Teams designing tools for the knowledge workplace commonly research how users work

Today, most product teams creating tools for knowledge work understand that they can benefit from connecting with the workers that they are striving to design for.

Researching user needs has become a conventional part of the application design process, providing inspiration that can fuel innovative systems.

While breakthroughs may come from purely technological developments, insights into user needs and behavior can uncover opportunities to advance workplace systems in powerful, engaging, and productive ways.

The communication of design research outputs has room for improvement

The wall of post it notes has become a typical symbol of design research and sense making, showing how a product team’s design brief can inductively emerge from a collection of disordered ideas.

It turns out that the core team that makes sense of this data does most of the learning. Communicating deep insights beyond the ordered wall of paper particles can be difficult. Many important ideas remain in a small group of people, essentially shelved or forgotten.

Researchers and designers could benefit from exploring new ways of communicating their early, formative learnings, with the goal of making more lasting and traceable impacts in their organizations.

There are ongoing opportunities for transformative design in knowledge work applications

The problem of communicating a range of insights from the field is often a major obstacle for organizations that design tools for the knowledge workplace. The connective tissue between a product team’s learnings and resulting design outcomes can be tenuous.

Knowledge workers’ practices can be difficult for product teams to understand. Outsiders can find it difficult to meaningfully critique the systems supporting specialized jobs until they have built real empathy for the work.

For a knowledge worker, thoughtful function can be truly beautiful. However, teams envisioning workplace interactions often overlook or under-communicate key opportunities to make a transformative impact with design.

Designing the design problem can lead to new visual languages

How could new forms of visual communication help product teams to understand and evolve workplace systems, highlighting where to invest effort in order maximize value and meet user goals?

How could thoughtful information design allow teams to move past post-it note particles of information to more systemic frameworks for design ideation, pushing the boundaries of what’s considered core for workplace user experiences?

How might these frameworks become distilled throughout the design research process so that they communicate a strategic point of view, accelerating innovation for knowledge work?

More to come on this topic, eventually to culminate in a new Application Concepting Series book.

Any and all comments appreciated, or tweet @J_Burghardt.