Information Design Watch, 5/15/2006

We recently attended the Success by Design Conference, an annual event sponsored by The Center for Design and Business in Providence, Rhode Island, USA (http://www.centerdesignbusiness.org/conf.html). The Center's mission is to explore the intersection of design principles and business intelligence. This year's conference focused on innovation in product design and service delivery. The following is a recap of our team notes and conclusions from several key sessions.

A nationally recognized thought leader for innovation management and design strategy, Jeneanne Rae of Peer Insight, LLC, (http://www.peerinsight.com/) helps organizations recognize and take advantage of critical business opportunities. Services currently represent 80 percent of the U.S. economy and is growing. As this market expands, companies need to think creatively about how to get a competitive edge. According to Rae, infusing service delivery with well-established design skills can lead to innovations in the customer experience. The designer's skill set is a natural fit for improving service delivery because it encompasses the following:

Empathy. Designing a service experience requires understanding users -- not just their goals, but also their emotional, social, and cultural needs.

Visualizing and Prototyping. Designers are used to developing typical scenarios to better understand how and why a product might be used. Some service scenarios can be studied with a physical model (for example, a passenger train car, built to scale); others can benefit from getting user response to verbal, visual, or virtual scenarios.

Integrated Solutions. Design takes into account the perspectives of both users and key stakeholders. Achieving a balance is key.

There is no product portfolio. A company that innovates a service will find it challenging to describe the offering in a way that has immediate appeal and can, at a glance, stand apart from the competition. This is where visualization can make a difference.

Services are fuzzy. Unlike products that can use a platform strategy and established pricing model, services require companies to think more conceptually about an offering that is intangible and perishable (can't be inventoried).

It's hard to go it alone. Innovating services delivery with design approaches requires some expert help; service companies need to recognize this and form professional partnerships as appropriate.

We found Rae's talk to be both observant and insightful. Design isn't (only) about making objects more attractive or fun to use. It's about understanding what goes into the ideal customer experience, and working to achieve that through research, modeling and testing.

Jonathan Hayes was responsible for leading the development of the Xbox 360 (http://www.xbox.com/), the Microsoft entertainment system known not only for its powerful performance, but also its beautiful presentation. Microsoft's goal of expanding the audience for Xbox beyond core gamers to a global market demanded a unique collaboration of artists, engineers and researchers. According to Hayes, "technology needs poetry." But balancing the tension between technology and design required some ground rules:

Structure the process. Because the team was very large and distributed worldwide, establishing a process, milestones, and master timeline was essential to keeping the project on track. Groups worked on specific activities independently, but also had a clear idea of when to converge with the rest of the team to share results and feedback.

Structure the solution space. The subjective nature of design can lead to excessive iterations, sometimes without an end in sight ("The right design? I'll know it when I see it.") The Xbox team managed this risk by creating a visual framework for articulating possible solutions: a quadrant system that indexed "Mild to Wild" on one axis vs. "Organic to Architectural" on the other. Stakeholders and users were told to frame their feedback within the context of these terms. This allowed very different prototype designs to be evaluated at a thematic level with specifics deferred for later.

Predefine inclusive design values. Before beginning the design process, the team established the requirements that the new product had to meet. By doing this, the team eliminated the risk of personal preference steering the design solution.

Look at work in context and in person. Throughout the process, the team validated the proposed solution by testing the Xbox with potential users and eliciting their feedback.

Hayes' session demonstrated that successful design solutions aren't crafted in a vacuum and often require the input of other talented individuals such as researchers and technologists. To make such a collaboration work, there needs to be agreement on the criteria for success and how to get there.

Stuart Karten Design (http://www.kartendesign.com/) is an industrial design consultancy that creates products using a user-centric approach. During his session, Karten outlined a specific process, "mode mapping," that visually represents observational and ethnographic data. The mode mapping process for human activity typically involves the following key steps:

(1) Do the research, then determining personas for the research subjects and a common set of appropriate "modes." For example, the modes for a person's average day might include: family, friends, work, play, rest, transit, etc.

(2) Determine more specific modes for specific inquiries. Peoples' relationships with their cars might generate modes like: chauffer, errand, commute, maintain, etc.

(3) Create sub-modes for the personas that tie into a primary person's mode. A "parent" may link to a "child" or a "patient" may be linked to a "caregiver".

Karten's approach to solving product design challenges resonated with our own approach to discovering user goals and needs. Using visual methodologies to translate research into requirements is a powerful tool for creating successful design solutions.

For more information about Dynamic Diagrams and our services, please visit our web site at http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/ or email us at info@dynamicdiagrams.com. If you are not currently a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe at http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-register.php.