Utilizing A Design-Led Thinking Approach to Spark Innovation

Welcome Back!?

Welcome back to the Thinking Differently About Innovation blog series. We talked about the “Voice of the Customer” (the “VoC”) in the first blog and how it serves as a litmus test to ensure a product or service hits the mark.?

Today my colleague Jeanne Ivy, Senior Design Manager at T. Rowe Price, joined me for a conversation about utilizing design-led thinking as a mechanism for tapping into the VoC—to inform development of innovative solutions that delight customers.?

What Is Design-Led Thinking?

Rachel Weker: Jeanne, thanks so much for joining me. I’m going to start at a high-level here and ask you what is design-led thinking?

Jeanne Ivy: Hi Rachel! I love the design-led thinking approach because it is such a creative and powerful way to solve problems. So let’s talk about what it actually is: A process that brings people together to collaboratively develop innovative solutions centered around customer needs, and allows teams to turn ideas into tangible, testable products as quickly as possible.?

That’s a significant departure from the more traditional approach where product teams start with assumptions rather than real data and customer input.

Identifying What Customers Want Versus What Customers Need

Rachel Weker: And it’s important to make the distinction between customer needs and customer wants, right? You can ask customers what they want but, you aren’t necessarily getting to what they actually need.?

Steve Jobs said his approach isn’t necessarily to “give the customers what they want,” but rather to “figure out what they’re going to want” before they even know. Reading “things that are not yet on the page” gives us more room and flexibility to develop something truly innovative.?

Jeanne Ivy: Yes that’s a great example. When we listen to the voice of the customer to identify unmet and possibly unknown needs, we can hone in on more opportunities to make a difference. And it applies to innovation both big and small…even smaller enhancements to existing processes can delight customers.?

There are five basic principles of design-led thinking.

1. Empathy: Design-led thinking is all about empathetic, user-centric solutions. Innovation is driven by the customer’s needs.
2. Collaboration: The aim of this approach is to pool a diverse variety of ideas and perspectives from multidisciplinary teams.
3. Ideation: When we talk about design-led thinking, we’re looking at a solution-based framework. That means we want to come up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible. It’s as much a step in the process as it is a core principle.?
4. Iteration: Once we have a big heap of ideas, we need to do something with them. This component includes turning thoughts into prototypes, testing, making changes, and testing some more.?
5. Action: More walking, less talking…! Design-led thinking is all about being hands-on, moving beyond discussion and hypothesizing about what your users want. The process encourages us to get out there and engage with our audiences to obtain meaningful, useful information.

Why This Approach?

Rachel Weker: So what are some key benefits of taking this approach, as opposed to the more traditional route to developing solutions?

Jeanne Ivy: The design-led thinking approach is more agile and less risky. Depending on the size of a project, it might take years to go from an idea to delivery. But with design-led thinking, the goal is to research, develop, and distribute quickly so you can monitor its effectiveness in “the real world” and make necessary tweaks and changes as you go. The product is being used, you’re getting feedback as you go, and you can adjust according to need and usage in real time.?

Going to market quickly can introduce the prospect of “failing fast,” which might be a tough concept to accept. But if you don’t, you won’t innovate. Failure can actually be a critical step on the innovation path. If you go to market quickly, and find “the fail” quickly, it’s much easier to address right then and there, early on.

How To Get Started

Rachel Weker: Talking about this concept of design-led thinking, what is needed to jump in and get started? From the standpoint of both resources and technology?

Jeanne Ivy: You really don’t need much. The beauty of design-led thinking is that you don’t need to build a big team, or dedicate a physical space, or run massive studies with large responses. You can go small. You pick one little piece and go from there. It’s all about quality, versus quantity.

I’ll walk you through my team’s typical design sprint as an example.

The sprint can be conducted in a week or less. We follow a modified version of Google’s original five-day design sprint. By the way, there is a terrific book by Jeff Knapp called Sprint that outlines this process.?

We start with a team of eight or fewer people, and conduct a series of design thinking activities to define our goal, identify audience needs, iterate on innovate solutions, and test our ideas, all within one week.?

For small projects, we will run several workshops that we custom designed to help people work together to solve problems creatively and effectively, and we mix up the styles and approaches. For example, some may be structured to generate lots of ideas quickly, to be grouped and voted on, while others facilitate prioritizing those ideas we believe will have the biggest impact and add the most value. These workshops can generally be conducted in an hour. And we hold most of our sessions virtually these days, using online white boarding tools, which translates into a simple set up.

We have an established, comprehensive VoC program in place already, so we have the ability to access data quickly, when we need it. What’s great about this process is, we don’t need to analyze a huge amount of that data to gather the insights and customer feedback that inform our designs—it can be done in a matter of hours, by reviewing calls, chats, and user analytics.

Discovery, Design, and Implementation

Rachel Weker: Okay so you started to touch upon facilitating design-led thinking. Can you delve a little deeper into the overall process??

Jeanne Ivy: Yes for sure. There are three phases to the process, and really if you think about them, they’re just common sense: Discovery, Design, and Implementation. Running throughout all three is that all-important VoC—listening to it, being open to change, and having your customers’ best interests in mind.

“Discovery” is basically developing a deep understanding of the problem—not only to be able to clearly articulate it to business partners, but to produce an end product that your customers find valuable. Remember that “empathy principle?” Here’s where you build it. Audience research facilitates knowing the user, who they are, how they think, and what challenges they face. Conducting interviews, leading focus groups and workshops, launching surveys, listening to calls, reading chats, analyzing analytics.?

The key to this component is triangulation: Looking at the behavior, not just what is being said. Using more than one resource to inform decisions, then stepping back to review and hone-in on what the customers need or want, even if they’re not articulating it.?

Next is “Design,” which is the stage that pulls on that multidisciplinary group to ideate and develop the concepts. Collaborating with stakeholders, conducting informal brainstorming workshops, and building things out. So we’re talking about wireframes, prototypes, and user testing here. We want to validate solutions internally and iteratively make changes and improvements prior to and throughout development.??

Then we move to “Implementation.” This is when we launch the pilot—where the rubber meets the road! And we’re validating through performance data and user feedback, and incrementally improving as we go while launching to ever-broadening audiences. This brings me back to one of the best benefits of the design-led thinking process: It’s quick, it’s flexible, and it facilitates meaningful action that can enhance the customer experience.

From Identifying Opportunities To Delivering Innovation

Rachel Weker: Now let’s tie it together: How does this approach connect to the identification of innovative opportunities and delivery of innovative solutions? And can you give us some examples of things you’ve learned?

Jeanne Ivy: When we approach our research from a design-led thinking standpoint, it can open our eyes to issues we didn’t know we needed to solve for, and uncover opportunities for innovative solutions. A great example of this is when our team conducted research to deliver a better experience for retirement plan participants to change the amount of their 401(k) contributions online.?

Feedback we gleaned from phone calls and chats of participants seeking assistance revealed the fact that people sometimes turn off their contributions for a short period of time—like while on maternity leave, or during a holiday season, or because they don’t want a contribution to come out of their bonus check. When they were ready to turn their contributions back on, they would then have to take the extra step of calling or going back online to do so.?

The research led us to this discovery, and while we had not originally planned to solve this problem, we were able to quickly develop and add a super simple “two-for one” online step: When participants change their contributions to zero, they are asked if they would like to turn them back on at a future date. Not only can this option save participants time down the road by eliminating that future step; it also helps to counter the inertia of potentially forgetting to turn their contributions back on.?

Our decisions aren’t always going to come from the top down. We may have a capability requirement identified, and that’s where we start, but user needs are what should drive our decisions and ultimately allow us to provide the greatest value to our customers.

As far as things I’ve learned, I would say be prepared to repeat certain steps in the process as you uncover flaws and shortcomings in the early versions of your proposed solution. Be aware that potential issues aren’t necessarily predictable, but thanks to the quick pace of design-led thinking, they will become apparent early on.?

Also, always utilize multiple channels of user feedback and insight—remember that “triangulation” concept I mentioned earlier? Pulling from several sources means you don’t need as great a quantity of data to get a comprehensive view of customer needs.?

And I suggest comparing the ongoing post-launch research results with the baseline research data taken before the redesign, to look for an increase in the metrics that you have identified as key indicators. So if T. Rowe Price redesigned, say, a participant transaction experience, we might be assessing the increase in completion rates or analyzing actions taken in response to a transaction such as adding beneficiaries or increasing savings rates.

Rachel Weker: Jeanne thanks again so much for your time and insight. This has been a fun and enlightening conversation.

The views contained herein are as of the date noted on the material and are subject to change without notice; these views may differ from those of other T. Rowe Price group companies and/or associates.

T. Rowe Price Retirement Plan Services, Inc.

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