Wish I was feeling creative... But I am not. So here are my notes from Day 2:

Adaptive Path
MX: Managing Experience Through Creative Leadership

Irish Bank:
Beer, starch and grease (the 3 food groups.)

Caterina Fake and Tim Brown spent last week in Davos.

keynote: Innovation through design thinking
Tim Brown
IDEO
The story he tells to business people for why design will make a difference for their business.

How we can connect design with business in a more valid, useful way. We can be who we are.

Design is everywhere.
AG Lafley (P&G) on Fast Company

beyond the stuff, designers have a unique way of solving problems.
the stuff that is beautiful is important, but it is not the only important things

Design is the stuff designers produce, but "design thinking" is what designers do.

it can be used top tackle a whole range of creative and business issues

> new strategies
design thinking is a great way of thinking about strategies, visualizing the future of your business.

"coasting" shimano ... a new category of biking. flat market for the last few years. Tapped out the number of people who want to wear spandex. 90% of the adult US does not use bicycles. How do we build a biking experience for the rest of us. Product innovation; retail shift for a normal person; working with city governments to isolate teh best safe cycling environments (communications programs; cycle parks).
> new offerings
> new business models
> new applications for technology
Keep the change reference (IDEO didn't come up with the idea, despite claims. They actually got fired from the project.)
> new partnerships


Design thinking is a human centered approach to innovation

3 important phases:
1. inspiration (where do ideas come from)
insights are the fuel for innovation -- gotta feed your brain with new insights
design thinkers use the world as a source of *inspiration*, not just validation

generative research (go out and do discovery)
evaluative (qualitative)
predictive

Design thinking innovation starts with empathy, looking at people and seeing things from their perspective, not yours.

aiming to understand people on multiple levels

*insights come from extreme users*
on the edges of the bell curve

2. ideation
building to think --> you learn the most as you build. You are literally thinking while you are building.
an idea might go through literally hundreds of iterations of prototypes
not all prototypes hve to be physical, but have to be tangible.
they make a lot of videos

3. implementation
We tend to forget that for our ideas to navigate through the organization, we need to be really good at storytelling.
Stories help provide the framework for describing a need
can be tangible and experiential

managing and measuring innovation for exec
portfolio outcomes
time to first prototype
net promoter score

Essentially a human centered approach to thinking

In order to shift clients over to design thinking, engage them in the process of design thinking

Experience blueprint is a tool they use to break things down into manageable chunks. The equivalent of a control print. a moment when you have to try to write it all down. You may not be able to, and you may not want to, cover *everything*, but focus on what is essential.


Designing future public services
design for social good: designing new public services
Jennie Winhall
Live|Work
Peterme: Jennie Winhall has a posse!

Worked under the UK design council
Started up the RED campaign.
tackling social and economic issues through design-fed innovation

Interdisciplinary team
designers
policymakers
service providers
experts

RED 02: Design for rehabilitation: Looked at how they could redesign prisons to work for rehabilitation

RED 03: energy consumption
private households contribute to 40% of London's carbon emissions

RED 04: MPs
New ways for Members of Parliament to interact with their constituents
Public sector reform was a focus: the experience of the end user became the focus
Redesign secondary schools
Look at how you can design out medical accidents

In the end, it became clear that these were all projects that affected existing institutions

*There are Limits to Modernism*
1) Society has changed
2) demand outstrips supply
3) emerging social issues
Chronic disease
Climate change
Anti-social behavior
** cannot be fixed nby just throwing money at existing institutions
motivate people into co-creating their own solutions
Decisions are not rational, they are emotional

Easier to build new nuclear power than to get people to adjust their consumption

A new generation of designed public services
designed around individuals
co-created
preventative
Causes -- not symptoms.

Talk about 3 things
New healthcare services
designing for behavior change
transformation design

RED 02: health
an epidemic of chronic disease
The biggest untapped resource is people themselves.

Communities of co =-creation
Wikipedia
grameen
creative commons
sims 2
OSS
FLickr etc

Peer to peer
open source
distributed
non-hierarchical
user-driven

Me2 -- Agenda card system to
ActiveMobs -- fitness groups make a tight social group; supported by website and magazine

These together helped establish how design provides a sapce for individuals and professionals to work together

Type two Diabetes Opportunities
1) segmentation based on character types (personas)
2) interactions that are dynamic, personal, collaborative
3) Tools and services to support people in their daily lives

Rather than the system dictating the agenda, the patient selects cards that describe things they want ot deal with, rather than the doctor asking questions.

Knowing struggler -- able knower
newcomer -- determined niave

Senior Housing estate wellness
ActiveMobs
register mob
gives you certain amount of time with a personal trainer
open or closed mobs

Prototypoing with live mobs
welliemob; timemob; backmob

Work with social dynamics within groups
Works because it is a group of friends doing what they like to do. Having the trainer involved is highly inspirational. Peer pressure and support interplay

Had to tap into and sustain motivations:
Motivation 1: Feeling better
"Wellbeing cards" - Increase self awareness of the benefits of exercise; gives a quarterly report
Motivation 2: Seeing progress
Group progress in visual tools

Designing for behavior change --> Go beyond shaping products into where the products we are building are shaping behavior.

Meaningful metrics --> in the end it wasn't until the doctors explained the ultimate metric: do you feel better?

Co-Created services

Aspiration!


GENERATION 1:
Improving existing services -- incremental innovation


Live|Work
From product desire to service envy: Service Design

we are what we do ...
... not what we own.

In order to do service design, they needed individuals and they needed competition

Each service experience has to be far more desirable than the product itself.

Cars are the ultimate challenge b/c of the attachment people have with vehicles.

Economic, Social, Environmental impact

3 - Transformation design

Characteristics
1) redefine the brief -- more than 50% of time spent writing briefs
2) collaboration between disciplines -- These issues are COMPLEX not COMPLICATED
3) fundamental transformation -- Designing the offering THEN redesigning the organization to support the offering
4) participatory design work -- much of the work and knowledge about the problem is in the front line;
5) building capacity not dependency -- embed a culture of innovation within the culture itself.
6) non-tradition outputs -- cannot predict what the outcome will be. Often results in designers designing job roles

More work than they can deal with.

Service design guidelines.

Design Council RED: All work has been released under creative commons license

they are starting a new organization called participle
--> look at this site hilarycottam.com/participle

jennie at jenniewinhall.net
email a question!!

What kind of mistrust might people have with new programs such as this
A lot of good innovation that occurs on the ground. the problem is not having ideas and making them work, the problem is scaling them up. Personality based initiatives. Can a new service be scaled up? Build/broker partnerships between govs and service providers? What they have noticed is that the big orgs can find it easier to eat up startups than to affect change internally.

What challenges come from the access paths such as the internet.
Try to provide on and offline solutions. A generational issue.

In the design solution, there are all these decks of cards. Curious about that as a design artifact. Cards as a solution. Why cards, were there other things you tried?
Talked about the cards with peter something form IDEO. Cards act as transitional object. it wasn't until the nurses tried out the two processes was not the same as picking out three things and sticking them on the fridge --> ownership oin the patient puts some of the responsibility on the patient.

In next project you want to structure it so that social and commercial groups work together. In US, outsourcing is big. Both sides need to collaborate, how do you deal with influencing collaboration?
Don't know yet. What is peculiar is that they have not had clients up unto this point. The projects have been falling into the gaps between the gov agencies. Everybody's problem and no one's responsibility. Requires that people build partnerships and then take the thinking back into the organization. People in an org often held hostage by outsourced bits. Create a clear idea what can be taken through the process.


The Transformative Power of Research
todd wilkens
Adaptive path
12 step plan to better yourself

when it comes to research as a design practice, the field has become a bit complacent, or at least a bit scattered. Need a good ol' fashioned revival.

Get back to core of what makes what we are doing what it is. By doing so, you refocus|reinvigorate your work.

People
Nothing gets more fundamental than people. UCD is built on the principle that focusing on people will lead to better design.
Research is our way of getting that understanding.

Two basic commandments to research in service design
Thou shalt understand people
Thou shalt get that understanding into your design.

We use research Generate and Evaluate ideas

Evaluate:
Usability
Human Factors
Ergonomics

Gnerate:
Design Research
User Research

What is "good" Generative research?
Where is this field going
Why?

When it comes to generative research, the main thing you are trying to gain is Insight and Empathy
These ideas started the UCD revolution

To create great experiences thou shalt understand people
Companies like to oversimplify their ideas of people
Experience vis a vis design is buiklt on how we think of people
At worst: People are essentially "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash"
Homo Economicus (picture of Spock)
Highly rational
Maximizes utility
Quantity!

Type A Personality (picture of Alex P Keaton)
(focus on tasks and goals)
Task oriented
Goal driven
Efficiency!

Sheep (sheep)
(focus on marketing rather than design)
Docile and Gullible
Stories and Preferences
Messaging!

These are not all wrong, just not really right.

What has been missing?
Emotions, Context, Culture, Meaning -- the messy complexity of human life.

People are erratic: act as individuals, groups, focus on relationships with objects. Mix and match things. Krispy Kreme in Guiness.

Understand people as people. We need to understand them as we understand ourselves. Taking a holistic view of people. Fundamentally change your view of the world in order to do this type of design. *Map our tools to the way we describe ourselves.*

Don Norman in Emotional Design: talks about the importance of the range of human experience in design. Without fun, anger, joy, excitement ... things go flat.

The Rise of Ethnography
BusinessWeek seems to love them.
importance of the holistic view

Not so much about methodology: its really about a new way of thinking about people.

Case Study: The Magic of things
The way people relate to their possessions
Everybody understands the magic of the things they own.

Behviours
more common to less common
Opportunistic showing and telling
Social behaviors
Care protect preserve
Proactive showing and telling
Knowing the value
Stewardship
Behind the behaviors were the motivations
Motivations help us to frame the experience
motivations are triggers that lead to desirable udser \behaviors
reducible moments
help explain the "soft benefits" of what "enjoyment" and "getting the most out of your things" really means

Motivations (lead to) --> Behaviors (establish) --> Connections

Case Study:
Ziba and Lenovo

Ziba contact by Lenovo to design a laptop, desktop and cellphone.

Their approach:
"We needed to create an approach that captured the soul of the Chinese consumer and inspired Lenovo's design teams."
"Turn Insights into Experiences"
"Benefits not Features"


Shift from
Task
Goals
Preferences
to
Behaviours
Motivations
Meaning

Strategy
Technology --> Features --> Experiences

Views of people:
Tech co's do not think much about users
Features oriented think of task goals and preferences
expedience firms think of Behaviors, Motivations, meaning (This is "Todd's Approach"TM)

Embracing complexity --> More Insight

Qualitative and COntgextual --> More Empathy

Empathy is not just innate, it can be developed through your design practices.

Keepign that in mind, how do we get this into the design?

Research --> Observations (Data, pictures, stories) --> Insights (patterns something something) --> Design

Design happens in isolation from everyone else

Successful research has to be actionable and durable.
Clear implications for design
not just a list of todos
durable in that findings have to last for more than just a few days ... most people never return to their report

TEAR DOWN WALLS
Integrating research and design teams
"you had to be there"
integrate empathy into the design process
Intel
Social scientists + designers coupled
Put social scientists in charge of a lot of these objectives.
Can't separate the science from the design
Prototypes are developed in concert with the design process
Samsung
Research and design in the same room
Took all the walls down between cubes
If Intel is at one end of the spectrum, you can even have developers call in on mute and listen to an interview while the design is occuring.
improve communications
Research artifacts and deliverables.
Tim's movie of the pork processes is a good example of communication innovation.
You need to be cognizant of how you communicate.
DO NOT USE RESEARCH REPORTS

The reason they are so problematic is that they are not actionable. Bulky, hard to make sense of.
Primary metric outside the group is by their reports. Because you use a 3 ring binder,

Wilken's Law: The effectiveness of research is inversely proportional to the thickness of its binding.

Good research deliverables:
Clear and straightforward
Engage readers
Tell stories

Personas: Where Insight meets Empathy
easily packaged
WWKD? (what would kitty do)
Not caricatures
Not stereotypes
Based on actual research

Moving from features to experience requires time to adjust.

Creating great experiences means understanding people and getting those insights into the design

Empathy and Humility

Interview with Irene Au
Jeffrey Veen & Irene Au
Google

Talk about a lot of the issues that we have heard about over the last day and how they apply to Google.

JV: Tell us about your background.
IA: Went to school for Electrical Engineering but was not interested in the work, more interested in how people relate to machines and technology.

JV: At the same time that they were developing Mosaic
IA: Yes, lead to working at Netscape

IA: Product development cycle very different at NS than it was at Yahoo, which is where she went next. Netscape was really just building a viewfinder.

JV: And what was your tenure like at Yahoo
IA: They realized they were going beyond the directory, and into the area of interactive experiences. Small group of designers, challenge was how to get involved earlier in the development cycle.

JV: You do the same thing at GOOG now
IA: What I hope to do

JV: You've been there 4 months now, how's that going
IA: Fun. like Disneyland. See tremendous opportunity to bring design thinking into the organization. Build products that are more relevant to people. How do we take the ideas to the next level?

JV: Design culture came out of a very simple interface issue: Search. Even UI decisions are made by an algorithm. It is a maturation process.
IA: Past methodologies may have worked when building search based features. You can see how it is changing now when you look at their hiring process. Cross-functional set of designers. Range of functions, skills, backgrounds and focus. Trying the change the way that the hiring process takes place.

JV: How do you maintain quality in recruiting with the sheer volume of applications
IA: Set expectations around the disciplines. Best of breed people who don't work in silos. Often advocate for "T" shape people who have deep skills in some areas and broad understanding of other issues.

JV: How do you prioritize so much stuff?
IA: So many projects! Everyone is empowered to create ideas. Need to have some kind of strategy around which get prioritized. Need to be more thoughtful in how we engage. Do fewer things really well. Do we want to be known as a shop where we service requests, or do we want to be higher up the ladder? Priorities should not be completely driven by the business needs. How amenable is the broader team interested in working with this team? Upsell on more high impact activities. Find the foot in the door chance, and then offer more opportunities.

JV: Your Trojan Horse idea
IA: Near term, practical; styleguides, etc; initiatives... Speaking to the Trojan Horse thing. Finding the wedge that can be used to communicate with the rest of the team. At Yahoo, the Usability studies were a very voyeuristic view into what was going on. The producers would eat it up. Over time an education happens, and people begin to understand and learn what we are trying to do.

JV: What are you seeing at google that is your oppportunity?
IA: The mockup. First day went into a UI review; looked at some mockups and it became clear that the broader customer experience issues had not been looked at. By looking at people, a design might naturally have come of it.

JV: I know that speaking the right language to the right people. At Google, it is much more about speaking the language of the developers. "Imagine a graph with a million nodes. And you can draw connections between them all." "Wow, cool, what are the nodes?" "Oh, they are people..."

IA: Sometimes you have to let products fail.

How do you carve out the space for a user-centered angle? Do fewer projects really well. At Google, often focus on the rigor around the process (what was your GPA? What about your implementation skills.) There is a softer side: How do you write a report

Peterme: A lot of people have found themselves at a point that could be considered success. The age old question: Should that group be centralized seen as a services group, or should it be de-centralized, going to the product groups, where you often miss some of the deeper opportunities.
IA: Earlier in a company's life, it makes sense for the UX group to be centralized, because it pulls together people from all over the map. Allows people to share and hone methods and standards. UX is most effective when integrated into the product team. Can you do this by matrixing into the product groups. Deep expertise in the product group, but links back to their main area of expertise. At some point the UX org gets so big that you could look at decentralized or centralized. Really have to look at how the organization is structured outside of UX.

JV: Styleguide, some of the techniques around keeping it up to date, current.
IA: Yahoo very matrixed. Product teams started funding their own designers; designs actually were targeted against core competitors. Central resources could not be linked over the styleguide. Implement a tax of 20% time for all designers. Univeral look and feel. Consistency without uniformity. Design pattern library. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Come up with the best way, and people can iterate and build off of that. Code: YUI library. Consistently implement and createa coherent experience

Q: Hiring shift --> was it influenced by your type of people being hired?
IA: Changes have been more subtle than the press may have made it seem. Changes she has been implementing have really been around clarifying expectations. Do we really want someone who can do it all, or are we looking for best of breed. Make sure we have a hiring process where the interviewers have a clearer ownership of the hiring process. With new changes, more consistency across the hiring process.

JV: Like to engage someone on a problem solving activity. Design exercises furing hiring.
IA: At Yahoo they had a design exercise. Come up with an excercise which allows for good GUI designers and others who are good design strategists. Build teams of complimentary skills.
JV: Not to see if they are good, but to see what they are good at.

IA: is it important to set aside time for design coaching. What about "pair designing"? A lot of cool stuff happening, but it is in pockets. How do you facilitate communication within the team? Need to be more open and forthcoming about it.

JV: Office hours: Specific time you can come speak to your managers. Also, putting a bunch of designers in a room and let the whole company come in and ask design questions.
IA: Two other things that are cool: Fix it days (come together on X day and fix Y problem). Testing on the toilet (in the bathroom stall, the door has episodes that teach you how to do testing from the testing group's blog.)

QUESTION ABOUT CONSISTENCY
IA: Consistency is important, but a new version does not necessarily have to carry across perfectly. Have to family well, but not necessarily perfect.

Labels: adaptivepath, conference, experience design, MXSF07, SF, ux

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