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Steelcase is the global leader (~$3 billion) in furniture for workplace and office environments. The company is headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and employs over 10,000 employees. Customers and consumers alike value Steelcase products because they're built well, provide great ergonomics, and help people do their best work.
Office environments have always changed over time. Open manufacturing floors turned to cubicles. Cubicles into bull pens. Bull pens evolved into hot-seating. The rate of change in the last 10-20 years has accelerated even further. Meanwhile, Steelcase products are built extremely well (did you know... Steelcase's first successful product was the steel waste bin, to prevent fires from cigarettes in the office trash bins?!). So, clients of Steelcase struggle when the furniture applications outlast the office style in terms of generations.
The increasing rate of change of office environments posed an opportunity / challenge for the company. Clients found it cost effective that Steelcase products lasted many years, if not decades, but work styles evolved faster than that, leaving them with much unused furniture or environments not suitable to today's standards. As a result, we were tasked with deciphering how to better align incentives. Our goal was to prototype and test new service models to ensure clients and consumers make the best use of their physical work spaces over time.
View related UXR best practices learned from this project and more. See 5 Methods of Prioritizing Recommendations for how to order UX recommendations by most important variables, and 5 Inflection Points of User Research for how to create meaning from user data that adds significant value.
Rapid prototyping Design planning Cross-department collaboration Vendor management Financial modeling Wireframing information architecture Low-fidelity UI design
My position within the Growth Initiatives department of corporate Research and Strategy allowed me to see / work with all facets of the company including: finance, research, product design, legal, strategy, IT, manufacturing, and more. Growth Initiatives leads new venture projects within the organization that fall inline with the company’s strategic vision, but outside of the current core business.
The small, nimble group functions as a start-up, but has the benefit of tapping into the many resources made available by the large enterprise. Once projects are proven successful (or unfavorable) they are adopted (or not) by the organization’s core. The main purpose of the team is to quickly develop and prototype new business concepts in order to test their business viability / user desirability / technical feasibility with the intent of bringing new products or services to market. This mentality makes for a quick pace, simultaneous project activities, and a learn-by-doing process.
During the 3-month design sprint we tapped into a variety of processes, methods, and frameworks to drive our ideas. The notion of design thinking alongside critical thinking was very present in our work. At many instances we found ourselves diverging and converging on our point of view in order to throttle up and down the level of abstraction among the problems we faced.
We began by developing a 30-60-90 plan to structure our work and coordinate our weekly activities. Following, we generated storyboard narratives to consolidate our models into a clear, concise, and compelling format. Several workshops with other stakeholders within Steelcase, as well as a trip to IDEO Palo Alto, helped us work through which aspects of the business models to prototype. After which, we worked quickly to test many of the hypotheses revolving around our project at the intersection of user desirability, technical feasibility, and business viability.
One influential condition was the quick pace in which we had to learn, digest, and incorporate new information into our project’s scope. We essentially touched all parts of the organization, and at many times were juggling several experiments and prototypes simultaneously. The notion of indexing information in a highly visual manner, while prioritizing it using frameworks allowed us to stay focused on our objectives without getting too bogged down in the details. At many times, the design methods helped us to keep alignment while dealing with highly ambiguous problems.
Overall, I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. Steelcase treats their employees very well, the project exposed me to an array of learning experiences, as well as enlightened me to more areas I can still focus on. Not to mention that time in Michigan is an well spent to enjoy outdoors with friends and family; fishing, tubing, swimming, skateboarding, micro-brews and more.
Paul has a natural ability to move easily between high-level conceptual thinking and detailed execution work, which was critical for a venture like ours. His work was used in a variety of ways including executive presentations, concept development, business model design and storyboard creation.” – Director of Business Development
