the legal sanity mentor: dan formosa
I’m a big fan of lawyer mentoring and have given and received this guidance throughout my career. Although lawyers typically look to other lawyers to mentor them, I’ve learned a lot about business and service from people outside the legal profession.
With a nod to the value of cross-discipline mentoring, I’m starting a new feature today called the legal sanity mentor. Each month, experts and influencers across a range of fields will share their views on and around the topic of designing and delivering client-centric services.
As I’ve posted before, we’re living in an era of consumer control. Clients are no longer content to be passive recipients of legal services. They are active and educated co-creators who want us to understand and respond to them as human beings in need. The lawyers who will thrive in this new marketplace are those who place a premium on a positive client experience.
Lori Herz is legal sanity’s longtime co-producer and content director. She recently talked to Dan Formosa, an award-winning design expert and one of the founding members of Smart Design, about his firm’s approach to user-centricity.
LH: Where in your product design process does the consumer experience become relevant?
DF: It’s always relevant. We started Smart Design on the idea that design should be more about people than things. It’s important to consider the social science and psychology behind the design.
LH: How do you make the jump from that idea to reality?
DF: In our industry, people often focus on how the average person would use a product, often homogenizing people into “personas." It’s like designing things for imaginary friends. It’s very idealized. Instead, at Smart Design, we consider a wide range of people. Lately we’ve been taking the design process through a reality check that we call “6 Real People.”
LH: How do you engage the six?
DF: Actually, it’s not always six. It’s at least that many, but can be more. The point is to engage real people in a real dialogue about the products we’re working on. We photograph and videotape them talking about and using the products. We pay attention to their perceptions and reactions and really get to know them. When we talk about the products as a design team, we refer to these reality checkers and say things like, “Susan could do that, but George couldn’t.”
LH: So, since the beginning, you’ve built your design business around the user experience. I think that you broke some ground on an approach that’s now gaining momentum in the marketplace.
DF: Yes. The brand itself is no longer the lure for consumers. People make buying decisions based on other people’s experiences with a product or service (think Amazon or CNET reviews). In the design world, this creates amazing opportunities for innovating and making improvements on existing products. These same opportunities exist in other fields, like the law.
Many thanks to Dan for sharing these insights as a legal sanity mentor.
