Our playbook powers services that work for life’s complexities

“Our playbook is about the art of the possible.” 

Phee: Playbooks are common in the design and development space. They’re a guide to the ‘how’, acting as point of reference, training manual and best practice guide.  We’d already delivered a playbook for the NEC Digital Studio team, and with this latest evolution of ours, the logical next step was to share it with the world. 

Annie:  Part of my role was to bring this great idea to life and that meant getting everyone from the user researchers and content designers to the developers and testers on the same page. With a shared understanding of what everyone does, the team could get excited about the power of collaboration. We really believe in this, it’s one of our brand promises and the playbook plays a big part in fostering it. 

Working with the team across the breadth of NEC Digital Studio to pull it together was such a buzz. Seeing it evolve has taught me a huge amount about the collective impact we can make. Like why involving a solution architect in discovery can avoid preventable ‘do-overs’ in alpha. Or why taking user-centered design expertise all the way into live products and services can make them more sustainable and accessible.  

We’ve all been using the playbook internally for a while, so the next step was to make it public. It gives people a sense of what to expect.   

“See how we work and get a flavour of what it will be like to work with us”

Annie: Working collaboratively is our natural state, even with the number of disciplines our work spans. Some potential clients might want to see what that means in practice, like how we work as one team and really ‘get stuck in’, as the National Deaf Children’s Society put it recently. We also explain that clients can expect complete transparency. If we’re off track, we’ll tell you, because that’s how we build trust. We expect the same level of openness from our clients. 

Phee: Trust and transparency are so important, particularly for tricky projects. How can an organisation feel confident that we could gain the trust of users that are traumatised, for example? Because we openly share how we take a trauma-informed approach to research in the playbook. 

We also talk about the skills of our Research Operations team, which isn’t a common set up in our sector. They make sure our research is ethical, effective and inclusive, blending rigorous data governance with participant-centered recruitment.  

“We wrote it for us, but we’re happy for anyone to use it.”

Phee: As Annie knows only too well, the playbook will always change as best practice shifts, but it’s already a big resource. We teach all sorts of tools and methods in our Design School, but if you just want an introduction to the phases of an agile project or to pick up some tips about service design, then great! We want as many people as possible to understand the benefits of these approaches and see that careful design and a real compassion for users makes services and products better (and often more cost-effective) in the long run.  

Annie: Creating services and products that are made for life is what we’re all about. That includes design and development principles that can work around all sorts of quirks and complexities – both technical and human – and genuinely deliver what users need. By explaining our approach in the playbook, we’re opening a window into that world. I’m really proud to let people in.  

Read the NEC Digital Studio playbook.