Driving product development

We must be able to handle data and apply intelligence more effectively; so every organisation and their users can benefit.

In 1988 Donald Norman published his book, The Design of Everyday Things. In it he first coins the term ‘User Experience’ to describe the movement in digital design towards a focus on the needs of the user.

Norman created the term to help close the gap that had grown between how businesses perceived their customers and how users were interacting with them. It would grow in significance to become an enormous multidisciplinary field, influential in evolving how we interact with technology.

When we first began building digital solutions it was clear what the benefits and efficiencies that user-led design principles were capable of achieving. Benefits and efficiencies that emerged from what Norman demonstrated as a product’s ability to make people feel ‘safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient — or just plain happier’.

However in the thirty years that have passed since Norman first emphasised these benefits, new gaps have grown to restrict how we interact with technology. Despite generating huge volumes of data we lacked the ability to reason over it. As our systems became more complex they would become so fractured and broken that ‘successful’ solutions would only need to differentiate themselves with just small incremental improvements in the level of insight, decision, actions and outcomes they offered to their users. Whilst user needs evolved to demand more personalisation, more control over data, more insight, vision and understanding, existing products, built across these fractured systems, lacked the ability to deliver them. Huge opportunities to progress user-led design have therefore been missed. Instead the marketplace for software has grown to reflect our fractured systems, producing products that are inherently biased and asymmetrical in their design and overly focused on serving transactions and processes unaligned with user need.

At Mortar we work with our partners to not only bring data together from across their fractured and siloed systems, we also ensure they have the technical infrastructure to apply reasoning to the data this amasses. Used effectively, intelligence in the form of custom algorithms and machine learning enhances and evolves the opportunties to interact with both data and users; to inform a new generation of products that are safer, more accessible and more efficient, and, with our product architecture, more scalable.

Of tremendous significance, and what defines this new generation of product development the most, is that our partners from across the broadest range of sectors, are able to more effectively address the needs of all of their users, communities and audiences. Because most users, especially those accessing services outside of mainstream marketplaces, have been deprived of the opportunities and support that many of us take for granted in this digital era. This means we can support the development of a new generation of products and solutions capable of tackling our hardest and most complex social problems, and work together to redesign our most fractured and broken systems at local, regional and national levels.

Mortar provides the technical framework for designing and delivering this new generation of products. Because to enable the delivery of these exciting new solutions products need to be developed with the architecture and infrastructure to harness and organise large volumes of data and to be able to apply intelligence and to design and deploy bespoke algorithms, models and tools in ways that are scalable; maximising their potential to impact and change society for the better.

Mortar is already developing new products developed with our partners across the sectors of government, housing and health. We have co-designed solutions that are tackling some of the most complex and wicked social problems such as homelessness with the Mayor of London through our Tenancy Sustainment Tool, exclusion with the Local Government Association through our Digital Inclusion Triage Tool, and we are exploring health inequalities with Integrated Care Boards through our First Point Case Management system.

As we grow and expand Mortar’s framework we continue to try and adopt many of Norman’s maxims in our work; to continue this incredible technological evolution and to make it easier to use technology to create a fairer and more equitable future.

When searching for the reason, even after you have found one, do not stop: ask why that was the case. And then ask why again. Keep asking until you have uncovered the true underlying causes. Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity