business

A Recap on the Talk

This week I attended PhillyCHI's event featuring Michael Carvin and Michael Zarro. The talk was entitled User Experience Research: Is there an Academic – Practitioner Divide? The discussion proposed the thesis that there is hardline division between the practitioner research and academic research. The talk was rich and the discussion afterwards fruitful. The conclusion was that there is much more room for the use of academic research within the practitioners day-to-day projects, but that due to perceived dense material, difficult search options, and time constraints many practitioners do not use the amazingly thorough research that is done in the field of human computer interaction. There also is the potential for further partnerships between academia and corporations within the Philadelphia area. When the talk was finished there were some tangential thoughts and further exploration that occurred as a group.
 

The Discussion

Rigor within User Experience (is there a lack there of?)
The subject of rigor within UX research was posed by Dave Cooksey of saturdave, an independent user experience consultancy. His concern seemed to me to be two-fold: 1. that there is not a rigorous community of partitioners providing the necessary feedback and constructive criticism on the amount and strategy for UX research and 2. that there is no standard for UX research, unlike other fields. Without such standards, there's no ability to measure the level of rigor or to even have baseline approaches to our methods. While many practitioners participate in discussing standards through a lively community online there is no formal academic requirement for practitioners in the field. In his talk. The User Experience of User Experience, another PhillyCHI event, Cooksey made the point that 'there is no qualifying test for User Experience Professionals as there is with architects or Doctors' and that 'we are not held to the same standards as other fields.' Yet, we are increasingly being brought to the table as experts in our field without the same formal qualifications as other disciplines. From my point of view this brings us both advantages and disadvantages. Without having formal requirements we are free to help shape what the field is in a way that other more formal professions are not. We have the ability to shape how we fit into a team through our actions. This could be seen as a disadvantage as well, which I think was more the point of the comment: that there are many practitioners who do not follow rigorous methods of practice, who could inevitably poison the perception of the field by producing low quality work and produce irreversible perceptions within the minds of our non-UX partners. This double edge sword I believe to be one though that is faced by many fields due to differences in the level of rigor at different institutions. Overall, I tend to lean towards the direction that our current position affords us immense opportunity to help shape our field as well as act as change agents in legacy institutional structures.
 
Is the bar set low for design research?
I brought up the point that was mirrored by another participant, forgive me for not citing his name, that the bar for User Experience professionals doing research is quite low. This relates to the way that we communicate to our clients and business stakeholders on the level of numbers and metrics. These are the bread and butter of what they do, and I feel that whenever research is cited or conducted by the User Experience teams, the tendency of business is to be either surprised that such thought was included in what is perceived as more of an aesthetic practice or to somewhat blindly take the research as fact without much questioning. This does get back to the earlier point of there being no true research standards in UX. I also feel it gets at this idea of the increasing overlap of product management and user experience professionals, as we get more refined in our ability to conduct both qualitative and evaluative research we are able to provide more objective rational behind our decisions and also speak more the language of business in a way that we have not been able to before. I recently wrote about this overlap in my article: Product Management and User Experience Had a Baby.
 
How can we use UX metrics?
After the talk a woman who also works at a large corporation explained to me that my comment on the bar being set low for research hit home for her. She spoke of a way that her internal design team has been able to improve the relationship with business as well as the outcome of the final product by creating User Experience Metrics that are more granular ways of measuring success and failure of given interactions and tasks. What these do is two fold: 1. it forces the designs to align closely with the business goals in a way that elevates the practice of User Experience within the eyes of the business as an important and rigorous practice that is integral to business success and 2. With the added inclusion of "how to measure success" tacked on to the definition phase of the user experience both teams are forced to consolidate and prioritize the use cases which comprise the heart and soul of the desired experience. At the end of a project when the product is within flight, the use of user experience metrics map seamlessly with the business metrics and both teams are able to measure success and failure concurrently.
 
Potential for Partnership: Academia and Institutions
The talk also raised the idea for more collaboration between academic institutions and corporations, especially within the Philadelphia area. By creating relationships either through a stipend or granting the ability to publish findings, institutions can have academic research and insight into their operations and products that may not be feasible internally due to timing, budget, or internal resources. This would require some level of trust on both parties and could be tricky from a legal perspective. However, from my perspective seems like a no brainer!
For now, I at least feel encouraged to reach out to local academics and libraries to use relevant published research within my daily practice. 
 
PHOTO CREDITS:
http://trevinwax.com/2007/12/26/2007-the-year-in-book-review/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/taedc/5686750281/lightbox/

...and it's called "Behavioral Systems Service Experience Design Innovation"... or something.

There has been a lot of talk recently about questioning the scope of experience design within business: In Adam Conner's article for Mad Pow, he states: "I believe Experience Design should be defined as a specific approach to design that treats the product as secondary and determined purely based on the ability to contribute to the creation of a desired experience." I tend to agree with this statement about the expansion of UX from the screen or product to the holistic experience and I also think it gets at the heart of the conversation on Design Thinking and other related innovation discussions.

In Sarah Malin's response to Bruce Nussbaum's Article "Design Thinking: a failed experiment" she writes, "Focusing on isolated elements of design thinking neglects a “systems” understanding of the whole skill set – ignoring the increasing need for systems thinking that can take in global reality in its entirety and embrace complexity." I think its astute to speak of "systems thinking" as this gets both at the heart of what business stakeholders, product managers, and designers all are trained to do: to make decisions based on holistic and complex data and systems. I'd rather take the discussion of what to call our field out of this article and focus on defining what I see the environment to be.
 

"I am a problems guy, you're the solutions gal."

That's a phrase I heard from a colleague of mine in terms of the relationship between his role as product manager and my role as designer. We are more alike in what we are attempting to do than many people think. In fact, our fields are beginning to overlap in real ways that are creating tension as well as sparking the above mentioned conversations. Market research which can pinpoint potential areas for business growth is not unlike ethnographic studies that User Experience professionals do to pinpoint sucesses, failures, and identify areas for innovation. In large companies product managers may conceive the initial product idea, but in the end we (user experience practitioners) are the ones at the front lines of the interface between that product or service and the consumer.  How can we make informed decisions about that interface without being part of the team that conceives, strategizes, and maps out the plan for not only what that product is but when and how the consumer will interact with it? It's like asking someone to make really pretty wrapping paper.
 

I want to be both a problem identifier and a solutions gal.

I want to help identify the experience gaps! Without having background into why decisions were made and previous history on the strategy and technology we can't help fill in the necessary holes in the experience, nor can we make informed decisions on the design. The problem here is a perceived lack of trust. By saying we want to be involved in the lifecycle of the product and service development phase, Product Managers and Business Stakeholders may not see the need any may even feel offended. They are trained specifically in market research, finance, complex decision making, yet we are trained in people and the creative thinking that will add value to those phases of that project and better inform both the design phase and the final outcome. We don't only want to present to business, we want to work together. And not just at then end phase, but from the formulation for the strategy phase. Why? Because design and business both want the same thing: a great product that our customers will love.
 

Asking lot's of questions leads to questioning.

I tend to ask a lot of questions, questions directed towards product managers, engineers, and other user experience colleagues. It is from these questions that I get the best ideas for designs, not from requirements documents or internal reviews. It is also from these questions that I believe I communicate most effectively, because by having a clearer picture of the larger system I can make more creative solutions from knowing the parameters before me. Then by then mapping the design back to the answers I get, the larger team sees the value of the questions when at first they may not have. This may seem commonsense, but I have been asked "Why do you need to know that? How is that related to design?" and told that I should not, "try to boil the ocean" by thinking to broadly.
 

Let's not boil the ocean...maybe just make it lukewarm!

Indi Young's book "Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior" has become a staple in the UX community. Its in-depth look at a type of generative research illuminates the ability for design methodologies to have immense positive impact on the overall customer experience. This method for determining the way people think is not subjective in nature: rather it is a system of carefully crafted, extensively analyzed, data modeling. The cumulative data of a large set of one-on-one interviews creates a warehouse of information to mine. User behaviors and tasks are then organized into respective groupings (towers) and matched against both existing and future products and services. By visually seeing the flow of the customer's task-based mental space across a strata of different market segments (user personas), business stakeholders and designers can have greater insight into where their roadmaps and existing strategies fall short of supporting their main consumer base. All in all, Young's method of data modeling is a powerful tool for businesses to enhance their experience strategy through gaining empathy for their customers by listening to their behaviors and experiences. 
The attached document is an illustrated summary of the book, told in diagram form, that's right: squares, circles and few words. I thought it appropriate to summarize visually, aligning my end deliverable more closely with the book's proposed end deliverable of a full fledged diagram analyzing the data gathered, as it can be distributed both succinctly and easily. Feel free to re-use any of the diagrams should they help you communicate a specific idea to a team-mate or stakeholder, or take this summary as is: one person's interpretation of a wonderfully powerful book!

Download the Illustrated Summary

 
SOURCES:
Book: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/alignment/
Author: @indiyoung

Recently the company I work for decided to merge two main design teams creating a unified front for User Experience Design. The culture of the new team was entirely different: significantly less formal, faster paced with a much heavier focus on group collaboration. The difference was so immense yet it still seemed to still have a powerful synergy within the business. I began to re-think the how I saw the role of the User Experience group within the larger organization. This transition as a case study, I decided to analyze design within business: more specifically, the potential for cultural change within an institution via design thinking + creativity.
 

The turtle and the hare, can they work together?

I was excited to join the CIM mobile team this past August, yet it was a significant change that has taken me considerable amount of time to adjust to. I would almost describe this change as a culture shock! Excel spreadsheets were suddenly replaced by rainbow post-its, meeting invites were replaced by hollering over the cube walls, wire-framing individually was replaced by group white-board sessions, and "where's my adaptor" became "where's that sharpie?"

But I had grown to enjoy immensely the challenge of thinking of better ways to formally communicate in widely spaced meeting touch-points, to solve problems individually and then present them to a group, and to craft the order and content of a document such that it was catered specifically to my audience. I did enjoy the fact that the audience was always different, and adjustments of communication strategy were needed, many times on the spot. Although it did feel it was an us vs. them mentality: between design and product and then later between product and engineering.

In this new environment with an much more casual set of meetings / gatherings, I felt a bit like a fish out of water(fall). It took me a while to recognize that what I was perceiving as a lack of formality (or in my view a lack of perceived clarity) was not getting in my way, rather it was enabling me to think 10x more creatively. I could still individually contribute to a group brainstorming design phase in a valuable way by sharing the idea generation phase rather than dividing it. And that casualness that seemed to come with agility was not the sign of a loss of clarity, but a tool for fostering an environment of creativity.

But I was still left wondering if and how that culture shift would be recognized with the teams I had formally worked so closely with - would the benefits of this way of working translate and how? On the flip-side, would the fast-paced hare, stop to ask for the turtle's seasoned perspective?  Knowledge of the business at large was most certainly not something to just leave behind, or was it? Was organizational history meaningless? Enter my interest in design thinking and related fields:

Design Thinking, a background.

Design Thinking has been used to describe implementing certain forms of the design processes within larger business structures. Usually it incorporates the idea of cross-functional teams and early on discovery methodology to promote collaboration, enhance innovation, and in the end create better products that support the user and the business. Or as Helen Walters in her online article for Fast Company states, "it’s at this nexus and intersection that the thriving businesses of the future will be built."

We've all seen those ven diagrams which seek to illuminate the designer's process and read the briefs describing the designers 'plan of attack', which usually goes something like this, "define, research, ideate, prototype, choose, implement, and learn" from Wikipedia on 'design thinking'. A component of design thinking, is taking these approaches, alongside a toolset of different cross-functional collaborative ideation practices, to create anything from a product to a business strategy.

Company's like IDEO have leading the way in terms of using design methodologies within business, but also have served to elevate the status of design beyond its narrowly focused 'aesthetic' role to that of a strategic partner within business, government, and cultural institutions. Through partnerships with such institutions, IDEO has been a successful partner at the table of cultural change and leadership, helping to create fields such as Social Innovation, Service Design, and Organizational or Business Design. The birth of such design fields illustrates a shift in the way design is perceived by the world at large, and has acted as a catalyst for change within the culture of business.
 

Creativity as a agent for change.

In his recent article Design Thinking is a Failed Experiment. So What's Next? a former journalist of Business Weekly and early-advocate for Design Thinking, Bruce Nussbaum highlights some failure points in the adoption and success of design thinking, proposing a new meme, "Creative Quotient." Some are quick to criticize this article as a sign of a lack of accountability on the part of the Nussbaum, others are more supportive.

One things for sure tweets from the design community at large get at an important point: the ball has already begun rolling. Take this rather humourous comment from @gretared (Gretchen Anderson of Punchcut), "What does the death of design thinking mean for the construction of rooms with bean bags and the sales of post-its?" This comment hits close to home: I think of the construction of the large CIM City space in the building, chalk full of orange bean bags and plants, not to mention the walls full of post-it scrum boards that line the mobile development corner. But self-satire aside, I don't see Nussbaum's article as describing the end of an era, rather I view it as an attempt to get at the heart and soul of a deeper inherent idea: the elevation of creativity as a valued and respected form of intelligence, to be applied to many arenas including, but not limited to, leadership, innovation, and strategy.

But change does not happen overnight, and in a large corporation, incremental change is often the way. I can see many glimmers of this, especially as described before in the adoption, at least in-part, of certain aspects of agile methodology and the implementation of cross-functional teams, which no-one is slow to mention the mobile team as a successful example of this practice!

So how can we as individuals designers act in support of creativity as a change agent? At last years Wharton UI Conference at Penn's Wharton School of business, Cory Ondrejka gave a brilliant talk entitled: Angry Dinosaurs: Accelerating Change and Institutional Incompetence. Where he advocates the following process for creating change within an institution (lovely nicknamed institution-hacking):
 

• find a space to work in where you have room to experiment/explore,
• collect data and build value from this data,
• publish findings (be transparent at least within the business) with a sustainable interface,
• include the customer in this process,
• "fail fast, cheaply, and publicly."

Sound familiar? For this process to be adopted, Cory recommends the following, "If you are trying to change a group, find the people who are your critics and make them your fans. The way to make them your fans is by spread the wealth, not to go around saying they are stupid dinosaurs." Which get's me to my last point:
 

When offered a seat at the table, respect the rules of the game.

By this I mean: in order for design to be a respected participant at the table within a business, a certain level of mutual respect is in order. A business stakeholder's lack of trust in the seemingly fuzzy design-speak about collaboration and creativity is not unfounded, especially if previous success has been proven through traditional business practices. Even though design thinking and creativity may have a multitude of recent successes, within the company I am part of, and it may seem refreshingly promising to jump on the bandwagon, there's still the voice of experience and tradition to resist the urge. These are often difficult to argue with, especially in terms of the inherent risk which accompanies true innovation.

I do not believe all stakeholders are indelibly averse to change, rather that we can't expect to build something internally or shift a culture without recognizing the foundation and system around us. Or as Helen Walter's says, "Designers who are looking to take a more strategic role in the organization, who should really be the figures one would think of to drive these initiatives, need to ensure that they are well versed in the language of business."

So let's check our communication style and our methods of quantifying success, such that we are working within the existing language of business, and not adding the to the perception of design thinking and creativity as risky. We can still employ agile and creative methods, while effectively communicating bottom-lines, evaluating metrics for success, and most of all being clear and honest in the way we communicate.

With all this said, internal design groups are obviously quite well situated to initiate such conversations, to collect large amounts of valuable data from customers, and have enormous potential for the specificity of knowledge required to create amazing customer experiences because they have the a level of visibility into the structure of operations and the culture of the business that external agencies do not. This assertion was echoed in Jarad Spool's talk Anatomy of a Design Decision where he mentions the advantage of internal design groups in creating powerful 'experience-focused' design or the design of the space 'between activities.' It's this transitional space is the exact realm I consider a required space for design at the holistic customer experience and service level.

As designers, we are in an extremely exciting space, within institutions that are supporting new technologies, innovation, agile development (at least for certain projects), and by considering opening the door for design partners to start having a voice at the table. By seeing ourselves as valuable experts in creativity, by finding a common language to communicate, and by including a diverse array of business parters in practices used in our own field to solve problems, we have the potential to not only create amazing experiences for our customers, but to also help evolve a changing institutional culture.

SOURCES:

Nussbaum, B. Design Thinking Is a Failed Experiment. So What's Next. Retrieved April 6, 2011, from http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663558/design-thinking-is-a-failed-experiment-so-whats-next

Ondrejka, C. (2010, June). Angry Dinosaurs: Accelerating Change and Institutional Incompetence  Keynote Talk, from Wharton School of Business Higher Ed Web symposium, Philadelphia. PA.

Spool, J. (2011, February) Anatomy of a Design Decision Presentation, at the Wharton School of Business, Philadelphia, PA.

Walters, H.  Design Thinking" Isn't a Miracle Cure, but Here's How It Helps. Retrieved March 24, 2011, from http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663480/helen-walters-design-thinking-buzzwords?partner=homepage_newsletter