Laying the groundwork for good

This post is based on a talk I gave at World Information Architecture Day Johannesburg 2018.

The natural evolution of a sport is from amateur to professional, over the last 20 years some of my favourites have gone through this process. Cricket and Rugby have transitioned recently while soccer continues to set standard for professional and commercial success.

Football players have gone from having a day job, playing on the weekends and having a few beers after the game to being multi-million Pound assets, the epitome of dedication, fitness, ability and nutrition. They can also be a bunch of spoilt narcissistic assholes, but let’s not get side tracked.

During my career design became digital, then user centred and now with customer experience its moving it beyond its glass prison. Our role keeps expanding, we are designing newer, more complex experiences which go way beyond our current understanding of technology.

Everyday we discover more about our users, our industry is constantly shifting and changing as we design new experiences to meet their ever evolving needs. Our industry is maturing, but we need to make conscious design decisions to define the way we work in the short and long term.

Now more than ever we have an opportunity to influence how technology affects our country. It’s the golden age of User Centered Design and will only continue to be so for a short time.

Attack, Attack, Attack!

In the late 60’s and 70’s the Dutch football team employed a playing style called Total Football. The aim of the system was for all outfield players to be able to play any position. The team would be less likely to fall victim to the counter attack, because they retained their team structure at all times. This philosophy turned the Dutch team into a relentless attacking force.

Johan Cruyff was the star of that side and would lead Dutch football out of obscurity to the brink of World Cup success. As a player and a coach he is considered to be the greatest influence on the modern game, his philosophies continue to be applied by some of Europe’s top managers.

A philosophy can be a powerful force, its an active choice to live and behave in a particular way regardless of the consequences. Art and design movements have been defined by their philosophies for hundreds of years. Human Centred Design is a common philosophy we all believe in. It is by nature a belief that by putting users needs firsts we’ll create better products, loyal users and profitable business.

Johannesburg is the most industrialised city in Africa, but has for all its success a huge amount of unfulfilled potential due to massive inequality. Basic employment, education and health care is a dream for most of our population.

What is inequality? Some degree of inequality will always exist, but there is a tipping point at which it becomes harmful to society and hampers development. Thomas Piketty author of “Capital in the 21st century” explains that when wealth grows faster than a country’s growth, inequality begins to spiral out of control. The majority of wealth sits with is held by a small minority.

The levels of inequality in South Africa are unsustainable. The large amount of taxes collected goes to supporting the basic needs of the poor .The level of social and economic inequality in South Africa is bad for our economy. It robs people of the opportunity to fully participate as employees and as consumers. Being poor as it happens, costs a lot of money.

The world’s largest asset owner and CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, released a letter to S&P 500 CEOs calling for corporations to act with social responsibility and to see beyond short-term gains. If bankers are starting to develop a conscience we must be worse off than I thought.

Many of the problems in our country are solvable, we just need to change our philosophy. As a designer I see imbalance and inefficiency as an opportunity, South Africa is bursting with opportunity. Coming up with a solution isn’t the hard part, making this shit happen…that’s where the work lies.

You got to have vision

I was coached by Jonny Tinkler, the father one of South Africa’s greatest soccer players Eric Tinkler, he would always say to us that “You gotta have vision”. What he meant was that you needed to see what was possible before everyone else did, the killer pass that set up a goal.

We as designers have the gift of vision, but it can feel like a curse. It can be frustration trying to explain something which seems obvious. We see the next four steps and we struggle to explain how critically important this step is or why a minor change can impact the whole system.

I love what I do, I sincerely want to make make people’s life easier and better. I’m driven by passion, it makes me a little crazy from time to time. I’ve gotten good at arguing and fighting for my work, perhaps too good. This has come from years of watching great work be destroyed by in my opinion by people who had no clue about the impact of the choices they were making.

I realised recently that this is a shitty attitude to have, I have turned the people around me into the enemy. I had no idea why they were asking me to compromise on a clearly superior, way more intelligent, more beautiful design. I didn’t know what pressure they were under to deliver and that my commitment to perfection, inability to compromise and fear of failure meant that the work I had created was sitting on the shelf rather than being available to the people who it was designed to help.

Although I was skeptical that any compromise would be used to cut corners I’ve learned that to achieve the end goal will take time. Business and tech sometimes takes a little longer to catch up, but by taking an iterative approach means that you have a real shot of progressively improving an experience. Your work is out in the public bringing you valuable data and context which you can use for the next iteration.

The false 9 — defining our future

The number 9 shirt in soccer is reserved for the star striker, the star of the team. Every other players job is to get the ball to him,l so he can put it in the back of net. The false 9 however is a decoy, his job is to drop back into midfield drawing the defenders out and creating space for other players to break into and score. Playing a false 9 is close to football heresy, a team without a striker is a team that doesn’t want to win. Spain won the World Cup in 2010 playing this system, there are benefits to going against convention

Last year I was listening to the High Resolution Podcast series and one episode featured Daniel Burka a designer from Google Ventures. He was impatient with designers feeling sorry for themselves and that we need to understand what role design plays in a business and how it supports business goals.

Business has always been a dirty word to me, the opposite of what user centered design was about. Actively looking to immerse myself in this world had never occured to me. When I did the results were surprising, I found out that “the suits” were frustrated at being left out of the design process and that if I worked with them from the start I could build a relationship of trust.

Instead of doing requirements gathering alone, I invited them in and used story maps to create a project scope. We had a conversation about what should be included and what shouldn’t, as well as the scale of the work they were proposing. It allowed me to explain to them how we would approach our research and why our method was so important .All before we had even kicked off discovery, they gave me the space to work.

It allowed us to have a conversation about scope and scenarios they hadn’t thought of, the users requirements that had been overlooked. I got to influence the direction of the project early on rather than trying to change their minds later on down the road.

Understanding the business problems had an impact on how we approach our design. We were able to assist with defining and solving the business problem. Changing our position and stepping out of our comfort zone exposed us to new valuable information and showed us how much influence design can have on a project.

Youth academies

Last year, Neymar the star of Brazilian soccer moved from Barcelona to Paris Saint Germain (PSG) for £200 million. There are only a few clubs in the world who can afford that sort of money, luckily for PSG they are owned by a Saudi Prince rich with oil money. Small teams cannot compete with mega rich clubs and focus on uncovering their next star by developing youth players in the hopes that they can sell them on at a huge profit in the future.

UX design finds itself in a similar situation, the most experienced designers are working for corporations that can provide the best working environments and salaries. As the demand for UX grows so does the demand for UX designers and even the big corporations are struggling to recruit staff. If you have tried to hire a senior UX in the last year you know how frustrating that process can be.

With no formal UX qualification other than few short accreditations course the journey from Junior to Senior is really up to the individuals appetite for learning and development. We need to create a youth system within our businesses to grow young talent.

Changing our processes and environments to help learning and development seems like an unnecessary waste of time, but there is a subtle benefit to working this way. It not only forces everyone to think about and document their process, but it also allows us to identify and replicate successes. It gives us an opportunity to challenge our own process, to identify what works, what doesn’t and what we do out of habit.

Young designers will benefit from a having a clear understanding of what is expected of them and how they can grow based on milestones and measurable metrics. Documenting these processes help us to communicate the value of what you do to the rest of the business.

It is required that as our industry matures, that we have a shared understanding of our own performance expectations, process and practises.

Setting standards

In the 60’s and 70’s the only qualification you needed to be a football manager was some experience working in the game and a drinking problem. The game has moved on, influenced by sports science, nutrition and elevated standards. To be a modern day coach you need to qualify for a coaching licence. Young managers spend time with legends of the game learning from managers at different clubs and in different countries. There is an effort by players, coaches and clubs to share their knowledge with each other and young managers.

I work in big design team which is spread across 3 different offices in Johannesburg in a fast environment serving a huge organisation in multiple territories. I cannot overstate the value of shared understanding from components to the business strategy in an environment like this.

The level of orchestration required to deliver a cohesive product into the market is complex. This is just the complexity of one institution.

At an industry level we need to have a shared understanding of what it is we do in our respective human centred design roles so that we can develop an identity as an industry. Growing designers and industry standards will increase our value and not diminish it. It is only with this shared understanding that we can consciously decide how we will move ourselves forward and proactively increase our sphere of interest.

The highlights

Lets recap.

The only way we are going to create the space to do good is if we earn the right, by strategically laying the groundwork, have a shared philosophy and give the next generation the tools they need to achieve it.

Creating trust and designing collaboratively will help us build better organisations and grow design lead business that delivers measurable, profitable and sustainable products.

We will then have the platform to then use tech and design to overcome some of our greatest social challenges in our country.