Why human centred design is the enemy of original brands
Thinkerbell’s Adam Ferrier considers why sleek, slick design thinking might cause your brand to slip right out of your customer’s mind.
There are three fads happening at the big end of marketing.
First, changing one’s title from chief marketing officer, to chief customer officer.
Second, using rhetoric around ‘humanising’ business, humanising data, humanising finance, telecommunications, energy and anything else. The fact we’re doing it through robots and AI seems problematic to me.
Human centred design / design thinking allows us to better understand the customer and their experience.
Once the human need is understood, one would assume agencies are using methodologies that incorporate a phase to consider competitor activity, brand, best practise from other categories AND THEN develop unique or distinctive brand experiences.
JB is an example of deliberative human-centred design; it’s just that they took a counter-intuitive approach to store design that 1) makes everything look cheaper and 2) makes it more likely that you’ll walk out of the store having bought more than you intended. Frictionless has its place, as does stickiness. Nice piece thanks Adam.
It’s a nice idea in theory, however it’s based on what appears to be a crucial misunderstanding of how design thinking works. In the example of mapping out a cereal brand’s customer experience map, Ferrier has made inferences as to the experiences a customer may have, which is ironically basically what companies do in the absence of design thinking.
In order to actually gain some insights about customers you wouldn’t get from just guessing why people eat cereal, you may likely gain some more valuable insights about why people might eat cereal (parents like colourful boxes with games to keeps kids distracted, would prefer an easier method to portion cereal etc) by actually talking to customers – What is important to you about eating breakfast? What do you like? What don’t you like? Why do you prefer cereal A over B? How do you think the breakfast experience could be better?
Design thinking and user experience design is about bridging the divide between consumer and brand, not tipping the scale too far in the consumer’s direction and nullify brand identity. All of the world’s biggest brands have invested massively in user experience, so someone has to be wrong in this situation…
Interesting viewpoint from Adam but it’s not as simple as he describes. As you say, the insights have been oversimplified.
I agree that brand is king. Yes. Particularly now voice is becoming more prominent. But if you don’t understand what people truly think about your brand experience, you can’t innovate. And you’re dead.
If people don’t genuinely love their mushy, messy Weetbix, there’s a problem. As soon as someone creates a better alternative, why would anyone eat Weetbix anymore?
Nice thought-provoking piece.
Well done on the many typos too – creates a sense of both urgency and authenticity.
Ha! Nicely done.
Needs a bit of a proofread. You also copied the mistake of using isles rather than aisles directly from this article to your Facebook post.
Thanks Carl. Should be all fixed now.
If not, I’m sure you’ll let me know.
Your example you use is when bad agencies try to use design thinking. I think media agencies have called this “connections planning”. You’re right, it produces the same plan over and over again and doesn’t differentiate your product. Good article.
Whoever said customer journey maps were a good outcome of Design thinking? They are an artifact that someone once decided was a good output. I would argue they are useless for the points you outlined as well as many others.
Designers are creative problem solvers. We need to understand and empathise then we can creatively solve our customer’s problem. However, this involves a level of rigour, rigour takes time. It is the lack of rigour that leads to the same, most obvious ideas being regurgitated.
Ferrier makes me laugh, he completely contracts the position of his shareholder, PwC on design thinking. If I was a CX practitioner working at PwC I’d be mighty pissed off if Thinkerbell were in the same room after this piece of adman babble.
https://www.pwc.com.au/the-difference.html
A fascinating piece indeed. As a designer and brand professional what I’ve come to realise is that the practice of UX Design has only a limited number of brand specialist while the growth of techies an$ process people has increased and this has resulted in the commoditization of the system ending up at a point where a template mentality begins to take hold of most. The consequence of this is the death of the USP.
If more people with actual branding and brand development backgrounds were to establish themselves with UX practices then the problem will begin to get solved… gradually. As someone who hails from an advertising and branding background, I believe the customer is king but desirability is queen.
Its up to all of us to ensure we don’t end up cookie cutting UX solutions for our clients and firms. Design thinking works, we just have to approach each client uniquely as far as practicable.
Like and agree. Good article.
From a HCD practitioner.
Nicely put.
Another symptom of the macro trend Jim Carroll saw blowing over in 2010 that he called Wind Tunnel Marketing.
If we’re slaves to generic data, and what people report they want, the output of marketers will increasingly go the way of the horror show of tedium that is the mid-market sedan. At best “raising the floor”, but all the while “lowering the ceiling.”
Loss aversion in action, I reckon Adam (contributing to the belief that all you have to do is be good at maths); because to define and build brands with distinctive characteristics, with memorable edges, and to consistently express them inside and outside an organisation, requires going all-in and is not for the faint hearted.
Seriously, Ferrier needs to up his game WRT his knowledge on Design Thinking and HCD before pissing on it. It’s making him look, erm, misinformed.
This article is of course purposively provocative and amusing for that. Whilst I disagree with the examples, I do agree that there is a place for Brand in design. The way a brand behaves, talks and represents values is often forgotten in a one design fits all approach that we worry that usability and design thinking might lead to. Brand is an important aspect of emotion and differentiation. The best design thinking should understand and embrace emotion as much as function if not more. So, badly presented though this is, there might be some grain of truth…
Clive, good to see you’re kicking. I agree Brand is vitally important, but you are being too kind to give this author a pass when he clearly doesn’t understand HCD/Design Thinking.
Hi Jim and Clive,
Of the tools and processes you’ve developed to talk about and explain design thinking – do any of them mention the value of a brand and how to use design thinking to build value into a brand?
That’s all.
There’s no grain of truth here… just opinion to weigh and consider.
But if you don’t do design thinking, how will you know your customers’ height is generally in the range of three to seven feet? You may put the box forty feet off the floor, or make the box too large to fit on a cart. It is also often useful to have empirical data that shows you should print a brand name on the box, and maybe something about the contents. Where would we be without data?
1. Start somewhere else — You start with one human for your analogy. If you start with ‘many’ humans, you may get different journeys. Then you can figure out your brand positioning.
Adam wakes up
Loves nostalgia
Brings out Weet-Bix
Carl wakes up
Kids are noisy
Settle them down with something that they picked out last time they were in the supermarket aisle
Scott wakes up
Cafe is just downstairs
Has avocado on rye
2. Agreed — I think the practice/artefacts of design thinking is geared more on solving product management (engineering) issues then it is about brand (sales).
The one thing being missed in this whole debate is that the ascendancy of design thinking has elevated the traditional focus points of design — facility, function and aesthetic — where the primary purpose of advertising creative thinking has always been differentation. The fact that ‘brand’ means many different things to different people, depending on where you stand, makes it hard to have a truly meaningful dialogue.
My pov of brand is it’s everything the business does under the name of a brand. Everything communicates – from the supply chain to the pricing to the uniforms the staff wear.
The problem with the industry at the moment is as “design thinking” becomes more popular, more marketers rush to use it (either because they want to, or because they feel they need to still have a seat at the table) That then leads to a fast and inevitably flawed understanding of things like personas and journey maps (both are tools that can be used, but aren’t required for design thinking) and as a result call bull shit when it enviably doesn’t work.
In the examples given above, obviously asking customers what they want and then doing exactly that is a terrible idea for innovation. But thats not design thinking. Design thinking is gaining empathy, using that empathy to define a problem, ideating for that problem, prototyping it and testing it.
word!
We use Design Thinking with all our clients. The view presented here is shallow. It’s a process. It’s unique to each user and each product or service.
Do you put brand thinking in your process? Are you trying to build a brand with your process or make things easier for the consumer? They are not the same thing.
Explains why we’ve got so many bland brands today!
Design thinking has become the clever (overused) term used by technology engineering sales folk and their advisors for the last 5 years in the financial service sector and as Adam points out has many flaws ………..however does highlight how backward financial services product sales and marketing had become.
Digital transformation is of coarse the latest in a series of buzzwords as is fintech and disruption however what is clear is that in this new digital world where there is almost no investment in brand friction-less customer experience has become the goal.
The problem is that once friction-less has been achieved, and it will be achieved, then who cares about the red, yellow orange and blue bank brand or Insurance company brand for that matter???
No one wants a loan or an Insurance policy. They want a house and piece of mind.
So then what happens to margin and loyalty when customers can get a loan and Insurance product at the press of a button in 5 seconds or less?
“The problem is that once friction-less has been achieved, and it will be achieved, then who cares about the red, yellow orange and blue bank brand or Insurance company brand for that matter?”
Nobody will. Businesses will be forced to spend less time thinking about colours and more time thinking about improving their product. It’ll be fantastic (unless you work in advertising).
“So then what happens to margin and loyalty when customers can get a loan and Insurance product at the press of a button in 5 seconds or less?”
Let’s say entire category does somehow manage to commoditise itself. So what? Businesses are supposed to maintain margin by running an efficient operation. That’s capitalism working as it should.
Well said Adam.
(I only do 3 Weet-Bix).
While I normally find Adam thought provoking, think he has missed the boat on this one!
Agree with many of the comments above, but just to reiterate a designer would never ask what a customer (or in the right terminology ‘a user’) wants because, as Henry Ford said, you’ll get the answer of ‘a faster horse’… or as we say “rainbows and unicorns”. Design thinking interactions with users are a far more complex process than a focus group, which seems to be the basis of Adam’s comments. And as Scott Lawton said, a journey map is just one possible ‘artefact’ of a sometimes complex but usually always effective process.
And brand not being part of design thinking??? Not sure who he has been speaking with but in our model (which is used internationally), brand is one fo the six core pillars of a design thinking approach.
Solid comment, well said.
The tendency with these opinion pieces is to put things into battle with each other. In my business we too use design thinking as a process but brand is considered within as important (but not all-important) orientation. Branding and design thinking need not be mutually exclusive practices.
Agree, there is a narrow viewpoint expressed in this article. I guess it depends on your approach as a business. If you’d like to ignore user centered design and favor brand, then I’d argue your approach is out of balance. This is also true of the reverse. The facts are that both practices yield results depending on business goals. It’s also important to note that there are good and bad practitioners in both realms. I don’t agree that user centered design results in generic design. Just like I don’t think that generic copycat marketing practices are the goal of someone who knows what they are doing in marketing. Generic characterization of design as a failure despite a long history of design creating great products is somewhat disingenuous. You’ve got examples of good and bad on both sides. Bad practices yield poor results… that’s kind of obvious.
Hi Nick could you share the processes you have and where the brand is considered if not the central orientation. I’m very curious to see what the alternative is. I still cant find anything online that refers to the brand.
Hey Adam. I’m from a brand consultancy so I’m definitely all about making sure brand is front-and-centre in every project. Design thinking doesn’t change that. It just represents a different methodology. We use it because it’s fast, incisive, collaborative, draws a broader talent pool into the process, and tends to result in bigger creative/strategic leaps. I’d clarify that we utilise some design thinking methods in our processes but I wouldn’t claim that we ‘do’ HCD.
In our processes, we inject brand by (1) considering a brand’s purpose in the context of the identified jobs-to-be-done, resolved in a brand-inspired opportunity question up front (2) evaluating and refining ideas iteratively against pre-set brand principles with clients and consumers (3) deploying brand principles as executional mandatories as we get closer to experience design/other branding outcomes.
Adam, good to see you stirring things up which I like as the market has overreached what HCD is and does.
Certainly agree Human Centred Design has exploded and people are changing their titles to UX from non design backgrounds and traditional consultants firms are buying design firms as they were losing too much business.
I’d make a point HCD isn’t aimed at marketers, its aimed at customers.
It’s very easy for big companies to throw statements like ” We put customers at the centre of everything we do.” phuke. Really?
It’s mostly rhetoric but many are slowly turning things around and acknowledging that their industry bias clouds their ability to build products for customers.
How gas HCD helped Telco’s? getting a contract used to take 45 mins of filling out pre Digital forms and Telcos paid management consultants to ensure the plans were complicated and not able to be checked against competitors. They worked out make it easy to gain customers and avoid churn as it cheaper to keep them than to get them back after they have left.
With HCD you’re not asking people for opinions, you’re observing them.
So in your Weat-bix example, lets use frozen peas. After you open them by cutting the corner off, how do do stop them going everywhere in the freezer. Use a peg? HCD may add sealable bag as a solution to a user problem.
To use a case study you’d be familiar with, the famous Febreze air freshner which would have become an epic failure for P&G without observational research in the 90’s.
HCD is about failing fast early and learning from to inform your decisions but that will get you closer to the right answer than relying on industry knowledge to make decisions on behalf of your customer.
Ultimately the customer determines the success of failure of your business by choosing you or a competitor.
I’m sure if Weat-bix messed with the recipe by making assumptions on behalf of customers there would be a mutiny.
Now we know that it wasn’t down to design thinking, could you possibly explain exactly what lead to the embarrassingly bad ads you created for 13Cabs and whether PWC hung on to their receipt?
Rubbish.
“Let Twitter be to short”
Longer posts equal better engagement so the company can monetise better (their UX research shows this).
“Let test cricket be too long”
Shorter games have increased engagement. More ticket sales. More TV ads to sell.
“Let JB Hifi isles be too skinny”
Better user flow is selling more product faster.
“And let Weet-Bix be forever difficult to eat, for these are the very attributes that make these brands strong”
Early web usability pundits used the same justification for what was actually just bad design. When they used user-driven design principals they converted more sales. The data and profits prove it.
Brand is important, but badly designed user experiences lower profits. Get them both right and you’re on a winner.
Ikea – terrible user experience.
Floor design is confusing
Cant get it delivered
Have to assemble it myself.
One of the most profitable companies in the history of the world.
There’s great money to be made in bad CX – HCD would make them more like everyone else (unless they take my advice and put brand at the centre of their processes.
This proves you don’t get it, Adam
IKEA have a principle called ‘Democratic Design’ that applies to their entire business, much is based on the concept of Human Centre Design. They even cite it.
Perhaps in future, in the absence of experience, you should research your opinion.
Read this (with an open mind) to try and understand my point http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pub.....11-091.pdf
and listen to this lecture on store layout.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/this-heat-map-reveals-the-secret-to-ikeas-store-design-2014-1
Neither of these are to a consumer benefit but both add value to the brand. Both would be killed with HCD as they would design around the consumer and what they need / want, not the brand.
Not sure why Im still bothering with this? I guess I really want people to at least understand the argument before trying to beat it.
He’s wrong on two more fronts –
Delivery
IKEA have offered delivery for a year. They also have a partnership with GoGet to help get larger purchases home.
Assembly
IKEA has a partnership with Airtasker for in-home assembly.
Both of these initiative are available to Australian’s.
Hi Im aware of both of these initiatives – both are to the benefit of the consumer – but will erode brand equity and value.
Read this (with an open mind) to try and understand my point http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pub.....11-091.pdf
and listen to this lecture on store layout.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/this-heat-map-reveals-the-secret-to-ikeas-store-design-2014-1
I’ve read this HBS study before – I strongly disagree either initiative erodes brand equity and value.
I’d argue they actually reinforce it.
IKEA’s Democratic Design principles – form, quality, low price, function, sustainability – haven’t changed. The world in which these principles exist has. The rise of on-demand, instant gratification shopping has changed customer behaviour and service expectations. IKEA needed to embrace this change in an IKEA way – both the gig economy and sharing economy have lowered the cost of labour and services. Both initiatives fundamentally reflect the principle of ‘low price’ and offer a very IKEA-way to fulfil customer expectations.
RE: Spacial Planning – Regardless of what an academic paper might theorise, Ingvar Kamprad never designed his stores to be confusing. They’re functional and highly efficient. In contrast, the stores would be confusing were traffic allowed to flow in a non-uniform way. You walk through IKEA like rooms in a house – that’s HCD.
That’s one maze like house.
Ikea is the perfect example of how CX design works, and negates your own argument Adam.
They’ve spent 10s of millions of dollars in planning, testing, and refining the “bad user experience”. Everything you’re experiencing has been consciously and cleverly designed. The experience is the brand, and the brand experience is based on extensive HCD.
Brand is of course important, but the old school has a way of negating what they don’t fully understand. There’s lots of cool research available if you look for it or want some pointers.
Please point me in the direction where HCD considers the role of brand and gets me insights that build a brand – would love to see it. Can’t find anything at all myself.
Ok, I’ll also take the bait…
This article speaks to your lack of understanding of Design Thinking and Human Centred Design.
There is some validity in suggesting these fields are having a negative impact on creativity, however, none of your arguments support this.
Firstly, your examples are from the over-researched and uninspiring sector of FMCG. Go and spend some time learning about victims of family violence or youths trying to get out of homelessness and you will see the value of a journey map as a tool to help the parties involved to be on the same page when understanding what people experience.
When done badly, HCD can be guilty of causing regression to the mean, however, once again your examples are not good demonstrations of why this occurs. Good research is not: ‘ask someone what’s wrong with something and go out and fix it’. Good research requires a structured understanding of a diverse set of experiences, and a leap of interpretation with empathy in order to design a better future. This is where the creativity happens, so it’s no wonder if you are using your approach that you feel like the process lacks originality.
Brand also plays a big part in this, but I’m confused about how you see brand as mutually exclusive from both product and customer. Doesn’t it just then become something that is dreamt up in isolation? A good understanding of people and product can help to fuel creative brand direction and create a well aligned and engaging outcome. Perhaps you have missed a few of these benefits along the way also?
Sadly, we are seeing lots of examples of people buying, selling or practising these fields with a limited understanding of their application and therefore producing poor outcomes. Unfortunately, your article has not highlighted any of the reasons for this or given readers an opportunity to understand what may be wrong, and what can be improved.
I may make a counter suggestion: That you spend a little less time writing about topics that either you have little understanding of, or are intentionally trying to grab attention, and spend more time learning how to apply methods in a more effective way so that you are better equipped to create better and more enjoyable products and services for all of us.
Pompous much?
My advice to you is to spend a little less time writing long replies to opinion pieces asking them to spend less time writing opinion pieces.
We seem to be inundated with ill-informed opinion pieces on this topic so I felt it was a good use of my time to set the record straight. Although, there seem to be so many other comments disagreeing with you that readers might not make it this far, thus making my time investment less worthwhile.
Are you 6?
For mine, Adam, your article really only looks at one side of a coin – and perhaps misrepresents that side too.
Regarding that one side: the point of design thinking, as others have noted above, is to produce empathy with your potential customer/s (aka people). This needs to be done on a deep and genuine level so as to obtain original insights, not mere one-liners.
For example, as a cricket tragic I will rail against all and sundry who argue that Test cricket should be shorter, including our friend ‘UX guy’ (who I’m not sure is being completely serious). The insight that hard core users love the tension and drama of cricket played out over 5 days will be incorporated by any decent Design Thinking practitioner – because to do otherwise risks alienating the product’s key users.
As for the other side: a ‘brand’ should not be confused with a product or a business. Rather, as you know, the notion of ‘brand’ represents the many and varied relationships that people have with that business. So Design Thinking alone cannot be sufficient when undertaking brand strategy – its outcomes and insights need to be compared to the capabilities and offerings of the business in order to find meeting points (or alignments, or whatever jargon you want to throw at it).
Great to see an article generating such discussion, but for mine a little more interrogation and research would have made it a more informative one.
Win a client. Make a good ad Adam. Otherwise youre all talk
Shouldn’t you be on campaign brief?
The problem with this opinion is it is an opinion on HCD, stated by someone who appears to have little practical experience of HCD. I wonder if Adam could cite a piece of his own work that is either relevant or a leading example of his opinion in practice?
Just because you have a media profile, doesn’t make your voice greater than anyone else. It certainly holds no gravitas on HCD.
Personally, I prefer to hear from people that have demonstrable experience in the form of examples, case studies,reviews – facts – when it comes to HCD and more broadly CX thinking, rather than an academic one.
Hi My point is I think HCD is silly for a brand builder as at it’s heart it doesn’t have that focus – it has as it’s focus meeting consumer wants and needs via design / innovation and creativity.
However, if you want case studies of creating products / services / innovation (and even advertising) built around consumer insights and experience that then build brands there are loads of examples. You can read most of the case studies in my book. This ones not a bad example of what I mean (brand first, but consumer still benefits) https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/art_series_hotels_wins_warc_prize/31495
You’re all half right.
A ‘brand’ is an emotional construct. You don’t shave your face with a brand, you do it with razor.
But you choose that razor above other razors that do exactly the same thing due to intangible emotional reasons – because you like or trust the brand a bit more than the others ( Byron Sharp would just say it’s because you remember them a bit more ).
If that razor keeps cutting your face you will stop using it. Enter HCD design etc
Both need to co exist. If yr waving the flag for HCD you’re at least 50% wrong. And vice versa…
Can’t bowl can’t bat
HCD has a key principle; designing the extremes.
I can recommend looking at how world-class design agencies like Smart Design and IDEO use HCD to drive innovation. It is the opposite of designing the average.
Adam you’re talking about shitty agencies who are only using the term and process of ‘design thinking’ superficially. I agree mainly with what you say about the bland, two-dimensional approach that’s being taken by many agencies and companies in Australia.
Go to Europe and work with a real company that takes design strategy seriously, and see the difference.
In Australia, design thinking is generally a joke. Because many companies are superficial at it. But to tarnish the whole term is incorrect.
Customer experience is the new disruption.
Adam is spot on. Have seen enough HCD decks and theory. Everything does look the same at the end. Very few real HCD examples and spare me the IDEO stuff.
When you think about brand and customer experience as two different things, you got it wrong.
CX is brand. Brand is CX. Just because agencies are bad at one part of the process, doesn’t mean they should be separate.
Interesting and enlightening, and the defensiveness of the HCD community is telling.
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” The Design Thinking Process like any tool, in the right hands, can create amazing Brands, or in the wrong hands it can just smash them up. I feel Adam would benefit form a little more research into Design Thinking to understand what it can and can’t do. Used properly it is equally good at helping brands better understand their “North Star” as well as their customers too.
Step 1 of my Design Thinking process involves a lot of “getting to know you.” Products, Company, People, Place etc. As well as getting to know customers, though the use of empathy maps. What I’m looking for is where a brand truth meets the customer need. That’s where the gold is. It’s about getting the balance right between listening and leading.
“If you’re arguing against empathy, no matter what the context, you are on the wrong side.” – Mary Engelbreit
Couldn’t agree more.
Interesting article and discussion.
One have to emphasize that the author is arguing from a marketing and brand point of view rather than a product developement point of view.
When he throws topics and words together like this (design thinking & user centered design/UCD) it shows that he has a small understanding of these terms or only worked in teams that did not understand to use these techniques properly. Which is a pitty.
Anyway, one can easily understand his idea of fearing that UCD is “regression to the mean”. But first, UCD is not meant to define your brand, it is meant to build products (It is focussing on *usability*, not brand, that is why UCD was formerly known as “usability engineering”) . And second, with his marketing and brand focus he is mixing 2 things: 1. doing your homework. 2. beeing innovative. For number 2 UCD is probably not the right solution. But to get the shit done your users are expecting from your product. Or in the words of Herzberg’s two-factor theory, creating hygiene factors to avoid unhappy users. To make them even happy it might need innovation and other methods, yes.
Referring to his example: If UCD found out that Twitter should provide double amount of characters, one wouldn’t recommend to do so. You would focus on hygiene factors and the real needs behind the user’s feedback.
However, brand is of course highly important. UCD won’t help us here that much. But UCD helps us building products somebody really needs and understands. When you look on the authors website thinkerbell.com you can see that he didn’t realize this yet. Fancy brand, weak ux & usability 😉
Based on this article and applying some HCD to Adam’s experiences, is there a brand of crockery manufacturers out there who would like to send him some deeper, more spill-proof cereal bowls for Christmas?
Marketers still have a lot to learn about the principle of medicine that states first do no harm. First do no harm to brands. Just the basics. We need to return to these
If only our political parties took the same stance. We actually know what they stood for and could vote according to their principles, rather than see them change like the wind to ‘please’ the populate (and seek power of course). Great article
In your example, we (the consumers) end up with better cereal through design.
Your position seems to argue that we’d have been happier if we had just been presented with better branding… I can’t speak for everyone but I rarely wake up in the morning and think “Golly, I’m in a rush, nothing can fill this nutritional gap like a big bowl of branding”.
When companies make better products they are inherently easier to brand and market. Any vehicle to that end is a savvy investment.
Wow…I am almost 2 years late for this overly entertaining chat! Below my two cents:
1. Too.much.ego will neither make brands nor HCD make things better and make better things meaningful and;
2. Brand proposition / Brand Design Sprints / Brand HCD Projects / Brand Design Strategy are just a few ways to marry branding and HCD
Says the girl with 22 years experience in both global marketing and HCD
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford