Fair greening of broadband access: spectrum management for

Design Methods In The Age Of The CustomerProcesses: The Digital Customer Experience Improvement Playbook

by Allegra BurnetteJuly 8, 2015

For Customer experienCe proFessionAls

fOrrEsTEr.COM

Key takeawaysDesign Methods Expand Beyond Product Teamsthe principles behind the methodologies of design thinking, lean, and Agile can be applied beyond product and software teams to bridge silos, ideate and create research-driven customer experiences, and transform businesses along the way.

Together, They Keep The Big Picture And The Details In BalanceWhen considered inclusively rather than separately, design thinking, lean, and Agile practices enable companies to go from blue-sky ideation to practical planning and detailed execution.

Understand Context, Culture, And Principles To Put A Practice In PlaceWhether they’re defining the strategy and overall approach, mapping out a touchpoint, or designing a particular interaction with the customer, Cx pros need to understand the purpose before applying the tool and adopt or adapt methods to fit within the context of the

company and its goals.

Why read this report

Customer experience (Cx) professionals want to grow and transform their businesses by fostering empathy for their customers, quickly adapting to challenges, and creating effective and compelling experiences. to do that, they turn to design methods that are already familiar to digital and product teams, including design thinking, lean, and Agile methodologies. But it’s very difficult to walk the walk until you can talk the talk. this report breaks down the main principles behind current design practices as the first step to building a cohesive and effective Cx program that’s optimized for customers, markets, capabilities, and goals.

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table of Contents

CX Pros Know What They Need

Design methods promise to transform Cx As usual

But the landscape is shifting rapidly

How To Create Effective Design Capabilities

1. establish the Big picture through Design thinking

2. use lean’s iterative processes to Define And evaluate touchpoints

3. scope And Build Features With Agile

Applications Will Vary

recommendations

Iterate As You Build Your Practice

Supplemental Material

notes & resources

Forrester interviewed 20 vendor, agency, and user companies, including Applause, At&t, Big spaceship, Fedex, Fluid, Ford motor, gotoresearch, iBm, intuit, manifest Digital, ministry of supply, mu/DAi, pivotal labs, prophet, red privet, rosetta, smith, solstice mobile, thoughtbot, and Wells Fargo.

related research Documents

Brief: staffing For Data-Driven Design

How Cx pros innovate

the power of Disciplined simplification

For Customer experienCe proFessionAls

Design Methods In The Age Of The CustomerProcesses: The Digital Customer Experience Improvement Playbook

by Allegra Burnettewith John Dalton, ryan trafton, Kelly price, and Kara Hartig

July 8, 2015

http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES121236



http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO8024

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For Customer experienCe proFessionals

Design Methods In The Age Of The Customerprocesses: the Digital Customer experience improvement playbook

July 8, 2015

© 2015 Forrester research, inc. unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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Cx pros Know What they need

to achieve the three drivers of elevated customer experience — ease, effectiveness, and emotion — companies need to change not only their mindset but also their approach to strategy and practice.1 to complicate matters, emerging customer behaviors that Forrester calls hyperadoption are fueling demand for new product experiences more powerfully than ever before.2 to cut through the noise and build experiences that resonate with customers and build loyalty, Cx professionals strive to be agile and innovative problem-solvers. But too often they find that legacy processes and systems block or slow them down. this is frustrating because firms agree that to succeed in this environment, they must build services and products that express:

› Empathy. understanding customers’ viewpoints and emotions through ethnographic research and qualitative data helps companies create solutions that satisfy — and sometimes exceed — those needs and desires. the agency gotoresearch uses diary studies, remote and in-person interviews, and microsurveys to gather insights that can inform product decisions and strategy in real time. to understand the true value of ethnographic research, mark mcCormick, senior vice president of Wells Fargo, has led customer experience and user experience teams for 20 years. He advocates getting everyone out in the field at some point, particularly executives who don’t usually have the opportunity to hear directly from customers.

› Agility. For Cx professionals, being agile means being able to nimbly adjust course based on data, research, and changing priorities to effectively and efficiently connect with customers. that’s what Hoteltonight did when it moved beyond same-day booking to a new seven-day registration system. the move addressed differing views of what “last minute” meant to customers and alleviated concerns customers had about possibly being stranded with no place to stay that night.3

› simplicity. streamlined experiences that hide their complexity lead the pack — you have only to look at the valuations of design-focused companies like Airbnb and uber to see the evidence. moreover, siegel + Gale, whose 2014 simplicity index ranks brands by how people perceive them, found that 70% of customers were more likely to recommend a brand because it’s simple and 38% would pay more for simpler experiences.4

Design Methods Promise To Transform CX As Usual

Design is big business, which surfaces in the venture capital dollars backing design-focused startups and the growing number of design agency acquisitions by companies like Capital one and mcKinsey.5 no wonder. With its focus on problem solving, process, intention, and visual rendering and output, design promises to help firms build a bridge linking empathy, agility, and simplicity with the intended customer experience. Disciplined design processes help firms cultivate:



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› Deep customer understanding. Designers are familiar with doing various types of qualitative research to understand the mindset and motivations of the end user and are practiced at putting themselves in the customer’s shoes to think through a solution to the challenge at hand. Designers at manifest Digital did so when they took the results of their user testing design ideation and created cartoon strips to visualize the new user flow. these images helped not only the client understand the intended experience but also the developers comprehend how they needed to program it.

› rapid iteration. teams well versed in techniques like design thinking and Agile design know how to work together over mood boards, sketches, and mockups to discuss which direction best suits the needs of the user or when they need to go back to the drawing board and start over. the team at turbotax makes changes quickly thanks to its prototyping culture, in which it A/B-tests the complete experience rather than a small component out of context, making it easier to keep the overall design and feature goals intact along the way.

› relevant solutions. Designers and their methods are the link between strategy and execution, from blue-sky ideation to the implementation of the user interface details. the agency Fluid took a storytelling approach when redesigning an ipad app for a retail client, making product and collection stories the centerpiece of the tablet shopping experience. By developing a hypothesis that shifted the existing paradigm and then prototyping and testing it with users, it was able to develop a product that connected with customers in a way that the old app did not.

But The Landscape Is shifting rapidly

Design thinking is not new, nor are many of the methods in the designer’s toolkit. But over the past decade, there’s been an explosion of interest in design thinking and a corresponding rise in a variety of design methods. As design firm mu/DAi notes, “it’s 1994 all over again,” referencing a time when design agency frog was enjoying the success of its defining collaboration with Apple, and design leaders ideo and razorfish had just opened their doors. But technology has moved a long way since 1994, as companies struggle to integrate:

› Data. Cx professionals pin their hopes on data to help them cut through complexity to find and validate solutions that help save money, grow their business, and improve customer experience. From big data and artificial intelligence projects like iBm’s Watson to A/B test results on which button option customers prefer in a mobile app, data abounds. But as Brooks protzmann, program design director of Watson, says, “the more and more data you have, the more and more design has to filter.”

› speed. manifest Digital notes that its clients traditionally focused on more linear waterfall processes, and as a result, its presentations to them were more fully formed, polished deliverables. But as Agile gains momentum, its clients now come wanting to achieve speed and to create more personalized solutions. Both client and agency have had to adapt their approach to meet the speed needs, including quickly iterating low-fidelity prototypes to arrive at a user-tested solution.



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› Customers’ evolving demands. Humans have a long history of being cautious about embracing change. But today, more people adopt more new product experiences more rapidly than ever before, and big data, cloud architectures, and ubiquitous computing herald another explosion of change in the coming years.6 But hyperadoption can also lead to hyperabandonment, so the pressure to connect quickly with customers is great.

How to Create effective Design Capabilities

Despite the growing interest in and use of design methods, just 29% of companies recently surveyed said that they follow a formal design process.7 Why? Because the customer experience field is vast, rapidly evolving, and confusing. But here’s the good news: Within the constellation of current design methods Cx professionals have at their disposal, there’s a range of tools that can help them manage the entire suite of challenges they face. indeed, pioneers like nordstrom with its innovation lab now promote their model of a comprehensive Cx practice, showing how they combine a variety of methods into an integrated whole (see Figure 1). to turn buzzwords into tangible, effective processes, Cx professionals need to first understand the principles, practices, and uses of the different methods.

1. Establish the big picture through design thinking. Discovery, ideation, and innovation are all hallmarks of the design thinking process, which help establish overall direction and vision as well as determine next steps at key decision forks in the road.

2. refine touchpoints via Lean’s iterative processes. By determining a minimum viable product (mVp) to build, measure, and learn from, companies can develop touchpoints within the customer journey based on customers’ real needs and responses, not guesswork.

3. scope and build features with Agile. When dealing with the nuances of determining required and optional features, short design and development sprints help firms prioritize what really matters to customers, quickly.



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fIGUrE 1 nordstrom innovation lab Combines Design methods in A Comprehensive process

Source: Nordstrom Innovation Lab website

1. Establish The Big Picture Through Design Thinking

tim Brown, president and Ceo of ideo, says, “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

Design thinking is a creative problem-solving mindset and methodology with a “bias toward action” that puts the emphasis on empathizing with the customer, clearly defining the problem, collaboratively and supportively ideating solutions with the team, and then prototyping and testing those solutions (see Figure 2). it can be scaled. iBm Design uses the core tenants of design thinking to build design capabilities across its 300,000-plus global organization as it adds hundreds of new designers to its product teams. Design thinking focuses on:



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› Ethnographic research. ethnographic research plays a key role in design thinking because it emphasizes the human element at the center of the experience. it is an essential corrective that challenges existing assumptions and gives insight into motivations. Agency red privet took data it compiled through extensive ethnographic research for a client and used it to create a decision map that identified the moments that mattered in determining whether a potential healthcare customer ended up as a “researcher,” a “validator” to someone else making the decision, or a “committer.”

› Collaborative problem solving. Active participation is an important aspect of design thinking. As part of the creative phase of a project, consultancy prophet runs what it calls playstudio, a co-creation ideation session during which client teams are put through a series of exercises that expose them to a variety of outside stimuli to help inspire thinking about possible solutions. one technique employed in these sessions is called “human library,” to which prophet invites people who have analogous experiences or expertise in categories outside of clients’ area of focus. their unique perspective helps clients address issues and develop solutions in ways that clients might not have considered.

› rapid idea testing. Google Ventures relies on design thinking as one of the approaches behind its “design sprints” and outlines a five-day process that starts with asking a question and leads to testing a prototype. each day focuses on a particular activity: 1) unpacking everything you know; 2) sketching ideas; 3) determining which ideas to pursue; 4) prototyping; and 5) testing with users. it has used this process to test business ideas, new products, and improvements to existing products, marketing strategies, and more.8 it also applies the process beyond the creation of digital projects to innovate broader business solutions.

fIGUrE 2 Design thinking Building Blocks As Defined By the stanford university institute of Design

Source: Stanford University Institute of Design



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2. Use Lean’s Iterative Processes To Define And Evaluate Touchpoints

lean stems from lean manufacturing, which emphasizes the elimination of waste — creating more value with fewer resources. Jim Womack and Dan Jones, founders of the lean enterprise institute and the lean enterprise Academy in the uK, respectively, emphasize purpose, process, and people in their 1996 book Lean Thinking. more recently, entrepreneur eric ries applied lean concepts to the world of startups, emphasizing the need to eliminate uncertainty, move quickly, and pivot when necessary (see Figure 3). lean prioritizes:

› The minimum viable product (MVP). As eric ries defines it, “the minimum viable product is that version of a new product, which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” A further refinement of the definition of mVp emphasizes that it’s not about putting just a minimum set of functionality out there; it’s about serving up a small slice of the complete experience (see Figure 4). solstice mobile’s goal is to quickly get to market with a product and obtain customer feedback as soon as possible. so it spends between one week and eight weeks — the minimum amount of time required to adequately inform the direction of the product or service — on the strategy sprint phase of the project before beginning development.

› The build-measure-learn approach. the cycle of building and releasing the mVp, measuring it through data including feedback and analytics, and then gleaning insights from that data forms the basis of the lean methodology. By continuously iterating on this cycle, companies are well positioned to pivot when necessary, before spending more time or money on a solution that doesn’t meet the business’ or customers’ needs.



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fIGUrE 3 the lean startup process

Source: The Lean Startup website



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3. scope And Build features With Agile

the Agile methodology came out of the software development world in response to the challenges of managing unpredictable projects. the published Agile manifesto outlines emphasized values: individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and response to change over plan compliance.9 Whereas lean focuses on iterative product releases, Agile emphasizes breaking up the development within those releases into short work cycles called sprints, with testing taking place during each cycle. Agile principles include:

› Continuous examination of scope. out of the three project pillars of time, budget, and scope, Agile identifies scope as the changing variable. What this means is employing a process of continuous prioritization and reprioritization of efforts, while allowing a quick change in direction when something isn’t working as intended.

› Customer-centric feature sets. Agile defines features from the point of view of user stories, which are described in phrases like, “As a [user type], i want [action/thing], so that [reason].” if a feature can’t be tied to a user or purpose, it doesn’t get included in the project plan.

fIGUrE 4 the minimum Viable product As A slice Across the Complete experience

Source: Jussi Pasanen, “Minimum Viable Product: Build a slice across, instead of one layer at a time,”Twitter, September 25, 2014 (https://twitter.com/jopas/status/515301088660959233)



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› Constant communication. An Agile methodology stresses cross-functional collaboration and team colocation whenever possible. short, regular meetings like 15-minute morning standups punctuate an ongoing rhythm of communication through each sprint cycle. retrospective meetings, occurring at the end of a sprint or on a regular time interval, give the team the opportunity to identify what is working or not working and define an action list to immediately address issues before they become obstacles.

Applications Will Vary

this balancing act requires understanding your company’s maturity, capabilities, culture, and market situation. there is no perfect starting point; cookie-cutter approaches won’t suffice. to get started, leading Cx pros take cues from success stories in adjacent, or completely different, markets to harvest tips and tricks. Fedex, iBm, and ministry of supply offer exemplary applications of different design methods, according to corporate culture, competitive pressures, and market opportunity:

› IBM embraces design thinking to transform a workforce. iBm has committed to adding 1,000 designers to the company within a couple of years’ time, with the goal of bringing the ratio of designers to coders from 1:33 to 1:8. to set the new teams up for success, it has instituted a series of summits, workshops, and design camps, ranging in duration from one day to three months, which focus on training new hires, informing and educating executives, and establishing tools and techniques to integrate the teams. its iBm Design thinking framework adds the concepts of hills, sponsor users, and playbacks to design thinking’s methodology (see Figure 5).10 A published design language provides guidance and access to tools throughout the company.11

› Ministry of supply innovates with Lean. the founders of ministry of supply put their massachusetts institute of technology training to use when establishing a new fashion brand. As cofounder Kit Hickey said, “in all engineering classes, you learn about lean design, human-centered design, going to market quickly, and getting feedback quickly.” they took this background and applied it to an industry known for new seasonal releases planned months in advance. Along the way, they transformed a traditional process that moves linearly — from inspiration to design and production — into an iterative process that takes direct customer feedback into account throughout, adjusting product fit, colors, and fabrics in response (see Figure 6).

› fedEx adopts Agile practices to migrate a culture. Fedex worked with agencies Answerlab and tank Design to build a web application that allows global customers with or without a Fedex account to ship in a few easy steps, resulting in significant increases in international shipping conversion rates. the team worked to deliver the application within nine months, using a process that integrated personas, scenarios, wireframes, interaction design, prototypes, and nine iterative rounds of usability testing and design. the successful outcome of this complex project with multiple stakeholders led to an increased appreciation for design methodologies among Fedex executives.



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fIGUrE 5 iBm Design thinking

Source: Charlie Hill, “Excellence At Scale,” Forrester’s Forum For Customer Experience Professionals,June 16, 2015



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fIGUrE 6 the ministry of supply’s Cyclical Design process

Source: Ministry of Supply

recommendations

iterate As You Build Your practice

For sustained continuous improvement, Cx professionals must:

› research existing capabilities. seek out existing employees who have experience with design methods. look particularly at the software and product teams. meet with the teams and the individuals, learn what their current practices are, discuss what is successful about those practices, and ask how those practices might apply more broadly to the company. Chances are that they will have a lot of ideas about ways to do this and will be happy that you asked them to contribute.

› Take things in small steps. it’s almost impossible to shift course all at once. Agencies like manifest Digital advocate for trying out unfamiliar methodologies on smaller projects and getting the process right before rolling it out more broadly. red privet likens the process of adopting design methodologies to being a novice cook. novice cooks will follow a recipe literally, but as they become more familiar with flavors that go well together, they’ll start to allow themselves to adjust the recipe. For more seasoned pros, the methodologies provide general guidelines and boundaries, which they adapt to their own needs, time frames, and budgets.



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› Adjust as you go. Contained projects with a discrete start and end and clearly defined scope may still lend themselves to a traditional waterfall approach that progresses sequentially from research and concept to specification, design, development, testing, and release rather than the cyclical approach of lean and Agile. the agency Fluid finds that it often uses a “wagile” approach that combines the structured methodology of waterfall design with Agile’s development sprints. manifest Digital found — when piloting Agile with a client that had many stakeholders with overlapping parallel processes — that waterfall was ultimately a better fit for the culture, so it went back to following a linear process for subsequent phases of work.

› Include coaching and training. the shift to integrating design methodologies within an organization needs support and guidance from more experienced practitioners, both internally and externally. partnering with a company with experience in these methodologies or bringing in a coach who can guide the team is often necessary to establish a working rhythm.

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Applause

At&t

Big spaceship

Fedex

Fluid

Ford motor

gotoresearch

iBm

intuit

manifest Digital

ministry of supply

mu/DAi

pivotal labs

prophet

red privet

rosetta

smith

solstice mobile

thoughtbot

Wells Fargo

supplemental material

Companies Interviewed for This report

endnotes1 Forrester surveyed 126 Cx professionals to find out how their firms manage Cx and how diligently they apply best

practices. to find out how they did, see the “the state of Customer experience maturity, Q4 2014” Forrester report.

For more on how changing mindsets and establishing design practices fosters innovation, see the “How Cx pros innovate” Forrester report.

2 James l. mcQuivey says that the next 10 years will usher in hyperadoption, a new stage in consumers’ behavior. For more, see the “Will people really Do that?” Forrester report.

3 source: Anthony Ha, “moving Beyond same-Day Bookings, Hoteltonight launches its 7-Day reservation system,” techCrunch, september 26, 2014 (http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/26/hoteltonight-seven-day-booking/).

4 source: “Global Brand simplicity index 2014,” siegel + Gale (http://simplicityindex.com).

5 John maeda, design partner at Kleiner perkins Caufield & Byers (KpCB), highlights the rising importance of design in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in his report on the KpCB website. source: John maeda, “Design in tech report 2015,” Kleiner perkins Caufield & Byers, march 15, 2015 (http://www.kpcb.com/blog/design-in-tech-report-2015).

For additional information on mcKinsey’s design acquisition, see the “Brief: mcKinsey enters the Design race With the Acquisition of lunar” Forrester report.

6 James l. mcQuivey says that the next 10 years will usher in hyperadoption, a new stage in consumers’ behavior. For more, see the “Will people really Do that?” Forrester report.

7 Forrester fielded its Q4 2014 Global Customer experience peer research panel online survey to 126 Cx professionals from september 2014 to october 2014. out of 126 Cx professionals surveyed, only 29% said that they follow a formal design process. For more, see the “the state of Customer experience maturity, Q4 2014” Forrester report.











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8 source: “the Design sprint,” Google Ventures (http://www.gv.com/sprint/).

9 source: manifesto for Agile software Development (http://agilemanifesto.org).

10 iBm Design uses the concept of hills, which it defines as “a project objective framed as a testable user outcome.” sponsor users bring domain expertise to development teams, and playbacks align teams and stakeholders around end-to-end user scenarios. source: Charlie Hill, “excellence At scale,” Forrester’s Forum For Customer experience professionals, June 16, 2015.

11 source: iBm (http://www.ibm.com/design/language.shtml).

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