Many organisations hire designers and wait for the products to get better. Then little happens. The designers end up last in line, get finished requirements and are asked to make it look nice.
Design culture is about the whole team: do you see your users, and does what you see change your decisions?
Culture is what you do every week
Culture doesn't live in a strategy or a poster of values. It lives in habits. What does the team do in an ordinary week? Who talks to users? What happens to what they learn?
We look for six habits. Switch on the ones you have in the graphic at the top.
- You meet users regularly. Everyone, including developers, product managers and leaders. Jared Spool found that teams where each person watches real users for at least two hours every six weeks make noticeably better products. He calls it exposure hours.
- You share what you learn. Insight that only lives in a report doesn't exist. Short summaries, clips from tests and a shared wall do more than a forty-page document.
- You test before you build. Ideas are tried with sketches and prototypes before they become code.
- You give critique, not approval. A design review is about whether the solution solves the problem. Whether someone likes the colour matters less.
- Design is there when decisions are made. Designers are in the room when priorities are set, and don't arrive only when something needs drawing.
- You measure what users achieve. Clicks and visits say little. Ask whether people get done what they came for.
Start with the first
The order isn't random. Without regular contact with users, the other habits have little to work with. That's why the graphic always suggests the most basic habit you're missing.
Small attempts beat big programmes
We've rarely seen a design culture grow out of a big change programme. It comes from one team trying one new habit, seeing that it works, and the team next door getting curious. Start with something small enough to do next week: two hours with a user, or ten minutes of test clips at the Friday meeting.
Leaders set the pace
The habits only survive if leaders make time for them and ask about them. When a leader asks "what did the users say?" before "when will it be done?", the team changes fast.
Design culture is what you do again next week.