Adding The Human Touch At The Fuzzy Front End Of Design
Sketch The User — then the
interface or prototype.
We want to design the purchasing experience — what we call the “first moment of truth”; we want to design every component of the product; and we want to design the communication experience and the user experience. I mean, it’s all design. And I think thats been hard for people to come to grips with.
—What P&G Knows About the Power of Design; FastCompany Issue 95, June 2005, P.56 By Jennifer Reingold
Concept designs and business brainstorming tools too often focus on technological ideas. We know how to spend money adapting user and customers to the technology. What about a brainstorming session where you assume the persona of a user or customer segment — coming up with ideas from that new perspective? Several brainstorming techniques take the form of playing cards. What if we add new cards to the deck. The cards I designed bring players into the game who are normally dealt out.
Stacking The Deck
The cards themselves are more a card design framework. Elements like human factors, persona, scenario, psychographics are added. New techniques making the rounds get the opportunity for organization–wide application at this phase.
Icons are added to the card face to reflect the objectives of the brainstorming session. Having such a flexible framework also encourages development of “house rules,” the user tailoring which increases playability.
The design process of prototyping the card deck makes for a good warm–up. Preparation is a sketch you build up of unique players and system dynamics at work in your business. The small investment of time and effort leading up to the exercise works to counter Theodore Levitt’s criticism:
The trouble with much of the advice business gets today about the need to be more vigorously creative is that its advocates often fail to distinguish between creativity and innovation. Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things …A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action. Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is only in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.
— Harvard’s Theodore Levitt Ideas Are Useless Unless Used Inc., February 1981, p. 96
As befits the action bias of information, Levitt gets a seat. Chips representing actual commitment from the players get cashed in by the winner, who becomes the project champion. By stacking the deck this way, there is less chance of the game becoming low commitment executive entertainment, a charge leveled against brainstorming exercises. Since the facilitator plays a role, guidance can focus creativity. In Serious Creativity De Bono cautions “There are far too many practitioners out there who believe that creativity is just brainstorming and being free to suggest crazy ideas. I intend to show that this is inadequate.”
Design Is Wild
Disney is in the film, TV, sports, publishing, and hospitality industries, but none of its major competitors — none — are run by people who come to their positions with anything like an artistic drive or a real sense of what their customers want.
— The Walt Within: What If Disney’s Prize Wasn’t Pixar, but Jobs? By Robert X. Cringely
Play is straightforward. Imagine you draw the card illustrated here, and also have a technology card, RFID, in your hand. If you are in the business of banking, this can suggest redesign of ATM cards so there isn’t one “right” way to insert the card. A human factors issue which, while amenable to a graying market, is also just generally user friendly. I find a game format introduced at the very earliest stage a good point of leverage to apply the power of design. Before “too early to consider design” becomes “too late to change it now.”
Shrinking a large medical device to one tenth its size can suggest new uses in novel situations. Such new uses can often change the design. This important feedback loop, when delayed to the end of construction, relegates design to mere decoration. Design–based management thinks a different way. A seemingly aesthetic element like color can be useful for performing a quick visual inventory, eliminating tedious computer interaction with barcodes, scanners and database queries. Or, by dealing a user into the brainstoriming process, hearing aid battery packaging should double as a battery insertion tool handling the demand of older hands. Design is the wild card in a business brainstorming session.
Cooper writes, “MBA students at Harvard and Stanford are usually not taught the value of design in their case studies.” Perhaps recognizing this, Stanford is forming a “D–School.” It is earnestly to be hoped course one will be communicating with the products of B–Schools about the power of design.
To discover the innovation design thinking can bring to your business contact Design Crux today.
Resources
- Business Week gives tips for turning brainstorming sessions into productive innovation, lessons on design thinking from top design firms like IDEO and Frog design. HBR: Melding Design and Strategy “…involving designers at each stage of the strategy and development process can lead to better product decisions and improve a company’s ability to seize new market opportunities.”
- Intro to design thinking “There is one philosophy that businesses only turn to design when they’re desperate. After they've competed on price, delivery, systems, etc., and they find their business is totally commoditized and they have no other choice, THEN they turn to design.”
- But do we know how to hire for innovation? “Case in point: Alph Bingham of InnoCentive remarked at the conference that many of the brilliant “solvers” in his network would never be hired by companies whose most difficult problems they just solved.”
- The Empathy Economy “Design thinking” can create rewarding experiences for consumers — the key to earnings growth and an edge that outsourcing can’t beat is all about design thinking and business. When advocating for design thinking in your company, making the business case for design should include how Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.
- What P&G Knows About the Power of Design can be seen in the article How P&G Conquered Carpet with the CarpetFlick.
- Functioning Form has a great post, how the design focus differs from traditional business problem solving. BusinessWeek Online explains design–based management is different from traditional management. Even so, Most Designers aren’t Design Thinkers — Yet. Even designers must climb the design maturity ladder to differentiate design strategy from decoration.
- The OVERnote adds an interface to the top part of sticky notes, not unlike my card deck. The objective is to make it easier to locate, categorize and navigate amongst many stickies. (Suggestion: Print the interface on stickers, then stick them to the notes. Don’t run sticky notes through a laser printer.)
- “an idea, verbally described, has very little value. an idea, demonstrated through an embodiment is powerful. this distinction is what defines design in a meaningful way. to design, one must be able to embody ideas, not just have them. there are a range of ways of doing so, from drawings to models.” —Chris Conley
- “Insead has joined with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., to offer a joint program that teaches the role of creativity in business decisions, how innovation really works, and why design may be as important to corporate management today as Six Sigma was in the ’90s.” Where MBAs Learn The Art Of Blue–Skying; BusinessWeek.
- Check out the Rocketmouse for innovative feel. Design is not just aesthetics, but the meeting of multiple disciplines like effective ergonomics. I often suggest adding a third dimension to increase your odds of design success.
- IDEO method cards and Free The Genie are two examples of brainstorming tools taking the form of playing cards. Would that you could shuffle several of these card decks together, adding users and customer cards to the deck.
- “At Sony, we assume that all products of our competitors have basically the same technology, price, performance and features. Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the marketplace.” Sony chairman Norio Ohga
- Stratford’s new D-School site brings the power of design to business. Aesthetics and Apparent Usability replicated Japanese research findings of ATMs with identical technical features and functions, but differing in perceived aesthetics. Users perceived the attractive ATM as working better. Norman explains: “…attractive things make people feel good, which in turn makes them think more creatively. How does that make something easier to use? Simple, by making it easier for people to find solutions to the problems they encounter.”
- “MBA students at Harvard and Stanford are usually not taught the value of design in their case studies. … In the information age—in the age of rapid innovation and extreme cognitive friction—design is a primary necessity.” (Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, page 77; SAMS 1999)
- Why do we still believe in group brainstorming? Actually studying the brainstorming session raises interesting questions.
- An Interview with Virginia Postrel talks about three sources of value: function, meaning, and pleasure. The article, Pricing Beauty: Reflections on Aesthetics and Value, is about communicating the business desirability of aesthetics. Postrel says designers make two mistakes: forgetting functionality and neglecting meaning.
- In business the true measure of an idea is product idea commercialization, the metric differentiating creativity from innovation. In studying why products fail in the marketplace, don’t forget Louderback’s Law: “Unless a new technology includes breakthroughs in at least two different dimensions — without adding hardship along the way — it will not supplant an older, established one.”
- Article describing how aging tech savvy boomers make for a boom in assistive technologies, and may accelerate the value of a use centered, human friendly product design.
- The Walt Within: What If Disney’s Prize Wasn’t Pixar, but Jobs? By Robert X. Cringely. The Disney–Pixal interaction will test whether traditional and design–based managment can coexist.
- De Bono on Serious Creativity.
- You can question any assumption. In Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry, Wildberger, an associate professor of mathematics at UNSW questions the framework of geometry and trigonometry “Rational trigonometry replaces sines, cosines, tangents and a host of other trigonometric functions with elementary arithmetic.”