How can I promote Design Thinking (or #UX Design) in my organisation?
Written by: Jingxiu Cheng & Edited by: Daylon Soh
As part of our #LeaningIntoChange UX Career Webinar Series, our founder conducted an interview with Mervy Quek, who is currently an Experience Design Manager at the COO Office in DBS Consumer Banking Group. He mentioned he uses design to solve operational and user experience (UX) issues that have both physical and digital touchpoints.
Before working in the financial sector, Mervy also worked in the healthcare sector at SingHealth, and played a major role in evangelising design thinking in the organisation, which manages hospitals and polyclinics in Singapore. He facilitated a wide range of healthcare improvement projects: designing spaces, objects to interaction touch points which aim to improve the overall patient experience.
Based on the valuable insights shared by Mervy during this interview, this article outlines five tips that you may use to promote Design Thinking in your own organisation especially during its early years of digital transformation.
1) Create a Design Thinking training programme
It can be extremely valuable to come up with a training programme to educate your organisation on the value of Design Thinking. Back when he was at SingHealth, Mervy and his team came up with a Design Thinking training programme, which involved creating a training curriculum that encouraged healthcare practitioners to adopt a Design Thinking process, and assisting them in implementing this process in their real-world projects.
As you build your Design Thinking course, Mervyn also encourages you to learn from experienced practitioners—when Mervy's team in Singhealth were building their training curriculum, they hired a design consultancy specialising in Design Thinking to observe how they run their workshop and learn from it. By adopting a training programme in SingHealth, Mervyn's team was able to advocate for a user-centred approach toward designing processes and spaces in healthcare, which ultimately helped to promote safety and reduce errors in healthcare practices.
2) Create a strong design culture
Top-level management is crucial for encouraging Design Thinking in your organisation. DBS promoted one of their designers to the role of a Chief Design Officer in 2019 and there is a designer in almost every product team, which helps to promote a strong design process in the organisation. DBS also integrates Design Thinking into their initiation process: all staff, including non-designers, are required to enroll in an online "4D Methodology" induction programme, which consists of lessons and assessments regarding Design Thinking. As such, all staff are well-versed in Design Thinking and are able to understand the value and speak the same language of customer-centric design.
3) Communicate effectively and build relationships
To convince people in your organisation to adopt a Design Thinking process, it is important to be able to communicate it's value effectively. Back in SingHealth, Mervy prepared a "sales pitch" and a "publicity kit" to encourage people to join his Design Thinking programme, by sharing what design thinking is and emphasising the value it can add to the team. Mervy also recommends having talks over lunch to share the value of Design Thinking, as this can help build relationships and lead to the spreading of design ideas through word-of-mouth. CuriousCore offers free Lunch and Learn talks to pre-qualified organisations, simply reach out via [email protected] to find out more.
4) Encourage cross-sharing
Encourage cross-sharing of design ideas both within your organisation and with other organisations. In DBS, there are regular mailers from the innovation team that talks about Design Thinking, and there is cross-sharing of projects from teams in different countries. In SingHealth, there was an innovation network that was set up, which regularly works with the Intellectual Property Team and Medical Innovation Team. Designers were also encouraged to attend seminars and expos to learn from other companies on their innovation ideas, and use existing good solutions to solve the problems in their own organisation. By encouraging cross-sharing of design ideas, you can create a strong design culture in your organisation—everybody can be practising design thinking, even if their title is not a designer.
5) Let the data speak for itself
In some cases, you might face resistance when trying to promote a Design Thinking process in your organisation. To justify the value of the Design Thinking process to higher management, Mervy recommends that you use quantitative & qualitative feedback to make your case. Complete projects and use evidence from these real-life case studies to convince others that a Design Thinking process works. When choosing your projects, make sure you prioritise—either select projects that have a smaller scope so you can achieve the results in a few months, or choose large-scale projects that have high visibility. Before you join the team, it might also help to ask the product team and management during the interview about how they make decisions. If they base their decisions on assumptions rather than actual data, you might want to reconsider joining the company. At the end of it, the evidence does not lie, and the value of Design Thinking can be clearly seen from the data.
In conclusion
Design Thinking can be effectively taught as a problem solving tool through all departments in an organisation and applied to create innovations or optimise existing products/services. CuriousCore is currently helping clients like HP and Prudential to make customer centricity practices a part of both their digital and physical touchpoints.
If you found this article useful and want to learn more about Design Thinking, feel free to check out other interviews on our #LeaningIntoChange UX Career Webinar Series.
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