Designers got business
Why Designers Should Understand the Business Landscape
Designers are the creative backbone of many enterprises without even knowing it. In the pursuit of creating visually appealing designs or crafting marketing materials, designers often overlook a critical aspect of their craft: understanding the business perspective of the companies and clients they serve. Here lies an untapped reservoir of potential that can not only transform the basic design work approach and make it more effective, but boost the careers of designers executing it, significantly.
The Business Blind Spot in Design
Designers typically dive into the creative process solely focusing on aesthetics, user experience, and sometimes, marketing strategies. A profound understanding of the business operations, goals, and market dynamics are often missing, or very limited. This leads to a crucial blind spot: a lack of alignment between design efforts and business objectives.
This alignment has spectacular meaning for both designer and client and its importance can’t be emphasized enough. For companies and enterprises the focus on their business is the most natural thing to do and designers should therefore make it the center of their work approach.
The Benefits of Business focused Design
1. Smarter Decision-Making and Reduced Frustration:
Understanding the business behind the design work empowers designers to make informed decisions. When armed with knowledge about a company's goals, target audience, and market positioning, designers can create solutions that align with a company’s business strategies. This streamlines the design process vastly with the expectations of the companies they work for. It means that both parties are pulling in the same direction. This will make designers a beneficial asset instead of a participant that needs constant briefing in the eyes of a company. It minimizes the frustration on both sides, caused by misaligned objectives and will save time spent on aligning the two participating parties. Therefore the main focus can be set on creating the best possible outcome instead of degenerating into destructive and time-consuming discussions.
2. Delivering REAL Value to Clients:
A deeper understanding of a client's business allows designers to create aesthetics that transcend the client's expectations and contribute to their actual success. Design solutions become more than visual elements; they become strategic tools that drive engagement, conversion, and revenue generation for the client's business. Despite a better and more effective outcome, this can save a project a ton of time.
3. Effective Negotiation and Client Collaboration:
Designers who can engage in meaningful discussions with clients or stakeholders have a strong basis for negotiation. This not only positions them as strategic partners, enabling them to articulate the value of their designs in terms of business outcomes, but will give them the chance to understand their personal value to a company as well. If price- or salary negotiation is a pain point for you as a designer, this is a game changer. Understanding the clients' pain points and business priorities will foster a better understanding of how much value is brought into a project financially. Despite their personal reputation, this is the strongest argument designers can be bring to the table in order to get paid appropriately.
The Transition: How Designers Can Embrace Business Understanding
1. Collaborative Approach:
Foster a collaborative environment within the team, inviting insights from other departments such as marketing, sales, and product development in workshops to get a deeper understanding of what drives all parties. This multidisciplinary approach provides a holistic view that helps make design decisions that really make a difference. Collaboratively working with a client, especially in the beginning of a project, eliminates a false approach in most cases, and prevent design work from going into a completely wrong direction. It also helps designers to hold a more central position within projects.
2. Ask the Right Questions:
Asking the right questions is difficult, but important. During client interactions or project briefings, designers need to inquire about the client's business objectives, target audience, and desired outcomes. These insights will guide the design process and add depth to the final deliverables, so they need to be thought through carefully. In most cases they need to be tailored to a client individually, but there a few key topics that can be included in every discussion:
Business objectives and strategies
Challenges
KPIs and USP
Target Audience and Market Positioning
Brand Identity and Messaging
3. Escape the Visual Mindset
This might sound a bit weird, because in most cases this is what makes designers who they are, but in order to exceed in the field of design, it is important to think outside of the box of a personal visual opinion. This doesn’t mean designers shouldn’t provide guidance on visual topics. It means that designers need to do what is best for the projects they work on, despite on what they think is the best visual outcome. The needs of clients and users can be completely different from, what might be, a visual success. It’s a designers job to keep an open mind.
Conclusion: Big Impact for Two Worlds
Designers possess an immense capability to transform ideas into compelling visual narratives. However, when this creative power is supplemented with a solid business mindset, the impact is gigantic. It's not merely about creating aesthetically pleasing designs; it's about crafting strategic solutions that elevate a company's brand, drive business growth, and resonate deeply with the target audience.
In summary, designers who bridge the gap between creativity and business acumen become indispensable assets to their clients and can take their work to the next level. They move beyond creating beautiful designs and become key contributors to the success and growth of the businesses they serve.
