Last week I had a chat with Jeff Howard, during which I described the presentations at the Service Design Network conference in November. My observation from the conference is that service designers seem to know what service design looks like. The process shown during the presentations looked very similar. This prompted Jeff to suggest that process is no longer a differentiator.
I’ve been pondering this statement since then. How true is it? And what could that mean? The design process has received a lot of attention over the past few years in part due to the push of user-centered design and a focus on experience over features. The best design firms rely on a strong design process that implements various methods. For the most part, methods are known, but flexible enough for variation. A lot of design education, whether it’s in the classroom, a conference presentation, or workshop, focuses on teaching process and methods. Even in the realm of business, design methods have been adopted to incite innovation.
The design process and methods are not very difficult to learn. For those who want to learn them and for design firms that believe them, there is not much room to grow in the process arena. Sure, new methods are created all the time. But I don’t think they revolutionize the process as a whole.
So that leaves us with all good design firms using a similar process with similar methods. How then do you differentiate? Or what is it that actually differentiates one design firm, or one designer, from another, especially if they have a similar focus, like service design?
While there are several ways to answer this question, one I find interesting is the culture and values that a designer or a design firm possesses. These forces affect the thinking during the design process and the making that results. But they don’t receive a lot of attention. Understanding the role those forces play in design process could be a way of articulating value and differentiation when the landscape of process execution looks the same.
I think it would be really interesting to hear design teams talk about how their culture and values influenced the decisions made during the design process that led to the chosen solution. Perhaps less how and more why.
Comments
6 responses to “Process not a differentiator?”
Isn’t it the people involved that make the outcomes different? Two different people can use the exact same process but in design, often the results can vary wildly.
Yes. The people do make the outcomes different. Values and culture affect why the outcomes are different. Yet we tend to focus on the process itself, and not what influences the results.
A couple quick points, one an anecdote from CMU and the other a personal approach:
a) Dick Buchanan’s graduate design seminar, he wrote out the steps of a typical UCD process on the whiteboard, blabbed on about the major steps, etc. When he concluded, I asked, “So if someone just walked in right now and memorized and did those steps, is that person then a good designer?” And Dick just smiled sneakily, saying something about the personal and the “noumenal”… hmm.
b) When presenting at conferences or for job interviews, I usually have a slide about “the process” and I preface it by telling the audience that all major companies have the same basic process with some variations but my process has evolved from personal experience and lessons learned, as well personal “talents and preferences”…
I offer these to suggest that there’s definitely something beyond just “the process” that differentiates the good vs. the great vs. the mediocre. You’re close when you say it’s something to do with values/culture for sure. I’d be blunt and just say quite frankly it’s someone’s talent and personal background of experiences/lessons learned at the individual level, aggregated to help/hurt the collective team. (hope that makes sense?) The ability to sketch, envision, speculate, connect dots together, mix up ideas, and foster the conversation along in an engaging stimulating fashion. There is an “x factor” no doubt… via values, training, background, etc.
Another (perhaps simplistic) analogy, football teams basically have the same overall playbook with some variations, but if you have a lousy quarterback who can’t “feel the field”, while the other team has a superstar gunslinger, well that’s a big difference :-)
I suppose in a market segmentation sense, process actually is a differentiator. Your comment that all the “good” design firms use similar processes and methods points to the fact that there are probably mediocre design firms that don’t use those processes and methods.
At some point, a set of processes becomes hygienic. They’re the baseline against which you judge a “good” design firm.
Interesting idea. Though by their nature culture and values are infused through out people’s lives and are thus hard to identify except in contrast to someone else’s culture and values. For example, I wasn’t really aware of the way my culture effected how I eat a meal until I spent enough time in another culture and got a feel for their approach.
I think the same would be true for design decisions. I might be able to give some generic values that I think of as being important in my designs. But the really interesting differentiators wouldn’t come out except in explaining why I would have done something different than another designer.
“Yes. The people do make the outcomes different. Values and culture affect why the outcomes are different.”
Why is there no discussion in design skill differences in this arena? In many of the design firms I am intimately familiar with, this is what I see as the greatest perpetrator of differing outcomes within the same process.