WORKING TOGETHER
All projects are designed to the needs and nature of the participants the brief. Many projects remain confidential, below are introductions to my three focus areas, innovation labs, immersion in emerging markets and organisations in transition.
EXPLORATION AND VALIDATION FOR INNOVATION LABS
"Emma brings a unique and playful approach that delivers fresh and delightful engagements for people."
Stiven Kerestegian
Direction Design Lead, LEGO Future Lab
My dedication to designing playful, collaborative processes whilst utilising data and technology to understand a subject is welcomed by industry-leading innovation teams.
I'm experienced supporting direction design by identifying and synthesising cultural, behavioural and industry trends. I work with a variety of well established and experimental techniques across foundational, exploratory, generative and evaluative research domains to gather observations and insights with consumers. I apply my own skills as a visual and interpersonal communicator to create frameworks and tools that bring the voice of the consumer to life in the lab.
Research can be a time-consuming practice, knowing which direction to even look in, can be the first stumbling block for many innovation teams. Here I work closely with business, design and engineering leads to identify research needs, see where rapid validation is required and where there are opportunities for more in-depth consumer probing. Balancing cost and time to collect data is paramount in lab environments.
Considering the size of your innovation lab or team, I work quickly to assess where we can have most impact carrying out research ourselves and where we can gain the most traction collaborating with a recruiter or other support from our networks.
MINDSET CHANGE IN LARGE ORGANIZATIONS
"Emma and the team have been core to support and educate our organization about the potential for design thinking. Bringing solutions to patients that will make a difference to their lives"
Rebecca Joslin
Snr. Director Global Marketing, Shire
In large organisations especially, some internal mindset change alongside research projects can be beneficial to prepare and effectively advocate final findings. Insights can have the most impact when the extended team is not only ready but recognises that the research is both valid and worthwhile.
MICRO CASE
Along with a team of strategists and service designers from Ocean design agency, I carried out a complex customer journey mapping project across 10 global pharmaceutical brands for Shire. Each brand required extensive desktop research to map the existing landscape along with patient and practitioner conversations. As the project progressed we wove in numerous up-skilling workshops to ensure all employees involved had an open mindset to the final delivery. Employees across departments and brands were guided through a co-creation process and first-hand participatory validation research with patient champions. The involvement led to a shared sense of ownership of the final insights.
The deliverable journey maps have encouraged and allowed teams to leverage comparability between brands. Individual teams now identify new opportunity spaces at a systemic level, with patient needs, emotions and experience at the centre.
EMERGING MARKETS, TECHNOLOGIES AND BEHAVIOURS
"What I thought would just be an interview, Emma showed me that it’s actually an art form."
Marc Kruger
Project lead, Ignitia
Foundational and exploratory research approaches can help us develop an understanding of a new market or consumer. These include methods such as in-depth interviews, shadowing or contextual visits often carried out in the field, along with digital ethnography often conducted remotely. Going to the source of the data creates the human closeness required to decipher why the data looks the way it does. Why people act or react the way they do.
MICRO CASE
Tasked with understanding changing behaviour around mobile usage for an established weather forecasting service for farmers in Ghana, I responded with a project plan that included a two-week immersive field study.
We gained the trust of farmers, mostly thanks to our local hires on the project who helped set up home interviews, farm visits, and small community workshops. We found invaluable additional perspectives from ad-hoc interviews beyond the initial scope of the research participants. A Regional Agricultural Officer, for example, revealed many unseen frustrations and experiences from previous trials and technologies offered to farmers. These kinds of understandings would have taken the team much longer to accurately synthesise from farmers alone.
The final field study review included insights, documentation and behavioural groups along with segmentation suggestions and service opportunities for each identified behavioural group. These deliveries were the first step in a new service concept and helped the client make a pivotal strategy decision. The employees who joined the team experienced hands-on training and were provided with a support kit to seed future research.
The study was designed with a cross-section of immersive and abstracted techniques to create convergent validity of the new insights. When developing the foundations for a new strategy, product or service it is essential that the findings can be validated and trusted.
ORGANISATIONS
I've had the luck to learn from people considered the best in their industry. Some collaborations have lasted for years and years, others are one-off deliveries.
For a conversation on how we might work together please reach out.
