With most businesses switching to e-commerce, having an exceptional design is crucial to stay ahead in the competitive market and differentiate your business from others. People these days pay attention and notice every little thing. Therefore, designers need to visualize a company’s marketing strategy and create designs by keeping the preferences of their target persona in mind.
Great design helps to enhance the marketing efforts of your business other than just making your content look good and stand out. There is an increasing need for designers to create the right design for your business to attract potential customers, improve conversion rate and increase your ROI.
Including photos of people has proven to be an essential strategy for designers to develop a deeper connection with the audience and increase empathy. When relevant and well-placed photos are combined with conversion opportunities helps you attract more customers.
Relationship between Design and Business
Designers can be passionate proponents of change in a business. They are visually curious, detail-oriented and fond of experimentation and always aim at building compelling products and intuitive experiences that help improve the lives of the people.
Design is important to business in the following ways:
Design exist to drive sales
The whole purpose of the existence of design departments in a company is to differentiate the organization from its competitors. Business leaders need to invest in design to gain a competitive advantage of creative excellence for business. A great design helps attract more potential customers, which ultimately leads to an increase in sales.
Design Serves Customers and Users
Designers aim at users even when companies focus and prioritize customers. Sometimes profits may lag when usability is focused, and conversion is not. Therefore, designers need to balance both for the right kind of approach. It’s their responsibility to focus on users and lead them into paying customers.
Design presentation need to demonstrate Business Impact
Designers have complex tasks to work on and are mainly preoccupied, which may sometimes waste their efforts. Therefore it is crucial for designers to focus on important activities such as:
- Attending meetings with non-design teams to understand their concerns and priorities.
- Building and maintaining relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
- Sticking to companies values, goals and policies.
How to increase Designer Value of your Business
Design and business complement and need each other. Designers can do more than just designing and teaching others how it functions and creative problem-solving process. Similarly, a business can also show willingness in learning.
Some of the ways to evaluate your designer values are:
Ask Questions often
At large organizations, where there are so many priorities, designers need to be willing to ask questions regularly. They need to keep probing when they don’t get enough clarity over a subject. Therefore, they need to centre their conversations with stakeholders around product road maps and company-wide goals to ensure that design aligns with strategic vision.
Practise Workplace Diplomacy
All companies have some degree of bureaucracy. Therefore, designers need to practice workplace diplomacy and lean on soft skills in order to navigate these pitfalls. Willingness to collaborate and humility, and knowing when to be differential is key for them.
Look for Gaps to fill
Designers need a proactive approach to solve problems within their organization, and casual conversations and company meetings are a great way to identify and understand user pain points, inefficient processes and areas of poor performance. By identifying potential problems, designers can quickly generate solutions with prototyping and share them with business leaders.
Find an Advocate
Advocate refers to someone from senior management who invests in the designer’s progress and advocates on their behalf. An advocate can be helpful in many situations; for example, when a designer comes with a profitable idea for an organization but a decision-maker is not convinced, an advocate can help articulate the idea from a different angle.
Designer value is growing to be a crucial part of the company’s success, and they are capable of performing multiple roles and can make their contributions to high-impact projects.
Conclusion
The importance of craftsmanship within the organization is tremendously increasing, and design is all set to advance towards all corners of the industry in the coming years. Therefore, businesses need to value designers as they are a crucial part of the company.
Design principles will help drive sales and improve customer satisfaction, while the whole design process can dictate the company’s overall success. Design departments will no longer work as separate entities within any organization as designers will be more influential than ever.
