Designing for what matters
How design and innovation can influence products, platforms, and the wider ecosystem.
Here at Z Energy, we’ve evaluated our efforts as innovation catalysts over the past year. We measure not only our activity but also our impact. This begs the question, how might we design in line with our stated purpose: “Solving for what matters for a moving world”?
It’s not completely clear to me how we achieve this aspiration as a company, especially as a designer. I’m often in the nitty gritty of bringing new products to the market (like Fastlane) so I’m not always considering our wider portfolio or impact as an organisation.
Inspired by a few books and talks (including Google’s Director of User Experience, August de los Reyes, on his idea of Ecosystem UX—see video), I have come to what I believe is a profound clarity: Designing for what matters at the feature and product level, and prioritising for the biggest experience gap at the platform level, allows organisations to solve what truly matters in the wider ecosystem. Below I’ll dig into some examples of this insight and how we as designers, researchers, and product managers can be effective at each layer.
Design at a feature and product level
So how might we design for what matters at a feature or product level? I’ll start by articulating the difference between the two.
A feature is a function or characteristic of a product that meets the needs of the customer or brings delight. Customers typically experience features organically themselves, by the affordance of the product itself. For example:
- A feature of a door is the ability to push or pull on a handle, so a customer can open it.
- A feature of Gmail is the ability to archive or delete an email, so a customer can manage their inbox.
- A feature of refuelling at Z is the ability to enter in spend, so a customer doesn’t pay more than they want.
A product, on the other hand, is an item or a service made up of a collection of features, typically with a bigger vision in mind. The whole product is where the customers relate to its value as more than the sum of its features. Customers often hear of the idea of a product by word of mouth or marketing, but experience the product through its features. Products do not “turn off”, as they can add value even while not actively in use. For example:
- Yale’s ‘Keyless Entry’, which offers the ability for a customer to remotely unlock their home or business, includes various features such as Bluetooth and optional deadbolts. When the customer is not actively using it, it is still keeping the house secure.
- Z’s ‘Frictionless Experiences’ product, which offers the ability for customers to get in and out of Z quicker and easier, first seen with our Fastlane trial.
It’s easy for organisations or the designers themselves to focus on design at the feature level, because focusing on making small improvements on the user interface or tweaking features to increase optimisation is satisfying and there is generally immediate return.
For example, when we released Fastlane to the market, we didn’t initially release it with the ability to pay with ‘Z Card’ (our fuel card). We heard complaints from the business and customers alike, so we added it. While many of the complaints went away, this change didn’t dramatically affect the uptake of the trial. What might have made a massive impact is if we implemented a solution where business owners could manage a fleet of cars from the online portal they already use. Understanding how business owners, administrators, and drivers use their fuel card might have created a much different solution to the one we have put to the market today.
By empowering those involved in the strategic development of each initiative with a keen understanding of the customer, the decisions made when bringing the product to life will make it more enriching. In addition, empowering the designers specifically to think more universally about the entire product experience (instead of just designing at a feature level) will naturally form a more cohesive and intuitive product as a whole.
Empowering the designers to think more universally about the entire product experience will naturally form a more cohesive and intuitive product as a whole.
While we haven’t figured out how to utilise design to its full extent, we believe we have begun to mature by utilising human-centred design techniques and implementing customer experience design principles. These six principles, inspired by the classic CX pyramid from Forrester, ensure that what we create is effective.
Meet my needs
- Be customer obsessed. Start with understanding our customers’ needs, motivations, and problems before looking at solutions.
- Co-create with others. Collaborate across the business, with customers and partners, to maximise value for everyone.
Make it easy
- Be cohesive. Contribute to the overall experience within a unified brand to build trust and confidence with our customers.
- Make it simple. Solve complex problems with thoughtfully simple solutions. Products and services are intuitive, logical, and straight up.
Make it enjoyable
- Go beyond expectations. Proactively anticipate our customers’ needs and design above and beyond their ever increasing expectations.
- Make it engaging. Build emotional connections and delight our customers; fueled by insights, data, and technology.
Aligning on these principles to help design and make product decisions support us in offering true value to the customer (and therefore value to the business). It also has immense positive upstream effects on the wider brand or what Reyes calls the platform.
Design at a platform level
A platform is a collection of products that engage and interact with one another within a single brand, benefiting both the customers and the business. I believe when we talk about Customer Experience, what we are talking about is the sum of our products offering value — our platform — and how we converse about these products with our customers (marketing, support, public relations, etc.). For example:
- Microsoft Office allows its customers to use a suite of products to communicate and get work done. It’s comprised of a range of different products and services that people subscribe to because of the brand equity and the value it offers.
- Z Energy retail network (serving both consumers and businesses) allows its customers to fuel up, service their vehicle, purchase conveniences, and refresh in one stop.
While I mentioned before that design at a product level is important, it often brings incremental benefits to businesses and their users. To design for what matters at this platform level is inherently more complex and requires organisations to think bigger about the role of design and its priorities. Kumar Mehta, Ph.D. suggests in his book The Innovation Biome, organisations need to prioritise for the largest experience delta in the human experience for innovation to be effective.
“The experience delta is the currency for defining an innovation, the force behind all activities, and the standard by which to measure the progress of the effort. The larger the experience delta, the greater the societal value provided by the innovation.”
At Z, we take a balanced approach to product strategy — like the ‘portfolio approach’ we introduced as part of our innovation team —so that there is a more likely chance of finding true innovation and solving for what matters. We also utilise a customer journey map at a product and platform level to highlight areas where we aren’t considering the universality of the user experience.
We take a balanced approach to product strategy so there is a more likely chance of finding true innovation and solving for what matters.
But what happens when you prioritise everything? Intercom’s Des Traynor points out in his poignant video that Product Strategy can easily become a mess, turning into a “collection of tangentially barely useful things smashed together.”
It’s here at a platform level where design typically gets pushed aside. Designers often get tasked with focusing on the micro-experience but miss dealing with the bigger strategy. And yet on the strategic level, true design intent can drive real customer behaviour change and a shift of expectations. When designing for cohesion between the products, platform, and the many gaps in between, customers trust the brand even more. This builds equity that is of higher value to the business than an individual product customer.
As Airbnb’s Director of Design Jenny Arden states in a 2018 design meetup, “design” is not just thinking about pixels but about earning your customers’ trust.
“Ultimately, what I think designers do is design for trust…. Users are no longer willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. You actually have to earn this.”
— Jenny Arden, Director of Design at Airbnb
August de los Reyes says that design can add immense unique value here, taking complex systems and complex ideas and straightforwardly presenting them, bringing cultural equity to a product.
“With the focus on harmonising the efforts of third parties, which could imply they have intents that are different from your own, not only does [ecoystems] create a really complex problem to harmonise, but I think it’s also something very elegant.” — August de los Reyes, Director of UX at Google
For example, when Google began to explore and design multi-factor authentication (MFA) for their Google Apps in 2010, they were simply designed to keep customers’ accounts secure and build customers trust.
But their first version had little cultural equity, as Reyes would put it. Over time, Google realised it had to teach its customers why it was worth doing. Customers didn’t understand why Gmail would be asking for their phone number or how this new “Authenticator” app works. Even still, many wanted more across the platform. One blog commenter said, “It would be great if this was a standard option on ALL of Google’s services. This is the best way ahead for cloud services.”
Looking back, Google was changing its customer expectations around security, which has had lasting effects reaching farther than Google. MFA is now a security standard for both consumers and businesses, with customers now expecting the extra security when it comes to their most valuable information.
Similar shifts in customer expectation can be seen in many different industries because of decisions on the platform level. For example, retail businesses have shifted to an “always on sale”, which shifted customer’s desire for thinking they are getting a good deal. Social media has needed to provide instant intrinsic gratification, growing a user’s reliance on these tools. By prioritising for the biggest experience gap and dealing with the social and cultural complexity through elegant design, modern organisations (like Google in the example above) have played massive ecosystem impacts, regardless if they’ve have had positive or negative effects.
Design at an ecosystem level
An ecosystem is a collection of platforms and brands in a broader context, not focused on a single business, but embracing and inviting participation with third parties. A few examples of brands having an ecosystem impact through their innovation and product design processes:
- Apple transformed the smartphone ecosystem with its iPhone in 2005 by enhancing not only the product and its features, but transforming the cultural value of a phone — the non-economic and non-functional benefits of the product — which was brought to life through its reliance on good design.
- Xero transformed the NZ small-business ecosystem in 2006 by changing the way people thought about managing reconciliations and about cloud-based software, again brought to life by taking the complex and simplifying it through design.
- Lewis Road Creamery here in NZ started by having a vision of being locally farmed and sourced. This has transformed the dairy industry and now organic and local milk and dairy is not a premium—it’s customer expectation. They’ve even had a massive impact on the chocolate milk scene.
- Countdown Supermarkets have launched ‘Click & Collect’ (and delivery), prompting a massive change to how remote and time-poor customers buy and receive groceries. While this was probably an impact stemming from other massive organisations like Amazon, here in NZ it was a first. Since then, other major supermarkets and retail brands—including Z Energy—have needed to start considering pre-order and click & collect experiences to meet customer expectations.
I believe considering ecosystem impact in our product vision allows us to start influencing the larger New Zealand landscape — which enables us to begin morphing and changing the world around us for the better. However, “considering ecosystems” is an aspirational thought, and I’m still quite unclear about businesses start to tackle that.
Considering ecosystem impact in our product vision allows us to start influencing the larger New Zealand landscape.
For example, if a business starts with customer-centric design at a feature level and prioritisation for large experience deltas at a platform level, they could probably expect some level of impact on an ecosystem level. Uber’s VP of Product Design, michael gough expands on this from a talk last year here in NZ.
“The core of design is empathy. That’s the starting point no matter what. That will always be how you address any product challenge. The classic way products were developed was you solved functional needs, and then maybe business needs, and then you lean heavily into human needs over time.” —Michael Gough, Uber VP of Product Design
Uber started their small ride-sharing platform in San Francisco and have now heavily influenced the mobility ecosystem. Gough, said: “We didn’t expect all of the downstream things that come and we are learning a lot about how we are transforming cities.” He proposes that designers are good at understanding systems and patterns and can start recognising the potential social, economic, and environmental impact of the work that they do. While it may possible to operate on this level (Gough created principles and designs teams to help understand their impact on those three levels), I think we still agree that the process for designing for what matters starts with connecting with people and their needs.
Some of the ecosystem effects of what we are doing now at Z with Fastlane are still yet to be seen. It will start with seeing how customer expectations will change with automating payment and whether competitors start offering a similar product. Even more, the possibility of using your number plate as a “payment method” gets me really excited about the wider impact we can make because of Fastlane.
In addition, we’re about to launch a new product here at Z. I believe it will transform customer expectations and behaviours because of its large experience delta. Once it launches, over time, we’ll learn if the impact on customers and society is as great as we hypothesized.
So how might we design in line with our purpose as an organization: “Solving for what matters for a moving world”? I believe it is by starting with understanding people. Then we could design for their needs at the product level. This, with prioritising the biggest experience delta at the platform level, will ultimately influence the wider ecosystem.
How do you think design and innovation can be used to solve for what matters?
