Adaptive Path Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

…I said at the Shift conference.

Photo by Euan

Download the slides (1.2 MB PDF)

Read Luke W’s write up.

Read Ivo Gomes’ write up of Day 1 (in Portuguese).

A few things popped out of Wired’s September article: Can the PS3 Save Sony?

“With digital entertainment, you have to think about hardware, software, and services that tie them all together,” says [Phil] Wiser, who managed to heave Sony onto the MP3 bandwagon before leaving earlier this year for a Silicon Valley startup. “But it’s very hard to quantify the advantage of good software. If you’re in a hardware company and you analyze it from a financial perspective, you just want to do it as cheaply as you can. Software and services are an afterthought.”

Great. You are selling a game console and the software and services are an afterthought.

Perhaps even more telling:

“At the root of Sony’s precarious position — not just in the industry, but with gamers at large — is the company’s overweening ambition. The PS3 is all about power. Sony has said curiously little about whether this amped-up Linux über-computer will actually be fun to play. Meanwhile, Nintendo wowed everyone at this year’s E3 with the Wii, a console you can play simply by waving a wand at the screen. And Microsoft has upped the quotient by making it easy to play with all your buddies online.”

These are some of the same reasons Disney had to buy Pixar, Ford and GM are in talks with Nissan/Renault and why Will Wright says “It turns out that we don’t use computers to enhance our math skills — we use them to expand our people skills.”

During the dot.com bubble, I worked with a large technology corporation on a product with a meticulously pre-meditated strategy. The strategy made sense on paper and was a nice antidote to all of the, um, exuberant product strategies popular at that time. The product didn’t take off mainly because it was trying to accomplish too much (think iMovie + iPhoto). Additionally, the product’s strategy was static from conception through launch, which was about a year and a half. This experience got me thinking … when is it appropriate to develop a detailed product strategy in advance, and when is it better to let the specific details emerge during the design process?

Enter the Economist’s Best Business Book from 2004: The Modern Firm: organizational design for business and growth by John Roberts (Oxford Press 2004). Roberts explores the question of predetermined vs. emergent strategy in a case study on the 19th century battle between the Hudson Bay Company and the Nor’Wester Company. The HBC succeeded for many years with a very exacting top-down strategy until, during a time of economic turbulence, the NWC was able to out compete them (briefly) based on a broad strategic direction and by relying on employees to make good decisions. Roberts asserts that in times of rapid change, business performance is heightened when strategy follows organization rather than the other way around.

This concept explains why broad strategic objectives and principles are more valuable for many technology-focused companies making products now. Overly specific strategies and detailed implementation plans *can* become an impediment to success. This doesn’t mean that strategy or planning isn’t important; quite the contrary. As Roberts explains it, the more important role of a product leader is to “set a broad strategic intent that informs and shapes dispersed strategic decision making [throughout the company or team]“. While this concept seems somewhat obvious, in the real world, gauging how much strategic detail to set from the start, and how much is allowed to emerge is often an interesting and challenging jugdement call.

Yesterday I attended Design 2.0: Products and their Ecosystems, put on by Core77. It was much better than the low expectations I had set for it.

One thing to note, before I get into the details, is that the discussion never quite gelled. It turns out ‘products and their ecosystems’ is a large enough topic that four people can address it and their stories not cohere. Some kind of stronger overarching narrative might have helped focus the discussion, and provide a stronger impression.

When you talk about ecosystems, you’re naturally going to get some biological analogies. Diego stressed the value of designing “fruit flies” not “elephants,” by which he meant, design smaller things with shorter expected lives, things that can flex once in the environment. Robyn Waters talked about product release strategies at Target that were similar—get products out there fast, see what people do with them, and then iterate. This all plays to the idea of prototyping and continuous innovation.

A challenge, though, is understanding your product’s relationship to the ecosystem. The iPod’s success is due to it fitting within a fairly complex ecosystem of physical products, digital products, and networks. While Apple began with the MP3 player (a fruitfly, perhaps), it realized that it wouldn’t deeply succeed until it had the software, and the music store, to provide an integrated experience.

Narratives and storytelling came up frequently. When trying to understand, and present, something as complex as products and their ecosystems. Stories help designers frame their solutions, to find a focus, a heart in their work. Stories also help users appreciate what is happening, to understand how the products can fit in their lives.

Some additional points of observation:

Diego presented the now-hoary “desirability/feasbility/viability” Venn diagram, and it was clearly new to many people in the audience—lots of furious scribbling.

Diego sums up “design thinking” as: Optimism; The Mind of the Child; Attitude of Wisdom; Building to Think (prototyping).

Steve implored people to be cognizant of cultural contexts, which lead to different cultural norms, and to not let your particular background skew your appreciation of others.

Robyn cited a creative process framework I’d never heard before, which was originated by Graham Wallas, which she then applied to contemporary concepts of left- and right-brained:
- stage 1 - preparation (left-brained analytical… research, etc.)
- stage 2 - incubation (right-brained, intuitive, inspirational, etc.)
- stage 3 - illumination (left and right brained together — eureka! light bulb)
- stage 4 - verification (analyze what happened)

Peter discussed the struggles between open and closed formats and technologies in consumer electronics, stressing the need for the former, and clearly upset that, at the current moment, all the major electronics companies were still pursuing the latter, in an effort to establish control.

What would be interesting is to have the first three speakers (Diego, Steve, and Robyn) all of whom are designers of some sort, apply their tools to Peter’s problem, which is getting both electronics companies and their customers to understand the importance and value of openness.

In all, perhaps not a home run, but a thought-provoking discussion nonetheless.

AIGA’s online business and design journal Gain features a weekly series of discussion summaries drawn from a mailing list. Last week’s discussion was on “Measuring for Managing Design”. I contributed to the mailing list thread, but I must say I found the discussion summary dissatisfying. Here’s what I wrote to the mailing list:

This was exactly the kind of situation that we at Adaptive Path attempted to address in our research on ROI, business value, and design. (Which lead to our report, “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience.”)

Choosing the right things to measure can be tricky. I knew of a colleague whose performance was measured on the number of screens he produced. This of course incentivized exactly the wrong thing — more screens probably means worse design, not better.

In our work, we seek to find out what our clients really care about (in terms of numbers/metrics/value) and then demonstrate how design interventions can affect those numbers. I think this gets at your final question. You find out from the business what matters, and then figure out how your design work can influence what matters.

So, for example, we just completed some work for a financial services firm. Among the things that a financial services firm wants is to get customers to add more accounts. The financial services firm knows the value of those accounts to the business (usually measured in “lifetime customer value,” but also in a more straightforward understanding of “assets held.”) In our redesign of the site, we will be successful if more customers add more accounts than they currently do.

But, and I think this is crucial to this discussion, the value of measurement is often greater before the fact than after. With the financial services client, we came up with 9 types of measurements that design could possibly influence. Through some initial prioritization work, we were able to wheedle that down to 4 key measurements. Those 4 measurements became our focus — decisions about design were directly influenced by how it would affect these 4 key areas. That lead to a coherence in our design that would have been lost if we tried to address all possible measurements.

Another thing to consider is that design-by-measurement is great at optimizing current processes, and squeezing the most out of what you already have. It is not as successful for spurring disruptive innovations.

For me, the issue comes down to “What is good design?”, and I would argue that good design is design that has the desired impact. If designers aren’t willing to step up for such accountability, we will continue to be paper-hat-wearing order takers for other parts of the business.

It’s our human nature to emulate things that are good. It’s our nature to make things complete. But when forming a market strategy, these tendancies won’t help out much.

Too often companies go after market leaders by trying to reach parity in feature sets, or worse, by trying to do a little bit of everything. Below is a diagram analyzing the competitors in online photo sites circa early 2005. I’ve been using this diagram to show that you can compete smartly by not doing what your competitors are doing:

Obviously I didn’t include all the competitors in the space in an effort to keep the story simple; and here’s the story: Prior to Flickr, all the competition was focused on printing an a couple of other features. Sharing was under-developed. Rather than competing on printing, Flickr completely ignored this functionality until recently. Instead, Flickr blew the wheels off the competition in sharing. It follows a similar pattern with editing and uploading functionality.

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