What is the mother of invention?
Posted by: Markus on: 30 December 2009
If you’ve spent your life creating a new invention, whether it’s the TV, lightbulb or any other new technology, I am pretty sure it’s been a rocky road you’ve followed.
Plagued with the possibility of failure whilst dedicating 1000s of hours of your life and most likely staking your house on the idea, I’d want to ask Edison or Ford “what motivated you in the pursuit of invention?”
Is it money, fame or success? Or is it the belief that your invention is going to make a difference?
An inventors motivation is what bridges the gap between the safety of technical knowledge and the application of that knowledge in doing something meaningful – and ultimately creating something that will be financially successful.
Is it not demeaning to inventors to say that technology comes first?
Technology is easy: it’s something we can see, we can learn about and play with. But when it comes to who is really going to use that technology to break through with the next “big thing”, the question an inventor wants answering is “who is going to use what I’ve made?”
Consider that great inventors are also great investors. They don’t invest their life on building something if they don’t have a good idea of who they believe they’re doing it for and why.
Real invention makes a difference to humanity
Posted by: Markus on: 10 December 2009
Re. the article written by Don Norman “technology first, needs last” http://jnd.org/dn.mss/technology_first_needs_last.html here’s my response – I think the article is a little irresponsible and I disagree – it is needs and technology in parallel.
With 4 new business ventures under my belt, I’ve learnt how hard it is to be an inventor. You have to make huge sacrifices to acquire the technical AND contextual knowledge needed to invent – these two things run in a parrellel.
Leonardo di Vinci believed the most important organ he possessed was his eye, not his brain… inventors are keen observers because that’s how they can apply their knowledge of technology most effectively – to spend years of pain and financial loss to break through with an invention, you have to have a central belief that you can improve a situation. That motivation comes from within the inventor, they have seen something you and I missed, because they possess the knowledge of a technical field and believe they can change it… I believe context and need have to co-exist for the inventor to find the reason why they believe a technology revolution is worth investing a lifetime – I think inventors realise their idea presents an opportunity to make a difference.
Inventors developed the insight that led to an invention gradually over hours of dedicated focus and hard work… that’s why you need creativity, imagination – that’s why you need designers who can facilitate the latent knowledge within organisations, because most business people aren’t very good at invention, they usually can’t see the true nature of the problems they should be solving with their knowlege. I wonder also what was the average age of the inventors in your list?
If we want to improve people’s lives and take our responsibility as designers for helping organisations reduce environmental impact we must focus everyone in organisations on thinking harder about why they are doing something when they go to work, before they start doing it.
With design research we are shining light on the human needs normally ignored before making a business decision, now employees can apply their knowledge more effectively. I’ve found on many projects that use ethnography/contextual study that the performance of people and the organisation goes up substantially, waste goes down, employees are happier and customers more satisfied. Presenting knowledge in that way to a lot of eyeballs and brains increases the chances of making a leap – yes, you need the right organisational culture, but doing work this way is how you start to make a difference.
The average technologist or engineer who could use this article to make their case, will waste huge amounts failing and leave far too much to luck BECAUSE they didn’t understand the context properly – they just like tinkering but they wouldn’t risk their job/house on it. I don’t believe inventors do that, good inventors are successful because they combine a gift for observation and technology – what motivated them? Inventors see a chance to make a difference to humanity otherwise why risk a lifetime’s work – what other reason is there?
The Power of Thought over Action
Posted by: Markus on: 23 October 2009
Seth Godin talks about the “me-conomy” but inversely at work, this has to become the “you-conomy” and we’re not all that good at switching from “me-conomics” to “you-conomics”. From a management perspective “management struggled with disconnects between what was really needed by business managers… and what was actually delivered.” according to C.K. Prahalad in his book The New Age of Innovation.
The problem is we just don’t listen properly. As humans, we are islands within our bodies – you are not in the world, you are sat behind an invisible curtain (your brain) that is VERY selective about what your conscious mind gets to experience of the world. If you do experience something, you can be up to 6 seconds behind it actually happening (there’s a program on iPlayer that explores this http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nhv56/Horizon_20092010_The_Secret_You/)
Such an isolation makes it much harder to listen and empathise than any of us actually realise. For that reason, we spend a lot of time doing and talking about what we think should be done, having not spent the time really investigating what’s really needed.
That’s why there’s so many average products, poorly supported services, product failures and shoddy software applications – because we just don’t think enough about someone else.
And yet the more you think things through first from someone else’s perspective, the simpler the solution you create will be. It is understanding the complexity of a problem that creates a simple solution not technology. Technology is just another crutch of “lets do something” providing options to solving problems, that don’t need solving. These problems would be better solved through the simple power of thought.
How design talks to customers…
Posted by: Markus on: 7 August 2009
Design conversations are a narrative in the mind of your customer (and sometimes the conversation moves outside the mind into the real world, via sales & customer services).
For the sake of simplicity, imagine you make toasters, the “design conversation” might go like this:
Customer: “Hmmm, hungry – what’ll I have before I go out?”
Toaster: “Hello! Hello? See my shiny loveliness and big, beautiful (and practical) toasting slot – imagine how toasty the bread will be when I’m done”
Customer: “Stick bread in the slot…”
Toaster: “Look, look – here’s my big handle on the right (we didn’t cater for left handers, just turn me around, I look great from behind)”
Customer: “Mmmm, smells lovely. [salivation commences]. Let’s get the butter out”
Toaster: “ding, ding – oooh, I’m all hot… no need to worry about being electrocuted, I’ve pumped my toast right out for you…”
Customer: “Oooh, ow hot hot… [scrape of knife buttering bread] Mmmmmmm…”
OK, this sounds a bit like toast porn but this customer happens to like sexy toasters. The point is that designers have to establish a conversation between a design object and a human. That needs a deep knowledge of the human behaviours that are going to be influenced by the design, in order to project the right messages at the right time in the toasting process.
Looking at design as part of a narrative to see how their lives really unfold around your products or services will without fail help you find out stuff that’ll differentiate you and impress your customers.
The defining gap between business & design – behaviour
Posted by: Markus on: 6 August 2009
Let’s say a prospective customer asked a marketer to “tell me what you know about me?” Here’s what the marketer said:
- You’re about 20-35
- You have £100-£200 disposable income each month
- You live in South East England or maybe another major urban area, but not the countryside
- You are most likely in a relationship but you could be single
- You probably don’t have kids
- You’re likely to trade up products, if you buy from face to face sales
- You’re most like to buy our complete portfolio of products within 6 months.
- You visit our website on average 5 times a month.
- You probably have a white collar job
- Maybe you have a pet.
This information is great for gathering prospective customers into groups around which business conversations can take place, but it won’t help you to “proactively develop an experience that hasn’t been made yet” (quote courtesy of a colleague)
Business conversations are focused on how to commercialise an idea – i.e. agreeing on a group of people who are likely to value a new experience. But much of the business conversation deals with hypothetical possibilities that are just too vague for design.
Design need to do their homework around the experience a customer will have of products, services or marketing communications, here’s what they study:
- What experience gets peoples’ attention?
- Why would people not use our experience?
- Which elements of the experience matter?
- What do people think they’re doing when they decide to use our experience?
- How do people engage with the experience and is it the way we imagine they would?
- Could you deliver an experience that’s better or do you need to do it differently?
To answer such questions, you need insight into human behavior. An effective business conversation can take place WITHOUT human behavior, but a design conversation CAN NOT.
Business people – here’s how you can significantly increase the value you get back from Design:
- Either involve what Design need in your research strategy or;
- Plan for them to spend time doing research for design once you brief them, so they can understand the messy behaviour of people who you want to buy your stuff.
This will ensure customers get what they think they’ve paid for and you get to optimise the profit from your investments as you know where the most potent moments of the customer experience are.
Humans – a comedy routine or comedy of errors?
Posted by: Markus on: 1 August 2009
We’re faster than any other animal at forming habits and routines about “how” we do new stuff, so we can quickly develop a skill we no longer need to actively think about. You don’t think how to use the remote, ride a bike, dance at a wedding, open the fridge, catch a bus or operate the washing machine – if you had to think about everything, you would grind to a halt.
This mechanism of developing mental routines to develop skills for day-to-day life is familiar and makes life easy to navigate – but it leaves us prone to a lot of shortcomings:
- Manipulation – We can be influenced by context and surroundings without even knowing it, because it’s easy to manipulate stuff we learned already and don’t actively think about.
- Sticking to what we know – We prefer to stick to our routines (especially when we doubt ourselves) rather than seek alternatives. And if we feel stuck with something, most of us will learn routines to live with it, rather than do something about it – an experiment proved between 64% and 83% of the time we do it the way we’ve always done it – rather than a new more obvious, easier way.
- Instant Gratification – It’s easier to get gratification from the familiar. For example watching a comedy now is easier to imagine over a period drama because it’s easier to get a good dopamine “feel good” release from the way you think of comedy over a complex drama plot. But it’s OK, you think you’ll watch the drama next week – I believe you
- Our reality = everyone’s reality – What we think is important, isn’t as important for others. In fact, it’s most likely you’ll only be noticing new stuff in your life – you won’t notice a load of routines you’ve already learned and bedded into your sub-conscious.
- Storytelling – We only re-tell 50% of a story. Because we remember meaning rather than words, we’re wiring a story it into pre-existing routines we learned already. That’s how comedians make you laugh – they poke around familiar routines you have of human behavior.
- Story telling – We’re also prone to another kind of story telling, a study established that we’ll add, omit, exaggerate or minimise information 61% of the time when we recount a tale onwards. That’s how comedians make ordinary stuff funny.
Thinking about the 6 traits above, watch how Peter Kay takes advantage of your mental routines to use what you’ve learnt about yourself, and others, to create laughter:
Think that comedians don’t consider the 6 human shortcomings outlined above? Whilst they might take advantage of the mental routines you’ve developed to navigate life effectively in order to get a laugh, comedians are incredibly rigorous when working on new material – they take their own human shortcomings very seriously. I recently went to see Stephen Amos practicing new material at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith… he had a clipboard and made notes throughout – he prototyped gags and got feedback that led to new ideas! Here he is without the clipboard:
So whether you’re preparing a great comedy routine or just starting a new project, follow what the comedians do to avoid a comedy of errors on your next big project:
• Lots of feedback (from the solution, from colleagues, from customers)
• Lots of practice (domain expertise, iterative design, prototyping)
• Find constraints/boundaries (scope, effective data organisation)
Maximizing the value of an ethnography for Marketing
Posted by: Markus on: 24 July 2009
The marketing guys want to do an Ethnography, how do you help them approach it in the right way?
Ethnography and observational study are about uncovering a human story that reveals the real behaviors of people who use the stuff you make. It’s about bringing the right stories into the company, rather than fairytales.
Here’s how to use ethnography to create the space for inspiration and shed a light on getting maximum value from an Ethnography:
- Clear Purpose & Focus: This video uses ethnography specifically to capture TV viewing habits: http://vimeo.com/5430231 – start to watch from 5:00. Note what’s depicted from 6:37 shows how an interesting insight was lost without a clear purpose, there’s “too much data” (or too many stories)
- Design Inspiration: Ethnography seems easy – you watch people – but you need to interpret it and use visual artifacts/prototypes (not a report with graphs) + well prepared workshops to share what’s been understood by the research team, with others.
- Guide don’t Steer: With ethnography, you are creating the space for people to reveal their stories to you – if you ask them “what do you think about…” you will influence by asking the wrong questions, you risk uncovering a fairytale, rather than a story with insight.
- Multiple Business Objectives: To uncover a variety of stories to meet different business goals, you will need numerous home visits by researchers + participants/stakeholders to interpret what’s been seen correctly.
- Collaboration: Designers, stakeholders and business people ought to participate in an ethnography – that’s how consumer innovators do it (Apple, Google, Goretex, Nike) it’s a shared experience where design produce the artifacts needed to tell the stories of human behaviour that give the research meaning to the business.
- It’s not about Ethnography, It’s about the Experience: We’re uncovering the ideal Experience, so that the marketing communication can reflect the most potent aspects of the experience.
- Prototyping for confidence: An ethnography is expensive, qualitative research and the numbers are going to be low to a Marketer. Any ideas cannot simply be launched into strategy and execution, they must be prototyped and tested on internal stakeholders and consumers in the form of prototypes – that’s much cheaper and gives a bit more statistical weight to ideas.
- No Reports: Last thing, a research report isn’t actionable enough as an output – this kind of research needs to inspire and tell the story, hence the need for some kind of design visualisation.
Market personas versus human behaviour personas
Posted by: Markus on: 23 July 2009
This picture was me using napkins to explain the difference between a market segmentation and a behavioural one – thanks to my patient colleagues for not only bearing with my ramble but surreptitiously snapping the moment and prodding me to write up my thinking.
Anyway, Marketing will usually start out selecting markets and breaking them down using quantitative research and some desktop research (take a look at this article for example). They’re trying to identify commercial viability with groups of 1000′s or even 1,000,000s of people – thinking about them behaviourally would fry any brain so it’s easier to start with a segmentation this way in order to find the market with the people most likely to buy what’s on offer.
The thing with segmentation is it’s broad – which means that a persona developed around a market segmentation can miss a huge amount of the detail that feeds and inspires new ideas.
Behaviours, like people, don’t like to fit into a box and they can exist anywhere across segments as my napkins prove! Which is why there’s so often a grating, grinding relationship between design and marketing as designers are forced to fit the Ugly Sister’s foot into Cinderella’s shoe, knowing the Design they’ve created won’t fit the people it’s supposedly made for.
Behavioural personas are much more relevant to the Design (and a consequence of research dedicated to a project, rather than a segment). They provide the flow of insights needed to inspire the right creative idea and their stories reflect the messy reality of people so everyone can agree on the real problems we need to solve.
Think of it as the difference between a market persona that says “Nadine, our 30 something wife, mother and entrepreneur hates to spend time in the kitchen” and a human behaviour persona that illustrates the real Nadine at work in her kitchen, bending down and faffing with measuring the right liquid volume to put into a cake for her sons 3rd birthday. Which one is going to inspire the Oxo Good Grips jug? That’s the difference between segmentation based personas and human behaviour based personas.
Brand republic – are you trying to trick me?
Posted by: Markus on: 20 July 2009
The picture here is part of the signup process for Brand Republic’s website. I’m wondering why I have to go through mental gymnastics to ensure I don’t get sent stuff from the guys at Brand Republic? Why is it, that on the one hand that I have to opt in, then on the other opt out of the default? Is this another case of marketers poisoning the well?
Isn’t the whole point of following Twitter friends or opting in to email the same thing – it’s about finding the people who’ve got something you think is worth investing your time on? If Brand Republic are trying to trick me into giving my details to some mailing list, is it because it’s easier than helping me see the real value of a subscription – or is it that the value of their email database is higher than the revenue they make from subscription to their magazine?
Unless there’s some legal reason for this, it seems a bit dishonest? What do you think?
Putting Marketing in the dock.
Posted by: Markus on: 18 July 2009
Marketers like structure – it makes them feel safer. They analyse and ponder, mainly at their desks, the trends and patterns of customer demographics.
I’ve also recently heard marketers stating that they must be “behavioral economists” and that if marketing has done its job, there’d be no need for sales. Is there nothing marketing can’t do?
For designers, treated as the final decoration station to the market place, there’s some apprehension about marketers – because marketers often speak for the customer when the final designs arrive, with little to validate their feedback as anything but their own perspective.
Now, are Marketers guilty of the above charges?
Yes. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing. As long as there’s a willingness to build on these things hand in hand with Design.
It’s true that Marketers tend to analyse the known factors in the market and about their customers and they should be responsible for everything from innovation, segmentation and market strategy. The big “guilty” charge which every Marketer should keep in mind, is speaking for the customer – it shows a lack of qualitative research to back up the quantitative.
At a project execution level, Marketing need to also anticipate that Designers will want to do research on qualitative experiences, finding ways to vicariously live customers’ lives and integrating design research into a production process that builds at least a prototype idea for the product, service or communication (make sure there’s lots of customers involved in the testing of the prototype as well…)
It’s the vicarious design research that, when combined with marketing research, breathes life into the design – it makes the design more real, human shaped and relevant, whilst empowering the business brains to settle on trade offs that make profit whilst delivering a good experience. It also provides the inspiration for the experience strategy that stops the political distractions of employees speaking for the customer, because the customers’ voice is central to the design.
