Successful Design for Your Employee and Customer Experiences

I was honored to have the opportunity to speak at the 2023 IAVM Region 4 Annual Conference on the topic of Human Centered Design. I have spent most of my career utilizing the methodology of Human Centered Design to maximize the usage of technology and improve processes. Below is a summary of the topic I presented at the conference:

Have you ever looked at the design of something thought to yourself, what were they thinking? Human Centered Design can support a better design process to both ensure buy-in for change management and save time and money by delivering the right solutions.

While Innovation will be defined differently across industries and organizations, the last organization I worked for defined it as ‘Commit to Constant Curiosity’. I love this definition for a few reasons: it encourages proactive commitment to the practice; it uses the term constant to enforce that core values are how you should perform your daily work, not something to be checked off your to-do list; and includes the concept of curiosity, which I equate to asking a lot of questions. It declares that the answer “that is how we’ve always done it” isn’t an option.

---

"Leverage an inclusive process to always design with, not for."

---

This definition helped the team push against the status quo, encouraged new teammates to bring their fresh outside perspective to the table, and supported the concept of continuous improvement. It is from this foundation that Human Centered Design can become bigger than a tactic and become rooted in the culture to direct employees’ process improvement efforts and drive employee engagement and deliver memorable customer experiences.

I propose four steps of Human Centered Design: Clarify – ensure you solve the right problem and that you fully understand the audience that will use the solution; Ideate – the idea generation process inclusively brings the right people together with encouragement to be creative and think outside the box; Develop – the solution analysis phase examines and tests potential solutions; and Implement – the change management process ensures employee and customer buy-in for lasting, sustainable solutions.

This methodology can be applied to a one-hour meeting to explore options for a small enhancement or a month’s long process implementing a large-scale project. You can use this process to analyze client feedback from your site visit process or work internally with employees on updating your employee onboarding program. It can also be used in designing kitchen prep stations or helping clients update their registration process. Really, this can be applied to any update on a process or space used by employees or clients.

Great teams and great organizations will get really good at this process. They will commit to being inclusive and ensure that they have the right people in the room. They will have engaged employees and loyal customers who know the organization strives to deliver memorable experiences. They will have a culture of communication and continuous improvement that maximizes resources and helps create trust with stakeholders.

If you would like to know more about how to apply Human Centered Design principles to designing great employee and customer experiences, let's chat. I love to talk about innovation and how connecting culture and process improvement leads to lasting success. Connect with Brooke Adamson at Brooke@AdamsonConsultancy.com and call or text (704) 918-2496.