We care about our clients, their clients, and the experience our solutions provide.
When approaching a Valiant Design project we seek to understand not only our client’s needs; but the needs of anyone that makes contact with the brand, website or product. This can cover a vast audience from the consumer, supplier, the client’s admin team, the board of directors and even our very own designers.
Although it’s true you cannot cater for everyone’s needs all of the time, it is important to cover these journey’s or experiences in order to gain a deep understanding of the issues or problems that resulted in the client coming to us in the first place.
On the surface, it always seems obvious “Make us look better” but we seek to achieve so much more than that. We seek to design with empathy.
What does it mean to design with empathy? Empathic design is the idea of engrossing yourself into a consumers position so that you are able to identify what solutions could be offered or designed to meet your consumer’s needs. Often; because a client is so accustomed to their existing situation, product or brand they may not be able to envision alternative solutions or even that there is a solution required or available to them.
Some fantastic real world examples of empathic design can be found in IDEO’s publication “Empathy on the Edge“.
One of my personal favourite stories being that of State Farm; an American insurance company’s efforts to make their product less intimidating to Millennials. The solution was a coffee shop called Next Door where Millenials could benefit from free coaching and advice in an environment where they weren’t being “sold to”. This platform for engagement emphasised the value of design empathy and creating real relationships with your consumers.
Your business and or brand could be doing better and we want to help you find the things that make your consumers tick. Our favourite thing is the process of discovering what is important to you and then designing beautiful and well-considered solution to convey that to your consumers.
For more information on design empathy, we recommend watching RSA Animates video on Outrospection. and reading through a few of the articles that inspired us. Links provided below: