How design buys ROI.
Much has been written and talked about when it comes to the true value of design. Leaders do best with design when they understand how it works, set it up for success, and habitually monitor its results.
While I encourage folks to read up on design’s proven impact—Forrester pegs design’s ROI at 229% per-project and between 71 and 107% org-wide, and McKinsey at 56 percentage points higher ROI for shareholders with a 32 percentage point revenue increase—this post will focus on my professional experience, where and how I’ve seen design deliver outsized impact.
Design is not art
Design and art share aesthetic and experiential qualities, and both are process-driven. But art works forward from a set of personal questions and poses them for public consideration. It’s a practice of creating knowledge through exploration. Design is different. It works backwards from a pre-defined result, like increased number of sign-ups, improved satisfaction, or a more comfortable chair. That’s why design has been absorbed by software companies and organizations en masse. It addresses real problems with real, measurable solutions.
Artists often work alone; designers, not so. We need massive amounts of information and context to drive our decision-making. Include us in strategy meetings, send us the deck, and write a concise project brief—these are the ways to get the best out of your designer. A designer who works in isolation, who doesn't ask for context or push for stakeholder access, is a red flag.
Design thrives on measurement
Leaders get the most out of design when they define that outcome: user satisfaction through smoother experiences, faster deployment through a stable front-end UI kit, or the acceleration of new product concepts. The practice of identifying key metrics is what keeps an organization both innovative and performant.
Where I’ve seen this work well was at HubSpot. Because our designers were partnered into internal Marketing teams (a transformation I led) they worked against pre-defined quarterly “MSPOTs” (mission, strategy, project, omit, and target). Targets are measurable outcomes used to hold the team—and its designer—accountable, and to track progress. One design-intensive experience, Make My Persona (designed by my team member David Carberry), resulted in a 200% increase in conversion.
Designers decide for the user
While designing, myriad decisions arise, sometimes every few seconds. Should the aesthetic be sober and trustworthy or organic and soft? Which font? How many screens? Where should the button go? Red or pink? Like art, design is crafting something real. But a designer is making something for someone else. And if we know how they (our users and stakeholders) think and feel, we can make those decisions on their behalf, crafting experiences that work for them.
Designers don’t decorate, they engineer. The experiences they build, whether it’s a mobile app or a hospital waiting room, are engineered to work for the people they serve. How well they work needs to be measured, and often, so a designer can understand if the decisions they made while crafting were the best ones. They’re usually not.
With the right metrics and measurement practices in place, your organization’s most important experiences can be continually perfected and shipped. Your role as a leader is to ensure that metrics are identified and measured, and the information is making its way to the designer in an accurate and timely fashion, so it can inform their craft.
