Overview of this Interview:

Thoughts on this Interview: Vern Burkhardt does a great job of asking insightful questions into the things that Tom has learned as a leader in a company that is rewriting the rules of design and business. I appreciate that Tom brings the importance that Face to Face communications as a primary issues for effectiveness.

Original Interview HERE at ideaconnection.com

Design Thinking for Innovation

Interview with Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO, and Author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation

Begin Part 3…

VB: Would you talk about the concept of mapping your customers’ or potential customers’ journeys?

Tom Kelley: We discovered while designing products and services that you can follow a customers’ journey every step along the way in their dealings with you. Some of the steps include discovering about your service, exploring your offering, trying it for the first time, becoming more familiar with it, and then using it on a regular basis. In each step you can distinguish yourself, you can provide something special as opposed to being the same as every one else.

One slightly extreme example is the backpack company, JanSport, which made its warranty services different than anybody else’s. If you send your backpack in to be re-sewn or repaired JanSport sends you a little postcard with a message from your backpack while it’s at camp. No one would say this warranty service is ordinary.

You want your business to be extraordinary at every step along the way, even at the end of the cycle. We think great companies look at every step of the customer’s journey, and ask whether they’re ordinary or extraordinary. They try, within the constraints of cost, to be extraordinary at every step. There are certain brands that stand out, such as Virgin and Apple, but there are many others as well.

VB: You say, “…when we walk into most offices, our senses shut down from sensory underload.” Is having an ‘innovation lab’ a must if a company wishes to promote a more innovative organizational culture?

Tom Kelley: I’m not sure I would say it is a must, but it certainly helps.

An innovation lab gives you permission to think differently. We go through our day-to-day jobs dedicating a lot of time to getting things out the door, taking care of current operations. It sometimes helps to have a place that prompts you to get out of your normal day-to-day thought patterns.

Some companies have had great successes creating innovation labs, which we describe as an ‘on-site off-site’. Most companies have ‘off-sites’ where they go to a hotel somewhere and brainstorm about something, but only once a quarter or once a year. The fact that you’re at the beach or in Los Vegas signals that it is not real life. An innovation lab in the corporate campus also sends a signal that we’re outside our ordinary path, but still strongly related to work.

I talk in The Ten Faces of Innovation about The Gym at Procter and Gamble, a place where employees exercise their mental muscles. It’s a space in which they’ve had great success in sparking new innovations. I also talk about Mattel, Inc, the toy company that created a space called ‘Platypus’. Lots of companies are coming around to the idea of having an innovation lab space within their corporate campus.

VB: Would you talk about the power of storytelling?

Tom Kelley: This is something we overlooked for the first ten or twenty years at IDEO.

We thought that a new product, service or idea should speak for itself. Now we realize data do not carry the day. When you give people data they forget it almost immediately as it rushes through their short-term memory. But we remember stories from early childhood. A story carries a message, moral, or idea.

We now believe that a story will deliver a message that you really believe in to your internal team. A story will also send a message to the world about your brand. That’s why I encourage people to work on their story telling skills.

VB: It needs to be an interesting story.

Tom Kelley: Yes, there’s a great book on this subject. I have one chapter in my book, but there’s a whole book by Chip and Dan Heath called Made to Stick. I think most people know intuitively, but the Heaths are quite explicit about what makes a story work. It needs to be simple, concrete, credible, emotional, and have an unexpected characteristic to it.

As you said, it needs to be a good story because a bad story is not worth the telling. If you create a good story that’s sticky in the Malcolm Gladwell sense, then that story will carry your message along with it.

VB: What do participants learn at IDEO University?

Tom Kelley: IDEO U is a first exposure to the innovation design process. It’s an offering that has come and gone at IDEO. It’s now often embedded in a larger innovation project as a workshop.

It’s about teaching, as quickly as possible, ideas about the process of design thinking. People could read my book or hear a lecture. But we’ve noticed over the years that it’s helpful if you can practice, if you can act something out. It’s the combination of hearing about an approach and then practicing it yourself. In IDEO U we take a moderately simple design challenge and tackle it in a practiced way over a period of 24 or 48 hours. We go through the whole design process and participants can see that it isn’t so hard, and yet they come out with some good ideas. The next step is to try the same process on the complex, messy problems we wrestle with everyday.

We have a session designed for the high school kids of employees; we call it ‘IDEO Boot Camp’. Both my kids have been through it. Over a one-week period we expose them to design thinking, and they brainstorm, do Anthropology, build things, and receive user feedback. It has the elements of IDEO U but is aimed at the high school level.

VB: Should we learn to color outside the lines but stay on the same page?

Tom Kelley: I use the example of my brother, David. If you always play by the rules you’re overly constraining yourself because innovators do break rules sometimes. They question the way things are done.

Staying on the same page is comparable to what Gordon MacKenzie says in Orbiting the Giant Hair Ball. He points out how organizations establish one rule after another, as part of their history, until the rules become a giant hairball. If you set your foot down on the planet this hairball creates, you get snagged in it, caught in all the rules. If you get stuck there it’s hard to innovate. But if you shoot off into space you’re not helping the organization either. MacKenzie’s central metaphor is to orbit the giant hairball; be near it without getting snagged by the mess of it.

What you just said about coloring outside the lines but staying on the same page is Gordon MacKenzie’s idea of staying close enough so as not to generate wild ideas no one can use. You’re in a position to come up with new, innovative ideas that have a fundamental practicality to them. It’s possible to implement them. They can add value to your organization.

VB: Do you have any final comments for our IdeaConnection readers?

Tom Kelley: The interesting challenge for us these days is how to take the design lessons we’ve learned from products and services, and apply them to broader social issues. We’ve just started on the journey of trying to apply design thinking to the education system in America. Other challenges are applying design thinking to global issues, such as how to get access to clean water around the world. These issues are on the frontier for us; they are the interesting challenges we’re starting to wrestle with.

VB: There are lots of these types of challenges.

Tom Kelley: There are. We think there’s an opportunity to apply design thinking. We’ve been using the left brain analytical model on these problems for the last 50 or 100 years, and we think new thought patterns might open up the possibility of new solutions.

VB: You’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you very much.

Tom Kelley: You’re welcome. Thanks a lot.

Conclusion:
“Products that become hits seem to enjoy a balance of features, price, and that often elusive element of timing.”

‘The best products and services aspire to the classic design principle “Make simple things simple and complex things possible.” Sometimes designing a winning experience is about reining in your wish list and resisting the temptation to do too much.’

Of the ten personas various members of an innovation team may choose to take on, we would do well to choose the two or three roles that most appeal to us, and hone the skills required to play them well.

Tom Kelley’s Bio:
Tom Kelley is the General Manager of IDEO. Working with his brother, IDEO founder David Kelley, Tom has helped manage the firm as it has grown from 20 designers to a staff of 530. During that time, he has been responsible for such diverse areas as business development, marketing, human resources, and operations. Prior to joining IDEO, Tom was a management consultant for Towers Perrin, advising senior executives on organizational and operational issues in North America, Asia and Australia.

He addresses business audiences on how to use innovation to transform business culture and strategic thinking. His tools and insights are from lessons learned at IDEO and other successful design teams.

Tom holds an MBA in marketing from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received the Delbert J. Duncan citation as the year’s top marketing scholar. He was also named the first-ever Executive Fellow by the dean of the Haas Business School.

Tom Kelley is the author of The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm (2001), and The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate & Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization (2005).

By Ben Hammersley|03 November 2009

It’s the hot design company hired by Apple to create its first mouse, (and by Microsoft to create its second), by the Post Office to rework the postbox, by Muji to create its wall-mounted CD player and by Procter & Gamble to reinvent toothpaste tubes. It made the Nokia N-gage, the Palm V and the Head Airflow tennis racquet.

Now IDEO is being retained by Barack Obama’s White House to help to reinvigorate the American civil service; by the government of Iceland to help the country to innovate its way out of financial crisis; and by the Kellogg Foundation to reinvent education.

It might seem bizarre that a company used to designing products is now solving country-sized problems, but it all comes down to the technique it pioneered and preached to its clients. It calls this philosophy “design thinking”.

Design thinking defines the practical way in which IDEO approaches its problems, but as a phrase it also allows design to be talked about in a meaningful way by non-designers. After all, what is a designer? In the popular mind, it’s the person who lends his or her name to a range of sunglasses or shoes – beret-sporting chaps who add several noughts to price tags.

Or it’s the engineer surrounded by technical drawings, making machines. Either way, for most people – and most companies – the idea of the designer does not involve solving problems that don’t involve making a product. But proponents of design thinking say that they can extend this creative mindset to address all forms of problem-solving.

Designing products, yes, but also designing new businesses, new strategies, even new additions to society. Tim Brown, IDEO’s president, calls it “a way of describing a set of principles that can be applied by diverse people to a wide range of problems”.

Practically speaking, the approach isn’t complicated. In stages, it goes like this:

Firstly, immersion, whereby the designers research the problem by plunging themselves into it – talking to the people they’re trying to help, working with them, interviewing experts.

Secondly, synthesis – whereby they gather together their findings and look for patterns.

Third, ideation – brainstorming solutions to the real problems identified by stage two.

Then comes prototyping, making mock-ups of solutions to try out against the problem.

After that comes the product.

Only at the end, at the prototyping stage, are judgments made; until then, all ideas are given equal weight.

This methodology is radical in that it differs from traditional approaches to business strategy in two key ways. Whereas in many companies the concept for a new product may have already been based on, say, an idea from the marketing department with a designer later brought in to make it look pretty, design thinking places the designer at the heart of the innovation process.

Secondly, the methodology gives a firm framework within which a wider team can work. It takes the cliché of the lone creative mind being struck with genius, and replaces it with a process that a whole team can follow.

Creativity, therefore, isn’t a thing that magically appears, but a process you work through.

And work through it they have. IDEO was founded in 1991, through the merger of four companies: David Kelley Design, ID Two, Matrix, and Moggridge Associates. That year, it won 15 awards, 12 of them IDEA awards (perhaps the most prestigious international design competition). By 2009 it had won more IDEA awards than any other company.

Fast Company magazine named it tenth in its top 25 list of innovative companies; by some reports, IDEO has worked for the other 24. Fortune placed it 15th in its list of companies most popular with MBA students. BusinessWeek, too, named it one of the world’s most innovative companies.

It’s the open-minded approach to ideas and innovation that defines design thinking – a term made famous by founder David Kelley. The methodology has led to a distinctive feature of IDEO offices around the world: walls full of Post-It notes, intended to help teams share their suggestions.

In group brain-storming sessions, every idea, every observation is written or preferably sketched on to one of the sticky sheets and then displayed. During four months of Wired’s visits this summer to IDEO’s London office – an open-plan loft-like space in Clerkenwell – the areas set aside for each of its current projects ebbed and flowed in the form of the sticky notes.

Research was written, sorted and synthesised with them; brainstorming sessions, where every member of staff is invited to contribute their input to a project, produced walls full of the things; prototypes even more so.

But there’s no better way to understand how creative people work than to be part of the process. So Wired commissioned the London office to tackle a problem as if we were commercial clients (detailed at the end of this article). The brief, we decided, would be unlike any conventional design project. It would be to resolve one of the UK’s most pressing social problems: urban rage.

Bill Moggridge, the twinkly-eyed grey-bearded British co-founder of IDEO, a Royal Designer for Industry and the designer of the world’s first laptop, explains how IDEO, design thinking and his own ideas came about. “I think in the early days, in an industrial- design consultancy, people probably came to us because they thought we could do cool-looking stuff,” he says. “The difference was that I always insisted on trying to understand what people would think and what they would want.

The simplest way of doing that was to make sure that we saw the real world.

So, for example, one of the earliest projects John Stoddard, who still works with us in San Francisco, worked on was for a Danish marine radio. We sent him to Hull and got him to go on a fishing trip up to Iceland so he could see what it was really like.

If you don’t get out there and see what it’s like, then you couldn’t really design it right. That was my basic thinking. I remember doing something for bone surgery, when we were first starting to do artificial joints. So I put on the wellies and green gown and went into the operating theatre and watched what the surgeons did as they were carving people’s legs up. It was pretty nasty, but very informative.”

Increasingly, as products become more sophisticated, consultancies such as IDEO are focusing less on individual devices and thinking more about designing systems. The iPod, for example, is a design classic because it is part of a system that includes iTunes, its music store, its packaging, even the real-world Apple store, and the way in which the music you buy is charged to the credit card attached to your account. It’s a product, yes, and a system too, but also a service.

Another example is the work IDEO did for Bank of America. Asked to help attract new customers from a specific target market – middle-aged women with children – the firm, along with a team from the bank, conducted interviews with potential customers across the US. They observed that some of them rounded up their bill payments for speed and ease of mental arithmetic: if an electricity bill came in at $42.23, they found that many would pay, for example, $45, knowing the difference would go towards the next bill.

It meant household accounts were simplified, and also that the customer’s psychological relationship with the utility company was subtly changed. Other potential customers they met had difficulty saving. These insights led the IDEO team to develop not an advertising campaign nor a set of branding guidelines, but instead a whole new bank account: one in which any money spent on the accompanying debit card is rounded up to the nearest dollar, and the difference automatically placed into a separate savings account.

Since its launch in 2005, the Keep The Change account, based on observation and developed through design thinking, has brought Bank of America up to ten million new customers, and has resulted in $1.8 billion of savings.

Today’s new technologies, of course, do not necessarily add any complexity to designing a system or a service over designing a single device. The lines have become blurred. As more devices are made to connect to the internet, to communicate between themselves as well as with their users, and to interact with the ever-more complicated new systems that make up modern life, their design becomes hugely more complex. Bill Moggridge offers the example of traditional telephone design.

“In the old days, you’d go into the hall and you’d pick up this thing and stick it to your ear and wind the handle, and then you’d speak to another human being. There was a bit of design for the infrastructure, which was an engineering  thing connecting you, and there was a very simple piece of exchange that the operator did, and there was a very simple piece of product design – the instrument – but nothing challenging about it. The really interesting challenges were human-to- human.

The operator had to be trained to learn how to deal with rude people or to know the addresses of two Mrs Smiths. Human intelligence was simply relied on, and businesses would think of this as a training opportunity or problem, rather than as a design opportunity or problem.

“Contrast that with today,” he continues. “You take the telephone, and now you’ve got human-to-machine first, then machine-to-machine, and finally machine-to-human, so there are design challenges all the way because of the process – because you can’t rely on human intelligence to do the interpretation. The thing becomes a design opportunity and need.

“Then you add all this other stuff like SMS and email and internet access, and you have a whole other set of design challenges and opportunities. Which means there is this very sophisticated object which is pretty intimate – you put it up to your face like a wine glass – with all sorts of interactions going on with tiny screens, controls that are too small to be easy to use, and there’s this range of things you can do with it, all of which you have to try to align. It becomes a very difficult, complicated system with lots of layers and a hierarchy of complexity, but every one of those layers has to do with design, as opposed to training.”

Here, then, is a third new field of design: interaction design, which considers how humans interact with devices and systems – in a way more involved than simple ergonomics. Moggridge may be most famous for the GRiD Compass, widely seen as the first laptop. But his most lasting contribution may come from having pioneered this field of interaction design – again, the study of how we use technologies, not just how they look or how they’re built.

The two go together, though, as Moggridge recalls:

“I had my first prototype [laptop] in 1981. I took it home and I started thinking, ‘Now I have a chance to use this myself.’ I sat down to work, trying to understand what was happening in this little electroluminescent screen. And within about five minutes I’d forgotten everything about the physical form of the product, I was so focused on that interaction with the software – I found that I was sort of sucked through the screen into this virtual world. Occasionally I’d remember, ‘Oh yeah, I designed this physical thing,’ but beyond that, the important aspect – the interface -was something that I didn’t yet know how to do. And so I decided to learn how.”

That decision – to leave behind industrial design – was a fateful one; it led Moggridge to become a trustee of the Design Museum, a visiting professor in interaction design at London’s Royal College of Art, a lecturer in design at the London Business School, and a founder of the short-lived but hugely influential Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy.

Today at IDEO he helps 550 staff (roughly equally split between men and women) and ever-more unusual clientele to “create impact through design”, as the firm’s mission states.

Impact is key. Indeed, Moggridge sees the designer’s job as embracing not just the person, but the entire planet.”You can think of design as three concentric circles. You have the person in the centre, and then you have the environment they live in, and then you have the world as a whole. For the person, we can also think of health and welfare – so you’re designing actual improvements in the way people exist in their relationship to the world in a holistic sense.

“The larger version of that is just a holistic look at the planet… and that becomes political. It’s no good just thinking about CO2 emissions in one country, it really has to be a global thing in order to have an effect. So the design of political systems that enable greater sustainability and that really will have an active effect is a much better problem outcome than looking at nice materials to make packaging or something.

“I think that the smaller circles are still always there, but you’ve got this bigger one surrounding them as well.”

Somewhere there’s a new pack of Post-it notes ready to tackle it.

When WIRED first approached IDEO, we were seeking a few bold ideas for a wider feature (in next month’s issue) on how to upgrade government in Britain. We thought the design firm responsible for the Apple mouse, the Palm V and countless other products and services would creatively address such a wide brief without too much prompting. Perhaps they would give us ideas for education or health – they work in both fields in real life, after all, designing insulin pens for Eli Lilly, for example, and primary-school syllabuses for the Kellogg Foundation. Yet as we got to understand how the firm works, and became inspired by its approach to innovation, we had our own breakthrough idea. Why didn’t IDEO create something unique for Wired readers – something new and useful?

Not a problem, said IDEO, we actually already have an idea of the problem we want to solve. Urban rage, they said. We would like to try to solve the problem of rage. The multidisciplinary team, which comprised Lydia Howland, Mike Albers and Ben Forman followed the classic IDEO pattern of immersion, synthesis, ideation and, finally, prototyping.

Their research took them in many directions: they met an anger-management therapist and a white-collar boxing coach; they undertook sessions of brainstorming with their colleagues; and Mike Albers took a four-day course that would qualify him to work as a nightclub bouncer. This preliminary work done, the team found that one of the major causes of urban rage was queuing. The traditional British skill of standing in line is a matter of pride to many urbanites, but the stresses caused by fellow citizens holding up the queue, jumping the queue, or simply being annoying nearby, were said to be enough to drive many of our sample interviewees crazy.

But the team couldn’t re-engineer all of the shops and services in the UK in order to reduce all of their queues; nor could they resolve the problem of all shops and banks and post offices employing too few staff.

But by changing the psychology of how we feel when we’re queuing, the team thought, we can reduce the amount of stress that we have learnt to feel, and so reduce our rage when we’re waiting. By queuing, they proposed, we should be able to do some form of good. Then the longer we queue, the better we can be made to feel about it.

They developed a teaser campaign to promote the strategy, with posters positioned wherever people are likely to be queuing or waiting: the bus stop, the post office, traffic black spots. It reads: “Queue Britain – the longer you queue, the better Britain gets!”

Visitors to a website address given on the poster and advertised in the media are invited to register for a Queue Britain card, which is then sent to them by post. Like a Tesco Clubcard, this is individual to the queue frequenter and allows them to earn Queue Minutes. And indeed it doesn’t have to be a card – it could be anything that can hold a barcode. In addition to the card proposal, IDEO also produced a prototype key ring.

These Queue Minutes, the team posits, could be earned from any of the partners in a Queue Britain alliance. The member company, such as the Post Office, will then pledge to award Queue Minutes to all participating people who have had to queue in their stores. Reach the front of a queue, and the shop assistant will add some Minutes to your account.

This might vary – you might perhaps get Minutes from the moment you enter the line, or only after a certain annoyance threshold has been reached; but either way, the longer you endure this inconvenience, the more Minutes you accrue. This is a good thing.

Minutes can also be earned in virtual queues, too; members of the Queue Britain alliance can advise their call-centre staff when it’s appropriate to award Queue Minutes to those who have been kept on hold for a long time, or whenever the website has been down.

But whichever way you earn the points, the clever aspect of the proposal happens here: once a cardholder has accrued more than a set number of Queue Minutes – and they can check their balance via the website – they can donate those Minutes to the charity of their choice.

So if you find that you’ve spent 15 hours in line in Tesco over the past few months – not an unlikely number – and if Tesco is a participating member of the Queue Britain alliance, then you can donate those Minutes to charity, and Tesco will fulfil those 15 hours either by making its staff available for community work, or by creating paid opportunities for public volunteers to help out. And now a few hours of your time spent standing in a queue is worth, say, a few hours of Tesco staff helping out at a soup kitchen.

The time you spend queuing, therefore, isn’t wasted time any longer. The more you queue, the more opportunities you have to donate other people’s time to your favourite cause.

Keeping this in mind as you stand annoyed in the post office, the team believes, will go a long way towards reducing ambient levels of rage in the city.

Furthermore, this system makes the really annoying transgressions – queue-jumping – into something even more socially unacceptable. Jumping the queue, of course, means you are not earning Queue Minutes, and you are therefore actively choosing not to do good. Being a little rude is one matter, but actively choosing not to do good is quite another.

The side effects on the companies involved in such an alliance are also interesting. The corporate-social responsibility movement is ever-more powerful – and the larger companies with queue-forming habits are exactly the same companies that would most benefit from being seen to be doing something positive and beneficial within the so-called “third sector”.

Of course, a company might decide to pay out Queue Minutes as a cheaper option than reducing its queues through employing more staff. But would anyone seriously mind if Tesco were to do nothing about the length of time that you had to wait in its lines, if you knew that the missing till operator was instead out doing something charitable?

This final product design from IDEO is not a device, nor a business, nor even a service. It’s not really even a product as such. As an amalgam of an advertising campaign, a technological system, and a concept based around the psychologies of the individual, society at large and big companies, Queue Britain is an idea that exemplifies the “design thinking” that IDEO is helping to introduce into the mainstream.

Designers are looking at solving the problems on an ever wider scale – from personal products, right up to focusing on changing wider society, and then the world.

Overview of this Post:

Thoughts on this Post: It is interesting to see the process play out with those who are just learning the concepts.  This update also crosses into social uses of Design Thinking.

Original Post and Comments HERE at the d.school projects site

Redesigning Retirement

Our Bootcamp students wrapped up their second design projects this week, and the results were spectacular.

Twelve teams spent three weeks using the design process to re-invent “the Golden Years” for rebellious Baby Boomers. Students were asked to give particular focus to the empathy phase of the process, and develop a strong user Point of View (POV).

How do you do that? Partly by getting out into the world, spending time with people to understand their needs, then narrowing down to develop your solution when you’ve found a really rich need. Here’s an example of how that’s done:

This team–Micol Seferin, Lee Redden, Ashutosh Bagaria and Jacob Klein–had been out talking to users all over town. But when they realized they’d only talked to men, Ashutosh set up another interview, with a Stanford librarian who’d he’d met in his first week on campus. Her rediscovered passion for sewing and need to share it was so compelling, that they did what any great design thinking team would do: they narrowed down to focus on designing for her. That meant moving fluidly past the other users they’d talked with rather than getting stuck trying to design a one-sized-fits-all solution for everyone they’d talked with.

Another fundamental aspect of the design process is iteration: the ability to keep re-inventing your solution based on feedback you’re getting from users. That can be tough when the feedback is: “This sucks,” and you need to start over again. But that’s exactly what the Time Capsule for Superheroes team did when their first idea fell flat with users. Team members Juan Valverde, Karen Cheng, Matthieu Rouif and Tanya Flores tossed out their first idea and came up with something new. You can some of their iteration process through the story they told:

A huge congrats goes out to all of the Bootcamp teams for their great work on the Boomer challenge!

Caroline O’Connor on October 27, 2009 in

[d.school Tags: Agile Aging, Boot Camp, Design Process, Empathy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ShareThis]

Question of the day

Our bootcamp students are deep in prototype-test-iterate cycles for their second design project, and they’re asking a question that’s fairly universal for design-process learners:

Do I have to test my prototype with the same users I designed it for?

The short answer is: Heck no!

It’s always best to get as far out of your own experience as possible when you’re looking for users, because outside your comfort zone is where you’ll find the deepest insights. But when it’s crunch time and you’re zooming through prototypes, don’t be constrained because you don’t feel like you have time to go back to users. Sure, your roommate, classmate, or those veteran user-testers otherwise known as d.school staffers can always test a prototype in a pinch, even if they’re not the Baby Boomer you’re designing for. But before you go that route, spend one minute brainstorming a quick way to get to your user group, or a good analogy for your user group. (The analogous testers can sometimes produce the most serendipitous results.) Even if time is so short you think you can only get one user, go get them! A tiny time investment in user-testing can pay massive innovation dividends.

(Pictured user tester: maureenhanratty)

Caroline O’Connor on October 23, 2009

Overview of Article: This is Part 2 of an interview with David Butler that is a follows up on the Fast Company Article and Business Week article that have drawn so much attention.

Thoughts on this Article: I like the questions that are raised and David Butler’s honesty in his answers.  This is a great “rest of the story” to go with the original interviews.

Part 2 of Designing on Purpose: An Interview with David Butler, VP of Design at Coca-Cola

by Henning Fischer

Welcome to part 2 of our interview with David Butler, VP of Design for the Coca-Cola Company. Part 1 is available here. When we left off we were talking about the different roles that design fills within Coca-Cola. This part of the interview shifts gears a bit and talks about one of the major themes we’ll be exploring at MX: designing in a down economy.

[Henning Fischer] How do you design with purpose in a down economy?

[David Butler] That’s a good question. It’s all in how you look at it. That sounds kind of trite, but there’s a similar discussion about the value of design. Is part of the value of design driven towards productivity? Doing more with less? Or is designing to do more with less thought about in terms of sustainability? They’re both sort of the same thing. In a down economy, doing more with less is exactly the focus of the company. In reality it’s what we do every day. As designers it’s always about how we can provide more value or more enduring experiences. It’s not that different from what we do in an up economy.

[Brandon Schauer] Design is easily seen as a cost center in a tough economy. What advice would you give to people who are feeling that?

[DB] When I got here, people asked, “What do you do?” and I worried a lot about trying to define design and tackle everything that we could impact. Soon I realized we should just focus our design efforts on the things that really matter for the company and provide the most value: the way people are going to actually touch the package and experience our brands. Most of what we do focuses on retail and the retail experience and that is never going to go away in an up or down economy. What I have done and what we continue to do is focus on the highest value that our function and capability of design can provide to the organization.

One more thing…let me say it in a different way. Everyone is tightening their belts, right? What that means, simply, is that we need to design more accurately, and we need to leverage our scale more proficiently. The projects we work on have not changed dramaticaly, they’ve just become more important.

[HF] I like the phrase designing with accuracy. In some ways it’s what we’re going to be struggling with over the next couple of months as well. We’re seeing changes in our business and I think we will have to increase the accuracy of the things and the engagements that we step into as well.

[BS] Yeah, if budgets are smaller and you’re doing fewer projects, you need to raise the chances of each project’s success that much more.

[DB] Linking projects directly to the value to the business is critical. If you can prove that value, it’s not a big discussion. You can see the impact.

[BS] Can you give is an example of ways you have helped to explicitly connect to that value? Have you been able to get down to bottom line dollar impacts and things like that with some of your projects?

[DB] Let me answer that in two ways. One is around cost avoidance. We can design something and talk about the scale and hypothesize what the cost avoidance could be. Another way is through the pure, old fashioned business case- the levers that drive the value and provide the return on investment that we have. Nothing new, just a straight-ahead business case. For example, if we design something to be durable over time, we can avoid a lot of the costs in the future. A great case study is the Coke contoured bottle. The basic form was designed in the 1920s. It has been basically untouched since then. Imagine all the costs that we have avoided around that design by designing a classic, enduring design.

[BS] You didn’t even have to create a new icon. You’ve just had to embellish something that was already in people’s lives. How about partnering within Coke? How have you worked with others in the organization to make design more effective?

[DB] As designers we’re intuitively equipped to adapt and integrate than perhaps other functions or parts of the organization. For us we have never had a problem integrating. It has always been the opposite. The demand has far outstripped the supply from day one. Once people understand the value that designers can bring to their part of the organization, it’s not a sell in at all. It becomes more about capacity discussion.

[BS] You’ve had a great career going on from brand director at Sapient to some really successful years at Coke. Who do you look to for inspiration and insight for where you’re going to take things next?

[DB] I’m actually very passionate about design theory. I’m a big fan of the publication, Design Issues. I’m really motivated by theory. I’m interested to see how design theorists are creating the idea of public policy around design in mass culture. That links into sustainability and other issues that we’re facing as a society. Keeping up with the thought of having this culture of design rather than focusing just on the profession of design. When you have a global view, you see the developing economies of China and Brazil and Russia. All these economies are advancing a global middle class and are seeking to develop into something that we here in the United States are familiar with. You see the opportunity and future for design and its almost overwhelming .

[HF] I don’t know if you have seen the recently published design manifesto that was sent to the Obama Administration…

[DB] That’s exactly where my fascination is. That’s where I see design going. For me personally, that’s exactly the path that I see before designers. It’s quite fascinating…

[HF] We’re definitely a few years behind people like the UK Design Council.

[DB] Not just that. If you think about it- I just saw this statistic the other day- roughly speaking we have about 10,000 students in design schools in the US. That sounds like a lot until you understand that China has over 100,000. You quickly see that Asia is going to be the source for design strength and leadership in the not too distant future. When you look at India and China, it causes you, as a Westerner, to rethink where design is going and your influence on that.

[HF] One last closing question: what will you share with us at MX?

[DB] I’d like to share how we developed our strategy and how we’re executing that design strategy here at Coke.

[HF] David, thanks for your time. We’re looking forward to seeing you at MX.

Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.

ShareThis

Overview of Article:

Thoughts on this Article: I like the questions that are raised and David Butler’s honesty in his answers.  This is a great “rest of the story” to go with the original interviews.

Original Post and Comments HERE at Adaptive Path

by Henning Fischer

Photograph by Jake Chessum

Brandon Schauer and I (Henning Fischer) recently sat down with David Butler, VP of Design for the Coca-Cola Company and MX 2009 speaker. Here’s part 1 of “Designing on Purpose.”

[Henning Fischer] Could you tell us a little about yourself, your team, what you do for Coca-Cola and where you sit within the organization?

[David Butler] We have a global design function and that entails four design centers around the world: one in North America, one in Europe, one in Asia and then on in our corporate headquarters. I personally sit in our corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

It might be interesting to understand a little more about the company. We have over 450 brands in our portfolio, operate in over 200 countries, the largest in the world, 900 plants (7x Procter and Gamble), 500,000 trucks (5x UPS), 20 million customer outlets (McDonalds, etc.), 10 million coolers and vending machines, 1.5 billion packages sold every day and almost 1 million employees world-wide.

Another thing that’s sort of interesting is the relative state of our global brands. For instance, the Coca-Cola brand has been in China for less than 25 years, which creates a different scenario when we’re designing for a lesser known brand in that market versus a market like the US or UK, which is a very established market. The challenges that we face as a design organization really vary depending on the area that we are taking about.

[HF] There was a big Business Week article on you a while back. You were given a mandate early on that you needed to “do more with design, go figure it out.” Where did that mandate come from?

[DB] At the time, the directive came from the Chief Creative Officer as well as the CEO, indirectly. We have a long legacy of design as a company but it had lost its focus without a clear vision, strategy and plan. I was fortunate enough to be tapped to figure out what to do with design.

[HF] That’s a hell of a question to get in a career.

[DB] Yeah. The Business Week reporter asked me the question and I said it sort of jokingly, but it’s true: the objectives I got were literally on a Post-It note, and they basically said “I know that you can figure out what we need as a company, so go figure it out.” Not a lot more direction than that. It was literally, “walk out there and figure it out.” So that’s what we’re doing.

[HF] The article talked a little bit about a manifesto for design that you laid out. Can you tell us a little bit about that and the vision that you sketched out and perhaps a bit on how it’s changed? It was four CEOs ago. Has it evolved and changed since then?

[DB] The manifesto was more of a reaction, which led to a strategy. The reaction was very Jerry Maguire like. Once I had been here for a few months, I wrote this manifesto. It was simply called “Designing on Purpose.” What I meant by that was that we as a company design literally millions of things all around the world, but a lot of it was without purpose and really not driven by user needs and opportunities that would build our business. That was a really new concept for the company—to think about design as a business strategy. I sent it out, and honestly, I wasn’t trying to do anything, but it stuck a chord, and everyone resonated to “designing on purpose,” even if they didn’t know what it meant. At least they got the phrase, and we built on that. That led to the strategy, which was written shortly after that. We have been implementing it since then.
The strategy circles around three areas: brand identity, user experience and sustainability. We have hired people and have expanded our teams, capabilities, and our process in those three areas to push design forward.

[HF] What does user experience mean for Coca-Cola? We have our own interpretation of it here on the West Coast and in the digital community, but I imagine it’s something quite different for you guys.

[DB] For us it has to do with the usability of packaging and equipment and as well as communications through clear information hierarchy, etc. We’ve brought new focus to ergonomics and the use of our packaging, which is how people touch and experience our brands and products.

[Brandon Schauer] In those activities, how do you give the rest of the Coke organization a feeling for the value of what your design group does and brings?

[DB] Around here, and I’d venture to say around the world, the word design has virtually lost its meaning. Strangely enough, I never use the word design or usability or phrases that we are used to as designers. I really try to communicate in terms of the people we are talking to inside the organization. A simple way of talking about the way the thing work versus the way things look. I use basic ways of communicating usability and try to shy away from anything that would cause dissonance or confusion.

[HF] Has design become any less of a dirty word?

[DB] Design was never a dirty word, just meaningless in the sense that it’s difficult to understand in the worlds of marketing, finance and science. As soon as we start talking about value, things that have or build value for brands, people get it. You don’t have to use the word design to talk about making something more legible or making something more usable. Up until then no one had associated these types of phrases or expressions to the word design. We don’t use the word very much around here, but we talk about the value and what it can do.

Our intention is to build a design thinking organization. To distill that type of knowledge into people, we shy away from anything that would cause confusion or impede that progress.

[HF] Design thinking—there’s a loaded phrase. Could you elaborate how Coke views it and where you are trying to push it?

[DB] The thing that I found out quickly was that this company and many other global companies have the opportunity to leverage massive scale. Not only do they have billion dollar brands, but also the scale they operate in is crazy. When you’re talking about the impact of design, you quickly see that it’s not just about designing the perfect label for something like Fanta, it’s really about helping this organization see differently, think differently and leverage design as an integration or synthesis capability along with making sure the label is right. That’s what we do: we focus on the highest value opportunities to build value for our company and our brands through redesigning vending machines, packaging labels or whatever. But we also use our time to build the capability of design in the company. The more popular phrase used today is “design thinking,” even though Richard Buchanan and others have been writing about that for 10 to 15 years. It’s interesting to see how that idea is moving into the popular culture of design.

[BS] Can you give us an example of helping Coke see the world in a different way for perhaps synthesis or integration?

[DB] Sure. Again, it comes back to the word design. If you come into a situation thinking that design equals aesthetic values or balancing aesthetic elements then it’s difficult to get past a sort of “applied art” scenario. A lot of times inside this company and I’m sure a lot of others, we talk about design in terms of innovation. To get to an innovation or to solve a problem that would speak to innovation requires a cross functional synthesis of things. In other words, our supply chain, brands, communications, markets, etc. all have to come together to get to an innovation. That’s just another way of designing toward a solution. We’re taking these elements and synthesizing them. We can leverage what we do best looking at multiple concepts, quickly prototyping them and reducing them down to the most useful solutions.

[HF] I love the fact that you’re taking about synthesis and bringing together disparate parts of the organization. How much time do you find yourself playing the role of a facilitator as opposed to the maker of things?

[DB] It goes back to the scale of the organization. Depending on the market, or the brand or the group that you’re working with it can really vary. I’m not trying to avoid the question. In some instances, all we really need is to improve the communication value of something so it’s much more tactical and it becomes more about information hierarchy or something like that. That’s more design as a function. Other times, it’s more about design as a discipline—more about “wicked problem” solving. It’s the problems that we can’t figure out, that we have no clue as to how to design a product or it hasn’t been done before. That’s when we tend to get brought in as facilitators and integrators across different functions.

Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.

Thoughts on Post: Robert touches on one of the biggest challenges that Design Thinking faces when applied to the social/human application:  How do you create an effective rapid prototyping experience?  I look forward to reading his thoughts on this.

Original Post HERE at FastCompay

Live From PopTech: Bringing Design to Social Innovators

BY Robert FabricantWed Oct 21, 2009 at 11:58 AM

Every year (at least for the last two) I have had the honor of serving as part of the core faculty of the PopTech Fellows Program. This means I’m involved in the planning stages for this five-day retreat. No matter how much time I spend preparing for the program, I’m always astounded when I finally meet the fellows. It’s difficult to comprehend the variety of innovations that this incredible group is driving, from virtual mobile phones and paper diagnostics to batteries made of common soil and building materials made of mushrooms. What’s even more astounding is the fact that the people driving these ideas are both incredibly special and shockingly ordinary.

My role is to introduce them to the design process–to provide some tools to help them think through and challenge the assumptions they’re making about their interventions. As always, I’m struck by how open-minded and creative these social innovators are (otherwise they would not have achieved anything close to the outcomes they’ve already seen). Creativity is not something they chose as an identity or practice–it’s a means, not an end. They many not spend a great deal of time talking about design, but research, prototyping, and abductive reasoning are at the heart of their work.

One of their most refreshing qualities is their orientation towards technology. This struck me while listening to Deb Levine, a longtime innovator in the area of technology and sexual health. She has an unparalleled track record–in the past 15+ years–of using digital technologies to increase access to information. Yet to hear her talk you wouldn’t think technology is anything special–though she was one of the first people to offer sexual health info on the Web and mobile devices in the U.S. In her intro talk, she described a teen-focused project she initiated in 2006. The default assumption is that the info would be delivered via the Web. But Deb started hanging out in front of schools and watching all of the kids “doing that thing with their thumbs.” Her simple observation led to a very early health intervention using SMS.

So what am I doing here? I don’t know much about the power grid in Namibia or low-cost diagnostics in Saudi Arabia. It’s interesting to be in a position of expertise with a group that has gone down roads and achieved things I don’t think I could achieve myself. My focus, as always, will be on behavior. I continue to see social impact largely through that lens. So we will be doing a deep dive into how you create the right conditions to drive changes in behavior. I will work with the group to help them answer the following questions:

• How do you link a set of behaviors together to achieve the desired impact of your intervention?
• How do you design prototypes and other interventions to test your assumptions around behavior and the underlying motivations that will support behavior change?
• How do you look at the barriers to behavior change and use them to your advantage?

This last point is key. Most designers (and social innovators) look at prototyping as a way to test their ideas, to see what works from a functional perspective and what appeals from an attitudinal perspective. But the most useful dimension of prototyping, I find, is to think about it as a tool for understanding behavior. Think about each prototype not as an intervention, but as a set of conditions to better understand the behavior you are trying to drive. It’s an important distinction because it shifts your orientation from what you are prototyping to the impact you are trying to create.

I will be blogging from PopTech throughout the week. Next up, a deep dive into how you design for impact. Please stay tuned.

[Photos by Erik Hersman]

Related Stories: Inside PopTech’s Solar-Powered Bag

Read Robert Fabricant’s Design4Impact blog
Browse blogs by our other Expert Designers

Robert Fabricant is a leader of frog’s health-care expert group, a cross-disciplinary global team that works collectively to share best practices and build frog’s health-care capabilities. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert recently led Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat the world’s worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Robert is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he teaches a foundation course in Interaction Design. In 2009, he joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and is a faculty member of the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellowship Program. A regular speaker at conferences and events, Robert recently gave a keynote speech at the 2009 IxDA Interaction Conference. He is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including I.D. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Overview of Post:

Thoughts on this Post: This a a good guide for practitioners who are learning how to put the concepts into action.

Original Post HERE at Usability.net

Summary

Parallel design is a method where alternative designs, often interface designs, are created by two to four design groups at the same time. The aim is to assess the different ideas before settling on a single concept for continued development. The design groups work independently of each other, since the goal is to generate as much diversity as possible. Design groups should not discuss their designs with each other until after they have produced their draft design concepts and presented them in a design workshop. The final design may be one of the designs or a combination of designs, taking the best features from each.

Although parallel design might at first seem like an expensive approach, since many ideas are generated without implementing them, it is a very cheap way of exploring a range of possible concepts before selecting the probable optimum.

Benefits

• Allows a range of ideas to be generated quickly and cost effectively.
• Parallel nature of the approach allows several approaches to be explored at the same time, thus compressing the concept development schedule.
• The concepts generated can often be combined so that the final solution benefits from all ideas proposed.
• Only minimal resources and materials are required to convey product feel.
• The technique can be utilised by those with little or no human factors expertise.

However, parallel design requires a number of design team members to be available at the same time to produce the concepts and it requires a lot of time to be invested over a short period for the design work to be carried out. Also, time must be allocated to compare parallel design outputs properly so that the benefits of each approach are obtained.

Method

The method requires design team members to be available concurrently in order to carry out design work in parallel. A requirements document is needed to make sure that the design groups are given the same information so that design work starts from the same starting point.

The following procedure may be adopted for implementing this method:

• Define clearly the boundaries for the parallel design, i.e. goal of system, tasks that it should support, user characteristics, etc. Each design team should receive the same set of requirements before starting the design activity..

• Each design teams may use whatever media they prefer to present their designs. It is recommended to use a low level of prototyping. No extra points should be given for ‘sophisticated’ prototypes.

• Design teams should have roughly equivalent skills.

• Decide beforehand how much time to allocate to the design work and set a clear time limit. 10 – 20 hours per group is often sufficient.

• Agree on the criteria by which the designs will be assessed.

• Allow sufficient time to carry out a fair comparison of the designs produced. This is often carried out in a design workshop, where all groups and their member participate.

• Discuss each design separately and then discuss how different aspects of the designs may be combined.

• The objective is to settle on one design concept based on the total effort.

Thoughts on this Post: This graphic and yesterdays video are from the same source (d.School) and are both really good resources.

Original Post and other content HERE

UNDERSTAND

Understanding is the first phase of the design thinking process. During this phase, students immerse themselves in learning. They talk to experts and conduct research. The goal is to develop background knowledge through these experiences. They use their developing understandings as a springboard as they begin to address design challenges.

OBSERVE

Students become keen people watchers in the observation phase of the design thinking process. They watch how people behave and interact and they observe physical spaces and places. They talk to people about what they are doing, ask questions and reflect on what they see. The understanding and observation phases of design thinking help students develop a sense of empathy.

DEFINE

In this phase of design thinking, students the focus is on becoming aware of peoples’ needs and developing insights. The phrase “How might we….” is often used to define a point of view, which is a statement of the:

user + need + insight

This statement ends with a suggestion about how to make changes that will have an impact on peoples’ experiences.

IDEATE

PROTOTYPE

Prototyping is a rough and rapid portion of the design process. A prototype can be a sketch, model, or a cardboard box. It is a way to convey an idea quickly. Students learn that it is better to fail early and often as they create prototypes.

TEST

Testing is part of an iterative process that provides students with feedback. The purpose of testing is to learn what works and what doesn’t, and then iterate. This means going back to your prototype and modifying it based on feedback. Testing ensures that students learn what works and what doesn’t work for their users

Thoughts on this Video:  This may be the best “short” look at what Design Thinking is and how to do it that I have come across.  If you can, find a way to participate in the activities that the facilitator leads.

Overview of Article:

Thoughts on this Article:  If you can learn how to do this very well, you will have much better results with your design thinking efforts.

Original Post HERE at Usability.net

Summary of Rapid Prototyping

In rapid prototyping interactive prototypes are developed which can be quickly replaced or changed in line with design feedback. This feedback may be derived from colleagues or users as they work with the prototype to accomplish set tasks.

This method is concerned with developing different proposed concepts through software or hardware prototypes, and evaluating them. In general the process is termed ‘rapid’ prototyping. The development of a simulation or prototype of the future system can be very helpful, allowing users to visualise the system and provide feedback on it. Thus it can be used to clarify user requirements options. Later on in the lifecycle, it can also be used to specify details of the user interface to be included in the future system.

Within software engineering circles the method is closely associated with user interface management systems and various design support tools. The latter tools offer the designer libraries of process and graphical interface elements for defining the software’s logical structure and ‘look-and-feel’. Here the title refers to an approach adopted by software developers in which the prototypes exhibit a higher fidelity with the end product than those created as part of other methods such as paper prototyping.

Benefits

• Gives users (especially the general public) a tangible demonstration of what the system is about.
• Permits the swift development of interactive software prototypes.
• Prototypes created by this method have a high fidelity with the final product
• The prototypes created under this method support metric-based evaluations

Method

• A general procedure for adopting the rapid prototyping method is outlined below. Allow enough time to create the prototype. If the prototype is to be evaluated with users then allow time to design relevant tasks, recruit the users, evaluate the prototype and report the results.

• Assemble the necessary equipment, including the hardware and software tools necessary to create the interactive prototype.

• Develop the prototype itself.

• Select appropriate users to test the prototype, trying to cover the range of users within the target population. A facilitator will also be required to instruct the users and run the evaluation.

• Prepare realistic tasks to occupy the users as they work with the prototype.

• Pilot the evaluation procedure and ensure the prototype can be used to accomplish the tasks.

• Ensure recording facilities are available and functioning.

• Conduct each session. The facilitator instructs the user to work through the allocated tasks, interacting with, and responding to, the system as appropriate.

• If necessary additional information can be obtained by interviewing users following their use of the prototype. Debrief and thank the user.

• Analyse the obtained information and then summarise the observations and user evaluations. Determine the themes and severity of the problems identified.

• Summarise design implications and recommendations for improvements and feed back to design team. Video recordings can support this.

• Where necessary refine the prototype and repeat the above process.

When using this method, avoid spending too long on the development of initial prototypes as user evaluation may result in substantial changes. Also, avoid making the prototype too polished as this may force users to accept it as finished. Do not put in features that will raise the users expectations but which are unlikely to be achieved with the real system (e.g. too fast response times, too sophisticated graphics) and do not put too much effort into particular features (e.g. animations) which may not be required.

Be aware that the method requires software development skills. Also, although rapid, the method can often be more time consuming than other approaches and that resources required are greater than paper and pens due to the need for software and hardware.

More Information

Many tools exist for producing rapid prototypes ranging from a sequence of Microsoft PowerPoint screens, to script based programming systems such as HyperCard, Toolbook and Visual Basic that can help to create a software prototype. The method requires more sophisticated technical resources than is the case with low-fidelity prototyping methods that rely on paper materials. An additional cost of use is the level of human expertise required to master the supporting development tools, along with the time necessary to implement a software prototype.