 Last spring I wrote about Bill Buxton:
Many
years ago, when e-mail and Internet access were just becoming the norm
in business, I met a guy named Bill Buxton, who was then with Alias
Research. His passion was trying to make virtual 'presence' imitate, as
much as possible, physical 'presence', to get the technology to adapt
to our preferred information behaviours, instead of the other way
around.
Bill's mantra was:
Ultimately,
we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design
are the "things" that we sell, rather than the individual, social and
cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that
they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.
To
that end, he had computer screens around a circular table in his
office, each showing the head and shoulders, and the computer desktop,
of one his meeting participants, so that virtual meetings were as
analogous as possible to 'real' meetings. He had another screen above
his office door with a picture of a door on it, that he could virtually
'open' or 'close' to signify whether he was, or was not, available for
impromptu e-consultations and e-conversations.
It was a little hokey, but Bill was (and still is, in his new work) on the right track.
Since
then, Bill has moved forward with his work on the Customer Experience
and written a book called Sketching User Experiences. The concept of
'sketching' is summarized in the graphic above. It is a "low-fidelity
representation" of the customer experience that is detailed enough to
provide context for how the customer lives/works/uses your product, but
short enough that it doesn't consume inordinate time to do so. The
video (1:26:00 in length) explaining this in detail is here.
He's very entertaining, though the technical quality of the video is
not great, and the first half is more valuable than the last half, IMO.
The key points he makes in the video and book are:
- Nobody creates new products from scratch -- almost everything produced today is a sequel, incremental, "n+1" product.
- Innovation
only comes from inside organizations when "someone misbehaves and it
turns out well" -- through skunkworks and other 'unauthorized'
activities.
- The software industry (and, I would argue, just
about every other industry) therefore only innovates and grows through
acquisition.
- What is needed to remedy this is a much better creative design process.
- Apple
was rescued from the brink of extinction when a returning Steve Jobs
authorized its exceptional and long-suffering, long-ignored lead
designers to do what they do best -- the result was the iMac and then
the iPod. Although the iPod was best-of-breed and quite innovative, it
still had (and has) many serious design flaws stemming from disconnects
among the various groups of designers and engineers ("I have 50
different songs on my iPod all named 'Adagio'")
- If we critiqued
books the way we critique technologies, the reviews would all be about
the binding and the type font. We need to start critiquing all products
by the quality of the user experiences they deliver, not by their
features.
- Great successes only happen when they are preceded by
miserable failures. That's why you need to do lots of experiments and
fail often and early in order to learn how to succeed. The Prototype blog (who I thank for pointing out Buxton's new work to me) relays a great story that Buxton uses to illustrate this:
The
ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the
class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he
said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all
those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on
the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh
the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A",
forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality",
however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get
an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works
of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for
quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning
out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality"
group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little
more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of
dead clay.
- Sketching is fundamental to
ideation, and ideation is the critical 'front end' to any good design
process. Unlike prototypes (see diagram above) sketches are freehand,
gestural, and they telegraph intent and emotion. They are caricatures,
exaggerations -- like the drawings of concept cars and new fashion
models, accentuating what's different and engaging. They are tentative
and exploratory, and the best ones resemble the design-idea sketches of
Renaissance thinkers. They are quick and inexpensive, plentiful (so you
have many alternatives to explore), and clear about what problem
they're investigating.
- A challenge with sketching is: How do you sketch interaction? You need to practice a lot to become skilled at conveying feeling, phrasing, intention, movement in a sketch.
- As
you move from ideation (sketching) to pre-production engineering
(prototyping) you get more invested in fewer alternatives, the idea
gets harder to change and criticize, and there is less room for new
ideation and innovation. Sketching is getting the right design, while
prototyping is getting the design right. Two different skills needing
two different kinds of people. The more sketches you offer, the more
open you remain to constructive criticism, iteration, learning from
failure. Ideas are not valuable -- it's what you do with them that
brings value. So entertain as many as possible, and use sketches to
ensure they get a fair airing.
- The more persistent (how long
and extensively it is available for review and consideration) and the
more malleable a sketch is, the more thorough the iteration and the
better the ultimate design. You need to give ideation time and space.
You can't afford not to.
- Sketching, like music, involves both a
craft (the technical skill) and an art. You need to learn the craft
first. Both need practice to become good at doing them. Not everyone is
good at it -- just make sure someone in your organization is.
- The
art of sketching is to some extent a wizard's art -- it is about
simulating and representing reality using 'illusion'. In the video
Buxton shows several examples of how inexpensive illusions that
simulate user experiences produce 'aha' understanding of unmet needs
and design problems, and allow exploration of solutions to them. For
example, he shows how, by pinning a complete newspaper to a wall and
then trying to read it through a cutout cardboard 'window', you can
start to appreciate the user experience of looking at a window on a
computer screen without the context or awareness of all the rest of the
content in the site, and start to think about ways to start to create
information landscapes and context-setting mechanisms that overcome
this online limitation.
- We have a dangerous propensity to think
we understand things intellectually, like our customers' wants and
needs, without reproducing the customer experience in sufficient depth
to really understand their experience, and hence to 'get' experience.
- We
also need to be good 'collectors' of information that could have value
later. We need to be constantly paying attention. Buxton carries a
camera everywhere he goes.
This approach seems to work well
for technology companies (hardware and software producers) but suppose
your 'product' is, say, research reports, or improved health outcomes
for your community? Can you 'sketch' new product design ideas using
Buxton's techniques?
I think you can. And I think that's where the idea of customer anthropology
comes in. This anthropology is one of the techniques you use to
research unmet customer needs. The transcription of the customer
observations and interviews is a kind of "sketch" of your customers,
and the needs that your enterprise might fill. But this isn't what
Buxton is getting at when he talks about sketching -- he's referring to
the process of ideation to address those needs.
In my new job,
we're starting to use customer anthropology to get a deeper
understanding of our customers. We've identified about 15 distinct
customer 'segments' with clearly different needs for the five types of
research 'products' we offer:
- Awareness products: Reports
that filter and distill the firehose of information out there down to
short, succinct explanations of what's happening in the economy, the industry and society as a whole that would appear to be important and will probably affect our customers.
- Research products: More in-depth reports that explain what these current developments and trends mean to our customers -- how these developments are affecting our customers and how they're dealing with them.
- Guidance products: Reports that suggest what our customers should do in response to these developments.
- Events and spaces: Facilitated seminars, workshops and meetings, in physical or virtual space, that allow our customers to help each other learn about or act on these developments.
- Tools: Applets, online or on flash memory or CD, that help our customers self-assess their knowledge or understanding of these developments and their implications to their businesses.
As
regular readers know, I generally tend to believe that things are the
way they are for a reason, and before I propose changing things I want
to make sure I understand those reasons. So my hypothesis is that the
current design of these products is pretty good. But my instincts tell
me that, like most products out there, the design could be much better.
So
I'm going to try to develop "sketches" of possible new designs for our
five types of products, that draw on understanding how the current
design has evolved, and on the results of our customer anthropology
into what our customers want and need that they are not currently
getting. I'd love to get Bill Buxton, a fellow Torontonian, involved in
the process, to see how his technique translates to non-technology
product design.
I suspect I may have to 'hire' a sketch artist,
though I'm certainly going to scour our organization to see if we have
some hidden talent in this area.
If this is successful, it could
become the standard 'front end' to our ideation and innovation process
-- the means by which we respond in a consistent, disciplined and creative way to identified unmet customer needs and develop new and better products.
What do you think? Is this a process that might work in your industry? Is there a sketch artist in your future?
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