Deep Understandings

Videos I've been working on lately

2011-08-18T19:57:00.000-07:00

Empathy Map
Empathy Map from Design for Delight on Vimeo.

Customer Journey Line
Customer Journey Line from Design for Delight on Vimeo.

Mindmapping
Customer Journey Line from Design for Delight on Vimeo.

Concept Sheet
Concept Sheet from Design for Delight on Vimeo.

Bodystorming
Bodystorming from Design for Delight on Vimeo.

2X2 Narrowing
Bodystorming from Design for Delight on Vimeo.

Drawing for Storyboarding
Bodystorming from Design for Delight on Vimeo.

In the works:
Storyboarding
Customer Feedback
Problem Statement
Project Diagnostic
Brainstorming
Observational Research

Go through training to be your customer

2011-06-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

We all know that when we aren't our customer, we make design choices that often don't really resonate with the customer. This can be especially true if you are highly tech savvy and your customer is not. In some cases, we are designing for audiences that are very discrete and specialized. How do you design for them? Well, of course, the standard observational methods and customer research applies. But, here's a quirky way to get some empathy for your customer -- go through training to become them.

This example is completely hypothetical, but go with me on it...

Let's say you were hired to design a web application for LVNs (Licensed Vocational Nurses - the ones who often provide bedside assistance in homecare and nursing homes and the like) to teach them standard care techniques and track what they've done with each of their patients for the day. You've certainly got the opportunity to talk with LVNs, and maybe observe them in their natural habitat. However, one option that you might not have thought of until now is to go through training to become an LVN.

The thing is, the people who best understand what it's like to be your target customer are your target customer. And, if you aren't them, you could put yourselves completely into their shoes by becoming them. The interesting thing about doing the training that they've done is that it exposes you to their vocabulary, the things they've been told, and their expectations. You'll be exposed to how they are treated, and how they see themselves with respect to related professionals. It can help you really connect with what they think and how they feel. And, as I've mentioned before, that is the key to understanding what motivates them. When you have that, you have deep understanding and empathy and the solutions that you design for them are likely to really resonate.

Deep Customer Empathy Method: Be the solution

2011-06-07T15:08:00.000-07:00

Want to understand the relationship between your customer and your product? Here's a method that might reveal some good insights. Use bodystorming with your customer and have them teach you. In this case, you play the role of your product.

Ask your customer to pretend that you are the product. For example, if your product is a blood pressure monitor, you would be doing the things the monitor does: taking blood pressure, displaying information, etc. Have them walk through the day and map when they are interacting with you (bonus points if you really spend the day with them as their product!).

Pay attention to the following:

Where do you sit?
When does your customer engage with you?
Do others interact with you too?
What do they need from you?
What do you do in your down-time?
What aren't you doing that you could be?

By involving the customer, you can learn what their specific constraints and needs are, rather than hypothetical ones.

By being the product, you can recognize where your product meets or exceeds their needs, and where it falls short.

It might feel silly, but it might also lead you to a deep insight that can be game-changing.

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

2010-09-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-15T08:12:00.001-07:00

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

2010-09-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-20T11:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Deep Understanding Exercise

2010-07-18T15:59:00.000-07:00

For those of you who contributed, thank you. I've taken this offline now. The exercise is complete. I will be writing about the experience shortly...

I tried to raise $100 in 2 days.

Explanation: This is an exercise that I did for getting "deep empathy" for people who are faced with having to raise $$ fast. I couldn't just pitch in the money myself, I needed to get it from someplace else.

(I'll write up a whole explanation in a future post)

Understand Your Customers' Minds

2010-07-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-02T09:56:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-05-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-23T09:21:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-12T09:49:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

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

Do I listen to what I say I do?

2009-12-21T12:55:00.000-08:00

Anyone who studies behavior knows that what people say is not what they do. More evidence reported in the NY Times shows that what people report listening to isn't what they actually listen to.

Visualizing You.... leveraging the internet to break down your name

2009-10-02T09:02:00.000-07:00

This shows 3 iterations of "Wendy Castleman". It is a pretty cool visualization from MIT:

It combines all of the data on the internet related to your name and creates a "digital DNA map". It seems to change every time I do it... and it combines me and at least two other "Wendy Castleman"s out there. Still... it's pretty cool.

Why not solve for everyone?

2009-09-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

I consistently get push-back from teams when I encourage them to solve for only a subset of people. I explain to them that if they want to really delight someone, they need to focus. That if you try to solve for everyone, you end up making choices that make it non-optimal for anyone. The experience for customers is like the difference between getting a gift that is absolutely perfect for you ("you know me so well! This is perfect! Wow!") and one that could work for anyone ("oh, how nice").

One of my colleagues just pointed me to a rather old video that I think I can use to help make my case:

What do you think?

Understanding Customer Values

2009-08-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

Understanding customer's values is key to getting to delight.

How often do you identify what your customer's values are? How do you use that information when designing solutions for them? If the solutions to customer's problems don't mesh with their view of the world and their values, they won't find the solution delightful. If they do... wow.

Examples of companies that focus on values:

Harley-Davidson designs everything to support their customer's underlying values of experiencing freedom, adventure and community.
Boon designs things to support their customer's underlying value of style and whimsy.
The Body Shop designs solutions to support their customer's underlying values of being sustainable, natural and unique.
Lego designs things that support their customer's values of play, creativity and community.

The better you are at recognizing a customer's values, the more likely you will be to delight them.

Here is a wonderful video of a small business customer talking about his business. Watch it and try to figure out his values. Then, look at the first of the "comments" on this blog entry for my assessment. How close are you?

Deeper Empathy Through Reflection

2009-08-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

One of my passions lately is in understanding how we can get deeper understandings of our customers... if we can establish "Deep Customer Empathy", then we can develop better solutions for them. I'm not alone in my recognition that we need to get deeper. Companies are starting to hire more ethnographers and specialists to help bring those understandings to the company. However, that's not enough. Everyone at the company needs to have the empathy, not just the researcher. Matthew May just wrote about this a couple of days ago. There is a WONDERFUL new book on the topic by Dev Patnaik, called "Wired to Care". Both are well worth reading.

To researchers and designers, this stuff might seem like it is old-hat. However, I've found that even researchers and designers don't necessarily go far enough in their investigations. I think an important step, when studying people who aren't you, is "reflecting" what you have heard and seen and how you are interpreting it. The customer can "course correct" you if you are slightly off.

For example, a team I was recently working with was trying to come up with new ideas for a market they hadn't really focused on before - young adults. I had them do some ethnographic research and some interviews, and when they analyzed the data, they determined that the area where the most opportunity seemed to be was in planning for the "mid-term". This market was great at managing near-term events (things in the next few weeks) and very long-term (retirement), but not really the time in between. The team identified a problem around planning for the time between 4 months to 40 years. I then brought some of the participants from our earlier research in to review the insight. Their reaction was lovely. They absolutely agreed on the problem, but they couldn't agree with the time frame. For this market, they couldn't really comprehend 40 years. They corrected the time-span of the problem to 4 months to 10 years...

This was just one of the things they dug into with the customer. But, it illustrates the importance of clarifying and getting deeper with customers. It isn't enough just to observe customers and understand where they are coming from. Since you are filtering things through your own eyes and experience, you should go the extra step to reflect with the customer to make sure you have it right.

New article on being a better manager... via Design Thinking

2009-07-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of talk about Design Thinking lately. What is it? It is applying the methods of "thinking like a designer" to problem solving. And it works so well that very legitimate sources of information in the business world are starting to embrace it.

The latest article on the topic is from MIT Sloan Management Review: How to become a better manager... by thinking like a designer. The article covers a variety of topics, from simplicity to experimentation, from effective team size to communications.

One of my favorite quotes in the article is from Nancy Duarte:

"[Managers] rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning." (p. 40-41)

People can interpret things very differently, even when it is concrete data. We tend to filter our understanding and interpretation of the world based on our own perspective, values and assumptions. By creating a context around the information and redefining the meaning of it, you can build a persuasive and compelling story - which can result in a shared vision.

Not doing things we know we need to be doing

2009-07-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

I need to get on a regular exercise routine. I have great intentions, it's the follow through that is lacking. I know how to do it, I just don't. Why? I'm busy, it seems like it will be a lot of work, I'm kind of tired... for some reason, although I need to do it, I don't.

I've noticed the same thing happening with customer research in product design. We know we need to do it. We know how to do it, at least to some extent. But, we often just don't do it. We skip over the research in understanding the problem and empathizing with customers, we skip over bringing customers into our design process to get feedback and direction on our concepts, we even skip over usability testing and validating that the customers can use the solutions we design to solve their problems. At the end, we release a product and wonder why on earth it doesn't delight our customers.

I decided to tackle my exercise issue head on. I signed up for a publicly visible exercise diary that reported my exercise on my Facebook page. You might ask one of the following three questions:

Why on Earth would you want to publish your exercise behaviors on Facebook?
How will signing up for a diary tool get you to actually exercise?
What does this have to do with design research?

To the first point, it makes me accountable to others. Okay, others aren't really looking over my shoulder, but if I don't track, it will be like a public confession that I didn't exercise again today. If I do, I may occasionally get encouragement from others. By doing this, I get myself to be honest to myself. Frankly, I'm much more likely to do something appropriate if I know I'm being watched.

I'm not alone in this. There is strong evidence that tracking your behavior, or knowing that your behavior is being tracked, can actually change your behavior. The effect of just measuring can get this result. It has been shown to be effective for getting people to eat better, exercise more, study more, and even drive more evenly.

Finally, what does this have to do with design research? The same effect is likely to work. Logging your customer research activities in a publicly visible place (okay, maybe just visible to other employees at your company) will result in more customer research activities. Tracking can help you see how far you've come and recognize the value in the interactions you are having with customers. You might even find that you are able to improve the quality of your interactions based on this information.

If you try this out, let me know how it works.

No *** for passwords!

2009-06-24T08:19:00.001-07:00

At the recent UPA conference in Portland, I attended a session that was on best practices in the registration process. The talk was okay, but the conversation around it was more interesting. One of the things that got raised was how users had problems creating passwords when the system changed the password text to ****. People thought it was for security if you were in a public place, but then Stephanie Rosenbaum piped up and told us the real history. Apparently, this was a holdover from old word-processing machines that created a paper receipt of everything you typed. In other words, we've developed a standard based on an old, out of date technology!

Jakob Nielsen commands that we stop using password masking in his most recent alertbox article. He points out that as we are moving to a more mobile device-centric world, misspellings and mistyping becomes more common. This is a real problem for masked passwords because the user won't know that they've made an error until the password fails. He does offer a carrot to those who want to keep masking: make it optional and let the user decide.

The best advice I think I've gotten in my career

2009-06-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

Next to my desk is a yellowing sheet of paper that I treasure. On it are 3 rules that I live by in my career, and I thought I'd share them:

Say NO
Keep standards reasonable
Take time out for thinking

These rules were written down on this paper during a conversation with a colleague, Pete Amico, who was brilliant enough to see through my frazzled state and offer me such sage advice. Pete left the company years ago, but the rules are still up on my wall where I look at them frequently.

Say No.
Here's the thing. I tend to be one of those people who really wants to help. So, I say yes. The problem is, it isn't really possible to do everything. In order to be at my best, it is important for me to make choices and say no to things I could do, and even things that I really should do. Saying yes to everything means that I have way too much going on to handle well, which brings us to rule 2.

Keep standards reasonable
I have high standards for myself. I tend to hold all of the work that I do to this high standard. That's great when I can pull it off, but not when I am trying to juggle multiple things. It isn't possible to do "great" on everything. I have to prioritize what is absolutely critical to do really well, and what will work if I just do okay. To do that, I need to follow rule 3.

Take time out for thinking
When there is a ton of stuff on my plate (because of my tendency to say yes) and I need to put in a lot of time to do it right (because of my tendency to hold myself to unreasonably high standards), I find myself with no time for thinking. Thinking, though, is critical to produce high quality work and to figure out what my priorities are.

So, the three rules are rules that I need to live by. Maybe they'll help you too.

(ps. consider applying these rules to designing products too... )

Business + Anthropology = nirvana, or something else...

2009-06-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

Navi Radjou blogged last week about R&D 2.0, which he suggests is more about anthropology than engineering. His blog on the Harvard Business Publishing site was focused on R&D in emerging markets, but is representative of a trend I've seen in the business literature lately.

I'm intrigued with the recent business "crush" on anthropological/ ethnographic methods. It seems that people are thirsty for real stories and deep understanding to give them direction.

I fear, though, for the impending backlash. If businesses don't apply those stories and lessons to improve their products and services, the role of ethnography may be seen as a passing fancy, a waste of precious resources. I think the key will be to have people who can translate meaning into direction and business implications.

If we do succeed in making businesses more sensitive to where customers are really coming from, it could be a beautiful thing. Business people will benefit from having the deeper customer understanding that comes from ethnographic research, and researchers will benefit from having to apply rigorous business thinking to their findings.

But... part of me is thinking back a few years to when the crush was on psychologists and usability. It isn't that usability isn't critical to businesses these days, it is often cited as one of the more important elements of the success of products. Many companies now have usability professionals on staff or regularly hire usability consultants to conduct research for them. However, in an era of limited budgets, I'm not seeing much growth or even discussion of the need for adding more psychologists to the payroll. (Maybe I'm not looking in the right place). I think that the problem is that usability is often thought of as a quality assurance step, instead of a strategic goal. Psychologists and usability researchers help perpetuate this by focusing on "usability problems" instead of the cognitive principles that can guide the direction and design of usable and enjoyable solutions. Our time hasn't past, but we have kind of dropped the ball in focusing so much on such a small piece of the picture.

For anthropologists and ethnographers (and user experience researchers who have a broader skillset than just usability testing), I hope that you can leverage your current moment in the spotlight to show real business value and differentiation through the work that you do. If so, everyone benefits and we will continue to see growth and excitement around the integration of ethnographic research in business.

Research Traps: 7 ways of thinking that keep you from doing great customer research

2009-06-15T15:49:00.001-07:00

An updated presentation that I made at UPA last week about "traps" that we can fall for in doing research.

Research Traps: 7 ways of thinking that keep you from doing great customer research

View more OpenOffice presentations from Wendy Castleman.

UPA 2009 in Portland - Day 2

2009-06-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

This was a really long day. But a good one. I started off with a great talk from Susan Weinschenk on crafting presentations. It focused on telling a compelling story and was very engaging and fun. I went to it because I was following her talk with my own talk on presentation slides and I wanted to make sure I knew what she was covering to ensure that mine didn't overlap too much. Her talk was full of tips about giving the presentation itself. I was safe.

My talk was about how the slides you present affect your credibility and influence. I structured it so that it would be kind of an "evaluation" session where we'd evaluate slides from real findings presentations. It was kind of an experiment. I wasn't sure how it would go. In retrospect, I would have done a few things differently... I would have offered more examples of good slides and best practices to counterbalance with the not perfect examples I used. Some people in the audience loved it. Others hated it. I guess I can't feel too bad about that type of reaction.

Later in the day, I gave my talk on Research Traps. It went very well... (slides are up on Slideshare). This was pretty much the same as the talk I gave last fall, but this was a much shorter speaking window. I had 30 minutes and it filled the time, but it wasn't too rushed and the audience seemed to get a lot from it.

I went to a talk on having a "Field Day" at Yahoo... kind of a customer intimacy experience for non-UX people based on the "Hack Day" concept. It was pretty cool. Mark Wehner and Tom Wailes talked about how they got multidisciplinary teams of 3 to go into the field and spend time with a customer, focusing their interaction on something that interested themselves. Then, they returned to the office and constructed posters to illustrate their most interesting insights. They had 2 minutes to share what they'd learned and prizes were awarded for good research behaviors (best artifact, best quote, best poster, etc). Very nice twist on "teambuilding".

I also went to a talk from Peter Roessler, from Salesforce.com, about a Graffiti wall that they'd put up to collect qualitative data from target users at a user conference. It was kind of cool. They had moderators man the wall so people could come speak to them if they are "auditory" thinkers, people could draw if they were "visual" thinkers, and... could collaborate on answers or not. Kind of cool. Got me thinking about some of the benefits of collecting data in public spaces.

UPA 2009 in Portland - Day 1

2009-06-10T21:28:00.001-07:00

It doesn't really feel like day 1 of the conference, since the past two days were tutorials and workshops and lots of meet and greet time. I stayed up last night talking until past midnight with old colleagues/friends from the Bell Labs days. That's one of the great things about conferences... catching up and sharing memories.

This morning the conference kicked off with a talk from Jared Spool. He's usually entertaining, but I usually don't completely agree with what he has to say. Today, though, was a different story. He was talking about how the field needs to grow and change. He pointed out that usability is not the same as user experience, and that as a field we need to transform ourselves. He talked about how we need to move from being just "usability practitioners" who smooth out the bumps to being "user experience professionals" who focus on delivering delight through the end-to-end experience. (Preaching to the choir).

Then, he talked about the difference between critics and coaches, and encouraged us to "Stop alienating people!" (wow, this from Jared???). He shared some research about successful and not successful teams. How successful teams were flexible and relied on tricks and techniques, whereas unsuccessful teams relied more on methods and dogma. Very entertaining and oh-so-true.

He talked about how we needed to broaden our skills and to specialize more deeply at the same time.

He talked about 3 core UX attributes (for teams):

Shared vision of the future of the product
Regular feedback by observing customers
Rewarding failure.

He said that it was our job to curate the failure process because "risk-adverse organizations produce crap." Okay... it was Jared.

Jared also did two STAR moments in his presentation (aka very entertaining parlor tricks):

He had 40 people in the audience fill out a survey then use their bodies to plot a visual graph of their data for the audience (we did similar things at VizThink this year and now I'm a big fan)
He had someone hold up a 67 foot string to illustrate a proportion and opportunity chart. Very dramatic illustration of the 3 inches of string representing the number of people who generated 80% of revenues versus the 67 feet representing people who come to the e-commerce site...

I went to several other talks during the day, but I'm much too tired to summarize right now. I'll get to it later... tomorrow I have 2 talks and will upload slides and commentary as soon as I can.

Tailgating and Innovation

2009-04-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

This morning, on my way to work, I was tailgated by someone. Not an altogether unusual situation on a northern California freeway, by any means! The tailgater finally gave up on me and changed lanes, where he sped up until he reached the next car, which he then tailgated.

When I was a young driver, I used to drive that way too. Somehow, it felt like if I could take up all the space, I'd get there faster. Over time, though, I realized that not only was this generally unsafe and rude, but I had to slam on my brakes pretty frequently. If I was just to back off a bit, I would have a much smoother ride and would end up where I was going pretty much at the same time. Now, I drive pretty much at my own pace. There usually is a nice buffer in front of me, so when I see red break lights I can assess the situation and react calmly.

This morning as I watched that tailgater speed up and stomp on the breaks over and over again, I realized that I was seeing might be a great analogy for innovation.

Let me explain.

Following the person in front of you too closely doesn't allow you to respond. Instead, backing off and consistently assessing the lay of the land can help you see new opportunities and react calmly to what you see in front of you.

Most startups are like tailgaters. They speed up quickly to follow the guy in front of them and then stomp on the break (or crash). Maybe even repeatedly.

Great innovations don't tend to come from following too closely. They often appear to be things that take a new angle on the problem, which can only happen if you back away and look around. Think about a a few things that really were game-changing:

The Nintendo Wii - Nintendo had been playing with the pack for quite some time, but they stepped back, assessed the situation, and took a new angle on the problem. This allowed them to "find a new lane" and speed out in front of the pack.
The Apple iPod - MP3 players had been around for some time, but Apple held back and looked at the lay of the land before launching in with a solution that had fewer features, but a much more integrated experience, including the revolutionary integration with an online music store (iTunes). Their new angle blasted them so far past the rest of the pack that all these years later, no one has caught them.
The Ford Model T - earlier models at Ford and all other companies were crafted one at a time. The Model T was created using an assembly line. Rather than continuing to follow the pack, the folks at Ford stepped back and reframed the problem of building a car... broke it into it's component parts and then strung it together . The result? 93 minutes to build a car... over a million cars built in 7 years (RADICAL acceleration over the way all other vehicles were built).

So... to come up with a game-changing innovation, it pays not to be a tailgater.

An experiment in guerrilla brainstorming

2009-04-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

I wanted to see if I could start up brainstorming organically to help build in fun and creativity into the workplace. So, I bought some really bright flipchart sticky paper and put up a new activity on the wall each week. No explanation, just a felt-tip pen and a simple instruction (like: add to this).

Open brainstorm on a general question

Result: not much action.

Thoughts… just too open, too scary to contribute to. Happy about the drawings, but that wasn’t a result of the prompt as much as it was having a blank piece of paper up on the wall.

Mind map

Result: incredible organic participation

Thoughts… The effort for the mind map was pretty clear: word-association. People jumped in and added without prompting because it was relatively anonymous, and after a while there was almost an implicit challenge to come up with something witty or silly to contribute. Low effort. Low risk.

Thought Bubbles

Result: mediocre, but creative contributions

Thoughts… really didn’t know what I’d come up with here. Didn’t come up with much, but found myself contributing random thoughts when I walked by. I think it might have been intimidating to “share a thought”. Somehow, less anonymous.

Octagon

Result: not much action (but I sure had fun with it!)

Thoughts… loved this from a thinking perspective. But, it didn’t elicit much participation. Too constrained?

Phase II of the experiment: Amping it up.

Mind map at a company event

We had a site social on the topic of innovation, with all kinds of “booths” on some of the great innovation work that is going on around the company. We put up a big blank piece of paper on the window and drew a circle in the middle with the word “Innovation”. Initially, everyone who walked by the area was handed a sharpie and asked to add to the mind map. It started off slowly, but evolved into a rich point of discussion and laughter.

Thoughts….Leveraging the success of the “Visualize” mind map, which was in a rarely used hallway, I had hoped that this would work, and it did! Some people were more literal than others, but some people jumped in and got really silly and creative. Made for a good interactive element at the event, while being low-tech, low-cost, low-effort. It was a collaborative, “social contribution” activity… and look how incredible it became! (Actually, it evolved much further after this photo, but I didn’t get a later picture).

Next Step

Anonymous mind map in a public space, without “prompting”.

User experience and the much neglected non-profit sector

2009-03-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox today was on usability of non-profit websites. It is a wonderful summary of a large-scale usability study on numerous non-profit sites in different sub-sectors. He found that about half of the sites had usability problems that kept prospective donors from getting around the site effectively, and more than half lacked the content that donors were looking for.

It made me think of the online user experience for non-profits in general. Every year, I hunt down non-profits that support causes that I think family members believe in, then donate in their name, as a gift to the family member. Usually, I come up with about 10 different causes that I need to research. I was not surprised by the results of Nielsen's study, but I think that it neglects to focus on a couple of other things (see caveat below):

Passion is lacking in the design of most non-profit sites. I don't know why, but many non-profit sites look amateurish, busy or generic. This is so sad, because the people who work for these non-profits are amazingly passionate about their causes. Here's an example: Paws with a cause is a non-profit organization that trains guide dogs for people with disabilities. Really great, right? Their site, though, looks unimpressive. The home page is not convincing, and many of the content pages are huge text documents, really, posing as web pages. Compare that with Charity:Water, which is a non-profit that raises money to build wells in poor countries. Charity:Water has a very rich, visually compelling website. It benefits from the fact that the founder is a photojournalist. Most non-profits aren't so lucky. But, I would argue that the people who founded Paws with a cause are just as passionate. It's just their site that is lacking passion.
Design... color, fonts, layout. Many non-profit sites end up using really, er, interesting choices. Compare the New Hampshire Food Bank with it's grey, purple, green, blue (at least 4 shades of blue on the home page) to Second Harvest of Orange County with it's black, orange, khaki and yellow. I don't love either of these sites, but the latter is more "professional-looking" because of it's choice in colors and imagery. I'd certainly trust my $ to them.

Non-Profits, like other companies, should consider the user experience when designing their websites. They should have a deep understanding of the customer's (donor) needs, create content that gives the customer the right level of information and interaction, and leverage all the best practices in design to deliver an experience that delights.

I think I know how I'm going to try to spend my volunteer hours this year... helping a non-profit with their online user experience!

caveat: I read Nielsen's Alertbox, not the full report, so there may be information like design and passion in the findings.

Handcuffs and Forcing Functions

2009-03-23T08:26:00.001-07:00

This morning on the way to work, NPR did a really quick blurb on something going on on the space station. Apparently, the astronauts put in a pin backwards yesterday, which is causing some kinds of problems that they are trying to resolve today. Such errors can be avoided by creating a forcing function... making it impossible to put it in any way other than the correct way.

Forcing functions have been on my mind lately, ever since reading the Fast Company article on "Make it stick: Build Handcuffs" in the April 2009 issue. The article talks about people's desire to have mechanisms that force behaviors for the things they feel they "should" be doing, but aren't necessarily. They give examples, like a "piggy bank" and the guy who sent resignation letters five years in advance. I have some of these forcing functions myself. For example, in my Quicken file, I have "fake" accounts that I "transfer" money in and out of for saving for vacations, childcare, property taxes, etc.

It is an interesting angle to take, but a risky one. Remember Quicken Financial Planner? No? That is because while customers "said" they wanted to do financial planning, they really didn't. So, they didn't buy the product. On the other hand, there was no forcing function to ensure that they would do the thing they thought they should be doing.

Are you trying to solve for something that people feel they "should" do? Is there a way you can leverage a forcing function in your solutions?

ps. If you can figure out an effective forcing function to get me a daily workout, I'd love to hear it!

Environmental Influences on Creativity

2009-03-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

Does where you work make a difference to how creative you are? I started thinking about this a while ago when I contemplated the differences between different corporate workspaces. Way back in 1999, IDEO touted it's flexible and playful environment as being necessary to encourage the type of creativity that is needed to be innovative, in the famous Nightline "the Deep Dive" episode. The Stanford dSchool has adopted this practice and has a very flexible environment consisting of red IKEA couches, whiteboards and tables all on casters. There are so many examples of really creative places of work. What do they have in common? Does it really matter?

A peek at some places:

Lego
Google (Canada)
Redbull (London)
Pixar

Getting beyond the obvious

2009-02-19T13:22:00.000-08:00

Try the following experiment. For each of these words, write down the first word that comes to mind.

Table
Cat
Shoe
Left
Black

Now take a look at your list. Let me use my powers of intuition and guess that your list will look something like this:

Chair
Dog
Sock
Right
White

That is because the patterns you have become accustomed to have build strong associations with those words. The associations are obvious. Obvious patterns come to us quickly, and most people come to the same answers.

Let me share a different set of word associations to that original list:

Frog
Sweater
Pin
Veil
Death Star

Were any of these words on your list? Why not?

Here was my thinking process that created this list... I went beyond the obvious to hunt for a unique association. In each case, this required looking at the original word and thinking about different aspects of that word.

From table to frog: Things with legs

From cat to sweater: Things related to yarn

From shoe to pin: Things related to bowling

From left to veil: Things related to weddings

From black to Death Star: Things related to Darth Vader

As you can see, unique associations usually aren’t the first things that come to mind. They generally become clear only after you have the additional information about the lens to think about the word. Even then, I'd imagine that you wouldn't have arrived at the same unique associations that I did.

Why is this important? Well, when we are trying to come up with new ideas, we should keep this distinction in mind. When we go with our initial ideas, we are usually going with the obvious. Innovation is unlikely when coming from that point because it is likely where everyone else goes too. When we spend some time looking at the problem or solutions from different angles, we're more likely to arrive someplace unique.

Take the time to brainstorm. It will get you beyond the obvious.

WSU Design Conference Notes

2009-01-17T13:07:00.000-08:00

Design and Cultures:WSU Interdisciplinary Design Institute – 5^th annual design conference January 14-16, 2009

About the conference

The design conference was an intimate conference with about 200 attendees, 2/3rds of which are students, bringing together different design perspectives from multiple disciplines and industries from around the world. Attendees were from all over the US, Canada, Germany, Portugal, Australia and India.The conference is held each year in Spokane on the Washington State University campus. In addition to the conference, they hold a student design competition each year that the conference speakers judge.
The general tone is upbeat. People are accepting, welcoming, curious and challenging.

Key Questions

I went into the conference trying to absorb as many ideas as possible, and as much of an understanding of the similarities and differences in design that I could. I had three primary questions. Here they are with some of the answers I collected during the conference:

What is design?

Creatively bringing things together

Brainstorming and Prototyping

Ideas for solving problems (functional, short-term)

Madness

Intuitive problem-solving

Conceptual blending

A stochastic, dynamic thinking process

A really complex vision integrating different elements

Reframing

Combine concepts

Lots of interaction with experts and target users

Trial and error

Brainstorming

Chance (implicit connections)

How do you know when you have designed well?

Feedback from users

Feedback from peers

Conference Highlights

Perhaps the richest conversations happened outside of the conference sessions, where conversation flowed freely over all kinds of topics relating to design, research, teaching and experiences.

Opening Plenary

The opening plenary speaker was the mayor of Spokane. One might think this an odd choice for a design conference, but Spokane is in the midst of a massive urban renewal project, so her discussion was about the process of designing the modifications to the city, including a good deal of background around what the problem was they were solving for. She had the head of her planning commission also talk to add details about the progress on the project thus far. It was clear that they had enormous pride in the city and in the design program at the university. Apparently, there are actually 3 universities in Spokane and one of their goals is to increase cross-pollination of the campuses through access corridors and shared spaces. The talk solidified my original impression of the conference being a very different kind of design than we do, yet somehow familiar in process.

My Talk

I gave a talk on how various corporate cultures can inhibit design-thinking and creativity. I proposed an idealized cultural environment: one that embraces diverse perspectives, expects experimentation and iterative prototyping, values customer involvement throughout the process, and is fun to work in. Then, I spelled out 5 cultures that violate at least one of these elements, and how to address them. I left them with the point that no-one designs in a vacuum, and asked them what they could do to make their culture a better place to design in. I wasn’t too sure that this would be a relevant topic, since the audience included primarily people from academic departments. But, the room was packed. People were standing and sitting on the floors. They were really engaged and asked tons of questions. It was clear that they recognized their own experiences in the cultures I discussed. The students related to it from a working in groups perspective, and more than one person said that I’d crystallized something they’d been trying to get their heads around. The feedback I received was all positive, and people said that they now felt empowered to address their cultural barriers. They added another “culture”… the culture of “Advancement”, where you need to take credit for the work you accomplish. The barrier comes with turning away from the diverse perspectives and FUN, because everyone becomes pretty ego-involved and possessive. I suggested that they go ahead and take joint credit for any project they are involved in, regardless of whether they were the one with the great idea “I was part of the team…”. I suggested that they might want to focus on building relationships to progress, rather than rely soley on the output of their creativity. Someone backed me up when they mentioned that IDEO’s bonus structure is based on humility, how much help you asked for. One question asked whether I thought these cultures and tactics would be true in other cultures. I admitted that I didn’t know, and then did a running thought experiment about Japanese culture: the juxtaposition of the culture that looks down on self-promotion (told the story of the Facebook equivalent in Japan that is very popular, but that people all put up cute pictures of their pets, rather than touting themselves) with embracing brainstorming (TPS). It was great, we filled up the hour, even though my talk was only 25 minutes.

Introducing design thinking to engineering students

This was a talk from Micah Lande, a PhD candidate at Stanford. He went through the evolution of a capstone project-based course from the mechanical engineering program at Stanford. He points out that traditionally, engineers and designers think differently because they ask different questions. Told the joke about “how many ____ to screw in a lightbulb”.

How many Engineers? The engineer says, “it depends… how many feet off the ground is the fixture?, what’s the wattage of the bulb?”

How many Designers? The designer asks, “does it need to be a lightbulb?”

He started by proposing a “Ways of thinking framework”.

Projects in the class used to be in the bottom two quadrants, but now more and more are in the upper two. Activity in the projects spans Future, Design and Engineering thinking... with more design and future thinking upfront, but going back and forth between engineering and design thinking activities.

The Culture of Design

This was a very controversial talk by John DeMao, jr. He presented a very academic treatise, analyzing the culture of design practice, weaving in perspectives from psychologists and artists. He says that the design process isn’t one that can be dictated, because it is, by its nature, contextually changing. He points out that there are inherent contradictions in design thinking, particularly between the clarity of thought versus the freedom of thought. He points out that a good deal of design creativity comes from intuition, which he says is not independent of prior experience or knowledge, but is below the conscious level. He defined design as conceptual blending – a partial match between two inputs resulting in new mental constructs, and suggested that conceptual blending itself cannot be taught. This led to a great debate in the room… He ended with the idea that we can only describe what the design process is after the design effort, not before. He said this is because you can’t describe where you are going because any point you can learn something that changes your trajectory. So, he points out, design isn’t really iterative because the cognitive acts modify at each step.

Informal Conversation

One of the best things was the informal conversations that we all had during meals and breaks. One of the themes that came up had to do with teaching creative design . After John De Mao’s talk (above), there was a desperation that came from faculty about what could be taught if conceptual blending (i.e., design) is subconscious. As the resident cognitive psychologist at the event, I pointed out that you have lots of skills that were taught that are currently primarily subconscious, like the skill of driving a car. At first, it was all explicit, so it was overwhelming. Now it is mostly automatic because it is implicit, so it is very difficult to describe or teach to someone else. What got you from the first state to the second state was experience. So, giving students practice and new experiences can help them be more effective designers. So then, someone asked what types of experiences to provide people with. John described design as conceptual blending; so the more exposure you have to different concepts, the greater chance you’ll be able to design. I mentioned a talk that Philip Shaw gave about awareness quotient, and suggested that a good experience to have would be slightly uncomfortable, something you wouldn’t normally seek out. We talked about the differences of having the “critic” mindset when going into an experience versus the “designer” mindset. The critic will find problems and complain about things, where the designer will strive to understand why. All of this was particularly interesting for me because I’ve had this pet theory that the human mind is basically a pattern recognition machine. We find patterns where none exist… so, if design is the blending of disparate concepts, then design should come naturally to us. The more experiences we have, the more connections we can make.

All in all, it was an interesting conference to be a part of. I’m glad I went.

WSU Conference on Design and Cultures

2009-01-15T19:29:00.000-08:00

I'm attending a conference at Washington State University Spokane on Design and Cultures. The conference is interdisciplinary, and it is wonderful expanding my thinking about design. I gave a talk today on corporate cultures that inhibit designing creative solutions. Here are the slides.

5 Corporate cultures that inhibit designing creative solutions

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design creativity)

12 activities to get "thinking"

2008-12-31T08:43:00.000-08:00

Here we are at the end of 2008. I am reflecting back on this year, what I've been up to and how things have evolved in my life. One of the key characteristics of this year is a focus on thinking "differently". I've been nurturing my creative thinking side this year, and have compiled the following list of 12 activities that can help me think differently (or even just to get thinking). Maybe they'll be helpful to you too...

1. Draw a storyboard. So often, I focus on problem and solution. But, by trying to convey the problem and solution in a story format, I have to think about context, mindset and impact. It's a different frame to look at, and sometimes I realize that I wasn't really thinking about the whole picture.

2. Write a letter. This works particularly well when I am obsessing or frustrated. I seem to think more clearly when writing. I have to chose my words and thoughts and put them into semi-coherent form. It needs to flow and be logical. This forces rigor into my thoughts, which often opens up new ideas for dealing with the issues that I am obsessed or frustrated about.

3. Find an image (or images) that represent what I think or feel about something. Sometimes, the right image can help me uncover a new lens to look through at the problem, which can help suggest different paths or solutions I hadn't thought of.

4. Sticky-Note thoughts. When there is lots of stuff roaming around my head, I write down one thought per note and shuffle them around, then organize them into dimensions, groups or flowcharts. This can really help me lasso my thoughts and ideas and put them into some usable form.

5. Take a camera out and try to capture things related to the issue I'm thinking about. Looking through the small window at the world helps me focus on small details that I might otherwise miss.

6. Draw with crayons and blank paper... it's like reconnecting with my inner kindergartner. Somehow, having chunky wax of many colors and a white canvas that I can scribble on gets my creative juices flowing. Let me make one thing clear... this isn't about the output of the drawing, it's about the ACTION of scribbling that is freeing. How often do you allow yourself to just play, with no particular goal in mind? I don't do it often, but kids do all the time. Harnessing that freedom can get my creative juices flowing. No one ever has to see what you've done... just toss the results in the recycling bin, then turn your thoughts back to the issue at hand.

7. Put it all together, then throw stuff out. I do this with presentations all the time. It's somehow always easy to add a new slide. But then, there are too many... so, I try to take out half and see if the story still holds together. I keep eliminating until I reach the core point or message that I need to focus on. It's hard to let things go, but it almost always makes it better.

8. Mind map. There is some great software out there for mind mapping, which works wonderfully, but somehow there is something even more powerful about drawing it out by hand. A mind map starts with a central concept or idea. Then, you just free associate... (people much smarter than me have summarized the concept pretty well here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map)

9. Collage. We do it with customers, but you can just do it with yourself. Use images from the internet, magazines or anywhere else. Build a collage to capture the problem or idea. Very abstract and creative. Works for getting me "un-stuck". http://www.vizthink.com/blog/2008/12/17/fun-with-photos/

10. Photo Diary. This is something I use for research, but I've also used just for myself. It kind of relates to #3, #5, and #9 above. But, it is a little more structured. Start by making yourself a "shot list" of both concrete and abstract things relating to what you are interested in thinking about. Then, actually complete the photo diary by taking or finding pictures for each. Here's an example that you can see where I did a photo diary for myself (it's in reverse chronological order). This particular example was just where I was exploring the experience of doing a photo diary...

11. Write a newspaper article. I got this idea first from a company activity a while ago... but the idea is pretty sound. The idea is that you write the story of your future success in the past tense from someone else's perspective. This requires that you come up with a vision and think about the implications and insights. And, it's kinda fun. Again, no one ever has to see it.

12. List X things. I do this all the time and it gets me moving. For example, I wanted to write a blog post today (I haven't done one in quite a long time). So, to get myself motivated, I put in the title the number 12. This was arbitrary, and I could change it at any time. But, the challenge was then to come up with 12 things. And I did! Try it. It is amazing... it nearly always works. (I like to use 3, 5, 7 and 10 too.)

Metaphors...

2008-11-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

Metaphors are in the air…

Yesterday, I was listening to Terry Gross on Fresh Air talking with Bill Moyers about the election. At one point, Bill Moyers quoted Joseph Campbell, “If you want to change a culture, you need to change the metaphor.” This crystallized something I’ve been wrangling with and helped me think about being more conscious of metaphors.

Metaphors are wonderful ways for us to convey concepts and help people understand what to do next. They are, of course, critical to the design profession and the history of computing. But, how often do we consciously consider our metaphors?

Nancy Duarte, from Duarte Design, wrote a blog entry today about using visual metaphors. She leverages political cartoons to convey her message… and has some excellent advice about being more purposeful in our metaphors and helping our “audience” experience the joy of discovery as they unravel the metaphor.

What are some metaphors that have informed your work?

Outside-In

2008-11-06T08:40:00.000-08:00

A famous biochemist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, once said, "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."

What do lightbulbs and old-time kerosene bottles have in common? One of Edison's employees was trying to solve the problem of having lightbulbs stay in the socket, and he noticed how kerosene bottles kept their lids on... and "viola!" we have the screw-in lightbulb socket that still exists today.

What do Botan Rice Candy and Mouthwash have in common? The makers of Listerine were looking for a way to innovate mouthwash, and the melting rice wrapper of Botan Rice Candy came to their attention... and Listerine ThinStrips were born.

What does a walking a dog in the woods have to do with a method for adhering two objects? George de Mestral went out for a walk with his dog in the woods and when he returned he noticed a lot of little burrs clinging to his pants. He recognized the potential of little micro-hooks and invented "Velcro".

Each of these were combined to come up with new innovations. In each case, someone looked at a current solution for something and saw the potential of applying that solution to solve a completely different problem.

All too often, when we are trying to find problems and solutions, we stick to looking at our customers, the particular problems they point out and the particular solutions they use.

But the opportunity for disruptive innovation is greatly increased by looking outside of the problem. I want to inspire my colleagues and peers to spend more time looking outside to solve their problems. For this, I'd like more stories...

I'm looking for other examples of inventions that were inspired by solutions to other problems. Do you have any that I can use?

Visual Thinking and the Financial Crisis

2008-10-08T16:23:00.001-07:00

Sometimes visual explanations help so much.

Thinking problems and their implications for communication

2008-10-06T09:14:00.001-07:00

I'm reading this book called "Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 basic mistakes we make in thinking" by Thomas Kida. In it, he lists 6 tendencies we have that keep us from thinking clearly. These mistakes are:

We prefer stories to statistics
We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas
We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events
We sometimes misperceive the world around us
We tend to oversimplify our thinking
We have faulty memories

Thomas' book is full of illustrations of these "mistakes", but you'll probably recognize the truth of them just to read the list.

I got to thinking about what these tendencies suggest for designing communications. Obviously, that first bullet relates specifically. You can be far more persuasive with stories than numbers. Steven Denning, author of "The Leader's Guide to Storytelling" and "The Secret Language of Leadership", tells the story of how he persuaded the World Bank to become a knowledge-sharing organization by telling a story about the CDC. Not giving lots of facts and figures. Telling a story. I'm trying to build that skill now, because I know it takes advantage of one of our "mistakes in thinking".

The second bullet is about the confirmation bias. Since we all have a tendency to seek information that confirms our beliefs, it would be in my best interest, as a communicator, to set people's expectations about what their beliefs are, then provide information that supports that expectation. Framing is a skill that politicians have brought to an art form, and one that can help drive home a message to an audience through use of imagery, mindset and expectation.

The third bullet point refers to our tendency to interpret nothing as chance. We are pattern-recognizing creatures, even when there are no patterns to be seen. This is particularly true, apparently, when we are under stress. In our quest to find meaning around everything, we are much more prone to fall victim to superstition and illusory correlations. The good part of this for a communicator, of course, is that it means that we are all thirsty for information that fits into our understanding of the world. So, if a story can be framed appropriately, and the right amount of pepper (er, information) added... we have a savory mix for being compelling.

Of course, the fourth bullet point falls out of the second and third, as do the fifth and, ultimately, sixth.

It seems to me that it can be remarkably easy to lead people astray in their thinking. This is scary power for a thought leader to have. I wonder if this is how our world has ended up in the rather precarious financial state we are in today...

Six Million Stories...

2008-10-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a story. Proof? Check out 6 Billion Others.

Web Search Strategies - Explained!

2008-09-24T14:10:00.000-07:00

Another great explanation from Common Craft. Use of this type of "video storyboard" can be particularly helpful when trying to get early feedback from users on some new concept. Try it out!

Geography matters to personality ?

2008-09-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

Does it matter where you live? Apparently so.

The Wall Street Journal just published an interesting article about a recent study on geographical personality traits.

There’s also an interactive graphic to display the data. Kind of basic, yet addictive.

Research Traps: 7 ways of thinking that keep you from doing great customer research

2008-09-16T14:18:00.001-07:00

I'm giving a talk in four hours on Research Traps... common mistakes in thinking that affect the quality of customer research.

Research Traps: 7 ways of thinking that keep you from doing great customer research

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: usability research)

My new favorite book

2008-08-21T09:41:00.001-07:00

Go buy the book "Slideology" by Nancy Duarte. Trust me, it's important. This is the greatest book...

Nancy Duarte is the person who built the slide deck for "An Inconvenient Truth". But, she's also, clearly, an amazing design thinker.

The book has lots of practical advice and ideas on building an amazing presentation. It's prompted me to completely re-think a presentation that I'm currently working on, and I'm totally excited to do the new talk.

In addition to the book, there is a cool website that goes along with it. The website has PowerPoint examples you can download.

5 corporate cultures that inhibit designing creative solutions

2008-08-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

Many companies have only one or two products or services that were considered innovative when they were released. Few have many. Some have none. Why is that? In part, it has to do with the culture of a company. Companies that embrace design-thinking, and value experimentation and action above planning and talk tend to produce more innovative solutions. However, most companies have cultural barriers that inhibit the design of creative solutions. Here are five key cultural barriers that tend to get in the way of innovation:

Culture of “Approval” – belief that the best answers are high-up in the organization, where people need to get tops-down guidance on what solutions need to be
Culture of “Planning” – strict adherence to a plan, requiring perfect vision from the start
Culture of “Correct” – with the belief that there is, in fact, one right answer
Culture of “Committee” – where everyone must be on-board for things to move forward
Culture of “Talk” – where employees are encouraged to tell others what their ideas are and why they are good before acting

The culture of approval comes about from two sources: childhood experience and business experience. Childhood is full of examples where the person higher in status (or age) has the right answers... parents, teachers, coaches... if you get approval from those sources, you are doing well. If you do not get their approval, you are "bad". The business experience comes from the war stories of those executives and managers that have had similar experiences, successes and failures in the past. Keeping in mind George Santayana's famous quote, "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it", we are persuaded to put undo importance on the approval of those who have recognized experience in the area. In both cases, it is wise to learn from those knowledgeable sources. However, just because these people are in positions higher up in an organization, does not mean that they have the right answers all of the time. Especially when it comes to changes in the way we do or think about things. For example, Ken Olsen, president and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, was known to have said "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Leaders do not necessarily have better vision into the future, so a culture of approval can kill off really radical new ideas far too easily.

The culture of planning comes about from lessons learned from NOT planning. Without plans, projects tend to flounder and get out of control. The output of projects without planning tends to be incomplete or bad. The problem comes about when teams are too focused on the plan, rather than the ultimate outcome. If you want to build an airplane, you will be able to do so if you follow the plan. But, if you want to build a new, effective means of flying... you may not build an airplane at all. It isn't that plans are bad at all... it's just that you need to be clear on what it is that you are aiming for. Most successful startups actually started building things other than what they became famous for... their plans changed when they realized opportunity elsewhere. For example, PayPal started off as a mobile encryption company... but turned to web payments when it was clear that they'd found a medium with much more traction than their original thought. Similarly, Flickr started off as a gaming company, but ended up with one of the best photo sharing sites around!

The culture of correct is one that comes from math. In math, there is a correct answer. Any other answer is wrong. Math is about the only area that is so absolute... but we grow up thinking that there are absolute answers elsewhere. Since there is only one right answer, you need not look for alternatives. In product design, however, it is not clear that there is, necessarily, a right answer. One approach may be better than another... but sometimes multiple approaches can solve the problem well. For example, both airplanes and helicopters fly. When it comes to inventing new things, looking for the one "right" answer can inhibit your exploration.

The culture of committee comes from a deep respect for the other employees, and the belief that everyone may have important contributions. The problem is that getting "buy in" from all of the relevant parties before actually trying stuff out can be a huge waste of time. It may become clear right away that something is or isn't a good approach once a team moves forward with testing out the idea. When committees are involved in design, all kinds of inconsistencies and feature creep can occur. Think about Congress... most laws that get passed these days have multiple layers of laws that don't actually have anything in common with the legislation that's being passed. Wikipedia states: "The defining characteristics of "design by committee" are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision." It is sad when a great idea is smothered in mediocre ones...

The culture of "talk" is difficult to overcome. It comes about for many of the prior cultural reasons. Intuit is particularly fond of the PowerPoint Presentation method of pitching ideas. The problem is that telling is not as useful or accurate as showing. Think about the Nintendo Wii. It is a solution that you can talk about in a power-point deck: "Instead of focusing on the visual design, we'll focus on the interaction between the user and the machine." Or, you can show it: "try swinging the tennis racket! When people rely on making decisions from stated ideas, rather than on proof of concept or experiences, it makes it more likely that they will overlook or dismiss the absurd, unique, innovative approaches.

Addressing these inhibiting corporate cultures head-on can lead to effective changes that can allow innovative, creative ideas to flourish.

Building the skill: How to really see experiences in your world

2008-07-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

You and I evolved to filter out information. We do it all the time… For example, do you really remember the details of brushing your teeth this morning? Driving to work? Checking your email this morning? This skill, ignoring information, is critical for you to function in the world. If you had to pay attention to everything that you did all the time, it would be very difficult to get anything done.

However, when we are trying to discover opportunities to delight, it is important that we overcome this ignoring skill and really notice the details of the experience. To do this, we need to consciously take ourselves out of the experiences to observe all of these elements:

• Goals – what is the experience for? How is it attained?
• Setup/Context (when, why)
• Content (words, pictures, colors, designs, architecture, etc)
• Actions (steps in the task)
• Sensory Details (sounds, tastes, smells, tactile feeling)
• Emotions (are there elements that are specifically designed to evoke emotions?)

For example, consider the experience of me brushing my teeth in the morning. Normally, I don’t think about it at all. But when I paid close attention to the experience this morning, I was able to gather a large amount of information:

Goals:

Get clean, smooth teeth, avoid cavities, and have fresh breath for my morning.

Setup/Context:

I need to brush my teeth because I hate my breath, the taste in my mouth, and the feeling of my teeth first thing in the morning.
I keep my toothbrush and toothpaste in the medicine cabinet in my bathroom, behind the mirror above the sink.
I stand in front of the sink while brushing my teeth.

Content:

Tools I use to accomplish this task: toothbrush, toothpaste, and water.
My toothbrush is green and white, with nubs on the side and handle.
My toothpaste tube has a cap that rotates off (kind of traditional for toothpaste).

Actions:

I get up and walk to my sink, open up the mirror, reach in and grab my toothbrush and toothpaste. Then, I open the lid of the toothpaste and set it down on the counter. I squeeze the toothpaste onto the brush (in the middle of the tube, which irritates my husband), and then put the brush in my mouth. I put the lid on the tube of toothpaste and put it back in the cabinet. I brush my teeth (brush, brush, brush), spitting at some point in the experience when my mouth gets too full of foam. When I feel like I’ve thoroughly brushed, I rinse the brush, slurping up water with the brush to rinse my mouth, hit my brush against the sink a couple of times, and then put the toothbrush away.

Sensory Details:

My toothbrush has a soft and rubbery handle, so it is squishy, which makes it pleasant to hold.
While brushing my teeth, the experience is cool, wet and foamy. My mouth fills with foam, so I have to spit.

Emotions:

I’m usually a bit grumpy and unconscious when I start this task.
The toothbrush itself is soft and squishy, and also bright and cheery, which makes me a little happy. But, I only notice the squishiness every once in a while (this was probably intentionally designed to delight me).
I experience very slight anxiety when my mouth fills with foam, until I spit. Then I feel a little relief.
I’m always a bit more awake and perky after I’m through brushing.

My challenge to you:
Try going through your day and identify the specific experiences that you encounter. Take note of the context, content, actions and sensory details. Pay attention to your emotions. Ignoring information comes naturally… work at building the skill of switching your attention back on to the experience itself.

This skill is critical when we visit customers. We have a tendency to focus in on the actions (and challenges) in the current experience, but not necessarily the related details in the environment itself and the emotions experienced.

What would happen if you stopped ignoring all those cues? What would you learn about delighting your customers if you “listened” to them on a whole new level? Start by listening to yourself. Becoming an expert at switching on your attention to look for opportunities to delight – yourself and your customers!

The benefits and risks of objective tracking

2008-07-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

When trying to understand customers, studying their behavior is the gold standard. We’ve all experienced situations where customers say one thing but do something completely different.

A study recently came out in the journal “Nature” that looked at mobile phone use in 100,000 people (somewhere in Europe). The researchers were able to see where people were, roughly, based on which cell tower their handset was communicating with.

The aggregated data gave a picture similar to that we can get from telemetry tracking data in our products and websites.

This data gives us a clear picture of what people are really doing, although it does not provide us with information about why they are doing it.

There has been a backlash since the release of the Nature study results. This AP article makes it sound like the researchers were doing something sneaky or unethical. In fact, what they did was NOT LEGAL in the United States because they did not have permission from the people they tracked.

Some products have internal tracking, as do many websites, but we do not always include this capability in everything we build. I think we need to be doing this all the time! There are definite benefits to having this capability:
• We can see what people really do. A usability test can tell us what barriers might exist, but it doesn't show us what people would really do. Ethnographic research can give us insights into what people really do, but the data may not hold up across all of our users (perhaps only a subset of users do it that way... maybe the majority, but not everyone).
• We can see shifts in behavior, that can inform us about the effectiveness of different aspects of a design. For example, many websites do massive numbers of A/B tests on the live site to understand what drove the most traffic to the product.

The risks are:
• Jumping to the wrong conclusion about WHY something is happening (we really need to follow up with other types of research such as surveys, site visit studies, and other methods)
• Coming across as sneaky or sly. We need to ensure that data is aggregated or anonymous, or that people opt-in or are aware of the tracking so we don’t get accused of invading their privacy.

Thinking about neutral

2008-07-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

I have mixed feelings about the NetPromoter metric. It is a 11-point survey question that we ask to our customers to assess their stated likelihood of recommending the product or service they use. The NetPromoter value is highly correlated with revenue growth in most markets, and so it is currently our best metric to predict revenue growth of a product or service. That's great. It is a self-report measure, of course, so it doesn't really correspond completely with behavior... some people give us a 10, but haven't actually recommended us... and some people have given us a 6 and have.

What is interesting, though, is how we use this measure to try to identify areas for improvement. We focus on why people are detractors.

We have a tendency to ignore the people who give ratings of 7 or 8 on the Net Promoter scale, because they don't drag our overall numbers down like detractors do.But this tendency means that we are ignoring the goldmine of rich ideas for building even more promoters. We should be building more promoters by focusing on people who are neutral.

Here are 5 reasons to focus on neutral:
They already like your product/service. Rating something well above the mid-point indicates an overall positive feeling. It is likely something fairly minor holding them back from enthusiasm.
More bang for the buck. Their issues may represent those of some of the detractors. Addressing these issues may lead to higher promoters than expected, given the population of neutrals.
It’s easier to nudge than shove.Sometimes a small thing will make the difference for this group of individuals.
They are likely to want to help.Since they like your stuff already, they are probably open to helping you devise ways to improve it.
Just interacting with them may make the difference.Positive personal interaction engenders some degree of trust and loyalty. If you make it clear that you care about them, they will care more about you.

5 things you can do on a site visit, other than watching tasks

2008-01-09T14:43:00.000-08:00

Site visits (aka Contextual Inquiry) are an amazingly rich source for customer understanding. We typically go on site visits when we are trying to understand how people are accomplishing tasks now (whether it is with our software or something else), what their main pain-points are in a given area, opportunities for innovation, inspiration, and to gain a better understanding of our customers.

Certainly, the best interactions with participants are when they show us their processes and talk about their issues. However, there are times when it can be difficult to get customers to give us those rich experiences. For example, sometimes participants don't think their process is important or interesting. Here are a few techniques to try that can kick start richer conversations and a deeper understanding of the people you visit:

Desk surface Inventory - Where does your participant use their computer? Do they have a desk? If so, take a look at the surface of the desk. What is there? When people pile up papers or items, or stick post-it notes to their monitor, they are trying to save some piece of information for some reason. Usually, things on a desk are considered things that the participant needs to pay attention to or remember. Have them walk you through the objects and papers on their desk. What are the objects? Why are they there? Get into this discussion with your customer. It might open up a window for further exploration and insights.

"Desktop" Inventory - When looking at your participant's computer, what does their computer screen tell you? Files that people leave on the computer screen "desktop" can be left for a number of reasons; these are often files that the customer isn't ready to file, needs to remember for some period of time, or used for "working" space. Much like the desk surface inventory, understanding what people leave on their computer desktops can give you insights and open the door for deeper discussions. What does the desktop background look like? Do they have a picture? If so, ask them about it. Have them walk you through each of the icons on the desktop and tell you what they are, what they use it for and maybe when was they used the file last.

Take a tour - have them walk you around the site and explain it to you. This works really well as an ice-breaker at the beginning of a visit. Sometimes, people are somewhat disconcerted by this request. Just reassure them that you are interested in knowing a little more about them (or their business). Have them show you around and take note of the things you see and what they tell you about the person. Ask your participant what they use things for, or how often they use a space. For example, if the participant shows you their formal dining room, you could ask them about when they used the room last and why. You never know what these types of tours might reveal to you about the person. You can expect to get clues to their values, the importance of various things that they use, and gain some color to better understand your participant. This activity also tends to set a good context for the site visit participants because it makes it clear that we are there to learn from them.

A day in your life - have the participant walk you through their typical day. You can map this out as a timeline of activities, or as a map of where the person is in their space throughout the day. If the participant usually comes into the office in the morning, grabs coffee from the kitchenette, goes to their computer and checks email, walks to the FAX machine to check for incoming orders, then to the store room to pull items from inventory... well that might be pretty interesting. Seeing how people are moving through their site and what they are trying to accomplish can give you insights into how to streamline processes, unveil hidden pain-points or opportunities to delight. It is really great to take advantage of being in their site to see how they use it.

Show me something - A fun activity to try as an icebreaker that can give you ideas about what your customer values, likes and dislikes, is to have them identify various things in their environment that reflects those values. Tell the person to think about things in the site, including on their computer. Then ask them to show you things. Ask them to show you something: "frustrating", "fun", "important", "painful", "delightful", "challenging", "unique" or other terms. With each thing, have them explain it to you and why they chose that. For example, if you ask the participant to show you something "fun" and they show you a golf club, ask them why they identified it as fun... you might learn that one of their passions is golf, that they spend every Thursday afternoon playing, and that they are getting ready to participate in a local competition. This information can help you better understand your participant, but can also help you build a relationship that might encourage them to share more with you as the session proceeds. You can tailor this activity around the thing you are interested in studying. For example, if you are studying payroll customers, you might do this activity around payroll. "Show me something important about payroll", "Show me something fun about payroll"... you might stumble across something really interesting!

These are just a handful of ideas of additional things you can do in addition to watching tasks. Please share your ideas with me!

Lessons from a friends and family photo diary study

2008-01-08T16:57:00.000-08:00

I was pretty excited about the concept of photo diary studies, but I wanted to get a feel for what it was like to run one, and what type of information I could expect to find out. So, I decided to run one with friends and family. I felt sure that I could get my family members to play along.

Logistics:

I did a “call” for participants via email and family blog. I had 8 people reply that they were interested.

I came up with a list of 15 activities. I tried to have them range from vague to concrete. I split the activities up into three weeks, to see whether I could maintain participation for that long.

Here was the list:

Week 1 Activities:
1. “This is me”
2. "Who I am" - Take a picture that tells me who you are (anything that reflects your values, beliefs, personality or other….) and describe it for me
3. "Past" - Take a picture that represents your past
4. "Future" - Take a picture that represents your future
5. "Frustrating" - Take a picture of something you find frustrating
6. "Delightful" - Take a picture of something you find delightful
7. "Fun" - Take a picture of something fun
Week 2 Activities
1. “Morning” - Take a sequence of at least 4 pictures representing your morning routine
2. “Family” - Take a picture of someone in your life that you consider to be family
3. “Desk” - Take a picture of your desk (or where you work, use your computer, etc)
4. “Shopping” - Take a picture the next time you are shopping and describe where you are, what you are doing, and why
5. “Challenge” - Take a picture representing your biggest challenge
6. “Loud” - Take a picture of something loud
7. “Life” - Take a picture that represents something you would like to do with your life
Week 3 Activity (final week!)
1. “Day” - Pick a day and take pictures throughout the day to document your day. Describe what went well and what didn’t go well during this day (include pictures, if you can).

How it worked out
Actual participation was much worse than expected. Of the 8 participants:

Two participants didn’t post anything at all

One participant only posted the “This is me” photo

One participant only posted activities 2-5 on week 1

One participant did the first 2 weeks, but not the last

Three participants did all of the activities

Some technical challenges came up:

One participant couldn’t upload her pictures because they were too large

One participant had some goofs with uploading a few pictures (where she uploaded the wrong ones and then couldn’t figure out how to edit the entries, so she just sent duplicates)

All of the participants used existing photos as well as taking photos for the study. What surprised me what the proportion of photos that were “pre-existing”. Of the 123 images submitted, 40 pictures were clearly existing images that were uploaded.

Since I knew these people, I was in a unique position to understand the pictures and how accurate a picture of each participant was conveyed by the images and content. I felt that the overall representations were fairly accurate, although quite limited.

The best pictures came from very concrete tasks:

Desk

Morning

I liked these images… people seemed to GET INTO it and they gave a wide variety of images and interpretations:

Challenge

Frustrating

Loud

The least useful were the tasks that were trying to get at who the person was. These elicited more anxiety in the participants, then revealed very predictable images having to do with parenting, etc:

Who I am

Past

Future

Life

Family

Wrap-up
Overall, I was happy with what I’d learned from the study. I learned that the logistics of setting up and encouraging participation were pretty time consuming, but that the joy of getting people’s images made it all worthwhile. I think these types of studies might be useful for giving us a picture of what customers are like in different parts of the country (and/or world), but that it limits our view so much that it cannot be used in place of actually going there in person. I also learned that it would be very difficult to get people to really document something that they are doing on a regular basis. Once, perhaps… but not many times. For example, this really wouldn’t work if we asked someone to take a picture of what they were doing each time they logged into email for a couple of weeks.

Deep Understandings

2008-01-08T09:25:00.000-08:00

Coming soon to a blog near you... Wendy's thoughts on gaining deep understandings.