S2E2: Kieron Leppard - Is Design Thinking still the answer?

0:00Carla, I'm really uncertain at the minute. Can you help me? Yes, I can. I have a solution for you. You know what it's called? No, what is it? Designing for a new level of uncertainty. An amazing title that describes exactly what the content will be. I know. So, yeah, we're part of Repotify to interview lots of designers around the world, talk about how we can navigate this completely new level of craziness in the world.

0:32Cool, I guess I'll probably subscribe and listen to that as well. Yeah, definitely enjoy Season 2 of Design Untangled.

0:46I'm Chris Mears. And I'm Carla Lindarte. We're two UX designers. And we hate jargon. So, we're here to help you untangle the world of design. Cut through the crap and talk about what really matters. Yes, solving people's problems. Welcome to Design Untangled.

1:07Hello, everyone. We're here today to chat to one of our very special guests, Kieran Leppard, who's Vice President of Experience Design at Huge. How are you doing, Kieran? You're doing very well, thank you. How are you both? Yeah, good, thanks. Hello. I'm here as well. You forgot to talk about me, Chris. Sorry. Oh, hello, Carla. You're there as well. Always lurking. So, yeah, I guess before we get started, let's cover the obvious question, which is just about lockdown and how you're coping generally, really.

1:40It's been a proverbial sort of rollercoaster of ups and downs. It's been brilliant in some aspects in that I've probably seen my children more in the last six months than I probably did in the preceding five years. But I've also seen my children more than I usually do for the last six months. So, that's also been a challenge. I think we adjusted pretty well at Huge because we've been kind of fully able to work remote and asynchronously because a lot of our clients demand that we do that.

2:10We have a lot of clients around the world. So, although culturally it's been a challenge to not be together in certain moments, I think we've probably done about as good as we can. And hopefully I think some of the stuff that we've learned from it about when we do have to be together and when we don't, we should be able to take forward into whatever happens after this, maybe next lockdown or lockdown after that, when we start to get back to normal. Yeah, I can imagine being really, really challenging for you guys. And have you seen any particular kind of trends in terms of what your clients are asking for during the pandemic?

2:51At the start, I think, you know, it definitely came in phases. I think when everything started to shut down, first of all, there was kind of a everything just stopped. So, like project contracts kind of stopped, that kind of thing. And we sort of almost stopped overnight. And then suddenly things started to pick up a bit again as I think people were working out what it was, you know, they were going to make of it. You know, we tried to do things like proactively just reach out, talk about how we could help, information we could provide, research that we actually did, proprietary research.

3:23We did it huge, but a lot of our clients, they just needed to focus on, like, keeping people in their jobs, keeping the boat afloat. You know, we had some clients that, you know, they were heavily invested in bricks and mortar retail, that, you know, their own revenue fell off overnight. And that was very, very challenging. But we had some other clients that were fully virtualized or digital first, however you want to kind of talk, however you want to position it. And, you know, they kept going, but certainly with a more cautious, you know, outlook of what was happening.

3:53I think what we started to see a little bit more now is that the work started to pick up again for us specifically. And that's good. And that means I think that people are just accepting now that the mode that we're in and the way we're going to work is what it's going to be, I would say, for at least the medium term. And so I think it's comforting to know that, you know, we've had new briefs coming in, RFPs, just clients asking for support. Again, the bigger change, I'd probably say, is that a lot of the work has a near to midterm focus.

4:24So, you know, typically at Huge, we're trying to look at, like, defining new categories and opening up new products and services that can create a lot of value. I would say that for most of our clients, sort of the horizons have come a bit closer in. So how can we start to leverage things that they already have? Or how can we just start to move the needle a little bit with things that they've already got in place rather than potentially pushing out much further? That's not to say all of our clients are doing that, but I'd say, you know, good old 80-20 rule, 80% of people are more in that mindset. But there are other people who are seeing it as an opportunity to either change the way their business operates, going more digital first, or just seeing it as an opportunity to just keep doing what they were doing because actually, potentially, they've got more customers or they're growing a lot quicker because of that huge shift to digital that happened.

5:11Yeah, I can imagine. And is it more like, you know, tactical fixes to websites or like quick development of apps or that kind of stuff that you're seeing? Yeah, I'd say speed, quick wins, those types of, you know, this year, as soon as possible, those types of phrases are certainly common, but they were always common, right? I think that we're having a lot more sort of discussions around conversion, sort of optimization. And I don't mean that just sort of just selling to people, just here's something that we've got.

5:42How do we optimize that to be the very best thing that it can be for both users and the business with what we've got versus maybe building out new capabilities or new services? Yeah. So I guess following on from that a little bit, I mean, some of the solutions will be to fundamentally kind of change the way some of these clients actually do business. And as you mentioned, that's kind of a longer term thing. Are clients still having that in the back of their mind so that could be coming down the road or is it very much focused on, you know, how are we going to survive the next month or two?

6:17Yeah, I don't think that ever goes away, right? You know, people always say, it's like, oh, you know, we don't want to do this right now, but we're still going to do that thing. So I think, you know, people understand this is hopefully just a moment and that we're going to get back to a place where they're going to, you know, the goals that used to be there or the objectives are going to come back again or the things they wanted to achieve. It just seems to be that I think in the, yeah, even the work that is looking still a bit further out, that 20% I mentioned, you know, it's just in a more challenging commercial environment.

6:48Every dollar counts, right? When people are losing their jobs and different areas and lots of different places and people are cutting back, you know, there is a lot of focus on making sure that when we propose any piece of work or a contract or a proposal, that we are really focused on being as lean as we can and making sure we create as much value and as much impact as possible. Yeah. So what kind of things are you helping with that kind of process? So clients are coming to you with these sort of time critical projects, I suppose.

7:22How are you getting those off the ground as quickly as possible and delivering that value as quickly as possible? Yeah. So we're running a lot of like co-creation and workshop sessions just online using tools like Miro, for example, using some of the techniques that we potentially use before in sort of in person, if you want to call them that sort of working sessions, but applying those into tools where actually like, you know, it's all about collaborating. In fact, in some ways we collaborate with our clients now more than we used to.

7:52You're not sort of building up to this like four hour, one day, two day workshop where you all come together and people fly in. You can just constantly kind of work together much more regularly or asynchronously, which has been kind of like really powerful. And, you know, some of these tools, I don't let you add too much branding to them, right? So you're not wasting too much time on like getting stuff into your brand design or toolkit. It's just about getting the information down, which for someone that works at a design agency is sometimes quite hard because, you know, we have a lot of pride in our brand and craft and details.

8:22But actually with my kind of more product and sort of hat on, I'm like, well, actually we're focusing on the value, which is the words and the content that goes in it, not focusing too much on the wrapper. So that's been really good. And so I think, you know, just making sure as well that we apply our learnings that we have from working with a lot of clients in a lot of different sectors and a lot of different verticals to very quickly help people close the gap. So we're seeing a lot of people, for example, if they had a weak or non-existent e-com offering, that is something that they want to accelerate quite quickly. That's probably the most obvious and most frequent request because it's just a way to get revenue back into a business

8:57potentially where there wasn't a revenue stream before.

9:01Yeah, I can imagine that. I mean, obviously they're trying to unlock existing value, like trying to, as you mentioned before, like, you know, lots of optimization work and, you know, stuff like that, that's going to help them operate better digitally. But how can you, because obviously based on my experience as well, doing that capital work could be a little bit tactical and potentially a little bit boring for designers. How do you keep your team motivated across, you know, these kind of more tactical projects and, you know,

9:35with the pace that they need to actually go for? Yeah, I think we're still applying a lot of sort of design theory and user-centric sort of thinking to it, right? So we've been running like maybe many one or two weeks sort of discovery phases where we're still trying to do rapid user research. We're looking out into the landscape to look for inspiration, either from direct competitors or people out of category. We're still talking to the brands and the business owners and trying to understand what it is uniquely they have to tell or that they have to give as part of a value exchange.

10:08We're still doing that in a mini way. But then we're staffing up some pretty, you know, nice multidisciplinary teams that would consist of to do that, researchers, data scientists, content writers, designers, UXers, like putting strategists and putting those people together and like just saying, listen, you've got an opportunity here to really help people and to help a business by providing that service or product in a new way. And, you know, me personally, I kind of geek out on data a little bit. And I think when you're getting fast iterations and loops into a process, that is hard.

10:42But you're able to kind of be like, we did that change and this thing happened. We learned this. And that either worked or it didn't. And that's, I think, for some designers, maybe not all, but I think that is quite a fulfilling thing to see that your design is actually being used, liked potentially, hopefully. Yeah, and it's actually going live as well. Exactly. So are you finding yourself having to rely, because of the pace of work, a lot more on quant feedback and data rather than qualitative stuff, because as we know, it's a lot more difficult to get to speak to actual users

11:17and, you know, sit down and do a full-on research session with them. So, yeah, is data becoming more of a priority, would you say, in terms of making design decisions? Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, what we're trying to do is probably run more quicker iterations using data and then, obviously, slightly slower ones using research, but trying to get a blended view between qual and quant always.

11:43It's, yeah, it's not easy. But, you know, if one thing is actually recruiting people, that's quite easy because we have to kind of do it all online. So I think even the recruiters are, sorry, the participants are even a bit more used to it now. So that has helped us in some ways. And then just trying to make sure as a team, we all kind of learn and share, you know, not just across the same accounts, but different projects to sort of understand, or these guys over there made a change that did that for their customers. Maybe we could try that quite quickly and kind of see if that works and try and get, you know, we had someone working in a workspace provider, and now we've got a team working on a B2B software market.

12:17They're not the same category at all, but a lot of them both lead up to an in-person, like lead gen form or a call to a call center. So there's learnings you can take from either one of those about how to create streamlined forms, about how to craft microcopy that leads to higher conversions. Like those principles exist across both, even if the two categories are completely different.

12:40So in terms of the process and how it's had to adapt, we spoke a bit there about how research has changed a little bit. Do you think design thinking is sort of the de facto process that we use to design products and services? Do you think that's still fit for purpose during this particular time we're in? Or do you think it's had to change or have other processes sort of emerged as a result of it? Yeah, I mean, I still believe in the design thinking process, right? I think foundationally that process hasn't really changed, you know, 50 to 70 years, right?

13:15Because it's still about understanding a problem space, understanding the people that are kind of struggling with that problem, creating solutions, potentially multiple solutions, testing them, and then iterating, right? You know, ultimately that design process hasn't changed that much. I do think, though, that, you know, maybe some of the, I guess, sometimes I sort of see designers, they're more focused in kind of getting the deliverable into their portfolio. So I want to do a service blueprint. And my kind of challenge to that always is like, well, why do you want to do a service blueprint?

13:46What is the outcome of that deliverable in order to make whatever gets put into some pixels at the end, or maybe not, more effective? So I do see that a lot in portfolios where people are more, and when I chat to people, I say, I want to do this. I'm like, okay, well, actually, what you really want to do is you want to be able to ship a product more quickly to someone that gets feedback from it. You don't want to create an asset, but, you know, people want assets in their portfolios as well. So I do think the tool is right. I do sometimes think that maybe some of the fluffier sort of stuff that surrounds design thinking

14:22and the slight different forks of the same tools and the same processes, maybe it's just pulling back a bit more to what really matters and doing that as quickly as possible. But I do think speed is the big differentiator at the moment. I mean, you raise a very, very, like, interesting point. Something I always said to, you know, people in teams when I was in agency world, and it's like you don't need deliverables, you just need solutions. And I think this is an opportunity, as you said, to kind of, like, make our work as designers a bit more real,

14:56you know, because, as you said, like a service design blueprint, like beautiful deliverable, but sometimes just didn't do anything, didn't change your organization. So it is interesting how you see that now it's more like realistic. Okay, go there, make those changes, you know, look at the data, et cetera. So what kind of advice you can give designers in terms of data and data analysis? Because, you know, it's something that obviously we've been talking about it, but it's been kind of accelerated based on our conversation and based on what's happening in the world.

15:31Yeah, I mean, for me, like data, it's just another tool, right, for any designer to use, right? It's no different to user research. It's no different to be able to prototype. It's just another thing that you can use to either, A, help you understand the problem space a bit better, or B, help you design solutions better. So, you know, there are plenty of good free courses out there that you can take just to kind of like upskill yourself very quickly. I mean, if you know you're working within a business that's using GA, then I would recommend that you just go and train yourself up as much as possible to understand how GA works,

16:06what the sort of core metrics are that you want to record, what the core metrics are that your business cares about, and, you know, know enough to be dangerous, right, in the nicest possible way. Like, because it's not something that's going to go away. And I don't, I like designers that have really balanced and T-shaped mindset and that they can bring in different parts when it's needed. They're not like, oh, I just do user research. I need a data person just to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Going back to the topic of the pandemic and how important, you know, design could be

16:41in the, you know, in this new kind of approach to the world and how we see the world. I was just, I want to refer back to the, not back, I want to refer to the medium post that you recently wrote, school design will grow up, which I thought it was really interesting, where you mentioned, we actually can put it in the, in the episode notes and people can have a, have a read. Um, it's very interesting. You talk about society centered design. So can you explain a little bit what that is and how can you apply that as a designer

17:16and in, you know, today's situation? Yeah. I mean, so what brought on me writing that article was just like many of us sort of sitting at home and suddenly thinking, God, all this stuff that I used to be focused on around like OKRs and business goals and metrics suddenly didn't really matter anymore when there was this global pandemic that was in place. And I started to see lots of people just talking about, you know, designing for society as kind of the community. So rather than focusing just on individuals, which user centered design did a lot and human centered design focusing on whole communities, um, for the collective benefit

17:50of a lot of people. So if you think about sort of what's happening at the moment, you know, there's no, it's not just one country that's affected by COVID. It's the entire planet, right? It's not just one community within the UK or within the country, it's entire connected communities across an entire region or entire countries. So really society centered design was really about trying to design for much broader context. Now, much of that work you're never going to do in an agency setting and probably not within a business setting, but it was interesting to me to sort of see how lots of designers

18:20were talking about it. And that is something that I kind of just thought was like really powerful to me, maybe growing up in the UK, where we do have some like national social institutions, but really just thinking about as a designer, not just thinking about the individuals within the business that use the product or service I provide, but what about the environment and the wider community in which they work and operate? Yeah, it was interesting that whole community thing, because as I'm sure many people experienced during the first lockdown, there was a much bigger sense of community just in our local

18:53areas, people helping each other out and all this sort of stuff. Like I'd seen people that were living like two doors down from me for the first time and all that stuff. So it's interesting to see how that's filtered through to the design approach as well. I'm interested to hear your thoughts actually, like why did it take a pandemic for us to be thinking about this in the first place? Do you think that's actually a failure of design itself or maybe the organizations that we're operating in that it's only just sort of come on our radar that, oh, we should

19:28actually probably design things that don't fuck up the world?

19:33Yeah, I think it's just, yeah, I think it's a combination of things. The pandemic was maybe just the thing that just pushed things over the edge. But there's probably also more things from just sort of the economy, but also through to sort of politics and the environment, all things that really just started to connect together. And that was kind of the thing that maybe pushed people over, that maybe made people think it's just too much kind of coming along now to kind of be ignored.

20:03And so, you know, I think when people really had that sort of worldview and it was about people coming together and you couldn't ignore the people clapping outside your house every Thursday at 8pm, that was a really powerful thing. And I just think for most people, it was a bit of a wake up. So if it wasn't like, you know, industrialized farming from five years ago or the consumption of kind of meat, which was one thing that shocked me. Someone told me recently that nearly, I think it's 50% of the biomass on earth is now like

20:33processed meat, which is just crazy. Oh God, I think I might be the other 50%. Yeah, so for me, that was just sort of like, you know, it was just a bit of a lot of a wake up call and just felt like writing something to sort of reflect it. And I kind of read this book by, I can't remember the chap's name now, J.K. Mutter around sort of the fact that sort of design processes as they've been designed, the philosophy is like there to help us design for anything.

21:05But a lot of the stuff we've designed in terms of the toolkits and the processes is really focused on mostly on kind of helping businesses that need to grow or scale, right? It's how it's mostly focused. As long as everything goes up to the top right hand corner of a chart, that's always been seen as a success. But now we're looking at a system that's kind of very finite, whether that be the materials we have to put into it or just the systems that are now in place. I think part of the challenge from this book was just the idea that it's not the tools

21:39that we have at the moment, they're going to need to change. So we've got the right philosophy and we've got the right beliefs as designers, but we need broader toolkits and able to help us in order to help us kind of achieve those goals that we want to. I mean, it's, it's, it's a bit tricky because, you know, there's a lot of designers out there who are, you know, in the middle of an organization that is kind of going through this change.

22:05Like what kind of practical advice you can give designers to not just, you know, help with the change that organizations have to go through in terms of like responding to, you know, things like a global pandemic. But also how can be part of it as well? Yeah. So I think, you know, a couple of years ago, everything was about design ethics, right? And I think after the sort of surveillance capitalism article, I can't remember the name of the lady

22:37that wrote it, but, you know, it's a lot about, you know, big corporations that are not regulated, that are global, you know, using our data to sort of do bad things and kind of manipulating us. Like design ethics committee sort of, sort of sprung out of that. And I sort of feel that there might be a newer iteration of that, that starts to come out where that sort of sustainable design or design sustainability is going to have the design community looking back at their employers and starting to say, hey, listen, you need to be doing this sort of thing.

23:08And I think if you look at a lot of the brands at the moment, I think that are doing a lot of social activism work, not just the sort of the Patagonias, but there are like a lot of brands out there now that whereas they might have been socially responsible a few years ago in that they were trying to just say, we're not doing anything bad. There's now a lot of brands who are being incredibly active and using activism to attract new customers and new fans to sort of leave the planet in a better state than they've left it before. I know Apple's huge carbon neutral pledge, but it's not just them.

23:40H&M has done something across all of their brands and you think they kind of work in fast fashion. There are lots of brands now that are really kind of saying, actually, we want to leave the world in a better place and we left it or we found it. And that's because our next generation of customers are expecting brands to operate in that way. So I think creating sort of just discussion and community, and it's not just for designers, right? It's for anyone that wants to do some good. It's going to have to set up mini communities within the places that they work.

24:12Yeah, I'm just interested to hear your thoughts because as we were discussing kind of at the start of the episode, I think when it came to crunch time, companies were immediately focused on, right, survival, how can we get enough money to keep people employed? What tactical things can we do? How are they going to shift that mindset to thinking about these bigger issues? So even beyond just kind of doing good as a brand or being more socially responsible with some of this wider society stuff you spoke about, is it through the success of these

24:47tactical things that will give them the platform to build upon that, do you think? Yeah, I think from a lot of, I think, you know, you can't do everything right. And I don't think every business or brand could support every, you know, social activism sort of activity that's going on. So I think it's about businesses and brands that attach themselves to something they believe in that's potentially linked to their purpose because then it, you know, it really has a core that is kind of relevant.

25:18I have seen like more brands looking to sort of seek sort of B corporation status or certification. If you guys know what that is, but that's about brands that sort of balance purpose with profit. And so they're actively not just saying about, you know, we are kind of use everything. It's just about us making more money, but they are starting to think about how the decisions that they make affect not just their users and their employees, but also the communities in which they operate and also the wider planet. And I think that will continue to grow.

25:49I don't think any forward thinking business or brand will be able to not have a very strong social action point of view if they want to be successful going forward. Yeah, definitely. It's a core part of what everyone is doing right now, at least, you know, in small and big scale.

26:10Going back to the topic of this series, which is about designing for uncertainty, like obviously as designers, we always design something that we don't know if it's going to survive for the next, you know, a year or three years, sometimes weeks. And we obviously use tools to be able to, you know, design thinking is one of them. But what other advice you can give designers right now to help them navigate to these kind of, you know, unprecedented level of uncertainty when you don't know if, you know, you can actually

26:46go on holiday. Like I had to cancel my holiday this week because that's what I'm using the example, but, you know, you can't really know what's happening. So how do you help, you know, consumers navigate through that uncertainty and what can designers do to actually help with that? It's a pretty big question, that one. Yeah, exactly. Because it's, I mean, it could be like something a bit more tactical, you know, that people can do it in organizations. Maybe it's just, you know, applying design thinking to more, but I just wonder, you know,

27:16what can you do in your role as a designer to actually help with that uncertainty? I mean, I think one thing is about creating an environment or creating space within your teams for people to be able to kind of express solutions that might be able to help. Because, you know, unless you say to someone, here's something we want to go and solve for, you know, put the power of design thinking, put the power of your experience towards, you know, trying to come up with new solutions. It could be like a speculative design thing where we're like, you know, this is something

27:46that we expect now to happen because of what's happened with COVID. How can we start to try and get ahead of that? What can we do and give to our users is something that might not be affecting them with how they interact with us directly, but is affecting them kind of in their day-to-day lives. I guess kind of an example of that might be, you know, people are going to start to go out again less. So, is there something that you can do to entertain people whilst they're at home, even if you're a commerce brand, right? And you're used to just selling to people, just giving people that escapism or engaging with them in a time that, you know, is pretty

28:21difficult at home. And, you know, there's a lot of people that are going to need, I think, continued help now in the winter. You know, the first lockdown, I guess, was sort of the lighter days. This is going to be the much darker days. I know at the start, I said that, you know, my kids could be challenging at home, but I think I'd probably prefer that than being just out of a home on my own, which I think is probably, for me, as someone who thrives off social interaction, would be a lot more difficult to be on my own. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's absolutely right. It's kind of like, you know, elevating the

28:53role of designers because that's what we do, isn't it? It's just trying to find other ways to, you know, come up with different scenarios, to prototype these scenarios, to test these scenarios and just help that. So that's great. Just to wrap up now, and I always ask this question, and is there anything that you can recommend our listeners to either read, have you mentioned a book? Oh, yeah. So the book, I'll remember the name of it. It's Rethinking Design Thinking.

29:24Rethinking Design Thinking. J.K. Van Patter. There's some really great diagrams and pictures in it and just like things that show you the gap between design philosophy and design methodology that need to be closed. I think also there's just some really interesting stuff happening with just some of the big brand work. Like Nike, a few years back, released their Circular Design Manifesto. Gucci recently released their Equilibrium one. I can't remember the name of H&Ms, but there's like a, I'm really interested in circular design and just, you know, circular

29:56supply chains and the circular economy. I think, you know, keeping abreast of what's happening there will be really important because I'll, I think I'll start to see a lot more of that coming into the design role and thinking in a circular fashion. For those that don't know what that is, could you explain circular economy a little bit? Yeah. So I guess traditionally when we designed a new supply chain, we just thought about it going one way. So we didn't care about waste or leakage along that. So let's just take an old classic

30:31manufacturing example. I produce a bottle made out of plastic. The bottle then gets filled up with liquid. Someone consumes that liquid. And then obviously we throw away that plastic. Then obviously we went into sort of the recycling sort of community where we started to try and sort of start to recycle those things, but there's still a lot of waste, right? Because they take natural resources, but they can never quite get back to exactly as they are. The circular economy just tries to create more and more of those recycling loops throughout the process. So it's either kind of

31:02recycle, reuse or repair. So as much as possible, you know, you want to try and keep those natural resources within the economy before they actually flush out into landfill and they kind of can't be used again. You know, even just look at some of the big e-com sites now that are doing trading for leather and for leather goods. And I Farfetch released theirs about a year ago. I think it was Harvey Nichols or Liberty was doing a luxury goods restoration service. So there's lots of brands now

31:33that are trying to do things and businesses that are trying to do things that try and keep things alive, let's call it that way, or keep them useful for longer. You know, typically people say, you know, buy less, buy better, you know, use more kind of thing as a bit of a phrase. And that's interesting to me about how we kind of think about that in terms of designing digital products and services. Yeah. Awesome. All right. I think that's all we had. So thank you very much for joining us today.

32:03I really recommend that everyone has a little read of your blog article, which we'll link up in the show notes. And yeah, thanks again for joining us. Thank you, Kieran. It's always a pleasure to have you on our podcast. All right. Thank you for having me. And yeah, stay happy, stay healthy. Search and subscribe to Design Untangled using your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. Follow us on the web at designuntangled.co.uk or on Twitter at Design Untangled.