Improvement by Design

Development of a process of how to approach improvement by design

Last week Sunita Yeomans shared with us some very valuable insights about how to approach improvement through design in existing organisations. The main challenge she experienced is that in commercial businesses the value of design seems not always to be believed in. Therefore, design leaders have to develop a strong creative strategy tailored to the business’s core and communicate the successes reached clearly by relating them to business objectives.

From Sunita’s examples and lessons learned she shared, I derived the following process for improvement by design:

Improvement by Design (adapted from Yeomans, 2019, illustration by Hinger, 2019)

It is vital for the design manager to understand the business objectives (e.g. increase of sales and shopping frequency) as well as the brand promise (e.g. convenience), because they build the final aim of all actions within the business. From each business objective commercial objectives can be derived. These are more operational targets that can be linked directly to a design approach applied to reach the target (e.g. make products look great by changing the style of photography).

It is suggested to try the proposed strategies to demonstrate their success to the relevant stakeholders. Usually after this first trial a rollout on a large scale is started with help of agencies that support the delivery of the design solutions.

What I like especially about this process is its connection between business and design as well as the link of design to the achievement of relevant business objectives. Design is not seen as an add-on at the end of a business process, but rather a powerful tool in it.

Although this term’s project is not placed in a business environment, I can imagine to adapt the basic idea to it as well: After defining the aims of our campaign, which could be seen as equivalent to the business objectives, we could brake them down in ideas of how to achieve these aims more practically and assign certain design methods to them.