Adaptive Path Blog

I remember when the prior MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte predicted in his 1995 book Being Digital that,

“what [information] is in the air will go into the ground and what is in the ground will go into the air.”

He was talking about the wireless spectrum and broadband wiring, and he was predicting the inevitable, how information could easily travel through either channel to people. Negroponte called it “trading places.”

A current-day prediction of the inevitable could be another case of trading places and gray spaces: that of products and services. As time goes on, things that are products will become more like services (think iPods, mobile phones, and spimes), and things that are services will become more like products (think NetFlix, FedEx, or JetBlue).

This interplay creates interesting new experiences, and new challenges for designers. Services have become design-able experiences that need the same thoughtful care and attention that products do, if not more. The emergence of service design has revealed new approaches and tools to making services more human and more valuable.

Even more promising is the overabundance of services in our daily lives. Services make up a larger portion of the U.S. economy (about 68% in 2006) than products. And services have retained their value in the downturn. As BusinessWeek noted, “prices of goods fell 4.1% last year; prices of services rose 3%.”

And from electronic health records to green energy, tomorrow’s economy hinges on well designed services to help us all change from old behaviors to adopt new ones.

Within this broader trend, I’m happy to be hosting a panel in conjunction with the CMU Bay Area Alumni on March 19 at Adaptive Path titled, Seeing Tomorrow’s Services: A Panel on Service Design. I’m lucky to facilitate a discussion between three dream panelists:

• Shelley Evenson, an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Shelley’s been an early teacher and thought leader for service design in the U.S., focusing on tapping into the needs of users of the service.
• Robert Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information, and he focusins on the contribution of the service’s “back stage” where materials or information needed by the “front stage” are processed. Just read his co-authored paper on the topic with Lindsay Tabas to be impressed.
• And Christi Zuber leads an internal Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente where her and her team have co-designed numerous new services with patients and clinicians that lead to measurable improvements on patient safety and satisfaction — demonstrating that service design has a big societal impact as well.

If you’d like to join us, remember to register ahead of time. And if you have ideas about the panel or the topics we should cover, comment here or twitter with the hashtag #stspanel.

In this time of economic constraint, there’s probably many business looking at efficiencies and optimizations trying to create value by trimming excess. But guess what: creating value isn’t a subtractive process.

photo by blyzz

Icky approaches like Business Process Reengineering were over-hyped and misapplied in the past because they focused on cutting back, not on the people in the processes. They asked, “what can be eliminated by new technologies and short cuts?” But as consumers we don’t think of value as the removal of waste. We think of it as the delivery of what we really need for the least sacrifice. Real consumer value isn’t something you back into and cut down to. It’s something you find, focus on, and delivery.

A while ago Peter and Jesse shared this simple diagram of how many businesses approach delivering value to their customers. They start are the core, working outward to eventually paint on the layer of experience. But that’s not how customers approach it.

Instead, they just see this:

From their perspective, the value is the experience they have with the product or service. Everything else, in fact, is just magic.

To create real value that resonates with people, businesses need to work from the outside-in.

Customer value has to be sensed and constructed from their perspective; not from the perspective of a costing spreadsheet. Reductive approaches create commodities. Put planning solutions from the customer’s perspective can create systems of solutions that are difficult to copy.

The simple way to design the customer perspective is to spend time in their world and construct solutions as they might experience them. THEN, work backwards into the organizational capabilities to support those experiences.

One great tool for thinking outside-in is the swimlanes tool created by Yvonne Shek at nForm. The basic idea is to create a new solution scenario, then map the flow of that scenario back into dependencies for the user interface, technology, and organization.

Another approach is what we’ll be sharing at our Good Design Faster workshop in April: rapidly create many ideas for new customer value, work as a multidisciplinary team to find the best integrated set of ideas to pursue, then quickly translate those ideas into prototypes that can be immediately evaluated with customers.

Designing from the outside in allows everyone in the organization to focus on the only thing that ultimately matters to customers — the experience you end up delivering. From that ultimate perspective, team members can make the smart decisions that will obviously result in great products and services.

(And if you’re interested in joining us for the Good Design Faster workshop, use BLOG when you register for 10% off.)

This month Dopplr delightfully surprised me, supplying me with something I didn’t know I needed. The result: I’m now a more loyal Dopplr user. It’s a great example of a long wow moment.

Dopplr is “an online service for smarter travel.” I keep and share my travel itineraries there, and I can share them with other people to keep them informed as well as increase the likelihood of a chance meet-up during my travels. (More about Dopplr.)

In January, Doppr delivered a personal annual report to each user, showing where you traveled, when, with/near who, and your resulting carbon footprint. You can download the annual report built for Barack Obama. Or here’s mine:

What’s remarkable is how much it delighted me and caused me to change my relationship with Dopplr. It delighted me by being perhaps the best designed statement I’ve ever received. I pine for the day a bank or phone company delivers a statement to me that provide insight about my behavior AND makes me want to hang it on my refrigerator. But it also made me change my behavior:

• I immediately added my other trips that were missing from 2008 into Dopplr — sadly I couldn’t find a way to regenerate my annual report, but I know Dopplr is hearing about the issue on Get Satisfaction.
• I searched around to see if my most desired Dopplr feature existed yet. It does! You can now forward Dopplr your travel confirmation via email. Or twitter or text Dopplr your travels. The point: I opened the door for deeper uses of the service.
• And now I’m paying more attention to my update emails from Dopplr and spending more time with it. In all, I’ve reinvested in Dopplr all because they delivered something I wasn’t expecting.

In a down economy, wow still wins.

Matt Jones, of Dopplr joined us last year at the MX Conference (video of his talk below). This year’s MX Conference will deliver more great ideas and inspiration. Get 10% off registration with discount code BLOG.

MX2008 | Matt Jones from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

It’s sad to say, but even the most usable, sexy, or innovative design work won’t succeed if it doesn’t fit within the greater business strategy of the organization. But just how do you know what that greater business strategy is?

It’s difficult to quickly get smart about an organization’s overall business strategy when there’s usually no simple Powerpoint deck to spell it out. Below are 6 questions I use to quickly sense the business strategy:

1. What’s their generic strategy? Years ago Michael Porter devise a model of three generic business strategies: cost-leadership, differentiation, and segmented strategy. Figure out which strategy the business follows, then the strategic decisions the organization makes will become more obvious.
2. How is the business different from it’s competition? Good differentiation means a unique position in the market relative to competitors. Example: Bose is the leader in sound quality, and will remain the leader because of its investments in R&D. Done right, the identified differentiators should be deeper than just brand perceptions, stretching to the organization’s competitive advantage. You’re work should embellish these differences.
3. How does the business make money? Look at the public financial reports, read what analysts say, and boil it down to the essence of how the firm makes money. Perhaps it cuts out the “middle-man” by making deals directly with suppliers and passing the savings onto customers. If so, where does experience play a role in that money-making process?
4. Is their market growing, shrinking, or flat? Again, go back to the financial reports. Look at year-over-year growth for their business and their competitors. Look at the trends in the overall marketplace. Is the business trying to grab the most of a growing market, steal business from others in a flat market, or survive and transition from a shrinking market? This shapes the overall intent of any firm’s business strategy.
5. What do they invest in? Based on whatever press information you have or historical details about projects and spending, discover what the firm believes in spending money on. People, process, product, financial, innovation? This reveals their bias for creating solutions, and the spending should correlate to what makes the business distinct in the market.
6. What do they say? Be like Scooby Doo. Look for clues and evidence. What activities does their marketing say they perform for customers? Grayhound Buses says, “leave the driving to us.” Enterprise Rent-A-Car says, “we’ll pick you up.” This marketing reveals what the firm believes customers care most about. If you’re project doesn’t improve or extend these activities that the firm promotes, it might be time to get a new project.

Sometimes you know the answer to these questions immediately, sometimes it takes a little homework. But by answering them, a team can end up much smarter about the business that they’re designing solutions for. Let’s call these smarts, “business empathy.”

Business empathy is like customer empathy—you’ve got to distill it down into operating principles that the team and business can rally around. The business’s stance, value, and activities can each be translated into important assumptions that frames what kinds of research, ideas, and solutions your team should pursue.

But what’s powerful about business empathy is it can demystify business for the design team, just like how user research can demystify the world of the customer:

• With customer empathy — We go to the customer’s world to gain empathy for them, to generate new ideas, and to realize needs that they aren’t able to articulate. The difference in design results from this insight can be profound. As pointed out in the HBR article Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design, “Sometimes customers are so accustomed to current conditions that they don’t think to ask for a new solution.”
• With business empathy —The same can happen if we engage in the same good behaviors with the business. A design team can understand the business’s unarticulated criteria for judging what design solutions fit their business. And just like the customer, the business is so accustomed to current approaches that it doesn’t think to ask for a new or creative solution.

So try it out. Get some business empathy, see how it changes your work — And if connecting business issues with experience design is where your head is at, then you should probably come join us at the 2009 MX Conference. (Use RNSB as your discount code and get 15% off!)

Timing is everything. Take Flickr for example, a photo sharing service that successfully emerged in 2004 not just because of good design, technology, and leadership, but because of the coincidental mass adoption of camera phones and affordable high-quality digital cameras. A good idea becomes a great idea if its time has come.

So as we start off in a gloomy looking 2009, I’ll put on my hunch-hat and share my nine ideas of experiences who’s time has come:

		Enabling behavior change — Whether it’s to extend your paycheck or conserve your energy, there’s plenty of reasons for people to change how they behave this year. But behavior change is a complex thing. It’s an experience that needs to be carefully thought through from the human perspective, from the depths of the cognitive psychology of motivation to the breadths of incremental change across weeks and months. People won’t substantively change their behaviors simply because of clever marketing campaigns. To change consumer behaviors we must design motivational experiences that push, pull, and ease the pathway to adopting new habits.
		Feeling the wealth of health — The U.S. stock market dropped almost 40% in 2008, making the phrase, “you always have your health,” more true than ever. Yet investing and participating in your own health and wellness is complex, clinical, and confusing. People and healthcare providers need to engage in simple but sound experiences that foster good decision making, good outcomes, and good feelings. Better experiences that design for the medical, physical, logistical, and emotional experience can make healthcare humane and something we all personally want to invest in.
		Visualizing value — We’ll all be looking to get the most out of a dollar/euro/yaun. The trouble comes when we try to access the true value we’re getting our of a product or service. Experiences that help people find and get the most value out of a product/service will be the winners. The challenges are in revealing the value—especially the non-financial value—and reminding customers of it. Progressive Insurance might help people find value, but few organizations also help people appreciate it the way ZipCar does. When it comes to value, all customers are from Missouri: show-me, show-me, show-me.
		Throwing a party for the third party — Traditional customer-centric product development meant finding customer needs, selecting the most marketable needs to design for, and creating a product to address them. But new approaches can turn this model on its head by opening up organizational capabilities to passionate customers and third party players who can participate in and design solutions that your business wouldn’t or couldn’t consider. Threadless proved this approach interesting. The iPhone app store has proved it real. So what aspects of your experience will you open up to pragmatic third-parties and what experience will you design to support them?
		Uniquely mobile — Mobile is here and it’s been here. What’s changed is we’re no longer trying to shoehorn desktop metaphors and desktop interactions onto mobile devices. What’s changed is that opportunities are opening up for more people to design experiences for mobile devices. As a result, we’ll see many more mobile experiences emerge that are only possible and only compelling on a mobile platform.
		Solid clouds — Cloud computing may be a hot meme, but outside the tech bubble the real world could care less. People will move to the cloud when the experiences offer something tangibly different and better than the desktop. Working more fluidly with a team is one such successful experience, but there will be more. But to find these experiences, we have to pull our heads out of the clouds and find solid on-the-ground benefits to people’s everyday lives.
		Long wow experiences — Yep, I’ll throw in my personal favorite: The long wow is an approach to customer loyalty based on systematically impressing customers again and again rather than simply (and naively) issuing them a loyalty card with an identification number stamped on it. The relationships that customers will keep before, during, and after an economic downturn are the strong relationships with brands that deliver moments of noticeably exceptional service—moments when the service delights, anticipates the needs of, or pleasantly surprises a customer.
		The elegant upgrade — Consumers have already started hanging onto hardware, such as mobile phones, for a longer period of time. This trend could be seen as a positive for the consumer, the environment, and smart business. Software upgrades, add-ons, and other modifications mean new and better experiences for customers. For businesses, it means additional revenue after the original purchase in a positive economy of scale. What has to be created are more elegant customer experiences for upgrading and augmenting products. Such products will be recast as services.
		Chorded services — Multi-channel services typically delivery cacophony, not harmony, across the various channels of customer interaction. The opportunity is to define a songbook of chords that your organization can play as great customer experiences—as noted by Kate in her recent virtual seminar. If businesses start simple and learn to play the chords well, they can coordinate multiple touchpoints to delight customers and support behaviors that results in both savings and positive revenue. Today a business can deliver just about any service over any channel, but by using the lenses of experience you can define what services are valuable when and where.

And here are a few more experiences that didn’t quite make the cut:

• Tween experiences — new businesses that fill in experience gaps between others (e.g.,TripIt)
• Customer servlets — simple service protocols that your business can excel at on specific channels
• Managing personal presence — relating ‘me’ to ‘we’ and ‘where’
• Gaps in personal expression — blogs may have peaked, but there are plenty of other ways to express ourselves
• Markets for talent — if the world is becoming flat, it’ll need more places where people can showcase and sell their talent to pragmatic buyers through a trusted third party

First: Because of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., we’ve delayed the price increase for MX until December 5th. Register now for MX 2009 to get in while it’s still cheap, and use the discount code BLOG to get 10% off!

Second: The MX program continues to get better and better. We’ve got a great line-up of confirmed speakers like…

• Bruce Temkin of Forrester and the experience matters blog
• Marty Neumeier author of The Brand Gap, Zag, and his new The Designful Company
• Margaret Schmidt the VP of UX design and research at TiVo
• Khoi Vinh, Design Director of the NYTimes.com, and author of the popular blog Subtraction
• and thought leader Sara Beckman of Haas School of Business who brings her deep understanding of how design drives business value

And we’ll be announcing some very exciting additional speakers in coming days. So keep an eye out for announcements, but go ahead and register now to get in cheap!

This Tuesday October 7th I’ll be joined by two great panelists at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club to share and discuss some of the key insights from the book Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.

My fellow panelists:

• David Verba, one of the authors of Subject to Change as well as CTO and co-founder of Emmet Labs.
• Kakul Srivastava, our special guest star and General Manager of Flickr—someone who has plenty of experience in fostering great services and great experiences

So if you’re in the Bay Area, please come join us at 5:30pm for the lively panel. We hope you’ll take away new practices and new language to make your own breakthroughs that customers will love. Tickets and more about the panel »

Designers often talk about the results of their work, and even about the design process, but what we don’t often talk about is the careful framing of a project that allowed us to do the great work in the first place. When working with organizations big or small, it pays to first reach clarity about WHAT to design before working on HOW to design it.

Last week I got the chance to talk through a solid example of design strategy work with Lulu Pachuau and Bob Medcalf of the New Zealand firm Provoke. In this podcast we talk about and show the tools and methods they used to help the research institute Industrial Research Limited create a cohesive web strategy for the future.

What’s got me especially excited about this work is that Lulu and Bob took several of the methods that we teach during the Design Strategy day at the UX Intensive workshop, and they adapted the methods to address the challenges they faced.

If you’re interested in building some skills to help you move upstream and frame great design work, check out Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive workshops coming to Copenhagen on October 13-16 and to Austin December 8-11.

• listen to the podcast »
• check out some of the work »

In many organizations, the people responsible for the user experience strive to show the value of their work. We may instinctively know the value of our work, but it’s so much more powerful when we can explain it terms that matter to others in our organizations.

This is why I’m really happy to be presenting Showing the Value of UX as a virtual seminar on August 6th. The seminar is geared towards people who are entering a point in their careers where they need to understand and communicate about both sides of the equation: UX and business value.

The seminar starts with a deep exploration on the connections between UX and business value, then progresses to a series of principles and tools that you can use to connect User Experience to real business impact.

‘Showing the Value of UX’ is similar to material that I’ve presented and honed at prior conferences on design, business, and management, and so it’s exciting to be able to share these approaches and methods with you directly at your place of work. This will be the second running of the seminar, based on the positive feedback we received from the first session, including comments like this from Sam Felder of the University of Southern California:

“Your presentation had our team discussing your ideas through lunch and gems that we’re going to try to use with clients.”

I look forward to taking this material online, and talking with many of you during the extended Q&A sessions both during and after the presentation. Use the promotional code BLOG and get a 10% discount! Here’s where you can register »

This Wednesday night I’ll be joining a great IxDA-SF panel at Adobe Systems to try to get to the bottom of it. While we probably won’t come up with an exact dollar figure (so sorry!), I expect we’ll get into the benefits of being able to connect design to business value and some of the skills and approaches for making it happen.

I’ll be joined on the panel by Nathan Shedroff, chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at the California College of the Arts; Rajan Dev, president of Hot Studio; and our special guest moderator Jess McMullin of nForm and the bplusd.org blog.

Find out more about the event on upcoming, and I look forward to seeing you there!