In an era where digital design often prioritizes aesthetics and speed, Purpose-Driven Design (PDD) shifts the focus to intention and impact. Developed over two decades, PDD is more than a framework for stunning designs – it’s a strategic approach to solving real-world problems for users and businesses alike.

Whether it’s cola wars, mobile plan battles, GPT jousting, or shampoo brands one-upping each other, every industry has its arms race for bragging rights on differentiation. In the digital agency arena, that arms race often centers on the design process. Of course, every company has embraced or created a design framework that works for them, but we are proud of the one that is uniquely ours. 

Purpose-Driven Design (PDD) is the custom design framework we’ve been developing over the last 20 years, fine-tuning it based on experience from project work. In this piece, we’ll look at what makes it work and makes it successful both for us and our clients.

“We aim to create design solutions that solve real problems suffered by real users,” says Greg Podunovich, senior product design strategist at Infinum. “Solving these problems can produce concrete, sometimes profound, impacts.”

Not surprisingly, these impacts ladder directly up to the goals of our clients.

“You can be confident you’re putting something out in the world where very little has been left to chance,” says Podunovich. “It has all been deeply investigated and validated.”

Todd Doyle, creative director for North America, echoes the sentiment. “Clients are always looking for confidence that they’ve made the right decision, and practitioners want to have confidence they are on the right track. PDD bridges this gap earlier because it forces everyone to always answer ‘why’ with everything they do.”

Rather than focusing so much on how we get things done, PDD focuses more on why we do the things we do. It’s not just about how to attack a website or a logo redesign or a product design. It applies to any sort of design challenge that could be thrown at the agency. The “why” can best be outlined by PDD’s principles.

“This principle-centered approach doesn’t just lead to visually stunning designs,” says Chris Bradshaw, Infinum’s product strategy director. “It results in impactful solutions that resonate with users and drive real-world success. We’re not confined by rigid rules but liberated to explore, innovate, and deliver value in every project.

We present the critical focus areas that may not always steal the spotlight but play a vital role in the success of your digital product.

When developing a new digital product, there are several crucial areas that often don’t receive enough attention but can significantly impact the project’s success. 

Why don’t they get the attention they deserve? Because many people outside the industry pigeonhole these aspects of product development as “mechanical stuff” that lives under the hood of the project. 

In other words, they are not the color, upholstery, or infotainment system of the car. But they are the very things that make that car hum. And if not addressed, they are the component parts that may leave you and your customers stranded on the side of the digital road calling for help. 

This piece outlines some of the most important places to invest when devising your digital growth plans and why we think they can be so critical to your business’ success.

We’ve spilled a lot of digital ink about this over the years, but we cannot overstate the importance of understanding your target audience. 

Oftentimes, clients are under the impression they know their customer well enough to skip past user research. They’ve managed their products and seen the analytics for years, and “they know what they’re selling” better than an outsider. 

These all may be true, but what business leaders don’t always have is insight into how customers will react to new digital products or changes to a current one. Through our experience, we know the only way to know these answers is through research and testing. 

The good news is that this phase can be tailored to a client’s budget and done fairly quickly (perhaps adding just a month to the timeline). In the big picture, that’s a small price to pay for the confidence you’re building the right product and that it will perform as expected. 

It’s important to ensure your digital product is accessible to all users including those with disabilities. Not only is it a matter of compliance with current legal standards, but more critically, it is the right thing to do for customers and your business. 

Recognizing that even the smallest market segment comes in many shapes and sizes is good common sense. If done right, it will increase goodwill for your brand and expand your base of potential clientele.

In addition, the innovations in accessibility often end up helping a broader audience: better screen contrast helps anyone in suboptimal lighting situations, transcripts and captions on audio and video add a helpful dimension for searching, scanning, or consuming content in noisy (or the exact opposite: very quiet) environments, and voice commands can be a superior means of directing an experience – when cooking or driving, for example. 

Related to both #1 and #2, it’s important to invest time in ensuring site or app navigation is clear and easy-to-use. Hero images, animations, and beautiful page layouts get lots of attention, but great navigation is key to improving user satisfaction and retention.

There is nothing worse than getting to the place you want to be and then not being able to find what you are looking for. Likewise, being led in the wrong direction because the navigation is too complicated, clever, or presented in a manner that doesn’t speak to actual user needs can be equally frustrating. 

Poor navigation is a fast track to proving how little you understand your customer – how they think, the words they use, and how they prefer to interact. You are not out to win awards, you are out to optimize your business for your customer. The best navigations out there are the ones that work.

Do your best not to frame your digital initiatives as a short-term fix. In the HBR article The Two Big Reasons Digital Transformations Fail, the authors suggest that one of the primary reasons for failure is “unsuccessful efforts to scale digital innovations beyond early pilot work.” This can happen for a number of reasons, including organizational structure, budget, or technical limitations. 

Through our Purpose-Driven Design process, we work with clients to conceive and engineer their systems to evolve and grow. Even if you are not able to invest in a long-term plan initially, it is best to put the building blocks in place from the start. 

Plan for future growth by designing a scalable architecture. This includes the right design system and codebase, efficient database management, and flexible server infrastructure. Planning the resources and budget for continual support, optimization, and growth also matters – and we can help in those instances as well with retainers or team augmentation plans.

With every new device and cellular grid innovation, expectations for speed increase. Pay close attention to your product’s speed. Use efficient coding practices, optimize images and media, maximize server performance, and leverage caching to reduce loading times, because fast performance is critical for user retention. 

Through his research, The Time to Win author Jay Baer found that two-thirds of customers say speed is as important as price, and 50% of customers are less likely to spend money with a business that takes longer to respond than they expect. 

Just as you wouldn’t want a customer seeking help from customer service to wait too long for support, you don’t want your digital experience to be slow and frustrating.

When your favorite feature takes too long to load, no one will know why it was your favorite in the first place.    

Any data breach is a big deal. If it’s bad enough, it can run a small company into the ground or shave billions off a large company’s market capitalization. Implement robust security measures to protect user data from the start, including encryption, routine updates and patching, secure authentication methods, and regular security audits and penetration testing. 

Treat your customers (and their information) as you would want your own information treated. It will be an investment you won’t regret. And if doing the right thing isn’t impetus enough, there are significant fines under a variety of regulatory bodies for not implementing proper security measures into your digital assets.

Invest in high-quality, relevant content that adds value to your users. 

Depending on the type of business you operate, this can take different forms. For an automaker, it might be 360 videos that take you inside the car and let you rotate the exterior at different angles. For a manufacturer of complex machinery, it might be how-to videos. For a domestic appliances company, it might be unique recipes. 

It could be as simple as a great FAQ page or homepage copy. Whatever it is, create your content for a reason, and make sure your end users immediately grasp why it matters. 

If your content can’t be evergreen, it’s important to develop a long-term content strategy that includes regular updates and diverse content types matched to the channels where it will be distributed. Be sure to stick to your strategy and create valuable content that fulfills the promise you make to your users when you offer it—that your content is worth their time.

It’s hard to know if you’re succeeding if you can’t see your results. It seems obvious, but analytics can be treated as an afterthought in the midst of a big, exciting redesign. 

At a minimum, you’ll want to use tools like Google Analytics to track user behavior, engagement, and conversion rates. This data is crucial for making informed decisions.

With a deeper engagement, time can be spent carefully outlining project KPIs and mapping them to business goals, and then setting up the systems to track them. 

Predictive analytics, heat mapping, user surveys, and alerts or automated reports just scratch the surface of what’s possible. The metrics matter, but it’s critical to contextualize them and “know what good looks like.” Armed with this information, businesses can ensure their products are performing and delivering the results they are after.

Ensuring your new product has clear and comprehensive policies and practices that comply with local and international regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) is vital to building trust with your customers and avoiding regulatory issues and fines. 

It’s important to create detailed terms of service to protect your business and clearly inform users of their rights and responsibilities. More than ever, consumers are aware of how their personal data is being used and are wary of companies who don’t take it seriously. 

The social and health impacts of digital products are also in the spotlight more than ever before. Work with your internal teams and agency partners to evaluate and mitigate risk. And if your product has unique and protectable components, you’ll want to consider relevant IP protection to make sure they can be fully leveraged for your business.

Investing in these often-overlooked areas can significantly enhance the success and longevity of your digital product. Balancing initial excitement with practical and strategic investments will provide a strong foundation for growth and user satisfaction.

If you’re about to embark on a digital redesign, rebuild, or optimization project, please take these recommendations to heart. And should you want an experienced helping hand on your journey, you know we’re here to help. 

Karri Offstein Rosenthal is a digital strategist, writer, and podcast host-producer whose latest series, “Held,” was a Top 25 Apple documentary podcast. Her play, “Broken Water,” was presented as part of the Lab@Piven and The Oil Lamp Theater Play Reading Series in the Chicago area. She was Director of Online Selling for the Scholastic Education Group and a marketer for startups and established firms in the education and beauty industries. 

In a world where digital presence can make or break a brand, user experience problems are not to be taken lightly. Companies often struggle to pinpoint why their UX is falling short, which is where our framework comes in very handy. 

It is difficult to overstate the importance of user experience. Most companies today deliver some – and in many cases all – of their products and services online. 

Companies face an increasingly sophisticated consumer whose expectations have been set by the Apples, AirBnBs, and Amazons of the world. Even the basic marketing site, one without e-commerce functionality, is a critically important representation of your brand. 

Failure to ensure user satisfaction and meet your customers’ expectations in these settings can mean the end of the most important commodity you have – your relationship with them.

A significant issue that companies face today is determining which parts of their digital ecosystem are functioning well and which are not. 

There are a multitude of reasons for this: these digital systems are complex and opaque. Unlike a physical store or in-person service situation, you can’t see your customers. You may not be able to speak to them, tell if they’re lost or confused, or even if they are a robot or a human. 

A technical issue could be related to network connection quality, tied to a particular device type, or to issues with the underlying code.

Simply put, it’s not easy to know. Faced with these truths, executives who are responsible for their digital business often don’t know where to begin. That’s a problem because it means you could be leaving money on the table or losing out to competition.

Fortunately, there are ways to handle your user experience problems, which we’ll explore in this piece.

To come up with a cure, you first need to acknowledge the symptoms. Oftentimes, problems bubble up organically. Online sales numbers start to fall off. Customer complaints trickle in or show up on review sites. User interaction drops. Conversion rates start to go the way of the U.S. stock market in 2008. Members of internal teams start criticizing elements of the digital experience. Maybe it’s several all at once. 

Once it’s clear you’re dealing with user experience problems, it can be difficult to see a path forward. At this point, these scenarios might seem familiar:

“Many times, clients are aware there are issues. Maybe they have even isolated where they are,” says Infinum product strategy director Chris Bradshaw. ”But they don’t know why these user experience problems are happening or exactly how to correct them, and it helps to have the experience of having helped literally hundreds of clients work through similar scenarios.” 

When these problems arise, we can step in.  

Good digital agencies have developed processes for helping companies overcome these challenges. At Infinum, we have created and implemented a proven methodology that simplifies the UX design process, including ways to execute improvements and optimizations. It’s called Purpose-Driven Design, or PDD.

We spent a lot of time thinking about how we might add some kind of secret sauce to our own process. We discovered that it had very little to do with what design deliverables we chose to embrace or throw overboard. At the end of the day, we found that differentiation comes through principles more than process. A process describes how you do something, while a set of principles describes why you do something. Our process is rooted in a set of six design principles.

As we say, “real value is discovered” and “you can’t guess your way to credibility.” There’s no shortcut around research. 

The steps we take in discovery workshops vary, but we’ll often start by interviewing stakeholders and real users to uncover the roots of the user experience problems, using the benefit of our 20 years’ experience and objectivity to gather our findings. 

Quantitative tactics are used to validate hypotheses: surveying real users or running A/B tests, among others. These approaches are augmented by deep dives into analytics and competitive analyses.

After gathering data, our solution architects, strategists, designers, and technical teams are able to map out different potential solutions and, critically, to pull together estimates so that clients can make more informed decisions about which path fits their budget or offers the best payoff. 

This is where PDD really makes an impact. Rather than dealing in ambiguity or the world of opinion, clients are able to step back and look at facts and figures. We find this stage is transformative for clients who have been struggling with where to start.        

“So often when clients come to us, they are overwhelmed,” says Kerrin Whipple, senior user experience designer and researcher. “They’re overwhelmed with how to initiate improvements, with data overload, by lack of expertise, and resources and tool constraints. We are able to take this load off their shoulders.”  

You may not run a medical company or bank, but you might see yourself reflected in their challenges. Here are a couple of examples that we believe highlight how our methodology helps businesses identify starting points quickly.

If you’re looking for a digital product development agency for your next project, size is probably not the first factor you’re considering. Still, it can be an important one, and we’ll tell you why.  

When choosing a digital product development agency, many factors come into play for the client. It could be past experience, location, specialization, price, or availability – to name just a few. 

While agency size is not likely to be the first evaluation criterion, we’ve found that many of the factors that typically “make the list” can be affected by it. 

In this piece, we’ll examine the interplay between agency size and other factors influencing the choice of a digital partner and outline why we think the medium-size agency is the best fit for most types of engagement. And yes, Infinum is indeed a medium-size agency, but before you accuse us of bias, let us explain.

There is no industry-standard definition for digital product development agency size, but there are some general conventions and rules of thumb in the agency world. For the purposes of this article, we will take these factors into account and define the framework as follows:

There’s a lot to like about small agencies, and we say this as a former small agency ourselves. From an accountability perspective, many clients will be able to have a personal relationship with a small agency’s CEO or founders, which can be a comforting thought should an escalation be needed. 

And if you’re a relatively large client using significant agency resources, you can often be assured of getting the “A Team” since you are not competing against numerous other Fortune 100 clients for agency talent. Simply put, you’ll be able to soak up more limelight than you could at a big agency, just owing to the relative size of your footprint.

However, it does not take long to come up against the limitations of small shops.

It’s basic math that when there are 25 people in a shop, there won’t be a deep bench of strategy, design, development, data science, AI/ML, content, QA, and platform expertise. And we didn’t even get into SEO/SEM, video and audio production, and other marketing functions. 

For example, the eight specializations above yield fewer than three practitioners per discipline in a shop of 25 if you include back office roles. Unless you are the only client, there’s just not enough talent to go around. Often, partnerships are leveraged to fill in the blanks, but these can be hit-or-miss since outside companies have their own priorities and cultures to maintain. 

Furthermore, small agencies don’t have the ability to scale if your project grows quickly or the scope increases on a dime. It’s not uncommon for stakeholders to want to grow a digital project once they see positive results, and it can be frustrating when there’s a desire to add on specific features or capabilities only to be told, “Sorry, but we can’t offer that” or “We hope to be able to offer that in future.”

There’s also much to love about larger agencies. With a deep bench across specialties, it’s easy to find a partner that can cover the entire product lifecycle and scale up when needed. 

With depth also comes experience: there are likely people on the team who’ve dealt with clients like you and problems like the ones you’re facing. That’s a comfort and can lead to some process efficiency attributable to expertise.

However, maintaining a large pool of talent requires infrastructure and ongoing investment. There are exceptions, but bigger companies often end up with relatively more overhead – more layers of management needed to handle the staff size, additional compliance requirements, or more complex technical systems, to name a few. The weight of such an obligation can be costly, and those costs may spill over into the agency’s rates. 

In addition, because large agencies often attract bigger clients, as noted above, there can be heavy competition for accounts within the agency. If you end up on the wrong side of this equation, it can mean losing the “A Team” that may have attracted you to the agency in the first place.   

Lastly, it’s worth noting that some large agencies describe themselves as a network of smaller shops. But these smaller shops often come with the same overhead as their parent company, which still means a higher price for you.

Talent is a hot commodity. In the current tech landscape, supply is outstripping demand, and it’s not easy to find and retain top-tier technical specialists who understand the ever-changing complexities of the digital space. 

In a recent MIT Technology Review Insights poll, 64% of global tech leaders said candidates for their IT and tech jobs lack the necessary skills or experience. It’s certainly not a hard-and-fast rule, but small agencies sometimes do not offer the breadth of opportunity or range of clients to attract top talent.

And since large agencies typically offer a wide range of capabilities to meet the needs of their variety of clientele, they can sometimes adopt a more general approach to their work. Top talent may be less attracted to the generalist nature of this work, preferring to be part of an agency that’s geared to a challenging or exciting subject matter that is their specialty. Additionally, talent in large agencies can also feel lost in the bureaucratic shuffle.

Middle ground is sometimes the playing field of the indecisive, but when it comes to choosing a digital agency, we dare say mid-size is a great choice for many projects. 

Full disclosure, at 370 people, Infinum is a mid-size agency. Not surprisingly, we feel there are some significant benefits to an agency of our size. But it’s not necessary to take just our word for it. 

According to a recent Forrester Wave: Midsize Digital Experience Agencies, mid-sized agencies offer many benefits. Customer respondents described them as “an extension to my team,” “big enough to do complex projects,” “more agile than the ‘big guys,’” and “a great cultural fit.”  

James Cole, CEO of Infinum North America, explains his perspective as someone who led a 25-person shop before being acquired by Infinum in late 2023:

 “Evolving from a 25-person firm to one nearing 400 employees was a bit of an adjustment. We were quite capable as a smaller firm, but now we have a much wider and deeper toolkit that we can leverage to benefit our clients.”

In summary, here are some of the reasons we think medium-size agencies are an exceptional choice.

When looking for a digital agency, only you can know what is best for you. When it comes to agency size, we’d encourage you to think about the factors we’ve noted above and how much they matter to you. 

How important is the speed of response? Do you have tolerance for lesser efficiency to gain breadth under one roof? Does the small agency you like have depth in the skills you need today – and tomorrow? How important is it that your agency mesh with your culture? 

If you’re making this important decision, we’re happy to be your counsel, whether you’re currently thinking boutique, small, medium, large, or extra-large. Feel free to reach out. 

Karri Offstein Rosenthal is a digital strategist, writer, and podcast host-producer whose latest series, “Held,” was a Top 25 Apple documentary podcast. Her play, “Broken Water,” was presented as part of the Lab@Piven and The Oil Lamp Theater Play Reading Series in the Chicago area. She was Director of Online Selling for the Scholastic Education Group and a marketer for startups and established firms in the education and beauty industries.