Innovation by design - Centre for Design Innovation

It starts (and ends) with the userCustomer support was alreadyconsidered a key point of differentiationfor Infacta, though Martin admits,“ aftergoing to the workshops, we saw thatthere were still areas where we couldimprove.” The culture of the organisationis showing significant signs of becomingeven more customer focused.Infacta are trying to get more feedbackcontinuously from customers now tosee how they use the software. “Over thepast few months we released a beta ofour GroupSurveys product. We sent outsome emails, ‘Do you mind if we giveyou a call?’ We got some feedback on theactual steps to create a survey. Changedthe layout. Users came back and said‘Fantastic. The new layout is far easierand simpler to use. We can’t wait forthe release.’”28|29 CASE STUDY THREE: INFACTANot only are Infacta consulting withcustomers, they’re also talking tothe rest of their employees. Informalchats in the kitchen that might havebeen forgotten are now a little morestructured. “Up to now it’s been, ‘thiswould be a cool feature.’ Meetings wouldbe ‘should we go down this route or thisroute’ … and now we don’t really carewhat route you go down as long as itmakes it simple for the customer.”Infacta already had an innovativeprogramme in place where developerswould field support for the productsthey were working on. The workshopsreinforced the importance of puttingusers first. “All the developers now havemore of a sense of ‘we need to focus onthe users’ as opposed to just focusingon the technology. The user doesn’t careabout the technology, it’s the front-endthey care about.”When new staff is hired, Infacta nowtreats it as an opportunity for a littleresearch and customer insight. “The firstthing we do is ask them to go purchaseGroupMail online and download thesoftware and watch what they’re doing.Before we wouldn’t have watched themand taken notes on certain things theywere doing.”Taking time to integrate design researchinto the development process has hadan effect on time to market. “The oneproblem is it has taken us a lot longer toget where we’re wanting to go. The waywe used to go was just to release stuff,get feedback and then make changes.Now we’re looking to use (user-centred)design before we create the firstrelease of the product. That’s a slowerturnaround for us.”