Adaptive Path Blog

Lou Carbone, Adam Richardson, Brooks Protzmann, Brandon Schauer. Jesse James Garrett, moderator.

JJG: Lou, how do these ideas resonate outside a group of designers?

LC: Two common threads: there are constraints on people to do what we are humanly capable of doing to create value. Those handcuffs of the old way of thinking are enormous. The other thing is the thirst to think in new ways. Back in the early days, people looked at me like I was smoking the drapes. Now everyone is smoking the drapes. We’re all trying to learn from what is happening in the world of business. Now, the interpretations are different, but there is something wrong with businesses that eat their own flesh. We can’t go on like that.

JJG: You see organizations get into these efficiency death spirals, where they squeeze every penny and thus the life out of their business.

LC: This is scary. All our tools are around efficiency. The clock is ticking and organizations are hitting brick walls, using the same tools. Consumers are more dynamic than how organizations currently view them.

JJG: Do organizations have to hit the brick wall, or is there a more elegant way of moving organizations to this new way.

BS: You can paint yourself into a corner with metrics and testing. So you are slowly just reacting to these small changes and might eventually sacrifice your customer experience for this. We shouldn’t just look at what is the decision for the next release, but create ideas for the next year and the next 18 months or so that will eventually give us a higher return. Don’t focus just on optimization.

BP: Making decisions that save money and reduce costs are easy. Making decisions that make your consumers lives better is hard. Especially for management. It takes dedication and a deep understanding of your customers’ lives.

JJG: Do we accept more constraints than we should?

AR: That’s right. Envisioning work is about figuring out what are “load-bearing walls” and what aren’t. Once you get past the perceived walls, it can open up all sorts of spaces.

BS: One of the things I saw today was the idea of focusing on the experience not the components. Is it because it is so abstract that it is hard for companies to pay attention to?

LC: One plus one doesn’t equal two in the world of experience. It’s about the experience as a whole. We should be eating Wheaties instead of calculating ROI. We need to understand the emotional investment. We need to boil it down to what the value is, unconscious and conscious, for the customers before we start talking tools and methods.

Q: A lot of the work we do is linear. How do we get beyond linear models?

LC: We generally think of experiences as chronological. When in fact, experience is a feeling that we associate with a brand, a company. When we pull our feelings together, it’s not very linear. How do you bring the design and management team into the chaos of the emotional consumer mind? How do we get into the customers’ shoes? Don’t start where you think it starts. Start in a different place–not in the store. Why can’t we be more creative? let’s design our businesses more creatively vs. doing it the way it’s always been done? Free yourselves!

AR: Does a company have to hit the wall? I’m thinking yes.

Q: The first question from management’s mouth is: how do we measure creativity and innovation? If it is not ROI, how? How can we transition a culture?

BP: You have to take a leadership position. You have to suspend disbelief for a while and put the brakes on measurement to change that.

AR: You can’t use existing metrics to measure innovation. Should we even ask, Does design add value? No one asks this of engineering. The output of design is what is great.

BS: How not to do it: measuring the number of ideas and how many make it forward and how many make it to product. Management time was eaten up evaluating the ideas. Ideas are cheap and you can’t value ideas on a post-it note.

Q: How do you separate what users say they want and what they really need?

BS: I like to break things into what they say, do, and make, with increasing meaning to each. This is for field research.

BP: Everyone has an opinion of what they want. You need to look beyond what is saying to trends and taking a leadership position. Then circle back with those customers.

LC: Look at deep metaphors and linguistics studies to see what is really being said. Look at the deeper meaning.

BS: We’ve tried doing that with mixed success. What are some things so that we can start doing that?

LC: It’s very different than how we’ve been trained to think about customers. People aren’t comfortable designing for deep metaphors. “Movement” for an emergency room, say.

AR: We need to nuance this idea of user-centered design a bit. It can’t all be the users’ needs. It has to be balanced with what fits with the business and with the brand.

LC: We talk about the Topography of Experience. It’s dangerous to base business off only one research study.

Q: Where do designers live organizationally? Where should they be?

BP: Needs to be organized how customers buy and use the product. Senior Management needs to reorganize to fit that.

LC: People in the organization need to push upwards. Need to feel the experience from the customers’ heart and soul.

BP: It’s painful though. Now everyone has a new identity.

JJG: How do you persuade people that the best way to accomplish the business goals is to follow this path? More tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Adaptive Path, Conference Commentary, Design Leaders, Experience Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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