TibetanTailor

Richard Saul Wurman in 33 writes about some things that are deepening my understanding goal setting and altering how I answer, “What am I accountable for?” Here are various thoughts from Wurman that really got me thinking:

• Show you know how to ask the right questions?
• The solution is everything isn’t “more.”
• Show how do your goals (measurements or what you are accountable for) translate into understanding the success or failure of the organization.
• What is the real information that lets someone else understand how you will perform?
• We need to measure our annual success by what you do every day.
• Talk about performance rather than how (we don’t want to use a vocabulary that encourages makeshift solutions that distract us from real problems.)
• Don’t put down a goal that is based on your expertise. Instead talk about what your are ignorant about, your desire to learn about something, your desire to create and explore, and navigate paths to knowledge, that curiosity is a bucket that is infinitely deep bottom that represents an unlimited repertoire.

References

33: understanding change & the change in understanding by Richard Saul Wurman

Why do we think someone is just going to just use a dashboard to drive.  Look close at the above image.

Do you see the WINDSHIELD and the world outside?

Would you paper over the windshield and go drive around by just using your dashboard? I don’t think so. Then why are we designing websites by just looking at the dashboard.

We need to focus on the road outside! Make sure you are looking out the windshield – Where do you want to go?

Some other peoples thoughts on this idea

Dashboards vs. Windshields

The space is one of the most important things to planning a successful bodystorming session. You need to inspect the space beforehand.  Look at the space as both a “brainstorming” space in which the troupes come up with a bodystorm and also a space in which they will perform their storms.  Ideally the troupes will come up with their storm in the same working space of 10-15 square feet that they will then perform in. This allows them to arrange props on the walls or in the space so each of the performances have zero set up time. Better spaces have fewer tables and chairs. Better spaces allow easy moving around so they can watch the performances of the troupes.  There should be some wall space to video project an example bodystorm  to help get people in the right stance. Also because this is about people moving around, make sure there aren’t wires on the ground that someone might trip on. There should be good airflow in the space too, with everyone moving about smaller rooms tend to heat up rapidly.

The most important thing to plan for is the people who will be participating. You need to think about who will be there and know as much as possible about them. Know what they do for their jobs, what experiences have they had that you can draw from, how likely they are to be expressive and take a risk in experimenting with bodystorming.
The second thing is preparing the problem statement. This is what you should spend most of your time on and many times preparing the problem statement takes 1/2 of my total preparation time. I often adjust if not outright change the bodystorming topic several times before the bodystorming session.
The third thing is the space you will be bodystorming in. You need to know it and to have visited there.

I do a great deal of prethinking about the bodystorming session before it happens. The preparation time allows me to be organic during the session and take advantage of surprise opportunities and deal with the inevitable hiccups that occur. right now I’m averaging about 17 hours of planning for a 2 hour session.

References

@Brynn asked me a bunch of questions and here are the answers.

I know many of us are concerned with efficiency and getting more done with less resources. And in the competitive environment of the internet where distribution costs are minor barriers we are concerned with speed to market. More important than “speed to market” or “time to market” is “speed to learning.”

Here are three types of time to learning situations. I am working on all sorts of ways to build the third type that actually helps everyday practitioners improve their day to day work.

References

Moore, Sally-Ann, “Time-to-Learning”, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1998

Why Experience Design Professionals Need to Know Strategy.

The biggest problem today is aligning strategy with customer experience.

Lack of alignment leads to disconnected customer experience touchpoints, wasted spending, and missed opportunities to drive purchase of products and grow business.

Strategy is about positioning and power and seeing how they can change over time.

Strategy in this sense and alignment with customer experience means knowing where you are in relation to your competition in the experience ecology with customers.

It means exploiting opportunities to produce better results. We need to systematically look at the changes that are happening in the customer experience specifically in relation to our business, in relation to our competition, and the ways our customer is changing over time. We need to be looking at the future environment, the future customer as they evolve and change and grow over time.

How do they (the customer) become better because of using your services and products? How do they continue to become better because of your evolving services and products. It is co-evolution.

It even means looking at the corporate strategy to know if it changes and to see how to exploit this change as an opportunity to get more value out of the customer experience.

This is about getting beyond mere features/functions by activating experience equity along the path to purchase.

This is how we need to think and act in order to unleash the full value of design thinking and experience design work.

See Also

Decision Makers Don’t Have Time for Wireframes (and it’s Function, Structure, Process Model)

Strategic Planning Process & User Experience (UX)

Want to Increase Frequency of Purchase? Use Entrainment

User Experience Strategy

Experience Design Strategy

The UX Value Mandala is based on some simple principles or beliefs.

KNOWING
The first pair of knowing the large/small is based on the belief that knowing is powerful. That if one acts on the curiosity that one has about an object that better understanding results.

DIALOG
The core of this belief is that discussion from multi perspectives is valuable. The second pair of seeing the same and discussing the different is a recipe for how to get the power of people together. It is a recipe for success with the most important part of any system we work in – people. But getting people together to talk isn’t enough. Most importantly there needs to be a common object that everyone can see or bounce ideas off of and feel they can contribute to. It is also not an idea that one person has. It depersonalizes the discussion. It should not be MY idea versus YOUR idea. We need to move beyond that if we want to get the innovation leverage of having multiple people contribute to something.

PRACTICAL DREAMING
Dreaming and planning are the keys to both short term and long term success. And this third pair of UX Values of planning the possible and dreaming the better speak of how we are making the world better. We must be able both to make practical plans and to dream a better place/situation that what we currently have.

DOING
Actually doing something, changing something, putting ideas into the real world to see what happens is powerful. We must get it done, but launch and abandon is not enough. We must look and see if the impact we were expecting happened and the way to do that is by measuring the impact. This is the best way for you to becoming a better designer and continually growing. If we don’t reflect on what we have done then we don’t know if our guesses and bets were correct we lose the opportunity to become better.

References

UX Values Mandala

Last night we did a bodystorming in Chicago. We had a great group of people who came to do bodystorming and they enjoyed it. They were a mix of designers, engineers/Computer scientists, and actors. One of the most interesting comments of the evening was by Byron Stewart of Dramatic Diversity , my theater partner in this, who commented about half-way through the exercise to me that he had initially thought some of the engineering and computer science people were actors because they were getting into it so well.

That speaks to the importance of structuring an environment and activities. Everything about the evening was positioned and arranged to encourage people to bodystorm. We weren’t just telling people “Ok, now bodystorm.” Even though this is similar to improv and as such seems not to be scripted there is a lot of preparation and planning involved.

Roger Martin writes about “stance . . . the knowledge domain in which you define how you see the world around you and how you see yourself in that world.” In last nights bodystorming we put people into a different stance and it resulted in encouraging exploration and innovation in how people saw and approached the design problem. As Martin also writes “The design thinker has a stance that seeks the unknown, embraces the possibility of surprise, and is comfortable with wading into complexity not knowing what is on the other side.”

I enjoy very much how Martin writes about design thinking and believe that bodystorming like this are one of the few ways to cultivate this kind of stance for people.

References

Roger Martin in “The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage.” 2009
ProjectBodystorming
Issue Boards (Another Technique for Design Thinking)

Chris Messina made a great presentation at OpenIDux. He basically took the browser and re-imagined it or redesigned it with social in mind.

He based his redesign on three principles – or three verbs. His three verbs were follow, share, and connect.

With those three words Chris hit the nail on the head for what does social mean for people today. As a quick little experiment I typed those three words into my search engine and the #1 result was . . . “FaceBook.” Very interesting.

What are those three words, those social verbs. Were there any other verbs that he tried to use but didn’t help him redesign the browser. What other options did he have?

Perhaps other options might have dealt more with creating meaning. With those 3 social verbs and other social verbs – the idea behind them is that they are all social actions; in that sense the social verbs don’t change the meaning of the object that is changing hands.

Other verbs perhaps learning verbs.

Solve
Predict
Measure
Interpret
Diagram
Evaluate
And the big daddy of them all identity

Maybe this moves us closer to using the the semantic web better – we need to also have a semantic browser to browse the semantic and social web. Perhaps the semantic web has been hamstrung by not building first a solid basis of the social. The foundation needs to be first social, then build on top of that. As Brynn Evans pointed out – “the meaning making takes place in social context. The social verbs are the backbone.”

I think Chris Messina has identified a missing piece of the puzzle in the sematic web. They forgot the social foundation.

References

Thanks @Brynn for your comments on an earlier version of this.

OpenIDux was the event at which Chris Messina talked

flock.com

Integrating Browser and Social Networks

Social Verbs