A lot of providers believe they can make a proof-of-concept first, and then focus on design. We believe the reality is that you have to get the user interaction right first, and then worry about the engineering. Most successful products got there by redefining user interfaces and delivering flawless design. You should not pay premium for the development as it is becoming a comodity. Design of User interface and User Experience, however is far from it and demands a higher premium. The biggest benefit will be the ability to get products to market faster and for less total investment than before.
The traditional approach for a large client projects was rather cumbersome. Traditionally you would get all the business stakeholders in a room to define their goals and objectives. Then run smaller offshoot workshops with the same group of people to define all the elements of the application in detail. By the end you’d typically have a huge list of application features that would get prioritized by the client lead and development would kick off.
As the Enterprise world moved toward Mobile applications, it showed that the Traditional approach to software development leads to bloated applications specs (how many features can you really fit on a smartphone), and with agile development the UX and Core Application details are being defined on the fly.
Using design led principles we separate our discovery into three parts - the core business value definition, the user experience, and then once this is defined and agreed the technical architecture begins.