Design is a powerful tool. It’s not just about styling, it’s about impact and strategic advantage. Businesses that incorporate design into their company culture enjoy more satisfied customers, operate with increased efficiency, and unlock greater financial rewards.
As today’s marketplace evolves faster than ever, together with customers’ expectations, the pressure to innovate is intense. Effective design gets you out in front and helps your business realise future value.
Design is as much about rigour and analytical thinking as it is about creative and innovative ideas. And it should be treated objectively – whether it’s in a stand-alone project or as a process embedded into a business. Holding design to account removes subjectivity and avoids decision-making driven solely by gut feeling.
At ELSE, we start by understanding the objectives of the business – whether that be increased revenue, operational efficiency or increased customer satisfaction – and define what project success will look like. Once we’ve broken down the problem, we design in metrics or measurable elements – setting us up to correctly understand the impact of any future design decisions.
Objectivity comes not only from measurement but also from understanding the value of what is being measured, as well as the tools and the processes applied. The ELSE Experience Framework introduces objectivity across the breadth of any product or service. So we always know when we’re delivering good and effective work.
No idea’s a bad idea — a classic house rule from any brainstorm — but let’s be honest, at some point you really need to establish which ideas are in fact the bad ideas. And the sooner the better, to help prevent excessive investment in projects that’ll likely fail.
When it comes to developing ideas, we involve customers as early as possible in the process to understand how they will be received ‘in the real world’. And we always include key stakeholders as we prioritise concepts. This way, we select the ideas customers really want, marry them to those suitable for the business, and ensure technical feasibility all the way along.
We find the best way to have customers validate what we’re doing is to get practical as fast as possible, and to build prototypes. Prototypes, no matter how rough, give us something tangible to be critiqued and built upon. We align them to ELSE’s experience framework, which means strategy always directs design and the final product.
We focus on customers journeys and measure progress over time to make sure, at every stage in a project, we’re on track to deliver the business objectives.
A perfect example of delivering impact through effective design is our recent work for Loterie Romande (Swiss National Lottery). The project objective was to offer a modern, relevant and personalised experience for their players. The redesign far exceeded all original goals, achieving a 250% increase in registrations, doubling player volume and delivering a 25% growth in sales.
Loterie Romande’s responsive new platform also opened up alternative revenue opportunities for them – which had the positive side effect of making increased funds available for social good. These additional opportunities were made possible through player tracking, cross-selling and targeted in-platform marketing.
“We are very proud of the recognition this award represents. The design of our online gaming platform has played a key role in the success of our technological leap forward. It allows us to respond to changes in the market and evolving consumer habits; we are addressing this increasingly connected segment of our clientele.” Jean-Luc Moner-Banet, CEO of Loterie Romande
This project received the 2019 DBA Gold award for design effectiveness. For us, design isn’t about winning peer-reviewed awards, but this was a nice bonus on top of seeing the significant and direct impact our design work had on the business.