Adaptive Path Blog

Fidelity is an on-going conversation in the area of prototyping. Varying levels of design fidelity elicit different reactions from project stakeholders: clients, research participants, and developers. Sometimes a low-fidelity prototype will allow stakeholders to be more generative and imaginative in their responses. Sometimes it will just confuse them. Sometimes a hi-fidelity prototype will allow stakeholders to accurately understand the design experience, sometimes it will cause them to be especially anxious about a detail like the colour.

Given our awareness of the prototype-fidelity issue, we, as designers, often times make quite strategic choices in determining the fidelity of a particular prototype for a particular step in a particular project. Different levels of prototype fidelity bring our projects different things: generative ideas, validation, the ability to see, play and iterate something that previously was only imagined, a concrete conversation starter for talking and thinking with our teams and stakeholders.

While the impact of prototype fidelity is becoming ever more explored and understood, to the point where I imagine most people have a few rules of thumb, I think there are a few more kinds of fidelity that are going to become especially important to wrestle with.

As background, a few years ago, me and a lot of people I knew, did UX design for software that typically had one environment and social context for use. Usually, it was one person in front of a computer in an office-like setting, even if he or she was doing something like gaming or social networking. The environmental and social aspects of the design could be adequately addressed in a discovery, user-research type step of the design process. The parity worked–end user sits in an office-like setting and uses software, I work in an office-like setting and design their software.

In the past two years, this has all changed. I have been working on projects that focus on convergent devices, multi-channel environments, product ecosystems, and more broadly, experiences for more than one person that occur across time and place. In this work, it is becoming abundantly clear that the environmental and social context of the design need as much exploration and strategic consideration throughout the design process as prototype fidelity. It is no longer safe to keep the context of use in a box called design research, to be opened and closed at the start of a project.

Instead, environmental fidelity, social fidelity, and prototype fidelity need to be employed and manipulated throughout the design process to bring to our projects the generative ideas, validation, ability to see, play and iterate something that previously was only imagined, and the concrete conversation starters that let us talk and think with our teams and stakeholders. So what are the characteristics of these additional types of fidelity?

1. Environmental fidelity

[left: working at AP's Austin studio | right: some of the world outside of our office --credits at end of post]

• What aspects of the physical space(s) and architecture impact your design?
• How does the environment change over time: time of day, day of week, season of the year?
• Are physical factors such as light, sound, weather, smell, temperature relevant to the experience you are hoping to support?
• What role do artifacts, tools and concepts play in people’s activities related to the design you are creating?
• How are tasks split between people and their environments? For example, do things like a wall map facilitate shared reference for people trying to determine a navigation route together?

2. Social fidelity

[left: focus group duck | right: flock of ducks in action]

• What roles do individuals, households and and larger groups of interest play in relation to the world and your design?
• What role do people’s existing desires, hopes, dreams, disappointments play in your design?
• What social rules govern the interactions of people–both implicit and explicit rules?
• What behaviors do people engage in that they are not able to notice or describe?

3. Intervention | Prototype fidelity

[phone prototype, knitted cake, etch-a-sketch]

The designed products, services and research probes that are evolved throughout the research and design process:

• Artifact based interviews–people doing personal show and tell with their existing products and services
• Mash-ups and re-arrangements–using existing products and services to combining and orchestrating in new ways
• Experience analogs–unrelated products and services that address an otherwise inaccessible aspect of the design goals
• Prototypes–a range of new designs of varying fidelity that seek to deliver on the design goals

Similar to how prototype fidelity can be dialed up or down to give the project the direction it needs to move forward, social and environmental fidelity can also be used strategically.

For example, at one stage in a project for a new mobile service, it might benefit the project to focus primarily on the role of the environment on the design.

• Social fidelity [low]:  low focus on friends, family, mobile calls
• Environmental fidelity [high]: spend the day with a research participant, going where ever they usually go, or follow the typical route without participant
• Prototype | Intervention fidelity [low]: mobile device with a screen that is a stack of post-it notes, interfaces flipped or drawn at appropriate times.

Spending a day in the field doing this sort of design work can illuminate environmental factors that can only be imagined from the office.

In the end, every project is going to have different needs as to how rigorously the social and environmental context should be considered and experienced during the design process. The exciting reality is that our design are not only impacted by the social and environmental context, but also serve to inform and create the social and environmental contexts of the future. Longitudinally, the iteration between the world and our designs already exists, the opportunity is to make it an explicit part of the design process.

Photo credits for Environmental Fidelity image:
Subway | Over the cube | Child  in bedroom | Camping | Football Game | Kitchen

Recently I had a chance to chat with Marty Neumeier, President of Neutron LLC and author of the recently published book The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation. Marty will be speaking at MX 2009, March 1-3 in San Francisco.

[Kumi Akiyoshi] How did you become a brand expert?

[Marty Neumeier] I went to Art Center in advertising and illustration. They didn’t have design back in, this is prehistoric days, in the sixties, there was no design major so I took advertising and illustration and if you kind of put those things together you get design. Then I went out on my own and just started doing all kinds of design- advertising, some copy writing, illustration, whatever I could get work doing and as I worked on all those things, I realized that none of it matters unless there is strategy behind it. You have to know what you’re applying it to. So I started to see a disconnect between what designers wanted to do and what the marketplace really needed – what businesses needed.

I started learning more about the real uses of design. I started reading books by Trout and Reese. They had a book called “Positioning” that was very enlightening. Then from there I just started learning more about business strategy and working my way through all the literature on business strategy. And then I was able to say, “Ok, if that’s what you’re trying to do, if that’s what you need to do, I know how design can help.” So that’s how I got into doing that. I don’t know if you know my history but in the late nineties, from ‘96 to 2001, I published a magazine called Critique.

[KA] Yes, that was brilliant.

[MN] Thank you. The idea of Critique was to help designers understand how to apply their work more closely to the real needs of culture and the real needs of business. I found it difficult because designers don’t always want to think about what they’re doing. They just love doing it. So I had to find enough people who wanted to think about design to build the magazine on. And after 5 years of trying, there just weren’t enough traditional designers that wanted to think about strategy and so I basically closed the magazine and closed my design business and I just sat down and thought about it for a while.

I realized there is a gap between creativity and strategy that is very wide and that nothing good is going to happen for designers or for business until we close that gap. So that’s when I started Neutron to start to solve this problem. Neutron, instead of going to designers to try to get them to understand more about how business works, goes to business people to try to get them to understand how design works and how design can help them. I think they’re more open to it than designers are open to business. And it’s proved to be true. We’ve been able to make a living just working with corporations to get them to embrace branding and designing and innovation.

[KA] So when you talk about designers, are you talking about traditional graphic designers?

[MN] Yes, traditional graphic designers.

[KA] I would have thought that designers working in digital media would be slightly more open minded about these things.

[MN] Yes, they are. They’re starting from a different position than traditional designers. The tradition of design really comes from Bauhaus. And the Bauhaus was really about trying to apply art principles, aesthetic principles, to industry and so it really embraced art. I think that’s what’s holding back traditional design – the feeling that we’re all artists. And I think interactive designers, for example, start from a different place. They don’t learn about the Bauhaus. They don’t care about that. They’re coming from technology. So their challenge is to add the aesthetic qualities that traditional design has. So that’s usually what is missing there, the traditional aesthetic qualities.

[KA] In your book, the Designful Company, which is a great book, you mention, “The central problem with brand building is getting complex organizations to execute simple ideas”. Are there examples of companies doing this successfully and if so, how?

[MN] It’s very difficult to do that because being creative within a corporate structure is not like playing classical music. It’s like playing jazz. There’s no music that everyone is playing. You have to respond to what others are doing. So that really puts a lot of pressure on the skills that are inside the company. We find that there aren’t enough design skills in most corporations – far from it. So how do they increase their ability to embrace design and use design in a more holistic way? In a more consistent, coherent way, and they need help doing that. They not only need to bring better design people who are sort of systems thinkers into the corporations, they need help on the outside too. That’s one of the roles Neutron plays. We help the people inside the companies deal with this confusion of work and all the disconnects, or silos inside which they work where they can’t or won’t talk to each other so how do you cross all those silos? So the Designful Company is all about addressing that situation for any company that wants to really win through innovation.

[KA] Do you have examples of companies that are successfully doing that?

[MN] No, because none of them do it perfectly across the board. There are historically some very good companies. IBM has done an amazing job over the years organizing all their design to look like it came from the same company. HP, one of our clients is doing a pretty good job right now, very much better than they used to do. We have a system for helping them do that. As I recall a few years ago, I don’t know how it is now, but Autodesk had a really good, consistent design program. So there are a few and usually it just comes and goes. So the challenge is to get the whole company working together against a common shared vision.

[KA] I guess I would think of Apple immediately.

[MN] Oh! How could I forget Apple? Well you know the problem with Apple, I don’t work with Apple so I don’t know for sure, but with Apple it seems like it’s very much CEO driven so that the CEO, Steve Jobs is the designer in chief, so that’s a very rare situation. He does a wonderful job and I’m so happy that Apple exists because it’s a great example and what we tell our clients is “Would you like to be Apple-ized?” because we could help you do that but it’s not going to be hiring a designer to be your CEO, it’s going to be more systemic programmatic way of looking at design where it outlives the CEO. It goes on.

[KA] What impact does design thinking have on the way businesses operate today?

[MN] Well, it doesn’t have enough is my view. But it could because the way traditional business managers think is kind of in a two-step process- knowing and doing. You have to know something, through experience, case studies, or you went to Harvard and you know there are certain solutions to certain kinds of problems. So that’s the knowing part and then you just go from there, right to doing. It’s very fast but it’s not reflective so there’s no one questioning the knowing or the doing. What designers do is they’re put in the middle step called “making.” So what we like to do is create prototypes of new options that weren’t on the table before. So that changes “knowing” because suddenly designers are saying “Well you thought you knew that but maybe you don’t know that. How would you regard this option?” Then changes “doing” because it gives you more options and that’s how you innovate. So that’s what needs to be introduced to the corporate world. It’s the difference between deciding the way forward and designing the way forward. With designing you prototype, you explore, you imagine different outcomes, and then you choose.

[KA] How do you introduce that to a corporation that doesn’t have design thinking?

[MN] Well, first you write a book (laughs). Then you start offering solutions. That’s what Neutron’s niche is. We offer a way to plant that seed within a company so that it will start to grow. And the seed often is the corporate vision. What vision can we embrace that is so bold and so beguiling that everyone will want to follow it and they will know what they need to do to work together. So you need that. The next thing you do is you need to give everyone in the company, especially in communications and marketing the tools to start building communications and products against that vision. Often that can exist on an Internet site and that site should be beautifully designed. It should be so easy to access and so clear, a lot of work should go into that. So that’s a great job for interactive designers to make that just a beautiful, useful place. Then you start to build a team internally whose job it is to collaborate. And they can do a lot to get it started because if they’re good people and they love to collaborate and they know what they’re doing and can cross silos, they can be spread out through the whole company and connect to do this work together and that starts to bridge the gaps.

[KA] In your book, you argue that truly innovative ideas don’t need much help from metrics. It’s often hard to evaluate metrics unless the product gains popularity. For example the Aeron chair, it was very unpopular during the metrics of consumer research but they decided to ship it anyway and it became very successful. Innovation seems to happen when an organization is willing to take risks.

[MN] That’s correct. But there’s a limit to how much of a risk they can take. A couple of things need to happen. They need to understand the nature of the risk, or the nature of innovation. I should say, which often looks riskier than it is. The other thing they can do is to use design and prototyping to de-risk the risk. Take the risk out of innovation. To do that you use a stage gate innovation process where you prototype very quickly a lot of future ideas then you test those with an audience and some of those will look good and you put a little more money into it and build it out a bit more and if that looks good you test it in the market place in a controlled way and if that looks good put a lot of money in and you roll it out. So the risk is broken down into parts. This is exactly how venture capitalist works. They take a lot of risk too. So they de-risk it by breaking it down into stages.

The other thing you can do is teach corporate decision makers what a really big success looks like in its early stages because they get scared when it doesn’t look great right from the beginning. We show them the “good and different chart.” What you want is ideas that are good and good is obvious, something that is more beautiful or more practical, more useful, faster, whatever it needs to be – those things are measurable. And the other thing it should be is different. Those things you can find out by testing prototypes with the intended audience and you’ll get some very interesting responses.

So with the Aeron chair the responses were “Well, it’s pretty comfortable but it’s very weird looking. I don’t think I’d every buy this.” Or, “You call that a chair? I don’t think that looks like a chair. I’d be embarrassed to have that.” Then if they sat in it they’d say, “Yeah, it has some interesting features that I couldn’t get in other chairs.” So if Herman Miller, the company that put that out listened to those responses, they would cancel the project and they would have lost out on the biggest success they ever had. So they were smart enough to realize that something that was very innovative is going to get mixed reviews on the “different” side. It’s going to sound too different to people that doesn’t mean that it’s a failure. It’s actually one of the hallmarks of a future success.

You have to have that if you’re going to try for real innovation. The Prius, the same thing. Who knew that the Prius would be the biggest success in car manufacturing in the last ten years? Well, if you looked at the “good – different” chart, and you looked at the pattern of responses, you would have seen that same pattern. That’s a class we teach in marketing so they can see how good and different relate to each other.

[KA] Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. I’m looking forward to seeing you speak at MX 2009, March 1-3 in San Francisco.

Happy Valentine’s day! Check out History of Valentine’s day.

Samsung Blue Earth Phone: Solar Powered and Made from Water Bottes. A phone that can run off sunlight – how very cool!  

TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense

The Complete Animated History of the Internet. Best video you are going to see all day.

Mozilla Phone Developer Seeks Your Input.

The iPhone Is That Guy at Your High School Reunion.

Brilliant color picker!

Three recent Touch projects suggest different senses as metaphors for physical RFID interaction.

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of @&%# That Doesn’t #@&% Work: if you are offended by gratuitous use of four letter words, please don’t check this out. 

Last Friday, a group from Adaptive Path went to see The Art of Participation exhibition at the SFMOMA. The show, which closed on Feb. 9th, was a collection of participatory art works, art that requires audience contribution in some form, created from 1950 to the present. It included work by Alan Kaprow (a painter associated strongly with Happenings), Yoko Ono (her Cut Piece), Fluxus, John Cage (4’33”), and Janet Cardiff. Unlike 99% of art museum exhibitions, visitors could and did interact directly with the work.

On one hand, I arranged the field trip to the SFMOMA for fun. But my not-so-hidden agenda was to challenge my understanding of “experience,” and gain some insight from my colleagues’ experience of the show.

I hear the words “interaction,” “participation,” and “experience” fifty times a day. I probably say them or type them or think them that many times, too. Don’t know about you, but when I use the same word that many times, their meaning becomes fuzzy. Worse, I start to believe I really know what the words mean. I start making assumptions. I need to check in with myself occasionally and push the reset button. Sometimes, this activity confirms my understanding. Sometimes it shifts subtly.

I’ve pulled together a couple of thoughts from the trip and subsequent discussions.

Experiences with a Big E

Teresa and I, at Peter Samis’ urging, did Janet Cardiff’s 2001 video piece “The Telephone Call.” Janet Cardiff is a sound artist who completed a video piece for the SFMOMA several years ago. You check out a video camera and stereo headphones from the main desk. Cardiff has pre-recorded a walk through the MOMA, recording all the sounds and sights there at the time. When you experience the piece, you follow her path through the museum. You literally see and hear what she did, while you see and hear what’s there now. It was the closest thing to a time machine I’ve ever seen. It was also an Experience with a Big “E.” The experience engaged me physically (heart racing, all senses firing), cognitively (trying to process two realities at the same time), emotionally (becoming invested in the story Cardiff was telling), and socially (Teresa and I interacting with each other, feeling some social awkwardness).

For me, other Experiences with a Big E include good theater, roller coasters, concerts, motorcycle riding, fun houses, playing in a band. I experience it with all my senses, in my body, in my mind, in my heart.

The Person and the Thing Behind the Glass

The show also had online pieces and installed kiosks throughout. I have rarely seen an installed kiosk in a museum that really works and engages people in the same way physically interactive exhibits, do. When you having Experiences with a Big E, the dull click of the mouse echoes through the hall with its dullness. Click… Sigh.

Yesterday, at our company meeting, I brought this up. I wondered out loud, when we say we are “designing experiences” that occur online or in a mobile device, what do we mean? Especially, when we are “designing experiences” for, as one colleague called it, the Thing Behind the Glass— mobile devices, screens, PCs, TVs, iPods or anything with a piece of plastic or glass between you and the thing you are interacting with. It was a passionate discussion. I was reminded that sometimes I have experiences online or with a Thing Behind the Glass that are, in fact, transformative. They do fire on multiple levels; sometimes my heart even races or I might exclaim loudly that something is awesome. But a lot of times, this experience happens with a lower case e – it’s subtle, it’s internal, it’s slowly transformative. It’s more of a cerebral experience.

Designing Opportunities for Experience

Recently, one of my colleagues pointed out a debate going on in the design community about the semantics of “experience design” and “designing experiences.” One designer goes so far to call the idea of “experience design,” as he says so eloquently puts it, horseshit. While I admit I love saying that word loudly over and over, I don’t get much else from black and white characterizations. Maybe I get a little over-stimulated, like a kid on fruit loops and apple juice, but not necessarily meaningfully engaged.

Human experience is messy. A layer of skin separates us from each other. I will never know what truly goes on in your head and you will never know what truly goes on in mine. With that in mind, of course the idea of “designing experiences” seems ludicrous. I do believe, though, that the value of these semantic debates is that they encourage us to think deeply and specify our meaning.

I use research tools to illuminate the human experience as it relates to a specific problem. Then, I design something with respect and attention to that experience. The outcome will support, assist, or facilitate a conversation with between human beings in a positive way. While I am not literally designing that person’s experience, I am designing opportunities for that person to have an experience.

Right now, most of the opportunities for experience I design are quieter experiemce, Things Behind the Glass. Someday I hope to design opportunities for Experiences with a Big E or some other hybrid experience that combines both.

What’s your experience with “experience?”

In December, a blind man led me into darkness. I had a cane, but it only partially helped. I felt around with my hands. I listened to the voices of the people around me, gauging their distance by their loudness, shifting so I didn’t bump into them. The smell of grass helped me understand I was in a park. When I put my hands into a basket, I touched oranges and knew it from the feel of their skin, not their smell.

I was in an exhibition called, “Dialogue in the Dark.” As the organizers explain, “In completely darkened rooms, blind people lead small groups of guests through an exhibition in which everyday situations are experienced altogether differently, without eyesight.” Prior to this, I’d never experienced blindness. Actually, I’d never experienced the loss of any sense before.

At first, my eyes strained to see, which was distracting. But when I focused, instead, upon my other senses, it was…fun, an adventure. I was experiencing the world in a fascinating way I wouldn’t have known, had I stuck to sight.

Of course, you don’t have to go into a dark room to grasp the difference between blindness and sight. But, like all good exhibits, it got me thinking…about assumptions and how often we assume that others experience the world in the same way we do. We make these assumptions everywhere: In conversation, design, and judgment.

Imagine:

You and I are sitting across a table talking to each other. I assume you hear me, and that my words mean to you what they mean to me. I assume you see the expressions on my face and understand their implications. I assume you are enjoying the hint of caramel in tea we share. When I shake your hand goodbye, I assume you feel my warm hand and know that I am calm.

Meanwhile, you can’t hear me well over the furnace, and you forgot to put your contacts in this morning, so my face is a blur. You burn your tongue on the tea so it tastes like nothing, and you only notice how cold and sweaty your own hands are when we shake goodbye. You feel guilty because you were distracted throughout the conversation; I reminded you of a childhood friend and your mind kept traveling back to old stories.

Therein lies one of the ironies of human experience: You and I are NEVER really having the same conversation. Never. Assumptions are dangerous because they keep us from listening and paying attention. Granted, we’ll never gain total understanding of one another. But, we can do a better job of understanding more. In the next few weeks, Adaptive Path will make an announcement on this blog about a research and development project that touches upon the impact of assumption in design. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll contemplate the power of assumption in your own life and work, looking for places to assume less and observe more.

Steven Keith is the Executive Vice President Strategy for capstrat and he’ll be one of the speakers at MX 2009. He and his team have been helping Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC) prepare for their future on the Web in the face of the onslaught of consumer-driven health care. In essence, Capstrat helped a 76-year-old health insurer evolve into a user-centered design advocate. Guided by a new organization-wide Web strategy, BCBSNC is moving toward greater emphasis on user research to ensure they are delivering better experiences that align with consumers’ needs in an increasingly DIY health care environment.

Understandably, this is a large and complicated process. So, I thought it would be helpful to talk with him about some of the details and what he plans to cover in his MX talk.

Todd Wilkens [TW]: Can you give me a synopsis of what you’ll be speaking about at MX? What are the main points you’re hoping people will walk away with?

Steven Keith [SK]: We want to speak about our effort to transform Web work at BCBSNC. We originally signed on with BCBSNC to help them develop an overarching Web strategy to accomplish their business objectives and better serve users. We quickly realized this was more than a strategic exercise. To be successful, it required a complete rethink of BCBSNC processes, team structure, and corporate culture.

Core was increasing the Web team’s strategic position in the company. That is, the Web team/Web Office (WO) should be contributing to the company’s vision for meeting the needs of prospective and current members online. And recommending that the Web team have a seat at the table when determining how business objectives translate to the Web.

Capstrat helped BCBSNC to embed the user (whether it be a current health insurance member or prospective shopper) at the center of their Web strategy. Then, we recommended a team structure to support user-centered design and realize their strategy. We developed a new org structure that included a group of online strategists domiciled within the Web Office to drive design strategy based on user research and usability.

Through the talk, we want people to see that an organization-wide shift like this is possible and specifically share what we learned about enabling a shift like this to take hold. We want to illustrate the before-and-after, with an emphasis on the after.

[TW]: Clearly, a lot of the work you did for Blue Cross of NC was about changing organizational culture and processes. Did the project start out that way or was it a design project initially that ended up needing culture change to be successful?

[SK]: It didn’t start out that way. We started by laying the strategy groundwork and quickly realized that we would have to venture into significant organizational change to be successful. A lot of our work became process design and org development. It was also a lot of consensus building, persuasion and culture communications. It was an assignment that was befitting an integrated communications firm like Capstrat that has many disciplines in place to help these projects succeed.

The project started out as a question from the executive team: “What is our Web strategy?”

We broke up the engagement into three phases.

• Strategy – what should BCBSNC prioritize on the Web and what should it sacrifice?
• Solutions – what tools and content will bridge business objectives with user value?
• Implementation – now that we know what focus on, how do we build the team and processes to support strategy?

[TW]: When you talk about process design and org development, was this more about rearranging the activities and people that they already had or introducing new practices, roles, and personnel? Or both? Without giving away too much of your MX talk, could you tell us a little bit about how you approached this process, including the major challenges and guiding principles you used when working toward the solution?

[SK]: With respect to process design, this was less about rearranging and more about defining a vision that would map back to their corporate goals. There wasn’t anything really to rearrange. We developed a design strategy-centric team, project prioritization schema and process that moved faster. Web work at BCBSNC today is done around a different set of goals and answers to a more discriminating strategic prioritization process. There is increased evaluation of what needs to be done based on their strategic directives and user research to determine whether or not it will get into the queue. This is much more about trying out new practices, hiring new personnel and moving or dedicating IT resources to support the new Web office.

Capstrat helped design their new organization with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) at the nucleus and User Advocates (UAs). We then recommended research/analytics, design and usability as core practice areas with a seat at the table, so to speak.

The challenges were many. Principally, helping the organization hone in on consumers as their priority audience on the Web. Then, helping the organization adopt value design for consumers instead of tools for insurance brokers or re-inventing claims adjudication. Once that vision was accepted, building the team to support the new vision and process was the tallest mountain to climb. The Web Office negotiated to move certain personnel from other parts of the organization to their team and declared new processes that broke out of the enterprise model. This was necessary because the organization was operating based on 18 month software lifecycles, instead of “Web time.”

[TW]: What sorts of tools, methods, or approaches did you use to address the consensus building, persuasion, and culture communications aspects of the project?

[SK]: Before Capstrat had UX or Business Process skills, they had persuasion architecture and corporate communications skills. We drew from a vastly talented team of Capstrat employee marketing folks who knew well enough this whole thing was far more than business process re-engineering or design strategy – it was just as much about culture change. We depended on our team of communicators to distill complex ideas and hefty reports into compelling conversation and presentations. One of the most powerful tools at our disposal was information designers at Capstrat who simplified complex information and illustrated it clearly through smart design. We helped release this virus into their 5,000 person organization with one-on-interviews with 60+ people in Phase One, consensus-building strategy sessions with internal stakeholders (which we call “grind sessions”), plus calculated communications and smart presentations to all the key decision makers.

More and more I am hearing UX practitioners talk about making the thing that we design. This often turns to discussions around prototyping and bridging the gap between design and implementation. As a Design Technologist, this is right in my sweet spot. For years my career was focused on the engineering side of projects and I cannot help but have that programmer part of my brain light up when working on design or strategy.

I sometimes get quizzical looks at my title, followed by questions about what qualifications I look for in a Design Technologist. Here’s some thoughts around that question. I think you will do best looking for someone who has a development background. If you find an individual with a history of “making stuff” then they will naturally have the right mindset to build something interactive. Usually this includes:

1. A comfort level with front-end programming (web, desktop, mobile, device)
2. A tool belt filled with techniques for creating interactive apps
3. The ability to quickly pick up new tools
4. A itch to dive into code and “just built it”

You also need to find that special someone who appreciates design and wants to be a member of the UX team. A design technologist uses her skills to solve design problems, not to code the final working application. A lot of developers will balk at this since they feel most productive when users are clicking on something that they actually built. A design tech needs to be satisfied knowing that the UX of the software is better because of their work. A prototype is often her end deliverable.

Also, this person may start to feel isolated since they work day to day with colleagues who don’t code and don’t swap stories about programming logic and MVC frameworks. She’ll instead work with IA’s and IxD’s who talk about design patterns and user research. Your design tech should help to bridge the gap between the UX and development teams. In doing so, she may be able to satisfy her desire to kibitz with other techies. It’s important that technologists stay connected to communities of programmers as lessons learned from that world are often very applicable to UX design problems.

My ideal design technologist job description probably wouldn’t mention specific development apps or programming languages. That’s a moving target and often this person would be asked to “just get the job done”. I would talk more about approach and project experience. If you are working for a company that make mobile devices then perhaps you want someone who’s worked a bit in the consumer electronics space or mobile space. I’m not saying that you’d want a Java-guru with years of experience shipping J2ME apps, but someone who understands the mobile context and is excited about the opportunity to try loading a prototype onto a phone.

Are you a Design Technologist even if your business card says something different? Do you want to learn techniques for translating your designs into prototypes quickly? I’ll be leading a day dedicated to this very topic at our Good Design Faster workshop in April. Register with the promo code BLOG for 10% off.

I’ve been invited to write a column, titled “Experience Matters” for the revamped HarvardBusiness.org. My first contribution went up last week, and has already garnered impressive response in the comments. What I’ll be talking about over there is likely not news to the readers of this blog. For me, the point of writing for HB was to figure out how to articulate the things that matter to us to folks who know little to nothing of what we do, but without whom we ultimately won’t succeed.

I recently had the pleasure of chatting via email with Sara Beckman, a member of the faculty at the Haas School of Business. Sara will be speaking on Communicating the Value of Design at our upcoming MX 2009 conference.

Embracing your inner “quant” changes the game for many design leaders. How do you move from the often subjective language of design to speaking a new dialect of business impact measured in numbers? In this conversation, Sara talks about approaches to assessing overall value, how having empirical data can unlock key strategic conversations, and tips for focusing efforts on the measurements that matter most.

You can read the full essay here.

But the essay is just one step in this very important conversation…hear more from Sara and other design leaders (and hobnob with the folks at the vanguard of leading experiences) at MX 2009 in San Francisco, March 1-3.

Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.

Known as a leading edge innovator in the use of social media in customer service, Zappos has become a darling of the Business Week set and a case study for those hoping to create a more meaningful customer service experience. Brian Kalma, Director of Web Strategy and User Experience was kind enough to sit down with me for a quick interview in preparation for his talk at MX 2009.

[Henning Fischer] Could you tell us a little about yourself, your team, what you do for Zappos and where you sit in the organization?

[Brian Kalma] I started at Zappos back in 2003 working on developing the Product Photography and Image Processing department. Back then it was a priority to purely represent the product visually. As that department grew to cranking out about 10,000 photos per day, it was in a pretty good place and I was able to move on to new things. Under the umbrella of Creative Services we incubated several sub-departments: Design, Front-End Development, Social Media, and User Experience. Each sub-department grew to be its own entity or merge with others, and I decided to focus on the area I felt we needed to improve on the most, User Experience. I currently head up our relatively new UX department where I am Director of Web Strategy/UX. The team consists of a UX Manager, 2 UX Designers, a taxonomist and a generalist.  We’re not quite at the point where we are the initiators and drivers of all projects, but we have now staked a claim in all projects and are key pieces to projects. The exception is the evolution of our ZETA site, where we are the business owners.

[HF] What does it mean to lead a UX team in an organization that is first and foremost customer service oriented?

[BK] Quite plainly, it drives our focus. Customer service should BEGIN online, not with a phone conversation or a shipping upgrade. This drives us to really focus the ZETA site on achieving the goal of being a service-oriented site, not just a company. We are leveraging loads of customer feedback, user testing and overall intuition. Every employee goes through 4 weeks of customer service training at Zappos, it is instilled in us, and it helps us make better UX decisions on our ZETA site. We have a ways to go, but are in a better place than ever.

[HF] How do you see the role of UX evolving at Zappos?

[BK] Personally, I see the team becoming key drivers and innovators at Zappos. I see us becoming the place business needs and problems are brought to first to solve, the site is our storefront, we have to drive it.  I also see UX evolving to become the data house for web usage statistics on our site as well as becoming the company resource for competitive research analysis. Ultimately, UX should be well enough integrated into the company such that we are less so a department and more so a mindset. Like customer service.

[HF] Zappos had jumped into social media far more enthusiastically than many, and you have spoken about the notion of people planning as being key to the company’s success. A lot of companies want a one size fits all approach to customer service, yet Zappos does almost the opposite. It has a very organic, homegrown effect, yet is clearly complex. How did this approach evolve?

[BK] This is a tough one to answer. Getting the right people with the right mindset is paramount to any notion/concept getting executed as envisioned. But, because you have the right people that vision can guide itself to a place not envisioned. I think Zappos always had a focus on service, it was the vision but it has evolved and has become realized in its own unique way because of the people. What we try to do, because we are confident with the people planning we do, is create as many customer touch point OPPORTUNITIES as possible. Not all customers want to talk to us, but when they do we want to be there in the place they feel comfortable talking to us in. It started with Phone, e-mail and live chat. It has evolved to be many places including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Get Satisfaction… you name it. We have team members who are savvy across many customer touch point areas, we basically tell them “be smart and be real”, then we trust our hiring skills. If a business leader or company owner is not comfortable having their employees talk to their customers then they have the wrong employees!

Join us at MX 2009 in San Francisco March 1-3. Register today using the code BLOG and get 10% off.