Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams

by Peter Merholz

Essential in design’s ability to succeed is an authentic understanding of user contexts and behaviors. This goes beyond standard practices of market research and user testing, and toward deeper engagement with the lives of the people being served. Nothing beats going into people’s homes or offices, and following them as they go about their days. While quantitative and marketing methods such as usage analytics and surveys provide data as to where things aren’t working, findings from such efforts focus on optimizations and point solutions. Good user research, particularly out in the field, reveals a richness of understanding that you simply cannot get anywhere else. It is this work that ends up revealing a customer’s journey, and inevitably, the experiential breakdowns that happen when people try to accomplish things that require them to unknowingly cross siloed departments in an organization. The primary benefit of such observations is that designers develop empathy for their users, which in turns leads them to design systems that have real impact, and avoid solutions that will be rejected by the intended audience. A secondary benefit that can be just as important is when executives and other people with authority outside of design witness the results of such user research, whether it’s the raw data (e.g., videos of people expressing frustration with the current situation), or the analyses that makes clear problematic patterns. When these executives ask how these breakdowns...