What business needs now is design.
What design needs now is making it about business.
- Beth Comstock
There are any number of studies that quantify the impact of design on the success of an organization.
None ever feel completely satisfying, as the linkages between design and revenue are loosely coupled and long running, which makes justifying investment difficult.
Nonetheless, we can quantify the impact of design on the business in six main areas:
Revenue - Products that meet well-defined customer needs deliver higher customer lifetime value at lower customer acquisition costs.
Retention - Onboarding processes that deliver value quickly will increase conversions and reduce churn.
Productivity - A mature design process reduces rework, wasted effort, and friction for designer, development, and product teams.
Support costs - Products that are approachable and/or learnable enable successful user self-service.
Development costs - Design defects create rework late in the SDLC, or worse, after release.
Time to market - Solid requirements and a consistent handoff process reduce uncertainty, rework and time to market in both design and development phases of a project.
In 2018, IBM published a retrospective on a 5-year, $100M, investment in design from 2012-2017 demonstrating significant positive impact on both time-to-market and project cost and a 300% ROI.
Forrester published a review of the IBM effort and identified faster time to market as the top benefit.
McKinsey has studied the impact of design for over a decade. Their 2018 report on the Business Value of Design showed that businesses in the top quartile of Design Maturity outperformed peers on revenue growth and return to shareholders by 2 to 1.
And, in the same McKinsey study, organizations in the top quartile of the Design Value Index (DVI) more than doubled their peers in growth of market capitalization.
