We are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have.- Bill Buxton
Check out this great presentation by Bill at Stanford.
ANTONELLA is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties.She is also completely imaginary.
A New York Times article on how Ford used personas to create the Ford Fiesta: Before Creating the Car, Ford Designs the Driver.
Kim Goodwin from Cooper spoke at an IxDA event in New York about integrating visual design and interaction design. At Cooper, they feel pretty strongly that these should be treated as two distinct disciplines as they haven’t found anyone that can be really good at both. For those of you not familiar with Kim Goodwin, she is the author of my favorite book about building digital products Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services. If you are a product manager or anyone else actively involved in product development, buy this book and read it!
Be sure to read more about this presentation at: Cooper Journal: Video of Kim Goodwin speaking about how to integrate interaction, visual and industrial design at IxDA NYC
About the presentation:
Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.
The best products and services don’t merely help people complete tasks, they enable people to accomplish goals. Sometimes the tasks a user performs are in alignment with their goals and often times they are not. Users have a tenacity for doing what it takes to get the job done. In a lot of circumstances, they come up with workarounds and other methods that were never originally designed into the product. Once in a while, they may even change their goals based on a product’s limitations. For example, if their GPS system can’t tell them where to find a “five star” restaurant, they might just settle for it to find them “any” restaurant.
One of the greatest opportunities to improve a product or service lies in between what the user’s tasks are and what their goals are. If you can discover a discrepancy between how the user uses a product or service (the tasks they are performing) and what they really want to accomplish with it (their goal), this can really open up the potential to make innovative changes to your product or service. Many companies that rely solely on market research, as opposed to user research, routinely design their products and services to improve the efficiency of tasks but not necessarily helping the user to accomplish their goal.
A classic example of this is the first generation iPod. There were quite a few mp3 players on the market and some even had video and larger storage capacity. All of these let you click through your songs and play specific songs. The goal of the user, decidedly, being that they wanted to be able to play their mp3 music. But if you ever used one of those pre-iPod mp3 players, you might have remembered your thumb getting tired from all the clicking you had to do as each click painfully moved you one song at a time to the next song. And if you held down the button, it would be just as painful trying to stop remotely close to the song you wanted. When Apple brought the iPod to market, it had fewer features than most of the players already in the market. But what it did do was capitalize on the unmet goals of users who were tired of the one click navigation offered by all of the other players. It would seem that the users of the current mp3 players formulated some new goals based on the limitations of the products they were using. Oh and we shouldn’t forget iTunes, it also allowed users to easily sync their music without having to drag and drop files and folders. It seems so obvious in hind sight.
A lot of Interaction Designers are probably already familiar with this concept. In fact, Cooper has coined the term Goal-Directed® method and is a good place to learn more. Even if you aren’t an Interaction Designer, understanding what your customer’s goals are will help you deliver a much better product or service in the long run.
Design Thinking has been a hot topic on the minds of the business community lately as top-tier schools like Berkeley and Stanford have been working to incorporate it into their business programs and an abundance of books are published correlating its importance to innovation. Most agree that Design Thinking really needs to be woven into the corporate culture in order to be taken advantage of. This can be a very hard sell, especially with larger companies that have huge amounts of inertia.
On the other hand, being a Product Manager developing a new product is like being on the front lines and offers the ability to start incorporating Design Thinking elements to some good effect and without the need for top down corporate change. Below is a list of some simple steps that I have been using at Electronic Arts to give Design Thinking a small foothold in our online business.
User research is a key component of Design Thinking. By user research, I don’t mean surveys or market data that results in quantitative data, I am referring to qualitative research. You want to really understand the goals of your users by watching how they use your product and asking open ended questions. A lot of users will request a well thought out feature, but good Design Thinkers will ask “why” they want that feature and continue to ask why until they uncover the user’s actual intent of their actions.
A good example is if a user came to you and demanded that you build them a bridge. Your immediate response should be “why do you want a bridge”. The user might respond, “so that I can get to the other side of the river”. Keep popping the why stack by asking “why do you want to get to the other side”. The user might respond this time with “so I can deliver a message to a person on the other side”. So now the problem isn’t about building a bridge, it is really about being able to send a message to someone on the other side of a river. This is important, because now you can try and solve the right problem.
This is the step that really gets to the heart of innovation. Traditional business thinking is all about coming up with one low risk solution and settling the matter there. But the Design Thinking approach is to solve the problem with as many different solutions as possible. Each of these solutions, by no means, have to be doable but the process of coming up with tangible and intangible solutions really opens up the floodgates of ideas. What I have found is that really good innovative ideas have emerged that end up affecting our entire product.
It helps to take a project approach to solving the user’s needs. Form a team of cross-functional members (development, marketing, product, qa, etc) and brainstorm all sorts of different solutions to the problem. Do not limit creativity here, the sky is the limit. Ideo has often sited lofty impossible ideas as launching points for doable innovative ones. To keep it all on track, try and time box the output. This means only allowing a specific amount of time to brainstorm before moving to the next step of refinement. Also, it pays to keep the “Devil’s Advocate” at bay during the brainstorming stage. Nothing stifles creativity more than the words “let me play the devil’s advocate”. After you have come up with a long list of possible solutions, start to narrow them down based on which ideas best meet every one of these categories: Customer Desirability, Technical Feasibility, and Financial Feasibility. Finally, you should be left with a very short list of viable solutions.
Development is expensive. Use lightweight methods like wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to get the ideas in front of people sooner. The sooner people can get a sense for how something works, the less it will cost to make changes–and there are always changes. After brainstorming solutions and prototyping them, it is important to try and get the prototype in front of the same users you used for the user research. The key here is to iterate on your ideas with prototypes. Try things out and see if they work or don’t work. Failing early lets you avoid expensive development costs and failing often lets you experiment with new innovative ideas with lower risk.
Nothing is more unsettling than when you have a solid emotional brand but all of your communications don’t accurately represent it. Whether you’re communicating by email to a customer, showing a power point presentation to an internal marketing team, or posting documentation for your API, all of these need to represent your brand and should look and feel the part. It is important for you to build proper brand guidelines, templates, marketing guidelines, letterhead, etc. that your entire team uses to accurately represent your brand. Any customer touch point, be it internal or external, should clearly articulate the emotions and goodwill of your brand. You should not only be concerned with just the aesthetics, but the voice of your communications, the content, and even the features you build should be checked against “does this accurately represent our brand”.
Don’t decide solutions, design solutions. Use Design Thinking for more than just product features. Try to design solutions for internal processes or marketing strategies. In fact, the more you can use this for any problem, the better the culture will be around it.
Tim Brown from Ideo was interviewed by Business Week and answered five questions. This video, albeit kinda crappy, gives some good insight into what design thinking is. Tim is one of the founders of Ideo and they have pioneered design thinking.
Be sure to also read Tim’s article on Design Thinking (PDF 2.9MB) from the June 2008 issue of The Harvard Business Review.