In 2023, gaining a competitive business edge is impossible without implementing digital innovation. With customers becoming especially demanding to get top-notch experiences and organizations aiming to tackle operational inefficiencies, prioritizing digital initiatives deservedly becomes a key objective on the CIO agenda.
Approaching innovation, companies tend to focus on cloud enablement, monetizing data insights, exploring AR & metaverse opportunities, and experimenting with AI. While each of the points makes a huge part in digital transformation and innovation, in practice, it’s often the experience that helps businesses get real value from innovations.
In this blog post, we’ll look at digital business innovation through the lens of experience design and explore its transformative role in cutting-edge technology adoption.
Design brings consistency to digital endeavors
Traditionally, design brings innovation to each level of product development—from understanding the challenges and opportunities to implementing specific decisions in a native, customer-centered way.
This principle scales to understanding the role of design in digital innovation and transformation.
Regardless of the approach and methodology used to introduce the changes, design empowers digital innovation with consistency. This encourages businesses to treat innovation as a way of addressing genuine consumer needs and helps them get complementary value from digital initiatives.
Let’s see how design becomes the heart of digital business innovation and helps organizations bring their products and services to the next level.
Design coordinates different world views to co-create new digital value
Level 1. Detecting growth areas and pain points through actionable communication
Excited by the essence of digital innovations, business executives might overlook the main value they are called to bring—making people’s lives easier. Design helps to break silos between different business units and introduce innovation to enhance the company’s key value—people and their skills.
Leveraging digital transformation and innovation at an enterprise scale is often characterized by various types of boundaries, including bureaucracy, inconsistency of opinions among stakeholders, and rounds of agreements it takes to reach a consensus on key operational decisions.
The collaborative nature of experience design allows businesses to look at their products from the user’s angle using a set of dedicated design methods: brainstorms, design workshops, stakeholder interviews, observations, focus groups, and journey mapping.
It’s design that brings stakeholders and users together at the negotiating table helping them foster a wider view of the company’s challenges and opportunities. Understanding end-users' needs and pain points allows businesses to remain unbiased and consistent during the whole research and development process.
- Gather feedback to uncover pain points and user needs.
- Align the findings with key business objectives.
- Turn insights into actionable items to reach goals and unlock new business opportunities.
Such a value-focused approach to digital innovation helps businesses stay relevant in the market by aligning the opinions of innovators and end-users. As a result, businesses not only shape their digital agenda but unlock a continuous stream of insights on growth opportunities.
Design drives the exploratory nature of digital innovation
Level 2. Re-framing existing design problems and de-risking innovation through continuous research
Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Samsung spend billions from their annual budgets on research and development.
Experiments underlie digital experience innovation, that’s why by prioritizing R&D initiatives, A-list enterprise tech companies invest in predicting the future of their products.
Luckily, the rise of tools and methods for continuous UX research has made it possible to quickly visualize, test, and refine innovative ideas with end users, thus de-risking product development and helping businesses approximate a sustainable tomorrow. By creating realistic prototypes, organizations can instantly conceptualize and validate ideas with users instead of spending time and development efforts on MVP development.
According to Hubspot, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs. This is also true for digital business innovation. Harnessing feedback-gathering culture, enterprises become one step closer to their customers and are more likely to address their needs in the way they expect.
In the long run, a consistent exploratory approach to experience design allows companies to mitigate financial risks, embrace continuous innovation, create unique value propositions, and remain competitive in the ever-changing digital landscape.
Design accelerates digital innovation adoption
Level 3. Finding native ways of changing people’s lives
As design practitioners, we are responsible for organizations getting predicted business results of technology adoption and crucial product changes. In fact, our role is productizing the practical value from innovations through intuitive interfaces and comprehensive user flows.
Digital innovation is at the same time a trigger and one of the most complicated stages of digital business transformation. To make sure that any innovation will be welcomed and easily embraced by consumers, designers need to transfer the insights and opinions of product users to the development team and watch them put the plan into action.
Here the efforts spent on research and explorations pay off, as designers are in charge of addressing user goals and pains with the product in the way they expect—user flows should look and feel native and reinforce the primary product value.
After the solution is implemented, designers’ work is still not over, as user expectations tend to grow and transform on a regular basis. To comply with the changing requirements and help businesses scale, designers review the delivered solution to make it even more useful for consumers:
- Collecting business success metrics to define new objectives and align with current business priorities
- Evaluating user feedback to make sure the solution brings expected practical value
- Conducting another round of observations to discover all ways in which consumers are using the product and detect any possible experience gaps
- Running usability tests to confirm that the solution works as intended and find room for improvement
In cases when digital innovation solutions appear complex and consumers require additional guidance, designers are also responsible for developing comprehensive walkthroughs that would help users eliminate digital friction and master innovation.
Secure your way to innovation and growth!
Today’s competitive business environment pushes organizations to take transformative product decisions and think out of the box. As digital innovation is not a standalone solution to the growing user expectations and business requirements, it’s important to make transformation a part of the company’s culture and promote a consistent approach to discovery-first product development.
At Trinetix, we focus on uncovering deeper dependencies and opportunity areas for businesses that undergo transformations. Years of expertise with enterprise clients allow our design teams to exceed their expectations with digital innovation services and deliver impactful solutions that change the world at scale. Consider creating value-driven experiences to consolidate your transformation efforts—let’s chat and get started.
