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Focus Design - Company Information. Management. Client List. Company. Established in 1997, Focus Design has earned recognition as an award-winning design and branding communications firm. The awards are greatly appreciated, but we are most proud of the contributions we make to our clients' success - both in the strengthening of their brands and ...
As Chief Executive Officer As an industry visionary dedicated to quality design and craftsmanship, Tim founded Focus with the goal to create a different kind of development company. His vision, built on a commitment to creative design and construction expertise, also emphasizes the importance of company culture and the professional growth of all team members through collaboration and effective ...
Focus exists at the intersection of development and construction. The places and spaces the company brings to life mirror the collaboration between its vertically integrated, multi-disciplinary teams driven to manifest success. Since 1993, Focus has utilized an integrated delivery model to produce a distinctive portfolio of real estate in Chicagoland.
Feb 19, 2019 · LinkedIn. Design exists along the entire continuum. It’s not design then development, but rather design and development. The ancient roots of the word “Design” have meanings such as to indicate with a mark or sign and to have a particular purpose or intention. Design is about asking questions, and asking the right, or most meaningful ...
- More Than A Department
- More Than A Phase
- More Than A Feeling
- How Can Your Company Harness The Value of Design?
1) From departmental silos to cross-functional teams.
Companies with a central, siloed design department (sometimes subsumed into marketing or R&D) generally performed less well financially than those that let designers off the leash and distributed design experts into cross-functional product-focused teams. This was equally true where design expertise is brought in from external agencies—the business itself is still responsible for integrating these partners into one customer-obsessed development team. One major European furniture manufacturer...
2) From narrow experts to interdisciplinary designers.
Whether you are developing a new vehicle, a medical device, or a banking service—physical, digital, and service designs are converging. Companies increasingly recognize that such distinctions aren’t meaningful to customers. As a result, we saw improved financial performance in those companies that broke down barriers and cross-trained designers in skills such as industrial and user-interface design, compared with those that maintained historical divisions with little cross-fertilization. For...
3) From cubicles to garages.
In a Silicon Valley “garage,” there are no departments, titles, or assigned offices. Everyone is focused on making a great product that meets a customer need. The environment is more like a workshop than an office, designed to encourage collaborative focus on building a great product together. A global consumer-packaged-goods player recently created a new design studio down the street from its main innovation center. A single open-air space with a concrete floor, it was a stark contrast to th...
4) From a design stage to continuous design.
A design-led approach to product creation means that design happens throughout development, not just at the early concept phase. From laying out a product road map, through preparations for production and launch, and all the way to in-service support, design should keep the team true to customer needs for the life of the product. Nespresso, for example, involves designers throughout its products’ life cycles and throughout the business system. Designers observe customer reactions both in stor...
5) From qualitative to full-spectrum research.
Qualitative research through user groups, interviews, and field observation is a powerful tool to understand consumer desires and motivations. Augmenting this with quantitative analytics, such as harvesting online reviews or analyzing warranty service, can detect underlying behaviors and lay a deeper foundation on which to build winning design concepts. Companies that used both forms of customer research created products that were more highly rated than those from companies that used qualitat...
6) From prototype once to prototype often.
Most R&D stage-gate processes begin with a product description and business model. Design-led companies begin with a prototype that answers a customer need, backed up with a business case. Design is inherently iterative, and companies that emphasize prototyping early rather than perfectly move more quickly toward products that customers love. This notion is core to the agile process pioneered by software companies, as is the use of minimum viable products, which gives teams the ability to qui...
7) From middle management to the C-suite.
The customer-centric culture needed to drive design impact throughout a business must start at the C-suite, with design leaderswho are also credible business leaders. They must strive to remain aware of what their customers love about their products and defend what customers hold dear through the tortuous path to market. Aston Martin and Burberry are widely regarded as two of the most valuable brands in the world and are regularly featured in rankings of top brands. Both have placed design le...
8) From perspectives to metrics.
The key to connecting design with commercial success is the ability of leaders to eschew subjective opinions or personal preferences and instead make decisions based on a factual understanding of the customer. Design metrics—such as customer-satisfaction scores and human-factors risk calculations—give leadership hard data on which to base crucial decisions. Some companies have developed design metrics that allow them to measure design during product development as rigorously as they measure q...
9) From financial to customer-based incentives.
The best-performing companies we investigated measured the long-term commercial impact of customer satisfaction. They tied senior-management bonuses to customer satisfaction in addition to revenue- and profit-based measures. This included indirect measures such as design awards and reviews as well as direct measures such as user scores. One consumer-goods manufacturer saw an above-forecast increase in both sales and customer satisfaction after linking management and development-staff pay to u...
None of the companies we’ve assessed so far exhibited mastery of all ten design actions. However, those that implemented several showed both improved financial performance and increased customer loyalty, in a time when many companies are suffering from falling customer satisfaction. Consider Disney. Throughout its storied history, Disney has put cu...
Brand Development Exterior Design “A deep understanding of F&B and a genuinely collaborative approach means that the always innovative solutions created by Focus are rooted in commercial reality, enhance the brand value, and work hard for the business.”
Dec 10, 2019 · This article is the first of four and will take you through how to win with a design-focused strategy. The other three focus on production, delivery and service. To focus on design is to create ...
