Aoki Reibo, Japan’s Living National Treasure

Thought I’d take a break from not getting anything useful done to exclaim about this morning’s breakfast. Maree took us to Fratelli Paridiso, which I find difficult: sitting in the dark waiting for the good-looking Italian staff, to interrupt their own conversations for rapid fire explanations of the illegible blackboard menu in unintelligibly thick accents - however everyone else loves the place. So I have to grudgingly admit this was the best breakfast dish I can remember having. A poached egg, basil, bacon, (roast?) cherry tomatoes and salty biscuit on polenta with balsamic and an incredible olive oil.

This tea looked so much better than it tasted.

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.

My unshaven facial hair snags in the keys during calls.

It’s also spontaneously stopped being able to roam. It drop outs. It randomly restarts. It drains batteries three times as fast as it used to. I assume these are symptoms of it trying to connect to the roaming partners network. It won’t manually connect either, although it does seem to see the roaming partner’s network.

This problem has exposed Three’s / 3’s / Hutchison’s Sydney coverage as being appalling. Their Indian call center’s have been very friendly but of little help to date. I’ve sent it off to be repaired - which was a huge inconvenience - but the problem was not fixed (at the time i just knew the batteries were being drained but didn’t know why)

I’m expecting them to fix this or replace the phone, when I finally get around to takeing it into one of their stores

Entree from Oy Restaurant (a “Sailors Thai canteen”, 71 Macleay St, Potts Point). Fancy, very tasty and expensive thai food. See their website

I almost destroyed Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody by dog-earing the bits I wanted to try and remember. As many of those as I could two finger type are recorded below:

p39

There is obviously some value to both photographers and viewers in having photos available, but in many cases that value never exceeded the threshold of cost created by the institutional dilemma. Flickr escaped those problems, not by increasing its managerial oversight over photographers but by abandoning any hope of such oversight in the first place, instead putting in place tools for the self-synchronization of otherwise latent groups

p45

Our basic human desires and talents for group effort are stymied by the complexities of group action at every turn. Coordination, organisation, even communication in groups is hard and gets harder as the group grows. That difficulty means that whatever methods help coordinate group action will spread, no matter how inefficient they are, so long as they are better than nothing.

p47

The cost of all kinds of group activity - sharing, cooperation, and collective action - have fallen so far so fast that activities previously hidden beneath that (Coasean) floor are now coming to light. We didn’t notice how many things were under the floor because , prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.

p49

You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action.

p51

All group structures create dilemmas but these dilemmas are hardest when it comes to collective action, because the cohesion of the group becomes critical to its success. Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user’s identity to the identity of the group

p59

Digital means of distributing words and images have robbed newspapers of the coherence they formally had, revealing the physical object of the newspaper as a merely provisional solution; now every article is it’s own section. The permanently important question is how society will be informed of the news of the day. … What holds a newspaper together is primarily the cost of paper, ink and distribution; a newspaper is whatever group of printed items a publisher can bundle together and deliver profitably. The corollary is also true: whatever doesn’t go i9nto a newspaper is whatever is too expensive to print and deliver. … The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurisation of publishing and a switch from “Why publish this?” to “Why not?”.

p65

The change isn’t a shift from one kind of news institution to another, but rather in the definition of news: from news as an institutional prerogative to news as part of a communications ecosystem, occupied by a mix of formal organizations, informal collectives, and individuals

p79

…Globally free publishing is making public speech and action more valuable, even as its absolute abundance diminishes the specialness of professional publishing … if everyone can do something, it is no longer rare enough to pay for, even if it is vital.

p91

On the web interactivity has no technological limits, but it does still have strong cognitive limits: no matter who you are, you can only read so many weblogs, can trade e-mail with only so many people and so on.

p98

We have lost the clean distinctions between communications media and broadcast media. As social media like Myspace now scale effortlessly between a community of a few and an audience of a fe million, the old habit of treating communications tools like the phone differently from broadcast tools like television no longer make sense. The two patterns shade into each other, and now small group communications and large broadcast outlets all exist as part of a single interconnected ecosystem.

p103

The twentieth century, with the spread of radio and television, was the broadcast century. The normal pattern for media was that they were created by a small group of professionals and then delivered to a large group of consumers. But media, in the word’s literal sense as the middle layer between people, have always been a three part affair. People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it and they like to share it. Because we now have media that support both making and shareing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption. We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. now though, we can do big things for love.

p106

We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase, from under one million participants to over one billion in a generation, makes the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions in communication tools.

p107

We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the media business, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the management of information for two audiences - employees and the world.

p111

Cunningham (Ward, inventor of the Wiki) made a different, and radical, assumption: groups of people who want to collaborate also tend to trust one another. If this were true, then a small group could work together on a shared writing effort without needing formal management or process.

p122

Wikipedia continues to grow, and articles continue to improve. The process is more like creating a coral reef, the sum of millions of individual actions, than creating a car. And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.

p128

To understand the creation of something like a Wikipedia article you can’t look for a representative contributor, because none exists. Instead you have to change your focus, to concentrate not on the individual user but on the behavior of the collective.

p139

The people most enamored of describing Wikipedia as the product of a free-form hive mind don’t understand how Wikipedia actually works. It is the product not of collectivism but of unending augmentation. The articles grow not from harmonious thought but from constant scrutiny and emendation.

p149

Now the readership for a particular (newspaper) story can be larger than the papers general audience..”

p225

Perhaps the most significant effect of our new tools, though, lies in the increased leverage they give the most connected people. The tightness of a large social network comes less from increasing the number of connections that the average member of the network can support than from increasing the number of connections that the most connected people can support

p231

Quote from Ronald Burt’s “The Social Origins of good ideas”: “People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a good competitive advantage in delivering good ideas. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. this is not creatively born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be valuable insight in another.”

p235

Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another. … Meetup is a giant information processing tool, a kind of market where groups are products and the market expresses it’s judgment not in cash but in expenditure of energy. failure is free, high quality research, offering direct evidence of what works and what doesn’t. … By dispensing with the right to direct what user’s try to create, Meetup sheds the cost and distorting effects of managing each individual effort. Trial and error, in a system like Meetup, has both a lower cost and a higher value than in traditional institutions, where failure often comes with someone’s name attached. From a conventional business perspective, Meetup has no quality control, but from another perspective Meetup is all quality control. All that’s required to take advantage of this sort of market are passionate users and an appetite for repeated public failure.

p245

The overall effect of failure is it’s likelihood times it’s cost. Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing it’s likelihood. … Open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure it reduces the cost of failure; essentially getting failure for free. This reversal, where the cost of deciding what to try is higher than the cost of actually trying them, is true of open systems generally. As with mass amateurization of media, open source relies on the “publish-then-filter pattern.

p247

Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of multiple possibilities (fitness landscape).

p261

Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the user. The promise is the basic “why” for anyone to join or contribute to the group. the tool helps with the “how” - how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopter the tools, what can you expect, and what will be expected of you?

p268

By understanding the two basic constraints of group action - the number of people involved and duration of interaction - any given tool, new or familiar, can be analyzed for goodness of fit.

p279

Wikipedia has over a dozen separate collections of pages, for functions like the history of specific articles and discussions of them, the administrative functions of Wikipedia itself and so on. Only one of these collections is for the actual articles; the rest are all about running the site in one way or another. Wikipedia, which looks like a reference work to the average viewer, is in fact a bureaucracy mainly given over to arguing. The articles are the residue of the argument, being the last thing anyone declined to disagree about. Most of the collections of pages other than the articles, however are accessed by only the most committed users.

p284

EBay’s solution was to create a reputation system, allowing the buyer and seller in any transaction to publicly report their satisfaction with each other. The system was designed to cast the shadow of the future over both parties, giving each an incentive to maintain or improve their standing on the site. … Omidyar was right, with a caveat: people are basically good, when they are in circumstances that reward goodness while restraining impulses to defect. The rewards and restraints can be quite simple and small, but in big groups with relatively anonymous actors, they need to be there or behavior will decay over time.

p303

The mistakes that novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere … But in times of revolution, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad.