Category Archives: Design Thinking

User research is valuable. Now get on with it.

It’s official, customer insights lead to better products.

During 2014 I noticed a proliferation of articles like this one (McKinsey) championing user research as a somewhat untapped source of design inspiration and product innovation.

It’s no surprise with ‘design thinking’ infecting the corporate world with it’s 5-step process, beginning of course with … understanding the customer. (Thanks d-school)

So while the business and design worlds are falling in love with customers problems, healthcare and other public sector services are adopting a user centred approach, why is user research still flirting and wanting to be noticed?

User Research UX design researchGoogle have a stab at answering this question in their article ‘What fuels great design and why most startups don’t do it?”

Through my own experience I can vouch all these barriers exist, but they are increasingly being broken down, and if the UK government can be wrangled into shape (good work to @leisa, @jwaterworth & the team at GDS) then … the future has never looked brighter.

So with the world we’ve been trying to win-over for so long realising (and exercising) the value of this work, being all ‘empathy‘ and ‘get out of the office‘. And with armies of corporates tasting the design thinking kool-ade during half-day versions of ‘ethnography’ … then coming back for more … it would seem our day has come. No?

Let’s put the years of ‘broken record’ evangelism of UX and bangings-on about how valuable our role is to bed and redirect this energy into delivering value.

Well, that’s my plan and I’m sticking to it.

Will you join me?

Nick.

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Lost and found in the design process

Which is better: Having courage to explore the unknown, or a map to help you find the way?

When heading on a design journey, I’m beginning to think courage and a good compass is better than a map.

A year or two back I tentatively drew a map of the design process for a specific client and their design challenge…

It became a 2m long poster to help a team of healthcare professionals new to design see what lay ahead, and refer to as they progressed towards their goal. A ‘you are here’, ‘look how far we’ve come’, (and sometimes ‘oops, we missed that bit!’) kinda thing.

Yet another design process map. Obsolete the moment it was printed.

I enjoyed pulling this together, thinking about the likely journey ahead for this team, reflecting on my own experience of design and building on top of classic frameworks promoted as ‘best practice’ by the likes of IDEO, Design Council, and what I’d learned during my time with Stanford d.school as part of the Better By Design program.

The cynic in me believes these design process diagrams likely derived from sales tools for design agencies, each claiming to have a point of difference and perhaps to have some ‘secret sauce’ that the other’s hadn’t discovered. …but their 3, 4 or 5 step bubble diagrams have become ubiquitous to the point they are almost redundant.

Semantics aside, they all promise gold at the end of a rainbow if you’re prepared to challenge your thinking upfront.

Other metaphors are funnels, diamonds, snakes, vortexes, washing machines, the list goes on, but essentially they describe a few phases of lost and found with a bit of loopback before finding that gold.

They make nice visuals and the theory seems sound enough, but when you start to actually apply one of these to a live project you realise how futile it is to try to map the design process.

A sequence of steps is convenient and tidy but the reality of design is more like this:

… and there’s no ‘one squiggle fits all’ here either…

Maps and guidelines give us comfort. They can provide a sense of shared understanding of where we are going and what to expect…

… but the reality of most meaty design projects is that we don’t know where we are going, and we need to find a new kind of device to help clients feel comfortable with the unknown.

What makes the journey-maker comfortable with the unknown?

Is it time to throw away these maps and find a design compass?

Yes, it’s another metaphor, but perhaps it’s the designer’s job to be that compass. Something the client trusts to navigate through the messy reality.

Designers are comfortable with the ‘lost’ feeling, because we’ve ‘been there done that’ and believe in great outcomes based on our own experiences.

So how do YOU convince a nervous client you know where ‘north’ is?

Do you roll out a map, or are you the compass?

I’d love to hear…

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Design thinking – One size doesn’t fit all

“It’s not about going from left to right and some magic happens on the other side, it’s about understanding the intention”.

…Said Director of Design Innovation at Intuit, a stop on the Bettter by Design Study Tour I was part of in 2012.

During our visit, Intuit shared how design thinking changed the culture, and profit of the company (eventually).

Their story: How they tried and failed to install ‘design as a process’ into their teams, arriving at a more engaging and successful model of ‘principles’.

A couple of key points I took away:

Design thinking – to the rescue?
With a history of incremental usability improvements but no real innovation, Intuit took a big swig from the design thinking cup. Their aim was to integrate design thinking into the business, to be more user-focused – exceeding customer expectations, rather than just meeting them.

Things didn’t go as planned…

“We made a mistake in that we started with design thinking as a process, when we brought a process back to Intuit, they puked all over it. Because in a culture where; product development has an agile process, marketing have a go-to-market process and legal have a compliance process, they couldn’t reconcile the design thinking process on top of theirs, so they did nothing”.

So, the conventional design thinking process wasn’t flexible enough for the realities of their culture and practice, and it simply wasn’t engaging teams.

Principles, not process.
To replace the rigid ‘process’ approach, Intuit arrived at three principles to underline all development work- teams could use whatever methods they liked, so long as they adhered to those principles.

So, how did that go?

“A seminal moment in our journey was when we took the process of design thinking and made it into principles. It’s not about going from left to right and some magic happens on the other side, it’s about understanding the intention behind these principles, then you can make it your own”.

“We have watched teams come up with their own methods and tools at any time in the process and it totally works. Thats when we saw uptake in the culture, when we started to see behaviours change, when we gave them permission to make it their own”.

Here are their principles:

  1. Deep Customer Empathy (Know your customers better than they know themselves)
  2. Go Broad to go Narrow (Quantity of solutions, then focus)
  3. Rapid Experimentation with Customers (Prototype, test, iterate)

Sounds like a win to me, especially if this has taken hold in an organisation of thousands.

So, how do Intuit involve customers in their design process?
To deliver on their first principle, (apart from their dedicated UX team) Intuit has committed to getting their teams out of the office and into the context of their customers using their products. Unsurprisingly, this has proven to build empathy for the customer, and as a positive bi-product, engagement with the ongoing design process.

Two big wins.

“We went from listening and fixing problems, to watching to find what they really need but can’t tell us.

This changed the way the organisation makes decisions by watching people’s behaviours versus listening to what they say”.

If you’re wanting to institutionalise design thinking, there’s a video on the Adaptive Path website which tells this story from another Intuit insider’s viewpoint http://youtu.be/HrxD_BaZlcU

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Design Thinking – The road-trip of a lifetime.

A couple of years ago I visited the Eames’ ‘case study house’ and thought I had entered design nirvana.
…Well, it did have a great swing:

Swinging in nirvana at the Eames house.

Next week I’m heading back to California, this time on a journey into the home of ‘design thinking’

Check out the highlights of the schedule…

I’m heading there with 25 CEOs of Kiwi export companies in the Government-backed Better By Design programme.

Along with a dozen others, I’m playing the role of ‘design integration coach’, helping promising NZ companies to integrate design into their business.

The principles behind the programme borrow a lot from the ‘design thinking’ school of thought popularised by IDEO, and more recently Stanford D.School. Both of which we’ll be visiting.

I’ve always been dubious of ‘design with a capital D’…

In fact, I tweeted not long ago:

“Is design thinking to design what cookbooks are to celebrity chefs?”

I’d love design thinking to be more than just a tarted-up version of taking a user-centred approach to design, beginning with end user insights.

This trip will either fully convert me, or leave me wondering whether it’s another wardrobe for the emperor.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

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