Signs of Convergence

Evidence of the mingling of design and business abounds. The convergence can be either very concrete, such as merged managerial-design roles, or less so through collaboration.

Don Norman, the father of user experience design stated in 2008 that UX professionals need to “learn to speak the language of business,” including using numbers to sell  ideas. In his 1998 keynote address to the Human Factors society, he mentioned that “four equal legs [of product development] are required for good product design, all sitting on the foundation of the business case.” In a Nielsen Norman Group report, Norman gets into either further detail by describing the organizational design that supports these principles of effective product development and collaboration. It has been a common drawback of each of the elements of product development to struggle for power and overlook the essential contributions of each “leg.” A recent article from this year at UXMatters nicely addresses the issues of power vs collaboration for the UX leader.

Obviously one of the big companies that has highlighted the integral importance of design in business is that of Apple. In 2005, in the wake of the iPod’s success, Bill Breen of Fast Company wrote about the Business of Design and the “design-based economy,” which has clearly gained even more momentum over the past decade. Design and business complement each other in so many ways that the field of  ‘Business Design’ is spreading in schools and companies alike, most notable of the latter is human-centered innovation consulting firm, IDEO.

What the MBA provides

Beyond a broader perspective to apply the user-centered approach, I have gained a better understanding of cost-benefit analysis, marketing process, techniques, and goals, competitive strategy, organizational dynamics, team building and incentives, and executive managerial issues. These fundamentals allow me to think beyond delighting users now, and thinking about long-term success for the company and the user alike. Compromises in the development cycle are necessary and it’s making the right compromises that can make or break a company or product. Furthermore effective collaboration across disciplines requires understanding each side with an appreciation for what each brings. Irreconcilable differences that can often happen between marketing, engineering and designers can end up surfacing in a product’s experience.

The more strategically we can think as designers, the more effective our recommendations can be within the businesses in which we work, and as a result the better the final experience can be.

Please share your comments and other articles on this issue as I’m constantly trying to track the convergence/intermingling of these disciplines.

“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.”

The BBC reports on an upcoming breakthrough for market research, currently being developed. Dr Roberto Valenti of the University of Amsterdam and Dr Theo Gevers.

The two have established a company, ThirdSight, to take advantage of computerized emotion recognition (decoding emotions from facial expressions). ThirdSight has successfully run its software on a smartphone, but the team acknowledges that results are not yet perfect, requiring a researcher to oversee the software, because it cannot decode context or hidden meanings. For instance, it considers both a happy smile and a bewildered smile as ‘positive’.

This technology poses some promising power in the future of market research.

Read full BBC article »

On the difference between researchers and practitioners:

One wants deep understanding, the other wants to know what to do next. One is happy as soon as an idea has been demonstrated, even if it is held together only by tape, string and mirrors–that is, even if it only works on special cases and requires careful attendance and repair by the research group. The practitioner wants something complete, robust, and reliable. Researchers are incapable of delivering this; they are too curious, too driven to learn new knowledge. The practitioner is too practical.

On emotional design and websites:

Everything has a personality: everything sends an emotional signal. Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions

On getting inspiration:

Stay curious. Always be learning new topics [...] And I talk mostly with my critics.

Read the full Don Norman interview on Design Research and Innovation.

Wang Mengqiu, senior director of technology and products, says Baidu’s product development philosophy differs from rival search company Google’s focus on “very cool” technology. “Our logic is different – we think about what users need most,” she says.

…“I don’t care that many people say Baidu can’t innovate,” she says. “You have to ask whether completely new things are needed.”…

She says Baidu would never have developed a product such as Google Earth, for example. For China’s nearly 500m internet users – Baidu’s target market – Google’s interactive world map has very little value, she argues.

“It is a dazzling, very cool product, but really think for a moment. The users we need to consider are not just high-end, well-educated users,” she says.

The entire presentation is extremely well done, and the discussion around relationships and our online versus offline social network truly illuminates important factors in social design.

Key quotes:

“We all have very different relationships with the people in our life and designing for them is very different.”

“The emergence of the social web is simply our online world catching up with our offline world.”

“A study of 3000 randomly chosen Americans showed that the average American has just four strong ties.”

Key slides:

I highly recommend all to view the entire presentation.

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place.

I particularly like the way he discusses the importance of setting contexts, using context maps, to better integrate content with the overall experience (see example map below).

Example context map from "Fusing Content Strategy with Design"

Such discussions all point to the importance of a fully integrated product experience process where content certainly plays a very big (and often overlooked) role.

The Nielsen Consumer 360 Conference has illuminated many of these changes over the past 3 days. Video excerpts for the talks are up on the conference website and YouTube. Here are a couple that I found particularly interesting:

• Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg talks about the end of email and her personal associations with brands
• Irene Rosenfeld, Chairman and CEO of Kraft Foods said that her company’s iPhone app iFood Assistant brought “20% of their expected year 1 revenue in 2 weeks.”

Here are a some other social media facts:

“Nearly six in ten online consumers (58%) say they start their day by checking email, whereas 20% head straight to search engine sites and 11% check in with Facebook

“Facebook-First Consumers [...] tend to become fans of brands for entertainment purposes, or to show support for brands, but not to obtain deals”

- ExactTarget study via Most Americans Wake Up to Email

There are countless social media infographics and statistics (which I encourage you to share in the comments) but the truth is plain: social media sites are changing how we engage with each other, the world, and organizations.

The Organic Growth Cycle

For all products, new customers are generated through a combination of paid and word-of-mouth marketing. In some cases, the majority of a product’s new customers come from organic, word-of-mouth marketing. While traditional marketing such as online advertising requires a constant input of resources, word-of-mouth marketing can essentially become a self-sustaining system, requiring little or no support—a sort of marketing Turing machine. Such a well-tuned organic growth cycle can help to grow a large customer base for any web product.

Traditional and organic marketing generating new prospective customers.

The key to creating a self-sustaining organic marketing and acquisition loop is enabling and encouraging word-of-mouth promotion buttressed by an outstanding experience that will compel customers to champion the product. Getting to the tipping point where each personal recommendation leads to more than one new customer and more than one new customer recommendation involves fine-tuning multiple facets of this growth cycle.

The organic growth cycle.

Fueling Viral Growth with the Organic Marketing Cycle

Creating the conditions for viral growth requires optimization at the customer adoption, engagement, and organic marketing stages.

Fueling the organic growth cycle until it becomes a looped system.

At the customer adoption and engagement stages, optimization means ensuring that prospective customers are effectively converted to active customers, and that the product excels to the point that those customers will take the time to champion it to people they know. Beyond that, to get to organic product proliferation, the customers’ affinity for the product must be captured via easy-to-find and easy-to-use channels that enable promotion to their friends and family. The following is the outline for the facets of fueling viral growth through organic marketing loop:

• Encourage Adoption.
  • Help prospective customer become familiar with the product.
  • Clearly communicate the value of the product to the customer. Give them compelling reasons to buy or try the product.
  • Make it very easy to buy or start using the product.
  • Meet customers’ needs with the product.
• Increase Engagement.
  • Meet and surpass customers needs and expectations.
  • Get user invested in using the product.
  • Keep evolving and improving the product.
• Enable and Encourage Proliferation.
  • Meet and surpass customers needs and expectations.
  • Create tools that enable and encourage organic, social marketing.

Encouraging Adoption

A product’s growth cycle starts with generating potential customers through traditional or word-of-mouth marketing. In either case, the end result is a pool of people that have some interest in buying or using the product. However, marketing does not generate active customers; it generates prospective customers that need to take steps to become active customers. The key is compelling those people to actually buy or use the product—adoption.

Adoption begins with a prospective customer becoming familiar with the product. For physical products this may extend to packaging. For most web products this includes such things as the homepage of a web site, other accessible areas of a web site, the product description page of an iPhone application, and so forth. The critical step is converting a person’s interest in a product into its usage or a purchase.

In order to optimize the progression from interest in a product to a purchase or usage, the migration process needs to be simplified and freed from usability errors. For example, if the web product can be purchased, the buying process has to be made simple and user friendly. Overall, optimizing adoption means:

• Clearly explaining the benefits of the product and showing the prospective customer what the product does and how.
• Creating a straightforward and fast buying or registration process.
• Ensuring low barriers to everyday usage.
• Getting rid of any usability problems.

By enacting the above points, more prospective customers will become active customers.

Increasing Engagement

Of course, just because someone buys or uses a product doesn’t mean that they will advocate it to their friends and colleagues. In fact, the opposite might be true; they might turn their friends away from the product if their experience with it is poor. It is, therefore, critical to ensure that customers will fall in love with what they are buying or using. This simply means developing an amazing product.

Customers will love the product if it efficiently and elegantly meets their needs. This means ensuring that the product is designed with the users’ needs in mind, that it is easy to use, and that it looks, sounds, and feels good. The fields of user-centered design, usability engineering, graphic design, and industrial design can enhance their respective elements of the overall product experience.

In addition to creating a great web product, one can create systems that can further engage the customer through the use of goals, games, and community. Game-like models create a compelling experience for the customer. For example, reputation points on a web site can encourage users to write reviews, and thereby, make the web site more interesting and valuable for others.

A community component can also engage customers by giving them the opportunity to form valuable social networks within the context of the product. Allowing users to connect with others within an iPhone application such as FourSquare, for example, makes them invested in the application because they create a valuable community that is not readily available elsewhere.

Some popular ways to create greater customer engagement include creating:

• A reputation system.
• Community involvement.
• Game-like systems such as earning points for user’s activity.

An engaging product experience leads to greater customer loyalty and impetus to advocate the product to their real-world social circles.

Enabling and Encouraging Proliferation

Once customers grow to love the product and have a strong desire to advocate it to those in their social circle, it is important to empower them to do so by developing mechanisms that make it easy to do so. Beyond true word-of-mouth advocacy, there are numerous other ways that a product’s fanatics can champion it, and consequently there are many systems that facilitate those varied forms of advocacy such as the ones below.

• Enabling customers to invite friends via email, messaging, or social applications to use or buy the product.
• Enabling customers to broadcast their affinity for the product on social applications and sites such as Twitter.
• Communicating the customers’ use of the product via social web sites and applications.
• Enabling customers to easily submit your product to bookmarking services and review web sites and applications.
• Incentivizing customers for their advocacy via distinction, special products, special treatment, or other rewards.

Creating and optimizing organic marketing systems such as those above will ensure that more of the customers’ affinity for the product will be transformed into action. Of course, all this work would be in vain if the customers do not love the product in the first place. That is why fueling the organic growth cycles necessitates optimizing adoption, engagement and proliferation.

Gizmodo’s Mark Wilson highlights the user experience improvements as:

Despite the redesign, you’ll find the experience is remarkably familiar. The basic fonts and menus are unchanged, with a few key differences. Most importantly, instead of seeing one page at a time (like being in Now Playing, then clicking to a new screen with a particular show), you see two pages at a time—a logical design update to the widescreen format that speeds up navigation enormously.

Check out the screen shots below:

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