Adaptive Path Blog

Malmö University and InUse are putting on their first Business to Buttons conference this June in Malmö, Sweden. The topics focus on, “how to create positive effects for the business and for society when designing Information Technology.” Both Dan and I will be there to present, along with a nice list of speakers.

I’m especially excited to hear from Ben Jacobsen from Conifer Research, the case study of the New York Times redesign, InUse’s deep thoughts on Effect Management, and Kim Goodwin of Cooper speaking on the integration of design into your organization. Come join us… you know all you need is this one great excuse to travel to Sweden!

Last summer Adaptive Path conducted a brief survey regarding the user experience practices within organizations. [Clarification: these were voluntary surveys of individuals about their organizations' practice around user experience.] From the data we collected, we found a few interesting tidbits. First of all, the term “user experience” or “customer experience” or similar derivatives have almost a 90% usage rate across various types of companies:

No surprise there, but this next data set piqued my curiosity because of the inverse relationships that emerged. Among our respondents, the for-profit public organizations were much more likely to have a group responsible for the user experience, but yet less likely to have an executive accountable for the experience. Now these for-profit public organizations are very large (70% of the respondents have over a thousand employees), and so the delegation and localization of UX responsibilities to a specific group of people may be due to the diverse range of products, services, and activities that the organization must coordinate.

While the for-profit privately-held organizations broke about even on both of these data points, the non-profits look about the opposite of the for-profit public organizations. I could read into these patterns and say they suggest: when an organization has an executive responsible for experience, the experience becomes the responsibility of the whole organization.

However, I think another hypothesis is more likely. The non-profits and privately-held firms tend to be much smaller in size. They’re more likely to have a single product/service, or a small handful of products/services. Therefore, the creation of a successful experience is much more crucially felt within these organizations. Someone at the top has their eye on the experience, and the role can’t be delegated to separate functional group in the organization.

First, for all you Window users out there I need to tell you of something that we should all concede that the Windows OS is superior at: calendaring. MS Exchange certainly has a few issues, but it pales in comparison to what we on the Mac OS have to suffer through, the iCal application. I’m not usually one to blog complaints, but this just keeps gnawing at me. So how does iCal suck? Let me count the ways:

1. It sucks that I hate to even open iCal. The struggles of time management are made even worse when you abhor the tools.
2. It sucks that I have a helper app to work around iCal. I bought MenuCalendarClock just so I wouldn’t have to open iCal to see my calendar. Why can this little app access the iCal data instantaneously, when iCal takes decades?
3. It sucks that I wait and wait. When I do have to open iCal, I can go make a sandwich, eat the sandwich, then come back and it might be ready (see point 4).
4. It sucks that it’s such a tease. Even when you think iCal’s ready, it’ll throw up the wait cursor whenever you want to enter text, change a time, or say, use it.
5. It sucks that I have to trick iCal into working. Let’s say I invite someone to a meeting and they decline. I move the time of the meeting, but their “decline” notifications stick with the event. I have to delete the old meeting and create a new one to send out a new invite. Crazy workaround for a way-too-common workflow.
6. It sucks that calendar sharing is broken. I’m sure it technically works just fine, but I find that most people’s published calendars aren’t published as regularly as they think they are and the synching usually errors out anyway. The whole reason of being on a common calendar platform is to have these complexities of scheduling smoothly resolved. Oh well.

I think Elizabeth Barrett Browning topped it off with 6 ways, so I will too (even though I’m sure I’ve omitted several of your favorites). I’ll just leave it with a final plea: Apple, please fix iCal… please! Else, you may need to beware the resentful customer (PDF) who may flock somewhere else.

It’s unfortunate that the 2005 design of the Target pill bottle has too often been treated as just a product design and graphic design solution. Yes, it received much earned respect for being a collaboration of graphic design with industrial design and for its sensitive approach to addressing sometimes life-threatening circumstances. But perhaps because it’s been put on a pedestal at the MoMA that we forgot to check out what’s going on behind the scenes at Target.

Target appropriately calls the bottle ClearRX, describing it more broadly as a, “prescription distribution and communication system.” That’s because it required quite a bit of work on the back-of-the-house to make the pill bottles work on the front-of-the-house.

Let’s take one aspect of the design as an example. The bottles have rings that fit around the collar of the bottle which are color coded to identify different members of the family — 7 colors in all. The concept is simple enough: Make sure you’re not accidentally taking someone else’s prescription just because the bottles look similar. However, the implementation is much more difficult because Target has to ensure the right color ring is going around the right subscription. Therefore Target’s Pharmacy IT system has to track which family member has which color ring so the colors are not accidentally switched when prescriptions are filled.

From listening to Deborah Adler tell the story of working with Target, it’s clear that considerable (if not more) design effort went towards the processes and systems surrounding the pill bottle. It was, “an enormous undertaking… a huge collaborative effort,” she said. Here’s a hint of some of the overall system that had to be coordinated:

“I work with the pharmacy team, pharmacy operations… the Target technology team to build the software to accommodate the new labeling system, the marketing team… there were major training sessions to train all the pharmacists on how to use this new system because they were the most important people to us… they were the front line… they had to explain how to use this new system, and they had to learn how to use it.. there was a bit of a learning curve involved.”

I’m guessing that it’s not just the design patents that have kept other pharmacies from mimicking the Target pill bottle. The pill bottle isn’t just a new SKU in a retail environment or just a piece of packaging that can be swapped out for the old design. The bottle is just the visible tip of a much deeper system of drug delivery that would take significant time and investment to emulate.

For me, the inspiration of this story is how a design artifact and a compelling story from Deborah Adler could spark the evolution of Target’s drug delivery system. When the-way-things-should-be aligns with a competitive advantage, great design ideas are more likely to come to fruition. In these cases, design prototypes and good storytelling can show the way things should be, and allow a productive discussion around what’s necessary to make things happen.

In Geoffrey Moore’s very old post on Digital Ecosystems (I’m still catching up on 2006), he highlights the tension that emerges between the concept of “product” and “service” when your product is delivered online:

“Services Displace Products. In the digital world, as bits substitute for atoms, products are reconceived as services. This is the threat that Google poses against Microsoft.

Services companies still have not completely caught up with this. They tend to describe their offers as products, which, although convenient as a means for integrating them into traditional organizational thinking, profoundly misrepresents their dynamics and causes companies to miss whole dimensions of consumer experience, need and value.”

Now much of the rest of the post was just gobbly-gook to to me, but the mix-up between the notions of products and services felt very familiar. When a service is created online, it’s often still sold as a product: how it’s packaged, priced, and then how it’s delivered.

One easy example of a missing dimension of customer experience is surprise. Off-line services have those well-timed surprises that aren’t built into online services. You get a lollipop at the barber, an occasional free drink at your favorite bar, the revealing of your entrée at dinner. Perhaps we’re working so hard at delivering the expected that we forget to plan for the unexpected?”

Anyone been paying much attention to the world of Service-oriented Architectures?

Some coverage of it sounds very much like just another IT acronym, while other descriptions make it sound very similar to things we UX folks talk about:

“…the current uses of SOA for integration and customer- (user-) facing applications are merely the first stages of the service-oriented evolution. Over the next few years, SOA will be the springboard for innovative IT shops to move towards business scenario development [where] business solutions will be compositions of services, business events, and business processes. These compositions match the interactions of your business—with customers, partners, employees, and regulatory agencies—in support of commerce, collaboration, and information exchange.”

It seems that one way of looking at SOAs is as open APIs for information behind corporate firewalls. A lot of applications built on them amount to mash-ups and they certainly pre-date the current web 2.0 craze. Because they are built (often) for internal corporate use, we’re thinking they don’t have the public visibility they could have and often the definitions for SOAs and the applications built for them might betray their environment, i.e. documentation heavy and not necessarily user-centric.

Still, the thinking behind SOAs seems to be compatible with building services for customer and user scenarios you as a business want to support. I’ll be interested to see if any SOA cases arise that demonstrate strong support for great user experiences.

When thinking about using design to lead change within your organization, it’s hard to not to consider the works of innovation and design consultancy IDEO. Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, will be kicking off day two of Adaptive Path’s MX Conference — a conference on managing experience through creative leadership.

In this short podcast (download), Tim packs in multiple insights on:

• selling experience within organizations
• the new opportunities for design managers
• prototyping experiences
• engaging with user generated content (note Times Magazine’s Person of the Year)
• and his work with the Acumen Fund

For more thinking from Tim, also see his Fast Company article, ‘Strategy By Design‘, and join us at the MX Conference February 12-13 in San Francisco. Tim will be joined by Caterina Fake from Flickr, notable author Scott Berkun, Jennie Winhall of the UK Design Council, Doug Beaudet and Sara Ulius-Sabel from Whirlpool, and more.

‘Tis the season for buying online. We now have in addition to “black friday” the term “cyber monday” (and is it too late to change the later to something a little less early nineties?). You’d think that online would have killed off catalogs, but BusinessWeek reported last week that the web only changed the role of catalogs and made them more numerous. So much for saving the rainforest through e-commerce.

First, I think this is a great step forward in multichannel services. As noted in the article, “the catalog is the best method to convince customers to go online.” However, to pull off cross-channel collaboration like this organizations must be able to plan and coordinate across groups. It may sound easy, but organizations can quickly get bogged down in issues such as, “Who should get credited with a sale that began in the catalog and ended online?” Once an organization overcomes these issues, each channel can play to it’s strengths.

Second, I do wonder why online retail has ended up with certain weaknesses. I understand that the web’s strengths are in breadth of inventory, personalization, and fulfillment, but why does it supposedly suck so bad at conveying the brand image? Business Week states,

“The new breed of catalog is a glossy, magazine-like statement meant to convey to consumers the look and feel of a brand. That’s a task the typical home PC just isn’t up to, no matter how good the resolution of the monitor.”

I’ll admit that catalogs certainly have a strength here, as they fill that moment where you’ve just arrived home and you’re sitting on the couch resting and browsing through your mail. You’re perfectly willing to be entertained at that moment with some brand imagery and lifestyle photos. But on the web when you’ve arrived at a site with a potential purchase in mind, a brand story feels more like an obstacle between the customer and your next sale.

Still, sites like Threadless manage to convey deep messages about their brand along with the shopping experience. Seeing everyday customer’s enjoying their t-shirts might not be quite as aspiring as following along with a Mount Everest climber wearing the same gear you can purchase, but it’s much more accessible and more meaningfully integrated into the purchase experience.

Last spring we received an email from a very professional and passionate-sounding high-school junior at the Marin School of Arts and Technology (MSAT). John Bjerke is his name, and he had just signed up for the redesign of his school’s website. He asked to come work with us at Adaptive Path two days a week as he moved through this big undertaking. We jumped for the opportunity, and it turned out to be a great one.

John has just written to inform me that the redesigned MSAT site is live. John deserves some big praise for his work — but to really appreciate it, you should: take a look at its prior incarnation; consider that John took on this huge project by himself; and learn about all John went through to make it happen…

Being a public magnet school that relies on recruiting applicants to build the school’s student base, the web site serves a critical role in the “business” of education. Meanwhile, the site also serves as the online point of contact between teachers and students as well as an information source for parents. Uh-oh: 4 audiences and only 1 designer/developer/project manager.

Here’s the process that John followed to make it possible:

1. Talk to the stakeholders. John started by defining expectations with the faculty and staff at MSAT, as well as the prior caretaker of the site.
2. Know what you’ve got. Next was an exhaustive inventory of the prior MSAT website’s content and inventory. John found a few things he never knew was there. Sound familiar?
3. Learn from the end users. John had users of the site categorize the site’s content and functionality as well as propose names for these categories.
4. Design for the goals of each user. Starting with whiteboard sketches and page mock-ups, John went through multiple iterations of the site navigation and layout to provide pathways for each user to their goals on the site.
5. Criteria-driven visual design. Visual design was something John was uneasy about tackling, so we took a very objective approach. We defined criteria for the visual design, then looked to other sites, magazines, and other sources to inspire the visual direction.
6. Iterative development. Back in John’s comfort zone, he knocked out working code in a number of days, integrating the content with TextPattern as he worked.
7. Strong handoff. After migrating web hosts (ouch), testing, and releasing the site, John’s handed off the content maintenance to two dedicated parent volunteers logged into the Textpattern system as content editors.

We hope and think that John got as much out of the experience as we did. It was a pleasure to watch someone pick the UX methods that made sense to them, plow through the process, and elegantly pull together a series of web-based tools to make it happen.

Wow. What were you doing when you were in high school?
John, thanks for working with us and impressing us.

In design and development, we’ve probably all had someone advocate that the new product/service, “has got to use some of that .” Please fill in with whatever hot new capability or technology you can think of: RSS, social networking, tag clouds — you know the usual suspects.

You often know at a gut level that the trendy addition is superfluous or even disastrous. But it’s always nice to have a few examples in your pocket when mounting your response…

NPR’s recent story on web-based viral marketing for ‘Snakes on a Plane’ versus ‘Borat’ makes a great case for examination. Despite all the hype and YouTube videos prior to ‘Snakes on a Plane’ (SoAP), the movie did no better than any other B-rated movie at the box office. The problem? The yuk-yuk fun that people were having with the concept of the movie had little to do with the actual content and genre of the movie. The experience of the buzz had nothing to do with the experience of the movie, and the people participating in the buzz weren’t the target market for the actual movie.

What should we learn from SoAP? Don’t engage in activities that don’t fit your core strategy and expect it to pay off. The marketers of SoAP executed perfectly on an (un?)anticipated opportunity for buzz marketing, but SoAP still fizzled at the box office.

In contrast the NPR piece points out that the Borat buzz might pay off because it’s all about yuk-yuk humor so the buzz might be tapping into the core target audience. Another example of effective buzz would be Blair Witch’s idea to, “use the Internet and suggest that the film was a real event” [The Blair Witch Project, Wikipedia]. The buzz fit the experience of the film and fit the target market.

So let’s hope Borat makes a good showing at the box office, so we can have another example of appropriate vs. inappropriate uses of trendy tactics.