Applying user centric design to your business plan

Image by Lars Plougmann

I got asked by an investor recently how we at Digital H2O do design. I liked the conciseness of my response and thought it was a good example of how to tie user centric design into a business plan. Here goes:

Our design philosophy is best described as user centric design. Our goal is to only design and build features our current, or potential customers, find valuable and that substantially help our business continue to grow. We spend significant time listening to our customers’ needs throughout the sales process. We then form hypothesis what customers’ needs are and what they can accomplish in the application. While designing features we show mock-ups and prototypes to customers in order to get feedback and incrementally improve the design. After the product is built and released we continue to test our hypotheses about how customers will use features we have built. We utilize automated event tracking in the app to monitor user activity. We continually interview customers via formal interviews and check-ins, but also by taking the time to deeply understand what they are trying to accomplish during support calls and sales check-ins.