Adaptive Path Blog

Until recently, I used to bank with Washington Mutual. One of the things that made WaMu unique was their “Occasio” retail style branch design. Those of you who may have seen Don Norman’s conversation with Peter at UXWeek 2008 might recall that WaMu came up with the design after extensive research, field work and ethnography. They spent considerable time and money studying how people do banking and even created some trial banks to help them study customers. The layout, which included a concierge desk, children’s area as well as “teller towers” was friendly, easy to engage with and emphasized more personal interaction between customers and tellers.

I actually used the branch services fairly often. I liked the layout and openness of the branch. But the details stood out. For example, the checking/deposit slips were clearly color coded and easy to read now matter which side was facing out. They were located on an island right next to where customers stood in line, which meant I could fill them out as I waited. When I spoke with a teller, we could both look at the same screen while we discussed our business. It was little things like this that made the customer experience a pleasant one.

Recently JP Morgan Chase took over my friendly neighborhood bank.  The very first change I noticed, besides the new logo on the tellers shirts, was the checking and deposit slips. The color coding disappeared, and the lettering became harder to read because the new slips didn’t fit in the slots the same way as the old ones. Then they were relocated, along with the pens, away from the queue line. Along with the logo, the little things that made my experience easy started to slip away. Soon the free standing teller towers will be a thing of the past.

According Tampa Bay Business Journal, the towers will be replaced with a “traditional” layout, including teller windows behind glass and offices where bankers can sit with customers to discuss products.”

For Chase, The rational behind this move is simple economics. According to Bank Investment Consultant blog  that overhaul is to bring the new branches more in line with Chase’s strategy of aggressively cross-selling financial advice, business banking and mortgage services.

In short, the branches that were originally designed to be customer experienced focused are now being redesigned to better serve the corporations focus.

Now, I understand that in these uncertain economic times, you have to go with what you know. However, it seems to me that the trend for many successful companies lately has been on improving the customer experience. In an industry that has typically been focused on the mission of the corporation, both Jet Blue and Virgin America have been successful differentiating themselves through excellent customer experience in an era of considerable uncertainty. In fact, Jet Blue boasts profits compared to traditional airlines while doing just that.

I recently wrapped up a project with a very traditional company that was focused almost entirely on how to map and improve the customer experience. The result of the work with this company will help with the transformation of its focus on the corporate needs to the service needs of the customer, which will build loyalty and trust between the company and its clients. I expect that more and more companies will turn to improving the customer experience as a way to strengthen and deepen their customer relationships.

I can’t help but wonder if the powers that be at Chase truely evaluated the value of the Occasio design and the impact it had on the customer experience before completely abandoning it?

I remember when the prior MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte predicted in his 1995 book Being Digital that,

“what [information] is in the air will go into the ground and what is in the ground will go into the air.”

He was talking about the wireless spectrum and broadband wiring, and he was predicting the inevitable, how information could easily travel through either channel to people. Negroponte called it “trading places.”

A current-day prediction of the inevitable could be another case of trading places and gray spaces: that of products and services. As time goes on, things that are products will become more like services (think iPods, mobile phones, and spimes), and things that are services will become more like products (think NetFlix, FedEx, or JetBlue).

This interplay creates interesting new experiences, and new challenges for designers. Services have become design-able experiences that need the same thoughtful care and attention that products do, if not more. The emergence of service design has revealed new approaches and tools to making services more human and more valuable.

Even more promising is the overabundance of services in our daily lives. Services make up a larger portion of the U.S. economy (about 68% in 2006) than products. And services have retained their value in the downturn. As BusinessWeek noted, “prices of goods fell 4.1% last year; prices of services rose 3%.”

And from electronic health records to green energy, tomorrow’s economy hinges on well designed services to help us all change from old behaviors to adopt new ones.

Within this broader trend, I’m happy to be hosting a panel in conjunction with the CMU Bay Area Alumni on March 19 at Adaptive Path titled, Seeing Tomorrow’s Services: A Panel on Service Design. I’m lucky to facilitate a discussion between three dream panelists:

• Shelley Evenson, an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Shelley’s been an early teacher and thought leader for service design in the U.S., focusing on tapping into the needs of users of the service.
• Robert Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information, and he focusins on the contribution of the service’s “back stage” where materials or information needed by the “front stage” are processed. Just read his co-authored paper on the topic with Lindsay Tabas to be impressed.
• And Christi Zuber leads an internal Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente where her and her team have co-designed numerous new services with patients and clinicians that lead to measurable improvements on patient safety and satisfaction — demonstrating that service design has a big societal impact as well.

If you’d like to join us, remember to register ahead of time. And if you have ideas about the panel or the topics we should cover, comment here or twitter with the hashtag #stspanel.

Today’s NY Times Reports “For Sprint Nextel, a Drop in Customers and Earnings,” citing 1.3 million customers dropping its service in the 4th quarter of 2008. There’s nothing in the article about why so many folks are leaving. This isn’t a recession thing — in the same time period, AT&T added 2.1 million subscribers, and Verizon Wireless added 1.4 million.

Forrester’s 2008 Customer Experience Index suggests a reason. Sprint Nextel was far and away the worst-ranked of the wireless service providers. Out of all the companies (from a range of industries), Sprint Nextel ranked 108 out of 114. Verizon Wireless ranked 59, and AT&T 64.

People aren’t going to give up their mobile phones, no matter how bad the economy is — but they will happily move to companies that don’t piss them off, as Sprint Nextel clearly does.

Reminder: Bruce Temkin, author of Forrester’s report, will be keynoting at MX 2009 in two weeks. Use the promotional code BLOG, and get 10% off when you register!

In December, a blind man led me into darkness. I had a cane, but it only partially helped. I felt around with my hands. I listened to the voices of the people around me, gauging their distance by their loudness, shifting so I didn’t bump into them. The smell of grass helped me understand I was in a park. When I put my hands into a basket, I touched oranges and knew it from the feel of their skin, not their smell.

I was in an exhibition called, “Dialogue in the Dark.” As the organizers explain, “In completely darkened rooms, blind people lead small groups of guests through an exhibition in which everyday situations are experienced altogether differently, without eyesight.” Prior to this, I’d never experienced blindness. Actually, I’d never experienced the loss of any sense before.

At first, my eyes strained to see, which was distracting. But when I focused, instead, upon my other senses, it was…fun, an adventure. I was experiencing the world in a fascinating way I wouldn’t have known, had I stuck to sight.

Of course, you don’t have to go into a dark room to grasp the difference between blindness and sight. But, like all good exhibits, it got me thinking…about assumptions and how often we assume that others experience the world in the same way we do. We make these assumptions everywhere: In conversation, design, and judgment.

Imagine:

You and I are sitting across a table talking to each other. I assume you hear me, and that my words mean to you what they mean to me. I assume you see the expressions on my face and understand their implications. I assume you are enjoying the hint of caramel in tea we share. When I shake your hand goodbye, I assume you feel my warm hand and know that I am calm.

Meanwhile, you can’t hear me well over the furnace, and you forgot to put your contacts in this morning, so my face is a blur. You burn your tongue on the tea so it tastes like nothing, and you only notice how cold and sweaty your own hands are when we shake goodbye. You feel guilty because you were distracted throughout the conversation; I reminded you of a childhood friend and your mind kept traveling back to old stories.

Therein lies one of the ironies of human experience: You and I are NEVER really having the same conversation. Never. Assumptions are dangerous because they keep us from listening and paying attention. Granted, we’ll never gain total understanding of one another. But, we can do a better job of understanding more. In the next few weeks, Adaptive Path will make an announcement on this blog about a research and development project that touches upon the impact of assumption in design. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll contemplate the power of assumption in your own life and work, looking for places to assume less and observe more.

So, it’s funny that Brandon just posted about how much he loves the Dopplr Annual Report, because, unknown to him, I had already emailed Matt Jones to ask about it. I thought it would make a good Single Question Interview, a new, and perhaps occasional, feature here on Adaptive Path.

Peter Merholz:  Dopplr just released the ability for every use to download a Personal Annual Report of their 2008 travels in PDF, best experienced when printed. In this age of increasing digitization and screen-based experiences, how did the Annual Report come to be?

Matt Jones: Well, we’ve become pretty obsessed with finding new ways to represent our user’s data that’ll let them reflect on the patterns it contains. It’s also become somewhat of a tradition for us, if you can have a tradition 2years, to try and do something with the data generated at the end of the year to sum it up.

Last year we created something we called the Dopplr Raumzeitgeist Map – a socially-generated map of the Earth created by the travels of Dopplr users in 2007. We updated that with the outlook for the summer, and the autumn of 2008, and also started to generate them for individual users and groups to embed on their profile pages.

For the end of 2008, we wanted to go one better. Giving a ‘datagift’ at the end of the year to our users was the starting point, and it felt like that needed to be tangible. All of us at Dopplr are fascinated by the blur between the digital and the physical that it’s becoming easier and cheaper to create (for instance we just helped stage the first ‘papercamp‘ to investigate this) and we were definitely inspired by things like The Day-to-Day Data Exhibition, Lucy Kimbell’s LIX project, Nicholas Feltron’s annual reports and even, Schott’s Miscellany. Creating something proceedurally in print from digital data seemed like the natural next step for us.

I sketched what I thought would be possible and interesting, making use of a lot of the assets we already had created online – like the blocks of colour and CC-licenced flickr photos for cities, and a histogram device we’d already used to display trips – also, then came up with some new visualisations for things like the carbon output of travel.

Tom Insam is a genius developer who can turn his hand to almost anything, and he used something called Prawn to code the generation of PDFs from individual user’s data. We sit next to each other in our little office and spent a long week going back and forth on what would work, what would create the best output with varied and variable data – the design and layout had to be fairly inexacting and robust to make sure that we’d get the best out of people’s data.

We also did a lot of calculations across user-data to find median values to help design with – so that we knew we’d please most of the people most of the time. Also we created a few alternate ‘modules’ to print if the data met special cases, for instance those with few connections with the dopplr network – where we could print messages and statistics from the service to encourage them to use new features…

After a long week, we were happy with our test runs, and set the process running to generate the reports for all our users – which took something like 40 hours or so! In parallel, we had the idea of illustrating the idea of the report by taking Barack Obama’s campaign travel data – which we were able to find from sources online, and create a special report generated with the same code.

The reaction to the report has be pretty great and we’re convinced now that doing more with web services in the blurry physical/digital realm will be something to put more energy into this year.

Yesterday Google announced a test launch of SMS search in Nigeria and Ghana. According to a post via White African, Nigeria and Ghana are the first two African countries Google’s released this service. In places like Africa where the prevalence of mobile phones far outstrips access to the Internet via a PC, services like Google’s SMS search makes a lot of sense. It’s a great example of tailoring a service to user needs. Looking forward to hearing more about this as it gets released throughout the African continent…

I’ll be presenting Mobile User Experience, What Web Designers Need to Know at WebDirections North in Denver, Colorado this February. In addition to a stellar line up of speakers presenting content on designing and developing for the web, there’s also a group of folks presenting content that’s sure to be relevant for mobile:

Brian Fling of Fling Media will be presenting The Mobile Web: A Crash Course and hosting the workshop Creating Mobile 2.0 Web Applications in less than a day.

Ryan Sarver will be presenting Building Location Aware Web Applications, which will give folks insight into the tools available to bring location to their web site or mobile applications.

And who could resist joining me in heckling my former colleague, Dan Saffer, now of Kicker Studio, as he presents and hosts a workshop on Tap is the New Click, timely content on designing gestural interfaces.

WebDirections North looks to be a great conference in the Mile-High City February 5-7.

Use this code: WDN09DRH when you register and save $50 before December 15th.

Say goodbye to the computer mouse
The BBC reports a leading research company is predicting the days of the computer mouse are numbered.

Google vs. Wikipedia: It’s War!
Wired magazine reports that the big G has launched a service called Knol – short for ‘knowledge’ – which is basically a different flavored Wikipedia. Watch out Wiki, Google wants your crown!

Android and Symbian, sitting in a tree…
“…Google’s Android OS and Nokia’s Symbian will “combine to provide a single open source OS,” sometime in the very near future…” Seems like a marriage between Linux and Fortran.

It’s cool, and green(er)
The iPhone’s unsoldered battery makes the new phone easier and more economical to dissemble and recycle.

E-ink coming to magazines
“The owner of Esquire said Tuesday that it plans to publish the magazine’s October issue using so-called electronic ink to mark the publication’s 75th anniversary.”

Samsung Haiku
Have you submitted and “ode to a mobile” yet?

We’re following the highs and lows of 2008 International Development Design Summit. Good stuff is happening there.

Desire Paths?
Here’s a whole collection of the phenomenon that inspired the AP name. Maybe we should change our name to “Desire Paths!”

The Long Tail and the Dip
Seth asks if you’re at the head, the long tail, or (probably) that really unfortunate dip in between.

Wordle
Impress your friends with pretty text-frequency analysis.

Stop sign innovations

Welcome to our new CEO, Michael Meyer
There’s a new sheriff in town… and he’s got killer sideburns.

Although UX Week is coming up, it doesn’t mean things are all quiet for our other events. We have a slew of new speaker videos from this spring’s MX Conference up for you this week. These aren’t just excerpts, these are their full presentations.

Ryan Armbruster, Chief Experience Officer for OnCURE Medical Corp.: How Emotion Transforms Experience

By the way, Ryan is hiring service designers.

Björn Hartmann, Stanford University & Microsoft Research: New Interactions: Enlightened Trial and Error

Stephen Anderson, VP of Design, Viewzi: Leading the Rebellion: Turning Ideas into Reality

At the end of the conference, Brandon challenged everyone to take one idea that they had heard and to try it out in practice. Inspired partially by Brian Cronin’s talk about Earth Day, the Designer’s Accord and going green, Thomas Obrey and our friends at PixelMEDIA in Portsmouth, NH are taking steps, both internally and with clients, to make a difference.

You can already register for next year’s MX Conference, March 1-3, 2009. It will be held in San Francisco. Use the code BLOG and get 10% off.

A recent post by John Kullman on Mobile Crunch highlights a study that speculates by 2011, 25 million Americans will use their mobile phones as mobile wallets. The report states that the ease and convenience of mobile phone commerce is hard to resist.

While I can appreciate the value of mobile wallets, there is something about this prediction that makes me slightly sad.

In a fast-paced and stressful world, who doesn’t need ease and convenience? It’s seems perfectly natural to want to make life a little easier and more efficient. It’s that desire for efficiency that’s inspired countless products and services like automatic bankteller machines, self-serve gas pumps and the revered Octopus and Oyster cards. I’ve used all these systems and services and yes, they have saved me time and made my life easier.

But lately I have been thinking how the systems and services we design in the name of ease and convenience are actually coming at a steep price.

It’s said that people are defined by their relationships to others. Given that, it’s probably easy for most of us to make a laundry list of all the important people in our lives. If one unpacks all the moments of interaction with human beings on any given day, it’s clear a good share of our time is spent reinforcing those important, explicit relationships – a phone call to the parents, conversations with work colleagues, dinner and drinks with friends and family.

The thing is, there are tons of tiny interactions we have throughout the day with people we hardly know – a conversation about organic produce with a clerk at the grocery store, commiserating with folks standing in line at the DMV, a wink from the bus driver while fumbling for bus fare. Somehow those interactions while seemingly less important, have significance in our lives.

They’re important because they give a richness and texture to our daily experience. They add an element of unpredictability and surprise to our lives. They provide us with opportunity to practice skills like striking up a conversation, thinking on our feet, joking, and flirting. Most importantly, I believe the cumulative effect of these interactions feed into the holy grail of human needs – the need to feel connected to the world around us and be part of something bigger than ourselves.

As we clamor to create systems and services like mobile wallets that streamline our lives and make things easier, unbeknownst to us, we’re actually slowly eliminating the opportunity for these types of tacit interactions to occur.

I’m not suggesting that we abolish convenience and efficiency as design principles because that seems crazy. The momentum of the modern world won’t allow it. However, if we simply approach design problems from a task/goal/efficiency perspective, we lose the opportunity to create systems that honor our need for these tacit human interactions and leave in our wake a society of people who enjoy convenience yet feel lonely and disconnected.

How do we change that trajectory? I’m not exactly sure. However, it seems like an interesting place to start would be to think about how mobile technology can “grease the skids” of social interactions. Instead of placing a premium on the accomplishment of a task or a goal, privilege mobile systems that enable the subtlety, elegance and grace of tacit human interaction.