Toward a unique customer experience using design thinking

The housing association in Stavanger, Norway, a company known to the vast majority of the locals, was looking to find new ways to offer a unique customer experience. If you’re a UX designer, I’m sure you can relate to this as a dream project come true — a large organisation ready for change, willing to invest in learning what their customers actually want. We were hired to gather comprehensive user insights, map out organisational inefficiencies and discover opportunities for automation and digitalisation.
To clarify, a housing association’s mission is to provide and manage housing for its members. The association is owned by its members as a mutual organisation. In Norway, housing associations played a large role in the reconstruction after the second World War by building housing cooperatives for the people. While housing associations used to have strong political ties and were not intended to make a profit, today, these associations have a strong commercial objective and are run like most other commercial businesses.
We started the project by mapping out the various stakeholder groups. As you can probably imagine, a housing association has quite a few. We reached out to customers and members, partner companies and employees and pretty much asked people out for coffee. In just over a month, we had conducted in-depth interviews with several representatives from each stakeholder group. We also held workshops with employees and managers from the housing association to learn about their organisation and in order to establish engagement and ownership of the changes that were to come.
We processed and analysed the data collected through interviews, observations and workshops through the use of customer journey mapping, user stories and process mapping. Further, we identified opportunities for improvement, innovation or digitalisation and developed concepts for further development of the organisation’s offerings, services and internal processes.
In about three months, we identified 46 possible projects and 62 quick fixes. Our deliverable included detailed sketches and descriptions of several of these suggested solutions. However, our greatest accomplishment was leaving behind an organisation that was finally knowledgeable about its customers’ needs and ready for change.

