- Here NN/G, we don't want learning
to stop after our UX conferences.
We host a participant panel
where we feature a past conference attendee
who can share a little bit of their work
and lessons learned.
Here's our panelists, Areej Aljarba
a service designer in Saudi Arabia.
Sharing how she's applied design thinking
to practice design thinking
in our 2020 virtual participant panel.
- My name is Areej Aljarba
I currently work in the finance of the financial sector.
I'm a C I grad from DePaul university,
and I just got my master's badge from the Nielsen nominee
group last August. So I'm pretty proud of this achievement.
All right. So,
so now I'm going to begin by
telling you a little bit of a story.
So usually I find myself in many rooms that are really
inspiring looking like this one.
And often I am the person that does this.
Now, let me give you a little bit
of context about this picture
when it was taking, it was taking,
when I went to the saline water conversion corporation and
I remember the security person was really confused,
should he let me in or not?
And he had to call his supervisor to double check just
because no woman has been to the corporation before.
And he led me and eventually, and I went there,
we moved the chairs and we had our design thinking workshop
with the engineers.
And usually typically in the middle of the design thinking
workshop, I have people coming up to me and asking me well,
so when are we, are you going to give us the designs?
And really they want that
finished UI designs in their hands.
And while I love the sub-process and I do want it to be my
reality, currently, it just a little bit far to reach.
And so today the story I want to tell you is how I'm
scheming to make this process and reality for me,
and the company that I worked for.
And my ingredient, really the secret ingredient here
is using design thinking to use design thinking.
So I have these six phases and the three themes network
experiment and prove,
and we will be going through each one of them briefly to
see, all right.
And just before we get into that, just as a reminder,
all of this scheming is still alive to that beautiful
process of design thinking.
All right,
beginning with sympathize until you,
you can empathize just in this phase,
just collect whatever you can have from data,
from existing data in the organization you need to,
and front liners are going to be your best difference,
have lunch with them. Talk to them as much as possible.
Now you go to that second phase,
which is a combination of both words, Posilitize,
and here you would want to host a show workshop where you
would network with people.
You would know who are the important people who influenced
those important people, the lingo that they use every day,
and just,
you want to bond with all of those people on some level,
in order to know how to form your color coalition.
And at this stage,
you don't have to tell them that they are a team.
Just not just not yet.
Now you go ahead and you hypothesize and really hear you
while it might be a little bit uncomfortable because we are
used to more data,
just feel confident enough to form a hypothesis at this
point and be realistic about that metrics and quick wins
that you want to achieve there.
Then go ahead and to prototype,
test and implement while these are spread out in three
phases, unfortunately you would,
you would have to put them in.
I had to put them in one just because,
because I needed to make it tangible for the stakeholders in
order for them to feel comfortable and believe into the
process. So once they see the designs, they are more likely,
they are more likely to cooperate and don't worry those,
those high fidelity,
they are going to be cheated like a wire frames.
And then you go to monitor, measure and validate here.
This is an essential step in building your case.
You would want now to involve the allies because you
familiarize yourself with those people and still
measurements tools that she can, that you can have.
And you're now collecting the hypothesis, the results,
the data, the metrics, and videos, if that's possible.
And finally, you go for the kill.
Your positive decides again, building your case,
approving the UX metrics,
connection to the return of investment,
showing evidence and including an action plan.
And that is really important because they can ask you that
question and you want to be prepared for it.
And this is where you go and you demand demanding reaching
the design thinking process.
And now, while this process may take months or years,
do not forget that this is what you want to arrive to.
That is the input. That is the goal,
because it can get comfortable maybe to,
to just go along with the assumptions that the hypothesis,
but really what you want to do is arrive at this state.
Now, I just want to,
I want this as a thank you to all of the instructors that
I had, the pleasure and honor to be, to be taught by.
And also just to show you how the ripple effects can be
amazing. Now,
one of the projects that I had honored to work with was with
the ministry of health,
to do virtual visits for patients across Saudi Arabia.
And just like to show you that you guys has,
have made an impact on me.
And I was able to make an impact on that,
on this geographical location to help cancer patient and
older gentleman living in the north of Saudi Arabia,
making a difference in his life instead of him coming to the
capital city of Saudi Arabia to make,
to make those virtual visits and making his life easier
through designing an experience.
So I really want you,
I want to leave you with that at the end of this story,
because that's really what counts.
And I think this is why we all love our work and,
and we chose this to chose to do this.
So just as a final,
thank you to another instructor and this MBC slides that
utilize that storytelling techniques. Thank you so much,
Rachel.
And thank you all.
- Amazing. Every shul you go back to, oh,
Jakob said something.
Okay. Will you go back to you facilitating the group?
Because I think we just have to kind of do a round of
applause as you were facilitating a group in a building that
a woman hadn't ever been led into to work at is just
absolutely incredible.
So a round of applause for Reesh,
because I think that that's incredible to be able to bring
this back and make waves. So for all of you listening,
Reesh I think is an amazing participant for this panel
because design thinking was just a little bit too far of a
reach to kind of come back and immediately implement.
But it doesn't mean that she can't implement it instead.
She kind of used the skeleton framework and said, all right,
how am I going to get people to design thinking?
And then you kind of saw how she augmented the design
thinking process to get there.
So if you have any questions for Areesh,
we're going to do some Q and a,
so feel free to drop them in.
And until then,
I was wondering if you could kind of talk about maybe the
biggest obstacles in your current context and specifically
what parts of the process had
the biggest effect on those obstacles?
- I think one of the biggest obstacles that I'm facing is
usually people do not want you to disturb them to the floor
that they are used to.
And like the thing that is that you need to come to them
with empathy, understanding what,
how they feel and addressing that, filling them.
I'm not the chair, I'm not making your life more difficult.
That is not the point of this.
And maybe not to say it's so directly,
but indirectly in the way you do things.
And I think once they see the benefits of that reflected on
the products and the services of the customers,
they are going to be your promoters.
You just have to hang on little bit longer, I guess,
with them.
- That actually reminds me of something that you and I
talked about when we were talking and getting ready for this
participant panel.
And it was something that I believe Nancy taught,
which is okay, let's, you know,
draw the stakeholder map as we know it.
And then let's draw the
stakeholder as it map as it really is.
Can you kind of tell the audience how you applied that and
what insights that led to?
- That was one of the really amazing exercises that I did
when it really helped me in the workshops.
So the exercise goes that you have to like sketch that
formal hierarchy of the company, which I did.
And then you have, then you go and sketch the informal ones,
the unwritten one.
And I did that. And once I did that,
I had a visual on all the things that I knew,
but I didn't necessarily know the, like really know.
And once I did that,
I realized who are the key people to talk to,
to influence and how I can go, go with my,
with my plan in order to convince certain people that, okay,
we do need data here. We need a study here.
We need a usability study here. And so it's a,
it's a simple exercise, but it's not an easy one.
- Yeah. And I think that, that goes with finding,
and we talk about this in a lot of classes that a lot of the
hard part about being UX is that you're not just trying to
do great UX work,
but you're trying to teach people about what UX is.
And it's one thing when it comes from your mouth,
but it's even stronger when it comes from someone else's
mouth who isn't in UX,
and they can then speak to the benefits or goals and you
call them promoters. We call them catalysts,
whoever those people are that have a really big impact on
everyone else.
And they may not be kind of the top hierarchy.
They may just be that person,
everyone really likes or respects and finding them and
having them kind of join your cohort and do some of that
work and pre promotion education for you is a really big
game changer.
So we have a question from Leeor. Areesh,
Can you talk a little bit about what kind of services or
products you design in your work?
- So mostly financial ones at the moment,
since I work in a bank and in the, on life,
on the freelancing side,
I collaborated with the health ministry to design a couple
of products that one of them was the virtual clinic visits,
since, because since the coronavirus obviously happened.
So a lot of these initiatives have started in Saudi Arabia
to digitalize.
A lot of the services are provided by the government.
- How have you carved out the role that you're in?
Because I know, you know, you were hired and are a
service manager, but you're doing so much more than that.
So how do you find those opportunities?
And do you have any advice for the audience?
- I think I'm still doing that and discovering that at the
moment, because, because the, I think the markets,
we are still new people with new to set of tools and skills
to introduce.
So I'm still learning how to do that.
I'm evolving every day.
I think the advice that I would give is that whenever a job
or a task or a project comes my way, I usually give my 100%.
Sometimes I regret it. And sometimes I don't,
but in every time I learned something and I,
and I think this is how I think this is how, like, how,
how you always reached this point.
It was a through all of these experiences.
- Laura has a question: which step of the process.
So I think maybe specifically your process that you made,
did you struggle with the most and why?
- I think for myself it was building, the hypothesis,
just because there isn't a lot of data at the moment.
When I start a project and I need to depend on a lot of
secondary data,
plus you need to push it with confidence at that moment.
And I think that, that usually to me, the most difficult,
challenging, I would say phase out of all of them.
- I loved the one I love to like positive and then like
politics and showing it around and the Poslitize,
which I think that's really smart.
And then the think ahead to be ahead.
And I think that that's kind of a lot of the game and the
ideas that you shared with the audience, which is, you know,
your goal is to get to the design thinking model,
but you can't get there just immediately.
So you're thinking ahead and you're kind of laying the
groundwork to get there, and it's a longer game plan,
but if you've played any, you know,
of those more strategic games, then, you know,
it's all about the long game.
And so a lot of our work is the long game.
What help did you get from the research team that you think
is most valuable? So did you get help from a research team?
What kinds of secondary data, where are you pulling?
What was most valuable?
- So I think what,
what you would discover in a large corporation is that they
have a lot of data across different departments.
So I did find a lot of reports and research existing.
The thing about it, that it wasn't specific, for example,
for a journey to be designed or specific enough for a
redesigning, a flow inside this, inside the digital service.
So that's when I, when I, I felt like, okay,
I need like a behavioral research instead of maybe a
marketing research that has been done or benchmarking those,
you would, I would find them easily in the organization,
the ones on the behavioral aspect.
I think those are the ones that I'm trying to push for.
- For those of you who've taken a course.
I think with me or any of the journey mapping,
we kind of always suggest you do an internal inventory of
research just that already exists and money was already
spent on, and then go from there once, you know, okay,
this is what we already have.
Then we can focus even a super small research teams,
efforts, and resources to fill those gaps.
And it sounds like in case,
that was kind of the more behavioral side that the larger
reports couldn't fill.
- Actually, the journey mapping done,
the only channel courses,
they inspired me because they do mention this process and
this, this is how I was like, okay,
so I can take this component.
And then from other classes I took other components and
Went with this process.