"design-driven business" entries

Reconciling design thinking with the craft of design doing

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Suzanne Pellican on the ups and downs of Intuit's journey to become a design-driven organization.

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In this week’s episode, O’Reilly’s Mary Treseler chats with Suzanne Pellican, VP and executive creative director at Intuit, about three core principles of design thinking and about Intuit’s journey to become a design-driven organization.

Pellican also will be speaking at our upcoming O’Reilly Design Conference about creating a culture based on design thinking, experimentation, and risk taking. You can find out more at the event website.

Here are a few highlights from their chat:

Design thinking is the practice of problem solving, and to me, that is based on those three core principles that I spoke about: deep customer empathy, going broad to go narrow, and rapidly experimenting with your customer. That’s the actual skill set and the tools and the mindset that you have.

Design thinking is absolutely experiential, and I think the first mistake that we made when we started rolling this out eight years ago was, if you’re going to change the way people work day to day, that’s going to take a long time. You can’t just ask people to do it and expect them to change. You have to give them ample opportunities to practice so that they can then understand it and make it their own.

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Designing at Nasdaq

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Aaron Irizarry on getting and keeping a seat at the table.

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Subscribe to the O’Reilly Design Podcast to explore how experience design — and experience designers — are shaping business, the Internet of Things, and other domains.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of our newly launched O’Reilly Design Podcast. In this podcast episode, I chat with Aaron Irizarry. Irizarry is the director of UX for product design at Nasdaq, co-author of “Discussing Design” with Adam Connor, and a member of the program committee for O’Reilly’s Design Conference.

Design at Nasdaq: A growing team

I first noted Nasdaq’s commitment to design when talking to Irizarry about his book and the design conference hosted by Nasdaq that Irizarry helps develop:

It’s interesting to see an organization that didn’t have a product design team as of, what — 2011, I believe. To see the need for that, bring someone in, hire them to establish a team (which is my boss, Chris), and then see just the transition and the growth within the company, and how they embraced product design. We had to work a lot, and really educate and pitch in the beginning, explain to them the value of certain aspects of the job we were doing, whether that was research, usability, testing, why we were wanting to do more design of browser and rapid prototyping, and things like that.

We believe we’re helping structure and build, and I think we still have work to do as a design-led organization. We recently did our Pro/Design conference in New York. Our opening speaker was the president of Nasdaq, and to hear her reference the design team’s research, and to be in marketing meetings, and discussing the personas that we created, and to hear the president of Nasdaq speak about these kind of artifacts and items that we feel are crucial to design and the design process, it was a mark for us like, ‘We’re really starting to make a mark here. We’re starting to show the value of what these things are,’ not just because we want design, but we believe that this approach to design is going to be really good for the product, and in the end, good for the business. Read more…