IDEO, the Californian design company that is one of driving forces to make the term "design thinking" popular, is not just the only "consultancy" company on the list of the most innovative companies (see this list in BusinessWeek from 2006), they also know how translate the complex process of human-centered design into a easily understandable form that allows the message to be picked up by main stream media.

One of the first milestones was a clip on 60 Minutes in 1999, another the cover story "The Power of Design" (Download PDF)(which should more approriately been named "The Power of Design Thinking") in the BusinessWeek in 2004 and the latest one is an article in the Harvard Business Review.

For years the clip was only available as a small clip on IDEO’s homepage, but since recently you can watch the full segment on YouTube.

Here are the three segments:

 

 

 

Here are the links to the single videos:

Inside IDEO - Part 1

Inside IDEO - Part 2

Inside IDEO - Part 3

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Experience Design as a discipline becomes reality through the people and organizations that actually focus on designing experiences instead of just products and services. That’s why it is always interesting when companies share their experiences and knowledge about experience design.

Adobe recently launched a new website and publication with the name INSPIRE.

This site will help us get that message [about the importance of “experience” in application design] out. But we hope it will do more – that it will also be a valuable resource for everyone who visits. In addition to videos and articles about everything and anything related to experience design, you can also expect to find content produced for MAX, demos, presentations we give here at Adobe, interviews with industry leaders who visit us, and more. We chose to name the site Inspire because that’s what we hope all this content will do – inspire you, our colleagues, customers, and users.

If you have time you should also check out the video "Why are we doing this?" where Chris Heimbuch, XD Practice Lead, and Ty Lettau, XD Design Manager, discuss the whys and wherefores of Inspire.

The challenge of experience design in organizations

Ty Lettau also shares some of the challenges of experience design Adobe and in general in his post titled Why experience?

We have over a hundred designers, researchers, and developers all putting the experience first. This means that our priorities list contains a lot of stuff that isn’t tangible. Experience isn’t measurable. You can sort of evaluate it in the abstract or rely on users saying things like “it’s fun” or “that was easy,” but at the end of the day, there’s no chart that can be drawn to show experience metrics. And that’s the problem. If experience isn’t measurable, then how do we know what it costs? How do we value the cost of creating a good experience, and how do we know the cost of not doing so?

By contrast, Adobe has around 7000 employees. Save a few extra hundred who really understand and fight on behalf of the experience, this leaves roughly 6500 people who have priorities that are measurable. Shipping on time, being free of bugs, making profits, etc… Each of these agenda items is tangible. At the end of the day, these things can be measured with numbers and charts. Their cost is known. The costs of not shipping on time, or having to release a patch to fix a major problem, are clear.

I do not mean to suggest that these people and their agendas are wrong, or evil in any way. But those are terrible numbers to be stacked against when you cannot really defend your position. Experience design is much like a religious or political debate… Easy to assault, impossible to defend.

Frank statements from Adobe and the role of experience design within the organization. Is this a unique problem to Adobe? I don’t think so, but it also shows that even though experience design becomes prevalent in more and more organization a lot of questions remain:

• Where does experience design fit in an organization and how can you make it measurable?
• How can you measure the “process” of experience design and not just the “outcomes”?
• Do we need to measure the process at all?

I am trying to answer a few of these questions as part of my research, if you have an opinion about these topics, let me know in the comments.

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The Design Management Institute has just published an article titled “Unleashing the Power of Design Thinking” written by Kevin Clark, Program Director and Ron Smith, Brand Experience Strategist for IBM Corporate Marketing and Communications. While the magazine is fully accessible only for subscribers and members of DMI, this article (and others from previous issues) is available as a free download.

In the article the authors share their experience, a few examples and a case study about business projects where IBM actively pursued a design approach to develop solutions. Additionally they argue that designers should have a more influential role in today’s organizations.

In this call to action, Kevin Clark and Ron Smith posit that design professionals can and should take on leadership roles in nontraditional arenas. Their own efforts demonstrate that the ways in which designers address problems—leveraging emotional intelligence, integral intelligence, and experiential intelligence—offer organizations valuable insights across a diverse range of business activities and decision-making.

One of the practical examples that is presented in the article is about the out-of-box experience of newly delivered IBM systems:

The Corporate Experience Design and Systems and Technology Group Design formed a cross-functional team to study the out-of-box experience for recipients of newly delivered IBM systems. Professionals who normally didn’t have an opportunity to work closely together were trained in observational research and went out in “discovery teams” to see clients receive and set up their new large computing systems. They included professionals from engineering, finance, human factors, industrial design marketing, and market intelligence. Not only did they come up with lots of recommendations, but they also continued to collaborate after the project concluded. Building community and working across professional borders is an important residue of design thinking.

The article also includes a case study about the redesign of IBM’s Client Briefing Centers, here is a short excerpt:

The big “aha” was thinking about briefing centers not so much as places to be briefed as settings where a collaborative dialogue can take place. They became less about going to IBM University and more about clients visiting IBM at home. We needed to move from training our professionals less in presentation skills and more in listening and leading collaborative discussions. It is a different mindset, requiring different talent.

Read more about “Unleashing the Power of Design Thinking”.

Find more free articles from the Design Management Institute.

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Does coffee taste better when your coffee machine produces a particular sound? According to industrial designer Elif Özcan Vieira and the findings in her Ph.D. thesis, the sound a product makes is an integral part of that product.

The auditory experience of product users is not just "a sensory response to an acoustical stimulus." In fact, users contribute characteristics, such as trustworthiness or a high standard of quality, to products on the basis of the sounds they produce.

Product sounds influence our reasoning, emotional state, purchase decisions, preference, and expectations regarding the product and the product’s performance. Thus, auditory experience elicited by product sounds may not be just about the act of hearing or a sensory response to an acoustical stimulus (e.g., this is a loud and sharp sound). A complimentary and meaningful relationship exists between a product and its sounds.

The importance of sound design is probably most important for car designers as one article in the German magazine Spiegel illustrates (Komponisten des perfekten Klicks, translated version “Composers of the perfect click” via Google Translate).

Most car manufacturers employ armies of physicists and engineers in the field of sound-engineering, to design all relevant sounds in the car according to the typical trademark sound. In times when cars are becoming increasingly silent, with the exception of sports cars, melodious sounds of indicators or closing doors are becoming increasingly important. The auto industry has recognized that even seemingly mundane sounds or noises are associated with feelings and not only shiny paintings.

It is estimated that between 2-5% of total development costs for a new car model go into sound design. Frederick Dudenhöffer, director of the Center Automotive Research says “Customers want to have an atmosphere, that signals, what brand he is driving. There are only few products besides cars, where emotions have such an big influence. When buying sports cars, 100% is about emotions.”

The importance of sounds can nowhere seen better than on the homepage of the premium brands, you can listen to a Porsche starting, accelerating and driving.

What are the implications for your business?

If car manufacturers spend 2-5% of their development budget on sound design, it is obvious that for a certain customer segments, remarkable customer experiences are created through “multi-sensory” experiences. Besides functionality, other aspects influence the customer experience through the different human senses – touch, smell, hearing, taste and sight. Only taste is a sensory experience that is difficult to design if you don’t sell food or drinks. All other sensory responses can be designed – and they contribute to the overall customer experience.

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The challenge in large organizations is that through an ever increasing division of work, less and less employees actually interact with customers. In small companies with only few employees, chances are high that every employee has to deal with customer every now and then. Think about an organization with tens of thousands of employees and the share of employees that actually interacts with customers significantly decreases.

As a consequence large organizations lose their customer-focus and struggle to improve their understanding of customer needs and requirements. The “silver bullet” is to get closer to the customer by spending time on the “front-line” and interact with customers. But how much time should employees spend on the front-line? And even more important, how much time should the CEO of an organization spend with customers?

John A. Quelch, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, recently asked this question and he states that it is important for CEOs to find a balance between time spent on the outside versus time spent on the inside, but there are situations when time is spent better on the inside than on the outside.

In a service business like Tesco’s, the health of the brand depends heavily on the quality of the millions of daily transactions between shoppers and staff. Motivating the front-line personnel is critical. But in the pharmaceutical business, the key to success is not customer intimacy but product innovation; the CEO will need to spend time with his chief scientists, medical opinion leaders, government regulators, and CEOs of the companies distributing pharmaceuticals, but not so much time with end consumers. And, if cost minimization is the focus of the business strategy, it’s not necessary for the CEO to spend time learning how different clients would prefer customized solutions.

If you still need to get closer to customers but need to limit the time spent with customers, Prof. Quelch identified three strategies that can help to overcome this problem. I am not happy with two of these since they reflect the solution to all customer and marketing oriented problems – growing the right (customer oriented) talent and investing in uncovering customer insights. Nevertheless one strategy was something unconventional: the definition of customer health lead indicators.

First, the CEO should spearhead the identification of three or four customer health metrics that are leading indicators of sales or profit performance. These metrics should not be off-the-shelf standbys such as customer satisfaction (which, in any case, is a lagging indicator): they must be specific to the strategy of the business. Company scores on these metrics may be benchmarked against direct competitors and/or outstanding companies in other industries.

The question what could be a useful leading indicator of customer health is difficult and cannot be answered in general for all industries. Lead Generation and associated costs is a high-potential area but too many factors affect this to give a one-for-all answer. Deloitte published an article about Leading Indicators and they have identified a set of indicators for different sizes of organizations.

The research has uncovered that [the 56 high-growth companies in this study] overwhelmingly use “leading indicators”, or metrics that act as predictors of future success. They use them to monitor their progress towards goals. They use them to shape short-term strategy and adjust longer-term objectives. They use them to achieve balance between productivity and growth. The research has extracted some notable insights. For example, the vast majority of leading indicators are industry specific. Additionally, customer-specific leading indicators are important for all companies, across all industries, and across all size segments. As confirmed in most discussions, these indicators are often the toughest to create and maintain.

This study gives an overview about a set of leading indicators, a few of them might be transferable to your company or department. One should remember that simply spending “more“ time with customers and measuring “lagging indicators” of customer health is not enough for a successful customer-oriented organization.

Read more about “How Much Time Should CEOs Devote to Customers?” from Prof. Quelch.

Read more about “Leading Indicators - Gain the foresight you need about tomorrow to better run your business today” from Deloitte.

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