Sneaking into people’s lives and admitting it
Posted: 22/08/2011 Filed under: marketing, Product design, service design Leave a comment »Once upon a time there was a mobile company who wanted to improve people’s lives (and their bottom line) by offering some amazing relevant and useful services. In order to do that, they decided to do some extensive research to ask customers what kind of information and services they’d like to have on their mobiles.
The customers were happy to be consulted. They filled questionairs and came into the discussion room to talk about their problems and what they needed to make things better. They got excited with the prospect o having updated train times, shopping lists, and news handy so they could organize their hectic urban lives on the go.
The well-intentioned mobile company took that on board and prioritized their product development with renewed confidence. A few months later, they launched their wap portal with lots of useful services.
The design and product teams watched traffic stats anxiously, looking to validate their hard work. But the stats were just weird. People were not accessing train times and news as expected. Instead, they were going crazy for things like nude, awful quality animated gifs (this was long ago) and clunky apps like mobile chat, which defied usability and common sense at the time. And yet, the revenue was coming from those.
What’s the moral of the story?
Customer/design research cannot make all the hard decisions for you or eliminate risk totally. Innovation should be user-centric, but for it to happen there has to be some experimentation and the will to go out of your comfort zone with some calculated risk.
Often the best test ground for innovation is life and not the research lab. Traditional quantitative and lab qualitative research is useful, but for innovation purposes it might mean testing within what we already know or suspect, and having interesting insights filtered out through what users pre-judge as being important. I’m more convinced by the minute that observational and contextual research techniques like ethnography, where you observe people in action, in context and their environment, has the potential to surprise and shows us opportunities which would not be otherwise be articulated in a lab.
But we should pick these insights to inspire and differentiate, and not just to cover ourselves. A bit of courage often pays off.
To App or not to App
Posted: 16/03/2011 Filed under: Content, Product design, user experience Leave a comment »I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, and reading this article in the Guardian about the fading novelty of news apps for the iPad got me thinking. I have frequent discussions with clients and industry colleagues about the suitability of the closed app format for everything.
Everyone wants to be on the Apple or Android app stores for “positioning” reasons. Marketeers love imagining their logo sitting permanently on the tablet’s main screen. But applications are expensive things to build, need to be heavily customised for different platforms, have hurdles for quick fixes and updates. Your customers won’t download your app just because you’ve built it, or even because they love your brand. Or they might even download it along with dozens of other free apps which they install and hardly use.
I see apps as a possible solutions for certain customer offerings. But you need to define the offering and the value to your customer and your business. And sorry, an App it’s not an offering in itself, let alone a mobile strategy.
The downloadable app format gives you an incredible array of interaction possibilities, which are great for tools, games, social networking and resources which people are going to use often, demanding rich functionality, willing to take the time to discover the cool new interaction possibilities you’ve worked so hard on. But sometimes the best solution for sites offering mostly web content is surprisingly… the web – customised for different mobile platforms of course.
Define the service offering, assess the value, then decide on the technology, interaction and presentation.
Design, this exercise of faith
Posted: 18/11/2010 Filed under: Product design, Uncategorized, user experience | Tags: design process 1 Comment »Design is done by people and people are driven by reason and emotion. This is my emotional cycle while going through a typical UX/innovation project:
1. Hope: I want this project really badly. It’s a dream project, different from all others in my whole career. It can make people’s lives better, maybe change the world a little.
2. Euphoria: We won it, the project is ours. Beers all around!
3. Angst: Down to reality – time, budget, resources – how to change the world with these mean constraints? Two sleepless nights later…
4. Sense of regaining control: We got a plan and some promising ideas and solutions to work with. Phew…
5. Faith: Our ideas need A LOT of work. Sad to see some being trashed, but lovey to see the best ones mushroom into even better ones. Many ups and downs, an exercise of patience and self-belief.
6. Relief: We’ve found the solution – it’s groundbreaking and beautiful! Beers all around!
7. Angst: Late hurdles and limitations invariably come. How far can sacrifices go so the main idea can survive? Am I being objective or precious?
8. Surprise/joy: We made it and it’s beautiful (not a classic beauty, but what they call an interesting beauty). Beers all around!
Service heroes
Posted: 06/08/2010 Filed under: service design, Uncategorized | Tags: service design Leave a comment »One of the main challenges of conducting a holistic service experience design project is that your client is very likely to be a person. A person in an ocean of corporation.
Service/customer touchpoints are almost never the responsibility of one team or individual. Take Telco A for instance: grossly simplifying things, there are VPs and divisions for everything: products, services, marketing, consumer, B2B, customer services, design, retail, IT, real estate, logistics, engineering, maintenance sub-contractors, procurement…
OK, corporations need to organise their ocean of people and activities into manageable parts, but usually they end up with lots of self-contained puddles which don’t network very well.
But customers, oblivious to this complexity, see only BRAND and SERVICE.
It’s no good to invest on a new brand campaign if your customer-services are done by some careless contracting company, not aligned with your brand values. It’s no good pushing your customers towards self-service if your digital channels are badly designed and inefficient. All the touchpoints need to be aligned and complement each other, as they are “the company” in the eyes of your customer after all.
There is where you, CEO, need a champion. If it can be yourself, even better. But you need empowered service champions who can can make sure your vision survives the messiness of divisions, hierarchies and P&L structures which discourage people to have common objectives.
For us, customer experience designers, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing our concepts implemented. But beyond our contribution, it is this strong champion (or champions) from the ranks of our client who will make it a reality.
Making UX design famous
Posted: 28/05/2010 Filed under: Uncategorized, user experience | Tags: job market, user experience, ux design 2 Comments »In the late 80′s, as I was finishing school and choosing a career, the cool thing to go into was advertising. It seemed so exciting and exclusive, maybe because advertising people were so natural and unashamedly self-promoting.
20 years later, its has lost great part of the glamour. So what do kids want to be when they grow up nowadays?
If you read this blog you probably know I work with digital UX design, a field (and market) that has been growing steadily in size and strength, even during this long economy downturn. The strange thing is that it has been a silent growth.
Everyone uses digital products and services (like everyone used to enjoy watching creative ads), our clients certainly see a huge value in our work, but somehow UX design hasn’t become famous as a professional choice.
There is a lot of demand for talented interaction and visual interface designers, it pays well, and it’s damn interesting and creative work. So why is it under the radar?
I think we need to do a better job of communicating all this goodness to the mainstream. I’m just building upon a larger debate about defining what we do and finding talent, which has been going on in Europe.
How would you explain and sell a career in UX design to those bright young things (before they waste their talent somewhere else)?
Starbucks service experience map
Posted: 01/05/2010 Filed under: service design | Tags: service design Leave a comment »You might not like Starbucks coffee (I don’t) but this service experience map shows that the quality of the coffee is nearly irrelevant when you consider what happens when customers visit their shops. The opportunities and risks are all in the service. From the Little Springs Design blog
On cooking and multitasking
Posted: 05/12/2009 Filed under: Off topic | Tags: cooking, multitasking, project planning 2 Comments »Multitasking at work is a lot like cooking. If you do some minimum planning you can decide on a recipe, shop for the ingredients and do a simple mental schedule: chop the vegetables while the oven heats, put the rice to boil, call your mother while the chicken roasts, dress the salad in the last minute.
I’m no time management expert, but I’ve learned that multitasking is possible with:
- Some predictability: you can estimate how much exclusive attention a task requires and how much time you need to get it done.
- Planning: to organise multiple tasks together, you need to figure out waiting times and active times (can you eat and whistle at the same time?) – in the end of which you’ll have an idea of how much time you need in total.
- Experience: the more experience you have the less time you need to get things right – experience also improves your ability to improvise.
The problem with this neat recipe is that it assumes you will be left in peace to fulfill your clever plan without unexpected extra tasks and distractions. Is it ever like this in real life? Perhaps you can handle one interruption (the bell rings while you are basting the chicken), but when your dinner guest calls in the last minute to say his date is a vegetarian, you’ll need:
- a good sense of humor
- cold blood
- pure luck: got anything in the fridge to knock up a quick veggie dish?
But if you have some wisdom and experience, you’ll use all you power of improvisation… to order a pizza. And thinking ahead, you’ll make sure the pizza is served cold so perhaps your friend learns to be a bit more considerate next time 
Easy on the eye, easy on the brain
Posted: 07/09/2009 Filed under: Content, user experience | Tags: user experience Leave a comment »Dom Phillips has just published an article for the FT.com showing that readership of tabloids in Brazil is soaring – despite the Internet - at a time that most of the newspaper industry is bleeding.
I’m not going into the prejudices which come to my mind when I think of regular tabloid readers. But the article made me think about what makes some formats so successful.
Entertainment hungry, low attention span, uninterested in deep reflection. I’m not describing tabloid readers, I’m talking about most of us Internet users. The way people read paper tabloids have a lot in common with the way we consume information on the web. In fact, tabloids need to change very little from print to online versions. Compare the paper version of The Sun with their website or even their iPhone app, for instance.
User-experience professionals have known this for a long time. Fat headlines, bite size text, picture rich, attention grabbing editorial style has been the norm and let’s admit, a reference of best practice (we scan – we don’t read, etc.)
All in the name of usability – or we are all closet tabloid fans!
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