Design thinking is a comms super power
Written by Jen Black, Associate Director Strategic Communication, NSW Public Service Commission. This article is based on a presentation given at the 2021 Strategic Communication Leadership in Government Conference.
Many of us are aware of using a more human-centred approach in our work, and over the past 4 years I’ve increasingly integrated it into my practice as a communicator because it super-charges results.
Human-centred design is about creating solutions that meet your customers’ needs and building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for. It can be done using a sprint methodology or be as simple as mapping a customer journey.
Last year, when embarking on a website transformation for the NSW Public Service Commission I led my team through a sprint to discover how we might improve content design within our organisation. Analytics told us that people couldn’t find what they were looking for – the search functionality was so poor it was barely used. Visually, the site was text heavy with a plethora of inconsistent styles.
The first step was to frame our design challenge. This focused us on the right problem to solve and clarified what outcomes we wanted to see and measure – immediately we had our focus on impact outcomes, rather than simply the need to create a new website.
Next, we interviewed content creators across the organisation; studied content design best practice; and immersed ourselves in the experience of website users. We also looked for inspiration from an unrelated field by interviewing an engineer about their quality assurance processes.
We learnt some unexpected things, including that web content creation was a pain point for our business teams and their perception was that we were too busy to help.
These insights gave us a specific focus to brainstorm ideas for a prototype, which was simply a consistent process for creating web content. We tested it with our business teams and feedback led us to develop an implementation plan and supporting materials.
The new process was a critical tool in helping us work with 14 business teams to migrate content to the new website within 6 weeks. Not only that, our unwieldy 600 page site was streamlined to 400 pages.
Our content design process map is now available on our intranet and all teams know that this is the process we go through before new content is published on the website. It has been readily adopted because it meets their needs.
But has the website customer experience improved?
Our analytics show (2020 v 2021):
Search is now 5th top page
bounce rates are down from 58% to 9.4%
session times across our site are up from 3 minutes to 9 minutes
Customers are now engaging more with content and finding what they are looking for. During user testing, one customer remarked: ‘The information is now set out in a clearer way, with the old website. . . it was overwhelming.’
Design thinking gives me the tools and frameworks to help create communication solutions that result in genuine change – it’s my comms superpower.
To find out how you can get started with human-centred design I recommend IDEO’s Design Kit at www.designkit.org/