Monday, February 3, 2014

Design Intelligence

Design Intelligence is an important dimension of running a high-mature digital business today. 

 It is the age of customer-centricity. How to delight customer via customer intelligence and design intelligence is a strategic goal for business to improve its maturity and prosperity. Design thinking turns to be a discipline with cultural, personal and strategic implications.

UX/CX as "strategy", as opposed to "design", is very critical: UX Strategists are a rare breed that has to balance the left and right brains Strategy. There are a few additional strategic facets of connection: business strategy, brand strategy, customer experience strategy and user needs. Taking all of this together, it is important to find ways to better advocate or articulate UX as a "framing" strategy and process, as opposed to an activity centered on "design" artifacts. 

Create a coherent set of design principles: Whatever design principle that you choose, it must be consistent with this general UX strategy. Choosing design principles that support the UX strategy is easy once the company knows what its UX vision is. The problem is that without a cohesive UX strategy, each department will attempt to pursue its own vision which means you will have to disparate design principles with no common theme. With unified vision, every design principle in every department, from marketing to products, is consistent with the overall UX vision of "delight" and "simplicity", and then, run a co-design exercise to come up with service principles and key messages. It is from the perspective of the end user, either from the end user themselves or through the lens of frontline professionals. The design principles must be broad yet narrow enough to support real decision making across the entire lifecycle. As a result, the adoption of these design principles across all functions is key to effective execution. 

User Experience is a philosophy, with perception upon design intelligence of business. Too often it is limited to a methodology to be included as a technical process or marketing/visual effort as an afterthought. In order to truly live up to the UX way of thinking, an organization has to change the very foundation of what their goals are. Once you start to put the value UX design provide to users as the highest goal, only then, will UX finally evolve into what it is meant to accomplish and improve overall organizational intelligence to run business.

UX is a psychological dimension related to both the visible and the invisible and often it is the invisible that is ignored by many: Besides UX processes, approaches and methodologies, how to deal with those invisible factors such as feelings, emotions, and psychology? In other words, why don't we talk about the actual experience the user is having. The process just gives you a framework, having a good toolbox allows you to select the right wrench in which the emotional connections are what make it works. If you can not find a way of connecting with customers at an emotional level then you are not connecting with them profoundly 

Thus, design intelligence is an important dimension for organizations to become more customer-centric. Leveraging UX to influence business decision making at the highest level might just be the very thing to induce the kind of cultural changes within businesses and take such a ‘digital’ way to run the business today.






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