Session page: http://webexsf2008.crowdvine.com/talk/view/175

Todd Wilkens
Date: Tuesday, April 22
Time: 1:00 - 4:00PM

Presented by Todd Wilkens (Adaptive Path). Based on a new O'Reilly book by the strategy and design experts at Adaptive Path, this workshop will help you learn how to make user experience a strategic advantage. As the factors affecting our business get more complex, we must deal with greater and greater uncertainty.

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We've seen a change from bottom line/cost cutting

An evolution that is more focused on design as the focus shifts to top line

Evolution of product strategy...

When new companies enter a new market, they focus on technology (making the impossible possible)

Most people stop in the middle when they understand the complexity (focus on features and differentiation)

"The really great person will keep on going .., and find a beautiful solution that really works" Steve Jobs in 1984 ... (shift to focusing on Features)

What does it mean to focus on user experience?

ipod: three years after diamond rio. It did less and it cost more and it dominated the market.

How do you think your customers think about your product (it's user interface and ... MAGIC ... they don't care what's inside)

... This leads to Experience Strategy

It's really hard to bring people around user experience.

It's important to talk about what strategy is. ... "Strategy is about saying no. It's about deciding on what you won't do so you can focus on what you do well."

Strategy is about tradeoffs...

"Tradeoffs are essential to strategy they create the need for choice and purposefully limit what a company offers. Michael Porter HBR

Dell - efficiency, process optimization ... they made money off the float (money making interest before the product is made)

The dreaded feature matrix... parity isn't strategy

Being the best is not a strategy ... Nobel prize winners don't set out to win the Nobel prize.

Novelty is not a strategy ... Just because it's never been done before does not guarantee success.

What is an experience strategy?
"You press the button, we do the rest." - George Eastman
It matched up the marketing line with what the product is supposed to do.

Google's product spec for calendar has a clear vision of what they feel their customer needs, and they let that dominate their design discussions.

The Elevator pitch: Focusing on customer value

Kodak, Shutterfly, Snapfish ahead of Flickr, but how did FLickr beat them?

Uploading
Storage Viewing
Editing
Sharing
Printing

Flickr nailed uploading and sharing and were ok in storage and viewing and ignored editing and printing

Symptoms you haven't clarified your customer value

:: Vague mandate
:: You look like your competition
:: Target customer is everyone
:: People internally don't understand what you're working on
:: It's a me-too product
:: Your offering lacks competitive advantage

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Framing a viable audience

:: Who is your target audience?
:: What experiences are compelling to them?
:: How is your offering different from competitors and substitutes?

For - target customers our main market segment only
who are dissatisfied with - the current market alternative

our product service is - new product category
that provides - key problem solving capability

unlike - the prod alternative
we have - differentiating attributes of your offering

OR...

Who is this service for
What is the service?
Why is it compelling?
How is it distinct?

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A good two-year strategy and a good five-year strategy look very different from each other.

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Understand the difference between a strategy document and a feature list

If you can put your competitor's name on top of your elevator pitch, you should start over

If your pitch sounds like something that would be in SkyMall, the likelihood of your product offering value to your customer base is probably very small.

"This is exactly the kind of thing you should do WITH the CEO, not take to him."

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Process evolution maps:
Scoping for experience

Who has infinite resources? .... right!

You need to think of this as something that goes out in pieces.

Flickr's tradeoffs

Started from Game Neverending .. realized that people were sharing photos.

They had some of the infrastructure done and made Flickr.

A lot of companies think of phases like

1 Cake
2 Filling
3 Icing
But who wants plain cake?

Instead try for:

1 Cupcake
2 Cake
3 Wedding Cake

Stage three will almost never look like what you thought it would, but

Developers are not a nervous lot by nature. Once they start to get nervous it probably says something about your process and that it needs to be fixed.

III Understanding People

This isn't about research, it's about how companies understand people.

Your customers are people and you should be interacting and talking with them as people.

Companies tend to oversimplify their view of people.

1. Old ways of thinking:
At worst: "gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." (from Cluetrain Manifesto) ... if you don't respect your audience, they will find out

2. Homo Economicus:
Highly rational
Maximizes utility
Quantity!
... when companies look at their customers with this model, they encounter Spock."

Type-a personalities
3. Task oriented
Goal driven
Efficiency
... at best, you have a bunch of like Alex P. Keaton.
... at worst, you have a bunch of robots

4. Sheep
Docile and gullible
Stories and messaging
Preferences!
... it means companies try to focus too much on preferences. It also tends to separate design from marketing. And then the customer says "this doesn't do what it says it's going to do."

This isn't wrong, just not totally right
We are evolving our approaches... they're just not complete

What's been missing?
The messy complexity of human life ..

People regularly mix and match products according to "suggested use"

They challenge social and cultural boundaries in unexpected ways. ... Understand them as we understand ourselves.

Don Norman in the 1980s thought color monitors didn't make much of a difference after running cognitive tests.

When he didn't think emotions were important, he didn't factor them into the importance of human interaction. He didn't factor them into his own intuition.

Tasks behaviors
goals > motivations
preferences meaning

You can talk about basically anything when you approach it from the right list, but you can with the left list.

Motivations lead to, drive and shape behaviors

Frame the UX by motivations
Design to support Behaviors

Things we tend to forget about people

Bad at predicting heir own behaviors
Hood at recalling their behaviors
Bad at focusing on things that didn’t affect their behavior???

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Field research

Wilkens law:
The effectiveness of research is inversely proportional to the thickness of its binding

Behaviors show us which patterns to design for

(Most common to least common)
Opportunistic showing and telling
Social behaviors - using with others ship share with others, formal groups
Care protect preserving
Knowing the value
Proactive showing and telling
Stewardship (education preservation appreciation)

Motivations
By and large people are motivated to develop connections with their things based on what the things symbolize of the their activities around the thing.

Even a little bit of empathy in the hands of a developer or designer can have a really powerful impact on the product you are developing.
When you develop empathy beyond they designers, can have a profound impact.

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Understanding people as people

Don't oversimplify; embrace complexity
Emotions context culture and meaning
Motivations and behaviors
Get out there and talk to them

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Design is an activity, not a role
Everybody recognizes that they're doing some of that
It's important for companies to take that seriously

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Ideas are neither scarce or fragile
Ideas are cheap, cheap, cheap.

The major thing that design is that it makes ideas tangible.
... That means prototypes (screen mockups, mailers or print collateral, phone or service script

You should be protyping the things you DON'T KNOW, not the things you do know. ("Is this how this could work? Does it feel right?"

You should prototype as often as you can and as quickly as you can. It will make for better products.

What works well with agile and flexible processes?
Have a conversation with materials ... get a block of marble and you start carving into it, for example... this idea of what is this going to be?

What does that mean?
"I can't think of one time where the picture I had in my mind is what we ended up on the screen -- a lot of times it's because you stumble across or evolve into something that's better."

"The coding is the sketching -- Python is my thinking language"
It shows that he's having this conversation with materials

It means you need to think about workflow
Typical workflow doesn't give a lot of room for the conversation

(old way)
Design ---------------
Development -----------------

Now, there's constant movement between the two before the product begins to take shape.

The Agile Manifesto
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Agile development is really more like Agile product making.

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I try not to talk about design like it's not a big heavy word, but what design involves. what it help with, if you send a little time up front understanding their business, it helps to talk to them about what's important to them.