McLean Donnelly

1. Team structure.
UX Meets MBA
When a designer goes to business school
McLean Donnelly
Vice President, User Experience
@McLeanDonnelly

2. 10,000
websites created each day

3. 1,000
apps published each week

4. 176,136
user experience roles on Indeed

5. 507
Head of Design roles on Indeed

6. 228%
out-performance of the S&P 500
by design-centric companies

7. Let’s take a moment
to celebrate this!
We’ve done it!

8. Hold up.

9. EBITDA

10. Weighted Average Cost
of Capital

11. Free Cash Flow

12. Capital Asset
Pricing Model

13. Wait, what?

14. “We don’t do that stuff. That’s
what business does.”
- Every designer everywhere

15. Waterfall and agile methodologies
have centralized business thinking.

16. Traditional BFA & MFA programs
don’t teach the business
skills design needs for
our next evolution.

17. Companies aren’t investing
in business skills for design.

18. If I get trained in business skills,
I can become a strategic & design
leader.

19. 3 Years of My Life...
8:00 am - 5:00 pm
UI Design
IxD Wireframes
Sketch
Photoshop
Email templates
Branding
Ux Research
Native Apps
Responsive design
Prototyping
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Accounting I & II
Finance & Markets
Economics
Statistical Reasoning
Corporate Strategy
Supply Chain & Logistics
Sales & Negotiation
Marketing
Business Law
Change Management
Business Literature
Venture Strategies
Leadership Capstone
10:00 pm - 7:00 am
Regret my decision
Pizza
Sleep

20. This layout works great for a dramatic quote or statistic.
Insert an amazing image and align it with this grey rectangle for a dramatic transition.
Feel free to change the copy to white should want it to show up better against the image.
MBA Adventure

21. So, wait you build apps?

22. Business savvy classmates
were eager to learn more
about design.

23. In that same spirit, design should
be excited to learn more about
business.

24. For, after all, the customer is
everybody’s business.

25. Here are 3 classes from my
MBA program that every designer
should explore.

26. Finance 101

27. If you can learn sketch,
you can learn finance.
Proprietary and confidential

28. Let’s learn to read an
income statement!
This is the blueprint to understanding
the business model and the biggest
variables that make up a business.
Proprietary and confidential

29. Pay close attention to
costs and expenses
Raw revenue generation will always be a key
driver for business, but as designers, our work
actually has a profound impact on cost
reduction for the company.
This type of analysis can give design-lead
projects credibility that would have previously
been considered, “non-revenue generating.”
Proprietary and confidential

30. Buy a burrito for someone
in accounting. Accountants
like burritos too.
Proprietary and confidential

31. Next, we should get the
hang of Statistics
Say you have two basic questions:
- How many people visit my website?
- How many visitors have I converted into leads or customers?
Those answers, easily found in Google Analytics, and with a simple
X/Y =Z ratio:

32. 77% percent of statistics are made up?
Or is it 81%?
Proprietary and confidential

33. Khan Academy is
a great resource.
Proprietary and confidential

34. I started fusing
these skills into
my design process
Armed with this new statistical skillset,
I was able to incorporate business
thinking as an early step in my design
process.
Proprietary and confidential

35. I’d take my financial knowledge, add
stats and would build a model!
Proprietary and confidential

36. Proprietary and confidential
Example “ROI of UX” Calculator
Design 1 Design 2 Change
Total Visitors to Page 1000 1000 0
Email Conv Rate 20% 10% -10%
Email Sign Ups 200 100 -100
Conversion Rate 5% 15% + 10%
Purchases 50 150 +100
Price 250 250 0
Total Revenue $12,500 $37,500 + 25,000

37. Just as there are free design
templates, there are free
excel modeling templates.
Proprietary and confidential

38. If you put it all together,
you can have jaw-dropping
designs, with a persuasive
business case.
Proprietary and confidential

39. Please remember this information is confidential.
Signature experience.Strategy

40. “Strategy is choosing what not to do.”
- Michael Porter
Proprietary and confidential

41. Porter is basically the LeBron James
of business thinking. He built a
strategic framework.
Proprietary and confidential

42. Porter’s framework gives us three
strategic choices:
Proprietary and confidential

43. Cost leadership: Low price, high volume
Narrow Segmentation: Ownership of a market
Differentiation: A new product or service
Proprietary and confidential

44. If choosing differentiation, I’ve found
success in going to the foundations of
Human Centered Design
Proprietary and confidential

45. Please remember this information is confidential.
Signature experience.Find the emotional connection

46. Customer Journey
Collage
A great way to find the emotional
connection with your customer is to build a
photo journal of their lives. Who are the
people they connect with, where do they
spend their time...visually connecting these
will help identify the emotional connection
you want to make.
Proprietary and confidential

47. Solve for those worries

48. Social Media Dialogue
Increasingly, customers use social media channels
as a primary method of communication with a
company. They are honest and will often engage in
constructive dialog about your product and
company.
Proprietary and confidential

49. This is your cover.
Insert an amazing image and align it
with this grey rectangle. Please use the
red, patterned, Shutterstock background
for internal presentations only.
Talk to your customers

50. Customer interviews can provide in-depth
details about a customer’s actions,
thoughts, and feelings.
1:1 Interviews &
unmoderated viewing

51. Find your signature experience

52. Northstar Workshop
Getting everyone in the room (UX, Product
& Tech) is key. It will foster unique
conversation and create a sense of
investment in the experience and who you
are solving for.
Commit the team to building a true
“Northstar” blending your product,
customer features, signature experience
and emotional values.

53. Venmo

54. 90% of all Venmo transactions are open to
somebody's friend, network, and 75%-plus have a
some sort of emoji or written commentary on that
transaction.

55. Please remember this information is confidential.
Signature experience.
Team
Mangement

56. “A bad system will
beat a good person,
every time.”
- Dr. Edward Deming

57. The strength of design is 100%
connected to the strength of
the design process.

58. Designers are good at
managing the work,
not each other.

59. The principles of Kaizen,
a Japanese lean philosophy,
is a powerful starting place.

60. This philosophy is best expressed
through the Dr. Edward Deming’s
14 points.

61. Point 9:
“Break down barriers between departments.
People in research, design, sales, and
production must work as a team, to foresee
problems of production and in use that may
be encountered with the product or service.”

62. Point 3:
“Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass
basis by building quality into the product in
the first place.”

63. Org Management 101
1. Every department adopts agile
1. Communicated vision
1. Detailed growth plans

64. Point 14:
“Put everybody in the company to work to
accomplish the transformation. The
transformation is everybody's job.”

65. Thanks!
@bradfrost
@mikeindustries
@bertbrautigam
@cap