Dear reader,

I’m about to convince you, beyond a reasonable doubt, that design is your company’s sharpest competitive edge.

In a commoditized industry, and even in those that aren’t, design exists to drive winning differentiation through experience. It’s not just about what you deliver, it’s about how what you deliver makes your users feel. Design is your secret weapon to making users feel awesome when they interact with your product or service, and this is the value and edge your design team brings to your company.

There’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s start at the beginning — who am I and why should you trust my expertise in design? I’m Sam. I’m a design leader, world traveler, and food enthusiast. I’ve spent the last 2+ years as the Head of Design at Chime, a rapidly growing technology company offering online banking services without all the hidden fees. We’ve made banking friendlier and more accessible, almost exclusively through designed member experiences. I’ve spent my career building design teams across various companies in Silicon Valley, from venture-backed startups to boutique agencies to publicly traded companies. I’m passionate about creating experiences that make the everyday more delightful, about advocating for women in the workplace, and about orchestrating teams that are high-performing, tight-knit, and happy.

Now let’s talk about you. Are you in the right place? I hope so, and if you’re unsure, here’s who I’m thinking you might be -

• A designer, design manager, or design director feeling like you’re not sure of your place amongst the product, engineering, or marketing folks at your company. In this conversation, we’ll talk about the unique and measurable impact you create.
• A product, engineering, business strategy, or other cross-functional stakeholder wondering how to work more efficiently and equitably with your design partner. In this conversation, we’ll talk about how empowering designers will help you get the highest value from them.
• An executive, feeling like you already appreciate and value design. In this conversation, we’ll talk about why you should show that appreciation by elevating design to your highest levels of leadership.

Let’s dive back into my core thesis. Design exists to drive winning differentiation through experience. What does that mean? I’ll break it down for you.

“…differentiation through experience.”

Differentiation is the process of making and positioning an offering differently from other similar offerings. For example, Subaru and BMW both make cars. Subaru has differentiated itself on outdoorsy utility, where BMW has differentiated itself on sporty luxury.

Experience is the process through which we perceive the world around us. In this same example, my experience driving a Subaru delivers on its position of utility with features like a higher body, all-wheel drive, and rugged body panels. My experience driving a BMW delivers on its position of luxury, with features like a lower body, faster speeds, and creature comforts.

Differentiation through experience, therefore, is the act of making an offering different from similar offerings by intentionally designing how it should be perceived and felt by its users.

This is important. It’s been proven time and again that emotions are a large driver, if not the core driver, of decision making¹. Most decisions, including the big, important ones, are made first using emotion, then justified using logic¹. In the case of fintech, if your banking experiences make someone feel good, excited, or even rewarded, and you do this better than the competitors, that someone is more likely to continue banking with you than to go to a competitor.

This seems obvious, yet emotion and feeling are so often ignored as key drivers of success. We tend to rely on “messages” to tell our story, forgetting how today’s consumers are absolutely bombarded with messaging. One study in 2007 noted that we’re exposed to 5,000+ brand messages every day² and another study in 2014 notes that while we spend almost 10 hours each day exposed to media, we only note “seeing” about 150 ads³. Within those ads or messages that we’re even aware of, only a small fraction make a lasting impression. Attention is a limited resource, and messaging requires attention. Emotion, on the other hand, doesn’t. We’re trained from a young age to read emotion in others and it’s something we do on the subconscious level⁴.

Bottom line: feelings speak louder than words — an experience that creates emotion is more instantly and more deeply understood than one that relies on messaging.

“…winning differentiation through experience.”

How do we measure the impact that emotion can have on an experience’s success? Let’s look at a recent case study from Chime. Chime provides a service to our members called SpotMe, which is a way for them to overdraw on their accounts fee-free. When a member swipes their debit card and there isn’t enough money in their account to cover the transaction, Chime spots them the money for the transaction (up to a predetermined amount). That money is paid back to Chime the next time the member gets their paycheck.

Our members say this is pretty magical and it’s gotten them out of many tough spots. For example, @cryptosarito tweets “In December my car broke down in Texas and my work advised if I couldn’t get back to Kansas I would lose my job! No joke, Chime that SAME day literally emailed to let me know they raised SpotMe to $200! Not only was I able to rent a car but 2 full tanks of gas! #SpotMeGotMe”. As part of the SpotMe experience, we ask members every so often to leave a tip for Chime to show their appreciation for the feature and to help us keep it free.

Our original tipping experience had a long message explaining why we were asking for a tip, accompanied by three large buttons with various tip amounts to choose from. There was a de-emphasized button to not leave a tip, and the whole experience felt quite obvious and straightforward, if not somewhat sterile.

Here’s where emotion comes into play: in an experiment, we redesigned this experience in three ways. First, we made the initial ask less utilitarian and more fun by removing copy and adding an illustration. Second, we made the option to not leave a tip more obvious. Third, we evolved the experience for when someone chose not to tip. Instead of the tip card just disappearing, the experience acknowledged their choice and told them “thanks anyway”. It was a small change and one that on the surface, didn’t seem to be worth an additional investment. After all, the member had already chosen not to tip. Could this emotional design approach actually make a positive impact on our business numbers?

Spoiler alert: it did. What we saw from this experiment was an increase in tipping revenue, and that was after making the “no tip” button more obvious. Not only did we see increased revenue from initial tips — we also saw increased revenue from the members who tipped the next time. The bit that we added to say “no problem”, that ounce of levity and compassion coming through — it changed how our members made decisions, and it did so in a way that provided validation to them and created positive impact to the business.

In this experiment, our tipping revenue lifted by an overall 11.3%, and we saw a 4.51% lift in the second tip rate from members who didn’t tip the first time.

Bottom line: in finance, a designed emotional experience is not just better for users, it’s also better for the business.

“…winning differentiation through experience — in all industries.”

Designing for experience isn’t just crucial to fintech, it’s the key differentiator for every major consumer brand we love today, like Apple, Nike, or Amazon. On the surface, these companies succeeded by delivering new services, but if you look deeper, you see that they actually delivered services that already existed, just with a newer and better experience.

Let’s look at Uber and Lyft. Both delivered the taxi service, only designed for the experience people actually wanted. We can break it down even further to see how each company designed a distinctive, differentiated experience. Uber designed their experiences to feel premium — your driver arrived in a black car and chauffeured you to your destination, while you sat in the back. Uber’s initial tagline was “everyone’s private driver”⁵. Lyft designed their experiences to feel neighborly — your driver arrived with a pink fuzzy moustache and gave you a fist bump, inviting you to sit in the front. Their early tagline was “driving you happy”⁵. These designed experiences appealed to two very different audiences, validating the motivation of each, and creating fierce brand loyalty to both companies early on.

Fast forward to today and you can see how the erosion of these designed experiences has caused a negative impact to both businesses. Brand affinity has disappeared, both on the rider and the driver side. People open both apps when looking for a ride, and these brands now compete solely on commodity — price⁶.

One of my favorite examples of designing for experience? Google Fi. Have you ever traveled internationally with your carrier? The last time I did it, I had to call my carrier in advance to let them know, then I had to buy an expensive international plan, and heaven forbid I was going to multiple countries, I might need multiple plans at multiple price points.

Google Fi? The experience is pure magic. You turn your phone on, and you’re covered. It tells you what price point calls are at, but texts are still free and data is at the same price point it always is. It’s that easy. Using Fi makes me feel smart, it makes me feel taken care of, and I’ve told tons of friends about it as a result. This designed experience has validated me as a smart traveler, and has created brand loyalty and word-of-mouth growth for Google.

Part of the magic of Fi is how hard the back-end systems and policies are working to make the experience great for the user. I’ll return to this because it’s critical — everyone is responsible for creating an emotional connection. Some of the leading designed experiences, like Prime two-day shipping or Costco’s return policy, come from people teaming up to create that emotional moment.

All companies benefit from a focus on designed experiences. While startups can gain a competitive edge by investing in design early on, established companies like Lyft or Uber can benefit from a return to their design roots, and even behemoths like Google can stay on top of the competition with relentless design thinking.

Bottom line: in any industry, designed experiences that connect emotionally are good for the user and good for business results.

“…drive winning differentiation through experience.”

Creating a good user experience is a shared responsibility. It’s important to note that in the case studies above, the designed experience didn’t just happen on the screen or in pixels. Chime’s experience relied on determining the exact right time to ask for a tip, Uber and Lyft’s experiences relied on creating the right driver/rider interactions, and Fi’s experiences relied on seamless carrier switching across country borders.

Great experience requires dedication and innovation from engineering teams, it requires conviction from risk and regulatory teams, it requires relentless push from product and strategy teams, and it requires cleverness from finance teams. Great experience requires the business to do the heavy lifting so the user doesn’t have to. It requires changing your mindset away from “that’s hard” or “that would take awhile” to “what more could we do” and “what would our user really enjoy here”? Good experience requires a shift from Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to a true Minimum Lovable Product (MLP), one that provides a cognitively complete offering that evokes an emotional response. Good experience requires design to vision the future and drive this MLP mindset.

Don’t underestimate how hard it is to create this culture change in your organization. To truly inspire user-centric design thinking from top to bottom, companies must invest in the Chief Design Officer (CDO) role the same way they invest in a Chief Technology Officer, Chief Operating Officer, or Chief Marketing Officer. The CDO’s job is to create and drive experience strategy. It’s their job to align leadership and the company around the intended user of the experience, it’s their job to set a vision of how to best serve that user, and it’s their job to lead the team who will design the experiences that will speak to the user and drive positive business impact. This work can’t sit under product, under marketing, or under another piece of your organization — it needs to be leading those parts of the org and bringing them along in this cultural shift.

Bottom line: to see the maximal impact from your design team, invest in a design leader at your highest levels of leadership who will drive culture change and make yourself an advocate for their mission.

“Design exists to drive winning differentiation through experience.”

Alright, we’ve worked through each piece of this thesis from start to finish. You’ve learned that:

• An experience that creates emotion is more instantly and more deeply understood than an experience that’s utilitarian or relies on messaging.
• In finance, a designed emotional experience is not just better for users, it’s also better for the business.
• In any industry, designed experiences that connect emotionally are good for the user and good for business results.
• To see the maximal impact from your design team, invest in a design leader at your highest levels of leadership who will drive culture change.

Let’s put it all together now. Why is Design the right function to drive winning differentiation through experience? First, it’s important to call out that design is the literal medium through which a user interfaces with a company. We see this interface come to life through a variety of modalities, whether that’s an app, hardware, software, voice, or otherwise. That interface is the conversation between the company and the user. It drives the emotion and drives the feelings. The designers on my team have spent years developing a wide and varied set of skills in creating these interfaces, including art history, artistic theory, graphic design, painting, cinema, TV arts, computer science, industrial design, visual journalism, and more. They’re experts at using lines, shapes, colors, sounds, content, and motion to interact with users, to guide them through task flows, to make the everyday more intuitive, and to infuse in those experiences the emotions a company wants to communicate.

Secondly, to create an experience that deeply resonates with users, you have to understand your users. Again, this is where Design is the expert — Designers live to create for humans. The most talented designers I’ve worked with have studied subjects like human factors and biometrics (understanding the human body and how it works), psychology (understanding the human brain and how it works), ergonomics (understanding how to make things beneficial for the human body and human brain), and human-computer interaction (understanding how people use technology).These skills make them experts in how humans work, whether that’s physically or emotionally, and make them natural researchers in becoming the user, in understanding the frame of mind a user is in as they use your service — what is the user trying to accomplish and what’s getting in their way? These designers are able to combine these scientific skills with the creative skills above to design interfaces that are instinctual and beneficial to users, that speak to the user in their own voice, and that reflect the user’s lived experiences back to them.

Understanding users and creating experiences that resonate isn’t easy and rarely does it employ the obvious answer. It requires getting outside of your own brain and it requires vastly divergent thinking. Designers are trained to uncover a problem space — not a solution looking for a problem — but rather a deep, foundational need that people have. Designers are curious, they ask why 500 ways, and they explore a multitude of possible approaches to the problem space. With rigorous testing and data, Design directs teams towards a convergent solution, or oftentimes a few convergent solutions, that work for the business AND for the user.

So, reader, let’s go back to the earlier part of our conversation, where I posited who you are.

• To the designer — what have you learned about the unique and measurable impact you create? Are you ready to bring that value to your team and your company?
• To the cross-functional partner — now that you know the power a designer can bring to your team, how might you empower them? How might you point designers towards problem spaces, encourage explorations into the emotional, and inspire all team members to think “what more could we do”?
• To the executive — how might you create space for a design leader and culture change at your highest levels of leadership?

What do you think? Leave me a comment! — I’m here to engage, converse, consult and help.

Works Cited

¹ Kassim, Karim, Lerner, Jennifer S., et. al. Emotion and Decision Making. Harvard U, 16 June 2014, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jenniferlerner/files/annual_review_manuscript_june_16_final.final_.pdf. Accessed 24 June 2021.

² Story, Louise. “Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad.” New York Times, published 15 January 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html.

³ ​​”Adults Spend Almost 10 Hours Per Day With The Media, But Note Only 150 Ads” Media Dynamics, Inc., 22 Sep. 2014, https://www.mediadynamicsinc.com/uploads/files/PR092214-Note-only-150-Ads-2mk.pdf. Accessed 24 June 2021. Press Release.

⁴ Kahneman, Daniel. “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice [Excerpt]” Scientific American, published 15 June 2012, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kahneman-excerpt-thinking-fast-and-slow/.

⁵ Clifford, Catherine. “Lyft CMO: Uber Is the Wal-Mart of Transportation. We Aren’t.” Entrepreneur, published 12 February 2015, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/242817.

⁶ Shahani, Aarti. “In The Battle Between Lyft And Uber, The Focus Is On Drivers.” All Things Considered, NPR, published 18 January 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/01/18/463473462/is-uber-good-to-drivers-it-s-relative.