Building design in a technology organisation
A Q&A with Nikos Karaoulanis, Head of Experience Design at Kainos
Technology companies are proud of their engineering heritage and capabilities. Their aim is to deliver efficiently engineered digital products. Design and design thinking however, are not always part of that heritage. We recently sat down with Nikos Karaoulanis, Head of Experience Design at Kainos to discuss his experience building a design capability in an engineering organisation.
Q: Over the last few years Kainos has built a sizeable design capability. A few weeks ago you were placed 10th in the Econsultancy 2018 Top 100 Digital Agencies report. Can you briefly take us through the journey of introducing design in a tech environment?
A: It has been a long journey and one where we have not yet reached our destination. I see four distinct steps, so far at least:
1. Understand context: I remember when I first joined the company, I spent some time visiting projects and asking people what they thought of ‘design’. My research gave me insight into how the company viewed design. It exposed long-held beliefs and a few misconceptions. Being aware of the wider context proved invaluable in growing and ‘selling’ design
2. Show the value: Story telling as a means of making the case for design is fine. Tangible proof is better. So while I would make the argument for design and the value it can deliver, I needed to back my views up with actual, tangible proof. The way I did that was to choose a project and get busy proving the value of design.
3. Build Support: Being able to apply user-centred design and design thinking on projects enabled us to both point at the value we can deliver and also gather support. It was critical to gain the right advocates early on. We found that the most effective advocates were delivery managers and account leads, people who were able to promote design across the project and with clients.
4. Request commitment: Once design was being included in projects and was seen as adding value, we needed to consolidate our position and ask for ‘official’ support and recognition. Being recognised as a distinct team meant we had the mandate to expand the team, introduce new skillsets, and define and sell new design offerings.
Q: Surely you must have faced challenges along the way
A: A few… There are two that come to mind:
- Established and long-standing views of design as the last step in building a digital product or service; design as the optional final, aesthetic layer. Technology firms have for some time delivered projects with no or very little design input, so why should they change? ‘What is it that a researcher would do that a business analyst cannot?’, ‘Testing with users takes time and affects delivery timescales’, ‘you are the guys that make it look pretty’. These questions and statements reveal long-held beliefs that needed to be addressed if we were to successfully build design capabilities.
- Designers’ reluctance to speak the language of others. Designers are proud of their craft, their approaches, and language. We will promote the virtues of design to anyone who will listen. However, we seem reluctant to view our work through the eyes of other, non-designers. How does our work and contribution looks like through the eye of a developer, technical delivery manager, or BA? We had to fight instincts and describe our work in a language familiar to others, not us. We had to find ways to make our work relevant to others.
Q: What next for design at Kainos?
A: Design Intervention. While having a design department is a positive step and a sign of design maturity for any organisation, we need to work on establishing a design approach across departments, teams, and projects; to infuse everything we do with a design approach. The aim will be to use design as strategy, not only as a way to deliver projects. It has been well-documented that organisations that use design strategically grow faster and have higher margins than their competitors. Design as strategy will help us determine and build a sustainable competitive advantage.
Q: Any advice for designers embarking on a similar challenge?
A: Be prepared for a long journey. My experience is that mindsets and established ways of working, especially if they had been successful in the past, take some time to change.
- Do your homework. Understand the organisational context before you plan your approach. Your plan needs to be tailored to the experiences, ways of working, and culture of the organisation.
- Don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself. Over the last 4 years we changed the name of the team three times. This was not because we were not sure who we are and what we do. It was because we needed to frame our work in the wider context. Our description of what we do changed as the understanding of what design is matured.
- Celebrate progress, big and small, and have fun.
