Focus on Experiences,not Products

Joel Eden

B.S. Computer Science, PhD Info Science/Human-Computer Interaction, Drexel(before that…GED at 16, Camden County College)

Current: Senior User Experience Product Manager, Checkpoint Systems

Past:

Design Researcher, Google

Senior Interaction Designer, Disney Animation Studios (Frozen, Big Hero 6)

Director of User Experience, 21st Century Insurance…and many other User Experience jobs

Research Engineer, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs

My background

Provoke people to discover wonder

My Why

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

And what you do simply proves what you believe.

Experiences vs Products

Testing Experiences (Value)

My Thoughts on (the Future of) Design

Topics

Let’s sketch…get out your paper and pencil

Let’s sketch …get out your paper and pencil

Draw: Your phone

Let’s sketch …get out your paper and pencil

Draw: Your phone

Draw: Your phone’s user interface

Let’s sketch …get out your paper and pencil

Draw: Your phone

Draw: Your phone’s user interface

Draw: Your phone’s user experience

This is a product

This is a product, not an experience

More interesting view of a product, still not an experience

This is an experience!

This is an experience from the user’s perspective

Art (designer’s perspective) vs. Design (problem’s perspective)

Interactions happen over time therefore Interaction Design must consider the interaction aesthetics of use (not just visual):(all senses…sense of timing, sense of rhythm, sense of humor)

Experience aesthetics

This is a product, not an experience

All touchpoints/moments are part of the experience the experience is the real product in many ways

Prototype fidelities vs Experience fidelities

Too often “prototype” is taken to mean “build”

“A prototype is a question rendered as an artifact”–Scott Klemmer, PhD (teaches Coursera HCI course)

Typical Prototype fidelities-Visual (pencil sketch…Photoshop mock)-Interaction (paper prototype…real behavior)-Data (lorem ipsum…real data)

Instead, think about Experience fidelity:-How do we get people to have a target experience that we want to test, regardless of, or with the cheapest of material prototype fidelities?

So how can we represent experiences?

Representing Experiences – leverage story methods

Represent products/services as storiesAfter a long meeting, Anne pulls out her personal assistant to note a couple of items she needs to follow up on, confirm the location of her next meeting, and see if anything important has come up in the last couple of hours.

The PA shows her the subject and location of her nextmeeting, which is in 25 minutes. There’s also an indication that she has three messages marked urgent (including one from her boss), one message from a client whose messages she’s told the PA are top priority, and a dozen others that can probably wait.

Narrative Scenarios

Storyboards

Product as a person

Hyper-real (Disney/Pixar trick)believable futures

Lean…lean startup, lean UX, agile UX

“A startup is a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” –Steve Blank

“Lean Startup isn't about being cheap [but is about] being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.” – Eric Ries

“Lean is about continuously prioritizing and testing your riskiest assumptions as fast and as cheap as possible…always...not for a special week in a special room.” -Me

Lean (Startup) Build, Measure, Learn loop

But…

Goal is validated learning (loop around), as fast as possible.

Lean Loop – But, need to go backwards to plan experiments

1. What is my most important/riskiest hypothesis?

2. What would I need to see happen to (in)validate it?

3. What’s the fastest, cheapest, least effort thing I can make or do to test it (learn)?

Need to go backwards to plan experiments

1. What is my most important/riskiest hypothesis?

2. What would I need to see (data) to validate it?

That’s what MVP meant!!!!!not “Build”

3. What’s the fastest, cheapest, least effort thing I can make or do to test it (learn)?

Lean Canvas (1 page alternative to biz plan)(Business Model Canvas Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas My tweak)

Validate in numbered order

Defining experiments from hypotheses

Highest priority item gets tested(place smaller bets, on smaller batches)

Turn assumptions falsifiable hypotheses

www.slideshare.net/luxrco

Test what? Ash Maurya’s 3 stages of a startup

Offer MVP Product

Instead of MVP at first:Ash Maurya’s Offer: Unique Value Proposition, Demo of UVP, Exchange of Value

Lean Design

How can we test product and service design ideas earlier, faster and cheaper?

Test offers (value propositions) using storiesAfter a long meeting, Anne pulls out her personal assistant to note a couple of items she needs to follow up on, confirm the location of her next meeting, and see if anything important has come up in the last couple of hours.

The PA shows her the subject and location of her nextmeeting, which is in 25 minutes. There’s also an indication that she has three messages marked urgent (including one from her boss), one message from a client whose messages she’s told the PA are top priority, and a dozen others that can probably wait.

Narrative Scenarios

Storyboards

Your goal is to create value, not software, hardware, etc…so test value!Your value proposition is the intersection of your customer’s needs and your solution.

Pitching value

Should be analogous to feature film story artists, iterating and pitching (value) stories:-Our customers/users or the product/service are the heroes of these stories.

Experience Mapping (customer journey map, service blueprint, etc)

These can be ok for communicating current state, bridging into product/dev work, but not as good for exploring and testing value.

From Story to Building – Story Mapping

Story Mapping-Donna Lichaw

User Story Mapping-Jeff Patton

Value pipeline: from story to building

In feature animation, as scenes and shots are approved, they move further down the production pipeline, towards final rendering.-We can follow a similar process, keeping track of decisions and dependencies.

Pipeline hierarchy:•Discover Needs•Story (scenarios of use)•Interaction Framework•Interaction design (+ Visual, Industrial, etc)•Software engineering

Goal Directed Design (human centered design)

Goal Directed Design has valid, rigorous design research and interaction design methods…BUT, it’s a bit waterfallish, linear, ~dogmatic.

Personas Scenarios IxFrameworks, IxDesign

Lean Canvas (1 page alternative to biz plan)(Business Model Canvas Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas My tweak)

1st 4 boxes - Human Centered Design (same methods, but lean tweaks towards rapid experimental mindset)

Human Centered Design “poured into” Lean loop…

= Non-linear, lean human centered design (“pull” design efforts through as hypotheses require, not as dogma)

Now, there’s no difference between design and research…it’s all just experiments. Any act of “making” (what looks like “design”) is in the act of learning, so it’s both research and design, intertwingled.

Future of design: Story + Generative design

Using computation to augment (and replace) humans in the process of discovering and fulfilling needs (design)!

Wondertron(if you’re interested…story(boarding), design fiction, generative design, animation, augmented/virtual reality); Experimental Design meetup

Some references: