Design Thinking For Enterprise

Timothy Allison at UXDX Community: Copenhagen. Video: https://youtu.be/rkObcsiHGA0

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction, and product design as an adventure

[00:00:14] I'm very glad [?] today to be here. It's a pleasure to be here, and great to see some of the people here to talk about design, especially when the weather's like this. So props for that.

[00:00:30] That's me in a circle. I can't [?] think of myself as very designery. I'm the product [?] ... I've been with Megan [?] for six years this June, and I've been with Zendesk for just about 18 months. I work primarily on the Guide product. Guide is a smart self-service destination featuring knowledge base articles, community forums and a customer portal.

[00:01:05] I wanted to start with this slide. This slide came from brand, and we don't always associate brand design and product design working together. At Zendesk we have a brand design team, and they work specifically on that stuff. They're awesome, and they create all of the brand work. Just recently we changed our mission statement, our tagline and strapline, to be "the company your customers want you to be." It used to be "relationships are complicated." It turned out that "relationships are complicated" is complicated, so they've changed it to "be the company your customers want you to be," which may well prove to be complicated, but right now it's good. It works in the narrative of this story. I'll come back to this, because it's important.

[00:02:00] I wanted to share this with you. A couple of weeks ago I was speaking in Dublin. I work with the Dublin team as well, and we passed a lot of shops, and I turned to my right and I saw this BMX bike in the window. It's a perfectly preserved Raleigh Burner bicycle, which is exactly the one I had when I was 10 years old. I fell off this bike, I made jumps with my friends at the bottom of the garden, I used to go on adventures. And for me this is the perfect piece of product design. It's the perfect feel. I'm thinking your design can be an adventure, and when it's the requirement, it can be something emotional, something that gives you memories, makes you feel things. You don't always associate that with product design, but it's possible in experimental design.

[00:02:52] This is a piece of work that I spent a year and a half working on. This was a mobile social app [?]. I kind of found it ... when we launched this product. The idea here, in terms of challenging the norms, was a messenger without any pictures. The idea was to take out the piece where all decisions are made on superficial things, how you look, whether you engage with someone or not, et cetera. I wanted to build something where all of that was taken away. So the format was these small cards, and it was about people having communication. I'm fundamentally interested in communication, how people use software and how design and humans work together.

The Guide design team

[00:03:29] But what does it look like here? This is our team now. Pretty handsome bunch. That's actually just on the third floor, maybe [?]. We work across a range of things. We have four feature-facing teams here in Copenhagen, and we work with all the different teams, typically over a quarter. So we will work with the feature-facing teams over a quarter on P1 and P2 priorities that design can get involved in. We cover what I would call the 360 approach to it. We don't have a specific UX designer or a specific UI designer. We think of ourselves as product designers, and that involves many different disciplines.

Getting to know enterprise design

[00:04:20] When I first joined the company, one of the first things I did was get my head around what it was all about. I came from a design world where I made all the design decisions. I knew how the users worked. I designed the product, and intrinsically the fabric of the decisions came from my brain. When you join a company like Zendesk, that's great, it's a bigger universe, it's multiple product suites. I was a two-time team member [?] in 2019 [?], and I had to understand how the product worked.

[00:04:58] One of my first pieces of design work was designing a feature called user segments, which allowed admins to create segments, grouping users together. You create a user segment, apply the user segment to a piece of content, and that would then act as a permissioned group. I approached this in this way: I talked through the problem, I got to know my stakeholders, I got to know my product partners. I started off sketching, drawing things out, higher fidelity ones, making [?] decisions there, then internal testing, and then it was pretty much shipped. It's a necessary piece of enterprise design, but this was starting to get into the rhythm of how things were going to work at the company, the decisions you have to make and the conversations you have with customers.

[00:05:47] I did that, it was good, and then it was a bit like: what now? As a group we were maturing as a department. When I joined, we were 45 people in this building; we're now around 65. And obviously we're going upmarket, delivering software for enterprise customers now, and the challenges and some of the things that are coming forward are getting more complex. This is the old adage of the hovering art director, where a designer is just trying to stare at a machine and some other people come and help them stare at the machine. Some people will say things, maybe someone comes up with an awesome idea, but it's not really the way to get things done.

[00:06:28] So I often get asked: how do we as designers come up with ideas? I've pretty much got the perfect slide for it. It works. This is how the Zendesk creative design leadership team come up with creative ideas. On the table, there are crisps. That's the VP. That's not a comic. Design's easy. No, we don't. And I still had a problem: what do we do next? So I pressed the clicker and nothing happened. That's what I did next.

Talking to customers and a design sprint

[00:07:52] What we did next was go and have better conversations with users of the Guide product about how they use our product. As designers, sometimes we design in isolation. We think about our team, think about a product, think about our design. What we really wanted to get into the heart of here was how our customers use Zendesk, in a Jobs to be Done fashion. How do they use Zendesk as part of their working day? You could assume that it's the only thing they use, but what we found out through research here was that it's only one piece of their working day. If they've got five or ten tabs open on the machine, maybe we're one of those tabs, but there are other tabs that are empowering them to get the job done.

[00:08:41] What we saw here was that there was a need for collaboration, communication, teamwork and workflow, and looking at this, having the conversations with our customers, it felt like this was the really big opportunity. We could see Jira was up there, Trello was being used, Excel, Google Docs obviously. So this gave us the starting point to talk about what we go out to get, what the problem is we're trying to solve, and how we can offer value to customers.

[00:09:13] And we did a design sprint. Show of hands: who here has participated in a design sprint? Designers. We literally threw the book at this. We'd done design sprints before, but this time we said we're really going to stick to the schedule, we're going to invest in it, we're going to get other stakeholders in, we're going to do this end to end, and we're going to take the learnings that we've got and see what happens, and trust the process. That was an important part of it: just trust the process, follow the day, stay calm.

[00:09:49] This was the map that we decided on very much at the start of the session. This was what we were working towards. We identified here Darla [?], a customer, content managers and contributors, and thought about them. The piece here was around professionally managing content, and there was a goal here, the long-term goal [?], which was buying the product. So this is a business goal. It's not designing something for the art, or for ourselves; it's designing something with purpose, and that's what keeps us in a job, lets us scale, lets us keep doing cool things, and lets us be the company that we want to be. So we have to keep that in mind. And this is a cat that looks happy, probably a shareholder, when our share price went up.

[00:10:34] This is how we did it. Most of you have probably already seen this, but in the spirit of the event today: we flew in a designer from Dublin to give us a different perspective, we had engineering in the room, we had sales in the room, we had a designer from Guide, we had product in the room. It was really a truly collaborative effort on a piece of work that was called team publishing. It's this publishing piece that arrived through the research: that people want to collaborate. So we used the team to try and solve this problem, to see if we could design a product.

Team publishing and the customer voice

[00:11:09] That's where we ended up at the end of day three. We decided on a name at this point; the feature actually ended up being called team publishing. We had some personas that appeared, and we set out building this with the idea of testing it with one of our customers, Trustpilot, who came in on the Friday for a session where we were going to get feedback on the product side.

[00:11:32] This is what it looked like, and this was all built using component UI. We have a pretty mature component library [?] for designers to work with, so we can pretty quickly put together a piece of UI like this that tries out ideas, that we can then put in front of the customer relatively inexpensively but make the conversation more tangible [?]. In this instance, it was about: what about this idea, where an article isn't just published or not, but has a state? What if it was ready for review, what if it was approved, or what if it was a draft? And inside was the idea that you could potentially go deeper into the level of the article. So if somebody has made a change, you can see at a glance here the size of the change that has been made, and potentially prioritize the list. This was really just testing out what we thought we knew at that point with people that we thought might have a need for something like this.

[00:12:27] I want to show a customer interview with Squarespace that we did.

[00:13:04] So she said... Claire at Squarespace works with a pretty mature [?] content team, and they all trust each other, and they all know that content. Squarespace is quite a forward-thinking company, and we spoke to Claire, and she meant quite a lot to this team publishing process. She actually used words in here like assignment, team, ready for review, states, approval. As we were showing her this piece of design that we'd come up with, she was almost finishing our statements. She goes, "This is me in here. This is it. Just what we could do with this. This is very close."

[00:13:46] I hope that I can stress enough the importance of the customer voice in the design that you're doing. We worked on the team publishing. We used the team to get the job done, to get the design done. We used the customer's voice to help us in that last twenty percent, when you're just not quite sure, or the designers are cycling similar ideas, or the mindset is a certain way. So wherever possible we really try to have the customer voice influence the design, and then we take it away and distill it and make it directive. This was a really good interview.

Lisa, Mike and Felix

[00:14:24] What else did that let us do? It also allowed us to identify our main personas for Guide. Lisa is our Guide manager. She's the content manager. She knows what everything looks like, she publishes, she works in the business to make sure they're offering a service that allows customers to serve themselves. Mike is the trusted content writer, who maybe hasn't got publishing permissions just yet, but he's our right-hand man who can get the job done.

[00:14:49] And then what happened through the research was that we discovered this character called Felix. We'd gone down to Siteimprove [?], we met some customers and showed them similar stuff there, and our customer at Siteimprove talked passionately about one of the agents that works there called Felix. He's super enthusiastic, he's like an API expert, he always wants to do optimization. So we decided to make Felix famous, and he's now one of our pillars in the office. If you were to speak to mostly everyone here in the building about those characters, mostly everyone in the building knows who those characters are, the jobs that they're trying to do, and the work we do inside the product for them.

A seat at the table, and launching Guide Enterprise

[00:15:32] So what did it look like at the end? This is a little bit about design having a seat at the table. From small post-it notes and design sessions and customer interviews, this was, I mean, this is the final design, other than the reassigned pieces on the screen. This is a piece of design that we were asked to produce for the Board of Directors update, a bit more than two weeks ago, when we gave an announcement to the street about launching Guide Enterprise and the features that it came with. So for me, I'm proud of it. Not just because it ended up there, but proud of the inputs, proud of the team effort, proud of building out a piece of design with the team that actually found its way slap bang into the middle of the table that we talked about quite a bit.

[00:16:26] Then on the 3rd of April we actually launched the enterprise content management platform as Guide Enterprise, and the centerpiece of Guide Enterprise was team publishing. Our president of products, Mr. Adrian McDermott, actually talked about what this thing was, and I just felt super proud, really, hearing the product being talked about, having been there from the start, and most of all having something that we're going to put out into the market that's going to be of value to customers, that customers are going to care about, that they're going to use.

[00:17:04] Coming back to here: be the company your customers want you to be. In this instance, with the work that we did and the approach that we took, this feature and the Guide Enterprise product that we've just launched is actually the product that our customers wanted it to be, because they were the ones that told us what they wanted us to build. Otherwise we could have just ended up staring at screens and standing around looking at each other.

What's next for design at Zendesk

[00:17:33] So what's next for design here? We've just hired a new VP of design in San Francisco, Kim Lenox. Kim joins us from LinkedIn, where she was a director of design, and she has experience working with 200-person design teams. She's bringing a lot of experience there, a lot of rigor, great insight. And just a few weeks ago we had an internal design sprint [?] here, design summit [?], in Copenhagen.

[00:18:01] We're investing a lot in design management, really trying to get a bit more scientific around the cultural properties and how they work, and designing better ways to empower the designers that work here, so we clear the road and they have all the tools they need to get the job done. We're also looking at computational design. Now we have more data coming in, deeper levels of data, more users, different workflows, different states. You can try to put that together on a spreadsheet if you like, but one of the things that we'd like to do now is actually start using computational design, to look at this a little bit more and give us the insights we need to go forth into the next chapter.

[00:18:40] And we're also hiring, nice. We've got an opening right now for a product designer and a senior product designer based here in Copenhagen, working on the Guide product with me and the team on this cool stuff, and you'll sometimes be in this room. So if you're interested, or you know somebody that's interested, come and reach me in the break or just hit up zendesk.com/jobs. Thank you very much.