The Experiential Effects

Linking Design to Business Growth

Our aspirations to design best user experience for our customers are means to some ends. And those ends are business goals - growth and profitability. Anchoring design to business goals is important as it facilitates the decision making process. Design trade-offs can be framed within the context of the goals. Features prioritisation can be justified using the goals. Design solutions can be crafted to align user behaviours with the goals.

But there isn’t always a clear line of sight from design outputs to business goals. For example, to gain 200,000 new users using a newly designed app seems unnervingly vague for designers. There isn’t any clear causal relationship between a specific type of design output and user growth. In marketing, you can determine the level of engagement you want to achieve with X dollar ads spent. Almost like a coin-op machine. But not so for product design.

So, what can design use to anchor itself? Design outputs can anchor to indirect growth impetus like user satisfaction, user proficiency and fulfilment of jobs-to-be-done. Let’s call these experiential effects. The experiential effects don’t affect directly business goals, but its absence can compromise your organisation’s capacity to achieve the goals.

For example, user satisfaction (experiential effect) can be measured with number of complaints received. Satisfaction doesn’t directly influence new user growth compares to, say, cash-back incentive. But high user satisfaction leads to positive word-of-mouth. Size of user base expands and eventually, decrease your user acquisition cost and increase profitability (business goal). Another example is proficiency level of your app users (experiential effect) doesn’t influence directly revenue growth. Lower proficiency among your users links to poor usability. With low proficiency, you get higher rate of transaction abandonment. This will result in lower transaction activity (business goal).

Think holistically to determine the causal chain of relationships between business goals and design. The understanding can give product designers a better context and greater confidence in designing the right solution in the best possible way to support growth and profitability.

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash