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Brian Gillespie

Posts written by Brian Gillespie

September 28

Visualizing Strategy

Connect the strategy to design dots!

Designers partnering in business strategy formation bring many fresh tools, techniques, and perspectives to the process. From methods for gathering information, forming insights, generating ideas, imagining concepts, validating concepts, and articulating a design vision that can make ideas real, design strategists (or strategic designers) bring unique value every step of the way.

One of the most powerful tools at the disposal of the strategy team is the collection of all of the strategic intelligence that realizes the strategy into a single visualization that quickly communicates the forces driving the strategy. From the digital business perspective visualizations often reflect strategies for single or multi-channel products, services, and experiences. The end result may be a completely new web site, a specific set of web-based services for a target market, or a multi-site strategy reflecting a diverse marketing campaign embracing social networks and other discrete touchpoints.

Visualizations can be all-encompassing, covering a full range of inputs that typically include over-arching corporate strategy, brand positioning, competitive positioning, and target consumers as well as outputs such as strategic drivers, principal ideas and concepts translated into prioritized products and services, and brand and design principles to apply when tackling implementation. On the other hand, visualizations can also focus on one contributor to the strategy information stream. A good example is the quantitative and qualitative research driving the establishment of market segmentation and creation of target customer personas.

Strategic design visualizations provide business design strategy a number of great benefits. Here are a few.
1. At a glance they provide a visual framework and a strategic context within which to house a quick view into the extensive research, insights, and findings driving the strategy. The report in word, the extensive presentation deck, the reams of research documentation are all still valid. Yet the visualization allows the viewer to quickly grasp the essence of the strategy and its principal highlights.
2. Visualizations are excellent ways to begin the socialization of strategy process across the organization.
3. Visualizations can be an excellent way to show how all departments within a company play a role in the execution of a strategy.
4. Visualizations can communicate the business logic driving design initiatives. In other words, one can draw a line through the visualization connecting the strategic dots that connect a piece of content, a new feature, a tone of voice, a certain aesthetic, to the core strategy.
5. Visualizations provide support objectivity when brainstorming ideas for new products and services.

Hey reader! If you have used great information design at your company to share your design and business strategies you may also have noticed the benefits. Why not share them here!?

posted to: Creative, Digital Strategy, Strategic Design | No Comments »

July 10

Design drives Innovation! Read all about it!

by Brian Gillespie

“Design as a Driver of User-centered Innovation”
“Using Design to Drive Innovation”
“Design Thinking for Innovation”
“Fostering Innovation Culture In An Unpredictable Economy”

Wow. You’d want to be crazy not to involve designers in your strategy for innovation! Right?! There is quite the clamor to replace, or at least partner, strategy with innovation, business thinking with design thinking, and technology R & D approaches to innovation with consumer-driven approaches. There are some great stories, making great headlines, about innovative new products and services, which are the result of a design-driven approach. Some are truly deliberate from the start; others had a happy ending and could rewrite history to fit the good story! And this is a good story. One that has lessons and insights for every business with faith in the need for innovation and a desire to continually improve their customer’s experience of their business, however they interact with the business. It also requires a will to lead their industry and leapfrog the competition, to regularly provide new customer value, and to inspire their internal teams to succeed.

So you are a business leader and you have seen the headlines and you have a few questions. So what does innovation by design mean? How does design drive innovation? Innovating what? Design thinking, huh? What do I need to do? Who can help me? How do I engage their help? Should I worry about ROI or just let the designers have at it? How can I afford to invest in innovation during a recession? How can designers help me? So many questions, so little time so today I will answer the final question…and only in part. Here are three ways that designers can help. There are more than three, but we’ll work with three today!

Designers can provide a framework within which to drive your innovation agenda. A simple and effective framework is an essential strategy and innovation process, revolving around three essential activities:

1. Gathering the business and consumer insights that will drive ideas
2. Generating as many ideas or business opportunities as possible,
3. Visualizing and prototyping the best ideas.

The icing on the cake is validation upon which to base your measurement strategy and return on design investment (RODI), which in these recessionary times is often an essential component of the decision to invest. Within this framework designers can draw from a wide range of proven tools and techniques to reveal ideas that can drive innovation. Experience audits, differentiation analysis, customer experience immersion, creative brainstorming, rapid prototyping, consumer participation, and strategy visualizations are but a few.

Designers can work with consumers, customers, and users to drive user-centered innovation. User-centered designers bring empathy to their investigations into opportunities for innovating product and service experiences. Insights revealed by first-hand immersion in the consumer experience are often the sparks that lead to great ideas. Building these ideas on a foundation of business and customer intelligence guarantees that your design strategy lines up perfectly in sync with your business strategy. That’s a good recipe for success in good times and tough times.

posted to: Digital Strategy, Experience Design, Industry Trends, Strategic Design | 1 Comment »

June 8

The Dynamic Duo of Persona and Consumer Journey

by Brian Gillespie

consumerjourneycollage

One of the principal strategic design tools employed by design teams today is the persona. The persona has come a long way in the past few years and is being broadly accepted by business as a critical component to defining a business strategy for new product and service innovation. The reasons for this acceptance are clear: the best personas are being created from insights developed through a balanced effort of qualitative and quantitative research. Marketing stakeholders are finding that personas, aligned with their market segmentation, really bring to life the characteristics of customers they have become very familiar with over the years, in a very real and dynamic way. In addition, the methods for socializing personas within an organization make them relevant such that they become a readily referred tool for a wide range of business planning activities.

However, the value and use of personas can increase considerably when paired with another empathic design tool…the user or consumer journey. At its highest level, a consumer journey outlines the various stages in the lifecycle of a consumer’s interaction with a brand, from initial awareness through to long-term retention. At a practical level marketers plot the potential channels through which they can acquire, convert, and retain customer’s interest in their products, services, and experiences, both analog and digital. It is becoming increasingly attractive and complex to orchestrate an overall, holistic experience of the brand that communicates in a clear, consistent, on-brand fashion. Marketers have a great number and mix of potential customer touchpoints at their disposal, beyond the direct contact with the product or service. Ancillary experiences through digital touchpoints, such as search engines, social media, digital signage, etc call for a broader understanding of the possible destinations for target markets.

Personas allow marketers to evaluate their options for interaction through the lens of key personas, representing target market segments. When personas are mapped to consumer journeys, digital marketers can be more deliberate about the communication strategies they roll out across channels. For design teams conducting customer research it is important to investigate the broader digital space that target users interact with. Are they bloggers…lurkers or leaders? Do they attend venues with digital signage? How do they use social networks? How are they influenced by others online? What web sites do they trust for actionable information? What web sites do they purchase products and services on? How do they use search engines? By investigating the answers to these questions designers can piece together insights into consumer’s current experience and how that can likely be stated as a prospective consumer journey over time and the key touchpoints that are likely to expose the consumer to a company’s product or service.

More and more digital designers are being enlisted to provide the insights and intelligence needed to strategize this open digital space. That’s good news for designers and good news for business!

posted to: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Experience Design, Strategic Design | No Comments »

November 10

Service design and/or Experience design?

by Brian Gillespie

Service Design Management was the theme at the 5th Design Management Forum in Cologne this past weekend. The title to the conference was “Creating Experience” which got some of us in attendance discussing the difference between service design and experience design.
In my own investigations before the conference I noticed that descriptions of experience design tended to suggest that experience design was actually the super-design practice, responsible for designing products, processes, services, events, and environments utilizing such diverse disciplines as graphic design, interior design, architecture, digital design, theater, exhibit design, theme-park design, game design, environmental design, and communications. I’d like to meet that designer! You name it, they do it!
Since I was attending a conference on design management I could not help thinking that experience design ought possibly be instead considered experience design management. As a design management practice, and not a design practice, it is responsible for orchestrating the distinct design services into creating the integrated whole experience. All the original design practices can continue to call themselves graphic designers, architects, etc., who not only do what they typically do but also at times contribute to a larger entity, the experience, in collaboration with many other design practices. Now as we know bringing different design practices together to work towards a single end is not unlike a very ancient craft…cat-herding! However, ultimately the greatest skill of the designer who also wants to be regarded as an experience designer may be their ability to collaborate.
Parting musings…my pre-conference investigations had experience designers designing services and service designers designing experiences. Is this possible?
It was also suggested that experience design is different than service design because xd is focused on the touch-point itself, the front-line of the experience, whereas service design also considers not just that but also the day-to-day processes that make the service work. That it goes deeper into the organization…and honestly as soon as you start doing that, are we back to being design managers again?

posted to: Experience Design, Strategic Design | No Comments »

May 14

Usability and Design, neighbors or roommates?

by Brian Gillespie

I like the approach UPA is taking to their international conference…
The theme of the conference is “usability and design: cultivating diversity“.

“Usability and design are professional approaches that are often seen separately. Usability is perceived to be focused on establishing standards, rather than a culture of practices to make products and services simpler, easier, and more pleasant to us. Design on the other hand is often connected to creativity and innovation.

This conceptual separation – which this conference sets out to overcome – is reflected in how the consultancy market is composed, how companies organise their staff, and the different professional languages in use.”