Our Thinking
Design that connects us
Our ThinkingThe business case for experience design
Experience design provides organisations a strategic approach to creating meaningful interactions that drive business value. It is a critical solution addressing organisational challenges and contributing to the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit.
By prioritising comprehensive experience design, organisations can:
Solve user needs through human-centred approaches
Create accessible, equitable products and services
Reduce customer interaction friction
Differentiate through thoughtful design
Build brand loyalty
Mitigate legal and reputational risks
Maximise ROI by aligning business goals with user expectations
Support social equity, operational efficiency, and sustainable practices
Experiences are continuous, spanning every touchpoint from initial interaction to post-reflection. Focusing on the entire journey allows organisations to address pain points, build trust, and establish meaningful connections, ensuring long-term success.
Why Inclusive Experiences Matter
For many organisations, accessibility is a checkbox exercise, a compliance task rather than a strategic priority. Consider these facts:
The Department for Work and Pensions' Family Resources Survey reports that there are 16.1 million disabled people in the UK
In the UK alone, disabled people and their families contribute an estimated £274 billion annually in spending.
Exclusionary design limits market reach, reduces revenue potential and marginalises users. Experiences are not just events, but perceptual journeys shaped by individual interpretation, memory, and psychological nuances. For instance, in aviation travel, the experience is not just the check-in, boarding and in-flight experience, it's the booking experience (app, online, or even in-person travel agent), the anticipation of the journey, the travel to the airport, parking, anxiety of navigating unfamiliar systems, duty-free shopping, pre-flight meal, the comfort or discomfort during the trip, and the reflection afterward, in other words, the entire end-to-end experience encompassing multiple touch points, both physical and digital.
By focusing solely on peaks, we risk neglecting the pain points and smaller details that significantly shape users' perceptions.
Recognising the complexity of user experiences demands a fundamental shift from compliance-driven approaches to genuinely empathetic, holistic design. By transforming from a compliance checkbox to a strategic imperative, organisations can unlock opportunities for innovation, empathy, and meaningful human-centred connection.
The Inclusive Service Blueprint - Your Competitive Advantage
At Mima, we champion a comprehensive approach to experience design. Using tools like inclusive service blueprints, we map the full user journey to ensure inclusivity at every stage, connecting what the user experiences to the behind-the-scenes processes that make it possible. It forces us to think about every stage of interaction:
Pre-experience - What prompts a user to engage? How do they plan, find information, or feel welcomed?
Core Interaction - How seamless and intuitive is the core activity? Are the services inclusive?
Post-experience - How do users reflect, follow up, share feedback, and want to use your service again? What lingers in their memory?
Designing truly inclusive services requires integrating experience design, human factors, accessibility, and deep knowledge of diverse access requirements. Critically, these approaches must be co-created with people who have lived experience. At Mima, we integrate these disciplines to help organisations transform user experiences into strategic advantages.
Evolve or Fall Behind
Experience design is no longer optional, it’s essential for growth, resilience, and sustainability.
The market message is clear, either adapt and design inclusively or risk losing out to competitors. Experience design is not just a nice addition to your strategy, it's the foundation of sustainable success in a competitive landscape.
Written by:
Lisa Baker
Head of Experience Design & Sustainability
Lisa is a Chartered Ergonomist with 15 years of experience across various industries, including healthcare, transport, culture and heritage. Lisa specialises in bridging human factors and service design to create innovative and sustainable services and experiences, grounded in evidence.
