Challenges are a hot topic in our studio at the moment, we're trying to get better at:
- learning from them
- where possible avoiding them, and
- spotting them early
We posted a more general article on this last week: learning from our challenge piles.
I presented on this at UX Australia last month
Presentation slideshow
I promised to follow up on the challenge that I didn't get to during my presentation; what happens when user and business needs collide?
As an industry we're pretty comfortable with technology, we are getting better at designing with implementation in mind. We are great at representing users and their needs, and we're used to working within time and budget constraints. What we need to get better at is the business stuff.
The conflicting perspectives of a human centered design project
If we're going to create impact, it's no longer good enough to design for our clients, we have to design with them. This means understanding our client's worlds, as well as our user's.
Campaigning for something that users want/need is useless, unless the business can support it. Here's an example.
We've been working with Asgard Wealth Solutions for over a year now, to improve the customer experience of their financial trading platform, AdviserNET.
When we started on the project we did a few solid months of research. We heard customers talking about reporting, for their investors and businesses. Reporting was very important to them and was currently taking too long to produce results.
We took this back to the business and decided that we should prioritise reporting.
What we heard from the business was that we needed to focus on the transacting components of the system, before starting on reporting. We were puzzled, "but they're more concerned about reporting, it's wasting their time".
We went around and around the boardroom. I grew more and more frustrated. The fact is though, I should never have been arguing on the first place, without improvements to the transactional components of AdviserNET, there wouldn't be a platform. Asgard needed to increase revenue. This meant focusing of transacting first.
This is an example of what can happen when designers don't explore and understand the implications of their recommendations.
What did we learn from this?
- Business and customer needs should be balanced
- Designers need to get better at facilitating discussions around feasibility, by asking questions like, "does this support the business priorities and needs"
- Always step through what implementation would look like, for the business and the user, in detail with the wider stakeholder group
