Automated transcript 

## Introduction to Julia and Her Expertise

Today we have Julia with us, who is a seasoned design leader with over two decades of experience in enterprise ux.

She is the co-founder and CXO of whitespace, a Geneva based consultancy specializing in strategy, UX, and technology. Julia is known for ability to simplify complexity and create intuitive human-centric experiences that drive real. Impact her career spans a wide range of industries from luxury goods and global, from logistic to international organizations and tech startups.

Judas Work has empowered organizations like the UN, GSK, Audemars Piguet, and even several Swiss contents to align on strategic visions, elevate the user experience and perform large scale digital transformation. So it's really my pleasure today to welcome on the stage Julia! So Julia, welcome. Hello. Thanks for the great introduction, Daniele. Hello everybody. I'm really happy to be here with you today. 

## The Importance of Communicating with Stakeholders

I'm going to talk to you about a topic that's very close to my heart which is how to communicate to stakeholders.

So my title of the talk is Service Design with stakeholder needs. Let's jump right into that. So the problem statement here is how to turn complex artifacts that we produce as service designers into memorable takeaways and actions. Designers like you and me we love complexity. We love to solve.

Big problems. We will analyze them. We go out and research, we bring back all that research we go through, painstakingly synthesize it into insights. We put together these big journey maps or blueprints and we are really happy with that. We love it, right? On the other hand we have our stakeholders and the stakeholders, what they are looking for are solutions.

Being like that and giving them this kind of maze is not going to make them happy. They want to have that, nice diagonal yellow error that will point them to where should they go now? So what, okay, thank you for all these insights, but what do I do with that? And I love the structure that Daniele has given us, which is, three learnings which has to, I have to reduce all my thoughts into these kind of three insights.

## Empathizing with Stakeholders

My first one is empathize with your stakeholders. Now I'll get you into that, what that means in just a bit. The next one is simplify. It's very easy to say. It's very hard to do. And the third one is think about the outcome. Where do you want to go with all that? Right from the beginning. And don't lose sight of that.

So we often start by setting out a vision. Then we go very busy, get very busy in all the details, and we lose track of where we actually wanted to go with all that. Now the first one, empathizing. We as designers empathize very nicely with our users, right? We do that constantly. It's our mantra.

And I feel we sometimes forget to empathize with our stakeholders with, and then when I talk about stakeholders, mostly really the business owners, the decision makers, right? The people who in the end will do something or not with what we're bringing them. Those people, super, super busy.

Lack of time constantly. If you are working with big organizations with, we do a lot they have no time. Their calendars are now double, triple booked. You have to really make an effort to get a little bit, we have to do these workshops that are accelerated. They're very intense, so that's one thing.

They just need to have the right information to make the right decision. So just enough information that's needed. Don't give them everything that you found in the kitchen sink. Give them like the little, silver platter that, that they need to look at and say, yes. You know that, that's great.

They care mostly about the business impact. That has several implications, right? So one is obviously we have the users' welfare at heart and so should they. And they do to a certain degree. But in the end it's a lot about the the business whether there's going to be cost savings with efficiencies, optimization.

Right now with ai, everything is about, how can we optimize things. It can be, obviously increasing revenue is another one. So that's what their mind is at and that's what we have to acknowledge when we are doing our work as well. And one of the things here that's important is to. Try to talk their language more.

So we have our own lingual, we can't expect them to know all our terminologies, and probably they shouldn't. One thing that I have found really useful over time to say, why do you need more user research? It's the risking de-risking is a big thing. And they love it. It's yes, we want to de-risk this.

How can we do that? So that's just an example. And then not to forget they need to look good meaning they have their own career path. They have, if you're working on a very strategic initiative for them, there's a lot of stakes in it as well. You have to help them to be shining themselves.

An example just to make it more concrete. So we've been brainstorming internally at whitespace about our clients and different client types. So obviously not all stakeholder stakeholders are the same. Not all clients are the same. And we have come up with a few which we think are a bit silly maybe.

We didn't take it too seriously, but it actually rang very true to all of us. So we have the engaged leader, obviously love to work with the engaged leader. That's a great personality to, to work with. We also have the stress micromanager and we have the clueless curious, so there are all these sort of different flavors of clients that you might encounter.

There's just the getting it done, that's a very typical maybe more like me, medium level manager who says I just helped all these things. I have to check off all that. We are building empathy maps around these personas and it really helps reflect for us personally in the way how we engage.

How much material do we show to them? How much do they need? Because some of them might be very interested actually in looking at detailed user journeys and others might not at all. 

## Simplifying Complex Information

Next point here is to simplify. As I mentioned before, it's really hard to simplify and you don't want to dumb things down either.

You want to be simple, but still be really effective and convey in a way also, very complex situation. Can't just be dumbed down. It still says complex, but how do you manage to give them the right kind of information? So one of the things that we've learned during many workshops is that you start by telling a story.

Making a very specific, very detailed story can have a big impact. The next one is to visualize your journey. So I don't mean just having emojis going up and down, which is great but also, really storyboarding the experience. And I'll show you some examples in just a bit. Synthesizing your insights.

So one of the mistakes that I have made as well is I come back with all kinds of insights and I think they're all really important and how can I communicate them back? You need to basically come up. I. With mega or meta insights that can be communicated again easily. It can be just three main points.

It can be six. It shouldn't be much more than that because after that you lose your senior stakeholders. So you go at different levels. You give them to, to the very sort of senior ones. You say there are these six items. You really have to. Believe that's the most important ones.

Other people might go down more into details, into root cause analysis and whatnot. But not everybody needs to go there. Going back to the very senior ones, or not even just the very senior ones. But the one pagers have been extremely helpful in terms of communication. Those are the things that get shared around that.

People want to see. What was this project about? Just read this. So here, what does it mean in practice? Here's an example of a beautiful journey map, which is actually an interactive one, it's done with Journey Track. It's a recent, it's actually a current project. It's fuzzy for reasons.

Don't try to screenshot it. Please. And so the beauty with these interactive tools is you can manage what which lines you can see you can tag, you can link pain points to insights into action items. So it's a really powerful tool and we recommend our clients to actually, get licenses for one of these solutions because they really help over time also to, to measure the impact and have the as is and the two B journeys and so on. So it's besides having, research repositories like, like dovetail, we think that journey mapping is really key, but it is too complex.

You can't show this again in a workshop. It's just too much. So you have to basically make it more visual simplify it a bit, and what you're seeing here is in a way a visual scenario, but also a storyline. So the storyline is basically going through the journey of. A this one is about a medical assigned scientific lead.

They work in pharma. They're the ones communicating to the doctors, to the healthcare professionals. And so what do they do when they prepare, when they have an engagement? And what do they do after the engagement? Many steps, different pain points, different opportunities and so on. Here you can see this whole scenario a bit more zoomed in, and you can see how you can.

Really relate to the emotions of this particular MSL as they're called, and what she's going through when she's preparing her engagements.

## Focusing on Outcomes

The number three insight that I'd like to leave with you is to think about the outcome. So we don't just want to have artifacts for the sake of making them. We really want them to have an impact and we want them to be powerful to align, to con convince and to get people to act in the end. In this previous example, for instance, we then created a video and the video had the visual, kind of scenario with the voiceover telling the story. And we made people just sit and listen to the worst case scenario for eight minutes and having to reflect. And that had a really powerful impact. You bring them along the journey in many ways to get stakeholders along and engaged.

I mentioned workshops a lot. Obviously that's the obvious one, but there's other ways to get them informed if they have any time. I would encourage them to attend some user research sessions or to participate in user testing. If you're testing an existing product it it just has such an impact to see, so that they can see firsthand what's actually going on.

They do the low hanging fruit, and that really resonates back to my point about he should use the language of the business they're looking for. How can we quickly have an impact? How can we fix this? So once you've laid out all the problems, it's a really good way to say, okay. There's a lot of things to do, but let's look at the things that we can improve like tomorrow or this quarter.

And so that's another one to that, that, that is really useful and practical. Then again, there's the kind of more longer term vision about this roadmap or action plan. And there I would just stress to be really, focused on, on value based and actionable. So the value comes from really thinking obviously about the business value, but also the user benefits.

First as a strategy and then second about the tech feasibility, which is often coming, being put front and center, but. Emphasizing the the actual value. Why is this important and what are we fixing with that can eliminate a lot of feature, kind of scope creep that might not be actually necessary.

So never hesitates to, question certain decisions or even ideas that might be very tech driven, especially in this day and age where, AI is just all over and everywhere. And then my last point here would be never to forget to always visualize everything. That's in a way a no brainer for designers, but I've seen quite a few of these final outputs that were extremely heavy in words and very poor in, in visualization.

It's just one of the things that will resonate always. And Daniella, I think I am done. This is my visualization. Beautiful. Hey, thank you so much for this round. You are extremely efficient. I see the Swiss culture really is in the blood and is really here now. This is wonderful to see.

Thank you so much. 

## Q&A Session

We already have one question in the room. Please continue to share your questions in the chat. We will start with the first question from Juliana. Juliana, ask. What are your strategies when stakeholders only want just enough information to decide on a project? The topic is complex and nuanced, so how do you deal with this?

I don't need to know everything, but sometimes there is a wish for us to share a bit more details and nuance. Yeah, that's a good question. I think that's one of our weaknesses as service designers that we get to know a lot. We really go deep into the matter and we know so much more that we would like to share.

But I do think depending on who you're talking to, they might not need it all. They might really just need the core decision here is what should be done. And give them some, very simplified. Why that is a pro, why that matters. I don't think that everybody needs to know everything all the details that, that's just my experience and can open some kind of worms as well.

What I do find interesting is, things where you, for instance, when we do reports, we have the kind of high level insights, but then we always link into the more detailed analysis. So someone who really wants to drill more into depth, into whatever, some specific topic they will have access to all the evidence that we found.

But not everybody needs that. They will basically trust us that we have done the research. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this possibility of saying. We need to not dumb it down, but go to the essence of it. And then for the curious ones, there is always space to ask questions and always space to go deeper with the other documents provided.

It's super hard. I think that's really I, it's a big struggle to condense things together in, in a meaningful way without losing the essence. So I always think about mark Twain, you probably have heard that quote a million times.

I didn't have time to write a long no, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one. And it's that it's very. Difficult, but in, in the end, when you get it it, it makes sense and it resonates. So yeah, it it's a, it's an extra effort to make things shorter and to the point.

Absolutely. We have another question from Ben. In mega, in many legacy organizations, they do not appreciate the value of human-centered design or Service Design. As disciplines, even when they might say they want the customer to be at the heart. How do you help these organizations to learn experience, the value we bring?

That's a very good one. Yeah, it's a story of my life, honestly. I've I've worked in this field for I think Daniele said over two decades. It's almost three decades. I started in the nineties, so I've seen a lot of. Change and so on. But the constant that has always been there is that you have to convince, you have to persuade people to see the light, so to speak.

Some organizations are better than others and it definitely helps to have within the organization some believers in Service Design or design thinking. If you don't, it, it is extremely hard for sure. What we've done with large organizations where we have. Basically an in with people who are.

Believers is that we help them to promote. For instance, design thinking is one of the big things that we're promoting with one of our clients across all the organization, which is huge. And so we do a little drop in sessions where we say, okay, you come in come with your problem that you'd like to discuss and we have a preselection for that.

And then we have a, just a one hour session. Showing them design thinking. What does it do? How can it help you? And it's just a teaser to get them to realize, yeah. That kind of way of thinking can actually really help unblock them in certain ways where they've been stuck and turning around in circles forever.

Have endless meetings and never getting anywhere. So I say showing them not by presenting, not by giving them, big sort of talks that. Doesn't seem to work so well, but really making it about their problem and really concrete examples, giving them some sort of teasers of how this could how might we and often that has then led into longer engagements and successful ones.

Another one is within a single organization is obviously we've done a lot of projects and then we can do many case studies, little videos where we interview people who have experienced the benefits of having our services. And then others can see that and hear from other people.

Not hearing from us, but hearing from others is always the best publicity. Absolutely. Yeah, there is power in these longer relationships where you then can showcase, Hey, in this department this is what happened. Yeah. And then it's oh, if the guys in HR did it. We can do because we are better than hr.

And so then there is like a positive jealousy, which can happen quite a beautiful element. We have another question from Lely who's saying first, thank you, Julia. Have you encountered stakeholders more focused on looking good? Than real impact. Who maybe who feel hesitant about the design team progress?

How do you manage and control this so people who want maybe to shine for the ego be on the stage, but maybe are not less interested in the kind of deeper impact? Let me think. Honestly I don't think I have had that happen so much. I do. See people who obviously want to shine. That's why I put it as one of my criteria of empathy with the stakeholders. They also need to do their own pr. They need to, show some success. So for sure, I think there's an element to that, but they are usually seeking to have an impact.

And if they if they're already open to having service designers work with them, then they are usually. Inclined to see do that for a reason. So they are on their end really pressed for, demonstrating some sort of result. And I think that's where the frustration often comes from, is that when we do initial research, for instance, it can be very slow, very long and and then people get impatient saying where is it?

Where's the outcome? Where can we where are our personas? We need to move quickly. We have to make some decisions about the next release or whatever it is. So we all, I. Or my team has often gotten that kind of pressure, especially when you start out and people don't know you so well.

There might be also some, maybe a bit of mistrust. What are they doing really? And what I think what works there is to just really be very transparent and communicate a lot. So if you are having common. Chats like teams or Slack is to even just give like little updates.

And they don't have to be, formal reports or anything. But it can be like every week there's okay, this week we interviewed, these three users and here's some kind of initial thoughts or summary and that helps to give them a little bit of food for thought without saying no.

We've, unless everything, or here's our key insights, I think that, is obviously then the next step. But just again about the taking them on the journey that kind of frequent communication and check-in can really be very helpful to, to get them to also see the value I.

Thank you so much. We will even have time for a tiny little bonus question which is telling about the efficiency that we have. That's wonderful. So we have a, another question from Juliana who asks, what formats or tool or frameworks do you work best for you to communicate with a short amount of time to stakeholders?

I wonder what you mean with communicate or what to communicate, but if you just as I just was mentioning in my previous answer you. Can communicate any way or format. I would go where the client is basically. If the client communicates primarily on, on teams messages, that's where you would have that constant kind of flow of information and communication.

If the client has some sort of intranet and they have a special space and then you go there, we do obviously always have some communication or, reporting out where we create reports. I'm not a huge fan of them, but it's something that is usually necessary in larger organizations and with bigger projects where you have these sort of report out, deliverables. And there, I think what works well is to have a very short version, but even doing like a video narration format which as I was hinting at before. Having the storyboard with a voiceover that gives you more detail and then sending that out.

People were, when they were. Listening to that in that example that I was sharing they were then immediately asking, how can we share that? Can we send that to other people? Because just more different way of hearing things than, getting yet another PowerPoint. Which, obviously is less exciting in the end.

Thank you so much. We made it through not only three questions, but even three plus one question. Thank you so much pose for the three insights and the four answers. 

## Closing Remarks and Networking Opportunities

Before we come to a close, I want to mention that within your company, whitespace, you are always looking for bright talent freelancers who can join.

For specific projects. So if you are someone who is interested in working on enterprise ux enterprise Service Design, having worked on at big scales, and especially if you have some experience in the Swiss market, for example, in pharma, then linkedIn is your place to get in touch with Julia. It's always a good place to get in contact and then see if maybe one day something happens together.

But for now, I want to say a big thank you to you, Julia. A big thank you to everyone who has joined today's event. It's been a pleasure to learn from you once more. And I wish you all a lovely rest of the day. We meet back tomorrow for another session day. Four of the Swiss Service Design Week.

But until then, I wish you all a lovely evening. Thank you again, Julia. Thank you, Daniele. And thanks to everybody who has been watching and commenting. Really appreciate it.