Lindsay Ratcliffe & guest contributor Jill Irving

ThoughtWorks were invited to participate in design-powerhouse IDEO’s first London-based Make-a-thon, which ran over two days in February. We jumped at the opportunity to collaborate and provide some of our agile application design and development experts to the event.

The ThoughtWorks-strong team went on to win ‘best pitch’ having designed and delivered an interactive web-hosted prototype demonstrate the Amnesty International ‘Panic Button App’ concept in less than day. The team built an alert app and platform for signalling at risk situations using Google Maps and HTML5 technologies. Accessible via mobile browsers by those at risk, individuals can hit the alert button to register when they’re in danger of being taken, sending their location and details. A group of volunteers then monitors the platform and in turn notifies the relevant local organisations.

Making the IDEO Way

The Make-a-thon was the brain-child of Haiyan Zhang, OpenIDEO Design Lead. The idea was to reinvent the ‘hack-a-thon’, keeping collaboration open, but by adding a more of a flavour of design methods and human-centred principles than a typical hack-a-thon would do. The event was a great blend the best of design jams and hack-a-thons as it brought together end-users with design talent, business minds and experienced developers to solve social impact problems in an offline open-collaboration forum.

To start there were eight challenges in all attracting teams of about six people each. Despite the fact the event was self-organising most challenges managed to attract a balanced team with members of diverse yet complimentary skill sets. The first day was spent exploring the briefs with divergent brainstorming and rough prototyping before presenting the initial ideas to the rest of the group. Then on the second day the teams refined their ideas to produce an experience prototype, which was then tested with on-site users or out in the real-world where possible.

Setting the Challenges

In September 2011, Amnesty International in collaboration with IDEO launched an open innovation challenge on the OpenIDEO forum - an online forum for promoting open social collaboration. The challenge was to identify and define ways that technology could be used to help people working to uphold human rights in the face of unlawful detention. Following on from the online challenge IDEO were inspired to hold a real-world Make-a-thon to take progress to the next level.

The aim of the Make-a-thon was to experiment with cross-functional collaboration for social good while tackling a number of briefs for both Amnesty International as well as some local community design challenges. These included making the London Bike Hire scheme (fondly known locally as Boris bikes) more user-friendly for tourists and making it safer for cyclists in London.

Exploring new Ways to Help Amnesty International

The event was a great platform for Amnesty International to explore new ways for people to give to the cause other making a donation or letter writing campaigns. As described by Owen Pringle, Director, Digital Communications at Amnesty International, ‘our traditional model is one of responding: a human rights incident occurs, we send in a subject matter expert and we use the evidence that we gather to affect policy change at a government level – it’s what we’re good at…however we also want to focus on the rights holder and be able to proactively intervene or prevent violations occurring if possible.’

With the Amnesty challenges, the organisers were aware that human rights issues and situations are often difficult. So IDEO and Amnesty collaborated to produce the guiding principles of optimism, solution-focussed and respectful to give the event a sense of purpose and direction.

One of the major differences of the Make-a-thon was the inclusion of users. In the case of the Amnesty challenges the teams had direct access to people who had first-hand experience of being unlawfully detained and interrogated. This was invaluable to help the team understand the emotions, needs, context, environment and constraints, and in fact the whole premise behind user-centred design. The users, along with the business representatives, provided information and stimulus for the concept generation but also feedback as to the suitability and viability of the products as they were designed and developed.

From Pitch to Prototype

The ThoughtWorks strong team, who won ‘best-pitch’, built a mobile web application nicknamed ‘Panic Button App’. The app enables people at risk of unlawful detention to send an alert to a ‘buddy’ if they are in danger, which could include a message (where time ad circumstances permit) as well as their geographic location. In order to allow access for the largest range of mobile devices, it was built with HTML5 and accessed via a mobile web browser. The team also experimented with SMS technology. An important facility was being able to provide support in parts of the world that do not have access to a mobile data network, and also to make the app accessible by non-smartphone users by using the SMS network.














The ‘Panic Button App’ team – Amir, Jill & Yu from ThoughtWorks and Bianca from BBC

The team imagined several different scenarios that considered the time as the critical factor when using the app:

• Option 1: Panic Button only – this could be used in critical situations and would take a matter of seconds.
• Option 2: Send a pre-composed message – where time is still of the essence, but not quite as urgent as above, the user can select a pre-composed message to describe their situation. The messages can be composed at the time of registration, rather than waiting for an event to occur.
• Option 3: Send a custom message – where time permits the user can enter a custom message to describe whatever critical information could help them in their situation. 
• Thanks to the ThoughtWorks developers, the ‘Panic Button App’ team was able to go straight from sketching ideas with marker pens and post-it's to prototyping in code. They uploaded the app onto a cloud hosting service so that it could be used on mobile web browsers. Once the prototype was working in a live environment they tested it with users throughout the rest of the day. After refining the design and interaction based on the user input they then did a live web demonstration of the end-to-end concept to the rest of the Make-a-thon team. 

For the prototype the team made use of Google maps and developed code to track messages, showing the locations of the user as they were entered during the demonstration (although this would not be a part of the Amnesty service is this was developed fully).










Images from the ‘Panic Button App’

A Game Changer

The make-a-thon event proved to be a game changer from the perspective of the organisers at IDEO and also Amnesty as providers of some of the design challenges. The real success was the blend of all the different skills and being able to design and develop and prove concepts at speed.
Haiyan said ‘Thanks for organising to have such fab developers at our event! We couldn't have done it without them.’

Owen Pringle of Amnesty waxed lyrical about the make-a-thon saying “We want to replicate [this event] as soon as possible” He also went on to say “The prototypes were amazing…we’re keen to get one or more of the prototypes into the live environment”

ThoughtWorks were also really honoured to be invited to take part and very proud of what they achieved on the day.

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Thanks to Jill Irving for contributing to this article and helping to make the day a success from ThoughtWorks, IDEO and Amnesty’s perspective.


Jill is a, Lead User Experience Consultant and UI developer at ThoughtWorks - she has loved creating things for the web since she used Netscape 1.1. Jill proudly considers herself to be slightly geekier than your average designer — bringing a rare blend of creative and technical ability to every project.

Thanks to everyone who attended the Agile UX conference, along with the organisers from UX Australia

I had the pleasure of presenting on Finding time for Design within Agile software delivery.

Here’s the slides from my presentation:

Audio: listen to my presentation here.

Slides: can be downloaded with notes from here.

The presentation summary:
In the Agile software development world, time is of the essence – or rather design time becomes a precious commodity. Taking the time to conduct in-depth user research, then create and explore innovative design solutions becomes an expensive luxury that isn’t always affordable. But what happens if there is a way to not just streamline the UX research and design process, but to actually produce better results for it?

As UX Designers in Agile dev teams we commonly grapple with challenges such as:

• Being allowed the time to go through the creative exploration process, when a Dev team is waiting for to you to finish so that they can start.
• Finding a balance between being Lean in practices, while exploring alternative innovative ideas and solutions.
• Explaining to Devs that lo-fi prototypes are more a communication tool and than a finalised deliverable

What’s the solution?

At ThoughtWorks we spend a lot of time trying to evaluate our approach and improve our techniques. I’ll share some of the Lean UX methods and approaches that we’ve been embracing to get out of the deliverable business and to start becoming an integrated part of Agile software delivery teams to collaboratively develop great experiences in short time frames. I’ll cover topics and techniques including:

• Engaging stakeholders and the Dev team early using collaborative design
• Rapid production
• Conducting lightweight research
• Rapid iterations
• Managing expectations
• Asking for more time
• Communicating progress through regular showcases

I just read an interesting post on Leisa Reichelt’s blog tackling the subject of “Customer Experience v User Experience” so I thought I’d attempt to articulate my thoughts on the subject.

The U in UX stands for ‘user’. A user in this context is a person who interacts with a computer system. During the advent of e-commerce UX suddenly found itself thrust into the limelight as it was thought that UX was one of the major contributors to determine product success – and failure where there was a lack of a coherent UX. However the users of the computer systems in the context of ecommerce, were no longer just mere users – like in the old days of desktop software –they were now potential 'customers'. These customers have quite different characteristics to users and they behave in different ways because they have higher needs, motivation and choice.  A customer will do what they need to in order to inform their purchase decisions; to make sure they are buying the right product, at the right price to meet their needs. This behaviour will invariably take them to various different places sources online and also offline. So the experience a customer has, is all encompassing and should consider passive and active experiences across all channels, not just the online channel.

A few years back I was engaged as a UXer by @alancolville, at what is now Virgin Media, to help design the hardware and the software for a new cable TV product. We began thinking about the ‘user experience’ but soon migrated into thinking more broadly about the total customer experience. Along with @damienread we took into account the broader experience ecosystem that included everything from online/video/TV and phone-based customer service and support, online/ offline and TV-based sales and marketing channels, operational support of installations, disconnections, fault-repairs and upgrades. It became a full-service customer experience programme.

This is where customer experience and service design actually become one and the same because you need to design for the full cross-channel customer experience. When you are dealing with a premium product of that complexity and a customer base who has choice through highly competitive offerings and a voice on public internet forums you need a much more holistic and strategic view. To play effectively in this kind of game there needs to be organisational changes to create an empowered cross-siloed, cross functional team who are responsible for delivering a customer experience that synchronised both internally and externally. Customer data and intelligence needs to be centralised so that all channels can benefit from the shared learning’s, then understand and act on the strengths and weaknesses in whole customer experience.

Here are some principles to consider when developing a customer experience strategy:·      “Know me” – recognise and respect customers’ identities, preferences and behaviours across channels. If they have signed-up online and completed a customer profile, don’t make them do it again in-store to join your loyalty scheme.·      “Do it once” – if customers move between channels to complete a purchase, minimise repetition of effort on their behalf to complete the deal. For example if a customer starts a mortgage application online but decides to finish the application in a branch, because they need some face-to-face support, don’t make them start the application from the beginning.·      “Be consistent” – customers don’t see channels they see a single brand. If your experience or product offerings are different across channels there should be a very good reason for it.·      “Be relevant” – design for everyone pleases no-one, so ensure that the design of the experience is focussed on the most important customers. Sure all customers are important, but you need to prioritise who the most important customers are to your business and make their experience relevant. 

An Experience Design approach that blends innovative, creative design thinking methods with the delivery methods of agile, lean and continuous is the most efficient and effective way to design, develop and deliver compelling experiences that delight customers and drive business success.

What’s in a name?
Experience design is the creative process to design human-system interactions that shape perceptions and influence emotional responses and behaviour. As a discipline it has evolved and merged with a number of disciplines over time. Perhaps it’s strongest influence stems back from the world of human-computer interaction (HCI). One of the key components of HCI is to make the design process human-centred, so that it’s always focussed on the human activity and the goals that the users want to achieve.
While experience design evolves as a design discipline, the most recent influences that are shaping design methods have come from outside the design industry. Process methods such as ‘agile’, which came from the IT industry and ‘lean’, which came from large-scale manufacturing are now shaping both business and design thinking.

For over ten years there has been a groundswell of change within IT delivery methods. As a result the industry has seen the widespread adoption of ‘agile’ and its derivative methods. Agile is a set of guidelines, written in the agile manifesto, for the collaborative development of software that focuses on delivering value rather than features, that delivers working software in frequent incremental chunks, rather than in the more traditional, risk-fraught, big-bang way.

Lean on the other hand, came from the manufacturing industry, is focussed on delivering value in the most efficient and effective way. Its philosophy is based on ‘just-in-time’ principles, or manufacturing when it’s needed, thus seeking to reduce waste in any form, be it effort, materials time and costs.
Both agile and lean are all-inclusive environments. Where once experience design practitioners were used to designing in ‘design phases’ of the project in the comfort of their design studios, they found that they were hoisted out of their comfort zones and expected to work in these new collaborative multi-disciplined environments. Some practitioners who recognised the need for change, saw the benefits and advantages that these new methods offered. Experience Design practitioners who have an appreciative understanding of lean and agile have been seeking to ‘redesign design’ and move away from the practice designing in isolation and in advance of development and instead are adapting experience design to fit within agile and lean frameworks.

One of the underlying principles of both methods is ‘continuous’.  The agile manifesto recommends that we strive for ‘early and continuous delivery of valuable software’ and lean talks about the practice of ‘continuous improvement’ or ‘kaizen’. ‘Continuous’ is most relevant in this the digital age, where the notion of the ‘deadline’, as once enforced by the production schedules of the large industrial machines, is almost obsolete. ‘Continuous’ is iterative and evolutionary and change is built into the process as a priority requirement, rather than something that is prevented or discouraged.

Interestingly there are strong parallels in the design industry. ‘Design methods’, which emerged in the 1960s, is the discipline that looks at the processes and techniques for creative problem solving. Design methods (see Jones, J.C. 1970 and Cross, N. 1989) has always advocated an iterative and evolutionary approach to creative problem solving especially as it pertains to product development and engineering. Likewise, the disciplines of human-computer interaction (HCI) and user-centred design (UCD) have instilled an evolutionary approach, augmented by ‘test and learn’ methods. This is where possible design solutions are tested with end users of the intended product to ensure that it is fit for purpose and meets the users needs.

And so by combining design methods with lean and agile methods the practise of ‘continuous design’ is now emerging. Continuous design is a philosophical and practical approach that uses empirical techniques as well as qualitative and quantitative data to continuously steer experience, service and product design and development.

The continuous design approach is applicable at any point in the design development lifecycle. You can take the approach at the start of a ‘green fields’ project or apply it down the track when looking to improve existing products. To look at how to apply continuous design we’ll start by looking at a green-fields project and take you through the process.

Validate the opportunity or problem space
During the early part of the process you need to look to discover why there is an opportunity or a problem. Don’t just take it as gospel. Question everything. Be almost child-like in your pursuit of the answer. Use all the sources available, including internal and external stakeholders, market and competitor intelligence and key to the continuous design approach the customer perspective. You need to understand who the new or existing customers are. This is not just demographic information but you need to know what drives them, what influences them, what makes them tick and what turns them off. You need to develop a sense of empathy, which also needs to be shared by everyone on the project team. Once you have collected all your data you need to understand what it’s telling you. You need to analyse it, look for insights and develop a hypothesis about the opportunity. We call it a hypothesis because we acknowledge that at this point it’s just a best guess based on what we have learnt so far.
A primary objective in continuous design is to validate any hypothesis as quickly as possible in order that we can either ‘fail-fast’, change direction or scale quickly. Underpinning the continuous philosophy is the lean mantra of avoiding waste. We don’t want to spend lots of time, effort and money on something if we are uncertain it will deliver the expected results. So we need to test early and test often.

Design Thinking – where magic happens
While having a plethora of data is great, it’s true value is in understanding the patterns and stories that inspire action.  Armed with customer insights, understanding of context and our product hypothesis, we can set about envisioning the solution. Here’s where the art part comes in. We use design-thinking methods to explore the opportunity space. We might start by using divergent thinking techniques to explore the opportunities available. We combine this with visual communication to rapidly sketch out ideas to inspire further development or tangential ideas from the team.

Once upon a time ago, design was done in a creative vacuum by creative people, however in the world of continuous design anyone who is willing to think creatively about the problem or opportunity space is welcome. This collaboration can include anyone on the project team from subject matter or functional experts that are part of the project team or anyone who has direct contact with customers, such as sales or customer service people. After a time-boxed period of thinking broadly, we assess all the ideas and start to converge on the ideas with the most promise. We then take those ideas refine them and add a little more rigour around the thinking.

Design, test and learn
This is the first opportunity to get out of the office and test the concepts with the target market. We take our strongest candidate ideas and seek to validate our thinking with customers. This process of explore, test and learn underpins the whole philosophy of continuous design. The idea is to avoid creating waste in terms of time, effort and money by developing the detail of a product until we have first validated that the concept is viable. Everything that way has done to this point has been an assumption, or guesswork and now what we want is proof that we are on the right track with the right idea.

Testing your concepts with customers is not an automatic tick in the box. You need to be prepared for failure, if it happens. Just because you, or someone on the team thinks it’s a good idea, it doesn’t mean that customers will agree. However the key point it is better to find out the idea is not a good one as early as possible so that you can change direction or drop the idea altogether before you have spent too much time or effort on it. With the right mindset you can still view failed ideas as a positive experience because you have new learnings and a new set of information which you can add to your knowledge base. Like Thomas Edison once said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Continuous Improvement
The design, test and learn approach does not just happen once. In agile development environments it happens every ‘iteration’ or even as often as weekly. We want to continuously build up design knowledge and confidence that we are delivering the right product for the right people at the right time. We apply the techniques throughout the project and also beyond once the product or service is launched. In fact, the live environment is the best environment for truly understanding how customers are interacting and responding to the product, service or experience. Therefore we need to be in a position to continuously monitor and measure the experience so that we can adapt and refine where the results are less than optimal.

To have the most benefit we need to be in a position where we can deliver improvements almost in real-time, rather than having to wait for the next infrequent production release cycle. To do this we combine the continuous design, test and learn approach with continuous delivery– “releasing high quality software fast through build, test and deployment automation”.

Continuous improvement is a seismic shift for organisations. It requires operational, cultural and process changes across the board. However it is the most effective way to reduce risk and waste while delivering compelling products and experience rapidly to market.

I just stumbled on myself on YouTube talking about 'Agility and the Customer Experience'. Check it out.

Cate Trotter from Insider Trends was also presenting at the ThoughtWorks Retail Agility conference the other day. Being a big fan of William Gibson’s ‘Pattern Recognition’ series I was very excited to meet a real-life ‘cool-hunter’.
Cate’s day job is looking for trends, looking for patterns that exist in subcultures that will come to influence main stream culture. She takes businesses on ‘trend tours’, to show them where the hip and happening starts.  She had a dizzying amount of great examples of cutting edge inovation in the retail sector that drives not just compelling customer experiences but also disruptive experiences. Real creative ways of engaging customers and creating buzz. 
One of the underlying themes that seemed to emerge for me was the subtle shift away from ‘hard sell’ and the focus on the immediate returns, to building brand and relationships in a more meaningful and engaging way. Which in the current economic climate is not only refreshing but a very insightful strategy for long term survival. While most retailers are scrabbling to claim their share of shoppers’ limited wallet with sales, discounts and ‘special-purchase’ cheap and nasty give-aways, to secure short-term income, some creating brand experiences that will encourage loyalty long after the event is over. 
Take Airwalk as a great example: They created and ‘Invisible Pop‐Up Store’ enhanced with augmented reality to create buzz around the very limited edition Goldrun sneaker. So cool! Or Wetseal, who have taken the concept of user-generated content and have created the capability to ‘crowdsource’ outfits.
Big thanks to Cate.

I presented at the ThoughtWorks Retail Agility Conference on Agile Experience Design. Specifically I was looking at how retailers can take advantage of AXD to design, develop and deliver compelling, shopper-centric, omni-channel experiences that delight customers and drive business success.I’ve been doing experience design for a long time. I’ve been doing agile experience design for a sizeable proportion of that time. When I was preparing the presentation I got that pre-presentation feeling, similar to the pre-publication feeling I got when reading the draft manuscript of our Agile Experience Design book. I was worried that I had nothing to say. I’ve been doing this stuff for so long that it has just become second nature to me and feels like common sense.
But no fear! A number of people approached me immediately after the presentation and thanked me for talking about the approach, about how inspirational it was and how it’s really got them thinking about how they can do things differently and most important, make a difference. Perhaps to other experienced practitioners in the same field, what I’m talking about isn’t necessarily all that different but it certainly seems to make a difference to many of the business and IT people that I meet along the way.
I guess that is similar to what James Box and Cennydd Bowles said in their book ‘Undercover User Experience Design’, “The fundamentals of UX design…are easy to learn but difficult to put into practice.” So I guess what I bring to the table is the benefit of my experience and the context of all of my learnings in different situations.

Wow how remiss of me! I have completely failed to blog about my biggest project of last year – the book! In November last year (2011) Marc McNeil and I published Agile Experience Design: A digital designers guide to agile, lean and continuous. To our knowledge it’s the first book to market about the topic of experience design in agile.
How it came aboutThere has been a lot of banter on the subject for a good number of years on various SIG groups, and lots of great presentations delivered at various conferences and published on the web that have sought to explain how to marry the two. However there was no one go to comprehensive reference point. I remember when I started with ThoughtWorks (agile custom software experts) as the only UX person in Australia wishing that I could find a definitive guide book on how to do UX in an agile environment. It is a very different way of working but I was keenly aware that someone somewhere must have solved the problem, and that I didn’t need to work it out for myself. The book ended up being the book I wished that I could have read back then.
I joined forces with Marc when I moved back from Australia to the UK and realised we were aligned in our thinking on the subject. We were also still surprised that no one had published a book on the subject and so we set about doing just that.
An non-movable feastFrom start to finish we had FIVE months. Prior to signing the contract I talked to Martin Fowler and Jez Humble, both successful authors, about the timescales and the unanimous opinion was that we were mad! Jez said ‘ You need at least 18 months to write the first draft, then you need some decompression time, then you need time to rewrite and edit.’ So we went back to the publisher, in the hope of revising the proposed publication date. However we were faced with a ‘deal or no deal’. Marc and I both laughed and agreed that we might as well die trying as not try at all.
A very non-agile processIn agreeing to the terms we were also asked to commit to the length of the book. At this point all we had written was two paragraphs describing the essence of the book. We had no idea. I flicked through a couple of notable books on my shelf, of the ilk that I thought ours might be, stuck a finger in the air and suggested 100,000 words. When we submitted our first draft, it was 135,000 words long. Naively we had not appreciated that 100,000 words had been cast in stone. We then had a very tough process to cut 35,000 words (over a third of the final book) from the manuscript (and still deliver on time).
Concurrent workingSo five months is a doable time-frame, just, if you are a full-time author perhaps. But hey, we both had full-time jobs. This is the job that give us the experience and expertise to be able to write books. We both also have families. So we begged borrowed and stole time and worked bloody hard for five intense months to produce the book. We are grateful to our families in particular who made the bulk of the sacrifices, for allowing us to realise our ambition.
Collaborative and feedback drivenTwo aspects that were sacrificed as a result of the timeframe was the ability to collaborate and also solicit feedback from peers and colleagues on the work in progress. We started off with the best of intentions and were able to include some contributions and get some feedback, but not as much as we might have liked. If word count and time had permitted we would have liked to have included more anecdotes and lessons learnt from other practitioners.
Test and learnThis book was only ever intended as a guide, rather than a recipe book. It would be a contradiction in terms to say that there’s a one size fits all approach to agile experience design. Every project will be different because of the budget, timescales and people/process/technology constraints. However to stay true to the nature of agile experience design I’m keen to hear about people’s experiences and how they have aplied, adopted or adapted some of the concepts and ideas in the book. I promise to share the finding and attribute them to the contributers either on the accompanying website (if I ever get the time to add some content to it) or perhaps even in version 2.0.

One the most undervalued roles in a web or software development team is that of a Copy Writer/Content Strategist.  Having a skilled specialist on a team who is able to set the tone of the conversation with users and ensure that it is consistent across the site can make the difference between a mediocre or great product.

Unfortunately, it’s rare to have a dedicated Copy Writer on a team unless the product is either content heavy or marketing driven. Largely the duty of authoring all those small but important bits of text tends to fall to the User Experience Designer and Product Manager/client when creating and reviewing wireframes.

In the worst-case scenario it gets left with the Devs to do when they are building pages. In this case instructional text, error messages, field labels, etc. end up sounding like the have been written by an emotionless robot. This is not a slight aimed at the English skills of my technically minded colleagues, but more a reality of what happens when copy is produced as a by-product of writing functional code.

Recently a colleague of mine, Meaghan Waters, shared a set of content writing guidelines, which had previously been shared with her by an old colleague, Amy Teshio.

It has some great tips and reminders on how to write compelling content. I found it so valuable and helpful that I had to share it here as well:

Clear, Compelling, Concise

Like most things in life, good writing is about thinking and feeling:

• If you can think clearly, you can write clearly.
• If you are passionate about what you have to say, your text can be compelling.
• If you can be dispassionate about how you’ve said it, your text can be concise.

Some tips:

Believe in your message.

Trusts its value. Let it speak for itself. Tell stories. Know when to move from information, to story, to visual rendition, back to information, etc. (or consult with others).

Get it down on screen/paper, then revise.

Let the flurry happen. Put it aside and come back with fresher eyes. Consult with our editorial team. Give yourself enough time to draft, consult, revise. Writing is different from editing. Don’t try to do them simultaneously.

Edit, edit, edit.

Remember, just because you are reluctant to give up a particularly nice word, sentence or paragraph doesn’t mean the reader will miss it. If you are having trouble giving it up, copy it to a separate file and make it your own buried treasure.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary word, a paragraph no unnecessary sentence, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style

Vary your sentence length.

Mix up the rhythm. It keeps it interesting and sounds less robotic.

As a general rule, a good sentence contains one idea.

If you have another idea to convey, start a fresh sentence.

Find your voice and stay with it.

Know your audience.
Voice should reflect subject matter.
Use the appropriate tone:

• Formal vs Casual
• Serious vs Humorous

Use active verbs. Avoid “to be” constructions and the passive voice.

No: The white iPhone is preferred by generation Xers.
Yes: Generation Xers prefer the white iPhone.

Stay close to the idea.

Don’t put too many qualifiers between you and your message. This attempt to be conscientious will only confuse the reader. Readers don’t retain ideas that are in remote locations.

Don’t say “perambulate” when you can say “walk”.

Avoid jargon. Use the simple, reliable work. Good writing is not so much a matter of using unfamiliar words, as using familiar ones in unfamiliar ways.

Watch stuff like:

Three factors of influence versus three influences.

When talking to different participants, paper copy remains a critical component of the way they manage day-to-day information.
But note: paper copy didn’t do the talking to the different participants.

Avoid passive voice/double gerunds.

No: The e-binder concept form was seen as a way to provide a format for organizing sharing.
Yes: Participants see the e-binder as a way to organize the sharing of information.

Why learnings instead of lessons? Why around instead of about?

A few weeks ago I attended the Customer Experience Management for Banking and Financial Services conference, presenting on driving agility into your customer experience.  There were some great presentations, it is great to see the banks taking customer experience seriously. From my notes, what follows are some of the presentations and ideas that resonated with me.

Anthony Thomson, Metrobank

Anthony Thomson, chairman of Metro Bank was inspiring. Everything they do is from the customer perspective.

For everything Metro Bank do, they ask ‘why are we doing this?’ Is it going to make our lives easier, or is it going to give our customers a better experience? The second trumps the first every time.

Metrobank see that they (like all banks) are essentially a money shop who sell the same products as their competitors. The only real differentiator is experience and service. With the Vickers Report recommending “the early introduction” of a system that makes it easier to move accounts and that is “free of risk and cost to customers”, this is going to become increasingly more important.

Retail is detail is the old adage. Think about something as small as the pen on the counter. Chaining it down may suggest security, until you see a chain with no pen attached. Anthony questioned what is the cost of a pen? What is the value of having your branded pen in your customers’ kitchen? Talking of branding he showed a picture of a Metrobank van. Banks use vans all the time to transport the pens and stationary to the branches, but they are never branded. Is this security trumping marketing? A lack of joined up thinking? He commented on the press comments on Metrobank attitude towards dogs. Focussing upon the dog misses the point. Customers love their dogs, why shouldn’t they be allowed in the stores and be positively welcomed! By saying “no dogs” are you saying we care more about our carpets than our customers?

Another detail thing – how often have you waited outside a bank to open in the morning, or be hassled out because it’s the end of the day and is now closed. Metrobank have flexibility, they’ll open a little earlier if people are waiting outside and stay open till the last customer leaves.

A theme through Anthony’s presentation was of empowerment. Empowering staff, removing pedantic rules that get in the way of delivering a compelling customer experience. He told a story of how a customer had to wait longer for assistance than expected and incurred an £8 parking ticket. A member of staff wanted to refund the customer and suggested giving them £4. To which Anthony commented “and only half piss them off?”

Empowerment starts with recruiting good people. Only a fraction of the people who apply get to work for Metrobank. They understand that skills can be trained so they recruit for attitude. If someone whose job is to interact with customers on a daily basis doesn’t smile, they don’t get the job. When it comes to targets, they ‘measure what matters’. They incentivise on service not sales because with good service comes sales.

Rob Hawthorn, Barclays

Empowerment was a theme that ran through the presentation that Rob Hawthorne from Barclays gave. He’s taken a leaf out of the hospitality industry and borrowed from Ritz Carlton with their Credo Card, a single sided card that reminds their staff of the levels of service they should provide. Barclays corporate staff are empowered to fix the problem. Like Metrobank they strive for no stupid rules and put the customer first. For example a customer pays in £230.60 and only £230.20 is credited to the account. They now refund then investigate. By introducing this policy change they say a 65% reduction in customer complaints.

Everyday, in every Ritz Carlton hotel they have The Line-up. This is a fifteen minute meeting to review guest experiences, address issues and identify how they can improve service. It is an opportunity to tell stories, both top down (what’s going on in the company overall) and bottom up (what can we learn from individuals and their interactions with customers). Barclays corporate do this across the organisation. From the top down they have one version of the truth; what is happening in Barclays world, what is important and what are customers saying today?”

The fifteen minute meeting is a familiar concept within agile, known as the standup it’s a brief meeting where the team review what they did yesterday, what they are doing today and any issues or blockers they are facing.

“How often do you see your complaints data?” Asked Rob. What use is seeing it once a month? You should be seeing it every day. Better still (and this is something that I alluded to as well), walk in the shoes of your customer. Get out into the branches, into the call centre and see what is going on for yourself.

Richard Brimble, Veolia Water

Not FS, but Richard gave a view on customer experience from a different viewpoint.  He gave an engaging presentation that started by asking if you are a blue tit or a robin. Blank states from the audience, so he elaborated. After the first world war milk companies started sealing milk bottles with foil tops. Until then the bottles had open tops and both robins and blue tits would drink the cream from the top. With the foil tops the birds had to learn to peck through them. By the 1950s the entire blue tit population had learned this. Robins never did. Robins are territorial and solitary creatures, whilst blue tits are social. They may be scruffy compared to the elegance of the robin, but they are innate communicators. They share their learnings and copy each others successes. As an organisation are you a robin or a blue tit?!

Sean Gilchrist, Barclays

Is Barclays going all Lean Startup? Sean Gilchrist from Barclays told a story of their lean customer development approach to developing their mobile bank Barclays.mobi. The journey started in data; a significant minority of customers were accessing internet banking using mobile devices. A clunky experience at best. Rather than going the Big IT route they went lean and did some customer discovery. “What’s important to you?” they asked customers.  “Checking balance” they were told. “How about paying bills on your mobile?” they asked, “No, we just want to check balances” was the response. “How about a branch location finder?” to be told  “No, we just want to check balances”. In eight weeks and on a shoestring they built and launched their minimum viable product, Barclays.mobi. The product was instantly successful and gave the team leverage to continue development.

Sean told another story about the perils of just pushing something into production without thinking about how people behave on-line. To access account information on on-line banking the customer has to use a security device that displays digits that are then entered into the application. The digits were displayed in two blocks of four:

1234 5678

A decision was taken to replace the single field on the application where this number was entered into two fields that better represented the way the number was presented on the screen, i.e.

|1234| |5678|

The week they made this change they received over thirty thousand complaints about this change. When I’ve recounted this story to Barclays customers they can remember when this happened and what a pain it was. People who don’t touch type look at their keyboard, not the screen. They entered the number as one continuum, not in two blocks. Tabbing between fields is an ‘advanced’ technique. Suddenly the customer was unable to enter the number without having to use their mouse to move to the next field. A change that was suppose to reduce errors ended up causing more. The issue was fixed by have an auto-tab between the fields, but not before customer complaints. Usability testing (oe even having an experienced usability expert on the team) before going live would have picked this issue up.

Trent Fulcher, RBS

Finally Trent Fulcher from RBS presented on the customer experience and innovation work he has been doing at RBS. A key takeaway from his presentation was that at RBS they demonstrated a positive correlation between advocacy and revenue per customer. Not only are advocates more profitable, they also bring new customers to brand. RBS accepted that they will always have detractors to the brand and are happy to take a calculated decision not to focus upon changing their perceptions, rather focus on ‘passives’ and move them to advocates. He demonstrated how RBS modelled their customer journeys, understanding what customers value and expect from every touch point. What they discovered is that for some touchpoints they were overreaching on these expectations, enabling them to understand if they were focussing effort on the parts of the journey that Make A Difference.

This is the presentation I gave at the Customer Experience Management for Banking and Financial Services on Tuesday. I’ll write up a synopsis of conference when I get a chance – there were some great insights from some of the speakers and it’s good to see some of the customer experience innovations that a handful of banks are pioneering.

I heard a good story this week about in insurance company getting a minimum viable product for Live Chat on their website.  It was when live chat was first starting and as a service was too expensive for them to pursue.  They had a call centre so what they did was a cheap workaround.  There was a call to action for Live Chat on the site, with a picture of an agent ready to start messaging.  But when the pop-up chat window opened, it had a message apologising that all their live chat agents were busy.  But if the customer entered a telephone number they’d get a call right back on their phone.  This was technology they already had. By all accounts it was successful, focussing upon the goal (get an agent talking to the customer real time) rather than the tool.

I’m really excited that Lean Startup Machine is coming to London over the weekend 16-18th September, especially so as I’m a mentor at the event.  I blogged about my experience in NYC a while ago.  If you want to experience customer driven innovation, getting a product into production in two days (pivoting on the way), then sign-up to what promises to be an awesome weekend.

I’ve been rather tardy of late with blog posts; too much else is going on, not least the writing a book Agile Experience Design with Lindsay Ratcliffe to be published in November. Lindsay writes a great article for our publisher on how the design process is no longer fit for purpose, being stuck in the old advertising/ print world with outdated concepts that are irrelevant for the digital world.  Not least is the concept of the deadline, working towards this mythical date for the final reveal.

I’ve recently seen several projects where deadlines have caused all sorts of issues.  Here’s a theme.  The business owner picks a date in the future for the new product to be launched with great fanfare.  An agency are engaged by the business to develop the creative concepts.  This creative stuff has to happen offsite, and certainly nowhere near IT (who are seen as party-poopers, unable to be visionary, rather doomsayers with their constraints).  Aligning the creative and IT is a challenge, but there’s a deadline for the agency to deliver the creative and this fit’s into the IT plan.  What happens next is that the creative slips.  The concepts are not quite right; the business asks for them to refined.  Their deadline passes.  IT raises it as a risk on the plan, but the delivery date for launch remains fixed.  Finally the creative is complete and signed off by the business who are delighted by the innovative concepts.  IT aren’t.  They got an unrealistic product vision to be delivered in an unrealistic timeframe with no control over the launch date that has been announced to the market.  As the date approaches and difficult conversations are had, who gets the blame?  Not the creative team who produced the hoped-for award winning design.  They are long gone.  It is IT who get the blame, once again failing to deliver on time or on budget.

None of this would happen if designers and developers collaborated.  If ownership of both the process and the product was shared.  How can we facilitate that sharing?   That’s coming in the book.  That I ought to get back to writing. To meet the deadline.

It’s time to brush the dust off this blog of mine and start doing something with it.  While I’m sure lots of people are starting off 2011 with intentions of blogging more, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and have decided that today is the day to do something about it.

Vision demos can seem contrived, impossible, and laughable. What strikes me about this vision demo from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is that these scenarios, in isolation, seem quite feasible given current technology.

Working with stakeholders from across the emergency management community [and] Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are developing future work environments for emergency management. These Precision Information Environments (or PIEs) will provide tailored access to information and decision support capabilities that adapt to the varying users and phases of emergency management. A PIE will provide analysis and simulation capabilities through novel interactions that transform planning, communication and decision making by first responders, policy makers, and the public.

Talk about unintended consequences…

“The Macintosh, for years, showed an icon of a trashcan of imminent danger of explosion if a single document was placed therein. Users quickly formed the habit of emptying the trashcan as soon as the first document hit. This not only turned a single-step operation into a two-step operation (drag to the trash, then empty the trash), it negated the entire power of the trashcan, namely, undo.”

source: Ask Tog: First Principles of Interaction Design

This is a workshop I facilitate about the importance of designing for behavior, the value of user stories and interaction narratives, and rapid ideation through sketching in an interdisciplinary team.

An illustration of iterative design and prototyping featuring the “boomerang” plane.

The Northwest lifestyle has found its way into shopping malls by way of Eddie Bauer, and into record stores through the alternative rock scene. Daniel Cardenas of Northwest Live wants to spread Northwest living through the Internet. With a camera in hand and adventure in his heart, Daniel travels between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, BC tracking down and documenting Northwest artists and events with the wonderment of a young boy.

Daniel, on behalf of NWlive, has generated a lot of content over the past year. NWLive needs a flexible yet solid web content delivery platform; one that can grow in-step with the growing body of work.

This is a media collection, not a web log

Design for context and the rest will follow.

There are five ways to organize content: Chronological, alphabetical, location, continuum, and category. The most readily accessible form of content sharing these days is the web log (blog). Blogs are great for journal style publishing whereby an author shares their thoughts, uploads a picture of their cat doing something cute, or posting a recipe for just about anything. Out-of-the-box, most web logs are organized chronologically with the most recent post first: One-dimensional content presentation. What if the content could be provided in multiple-dimensions? In how many other dimensions can we present NWLive’s content? How can we raise the bar and make the NWLive media collection less like a blog? And finally, how can we improve the discovery and retrieval of content in the media collection? The answer does not reside in the content itself, but in the context and the purpose for its use.

We can describe the context with the following activities and use cases for the NWLive media collection:

• An office worker takes a break from the daily grind to watch short, yet entertaining media clips
• An event attendee follows-up a few days later to relive highlights and reflect on their own experiences
• An internet searcher explores a topic of interest and discovers some relevant media clips

Content Strategy

How the media collection will be used and in what context guides the content strategy.

Observing when and how viewers consume the content provides valuable data. NWLive needs qualitative data to know whether the current content strategy aligns with the Northwest lifestyle.

To help us generate content strategy proposals and in-turn validate those proposals, we look to representatives of NWLive’s target audience: Females in their late twenties to early thirties. While NWLive’s content does not currently reflect the interests of any one gender, focusing on the female gender as a target audience helps to bring a balanced gender perspective by avoiding the male archetype’s penchant for sports, beer, and bikinis. The target age group ensures the audience has the means to travel around the Northwest and participate in leisure activities.

Usually, one persona will suffice. However, the Northwest lifestyle is quite unique in that there are two hemispheres of experience given the cosmopolitan attitude of major Northwest cities and the natural environment surrounding these urban centers. In response, we created two personas:

1. Intelligent 30-something
   Natalie H represents the typical Northwest archetype: outdoorsy, environmentally conscious. Natalie’s primary motivation for exploring the Northwest-centric media collection is to raise her awareness of outdoor activities and community events with an environmental focus.
2. Hip 30-something
   Kristen J is the life of the party with approximately 50% percent of Facebook’s 500 million users as her ‘friends’. Below that party-girl exterior lives a community activist who volunteers at the local youth shelter, providing mentorship to young girls from broken homes.

By focusing on these two primary personas, we have a good grasp of who consumes and shares the content. The next time Daniel chooses a Northwest event or topic to shoot, he can ask himself if Natalie or Kristen will take interest in that content.

Design Strategy

Let the content shine.

Video-based media holds our attention quite well when displayed on the television. The TV screen feeds our eyes and synapses. Television has an advantage: The rectangle is completely filled with images broadcasters and filmmakers want us to see. This experience changes in an interactive context. Not only are our eyes filled with a moving image, our visual field scans across text and controls. When combined, all of these elements call on us to make decisions about what to do and where to go next.

The design principles for NWLive have to support the viewer’s goals to discover the content they find relevant and quickly retrieve content they want to experience again. In order to get the message across to viewers, NWLive needs a user interface that showcases the content, vs. the work of a web graphic designer. And likewise, viewers need subtle visual cues like tags, descriptions, titles, and media controls in order to support and enhance their interactive experience.

Give the content producer the freedom to change and to iterate on their platform of choice.

Daniel has a brand direction for his media collection. He also has a logo that he commissioned from a talented graphic designer. He uses the logo to brand NWLive videos so that when they are viewed and shared across various channels, people know who produced the content. Daniel isn’t quite sure about how the brand will be expressed in an interactive realm and he’s not even ready to consider this aspect until he sees results about how people are using his collection. Daniel wants the scaffolding so he can figure out the finer details later.

Business Strategy

Hosting a website comes with a cost. While those costs continue to drop, Daniel has to be able to pay the expenses incurred through owning camera equipment, travel and fuel costs: the normal operating expenses.

Let them see ads.

Most viewers do not mind the presence of ads in their viewing space as long as the ads do not obstruct or obscure the content. Popups, flyouts, and other egregious methods used by advertisers to force their message into a viewers face typically put people off. People will usually appreciate a website that doesn’t bark at them like a rabid car salesman.

When ads integrate nicely into the user interface they do not obstruct content. Three advertising opportunities for NWLive to leverage:

• Google ads
• In-Player ads
• Partner-based ads

In part 2, we will generate design solutions and work toward a sustainable technology strategy.