How to drive strategic design processes at speed with ‘just enough insights’
With design and strategy increasingly becoming intertwined disciplines, the role of research and insights in the process is also changing. To drive innovation at speed you need a new approach. One that ensures, that you can stay a step ahead of the competition, and don’t design a solution that no one needs. This is where “just enough insights” is key. Here are 4 principles to help you get started.
As a designer or researcher, have you ever felt stuck between competing ideas about how you should go about your research and design process? You’ve probably had those kinds of discussions with project managers and clients many times.
5 or 10 years ago the question was usually about how much user testing to do. And before that, it was all about if and why we needed to test at all.
With design and strategy increasingly becoming intertwined disciplines this is changing. And so is the role and potential of research, and how you go about it. But we still face competing ideas and paradigms, focusing in detail on the research process. Should it be a bottom-up process with rigorous protocols so you can turn every stone before thinking about potential solutions? Or should you instead start by defining the solution, top-down, based on your experience, instincts and gut feeling, and disregard research?
With the requirement of speed today, a much more integrated approach is required, one that allows you to merge speed, design and strategy to help drive businesses and organisations forward. The key to tying these three things together is the concept of ‘just enough insights’.
Here are four principles to help you get started.
1. Prioritise early research
Immerse yourself in the context you’re designing for as soon as possible. This is critical for at least two reasons:
First of all, this helps you build initial understanding and empathy of the domain you’re designing for. As it will inform your planning and decision making. Define a high level initial research framework, eg. like a mindmap, before starting your research.
Secondly, this will also allow you to leverage existing insights and discover your knowledge gaps. Don’t repeat the work of others, but use it to learn, and refine and detail your framework, fast.
To get started, I would suggest a couple of my favourite research activities:
Begin with search engines like Google Scholar or more specific scientific journals. Do this as you learn about the project you’re engaging in, and do it even before the first client meeting. Make sure to look for meta-studies first before diving deep into selected publications.
This will help and guide you to ask better questions before deep diving into materials from the client — such as insight reports. After this, continue with stakeholder interviews to understand the client’s priorities, objectives and challenges, and be sure to look out for hints and insights that can guide you as you continue with the process.
2. Define and share hypotheses often
Based on your initial insights start defining hypotheses to build a point of departure for your design and to qualify discussions about scope.
Here, I would recommend starting by mapping all your findings as you do in your early research. Consider using a ‘quick and dirty’ approach by using screenshots of particular parts of articles like quotes and graphs to map your research. An effective and easy platform for gathering your findings could be using an online tool like Miro, which allows you to easily drag and drop screenshots. Build a simple framework to help you structure your findings across your research focus areas, and as you go along make sure to add links for later deep dives.
Then, set aside time to look for patterns across your findings. I recommend doing this in short 45 or 90-minute sprints with a teammate; to force yourself to keep it focused and stay open to questions and input that might guide your further work. You can easily do this remotely. Look for challenges, opportunities, activities, knowledge gaps etc.
In this part of the process it is critical that you activate your hypotheses and insights by sharing them with your team and the client as deliverables. These could be target audience profiles, key challenge descriptions, journey or process maps etc. Aim for sharing often and make sure to facilitate discussions that can sharpen your direction further. Don’t push yourself to do a fully fleshed out deliverable now, but allow for an iterative process and ‘just enough insights’ to propel you and the team forward.
3. Explore how challenges and hypotheses can be drivers for opportunities
It is essential to think of challenges and hypotheses as something active and open-ended that can drive your exploration process. Each challenge is a potential opportunity. To me, this part of the process is extremely motivating. You’ll have to combine curiosity and creativity, trust the process, and insist on exploring the challenges from multiple angles to discover the opportunities. This can be a hard, but also a very fun and rewarding process.
On the one hand, go for bottom-up exploration with your client, target audiences or other key stakeholders and use something specific for conversation starters. At this stage of the process, think of your hypotheses and initial deliverables as prototypes for exploration and always try to take them one step further and conceptualise them whenever possible. This could be as an exercise for an upcoming workshop: how might we’s, journey maps, or anything else that could support discussions and exploration of your hypotheses. Again, doing this in 45 or 90-minute sprints can be surprisingly fruitful.
On the other hand, you should also go for top-down market, competitor or trend research. Ask yourself — or a colleague who can help out — how your hypotheses are reflected in a wider perspective. What are the drivers behind them and how might they explain or change your hypotheses?
You can keep refining, adding or even discarding hypotheses — in the form of different types of deliverables — on their journey towards becoming more and more valid. This way your hypotheses will support decision-making and begin to set a direction for your product design.
4. Do additional research when you need it
During your initial research, you will learn about your knowledge gaps. And working with your hypotheses, you will need to explore or validate them further. Exactly what kind of research to conduct, who to interview or which focus areas to look into is rarely possible to anticipate before you reach the point where you need it.
What is important here, is to stay open for doing additional research, and embrace the fact that this might influence the direction of your design and process. This is an inherent implication of aiming for just enough research. Think of additional research as stepping stones — which activities are needed to elevate you to the next step in your intertwined strategy and design process?
I’m curious about your thoughts on this
How are you connecting design and strategy in your work? Which role do insights play in this? And how might the concept of ‘just enough insights’ and the four principles work for you?
Manyone is a strategy-design hybrid. Visit us at Manyone.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
