Sustaining an Audience is Hard
“…It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.” — Bruce Springsteen
I had some time to kill this summer, and I found a book in the shelves at my dad’s place, who I know is a big fan of “The Boss”. And while reading an interview he gave to Ken Tucker in Entertainment Weekly, that one comment above popped out and stirred something in me, and I remembered a quote by Neville Brody;
“Good design is about consistency, consistency, and consistency”
I read these words for the first time while I was in University, and they’ve stuck with me. And with the growing complexity in the combinational matrix of customer touch-points, I find them more relevant than ever. I think we can update this phrase to “Customer satisfaction is all about consistency, consistency and consistency”
Then while doing some research for this little rant, I came over this article; “Three C’s of customer satisfaction” , published by McKinsey in 2014. And here is a small excerpt from that article;
“It’s not enough to make customers happy with each individual interaction, it requires consistency. And getting consistency right requires the complete attention of top leadership. That’s because by using a variety of channels and triggering more and more interactions with companies as they seek to meet discrete needs, customers create clusters of interactions that make their individual interactions less important than their cumulative experience. This customer journey can span all elements of a company and include everything from buying a product to actually using it, having issues with a product that require resolution, or simply making the decision to use a service or product for the first time.”
(Yes, if you read the article, you can see that they are also quoting Bruce!) But as you might know, this didn’t start with Bruce…this is not exactly new insights.
I recently came over this amazing reprint of the EPA Graphics Standard, and had to get a copy. It’s been collecting dust for a few months until I finally had some time to study this thing. So I sat down with a good cup of coffee (Ethiopian by the way ☕️), and I came only a few pages in when I read this, and please bare with me as I keep on with this little rant with another quote. This time by Douglas M. Costle, the Administrator for United States Environmental Agency (EPA) and is dated August 1977.
“It is extremely important to the success of this effort that those in any way responsible for the implementation of the system and the appearance and presentation of any printed or other visual material to be produced by this Agency make themselves conversant with the elements of the system, their function, and the guidelines established by this manual. With everyone’s cooperation and, understanding, we will be able to improve our service to the public, simplify some of our tasks, and produce our communications more memorable, consistently, and economically”
The arguments for creating the EPA design system was also written in down in the manual.
- Minimise decision-making time in matters of design by providing design solutions.
- Reduce outside services by increasing in-house efficiency
- Standardise by limiting the number of formats and sizes of publications
- Economise on printing, typesetting, and handling costs
- Reduce waste and redundancy with common purchasing and centralised controls.
This was written 41 years ago to date, and every company who have successfully made their mark in the digital space have a long time ago realised how important this is, and have invested in systems far more complex than the one EPA built back then. These past 5 years, we’ve seen design systems made by IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce, Google and AirBnB etc.
So, let’s try and create an updated list for making a design system today:
- Vast cost savings in build
- Greater design implementation quality
- Headstart on browser compatibility
- Business controls change
- Project cost savings
- Increased sales opportunity
- Minimise accessibility risk
- Rapid brand change
- Speed to market
- Scalable across brands
- Adaptable to all devices
- Increased design velocity
- Brand alignment
And let’s add the fact that consistency on the most common customer journeys is an important predictor of overall customer experience and loyalty.
Yet, I’m struggling to get my own leaders to realise why these kind of systems — such as a design system, are critical to the success of the company, and is instrumental in order for us to be able to play a major role in the digital economy. Design is all about understanding the customers decision-making process, as those decisions lead to actions, and those actions drives the bottom line. And we need to understand that making additional investments to improve the customer experience without tightening the consistency of experience is just throwing good money after bad.
#telenordesign #designsystems
