HOW TO APPLY DESIGN THINKING TO CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PROJECTS
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a process for creative problem solving. It is a process which encourages organisations to put people (a customer, user, audience, community etc) at the centre and design products, services and internal processes around the human need.
For more on Design Thinking, check out this article from IDEO.
Designing for success
Research from McKinsey shows that 70% of transformation programs fail. Customer Experience can certainly be counted as a transformation program and likewise can be prone to failure without careful management.
Whilst many CX programs start with good intentions, they can easily lose their way and fail, due to the lack of a robust, yet flexible framework to guide the delivery.
Design thinking is a process which joins strategy and execution together. It can be applied to CX too. It allows organisations to explore CX challenges in a structured way, find inspiration, ideate solutions and implement actionable plans without going off course.
The Double Diamond model
The most well-known method for applying design thinking is through the double diamond model. It provides a framework to guide teams designing new products, services and experiences.
The benefits of the model are:
Increasing speed to market
Providing a framework for keeping projects on track
Ensuring each stage of the project has a clear purpose and delivers value
Uses prototyping and iteration to minimise failure of CX initiatives
Applying the framework
The double diamond model splits CX transformation programs into four individual phases (often known as the four D's):
Discover
The start of the CX program where the program objectives and customer needs are identified
Define
This stage interprets and aligns the customer needs with the business objectives
Develop
This marks a period of designing and evaluating CX solutions
Deliver
Where the final CX solutions are developed, tested, iterated and launched
Discovery phase
The discover phase is about removing uncertainty and ambiguity around the project, understanding your business and stakeholder needs, putting assumptions aside and going out and seeing for yourself the customer experience, listening to customers, building empathy and content around their experiences. The result will be a pile of research findings - but not the end solution.
The value of the discovery phase is that it reduces risks; giving you a clear understanding of the goals and requirements which can determine the success or failure of a project.
The discovery phase can help establish the roadmap and bring alignment and trust amongst stakeholders. Assumptions, overconfidence and enthusiasm make it easy skip this phase, but you need to reign this in and invest in this preliminary phase to ensure your CX solutions are valid, relevant and solves the actual (and not presumed) customer needs.
Define phase
The define phase is about finding the right CX problem to solve. Here you synthesise your research, understanding and making sense of your findings to define whether you are solving the right CX problem and phrasing your CX vision accordingly.
This entails laying out all your research findings, building themes and clusters to gain an overview, uncovering insights, and deducing opportunity areas and potential fields of action. These are used to form the ‘How Might We?’ questions - questions that state what is to be done or solved based on the CX opportunity.
The output is a final brief or strategy proposal that clarifies or details the initial brief challenge or even contradicts it.
Develop phase
Now you have deduced the actual question to solve, you can start ideating potential solutions. Ideate as many ideas or potential CX solutions as possible and approach ideas with an open mind. Apply a “yes, and...” rather than a “no” or a “yes, but” mentality.
Towards the end of an ideation phase, evaluate the first ideas you want to bring into further exploration. Evaluation methods such as Desirability, Viability & Feasibility (DVF) assessment can help determine the most valuable outcome for customers.
Set the ideas, CX vision or hypothesis to a point where you can make them tangible. The output could be a set of ideas, strategic approach, concept, draft design, vision or prototype.
Deliver phase
Once you have come up with potential CX solutions, you want to evaluate these and the way they need to be implemented or executed. To do so, you may need an agile approach consisting of four steps:
Prototype, test and analyse the findings - make your best ideas tangible, test them out and see what happens
Learn, iterate and test again - bring in the learnings, maybe rethink the solution, revise and re-test
Build, iterate and repeat - the better your results get, the higher fidelity you can make your solution
Launch the solution and push it to customers
In this phase aim to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that offers enough tangibility to find out whether it solves the problem, answers the original question and is valued by customers. This saves time in going to market and reduces risk.
Putting the four phases together
What happens after you launch your CX solution?
Once you have launched your CX solution it is important to measure the effects of the CX solution.
Be wary of initial results, as customers might hesitate to try new solutions, or take a little more time at first to understand changes to process or understand new features. Over time you can see if the CX improves as customers adapt to the solution and what further learnings arise.
It’s important to realise this approach isn’t linear or static. In reality, you need to be prepared to be agile and go back and forth at any point as new insights, ideas and findings come to light.
Benefits of the double diamond model
Every CX project differs. You may focus on one aspect of the customer experience or the whole customer journey. Therefore timings, resources, tasks and outputs will need to be determined for each phase. These will be governed by your CX program's objectives, time, resources and budget available.
However, the double diamond methodology is sufficiently flexible to adapt to different needs, and scale as required, providing a pathway to follow to keep your project on track.
Furthermore, it reduces the reliance on assumptions, seeking real customer insights and allows you to validate ideas before releasing them reducing the risk of CX transformation failure.