I was introduced to Zack Rosen, CEO of Mission Bicycle a few months ago at an evening event at the Adaptive Path offices. A mutual acquaintance had suggested we talk given our interests in bicycles and user experience. I had already heard about Mission Bicycle’s innovative model of selling fixed gear bikes online and was intrigued to hear about the company’s next step: opening up a retail shop that would challenge pretty much every convention in bicycle retail. What Zack wanted to do was exactly in line with a few ideas that I had with some friends while in grad school.

As we talked the idea of a collaboration between Mission Bicycle and Adaptive Path began to take shape. Zack had plans for the shop’s interior design, but the experience of the retail environment was still missing. The goal was to design a simple retail experience that would help customers assemble their perfect, custom bike. Some of the fundamental questions that needed to be answered were:

• How do you showcase and sell a great but complex product in a constrained environment?
• How do you create a space that extends and supports other brand experiences?
• How do you sell in-store if you’ve only sold online?

It was something that I had wanted to work on for ages. The only hook? It was the middle of April and the shop was set to open in less than a month. The design would have to be ready almost immediately to be in place for the store’s opening. In less than 13 business days, Adaptive Path created display system signage that helps customers build their ideal bike. Rachel Glaves and I developed the concept together, and Rachel handled all the production work, which was no small task.

The time constraints required us to take an iterative approach to the project: The process was light and fast and required trade-offs between getting far and going deep. Fortunately, we were able to work with the entire Mission Bicycle retail team including business folks, architects, mechanics, web and graphic designers to make it happen. The process involved:

• Interviewing cyclists to understand their needs and expectations of a custom bike retail experience
• Clearly articulating the Mission Bikes process in a way that aligned with cyclists’ needs and expectations
• Sketching and generating experience concepts quickly
• Prototyping the experience design concepts in our studio

In the end we came up with a four-part system to help customers spec out their bike: instructions, wall and table mounted displays and a build kit.

The shop looks amazing. They sold 5 bikes during their first weekend. Here’s a video of Rachel walking through the experience.

Mission Bicycle Retail Experience from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

We put together a little case study with more detail about the design of the experience, including how each concept progressed from rough sketches to installation.

About the Mission Bicycle Project
Mission Bicycle was started in 2008 as a online side business of web development consultancy Chapter Three. With strong initial sales, Mission Bicycle looked to open a flagship retail space in the Mission District of San Francisco and secured a lease on 766 Valencia St. in February 2009. With three months to open the store, Mission Bicycle partnered with Grayscale to design the interior space and Adaptive Path to develop product selection and purchase experience and signage system. The store opened in May 2009 resulting in a 50%+ net increase in bicycle sales for the company.

Part of the Smart.fm iPhone App Story

While Dan is busy coding away at the iPhone App, I wanted take this time to share about our first project with smart.fm, a project to reimagine the smart.fm web experience!

What’s in a name? What we call something can have a profound impact on the way we think about it. And changing the way we think about something can have powerful implications on what we design and how we evaluate it. For smart.fm, the ah-ha moment came when we realized that it’s about Goals, not Lists.

Smart.fm is a learning community founded on a powerful technology that equips users to memorize anything — from the Capitals of the World to Japanese Vocabulary to the names of various Heart Murmurs. Today, you learn using Lists. A List is a set of content about a topic that is typically managed by a single person or a content partner. While Lists are a straightforward organizing principle, they don’t form natural hubs of activity. It’s hard to rally around a list.

Smart.fm partnered with Adaptive Path to transform the site into a “motivating, social world of learning.” Collaborating closely with smart.fm, our team (Me, Brian Cronin and Kate Rutter) sought out new ways to bring people together and engage them in collaboration and competition around learning. Through a series of exercises where we envisioned what the experience of using smart.fm could be like, the answer that emerged was Goals.

Instead of organizing content around topics, which people may study for many different reasons, content will soon be organized around Goals that people can form communities around. But before I get into the exciting implications of this shift, I wanted to share some of the experience-minded tools that led us to it:

1) We described the experience we wanted to aim for.

Using our Elevator Pitch “mad-lib” template, we brainstormed ways to fill in the blanks: “For people who… the new smart.fm is… It’s different because…” Ideas that emerged included “Smart.fm is like a pickup basketball game — it’s easy to jump right in and participate.” We refined these ideas into guiding principles that described the ideal smart.fm experience: “a friendly social world of learning” that “invites play” and “reveals and celebrates progress.”

2) We dissected the experience and brainstormed new metaphors for its parts.

From the experience mapping and metaphor brainstorming exercises that I wrote about previously, we selected some of the most compelling metaphors.

3) We imagined some possible experiences inspired by these metaphors.

We then explored how they could be applied to the major activities of the smart.fm experience — discovering, learning, celebrating, collecting, making and collaborating — and communicated the resulting ideas through “Concept Posters.” These posters enabled us to describe what an experience should feel like without getting into interface details. Aspects of the poster showing how “Smart.fm is like a scavenger hunt for knowledge” particularly stood out to the team — especially the idea of challenging users to create content through collaborative scavenger hunts.

4) We pictured the future.

We then used sketches of “The Homepage of the Future” to explore the best concepts further. Since a well-designed homepage tells the story of what you’re all about, sketching potential homepages can be a great way to boil a concept down to its essence using a value proposition, some featured content, and a presentation of core features or “how it works.”

5) It all came together in “Goal-Based Missions” — or simply, Goals

These explorations culminated in the idea of “Missions,” which we articulated through sketchy diagrams illustrating an exciting, game-like smart.fm where social activity is embedded into everything.

As the new activity hubs, Missions brought both learning material and social activity together in an elegant and cohesive way:

• Missions are about shared goals. While people may learn English for many reasons, people who want to “Spend a Week in the US,” “Impress their friends” or “Pass the TOEFL” will have much more in common with each other than everyone learning “English Vocabulary I.”
• Missions are social by nature. The shared goal is what brings people together. Instead of “signing up” or “enrolling,” you can “Join” or “Participate” in a Mission, competing or collaborating with other team members who share the same goal.
• Missions can be about creating content, not just learning it. The scavenger hunts idea from the concept posters manifested itself in the “Fact-Finding” aspect of Missions: If you want to learn enough Japanese for a week in Japan, but don’t know enough to build a list of stuff to learn — you can challenge others to create content for you.

While my high school sister loved the idea of “24-like” Missions, proposing there be “Objectives” and “Directors” and spy tools, the idea of collaborative Missions lives on under the more neutral name, “Goals.” Since the final wireframes were delivered, Smart.fm has already enabled collaborative list-building, and soon you’ll be able to do much more, including:

• Collaborate with others who share a goal (say, “Become culturally literate”) to create and collect learning material that will help you achieve it.
• Challenge other users to contribute content about a certain topic (such as “Hip Hop Artists” or “Internet Memes” — you can actually add content to these lists today!).
• Ask questions about things you want to learn (“How do you say ‘Experience Design’ in Japanese?”) and get answers from others.
• Earn badges for completing your goals and responding to challenges.
• See how you’re doing compared to others who are pursuing the same goal, others in your hometown, and perhaps even others who share your first name!

These are just a few of the exciting possibilities that reframing Lists as Goals has afforded, and we look forward to seeing both the name change and mindset change taking shape on smart.fm!

Okay, so I had to laugh at this or I might have gone postal on my coworkers. Today I spent about 20 minutes trying desperately to cancel 2 magazine subscriptions. I was dumb enough to sign up for them as a “free” add-on to another purchase a long time ago — 6 months for free, thereafter auto-renewal. Ah, sweet auto-renewal…how I loathe you.

Let me see if I can help you envision the pain:

1. Renewal charges show up on my credit card (I would have cancelled prior to renewal if I could have ever figured out where to call. But that’s another horrible user experience blog post. Let’s move on.)

2. I call the number listed on the charge.

3. I am asked by an automated voice if I want to use voice prompts or keypad. I choose keypad.

4. I subsequently end up in a system that asks me for voice prompts at every step in the process with keypad as an option only a couple of times.

5. The system keeps telling me it is sorry that it doesn’t understand my voice.

6. I repeat each one of my answers, typically, 4 times before there is recognition.

7. I have to go through 6-7 questions/steps before I can actually cancel my subscription. (Since the system struggles to recognize my responses, this is looking like about 24 attempts to answer questions by this point…)

8. At each one of those steps I hear a long spiel about some fantastic offer that I now have to extend my subscription…I have to listen to the whole thing before I can move on to the next step in the cancellation process.

9. And here’s the kicker: I can only cancel one magazine at a time. So, I have to repeat the entire process for my second magazine subscription. That’s about 48 steps to cancellation…

And in the end, I am not actually 100% sure that the subscriptions were cancelled. It seems I’m getting a refund for one, but not the other (who knows why). Exasperated, I do exactly what they hoped I would and give up. I just can’t take it. Objective achieved. I wonder if Money Magazine and National Geographic Traveler know or care that this vendor designed a system to lock me in.

I have no idea what name of this company is…but if you feel like reminding yourself that yes, user experience designers do, in fact, have the opportunity to make the world a worse or better place…please call this number and enjoy!

1-800-927-9578

Part of the Smart.fm iPhone App Story

In his last post, Dan shared an overview of the smart.fm iPhone app project, but I wanted to expand on what he shared by offering some guidelines for anyone taking a product from web to mobile.

Don’t think “mobile version of a website,” think “mobile component of a larger experience” The smart.fm iPhone app should not be a pared down version of the smart.fm website — a path that thinking of it as a “mobile version” might lead us down. Instead, we want the iPhone app to complement the website — not replicate or miniaturize it — and to support the larger experience of learning anytime and anywhere.

Put experience first, not features. Taking the list of website features and prioritizing them might seem like an obvious starting point for designing a mobile app based on an existing site. But because a complementary iPhone app may or may not include features from the website, before we looked at features at all, we took time to think about the mobile experience independently. Why might you use this app in a mobile context? What are some scenarios where you’d use it?

Get into the mobile mindset. When you’re sitting in a meeting room, it can be hard to think beyond obvious mobile uses. So much so that taking the team on a walk through the neighborhood, mobile-sized sketchbooks in hand, has become a regular part of mobile workshops I’ve facilitated and participated in in the past.

On another project, I took the team on virtual walks, where we first listed the breadth of contexts in which you’d use the mobile device (in bed, in front of the TV, while shopping, on a plane, etc.) and then imagined how we’d use the mobile device in each of those contexts.

For the smart.fm workshop, we free-listed not only mobile contexts, but also the characteristics of mobile experiences. We clustered these characteristics and then used these as starting points for imagining use cases for the iPhone app.

Get into users’ minds. From this emerged dozens of ideas for new, uniquely mobile uses for the iPhone app. We voted on the top use cases and clustered them based on the mental “mode” a user would be in when engaging in that activity: Are they in a “Study” mode? A “Reacting” mode? A “Look Up Something” mode?

Once we’d defined the major mental spaces, only then did we bring out our pre-printed sticky notes featuring every action you can do on the website. Talking through each feature one-by-one, we discussed whether and when you’d want to do that thing in a mobile context, and if so, which mental space would you be in.

Think system, not standalone. To continue to remind us all that the iPhone app will be part of a system, not a standalone app, we intentionally called the bucket for features that wouldn’t be included in the iPhone app “Stuff the website is better at” rather than “Other” or “Discards” or something like that. While we do want people to be able to engage with the app without having to use the website, realizing that the website is simply better for some tasks made us all feel better about leaving some features for the site to handle.

While it can still be hard to let some possibilities go, knowing what the mobile is best at and doing that well can result in a much more compelling mobile experience than a “mobile version of Smart.fm” could ever be.

By getting everyone into the mobile mindset, we were able to develop a solid set of priorities that we’ve been continuing to flesh out through user flows and wireframes. We look forward to sharing our progress soon!

For now, here’s a summary of activities teams can engage in when engaging in a mobile prioritization work session:

1. Write mobile contexts and characteristics on stickies and cluster them on the wall.
2. Based on these contexts and characteristics, imagine how you would use the app in a mobile context. Add use cases to the wall near the characteristics from which they emerged.
3. Dot vote on which use cases are the most compelling.
4. Cluster the most compelling use cases based on which mental mode the user would be in when engaging in that activity.
5. Referencing a list of all of the existing website features, determine which activities fit into these mental spaces and which are better left for the website.

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!