Taking an agile and fast paced immersive approach to design research, STBY recently completed a series of quick research iterations exploring innovative payment solutions for the UK and Dutch market.
Based on successful experiences elsewhere, the client company asked STBY to help them investigate local differences in perspectives and habits around payment solutions – and also how these could be translated into local service adaptations.
STBY facilitated a series of guided fieldtrips and interviews with local businesses and experts in London and Amsterdam, giving a perspective on unique local practices to a large and multidisciplinary client tem. The research took place in rapid cycles with different members from the client team joining in for each of the interviews. This helped the team to understand first hand the opportunities and challenges they would need to factor in when designing for local markets.
Success in such fast moving markets is often connected with development speed, as companies benefit greatly from being first to introduce their products. Such constraints mean that design research needs to adapt its processes and make a few trade-offs to fit the particular needs of the company. In this case, the speed and therefore limited documentation and analysis of the research was compensated by a heavy involvement of the client team during the customer immersions and by covering as many possible customer perspectives as possible in a tight time frame.
As a successful company delivering a successful service, it is possible for people to become very confident on their own assumptions of how customers in different countries will react to their service. However, specially in a topic related with money, there are many cultural norms, needs and perspectives that need to be taken into consideration to allow a successful service introduction.
This willingness by the client team to adapt their services to local contexts has a parallel in STBY’s practice of adapting our methods to fit the particular context of our clients. In this case, a highly collaborative and agile design research approach proved to be the ideal way forward for us and for our client.