Design Thinking Method

Design thinking offers a structured yet flexible framework that aligns with the project's objectives, challenges, and organizational context, making it a suitable and effective approach for driving transformative change within the enterprise.

Constraints

• Stakeholder buy-in required at milestones
• Working on other projects at the same time
• Limited production resources
• Prioritisation levels

A first step to address this challenge was to engage major stakeholders in a workshop to develop a concrete objectives that would form the basis of a simple brief.

Several primary objectives dropped out of our workshop as goals. Some were measurable, and naturally some weren't, and some objectives were nice to haves.

Stakeholders were then asked to perform a round of dot voting to see which objectives were the most relevant, then we ascertained the objectives which carried the most votes and then grouping them by priority (see pictured).

The objectives were the most pertinent to form a simple brief were:

• 1. Influence the business to ask the customer questions
• 2. Influence the business to look at issues and validate their solutions from a human level

Further stakeholder discussion around the framing statement and consideration of the target audience and the present business focus on digital transformation led me to focus Initial discovery research on and around agile processes, as a potential inroad to customer-centricity process uptake. Upon further research I discovered SAFe (a part of the Scaled Agile Framework) Identified the customer centricity as a critical aspect of Agile process.

[pictured] SAFe diagram showing the position of customer-centricity as a fundamental part of large scale Agile process.

Identified Target Audience

Success Metrics

• 1. Advocacy of the initiative (at early stage)
• 2. Engaging the UX team to perform customer research
• 3. Lift in customer-centric focused epics and stories in team backlog

I conducted some guerrilla testing with a few team leaders & technology managers. The testing method was in the form of a simple discussion around the benefits of the customer centricity aspect of the SAFe framework and its alignment with the business focus of customer with the digital transformation work. I was also trying to learn what may be any inhibitors and what may help them achieve more in this area.

Through analysis the hypothesis was proving correct that there appetite around customer-centricity in process. What I also learned was that the major inhibitors of carrying out this work was lack of the customer data and how to action said data. Plus I learned that the participant's understanding of the end-to-end customer journey was limited.

The Right Issues

This was the critical 'customer' thinking process that we wanted to enable the pods and team leaders with. A way to frame/approach issues from a customer perspective and test the right issues.

They would also understand that if they required further analysis they would cross over into the bottom cycle which involved engaging the UX team to help them build a concrete 'customer' hypothesis and gather and document the 'supporting evidence' for the business case, which was seen as key to engaging with the teams where and when needed.

The role of leadership was then to discuss POD proposed solutions at the issue identification stage from a customer perspective and whilst prioritising backlogs . It was envisaged that the prioritised need for customer oriented solutions being pressed from leadership would keep the wheel turning.

The Right Time

Testing also saw a lot of confirmation around the time to implement this thinking was at the identification phase of the issue.

The Right Tools

To understand what may define what the right tools were, some time was spent defining purpose around 'Critical Customer Thinking' which resulted in the ambitions your see below. These were tested with executive stakeholders to understand the appetite surrounding the ambition of the purpose and introduced the term 'customer critical thinking' to see how they responded. These are the goals were approved for further exploration.

Role: Technology Employee in an Agile Team

Characteristics:

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Pain Points:

Behaviors:

Needs:

Role: Business Team Leader / Insurance Executive

Characteristics:

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Pain Points:

Behaviours:

Needs:

A Living Document

A living document is continuously updated to reflect current information, making it crucial for ongoing relevance. These documents support better decision-making by providing accurate, up-to-date insights. They encourage collaboration, ensuring all team members work from the latest data, thus aligning efforts towards strategic goals. Living documents help businesses stay agile, allowing quick adaptation to market changes, opportunity capture, and effective risk mitigation.

Why a Living Document

This became the focus of a solution for the following reasons:

• 1. Attends to the primary pain points of our archetypes
• 2. Provides a platform solution for our team to communicate with the broader enterprise in lieu of presence
• 3. Addresses critical needs described in JTBD data
• 4. Scalable, responsive and highly-available solution for dispensing customer data
• 5. Fits the corporate mental model of our archetypes and how they interface with company information
• 6. Ready availability to invoke in team meetings and individual work requirements

Communicating the Right Data to the Right People

With research backed rationale we were able to safely say that the solution statement would be easily test true, as would the hypothesis and focusing statement it was derived from. Enabled with this evidential data I was able begin to move into the 'experimentation' phase of the process. I now knew who the right people were, what their needs were, and how we can effectively communicate with them. Now it was time to understand what the live document was an how it worked within the overarching UX team engagement journey.

Workshopping the Solution

I begun by having some whiteboard time to devise some creative solutions to manifest a concept centred around the idea of a living document. These concepts were then tested with the Head of Design, who would provide me further insight as we worked in collaborative creative sessions. Plus he would provide understanding around the constraints and other challenges.

Ideation Workshop Outcomes

Many great ideas that came from the team during the workshop, and after a dot-voting exercise would be put into a backlog for further development. Then performed some Kano analysis on the front-runner group of concepts. Then the top concepts were evaluated to find which had the best value for effort ratio. The first was an online destination that could be launched rapidly to establish a branded destination and evolve it to the needs of the enterprise and the team could start feeding into it. The most important thing was to get 'somewhere' up and running quickly but the data would have to be impactive enough to actually be used in BAU work.

The second concept was an interactive journey map of the business. This information would provide value by conveying customer context at each stage of the journey, and what success and value looked like to them at any given stage. This would be highly valuable to keep the enterprise as a whole on the same page.

The omnipresence capabilities of these tools were considered highly valuable in addressing the challenge of information availability and the impact that may have on some of the uptake inhibitors that were also explored earlier in the process. Whilst also providing an accessible customer-centric toolkit to address the overarching challenges of the project.

Finding the Right Focus

As you can see from the above image of the workshop output, what may be required to introduce and provide competent understanding of customer-centered design to the broader business was too much to ask . It would be insane to expect everyone to read what was quickly looking like a books worth of learning on customer-centricity at TAL. It would also be a bit assuming to think they are even interested. The depth of this content would require a learning curve that was too steep would only add more uptake inhibition.

Although it wasn't all wasted effort. After further discussion it was understood that topics under the 'how' may present the most optimum data. There was concept content under the 'how' section, which leant itself to being align-able with UX playbook content. A UX playbook is a tool that practitioners use to guide individuals or groups through a UX process to provide an output of customer oriented data.

I drew inspiration from a lot of these types of toolkits. Simple exercises tailored to the differing needs and environments they were created for. I proposed to do the same for TAL in regard to tailoring it specifically for the business.

Further Concept Refinement

The next stage was to get this format into a medium fidelity prototype. With the medium fidelity focusing on the copy content which will be guiding team members. So these exercises needed to 1. Make sense 2. Deliver valuable customer data 3. Encourage uptake by being easy, quick and fun to complete.

There were 4 tools exercises for customer data gathering exercises identified in the initial content workshop as being able to deliver the most valuable insight and information for our teams.

Upon further reflection of these I realised that the output had similarities to the output of various stages of the design thinking process. This alignment is described as follows:

• Know Your Customer > Empathise
• Define the Problem > Define
• Get Some Inspiration > Ideate
• Think With Your Hands > Prototype
• Monitor and Improve > Test & Iterate

So seeing that alignment I felt that I had a full, yet simple system that will enable teams define and own the customer work crucial to their outcomes. I moved then into developing an Axure prototype to use for testing the content. This test and iterate process was conducted in conjunction with the development of the fidelity of the pages of content.

Instilling TAL's Ambition

Customising the customer journey map to tune in with TAL's strategic ambitions of understanding, confidence proved highly valuable in testing and was well received in testing and with stakeholders. One piece of feedback was that it provided important clarity to guide decision-making at a micro level.

Mind the Gap

The most important part about the discovery work was documenting the customer experience gap. This would be a primary area of focus for the enterprise to bridge these gaps in the customer journey as they became apparent. This mechanism proved well again in providing understanding throughout the enterprise

Scroll window to view a wireframe artefact from user testing

One part of the process that was paramount was comprehensive was testing. The approach I undertook was to test in small increments. This would assist in retaining the focus of testing the appropriate thing. A principal of this project that was to be observed was that we wanted not to build the thing right, but to build the right thing. The data to help achieve this was only going to be divulged in the testing.

Pictured: Content page gaining fidelity and introducing key visual elements specifically developed for this project

In parallel to the journey map development I worked on bringing up the fidelity on the visual direction for the pages. The style is line with TAL's brand guide but there is a distinguishable difference in the stylistic approach to try to create an internal team brand language that was discernible and individual to our purpose in the business.

Pictured: Bringing the exercises to life in high-fidelity

Further testing of the journey map revealed that users would benefit from even further context in the way of understanding the business process that the customer is going through. So it was agreed with stakeholders to research and add a layer of service design and the back and forth between the primary actor actions (Customer, Advisor, TAL Business).

Testing Reveals Further Advocacy

Uptake of using the journey map as a tool was apparent and a copy was requested at the conclusion of testing many participants. There was also a lot of advocacy from our participants which bolstered the need to see it accessible online. It was a necessity to see this data to get stakeholder buy-in to turn it into an interactive online tool for our teams and executives.

Advocacy of the Initiative

8/10

Lift in customer-centric focused Agile epics & stories

⤊27%

*Rough calculation from quantity sample from Jira product backlogs.

Number of testing participants

>50

*Includes executive and internal stakeholders plus recruited external participants.

Team Engagement

I was proud of the outcomes and results of this project. Some very difficult terrain to tread with maintaining stakeholder engagement to ensure they believe in, and want to pursue this project considering the time and budget that was put into it.

I found great merit in achieving the success metrics that were instilled from the beginning. Although I feel like I maybe should have reigned in the divergence of thinking at the beginning of the project. This approach initiated some work bloat and maybe some dead-end thinking in the ideation phase. There were too many good ideas to potentially pursue.

I also believe the rigour of the testing at every phase was a key factor in inspiring confidence at important milestones that I could back the thinking with evidence. It was great to collaborate with so many people

Some of the biggest value in having this information available I believe is intangible and can only be discussed hypothetically. But from that perspective we could consider how valuable this information could be to a new intern with no understanding of insurance at all, and have them look at the customer journey map to guide them from their first day. There are many scenarios that we could use to illustrate the value of this solution. Consider the situation without the journey map for instance. It can take months, even years of self-discovery in a business to understand and mentally detail all the intricate inner workings that the data in the journey map divulges in an instant.

Design Thinking Method

I believed Design thinking to be an effective process model as it offers then non-linear capability to deal with change as the project progresses.

Constraints

• Short time to market
• New and complex regulatory landscape
• Working with an external development team

City of Melbourne challenged teams of designers, developers and data scientists to propose a potential solution for this pressing problem.

The Challenge

How might we create effective and permanent behaviour change around transportation modes; switching away from driving to cycling or public transport, or other sustainable alternatives?

The Outcome

The winning design! A habit-forming app that seeks to incentivise choosing sustainable transport modes and change the way Melbournians make decisions about transport.

The Current State of Affairs

Experience Design

Jacob Hutchings | LinkedIn

Rachel Raphael | LinkedIn

Salma Abdul Hussein | LinkedIn

Inyoung Choi | LinkedIn

Development

Hsing Fu Tay | LinkedIn

Fiona Jessica | LinkedIn

Data Science

Vicki Simmons | LinkedIn

Design Thinking Method

It was important to better understand the problem in front of us. Our challenge was to affect behaviour change – but what behaviour should we be trying to change? And where would our efforts be most effective and most appreciated? Design thinking was best identified as a method of drawing out the problem at its core and work out solutions from there.

Constraints

Aligning with the CoM strategy

Current infrastructure

Topic Mapping

We were keen to get on to the streets, picking up phones, blasting out surveys to hear from Melbournians. But first, we needed a strategy.

We had plenty of data on what modes of transport people were using, when they were using them, and where they travelled to. But there was plenty we didn’t know about why they choose certain modes, and how they make decisions. We drew up a topic map to try to uncover a deeper understanding of Mebournians on the move.

Survey Composition

• Why did people choose the transport modes they did?
• What factors enter into that decision-making process?
• How important are they?
• How consistent were they in their habits?
• What was their propensity to change?
• What would motivate them to switch to a different mode?

It was a great response given the timeframe and breadth of the questions that were composed. As we started to trawl the data for insights one thing was quickly becoming obvious. The preference was 'Comfort over convenience'. This factor worried us as we examined the data and it became more and more prevalent that almost no commuters at all were susceptible to change their driving habits.

• Survey sample size: 88 Respondants
• Interview sample size: 8 Respondants
• Sample age range: 20y/o ~ 80y/o

We stuck our responses from the surveys and interviews on the wall and mapped them into themes, what we call affinity mapping, this helps us see visually map put our findings, see patterns, validate or invalidate hypotheses.

• Those who will only drive
• Those who will only use sustainable modes of transport
• Those who switch between multiple modes of transport

The people who only ever drove to work did so because they lived further away, lacked practical access to stations, tram stops, or bikes. This seemed like a problem calling for an infrastructural solution, not necessarily in our scope, and something CoM was tackling already with existing strategies.

They usually had access to sustainable travel options but opted out of it, and often chose to drive instead. How could we creatively influence them away from driving? It was decided that the key findings of our user research should guide the ideation phase. The key insights that guided this were the following:

• The most important factors in choosing a transport method are time and convenience.
• They will default to whatever will get them from A to B quickly and with little fuss.
• People are less bothered about comfort, cost, or social or environmental impact.
• Most people want to be sustainable and environmentally friendly, but don’t really want to go out of their way to do it.

Through this research, we started to see a persona emerging...

Millie is a young professional, and lives in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. She has access to trains and trams, owns a bike, but still opts to drive to work most days. She cares about getting to work as quickly and as efficiently as possible. She says she cares about the environment and sustainability (and most likely does care), but she’s not really willing to go too far out of her way to change her habits to benefit those causes. I think we all know someone like Millie.

Millie

• 27
• $80k
• High tech proficiency

Transport Preferences

• Tram : to office most days
• Drives : often
• Uber : when drinking or lazy
• Cycle : but barely uses
• Walk : only for leisure

Motivators

• Travel quick and easy and without ruining her hair.
• Effortless contribution and constant recognition.
• Wants to understand her impact.

Pain Points

• Hates crowded PT
• Delays
• Bad weather
• Slow traffic

The solution direction we started to realise was entrenched in behavioural psychology and has already been tested in technology. Apps like myfitnesspal and headspace have already succeeded in changing the habits of millions of people in their day to day lives. We wondered what was the secret to their ability to transform?

"How can we get someone like Millie to consider how her transport choices impact her city, and ultimately choose an alternative to driving as her default?"

We had a solution statement that we framed through an existing incentive method which was a 'rewards' scheme. The best way we could phrase it was as you can see in the above image was "Fly-buys meets public transport".

Gamifies your choices, rewards you bonus points for weekly or monthly streaks; Compares your travel choices to your friends, coworkers, or neighbours – “Which suburb is the most sustainable?” It was also exciting with a lead such as this that it was evident the feature possibilities of this scheme. We quickly began to design studio what we all thought this 'thing' was. The images above detail the results of this process.

• Linking up with your pedometer or tracker on your bicycle to reward walking or cycling as well
• Metro pays you more coins when trains are delayed or cancelled
• Bonus points for taking public transport when the weather is bad
• Rewards you ‘coins’ which you can redeem to fund local community projects
• Tracks your carbon emissions (e.g. "By taking the train you saved the city of Melbourne X amount of carbon output")

We had a reasonable understanding of the city infrastructure sensors that and how we may use these within the solution. It was easy to get carried away and out of design studio we were quickly losing sight of feasibility. It became apparent that to use CoM city infrastructure sensors was also going to be difficult. We really needed to simplify the technical scope.

I decided to pivot and concentrate on an existing piece of infrastructure which can essentially keep easy track of public transport use against an already existing unique identifier. That essential piece was Myki ticket usage. This envisaged system could also support the current Myki registration campaign so people have incentive to register their myki.

This quickly sketched diagram depicts the notion of how a simplified system could work in a top level view. Most importantly the incorporation of the 'Emissions' dashboard.

For this type of solution to work, messaging and tone of voice would be integral. There would be no guilt-tripping here. A quick branding exercise was undertaken to determine that our content strategy would aim to be:

We borrowed a process called Storyshowing to craft a compelling narrative for our pitch. We roughly based it on the following structure:

• This is what happened to me.
• Has this happened to you?
• This is what we learnt.
• Let me show you.
• Whats in it for you.

• Quantify your contribution
• support causes you care about
• rewards yourself with... Free coffee (for example)

User Dashboard

The prototype was developed using a template system called CoreUI. It is a Bootstrap based it is a highly developed front-end system that uses best practices and can be ported or integrated with many different languages and libraries. This was chosen as it was something that our development team understood and could iterate quickly and work effectively to focus on the core development duties as opposed to writing something from scratch. Even though CoreUI out of the box gave us a great boilerplate to work from, there were still a lot of changes to make to suit our requirements.

Simply click the 'Submit' button to bypass the login to access the dashboard

Next Steps

It would be great to get some more user testing completed in terms of validating the concept. Then focusing on the uptake and social engagement areas. There were a lot of future features that could be plotted on a development roadmap that utilised the underlying CoM infrastructure as opposed to relying solely on the Myki system. I envisage there would be a fair amount of UX strategy involved to validate the features.

Reflection

It would be hard pressing to find any major discrepancies with our research driven design approach. We stuck to the process and concentrated on delivering the key insights, and understanding what it was that we were dealing with at it most fundamental state, so that was what could drive the ideation. I feel like I need to work on how to deal with big data sets a lot more and find out what are the best questions to be asking. There is still a lot more rationale and feature ideation to provide to this case study to back up the direction. Hopefully I will get a chance to input that soon. Thanks for your reading.

We needed to get to know our audience and most critically, their pain points. We undertook the following methods to start to define them. We considered the major challenge to be the wide demographic reach of the platform itself.

Several areas of research were investigated to allow us to gain insight to the market itself. Competitive feature analysis could present gaps in functionality that could be addressed that could ideate into an exclusive feature.

We also investigated the Netflix business strategy information presented during their recent shareholder conferences. We uncovered some data that would eventually go into strengthening our case for the new feature we eventually envisaged.

Just some sample data to provide an idea of the Netflix's reach and market share. So not only are we speaking across the large demographic but across a massive user-base.

This graph depicts the summation of findings into market research across the different segments of analysis. We easily see why Netflix is the market leader. This also accounted for what would turn out to be the key component content.

Sample Size

Key Insights

Main Pain Points

Focus Demographic

Key Insights

Edutainment

Persona Development: Meet Celine

Name: Celine
Age: early 20's
Location: Melbourne
Mind-set: Language Learner

Hi. I'm Celine. I recently moved from Indonesia to Melbourne to study at uni. I watch Netflix on Apple TV and love it. I’m currently hooked on the Netflix Original Korean series Stranger, so much so, that I’ve started to learn the language whilst watching the show.

"I use movies to help with my English"

Sometimes I don’t understand the slangs and cultural references so I need to go to Google and find out. I wish it was easier.

Goals

Pain Points

Motivations

Information Architecture

Next Steps

On Reflection