A talk with Anthony Lamont, a multiple award-winning Belgian design strategist.

Welcome to the first article of the [Design Strategy Talks] series. Here you’ll find different perspectives and insights from my colleagues around the world. The goal? To learn and improve your design process!

Let’s jump right into it with our first guest, Anthony Lamont.

Who is Anthony Lamont?

Like so many of us, Anthony dreamed of doing something creative and getting paid for it. He started working in advertising and became the art director of DDB Brussels. A stellar position at a renowned agency – sounds awesome. But something didn’t feel right. He disliked the way challenges were approached. Solutions felt hollow, like adding coating on top of existing brands.

That’s when he asked himself the question that changed his career and plenty of products worldwide:

Determined to find the answer he quit advertising and founded Yonder Innovations, a product design studio that greets you with: Life’s too damn short to build things nobody wants.

Ten years later, he’s also a lead design strategist of a Belgian product studio In The Pocket and has received multiple awards for his work (Eurobest, UX Design, Red Dot, iF Design and more).

Let’s see what he discovered on his design journey!

The problem: Few companies know their actual end-users

“Design strategy should address real problems companies have today and solve them by improving products, not just adding features for feature’s sake.”

Anthony sees design strategy as taking the user-centered design methodology and mindset and applying them to larger systems and products.

In order to do that, design strategist usually follows a 3-step process:

1. Understand phase: Start with the why. Frame the problem and define the goals.
2. Ideation phase: Make sense of all the findings and translate them into solutions.
3. Product phase: Create a final solution prototype and test with end-users.

Anthony has a great and seemingly simple definition of what is a successful strategy.

As designers, we have the power to change things.

Anthony emphasizes that designers need to be aware that they have a much larger impact than they think. A digital product can easily reach millions of users globally. Failure has a direct impact on a company’s revenue.

If the design is so important and impactful, how do you minimize the chances of failure? Anthony says the way to go is user testing.

However, when discussing user testing with clients, the talk quickly turns into a conversation about the budget. How much will it cost? Clients see it as an expense and not as a necessity to deliver better products. The good news is, Anthony says, user testing doesn’t have to be expensive. And neglecting it is a huge risk.

Studies show that half of the problems users have while using a product were actually overlooked by experts. That’s a huge risk you’re taking every time you skip user testing.

User testing also reduces bias. Men still dominate the design industry. Design and engineering companies create products for a global market, but the teams are rarely diverse enough to reflect global perspectives. The impact of having such a limited set of voices in the room where design decisions are made has far-reaching implications.

A quick example – female drivers were 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash up until 2011. Why? Because crash test dummies were based on the ‘average’ white male.

“So when testing, include a healthy mix of real users,” concludes Anthony.

Sharing knowledge is the most important thing within a design centred organization

Now let’s mix it up a bit and go from users to designers and design strategists.

Anthony sees a design strategist as someone that needs to be a critical thinker aiming for user-centered solutions.

He describes himself as more of a coach-like strategist that strives to improve his co-workers’ strategic mindset and development.

He believes that sharing knowledge is the most important thing within a design organization. In order to improve, designers can benefit a lot from a good design critique format.

But what exactly does he mean by design critique?

Critiques should leave designers feeling inspired, challenged and empowered

That said, Anthony sees less and less companies and studios implementing critiques because they have no clue how to run them properly. They see them as inefficient, so they stop doing it and miss out on vital opportunities to improve.

The importance of communication is why Anthony has mixed feelings about distributed design teams. Complete offshore development teams are improving, but distributing a design project among different designers feels too difficult. Why?

Anthony’s recommendations

Anthony uses Sketch for most of his UX and UI work. Adobe is just not appealing to him anymore. For user testing, he’ll make his prototypes with Invision and for high fidelity mockups, he’ll use Principle.

Instead of a super-secret tool, he’d rather recommend a podcast.

The 3-bullet recap

Anthony, thank you very much for your time and wisdom. It’s been a blast! We’ll end this and every other article in the series with a 3-bullet recap of the most important points.

Here it goes:

1. Always research your users and make sure you understand their needs.
2. User test your product with at least 5 people to identify 85 % of usability problems.
3. Remember how impactful design is. It can touch millions of users. You have the power to change things.

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