Digital Product and Service Design

The requirements for successful product and service design have been transformed in the digital age. I’ve been involved in building websites, services and online products for 16 years and suggest that the following are pre-requisites for a successful project.

A Multi-disciplinary team

Looking across your business and seeing experts in visual design, technology and strategy would seem reassuring, but success relies on close collaboration. Simply passing between departments and convening meetings is a recipe for failure. Input from each discipline is vital at every stage, visual designers should have as much bearing on technology, as strategists should on the layout of a page. Every member of the team becomes a service designer foremost, a specialist second.

A Creative Process

A talented team, reworking an existing product or service is a wasted opportunity. “Creativity is connecting things” and to this end its as important to start by rejecting the status quo and approach a problem without preconceptions, as it is to have subject matter experts. For this reason, its useful to separate the team from “day-to-day” management of business as usual. Make time to explore the problem from new perspectives, employ lateral thinking techniques and assume that everything you know about the problem is wrong.

The Users

Users lie at the centre of the process, from initial research, through ongoing testing. Build, test, learn… this relies on focusing on the users when building, testing with the users and intepreting the results in order to refine.

Perseverance and Failure

Taking lateral approaches will lead to dead-ends. But that exploration of the problem is important in order to generate the eventual solution. For that reason, the project team and schedule should accommodate a burtally honest approach to review and assessment. Build time and opportunity to pivot as required and manage expectations amongst stakeholders that this is all part of the process.

Strong Project Management

The Project Manager is the lynchpin, they must not only control and guide the experts to ensure a productivity in the face of diverging and expanding scope and opportunities, but also manage stakeholder expectations and ensure engagement with the organisation. Often digital service design leads to internal disruption and the overturning of long held beliefs. The project manager must work with the team to manage this process.