Its getting very serious.

McKinsey released two white papers / articles recently, and I think they hint at a future where the creation of customer / user experiences is taken very seriously indeed.

The first – ‘using behavioural science to improve the customer experience’ (pdf download) sets out that...

“By guiding the design of customer interactions, the principles of behavioural science offer a simple, low-cost route to improved customer satisfaction."

Within a week another article titled “The Human factor in service design” looked at how the

“Focus on the human side of customer service to make it psychologically savvy, sound, and easier to scale”.

I admire McKinsey – it’s fair to say they have been more than a little successful, and their recent articles, research and models on the themes of user experience and service design show the increasing role data has to play in the creation, measurement and refinement of experiences.
What registered with me about the article was that it’s a good sign when a McKinsey article is full of what I consider to be well established practices, and reminded me that it takes a data driven approach to validate critical business decisions. (another truism.)

But what data? What can you measure, and how do you prioritise / synthesise one data stream from or with another ? I think the value of design processes and practices have been massively underestimated in the innovation process because the measurement models were too simplistic, and that the models failed to truly understand human behaviour. The processes used to form decisions are only just beginning to be truly understood, and the impact of this is perhaps best described by Alan Greenspan who said that he found a

"..flaw in the model..... the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works"

The (fundamental) flaw was that they failed to understand was human behaviour, there was irrationality in the markets, like there is irrationality in almost everything we do. (The last truism.) This has driven a new interest in behavioural economics, something we have been exploring for some time.
The challenge we face is applying the principles and models of behavioural economics to the creative process. Essentially we are running hundreds of tiny little tests to assist in the creation of the look, feel and behaviour of devices and digital platforms.

The results of our tests are maps, sketches, code, layouts, models – whatever. There are a huge number of ways to measure any form of design from MRI scans to simple card sorting exercises, but for us they either aren’t fast enough or provide little insight.

So, we have stuff that is tricky to measure and tests that are too slow or inaccurate. To get round this we use techniques like role play and empathy to inspire us. As designers we are perfectly comfortable with this approach and our assumptions, when tested, are often proved correct, but this isnt going to be good enough in the future, we are going to be inspired by a more direct form of data.

Which brings us back to the McKinsey articles. I don’t think the new models and data will be produced in experiments and tests, but in the real world.


One of the many impacts of the Internet of Things will be that we can have access to multiple macro, real time experiments running 24/7. One of the challenges we will face as a design and innovation business will be to really harness data driven design – not only how the data influences our work, but in how we structure data streams to provide better user experiences over time.