Values Based IxD

James McNab - Lavalife

Notes originally by JayGoldman. If I missed your name (or mis-spelt it!) correct it below. I attributed some comments to ?. Also, come and introduce yourself so I know who you are next time!

• When you design something with a well articulated clear vision of your customer and what they're about and the scenarios in which they interact with your product, you will be more successful in the market place.
  • We have an ever-evolving toolkit for doing design work that tend to make this process easier
  • If you understand your customer well and leverage some of these tools, you get a product that works and is generally successful
  • If you don't, you might win anyway but you're throwing caution to the wind
• One of the things James deals with at Lavalife is the perception of the risk of launching new designs
• Why is a Customer-centric approach successful?
  • Why can't we sit in a lab and figure out the formula?
    • Dan Chen: Because it's a bunch of engineers trying to figure out how to date
• Three examples of not following values:
  • 1. One of the clients James had in the past was FedEx
    • 15 or 16 different customer interfaces to ship things which were all different
    • Got that down to four and were moving towards one
    • Touched on an invoice management interface
      • Some businesses had shipping skids of invoices showing up on a weekly basis
      • FedEx had a little app that could automate and do it all digitally
      • "This will simplify and optimize your business"
      • It was remarkably difficult to setup and manage. Every business had a DBA running it
      • A promise was made which was partially successful (got rid of the skids), but clients had to hire a resource (DBA) just to run it and had to migrate between systems
      • Fixed the system by simplifying based on user's needs
  • 2. Lavalife: How do you build a system for people to search for partners?
    • Interests
    • Locally
    • Hot or Not
    • Until about a few months ago, you couldn't easily search for people with similar interests (buried under six layers of UI and very complex forms)
      • Interests from a drop-down list
    • Our promise is not about finding Mr. Right, it's about finding Mr. Right Now
    • No promises about finding the person for you, but rather giving you the tools to find them
  • 3. Website for people about to go into chemotherapy
    • Promise of the site is to help people get their lives under control and manage their way through a very difficult time and quell the chaos in their life
    • Experience was that the navigation was impossible to use and you couldn't even find a way to get to the next page (it was below the fold)
• Design Metaphysics
  • An ara of philosophy where you get into the intangibles of why things work and what holds them together
  • We have more success when we dig down into the metaphysics of a design problem than when we don't
• How do you pick which design approach to take in your business
  • ?: I guess we try to match it to a problem somehow and figure out which approach does the best job
    • So you characterize a problem and then find the best solution for it, build a solution, test in the lab, iterate
    • This can help us hone our approach and figure out which ones are more effective
• You have a customer, an experience, and a brand
  • The most critical is the customer - if your promise doesn't work for them, good luck
  • FedEx didn't live up to the experience
  • If you make a promise that sets the tone of a brand but your product doesn't live up to it, good luck
• Customers have values
  • Brand values are called attributes
  • Experiences also have values/attributes (sometimes called brand experience)
• If you draw a triangle between customers, brands, and experiences, the customer point is fixed (people are who they are)
  • You can produce an experience which matches your customer but not your brand
  • Ideally you achieve alignment across all three points
• 'Values are actually priorities expressed in a certain category in a specific context'
  • In the FedEx example: we have a business efficiency tool which is supposed to make your business more efficient but doesn't.
    • Category is business efficiency
    • Context is the ease or difficulty of setup
  • In the Lavalife example:
    • Category is finding a mate
    • Context is performing a search
    • Priority is finding someone with similar interests
  • In the chemo website example:
    • Category is medical information
    • Context is navigating an overwhelming amount of info
    • Priority is making sense of your life
• JonLax said not to listen to your customers (see Experience Divide
  • Agree sometimes but also not
  • If you listen to the solution, it's "a faster horse"
  • If you listen to the problem, it's "get the mail delivered" by whatever means
• ?: How do you figure out which part of the problem is the highest priority?
  • The rule that applies is that you can't build one thing for everyone or you end up with the Toyota Corrolla (most average car for the average person at the cheapest price)
  • JayGoldman: this isn't a great example because Toyota set out to build that car and they did a fantastic job of it, so they achieved their goal. It's maybe not inspiring, but it sold a lot of cars
  • Depends on how you segment your market - if you cut a segment that values fuel economy, safety, and cost but less focus on design, then they buy a corrolla. If you segment on a priority on excitement and design then you build a different car, generally along the promises of the brand rather than on performance or reliability
  • You can't satisify everybody, but if you cut the segments right, you can please a lot of people
• Anuj: what about eBay which seems to appeal to all markets?
  • Do people interact other than as buyers and sellers?
  • JayGoldman: they segmented along the lines of buyers and sellers, not along the lines of people who wanted to buy a stereo vs. people who wanted to buy a laptop, and "sellers" and "buyers" are huge markets
• SamLadner: I try not to use the word "customer" if possible. I look at brand attributes as "artifacts" and the experience as the "symbolic practice", but the word "customer" suggests that there is a nexus of buying and selling and it may not be appropriate in all contexts. It's about economic production, not cultural production.
  • In Web2.0, delivering value to your customers that is aligned to their value and their experience is no longer aligned to selling anything to them
  • "Customer" is better than "User", which in its heyday turned people into a set of needs and requirements and you stop thinking about the person on the other end
  • MadhavaEnros: what about participant or actor?
  • ?: what about person?
  • No brand manager will agree that the brand is an artifact - they control it and don't want to think that its about how people interpret it
    • RickInnis: the brand "nestle" is evil incarnate
    • Oh, I would never use software from the ABC Software company
      • JayGoldman: what did you think when you heard that the brands DavidCrow and Microsoft were merging?
    • FedEx grew sixteen interfaces because they were aligned to the individual services offered by FedEx as silos, not as a service offered by a single company
• DanChen: the company values don't need to match the experience values for it to succeed
  • Worked at Samsung and it was like working in a concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire with security guards to protect IP, but outside, everyone looks at them and says "Wow! Samsung is all about imagination!"
  • Everyone thinks Apple is about creativity but its an almost total dictatorship
  • SamLadner: it's a matter of engineering cultural memes that hide the lived experience of working there vs. the lived experience of using it
  • RyanColeman: the brand value has to be genuine in order for it to come through the manufacturing process
  • SamLadner: WalMart missed the boat on this because we all know that the lived experience of working there is horrible even though we haven't
  • The one value held by all businesses is $
  • RyanColeman: people know in the outer circle that WalMart isn't a great place to work and their brand value in those areas is diminishing that experience
• Punch Integrated Communications make their money by doing intra-branding work
  • To the outside world, our company is X
  • Internally, here's what X means to working here
  • If the brand is known for altruism, they figure out how to make altruism work within the company
  • They are integrating the company and experience values
  • The old way is the barbed wire fence and hiding the people who work for you
  • The new way is to have everyone express the values of your culture
    • JayGoldman: this is the promise of Web2.0 - Microsoft pre and post blogging are very different companies. Apple never got on this
    • DebHartman: you have to have got over the fear of the concentration camp
    • SamLadner: it's easy to do marketing badly and people won't necessarily know and this is about creating places that the culture can glom onto the brand
    • JayGoldman: you used to be able to build bad products and cover them up with marketing but now you have to build good products because people will know
    • DebHartman: tell them that we have Google and will search and find out before we buy
    • DanChen: at Samsung we lived in corporate dormitories divided by gender and they did psychological profiling on us so when someone pays you, they can do a lot of things
• What do you really need to know about your customers?
  • Things like demographics and psychographics are no longer the actual data
  • There are things you can infer about the customer based on their process
  • If you know their values, you can craft a brand and an experience that relates to them
  • You can build brand of a successful product or a successful product off a brand but you need the customer
    • You need to know any two sides of the customer-experience-brand triangle