What do your customers want and why?
How to give them what they need so they love your brand.
User Research and Strategic Design
Human Environments, Experiences, Products, Services and Systems
Strategic Design Leadership.
Product & Service Innovation. Cultural intelligence, actionable insights, practical prototypes.
What is Design?
“Aesthetical planning,” wrote Bruno Munari in Design as Art. “A plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose,” Charles Eames famously said.
Design is the process of making specifications and conversations for building things – objects, products, environments – and non-things –services, brands, processes, experiences & systems.
What is Leadership?
“The ability to inspire and guide people toward a shared vision,” Peter Drucker taught. “Leadership is about coping with change,” opines John Kotter. “Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader,” Toni Morrison reminds us.
Leadership is doing the right thing. Management is doing things right. A leader serves, guides, listens with compassion & empathy.
What is Service Design?
Why it works
Service design is a multi-disciplinary practice that orchestrates the creation and delivery of experiences and systems across entire value chains to create end-to-end experiences. Service design integrates behavioural sciences, systems thinking and human-centered design.
Service design has evolved from the “human factors”, “practical branding”, “user-centered” design and other participatory, empathy-led design traditions. It is collaborative, holistic and evidence-based.
How it works
Plan & conduct immersive UX and Design Research
Synthesize evidence, articulate insights, identify opportunities
Design, build and test – prototypes, alphas and pilots
Launch products and services across physical/virtual, analog/digital, in-person/remote and other media.
I offer: Evidence, Insights & Prototypes. Discovery
Immersive User Research
Ethnographic Studies
Field Research Reports
Behavioural Models
Cultural Intelligence & Insight Reports
Competition & Benchmarking Analysis
Frame the problem from the user’s point-of-view and context. Observe their behaviour, listen deeply to them, and co-create and collaborate with them to understand their motivations and needs.
Synthesis & Insights
Workshop Design & Facilitation
Min
Journey Maps
Service Blueprints
Strategic Roadmaps
Define important types of users. Describe their needs, goals, motivations and challenges. Personas enable us to keep the human needs in mind as we create services for them.
Plans, Prototypes & Pilots
Concept Designs
Information Architecture
Interaction Designs
Prototypes
Pilot Programmes
Digital, physical, experiential and environmental rapid prototyping gives you real-time feedback from real users that allow you to make strategic and operational changes on an on-going basis.
Outputs to outcomes
As-is journey mapping
How and why are users doing things now?
A customer journey shows the path that a persona takes though a service system. It can show the emotional state and human need at each stage, touch point and context of their experience.
Digital touchpoints
Interfaces, context and seamlessness
Bring concepts to life through prioritised designs. Test and refine concepts, proofs, prototypes and pilots across the service system.
To-be service blueprinting
How users, customers, staff will do things better.
The service blueprint is a strategic and operational tool that enables an organization to orchestrate their service capabilities. It shows which interactions need to occur within and between systems.
Physical experiences
Way finding, signage and environments
Humans are embodied beings in space and time. Look, I won’t get too philosophical here, but the places people find themselves has a huge impact on how they behave and what they feel and think.
Prototypes, MVPs & Pilots
Start with Real Needs – Customer Experiences
Choosing which features and functions to start with requires careful consideration. We visualising complex systems and interconnections to decide.
It requires planning and orchestration to transform data into information, knowledge and wisdom. And then action. Learn by doing. Keep iterating.
Backstage operations
Signature moments
Services that people love are created by never letting customers see all the “behind-the-scenes” activity. When strategy, operations, partners, suppliers and other inputs are orchestrated and integrated effectively the customer experience can be relevant, meaningful, and seamless. This is called the Back Stage in service design.
I am a behaviour-led creative and strategic (service) designer with 25 years experience in print, graphics, motion, interactive, digital and service/product systems.
I have worked in the Aviation, Beauty, Fashion, Energy, Entertainment and Financial Services sectors.
I have led research, design and innovation teams and projects for Fjord (now Accenture Song), Designit (Wipro), and the NHS.
I served as Global Executive Director of Service Design for The Esteé Lauder Companies helping brands such as Aveda, Jo Malone, MAC, and Origins to design and implement end-to-end customer-centric programs.
Being, Doing, Making
I gather evidence, make sense of it, and do innovation: discover + define.
➜ Research ➜ Synthesis ➜ Rapid Prototyping ➜
The work creates behaviour change at scale. It examines how human beings engage with each other and brands across multiple media and technologies for connection and agency.
Focus: human-to-human connection, human interaction with technology
Approach: collaborative, co-creative, holistic, human-centered, evidence-based, behaviour-led
Expertise: ethnography, strategic branding, interaction design, user experience design, service design
Nouns: Artist. Designer. Creative. Strategist. Traveller. Leader. Ethnographer. Teacher. Writer.
Motto: Travel is victory!
Status: Radio, Radio
