Clears the Fog Surrounding Innovation: A Design Toolkit that Bring Clarity Back to the Team

May 24, 2024

Effective consulting means that the client grows the ability to work independently without consulting assistance.

Since 2022, I have been working closely with Fortune 500 clients in the healthcare and technology sectors, leading their digital transformation initiatives. As a UX Lead, my role extends beyond delivering interfaces and UX strategies; I also diagnose and refine innovation processes and workflows to continuously empower teams to drive their own work and achieve the next milestone independently, without needing our assistance.

Bring clarity to innovation initiatives

An innovation initiative always gave us and our clients headaches in its early stage — too much information, a broad vision, but no clear plan to move ahead. We sat in a meeting for hours, struggling to set foot in any direction.

After years of working with ambiguity, I developed a toolkit that enables rapid innovation planning based on project vision, scope, and the clarity and complexity of detailed requirements. This toolkit helps designers and non-designers to self-navigate and further guides teams to visualize both “known” and “unknown” elements, better voicing out 'why' we adopted certain probing or ideation activities.

After rollout, UX research and ideation activities adoption doubled. First-pass design acceptance reached 92%, ensuring outputs met client requirements.

From vision to execution: Are we ready to kick off?

A question of eagerness, confusion, and even frustration that I received from clients and junior fellows is 'When are we ready to kick off?' — for each project, the timing of start could differ, thus it sounds arbitrary and less convincing.

The reality is — a 'yes/no' answer would never lead us far. The approach to implementing an initiative varies depending on the stage it is in. After brainstorming with my design fellows, here are five stages of initiative planning:

Locate A North Star

(Understand overarching business and social vision to be realized)

Gather Your Crew

(Learn stakeholders: who might stand along or against you; Learn knowledge: project history, what project knowledge is accessible/inaccessible)

Draw Your Route

(Specify the exact scope and details of the new features or services intended to introduce)

Check Your Toolbox

(Understand the resources available to make a feature or service happen)

Plan for Pitfalls

(Prepare for edge cases when reality strayed from expected situations)

Rather then viewing 'the production of design or innovation strategy' as a miracle moment, it visualizes a journey by which we gain understanding as well as confidence step by step. Moreover, it became a map that we can locate ourselves while project moving and plan what action we need to take to move forward.

From understanding to strategy: A design thinking process

At the same time, I also set aside time to regularly host design workshops and training sessions to mentor junior designers and researchers. These sessions include basic design consultation agendas and processes inspired by design thinking, with the goal of helping most designers and researchers develop the mindset of “respond, instead of react”:

Explore

Collect

Digest

Assess

Strategize

Restructure Strategy Process: A Ladder of Understanding, Assessment and Taking Action

Over time, I’ve come to realize that we design consultants go back and forth through the following process in every project, even though our focus may vary from project to project. Thus, I introduced this visualization along with key probing questions and specific design activities to move over phases smoothly.

Impact

To streamline our consulting process, I introduced this tool to all my coworkers. Since then, it has been widely adopted during the kickoff phase of various projects and has successfully driven more than 30 projects over the past two years.

In addition to these proven tracks, this tool has also been widely beloved by non-designer colleagues—including product managers, technical leads, and other leadership roles—for its thoughtful consideration of resource allocation, stakeholder management, and knowledge management. Self-guided by this tool, three projects have been completed by non-designer team independently without design consultancy. As a result, it has evolved into another form of application: implementation through workshops and facilitations, in which design consultants play a supporting role rather than acting as “lone wolves.”

Since the tool and the workshops have improved non-designers' understanding of design rationale, the adoption rate of design activities such as user interviews, concept design, and creative workshops has doubled. First-pass design acceptance reached 92%.

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