Five considerations for building digital/physical design teams
With customer experience front and center, designing the right solutions relies on having the right team
By Max Burton and Adam Leonards
Organizations have traditionally run separate design groups for developing hardware and software solutions, but this divergent approach to working is very much a thing of the past. A customer’s experience with a product or service should be seamless interaction and does not reveal any distinctions between the physical and digital aspects of the design process to show. This is why it has become so important to bring together designers with expertise in physical and digital design, right from the outset of a project. We call these types of projects convergent or blended projects.
Fjord is building a capability that marries digital and physical design from strategy all the way through to delivering product to customers. On these convergent projects, we like to have someone in a creative director or design director role, who has a breadth of expertise and experience in both physical design and digital design that enables them to oversee every aspect of a project, driving the blended team to define and develop the best possible solution.
With this role at the helm, how do you go about building the rest of the team to ensure the solution you design is the best outcome for your client’s customers?
1. Start with a problem — and an open mind
Build a multidisciplinary team with a breadth of skills and experiences, who can work through the opportunity together with open minds, and you’ll be better able to arrive at the best possible solution. If you start a project envisaging your solution as either physical or digital, that’s where you’ll land — whether or not it’s the right choice to make. Multidisciplinary teams design better solutions. To be successful, designers trained in digital or physical must understand others’ vocabulary and the boundaries of their skillsets, so that each can help the other.
With your blended team, co-create a holistic vision driven by experience principles and storyboards that define how the customer will interact with the product or service. This will shape your narrative, which will remain a constant reference point throughout the project, guiding the design team and the client alike (when the client understands the narrative, they will be on board with the solution — be it digital or physical).
2. Understand how each design approach differs
One of the challenges is the contrasting ways in which physical and digital design processes work. Hardware design favors a waterfall approach — usually a lengthy process in which you can’t reverse or change a decision. For instance, for a physical product, if you signed off on a rounded-edge finish and have started to tool accordingly, it’ll cost you significant time and money to change to a square edge further down the line.
Software design often leans towards Agile, which makes it easier to evolve the project as it progresses because changes can be made comparatively quickly and easily. Interestingly though, agile is influencing physical design, with many teams taking a sprint-based, cyclical approach that makes it more flexible than it once was, but there’s no getting around the practical limitations. This usually means that the physical design has to be completed earlier in the product development process, whereas digital designers can continue to refine the design up to — and even after — launch.
3. Define the meaning of “physical products” in today’s climate
Set the clock back 20 years, and you’ll land in a time when people were impulsive consumers of things, quickly becoming bored and moving on to the next big thing. In the intervening years, there’s been a shift in society whereby we’ve come to understand and object to the impact such materialism has on our planet, and we’re more motivated to invest in human relationships and enriching experiences instead of the latest must-have. What we need now is far fewer things, which are much, much, much better designed.
Consider, for a moment, the cellphone industry. Years ago, companies like Nokia and Motorola created numerous handsets, each designed to meet the needs of a specific audience in a particular region or country, and with certain budgets, lifestyles, habits etc. When Apple launched the iPhone, they wiped out the whole business model with a single SKU. They had introduced an exquisitely designed piece of hardware that was simply a beautiful vessel for sophisticated, flexible software platform that any user could customize for their own convenience via apps.
Physical products in this digital era need to be much more refined. This is why we see brands investing huge money on developing fewer items to an exceptional standard, and those items have become showpieces for their brand. Think, for instance, about what Amazon’s Echo range has done for its brand, or the latest Sonos smart speaker.
4. Bring in people who specialize early, and generalize later
For a designer to operate within and contribute value to a multidisciplinary team, they need to have developed a deep expertise in their craft at the start of their career. As they progress and gain experience, it becomes possible to diversify and eventually generalize — which is a craft in its own right.
The best multidisciplinary teams boast a mixed team of entry-level designers up to senior directors, to achieve a breadth of skillsets and a depth of seniority and experience. We start out storyboarding with as many disciplines as possible, so that we have all the right people in the room, asking the right questions that will lead us to the best solution.
5. Embrace the ebb and flow of a project
While it may feel counterintuitive to people entrenched in industrial design, flexibility is the key to ensuring you have a team that is best placed to solve the problem at hand. Be prepared to split the team off if efficiency demands it, and to taper people’s project hours depending on the need for their skillsets at each phase.
Above all, be experience-driven. Align on what the customer’s ideal experience should be and move forward together to achieve it.
Max and Adam are part of Matter Global, which recently joined the Fjord and Accenture Interactive family. You can read more about the acquisition here.
