Being an experience-led organization
We’ve heard it before: we should focus on designing for an experience; experiences are fundamentally different design challenges to a product or services; experiences are designed from the outside in. We’re also told that we can apply this experience-centric perspective to tackle problems beyond the design of a product or piece of software. But we don’t often see examples of these ideas being put into practice. So that’s what I’d like to share. Earlier this year I was asked by a client – YHA Australia – to work with them on a project aimed at selecting a new core IT platform for the organization. YHA Australia operate a network of some 120 or so hostels across Australia, and the system serves as the primary booking and hostel management system for each property. This presentation reviews a case study in which user experience design principles have been applied to the evaluation and selection of a new core IT system. The presentation will cover the research, analysis and strategic work undertaken for the project, showing the major deliverable – a three-tiered mental model and experience lifecycle diagram. The project itself uses a customer experience lifecycle to determine business and technology requirements, which in turn filter through to the evaluation and selection criteria by which a tender process could be initiated and completed. This contrasts with the traditional approach to such projects of enlisting business analysts to interview internal stakeholders to generate lists of functional requirements with little or no consideration for the people impacted by the new system; and without any intentionality in the experience enabled as a result of the technology tier.