Planners doing the design tango

     image source: STAYFLY!

I believe that as planners we can learn a lot from design thinking.

1. We are both problem solvers.

As planners we spend all our time working on things "in secret" and as a result we tend to not share our tools and we certainly don't share our findings.  Imagine my surprise some months back to realize that there is another group focused on how to better identify people's real needs and to innovate based on these findings.

User Experience designers are many steps ahead on some fronts and willing to share both their tools and their findings.  I want to repeat this last part.  They are willing to share both their tools and their findings.  I witnessed this in presentation after presentation in San Francisco.

I would hazard to say that David Armano thinks of himself as a designer.   He recently had a client who was interested in micro-formats.  Imagine this was your client and this is your first meeting with them.  As a planner, how might you position it?  How would you research it?  I hazard to guess you would be hard pressed to put together a more powerful and insightful presentation than this one:  Micro-Interactions presentation. 

The planner in me would KILL to see what David presents at a later stage to this client when it is now specific to their audience, the research done and the objectives at hand.  (So everyone remember to keep knives away from me during the next karaoke session.)

2. Customer "in the center" just makes sense.

A focus group is anything but involving the user.  It's akin to putting rats in cages.  Something quite sick and that society doesn't trust in anything but quantitative settings.  And yet, focus groups are anything but quantitative. They are the worst of many worlds.

At the Adaptive Path MX conference in San Francisco the conversations were generally around how to drive innovation and positive impact for the business. Every model and every solution hinged on one thing:  the customer in the centre. 

A message that people in marketing have been hearing for some time now.  I think people want to put customers in the centre but are struggling with how to do so.  Something design has been focusing on for quite some time.

3. The power of surprise and innovation

Both the greatest and the simplest single thing to come out of MX San Fran (for me) was a tiny little model for defining the types of research used on a project.

• Explicit:  What someone is willing (and able) to tell us.  What they say.
• Tacit:  What they won't say, but we can infer.
• Latent:  What they don't know and can't say.

Certainly not rocket science.  But when I look at the majority of research I've witnessed being done in marketing, it is both self-reported (surveys, focus groups, interviews) and definitely explicit in nature.  We tend to maintain a very tertiary focus on lurking, behavioral monitoring or any other activities pertinent to tacit observation.  Inference is generally left to what we can glean from explicit task data.

My favorite, however, was latent.  Something you can't ask because they truly can't tell you.

So what good is Latent as a category if a person doesn't know it, can't say it and we can't infer it?!  Great question.  This category refers to where a person can only respond after "seeing" something.  It can be a prototype, a story or even a re-enactment.  It is where the light dawns and they can then have a reaction or response to the idea being tested.  The need is suddenly realized.

We use re-enactments all the time with clients.  But using it in research and ideation is where its real power lies.

If the idea behind the iPhone had been focus grouped to see if people needed a single, touchscreen device, I'm sure it would have been lukewarm at best.  But take that same concept and put a prototype of it into people's hands and watch the amazement and wonder appear and the realization that suddenly so much is at their fingertips that wasn't even a concern before.

If we are working to surprise, delight and innovate, one would be well advised to take a lesson from the design sectors and use all three research categories on your projects.

Wrapping it all up...

So why isn't everyone embracing user-centred design principles?  I think part of the problem is that focusing on the user and the experience first forces us to define the problem differently,  often in a way that breaks down silos.  Sort of the point but the challenge lies in how quickly it can take us away from our areas of expertise and right into someone else's sandbox.

The toad, who is all for a shift to user-centred design principles, presents a sage argument for why agencies should tread carefully before embracing all things "user experience."

"So we can suggest changes in store design to our clients. But if they already have a store design agency, they’re not going to care what we think. Or want to pay us for it."
   - Alan, the tangerine toad

I am learning an unbelievable amount from design thinking.  It has changed the way I approach research and how I am struggling to combine participatory elements into almost everything I do.  And agency, or no agency behind me, I'm proceeding forward.  Watch for more.