Principle 3: Design for humans
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The design process strives to include all possible participants and stakeholders in the discovery phase. The thinking is that, if teams talk to all the people who work with a product, service, or system (participants), as well as all those who administer, approve, or oversee it (stakeholders), and design with them, then the end result of the work serves the needs of all those people.
Consider changes in workflow
As they move through the design phase, teams need to evaluate how the proposed solution might change the workflow, or unduly increase the workload for participants or stakeholders. Teams can do this through talking with these impacted groups as the process goes on, testing with them, and listening to anxieties about being expected to “do more with less” or, conversely, with being cut out of access or workflows they may see as key to their work. Finding these participants might seem difficult, but if you talk to your primary participants, they can direct you to others who might be touched by these changes. Contact those groups, and set up testing with them.
Case in point
Scaling USPS
A well-designed product or service continues to be useful even as circumstances around it may dramatically change. Back in 1775, the creators of the U.S. Postal Service could not foresee that delivery planes, trains, and trucks would one day replace wagons and horses as the way to get packages from here to there. Technology has radically changed, but the core service offered by your local post office remains relevant today, especially as the number of packages sent continues to increase.
In fact, much of the boom in online retail could not have occurred without having a reliable, low-cost shipping infrastructure in place. From small, single-person shops, to industry giants like Amazon, the U.S. Postal Service’s package delivery has allowed businesses of all sizes to engage in digital interactions that result in goods showing up at customers’ doors.
This increase in scale, however, has not been without its challenges. The services that characterize modern package services, like flat-rate boxes and weekend delivery, have caused a need for the design for changes within the USPS itself. For example, in the age of Sunday delivery, how are personnel deployed while still honoring labor contracts? How might an unexpected glut of packages be absorbed into the delivery system quickly and efficiently? Whenever a public-facing feature is added, all these questions and many more have to be designed for inside the organization. These are the types of changes that teams must consider when creating new products, services, or systems in the context of large-scale organizations. One change is rarely one change; in an organization of any size, consider the potential changes to workflow, personnel, etc., that will have to occur to support a new or evolved system.
Value new participants
Your design does not exist in a vacuum. It will be integrated into an ecosystem of processes, all of which have their primary participants and stakeholders. For this reason, it’s important to understand and anticipate the role of new participants in your proposed designs.
New participants are people who are entirely fresh to the process. When the team is creating an entirely new product to offer to veterans, or a new system for school administrators to talk to one another, then everyone will be a new participant. Keep in mind, however, that new participants also come from inside the organization. Whoever will distribute or administer that new product is a new participant. Introductions, training, and a consideration of their current workload will all need to be addressed.
Case in point
The USAJOBS redesign
The USAJobs website is well-known to many federal employees. Through this job application portal, one can find a position that fits with a desired career path, background, employment preference, and grade level. In the past, this site had been run by both the federal government, and by private entities, but it had never gotten good reviews, either from new or experienced participants, in terms of experience or usability.
Navigating the site required participants to understand multiple things that they might only know if they had prior experience with federal employment. Even if applicants did have an understanding of the federal hiring system, the site’s structure made it almost impossible to understand if they had successfully applied for a job or not. Applicants had no visibility into where their application was in the hiring process. In addition, unless someone explicitly reached out to them, they had no way of knowing whether their application was still moving through the system or if they had been dropped from consideration.
These pain points were considered during the massive redesign of the site from 2015-2018. Although still reflective of a maddeningly byzantine hiring path, both applicants and hiring managers are now able to interact through a more modern, transparent system. This improvement was made possible by constant testing, both with new and experienced participants, as alterations to the site design were proposed and built. No feature of this site appeared to the public without hearing from participants about their experience with it. This sort of large-scale change is possible only through a long-term commitment to change that is paired with a constant return to focus on the participants themselves.
