How an error in technical specifications turned a tiger into a beaver, or Why design is the ace of spades in the deck of a digital product
Hi all! I'm Vika Levena, head of analytics at AGIMA. In my line of work, I work a lot with designers. In the custom development market (and not only) everyone understands exactly how important the role of design is. But when the time comes prove this importancethe situation turns into that same centipede that doesn’t know which foot it started walking on.
Therefore (and also because I am an analyst), in this article I decided to systematize the benefits that design brings. Here I tried to sort everything out, give examples and figures – as they say, “in case of important negotiations.”
How to influence product development strategy if you are a designer?
Design is the first thing your client sees. In principle, a digital product cannot exist without design. But design is also part of the larger product development process. In order to formulate a strategy for its development, in my opinion, it is important for designers to:
arm yourself with curiosity and ask the right questions;
conduct research – quantitative and qualitative;
be empathetic and look at the product through the eyes of the user;
be able to work in a team.
Let's talk about each point in more detail. And one great designer story about the coat of arms of Irkutsk will help me get started.
History of the coat of arms of the Irkutsk region
The original coat of arms of Irkutsk, approved in 1790, depicted a tiger holding a sable in its mouth.
Then a detective story happened, and this tiger disappeared from the coat of arms. And instead it appeared something.
Let me explain. In 1858, a large-scale reform of Russian heraldry took place. And so, with the next approval, the description of the coat of arms of the Irkutsk province came “from the spot” to the St. Petersburg Heraldry: “Babr carrying a sable in his teeth.”
Babr is the same tiger, only in the local Siberian dialect. But the then metropolitan heraldry official, who checked the descriptions of the coats of arms, did not know this word. He took it for a typo and corrected the “a” to “o” to form the familiar word “beaver.” A beaver carrying a sable in its teeth – what could be more logical?
Sovereign Emperor Alexander II was also not embarrassed by anything, so soon the artists received this description in the form of a technical assignment.
Now, fellow designers, imagine: you receive a technical specification for the logo “a beaver carries a sable in its teeth.” What are your actions? And here it’s not a logo, but a whole coat of arms, approved by the Emperor himself.
The artists did their best, trying to draw everything according to the specifications and not incur suspicions of mockery. That's why they painted a beaver, but not quite a beaver. Some non-existent animal with a beaver tail and webbed feet, which could, with great effort, be passed off as a beaver if necessary.
In 1859, the coat of arms of Irkutsk acquired this form:
What does this story teach us?
Firstlyit clearly shows that you should check the technical specifications for sanity and you should not correct other people’s mistakes until you are convinced that it is really a mistake.
Secondlylet's shift it to product development strategy. If the official had looked at the coat of arms with the babr through the eyes of the user, he would have realized that something had gone wrong. Plus some common sense in this story would also help a lot.
Thirdlyone person cannot ask questions, answer them, do research and still show empathy. Therefore, teamwork is everything to us.
But common sense and sensory perception are good, but all this does not work if communication with the customer is broken.
Design as a strategic asset
In order for a designer to contribute to product development, it is very important to establish communication with the business. Often designers speak “designer’s” language with clients, and then misunderstandings arise and the process stalls.
The designer talks about the image of the brand, but the business does not understand where its money is. In fact, the brand image affects the competitiveness and promotion of the product, that is, it saves money on advertising. And if you save, consider it earned.
The designer speaks about audience perception of the brand, and business again does not understand where the money is. But it is the design that allows a product to stand out from many analogues with similar characteristics.
For example, anything with cats sells much better than the same thing without cats. There are plenty of examples of this, starting with the Hello Kitty brand and continuing with the guys who released sparkling wine under the Fluffy brand and conquered the Russian market, practically without investing in advertising.
The designer says that beautiful pictures influence the desire to buy something. It’s hard for business to argue here, especially if the business has not had lunch today and has already seen an advertisement for a protein bar or just a burger. But business asks a logical question: “How to measure this desire?” The simplest answer to this question is A/B tests of product cards with different designs and the difference in purchase volume and conversion.
Below I have collected some facts and figures from studies of the impact of design on the financial performance of companies. I hope they will be useful to you in a situation where you need to defend your cool selling design to a business.
Every £100 invested in design (graphic, industrial, etc.) increases a firm's turnover by an average of £225 – source.
Companies that actively invest in design have increased their gross revenues over the previous five years by much more than those who save on it, by 58 billion kronor (almost $9 billion) – source.
Graph of the InVision study, which involved 2,200 international companies in 24 industries from 77 countries:
Where can a designer get hypotheses for research?
Design is usually based on hypotheses. At the stage of their construction, we determine what the user wants to see and what not. Here are some sources of these very hypotheses:
Disagreements in the design team. Some say “let’s do it this way!”, others say “no, let’s do it differently!”
These are hypotheses. These can be taken to a researcher and asked to be checked. If this is already some kind of live product that contains quantitative data on user behavior, then it is better to pass it on to web analytics. By the way, any disagreements within one designer’s head are also hypotheses.
Personal experience. In this case, observation and reflection are very helpful when you yourself use a product and evaluate it as a user – what is done well and what is not from a design point of view.
For example, I go to the OZON website not so much to order something, but to understand the user experience in the entire Ecom sector. Whether it’s buying a pack of coffee or an apartment, we’re used to the OZON service, we’re used to fast delivery and the fact that we can go out to pick up our order in slippers. These expectations are already in the user “sewn in» default. He always expects this level of service.
Therefore, I try to notice how the OZON website solves a particular problem of communication with the user, how it attracts his attention to what the business needs, how he manages expectations, and how he explains the incomprehensible. And I can rethink and apply this experience in completely different areas of our customers’ activities.
Reviews and support requests. The penultimate item on this list, since it is from the Captain Obvious series.
More than half of all reviews will be about what we cannot influence or what we can, but it is very difficult and expensive. But the second half is what gives us insights that we cannot catch in interviews or qualitative research. In reviews you can catch very rare and useful cases that you wouldn’t know about in any other way.
In-depth interviews with users. I put it as the final item because it requires a lot of resources and time. Both are usually limited.
However, in-depth interviews work best when conducted by a UX researcher. together with the designer.
Nothing hits home like when the fifth user in a row fails to find a button that says “press me.” The hardest part is figuring out how to tell them where she is. We can’t get into everyone’s head, but at the same time we can peek through that very “keyhole” and hold it as a reference.
We did the research and came up with a cool design. But how do you know that he is really cool?
In other words, how can we understand that we did well and did everything well? You need to arm yourself with metrics. I will give the most basic ones. Each of them can be decomposed and rotated:
user involvement – frequency and intensity of interaction with our product;
Retention Rate – the percentage of users who return and use the business product again;
time spent on completing a task – not to be confused with the time spent by the user on the page;
user happiness (surveys).
Let's take a closer look at the last point.
How to measure user happiness
There are special surveys for this. Typically, they are used by UX researchers. You can ask them to measure the happiness of users before the next redesign, make a starting point, then change something, redesign and ask them to measure the happiness of users again.
In my practice, it has never become “worse” after such changes: after all, designers are professionals and they know about human-centered design.
Conclusion
In my opinion, a good designer is a strategist, analyst and empath all rolled into one. He not only guesses what the user wants, but also measures the result of his work in numbers, sets the direction of development and shapes the perception of the product. Therefore, in any strategy, the role of design goes far beyond aesthetics – it becomes the most important asset influencing the success of the product.
PS We talk a lot about product management, strategy and research in the Telegram channel “Product effect» — subscribe if this topic is interesting. And our design team also leads a cool Telegram channelwhere he shares good and not so good examples of design from around the world.
