Innovation Begins with Real People

If you are trying to innovate and are looking for new ideas and insights for new products or services, nothing proves more useful and fruitful than getting out of the office and out from behind the computer, then immersing yourself in the World outside. Where real people live and work. Go to where your customers and potential users are.

The art of seeing and observing people with an open mind and especially recording those observation with good ethnographic techniques, such as video, diaries and in person interviews. Makes you more aware of existing pain points, that can be fixed and improved upon. It can also fuel new ideas for things that can be introduced and created to improve peoples lives and make your services and products better and easier to use. Techniques such as participant observations where you try for yourself what others have to go through, will give you incredible first hand experience of what people do and how they do it. Living with a customer for a day or watching them use your service or product without prompting can be incredibly insightful, about what is lacking, and where improvements can be made. The data and information your gather can fuel many insightful innovations.

This you cannot gain from sitting at a computer and just assuming what people do in the outside World, where noise and distraction can occur. You cannot even always believe what people say they do, you sometimes are best seeing them do it and then trying it for yourself. Then you can better empathize and really begin to use design to solve and build something with a clear purpose for improvement. Designers are incredibly adept at solving problems and coming up with innovative solutions, sadly though their focus is not always finely tuned to the exact problem they are solving or they are tasked with the wrong problem to solve by their clients. Getting them out of the office and educating your clients that can hide behind their data from focus groups gets you closer to problems and ideas that really need fixing, inventing or improving.

Doodling in meetings is a good thing

Drawing skills are an important skill for any designer, but especially for user experience design.

Whenever you attend a client meeting you should automatically start doodling, and ideally get up to the whiteboard and capture the moment visually for all to see. People tend to talk in abstracts and your job as a user experience facilitator is to help not only the client solidify their goals but help the team you work with understand the vision. So why doesn't this happen more? Well most people's first reaction to being asked to draw anything is "oh I am not good at that, I do stick figures only". Well guess what they work too.



Here are a couple of considerations of how you might go about capturing user experiences with sketches.

Firstly loose the detail. Yes people and hands are difficult to draw and we all struggle with them if you try to capture the details. If you think of people as stick people. It gets a lot simpler. Take for example these examples from Austin Kleon about how to draw faces. Communicating an idea doesn't need a Michelangelo rendering to get the point across.

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Simplicity is key to communication, especially in meetings and when using a white board, because after all as your sketching you meant to be listening to the client speak and be ready to step back into the conversation. Anything longer than a couple of minutes work is probably too detailed and missing something simple about the concept you are capturing. Sometimes it is unnecessary to draw complete people, just hands work or a close up of a face. Just drawing objects helps, especially in UX where devices are just boxes(think the black brick that is every mobile phone), this means that you can convey a moment of interaction by doing a close up of the device and maybe just a hand gripping it. Again think cartoon style, I would even say that like Disney only use 3 fingers to represent a hand, it works fine it has enough information to express action.

 


These are the types of sketches you need to be practicing when you are doodling, these basic drawing techniques. Think of a action like holding a phone and try and draw it on your note pad. Think how you might draw a gesture such as waving, or pointing, action arrows help a lot in capturing motion. Study how others draw storyboards. I find that thinking about people as Lego figures helps, I always find that these simple characters can capture a whole host of interactions just by playing with poses and making a small additions to what they hold and how their faces look. People don't get represented much simpler than this, plus if you use the real Lego's you can practice drawing what you see.





What is critical about these drawing skills is to use them to help remind all in the room of the discussion that took place and allow people to review them at their leisure during the communication. Also, their value is in the storytelling of the experiences and touch points with end users and consumers. It gives you something to capture and share at the end of a meeting that helps everyone remember some of what was discussed, more than just a bullet list of notes. I always try my best to do more drawing in meetings and I think all designers should have the skills to draw what they are talking about as part of the communication process.

Brand experiences not products

I think we all believe that life's experiences are more important to us than the material possessions that we own. Well Susan Weinschenk recently wrote about the research that Carter and Gilovich did to prove out this idea and they uncovered some valuable ideas.

Their research looked to uncover why we value experiences over possessions. They proved that people use experiences to define their sense of self. People prefer to talk about themselves in terms of experiences rather than what they own. This can be thought of as part of our life story we carry around with us. People it seems prefer to talk about purchasing items through the experiences they have with it, rather than the material ownership of the product.

Knowing people by what they have experienced and how they use a product is more likely to give us a greater insight to the person than what they bought. Our memories associated with an object make that object more valuable and satisfying when the association is positive.

So with this in mind Susan put forward these considerations for products and experiences.

• If you are marketing a product, put emphasis on what experiences you will have with it rather than what it will look like/feel like/ be like to own it.
• If you are collecting purchasing info about target clients (as has been in the news lately with questions about privacy) you’d be better off to know what people’s purchases imply about the experiences they are having rather than just inferring from the data what they own.
• The user experience of a product is more important than we think. It’s not just the idea that the product should be easy to use/ interesting. The EXPERIENCE part of user experience is not just a fancy word to use. People remember and evaluate, and even cherish experiences, even with technology.
• Customers may resonate more with a brand if they can get a sense of what the organization has DONE, not just what products or services they sell.

Applying Positive Emotions to Technology

A wonderful story of how the people at GE realized that their technology was being used by people in hospital often in difficult circumstances and with a lot of intimidation and fear about the unknown. This is especially true of the children in the children's hospital at Pittsburgh under going repeated treatment. The question was why does something that can help you have to be so clinical and scary?


The insight was to make the treatment more like an adventure for the kids. This was a wonderful approach to taking something that is highly scientific and necessary, down to a level that works for the people that have to use it. The results are stunning and a great example of how design can reach beyond the function of technology to create something very emotional and touching for those involved.


"The focus of the Adventure Series is to provide successful distraction therapy that will appeal to all five senses. Three-dimensional decorative elements were created for an enhanced viewing effect, and lights, sounds, and aromatherapy were added to create a one-of-a kind experience for each and every patient. "


Doug Dietz, Principal Designer, GE Global Design and one of the originators of the Adventure Series says.


“We did simple things that get overlooked,” he says. “I mean, some of the most effective insights we got came from kneeling down and looking at rooms from the height of a child.”


“Our first design session was actually in a daycare,” says Dietz. “We knew we had to come at this from a different perspective.”

Kathleen Kapsin, director of the Pediatric Radiology Department at Children’s Hospital, agrees.

“All of our equipment is very high-tech,” she says. “We can get you great images, but we can’t get them if the child isn’t laying still and feeling well enough to go through the scan.”

“We now have an elaborate way of almost pulling off a theme park,” she says, referring to the outfitted rooms.

Measuring Usability - SUS Questionaire

Producing interfaces and software experiences always produces questions of usability. Is something ultimately usable by the end user, are they able to better perform their task, be more efficient and are they more satisfied with the interactions. These questions are the goal of usability studies, throughout the design process. The problem however is firstly the amount of money, effort and time needed to perform a through usability study with a diverse user base, but the other problem is interpreting the results accurately to know what fixes are worth making and what works and what doesn't.

One system that attempts to addresses these questions in an optimized way is the System Usability Scale (SUS), published by John Brooke about 20 years ago, that asks 10 simple questions that require a rating from 1-5. It is based on the Likert scale questionaire. The questions are outlined here that gives results for overall usability and user satisfaction index. This site goes into greater depth, on the subject.

The System Usability Scale

The SUS is a 10 item questionnaire with 5 response options. 

1. I think that I would like to use this system frequently.
2. I found the system unnecessarily complex.
3. I thought the system was easy to use.
4. I think that I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this system.
5. I found the various functions in this system were well integrated.
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system.
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly.
8. I found the system very cumbersome to use.
9. I felt very confident using the system.
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system.

The SUS uses the following response format:

 

Scoring SUS

• For odd items: subtract one from the user response.
• For even-numbered items: subtract the user responses from 5
• This scales all values from 0 to 4 (with four being the most positive response).
• Add up the converted responses for each user and multiply that total by 2.5. This converts the range of possible values from 0 to 100 instead of from 0 to 40.

Interpreting these results it is important to understand that these are not a percentage, even though they are in the range 0-100. 

While it is technically correct that a SUS score of 70 out of 100 represents 70% of the possible maximum score, it suggests the score is at the 70th percentile. A score at this level would mean the application tested is above average. In fact, a score of 70 is closer to the average SUS score of 68. It is actually more appropriate to call it 50%.  

When communicating SUS scores to stakeholders, and especially those who are unfamiliar with SUS, it's best to convert the original SUS score into a percentile so a 70% really means above average.


An example of calculation and table.

How to score the SUS

After collecting the data go into the next step to grade usability.

a. Replace each answer with a number from 0 to 4.

Specifically, for questions 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 the score contribution is:

• Strongly Disagree = 0
• Disagree = 1
• Not sure = 2
• Agree = 3
• Strongly Agree = 4

For questions 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 the score contribution is the opposite:

• Strongly Disagree = 4
• Disagree = 3
• Not sure = 2
• Agree = 1
• Strongly Agree = 0

b.  Add scores and multiply total by 2.5.  Calculate the mean to find the score.  The total score should end up with a range between 0 and 100.  The highest the score the more usable the website is.

Any value around 60 and above is considered as good usability.


The SUS should never be a substitute for good user testing and techniques. It is a low cost technique that can be used in parallel with user testing and enhance/validate the results.

Successful Crowdsourcing Requirements

As part of a project I am working on at the moment I am thinking carefully about how it might benefit from crowdsourcing the content for the site. I can't talk too much about the project right now, but I can share my discoveries about crowdsourcing so far. As I mentioned in a previous post I recently read the book by Jeff Howe, and in a previous post I had found a few key motivators to crowdsourcing on the web. Jeff, kindly puts a summary at the end of his book that extends this list, with the following observations that he made on crowsourcing and what makes it work. His key discoveries for successful crowdsourcing include:

Picking the right model. 

As outlined in his book, which I don't plan to repeat fully here I suggest you buy and read it yourself, he talks about the different models of crowdsourcing that exist, including crowd creation, collective intelligence and crowd voting. Each of these has different goals and needs from the crowd, and some projects require one of these approaches and some require all three.

Pick the Right Crowd.

Picking the right group of minds to tap into is of course important to any endeavor as you want to have the product of their efforts to be inline with your needs and goals.

Offer the right incentives.

offering the right incentives of course falls inline with the right crowd and right model. Some crowds are inspired and work to impress peers and some work to make money, each crowd can be motivated by different things, so it is important to know what motivates your crowd, and allow those motivations to shine and work in your site.

Don't assume the crowd is your new workforce.

It seems that it is easy to fall into the mindset that crowdsourcing is going to save you time and effort and reduce the need for fulltime employees. But as Jeff explains, often the content they produce needs guidance, and filtering, by someone professional in the area of the crowds domain. Crowds also don't always show loyality if they feel cheated and any attempt to think of them as substitute works will back fire.

Dumbness of crowds or the benevolent dictator

This is an extension of the previous principle, crowds are not always very good at self organizing and often need guidance from a guide, or principle that helps focus the crowds efforts.

Keep it simple

The way to think about crowds is to see them as many different people with many different skills and more importantly with various amounts of time available to work on their projects. So as such breaking problems or tasks that are of different sizes ideally smaller the better, is more likely to yield results. Those that have an hour to spare can use it, and those that have 5 mins can also take part in the collaborative efforts.

Sturgeons Law

This is simply that most of the content(+90%) that people of such varing degrees of ability will produce will be less than satisfactory. But 10% will be amazing and above average. The task of course is to get as many people invloved as possible to increase the amount of great work produced.

10% Rule to aid Sturgeons Law

Allow the crowd to sort through the content themselves voting the best up to the top and allowing the bad items to fall to the bottom of the fish tank. The 10% concept comes from the view, of Bradley Horowitz that approximately 1% of a crowd produces something, 10% votes and comments on it and 90% will just consume it. So the 10% is a valuable asset to getting the best of the crowd.

The community is always right.

This simply suggests that the community can be guided, but in the end you are a follower to the crowds wants and desires. After all, if the community feels ignored or pushed, then they will just leave for something else.

Ask what you can do for the crowd.

It is important for crowd to be considered as individual people, they are going to have needs, wants and desires. Your job as a crowdsorcerer  is to put in place those things that address the crowds Maslow needs, if you want to really see success then work with the community you create.

So there you have it a nice summary of some considerations for crowdsourcing efforts. I have already begun to rethink how my project might benefit from some of this advice. Time will tell how successful it becomes. 

Personality Traits

When working on a project it is not uncommon to produce a persona, a persona is like a generalization of a group of people that can be reflected into one character that exhibits those common traits. It is often the result of user research. that looks at many working individuals in a specific task and considers what is common to them all. What things they share in motivation and emotional feeling in performing a task is important for user experience design. This can be very useful for planning next steps, for product or software development, as it helps to evaluate a feature or service against a list of people that might use the system. It can also help when rationalizing user experience design concepts, and bring the designs empathetic mind inline with the target user, when creatively conceptualizing. Personas are a very useful tool in the discovery stage of a project, especially if the project is going to move into the hands of a creative type that will need to empathize with a potential consumer or user.

When working on a persona, and when studying people for projects it is useful to think about personality traits and psychology has produce many fascinating studies in this area, that give a good foundation of knowledge to have in mind when working on products and concepts for people. Personality can greatly influence the way you might approach the problem. For example, making a product for an extrovert is vastly different than an introvert personality type, and if something requires any social interaction, then care must be taken to cater to the right crowd of personalities. The level of public display and private information people are willing to share and talk about will differ depending on target users and what the goal of the service or application is. People and their personalities are valuable information for any designer to understand.

A couple of my favorite summaries of personality include Myers-Briggs and OCEAN(the big 5).

Myers-Briggs breaks people's personalities up as follows:

Extraversion (E) -	(I) Introversion
Sensing (S) -	(N) Intuition
Thinking (T) -	(F) Feeling
Judgement (J) -	(P) Perception

These types can be combined into 16 possible combinations. Each would exhibit different personality traits and reflect a different type of person.

The other is the OCEAN, which stands for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The idea behind each of these classifications is that most people can be evaluated against these traits and from that you can make assumptions about how that person may behave under certain conditions and in in certain situations. Narcissists and extroverted people are good examples of extreme cases of personality types, that can be designed against.

Each of these classifications covers a broad set of people and all though of course everyone is an individual and will respond in context and situations differently, these documented personality types real help form a good impression of key personality types and help designers empathize with someone whom might be using their design.

These are only tools and in design of course we don't always want to restrict our end design to one type of person, but if you are looking for insight into behavior and characteristics then these two evaluation approaches really help.

For example, lets say we are designing for an extroverted personality type then here are some of the key characteristics they might portray versus an introverted personality.

• Extraverts are action oriented, while introverts are thought oriented.
• Extraverts seek breadth of knowledge and influence, while introverts seek depth of knowledge and influence.
• Extraverts often prefer more frequent interaction, while introverts prefer more substantial interaction.
• Extraverts recharge and get their energy from spending time with people, while introverts recharge and get their energy from spending time alone.

extraverted people tend to think and say things like

• I am the life of the party.
• I don't mind being the center of attention.
• I feel comfortable around people.
• I start conversations.
• I talk to a lot of different people at parties.

These notes would be very helpful in designing a product or service for people that exhibit very extroverted personalities. Or if you wanted to encourage more extroverted behavior from people then these would be important features to add to the experience to enhance those types of experience and personality types.

Crowdsourcing motivations

Came across this nice list of motivational concepts that help power crowdsourcing efforts. Found here. Seems  many of these are, of course, powered by psychological concepts on human motivation and engagement, but also interesting to note a few of them fall into the realms of game mechanics and gamification of tasks, such as, leaderboards and badges. Of course, it is no real surprise when you consider that fundamentally the crowd is the same group of people in both cases, only in a different context of effort.

1) Monetary Compensation: The company outlines what you need to do to make money. You do it. You make some money (the amount varies widely). Rinse and repeat.

2) Points and Rewards (Non-Monetary Compensation): You do something good or you contribute in a certain way and you get some quantifiable but not directly monetizable reward. Many companies have some type of “points”. Keeping score matters here (see below for more on this). Sometimes these rewards in the end are monetizable either by exchange (turning them in for prizes) or indirectly monetizable (using points to get access to more of the system).

3) Leaderboards and Competitive Standing: Many companies let you know where you stand against your peers. Leaderboards usually reflect you standing using some other form of motivation (earned money, earned points, badges, etc.). What’s key is that you understand from the physics of the system you’re using how to positively affect your leaderboard status. Leaderboards are always public. This plays to people’s desire to compete publicly.

4) Badges and Goal Completion: The system you work with defines levels of achievement or specific goals to complete and you are awarded something (even just a graphical badge) that denotes your accomplishments. Necessary in this motivation (like leaderboards) is that the badges are publicly viewable (this is the boy scout badges concept and is basically the way Zynga learned to dominate the social gaming industry) and a core part of Foursquare’s philosophy.

5) Reputation: The system has some mechanism (usually a combination of all the other things I mentioned above) to help you express to others (and self evaluate) what your reputation is in the system. Foursquare uses the Mayor concept, Zynga uses a ranking system for player titles and Mahalo uses a martial arts belt system. All of these approaches make it easy for someone to understand that someone has a general standing greater or less than them.

6) Community: You can participate in and communicate with a community of similar people interested in similar things.

7) Collaboration: You can work collaboratively with other people on something larger than you could create yourself and the results are publicly (or at least partially publicly) on display. Your group effort is visible.

In another blog post, here are are some of the suggested things we are learning about crowds.

What we’re learning about the crowd:

1)    The crowd needs information about itself. Game mechanics has included this mechanism publicly, in the form of leaderboards, because it encourages people to compete with each other.

2)    The crowd needs information about its goals. These goals are applicable at both at the individual level and the group level. This is a very subtle point because crowd mechanics gets interesting when some individuals in a crowd are hitting the goal – but some are not.

3)    The goals need to be realistic. At Trada, the goal is an advertiser’s CPA. If this CPA is simply unattainable (you can’t get a 50% conversion rate to sales for visitors are your website on a $1000 product) then everyone loses. We’re learning a lot about making sure the advertisers’ goals are achievable as part of the “social contract” that exists between the crowd and its patron.

4)    There need to be known group incentives that are substantive compared to individual incentives. For example, a “group win” should not pay someone 1/100th of what they make when they win individually. As much as possible, the group win should be more lucrative than an individual win.

5)    Group wins, like individual wins, must reinforce a very small set of core incentive principles. In Trada, the CPA is king and almost all the rewards, achievements and levels are a reflection of this. Group rewards must be based on and reinforce the same core incentive structure.

6)    Groups must be able to anonymously socially regulate themselves. We call this the “shoulder tap” – a mechanism where someone in a group can effectively say to someone anonymously “please check your work, it’s way above the goal”. This form of social regulation goes on all the time around us. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this from the ‘quiet car’ on an Amtrak train to NYC. A “shhh” on the quiet car is an example of social regulation and in most cases is anonymous enough that someone in the group is willing to do it.

7)    There must be a rules-based regulator that can be called to enforce group behavior.  Any group must know that there is a 3rd party regulator (e.g. the SEC, Wikipedia administrators, CJ’s network quality group) that has the power to enforce, in a non-subjective and rules based way, final arbitration policy when someone’s behaving badly in the group (including the patron – e.g. the advertiser – in our model).

As I dive deeper into crowdsourcing, I am curious about the future of global collaboration and people sharing problems and approaches to solving those issues, especially large problems around health, environment and technology. I also like the idea of diversity of minds to generate different angles of addressing the problem being tackled. I think crowdsourcing has the potential to change how people work together and work towards the future of innovation. Of course, I appreciate it is not going to work in all instances, but I do think that for content generation and sense of community around issues and knowledge it is proving to very powerful. This investigation will be on going.