Corporate Vision Issue 5

34 CORPORATE VISION / Issue 5 2018 , Human Thinking Ltd (HT) is an innovative design agency delivering world class, cross- channel UX, design and build. We invited Founder, RichMumford to provide us with a thrilling overview of this dynamic and unique company, which has been elected as the London Representative of our prestigious 2018 Digital Elite. Thinking Human - Acting Digital Everyone seems to have jumped on the User Experience bandwagon in recent years. Demand for highly skilled UX practitioners has never been higher, yet a skills shortage in this domain is a very present reality. This situation has led to an influx of under skilled practitioners entering the market, ultimately delivering substandard solutions for agencies and clients alike in a space where delivering World Class Digital experiences has become a commercial imperative. HT was conceived in 2012 as an antidote to this problem, where instead of focussing upon emerging technology as a solution looking for a problem to solve, the primary goal was to deliver Digital solutions of the very highest quality with end users’ real wants and needs at the very heart of the process. The world is evolving at an ever increasingly rapid pace, digital has transformed the way in which we live and technology is now an everyday part of our lives. With such advancements it is easy to forget the stuff that matters. At the very heart of it all, we are still human beings with the same emotional needs and desires. Often, technology ignores this very perennial fact. Technology is an amazing toolset, but if not properly considered in a human- centred way it can often miss the mark. Instead of traditional technology-led approaches, we regard people as presenting the opportunity and technology as being the enabler. This ideology was internally dubbed as ‘Thinking Human’. Six years on and that banner is still proudly flying high over the business and setting Human Thinking apart from its peers. It is woven into the DNA of everything that the business touches and is an integral part of its manifesto. The business has always believed that designing successful consumer experiences takes skill, but also needs to be grounded in meaningful research and insight so that the resulting service or concept is buildable, usable, measurable and, most importantly, delivers on the business imperative. HT bring a blend of brand experience design, business consultancy and formal experience architecture together to form the backbone of the business. Human Thinking is classed as a London-based full-service User Experience agency providing research, insight and design services and was founded by Rich Mumford as a fully-fledged agency in 2012. He explores how the firm came into being and how its first, illustrious client set an exciting precedent for what was to come. “Our very first client was in fact Google, we delivered some early concept work for the Stanley Kubrick Estate’s online archive and were then subsequently invited to work on the experience design for Google Science Fair, Google’s global online worldwide science competition. It was a really exciting time for the business.” Since then they have worked for some of the world’s best-known brands on a wide array of different projects. Their main strength has been evident in business transformative customer-centric design – this roughly translates to the application of a flexible process that places the end consumer at the heart of the business, deeply analysing who they are, what their needs are and where the opportunities exist for the business to engage with them and deliver value. Often the output of this process provides something of an awakening for their clients, presenting a rare opportunity for genuine insight- driven business transformation. Rather than be too rigidly driven by process, they see their offering as a more flexible, highly skilled stable of people with well-honed toolsets, all coming together under the umbrella of seasoned discipline heads. The key value here is in the ability of the experienced individual to apply the right tools at the right times, it minimises wastage of effort and ensures economy for their client base. HT offer a wide variety of services from primary user research to detailed product specification. They also have extensive experience of planning and running mixed methodology research programmes covering quantitative and qualitative, as well as longitudinal ethnographic research. Additionally, HT have a wealth of experience in the formal Digital design arena, covering detailed user experience design and visual / graphic design. They have delivered many Digital vision pieces, high-level concepts and working prototypes for their clients as well as market ready consumer facing products across most business verticals. They have worked with major grocery retailers, global consumer electronics manufacturers, media companies, utilities providers and academic establishments. They recently delivered a business- critical online flight booking and management platform for a major UK airline. This covered early research, concept development, prototype development, user validation, formal UX design, 1804CV37