Design has become the largest differentiator most businesses have. Don Norman covered a host of everyday problems with products in his classic book, The Design of Everyday Things. He uncovers how you may not be alone in having trouble figuring out if a door “pulls” open or “pushes” open. It is a very worthwhile read and shows off the ability of Design to lesson the value in usefulness.

All businesses have some unique selling proposition for their goods or services too. There is something – besides price – that continues to keep their business in business. In a world where white collar jobs are done by people in far off times zones who have no connection to the customer – design may be the ONLY thing that differentiates your sales efforts. It’s not just techies offshore either. Today you find HR, scanning MRI’s, financial back office, customer service centers, and as much business process as companies are willing to send away. See examples here: Scanning, HR jobs, Call Center, Contact Center, Healthcare, and of course Software.

In an October Mass High Tech article, Richard Banfield wrote;

“Today, leadership faces an ever-increasing wave of new startups with fewer barriers to entry than ever before. Thanks to the decreasing cost of technology and increased access to microfunding, each of these startups begins with less overhead and less risk. Less risk means more potential competitors for the incumbents. Less than This 20 years ago, you could dominate an industry by simply building a massive infrastructure that would be too expensive or time consuming to compete with. Today, a feisty startup can eat your lunch using a bank loan and a socially exciting website.

To survive in a world in which your competitors are younger, faster and smarter than ever, you’ll need something else. You need a design strategy.”

Fast Company’s 2007 Master of Design Annual had more must-read articles and gave insight into great design minds like Philippe Starck and Yves Béhar.

“The style of tomorrow will be the freedom and recognition of difference. We must replace the name ‘beautiful’ by the name ‘good.’ Beautiful means nothing.” Philippe Starck

Meaning: good design is really about simplicity. It is about stripping out all the extraneous visual nonsense and leaving only the key elements needed to communicate clearly. It means designing only the necessary elements to make your product or service be preferred.

Massimo Vignelli, who founded Unimark in 1965, believes that

“It’s really more about logic than imagination.”

He and his wife Lella have done brand identity work for Bloomingdales, Ford, American Airlines and Knoll. But all of their most lasting work is SIMPLE.

Created in 1972 (before Adobe made graphic design easier for all) their New York Subway map is a perfect example of simplicity – and it was all done by hand. Each line bends at 45 or 90 degrees. Every line has a color and it was modeled after London’s underground map.

Design as a differentiator is not new – but it does have more believers today. Legendary Apple is one of the “True Believers” who controls the hardware, software and industrial design elegance. MIT’s Technology Review did a great story last year on why Apple’s success stems form their design culture. You can read the MIT article here. Robert Brunner says his team pushed manufacturers to find new solutions during his tenure with Apple industrial design. And bloggers write about Apple constantly in this role – including sending more tech business reporters to MacWorld each year.

1. Who should be next Apple CEO?
2. What we can Learn from Apple
3. Newsweek looks at MacBook Air

But even companies like Proctor & Gamble and SAS have claimed that Design will be one of the ways they differentiate in their marketplaces. And not just visually.

An older article in Bnet discusses the actual Value design can add to enterprises. The article shows how Design has 4 Powers:

1. Design as Differentiator
2. Design as Integrator
3. Design as Transformer
4. Design as Good Business

This is really where Design makes a difference: adding value to the equation of your business. Our own case studies have shown some correlation to the value of design. We have had clients increase online sales or decrease costs using simple web design. Getting measurable ROI from Design differentiation is the ultimate goal.

The fact is there is so much more information available now – that we need intelligent design of it – and advanced filtering to see for ourselves. Reading my daily blogs and info updates I have recently seen a couple of interesting articles on the history of the Graphical User Interface. Of course, there is a wikipedia entry, but also a nice collection of GUIs found here as well.

At Macworld 2007, Steve Jobs rolled out the much-anticipated iphone (naming rights still pending;-) with a very slick user interface that only requires our fingers. This type of touch-screen interface already has competition from Microsoft, GE Healthcare, Mitsubishi and brilliant engineer Jeff Han who made his debut last year at TED 2006 and then had his video downloaded a quarter of a million times from YouTube to become on of the most popular tech videos of all time according to Fast Company.

Last week Guy Kawasaki riffed on the The Art of Visualization where he pointed to some very cool third-party graphical representations of his book The Art of The Start. He also linked to the Periodic Table of Visualization about how data and abstract thoughts can be visualized. I recognized many of my thoughts (and way cooler diagrams) on how we can visually explain our client’s businesses.

This visualization clarity is related to our love of Tufte’s information design books. The poster he sells of Napoleon’s March on Moscow in the Russian campaign of 1812 may be the best example of complex data being visually displayed for laymen to understand. Tufte offers an excellent course if interested.

Boxes and Arrows (with a brand new web interface themselves) has an interview online with Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice “The problem used to be, ‘how do we get information out to people?’ That problem has now been solved in spades. Now the problem is, ‘how do we filter the information so that people can actually use it?’”

One answer: user-centered design with multiple avenues to find the information that solves their needs – when they need it. Information Architects and Web Designers should all start with a better understanding of their audiences. Those personas and user profiles are not steps to be skipped, but instead are steps toward visual design that works.

In User Interface Design for Programmers, software guru Joel Spolsky describes it as:

“When you’re thinking about user interfaces, it helps to keep imaginary users in mind. The more realistic the imaginary user is, the better you’ll do thinking about how they use your product.… Thinking about a “real” person gives you the empathy you need to make a feature that serves that person’s need.…”

So how do things really look to your users? In this recent post from Joining Dots they have an interesting quote from Larry Bassidy, former CEO of Honeywell:

“Ask a CEO what kind of culture they have and they will describe the kind of culture they want, as if it exists, instead of describing what is really going on.”

They go on to wonder aloud if companies really “want” a user-centered design or collaboration and knowledge sharing or whether companies really want to impose guidelines within which users can publish intranet material. A difference between what they say and what they do.

Actually creating useful pages is far harder. We have found in user tests of our own web development, users say one thing and actually do another (they also frequently overstate their web-savviness – but that’s another topic;-). So just how can a developer use audience information and user personas to improve the visual medium? We all must have a more thorough understanding of the way people will use our sites and web application pages. Too frequently client directives like marketing, advertising, corporate opinions, and most often “how they sell” stand in the way of creating truly useful interfaces to “why customers buy.” Solve that one and your web application has a far greater chance for success.

Start 2007 with a renewed push for the way things look. Make resolutions that make you look at things differently. Review the masters of visual display who have solved far greater problems with elegant solutions. Have your newsreader search the web for useful insight. And don’t settle for “because that’s how we have always done it.” It’s all new again.

You can’t find many businesses today who don’t claim to be ‘design driven.’ Who doesn’t want to be the next Apple? But making that quantum shift from repetitive process-driven business to a more intuitive project-based one geared to customers is daunting.

Go to Amazon and search for “Business Creativity” books and you will see almost 3000 results. Industries who have been investing in design far longer than the current crop of business books need to get religion about design again. Software and web developers need to refocus – especially if the business buyers believe design can help them differentiate.

Microsoft has arguably as many Design and User Interface employees as any major corporation, but they have a dismal record of creating user-preferred design. Apparently Vista has 9 different ways that users can shut off a laptop. Friday’s BusinessWeek article claims “that Vista, for all its capabilities, could end up being too complex for the average consumer.” Joel Spolsky covered the Vista shut-down this week and says that “the more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they’ll feel.”

We have recently needed to adjust a user interface in a Section 508 compliant design that can be read in software like JAWS. As a result we are looking at established conventions and lower browser standards. But it will make us ‘listen’ to the users as well as how they view our design. And it will make us rethink everything we design going forward.

Go back and read last year’s Fact Company article on The Business of Design. “Design-influenced companies also understand their customers at a profound level and mobilize around that insight.”

That is where we all should start.

Too many companies start their their online shopping experience with how the company is set up. Corporate organizational charts (focused on the inside view) take over the web solutions. Commerce stores are set up in the same silos that the company uses for financial reporting purposes. You can almost tell the organizational chart by their sales solutions.

Our experience with financial service companies finds that products and services are typically separate entities in the corporation. As a result customers need to self-select into the types of products that make sense for them. So depending on the level of knowledge a customer has, or the entry point to the site, or the targeted advertising banner rate quote, the customer quickly gets to a solution – just maybe not the best solution for them.

So how does a company understand that the potential site visitor needs to finance his daughters wedding? That ‘product’ doesn’t exist on a bank site. The solution may come from an “Any Day” loan, or an Equity product or a Card Product or some sort of unsecured borrowing that can only happen when the bank listens to the need. That kind of listening can only happen by improving customer relationships.

If you are trying to improve your site for the Holidays you have probably missed the window for a major redesign effort which could improve your online relationships. But what you do have time for is improving what you have right now.

This Holiday season more companies intend to improve their relationships with some old fashioned technology – and still the only ‘killer app’ – email. In a recent WebTrends survey 80% of retailers stated that regular customer email is their preferred method for building relationships.

There are tons of email marketing sites that can help improve yours, but this recent article shows 3 successful ways to improve response without using discounted prices as the driver. Make your emails relevant; Time them to the season’s buying habits; and take advantage of key repurchase behavior. Repurchase behavior is key since it means you know about your customers.

More companies improved customer relationships this year with the addition of live chat and personalized promotions. Look at Bank of America’s Mortgage. The minute you land on those pages, a liveperson pop-up asks if you need assistance now. Liveperson did small sample interviews that showed users spend an average of 20 hours online each week and that 17% of the time is dedicated to research and comparison of products. Those shoppers spend more than $1000 online each year.

Customer relationships are expensive to start and invaluable to improve on. Use the information you have right now to improve yours. Why do customers buy from you in the first place? What parts of your site are most popular? Are there repeat sales of similar items? Do your customers ask for items that you have but can’t be found on your site? Can you cross-promote similar items better by using existing customer data? How can you better solve the needs of site visitors?

Someone once said that web users can really only do 4 things on any web site: Research, Purchase, Entertain themselves or Flee.

Help your customers research and purchase from you. See if you can’t speed up their getting information from you. Conduct a series of conversations with them through email or personalized content on your site. Use your ears and listen to what they need. Do everything you can to avoid the last of the 4. Flight means no return.

Take the steps to make sure your customers enjoy their Holidays.

We are starting to see the frothiness of web hype (Web 2.0 BS Generator) again with mergers, venture money and hyperbole from consultants, but many of the old adages still apply. The Journal of Marketing has only been around since 1936 and has published a ton of research on effectiveness. One of the articles I remember most came from a 1961 quarterly publication. It was by Robert Lavidge and Gary Steiner and we used it in class at Georgia when we discussed measurement. It took users through the 6 step process from Awareness to Knowledge to Liking to Preference to Conviction to Purchase. Advertising programs have been teaching kids to write copy to get people across that spectrum ever since. Bill Bernbach exemplified the skills starting with the 1959 Volkswagon Think Small campaign and held our attention for decades.

How does that age old ’selling’ translate to the web? Where are we on Lavidge and Steiner’s continuum? Seth Godin has important opinions in his book “All Marketers are Liars” highlights which can be seen in a fantastic video of a talk he gave at Google’s offices (Godin Video). He believes that people “poke around” on a site until they can find meaning. And Meaning is the only thing that leads to Action (purchase in the old model).

His premise is is that you don’t have to invest millions in advertising (like the push model of old) if you can make a story worth telling by your customers. Engage your site visitors with a story? Have you been to a sales training session of any type where they didn’t tell you that? Story telling as a sales process works and it has been since the beginning of advertising. Getting customers to tell them is another story altogether.

So – how can a company cause those conversations to take place? That may be the most qualitative measure I have ever studied.

New York Times economics columnist, Virgina Postrel believes we are just at the beginning of a time when ‘design’ and form factor will prove beneficial. Her book The Substance of Style gives case after case of style influencing the purchase decision. In sexy technology toys like laptops and game cubes as well as everyday items like a toilet brush – design matters for sales.

Consumers are expecting smart design in their purchases. They are expecting to see it in products from vacuum cleaners Dyson to MP3 players iPod to automobiles “BMW:5.

Obviously this applies online. Web applications that make sense and are easy on the eyes have higher success metrics. Jakob Nielsen included one of our own case studies 3 years ago in his ROI for Usability Whitepaper. His metrics were for sales and conversion rates as well as user performance or productivity. Granted, gathering a true mathmatical measurement of design improvements is squishy, the underlying results of our examples are that online sales can improve dramatically if design is appreciated.

There are still only a handful of hugely successful online sales stories (Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Apple, GAP) but more and more evidence that the Internet is being used for research and comparison shopping.

As trust in online security increases that awareness and knowledge of a product or service will continue over the vintage advertising continuum toward prefernce, conviction and ultimately purchase. Those final purchase decisions will be guided by preferred “Design” that doesn’t stand in the way of commerce.

Another auto example is how things don’t work – like the fuel door on my 2004 Honda Odyssey being in the way of the drivers side sliding door when refueling. Toyota rode 100,000 miles with Mom’s before they redesigned the Sienna and the result is new leader in the mini-van category. Customer inputs made that redesign a huge succes for the auto maker.

Customer-focused works for physical space too. Architects have gotten into the groove using charettes – a combination of town hall meeting, brainstorming and old-fashion teamwork to design solutions that solve customer needs. How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand has some great examples of space changing over time becasue of customer needs. Who among us hasn’t edited our own homes with personal decisions based on our lives?

More importantly, customer focused works for organizations. Nordstrom is famous for their customer service, but it stems from their organizational chart – an inverted pyramid with the Board of Directors at the bottom and Customers at the top. Building customer-focused organizations starts with just that type bent. In The Roaring 2000’s Harry Dent described a little different tact on customer-focused organizations by having the sales people empowered to make decisions and recommendations to help customers more. His perfect company of the future was only seen in the background (like so many eBay entrepreneurs) while creating customized service for each buyer.

Customer-focused seems like common sense. After all – without any customers, you don’t have a business. But in a recent Inc. Magazine survey, CEOs of the fastest growing companies listed their top concerns as: competitive strategies, managing people, keeping up with technology, managing growth and finances. Nary a “customer” focus among them.

Going forward we can all improve on our customer focus. Try adding customer inputs to your next project whether that be home improvements or product development or application design. Chances are you will find a better solution based on the improved inputs.

SIMPLE is not new. It is common sense. And it has been around since the beginning of business. Peter Drucker wrote about Simple in the 1950’s. I listened to Bill Jenson (Simplicity – The New Competitive Advantage ) at a Fast Company Real Time conference. His whole approach seemed right about stripping away the complex to focus on what was important in business – any business. Clarity of purpose is Simple. Very hard – but Simple nonetheless.

Simple is stripping away the old (200 channels and nothing on) with personalized info (Tivo). Simple is not spending 2 years writing requirements for an application, but using faster tools and processes to deliver an application that just does one thing well (iPod, Palm, Basecamp, Blinksale examples). Simple is applying the right people to a task and focusing only on core competencies. For individuals and companies alike.

In today’s web development world, simple is more like the Hollywood movie studio model. Bring in the best talent for lighting, editing, acting etc. and then release them when project is done. Simplify down to what you do well and focus on it. Common sense.

In Jack Trout’s book The Power of Simplicity , he quotes Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. as the CEO of General Motors in 1944 telling Peter Drucker to only put down “what you think is right” in his consulting report on the great company. Simple guidance for any consultant. We should all strive for this simple target.

“Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.” Ralph Waldo Emerson