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User Experience
User Experience Entries from February 1, 2006 - March 1, 2006
Wednesday
01Mar
Wednesday, March 1 Say What you Mean, and Mean What you Say
Why can't more companies be like this? Communicate the essence of what you're about:
What do we provide? Things that are all good.
What will your experience here as a customer be? Friendly.
"Good" and "Friendly" are both terms that are human-speak, not corporate speak, and communicate volumes in two simple words. Furthermore, this bakery (which I drive by every day) is absolutely consistent in their messaging - they use the "Now hiring friendly people" line every time. Sometimes they even accompany it with a big red and white balloon arch, perhaps when the labor market is tight!
Saturday
25Feb
Saturday, February 25 Wicked Problems: Pattern Experience
Ability Two: Pattern Experience
(Continuing my discussion about wicked problems, using the sports analogy I employed for the About With and For Conference, where the theme was Work & Play.)
In addition to having wide peripheral vision to spot nascent opportunities and threats at the edges, understanding wicked problems also requires deep experience with patterns, and with the consequences of those patterns. Wicked problems at the beginning are sensed only vaguely, so having an innate sense of patterns built up over years of experience helps shortcut you to a more precise definition.
Chess grand masters are great examples of this. They have built up the ability to understand where patterns of pieces on a board are going to lead. This is how they can play dozens of other players of lesser skill level simultaneously. They don’t need to memorize every piece, only the broad pattern for each game. This is the antithesis of the brute force computation model typically used by less experienced players (and computers), who think through individually about each move and piece.
Most chess moves on a professional level are decided upon in under a minute - the rest of time is spent thinking and confirming the soundness of the decision. This happens with wicked problems too: you want people on the job who can get that almost instinctual feel for the problem and where it’s leading, even if they can’t consciously articulate it right away. This is the realm of hunches and hypotheses, an area where quantitative analysis does not play well (or at least is insufficient).
But because each wicked problem is different, you can’t apply past patterns by rote. You have to be open to learning new things which further illuminate the pattern but which also may move things in a new direction. Chess grand masters have deep catalogs of gambits, but they don’t follow them blindly. Likewise, you should do as much as possible to leverage past experience, but allow current conditions and new knowledge to alter course.
Next up: Understanding Through Practice
Saturday
25Feb
Saturday, February 25 The Winning Lifecycle
My prediction: next winter olympics, the US will place 9th in the overall medal rankings. Why do I say this? Because a chart that appeared in today’s San Francisco Chronicle shows a strong pattern. I've reformatted it here with a line graph to emphasize the pattern. (Bear with me a minute for the business-related connection.)
The US rankings have gone through clear cycles where they bottom out, and then gradually come back up close to the top again. The cycle from 1968 to 1984 covers 5 winter games, and it looks like we are currently at the high point of the current cycle, going from 1988 to 2006 (18 years and 6 games). (There are more games in this second cycle, as the games occurred in both ‘92 and ’94 in order to allow the winter and summer olympics to alternate 4 year periods.)
This would indicate that we are due for a “correction” as they say in stock market terms. I wasn’t able to find data going further back, but if anyone knows of any, do send it along as it will be interesting to see if this goes back further than 40 years.
What causes such dramatic drops off the cliffs? I’m no expert on this, but can speculate that one of the causes might be hubris (something the US is suffering from in multiple areas, at the moment...). The US men’s ski team came into these games as the self-proclaimed “best in the world”, and has publicly imploded. The men’s speedskating team also has not done nearly as well as expected. One can’t help wondering if, after a period of years, the sense of urgency gets lost and that, independently but in unison, all the various training programs for the different sports start to rest on the laurels a bit, even if subconsciously, and things go into autopilot.
At the risk of belaboring the sports/business analogy that I’m using with the wicked problems posts (since those originated with a conference who’s theme was work and play), companies do seem to go through similar cycles. Motorola’s cellphone business had been in the doldrums for so long that people had lost count, but thanks to some intuitive bets they have had turn-around success with the RAZR. They are parlaying this into a series of interesting designs with the PEBL and the SLVR (how long ‘til we get tired of these naming conceits?), and though they ”did a Bode” with the ROCKR they seem to be effectively putting that behind them.
It’s too early to tell when this streak will come to an end, but I would certainly caution Motorola against allowing recent success to lull themselves into complacency. (From what little I know of Moto’s corporate culture from reading articles, this is a tendancy that they have, which is partly how they ended up in the position they did.) Though part of me really dislikes the implications of an endless grind conjured up by Andy Grove’s statement “only the paranoid survive,” at the same time it is worth heeding -- especially when you are successful.
Wednesday
22Feb
Wednesday, February 22 The Difficult Things are Easy, it's the Simple Things which are Difficult
Steve's comment to my post below reminded me of a description by Charles Eames of the process that he and Eero Saarinen used in designing a chair, which appear in Ralph Caplan's book By Design. According to Caplan, Charles had been asked about the "trick" of winning competitions (something near and dear to the heart of any budding designer), and he admitted there was one, though he credited it to Eero. I'm going to quote it in full from the book:
This is the trick, I give it to you, you can use it. We looked at the program and divided it into the essential elements, which turned out to be thirty odd. And we proceeded methodically to make one hundred studies of each element. At the end of the hundred studies we tried to get the solution for that element that suited the thing best, and then set that up as a standard below which we would not fall in the final scheme. Then we proceeded to break down all logical combinations of these elements, trying to not erode the quality that we gained in the best of the hundred single elements; and then we took those elements and began to search for the logical combinations of combinations, and several of such stages before we even began to consider a plan. And at that point, when we felt we'd gone far enough to consider a plan, worked out study after study and on into the other aspects of the detail and the presentation.
It went on, it was sort of a brutal thing, and at the end of this period, it was a two-stage comptetion and sure enough we were in the second stage. Now you have o start; what do you do? We reorganized all elements, but this time, with a little bit more experience, chose the elements in a different way (still had about 26, 28 or 30) and proceeded: we made 100 studies of every element; we took every logical group of elements and studied those together in a way that would not fall below the stanard that we had set. And went right on down the procedure. And at the end of that time, before the second competition drawings went in, we really wept, it looked so idiotically simple we thought we'd blown the whole bit. And won the competition. This is the secret and you can apply it.
This is the chair they designed. As you can see, it is incredibly simple. Simple is difficult.
Tuesday
21Feb
Tuesday, February 21 Wicked Problems: Peripheral Vision
Ability One: Peripheral Vision
(This post is a follow-on to my posting over at CPH127 about wicked problems, take a look at that first to set the context. This is the first of several postings on capabilities and states of mind that companies need to have to address wicked problems. )
Bill Bradley is today known primarily as a politician in the US, but in his youth he was an outstanding basketball player. Among several notable abilities, he had a natural gift: his eyesight. Specifically, he had abnormally good peripheral vision. Whereas normal peripheral vision covers a horizontal field of 180 degrees, his covered 192 degrees - he could literally see behind himself. Vertically, most people can see 47 degrees upward while looking straight ahead. Bradley could see 72 degrees, meaning he could see the basket even when looking at the ground. These factors gave him an ability to see things on the court that others could not, and detect threats and opportunities earlier than others players. (For a nice essay about Bill Bradley, see this book by John McPhee.)
Peripheral vision is an interesting thing: it provides much less detail but much more sensitivity to movement than our central cone of vision (which is only about 7 degrees in diameter). Peripheral vision is essential when you’re in the jungle or on the savannah, spotting movement at the edges that indicate danger. But our medical tests for eyesight pretty much ignore peripheral vision, focusing instead on how much small detail you can resolve in your central cone.
Business analysis is often the same way. Movements at the edges that are ill-defined are ignored, and all tools and attention are focused on what we can see clearly with great detail that's right in front of us. But it’s the movements at the edges that can both be the most threatening, but also represent the new opportunities. This is where the disruptive innovations that Clayton Christensen talks about come from. By the time you can prove their existence in detail, it’s too late.
Wicked problems are very difficult to understand by staring straight into them and looking for clear detail, however. They need to be approached from the edges, sort of like doing a jigsaw puzzle where you find the edge pieces first. Having peripheral vision that is trained to be sensitive to the edges is a key capability (this applies both to product teams and to business units - wherever wicked problems occur).
So encourage staff and managers to pay attention to and nurture their peripheral vision - meeting with their “whacky” customers who push your products to the limit, talk to people who aren’t your customers any more and find out why, and pay close attention to disruptive innovators making cheap and “poor” products that your traditional customers wouldn’t touch. And if you think you're facing a wicked problem, don't expect hard numbers on it; by the time you've got solid data, it's probably too late.
Next up: Pattern Experience