Focus - Solving for the Right Outcomes
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The problems we set out to solve aren’t always the ones that need solving. Adam Polansky will talk about some different ways that you can get under the hood with problems and investigate ways to help real problems present themselves and the criteria you can use to go after them.
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Focus - Solving for the Right Outcomes
- 4. 30 MB!
- 6. Focus Solving for the Right Outcome Adam Polansky @AdamtheIA
- 8. The 5 Whys Based on a game by Sakichi Toyoda DAMAGE IN TRANSIT @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 9. What problem are you solving? …and for whom? What will be the outcome? @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 10. A solution without context is an abstraction @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 11. Design is the process of going from an existing condition to a preferred one. @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 12. The environments have changed @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 13. The best experiences align with what you desire in your world. @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 14. Begin by looking at the world where the problems live @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 15. What to look at What are people doing? Where are they doing it? Why are they doing it? How do they feel about it? THIS is where you find opportunities How are they doing it? What result are they getting? @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 16. Do the Research Contextual Inquiry Field Observation Usability Testing Analytics @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 18. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2015: © Gartner, Inc. 2015 @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 19. What can be made: simpler or more manageable? more convenient? F***ing Magical? What to look for @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 21. is worth Time & Cost You get 1 @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 22. Pain breeds insanity Insanity breeds distrust Distrust kills quality @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 23. Quality is easy to defer and nearly impossible to recover @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 24. Bad intent erases quality. @AdamtheIA #BIGD18
- 25. Having a seat at the table… means knowing when to refuse it. @AdamtheIA #BIGD18 Design Ethics. Mike Monteiro. Mule Design
- 26. Look at the world for real problems in need of real solutions. Expectations already exist. Exceed them! Commit to the value of Quality. Be accountable for the work you do. @AdamtheIA #BIGD2018
Hinweis der Redaktion
- About forty years ago, a guy named Ray Ruby figured out that if you put a drop of liquid in one end of a tube of a specific diameter, you could predict exactly how much force or surface tension it would take to move that liquid to the other side of the tube. Surface tension is what holds a drop of water on the end of your finger before it falls. What could Ray and his friends do with this knowledge Well,
- They embedded 4 of these tubes in a round plate that would show the tubes turning red if they were shaken or dropped.
- The plates were used in Disk-Packs, the industrial grand-daddy to the floppy disc. Disk Packs where about the size of a Tupperware cake carrier and sat inside a disk drive about the size of a dish washer. Problem was, if you dropped or mishandled a disk-pack you wouldn't know if it was damaged until you put it in the drive and it crashed. But…If you looked at the 4 little tubes in the top of the pack and any of them were red, that could tell you the pack had been dropped or something. Everyone thought this was great! Honeywell, the manufacturer of the disk-packs and drives became their first customer. Now they just needed more customers like that. So they hired a guy to find them. His name was Dick
- Over the next two years, Dick learned that there weren’t any other clients like Honeywell but he did make an observation: All over the world, people were putting things in boxes and shipping them without any idea what was happening to them in transit. What if there was a way to monitor your shipment? Dick recommended putting the tubes in stickers on boxes. If you received a box with a red indicator on it, you didn’t accept it. That’s what they did. But you might not guess what happened. “Instead of people buying “clips” and slapping them (gently) on their packages, the shipping companies bought them. They created awareness programs for their employees and promoted the fact that they were proactively looking-out for the condition of your stuff. Companies saved money by not accepting potentially damaged packages, they saved money in replacement parts, shippers where more careful when handling goods. The Shockwatch changed the way people behaved because observing their behavior in the first place led to a solution with an outcome different from the one they set-out to solve.
- Dick’s last name was Polansky and he was my father. His idea would grow into ways of preventing damage to forklifts, warehouses, rail cars, autos and paper rolls. I grew up around smart people who solved problems by understanding the nature of the environments their products occupied….and by asking ”Why?”
- How often does a conversation like this occur. The C-somebody EO, MO, TO … says “We need a program, a mobile app, a web site, an Internet of things because…reasons; It’s going to be big, we need some of that, we need to be in that channel. When that happens, does anyone ask “Why” because those reasons aren’t reasons. Someone needs to ask “Why?” and keep asking until the problem can be clearly stated and the weight of need (if there truly is any) can be understood.
- How to you recognize that need? In the book Gamestorming, by Dave Gray & Co., there’s an exercise called the “ 5 Whys” We use it where I work to get to the root of a problem. If we take the example of the Shockwatch, the conversation might have gone something like this: Our equipment costs are so high. Why is that? Equipment is often damaged when we receive it. You can’t tell when it’s delivered so we accept it. Why so much damage? The shippers are mishandling our equipment in transit. Why do they do that? There’s no accountability Why is that? No one can prove exactly when the damage took place. There’s no monitoring This conclusion would have shown the team where the real problem was and where to focus their solution.
- What’s broken that needs fixing? …WHY What works but could work better? …WHY Who benefits? …WHY Who loses? …WHY When it’s all said and done what will be the result?...and WHY? WHY uncovers reality. WHY can force honesty. WHY can get you to root of a problem that really DOES need to be solved WHY can generate an outcome that really DOES need to be realized That outcome is the context you’ll be working within
- You can’t build an abstraction You can’t estimate the value of an abstraction You can’t predict what an abstraction will do You’ve heard about solutions in search of a problem? Begin with the problem.
- Herbert Simon gave the best definition of design: “To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.“. Recently in an interview the designer Milton Glaser one of the greatest designers of our time gave an interview where he said. “Design is the process of going from an existing condition to a preferred one.” Whether he knew it at the time or not, he was paraphrasing Simon, but did you notice that neither of them made any reference to art in their statements? ” Glaser went on to talk about how things can be rendered many ways; not just by an artist. He used to say that Design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.” Still not a direct reference to art. Yeah, art directors are responsible for design but so are engineers, IAs, strategists, product owners even quality assurance because they all inform the end product toward a purpose – a desired state. Great design doesn’t just look good. It works well and it’s a vehicle for great experiences for the people who use it. We can equate quality with good design.
- For the longest time, we designed for roughly the same environment. I’m talking specifically about digital now. A person sitting 18-20” from a screen with a keyboard and mouse; desktop, laptop. Now, technologies have raised the bar for what people expect from it because devices like personal digital assistants, PDAs and Blackberry’s moved tasks from the desk to our hands 10 years ago. We got an app store and a limited environment opened-up even more to the point that a mobile phone serves as the only computer many people need or own. New considerations come with that. Luke Wroblewski described the need for phone applications to be manageable with one eye and one thumb.
- Back In the mid-nineties people were talking about WANs, Wide Area Networks, LANs Local Area networks but they were just whispering about PANs personal area networks. That term may have died but look at what we have! We’re personally connected to our homes, our cars, our music, our families and our care-givers. We maintain relationships of a sort with people around the world. I know what beer my friend in New Zealand drank with dinner before the appetizers were finished. Expectations. We’re designing for more than one generation that grew-up on games with rich interaction and responsive controls. These folks don’t just hope the tech they use professionally and personally will be similar, they expect it. They expect it to surpass…routinely. The best experiences align with what you desire in your world.
- When it comes to designing solutions, you don’t have to look far for the problems. Usually no further than the people who use your products or services. There is almost always something that can stand to be improved. It may not be your product but it may be the support. A solution might be operational but it may also be solved on-line, or with a mobile device or wearable. Somewhere you can find a way to ease a process by removing or even adding a few steps. Maybe the problem is that the solution is too far from where the problem occurs and maybe you can find a way to close that gap.
- Observe what are people doing and where are they doing it? Home, Office, The park, the train, the bathroom? Don’t laugh! How many of you have done this? (Walk away, stop, turn around and grab phone, walk away) How and why are they doing it? Is it a direct result of what and where? What are the connections.? What results are they experiencing? How do they feel about it? Are they happy, pissed-off, indifferent? These are the elements of a journey map - one of several tools used to characterize the context around an activity.
- What else will give you insight? You may have participated in one or all of these data gathering methods. Interviews to hear what people are thinking, Field Observation while you’re in Discovery to see what people are actually doing, Usability testing of early prototypes and completed apps to hedge your bet that people can actually use them. Analytics after launch to extract what’s really happening with your products. Rinse and repeat. No single method will give you all the insight you need. It’s the combination and repetition of methods that gives you a more complete picture; faceted. In 3 dimensions. We talk about them all the time! The thing is, you have to DO THEM! Find a way, you can sneak this stuff in.
- Another place you can look is off-screen. Most of you know what a 2D graph looks like; two planes – X & Y axes. But… add a Z plane and you are working in 3D now. Why is this important? Because all the things that happen in the world you’re observing happen in the Z space. Whatever we’re doing on a screen is often connected to something we’re doing off the screen. What do you think is so attractive about Virtual Reality …Augmented Reality? It offers an environment like the one we live in with physics we can readily understand. That said, if you think a VR project is necessary, you have to observe the world you want to create. What is the physicality of that world? Will it mimic the physics we know or will it go beyond giving people extraordinary powers. Also be deliberate when you determine its value not just to your enterprise but to the people who’ll us it. Has anyone not seen a sci-fi movie that shows someone interacting with a virtual environment? Does it ever occur to you that if you did that all the time, your arms would get tired? American Sign Language interpreters work in teams of two for that exact reason. Cool might have a short life-span if it isn’t sustainable. Why is the Z Space so important?
- Innovation is measured by comparing the effort to produce something to the value it brings. Do you want to teach with it? Inspire? Entertain? Be productive? Challenge? This is called the Hype Cycle – it’s a story that shows the journey of ideas. This one charts the path of emerging technologies and I just want to point-out that well over 50% of these techs exist beyond the app. They operate in the Z space. They face different challenges; the supporting tech may be too immature, infrastructures may not be in place, economies of scale still hard to realize or predict or maybe people’s arms just get tired. These are problems and people’s expectations are building around people like us solving them because, more specifically, they are design problems.
- I remember our first microwave oven in the 70s. We’d put a piece of cheese on a Dorito and watch it sit there. Suddenly the cheese would bubble-up and melt across the chip. This was like time-lapse photography in real-life. That’s all we had to compare it to. We watched it like TV for weeks. Now, my dad also was with Amana when they developed the first radar range so he understood the principles involved and he explained basic microwave science to us. Our response? “Yeah, that’s cool dad. Gimme another piece of cheese. Just about any application has room for improvement. Can you make it simpler by removing friction points to streamline a process. Maybe you need to add friction points to make a complex process manageable. Can you find a way to improve convenience. Face it. We’re lazy and love anything that can save us a tap or a click. Look at your favorite apps, look between the screens at what really happens when you tap or click on something. Does the screen just become a new screen or are there truly cinematic transitions. Does one image evolve into another? Do they set a tone? A box or image that glides-in says something different than one that bounces. They aren’t quite subliminal but the aggregate effect of these transitions can create an experience that is calm, energetic, practical, frantic or...magical. Magic is what we call somthing that can’t be explained. An experience can be so good the device disappears and you forget you’re holding a little computer or sitting in your living room or at your desk. Yes logically, we know there are real explanations like mocrowaves but we like to suspend that knowledge because frankly, it’s more fun to believe in magic...even if it’s just for a little while. We get to make magical things. All these elements speak to Quality. Quality is the province of UX; not exclusively but quality is where our influence can be seen
- Quality is in the UX details that speak to finesse, completion, fit and finish. All these things roll-up to Quality. Quality needs protection because it can’t speak for itself on spreadsheet tomorrow. What do I mean by protection?
- Every project is acted-upon by three factors. We know this. Time, Cost and Quality or Good, Fast & Cheap. There is a general belief that a product owner gets to control two of these dynamics at the expense of the other. That’s a lie. You get one. I say this because if you decide that time and cost are going to be controlled, you WILL have to break that tie at some point downstream and it will cost you. You can help yourself by determining which of the three has the least flexibility when compared to the other two.. Which has the most and what’s in the middle. Here’s the problem: People in charge like predictions. They want to know when they’ll go to market because they are coordinating other efforts. They want to know what the expense will be so they can predict what the ROI will be. People can and do make those numbers up arbitrarily. How do you estimate the ROI of Quality. How much time does quality take? Quality isn't a direct cause/effect dynamic. There are phases in between before it's realized. Some people don't have the patience for that.
- Here’s another fact. People will do the most nonsensical things to avoid pain. When a project get’s going it doesn’t take long before time or money is causing pain. When we are are in pain, we get tunnel vision. We want the pain to stop. We lose trust in others especially if we think the pain is their fault so we’re less likely to take advice. We also want pain to stop RIGHT NOW so we lose sight of longer term benefits like those that come with Quality. Since we want the pain from time or money to go away, we cut scope, that scope usually includes the refinement that gives a product quality. Quality ends-up on the curb because the pain from bad quality can be deferred – remember we want the pain to stop NOW. Quality needs protection because it can’t be dissected into pieces on a spreadsheet and put back together again in any way that works. If you begin by understanding the real needs to real people and using that as your context, you make that inflexible, it will be worth the time and money. How much? I don’t know but I do know it will be more than if you don’t keep it in the picture.
- It's impossible to recover because recovery means more of the time and cost you thought you were saving. By the time you realize it, It may be too late. You put a piece of crap out there and now you have to win-back lost credibility with stakeholders and the people using the product who got shorted on the first go-round. People won’t care what it cost. People won’t care how long it took unless they’ve been led to expect it which only raises anticipation and magnifies the disappointment if the quality is poor. That, after all is what they do care about. In the long-run, quality abandoned will always cost you more than quality implemented.
- You can do the most elegant work but bad intent erases that. I grew up with marketing and advertising. I got really good at convincing myself of the reasons for doing work for people with bad intent. Strictly speaking, what they’re doing was legal. A pawn shop is a legal business. Cash-on-hand home buyers are perfectly legal but the truth is they both engage in predatory business practices. They take advantage of people in a bind. I could tell myself that they provide a service to the un-banked or unbankable or that they free people from paying for a property they can’t afford. I could rationalize with the best of them. I would compartmentalize. I would put the truth in a little box and close the lid. I wouldn’t open it because I knew if I examined it closely enough, I wouldn't like what I saw. Everyone has their reasons ”I’m not paid to make the decisions about our clients.” “I have a mortgage.” “I have kids” “I like and want to keep my job.” “Somebody is going to get this job. It might as well be us.” Those are good arguments. Everyone has their own scale for what’s acceptable. That’s your moral compass. Ethics are not morals. They are empirical. One day you may find yourself at a fork in the road where you know your moral compass and the ethical approach are diverging. What if you learn that your company just landed an account for a big utility firm. That’s big news and probably big money. But what if that company is nationalized in a country where the leadership uses it to locate and imprison “enemies” who eventually disappear; a capability made easier by the design work you’re being asked to do? Morally, you might be able to distance yourself from the outcome; you put it in that little box and shut the lid and later you feel bad when you hear about the events on the news. You might even connect those events to your work but it’s just business right? You have all those good arguments remember? Morality might be debatable but Ethically, you’re accountable.
- In his Designer’s Code of Ethics, Mike Monteiro says Designers are human beings first and that we are responsible for the work we put out into the world. That means we own the outcomes even when they are unpredictable but especially when they are. If you keep asking “Why” you might uncover the fact that people have bad intent for the work you do. You can rationalize away your accountability or accept it. Refuse the work if you can. Try to convince decision makers to refuse the work. If you’re unsuccessful, quit. Easy to say but I can tell you with absolute certainty, if you have an ounce of empathy, you’ll regret some of the compromises you made in life. It’s going to happen. Which will you regret more, quitting or enabling bad intent that may cause people harm which could include murder. That’s an outcome. Recently, when I learned that we were pursuing a prospect with questionable ties, I challenged the execs at my company. I began by outlining a connection that they hadn’t considered and provided information sources to back-up my claims. I left a copy of Mike’s book for my CEO to read. He did. I followed-up and we discussed the prospect in question and our policy at length. I was told the steering committee would revisit this pursuit. I never heard anything about that prospect again. Was I prepared to quit if we accepted this client? Before I raised my concerns, I convinced myself that I was. I’ll never truly know since the decision was never pressed. In doing this, I learned two things. First, that my company has a policy that exempts anyone from working for a client they have a conflict with whether it’s a social stance or a personal issue. No repercussions. I learned that people in the company had exercised that option in the past and I knew their advancement had not suffered. Second, I learned that anyone with a point of view regarding a client's intent is welcome to share it. Again, no repercussions. With great power comes great responsibility. I would add If you want the responsibility, you have to accept accountability. If you can’t or won’t, don't accept the work. I don't really expect this to stick with you right now but a few of you are going to be in a situation where you have to make a choice and I hope you remember it then.
- So…while that’s ringing in your ears, let me wrap this up with a few reminders. The best solutions fill needs. Ask “Why“ to uncover the real needs. They need the best minds to tackle them not just MBAs but designers of all definitions. People have expectations. Meeting them is great. Exceeding them is better. Commit to the value of quality. Artificial Intelligence is burning-up the headlines but I’ll say it. There is no piece of software in the world that can replace creativity in the moment. That’s where the kind of quality we see as magic emerges. Everybody wants it but it needs protection in the form of championship and enterprise commitment. Most importantly deliberately decide what your principles are and stick to them. That‘s what makes them principles and not just guidelines. Have the vision to see the longer horizon and the outcomes that can’t be achieved any other way. There are no short-cuts.
- Without being deliberate about your design and quality, people will have SOME kind of experience by default. Why wouldn’t you want to move that in the right direction? Deliberately Ethically Magically