How to make yourself valuable as a designer working for big organizations
By: Maarten De Winter
Tags: UX, Experience Design, Service Design, Design Thinking, Design

Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash

As a design thinker, UX designer, (customer) experience designer, service designer — or whatever you call what you’re doing … we all understand the importance of designing the right layers of experiences around a product that is being offered.

It’s the reason why you have a specific coffeeshop where you drink your latte and why you haven’t ordered a regular cab in years.

Now if you’ve ever worked for a big organization, where people wear suits and talk with buzzwords, as a designer it can become relatively frustrating to work on projects that just don’t seem to add a whole lot of value to the overall experience of the product. Frustrating, right?

Why big organizations (frequently) fail at creating experiences.

Although this seems pretty obvious to you, there are still many organizations that lack focus on creating a good experience for their customers. This mainly has to do with the way that organizations are set up.

Since the industrial revolutions, organizations have focused on efficiency. Dividing the organization in units (“silos”) and making those units solely responsible for their part of the product has led to a situation where the holistic experience of a product is not being looked at. At least not by a dedicated (team of) designers.

This has resulted in a negative trend where it seems that anything outside the core product is mostly seen as an overhead; something that is not important enough to spend money on.

Is there still hope for the big organizations?

To answer my question; yes. Since most organizations feel a great pressure to increase their revenue, they are constantly looking for ways to innovate their business model.

In the past couple of decades that innovation focus has been on generating unique selling propositions (USP’s) in the form of physical new products, improved functionalties and lower prices.

Remember the megapixel war that the smartphone industry has been dealing with early in the 21st century?

While this has resulted in some amazing smartphone camera technology, it hasn’t been very rewarding for the companies that participated in this price war. The successful innovations were all reproduced by the competition, ultimately ending up as commodities.

So, today more and more big organizations focus their innovation on the experience they are offering to their customers. It’s what differentiates them from the others. But understanding the needs of their customers in a way that will provide useful insights… that’s hard!

This is where you come in.

If you want to become valuable as a designer working in a big organization, you need to understand the challenges that they are facing. Become the “silo breaker” that they are looking for, and tackle the end-to-end experience of multiple stakeholders, not just individual moments in the experience.

With a strong emphasis on user research, prototyping and testing you can improve the services that they offer now and perhaps even develop whole new value propositions.

Good luck!