Our process is informed by over 15 years experience delivering projects for our clients. It is designed to address the complexities of designing services for social use and incorporates an iterative design and development approach. As we tailor our approach to specific business needs, not all projects will follow the process outlined below verbatim — we provide it as a “broad brushstroke” view to provide some insight into how we approach our work.

Explore

First, we immerse ourselves in your business. We tap into your expertise to understand the opportunities and challenges, get a handle on what is already known and where there may be gaps, so that we can target our activities to provide the most value. We define the challenge(s) we are trying to address and develop a clear set of objectives for our work.

We work with you to assemble a project team with relevant internal stakeholders from across your organisation. We gain a sense of your organisational culture and the processes, policies and structures that may impact our work as new services are envisaged and turned into reality.

We also seek to understand your business from the perspective of external stakeholders. Ethnographically inspired research techniques reveal stakeholder needs, motivations, barriers and context of use, and identify any misalignment between customer perceptions and expectations and organisational perspectives.

Envision

With a shared understanding of the project outcomes and organisational objectives, and the needs of our end-users, we collaboratively develop conceptual design of the service or product.

Co-design techniques continue to align design activities with customer and business value. We may also engage relevant experts and specialists to assist in developing the conceptual design.

The Envision process may involve creating ‘scenarios of use’ and other rich/visual methods of envisioning the new service, to strengthen communication of concepts to stakeholders, executives and staff, creating a shared vision of what "success" might look like.

Execute

Working with something in the ‘real world’ tests a design and can uncover opportunities for improvement that may otherwise be missed. Getting a prototype into the hands of users quickly is an inexpensive way to turn ideas and conceptual designs into something tangible early.

An iterative approach — designing while progressively testing and incorporating feedback — uncovers potential issues before they become costly errors. For example, learnings from prototyping and testing may challenge the overarching strategy, taking us back to reconsider the outcome of the Envision phase.

Prototyping and iterating also helps us to build and test the internal supporting structures required by your new product or service — for example, organisational policies or new team accountabilities — to ensure that the proposed solution is sustainable and feasible from a business perspective.

And evolve…

Our work does not finish with the launch of the product or service. We continue to seek feedback to evaluate the success of the product or service in meeting its objectives — both organisationally and from the customers’ and stakeholders’ perspective. These evaluations then inform the further evolution and refinement of the service or product over time.

Design activities

We apply a variety of techniques to solve a particular challenge or set of challenges, depending on the context and requirements of the project. We’ve created a toolkit outline to provide some additional detail about the type of activities we might undertake on a project.