It is true that designers are so loyal to their users that all they think about is them. It is totally fine to want your users to have the best experience while using your product, but it should not obstruct the business goal—Profit!
Directly or indirectly, every business comes up with a solution and tries to sell it so that profit maximization remains. The design, an app, or a website comes as a result of building or selling the solution. Gopal shared his unique insight with our designers on how to be user-centric and business-oriented.
Gopal Upadhya
Gopal is a certified usability expert from Human Factors International with a sociology background. He found his passion and moved to design communication. He has over 15 years of experience in UI and UX design.
He has worked on various projects for many clients, ranging from applications to websites to graphics, and he always focuses on delivering user-centric and practical solutions. He’s passionate about design, human behaviour, and psychology. He excels at team building, collaboration activities and currently manages an in-house team at Moglix.
His journey started as an animator, and he eventually found his way up. Now, he is the director of design at Moglix. He has garnered over 15 years of experience and manages over 20 products at Moglix. In addition, he is also a mentor at MAIC. MAIC is a Moglix initiative featuring a unique curriculum, interactive projects, and export horizons for school students.
His work at Moglix is to ensure that all designs are functional and usable to bring value to their client. He has been there for three years, which means he is doing an amazing job, so we are learning from the best.
Understanding Common Business Terms
When learning a new language, the first vocabulary we pick up is usually slang and teasing words. It is somehow believed that once you get a good grasp of slang, you won’t be cheated or seen as a novice when you are around the natives of that language.
Gopal used that theory with us and started the session with a little trivia to test our knowledge about common slang in the business industry. Our designers tried their best. He asked for the meaning of:
- KPI
- AOP
- CAGR
- CAC
- ARR
- BI
- OKR
- CLV
Did you know all of this without using Google?
It’s fine; we are all here to learn!
It is important to familiarize yourself with these terms to get on board with the business guys on a team. If you are going to be driving profits and other business goals with your design, you need to be on the same page with the business team because most of their conversation will be centered around their lingos/slang.
Why should you align your business goals with Design Decisions?
This is just like asking why we should breathe as humans. Business goals are as important as the user experience, and it sustains the brand. It increases ROI, fosters collaboration, etc.
Gopal explained about eight solid reasons why we should, and they are as follows:
How do you meet the business goals?
He told us that we need first to understand business KPIs and their importance. He walked us through the general KPIs
- Revenue Growth: It measures how much sales a company make over a period of time
- Net Profit Margin is the amount remaining after deducting all the costs of operating the business. Gopal also chipped in that it is similar to PAT(profit after tax); the difference is that PAT is revenue, while the profit margin is a ratio.
- Operating cash flow: How much a business generates during a regular business operation.
- Return on Investment is simply what you get back from pushing a feature or service. It is the profit of an investment relative to its cost.
- Customer Lifetime Value: Projected profit a customer can bring to the business.
- Customer Acquisition Cost: The amount you pay to get a customer.
- Market Share: The part of the market a company or a brand controls
Ecobox: A case study to understand how KPI works
Our team had the privilege of seeing how these KPIs work with a case study from Gopal.
So Ecobox is a subscription-based service that provides eco-friendly home items. The aim is to create a demand for sustainable and green products.
The next step is to understand the business’s current situation and identify opportunities for growth and expansion. This can be done through market analysis and Competitor analysis. The market is projected to increase by 15% annually, and then there will be a gap between Ecobox and other E-commerce companies that provide “Differentiation and Market Leadership.”
Based on the result, the KPIs need to be set strategically. Gopal said it is normal for designers to want to jump into solutions, create dashboards, or consider UIs. However, he taught us that business decisions should fuel design.
We have to make sure to understand the business elements before jumping into the solutions.
How does it fit into UX?
He walked us through the process of design, which are
- User Research and Persona Development
- Customer Journey Mapping
- Mobile First Approach
- Usability Testing
- Marketing and Awareness
- Feedback Mechanism
- Performance Optimization
- Retention Strategies
You will notice that about four points are not included in the regular design process; most of our design process ends with usability testing and iteration. Let’s quickly discuss the remaining four parts and how they can help you make business decisions while picking user experience.
Marketing and Awareness
Once the design is developed and ready to hit the market, designers must follow up with this stage. What good is it if your beautiful and amazing design does not reach your target audience? You have to experience the growth from the first user to help you understand the business goals.
Feedback Mechanism
Experiencing growth gives you the opportunity to form an emotional bond with the feedback you get! As a designer, you should focus on qualitative and quantitative feedback analysis to improve your design. It would help you in iteration and expand your scope of creativity to cover business goals and user feedback.
Performance Optimization
We think performance optimization is for product managers and business teams, but designers also have a share in it. You have to measure the performance of your design outside user feedback. You have to know its speed, the traffic it is getting, the users’ age group, etc. Users might leave it and go elsewhere if your design takes time to load, no matter how functional. So, you need to know all these and tailor your design accordingly.
Retention Strategies
Your design must keep your users coming back for more. Your UI, UX, and iterations must attract and retain more users. User satisfaction is best felt when a user keeps on using the product; that way, you can judge its customer value. So whatever decision you make while designing, keep in mind that it is to increase a customer’s value.
Interactive Session
After Gopal finished his explanations, we had questions raised by our designers, who were really enthusiastic about the business of their design.
Kishor: What parameters should a design agency adopt before starting a project, and how can we assess these parameters after the project to show that the design has a good ROI?
Gopal: So the first thing is to speak the language of the project owner. Understand whether they are coming from a business or design background. Then, use terms that they are familiar with to ask them what they envision in their project. Their answers give you a vague idea of the returning users they need, the percentage of ROIs or the CTRs. Another thing is the engineering KPIs, like the speed of the website, which is also very important. You will get to figure out the back and forths to help you kick-start the design.
Priya: How do we ensure that day-to-day operations and decisions align with the business’s long-term goals and strategy? Do I involve the designers in the output of their designs?
Gopal: This is a good question, and there are two ways around it. The first is to create a mechanism that provides weekly reports of the ten important KPIs. At the end of the month, they can study the pattern and growth over time.
The second thing is to keep in touch with the business stakeholders from the first day. There are times when the project goes smoothly, and you think there is no need to meet the Business stakeholders, but you still have to create a system to keep in touch with them, as they are very important in the design process.
The Fusion of Business And Design
The question-and-answer session ended, and the take-home message is to gradually incorporate being a user-centred and business-aware designer. Finally, we can’t forget to always use the lingo of the business Industry!
