Assumptions
The things everyone believes must be true.
User experience consultancy
Challenge the expected.
We challenge the assumptions, conventions and inherited thinking shaping the experiences organizations create. Because “that’s how our industry works” is a terrible reason to keep doing something.
The premise
What if the problem isn’t the experience?
What if it’s the thinking that created it?
Organizations spend enormous amounts of time improving experiences: making processes faster, interfaces simpler, journeys smoother and communications clearer.
All worthwhile. But sometimes we’re improving something that shouldn’t exist in its current form in the first place.
We don’t immediately ask, “How could we make this better?”
We start somewhere else: “Why does it work this way at all?”
The problem beneath the problem
Most UX problems aren’t UX problems.
They’re assumptions disguised as requirements.
Once an assumption becomes a requirement, people stop questioning it. It gets written into a brief, then into a process, then into a system, then into a KPI, then into “best practice.”
Eventually, it stops looking like a decision and starts looking like reality.
But it isn’t reality. It’s just something nobody has challenged for a long time.
“The form is too long.”
Why the form?
“Customers keep dropping off.”
Why this step?
“Support calls are too high.”
Why must they call?
“The journey is too complex.”
Who made it complex?
The Spanner
A question powerful enough to challenge an assumption.
A Spanner is a deliberate challenge to something an organization or industry has stopped questioning.
“Customers need to complete this form.”
Do they?
“This process takes three days.”
What makes three necessary?
“Customers expect an advisor.”
Advisor—or answer?
“That’s standard in our industry.”
So what?
What we challenge
Not everything needs changing. Everything should be allowed to be questioned.
Conventions
The things everyone in your industry does roughly the same way.
Friction
The things customers have learned to tolerate.
Complexity
The things organizations explain rather than simplify.
Journeys
Experiences shaped around organizational structures instead of human needs.
Processes
Internal requirements that have accidentally become customer experiences.
How we work
Observe. Uncover. Challenge. Reimagine. Prove.
01 / Observe
What’s really happening?
We look at the experience customers actually have—not the journey on the wall, not the process in the manual, and not what leadership believes happens.
02 / Uncover
What’s underneath it?
We identify the assumptions, constraints and decisions creating the experience. Some are necessary. Some were necessary once. Some exist because nobody has questioned them.
03 / Challenge
What if it worked differently?
We remove, reverse, simplify, reframe and borrow from other categories to create deliberate challenges to accepted thinking.
04 / Reimagine
What becomes possible?
New journeys, services, interactions, propositions, environments, business models and expectations.
05 / Prove
Does it survive reality?
We test ideas against customers, employees, technology, operations, regulation and commercial reality. We are not here to prove ourselves right. We are here to find what works.
Who we’re for
The constructively dissatisfied.
We work well with...
- Organizations that know working is not the same as working well.
- Leaders prepared to question assumptions their industry treats as facts.
- Businesses entering established categories without wanting to inherit their baggage.
- Teams willing to look outside their category for inspiration.
- Companies prepared to challenge internal processes when those processes create poor customer experiences.
Probably not for...
- Organizations looking for predetermined answers.
- Teams that want innovation without questioning anything important.
- Leaders whose definition of customer experience is simply improving a score.
- Organizations looking for someone to validate a solution already chosen.
- Anyone whose brief is: “Show us what competitors are doing so we can do it too.”
The Spanner Questions
Questions worth throwing into comfortable industries.
Healthcare
Why does the waiting room still exist?
Automotive
Why does buying a $70,000 car involve more friction than buying a $700 phone?
Insurance
Why does making a claim feel like proving you deserve the thing you already paid for?
Services
Why do customers have to understand your organizational structure?
Everywhere
Why are we making the form easier instead of asking why the form exists?
Start with the assumption
What’s something your industry does that has never made sense to you?
That’s probably worth a conversation. You don’t need a brief. You don’t need a solution. Bring us the assumption.
Throw us a spanner →