Adaptive Path Blog

Next week I’ll be speaking at the 2009 MEX Conference in London. Marek Pawlowski invited me to create a talk around point number three of this year’s mobile user experience manifesto: Customer research methodology must be enhanced to close the reality gap.

My talk – Failures of Imagination: The Role of Research in Creating Compelling Mobile Experiences – was inspired by an NPR segment I caught recently on a road trip in Arizona. Admittedly, talk radio can be mesmerizing and the mind can forge seemingly unrelated relationships between disparate topics amongst the monotony of the desert landscape. However, I believe there was an important message about the role of imagination in the piece Where Were The Media As Wall Street Imploded? that strongly correlates to the primary reason why mobile research often fails in the mobile design and development process. A failure of imagination.

Why didn’t journalists warn us of our impending financial doom? Didn’t they see it coming? Folkenflik’s story gives some compelling and logically sound reasons as to why business and financial journalists were as dumb-founded by the recent collapse of the US financial system as the rest of us. However, it was these words that left my mind a buzz as miles of desert unfolded before me:

“If everything we had said and written came true then we might have expected some of this to have happend. But I think there was a failure of imagination among economists, policymakers, as well as journalists.”

Imagination. It’s not a word we often associate with economists and policymakers… and it’s not a word we easily associate with mobile research, either. These are professional activities that require rigor around the fact finding process. However, the evidence of the impact of facts without foresight is clear. Facts do us little good if we lack the imagination necessary to embrace the futures facts can steer us towards. I’ve seen the impact of a lack imagination with regard to research play out countless times in initiatives I’ve been involved with both inside organizations and as a consultant. Too often research is used to reinforce existing agendas, instead of informing a compelling vision of the future.

At MEX, I’ll share my ideas for how to inject imagination into mobile research and design through defining a clear and informed hypothesis for research studies. I’ll also share three case studies on mobile design research methods developed at Adaptive Path that have proven effective in the creation of compelling mobile experiences.

There’s a stellar line up of speakers planned for the conference, including:
Robert Fabricant, Executive Creative Director, Frog Design
Hampus Jakobsson, Co-founder and Vice President of Business Development, TAT
Sian Townsend, User Experience Researcher, Google

Hope to see you there!

The Big (D)esign Conference in Dallas on May 30th promises to be a terrific experience, packed with interesting sessions in User Experience, Strategy, Social Media and Code Development. For one day and $50, it’s a great way to refresh your networking skills, learn some great stuff and hang in Dallas when the weather is good.

While you’re there, don’t miss our own Teresa Brazen, who will be speaking in the Strategy track, sharing her experiences with exploring the UX Landscape.

Teresa is the founder and host of Tea with Teresa, a podcast blog dedicated to dispelling mystery and learning more about the world together through candid conversation, jargon-free dialog and tea. Here’s a snapshot of what she’ll cover in her Big (D)esign talk:

Tools and Methods to Learn, Navigate, & Make A Name for Yourself in the UX Landscape.

Coming from outside the user experience (UX) industry and landing smack in the belly of the beast, Teresa knows how fresh eyes can be an asset. In her talk, she will present three creative approaches to understanding and navigating the sea of methods and concepts that make up the User Experience practice, while embedding yourself as a key player in the UX industry. She comes from the perspective that ‘It’s okay not to know everything about User Experience yet’ (most people don’t know what it is, anyway!) and reveals some simple, creative ways to learn about the interesting processes, methods and practices that make up the field.

Tools & Methods include:

1] Maps of Knowledge: Diagrams that allow you to visually see what you know about the industry, what you don’t know, and areas where you can supplement what you already know (if you’re already a UX professional) or what you learned in school (if you’re a soon-to-be UX professional).

2] Get to Know the Pros: Building your network is as simple as taking advantage of resources around you. Teresa will share how her podcast, TeaWithTeresa.com, allows her to learn about UX methods and practice from the people that created the field or made huge waves in the industry. She will also share key things you can do to build your own network within the field.

3] Building A Personal Brand: A personal brand means you’re known for something and helps you stand out in a crowd. Whether you’re a student or an experienced UX professional, growing your personal brand will make a difference for your career. Teresa will provide you with tools to help you uncover what you have to offer, create a mantra (What do you care about?) and will share videos from others who have created strong personal brands within the UX community.

On the Experience Design track, you’ll be able to catch AP’s Design Researcher and Manager of the Austin Office Todd Wilkens as he shares his Case Study for Redesigning MySpace.

So hop on over to Dallas at the end of May to say “Hi!”

Yesterday, on stage at MX 2009, Bruce Temkin, customer experience analyst from Forrester stated, “Brands are dying.” It’s a provocative statement that he didn’t elucidate at the time. Luckily, BusinessWeek’s intrepid reporter, Helen Walters, flagged him down for a quick interview to get him to talk more about it. Watch it here:

Bruce Temkin, Forrester, MX 2009 from Helen Walters on Vimeo.

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.

Part 1 of this interview.
Part 2 of this interview.

Margret Schmidt is among our speakers at MX 2009, taking place 2-3 March in San Francisco. You can register for MX 2009 using the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off. Prices increase January 31st.

PM: We met at a conference last fall where you were speaking about the design and launch of the new TiVo.com website. I believe you mentioned that the site design had not significantly changed for 5 or so years before this most recent launch (and looking at the Internet Archive confirms this. What had been the organizational barriers to change? How were you able to overcome those barriers and launch a radically new design? What did it take to make the site more of an extension of the TiVo product experience?

MS: Historically, tivo.com was treated as an online version of our marketing materials. It was about selling DVRs, and marketing was responsible for that function. Because there wasn’t an interaction design team within marketing, overhauls of the site involved external agencies and lots of money, and didn’t happen that often. As the company evolved the web site did too, and we added product features like online scheduling, and we enhanced customer support tools.

Over the five years where the site didn’t change much, we actually undertook two different redesigns that never launched. They failed for many reasons, but mostly for lack of communication, teamwork, and a shared vision. Different teams had different agendas, and we sent conflicting messages to our agencies.

This last redesign was successful because everyone came together with a common vision. The site as “owned” by marketing, and the redesign project was “lead” by user experience. We had very open communication and shared responsibility. We modeled the project after the way we ship DVRs and features – collaboration and iteration. We did use an agency for vision and high-level design, but also a strong internal team that kept the principles of TiVo’s ease and simplicity in focus during the detailed design and implementation. It was a lot of hard work, but everyone involved knew the end result would be worth it.

Once the redesign was complete, we immediately jumped into the metrics to figure out what needed to be tweaked, and then launched further updates to the home page, “What is TiVo?”, and “Shop” based on what what was working, and what wasn’t. This ongoing work is done internally, with user experience as a service organization working for marketing, product management, or customer support (depending on the site section).

PM: Now to something a little less pleasant. In TiVo’s SEC filings (PDF), it’s recorded that in the last two years, TiVo’s total subscription numbers have gone from 4.4 million to 3.5 million. Obviously, TiVo is in a wickedly competitive market, and, frankly, it’s a testament to the quality of your experience that you’re still around, when what you are competing with is essentially “free”. Still, it must be quite worrisome. As VP of User Experience Research and Design, for what are you and your group held accountable? Do you have any metrics for which you must deliver? What is the charter of the User Experience group in improving the bottom line?

Also, in your seven years at TiVo, what have you had to learn about how businesses operate? How has that changed your view of the role of User Experience in business?

MS: User Experience is responsible for supporting the business needs of various groups. We strive to deliver the best experience for our products, and the best research to inform decision making. We don’t have our own metrics — we share the metrics of our businesses, like selling DVRs or shipping features on a schedule. Over my (nearly eight!) years at TiVo I have had increasing exposure to the business. UE participates actively in product strategy, and shares insights from customers in all aspects of the business, including pricing, packaging, marketing, and support. We bring the customer viewpoint into the conversation, so that the decision maker can weigh it along with the business needs and the technical implications. I think it is critical that businesses have this perspective.

PM: Obviously, I agree that businesses need to have that customer experience perspective, but, clearly, many don’t. As such, I like to use companies with strong UX practices as exemplars. Thinking about that, and the challenges that TiVo is facing, how do you see User Experience maintaining and even improving TiVo’s marketshare or bottom line? What new value opportunities has User Experience identified for TiVo?

MS: It is pretty much the standard stuff. Anything we can do to reduce support costs or increase sales helps the bottom line. When we design features, we think about how to minimize the reasons people might call for support; and we add online self-service tools to tivo.com. To help increase sales, we analyze the reasons people don’t complete a purchase (like they couldn’t tell if the particular model of TiVo DVR would work with the setup they have in their home) and we identify ways to address them. We’re adding a tool to the web site that asks a few questions about your home A/V and networking setup, and then identifies the DVR models that will work for you. We want to give customers confidence in their purchase decision.

PM: I want to wrap up our little conversation here with a look toward TiVo’s future. What new experiences can we look forward to? Thank you for your time!

MS: You’ll see us continue to focus on getting great content to your TV. And we’ll give you new ways to discover the best TV for you – ways that help you get the most out of the channels you already pay for. In these times, when people are cutting back on their entertainment spending, we want TiVo to be a great value for finding and enjoying the TV and movies that are most interesting to you.

Thank you Peter. I enjoyed the interview and look forward to MX 2009!

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

Forrester has just released in 2008 Customer Experience Index. (Registration required to download). The Index was compiled by Bruce Temkin, who will keynote Day 1 of MX 2009. The results confirm what we all suspect — retailers and hotels rank the highest (their business is predicated on customer experience), and health insurance providers, TV service providers, and internet service providers are the lowest (three industries where customer choice is constrained).

At MX 2009, Bruce will talk about how experience-based differentiation is even more crucial in a down economy, and provide insights on how companies can do more to embrace it.

It’s also worth noting a couple of additions to the MX 2009 program:
• Dan Roam, visual thinking advocate and author of Amazon 2008 Top Business Book The Back of the Napkin
• David Butler, VP of Design for Coca-Cola, featured in this BusinessWeek article on reinvigorating the classic 100-plus-year-old brand

Between now and the end of the year, you can save 15% off our already discounted registration fees for our events with the promotion code RNSB (Register Now Save Big). We know times are tight and training budgets are in jeopardy, but we also believe key investments in making you and your business smarter will be just what’s needed right now. We pledge that MX will deliver on that promise!