April, 2009

Innovation through the recession

  • Thursday, 30 April, 2009
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Two men were running through the jungle chased by a lion.  One of them stopped, took off his backpack and took his trainers out.  The other man turned around. “Why are you putting your trainers on?” he asked, “They won’t make you run faster than the lion”. To which the man replied “I don’t need to run faster than the lion…”

In the current market conditions just blindly running won’t get you ahead of your competitors.  And standing still is not a sustainable option.  Those that succeed won’t be the ones that batten down the hatches and retreat to the trenches, history shows it will be those that continue to innovate and cultivate ideas.  During the 1990-91 recession, according to a Bain & Company study, twice as many companies leaped from the bottom of their industries to the top as did so in the years before and after.

“Even though we’re in an economic downturn, we’re in an innovation upturn” said Bill Gates at the time.

In the 1920’s Post and Kellogg’s went into the recession head to head. Post cut back, it reined in expenses and slashed advertising budget.  Kelloggs meanwhile maintained their marketing spend and pushed their newly launched product, Rice Krispies.  Today Kellogg’s are a household name.  Where are Post?

IT organisations are retreating to core, keeping the lights on and holding off any “non-essential’ projects, innovation included.  This is a shortsighted viewpoint, but not entirely unexpected.  With project life cycles taking so long, innovation traditionally takes significant investment and time to see results.  Modern lean and agile approaches to IT are a challenge to this entrenched view.  It is possible to innovate at speed.  It is possible to take an idea and turn it into something tangible in weeks rather than years.  Let’s start with the idea.  Where does it come from?  You could get the brightest minds from expensive management consultancy firms, but they take time. And in uncertain times, what do they really know? (I speak with experience having once been a customer strategy management consultant).  Alternatively you could harvest ideas from your customers.  That’s what IdeaStorm does for Dell.  And Mix does for Oracle (built by ThoughtWorks by the way). Don’t restrict this to your customers, building an internal ideas engine in the enterprise yields great results.

So once you’ve got the idea, how do you nurture it from a vision into a proposition that has legs?

Product innovation is all very well, but do you have the capability and the attitude to really do it?  In the current ecomomic climate, unless product innovation is in your DNA, chances are it will need to be accompanied by process innovation.  Why? Because most organisational processes are slow, cumbersome and hinder the agility required to really innovate.

In 2009, if there’s one thing that organizations need, it’s agility. Our economy and the business environment are a steady stream of ups, downs and rapid change; in such an environment, the ability to sense, respond and react are true survival skills!

At ThoughtWorks we do both these things for our clients all the time, helping them introduce aligity into the whole product development lifecycle; product innovation through process innovation.  It starts with helping them rapidly distill their vision into something concrete, then prirotising and estimating what is important before building it at speed with quality to get innovation to market; fail fast or succeed sooner.

Recession doesn’t make the market need disappear. Andrew Rezeghi in this great paper (which is abound with stories of companies who have innovated through recession) argues you should invest in your customers, now they need you most, loyalty hangs in the balance.  Whilst the market may be driving down prices, now is the time to focus on experience based differentiation.  How can you use digital channels to engage with your customers in new and compelling ways?  How can you harness social media and new interaction paradigms to delight and engage your customers?  Ho can you innovate at speed? Go beyond your product and grow roots for lifetime value when the good times return.

Test Driven Design

  • Wednesday, 29 April, 2009
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I recently worked with a client where one of our deliverables were wireframes that illustrated how pages would be laid out and how the UI would work.  We were quite pleased with the results, there was some quite complex AJAX based functionality that provided a really immersive, goal orientated experience that looked like it would make finding products easy and enjoyable.  Testing the initial wireframes with users was an enlightening exercise, and demonstrated that the wireframes we had developed were not yet ready – users were not able to fulfill the goals they were set.  More worrying, some of the complex functionality we were introducing just did not work (some of the navigation, filters and sorts were confusing, just presenting information on a single page would suffice).

Usability testing often gets discussed and is a good intention but all too often budgetary or time constraints mean it never happens.  The user testing I refer to here impacted neither.  We did our testing in a meeting room, the customer sitting at one end with a facilitator, and the team watching on the projection screen in the same room.  We used a talk-aloud protocol walking through the static powerpoint wireframes that were linear in their presentation according to the ‘happy path’ to realise the customer goal.  Someone took notes as we went through the wireframes (in the notes section at the bottom of the PowerPoint deck).   It was quick and dirty but produced results.  After a couple of sessions things that we, too close to the design, had missed.  Changes to the wireframes took a few hours and allowed retesting the following day.  Indeed we made some quite significant changes to the user interaction model.  When we re-tested the wireframes the improvements were evident.  The feedback was more positive; there were fewer blank faces, less confusion and “I’ve no idea what to do next” was never uttered.  This was true iterative design in cycles that took a few hours.  Compare this to the days if code was involved.

Where does this fit into the agile way of delivering software?  In the agile/ lean zealot’s passion (and impatience) delivery, and their (dogmatic?) assertion that anything but code (working software) is waste, they loose focus upon what is really important, that of overall product quality.  Product quality is not only zero/ minimal defects and meeting the business requirement, but also delivering something that is usable and delightful to use.  Developers may do Test Driven Development, but this is based on assumptions that what they will code is right.  TDD should start earlier in the process, Test Driven Design.  It takes time to write your tests up-front, but we know it to be a good thing.  So why not design the user interface (wireframes) and test that up front?

Using stories to sell products

  • Tuesday, 28 April, 2009
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Dolls are girls stuff.   I don’t count Action Man (Which I had a few of as a youngster) dolls.  But being a Daddy of two girls, dolls start to be part of my world.  Wandering down Michigan avenue in Chicago on Saturday I stumbled across American Girl. Not only have they have elevated the doll beyond a product and into an experience, they have created an experience around the buying and owning of their dolls.  The product, the doll, is almost secondary to the narrative.  Every doll has a back story,  indeed they come with a paperback to describe this story.  Books build on this story, as do DVDs computer games as well as the dolls clothes, furniture and accessories all extending the product experience.

Wandering around the store I passed the doll hair salon (dolls sitting on doll-sized hairdressers chairs with their hair being plaited, braided, styled, blow dried…), the hospital (fixing broken dolls, returned to the owner wearing a hospital gown and discharge certificate), the historical doll museum (dolls representing children from different eras)… Walking into the American Girl I had no intention of spending any money there.  I ended up buying two dolls and clothes, I bought into the experience and took home to my girls not just presents from Daddy’s worldwide travels but also a story to tell.

Dolls are a product that it is (arguably) easy to create stories, narrative and experience around.  It is easy to provide this as a case study, but harder for a completely unrelated industry (such as financial services) to learn anything from it.  Harder, but not impossible.  Look at comparethemarket and the way they are building a story with Aleksandr around what is a pretty dull product.  As you develop a new product or application, can you build a narrative that supports the product?  Once you start telling a story, what new insights come to mind? How can you build an experience beyond the immediate product?

User interface is a disruptive technology

  • Thursday, 2 April, 2009
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Last year, according to Gartner, with belts tightening, technology executives need to focus upon disruptive technologies (that cut costs).  The top ten list of disruptive technologies makes strange reading.  How will social computing and mash-ups cut costs (enterprise 2.0?)  Most interestingly, coming in at number six on the list is “user interface”.  Now let’s leave aside the fact that a “user interface’ is hardly a technology (it is how technology manifests itself to the user) I’m interested by the fact that it can be considered to be disruptive. What is disruptive about user interface design?

But think a little further.  What is really disruptive is the realisation that good design is more than just adherence to functional requirements; good creative design is more than ‘bells and whistles’ or ‘gold plating’.  A good user interface will cut costs by enabling the internal user base be more efficient and productive.  A good user interface will enable customers to succesfully complete their transactions / goals.  In a world where poor UI on enterprise applications remains, maybe user interface is indeed a disruptive technology after all.