Converting Need into Demand

Converting Need into Demand, or Putting People First

  • Converting Need into Demand: Peter Drucker's phrase that captures the job of the designer.
  • Human-Centered Design: Importance to innovation, but difficult to spot a need and design a response.
  • Adaptation to Inconvenience: People adapt to problems, making it hard to identify needs.
  • Traditional Techniques Limitations: Focus groups and surveys yield incremental improvements, not breakthroughs.
  • Designers vs. Design Thinkers: Designers fulfill manifest needs, while design thinkers articulate latent needs.
  • Three Elements of Successful Design Program: Insight, observation, and empathy.

Insight: Learning from the Lives of Others

  • Source of Design Thinking: Insight comes from observing real-world experiences.
  • Thoughtless Acts: Behaviors that reveal unmet needs.
  • Consumers' Inability to Articulate Needs: Behaviors provide clues about unmet needs.
  • Design as Creative Endeavor: Solution lies in creative work, triggered by observing odd practices.
  • Evolution of Design to Design Thinking: Focus shifts from products to relationships between people and products, and people to people.
  • Migration of Designers: Addressing social and behavioral problems.
  • Jennifer Portnick's Story:
    • Challenged Jazzercise's weight-discriminatory policy.
    • Inspired design thinkers to frame the problem in a new way.
    • Insight that not all fat people want to be thin, and weight is not inversely proportional to happiness.
  • Value of Single Example: Jennifer Portnick's story gave more insight than statistics.
  • Search for Insight: Everywhere and free.

Observation: Watching What People Don't Do, Listening to What They Don't Say

  • Importance of Fieldwork: Spending time with people who will benefit from the work.
  • Ultimate Clients: Grocery store shoppers, office workers, and schoolchildren.
  • Observation: Watching what people do (and do not do) and listening to what they say (and do not say).
  • Anthropological viewpoint: Observation relies on quality, not quantity.
  • Focus on Extreme Users: Head for the edges to find people who live, think, and consume differently.
  • Zyliss Example:
    • Studied children and professional chefs to design a new line of kitchen tools.
    • Children highlighted issues of physical control.
    • Chefs yielded insights into cleaning.
    • Resulted in a line of products united by a common design language but with the right handle for each tool.

The Behavioral Turn

  • Reliance on Seasoned Professionals: Trained social scientists guide the observation process.
  • Intel's Investment: Human-centered research practices, studying mobile payments among Muslim women in Morocco and Airbnb hosts in Portland.
  • Genevieve Bell's Work: Observing people's interactions with technology globally.
  • Reasoning: Barely half of the world's population has access to the Internet so Intel needs to be ready when the next 50 percent comes online.
  • User-Experience Design (UX): Exploded in recent years and added to the designer's tool kit for quantitative and qualitative tools.
  • Companies Recognizing the Human Element: IBM, Microsoft, Google, SAP.
  • Demand for UX Researchers: Consumer-oriented companies like Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Facebook, FitBit, and Netflix.
  • Differences between Academic and Industry Researchers: Academics motivated by scientific objective, while industry researchers focused on practical implications.
  • Ethnographers in Cross-Disciplinary Teams: Integrated into teams with designers, engineers, and marketers.
  • IDEO's Ethnographic Practice:
    • Project for The Community Builders.
    • Team consisting of an anthropologist, an architect, and a human factors specialist.
    • Overnight stays with families at different income levels in Park Duvalle, Kentucky.
    • Project to develop a tool kit for NGOs to meet the needs of subsistence farmers in Africa and Asia.
    • Overnight stays in farming villages in Ethiopia and Vietnam.
  • Deputizing Clients: Enlisting clients in conducting observations themselves.
  • Alan G. Lafley (P&G CEO) Example: Shopping for records on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue.
  • Emergency Room Care Project:
    • Observing analogous situations: pit stop at the Indy 500, a neighborhood fire station, an elementary school playground during recess.

Empathy: Standing in the Shoes (or Lying on the Gurneys) of Others

  • Importance of Empathy: Distinguishes design thinking from academic thinking.
  • Mission of Design Thinking: Translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives.
  • Recognizing Different Coping Strategies: Inexplicable behaviors represent strategies for coping with the world.
  • Xerox PARC Example: Computer mouse designed by engineers for engineers.
  • Apple Computer Example: Creating a computer "for the rest of us".
  • Limitations of Generalizing from Own Standards: Designers limiting the field of opportunity.
  • Building Bridges of Insight through Empathy: Seeing the world through the eyes of others, understanding their experiences, and feeling their emotions.
  • SSM DePaul Health Center Example:
    • Redesigning the American shopping cart.
  • Kristian Simsarian's Experience:
    • Checking into the hospital and going through the emergency room experience as a patient.
    • Observed the disorienting check-in process, frustration of waiting, and anxiety of being wheeled down an anonymous corridor.
  • Value of First-Person Experiences: Buying a first car, stepping out of the airport in a new city, evaluating assisted living facilities.
  • Larger Discovery: Details, not the efficiency of the staff or the quality of the facilities, were key to the new story they wanted to tell.
  • Competing Narratives: Hospital saw the patient journey in terms of insurance verification, medical prioritization, and bed allocation.
  • Patient Experienced it as a Stressful Situation Made Worse: Balancing medical and administrative tasks with empathic concern for the human side of the equation.
  • Layers of a Patient's Experience:
    • Physical environment: Intense, crowded place with few cues.
    • Cognitive: How does a patient make sense out of the situation?
    • Emotional: What do the people in your target population feel?
  • Cognitive Understanding of the Ordinary and the Familiar:
    • Tim Mott and Larry Tesler's metaphor of the desktop at Xerox PARC.
    • Juniper Financial example: Asking participants to "draw their money."
  • Emotional Understanding: Turning customers into advocates.
  • PalmPilot Example:
    • Jeff Hawkins bucking conventional wisdom and creating a product that did less than was technically possible.
    • Teaming up with Dennis Boyle at IDEO to work on a redesign that would appeal at an emotional level.
    • Focusing on the form factor and creating a sleek, elegant, and sophisticated device.

Beyond the Individual

  • Understanding Social Interactions: Extending understanding to the social interactions of people within groups and to the interactions among groups themselves.
  • Group Effects: Smart mobs or virtual economies.
  • Chair Example: Designing chairs needed understanding of group effects.
  • Steelcase Example: Using network analysis to understand who in their organization interacts with whom.
    *Examples of tools: video ethnography and computer interaction analysis
  • Cultural Differences: Moving from bad jokes about "political correctness" to the center of concerns.
  • **Innovation Opportunities: Spending time to understand a culture can open up new innovation opportunities.
  • Moving from Insight to Observation to Empathy: Tapping into the collective intelligence to unleash the full power of design thinking.
  • Collaboration blurs the boundaries between creators and consumers: us with them.
  • Howard Rheingold and Jeff Howe examples of collaboration: smart mobs and crowdsourcing.

significant Change in the Role of Consumers

  • Companies Dreaming Up New Products: Enlisting armies of marketing experts and advertising professionals to sell them to people.
  • Ethnographic Model: Reaching out to people, observing their lives and experiences, and using those insights to inspire new ideas.
  • Enhanced Level of Collaboration: A blurring of the boundaries at the level of both companies and individuals.
  • Individuals as Active Participants: Thinking of themselves as active participants in the process of creation.
  • Organizations Comfortable with the Erosion of Boundaries: Between the proprietary and the public.
  • European Union Initiative Example: Tony Dunne and Bill Gaver of the Royal College of Art in London developed a set of "cultural probes".
  • Sweat Equity Enterprises Example: Working with companies to codevelop new products with inner-city high school kids.

The Unfocus Group

  • Bringing consumers and experts together in a workshop format to explore new concepts around a particular topic.
    *Memorable example - women's shoes: color consultant, a spiritual guide, a young mother, and a female limo driver
  • Raymond Loewy and George Washington Hill Example:
    • Loewy was visited - offered 50,00050,000 improve Lucky Strike package - wager accepted.
  • Chance only favors the prepared mind : Louis Pasteur observed - 1854.
  • Themes and Variations: Techniques of observation, principles of empathy, and efforts to move beyond the individual
    *Insight cannot yet be codified, quantified or even defined- makes design process both difficult and exciting.
  • There is no algorithm that can tell us where it will come from and when it will hit