Adaptive Path Blog

Jennie Winhall

Red Project: Addressing social and economic issues through design-led innovation. How public services can be transformed through design skills. In the past, did work redesigning prisons (design for rehabilitation). Did work on domestic energy consumption, and redesigned better interactions with Members of Parliament.

Big push on public sector reform, for the first time looking at the experience of the end-user.

There are limits on modernizing existing services. Shells of services were designed a long time ago and society has changed. Demand outstrips supply. And now looking at a new range of social issues (climate change, obesity, etc.)

Need to help people co-create their own decisions. Which would be fine if people made rational decisions, but they don’t. Easier to build new power plants than to change every person’s behavior.

The public sector needs a new generation of public services. Preventative, co-created, and around individuals.

Health care project: can we use the characteristics of communities of participation to create new health care services? Redesign the interactions with patients and doctors to be more collaborative and interactive. Created a set of cards with issues and statements that the patient can use to talk to doctors about. Shifts the power from the system to the patient. It forces a different kind of behavior. Very adaptive–allows doctors and patients to get straight to the problem.

Exercise project: How do you make exercise social? Activmobs. werearemobs.org Self-organizing system. Rather than try to prototype it ourselves, actually made three activmobs and watched what they did and designed the system around what arose. Social dynamics were very important: support and peer pressure. A number of the tools developed were about increasing self-awareness. What is important to users. Also a lot about progress and visualizing progress. Especially as a group. It’s important to make things visible.

Designing for Behavior Change
Go beyond shaping products, to realizing that the products we make shape behavior. Metrics have to be meaningful to individuals. Self-assessment.

Can’t use a delivered service process. People need to shape the service itself and thus you can’t design the service entirely. You need to distribute tools to people.

Aspiration is important. Users have to want to participate.

Services have to be more desirable than owning the product itself.
New kind of disciple: transformation design.

Transformation Design
Half the skill of design is identifying the correct problem to solve. Problems are complex and require systems thinking and inter-disciplinary thinking. Integrate non-design aware people into the process.

Reinventing the organization to deliver the new offerings. Top-down structures aren’t working. Need to embed a culture of innovation onto an organization so that when designers leave, it doesn’t all collapse. Build capacity, not dependency.

Lots of non-traditional design outputs. Things like job descriptions, not just things.

In Geoffrey Moore’s very old post on Digital Ecosystems (I’m still catching up on 2006), he highlights the tension that emerges between the concept of “product” and “service” when your product is delivered online:

“Services Displace Products. In the digital world, as bits substitute for atoms, products are reconceived as services. This is the threat that Google poses against Microsoft.

Services companies still have not completely caught up with this. They tend to describe their offers as products, which, although convenient as a means for integrating them into traditional organizational thinking, profoundly misrepresents their dynamics and causes companies to miss whole dimensions of consumer experience, need and value.”

Now much of the rest of the post was just gobbly-gook to to me, but the mix-up between the notions of products and services felt very familiar. When a service is created online, it’s often still sold as a product: how it’s packaged, priced, and then how it’s delivered.

One easy example of a missing dimension of customer experience is surprise. Off-line services have those well-timed surprises that aren’t built into online services. You get a lollipop at the barber, an occasional free drink at your favorite bar, the revealing of your entrée at dinner. Perhaps we’re working so hard at delivering the expected that we forget to plan for the unexpected?”

Next week’s near-simultaneous launches of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii console present a huge challenge for retail stores trying to satisfy eager gamers. To deliver a better experience to customers, Best Buy has distributed a “playbook” to its stores detailing the business value of managing the experience, providing best practices for handling the crowds on launch day, and even mapping out the customer’s path through the store and where to have employees stationed to answer questions.

I’m having a two-week conversation with Jim Leftwich and WELL members about interaction design starting today over at the Well’s Inkwell Interview series.

Update: Non-members can participate in the conversation by sending an email with your comments to inkwell [at] well [dot] com.

…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).

There was an article on BBC that I thought was a very interesting account of a traveler stuck in Heathrow during the latest terrorism scare. Many other people were stuck without proper information about the new carry-on rules, or flight delays or what was really going on with their travel plans on a minute-by-minute basis. To be fair to the airlines, it seems as if they didn’t have the whole picture either and were reacting as well as they could.

It got me thinking about how airlines use their communications systems to convey different types of information to their customers. Traditionally, the kiosks, signs and monitors are in place to convey one-way information about flight status or departure information. The gates will tell you you’re in the right place and that you may as well sit down because your flight is delayed.

But what happens in a situation where the need for information dramatically shifts beyond the normal flight status? In the case of Heathrow (or any airport in an emergency situation), the needs of the passengers grew dramatically and there lacked sufficient resources to explain, educate and reassure.

Here is an opportunity for companies to have plans or infrastructure to immediately shift the use of their existing communications systems for a completely different purpose.

Imagine if the airlines were able to turn on new templates and new information feeds to their website, rather than just a simple “Emergency Travel Information Update” page? What if their booking engine transformed into a tool that helped existing passengers re-route their travel? What if the kiosks and monitors at the terminals changed into live updates and alternate travel option information instead of just “Flight 280 is Delayed/Ontime”? What if the airline had an RSS feed that could find it’s way into people’s laptops or mobile devices that gave them instructions on what to do (or don’t do) next.

This issue goes beyond a website design, beyond customer service policies. It speaks to the heart of service design and how having a holistic approach to communicating to your audience has a greater impact than one or two good tools.

The companies that get service design already do a good job of uniform communication across all their channels. The interesting challenge for some companies is understanding that they may need to have multiple sets of service design policies to communicate with their customers even more effectively.

On Tuesday I introduced the day of sessions, and realized something while speaking.

I told a story of a recent project, where we were hired by a financial services firm to redesign the website where customers manage their accounts, move money around, evaluate their performance, and the like. Being dutiful user-centered designers, we conducted a passel of in-home interviews with customers, finding out how they approached financial management.

We learned that while websites were key components, they were only one of many tools and channels that customers use to accomplish their goals. Customers also deal with monthly paper statements, call center representatives, physical branches, etc., etc. And by appreciating the customers’ perspectives, we realized that improving the website, while important, was insufficient. No matter how good the website’s design, its ability to satisfy both the customers and our client is constrained by the problems people have with these other tools.

And while our direct client contacts understood this (in large part because they joined us for the research), there was little they could do about it. This image from my presentation illustrates why:

The people we worked with were deep within “interactive marketing.” Their lives were the website. They didn’t really know the people who worked on the monthly statements or at the call center. And even if they did, they didn’t have the time to collaborate with them — they had too much on their plates already.

Because of the research, our contacts understood the need for addressing the customer’s experience across multiple channels and media. But they couldn’t move on it. In fact, in order to find a person who has a view across the entire experience, you had to go all the way up to the Chief Marketing Officer (at the top of this diagram).

What I realized while speaking was that this is an example of the Frozen Middle. The Frozen Middle is a term coined to describe how strategic pursuits developed by senior executives can get bogged down in execution by middle management. Our experience, then, was sadly typical.

The new wrinkle that we saw was that we also have people in the trenches who “get” the need for a holistic view. “Individual contributors” are not seen as the source of strategic insight, but it’s clear that these folks, who deal most directly with the customers, are witnessing behaviors that are crucial to the organizations larger success.

(I’ve made my introductory slides (PDF) available for download. It also includes slides stolen from MAYA Design and an introduction of Michael Bierut.)

There’s been a lot of talk about “total experience design”, service design, et cetera and how these point to the changing nature of design generally. There is a growing realization that we are no longer designing products, web sites, or monolithic centralized systems. As the internet and digital networks in general become more ubiquitous, more distributed, and more integrated in our lives, we’re finding that it’s better to think of our projects in terms of services and systems rather than products. As Adam Richardson of frogdesign puts it, his new mantra is: “The system is the product.” Our projects generally involve multiple touchpoints (i.e., the web, mobile devices, and physical spaces) and the need for consistent or complimentary experiences across them. These kinds of projects require design that understands and integrates well with the aspects of people’s lives that have nothing (or very little) to do with the things you are designing. Meaning and culture play ever bigger roles.

Of course, focusing on services means having to deal with a much messier set of issues related to human behavior than in traditional interactive design. This is fundamentally changing the way we all go about doing design. In particular, I’ve been thinking that we may need to move away from a framework of tasks, goals, and states in favor of a framework focused on behaviors, motivations, and contexts. (This change is already under way in the fringes of HCI research and design, but I say it’s time for it to take root in mainstream design.)

Essentially, I am calling for an end to the decades-old framework that HCI, information architecture, and interaction design have been using for understanding users. That’s right, I say take a hike, task analysis! Good bye, user goals! These concepts are insufficient for the new kinds of systems we are designing. People do not live their lives in terms of tasks and goals; most behavior is not task-oriented nor goal-driven. The drivers for action are often complex, subtle, and closely tied to culture, meaning, and context. But it’s nearly impossible to talk about meaning in terms of tasks and goals.

Focusing exclusively on tasks and goals means that you tend to ignore or de-emphasize all of the activities that people engage in that are specifically not goal-oriented. It also means that you will often ignore the messy jumble of activities that take place around but are not oriented toward your system. This is not always problematic but it quickly becomes so when you are designing for multiple contexts and mediums. When it comes to designing for the total experience, the activities that have little to do with the system you are designing are often just as important as those that are central to it. More than ever before, people switch from one context to another rapidly and often. They were in the outskirts of Cleveland mowing their lawn then the cell phone rang and suddenly they’re planning a trip to Thailand.

Now I want to make sure that I’m being clear. This is not just a semantic or linguistic game I’m playing. I’m not just substituting one set of words (i.e., behaviors, motivations, contexts) for another (i.e., tasks, goals, states) while maintaining the underlying structure. Rather, I’m trying to take the insights of the last 40 years of social science and bring them into our way of thinking about designing interactive systems. (Note: I’m using the broadest definition of that term “interactive systems”.) The role of culture, meaning, and context in human life is undeniable. Every field of social science has been integrating culture and meaning into their theories and methods—some more than others—and we as designers should be doing the same. To do that, we need a framework that takes these things into account as well.

The reason I’m making such a big deal out of this is that the models we use to understand and talk about people greatly influence how we can understand a problem or situation. If your framework doesn’t explicitly account for culture and context, then it is unlikely that you will be attuned to these things when you do your research and design.

Practically, this means that simply incorporating “ethnographic” methods into your current process will NOT get you to where you need to be. You can spend six months “in the field” or interview 150 people. But none of it will matter if you don’t have a conceptual framework that actually allows you to incorporate the subtleties of behavior, motivation, and context that led you to use these methods in the first place.

Of course, as a result of these changes in approach, our jobs become much more complicated—but also much more exciting. More importantly, our designs will also be more effective and successful.