How designers can win spends and influence people
Designers need to work harder to gain influence, credibility and budget by connecting digital data to commercial data.
4 min read
Feb 2021
George Bernard Shaw famously observed that “England and America are two countries divided by a common language”. Had he ever moved from the crafting of prose to the designing of product he might well have observed the same thing about designers and budget holders. Theoretically on the same side and able to speak the same language, they have access to the same words but somehow never quite manage to fully communicate.
My decades of experience in digital design have brought me into contact with many design teams and just as many leadership teams. And like England and America, these teams often find that they use common vocabulary but don’t speak the same language.
Design teams are unhappy that management ‘don't get it’.
Management teams complain that designers use up the budget on indulgent beautification and want everything validated before a pixel goes on a screen.
And often both are right to a greater or lesser extent.
The different perspectives are rarely about whether design matters or not. Most senior teams already believe that customers matter, usability matters and better products matter. The gap is in how that value gets expressed.
Designers naturally talk about users, needs, journeys, friction, accessibility and experience. Budget holders naturally talk about revenue, cost, risk, productivity and return. Both are describing organisational performance, but from opposite ends of the telescope.
So, when designers complain that senior leaders don’t get design, they may be diagnosing only half the problem. Perhaps designers don’t get senior leaders. If we want greater influence, bigger budgets and earlier involvement in important decisions, we need to get much better at connecting what matters to users with what matters to the organisation.
Data points are simultaneously the beating heart of design performance and the building blocks of the business case for all design.
And that requires designers to make one important change.
Get better at talking about data.
Want to gain more credibility within your organisation? Start talking the language of data.
Want access to more of the product development budget? Start talking the language of data.
Want a seat at the board table, or representation when the big decisions are being made? Start talking the language of data.
You can’t get any of these things without it.
The reason is that properly mined and understood data is the glue which connects the designer’s interface to the Finance Director’s spreadsheet.
Data points are simultaneously the beating heart of design performance and the building blocks of the business case for all design.
Go after rich, nuanced data which is closely integrated with organisational goals. Become at least as fluent as your manager in talking about the numbers they care about.
Let me share a few sample business cases for design.
The e-commerce website currently enjoys a conversion rate of 1.5% which generates revenue of £1m and margin of £150k per month. Using design thinking, we can move conversion rate to 2%, generating revenue of £1.33m and margin of £200k. The design project costs £75k.
The B2B website generates 10 leads per month for the professional services business, 2 of which are qualified out, and 50% of the remainder are converted, at an average value of £25,000. Design strategy and research will double the number of leads each month and increase their quality. The design project will cost £50,000 and the outcome is 20 leads per month with 2 qualified out.
The telecoms onboarding process generates 10,000 support emails and 20,000 support calls per month, at an overall cost of £4 per call and £2.5 per email. Using contextual analysis, thorough desk research and UI design, the design team can reduce emails to 6,000 and calls to 8,000. The design project costs £100,000.
Here’s my challenge to you – secure the budget for those design projects without referring to data.
You can’t, because it can’t be done.
If your design team isn’t driven by data, please start now. Go after rich, nuanced data which is closely integrated with organisational goals. Become at least as fluent as your manager in talking about the numbers they care about.
Get your hands on the numbers which help you understand what it’s like on the front line:
how users behave – journeys, flows, funnels, search behaviour, conversion
what users achieve – task completion, abandonment, errors, bottlenecks
how well the experience performs – page speed, task time, usability, accessibility
commercial performance – acquisition cost, cost to serve, conversion rate, lead value, customer lifetime value
Close the gap.
Learn the language of the people holding the budget.
Deal in the currency of data.
