It’s optimistic to think that all software, technology, innovation, and transformation projects intended to improve an organisation actually deliver their outcomes. After all, significant time, effort, and money are spent to make an organisation, or its products, services, and experiences, higher performing, efficient or more valuable. But after decades of observation, ~70% of transformation projects still fail to deliver their intended value. And the common reason they fail is because teams keep misunderstanding the Human Factor.

If AI is the horse, the thing meant to do the work, then they should pull the cart, to wherever the driver specifies, not the other way around. The way to thrive, with a Human-Centred Design lens is to understand the human, system and organisational problems and solve outward to the technology. That way we can build the sort of future where organisations and the people they serve, both benefit. 

Some years ago, we got the idea to think about Human Centred Design, not as a sequence of steps, stages or phases of activity, but as a set of characters in an epic story of design adventure.

Experience mapping, in all its forms, is a key stock-in-trade for Cognitive Ink. Over the years, we’ve accumulated many dozens of mapping techniques. Yet, for many reasons, we keep circling back around to the humble, time-worn and clarifying flowchart.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of product, service and experience design principles that pervade the world. Some are very specific to lower-level concerns, like principles of grouping, to make interfaces easier to comprehend. Others are more abstract, like how we should ‘sail towards Blue Oceans,’ to find products and services that are radically new business areas.

Have you ever felt that you’re not getting the core—the heart—of your product, service or experience, right?

In an urgency to do human centred research work, it’s easy to jump right into action, throwing money and time at setup, recruitment, staging and then the actual interviews, workshops, on-sites, surveys or analytics that form the backbone of qualitative and qualitative research practices. But it’s worth asking first, ‘What are you measuring?’

Whether it’s explaining a past challenge, or presenting a better future, it comes down to taking to time to find the secret stories of how things work.

There are a lot of forces, some recent and some historical, that work against talking with real people during user research. The rise of synthetic users is the most recent and perhaps the most powerful. But even when considering the apparent efficiency and cost-effectiveness of synthetic users, we still advocate talking with real people.

Suppose you’ve reached the point where you’re interested in visually mapping your product, service, or experience. Yet, you or a person in power might ask, before committing fully to a mapping adventure  “What benefit does all this visual committing mapping bring?”