The talk I gave at UX Australia this year was on experience strategy and how you go about creating one. Given the talk was about 45 minutes long, it was necessarily high level. In it, I was able to present the Experience PromiseTM which is a new deliverable for communicating the experience vision. We created it at Different a year or so ago and have been using it with great effect to ground project teams and clients in what the customer experience goal really is. Now I must get on and write a book by the same name. I've been planning to do it this past few years, but procrastination and a manic schedule seems to get in the way. No more excuses! Enjoy the preso.
ho·moph·y·ly [hoh-mof-uh-lee, hoh-muh-fil-lee, hom-uh-fuh-li]
–noun, plural -lies.
1. a resemblance due to common ancestry.
2. the condition of being of the same race.
An interesting segment on ABC Radio National's program Future Tense discussed "Echo Chambers" this morning - a label given to the phenomenon when we seek out people who share our opinions in environments such as Twitter and other networks. For a long time we’ve known that birds of a feather, flock together. But it’s interesting to explore what role the information age and internet play in exacerbating this phenomenon. Quite opposite to what many think; that the internet brings us closer to people from other cultures and divergent opinions; the evidence of behavior on social networks suggests that we actually talk very little to those we don’t know and/or don’t share our values and views.
It got me thinking about how this phenomenon can be better leveraged by user experience practitioners and business. We like people like us. If you’ve ever studied anything about body language, you’d know that we mirror people’s postures when we want them to like us. You may also know that we alter our digital identities on social networks in ways that we think will make others like us, maybe such that they are more like them. Take LinkedIn for example. Would you post pictures of your unguarded moments at a party on a network designed for making professional connections? We don’t because the people we want to like us would not think the best of us if we did. It's not the professional image we think employers would project of themselves.
This phenomenon of homophyly has many implications for the experience designer. Outside of the digital realm and into how we approach clients, it means we need to dress the same as our clients and talk using terms they understand if we expect them to like us, believe us and adopt our recommendations. Too often we flock together, talk to each other in our special language because we are human. We like people like us.
But, clients who pay the bills usually aren’t like us. They think we’re oddballs spouting jargon about things that don’t seem to matter to them. That is, until we make it real for them by speaking about the bottom line and how good customer or user experience positively affects that. Or about how they don’t succeed with their internal projects because there are just too many opinions; opinions that don’t ultimately matter because it’s not usually about the internal people at a company. It’s the customer’s opinion that matters and you can only hear that through the filter of the experience researcher and designer.
We are translators of customer needs, goals and can lead business strategies through this acumen. That’s our value and that’s how we must position ourselves if design is to be taken seriously and truly change the world for the better – bringing our clients success. But not in jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers when our clients wear suits. And not in a suit when our client wears jeans. And never speaking in terms they don’t understand.
About three years ago, I presented at UX Week 2007 on a topic that in hindsight, probably was best left to some kind of tutorial. At the time, I had been specifying the interface behaviour of highly conditional and rich internet applications (think flash, ajax, etc) through an adaptation of Jesse James Garret's Visual Vocabulary.
I just stumbled across the old presentation and took another look. It's not all bad, though I think I completely lost my audience given the convoluted nature of the topic. You would be forgiven for enquiring whether this is a good use of time - diagramming rich interface behaviour - when you could be prototyping the interface instead... it smells a bit like documentation gone mad.
It was at least an interesting thought experiment and one I'm posting it here because maybe one day, someone will find it useful for something. If you do, let me know.
Aarron Walter makes some salient points about designing products to elicit an emotional response over on Carsonfield's Think Vitamin. He makes a nice analogy that usability is equivalent to edibility of food. Yes, food has to be edible. But what about tasting good? That's how emotional response equates to design.
"Positive emotional stimuli can build a sense of trust and engagement with your users. People will forgive your site or application’s shortcomings, follow your lead, and sing your praises if you reward them with positive emotion."
So, I wonder in what circumstances we may want to provide people with something other than positive emotional stimuli through our products and services?
Roberta Tassi has assembled quite a collection of delicious deliverables for Service Design as part of her thesis. www.servicedesigntools.org is a helpful resource in refining our approach for the work we're doing at Different right now. New challenges arise with each new project, as none are quite alike. This site showcases a few different ways to solve similar problems.
Starbucks Service Experience Design - A map of positive and negative factors felt by customers as they move through the end to end experience is a powerful means to realise opportunities. The artefact hints at the emotional journey along the way and coupled with events within the control of Starbucks, it highlights the areas in need of attention to deliver the most impact on experience.
We have been creating these for our Service Design projects at Different as part of the Experience Research and Strategy phases. They're very powerful communication tools that have seen us open the eyes of even the most conservative clients. As such, they deliver tremendous value in terms of supplying clients with the "ah ha!" moment regarding this crazy dark art we practice called "Experience Design".
Straight out of a Neal Stephenson novel - 'Diamond Age' is about life when nanotechnology is matured. This 3D printing service is reminiscent of a gadget he talks about where you can have anything you want created by dialing up a few codes. Cool for prototyping!
And if you think that's nifty, check this out: RepRap is a 3D printer that you can have at home. Not only does it print plastic objects for you, but it also can print itself! (well, about half of itself anyway). In an Open Source meets Slow Food way, the RepRap is freely available to everyone and is primarily distributed locally.
The concept is quite staggering in that it indicates a future as depicted by Stephenson and it's happening right now. Download a design off the internet and your RepRap printer will whip it up for you. The implications of no longer needing to buy as many manufactured products, since they can be made at home not only means cheaper goods, but also less transportation and the environmental damage that brings along with it.
RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.
Latest article I've written for Boxes and Arrows is about "the minefield" of Agile environments for the UX soldier.
Bringing User Centred Design to the Agile Environment
OZ-IA is an information architecture conference held here in Sydney annually. I presented this year on a topic which has occupied me the past few years: Selling user experience design and the value of design thinking to business.
The thrust of the presentation goes like this:
