Capital.com - Putting Design At The Core Of The Business
Design Director - Sam Fuller
capital.com - vibrant and exciting; successful and profitable - yet stuck in the rut of “startup mentality”…
In the newly created Head of Product Design role, partnering with new heads of Research, Product App and Product Web, the task was to evolve the Product maturity of the businesses, placing customer centricity and Design Thinking at its core - transitioning from a ‘throw everything at the walls and see what sticks’ startup mindset to a measured data, insight, and above all customer driven approach.
The Problem
The business had enjoyed rapid growth over its first 7 years and although it understood the importance of a transition to a more mature, measured approach to creating its products it was struggling to step out of the startup ways of working mindset.
It was obvious that as a result of this rapid growth, design, and engineering capabilities had become relegated to ‘services’, sidelined from the main product driven business. In the early days they had been entirely integrated and operating as one with the product team, whereas now they were merely assigned to deliver.
Key Challenges
Siloed departments working to individual goals: Leaving no space or time for designers to think, work and actually design.
Low design team morale: Designers not enabled to perform or empowered to think, lead to them being treated as ‘pixel pushers’ as opposed to being utilised as actual engaged professional designers.
No engagement with users = poor user engagement: Designing based on assumptions without guidance from insights and data or user testing feedback gives the design team nothing to ‘fall back on’ or demonstrate value with.
Lack of cohesive Branding: The visual identity across the business was diluted and inconsistent, leading to a lack of purpose in design and more broadly. Leading to…
…Inconsistent UI and interaction patterns: High speed production without a strong foundational design system lead to inconsistency. Inconsistency became a stick to hit design with.
Conflicting and shifting product roadmaps: Conflicting business priorities and departmental propositions causing a ‘no breathing space’ delivery obsessed culture.
Image credit: Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal / ClearlyAgile
The Approach
Strategic Planning - Remove the ‘Them and Us’
To place research and design at the core of the product development strategy and engineer the shift towards Design Thinking the team and I set out some really basic principles that all our solutions would be based on:
Start with the Research
‘Relentless Collaboration’
Total Transparency
‘People support what they help to create’
Key Actions
Design Leadership: Used my newly appointed authority to advocate for the design team and Design Thinking and to lead the design vision and strategy based on the personal principle:
‘Using my clout for good’Cross-Functional Teams, Continuous Discovery Squads: Established multidisciplinary teams integrating Researchers, designers, developers, and product managers specifically tasked with fostering collaboration, working towards a common goal.
Design Thinking Workshops: Conducted company-wide workshops to demonstrate the value of design, Design Thinking and instil a user-centric mindset to promote empathy-driven design.
Image credit: Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal / ClearlyAgile
Solutions
Reposition Research and Design as ‘The Glue’ that works to bring Research, Product, Brand, Engineering and Analytics together as one.
Working hand in glove with the director of research we successfully positioned our combined teams as critical for inclusion at every stage of the product process, with emphasis on the importance of the discovery phase.
Change the culture: Through being used as a service instead of an integrated part of the product process, the excellent design team I inherited had adapted brilliantly and resiliently to the sub-optimal working situation, gauging their success purely on the number of tasks completed instead of the quality and effectiveness of the output. This meant priority one was getting us all back to a place where discovery, insights and research came first giving everyone the time and space to do what they do best, fully supported by all stakeholders.
Demonstrate our value: From user research and discovery work through the design process to user testing of high fidelity prototypes we demonstrated the value at each stage by constantly sharing the work, bringing the rest of the departments into our sphere of work, driving forward as an equal partner with Brand.
Over-sharing - efficiently: Sharing more should never mean more time in yet another meeting for anyone - we combined sharing our work with crit/feedback sessions and framed every share in strong context by using a ‘30-60-90 percentage of completeness’ definition for every share, enabling all stakeholders to frame their input accordingly and also only attend the parts of the session relevant to them.
Embedding Research and Design in the Development Processes
To integrate design seamlessly into the development cycle, we pushed for the adoption of the following practices:
Agile not ‘fagile’ (fake Agile): Reasserted the importance of the agile process by demonstrating it’s value as an enabler for all stakeholders, including designers.
Continuous discovery - horses for courses: Adopted Continuous Discovery methodology, but ensured we only applied it where it was clearly needed. In my experience its a very effective method, but there can be a tendency to try and use it as a magic wand to solve every product process, some of which it’s not suitable for - hence horses for courses.
Capacity Planning and Prioritisation: ‘Prioritisation’ was being attempted, but again was not joined up internally, did not include design in the process and crucially did not realistically consider the actual capacity of the team. In close collaboration with all the product departments I instigated a new entirely integrated capacity planning system that gave complete visibility of the research and design team’s availability, completed before any prioritisation was attempted, thus enabling more efficient and realistic (achievable) prioritisation to happen.
Enhancing User Experience (UX)
Improving the overall UX was a top priority. The approach included:
Foundational layer for the Design System: Whilst the inherited design libraries were very well structured and maintained, the design system was not complete, and was lacking a foundational layer defining the absolute basics of button logic, interaction patterns, consistent colour usage etc. Again as a useful way of driving collaboration, I set up a project to create the ‘Digital Design Language’ that would underpin and ultimately enable the cohesive completion of the design system whilst also improving Marketing and Brand consistency and drive better understanding of the company identity internally.
Design Documentation: Maintained comprehensive design documentation to align all teams on the design vision and guidelines.
Interactive Prototypes as standard: Changed our approach to presenting work at 90%+ complete stage to always include interactive prototypes. This really helped to drive engagement with and understanding of our work internally whilst provided a more reliable platform to test and iterate with users before full-scale implementation.
Image credit: Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal / ClearlyAgile
Results
Team happiness, manager ratings and job satisfaction: Improved consistently across all (quarterly) health check results for research, design, product and engineering. Designers empowered to design, regained their personal and professional self respect.
Streamlined collaborative development: The integration of design into the development process and the overhauled capacity planning and prioritisation lead to led to more efficient workflows.
Faster Release Cycles: The time to market for new features eventually reduced by 16%, due to fewer redesigns and a more cohesive development process.
Cost Savings: Reduced the costs associated with post-launch fixes and redesigns, leading to substantial savings in the development budget.
Enhanced Visual and Brand Identity
The consistent visual language and improved design cohesion bolstered Capital.com’s brand identity and laid a strong foundation for the subsequent Brand Evolution project both practically and in terms of cross functional teams (my Marketing and Video creative teams specifically) understanding of the brand landscape and what was needed to evolve.
Stronger Brand Recognition: Consistent design elements increased brand recognition and loyalty among users.
Better internal understanding of the company identity and purpose.
Positive Market Perception: The enhanced user experience garnered positive reviews and increased media coverage, positioning Acme Tech as a leader in design innovation.
Conclusion
By positioning design and Design Thinking at the core of our strategy, my team, peers, colleagues and I successfully addressed the disconnect within the business and its processes, ultimately leading to greater team cohesion, collaboration, improved culture and above all happiness, alongside a more streamlined development process, and an enhanced brand identity.