Process + Brand = Experience

Designing while grateful.

Thanksgiving is my absolutely favorite holiday. It's not just because I love to cook. Ok, maybe it's a strong reason. But I love this holiday because I like to reflect on my life and what I'm thankful for - the people, my health, work, just everything. Life is pretty wonderful.

I am grateful and feel blessed that I chose the career path I did in customer experience. I feel like my life is a present every day. I get to work on innovative projects with smart people and develop solutions for people's problems. And I'm encouraged to consider multiple approaches and options to discover what's best. It really is a great job. In what other profession do you get to help people complete tasks in their lives, help businesses engage with customers in a better way, and be paid to be creative with crazy ideas? 

This is why I'm bothered when I see designers being snarky. I understand why. First, there is no excuse for poor design. There are too many great designers out there to help you create a usable product. A designer spending an hour on a product can improve its experience 100%. Great design doesn't cost that much. Second, it's easy to be critical of ourselves and others when it comes to design. Hindsight is 20/20 and if we could all go back in time to create a different product than what we did, we probably would. Or we would take a different approach entirely, making and experience simpler. Third, if our egos are involved in our designs, then no one designs better than we do ourselves. I have been in too many arguments with other designers, not about the design approach, but an argument closer to, "I would have done it THIS way."  I used to joke that information architects (what a UX designer was called 500 years ago) were like Betta fish (or Siamese Fighting Fish). You can only have 1 per bowl. So only 1 IA per team. And don't question their design or approaches. 

I'm always nervous when I design a new approach for an app. I want everyone to like it and find it useful or helpful in some way. I'm always looking for experiences to be innovative, yet familiar. And I have to remind myself, how people see my design, my work, is not a reflection of me. My work reflects my understanding of what will help the business and the customer. I could have misunderstood a strategy or approach. Or I missed a way to simplify some steps. In the end, I'm helping people complete a task to help them in their lives and helping the business help their customers. I'd say I'm less a designer and more a facilitator. 

There's this weird legacy belief about "the hero designer," who becomes a celebrity for having "the" innovation that rocks the world. I remember being at a Design Management Institute conference over 10 years ago where one of the speakers said that such an idea was dead. With the rise of interactive design and automation, you can't create anything alone. This is true. I think this also speaks to the elusive unicorn - designer, developer, UX strategist, all-in-one. Some exist, but some debate that maybe not. Or that it is difficult to do all things well. Either way, I would argue that design was never about heroism. Even in the "Mad Men" advertising era, great graphic design relied on great copy, good account management, honest customer ad testing, and clients who knew their business and markets.

We were fed a myth. 

Instead, I believe that heroism in experience design comes from being that facilitator in the background, listening, observing, and discovering trends in the conversation. It's not always the fabulous, glamorous person who makes everything shiny and spectacular or fills a room with charisma. It's the person who makes an experience come alive by communicating well with the entire team, making sure everyone is aligned and the business and customers have been heard and understood. The great experience designers often sit in the background, helping the team make a vision real, leading the charge through influence.

Effective experience design helps a team collaborate, bring a vision to life, and enables everyone to be more productive.  

So this Thanksgiving, maybe we designers and strategists need to look at our jobs differently. Rather than be the "fabulous designer creating," what if we were facilitating change, solving people's problems, and helping visions become real? We shouldn't dismiss the fact that as business facilitators, we are helping professionals ease into this new world of automation and customer interaction. We are working at the cutting edge of a new world, a new age. That's a wonderful opportunity. I know I'm truly thankful and grateful to be part of it.

A reason why Mayer isn't happy with Yahoo results...

Forbes magazine really summed up why Yahoo needs better results. The world would be very interesting if AliBaba or SoftBank bought Yahoo. It would be the end of an era - rather, an era where a great idea grew into a great company which was driven into the ground.

Apple and IBM - a partnership to benefit the users!

This morning I woke up to TechCrunch's article about this partnership between Apple and IBM.

Personally, I think this is fantastic! It's about time that Apple will officially be brought into the workplace. People have been unofficially bringing Apple into the workplace for years through BYOD. They were the outlaw/bandit technologies. In some places, there would be an option for people to choose to work with a Mac or a PC; but those working with a Mac were either developers or creatives. Business people have a hard time adopting them for work. 

I find this ironic because I remember when an office would have BOTH Macs and PCs and there would be races on complex calculations in Excel to see which computer system would win (hint: Mac always did). The Mac was always the superior computer - even for the business team.

Apple is like the pretty girl at a party - no one expects her to be smart, good at math or science, and actually be able to hold a conversation. Unfortunately in our society, the qualities of being efficient and effective doesn't include beauty. Or fun. Or entertainment. 

More irony -  to run entertainment "products" and projects you need some seriously hard core systems due to the extremely large file sizes and the need for granular processing (at the pixel level). Audio and video files are massive! Dreamworks buys high-end HP servers to support their animations, which have amazing levels of detail. Detailed photographs require amazing pixel level control to mirror what happens on traditional film - and it requires amazing amounts of computer power to process that. Art/entertainment is really big IT business...but some conservative IT professionals sadly just don't see it.

Consumers are behaving differently than in the past. 10 years ago, people used the devices they were assigned at work. Today, they see how these devices are easy to use and bring them to work to use their. The division between work and personal life is fast deteriorating. Technology needs to helping people do more in their lives so they can enjoy living rather than only optimize the workplace. Apple and IBM seem to have caught on to that. And hey - if you can't beat 'em (I think the whole BYOD movement has demonstrated that), join 'em.

Little known fact - Apple was in the enterprise market with their servers (they recently pulled to the small business market). Again, the speed of the Apple OS makes it superior, but there were some key components missing - they fixed the multi-user management, but integrating with other proprietary systems proved challenging. Apple's OS is REALLY Unix - it is from NeXT (and I know most hard core Unix fans believe that they had a superior system). This is why Apple's OS performs so much better than Windows. But this proprietary nature of Apple made it hard to be enterprise class.

Windows run on any type of PC, just like Microsoft server software. And Bill Gates gave away a lot of enterprise software for free to get customers "hooked." As a strategy to get marketshare, Microsoft SQL was given away for free when it first came out. It worked! I remember a number of IT directors telling me that we wouldn't use the better Oracle database for a project because the Microsoft license was free. Sure, they got stuck with a Microsoft database, but at the time, $30K vs free was an easy decision. 

Today, more IT decisions are being made from users than it is from the directors making the decisions. Why this partnership between Apple and IBM makes sense.

In some ways, we all should have seen this partnership coming. IBM got out of the hardware business, but it is still working with businesses, so what was it going to sell to them? I doubt Dell products. 

Apple will get further into the enterprise business, and IBM showed that it is listening to its customers with this BYOD problem. Sure, some companies will have a hard time accepting iPhones, iPad and Macs in a workplace, in the same way that some labs can't accept the pretty girl finding a cure for cancer. But the companies' employees will be thrilled that they can use 1 device - not one at home and one at work - do their job anywhere.

We will have more blurred lines between work and leisure, but more opportunities for living.

Improv and Agile - Part 2: Teamwork makes the experience

Agile is about teamwork - as is a live music belly dance performance. There is distributed ownership and responsibility and in both cases, the teams work together to create great experiences for customers/users. So here are more fun comparisons...

 

In Egypt, the top dancers have their own band. Yes, the band works for the dancer - the dancer orchestrates the show, chooses the music, and leads the band.

However, when you aren't as well known and don't have a budget (or if you are traveling without your band), you come to a club or restaurant to dance and the band comes to jam. The band and dancer are colleagues and everyone collaborates on the performance. The band doesn't question the dancer's technique or choice of movements, but the band may think a different song than what the dancer requests will make for a better performance choice and is just better suited for the dancer. The audience participates by showing approval and disapproval. The performance is a group effort and experience - its not just about the dancer.

This is more true with a drum solo. Great live drum solos aren't about just a great dancer and drummer; it's about how the drummer and dancer interact with each other and the audience. It's about trust - the dancer trusts that the drummer is going to make her look good. And the drummer trusts that the dancer is going to respond just right to what he does. And both watch the audience and try to give them a memorable experience.

If we look at an Agile project, it's quite similar in that developers aren't under the "control" of a UX person. They are peers working together to create a final product. A developer may have a technical reason why one UX approach is better than another. And like the band playing a different song for the dancer, the UX professional may think that the developers are telling him what to do, but actually, they are recommending a better approach for the product. It's about the collaboration.

 

True collaboration isn't about ownership; its about knowing your role and what you are expected to contribute to a project. 

 

Dancing to recorded music is a little like Waterfall 

When a dancer performs to recorded music, the music is secondary; the band who played the music is in the background - literally. The music is experienced through a device and the dancer is the star. The dancer knows that version of the song and is able to control what the experience should be. The dancer needs to only build a relationship with the audience. There is no collaboration (and no "magic").

The same is true with UX. If the development team is independent and executes "orders", then the relationship between UX and development is strained. One is dictating to the other what to do and basically, dictating a result. Everyone owns their own area, but there is no communication about which approach is better or worse. Everyone is working in their bubbles, executing according to a plan defined without knowing the implications of all decisions (or months earlier when market conditions were different).

 

The Audience/Users really, really really want to like you

Any audience wants to like you and your performance. People go out and want to have a good time - they aren't going out to be critical and mean. They want to enjoy the evening. For someone not to like your performance, you almost have to earn that. I have seen ok and outstanding performances, and if you ask the people you went with what they thought of either one, most times they will say both were great. There may be some critique, but generally, people are pretty pleased no matter what they see. Why? Because people like to like other people (just do a Google search on being liked - there are dozens of articles about how to be liked. Facebook is a great example of people wanting to like other people - how many people do you like that you barely know?). Most people are fairly positive and they want to like the restaurant they are eating at, the people who are there, and again, have a great time.

Users are the same way. They want to like your site or application. They really do. Of course there are people who are haters; they are everywhere. Those are the same people who watch a performance on Youtube and feel the need to make a negative comment rather than just click to another video. Generally, people want to like a site and will use it even with imperfections. And if people like the product - it's all good.

I worked on an online print site that had a number of usability challenges. Everyone in the company knew it, the customers knew it, but people still bought from the company because it produced great product. The company wanted to fix their issues and as part of the research, I called a few customers and got their feedback. In all cases, the customers found ways to work around the site's ineffectiveness and inefficiencies to make their purchase. They loved the product and wanted to love the company so much that they were willing to work around challenges to make it work. It was incredible to see (and these workarounds gave us incredible insight into how to fix the site).

I've also witnessed usability tests with a product that had a well-liked concept. And these test participants really tried to make the site work as expected and are almost sad when it doesn't do what they want. In usability tests they want to help you - not just because they are getting paid - but partly because if they are part of your brand - they are a cheerleader (see my article on how getting customer feedback involves customers).

Of all of the team members to create an experience, the audience is probably the easiest to win over. They are there to enjoy the experience and are willing to be led; the dancer/band or UX/developers need to create the experience and need that relationship to create something memorable. 

 

Teamwork and collaboration is key to getting any project done - and everyone needs to understand their role and what they are contributing.  Even the audience. But without everyone contributing, you don't have an experience. If you don't have an audience or users - you have a few people hanging out to jam (or create a site or app). It's about coming together to create an experience that brings joy to everyone participating. The audience/users want to like what you are doing; and if the dancer/band or UX/developer like working together, then they will create something unique and fun. That's what's great about Agile - it's about people coming together and bringing their best to make their best. Working in Agile is technical live entertainment - it's a jam session to create art.

 

 

Fascinating article about new technology adoption and narcissistic CEOs

I saw this today on the HBR Daily Stat - Narcissistic CEOs Take Bold Action When There's an Appreciative Audience. Very insightful and, sadly, often a driver for change in things that may not yet be broken - or just changes to make changes. Definitely worth a read. I can see how it could impact a project - especially with Agile. A sudden reprioritization or change to satisfy an ego rather than a bottom line. Or stories are written to support the disruption rather than see how the disruption can contribute to the company. Something worth thinking about....