Design (re)thinking

Editor's note: Scott Lee is managing partner/senior client partner Asia at research firm InSites Consulting. Marcus Lui is strategic consultant service design at InSites Consulting. 

COVID-19 caused huge disruption to our lives, forcing us to work, school and shop from home. With survival our first priority, many of us changed the way we go through the day, addressing deep personal tensions and reimagining our relationships with people as well as brands. The pandemic has reset the way we seek and achieve happiness; redesigning our lives for greater resilience, seeking wellbeing, getting closer to nature and so forth.

The world is still speculating on whether these new priorities and behaviors might change for good or return to pre-pandemic times. Acting as a tailwind, the pandemic has accelerated existing trends and influenced new ones. What is clear is that we now live in a more VUCA world: more volatile, more uncertain, more complex and more ambiguous.

Digital now permeates all aspects of our lives. It can no longer be ignored by brands or researchers; indeed, it feels like even the most mundane products now come with embedded software (the so-called Internet of Things). This software world affects both the products we buy and the ways we work. Moreover, it increases data sources available to brands. Yet, in some ways, the more data brands collect, the less they seem to understand consumers as real people.

A new normal has emerged, whereby consumers expect to have their cake and eat it. We refer to this as “bothism” – consumers expect great convenience and great experiences. More than this, they want brands that they can identify with, that share their values and offer human interaction at scale.

From a commercial perspective, this means development cycles are getting ever faster and more agile. In an increasingly software-driven world, everything starts to behave like a perpetual beta app, with continuous updates and mounting pressure to stay sticky, to be relevant to consumers. Banks, insurers, airlines – you name it – it’s no surprise many are asking: “How can I gamify this?”

Continued erosion

From a market research perspective, this VUCA world has caused the continued erosion of in-person, offline methodologies, as well as challenging the research project mind-set. Discrete research projects, with binary step-wise methodologies of “qual then quant” or “quant then qual” are struggling to keep up. Hard-grafting researchers will burn the midnight oil to try to duct-tape the old paradigm together. But for how much longer?

Beyond agility, there is a deeper issue for traditional research; focus groups, for example, are arguably becoming out of sync with the ever-empowered consumer of today. Certainly, for next-gen consumers under 30, brands must engage in their (digital) world to avoid losing relevance and falling behind.

Arguably, there are even cracks in the burgeoning multimillion NPS software industry; how effectively are we listening to consumers by repeatedly (and a bit desperately) asking them whether they will recommend us? As response rates turn south, some management consultants are questioning the efficacy of these scores.

It seems that since the pandemic, brands are experiencing a consumer-centricity gap; lacking in empathy, lacking effective collaboration tools and lacking the ability (or willingness) to listen.

Make it matter

So, how do we best harness digital to stay fast and agile, to engage consumers continuously but with the necessary depth of insight and breadth of validation? How can we create the necessary shift from a research project mind-set to continuous innovation? How can we humanize market research and make it matter to people through mutual trust and shared understanding? 

Around three years ago we witnessed a spark between design thinking and insight communities. Through the pandemic we have experienced a deepening of this trend with different clients, with insight communities becoming a supercharged medium for the application of design thinking.

Certainly, the two share synergies that differ from traditional research. Practitioners of design thinking and insight communities both have a passion for a more human approach to research and have long espoused the need for greater authenticity and transparency in the way we engage users and consumers. Design thinking tasks itself with giving people greater agency to shape the products or experiences in their lives, while insight communities, especially in a branded context, aim to give people more say in how their ideas and feedback shape brands. 

Building true dialogue

An insight community is an online platform where people are invited to participate in a brand’s research activities. They come in different shapes and sizes, ranging from pop-up communities of a few weeks to ongoing communities with thousands of customers. They look and feel like a social media site, which is key to building true dialogue, trust and openness. That’s because a community is more like an ongoing relationship, a two-way interaction, compared to the “single date” of traditional research projects. 

While communities were originally used for qualitative exploration or quantitative validation, lately some platforms have started to fuel both qualitative and quantitative research. As such, insight communities evolved into a hybrid methodology that can provide a 360-degree view on consumer needs, frictions and aspirations. The tool has proved to be a popular way for brands to stay close to their consumers, prospective customers or even colleagues, especially during the pandemic, when markets and categories have been shifting dramatically. 

More than any other methodology, insight communities now offer an always-on window into consumers’ lives, a space to meet in their natural habitat, to capture moments of truth as they happen, to get broader and deeper contextual insights. They allow brands to collaborate with consumers over longer periods of time, facilitating iterative, longitudinal research – and with a diverse variety of people. As such, community members can have different profiles ranging from everyday consumers to trendsetters and even creatives, who help brands to not only unearth insights but also foresights and creative breakthroughs. 

Gaining mainstream attention 

Design thinking is not a new concept. Attempts to develop the science of design first appeared in the 1960s, in an effort to align stakeholder interactions with technology. Since then, design thinking has been earning mainstream attention and adoption across businesses, institutions and even marketing research.

Design thinking is in essence a human-centered problem-solving approach that has gained traction in many companies recently. It helps to align stakeholders around an empathy for users’ challenges. By harnessing an iterative process of divergent and convergent steps, the classic Double Diamond model, it involves stakeholders and users in the journey of solving the right problem in the right way.

As an approach it has also seen a surge through the pandemic, not least because it underpins many of the ways of working in UX and digital innovation. As the importance of digital grows, so does the prevalence of design-thinking practices.

More fundamentally, design thinking helps brands navigate ambiguity and complexity by deriving patterns from complex data sets to define problems to solve. It also fosters interdepartmental collaboration and ensures consumer centricity of solutions at every step. Like communities, it helps to make your brand VUCA-proof, not by relying on the past to extrapolate to the future but ensuring through exploratory research we are ensuring “doing the right thing” before “doing it right” by embedding validation research.

Solve a challenge

Around three years ago in Asia (in the days we were still ABN Impact), we saw an opportunity for design thinking to solve a challenge we faced with our insight communities. In principle, a community brought lots of great insight tools into one place with a group of highly engaged consumers. In effect it was an all-you-can-eat insight buffet.

Unfortunately, clients in Asia were not used to buffets, they were more inclined to enjoy discrete, a-la carte research projects. While UX researchers in digital teams had the muscle memory for agile, insights teams did not have this habit for iterative and continuous learning. Moreover, the heritage for research generally in Asia was a heavy diet of validation research. Encouraging clients to step back and use more explorative research first was also a fundamental challenge. 

We had the community tools or hardware but in a sense not the software to enable iterative research with clients. The insight community as a methodology on its own didn’t help clients to frame the problem strategically nor did it drive the actionability that was needed. 

It was also clear that while design thinking was gaining popularity, it fell short on the issue of scalability. Traditional design thinking relied heavily on in-person ethnography and multiple stages of face-to-face workshops, in-person product or UX tests. It often felt long and laborious. It wasn’t unusual for people to start applying the design thinking badge to any project, while ignoring the rigor of a full Double Diamond approach. 

Clients needed more efficient and scalable ways to practice design thinking, while the pressure was on for insight communities to show they could drive greater strategic intent from insights.

As a result, we started exploring how to apply design thinking principles to clients’ insight community activities and research roadmaps. By doing so, we also hoped to raise the profile of both methods within our clients’ organizations, improving the standard of insights for them in the process.

Change the ways they worked

Today around half of our business in Asia is with financial service clients. Even prior to the pandemic we were seeing a growth in these and other service industry clients leveraging design thinking. As digital practices increased, marketing teams were seeking to change the ways they worked and a new language was slowly emerging around customer insights. Here are some recent examples.

Asia Miles rewards program at Cathay Pacific

Closed-loop continuous innovation, integrating content directly from members

Asia Miles uses an always-on community of around 10,000 members with whom we conduct a variety of qualitative and quantitative activities. The community is an intrinsic way of engaging members on core initiatives and has visible endorsement from the CEO. 

Some time ago we started to bring design-thinking principles to the research programs on this community. In one instance, we used a sequence of activities to help design the new Asia Miles dining rewards pillar. We went from exploratory activities on the nature of dining out to defining the pains in the journey of earning miles in restaurants, before moving into prototyping and testing a new Asia Miles dining app. 

The iterative nature of the research led to many changes in the dining program, from the marketing, a special members’-choice program (of restaurant) to significant new partnerships with local food and beverage search sites like OpenRice – culminating in three times more accruals of miles through dining. 

In addition to closing the loop from development through to testing and tracking of initiatives, we also opened the door to engaging members themselves for content. Exploratory research identified the need for real Asia Miles member stories (rather than key opinion leaders) to inspire and educate less-savvy members on how to get the best from the program. Subsequently, we sourced real community member stories and created content of a select few to embed on the member website. 

L’Oréal Hong Kong

Stepping back to define challenges through true consumer empathy

L’Oréal has an always-on insight community of 2,000 Hong Kong consumers which is home to weekly online and offline insight activities. In addition to regular tactical activities, we also introduced a design-thinking process, which encouraged the team to step back and empathize with consumers’ perspectives around personal subjects like sensitive skin.

Following a mixture of profiling surveys, mobile ethnography and one-on-one interviews, members of the community who suffered from sensitive skin conditions were invited to join the client in a co-creation workshop. The client discovered a consumer journey with sensitive skin that descended into a feeling of helplessness. Sufferers were unable to find the right solution and struggled to define the problem with their skin.

Asking client stakeholders to prioritize consumer problems as “how might we” opportunity statements created that crucial feeling of empathy that switched the team’s way of thinking to, “How might we make it easier for sensitive skin sufferers to understand their skin?” Subsequent digital solutions focused more on helping consumers diagnose their skin issues. 

This was also an apt metaphor for how to tackle research projects with a design thinking mind-set, to spend more time understanding and defining the problem instead of jumping to the recommendation or solution. 

HSBC Indonesia

Supercharging design thinking to build new banking propositions

HSBC needed to develop more relevant ways to position both its Advance and Premier solutions to consumers in Indonesia. In the midst of the pandemic it turned to its structural insight community of 1,200 customers. 

We conducted a series of activities including online surveys, forums and immersion sessions with both Millennial and mature customers from their insight community. For each Advance and Premier banking segment, we developed a set of personas articulating their true money mind-sets and potential opportunities. 

Through interactive digital workshop sessions with various stakeholders within HSBC (i.e., the product team, marketing, sales, digital, service and many more), we were able to connect the client to these consumers, bring the personas, their insights and resulting “how might we” opportunities to life before guiding ideation and proposition development.

This combination of insight community and digital workshops supercharged the design-thinking process, bringing exploration and validation steps together with greater agility. Despite the challenges facing Indonesia through the pandemic, HSBC recorded one of its most successful Premier campaign launches ever. 

Bupa Hong Kong 

Design thinking brings strategic perspective to journey mapping on communities 

In adjusting to a new normal, many Hong Kong people have had to make changes in their lives, including their insurance and health care service needs. To keep centered on the customer throughout this period of digital transformation, medical insurance company Bupa HK worked with us to establish digital journeys across the entire customer lifecycle. 

The critical step on this program was at the very beginning, conducting a digital workshop and online stakeholder interviews to map out the lifecycle. We were able to structure and prioritize the need for multiple digital journey investigations across it. 

Bupa was then able to harness the structural insight community of its customers to embark on a program of multiple journey investigations, including zooming in and out of macro journeys, micro journeys and lifecycles.

Standard Chartered Bank Singapore

Optimizing the CardsPal app through community experiments

When new Singaporean regulations made it easier to aggregate banks’ products and services in a single app, Standard Chartered took the opportunity to develop CardsPal, an app that helps users find credit card deals to maximize savings on shopping, dining and more.

We conducted research in Singapore to prioritize the launch for CardsPal. Using an insight community over several weeks, we were able to understand the context of users’ current credit card behavior as well as test the beta version of the new CardsPal app. 

First, we used forums to explore users’ needs and existing perspectives. Then a series of asynchronous tasks were launched on the app. We also conducted one-on-one standard UX interviews with screen-sharing and a think-aloud protocol to drill into specific issues. 

Prototyping and testing is at the heart of design thinking. An insight community is a great place to experiment with prototypes or conduct UX testing in many different shapes and forms, in an iterative way, throughout the development cycle. It also overcomes one of the core challenges of UX testing, namely, finding profiled users at speed, where you can conduct multiple UX approaches in one. 

Increasingly relevant 

In today’s VUCA world, the customer-centric approach to problem-solving that design thinking affords is increasingly relevant for brands and businesses. It enables agile and iterative solution development throughout the innovation process, it prioritizes challenges to optimize resources and it defines appropriate performance criteria for better impact measurement.

In recent months, it has undergone a digital makeover. By integrating design thinking with digitally enabled customer engagement and insight tools such as insight communities, brands can expand their market research to gain broader user empathy. The integration of these tools affords a continuous window into the lives of consumers; greater exploration, iteration and validation throughout the research; and better impact measurement.

Ultimately, a digitally-enabled post-pandemic version of design thinking (we’re coining the term design re-thinking!) is helping brands organize themselves to better enable the continuity of the consumer learning process – notably the awareness, understanding and application of user insights – and completing the innovation loop through definition of performance measurement of solutions. 

What’s clear is that insight communities are moving beyond just being a new vehicle or tool for research. They have, alongside the growing influence of design thinking in business, become part of a whole new mind-set and approach to insights.