Learning Service Design on the Job + Leading a Design Team + Service Design Standards with Tracey Williams — DT101 E47

06/09/20 • 46 min

Tracey Williams, a Service Design Director for Absa Bank in South Africa, discusses learning service design on the job, growing design skills on her team, and building organizational service design standards with Dawan Stanford, your podcast host.

Show Summary

Tracey’s career didn’t begin in design; she started in financial services, and went through a graduate program focused on business targets and goals. She’d always had an interest in problem-solving, and while working at Absa, she got involved in numerous projects that she found new and exciting outside of her specific role. She had studied marketing, and found that much of the old-school marketing thinking aligned with some of the thinking in design spaces.

She submitted an idea to a social entrepreneurship course and was accepted. Tracey then proceeded to learn service design and design thinking as she led her team through development of the idea. Her biggest challenge during the project was using the tools of design, which were still new to her; she had to learn through doing, and through failure and then trying again. She learned that design is about looking at a problem from a different perspective.

Tracey hosted the first Absa Women Forum at the Wentworth Angels headquarters to celebrate the role of single mothers and women.

Listen in to learn:

>> How Tracey developed her design skills>> What service design skills she has learned on her job>> Why she was called a design “Padawan”>> Who Tracey is bringing onto her team for service design>> How Tracey is developing new designers at Absa>> What she wishes more people understood about her work>> How she protects her work from being devoured by the larger system >> Books Tracey used to learn service design on the job

Our Guest

Tracey is a designer with seven years of experience in financial services. She is currently a Service Design Director for the Absa Bank Design Office, where she has played a key role in establishing and demonstrating the value of Service Design. Her teams have worked across different areas of the business and engaged with several stakeholders along the way, including those in Relationship Banking, Business Banking, Card, and most recently, Home Loans.

She enjoys working with cross-functional teams to solve complex, wicked problems with solutions that address both customers' needs and meet the business objectives. Beyond the delivery of design work, she has a passion for developing young talent and worked with a colleague to start the first design graduate program at the bank focused on transforming and growing its future design leaders.

Show Highlights

[02:33] How Tracey became involved in banking projects early on in her career.[03:43] Tracey’s experiences in a social entrepreneurship course.[06:24] Tracey talks about her early challenges in working with service design.[10:30] Tracey talks about a design graduate program she co-founded with a colleague.[12:30] Her leadership team’s work to create a skills matrix for designers.[14:21] How Tracey is developing new designers to fit the strategic objectives of the bank. [16:20] Her work to create solid service design standards for the bank.[19:10] What she wishes others understood about service design.[20:39] The concept of “go slow to go fast” and making sure pacing is comfortable and sustainable.[23:13] How Tracey is able to prevent her project being devoured by the larger system. [25:46] The short term and long term views and value of service design.[30:09] How Tracey is working to better tell service design success stories to other staff at the bank, and also to the bank’s customers.[32:25] Ways other banks can use service design.[36:27] Maintaining quality within a larger team and keeping up with service design standards.[42:29] Books and resources that have helped Tracey during her journey.

Links

Tracey on LinkedIn Absa Bank SDN Conference 2019

Book Recommendations

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries

Show Summary

Tracey hosted the first Absa Women Forum at the Wentworth Angels headquarters to celebrate the role of single mothers and women.

Listen in to learn:

Our Guest

Show Highlights

Links

Tracey on LinkedIn Absa Bank SDN Conference 2019

Book Recommendations

Previous Episode

Prototyping Insights + The Prototyping Canvas with Carlye Lauff — DT101 E46

Carlye Lauff is an independent contractor specializing in innovation strategy and design research. We’ll talk about her path into design and how she obtained her Ph.D. in Design Theory and Methodology, and then hear about her global work with organization innovation using human-centered design. Carlye talks about prototyping barriers, how to overcome these barriers, and her tool, Prototyping Canvas, with Dawan Stanford, your podcast host.

Show Summary

Carlye was exposed to the power of human-centered design thinking with her coursework during her undergrad at Penn State University. One project brought her to Kenya, where she was on a team initiating a telemed health initiative. Through this project, she saw the power of applying design thinking to a real-world problem. As a result, she pursued her Master’s and Ph.D. around design thinking — including founding the Design for America studio at Colorado University Boulder campus — with an emphasis on prototyping, and helping companies and organizations find ways to prototype more effectively. She has continued to work on design thinking-based projects around the world.

She is currently consulting in the U.S. in the field of innovation strategy, partnering with organizations and training their teams in the use of design thinking and human-centered design. She also works with teams to co-create solutions to actual projects and challenges in their organizations, including leading a project with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help children enhance their social-emotional learning.

Learn how Carlye teaches and trains professionals to make human-centric products, the challenges organizations and people have when prototyping, how to use analogies and case study examples, and how Carlye creates lasting organizational change long after her work with the company is done.

Listen in to learn:

>> How Carlye co-created an educational children’s toy at Robert Wood Johnson to help preschoolers identify their emotions>> Her experience with prototyping and how she overcame obstacles with prototyping>> The two strategies Carlye finds helpful when explaining prototyping>> Methods you can use for low-fidelity early prototyping>> How Carlye worked with the International Design Center in Singapore, focused on helping companies create lasting organizational change>> Two research-validated design tools Carlye collaborated on>> Carlye’s recipe for how to create great design >> Why she takes failure out of her language and replaces it with iterating and evolving

Our Guest’s Bio

Carlye is an innovation strategist, design researcher, and enthusiastic instructor who blends human-centered design practice with systems thinking approaches. She has helped more than 25 global organizations re-think their design processes and strategies, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies to universities.

Carlye is an independent consultant that empowers people and organizations to innovate using human-centered design methods and strategies. During 2018-2019, Carlye served as a Design Innovation Fellow at the SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC) in Singapore, where she trained companies in design innovation strategies, led an in-depth consulting project for the Land Transport Authority, and researched design methods like the Prototyping Canvas. Carlye received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University. Carlye’s research is within the field of Design Theory and Methodology, and she develops tools and methods to support designers and engineers. Carlye also founded the Design for America studio at CU Boulder in 2015 as a way to give students experiences working on interdisciplinary teams applying human-centered design to solve real problems in the community.

Show Highlights

[02:05] Carlye’s origin story and how she came into design as a career.[04:08] Her current work in the field of innovation strategy.[05:23] Her experience with Robert Wood Johnson co-creating a children’s learning project. [07:44] The challenges of prototyping.[10:10] Two strategies she uses to explain prototyping: analogies and case studies.[12:48] Examples and applications Carlye uses when explaining prototyping.[14:40] Hands-on activities Carlye uses to help people get a feel for prototyping: games, storyboarding, and roleplaying. [19:10] Her work in Singapore with the SUTD-MIT International Design Center and its Design Innovation Team.[21:05] Carlye checks in with the leadership of organizations to find out how they will support and continue her work when she is finished with her workshop or consulting.[22:18] Carlye talks more about the innovation hubs she worked with in Australia and Singapore.[25:50] Her excitement about design method...

Next Episode

Understanding Customers: Research, Insights, and Storytelling with Steve Portigal — DT101 E48

Steve Portigal is the Principal of Portigal Consulting and an experienced user researcher who helps companies harness the strategic power of insights. He is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. He also wrote Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. We talk about interviewing people, customer research, and storytelling with Dawan Stanford, your podcast host.

Show Summary

Steve started out in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), in the days before the World Wide Web and before the formal idea of user experience (UX) existed. He had a brief exposure to design as a profession through an article about industrial product design, and to the idea of bringing together people from many different disciplines to collaborate and create solutions to problems via another article about a project trying to determine how best to find a way to demarcate dangerous locations, like nuclear waste sites. These ideas planted seeds leading to his interest in design. Steve graduated with his Masters in HCI, had a summer internship in Silicon Valley, and eventually found a job in an industrial design consultancy to work on what was essentially proto-UX design with their software.

At the same time, this company was exploring ideas surrounding ethnographic research and the idea of uncovering product opportunities, and Steve managed to apprentice himself with the team, where he learned about organizing and finding connections within data. He also had the opportunity to develop his initial interviewing skills, which he continued to hone as he started his own consultancy focused on user research. Steve was one of the first people in the early 90’s to develop design processes for user experience and research.

We talk about Steve’s excitement for and interest in spending more time with stakeholders within a client’s organization. He has learned why a stakeholder’s perspective is essential in relation to the success of a project. He talks about creating “learning-ready” moments, how he helps people have these moments, and how learning and sharing the journey of learning affect learning retention.

Listen in to learn:

>> How Steve and others developed the design processes in the early stages of user experience and research >> How Steve’s skills, interests, and the work he does for his clients has evolved over the years>> When Steve knows he’s found a great client>> Why he believes that learning together is when change can happen>> Why understanding stakeholders gives better results with clients>> Being able to embrace realistic expectations of what you can accomplish

Our Guest

Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps companies to think and act strategically when innovating with user insights. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is principal of Portigal Consulting and the author of two books: the classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights and, Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.

He's also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Steve is an accomplished presenter who speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies and conferences across the globe.

Show Highlights

[02:09] Steve talks about his origin story and his introduction to the ideas of design and user experience. [06:15] Steve’s first job at an industrial design consultancy.[08:15] Steve’s apprenticeship with the team exploring a nascent practice in what was basically user experience. [09:58] Many companies were exploring and experimenting with these new ideas around user research in the 90s, and how that led to the development of best practices and processes around the work.[13:05] Steve’s litmus test for a new client.[13:37] How Steve’s role and work started to shift and change.[15:40] The way in which Steve sets up expectations with new clients and spending time with the stakeholders in a client’s organization.[16:20] The value in spending as much time with stakeholders as with users to gain a deep understanding of their motivations and perceptions.[19:03] Repetitive patterns and questions Steve sees with clients.[22:28] Using storytelling to help explain concepts and share information, and to help move clients through shared experiences and discussions.[24:04] Separating the value of the research from any action that may take place.[28:15] The importance of the “Why” of user research.[30:39] How Steve’s practice has evolved and the scope of his work today, now that many companies have in-house user research and design teams.[35:05] Steve’s specialized “master classes” for design team...