The importance of a human-centered design (customer or employee)
Refocusing the organization’s efforts on the user or employee and not on the product or service considerably improves the defined results and plans.
When we start a project, either at the beginning of a fiscal year or because we start a new phase or corporate project, be it personal or entrepreneurial, our goal is to be the most successful, unique, and prevail among the others—consumers, customers, users for a while.
Once the project starts, do we understand where we want to go and where we want to go? Are we aligned to the situation, or what will happen? Perhaps most people would think so when I ask: Are you selling a product, a service, or an experience? Are you designing a process or business initiative with financial results in mind or employee alignment, the processes they have to go through, and the technology they must use?
When we design a product, having a change of mind turns it into a service or experience. When we think about it in the company, it becomes a cultural change that adjusts the organization, skills, and abilities to generate results.
This change is to have a user-centered view or user-centered design. In the end, those who buy a service or an experience are people, and organizations could not exist in people.
How to achieve a user-centric vision?
When we have a user-centered vision, we pay attention to the problems or challenges that a person has regarding a service or experience or an employee to better interact and perform in their workday. When we can understand these issues, the consumer (CX), the user (UX), and employee (EX) experience presents us with a framework for strategy, measurement, and execution.
Discovery is successful when we connect with people (consumers, users, employees) and better understand their thoughts and actions (aka being empathic). Several tools in the innovation and marketing frameworks help us generate this discovery, such as “empathy maps” and “buyer persona.”
In both models, what stands out is the search for positive and negative emotions that this person has. Later, that would help us understand if this could be related to a problem or frustration about a service or bad experience.
When we discover emotions, we connect neurally with people. We can have discoveries that complemented with two other innovation and segmentation models, such as the buyer persona segmentation model by demographics or by culture and generations.
The information collected with all the canvas leads us to discover different perspectives and connect emotions and needs that may be similar between other regions, cultures, and generations. We start to have a mix of people that conclude into a tribe who coincide with a problem to be solved, either in service or personal and work experience.
And this is what Clayton Christensen calls the discovery of a “Job to be Done” JTBD.
In certain situations, people have motivations and emotions that produce something good or bad and become better for both of them.
I want to comment on the example of milkshakes that Clayton Christensen mentions in one of his talks. Through this process, emotions from different tribes are aligned to solve a need, and improvement and innovation are made.
When we get to this particular point, it will be possible to see that there are many opportunities for improvement and proposals for new services that could undoubtedly generate disruption and better results than if we only think about the product or technology without thinking about people.
