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Design is design, not the beauty of pictures.


Companies with the right design processes earn significantly more.

I would like to talk about three basic things from the perspective of a five-year study and my practice in Russian and international companies:

  1. Few people perceive design as a way to design a product and as a complete business process. The deeper this process is integrated, the better the financial results of the business as a whole.
  2. Often there is a situation that in design no one plays for the client.
  3. There is not much financial difference between poor, mediocre and good design: the market rewards only companies with excellent processes.

My name is Nikolai, I’m a design director at McKinsey & Company. One of my work tasks is to show and explain to companies what design is. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a “picture” or “drawn interface”. This is a design that leads to the fact that the main task of the business will be solved. And the main task of the business is to satisfy the needs of customers as much as possible while earning or accumulating some other resource.

In practice, a scheme with the reverse logic is often found in Russia (yes, all over the world): first they produced something, and then they try to design it. More precisely, they rather made and try to convince that people need it. Or just made and forced to use, leaving no other choice. Perhaps you are familiar with this feature of the design of devices: a ready-made development is taken, and a case-instruction-packaging-marketing is thought of for it.

Correct design starts from another: the client’s needs are sought, and a solution is devised for it, and then a cross-disciplinary team (including RnD) decides how to do this. An example from another sphere: if a bank wants to open brokerage accounts for individuals, it is better to first draw everything in steps, see how it is: a) necessary and b) clear to customers. And only then start writing code.

Let's talk a little more with the numbers of the study.

About the study


For five years we followed the design practice in 300 public companies, collected more than two million financial records and recorded about 100 thousand project activities, then we interviewed business executives and design specialists.

The ultimate goal of the study was the question of which design processes / activities affect the final financial performance of the company. With the help of a regression analysis, we determined the actions that are most correlated with the improvement of financial indicators.

It is important that the top quartile of companies increased their income (+32%) and the total profit of shareholders (+56%), as a result of these actions significantly faster than the industry as a whole. Moreover, the difference between the second, third and fourth quartiles is not very significant. This means that the market rewards companies that do something special.



The difference between good, mediocre and poor design is almost unimportant. What matters is the difference between a great design and everything else they do on the market.

The results were confirmed in three sectors: medical technology, consumer goods and banking services for individuals. Good design matters no matter what you produce as a product. Both in physical goods and in software, the investment pays off.

General situation


More than 40% of the companies surveyed still do not talk to their end users during development. Just over 50% admitted that they have no objective way to evaluate or set targets for the results of their development teams.

I.e:

  1. Decisions are often made based on the opinion “We know what the user needs” without verification.
  2. Design teams do not know by what principles their work will be evaluated and how a good design differs from a terrible one. Numerically.

That is, there is no way to understand what engineering and design give to business. The consequence - it is not clear how to budget it. Consequence - the design is often budgeted according to the hygienic principle of “what was”. Many managers understand that something is going wrong, but they cannot analytically substantiate the need for a more thorough and systematic approach to design.

From time to time I come across a situation that among companies there is an opinion that the most important thing in a product is its functionality, and the rest will somehow apply. Today, everything is completely different.

As a result, the business owner wants to operate in understandable categories: calculate the benefits of each investment and “cut” those that do not bring obvious benefits. Further, everything is based on an intuitive assessment of the value of design and design processes for the end user. On the other hand, the design team wants to do their job well, but often “good” for them is replaced not with “good for the company” or “good for the product” or “good for the user”, but with “good from our point of view view. " Because the feedback is not collected, and in the end you can evaluate only the likes in the portfolio.

Thus, almost no one plays for the convenience of the client inside the company.

The companies in the study, which showed the best financial results, realized that design is a top management problem, and evaluated their design indicators with the same care with which they tracked income and expenses. In companies where the design is on the periphery / poorly integrated, designers often say that they are not taken seriously. There, design problems remain in middle management, rarely rising to top managers. It may be “lucky”, and the head will make a decision on the basis of intuition, rather than concrete evidence, and it will be correct. But it just might not be lucky.

What's wrong?

  1. The business was not interested in metrics.
  2. Designers, for their part, did not use any metrics.

As a result, it is not clear how the work of the designer or designer in general is related to business goals.

It is not necessary that the leaders of the study on the financial effect have numbers, but almost always one way or another, work is carried out to find out what is important for the end user. The best results are among those who maintain a basic level of customer understanding among all managers. These companies also have an interest in what users need, unlike what they say, what they want. The CEO of one of the largest banks in the world spends one day a month with bank customers in retail and encourages all board members to do the same. Rather, what matters here is not what he learns for that day, but what he sets an example.

Less than 5% of companies make objective decisions based on structured data.

What to do?


Embed design metrics (satisfaction rating and user convenience assessment). Collect observations about user needs, and synthesize insights for business and development.

The study was a company from the field of online games, which found that there are several simple site improvements that give a 25% increase in sales. However, a number of other improvements slightly changed the perception of value. That is, they eventually did the necessary and sufficient work with a minimum budget with maximum financial result. But in the field of online games, mathematics is traditionally strong, and a lot is considered there.

It is also important to remove the barriers between different types of design. No matter what you do inside the company, you do it for the user. In practice, this means finding the client’s path (pain points and satisfaction points) instead of designing from a ready-made technical solution. That is, first the product is "drawn", and then embodied, and not vice versa.

More precisely, it is worth talking about the focused design of the client experience from beginning to end, when the whole system is purposefully designed by the team. And it's not just about the main point of contact. For example, not only the bank’s mobile application (the main product), but also all other means of interaction: from the tone and language of communication with the client in the call center to the form of the courier who brings the card.

For example, if some kind of professional tool is being manufactured, then the designers (and ideally, all the participants in general) study the reviews for the tools of this class (in order to understand what is most important for professionals), discuss the possibilities of maintenance and layout with production, assemble prototypes, and test them and only then they set the task of manufacturing. In a bad situation, the design department gets a ready-made diagram of the device, and you need to somehow “paint” the case, in which little can be changed.

A good example is the creation of digital tools for miners. It all starts with field research, interviews in the context of their work, identifying needs. Next - prototypes, tests, iterations -> production. Due to this, it is possible to ensure the applicability of such tools in the end. In a bad situation, the business writes TK in a cool office, designers in beautiful coworking draw mock-ups, outsourced developers file down the product. And then it turns out that no one needs this at all in the mine, because nobody asked what was needed.

Only about 50% of the companies we surveyed conducted a user survey before developing their first ideas or specifications.

Another example: the hotel wants to reduce check-in time. At the “production” level, this cannot be solved in any way, because there are physical restrictions on driving a questionnaire into the system and issuing a key. But you can solve this problem a step earlier, enabling the client to log in through social networks.

The best results are obtained from a constant combination of user research: quantitative (for example, joint analysis) and qualitative (for example, ethnographic interviews). This information should be combined with the reports of a group of market analysts on the actions of competitors, scanning patents to monitor new technologies, business problems noted by the financial team, and the like. Without interaction, development functions can end up in a vacuum, creating great work that will never see the light and delight customers.

Leading companies make user-centric design an obligation for everyone, not an isolated function. Our studies show that overcoming isolationist tendencies is extremely valuable. It is about 7% growth.

Raising the best talent is crucial. Companies in the top quartile were almost three times more likely to have special incentive programs for designers. These programs relate to design results, such as user satisfaction metrics or key design prizes and awards. It’s not very important for a designer to get a higher position in the management (more precisely, it doesn’t work for practical motivation), but it’s much more important to work freely on interesting projects, to be able to talk about the results at conferences and so on. For example, in one company in the consumer sector, leading designers left because they spent a lot of time preparing internal presentations for marketing.

IterativenessAlmost 60% of companies used prototypes only for the final stage. The most successful companies consciously develop a culture of sharing early prototypes with other teams in the organization and promote embryonic ideas.

Total main research factors:

  1. Analytical leadership - the introduction of metrics and the assessment of design activities with the same thoroughness as, for example, for evaluating financial and operational activities.
  2. Cross-functionality - human-centricity is introduced into the organization and becomes the responsibility of all employees, not just one department.
  3. Continuous iteration - reducing the risks of developing and launching new products, through constant communication with the end user to validate, test and improve ideas.
  4. User experience - any project starts with a user, not specifications. The barriers between design disciplines are breaking down: the common goal is to create a seamless customer experience.

How to implement this in your company?


We explored this as well. Management should take an analytical approach to design, it should be conducted from the user experience to the product, and not vice versa. Then it’s important to think about a training program for designers and work out a new team structure. All this must begin to be done on one or two pilot teams to train the rest of the company on his example.

Example:manufacturers of medical equipment made a new surgical device to prevent threats from competitors. Leaders were keenly interested in projects. The bonuses were tied to usability indicators and surgeon satisfaction ratings. Cross-functional and collaborative teams were formed that conducted over 200 user tests over two years - from the earliest concepts to the detailed design of functions. In total, 110 concepts and prototypes were prepared. The final satisfaction level exceeded 90% compared with less than 76% for the devices of the two main competitors.

In the next publication, I will tell you how to apply the principles of zero-based-design processes (and not zero-based) in steps, and show how it looks in practice in Russian companies from the point of view of implementation principles. Well, that is, in practice, not everything is so simple, and this is not a “magic pill”, but you can definitely get the benefit.

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