Chiara Diana is an Executive Creative Director at frog. I spoke with her about her career path and her recent design work, in particular her award-winning design innovation work for British Telecom. Chiara will be presenting a strategic design case study at the UX STRAT Europe conference, which will take place in Amsterdam on June 10 – 12 (see https://www.uxstrat.com/europe for more info).
Paul: Hi Chiara, thanks for taking time out to talk with me today. Can you start by telling us a little about yourself, your career, and what led you to your current role at frog design?
Chiara: If I include time studying, I’ve been in design for more than 20 years. I studied design at Politecnico in Milan. At that time Milan and London were among the leading places to study design in Europe. I chose Milan because of the structured, systematic approach to design education provided there.
When I began, my professors were teaching traditional visual design basics, the rules of space, hierarchy and emptiness, mostly for posters and paper books. With the introduction of multimedia design we began playing with interactive CD-ROMs and programming Director and Flash. When Netscape came out, I started coding simple HTML to design web sites. It was the beginning of what later became user experience.
I wrote my final thesis on the creation of new museum experiences, leveraging Bluetooth to access information about art pieces. Because of my thesis, I was awarded a scholarship to study interaction design. At the time, it was still a nascent discipline.
After that I split my time between freelancing and working in the research center at Domus Academy, exploring how technology was pushing the boundaries of design to transform the human experience. We had great clients who came to us in order to push innovation by blending interaction, design and digital technologies.
Eight years ago, just after the birth of my first child, I joined frog design, where I still work today. I collaborate with frog clients to deliver user experiences across platforms, helping them understand complex problems and while orchestrating efforts across different design disciplines.
Paul: The focus of the UX STRAT, where you will be speaking next month in Amsterdam, is user experience strategy. People have different ideas about what that is. But when you heard the term “user experience strategy,” and heard about this conference, what did you think it was about?
Chiara: I think it’s not so much about the details of the design of a specific touchpoint, but more about orchestrating the experience across the different touchpoints within an ecosystem; how you align the design with all the single moments of interaction according to the value that you aspire to deliver and how you’re able to build those connections across all of the touchpoints. The challenge is in keeping an element of cohesive identity and sense of purpose, while respecting the specific nature and situational nature of each interaction, task, and need.
Paul: That’s a great definition. I think it comes about largely because of the change, in the last few years, from web sites being considered as the digital channel within the overall business, to the situation now where the digital portion of the customer experience is a major component of the business. It’s really not just something you add in or that you can design with a group in the back room, but design impacts the whole organization. And this broader scope is what we’re exploring at the UX STRAT conference, that is, what’s the smartest way forward for design leaders and businesses in this time of transformation? Most schools don’t teach you how to think in those terms.
Chiara: When I teach design students, I provoke them to reflect on the design, even something apparently simple, like the Amazon Dash button. What is the role of design here? What are you triggering by clicking the button? How many systems and people get activated from the moment when the interaction happens until your package is delivered? Design today has an unprecedented scale of impact.
Suppose you want to re-design a checkout process in three steps, that today consists of ten steps. You need to ask yourself ‘why is it ten steps?’ What does it mean for your organization that it’s ten? How many departments and backend systems need to change to make the process even just 1 step less? So, the implication of your design choices are much much more strategy than you might expect.
Paul: What are you going to be talking about at UX STRAT in a few weeks?
Chiara: I’ll talk about a one-year collaboration that frog had with British Telecom in London. BT is in fierce competition with Sky and with Virgin. TV is a critical element within a provider’s broadband offering, so BT wanted to establish leadership. After spending a significant amount of money acquiring the rights to big sporting events, like the Champions League, BT was still lagging behind competitors because of user experience. Together, we completely redesigned the BT TV experience from the ground-up; on the setup box, smartphone, tablet, web, Apple TV, Chromecast and all the big screens and connected TV and consoles. The business and cultural impact for BT has been tremendous. My talk outline our design journey together.
Paul: I view frog as of one of the best examples of firms that embody strategy in design, which is the main focus of UX STRAT events. I worked for Sapient back in the year 2000, and we also had that kind of strategic design DNA that frog has. And there are a few other companies like that, some through acquisition of a strategic design partner. Do you think that many companies are able to catch up to that strategy focus now, or do you think there’s still some secret sauce that these top tier firms have that others don’t?
Chiara: I think that there is an ability to manage uncertainty, which is something that you learn through experience and practice. You might agree that the way in which designers approach user experience strategy today is not the same as it was just a few years - even few months - ago. Some organizations bring the ability to live in continuous transformation, and to embrace the uncertainty that comes with ‘what’s next’. frog is one of those special places. And it’s fun, because I have to keep learning and evolving.
Paul: When I was at Sapient, I think there was a pretty significant skills gap between companies and agencies. The companies didn’t have UX skills, and we had lots of experience on very large e-commerce projects to design easy and useful experiences at a large scale. Since that time, I think the skills gap has narrowed, companies are able to hire these skills and there are even advanced degree programs that turn out very qualified people to do the kinds of research and design work we were discovering through project experience. However, while the skills gap has narrowed, I think something that design agencies still bring to the table is a willingness to take risks when presenting potential design solutions that fit the data rather than stakeholder expectations or demands. Do you think readiness to take risks plays a role in strategic design?
Chiara: I think you are highlighting an interesting point: the level of risk and uncertainty that you envision is not related to solely to design. It’s a risk related to the implications that your designs bring. It’s not a risk of, “should we create the page in yellow or blue?” That’s not the risk that you’re talking about. The risk is in identifying new opportunity areas for a company driven by new technologies, capabilities or needs within a transforming society. Or it’s about defining new delivery models or new partners that they’ve not yet thought of. Or even in designing something that is needed just to keep a company on par with the market, but that, for them, constitutes a significant transformation.
What I feel that creative consultancy brings to the table is an ability to envision how the future could be. A traditional consultancy might do a lot of analysis into the current state in order to identify a viable next state. Instead, we look ahead first and then work backward. I think that this ability to envision possible futures, and then use that vision to organize, create alignment, and build something meaningful remains a unique capability of designers.
Paul: Looking into the future, there are a number of technologies right now that seem to be gaining a lot of traction: machine-learning, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality. These technologies present a lot of new challenges for experience designers, since they greatly expand the realm of human experience. From your perspective in working with frog, what do you think is going to be a technology or innovation that’s going to change the way that experience designers work in the next few years? What do you think is coming next that is going to rock our world, so to speak?
Chiara: I think that the conjunction of all these things is bringing a big shift in the way we define ecosystems. With big data analytics driving machine-learning and transforming human and non-human interaction, we are transforming the definition of an ecosystem, that is, where and when interactions are happening.
From the perspective of user experience strategy, what we need to orchestrate is much more complex and the boundaries are less defined. So, we are shifting from the concept that you can create an ecosystem owned by a brand to a concept of an ecosystem that exists around the customer – with interactions that may not be under your control. An upstream interaction with a 3rd party service may be an entry point for a downstream interaction with your brand. So, how you have to control or play within this newly defined and not-owned ecosystem is becoming, I think, extremely challenging. And even in very simple terms, the moment you say that your product offering is not defined ahead of time, but is automatically defined by data, then what level of control do you have?
Paul: These are exciting times! I look forward to hearing your presentation in a few weeks in Amsterdam!
Chiara: I’m really looking forward to joining the conference!
Find out more about Chiara, her strategy presentation, and the rest of the UX STRAT Europe program at https://www.uxstrat.com/europe/program