Adaptive Path Blog

Jared Spool. You know him, you love him, and you can see him when he keynotes MX: Managing Experience on March 7th.

He’s graciously allowed us to repost this article so we can give you an idea of what his MX talk is based on.

The 3 Qs for Great Experience Design
By Jared M. Spool
(Originally published: Oct 06, 2008 here)

For more than seven years, we’ve studied how the great user experience teams succeed. We’ve looked at a variety of variables to isolate what it takes. We’ve looked at management structure, employed methodologies, best practices, and hiring qualifications. We’ve looked at team communication techniques, requirement gathering techniques, the target industry, and the geographic location. All said, we’ve inspected about 250 different variables for dozens of organizations across a wide variety of industries, educational institutions, and government.

As with most things, most variables don’t play a role. However, we found three key variables as being critically important: vision, feedback, and culture. Using these three variables, we’ve created corresponding questions to help us quickly rate a team’s experience design prowess. Teams that answer these questions well are far more likely to create great experiences than the rest of the pack.

Factor #1: Understanding the purpose of vision
Here’s the first question we ask: “Does everyone on your team know what the experience will be like interacting with your offerings five years from now?”

When the answer is affirmative, any team member can describe what the user’s experience will be like in five years. They’ll tell us a story, like this real one from a century-old insurance company:

“An insured home and car owner, having just had a tree fall on their garage, will log into the site, explain the damage, upload pictures, and get initial claim approval to start temporary repairs and get a rental car—all within a few minutes. Within the next 24 hours, inspection appointments and a detailed damage assessment are scheduled and reviewed, and the repairs are underway within 48 hours. All the payments are handled electronically from the insurance company, with a single NET-60 bill sent to the policy holder for the deductibles.”

This story is an experience vision. It outlines how the person, in this case someone who insures both their home and car with the company, can make a joint claim and quickly start the recovery process. Notice that the story doesn’t describe the specifics of the design or the system — that’s not important. What’s important is understanding the experience of the policy holder.

While this particular story may not sound that interesting or difficult to someone outside, for this organization it’s a radical departure from today’s experience. Their business units currently don’t talk to each other and pretend that customers don’t exist beyond their own individual products. So, this integrated vision shows a radical departure and eliminates much of the frustration caused by today’s organizational reality. For this organization, five years is aggressive for the substantial, under-the-covers changes that this vision will require.

We like looking five-years ahead because it gets beyond the immediate reactive requirements and starts considering what a great experience could be. If we only looked one year ahead, we’d be stuck with the current realities. If we look too far out, we get into the realm of science fiction.

Because everyone on the team has the same vision, they are all on the same page for what it takes to succeed. Think of it as a stake in the sand on the horizon. Everyone can see the stake and knows when they are taking baby steps towards it and when they are moving away. The stake can move at any time (and, for some organizations, does frequently), but that’s ok, since everyone can see the change and start moving in the new direction.

Struggling teams can’t answer this question affirmatively. They either have never considered beyond the problems of the day or everyone has a different vision. Working to have a solid vision that everyone shares will go a long way to help these teams.

Factor #2: Having a solid feedback mechanism
While the first question deals with where the team is going, the second question deals with where the design has been: “In the last six weeks, have your team members spent at least two hours watching people experience your product or service?”

We’re looking for teams that can answer affirmatively no matter when we ask. That means they are regularly watching the users and learning from them.

These observation sessions can happen in a variety of ways (and in the best organizations, the variety is wide). They can be usability tests or field studies. In each case, each team member has spent a minimum of two hours observing the current experience.

Note that we’re not talking about surveys or satisfaction measures. Those instruments are often flawed and only give a very small piece of the picture. In the best case, they can tell us whether users are frustrated or delighted, but they can’t tell us why. The team needs to observe the experience, in a detailed manner, to really get the information required to make the critical decisions.

Six weeks is an important period. In our research, the average team member works on an experience design project for twenty-four months. This means they’ll encounter a minimum of 16 separate experiences during their tenure, working out to be an average of 48 observations for a four-member team during that period. All of that detailed information can’t help but create better informed decisions in the design process.

Longer than six weeks and the exposure to the users starts to wear off. It’s far less likely that a team member will say, “What about when we saw Fred have problems with accessing multiple policies?” when Fred’s experience happened months before.

Many struggling teams have never had a single member observe the experience of using their design, even though, in some cases, millions of users interact with the design every day. In other cases, they only get data from indirect sources or they’ve had limited exposure during their tenure. When this happens, each member of the team can only talk to their own experience of using the design, which is very likely to be at odds with how real users experience it.

Factor #3: Living a culture that relishes “failure”
The first two questions are straight-forward and make sense, from a strategic perspective. You have to know where you’re going and you have to know what you’ve already built. The last question, on the other hand, can seem counter-intuitive: “In the last six weeks, has your senior management held a celebration of a recently introduced design problem?”

In most organizations, problems are not cause for celebration. However, in a culture that pushes for frequent small changes, problems become opportunities for improvement. Teams that answer affirmatively have established a culture that not only accepts failure, but relishes it as a way to learn about the users and their needs.

At a major software corporation, the CEO regularly holds parties to give out a valued award, shaped as a full-size life preserver, to individuals who have created “learning opportunities” by introducing a problem into the design. Of course, the CEO acknowledges that the problem wasn’t introduced intentionally. But, because it made it into the design, the organization learned important lessons they can use going forward. Receiving the life preserver award from the CEO has become a high honor within the company.

For example, a technology company recently experienced a massive server outage as, upon the release of a highly-desired new feature, millions of users tried to upgrade simultaneously. While the server outage was a major embarrassment (reflected in the press and on Wall Street), it was because of a successful marketing and design campaign for highly-desired functionality. Despite the momentary crisis, the organization simultaneously learned how to create desirable enhancements while also learning the impact that it has on their infrastructure — both valuable lessons they’ll refer to for years to come.

The best organizations hold these celebrations frequently, because they are constantly learning from their mistakes. By making the learning process explicit, through their acknowledgement and reward, the culture starts to look for it. As the old saying goes, “That which is measured gets done and that which is rewarded gets done well.”

Struggling organizations do not hold celebrations of what they perceive to be design problems. Instead, they’ll punish the “culprits” and put new product-preventing policies in place to stop it from re-occurring. Soon, the original stimuli for these policies are forgotten and the organization is doomed to repeat the mistakes.

Driving Towards Improvement
The neat thing about these three questions is their applicability to constant improvement. Teams can self assess and look for opportunities to answer the questions better.

A good team may have a start to the vision, but hasn’t communicated it to everyone who has influence over the design. The team may occasionally get feedback on their current experience, but hasn’t seen anyone recently. And there’s always opportunities to highlight the latest things they’ve learned, even if it was a difficult learning process.

While further research could show there are other factors that influence a team’s success, it’s clear to us that these three factors are critically important. Fortunately, improving them has little downside, making them a serious candidate for any amount of investment the organization can afford.
———–
About MX: Managing Experience
March 7-8 | San Francisco | $1,595
Use promo code BLOG for 10% off
www.mxconference.com

MX is a conference for people who take a leadership role in guiding better experiences into the world. MX serves up examples to learn from and approaches to adopt that can help you lead your organization toward investing in or improving your customer experience on the web, mobile, and more. Over a day and a half we’ll look at the key elements critical to your success as a leader: experience strategy and communicating that strategy, organizational buy-in, results-oriented investment and measurement, and the emerging trends you’ll have to master.

MX 2010 | What is MX? from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

We hope to see you in March! Register now and use code BLOG for 10% off your registration.

Maybe we’re crazy or just caught up in the spirit giving — who cares!? This is your chance to get your seats for UX Week, MX: Managing Experiences Across the Web and Beyond and UX Intensive Amsterdam super cheap.

Now through the end of the year, we’re giving 15% off the already low early bird prices. In some cases you’ll save over a grand by registering now. That’s a one followed by three zeros. It looks like this: $1,000. Cute little zeros!

Now might be a great time to check in with your purse string holder to see if there’s any budget left to snag these great prices (and invest in your professional development). Here’s a flyer you can download and leave on your boss’s desk as a hint. Are you the boss? Print it out and hang it up as a reminder to register by December 31st to save BIG.

Register with code RNSB by midnight, December 31st, Pacific Time (although we hope you’re doing something more fun at midnight December 31st than looking for conferences to attend). Hope to see you next year!

I’m terrifically excited to announce MX 2010, the conference for people who take a leadership role in guiding better experiences into the world. If you need to guide, lead, or drag your organization towards delivering great experiences, this is the event and the group for you.

It’s career-shaping content
We’re ecstatic about our keynote speaker Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, one of the most enlightening and effective communicators on what it takes to empower design teams and deliver experiences the increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

We’re also bringing back Margaret Gould Stewart, previously of Google and now at YouTube, she’s arguably the most loved UX team leader and the most refreshing and practical thinker in our practice.

Plus we have Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction, who’s changing the way organizations are delivering customer service in the future. We also have Dan Saffer, popular speaker from Kicker Studios. Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path and Harvard Business Review blogger, will be sharing his most recent discoveries of how organizations make great experience happen. And soon we’ll share more exciting speakers including members of some of the most highly rated customer experience organizations around.

It’s what matters right now
We’re maximizing speakers and content around the topics that make a difference right now to UX leaders. That means we’re addressing head on:

• Creating and communicating an experience strategy
• Organizational buy-in and change to deliver great experiences
• Delivering meaningful business results
• And the emerging trends you need to plan for today

It’s super-concentrated
We’ve been hard at work devising a super-concentrated form of MX, packing into a day-and-a-half more great leaders, more examples of success and failure, and more ideas about how to make things happen. To do it, we’re featuring many short-format sessions and speakers sharing the very best and most essential ideas as focused and fast as they can. For a day-and-a-half of your time, you’ll be leaving with a boat-load of new ideas and new practices for the rest of 2010.

Come make your 2010 great
Come to San Francisco March 7-8 and join our focused community of UX leaders who are sharing and shaping the practices of our field. We have a great low room rate at the event site, the lovely Intercontinental San Francisco. Register now and get in cheap. Do it! And make a big difference in your year for 2010.

One major new addition to next week’s MX Conference is hands-on workshops led by experts who can stretch our thinking and skills in new directions. One of these is Josh Levine, formally of Nuetron, but who has recently formed his own new practice. He regularly leads workshops to help organizations understand and manage their brand and their customer experiences strategically.

I caught up with Josh for 5 questions I’ve been dying to ask. Register for MX 2009 here (use the code BLOG for 10% off) and I’m sure you can ask him more in person. Here’s the Q&A:

[Brandon Schauer] You recently left your position as a brand coach and creative director at Neutron to start your own practice named The Matter Collaborative. You’ve read the financial section of the paper recently, right? Are you nuts?

[Josh Levine] Nope—now is exactly the time to start something new. Just because no one knows what’s going to happen, doesn’t mean there’s not tremendous opportunity. You just have to look beyond the paper panic to see it.

[BS] So now that that’s out of the way, just what is The Matter Collaborative about, what kind of problems do you solve, and how do you solve them?

[JL] For over ten years I’ve helped global brands engage consumers and empower employees through design, strategy, and marketing programs. I started Matter as a way to bring similar benefits to creative entrepreneurs with smaller businesses but just as big a vision. My goal is to help them increase their value and get the work they want through positioning, messaging, and touchpoint design.

[BS] You recently chaired an intense panel at the San Francisco chapter of the AIGA titled “Design Through the Downturn.” So what’s the answer? How do we successfully design through the downturn?

[JL] The bottom line is that in order to not only survive the downturn but grow your design-driven business over the next 10 years you have to embrace the tidal wave of change broadsiding our industry. Design is no longer about the artifacts regardless if its a product, an identity system, or even a website—these are all things that can be outsourced on the cheap or worse, slashed from budgets entirely. Today design is about applying right-brain thinking to solve problems in a left-brained world.

I suppose you could say this is what design has always been about. That’s true—but today (and this goes back to your first question) there’s a greater need for the non-linear, generative thinking designers employ to solve problems. Businesses have leveraged themselves to the gills. Cutting budgets and head count will only get you so far. Apply design as a problem-solving tool for businesses and you’ll discover where the real value is, and will continue to be over the next decade.

[BS] While at Neutron you helped to create and pilot their “steal this idea” newsletter. For people managing user experiences and UX teams in 2009, which idea would you recommend they steal?

[JL] One of my favorite ideas is Invisible Branding.

The term refers to those unseen elements which play a critical role in a customer’s experience, but are often overlooked because they don’t take a physical form; CEO vision, pricing strategy, and vendor selection are a few examples. This piece of the brand experience is so important, I predict over the next few years companies will begin to create teams dedicated to designing and managing invisibles. IX anyone?

[BS] So there’s brand and there are experiences. If you had to clarify these two amorphous overlapping concepts (like I’m now insisting you do) what’s the simplest way you can describe the differences and the relationships between them?

[JL] I explain to my clients that brand is just a synonym for reputation. So, how do you influence your reputation in the market? No matter the touchpoints you come up with (your messaging, your website, the way you answer the phone) it’s all part of the experience.

Brand is reputation, and reputation is the sum of customer experiences.

One caveat: while brand and experience are connected at the hip, there’s one important difference—the company can design the experience, but it’s the customer who decides the reputation.

The company (designs) the experience (is interpreted by) customers (determine)

the reputation (is the) brand.

Recently I had a chance to chat with Marty Neumeier, President of Neutron LLC and author of the recently published book The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation. Marty will be speaking at MX 2009, March 1-3 in San Francisco.

[Kumi Akiyoshi] How did you become a brand expert?

[Marty Neumeier] I went to Art Center in advertising and illustration. They didn’t have design back in, this is prehistoric days, in the sixties, there was no design major so I took advertising and illustration and if you kind of put those things together you get design. Then I went out on my own and just started doing all kinds of design- advertising, some copy writing, illustration, whatever I could get work doing and as I worked on all those things, I realized that none of it matters unless there is strategy behind it. You have to know what you’re applying it to. So I started to see a disconnect between what designers wanted to do and what the marketplace really needed – what businesses needed.

I started learning more about the real uses of design. I started reading books by Trout and Reese. They had a book called “Positioning” that was very enlightening. Then from there I just started learning more about business strategy and working my way through all the literature on business strategy. And then I was able to say, “Ok, if that’s what you’re trying to do, if that’s what you need to do, I know how design can help.” So that’s how I got into doing that. I don’t know if you know my history but in the late nineties, from ‘96 to 2001, I published a magazine called Critique.

[KA] Yes, that was brilliant.

[MN] Thank you. The idea of Critique was to help designers understand how to apply their work more closely to the real needs of culture and the real needs of business. I found it difficult because designers don’t always want to think about what they’re doing. They just love doing it. So I had to find enough people who wanted to think about design to build the magazine on. And after 5 years of trying, there just weren’t enough traditional designers that wanted to think about strategy and so I basically closed the magazine and closed my design business and I just sat down and thought about it for a while.

I realized there is a gap between creativity and strategy that is very wide and that nothing good is going to happen for designers or for business until we close that gap. So that’s when I started Neutron to start to solve this problem. Neutron, instead of going to designers to try to get them to understand more about how business works, goes to business people to try to get them to understand how design works and how design can help them. I think they’re more open to it than designers are open to business. And it’s proved to be true. We’ve been able to make a living just working with corporations to get them to embrace branding and designing and innovation.

[KA] So when you talk about designers, are you talking about traditional graphic designers?

[MN] Yes, traditional graphic designers.

[KA] I would have thought that designers working in digital media would be slightly more open minded about these things.

[MN] Yes, they are. They’re starting from a different position than traditional designers. The tradition of design really comes from Bauhaus. And the Bauhaus was really about trying to apply art principles, aesthetic principles, to industry and so it really embraced art. I think that’s what’s holding back traditional design – the feeling that we’re all artists. And I think interactive designers, for example, start from a different place. They don’t learn about the Bauhaus. They don’t care about that. They’re coming from technology. So their challenge is to add the aesthetic qualities that traditional design has. So that’s usually what is missing there, the traditional aesthetic qualities.

[KA] In your book, the Designful Company, which is a great book, you mention, “The central problem with brand building is getting complex organizations to execute simple ideas”. Are there examples of companies doing this successfully and if so, how?

[MN] It’s very difficult to do that because being creative within a corporate structure is not like playing classical music. It’s like playing jazz. There’s no music that everyone is playing. You have to respond to what others are doing. So that really puts a lot of pressure on the skills that are inside the company. We find that there aren’t enough design skills in most corporations – far from it. So how do they increase their ability to embrace design and use design in a more holistic way? In a more consistent, coherent way, and they need help doing that. They not only need to bring better design people who are sort of systems thinkers into the corporations, they need help on the outside too. That’s one of the roles Neutron plays. We help the people inside the companies deal with this confusion of work and all the disconnects, or silos inside which they work where they can’t or won’t talk to each other so how do you cross all those silos? So the Designful Company is all about addressing that situation for any company that wants to really win through innovation.

[KA] Do you have examples of companies that are successfully doing that?

[MN] No, because none of them do it perfectly across the board. There are historically some very good companies. IBM has done an amazing job over the years organizing all their design to look like it came from the same company. HP, one of our clients is doing a pretty good job right now, very much better than they used to do. We have a system for helping them do that. As I recall a few years ago, I don’t know how it is now, but Autodesk had a really good, consistent design program. So there are a few and usually it just comes and goes. So the challenge is to get the whole company working together against a common shared vision.

[KA] I guess I would think of Apple immediately.

[MN] Oh! How could I forget Apple? Well you know the problem with Apple, I don’t work with Apple so I don’t know for sure, but with Apple it seems like it’s very much CEO driven so that the CEO, Steve Jobs is the designer in chief, so that’s a very rare situation. He does a wonderful job and I’m so happy that Apple exists because it’s a great example and what we tell our clients is “Would you like to be Apple-ized?” because we could help you do that but it’s not going to be hiring a designer to be your CEO, it’s going to be more systemic programmatic way of looking at design where it outlives the CEO. It goes on.

[KA] What impact does design thinking have on the way businesses operate today?

[MN] Well, it doesn’t have enough is my view. But it could because the way traditional business managers think is kind of in a two-step process- knowing and doing. You have to know something, through experience, case studies, or you went to Harvard and you know there are certain solutions to certain kinds of problems. So that’s the knowing part and then you just go from there, right to doing. It’s very fast but it’s not reflective so there’s no one questioning the knowing or the doing. What designers do is they’re put in the middle step called “making.” So what we like to do is create prototypes of new options that weren’t on the table before. So that changes “knowing” because suddenly designers are saying “Well you thought you knew that but maybe you don’t know that. How would you regard this option?” Then changes “doing” because it gives you more options and that’s how you innovate. So that’s what needs to be introduced to the corporate world. It’s the difference between deciding the way forward and designing the way forward. With designing you prototype, you explore, you imagine different outcomes, and then you choose.

[KA] How do you introduce that to a corporation that doesn’t have design thinking?

[MN] Well, first you write a book (laughs). Then you start offering solutions. That’s what Neutron’s niche is. We offer a way to plant that seed within a company so that it will start to grow. And the seed often is the corporate vision. What vision can we embrace that is so bold and so beguiling that everyone will want to follow it and they will know what they need to do to work together. So you need that. The next thing you do is you need to give everyone in the company, especially in communications and marketing the tools to start building communications and products against that vision. Often that can exist on an Internet site and that site should be beautifully designed. It should be so easy to access and so clear, a lot of work should go into that. So that’s a great job for interactive designers to make that just a beautiful, useful place. Then you start to build a team internally whose job it is to collaborate. And they can do a lot to get it started because if they’re good people and they love to collaborate and they know what they’re doing and can cross silos, they can be spread out through the whole company and connect to do this work together and that starts to bridge the gaps.

[KA] In your book, you argue that truly innovative ideas don’t need much help from metrics. It’s often hard to evaluate metrics unless the product gains popularity. For example the Aeron chair, it was very unpopular during the metrics of consumer research but they decided to ship it anyway and it became very successful. Innovation seems to happen when an organization is willing to take risks.

[MN] That’s correct. But there’s a limit to how much of a risk they can take. A couple of things need to happen. They need to understand the nature of the risk, or the nature of innovation. I should say, which often looks riskier than it is. The other thing they can do is to use design and prototyping to de-risk the risk. Take the risk out of innovation. To do that you use a stage gate innovation process where you prototype very quickly a lot of future ideas then you test those with an audience and some of those will look good and you put a little more money into it and build it out a bit more and if that looks good you test it in the market place in a controlled way and if that looks good put a lot of money in and you roll it out. So the risk is broken down into parts. This is exactly how venture capitalist works. They take a lot of risk too. So they de-risk it by breaking it down into stages.

The other thing you can do is teach corporate decision makers what a really big success looks like in its early stages because they get scared when it doesn’t look great right from the beginning. We show them the “good and different chart.” What you want is ideas that are good and good is obvious, something that is more beautiful or more practical, more useful, faster, whatever it needs to be – those things are measurable. And the other thing it should be is different. Those things you can find out by testing prototypes with the intended audience and you’ll get some very interesting responses.

So with the Aeron chair the responses were “Well, it’s pretty comfortable but it’s very weird looking. I don’t think I’d every buy this.” Or, “You call that a chair? I don’t think that looks like a chair. I’d be embarrassed to have that.” Then if they sat in it they’d say, “Yeah, it has some interesting features that I couldn’t get in other chairs.” So if Herman Miller, the company that put that out listened to those responses, they would cancel the project and they would have lost out on the biggest success they ever had. So they were smart enough to realize that something that was very innovative is going to get mixed reviews on the “different” side. It’s going to sound too different to people that doesn’t mean that it’s a failure. It’s actually one of the hallmarks of a future success.

You have to have that if you’re going to try for real innovation. The Prius, the same thing. Who knew that the Prius would be the biggest success in car manufacturing in the last ten years? Well, if you looked at the “good – different” chart, and you looked at the pattern of responses, you would have seen that same pattern. That’s a class we teach in marketing so they can see how good and different relate to each other.

[KA] Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. I’m looking forward to seeing you speak at MX 2009, March 1-3 in San Francisco.

Steven Keith is the Executive Vice President Strategy for capstrat and he’ll be one of the speakers at MX 2009. He and his team have been helping Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC) prepare for their future on the Web in the face of the onslaught of consumer-driven health care. In essence, Capstrat helped a 76-year-old health insurer evolve into a user-centered design advocate. Guided by a new organization-wide Web strategy, BCBSNC is moving toward greater emphasis on user research to ensure they are delivering better experiences that align with consumers’ needs in an increasingly DIY health care environment.

Understandably, this is a large and complicated process. So, I thought it would be helpful to talk with him about some of the details and what he plans to cover in his MX talk.

Todd Wilkens [TW]: Can you give me a synopsis of what you’ll be speaking about at MX? What are the main points you’re hoping people will walk away with?

Steven Keith [SK]: We want to speak about our effort to transform Web work at BCBSNC. We originally signed on with BCBSNC to help them develop an overarching Web strategy to accomplish their business objectives and better serve users. We quickly realized this was more than a strategic exercise. To be successful, it required a complete rethink of BCBSNC processes, team structure, and corporate culture.

Core was increasing the Web team’s strategic position in the company. That is, the Web team/Web Office (WO) should be contributing to the company’s vision for meeting the needs of prospective and current members online. And recommending that the Web team have a seat at the table when determining how business objectives translate to the Web.

Capstrat helped BCBSNC to embed the user (whether it be a current health insurance member or prospective shopper) at the center of their Web strategy. Then, we recommended a team structure to support user-centered design and realize their strategy. We developed a new org structure that included a group of online strategists domiciled within the Web Office to drive design strategy based on user research and usability.

Through the talk, we want people to see that an organization-wide shift like this is possible and specifically share what we learned about enabling a shift like this to take hold. We want to illustrate the before-and-after, with an emphasis on the after.

[TW]: Clearly, a lot of the work you did for Blue Cross of NC was about changing organizational culture and processes. Did the project start out that way or was it a design project initially that ended up needing culture change to be successful?

[SK]: It didn’t start out that way. We started by laying the strategy groundwork and quickly realized that we would have to venture into significant organizational change to be successful. A lot of our work became process design and org development. It was also a lot of consensus building, persuasion and culture communications. It was an assignment that was befitting an integrated communications firm like Capstrat that has many disciplines in place to help these projects succeed.

The project started out as a question from the executive team: “What is our Web strategy?”

We broke up the engagement into three phases.

• Strategy – what should BCBSNC prioritize on the Web and what should it sacrifice?
• Solutions – what tools and content will bridge business objectives with user value?
• Implementation – now that we know what focus on, how do we build the team and processes to support strategy?

[TW]: When you talk about process design and org development, was this more about rearranging the activities and people that they already had or introducing new practices, roles, and personnel? Or both? Without giving away too much of your MX talk, could you tell us a little bit about how you approached this process, including the major challenges and guiding principles you used when working toward the solution?

[SK]: With respect to process design, this was less about rearranging and more about defining a vision that would map back to their corporate goals. There wasn’t anything really to rearrange. We developed a design strategy-centric team, project prioritization schema and process that moved faster. Web work at BCBSNC today is done around a different set of goals and answers to a more discriminating strategic prioritization process. There is increased evaluation of what needs to be done based on their strategic directives and user research to determine whether or not it will get into the queue. This is much more about trying out new practices, hiring new personnel and moving or dedicating IT resources to support the new Web office.

Capstrat helped design their new organization with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) at the nucleus and User Advocates (UAs). We then recommended research/analytics, design and usability as core practice areas with a seat at the table, so to speak.

The challenges were many. Principally, helping the organization hone in on consumers as their priority audience on the Web. Then, helping the organization adopt value design for consumers instead of tools for insurance brokers or re-inventing claims adjudication. Once that vision was accepted, building the team to support the new vision and process was the tallest mountain to climb. The Web Office negotiated to move certain personnel from other parts of the organization to their team and declared new processes that broke out of the enterprise model. This was necessary because the organization was operating based on 18 month software lifecycles, instead of “Web time.”

[TW]: What sorts of tools, methods, or approaches did you use to address the consensus building, persuasion, and culture communications aspects of the project?

[SK]: Before Capstrat had UX or Business Process skills, they had persuasion architecture and corporate communications skills. We drew from a vastly talented team of Capstrat employee marketing folks who knew well enough this whole thing was far more than business process re-engineering or design strategy – it was just as much about culture change. We depended on our team of communicators to distill complex ideas and hefty reports into compelling conversation and presentations. One of the most powerful tools at our disposal was information designers at Capstrat who simplified complex information and illustrated it clearly through smart design. We helped release this virus into their 5,000 person organization with one-on-interviews with 60+ people in Phase One, consensus-building strategy sessions with internal stakeholders (which we call “grind sessions”), plus calculated communications and smart presentations to all the key decision makers.

I recently had the pleasure of chatting via email with Sara Beckman, a member of the faculty at the Haas School of Business. Sara will be speaking on Communicating the Value of Design at our upcoming MX 2009 conference.

Embracing your inner “quant” changes the game for many design leaders. How do you move from the often subjective language of design to speaking a new dialect of business impact measured in numbers? In this conversation, Sara talks about approaches to assessing overall value, how having empirical data can unlock key strategic conversations, and tips for focusing efforts on the measurements that matter most.

You can read the full essay here.

But the essay is just one step in this very important conversation…hear more from Sara and other design leaders (and hobnob with the folks at the vanguard of leading experiences) at MX 2009 in San Francisco, March 1-3.

Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.

Known as a leading edge innovator in the use of social media in customer service, Zappos has become a darling of the Business Week set and a case study for those hoping to create a more meaningful customer service experience. Brian Kalma, Director of Web Strategy and User Experience was kind enough to sit down with me for a quick interview in preparation for his talk at MX 2009.

[Henning Fischer] Could you tell us a little about yourself, your team, what you do for Zappos and where you sit in the organization?

[Brian Kalma] I started at Zappos back in 2003 working on developing the Product Photography and Image Processing department. Back then it was a priority to purely represent the product visually. As that department grew to cranking out about 10,000 photos per day, it was in a pretty good place and I was able to move on to new things. Under the umbrella of Creative Services we incubated several sub-departments: Design, Front-End Development, Social Media, and User Experience. Each sub-department grew to be its own entity or merge with others, and I decided to focus on the area I felt we needed to improve on the most, User Experience. I currently head up our relatively new UX department where I am Director of Web Strategy/UX. The team consists of a UX Manager, 2 UX Designers, a taxonomist and a generalist.  We’re not quite at the point where we are the initiators and drivers of all projects, but we have now staked a claim in all projects and are key pieces to projects. The exception is the evolution of our ZETA site, where we are the business owners.

[HF] What does it mean to lead a UX team in an organization that is first and foremost customer service oriented?

[BK] Quite plainly, it drives our focus. Customer service should BEGIN online, not with a phone conversation or a shipping upgrade. This drives us to really focus the ZETA site on achieving the goal of being a service-oriented site, not just a company. We are leveraging loads of customer feedback, user testing and overall intuition. Every employee goes through 4 weeks of customer service training at Zappos, it is instilled in us, and it helps us make better UX decisions on our ZETA site. We have a ways to go, but are in a better place than ever.

[HF] How do you see the role of UX evolving at Zappos?

[BK] Personally, I see the team becoming key drivers and innovators at Zappos. I see us becoming the place business needs and problems are brought to first to solve, the site is our storefront, we have to drive it.  I also see UX evolving to become the data house for web usage statistics on our site as well as becoming the company resource for competitive research analysis. Ultimately, UX should be well enough integrated into the company such that we are less so a department and more so a mindset. Like customer service.

[HF] Zappos had jumped into social media far more enthusiastically than many, and you have spoken about the notion of people planning as being key to the company’s success. A lot of companies want a one size fits all approach to customer service, yet Zappos does almost the opposite. It has a very organic, homegrown effect, yet is clearly complex. How did this approach evolve?

[BK] This is a tough one to answer. Getting the right people with the right mindset is paramount to any notion/concept getting executed as envisioned. But, because you have the right people that vision can guide itself to a place not envisioned. I think Zappos always had a focus on service, it was the vision but it has evolved and has become realized in its own unique way because of the people. What we try to do, because we are confident with the people planning we do, is create as many customer touch point OPPORTUNITIES as possible. Not all customers want to talk to us, but when they do we want to be there in the place they feel comfortable talking to us in. It started with Phone, e-mail and live chat. It has evolved to be many places including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Get Satisfaction… you name it. We have team members who are savvy across many customer touch point areas, we basically tell them “be smart and be real”, then we trust our hiring skills. If a business leader or company owner is not comfortable having their employees talk to their customers then they have the wrong employees!

Join us at MX 2009 in San Francisco March 1-3. Register today using the code BLOG and get 10% off.

Welcome to part 2 of our interview with David Butler, VP of Design for the Coca-Cola Company. Part 1 is available here. When we left off we were talking about the different roles that design fills within Coca-Cola. This part of the interview shifts gears a bit and talks about one of the major themes we’ll be exploring at MX: designing in a down economy.

[Henning Fischer] How do you design with purpose in a down economy?

[David Butler] That’s a good question. It’s all in how you look at it. That sounds kind of trite, but there’s a similar discussion about the value of design. Is part of the value of design driven towards productivity? Doing more with less? Or is designing to do more with less thought about in terms of sustainability? They’re both sort of the same thing. In a down economy, doing more with less is exactly the focus of the company. In reality it’s what we do every day. As designers it’s always about how we can provide more value or more enduring experiences. It’s not that different from what we do in an up economy.

[Brandon Schauer] Design is easily seen as a cost center in a tough economy. What advice would you give to people who are feeling that?

[DB] When I got here, people asked, “What do you do?” and I worried a lot about trying to define design and tackle everything that we could impact. Soon I realized we should just focus our design efforts on the things that really matter for the company and provide the most value: the way people are going to actually touch the package and experience our brands. Most of what we do focuses on retail and the retail experience and that is never going to go away in an up or down economy. What I have done and what we continue to do is focus on the highest value that our function and capability of design can provide to the organization.

One more thing…let me say it in a different way. Everyone is tightening their belts, right? What that means, simply, is that we need to design more accurately, and we need to leverage our scale more proficiently. The projects we work on have not changed dramaticaly, they’ve just become more important.

[HF] I like the phrase designing with accuracy. In some ways it’s what we’re going to be struggling with over the next couple of months as well. We’re seeing changes in our business and I think we will have to increase the accuracy of the things and the engagements that we step into as well.

[BS] Yeah, if budgets are smaller and you’re doing fewer projects, you need to raise the chances of each project’s success that much more.

[DB] Linking projects directly to the value to the business is critical. If you can prove that value, it’s not a big discussion. You can see the impact.

[BS] Can you give is an example of ways you have helped to explicitly connect to that value? Have you been able to get down to bottom line dollar impacts and things like that with some of your projects?

[DB] Let me answer that in two ways. One is around cost avoidance. We can design something and talk about the scale and hypothesize what the cost avoidance could be. Another way is through the pure, old fashioned business case- the levers that drive the value and provide the return on investment that we have. Nothing new, just a straight-ahead business case. For example, if we design something to be durable over time, we can avoid a lot of the costs in the future. A great case study is the Coke contoured bottle. The basic form was designed in the 1920s. It has been basically untouched since then. Imagine all the costs that we have avoided around that design by designing a classic, enduring design.

[BS] You didn’t even have to create a new icon. You’ve just had to embellish something that was already in people’s lives. How about partnering within Coke? How have you worked with others in the organization to make design more effective?

[DB] As designers we’re intuitively equipped to adapt and integrate than perhaps other functions or parts of the organization. For us we have never had a problem integrating. It has always been the opposite. The demand has far outstripped the supply from day one. Once people understand the value that designers can bring to their part of the organization, it’s not a sell in at all. It becomes more about capacity discussion.

[BS] You’ve had a great career going on from brand director at Sapient to some really successful years at Coke. Who do you look to for inspiration and insight for where you’re going to take things next?

[DB] I’m actually very passionate about design theory. I’m a big fan of the publication, Design Issues. I’m really motivated by theory. I’m interested to see how design theorists are creating the idea of public policy around design in mass culture. That links into sustainability and other issues that we’re facing as a society. Keeping up with the thought of having this culture of design rather than focusing just on the profession of design. When you have a global view, you see the developing economies of China and Brazil and Russia. All these economies are advancing a global middle class and are seeking to develop into something that we here in the United States are familiar with. You see the opportunity and future for design and its almost overwhelming .

[HF] I don’t know if you have seen the recently published design manifesto that was sent to the Obama Administration…

[DB] That’s exactly where my fascination is. That’s where I see design going. For me personally, that’s exactly the path that I see before designers. It’s quite fascinating…

[HF] We’re definitely a few years behind people like the UK Design Council.

[DB] Not just that. If you think about it- I just saw this statistic the other day- roughly speaking we have about 10,000 students in design schools in the US. That sounds like a lot until you understand that China has over 100,000. You quickly see that Asia is going to be the source for design strength and leadership in the not too distant future. When you look at India and China, it causes you, as a Westerner, to rethink where design is going and your influence on that.

[HF] One last closing question: what will you share with us at MX?

[DB] I’d like to share how we developed our strategy and how we’re executing that design strategy here at Coke.

[HF] David, thanks for your time. We’re looking forward to seeing you at MX.

Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.