Design power up! Going to the next level of design maturity in ING
Using design methodologies to design a Design Department
Ten years ago, only a handful of UX designers worked for ING in the Netherlands. They were part of a relatively small ‘Internet department’. In ING Belgium, designers were organized in a similar way: in a small department focused on Belgian customers only. Fast forward to today, Design within ING Belgium and ING in the Netherlands is a fully-grown department with more than sixty designers. In this article, you’ll discover how design was used to design a design department, how designers spend 20% of their time to improve the department and how the department became an example for the other departments within ING in two short years. This is the inside story of the evolution of design in ING.
We interviewed the two people who made it possible for the designers in ING to have their own department.
Gregory Ek — the “father” of the design department. He believed from the start that designers could and should have their own department and that ING’s future depended on it. He is the one that instigated everything.
Frédéric de Staercke — the current lead of the Dutch and Belgian design department. He helped spread the idea to ING’s top management that design should have its own department, and he put a lot of effort in setting it all up when the idea was accepted.
So gentlemen, for starters, can you tell us a bit about this brand new Design Department within ING?
Frédéric: It is a department running its own operation at the same level as other departments within the bank. With that independence and positioning, we can enable customer centricity at all levels of our organization. Currently, we are mostly focused on the digital experience but we also focus on other touchpoints, such as the customer experience within ING’s branches.
Gregory: We are providing the other departments within the bank with the right designers to help them deliver their projects successfully. In addition to that, the department is focused internally on the way of working, the impact, the craftsmanship, and the representation of designers. We do our best so that designers can reach their full potential.
Can you describe the situation before the designers got their own department?
Gregory: Before we became a single department, there were three design teams in the Netherlands and two teams in Belgium. They were coexisting but not really working together. There were a lot of overlaps in projects that the different teams were working on. Sometimes, designers within the different teams were working on the exact same things. Sometimes, they were doing different things for the same project, but those things clashed once they came together. It was not the most efficient setup.
Frédéric: Content-wise, we were mostly already doing the work that we are doing today. This consisted of performing design tasks for teams in all of the tribes of the other departments. But there is one key difference —in the past, we had to follow whatever the bigger department that we were a part of said and did. Because of that, we weren’t in a good position to influence the priorities of the bank and to provide our designers with opportunities to further develop themselves and their skills.
So what changed now that Designers have their own department?
Frédéric: The way that work comes to us is now in our own hands. We can increasingly influence the kind and quality of incoming requests from other departments. There are now multiple examples of designers that are at the forefront of creating roadmaps for other departments. This is feasible because our expertise is now recognized by decision-makers. We took our destiny into our own hands and are now influencing other departments more and more with our way of “design thinking”. This is driving the motivation of our designers upwards; proven by our happiness score (measured by an anonymous survey) which shows that our designers are very happy (with a sky-high record of 80%). Other departments within the bank dream of a score like this for their respective employees.
There are now multiple examples of designers that are at the forefront of creating roadmaps for other departments.
Gregory: We used design techniques to define the most efficient teams of designers. We wanted to limit the handover between teams, so we created “expert teams”. Basically, we assigned every designer to a specific team that focuses on one domain. We’re much more efficient with this new setup. It’s important to note that this wasn’t perfect from the start though. It took us one year and multiple iterations to get to a setup that really worked.
Frédéric: The expert teams are organized around bigger journeys for the customer. We removed the barrier between mobile and web and we also removed the barrier between the two countries (The Netherlands and Belgium). This way, one expert team has all the skills to improve the experience of a bigger journey or a set of related journeys (regardless of the design methods used, the country the customer is in, or the device that the customer is using).
Designers focus on delivering customer-facing interfaces. That is mostly done in cooperation with other departments. Aside from their regular work, the designers also have tasks meant to improve the Design Department as a whole. In that way, the whole department is involved in helping to further improve itself. We define OKR’s to track the progress step by step.
Can you tell us more about your roles in the creation the Design Department?
Gregory: I was a missionary, an evangelist spreading the good word of Design with a capital D. And I knew I had to prioritize this role when, in 2016, someone really high up in the organization casually asked us during a meeting what we were actually doing as designers. Design was there and yet it was invisible. I knew then that this was not going to be easy. Naturally, you first had to convince the designers and design leads of the bigger impact they could have. Some of the hardest people to convince at first became the biggest ambassadors of the Design Department later on. Frédéric was one of them. When colleagues realize you are not playing a political game, but carry with you a genuine belief; when they can sense that you really want to do good for ING and its customers, then a cultural shift can happen in big teams.
Frédéric: The idea originated from Gregory. Once I was convinced, my contribution was in the thinking process — how to organize the expert teams and remove the border between the Netherlands and Belgium. Since the beginning of this year, my role has really become concrete since I now manage the Design Department. I try to enable designers to perform as well as they can. Usually, we designers, are not that good at computing our numbers and selling our designs to the other departments. But since we work in a number-minded organization, I try to demonstrate to the bank the impact that design has (using their favorite tool: numbers).
In retrospect, was this the right time to start an independent Design Department?
Gregory: A year before we started the Design reorganization, there was a bigger reorganization in Belgium. In hindsight, it would have been a better moment to make our own move then. But at that time, I didn’t feel confident enough to interfere with the bigger reorganization that was taking place (even though it would have saved us a lot of energy if we had done it then). Many people had to go through several reorganizations in a short time frame. This can drain the focus and energy of even the best teams.
Frédéric: I think it was the right time because there really was an urgency. If we want to own the customer experience in the future, we need to move faster in doing so as an organization. That’s where designers play a huge role: if we don’t move fast enough, we might just become a bank that simply “owns” bank accounts, while other banks will own an experience. We know new players want to enter the market and that new digital banks are growing fast. We see Google received a banking license in the Netherlands and Apple is already there as well.
Funnily, the COVID situation helped us. We now have Dutch designers working for Belgian teams and Belgian designers working for Dutch teams. This is something I would not have seen happening a few years ago.
How do you create a new Design Department? What was your approach?
Gregory: A traditional reorganization is often a group of bosses, sitting in a room, dividing the resources among themselves. With us, it went differently. It was a group of colleagues trying to solve a problem together. We consciously took the approach we would use with any other design project. It was a lot of work and I had to trust the techniques that we use as designers. The way that the Design Department was created is no accident; it was designed using insights, analysis, testing, and refining.
With us, it went differently. It was a group of colleagues trying to solve a problem together.
Frédéric: I really think design thinking is a science. It has proven methods and results. I think a designer can take on any challenge. So this was our approach — use design to solve this problem.
Gregory: The first step was to involve a small group of designers to think about the topic and the problems to solve. A scope was created and several problems were identified. Inspiration was also gathered by this small group. Then, we started to open up to the other designers. This way, we got additional insights and data from Design managers within the Netherlands. The next step was to involve the Belgian department to include their vision but also their problems. What followed was a mini design sprint to define and prioritize the problems we were solving and explore different solutions. After that, we went to more senior designers to ask for their feedback regarding the outcome of the design sprint. With the outcome of the design sprint and the feedback we gathered, a sales deck was created. With that deck, we communicated our proposal to stakeholders. We made sure it was a well-written and illustrated story.
A good example is the addition of the Nokia story in our internal deck. I worked at Nokia so the example to support our story was very personal and credible. One of the takeaways was this: it is possible to be on top of the hill for several years but fall very quickly if you don’t evolve. You must continuously improve to survive.
One of the takeaways was this: it is possible to be on top of the hill for several years but fall very quickly if you don’t evolve. You must continuously improve to survive.
Another important aspect of the story was that the design department itself was an experiment. We needed to learn from the experiment before we could really start a department. We got the blessing of senior management. We started the experiment and again gathered data. Our main question was this: are we solving what we identified as problems with this new setup? Things were going well, but there were a lot of issues still. We kept iterating and improving until we finally got the official permission to start our own official department.
What is the difference between banks and other companies in how design is positioned and organized?
Gregory: I worked at Samsung before I worked at ING. At eight o’clock in the morning, the Samsung Mobile CEO would patrol the floor with designers to see and experience the new developments first-hand. At ING, just like any other financial institution, people high up in the organization still ask from time to time what designers do exactly. Not everybody knows how to benefit from the designers’ expertise. They just see designers as being the creators of interfaces and slick presentations. When starting a project, designers are not always present. Luckily, that is changing these days because of the Design Department’s communication strategy, which focuses on showing the impact of every designer.
Frédéric: I think that most companies face the challenges we faced. This story will probably sound familiar… I remember a meeting with someone high up in the organization that said that we, designers, were not business and sales orientated (because we “only like beautiful stuff”). Statements like that drive me crazy (especially since my background is in sales). You could say that I sell designers now (laughing). So, two weeks later we came back with a sales-focused design presentation and it was a done deal. The stakeholders started taking us seriously. I work on showing that the Design Department is one of the most organized departments within the bank. Each designer that we employ generates a lot of money and we can prove it. We are really building credibility within the organization.
What is the future of the ING Design Department?
Frédéric: I see more and more that designers are impacting the roadmaps of other departments and pushing for innovation. That is exactly what we want to go for. We need designers to have a big impact on what the organization is doing. Only then can we reach the point of creating the best customer experience.
Gregory: We can still learn a lot, we don’t even have to look at other companies to get inspiration. The way some of our projects are running now is beautiful; but the required methodology used in order to do so is not yet systematically applied everywhere. If more designers could replicate things that are working really well for other designers within ING, we could be the bank with the best design team. We could be the best. Even with far fewer designers than some other banks.
I moved from the Dutch/Belgian Design Department to the global organization so that I can involve all design departments from other ING countries. It’s just basically replicating at a bigger scale what we did by making one team out of the Dutch and Belgian teams. Ideally, one day, we’ll have a global Design Department!
Frédéric: Customer experience is now the most important value within the organization. In the future, I foresee that sustainability and doing good for the planet and the people will become more and more important, even necessary. I am convinced that designers will be the key to providing optimal solutions for those subjects.
This is just the beginning!
This article is created by Thomas Kos and Filip Mishevski for the ING Design Blog. We would like to thank Greg and Fred for their openness and cooperation and we would like to thank Quentin Tran for helping us craft the story.
