Create compelling customer experiences by blending design thinking with agile, lean and continuous delivery

An Experience Design approach that blends innovative, creative design thinking methods with the delivery methods of agile, lean and continuous is the most efficient and effective way to design, develop and deliver compelling experiences that delight customers and drive business success.

What’s in a name?
Experience design is the creative process to design human-system interactions that shape perceptions and influence emotional responses and behaviour. As a discipline it has evolved and merged with a number of disciplines over time. Perhaps it’s strongest influence stems back from the world of human-computer interaction (HCI). One of the key components of HCI is to make the design process human-centred, so that it’s always focussed on the human activity and the goals that the users want to achieve.
While experience design evolves as a design discipline, the most recent influences that are shaping design methods have come from outside the design industry. Process methods such as ‘agile’, which came from the IT industry and ‘lean’, which came from large-scale manufacturing are now shaping both business and design thinking.

For over ten years there has been a groundswell of change within IT delivery methods. As a result the industry has seen the widespread adoption of ‘agile’ and its derivative methods. Agile is a set of guidelines, written in the agile manifesto, for the collaborative development of software that focuses on delivering value rather than features, that delivers working software in frequent incremental chunks, rather than in the more traditional, risk-fraught, big-bang way.

Lean on the other hand, came from the manufacturing industry, is focussed on delivering value in the most efficient and effective way. Its philosophy is based on ‘just-in-time’ principles, or manufacturing when it’s needed, thus seeking to reduce waste in any form, be it effort, materials time and costs.
Both agile and lean are all-inclusive environments. Where once experience design practitioners were used to designing in ‘design phases’ of the project in the comfort of their design studios, they found that they were hoisted out of their comfort zones and expected to work in these new collaborative multi-disciplined environments. Some practitioners who recognised the need for change, saw the benefits and advantages that these new methods offered. Experience Design practitioners who have an appreciative understanding of lean and agile have been seeking to ‘redesign design’ and move away from the practice designing in isolation and in advance of development and instead are adapting experience design to fit within agile and lean frameworks.

One of the underlying principles of both methods is ‘continuous’.  The agile manifesto recommends that we strive for ‘early and continuous delivery of valuable software’ and lean talks about the practice of ‘continuous improvement’ or ‘kaizen’. ‘Continuous’ is most relevant in this the digital age, where the notion of the ‘deadline’, as once enforced by the production schedules of the large industrial machines, is almost obsolete. ‘Continuous’ is iterative and evolutionary and change is built into the process as a priority requirement, rather than something that is prevented or discouraged.

Interestingly there are strong parallels in the design industry. ‘Design methods’, which emerged in the 1960s, is the discipline that looks at the processes and techniques for creative problem solving. Design methods (see Jones, J.C. 1970 and Cross, N. 1989) has always advocated an iterative and evolutionary approach to creative problem solving especially as it pertains to product development and engineering. Likewise, the disciplines of human-computer interaction (HCI) and user-centred design (UCD) have instilled an evolutionary approach, augmented by ‘test and learn’ methods. This is where possible design solutions are tested with end users of the intended product to ensure that it is fit for purpose and meets the users needs.

And so by combining design methods with lean and agile methods the practise of ‘continuous design’ is now emerging. Continuous design is a philosophical and practical approach that uses empirical techniques as well as qualitative and quantitative data to continuously steer experience, service and product design and development.

The continuous design approach is applicable at any point in the design development lifecycle. You can take the approach at the start of a ‘green fields’ project or apply it down the track when looking to improve existing products. To look at how to apply continuous design we’ll start by looking at a green-fields project and take you through the process.

Validate the opportunity or problem space
During the early part of the process you need to look to discover why there is an opportunity or a problem. Don’t just take it as gospel. Question everything. Be almost child-like in your pursuit of the answer. Use all the sources available, including internal and external stakeholders, market and competitor intelligence and key to the continuous design approach the customer perspective. You need to understand who the new or existing customers are. This is not just demographic information but you need to know what drives them, what influences them, what makes them tick and what turns them off. You need to develop a sense of empathy, which also needs to be shared by everyone on the project team. Once you have collected all your data you need to understand what it’s telling you. You need to analyse it, look for insights and develop a hypothesis about the opportunity. We call it a hypothesis because we acknowledge that at this point it’s just a best guess based on what we have learnt so far.
A primary objective in continuous design is to validate any hypothesis as quickly as possible in order that we can either ‘fail-fast’, change direction or scale quickly. Underpinning the continuous philosophy is the lean mantra of avoiding waste. We don’t want to spend lots of time, effort and money on something if we are uncertain it will deliver the expected results. So we need to test early and test often.

Design Thinking – where magic happens
While having a plethora of data is great, it’s true value is in understanding the patterns and stories that inspire action.  Armed with customer insights, understanding of context and our product hypothesis, we can set about envisioning the solution. Here’s where the art part comes in. We use design-thinking methods to explore the opportunity space. We might start by using divergent thinking techniques to explore the opportunities available. We combine this with visual communication to rapidly sketch out ideas to inspire further development or tangential ideas from the team.

Once upon a time ago, design was done in a creative vacuum by creative people, however in the world of continuous design anyone who is willing to think creatively about the problem or opportunity space is welcome. This collaboration can include anyone on the project team from subject matter or functional experts that are part of the project team or anyone who has direct contact with customers, such as sales or customer service people. After a time-boxed period of thinking broadly, we assess all the ideas and start to converge on the ideas with the most promise. We then take those ideas refine them and add a little more rigour around the thinking.

Design, test and learn
This is the first opportunity to get out of the office and test the concepts with the target market. We take our strongest candidate ideas and seek to validate our thinking with customers. This process of explore, test and learn underpins the whole philosophy of continuous design. The idea is to avoid creating waste in terms of time, effort and money by developing the detail of a product until we have first validated that the concept is viable. Everything that way has done to this point has been an assumption, or guesswork and now what we want is proof that we are on the right track with the right idea.

Testing your concepts with customers is not an automatic tick in the box. You need to be prepared for failure, if it happens. Just because you, or someone on the team thinks it’s a good idea, it doesn’t mean that customers will agree. However the key point it is better to find out the idea is not a good one as early as possible so that you can change direction or drop the idea altogether before you have spent too much time or effort on it. With the right mindset you can still view failed ideas as a positive experience because you have new learnings and a new set of information which you can add to your knowledge base. Like Thomas Edison once said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Continuous Improvement
The design, test and learn approach does not just happen once. In agile development environments it happens every ‘iteration’ or even as often as weekly. We want to continuously build up design knowledge and confidence that we are delivering the right product for the right people at the right time. We apply the techniques throughout the project and also beyond once the product or service is launched. In fact, the live environment is the best environment for truly understanding how customers are interacting and responding to the product, service or experience. Therefore we need to be in a position to continuously monitor and measure the experience so that we can adapt and refine where the results are less than optimal.

To have the most benefit we need to be in a position where we can deliver improvements almost in real-time, rather than having to wait for the next infrequent production release cycle. To do this we combine the continuous design, test and learn approach with continuous delivery– “releasing high quality software fast through build, test and deployment automation”.

Continuous improvement is a seismic shift for organisations. It requires operational, cultural and process changes across the board. However it is the most effective way to reduce risk and waste while delivering compelling products and experience rapidly to market.