NextWAVE Innovation
UX for Human Ecosystems
Beyond Service Design: Experience as a Living System
Most UX and service design approaches focus on optimizing touchpoints, journeys, and interactions. While valuable, these methods often flatten human experience—treating people as users rather than agents within complex, evolving systems.
At NextWAVE Innovation, we go deeper. Our approach embraces human ecosystems’ messy, emergent, and interconnected nature. We design not just for interfaces or services but for the dynamics that shape behaviour, relationships, and institutional change.
And at the heart of this work? Design Research that reveals insights across multiple layers.
The NextWAVE Difference: Uncovering Layers of Insight
Design research, at its core, is about understanding human experiences and behaviors. But what makes NextWAVE different is not just the research itself—it’s our ability to extract insights that operate at multiple layers.
Every research activity—whether a usability test, stakeholder interview, or field study—has the potential to reveal much more than just surface-level issues.
Most research stops at the surface. We go deeper.
Layers of Insights
Surface Layer (Tactical Insights)
- The immediate pain points, usability issues, and workflow breakdowns.
- Most product teams act on these insights first, which leads to better usability—but rarely in connection with deeper patterns.
Sequenced Layer (Transactional Insights)
- How interactions unfold across multiple touchpoints, roles, and timelines.
- Why pain points emerge not just in isolation but through misaligned flows and processes.
- These insights lead to recommendations to consider bigger redesigns beyond workflows and lead to better service design and overall UX
Structural Layer (Strategic Insights)
- Organizational vision, strategies, culture, and policies that shape the customer or user experience.
- Why certain pain points keep recurring—pointing to broader misalignments, usually between the organization’s strategy and the user’s (sometimes hidden) needs, expectations, and desires.
Systemic Layer (System-Wide Implications)
- The network effects, power structures, and long-term shifts that drive change.
- What’s happening beyond the organization—in markets, industries, and societies.
Most teams fix surface-level and sequence-level issues, leaving deeper problems unresolved. At NextWAVE, we work across all four layers—seeing the hidden structures and systemic forces that shape experience, not just its symptoms.
Who We Work With: Transforming Experience at Every Level
Whether you’re designing for users, employees, citizens, or communities, our system-aware approach helps you uncover insights and drive meaningful change.
Product & Innovation Leaders
Who they you: Heads of Product or Innovation at organizations navigating complex digital and service ecosystems.
Your challenge: Traditional UX approaches only scratch the surface—focusing on usability but failing to address organizational and systemic barriers to great experiences.
How NextWAVE helps: We help enterprise leaders move beyond interface-level fixes to structural and systemic UX improvements, aligning experience design with business transformation, cultural change, and long-term strategy.
Public Sector & Policy Innovators
Who are you: Government agencies, civic design teams, and policy-makers aiming to improve services, engagement, and governance.
Your challenge: Public services often suffer from deeply embedded bureaucratic complexity, fragmented user experiences, and policy misalignment that prevent meaningful change.
How NextWAVE helps: We use system-aware UX research to uncover barriers at all levels, helping policymakers and service designers craft human-centred policies and experiences that address user needs and the institutional forces shaping them.
Organizational Transformation & Change Leaders
Who are you: Internal consultants, HR leaders, and change management teams working to improve employee experience and organizational effectiveness.
Your challenge: Most employee experience initiatives focus on surface-level engagement programs but fail to address the structural and systemic factors that shape how people work, collaborate, and innovate.
How NextWAVE helps: We apply design research at all four levels—revealing how policies, workflows, leadership behaviours, and system-wide incentives impact experience and helping organizations create conditions for adaptive, human-centred transformation.
Social Impact & Nonprofit Organizations
Who are you: Foundations, NGOs, and mission-driven organizations tackling complex social challenges such as health equity, education, or sustainability.
Your challenge: Many social impact initiatives struggle with fragmented user experiences, misaligned stakeholder incentives, and systemic barriers that prevent lasting change.
How NextWAVE helps: We use ecosystemic UX research to uncover hidden dynamics and leverage points, designing solutions that go beyond service delivery to transform systemic conditions, helping organizations drive deeper, more sustainable impact.
Thought Leadership
Fractional Design Leadership: a solution to the vicious cycles of product design.
Most software companies struggle to define a business strategy that matches what their customers are really looking for – but it doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s time to change our thinking, and our approach.
We’re thrilled to announce a new family of services designed to help you break through endless design cycles and shift to a culture of data-driven decision making to design products that keep your customers wanting more:
Fractional Design and Innovation Leadership.
Systems: The Sixth Element of User Experience
In the light of the shift that’s taken place since the beginning of UX from designing software-like interactions on the web to building web-based software and services, and seeing the impact these have on the wider world, it’s time to update the elements of User Experience to include a new element: systems.
A Systems Thinking Approach to Understanding the Value of UX
Recently, I’ve encountered a wave of skepticism from senior leaders in product development circles. They’re posing some tough questions: Why invest more in UX? What’s the value of UX? Can’t product managers handle research? Why can’t product managers do the research? Yet, amidst these “anti-UX” questions I’m seeing and experiencing a completely different on-the-ground reality: product teams champion UX. They see both the tactical and strategic value of a solid UX practice. In this article, I’ll dive into why that gap exists, how to bridge it and how to respond to the “anti-UX” questions in a meaningful way using a systems-based approach. If you’re navigating the challenges of trying to deliver a complex product or argue for the value of UX, let’s connect to explore the power of a systems-based approach in driving product success.
Transforming Product Development: A Guide to Strategic UX Research Integration
Episode 5, 3 Minutes
Product managers, researchers and designers tell me they’d like to shift to more Strategic UX Research but often aren’t really sure how. As with most transitions, it can be hard to know where to begin, and it is easier if you break it down into smaller chunks. In this video, I explore where Strategic UX Research fits into the product development process and provide a quick assessment tool to help you think about where your research practice is.