#design tactic

The Savannah Bananas are an incredible example of a design leader placing a stake in the ground. The leader/creator of this baseball team believes that baseball should be a fun experience for fans. And they set out to create a team that flips everything we know about baseball entirely upside down in order to achieve this vision. Every choice they make is guided by their "fans first" value.

"We think there’s a better way to do almost everything. So we will try it all. Some people may think we’re crazy. But we are okay with that. No matter what, we just want to have fun. We are driven by this goal to make baseball fun. And ultimately give fans the best possible experience at our ballpark. We call this Fans First."

When factoring cultural parameters into our designs, it's critical to consider appropriation versus appreciation. Appreciation requires significant effort to learn and understand the parameters, which could include the meanings behind cultural symbols and practices. It's simply not okay to design products or services that are "inspired" by a culture different from your own without understanding the cultural context. Listening to and working with the members of the culture is key, which means participatory design is likely the best strategy.

I appreciate the perspective provided by Matter, a textile designer, in this article:

I wanted to share an example of design leadership from my organization/team that I'm particularly proud of. My company has been running the same new hire orientation program for several decades. The program consists of 12 instructor-led sessions. The executive sponsors are quite proud of the program. However, our company has evolved significantly in the last 3-5 years and the instructional design team sees a huge opportunity to revamp to better suit our increasingly diverse audience.

My team realizes we have a bit of a challenge in convincing the program sponsors to envision new possibilities. We're applying ethnographic methods to understand the stakeholder experience from several perspectives--learners, presenters, and admin. We're using surveys, interviews, focus group discussions, attendance data, and observations (the IDEO field guide shared in this course has been particularly helpful to us as we've planned these activities). We're creating journey maps as a key analysis and storytelling tool.

Although we're still in early stages of our ethnographic research, I am very confident we'll be able to bring our sponsors along with us on this journey and engage them as equal partners so we can collaboratively design a new onboarding experience. I'm loving how I've been able to take concepts from this course and apply them directly in my work that same week.

An organization's core values document the abstract mindsets that comprise the company culture and guide decisions across all level of the organization. IDEO's values drive their success as design leaders.

I've always wanted to do A/B testing for a learning solution but haven't worked it into our process yet! I imagine many streaming platforms use A/B testing. In my research, I found this interesting blog series where Netflix designers explain how they use A/B testing to inform their decision-making.

In my second interview, I heard from a fashion-forward woman who has made a variety of clothing purchases in the last few months. She described how trends, social media ads, influencers, budget, quality, and reviews all factor into her decisions to purchase clothing and from which brands/stores she purchases. She also described several challenges with her clothing organization based on the shape of her closet, which makes it difficult to see everything.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear similar themes from my preliminary research in both interviews.