Design culture – what is it and how to build it

In an organization with design culture, people don’t just work for their paychecks but they are passionately engaged in the creation of real results. These companies are built for creating great products and every member of the team wants to reach one goal: engage their customers with meaningful experiences.

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."Says Peter Drucker. In a company with a healthy culture, customer satisfaction and progress is inevitable, because the company members are motivated and creating extremely high quality products. So then, we just have to sprinkle a bit "design culture" on your organisation, right? As always, it's not that simple.

Building a design culture inside a company is not an easy task because it's all about relationships, interactions, and attitudes. But if we observe all the characteristics of design culture, we can find some exact methods and techniques to work with.

1. First, you need to decide it

Building up design culture in an organization is not an easy task. It requires a lot of human and financial resources. It can be also very unstable, dynamic because it depends on the people in the company. The creation of a culture like that has to be a top-level decision and every stakeholder has to participate in this task.

How to achieve this?

Well, it sounds easy, right? You just have to make a decision. In case of a small or a medium sized startup, a decision like that is not so challenging. A few people or even the whole company can just decide together to build a new, customer-centered design culture.

Whereas, in the case of huge, multinational organizations with hundreds of people and stakeholders, it can be very difficult to come to an agreement. Scaling up design culture is not an easy task, but there are some really big companies - such as Google or Apple - who had already solved this problem and succeeded in introducing this culture to their everyday work.

2. Recognizing that your customers (and their experiences) are the highest priority

In an organization with a design culture, everyone in the company is taught to understand the importance of the client or customer.

Everyone has to accept that at the end of the day the company’s main goal is to satisfy their clients and create great customer experiences.

The focus on great experiences isn’t limited to product designers. It infuses every customer-facing situation. In a culture that focuses on digital customer experience, every touch point with the client is designed around their needs rather than internal operational efficiencies.

How to achieve this?

First, get to know your customers. Have a dedicated researcher team. Conduct interviews, observe them in real life, ask them about their problems and motivations, make user tests, watch site analytics.

There are countless opportunities to get more information about them. Try to constantly gather as much information as your team can.

Knowing your customers is a good thing, but in an organization with a design culture, it’s not enough if only your product design team does that. But how do you familiarise your whole company with your customers’ problems and motivations?

1. Try to involve them in your design team’s customer researches. For example, if the UX researchers are having field research or conducting interviews, some people from engineering or finance should go with them and just observe.
2. Answering support emails once a month can be also a good task for everyone in the company to get closer to clients. Hotjar has this practice, sometimes even David Darmanin, the founder and CEO of Hotjar himself answers to customers.
3. The design team can create materials about their findings and share it within the company. For example, posting persona posters on the wall, or creating persona or customer journey brochures.

3. Apply design strategically

“Oh don’t talk about the features, it’s not so difficult at all, just make it look pretty!” How many times did you ever heard sentences like this one? Design is often misunderstood as being only about aesthetics. This explains why business stakeholder often can’t recognise the importance of design in strategic decisions.

How to achieve this?

1. Most importantly, don’t leave out designers from strategic decisions.
2. Organising UX strategy workshops for business stakeholders can show them the connections between design and business strategy.

4. Inclusive design decisions and processes

In a design culture, everyone in the organization should feel empowered to participate in the design process. Anyone can have important information and feedbacks about the customers or the product. This means you need proactivity from non-designers and also openness and acceptance from designers.

How to achieve this

1. Let people think on design questions and give them the opportunity to share their ideas.
2. Try to create a tolerant, understanding design team which is open to feedbacks and cooperation with others.
3. Try out design thinking methods to solve problems even if they’re not design related.
4. At Shopify design meetings are usually broadcasted online and everyone can watch it or even write some ideas to the groups.
5. Open-for-everyone sketching or brainstorming meetings can be very helpful to get various feedbacks about design questions.

5. Work in small, highly autonomous and multidisciplinary groups

What makes some groups more successful than the others? In a recent MIT study the experiment participants had to solve very difficult problems in groups.

Surprisingly, the high achieving teams were not the ones who had one or two participants with outstanding IQ scores.

Nor were the groups with the highest aggregate IQ. Instead, in the most successful teams there were people from a variety of backgrounds and had strong soft skills: showed high social sensitivity to each other and gave equal time to each other to communicate.

Having multidisciplinary teams will enable your team to observe all problems and solutions from different perspectives. The small team size will help to create a good relationship between your team members, so they can cooperate better.

Autonomy will give them the opportunity to have full responsibility for their work, which increases motivation and commitment to the team.

How to achieve this

1. Don’t have huge, completely separate departments in your company.
2. Have highly diverse, multidisciplinary teams. (Maybe you can start with hiring more women?:)
3. When hiring new people, soft skills and social skills are very important. You can teach anyone a UX process, but you can’t teach them how not be assholes.

6. Create the right atmosphere for growth - the most difficult part of design culture

An organization with a design culture has a high tolerance for failure. This means that everyone on the team has to feel free to try out different things, experiment, fail and learn from their mistakes.

They also have to be encouraged to share their experiences with the rest of the team and not be afraid of what others may think. This part is maybe the most difficult one because designing ‘atmospheres’ or ‘attitudes’ aren’t an easy task to do.

How to achieve this

1. Give the opportunity to your teams to show their new experiences, methods, knowledge with others. For example, organize monthly or weekly education meetings.
2. Have a “fuckups” poster or Slack channel where everyone can share their professional failures.
3. Make it clear that you want to learn from your mistakes and not punish or penalize others. Having everyone on the same page, an open-minded team will help in this a lot.
4. It’s much easier to admit and tell about or mistakes when the company and the company leaders do it too. Having a transparent, self-conscious organization will help you to build up trust in everyone.

Last but not least

These are our experiences on how you can build a healthy design culture inside your company.

But I think this whole method is definitely not carved in stone. It depends on your company structure and most importantly, on the people who you are working with. You can create your own processes and ideas about your organization's design culture.

Also, do not hesitate to share these experiences with us! Our UX company wants to learn from you, too, because, in the end, design culture is all about experimenting, relationships and most importantly, people.