His book is about the:

• power of design to influence
• lack of designers’ involvement within the design process
• absence of ethical considerations within the design process of products and services

It’s essential reading for any designer (or indeed non-designer), and it inspired me to write about a topic that has been on my mind for some time: emotional connection with users, and the point at which creatives stop being cool.

I’m going to keep this blog post specific – it’s a thought piece with some tips and hints on how to avoid commonly held misconceptions, with some practical advice and guidance when it comes to designing experiences.

Make it pretty (and make it work)

In the digital user experience team we are committed to representing the voice of our users through the design of services that meet their needs. Having just been through a big digital transformation programme, we’ve learned how to take a user-centred design approach to our work, because we recognise that by solving users’ problems, we will also be able to meet business objectives.

Many organisations say they value the importance of good design and ‘putting our customers at the heart of all we do’, while their services and systems fail to back up that corporate promise.

On reflection, there is a good reason for this. Generally speaking, digital functions grew out of physical functions such as Marketing, Communications and IT. These were traditionally the ‘go-to’ areas that were commissioned by stakeholders to create stand-alone platforms, creative campaigns and innovative solutions. As a result, so many companies still focus on stand-alone innovations before people. There seems to be a shared mythology that pleasing aesthetics are all that is needed to capture attention, elicit engagement, and smoothly convert another happy customer. But the more difficult question, with more up-front effort, is does it DO what it’s SUPPOSED TO DO in the first place.

Caption: ‘Pretty Vacant’ sign, courtesy of ��

You don’t go to the cinema to listen to the radio

We want people who visit us in an online or offline environment to have a seamless, frictionless experience, with very direct outcomes.

We want them, for example, to:

• feel connected with us
• remember us, even if just for a quick moment
• become our advocate
• tell their friends and family about the outstanding work we do
• carry our message in a crowded and noisy world

So that…

• they buy our goods and use our services,
• we can reduce our support cost and burden
• deliver against strategic outcomes… you get the idea!

We hope that in the longer term, it might even translate into a stronger brand advocacy, loyalty and eventually increased revenues. The ultimate utopia: users’ needs meeting business’ needs.

But emotional connection is about more than just pretty pictures and impressive-sounding vocabulary – it is about meaningful content that helps people achieve something they set out to do. In this scenario, a user walks away from their interaction with us feeling satisfied, and with an innate sense of the great care we took to meet their needs as easily and clearly as possible – now �ٳ�����’s a recipe for brand loyalty.

The way we choose to share this content matters, and certain mediums (or channels) are better than others to get that impact. I’ll be the first to admit that a web page on its own is hardly ever enough.

We need to choose the right tools, or channels, for the right job. Just like we can’t expect people who go to the cinema to listen to the radio: select the best tool available for the task.

Let me explain.

Art vs Design

The basic is to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan.

as something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.

, she talks about the similarities in the two concepts but also how they are different in their own ways. She says that design is a deliberate practice with intentions to create with a specific purpose and plan. Art is an expression of the artist for decoration, and meant to be interpreted in any number of ways.

Good art is always interpreted, leaving the observer to find the missing pieces dropped on purpose. Whereas, good design should never be open to interpretation; it should be easily understood. In fact, good design when done well is invisible to the user ().

My reflection of that is that in many organisations, ‘design’ is often mistakenly interpreted as indulgent frosting on a functional interface. The problem with this view is that if design and users’ needs are not considered from the start, it’s extremely hard and costly to do something about it later on.

There’s a good reason why many corporate portals or systems don’t function to meet requirements. They have not been designed from end-to-end with both a carefully considered user and outcome in mind. Factoring into your business case two weeks of UX design before the end of a project may meet the requirement of ‘doing some design’, but in reality won’t make the user experience any better!

You cannot fix a cake once it’s been baked. wise words – not mine. Mike says critique should be embraced at every stage of the design process, by the very people who’ll be using your service. That’s how you increase a project’s chances of success. Get feedback early and often to decrease the overall costs of maintenance, repairs and doing big projects time and time again!

The extent to which aesthetics matter

Aesthetics do matter. It is a simple fact that good-looking products and user interfaces are perceived as more valuable and having more positive qualities, even if it’s not true! This is referred to as . Users tend to perceive that things which look better, will work better, even if they are not actually more effective or efficient.

Really good design takes this into account. It makes sure that content is presented to users in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, both as a first impression and also consistently at all stages in the user journey. This elicits a sense of trust in users, and rewards that trust by maintaining it throughout their experience.

But…

Undirected or non-intentional aesthetic design carries its own risks. If this attempt at emotional engagement compromises basic functionality, reliability or usability of an interface, the positive experience you want to promote will mutate into a rant-inducing disaster for our users.

There is no point in presenting an attractive interface that doesn’t help users do what they came to do… or worse, gets in their way.

Caption: Jacques Carelman’s “impossible teapot”. Image credit:

Real examples include social media posts without punctuation, which puts an added burden on people who use screen readers. Or the use of hashtags that don’t use capital letters to help distinguish words. Or the failure to add alt-text to images. Other examples from physical settings, are special signages in buildings or at events that are meant to help clarify how something works or is accessed. Without these signs, a user is left guessing, creating needless frustration.

It shows how design serves as the communication between object and user. We call this the “”: where design elements give you the wrong usability signals to the point that special signage is needed to clarify how they work.

Caption: Your sign says ‘push’ but your handles suggest otherwise. Image credit:

Examples and tips

Tip 1: how do we know what to design?

The answer is – always -your users know. The solution is firmly held by the people we’re designing the product or experience for. This is why we need to understand them better so we know what they need as well as what is aesthetically pleasing for them.

Caption: a OneWeb end of programme sticker: ‘The answer is always: the user knows.’

Your answer is also to start viewing ‘design’ as a series of structured, systematic, intentional decisions. Some of these may not look much like “design” as it is traditionally (and mistakenly) understood (i.e. visual styling). It could be in the form of processes, or structured data, which are some of the layers we have to consider when we design services or interfaces.

For example, text messages from an organisation may not be designed as an official communication channel, therefore causing confusion and preventing users from taking an action resulting in not meeting users and business outcomes. Or say we want to add entry requirements, or related news in multiple areas within a website, rather than creating content multiple times across multiple pages, we can instead structure and manage it in one place, whether we’re publishing it for the first time or the thousandth.

Tip 2: keep things simple

The functionality of products, platforms, and websites must not be undermined. Without it, we are designing our products in the name of art and without a purpose.

Even basics like the photography brief for some new imagery, should always come back to the same principle of fulfilling an intentional purpose: meeting our users’ needs in their own context:

• can I discern the image?
• can I see myself in these spaces?
• are the images authentic?
• am I inspired by your work?

Fundamentally, this is an essential part of creating accessible images and therefore services. You should test what problems these images are there to solve. Your work should be going in front of users, your actual customers, to increase your chances of success and as already mentioned, de-risk issues when you eventually go live.

Caption: K.I.S.S. Keep It Stupid Simple. Simplicity is a lot harder than complex, image credit:

Tip 3: persuasion does not happen at pixel level

As beautifully articulated by Mike Monterio, “a pixel is just a point of proof in the execution”. If we want to design the right way, we are going to have to do it by talking to people. Because designers get hired to solve business problems.

Design isn’t marketing. Both are important but different. Marketing is about persuading users that something is a good idea. Design is about making it self-evident. A product’s usability is often cheaper and easier to address than its persuasiveness, but in order to achieve this with good design, we should not just be feeding in at the beginning or the end of work – good design happens from the start and throughout.

Answering the question of what users want to achieve is done through user research. That is not the same as more traditional market research that has been carried out for years. User research focuses on understanding user needs and how to address them, rather than how to convince them to buy. The emphasis is on observing their behaviour, rather than canvassing their opinion.

As an example, we got insights from user research for some of our study products, which are around building emotional connection. It was all about:

• being able to see the university’s places and spaces, the people (staff and students)
• hearing students tell their stories about their experiences in their own words – all about getting a true insight into their possible future
• being able to feel that this is a good choice for them

This then informed our content strategy in the selection of which content to show. In many cases this is content that hasn’t previously been published, or not published in a way that will meet these needs.��A survey or focus group could have possibly suggested some of these insights, but they wouldn’t have allowed us to find, try out and validate the best ways to execute our design solutions.

Tip 4: solving the problem can’t happen until you understand the problem

That generally means talking to people who are experiencing the problem – not your colleagues, or your friend, or your next door neighbour – unless of course they are among the people who will be marginalised as a result of your product design.

There also had to be a socio-economic lens to the design decision making, similar to those in an article by . Basically any organisation has to consider the impact of change on users, especially the ones who could be excluded by any bad decisions.

Tip 5: not understanding the scope of your work is a problem

Generally speaking, organisations are not very good at articulating business outcomes, and this makes it much harder to understand the scope of the problem you are trying to solve.

Example: “we need more revenue” is not a problem, it is an observation. Because it is not a problem, it also doesn’t have an actual solution, and if you attempt to seek one, you’ll find yourself bogged down in endless speculation that produces few results.

“Our customers drop off during the onboarding experience, which lowers our conversion rate and is leading to lost revenue” is a problem. It is specific, informed and, perhaps most importantly: actionable. Armed with this, a digital user experience can begin the investigation that will eventually lead to a meaningful answer.

A big part of what design is about is to give us a problem to solve with some measurable outcomes that explain what metrics you are looking to move.

Tip 6: not doing research to understand the problem is a problem

Back to the cake metaphor, it’s always a good idea to make sure that the cake is baked with the right ingredients for the right person. And it’s always a good idea to have a good peek behind the curtains to get your assumptions tested. I am forever grateful for challengers who kicked the tyres during usability testing or prototyping. I’d much rather it happened at that point in time, before the team released something that people cannot use. The real value of user research comes from increasing our understanding of who our users are. With every study, every interview, every interaction, our team gets to know our users a little bit better, including the context in which the users work. Then design, test and iterate!

Gathering the right feedback to understand what will drive the connection with users is a gift. “I like it”, or “this looks good ” is not good feedback because it only gives us part of the picture. It doesn’t tell us if someone can use a service, or what frictions they encounter, and does it do what they need it to do. Data and metrics can’t fully answer these questions and they can’t steer you towards the best solutions. This is why we use both qualitative and quantitative research techniques. Data tells you what is happening, qualitative research tells you why and helps you figure out how to solve problems. We talk to people, we get under the surface of what is happening. Good feedback is done through observations in order to identify how to improve a service or a product. Start by outweighing the evidence. Learn what works, learn what doesn’t work ().

Frustration costs

When something is not designed it becomes messy. Not joined up. Annoying. Not user-centric. You make your users work extra hard. In a digital world, extra unnecessary work translates to users going elsewhere to get their needs met.

was developed by the in 2001 as a communicative model for illustrating the variation in companies’ use of design. It suggests that when an organisation adopts design as part of its business strategy, �ٳ�����’s a positive link with higher revenue.

Caption: Design Ladder lists four levels of design.

We’re seeing many companies that understand this link. But the truth is large organisations are orientated around themselves, not the end-user.

As a design team, we’re in a position to help users make decisions, but also for our university. (Jared Spool). It creates frustrations, generates calls, and increases development costs through rework and waste. It also damages the environment (, Gerry McGovern).

We’re therefore in a unique position to research and test where poor design costs our organisation money.

In addition, try to ‘flip’ the perspective and see the choices you want to present from the outside. Avoid flooding with options, but bear in mind the balance between users’ time and comfort zones for handling options for a digital product. Guiding them to select between clear options that will get them somewhere quickly will take the work out of the user experience and reward the user and organisations alike.

Using common design tools and patterns, colour, line, contrast, help people consume information and make decisions more easily. “This is specifically the case for designing forms, or when you convince someone to take an action – the way typeface, colour and layout fit together says a lot about a brand and shapes new users’ perceptions.” (Aaron Walter, ).

Conclusion

Bear in mind that the aesthetic-usability effect has its limits. A pretty design can make users more forgiving of minor usability problems, but not of larger ones.

At the end of the day if:

• the user can’t find the product, the user can’t buy the product.
• the service has multiple interactions that aren’t consistent visually or that haven’t been designed for access, you end up failing those people you were meant to serve in the first place.

Even great-looking sites will have no revenue if they suffer from poor findability. The emotional connection is therefore derived from being able to complete the task efficiently.

From a pragmatic point of view, we need to master the right balance between the design, functionalities, and user experience, planning, thinking ahead, doing deep analysis and being careful and considered in constructing something that will be solid, reusable and stable. Form and function should work together. When interfaces suffer from severe usability issues, or when usability is sacrificed for aesthetics, users tend to lose patience. On the web, people are very quick to leave.

Final notes

There are many important points raised in this article. Many of them are underpinned by good standards and assurance check-points.

If you want to hear more about it, we will be hosting an Ask Me Anything session, and we will be happy to answer your questions then. To find out more first, .

Huge thanks go to Mark, Kate, Jonny and Claire for helping make this blog post better.

Links to articles and further resources:

• (Ayesha Ambreen)
• (NN Group)
• (Don Norman)
• , (Jared Spool)
• (Jared Spool)
• (Mike Monteiro)
• (Danish Design Council, issuu document)
• (Aaron Walter)
• (Smashing Magazine)
• (Jesse Russell Morgan, UX Collective)
• (Ben Holliday)
• (Gerry McGovern)
• (Gareth Ford Williams)

As someone who has always worked in digital roles, I thought for a long time that moving everything online would make me happy. But fresh insights bring fresh perspectives, and I’ve become more cautious about the ways in which we use digital tools to tackle real world challenges.

has brought a new sense of urgency to many digital practitioners, including myself, over the past decade. If this topic is new to you, then in essence the Internet – everything from data centres, to telecoms networks and end-user devices like phones and laptops – uses a lot of electricity. In fact, if you add it all together, the internet uses roughly the same amount of electricity as the entire United Kingdom, one of the world’s largest economies (Tom Greenwood, ).

In this blog post, I acknowledge what we are doing as a digital user experience team, some of our ongoing challenges as part of the OneWeb programme, and also what other steps we need to take, collectively and individually, to tackle this issue.

#1. Simple, small and effective content has a lower environmental burden

Simple, small and effective content is good for the environment and also better for your users, and you!

Design and content have a big impact on energy efficiency. From search engine optimisation (SEO), content design, and use of images, videos, fonts, to code and design choices. Running a popular digital service always has a cost associated with it, but we don’t tend to factor in the cost to the environment. The assumption is often that digital means green, but this is far from the truth.

In the words of Gerry McGovern, author of :
“Our ability to create stuff using digital tools far outstrips our ability (or willingness) to organize and manage what we have created. Dealing with the consequences of easy production and poor content management is a growing challenge”. –

To illustrate Gerry’s point I’ve included a snapshot from our 2018 content audit where we estimated our digital web estate to contain roughly 4 million web pages. Only 156,000 of these have been accessed in the last 3 years and just 8,000 pages account for 90% of all traffic to our digital estate.

Caption: representation of access to our web content, 2018

COVID-19 may have reduced traffic emissions, but it exacted a toll elsewhere for this saving. Like many other academic institutions this past year, education had to be delivered online. The University’s daily contribution to global carbon emissions as a result of online lectures and staff meetings is likely equal to that of someone flying from London to New York¹. Given this additional burden, there is even more reason to consider how we make content that is designed to last, and how we focus on completing meaningful tasks rather than ‘vanity projects’ that needlessly consume time, energy and budgets…

Now – Southampton is not unique in this matter. This is a consistent problem for almost every large, complex organisation.

There are many reasons why an organisation’s digital estate becomes unnecessarily bloated and so much content goes unvisited. It might be that:

• the content and underlying service are not designed to meet user needs
• the content is inaccessible to a large number of users because of poor positioning or broader accessibility and user experience (UX) issues
• constantly seeking the next new thing which makes it harder to argue for review and maintenance ahead of creation… a challenge we’ve already discussed in this blog post about digital governance

¹��dzܲ������ if 20 people join a Microsoft Teams video call for 1 hour, all with their webcams broadcasting Standard Definition video. This doubles if everyone broadcasts HD video.��If the University delivers 50 online lectures or virtual staff meetings like this every day, between 225GB and 550GB of data will be sent across the internet.��It is estimated that . So, 225GB of data generates 675KG of carbon.��A London to New York flight generates roughly .

#2. Whack-a-mole with platforms and systems

I’ve never said that OneWeb is the silver bullet to all our organisational problems. However, thanks to the boldness of our University in trying to deal with it, it is a step towards a better standing point, which includes the reduction in size and therefore cost of maintaining our web estate. We didn’t necessarily plan around adding to the green credentials of the University, but this will be one of the longer term outcomes of the programme as we pare back and simplify to only what’s needed to meet user needs and help them complete tasks.

We’re working as fast as we can, trying to address all the legacy issues around content creation and maintenance, which are only the tip of the iceberg. As we’re working our way through, however, we’re reducing and figuring out some of the answers to long-term maintenance and support, as more and more platforms and systems crop up all over the place.

Caption: Whack-a-mole with systems and platforms, image credit:

I do appreciate that some of these appear for very good reasons, for example, in response to urgent policies and compliance requirements. However, the lack of forward thinking and the burden this creates for users, as well as the impact to our planet, go against our best interests as a society, organisation and individuals with sustainability targets in mind. Platforms that do not meet people’s expectations undermine the credibility of the service and of the University.

And this is a good place to segue to the other side of digital sustainability ethos: fairer, more equitable design.

#3. JEDI is not just a force for good in galaxies far, far away

The Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (JEDI) framework supports creating digital products and services that are fair and open to all.

As mentioned at the start, it is important not only to promote these principles, but to fold them into the very fabric of our projects. A project ethos with JEDI at its core is less likely to alienate the people working on it as well as its potential audience (whether intended or unintended).

So, how do we incorporate these principles into our own design practice?

Equality and justice in digital design is a question of opening up opportunities for users by making our information and processes more transparent, and more available. Right now, we are employing design thinking around PhD level, where currently the information needed is scattered to the winds, the application process is opaque and specific opportunities are hidden. We’re bringing everything a potential candidate would need together and creating intuitive user journeys, while also adding guidance so that anyone from any background can easily gain an understanding of information they need.

Plain English layer

Embedding Plain English and accessibility principles in all our digital content is an exercise in inclusivity. We specifically aim not to exclude anyone, whether they:

• don’t have English as a first language
• have a disability
• are looking at our content while multi-tasking, for example looking after family
• are simply not initiated in the subject area yet

Our users are diverse people with diverse needs that change from journey to journey. We should design our services to reflect this.

There are obvious social equality issues that factor into our users’ backgrounds and circumstances. One way we aim to improve things is by applying a ‘plain English layer’ to things like research projects, which we expect will also help with discoverability through search.

Diverse communities

Our aim for the new subject areas pages (currently in prototyping stage) is to create a strong sense of place. We are assisting potential students in their desire to imagine themselves ‘there’. ‘There’ means physical spaces like facilities but it also means community – people. We need to reflect the diverse community and culture at Southampton, as we know that’s really important to all our users.

Part of Inclusive Design Toolkit (developed for ) reveals that we should be thinking about variations in access and inclusion when we think about user personas. It is a good reminder of situational inclusion. We think �ٳ�����’s another layer (socio-economic) that would lead to some people having greater situational needs than others. Perhaps particularly when we’re talking about access to tertiary education. This could also be exacerbated by the global pandemic.

Image: Microsoft Design Toolkit by Kat Holmes

#4. With a great website comes great responsibility

“The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power…Design is a craft with responsibility” – , Mike Monterio

Reduce, reuse, recycle…

Our evolving design system promotes a coherent, familiar and shared design language underpinned by design principles which support the principle of access for all. It ensures design patterns are reused, work isn’t repeated and user experience can be sustained.

Our evolving design system

As we redesign new services, we’re working with external accessibility organisations to independently assess our designs to ensure they meet accessibility standards so that people can easily access and use our services, regardless of any physical or mental disability.

Third-party supplier products are vetted as part of our procurement process to ensure they meet user needs, adhere to accessibility guidelines and provide an experience consistent with our existing products.

We work with existing suppliers to help improve the accessibility of their products with immediate fixes and feed into their product development roadmaps.

Our Student life section of the site has been redesigned for simplified journeys with more direct routes to completing key user goals. For example, applying for accommodation now follows patterns users are familiar with on commercial sites, allowing them to select rooms and locations which meet their individual needs. Users can now easily compare and save the key details of their accommodation options before applying.

Accommodation journey with key user goals

We have worked to harmonise the experience on the site and our third-party application system. Immediate changes included aligning and simplifying language and applying consistent design patterns. Changes to interactions and journeys require product development and have been fed into the supplier’s roadmap.

Journeys are supported by imagery and student stories showing the diverse community of people actively engaged in university life, but only when they meet user needs and add value. They help give users a feel for the place, what they can do, and what their lives might be like there.

Data, and being responsible with it

One of our principles is to, where useful, ingest existing data from various university systems to products and services. It’s then surfaced to users in focused locations in a familiar and accessible format. For example, staff profiles, which link staff to their research work, teaching activities and associations with organisations and people, now automatically base much of their structure on other reliable data sources.

Image: visualisation of staff profile product with key data sources

Ultimately this saves time for our internal users and allows our digital experts to concentrate on more involved tasks, as well as supporting a wide breadth of external user journeys. It also promotes one true source for structured data, accuracy and reduced maintenance overhead in the longer term. It will therefore be easier to sustain in the future, or innovate new solutions around user needs and have data that is used in a responsible and ethical way.

Conclusion: Behaviour change starts with the organisation

We have a lot more work to do. We’re at the start of a much bigger journey. As part of OneWeb, we are helping colleagues to streamline and organise our web estate, making it quicker for people to find the information they need. This in itself will help reduce our impact on the environment. But that’s not enough.

We have to change our behaviour, as individuals and organisations. Technology is rarely the key challenge:

• organising content is key
• focusing on quality over quantity is key
• designing to last is key

For some people, web content, and ‘digital’ feel cheap, easy to create and store – rather like ‘fast-fashion’. Many are used to ‘print’ and are concerned with perfection and completeness before publishing so content isn’t working as hard to meet people’s expectations. Why is that? Our key problems are social, not technological.

If user centred design is all about understanding people’s needs and delivering services that meet them, then it follows that we should consider the impact of those services have on our users and, by extension, our planet.

In the next few months, we will deliver a new digital user experience strategy, which will include guiding principles and governance. We’d like to hear from you as we get round to introduce it.

. Thanks for reading.

My immense thanks to all my contributors: Mark, Dan, Steve, Kate, Jonny.��

Resources we learn from:

• by Gerry McGovern
• by Tom Greenwood
• by Smashing Magazine
• from Kat Holmes for
• by Snook
• by Cennydd Bowles
• by Lou Downe

Hey. I’m Ayala and I’m a self-confessed optimist: I generally think that everything will work out just fine if you work hard and take calculated risks every now and again.

Those who know me well will tell you that conformity and patience have never been my greatest strengths.

I was brought up on a : a collective community where, from a very young age, we were expected to be independent, self organise and contribute to the broader community needs (people over profit). It was safe and everyone played by the same rules. But it was also a real mixture of dynamics between collectivism and individualism, which created what I would call ‘positive tensions’. This idea has stayed with me and I still believe that the power of the group – harnessed properly – is awesome, and that doing so requires embracing short-term pain in favour of longer-term gains.

Image: ‘kibbutz life’ collective celebration. Source: Kibbutz archives

Collective vs self interest

This post is not about me, or the story of my life. It’s actually about ‘governance’ and how to make short-term changes stick and endure the stress test of real life. These are big ideas, and often big ideas make big organisations nervous. So to make lasting change requires quite a lot of optimism combined with more than a pinch of realism! Governance also requires us to get to the ‘sweet spot’ of the overarching power of the collective balanced with the proactive need of the individual.

For the past two years, I’ve been the Business Owner of OneWeb, a large-scale digital transformation programme at the University of Southampton. Working with many different functions and colleagues, I’ve noticed some strong parallels and that’s what ‘re-triggered’ some of this thinking.

So, after all of the hard work we’ve put in, and as we look to both conclude and look towards the future benefits of completing our ambitious programme, I wanted to share a few thoughts and learnings.

1# Governance isn’t a dirty word (but can be seen as evil)

. And they normally fail for pretty consistent reasons. I’ve spoken a lot about the messiness of change and the messiness of humans, and my experience to date has confirmed what a difficult thing transformation within large organisations is to achieve.

The problem is that the word ‘governance’ is often mistaken for meaning ‘restrictions’: putting limitations in the way of individual needs and creativity. The power of the collective is much stronger than the individual, and in the context of a university (or any large, complex organisation), this often leads to some prioritisation of the ‘centre’ over the ‘individual’ (aka faculties, schools, academics).

Anyway, you get the idea. While individuals are mainly on board with everything you’re proposing, collectively, the narrative is such that people in the organisation dislike, even hate, any idea that this may mean they have to conform to the centre. On the other hand, governance (done well) is a force for good for everyone: the group, the organisation and the individual.

#2 Maintaining is as important as building

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” – , Hocus Pocus.

I agree with Kurt. Governance is essential when you form digital services and it’s through ongoing maintenance and development that you capitalise on big investment.

When creating new and improved services for users, many organisations often don’t delve deep enough into the internal efforts within the collective that delivers that service. This is risky because it can bring a lot of confusion and uncertainty about ownership and responsibilities, funding models and other critical elements such as standards and ways of working. Standards, of course, help with re-use and maintenance.

When OneWeb got approved in 2019 we were adamant that we didn’t want to limit ourselves to just improvements that lie directly in the user interface. The mandate was to create a real change – create services and products that meet user needs – that would last beyond a facelift. Not just re-skinning, and legitimising new visuals, but doing it properly and getting to the root of the issues. This meant sorting out governance issues so we never have to do expensive ‘facelifts’ ever again.

That’s of course easier said than done. Service design, user research and journey mapping have all helped us to understand the bigger picture better since we’ve started. We collaborated with external users and our colleagues internally to understand what all services’ layers and interfaces are made of. We knew that we had to start somewhere, and the website was an obvious place to focus our initial change, but with all this work came a catch-22 scenario. We know that our users want a single, integrated experience. They are not interested in learning how to carefully navigate our various channels and systems just to understand what’s going on inside our organisation and their place within it.

So the questions become:

• how do we get our stakeholders to recognise that building new, shiny things is often (wrongly) prioritised over maintenance and re-use?
• how do we get others to recognise that the world is littered with ?
• how do we address governance in a way that benefits the organisation (i.e. not reverting back to type, allowing us to achieve outcomes that we never imagined before)?
• how do we make the processes and standards really clear whilst preserving a sense of creativity and individualism at the same time?

These are big questions – ones I am seeking to answer.

#3 There needs to be a big ‘G’ in Governance

Back to Kibbutz life.

Life in the community is unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since. There’s little privacy, the sheer number of people coming and going is difficult to adapt to, and having company at all times forces you to regularly confront your personal flaws. Communal often means secure, it means creative, it means diverse, it means open to debate. It also means new, diverse connections, which is one of the biggest challenges of governance – collaborating with others.

My point is – to do a proper job of digital services, and to manage the user experience properly, and to stop buying things we do not need, governance must underpin all the following service layers:

• user interface
• collaboration within the organisation
• nasty IT / legacy stuff
• data and information design

Governance is also a major enabler for digital.

We should all learn from past experiences. Organisations tend to do what’s easiest for a particular department, faculty, or even a manager. I know it sounds harsh, but how do we stop and ask ourselves:

• who is accountable for good or bad design?
• who is accountable for good / bad information?
• who is accountable for the impact it creates for the user?

Good governance should be supportive.

If you haven’t thought of it properly you will have a challenge on your hands. A focus on services is now more important than ever because they’re our engines: for data, for design, for systems. And governance is a major enabler for digital as well as communities of practice to flourish because good ‘big governance’ should be the glue that enables small-scale flexibility and excellence..

#4 Unless culture changes, we will be running uphill with one arm tied behind our backs

Culture is always an interesting component and I have difficulty describing it. As per :

“… you can’t change the culture by diktat, it’s a function of the experience of the people. If you want to change the culture you have to change the experience of those people.”

So unless we make some fundamental changes in how we come together, communicate and organise ourselves, we will continue to feel as if we’re running uphill with one (or two) arms tied behind our back. And damn – that makes things harder than they should be!

Image: Most organisations were never designed (for the internet), Source:

Kibbutz life offered stability, identity, community, belonging, a world view that previous generations to mine had lost. My kibbutz was a powerhouse when it came to agriculture and technology in its very heyday. People were ambitious together. But it failed to anticipate a ‘second day’ revolution, in which many among my generation sought new adventures elsewhere. It also failed to anticipate the messiness human beings desire, and how it can, in a closed, family-like system, produce uniquely poisonous variants of hurt and betrayal. Collective memory (or as I call it ‘the broken hearts club’) can lead to a long period of collective soul-searching and problem solving running up hill…

Can you see the parallels, or have I digressed?

But there are some strong lessons here for governance.

My kibbutz did eventually turn itself around: from a close and rigid, risk-averse culture to a dramatically more diverse and inclusive culture with a lot more freedom for people to operate within the community’s parameters (framework), where everybody shares spaces, communal social and cultural life, and major decisions…

So a few more thoughts on how we could potentially overcome some challenges, some heavily influenced by speaking with my team members as well as , which I will attempt to summarise below.

Not channels, services:

We don’t solve users’ problems by building a thing and sticking it on a website. Fast forward a few years, and the complaints about the website from everyone in the organisation will become unbearable:

• nobody can find their way around the website
• student-facing services are bogged down with questions from confused students
• product owners are frustrated with users who can’t make sense of their services or products

Then finally, someone decides that something has to be done. We really need to change the conversation. We should be talking about journeys and experiences for users, which make up a service.

With my team, we sometimes talk about and organise ourselves around areas like ‘courses’ or ‘education’. But really what we’re talking about is ‘Becoming an undergraduate student’, or ‘finding people and expertise’. These are all services. If we look at it end-to-end it includes multiple touchpoints, both digital and physical, some of which start long before people are aware of us.

Action:

• we need to define what a ‘service’ is at UoS and look at them end-to-end.

Image: Good services are designed.��Credit:

Organise ourselves around services:

Not at all easy to do in large complex organisations with plenty of egos, but if we set up teams and jobs around services, this affects interaction with stakeholders as well as team dynamics. The risk is that if you ignore it, you’re creating silos and disjointed experiences.

Take for example data design – by building data infrastructure that ignores the drivers that shape the environments in which the infrastructure is deployed and built, this will ultimately result in brittle infrastructure. Funding choices shape the type of infrastructure we get.

Funding choices > poor infrastructure + poor data design = poor user experience = (poor services).

Action:

• to align ourselves to services with some joined KPIs and not some lower level / vanity metrics.
• to get under the skin of our corporate strategy so we can create a funding model that can support a future digital infrastructure (with designers, technologists and information builders).

Cut across in another way:

However teams organise, there’s always a tendency to work in silos. Cutting across departments helps to build more collaborative functions into job roles e.g. lead roles that look across a set of services for certain types of users. Design crits and similar meetings also help to expose what teams are working on and build consistency of approach.

Action:

• to change structure, and processes to align against a service model.
• to look at artefacts, such as common journeys, data standards, architecture, diagrams, design and content patterns, dashboards to ensure everyone has a shared understanding.

#5 Conclusions: world of imperfection

We buy systems instead of processes, capabilities and skills. The bottom line is that services have evolved and now behave in a way that just about makes ends meet. They’ve evolved to work in a particular way, but now they’ve reached such a point where everything is frozen in time.

This is because when people (customers) keep paying for the service, it’s hard to make the case for change. And few people are incentivised to make the case for change because livelihoods depend on everything staying just the way it is.

But our customers don’t ask for backend process improvements. They don’t ask for efficient devOps, or design systems, or product teams. They want what those things enable, but they are not going to mandate how we do what we do.

The hardest challenge is to sometimes accept that companies and organisations often do what is worst for them. We must persevere and keep showing that there is huge value in improving skills and processes, in focusing on quality, not quantity.

What we started as part of OneWeb lets our organisation deliver on these benefits. We haven’t arrived in my utopian state – for that, we also need good governance.

The double-irony is that everything I’ve mentioned – improving processes, standards etc. – also helps the ‘sexy’ stuff with AI and dashboards that management is keen on and might even pay for (but might not actually need to).

And no system on its own can do anything useful. Data and information quality is one of the huge challenges today; a tremendously complex problem that requires highly skilled people and well designed systems. But so few organisations want to invest in the skills and think big. And decision-making around what our teams (and others) are making has to be cut and clear.

Image: Leading transformational change. Source:

Everyone in the teams needs to understand where we’re heading, and people outside the teams need to know our strategy so they can see how it helps the University and how they can help if they have the information we need.

Bringing it back the full-circle: let’s understand what we’re doing and what is the role of governance in the creation of services, and how we’re going to do it consistently. If we can reach a state of ‘positive tension’ – where seemingly conflicting views unite under the banner of good governance – then individuals can decide if they are going to collaborate, or leave the pack. Just like in a collective.

At the end of the day, we all live in a large globalised digital kibbutz and our survival depends on our communal skills, not just trust in our leaders.

Intent matters: it’s not what you believe in – it’s what you do. Source: Kibbutz archives��

Thank you for reading my post to the end. We’re looking at developing our governance approach and principles, so please come back in 2021 to check on our progress and updates.

My immense thanks to Mark, Jonny, Kate, Andy, Dan for their thoughts, contribution and suggestions. Thoughts and comments are always welcome, especially If you have managed to make short-term changes stick, I would love to hear from you.

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What does that really mean?

Below is an attempt to define what we mean by ‘digital products and services’.

Digital has created new expectations.

People expect better experiences, powered by better systems. Seamless, low effort, engaging, cross-channel experiences are the new minimum. As technology proliferates, we need to think beyond websites to digital products and services, in order to meet the needs of our users’ increasingly sophisticated expectations.

Everyone has a different idea of what we mean by digital products and services. That can trip up teams (and leadership), so it’s important that we’re all using the same vocabulary to say the same things.

What is a digital product?

It might be tempting to say a product is something we can market or sell. But when it comes to digital products, this definition has limited applicability. Take the search function on our website. Is that a product? Or is the entire website the product? And how would others, including people from IT, marketing, admissions, recruitment, academics etc, answer this question?

You use digital products / services every day in the real world:

• your mobile banking app (Barclays banking app, for example, allows you to contact the call centre without going through the whole authentication process again)
• the interface of your consumer electronics devices such as your phone or smart watch
• the heat controller smart app for your home… you get the idea.

Ecosystem of San-Francisco Airport – expressed in terms of digital products.

Some products and services are made up mostly or entirely of software, such as your Facebook messaging. Some are available as mobile apps and websites. But technologies are changing at an ever-faster pace. The digital touchpoint through which we use a product or service can sit on many types of platforms and devices. Those can include: web, mobile, auto, wearables, VR and beyond. Things are also moving beyond the visual interface towards the more natural form of conversational interface. Such examples are speaking with your Amazon Echo or accessing services in written conversation in your messaging app.

Because things change so quickly in the digital space, it no longer makes sense to think of ‘websites’. Although the website continues to be an important way to deliver services for our users, by changing our perspective to focus on delivering the service, rather than updating the website, we are better able to meet our users’ needs.

This is also where the lines blur between products and services.
An end-to-end service may be made up of a number of products. The service may be delivered digitally, but it may include non-digital elements.

What does it mean for OneWeb?

When you hear us talking about digital services in relation to OneWeb, we mean end-to-end: from when the users are searching for where and how to do something (e.g. where and how to apply for something), through applying (entering information and choosing between different options) to when they finish (e.g. successfully applied and received confirmation).

User journeys are interactions

Our end-users (e.g. prospective student, peer researcher, CEO of a company etc) will start a journey with us by trying to do something, whether something tangible like booking an open day, or a task that allows them to make the next step in making a decision, for example, about whether to apply or not. That journey can start on the University website, or it might start on Google, with an email, a visit or a phone call.

A user journey is made up of all the steps a user takes that relate to a university service, from when they start interacting with us to when they stop.

When we talk about steps, these can include:

• seeing campaign messages
• calling and asking questions or advice
• responding to social media posts
• receiving a letter
• completing a form, and much more.

As you are interacting with the product it does more than simply display information, as say a marketing website does. Complex interactions take place between the part you use (the front-end), which is connected (integrated) into the wider system that runs the service in its entirety (the back-end). Our systems, data and processes are core to it all. This is also why OneWeb is wide-reaching.

An opportunity to break silos

From what we’ve seen so far, the journey is a series of events and processes made of different chunks, for example:

• policies from external sources (e.g. Office for Students)
• processes and policies from Admissions
• campaign messages and activities from Communications and Marketing
• conversations with student recruitment (e.g. outreach at schools and International Office)

Currently, each one acts as a separate entity (and I do acknowledge that we all try to collaborate closely), but at the end of the day we are silos.

We all do things in different ways: store data differently, count and measure things differently, notify our end-users differently, and some of our processes are unintentionally full of jargon and abbreviations that mean very little to our end-users. All of this pushes them away, rather than pulling them towards us.

This is the way things are because this journey was never designed in the first place. The systems we have today are the result of legacy, ad-hoc processes on top of more ad-hoc and workaround processes, letter by letter, form by form, email by email.

We don’t know at this point what the mapping of our end-to-end services will look like because the discoveries that will identify what the problems are in key areas have not started. We will be working with all the different teams, departments and directorates to first resolve and co-create the ‘Become an Undergraduate’ journey from a user perspective.

“You can’t fight silos, with silos”

Enter service design

We all need a good dose of proper service design thinking. By that we mean a user-centred approach that allows us to create end-to-end journeys that work for everyone. Service design will make products and services that are useful, usable and desirable for users, and effective and efficient for us.

Make no mistake: service design is not just a design tool. It will transform what we do and help us in delivering our goals. To answer key questions we will need to collaborate with you, to help us to take a close look at the current set-up. This means we can visualise a whole service based on data and evidence from both the end-user and the University’s point of view.

“We all need a good dose of Service Design”��

When we don’t jump into predetermined solutions, we have a much better chance to create digital products and services that take better advantage of a changing marketplace, and create value for the University, and the end user. We get a chance to test ideas and produce results that work for users quickly and effectively.

There is more than one way to achieve an outcome. Service design is a proven low-risk starting point towards a much larger scale change.

Over the coming weeks, we will write more about our findings and work with colleagues. To keep up to date, please , and let your colleagues .