Let's Get Physical: Scaling UX Strategy for Digital Interactions with Physical Space
Leading groundbreaking large-scale UX strategy to envision, define and create scalable business processes and data automation applied not to ui but to physical spaces – buildings – includes lots of challenges. Learn how we created efficient methods and tools to gather disparate sources of property information, organize it and turn it into useful well-structured spatial data that brings to life interactive experiences with physical space… on a huge scale – for more than 4,000 Hilton hotels across 11 brands in 80-plus countries in… a very short time.
UX STRAT Europe 2017: Nico Weckerle, "Shifting the Deutsche Telekom Mindset t...UX STRAT
UX STRAT Europe 2017 presentation by Nico Weckerle, Vice President Experience Strategy, Deutsche Telekom:
"Shifting the Deutsche Telekom Mindset to Ecosystem Design Thinking"
UX STRAT Europe 2017: Martin Kulessa: “Turning BMW into a Customer Oriented M...UX STRAT
UX STRAT Europe 2017 presentation by Martin Kulessa, Chief Customer Officer, NOW Mobility Services, BMW: “Turning BMW into a Customer Oriented Mobility Services Provider”
Customer Experience & User Experience - is the union greater than the sum of ...UXPA International
This presentation will bring to focus CX & UX disciplines and the synergies in their approach to solving customer problems. We will talk about a model where CX & UX disciplines will need to work together through shared processes and deliverables. The cooperation and coexistence of the groups allows for unifying experiences for customers across multiple channels and devices. There are internet retailers that carry your cart status across multiple devices, now imagine it’s a retailer with a brick and mortar along with a digital presence that can carry your cart across all of those channels. The union of CX & UX teams organizationally or from a process and deliverables standpoint can be beneficial for the two groups and the business. We will present the story of UX and CX groups coming together within our company to create organizational change to be focused on customers.
Let's Get Physical: Scaling UX Strategy for Digital Interactions with Physical Space
Leading groundbreaking large-scale UX strategy to envision, define and create scalable business processes and data automation applied not to ui but to physical spaces – buildings – includes lots of challenges. Learn how we created efficient methods and tools to gather disparate sources of property information, organize it and turn it into useful well-structured spatial data that brings to life interactive experiences with physical space… on a huge scale – for more than 4,000 Hilton hotels across 11 brands in 80-plus countries in… a very short time.
UX STRAT Europe 2017: Nico Weckerle, "Shifting the Deutsche Telekom Mindset t...UX STRAT
UX STRAT Europe 2017 presentation by Nico Weckerle, Vice President Experience Strategy, Deutsche Telekom:
"Shifting the Deutsche Telekom Mindset to Ecosystem Design Thinking"
UX STRAT Europe 2017: Martin Kulessa: “Turning BMW into a Customer Oriented M...UX STRAT
UX STRAT Europe 2017 presentation by Martin Kulessa, Chief Customer Officer, NOW Mobility Services, BMW: “Turning BMW into a Customer Oriented Mobility Services Provider”
Customer Experience & User Experience - is the union greater than the sum of ...UXPA International
This presentation will bring to focus CX & UX disciplines and the synergies in their approach to solving customer problems. We will talk about a model where CX & UX disciplines will need to work together through shared processes and deliverables. The cooperation and coexistence of the groups allows for unifying experiences for customers across multiple channels and devices. There are internet retailers that carry your cart status across multiple devices, now imagine it’s a retailer with a brick and mortar along with a digital presence that can carry your cart across all of those channels. The union of CX & UX teams organizationally or from a process and deliverables standpoint can be beneficial for the two groups and the business. We will present the story of UX and CX groups coming together within our company to create organizational change to be focused on customers.
UX STRAT Europe 2017: David Ruiz, "Developing a Multi-Channel Banking Experie...UX STRAT
UX STRAT Europe 2017 presentation by David Ruiz, Head of Design and CX, Orange Bank: "Developing a Multi-Channel Banking Experience for a Telecom Giant"
UX STRAT 2014: Tim Loo's Workshop - Experience Visioning & RoadmappingTim Loo
This presentation is a shareable version of my workshop presentation from UX STRAT 2014, Boulder, Colorado.
In this workshop, we discussed the purpose of vision and roadmap in the experience strategy and the importance of working together with both business stakeholders and customers in the planning process. We covered practical definitions, skills and techniques:
- What is an experience vision?
- What are the ingredients for a great experience visions?
- Running visioning workshops with stakeholders
- Communicating experience vision through storytelling
- What is an experience roadmap?
- Creating a delivery roadmap
Psychology & UX: Evidence-Based Techniques to Improve Your Customer ExperienceSitback Solutions
Join Cynthia Tang, XD Team Lead and Registered Psychologist, as she talks about how marketers can review their website for UX design best practice, and use a powerful understanding of human psychology to improve the customer experience .
You will learn:
- How to go from behavioural insights to behavioural change
- How to leverage the subconscious to improve customer experience
- How human biases affect the way we design for - and interact with - websites
- The UX design features that increase conversion rates and drive engagement
- How to make a compelling case to your organisation to invest in a UX review of your website
Learn More: https://www.sitback.com.au
This presentation was given at SDC 2013. It is a summary of figures for ROI of UX , but most of all an explanation why ROI is totally out of scope when disussing "why UX".
Establishing HCD Culture for a 115 Year Old BankUXDXConf
Creating design teams focused on user can be hard, but building that team in a mature and established business - even harder.
In this talk, Daphne will talk through the journey of success that her and her team at Banco Pichincha as they build and establish a human centered design culture in Ecuador's oldest bank. She will talk through:
- The experimental process that incorporates cross functional teams;
- How they continue to ensure that the culture is deeply engrained through the onboarding model; and
-What changes she foresees to improve the efficiency of the teams
SDL added strategists to a UX team (UX STRAT Europe 2015)Peter Boersma
This presentation shows how UX strategists contribute to the way SDL helps the world's best brands deliver exceptional customer experiences. Using several of our enterprise software product releases as examples, Peter shows how he and his fellow UX strategists are promoting service design and design thinking, how they develop visions and roadmaps for products and cross-product capabilities, and how they collect user and usage data. He also talks about the link between UX Strategy and Product Management, and the future of UX Strategists at SDL.
Supplementing article: http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2015/ux-maturity-reality-performance
Video: https://youtu.be/B6oJL-MbPm8
Simon Norris' talk at Interact London 2015, UX Maturity: The Reality of Performance takes an intellectual slant on UX Strategy, sharing knowledge and insight from Nomensa's engagement with Liberty Global to create a Pan-European Brand-Agnostic UX Strategy.
UX STRAT Europe 2018: Dr. Giulia Calabretta, Delft University of TechnologyUX STRAT
UX STRAT Europe 2018 presentation slides by Dr. Giulia Calabretta of the Delft University of Technology, "Strategic Design Practices for Enterprise Innovation"
UX STRAT USA, Mike Hubler and Tim Klauda, "Changing the Culture of Consumer a...UX STRAT
Presentation at UX STRAT 2015 by Tim Klauda, Vice President of Global Digital Creative, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts; and Mike Hubler, User Experience Program Manager, Northrop Grumman Corporation
UX STRAT Europe 2017: David Ruiz, "Developing a Multi-Channel Banking Experie...UX STRAT
UX STRAT Europe 2017 presentation by David Ruiz, Head of Design and CX, Orange Bank: "Developing a Multi-Channel Banking Experience for a Telecom Giant"
UX STRAT 2014: Tim Loo's Workshop - Experience Visioning & RoadmappingTim Loo
This presentation is a shareable version of my workshop presentation from UX STRAT 2014, Boulder, Colorado.
In this workshop, we discussed the purpose of vision and roadmap in the experience strategy and the importance of working together with both business stakeholders and customers in the planning process. We covered practical definitions, skills and techniques:
- What is an experience vision?
- What are the ingredients for a great experience visions?
- Running visioning workshops with stakeholders
- Communicating experience vision through storytelling
- What is an experience roadmap?
- Creating a delivery roadmap
Psychology & UX: Evidence-Based Techniques to Improve Your Customer ExperienceSitback Solutions
Join Cynthia Tang, XD Team Lead and Registered Psychologist, as she talks about how marketers can review their website for UX design best practice, and use a powerful understanding of human psychology to improve the customer experience .
You will learn:
- How to go from behavioural insights to behavioural change
- How to leverage the subconscious to improve customer experience
- How human biases affect the way we design for - and interact with - websites
- The UX design features that increase conversion rates and drive engagement
- How to make a compelling case to your organisation to invest in a UX review of your website
Learn More: https://www.sitback.com.au
This presentation was given at SDC 2013. It is a summary of figures for ROI of UX , but most of all an explanation why ROI is totally out of scope when disussing "why UX".
Establishing HCD Culture for a 115 Year Old BankUXDXConf
Creating design teams focused on user can be hard, but building that team in a mature and established business - even harder.
In this talk, Daphne will talk through the journey of success that her and her team at Banco Pichincha as they build and establish a human centered design culture in Ecuador's oldest bank. She will talk through:
- The experimental process that incorporates cross functional teams;
- How they continue to ensure that the culture is deeply engrained through the onboarding model; and
-What changes she foresees to improve the efficiency of the teams
SDL added strategists to a UX team (UX STRAT Europe 2015)Peter Boersma
This presentation shows how UX strategists contribute to the way SDL helps the world's best brands deliver exceptional customer experiences. Using several of our enterprise software product releases as examples, Peter shows how he and his fellow UX strategists are promoting service design and design thinking, how they develop visions and roadmaps for products and cross-product capabilities, and how they collect user and usage data. He also talks about the link between UX Strategy and Product Management, and the future of UX Strategists at SDL.
Supplementing article: http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2015/ux-maturity-reality-performance
Video: https://youtu.be/B6oJL-MbPm8
Simon Norris' talk at Interact London 2015, UX Maturity: The Reality of Performance takes an intellectual slant on UX Strategy, sharing knowledge and insight from Nomensa's engagement with Liberty Global to create a Pan-European Brand-Agnostic UX Strategy.
UX STRAT Europe 2018: Dr. Giulia Calabretta, Delft University of TechnologyUX STRAT
UX STRAT Europe 2018 presentation slides by Dr. Giulia Calabretta of the Delft University of Technology, "Strategic Design Practices for Enterprise Innovation"
UX STRAT USA, Mike Hubler and Tim Klauda, "Changing the Culture of Consumer a...UX STRAT
Presentation at UX STRAT 2015 by Tim Klauda, Vice President of Global Digital Creative, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts; and Mike Hubler, User Experience Program Manager, Northrop Grumman Corporation
Enterprise Usability: The Olive Garden PrincipleDylan Wilbanks
In enterprise UX we find ourselves trying to be "a little better" than everyone else. But what do we need to do to be truly great at design? Dylan Wilbanks explains the journeys he's been on and how he's worked to make design better.
Facilitators: Lawrence Neeley (Olin College) and Leticia Britos Cavagnaro (Stanford University)
Design Thinking is a method for the practical and creative resolution of problems through design with a comprehensive understanding of stakeholders, users, or customers. There has been significant coverage in the literature on this method, much in connection to Stanford’s d.school. This widely adopted method has direct application in engineering. Through this breakout, participants will learn some of the core concepts of design thinking and available resources. Participants will discuss how to leverage the overlap of design thinking and entrepreneurial mindset.
You'll learn:
Interaction design best practices for data products
How to transform unstructured data to useful insights for users
How to adapt to upcoming trends in data products
Creating and Scaling an Enterprise Design Systemuxpin
You'll learn:
- How to create a unified design language for a complex organization.
- How to use the most efficient processes and tools for maintaining the design system.
- How to scale code and interaction patterns across platforms and products.
Design has slowly shifted from outcome oriented process to a thinking oriented process that does problem solving.
We made a presentation at Lounge 47, which is a upcoming startup incubation center.
Webinar : How to Apply Design Thinking to Enable Innovation in Your WorkplaceProductinnovationacademy
Product Innovation Academy take great pleasure in inviting you to the monthly webinar series. Our theme for this webinar will be about
"How to apply Design Thinking to enable Innovation in your workplace"
Use the linkedin thread http://goo.gl/uF6XlV to post your questions which can be answered by the speaker offline as well
Speaker:
Manisha Phadke an alumnus of IDC, IIT Mumbai, has a two-decade experience in disciplines like Information Design, UI / UX, Design Strategy and Business Development in varied domains such as Publishing, Education & E-Learning and Jewelry.
Widely travelled has a global experience in translating customer insights into viable product strategy.
A passionate Educator and Trainer has converged her professional practice and knowledge base into imparting the use of Design thinking as a creative problem solving methodology. Be it for students, faculty or corporates, she has customized programs to facilitate need based learning outcomes.
Mentoring Startups with the same philosophy, has also take to exploring online education platform as an individual learning tool rather than a broadcasting teaching tool.
With enthusiasm that cannot be corked in, she believes that one is always a student, learning from unexpected stimuli!
Join 3 Day workshop on product management | user experience | design thinking
know more : http://www.prodinnov.co/
You'll learn:
- How to get buy-in from executives and stakeholders for user research
- How to choose lightweight yet effective research methods
- How to document your results to prove ROI
Designing a Sustainable Enterprise UX Processuxpin
You'll learn:
- How to select the right UX activities and plan resources appropriately.
- How to evolve your process as you grow.
- How to conduct proper discovery, transition from waterfall to Agile UX, and more.
Buttons on forms and surveys: a look at some research 2012Caroline Jarrett
Does 'Submit' or 'Send' or 'OK' go to the left or right of 'Cancel'? Does 'Next' go to the left or right of 'Previous'? This talk at the Information Design Conference 2012 discusses three research studies on forms and surveys.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
How to Use Data to Build Products by Tradesy Product AdvisorProduct School
Main takeaways:
- Product Management is probably the most exciting function in technology organizations - it's an art and science that's well-suited for certain personalities
- The goal of a good Product Manager is NOT to launch a product - rather, it's to move a planned metric in the right direction by the right amount
- A good Product Manager can answer the question, "How did your product do yesterday?" We can't answer that without a well-defined analytics strategy and data requirements built into our products
Org Design for Design Orgs - The WorkshopPeter Merholz
As the move to establish in-house design teams accelerates, it turns out there’s very little common wisdom on what makes for a successful design organization. Books and presentations focus on process, methods, tools, and outcomes, leaving a gap of knowledge when it comes to organizational and operational matters. This workshop seeks to address this lacuna by shining a light on the unsung activities of actually running a design team, and what works and what doesn’t.
Topics include:
- How a service design mindset shifts standard organizational approaches
- Organizational models for design teams, from centralized to decentralized and back again
- Breadth and depth of skills and strategic thinking
- The 5 Stages of Organisational Evolution
- A New Taxonomy of Design Team Roles
How to Use Data to Build Products by Tradesy Product AdvisorProduct School
In this presentation:
-Product Management is probably the most exciting function in technology organizations - it's an art and science that's well-suited for certain personalities
-The goal of a good Product Manager is NOT to launch a product - rather, it's to move a planned metric in the right direction by the right amount
-A good Product Manager can answer the question, "How did your product do yesterday?" We can't answer that without a well-defined analytics strategy and data requirements built into our products
IBM Design Thinking with z/OS Communications ServerzOSCommserver
This presentation will provide an overview of IBM Design Thinking. Teams across IBM will use the practices around Design Thinking to build better product designs. The IBM Design Thinking framework is used to guide our product teams through the process of product design and delivery. A key requirement of this framework is to work more closely with our clients, receiving feedback throughout product design process.
Sachin Rekhi shares the 4 dimensions of product management (vision, strategy, design, execution), discusses where product managers fit in the R&D organization, and how product management roles differ across and within companies.
Jim Conroy, Vice President EMEA, SopheonKGS Global
Grow & Prosper: Are Your Innovation Practices Inhibiting Success?
Innovation and new product development are cornerstones for growth in cosmetics and personal care, and yet remain a key difficulty to most companies. Ironically, success is commonly undermined by the internal practices and processes in place. By driving innovation performance, companies can achieve new product success through:
Maintaining “enough” idea as well as “good enough” ideas at the front end for a high-value development funnel
Accelerating time-to-market and meeting targeted product launch goals
Adapting portfolios quickly to respond to changing trends and consumer needs
Improving new product investment decision-making to focus resources on the highest value brand innovations and to contain risk
At Wilderness Agency, we believe marketing can help capture the stories that drive business. We are driven by two main philosophies 1.) Grow our clients’ businesses. 2.) Enhance the local economy.
Scaling Agile is not the Path to Business Agility - CIO EDGEInês Almeida
I spoke to Australia’s top technology leaders at Adapt's #CIOEDGE event challenging them to review the focus of their current Agile Transformation initiatives and take a design-led approach to Business Digital Transformation.
The Butterfly Principle for Product Management by GameBench CEOProduct School
Startups have changed the way technology companies perceive product management. Experimentation and application of lean principles are no longer just for startups. Large enterprises want to cultivate a startup mindset and mimic such an environment.
So what’s the startup product mindset? How does obsession with a customer problem help startups succeed? And what makes them fail?
Sri shared his experiences and real examples around customer-centric and pragmatic product management that gives enterprises an edge over their competitors. He discussed the butterfly principle in product creation and how it helps create products customer love.
Right questions need to be asked to bring out the real
perspective of the end user.
A great design can go a long way in eliminating
complexities and thereby simplifying and enhancing the
user experience.
Pin the Tail on the Metric: A Field-Tested Agile GameTechWell
Metrics don’t have to be a necessary evil. If done right, metrics can help guide us to make better forward-looking decisions, rather than being used for simply managing or monitoring. They can help us identify trade-offs between options for what to do next versus punitive or worse, purely managerial measures. Steve Martin won’t be giving the Top Ten List of field-tested metrics you should use. Instead, in this interactive mini-workshop, he leads you through the critical thinking necessary for you to determine what is right for you to measure. First, Steve explores why you want to measure something—whether it’s for a team, a portfolio, or even an agile transformation. Next, he provides multiple real-life metrics examples to help drive home concepts behind characteristics of good and bad metrics. Finally, Steve shows how to run his field-tested agile game—Pin the Tail on the Metric. Take back this activity to help you guide metrics conversations at your organization.
White wonder, Work developed by Eva TschoppMansi Shah
White Wonder by Eva Tschopp
A tale about our culture around the use of fertilizers and pesticides visiting small farms around Ahmedabad in Matar and Shilaj.
EASY TUTORIAL OF HOW TO USE CAPCUT BY: FEBLESS HERNANEFebless Hernane
CapCut is an easy-to-use video editing app perfect for beginners. To start, download and open CapCut on your phone. Tap "New Project" and select the videos or photos you want to edit. You can trim clips by dragging the edges, add text by tapping "Text," and include music by selecting "Audio." Enhance your video with filters and effects from the "Effects" menu. When you're happy with your video, tap the export button to save and share it. CapCut makes video editing simple and fun for everyone!
Expert Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) Drafting ServicesResDraft
Whether you’re looking to create a guest house, a rental unit, or a private retreat, our experienced team will design a space that complements your existing home and maximizes your investment. We provide personalized, comprehensive expert accessory dwelling unit (ADU)drafting solutions tailored to your needs, ensuring a seamless process from concept to completion.
Can AI do good? at 'offtheCanvas' India HCI preludeAlan Dix
Invited talk at 'offtheCanvas' IndiaHCI prelude, 29th June 2024.
https://www.alandix.com/academic/talks/offtheCanvas-IndiaHCI2024/
The world is being changed fundamentally by AI and we are constantly faced with newspaper headlines about its harmful effects. However, there is also the potential to both ameliorate theses harms and use the new abilities of AI to transform society for the good. Can you make the difference?
Transforming Brand Perception and Boosting Profitabilityaaryangarg12
In today's digital era, the dynamics of brand perception, consumer behavior, and profitability have been profoundly reshaped by the synergy of branding, social media, and website design. This research paper investigates the transformative power of these elements in influencing how individuals perceive brands and products and how this transformation can be harnessed to drive sales and profitability for businesses.
Through an exploration of brand psychology and consumer behavior, this study sheds light on the intricate ways in which effective branding strategies, strategic social media engagement, and user-centric website design contribute to altering consumers' perceptions. We delve into the principles that underlie successful brand transformations, examining how visual identity, messaging, and storytelling can captivate and resonate with target audiences.
Methodologically, this research employs a comprehensive approach, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses. Real-world case studies illustrate the impact of branding, social media campaigns, and website redesigns on consumer perception, sales figures, and profitability. We assess the various metrics, including brand awareness, customer engagement, conversion rates, and revenue growth, to measure the effectiveness of these strategies.
The results underscore the pivotal role of cohesive branding, social media influence, and website usability in shaping positive brand perceptions, influencing consumer decisions, and ultimately bolstering sales and profitability. This paper provides actionable insights and strategic recommendations for businesses seeking to leverage branding, social media, and website design as potent tools to enhance their market position and financial success.
Book Formatting: Quality Control Checks for DesignersConfidence Ago
This presentation was made to help designers who work in publishing houses or format books for printing ensure quality.
Quality control is vital to every industry. This is why every department in a company need create a method they use in ensuring quality. This, perhaps, will not only improve the quality of products and bring errors to the barest minimum, but take it to a near perfect finish.
It is beyond a moot point that a good book will somewhat be judged by its cover, but the content of the book remains king. No matter how beautiful the cover, if the quality of writing or presentation is off, that will be a reason for readers not to come back to the book or recommend it.
So, this presentation points designers to some important things that may be missed by an editor that they could eventually discover and call the attention of the editor.
18. “By 2020 Intuit will be
considered one of the
most design-driven
companies in the
world.”
https://hbr.org/2015/01/intuits-ceo-on-building-a-design-driven-company
Brad Smith
CEO, Intuit
23. 1. Going global
2. Refreshed & realigned strategy
3. Brand strategy
4. Products to platforms
5. “Design-led by 2020”
6. 2-sided customer benefits
7. Working across business units
30. Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
Jan
help tax preparers
Save Time
Feb Mar Apr
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
Sleep
Tax
Prep
Life
May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
60. Apply the missions
to every customer
Growth Market AccountantPremium Accountant Value Market Accountant
61. Premium Accountant
Growth Market Accountant
Value Market Accountant
Save Time Grow My Practice Make a Difference
delegation
firm management
collecting client data
file faster
get paid sooner
know what to do next
advise clients
maximize services
higher retention
more recommendations
market myself
build client base
increase referrals
provide clients insights
advise best tax outcomes
provide best value
keep rates affordable
deliver refunds faster
maximize refunds
reduce liability
file faster
get paid sooner
know what to do next
87. Product Management and
Experience Design need to
jointly solve for Discover,
Define, and Design. This is
not an XD only job, is the
job of all of our roles.
”
“
113. CHANGE
• Going global
• Refreshed & realigned strategy
• Brand strategy
• Products to platforms
• “Design-led by 2020”
• 2-sided customer benefits
• Working across business units
MISSIONS
• Save Time
• Grow My Practice
• Make a Difference to Taxpayers
CHALLENGES
• Agile product teams
• Resourcing “Run the business”
• Altitude
• Not enough designers
• Perspective
• Ambiguity
• Customer insights in silos
• Winning together
METHODS
• Speak the language of business
• Apply the missions to every customer
• Learn the missions
• Track progress against the missions
• Plan projects in pursuit of missions
• Commission mission captains
• Design Week
• Train for strategic UX work
• Embrace ambiguity… then murder it
• Experiment with a unit of one
• Reframe design work requests
• Publish case studies
RESULTS
• XD driving clarity
• Do more with customer insights
• XD at all altitudes
• Happier, healthier designers
• Product Managers advocate for
holistic XD
PRINCIPLES
• Every designer is a strategist
• Every designer owns the
Missions
• Execute the design process
like you’re on a mission
• Empathy for all (even your
coworkers)
• XD Missions = Business
Strategy
• Missions need metrics
• Products and features exist to
deliver customer benefits
• Designers are storytellers
• Silos suck! Break out!
Editor's Notes
Howdy, y’all I’m Ben Judy. I live in Texas now, but I grew up in…
Iowa. That’s where they grow all the corn.
Growing up surrounded by farms, I saw a lot of these.
They’re called silos.
What do you put in silos?
[:21] Grain. Corn, soybeans.
What you’re not supposed to put in silos is…
experience designers. I’d like to share some reflections on that.
But more importantly, I’d like tell you the story of the experience design team within the Pro Tax Group at Intuit. This is about building a strategic capability with a newly formed team.
Here’s my outline. I’ll begin by describing the environment of change we’re in as a team. I’ll explain what we call our missions, and the challenges we’re facing as we organize our design strategy around those missions. I’ll tell you about our methods and the results that we’re seeing. Finally, all of this will add up to a set of principles for employing what we call a “Mission-Based XD Strategy.”
It’s an irresponsible amount of content for a 25 minute presentation. So I’m going move really fast.
If you catch nothing else, though, you’ll hear me talk about how we’re busting out of those dreaded silos. All right, let’s go.
[1:30] These are our missions. But before I explain them, first…
I need to begin with some context.
Intuit is a 32 year old software company with roughly 8,000 employees.
My friend Phil you just heard from 30 minutes ago is on the Consumer Tax side of Intuit, I work in the Pro Tax Group. We sell software to accounting firms and what the government calls “enrolled agents.” Professional tax preparers.
Now, to really set the context for our XD strategy, I want you to imagine you’re part of a new experience design team in a company undertaking changes in each of these areas.
[2:14] One: after more than 30 years as a U.S. based, U.S. centric software company, we’re going global.
A second change at Intuit is a major refresh of business strategy at all levels. These alignment triangles are a new paradigm Intuit adopted a couple years ago, and the content of all of these layers underneath the Mission have changed in just the last two or three years.
Also, our brand strategy is changing. We’re transitioning from a house of brands to a branded house.
More change! We’re also continuing to transition from a company that sells boxed software products off the shelf to building open platforms and interconnected software ecosystems in the cloud. For example Quickbooks desktop to Quickbooks Online as a third party app platform.
This is my favorite. Our CEO famously said, “By 2020 Intuit will be considered one of the most design-driven companies in the world.”
Which, as a designer…
[3:30] … makes me do a little happy dance in my head.
But the reality is, we’re already a customer-first, design-led company. We serve small businesses, individual consumers, and the accounting professionals who serve both of those groups.
The Pro Tax Group has historically focused on those
[click to build] accountants who serve clients.
[click to build] But now we’re focusing a lot of attention on the relationships between our customers and their clients, the taxpayers.
Which means Pro Tax is learning how to design and deliver two-sided customer benefits. This is awesome, but it’s more change.
And it means we have to work together with the rest of the company. To operate as One Intuit, all of our businesses and departments need to collaborate and coordinate more closely than they have in the past.
So, all that to say, the times — they are a changin’ at Intuit. And that’s far from a complete list of changes.
[4:34] In the midst of all of this strategic change, in February of 2014 I joined this business unit of about 800 employees — and, including myself, we had three experience designers.
But, in the last year and a half, we’ve grown a new team. We now have seven interaction designers (including yours truly), two visual designers, a research recruiter and some strong leadership. We’re in four locations.
And as our team comes together, we’re developing an identity and a strategic approach aimed at helping us reach our full potential.
Rather than being a loose group of individual designers who are isolated within software product teams…
we’re a single, mission-based team that designs for the entire ecosystem of Pro Tax products. Our focus on three primary customer benefits is allowing us to break out of those silos.
[5:32] So I’ll tell you about our missions. Now of course yours will be different, but these are ours.
Saving Time is first. Tax preparers work insane hours during tax season. They can’t take on more work. If we can help them optimize their workflows, then we can help them grow.
That’s the second mission, help accountants Grow their Practice. Sometimes growth means adding more clients, but also it could mean growing the value they provide to existing clients or growing revenue from adjacent professional services.
And those two missions help accountants do the thing that led them to their profession in the first place: Make a difference in their clients’ lives. This is the heart, the most emotional of the three missions.
Now, experience design didn’t come up these missions ourselves. Veteran Pro Tax employees have known for a long time why these things are important customer benefits.
[6:30] In fact, our business unit vision statement incorporates all three of these ideas. This is very important: the missions are enduring strategic goals that XD shares with the business.
So, great! We’re all singing the same song. What could possibly go wrong? Well…
As a new design team within a relatively old software company, we’ve faced many challenges.
One challenge is simply working with multiple, Agile product teams. And this is not going to become a discussion about Agile or Lean UX. But I do hope to articulate how our mission-based strategy has helped us cope with some process and resourcing issues around product development and delivery.
Initially, we aligned our designers individually to Scrum product teams, but without an overarching design strategy for our product ecosystem. We had no UX strategy. None of us were looking at the whole farm.
Now, this will be familiar to most of you. The double-diamond model of experience design with four phases: Discover, Define, Design, Deliver.
What I noticed right away as I started working in Pro Tax is, we have methods that provide for the beginning and the end of this process but things were getting hazy in the middle.
[7:53] We have a strong focus on Discovery. Just two of the ways we Discover are Unite and Design for Delight.
We do these Unite events, where our employees get out of the office and spend the day with our customers to discover surprising insights and to build empathy.
Also, Intuit has this awesome program called Design for Delight, D4D. There’s a heavy emphasis on going broad, brainstorming. Ideation. Discovery.
When it comes to delivery, most of our product teams practice development methods like Scrum, which provide lots of rigor around how we Deliver software.
But, even though we talk a lot about measuring customer benefits, I don’t see us always defining them at the project level. There’s a lot of ambiguity about what the design process should be and where we’re at with any given project. As a consequence, our approach to solution design, that third D, is also too fuzzy.
[9:00] So our XD strategy has to fix that problem. I know it might seem kinda weird to say that design strategy is somehow responsible for fixing design process at the project level. But I really believe they’re connected.
Here’s this little world I use to try to visualize placement of design work in a large software company. You have execution down here. A bunch of agile product teams iterating constantly. And those loops — their headlights only go out about two weeks maybe a month. They can’t see very far from ground level.
And there’s this concept of horizon planning, the H1, H2, and H3 way up there. And really it just asks the question: is your company innovating, or stagnating?
Horizon 3 at the top would be taking moonshots. Big, bold, ambitious moves that can transform a company, and maybe transform an industry.
Well, another challenge we have in Pro Tax is that three quarters of our software development time as a business unit is spent running the business. Not even extending our core business, just maintaining and running what we already have.
So let’s place our double diamond model here. Our design projects, where do they go? When UX designers live down in those silos of Scrum product teams in this environment, notice what happened. Our diamonds, if they exist at all, get sucked down into executional, run-the-business, just-in-time, MVP, you name it, it’s anything but strategic. We’re not going out, and we’re definitely not going up.
[10:45] So our challenge is one of altitude.
We need to be operating on a higher level, but being a new team with minimal resources, we struggle to climb up out of those silos, where the developers and product management say they want us to be.
Understand, another challenge: our product managers outnumber designers roughly 2 to 1. Don’t tell them I said this, but I call that a mathematical formula for bureaucracy.
Peter talked about prioritization. Product management recently gave us this list of 54 projects, most of them due to be completed in the next four months. Did I mention we have seven interaction designers? As I get into our methods and principles in just a minute, you’ll see how a mission-based strategy helps us deal with this.
But not yet, let’s keep piling on the challenges. Perspective. We hear comments like this:
“Intuit sells products, not missions. And missions come to fruition in our products.”
And this is said as a sort of rebuttal. It’s typical of the mindset of a product manager who wants to see designers stay fully dedicated only to his or her product.
[12:08] But here’s why we know this perspective is too narrow. Last year we added electronic signature capability in our pro tax products. The customer benefit here is saving time. Clients get their returns filed faster, accountants get paid faster.
We had three different Agile product teams in the same building, delivering this set of features separately. Engineering built a common data service. But we didn’t design strategically for a common experience. It was a lost opportunity for re-use of design patterns, for collaboration, sharing insights, ecosystem thinking, and efficiency in XD resourcing. Because we designers were trapped with each product team in their respective silos.
Again, it’s a question of altitude. Where is your UX team spending its time? Down here? Or up here, overlooking the entire business and all of your customers — now and into the future?
So here are some methods we’ve used to elevate — to organize our young team around what we know to be the greatest needs of our customers, which allows us to design for the whole farm, so to speak.
First, we’re learning to talk about these missions the way the business does.
[13:38] In our case, that means we designers have to get comfortable with those alignment triangles. Pay attention to corporate strategy, be inquisitive, and contribute to it.
We’re also making sure these missions are expressed in ways that are applicable to all of our customers.
[13:32] We do the research to figure out how the missions solve specific problems for each of our market segments such as: Premium, Growth Markets, and Value Market Accountants.
We had an awesome summer intern this year who built these amazing “Firmona Boxes.” Not personas, but “firmonas.”
Each box represents the different market segments of accounting firms.
Inside each box is a game; a group activity designed to help us build specific customer empathy, such as what it feels like to be a Value Market tax preparer working through hundreds of returns in a matter of weeks.
This is a customer benefit focused, mission-based activity. Not something an Agile product team would ask us to do.
[14:52] More than feelings though, starting out, we also had to learn how to think about the missions. We had to train our brains.
I created a set of digital flash cards so we could drill ourselves on the missions and other points of business strategy. It’s a nice thing to pull out when you’re sitting in a meeting about the minutae of running the business. Get your mind back on what really matters.
We started gathering as a team each morning in front of these mission boards to review our projects and task status, in context of fulfilling each of the three missions. Never before had our design work been framed this way.
And now we’re experimenting with project management software to help us plan and track our design work through a mission-based strategy lens.
We assigned ourselves roles that we call Mission Captains. We act as accountability partners to make sure that we’re focused on customer benefits across all of the product design and discovery work that we’re doing.
[16:05] And this summer we hosted an event we called Design Week. We invited the entire business to come for five days of guest speakers, inspiration, design activities, and all throughout, we had a strong emphasis on those missions.
Now, we’re very much at the beginning of this journey. But let’s talk about some early results that we’re seeing.
One result, internally, is greater clarity around our priorities as we drive a stronger commitment to the missions.
Another challenge we’re facing: we’re often told to “embrace ambiguity.”
And boy do we have ambiguity. Especially around our design process. I’ve had PM’s tell me, “Oh yeah, double diamond, we already do that.” And others have said, “Oh, we used to do that, but we do Agile now instead.” Total confusion and ambiguity.
[17:05] Timing is critically important. There’s a time for embracing ambiguity (going broad) and time for clarity (narrowing.)
But at an organizational level, when the strategic purpose of experience design is ambiguous, the entire design process is unclear.
This is what you end up with. I swear to you, this is an accurate picture of a project I was trying to rescue just last week. We’re adding some client data collection and communication features to one of our desktop products. For months, this project didn’t really have any design leadership in regard to process. And it finally got to the point where all anybody knew is that engineering had a ship date and it was like, now. Otherwise, seemingly everything about this project was totally ambiguous. So what do we do? [click to build] Schedule some research. No! It’s too late!
So that’s why I call myself the “ambiguity assassin.”
If I’m on the project, I make sure I know when we’re supposed to be narrowing, and that’s when I start driving conversations that eliminate ambiguity.
Let me bring it back to strategy, now. A focus on customer benefit missions allows me to do this, because my role is no longer merely about sitting with the developers and delivering incremental product improvements rapidly. The whole end-to-end experience design process is how we deliver those customer benefits, and that’s my domain. I get to climb up the mountain.
Another result of mission-based design strategy is doing more with what we learn about our customers.
[19:10] I love that Intuit is a very customer-centric company. Even our CEO spends at least 60 hours each year doing ‘follow me home’ or ‘follow me to the office’ visits.
But — even in such an environment — you need experience designers acting as champions of a customer-first approach. Why?
Because we have this other challenge: while our employees go out in small teams to engage with customers — and that’s great — when they come back, they take the knowledge and empathy they gained back into their silos. Farmer Brown here doesn’t know what’s in each silo. And neither do I.
Mission Based Strategy is XD’s way of solving for this. As this cheesy artwork clearly illustrates, we can categorize insights using the missions. That centralizes knowledge and customer empathy, informing our entire ecosystem of products and platforms.
And then we can help the company do better horizon planning. Say we learned X about how accountants want to make a difference to their clients. That might indicate incremental improvement Y to product Z. Or it might indicate an impossibly big problem we should seek to solve with a moonshot. That kind of analysis is how experience design people can influence corporate strategy with customer insights. By the way, we do all our own research. We a small team, we’re all full time researchers on top of our day jobs.
Another result of mission-based strategy: designers are happier and more effective because we’re working together.
[21:09] We’re collaborative beings. We learn from each other and challenge each other. You can’t do that in product silos.
One last challenge I’ll highlight, as an intro to my final result. Winning together. XD strategy can’t be XD versus the Evil Empire: product management, development, marketing, whoever. We have to win together or we don’t win at all.
Recently one of our PM’s said: “Product Management and Experience Design need to jointly solve for Discover, Define, and Design. This is not an XD only job, is the job of all of our roles.”
This made me do another happy dance.
That’s how we start winning together: by recognizing that an holistic approach to XD work is all of our jobs. The light bulb went on for at least one product manager. I call that a result.
[22:09] Well, what have we learned? Here are some broad principles for Mission-Based Experience Design. As I go through these, I’ll weave in some more methods, too, so you can see more of how we’re applying these.
First, on a relatively new team, every designer needs to at least have some capability to think and operate strategically.
Now, it changes at scale. If we had 40 designers like the bigger business units do, we could have an XD strategy group. But we’re all we’ve got.
The application of this principle — the method — is to train our designers to think and work like strategists, even if that isn’t their greatest skill set or passion in life.
It’s easier than you might think. Go to Paul’s UX Strat Masterclass workshop. How’s that for kissing up to the conference organizer? Back in February, four of us from Pro Tax did this. And Paul, I just have to thank you because…
[23:27] You inspired me. I spent the next month gathering every strategy document I could get my hands on from across Intuit and tacked them up on these black foam boards. That kickstarted a lot of what I’m talking about here. Just one day of the right kind of training can do a lot for a team.
Second, every design team member has to own the missions and communicate them consistently.
People in other departments started asking, “what are these missions I’m hearing about?”
When one of us would say, “I dunno. It’s some new thing our boss is talking about but I don’t get it.”
That introduces ambiguity. Get all the designers together and sell it to yourselves first.
The next principle is about attitude: Execute your design process like you’re on a mission.
The method is, yes, embrace ambiguity …
[24:22] … and then murder it.
Sorry if I just ruined the innocence of gummy bears for you. It’s just business. Nothing personal.
Strategy demands that you kill the ambiguity, get everybody aligned on the process and where you are. Designers need to manage the design process for the organization. Don’t let this happen.
Principle: practice empathy for other departments.
For us in XD, moving to Mission Based Strategy has been freeing. But for others, it’s been unnerving. They're worried that we're going to abandon the product teams.
We’ve had to do a lot of soft skills work to build understanding and trust. XD has to model empathetic behavior so that others reciprocate and try to see things from our perspective, too.
I recommend you experiment with a unit of one. I’ve been the canary in the coal mine. I was the first team member to pull out from a product team. We didn’t just yank everybody out. That would have been a disaster. In a political, corporate environment, proceed with caution.
[25:49] Principle: Connecting the Missions with Business strategy is critical. In our case, we drew our missions from the business strategy. Now, we could do that because we’re in a customer-centric organization to begin with. That’s quite an advantage.
But this is why we draw these pictures that put design process in context of business strategy.
This is also why we explain the missions in terms of the impact to our customer market segments. Business leaders think in these terms.
They also like numbers. Missions need metrics. So we have KPI’s. We’re figuring out exactly how to measure Saving Time, Grow My Practice, and Making a Difference. We conduct baseline measurements of user experiences and compare new designs to that data.
Principle: Products and features exist to deliver customer benefits. Can I get an amen?
Product managers and software developers are often incentivized to think product revenue first. I’m glad they are: I like it when my company makes money and our stock value goes up.
But when we get requests for design work, we use Project Briefs to ensure that everything we do is mission-based, and that we keep our eyes on the whole ecosystem at every step of the process.
Principle: We believe designers are storytellers and the best stories we can tell are about the success we’re having accomplishing these missions on behalf of our customers.
Case Studies are a nice method. We want to be the storytellers, not just for design, but for the whole organization, of how we won together and delighted customers.
And folks, I know that I've been light on details. What I've shared today is the high level case study of our team as we grow a strategic capability. Next year I'd love to share with you one of our project case studies that shows exactly how all of this is both benefiting our customers and driving business success.
To sum it all up, it’s about busting out of those silos.
Strategically organizing our team around customer benefit missions has allowed experience design to become more effective partners with the business in innovating at all altitudes, always keeping our customers at the center of our designs.
[28:20] So that’s the story so far. There’s a lot in there. I know I had to rush through all of these things. But I’m happy to take a question or two.