User Experience Design

CHAPTER 09THE EXPERIENCE DESIGN PROCESS: Creating a structure that facilitates success

To drive effective business growth, a strong user experience design process is needed to consistently take business and user problems and convert them into effective solutions.

In one of the organizations I was associated with, the board of directors mandated that the organization adopt design thinking (similar to the design mindset) as a critical business discipline. And in order to accelerate change management, we sponsored design thinking training for multiple leaders across the organization over a two‐year period. We partnered with a top business school to offer a design thinking boot camp for leaders from sales, HR, professional services, engineering, and customer support.

Despite the investment, it was becoming evident that while many people were getting attuned to and excited about the power of design thinking, the philosophy wasn’t trickling down to the departments. There wasn’t a process to deploy design thinking across the organization in a sustainable way across all departments and roles. This became a significant bottleneck to manage the transformation in the organization.

Unfortunately, many high‐potential organizations have not invested in the process and therefore are never able to build momentum or sustainability in their design practice. In the absence of a cohesive process, ...