All software, whether it's for consumers or workers, needs to meet the ever growing demands people have in today’s world. Greater user expectations and influence are forcing companies to create and deliver better products, but not every organization has a rich heritage in software creation like tech giants Apple and Google. Most companies need to be more customer-focused, become design specialists, and transform their cultures as they shift to become both software makers and innovators.
Myers, a 16 year specialist in design and head of design services at Cooper, will share the elements of product success that companies need to possess and be market leaders: user insight, design, and organization. Myers will share principles and techniques that successful innovative companies use to truly understand their customers. He’ll also discuss the methods effective designers use to support their customers and create breakthrough ideas and delightful experiences. And he’ll finish by sharing the magic formula organizations need to deliver ground-breaking experiences to market.
This talk was initially given at Visualize 2012.
2. What
I’ll be talking about
The challenges we face today in software creation
The elements that lead to product success: user insight, design,
organizational effectiveness
Principles, techniques, examples of each element
12. Many companies are now software makers
GE is now the 14th largest
software provider in the world
13. Old methods and cultures limit product success
Michael Porter’s Value Chain model, a classic business strategy definition of of how
companies should be organized to determine their market competitiveness
32. Don’t rely on the least-experienced person to guide your product’s vision
“ A lot of times, people don’t
know what they want until you
show it to them.
”
Steve Jobs
35. We start with an overview question
What’s a day look like?
+ Makes it feel less like a survey
+ Makes you less inclined to ask
leading questions
Research
Technique
36. We follow up with “case-focused” questions
Tell me about a specific
instance when…
+ Ask for interviewees to tell stories Research
Technique
+ Ask for specific examples
37. We also look around the room Team
environment
Process
flows
Workarounds
Lots
of
codes
to
remember!
Heavy
use
Research
Technique
38. We ask “why?” a lot. A conversation might go like this…
Tell me about a part of the
system that you love.
I really love that Starmine
analyst rating.
Why?
Because it’s awesome.
What’s awesome about it?
It tells me how good the
analyst is. Duh.
And why is that
good?
Because I need to feel
confident when I use their
advice .
Yahtzee!
Research
Technique
39. We take an interviewer’s mindset: Apprentice
Research
Technique
40. In the end it’s simple
Attention to Simple, Execution
Great
people’s + elegant + on the = products
needs & goals ideas details
Magic
Formula
41. So what do I do with all this research? Personas: The synthesis of user research
Design
Tool
42. They represent the needs of many
“ The persona is the voice of the
user, each has a goal. This
informs lightweight, quickly
iterated designs.
”
Alan Cooper
45. Other noteworthy research methods
Journaling Participatory design
User research via web conference Lightweight user research (street, friends)
46. At the very least, sketch personas can be based on a set of agreed-upon assumptions
47. If you can speak with authority about your users you will become an authority
48. How much do you know about your users?
+ How much do your teams (esp. designers) know your users?
+ Do people visit users in their environments often?
+ Do they use ethnographic techniques?
+ Do you know what they need and want?
+ Does your organization have and use personas?
+ Do you design from their point-of-view?
+ Do your customers love you and acknowledge that you “get them”?
54. We’re all solving problems
Design
Principle
Roger Martin’s Design of Business
http://dthsg.com/what-is-design-thinking/
55. What’s makes designers good? Abductive thinking: imagining what could be possible
Design
Principle
Roger Martin’s Design of Business
http://dthsg.com/what-is-design-thinking/
59. We use methods
Project Charter User & Domain Exploration Framework Detailed Development
Analysis Design Design Collaboration
Stakeholder Ethnographic Concept Scenario-based Detailed design Product
research interviews Sketches design stewardship
Form & Behavior
Domain research
Service Interaction Product Specification Design
Blueprints Models ecosystem support
Experience
vision
workshop Visual style guide
User & Domain Visual Front-end
Analysis Language User feedback development
Prototype
Studies
refinement
Design Prototype
Imperatives development
User feedback
Front-end
development
60. Figuring out the big ideas first using sketches. They’re cheap.
Design
Principle
68. Stories help people imagine how your idea will change their lives or the lives of others
A character A trigger that Journey to
Great story
we believe + sparks a quest + resolution = (excitement)
(persona) (problem) (solution)
73. Why is this important? Aesthetic products are perceived as easier to use than less-aesthetic products
“ Attractive things work better…
When you wash and wax a car,
it drives better, doesn’t it?
Or at least it feels like it does.
Donald Norman
”
Author of the Design of Everyday things and Emotional Design
75. How design-capable are you?
+ Is design important to your company?
+ Do you have great designers?
+ Is design integrated with development?
+ Are teams generative?
+ Are there clear design processes that people use?
+ Do people communicate their design vision?
+ Do you care about the details before shipping?
+ Do you sell design with stories and prototypes?
77. Hard lesson: You can know your users, do great design, and still fail
Plastic Logic
Que Proreader
Beautiful design
Multiple product delays
Market changes
Competition
Expensive
Hard
Truth
78. It takes a great deal to be successful at product success
+ Leadership
+ Process
+ Principles
+ Tools
+ People
+ Education
+ Collaboration
+ Communication
82. Citrix VP of Product Design spends half her time marketing internally
Opera6on
Insight
83. Change: Create small wins. Show results. Share how you did it. Ask for more.
Small Show Share Ask for
win + results + work + more = Progress
Opera6on
Technique
102. The design was successful and the prototype excited the crowd
103. Practice Fusion is managing to achieve success in user insight, design and organizational will
104. How
does
your
organiza6on
measure
up?
+ Does your company have values in design and innovation?
+ If not, is it willing to change?
+ Does your leadership value design and product invention?
+ Do your teams have strong processes that incorporate user involvement
and design?
+ Do you attract the talent?
+ Does your company support risk-taking?
+ Does your company value quality over deadlines?
111. Contact Cooper for strategy + design
User research, domain Product strategy and Interaction design
Research, and analysis service strategy and service design
Visual design Prototyping and Education and
and branding development mentoring
+1 415 267 3500
business@cooper.com
Notes de l'éditeur
My name is Nick Myers, I’m a managingdirector at Cooper.I’m here to talk about the elements that create product success.
I’m going to first talk about today’s challenging in software creation. Then I’m going to go into depth on the three elements that I’ve observed over the years working at Cooper. And the patterns of behavior that are inherently leading companies to be more successful with their software. I’ll share some techniques we use at Cooper to help companies improve how they create products and increase adoption across teams and organizations.
The digital world has changed at a wicked pace.More customer interactions are now digital. Software serves us everywhere. User experience design influences more of these interactions every day. And a company’s brand sits at the center of this change.
Computers used to be clunky, large, uninviting and complex.
Now we use simpler, more useful products that do some magical things like connecting with people over video chat when we can’t be there in person. The bar has been raised and we’re now living in a future we didn’t imagine possible many years ago.
This is my wife, Caroline and here she is connecting with family and friends in her home town for her own baby shower she couldn’t attend. It was pretty amazing to see her participate in a way that wasn’t imaginable just ten years ago. As a result of these innovations she now has very high standards for these technical products.She hates how TiVo doesn’t record her programs right. Her Dell laptop seems to break all the time. She even hates her iPhone. Whenever her iPhone fails, she blames me. “You designer people need to fix the user experience.” she says or “you need to tell your people.” I kindly remind her that I didn’t invent the iPhone, as much as I’d like to say I did, but she doesn’t care.
It’s not just my wife though.We see it in many industries at Cooper: new professionals entering the field such as doctors, nurses, financial advisors, IT admins, employees in large companies expect more.
This is largely because our expectations are being redefined every day. What was once exceeding our highest expectations are now meeting our basic needs lower in the pyramid. And so we have to now aim higher to create satisfying experiences.
There are now nearly 700,000 apps in the App store and that’s just for oneplatform. Less than 100 of those apps appear on the iTunes homepage at any one time. Unless you have heavy investment you need a great product with a great user experience to be noticed.
As more customer interactions become digital we have greater influence on the brand perception. And if that experience is handled well, it can become a key factor in elevating your brand. If you’re creating software for internal use, the experience is representing user’s perceptions of your team’s brand.Consider the formidable Facebook like button. Potentially the most lucrative icon ever created. According to Facebook’s recent IPO, in Dec 2011, Facebook received an average of 2.7 billions likes and comments per day.
Companies believe that user experience is important thanks to the achievements of companies like Apple. Everyone wants the iPhone of their industry. Design is now more strategic but companies haven’t figured out how to drive their brand through user experience or truly differentiate in this new world.
Quick poll:Who here works for a company that develops software?Many companies are now software makers. GE is one such company that has transitioned to become one of the biggest software makers in the world. Everybody whether internal or external is a software provider.
Transforming from industrial companies to be more nimble, generative, effective product companies is a challenge.
How do companies adapt to the changing markets, transform their cultures, and create amazing products?
Three basic tenets to delivering successful products to the marketplace:Awarenessof your users, ability to design great experiences for them, and the ability to deliver those products to the market through organizational will.
Few have it all figured out.
Achieving excellence in all three is a monumental challenge. These are cultural values.
I’m about to dig into these elements. But before I do I want you to consider theme in context of your company. Where are you succeeding? Where are you struggling? What other principles, strategies or techniques are you using that aren’t covered here?
Let’s first talk about user insight.
Only a deep understanding of your users will help you create something they love.
Most teams creating products are centrally focused without a strong connection to customers.
This was especially true of engineers and Alan wrote about this in the phenomenal book, the Inmates are Running the Asylum.
But all the interesting stuff, the action, is happening at the interface between each company and its customers.
We are improving. Effective teams are operating close to the edge and have a better sense for the action.
Companies really need to design for people first. Even the word, “user” is generic and unclear. In fact, the only other industry that refers to customers as users is the drug trade. Kinda scary, right?
We need to get closer to people. Seeing how people work in their environment helps us understand their needs and goals and the way they live and work.
Here’s a small example: For Practice Fusion an EMR software company, Cooper designed a new iPad app. While observing general doctors we noticed that they were extremely busy rushing from appointment to appointment without much time to spare. To support their day-to-day work we organized their patient view to support their daily schedule and created an experience dedicated to minimizing keyboard input and help doctors spend more time caring for their patients. The schedule view is something we figured out by observing the doctors.
Observing people naturally also helps create and identify new products and markets. Take TaskRabbit, a new platform for busy people to get help with their chores. With this new marketplace it was hard for customers to understand how much to pay, so we presented them with typical pricing for each task. We also realized that this was a tool used by busy people so posting a task in less than a minute was critical to the overall success.
Many software teams and companies interview their customers using poor techniques because they don’t reveal people’s latent needs. Henry Ford once allegedly said if he’d asked his customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse. The quote has not been proven to be true but it illustrates the point that simply asking questions means we may not identify people’s need. In this case: to travel fast and easy from point A to point B. A goal that hasn’t changed even by today’s standards.
People tend to agree out of politeness when we ask:Would X feature help you?You like X, don’t you?People are agreeable out of politeness and fear of looking stupid
Recently a team at Cooper redesigned an eye exam machine (this isn’t the exact machine) and noticed the technician struggle to flip constantly between three different input devices. They’d become so used to it they didn’t realize how energy-zapping it was. People also don’t really speak specifically about their use when asked questions.
And most people aren’t specialized or experienced in software design. All this is to say, that better methods that reveal people’s latent needs will help you unravel more insight about your customers.
To learn more about customers it’s better to use ethnographic research, the practice of observation and interview.
Ethnography is used in several social science disciplines in order to understand the ordinary behavior, values and goals of a set of people. Anthropologists use it to understand cultures that differ from ours. While sociologists use it to understand the behavior and interactions of people within their social context.
And we ask “Why” a lot to understand people’s underlying goals and needs. A conversation might go a bit like this.
In the end it’s simple…
Lots of deep research is hard to remember. So we synthesis the data into behavioral patterns of people called personas.Personasare archetypal users that represent the needs of your audience.
These tools, invented by Cooper help bring focus for teams as they design, prioritize and develop. You know you’re using them right if people start talking about design decisions based on the needs of Louisa.
But personas on their own don’t really mean much. Scenarios, the navigational pathways, bring your personas to life and help people see the ideal usage of a software products through the eyes of your user.
Scenarios highlight the primary features your product must convey. So they naturally prioritize the functional requirements. Making your software much more useful.
There’s nothing better than user research in people’s location of use. But there are some substitute research methods you can use.You can ask customers to journal their experience by documenting in word or with photos. You can bring people together to do participatory design. You can interview people over video conference. This is certainly better if it’s at the person’s work location. And you can do other light research on the street, through friends. This is really gorilla style stuff that if you’re enthusiastic you can get some good research from.
Supposing you can’t do user research. Personascan still be created in a way that they become an agreement of assumptions. You may not reveal as much insight but your decision-making meetings will hopefully be more efficient.
If you become an expert at knowing your users at your company you will be trusted with more decisions on product and service strategy.
That’s all I wanted to say about insight.Some questions to ask yourself in evaluating your team’s effectiveness here…
Let’s shift now to talk about design.
Design is hard.Many decisions are made along the way.Andit’s easy to take a wrong turn and get lost.
The simplest answers always seem obvious.But the truth is they take a long time to get there. Simple is hard.
We’re makingstuff. This is a craft. And like like made things software design takes effort.
Design isn’t something you can take on at the end. You can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig.
We’re all solving problems.
But designers solve them differently using abductivethinking.It’s the designer’s ability to create solutions based what could be possible. Roger Martin asserted that real value creation now comes from using the designer's foremost competitive weapon, his imagination, to peer into a mystery -- a problem that we recognize but don't understand -- and to devise a rough solution that explains it.
Good designers consider possibilities.
They’re filled with patterns of design that they can reuse and refer to in new software design. You can see here a pattern library of mobile interactions.
We’re not magicians, we’re not artists. We don’t hit things with a pretty stick.
We use methods that allow us to focus on creatively solving problems.
We start with the major anatomy, or the architecture of the system…
And this is where we work on the big ideas. Incidentally, anyone can work on these big ideas.
One great exercise to try: Find a problem. Spend an hour generating ten different solutions to that problem.
We used to be a lot more practical at idea generation but the truth is we push the boundaries of our work a lot more at Cooper now we explore as teams. We host exploration workshops with our clients to generate piles of ideas around parts of the software and sheer volume of ideas can fill an entire room.
And the more we explore the more we can create better and more novel interactions that both surprise and delight our customers.
The worst thing for you to take away from this presentation is to go home and start creating wacky ideas. The point is to get the foundation right first. Then you can leverage a usable product and elevate the experience to something people will fall in love with.
All design should be based on good rationale. Does the design help our persona, Louisa? Does the idea represent the real-life scenario in the right way? This is where our teams often ask why a lot to. To ensure there’s good rationale behind the design.
And when the design comes together we need to share it.But!We’re not sharing features, we’re selling a vision.
All classically great stories begin in a state of everyday life but then a trigger sparks a quest for resolution. The story then takes the audience on a journey to reach that resolution
Prototyping helps you evaluate the design quicker. It’s cheaper. It’s great for testing more elaborate interactions and new technologies
And as interactions and motion are more pervasive in software prototyping has become more critical for sharing the nuances of a design. You’ll note I’m very behind on all my tasks. Especially the haircut.
Prototyping helps you evaluate the design quicker and make adjustments down to the details.
And good designers are relentless down to the last detail.
Why? Because people simply love great looking products.So much so that they believe they’re more usable than less aesthetic products. What we call the usability effect.
And of course, if you’re looking to get people excited, there’s no better way than a rich, great looking prototype. We designed an iPad product for Thomson Reuter’s Corporate Services team, it was shared with an exec in a hallway conversation, and he then started sharing it around the company at large.
Let’s shift now to talk about organization.
Here’s a hard lesson:You can know lots about yourusers. You can do great design. And you can still fail. Organizations have a significant impact on product success. Here’s an example of a product called the QueProreader. Anyone heard of it? It was a large format digital reader. Especially targeting newspapers and magazines. It was presented at CES several years ago and created a ton of excitement at the conference. And then nothing happened. Two years went by and Plastic Logic still hadn’t released the actual product. It was simply a demo that had failed to hit the market. In the time, the new iPad was released. The eReader market had grown and devices were becoming very cheap. And the Proreader, was expected to cost north of $700. As you may have figured out that Plastic Logic’s inability to release the product and do so with a good strategy meant it was a huge failure.
It takes a lot to be successful. You need leadership, process, tools. Great people. Education to help your company grow. Collaboration and communication for teams to change.
Design is hard, but change is insanely difficult. Metro, Microsoft’s new design system, took many years to reach this point. It’s considered to have begun development in the mid 90s.
ClaudiaKotchka, the VP of design at P&G, was hired to change P&G and make the organization more design-centric. It took her a full seven years to see the change happen.
Needless to say, change takes time. There aren’t that many design leaders. We’re not all very good being operational. But effective leaders need to be operational to make a difference higher up the org.
Catherine Courage, VP of product design at Citrix spends half her time marketing internally. It requires championing, marketing, selling, better business thinking.
Start small, get results, and then share how you got there to get more support. Then repeat and build yourself a track record of success that’ll help you build more support in the future.
Experience workshops are a great way to get people thinking more about what new experiences you can create.
Everyone in your team can join and share the experiences they have, both good and bad, with other software.Thisthen gets related to your new product or redesign and people get excited about what that could be. It’s educational for everyone to learn about what makes a good product. And it’s a great way to bring excitement and inspiration to your teams. Also great for different teams to collaborate more.
Tools have significant impact.Style guides or UI guidelines can push teams to changefaster. People see new designs and tend to want to adopt them if they’re good.
And standards help improve the baseline.
Tool libraries or UI toolkits help save teams time and are generally great quality. There are more and more front-end toolkits coming out all the time. Twitter has a new one called Bootstrap that’s great. These ideas improve the design foundation
Going even further, you can change your company culture with principles. Cooper collaborated with Citrix to create these new principles which were to guide product and design teams. They the basic tenets of how all new Citrix products should perform.
We crafted them with a new visual language system for Citrix which they use today. But the principles really changed how people work at Citrix. They started as principles for product teams, now they’re used everywhere. Their visibility grew and employees started making their own videos of products they loved. The principles show up on their security badges to remind everyone every day about their importance. And employees are trained on the importance of the principles. Even their legal teams use them to guide their work. True transformation has happened with the culture thanks to the efforts of Catherine and her team.
This video created by Energy Energy is a great campaign piece they created for marketing the principles across the company.
The Citrix product design team has grown significantly in the last three years to about 80 people.And Citrix products are winning awards.Citrix has also been named to innovative lists.
Mark has outlined design as one of his three top goals for the company the last three years. That’s really significant.
One of Catherine’s superpowers is her ability to socialize her ideas. It’s often hard to get everyone in a room and get consensus for support. Especially if you’re proposing lots of change. So campaign to different individuals until you feel you have enough support from a majority.
What are some other strategies successful companies employ? They diversify their portfolio of products. There’s the set of money-making products that made your company a success. Then there are new products in research and development that are yet unproven. And then there are the slightly more mature products that have come out of the labs and may become significant products for the company. Diversifying your strategies is a great way to split teams, philosophies and make faster progress.
Otherwise, everyone at the company simply sticks with the status quo and the moneymaking products.
If you don’t disrupt your product someone will. Just ask the Blackberry, annihilated by Android and Apple.
There are different types of innovation. And when new technology comes along it’s easier to shift to something new like this and leave the old thinking and infrastructure behind. The mobile shift has helped many companies evolve their products faster and start fresh.
Practice Fusion has really disrupted the healthcare industry with a new free EMR. But that’s not enough. They worked with Cooper to disrupt their own web interface despite their success.
Here’s their web-based product. We worked with them over several months to understand their users, design for their context and deliver a new tablet solution.
Here’s a video of what happened. What’s nice about the video is you’ll see a little bit of the user insight, little bits of design exploration and experience workshopping, the prototype we built for their user conference and the end result.
The prototype above all was the star of the show.
Practice Fusion is a company, like Citrix, and others that are managing to change their products, cultures, awareness of users and design capabilities.
I hope you enjoyed it.You can find me on twitter or via the Cooper journal.You can also follow Cooper via our twitter feed.Andif you’re interested in learning more about Cooper, come by and chat afterward.