Monday, March 11, 2019

DESIGN SPECIAL .......The business value of design PART III


 The business value of design PART III
 More than a department: It’s cross-functional talent

Top-quartile companies make user-centric design everyone’s responsibility, not a siloed function. In the tired caricature of traditional design departments, a group of tattooed and aloof people operate under the radar, cut off from the rest of the organization. Considered renegades or mavericks by their colleagues, these employees (in the caricature) guard access to their ideas, complaining that they have too often been burned by narrow-minded engineering or marketing heads unwilling to (or incapable of) realizing the designers’ grand visions.
We are not suggesting that this stereotype is still common—or that other functions are necessarily to blame—but it can be surprisingly resilient. One company we know, for example, unveiled a new flagship design studio to much jubilation from the design community. Before long, all the designers had moved their desks inside the studio, and had deactivated door access for the marketing, engineering, and quality teams. These moves drastically reduced the level of cooperative work and undermined the performance of the business as a whole.
Our research suggests that overcoming isolationist tendencies is extremely valuable. One of the strongest correlations we uncovered linked top financial performers and companies that said they could break down functional silos and integrate designers with other functions. This was particularly notable in consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) businesses, where respondents from companies that were top-quartile integrators reported compound annual growth rates some seven percentage points above those that were weakest in this respect.
Nurturing top design talent—the 2 percent of employees who make outsized contributions in every business—is another important dimension of team dynamics. Getting the basic incentives right is a part of this: in our survey, companies in the top quartile for design overall were almost three times more likely to have specific incentive programs for designers. These programs are tied to design outcomes, such as user-satisfaction metrics or major awards.
Crucially, though, retaining great design talent requires more than promising a big bonus or a career path as a top-flight manager. Carrots such as these are not enough to retain top design talent if not accompanied by the freedom to work on projects that stir their passion, time to speak at conferences attended by their peers, and opportunities to stay connected to the broader design community. Talented designers at a CPG company well-respected for its design credentials started leaving because of the amount of time they had to spend styling slideshow packs for the marketing team. Conversely, Spotify’s appeal to top designers is often attributed to its autonomy-with-connectivity culture and to a working environment characterized by diversity, fun, and speed to market.
Design already touches many parts of a business: human–machine interactions, AI, behavioral economics, and engineering psychology, not to mention innovation and the development of new business models. While not a new concept, “T-shaped” hybrid designers, who work across functions while retaining their depth of design savvy, will be the employees most able to have a tangible impact through their work.
They will only be able to do so, though, if they have the right tools, capabilities, and infrastructure. That calls for the sort of design software, communication apps, deep data analytics, and prototyping technologies that drive productivity and accelerate design iterations. All of this requires time and investment. We found a strong correlation between successful companies and companies that resisted the temptation to cut spending on research, prototyping, or concept generation at the first sign of trouble. Formal design allocations should be agreed to in partnership with design leaders instead of appearing (as they often do) as line items in the marketing or engineering budgets.
More than a phase: It’s continuous iteration

Design flourishes best in environments that encourage learning, testing, and iterating with users—practices that boost the odds of creating breakthrough products and services while simultaneously reducing the risk of big, costly misses. That approach stands in contrast to the prevailing norms in many companies, which still emphasize discrete and irreversible design phases in product development. Compartmentalization of this sort increases the risk of losing the voice of the consumer or of relying too heavily on one iteration of that voice.
The best results come from constantly blending user research—quantitative (such as conjoint analysis) and qualitative (such as ethnographic interviews). This information should be combined with reports from the market-analytics group on the actions of competitors, patent scans to monitor emerging technologies, business concerns flagged by the finance team, and the like. Without these tensions and interactions, development functions may end up in a vacuum, producing otherwise excellent work that never sees the light of day or delights customers.
In a successful effort to improve the user experience, one cruise company we know talked directly to passengers, analyzed payment data to show which food and activities were most popular at different times, and used AI algorithms on security-camera feeds to identify inefficiencies in a ship’s layout. At a medical-technology company, blending sources of inspiration meant talking to a toy designer about physical ergonomics and to a dating-app designer about the design of digital interfaces. These moves helped the company to refine a device so that it appealed to customers with limited dexterity. The resulting product was not only safer and easier to use but also beat the market by more than four percentage points when launched.

Despite the value of iteration, almost 60 percent of companies in our survey said they used prototypes only for internal-production testing, late in the development process. In contrast, the most successful companies consciously foster a culture of sharing early prototypes with outsiders and celebrating embryonic ideas. They also discourage management from driving designers to spend hours perfecting their early mock-ups or internal presentations.
Design-centric companies realize that a product launch isn’t the end of iteration. Almost every commercial software publisher issues constant updates to improve its products postlaunch. And the Apple Watch is one among many products that have been tweaked to reflect how customers use them “in the wild.”
A first step toward great design
We realize that many companies apply some of these design practices—a strong voice in the C-suite, for example, or shared design spaces. Our results, however, show that excellence across all four dimensions, which is required to reach the top quartile, is relatively rare. We believe this helps account for the dramatic range of design performance reflected in the observed companies’ MDI scores, which were as low as 43 and as high as 92 (Exhibit 5).
Exhibit 5 IN THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The diversity among companies achieving top-quartile MDI performance shows that design excellence is within the grasp of every business, whether product, service, or digitally oriented. Through interviews and our experience working with companies to transform their strength in design, we’ve also discovered that one of the most powerful first steps is to select an important upcoming product or service and make a commitment to using it as a pilot for getting the four elements right. This approach showed far better financial results than trying to improve design as a theme across the whole company—for example, conducting trials of cross-functional work in isolation from real products or services.
One medical-equipment group we know rallied around the design of a new surgical machine as it sought to head off a growing threat from competitors. The commitment of the CEO and senior executives was intense; executive bonuses were tied to the product’s usability metrics and surgeon-satisfaction scores. Cross-functional and co-located teams carried out more than 200 user tests over two years, from the earliest concepts to the detailed design of features. In all, more than 110 concepts and prototypes were created and iterated. The final design’s usability score—a measure of customer satisfaction—exceeded 90 percent, compared with less than 76 percent for the machines of its two main competitors. The ultimate solution combined a physical device, a digital data pad that could seamlessly connect with more than 40 third-party operating-theater devices, and a service contract.
In the past six months, the company’s market share has jumped 40 percent, in part as investors understand the upcoming user-centric products and services that set the company apart from its competition and—even more important—that will improve patients’ lives.
The McKinsey Design Index highlights four key areas of action companies must take to join the top quartile of design performers. First, at the top of the organization, adopt an analytical approach to design by measuring and leading your company’s performance in this area with the same rigor the company devotes to revenues and costs. Second, put the user experience front and center in the company’s culture by softening internal boundaries (between physical products, services, and digital interactions, for example) that don’t exist for customers. Third, nurture your top design people and empower them in cross-functional teams that take collective accountability for improving the user experience while retaining the functional connections of their members. Finally, iterate, test, and learn rapidly, incorporating user insights from the first idea until long after the final launch.
Companies that tackle these four priorities boost their odds of becoming more creative organizations that consistently design great products and services. For companies that make it into the top quartile of MDI scorers, the prizes are as rich as doubling their revenue growth and shareholder returns over those of their industry counterparts.
By Benedict SheppardHugo Sarrazin, Garen Kouyoumjian, and Fabricio Dore
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-design/our-insights/the-business-value-of-design?cid=other-eml-alt-mkq-mck-1810&hlkid=3e6b7a194cde4f8ab3f8484c73826bac&hctky=1627601&hdpid=e472413a-7de4-4ed4-a341-c40f007886c5

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