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.

Empathy is the new black

It’s good to see empathy making the rounds in the business publications again.

The key to delivering a great experience for is to have empathy for your customers. And the best way to develop that empathy is obvious, yet it requires constant repeating: Go to them. It’s shocking how many methods companies have for learning about customers (surveys, focus groups, phone questionnaires), and how hesitant they are to engage in the simplest approach. I suspect its because they’re afraid of what they’ll find when engaging customers directly, and prefer to hide behind the reports and charts those other techniques produce, and which provide endless opportunities for interpretation.

Full Article: Harvardbusiness.org

It’s become fashionable in the last decade to prescribe innovation as the cure for every ill facing business. If companies could only start creating compelling products and services on a regular basis, they would never need to worry about next year’s growth figures. While that might be true, such talk tends to focus on design or even flashy marketing. In the process, a critical factor gets left out of the conversation: empathy, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another person. Unless new products or services connect with the lives of real people, design or marketing can’t do much to make them succeed.

Full Article: BusinessWeek

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…

Patterns in UX Research

Steve Baty illustrates 10 common patterns found in user research data. Knowing what to look for can help you see the forest and the trees, but it can also make everything look like a forest.

One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior. Patterns demonstrate a recurring theme, with data or objects appearing in a predictable manner. Seeing a visual representation of the data is usually enough for us to recognize a pattern. However, it is much harder to see patterns in raw data, so identifying patterns can be a daunting task when we face large volumes of research data. Patterns stand out above the typical noise we’re used to seeing in nature or in raw data.

Full article: UX Matters

Laura Barton meets Gillian Tett | On the money

Gillian Tett, assistant editor at the Financial Times, on the causes of the credit crisis and how her training in anthropology helped her predict our current dilemma more than two years ago.

I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,’ she reasons. ‘Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.

Full Article: The Guardian

Deconstructing Analysis Techniques

A straight-forward and clear overview of the major components of analysis for experience design. A must read.

Analysis is that oft-glossed over, but extremely important step in the research process that sits between observation (data gathering) and our design insights or recommendations. In many respects, analysis is crucial to realizing the value of our research since good analysis can salvage something from bad research, but the converse is not so true. This is where the literature tends to fall a little silent, jumping over the analysis techniques straight to a discussion of how best to document and communicate the findings from analysis. This article seeks to begin to redress that imbalance by breaking down the analysis black box into its major sub-techniques.

Full Article via: Designing For Humans