Maria Cordell talking about design research

This is a personal recap of the four day workshop held by Adaptive Path in Berlin from April, 15th to 18h. Please be aware, that this summary is deliberately focused on topics of personal interest and in times deviates from the Adaptive Path lingo.

1st Day: Design Strategy (Patrick Quattelbaum)

In many companies (especially the traditional major ones) design still happens as an afterthought without clear connection to the overall business strategy. For design to be effective, it needs to be a product of the business goals, the customer needs and the organization’s capabilities (both in terms of technology and organizational fit). E.g. depending on whether a company is competing on cost or unique differentiators, an effective design of a product might greatly differ. Great companies are able to create a strategy where core elements are reinforced by a large number of supporting aspects – often enabling broad success of the strategy in the first place (e.g. low service price competing products relying heavily on excellent self service offers).

The extent to which design is allowed to be part of the overall business strategy can be expressed in terms of the role it plays in the company. Mr. Quattlebaum distinguishes several degrees of integration with the lowest regarding design as a necessary process step of product development without clear goals and no success metrics up to where design is a core competency supporting and informing the overall business strategy (of which a good example would be Apple Inc.).

Increasing the role of design in your company can only be achieved as a gradual process, as stakeholder buy-in is crucial for your success. Growing design from a cost function to a core competency with strong roots in the overall business strategy takes some serious change management. Focus on quick wins generating immediate business value and (hopefully) positive business attention. Moving beyond quick wins, effective communication of your vision is critical to gain traction with stakeholders from all parts of your organization and beyond.

(Much to my own experience,) companies often lack a clear alignment between customer and business value. Increasing your alignment to the needs of your customer can be a great business opportunity (albeit this might challenge part of your business goals). In order to assess what customer value means in the case of specific offerings, a company has to go beyond pure market research and strive for insights into the mental model of customers (their needs, feelings and behaviors). Such insights are generated by design (aka user) research methods like contextual interviews, diaries, user tests etc. (see second day of the workshop). Based on these insights a company can formulate experience principles that inform the design and facilitate a consistent user experience across products and channels. A potential pitfall for pitching cross channel service strategies is the absence of management responsible for promoting cross channel performance in traditionally organized companies.

Efficient creation of compelling products acknowledges the uncertainties of product development. A focus on validated learning and rigorous prioritization help to both minimize risk and accelerate time to market leading to the strategy of minimum viable products (minimum features) and services (minimum touchpoints). Another way of thinking of MVP/MSP is as a platform approach to product design enabling quick incremental evolution and at its best a continuous stream of customer delights (called “The Long Wow” by Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer).

While execution should be driven by short feedback cycles, maintaining a consistent strategy requires a long-term vision (characterized as a “North Star”) in the form of road maps and product evolution maps that resonate with the stakeholders and (hopefully) rally them behind a common goal.

Further Reading

• “What is strategy?”, Michael Porter, PDF-Article
• Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, Book
• The Service Anticipation Gap, Brandon Schauer, Blog
• Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences, Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati, Book
• Lean Startup, Eric Ries, Book
• Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath , Book

2nd Day: Design Research (Maria Cordell)

Design research (aka “User Research”) plays an important role in  all phases of the design (and implementation) process. Among other things, it informs the design strategy, identifies innovation opportunities, generates insights into contexts of usage and provides vital verification for concrete designs.
Design research is not the same as market research, since they differ both in focus and purpose of their research. That said, data from market research can support in planning design research efforts.

Careful stakeholder management is critical for the success of design research efforts. From pitching for the initial go ahead to presenting the final research results, a wide range of stakeholders has to be bought into the effort. Some crucial points are:

• Understand the wider context of the research effort (including the role of important stakeholders and the goals of the project)
• During all steps of the effort, keep the research objectives closely aligned with the actual project goals- Aim for true insights and understanding
• refrain from attempting to validate preconceived notions
• Identify and achieve buy-in of subject matter experts- Recruit key stakeholders as “witnesses” of the research effort; they will later serve as “champions” of your findings, if your methods or your results are doubted

Apart from basic advice about recruiting and research methodology, I found the following tips to be of particular interest to me:

• “Triangulation”: Quantitative and qualitative research can be combined to strengthen identified insights
• Guerrilla research in coffee shops – produce quick (preliminary) insights at your local barista: Three researchers work together with one interviewing, one taking notes and one asking people in the waiting queue to participate in the interviews offering free coffee and cake in return (remark: this only works with a Starbucks-style serving process).
• Method “Process Sketching”: Let users draw and narrate the events of a recent experience on a swim lane diagram of the anticipated touch points; can later be further annotated with post-its; can be used as a basis for Journey (aka Experience) maps
• Method “Picture Cards”: Let people select from a provided set of picture cards and words and let them arrange and annotate in a way they see fit to tell a story about the research topics. A sample introduction could be “We have some pictures and words here, which ones are resonating with your daily work routine?” This method is especially useful for gaining insight into the attitudes and feelings of people. It can inform the design and  help in creating Personas. Frequent usage can be facilitated by a core set of cards, which is customized for specific tasks.
• Always test your interview plan with colleagues / friends before you go into the field.
• The AEIOU framework is a good starting point for clustering your observations. Although you might want to extend it with additional aspects to allow for coding of – among others – emotions, goals and sequence of events (time).

Further Reading

• Design research: What is it and why do it?, Panthea Lee, blog
• Recruiting without fear, UIE, paper
• Mental Models – Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behaviour, Indi Young, book
• Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, Jon Kolko, book
• Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, Brenda Laurel, book
• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, Jesse James Garret, book
• Observing the User Experience, Mike Kuniavsky and others, book
• Storytelling for User Experience, Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks, book
• Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas and Design Effective Solutions, Bruce Hannington and Bella Martin, book
• Example for experience maps: Exploratorium: Mapping the Experience of Experiments, blog article by Adative Path’s Brandon Schauer, blog

3rd Day: Service Design (Jamin Hegeman)

Effective service design needs to start from a customer’s point of view (aka outside-in perspective) and has to take into account all aspects of the service experience. When (or if) taking the customer’s view, most organizations tend to focus their efforts on specific parts of the service journey (a single channel, product or touchpoint), while the customer experiences the service as the sum of all steps and circumstances of the experience. Thus, customers frequently are confused, affronted or even scared.

A well designed service is an orchestrated effort of all parts of the organization(s) providing a consistent and seamless service experience. Dealing with service experience requires a much broader view than the term “user experience” which is usually associated with a single touchpoint or product.

Because of its broad scope, effective design of complex services means a fundamental mind shift ultimately leading to strategic changes in the organization and processes of an enterprise. Quite a bit of careful change management might be in order to disrupt silos and alter established processes. In the end, it is the people who have to drive the change, so small gradual steps might be a better fit than an attempt at revolution.

Apart from improvements for the customer and the benefits this can have for the company in itself (increase in retention and sales volume), effective service design also leads to process harmonization (potentially eradicating inefficiencies) and to higher motivated and more productive staff. This is where traditional management consulting and service design need to go hand in hand to create a system which satisfies the needs of customer and staff as much as the goals of the business. Needless to say, such a system integrating previously unrelated parts of the company will constitute challenges for the IT department.

Mr. Hegeman introduced during the day some tools, he found helpful on his own service design work:

• Territory Mapping collects and visualizes all elements of the (existing) service. Think of people, places, products, services, artifacts and technologies involved. This is a good starting point for your service design endeavor. It serves as first glimpse at the system’s complexity and can be used for discussion with team and stakeholders refining it along the way.
• Service Storming – Another method which can be used upfront before detailed research takes place (or later during service prototyping) is service storming: During a workshop with stakeholders the participants are divided into small groups and asked to create the story of an ideal service journey they are to enact for the other groups. Defining a journey should take 10 minutes, allow another 20 minutes for rehearsing, then every group gets 2 minutes to act out (transitions from one touchpoint to another are “instant”). Presenting a service journey “on stage” is a much more personal experience than mere discussions. Emotions, creativity and bonding of the stakeholders will all be spurred by the exercise.
• Journey (aka Experience) Maps document a service journey in its different stages (time & place) regarding all associated aspects (people, actions, emotions, needs, …).
• Service Blueprint is a diagram method to represent a flow of service interactions not only on the customer facing side but also including all operational aspects of the interaction steps. They are used for verification, planning and implementation of services.

Further Reading

• This is Service Design Thinking, Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, book
• Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, Book
• Service storming and dragon lines, Jamine Hegeman, blog/slides
• Examples of experience and journey maps by adaptive path:

• The Anatomy of an Experience Map, blog
• New Ways of Visualizing the Customer Journey Map, blog

On Pinterest search for Service Design to find a cornucopia of diagrams.

4th day: Interaction Design (Maria Cordell)

I also attended the 4th day of the workshop and found that it too was very worthwhile. But since interaction design is not my focus and for the sake of time management I decided to skip a detailed recap of this day.

Scrollable paper prototype for mobile

This article is summing up my personal impressions from Mobilism 2012 with a focus on overarching themes and ideas. Disclosure: I am currently working for a German carrier. I will leave out any topics directly related to carrier business and strategies. Carrier bashing was a frequent theme during the conference.

Post PC is here

Coming from the late visionary Steve Jobs this term might still sound like a fancy to some, but during the talks and discussions of Mobilism 2012, the common feeling was that it is here already. With smartphones and tablets, a new class of personal general purpose devices is on the rise, which is disrupting the way we use information technology (and devices in general). Traditional PCs might not go away but they cease to be the dominant device.

Scott Jenson at Mobilism 2012

We are still adapting to this brutally quick development and nobody knows where exactly we are heading. Established pundits and incumbent market players are still getting to grips with the fundamental changes that are taking place. Many still follow strategies and mental models that have been clearly invalidated by recent development.

In his talk, Horace Dediu, calls this development asymmetric competition: A new player enters a market in a way that incumbents are not able to retaliate. It’s ”David against Goliath” and the desperate powers to be (like Nokia) answer with the ”Charge of the light brigade”. The former dominant market players are encumbered by hedging their existing markets and relationships (e.g. Provider, distribution channels) making it exceedingly difficult for them to respond to the ”flanking maneuver”, that hits them in the rear.

Directly asked about his forecast of the future, Mr. Dediu answered cautiously: The mobile market will possibly not end up like the PC market with one dominant player. His reasoning: Sheer number of devices (more than one plattform can thrive) and no dominance of the business market as was the case when Microsoft Windows started to rise (just the opposite: consumerization is a driving force for mobile). His bet: Maybe there will be one or two flavors of Android plus iOS and Windows Phone.

A recurring theme of the conference was that app stores will not scale. Coming from some players this might be called ‘wishful thinking’ (Facebook, carriers), but apart from the looming app glut other reasons were given that might prove more compelling:  The advent of smart devices were the one that struck me most. They are expected to play an important role in further transforming our daily lives. And they have the potential to fundamentally change the the way we interact with devices in general. This will incite a powerful push towards instant cross platform operability. (See Scott Jenson’s article on smart devices).

The web won’t die any time soon

The Mobile web is clearly inferior in some aspects to native apps. The web, however, should not attempt to to compete with native on its own turf, but claim the use cases where it can excel with its natural strengths (cross platform, no access restrictions, searchable, linkable, installation free, etc.). That said, there are various initiatives working on narrowing the gap between web and native.

Major industry players (like Facebook, Google, Mozilla, …) are pushing hard to advance web access on device capabilities. Painless payment functionality is another feature for which we will see various approaches. In addition, app store like marketplaces (by Facebook, Mozilla, Google, …) for web-based apps enable easy monetization, discoverability, user recommendations, etc.

James Pearce from Facebook presented in his talk the W3C interest group for advancing the standards of the mobile web: Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group (http://coremob.org) and the Ringmark Benchmark by Facebook http://rng.io

It’s not about smartphones, stupid

One recurring message of many talks was: The web is multi screen (and always was).

(Probably) the next big (in a rather literal sense) thing: TV. As Jason Grigsby has put it in his brilliant and highly entertaining talk: Smart TVs might become the next feature phones. Another memorable punch line: You can’t predict future behaviour from a current experience that sucks. If Apple (and/or Google) get it right, this will become another huge overthrow with new players disrupting the eco system of what we know today as “TV”.

In his talk Jason Grigsby makes a clear point for why TVs are a different kind of beast both in terms of design and interaction. A surprising insight of his talk: Browsers of recent Smart TVs are already quite good in supporting standards. But do not try anything to fancy, since – comparable to smartphones – they are not packing the horse power (in terms of CPU and GPU) you can expect from desktop based systems. If you you are the hands on type: Try the Google TV emulator and the Opera TV SDK.

We are far from reaching the end of fragmentation that has started with the rise of Smartphones as popular devices for browsing the web. Responsive Web Design might not be well suited to address all challenges of the multi screen world alone, but it will become an important tool for catering to different screen sizes within a single device class.

Supporting a multi screen environment

Even before the Post PC era dawned on us devices (in this case mostly PCs) have never been uniform in their capabilities (in terms of screen size, CPU power, etc.). But only with the advent of tablets and smartphones, the need for a flexible presentation of content and functionalities has become impossible to ignore. Thus, the challenge of multi channel content delivery (as CMS vendors labeled it in the old days) has been well known for years. It just recently changed from a fancy feature tick on product descriptions to a centre feature that now every one needs to consider.

The appeal for decoupling content and presentation was a recurring theme throughout the conference. Lyza Gardner pointed out, that the past problems with accepting a more abstract content management that is decidedly not “WYSIWYG” stemmed from lack of usability and the missing buy in of the editors.  She vividly pictured it as getting the chocolate out of the M&Ms.

Stop designing with photoshop! Semantically structure your content! Enable your content to reach as many channels and contexts as possible! Be relevant! Nothing new here. But bad web design will make you look even worse than it used to. Stephen Hays presented an interesting approach to a workflow for responsive web design. Brad Frost very entertainingly pointed out how “bullshit” (irrelevancy, clutter) will only get you ignored and eventually abandoned.

Tools and frameworks for the mobile web

Today you can choose from various approaches of developing web and hybrid apps. All have their specific advantages and pitfalls. Be sure to know them, before you paint yourself into the wrong corner. Frameworks for bringing legacy content online with a minimal effort are a short-term relieve, but might not be a viable long term strategy – only postponing the necessary invest to launch a full blown multi screen strategy. That said, there are astonishing solutions for kickstarting legacy content into the mobile age. Take for example mobify.js which works injecting JS code into the legacy desktop webpages scraping the content and rebuilding the output on the fly.

When going for cross-platform hybrid approaches, make sure you do not alienate your users by an experience that is lacking in “smoothness” or the look and feel expected from native apps. If you need the last ounce of polish, nothing beats native.

Although there are tools emerging that work around the lack of debugging capabilities of mobile web browsers, it can still feel like a reminiscent of the (not so) good old times of IE 6. What we really need is good native support for remote debugging mobile web browsers. Blackberry and Opera show how it can be done. Chrome for Android will follow shortly. (see Remy Sharp’s presentation)

Device simulators have their uses. But nothing beats testing on real devices. – Lots of different real devices.

If you think that is a platitude pointing out your garage full of smartphones and tablets, then remember those TVs …

There was so much more

Make sure to check out the slides of the talks once they are up on mobilism.nl. Watch the videos from the discussion panels. And do not miss out on the hilarious explanation how app cache is a real douche bag …

Thanks, ppk and all the others. Great conference!