Adaptive Path Blog

Sara Ulius-Sabel

Whirlpool is probably bigger and more complex than you probably realize. We’re now the world’s largest manufacturer of home appliances. It makes us less complacent and more vigilant, knowing other company’s are gunning for us.

Have a huge portfolio of brands and are often competing against ourselves. Forces us to think about product development in a different way. Design locations in six locations around the world. Each region focuses on regional design, but we all have to share best practices and things that have global implications.

It’s not just about being usable. We also need to be useful and desirable. User needs for us have been fairly stable for many years. This made us pretty complacent. Why need to research how people wash their clothes? But we had to shake the organization up and say that there might be something better out there we could be offering.

The sea of white: commoditization of appliances. Starting to erode the paradigms of more features (27 cycles on a washing machine!). Consumers don’t need this.

How we approach usefulness: addressing unmet needs. Getting beyond the washing machine. How do you add utility without adding things like more cycles. We do it through research and ethnography. Environments, rituals, processes. What is missing? What are they doing now that is a strange behavior? We found loads of compensatory behaviors. What we did was make a series of products that are outside the machine and that is about the laundry process experience. Simple products, but a big step for us.

How we approach usability. Historically, usable always followed useful. It’s only recently that the usability team has been able to make recommendations to the engineering team. Lots around ergonomics and ease-of-use. Also taken on perceived quality. You need confidence in the appliance (the whooshing sound when you open the refrigerator door). Not only about can everyone use it, but what is the experience using it. Making sure people feel satisfied.

Help users understand the process. Help people build a mental model of what the machine is doing. People want to know what is available to them and the combinations they can create. Make it seamless and in the background–like it was meant to be there all along. Everyone can benefit from accessible design.

Desirable. Why would anyone lust after a washing machine? It’s not rational. It’s something about the product that makes you feel good. By owning the product you took on the characteristics of the products. Products–appliances!–can be desirable. We should seek this out.

Can desirability be added systematically? Contributed by the features, aesthetics (sigh, tough, smell). Not static–as new competitors and new technology comes on the market, it might not be desirable in the future. Want to make it less a fluke. Which is where my role comes in.

My title is design metrics manager. Metrics are a way to communicate design to the rest of the organization in a way they can understand. We use the metaphor of health: checking the health of products.

Each brand has to be something different for different people. How do you drive people to different products, sometimes on the same platform? The users all need a refrigerator, but which one? We need to find the dimensions that trigger an emotional response. Trying to drive different experiences with different brands. Point of the project is to make someone fall in love with products, not better engineering.

Pressure is about measuring vs. creating. Not only having to convince upper management, but also convince the designers that metrics are ok. Not grading their designs.

Question for everyone: how do we sustainably get to Wow? As the competition comes after us, we have to force ourselves to continue to move forward, where every product is capable of triggering wow.

Q: Can you tell us some of the design metrics?

A: They are proprietary, but they are all user facing. Asking multiple questions that help differentiate the products.

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Irene Au (IA) and Jeff Veen (JV), Google.

JV: Tell us about your background.

IA: Electrical engineering background, but it wasn’t for me. Wanted to focus more on the impact of technology and people. Made way to human-computer interaction. A lot of the research at the time was about web, web technologies. Went from University of Illinois to Netscape. Netscape Communicator 4. Then went to Yahoo. The really fascinating projects were the stuff that was going on inside the viewfinder (the browser). Yahoo had just acquired 411 and realized what they were doing was going beyond the directory of the web. Was a small group of graphic designers there and producers would come a week before a product launched and wanted graphics and layout. I wanted to improve the experiences earlier.

JV: How long have you been at Google now?

IA: Four months.

JV: And how has that been going?

IA: It’s like Disneyland. Tremendous opportunity to bring in design thinking into the organization. Great breeding ground for ideas. How do you take it to the next level.

JV: All the difficult user experience decisions often happen in the algorithm level.

IA: The kind of strategies Google employed in the past might have worked for search, but not for more complex experiences. Traditional designer was an HCI generalist who had a good eye and could build products as well. Need a different set and range of functions and skills and backgrounds and focus now. Changing the hiring structure now.

JV: How do you optimize the recruiting process to find the type of designers we’re looking for?

IA: Need to set up a set of skills: anthropologists, HCI, visual designers, best-of-breed people. Don’t want silos though. Want T shaped people: specialization but broad skills too.

JV: How on earth do you prioritize all the projects at Google?

IA: We don’t have the bandwidth to cover everything. Need a strategy for this, so we don’t just come in at the tail end to work on a mock-up. We need to be more thoughtful in how we engage. We need to do fewer things really well. Is the design group a shop, or a really strategic group? Can we get involved early is one factor. We can upsell into strategy sometimes.

JV: Does this happen at an organization level?

IA: It’s like managing a financial portfolio. You need stuff you can turn over quickly, then other stuff that is infrastructure. Over time, people understand what it is we do. The mock-up is the key at Google. But we need do more and find out what people do.

JV: We need to speak the right language to the right people. Speak the language of finance to business people. But at Google, it’s speaking the languages of engineering.

IA: For the projects we do engage in, we need to set ourselves up to succeed. If we don’t, nobody wins.

JV: Some groups are very metrics driven, some aren’t.

IA: It’s important to be adaptable to the micro-cultures within the organization. Some places are top-down. If we try to apply the same kind of management to both, it won’t work. But we do need to take what works well in one area and apply it to others if we can.

Q: What level of management brought in this type of design and what sort of support are they going to give you?

IA: No deliberate decision from the top. No clear vision for how this will play out.

JV: Everyone says we’re very user-centered. But we don’t do certain techniques.

IA: The question is how do you carve out that space to do those things. Everyone needs to be part of the analysis of the research and brainstorming as well. It’s very transformative. At Google we focus on the rigor (GPA, SAT scores), but there is also this other side with the softer skills like communication we need to focus on more.

Peter Merholz: We need to better facilitate meetings. Should the design group be centralized (rest of company as client) or instead be decentralized (part of the product team)?

IA: Early in a company’s life, really important for designers to be centralized. It helps to have a group to share best practices and standards over time so teams can stop re-inventing the wheel. But it’s best when the designer is merged into the product teams. But it is good when there is some sort of combination: connection to a team and to a group of designers. At some point the UX team gets so big, you have to address this question. It depends on the organization. At some point, you get diminishing returns on decentralization.

JV: Google has amazing centralization especially for engineering. One way to write code at Google. How do you go about making a style guide and keeping it up to date?

IA: Universal look and feel. Build consistency without uniformity. Design pattern library: best practices around interaction design. UI code library. Consistently implement models.

Sam Felder: I’m curious if Google’s new hiring practices were affected by designers and how will it affect the company?

IA: I think the changes have been more subtle. The changes have been about clarifying what we want (expectations). And gives the interviewers more confidence about evaluations.

JV: How many of you use design exercises in hiring? [a few hands raise] I go back and forth on that myself.

IA: It’s really important to come up with an exercise that fits everyone–interface designers to design strategists. We need people throughout that range. Need exercises that allow for that flexibility.

JV: You need to see what people are good at. I have a lot of new people on my team. How do you approach mentoring?

IA: It is important to set aside time to do it. Learn from things like pair-programming. Pair designing? But how do we facilitate across teams so that people learn from others?

JV: Office hours at Google. What a great idea. All managers have them. And designers office hours. Time for unstructured feedback and communication.

IA: I have an open door, but it’s nice to have time blocked out.

JV: Everyone has office hours, so it’s great to just go somewhere and answer the question.

IA: Testing on a toilet is also great. When you go into the bathroom stalls, on the doors are code. It would be great to have that for design too.

Q: How do you go about creating consistency between mobile and web?

IA: There is consistency in look and feel and then there is consistency in interaction and you have to find the elements that communicate as one family, but not to be exact.

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Jennie Winhall

Red Project: Addressing social and economic issues through design-led innovation. How public services can be transformed through design skills. In the past, did work redesigning prisons (design for rehabilitation). Did work on domestic energy consumption, and redesigned better interactions with Members of Parliament.

Big push on public sector reform, for the first time looking at the experience of the end-user.

There are limits on modernizing existing services. Shells of services were designed a long time ago and society has changed. Demand outstrips supply. And now looking at a new range of social issues (climate change, obesity, etc.)

Need to help people co-create their own decisions. Which would be fine if people made rational decisions, but they don’t. Easier to build new power plants than to change every person’s behavior.

The public sector needs a new generation of public services. Preventative, co-created, and around individuals.

Health care project: can we use the characteristics of communities of participation to create new health care services? Redesign the interactions with patients and doctors to be more collaborative and interactive. Created a set of cards with issues and statements that the patient can use to talk to doctors about. Shifts the power from the system to the patient. It forces a different kind of behavior. Very adaptive–allows doctors and patients to get straight to the problem.

Exercise project: How do you make exercise social? Activmobs. werearemobs.org Self-organizing system. Rather than try to prototype it ourselves, actually made three activmobs and watched what they did and designed the system around what arose. Social dynamics were very important: support and peer pressure. A number of the tools developed were about increasing self-awareness. What is important to users. Also a lot about progress and visualizing progress. Especially as a group. It’s important to make things visible.

Designing for Behavior Change
Go beyond shaping products, to realizing that the products we make shape behavior. Metrics have to be meaningful to individuals. Self-assessment.

Can’t use a delivered service process. People need to shape the service itself and thus you can’t design the service entirely. You need to distribute tools to people.

Aspiration is important. Users have to want to participate.

Services have to be more desirable than owning the product itself.
New kind of disciple: transformation design.

Transformation Design
Half the skill of design is identifying the correct problem to solve. Problems are complex and require systems thinking and inter-disciplinary thinking. Integrate non-design aware people into the process.

Reinventing the organization to deliver the new offerings. Top-down structures aren’t working. Need to embed a culture of innovation onto an organization so that when designers leave, it doesn’t all collapse. Build capacity, not dependency.

Lots of non-traditional design outputs. Things like job descriptions, not just things.

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Innovation Through Design Thinking

This is the story that I tell to business leaders about why they should invest in design.

Design is everywhere these days. Beyond the beautiful stuff, designers have a unique way of solving problems. Stuff is not the only thing that is important. We call it design thinking. It’s the way we go about solving problems. It can be used to tackle a whole range of creative and business issues.

Design thinking is a great way of thinking about design strategy and the vision for future business. Design thinking can be used to develop whole new markets. Design thinking has been used to create new products and offerings. Design thinking can even be used to create new business models and new applications for technologies. Design thinking can be used to create new ways of connecting with customers. Design thinking can be used also in a place we never expected: in the infrastructure of business.

What is design thinking?

It is a human-centered approach to innovation. You either grow through acquisition or you grow through innovation.

There are three buckets of innovation: technology, business, and people. All innovation is a combination of those things. Lots of people are doing the technology and business. Technology is the main engine of innovation. Most businesses come from a business perspective. But most designers come at it through people.

Three Important Phases: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.

Inspiration. Where do ideas come from? Insights are the fuel of inspiration. You don’t get ideas from sitting at your desk. Use the world as a source of inspiration (not as a source of validation). It starts with empathy and seeing things from other people’s viewpoints, not yours. Aim to understand people on multiple levels: physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and culturally. Method: Analogous Situations. Where else might we go to get a similar type of situation? Insights can come extreme users. Not in the middle of the bell curve of users. Get out there and look, listen, and try.

Ideation. Building to think. Prototypes aren’t milestones. Really the value of prototypes is what you learn as you build it. Learn by prototyping. An idea might go through literally hundreds of prototypes. Better be able to build them quickly and cheaply. Not all prototypes need to be physical, but they do have to be tangible.

Implementation. We tend to forget that we need to be really good at storytelling. Ideas need to navigate through an organization. Storytelling can keep good ideas alive. Stories provide a framework for creating and preserving ideas. Can bring stakeholders together. Stories can be tangible and experiential. Sometimes the story can even be the end result: the strategy, an idea, etc.

Managing Innovation

Ways to grow: extend new (brands, share, leveraging users), create (markets), manage (raising price/usage/share), adapt (expand footprint, winning share).

Three different types of innovation: incremental (existing offerings and users), evolutionary (either a new offering or new users), and revolutionary (new offerings and new users). From least risky to highest risk. This can be tracked and measured. Ways of measuring: portfolio outcomes, time to first prototype, net promoter.

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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.

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Adam Richardson, frog design

Ways of dealing with projects where you have to think really far out in the future (3-5 years), but you also have to be designing in the near-term. You have to be in two mindsets simultaneously.

Evolve: incremental innovation (~1 year of competitive advantage)
Expand: 2-5 years of competitive advantage. Growth innovation (into new markets)
Envision: Breakthrough innovations (5+ years)

Usually loads and loads of stuff in the evolving area, very little in envisioning. Most companies want pay-off from innovations within three years.

Four Easy Steps to Manage Schizophrenic Projects
1) Manage the dimensions. Dimensions (”constraints”) are enablers, not hindrances. Avoid designer’s block. Some dimensions are load-bearing (can’t change them), some are more decorative. Hard to tell which is which.

2) Manage the communications. In particular, communication around dimensions. Can’t manage long-term projects with the same metrics as the short-term. Have to manage up and down the chains of command. No surprises. Executives hate surprises. “One last thing…” is for the audience, not key stakeholders. Know what kind of organization you are in: Where does innovation come from: bottom-up or top-down? and How do they make decisions: faith-based or proof-based?

3) Manage the design factory. (read the book by Donald Reinertsen of the same name) Pay attention to the interfaces. Not the UI, but more about if you can break the experience you are designing into chunks, then figure out how information is passed between chunks. Do this early. Manage the queues. Large batch activities (can hold up everything else) vs. small-batch activities. Split up things and make them happen in parallel so that the big-batch stuff doesn’t hold everything up.

4) Deploy the scouts. There is a spectrum of scouts: illustration, prototype, partial market test, full market entry, fast follower. Try out different pieces of the system. Start with the simple, then move to the hard(er). All have different pros and cons. The product itself can be a scout.

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Experience Strategies

We had a hunch that there was a community out there that hadn’t gotten together to talk about the experience of managing user experience. And here you are.

George Eastman: “You press the button, we do the rest.” Photography could be a mass consumer activity. He turned this idea into a product: the kodak. The very first consumer technology product. You press the button, the Eastman Kodak company does the rest. History of photography: before kodak and after. We all would like to be part of a product that transforms an industry.

What’s the highest compliment we can give a product? “Highly profitable”? “Never breaks”? No: “Can’t live without it.” What does it take to make products we can’t live without?

Can’t rely on technology to sell products. This can work as a strategy (for a while). (see: Wordstar, early VCRs.)

Move beyond technology to features. This too can work for a while. But there’s still the VCR’s blinking clock.

How to get beyond the features mindset: “the beautiful, elegant solution that works.” –Steve Jobs (in 1984) You need a different mindset: delivering value through experience.

A big part of the iPod’s success has to do with the psychology of technology. We relate to products as if they were people. People have affection for their devices. When you interact with a product, you ascribe personality traits to it. Products should have a personality.

This is different from how most products are made: a core of data with a shell wrapped around it. This model doesn’t exist in the minds of people who use it. Their model: the interface and the rest of it is magic.

More and more, the integrity of experience is becoming paramount. “Designing from the Outside, In” –Tim O’Reilly. We call it experience strategy: an approach that provides a clearly-articulated touchstone (the personality/idenity) of the product that affects all the choices made about the product. A star to sail a ship by. A clear objective to design toward.

The identity of a product is not the brand. Brand is the message you want to send the consumer. Experience strategy is the opposite. It starts with the consumer.

Strategic design requirements: the qualities the system needs to have to deliver particular experiences. Add that to business goals, and you get a set of experience strategies. When you get into the design process, you can make decisions based on this set of experience strategies. These can even outlive the individual product: the next iteration can still use those strategies.

But individual products aren’t the whole experience. There are many touchpoints. The iPod, for instance, isn’t a stand-alone product. Needs iTunes and iTunes Music Store. The system provides the total experience to manage, play, and acquire media. We need a systems view.

[Flickr example: hub of photo sharing system]

The experience is the product we should deliver. And the only part of the product the audience cares about.

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Mohawk Fine Papers has published a book of 40 posters designed for the Yale School of Architecture by Michael Bierut. A small sampling of these stunning pieces are posted over at Design Observer. Points of interest: each poster features different typefaces, an adherence to the simplicity (and low printing cost) of black and white, the use of simple geometric forms to create complex layouts. One poster, for “Non Standard Structures: An Organic Order of Irregular Geometries, Hybrid Members, and Chaotic Assemblies Symposium” was featured in Michael’s talk at UX Week 2006.

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If there’s any company that can be a catalyst for changing an entire industry’s dynamics, it’s Apple (as demonstrated most recently by the iPod). And contrary to popular perception, handset manufacturers (Nokia, Moto, LG, etc.) might actually *benefit* from Apple’s success (as opposed to suffer because Apple becomes a competitor).

Cell phone manufacturers, in general, have been hurt by declining margins because consumers (in the US especially) don’t view phones as a valuable product in their own right. For years now, the network providers have been giving away phones for free or at deep discount as an incentive device. So, while true that the RAZR has done Moto well financially, the networks still control pricing power, not the phone manufacturers. And as a result, the public perception of value is more squarely placed on the network than the phone itself.

Apple is arguably the only company with enough brand cache and product design savvy to turn the cards on the networks and both change how people view a cell phone and alter their purchasing behavior.

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Before the holidays, Brandon interviewed IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown about the challenges of bringing an experience perspective to organizations, the need for cross-channel and cross-disciplinary design work, and the use of narrative to prototype experiences. Today, we posted a transcript of that interview.

Tim, of course, is keynoting the second day of our forthcoming MX San Francisco conference on managing experience through creative leadership, taking place February 12-13. Also presenting are Caterina Fake from Yahoo, Irene Au from Google, and folks from Dell, Whirlpool, and others.

Register by January 15 for a discount, and join other attendees from organizations such as AOL, Bank of America, Caterpillar, Comcast, eBay, Intuit, LeapFrog, Nokia, SAP, Sun, USC, and more.

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