Get first-hand experience with the task to understand the experience

I've worked with a lot of teams who have been trying to design a feature or product to help people with a particular task. Oddly, I often find that people on the team have not tried the task itself, either with their solution or with any other method. While this might seem strange, let me give you a common scenario that might illustrate how this can come about:

One of the top call drivers to support for a product was around a specific task. A team was pulled together to fix the feature that supported the task. Although this team is quite familiar with the product and the feature, they have not experienced the task for themselves. They do take a look at the feature and decide that there are user interface elements that might be unclear or are probable causes of usability issues. They make some changes and roll out the revised feature.

Sure, you might suggest that they do a usability test to understand what the issues are, or a site visit to watch a customer using the feature... and you'd be right to suggest that. But, a very simple first step is often missing... have each of the team members attempt to do the task themselves.

I was recently working with a team that was thinking about how they needed to change the customer service/support IVR to be successful at routing calls to the right agent. The first thing we did was give the team a scenario and had them call the live phone line to try to accomplish a common task. They came back and discussed their experiences, recognizing a number of issues that they would have missed if just talking with customers or listening to the support representative's conversation with the customer from our side of the phone.

It's low-hanging fruit... it's easy... and, it can give a team a quick hit of empathy for the customer.

Getting first-hand experience with the task is method 4 in my list of 101 methods for getting Deep Customer Empathy, and falls into the "be the customer" category, although it obviously falls far short of actually becoming the customer on the depth of empathy you walk away with.

97 more methods to come...

AIGA D.Talk on The Rise of Service Design

Last night I attended a panel at AIGA on “The Rise of Service Design”. It was a packed room, reflecting the general interest in this topic.

The session was moderated by Josh Levine (Great Monday)

The panelists were:

• Chris McCarthy (Kaiser)
• Hugh Dubberly (Dubberly Design)
• Jamin Hegeman (Adaptive Path)

The key bits were:

· Service Design seems to be a name for Experience Design over a coordinated set of touchpoints (rather than just a single task) and across an ecosystem of people and objects. For example:

o Netflix

o Starbucks

o Hotels & Restaurants

o Nursing Shift Changes (passing off patient care data) at hospitals

· The tools of product design are insufficient for service design. Service design needs to have workflow models and diagrams to make the intangible tangible.

o Our journey map is another example of a service design tool

o Service Blueprint – a tangible artifact for discussion and referral

o Ethnography, Co-design

· A few interesting points about Services:

o Value is derived at the point of consumption.

o The customer helps to create the experience. You aren’t designing the experience, just the scaffold for the experience.

o The focus is on the relationship between things (including people), not necessarily the things themselves (transitions more than destinations)

o The room had the overwhelming feeling that in the future, the winners will be the ones who took service design seriously

Make your life an integral part of your customer's life

We all want our products and services to be important to our customers. So important that they are integral; the customers can't live without them! Since this is our aim, we need to really be intimate with that customer's life. Talking with them is not going to be sufficient... you should live with them.

Think about it. If you were to design something for your spouse or child, you'd know the types of things that would delight them. You understand their lives, their values, their ambitions, the full context and reality of their existence.

So why do we expect to know our customers that well from listening to the complaints to our call center or reading the answers to a survey?

Here's a radical idea for getting Deep Customer Empathy: Live with your customer. Work in the customer's office, or live in their home, or drive in their car. Experience their world through from their perspective.

This might seem like a crazy idea. However, anthropologists have been doing this for decades. Margaret Mead used this method to study adolescence in Samoa. Lego had a team who lived with kids to understand what their lives are like (leading to the revitalization of the company). Read about more companies who've taken this approach in this CNBC article from last April.

This is method 3 in my list of 101 methods for getting Deep Customer Empathy, and falls into the "be the customer" category, although it obviously overlaps in the watch. Why "be"? Well, because it is so close that you kind of brush into playing the part, at least for a time. In fact, that is my challenge... live with them and become one. You'll have very deep customer empathy...

What would living with your customer look like for you?

98 more methods for deep customer empathy coming...

Become the Customer for Deep Customer Empathy

About a year ago, I wanted to understand the big deal about Farmville... it seems that 1% of the world's population plays Farmville. I know that it leverages some of the key components of gaming that make it compelling (check out slide 8 on Byron Reeve's preso), but it still didn't make sense to me how so many people could get sucked into a game about farming. Farming? Really?

Well, to get a clue, I decided to try it out. (In all honesty, I couldn't do the farming thing... I did Cafe World instead, which is the same game design only about running a Cafe). I BECAME the customer. I have been playing for nearly a year and have found many subtle elements about the experience that reinforce my gaming behavior. I have such a good understanding of being a customer that I can easily envision leveraging these elements in non-game experiences to make them more compelling and fun.

What I did was to appease my own curiosity, but I've applied this same approach to product design. When at all possible, I try to become the customer. For example, recently I was working on a project where my customer is a person who needs funding to start a small business. So, what do I do? I ask my friends and family for money, try to get a loan from a bank, from Lending Club or Prosper, and look broadly for ways to find cash. This gives me some direct personal experience with the customer's experience.

As a method, it isn't as powerful as solving a problem you already have, and it should, ideally, be combined with methods that get you experience with the target customer (you might not really be 'typical'). But, it can get you empathy pretty quickly.

The key to this method is to do the thing the customer does and make it a part of your life. Become the customer for real. If you sell cars, buy a car. If your customer runs a small business, start a business. If your customer is a student, go to school.

Many companies encourage this behavior in their employees.

• Harley-Davidson employees almost all ride.
  
• Southwest executives fly coach (heck, everyone does!).
  
• TurboTax employees at Intuit do their taxes with TurboTax.

But... are you one of your customers? If not, is your understanding of their needs deep enough to really design solutions that delight them?

99 more methods to come...

101 Ways to get Deep Customer Empathy for Design Inspiration and Insights

Okay, so I'm not going to list all 101 right now. What I am going to do is start a series where I will be talking about these 101 ways. My goal is to write about at least 2 per week... but, before I start, I thought I'd lay some context:

Why do you need Deep Customer Empathy?

Have you ever bought a product, only to find that it wasn’t really what you thought you’d be getting, or that it did solve some of your problems in a way that didn’t work for you? Have you ever been disappointed at a present that someone got you that made it feel like they really didn’t understand you? Have you ever called a support line to get help and find yourself explaining your problem over and over before someone was able to solve it? If you’ve experienced any of these things, you’ve experienced what it is like to have someone lacking empathy for you and your perspective in the design of their offering.

Let’s turn that around.... have you ever bought a product, only to find that it went beyond your expectations in how well it solved your problems? Have you ever been delighted by a present that someone got you that you didn’t ask for, that made it feel like they understood you perfectly? Have you ever called a support line and had someone immediately understand and solve your problem? If so, you have experienced what it is like to have someone have empathy for you in the design of their offering.

Are you trying to create a product or service to solve problems for someone else? Would you like to have their experience align with the second paragraph? Then, you need to get deep empathy for your customer. You need to get to know them so well that you understand their needs better than they understand them themselves. The better you understand your customer, the more likely you are to find a way to delight them.

So, how do you get deep empathy for your customer?
To get empathy, you have to make a personal connection with them. You need to engage your internal emotional center, which is fed through specific stories and direct experiences. You aren’t going to deeply understand the customer’s perspective from a data point in a survey. Surveys, log-files, and call center analytics can engage your intellect and point you to problem areas, but they cannot help you get deep empathy. You need to be more intimate with your customers.

It is hard to understand your customer from your cube or office... Try to connect to where they are coming from.

The key to getting that recognition and understanding is to be able to relate to their world, their reality. To do that, you need to connect with where they are coming from: their environment, their expectations, their constraints. Unless you are solving for someone else who sits in a cube in a large corporation, you probably can’t fully recognize your customer’s perspective until you experience it for yourself first-hand.

The 101 methods fall into the following categories:

• Be the customer
• Have the customer teach you
• Watch the customer
• Talk with the customer
• Have the customer document it
• Talk with other, interested parties

The first method, falling into the category BE the customer was illustrated in my last blog posting. Find a problem that YOU personally have and solve that. That was how LL Bean got started... Leon Leonwood Bean was tired of having wet feet when hunting and fishing, so he invented a pair of waterproof boots. What problem do you have? (I'm sure you have at least one, we all do). What would it take for you to invent a solution?

100 more methods coming soon...

Necessity as the mother of invention

I'm sure you've heard the Plato's phrase "Necessity is the Mother of Invention".. .

A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to someone who once again drove this home. His name is Matthew Browning. He's a nurse and founder of a really cool web application service called "Your Nurse is On". Here's his story...

As a senior nurse working in a hospital environment, he found that he was spending an enormous amount of time trying to hunt down other nurses to work shifts to cover for nurses who couldn't work on their scheduled shifts. Apparently, shifting shifts is really common and disruptive in the healthcare field. He would find himself calling one nurse after another to find out if they were interested and available in working the shift in question. The nurses would often be irritated at being bothered on their days off, and had little say over whether or not they would be asked to work the extra shifts.

Finally, Matthew decided to do something about it. He created Your Nurse is On, a web-based service that instantly contacts the right nurses on their preferred devices. Nurses (supply) sign up and indicate all of their expertise, location and communication preferences. Administrators (demand) can simultaneously send out queries to qualified, interested nurses. Simple, elegant, solves one problem REALLY WELL. Matthew found that his own time in trying to schedule was cut from as much as 10 hours a week to about 10 minutes a week. WOW. Now, Matthew is still a nurse, but he's also CEO of a new small business that sells an award-winning SAS application -- Your Nurse is On (YNIO) -- that is helping nurse staffing nationwide. Awesome story.

Anyway... the lesson of Matthew is that focusing on YOUR OWN PROBLEMS is often one of the very best ways to have deep customer empathy and devise great solutions that really delight.

Understand Your Customers' Minds

In some ways, this method isn't at all new. Yet, the video articulates it and the benefit so well...

iPad, Kindle and Paper - Reading Speeds and Immersion

Jakob Nielsen just released a study on iPad, Kindle, Paper and PC reading rates.

I have issues with this study, but it's interesting. As a user of Paper Books, PCs, a Kindle, and an iPad, I can definitely say that I have some preferences. But, what struck me is that this study really was highly confounded. When you read a paper book, you are doing something you've done for years (as a college student). When you read a Kindle, there is definitely a period of adjustment to getting really immersive.

After reading my first novel on the Kindle, the immersive reading experience for me is now much like reading a paper book. It wasn't that way at first, but it got that way. The iPad, in contrast, is more taxing on my eyes, so I don't find that I can read for as long on the iPad without being fatigued. Now, I'm just one person, but my experience is making me question the validity of testing paper against e-book readers when the users aren't existing users of e-book readers.

Innovation Lessons from Visual Perception and Walks

I was just out on a walk at the lovely Shoreline park, just behind where I work. I was walking along, thinking about Innovation challenges, and passively observing the world go by.

One of the things I noticed was the phenomenon of Motion Parallax. Things in the distance really didn't seem to move much, but things near me zipped past me quickly.

It occurred to me that there was a lesson here for teams who are trying to be innovative.

If you try to address something that is off in the distance, you can keep an eye on it and it doesn't move much as you move towards it. If you head off to one direction or another, it's still there. However, if you choose to address something that is nearby, it will zip past you very quickly.

For a bigger impact, focus on the goals that are out in the distance. They are easier to aim for...

For a quicker, but small impact, focus on the goal close to you. But, be careful... it's a moving target and the opportunity may zip past you before you are able to make the change.

Digging for innovation diamonds

This morning on NPR, I heard a story about Einstein’s brain. Bear with me, this is relevant to innovation…

Apparently,Einstein’s brain was fairly normal, except that it had an overabundance of a type of cell called a Glial cell. When I was taught neuroanatomy in college, I was taught that a Glial cell was a cell that glued the brain together and, perhaps, provided some nutrients to support neurons (the cells involved in processing information). When scientists discovered that Einstein had loads of Glial cells, they were perplexed. Why would this brilliant genius have more Glial cells? They didn’t DO anything… or so they thought. So, the scientists started taking a much closer look at Glial cells. They discovered that Glial cells did, in fact, communicate information. They just communicated in a different way than neurons: with biochemistry. This discovery radically changed neuroscientists understanding of the brain and how it works… it changed everything. And, it stemmed from digging into an observation that didn’t make sense.

When I heard this story, I was struck by how familiar it was. One of the stories we hear about all the time at Intuit is the story of how QuickBooks came about. The product Quicken, which is intended to help individuals balance their checkbooks and manage their personal finances, was being used by people for their business. That didn’t really make sense to the team. The product was for personal finances, not for business accounting… but, they finally dug into the finding and discovered that small business people, without a background in accounting, were using Quicken because it was easy to understand, and a more effective way of managing their finances than manual methods. These people wouldn’t use the existing accounting software tools because they were too complex and required an understanding of accounting principles. This insight changed everything. We built a product specifically for these non-accounting small businesses to manage their finances (QuickBooks), and were immediately dominating the market. The innovation stemmed from digging into an observation that didn’t make sense.

We don’t do this enough. We don’t pay attention to the sparkly observation that doesn’t make sense. We miss the diamonds. Why? Well, we aren’t looking for them. They don’t fit into the context of our current understanding, so we skip over them to the observations that do make sense. We’re looking for “problems” with the current state. However, looking for problems usually only leads to incremental design improvements. For RADICAL disruptions, those things that change everything, you have to look for the diamonds.

Here’s a challenge for today. Kind of a warm-up. As you go through your day, take a look for things that aren’t expected or don’t make sense.

It’s easier than you might think. In 10 minutes walking around my office filled with standard cubicles this morning, I found:

• A crystal vase, filled with markers and a USB cord
• A box of brownie mix
• A bottle of clear nail polish
• An open eyeglass case with glasses
• A thermal carafe (the kind you get at diners, filled with coffee)
• A dead plant (in a pot wrapped in purple tissue paper)

Each of these is unexpected. Each provokes my curiosity. Each suggest a purpose… although I would need to actually talk with the owners to verify. And, importantly, each were things that were easily overlooked as I glanced in people’s cubes.

Why do this warm-up? It gets you looking for the unexpected. You might find gold, you might find a rock, or you might, just might, stumble on a diamond.

Is your culture inhibiting your creativity?

I'm giving a talk tomorrow morning on the impact of working environment "culture" on creativity and capability to design great solutions. This is an update on the one that I gave a little over a year ago at the Design Research conference in Spokane. This time, it's intended to get the audience involved in identifying the barriers to creativity in their own 'corporate culture' and making a plan for how to overcome those barriers.

Is your corporate culture keeping you from designing

View more presentations from Wendy Castleman.

Apparently, Nothing Trumps the Power of a Personal Experience

A small group of executives was given a vast amount of data about a problem they were tackling about employee engagement. They looked it over and set it aside. Then, they had frank conversations with a couple of individual employees. They came away from their conversations and dismissed the lesson of the data, and made decisions based on the experiences of the few individuals they spoke with.

Things like this used to drive me crazy. As a trained scientist, I was taught to be skeptical of a single observation until you’d verified that it was a reliable learning. My background instilled a love of experiments and repeatable, reliable data. I hated when someone would challenge or dismiss my vast research and carefully controlled experiments with a personal anecdote.

Recently, though, I have come to understand and embrace this phenomenon. After seeing this happen hundreds of times (more often than not), it occurs to me that we seem to be wired to put undo weight on our own personal experiences and concrete stories of other’s experiences. We do this because the experiences and stories resonate with us as “real”. We can recall our own experiences or empathize with those of others, and it is a deep connection to the “truth” of the information. When we look at large data sets or aggregated data, it lacks the deep personal connection that makes it seem real.

In other words, for the scientists in my reading audience, although the reliability of information is important to the average person, it isn’t as critical as the validity of information.

This jibes with what others have observed about the power of story over data in presentations (e.g., see Stephen Denning’s The Secret Language of Leadership) and the power of empathy in business (e.g., see Dev Patnik’s Wired to Care).

SO… when challenged with helping people internalize reliable data, I have begun to try to give people a personal experience with the topic of information.

Nothing seems to trump the power of a personal experience.

Soaking rain of ideas in a brainstorm

I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on brainstorming. Sometimes brainstorms are wildly successful, and we come up with really new ways of approaching a problem/solution. Other times, it seems like brainstorms don't really generate much of anything new or interesting. I think there can be a number of reasons for that, but I've been paying attention so I can learn how to get a better hit rate.

Setting the field
Most innovations that have happened in history have come about through applying something that is working to solve a similar problem somewhere else. It is hard to look at the same problem the same way and come up with something new. So, brainstorms are more successful when people bring in new insights. The more successful brainstorms I've been a part of have been well planned and everyone has been a part of some "pre-work" to help prime the pump. Knowing that you have a brainstorm coming up can help you begin to keep your mind open to ideas that might be relevant. We have had good success with having people have deep customer experiences, spending time researching the "edge cases" and sending people off to advance their AQ (Awareness Quotient) through experiences in spaces that aren't directly related to the problem area. Basically, give the participants of the brainstorm some new experiences to draw upon when coming up with new ideas.

Building in diverse perspectives
For a brainstorm to be successful, the team needs to come up with lots of ideas that are different from one another. You are more likely to get a breadth of ideas if you build in diverse perspectives to the brainstorm. There are two ways I've tried that work to bring in diverse perspectives: with the people and the brainstorm prompts.

First, the people. The more diverse the roles, backgrounds and experiences of the brainstorm participants, the more diverse the ideas are bound to be. That is because our experiences shape the way we think, so the ideas we come up with are bound to be influenced by those experiences. The more diverse the people, the more influences come into play on the generation of ideas. So, stack the deck by pulling in a diverse group to participate in the brainstorm.

Second, the brainstorm prompts. Usually when doing a brainstorm, we focus on one thing. Say, for example, we're having a brainstorm about places to go for lunch. We usually do the brainstorm by saying "where can we go for lunch?" and then generate ideas. Recently, though, we've had some real success by breaking apart the brainstorm into a series of smaller brainstorms around themes or sub-categories related to the brainstorm. So, instead of "where can we go for lunch?" we might ask "What Asian food places could we go for lunch? What Mexican food places could we go to? What burger joints could we go to?" What this does is generate a much larger set of options to choose from, inevitably more diverse than we would have gotten to with the larger question. So, stack the deck by breaking up the brainstorm into several smaller-brainstorms.

Going for the slow drizzle after the downpour
Ever been in a brainstorm where everyone comes up with lots of ideas, don't really share them with one another, and then stop when the ideas stop coming? I've noticed something really interesting lately. The REALLY interesting ideas often come later in the brainstorm, when it is hard to come up with ideas and people work harder to combine or alter ideas that are already up. This is the slow drizzle... it is the point at which everyone starts listening to the other ideas and trying to build on them. I was always a little skeptical of "Creative Rainbow" and "Scamper" (brainstorming methods), but now I see that their real value is in the slow drizzle after the initial downpour of ideas. So, build in extra time so that the brainstorm seems to be faltering, then pull out the tools: "What can we combine?", "What can we amplify?"...

Following Objects

When studying a new area, we often talk with and watch people doing whatever it is we're interested in. For example, if we were interested in Shopping, we might talk with people about their shopping habits, watch them shopping (maybe going with them and asking questions), etc. But, how often do we watch the objects that people interact with in the environment? While I might note that they are using a shopping cart, and maybe even how they are using it (what they put in it, etc), I rarely have taken the time to map the experience of the objects themselves.

This week, I was in an ethnography class and one of the exercises we did was to follow an object. I've always wanted to do that, but haven't. So, some of my colleagues and I went to a local Target store to study the life of shopping carts. One colleague studied the cart experience in the parking lot. She noticed a distinct non-shopping role for parents. A shopping cart is an entertainment device and a tool for containing children in the potentially dangerous environment of a parking lot. Another colleague studied the life of carts that migrated to locations other than the store (for example, to a nearby apartment complex). I did a case study of one particular cart's journey through the store.
Here is the full report, if you are interested.

20 Minutes In The Life Of A Shopping

View more presentations from Wendy Castleman.

I found it a really interesting experience. I noticed things I wouldn't normally notice, and I could see how this could be a really useful technique for tracking artifacts that customers use when solving problems that I'm interested in.

So here is my challenge to you. Next time you are researching something, or are somewhere that you have some time to kill, try tracking the life of an object in that environment.

Cool New Trend in Resumes

Looking for work? Got a resume? This is for you:

Why be boring and staid like everyone else in the pile of resumes? Why not show your uniqueness, creativity and visual thinking design skills in creating a visual resume?

One of my favorite blogs is "Cool Infographics". He's got an awesome set of 18 infographic resumes.... for example, this one