Sutherland Labs — Studio Visit
Behind-the-scenes at the 5-year-old innovation lab for a global digital transformation company
Thursday, March 28, 2019
In my search for design companies in the Bay Area, I discovered Sutherland Labs and instantly fell in love with their approach: merging research, design, and strategy to innovate with experiences and services. I immediately reached out to John Kolesar for a studio visit.
Background
At Sutherland Labs, designers collaborate to bring the human back into digital services. Just think of the awful voice machine when you call customer service that makes you listen to an entire speech before offering what you need. Service design is all about transforming these experiences — in particular, the ones that overlap with customers and internal processes. While this isn’t their only focus, it is a huge one. Projects at Sutherland Labs range from research explorations to complete experience revamps for both their parent company Sutherland Global and external clients — I can’t name any specifics, but you already know these giants off the top of your head.
Here are the major takeaways from this visit:
- Project Diversity
- Advocating for the Design Process
- Experience Design, Applied!
1. Project Diversity
At Sutherland Labs, researchers, experience designers, and graphic designers alike work on a wide range of fields, from healthcare to banking to transportation. Technology is at nearly every touchpoint in our lives, anyway! Adaptability is key when running from client meeting to client meeting. Sometimes, the toughest part is simply engaging with clients from a completely different industry without seeming lost.
Project types also vary widely — From broad 1-week research explorations to specific goal-driven projects, the team emphasizes collaboration and transparency with clients as much as possible, even going to lengths for facilitating on-site observations of customer engagements. All of this is to promote involvement and ensure clear understanding of the human-centered design process.
2. Advocating for the Design Process
Top-level, C-suite clients from business-heavy organizations often don’t have the same human-centered point of view as designers. As such, educating and advocating for the benefits of human-centered design (HCD for short) is part of the job. The value of HCD is clear as day when given some thought: A great customer experience will lead to more customers and sales. Of the flip side, a poor customer experience will lead to a decrease in customers and sales.
The education and onboarding process for new clients has to be strategic and guided, as goes with any design agency. One example might be hosting a quick Journey-Mapping session with clients to map out experience touchpoints and identify areas of opportunity. The ability to see all parts of a User Journey in a map allows clients to understand logically and from a design perspective how customers feel as they are trying to complete a task. Seeing from this new perspective allows people to think and imagine in new directions… drawing up the creative “what-ifs” that are vital to inciting change within an organization.
3. Experience Design, Applied!
This was the most exciting part for me: seeing Experience Design and the broader Service Design methodologies applied in real life (psst — it’s the exact same stuff you learn in your XD course or online)! Sticky notes were mapped in charts of all sorts on every wall in the studio, and the creative thinking was overflowing. User Personas and User Flows were plotted on large sheets of foam core, which made complete sense — I have struggled immensely trying to fit an entire user journey on a 1920x1080 px canvas because there’s simply too much information to visualize! Working large scale allows people to view the entire process in detail, including Tasks, Pain Points, and Opportunities that respond to each Phase of the journey.
Moreover, there is not one best way to visualize maps because every project has different requirements. Emotional scales (e.g. stress levels) and focus points (are you trying to emphasize that the user journey has too many steps, or that specific areas are troublesome?) should be chosen based on the most important aspects of the project.
Concluding Thoughts
Sutherland Labs is a small, but extremely talented service design team with major clients from all around the globe. Their design practices and methodologies are the same as what I’ve learned and practiced throughout my experiences in the Industrial Design program at RISD. Even more, I totally empathize with the need to educate people on a day-to-day basis about human-centered design. I do this through co-leading the RISD/Brown Design for America Studio, and I do this in my daily interactions with strangers on the plane or with friends from completely different academic backgrounds.
By putting users at the core of the design problem, you are able to solve for key problems that affect peoples’ lives. Undeniably, the ethics of the product or service in question is debatable. In the real world, when working for business clients, the line between “human need” and “consumer need” is blurred and often goes back to the core values of the company. But by being a human-centered designer, we make peoples’ lives a little bit easier to live. It’s our choice to decide for whom we want to design better lifestyles, and why.
Who are you using your design superpower to fight for?
Special thanks to John Kolesar and Jun Chan for being wonderful hosts!
