Design is how it works

The title of the new book, Design is How it Works, on the power of “Big D” Design comes from a Steve Jobs quote: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” I haven’t read the book (yet), but something struck me as I was reading the Core77 review quoted below.

What Greene does differently than most other business book writers is dig deeper, not just repeating the story anecdotally but interviewing the key players to try to find what drives them. The OXO case study is supportive of one of his main theses, that the way to craft successful products that drive sales is to pay attention to users on the fringes of the customer base. Greene calls these users outliers, but REI, Clif Bar and Nike might call them extreme athletes, while Virgin Atlantic has its road warriors and Porsche has speed freaks. For OXO the elderly or the arthritic may be sensitive to form factors that healthy and youthful users might ignore. Correcting the product for the needs of that outlier population actually enhances the product for the rest of the user base.

Outliers… It’s a good idea, if not a new one. Designing for outliers equates to designing for people who are particularly sensitive to the performance of your product. The difficult thing about this particular design principle is that the maxim isn’t complete. At least as important as designing for the outlier, is selecting the right one. To which aspects of your product should your outliers be sensitive? Your outlier might be the extreme user who will push your product to its limits (REI), or the frequent user who spends the most time with your product (Virgin Atlantic), or the user who struggles the most using your product (OXO).

It’s a nuance, but it’s one that determines the difference between success and failure. Designing for the wrong outlier can be as catastrophic as designing a bad product. How do you understand which of your users are the right outliers? Well that’s where the research comes in.

Although almost all of the companies profiled by Greene eschew focus groups in favor of ethnography and a guiding corporate structure, each case demonstrates that when the customer is ignored or misevaluated, problems occur. The clearest lesson of Design is How it Works is that the end-user must be listened to, if not in focus groups, at least in spirit.

A good lesson. But which outliers should I “listen to.” I’m looking forward to reading the book to see if and how this question is addressed.

References

Book Review: Design is How it Works: How the Smartest Companies Turn Products into Icons, by Jay Greene – Core77.

Staying in touch

So, why have I renewed my interest in writing under this Observations & Insights banner? Well, as usual with me… there’s a story.

I’m recently back from my first trip to Tokyo, and in a way, that trip represented a professional bookend of sorts… or more optimistically, I’ll call it a bookmark–an opportunity to pause and reflect on what has come before.

For those who don’t know me, it’s worth noting that the reason I was in Tokyo was for the EPIC 2010 conference (which I’ll write about at length in a later entry). At the conference, I had the opportunity to see and catch up with many old friends and former colleagues whom I haven’t seen or corresponded with very much in the past few years. Upon returning, I find myself at a moment where a few of my closest colleagues are now moving on to new challenges and new surroundings.

My hope is that writing here may provide this as a venue for:

• continuing the conversations with people who I have (and wish I had) spent a significant amount of time with over the past few years, and
• engaging in conversation a bit more often with the larger design and research community I’m happy to be a part of.

So, there it is… Welcome to the refresh. Whether I know you or not, I hope to talk to you soon… 😉

A day worth blogging about

Yesterday I had the good fortune to be invited to “Made in India.” a lecture put on by Carlos Teixeira at Parsons School of Design. The reason I had that good fortune was by the grace of Sonia Manchanda of Idiom, my collaborator and co-curator for the workshop series at EPIC 2010.

The lecture was fascinating. It was the first in a series related to Carlos’ current project, to understand how Design is developing in emerging markets. Of particular interest is his observation that Design is developing differently in those markets. The lecture put facts to that observation. Much of their recent work at Idiom has been in the “design of business,” through a collaboration with The Future Group, a company dedicated to bringing to the masses what only the rich had before, through a fusion of modern retail business models with Indian culture.

Idiom and Future Group take a particularly aggressive approach to scenario and prototype testing, quickly turning out realistic concepts for introduction to real users in real situations. Some of their innovations include BigBazaar, a big box food retailer that incorporates the local seasonal vendors that Indian communities have come to rely on, and Home Town, a Home Depot / IKEA mashup that makes home design and construction available in a cultural context that does not do DIY.

But that’s not all, earlier in the day, I spoke briefly with a collection of the brightest minds working at the intersection of ethnography and business from Latin America, the US and Europe, some of whom are old friends and some I hope will be. That call was to begin the planning process for the EPIC 2010 program, for which I’m the workshop co-chair. Here’s a secret: the papers deadline is going to be extended. If you’re so inclined, submit something… There’s still time.

Working backwards, I spent the morning doing secondary research on the current state of the Healthcare IT arena here in the U.S. and identifying opportunities for innovation in software and services. I found some inspiring new work and personalities like Dr. Jay Parkinson, a physician entrepreneur whose own pediatric practice has been described as

“Geek Squad with doctors and a Netflix-priced monthly membership subscription fee — it is a branded healthcare “experience” that mixes “concierge service for all,” with house/office calls and web visits via email, IM, video chat, and text messaging.”

This is why I love what I do… It was a good day.

Ethnography is not an in-home interview

Grant McCracken provides a case on how the new Tesco US stores are underperforming expectations, and where the blame may lie.

Ethnography is good at the following things.

1. it is good at picking up the telling detail. And yes, you want to be in someone’s home to do this. Or at point of purchase. Or where the product gets consumed.
2. it is good an embracing point of view, so that we see all the details at once. This is the “holistic” approach for which anthropological is in the social sciences famous.
3. it is good at seeing the topic from several (and collective) points of view, the client’s, the consumer’s, the various members of the household, family, neighborhood, city, etc. This is the cultural point of view. And it looks as if Tesco entirely missed this entirely.
4. it is good at dollying back from fine details to an ever larger picture so that we see the product, or innovation, or opportunity in successively broaders contexts. This is the strength of the big management consulting houses like McKinsey. What they lack in ethnographic nuance and cultural understanding, they make up in the construction of a powerful strategic picture.

The irony: when we define ethnography as interviews done in-home, almost all of this potential value is lost.

Full post: This Blog Sits at the…

What is ethnography and how does it aid customer understanding?

Simon does a wonderful job here describing the value of ethnography, getting past the typical arguments re: depth of understanding (where most explanations stop) to explain the enduring business value of the models of human experience that can result.

But perhaps the most significant advantage of high-calibre ethnographic work is derived not from its academic legacy, but more directly from its recent history as a business tool. Most of the pioneers of applied ethnography developed approaches that were tailored to innovation, decision-making and production processes. In practice, the focus on building models is what realises an ethnographic programme’s value to a business. A model can be applied to issues that weren’t part of the original research brief, and it can be updated and extended long after the original research programme has ended.

Full article: MyCustomer.com