Accenture Interactive Scales Design to Keep Pace with Client Demands

The pace of change will never be slower than it is today. And this is especially true in the digital world. As consumers increasingly expect personalized experiences—and have more choices available than ever—brands need to continually offer fresh experiences to capture attention and engage with audiences everywhere across channels.

To accelerate creating new digital experiences, brands must find ways to evolve their design capabilities to address new market realities. Design teams need integrated tools and strategies to quickly turn ideas into prototypes and reliably collaborate across regions and teams. It’s a challenge that many brands are tackling by tapping into the marketing expertise of Adobe and Accenture.

Pioneers in faster, smarter prototyping

The Accenture Design Center of Excellence in Costa Rica is setting the standard for delivering multichannel solutions at scale and driving adoption of standard tools across teams—including Adobe XD for user experience design.

“We want to accelerate and improve daily production by aligning the right people with the right information and tools,” says Narciso Tauler, Global Activation Network Managing Director, Accenture Interactive Operations.

Adobe XD has already had a big impact on speed and efficiency at the company by allowing teams to build robust design systems and reuse them for multiple projects. Accenture has created design systems to help clients in a variety of industries – including consumer packaged goods (CPG), media and communications, travel, and sports – develop new experiences quickly, while reusing assets and maintaining consistency.

“By building custom design systems in XD, we reduced prototyping time by 25% and simplified the handoff from design to development,” says Luis Bujan, Program Manager and Head of Production for Accenture Interactive Operations Costa Rica.

Global design challenge drums up excitement for XD

One way the Design Center of Excellence helped drive adoption of XD was by launching its first ever Designathon in collaboration with Adobe. The event attracted more than 300 designers, developers, and managers from Accenture’s global Experience Activation Network. Working in teams, they collaborated to solve business challenges in three key verticals—telecommunications, travel, and retail—producing 40 ready-for-market prototypes.

“Our employees came together from different backgrounds and disciplines, but they all needed to use design thinking and XD to make their projects come to life,” says Juan Julio Rojas, Design Director at Fjord, part of Accenture Interactive. “The Designathon helped all of us develop better insights into how we can work together as a large team and evolve our design capabilities with XD.”

The exercise was a powerful way for designers and non-designers alike to see how XD might fit into prototyping and production processes. Effective collaboration is critical for Accenture teams around the world, who hand off projects across time zones for faster delivery to clients. With XD, team members can access designs online from any device and quickly share documents with collaborators right within XD to get faster, more robust feedback.

Fast cars, faster digital twins, and the future

Teams at Accenture Interactive also use Substance by Adobe for 3D texturing and materials authoring, helping clients create product visuals faster and more cost effectively.

Accenture relies on Substance to create materials for a European auto maker. By creating digital twins of every surface and material on a vehicle, Accenture minimizes the number of photo shoots required to produce a variety of marketing assets, from online car configurators to print materials to billboards.

“Substance makes it easy to digitally re-create the textures and colors on a car, including the dashboard, upholstery, and taillights—so they can be swapped out as needed,” says Bujan. “What used to take two days can now be done in a few hours.”

Substance presents amazing new opportunities beyond the automotive industry, and Accenture is already looking at the potential for its use with consumer goods, power tools, and textiles. Accenture is also testing the 3D design capabilities of Adobe Dimension to help streamline localizing digital assets – for example, updating the label on an image of a bottle in the local language.

And this is only the beginning for Accenture. Using its collaboration with Adobe as a foundation, the agency is poised to break new ground as it adopts more Adobe apps to create digital experiences at scale for brands around the globe.

Accenture uses Adobe Creative Cloud to deliver powerful multichannel, multitouch experiences for the world’s biggest brands.