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Innovation Design Quality Control

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You want and need help in transforming your organization or business line and are seeking a consultant to help you. What should you look for? Let’s look at questions and issues you may want to consider when starting an innovation journey.

We break it down into three (plus) areas: Design research and foresight, service development, and evaluation.

Design Research

Design research is about exploring the problem or circumstance that you’re looking to intervene in through introducing a new product, service offering, or policy (which we’ll refer to as an innovation).

Design research is much more than ‘doing your homework’ and is meant to work with any marketing and financial studies you may have done. Design research is about exploring your end-user(s) — both identified and potential additional users. Responsible design research is also about looking at who else your innovation affects.

It will incorporate systems thinking into the process by considering the various ways in which your innovation affects and is affected by the various interconnections around it. For example, your service might be tied to other things (e.g., supply chain, regulatory issues, community norms) and good design research will help articulate these and allow you to map and model systems using visual tools.

Your innovation design team should have skills in design and research and understand a variety of methods and approaches such as quantitative analysis, qualitative data collection, sensemaking (for innovations dealing with complex situations), and behavioural science. The last point — behavioural science – is what allows you to understand what, why, and how an individual or group will choose to engage with your innovation and serves as a foundation for the next stage of work: service development.

But first, let’s go a little ahead into the future to look at the other part of design research: foresight.

Foresight

Strategic foresight is an approach to research that looks at the trends and drivers that influence specific domains of interest like your market, community, or social life as a whole. It draws on a variety of data sources such as published reports, publicly available (or privately held — if you have access) databases, as well as a series of exercises and activities that allow you and other stakeholders to envision what possible futures might look like.

The UK Social innovation agency Nesta has a useful, accessible primer on some of the methods that are used to envision futures.

Future-thinking is important because your innovation will always be applied to tomorrow, not today. Sustainable, effective innovations are those that meet emerging needs not just present ones. Foresight considers how and why things might change and, when combined with strategy and behavioural science, allows you to shape the design of your innovation to better anticipate and (hopefully) meet those changes as they emerge.

Service Development

Service development can include everything from exploring the physical space where your innovation will be deployed to undertaking usability research on digital platforms. The range of practices associated with what is more commonly called service design are many and when enlisting support to design your innovation it’s critical to ensure you have the right talent.

Service design often seeks to develop models of your intended users based on the design research you’ve undertaken. This can result in tools such as personas that provide evidence-informed caricatures of your users that you can use to develop and test scenarios.

Service design methods incorporate visual thinking methods and tools and design thinking by exploring the research, developing ideas, testing and trying these ideas out in ways that inform strategy, and then deploying them into the world. Having a design team with skills in design methods, facilitation, and visual presentation will make this much easier.

Visuals can include everything from simple (but illustrative) maps like the image above to more sophisticated visual models, ‘gigamaps‘, and storyboards.

Evaluation

Last and certainly not least is evaluation. It’s one thing to design an innovation, it’s another to know whether it does what you think it does. Evaluation allows us to assess what kind of impact our innovation has on the world, what processes lead to that impact, and what aspects of our service, product, or policy are most likely influencing this impact.

It is through evaluation of our innovation that we are better able to fine-tune, amplify, or retract our offering to ensure it’s creating the most benefit and not doing harm. Evaluation also allows us to understand what hidden value our innovation might be offering, to articulate your return on investment (ROI), and to widen your perception of what your innovation does and could do.

Bringing in design firms that do not build in professional-grade evaluation to the project is like doing half the work. What good is your new product or service if you have little idea how or whether it works in the real world over time?

These are some of the things that anyone looking to develop an innovation in-house or with a consultant team needs to consider. We have a lot of resources on our learning page on some of these methods and tools as well as overall approaches to supporting groups in asking better questions prior to engaging a contractor.

This is what we do. If you want help with any of this and doing good, quality service design, design research, evaluation and foresight, please reach out and contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

After-Action Review: Learning Together Through Complexity

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Complexity science is the study of how systems behave when under conditions of high dynamism (change) and instability due to the number, sequencing, and organization of actors, relationships, and outcomes. Complex systems pose difficulty drawing clear lessons because the relationship between causes and consequences are rarely straightforward. To illustrate, consider how having one child provides only loose guidance on how to parent a second, third or fourth child: there’s no template.

An After-Action Review is one such way to learn from actions you take in a complex system to help shape what you do in the future and provide guidance on what steps should be taken next.

The After-Action Review (AAR) is a method of sensemaking and supporting organizational learning through shared narratives and group reflection once an action has been taken on a specific project aimed at producing a particular outcome — regardless of what happened. The method has been widely used in the US Military and has since been applied to many sectors. Too often our retrospective reviews happen only when things fail, but through examining any outcome we can better learn what works, when, how, and when our efforts produce certain outcomes.

Here’s what it is and how to use it.

Learning Together

An AAR is a social process aimed at illuminating causal connections between actions and outcomes. It is not about developing best practice, rather it is to create a shared narrative of a process from many different perspectives. It recognizes that we may engage in a shared event, but our experience and perceptions of that event might be different and within these differences lie the foundation for learning.

To do this well, you will need to have a facilitator and a note-taker. This also must be done in an environment that allows individuals to speak freely, frankly, and without any fear of negative reprisals — which is a culture that must be cultivated early and ahead of time. The aim isn’t to point blame, but to learn. The facilitator can be within the team or outside the team. The US Military has a process where the teams undertake their own self-facilitated AAR’s.

To begin, gather those individuals directly involved in a project together in close proximity to the ‘end’ (e.g., launch, delivery of the product, etc..). As a group, reflect on the following three question sets:

  1. The Objectives & Outcomes:
    • What was supposed to happen?
    • What actually happened?
    • Practice Notes: Notice whether there were discrepancies between perceptions of the objective in the first place and where there are differences in what people pay attention to, what value they ascribe to that activity (see below), and how events were sequenced.
  2. Positive, Negative, and Neutral Events:
    • What created benefit / what ‘worked’ ?
    • What created problems / what ‘didn’t ‘work’?
    • Practice notes: The reason for putting ‘work’ in quotes is that there may not be a clear line between the activities and outcomes or a pre-determined sense of what is expected and to what degree, particularly with innovations where there isn’t a best practice or benchmark. Note how people may differ on their view of what a success or failure might be.
  3. Future Steps:
    • What might we do next time?
    • Practice notes: This is where a good note-taker is helpful as it allows you to record what happens in the discussion and recommendations. The process should end with a commitment to bringing these lessons together to inform strategic actions going forward next time something similar is undertaken.

Implementing the Method

Building AAR’s into your organization will help foster a culture of learning if done with care, respect and a commitment to non-judgemental hearing and accepting of what is discussed in these gatherings.

The length of an AAR can be anywhere from a half-hour to a full-day (or more) depending on the topic, context, and scale of the project.

An AAR is something that is to be done without a preconceived assessment of what the outcome of the event is. This means suspending the judgement about whether the outcome was a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ until after the AAR is completed. What often happens is successes and ‘wins’ are found in even the most difficult situations while areas of improvement or threats can be uncovered even when everything appeared to work (see the NASA case studies with the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters).

Implementing an AAR every time your team does something significant as part of its operations can help you create a culture of learning and trust in your organization and draw out far more value from your innovation if you implement this regularly.

If your team is looking to improve its learning and create more value from your innovation investments, contact us and we can support you in building AAR’s into your organization and learn more from complexity.

Personas: Visualizing Your Audience & Customer

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When we design any service or product we are creating it with someone in mind. Personas are a design-oriented approach that can enable us to envision this ‘someone’ – our markets – to better design our products and services for them.

Whether it is a new software product, a grant-making project, a collaborative initiative, or a social policy — any product or service is designed for some person(s) and groups. The more we can anticipate what the needs, wants, and preferences are of this group and how they live, work, and play — the better fit we’ll have.

Personas are a visual way to develop hypotheses and insight into what our customers, clients, and audiences might think, act, and use .

Personas: Qualities

Personas provide evidence-based insights that help us reframe
challenges by creating caricatures that are rooted in data and observations and can provide us with a means to anticipate how or why these individuals might engage with our products and services.


• Personas are not just descriptions of what we already believe about our audience. They come from the perspectives of our actual users. They may challenge or differ from the usual categories we rely on to think about our users.
• Each persona represents a group of users with similar characteristics,
habits, needs, and/or goals. Demographics may or may not play a key
part in a persona.
• Users also differ in important ways from each other; personas highlight
differences that matter.
• Personas are formed by bringing together multiple sources of
quantitative and qualitative data from diverse internal and outside
sources. If the data is not available, then design research is recommended to gather what’s required to make informed decisions.

This might include: surveys, published research from elsewhere, government or external reports, key informant interviews, field observations and direct observation or engagement with users.

Design Steps

Personas begin by looking at the data you have available and, where necessary, gathering more data to ensure you have a reasonable sample that captures both who you believe is your primary user and those who might be potential users.

Examine patterns and look for qualities among the sample — those individuals and groups that are represented in the data — that might go together. This includes things like:

  • Demographics – those that matter related to your product (e.g., age, sex, gender, race, ethnocultural heritage, income, sexual identity, education, employment)
  • Personal Identifiers (e.g., lifestyle behaviours, consumption patterns)
  • Experience with product or service. Are they experienced or new? What knowledge do they have or need to use it? What motivation might they have to use it?
  • Aspirations. What does the product or service solve for this individual? What does it bring to them or allow them to achieve? What are their goals?
  • Fears and Hopes. What are the ‘pain points’ or the things that will attract or detract users from engaging with your product?
  • Skills and Knowledge. What do users know, need to know, and what skills are necessary to engage with your product or service?

Next, sketch out the user. Make them visual — a look or feel and even a name. You might find yourself coming up with many different personas and this is helpful do allow you to determine the differences that make a difference. For example, if you find that the use of your product isn’t highly influenced by a certain demographic quality then that persona isn’t as affected by what you choose on that issue.

Once your personas have been developed, it’s helpful to consult with actual users that represent those personas in some form to test or validate some of the assumptions you used to develop those personas. Personas are not representative of actual people, they are combinations of qualities so the fit doesn’t have to be perfect, just coherent. Coherence is what you’re looking for.

After this, refine and design. Take what you learn and start designing your product or service for these users.

Sample

Below is an example of what a Persona could look like. The example below is modified from a real project undertaken by Cense Ltd and uses the example of volunteerism within a particular community as the focus. It represents one of many personas that were developed as part of an understanding of the issue. In this case, there was considerable data available on users which made it possible to give a confidence score out of 10 based on how confident the team felt the persona adequately represented characteristics of actual users.

What you’ll find is that by undertaking this research and the process of envisioning your users and potential users you can create a better fit with your product, higher adoption rates, and far fewer problems down the road.

This is a highly participatory process and when combined with the best data and developmental design approach increases the learning of your organization as well as creating better, more innovative products.

Want to apply this to your work and need some help? Contact us and we can help. This is what we do.

The Personal Inventory Method

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What’s important to you? It might sound simple, but when we engage in service design the way we ask that question will shape the answers we get.

Keeping with a design-inspired ethos of ‘show, don’t tell’ the Personal Inventory method is a simple means to answer that question of importance for people.

The method is simple, flexible, and can be used in physical, digital, or hybrid contexts so it’s suited to a variety of situations where we might seek to understand the values and beliefs of an audience or particular service user. The Personal Inventory method is a means for participants to gather and catalogue artifacts and evidence of their activities that help answer the question they are posted about what is important to them in a particular context.

Setting Up

The Personal Inventory is shaped around a specific question tied to importance and value within a context. While it can be helpful to ask the question generally, most often we want to focus attention on a particular topic. For example, if we are seeking to design a system that supports patients in navigating their healthcare, we might ask a question: What is important to you about your healthcare experience? Or, What is important to you when being cared for?

The next step is to provide a context for data gathering and presentation. For those who are using digital tools, it might be worth using a platform that is easy to navigate such as a Pinterest board, a shared Google Photos or Flickr folder, or a more sophisticated, but highly modifiable tool like Milannote. The tool should be something that your participants feel comfortable with and this might require some initial training and support.

For using a physical media, a simple scrapbook or posterboard will do.

Gathering, Sharing, and Learning

Provide a timeline for the project that is reasonable and have individuals capture artifacts that represent or illustrate what is important to them. This might include original photos or videos, representative images from the Internet or magazines, even sound recordings. For physical-based projects, this could also including bringing in physical items (or photos of them).

The guidance for the participants is recommended to be light so that individuals aren’t too directed toward a particular ‘idea’ and influenced to give what they think the researcher wants.

Once gathered, the process of ‘show and tell’ can be illuminating for everyone involved. This can be done as part of an individual interview/conversation or as part of a group (with permission from all participants) to allow everyone to speak to what they are sharing. Sometimes items might have a clear explicit meaning and an implicit meaning. The design team has an opportunity to converse with participants and ask further questions to help understand values, behaviours, and memories.

Outcomes

The Personal Inventory method is a creative, visual means to engage participants in research and elicit knowledge about values-in-practice. The opportunities to inquire about things in context and in relation to the problem domain that we are design for is high and it allows individuals to speak to their experience freely in a non-technical way. This method works well for people of various literacy levels and means and can produce insights into what both current designs do (and don’t) and what future designs might consider.

This is a simple method to use. If you want or need help designing your project and using this, reach out and contact us. This is what we do.

Design for Living: A Day in the Life

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Product and service developers can easily be fooled into thinking all they need to focus on is the moment of engagement with their product. The design method “A Day in the Life” can help us put our potential audience (customer, client, or “user”) into a clearer perspective.

A Day in the Life is a simple activity that seeks to catalogue the activities and contexts that your audience might engage in within a typical day to help shed light on the life circumstance and situations that could influence your product.

Begin at the Beginning

Let’s illustrate this simple method with an example: education and training. When we design for education and training, the actual service might be a class, webinar, or workshop. However, the total experience of learning may involve much more than that.

Rather than assume your service starts at the moment people sit down (in person, at the computer etc..) go back to the start of their day.

Start with imagining a ‘user’ — be as specific as possible about this person with as much detail as you can provide that reflects a ‘typical’ or a particular (e.g., specific segment) service or product user.

Then ask: What happened the moment they woke up?

This question tells you a lot and invites other questions: Did they get a good sleep? What were the conditions that they slept in? What time did they wake up?

This matters because one of the assumptions behind your education and training service might be that people are attentive, able to listen and process the material, participate when necessary, and able to codify what’s learned into their brain and apply that later to whatever problem is at hand.

If you want your service to be useful, it needs to fit the circumstances of your user. If your participants didn’t sleep well, had to get up early to commute, are living in a state of fear or violence, or have no good place to sleep at all they are already facing some challenges before they start.

Continue the Story

The first question will lead you to a series of other questions that continue with: What happened next?

You continue this story as you progress through the day in the life of your participant up to and through the actual service event you’re involved in. After that? Continue the story through to the end of the day.

Along the way you will identify such things about your audience like:

  • Demographics
  • Social life and network
  • ‘Touchpoints’ with other systems and services
  • Preferences
  • Social and psychological circumstances.

These are imaginations of sorts based on what you think is a ‘typical user’. To increase the likelihood of reflecting the experience of a diversity of users it is best to conduct some background research to ensure you are reflecting the true characteristics of your audience. This method also works for identifying qualities about non-typical or non-users to help you understand why they might not use or desire your product or service.

Putting it into Practice

This exercise is best done as a group and can be conducted within 2 hours comfortably with more time for more granular exploration. It is meant to be participatory, engaging and allow for some creative reflection.

Materials include:

  • Whiteboards or large flipchart paper
  • Markers
  • Sticky notes
  • Stickers (optional)

Over the course of a morning or afternoon, you can bring your team into a place of greater understanding of your users — current and potential — and help set the context for your service. If we consider our example of education and training, the lessons we learn from this might be that we break programming into different chunks, change the distribution model, provide additional or alternative means to access content, or perhaps follow-up with reminders and tips to aid memory or application.

This simple, engaging and powerful method will help you tell better stories about your product or service and those of the people you wish to influence and serve.

A Day in the Life is one of the methods that we teach as part of the Design Loft Experience pop-up held as part of the annual American Evaluation Association annual conference each year. It’s one of many methods we use to help our clients understand the bigger picture and gain new insights into their work. Want help implementing it? Contact us — this is what we do.