Teaching Design Thinking

In 2020, I worked for Foolproof as a Principle Designer, specifically in the role of Design Lead in the Human Centred Design Team at NatWest Group.

Background

NatWest Group retail banking structures it’s business through ‘journey’ teams which are very similar to product squads. Each journey team is home to a number of ‘Journey Developers’, each of whom are responsible for the design and optimisation of multi-channel customer journeys. NatWest Group aims to ensure each of the Journey Developers are supported through relevant education and training.

I worked alongside another Principle Designer to design and present multiple sessions on Design Thinking and associated design activities and artefacts to help Journey Developers understand how to embed Design Thinking into their overall ways of working. This program was ultimately called the ‘Design Academy’.

Our process

Before creating any content or designing a curriculum we undertook a discovery process to understand more about the Journey Developers, their ways of working, the type of work they undertake and how it interconnected with other parts of the business.

We also spoke to multiple senior stakeholders to understand their goals and aspirations for how Design Thinking might influence the thought process and behaviour of Journey Developers.

Finally we looked at other existing frameworks that influenced the way in which Journey Developers worked to ensure our delivery of Design Thinking principles could be discussed contextually and in a relevant way.

Solution

The discovery process revealed a number of typical scenarios that Journey Developers faced and enabled us to design three bespoke presentations to cover these scenarios. These three explored how frameworks such as the ‘Double Diamond’ and robust discovery and definition can help the business to identify and tackle customer problems in an effective, prioritised way.

These bespoke presentations were preceded with an introduction to Design Thinking and were then followed by further deep-dives into subject matters such as Primary Research and Customer Journey Mapping.

Given the ‘Design Academy’ was run during the COVID lockdown (2020) all presentations were delivered remotely over Zoom and were combined with Mural whiteboards and Zoom breakout rooms to ensure the attendees attended a fun, interactive and productive session.

Business value

The Design Academy delivered against a number of long term NatWest Group objectives. The primary of which is to ensure customer insight is gathered and used to inform every product or service design decision. Journey Developers self-reported a significant increase in their ability to factor in relevant ‘Design Thinking’ activities when planning projects and creating design briefs for the Human Centred Design team.

In addition, our combined understanding of Journey Developers and Design Thinking saw us advise the business on how to define the Journey Developer role going forward in order to ensure Design Thinking could be effectively embedded as part of the working culture.