As a global society, our domestic, commercial, and subconscious behaviours have seen a drastic shift since the turn of the century. Sophisticated technology infrastructures now span the globe, ever bending under the increasing demand of a hardware rich customer base, whose homes offer them dozens of mediums by which to interact with a given piece of content. Not only do businesses need to keep up with the demand of ever updating (and sometimes open source) operating systems, but the constant threat of disgruntled customers posting scathing reviews has potentially reputation ending ramifications. 

And so “disruptor” brands have emerged, customer centric, lean tech stacks and operating models, which have swiftly and unapologetically laid rest to some ‘not fit for purpose’, household institutions. The list is vast and ever growing – 

  • Tesla vs the automotive industry (TBC)
  • Airbnb vs Thomas Cook
  • Deliveroo vs Jamie’s Italian
  • Uber vs black cabs
  • Apple vs Nokia
  • Amazon vs the high street
  • Google vs AOL

…and it’s looking like 2020 will have more to add before the year is out. 

C19 has further accelerated this need for adaptation to market demands, but if we leave aside the obvious and more immediate impact this pandemic is having from a medical and financial perspective, the longer term picture has some massive positives that are emerging. Businesses are recognising and taking ownership of their footprints and sustainability, global collaborations to solve a common threat (without the need for WMDs) are spanning historically unfriendly borders, and customers are less and less having to accept a sub par offering from a monopolised market. 

Now by no stretch of the imagination am I suggesting that it should be expected (or a good thing) that we are entering into an era whereby the start up revolution will wipe the FTSE 100’s off the scene. The smart, progressive, and successful institutions are already adapting to what the new ‘normal’ looks like, and even making lemonade from the lemons. 

So how are big companies digitally adapting? How can they implement a rapid digital response to a seemingly uncertain and unfamiliar enemy? And what can they learn from small successful tech startups?

Firstly, let’s define what is mean by UX and Tech debt, commonly regarded as the two main contributors to long term digital failure:

  1. Technical debt – A term devised by Ward Cunningham in the early 90’s, usually referring to the additional time and expense resulting from getting to market too quickly, choosing less suitable tech stacks in preference of a speedy MVP delivery, instead of releasing the best approach. The end result being a ‘debt’ that is owed to the system once you want to build out further.
  2. UX debt – once again usually a casualty to unrealistic timelines or insufficient allocated budget, UX debt is the overall weaknesses in the customers usability of your system that accrue and compile, resulting in lower conversions and higher drop off rates. Other common contributors are things like:
    • Lack of predefined digital standards
    • Skipping user testing
    • Design by committee 
    • Lack of design prototype testing
    • and SO many more…

With this in mind, I’m going to focus on the most common ways in which businesses grow digitally, look at where the traditional pain points are, and hear how leaders in their fields are able to build lean and stable solutions with long term sustainability in mind.

Route 1 – growth by acquisition

Buy up the new kids on the block and run their offerings in parallel to their existing propositions. It’s most startup shareholders dream, the years of taking minimal salary from the business, eating tinned spaghetti whilst you beg borrow and steal to pay a dev contractor £12k for the month, and in come the industry giants to buy their stake in return for several more years of service during handover. 

At first the impact on production is minimal; some analytical tagging here, integration of business reporting tools there, the odd new face brought in to ‘ensure a smooth transition’ (spy), but generally speaking the day to day of digital design and build remains relatively lean and uninterrupted. You then face into one of three scenarios.

  1. If it ain’t broke… – the brands are kept separate, the processes stay as is, the newly acquired entity remains lean and adaptive, the parent company’s traditional offering goes under the microscope. High level profit based benchmarking ensues, often leading to scenario 2…
  2. Out with the old… – the business switches to the systems and operations of the leaner and more attractively margined setup, creating a wild west style scramble of employees and departments justifying and ‘aligning’. When the dust settles, the real job of tidying up begins (hopefully having not confused and ostracised the customer base, with an eventual muddied and bastardised product offering).
  3. The more the merrier – the two products sit side by side under the brand of the acquiring company, the business is able to offer more targeted value to a wider customer demographic, but the tech and brand deficit that is created offers very little in the way of sustainable foundations to build on.

All very doom and gloom worst cases, but sadly common cyclical trends that no doubt you’ve experienced or witnessed. Contrary to this, for the past couple of years I’ve been fortunate enough to work closely with Tom Smith, Design Lead at Aviva, who’s seen MASSIVE digital growth within the business, and used decades of industry experience to help guide it towards more customer centric and subsequently commercially sound solutions.

Simply put, businesses large or small have one simple mantra to adopt to ensure growth, retention and loyalty – speak and listen to your customer. Far too often, a business will aim to compete in a populated marketplace by simply adding one more product feature than their nearest competitor and feel that this is the way to deliver value for the customer. Wrong. You wouldn’t go to the expense of building a Bugatti Veyron to perform the daily school run for instance, so learn what your customer truly needs. They won’t necessarily know it, and this is where time and money should be spent running focus groups, lab testing, A/B tests and open betas. Understand your customers needs and wants. You will often find these are constantly changing as the world around us morphs.

At Aviva, we hold true to this approach as much as possible. We aim to fail quickly and learn. This approach is constantly put to the test however. I’m a realist and will be the first to admit that other imperatives come into play that test this approach and collective resolve. On those occasions, we are fortunate to lean upon several factors, one of which is our UI design system, which can fast track the design hypothesis validation process, prototyping and testing with users to avoid incurring large time and cost expenditure and therefore pinpoint much quicker the areas of true customer value. This allows us to then align wider stakeholders behind a customer solution as a design practice much sooner.

If I could offer any tips, aim to have a single view of your customer, be smart with reusable tech stacks, bake accessibility needs into your delivery method from the very start to guarantee inclusivity and aim for the holy grail whereby customers can self serve.

Route 2 – the internal startup

It’s like any other day in the office, you walk up the stairs, coffee in hand, except something’s not right. The once transparent and sky lit meeting room across from your desk, is now blacked out. Door locked. You check the booking system – busy for the next 6 weeks. Once friends now keep a deeply buried secret as they scurry in and out with Pret bags and coffee cups. Weeks pass. All you know are words whispered in the canteen – “Project Elron”. Fade to black.

Freemasonry in outward appearance, the internal startup is a members only club, that quite often by the time it reaches cross functional peers and those with ‘on the ground’ battle insight, it’s too late. Whilst intentions are truly valid and well meaning, the MVP is never built to last the sands of time. Propositions, research, UX and visual design are often heavily represented to create a truly customer focused strategy and UI, but in this scenario there is never enough input sought from the development teams – especially those with enough of a commercial and operational understanding of what ‘day 2’ and beyond realistically entails. Playbooks and methodologies (taken from the early days of Spotify, Facebook, Netflix and so on) form the purest bedrock by which to launch a high performing and long lasting start up….. but this is no start up. And slowly but surely, the descoping begins. It starts at the point whereby the devs worth listening to (who may well have been kept out of the loop to avoid push back) are brought into the fold (about the time the black paper comes down from the glass walls of the meeting room).

Aside from the practicality of the build and launch, the internal politics of those who believe they should have been consulted start to appear in the form of strongly worded emails, cc’ing those with very long job titles. All of a sudden, what was once a beautiful ideal, is now a Brexit negotiation.

The internal start up model poses a number of delicate hurdles and blurred border lines, so more than any other method it requires a softly softly communicative approach, back by a deep understanding of the core product and market.

Darren Bishop has worked within the Fintech and the digitalisation of businesses, spanning both the Finance and Data sector for many years. As CEO, product owner, and everywhere in between, he’s well aware of the common pitfalls involved in these types of projects.

The past 10 years have seen a level of digital transformation in financial services, that has actually been far less revolutionary than the retail sector. The so-called entrepreneurial or disruptive spirit in retail markets is everywhere to see, it captures the imagination and puts the end user customer first and foremost. Building the tech stack and working backwards from the customer’s experience seems so brilliantly obvious, something retail tech knocks out of the park

With this in mind, we in finance are fortunate enough to be able to draw upon an array of strategies and methodologies that have been successfully demonstrated across horizontal markets. Ultimately it comes down to appealing to the psychology of the target audience, their needs, their desires. And this applies internally when creating the product in the first instance.

It’s not only the customer that you are selling to, it’s the business itself too. If you are unable to sell them the vision and continually bring them along on the journey, then you can’t expect them to accurately portray the same enthusiasm and sentiment in what they create.

Route 3 – external agency

There’s nothing more unnerving than being sat across a table from an external agency Account Manager, watching them smile like Jack Nicholson on Prozac, talking you through a proposal which at no point takes into consideration existing tech or internal politics, and just generally not blink the whole way through. Great cakes though.

The external route has to navigate both the ‘acquisition’ and ‘‘start up’s shortcomings, becoming more and more frustrating for both parties the longer it goes on and the more stakeholders that are drip fed into the sign off process on a weekly basis. I’ve been on both sides of the table, it can be VERY hard work. 

The enthusiasm and momentum of the project is at full warp during the scoping and research phase, everyone giving their 2 cents, every one ensuring that their arses are covered. The research groups objectives are also at this point skewed to a particular self fulfilling hypothesis, but generally the outcome is valuable. 

The wireframes and visual design prototypes are where a) those who paid little attention to the site specification, start to understand what someone meant by the term “carousel”, and b) everyone begins to recall their GCSE dally with Microsoft Publisher in 1997. This is where a mixture of revisiting the initial specification, using the term “make it pop more”, and requests for stock images of ‘small plants growing out of soil in someone’s hand’, start to delay launch. Coincidentally the first designer has now quit the agency and you’re now dealing with Matt. 

But it’s the parallel running battle that has been quietly raging via long email chains between concerned devs, change managers, and the agency AM reciting the same sentence “which is why we believe that Wordpress blah blah*”, that is where the legacy tech deficit is forged. What was once conceived as a lean tool that would be used to compliment the existing portfolio, now strikes dread in the hearts of the client side devs who are frantically trying to create newly spec’d APIs from one system to another. 

*By the way I’d like to point out at this point that I’m not knocking Wordpress. Big big fan.

Eventually, Day 1 launch is announced on social media (2 months after the original roadmap had it scheduled), but it’s shiny and does the job. Pats on the back for all through internal mailers and the odd amazon voucher. The list of descoped items that have been pushed in a Jira story named ‘Post launch’ (backlog) eventually fade away into the horizon, and the HR team based in an office above a Sainsbury’s Local in Ashby-de-la-Zouch begin to take ownership of the CMS (upload new media > c:\Documents > iphone uploads > pictures of my children with the cat 2009 > img_0000000943.jpg > this file is 27gb are you sure you want to upload? > upload complete).

To effectively execute a sound collaborative solution, you need to have a solid project lead. Someone who’s experienced both sides of the relationship, with sound technical understanding and stakeholder management skills. I reached out to Dan Ashby who I’ve worked with for many years, and asked him what advice he’d give to both agency and client as to ensuring a tech stack with longevity is maintained throughout.

On the Agency side it is important that all employees with the correct skillset are bought in at the correct stage of the project. Digital projects tend to go badly wrong when the correct input is not given at the right time, no developer likes being given designs they have not seen to build by a designer, no digital team wants a project planned by an account manager and no SEO specialist wants to be given a project that has already been built to SEO.

Ideally you have a Project Lead who has a grasp of all that is involved in a project, what their teams skillsets are and when they should be involved. Good team work and skill sets all round will ensure the best outcome for the project and that the most compatible technology stack is used for the project.

As a Client you should be looking into who you are dealing with, the questions they are asking and their skill sets. You need to feel comfortable that you have spoken to the right people and that they know their onions.

You should be given options for getting a project over the line and have technical connections who ask questions. If you are not receiving push back and questions coming the other way you are likely working with a team of yes men or a team who do not know what they are doing.

Also you should bear in mind that the cheapest quote is not always the worst and the most expensive quote is not always the best, it is all about the people you need to be confident in working with, they have full understanding of your project and you have a good communication stream with them.

Top tips to ensure a UX/Tech harmony

Granted that with big corporations you may find yourself inheriting legacy systems and issues beyond your control from the outset, so the following is a list of approaches I work to in both micro and macro management of digital projects:

  1. Don’t avoid the tricky conversations at the start
    You’ll often hear the term “fail fast” when working on digital products, but sometimes with little detail as to how you follow on from it. In the context of a digital product life cycle, it’s widely accepted that what costs £1 in design, costs £10 in dev, £100 to amend once live. With this in mind, fall out at the start, have a beer later that evening, not only with the inevitable issues you were going to face get tackled early, but you’ll learn a lot more about the team around you in the process.
  2. Why why why why why
    A method originally conceived by Sakichi Toyoda and used within the Toyota Motor Corporation during the evolution of its manufacturing methodologies, “the 5 whys” is a  technique to determine the root cause of a defect or problem by repeating the question “Why?”. Each answer forms the basis of the next question, and you continue until the fundamental issue is identified. Simple concept, extremely effective. (Thanks to Alex Darlington for introducing this concept to me)
  3. Devs designing and designers deving
    I spent years as a “web designer” when that was a thing, and having been everything from salesman to op support (and all in between), I knew html and css like the back of my hand, with a thorough understanding of how most bank-end languages were integrated. Now I practice primarily UX and visual design, and if I don’t already have the knowledge as to how a component will work, I know the questions I need to ask and the method by which to handover to the next person in the chain. So get your cross functional squads desks sitting together, get them involved in other people’s tasks (even just shadowing), and don’t just up-skill, cross-skill.
  4. Understand in advance where and what you’re willing to compromise
    You’re not going to get it all your own way, nor should you (unless you’re the sole investor and intend to watch your investment amount to nothing). If you’re lucky enough to have a great team of people around you, then you need to trust and value their input. There will always be roadblocks (commercial, technical, market and so on) to which you need to adapt and move forward. If you believe in something strongly enough and have the research/knowledge behind it, then stick to your guns. If you aren’t getting your hypothesis/feature into day 1 release then ensure it’s clearly on the roadmap.
  5. Communication doesn’t mean talking
    And I mean this in the ‘one way talking’ sense. Straight out of uni I found myself in a call centre sales job, it destroyed my soul. But after a year I was sat in front of a business owner for a field sales role with a shiny BMW company car waiting for me. He asked me “what do you think communication is?”. Sat there is Primark’s finest polyester offering, and before he’d even finished the question I blurted out “it’s about having the gift of the gab”. Led balloon. Still got the job to be fair though.

    I can’t emphasise enough just how important communication is, and by that I mean LISTENING. Get that full picture of parameters to work to, challenge them, but understand them. And if someone challenges your work or input, then good – it means they’re listening and paying attention. Regular communication surfaces a more collaborative and fruitful output earlier in the project.

There’s arguments either way as to this age old UX v Tech debt trade off being chicken and egg, and ultimately it is more often than not unavoidable at some point in a product’s life cycle. In a view to consider this as impartially as possible, and having sat as both a UX designer and front end developer, my conclusion is that UX debt is the more costly to bear and rectify long term. Why? MANY many reasons…

Redesigning something involves the devs to redevelop the new outcome again (so straight away that’s double the man power costs relative to a ‘straight to dev fix’), and that’s not including the time needed to get everyone back up to speed, testing, cross system debugging etc.

Humans are fickle and are evolving an increasingly narrow attention span. If you make a journey more difficult from the outset, they’ll switch off or find someone else doing the same thing better. And if you DO manage to cling onto loyal and/or lazy customers, having to fundamentally retrofit better solutions can sometimes put people’s noses out who are now accustomed to your original bad UX – sometimes you just can’t win!

One of my favourite “hang in there” style quotes is from Winston Churchill,

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”

I couldn’t agree more. But to frame this with context, fail quietly and early on, because sadly our publicly visible failures can be suspended in time through articles like this one (sorry) and bitter customer reviews that sit at the top of Google search listings. 

Final mantra then that I want to leave you with – the longer the UX and technical debt remains unpaid, the more these costs will mount at a “QuickQuid*” style compound interest (*500% APR).