Design Thinking and Digital Intent, Part 1

Another example that shows the importance of design—or the impact of its lack—occurred in late 2011, when J.C. Penney hired Ron Johnson—who was credited with the success of the Apple Store—as its CEO. Johnson very publicly left J.C. Penney after just 17 months at the company. What went wrong? The design changes Johnson had implemented did not speak to J.C. Penney’s core customers. He instituted a ban on discounts and introduced an innovative shopping experience in lieu of savings. It was a great concept, but for J.C. Penney customers, the thrill of the discount was the experience. Taking that away for what the company thought was a cooler design resulted in failure. The retailer has since struggled to regain its footing.

Good design can save and make you money. But how can you apply design to your strategic thinking? I’ll provide some key takeaways to help prevent these stories from becoming your own.

Knowing Your Users and Involving Them in the Design Process

For UX design professionals, the importance of knowing our users is a no brainer. We have been involving them in the design process all along. However, enterprise organizations have been slow to adopt this practice. This is not necessarily about recognizing that users are important, but more around how to stress their importance every day. Employing design thinking makes this easier. Your user base is one of the most important parts—if not the most important part—of the design process. As you can see in the earlier examples, as a result of not fully knowing their users’ needs, these large organizations took massive financial hits and had to conduct substantial redesigns to create something that worked. They failed to formulate the digital intent of their efforts and understand their core users’ behaviors to inform their design decisions.

Simply setting aside the time to think about what it is they are trying to achieve and centering on the user of a design solution is something many companies do not do, and it can cost them. Not all companies can afford to limp along for years because of design mistakes—as J.C. Penney has done.

In 2009, Kaiser Permanente came up with the 22 key experiences for a “Total Health Journey”—the primary moments of a patient’s care when going through their healthcare system. They implemented design thinking to look at everything holistically—from conducting traditional stakeholder interviews about care facilities, to studying how people reacted to the color of the carpets in their offices. Through this process, they determined their key user experiences and found specific, visual ways to improve them, dramatically enhancing the user experience. Understand your users, and you’ll reap the benefits.

Applying Design As a Continuous Process

Every designer is familiar with the frustrating question: “Why can’t you just fix this one thing about the design?” But this question is often posed too late in the design process to be of value. The problem here is that design is not a thing to be applied like a performance tune-up. Design is a continuous process that you not only apply throughout a project’s lifecycle, but need to embed in a company culture.

You need to think about design from an idea’s inception. When creating a new product, you must ensure the team working on that project includes a design expert. That person needs to be part of the core team, not an add-on during just the final stages of the project. For many companies, this might mean making a greater investment in design, but it also means that, during every step of the development process, your team can seek insights from someone who understands how to make the product the best it can be for users. Investing early in design means you can later reap bigger rewards rather than rush to fix things that have gone awry.

Avoiding the Copycat Trap

Another goal people mistakenly apply to design is “Make our product look like X.” Whether it’s the design of a competitor or just an innovative brand, in most cases, the design someone likes has nothing to do with your own business or goals. It’s just a cool thing they want to emulate. While there is nothing inherently wrong with finding inspiration from many sources, it’s crucial that you ensure the design people want is right for your business.

Consider what happened to J.C. Penney when they hired Ron Johnson. They wanted a cool design like Apple’s, but that’s not what their customer base wanted. They were not thinking of their digital intent and lacked a clear design goal.

Before you embark on any design-related project, you need to identify your core strengths and consistently drive your approach to designing and executing on your offerings to your customers. Design is one of the most important factors in bringing an idea to life. However, it is not the only factor that matters. You also need digital intent if you want to be able to tie design thinking to strategy and align it with the execution and realization of your next steps in seeking digital-transformation success. At the end of the day, digital intent is about understanding your customers and how well they enjoy using your product, application, or service.

What’s Next?

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll delve deeper into digital intent and how design thinking can help you to both solve an identified problem and also figure out what problem to solve and where to start.