Designing the Future of Business

7. Think beyond engagement to relationship.

Engagement could be just another word for marketers to overuse, and advertisements often get in the way of designing great experiences. So perhaps we should replace the word engagement with an alternative like relationship. We should stop thinking about how to engage customers and instead think about how to relate to people and deepen our relationships with them over time. Perhaps doing so would shift us all toward designing a mature and sustainable service model rather than focusing on the short-term wow factor that we often impose on customers in the wrong way and at the wrong time. Furthermore, it may encourage us to discover the emotions driving people instead of relying on the limited lens through which businesses often see their customers—viewing them primarily as market segments. (See Bill Lee’s “Marketing Is Dead.”)

8. Deliver Big D design and make a positive impact.

Businesses are starting to see the importance of design and becoming familiar with examples of how design can be a differentiating factor in business. But we need to do much more work to educate mature businesses about the operational realities that let us bake design into the way everyone works in a business and deliver great product and service experiences. This means we need to create overarching design principles, devise smarter ways of working, and develop toolkits for UX professionals that facilitate design. We should encourage a continuous cycle of design thinking, so we can constantly iterate our ideas, products, and services toward better design. We should not see UX design as yet another silo of protected territory. Instead, we should open things up, facilitate collaboration, and encourage richer conversations. See “Patrick Whitney on Reframing Design Thinking—and Beyond” and our article “Positive Design Impact.”

9. Develop ecosystems and engage in holistic thinking.

Thinking about ecosystems evokes images of connections and energy flowing between nodes. There is a complex and pervasive ecosystem at play in people’s lives, which extends well beyond the way businesses see their own ecosystems and customers. Businesses often frame digital ecosystems without considering people and their activities. To survive in this world, we need to grow, overlap, and connect our ecosystems, looking at complementary ways of providing better services to people. Businesses may not always be able to build or provide the platforms for such ecosystems, but should look for opportunities to connect them. For example, to discover opportunities for banks looking beyond transactions, we need to extend our awareness beyond traditional business services and become deeply immersed in the lives of people. (See Dave Gray’s “What Is a Connected Company” and Global UX, a book Dan coauthored with Whitney Quesenbery.)

10. Get out of the building and gather evidence.

There are so many versions of customer truth floating around a business that it’s hard to know who really has a full understanding of the customer. Actual customer data is relevant, but some so-called customer data is based on false assumptions and opinions. While opinion can be important, we need to balance opinion with real data, in the customer’s own voice, to get clarity on customer needs. To make informed business and design decisions, we need to ensure that we attribute the data that we discover correctly and verify that it maps to other data. Reliable research requires business investment. We can no longer rely on old methods of discovering customer needs or rely on numbers alone to capture human needs, motivations, and behaviors. Understanding human needs is bigger than numbers.

To that end, we need to get out of our cubicles, get out of the building, and learn how our products and services fit into real people’s lives. To communicate our understanding of human needs, we need to capture rich stories in the voice of the customer, as well as photos and videos. We must encourage businesses to foster constant curiosity about how they can serve people better.

Research is about answering big, interesting questions. This does not stop at one customer interview. Research is about constant learning; taking the business outside to listen to and serve customers. Customer contact is not the sole responsibility of sales or other customer-facing staff.

We should codify our learnings, creating tangible artifacts to share with others, and give these learnings and stories a home inside our businesses. (See Jan Chipchase’s “What’s the Secret to Design Innovation? Extreme Immersion,” Will Evans’s “Introduction to Design Studio Methodology,” the Global Design Research Network Web site, and the Web site for the book This Is Service Design Thinking.)

In Conclusion

Embarking on and investing in mature user experience and design programs is necessary to achieve all of this. Businesses must invest in the leadership and the tools that are necessary to make the future of business that we’ve described in our ten themes a reality.

However, we should not be so naive as to think that establishing a UX team or engaging an outside UX consultancy like ours can alone solve the larger problems. We need to invest in holistic business initiatives that enable User Experience to bring real value to projects and customers, delivering business returns beyond traditional business metrics. What do you think?

Thank you to everyone we have spoken with for all of the great conversations that push our practice along. These conversations have spanned the better part of a year traveling to places including Australia, Canada, USA, China, and Europe, with deeper moments at UX Hong Kong 2013—both with invited speakers and attendees.

We look forward to receiving our next learnings at UX Singapore 2013, where the journey continues, and we will continue to push ourselves to explore both ideas to which people are receptive and those to which people are not.