Introducing BT design
The design team at BT Consumer is a large group of like-minded people who believe that, at its core, all great design must be human-centred. We’re a new team and we want to share what we learn and work in the open wherever possible because it makes things better.
In this introductory post, Conor Ward, our Director of Design, explains that to create the best digital products, loved by our customers, we involve the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process.
Putting users at the heart of what we do
We define design as ‘human insight-based creativity’.
‘Human’ means we consider the 30m+ people we’re creating for, as well as those who do the creating. Customer experience and user needs inform our decisions and that stems from a great employee experience for those who work here.
‘Insight-based’ means we evidence all things. We focus on a problem, embrace uncertainty, and test hypotheses. We run experiments constantly and act on what we learn.
‘Creativity’ means we go beyond with big, bold thinking that pushes the boundaries. We follow our Experience Principles (more on those in a future post) but aren’t limited by them. Instead, we use them to strive for better and move innovative ideas.
Building on a great history
We’re working on one of the largest digital transformations in the UK right now, with 170 designers involved across four sites. This means we spend a lot of time looking ahead and thinking of improved ways to solve problems. But our background is user-centred too. In 1846 we were the world’s first public telegraph company. To connect people effectively we had to understand what they needed from that service. With digital design, we’re doing the same thing but in new ways to meet today’s expectations and prepare for tomorrow.
As a design team, we are driven by user needs and all that we do is based on evidence. We trust each other and have the freedom to try, fail, and keep learning in all that we do. Challenge is always expected and welcomed: we don’t accept the status quo. Our focus is on learning fast and continuous improvement. Our bias for action means we prefer to run practical experiments, rather than merely talk about ideas. It’s how we get better, and our products will too.
User-centred design (UCD) means that everything we create is meeting a validated user need and we keep users continuously involved in our process at all stages. Why does this matter? Because we know if we meet user needs — providing value to our customers and exceeding their expectations — business value will follow.
What’s the design process like?
We’ve learnt that standard design thinking and the Double Diamond model can be slow in large organisations. Sometimes following a step-by-step process means you forget to return to the discovery phase to re-think problems and the customer needs (or external pressures mean you can’t return, even if you’d like to do so). Instead, you get wrapped up in tweaking current solutions.
So, we’ve decided to take a simple UCD approach to how we work and what we work on. We call the process ‘Build, measure, learn’.
‘Build, measure, learn’ acknowledges the value of being agile — iterating and learning fast. There’s a range of activities you might do during each phase. The variety of design and research methods (whether that’s contextual analysis to find out how users behave in real life, or journey mapping to understand where people interact with our services and products) means we’ve been describing the process internally as ‘choose your own adventure’ for design.
Now we’re really getting started, you can expect a weekly blog post from a variety of authors on the BT design team and we’ll share more about our design methods soon.
