Recently in MX SF 2007 Category
[A discussion with all of today's speakers moderated by Peter Merholz]
Q: How do we sustainably get to wow? If we mean something that makes people happy, solve their problems, accomplish their goals, etc.
Irene Au: People at the top have to care about it. It doesn't have to be Steve Jobs, it can simply be someone really high up who care about UX and design. Figure out what parts you can impact to get these activities to happen on a more regular basis.
There is someone at Google who gets it and advocates at the highest levels. At Yahoo you see the leaders advocating for great experiences.
Jeff Veen: At Adaptive Path he worked on MeasureMap and realized that he wouldn't invent a technology, instead he thought about bringing a product to new audiences. How do I know if my blog is successful or not? This simple problem allowed them to pick a few metrics and solve a simple problem elegantly.
Todd Wilkens: With MeasureMap you knew what Wow was, you were designing for yourself. If you look at Whirlpool they have to make up metrics to understand what Wow is and can last a long time.
Jeff Veen: Speaking of Whirlpool. In the 90's there was this cliche of the fridge with the Internet connection. Whirlpool talks about UX but now is working on networked products. What about security, APIs, etc?
Sara Ulius-Sabel: Users really don't want the Internet on the fridge. The new product was an experiment exploring new areas and figuring out how to bridge the divide with suppliers. They know that there is some interest around digital devices and also that they are not good at digital devices. So build something that other people can hook up to.
Scott Berkun: So how do you sustain a team? Think of the Beatles. You do wow, wow, and how do you keep it together? What if a key person leaves? You have to replace them and the chemistry changes. It's just about who is doing the work. How do you sustain a healthy productive team? About half of the room says they don't.
Peter Merholz: Does that resonate with Whirlpool? Do people get to mistakes?
Sara Ulius-Sabel: Nothing new is really new. The combo washer-dryer was done in the 60s. Often fall into the trap of believing that what is new is the latest and greatest but it's almost always been done before.
In terms of the culture, Whirlpool is a big risk averse company. There is emphasis on shareholder value and cost. The ability to take risks is bounded and that is hard to face.
The Whirlpool Duet was built by an isolated team and they came up with something fabulous after 18 months away from everyone else.
Peter Merholz: By achieving empathy we realize and experience strategy that gets us to design beyond products (and maintain focus when making mistakes). This requires systems thinking (which in turn requires tearing down walls), that produces transformation for your matrixed(?) adaptive organization.
Q: Should products make people feel good about their children? Do designers have a responsibility to the consequences of your products on consumer culture?
Sara Ulius-Sabel: Should products be a vehicle for making a people prouder of their children? It certainly isn't the only way but it is an opportunity.
[My laptop battery died at this point. The rest is constructed from paper notes.]
[By Scott Berkun]
Does innovation mean:
- Being first?
- Being better?
- Winning?
Is success without innovation worse than failing?
Progress > Innovation
Success > Innovation
Chronocentrism: the belief that what is going on right now is the most important thing ever.
If you look at history almost every civilization was the best it had ever been done.
Innovation is not new, it is one of the oldest concepts we have. The idea of toolmaking is millions of years old. All the things that were in the world when we got here were innovations in their time.
There is knowledge in understanding how this works. Look at stained glass. There was some guy who had some idea. Can you imagine how this conversation when with a priest at the church? Church design cycles were longer than people's lives.
You can dissect anything around you and ask what must it have been like to make this thing a reality, to make it so successful that it became an assumed part of the world.
Look at a soda can. Someone invented this. Cans predated manufactured can-openers by decades. When you drink a Coke ask who made this thing that came to you.
Soda was invented as a medicinal thing. It was sold by pharmacists and then they started adding flavors.
There are fantastic stories behind each and every thing around us.
If you accept that innovation is old, one thing comes with is mythology. We have ideas about creation, about how invention happens.
Prometheus decided that he wanted to give people fire. He went to Zeus and stole it to give it to people. Think Karen Armstrong's writing on mythology.
Go to Rockerfeller Center and you'll find Prometheus there representing something important. This reflects what we as designers can do, we can bring good to the world through creative acts.
All creatives see themselves this way, they have power to bring to people.
Look at Newton. This is another myth about how ideas are formed, they are given by God. It puts the burden on external forces. If you look at science you see this myth again and again. It externalizes the burden of being a creator and lets it happen because of divine force or the muses or whatever. Anyone can discover, they just have to be in the right place.
The true story is that Newton worked on his theory for fifteen years. Even if the apple thing happened it is a mere footnote to what really happened. He stood on the shoulders of giants.
So corporations.
3M: Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing. How does this company get to make Post-It notes?
Bunch of guys get together in the early 20th century. Mining is big so they wanted to mine stuff that would be abrasive and could be used to grind stuff down. They ended up mining the wrong stuff. They couldn't sell it and decided to go into sandpaper manufacturing. This was a new and growing market. Slowly they developed a successful business.
One of the engineers at the sandpaper company. He wants to go to a company using his product to see how the product is being used. He sees them trying to do two-tone painting. There is a problem he can solve. He goes to his boss and asks if he can do it. This guy doesn't listen and builds a prototype and shows it to his boss again. Boss says no again. He has to decide if he's going to do it or not. He builds another prototype and his boss says yes and thus masking tape was born.
It outpaced sandpaper. So this was cool? How do they do it again? This led to Post-It notes. The secret lies in this: mistakes will be made but if the person is essentially right the mistake will be smaller than the mistake made by management when they quash independent thinking.
[ Find William McKnight, CEO of 3M, quotation from 1948 on this subject]
Second example. Look at the space program. One myth of innovation is that big organizations can't innovate. They need someone leading the show who gets it.
The space program happened because the President put his reputation on the line to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. This took 500,000 people to accomplish. This is one of the biggest projects in human history and it worked.
All the components were engineered by corporations and it worked.
We like to talk about the chaos in innovation in disasters. Look at Apollo 13. Most of the stories about innovation fit the model that ideas come from special places that there is no mess, no chaos, a flash of brilliant insight. But the truth way more often approximates what happened in Apollo 13, an endless series of impossible challenges with lot's of missteps.
[Look at From the Earth to the Moon episode 5 about the design of the lunar lander]
Most of the design of the lander was human factors design. How can you see out the window, where do site, etc.
So part 3, lessons.
Look at the history of the computer mouse. Look at Thomas Edison, he gets credit on his own but really he had a huge shop of innovators. His self-promoting played into the myth even though he also talked about the collaboration of his lab.
So how does innovation happen:
- delegate responsibility
- allow people to do their jobs in their own way
- expect mistakes to be made
- reward initiative to create growth
- succeed in holding these values above all others
Think about 20% time. Google deserves credit for having this spirit but 3M had this first because they understood that innovation comes from the periphery.
The failure of Taylorism is that it takes power over how work is done away from workers.
Use these principles within. Let your own team make mistakes, give them room, delegate. Start with yourself.
Key points:
- innovation and design are ancient
- we can learn from history and mythology
- organizations of any size can innovate
- innovation is simple, but hard: delegate, expect mistakes, reward initiative
Whirpool is the world's leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances Annual sales are more than $18 billion and there are over 80,000 employees. More than 60 manufacturing and technology research centers around the world.
Globally Whirpool markets over 20 brands in 170 countries. One challenge is that they are competing against themselves for market and audience share. This forces them to think about product design in a very different way. Maytag, Kenmore, etc.
Global design locations in six locations; America, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, India, and China. Need to focus on local needs but also share standards globally.
Structure is matrixed by brand and category. Brand studios, etc.
[stepped out for a moment]
Approach to product design is to make products relevant to consumers.
Appliances = Useful
Usefulness is the reason they are in business. But there is a need to go beyond useful.
Core user needs are enduring in this industry. Allows Whirlpool to leverage deep understanding of users and user behavior. This allows the organization to be complacent. Why keep researching how people want their clothes washed?
The tendency was to drive desirability through incremental innovation:
- better
- bigger
- faster
- more
Do you need 27 cycles on a washing machine? Is that progress over 25?
As long as you had more power or speed you could make a better product. With a ton of work this is being eroded. The design group is pushing back against these paradigms by asking why.
Do more cycles differentiate in a way that consumers care about?
How do you address unmet needs? Use in home research. What does the kitchen look like, the laundry room, etc.? Design products like the laundry tower and laundry work-surface. What they found was that there were loads of compensatory behaviors. People would hang clothes on doors, bottles were everywhere, etc. What came out of this was a system of products that had integrated storage solutions and work surfaces. What is the laundry process experience and where does the product fit in?
Another new product is central park. it is an attachment point on a fridge that supports other electronic devices. Digital picture frames, charging stations, tablet pc, tv, satellite radio, etc. Realized that it wasn't a core competency so they partnered with people to integrate preexisting devices in a way that mattered. They knew there was a need for information management and entertainment in the kitchen. How do you get to one system that is a docking device, the infrastructure for other people to bring those solutions into the consumers home.
Usability and user experience design specialists work alongside the other teams. Historically usable has followed useful. Only recently has usability been able to make decisions for the project teams. Instead of reacting to engineering they are coming to the table and making recommendations. Many of this is around ergonomics and ease of use. Ergonomics is seen as a factor of quality. Have the user experience specialists act as change agents.
Glass lids and windows, for example, helps users to understand the process. They can build mental models about what's happening by seeing what the machine is doing. In-home research showed that people were fascinated by this. Marketing and design thought they should hide things and that glass would get dirty but people liked being able to look in, they would watch the whole cycle.
A couple of things about the new design is that you see lots of yellow and green lights. Research showed that people didn't understand why they couldn't use hot water with delicates. It used to beep at them and make them feel stupid. They wanted to know what their options are. The new systems uses the light system to show what is available to the user. You can see defaults, what is available, and what is not. 100% of users in testing got it so much that it was in the background. It helped them understand the machine.
the other thing about this particular project is that they had read an article by the National Federation for the Blind. As things go more electronic you are losing accessibility because you are losing tactile feedback and manual controls.
How do you make this usable by someone with limited or no vision?
The solution is a system of auditory sounds, all of which are unique and scaled to explain the point in the process. Even sighted users started to enjoy the benefits of this by saying that they could multi-task because of the sonic feedback. This was also less insulting to visually impaired users than other systems, like talking systems, because they didn't feel singled out.
Another facet is to make products desirable. You don't think that an appliance can be sexy but think about the KitchenAid. You want one. It looks good, it is something you lust after.
So how do you make an appliance sexy? The KitchenAid is bold and sexy, it makes the kitchen look less bland. It has power and prowess. It conveys a sense of confidence on the owner.
BOOK: Trading Up: The New American Luxury
Desirability is multi-faceted. It is the features, the aesthetics, the sound, the smell, etc. It isn't static. As new things come this changes.
So metrics. They are multi-faceted and intended to measure some of the factors that contribute to usefulness, usability, and desirability. How do you put a number on lust or pleasure?
They use the metaphor of health to define their quantitative metrics. Ask where are you in terms of building an experience. If you are a 25 and you want to be a 75 where can you fill in the gap.
The scale at the doctor's office doesn't tell you what your weight should be.
The advantage of the diverse brand portfolio is that they don't have to be all things for all people. The challenge is that they have to be different things for different people.
If you have three products on the same platform how do you drive different experiences to different customers? The trick is to tease out what the differences are and map that back to metrics. You set targets to differentiate your products from one another. Find the dimensions to trigger an emotional response.
In all of this they seek balance:
- Useful vs. Desirable
- Mass-market vs. Differentiation
- Measuring vs. Creating
So how do you sustainably get to Wow? How do you make sure it isn't a fluke?
Q: Specific examples of metrics? Can you make so when a kid leaves pens in his pocket there isn't ink on everything?
A: Many metrics are proprietary but they are user facing, not business facing.
The design metrics must be concerned with the product experience and they roughly map onto the three concepts of useful, usable, and desirable. An NPV wouldn't quite do it.
Q: How much of this is a brand exercise and how much is product design?
A: A couple of ways. Getting buy-in from stakeholders all the way through the group. Getting them to acknowledge that the metrics are in place and they should drive all products, not just premium products. This way the brand, from product to product, communicates a similar experience, that they engage the consumers in similar ways.
This way it isn't projectcentric but can influence the whole organization.
Q: How has internet marketing changed your strategy?
A: Don't know much about sales strategies but as far as whirlpool and kitchenaid which are online you can't actually buy that much. For the major appliance you still need the in-store interaction.
Jeff Veen interviews Irene Au, both of Google
A: Background was in EE. She went to U of I for grad school and got into human factors. Worked on Mosaic.
Then went to Netscape to work on Communicator 4. Then to Yahoo. Netscape was interesting but really they were just working on a viewfinder but the interesting stuff was inside the viewfinder.
Rocketmail had become Yahoo Mail and My Yahoo was brand new. They were moving beyond the directory of web sites that started. There were a small number of designers who were called on to quickly turn around graphics at the end. The challenge was to get designers involved earlier.
Now Google for the last four months and the idea is to do the same thing.
Google is like Disneyland. But apart from the food and the fun stuff, there is a tremendous opportunity to bring design thinking to the organization to radically change the organization. It's so innovative and now the challenge is to take that to the next level.
V: The design culture came out of the search product. That's an easy interface challenge. All the difficult interaction decisions are in other products like mail clients.
A: Strategies deployed in the past work for search but not for more complex experiences where you are trying to tie it together.
They used to look for a generalist with a background in HCI with an eye to aesthetics who would code his own stuff.
That works for search but not for experience design. You need a cross-functional set of disciplines and people who can work across these to move users from one thing to another.
V: The challenge then is to maintain quality. All the resumes and hiring must make it hard. How do you maintain quality?
A: Need to set expectations around different skills. People who are anthropologists and psychologists. Best visual designers. But avoid siloing. Hiring T shaped people with deep experience in one are but some experience in lots of areas.
V: So prioritization. There are so many initiatives under development. How do you prioritize.
A: The laws of physics don't allow everything at Google to get covered. You have all these engineers and PMs with ideas. People are empowered to bring those to life but there isn't enough bandwidth to work with designers. Need to be more thoughtful about how engagement happens. The solution is to do fewer things really well. Do you want the design team to be a shop or a high-end strategic asset to the organization? This requires careful choice of projects with meaningful impact on the business. Must also take into account how amenable the project team is to working with the design team. Must get involved early and up front.
Also look for opportunities to offer goodwill to the project teams. Have a chance to upsell on more high impact activities. Getting the foot in the door to introduce new ideas.
V: So that happens at product and project level. What about the org?
A: Managing a portfolio. Part is projects, part is infrastructure, part is blue-sky thinking. Speaking to the trojan horse thing, the wedge to use to engage with the teams is very interesting. At Yahoo people had never watched users using products. The usability studies were a great voyeuristic view into how people were using the products and the developers ate it up. This turned into what are you trying to do, what is the opportunity. Over time people start to understand and learn. Just keep asking and trying.
V: So what about at Google?
A: Sometimes its the mockup. Teams feel that they can't launch with out the UI. Looking at mock-ups of a project you ask about use-cases and sometimes nobody has stepped back to ask those questions. If you just ask people how they are dealing with this issue a design can emerge out of that.
V: At AP, always talk about speaking the language of higher-ups. At Google that language is engineering. Hard to communicate a social network to engineers.
So a little bit about selling design. What about when a team is really struggling?
A: Miscommunication is often the cause. A designer is left out and a PM does mock-ups. First step is to explore the problem. Understand the politics, the stakeholders. Maybe its just really opinionated people who believe that designers have no value to add. If they believe that design is easy it is hard to communicate design rationale to them. But that's where prioritization comes into play. Is it better to staff a project with no opportunity for success that has a high priority or a low-priority project with a high opportunity for success. Spreading the team thin on projects where they aren't set up to succeed doesn't serve anyone well.
V: Pretty flexible about how that happens within the organization. Some people are aligned to metrics and others are more personality oriented.
A: Important to be flexible and adaptable to the culture of the organization.
Culture of advertising related projects is very different than other products. They are much more top down. If they are more structured around driving priorities, the design team can use that to their advantage. If other project teams are more free-flowing the design team must use that factor in context.
Q from audience: How do you bring design into this kind of organization?
A: The view was that this was an important role but they don't necessarily have a clear vision. Evangelize up and down.
V: There is also a next step about the integration of design.
A: There isn't an understanding of how to use ethnography, for example, so the question becomes about how that space can be created.
In a previous life she had an experience where someone just wanted to copy the competitor. They convinced them that this was a bad idea by doing rapid ethnography. Analysis, brainstorming, etc. can lead to the transformation where people can see a new vision appropriate to the situation.
At Google often focus on rigor but also need to focus more on the softer skills. How do you influence teams, etc.
Q: What we all need is meeting facilitation skills. But to the question, many people find themselves at a point of success, they are managing teams, but should that group be centralized or out in the business units?
A: Now had experience with two or three rapidly growing companies. Early in the life, centralization is important. The team is smaller, it is cross-functional requiring different kinds of people with different skills who can share best practices and standards and methods over time. This prevents reinventing the wheel and leads to higher-end activities. At the same time, user experience is always better when tightly integrated.
V: So Google is really centralized. There is one way to right code. In the design group they are now working on style guides. How did this play out at Yahoo?
A: At Yahoo the matrix structure invested people in their products. Yahoo Sports tried to compete with ESPN, etc. and this fractured the organization. It was hard to focus central resources on a style guide. Getting 20% time on a style guide was really hard and the idea of a centralized tax was hard to push for. One style guide was the universal look and feel. Consistency without uniformity. Message Yahoo as a company without making the products the same. The second component was a design pattern library, a catalog of best practices for interaction design. Best way to do pagination or table design, etc. Parts of this are publicly available. The third part is the UI library, now YUI (and very useful), this allowed a more coherent experience.
Q: Changes in the hiring practices at Google. Are they connected to the presence of designers? Is that required for change?
A: The changes are very subtle. In UE team the point is clarifying expectations for people. And an interview process that gives the interviewer more certainty about their experience with the applicant. In the past interview scores were inconsistent based on whatever they happened to talk about. Now seeing more consistency .
V: Do people use design exercises? Engaging people in design exercises can be really handy if done well. Not just leaving them in a room but working with them to see what happens.
A: Also had a design exercise at Yahoo. Needed something that would allow people to express what they are about. It's hard to find where people are in the spectrum. If you can't get people who can do everything get people who compliment eachother and give them flexibility.
The design exercise isn't to see if they are good but to see what they are good at.
V: What about mentoring? There are lots of young people at Google. How do you approach that?
A: It is important to set aside time for this. In programming people talk about pair programming. What about pair designing? When this happens it is often in pockets. How do you get the spread around, to facilitate communication within the team? Need to be more open and forthcoming.
V: Office hours is great. Managers have office hours to get one on one time. Put designers in a room and tell people come in and get design questions answered.
A: Office hours is part of Google's culture. It's hard to get used to a long line of people but its nice to have time blocked out.
V: Design office hours, accessibility office hours, etc. gives time for answering question.
A: Fix-its are great, where everyone drops everything to fix things. Also great is testing-on-the-toilet. When you go into bathrooms at Google you have toilets with warm seats and a screen with a video about unit-testing.
Q: What about cross-platform consistency? As you go to mobile, etc. how important is consistency.
A: There is consistency in look-and-feel and consistency in interaction. Not everything needs to look the same everywhere but it is important to find the elements that communicate things as a family.
V: That's a point about the difference between mobile and web. A spreadsheet on the phone is different. What am I doing with a spreadsheet on my phone?
Thou shalt understand people and thou shalt get this into your designs.
There are really two reasons to do research:
- generate ideas
- evaluate ideas
When talking about evaluating you talk about established ideas. Usability research, human factors, ergonomics, etc. Design research and user research are much fuzzier.
So where is the field going and why?
Talking about the generative part, when it comes to this kind of research the main thing is to gain insight and empathy with people.
What we are talking about is the latest stage of the revolution
- To create good experiences, thou shalt understand people.
Companies really like to oversimplify. At the worst you have the model that customers are all about gulping products and crapping cash.
Another model is homo economicus, a highly rational being that maximizes utility. Quantity matters here: features, products, etc. But a world full of these people would be a world of Vulcans.
Another model is the Type A personality model. Everything is a task leading to a goal. Efficiency is the greatest thing ever in this worldview. It's all about the Alex P Keatons of the world. This has led measurement to focus on time to complete tasks and number of steps to the end of the task.
Yet another model emerges from marketing, people are docile gullible sheep. It's all about stories and preferences. Messaging become the most important thing ever here. Focus groups, market surveys, etc. Tracking and influencing preference is the goal. Encourages more money to marketing and less to design. This disappoints consumers is that product doesn't live up to the story.
These models aren't wrong, they just aren't really right. People do want features, the do want more for less, they have goals, and they can be touched by the right story.
These approaches are just reaching their limit of usefulness, especially if you want to differentiate from competition.
So what's been missing? Emotions, context, culture, and meaning. So what does this mean? The messy complexity of human life is left out. If we step back and look at our own lives we realize that we rarely think of the people we design for in this way. People's relationships are convoluted, they act as individuals in one moment and as a member of a group the next. People mix and match products outside of "intended use." What is public vs. private, old vs. new, etc.
We need to understand as people, the same way we understand ourselves. Take a holistic view.
Our frameworks need to match the way that people talk about their own lives. Our customers are really like us. This framework is extremely important for people in management because it impacts the way an organization is set up.
So trends...
Lou Carbone talked about emotion from a marketing history. Don Norman comes at this from the perspective of product design. (Book: Emotional Design)
Another trend is the rise of ethnography. This is buzz word of right now. This means jobs for anthropologists. Business Week loves this. This trend is a testament to the importance of holistic, complex, realistic view of people. This is core of building experiences.
It's all about a new way of thinking about people, it's a matter of changing the way we think about people.
Case study: Needed to understand how people relate to their possessions
Trying to create something, needed an holistic view. The magic of things is complicated.
Started by looking at people's behaviors. Opportunistic showing and telling. People are social around objects, they form groups around objects.
But more interesting was that behind the behaviors were motivations and emotions.
They grouped into symbolic and representational motivations and activity-oriented motivations.
- how to frame the experience
- triggers that lead to behaviors
- reveal seducible moments
- help explain the soft benefits of what enjoyment and getting the most out of your things really means
This gave a good way to design for the process.
Case study: Ziba and Lenovo
Ziba was contracted by Lenovo to help envision some new computers; laptop, desktop, cellphone. (See business week) This won an industrial design award.
But the approach is what is interesting here.
Needed to capture the soul of the Chinese consumer to inspire Lenovo's design team to embed in the organization.
The world soul was talked about repeatedly in the process. Can't just design to baseline needs, instead focus on aspirations and the connection of aspirations to motivations.
Why do people do what they do.
- "Turn insights into experiences."
- "Benefits, not features"
So what does this mean?
Shift from Tasks, Goals, Preferences to Behaviors, Motivations, and Meaning. Not just a shift in words. It is a difference in the way we try to understand people. These are words we can use to talk about our daily lives, it gives us a more honest way of talking about other people's lives.
Strategy have moved from technology to features to experiences. Along this line there is a changing view of people. Users to Tasks/Goals/Preferences to Behaviors/Motivations/Meaning.
Maybe some other words are better, but the idea is the same.
Embracing this complexity leads to the more insight. Acknowledge it and do our best to work with it. If you can only talk about tasks, there is only so much you can understand. A subtler thing that is going on is that people are focussing on qualitative methods. It helps design professionals to develop empathy.
Keeping this in mind we get to the hard part.
- Though shalt get these insights into design.
This seems obvious but it is not straightforward. These new approaches have very intangible qualities that are difficult to communicate in a tangible way.
Process; Research > Observations > Insights > Design
The problem arises when you think about how design groups are structures.
Research is created and then thrown over the wall to someone else who puts it on the shelf.
So how do we address this? Make it actionable in design. Make research insights durable throughout the process, more than the week or two after research findings are presented. Designs go on for a while and you don't want to lose sight of the insights.
So how do we encourage research to be actionable and durable? Tear down the wall (this is the key to most of this actually).
- Integrate research and design
- Improve communication
Integrating research and design is all about teams and organizations.
"You had to be there." When it comes to contextual research, being there is the thing. But just as researchers must be there, so must the rest of the design team. This gives information that is difficult, if not impossible to communicate in a report.
AP takes clients and designers to the field. They get them on the phone, they get them in the interview. This starts way at the early phase and helps to build empathy that will be built through the system.
You can't capture empathy in a report so involving people in the process is very powerful for getting good outcomes.
Look at Intel where designers and scientists work together. Their people and practices group tries to look ten years out. They put social scientists in charge or organizational directives. What they found out what that research can't be separated from research. The prototypes are also developed in concert.
Look at Samsung where design research and design are in the same room. They didn't go as far as Intel but they took the walls down and made people sit together. This led to lot's of collaboration. It helps design work to happen.
So how do we take this back to our orgs?
Look for subtle changes. Get people to participate, get engineers on the phone on mute while they do something else just so they can listen.
Improving communication is really important. Think about research artifacts and deliverables. Try to be innovative and compelling. Need to be reflective about how you do communications. What makes a good research deliverable.
Don't use reports, they are where good insights go to die. They aren't actionable, it is hard for a designer to make sense of them.
This is not a successful recipe for good research.
LAW: The effectiveness of research is inversely proportional to the width of the binding.
Good deliverables:
- clear and straightforward
- engage readers
- tell stories
One good example: Personas. Where insight meets empathy in a convenient sharable package.
Some people are already biased against them but when they are done well they make research actionable and durable.
The key is that they are subtle. What would "Kitty" do? It's the first step to empathy.
So what are personas not.
- Not caricatures
- Not stereotypes
- Not fictional
It keeps you honest. Don't oversimplify. Deal with the complexity. This is clear and straightforward. It's a single page with pictures.
Include quotes where appropriate. Look for obstacles, triggers, etc. that are connected to what is being designed.
By putting personas into the Insights phase it is very powerful. You can put it on the wall and they will look over your shoulder. It has impact beyond the design work, it can institute itself throughout the organization.
Remind yourself that you are not the target audience.
So user-centered design is really what we are talking about. By its very nature you need to understand people. Moving the focus to experience rather than features requires that you take more into account.
"True long-lasting emotional feelings take long times to develop."
What matters is memory.
Creating great experiences means understanding people and getting those insights into design. We have a chance to transform the way we do design.
RED, a project of the UK design council, was a project to promote design.
An interdisciplinary tema was set up to run the project. In the past they did work on redesigning prisons. Looking at how they could be designed to actually work for rehabilitation. They are expensive, don't work, and lead to recitivism.
Also spent time on household energy consumption and a design workshop with members of parliament on how citizens can interface with their government (if only we had this in America...)
There was a big push on public sector reform. Much money was put into reorganizing the public sector to improve the experience of the end user. They did some large scale project on secondary schools to create better learning environments. This led to extra investment from the government.
Also looked at designing out medical accidents in hospitals. In the end this led to improving preexisting services. But there are limits to modernizing what already exists. Most public services in the UK were created in the 1950s.
But society has moved on and technology is completely different. If you redesigned to put people at the heart with what we have now it would be completely different. Moreover, the rising demand will cripple the current system. The interesting thing for designers is that we are looking at a new range of issues (chronic disease, climate change, anti-social behavior). These problems can't be fixed with more money, they are problems that require citizens to modify their behavior.
But people aren't rational, they make emotional decisions and this is a challenge for policymakers and traditional economists. They are used to dealing with rational. Its easy to say build five nuclear power stations. Its hard to say turn down the thermostat or eat a healthy diet.
This messy irrational emotional stuff is hard. This is why the public sector needs a new generation of services cocreated with individuals for individuals. These would be preventative to focus on causes not symptoms. A design approach is a fantastic way to do this.
Three case studies.
Two years ago they ran a large project about chronic disease. They have a National Health Service. It is the third largest organization in the world. It was designed to treat infectious diseases but those are very different than chronic diseases. The NHS must rely on people self managing their long term conditions. It has nothing to do with hospitals and everything to do with daily life. Investing money in hospitals and nurses won't fix this.
A new model must harness the energy and expertise of ordinary people to deal with this. In software you have open sources, you have P2P finance like Grameen, flickr, etc. These systems rely on ordinary people to generate content themselves. Non-hierarchical, user-driven, solutions strengthened by greater participation, not burdened by demand.
Two partners and two problems were engaged [VIDEO re: diabetes and physical exercise]
Use agenda cards to prototype experiences. Work toward taking action to solve problems. Active mobs are a group of people who build on existing interests. Group dog walking for fitness. They harness the power of social groups. Any activity can be mobbed to build social support structures to sustain motivation. These help people to see the immediate benefits of activity. The web can help to connect and motivate people in these social contexts. Contact with a personal trainer is cheaper and more effective in the context of a group.
The research revealed that people know what to do but need support. But someone other than a nurse or a GP is needed. Web sites, catalogs, and other prototypes allowed participants to experience concepts as prototypes. This short work shows that design can quickly lead to new solutions to insoluable problems, to help cocreate solutions for people.
The process ran for nine months with hundreds of people. It included economists, policy experts, etc.
Type 2 diabetes impacts people later in life and if it gets bad can lead to blindess or could require amputation. It is not curable but its impact can be mitigated. These ongoing tasks cannot be achieved through a ten minute consulation with a doctor.
User experience research > Character profiling
Looking for common paths but found that there isn't one. Any solution must be segmented on character types. Interactions are dynamic, personal, and collaborative. Tools and services need to support people in their daily lives.
The current interactions encourage patients to lie to their doctors. The deck of cards was made from statements that ordinary people made in interviews. They pick out statements that are relevant to them and then take those into an interaction to determine what they want to talk about that day. It forces a different kind of behavior that gives the individual control over the interaction.
You just deal a new hand when you have new issues to work on.
Doctors and nurses resented this and too game like but when they tried it they liked it because it got straight to the heart of the problem with the patient in the first two minutes.
Also enabled people to talk about hidden issues to eachother.
They divided people into a two-by-two to see how people break down and then move from one group to another. As they tested the cards they found that people needed a coach to help them through the process.
This led to the idea of creating an independant network of life coaches.
The NHS lacks person centered accounting so it was hard to determine the cost of this. They worked out that having a coach available for nine months is much cheaper than putting a patient on insultin.
Another case study focussed on exercise.
Activemobs came out of the idea that social groups lead to pressure. This is positive pressure to benefit your life in the way you want. They are self organizing and built on social software.
Protoyped with live mobs. Worked with dog walking groups, neighbors who had back problems, etc. Learned about designing a system that will help people change their lifestyles. Groups are very useful in this context. It is a group of friends, not a class, not led by an instructor. Having a personal trainer is highly aspirational.
A woman was scared to try salsa but always wanted to. With her friends she was comfortable with this. People show up because they don't want to let their friends down. That social dynamic provides the design materials. Need to tap into and sustain motivation and this is different for everyone.
Some people are motivated by not being able to do something they used to be able to do and can't. Tools can be developed that increase self awareness of change. Well-being cards were developed to track whatever the individual wants. They then got bank statement like reports on these metrics.
Collective metrics are also helpful. Ten inches lost off the collective waist.
The importance of making things visible can't be underestimated (voting, energy consumption, etc.)
The solutions to these problems depend on people changing their own behavior.
Go beyond shaping products to shaping behavior/ experience.
- meaningful metrics from the perspective of the person, not the system
- co-created services because you can't deliver this product. people must shape the service themselves. you can't design is totally from the outset. you must instead build a platform and distribute tools with different rules and roles to emerge.
- must make the service really aspirational. you can't force people to do anything. as designers we need to understand what motivates people.
Go from improving public services to using the design process as a key method to create new services. Designers are uniquely placed to do this. There is a shared set of skills and characteristics that mark this discipline.
See: LiveWork
They needed people, clients, and competition. Their philosophy is about shifting society from ownership and consumption to the use of things. In order to do this they realized that service experiences needed to be more desirable than owning itself.
Cars are the ultimate challenge. They began to work with streetcar, a car sharing service, to make this more desireable than owning (zipcar made me feel this way when I lived in DC). Live|Work is now working on transport services in rural economies.
Transformation design.
- redefine the brief
- collaboration between disciplines
- fundamental transformation
- participatory design work
- building capacity not dependancy
- non-traditional outputs
Good strategy always must start from the perspective of the user. Design the offerening and then redesign the organization around that offering (think Target ClearRX).
Orgs are struggling to adapt and to continue to adapt. The only way to do this is to embed a culture of innovation within the company itself. Can't fall apart when they leave.
Orgs can't predict from the outset what the nature of the solution is, could be a service or product etc.
The last two in the above list is a real challenge. Where is the solution and who will do it. This is far away from the rockstar designer, this is about nitty-gritty problem solving in collaboration with real people.
In the UK the cabinet has put out guidelines on service design.
look at www.designcouncil.info/RED
look at participle (need to find URL)
[QUESTIONS]
Q: govt has history of botching this. Do people (employees and citizens) come with skepticism? Do challenges come with using the web for a diverse audience?
A: Lot's of community groups are already innovating. The problem isn't having ideas, it's in scaling it up. The skepticism is about making it work in more than one place, outside of personalities. Planning to broker partnerships between local government and technology companies. There is thus a commercial and social imperitive at the same time.
Q: In the design solution cards were used. How did you settle on this?
A: Not the answer to everything. But a useful tool, an artifact.
Q: How do you get it to not just be outsourcing?
A: Look for gaps and build partnerships. The hope is that you can construct it in such a way that people join the process in a real way and then take it back to organizations. Look at healthcare or transport. The people are held ransome by outsourcing. By using design process as a conduit for different expertise to be brought into the solution.
Ok. I'm back online. As any reader of this site knows, I normally live blog these events. This time I ran out of the house to get to the airport on Sunday with my laptop sitting on my living room sofa.
Thanks to the great folks at Adaptive Path, I'm now back online using one of their spare 12-inch Powerbooks.
So far the conference has been very stimulating. Yesterday's talks (and I will post my notes when I have time) centered on the the business case for experience design.
Jesse James Garret kicked off the event with talk on creating value with design. This set the tone for the day. Anyone who has tried to sell their organization, no matter how cutting edge, on using design as a primary driver for business decision-making understands the importance of the fundamental question of value.
Lou Carbone, the CEO of Experience Engineering, took the stage to wow us with his amazing presentation skills and his vast experience helping Fortune 500 companies understand experience design.
[MORE ON YESTEDAY SOON, THE NEXT PANEL IS STARTING
[Typed after the fact from handwritten notes. The time stamp has been adjusted to reflect when the event occurred.]
Our understanding of value creation is being tested in a big way. In our haste we often fail to step back.
Be a consumer, not a designer or a technology.
Think about Howard Johnson restaurants, once one of the largest brands in America. They invented franchising in America but are now completely gone from the landscape. Why?
Toward the end of the life of the company [Lou Carbone] worked on an ad campaign for Howard Johnson that was incredibly effective at getting people to come to the restaurant. They used all-you-can-eat promos and other gimmicks and it worked... Until it didn't. After the initial burst of customers, fewer came than before the campaign because everyone who came had a terrible experience. The company was focussed on cutting corners, improving efficiency and lowering cost. Instead of thinking about how they were making people feel, they focussed on cutting the length of their straws by 1/4 of an inch or on switching from 4-ply to 2-ply napkins.
Compare HoJo to Disney. Disney created an experience that people pay more for than a trip to Europe. They create something so satisfying, so pleasurable, that people not only part with their cash but they love every moment.
People too often think about best practices instead of next practices. Disney thinks about how the velocity of air on a ride will make you feel. Feel what your customers feel.
Research has shown that 60 to 80% of customers who defect other products identify themselves satisfied. Asking this isn't enough. Look to other metrics, like the Net Promoter Score where you ask a customer how likely they are to recommend your product.
Think about the difference between loyalty and rewards. [Lou] flies quite a bit with Northwest. He's a platinum whatever and they have trained him to receive upgrades. But bad experiences and the general wheedling required to get anywhere make him feel like a bad person when he interacts with NWA. Think about how you make people feel with your products and services.
Think about Jet Blue.
You want your customers to feel ownership.
Look at Harley. Their customers organize owners groups, associations, rallies, etc. People tattoo their bodies with Harley logos.
Think about Truefit & Hill. Experience can come to matter more than quality. It's about how it makes you feel.
Experience preference model (rejection, acceptance, preference).
Designers making experiences can create something not rooted in the industrial age, outside of processed.
The evolution of business can been seen to progress like this:
Commodities > Products > Services > Experiences
A company like Starbucks operates in the latest stage of this evolution. The idea of make-and-sell is wrong. Experiences cannot be created on an assembly line. Sense-and-respond is the new model. We've lived with efficiency over effectiveness.
Drucker quote: The reason for being is value for customers, profits are the reward not the objective.
Think about what experience clues create certain emotions.
"Brand" only represents what a customer feels about the company. The real customer value comes out of how they feel about their experience.
Know how a customer thinks. Understand psychology. Remember that you cannot not have an experience. You must systematically and purposefully design experience clues.
An example of this kind of thinking is to pay attention to ideas of cleanliness and safety.
Books to look at:
[Typed after the fact from handwritten notes. The time stamp has been adjusted to reflect when the event occurred.]
About 150 year ago, Scientific American hailed the development of a new camera. The problem is that it 19 individual parts. This kept photography in the exclusive domain of pros and advanced hobbyists .
Eastman came along an developed a device around his invention of roll-film and a simple maxim: "You press the button, we do the rest." Photography as a mass-consumer activity. The Kodak camera reduced the complexity of photography to a simple interaction.
What's the highest compliment a product can receive? "Highly profitable" "Reliable" The goal is: "can't live without it." What does it take to get there?
[Steve Jobs quotation]
When you start looking at a problem and see a simple solution you don't understand the problem. You keep looking and see how complicated it really is and you are halfway there. The really great person will keep going to find the key underlying principle and create a beautiful, elegant solution that works.
[Samuel Johnson quote about a dog walking on its hind legs]
Think about the difference between WordStar and a typewriter.
Think about the complicated VCR so loaded with features and buttons that nobody can set the clock. Remember the blinking 12:00.
The Tivo is a transformative product. They took a step back and re-imagined the experience. This was so successful that their mind-share not exceeds their market-share.
Look at the Rio vs. the iPod. The iPod did less, cost more, and completely dominated the marketplace.
The cognitive mechanisms that are at play in a product are the same as those at play in human relationships.
"Products are people too"
Anthropomorphize what you are doing because your users will do the same thing. Know who you are and what you are trying to convey. If you don't know what you are conveying you are taking the risk that your users will have a bad experience with your product and thus with you.
O'Reilly calls this designing from the outside in. It can also be called experience strategy.
You need a clear objective. Look at Google Calendar and Flickr. They started with a clear idea of what they were doing and then always referred back to that to evaluate choices.
Identity is not the brand, identity is the experience people have with you. Work from the consumer back to the organization, not the other way. Work inside out, not outside in.
Develop strategic requirements from field research and compare them to business goals and values.
Business Value + Opportunity = Experience Strategy
The web site doesn't stand alone; it's part of the complete experience. Leverage the system.
iPod is not the product, the system is the product. iTunes + iPod are the experience. Play/Manage/Acquire
flickr, for example, doesn't control the system the way Apple does. They are, however, able to position themselves within a system. They took a systems view and allowed their experience strategy to drive every decision.
Deliver a product that knows who it is.
Who is this guy?
