Savvy business leaders of today don’t just source and deploy technology. They make it their goal to design great experiences, harnessing every dimension of the evolving digital ecosystem along the way, which leave their employees better equipped and inspired.

Winning the war on talent and gaining market advantage, especially for small and medium business owners, demands increasingly heavier investments in digital tools and infrastructure that make staff more productive, better connected, and better informed.  

The best digital strategy starts first by crisply defining the problem to be solved, then pursuing one of three execution paths: sourcing a commercial package, partnering with an early stage vendor to adopt and shape their emerging platform, or designing a custom digital platform. The latter path might require a blend of in-house resources, and those from a systems integrator or digital agency, but regardless of the design and development process, the goal should always be to deliver a great experience for staff.

When designing a great experience, be sure to thoughtfully consider workflow and the context in which a proposed platform will be used. Make informed trade-offs between architecture and experience, and grind past gratuitous swipes and taps to focus on only the most intuitive and natural interactions that make life easier on staff.

But what if the goal was a digital strategy well short of amazing, that burdens your business with bad technology, reduces productivity, and ultimately generates embarrassment?

Here are three design principles that will get you nothing more than that less than awesome result:

1. Design Democratically

Some praise the collective wisdom of the masses, but designing great digital experiences requires tyranny, not consensus. A mediocre design always flows from a room stacked with people equally empowered to design. A surefire way to avoid an awesome result is to find all of the internal stakeholders you can and grant all of them veto power.

2. Ignore the Little Things

Stunning visual interfaces are cool, but a great digital experience reflects a set of micro-experiences that add up to create an emotional connection. Every detail from the download to the authentication process, from the nuances of navigation, to image loading, converges to enhance, or destroy, this emotional connection. If the goal is to maximize frustration and limit enthusiasm, it’s best to ignore these little things, focus on the big picture, and just get the system launched. In this consumer driven IT world, I am sure staff will be very forgiving.  

3. Avoid Passion 

When IT is viewed as non-strategic overhead, and is sourced, coded, implemented, and deployed without passion, the result is predictable. Requirements are fulfilled, but users are rarely empowered. Milestones are met, but business sponsors still complain. To ensure platforms arrive with a thud, it is best to prioritize deadlines, and link IT staff bonuses to meeting very quantifiable metrics that squash any incentive to get creative, experiment, and discover new ways to dazzle.

There has never been a better time to launch digital innovations inside businesses of every scale, exploiting an ever-expanding array of cloud-based vendors bent on revolutionizing how enterprises go digital. Be good to your people by not launching technology stink bombs that crush morale, making them shrug their shoulders and wonder, “what were they thinking?”

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Keith Strier is a Principal in Deloitte Consulting and Managing Director, Digital Innovation for the firm's global enterprise. Follow him at: @kstrier

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