The Three Lenses of Design Thinking: Evolving User Research into a Strategic Role

and with that I would love to introduce uh our next speaker Brian Sullivan who is a director of user research and design strategy over at saber Corporation and today he's going to be talking to us about the three lenses of design thinking role of user research evolving into a more strategic one alrighty and with that Brian I'm going to switch give you control and let you take it away great all right let me switch real quick and in advance I just want to say uh thank you everybody for joining us and also for the accelerant team it's tough to put on a conference I've had to do that in the past and I just know how much work that goes into it so what I'm going to talk about today is the three lenses of design thinking and how I believe user research is currently evolving and where it needs to go in the future so in advance thank you for attending today I know you had to make some tough choices to be here it's kind of that time of year where we've got back to school we've got vacation we're at work we're finishing work thank you for being here really appreciate it uh this is kind of an overview of what I'm going to talk about today what is design thinking why is it critical to do early on some of the benefits that kind of sets the ground rules many of you will already know it I have a little bit of a different flavor because of the role that I play at my company I'm going to give you the framework that I use and it can be adapted for the three lenses I call them product service design and business design thinking business design thinking is probably new to some people then I'm going to talk about how the future of user experience really needs to evolve and move up into this area of I would call it next if we think of three Horizons the first horizon is now the second Horizon is new the third Horizon is next and I'll talk about that we'll save some time for Q a so let's get started so a quick introduction about me um feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn here's some information about me I'm currently the design strategy director as Sierra had mentioned I have 25 plus years of travel experience I'm a user researcher and a design futurist so I tend to do my user research and my design design thinking primarily in Horizon 3 which I'll talk about a little bit later I've written a book I I it's the design studio method I wrote a chapter in 97 things every ux practitioner should know the interesting thing is that became an Amazon bestseller I've won a bunch of different Awards and founded a conference president of the local chapter of DFW xpa and I'm an Adjunct professor in user experience at both SMU and UNT if you're in the Dallas area feel free to join us we have a community of over 5 000 professionals and we meet uh every month now let's get to design thinking how I view it we'll walk through the framework then I'll talk about how we can use the three lenses and where I believe user experience is going especially user research and strategy I tend to think of design thinking as a framework and there's a lot of freedom within the framework and we can translate user needs into products services and experiences and the beautiful thing is that we can do this in a very collaborative way and what I found out is it yields better and more innovative solutions in the long run here's just a few ways that I have applied design thinking and adapted user research I look at it with products with processes and really in customer engagements and we can create a new product concept we can redesign an entire application maybe the next version we can do processes maybe we can onboard everybody within a business unit we might brainstorm customer value propositions and we might even talk about how we would validate a hypotheses by running rapid experiments uh the way that I look at design thinking is we've got to have product design and Tech involved and where we see that overlapping and we're having these discussions I think it's really good to have customers and real users involved and if we can have commercial and sales it's even more important because we're now talking to people on what they might want to purchase and then commercial and sales can maybe tell us how they could structure that there's a lot of benefits to design thinking and you you can pick out any one of them I know like the young lady that is here on the right of the screen when I first learned about design thinking I was eager and the main reason that I was eager is that it could help me to build a product Vision but also to validate them and I think that's important because it gets us closer to our customers when I first started to build out the design thinking program at my company I looked at Ideo Stanford IBM and Google I also looked at how design thinking is being used a lot for training so if we're going to scale user research and scale design thinking we've got to understand that there is a path forward and this is just the number of employees that have went through some type of training like you're going through today now what is design thinking and a lot of people will ask you that and when I break it down design thinking really answers this one fundamental question how can we build better products and if you're doing service design how can we build better services but I would even fundamentally say how can we build a better business that's the third lens of design thinking what I want to do is I want you to get out a little piece of paper or get a sticky note out get a pen or a Sharpie and I want you to take one minute to draw vase I like to do this exercise to kind of bring home and illustrate what does it mean to really build a better product and a lot of times when I go through some of the big words that I mentioned before it doesn't really resonate with people so I like to do these two activities back to back so we have about 30 seconds um if you're a designer or a non-designer that's the 30-second uh Mark I want you to put a go ahead and put a drop shadow uh maybe put in some shading and you know if you're really proud of your vase or boss depending upon what part of the world you're in go ahead and put a little signature down on the bottom right I have about 10 seconds left we're going to finish up and what I want you to do now is put that piece of paper to the side if you don't like your drawing you might want to scrap it and throw it in the recycle bin now what I want you to do is let's reframe the opportunity We Want to Build a Better product or an experience now I want you to take one minute to draw a new way of experiencing flowers in a hotel take it away so you had practice with a base you could still do that or you might do something different because we've reframed the opportunity I will stop monologuing to give you some creative space we're about 30 seconds left you probably spent a little bit more time thinking about what is that new way of experiencing flowers in a hotel than you did actually putting pen to paper so we're wrapping up finish up put your drop shadow sign your name and we're going to continue on now this particular example may seem a little silly to people but it's not there is a hotel in the Mojave Desert in Las Vegas called the Bellagio and this is a picture of it they actually took this as a design challenge to create an experience of experiencing flowers in a hotel in the desert ladies and gentlemen and so when you first go into the Bellagio you can smell the flowers you can see the flowers you can see the vases you can also see above you this really wonderful display of flowers coming down and meeting you from the ceiling as you continue to approach maybe the concierge desk you might see this type of a floral panel as you walk through the Bellagio you might see these tile mosaics that show up from time to time again remember it's experiencing flowers sometimes it's not flowers it's Vibes and then sometimes it's not real flowers but it's these types of art sculptures the other thing that you might experience is Gardens here so there are flowers being used as different shapes notice that there's lights different shapes of vases different plants and there's walkways where people can enjoy the the indoor gardens that they have it addition to that you might see little butterflies and little types of flowers you have another scene that's like this where there's water they even have sound you can hear birds chirping you have bamboo you do have a bridge that you can walk over they have this really large room and it gets transformed every year so this is what it might look like at Chinese New Year this is the fourth of July this is what it looks like a little closer to Thanksgiving here's what it looks like at Christmas time by the way you want there to get a room the floral patterns notice the Iron Work you see two three four five six seven different types of vases you see floral colors you see paintings prints when you go to the bathroom you still have that going through the entire experience you also have a little bit of floral Aromas by the way the Bellagio you can play the lotus flower slot machines when you go outside at night sometimes they will have this type of a digital experience talk about a new way of experiencing flowers in a hotel in the desert ladies and gentlemen that is design thinking on steroids so to give you an example of the type of work that I've done over the past few years with my team I have done this many projects over during the covet curveball as we've all experienced I've done product-based workshops process or service design workshops I've done customer engagements and I've started to move into that next lens of design thinking which I will call business design thinking again the framework that I'm sharing with you is very flexible so how do we innovate with design thinking and where does user research play a role so let me explain to you the Double Diamond many of you understand that the first diamond is really falling in love with the problem this is where I think user research plays its biggest role we understand the opportunity the pain points the gaps the areas of interest and then once we can come to a focal point where the two diamonds come come together it becomes really interesting because we have alignment we might what we might want to explore towards building out a solution and we can show that to customers in many different designs when we start to deliver that I think it becomes another point where user research can validate these designs through to traditional usability and user research methods this is how I tend to look at the different stages and if we use the Double Diamond we overlay it through these six stages it kind of looks like this now what I want to make very clear is what I'm showing you here looks very linear but design thinking is not the reality is is that you can start anywhere in this framework there's flexibility you can start at the end and work your way back you can start at the beginning you can start at the middle it really just depends upon what is the issue the problem or the opportunity that you're trying to solve the next thing that I really love about this type of a framework Beyond its flexibility is I think it's an accelerator and if I had to find a synonym for the word strategy it would be alignment when we get that alignment we can when we can all agree on what problem we want to solve what opportunity you want to go after it becomes pretty easy to focus our efforts and be laser focused on the solution and that that ends up being less rework now I want to kind of explain to you how I think we typically work and why I see this as a pretty large accelerator when we use design thinking here's what I think we fail this is a pretty interesting little image we start with a design Challenge and at the start of it we're super excited we're trying to get a really good understanding we're planning and then we get some interest maybe from a customer from an executive we may not have total alignment but as soon as we get to go ahead as soon as we get the green lines kind of all hell breaks loose when we move from planning to building because we really got to start working there's a lot of churn that's there the little blip that you see towards the end it's both a good news bad news situation the good news is somebody super interested in your solution the bad news is there's probably new requirements so when we reach that towards that end if we didn't do design thinking typically what we have is a sub-optimized feature driven solution based on a bunch of assumptions we've missed the deadline because we didn't have the alignment up front we didn't do the user research we didn't get the insights that we needed early on but to give you a different view if we had done design thinking uh we had fell in love with the problem we drove toward a solution we tend to have a Double Diamond in the planning phase so we really have a pretty good vision of what we want to build so we get alignment on the problem we validate that with real users we drive that with our stakeholders we go through a build phase yes there's going to be shifts and changes we should hit our deadline with a new user valid concept with both a prototype and a plan the deadline should not be pushed out now this is a little bit of Nirvana but I also want to address another elephant that's in the room I think some people talk about fail fast fail early I want to put it into context when we talk about lean or design thinking nobody wants to fail towards the end if we fail towards the end we're just increasing a ton of risk we've got to deploy resources there's more money but if we allow time for Rapid experiments early we can adapt we can learn there's less risk there's more research that's involved here and I think it's just flipping the type of research that we do now I want to give you the basic walkthrough of the six stages that I've been talking about at a really high level and I want to go granular then I'm going to go through how we can use these through the three different lenses and I want to explain that's still not enough we need to do more because what we need to do is level up our insights we've got to drive to a Future Vision so that we can really build better products services and our own businesses ladies and gentlemen so the first thing that I want to do stage one is framing the opportunity we need to really kind of agree on our starting point for all of our future discussions Charles ketering founder of Delco once said a well-stated problem is half solved so when we're doing framing the opportunity we really want to identify a specific problem because that's the single most important factor of success if you're addressing the wrong one you're probably going to get a lot of false positives and you're not giving users what they want or more importantly what they need now I think that a lot of times our engineers and technologists within our team tend to really frame the opportunity in a much different way than we do design is intentional it must be for a specific person it must be for a specific business opportunity and it must be measured in an exact way technologists tend to do how do we solve it if we frame the opportunity in terms of the who what wow it's much more important and it's more impactful both to the users and to the business the next thing that I like to do when I first come into any type of a kickoff meeting or a workshop I like to have what I call a project definition worksheet I have people fill out the same types of questions it's almost like a pre-buttal because if they can fill this out I can quickly read it maybe have a quick follow-up meeting with them and make sure I have a good understanding of what they want here are some of the things that are you might find within the worksheet I like to give people about an hour to do this the most important thing is competitive differentiation and what are the metrics that matter I think competitive differentiation is important because people pay more for that once they do that I like to hear what I call an elevator pitch a two-minute readout now you've heard of the term elevator pitch ladies and gentlemen I want you to imagine the elevator only has two floors so I like to use this fill in the blank template our project is called blank it's kind of like blank the person or group who uses it is blank they struggle because of these reasons in a perfect world they'd be able to do this and it would be awesome because of this within this template you can kind of clearly see the who what wow if we can get that initial alignment then we drive all of that into the first diamond again this is just a starting point the initial Tipping Point then it's really about real deep user research and empathy we want to know how people work what do they want what do they need I really like this quote from Scott Cook where he says you can't walk a mile in someone else's shoes until you take your own shoes off I'll just say Amen to that I think to learn anything meaningful about our users we need to talk to them and we need to observe them especially in their natural environment that's where the best data comes from and you can kind of more easily see pain points and gaps when you're talking or observing people so I like to do things maybe a little bit differently than other user researchers and strategists and that I tend to ask for a broad range of stakeholders but I also want to look at the users so one of the first things that I do is I build a stakeholder map I like the stakeholder map because I want to know who's who in the zoo and what do they do now one of the things that you'll see here that's a little bit different than other people is the arrows that you see on the right that's kind of the relationship status if you will between the different players a dark Black Arrow here on the on the Whiteboard means they have a very strong relationship um if it's a normal Arrow it means it's basically normal if it's a dashed Arrow it's a weak relationship if it's non-existent I tend to make it not a solid Arrow but you see the edges but you can't really see through it you see through it there's no black that's just to kind of get a view of the ecosystem who I'm dealing with look at potential bottle bottlenecks maybe some opportunities what I will tell you ladies and gentlemen when you first kick off a project stakeholders make or break every single project that's why I tended to shift to this type of a tool just to figure out who's who in the zoo and is there a conversation I need to have the next thing I do is I build an empathy map most people know what that is what does someone say think do or feel when they're going through an experience I think one of the things that I learned pretty early on when I'm gathering my insights why do you feel that way right and be more specific so qualifying an empathy map with the real user is important now empathy Maps sometimes are filled with a lot of assumptions it's not a replacement for real user research and in fact if you do real user research up front you can use an empathy map to synthesize it it's almost like a data collector one of the things that I like to do within an empathy map is I talk about this concept called design drivers if we want to level up our insights which insights are the most important specifically to the customer we're going after we might want to ask ourselves hey where are we making assumptions if there's an assumption we might need to do more research we might need to follow back with that person the last thing I think that's more important is of any of these patterns and again we see them in the green sticky notes are those translating into design themes things that we need to keep top of mind when we start to explore the context of how this person operates within a journey map if you've got a pretty good understanding of an empathy map I tend to build a high level user persona I like mine to be research based and you can see here that the design drivers are right in the middle that's the thing that's most important is what we gotta keep top of mind some of the things that are on the bottom are the contacts the pain points and some of the motivations and goals of an individual I've had my team develop 72 user research-based user personas I also use a concept known as extreme users so I will have kind of our mainstream user so for instance a frequent business traveler if we go to one extreme an infrequent business traveler The Other Extreme might be a VIP business Traveler so I kind of have that type of layering but within the user Persona library and when you get deeper and richer insights again the extremes tend to maybe pull out information that you might not see from the mainstream users again the empathy Maps can be used for the user personas I've got them in a Persona Library it's easy to access the personas act as a lens into a journey map so the current state Journey map gives you the context into the reality that a person is feeling and the pressure points that they have you can't have a presentation without a Steve Jobs quote so here is the obligation that I have to um Steve Jobs most people don't know what they want until you show it to them and to me that speaks to context new Solutions are really produced by mapping a current experience or a similar one and highlighting user pain points and gaps then you can build Out Future State Solutions based on that a little bit of what I call the Texas two-step so it's easy to fall back into the Trap of being product Centric which is what we see on the left we need to really um train our stakeholders to be user-centric and here's just some of the questions that we need to do I think a lot of times okay we've collected this information in the user personas I know what to do but wait a second let's now apply that to context right let's be outwardly focused not inwardly focused on how do we make money how do we reach our goals so this is a product Centric View and again this might look like a backlog right it's stuff you should already be working on a user-centric view of travel prepare shop book plan pack Travel maybe do some excursions enjoy your destination and come back if we put it at a high level into a journey map you would have the stages out front you'd have a list of activities here's a pro tip ladies and gentlemen when you're dealing with customers have the stages and the activities already mapped out and validated if you don't do that you're going to have one person say well I do it this way well I do it this way don't co-create stages tasks and activity in session have them quickly validate them and then go to the current state challenges they're having have them map that out here's an example of what it looked like in a pretty recent strategy Workshop that I did and again this is really important if you have customers involved the product manager can hear the conversations that they're having what's important to me may not be what's important to someone else the pink stickies that you see at the top is a logical grouping of the major issues that they're seeing uh if you have a wall of sticky notes pain points opportunities areas of Interest one way to quickly refocus or synthesize the data is to have need statements again I like to call these a who wow this is a bad example because probably what a product person is doing is they're inserting the solution into the need and really the dashboard and all the data in one place is more that product manager is trying to insert themselves a better example is the hotel agent wants to see packages arriving today just so she has better customer service and knows when they arrive so need statements are a way to quickly synthesize pain points areas of interest and gaps once you've done that it's the second part of the Texas two-step what is the future Direction This is where we ideate so if you've got some pain points and you've synthesized that or the key you user need statements then we start to ideate I love this quote from Ed catmull where he says in the beginning all of our movies suck the future is not the destination it's a direction and especially at this point we haven't really started to visualize it new Solutions are made Again by mapping the current experience and highlighting them we did that when we built out the current state Journey map and we highlighted that then the things that they vote on the most let's then brainstorm waste and improve it so really we're kind of right here in the Double Diamond so if the current issues lead to Future Solutions this is where we build our future Direction so we brainstorm brainstorm those future state products services and experiences I like to use what's called big idea vignettes so have a little image with a brief caption big ideas or broad conceptual user Focus they're not features again it's easy to fall into that trap of the backlog so try to make it Broad and conceptual not too specific at this point have a sketch a headline and a caption and again this leaves enough room to explore there's many different ways to produce different features there's different products or services that fall under a security concierge big idea uh after they do some big idea of vignettes I like to have them cluster see if we have some patterns towards that initial solutioning I might have them vote on the top clustering I like to use a prioritization grid here and I use a wave chart so there's no brainer's performance payoffs and differentiators I think a lot of times people might focus on no-brainers to quickly resolve resolutions for customers but the more interesting ideas and customers tend to pay more for differentiators and it's really how you beat the snot out of the competition performance payoffs are we're better faster more efficient better data quality there's an interesting thing that happens in session with customers when they start to debate between differentiators performance payoffs and unwise ideas I think that's gold right there not just for user researchers but really for product managers so have them put them on the chart it might look like this and we still need to further describe each of the Big Ideas this is when we lean heavily into defining the New Concept we kind of revisit the who what while statement but it's more from a solutioning perspective Albert Einstein once said if I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about it and five minutes solving it again let's align on the problem so that the solution becomes laser focused again defining the new concept is essential so that it resonates with users the product team and really more importantly the customers and your Executives we revisit the who what while statement it looks like this this comes from IBM design thinking here's an example from a IBM bluemix I think it should take no more than 30 minutes for a developer to build and run an app using IBM and third-party apis here was one that was produced a couple of years ago and a project that I was in it drove alignment it usually takes an hour or so and the thing to level up here is the wow not the how the wow then it's creating a prototype we kind of get more into the groove and this is kind of where we live and play as product designers and user researchers I love this quote from John Maeda if a picture is worth a thousand words prototype is worth a thousand meetings again I'll give an amen to John there again prototypes allow us to visualize our ideas and refine them and to experiment quickly business requirements can be easily misinterpreted there's really two ways to build prototypes storyboards and interactive prototypes using a tool like figma I like to also say to people just remember everything starts with a sketch you can make it low Fidelity and then higher Fidelity sketches can be rapidly iterated with your customers there's no special design skills needed I've outlined in that that in my book The Design Studio method again low Fidelity tools Drive High Fidelity ideas we can quickly test sketches using the Marvel app the other thing I like to do with customers and maybe some of our stakeholders is talk about the difference between criticism and critiquing criticism feels very personal it's usually negative it's very opinionated it's also vague critiquing on the on the other hand is collaborative it's more about the idea not the person it's it's very concrete what I teach my grad students is a really simple tool I like I like I wonder Rose Thorn bud is another approach that can be used too and here's an example of a designer and a product manager using I like I like I wonder it's not enough to just create a prototype we've got to validate it it's best to validate it with real users so this is where Steve crew comes in the single best thing you can do Fred to improve a product is a usability test and again I think now this is very logical we all understand that but not that long ago people just didn't regularly do it now prototype validation lets you know how well your solution can be used and learned learned you want to do that early you want to do that often rather than doing it with designers I would suggest you even push it further more into that Horizon 3 that I was talking about I'll talk about that in a moment now why do we validate with real users to test our assumptions validate perform experiments fail fast fail early fell often test iterate the rapid experiments that I talked about before now we want to validate with users not buyers it's important but buyers have different needs Roberto here is really thinking about training and scaling it versus Christina she just wants to get people onto an airplane that are queued up so it's very both are very important but you really want to validate a prototype with real users and then kind of explain it to the it buyer again five to six users uncover the vast majority of issues it's per User Group though this tends to shock people but I want to now switch gears so that I think everybody kind of has an understanding of design thinking and that's product design thinking how do we integrate that into leading practices and then how do we level up everything so again here's our Double Diamond let's align on understanding opportunity designing the solution we've kind of went through all of that in a really fast way today and again I think I understand we can start anywhere but if we look at this we can kind of layer in design thinking lean and agile into more of a plan build run type of way and this is kind of how I see things playing off I usually start super early with design thinking and research as we start to go in more to a concept validation there's some lean coaches and some agile coaches that I tend to work a little bit more with and then they start to take over again this is a flexible framework that fits in nicely with our other partners and if you look at it there are certain things that are similar with Lean Startup agile and design strategies I've kind of outlined them here now the three lenses of design thinking I have to go through all of that really long intro to get to the meat of what I really want to talk about today so product design thinking can look like this we can do evolutionary Innovation move from a version one to a version two maybe we're downloading the latest update from next Netflix or maybe the latest update for our phone that's moving from a version one to version two sometimes that's really fast sometimes it's not it just depends upon how big the problem or opportunity is we're wanting to explore that's evolutionary Innovation there's a lot of money in evolutionary Innovation there's a lot of brand resonance there but you also with product design thinking do you can do revolutionary Innovation you might have a new idea and introduce a completely new product so imagine switching from a Blackberry to an iPhone back in the day or purchasing an electric car versus a gas powered vehicle right or building a new module onto something that's revolutionary Innovation at a product level service design thinking and I think Jen's going to talk about that next you might want to rethink handoffs from internal teams optimize how people work take a manual process and automate it you might want to create a touch a touchless experience because of a global pandemic right so I think we've done real-time service design and appreciated a lot more because of coven but this is really everything outside of a computer screen outside of maybe your phone right so it's calling a help desk right interfacing with the sales agent at the Apple Store all of those are service design now I want to talk about business design taking the third lens ladies and gentlemen I think we can perform user research and prototype businesses think about your current business model or maybe you want to completely transform or disrupt a specific industry you might take a current business model run it through design thinking and go through these stages and reimagine or create a new and improved business model you might want to redefine customer value propositions maybe you look at the business needs to understand early adopters who are the key Partners maybe you want to build by or partner with someone what are revenue streams what are rapid experiments that you might run to validate assumptions right so let's look at that for a moment so I went through all the different product design techniques that I used here are some experiments that you might run this isn't a product and really kind of at a service level but if we're validating a business right we can use the product canvas or the business model canvas and we run a different set of experiments to make sure that this business model is a Little Bit Stronger now I know many people that are on the call have talked about and learned design Sprint I actually think we need to move into Innovation sprinting when we kick start a project whether it's product design or service design what is the business model what is the customer value proposition how do we test with real world people up front to validate all of our hypotheses and assumptions synthesize that throw that back into the business model and again I think that's how we can transform business and again ux design evolves kind of into Innovation where we validate the problem the market the solution and people's willingness to pay strategize is a great company that has been instrumental into really having me rethink the way that I do my own user research practice at my company here's some other resources that I think you might want to look at value proposition design business model generation and testing business design or I'm sorry testing business ideas testing business ideas is a really great way to quickly learn about new ways to test out your business ideas your hypotheses and your assumption there's also a really great site called learning Loop that has playbooks and between these two you'll have an entire new toolkit as a professional to provide value and and this is to business owners to the c-suite people now the future of ux is really to move into strategic priorities at a business level often I hear user researchers and designers say I want to see it at the table and they're really not ready for it they probably would have a seat at the table but it would look like a baby in a high chair until we can shift our thinking make it a little bit more mature so that we're thinking about the business model the customer value propositions and validating them at a higher level I don't think we're going to have a really good seat and I don't think people will take us seriously initially so again current state reality future State solution we're now here right if we're doing business design thinking user research and design validates sustainable business models that make differentiated products that's really hard for our competitors to you know replicate easily and that makes it sustainable we can also take our timelines work with our product management people and then start to accelerate our timelines a lot of times the natural tendency is for us to build but we can also buy or partner with people Buy has two flavors we might buy services from a company maybe there's a tool set and we buy those services and we accelerate a timeline or we might buy a startup and there's something that we could use there's a lot of startups doing really cool stuff with AI machine learning and apis or you can do a blended model right and then the next thing is let's think about it in terms of the three Horizons ux currently does a good job at building the now but we also need to work on the new and I think we've started to move there but we also need to go into that space of Imagining the next building a a new way of thinking about our practice think of it ladies and gentlemen as you're in a car and the biggest thing in your car is your windshield right you do have the rear view mirror and as you're driving down the road you're kind of reacting to the cars around you the cars that are around you that's going to be your competition right that's going to in some ways be in-house systems with your customers we're reacting to that right Horizon two that's going to be those cars that are maybe three four five cars up right and you know you need to kind of anticipate where they might go and you might have to quickly adjust typically that um in terms of a time frame for a business that's you know one to two years you're already making those plans now it's kind of that time of year but you know what if you're driving down the road you're looking out that windshield if you're going to the Future where you want to change the game where you want to disrupt it that's about five years down the road ladies and gentlemen and that's going to be around the corner maybe the next city but if you don't start to plan for that now you're probably never going to get there and I really think that the fundamental question that we should ask ourselves is user researchers is no longer really [Music] can we build better products and services we have all the tools to do that now I think the future of ux research is to really ask ourselves what Future do We want to explore together and if we do that using design thinking maybe in a new way where it's not just products and services but it's also with business models because we can prototype them we can validate the problem the product the market people's willingness to pay and ladies and gentlemen I'm going to leave it there I want to give a special shout out to Bill McDowell and Sierra Thomas for their help today uh Sierra I'm going to go ahead and stop the share and answer any questions that people might have alrighty thank you so much Brian that was wonderful I always love hearing about design thinking and it's wonderful hearing about how it's applicable to everyone and not just designers um so I'm going to check real fast for some questions I saw one pop up um is this presentation going to be available later so we will be sharing all presentations uh that are allowed by the companies that are sharing here so if Saber allows us to share this presentation it will be shared if not it was because of a confidentiality reason um any other questions I am refreshing some pages right now to see I do have one of my own while uh well I'm waiting for these to load um when you were mentioning the starting point way back at the beginning about framing the opportunity have you ever run into a situation where uh you got halfway through a project and you realized that the opportunity was totally different than what you originally framed it as yeah I think that that's it's again it's a flexible framework if that happens you go back and reframe the opportunity if you have other people there they they can challenge you very early on again it's the starting point of all future discussions it doesn't mean you kind of do that steady state March towards something you can always go back all righty awesome um we have another question what does Brian think the biggest opportunity is that we can do or sorry that we can do to have a seat at the table as ux researchers yeah I think that's a great question uh I think that what I was trying to lay out here you need to understand the business uh and you need to understand the business really well and not just the business at a domain level I want you to think about it in terms of how War gets done just you know at any company a company's job is to again if it's a for-profit company it's to make money if it's a non-profit it's to serve the community right figure out what those values are and then figure out what those drivers are once you do that the single best thing that you can do and again I tend to be a visual person you need to be an asterisk at your company literally you need to go up down across and sideways so that you can break through what I call there's this permafrost layer at every company and you got to be able to break through it you do that usually with allies and you've got to be available to adjust quickly but to me I think what I've done is I've always had an ending point and I've always tried to upsell from there oh a usability tests great what if we did rapid iterative testing oh that's awesome what if we did a design studio oh that's awesome what if we did use a research oh that's awesome what if we did design thinking oh that's awesome what if I worked with you on doing business design thinking so there's ways to do it to where you can always upsell always be selling isn't that isn't that the term always be selling always be closing that's right ABC always be closing um actually when you're uh Steve Jobs quote came up I it jogged a memory for me of a quote from Henry Ford I believe that was uh if I had asked what people wanted they would have told me Faster Horses yeah yeah they're there's an interesting thing when we when we go into Horizon 3 people will get a little bit nervous there's some research by a gentleman by the name of Jim dater d-a-t-o-r typically there's four outcomes for any decision you have kind of business as usual you have growth you could also have declined right and you know some people think business as usual is boring right but going to church going to synagogue Gog some people really like that right I'm one of those people that like going to church um like then it's declining so there's a sudden decline well the collapse of the Berlin Wall is a pretty good example of that that was already happening and when it happened it was so sudden the Third Way that the future can change you can have a transformation and the transformation usually is by choice so the underlying systems or business models they change intentionally a good example of that would be Uber Uber change the business model for how you do and get from point A to point B it's no longer a taxi you can take an Uber right and so the whole systems underneath that change and that's what it was called transformation The Fourth Way is it's called an new equilibrium so the underlying systems are basically the same they're just put to another use so a really good example of that would be airport security after 9 11. there's a big external Force we have to make an adjustment so all of a sudden you know we're using sensors for human bodies there's always been conveyor belts to move stuff around we build lines we do stuff like that but there's typically four Futures so when I was talking about Horizon 3 I understand [Music] growth decline transformation new equilibrium which is a typically it's all four it's not in either one that was a trick some things are growing some things are declining the tech will stay the same sometimes it's different but if you kind of have that in your head when you're playing in Horizon 3 that kind of helps you to frame your user research I didn't add that in the slide but you know you got the voice over yeah no that was I thank you for adding that um is there we have we still have four more minutes I wanted to ask with the transformation part is that always a transformation by choice or design fluid transformation by need it's usually [Music] um well that this is another thing that I didn't add so when you look at a business model right so I remember how I said I was a futurist so if you have a business model and let's just say that this is the business model you have forces that are coming in so some of those might be governmental you have other forces that are market-based you have other that are economic hey inflation y'all right you also have just kind of market-based Trends specific to an industry so what a company might decide to do because of the stress that's being put on that business model to say hey we no longer think that this is a viable option because of that we choose to invest in to attack transformation right and so maybe it's going off of Mainframe to Cloud but it could be kind of a combination of hey we want to do this because our customers want it or we want to do this as a company to save money or some hybrid in between it was a great question it's a great question I also don't have those slides in this presentation I'm having another one uh maybe maybe another conference then well we'll have to have you back at some point all right cool alrighty I'm going to do one more scan just