This document discusses the importance of design and user experience (UX) for startups. It provides examples of how UX design can help startups succeed by addressing common reasons for startup failure such as lack of product-market fit, running out of cash, and poor marketing. The document also provides case studies of startups that Interactivism worked with, including how UX design helped Scoutables validate their product idea and differentiate Cisco Metacloud's offering.

1. Disruption: Designing Successful Startups
Erik Wingren, Partner @ Interactivism
Petra Wennberg Cesario, Partner @ Interactivism
Julian Scaff, Design Director @ Interactivism

2. In the 1920s, the
average lifespan
of an S&P 500
company was
67 years.
Today it’s 15 years
Source: Innosight / Creative Destruction Whips through Corporate America
In the 1920s, the
average lifespan
of an S&P 500
company was
67 years.
Today it’s 15 years

3. Source: Innosight / Creative Destruction Whips through Corporate America
The primary driver for this increasing rate of change is – no
surprise – technology, and survival is determined by balancing
3 objectives:
1.effective operations
2.creating new businesses which meet customer needs,
and
3.shedding old businesses that do not
To put it simply: Big or small, if you don’t focus on
users, you are dead…

4. In 2018, 12 of 25 top
funded startups were
co-founded by designers.
Up from 5 of 25 in 2015
Source: KPCB Design in Tech Report 2016
A more than 85%
increase since 2015
Why? Because good design is critical to
competitive advantage

5. What is UX design?

6. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Product Requirements

7. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Data

8. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
User Interface

9. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
User Experience

10. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
UXContent
Strategy
Architecture
Computer
Science
Industrial
Design
Human
Factors &
Ergonomics
Cognitive
Science
Motion
& Sound
Design
Information
Architecture
Visual
Design
Interaction
Design
UX touches
on a lot of
fields

11. UX is the sum of the experience of using
a product or service.
UX goes beyond meeting users’ needs
with an efficient and easy to use product.
UX should strive to evoke emotions like
delight, belonging and participation.

12. Source: Temkin Group / KPCB Design In Tech Report
6x more likely to
buy
12x more likely to
recommend
5x more likely to
forgive
Emotion is the strongest driver of loyalty. Customers
with positive emotional experiences are:

13. Why design matters to startups

14. Top 10 reasons startups fail
Source: CB Insights: Startup Failure Post-Mortems
23%#3 Not the right team
18%#5 Pricing/cost issues
17%#6 Lack business model
13%#10 Bad timing
29%#2 Ran out of cash
42%#1 No market need
19%#4 Get outcompeted
17%#7 Poor marketing
14%#8 Poor product
14%#9 Ignore customers

15. UX will improve the product-market fit
#1 – No market need (42%)
42% of failed startups stated that they - in retrospect – were building a
solution looking for a problem, as opposed to targeting a validated market
need.
A user-centered approach to product design will qualify the input of the
lean product-market fit process…

16. Engaging UX from start will reduce dev
time by 30-50%
Source: IEEE Spectrum: Why Software Fails
#2 – Ran out of cash (29%)
By engaging UX in the beginning of projects, startups will shorten software
development time by 30-50% on an average. Or: By engaging design early
on, a company with 10 engineers can have the output of 16-20 engineers.

17. Moore’s law is not enough
#4 – Get outcompeted (19%)
According to Gartner, last year 89% of companies said they believe that
customer experience will be their primary basis for competition. That’s up
from 36% 4 years earlier.

18. UX will help create a differentiated brand
and product proposition
#7 – Poor marketing (17%)
• Good UX designers look at the entire customer journey, and design an
experience across every user touchpoint.
• Good UX designers look for opportunities to go beyond meeting needs
to evoking emotion.
• How about virality?

19. UX will foster relevant features that solve
real problems
#8 – Poor product (14%)
A user-centered approach to product design will:
• Combat feature-itis and complexity in the interest of serving edge
cases.
• Foster simple and efficient functionality through best practices in
usability and design consistency

20. UX puts users at the beginning, middle
and end of the process
#9 – Ignore customers (14%)
Not until we understand the problem AND the users, do we start what most
people think of as “The Design Process”:
• Concepting solutions
• Prototyping the most promising ones

21. How do you spot good UX?

22. When evaluating a startup…
Have they done user research?
Do they understand the entire customer journey?
Do they prototype and test before development
Do they have senior design leadership?

23. Examples

24. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Disrupting disability insurance

25. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY25
Scoutables
Scoutables is a Pasadena based startup that’s
revolutionizing the way professional sports teams
manage financial risk around their most valuable assets:
their athletes.
- The biggest line item for is their athlete payroll.
- When players get injured they can’t play, but they
are still getting paid.
- There are disability insurance products out there,
but they are crude and expensive.
- Scoutables uses big data analysis to make
sophisticated, and fair underwriting decisions.
Challenge: Interactivism was asked to design a demo
app, to showcase Scoutables’ analytics capabilities by
offering daily machine-generated scouting reports and
graphical data-driven insights about every player in
Major League Baseball. The app was scheduled to go
live by Opening Day, less than 3 months away. We’re
both from Sweden and know nothing about baseball.
Process: We ran design-storms with baseball insiders -
players, front office staff and sports journalists – as well
applied mathematicians from CalTech. Being total
n00bs gave us permission to challenge the traditional
approaches and really get to the heart of the matter:
What data is critical when evaluating a player, and how
best to visualize it?
Success: Applying design thinking from start allowed
us to prioritize technical requirements for the underlying
data platform. We released the demo app less than 3
months from kickoff. The company is currently signing
up customers for their private beta insurance product.

26. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Taking OpenStack to the next level

27. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY27
Cisco Metacloud
Metacloud is a premium on-premise private
cloud solution that is delivered with a SaaS
like service model.
Interactivism has worked with Metacloud
since 2013, across all aspects of their user-
facing product experience.
Challenge: Differentiate the open-source
product Open Stack via design – to reflect the
high-end service offering provided by
Metacloud. Develop a UX/UI system capable
of accommodating the constantly and quickly
evolving upstream open-source project.
Process: Starting with the core product, built
on the Open Stack Horizon Dashboard, we
gradually worked our way through every
touch-point, allowing us to develop a holistic
design system.
Success: A great product/service proposition
+ UX = Acquisition by Cisco in Sep, 2014.
Interactivism continues to work with
Metacloud on existing and new products.

28. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Our blades are f**king great

29. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY29
Dollar Shave Club
By focusing on the essence of their
offering - a totally decent razor,
automagically shipped to your
doorstep, for as little as $1/month -
Dollar Shave Club gave the 800-
pound gorillas in the category a run for
their money.
Gillette, Schick & Co were too busy
competing on how many blades they
could fit into a single razor to see what
was coming.
Interactivism designed the UX for the
Dollar Shave Club launch web site,
with specific focus on the check-out
funnel, which for a subscription
commerce service is 99% of the
business.
The company raised just north of
$160M in venture funding over 4 years,
and in July 2016 the company was
acquired by Unilever for a cool $1
Billion.

30. Further reading
https://shrtm.nu/IQlB

31. Thank you!
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Pasadena CA 91001
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