UPA 2009 in Portland - Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.