What big companies can learn from start-ups about being ‘user centric’
From developing customer based personas to enhancing delivery, simplicity of design can reinvigorate outmoded models of user interaction, says Sam Williams.
The Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) has just opened a ‘User-Centred Design’ Exhibit, which explores the evolution of wearable technology.
Featured is the August Smart Lock, which allows users to unlock doors with their smartphones, a telephone that is designed to hold between your ear and your shoulder while you multitask, a gear-powered wheelchair that helps users navigate rough terrain and Mimu gloves, which allow users to play music with hand gestures.
With the advent of design thinking and the growing emphasis on user interfaces, technology developers are increasingly aware of discovering what challenges their users are faced with and putting their needs at the centre of everything they do in developing new technology and apps. And I’m not just talking about the consumer domain either, where this approach has been employed for decades.
User centred design has to be adopted if enterprises are going to develop apps that are useful. This is particularly important since the majority of today’s workforce are now in their 20s and technology is the centre of their world.
Human-centred design, a term coined by Stanford d.school, emphasises designing with the needs of users in mind, has been credited with inspiring intuitive products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad – which defied prevailing design conventions of their category and were still hugely successful.
However, it’s only recently that the same approach has proven effective for more complex technological design in the enterprise. The fundamental principles of design of placing users at the centre, building empathy and iterative problem solving, are proving to be uniquely suited for tackling some of the biggest challenges organisations in Australia and New Zealand face today.
Of course, user centred design is not a panacea, but it does offer a powerful set of tools for better understanding the needs of users, building empathy and testing assumptions that may well be wrong, which ultimately reduces waste, improves efficiencies and creates better services for customers.
Even when designers apply techniques to understand users and their context, they tend to interpret the information in their own way. A designer, after all, is a human being with preferences, values, beliefs and desires, like all other human beings.
At the onset an organisation must identify what is the archetype or set of common characteristics within the user group.
I recommend carrying out a field research process, whereby users are observed at work, conducting interviews and also studying their behaviours. It is useful to create a common shared understanding of the user group for which the design process is built around.
This will ensure that they prioritise the design considerations by providing a context of what the user actually needs and what functions are simply nice to have.
The next step is to create a set of personas or a representation of a type of customer. In this YouTube video Gregg Bernstein describes how to perform user research, to inform your design decisions and get everyone in your team on board with using particular personas.
First of all you need to create your personas and come up with the ‘daily life of’ or a sequence of events where your personas are the main character of the story.
The story should be specific to things that actually happen and relate to the problems of the primary stakeholder group. You then need to create a social context in which the personas exist (an actual physical world). The story-form helps because it is easy for everyone to understand.
Then you need to describe the interaction between an individual and the rest of their world (a short event), which normally includes details about an interaction represented with a series of simple steps to achieve a goal (based on the persona and may include cause-effect analysis).
This makes a complex business problem easier to overcome for designers (to break problems or complicated tasks into smaller bits).
The next step is to help identify useful levels of design work (the actual low level processes can be solved as simply as possible). This approach will give enterprise development teams a better understanding of the problem by splitting it into small parts. This will significantly speed up the time it takes to develop and launch an enterprise app.
To make this user centred design approach work though, a cultural revolution is going to be required in most large organisations; only then can they approach software and app design from the user’s perspective.
They also need to find ways of speeding up the development process and this can be done by adopting a bi-modal IT culture, whereby two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility are adopted.
These cultural shifts will enable larger organisations to benefit from the approaches and processes I’ve talked about here, so they can create what I call a Minimum Viable Product, which allows an iterative experimentation to take place enabling them to learn more, as they go, from their diverse talent pool using collaborative processes in a high-trust culture.
Only then can they get proper feedback on what users see and then any adjustments can be quickly made, if required. Steve Jobs once famously said: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
App design doesn’t have to be so complex as some make it and getting technology services to market for customers and for enterprise users should take weeks or months, not years. The complexity of the world around us has increased considerably. We not only need to cope with the immense complexity around us every day, but we need to learn to thrive in it.
Sam Williams is the CMO at Certus Solutions
