Principle 2: Teamwork
Reading time: 4 minutes
The myth of a solitary genius solving a huge problem no one else could solve is just that — a myth. Although CEOs, sports team leaders, and award-winners tend to get public credit, none of those people achieve their goals without the consistent, robust support of a variety of other people.
Making decisions
The same holds true in design. Although design clusters around a few big names, like Frank Gehry, an architect, Jonathon Ive, an industrial designer at Apple, and Miuccia Prada, a fashion designer, all of these people have teams with whom they work, and none of them designs in a vacuum. Working in teams allows organizations to take advantage of the unique backgrounds, training, and natural talents of a variety of people. Design teams espouse multiple disciplines, which enables them to hear multiple viewpoints during the design phase, in the same way they did during the discovery phase.
Case in point
Interdisciplinary NASA teams
When NASA undertook to land research robots (called rovers) on planet Mars, no one person accomplished the task. Not even one leader can take credit. Instead, to land and operate a rover successfully on Mars, NASA assembled multiple teams of flight and mechanical engineers, physicists, rocket scientists, designers, project managers, finance specialists, and others to take on the task.
In their shoes: empathy in design
Designing for those unlike yourself depends on practicing empathy, to create designs that will work for the participants.
The word “empathy” is often used in the design circles to describe an ideal emotional state between designers and participants, in which the designers have so deeply learned about the participants’ experience with a product, service, system, or lack thereof, that they can, as nearly as possible, stand in their shoes. Practicing this emotional intelligence during the design phase allows designers to create solutions for people whose experiences they may never have, but with whom they can empathize successfully, to codesign new or evolved products, services, and systems that improve participants’ future experiences.
Your team has practiced empathy throughout the discovery phase during Interviews. As you move deeper into design, lean on that deep empathy or sympathy you developed while iterating, to help you design for your participants, even if they are different from you.
Case in point
VEO and transitioning veterans
The VA Welcome Kit is one example of using empathy to design better experiences. Through hundreds of interviews with veterans, administrators, and service providers, the Veterans Experience Office has organized varied offerings, opportunities, and earned benefits into a single, well-designed informational package. Through intensive research with veterans, and a value and practice of co-design during the design phase, the Welcome Kit improves veterans’ understanding of available services and benefits in the large VA system. Using plain language, the Kit strives to bring together the myriad phone numbers, registrations, and options a veteran has upon entering VA, into a consistent, readable, and modern layout. To design it, VEO spent a year speaking and co-designing with veterans to understand and empathize with their confusion regarding benefits and services during transition. Building this empathy meant VEO sent employees and designers to all parts of the United States to talk to veterans about that experience. What this research found was that veterans bring a range of readiness for civilian life to their period of transition from the military, but that VA could do a lot better to smooth that path with consistent, consumable direction regarding the VA organization.
The research and design teams used empathy to engage with veterans about their experiences, and came to understand at a minute level veterans’ feelings of confusion and frustration with VA. The teams synthesized those learnings into the VA Welcome Kit and tested the product extensively with veterans across the country to ensure its utility. In this way, VEO stepped into the shoes of their product participants in order to improve their earliest experiences of VA. VA’s Welcome Kit teams engaged empathetically with (rather than designed authoritatively for) veterans across the VA system, and used this information to design the VA Welcome Kit, which now in use across VA.
