One size doesn’t fit all: 3 ways to drive adoption with human-centred design

Earlier in our Journey to digital enablement series, we introduced you to our Salesforce journey where we explained how we set up our transformation for success by focusing on our people. Too often, people are the reason transformations fail. If they don’t buy in to changes, it’s almost impossible for new technologies and processes to live up to expectations.

We knew that if we wanted to change the way our people worked, we had to find innovative ways to spark interest and boost engagement. To do this, we put our people and what drives them at the forefront of all of our design implementation and training decisions.

Given the diversity of people within our global network of firms, we knew a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work. Instead, we used human-centric design principles to encourage change.

This meant putting a laser focus on our people’s experiences.

Putting people first

We asked our development teams to focus on designing solutions that would work for our people. We asked one question over and over again: “Is this solution easy to use?” When the answer was “yes,” we knew we were on the right path.

We continue to ask this question every day. We’re also using tools like Einstein Analytics to better understand how our people are using Salesforce, so we can improve their experience over time. Continuous improvement helps us stay ahead of shifting dynamics and is critical to our long-term success.

3 techniques for successful human-centred design

Over the course of our journey, we found three human-centric-design techniques useful for encouraging digital adoption. Consider using these techniques as part of your own change approach.

1. Identify key personas

When it comes to encouraging behavioural change, remember this: people are different. In most companies, teams are made up of people with diverse characteristics, from their roles, ages and cultural backgrounds to their digital skill sets and readiness for change. To foster stronger digital enablement, it’s important to understand the different journeys your people are on and what will encourage them to change how they work.

We used personas to support our human-centred design approach and to push a consistent experience for our people across all platforms. To make sure we identified valid data-driven personas, we conducted extensive interviews across our global network of firms, gathering insights into how our people work. We then segmented our people by roles and behaviour sets, addressing different pain points and customizing their journeys.

2. Create journey maps

Identifying key personas is only one part of human-centred design. Once you understand how your people are different, you need to understand how they work and what you can do to encourage them to change their behaviours.

Once we identified key personas, we developed day-in-the-life journey maps for each. We used these maps to inform the design of our solution and our digital enablement strategy. As part of our transformation approach, we then created future-focused, day-in-the-life journey maps to help our people understand what changes would mean for them and how Salesforce could help them achieve their day-to-day goals.

3. Tailor learning experiences

People can make or break the success of a transformation. It’s important to understand the unique needs of different personas during the design process. But even more important is the need to tailor learning experiences and training to different personas so people in different roles can embrace digital adoption rather than fear it.

We developed persona-specific learning modules as part of our transformation journey. This included designing a suite of interventions for each of the different personas so our people could better understand how changes would affect them directly. For example, we created a digital proficiency curve to increase the adoption of digital tools among partners and staff. And we helped our teams advance to a higher level of digital proficiency through tailored interventions.

Focusing on people

When it comes to digital transformation, people need to be front and centre of not only the design approach but the implementation process as well. In our next blog, we’ll share how we created an innovative campaign to drive digital adoption among our people.

Find out how our digital enablement approach can help you on your journey. Contact us today.

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