Author: Emily Ludolph / Source: 99U by Behance
It’s no secret that good design is good business. But what does it actually look like when a designer executes a business model? What happens when designer-founded companies like Airbnb and MailChimp bake design thinking in from the start? Recently, an audience of entrepreneurs, designers, and creatives, gathered at the Northside Festival to visualize the future of business and design.
“Design has become ‘the big D’,” says Festival Director Brian Quinn, “The future is the designer who’s not the last person you talk to and say, ‘make it look pretty’ but the first person you integrate to figure out how it all works.”Gene Lee, the VP of Design at MailChimp, sat down with Droga5 Group Design Director, Devin Croda to discuss what happens when you put designers in charge of operations, how data will drive the future of design, and when you should give or withhold a high-five.
Not every company starts with a design founder, so we gathered a few design tips and operational tenets from Lee so you can integrate ‘the big D’ into your business.
Solve an original pain point.
The thing all designers have in common is they see a vision of the world as it could be. What designers can particularly excel at? Looking concurrently at opportunities at the experience and the business level and asking ‘what are we trying to solve?’ Lee predicts the trend in design-led business modeling, like Airbnb, Square, and Pinterest, will only grow. “Steve Jobs said, ‘Design is not how it looks, but how it works,’” Lee points out. ‘The latest trend in design is not how it looks but how it leads.”
Give high fives.
Often you just want to hit one simple, utilitarian button and be done. But sometimes, Lee points out, there’s as much emotion as function in a button click. Like the terror you feel when you’re about to send an email to 5,00 people. Lee advocates mining the design journey for emotional moments and crafting acknowledgments of those emotions.
“You’re about to push the button to send. And you start to sweat…So, we dialed up that emotional side,” he says. MailChimp’s users see an illustration of a perspiring hand about to press a big red,…The post High Fives, AI, and Connecting the Dots: MailChimp’s VP of Design on What Business can Learn from Design appeared first on FeedBox.