UX strategic ingredients for better, more relevant products and services

Here are the things that stood out:

David Ruiz (Orange Bank) argued that in-house design teams are key to breaking through silos and barriers. In-house teams can build the right culture and mindset for the long term. Nevertheless, his experience is that external design teams are often heard much faster than an internal team. So don't be afraid to call in an external party every now and then. And above all, make sure you're there when important technology and governance decisions are made. Because those are your moments of truth as a design team.

David's presentation is also in line with what we see in a broader sense in the design world: the traditional model of a design agency that does projects remotely and occasionally comes by to show the progress is passé for most organizations. Not least because of the agile transformation, on-site UX expertise in agile teams is a must. In order to continuously deliver an authentic and good user experience, an organization needs an excellent internal design capability that has a mandate and looks for the right (internal and external) collaboration.

How do you get from a fragmented to a coherent, distinctive experience in a short time? According to Chiara Diana (British Telecom), you need good orchestration tools for this. In ten weeks, she has created a completely new TV experience that allows BT to compete with the competition. Her advice: create and visualize a vision of experience; integrate that vision into the existing ecosystem and scale for future platforms. Use a design system as a UX foundation to ensure consistency and speed in design and deployment. And above all, ensure that content and proposition (Drive), technology (Enable) and user experience (Engage) work together.

Who is about UX, about CX, about identity, and how can you organize that well? What works best differs per organization and depends on the UX maturity of the organization.

According to research by Marion Fröhlich (SAP), a matrix organization usually works best to get the most out of UX. But she also advises continuously adapting the structure of your UX team to what is needed in the organization. One of the companies from her research that is furthest in development indicated: the ultimate goal is to completely dissolve as a UX team in the organization so that an organization is created that is good at innovation instead of design-driven innovation. 'Get rid of design managers to really integrate design in your business!' An interesting aim, but why should that only apply to design and not to other disciplines?

Wanja Rinke (PWC) makes the positioning and implementation of UX dependent on the business model. She identifies five archetypal business models (e.g. technology-enabled, transaction-oriented, CX-oriented, et cetera). Four capabilities are always required: value creation, value enabler, value delivery and value design. Each archetypal business model has its own interpretation of those capabilities. In total, its framework identifies 46 fundamental digital capabilities (so-called 'd.quarks') for the realization of digital business models.

Another approach is that of Rob van der Haar (Informaat). After the digital and agile transformations, it is now time for the experience transformation. This offers the opportunity to realize unique, credible and convincing customer experiences with your UX capability. But this requires UX to be present in the right places in the organization. To this end, Rob distinguishes three essential 'experience chains': the channel experience chain, the value experience chain and the real-time experience chain. These chains connect strategic, tactical and operational processes. A well-organized chain ensures that strategic goals can be translated tactically and operationally. For example, if your channel experience chain (positioning > identity across channels > delivery) is not well organized, you run the risk that the customer experience between channels is inconsistent. Rob's motto: take an enterprise perspective on design, focus on essential experience chains and let the organization work together.

More and more companies are realizing that digitization in itself is not enough. It also has to be quite fast and effective. Digital transformation is evolving into agile transformation. More and more often we see that ideas from lean thinking, design thinking or service design are also included in agile transformation. Not only does one want to deliver something quickly, it should also be delivered involving the right, unique user experience.

Laura Müller (Daimler Lab1886) shows how to build successful companies by basing the innovation process on lean, agile and design thinking. An attractive process for testing and validating interesting business concepts. Daimler uses employee crowd-sourcing to get ideas and has people participate in the lab for a while. This makes it easier to roll out and accept the solution and it transforms the mindset of people.

Her lab also has a 'license to kill'. So if an idea no longer fits the needs of the user or market, they can resolutely put an end to it. In addition, they have the essential buy-in from senior management.

As a UX team, you also need the right skillset to have strategic impact.

David Ruiz’s bold statement “Design as facilitation is over.” is one just after my heart. Because how can you have strategic influence if you only facilitate the ideas of others, but do not come up with a vision yourself?

According to Giulia Calabretta (Delft University of Technology)), as a UX strategist you must be able to use various so-called 'narratives' to put UX and people-oriented innovation on the map in your organization. The Sell narrative (people-oriented services sell better), the Teach narrative (educating people in design helps to scale up UX) and the Problem solving narrative (design helps you solve complex problems more effectively). You can of course combine these three narratives if you want to help an organization transform to experience orientation (and therefore scale it up).

A right UX set of skills is also necessary for successful innovation processes. Laura Müller discovered eight skills that you need as designers to be able to deliver successful UX design in fast innovation processes. Think of things like: open to change, empathy, good atmosphere, and pain points over solutions. And, she says, don't forget: “Being wrong does not mean you failed, it means you are closer to the right product.”

This skillset also reminds me of the soft skills my colleague Carla Huls recently discussed in her post Five essential soft skills of the agile UX designer.

The story of Jim Karbach (MURAL) showed that with the methods used by design professionals, you can not only design digital strategies and services, but also answer social questions like: 'How can we ensure that more so-called 'formers' (former hatemongers of IS, KKK, neo-Nazis, et cetera) join a love-preaching organization like Hedayah?

Hedayah is a community aiming to counter violent extremism by promoting and sharing effective strategies against radicalization. One strategy is to tell 'Counter Narratives' to tell people on the brink of radicalization the real story of life within such an organization and in doing so save them from going astray. In this respect, input of 'formers' is of course very valuable. But it turned out to be difficult to recruit them. It was therefore also great to see how the experience world and the 'involvement journey' from 'formers' to Hedayah was mapped in creative co-creation sessions (with a former neo-Nazi, IS member, Hezbolla fighter, etc.). The associated pain points and opportunities that can be used to improve this journey in order to attract more 'formers': 'Peace is Waged with Sticky Notes'.

A more strategic impact for UX means looking ahead. For example, what do Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) mean for UX?

Eva Deckers (Philips design) is convinced of a two-stage rocket approach: “Make data meaningful, then use it as creative material.” She took us through what Philips is doing to realize solutions for healthcare with data-enabled design. For example: Why is your baby not drinking enough milk? Is he sick or is there something else going on? With their patient-tracked data solution, you can see that it's not just the bottle itself, but possibly also the noise in the environment. Much of this revolves around data visualization in decision-support dashboards. You want to tailor it to the needs of different target groups in the ecosystem: the parent or carer, the doctor, the researcher. As a designer, you should regard data and intelligence as new design material.

But before we get to that, there are still a few things that need to be done:

• Integrate data design skills with service design skills to develop differentiated customer-oriented propositions.
• Make more impact with a data visualization capability.
• Develop tools to make data exploration easier and take the first steps in building intelligent systems from a design perspective.

Hervé Mischler (Salesforce) shows what lies ahead in AI: a development from automated, assisted to agentive systems. All variants use data and the AI behind it is only as good as the data they work with. If the data is ‘biased’, then the output of the AI is too. If you as a consumer do not have control over that data, undesirable things might happen (think of the 'social scores' that are currently in vogue in China).

Still, some solutions can help put data control in the hands of the consumer. In terms of technology, the solution may lie in decentralized identification. Technologies like blockchain in combination with AI and local machine learning, would offer a solution here. Data can easily remain on a device itself, as companies do not necessarily need it. In terms of regulations, the GDPR (AVG) is of course a good example in this respect.

As designers, we can create ethically responsible AI applications by applying Responsible AI design. Which means Human-centered (so not designing for the algorithm), Value-aligned (strictly aligning with the core values of your company), and Private by design (regulations and technology).

The near future will also bring more and more mixed-reality solutions. Alastair Somerville believes that 'virtuality' has always been around. What we have been doing for years in novels, theatre, films, et cetera is in fact also creating an ‘apparent reality’. So as a designer, take advantage of ways in which people now combine parallel worlds. Think of the combination of the physical world with dreams, theater and books. And so his advice is: “Look for rectangles, all thresholds (gateways to other realities) are rectangles.”

To get a grip on, and give direction to the development of digital services, UX strategy is necessary. Which proves quite a challenge for many organizations. It calls for a more people-oriented and design way of thinking and acting. UX strategists are there to lead organizations in this and to safeguard them at all levels.

Making more impact with investments in UX can be done in two ways:

• Along the substantive axis: by applying gradually more focus on what we design, for whom and for what business purpose (instead of just focusing on ‘how’). And at the same time by ensuring that what is designed, is also realized in the agile teams. To do this well, UX needs to continuously adopt new technology (data, AI, AR, etc.) and regard it as creative material.
• Along the organizational axis: by ensuring that UX is present (and collaborates) in all places in the organization where choices are made that influence the customer experience.

For both axes, operational, tactical and strategic perspectives must be aligned. This requires vision and leadership, but also change-agent competencies, as well as the necessary resilience. Little by little, the UX community is learning how to make more impact in organizations and, and consequently better and finer digital services in the world around us.

Susanne van Mulken A lot of recognition for me this year too, at UX STRAT Europe. Sustainable innovation first of all means breaking through walls and ceilings with excellent design and good results. After that you can pave the way for scaling up design. If you have that in order, you can also more easily anticipate new technology, such as Mixed-Reality, AI and Big Data. However, organizations cannot afford to do one after the other. At UX STRAT Europe there was plenty of inspiration for each of the three signs you need to keep in the air.

Marieken Kerkhoven The first day of UX STRAT Europe was for me a day full of inspiration and food for thought, with an emphasis on understanding and deepening. Understanding data as creative material. Immerse yourself in every journey, even if it is that of ‘radicalization’. Understanding our responsibility as designers, especially when it comes to smart devices. Gradually deepen, maintaining tight deadlines. And finally, using these deepenings and all this understanding of underlying needs to set the strategy.

Ineke van Gelder This UX STRAT Europe was my first. The stories I've heard and seen especially strengthen my opinion that we can make an impact at a strategic level in organizations with our UX design expertise. Not because our discipline is unique or deserves it in some way, but because our approach matches the way companies want and need to innovate. Motivated by a market in which consumers and users determine the necessity and direction of the innovation.

Victor Visser To me, UX STRAT Europe was a very inspiring and interesting conference. In addition to the keynotes in which the essential importance of good UX for a product or service was again emphasized, it was also good to see what an organization should look like in order to get UX in its DNA, and what the mindset of the people should be. This DNA is desperately needed with the swirling emergence and major impact of new technologies such as AI, AR, big data, blockchain, et cetera. As designers, we must already be working on how to design with these technologies, and how we are going to help the user as well and responsibly as possible by applying them. “With great power comes great responsibility.” Unfortunately, I did not see this ethical side represented in the lecture by Susan Petric (Google), where it seemed to center around making people travel even easier, and more, while the ecological impact is enormous! And if anyone could do anything about this problem, it would be Google. Susan agreed, but it didn't seem to be high on their agenda. Shareholders will probably always have more power than designers. With our approach, we as designers can come up with a better way and that is why a 'seat at the table' high in the organization is crucial for better UX, both in short term and in the long run.

The presentations mentioned above, and also the other presentations of UX STRAT Europe are now available.