For more than 30 years, Design Thinking has been a popular problem-solving methodology used by many businesses and consultancies. Rooted in the idea that a problem can be more effectively resolved through a disciplined combination of empathy, creativity, and rationality, Design Thinking has since evolved beyond the practice of merely “thinking like a designer” to include more rigorous and systematic approaches to research, collaboration, and co-creation.
At Nurun, we employ Design Thinking principles by always looking at problems through the lenses of people, technology, and business. For us, putting people first (and at the center) of our design process is paramount. Our approach to human-centered design is focused on inventing practical, useful digital products and services that people want and need. If something isn’t useful to consumers, they’ll ignore it. If we don’t respect what consumers want, then we’re simply being intrusive.
By placing ourselves in the consumer’s mindset rather than a client’s mindset, we are better able to uncover consumers’ latent needs, allowing us to move from problem solving (i.e., the executional process of getting things right) to problem finding (i.e., the strategic process of doing the right thing). In other words, we’re not simply proposing to find solutions to problems that already have been identified. Instead, we work to identify and understand problems that have yet to be seen or have yet to be uncovered.
We’re not a marketing-services agency, nor are we an IT firm or a pure-play design shop. As a design and technology consultancy, we are in the unique position of being able to uncover insights that lead to the ideation of brilliant digital products and services, and then we can build them, too.
Nurun’s human-centered design process is grounded in a deep respect for people and their needs. Informed by Design Thinking principles, our process begins with research, which pulls together ethnography, technology, and business, resulting in actionable insights. These insights lead to prototyping, with people always at the center of the process. Many design processes and methodologies end at the prototyping stage, but we pride ourselves on our ability to realize and execute ideas, not just conceive them.
“We are in the unique position of being able to uncover insights that lead to the ideation of brilliant digital products and services, and then we can build them, too.”
Because we are a digitally native company, we cover the entire spectrum from strategy to execution, with both a digital and human-centric mindset.
We are human-centered
We design for people first, not exclusively to please our clients. To do so, we utilize strong and rigorous tools to help our clients understand what’s best for their customers. We start with trained anthropologists, who design and employ ethnographic tools to collect stories, facts, opinions, and experiences about people, places, and cultures.
We are ambitious about technology
Our design process—research, model, realize—may be simple to explain, but it’s also very ambitious, especially when it comes to technology. The difficulty is not in the promise of finding the right technology to solve a business problem; the challenge is in the realization of the right solutions for a real consumer need.
We are business-minded
We are in the business of helping our clients reinvent and transform their businesses. We believe the best business solutions come out of solving real people’s real problems.
As a global organization, one of our greatest challenges is ensuring that all Nuruners are fluent in our common language and knowledgeable about our ways of working. This is no small feat, given the differences in languages and time zones, the unique cultural perspectives we each bring to the conversation, and the varied cultures, processes, and ideas of local offices.
We are committed to global training and sharing best practices across our worldwide network because we believe our organizational strength lies in our ability to leverage the knowledge and human insights of everyone on our team, no matter the location of their home offices and no matter the assigned disciplines in which they work. To us, everyone’s perspective is valued.
Recently, we held an intensive Design Process Workshop at our global headquarters in Montréal. We invited 30 of Nurun’s top talents from around the world to participate in a three-day exercise where we collaborated on solving a business problem for a real client.
Workshop participants represented a variety of functional roles at Nurun, including client partners, content strategists, designers, innovation leads, project managers, technologists, and UX architects. Designed and facilitated by our global directors of business strategy, ethnography, innovation, R&D, and technology, the workshop provided participants with an in-depth look at Nurun’s human-centered research practices, further defining the core principles of our design process that is the foundation of our product and service innovation offer.
The challenge for the group was to reinvent the business of one of Québec’s premier sellers of books, CDs, DVDs, musical instruments, and cultural artifacts. Thanks to the proliferation of legal and illegal digital distribution of media and entertainment, in-store sales—the primary revenue source for small and mid-sized bricks-and-mortar merchants—have been plummeting. Coupled with fierce competition from larger national and international retailers, both online and offline, smaller, local merchants in the category—like our client— have taken a beating in the marketplace.
Making the Strange Seem Familiar, and the Familiar Seem Strange: Human-Centered Field Work
Our Design Process Workshop began with intensive briefings on Nurun’s approach to understanding and immersing ourselves in people, technology, and business. Workshop participants were then divided into multidisciplinary teams in preparation for sending them into the field to collect data about the client’s consumers and business. Field research included visits to a variety of locations, including our client’s retail outlets throughout Montréal, smaller independent booksellers, music stores, and coffee shops. In essence, it wasn’t enough to imagine that we knew how and where our client’s consumers lived and shopped, nor was it enough to bring them to us in an artificial setting. Rather, our teams had to go to the environments where our client’s consumers shopped for and expressed themselves through cultural products.
Because the perspective that Nurun brings to Design Thinking methods is steeped in anthropology, workshop participants were guided by our team of trained anthropologists to utilize Nurun-designed ethnographic tools to collect data and uncover new insights about consumers in the field. Rather than haphazardly asking questions that were based on personal assumptions and biases, workshop participants were asked to put themselves in the roles of researchers, and given field notebooks that provided prompt questions and visual response exercises that helped put research subjects at ease, allowing the subjects to get past top-of-mind responses and to probe deeper into real wants and desires.
Most people’s conception of anthropology is that it’s the study of foreign cultures in faraway places. The key, however, to exploring not-so-distant cultures and places is to let go of inherent cultural biases and assumptions. Making the strange seem familiar and the familiar seem strange allows researchers to move beyond surface impressions, to see what’s really in front of them, to gain a deeper understanding of how people make meaning of their lives, and—in the case of our field work exercise—to understand how technology has impacted and changed the ways that consumers shop for goods such as books and other entertainment media.
There is no doubt that technology has affected culture, but culture has also affected technology, too. Although technology is rapidly changing, real behaviors often change more slowly, and retailers aren’t always aware of all the ways that consumers adapt technology to fit their needs as well as their increasingly high expectations.
In the field, our workshop participants immersed themselves in the cultures and environments of our client’s consumers. This human-centered approach is designed to be more than empathy or observation or desk research. Through the collection of facts and stories—about objects, events, cultures, and peoples—our reseachers are trying to answer the questions: What does it mean to be human? And what sorts of designs can enhance what it means to be human for these consumers?
By observing, interviewing, and participating in the lives of real consumers, our researchers were able to uncover facts, patterns, and tensions that exist in consumers’ lives. Being in the settings where people interact with the products and services that our workshop exercise was seeking to explore—whether it was hanging out with consumers in a coffee shop or experiencing firsthand how they actually shop online and offline—our workshop participants gained invaluable insights into and context about consumers’ lives, getting to know who these consumers really are and what they really want (not just who consumers said they were and what they said they wanted), and discovering details about their behaviors and desires that may otherwise be hidden.
Without understanding who a consumer really is, it’s difficult to place their responses in the larger context of field research. In an ideal process, research subjects have the opportunity to be better prepared to answer questions about the tensions that exists in their lives due to technology. They would receive advance preparation or homework—known as self-immersion exercises—to help guide them to becoming more open about themselves and providing more holistic responses.
In the guerrilla field work that our workshop participants did, the opportunity for advance field study wasn’t available; however, as with all field work, our researchers supplemented the facts and stories they gathered from their field interviews with visual documents such as photographs, videos, and other artifacts to help get a fuller picture of the experience and to ensure that we can share the real feelings of the experience with others involved in the research, and ultimately with the client.
Once the field work was completed, our workshop participants reconvened as a group to analyze and synthesize their collected data.
Putting the interests of consumers front and center means we will sometimes push our client partners out of their comfort zones, allowing them to see new avenues and new opportunities that they never knew were possible.
Why is it so critical for Nurun to be resolutely human-centered? Because it gives us the authority to provide guidance to our clients that’s not simply based on what we assume or what we intuit; our recommendations are determined by participating with, observing, and talking to real people in their real environments.
On the second day of our Design Process Workshop, participants gathered to comb through all of the data that they collected. The process is collaborative, with each team sharing its findings and facilitators providing guidance and feedback.
Under ordinary circumstances, field work can take significantly more time than the day-and-a-half days that the workshop participants had in the field. Thanks to the rigor and structure of the exercise, though, there was plenty of rich data to be mined and analyzed.
Creating Thick Descriptions and Rapid Prototypes: Synthesizing Field Work
Our perspective at Nurun is that new technologies (and adaptations to new technologies) can often bring improvements to people’s everyday lives. But new technologies also can bring challenges to people’s lives as well. Once a technology has been accepted and integrated, that technology becomes part and parcel of the cultural rules by which people live. By changing behavior patterns or introducing new technologies, there’s the potential of changing the cultural rules, thereby creating tensions in people’s lives.
The workshop exercise of exploring ways to reinvent an iconic Québecois retailer’s business through technology provided ample opportunities for our participants to deeply consider the impact of new technologies—both on a client’s business and on consumers’ lives.
Workshop participants brought back everything from their field research: interview notes, photographs, short videos, and artifacts, as well as their memories and thoughts from the field. Among their teams, the participants began to analyze their findings and work toward identifying the key problems that affect the client’s consumers and business through the lenses of people, technology, and business.
The workshop facilitators—Nurun anthropologists, business strategists, innovation leads, and technologists—then helped workshop participants synthesize their findings into tension statements, using the thick descriptions (notes, pictures, and ideas) about the real consumers they encountered in the field. For example, Michel wants to purchase a book as a Mother’s Day gift for his mother, but he doesn’t know which book to choose. He knows that his mother enjoys reading mystery novels and she has already read most of the current bestsellers. Michel would like a recommendation for something new and unexpected, but he’s unsure if he will get the best recommendation from an expert salesclerk at a bricks-and-mortar bookstore or from the online suggestions of other shoppers.
These tension statements are created to be as specific as possible, supplemented by additional context about the individuals being described, including their ages, professions, personal histories, etc. By capturing the tensions of actual individuals, the workshop participants were forced to confront the real needs of real consumers, instead of generalizing individuals as target audiences.
Once the collection of tension statements were created, they were categorized into six major themes, then the statements within each theme were discussed among the entire group. These tension statements were subsequently whittled down to 12 key statements that we used to develop five principles that would guide the design of our solution. From there, the group was assigned to functional teams (creatives, client partners, technologists, etc.), and each team was assigned one of the five design principles to explore.
During our design process, many ideas are conceived, and some of those ideas may be deemed undesirable to consumers, technologically unfeasible, or not viable as a business solution. Nonetheless, sharing all ideas provides added context for what the true solutions could be. Understanding the consumer, the client, and the cultural framework from a higher, more strategic level allows for the ultimate creation of the best solutions.
We believe great design is more than aesthetics. As digital designers, we don’t always know how people will react to the products and services that we create for them.
The rules of engagement are constantly changing, and we are relentlessly curious about how people respond to design. For us, great design is a mix of art and science. Connecting the dots between what we intuitively know is a good idea with what is proven to work through rigorous research is what drives our passion and inspires us to even greater things.
The third and final day of our Design Process Workshop brought together the insights uncovered from the teams’ human-centered field research and the technology and business opportunities created from their rapid prototyping sessions. Workshop participants reassembled into their original multidisciplinary teams and presented their design, technology, and business solutions to workshop facilitators, who functioned as preliminary judges.
Three teams’ ideas were selected for further exploration, and participants in the remaining two teams were integrated into the three chosen teams. The newly integrated teams had two additional hours to fine-tune their ideas, with feedback and coaching from workshop facilitators. Three teams presented again, and two teams were selected to move forward.
Pulling It All Together: Final Presentations
Following a recap and explanation of the design process for the client, two teams presented their recommendations to a panel of judges comprised of representatives from the client company and senior executives from Nurun, including Jacques-Hervé Roubert, president and CEO of Nurun.
The clients had the chance to review the field notebooks to see the results and artifacts from workshop participants’ field work, and client feedback validated the recommendation that Nurun proposed. Overall, the client was engaged with the presentations and interested in the potential solutions. The comment that summed up the client’s reaction most succinctly was that they felt that they had tapped into a “goldmine of experts.”
A valuable part of the design process is to shed personal and cultural assumptions and biases, and to be open to new ideas. By design, specific roles weren’t assigned to workshop participants. Each participant was responsible for finding his or her role within their respective teams, creating opportunities for each participant to think and work in new ways. With the guidance of the facilitators and the structure of the workshop, Nuruners were able to play to their own strengths as well as uncover new strengths they didn’t know they possessed.
Brainstorming and innovation can sometimes be thought of as the exclusive purview of creative types, but our design process depends on contributions from all stakeholders, regardless of their day-to-day roles. The most innovative ideas and solutions come from unexpected places, and the design process workshop demonstrated to our workshop participants that working outside of their comfort zones can yield surprising and effective results.
The design process, however, isn’t a free-for-all. It’s a rigorous and structured process that leads to the discovery of solutions that are desirable, feasible, and viable.
“The design process is a rigorous and structured process that leads to the discovery of solutions that are desirable, feasible, and viable.”
Human-centered design is much more than a list of techniques. As the workshop participants learned, it’s a state of mind. By immersing themselves in the cultures and environments of their research subjects, Nuruners were able to probe deeper into consumers’ real wants and needs, and come up with innovative solutions and recommendations for the client.
For workshop participants, three key takeaways:
- Making personal connections and gaining deeper understandings of Nurun colleagues and our ways of working has led to better sharing and greater collaboration across the network.
- Everyone, no matter their assigned job function, plays an important role in the design process. Each Nuruner was empowered to recognize his or her own strengths, and encouraged to bring those strengths and knowledge back to their home offices.
- The design process isn’t magic; it’s systematic and rigorously applied. The ideas that are generated through the process aren’t just intuitive leaps of faith, but are ground in meticulously thought-through analysis of data.
Many thanks to our client and to all of the participants of our 2014 Design Process Workshop.
About Nurun
Nurun is a global design and technology consultancy that works with some of the world’s most innovative companies. We create products and services for the connected world through a combination of human insight, new technology and smart thinking. Clients include Adidas, BBVA, Bouygues Telecom, Coca-Cola, Electronic Arts, General Electric, Google, The Home Depot, Tesla Motors, Sony, and Walmart.
Headquartered in Montréal and with 12 offices across North America, Europe, and Asia, Nurun has multidisciplinary teams of more than 1,200 anthropologists, designers, strategists, and software engineers. Nurun is a wholly owned subsidiary of Québecor Média Inc., one of Canada’s largest telecommunications and media providers. For more information or to find our latest insights, visit www.nurun.com
