Myth-busting digital transformation: it is not instant, nor a replacement
After happening upon this video clip I had to share it as an analogy for some organisations’ understanding of, and, sadly, approach to, ‘digital transformation’.
This video to me visualises very well how some organisations approach improving their digital services. The animals that have been processed by the magic digital transformation fountain look a lot stronger, and the overall perception is that they are now much more kick ass.
Things, obviously, don’t work like this in real life. Multi-channel culture change to user centred design is not a “boom” moment you can schedule. It takes a long time and will be iterative. Training and embedding of skills are huge and far-reaching aspects.
Digital is not a magic wand
Let’s wind right back and start with “digital transformation”. What does that even mean?
I’m translating it as “improving the services we offer our users by adding or enhancing digital touchpoints”. Sorry, that still sounds a bit jargon-y. Let me try again: “making our services better for users by improving or adding digital bits”.
Immediately you can see a problem. The assumption is that “more digital” equals improvement. Even if (and this isn’t a given) the digital service – which could be just one web page giving information – is done well, superbly designed around the user, with interaction and content design tested on multiple devices and all other digital interaction points there’s still a problem.
Because with the “digital to save the day” attitude prevalent in the very name of the digital transformation concept, there’s no thought towards backup and offline, non-digital processes.
What if some of your users don’t have a broadband connection or are some of the 11% of people in the UK who don’t use the internet even weekly, let alone every day, hour, minute? What if the digital timetable display is just not working for some reason?
The bus stop conundrum
A real world example is the local bus stops in the town where I grew up. Paper timetables got replaced with those digital countdowns panels that are part of the bus shelter roof. But many have now disappeared or aren’t in use.
I imagine the assumption is people have Citymapper or similar on their smartphone. Not everybody does! Really, not everybody at all.
The user need is to know when the next bus is coming, crucially when they are at the bus stop*. Now the onus to meet that need is put on users themselves. Why were the paper timetables even taken away? They are a good back up if the digital display fails or your phone battery dies.
Back to those super furry animals
OK so, digital doesn’t always help but it can make a huge difference. I do use Citymapper and it’s amazing. For me. When my mobile is charged.**
So wanting to “make our services better for users by improving or adding digital bits” IS still a great thing (just not necessarily the only great thing your organisation can do for its users).
How do organisations improve their digital services if there is no animal transformation fountain and no Tinkerbell with a magic wand??? Ah, perhaps they call on Mary Poppins to take them through the grey pavement into an alternative colourful reality?
Chipping away by having conversations
Certainly it might feel like there are concrete-like slabs, boulders even, in the way of introduction of digital best practices and processes. But it’s likely to need to be chipped away at, not smoothly stepped through. Only people with talking umbrellas can do the latter.
So how do you chip away? Talking. Talking to people. Presenting to them. Showing them examples of how to build services around the user. Introducing them to the idea that their users have needs, that they come to a website or app or digital point to complete a task (and that a task could be as simple as checking the weather for the day), that users are likely to be time-pressured and that they might be juggling multiple offline tasks as they interact with a device or digital point. That their cognition could be affected by stress or other emotions. That users may have access challenges. That an inclusive design approach will help everyone using the service.
Inclusive design
Show them this from the Microsoft inclusive design principles:
The PNG image above shows how accessibility challenges can be permanent, temporary or situational for people. It’s divided into categories of ‘touch’, ‘see’, ‘hear’ and ‘speak’. All of these senses are relevant to the needs of your digital service users.
Touch shows a person with one arm, then a person with a broken arm and then a person a baby to show permanent, temporary and situational physical impairment.
Sight shows a person who is blind, a person with cataracts and a distracted driver.
Hearing has someone who’s deaf, someone with an ear infection, and a bartender in a noisy bar.
Speech shows someone who communicates non-verbally, someone with laryngitis and someone with a heavy accent. The implication is the person with a heavy accent is situationally rendered unable to speak, as they may not be well understood in some locations.
User testing
These access challenge illustrations can really help introduce people to the idea of designing inclusively and understanding that users will have access challenges.
But tell them that even though they ARE useful for understanding the concept that making digital products more accessible improves them for all users, generic personas of any sort are not enough.
They will definitely need to do some user testing with real users if they want to improve services for their own users. And it has to be the right kind of user testing not a tick box exercise. Literally, not a tick box exercise — surveys are misleading and unreliable.
Making things better through user centred design
When you know something about your users and what they want, you can start designing, or improving, services for them. But unlike the ‘pollos’/‘crocodilos’ in the video clip at the top, the elements of improving a service aren’t consecutive. It’s more of a loop stitch idea.
Neilson Norman group’s Design Thinking 101 graphic is another useful visualisation, and they have provided a text summary of all the stages in their graphic on the web page.
The design part of the loop refers to content design as well as service design as well as interaction design. This is where it gets a bit tricky to explain because digital content and interaction design are part of service design and do obviously contribute to design of the service. But designing the service is not just designing the digital part of the service, it’s knowing it inside out and bringing that to the whole design process.
Service designers are super aware of what the service offers and what users require from it. They know helpful niche things about it that can help you get the content right. Good ones are pretty radical about questioning established service processes, and questioning changes the team are making, to get a better result for users.
User testing
Of course the more a content designer finds out from user research sessions the more they understand the service and requirements for themselves. Which is all for the good.
Content, interaction and service design skills are all needed to make a prototype which is tested with users. The designers are ideally party of a multidisciplinary team. Read my thoughts about why multidisciplinary teams are good, if you like. You can find out what I think good service design is too. It’s had some really nice feedback, so it hopefully it might not be entirely wrong.
“This sounds expensive…”
So you’ve spoken to your organisation about user centred, inclusive design, about interviewing users, about a circular design process (wait, what, we don’t just sign off and publish?), about getting skilled service designers, content designers, user researchers and working in multidisciplinary teams.
A lot of these terms and skills may be new to them. And they may already have contracted web design agency. If so try and work with the design agency. Encourage them to use the GDS design system that’s full of open source inclusive design components.
The long view
They will be thinking about initial costs. Encourage them to think long term. Creating content that users want and need is crucial. Designing the service so that it reaches them is equally crucial.
The colour of the website only really, really matters in that the contrast of background and text is OK for people who have colour blindness or low vision. OK it will reflect your brand a bit and could influence perception of it — but so will clearly designed content, or the lack of it. People lose trust in websites that are out of date, have mistakes or are not consistently designed, including consistency of content style.
Design the content first
Users don’t have much time on their hands these days. People scan a page for what they need in microseconds. Make them see the content they need. Make it readable. Use clear language, subheadings, bullet points. Front load to put important information at the start of titles, headings and bullet points.
They’re looking at your website now, on their mobile. In 3 seconds their friend will arrive. Or they’ll go to their yoga class. Or they’ll finish their lunch hour. Or they’ll just get irritated that they can’t find the thing they’re after and go off to look on a competitor’s site instead.
Give them a simple, clear website to interact with. Don’t make them have to think how to get to what they want. Ingenious branding concepts are generally very likely to be lost on most of your users. They simply don’t have time for all that.
Where are all the words?
Looking at it another way, you can have a one page website with a white background and your company name typed out at the top and it can convey information users want. Users will still find it a helpful resource.
If you have a multi-page website with an intricate colour palette and a lovely logo design, but no words, users will find it blooming useless.
In fact, they won’t find it, as Google won’t have any words to pick up on or content quality to assess so they won’t be able to rank it in search results. And users won’t be able to get to the multiple pages from the homepage, as there won’t be any navigation labels.
When you take away all the words, you suddenly notice how peculiarly, exceptionally useful they are on a website.
From tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow
By now your stakeholders should have a pretty good idea that what’s ahead is not linear. It’ll grow more like a tree, with roots delving deeper into user behaviour and needs.
With branches growing out as the organisation develops its user centred design capabilities through skills and processes training, recruitment and other organisational changes.
And not forgetting leaves: the front end digital content that users will interact with. Like leaves these interactive elements will be cyclical, iterative if you like, with content going out of date and needing to be redesigned as user needs change***.
Pruning — cutting (content) back and grafting — bringing (content) together for a better end product may be needed. Um, this metaphor could go on.
Becoming an organisation that takes a user centred design approach
This is what organisations should be doing, and saying that they are doing. To be fair, some are doing it but they’re still calling it “digital transformation”, which is not helpful.
The user needs of people working for the organisation are to have upcoming changes to how services will be designed and presented made clear to them. They, ultimately, will be making the changes happen, through their job roles.
Compare:
“Digital transformation. What on earth is that? I don’t feel connected to it. I think it’s something management want us to do.”
to:
“Oh, so we’re ‘taking a user centred design approach’. I’m not entirely sure exactly what that means yet but I bet it’s something to do with designing things around users. Who are these users? I’m feeling curious about this, and I like the ‘design’ part, it sounds creative!”
My definition
I think I’ve reached a definition of ‘doing a digital transformation’ that I like. It isn’t a definition, it’s a replacement. This is the new one:
“We’re taking a user centred design approach now.”
Because the other thing with ‘digital transformation’ is it’s often unclear when or if it’s started or whether it’s merely biding its time, lurking, darkly, somewhere on the horizon.
And also, importantly, a user centred design approach acknowledges that digital might actually not be the best channel for, or most important aspect of, service improvement for the user.
If all this sounds familiar, then brilliant
As I said at the start of this article, this isn’t new thought, it’s just me putting down some things that seem very important when I look around and still see organisations expecting a chicken to walk through a fountain and turn into crocodile. If you know what I mean.
The more of us saying “um well, the term digital transformation is a bit of a misnomer because it’s not linear, it’s not a boom moment thing, you can’t really have a deadline for it, in fact it’s more like a tree growing as you learn about users and train your staff”, the better.
Thanks for listening to what is in essence a very long rant about an IT term!
* Not at the last time they had internet access.
** My hands get really freezing in winter sometimes though, as I haven’t once again fulfilled my own user needs by also buying screen-touchable gloves. I imagine people in Chicago, where temperatures go below -30°C, would have this problem a lot more than me.
*** Oh yes, user needs do change. Keep checking on them.
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