Jeans in the boardroom? The rise of a design culture at nib Health Funds.

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 :).

Transcript

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.