An experiment in light expression

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Microsoft announced the launch of multi-touch technology with Windows 7 by 2010.

Its good to see that touch is generally becoming a more common form of interaction. Its time we got rid of the clunky keyboards and error-prone and mechanized voice recognition technology through some intuitive, instantaneous, responsive and almost-fluid Touch Interfaces.

Darwin would definitely approve…

Business Today recently released a BT-Monitor group study on India’s most ‘innovative’ companies. This is a timely study and it brings out some of the key areas in which Indian companies are innovating – unique distribution channels, customizations for first time consumers, lower cost product development, and in some cases, technology interventions.

However, I believe this study is incomplete and skewed because it fails to take into account two dimensions that are highly critical to innovation: Consumer Experience and Product/service differentiation through Design.

Consider similar lists released recently by Fortune and Business Week documenting the world’s most innovative companies.

Here is Fortune’s top 10 list: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mostadmired/best_worst/best1.html)

Now look at Business Week’s top 50 list: (http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/most_innovative/index.asp)

Scanning across the names of the world’s top innovators what are the common threads you find? Is it simply low cost product development? (No- they all contract manufacture in China). Is it lower prices (No – companies like Whole Foods and Apple have significant markup)

No – what is truly common (or uncommon) to Apple, Whole Foods, Amazon, Starbucks and even once-stodgy technology giants like Cisco is their relentless pursuit to creating a compelling, integrated and delightful user experience for their end consumers. Not only how to streamline costs and operations but how to make their offerings resonate with customers’ deepest needs and desires.

Here’s how BW put it “Not so long ago, no conversation about innovation would be complete without the story of 3M inventor Art Fry’s eureka moment that led to the Post-it Note. Today, that tale, which verges on cliche, has been almost universally replaced by the story of the iPod, Apple’s omnipresent icon of design. It should come as little surprise, then, that Apple tops the BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for the third year in a row. That sort of staying power speaks volumes about the sort of innovation that matters today. Unlike the Post-it Note, which proves the value of lone inventors, the iPod epitomizes today’s innovation sensibilities. These include the ascendance of design, the focus on the user’s experience, and the power of ecosystems….”

My conclusion – some if not many of the Indian firms that are being touted as ‘innovative’ as currently innovative simply because of a temporary cost benefit, a monopolistic market position, or deep pockets. These firms will struggle in years to come as Indian consumers and indeed global consumers become more and more demanding in the ‘experiences’ from these companies and their products and services.

Here is my pick of two sectors that may lose their ‘innovation’ edge unless they get their customer experience defined right, and soon.

1.      Airlines – In this sector, consumer experience can range from frustrating to terrifying. Read some of the first hand accounts below on the rudeness, unprofessionalism and callousness of the service staff of some Indian airlines.

http://expertdabbler.com/2006/07/25/air-deccan-simply-cry/print/

http://jerinj.blogspot.com/2006/07/low-cost-airline-take-train.html

http://www.m-travel.com/news/2007/03/air_deccan_taki.html

http://youthcurry.blogspot.com/2007/07/strange-bedfellows.html

2.      Banking  – Untrained and unprofessional customer service reps, non-working ATMs over holiday weekends, long queues at bank centers, lousy ‘relationship managers’, spam calls – there is a litany of complaints against most Indian banks and the way they treat their customers.

http://www.complaints.com/2006/november/22/Horror_Exp._with_HDFC_BANK_10047.htm

http://www.mouthshut.com/review/HDFC_Bank-29278-1.html

http://rediff.co.in/getahead/2007/sep/28cards.htm

To end things on a more positive note, I would say that the Telecom, FMCG and Automotive sectors have comparatively been showing much more initiative and maturity in defining good consumer experiences by optimizing the various touchpoints of the experience (pre-sales, sales, service, repeat sales). They also seem to have taken notice of the need for differentiating themselves based on design innovations (Think Swift and Scorpio, Airtel HelloTunes and mCheck payments, think Kurkure and Bingo)

Via Tom Stewart on the upcoming ISO 13407, a good article on the need to include the language of ‘user experience’ within existing usability standards. Mr. Stewart’s expansion to the ISO standard will define User Experience as ‘all aspects of the user’s experience when interacting with the product, service, environment or facility….a consequence of the presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behaviour, and assistive capabilities of the interactive system….all aspects of usability and desirability of a product, system or service from the user’s perspective’.
I particularly liked the reference to the Apple Store in the article. I’ve used the Apple store as an example of stellar Customer Experience (not just individual user experience) in several of my presentations. Apple did so many things right - they followed the golden role of rapid, iterative prototyping (under the vision of Mickey Drexler and the smarts of Steve Jobs), they hired passionate Apple enthusiasts instead of the sorts of run of the mill floor staff you find at Best Buy or Walmart and they kept ‘live’ (Wifi/music/video enabled) products you could play with (which Nokia’s concept stores do a pretty tacky job of as far as I’m concerned) for as long as you want. The Apple store is a brilliant component of the Apple experience ecosystem.

All in all, the broadening of the ISO usability standard to ‘User Experience’ is a step in the right direction - Apple illustrates how user experience driven products and services can lead to significant market innovation. I hope more companies can learn from them without blindly imitating them.

Is there a direct relationship between a company’s design investments and its stock market performance? Can PE firms and venture funds use such a relationship to select winners just as they use environment friendliness and carbon footprints?

The British Design Council which first came up with the ‘Design Index’ and ‘Emerging Index’ seems to think that there is. In a comprehensive study first released in 2005 (and updated in early 2008), they showed how an index of 61 top design-award winning companies had outperformed the FTSE by 200%.

The Design Council primarily used prestigious design awards (including by Interbrand). I think if someone wanted to take this research ahead, they could additionally look at:

-         Media coverage of customer reactions to the ‘design’ or ‘user experience’ of the company’s products and services

-         The company’s resource (human and infrastructure) investments in building core design competencies

-         The company’s global footprint (in case of multinationals)

-         The company’s history of using quantitative design and usability metrics to track improvements longitudinally

In these volatile financial times, I would be personally happy if someone could prove a ‘strong corelation’ between Design and stock market performance – at least then companies in India and China would ‘get’ the value of design and invest in building world class design teams and infrastructures.

Yesterday on Mar 6 we finally managed to lift one foot off the ground and get the Bangalore User Experience and Design community closer through the first event of 2008 - a guest lecture by Murli on User Experience ecosystems, creativity, design thinking and innovation held at the Oracle Outer Ring Road office and supported by UPA Bangalore, CHI Bangalore, IxDA and various other individuals with a passion for user experience and innovation and that sort of thing.

Muthu’s just posted some pictures from the event on Picasa at http://picasaweb.google.com/bangaloreux/Mar06UXmeet/

If you were there, we would love to hear from you on what you thought and what kinds of things you’d like the community to keep working on further.

I am off to San Francisco tonight and will soon post my reflections from the event.

In mid February I traveled to IIT Kanpur with my colleague Adesh. We spent a good three days in the company of design students and faculty in the midst of the hustle bustle of ‘Techkriti’ - the annual IITK technical fest (read: a love fest for geeks and robo-heads) and the quaint (imagine peacocks walking outside your window) and picturesque IIT campus.

On Friday, we met some enthusiastic students and Prof. Satyaki Roy who was the brain behind this workshop idea - easily one of the most accessible, engaging, enthusiastic and savvy professors I’ve interacted with in a while. We had made up our minds that we would keep the workshop very engaging and hands on with minimal ‘Powerpoint gagging’ - however as I stood in front of those students and started my spiel on our past engagement and our plans for them and such, i had a moment of doubt on whether we’d be able to pull off an intensive Interaction Design workshop in all of two days.

Some say we did!

On Day 1, we started off the students on some basics of Interaction Design including user research and persona development. For the given design problem (Redesigning a healthcare system for the IIT Kanpur community on campus), the group conducted interviews with students, staff and faculty and went through the whole affinity diagramming process of sorting and synthesizing their interview findings. My big reminder/lesson from Day 1 was that user research is indeed a political process as much as it is a design process. We rounded off Day 1 with a requirements generation exercise.
On Day 2, we shifted gears and moved into Interaction design models, prototyping and usability evaluations. The students developed Interaction Design models to drive their requirements forward and subsequently worked with Powerpoint to visualize low fidelity prototypes. Dr. Roy was game enough to act as an archetypical ‘user’ during the usability testing session. My big reminder/lesson from Day 2 was that when you give students a free hand and let them work through figuring out a solution, they can come up with some pretty interesting ideas.

We ended Day 2 with each group giving brief ten min presentations to the workshop participants on their design rationale, process and final solution.

Alok Agashe, one of the workshop participants has posted the pictures from the workshop on Picasa

We left Kanpur on Sunday and were unfortunately too physically exhausted by the end of it all to try out Kanpur’s famous “Thaggu ke Laddoo” (The thug’s sweets). However, i found myself intellectually very charged up and inspired at the end of that weekend - I hope to be back in IIT Kanpur soon enough. There is something about good university campuses which is so different from air conditioned corporate existences. Edward Said, in one of his books fondly remembered his days at Columbia University as some of the best in his life.
I am hoping to conduct similar workshops within the Bangalore UX and Design community as well.

Last Saturday I attended the Mindtree hosted ‘icamp’ or innovation-focused Barcamp.

I must say I was rather disappointed by several aspects of the event. While the organizers got the ’structure’ somewhat right (the registration was smooth, the food was OK, the presentations were on time), they screwed up on the ‘content’. Most presentations were fairly dull and some were simply rip-offs.

A certain gentleman started valiantly on how innovation can be taught in MBA schools and was heckled immediatly by the audience with inane questions along the lines of: Why MBA schools? What is innovation? Why not the other schools? It made me realize that the word ‘MBA’ elicits a strange response from non-MBA’s - its sort of like using the words ‘Lawyer’, ‘Financial Planner’ or ‘Software Programmer’ - people either love them or just can’t stand them. Anyways, after much hand waving about Black Swans and Prototyping and Scenarios and such he managed to finish in time. My personal opinion is that the speaker had his heart in the right place but needs to get more fundamental inspirations from design thinking that he can share with students.
The second presentation was by the eclectic and sharp Murli, who, much to his discomfort found himself using a Powerpoint presentation. The minimal graphics content heavy Powerpoint was no match for the energy and vigor of the speaker and the whole experience got a bit disorienting with the rather lame Powerpoint and the rather convincing speaker. I loved Murli using paper with large text to convey that he sought disagreement and more questions and positive argument. I hope Murli tells organizers he doesn’t need Powerpoints.
A third presentation was by a senior gentleman who spoke about ‘Unusual Sources of Innovation’. While his hands on and interactive style went some way in making the presentation bearable, his content was simply too dull and commonplace in the end. Using Apple, Google, TV and the Tata Nano as starting points he launched into a discussion on what made these companies and their products successful and tried to relate how any learning from these case studies can be related to one’s job. Now the problem with Apple or Google case studies is post-hoc rationalization. It is rather easy to fit any explanation to explain their success - design, marketing, stickyness, rabid users, technology, user experience etc. I found the spirit in the presentation but the speaker would have been so much more convincing if they had used genuinely ‘unusual’ sources - how about ideas generated from sleep deprivation? from watching corny Hindi movies? from opening random pages of random (not only science fiction) books?
I bailed out in the early afternoon - couldn’t stay around long enough to be inspired to share my thoughts in that setting. It is events like these that make me question Bangalore’s claim to being the cutting-edge, futuristic metropolis. It ends up projecting itself as a city which is mirroring San Francisco or New York or London with a time lapse.

These past two Friday afternoons, I’ve been visiting the National Institute of Design (NID)’s Bangalore campus for providing industry inputs and teaching a class on ‘Prototyping and Usability’ to students of the Masters in Design program.

Over the next few weeks in January/February, I will be covering (with Adesh, a brilliant and enthusiastic Senior Interaction Designer from my team) the following topics through a mix of presentations, case studies, examples and hands on activities.
- How prototyping drives design and innovation
- Overview of prototyping, fidelity and tool selection
- Fundamentals of low, mid and high fidelity prototyping
- Group and individual exercises on different prototyping techniques
- Usability evaluations: Methods, metrics and protocols

All the students are in their second semester and are taking other classes in User Experience Design including on web design, usability studies, Interaction design and user research.
I’m quite excited about how the next few sessions turn out. Its always energizing to be in the presence of students - keeps me on my toes too.

I’m also looking forward to my visit to IIT Kanpur’s design program in mid February for a design workshop we’ll be conducting over the weekend of Feb 15.

I recently caught an iTunes video of Jonathan Harris’s work including the fascinating ‘We Feel Fine‘, ‘Yahoo Time Capsule‘ and ‘Universe’ projects.

Harris’s work reminded me of an old (paraphrased here) Terence Mckenna quote “If aliens were to look down upon Earth from their ships, they would not see biology the way we see it - they would see the evolution of a gene swarm of concepts and ideas and language using human biology as the reduction valve”.
Harris’s work describes a new mythology - the mythology of the post modern relativistic age of the 21st century. For every kingdom, merchant mafias, gate keeper and courtesan of the ancient age, there is a corporate monopoly, Private Equity cult, legal counsel, and minor celebrity surviving through their 15 minutes of infamy. Harris’s Universe is not made of hydrogen and carbon, but of the bubbling cauldron of thoughts, events, concepts, and meta-verses.