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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Experience Is the Product

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How do we deliver great products and services in an uncertain world? The thing to keep in mind, not just in the abstract, but truly and viscerally, are your customers and their abilities, needs, and desires.

This is a crucial time for businesses around the world—and we use the word "crucial" intentionally. We're sitting at the crux of a fundamental shift in the ways in which businesses engage with their customers. There are many reasons for this shift—globalization, containerization, digitization—and these emerging forces are causing consternation for businesses that don't quite know how to react. The old tools at their disposal, such as efficiency, optimization, just-in-time manufacturing, blitz marketing, and outsourcing no longer provide the gains or competitive advantages they once did.

The key to succeeding in the contemporary marketplace is to fundamentally change your relationship with customers. Once you stop thinking of your customers as consumers and begin approaching them as people, you'll find a whole new world of opportunities to meet their needs and desires.

Seizing those opportunities is another matter. Businesses must stop thinking of their products and services as standalone offerings, and instead adopt a systems-oriented mindset that better serves people's actual needs. Furthermore, to continually deliver high-quality products, businesses need to incorporate design approaches into their standard work practices and build an internal design competency. This doesn't necessarily mean hiring designers, but at the very least it is critical to understand and appreciate the values and worldview that designers often bring.

Of course, it doesn't end there; you still have to deliver your product or service. Contemporary life is too uncertain for overlong development cycles. By the time a product finally gets released, the world has often moved on. And so businesses need to move away from their onerous technological and engineering approaches, embracing nimbler, more flexible means when building products and services.

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You Press the Button, We Do the Rest

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In 1886, Scientific American hailed "a new photographic apparatus" () as an exemplar of contemporary product design.

Figure : Engraving of a cutting-edge camera in its day.

Note the complexity of the magazine's description:

This apparatus consists of a box containing a camera, A, and a frame, C, containing the desired number of plates, each held in a small frame of black Bristol board. The camera contains a mirror, M, which pivots upon an axis and is maneuvered by the extreme bottom, B. This mirror stops at an angle of 45°, and sends the image coming from the objective to the horizontal plate, D, at the upper part of the camera. The image thus reflected is righted upon this plate.

As the objective is of short focus, every object situated beyond a distance of three yards from the apparatus is in focus. In exceptional cases, where the operator might be nearer the object to be photographed, the focusing would be done by means of the rack of the objective. The latter can also slide up and down, so that the apparatus need not be inclined when buildings or high trees are being photographed. The door, E, performs the role of a shade. When the apparatus has been fixed upon its tripod and properly directed, all the operator has to do is to close the door, P, and raise the mirror, M, by turning the button, B, and then expose the plate. The sensitized plates are introduced into the apparatus through the door, I, and are always brought automatically to the focus of the objective through the pressure of the springs, R. The shutter of the frame, B, opens through a hook, H, within the pocket, N. After exposure, each plate is lifted by means of the extractor, K, into the pocket, whence it is taken by hand and introduced through a slit, S, behind the springs, R, and the other plates that the frame contains. All these operations are performed in the interior of the pocket, N, through the impermeable, triple fabric of which no light can enter.

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Increasing the Importance of Design

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Throughout the 20th century, businesses largely ignored the lessons from Eastman's experience. Because of the relative simplicity of their offerings, companies felt that an experiential orientation was unnecessary. Products were developed from a technological and feature-based standpoint and, by-and-large, that was fine. An experiential approach to, say, shaving, wouldn't gain you much advantage, and the nature of the tools necessitated a functional approach.

This perspective changed with the rise of computerization, the embedding of microchips in everything—in short, the increasing digitization of our world. Microchips allowed for rapid evolution in product complexity, and product designers, stuck in their old habits, did nothing to allay this. Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, means that those chips packed more and more power, which product designers felt obliged to use.

With instantaneous worldwide digital communication and global shipping streamlined by containerization, the end of the 20th century was a time of even more rapid globalization. Manufacturing costs plummeted as production shifted to Asia. Adding features and functionality wasn't much more expensive, and customers assumed that products that did more things must be better. Today, however, this belief system is reaching a breaking point. Customers now often return items that aren't defective, and in fact work as planned, but turn out to be too complicated to figure out.

As global trends have developed, business management has come to rely on efficiency, optimization, and quality management to deliver value. The good news is that these approaches have worked, and worked well. Many organizations have become very lean, wasting less time, allowing fewer defects, and adopting more efficient processes. Ironically, the bad news is that this type of business optimization is increasingly commonplace. The processes for measuring and controlling efficiency are well-known and well-documented, and so in today's world they no longer provide a significant competitive advantage.

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Technology, Features, Experience

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Apple is a company that has parlayed design into phenomenal business success, driven by its CEO, Steve Jobs. Here's what he has said about delivering beautiful solutions:

"When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop. . . . But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem—and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works. That's what we wanted to do with Mac."

– Steve Jobs

In that quote, uttered 17 years before the introduction of the iPod and 23 years before the iPhone, Jobs neatly captures the evolution of product offerings. You can strip it down even further to just three key essentials: technology, features, and experience.

Products necessarily begin with the technology that makes them possible. And the introduction of a new technology can establish a company in the market. When VCRs came on the consumer market in the late '70s, all that really mattered is that they did something you could never do before—record television shows so that you could play them back on your own time. It didn't matter that a VCR took up a lot of space and didn't look pretty and wasn't particularly intuitive. It's an example of the walking dog syndrome: a dog doesn't walk very well on its hind legs alone, but we're fascinated and thrilled because it can walk that way at all.

Eventually competitors mimic your technology, and features become the important differentiator. You load your offering with more stuff, and it fills the product's packaging with bullet points. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, VCRs began loading up on functionality by adding VCR Plus, on-screen menus, various playback speeds, child locks, jog wheels, 21-day timers, the ability to record one frame at a time, and more. As Jobs said, "Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop." It's for this reason the blinking 12:00 became the icon of poorly designed consumer electronics, and most folks used the VCR as simply a videocassette player, viewing whatever they rented.

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The Experience Is the Product

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We live in an increasingly uncertain world, where the tools that served us well for so long no longer do. Technology isn't sufficient; we can't simply add features to attract an audience. There is no more efficiency to squeeze out of our operations, nor defects to remove from our products.

How do we deliver great products and services in an uncertain world? The thing to keep in mind, not just in the abstract, but truly and viscerally, are your customers and their abilities, needs, and desires. When you do that, when you truly empathize with the people you serve, you'll realize that for them the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing they truly care about.

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Chapter 2: Experience as Strategy

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All that matters to customers is their experience.

For decades, businesses have sought technology, features, and optimizations to maintain or increase an advantage over their competitors. But the value of investing solely in these things has reached an end. The experiences people have with your products and services are the real differentiator, a strategy that must be explored and embraced in our changing world.

In the last chapter, we liberally threw the word "experience" around. We even made the claim that "the experience is the product." Now we'll break experience into its component parts, so you see what we mean.

When a person engages with your products, services, and environments, a set of distinctly human qualities comes into play. A person's experience emerges from these qualities:

• Motivations: why they are engaged with your offering, and what they hope to get out of it
• Expectations: the preconceptions they bring to how something works
• Perceptions: the ways in which your offering affects their senses (see, hear, touch, smell, taste)
• Abilities: how they are able to cognitively and physically interact with your offering
• Flow: how they engage with your offering over time
• Culture: the framework of codes (manners, language, rituals), behavioral norms, and systems of belief within which the person operates.

When someone says they've had a good or a bad experience, what they're talking about is how a product, service, or environment did or didn't satisfactorily address these qualities.

In the 20th century, in addition to an emphasis on computerization and globalization, business management focused heavily on optimization. The early days of business management began with economic theory and the work of Fredrick Taylor, who performed time and motion studies in factories to scientifically examine and select the most efficient working methods. His approach influenced followers who brought about such commonplace practices as the use of Gantt charts and financial budgeting for accountability. Efficiency became paramount.

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Competitive Advantage: A Little History

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In the 20th century, in addition to an emphasis on computerization and globalization, business management focused heavily on optimization. The early days of business management began with economic theory and the work of Fredrick Taylor, who performed time and motion studies in factories to scientifically examine and select the most efficient working methods. His approach influenced followers who brought about such commonplace practices as the use of Gantt charts and financial budgeting for accountability. Efficiency became paramount.

Since Taylor, the obsession with optimization has remained constant. An old adage suggests that "you can only manage what you measure," and optimizations and cost-reduction can certainly be measured. If we fast-forward to the latest trends in business management from the past decade, you'll see the same focus on optimization in the popular Six Sigma and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) practices. Six Sigma focuses on quality, attempting to produce only 3.4 defective parts per million "opportunities" to err. With Six Sigma, organizations squeeze costs by searching out and eliminating waste. BPR is a practice of applying similar optimization tactics to business processes (). A BPR process typically leads businesses to rethink or eliminate activities that don't add significant value.

Take Dell, for example, a company that has so tightly choreographed its supply chain that it can actually sell computers below cost and turn a profit from "float"—the interest made on money between the time they receive a customer's payment for the computer and the time they have to pay the other partners in the supply chain. Now several other manufacturers have emulated Dell's supply chain while also working to differentiate their products, leaving Dell no longer with the lion's share of the market.

Figure : The iterative cycle of Business Process Reengineering optimizes what a business already does.

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Escaping Parity

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It's the marketing MBA's favorite tool. It gets rolled out at meeting after meeting in all of its analytical, bean-counting glory: the dreaded feature matrix, a document created by some assistant-of-something who compiled a list of all of the companies that might be considered competitors, cataloged all of their products' "features," and tallied the results in a giant matrix.

It's a very logical, thorough approach. By comparing you to your competitors apples-to-apples and oranges-to-oranges, you find where you're ahead, where you're lagging, and where you're absolutely not represented. Unfortunately, the typical response is to focus on the deficient or missing "features." That makes sense: who would want to face the new VP when he's smoldering over the competitor's market-leading Automated Configuration Wizard that you don't even have a response to? The natural response is to seek parity with your competition.

But what is parity? It's sameness. It's removing differentiation between you and the competition. It's looking only to your competitors for what defines your offering. From your customer's viewpoint, if you've reached parity with your rivals then there's no discernable difference between you and anyone else. The experience can become so banal and impotent that it either ceases to exist, or only the negative aspects of the experience (usability issues, for example) are notable. Avoid the pitfall of parity. Avoid the feature wars, vying to have more bullet points on your packaging and spec sheets than your rivals.

Different is good. Competitive strategy is based on doing things differently than your competitors, and demonstrating the worth of those differences to customers. Seth Godin spent his entire book, Purple Cow, explaining the importance and value in developing something different than all of those boring white-and-black Holsteins out there: "Create products and services that are worth marketing in the first place." Amen. A good experience strategy creates differences that you can present to customers, preserve over time, and perform better than your rivals.

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The Escape of Novelty

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Years ago a national bank began a redesign of its retail customer web site. The bank's business leaders were assured that putting weather information on the customer site would be a big win: everyone likes to know the weather, and none of their competitors had weather information on their sites. They matched a customer need with a unique component to their offering. The only trouble was...the weather has absolutely nothing to do with banking.

Weather on a bank site is unique, but that's about all it is. It's just a novelty. Perhaps it's amusing or unusual, but only because it's unexpected. As time wears on, it becomes useless and potentially annoying. Differentiation isn't just about being new, it's also about being relevant.

Yet this is a mistake that organizations make repeatedly, especially with the increasing focus on innovation. A lot of stock is placed in "new." It's easier to make something new than it is to make something that's useful or desirable. Thus many companies pander to novelty at the expense of more beneficial qualities.

Crazy predictions peppered the Web prior to the launch of the high-tech Segway scooter (), aka the "human transporter." Its patented technology was supposed to change cities and create a new world. Steve Jobs referred to it as an "incredibly innovative machine."

The Segway was certainly new and certainly innovative, but the problem was that no one wanted to use it in the context for which it was intended. Prior to the Segway's launch, both Jobs and Amazon founder Jeff Bezo's shared concerns that they both lived minutes from a grocery store but were unlikely to use a Segway to get there. Why not just walk? The Segway was targeted to fit a need that few, including billionaire CEOs, actually had. The experience of riding on a Segway is new and different, but the Segway technology in its current form isn't relevant to the way people move through their lives.

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Why Experience Matters

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Strategies of parity are low value and short-lived. Strategies of delivering new offerings for novelty's sake won't survive much further than the infomercial. These approaches center on features and technologies rather than focusing on the one thing that really matters—the experience. But even though experience matters to everyone, we almost always lose sight of it in product development.

No one wants to deliver a product that mystifies its audience. In fact, the inception of most new products is spurred by a need to address an experiential concern. Often though, while creating the product, designers, engineers, product managers, and business analysts get so caught up in the process that they lose sight of the initial goal.

This is a tragedy, because to the customers the experience they have is the only thing that matters. Customers rightfully have little appreciation for the technical workings of a product. Beyond the interface, everything else might as well be magic. Think about a light switch. You flip a switch; a light turns on. How many of us care how it works? Or you put things in the refrigerator, and a day later, when you take them out, they're cold. Magic. You pick up a handset, press seven or ten digits, and are talking to someone far away. Magic.

However, if you take typical product development approaches, you'll see why experience falls by the wayside. Let's say we're writing software. We begin with an idea of a human problem to address, and start making whiteboard sketches of a user interface. As we build it, we become keenly aware of the data that undergirds the application, and the logic that turns that data into something useful. When challenges arise, we typically make decisions at the level of data (we need a different data model; we need to integrate with particular kinds of systems) or logic (getting something to happen is too hard to program, so let's simply throw it out for this release; hey, we've already got a library to make it do something similar, so let's just use that). We make decisions without considering their impact on the experience.

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An Experience Strategy Isn't a Brand Strategy

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Some might argue that Google's success is a result of extending its marvelously successful brand. While Google does have remarkable brand awareness, this has had limited impact on their products beyond Search. Yahoo's email, maps, news, and finance products have far larger user numbers than Google's offerings.

Discussions of experience and design inevitably involve brand. The UK Design Council's web site begins its discussion of experience design with this sentence: "Experience design concentrates on moments of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create." But not every organization can be reduced to a brand. Some of the best designing for experience occurs in public institutions—for example, the Seattle Public Library, or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For the people who use them, these places become much more than mere brands.

This brand orientation is antithetical to designing for experience. Traditional brand strategy is practiced as a marketing function; it's about associating a company or its products with a set of values and qualities. Brand begins with the company. As such, it's very much an inside-out orientation: an organization identifies the attributes it wants to project, and does what it can to communicate them to customers.

As marketing consultant Lou Carbone puts it, brand is very much rooted in 19th- and 20th-century practices of "make and sell," of a manufacturing economy that needed to communicate attributes of its products and the companies that made them.

Such an approach is insufficient as we shift from "make and sell" to the delivery of services, where products aren't interesting in and of themselves, but only as interfaces to larger systems. In contrast to traditional brand strategy, experience strategy begins with the customer. It's about contributing to a desirable experience, helping people accomplish what they want to get done. Experience comes from the outside in; an appreciation of customers' motivations, behaviors, and context leads to the development of a product, service, or system that can satisfy them.

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Embodied Experience Strategy

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While an experience strategy can sometimes simply be presented as a list of bullet points, cut-and-dried presentation methods don't bring the strategy to life. Embodying the experience strategy in some kind of prototype can be incredibly effective. A recent example often mentioned in the press involves Deborah Adler's master's thesis in design school. Looking for a suitable subject, she found out that her grandmother had taken her grandfather's medication by mistake. She realized that such mix-ups were too easy. Prescription bottles used haphazard typefaces on labels affixed to curved surfaces that were hard to read. At first glance, all bottles from the same pharmacy look the same. Research showed Deborah that 60 percent of people taking prescriptions had committed errors similar to her grandmother.

Her thesis project, named SafeRX, reconceptualized the pharmacy bottle, incorporating modern typefaces, visual hierarchy, color-coding, and improved bottle design. She shopped it around after graduation, and found an interested suitor in Target. Working with an industrial designer, they turned her initial concepts into ClearRX (). Her initial SafeRX design served as a prototype experience strategy, a guiding light for all of the people developing the systems that would make it work. When changes were necessary, it was always with an eye to how to maintain the essential qualities of experience. For instance, Adler's initial concept involved color-coding the labels to distinguish each family member's medication. When color printing proved too costly, the experiential quality was delivered through colored rings affixed to the bottle's neck.

Figure : The Target ClearRX pill bottle, with many of the components demonstrated in the prototype.

Experience strategy prototypes can also be simplified to the extreme. Product designer Jeff Hawkins measured the sizes of his colleagues' shirt pockets, and then carved a block of wood that would fit inside. He was developing a personal digital assistant, and he knew it was paramount that the device be small enough for easy carrying.

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Creating Effective Experience Strategies

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Having an experience strategy means having a strong plan for the experiences your firm offers—a plan so strong that it guides decisions about how the firm executes, maintains, and manages these experiences to create value both for the customers and (as a byproduct) for the firm.

These planned experiences:

• Truly differentiate themselves from the perspective of the customer, connecting to something distinct about your firm; feature parity isn't an experience strategy.
• Are what matter most to customers —to truly understand these experiences, you have to understand them from the context of the customer. The experiences are what they choose to engage in, not the nuts and bolts that create them.
• Should be invested in and managed just as you would manage any other portfolio of opportunities. Business decisions should be made with consideration of the impact on experience.
• Can be cultivated and nurtured, while keeping in mind that they arise not from an controlled expression of what the firm says it stands for, but from the customer's perception of the set of distinctly human qualities outlined at the beginning of this chapter.

As you have noticed, much of an experience strategy hinges upon how people perceive experiences.

Understanding the strategic value of listening to the customer's perspective is just the beginning. Practicing experience strategy successfully requires mastery of the topic covered in the next chapter: ways of understanding people.

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Chapter 3: New Ways of Understanding People

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We must understand people as they are rather than as market segments or demographics.

A few years ago, two of Adaptive Path's practitioners worked together as members of a small design team at a company called Epinions.com. Epinions, which has since been acquired by eBay, featured reviews of products and services written by consumers. Reviewers earned money for their reviews, consumers rated those reviews, and other sites syndicated the content. As a whole, the site focused on building a community of authors, raters, and readers, and it was one of the earliest pieces of explicitly "social software," long before services like Friendster, MySpace, or Flickr even existed.

It was a place where the traditional models of understanding people simply as individuals interacting with computers and the traditional business models related to products broke down fairly quickly. Because Epinions was so dependent on community, it had to function as a service and a system rather than simply as a product or site.

At Epinions.com, our customer research began with standard usability practices, where participants came into our lab and performed predetermined tasks with our site and those of our competitors. We quickly realized that we needed to abandon these overly structured methods in favor of research approaches that were more qualitative and contextual. One of our most useful sessions occurred when a woman came into our lab and brought her infant with her. The baby needed some attention at a number of points throughout the session, and it was amazingly instructive to see how the woman dropped in and out of a process that we had always considered to be continuous. Through our conversations with her and others, we began to realize that the process of researching product purchases was generally long and disjointed. We needed to support this process explicitly, and make it easy for people to step away and quickly regain a sense of where they were when they left off.

But the woman with her baby gave us something even more important than insight into processes. Seeing her struggle to use the system one-handed and with continuous interruptions gave us empathy for her that informed our design work throughout the Epinions system. Empathy gave us a flexible and extensible understanding of our users that went far beyond the explicit problems, goals, and tasks associated with the particular situation we were studying. We nurtured and expanded this empathy, using a form of digital ethnography which involved hanging out with and taking part in the online community of reviewers, raters, and readers. This proved to be one of our most effective tools for truly understanding the needs and motivations of the people who used the Epinions system.

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Empathy

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We'll be talking a lot about empathy in design throughout this book; it can be a tricky concept, so it's worth taking some time to discuss it explicitly. To paraphrase a number of dictionaries, empathy is being aware of, sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another without having those feelings, thoughts, or experiences explicitly communicated to you. When you begin to unpack that definition, you see why it's such an effective tool in the hands of an organization trying to provide compelling customer experiences.

When you're designing a product or service, it's crucial to differentiate between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy has two common uses, neither of which is appropriate in design. In the first sense, sympathy means something akin to pity. This maintains a distance between you and the other person or group and doesn't necessitate respect. In fact, it can establish a sense of superiority, especially if your team begins to feel actual pity. The other sense of sympathy is an actual shared experience or feeling, as in people whose situations are nearly identical. This form of sympathy removes objectivity, creating a situation where you would say that a person is "too close" to a problem or situation.

By contrast, empathy is an understanding of a person or group's subjective experience by sharing that experience vicariously. Sharing an experience avoids the distance of pity while vicariousness maintains an observer's level of objectivity. Thus, we could say that empathy is something like a balanced curiosity that can lead to a deeper understanding of another person.

Empathy becomes meaningful for organizations when it helps us deal with the uncertainty of human behavior and motivation, by letting us bypass the need to explicitly codify every activity and driver. Empathy takes advantage of our innate human ability to understand things about others, and it goes beyond what they (or even we) can articulate. Everyone knows that effective intuition is an important factor of success in almost every field. You develop your sense of intuition by doing the job, by being in the thick of an activity. Over time, you find yourself able to make quick and accurate decisions based on knowledge that is difficult to explain.

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Old Models and Their Problems

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As important as customers are to every business, it's amazing how seldom organizations explicitly consider how they think about the people who keep them in business. What we're talking about here are the frameworks that guide organizations in characterizing what their customers are doing and why. Sometimes an organization may not even be conscious of these processes, but models exist nonetheless. Historically, businesses have seen people as consumers, message receivers, rational actors, and human factors. As we'll see, none of these models are sufficient for developing empathy, understanding experience, or dealing with the unpredictability of the human world.

Perhaps the worst model we've come across is one that views people as nothing more than consumers, i.e., purely as a means to make profit. The authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto give one of the best accounts of this model and its consequences. With the advent of the industrial age, "the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers." They quote Jerry Michalski, a long-time Internet industry analyst and organizational consultant, who notes that businesses began to see a consumer as really no more than "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." If you're reading this book, it's unlikely that you or your company take this view, but we're sure you've come across companies that do. This model is not only disrespectful, but it also creates an explicit barrier to developing empathy for your customers and users. It also tells us nothing about the nature of our customers, or the characteristics of the products and services we're creating for them.

The change from customers into consumers was accompanied by a serious change in the balance of power in the market. As our Cluetrain friends put it, "power swung so decisively to the supply side that 'market' became a verb: something you do to customers." This is the reality we live today. For better or worse, "market" is now used largely as a verb.

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What's Been Missing?

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Think about your own life and the lives of people you know. Our relationships are complicated and convoluted; our behaviors can be quirky and erratic. Sometimes we act as individuals, sometimes as groups, sometimes as both at the same time. In short, people's lives are messy. It is quite difficult to capture or describe this complexity in terms of consumption, messaging, rationality, utility, or even tasks and goals. The relationships we have with products and services are no less complex.

For example, Proctor & Gamble created Old Spice High Endurance Hair & Body Wash as part of the company's Old Spice line of products. This new product combined shampoo and body wash, and it was a direct result of research that revealed the blurred boundaries of people's everyday lives. After collecting hours of videotape documenting the showering habits of sample male customers, Proctor & Gamble came to understand something very important and interesting about the way that many men approach getting themselves clean. "We kept seeing men using body wash on their hair."

When we're trying to understand our "users" and "customers," we have to remember that they're people just like us, and just like us they regularly cross understood boundaries and categories. They mix and match products to serve previously unidentified needs, and they have motivations and passions that can't be reduced to utilitarian goals. People are inconsistent, often inarticulate, and they challenge social and cultural boundaries in unexpected ways.

The first step to understanding people is to view them realistically. Accepting our inherent messiness means addressing three elements that the "sheep," "homo economicus," and "tasks and goals" models lack: emotion, culture, and context.

Most successful organizations are already aware of the importance of emotion. Marketing and design professionals have always talked about emotions, but research has generally failed to address them in any fundamental way. The closest they usually come is in measuring preference for one product or concept over another. But in recent years this has begun to change. Now, even staunch proponents of cognitive science, which pioneered the "tasks and goals" view of people, are coming around to the importance of emotion and affect. In fact, Don Norman, perhaps the most famous cognitive scientist in the world of design, has dedicated a whole book to the subject.

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A New Model

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Taking emotion, culture, context, and the rest of the messy complexity of human life into account leads us to a new model for understanding our customers. In , we discussed how companies have been evolving the way they approach the design of their products and services. Organizations often begin with a focus on technology, which later becomes a focus on features, and finally develops into a more holistic focus on experience. At the same time, we are seeing a corresponding evolution in the way organizations think about the people they're trying to serve. At the technology stage, organizations spend little or no time thinking about users explicitly—the act of making something possible is enough. When companies focus on features, they tend to view their customers and users in terms of tasks, goals, and preferences. This makes sense; features map pretty clearly onto these concepts. But a focus on experience starts to show the shortcomings of the task/goal/preference model.

Taking a more holistic, experience-focused approach to design means taking a more holistic view of people. What we need are frameworks and terminology that are closer to the ways people talk about and live their lives. To understand people as people, our understanding of our customers and users must better match our understandings of ourselves. After all, our customers aren't so different from us when it comes down to their basic motivations and behaviors. Recognizing this is an important step toward empathy with our customers.

In fact, motivations and behaviors turn out to be a very useful framework for talking about people's lives. If we accept that we need to more directly address emotion, culture, meaning, and context, we find that it's nearly impossible to talk about culture and meaning in terms of tasks and goals. From a more personal perspective, you and I can talk about just about everything we do in our lives in terms of behaviors and motivations. We're motivated to behave in certain ways in the realms of information seeking, banking, or shopping, but also in the realms of love, family, art, and health. We can talk about love and art in terms of tasks and goals, but we diminish the essential spirit of those concepts when we do.

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Embracing Complexity

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Albert Einstein once said that "the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." This is often paraphrased as "theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."

With that in mind, it's clear that it is time to improve our models. We know that people aren't simple, yet our theories and models for what makes people tick have been missing a lot of essential data.

If earlier reductionist models offered ways of avoiding or reducing the complexity in people's lives, these new approaches are our attempts to acknowledge and embrace that complexity. By doing so, we are able to understand people more honestly and completely. We gain the potential for greater insights because we see and account for things left out of the old models. We build empathy that gives us the ability to provide a truly great product or service experience. This greater understanding also allows organizations to handle uncertainty and reduce risk. In , we'll explore some of the best ways to go about gaining that understanding. We'll see that understanding customers is not the responsibility of only the research and design team, but of the organization as a whole.

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Chapter 4: Capturing Complexity, Building Empathy

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The success of experience-focused products is contingent on everyone sharing an understanding of users and a vision for the experience, because so many people play a role in delivering that experience.

Creating engaging user experiences requires a solid understanding of the people you want to serve, which inevitably means doing research. Research is a reliable way to gain insight and deal with uncertainty, but to incorporate the ideas from you may need to reconsider how you think about research. In our experience, a lot of research does nothing but keep research staff busy; however, well-executed research can transform your organization's understanding of its customers, and help your team create compelling experiences.

In this chapter, we'll share what we've learned about how successful, experience-focused companies approach their research efforts. We've already spent a lot of time discussing empathy and the importance of understanding the complexity of your customers' lives. Now, we'll look at some of the methods we use to capture that complexity. We'll also talk about some of the mistakes organizations make with research, and indicators that your research methods could use fine-tuning. Finally, we'll share principles and strategies for successful research.

Of course, every organization has its own needs and idiosyncrasies, so it's impossible to offer step-by-step instructions, but Adaptive Path's strategies have proved effective for our clients and us, even in an increasingly ambiguous market.

Research for product and service design is about two things: generating ideas and evaluating ideas. It's about answering fundamental questions such as: What should we make? How should it work? Why should people care? This is even true once you have tangible designs, prototypes, or completed products and services. Research will augment your work by giving you insight into customers' lives, and helping you develop empathy for them.

Businesses today may use several different types of research:

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Why Research Is Essential

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Research for product and service design is about two things: generating ideas and evaluating ideas. It's about answering fundamental questions such as: What should we make? How should it work? Why should people care? This is even true once you have tangible designs, prototypes, or completed products and services. Research will augment your work by giving you insight into customers' lives, and helping you develop empathy for them.

Businesses today may use several different types of research:

Evaluative research is a fairly well-understood endeavor, with established disciplines such as human factors, ergonomics, usability, and the like. These fields have developed out of—and have incorporated—a great deal of social and medical science. Their efficacy has been proven over and over because organizations have been doing acceptance tests, usability tests, and market tests for a long time.

Generative research deserves attention because it's a fairly fuzzy endeavor with few clear disciplinary origins. Perhaps this is best indicated by the fact that no one can even agree about what to call it. Your organization probably does some form of "market research" or "user research" as part of its design and development process. But what do these terms mean?

Market research has a fairly established set of techniques (surveys, focus groups, market segmentation), but tends to focus more on what to say than on how a product should work. This can lead to problems, which we'll discuss in more detail later in this chapter.

User research, a term that came out of the world of software and internet applications, is even less clear. It can include anything from observation and interviewing to simply applying evaluative usability techniques at an earlier stage in the process—for example, evaluating earlier versions of a product or offerings from competitors. In our experience, user research has a tendency to be more of the latter than the former.

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Capturing Complexity with Qualitative Research

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made a strong case for the importance of addressing emotion, culture, meaning, and context when we try to understand our customers. When our models of human behavior and motivation are simple, we can get by using primarily quantitative methods like surveys and statistics for research. But once we acknowledge and embrace the complexity of our customers' lives, we need a way to make sense of those intricacies and a means of interpreting the numbers. This isn't a book about research methods, but rather the methodological approaches that organizations use that are critical to the way they understand their customers. So, it's worth taking a moment to review some of the high-level points related to different styles of research.

Quantitative research is useful for understanding trends and getting a sense of what is going on. Some quantitative methods can also give you insight into how things are happening, but they usually don't tell you why. That's because in order to interpret numbers, you need a sense of the mechanisms at play. Otherwise there's no way to know whether a change in a certain number is good, bad, interesting, or trivial.

You can obtain the necessary information through qualitative and contextual research methods, which are specifically geared toward uncovering mechanisms and revealing why something is happening. The range of these qualitative and contextual methods is vast, but there are some commonalities among the techniques that can help give a sense of what they are all about. As it turns out, many of these methods are also well-suited to building empathy.

Qualitative research, put most simply, is concerned with the qualities of an experience, situation, set of behaviors, and so on, rather than the quantitatively measurable aspects. It focuses on process rather than outcomes—the how and why as opposed to the what, where, and when. Because of the focus on how and why questions, qualitative researchers have to spend a lot of time talking to people. Nearly all forms of qualitative research involve some kind of interviewing. These interviews aren't heavily scripted in an attempt to prove hypotheses by exactly replicating questions and activities across subjects. Rather, they are designed to elicit stories about experiences by responding to what participants say and allowing the conversation to go in unexpected directions. It is more like facilitated storytelling than surveying.

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Where Organizations Go Wrong

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Before we offer our suggestions for doing effective research that captures complexity and develops empathy, let's look at where organizations go wrong. Below are some common symptoms we've come to associate with organizations whose research efforts aren't as effective as they might be. See if you recognize any of these scenarios.

You might be doing research poorly if:

• You keep making the same mistakes with your customers.
• The functionality or usability of your product is excellent, but sales and usage are low.
• Your products are improved but seldom innovated.
• You have a shelf of reports, and no one knows what's in them.
• Your research team is busy and spending money, but your products don't seem to be getting any more successful.
• The marketing and positioning of products is great but ultimately fail to deliver.

Problems like these tend to result from one or two common faults. Some research fails because the methods aren't appropriate for addressing holistic experiences. Just as often, research fails due to organizational issues; perhaps others in the organization don't see its value or its relevance, or simply don't know how to use it.

In many organizations, research is conducted by a department or group that is removed from the rest of the design and development process, both physically and organizationally ().

Figure : How research works in most organizations.

This means that most of the insights are trapped in the research group. If researchers are the only people talking to your customers, the rest of your organization has little opportunity to develop honest empathy. Many research teams receive a set of requirements, go do the research, and then pass the findings back over a figurative (or sometimes actual) wall, in the form of research reports and PowerPoint presentations. Designers, developers, and management read these once, and then file them away on a shelf or in a folder on their computer. This leads us to a second common mistake.

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Making Research an Organizational Competency

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We've found two guiding principles that make research as effective as possible in organizations. Research is successful when:

• It's treated as an organizational competency.
• Research outcomes are both actionable and durable.

When you want to provide a cohesive experience, research must be an organizational competency rather than the job of one person, group, or department. After all, researchers don't actually make products and services; whole organizations do. It's vital to get research insights out of the research department or group and into the organization at large. The success of experience-focused products is contingent on everyone sharing an understanding of users and a vision for the experience, because so many people play a role in delivering that experience. Your business analysts, customer support teams, and retail sales folks should have as much understanding of your customers as your researchers and designers.

Truly effective research work exhibits two traits: it's actionable and durable. Actionable research has clear implications for design, development, marketing, and so on. This ensures that research can influence the work done by these groups. Research that isn't actionable won't have much impact on the products and services being developed. Durable research offers insights that last beyond the research-findings meeting. Otherwise, companies end up having to learn the same things about their customers over and over.

Adaptive Path uses—and recommends—the following strategies to produce actionable, durable results.

We've spent a lot of time talking about new methods, but we don't mean to say that more traditional and quantitative approaches are unhelpful. What we're saying is that these approaches alone are insufficient. But it is equally true that qualitative methods are insufficient on their own. Taking a mixed method approach is one of the best strategies for ensuring success.

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Chapter 5: Stop Designing "Products"

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What do people want to accomplish? How does this activity fit into their lives? How can I deliver on those desires? Asking these questions inevitably shifts your focus away from one-off, standalone products and allows you to start thinking of products simply as elements of a much larger system.

Magazines like BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Forbes have all offered lengthy features on how companies such as Intel, Microsoft, and IDEO watch people in order to understand how to better deliver on unmet needs. What magazine articles rarely discuss is how to take advantage of these observations, or how they can actually guide the development of your offerings.

Remember the story that started this book, about George Eastman and the experience he wanted to deliver with the Kodak camera? If you look at his famous slogan, "You press the button, we do the rest," you'll see that Eastman marketed the camera based on the promise of a drastically simplified experience. But to achieve that result, Eastman needed to do more than merely design a simpler product—that would address only the "you press the button" half of the phrase.

The photographic process is necessarily complicated; it involves loading the camera, exposing light-sensitive material, removing that material, processing the material, and printing images from that material. In this context, just offering a simplified camera wouldn't do enough to alleviate the many challenges of this process. Eastman's genius was in designing his system so customers could focus on what mattered most to them—capturing the image. Photographers no longer had to develop film themselves or pay exorbitant fees to experts. Eastman moved these parts of the photographic process to his developing and processing plant in Rochester, New York (the "we do the rest" part of the equation), thereby allowing the Kodak camera to be remarkably straightforward to use.

An advertisement written in 1888 () explains this approach, "A Division Of Labor: After the 100 pictures have been taken, the strip of film (which is wound on a spool) may be removed, and sent by mail to the factory to have the pictures finished."

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Doing It Right

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As a discussion of product design grows longer, the probability of using the iPod as an exemplar approaches one.

-(With apologies to Mike Godwin).

Over 100 years ago, Eastman's experience-driven, systems approach transformed the field of photography, creating a pre-Kodak and post-Kodak division. Less than a decade ago, digital audio players experienced a similar division, thanks to Apple and its iPod. Though not as fundamental as the shift brought on by Kodak (the iPod had wildly successful portable-audio predecessors, such as the Sony Walkman), the product landscape was permanently altered by the introduction of the iPod in October 2001.

Before then, your portable digital audio choices were CD players, which necessitated carrying stacks of CDs; CD-MP3 players, which required users to rip and burn CDs; flash-drive MP3 players, which at the time had an extremely limited capacity of about 64 MB; or hard-drive MP3 jukeboxes (). The MP3 options were too expensive or difficult to use for true mass-market adoption, so many people still used CD or audiotape players.

Figure : The PJB-100 MP3 player offered 5 GB of storage in 1999. Two years later, Apple introduced the iPod, with the same amount of storage.

Much has been written about why the iPod proved successful where others had failed. Typically, it boils down to a superficial discussion of "design," focusing either on the iPod's form—at launch it was smaller than any comparable multi-gigabyte jukebox, and it has an undeniable aesthetic appeal—or its elegant interface and its ability to provide access to thousands of songs.

But the iPod is actually a remarkably limited device. Its basic functions are: browse media, play media, rate media, and change volume level. Heck, it doesn't even have a power button. And I'm paying $250 for that?

The iPod's limitations are even more remarkable when you consider that the standard practice in consumer electronics is to cram as many functions as possible into a single device—have you used a mobile phone lately?