Sneaking into people’s lives and admitting it

Posted: 22/08/2011 | Author: | Filed under: marketing, Product design, service design | Leave a comment

Once upon a time there was a mobile company who wanted to improve people’s lives (and their bottom line) by offering some amazing relevant and useful services. In order to do that, they decided to do some extensive research to ask customers what kind of information and services they’d like to have on their mobiles.
The customers were happy to be consulted. They filled questionairs and came into the discussion room to talk about their problems and what they needed to make things better. They got excited with the prospect o having updated train times, shopping lists, and news handy so they could organize their hectic urban lives on the go.

The well-intentioned mobile company took that on board and prioritized their product development with renewed confidence. A few months later, they launched their wap portal with lots of useful services.

The design and product teams watched traffic stats anxiously, looking to validate their hard work. But the stats were just weird. People were not accessing train times and news as expected. Instead, they were going crazy for things like nude, awful quality animated gifs (this was long ago) and clunky apps like mobile chat, which defied usability and common sense at the time. And yet, the revenue was coming from those.

What’s the moral of the story?
Customer/design research cannot make all the hard decisions for you or eliminate risk totally.  Innovation should be user-centric, but for it to happen there has to be some experimentation and the will to go out of your comfort zone with some calculated risk.

Often the best test ground for innovation is life and not the research lab. Traditional quantitative and lab qualitative research is useful, but for innovation purposes it might mean testing within what we already know or suspect, and having interesting insights filtered out through what users pre-judge as being important. I’m more convinced by the minute that observational and contextual research techniques like ethnography, where you observe people in action, in context and their environment, has the potential to surprise and shows us opportunities which would not be otherwise be articulated in a lab.

But we should pick these insights to inspire and differentiate, and not just to cover ourselves. A bit of courage often pays off.

To App or not to App

Posted: 16/03/2011 | Author: | Filed under: Content, Product design, user experience | Leave a comment

I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, and reading this article in the Guardian about the fading novelty of news apps for the iPad got me thinking. I have frequent discussions with clients and industry colleagues about the suitability of the closed app format for everything.

Everyone wants to be on the Apple or Android app stores for “positioning” reasons. Marketeers love imagining their logo sitting permanently on the tablet’s main screen. But applications are expensive things to build, need to be heavily customised for different platforms, have hurdles for quick fixes and updates. Your customers won’t download your app just because you’ve built it, or even because they love your brand. Or they might even download it along with dozens of other free apps which they install and hardly use.

I see apps as a possible solutions for certain customer offerings. But you need to define the offering and the value to your customer and your business. And sorry, an App it’s not an offering in itself, let alone a mobile strategy.

The downloadable app format gives you an incredible array of interaction possibilities, which are great for tools, games, social networking and resources which people are going to use often, demanding rich functionality, willing to take the time to discover the cool new interaction possibilities you’ve worked so hard on. But sometimes the best solution for sites offering mostly web content is surprisingly… the web – customised for different mobile platforms of course.

Define the service offering, assess the value, then decide on the technology, interaction and presentation.

From Business to Buttons 2009

Posted: 07/05/2009 | Author: | Filed under: Product design, user experience | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

From Business to Buttons 2009 brings us Garr Reynolds, presentation guru and web 2.0 thought leader, along with a great mix of tech heavyweights, startup cases and experts in innovation including:

  • Matt Jones (founder of Dopplr.com)
  • Scott Berkun (author of The Myths of Innovation).
  • Todd Lefelt (Director of User Experience  at Huge)
  • Microsoft (sponsor) with the Interactive Surface tabletop.
  • The Cocktail (sponsor) introducing Iwannagothere.com, the travellers social network born in Spain.
  • Complete list of speakers, sessions and registration at businesstobuttons.com

When and where: 11-12 of June in Malmö, Sweden

Short bios:
Garr Reynolds, Associate Professor of Management at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan, is the creator of the most popular website on presentation design and delivery on the net: presentationzen.com. He shares lessons and perspectives on making remarkable presentations that are simpler, visual, engaging, and effective. He is the former Manager of Worldwide User Group Relations at Apple Computer, and spent most of the ’90s at Sumitomo Electric Industries in Osaka.

Scott Berkun is the author of bestselling books “Making things happen” and “The Myths of Innovation”.  At Microsoft from 1994-2003 he oversaw projects such as Internet Explorer (v1-5 of), Windows and MSN. He has taught at the University of Washington, regularly contributes to Harvard Business Digital, and has featured as an innovation and management expert on MSNBC and on CNBC. He writes frequently on his popular blog:  scottberkun.com

Matt Jones is a founder and lead designer of Dopplr.com, a service for frequent travellers. His previous positions include Director of User-Experience Design at Nokia Design, and creative director for Sapient in London. In the late 90s, he was creative director for the launch of BBC News Online. He has spoken at events such as Reboot, Ars Electronica, O’Reilly’s Etech and FooCamp. He now blogs at www.magicalnihilism.com.

Todd Lefelt is the Director of User Experience  of Huge, where he oversees research and interaction design for projects including Audible.com, Nickelodeon and The Warner Music Group. Todd has over 10 years of experience leading the definition of scalable interactive media strategies and user friendly experiences.  http://www.hugeinc.com

Iwannagothere.com is a social network dedicated to travel, an off-shoot of The Cocktail. During the conference the people behind Iwannagothere will be showing how they have used the Effect Map methodology in the development of the service and will be launching their mobile  service, co-designed by The Cocktail and InUse.

About the conference

From Business to Buttons is the most important European conference on Design for Business. It’s third edition runs between 11-12 of June in Malmö, Sweden.
For whom: designers, business strategists and user experience professionals.
Organisers: InUse, Ergonomidesing, Malmö University – Sponsors: The Cocktail (Spain) and Microsoft.

Forgetful and happy

Posted: 13/04/2009 | Author: | Filed under: Product design, user experience | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

I have been reading some interesting articles on how service designers have been using Behavioural Sciences to improve customer satisfaction and… to make more money.

Behavioural sciences have shown that customers have a short memory span and we should bear this in mind as we design and manage services. It’s not as evil and deceiving as it sounds – it is more about leaving the best to end. Some of the findings that are relevant to user-experience include:

  • We prefer progressive improvements. We can tolerate weak starts and decent middles if what follows is a good end (the concept of Beta services). But we are cruel and judgemental when services start well and disappoint in the end.
  • We prefer to resolve  unpleasant things early, getting them out of the way and taking our time with lighter/ fun things. Kind of obvious but it gives us the clear hint that if we need to ask the user to make an effort (e.g. registration) or to inform them of a limitation (e.g. availability, delivery policies)  it should be done sooner than later.
  • A positive end is the part of the experience that we remember the most.

This is a great endorsement to UX designers and clients who understand that they need to dedicate as much attention to homepages as to lower level/exit pages – knowing that any page can be an entry point and that they have little control over the user’s exit points.

Using some basic Behavioural Sciences concepts to improve business is no evil plot to control the customer’s mind. It’s about sustaining the quality along the whole user-experience and surprising the user positively at the end – whenever that is.

Read more:
Want to Perfect your Company’s Service? Use Behavioral Science
Richard Chase for Harvard Business Review


Are we doing product or service design?

Posted: 05/02/2009 | Author: | Filed under: Product design, user experience | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sometimes when you try to decide if the output of an interactive project is a product or a service, things get blurry. Traditionally products are defined as tangible goods as opposed to services which are defined as intangible goods.  Not so helpful… What is that tangible on the web? Perhaps the interface, but not much else.

I prefer the definition which says a product is something we own whilst a service is something we can use temporarily. The difference between buying and hiring a dinner jacket.
This definition seems useful, so I’ll try to apply it to a few real life projects (the output of which I would have called generically Product in the past):

An e-learning platform – Definitely providing an education service
An online newspaper – An information service
A software-as-a-service online shop – Can provide a similar service to a sales assistant offering expert advice and guiding the customer towards  a suitable service package.
A mobile mapping application – A tricky one. I have downloaded the software (so I own it), but for it to be useful at all I need data provided by the mapping company (a service) facilitated by my network operator (also a service).
A multinational corporate website – Essentially a marketing and communication tool between company, customers, investors, press, etc. At the same time you can consider it as a provider of self-customer-services.

Why is this differentiation relevant to interactive projects?

It is pretty clear that many online projects will generate hybrid product-service offerings, just as in the physical world. But I think we (practitioners) are developing more services than we imagined, yet treating them mostly as products.

Services usually involve longer or repeated engagements with the user and perhaps we can contemplate that more efficiently.  It would be really interesting to start using rich design tools such as service blueprinting in addition to content maps and prototypes.

Let’s see how it works in practice.

——–

Some interesting reading: Better than owning

Usability, user experience or customer experience?

Posted: 30/01/2009 | Author: | Filed under: Product design | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Product development practitioners have little control over what happens after they hand over a project deliverable.

It’s a bit like delivering a baby and hoping the parents will be  responsible and caring. Because good user-experience  and ultimately the success of a website or an interactive product depends hugely on its management, perhaps more than we would like to admit. A couple of examples:

> In a content-rich site we (consultants) often have no control over the quality of incoming content.
> On an e-commerce site, we don’t determine pricing, delivery policies and fulfillment.
> A well designed, user-friendly corporate website can improve the image and perception of a traditional brand, but it can´t change the corporate culture by itself, which is ultimately what governs the relationship with their clients.

I think it’s important to differentiate  usability, user experience and customer experience in terms of expectations whenever we are to be made accountable for results and ROI.  There are many definitions – this is my understanding:

usability, user-experience, customer-experience

The good news is that there are several ways to extend our scope of influence so the final customer experience is closer to what we had conceived initially:

> Design flexibly to scale – sites tend to inflate in content, sections and functionality with the time.
> Speak to stakeholders during the project (marketing, customer care, IT…) – understand their requirements,  advise  on realistic resources they should plan for.
> Write a set a recommendations for post-development UX management, e.g: Fulfillment best-practices, focus areas for customer care, privacy policies, advertising and editorial guidelines, etc.

It’s great to be the product midwife but it’s much better to be the godmother!

More customer research, bolder decisions

Posted: 27/08/2008 | Author: | Filed under: Product design | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

I have been a fan and advocate of customer research in interactive product development for many years .

For us product designers and marketers, knowing what customers want and need can be highly inspirational and often a well deserved kick in the butt. And both (inspiration and kicks in the butt) are triggers of innovation. Real insight can  help us making bolder product decisions, moving from the realm of redesigns to the one of innovations.

When I’m totally comfortable with this argument the famous phrase from Henry Ford kicks in to disarm me: ‘If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.” I usually stammer something about good moderators and the wise use of data in response. But I have lacked some punchy response to this so far.

But Mark Hurst has formulated a very nice one in Exceptions to listening to customers

I’ll quote his last couple of paragraphs:

“… nondirected customer research is applicable, and helpful, when it’s time to create a game-changing new product or service. And it doesn’t require asking customers to invent the thing.

After all, a good lab moderator won’t ask the customer what product they want … rather they’ll simply try to understand the customer’s unmet needs and pain points, so that they can (back at the company) innovate the right solution. Customers, important as they are, are not designers”.

Thanks for the argument, Mark!