In 1994, the Walt Disney Company launched Disney Cruise Line, a new franchise flagship. It did all the right things, starting with hiring an experienced team from the top cruise lines and commissioning the construction of its own fleet. But Disney’s focus on creating next level experiences meant that this could be no ordinary cruise operation.
In the middle of the first design concept presentation for Disney Cruises, the team ran Disney CEO Michael Eisner through the passenger experience, including their arrival at Castaway Cay, Disney’s private island in the Bahamas: the ship would anchor off the coast of the island and passengers would be shuttled to shore in smaller tenders.
Eisner stopped the team in mid-sentence. Why wouldn’t the ship just pull up to the dock so that passengers could disembark directly onto the island—especially seniors or disabled passengers who might have trouble transferring to the tender boats? The answer was that docking a giant cruise ship requires a deep-water port and creating one at Castaway Cay would be a fiendishly involved and expensive proposition. But Eisner pushed back and Disney made the investment to build the port required to receive its ships. This commitment to creating a better customer experience is one of the reasons Disney delights its guests.
Of course, it’s hard to argue that Disney’s new port solved a widespread human problem. But it is a good example—and on a grand scale—of leveraging design, technology and engineering to elevate customer experience. It’s a demonstration of an obsession with the end user; anticipating their needs, surprising their senses, and so standing out from the competition. And it’s a lesson that can be applied everywhere from travel to healthcare, tech to beauty goods, and in the creation of truly life-enhancing products and services.
Drawing on decades of experience, John Edson, PA Consulting’s head of design and engineering in the US, helps companies create innovative products. Edson and his team help clients employ three mindsets that help them—like Disney—go far beyond the ordinary to create the life-changing.
DESIGN GIVES A DAMN
The most valuable companies are obsessed with their end users: simple in theory, incredibly challenging in practice.
In a typical company, business units conceive brand extensions, marketing plumbs the customer research, product managers create a proposition, designers and engineers specify a product, and manufacturing delivers. In that cycle, though, the customer can get lost.
It is design’s job to make the complex simple, to rationalise and untangle. It is also where competing demands—functional, material, commercial—meet and are resolved. A design mindset keeps the customer in focus at all times.
To create great products that answer a need, says Edson, design pays attention to detail, but it also goes beyond expectations to surprise and delight while being as accessible as possible. ”Good design makes you feel appreciated and thought of,” he says. In short, design gives a damn about the end user.
“I have worked in Silicon Valley for three decades—and there is still the seduction of what technology can achieve. But if what it can achieve is not matched to human need or desire, it’s meaningless to people and therefore meaningless in the market.”
Edson says teams should be defined by intent and ambition, not function. “When companies get big, roles get specialised and the focus shifts to optimisation, and not that continued passion for creating things that are useful and desirable to customers,” he says. “The best, most innovative companies reorganise themselves around teams that are focused on meeting a customer need or creating customer desire.”
Design’s cross-disciplinary flow of ideas and intent—the functional dynamics of giving a damn—becomes ever more important as the Internet of Things and other technologies smarten up “dumb” physical objects, and services are built around and informed by data and data analytics.
The best brands create desire that goes beyond a must-have craving. It can be making the difficult and challenging easier, more intuitive, or simply fit more comfortably into the flow of the everyday. “Nobody wants a medical device the way that they want an iPhone or a smartwatch,” says Melanie Turieo, PA’s head of health and life sciences product development. “But the principles are the same. If the design is done well, the more likely people are to do the things that they need to do but may not want to.” PA has a history of applying this type of design vision to healthcare products, from breath-activated inhalers to easy-to-use auto-injectors, making life far easier for those with physical disabilities to those with a disabling fear of needles.
To give a damn about your customers with inspiring design, Edson recommends four approaches.
Firstly, build cross-functional teams around product, not in silos of discrete capabilities, with a clear picture of the customer. “Surprises happen when designers, marketers and engineers are working together with the product at the centre.”
Secondly, talk to your customers throughout—and beyond—your product development. “You need an understanding of customers’ motivations and behaviours in product definition, design and even through final development, in order to build products that meet their needs and stand out from the competition.
Then, prototype early and often. “Prototypes objectify the design. By making objects, we get out of the trap of speaking subjectively and abstractly about product features and benefits, and get to great solutions faster.”
Lastly, put a design leader in top management. “Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs held onto a vision for creating products and services that would delight customers and used it to drive strategy.”
DESIGN HAS A POINT OF VIEW
“Design IS a point of view” says Brett Lovelady, designer and founder of Astro Studios, part of PA Consulting. “Modern design tools, skills and experiences are increasingly more alike than differentiating. This has elevated the need to cultivate design talent or designers that have relevant, soulful, cultural points of view, with a goal of creating real solutions or IP (intellectual property) within their solutions. Insights, technologies, data, etc., are all fuel for the design process, but it’s enabled talent that will commercialise valuable, even industry-leading solutions, for the marketplace. Designers are often the human or environmental advocates in the process with abilities to create real connections beyond the function of product, often elevating the desire within the targeted audience, the desire to acquire and even self-identify with successful, design-driven brands.”
On a recent project, Edson put these ideas to work by helping a home product company gain more market share by creating a stronger brand identity, clear and evident in the design of their products. “The company has been a leader, creating 5-star products that people love—once they own them,” Edson says. “Through simple research, we found that many consumers didn’t even recognise the brand and didn’t know that their products, sitting on the shelf next to each other, came from the same company. And worse, the design of the products didn’t showcase their best features—and consumers were buying the competitors’ products to get those features.
“If you think about a home products company like Dyson, they have leveraged a point of view, a repeated and consistent way of showing off features and implying power. You may or may not love the way they look, but you know a Dyson product when you see it, and they strongly connect it to power and utility.”
Design increasingly recognises that need and desire come in almost infinite shape and variety, and designing to an assumed human median is bad design. Guide Beauty was developed by professional make-up artist Terri Bryant. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, Bryant understood that the design of most beauty tools presumed a steady hand.
Working with PA, Bryant developed a range of ergonomic but strikingly elegant applicators that were far easier to control and stabilise. Bryant and PA also recognised the power of brand and packaging in the beauty market and developed an identity that was inclusive, chic and confident.
Edson suggests three ways you can express your brand point-of-view in a distinctive and recognisable way, and differentiate it from your competitors.
Firstly, design with a bold conviction. “Pick a point of view that has something to say and establishes a real connection with your customers. And this doesn’t mean picking up Apple’s clean and modern aesthetic, it means creating your own.”
Secondly be consistent. “You need to have a single recognisable voice in the market which is different and relevant. And then you want to repeatedly ‘speak’ with that voice to get the benefit of recognition with customers.”
Lastly, be careful with how you regard your research. “Your brand character needs to appeal to people, but don’t ask people who they want you to be.”
DESIGN HAS A CONSCIENCE
Design is, by definition, problem solving. Good design does good when it is applied to the right problems. But design’s conscience runs deeper. It is, inherently, against waste and bad outcomes. That’s why sustainability is talked about, as, in many ways, a design problem. Design’s logical push is towards sustainability and good outcomes—and its role is vital given that 80 percent of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design phase.*
Edson is clear that design for good and design for desire are not mutually incompatible. Quite the opposite. Changing behaviours and outcomes for the better means creating desire for that change.
“Tesla has taken the Apple model of creating charisma around technology,” Edson says. “Creating real desire is accelerating EV adoption faster than our predictive models thought possible.”
In a similar way, PA worked with the UK Government’s Office for Zero Emission Vehicles and the Royal College of Art to design a blueprint public EV ChargePoint, launched at COP26. The ambition was to create a ChargePoint as endearing and iconic as Britain’s red post boxes that could be adopted and adapted by local authorities and private providers. PA talked to motorists, EV enthusiasts and sceptics, a range of other stakeholders, including disability groups, as well as the Design Council and Historic England. Dan Toon, PA design lead, UK and Europe calls this understanding of people’s needs and frustrations the “seed capital to come up with great ideas.”
Good design can help with wider adoption of beneficial technologies, such as EV charging points
“The challenge of climate change is the challenge of changing human behaviour,” he adds. “At the intersection of people and technology, design can have a major impact.”
Toon says the brief was a useful insight into the high and complex expectations of design. “The end product needed to be functional, inclusive, sustainable, adaptable, affordable and finally, and arguably most importantly for behavioural change, people had to love it.”
For PA, identifying customer need means quantitative and qualitative research. And increasingly, says Edson, the application of AI and data analytics. As more and more products offer digital feedback, so the more personalised and particular can be the design response to that need. “This is where physical and digital products overlap,” he says. “Once we put something in a home, workplace, care home, hospital or car, we can understand how they are being used, take that information and fold it into future generations of that product or service. We are just on the brink of understanding how AI, machine learning and data analytics can really inform design choices.”
The pandemic presented a unique opportunity to leverage smart design to establish AI, machine learning and predictive analytics as a force for good. As Covid-19 spread across the world in 2020, information was suddenly everywhere, but hard to aggregate and validate. Unilever needed to forecast the future direction of the pandemic and rapidly evolve their workforce strategy to help protect employees, while maintaining the supply of products to 2.5 billion consumers worldwide. PA helped Unilever to design and build a world-leading predictive tool called Covid-19 Awareness and Situational Intelligence, or CASI.
CASI is a live dashboard that accurately predicts Covid-19 trends, providing real-time and predictive intelligence from a global and regional level down to individual Unilever facilities, warehouses and distribution centres worldwide.
CASI aggregates, normalises and validates more than 250,000 Covid-19-related data points daily, integrating 75 subnational data sources. As Richard Chamier, data analytics expert at PA explains: “the Unilever-PA team applied AI and machine learning to create predictive models, designing an automated and dynamic dashboard to present this data in a simple way.” CASI was rolled out globally across Unilever within three months—and the dashboard design is key to enabling it to be accessed 800 times a day across Unilever and accelerate decision-making.
Developed with Unilever, the CASI live dashboard provides real-time and predictive intelligence on Covid-19
“Charles Eames [the visionary American designer, architect and film-maker, and champion of a more inclusive, democratic modernism] talked about the fact that design loves constraints,” says Edson. “Creating products and services that make the world a better place is a constraint.”
To ensure your design has a conscience and is a force for good, Edson recommends three things to keep front of mind.
Firstly, be ambitious about commitment to do good, and your teams will deliver. “The expectations of design in changing attitudes and behaviour are high and complex, so bring a high bar in your design criteria. Design loves constraints, but if we don’t name them, we can’t design for them.”
Listen hard to your customers. “Treat user frustrations and feedback as seed capital for your future innovation and product developments.”
Finally, think outside your own domain. “Be conscious of how your product can influence and impact the wider ecosystem, and create products that serve every user, including the environment and future generations.”
Changing behaviours for good, and on a massive scale, is ultimately design’s super power. Regulations and powerful sanctions can help make the world a better place, but ultimately better ways of doing things need to get to market and succeed because their design, what they do and the way they do it, is irresistible. The best design can and should change lives for the positive.
