Q&A With Daphné Repain

Daphné Repain at UXDX Community: LatAm. Video: https://youtu.be/vVYdJMRV-E8

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.

Bringing human-centered design to a 115-year-old bank

[00:00:00] Host: ...questions, and thank you for sharing. Thank you, see you. Now we're over to Daphné, and apologies for the switch in timing, but welcome, Daphné.

[00:00:14] Daphné: Hi, how are you?

[00:00:17] Host: Very good. Again, I loved your talk. It was really interesting, and it's really inspiring what you've achieved in two years, working one of them during a global pandemic. That's really impressive. For those who haven't seen the talk yet, it's about bringing human-centered design to a 115-year-old bank. Just with that title: when you were given the role and you were told, "Okay, your mission is to bring human-centered design to this bank," what was your initial reaction, before you had even started?

[00:00:58] Daphné: First, I was thinking that it was a really amazing challenge, regarding the country and regarding the region. Before starting this digital transformation, we could find lots of services that were painful for clients, and this is something you can find easily in Ecuador or in the region. So I thought this was really an amazing challenge. Another thing I was really attracted by was the social impact we could have, because it's a really old bank. People trust this bank, and this bank has evolved through crises within the country, and international crises as well. So I was really, really excited to manage this challenge there.

How the center of excellence is structured

[00:02:08] Host: Excellent. And as I said, you seem to be doing phenomenal work with it so far. One question I have is around how the structure works. With a center of excellence, my experience has been that people will come and ask, "Oh, I'm running a project, I need some work." Is that how it works, that people come with requests to you? Or do you have people out in all the different teams around the organization?

[00:02:40] Daphné: Regarding the structure, this is really something we are currently experimenting with, and it's ongoing, because we have to adapt to the changes we are living through within the organization as well. People, teams and areas can come with some needs and ask us for help. Within the center we have service portfolios, so you can ask, "Okay, for this quarter I would need some designers for this product," something like that. Unfortunately, we cannot assist or provide people from the center of excellence to all of them. So we manage a prioritization framework to make sure that, in line with the organization's strategy, we can provide the people needed to respond to the big strategy.

[00:03:51] This allows us to provide a pool of designers on those projects. In general, those designers can rotate from one project to another, but they're going to stay three months, six months or more, depending on the needs. On the other hand, we're just starting with design clinics. It's like, okay, you can come with a problem you would like to solve, and we're going to help you within a workshop of three or four hours: to do your research brief at the beginning of your project, to do a stakeholder map, to do a design thinking workshop, an ideation, a journey map, whatever you need. We're going to help you, but really as short-term help.

[00:04:50] In a few months we're also going to provide, because we are currently building and designing it, the Academia de Experiencia. The idea here is to have an internal academy within the bank to make sure we can share content, share knowledge and transfer knowledge to other teams. The idea is not to provide a certification in experience, whether customer experience or research or something like that. The idea is really to make sure you have the keys to start using this knowledge within your project, with your teams, and things like that. So we are currently building and experimenting with this way of providing services within the bank.

[00:05:39] Host: Excellent, that's really interesting. Is the intent of that that teams can self-serve, or that your team will be able to get up to speed quicker when they're starting a new project?

[00:05:54] Daphné: Sorry, I didn't understand that one. Could you...

[00:05:57] Host: As you were saying, you can't help everybody. So is the intent that those teams you can't help will learn this and then they can just do it themselves? Or is the intent of the academy that when your team starts a new project, they can get up to speed very quickly?

[00:06:17] Daphné: The idea is to make sure we can scale. Obviously, everybody is not going to be a UX designer or an expert in customer experience or things like that. One of our goals is to make sure people are able to be more autonomous in managing a human-centered design culture, mindset or framework, with that kind of knowledge, playbook or toolkit. And also to make sure that they apply it, not like, "Okay, I have another recipe I've learned in another way, in another space, or from a certification," but that we really apply the guidelines and have the quality we want within the organization.

Changing the mindset

[00:07:10] Host: Great. You touched on my last question there. It was around the mindset. You came into the bank, and people were used to working in a particular way. How did you change their mindset to see this as useful, and not just another thing they have to do?

[00:07:30] Daphné: That's still a good question, because we are still doing it. I think the really good part we had at the beginning, which helped a lot, is first that the whole C-level was really on board with the transformation. It was part of the transformation, so that was a really good help there. And also because we started a kind of experimentation. When you're doing an investigation, you have some variables, and some of them are the ones you're not going to change anything in; it's a control group or something like that. That was a bit like the bank.

[00:08:18] Within the bank, but with many new people who didn't have the previous culture, new people within the bank with multidisciplinary know-how, we brought them in and started to build new services and new products with them. This was a really good way to start easily, with less friction regarding the way of doing things. It also allowed us to start getting results, and to show, as Patty[?] was saying before, with data: you're going to see that you have good results regarding sales, and good results in building product. You're not going to get so many defects, you won't have to redesign things, and regarding time to production you're going to be much more efficient, something like that. Those results were good indicators to demonstrate that it was useful.

[00:09:31] Host: Excellent. That brings us to time, but thank you very much, Daphné, for sharing your experience. I always love learning about other transformations, because they're always so difficult. Thank you for your time, and next up we have Amanda Appel[?]...