Choosing the right method
Role: Researcher & UX designer
Company: OP bank
Year: 2017
All professionals have their own "always reliable" tools and methods to face their own challenges, however being comfortable or an expert in a tool or method doesn't always mean it is the best one for a certain problem. This project aimed to offer a safe exploration platform to a design team in OP in order to discover new ways to approach their challenges.
Our Method Selection Pool is a digital tool that designers can use, in this case in the banking sector though the concept can be scaled to any industry, to browse different ideation, facilitation and co-design methods and tools for their projects. The idea is to give designers a more versatile set of tools to face their professional challenges adequately instead using the same method all over again just because it is comfortable.
Not all that shines is gold
We all have that one dance step we know perfectly but that doesn't mean it will go well with all kinds of music. It might actually end up really bad, and this is much truer when it comes to design. Designers might be comfortable with methods and practices and might fall victims of their own comfort zones. The design leads at OP identified this and tasked us with coming up with a solution that could be used by all their designers.
How can we motivate designers to explore new methods safely and collaboratively incorporate them in their projects? Which methods would be relevant for them?
Many methods doesn't mean
meaningful methods
We wanted designers to feel comfortable trying new methods and thus we needed to do the research ourselves. While exploring, I figured out that there is an overwhelming number of methods and new ones are coming every day. However, not all of them are useful in the OP design team's context. In order to not be a victim of our own proposal, we needed to segment and find which would be the absolute most meaningful. After some days of researching, experimenting and validating our findings, we narrowed the methods to final 20. These constituted our final method pool.
Designing the Method pool
Having the methods was half of the work, the second challenge was to make them available to the design team in an interesting way. After talking to them we realised that an internal tool would be the best way for them. For this tool to live up to our expectations, we needed to make a friendly and intuitive experience out of choosing a method. Here is where my UX skills came handy to design the tool itself. The idea was to give a concept that could be incorporated by them in the future so the level of this proposal was a conceptual prototype. We played with the idea of playing with cards and a filtering process for them.
The Method Selection Pool is more than a bunch of methods or a digital tool. It is a place of discovery, experimentation and collaboration. It is the easiest way to learn new methods and grow together as a design team.
The method selection
The method selection is very simple. The user lands in a home page where they can learn about the project. When started, they can start filtering their needs in order to narrow the methods which are divided in three main categories with sub categories that make narrowing their search even more simple and meaningful. The result is a card, or more, containing the method.
The method cards
The method cards themselves are not just information but a complete guide of how to use it. Designers can upload local use cases to strengthen it and can be appointed Method Keepers which means they are experts and can be consulted in order to know more about it. In other words, keepers are experts willing to share their expertise. With all this information, there is no excuse to keep using the same old methods all over again.
