Why User-Centricity Fails (And What It Takes to Make It Stick)

Organisations don’t struggle with user-centricity because they lack methods—they struggle because they rely on effort instead of systems. Drawing on 13 years across global organisations, this session explores how research, design, and customer insight become lasting organisational capabilities through ownership, infrastructure, and repeatable ways of working.

Field

Format

Talk

Day

Thursday, Oct 15

Room

Aula K

Time

12:35 PM

Organisations do not fail at user-centricity because they lack methods

They fail because they rely on effort instead of infrastructure.
Research, journey maps, workshops, and passionate individuals can create momentum. But without clear ownership, reusable knowledge, repeatable processes, leadership support, and integration into decision-making, the work resets with every project.
User-centricity only sticks when it becomes part of the system.

Why is this conversation important now?

Organisations have more customer data, research tools, design methods, and AI-generated insight than ever before.

But more insight does not automatically lead to better decisions.

Teams are under pressure to move faster, do more with less, and prove immediate value. In that environment, user-centricity can quickly become a workshop, a deliverable, or the responsibility of a small specialist team.

The risk is not that organisations stop talking about customers. It is that they talk about them constantly while changing very little.

Who is this session for?

This session is for service designers, researchers, CX professionals, design leaders, and transformation teams who are tired of producing good work that never changes how the organisation operates.

It is especially relevant for people whose research is praised but ignored, whose playbooks are published but unused, or whose teams become the bottleneck because every user-centred initiative still depends on them.

Key takeaways

People will leave with:
A sharper diagnosis of why user-centric initiatives lose momentum.
A clear understanding of the difference between demand and real scale.
Practical principles for building ownership, capability, and continuity.
A way to assess whether customer insight is connected to actual decisions.
A new perspective: user-centricity is not something a design team delivers. It is something the organisation must be designed to enable.

The core takeaway is simple: Passion starts the work. Effort creates progress. Systems make it last.

Roman Schoeneboom

Roman Schoeneboom

Research Assistant @ ZHAW University of Applied Sciences Zurich

Roman Schoeneboom has spent 12+ years leading research and design across global organizations—Tesco PLC, Lloyds Banking Group, Credit Suisse AG, EY, IKEA, and Siemens—where he translates user insight into organizational strategy.

His expertise spans service design, research strategy, and design operations. Roman doesn’t just conduct research; he builds the systems that enable organizations to listen at scale. He’s mentored 20+ researchers and designers into senior roles, established research governance across 600+ colleagues, and orchestrated multi-stream programmes that informed company-wide roadmaps.

He’s particularly passionate about the nexus of research leadership, team development, and systems thinking. Roman has published in Touchpoint (Service Design Network), contributed to The Design Thinking Playbook (Wiley), and is a certified LEGO Serious Play facilitator.

When not facilitating workshops or mentoring, Roman is an avid mountainbiker and drummer based in Winterthur, Switzerland.