Design can be the voice of the customer
Now it’s time to speak up
by Daemonite Steve Morris
Last week I nearly missed my train stop on the way back home from London. No, I wasn’t falling asleep actually, far from it I was engrossed — furiously scribbling in my notebook as I spent the journey listening to the ‘Design Better Podcast’ from InVision. The guest talking with Aarron Walter was Josh Ulm who’s been leading design and product teams for two decades years at companies like Adobe, Oracle and Vodafone — that’s an impressive CV. Josh is clearly well placed to talk about Design and its role in business as something more than a support function or a production resource.
The amount of pages taken up in my notebook with my scribblings tells me there were a lot of ‘takeaways’, probably too many to include in a short blog post, but one theme really stood out: If Design wants to prove its worth in terms of having a ‘seat at the table’ then a good place to start is to be the ‘voice of the customer’. Personally in business strategy meetings I often prefer to stand at a whiteboard more than sit at the table, but that aside when we talk about customers we should be clear that this is not only the people that consume and interact with the product or service you sell, but also those colleagues and teams you work with internally.
Design is uniquely well positioned to listen, understand and help articulate those unmet needs and to connect the experience of those people to the wider strategic objectives of a business. Not only that but ‘humanising a problem’ is one of the central principles of Design Thinking, having the skills and tools to interpret those numbers into a compelling story and a unifying vision. Ultimately Design should own the responsibility for an organisation’s ‘shared understanding of the customer’. Design is still involved in the production and craft of document creation, but those should also include strategic documents.
Design has to do more than just tell people how important it is, it must lead the way so it is seen as much more than a production resource. For most organisations this isn’t going to happen overnight, so Design needs to play the long game so that it can really get close to the strategic imperatives.
Listen to this (but remember to keep an eye on your station stop!)
