This was presented at UX Australia 2013 by Glyn Thomas and Tim Hogan. This is the story of how a regional Australian Health Insurer with a history deep in steel manufacturing was able to value not only the efforts of designers but the authority of design itself… Kind of – well, sort of. We aren’t working in a designers paradise, we don’t often get to “think different” and sometimes just getting the word ‘design’ into a conversation feels like a victory. It took a comment by an outsider – encouraging us to look back and see the design culture we had cultivated – that helped us focus on the progress made and look past the myths of ‘design culture’. We will step you through our journey highlighting the anti-patterns we identified, the opportunities created, the mistakes we made along the way and the challenges that remain. We will present an emergent model that supports continuous cultivation of our design culture. **Video used at the start is found here: You might want to watch the first minute :)** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6GkTizYFHA Slides without Audio are pretty hard to understand so please contact us if you want more depth :).

1. Jeans in the boardoom
The rise of a design culture at nib Health Funds

2. nib is a health insurer, started within
a culture of steel and coal. How has it
come to embrace a design culture?

3. So - what is a Design Culture?

6. But do these things really
build a design culture?

7. • User needs addressed
• Focus on problem solving
• Designers in leadership
Design is important to
success of the business

8. Where we were ...

9. A long list of
features

10. Design was
the Surface

11. No feedback

12. No improvements

14. No change six
years later

16. Despite changing user needs,
technology and business goals -
nothing changed ...

17. So where were the designers
in all this?

18. We were in
our Ivory
Tower

19. Safe from harm, far
from valuable.

20. Where we are ...

21. we talk about value
rather than features

22. Design is baked in
resulting in real compromise

23. Frequent feedback

24. Continuous improvement
we iterated from static to responsive

25. Not an exclusive club
so others share empathy with the user

26. • we talk about “value”
• design is baked in
• frequent feedback
• continuous improvement
• design is not an exclusive club
What about today ...

27. What about the model?

28. Valuable + Visible

29. Valuable + Visible

30. Valuable + Visible

31. Let’s dig deeper into valuable

32. Leadership
to set vision and
be an advocate

33. Iterative
so we know we are creating the value

34. Divergent and
convergent
to uncover new
value

35. but, this is just what we do

36. To change a culture,
we also need to be ...

37. Transparent
and
collaborative

38. Vision and advocacy
Leadership

39. Allowing value to be created
Iterative
Leadership
Divergent
and
Convergent

40. to grow through transparency
Iterative
Leadership
Divergent
and
Convergent

41. Our Learning
• Too much talk
• Design by committee
• We weren’t sharing goals
• Jargon

42. Where to next?
• Better iteration
• Work closer with devs
• Dev’s in user testing
• Jeans in the boardroom?

43. Jeans in the boardoom

44. Jeans in the boardoom
Not about the new replacing the old,
but the two co-existing.

45. Thankyou
glyn.thomas@nib.com.au
t.hogan@nib.com.au
@glynthomas
@timswit
All illustrations are by Pearson Scott Foresman and are available within the public domain through wikimedia.
All icons from the nounproject.com - ping pong bat s by Claudio Gomboli and the log by Diego Aguirre.