Exploring user experience as a driver of process innovation

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that user experience approaches to innovation should not be limited to new product development but have the potential for other types of organizational innovation. By focusing on process innovation, the investigation seeks to look into three key areas: how user experience could serve as a driver of organizational change, the influence of the organizational context and the impediments to user experience process innovation, and the consequences of process innovations on the delivery of the company offering. These three areas present the main and subsidiary questions of the investigation. Due to the scarce literature on the topic of user experience-driven process innovation, the topics of user experience and process innovation are reviewed separately in the present study. Afterwards, they are integrated within the conceptual framework of the investigation. Adopting a view of the organization as a transformational system, the theoretical model of van Gigch (1991) is extended with the experience-operations model of Johnston and Kong (2011). By that, the link between business processes and user experience is illustrated. Based on the introduced framework and the overview of the literature pertaining to user experience and process innovation, the research questions outlined above were formulated. Examination of the questions of investigation was devised as a single case-study of a service providing organization, where perspectives from employees, service users and company documents were integrated. Through thematic analysis, the following themes emerged from the data. Firstly, the most significant attribute of user experience appears to be the speed of problem resolution, thus suggesting an objective for user experience-driven process innovation. Secondly, customer surveys are not a true representation of user experiences as suggested by the gap between evaluated dimensions and user perspective. And lastly, weakened communication and organizational control were identified as key factors affecting user experience-driven innovation.