This is part 1 of a 2-part series exploring 2018’s greatest organizational challenge: achieving digital excellence.

Most organizations we meet encounter challenges across the wide breadth of skillsets and expertise that are required to successfully execute digital projects. Sometimes this can have a compounding effect that radically undermines team efforts, as teams move across a series of project phases that each require uniques skillsets to execute. In other cases, achieving digital excellence may just be a path to becoming more efficient and effective in meeting organizational goals and ensuring even greater success in your role.

Let’s take a look at where this complexity comes from and why we’ve designed our services around closing gaps between phases and enhancing your team’s processes and skills during each phase.

Knowledge and capability needs to run wide and deep

Digital is complicated. Many steps and many different levels of expertise are needed in order to execute effectively. Each failure or issue in process, methodology, or outcome across your efforts increasingly undermines every effort that follows.

Core areas of expertise required to successfully meet digital objectives include:

A typical digital project will include this depth of requirements and the skillsets required to execute effectively across these standards of practice.

Jobs-to-be-done and outcomes for personas

Device and platform support (hardware vs software; mobile, desktop, other)

Promotion and communications (including marketing, advertising, social, and SEO)

Context of use (adaptive and contextual IA and content)

Review (KPI review, behavioural tracking review, user testing, etc)

It’s difficult for any one team to bring this level of expertise to the table. That’s why we’ve built our consulting practice on helping you learn and execute in these areas.

Ultimately, success is determined by your organization’s ability to:

Define an effective roadmap, meeting organizational and market needs.

Execute at a high level across all stages of product and service delivery.

Plan, scope, and evaluate systems that can make a measurable impact.

Continuously improve across customer experience and service delivery efforts.

The expertise required to meet digital objectives in organizations. Why we’ve designed our services around closing gaps and enhancing your team's processes.

Why digital excellence is so difficult to achieve

A typical organization needs to support any number of complex business rules that are defined from varying departmental and stakeholder needs, regulatory requirements, customer service objectives, technology considerations, and more.

Across digital products and interfaces, as well as service models, users of a product or service may interact with complex internal systems. This can include trying to navigate organizational rules related to data handling, security, access, language, and documentation. This can lead to a complicated user workflow that makes it more and more likely someone will get frustrated, complain, or move on.

It’s precisely in the face of these complex requirements that 

a simple, intuitive interface becomes essential to provide valuable, rewarding access to otherwise complicated systems.

, rules-based and engineering-led products and services often fail to deliver compelling, usable interfaces due to a lack of abstraction.

Here’s how you can identify a lack of abstraction which limits the value of a product or service:

organizational requirements are front and center

, with complicated user workflows and language in place to prevent behaviour.

, instead of the product or service providing increasing value with every interaction or engagement. e.g. providing intelligent recommendations, helping organize information, or other automations or valuable outcomes.

navigation models are unintuitive to users

 as they have to learn industry terminology or organizational processes instead of using familiar terms and supporting common, everyday behaviours.

The more complex your system, the simpler your interface needs to be.

The bottom line is: users aren’t interested in muddling through the complexity of your systems, but how a simple, intuitive interface can allow rewarding interaction and outcomes for them.

Simply put: it’s the responsibility of an organization to translate complex organizational processes into a simple, intuitive, and ultimately seamless user experience.

It is okay for your organization to have complex processes, use language that would otherwise be confusing to your users, work within limitations or follow best practices that would not seem familiar to your user base. However, if you force these requirements on your users this will lead to confusing and frustrating products and services that will limit adoption, engagement, and use.

It is crucial to therefore find the balance between the complexity of the organization, rules, and data, and providing a compelling experience for your users.

The challenge: in most cases, there is always an alternative to your interface. Whether it’s taking up costly time at your call centre, requiring hands-on support, or, worse still, switching altogether to a competitor. 

The cost of a poorly executed interface is both measurable and profound.

Succeed by making your product or service a rewarding alternative for users

Here are three rules to live by in shaping your organization’s products and services:

Users have a variety of ways of solving the problem you’ve designed your organization and product around. If your way isn’t a better way, you’ll lose them.

Users will work to follow the processes they’re familiar with or without your organization, including through competitors or their own methods. Your job in designing a product or service is to provide higher value for your user over any other alternative method of solving their problem. If not, you limit the incentive to try and continue to use your product or service.

Remember, the familiar is always easier. Your way needs to be more efficient, enjoyable, or informative than any current user process, or you end up wasting your investment in providing a product or service.

Simple and intuitive wins over complex every time

If you’re having challenges translating business processes into a seamless user experience, we’re here to help. Learn more about our approach to 

Users aren't concerned about the complexity of your system, but how a simple, intuitive interface can support rewarding interaction.

Complex systems require simple, intuitive interfaces

Empathy fuels connection, sympathy drives disconnection.

What is the best way to ease someone's pain and suffering? In this beautifully animated RSA Short, Dr Brené Brown reminds us that we can only create a genuine empathic connection if we are brave enough to really get in touch with our own fragilities. 

A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe.

Powers of Ten from Charles and Ray Eames (1977).

Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes.

Powers of Ten from Charles and Ray Eames (1977)

North Americans in 2050

Instagram: Here's a vintage photo of my donut

G+: I'm a Google employee who eats  donuts

Social media explained (with donuts)

Impermanence is the rule not the exception with design. There is no design artefact (i.e., a website, brochure, product, etc) that offers a solution as business needs, customer behaviour, etc, evolve.

Design needs to be the foundation for researching, understanding and collaborating on iterations. Immersion and iteration is how you address impermanence, not an all or nothing attitude about design artefacts.

So design the platform (research methods, collaboration methods, technical methods) that supports iteration instead of focusing on building artefacts based on a snapshot perspective of a business and their consumer.