The Fight for Desirability

HCD or Human-Centred Design mandates that when you start designing something you start with what is desirable to humans. Then you work out what you can achieve from an ‘as of that day’ viable (financial) and feasible (capability) point of view. If you do it the other way around, you are not innovating; you are simply iterating on what you’ve already got.

HCD helps organisations drastically transform their products, services, strategies, and culture to be customer-centric.

This happens, without the constraints of their own viability and feasibility, during the design process. The viability and feasibility of an organisation should not impede the design process, it should be highlighted as an issue once you know what people want, and your organisation should make compromises away from viability or feasibility, not away from desirability.

HCD is fun, yet serious. (Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash)

Before I continue, a couple of side notes…

Desirability also helps companies drag their viability and feasibility in the right direction, towards desirability. If they’re not capable of doing the thing that people will love, they’d better formulate a strategy that changes viability and feasibility.

I’ll get back to the main point in a second…

However, a lot of people will say “but the customer is not always right”. I ask those people to reframe between customers, and humans. Read my first sentence, “What is desirable to humans”, not just customers, but to people, all people, or specific pockets of people if you’re good at data-driven persona identification like we are. You need to gather insights, then come up with ideas during the design process, this means you can create entirely new things, with only insights from people, not ideas from customers.

Back to my main point, HCD sounds simple right? Well, in the current business landscape, full of gigantic incumbents, it’s not.

If you’ve ever gone through a corporate investment process, you’ll know that it’s not. Desirability won’t get you investment dollars unless your investment committee sees something tangible.

PRO: Financial metrics, and proof, from a bottom-line point of view, will definitely get you investment dollars.

CON: “Prove it, is the absolute enemy of innovation” as Roger Martin says. If you have to prove it, in the old way of proving something, you’ll butcher it to the point that it’s not the something new anymore.

The reason a lot of incumbents and corporates aren’t innovating is that they’re forced to ‘prove it’ to get investment dollars to invest in innovation. This is a negative feedback loop or death spiral for corporates.

Enter the fight for desirability. The fight for the user. The fight for the citizen. The fight for the employee. The fight against the machine. The fight to help organisations truly innovate.

The trick to winning is finding out how to work in an Agile and HCD way within your investment process.

I’ve been in this battle for a long time now, and have come across various strategies to get dollars to innovate. Here are a few of the big ones…

1. Make sure your investment process includes a bucket for ‘innovation’ that has zero financial metrics but includes digital capability goals like Cognitive, Channels, Data, Beyond Screen, or other. When you explore these new things, you’ll have to work in an HCD way
2. Fit it into a massive program of work; often innovation projects don’t really require that much money, what’s another $50k in a program with a total spend of $20m
3. Do it on the side of your day job, gather an unofficial crew of HCD’ers and pick a challenge that will have a lot of positive impact on your customers or employees (your colleagues). Be the one others want to stand around.
4. Get a vendor to help you fund it by being their test subject. This often works when you’re in marketing or the HR team, there are so many start-ups out there focused on HCD products and services.
5. Quit, start a company, do it yourself, and then get purchased by your old work.
6. Hold an innovation JAM, collect ideas from your colleagues, knock on the CEO’s door, talk them through it, get some cash.
7. Invite your bosses to observe some real customer testing, they’ll have an ‘ah ha’ moment and then throw money at you.
8. Invite your boss to some HCD training, they’ll definitely have an ‘ah ha’ moment, change their view of how to do business, and then throw money at you.
9. Start using the lingo of HCD and Experience Design to loosely describe the things your project teams are doing, gently ease them into the rituals and mindsets of a Design Process, and then set-up an HCD community of practice showcasing what ‘you’re already doing’.
10. Quit and join a design-centric company.

The momentum being gained in HCD because of the rapid adoption of tech is probably the strongest call to action. This tech proliferation is driving an exponential rise in the experiences companies are able to design. Organisation must shift the majority of their workforces to be more experience focused, rather than tech-focused.

The companies of the future will grasp experience design in it’s entirety, they’ll work in a dynamic experience environment where they can prototype and scale on the fly, and they’ll have experience systems that ensure a consistency across touch-points, even when they inject new tech.

From now on, Experience is everything.

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