Designing User Experiences for Complex Systems

Note: The following is an excerpt from my Master’s thesis entitled “User Experience Design of Complex Systems”. This is the final section of the research which provides a framework for designing user experiences for complex systems. I hope that references to earlier sections in the thesis do not cause confusion in any way. Please contact me if you would like to see the entire thesis.

Overview

The previous chapter of this research presented a range of findings regarding the deployment of design strategies within organizations with particular focus on the design of complex systems. This chapter will attempt to translate those findings into a set of actionable principles for designing and developing complex systems that optimize user experience. This “system experience design” methodology will span the product lifecycle from initial research through final implementation. The intent of this methodology is to help practitioners conduct effective research, conceive creative “system” ideas, and effectively translate those ideas into a cohesive vision.  Ultimately, systems created through this method should provide high quality and innovative user experiences and be highly desirable by customers.

However, this effort may also require specific methods for managing the complexities that are associated with systems design. This approach borrows specific methods from the disciplines of Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, User Experience Design, and User-Centered Design. The intent of the approach is to provide a practitioner with tools and techniques to balance the broad nature system design with detailed aspects of product interface design. Adherence to these principles will also help practitioners balance the strategic, technical, and design-oriented aspect of a systems project from foundational research through final implementation. As learned in this research, the individual steps of a design process are not as critical as the nature in which that process comes together as whole, so it is essential to keep a broad view.

Finally, an ideal system experience design process will meet the following objectives:

1.      Be focused on the intent of the customer

2.      Translate customer insights into technical requirements

3.      Promote holistic “systems thinking”

4.      Promote exploratory thinking and resulting innovations

5.      Balance customer desirability, technical feasibility, and financial viability

6.      Produce understandable design artifacts to serve as common points-of-reference

7. Enable the explicit communication of intent, assumptions and expectations
8. Identify and resolve gaps, redundancies, and inconsistencies across the system experience
9. Identify paths to opportunities for innovative solutions

Process Walkthrough

The following is a useful set of principles to guide you through the experience design of complex systems.

Stage 1: Situate

A compelling design for a future system experience must be built upon a rich understanding of existing situation. This includes the current conditions of the market, capabilities of relevant technologies, and expectations of prospective users. As noted throughout this research, a balanced foundation of insights from these perspectives is critical to market success.

Unlike technology and market research, the process of understanding prospective users is much less a science than an art. From personal experience, I believe this aspect of research is most effective when researchers demonstrate the following behaviors:

1. Empathetic Observation: The capturing of user insights can be a challenging and misleading process. One way to avoid this common trap is through ethnographic research, which is the practice of immersing oneself in the environment of a target user for an extended period of time. This allows the researcher to gather interesting insights that may not have been articulated by anyone in a user survey or interview. Just as important is the ability for a researcher to establish a level of empathy for the observed. By experiencing a prospective user’s frustrations and intentions, the researcher establishes an emotion tie to solving the problem. This can be an incredibly motivational force during the process of designing and realizing solutions.

2. Principle Development: Research of design-oriented organizations such as Apple and Frog Design revealed the reliance on enduring design principles. This type of principle development is made possible through the sustained observation of the preferences and behavioral patterns of prospective users. When a new project arises, the organization is able to draw from existing principles that have endured over time and overlay them with new insights that are particular to the specific opportunity.

3. Pattern Recognition: One of the challenges of the Situate process is the attempt to understand which observations are meaningful and which are random. Researchers must look beyond current actions and comments to extract behavioral patterns and expectations that may carry through to future conditions. For this reason, the ability to quickly and accurately recognize meaningful patterns of behavior and thinking in a user environment is critical for success.

The desired output of the Situate stage is a foundation of principles and insights on which the creative process will be begin. Examples of user-related insights may include the expected priorities of users, the likely “mental model” of which they will be basing decisions, and the behavioral patterns that they will likely exhibit in future conditions. This process of extracting enduring patterns is a challenging one as it will be easy to fall into the trap of simply taking direction from prospective users. Instead, the system designer must “read between the lines” of user feedback and behaviors to extract latent needs and unarticulated expectations. One method for gathering such insights is to conduct extensive ethnographic research, which is the process of unobtrusively immersing oneself in the environment of the user to “live in their shoes” for a period of time. This type of empathetic observation allows the researcher to fully understand the conditions of the prospective user. This process reveals significantly more insights than those that are lost in strictly verbal interactions. Ethnographic methods should not be relegated simply to the responsibility of designers. As noted in the interviews with Sean Carney, those of other disciplines should be involved in the process as well. Engineers, for example, significantly benefit from first-hand observations of the people that will be interacting with the technologies they develop.

An effective method for communicating user-related insights and design principles is the development of user personas. This is the process of developing notional profiles for the distinct user types that may interact with a system. In the marketing domain, this method is particularly focused on market segmentation and demographics. However, this level of specificity is not necessary for user experience design. Instead, user experience personas focus on behavioral patterns, preferences, and principles. The benefit of these personas is that they allow the designer to organize and communicate design principles in the most tangible way: by linking them to an actual individual human’s experience. In the face of system complexity, user personas provide a simple and understandable point-of-reference of which all disciplines can center around. In this sense, user personas are a powerful means of cross-disciplinary communication and coordination. 

Stage 2: Conceive

The second recommended stage of System Experience Design is to conceive the system. It is during this stage that system designers will utilize the principles and insights from the previous stage to envision a solution that will provide a more desirable experience that is both technically feasible and economically advantageous. This stage should be divided into the following three steps:

·         Step 1: Determine Intent
The first step of the Conceive stage is to determine the intent of the system. What this requires is a determination of the ideal system from the perspective of expected users. Specifically, the system designer must determine what the system will do for the user, how it will address their environment, and what their conditions will be like as a result. By taking a user-driven approach, the system designer is forced to think holistically about the user’s entire interaction with the system. This is in contrast to a technology-driven system design approach, which may lead individual components being designed in isolation.

The resulting output of this step is a set of “intent statements” that convey the most desirable system from the perspective of the user. These statements are best communicated with the grammatical structure of “To [verb]”, such as “To improve the sharing of contextually-relevant photographs with friends” (which is your intention) or “To share contextually-relevant photographs with friends” (which is the user’s intention). Either one of this approaches is acceptable. It is only recommended that the system designer be consistent in which approach is utilized. These short statements will be extended in the steps that follow with technical solutions. However, this initial statement is critical because it establishes the intention of the system and ensures that all technical decisions are ground in user-centered rationale. In addition to the specific “To” statements, it is recommended that system experience designers develop a single “To” statement that summarizes the whole intent of the system as well. This structure for articulating intent was adapted from the System Architecture framework of Professor Edward Crawley, Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT.

One may find it peculiar that an innovation-centered process such as this does not contain a stage dedicated to ideation. The reason for this is that it is expected that a wide range of creative ideas be evoked and explored throughout the entire process. For example, in this particular step, the system designer should develop and consider an extensive range of user intentions to address. The designer should then carefully select the sub-set of intentions that are yet to be effectively addressed by market. The rationale behind integrating ideation into every step of the process is that a high quality product experience requires an entire range of great ideas disseminated throughout. These “smaller” ideas may be the targeting of hidden customer needs, novel methods of product interaction, or the development of original supporting services. 

·         Step 2: Identify Satisfying Conditions
It is during this second step of the Conceive stage that the system designer must begin to explore possible system conditions that would address the intentions identified in the first step. Ideation during this process requires a great deal of cross-disciplinary exploration, as new “system ideas” will likely rely upon a combination of insights from a range of domains. One could think of this step as a form of “targeted brainstorming” where those of all disciplines explore the various ways in which desired intentions could be met. For example, meeting the intention to “share contextually-relevant photographs” might be addressed with strategies that involve sending, projecting, or printing images. It is important that specific technical or financial constraints do not interfere during this stage. Development of innovative systems requires that seemingly ideal and potentially disruptive ideas be explored during, despite the fact that they may seam technically infeasible or financially improbable at first. This process must embrace the reality that great ideas result from the exploration and advancement of existing, lesser, or failing, ideas.

The output of this state is an articulated set of conditions that serve as the strategy for the technical solution that will be determined the steps that follow. The format for this articulation is a “By” statement, which will be associated with each “To” statement from the preceding step. In effect, this “By” statement will bridge the gap between user insights and technical solutions. To continue with the photography innovation example, a “To-By” statement may read, “To share contextually-relevant photographs with friends by direct and immediate transfer based upon proximity and authorization”. The challenge presented by this intent may open up opportunities for innovations in wireless communication, hardware design, or business strategy.

·         Step 3: Envision Solution
It is during this step that the form of the system begins to develop. Using the intentions and strategies formulated during the previous steps, the designer must conceive the components, services, and additional elements that will converge to create a desirable system. In order achieve this goal the designer should utilize the previously developed “To-By” statements as structure. This structure should provide the necessary creative tension to instigate ideas that draw from the insights developed during the Situate phase. This is actually the critical aspect of this process that enables innovative ideas. By determining intent, but not specific solutions, the earlier steps have simultaneously provided direction and flexibility. This is a powerful combination when utilized properly. 

Note that during this step, the designer should be utilizing the “To-By” statements as a composite and not as isolated requirements. This will allow for better system design and improved opportunities for achieving the competitive advantages that well-designed systems provide. A holistic approach will also increase the likelihood that the user’s experience with the system is cohesive and consistent. Another advantage of a systems-based approach at this stage is the likelihood for maximizing and controlling the positive emergent properties of the system.

The format of this step is the “Using” statement to be appended to the previously developed “To-By” statements. This allows the designer to determine the solution that will provide the conditions that will address the intent of the user. Completing this statement will create a direct relationship between proposed user intentions and specific technical solutions. To continue with the photography example, the “To-By-Using” statement may read: “To share contextually-relevant photographs with friends by direct and immediate transfer based upon proximity and authorization using a multi-touch camera interface, wireless technologies, and authentication based upon social networking services”. This singular statement demonstrates an example of a technology solution can be tightly bonded to a user-centered purpose. 

Stage 4: Graphical Depiction

As noted throughout this research, a good process should produce understandable design artifacts to serve as a common ground between disciplines. The value of design artifacts is their ability to reduce ambiguity and confusion by providing a common visual language. This value is particularly important in the design of a system user experience where system ambiguity and domain-specific jargon can lead to frustrating or non-existent interactions. In a systems context, the goal of these visualizations is to help facilitate coordination across those involved in developing the system and to help maintain a singular holistic viewpoint.

These visualizations are also critical in establishing and maintaining a vision for the final end-state for the system. In this sense, they serve as prototypes to be constantly evolved during the system design process. This is particularly critical in long-term, complex systems projects where simple visualizations can provide much-needed clarity and focus. Beyond internal consensus, they can also be used to communicate ideas with intended users or demonstrate a vision to a client or customer.

For this method, it is recommended that the system designer draw from the “To-By-Using” statements developed into the previous stage to create the following two design artifacts:

1.      System Experience Visualization: This visualization is an attempt to capture the entire system experience in a single diagram. It should cover the full scope of the system experience, including all people, places, objects, and interfaces. Unlike a purely technical system diagram, such as software architecture diagram, this visualization should primarily focus on the user’s activities and interactions within the system. For that reason, it is not necessary to delve into the specifics of technologies at the high-level visualization. An example where System Experience Visualizations would be highly valuable would be the development of a system of convergent hardware and software products within an organization. In this case, a system-level visualization will help the various product owners to understand the context of their solution within the “big picture” of the user’s environment. This approach reveals gaps, inconsistencies, or redundancies in the user’s experience across the various products. More importantly, it facilitates critical holistic thinking by keeping the focus on the singular viewpoint of the user. The purpose of System Experience Visualizations is vastly different than a technical system visualization that is primarily concerned with the functional or formal interfaces between components.

2.      System Experience Storyboards: While the high-level visualization maintains the holistic viewpoint, System Experience Storyboards are focused on the specific interactions of the user.  The idea is that the viewer gains a rich understanding of the system experience by observing a broad system view in conjunction with visualizations of the specific activities that weave through it. The expected output is a series of annotated graphical depictions of the specific activities of a prospective within the system environment, including interactions within component interfaces. Storyboards should be developed for all essential user types and activities and address all of the intentions outlined in the “To-By-Using” statements. The purpose of the storyboard is to ensure that a user’s singular experience across the components of a system is seamless and consistent. In other words, it should not feel like a collection of components instead like single cohesive system. It is during the development of storyboards that the system experience designer will begin explore the specific interactions that each user will have with each interface. It is necessarily to continuing refer to and evolve the System Experience Visualization as the storyboards are developed. This ensures a consistency between the broad and detailed views.

The recommendation of the previously described visualizations is not intended to restrict the system experience designer from developing additional visualizations. Instead, the designer should explore any opportunities to graphically depict the experience that an individual will have while interacting with the system. For example, I have developed interactive animations in the past for a system that featured highly dynamic, non-linear interactions. In addition, the system experience designer may want to include the detailed design of specific user interfaces. It is highly beneficial, but not required, to have the same individual “owning” the system experience as well as the specific component interface designs. 

'Tis Better to Critique Than Create

It kills me to write that title. I pride myself on being a creator first, and a critiquer second, and never critiquing something without offering solutions. However, I'm also aware of how easy and natural it is to critique.Any blog, website, or newspaper is filled with opinions, both professional and unprofessional (hello, blog comments!) about what's wrong with everything. On the other side, it's much harder to create. Many people are not able or willing to create something new, but they know how to meticulously analyze what's been created. Is this a lack of creativity, a subconscious avoidance of critique, or some other social factor? No matter the cause, the reality surely exists. Anyone in a design profession, particularly those with clients, understand the annoying reality of "the rock game". This situation is the endless "fun" that results from a client or manager who is does not know what they want, but knows exactly what they don't want, especially when they see what you've created. The result is a back-and-forth of design iterations where each "rock" you bring back is met with a response of "not that rock, bring me another rock". 

Anyway, this is nothing new to anyone, but I'm wondering how to put this phenomenon to more useful purposes. I've been designing beer labels lately for my own brews as well as those for friends involved in home brewing. It's a nice way to de-stress for an hour after a long workday or hours of thesis work. What I've learned from designing these labels is that my best designs come from utilizing the ease of critiquing verse the slow process of creating. What I do is essentially a design version of a brainstorm, just quickly playing around with concepts and giving very little planning to the process. The logic is that it's easier to recognize what you want when you can see what you don't want. In this sense, you're learning about your design and constantly tweaking the course, which I personally think is far more effectively than planning up front and executing in a straight path. I suppose this is a surrender to the fact that design iterations are inevitable, so you might as well use them to your advantage. Is what I'm doing just rapid iteration that every decent designer does? Sure - I'm just pointing it out that the power and ease of critiquing can be leveraged to speed up the creation process. 

Here are a few iterations of Christmas beer label I created for a friend of mine, in addition to a few other designs that I created for my own brews and brewpub concepts. For a point of reference, I probably created 24-30 unique Elfin Good Christmas concepts in under an hour. I hope this concept helps you in your creative pursuits. Happy Holidays! 

The Digital Life of Reily

The wave of the sustaining digital life is swiftly approaching. With Facebook’s upcoming release of their “Timeline” tool (http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline), everyone will soon be shifting their focus from the meaningless last minute to the meaningful last decade. “Big Picture” thinking is hardly in lock-step with an online culture that is generally more interested in speed and convenience. Nevertheless, Maslow will proud that many of us will likely evolve from “Love/Belonging” (e.g. making Facebook friends) to “Esteem” (e.g. winning at Facebook games) and now to Self-Actualization (e.g. building a Facebook Timeline). 

Will it take off? I fully expect that in some way, shape, or form, the idea of a digital profile to represent your life experience is to here to stay. I have to admit, I like Facebook’s concept video and I won't be surprised if they have success with this, provided they’re out front and learning from the behaviors of their users (which they traditionally don’t). In the meantime, however, I expect to hear plenty about Facebook’s confusing privacy settings and tricky “opt-out” policies and you know someone is going to miss out on their precious dream job due to pictures that were taken with after a beirut tournament 12 years earlier in college. 

Clive Thompson just wrote about this same trend in the most recent Wired Magazine with a piece on “Memory Engineering” (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/st_thompson_memoryengineeriing/)

He primarily focuses on a Foursquare plug-in called 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo (http://4squareand7yearsago.com/) that “finds your check-ins from precisely one year earlier and emails you a summary”. Programmer Jonathan Wegener is working from good insight when he says “there are so many trails we leave through the world,” Wegener says. “I wanted to make them interesting to you again.” I hate to pick on ideas, but this feels like it’s not stepping the right direction towards more meaningful digital longview. 

I like the idea of the fun of memories from the past popping up, but Foursquare check-ins that arrive every morning pointing back exactly 365 days? Why am I living vicariously through myself from a year ago? I imagine that only 1 out of 100 days messages might be slightly interesting (e.g. “what a great day. Can’t believe that was a year ago”), but if the event was that big of a deal, it shouldn’t shock you that it was a year ago. In other words, there’s no concept of surprise or discovery, and you’re really not building a sustained narration because you’re just getting check-ins from the ghost of Foursquare past. Now, if they add some randomization and customization, then we might be talking… I might like a weekly email that tells me other things I’ve done over the past few years during this week, including places I went, pictures I took, and people I spent time with. It’s worth noting that Thompson also mentions other apps for tracking personal experiences, such as Memolane and Patchlife.

Admittedly, I may sound a bit bitter, and I probably am. Some of us have been talking about a likely shift towards a sustaining digital timeline for probably two years now. Unfortunately, the closest thing I have to proof is a moleskin page or two from 2009 and a Google Document from “76 days ago” with notes about an app that will “capture a timeline of events; share and follow timelines”. Now, we’re watching the wave take shape without a board to paddle on. Yet, such is life in the fast moving digital age. Fortunately, we have been tossing around one other idea that complements this whole movement, but I think we might let it pass and go find a new wave. I’m sure I’ll get reminded of this one in a year anyway. 

Interview with Juhan Sonin, Creative Director at Involution Studios

On August 19, 2011, I had the opportunity to sit down with Juhan Sonin, Creative Director at Involution Studios (http://www.goinvo.com/), to discuss the state of design within organizations and what designers could do to have more influence. The following is an overview of that conversation.

Sonin and I began our discussion by postulating why more companies have not been successful in their pursuit of creating better products. His view is that just like any other discipline, there is a range of talent, skill, and knowledge in the field. He explained that “the best managers, designers, and engineers understand the 3-legged stool”, referring to the multi-disciplinary aspects of product development. In his view, the failure to address the business, design, or technology-related aspects of product or service opportunity will only lead to inferior outcomes. He points to the success of Apple as an example of achieving this balance, explaining how Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive are each “design, engineering, and business-minded”.    

On the topic of designers having more impact within organizations, Sonin believes the biggest factor is the ability to communicate design. He says, “Most designers aren’t good enough at pitching their own work”. He states that we as designers are delusional if we believe we can be successful in organizations “without being able to design our own stories”. “Otherwise”, he says, “What are we doing in design”? Sonin goes into greater detail about his definition of design communication, explaining how we must not only be able to explain design but be about to translate it into business and technical terms as well.

In response to the notion that design decisions are difficult to defend because of their qualitative or subjective nature, Sonin took the counterpoint. “Most designers don’t how the science of design” he explains. “There is both qualitative and quantitative data.” In his viewpoint, it is no more or less opinionated than the discipline of engineering. So how do we fix this problem of the non-influential designer? Sonin points to design education, pointing out the current gaps and explaining that designers should be challenged to learn more. “Designers should have engineering knowledge. They need to understand how to make things, not just design in a vacuum.”

As a successful designer himself, Juhan Sonin doesn’t see too much of a challenge in creating new products. However, what companies struggle with, he explains, is when you have an entrenched product. “It’s year six. What do you do next? How do you shift? This is where products become obsolete.” He explains the financial and emotional challenge of this endeavor. Sonin points to the struggles of Eastman Kodak as an example. From his perspective, Kodak’s poor leadership, lack of future vision, and weak design communication led to their downfall. “The refused to turn the ship”, explains Sonin. 

The Emergent Nature of Design

Go into any Best Buy or any other consumer electronics store and you’ll undoubtedly see a vast array of products that are barely distinguishable from each other. They may identical features, utilize the same technology, have the same performance measures, and even be offered at similar prices. Yet, you make a decision. You’re able to make a decision from a seemingly homogenous set of choices because products simply aren’t the sum of their parts and features. You may favor specific features (e.g. touch-screen), performance measures (e.g. storage), or even be set on price, but these are simply your priority and not your sole reason for purchasing. What I’m getting at is that a product is a composite that is greater than the sum, and it’s this composite that you’re buying. I think this is what separates Apple from the “non-Apples”, which seems like everyone else recently. Apple clearly gets the concept of creating a product composite that people instantly get what it is and what it does for them. It’s based on true empathetic understanding of their customer base, which, unlike pretty white boxes, is truly the foundation of the user experience design.

So what is design? For this discussion, let’s say it’s the difference between the sum of the engineering and the resulting product.  Admittedly, there are thousand holes in this overly simplistic formula, yet there is some value in using this as a mental model and I’ll explain why. Consider two products that are comparable on features, parts, and performance. Yet, they are not equal. They are not equal because the emergent property of design must be accounted for when considering the whole product. (Note: By “design”, I’m referring to the whole product experience and not just the aesthetic aspect of it) For example, one could compare any iPhone with any Blackberry to see that Apple created a much greater product by maximizing on design and not on more measurable factors, which are fairly similar. Yet, if this is so obvious, why can’t companies get it right? Why are so many companies failing to create compelling product experiences when they know it’s good for business?

One aspect that makes this so challenging is the straightforward and simple nature of measurable criteria such as features and performance. In fast-paced, competitive business markets such as the automotive, electronics, or software industries, it’s much safer to make investments on tangible measures. They’re easy to add, compare, increase, and compete upon (“Faster than the competition!”). They also make it easier to make decisions upon, helping determine what next year’s model or version will feature (“Now with 20% more stuff!”). Unfortunately, it doesn’t take an MBA to know that this type of arms race never ends well for anyone involved. In the process of trying to “out-measure” each other, the market is always cannibalized. It’s ongoing science fair where the gym is always destroyed by the competing volcanoes of baking soda.

Now let’s consider design again - It’s the art class down the hall from the science fair with the crazy kids that nobody gets. And unlike science, it’s just so hard to measure. Paint and canvas are relatively cheap, but they can come together to produce a priceless masterpiece. In fact, art is all about emergence. It’s not focused on aesthetics as much as it is focused on the emotions it evokes in its observers, which is really the essence of product experience design. Sure, Apple’s products look beautiful, but that’s a deceiving veil. I believe this is what many organizations misunderstand. They think that they can engineer a product and then “throw in some design”, but this is completely wrong. When done correctly, products are a fusion of design and engineering, of art and science. Think of an Aston Martin or latest Apple product and tell me where design ends and engineering begins. As I mentioned earlier, people buy composite products, not a collection of pieces and parts where design has been slapped on. 

Now here’s the fun part: design is cheap. At least, great design is not necessarily more expensive than bad design. What’s the significance of that fact? If products are a composite of measurable engineering and emergent design, organizations would be best served by maximizing on design emergence while minimizing the engineering without lessoning the value of the whole. Quite simply, organizations need to understand the emergent property of design and strategic advantage of getting it right. They need to accept a little art at the science fair.  

Interview with Mark Rolston (Chief Creative Officer) and Theo Forbath (VP of Innovation Strategy) of frog

On August 3, 2011, I had the great pleasure to hold a conversation with two of the premier experts on innovation and design at frog, the renowned and celebrated global innovation firm (www.frogdesign.com).

I owe a great deal of appreciation to Mark Rolston (Chief Creative Officer) and Theo Forbath (VP of Innovation Strategy) for taking the time to share insights with me that will provide ongoing value to my work for years to come.  The following is a summary of that conversation.   

Balancing Science and Art

Early on in our discussion, I approached the topic of the product development process in an attempt to identify the elusive patterns of behavior that lead successful or failing products. Rolston rightfully prevented us from going down this path, pointing out that the individual steps within a process are not where problems occur. Instead, what matters is how the entire process comes together as a whole. Rolston continues by instructing that in design, “form is held together by negative space”. In the practice of product development, “process is the positive space, and the connections are the negative space”. 

This might sound highly abstract or theoretical to some, but this way of thinking is in lockstep with the study of systems. The discussion of positive and negative space evokes the importance of balancing the science and art of experience design. The process of scientifically breaking down a design into individual technical requirements to “check all the right boxes” can cause one to lose site of the outcome that it creates when it comes together as a whole. At risk of digressing, I believe this also describes the misguided attempts of the business community to formalize the Design Thinking process. Once you add repeatable structure, you degrade the resourceful and imaginative nature that can make it so valuable. By over-emphasizing the science, you sacrifice the art, and it’s the art that provides the real value.

Theo Forbath, frog’s VP of Innovation Strategy, reiterates the importance of holistic thinking by explaining that the companies that fail are the ones that fail to “bring it all together”.  frog achieves their balance between art and science by conducting deep qualitative and quantitative research in the early phases of an engagement. Their qualitative research is often done in the form of ethnography, led by famed ethnographer Jan Chipchase. Forbath explains that frog follows this up with thorough quantitative analysis to provide their clients with “left and right brain insights”.

The Mick Jagger Phenomenon

In discussing what it takes to create truly great experience design, Mark Rolston, describes the concept of “The Mick Jagger Phenomenon”. The lead singer of the Rolling Stones is not the most talented in the world, nor the best song writer or best-looking, “yet the way they put the package together is highly authentic, completely aligned, and pure in its plan. It’s an authentic expression of what they want to be”.  The leading creative mind at a world-leading design firm is not going to use the same terminology of the systems domain, but his viewpoint is completely aligned. Essentially, what he’s discussing is emergence – the ideas that the manifestation of a system is greater than the sum of its components.

In Mark Rolston’s view, Apple has dominated their market, much like the Stones did, by creating an authentic and consistent expression of what they wanted to create. This authenticity drives customer loyalty to the point where customers will forgive the occasional flaw or missing feature. This customer forgiveness is an extremely powerful attribute in a hyper-competitive technology market. This concept authenticity is clearly the differentiator. Those that fail create products that “check all the right boxes, yet the complete expression is just not right”.

On Complexity

“Technologies have become vastly more complex”, explains Mark Rolston. He describes the vast array of decisions that need to be made during today’s design and development process, such as hiring engineers, and buying hardware, code, and packaging. “So much engineering has to happen before an experience comes to market. We have an illusion that we come out of research with a pure idea and engineering is merely the means to getting it out.” As he neatly and accurately sums it up, “we’re not making toasters anymore!” If this trend is to continue, it is clear that designers will need to sharpen their skills for understanding complexity and the dynamics of a technology system.

Rolston asserts that this complexity often exceeds an organization’s readiness to manage it, leading to situations where they compartmentalize duties but “lack clear perspective on the whole”.  He recommends instituting organizational restructuring and process improvements over time. However, there are also near-term measures to address this complexity problem. “The immediate fix is to better embrace the tangible artifacts inherit in the process”.  Removing abstractions, he explains, is part of removing complexity.

On Direction

I have long believed that many designs fail not due to a poor idea, but the inability to maintain the intent of that idea throughout the design and development process.  I was glad to hear that Mark Rolston recognizes this dilemma as well and seeks a better solution. “It’s true that Steve Jobs, as well as any number of auteur movie directors, create the impression that a single dictator-creator can shepherd a project through. However, finding such genius is elusive. We need a better answer.”

To offer some hope, Rolston informed me “carrying the idea does not require a person owning it”. He feels it is a significant improvement, “but many organizations cannot do it. They can’t afford it or they politically aren’t willing to.” Rolston advised that in the absence of powerful leaders, “high-fidelity artifacts (progressive working examples of the product) are the next best thing. They don’t lie (at least very well) and they help an organization rally behind the goal.”

As an example, it was noted by Rolston that concept animations are “priceless” towards carrying intent as they “create connective tissue” across the process stages. Rolston and Forbath agreed that the key to such high-fidelity artifacts is achieving a balance between inspiration and feasibility. If it’s too safe, it will get a “so what, we can do this today” reaction, but too far out towards science fiction and it becomes too hard to connect.

The Importance of Softer Clay

For an innovation firm like frog, the client forging ahead to a solution is one of their greatest challenges. Often, it was explained to me, clients will come with a solution in mind but they haven’t done the proper research. The example they give is that of a consumer technology client asking them to design a tablet computer without considering the public’s opinion of their ability to create one. This uninformed approach can lead to failure, at worst, and at best, mediocrity.

They address this challenge of clients jumping ahead to solutions by working with them to “delay as long as possible the fixing of plans in the course of a project”.  It is this mindset they refer to as “pushing determinism forward”. By taking this approach, an organization allows itself to learn along the way, discovering new opportunities as the problem and potential solution space is better understood. By increasing understanding of the problem and maintaining flexibility in the solution, you have a vastly greater chance of “authentically mapping your solution the problem that you’ve discovered” in Rolston’s opinion.

Another critical threat to creating innovative products is the urgency of market competition. Rolston believes that focusing on competition leads to organizations only looking a quarter ahead at a time and creating products “out of the chute”. frog is trying to “unhinge this chute-like process” and get people to “be comfortable engaging a project with an undefined outcome”.  In their words, “the fidelity of the problem must be concrete for the sake of the financial and organizational investment, but the form of the imagined outcome should not.” This approach allows organizations to understand a problem and determine their direction, and then allow plenty of time to “push and pull” to meet their objective. Put succinctly, organizations need “softer clay”.

While discussing innovation and foresight, Rolston describes HP with admiration and some constructive criticism. “HP is a great computer company. Computing is a fundamental driver is the last 20 years and next 100 years. It drives who people are and how they’ll behave. HP is one of the biggest and most successful companies in this field, and yet, they can’t think ahead or think aggressively.” He continues by explaining that HP “passively looks at what the market wants tomorrow”, focusing only on short-term innovation and not further out.  He advises that it’s not the market that HP should be looking at, but instead shift focus to the people.  After all, “markets are made serving the wants and needs of the people”.

So how does an organization look past next quarter? Theo Forbath’s viewpoint is that qualitative research is the remedy to this myopic, market-driven thinking. One of the primary distinctions between Apple versus HP is their willingness to look at core human behavior, according to Rolston. HP simply “look to their analysts”, but they need to look “past the next quarter” for greater success. Forbath and Rolston agreed that specific roles really are not important (e.g. Designer, Technologist, Futurist, etc.), just that there are individuals looking far ahead into the future. 

Interview with Jerome Nadel, CXO at Option NV

As part of my thesis research, I recently had the great pleasure of remotely sitting down with Jerome Nadel, the Chief Experience Officer at Option Wireless Technology (http://www.option.com/). Mr. Nadel also happens to be my former boss and mentor at Human Factors International, so he was more than willing to discuss what it takes to create truly great user experience design. Excerpts from this discussion are as follows.

On Ideation

According to Nadel, organizations can innovate in a variety of ways. The first comes from simple “readiness” and being positioned to discover new insights and generate ideas at any time. The second is more proactive and seeks discovery through research, such as the practice of ethnographic methods or traditional market analysis. Finally, there is perhaps the most effective form of innovation, which is “aggregative innovation”, seeking opportunities to connect products and services that already exist within an organization or market.

On Innovation

For Nadel, the real key for organizational innovation may be in the seeking of “discontinuity”. By discovering and capitalizing on disconnects between market expectations and offerings, organizations can create completely unexpected yet welcomed systems of value. Apple, for instance, has done this masterfully over recent years with their suite of media devices and digital services.

These devices did not stem from problems, so to speak, but from opportunities that were created by technology markets that did not quite align with the intentions of its customers.  Beyond isolated devices, however, the smart organization creates a system around the solution to that discontinuity. In other words, it’s not the iPod that enabled people to build, manage, and enjoy their digital music library, it was the system created by the integration of the iPod device, the well-designed digital interface, and the easy access to the iTunes music library.

On Design

Nadel discussed the trends of design and how “the new design is service design”. This is a subtle yet powerful shift from physical and isolated aesthetic design to a more dynamic and human-centric service design. However, one must not confuse this viewpoint as a comparison between the physical product and the digital service. In Nadel’s view, “the device is the service, and it’s the service that people care about”.

On the Economic Benefit of Eco-systemic Thinking 

Nadel explains that the real competitive edge is in “eco-systemic thinking”. The key is to look beyond isolated products to look holistically at all the connections with complementary products and supporting services. By doing so, an organization can create real value for their customers.

Organizations benefit tremendously from this systemic approach for a variety of reasons.  The primary one is due to the profit margins that an organization can make on selling services compared to selling isolated products. According to Nadel, “smart companies get recurring revenue and as a result, better margins”. Consider Apple as an example, an organization which makes tremendous revenue on sales of its iPhones and iPad, but margins are thin when compared to sales of mobile applications and digital media. In Nadel’s words, “value equals margin”, which in turn, creates a “fiscal aspect for innovation”.

Quite frankly, the key point of this systemic approach from a standpoint of business strategy is that “you can’t make money just selling little pieces”. An organization must think systemically and not in isolation. As one can see from the Apple case, they have been able to capture value through their patterns of systems thinking, creating ecosystems of services around integrated devices. In Nadel’s view, Apple has been “remarkably holistic”.  

Success in systemic thinking should really come from the top in Nadel’s view. The key is “strong leadership with a eco-systemic view that is thinking in a connected way”.