Use design thinking principles to create a human-centred digital strategy

At the University of Exeter, our vision is to be “the most accessible and connected university destination”. We know that technology can transform what we do and how we do it, so we are committed to investing in digital technologies and digital skills development to meet the needs of our people, to strengthen our research and education and to maximise our global impact. 

Our digital strategy was co-created with our students, staff and the wider community. Since its launch, we have been engaging and communicating in as many ways, and through as many channels, as possible to reach across our communities in ways that suit them. We’ve used creative storytelling techniques, employed student interns to help communicate across the student cohort and even tried TikTok. In our 2030 digital strategy, we have committed to being agile, user- and data-led, to using design thinking principles and to involving our students and staff in every step of our digital transformation. 

One of our first user-led initiatives has been to recruit an in-house design team consisting of user researchers and content, user experience and visual designers. Led by me, as head of design, the team is starting to use human-centred design and design thinking principles to understand and solve our more complicated problems, as well as improve our user journeys and experiences. Design thinking is a methodology used to solve complex problems. It’s an iterative, non-linear process that often involves the following stages:

• Empathise: understand your users
• Define: frame the problem
• Ideate: generate ideas
• Prototype: make quick and cheap versions of your ideas
• Test: test your prototypes with users

This is still a new approach for us and the higher education sector more generally, so I’m going to explain how we are using creative problem-solving methods to help us bring our digital strategy to life.  

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Problem 1: we don’t really understand our users

The first design thinking step, “empathy”, can help here. We have brought staff and students from around the university into our user research and workshops to do things such as empathy mapping (visualising user attitudes and behaviours), which helps us understand the user, enables colleagues to put themselves in their users’ shoes and to connect with how they might be feeling about their problem, circumstance or situation. Our aim here is to build cohesion and community, create joint value for colleagues and the strategy team, and generate buy-in.

Problem 2: there’s a perception that someone else is deciding the future and staff feel they’re being ‘done to’

Ideation can help here, and this is the fun part! If you haven’t done it before, we set rules such as:

• No idea is a bad idea
• Defer judgement
• Encourage wild ideas
• Be visual.

It’s about generating lots of ideas; we bring together colleagues from relevant departments for a single ideation session that can be anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours long. There are lots of ideation techniques out there and we pick the right one for the situation, but the rule at this stage is that it’s about quantity over quality. We then cluster, group and merge ideas, analyse them against criteria such as feasibility, viability, desirability or a complexity v impact matrix. Our aim here is to allow staff and students to shape the future themselves and we want them to be invested right at the start and to talk confidently about the ideas, why they are right and what problems they solve or needs they meet.

Problem 3: colleagues are finding it hard to visualise what the strategy means for them and their users

We have started to evolve our vision and the themes from our digital strategy into specific concepts that bring them to life. These can be high fidelity on-screen designs or lower fidelity sketches illustrating what the future might look like. The important thing is that they give colleagues examples of what their experiences and interactions could be and help them to visualise the future. At this stage, we don’t know if the ideas and concepts are feasible or viable yet, but the aim here is that they provide inspiration and bridge the gap between a vision and reality.

Problem 4: some people can have a siloed view without the wider context  

When we share our concepts, we show them from the beginning of an interaction to its completion so that the full context of the experience is visible. Inevitably, people focus on their area of interest but this allows them to see the whole picture and, most importantly, to see it from the user’s perspective.

By applying design thinking methodology and creative storytelling techniques from the outset of our digital transformation journey, we aim to bring our digital strategy to life and take our staff and students along on the journey with us. 

Joe Holland is the digital team’s head of design at the University of Exeter.

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