Adaptive Path Blog

In many organizations, the people responsible for the user experience strive to show the value of their work. We may instinctively know the value of our work, but it’s so much more powerful when we can explain it terms that matter to others in our organizations.

This is why I’m really happy to be presenting Showing the Value of UX as a virtual seminar on August 6th. The seminar is geared towards people who are entering a point in their careers where they need to understand and communicate about both sides of the equation: UX and business value.

The seminar starts with a deep exploration on the connections between UX and business value, then progresses to a series of principles and tools that you can use to connect User Experience to real business impact.

‘Showing the Value of UX’ is similar to material that I’ve presented and honed at prior conferences on design, business, and management, and so it’s exciting to be able to share these approaches and methods with you directly at your place of work. This will be the second running of the seminar, based on the positive feedback we received from the first session, including comments like this from Sam Felder of the University of Southern California:

“Your presentation had our team discussing your ideas through lunch and gems that we’re going to try to use with clients.”

I look forward to taking this material online, and talking with many of you during the extended Q&A sessions both during and after the presentation. Use the promotional code BLOG and get a 10% discount! Here’s where you can register »

Last week I attended Connecting 07, the ICSID/IDSA Congress. I’d never before engaged with IDSA, and I quite enjoyed it. What struck me was how the issues that industrial and product designers are facing are pretty much identical to what we’re seeing in the world of experience strategy and design.

My favorite talks/speakers:

Hans Rosling, Gapminder. Hans is a dynamic speaker who is able to make statistics and data visualization fun and provocative. If you haven’t seen his TED talk, you should.

Sabine Junginger, Lancaster University. Sabine spoke on “Design Change: A Paradox” about the role that design can play in change management. This may have been my favorite talk of the event, because it both supported and challenged conventional wisdom about the emerging role of design in business. As I wrote to my colleagues:

Sabine studied under Dick Buchanan at CMU, and has a Ph.D in…. DESIGN! But, she has her head screwed on tight. She pointed out that while design is often brought in to make change, it often serves to accommodate the status quo with band-aids.
Three things I liked:

she kind of dissed design thinking, saying you can’t separate thinking from making.

she pointed out how the current design+business craziness means that the different organizational silos (marketing, product dev, IT, etc.) each bring in design to make change, but end up using design only to bolster their silos

that successful change management with design *begins* with the product… i.e., it’s essential that you use the act of designing a product to produce change… you don’t change an organization in the abstract so that it can then produce better products
- visions and strategies (and organizations for that matter) must continue to evolve. (Okay, that was a fourth thing)

Sam Lucente, HP. Sam (written about in the latest Fast Company) is in charge of design across all of HP, and has an amazing story to tell about how design is evolving and succeeding at HP. He gave good slides, some of which I photographed. I think the most important lesson from Sam was that in order for the design practice to be seen as a valuable contributor at HP, work had to begin at the most basic level — consistency and simplicity throughout the entire product line — before design could be successfully used to differentiate and innovate.

James J. Pirkl, The Generation Connection. This guy advocated a “transgenerational” approach to design. He objects to how older generations are conventionally perceived, and made the case that many suppositions about the elderly are just plain wrong. He doesn’t advocate design for elderly though… He advocates design that works for all. He showed his Transgenerational House, an embodiment of his design principles, which, honestly, looks pretty cool.

Today’s New York Times feature on Prince belongs not in the Music section, but the Business section.

Given the themes that we address here at Adaptive Path and on the blog, what impressed me was how Prince was handling his “multi-channel experience.” He has a habit of giving away his recordings, which conventional wisdom would assume means he’s giving away his money. But in the same way that Apple controls iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes music store, Prince has achieved control over his recordings, his touring, his online presence, and the like. And in the same way Apple doesn’t make money on the iTunes Music Store but rakes it in with iPod, Prince seems to have an innate understanding of how his coordinated effort to get his music out in the world can produce far greater revenues than reliance on any one channel.

The power of Prince’s approach is summed up in this passage from the piece: “Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not. ‘Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it,’ his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD.” Driven by that desire, he’s done everything he can to make that a reality, and has reaped the reward of not only significant cash, but total creative freedom.

How can your organization learn from Prince?

I’m pleased to be conducting Adaptive Path’s first online seminar on April 5th: ‘Showing the Value of UX‘. The seminar is geared towards people who are entering a point in their careers where they need to understand and communicate about both sides of the equation: UX and business value.

The seminar starts with a deep exploration on the connections between UX and business value, then progresses to a series of principles and tools that you can use to connect User Experience to real business impact.

‘Showing the Value of UX’ is similar to material that I’ve presented and honed at prior conferences on design, business, and management, and so it’s exciting to be able to share these approaches and methods with you directly at your place of work.

Elaine Cohen, Director of IA at Ruder Finn, just wrote me to ask, “Is your seminar focused on how to sell UX to your company?” Rather than selling UX, the seminar focuses more on how to integrate it with your company. The material we’ll go over touches on this in a couple of ways: [1] I’ll share some models of how UX can be integrated into business processes to improve the UX-team’s perception, accountability, and role in the project selection process. [2] We’ll walk through design methods that create better dialog between you and your business parters, resulting in better experiences that also create greater economic value.

I find that when a UX team is able to see the connections between their work and business value, the selling becomes much less challenging because both you and the rest of the business are working towards the same ends.

I look forward to taking this material online, and talking with many of you during the extended Q&A sessions both during and after the presentation. Here’s where you can register »

I’m belated in posting this (I blame SXSW) but two things in my inbox seemed related.

One was David Pogue’s newsletter column on CompUSA closing many of its stores.

The other being the Fortune article on how Apple is America’s best retailer.

As a reader of this blog you probably know where my post is heading. CompUSA fails because it plays in the commodity-and-low-margin space, squeezing as much as it can out of efficiencies and low labor costs; it is unable to compete with online retailers who can discount even further. Apple succeeds because it plays in the experience-and-high-margin space, providing tantalizing environments that compel visits.

CompUSA thought that what they got with real estate was shelf space. And so they crammed stores with as much product as they could. But they’ll never be able to compete with an online retailer’s infinite shelf space.

Apple realized that there’s a lot more that you get from real estate. There are things you can do in a physical environment that you can’t do anywhere else — play with products; getting immediate servicing when a product needs support; take classes on tools. At an Apple Store, there is remarkably little “shelf space.” Yet their $/sq.foot ratio is unparalleled. You do the math!

Last summer Adaptive Path conducted a brief survey regarding the user experience practices within organizations. [Clarification: these were voluntary surveys of individuals about their organizations' practice around user experience.] From the data we collected, we found a few interesting tidbits. First of all, the term “user experience” or “customer experience” or similar derivatives have almost a 90% usage rate across various types of companies:

No surprise there, but this next data set piqued my curiosity because of the inverse relationships that emerged. Among our respondents, the for-profit public organizations were much more likely to have a group responsible for the user experience, but yet less likely to have an executive accountable for the experience. Now these for-profit public organizations are very large (70% of the respondents have over a thousand employees), and so the delegation and localization of UX responsibilities to a specific group of people may be due to the diverse range of products, services, and activities that the organization must coordinate.

While the for-profit privately-held organizations broke about even on both of these data points, the non-profits look about the opposite of the for-profit public organizations. I could read into these patterns and say they suggest: when an organization has an executive responsible for experience, the experience becomes the responsibility of the whole organization.

However, I think another hypothesis is more likely. The non-profits and privately-held firms tend to be much smaller in size. They’re more likely to have a single product/service, or a small handful of products/services. Therefore, the creation of a successful experience is much more crucially felt within these organizations. Someone at the top has their eye on the experience, and the role can’t be delegated to separate functional group in the organization.

Sara Ulius-Sabel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experience Strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Flickr example: hub of photo sharing system]

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

The iPod turned five yesterday and much ink has been spilled in the last week about the product’s success, its ubiquity and impact on Apple. The state of the digital music market at the time of the iPod’s introduction has been relatively ignored though. It’s hard to imagine its embryonic state in 2001 from the perspective of 2006 and five years of hindsight. At the time, everything in the space, from devices to software to services, was up for grabs as various industries grappled with the problem of creating a new model for the music business. Several products already existed, but no one had quite nailed it before Apple came along.

One of the most remarkable things about the iPod’s introduction was the clearly articulated argument that Steve Jobs made when it was introduced. It’s preserved on YouTube and truly worth a look. Jobs’ argument is carefully constructed and compelling on many levels. However, aside from his famed “reality distortion field,” the argument adheres to basic business principles and provides an extremely useful template for the introduction of new products and services into emerging or underdeveloped markets.

Describe the Target Market:

On deciding where to innovate next, Apple chose music. Why?

“We love music, and it’s always good to do something that you love. More importantly, music is a part of everyone’s life. Music has been around forever; it will always be around. It is not a speculative market. Because it is a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market all around the world. It knows no boundaries.”

Although I’m sure he (and his team) examined it in great detail, Jobs stays away from hard numbers such as demographics, market size, dollars spent and average music library size. During the pitch, he keeps the focus on where music fits in people’s lives, not where it fits into Apple’s bottom line.

Know What You Are Not Going to Do:

It’s a given that the digital music player market wasn’t exactly saturated in 2001, but Jobs’ back of the napkin analysis of the opportunity space was clever in its adherence to simplicity. He compared traditional CD players, Flash-based units, Mp3 CD units and hard drive jukeboxes on a simple price per song basis. Again, a basic analysis but one that illuminates the choices available to Apple. More importantly, Jobs was clear about what Apple wasn’t going to do. “We studied all of these and that’s where we want to be.”

State Clearly What You Are Going to Do, Part 1:

Jobs described where the iPod fits into Apple’s product portfolio in one simple sentence:
“iMac, iBook, iPod.” Having established it as part of Apple’s consumer-focused offering, he offered why Apple could go there:

“No one has found the recipe for digital music. Not only do we think we can find the recipe, but we think the Apple brand is going to be fantastic because people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from.”

State Clearly What You Are Going to Do, Part 2:

Jobs described the offering in concrete terms: an Mp3 player that holds your entire music library with CD quality sound that doesn’t limit you to one format. Rather then dwelling on technical specifications, Jobs again came back to a value proposition that describes what Apple is going to do for the consumer:

“How many times have you gone on the road with a CD player and said, “Oh god, I didn’t bring the CD I wanted to listen to. To have your whole music library with you at all times is a quantum leap in listening to music.”

Show How Features Support Purpose (or, If You Must Explain How, Do It Like This):

Jobs then takes the Wizard of Oz tack and gives us a peek behind the curtain by detailing the three breakthroughs that will allow us something heretofore impossible: The ability to fit our whole music library in our pockets.

1. The iPod is ultra portable: Jobs describes the new hard drive and skip prevention technology that makes it possible to “take iPod (and all your music) bicycling, mountain climbing, jogging, you name it, and you are not going to skip a beat.”

2. The iPod is fast: A simple apples to apples (no pun intended) comparison between Firewire and USB demonstrates that the iPod is going to upload 1,000 songs in 10 minutes rather than 5 hours.

3. The iPod is smart: The battery of the iPod is supported by FireWire rather than a separate charger, meaning that there are fewer parts to keep track of. It charges and loads songs, all at the same time.

Jobs cites all three of these technologies to back up his claim that “people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from.”

Demonstrate Strategy Tangibly:

After all the build up, Jobs pulls out the iPod. It’s the size of a deck of cards, and he makes the explicit comparison. What he holds in his hand is the tangible result of what he’s talking about, and it shows.

The iPod pitch is remarkable in its simplicity and effectiveness. It sticks to the basics of Moore’s elevator pitch and doesn’t add much fluff. What is remarkable has been Apple’s adherence to this technique and development philosophy over time. The future was staring us right in the face.

There’s a range of vocabulary that can be used to refer to user experience: ‘usability’, ‘interface’, ‘human centered design’, etc. What term we use seems to depend on what sells — within an organization, you use the terms that connect with the values and the understanding of the people you’re working with.

Adaptive Path recently conducted a survey of over 800 user experience professionals to create a base of quantitative insight into how organizations value and practice user experience. One of the simpler questions was, “If you use other terms [than 'user experience'] that are similar in meaning or intent, which terms do you use?” Here’s the terms we heard, ordered by the number of times mentioned:

93 Usability
63 Consumer experience
28 User centered design
21 Customer experience
20 User interface
14 Interaction design
13 Information architecture
11 Design
10 Brand experience
10 User interaction
8 Experience design
6 User satisfaction
5 Customer satisfaction
5 Ease of use
5 Experience
4 Customer journey
4 User interface design
3 Human factors
3 Interface design
3 Look and feel
3 User research
3 Visitor experience
2 Brand user experience
2 Client experience
2 Customer service
2 Experience strategy
2 Goal-directed design
2 Interface
2 Intuitiveness
2 Joy of use
2 Learner experience
2 Online experience
2 Product design
2 User advocate
2 User-friendliness
1 Aesthetic
1 Analytics
1 Audience experience
1 Audience-centred
1 Brand
1 Brand image
1 Brand value
1 Caller experience
1 Comprehension
1 Constituent experience
1 Consumer insights
1 Context
1 Customer centered design
1 Customer centered usability
1 Customer enjoyment
1 Customer focus
1 Customer-based product development
1 Defensive design
1 Delight
1 Donor experience
1 Ease-of-use leading to productivity
1 Educational experience
1 Emotional resonance
1 Emotional-centered design
1 Employee experience
1 End user
1 End-to-end experience
1 End-user centric
1 Enjoyment
1 Ethnographic study
1 Experience architecture
1 Experience planning
1 Experiential perspective
1 Field study
1 Flow
1 Form factor
1 Fun
1 Function
1 Functional design
1 Functionality
1 Good experience
1 Graphic design
1 Guest experience
1 Human centered design
1 Human computer interaction
1 Human experience
1 Human interface
1 Human systems integration
1 Human-machine interface
1 Humility
1 Information environment
1 Information Strategy
1 Interaction
1 Interaction model
1 Interactions
1 Journeys
1 Keeping them happy
1 Learning experience
1 Legibility
1 look-and-feel
1 Magic/Magical
1 Man machine interface
1 Marketing goals
1 Meaningful experiences
1 Member experience
1 Motivations
1 Multi-sensory experiences
1 On-brand
1 Overall customer satisfaction
1 Participant experience
1 Perception
1 Personalization
1 Product development
1 Product feature list
1 Product strategy
1 Product use
1 Programming experience
1 Rapid design
1 Readability
1 Reader
1 Research
1 Shopping experience
1 Site experience
1 Site optimization
1 Software design
1 Solution design
1 Stakeholder experience
1 Stakeholder value
1 Story
1 Total customer experience
1 Touchpoint
1 Usability evaluation
1 User
1 User adoption
1 User behavior
1 User centered
1 User centered design approach
1 User centred design
1 User design
1 User engagement
1 User environment
1 User experience
1 User experience design
1 User experience research
1 User flow
1 User friendly
1 User interaction design
1 User mental model
1 User needs
1 User perception
1 User study
1 User-based usability testing
1 User-focused design
1 User-friendly design
1 Value
1 Visitor
1 Visual experience
1 Visual interaction design
1 Visualization
1 Web experience design
1 Work practices
1 xDesign

Based on some interpretation, about 42% of these responses refer to the end person/human/being in the phrase. About 29% use the term experience, and a little more than 26% refer to the activity they perform (e.g., design, research, development).

Note that these were all “write-in” responses for alternative to ‘user experience’ used within organizations. When asked if respondents used the term ‘user experience’ within their organization, about 89% said yes. We’ll be sharing and reporting on more of the results as we study the data — there’s much more to come.