CharterMason HCD practice

Our Human Centred Design practice

We seek to positively impact how people experience their daily life and engage in the

world.We design with and for people to create meaningful and sustainable outcomes. We do this by melding human insight with business practicalities, and building capability inside the business.

Our practice

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Our practice is founded on three mindsets which enable us to navigate complexity, create compelling outcomes and provide differentiating and sustainable solutions for people.

HUMAN CENTRED

We put people at the centre of everything we do. We seek to deeply understand

people and their context.

DESIGN LED

We use human centred design as our approach

for collaboratively solving problems, identifying

opportunities and creating compelling

outcomes.

HOLISTIC MIND

We are strategic thinkers. We consider

the systems, connections,

dependencies and relationships that

solutions need to be sustainable.

We solve complex strategic problems and create desired futures using a human centred approach. Our work is founded in discipline knowledge and practices of design, systems thinking, behavioural science and organisational change.

Our approach


EXPLOREWe understand the

context and problem through research; and through deep insight define opportunities.

EXPERIMENTWe co-create with

people to experiment possible solutions and balance customer and

business needs.

EMBODYWe work with you to

deliver and communicate the final solution, measure the outcome and capture

learning.

ENGAGEWe engage with the people impacted by the problem throughout the project – you, key stakeholders, customers and others

to ensure understanding, learning and alignment.

We tailor our approach based on your outcome. We use our bespoke ‘triple diamond framework’ to identify opportunities and design meaningful and impactful solutions for people.

Our services


Service designService vision | Service blueprints

| Service journeys | Channel strategy | Customer journeys

Customer centricityCustomer centric maturity

assessment | Customer centric strategy | Mindset & culture |

Transformative change

Strategic designPurpose and vision | Strategy |

Mindset & culture | Organisational transformation |

Organisational design

Capability building and coaching

Coaching | Facilitation | Training

Customer research

Human insights

Our services


Strategic design

Purpose and vision | Strategy | Mindset & culture | Organisational transformation | Organisational design

Service design

Service vision | Service blueprints | Service journeys | Channel strategy | Customer journeys

• We help you establish your purpose, vision and strategy for your future.

• We collaboratively design new structures and ways of working to enable you to create the most valuable relationships between your business, your people and your customers.

• We work with you to shift mindsets, build capability, and embed new organisational ways of working that are human centred and design led.

• We create compelling customer experiences that deliver competitive advantage and drive customer loyalty and advocacy.

• We help you intentionally craft the end to end experience and delivery of your services.

• We balance customer needs with business practicalities. We take a holistic approach by considering all customer touch-points in the service journey. This enables us to uncover opportunities for more efficient streamlined services, that are easier to deliver for your people and result in greater customer delight.

Customer centricity

Customer centric maturity assessment | Customer centric strategy | Mindset & culture | Transformative change • A truly customer-centric culture is capable of disrupting the market. We help you build the mindset, culture and capacity for customer centricity and transformative change.

• We use our bespoke Customer Centricity organisational maturity assessment to determine where you are on your journey.

• We help you identify areas for development, determine strategies for growth and work with you to build maturity and embed change.

Our services


Capability building and coaching

Coaching | Facilitation | Training

Customer research

Human insights

• We deliver a variety of Coaching services for Executives, Leaders and their teams including Human Centred Leadership to empower leading human centricity in their area of the organisation, and Human Centred Design to build design capability through project execution.

• We offer a range of experiential and immersive workshops and capability building services which can be run in-house within your organisation. These can be customised to your needs and allow you to explore the way design could help you meet the challenges facing your organisation.

• We are experts in facilitating purpose and vision workshops for organisations, leaders and teams.

• We conduct qualitative research to develop deep understanding of the behaviours, motivations and decision making processes of people and how they experience the world.

• We synthesise data to reveal insights, opportunities and risks for your organisation.

• We have extensive experience in using a number of methods and tools for customer research including ethnography, contextual inquiry, co-creation workshops, interview studies and diary studies enabling us to design the most appropriate approach to meet your needs.

practice in large organisations and how to grow an organisation to maturity in this area. Since this time she has continued to build upon her research through practice, having established a human centred design academy, enabling customer centric organisations and delivering outcomes based on deep human insight.

Through this combination of academic and practical experience, Zaana has developed her own unique approach and methods which will be used as the foundation of our Human Centred Design Practice.

Dr Zaana HowardHuman Centred Design Practice Lead


Zaana is our Human Centred Design Practice Lead, with extensive experience in leading complex strategic and service design projects. She specialises in enabling design led and customer centric cultures, and developing human centred design capability.

She is one of the first people in Australia to obtain a PhD in design thinking. Her research focused on understanding design thinking in

Examples of our experience...


Frontline empathic customer conversations


Services: Customer centricity | Capability building and coaching

A leading insurance company recognised it had a significant problem with member retention. Our Practice Lead conducted research workshops with Contact Centre staff and qualitatively analysed a number of calls in order to understand how staff handled these calls and how they could be improved.

Insights from this research led to the hypothesis that if frontline staff increased their empathy they would be better able to understand and respond to their needs. In turn, she hypothesised that it would increase the retention of members calling to cancel their membership. Our Practice Lead worked with a group of eight agents and designed and delivered three workshops focusing on understanding empathy, increasing active listening and improving skills in crafting open questions. In addition, she provided additional coaching with participants on request.

Agents who participated retained 4 times as many members as the control group. In addition, the use of offers to retain members, such as discounts, decreased. In addition participants individual NPS scores increased from an average baseline of between 8.8-9.3 points within 2 weeks of the workshop. The conversation shifted to one often based on price to one instead of value for the customer.

Due to this success, this capability uplift project in having empathy based conversations with customers was rolled out to all 700 frontline staff across Retail and Contact Centre channels.

Customer centric capability strategy and Executive coaching


Services: Strategic design | Capability building and coaching

This financial services company had a strategic imperative to put the customer at the forefront of how they work. As part of this, our Practice Lead co-led a project to develop and deliver on a strategy for building human centred and design led capability across the business.

The team worked with business leaders to determine their needs and developed a strategy. As customer centricity exists in the behaviours, decisions and actions people make everyday the strategy focused on individual transformation to then shift toward a customer centric culture. We were engaged to design and deliver capability initiatives for Executives, Leadership teams and all employees.

As part of this strategy our Practice Lead co-designed the development and roll-out of an Executive Coaching program for executive leaders to enable them to be more customer and human centric in their leadership and way of working. 27 Executives participated in the seven month program, of which our Practice Lead coached 9. Coaching topics included empathic leadership, mindset and habits, possibility and experimentation, and purpose.

This program transformed how the Executives and their leadership teams worked together, with participants becoming recognised customer advocates respected across the business. In addition, many participants experienced significant personal growth over the program which had a positive impact on their personal and team’s work performance and extended to their personal relationships.

Establishing a human centred design academy


Services: Strategic design | Capability building and coaching

Our Practice Lead led the design, development and launch of a human centred design academy, a capability building service offering as part of a design consultancy. The academy was designed from extensive industry research on capability programs, insights from our Practice Lead’s PhD research and built using a human centred design approach.

She conducted research interviews with potential participants and organisational clients to understand learner needs from a content, structure and experience perspective. From insights the academy was designed to develop a human centred and design led mindset through learning the toolsets of design.

Our Practice Lead led a team to design and deliver customised immersive learning experiences to build capability to support client strategy needs and outcomes. Program topics included: embodying empathy; understanding complexity; customer centric thinking and design; creating meaningful customer experiences; co-designing with customers; human centred decision making; collaboration and creating high performing teams; customer research; prototyping and testing.

Within the first year of operation, the academy generated $250K in revenue and programs were running weekly. Many participants had significant personal as well as professional transformations within the courses with several now leading customer centric and design led programs of work in their organisations. In addition, the academy is now operating programs globally.

Understanding drivers for purchasing insurance


Services: Strategic design | Service design | Customer research

Our Practice Lead co-led an engagement focused on understanding customer needs, motivations and behaviours when purchasing insurance products in order to build the ideal customer journey. The key outcome of the project was to increase the digital conversion rate for purchase of this type of insurance.

The project started with six co-design workshops for three different products. Our Practice Lead collaborated closely with the client project team, mentoring and building their capability in running customer workshops and synthesising data into insights. Workshops were framed to understand the customer’s context and needs when purchasing the insurance products and their ideal journey to purchase. There was no bias toward the online channels in the design of the workshops. Key insights focused on the customer need for knowledge rather than information which resulted in their confidence to purchase.

Our Practice Lead also facilitated a strategic organisational workshop to share research insights and to co-develop an action plan with key stakeholders. Deliverables included an ideal customer journey, design principles for delivery and an action plan as well as strategic imperatives for achieving the outcomes the client desired.

The Client redesigned the digital experience based on customer insights and strategic actions we recommended. This saw an immediate increase in online application by 100% and an increase in quote to buy conversion of 64%.

Co-design for community inclusion


Services: Capability building and coaching | Customer research

As part of a National Community Inclusion initiative our Practice Lead led a project working with 11 disability service providers to build capability in co-design and coach them in leading co-design projects to increase community inclusion in their respective organisations.

As part of the project she conducted contextual inquiry and a diary study with the service providers in order to understand the disability context and their needs for capability in co-design. While this served to inform the design of the capability workshops, it also role modelled human centred design for participants and built trust and rapport.

From research insights our Practice Lead collaboratively designed and delivered a bespoke two day workshop for participants focusing on a co-design mindset and tools for use in the field. Following this she provided coaching support for participants by way of group coaching via video conference calls, and individual coaching to guide participants in designing and delivering their co-design for community inclusion projects.

The service providers involved all successfully used co-design methods and tools in their community inclusion projects. This resulted in individual transformation for the service providers, and through this many have made significant changes within their organisations to progress co-design as a way of working. Projects also resulted in increased empowerment, especially through decision making, and greater community inclusion for project participants.

Contact us


For more information on our HCD offering please get in touch:

Paul MartinicoPartner, Account Executive

[email protected]+61 402 270 896

Nick PolceDelivery Partner

[email protected]+61 407 476 561

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

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CharterMason HCD practice