Being Design Driven
Why You Care
Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery with Russ Hall
Let’s say you know your company isn’t yet the icon you want it to be. Perhaps you’ve taken a few steps, tentative or assertive, but you aren’t yet a design-driven company from one end to the other. Well, you need to be. It isn’t easy, or more companies would be doing it. If your company, products, or services do not live in the gut of your customers as a positive emotional experience, you are going to have to take a candid look at yourself and consider what you need to do to get started and keep going.
Here are some of the steps you need to progress through to become design driven as a company:
• Awareness of where you are and where you need to be
• Commitment to taking the leap of faith
• Implementation of some new approaches and people, half steps to full steps
• Vigilance—the need to stay fresh and tap the most current customer needs for emotional experience. This is also about staying on top of every aspect of the customer experience supply chain so all things that affect design are done properly and coordinated.
The last is more important than it might seem at first because companies that once “got it” have shown that it is possible to “lose it.” Rejuvenating and keeping the process alive is up to you. Before you start, you need that first step of awareness. To begin, answer the question: What is a design-driven company, and what isn’t?
Conrad Hilton was famous for a couple of things, the least of which is having Paris Hilton as a descendant. He is notably more famous for saying that every member of the staff of his hotels is on the sales team, from bellhop to mail room clerk to reservation maker to accountant. He wanted the experience of the customer to establish a positive emotional connection to his brand. Every detail went toward that. His hotels were among the first to put an “H” imprint in the white sand of the hallway ashtrays and to fold the toilet tissue into a triangle at the end.1 The effect was to communicate to the customer, “Hey, we’re paying attention to every detail of your stay.”
He clearly had the customer experience in mind, but did that make his company a design-driven one? No. Because it wasn’t long before competitors were putting an imprint “S” in the sand of their hallway ashtrays, and it wasn’t too hard to fold the end of toilet tissue. Competitors on a misguided path even went to extremes of origami, enough to scare the patrons away from some complimentary items in fear of getting a paper cut.
A step toward awareness is recognizing what part of your design can be easily replicated by a competitor and what amounts to a truly iconic experience that cannot easily be copied.
A design-driven company has commitment from the top. Hilton had it while Conrad was around but has devolved to become just another “respectable” chain since. Hilton couldn’t retain its iconic quality without focus, vigilance, and freshness. Apple began to drift during the interlude when Steve Jobs was not present and quickly restored focus when he returned. This is the very thing that makes the task so difficult for a company like Dell, which brilliantly built a business using superb traditional supply chain management. The commitment to become design driven with a relentless vigilance of the customer experience supply chain must be championed at the top and cascade to be part of every aspect of the way a company operates.
That’s why a company doesn’t become a design-driven company without continuing executive leadership. Because it’s inevitably difficult, and at the beginning it’s not everyone’s passion and you’re going to have to do things you’re not comfortable with or you haven’t done before. People don’t do that unless they are inspired to, or have to, or unless they’re given an incentive to do so—human nature being what it is. So you have to have someone around who understands all this and is willing to drive change through the system.
Apple continues to be an excellent example to learn from. Selling 25 million iPods can do that, as well as being named the world’s most innovative company multiple times. Yes—we know—you read the press and sometimes we all get sick of hearing from pundits. But the thing of it is—there are too few examples to use for companies that have really achieved this level of mastery when it comes to being design driven. Consider this the good news, however, because this is also a statement of opportunity for you to get out there and lead a parade. If you look inside any design-driven company, you will find someone doing the job of Chief Experience Officer. It’s what to do if you’re not Steve Jobs because you don’t have to be the Chief Executive Officer to be the Chief Experience Officer. It so happens that Jobs holds both jobs (couldn’t resist that one)—but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Back to Apple. So what is it really about on the inside? These days what it’s about, according to Jonathan Ive, the Senior Vice President of Design who in 2003 was the winner of London’s Design Museum inaugural Designer of the Year award, is that “not only is it critical that the leadership of a company clearly understands its products and the role of design, but that the development, marketing, and sales teams are also equally committed to the same goals. More than ever I am aware that what we have achieved with design is massively reliant on the commitment of lots of different teams to solve the same problems and on their sharing the same goals.”2
The reason, he says, that so many new products are bland and derivative is because “so many companies are competing against each other with similar agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see. A preoccupation with differentiation is the concern of many corporations rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources, and caring enough to try and make something better.”
Characteristics of the Apple design-driven experience include:
• Driven from the top—The senior team is thoroughly committed to not only the design-driven strategy, but also to making design and innovation a feature of the company DNA. According to Ive, this is a major part of Apple’s success as a design-riven company.
• Design-driven focus—Design is not applied as an afterthought or window dressing, it is a starting point. Design is also not primarily about good looks. It’s about solving a problem by blending function and usability, often in an iconic style, to create an emotional connection with the intended customer. As Jobs tells it, it is about making products “that people love.”
• Thinking differently—Greatness is not achieved by doing like everybody else. By thinking differently, you can make a difference. In some ways, Apple’s iPod had fewer features than competitors; the design of the feature set functioned so as to provide a better customer experience. People do get to love their iPods.
• Quick to prototype and market—A design-driven company doesn’t labor on a product until it’s perfect. To quote Jobs: “Artists ship.” Instead, it launches new products quickly, often, and improves on them in response to consumer feedback. Recall how the iPod came out with a Windows-friendly version while in its first year of release.
When you look at the companies that do design well, that are driven by it, you can see they are, from the very beginning, searching for the right opportunity; they have their mind on what the experience design possibility is. When they find the opportunity, they begin to design what that is. When they move into engineering, the physical design and the emotional aspect are very important to engineer. It’s not something to be eliminated because of costs. You have to figure out how to do it. Same thing in manufacturing. The selection of quality materials and how parts go together, fit, and finish—all those things are kept at a high level. Again not something to be viewed as, “Oh, we’re spending an extra fifty cents; let’s cut that out.” They figure out how to do it, and they get the product into distribution.
Design-driven companies manufacture to the way they design rather than design to the way they manufacture.
Another instructional and compelling Apple example is that when they create something, they don’t force it into an existing manufacturing line and then wait to see what happens. When much of the product design is based around clear plastic, they actually change all the lighting in the manufacturing facility; everyone wears gloves; they build their line around the reality that “we have to maintain the quality of these parts” and be able to see them as product moves along through a scratch-free system. They spend the money to do that. Another company might just say, let’s throw it on this line, and then “Oh, we’re having a lot of defects. This is too expensive; we can’t be doing this. The reject rate is too high.” You carry design into every corner of the process, and of course, into the promotion and into the market. That’s the idea of being design driven. It’s a process, not an event. It’s just the way you do things.
It’s important to understand how you become design driven. You don’t just flip a switch and have it be an overnight event; it has to be given time.
Apple did not start out as design driven as it has become. As Apple focused on customer experience (above a lot of distractions) it became so. During the Sculley years, Apple continued to do great design and build an exceptionally talented design team, while at the same time management grew to misunderstand what Apple was really good at and what really mattered. Focus was quickly restored when Jobs returned and saw how the business had drifted and that it was not leveraging the full capabilities of a unique design infrastructure.
Design, as we discuss it here, is really a methodology you use to shape and create the relationship between you and your customer. What’s core to this is that design means you are overtly creating, developing, prototyping, doing it with customer emotion in mind as opposed to just letting all this evolve and happen. What goes on in most companies is they go about doing their business in their little silos. We need this, we need that, we need this, we need that, and all these things, and all of a sudden in a haphazard way, they’ve concocted an experience. Sort of. Then they go about trying to shape it all. This isn’t working here; let’s fix this one; then we’ll jump to this one, and still, while they may incrementally improve things, they aren’t aligned in any sort of “where are we going” way.
Design is everybody’s business, and if a CEO’s going to do it right, he or she has to understand that that’s the case.
Endnotes
1 Carbone, Lewis P., Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again (Pearson, 2004).