BACKGROUND

It was bring your child(ren) to work day at WalmartLabs. So, we needed to come up with activities to entertain our miniature guests, and therefore decided to run a guided design studio for kids. We took over our large conference room for the day and outfitted each participant with a goody bag containing markers, colored pencils, and sugar. Lots of sugar.

PLAN

As anyone with kids, or retired summer camp counselors like myself can attest, it’s not easy getting 10 children, all hopped up on sugar, to focus on a workflow. Because of this, the design of the studio itself needed to have a flow that was open-ended, allowing the child design team to be completely imaginative, have an engagement arch with multiple peaks, and provide an end result that they could hold in their hands.

We decided to have them create an iPad game, from scratch! But here’s the trick: they didn’t know they were making a game at first. That was saved for the end, the final stretch, the big reveal.

“Today we’re going to create a fictional story together. Doesn’t that sound like fun!?! (blank stares) So, what makes up a really great story? What do all stories have in common?”

PROCESS

The themes we wanted to convey through our activity were collaboration, teamwork and ideation. We wanted to illustrate that by working together we can create something greater than any single imagination could surmise, an end product whose ingenuity was greater than the sum of its parts.

We’re going to write a story as a group, first, by identifying the common components of every story (who, when/where, what, why, how). This obviously took some guidance, but it connected.

Who: CharactersWhen/Where: SettingWhat: Mission / PlotWhy: MotivationHow: Storyline

Next, we’d explore each of those components by drawing individual ideas onto Post-it notes and placing them on the whiteboard beneath each heading. The Post-it exercise is generally more fruitful when each one contains a little sketch of an idea, but a word on a post-it works too.

CREATING CHARACTERS

Beneath the “Characters” heading we created 4 main characters by reviewing our individual Post-it notes as a group, allowing each designer to describe their idea one by one. We group similar ideas together, ideas, decide what traits to keep, remove or expand upon.

MEET THE CAST

STORYBOARDING

We made up some simple iPad templates and printed them on 11 x 17" paper. These helped us frame individual scenes which we then used to string the plot line together.

STORYLINE

The year is 2048. Setting is a post-apocalyptic city in Arkansas, USA. Our heroes stand before a landscape speckled with tall buildings and lightning. There is also water…somewhere. The story begins when Rupert becomes possessed by Hairy Pudding (affixed to his head), and turns evil! Rupert rides his motorcycle up to the abandoned 7–11, where he plans to meet best friends Fiona and O’Laina. They’ve been scouring Arkansas collecting the ingredients of a magical cure to all the diseases plaguing the world: Pudding-possession, Zombification, and Orcism. They find the final ingredient to their magical potion in the bottom of a Cracker Jack box — a Mirror toy. The potion is complete! And just in the nick of time, as Rupert arrives, they trick him into drinking the potion, turning Hairy Pudding into a good robot pudding-bowl, remaining friends all the while.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

We used the iPad app Bloxels to build our sprite character Rupert, and set him loose in a dystopian future Arkansas.

THE END…

How fun! The junior design team was able to see how the final product was made through collaboration, and I was able to blissfully ‘waste’ hours of work-time sketching a sentient, robotic bowl of pudding with jet propulsion.

Picture yourself in a meeting where the goal is to take a product requirement and build something new and innovative. Multiple stakeholders have their own ideas of what to build and how to build it, but no one can agree where to start. Sound familiar? This happens more often than it should.

Why are we arguing about possible solutions and making decisions based on our opinions and assumptions, when we don’t understand the people, problem, or product yet?

Think back to math class, in which just writing the answer to a problem wasn’t enough. We had to show every step of our work, so the teacher could understand our thinking and how we got to the solution. We all had to rationalize our mental processes by using what we learned in class.

In the revamped Walmart design team, we follow what we learned in school — rationalize our thinking by using meaningful research and design methods, so we’re not jumping to solutions based on our own assumptions. We want to understand customers by involving them in the design process.

CO-DESIGN AND PARTICIPATORY DESIGN

Our team is changing how we approach traditional design thinking. We want to understand the needs of our customers and gain empathy for them. One way we do this is by involving them in the ideation and design process.

Rather than design in isolation, we want to co-design. Co-designing means involving designers, product managers, developers, business stakeholders, and actual customers to design solutions together.

How do we involve everyday people, who are not designers, in our design process? Too often, companies and individuals make these assumptions about creativity:

It belongs to a select few.It’s owned by creative right-brained thinkers, such as designers, painters, artists, and poets.It’s unavailable to left-brained thinkers, such as mathematicians and engineers.

These assumptions just aren’t true. As product design leader Catherine Courage says in her TEDx video, “Creativity is a birthright, available to all, but used by few.”

One way of co-designing is through a research method we use with our customers called participatory design. This helps our customers express their experiences, needs, and aspirations creatively and collaboratively, in a way traditional interviews and surveys can't reach. Participatory design gives customers a voice in the design process.

We recently used this method for a project to help witness our customers’ reality and ideals when it came to shopping for their everyday essentials. This, along with other research methods we used, helped us better understand our customers’ journeys. It’s a powerful way to transform the opinions and assumptions of our design and product teams into the human-centric solutions we’re developing.

The power of participatory design is that it can apply to all phases of design: Exploratory, conceptual, and evaluative. An experienced researcher will know how to set up a participatory activity, depending on the problems and questions that need to be addressed.

OUTPUTS VS. OUTCOMES

Another different approach we’re taking to design thinking in our team is to measure and improve our design continuously, even after implementation. We do this by shifting focus from outputs to outcomes.

Infatuation with speed causes some companies to trade user experience quality for faster development and release times. Somewhere at the top of the management chain, a release date is decided, and meeting that date becomes everyone’s priority. With the whole team focused on shipping, the pressure on designers is huge. Because designers are expected to deliver and can’t let the development team slow down, teams get stuck in shipping mode.

These companies are focused on outputs, or the “what”: Features, products, services, and revenues. They forget the most important part - the outcomes. Outcomes are the “why,” the benefits your customers receive from your stuff. They can relate to changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, or conditions, and eventually create meanings, relationships, and differences.

What you measure determines what you achieve. To create impact, we need to measure impact, which means measuring outcomes. Shipping is still very important to us. But by taking a data-led approach, we are now measuring the impact that the value we ship has on our customers, which helps us create even bigger impact.

IT’S ALL ABOUT CUSTOMERS

The design team is excited to reshape our product roadmap to better serve customers. Co-design helps us understand what our shoppers really mean when they say “I want” or “I need.” Our focus on outcome, rather than outputs, enables us to create experiences that map to those customer aspirations. As we say at Walmart, “Who’s number one? The customer, always.”

In the dizzying seven months since I joined Walmart we've worked at startup speed to launch everything from 2-Day Free Shipping to Pickup Discount, creating meaningful shopping experiences that save our customers time and money. We’ve seen how our design work can move the business, but are even more energized at hearing the stories of how this positively impacts financial and time budgets in ordinary households. For example, my family disabled our dash buttons this week after Walmart rolled out an Easy Reorder experience that we’ve been steadily iterating on for months. We’re saving a lot more on our weekly essentials, and it’s much simpler than hitting individual hardware buttons that often get out of sync. We don’t design for ourselves, and living in the Silicon Valley bubble makes my home experience anything but ordinary – but this anecdote excites me that millions of other households can experience the same benefits.

Working at this intense pace has also helped me get to know what makes the Walmart Design team tick. Beyond the global scale, the energizing influence of a visionary and experienced leadership team, the breadth that comes from working collaboratively across equally passionate product, engineering and business teams, or the gratifying depth that comes from practicing excellence in a specific design discipline; this team is pulled together by a fundamental desire to have a purposeful impact in the lives of our customers. It's no coincidence that during this same time period Walmart has continued our fight against hunger and furthered our efforts around sustainability, pursuing broader efforts to have a positive impact on the world's social and environmental systems.

Design has a unique role to play at Walmart, tying together our obsessive focus on the customer, our global scale, and our efforts to have purposeful impact in the world. Our team's manifesto is Design for Living Better, and today we're launching this site to share what this means to us and invite other designers to join us in making it tangible in the world.

Here's a glimpse into what Design for Living Better means from the team: