I know that brands want to figure out how to use social media to do their branding work. And being brands, and generally well-0versed  in the dark arts of marketing and sales, skilled brand professionals know that consumers respond out of psychological interest and not out of material need.

There’s nothing intrinsically loathsome about this — the arrangement is equally familiar to the consumer. Who, in his more lucid moments, believes himself to be playing tricks on the marketers, and to have figured out just exactly how the machine works.

Well then, I’m in a state of chronic nonplussedness when it comes to brand involvement in social media. For it strikes me that brands continue to look for themselves in this medium. A medium full of users — nay, of people who consume shit all day and even night long — and talk about it, too. With their friends.

It’s like brands want to change the channel. Dig that remote up out of the bowels of the corporate sofa and find, all lit up like Christmas in Vegas, the chromed shine of their own brand image shimmering on a screen like a hot desert mirage.

Brands have figured out why people want things. They’ve nailed the imagery, the messaging, even the copy. They know how to mediate desire, how to intensify it, raise it up high and with celebrity pedestal amplitude, work the seductive power of distance and altitude. Brands know why people like what other people like, and how to work this dynamic with Shakespearian precision.

So then why have they not figured out how to go social? What’s holding them back? Why the silly games, the useless rewards, the getting behind the stuff people do on social that’s only “as if” if meant something? A revelation of what’s deep in the brand’s heart and calculating mind — that it doesn’t matter, as long as the numbers come out right. Or fooled, perhaps, by the pitching gearheads whose claim to understand what the user wants is possibly doubly corrupt (for it’s bankrupt too). Shiny person, meet shiny object. Likey likey.

I don’t get it. Why brands would want to get behind the smallest shit that people do online, the little itty-bitty clicks of point-less-this and double-plus-ungood save-and-share-and-like… Because all that counts is what they can count? Why diminish brand value and fork brand equity by scrunching it into little votes and likes and points and badges and other diminutive things because people do them just because they’re in the habit of doing them. Why? Because that’s the best they can get? If, then, because that’s the best we’ve been offered?

It works, this social. It works for high brow purposes and just as equally for the trivial silly and the redundant banal. It works because it’s of and by and for the people who use it. Sell into the small acts, the ones you can count, and you get small branding. Yes it’s distributed, yes everyone gets it, yes it’s the hot thing on mobile and web and pad. But pack a brand into bite-sized activities and you’re going to get bite-sized brand messaging. Sound bytes the value out of brand equity.

Small acts and gestures, the lowest common denominators in a medium whose real value is its stretch and span — relationships on a thread, no distance, spanning time. Think small and get small. Acts, you can see. Just look. Activity, takes vision. Where is it then? Where, the new narratives? Stories we can put ourselves in. Forms of expression shared with friends and rich with meaning that grows. History, past, archives, memories. Or future, hopes, plans, promises. Where, brand people, are we the people? What we care about and find interesting. Not profit motive — real motive.

I’d like to know. Companies have responsibilities on this planet. The people are not opposed. Such a shame, this business underwhelming.

The term co-design refers to a philosophical and political approach to design best applied throughout the design life cycle [1].  Codesign builds on the methods and principles of Participatory Design which assumes ‘users’ are the experts of their own domain and should be actively involved in the design process. This article explores some of the methodological tools we use to enable codesign. Specifically, we explore the rationale behind some common workshop techniques used early in the design process, which combine the activities of research and idea generation.

The premise of codesign

Involvement of ‘users’ early in the research and ideation phases of the design process is often equated to “asking users what they want”.  (A certain quote oft attributed to Ford comes to mind). Codesign however, goes well beyond this. The premise is that ‘users’ become partners. Rather than being viewed as a source of information to be input into the design process, those impacted by the design are invited to work actively with designers to shape the definition and direction of the project. Participation can include sharing personal experiences and perspectives, contributing to the generation of new design concepts, the evolution of those concepts, analysis, interpretation, decision making, evaluation and more.

When taking a codesign approach it is our role as designers to facilitate that participation. At the beginning of the design process we work with users to understand the design project in relation to their everyday lives including their habits, rituals, dreams, attitudes and experiences. These then become resources for inspiring design concepts and direction. In order for people to actively and effectively participate in the design process they must be able to imagine, access, and express their experiences and expectations. Simply asking people questions is not enough to facilitate this process. This is because people are not explicit sources of information. As humans we are limited in what we can express by our existing frames of reference, we can only talk in the language that we know.

In addition, much of our experience and knowledge is tacit, or embedded in the everyday. Our habits, rituals, dreams and attitudes are not (necessarily) things that we can gain immediate access to in order to describe them to design researchers, we may not even be aware of them ourselves.  Codesign methods (also known as generative methods (Sanders 2000)) create a platform for this to occur by making things that are normally unobservable available as resources for design. While methods such as interviews and observations give us access to the explicit and observable, generative methods allow us to access the tacit and implicit aspects of people’s lives (Sleeswijk Visser 2009). They also set up a collaborative, discursive space between designers and users where ideas can be generated, explored and documented.

Codesign activities

As with any workshop, the specific activities will differ depending on the topic being investigated and the nature of the participants. However there are several qualities or principles that underpin most codesign activities that help to make people’s everyday experiences available and create a platform for sharing and ideation.

They are visual, expressive and creative

Codesign workshops make heavy use of visual materials as a way to assist people to make and communicate associations and experiences. This is because images are more accessible and quick to use (compared to written word for example) and participants are able to attribute their own meaning to them.  Random images can remind people about significant things they might not have considered or can act as metaphors to represent complex concepts. Images are also evocative and help to provide multiple frames and ways of seeing and expressing. They can be ambiguous enough to allow creative and unusual connections to be made and leave space for people to explore their own interpretations.

Building a “nudie” - a derivation of personas where participants create a visual version of a stakeholder to explore their perspective, needs and experiences. (Image care of Digital Eskimo)

The process of selecting images can also act to generate valuable discussion between participants. We often begin a workshop by asking participants to create a collage that describes their experiences about something related to the project topic (e.g., being a post graduate student, dealing with cancer, notions of giving etc). Visual storyboards can also be an effective way for participants to convey emotional experiences or journeys. In addition to what is created, it is the stories, memories and experiences that are shared when people communicate why particular images have been chosen or placed together that reveal significant insights.

Selecting images for a visual scenario that portrays the emotional aspect of an experience. (Image care of Inspire Foundation)

They are physical and tangible

The act of physically getting up, moving around and using our bodies and hands to make and do things, to select, create, stick, sort, gather, glue and compose, both individually and in groups, is a central part of creating space for discussion, sharing and idea generation. (Sanders in particular emphasises the ‘make’ aspect of generative methods). This can include three dimensional prototypes made out of playdoh or card for example, but it also applies to the building of collages, maps and story boards, or the process of acting out an interaction or experience. All of these activities can act as prompts that help participants to explore, remember, imagine and verbalise aspects of their everyday lives, feelings or experiences. The physical act of working in close proximity with other people and creating something together is also an important part of fostering collaboration, trust and sharing between participants.

Touch-points are grouped and categorised

A service described through the metaphor of a city

They support creativity through (appropriate) constraints

Part of enabling people to be creative and participate in the design process is in providing the right kind of constraints. Leaving things too open means participants struggle for direction or to get started, defining things too specifically leaves little room for participants to take ownership and create something that is meaningful to them. For example, when asking participants to generate or explore new campaign concepts or ideas, we will often have them incorporate a combination of words, images or concepts [2] or make use of physical props such as playdoh when developing their idea. These elements act as constraints that create boundaries within which participants need to work, but they also become inspirational start points that leave enough room for participants to apply their own creativity, strategy and ideas.

Planning out possible workshop activities and the props required

Activities such as building personas or scenarios also provide participants with a particular structure or format through which to think about, approach, explore and communicate aspects of the design. For example having participants build visual personas (e.g., nudies) or Facebook profiles can be a way to enable participants to explore and contribute to interpreting and connecting with that data. The concept and format of the ‘persona’ acts as a constraint that allows people to make sense of, and structure, information but allows them to do so through their own words and images. The scenario format, with specific actors and a beginning, middle and end also becomes a simple framework through which participants can create, communicate and evaluate new design ideas in context. In addition to the story itself the process of negotiating and considering the sequences of action involved and what should be included and represented and why, brings to light a range of details, experiences, needs and dependencies.

Exploring a concept through a visual storyboard or scenario

They are playful, fun and rewarding for participants

Fun is a deeply important aspect of participation. It is central to facilitating sharing, trust and confidence building and helping people open up. It is also part of keeping people’s energy levels up. If people are tired and the activities too serious, it is hard for participants to maintain interest or contribute in meaningful ways. This is particularly true if the topic of the workshop is sombre or serious. It is our role as designers to find a sensitive way of exploring such topics, but also one that allows people to open up and be creative. It can be very rewarding for participants to discover aspects about themselves they had not been aware of, or to think in new ways about a topic they had not stopped to consider before.  Participants often also value the opportunity to gain an understanding of other people’s experiences and perspectives. Ensuring the workshop is interesting and rewarding for participants is also critical when seeking participation and input to important topics that have a significant impact on people, yet can be perceived as potentially ‘boring’, unappealing or stigmatising e.g,. skin cancer, mental health, financial or social issues. Codesign workshops are key relationship building activities and sessions should always be enjoyable and energising (though also often exhausting) as well as ‘productive’.

A persona comes alive in this crime fighting scenario acted out through visuals and playdoh props

The outcomes

As part of enabling participation in the design process codesign activities aim to:

• Create a shared understanding and shared language between participants and designers
• Support a sense of immersion, dialogue and empathy for the perspective of those who will use and experience the design
• Generate rich personal, visual, and tangible material that is both subjective and designerly [3]
• Act as a source of inspiration and information for both designers and participants to work with in visioning future designs.

For these reasons the outputs from codesign activities differ significantly from interviews, surveys or observations. The subjective nature of what is produced through such workshops is important to supporting empathy and immersion into the design space whilst its designerly nature makes it a natural design resource, quite different to that of a written report. As designers we benefit from working with concrete things we can see and feel and imagery for example can be quickly scanned and absorbed (Mattelmäki & Battarbee, 2002). For designers, as well as clients and participants, material generated through such activities can be more accessible than traditional research outputs. They can also go beyond research feeding into idea generation and concepting.

In taking such an approach to design we, as designers, move from being experts to being facilitators. Our skills shift away from a focus on idea generation, to being able to facilitate design through collaboration. An important aspect of this is knowing what activities are appropriate, how to frame the activity (e.g., what are the right questions to ask) and what props and tools to provide as constraints.

To do true codesign, where participants become partners in the design process, requires a lot from us as designers, but also from our clients. There is a shift in (or relinquishing of) power that needs to take place to really allow participants to help shape and direct the design process. While this has not been the traditional approach to design, an increasing move towards co-creation and open innovation in mainstream businesses and local government environments will, we hope, create new and more opportunities for such an approach.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to our clients and participants, in particular the Inspire Foundation and Digital Eskimo.

Notes

[1] The term codesign is now widely used within product, UX and Service design fields. The interpretation of codesign applied here is based on the principles of Participatory Design and is best represented by the extensive work of Liz Sanders. Check out Sanders’ extensive selection of papers on her website for more about the different types of generative design activities she’s been developing and evolving for the last 20 years www.maketools.com

[2] See for example work by Kim Halskov and Peter Dalsgård on Inspiration Cards. Depending on the context there are also a range of pre-existing packs of images and concept cards that can be used such as the Iniva “What do you feel cards” or AT-ONES Touch-point cards. We often make our own and it is possible to design the workshop activities so that concepts or words that are used in idea generation activities come from earlier activities with participants, allowing ideas to be built upon over the course of the workshop. This approach means that the concepts are meangingful to participants and that they have a direct connection and sense of ownership over them.

[3] Sanders map of design research methods demonstrates the significance of designerly methods. (See Sanders, Design Research in 2006 (pdf). Design Research Quarterly, 1. and 
Sanders, L. An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research, Interactions (November – December 2008). 
In these articles Sanders talks about how older more established styles of research which rely on systematic data analysis whilst newer, design driven forms of research focus on tools for expression, reflection and sharing which embrace subjectivity and blur the boundaries between research and design. For further discussions on “designerly” approaches see also the recent Johnny Holland article by  Jonas LöwgrenDesignerly ways of working in UX and Erick Stolterman et al’s paper Designerly Tools (pdf) from DRS’08.

Further references that might be useful to those exploring the use of such techniques include:

Gaver, W., Beaver, J., & Benford, S. (2003). ‘Ambiguity as a Resource for Design’. CHI, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. ACM.
Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. (1999). ‘Design: Cultural Probes’. Interactions, pp. 21-29.
Mattelmäki, T. (2008). ‘Probing for co-exploring’. CoDesign, 4(1), pp. 65 – 78.
Mattelmäki, T., & Battarbee, K. (2002). ‘Empathy Probes’.  PDC’02. Malmö, Sweden, CPSR.
Sleeswijk Visser, F. (2009). Bringing the everyday life of people into design. PhD Thesis Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft.
Sleeswijk
Visser, F., Stappers, P. J., Lugt, R. V. D., & Sanders, E. B.-N. (2005). Contextmapping: experiences from practice. CoDesign, 1(2), pp. 119-140. (See Sleeswijk Visser’s publications page for access to her papers)

There are a lot of theories about what drives people and how they move through life. It’s my belief that on a subconscious level we are goal driven creatures. There is nothing people do that can not be defined as a goal. From this starting point I designed a simple model that can help us as designers make the decisions where to focus on in the design process.

Analysing ‘goals’

In order to work with the model we first have to get a simple understanding of the definition ‘goal’. In goal-setting theory a goal is an end state somebody wants to reach. In order to reach the goal you need to have a clear awareness of the tasks that need to be done. If all the tasks are done the goal has been reached. The interesting part about goal-setting is that each task in itself can be viewed as a goal, since it also should has an end state in order to be able to finish it. I would like to define these tasks as being ‘facilitators’ for the above goal, they answer the question ‘How do I reach this goal?’

An example: when the general goal is ‘Getting married’ the facilitators can be stuff like ‘find a boyfriend’, ‘get a marriage proposal’, ‘buy a wedding cake’, ‘say yes on wedding day’

The above approach is pretty straight-forward. The moment you have a goal, you can start defining the tasks and make them small and doable. But it also works the other way around. If we can keep breaking down goals we should also be able to build them up. Each goal somebody sets must come from somewhere. Above each goal are one or more motivators. These motivators are the reason we’ve set the goal in the first place. They are in themselves goals. When you pick a specific goal the ‘motivators’ above this goal will answer the question ‘Why do I want to reach this goal?’

An example: when the general goal is ‘Getting married’ the motivators can be ‘romantic relationship’, ‘financial security’, ‘have children’ but also ‘get away from my parents’

Finding the right motivation

So if you’d continue this way of thinking you could almost create an endless flow of interconnected goals. Each higher goal (motivator) becomes more generalistic, while each lower goal (facilitator) is more specific. When looking at the examples you also notice that defining the motivators makes you realize that not always the obvious motivations might be the ones that you’d automatically would have gone for. Not all people marry for a romantic future, but there are loads of people going for financial security. The same goes for all other goals. We can consider the facilitators to be the basic foundation of a goal. They should be there, but in no way they should go beyond just facilitating. In a way they are the design patterns and usability check of the goal. If it’s there and people can reach the end state than that’s good enough. On the other hand the motivators are much more. The motivators are the things we should remind people of. An example: when somebody is about to get married, but she is getting last minute doubts. What do we do? We probably won’t get here to marry by talking to her about the facilitators (“Hey, you bought a beautiful wedding cake. What a shame to throw it away.”). No, instead we need to remind her of the motivators above the goal (“If you don’t get married you can’t leave your parents house. Is that what you want?”)

Turning goals into design decisions

When we understand the way goals work we can start using the model. It enables us as designers to make fast and simple judgements in our design process. By analysing goals it will give us insights in what people want, how they will reach that goal and how we can keep them motivated while doing this. We can do this on different levels in the design process. Let’s look at some examples for a holiday website:

1. Overall user goal: I want to go on holiday

The overall user goal is one that will get people to your website in general, but not specific enough to dive into the details. In the case of a holiday website you’d want people to come to your website and immediately understand that here they can find stuff that enables them to reach this goal. By filling in the motivators and facilitators in the model you get an idea what you need to focus on. Users need to get a quick feeling that the facilitors are there, but it’s the motivators that you need to use to create the atmosphere. So in this case you can imagine a homepage with images of far away places, happy family pictures and copy that talks about being free and away. This is an ideal way to make clear decisions what is important on the website, because the motivators can be many things. It’s not just the ones I mentioned, but can also be ‘get a great deal,’ ‘have an adventure’ or ‘meet interesting people.’ In fact, the motivators that you focus on on this overall level should be linked to the strategy, they define the theme of the website (see: ‘Aristotle’s Storytelling Framework for the Interactive Products‘). Motivators: be free, enjoy the family, see the world Facilitators: get inspiration, find a place to travel to, find a good deal, book the holiday, …

2. User goal: I want to book this specific hotel

Somebody went through the website and found a great hotel that he wants to go to with his wife. In almost all cases you’ll pass through a series of forms. These kind of flows have a tendency to focus primarily on usability issues, but keeping the user motivated is just as important. When we put the goal in the center we find the practical form steps as facilitators, they should be there and work without trouble. Again the motivators are the most important aspects. The user is booking the hotel because of multiple reasons, for example ‘A romantic weekend away with the wife,’ ‘It’s a super deal’ or ‘This is the cute hotel we always wanted.’ You can already guess what I am going to say next; it’s the motivators you should put on the front. If it’s a super deal, show it on every step of the booking process. If the booking date is around valentine’s day, make it romantic. And at least always show a picture of the hotel room and the price, since that was in itself a motivation to book it.

3. User goal: I want to sign up for the newsletter.

You can use the model for big issues, but also for very small ones. For many teams it has been a great way of understanding how to make certain features on a website appeal to users. Take for example the newsletter sign-up. How many times haven’t you had a discussion with a client about the fact that people don’t want to sign up for a newsletter just for the sake of the newsletter itself? And there are many similar issues like these around. By putting the goal ‘Signing up for a newsletter’ in the center of the model you can easily let a client discover what the real motivator for people is to sign up, like ‘Be the first to get good deals’ or ‘Automatically receive monthly articles’.

To conclude

This model was designed to create a simple tool that enables us to make decisions on any level in the process. It’s an easy way to explain to other designers what they should focus on in their design. I’ve also used this model in workshops with web editing teams for different clients. It gave them an hands-on way of approaching the content of the site, helping them to understand what they should focus on when writing text for specific pages or how to set up a flow.

Recently we had a chance to talk to Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and researcher. She is the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research. We talked with her about social research, myths, design research and several other interesting subjects.

Dianna Miller: I heard you speak a year or so after you joined Intel about the home studies your team conducted in China.  Can you talk about how Intel envisioned the contribution of social research in 1998 when you started there? How has it changed over time?

Genevieve Bell: The impulse to hire social scientists generally—and anthropologists in particular—arose in the 1990s at Intel as markets the company had traditionally served changed and grew beyond recognition. If you can remember back that far (it seems forever ago), it was a time when the PC was starting to move from office and work functions into the home. It wasn’t precisely clear what people would do with computers during this shift. Intel hired social scientists to help explore what might happen. In the vernacular of my office at the time, it was all about “finding new users and new usages” for technology.  We looked at emerging middle-class households in urban Asia and their complicated relationships to new information and communication technologies; we studied health-care providers, in homes and hospitals, and mapped their uses of digital devices and analog ones; we studied classrooms and televisions, teenagers and families with small kids. We spent a lot of time educating and engaging the engineers and other decision makers about what life was like beyond the walls of the company – it was exhilarating and exhausting.

These days I have a new research group at Intel – Interaction and Experience Research. Comprised of nearly one hundred researchers, running the gamut from ethnographers and interaction designers to computer scientists and physicists, my group is charged with reinventing how we experience computing. As Justin Rattner, my boss and Intel’s Chief Technology Officer likes to point out, we are “already late,” by which he means our relationships with computing are long due for an overhaul. We have a strongly interdisciplinary approach that shapes everything from framing questions to the projects we tackle and how we choose to share our thinking. Currently, we are exploring changing notions of storytelling and social participation; charting the shift in use of cameras, phones, and televisions; and hacking the latest screens, printers, and sensors to see what we can make with them, just to name some of our work.

DM: In your book, “Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing,” you and Paul Dourish discuss the distinction between the mythology that has shaped values and vision in ubiquitous computing, and the messiness of everyday experience. What are examples of these myths and messes, and why is it important for designers to understand both?

GB: Oh, such a good question. As an anthropologist, I also think about this as the difference between cultural ideal and cultural practice. In either case, there are many examples. Take security. We design systems to keep systems safe and people write their passwords on bits of paper stuck to their systems. So, is it that people don’t care about security or is that the security we are designing is securing the wrong things? Or, are they just securing them in the wrong ways? Clearly we know that people care about the security of their homes, their possessions, their digital selves, but they adopt a range of patterns for doing it that are incredibly messy, complicated, and contradictory. Not to mention that in other cultural traditions beyond the west, sometimes it is not as much about security as it is about courting good fortune, about diminishing the barriers to good fortune finding you. What does a system look like that courts good fortune or allows security to be about writing passwords on post-it notes?

DM: On the subject of messiness, designers are stepping up to challenges that address cultural, technological, and political complexity. We’re not only collaborating with other disciplines, but our work itself is becoming transdisciplinary. What do you see as the strengths and limitations of the designer’s contribution? What do we need to be aware of?

GB: I think our biggest challenges (and opportunities) are about creating the possibilities of collaboration. For me, that means we need to invest in making our work, our methods, and our insights intelligible to the broadest possible base. Being transdisciplinary means committing to work across disciplines and across cannons and methodologies. It means we have to be generous and genuine and always committed to moving the conversation forward. I suspect it also means that what we do will necessarily grow and evolve, which is great. We can learn from all our encounters and improve what we do. And, I think it also means we need to let go of the memories of every time it didn’t work well in the past. I don’t mean to be a Pollyanna, but I think we have to look forward with hope and optimism.

DM: What new skills and knowledge should interaction designers who’ve been focused on screen-based projects be developing now to design for smart objects and environments?

GB: I think there is a lot to be gained for reading the work in material culture from neo-Marxism through the Manchester School and the various American reinterpretations of cultural studies. There is much to be gained from the theoretical perspectives that have been rehearsed in that body of work. I think we need to continue to privilege thinking holistically. Even if you are not designing for the whole system or the whole environment, I suspect you need to understand it. For me, that means we also need to attend to ideas of power, both social and political, as it has much to do with these news spaces we find ourselves exploring.

DM: What new tools and methods is your team exploring to study emergent behavior and relationships between space, infrastructure, culture, and experience?

GB: Most excitingly for me, we have been experimenting with processual and post-processual archaeology and returning to a material culture bent. We have been excavating cars of late, in the classic archaeological sense. It’s been fascinating to think about the flow and traces of objects that are in those cars, move through them, and stubbornly resist materializing there.

DM: Which areas of research do we still need to put more focus on?

GB: I think we have a great deal more work to do, which is good because I like research. We have spent a lot of time focusing on the obvious and the obviously sexy stuff – mobility, gaming, social networks, and of course the individual and youth. We have, as a consequence, neglected the other stuff of daily life – religion, spirituality, love, child-care, anyone over 40, who does the dishes, who puts out the recycling, community, the nation-state, changing ideas of citizenship.

DM: There are still development organizations that are hesitant to invest in design research partly because they perceive it as either too time-consuming or expensive. What advice do you give to experience design teams that are attempting to convince their organization of the value of social research and generative design methods?

GB: I think you need stubbornness and patience in equal parts. It takes time and a lot of repeated conversations. After all, this is about organizational change and that tends to come slowly.

Interaction 12

Genevieve Bell will be one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 12. It is the fifth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Dublin, Ireland.

The Surgeon General of the United States says that “youth violence is an ongoing, startlingly pervasive problem.” Despite the fact that “the majority of aggravated assaults, robberies and rapes are never reported to the police,” one out of every 3,000 youths aged 10-17 are arrested for serious violent crimes – homicide, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault – each year. While the predictive risk factors include family aspects we might all expect – low socioeconomic status, poor parent-child relations, broken home – many of the individual risk factors apply only to males and the most predictive risk factor of all in this troubling laundry list is simply “being male”.

By now you are surely wondering, “Um, isn’t this supposed to be an interaction design publication?” Yes, of course, it is. But the domain relevant to digital products that is most important, least understood, and represents the greatest opportunity for remarkable growth and advance is the degree to which we understand our users.

To be sure, a focus on users is nothing new. In computing devices it dates back at least to the long-standing Scandinavian tradition of cooperative design, later applied to IT artifacts around 1970. There is an entire subculture in the digital design community built around the idea of user-centered design. Memes about narrative, storytelling and ethnography punctuated the 2000s, and we generally believe we have refined, evolved framing and methods for considering users as part of the product development equation.

Hardly.

Divining Human Understanding

Going back to my opening about the epidemic of violent crime in young males, how well do we understand that problem? It is certainly recognized as a problem, by the highest governmental authorities. A litany of risk factors and predictive models exist, so people more likely to participate in violent crime can be identified by parents and teachers and kept track of as they wind their way through adolescence and young adulthood. Yet, as a society, we dismiss such perpetrators as criminals, animals, evil and inherently bad. We do this despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that their gender – a coin toss at birth – and socio-familial situation are the drivers behind their destructive behaviour.

Let’s break those two things down: why gender? To better understand that we need to learn a little about endocrinology, the field of medicine focused on our hormones. Androgen is the term for hormones that stimulate and control the development and maintenance male characteristics, including those in the Surgeon General’s laundry list of risk factors. There is a long history of castration in human cultures all around the world, as even before the science behind it was understood, people learned that men without testes were far less aggressive. Enlightenment era heroThomas Jefferson even created legislation in the state of Virginia after the Declaration of Independence was signed making castration the punishment of choice for a handful of crimes. The amount of testosterone production varies widely from one man to another, and indeed those who are – from the standpoint of modern civilization – cursed with very high levels of testosterone are far more likely to prove unable to stay within the behavioural bounds dictated by our society.

Another critical discipline for understanding behavioural differences by gender is neuroscience. Like most of the United States sick care system, the preponderance of investment in and attention to neuroscience has to do with the work of neurologists, curing brain tumors and other diseases. But it is also the field that best understands from a mechanical perspective how and why we function. Male aggression is actually one of the more complex dynamics within the brain, involving all of the amygdala, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, hippocampus, septal nuclei and periaqueductal grey of the midbrain. While the complexity of each of these disparate brain factors’ impact on male aggressiveness is beyond the bounds of this article, needless to say there is a startling amount of science and real understanding into mapping observable brain structure, condition and operation to many critical human behaviours, male aggressiveness that leads to violent crime being only one.

Now, let’s consider the other main group of predictive risk factors for violent behaviour, socio-familial background. As just one example, MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan have done wonderful work on the psychology of why people can’t escape poverty. In a nutshell, they illustrated that since buying small, everyday comforts is far more costly to the poor than to the wealthy – representing a substantially larger proportion of their net worth – that poverty limits free will and in the process has a resultant drain on one’s overall willpower. Needing to make tough decisions and sacrifices much more frequently than their more affluent neighbours makes it far more likely that the poor will have willpower issues in other contexts. Such as, say, testosterone-fueled moments that spiral out of control. These are economists, studying issues of psychology and sociology, deconstructing behaviour in remarkably insightful ways.

While socio-economic status is only one vector of the socio-familial milieu, the example highlights the ample research and science which illuminates the conditions that finally culminate in serious violent crime. And it underscores an important point: while some criminals might be “bad” in some objective way, many of these criminals are simply very unfortunate people who are victims similar to those they’ve victimized: they happened to be born male, they happened to have high testosterone levels, they happened to be born into poor or broken families. Armed with this knowledge, surely we as a society can do better?

Truly Understanding Users

I’ve chosen the issue of serious violent crime in young males as my example because it nicely applies to all of the five sciences that should be essential learning to anyone serious about understanding users: endocrinology, neuroscience, economics, psychology and sociology. In each of these, crucial pieces of the human behavioural puzzle are provided:

• Endocrinology: the study of the endocrine system which secretes hormones into the bloodstream and regulates the body;
• Neuroscience: the study of the central nervous system which uses neurons to coordinate our actions;
• Economics: the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services – crucial to the understanding of individuals in a fiercely capitalistic, free market society;
• Psychology: the study of people and groups in order to best understand them;
• Sociology, the study of a society in order to best understand that society and its inhabitants.

Needless to say that the role of some of the more social sciences on this list – particularly psychology – are already seen as having a role in successful user studies and understanding. However, the preponderance of research and publications on user studies deal more with principals and practices of the discipline and less with understanding the users themselves, much less in a deep, multi-disciplinary scientific way. The future of design will belong to those who are able to untangle what people do and why, even those who can predict and understand – using a scientific basis – what people are likely to respond to and why and how, as opposed to simply making gut decisions.

As it is a fairly straightforward matter to untangle the objective dynamics behind serious violent crimes in young males using these approaches, imagine the impact you can have on your product, service, company, market or even society if you have the vision, rigor and discipline to start truly unpeeling that most complex and layered of onions, ourselves.

Interaction 12

Dirk Knemeyer will be one of the presenters at Interaction 12. It is the fifth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Dublin, Ireland.

I’ve been watching two trends recently in the realm of digital product development. First is the incorporation of gaming concepts into products that seemingly have nothing to do with gaming. Second, the importance of designing products that are not only easy to use but a pleasure to use.

To be sure, these trends aren’t new. My point is not to shed yet more light on what we already know. Rather, the potential impact of these trends as they go mainstream is significant for UX designers– our skills are becoming strategic rather than tactical.

Let me explain. A wireframe is a tactical output that (hopefully) partially fulfills a strategic direction for a system. But working with a product manager to figure out how to incorporate gaming concepts into a product moves us, the UX designers, in a strategic direction. This changes the opportunities in front of us as designers. The term I use to encapsulate these opportunities is “digital product strategy.”

What is digital product strategy?

Product strategy binds business strategy to product management. Marty Cagan put it nicely in a April 2009 blog post: “Think of it this way. The business strategy and business portfolio planning provides a budget and a set of business metrics. The product organization then lives within that budget to pursue as aggressively as possible the best ways to hit those business metrics.”

Product strategy (let alone digital product strategy) is a relatively unused term – no Wikipedia article exists as of yet, and it ranks fairly low as a competitive keyword (at least as I write this). As such, there’s not a lot of consensus as to what it encompasses. So, I’ll provide my thoughts with an emphasis on products that are digital by design – they make heavy use of software as part of their interaction model or delivery mechanism.

To me, a good digital product strategy brings together seven areas of expertise:

1. Market/industry expertise: A deep understanding of the domain you are engaged with;
2. User expertise: Engagement with actual or potential users of the product;
3. Competitive expertise: Commitment to finding “sustainable differentiation” – the “secret sauce” that cannot be easily copied;
4. Related-Industry expertise: Engagement with other industries or markets that you can learn from to create a better product for your industry
5. Design expertise: knowing how to make a product easy and fun to use with the latest design techniques for many different devices
6. Technology expertise: Knowing what is technically possible today and in the future and the devices that make sense
7. Business expertise: Knowing how the product will fit into the operational realities and capabilities of the business

Here’s an example, I have been working with a customer over the last few years to help them introduce a direct business-to-business channel alongside their traditional distributor-based model. The main channel became an e-commerce website, and our “product strategy” was about achieving parity with two main competitors. From a digital product strategy perspective, the website became the primary delivery mechanism for a tangible product, and thus a huge part of the product UX.

As we emerged from the parity phase, we consciously moved to an innovation phase. What once appeared as “solutions” in the first phase – an e-commerce website – looked like a limitation when we focused on the market and the users from this new perspective. Customers were using the website during lunch hours, and we knew that they were walking from the storage cabinet to the PC with written notes about what they need to restock. These two things pointed to a fundamental inconvenience in usability. This inconvenience couldn’t be fixed by a more usable website, however. It was a great opportunity for a mobile application with a bar code reader for replenishing inventory.

Had our product strategy remained focused on the website, we would have run repeated usability tests to fine tune the features, and we would have continued to focus on competitors to keep up with new features. The idea of a mobile app that really addresses that fundamental inconvenience wasn’t possible until we shifted our perspective. By combining our knowledge of the market, the users, existing technology capabilities, and design expertise, an innovation became imaginable. A new product is conceived that can move into the more traditional product management processes.

Product Strategy and User Experience Design

The example above points out how UX design is a strategic skill. As the realization of business strategies become more dependent on the development of digital products (or products that make heavy use of digital technologies), the UX designer offers the unique combination of:

1. How to understand the real life of users;
2. The capabilities of technologies and devices;
3. How to make something easy and fun (or at least really convenient) to use—three of the seven areas of expertise I described above.

This moves us closer to business strategy and simultaneously requires a change in our deliverables. In an earlier article, I discussed how the requirement is a “somewhat strange and antiquated way to capture what a software system is supposed to do.” We have to develop new deliverables to replace the requirement as the first and best way to express the system we want to design. Conceptual wireframes, sketches, storyboards, and user models (like the famous Flickr model) are more appropriate deliverables for product strategy work. Companies that consciously do product strategy as a discipline know this, but there’s plenty of opportunity left in the mainstream projects many of us work on each day.

As such, we supplement the work of the CTO, whose job is to set a technical direction. Martha Heller describes this role well: “… the digital product groups hire a CTO, who designs and executes against the digital product roadmap.” In other words, the CTO is the technical expertise part of digital product strategy, while UX design is the easy-and-fun-to-use part and the knowledge-of-real-users part.

UX Design, Product Strategy and Gaming

A new opportunity exists for the UX designer as gaming concepts become part of product strategy. Who else is better equipped than the UX designer to bring this discipline to the table?
To decide that a product is going to be structured as a game rather than, for instance, a document sharing system is a strategic product decision, not a tactical one. When we start thinking about incorporating gaming concepts into our products to increase engagement, we’re making fundamental decisions about our products.

A lot of people are talking about gamification of digital systems. I could choose any number of people to quote about the fundamental structures of good games and how they can be applied to digital products. I like the succinctness that Jane McGonigal provides, so I’ll use her definition: “When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.”

There are two conclusions to draw from this for UX design:

1. These are not simply features we add into our digital products; they invite us to think about our products in a fundamentally new way;
2. The UX designer is the best equipped discipline to bring the full force of these concepts to the product strategy conversation.

Blending these traits into an engaging and compelling UX – that is fundamental to the product itself – is really what the UX designer is equipped to do. That companies are now getting on board with the engaging power of gamification in formerly utilitarian software systems yields lots of opportunities for our once tactical discipline to become strategic.