In the last few weeks, we’ve received more questions than usual around crafting impactful, remote design thinking workshops.

We have mixed feelings about this; design thinkers have long fought the perception that design thinking only happens in workshops. Part of what makes them so transformative is that they offer a form of alternate reality, where an entire team is focused in intense collaboration, around a specific problem — and nothing else. When teams leave the workshop, elements of that model of co-creation should continue on an ongoing basis, even without everyone huddled around the same physical whiteboard.

This ongoing collaboration — rather than sticky notes and a catered lunch — is what truly allows teams to deliver impactful outcomes for the people they serve.

That being said, there’s no denying that workshops can be a powerful tool in a team’s human-centered way of working. A great workshop can act as a catalyst for real behavior change, and we have some guidance on how to do them well based on IBM’s years of experience collaborating as a globally-distributed company.

Transitioning from in-person to remote workshops

The workshop fundamentals don’t change

The 2 most important aspects of a design thinking workshop still hold true: the problem to be solved and the people you’re bringing together to solve it.

These 2 aspects — the problem and the team — are foundational to any workshop. It is even more important to have them clearly defined when conducting a remote workshop. People need to understand why they’re there and what problem they are solving. As the facilitator, project manager, or leader planning the session, make sure you align everyone around a shared goal in advance of the session.

You still follow many of the same working patterns and facilitation considerations as an in-person session. How is the team diverging and converging? How are you building moments to observe, reflect, and make? Where should the team pause and dig deeper?

Prepare, prepare, prepare — because everything else is different

In an in-person workshop, you have flexibility to pivot and change your approach if something goes sideways. You naturally have a more captive audience when everyone is in the same physical space. In a remote workshop, it’s much easier to “lose the room”. Attendees can easily go on mute, start checking email, generally disengage, or even leave the session altogether.

As you prepare, focus on these 3 foundational elements:

1. Tools and technology
In remote sessions, your tools can make or break your workshop. As a facilitator, it’s important to consider the technology you and the workshop team have access to, as well as what technology participants are familiar with. If you’re introducing new tools, you’ll need to build in plenty of extra time to account for the learning curve as well as backup options if the tech doesn’t work for any reason (access issues, cloud-based tool outage, connectivity, participants joining only from a land line, etc.). Accounting for technology access and back up plans is even more important if you’re collaborating with people outside of your own organization.

For instance, one IBM team found while preparing for a client workshop that many participants worked in an area where power outages occurred frequently. The team planned to switch to mobile devices and mobile hotspots if they needed to.

For ideal engagement, you’d have your group seamlessly blend the use of video conferencing, live visual collaboration tools (Mural, Box, Google Drive, etc.), and a central text conversation space (Slack, Microsoft Teams, video conferencing chat box, etc.). Make sure everyone confirms they can access the tools you plan to use beforehand.

Nothing is more frustrating for participants in a remote setup than if things fall apart. If clients and colleagues have a negative first experience, you probably won’t get a second chance.

Tips:
· Plan a brief pre-meeting to discuss expectations and onboard participants to the tools and technologies, so when your actual session starts, everyone can jump right in.
· Use video conferencing whenever possible. It helps you engage in real conversation using non-verbal communication cues that get lost in voice-only interactions.
· Set up all of your activities and workspaces ahead of time. Include clear, step-by-step instructions as well as illustrative examples of what to do. Assume that participants won’t remember anything you say.
· Bring in 2 facilitators — at least. Assign 1 facilitator or leader per breakout group to help keep the team on task. Assign a “technical coordinator” to support logistics, questions, and challenges around technology.

2. Approach and agenda
For all workshops, you need to carefully craft the agenda to achieve the intended outcome and create an engaging experience for participants. Your agenda becomes even more important when you’re remote; it’s more difficult, but not impossible to pivot.

Unlike with in-person workshops, we strongly discourage full-day sessions. No one wants to sit on a conference call for 8 hours. Instead, break up the session over multiple days, especially if you have participants from different time zones. For example, you could break up two full days over 5 days with 3-hours each. However, as you make time estimations, expect that each activity will take 2–3 times longer than it would if you did it in-person.

That said, remote workshops give you more flexibility. You’re not constrained to the 2–3 days when everyone is physically there, and it’s more logistically feasible for real users to participate. We recommend you only spend a few hours total in full group session and have smaller breakout groups for deeper ideation, prototyping, or synthesizing. State clear directions before you break out, and to come back together as a full group to align on where the breakout groups arrived.

Communicate more than you think you should. Reiterate the agenda, how and why each activity builds on the last, any “ground rules,” details of each activity, incremental insights the group comes to, what’s expected next and by when — all of it.

Tips:
· Clearly distinguish between silent ideation time, group breakout discussions, and full group Playbacks.
· Build in time for breaks. Don’t just assume you’ll squeeze them in.
· Plan workshop hours with everyone’s time zone in mind.

3. Engagement
So, once you’ve tested out all the technology and planned the perfect approach, the only thing that’s left is to keep people engaged.

Make no mistake, it’s harder for individuals to focus for long periods of time on digital mediums. There are numerous distractions on their laptops, and unlike in an in-person session, you obviously can’t just ask people to put their devices away.

At the start of the session, remind everyone of the goals, the agenda, and how this differs from a usual video conference.

When you’re physically in a room together, there is a natural energy the group feeds off of, and it’s easy to glance around to “read the room.” If you have the ability to use video conferencing, encourage people to keep their camera on. Also, if you’re on a video conference, establish a visual cue like a thumbs up or down for agreement or disagreement. That way, you can tell when people start to get distracted. This also builds in more non-verbal communication — which helps keep quieter voices seen and heard.

Encourage movement and walking away from the screen. Don’t go more than an hour without at least a 5–10-minute break.

Be intentional about the interactions you plan during the day. Don’t make any presentations more than 15 minutes or Playbacks more than 2–3 minutes. Spend most of the time asking open questions and running activities. In general, don’t spend longer than 15 minutes on each next interaction, question, or activity step.

Make it clear from the beginning that participants will leave the workshop with clear next steps. Nothing keeps people more engaged than knowing why their work matters.

Tips:
· Write down how often people speak to ensure that a single voice doesn’t dominate the discussion.
· Create a back channel where you can communicate with the other facilitators to coordinate facilitation.
· Create a chat space for people who may not feel as comfortable speaking out loud where they can contribute to the workshop and ask questions. Assign one co-facilitator to monitor the chat and raise any relevant points to the full group.

Bringing remote co-creation to your day-to-day work

As you’re transitioning to fully remote work, it’s an opportune time to use the unique benefits of a remote workshop to make this way of working stick.

When working face-to-face, the intensity of engagement and co-creation during a workshop is extremely high. However, this energy struggles to sustain itself when you go back to day-to-day work.

In contrast, a remote workshop better integrates design thinking with the team’s way of working. In order for a remote workshop to succeed, a lot of the true design thinking “work” has to happen in between sessions. Instead of magical moment, this is a prototype for how a team can work on an ongoing basis.

As you plan the workshop, consider how this way of working extends into your team’s regular operations. Take time at the end of the workshop to discuss how to weave the cadence of observing, reflecting, and making into your work. Finally, make someone responsible for keeping a human-centered focus going forward.

In reality, no one is perfect the first time they start collaborating remotely. We’ve been working at this for a long time at IBM and still continue to learn along the way.

If you want to discuss how you might help your teams innovate and collaborate in a suddenly remote environment, email us at designthinking@us.ibm.com.

Remote workshops: prototype a new way to collaborate was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As we all navigate the effects and impact of the current state of the world, the question is raised around how we build effective remote and distributed cultures. At IBM, we’ve found an application of human-centered practices that enable our large, globally-dispersed teams to do just that — co-create delightful user experiences that make business impact at the scale of our own enterprise and that of our clients.

To support teams and organizations navigating this period of remote collaboration, we’re temporarily opening up free access to everything on our Enterprise Design Thinking site. This provides actionable guidance through trainings and tools to get your team in the mindset of human-centered innovation, even when everyone is suddenly remote.

It’s important to remember that what really makes design thinking and human-centered design impactful, more so than activities and workshops, is the environment and mindset it promotes. It’s easy to focus on tools and techniques — they are the manifestation of a design thinking mindset and an effective part of it. It’s the mindset, however, that allows teams to align and find unique and effective solutions to real human problems, no matter the situation.

An environment that truly fosters innovation takes time and effort to build. Translating a pre-virus, in-person culture into a fully remote one is not just a copy-paste exercise with a few additional conference calls and screen-sharing moments. It requires thoughtful consideration of what it really means for everyone to be in different locations, still collaborate effectively, and create business and user outcomes.

So, the question is, how do you establish and maintain a remote culture that leads to creativity and innovation?

With the large, often geographically-dispersed teams we have at IBM, we have had ample opportunity to iterate and learn over the years on what works well and what doesn’t — and you can take advantage of our lessons learned.

It starts with your principles.

Principles are the first piece to building a culture. They are what allow us to quickly make decisions even in circumstances we haven’t encountered before. IBM has infused its culture with 3 principles from Enterprise Design Thinking: a focus on user outcomes, restless reinvention, and diverse, empowered teams. Each of these principles was selected for a specific reason because of how it helps us build a culture of innovation. These principles might be a place for your own organization to start with, or you might evolve a set of your own principles in order to drive an innovative culture.

We’ve spent years embedding these principles in our teams’ operations, from changing the way we frame and measure problems to how we build and structure teams. This leads to the next consideration in how we create a culture of creativity and collaboration — how we choose to exemplify these principles.

Your principles should ground your day-to-day work — especially when facing high levels of stress and uncertainty.

An already rapidly changing, dynamic environment has suddenly reached a whole new level. Restless reinvention, therefore, has become even more important to de-risk innovation by delivering incrementally and minimizing time-to-value. In the midst of uncertainty, we need a model for action — we’re constantly observing, reflecting and making. We call this the Loop, which drives us to understand the present and envision the future. It enables us to build on our successes and learn from our failures along the way. When taken to heart, it keeps us moving forward despite the uncertainty the future may hold.

We’ve been maturing this behavior model for more than 7 years. Even with good momentum, it’s easy to fall back on old habits or solve new problems in old ways when confronted with a difficult situation. Given the current landscape, teams and organizations should consider the additional support that may be required to foster the desired behavior.

Teams may need extra guidance to consider innovative solutions or new ways of working rather than reverting to their comfort zone.The market insights and research organizations gathered 3 months ago may no longer be relevant as current circumstances impact user behavior now and in the future. Prototyping is even more important now in order to quickly test concepts before delivering into a world of unknowns. Leaders should focus on encouraging teams to get feedback early and often, even if the form of the prototype has to change.

Every day, we make decisions about how we approach our team’s way of working and about the actual work that is done. The important piece is to be intentional about balancing a bias towards action with thoughtfully considering what’s tried. Take meetings as an example: Do we start the meeting by connecting as human beings or do we launch into the agenda? Or look at how we are approaching challenges: Do we critically examine the problem we’re solving and dig for the real user needs, or do we forge ahead with assumptions and perhaps deliver the wrong thing?

We all have the power to choose through our decisions and actions what principles we want to exemplify. And that — more than any other tool or technique — is what will enable us to achieve outcomes and solve problems that matter for our businesses and the world.

How do you do this sustainably?

It’s not clear yet how long the current situation will last or what the full impact will be. Building the skills to be adaptive and flexible, to identify the right problems with innovative solutions, and to stay focused on our shared humanity is an investment we can make now that will have a large payoff in the future. Ultimately, it’s people that build culture. It’s important not to let short-term pressures cause us to lose sight of the fundamental things that drive real results for customers and employees.

We can still solve big problems even in uncertain circumstances. Fostering a human-centered mindset — and encouraging collaboration in different ways between teams and stakeholders — will be valuable now and in the future.

We firmly believe that Enterprise Design Thinking is a 21st century mindset that can help teams amplify their human-centric innovation potential and unleash their creativity — no matter if they are working together in the same room or remotely. As more and more teams and organizations follow a human-centered approach, the world will become a better place for all of us.

That’s why we have decided to temporarily open up free access to everything on our Enterprise Design Thinking site. We look forward to sharing our online courses and tools with you to help build cultures of human-centered innovation.

As a starting point, you might introduce your team to our Practitioner Course or reflect on your principles and way of working with a team retrospective (you can find the instructions in our Toolkit). Or, if you want tactical advice on how to turn a remote design thinking workshop into a catalyst for a new way to work, check out our recent blog.

How to maintain a human-centered focus in a fully remote world was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly relevant to how everyone moves through the world. However, many people don’t feel empowered enough to shape that relationship.

There’s a real need right now to resolve this tension, which means a select few can’t act as all-knowing gatekeepers. As long as we have a destination or a goal in mind, we can all play a role in how our teams get there.

That’s why we launched a new online course, Team Essentials for AI. It breaks down how to map design thinking methods to the technical realities of AI.

The course uses a fictional case study to walk through how to build an intentional, responsible AI action plan and gives people the resources to try it for themselves in a workshop. It takes a few hours to complete, and the workshop the course prepares you to run should last about a day.

The course is derived from IBM Design’s AI Essentials Framework, which walks teams through a series of activities that help them come together on a shared vision for AI.

How we got here

This framework started as good old-fashioned design thinking.

“We’d been running design thinking workshops with various product teams,” Adam Cutler, Distinguished Designer of AI Design and Cognitive Enterprises recounted.

“And we realized teams weren’t aligned on understanding what AI was, how to design for it, or what to build for it.”

Software Designer Andi Lozano remembers when her team showed up to a workshop with Adam’s team to improve an AI feature, they came prepared in the traditional design thinking sense. They identified user pain points, fleshed out personas, and mapped their users’ current experience.

But when Adam asked about their intention behind their use of AI, the room fell silent.

“We thought we had more alignment going into it than we did,” Andi recalls.

The workshop reframed how the team discussed the relationship between AI and their users: security analysts. The importance of ethics and explainability continues to stick with Andi.

“It’s a security analyst’s job to be really skeptical, and if we provide no evidence for the insights we give them, why would they even trust it?” she said. Now, when she and her teammates vet each other’s ideas, they always frame the conversation around an analyst’s trust.

After a while, Adam realized his team couldn’t reach everyone directly, but they could pass along the valuable lessons learned through these workshops in an online course. It found its natural home on our platform.

Why this course, and why now?

The more AI begins to venture out from innovation initiatives to underpin the nature of modern business, the more all employees and customers should shape how their companies use it.

The days of a chatbot for the sake of it are at their sunset. In order to push into the next phase of innovation, AI can no longer just be a shiny touchpoint; it must be useful, intuitive, and responsible. As design thinking and its success has taught us, all worthwhile solutions start with a human problem. The same rings true when it comes to AI.

That still requires developers and data scientists, of course, but it also requires everyone else to jump into the ring.

A digital marketer may be up to speed on personalization trends. A researcher may know how users feel about the various ways in which their data gets collected. A compliance professional knows data and privacy regulations like GDPR backwards and forwards. That information’s all valuable from day 1 and has to ability to shape foundational direction for the better.

Teams often struggle to align early in the AI development process. This leads to wasted time and opens the door to unintended side effects of AI models. Through this course, you can pick up the tools to answer important questions and set a direction together before any model gets built.

Even as a former workshop participant, Andi was eager to take the online course. She found the newer activities — ones she never went through before — actionable and accessible. They set guardrails for productive conversation.

She also enjoyed the balance between observing a team as they figure out how to insert AI into their experience and the space to reflect on what she would do in their situation.

How to get started

At the end of the day, this is a design thinking course at its core. That means you need to have a basic understanding of design thinking to get the most out of it.

Before you take the Team Essentials for AI Course, you need to earn your Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioner Badge. You can take our free Practitioner Course to make that happen. (We promise there’s lots of good stuff in that course, too!)

Only the first step

If you find yourself thinking, “This was cool, but I want more,” after you take this course, then you’re our ideal person. You’re also in luck. You can find information about data, ethics, and conversation design on the IBM Design for AI site.

Bringing in AI often means you augment tasks traditionally done by humans. To do it right requires people to infuse deeply human conversations into every decision—to anticipate more things than a couple of individuals’ experiences could think up.

You’ll need your team members to get an AI initiative off the ground. They’ll need you, too.

Intent-focused, not tech-led: Take AI past the experimentation phase was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Back in 2017, two design leaders took on a side project that quickly snowballed into a culture shift toward employee centricity, affecting a multi-thousand-person human resources organization.

Design Director Damon Deaner and Design Principal Oen Hammonds spent 3 years recruiting and training a workforce of designers in service of IBM’s reincarnated design program. Their success gained buzz among the company’s HR leadership, which started a conversation of how they could infuse design thinking across the HR organization.

While still busy with their day jobs, Damon and Oen worked with HR’s Careers and Skills team to improve how employees and managers discuss career growth. They completely reimagined the career conversation experience and redesigned it through the lens of user experience and visual design.

“What that showed was the value and the outcomes that having design professionals and design thinking leaders can bring,” Damon said.

From there, HR officially brought them aboard to help reshape how they connect with employees.

Over a year later, their Employee Experience Design team acts as an internal consultancy for the HR organization. They train and upskill people in Enterprise Design Thinking, while also leading and supporting various HR teams in the creation of new employee-centric products and services.

To understand how they reached and influenced dozens of teams in a relatively short amount of time, you first need to know a little more about employee experience itself — and why it especially matters now.

What’s employee experience, and why’s it important?

Employee experience is just as broad as it sounds. It’s the first conversation with a recruiter and the last one with a manager. It’s career growth, promotions, compensation, relationships with peers, office space, and everything in between. Most importantly, it’s how all of these individual things blend together — much like they do in the mind of employees.

While that may sound daunting, research suggests it’s worth the investment.

Jacob Morgan, an author and speaker who researches the future of work, analyzed 252 global organizations in his book “The Employee Experience Advantage” and found companies that heavily invest in employee experience bring in more than 4 times the average profit and more than twice the average revenue. They also appear twice as often in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. And as job-hopping rises in favorability, companies face an ever-increasing challenge of retention.

With these kinds of stakes and benefits at their fingertips at the end of 2017, the Employee Experience Design team got to work.

Before they started creating, they researched their employees.

The team knew that since they were entering a new area of the company and serving people they never served before, they had to conduct some original research. User Experience Designer Claire McCloskey said they focused their research on managers within the company because of how deeply they impact overall employee engagement.

“We wanted to understand their key moments, their key pain points, the processes, experiences, and even tools… that encompass their journey,” Claire explained.

She observed managers in their own environment and interviewed them, including people across different parts of the business and the world.

At the end of her research, she learned that HR gave managers useful tools and processes, but they felt disjointed. Some managers found it difficult to seamlessly accomplish essential tasks.

“They were kind of left on their own to navigate through them when they’re looking at accomplishing a specific goal, which we know can lead to some cognitive overload or confusion,” Claire explained.

Natalie Miller was one of the people Claire interviewed. When she first became a manager, she felt like a lot of the tools and portals she needed to access were scattered.

“I had to keep my own spreadsheet and keep a lot of those HR things documented in my own personal files, because there was no one place to see everything at once,” she said.

To ground her team in what she learned, Claire made 7 journey maps to articulate the IBM manager experience, which break down steps employees must take to reach a destination, outcome, or goal. In the maps, she noted the key moments that managers face throughout their career, as well as the insights, tools, and emotions attached to them.

The team used these maps and Claire’s findings to think strategically about how they could impact HR.

To make meaningful change, they needed all of HR.

“There’s almost so much of a good thing that we felt that there was a certain degree of noise and confusion for managers and employees,” Visual Designer Ashley Profozich said. “So we realized that we could have impact by coming in and being a unifying force behind all of that, to create a single strategy for the employee experience.”

This vision birthed the IBMer Experience Playbook, a guide for people who work in HR to create cohesive and user-centric employee experiences.

Ashley and the team started by thinking about how they could bring everyone in the HR organization together with a shared strategy for creating experiences that are human, friendly, and meet the needs of real employees. The playbook outlines principles related to design thinking, tone and style, channel strategy, success metrics, and inclusivity. These best practices make it easier for HR practitioners to center employees in everything they do.

As the lead for the project, she built a community around the playbook, holding office hours and answering questions in their dedicated Slack channel. She also runs a Sponsor User Program, which means she actively engages people who use the playbook to learn how to make it better.

“We were super intentional about co-creating the playbook with a wide variety of Sponsor Users to make sure that the guidance wasn’t something that we were imposing upon people but rather something that was born from the people themselves who also saw a need and had a passion for this,” she explained.

Kelly Creary, an on-boarding specialist, sees the playbook community as a chance to connect with people who work outside of her usual scope and create more synchronicity.

“Working with the Employee Experience Design team has completely changed the way that we think and work around style and tone and has brought back a human touch to our communications,” she said.

HR practitioners who followed the playbook saw some stark improvements in their performance metrics. Sarah McNee, an HR communications professional, cited an email campaign in 2018 where her team doubled their click-through rate.

“When an offering is designed well, it helps our employees save time and enjoy the experience,” she explained.

Anshul Sheopuri, VP of Data, AI, and Offering Strategy for HR, saw engagement jump from 4% to 10% on one of his projects after his team identified some experience, analytics, and operational gaps and friction through user research.

“People are beginning to expect the same quality of experiences at work that they might have while at home watching a movie or shopping online,” Anshul said.

In a large company where scaling a good idea is often the biggest hurdle, the playbook’s guidance acts less like a crown jewel and more like a vehicle for HR professionals to chisel their own.

Deep conversations replaced menial tasks.

Until recently, Natalie and Julie Johnson (who’s also a manager) spent a lot of their time answering logistical questions for their direct reports and performing menial tasks.

“Career coaching is time consuming,” Julie said. “Now as a manager, I have time for things like that. There’s more focus on the employees, but it’s at a deeper level. It’s at a more meaningful level”

Julie also mentioned that she sees HR tools become more intuitive all the time, citing the new payroll site as an example.

“When you go to that site now you sit there and say as an employee, ‘Well, I want to know about my paycheck. Or how do I sign up for direct deposit? Or where’s tax information?’ It’s like someone thought through those things, because that’s how it’s organized now,” she explained.

Natalie believes the improvements impact the bottom line in that she and her employees save time, and time is money.

“I’ve probably saved hours just having all these programs interconnected and linked together,” she said. “I spend less time managing this business, and more time driving the business.”

It really, truly does take a village.

Oen, who founded an Enterprise Design Thinking chapter for HR practitioners, saw the most meaningful transformation in the ways people worked together. They’re beginning to bring design thinking into the picture “sooner, rather than later”

When he articulated their team’s 3 ingredients for successful, wide-reaching change, they all came back to people who rally around a shared vision.

“One is having a common language, which is Enterprise Design Thinking,” he explained. “The second thing is executive sponsorship. Not just that, but endorsement. The third thing is a lot of mindset changing among the HR practitioners.”

With all of this under the Employee Experience Design team’s belt, it’s worth asking when they can claim they accomplished their mission.

Damon says it’s in a world where all things employees experience “are so friction-free and and easy to accomplish that they don’t get in their way of being as effective and productive as they can be.”

However, he’s at peace with the fact that they’ll likely never get there, explaining that “there’s always room to improve, there’s always feedback to incorporate, there’s always improvements we can make to experiences, and there are always bigger and better outcomes we can try to achieve.”

Scale employee-centric practices across your HR organization with our learning platform

How a small design team made a big impact on employee experience was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re often at our most vulnerable and stressed when we need to gather information, sort through records, and make crucial plans related to our health.

The Dubai Health Authority (DHA) sought to make it easier for their patients to deal with these logistics, and found that they didn’t just need help connecting to medical information; They needed help connecting to their loved ones as well.

Together with IBM, DHA tackled these issues with their award-winning products, Tifli, a pre and post-natal care app, and Hayati, an app originally meant to aid people with diabetes that was eventually expanded for other conditions.

They listened to the communities

20% of Dubai’s population has Type 2 diabetes, and there’s an increasing rate of high-risk pregnancies due to hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. So, DHA saw these communities as high priority.

Entering the project with IBM, the DHA’s challenge was to “create citizen-centric healthcare experiences, infused with innovation and powered by smart technologies to improve health, wellness, and happiness,” according to Ramsi Bedeir, CX Director in IBM’s Dubai studio.

Their first step in tackling this challenge was a design thinking workshop with pregnant women and diabetic people—as well as the people who take care of them. In this workshop, DHA employees discovered firsthand the day-to-day struggles of people in these communities. They also worked with doctors to understand roadblocks that prevented them from serving their patients better.

Through speaking with doctors, Alex Tattis, Hayati product owner and Senior CX Strategist, said they found doctors and nurses needed to spend more time with patients than their bandwidth allowed. This sparked the idea of creating a mobile app.

The app streamlines health information into one user profile that health professionals can update in real time. For example, if you went to the doctor for the vaccination, you wouldn’t have to chase down those records later, or even go through the hassle of uploading them yourself. Instead, healthcare professionals would work through the minimal logistics to make sure they’re immediately accessible to you from your mobile app.

They let their users surprise them

DHA knew going in that easier access to medical records, information, and resources for patients would be a top priority. However, co-creating with the communities they wanted to serve showed them how crucial improving emotional support systems was to the patient’s healthcare experience.

“Typically doctors know the medical things, but the emotional things… It’s difficult to understand the lifestyle,” Amani Al Jassmi, DHA Director of IT, explained.

For example, DHA and IBM found that many husbands and fathers didn’t know how to make their wives feel better during and after their pregnancy, and felt guilty whenever they couldn’t be there for the mother of their child[ren] in person. To remedy this, the team that worked on the Tifli app included a “loving nudge” feature that allowed husbands to draw their wives a heart and send a short, loving message.

Mothers also wanted a platform to share moments and emotions related to pregnancy and motherhood with their loved ones. Tifli allows them to do this. Think Facebook, but more niche and with presumably higher “friends list” standards.

They turned healthcare norms on their head

If this sounds radically different from how providers typically approach healthcare, that’s kind of the point.

This project is part of a larger digital transformation effort by the government of Dubai that Amani believes is ingrained in their national culture.

Amani acknowledges that digital transformation in healthcare is extremely difficult, which made the positive outcomes of this project even more gratifying.

“Our partnership with IBM enabled us to begin a citizen-centric journey with our citizens immediately and continue to enhance over time.” Amani said. “The mobile application strategy and Tifli and Hayati mobile apps developed by IBM Studios Dubai were the first step.”

Learn more about uncovering user needs on our platform.

More than just medicine: how design thinking uncovered modern patient needs was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

People often pitch design thinking as a mindset shift to solve modern problems. Ironically enough, in its most cliché form it plays out through analog means. With everyone in a room together, people often write, draw, and discuss without technology.

However, when people can’t work in the same physical space, teams start to rely on tools like InVision, MURAL, and cloud-based document editors that allow for quick and seamless collaboration in real time. Teams lucky enough to gain access to them tend to adapt well in a virtual design thinking session.

But what if you can’t access them?

Workers lack access for reasons that range from sensitive information policies to tight budgets to an executive who doesn’t understand the tools’ value.

We won’t try to sugar coat it: Remote design thinking (and remote collaboration, in general) inevitably requires more time and patience when people rely on clunkier and more basic modes of communication. But it’s an endeavor worth pursuing nonetheless. If they want to stay competitive, companies can no longer demote a focus on their users to a “nice to have” — even if employees still work in computer programs from the 1990s.

We broke down how remote design thinking sessions can play out logistically in a relatively low-tech environment.

While this recipe won’t replace MURAL or things that share a similar purpose, it should act as a resource for people who want to build a new work culture without all of the processes, norms, and buy-in on their side.

Download the recipe here, and check out our Toolkit for some activities to try out with your team.

The low-tech recipe for remote design thinking was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s a secret most gatekeepers feel uncomfortable sharing: We all work in pretty similar ways.

We’re beholden to deadlines and people, and form our processes based on our obstacles. We develop names for these processes and the parts of their whole. A common language helps reduce the cognitive load once you’ve learned it, but it also often puts up dividers between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

People who aren’t on product teams sometimes tell us that they don’t see the relevance of prototyping. It’s part of the product world’s lexicon, but you can apply its spirit anywhere: Don’t wait until you’re done with something to show it to people.

If someone relies on your work, you can and should create prototypes. This might sound like just another old saying to you, so let’s break down how this could actually play out.

What prototyping looks like in customer service

Let’s say you work for a pharmaceutical company that just brought a new drug to market. You want to ensure your customers can find relevant information when they call in, and customer service agents are prepared to either give them that information, or direct them to the right person.

You decide for the first 6 months, it might work best for inquiries about the new drug to have its own special button (6) for customers to push, but will still route to the department that answers questions about drugs in general. Then, you write out frequently asked questions and answer them for this particular drug.

Before you implement the plan, you show it to someone in your department, as well as a customer service agent. After all, prototyping without testing is like a car with no gas: Cool to have, but not serving its purpose.

The person in your department points out that this type of drug treats significantly different things, so it’s worth doing some research to flesh out the questions more. The customer service agent said that the last time the company rolled out a new drug, they were so overrun with calls that they wish that just a handful of people were assigned to answering just those questions.

You keep this feedback in mind and make changes. Next, you test out this flow with actual customers. You find that they don’t wait to hear all the options, and press the button for inquiries into all drugs (2), which — because of the feedback you received from a customer service agent — takes them to an agent not trained to answer their questions.

So, how do you negotiate multiple people’s needs for the best experience? You find a pretty simple solution after some brainstorming: change the script from “Press number 2 for questions related to our drugs” to “Press number 2 for questions related to all drugs except Newdrugiclin.”

You test this solution with all parties, and it works pretty seamlessly, so you go ahead and roll it out.

A couple of weeks later, customers start to report side effects, and customer service agents fumble to help them. You listen to some of the conversations and identify the common actions customers request the agents to take. You research the new drug, calling around to experts and reading articles. You use all of this information to make updates to the discussion guide in under a week.

Lessons to take with you

This example shows the value of rapid prototyping and testing, demonstrates an important mantra: Everything is a prototype. When your work roams out in the wild and needs improvements, ask yourself what incremental change you can make in a short time. If the change stands well on its own, don’t wait for a big rollout six months down to road to address user needs.

Learn more about prototyping on our platform.

How to prototype in customer service was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

IBM Watson Workspace, a team collaboration application with built-in artificial intelligence, aims to solve a problem very much of this age: information overload.

Everyone obviously benefits from the quick and constant modes of communication like instant messaging and video conferencing, but that doesn’t come without fatigue. That, coupled with our attention spans shrinking collectively, makes it easy to lose focus on — or not even come across — the important stuff.

So, can we have our cake and eat it too? To extend this metaphor a bit, imagine Watson Workspace as your personalized food critic. It uplifts information important to you in real time so you know where to focus your time, attention, and input.

This technology isn’t simple, and to execute on it well requires an intimate understanding of how people communicate, and what they want to know. Ami Dewar, IBM Design Principal, voiced the importance of building a relationship with your users.

“Different people work in many different ways,” she said. “It’s been more beneficial for us to engage a really wide net of people in order to design a personalized solution tailored to individuals.”

In the world of Enterprise Design Thinking, people typically build a relationship with their users through a Sponsor User Program. This is essentially an agreement where both the user and the product team formalize parameters for feedback and co-creation.

The Watson Workspace design team crafted their own take on this kind of program, calling it an Enterprise Preview Program. They worked with about 50 employees from a handful of companies, each focused on different use cases for the product. That’s a lot of people to work with in a significant way, but the team felt it was worth it to build up a large base for feedback.

“People have very different expectations. Sometimes we’ll find half the people really like something and the other half doesn’t,” she explained.

While it’s easy to fall into the routine of going back to the same 10 people, this team took more of a rotational approach. However, this isn’t how they work with every user.

Several users reach out to the design team on a regular basis — even outside of formal testing sessions and surveys. From bugs to “wish lists,” their feedback varies in scope, but is reliably constructive and comes from everyday, hands-on use of the product.

You could argue that these customers feel comfortable with fluid communication due to Ami and her team breaking down barriers for meaningful conversation. Ami personally responds to comments and questions coupled with Net Promoter Scores (the method Watson Workspace uses to collect product ratings), and even reaches out to customers who give the product a low score.

This level of rigor in uncovering what really matters to people has paid off. The team patented their AI-infused innovation, increased their Net Promoter Score, and saw service disruptions decrease 69%. But most importantly, users reported measurable improvements in their own collaboration.

If we learn anything from this, it’s that in order to hear your users with equal parts breadth and depth, you need to listen in a variety of ways.

Learn more about Sponsor Users on our learning platform.

The many ways Watson Workspace listens to its users was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Project Monocle team started with a directive from executives: Build a one-click solution that helps IT administrators send updates to 1000s of servers. After listening to their users, they rebelled. See what happened when they leveraged design research from inception to development to uncover the IT administrators’ real needs.

Learn more about design research on our learning platform.

Project Monocle: a case for design research was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When the pervasive encryption team came together to tackle security for the z14 release, they turned to Enterprise Design Thinking to align their global team and understand their users’ true pain points. See how this human-centered approach increased the team’s collaboration and helped them built trust with the people who matter most: their users.

Learn more about uncovering user pain points on our learning platform.

An encryption team gained user trust by building empathy was originally published in Enterprise Design Thinking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.