jeans in the boardroom? the rise of a design culture at nib health funds
DESCRIPTION
This was presented at UX Australia 2013 by Glyn Thomas and Tim Hogan. This is the story of how a regional Australian Health Insurer with a history deep in steel manufacturing was able to value not only the efforts of designers but the authority of design itself… Kind of – well, sort of. We aren’t working in a designers paradise, we don’t often get to “think different” and sometimes just getting the word ‘design’ into a conversation feels like a victory. It took a comment by an outsider – encouraging us to look back and see the design culture we had cultivated – that helped us focus on the progress made and look past the myths of ‘design culture’. We will step you through our journey highlighting the anti-patterns we identified, the opportunities created, the mistakes we made along the way and the challenges that remain. We will present an emergent model that supports continuous cultivation of our design culture. **Video used at the start is found here: You might want to watch the first minute :)** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6GkTizYFHA Slides without Audio are pretty hard to understand so please contact us if you want more depth :).TRANSCRIPT
Jeans in the boardoomThe rise of a design culture at nib Health Funds
nib is a health insurer, started within a culture of steel and coal. How has it come to embrace a design culture?
So - what is a Design Culture?
But do these things reallybuild a design culture?
• User needs addressed
• Focus on problem solving
• Designers in leadership
Design is important to success of the business
Where we were ...
A long list of features
Design was the Surface
No feedback
No improvements
No change six years later
Despite changing user needs, technology and business goals -
nothing changed ...
So where were the designersin all this?
We were in our Ivory
Tower
Safe from harm, far from valuable.
Where we are ...
we talk about valuerather than features
Design is baked inresulting in real compromise
Frequent feedback
Continuous improvementwe iterated from static to responsive
Not an exclusive clubso others share empathy with the user
• we talk about “value”
• design is baked in
• frequent feedback
• continuous improvement
• design is not an exclusive club
What about today ...
What about the model?
Valuable + Visible
Valuable + Visible
Valuable + Visible
Let’s dig deeper into valuable
Leadershipto set vision and be an advocate
Iterativeso we know we are creating the value
Divergent and convergent
to uncover new value
but, this is just what we do
To change a culture,we also need to be ...
Transparent and
collaborative
Vision and advocacy
Leadership
Allowing value to be created
Iterative
Leadership
Divergentand
Convergent
to grow through transparency
Iterative
Leadership
Divergentand
Convergent
Our Learning• Too much talk
• Design by committee
• We weren’t sharing goals
• Jargon
Where to next?• Better iteration
• Work closer with devs
• Dev’s in user testing
• Jeans in the boardroom?
Jeans in the boardoom
Jeans in the boardoomNot about the new replacing the old,
but the two co-existing.
Thankyou
@glynthomas
@timswit
All illustrations are by Pearson Scott Foresman and are available within the public domain through wikimedia.
All icons from the nounproject.com - ping pong bat s by Claudio Gomboli and the log by Diego Aguirre.