Harry West - Designing your Business: Creating a Compelling Consumer Experience

At last week's Designing your Business: Creating a Compelling Consumer Experience, BIF Research Advisor Harry West and Design Continuum did more than hammer home the role "design thinking" plays in creating a consumer experience that resonates with your target audience. Harry and his team also reminded us that sometimes the best way to understand something is to experience it yourself.

While most of the workshop participants, including reps from CVS, Novartis, Equity National, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the Rhode Island School of Design, had an inkling of what design thinking is all about, few were prepared to hit street and 'walk a mile' in a customer's shoes.

The workshop began with slides and some lively conversation about the physical, emotional, and economic dimensions of "brand" experience. Then, after a quick coffee break, the teams were split into small groups and sent packing to do their own low tech, high impact observational research.

From convenience stores to a local tea shop, the teams - armed with notebooks, a digital camera, and a "sherpa" form the design continuum team - observed the actual experience of real customers in real life situations. The result? A new understanding of what works and what doesn't when you're trying to create a customer experience that keeps the crowds coming back for more.

"I learned to look at the everyday, seemingly-mundane functions - like paying for goods and services - as opportunity for improvement," says CVS marketing director Bill Fay. "My biggest challenge now is how I can inject the thought processes we used into my everyday life, at work and at home."

After a few hours in the field, the groups returned to present their finding as well offer some suggestions on how the organizations they visited could enhance the experience of their customers.

"The session reinforced the potential for design thinking to be applied to a range of problems and opportunities, even those outside of business. I imagined design thinking applied to other critical issues like the ecology, housing, poverty, education and government," says Larry Quick of New Commons, a Rhode Island-based consulting group. "Just imagine if we could bring the design minds in the room to those types of issues."

Our day of designing thinking taught us the importance of creating products and experiences explicitly designed to make sense to the people who use them. The Design Continuum team reminded that although finding the intersection between a functional solution and a satisfying customer experience may not always be easy, it's critical to staying competitive in today's market.

West said designing thinking is a heuristic process. (We looked this up in the dictionary. Basically, it's a process that encourages learners to discover solutions for themselves through trial and error.) That discovery process requires a conscious decision to observe with complete ignorance. Check your pre-conceived ideas at the door, assume nothing, observe with eyes wide open, and you too can be a design thinker.