Have you ever felt undervalued, misunderstood or not even part of the team as a designer in tech?

Well, you’re not alone.

In fact, most designers are working in organisations that are on the opposite side of the spectrum to the design centric heroes we often hear about like AirBnb, Netflix, Spotify and LEGO.

Majority of organisations have low design maturity.

This graph is from InVision’s 2018 report. Looked at over 2000 organisations across the world and found that only 5% have Level 5 design maturity where design is strategic.

It’s been 5 years since this report so I’m sure things have changed (I’m optimistic) but I think the fact that majority of organisations have low design maturity has probably stayed the same.

More than 80% of organisations sit at Level 1, 2 and 3 where designers are only making screens, running workshops or still trying to scale design as a an embedded, default part of the process.

Traditional practice of these organisations is commonly: discover new technology, decide it’s a good idea, build something that seems to work, deliver it, make people use it, teach people how to use it and users create their own workarounds to retrofit the solution into their workflow.

And even within organisations, different teams often have varying levels of design maturity and capability.

I used to work in a technology consultancy in teams across the whole spectrum and now I lead building HCD capability at eHealth NSW, an Australian state government agency that delivers digital solutions to the public health system.

My team and I are working on shifting that mindset to bring users and community in as early as possible to define the problem, understand the context, co-design and prototype a solution and test it before delivery.

Our users are mostly clinicians and frontline healthcare staff. The easier and safer it is for clinicians to use digital health solutions, the better care they can deliver and the better outcomes we have for patients.

Disclaimer here that in this talk, all opinions shared are my own and don’t represent the views of my employer.

Recently I took our design community of practice of design practitioners and design enthusiasts across the business to the UX Australia conference in Sydney.

I had the pleasure of listening to George Aye, co-founder of Greater Good Studio speak in person (fangirl moment for me!). George shared a neat visualisation of the power dynamic in relationships such as doctor-patient, teacher-student, employer-employee and client-agency.

It’s a triangle. When you’re on the pointy side of the triangle, you’re subject to the power at the broad end.

I’m going to borrow it here to describe what it can feel like as a designer in an organisation with low design maturity.

When you’re the only designer in a team with low design maturity, it can feel like this - at the pointy side of all your relationships.

In reality though, if we decentre ourselves as designers, the power relationship is actually that the people affected by the design is at the mercy of our collective decisions.

Some of us get to work in the top 5% design-led organisations. For many of us, it’s quite likely you’ll end up working somewhere where design is not well understood or widely practiced or done well so we need to learn how to thrive in organisations that are still on their way.

Today I’m here to share some strategies that can enable better collaboration between you and your team or stakeholders so that you can thrive as a user experience, product or service designer in organisations with low design maturity.

I’ve called this talk “Dance towards doing design together” because a lot of the time we talk about this situation like it’s a battle, a fight to prove that we’re right. I think that needs to change.

Let’s jam about how it can be a dance instead. Now when I say the word dance, the dancers in the room always get excited. The non-dancers cringe. That’s exactly how some of your stakeholders feel when you say “design”!

I’m not a dancer and I’ve always admired people who can dance. They’re so flexible and cool and how do they control and move their body like that?!

I can’t dance but I’ve tried to go to dance classes.

The first thing is start with foundations: we need to understand the context of what people know about design and their mental models when we talk about design.

Design to many, still means: industrial design, graphic design, interior design or fashion design. The design of tangible things.

As design practitioners, we know how design has emerged as a discipline of creative problem solving. We can design not only things, but also visible interactions on interfaces, invisible interactions in services, experiences, organisations and society’s systems.

We need to recognise that some people haven’t bridged the gap between third Industrial Revolution tangible thing design and modern day design.

Never assume people have the same understanding of design as you do. And don’t judge them for not knowing.

When I was in consulting, we almost always kicked off client projects with setting the scene about common terminology and our definitions. Framing it as a way of making sure we’re all on the same page rather than it being condescending.

Another trick that works well is elaborating on the impact of your role when introducing yourself rather than just the title. Instead of Hi I’m the designer and I do UX. Try I help the team understand our users current experience with our thing so that we can make better decisions that lead to a thing that solves people’s problems and meets our business goals.

After setting foundations, let’s acknowledge that group dance takes coordinated effort and chemistry. To be able to get a group of people moving together in sync, we need common ground, trust and the right energy.

Can you think of the last time you sought to understand your team members or stakeholders with the same enthusiasm that you try to understand your users?

If the answer is no, there’s so much opportunity here. We can’t partner with people who we haven’t built a relationship with. Get to know them. What matters to them? What are they trying to achieve? How is their success measured?

You’ll be surprised that actually you’ve always been working towards the same things, just framed in a different way.

If not, having these conversations to align on a common purpose towards a vision can create that common ground. We can nudge our stakeholders to care about doing more research by talking about how we all don’t want to be creating something that nobody uses or finds valuable.

To build trust, we need to check our ego. Design isn’t the magic wand that can solve every problem. Rather than focusing on people’s gaps in design knowledge, we can celebrate how each of our strengths combined give us a more holistic perspective to solve problems. Design is only one piece of the puzzle - often the missing piece - but there are other important pieces that make up the picture too.

The last ingredient to coordinated group effort is energy. It can be awkward, uncomfortable and confrontational trying to dance. What we can do is create an atmosphere that generates curiosity and interest so that people are encouraged to explore.

I do this at eHealth NSW by running fortnightly lunch & learns that people can drop into rather than mandated training. Nobody wants to do something that they have to, should or must do. But when we give people choice and control to participate in something fun & exciting, they will feel empowered to get involved.

Now we can start taking one step at a time. We can’t learn to dance by watching videos, we need to take action and actually move our bodies.

Sometimes all it takes is an invitation. Instead of asking developers to wait for the usability test report, our UX designers invite team members to observe sessions live. The impact is immediate. Sometimes individual contributors in technology are so engrossed in delivering that there’s a disconnect between them and the real end user experience. Give people permission to be involved in design work at all stages.

But even with an invitation, it can still be so challenging to take that first step.

So we need to understand the barriers and break them down.

Fear of making a mistake, looking silly or stupid and feeling uncomfortable.
Ego - my way is the right way and no other way will be better.
Misconceptions about design - it blows out the timeline, designers complicate things.

To combat fear, make sure you make time for warm up exercises! Showcase imperfection.

Ego is a tricky one. Lead the resistor to suggest your idea. Instead of “We should be doing more user research” >> “Looks like we have some gaps and don’t have enough data about people’s needs to inform prioritisation.. Do you think user research could help?”

Have yes, and conversations rather than yes, but conversations.

Yes you’re right that we can’t boil the ocean, and that’s why I need your help to find a sweet spot to make the best use of your expertise in the constraints and my ability to see possibilities.

Yes it does take more time and investment upfront in the short term, and then when we look at it long term, it actually saves us time reworking and debugging later on.

I find “yes, and” so powerful because it moves us away from an “us versus them” mindset and moves us towards “we’re all in this together”.

And so, there we have it.

Start with foundations.
Set the scene for coordinated effort.
Then take it one step at a time.

Do we still think it has to be a battle when we can dance together instead?

I’m not the first person to talk about this topic. Here are some books and resources I’ve found incredibly helpful.

I hope this talk has sparked reflection on how you can embed more humility, generosity and fun into how you collaborate in a place with lower design maturity than you would like.

And if you take only one thing away, this is your sign to reach out to a stakeholder or team member who thinks differently to you, have a jam, make it more of a tango and less of a solo.

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Dance towards doing design together