STRATEGY | CASE STUDY

Empower the Team with Experience Design

COMPANY OVERVIEW

An American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores.

BUSINESS NEED

The Analytics team in the Ethics and Compliance Division had been getting a lot of traction with a growing number of internal teams. Suddenly, everyone needed insights and visualizations from their data. The small team found themselves with a ton of work to do, designing and delivering dashboard after dashboard. Every design phase was a long and painful process, as the team had great difficulty extracting clear requirements from their stakeholders. They were looking for a way to change how they worked with stakeholders and break out of the cycle.

SOLUTION

The client brought in Ironside to run a 3-day workshop, with the goal of getting the team quickly ramped up on Experience Design techniques and best practices, in order to help them get unstuck. We started with an overview of design thinking concepts, then went through the end-to-end process in depth. The team practiced the techniques using their own business problems, and we ended with a discussion of the practical details of rolling out these processes internally.

Understand Experience Design

Explored examples of well-designed experiences in the real world
Discussed the mindset embodied by this type of work
Learned about the benefits of utilizing Experience Design, and how it’s integral to success

Learn the Process

Assembled a full and nuanced picture of the business context with the Discovery phase
Added shape and clarity to the design problem with techniques such as Personas, Journey Maps, and Card Sorting in the Analysis Phase
Explored a broad array of design options with collaborative, rapid-design techniques in the exploratory design phase
Filled out the most promising design options, and got feedback from target users in the Refinement phase

Apply the Process

Collectively discussed the greater business context as a team (Note: This simple activity is often eye-opening. Teams tend to think they have a shared understanding of what goes on, until they actually try to clarify it together)
Got a head start on defining Personas, which become assets the team can use to frame future design problems
Collectively explored one or more lingering design problems as a team, to practice the techniques and simultaneously get unstuck

Utilize the Techniques

Discussed organizational challenges to adoption of the techniques
Strategized as a team how to counter these anticipated roadblocks
Identified specific actions to start, quick wins, to kick start process change and make this more than just theory

KEYS TO SUCCESS

The 3-day workshop resulted in the following benefits for the client:

Gain familiarity with the sequence of activities and grasp why they work through practice with real, tangible problems
Foster engagement and rapid learning by practicing new techniques within the highly familiar context of their day-to-day work

Empower the team through realizing that they can make true progress on challenging problems with the techniques they’ve learned
Carry the energy forward with useful assets from the workshop and clear next steps to take as a team

READ ADDITIONAL CASE STUDIES

Strategy Data Analytics Platform