Concept prototyping. Too valuable not to.

Have you noticed that ‘being innovative’ and ‘producing concepts’ are all the rage at the moment? It’s very fashionable, let me tell you; and quite frankly, it’s about bloody time.

I’m not going to go into how to facilitate innovation, or why and  how Apple seem to do such a good job at it all, I will however join the chorus and bluster on a bit about the common sense reasons why we need to do truckloads more concept prototyping.

The concept provides the experiential and aesthetic vision for a product, and I’m not talking just any old vision, I’m talking about a verified vision. You did remember to test it didn’t you? Yes of course you did. The vision isn’t just a well documented set of requirements, or a set of wireframes, it’s an interactive prototype that shows exactly what the final product is going to be. Why’s that? Because seeing is believing; and believing gives us confidence and direction.

The concept is what gives us focus to ensure every action we take along the way through detailed design and development support the core idea we want to bring to life. It also gives us the evidence at the end of the process to show that we did the right thing… When someone asks “But why?” you can just point to your archive of concepts and say “That’s why”.

Personally, I love doing concept work. That time when you take the core of an idea, explore it, bring it to life, verify that it works, and either nurture it or mercifully pull the plug and let it fizzle into oblivion. The work isn’t easy, in fact if you’re doing it right, starting broad and verifying each concept with real people it’s a hard slog. It takes time, it’s full of risk, but it is most certainly worth it. How else do you differentiate? How do you make something better, unique, and desirable for your customers? Importantly, how do you do it all before you actually throw down the cash and build it? There’s no other way really.

Prototypes mean less wireframes in documents, less verbiage in requirements specifications, less meetings to clarify it all and more time to go get a beer on a Friday afternoon. Arguably, wireframes (and every other bit of documentation) have their place in the process, but it’s not until the ‘thing’ starts to come to life that customers, people on the project and stakeholders truly understand what it’s all about. I’m sure there are people you love and care about that are wireframe experts, but is that bundle of paper they sweat over and push across the table to you really an articulation of the experience, or just an articulation of how hard they’ve worked for a couple of months? And when you read that weighty tome, do you immediately get how the transitions will flow, how the visual design is impacting the information design, how the panel slides out from… er, which page was that on? Well, maybe you do and that’s great; but then, how do you present that set of wireframes to your customers for testing? Perhaps with a prototype?

Where am I going with this? Nowhere everyone hasn’t been before, except to say maybe we could be keeping the process simpler, and take advantage of all of those prototyping tools out there now that make building something almost as easy as talking about it.  How about not even making it a process and just having the framework to create verified, readily shared and understood concepts…

1. Get insights. You need to have an ongoing program of research to deliver insights for new products, and to refine the ones you already have; just don’t go overboard with it.
2. Prototype. Use the insights to drive design and explore alternatives, lots of alternatives. Think ‘many, many’ like Apple, but do it your way.
3. Verify what you’ve got. Test everything, explore it with customers, make sure they can use it, want it, and don’t already have it.
4. Decide. Make a decision on what you’re going to do with the concepts, and move on.

Continue reading at:

• You Can’t Innovate Like Apple
• Innovation Workshops: Facilitating Product Innovation
• Industry trends in prototyping
• Concept Design Tools
• Apple’s design process
• Sketching User Experiences
• 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
• LukeW. Some Things I Learned from Architecture School

The final push to finish the software: Real Artists Ship… You’d better get back to work!

A little tale about shipping product at Apple from January 1984 and getting ‘something’ out the door on time.

Article Extract: Finally, the deadline for finishing the software was less than a week away, and it seemed obvious that there were still too many bugs for us to ship it. Late on Friday evening, we convinced ourselves that we needed an extra week or two to fix the remaining problems. Steve Jobs was on the East Coast, along with Bob Belleville and Mike Murray, doing press for the introduction, so we arranged for a conference call early Sunday morning to tell him about the slip… “No way, there’s no way we’re slipping!”, Steve responded. The room let out a collective gasp. “You guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn’t going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. Just make it as good as you can. You better get back to work!”

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship.txt

Wiki’s as specification… I don’t think so

Browsing this article the other day at B&A about using Wiki’s for specs, yet again raised the point about how teams seem to rarely agree on just how the ‘thing’ they’re creating should be documented. Now, I’m keen on the collaboration side of wiki’s, but managing links, tracking progress, and mixing design with documentation can be a bit tricky.

It’s something that’s difficult to make work because specification is as much about the experience and preferences of the team as it is about the effectiveness of any one tool or method. Perhaps we can put it to a vote…

This week, I’m a fan of using:

• Axure with Shared Projects setup for the collaborative production of interactive prototypes as specification (with a bit of messing about you can output Word docs too), and
• Basecamp for general project management

…but although we’re seeing increase use of these tools, they’re yet to really take off in my immediate design community.

What tools would you vote for?

On innovation culture and experimentation: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

A good read here titled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, (thanks Brett.C for this one)…

One of the key aspects of an innovation culture the article highlights is the important role experimentation plays. Innovative companies try stuff.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

A few extracts from the longish article:

“Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad…

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. … That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away…

Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.”

Facilitating Product Innovation… The Yahoo way.

Doing short, sharp sprints of activity to explore and verify concepts is definitely the way to go to ensure you’re looking at the right things at the right time for customers; and it’s interesting to hear from someone working within Yahoo having success with their ‘YoDeLs’. The YoDeLs are simply an intensive week or so of ideation, design, iteration, and usability testing, during which product managers, researchers, UX designers, and engineers work together to solve a focused challenge.

They keep the specification light and instead of detailed documentation they produce visually rich, interactive prototypes and deliver them with financial models showing the value of the ideas. It’s a good, practical approach to innovation.

A little bit scary perhaps that only 4% of innovations actually go anywhere, but a great call out that innovation means lots of work, lots of time, involving customers deeply in the process, and taking risks and being prepared to fail often and move on quickly.

http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/06/innovation-workshops-facilitating-product-innovation.php

Usability & Experience Metrics – Lightweight, powerful, and telling

One of the most powerful and telling metrics I like to use is the single question “I would recommend this product to a friend or family member” with a rating scale for agree/disagree. I’ve found it correlates well with more comprehensive usability measures like SUS, SUMI, etc, and so on and provides a good measure of the overall experience. When evaluating banking processes a few years ago we did a bit of a comparison and found a strong correlation. There’s a whole book out there on the topic: The One Number You Need to Grow, by Reichheld but I must admit I’ve never read it myself.

I was just browsing about and came across the Forrester index again and couldn’t help but admire how they keep the survey really simple, just three questions. It prompted me to think about our metrics, and if while we’re all getting people to fill in things like the SUS at the end of sessions, why don’t we also get them to just complete a couple more to get an overall experience rating.

So next time you’re doing your SUS at the end of a typical set of tasks, how about prompting with these ones as well:

• I would recommend this product to a friend or family member
• I enjoyed interacting with this product

The advantage of getting something reliable with just two or three questions is that these could easily be tacked on to products or web sites to be completed while people are using them (with perhaps, a pretty good chance people will respond to the one, two, three question format).

Would you recommend this recommendation to a friend or family member?

——————

Here’s the bit about Forrester…

The CxPi Methodology – Forrester’s three little questions to rank the CxP of more than 100 companies.

This analysis was based on responses from 4,564 US consumers during October 2008. The Customer Experience Index (CxPi) was calculated as an average of the indices that came from consumer responses to the following three questions from an online survey:

• Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how effective were they at meeting your needs? (”Usefulness” rating)
• Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how easy was it to work with these firms? (”Ease Of Use” rating)
• Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how enjoyable were the interactions? (”Enjoyability” rating)

Consumers selected responses along a five-point scale – ranging from a very negative experience (1) to a very positive one (5). The individual indexes were calculated by taking the percentage of consumers who selected one of the top two boxes (4 or 5) and subtracting the percentage of consumers who selected the bottom two boxes (1 or 2).

Melbourne Event: Iron Designer II – Revenge is a dish best served cold – 7pm, Friday July 24th

Like Iron Chef, perhaps MasterChef… How about throwing fruit at designers while they try and cook something up? Come along if you’re in Melbourne on July 24.

Iron Designer is the official closing event of the State of Design Festival where some of Melbourne’s most creative minds fight it out in a no holds barred design battle – vying for the people’s ovation and fame forever.

The scissors will be out as this year’s challengers go head to head for the coveted Iron Designer crown. Inspired by their Japanese cooking counterparts, design contestants work individually or in teams of 2–3 in a pressure-cooker, style design-off. Responding to State of Design’s Festival theme, design contestants will receive a ‘Sample of the Future’ and the battle’s key ingredient will be revealed.

The designers are required to represent their future visually, within a set amount of time, using the key ingredient as their main working material. The aim of the game is to present a live and entertaining exploration of the creative process, showcasing the way designers think and how they transfer their thoughts into something visual.

Reputations will be on the line at the BMW Edge Design Stadium. This fast-paced contest will then see winners go through to a championship playoff – where the ultimate winner will be crowned Iron Designer 2009, basking in the glory and adulation of the crowd.

Featuring Chase & Galley, The Foundry, Cornwell Design, Maddison Architects, Wooden Toy, 21-19 and Six Degrees. Hosted by Tony Wilson.

Tickets
https://www.stateofdesign.com.au/tickets

About
http://stateofdesign.com.au/events/design-for-everyone/iron-designer
http://irondesigner.studiobinocular.com/ (not much info on this link yet)

Impressions of the events: How to Use Design to Drive Innovation AND The Future of Design Thinking: A conversation with IDEO

I went along yesterday to the Momentum Innovation event held at the EBC “How to Use Design to Drive Innovation”, and the Design Victoria event “Future of Design Thinking: A conversation with IDEO”. Both were great.

I had to leave the Telstra hosted event a little early to make it to the evening event, so if anyone out there was able to stay for the panel and interactive discussion it would be great to hear how it continued on (reply if you can). I did get to hear the main presentations from IDEO team, Fonterra, Woods Bagot, and DE before dashing out.

What stood out for me was how similar the process was for these diverse business groups. Each successful company attributed the majority of their success to delaying build and staying flexible with ideas until the product concept was rock-solid; having been proven to offer value to customers and the business through simulation or prototyping, and evaluation in context.

For IDEO, it’s just always been the way they do it. They delay judgement, observe their customers (not just listen), and continuously adapt and change what it is they are creating. Their approach to design has proven to be successful many times over, creating new or evolved products and services including designs for bicycles, aeroplane cockpits, banking customer retention strategies, and even community health and youth education about parenting. At the Design Victoria event Arna Ionescu from IDEO presented a great case study highlighting how they had redesigned the education of youth populations in regard to contraception and developed a strategy and framework for improving the problem situation in the US. The key insights had come not from people within the business, or extensive market research, but through ethnographic methods and experience simulation in the real world.

Angeline Achariya from Fontera described how they observe people discovering their products in the supermarket (e.g. new milk cartons), track uptake and attend people’s homes to see how the products are actually used. At the core of their approach was that they went to customers, instead of making customers come to them in an artificial environment. Only after they had verified the product prototype in all contexts do they put it in the production pipeline. By prototyping and evaluating first, and keeping designs simple and focused, Fonterra felt more confident they were taking the ‘right’ product into production and increasing the final market success.

James Calder an architect from Woods Bagot highlighted how, in their effort to design buildings that may not be delivered for 5 years and were required to be relevant up to 100 years later, would spend a significant portion of their design time simulating aspects of the experience and allowing their customers to be immersed in something tangible years, before construction would actually begin. Through simulating the experience first they were able to drive innovation by convincing customers of the final value of an innovative design. His comments about letting users determine the use of the space rather than office managers struck a chord… If people are 10 times more expensive than office space, why don’t we let them sit where they want, give them as much light as they want, and so on. Their approach to design had been measured over time by themselves and their clients with increases in productivity, user enjoyment and satisfaction, and staff retention. All of that, as well as an increase of around 30% or more in terms of the number of staff a building could support.

Everyone appeared to agree that simulating the experience long before coding, building, or production, and iterating on that experience, was the best way to mitigate risk and get it right first time.

IDEO summed up the process as inspiration leading to ideation and the exploration of concepts, and finally on to implementation. They encouraged us all to inject more empathy and imagination into the process to achieve great insights for design and delay judgement, specification and implementation until after a design framework had been created and the experience understood and verified.

• InnoFuture
• Future of Design Thinking Overview
• IDEO
• IDEO Design Thinking

Waving to Google?

Google have recently announced Google Wave, a tool for communication and collaboration via the browser. The actual launch appears to be months away. There’s no doubt its working, but just how good the experience will be remains to be seen. By all indication… it will be good.

In Google Wave, users create and invite other people to “waves”. Everyone on a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It supports concurrent rich-text editing; where you see what other users on the wave are typing in real-time. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content – it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can even use “playback” to rewind the wave to see how it evolved.

If you like, you can think of it as threaded email on steroids, with what we’ve all been begging for… a decent user interface and interaction.
From what I’ve seen, it looks great. There’s tremendous potential, a chance to ditch a few tools in favour of one, but I have some doubts about the general hype of it being an ‘email killer’. It could certainly be a Twitter killer, perhaps even kill off a wide variety of popular collaboration tools like Basecamp, and will no doubt crush Microsoft OneNote, but because it requires each wave participant to have a compatible wave viewer (which by the way will be easy to come by), I think it will be some time before it puts any serious dent in email traffic; simply because people are lazy and new ways of working don’t often come easy to the majority.

Here are some things I love about it:

• The UI seems to do what it needs to do… and nothing more. It’s only in demo form now but if I feel comfortable looking at it, can follow it, and want to use it. It gets a preliminary thumbs up.
• Messages can’t get lost, and can be directly searched for, or found and observed by replaying the timeline (I love time travel). Playback will put an end to the ‘who put that in there and why?’ questions that pop up all over projects. You are now accountable, and your comments traceable…
• You can edit the same document, practically the same bit of text at the same time any number of other people are also editing it. Great for live collaboration over things like lists, plans, or document Copy.
• In an IM chat, you can see what people are typing as they type it so you don’t have to wait for them to hit send before you interrupt. If you’re a private person that likes to get their thoughts in order before other people know what you’re thinking, you can turn off the character-by-character send and revert to more traditional type, send, wait for reply.
• The Rosey robot translator could revolutionise cross-cultural teams who speak different languages. For work I’ve been involved in with people in Japan and France, this would have helped immensely.

Food for thought:

• An interesting side-effect of the live nature of the conversation may be that people hit ‘Done’ less often, and don’t actually commit aspects of the conversation to the Wave. This could potentially confound the historical aspect of a wave as people type, delete, retype to each other as they can see the characters flowing in.
• Without a strong motivation to move across from their current methods, say to work collaboratively on a corporate project where everyone uses Wave, people may not feel the need to try it out. We’ve all seen how the use of a collaboration tool like Basecamp can be completely confounded if just one of the key participants won’t use it and keeps taking the conversation back to regular email.
• To be popular, it’s going to have work well with email. I’m guessing waves will initially be available in your Gmail inbox as well as the Wave inbox. It will be interesting to see if, or when wave support would be added to apps like Outlook. Embedded in Outlook would be an ideal way to drive uptake… but then once you were fully engaged, why would you bother using Outlook again?
• You can’t really delete a wave. Possibly not a concern in most situations, but a wave cannot be deleted without the express permission of every participant on it. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. That said, there will be support for more controlled wave conversations in corporate environments where the wave is hosted internally and access limited.

There’s a lot more to be said about the open APIs, the extensibility, the ability to embed waves on sites and within services, robot participants, and so on. But enough from me, over to you…

Where can you see yourself using it?

General chat on the web

• TechCrunch
• At Google
• Another TechCrunch

———————

[Revisiting this post a few weeks later]… Well, after actually using Wave for a while I’d have to say my early impressions and preliminary ‘thumbs up’ appraisal of the UI needs to be revised down a little. Collaborating with a group and pumping comments in throughout a Wave can be very confusing for participants, and as expected it’s a little tricky keeping people motivated to stay on a wave and not return their old familiar way of doing things. That said I’m sure we’ll still see great applications utilising the technology being pushed out soon.

Check out some Google Wave use cases at LifeHacker

Xbox Natal. Very cool.

I love what Microsoft are doing in the home entertainment space with delivering the set-top box experience via the Xbox, and now we’re getting a first look at Natal the  “No Strings (or Controllers) Attached” experience.

On demand Movies, Television and Music; Facebook social networking, Instant Messaging, and amazing games as well. Why on earth would you go out and buy a set top box if you’ve got an Xbox and a network to plug it into… Oh yes, those copyright laws limiting the distribution of content in this neck of the woods (Someone tell me why can’t I watch True Blood and Torchwood here when all those lucky folk over there are doing it).

I maintain I’m not a geek, but I do have a Windows Home Server dishing up content to my Xbox and other extenders. It’s nice, works well and means we never have to get a DVD out to watch a movie, and recorded TV happens anywhere in the house. It’ll be nice when I can turn that off, or at least supplement the content and tap directly into all that good gear hosted on the Internet instead.

With broad appeal, limitless content, powerful gaming and extensibility, Xbox is really positioning itself nicely as the must have household appliance.

Assuming it works, supporting gestural interaction will mean anyone can walk up and use it immediately…

Pick one up for me when you get yours.

Natal