The Design Imperative

I started my own business two years ago. Believe me, starting a business is a serious learning experience. You learn a lot about yourself, about others, and about how the world works.

The more I learn about running a business, the more I realize that every product or service is a commodity. The rapid pace of globalization that is underway will see to that.

There are literally hundreds of millions of people around the world that are hungry to get just a small piece of the action that we enjoy today as early adopters of the Internet. And globalization will give them that opportunity. The world is changing.

Delivering a Compelling Experience

The true way to differentiate yourself from the competition is not by patents and intellectual property and crazy smart algorithms, but by delivering an outstanding “experience” for your prospects and customers.

Smart companies have figured this out. People will pay extra for a great experience. Why is it that people will pay more for a Mac when a PC is cheaper, or for the iPhone over other mobile devices? Because Apple has designed a killer experience, and created a brand that many people identify with.

Great design is not added in at the end of the product development process. It is engineered into the product from the beginning. It is part of the culture of the company. It’s a telling sign that Apple even designs the “un-boxing” experience for their products.

Watch this video of Jonathan Ive talking about Apple’s design philosophy and you’ll get what I mean.

I like Apple’s approach to the PC market. They refuse to get caught up in price wars for low budget PCs. They deliberately forgo that segment and choose to deliver an excellent product and experience at the higher end of the market.

And the reason is a good one – delivering the lowest cost product comes at a price – you have to sacrifice many of the things that make a great experience.

The Sacrifices Companies Make

For example, when you buy a new PC, do you ever wonder why you have to spend at least an hour removing the tons of crap-ware that is installed on it? Partial free trials of software that expire in 30 days and constantly prompt you to upgrade, slowing your machine to a crawl? That’s because the PC maker gets paid by those companies to put that junk on your new PC. And, it represents most of their profit margin on low-end PCs!

Zappos – A Service Company That Happens to Sell Shoes

Another great example of delivering a great experience is Zappos. Zappos is legendary for its customer service. And there is tremendous value in that – Zappos was recently acquired by Amazon.com for $1.2 Billon dollars. I recently heard Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh do a keynote at a conference and he said something very interesting.

Tony defined Zappos as “a service company that happens to sell shoes.” Zappos mission is Delivering Happiness to the World. He believes that Zappos could sell anything, as long as they deliver a great experience to their customers. Once again, this mission is central to the culture of the company.

The Design Imperative

I’ve been watching an interesting trend – small Internet companies started by a few people who have a great design aesthetic. These companies start right out of the gate with an awesomely designed experience and do very well as a result.

Posterous is a great example. This company was started by two founders who obviously care about design – you can see elegance in every aspect of their service. Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal have done an amazing job enabling people to blog by simply sending an email. Seriously, you should check out this service.

37 Signals is another. This company was started by a small Internet consultancy who wanted to create products based on what they were seeing their customers needed. They established some ground rules for their products early on – the applied the 80/20 rule to everything they did and as a result their services like Basecamp and Highrise are elegant, easy to use, and very popular.

So this is the Design Imperative – I believe that any business who wants to create lasting value should put a top priority on excellent design and customer experience. It needs to be baked into everything you do – as part of the culture of the company.

My Resolution for Expand2Web

For me and my business, I am committed to excellent customer service. Building meaningful relationships with my clients, customers and partners. And I am always challenging myself to improve on this.

For example, I feel like everyone at Expand2Web (there are only three of us at the time of this post) goes out of their way to deliver great customer service. We spend a lot of extra time with clients – and even people who are not our clients – that we are not compensated for. But we know it is an investment in building great relationships with great people.

At the same time, I feel we can improve how we deliver a compelling customer experience and awesome design. We don’t have a designer on staff. I have long been an admirer of good design, and have read as much as I can about it. But I recognize I am not a talented designer.

One of the guys on my team (Thomas), recently doubled down on improving his design skills, and made some amazing layouts for our SmallBiz WordPress theme. I like his attitude of challenging himself to constantly improve.

My resolution is to embed passion for excellent design into everything we do at Expand2Web. All of us will continue to improve our skills and recognition of good design, and I will invest in hiring top-notch designers to help us with every aspect of our work. Our next hire will be a professional designer.

I hope you continue to see this increased design focus on our websites, in our products, and in our overall customer experience.

If you have any thoughts on design and delivering great customer experiences, I would love to hear from you in the comments below, or just email me at design@expand2web.com!

Book Recommendations:

Here are a few books that are must reads if you are at all interested in great design and customer experience:

• Don’t Make Me Think – Great exploration of web usability. It’s a classic.
• Non-Designers Design Book – This book breaks down key design concepts into a way that non-designers can understand.
• Made to Stick – Why do some ideas stick and other die? This is probably my favorite book I read this year. Outstanding.
• The Experience Economy – Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage.
• Tribes – Another outstanding book by Seth Godin.
• 37 Signals – Getting Real
• Crush It – Awesome, thought provoking look at why doing what you love is possible as advertising dollars shift from TV to the Internet.

What are you favorites? I would love to read them!