As a UX consultant, I get frustrated by clients and designers who think that user-centred research, particularly senior executive stakeholder interviews, is done simply to tick the box of, “I did some research”.
What really pains me is the comment, “Don’t worry, we’ve already done interviews with stakeholders and you don’t need to do it again”.
I always retort:
why did you do it?
what were you looking for?
what did you learn?
is it documented?
People miss the point of doing research with senior staff members of the organisation.
Of course, it’s about getting stakeholder buy in, but any one can do that. However, any new consulting project should have some forum where the team members hear the strategic issues, for themselves. Not just the biased version from the internal project team. Consultants need to build a picture of the organisation and identify opportunities; so that every design decision that flows from there on in meets the strategic business and personal needs of the client and, more importantly, their customers.
Also, don’t forget, doing this research also allows the stakeholders need to voice their opinion, without biasing their view because their fellow staff member is in the room.
User centred design is not about hearding cats for the sake of it. There’s a reason for every step and if you don’t know why your doing something, ask.
To me, “Viral” mostly conjures up bad feelings right? Computer virus, swine flu, bird flu, epidemic, pandemic.
So what is So good about a ‘viral’ social media marketing campaign? Are you trying to infect healthy people? or just sell them crap?
Let’s look at some campaigns that worked:
Target Bullseye Gives
Choose your own charity.
Ford fiesta
Ford gave 100 people a car for a while and let them tell everyone about their experience!
Dunkin Doughnuts
Free stuff - sustenance, prizes and notoriety!
Why?
You have to think ‘What is the intention of you marketing campaign?’ Is it just to sell stuff or is there some ‘good’ in it? Your campaigns will actually be successful if you’re:
Helping out
Target’s campaign is for charity
Dunkin donuts’ campaign worked as they have away stuff.
Providing a voice
Ford certainly gave their customers a voice by letting them sprout off about their cars!
Connecting people
Improving businesses
I was interested to see that Laurel Papworth’s Jan 09 list of cool social media campaigns from Australian organisations. They all ticked the boxes from my list above. It includes The Power House Museum, Aussie Defence Force, non-profits and retailers, plus they also
provided stimulation for people’s minds
raised people’s level of consciousness by making them think - educating them
If you are not aware of any useful things in your campaign, then it is probably wasting people’s time and not particularly successful or indeed sustainable. In fact under viral marketing on Wikipedia is actually states that ‘The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable!’
What a waste!
When I was at the recent iMedia Brand Summit in the Hunter Valley (loved it!) much of the conference covered social media and the ability to access huge numbers of people relatively easily BUT
The reality is that if you are doing it purely for sales or personal gain then you have missed the point. In essence a good campaign needs to add value to people’s lives by offering them something they need, or didn’t know they need, online. In this context it is about helping your customers. Make sure you are honest, well actually authentic is a better word.
Think about the ‘core’ message for your customers. What will give them an ah ha moment. Make them realise something that they had never thought of before, never knew.
Truth is, we all know that if we help someone the rewards come back in many many ways. It’s called Karma.
Imagine if all the technology that was ever built was made with users in mind? What would it be like?
More usable I hope?
Would we:
- all be richer?
- not waste time, daily?
- spend more time doing what we like?
- be happier at work?
- be more technically advanced than we are now?
- be more social?
- more connected?
- more controlled by Big Brother?
I know there is a certain amount of experimentation that needs to occur. But not experimentation on things that exist already elsewhere; that we have been doing for years.
He uses creative constraints like time, money and understanding market realities to generate better and faster innovations. But he reminds us to forget about the restrictions of red tape and any fears you may have. Most of all he points out that understanding your customers and what they do is key! Erm… I agree!
I always remember when I was in a meeting with a big bank and the creatives were being drilled on the benefits of accessibility with the website they had just built. I heard cries of "you’re stemming our creativity" and "that’s so boring" but if they had been given their creative constraints up front, or better still, created them themselves, then there would have been no argument.
There’s times I go out at Long Reef, across the road from my place, after a busy work day and for ages can’t seem to catch any waves that are worth writing home about. Mainly, this is because I don’t let go. Let go of the day, the past, tomorrow or what other people think. I don’t live in the moment.
Then, I’ll catch a screamer, and everything changes, I spend the rest of my surf totally ripping, totally absorbed.
Tim, the writer, describes this perfectly,
[Surfing is] a way of slowing down and processing stuff without consciously addressing it. A lot of the time we’re forced to live in the future or the past. Surfing is something that keeps you in the present tense. Some of that is just the immediacy of the problems it sets you, physical adjustments you make every half second to stay on your feet or avoid physical injury (or discomfort, at least). Some of it is just the energy required that dulls much of your other problems.
I don’t meditate much anymore, but I surf. Once again, Tim captures this,
For me surfing is about beauty and connectedness. Riding a wave to shore is a lovely, meditative thing to be able to do. You’re walking on water, tapping the sea’s energy without extracting anything from it. You’re meeting the sea, not ripping anything out of it.
And I’m being environmentally friendly at the same time,
Few other water pursuits have this non-exploitative element. As a boater, fisherman, shell-collector or whatever, I’m always taking something away from the sea, having an impact on it… But as a surfer I’m riding energy that the sea is expending of its own accord, the way a dolphin or seal or sea-lion does. The actual physical sensation of sliding down a wall of water, feeling really awake and alive and in the moment, is hard to describe to the non-surfer. It looks beautiful and it feels beautiful. Knowing that you’re not doing any damage just makes the feeling better. For some men in particular, whose lives require a kind of utilitarian mindset that can be pretty unfulfilling, this is one of the few activities they undertake in which they can do something pointlessly beautiful. There’s no material result, nothing they can show themselves or the boss. There’s just a bit of a rush, an elevated heart rate, a buzz that lasts all the rest of the day.
I am most certainly taking a copy of ‘Breath‘ on holiday with me!
Of particular interest to me were his findings about the web usage of people who were simply web users and those who were web evangelists (i.e. members of the Web Standards Group in Sydney). The web evangelists almost always had a blog and a page on a social network. They also contributed to a social networks and wrote on other people’s blogs. They leveraged tags to manage their web content too. This all means that they are online a lot and therefore more likely to be up to date on the best ways of doing things on the web.
In this way, the evangelists may be more likely to be exposed to the most cutting edge technologies or applications of technologies. They are moving around in the cyberspace networks where the new technologies are most likely to be described and then reviewed by peers.
Roger then went on to describe how traditionally business people have had the most influence on what technology people could use and how it could be used. However, these days the end users, whether they be normal users or evangelists, have much more influence over how the technology is designed.
This model puts the feedback from web users and evangelists, though online mechanisms, at he end of the line. Isn’t that too late to get their input?
I have often met web workers, including UI and IA people, who are too busy in their daily jobs to have time or interest in using social networks, RSS, blogs or other new applications. So why should we leave it to them to come up with cool websites?
Surely better technology is created (and recreated) when evangelists are involved at the strategy end of the process? If they are not, then how people who are too busy doing their own job (normal users) possibly know what is available to them and how it should be executed.
If you are a busy web user, then I reckon you ought to be engaging a web evangelist early (and often) so that you can be innovative or at least know that what you will appeal to people in the not to distant future.
In the past I’ve been asked by readers of my blog not to just write about the information I have gathered at functions, but instead to write down my experience of the event.
This has been a good tip, as it has helped me to gain further insight into my experiences and contextualise my learnings so that other people can digest what they read from a completely different point of view to their own.
Nancy Duarte contributed to Garr’s book. Her company did Al Gore’s presentation that was turned into the Academy Award Winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth. They also do many of Steve Job’s presentations too!
Her tip for ‘digital natives’ was to use Mind Mapping to plan out your presentation. It was interesting to note that Garr didn’t propose this, he reckons you should use paper and pen.
I don’t consider myself a digital native! However, I do use mind maps to plan all of my presos. Because maps are essentially pictures it is easy to remember the presentation content and they also help with creativity, as I discuss in this post.
So I punched out the mind map in an hour, easy!
BUT
Then it took me 15 more hours (a weekend) to finish my first 70 slide presentation!
WTF!
Normally, it takes about another hour to whip up the preso. I’m thinking, ‘Jeez this stuff is slow going. Is it worth it?’
Side note - Mindmanager is even kind enough to export the mapped presentation to PowerPoint in a completely boring hierarchical fashion, just as PowerPoint and KeyNote were designed! Not that the Zen man, Garr, from Japan allows that! B O R I N G
Finding piccies
Once I was happy with my mind map I procrastinated….
Then, when I got up the gumption, I searched for pictures representing ‘web2.0′ into iStockPhoto. It didn’t work!
then I clicked on ‘Did you mean: web’ and started looking tediously through iStockPhoto for images. As I found ones that looked pretty I stuck them in the lightbox thingy.
lightbox thingy
Then I tried to buy it a low res image and realised I had no credit.
$$
This stuff doesn’t come for free! I ended up spending a 100 bucks on ‘low res’ iStock images - they seemed good enough for a Keynote slide. Plus a few I took other very low res images off Google images too.
I soon got sick of this and asked my Twitter crew for any ideas. Some suggested using the search function, but that was not good enough.
I tried a few searches on the most popular piccies, and I found this…
That wasn’t very fruitful.
And then I realised that I needed a process!
The process
I went through each box of my mind map and got a pic for each thought. That allowed me to focus and use a repetitive task.
As meditators know, repetition, without distractions helps to get you into ‘the zone’.
Kinda Zen really!
Time faded away and I cranked through hundred of images and ‘lightboxed’ any that reflected an emotion related to each box on the mind map. Afterwards I quickly picked out the ones that worked.
When the word in a box wasn’t particularly interesting I just used text or a quote from some other smart person. Actually when I got sick of finding photos I did this!
A principle that I used through the whole presentation was to ensure that the slideshow could be read [on slideshare] by someone clicking through it in a couple of minutes. They had to be able to draw enough info out of it to leverage some understanding. By doing this I was able to present the slides to a client on Monday in 10 minutes. And at the conference, later that afternoon, I managed to string it out to 25 minutes.
This is a high level representation of how I looked at the map and picked out relevant images (slides)
‘Of course some nodes of the map are just words, you need to fill up the time you have!
So what happened next?
I had another presentation to prepare for the following day. It was along similar lines and it only took 30 minutes! This is because I reused 2/3 of the slides and I knew what to do and could quickly and easily predict how to find the images I needed for the slides.
This alerted me to how professional presenters do their preparation.
Garr uses the same iStockPhoto images in his slides and book and his slide deck is massive. During the preso he selected relevant slides to talk to. He even added some photos relevant to the day, which I’m sure he does each time he presents.
Then I had to do some presenting!
So I practiced it with:
my wife
a client, and
in my mind.
All the time worrying that it might:
take too long
come out wrong
run out of time
be too short
be boring
I went to the toilet 3 times before I delivered the presentation. You know, in the hour before I delivered it. Ok, half an hour
Then I couldn’t get Keynote to display the time and next slide on my Mac.
Then it worked.
So I presented.
And I never once had to look at a presentation plan like this:
Although I did check the time 3 times. I finished ready for questions within 30 seconds of my ‘glass tap’ from the chair.
My experience
When I was at Garr’s presentation, I asked him. ‘How do you know what is on the next slide?’ ‘I don’t know’, he said. ‘It just happens.’
Well funnily enough it did just happen. I was right in the zone and engaged with the audience. My hair stood on end and it just flowed.
Vanilla Ice hit the nail on the head with that opening line!
I was out at dinner a couple of months ago with some friends. We were talking about the huge number agencies some companies have working for them!
One brilliant solution that Steve, a friend, has implemented in his Telco business is to run an ‘All Agency WIP’. They had been doing it for about 3 months, when we spoke, and meetings were coupled with the sharing of info between the agencies during the week, via an FTP site. This helped maintain communication and momentum between meetings. They found the meetings quite a challenge, however, there have been massive improvements in communication and innovation in Steve’s business!
Steve realised that within his company he has access to an additional 20 full time employees (within his agencies). And just as he would have a weekly update and brainstorm with his direct line managers together, he believed that he should do the same with all the key agency staff. This happens regularly, not just on projects where the agencies are forced to work together.
Steve’s company currently has 6 agencies (Media, PR, Brand, Point of Sale & Collateral, Merchandise & Distribution, Promotion, DM Agency) …..they’re still trying to work on what the optimum size group is to make the meetings effective. …..Currently they have all department heads from his company’s marketing & brand teams plus 1 - 2 from each agency (Group Account Director, Account Director/Manager) so its generally a largish group. They clearly require some management.
You see, he’s doing something that is the same as the norm - a boring old WIP. But it’s a little bit different. He is thinking outside of the square. It might be a little hard to get all the [competitive] agencies engaging in a meeting together, but the outcomes are fantastic!
No longer to different agencies do parallel projects that double up on budgets, making it harder to drive profitability. Now the initiatives are being aligned to drive further sales success and manage consistent brand messaging.
In order to make the most of the meetings he set out some high level objectives:
Marketing Objectives
- Drive brand and challenge the market
- Get customers to buy stuff, spend more money & stay with us
Why have an all agency, all company marketing WIP?
- increase communication (internally and between agencies)
- better planning
- increase consistency
- reduce costs
- accountability
- challenge each other for best ideas
In order to execute it you need a good leader, a lot of will-power and openness to new experiences on the part of participants. And, of course, you need some metrics that put people’s balls on the line. That will make sure the all agency WIP is successful!
With the right strategic thinking up front, any reporting process for a consulting job can be as simple as filling in the boxes.
Last week Joanna and I were a bit overwhelmed by the number of pages of notes that we had both taken in the research and scoping phase of a knowledge management project for from a large listed Australian Corporation. They have over 300 franchises. Together we had documented a myriad of new and legacy communication mechanisms and numerous technical systems that included email, intranet and CRM etc. The challenge now was to make sense of the data and sensibly combine our notes to create a report!
I started by looking at the mind map notes we had taken and identifing some common themes around what each person we interviewed had told us. By finding these themes I could create a list of things that we could report on for each communication system they had. Like this:
When I showed it to Joanna she breathed a sigh of relief! By using this framework and filling in the boxes about the key themes for each system, she can easily ensure coverage of the important issues across every communication mechanism. And, more importantly, work out what else we had to find out.
The creation of a framework allowed us to get our heads around a massive amount of data and also allow collaborate on the reporting framework in a quick and easy fashion. All with the confidence that no strategic issues will be missed.
I use this framework approach to any work I do. If I don’t have a framework to think from the tasks will feel overwhelming. It’s just like when you have lots of things to do. Writing a list very rapidly dispels any angst you may have.
