Interesting McKinsey study reveals what every business should to know about design

The consulting firm McKinsey has studied 300 companies and based on the results they argue what successful companies need to do when it comes to design. To someone who has worked with this issue for decades, the results are not surprising. But they are encouraging. A summary can found in this article in FastCompany.


The study ends with presenting four areas that increased revenue and total returns the most:

"1. Tracking design’s impact as a metric just as rigorously as you would track cost and revenue. McKinsey cited one gaming company that tracked how a small usability tweak to its home page increased sales by 25%.

2. Putting users first by actually talking to them. This helps to think outside of a standard user experience. One hotel that McKinsey underlined presented visitors with souvenir rubber ducks embossed with an image of the host city–with the encouragement to collect more rubber ducks from the hotel’s other locations. The initiative improved retention 3% over time.

3. Embedding designers in cross-functional teams and incentivizing top design talent. McKinsey pointed to Spotify as an example because the company gives its designers autonomy within a diverse environment–unlike a consumer packaged goods company, which was bleeding designers because they had to spend time making slide decks look pretty for the marketing team.

4. Encouraging research, early-stage prototyping, and iterating. Just because a product or service is launched doesn’t mean the design work ends. One cruise ship company that McKinsey highlighted spoke with passengers, assessed which activities were most popular by looking at payment data, and analyzed security feeds with machine learning algorithms to find inefficiencies in a ship’s layouts–all in the name of improving user experience over time." (see the article)