Orientation in the HCD process

Delivery: the foundation of Measurement

Delivery is the foundation of the Measurement phase. Without effective Delivery, your hoped-for impact from Discovery and Design will be skewed.

In the Design phase, you measure the performance and functionality of your product, program, service or system. In the Measurement phase, you measure real-world impact. And that has to do, yes, with performance and functionality, but even more so with how you are delivering the product, program, service, or system to your audience.

Pivoting you and your team’s mindset from design, which focuses attention on iterating the offering forward to address specific user issues, to delivering it to customers in the midst of their busy, messy lives is a difficult transition. While you know a great deal about your offering and how customers want to see and use it, you have to widen your lens farther in the delivery phase. In fact, you have to start seeing your offering in context, that is, as it appears in the lives of your users.

One of the main issues with this reorientation for a team is that it takes away a lot of control from the team. Especially in the latter half of the design phase, the team gets more and more narrowly focused on how the product, program, service, or system functions. The ability to control, tweak, and fiddle is satisfying. Now, the team has to step back and consider how the offering can best sit within the lives of users, that is, outside of the controlled circumstances of a moderated or unmoderated testing session.

You’ve made a nice thing that works for customers. You’re excited; the team is excited. Now is the time to look up; now is the time to focus on the Big Why.

Purpose

The best way to reorient yourself and to set up for the Delivery and Measurement phases is to state why your offering exists. Whether you’re just emerging from the Design phase or you simply inherited an offering that’s been operating in the world for ages, a product, program, service, or system’s reason for being isn’t always straightforward, well-stated, or stated at all.

We call an offering’s reason for existence its Big Why statement. If you have a strong problem statement from your Discovery phase, take a look at it again, from the other side of the Design phase. Does it capture what in statistics literature is called the “theoretical framework”¹ of offering? The big why isn’t a literal statement about what you do every day; it’s the general realm or category you work in. This big why is why your intervention was designed and deployed in the first place.

To craft your Big Why statement, start in one of two places:

The problem frame or research area that you started from in the Discovery phase. The mission or vision statement of your office.

If you have a strong problem statement from your Discovery phase, take a look at it again, from the other side of the Design phase. Does it capture why you made your offering?

If you have a mission or vision statement, look at it. Is the statement too vague or confusing? To find specific exercises on how to craft a Big Why, see the HCD Measurement Operations Guide.

Conclusion

The Delivery phase is much more than simply putting your offering into the world and hoping that people find and use it. It’s the way you translate the hard work of design into real-world impact that you can measure. Even if you never got the chance to intentionally design your offering and inherited it instead, investing in your delivery process can help you reach customers more efficiently and effectively than you have before. Delivery is the phase you’re going to be in for the rest of your offering’s time in the world; it’s worth the trouble to get it right.

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