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Business
Beautiful Monsters: Check your assumptions at the door
Every product, service, or business model is defined in large measure by what designers take for granted. These assumptions can be held so deeply as to be invisible to the designers themselves. And yet their acknowledgment, and negotiation, are key to industrial evolution, profit, and harmonious relationships to various ecosystems.
In the early days, for instance, you could assume that those with access to computers were backed by organizations willing to invest the funds necessary to acquire or build the complex infrastructure required by computational behemoths. But with the advent of microprocessors and other such developments, that all changed. Now the intrusion of computers into every corner of our lives is nearly complete, with 11 percent of the people recently polled saying they’d like their email deliver directly into their brains in the ultimate post-media consumer fad.
Beautiful Monsters: Be the change
The Market Street grid, Courtesy: bricoleurbanism.
This week, San Francisco started choosing sides for another Market Street Mêlée, which we fight once every ten years or so. On one side of the double-yellow line are arrayed various assorted starry-eyed, bipedal dreamers who propose closing down the main artery of our fair city to most carbon-emitting traffic so as to give pedestrians and bicyclists a break, reduce pollution, and increase the beauty and overall mellow vibe of the grid. On the other side stand the self-styled hard-nosed rationalists who see in this as a pedal-powered economic and moral calamity in the making.
Beautiful Monsters: The odds are in
Beautiful Monsters is a series by David Fore, head of Cooper's consulting practice. It is intended encourage conversation about how interaction designers can grow more sustainable practices, with the goals of improving our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet. Start at the beginning, or read the latest installment below.
Critics may charge that I’m loving on WunderMap too much. But these guys have vision. They provide fantastic resources for visualizing many of the changes afoot, which is a necessary precursor to visualizing solutions. But what they haven’t done yet is provide us the coordinates of our honeybees, one in three of which have disappeared from these parts. Without honeybees we don’t have agriculture as we know it — and, ipso facto, culture.
"How would our federal government respond if 1 out of every 3 cows was dying?" a scientist recently asked a bovine Congress.
Beautiful Monsters: Why on earth does this matter?
It used to be that everybody talked about the weather, but nobody did anything about it. Not anymore. Through the magic of technology, I am empowered to make better decisions about where not to breathe. That’s because the good people at WunderMap have devised a smoke map. For a few days there, the smoke from local wildfires were absorbed by our (formerly) infinitely capacious atmosphere. So I didn’t think I’d need the smoke map. But then temperatures hit new epochal records, humidity took a dive, and the wind began fanning the flames again.
Should our misfortunes expand to include plagues of frogs, boils, and gnats, I know WunderMap will have my back.
In other news last week, the U.S. continued to emit vivid plumes of interactive graphics displaying our industrial might, which nobody can deny … it’s just that my emissions are necessary, while yours are not. World leaders at the G8 Summit in Japan, meanwhile, decided to postpone serious action on climate change for another few decades. Tomorrow’s always the best day to begin a diet.
Why on earth should such things matter to interaction designers? Put another way, why does earth matter to interaction designers?
Beautiful Monsters: With such a late start, we best get moving
From our position at the confluence of human desire, technology, and business, interaction designers can make a tremendously positive—or negative—impact on the biggest issues facing us today: the sustainability of commerce, human societies, and natural systems. Despite these opportunities, software makers are discouraged from thinking outside the aspect ratio of the computer ’s monitor.
This is the first in a series of articles intended to serve as an ongoing conversation about how interaction designers can move the industry toward an Ecosystem Centered Design to improve our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet.
About Face 3: Foreword
The industrial age is over. Manufacturing, the primary economic driver of the past 175 years, no longer dominates. While manufacturing is bigger than ever, it has lost its leadership to digital technology, and software now dominates our economy. We have moved from atoms to bits. We are now in the postindustrial age.
More and more products have software in them. My stove has a microchip in it to manage the lights, fan, and oven temperature. When the deliveryman has me sign for a package, it's on a computer, not a pad of paper. When I shop for a car, I am really shopping for a navigation system.
More and more businesses are utterly dependent on software, and not just the obvious ones like Amazon.com and Microsoft. Thousands of companies of all sizes that provide products and services across the spectrum of commerce use software in every facet of their operations, management, planning, and sales. The back-office systems that run big companies are all software systems. Hiring and human resource management, investment and arbitrage, purchasing and supply chain management, point-of-sale, operations, and decision support are all pure software systems these days. And the Web dominates all sales and marketing. Live humans are no longer the front line of businesses. Software plays that role instead. Vendors, customers, colleagues, and employees all communicate with companies via software or software-mediated paths.
Goal-Directed Service Design
Most people think of Goal-Directed Design techniques as focused on product design, but they work equally well for services. A service is comprised of the various "touchpoints" between a customer and a business. Touchpoints include public-facing systems such as web sites and web-enabled software, but can include other channels as well, such as brick-and-mortar stores, points of sale, interactive voice response systems, email and postal mail, too.
A service model best fits offerings that are intangible, distributed in space, or play out over a length of time, especially on a routine basis. Some obvious examples include: electricity, hotels, mobile phone service, or even a government. The touchpoints you design as part of your service are critical to the user's understanding of your brand. Increasingly, many touchpoints are interactive systems rather than human contact, so paying careful attention to the design of these things from the user's goals is vital.
Six Sigma and Goal-Directed Design
If you work for a large company, or have one as a client, you've probably heard about Six Sigma. Many companies report great success using Six Sigma initiatives to improve the quality of their products and services, measured by increased customer satisfaction and millions of dollars saved.
At the core, Six Sigma and Goal-Directed design share some of the same values and provide tools to solve some of the same problems. Six Sigma seeks to understand and quantify the functions that matter most to users and provide improvements in those most leveraged areas. Goal-Directed design seeks to delight users and increase loyalty by creating products that are powerful and pleasurable to use. Six Sigma identifies and tracks faults "critical to quality" (CTQs). Goal-Directed design uses personas and goals to define and communicate interaction design decisions.
Myths and Measurements: Evaluating the ROI of Design
There's a dirty little secret that nobody in the design community wants you to know: it's actually possible to build and ship a software product…without designing it first! There. I said it. Now my time is short; even as I type, assassins with square-toed shoes and goatees are stalking my whereabouts.
But just because you can construct software products without designing them first, why on earth would anybody want to?
The analogies are endless: you wouldn't point a construction crew to an open lot and tell them to build a structure without giving them blueprints, would you? You wouldn't ask a doctor to re-set a broken bone without looking at an x-ray; you wouldn't storm the beaches of Normandy without a battle strategy and a good map; you wouldn't even don your shoes before putting on your socks.
Executives chuckle warmly at these analogies, and agree wholeheartedly that yes, it's always best to design products—the things that their companies sell for money—before building them and putting them in the hands of customers. Yet even though business decision-makers of all stripes acknowledge the merits of design, it's the designers and usability professionals who are the first to get jettisoned from a project plan when the going gets rough.
Ten Ways to Kill Good Design
It's a given that we at Cooper—and most of you reading this article—believe design is the right tool for translating market needs into tangible product specifications. The people who hire us to design their products or who attend our Cooper U courses think the same thing. Unfortunately, the best designs and the best intentions won't always lead you to success, because the problem goes beyond your product and beyond your design or development process. Building better, more innovative, and more profitable products requires organizational change on a deep and difficult level.
When design pilot projects fail, it endangers everyone's willingness to adopt design methods. Over the course of doing hundreds of design projects and teaching our methods to more than a thousand people, we've seen that several reasons for failure keep showing up. A discussion of these reasons follows, along with some solutions to consider. Let's start with the easiest ones and work our way up.
Where Do Product Managers Fit?
People often ask how interaction designers should fit into their companies. If the company cannot take good advantage of it, the most brilliant interaction design in the world won't help as much as simple, workmanlike interaction design will benefit a company that uses that design well.
2nd Edition Foreword Excerpt: The Inmates are Running the Asylum
In my recent travels I have noticed a growing malaise in the community of programmers. Sadly, it is the best and most experienced of them who are afflicted the worst. They reflect cynicism and ennui about their efforts because they know that their skills are being wasted. They may not know exactly how they are misapplied, but they cannot overlook the evidence. Many of the best programmers have actually stopped programming because they find the work frustrating. They have retreated into training, evangelism, writing, and consulting because it doesn't feel so wasteful and counterproductive. This is a tragic and entirely avoidable loss. (The open-source movement is arguably a haven for these frustrated programmers—a place where they can write code according to their own standards and be judged solely by their peers, without the advice or intervention of marketers or managers).
Programmers are not given sufficient time, clear enough direction, or adequate designs to enable them to succeed. These three things are the responsibility of business executives, and they fail to deliver them for preventable reasons, not because they are stupid or evil. They are simply not armed with adequate tools for solving the complex and unique problems that confront them in the information age. Now here I am sounding like I'm slamming people again, only this time businesspeople are in my sights instead of programmers. Once again, to solve the problem one must deconstruct it. I'm questing after solutions, not scapegoats.
Features Talk, but Behaviors Close
What’s a feature?
Features are often the currency of software development and marketing, yet few people can agree on what exactly defines a feature. The term can be used to describe a particular piece of functionality, an entire set of functionality, a capability, or sometimes even a possibility. The experts are no help. Typical is webopedia.com, which goes out on a limb by stating that a feature is, “a notable property of a device or software application.”
In other words, a feature is a feature of something.
What is telling, though, is that the vast majority of definitions refer to featuritis or feature creep, the seemingly endless proliferation of features that glom onto what was once, perhaps, a product with a clear vision. Everyone knows that features pop up during the product cycle like mushrooms after a rain.
Managing the Risk in Digital Customer Touch-Points
Are your customers getting a helping hand or the cold shoulder?
The great thing about big American businesses is that they give us many of the stories that become the fabric of our lives. Frankly, we'd rather not endure the circumstances that result in the stories, but like train wrecks and tornados, they are entirely unforgettable and we talk about them for years. I'm talking about customer service horror stories, of course.
We all have many of them. The stories get particularly interesting when they relate to monopolies or near monopolies, otherwise known as oligopolies. Why? Because any interactions we have with such firms are biased from the get-go by the distrust we have for important players in our lives over whom we have little influence and control. We feel victimized before we even pick up the phone to attempt to do business with them. From their business perspectives, this should present them with an interesting challenge: how do we make our customers trust and love us, so that they won't find ways to live without us? Unfortunately, such firms rarely seem to rise to the challenge.
A good example would be a very unpleasant run-in I had recently with my oligopolist ISP (Internet Service Provider). The setup for the story is that I moved about six months ago. I called my ISP during the move to have them disconnect DSL at my old address and transfer it to my new address-simple enough. Six months later, still no DSL; however, my credit card bill continues to be charged. I decided to give them a call, but having already called them three times previously in recent months, it's fair to say I was already not in the best of moods and pessimistic about the quality of service I would receive. Suffice it to say that they lived down to my expectations. The customer service interactions went like this:
Goal-Directed Content Management
A year ago, most software industry analysts were predicting that Content Management (CM) was going to be the hot sector this year. Unfortunately, sales for most CM software providers are not meeting expectations, and even CM insiders are suggesting that the cause could be a growing disappointment with CM implementation results. Anecdotal evidence from within the CM industry indicates that CM implementations fail to meet corporate expectations about half of the time.
Part of the reason for missed expectations could be poor usability. Forrester Research recently released a research paper on the subject: "Packaged Apps Fail The Usability Test." In it, they don't name the vendors, but they rate the usability of two popular CM systems. Both rated very poorly. Forrester's conclusion is that much better design is needed to win user adoption and higher rates of corporate satisfaction.
5 Insights for Improving Product Development Cycle Success
In my article last month, Innovate, one step at a time, I discussed how the process of innovation easily derails during difficult economic times, such as today's. When creating software and digital products, innovation typically spans many months, and it can become disrupted by unobservable or frequently changing business conditions that make it extremely difficult to form and evaluate viable options. When people can't see where they're going, they typically just stop. This is tragic with respect to innovation, since it is innovation that propels business and society forward.
Innovate, One Step at a Time
I believe most things run in cycles: the economy, the stock market, fashion, moral codes, even one's own personal status and influence (your personal "stock price," so to speak)—sometimes you're hot, sometimes you're not. The past couple of years have been particularly harsh in reinforcing a history lesson for us: when the pendulum swings very hard and far in one direction, it will most assuredly swing just as decisively in the other eventually.
During recessions, uncertainty prevails, and like a driver trying to weave his way along a mountain road in heavy fog, many businesspeople eventually tire and just pull their businesses over to what seems like a safe embankment, turn off their engines of innovation and progress, and wait for the fog to lift. But how long can one afford to sit on the roadside? At what point does it become riskier to do nothing than to proceed with caution? One has to wonder if there's a better way, a way to keep moving forward in measured, confident increments, rather than eventually creating an additional element of uncertainty by deferring innovation altogether.
The High Risk of Low-Risk Behavior
"Necessity is the mother of taking chances."
-Mark Twain
Occasionally I encounter a motorist on the highway who is driving very slowly, some 20 miles per hour slower than the flow of traffic. This driver undoubtedly believes himself to be driving in a reasonable manner, equating his slow speed with safety. Unfortunately, he fails to recognize the greater risk of a much faster car plowing into him from behind. His slow speed has made his car into a barrier rather than part of the traffic flow, and yet he cruises on, oblivious to the squealing tires and honking horns directly behind him.
Is this really a safe practice? Not on the highways in Silicon Valley.
Three Traps
We talk to a lot of technology companies here at Cooper, and over the years we've seen some clear patterns emerge. On the positive side, more and more companies are realizing the importance of a good user experience and of the overall usability of their products. Unfortunately, we also continue to see companies falling into the same product development traps, to the detriment of their products, their customers, and their business.
These traps can be hard to spot, because they often appear to be standard business practices (especially when the company has never done it any other way), but when you take a step back you see that those practices really don't make much sense. If you have the nagging feeling that there's something not quite right with your product development initiative, it may be because you're falling into one of these traps. To help you recognize bad practices and work to avoid them, here are three common development pitfalls.
Putting People Together to Create New Products
When companies plan out a new product (or service, or business process) they often think of the effort as the coordination of two teams solving different problems. Engineering addresses the question "what can you make?" Marketing addresses the question "what can you sell?"
You could engineer a combined toaster and cell phone, but you could never sell it. Marketing would tell you that you have a product no customer would buy. Likewise, you might successfully market a car that runs on tapwater, but the impossibility of building one makes it a meaningless product idea. Smart organizations know that they need to combine the insights from both marketing and engineering to find products that they can both make and sell.
The Iteration Trap
High-tech companies are in a hurry—as well they should be—but many hurt themselves by trying to move products out the door too quickly. I often hear executives repeat homilies like "Ship early, ship often," and "Launch and learn." They assume that there is no penalty for simply slapping something together, shipping it, and then upgrading their product or site in a rapid iteration cycle. Unfortunately, there is a big, hidden cost associated with this tactic.
Rapid development environments like the World Wide Web have promoted the idea of simply iterating many versions of a product or service until something works. Arguably, the Web is in its nascent stage and companies are still experimenting to see what works and what doesn't, yet this should not be an excuse for iteration without planning, nor should "speed to market."
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