So that’s a ludicrous amount of stickies marking all the bits that seemed worth noting as i read Subject to Change. I was disappointed when I got to the end and hadn’t learned any specific new techniques. And yet it was exciting to read a clearly articulated explanation of experience design aimed at business people. It helped me recognise and reorganise my own understanding of experience strategy, research and design. Below are my notes, some paraphrasing jumbled up with quotes, any typos are my own.

P8-9

Design has been saddled with many connotations: Design as aesthetic (styling), design as a role, design as objects, design as rock star. But the authors say design is an activity: Empathy (understanding of how people will behave/interact), Problem solving, ideation and prototyping, finding alternatives.

p10

Great quote on design from Steve Jobs: “When you start looking at a problem 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.”

p13

“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.”

p16

Component parts of experience: Motivations (why they’re engaged), Expectations (preconceptions), Perceptions (affect on their senses: see , hear, touch, smell, taste), Abilities (cognitive and physical interaction), Flow (engagement over time) & culture (their behavioral norms belief systems, manners, language, rituals)

p18

Definition of strategy: “Strategy is about trade offs - purposefully choosing tactics different than those used by your competition. Strategy means saying no to some activities so you can excel at others. And the result of these strategic trade offs is products and services that are clearly distinguished in customers’ minds, with meaningful differences that can’t easily be replicated by others”

p17-22

Things that aren’t strategies: operational efficiency, parity of features, being the best, novelty

p24

Experience strategy: “An experience strategy is a clearly articulated touchstone that influences all of the decisions made about technology, features and interfaces. Whether in the initial design process or as the product is being developed, such a strategy guides the team and ensures that the customer’s perspective is maintained throughout.”

p27

Brand strategy is inside-out orientation, experience design is outside-in: not making something then communicating it’s attributes but rather understanding customers motivations and making a product, service or system that can satisfy them.

p36

Definition of empathy:”…empathy is an understanding of a person or groups subjective experience by sharing that experience vicariously. Sharing an experience avoids the distance of pity while vicariousness maintains an observers 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.”

p37

“…a catalog of observed behaviors isn’t sufficient to craft cohesive and compelling experiences. We need to develop an intuitive understanding of the motivations behind these behaviors. Finding empathy helps us grasp the mechanisms that drive behavior, as opposed to just the observed external actions”

p40-46

“We must understand people as they are rather than market segments or demographics” Not as (list of four prior models) consumers, or as sheep (to be persuaded by a marketing message), or as “homo economicus” (rational actors, interested in features only), or as “human factors” (with tasks and goals). These models are not completely wrong but don’t cover the necessary complexity: emotion, culture and context.

p53

“Behaviors are the activities in which people engage… Motivations lead to, drive, and shape behaviours. We design specifically to support behaviors - just as we’ve focussed on tasks in the past. We use our understanding of the underlying motivations to frame the overall user experience.”

p55

Embracing complexity: “If earlier reductionist models offered ways of avoiding or reduceing 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 an organization to handle uncertainty and reduce risk.”

p58

“Research for product and service design is about two things: generating ideas and evaluating ideas” … Design research is not about proving anything “Instead design research helps establish the constraints and opportunities that make great design possible. Together, the insight and empathy resulting from research provide both a wellspring for ideas and criteria for evaluating those ideas”

p60-61

“Quantitative research is good for understanding trends and getting a sense of what is going on … qualitative and contextual research methods are specifically geared toward uncovering mechanisms and revealing why something is happening… 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.”

p64-66

Design research mistakes: research in isolation, not involveing external teams, research reports that don’t get used, confusing market research with design research (”its not just about telling a better or more persuasive story, but also about creating better products and services. Research for the design of products and services is a fundamentally different process than research for messages”)

p67-74

Research is successful when:

• It’s treated as an organizational competency.
• Research outcomes are both actionable and durable
• Mix methods (diversify the research techniques)
• Integrate research with the design process
• Create truly useful deliverables and artifacts “Clear and straightforward, they engage readers, they tell stories” (e.g. personas)
• Make prototypes

p81

“Apple’s approach to delivery differs from Kodak in that they don’t hide the complexity from their customers. Instead they leverage components across a system, so that the experience never becomes too complex. With digital systems, you can appropriately give people a lot of power and control. The trick is to approach the offering as a system whose components have narrowly defined functions, so that the experience is never overwhelming”

p82

on maintaining focus: “This is where experience strategy and system design intersect. In designing a system, you get caught up in all the opportunities that technology makes available. A strong experience strategy makes clear not just what to do, but what not to do”

p91

“to fully succeed , each customer-facing channel needs to stop being a walled off silo and become an instrument in a coordinated symphony that addresses the whole customer experience. The problem facing big corporations is that they are structured to optimisey and operations, typically around the repeated delivery of the same product or service. This tructure runs exactly counter to what’s needed in a truly customer-facing organization, which requires that products or services continually evolve to meet customers needs.”

p93

Don’t over engineer: “you have to recognize that a system will degrade, and make it such that such entropy doesn’t shatter the entire experience. the true success of experience design isn’t how well it works when everything is operating as planned, but how well it works when things start going wrong. … Ultimately instead of providing seamless environment, you want to provide meaningful, beautiful seams into which people can insert themselves, customizing their experience to suit their needs.”

p95

Stewart brand notes that all buildings are predictions and all predictions are wrong ..(the products we design) can be designed and used so that it doesn’t matter when they’re wrong. he makes the case that the most important thing when creating something that can accommodate uncertainty is to have a strategy ” “where a plan is based on prediction, a strategy is designed to encompass unforeseeably changing conditions.” .. “The key message here is not to approach a design problem assuming you’ll create a product, a service, and a system. Begin with the experience you want to design for, and then - and only then - identify the components that will deliver it.”

p98

So there you have it: the secret sauce is to focus on experiences by delving into the complexities of people’s lives, and then to create elegant systems to support them” :-)

p99

Business week quote: ” While process excellence demands precision, consistency, and repetition, innovation calls for variation, failure and serendipity.”

p101

“(experience driven organizations) are extremely hard to create and sustain. First, the customer perspective must be understood widely and considered often. Unfortunately many employees in large organizations go years without seeing a customer. Second, products and services must be managed and presented as a series of related experiences, not as features occupying a market gap. But assessing needs and delivering solutions from this more qualitative perspective challenges most conventional business wisdom. third, measuring and proving the value of experience-driven changes is difficult, although not impossible. Sadly, however, most organizations prefer to gauge their progress using the same metrics as their competitors.”

p105-106

About design:

• Design is humanistic: (assumes a customer/user in a context)
• Design is generative “creates articles we can all look at and think about” (give example of creating 100’s of sketches for news website story page)
• about making decisions: “enables quick exploration and trade offs, showing different combinations of combinations components in different orientations, anyone can see and respond to design, and it can move to a chosen context for evaluation.” … ” but most organizations don’t actively participate in design. It’s outsourced, delegated, pushed away. Somehow, design isn’t seen as a suitable way to confront and solve problems, instead we ineffectually flail at these problems with bulleted slide decks, passionless meetings, and soulless reports.”

p107

Misconceptions of design:

• Design isn’t only for designers.
• Design isn’t a panacea. - all kinds of thinking are needed
• Design isn’t easy: ” It often fails, but that’s part of how it works. By finding what doesn’t work, you move more quickly to wards what does. What’s more, because design isn’t formulaic, you’ll naturally arrive at different outcomes than your compeitors, and those outcomes may be better than you ever imagined.”

p110

Design can and will fail when it’s practiced outside of the context of system and strategy. Sam Lucente design head at Hp quote: “For the longest time, ideation was about throwing out as many ideas as you can. We’ve realised pretty quickly it’s really not about a bunch of ideas; it’s about really good strategy, alignment with business, diagnostics, and deep customer understanding, And when you’re ready to talk about ideas, bringing people to the table who are informed is what it’s all about“

p111

Design a core competency: ” design is a way of approaching problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning that can yield better outcomes. It’s an open approach, and anyone in the organization can participate to generate solutions, make insightful and meaningful decisions, and build empathetic offers that address needs that customers may not even know they have. As markets, lives, and the world become more complex, developing design as a core competency will be a key business practice for small and large companies alike.”

p119-120

How design helps find the right solution:

• Presupposes multiple solutions: ‘abductive reasoning’. “embraces the logic of what might be, Designers may not be able to prove that something ‘is’ or ‘must be’, but they nevertheless reason that it ‘may be’“
• Shifting focus and taking off the blinders
• Defining constraints that drive great solutions

p125

Scott Berkun quote: “The dirty little secret - the fact often denied - is that unlike the mythycal epiphany, real creation is sloppy. Discovery is messy, exploration is dangerous“

p126

Tim Brown IDEO CEO quote: “Strategy should bring clarity to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people where you, as their leader, are taking them - and what they need to do to get there … people need to have a visceral understanding - an image in their minds - of why you’ve chosen a certain strategy and what you’re attempting to create with it … because it’s pictorial , design describes the world in a way that’s not open to many interpretations.“

p128

Suggest storyboarding as a good way of “prototyping” experiences.

p133

Four steps to “your long wow”:

• Know your platform for delivery: know touch points, know the medium
• Tackle a wide area of unmet customer needs:
• Create and evolve your repeatable process
• Plan and stage the “wow” experiences: don’t try and do it all in one go

p136+

Don’t try to control too much: “In the days before Google, search engines like Excite, Hotbot, and Altavista larded themselves up with content in a desperate effort to hold users beyond the two pages of a search activity: the search box page and the results page. The goal was “stickiness”, discouraging people from leaving your domain. When Google launched, one of the reason it shocked the web community was it’s focus on sending you directly to where you actually wanted to go. How could there be a successful business model in actively sending people away from your site? Seven years and $155 billion market capitalization later, that question has obviously been answered. The other search engines attempted to control your behavior. Google recognized that users maintain control, and to win they had to become the user’s preferred choice.”

p140

Design competency: A strategic advantage: ” Design competent can allow an organization to create and sustain a competitive advantage over its rivals by providing an understanding of customers and showing how best to deliver ideal solutions for them. In most markets, a company’s cost advantage or technology advantage can be temporary, but the ability to re frame possibilities and translate new ideas into great experiences again and again gives companies a sustained leadership in the market.”

p142

Agile manifesto:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• responding to change over following a plan

p144

The irony is that the “never look back” waterfall model was originally about iteration. Winston Royce … clearly called for at least two cycles of iteration.The truth is that most software development addresses complex requirements and needs exploratory programming or some level of experimentation to get to the appropriate solution. … Markets change, strategies shift, or goals are reevaluated And the classic waterfall method, which asks for an iron clad design up front before all of the factors can be considered adequately, is rarely up to the task.”

p156

In an environment where exploration leading to a dead end is viewed as an expense to be reduced, true innovation is difficult .. at some level we have to loosen the reins of pure profitability as a metric around the personnel and departments we hope will be the sources of innovation.”: Create opportunities, Build accurate prototypes, make iterative process inexpensive and easy, encourage open communication, experiment, experiment experiment.

p159

Cute quotes: “To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous.” Chinese proverb. “Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers” Henry Louis Mencken

p163

Excellent summary of whole book - too long to reproduce in it’s entirety here.

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