Digital transformation gone wrong

In the past few years I have enjoyed working on a number of digital products as a UX designer. Throughout my engagements, I couldn’t help but notice a certain pattern. I call it the Imperial Syndrome.

Imperial because it affects established brands that have been enjoying a nice ride at the top of the market. Until now…

Hopefully this story will help organisations embarking on or already going through a transformation process.

Phase one – The Legacy

Let’s rewind 15 to 30 years.

An entrepreneur, often a software developer, or some business partners, see an opportunity to develop a product to solve a particular problem.

The digital world is then a wild, barren territory, and though failure is certainly an option, launching a product comes with one key advantage: The potential of being first to market, a rare convenience nowadays.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying well-established product organisations had it easy. Only being first to market is a one-of-a-kind opportunity that contributed to building a number of digital success stories.

Let’s jump back to the late 90s. Unsurprisingly, as with every revolution, one of the most common forms of adversities these businesses face is resistance to change. How will a computer program do a better job than my accountant, 30 years of experience, and that good old file cabinet that has helped me and the previous generations flawlessly?

To make things just a bit harder, customers then have to learn to work with the hardware as well as the software.

Yet nothing can stop progress, and the more visionary customers start jumping on board, transcended by the excitement of new technologies.

More often than not, the resulting products end up growing into complex tentacular systems rife with nonsensical flows and counter-intuitive interfaces, reinforcing the absurd notion that some people are just “not good with computers”.

Those programs are built by engineers with no consideration of usability beyond a make-it-pretty-at-the-end, lipstick-on-a-pig phase. That’s what you could call tech-centric design.

But people get on with it. Because in the nineties, it is what the world has to offer and there is no going back to the old file cabinet, though I’m sure many must have longed for it.

Enters the competition.

Phase two – The Disruption

If the businesses above made it, it’s because they were good. They did outperform their competitors, yet they were usually playing by the same rules and fighting with the same weapons.

They probably did not expect to be threatened by school kids with sticks and stones.

Disruption starts as an insignificant, laughable breeze. Until you’re in real trouble.

Leveraging new and often risky technologies, the disrupters based their products on human-centred design, aware of the huge value it had provided their models, Apple, IBM, or more recently AirBnB to name a few.

When the slow and heavy industry leaders realised they had to start transforming, they were already a train behind.

Phase three – The Failed Reaction

Famous last words: We know how it’s done

We are now in the 2010s.

With an archaic legacy product laden with usability issues and relying on older technologies, the decision is generally to start from scratch, and develop a new product that would leverage the latest technologies and better compete with the disruptors.

The new baby is going to look much sleeker and will be user-friendly, it’s a promise.

The delivery method is agile, and designers are also brought on board.

Nothing wrong here, but if we look in the details, many little things are setting the project for failure:

1. In a lot of cases, the company does not want to serve the customers a half-baked product, which is understandable when you consider they are reputable organisations delivering fully-featured products, sometimes in high-risk industries. As a result, although the development method is generally agile, it is understood the product has to be somewhat complete before it is released.

What will happen if the customers can only achieve half what the legacy product offers? It will certainly be a disaster.

They often end up trying to complete the product before pushing it to market, which is risky and usually results in the absence of customer engagement.

2. There is no clear interest in investing too much time and effort in working closely with users. And that’s because being in the field for 20 years or so, they believe they know their audience, they know their users, and they know what their users want.

That’s one of the most frequent and most dramatic, expensive mistakes in digital re:transformation.

The form of delivery has changed but the foundational mindset has not, and the company think they can build a good product with a good team of clever engineers and developers. “We know how it’s done, we actually did it 20 years ago”. Except everything has changed:

The “first to market” wildcard is gone now, the customers have had a taste of something else, something better, products that help them achieve their goals. What the “new old” product does is deliver a mountain of features based on assumptions.

As a result, the new product launch is often a disaster, and even when delivery goes well, nothing more than disappointing.

Phase four – The Redemption

Adopting a user-centric approach, for real

That’s when the real questions get asked. What are we doing wrong? We’ve ticked all the boxes in the bingo card of product development and yet no one wants our new product.

Worse, the legacy product has started losing some serious ground to competitors while we were throwing millions into what we thought was going to be its successor.

With a legacy product users usually hate and millennials don’t care about, side by side with a new, shiny product that gets no traction, there are many potential options:

1. Restore the old product. Overhaul it from inside, one feature at a time.

One of the most common issues with that is the technology it was built on can be old and clunky. Not to mention the product usually suffers a bad reputation: It will always be that frustrating yet unavoidable reference. We have waited too long.

2. Take the new, failing product and pivot? Sounds like a good idea, after all the tech stack and the UI are fresher and user-friendly. The problem is that the customers will not understand how a product that failed in meeting their needs 12 months ago will do a better job now. How do you communicate the shift? How do you convince customers it will solve their problems this time?

3. Start from scratch. Put your startup hat on. Get ready for a risky, unpredictable journey, with a huge advantage: A brittle, but existing customer base.

New beginnings

Whatever the approach, they face a set challenges.

Naming and marketing

How do you name a new new product? Do you refer to the legacy name, or stay as far away from it? Has your value proposition changed?

A well established brand or product can actually end-up being a burden, and any decision will require a huge marketing effort and customer feedback.

Structure

“Business as usual” or does the new product deserve its own business model? If disrupting itself, should the organisation launch the product as a pseudo-independent startup?

Delivery

Many of those new projects benefit from a lean, agile approach in an MVP or RAT perspective, releasing the highest risk/highest value feature first in constant collaboration with the users.

Which takes me to my most important point (you know me)…

A shift to real user-centricity

A two-way communication with the users, today and forever

In the realisation of the real value of human-centred design, a real shift needs to occur in the organisation’s mindset and activities. A shift from knowing to learning, exploring and failing. A shift from dictating to listening and observing the customers. A shift from long-term planning to agility. A shift from silos to collaboration and transparency.

A user-centric approach requires a strong, shared vision across the company.

Back to square one

It is sad but true. The organisation may end up taking the same approach as the two young entrepreneurs in a garage next door. Their advantage is real as they benefit from an established customer base, strong business knowledge, experience, hopefully a sound structure and some money in the bank.

Yet they usually realise they have to re-discover their product-market fit, ever-changing user goals and value proposition.

History repeats itself

We all know the digital revolution will be followed by others, closer in time and arguably of greater impact.

After Hotmail, Myspace and many more digital falls, now is Facebook’s turn to slow down, leaving a void for the next big things to rise. It’s the cycle of life, not unlike the rise and fall of civilisations, one revolution at a time. There’s nothing wrong with declining after rising, after all it’s a natural pattern.

That’s why organisations need to realistically plan for that cycle.

Today’s disruptors will become tomorrow’s establishments, and they will have to deal with similar issues. Adapt or die.