Originally published on Cherwell.com

We’ve been talking about Service in IT for a long time. More recently, concepts such as Service Design, the Service Experience, and even Human-centered Design have made some headway into the IT mind space.

But while we’ve given these topics some lip-service, most organizations have paid little attention—and devoted few resources—to embracing experience design and embedding into the development and operational culture.

The recent pandemic, however, has brought some emerging trends to the forefront of IT’s reality and accelerated their impact—and in so doing, may finally make experience design a critical path item for enterprise IT organizations.

3 Accelerating (and Colliding) Trends

The first of these accelerating trends is the remote work or work from home (WFH) movement. The ability and desire to enable workers to work from home — or wherever they chose—has been building slowly for years in a series of fits and starts.

And then COVID-19 hit.

When it did, it kicked off what some have called the greatest WFH experiment the world has ever seen. We are clearly in our WFH moment. A recent Cherwell study found that COVID-19 created a 74 percent increase in remote work—anyone surprised?

The second trend may be a bit more unexpected: a pandemic-induced increase in automation. A recent study by Inference Solutions found that 64 percent of organizations expect to increase investments in automation technology over the coming year due to COVID-19. It seems that organizations are increasingly turning to automation to help them cope with their rapidly changing circumstances and uncertainty. 

But it’s the third trend that may be most significant.

As automation increases, it puts corresponding pressure on experiential execution. (We’ve all had those horrible experiences of automation gone wrong.)

Another Cherwell study found that well-integrated processes (a critical part of the experience) resulted in higher productivity, better collaboration, and an improved employee experience. Unfortunately, the same study also showed that those processes and experiences are not well integrated in most organizations—and employees and customers are suffering as a result.

The net-net as these three trends accelerate and intersect is that there is a whole lot of change coming to the enterprise IT landscape. These changes will demand that IT leaders start redesigning and reimagining the customer and employee experiences they deliver to accommodate these new work environments, increased automation, and the need for high levels of integration. And they’re going to need to do it fast.

The Experience Challenge

There’s only one problem in overcoming this experience challenge: most IT organizations are presently ill-equipped to do so.

Closing this gap will require that IT organizations create customer and employee experiences that are transcendent, well-integrated, and focused on helping the customer or employee achieve their objectives on their terms—and that requires empathy.

Unfortunately, individuals with a high technical aptitude often do not have equally high emotional understanding. “Research suggests that those working in a technological field…have low empathy,” explains the Interactive Design Foundation in Is Empathy the UX Holy Grail? “One of the biggest issues…is a lack of appreciation of how users think and work. Their assumption is that users will approach and solve problems in the same way as the designers and developers.”

The good news, however, is that it’s not all about emotions. Leaders can cultivate observational behaviors within their teams that will change how they design experiences.

“In the context of design, empathy isn’t necessarily feeling how people feel or stepping into their shoes to adopt their lifestyle and everything that comes with it,” the article continues. “Empathy in design is simply taking the time to carry out user research, absorbing it into your thinking to guide your decision-making processes.”

And more good news, this approach has a name: Empathic Design.

Using Empathic Design to Close the Service Experience Gap

Empathic design is part of the broader, human-centered design approach and overarching Design Thinking principles.

The challenge with applying design thinking in most IT organizations is that it requires high degrees of customer intimacy and empathy—both of which, as we covered, are often less accessible given their make-up.

Empathic design is a way to get around that gap.

In a recent article on his blog Digital Wellbeing, Dr. Paul Marsden summarized his critical take-aways from Matt Watkinson’s book The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences.

He writes that great experiences leave nothing to chance, are effortless, are stress-free, put the customer in control, and consider the emotions (among other things)—and that empathic design enables people to create just these types of experiences. “Empathic design is people-first, not technology-first, and builds out from human needs, emotions and desires.”

Most importantly, however, it’s a set of design principles that can enable IT leaders and would-be service designers to close the experience gap. It does so because it is based not on innate empathy or understanding of how a customer or employee consumes a service, but on observing users doing so in their own environment.

According to Harvard Business School Professors Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey F. Rayport, who developed the concept, empathic design involves five fundamental steps that IT leaders can readily embrace:

• Observation
• Capturing Data (qualitative insights and things like pictures and videos)
• Reflection and Analysis
• Brainstorming for Solutions
• Developing Prototypes of Possible Solutions

There is much more to this approach than I can cover in this article, however, allow me to summarize it like this: get out of IT and spend time observing and interacting with your customers and employees where they interact with your software or service so that you can understand how they actually use them and discover needs that they don’t even know they have yet.

As professors Leonard and Rayport put in their Harvard Business Review article, “Empathic design pushes innovation beyond producing the same thing only better. Developing a deep, empathic understanding of users’ unarticulated needs can challenge industry assumptions and lead to a shift in corporate strategy.”

The Intellyx Take: We’re All Designers Now

The pandemic and work from home experiment are merely accelerating trends that have long been building.

The growing criticality of the customer and employee experience, and the fact that almost all experiences are now, at a minimum, digitally-enabled and increasingly powered by automation, have thrust IT into an essential design role.

Whether you like it or not, we’re all designers now.

But while you may not have trained designers on staff, embracing design thinking principles and embedding the importance of empathy into your transformed culture is an initiative that every IT leader can champion.

Adopting empathic design approaches can be an excellent first step. It helps to overcome the natural empathy gap and, with its focus on observation, data, and prototyping, is more accessible and less threatening to technologists.

Most importantly, it will begin to make the all-important cultural shift that will be a crucial driver of transformational success. By leveraging empathic design approaches, you and your team will be embracing the need for empathy—and your vital role, however unwittingly, as a service experience designer.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. At the time of this writing, Cherwell is an Intellyx client. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper. Photo by Amy-Leigh Barnard.