Our small team of strategists and experience designers had been on the receiving end of many asks to do work that looked like making backwards-looking strategic reasons for decisions already made by leadership. Realizing that the company had no cohesive strategic structure for thinking about customer needs, we set about creating one. This work resulted in a core framework that subsequent projects utilized to re-align and re-frame asks within a customer focused experience strategy.
Type: Design Strategy
Client: T-Mobile
Timeline: Late 2019
My Responsibilities: Co-author
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The research phase of this project began life as an effort to create a 'Core Customer Journey'.
Broad realizations regarding mismatches between the way the company thought about customers and the way customers thought about themselves guided our investigation.
Time and budget restrictions gave us a short window in which to investigate secondary research, facilitate internal workshops, and synthesize our findings.
Building a new way to think about designing for humans
As a relatively new design team within a large organization, we as a group gradually came to the realization that there existed no real foundation of thought leadership in terms of human-centered design.
During a short window of time when we knew as a team we had some opportunity to change this, we set about building this foundational framework - not as a set-in-stone methodology, but as a hypothesis that we could actively test and develop with every project.
Summarizing findings from the previous phase of work (shown above), the key outcome was centering the importance of trust as the core currency of customer experience.
As a 'choosable utility', T-Mobile is in a unique position. As a wireless carrier, they are core in function and supportive of many aspects of contemporary life, but at the same time different than a true utility in that customers have choice among several competitors.
The stakes are high for customers in that their choice can potentially impact a large cross section of their life. For the carrier, the stakes are high in that there are several options, all vying for the same customers in a saturated market.
Most customer journeys within a given problem space interact with several common 'moments' that have an outsized impact on the perception of trust. Discovering and focusing on these moments gives structure to a design problem, and a place to invest in building trust.
A bad habit of businesses is thinking of their customers strictly in terms of the product being sold to them. Customers aren't defined by the things they purchase, they purchase things to help solve their problems. Re-centering human needs at the core of our design work helps us get past assumptions of products based in features and move towards what matters most.
The key theoretical construct of this approach uses 'Amplifiers' as a concept to define what is most important for the kinds of people we might be designing for. These consist of aspects of their lives in which interaction with the problem space holds special risk. This list is a first attempt at outlining those major aspects, but will change and grow over time as we learn through iterative design.
Understanding our audience within a given problem space in terms of these Amplifiers allows us to use inclusive design principles to do the most good for the most people by focusing on those who have the greatest risk.
Another key concept in this work is the hypothesis that these Amplifiers are intersectional in nature, meaning that as they overlap the character of the risk changes, and can multiply in the magnitude of consequence, or risk.
Getting to know how Amplifiers interact within a problem space for the customer population gives us insight into what we can do to design for them at those key moments in a customer journey that will always have outsized impact on earning trust.
Sometimes motivation for customer behavior and choice can stem from factors external to themselves. There are often choices a company may make for their own reasons that end up affecting customer experience in surprising and unanticipated ways. It's important to seek and discover the impact of these factors in order to not confuse the resultant customer behavior as resulting from intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation.
The true utility of this foundational framework is in providing a repeatable process through which any designer can translate and expand business asks into human-centric design.