Change Management – How User Research Can Make Your Transformation Efforts Accepting, Fun, Collaborative And More Inclusive.

Almost all successful transformations have one thing in common: Change is driven through empowerment, not mandated from the top. When we at Appnovation conduct customer and user research inhouse for smaller and larger organizations, we pass on the right insights, tools and processes to equip teams and individuals to drive change within their own organization. Here is how we do it.

We Start Small, But Broadly

Today’s digitized world is moving rapidly, and the shelf life of business strategies, marketing plans, customer engagement models, products and (digital) services gets shorter, so a corporation’s transformation capabilities become its only enduring advantage.

Our design and research team at Appnovation learned that by conducting user and behavioural customer research for companies in-house, we not only share valuable new insights about why people hire a company (= their digital product) to help them complete a task, but that we can help educate and empower existing employees to identify gaps and opportunities. This, in turn, means that these employees can drive innovation, improve upon existing operating models, tighten customer relationships, find the right partners, adjust internal processes and be more cautious with their own resources.

Change management starts internally with a small group of people who understand the gap between the value they provide and the value their customers expect.

We recommend starting any user research initiatives by including a few key individuals from across the organization with facetted, diverse backgrounds. This way, learnings from user testing sessions get spread faster throughout the organization in many different ways and through various communication channels.

We Pursue Value

Merely 26% of transformation initiatives succeed. Poor execution and misdiagnosis of the real problems is often the case for change management failure. Why? Quite, often organizations pursue the wrong change path. So before worrying about how to change, executive teams need to figure out what to change — in particular, what to change first. The user research methodologies we apply to understand customer and user behaviour online (external behaviour & attitudes) can also help us identify the challenges within the company (internal behaviour & attitudes), and to prioritize them. Equipped with external and internal insights about customers and employees, leaders can better plan their change management strategies and work on effective communication strategies to create empathy amongst employees. The importance of this early research incubation stage is to understand what customers and employees value most, but also to pick the right transformation quest.

Organization don’t change. People do. Change needs to grow organically and cannot be manufactured or implemented by putting up shiny neon posters with bold, punchy claims printed on them.

We Run Experiments

When we get invited to run user testing sessions to validate the performance of an existing product or service, we usually come prepared with test objectives and a structured script that also includes running experiments with alternative designs or early concept ideas. These in-context experiments are designed to allow us to produce comparable behavioural data and construct product usage patterns. We basically want to know if our alternative designs outperform the existing solutions. As a nice side effect of showing and probing something new to people; they all of a sudden start sharing their thoughts, feelings and emotions they have about this new idea while using it.

Over the years, we became quite confident in producing experiments that allow us to test all sorts of design assumptions and we apply the same techniques to test change management and (digital) transformation strategies and tactics to validate their potential impact on teams, individual employees and customers. In return, the leadership team can see far in advance what works and what does not work, which ideas face more or less support or produce friction.

We found that employees are extremely open to validating and testing new solutions and concepts to solve common problems because they feel that their opinion and insights count. It’s a way of introducing change by doing – a participatory approach to organisational transformation.

Change management is all about data, people and empathy. Changing mindsets and behaviours – internally and externally. User/customer research is all about empathy. The secret to leading organizational change can only be empathy.

We Communicate Change Through Experiencing Insights

People are reluctant to change – or – I should say, our mammalian brain is reluctant. They even accept dealing with old technology, additional complexity and time-consuming work hacks, before learning something new and letting go of a daily routine. But quite often, people just revolt, because change gets first introduced by a person they have never really liked or were always suspicious of. Let’s just say, it isn’t easy to change attitudes or relationships; they’re deeply ingrained in organizations and people. Communicating change effectively and with lasting impact is a skill that only a few leaders have mastered. There is an alternative route to getting people inspired and engaged.

We most commonly start our user research in-house at our client's offices; We take a small team of researchers and embed ourselves within their team of project leaders, product managers, producers, designers and developers. We basically let them do the research and we just assist with the initial set-up and make sure things run smoothly and there are no major hick-ups. This empowers people to be able to gather behavioural user and customer insights on their own and decide themselves what can and should be fixed immediately on the basis of assessing their own capabilities. We believe this is the key part; letting people understand where they made mistakes and having them figured out how to collaboratively fix them. Basically, it’s about training employees to become more self-reflective and able to initiate and take action– with little to no guidance.

All change management and digital transformation initiatives should follow these guidelines and be driven by ideas that come directly from user research and behavioural usability testing methodologies. They are more transparent, acceptable, fun and collaborative.

Need help with behavioural research? I am passianate about UX Design, User Research and Customer Development. Talk to me or one of my collegues at Appnovation about this specific service. Appnovation is a Vancouver based full-service digital agency and we have offices around the world.