ve tried to take the approach of connecting experience design to a business imperative, in this case customer loyalty…. This means some issues need to be addressed by the design early on before you start trying to collect more information or value, like usability and trust.‘

A great example of an article we need more of, from someone who groks design and can connect it with business issues.

The Evolution of the Design-Inspired Enterprise (abstract free, article not free) in MIT Sloan’s Management Review is another article in the avalanche of recent business publications discovering design…

…companies such as Master Lock, Procter & Gamble, BMW and Cambridge SoundWorks have employed design research — including the use of multidisciplinary teams and a variety of ethnographic and psychophysiological techniques — to build organizationwide identification with the customers’ needs and aspirations, keeping everyone’s eyes on the same prize.

In the next decade, many design jobs will move offshore. If you think I’m wrong, if you think this is preposterous, then talk to out-of-work programmers who thought the same thing only five years ago. But Victor, you protest, someone can’t do user research from 4000 miles away. To this I’d say, most companies aren’t doing user research anyway. Good-enough design is good-enough to most companies, and good-enough design can be done offshore.

Paul Ford, in Outsourcing, Etc., says, ‘I’m struck by the irony that the tools, networks, and protocols built over the last 40 years by programmers are the exact mechanism that allows these jobs to move overseas.‘ The same is true for design, as we write about design, critique each other’s work, and release our tools for those overseas to learn from. Furthermore, when we offshore our programming work, we send them our designs, we explain our designs, and in doing so we educate offshore workers in design. They’re probably getting a better case study-based education than many of us have had.

India, for example, has a new, growing middle class that will absorb the jobs that we won’t be able to fill in the coming years. Already firms right here in New York City have difficulty finding entry-level web design workers. You’d think recent college graduates would love a job in this industry, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Mind you, I don’t think this is a bad thing, it is simply the ways things are. If we recognize this now and prepare our skills accordingly (i.e. move up in the problem-solving food chain) we’ll protect our ability to earn a living. Brett Lider has some good ideas along these lines.

I’ve mentioned the Rotman Management (University of Toronto) design issue (.pdf) recently, but having finished it I’d like to point out what’s worth reading in this worthy mag:

First, if you’re printing just do pgs. 5-30. The rest is fluff and alumni only.

The dean’s column on page 7 contrasts the business focus on optimization throughout the 20th Century with the design focus on invention: ‘Value creation in the 20th century was largely defined by the conversion of heuristics to algorithms. It was about taking a fundamental understanding of a ‘mystery’ ­ a heuristic ­ and driving it to a formula, an algorithm ­ so that it could be driven to huge scale and scope… I would argue that in the 21st century, value creation will be defined more by the conversion of mysteries to heuristics ­ and that as a result, we are on the cusp of a design revolution in business.‘

On page 12 Darden professor Jeanne Liedtka takes a more intellectual view, contrasting design and science: ‘The most fundamental difference between the two, they argue, is that design thinking deals primarily with what does not yet exist; while scientists deal with explaining what is. That scientists discover the laws that govern today’s reality, while designers invent a different future is a common theme. Thus, while both methods of thinking are hypothesis-driven, the design hypothesis differs from the scientific hypothesis.‘

Demand Innovation on page 26 is a quick case study by Adrian Slywotzky of Mercer Management Consulting on a product company that looks at the higher-order needs of its customers and creates services that help customers use its products. ‘These companies are focused on creating new growth and new value by addressing the hassles and issues that surround their products rather than by improving the products themselves. They have shifted their approach from product innovation to demand innovation.‘

Not too long ago I wished for Designers Without Borders, a SWAT team-like organization that would drop designers into third world countries and give them help with technology no one else could offer. Brainheart magazine reports (albeit not online) on something close to this, Geekcorps: A US-based, non-profit organization, we place international technical volunteers in developing nations. We contribute to local IT projects while transferring the technical skills needed to keep projects moving after our volunteers have returned home. Here’s your big chance to go help the Rwandans.

In David Stutz’s resignation letter to Microsoft, he despairs of the toll the downturn will take on management: ‘Being the lowest cost commodity producer during such a recovery will be arduous, and will have the side-effect of changing Microsoft into a place where creative managers and accountants, rather than visionaries, will call the shots.’

I expect that’s the situation in many places, it’s an economic necessity. The question is: when the economy swings back up can the company re-institute the visionaries or is the culture irreparably altered?

Link courtesy Mark.

Alternate career idea #51: Form a small team of crack Internet peeps to provide quick and simple services in the developing world. For example, imagine a SWAT team dropping into Afghanistan to set up a simple website to disseminate information within the new government, complete with no-nonsense hardware and training. Then we’re off to somewhere else. Of course, the usual we’re-here-to-build-a-website-but-first-we’ll-help-prepare-the-organization activities would happen. It’s all funded by grants, donations, etc.

I was going to call it Designers Without Borders, riffing off Médecins Sans Frontières, but they already exist, albeit in more of an educational capacity. I want a SWAT team.