Adaptive Path Blog

Two of this afternoon’s speakers hail from software — Bill Buxton, now at Microsoft, and Scott Cook, founder of Intuit.

Buxton gives perhaps the highest good-ideas-to-minutes ratio of any speaker I’ve seen. My notes were extensive. You can get a sense of what he said by watching his talk from Interaction08 (video embedded at the bottom)– he covered many of the same themes, though he did gear it toward a more senior audience.

Some key ideas from Bill’s talk:

• Software companies rarely produce more than 2 products wholly in house. Adobe has had two - Illustrator and Acrobat. Everything else came in through acquisition.
• In the field of building construction, around 20% of costs go towards the design and architecture. Is that true in software and interactive products?
• The first industrial designers (Dreyfuss, Loewy, etc.) all started their businesses in the depression, and their businesses lasted through WWII. These people had a seat with the executives, and were considered crucial to the business’ success. After WWII, designer got pushed further and further down the org chart.
• It’s all about where design is situated. IDEO’s designers aren’t necessarily any better than the designers within an organization… But, because of their high fees, they are brought in at an executive level. The difference is having design at the executive level, not in the talent and capability of the designer.
• If you cannot come up with 5 equally valid solutions to a problem, you are probably not a designer. Come in with an open mind, and multiple solutions. And come in with your mind not made up. This is essential for criticism. If you have 5 ideas, none of which you’ve decided is best, when those ideas are criticized, *you* are not being criticized. If you only come up with one idea, and that idea is criticized, it’s easy to feel that *you* are being criticized.

Scott’s talk was mostly a story of Intuit and its success, which has largely been driven by observing users struggle with things, and addressing the unsolved problems in those struggles. Intuit has recently started a “design4Delight” initiative in order to get their customer experience mojo back. It was a good talk, but didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know. Except for learning that when QuickBooks launched, it had fewer features than competitors (fewer than half, in fact), and became the market leader within one month.

He also shared this quote from Intuit’s Operating Values. It’s very similar to what Brandon talks about with The Long Wow… It’s always nice to get further validation.

“What do we mean by wow? Wow means creating customer enthusiasm and delight. IT means giving customers dramatically more value than they expect…We know we’re succeeding when we inspire our cusotmers to go out and tell others about our company.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Conference commentary, Experience design, 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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