Co-creation in design is like bringing in a co-pilot for your project. You and your team have spent a lot of time in the design process; walking a mile in the user’s shoes, talking and learning about their journey’s, using your newfound knowledge to come up with some great ideas through brainstorming, developing them into fully functional concepts and then having built them into rapid prototypes. That is phenomenal progress which most companies are hesitant to fully consider for their products or services. Now that you’re armed with a working prototype – anything from a pencil sketch storyboard for a video to a wireframe of an app’s function to a 3D printed model of a physical product – you’re ready to take it out on the road to socialize it with the most important member of your design team: The User.
Co-creation in the design thinking process is all about gaining rapid feedback by putting your prototype in your user’s hands. By watching their reactions, listening to their thoughts and understanding their friction points, your team will be able to refine the concept even further to truly ensure that it is aligned with your user’s ultimate needs. Typically, we like to conduct between two and three rounds of co-creation/client feedback on a project, iterating based on their feedback at each step.
To create and launch ideas that are truly innovative that stand out from the overburdened market – innovations that are truly meaningful to your users – the modest investment of time working with the end-users will pay off tenfold from the insights gleaned. Moreover, the additional face time you get with your clients and users not only builds further trust but also generates positive energy advancing the professional relationship. To truly call your business customer-centric (or client-centric), planning for multiple meetings and budgeting for dedicated time to this process is a critical step in Design Thinking.
Far too often I speak with creative professionals who don’t want to share their work with clients until it is pixel-perfect. While this is a noble pursuit, it ultimately hinders the design process. Got a sketch? Great, let’s get it in front of the client right away to get their feedback! It is not worth it to get caught up in worrying that everything MUST be pixel-perfect when you and your team are striving to create something innovative. It’s a messy process and getting feedback sooner saves time overall because you’ll hear from the proverbial horse’s mouth about what is and isn’t working. Moreover, the client or user will love being involved in the process.
Investing the time for co-designing with your users will always pay off with informed design decisions
Why Co-Creation Works
Bring in the users. Remember your users that were interviewed earlier on to learn about their needs? This is a great time to bring them back to show off what you and your team heard from them. You don’t necessarily need to use the same people. Users who have made suggestions in the past, or are current users who have a motivation to affect positive change are the sweet spot in your target group. Enlisting a diverse group will help extract a range of thoughts and opinions. More often than not, diversity in this sense would be a range of users from casual through power users, actively involved consumers to aloof bystanders, early adopters to laggards. Even bringing in users outside of your target market will help, possibly converting new users and opening up additional target markets that might have been overlooked. Just make sure that you’re not bringing in the number one fan (they care too much) and that they are all trustworthy; you are showing off a product or campaign that has yet to drop.
- Show your work. While you’ve refined down one or two concepts into rapid prototypes it is best to show off one or two more concepts that didn’t make the cut for whatever reason your team might have decided. Typically you want to show users more than one option so they feel like they have a range to pick from. In the design process, we will show our client’s three options; one that is bang on the brief (the safe one), one that has a little more flash (the one we’re really selling) and one that is out in left field (the wild one). Nine out of ten times our client’s take the one above and beyond the brief which we sold, sometimes they surprise us and chose the wild one. Only a handful of times has anyone gone with the safe one. By giving options, working and refining aspects of each concept, we’re able to customize the product to the client’s exact desires. After all, no one goes to an ice cream parlor that only sells vanilla.
One at a time. Just like the user interviews, you’ll want to take the time to talk to each user independently. This way they are not influenced by other’s negative or positive comments and they can speak their thoughts exclusively. By removing the peer influence, you can get a far truer representation of their thoughts and ideas.
- Give the users tools. While you and your team arrived armed with strong visuals or 3D printed products for the users will also need access to visual tools to help them with their co-creation to build concise feedback as well. Whether they need colour coded stickers to stick on their preferred concept, iPads to mark up a UI or wireframe flow, or sticky notes to place on a 3D prototype, giving users access to visual tools that allow them to explore their own creativity and ideas will generate stronger results than traditional ‘focus group’ style conversations. When presenting video concepts to our clients, we like to come in with two boards for the same concept; one with the copy written into the speech bubbles, and one where we leave the bubbles blank. When approaching the blank one, we encourage our clients to get involved with the writing of the script by having them write out what they want to hear. From there our writers take this input and reflow it into the script to truly encapsulate the client’s thoughts and feedback.
Encourage conversation. When involving users with prototypes it is critical that everyone pays little attention to the clock. Once the conversation starts, ideas flow and the energy builds. Ride that wave by feeding the users more stimulus in the form of questions that can provide revealing answers. Try to answer their questions with questions, this allows you to feed off their energy and extract more valuable feedback. For example, a user might ask, “How does the signup process work?” One possible question-as-an-answer could be, “How would you it to work?”
- Rapidly turnaround feedback. The users you have engaged have worked with your sketches, mockups, wireframes or 3D printed models. They’re now accustomed to the low-fi products you are putting in front of them. Don’t stress now about getting something pixel-perfect, just show them that you’ve heard them and prove it in the next iteration. Sometimes we have a team member making revisions while we’re still working with users or clients and can show iterations in real-time based on their feedback.
Animation courtesy of DeeKay Kwon https://deekaykwon.com/
Final Thoughts
Okay, so you’ve got your users involved with co-creation. Ideas are flowing and things are looking great. How can this go wrong? Without putting in the right guardrails, this part of the process can quickly devolve into a designer sitting at their desk with a user (or more often a client) standing over dictating the design/concept. By establishing from the outset that this process is a collaborative session designed to identify friction points, poor usability and effective messaging, you and your team can keep the conversation on track and avoid the eternal struggle of designer and client.
Now that you and your team are armed with direct customer feedback from the co-creation sessions, you’re ready to continue along the design thinking path to create the right solution for the market that is based on data, research, and direct user feedback. Will the final go-to-market product be perfect? Absolutely not. You have, however, taken another critical step toward de-risking the project and adopting critical input from the unquestionably, most important person involved in the project overall: The User.