Designing for learning
A call to design for better data: when we put together Agile Customer Thinking a few years back the idea was that “any responsive organization needs something to respond to”.
And what they would respond to was the customer.
We were looking at popular customer insights and design methods like Design Thinking and Market Research and saying: these might be good, but they are too slow, they don’t scale, they are not real-time nor continuous, they turn insights and ideas into events instead of being an integrated part of our ways-of-working etc.
We need something better!
The digital environment at the same time is a huge recording machine .. if you design for it.
It can invite users to produce signals through a broad range of events, interactions, feedbacks, responses .. I you design for it.
The problem is, we don’t design for it. We make most platforms to serve conversion, not imagination.
We know customers come to the Internet with a range of personal needs and we know they bring their information with them .. e,g. A physician knows their own skill level, the skill level of their nurses, the types of patients they have, how they earn money etc. And we know they are looking for insights relevant to that.
But we don’t design for it …
Common design and data collection on the Internet is: what is the click-through-rate, which pages did they visit, how deep did they scroll, did they complete the funnell or where did they fall of?
These are not insightful data helping us respond to our customers, these are channel data helping us respond to our channels.
The call to design for better data wants us to:
First: acknowledge the difference in the data we are collecting, between what is human data and what is channel or technology data
Second: stop missing this massive opportunity of designing for our own insights, imagination, curiosity and surprise
https://www.agilecustomerthinking.io/
(The image at the top is a prototype from 2017 where we attempted to demonstrate the lost potential and how good we could make the experience if we designed for it).
