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GLOBAL WATCH MISSION REPORT

Innovation through people-centred design – lessons from the USAOCTOBER 2004

The DTI drives our ambition of‘prosperity for all’ by working tocreate the best environment forbusiness success in the UK. We help people and companiesbecome more productive bypromoting enterprise, innovation and creativity.

We champion UK business at homeand abroad. We invest heavily inworld-class science and technology.We protect the rights of workingpeople and consumers. And we stand up for fair and open markets in the UK, Europe and the world.

Global Watch MissionsThe UK government Department of Trade andIndustry (DTI) Global Watch Service provides fundsto assist small groups of technical experts from UK companies and academia to visit other countriesfor short, fact finding missions.

Global Watch Missions serve a number of relatedpurposes, such as establishing contacts withoverseas organisations for purposes ofcollaboration; benchmarking the current status ofUK industry against developments overseas;identifying key developments in a particular field,new areas of progress or potentially disruptivetechnologies; or studying how a specific industryhas organised itself for efficient operation or howgovernments, planners or decision makers havesupported or promoted a particular area of industryor technology within their own country.

DisclaimerThis report represents the findings of a missionorganised by INCITE (Incubator for Critical Inquiry intoTechnology and Ethnography, University of Surrey) withthe support of DTI. Views expressed represent thoseof individual members of the mission team and shouldnot be taken as representing the views of any othermember of the team, their employers, INCITE or DTI.

Although every effort has been made to ensure theaccuracy and objective viewpoint of this report, andinformation is provided in good faith, no liability canbe accepted for its accuracy or for any use to which itmight be put. Comments attributed to organisationsvisited during this mission were those expressed bypersonnel interviewed and should not be taken asthose of the organisation as a whole.

Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that theinformation provided in this report is accurate and upto date, DTI accepts no responsibility whatsoever inrelation to this information. DTI shall not be liable forany loss of profits or contracts or any direct, indirect,special or consequential loss or damages whether incontract, tort or otherwise, arising out of or inconnection with your use of this information. Thisdisclaimer shall apply to the maximum extentpermissible by law.Front cover image courtesy of Design Council

Innovation through people-centred design

– lessons from the USA

REPORT OF A DTI GLOBAL WATCH MISSION OCTOBER 2004

Edited by

Nina Wakeford – University of Surrey

1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 4

Foreword 5

Executive summary 6

Introduction 11

1 Role of PCD in mitigating 16risk in developing newtechnologies

1.1 Introduction 161.2 PCD processes help mitigate risk 161.3 Disruptive innovation through PCD 181.4 Putting a value on PCD: the 19

challenge of measuring ROI1.5 Making a cultural impact on user 20

experience1.6 Conclusion 211.7 Recommendations 21

2 Developing innovation 22processes

2.1 Background 222.2 Use of experience frameworks in 22

the innovation process2.3 Use of cross-cultural 23

understanding in the innovationprocess

2.4 Discovering breakthrough 24technologies in the innovationprocess

2.5 Overcoming barriers to a people- 25centred innovation process

2.6 Four areas for practitioners to 26extend their practice in innovation

2.7 Conclusion 272.8 Recommendations 27

3 Effects of organisational culture 283.1 Introduction 283.2 Guiding organisational ohange 283.3 Working in teams 283.4 Creating internal communication 293.5 Translation of research findings 303.6 Conclusion 313.7 Recommendations 31

4 Translating research insights 324.1 The translation point 324.2 The end of research is not the 32

conclusions4.3 A shared, collective perspective 33

about consumers will lead tobetter strategic design, faster!

4.4 Visualisation techniques 354.5 Conclusion 364.6 Recommendations 36

5 Evolving traditional UCD 37techniques

5.1 Introduction 375.2 Personas are evolving in US 37

companies5.3 Communicating personas 385.4 Tailoring personas for specific 38

design challenges5.5 Personas for innovation strategy 395.6 Diversifying techniques to 39

challenge technology-led design5.7 Developing direct contact 41

techniques5.8 Conclusion 415.9 Recommendations 42

2

INNOVATION THROUGH PEOPLE-CENTRED DESIGN – LESSONS FROM THE USA

3


6 PCD and ‘brand experience’ 436.1 Introduction: design is from 43

Venus, brand is from Mars6.2 Successful integration of brand 43

and PCD6.3 Differentiated experiences in 44

traditional physical products6.4 Brand differentiation beyond 44

physical products6.5 Brand and co-creation, developing 45

tools for brand differentiation6.6 Cultural sensitivities in brand 46

experiences6.7 Orchestrating multi-branded 46

experiences to be people centred6.8 Recommendations 47

7 Adaptation, personalisation 48and ‘self-centred’ design

7.1 Introduction 487.2 An amateurisation of design – 48

social software7.3 Amateurisation means speed 497.4 Adaptive design 497.5 Adaptation and new markets 507.6 Evolving adaptive design 51

principles7.7 Encouraging clients to become 52

designers7.8 Transparency and nurturing 53

design7.9 Conclusion 537.10 Recommendations 54

8 Dialogues with academic 55research

8.1 Introduction 558.2 Connections to academic 55

disciplines8.3 Participation in changing 56

research agendas8.4 Collaborative projects 568.5 Ad-hoc inspirations 578.6 Developing PCD amongst 57

students8.7 Barriers to academic dialogues 578.8 Summary 588.9 Recommendations 58

AppendicesA Mission team 59B Host companies and 64

seminar participantsC Photo gallery 68D List of exhibits 70E Glossary 71

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

• The mission participants are grateful to therepresentatives from all the organisationswe met who made time in their busyschedules to share their knowledge andexperience. The mission and this reportwould not have been possible without theirsupport and openness.

• This mission was made possible with thefinancial and practical assistance of the DTIGlobal Watch Service. Our personal thanksgo to Farida Isroliwala in London, and toLouisa Quilter and colleagues at Pera.

• At INCITE, this mission benefited from thehard work of Zoe Tenger, Kris Cohen andKatrina Jungnickel, based at the Universityof Surrey.

• Last, but by no means least, the missionparticipants would like to thank Dr SharimaRasanayagam (Consul, Science &Technology) and Doreen Reid (ResearchAssistant) at the British Consulate Generalin San Francisco; Dr Malcolm McLean(Vice Consul, Science & Technology) andJennifer Boynton (Research Assistant) inthe British Consulate General Los Angeles;and Andy McRitchie, British HonoraryConsul, Oregon. These people workedtirelessly on our behalf before, during andafter the mission to ensure its success.

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FOREWORDSarah TurnerDTI Global Watch Service, Pera

The objective of DTI Global Watch Missions isto meet and learn from leading organisationsoverseas, to exchange information and gainfirst-hand knowledge of technologydevelopments and the policies, initiatives and business models underpinning theirdeployment. This mission certainlyaccomplished that. We met leadingconsultants in the field of people-centreddesign (PCD) including SonicRim, SmartDesign, Jump, IDEO, Cheskin and AdaptivePath, as well as in-house design teams forBMW, Volvo, Nike, Microsoft and Intel.

PCD combines anthropology, sociology anddesign to identify opportunities and shapeorganisations, products and services to bestexploit those opportunities. People-centreddesigners argue that while traditional marketresearch may achieve product improvements,only a more detailed heuristic approach canguarantee that the product is in the rightballpark to start with.

Intel describes this as the difference betweenincremental and radical innovation, and have aprocess for both. The former uses designresearch to refine and develop existingproducts for existing markets; the latterfocuses on ‘new users, new uses’, iedisruptive technologies that might addressnew markets and create entirely newproducts and business models.

We urge all UK technology companies to putPCD at the heart of their R&D and innovationactivities and promote a people-centredculture throughout their organisations. Thiswill help ensure they develop the rightproducts and services for the right markets,first time and all the time. This report is full ofinspiring examples of where and how this hasbeen achieved.

The lesson from the USA for PCDpractitioners is around pragmatism. Having toevangelise what you do is not unique to thisbusiness, nor is having to measure theimpact of what you do or make a businesscase for it. Speaking the language…

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARYNina WakefordUniversity of Surrey

ISSUES ADDRESSED

The mission aimed to investigate the impactof user-centred research in the designprocess, with a particular focus on newtechnology including computer hardware andsoftware, mobile phones, and technologyservices. The group was interested in theways in which user-centred researchbecomes integrated into both the productdesign and development process as well asembedded within organisational culture andlong-term strategic thinking.

As well as hosted meetings at companies onthe West Coast, group seminars were held inLos Angeles and San Francisco. Issuesaddressed included the following:

• Given the development of user-centredresearch techniques over the last 20 yearsin the USA, how far have such techniquesbecome part of the innovation process?

• In what ways does this type ofknowledge become part of innovation at astrategic level?

• How are research techniques such asethnography used and valued inorganisations?

• How is cross-cultural or sub-culturalunderstanding used?

• How are findings translated into actionableknowledge for designers and engineers?

• What new research and visualisationmethods are being developed?

• How are traditional techniques – such aspersonas – being evolved?

• Are there organisational issues withincompanies that can impact upon the useof people-centred design (PCD)?

• How can PCD work alongside the need tocreate branded products and services?

• Are US companies taking into accountproducts that have emerged from non-professional designers?

VISITS AND SEMINAR PARTICIPATION

Los Angeles seminar

NOP WorldCal State University, PomonaArt Center College of Design, Pasadena

Los Angeles host companies

Volvo Monitoring and Concept CenterBMW Designworks

San Francisco seminar

SonicRimIntel Research Lab, BerkeleyAaron Marcus and AssociatesHaas School of Business, University ofCalifornia, BerkeleyIBM Almaden Research CenterSwim Interaction Design StudiosInstitute of Design/Illinois Institute ofTechnologySmart Design USAIDEOAdaptive Path

Silicon Valley host companies

FXPalCheskinIDEOJump

Seattle

Usability Group, MicrosoftMicrosoft Research

Portland

NikeIntel People and Practices Research GroupIntel Proactive Health GroupIntel Design CenterDepartment of Informatics, University ofCalifornia, Irvine

FINDINGS

In sum, mission participants emphasise thatpeople in their social context rather than task-centric users should be considered afundamental source of innovation. The reportreflects this view in the title ‘Innovationthrough people-centred design (PCD)’.

The report is divided into eight chapters, eachwritten by a mission participant. What followsare brief summaries of findings in the variousareas under consideration. For a fullerexplanation of these findings, and forrecommendations, please turn to theappropriate chapter.

1 Role of PCD in mitigating risk indeveloping new technologies

In the USA, as in the UK, designing newtechnologies and services is a high-riskventure. Some of the US technologycompanies visited are making investmentsin PCD as a starting point for innovation.PCD processes are more effective inmanaging uncertainty and mitigating risk,particularly at the beginning of the innovationprocess. US companies reduce business riskby investing in strategic research andattempting to calculate the return oninvestment (ROI) for PCD. They do so in thehope that this will avoid them making

incorrect assumptions about newopportunities – in other words, opportunitieswhich do not fit in with consumerbehaviours, experiences and expectations.However, companies such as Intel alsopractice ‘disruptive innovation’, including‘people and practices research’ which maysuggest the business develops in drasticallynew directions. PCD has helped companiessuch as eBay optimise the performance andappeal of their product by includingethnographic research and having weeklycontact with a group called ‘voices of thecommunity’ and then presenting PCDproposals on an equal footing with ideasoriginating from elsewhere in the company.

2 Developing innovation processes

Two people-centred innovation techniquescan be highlighted as evidence that PCD isbecoming part of innovation programmes.An ‘experience framework’ is arepresentation of how experience isorganised by the user. It is based onqualitative research and can be used togenerate an opportunity map for newproducts in both the short and long term.Cross-cultural understandings are becomingincreasingly important for companies suchas Intel who are using multi-sited worldwideresearch as part of the innovation process,including the development of new featuresor entirely new products that are morerelevant for local cultural conditions. UScompanies are overcoming barriers to usingthese techniques by linking research withknowledge generated from traditionalmarket research organisations (NOP) andimmersing engineers or senior executives infieldwork (IDEO, Microsoft).

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3 Effects of organisational culture

Although there are still some organisationalbarriers to fully accepting the importance ofuser-centred approaches to design, manyUS companies could spell out a clearunderstanding of these obstacles andpossible ways forward. Design groups hadinitiated change within their organisationalstructures to enable better design practicethat incorporated PCD. Some pragmatictactics for encouraging organisationalchange include creating internalcommunication in a language appropriate tomultidisciplinary teams, which may includedebating ROI. Developing a visual languagewas crucial in companies such as Microsoft,who use pictures, personas and websites.Further advice was offered to those wantingto promote PCD within companies,including recognising the power of PCDpractitioners as storytellers withinorganisations, and a suggestion that if nobudget is available for formal research itshould be conducted ‘under the radar’ as‘guerrilla research’.

4 Translating research insights

US companies acknowledge the need forbetter mechanisms for the ‘translation’ ofresearch findings into potentially actionableinformation for designers and innovators.The identity of the translator varies fromcompany to company, but is generally aprocess involving several people, rather thana sole translator. There is a recognition of theneed to integrate designers into researchprocesses and researchers into designprocesses, as well as involving clients andexecutives who themselves may be themost effective translators of research.Remote mechanisms such as photoblogging may be one means of translation,as well as other visualisation techniquessuch as professionally produced films(BMW) and a physical re-creation of adomestic interior (Intel).

5 Evolving traditional UCD techniques

The traditional user-centred design (UCD)technique of the persona is still in widespreaduse in US companies. It has been developedand evolved at Microsoft and Intel as a way tobetter understand the experiences ofconsumers and users. At Microsoft, personasare part of an attempt to shift a technology-leddesign culture to one that is more customer-centric. At Intel, they have been usedsuccessfully to enable awareness of existingand emerging global cultural experiences, forexample in China and India. Personas haveevolved from their original formulation asrepresentations for user requirements and arebeing used for innovation at the strategic level.More recently, personas have been used atMicrosoft to re-frame internal perceptions ofmobility within product development teams,encouraging a shift in current perceptionsthrough developing an understanding ofpeople’s behaviours within social, emotionaland cultural contexts, rather than just focusingon technology and feature implementation.New techniques are emerging alongsidepersonas, including ‘drawing the experience’,‘extreme users’ interviews, and direct contacttechniques such as ‘adopt a family’.

6 PCD and ‘brand experience’

The successful integration of brand withcustomer needs is rarely seen as paramountin technology development in the USA.Brands in the media-centric space of the weband digital interfaces have evolved acooperative model that allows complex co-branding to coexist. It is not clear how thismodel would transfer to the UK given thedifferent history of media co-branding. Inteland Microsoft are both successful atorchestrating multi-branded experiences, andcoexist their brand on products they do notcompletely control. Intel is concerned with‘influencing the ecosystem’ as much asgenerating a monolithic brand identity. At apragmatic level, Aaron Marcus has set out

8


five elements of interaction that provide away to think about the development ofpeople-centred branded experiences.

7 Adaptation, personalisation and ‘self-centred’ design

Few companies in the USA are consideringapproaches that push at the limits of PCDthrough adaptive design. The only companythat offered a new framework was AdaptivePath. It is widely acknowledged that one ofthe problems of many PCD techniques andtheir place in the process of innovation istheir inability to scale up to large-scale designchallenges. Adaptive Path’s work with Bloggerindicates the innovative approach of takingthe ‘social software’ movement seriously inorder to create a mass-market product fromthe user’s point of view. Adaptive Path alsorecommends paying attention to the‘amateurisation’ of design. This approachcould fundamentally change the debate aboutissues such as ROI. US companies can bepositioned along a continuum fromincreasingly involving users in the designprocess through to amateurisation of design.Although there was little evidence thatcompanies could integrate ways to nurturethe creation of products by users themselvesinto their innovation processes, some UScompanies advocate a high degree of userparticipation in design (SonicRim). In adifferent model, IDEO-U encourages clientsto adopt IDEO design thinking themselves.

8 Dialogues with academic research

Advanced research and development groupsrequire specialised kinds of knowledge, andthis is often sought externally, sometimes bylinks to academics or through collaborationswith universities. There is a long history ofcrossovers of methodologies from academicdisciplines and PCD, including the early workat Xerox PARC and E-Lab. US companies aredeveloping a range of ways of benefiting fromacademic research, including running

collaborative projects (Illinois Institute ofTechnology), sponsoring individual academics(Dourish/Intel Research Council) and ad-hocworkshops and brainstorming (Volvo, NOP). However, there are barriers to collaborativePCD research for innovation. These includeproblems of translating textual outputs intoforms of research findings that can be used inmultidisciplinary design teams, and a lack ofunderstanding within organisations or fromclients about the difference between long-term ethnographic fieldwork and short-termqualitative interviews and observation.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The key recommendations of the report areas follows. Further recommendations areincluded at the end of each chapter.

1 UK companies need to recognise theirtechnology-led culture and the limitationsto innovation that this presents, otherwisethey will lose out to companies that usePCD to drive innovation and design.

2 UK companies need to adopt people-centred innovation techniques at anearly stage of their innovationprogrammes to continue to competewith US organisations.

3 Early-stage emerging technologybusinesses often have a better opportunityto adopt PCD than large corporations, andshould be encouraged to do so.

4 UK companies must move towardsbuilding multidisciplinary product teams.These disciplines need to be linked upthroughout the design cycle, not justduring the final phases.

5 PCD teams need to be winningchampions at senior levels to influenceworking practices through anunderstanding of the benefits of PCDand the means of delivering it.

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6 PCD teams should create a new stage inthe innovation process – ‘the translationpoint’ – where actionable outcomes arebuilt from research.

7 UK companies should invest indeveloping new communication toolsthat make research insights moretangible, beyond powerpoint andspreadsheets, to inspire and focus theinnovation team’s attention.

8 PCD practitioners need to clarify thepropositions offered by different varietiesof ethnographic research.

9 PCD techniques should integrate thedevelopment of brand experience.

10 UK companies should learn from theemerging practice of ‘self-centred design’and use it as a rapid prototypingmethodology in order to inform theresults from lengthier research-led design.

11 UK higher education institutions need todevelop translation mechanisms so thatPCD-relevant academic research alreadyunderway in UK universities can be usedfor technology innovation.

12 UK policy should encourage the uptakeof PCD within R&D, for example withinthe UK research grant system within thescience base, R&D grants for newtechnology ventures and R&D tax creditsfor UK businesses.

13 The communication of academicresearch should itself be seen as adesign challenge.

14 UK government should encourage afunding base, particularly for SMEs, to beinvolved in collaborative research with theUK university sector.

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11


INTRODUCTIONNina WakefordUniversity of Surrey

RATIONALE FOR THE MISSION

The field of design has always drawn from an eclectic set of work practices andinterdisciplinary influences. When the termuser-centred design (UCD) was firstestablished, it was intended to include avariety of new directions in human-computerinteraction, moving beyond empirical methodsand quantitative rules to new interpretationsof phenomena. However, in UK industry, theterm UCD has become synonymous withinterface design, usability and more recently inweb development with experience design.Despite the importance of design to the UKeconomy, there is surprisingly little discussionin the UK technology business communityabout the broader areas of UCD, such as userresearch and its application to design, andoften no discussion at all of the role of userresearch in innovation.

Even if a company has decided that it wantsto follow a UCD process, it is difficult formany UK businesses, particularly those at anearly stage, to make informed decisionsabout what kind of user research they shouldundertake or commission. How do youdiscriminate between different kinds ofresearch on users? When would you gainmore from funding a long-term ethnographicstudy rather than a short-term videoobservation or a set of focus groups? How doyou compare the kinds of models andopportunities that can emerge out of thesevery different techniques?

Part of the problem is that there are fewmodels of how UCD can be part of long-term strategic innovation. There are at leasttwo reasons for this. First, one of thetraditional sources of inspiration for

technology innovation has been thetechnology itself. Second, there is still awidespread view that design equates to‘styling’ of the final product, and a confusionas to how to bring it into the developmentprocess at an earlier stage. What could newmodels for inspiration and innovation looklike? How might long-term companystrategy be influenced by design?

This DTI Global Watch Mission aimed toanswer some of these questions by visiting aregion where many new technologies arebeing developed and UCD technologies arebeing practiced. The mission was organised bythe University of Surrey’s INCITE researchcentre in conjunction with the relevant DTIInternational Technology Promoter and the USBritish Consulates to investigate the impact ofuser-centred research on the design processin the USA. Given the background of theparticipants, the focus was mainly, althoughnot exclusively, on new technology includingcomputer hardware and software, mobilephones, and technology services. The groupwas interested in the ways in which user-centred research becomes integrated intoboth the product design and developmentprocess as well as embedded withinorganisational culture and long-term strategicthinking. What could be learned from keyorganisations on the West Coast of the USA?What new opportunities can be identified?

The aim of this report is to disseminate thefindings of the mission to a wider UKaudience. We hope it will make connectionswith the recently announced initiatives suchas the joint EPSRC and AHRB programme‘Designing for the 21st Century’ which waslaunched in March 2004 by the RightHonourable Estelle Morris MP, Minister for

12


the Arts1. The report also speaks to thoseinterested in the UK Foresight Programme,which has been building bridges betweenbusiness, science and government since 1994around science-based futures projects.2

‘PEOPLE-CENTRED’ OR ‘USER-CENTRED’?

Despite the best efforts of practitioners, UCDis often thought to be purely about ‘usability’or making things ‘easy to use’. Frequently,UCD becomes merely ‘user testing’ and isbrought in at the end of the productdevelopment cycle. Users are often conceivedin a task-centric way that fits into currenttechnology-led business models.

In this report, the mission participantsemphasise that people in their social contextrather than task-centric users should beconsidered a fundamental source ofinnovation. Many practitioners involved in UCDwhom we met on the West Coast shared thisview. However, many also agreed that inpractice UCD could often translate as thinkingabout social context after the fundamentaldesign ideas had been formulated.

By using the term people-centred design(PCD) in this report to highlight a range ofpractices including old and new forms ofUCD, the participants want to press homethe advantages of designing for social use.As Uday Dandavate of SonicRim told the San Francisco seminar: ‘The seeds of user-relevant innovation can be found in thedreams and ideas of everyday people’.

MISSION PARTICIPANTS

Amy Branton, Skybluepink LtdDan Hill, BBCRachel Jones, Instrata LtdAndrew McGrath, OrangeGary Mortensen-Barker, BTPaula Neal, PDD Group LtdEllie Runcie, Design CouncilSarah Turner, DTI/PeraNina Wakeford, University of Surrey

Further details of participants are included inAppendix A.

KEY QUESTIONS

The mission meetings and seminars wereoriented around a set of key questionsdeveloped by the mission delegates. Theseincluded:

• Given the development of user-centredresearch techniques over the last 20 yearsin the USA, how far have such techniquesbecome part of the innovation process?

• How are research techniques such asethnography used and valued inorganisations?

• How is cross-cultural or sub-culturalunderstanding used?

• How are findings translated into actionableknowledge for designers and engineers?

• What new research and visualisationmethods are being developed?

• How are traditional techniques – such aspersonas – being evolved?

• Are there organisational issues withincompanies that can encourage the use of PCD?

• How can PCD work alongside the need tocreate and maintain branded productsand services?

• Are US companies taking into accountproducts that have emerged from non-professional designers, such as the socialsoftware movement?

1 For more details see www.ahrb.ac.uk

2 For more details see www.foresight.gov.uk

13


SHARED PROBLEMS

Many US companies that we met hadencountered challenges in trying to establishPCD and achieve the organisational changeswhich would make it part of the innovationprocess. As the following chapters makeclear, they also sometimes struggled withdeveloping appropriate research techniquesand ways of representing data about users.Although some new forms of thinking doexist amongst the companies we saw, andseveral kinds of best practice are outlined inthis report, for the most part the USA doesnot have starkly different paradigms for PCDor how it fits into the innovation process. Ourexperience with the host companies was oneof challenges shared. There are thereforeconsiderable opportunities for UK companieswishing to innovate in this space.

One of our hosts, Darrel Rhea, Principal ofCheskin, has pointed out that the early stagesof innovation often appear to US companiesto ‘look like a cloud raining on a funnel’. Hisdescription is:

‘Some vague mixture of ideas, trends, userrequirements, etc, swirl around in a cloud.Some of these ideas and influences dropinto a funnel and get reduced into a productthat (magically) emerges out of the end ofthe funnel.’ 3

One of the challenges of a firm such asCheskin is to provide not only the research forproduct and service innovation, but also amodel for how information and insights fromresearch can lead to positive outcomes.Otherwise, he points out that the advanceddevelopment mindset becomes that of ‘fire,ready, aim’.

EARLY INNOVATORS IN THE USA

Understanding the way in which designresearch for new technologies has evolved inthe USA shows opportunities for futuredevelopments in PCD, as well as allowing UKcompanies to better understand thedifferences between approaches.

During the mission we had the opportunity tomeet some of the key US figures who hadshifted the focus of design research fromhuman-factors based ergonomic issues toproduct use in its socio-cultural context.These included Jane Fulton Suri, JeanetteBlomberg and Rick Robinson.

Jane Fulton Suri from IDEO encouraged thedesign research community, and her clients,to focus on contextual research rather thanrelying on techniques from cognitivepsychology. Early on in her career, shebrought this approach to the study ofmotorbike accidents:

‘The question was why lads on bikes werehaving a lot of accidents, and why driverswere failing to see them. We were tacklingthe problem at the level of putting on lights,and of wearing bright clothing. But then werealised that there had to be other forces atplay in what boys were doing on motorbikesother than getting from point A to point B. Wewouldn’t get far without tackling some of theissues to do with status, young manhood,and the meaning of clothing in the culture ofmotorbikes and adolescence.’ 4

3 Darrel Rhea, ‘Bringing Clarity to the Fuzzy Front End’ in Brenda Laurel (Ed),

Design Research: Methods and Perspectives. MIT Press, Boston, 2003.

4 Quotation is from William Reese, ‘Behavioral Scientists Enter Design:

Seven Critical Histories’ in Susan Squires and Bryan Byrne (Eds), Creating

Breakthrough Ideas: The Collaboration of Anthropologists and Designers in

the Product Development Industry. Bergin & Garvy, London, 2002.

Jeanette Blomberg, now based at IBMAlmaden, was formerly one of the WorkPractice and Technology Group at XeroxPARC. This group, founded by Lucy Suchman,played a crucial role in the development anddissemination of a highly influential researchapproach based on the study of how peopleinteract with computers and othertechnologies. As a member of the WorkPractice group, Jeannette drew uponethnographic techniques which involved closeanalysis of videotaped conversations.

The researchers communicated their resultsto systems designers inside Xerox, but theirmethods and multidisciplinary team approachhas been influential in forming groups outsidethe company, such as the People andPractices Research Group at Intel.

Rick Robinson, now of NOP World, pioneeredthe use of ethnography in industrial designthrough his company E-Lab. E-Lab also usedvideotape to record everyday consumerbehaviour. The company also insisted onhighly visual collaborative data analysissessions, often with the participation ofclients as a well as the team of researchers.E-Lab encouraged clients to learn about thevalue of having sturdy data analysis in orderto build long-lasting ‘experience models’ (seeChapter 2). Rick Robinson has played a majorrole in promoting such ways of working in thepopular business and design presses, as wellas through his own writing. By the late1990s, techniques derived from ethnographywere considered a key part of designconsultancies in the USA. One ex E-Labemployee has stated: ‘By 1997, every majordesign firm claimed to include ethnographyas one of its approaches’5.

The mission delegates also met UdayDandavate from SonicRim. SonicRim’sfounder Liz Sanders began to develop ideasof participatory design while working at Fitchin the 1990s6. (Participatory design alsoinfluenced the Work Practice and Technology

group at PARC). SonicRim is based onbringing together three elements: whatpeople say (learned from marketing research),what people do (learned from participantobservation and anthropology) and whatpeople make (learned from participatorydesign).7 Participatory design, for SonicRim,includes techniques involving Velcro coveredshapes and image collaging.

These early innovators continue to work inthe area of PCD in the USA, but theirinfluence has been widespread, and manyplay an active role in international forumswhere PCD is discussed and evolved, such asDesigning Interactive Systems (DIS2004) orthe Participatory Design Conference8.

CURRENT STATE OF PCD IN THE USA

The remainder of this report outlines findingsof the mission and also sets outrecommendations for those interested indesign research and innovation in the UK.

Each report chapter looks at a particularaspect of PCD, from organisational andstrategic planning issues to a more fine-grained focus on the development ofparticular techniques. Inevitably, the examplesthat are used here are drawn from a small setof companies on the West Coast.

However, the wider context of PCD in theUSA has to be seen in the light ofconsiderable media focus on some aspects ofsuch work. Earlier in 2004, the San JoseMercury News, the local daily for the Silicon

14


5 Christina Wasson, ‘Ethnography in the Field of Design’, Human

Organisation. Vol 59, No 4, 2000.

6 See Reese, 2002 (above)

7 See Reese, 2002 (above)

8 For more information on DIS2004 see www.sigchi.org/DIS2004. For

information on the Participatory Design Conference see

www.cpsr.net/act/events/pdc

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Valley region, ran a story entitledAnthropologists Dig Into Business whichfeatured the work of many of the companiesthat were visited on the trip. The reporterconcluded such companies were ‘part of agrowing trend in which anthropologists, longperceived as notebook-toting academicswho studied isolated cultures, are woveninto the fabric of corporate America’. Thishas also been noticed by the New YorkTimes, who reported a predicted growth innumbers of ‘industrial anthropologists’,particularly in the high technology arena.Other US media such as Fast Company,CNN.com and Business Week have also runstories about the reported benefits to UScompanies – from Whirlpool to Hallmarkcards – of having an ethnographic view oftheir customers. When the mass media treatsuch research as exotic, it is likely tocontinue to attract attention. In somecircumstances, external publicity may helpthe research to be used internally in largeorganisations. For example, at Intelresearchers in PAPR such as Genevieve Bell,Ken Anderson and Tony Salvador have allreceived extensive US press coverage fortheir work, and acknowledged that in somecircumstances this can be used within Intelto create added impact.

Some researchers at US consultancies toldus that they still found it difficult to sell PCDwork to clients, and in particular the kind ofextended project which generates modelswhich can be reused over a long time span(see Chapter 2). Within organisations, somePCD advocates agreed that research mightoccasionally be carried out ‘under the radar’to cope with organisational barriers (seeChapter 3). It is unlikely that these are issuesspecific to US West Coast companies. Thesituation may be improved by the gradualformalisation and professionalisation of PCDin the USA, including the appearance in thelast two years of two volumes that explorethe range of techniques and approaches thatare used in US firms. Susan Squires and

Bryan Byrne, who both worked at GVO, haveedited Creating Breakthrough Ideas: TheCollaboration of Anthropologists andDesigners in the Product DevelopmentIndustry (Bergin & Garvy, London, 2002). Thisvolume includes histories of practitioners inthe field, as well as a proposal for developingan ‘Integrative Design Discipline’. Morerecently, Brenda Laurel, an early PCDinnovator at Interval Research and now Chairof the graduate Media Design Program at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, hasbrought together a substantial collection ofarticles, both theoretical and practical, inDesign Research: Methods and Perspectives(MIT Press, Boston, 2003). For readers of thisreport who want to think further about whatkinds of future design researchmethodologies are being proposed amongstcurrent US practitioners, these books areexcellent places to start.

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PCD PROCESSES ARE THE DRIVING FORCE IN DISCOVERING OPPORTUNITIES OTHERS HAVE MISSED

PCD PROCESSES ARE ABLE TO IMPROVE EXISTING CONDITIONSAT A TACTICAL LEVEL

DISRUPTIVE

INCREMENTAL

1 ROLE OF PCD IN MITIGATINGRISK IN DEVELOPING NEWTECHNOLOGIESEllie RuncieDesign Council

1.1 Introduction

Achieving growth in a way that limits risk andincreases the chances of longer termprofitability is a challenge for mostbusinesses. The UK Design Council’s workwithin the technology sector suggests thatthe key to success is to create futureproducts and services that are useful andappealing to people, as well as generatingvalue through identifying future market needswhich may drive opportunities for innovation.This is a current challenge for many UKcompanies in the technology sector.

The mission confirmed that developing newtechnologies for future markets is high-risk –there are no users at this point, therefore thedepth of understanding people’s needs,expectations and values in future markets willaffect the success of the business. Atresearch and development (R&D) stages it iscritical there is understanding anddeployment of the appropriate people-centred

design (PCD) skills and processes to helpminimise those risks. We found that PCDhelps a business achieve effectiveoptimisation of existing product performanceand appeal, as well as helping somebusinesses reduce the risks through beingintegrated in up-front research (see Exhibit 1.1).

1.2 PCD processes help mitigate risk

Given the perceived elusive nature ofinnovation, exploring all relevant opportunitiesand threats around ideas at the R&D stage isessential to mitigate risk by accentuating thepositive and removing the negative factors.This requires having formal and informalprocesses that are recognised strategically,culturally, and that allow project teams to:

• Gather relevant research• Translate research into actionable

knowledge • Apply knowledge

Exhibit 1.1 Increasing degrees of innovation (source: Intel)

Gathering relevant research

US companies emphasised the importanceof understanding the type of researchrequired and the skills necessary togenerate effective knowledge.

Darrell Rhea, CEO of Cheskin, highlighted theimportance of achieving balance betweenrigorous and relevant knowledge fromresearch while working to pressured timeconstraints to deliver research that is ‘justenough’ to bring about innovation. Heemphasised that many technologybusinesses risk diluting user research inputsthrough not understanding what skills andmethods are needed, and by not integratingdesign in the process.

Alex Bernstein at BMW Designworks outlinedtheir process for innovation (see Exhibit 2.2,page 23). Its effectiveness depends uponintegration across the business, ensuring it isa nonlinear development process, that the

process is guided by feedback from endusers, and that it is iterative at all stagesthereby continuously exposing potential risks.

Gitta Salomon from Swim insisted that ‘mostof the time, iteration starts from the wrongplace’. It is imperative that PCD processes arein place to avoid this.

Translating research into actionableknowledge

Many US businesses recognised thattranslation of research into usefulknowledge for innovation is problematic.Dev Patnaik from Jump Associatespresented a framework to highlight thesensitive translation points (see Exhibit 1.2).This framework is based on the notion ofthe ‘translation point’ developed by AmyEdmondson of Harvard Business School.It is common for research to be ‘handedover’ to teams who need to apply it. Therisk is not identifying the real insights.

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Exhibit 1.2 Cultures of innovations (Source: Jump Associates)

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Applying knowledge

It was felt by most companies that being asintegrated as possible across disciplines andteams in the development of newtechnology will increase the chances ofbeing able to reach tangible outcomeswithin short, pressurised timescales.

Tom Dair of Smart Design offered thefollowing checklist:

• Integrate designers into the researchprocess

• Integrate researchers into the designprocess

• Integrate people (users) into the designprocess

1.3 Disruptive innovation throughPCD

When established corporations haveachieved huge growth and success there isa significant risk of complacency, exploringfuture market opportunities too late.

‘Successful products create their own ‘valleyof death’ and prevent innovation aroundthem… if you own 85% of a market, don’trelax, zoom out and redefine a market suchthat you’re only 10% of it.’(Herman D’Hooge, Innovation Strategist, Intel)

However, PCD can be used as a starting pointfor disruptive innovation (Exhibit 1.1)

‘Proactive Health’ is a long-term Intel researchstudy led by Eric Dishman concerned withunderstanding how people today will feelabout their health and wellbeing in the future,with a particular focus on cognitive decline.Social research is already predicting thatpeople will want to feel more empoweredmanaging their health as they age, but ifcognitive decline increases they becomemore reliant upon support networks.

The Proactive Health team at Intel havebeen prototyping sensor-based experiencesto explore ways in which needs could besupported within homes while still involvingsocial networks (family, friends and carers).

Intel have invested in such PCD research tohelp them gain a deep level ofunderstanding about social issues on a 5-10 year horizon, to identify opportunitiesthat could take the business intodramatically new directions. Understandingfuture contexts and identifying future needsrequires anticipation of the emergent, theunplanned and the unpredictable.

The People and Practices Research (PAPR)team at Intel use a range of social anddesign research methods, including long-term ethnography, to explore culturalbehaviours in contexts such as the home,workplaces and public spaces.

With such long-term research studies it canbe challenging to show the value ofethnographic and design research. Byphasing the research in stages, the PAPRteam demonstrate progress, convey rapidinsights in compelling and innovative ways,and communicate at a senior level.

The UCD group within Intel, led by HermanD’Hooge, uses a framework (see Exhibit 1.3)at all phases of design research, whetherwhen just starting ‘exploratory’ research tounderstand future needs, or getting inputfrom people on concept prototypes, or eventesting/trialling potential products. It is acontinuous process that ensures feedbackfrom people in the design is at the core.

1.4 Putting a value on PCD: thechallenge of measuring ROI

The US companies we visited confirmedthat tracking the bottom-line value of PCD isa challenge. Some companies havedeveloped ways of measuring the impact ofPCD on their business.

‘Being user centred is the corporate culture,it informs our business development.’(Justin Miller, Senior Director, UI Design, eBay)

At eBay, it is recognised that the quality ofexperience drives product development andinnovation strategy. They described themselvesnot as being ‘user centred’ but ‘user driven’.Potential projects at all levels must follow aprocess that will ensure the business case ismade for the user experience.

1.4.1 eBay’s process of ‘user-drivendesign’

1 Gain an overview of the projectapproval process and criteria

At eBay, the project approval process is openand includes multifunctional teams. Newideas for projects have internal sponsors, and

must give return-on-investment (ROI)analysis. A Product Council – seniorexecutives across the business groups – willgive approval based on the anticipated ROIand fit with short- to long-term goals.

2 Understand the financial leversthat drive the business

The projects proposed must take intoaccount the value of how the userexperience will affect them. Financial leversat the tactical level include increase innumber of registered users, bidding flowand value, listings of items for sale, anddecreasing costs. User experience metricsare understood throughout the company.

3 Determine current issues andfuture opportunities

Research may include formal ethnographicfield work for projects that are 2-3 years outand 5-7 years out. Most projects are lookingahead six months and include user interface(UI) and usability studies. In one financialquarter, ~200 projects are developed. A keyinformal input for new ideas comes from‘voices of the community’ – a group of 1,000representative global users who are in weeklycontact with a dedicated user experienceteam of 80 via conference calls, e-mail andparticipate in an annual conference.

At a strategic level, discussions aboutexperience and business issues happenregularly with senior stakeholders to ensurethere is a shared understanding andcommunication of the potential futurebusiness opportunities and risks.

4 Select a product area to change

The impact of the project must be significant,measurable, and attributed to the project.

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Exhibit 1.3 People – prototypes – products(Source: Intel)

5 Estimate the ROI for the project

Based on:

• Time to design, test, develop and launchthe product, as well as time from otherbusiness groups

• Identifying the range of financial leversaffected, their value, and then relating theseback to insights that have been revealedthrough the various forms of research

• Reviewing user experience and financialmetrics before and after previous projectsto help gauge the likely impact

6 Present these proposals on anequal footing with other proposals

The focus is on people as existing or futurecustomers and business benefits expected,and a justification of the financial results.Presentations are formal business pitches.

7 Follow-up

To determine what worked, what is stillbeing addressed and what didn’t work froma user and business point of view, allprojects require ongoing follow-up acrossthe business on the many techniques ofuser research. The results are communicatedto key stakeholders within the company, anddocumented across the business to recordlearning for the future.

eBay’s approach was summarised by JustinMiller (Senior Director – UI) in an illustration(see Exhibit 1.4).

1.5 Making a cultural impact on userexperience

Across most of the technology companieswe visited, PCD research exists at theproduct development level. Somecompanies recognised that, if it only existsat this level, the value might not extendbeyond tactical usability issues.

A key learning in this area from Microsoft isthat PCD must be challenging enough tointegrate into corporate culture andestablished technology-based businessmodels. Microsoft employs ~800 productdesigners and ~150 user researchers.Together they’re responsible for usability, userinterface and interaction design. Over time,they have become integrated into the coreproduct development teams at Microsoft. Thecore team consists of software developers,testers, program managers, and also design,usability, and user assistance.

The goal of Microsoft’s user researchers is tomake an impact on the experience of peopleusing Microsoft products. To help themachieve this, they have been building creativetools and end-user understandingprogrammes for development teams, tomotivate them to engage with theexperiences of using their products.

‘How can we get at the elusive aspect ofsomebody really enjoying the product? Weknow that may not be adding anotherfeature. There’s more to life than addinganother feature.’(Gayna Williams, User Research Manager, WindowsClient)

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TRADITIONALUSERCENTREDDESIGN

USERDRIVENDESIGN

USERS

USERS

Exhibit 1.4 eBay practice

Among the tools the user research team havecreated is a scorecard system that creates anincentive for development teams to takeresponsibility for the end-to-end experience oftheir products – and thinking this through atthe earliest stages of development. Thedevelopment teams are accountable if theyhave not done so during the developmentprocess. This has brought practical benefitsby demonstrating the value of PCD in thesuccess of a product, while playing to theproductivity-based reward systems.

It has served as an effective mechanism forbringing cross-functional teams together toshare relevant knowledge at the right time,discovering and learning about the impact ofuser experience.

How the Microsoft model works:

• The development teams will work on 3-4 month coding milestones

• The scoring system makes the correlationbetween the improvement of codedevelopment in parallel with theimprovement of the user experience,which feed in through their ownparticipation in the lab and field studies

• As the product nears completion, userexperience scores are matched to codingprogress to check they are balanced. If user experience is still low at this stage,there is a problem

• Feedback from this tool maps to theoverall development team performance sosuccess is recognised and it increases thechance of becoming deeply ingrained inthe next development phase or project

Over time, using this approach and the manyother tools and programmes the userresearch team are creating, they hope toshift the culture of the product developmentteams from being technology responsive tobeing people responsive – not just in theday-to-day development process, but also inidentifying product ideas for the future.

1.6 Conclusion

The mission enabled us to identify UStechnology companies which invest in PCDeither in developing differentiated productsor as a starting point for innovation,particularly Intel, eBay, BMW Designworksand Adaptive Path.

Visits to these companies confirmed that PCDresearch methods and processes are effectivein managing uncertainty and mitigating risk,particularly at the front end of innovation.

We concluded that the way in which PCD isperceived and valued will affect the level ofimpact it can have on the future of theorganisation, as well as the success ofproducts and services. This could be the levelat which it is integrated within R&D, where itis positioned in the overall structure of theorganisation (avoiding it being a function ofmarketing), and perhaps having metrics inplace to be able to assess the ROI.

1.7 Recommendations

• Integrate PCD in R&D. The UK governmentcould encourage this at a national level byincorporating PCD in the funds allocatedthrough the Research Councils andthrough award criteria for businesses suchas R&D grants and R&D tax credits.

• UK private investment community usePCD as part of due diligence of high-techstart-ups. Trade bodies such as the BritishVenture Capital Association and NationalBusiness Angels Network shouldencourage this and provide knowledge tosupport their members in testing thevalidity of product to market propositions,through the level of investigation takenby the business to identify people’sneeds, experiences and expectations infuture markets.

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2 DEVELOPING INNOVATIONPROCESSESRachel JonesInstrata

2.1 Background

Higher management in corporationsunderstand that innovation is critical to themid-term and long-term success of theirorganisations. In recognition of the importanceof innovation, corporations invest large sumsin R&D divisions to try to ensure thatinvention will extend their corporation into thefuture. However, by their own remit, R&Ddivisions are almost always technology driven.

People-centred innovation techniques havebeen around for 20 years but to what extent have they become part of theinnovation process?

In this chapter we describe how US WestCoast organisations have made three people-centred innovation techniques part of theirinnovation programmes: use of experienceframeworks, use of cross-culturalunderstanding, and discovering breakthroughtechnologies. We also discuss barriers to the

adoption of a people-centred innovationprocess and identify ways that USorganisations are overcoming these barriers.Finally, we outline four areas wherepractitioners in people-centred innovationcould extend their practice.

2.2 Use of experience frameworks inthe innovation process

An experience framework is a representationof how experience is organised for the user.By exposing the underlying behaviouralstructure, it is possible to identify ‘whitespace’ opportunities, and develop anopportunity map or matrix. An opportunitymap is a tool for looking at the intersection orapplication of the model to existing andpotential products by aligning activities fromdifferent frames of reference, such as thecompany, product requirements, andactivities over time. Rick Robinson, co-founder of E-Lab and currently a director atNOP, talked about a project they had carried

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KEYPEOPLE-CENTRED INNOVATION TECHNIQUES

TRADITIONAL TECHNIQUES

Exhibit 2.1 People-centred innovation techniques

out for a major household cleaning productcompany. They identified a series ofopportunities for new products that enable‘just in time’ cleaning. The experienceframework is still being used by the companyseven years later.

BMW Designworks was one of only twoorganisations that articulated an innovationprocess. BMW Designworks is a designstudio based in California which has aninnovation centre comprising eight people.They said that ‘ideas come from everywhere’and they need a process to organise andintegrate them. They follow an iterativeprocess and, as new features emerge, theycheck them with their market, technologyand user knowledge. For their userknowledge they mentioned an experienceframework developed by E-Lab a few yearsago. Although the use of market, technologyand user knowledge in the innovationprocess was reported by several companies,the diagram drawn at BMW Designworks(see Exhibit 2.2), with a spiral showing theiterative process, was the most developedrepresentation we saw on our visit.

Typically, BMW Designworks present around50 new features to the business groups, ofwhich about five are chosen. The selection bythe business groups is based on a variety ofreasons, such as brand attributes andscalability. They involve people in marketing inthe ideation and innovation process so thatbusiness groups gain a sense of ownership.They talked about two projects: Infotainment,which explored how much entertainmenttechnology could be added to a car, and theTomorrows project, which is exploring howconsumers will have changed in 2015.

2.3 Use of cross-culturalunderstanding in the innovationprocess

Nirmal Sethia, from California State Universityin Pomona, talked about a book by C KPrahalad titled ‘The Fortune at the Bottom ofthe Pyramid’. Prahalad claims thatorganisations cannot afford to ignore thefastest growing new market, referring to 4 billion people in the Third World. However,the same products produced for ‘rich’ marketswould be both too expensive and inappropriatefor the developing markets. Both new productsand new business models are needed.

Intel recognises that technology has overshotwhat people need in terms of performance,and has realised that it needs to look beyonda business model based on Moore’s law.Moore, co-founder of Intel, predicted that thenumber of transistors per square inch woulddouble every year since the integrated circuitwas invented. The People and PracticesResearch (PAPR) group takes on theresponsibility to explore the technology spacein general in order to excite the industry andto develop market leading products.

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Exhibit 2.2 Innovation process used at BMWDesignworks

The expectation is that Intel’s partnerorganisations, such as IBM and Dell, will alsobegin developing products (that use Intelchips) in the new opportunity spaces created.An innovation group has been set up to usecultural understanding to identify newopportunities. The innovation group proposethree or four prototypes for productisationeach year.

Herman D’Hooge, Innovation Strategist atIntel, who leads the innovation group, gavethe example of a market opportunity they hadidentified in China, where a sector of peoplecould afford to buy PCs but were notpurchasing them. The innovation group thendrew on work undertaken by Genevieve Bellof PAPR who encouraged the innovationgroup to look to education rather thanentertainment. Herman articulated theinnovation process, as shown in Exhibit 2.3.Ethnography was used to add detail to thepersonas that were created by MarketResearch and Strategy.

PAPR found that Chinese parents arereluctant to buy PCs for their childrenbecause they see it as distracting theirchildren from their education. Intel hasdeveloped educational software packagesand put a physical key lock on the machinethat when locked only enables theeducational packages to be used and does

not give access to games or the Internet. Theadapted PC will be released next year.

Genevieve Bell documented Chinese Internetcafés through extensive photography anddiscovered their similarity to giant gameparlours. Intel has used such ethnographicobservation to identify new user features forthe PCs, such as a service button for foodand drink, multiple audio channels, and a USBkey containing the user identity and scoringdetails. Intel also has used ethnographicobservation to identify new features for caféowners, such as anti-theft and recoverycapabilities, and changed the form factor tomake the chassis movable and the deviceoperable in high temperatures.

2.4 Discovering breakthroughtechnologies in the innovationprocess

Even though we met some of the largesttechnology corporations in the world, therewas no evidence of using people-centredtechniques to inspire technologicalbreakthroughs outside Xerox R&D, wherethey emerged in the 1980s1,2.

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Exhibit 2.3 Innovation process used at Intel

1 Dourish, P (2004). Where the action is: the foundations of embodied

interaction. MIT Press.

2 Suchman, L A (1987). Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-

machine communication. Cambridge University Press.

2.5 Overcoming barriers to a people-centred innovation process

Only two out of the 20+ companies we metarticulated an innovation process for theirorganisation (or client organisations) that wasinformed by people-centred innovationtechniques. In this section, we try tounderstand why a people-centred innovationprocess has not been adopted more widely.

The experts we met told us of significantorganisational barriers that need to beovercome for people-centred techniques tobe adopted into the innovation process. Weidentified three ways these barriers arebeing overcome:

1 Links to market research organisationsSome leading experts in developingpeople-centred innovation techniques havejoined market research organisations suchas NOP and Cheskin. Market research isan established discipline, which makes thefit into client organisations easier.

2 Emerging transformation techniquesWe noticed the emergence of people-centred transformation techniques aimedat changing organisations by making seniorexecutives adopt a more customer-focusedapproach. The techniques take the form ofcustomer immersion at IDEO andMicrosoft, and co-creation (or acommercialised form of participatorydesign) at SonicRim.

3 Organisation overviewJeanette Blomberg is leading an R&Dgroup at IBM whose remit is to look athow a division called Global Services canadopt people-centred approaches.

Some organisations, such as eBay, have ashort development cycle and easy access toan extensive customer base. It is possiblefor such organisations to explore incrementalchanges with almost immediate feedback

from customer forums, such as messageboards and customer conferences.Therefore, some organisations avoid havingto invest large sums developing the rightproducts first time, and their innovationprocess can be less formal. As such, nobarriers are incurred.

A people-centred approach has been used inproduct design for over 10 years tounderstand the context in which a productwill be used in order to inform anddifferentiate its design, eg IDEO. Theapproach has met with some distrust bydesigners who see it as taking away fromtheir creative ‘gut instinct’ rather thaninspiring creativity. This was still apparent atsome companies we met on the mission,such as Volvo. In a similar way, people-centred techniques used in innovation couldbe seen as encroaching on other people’sterritory in organisations and taking awaysome of the flair and experience for whichthey are valued or aspire. This was apparentin some organisations, such as Microsoft.

The value that people-centred techniquesbring to strategy and innovation in particularhas yet to be clearly articulated. The people-centred ‘buttons’ need to be identified andarticulated in terms that corporationsunderstand. (Chapter 1 offers a detaileddescription of how organisations aremeasuring value).

In its use of people-centred techniques inthe development process, the MicrosoftUser Experience team have madethemselves accountable to the organisationand responsible for the recommendationsthey make. We suggest it is necessary notonly to articulate the value but also todevelop accountable mechanisms forpeople-centred techniques in order for amore person-centred approach to beaccepted into organisations.

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2.6 Four areas for practitioners toextend their practice ininnovation

1 Levels of impact of people-centredinnovation techniques

As people-centred techniques used ininnovation can be expensive, organisationsare always seeking new ways of reducingthe time and cost required. Paul Dourishfrom the University of California, Irvine,pointed out that the impact whichinnovation will make reflects the quality ofthe analysis. In a short time, one canunderstand the context of a product andmake incremental improvements. In thelonger term, corporations benefit from anexperience framework that informs productplanning and identifies new businessopportunities, such as the frameworksdeveloped by E-Lab and still in use at amajor household cleaning organisation andBMW Designworks.

It is necessary to clearly outline thedeliverables that will be obtainedcorresponding to the quality of experience ofthe individuals involved and the time spent onthe analysis. Darryl Rhea from Cheskin isworking with the Design ManagementInstitute (DMI)3 in this area.

2 Innovation from cross-culturalunderstanding

Cross-cultural understanding is being usedto inform the innovation process at Intel andMicrosoft by detailing personas that havebeen identified in market segments basedon demographics. People-centred innovationtechniques commonly deliver a behaviouralsegmentation that is developed into anexperience framework for a particularmarket space, such as cleaning or catchinga cold. However, Intel and Microsoft cannotbenefit from these techniques because oftheir need to inform general markets, and

thus they have to focus on specific problemareas and predetermined personas.Organisations that do focus in particularmarket spaces have an advantage and anopportunity to develop cross-culturalexperience frameworks.

3 Multidisciplinary teams

People-centred techniques used in product design face issues aroundtranslating customer-related contextualinformation into the design (see Chapter 5).One technique suggested for overcomingthe translation problem is to involvedesigners in the research. People-centredteams focusing on innovation currentlyconstitute ethnographers and visualdesigners. However, to ensure these teams are effective within theirorganisations, we suggest it is necessary toinvolve disciplines already involved ininnovation, such as planners, designers,technologists, strategists, branding andmarketing. It is suggested that a broadmultidisciplinary group that includes people-centred teams needs to be involved in aninnovation process.

4 Future scenarios

During our visit, Rick Robinson from NOPand Alec Bernstein from BMW Designworksindicated that experience frameworks arestill useful as much as 5 to 10 years ahead.During that time, people’s attitudes andbehaviours may have changed, such ascommunication behaviour has done with theadvent of mobile technologies. It isnecessary to consider future trends and howthese blend with and extend current people-centred techniques. NOP are carrying outlongitudinal studies of ‘influential’ customersand integrating trends research withlongitudinal ethnographic research.

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3 Design Management Institute: www.dmi.org

2.7 Conclusion

Even though the companies visited are nofurther advanced in the development of PCDtechniques than the UK, US corporationshave recognised the importance of usingpeople-centred innovation techniques as partof their innovation programmes and haveestablished practices and processes thatencompass these techniques. There are stillbarriers to the adoption of people-centredinnovation techniques but the USA seemsfurther along in overcoming these barriersthan UK industry.

2.8 Recommendations

• UK industry needs to adopt people-centredinnovation techniques as part of theirinnovation programmes in order to continueto compete with US organisations.

• In both the USA and the UK, ethnographicresearch is offered by many organisationsbut comes in many different varieties.Practitioners need to clarify thepropositions they offer against the benefitsto their clients.

• UK organisations that focus in particularmarket sectors but chose to expand intothe Third World are able to employpeople-centred innovation techniques todevelop cross-cultural experienceframeworks. This gives UK industry anadvantage over US corporations whooperate in general markets.

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3 EFFECTS OF ORGANISATIONALCULTUREGary Mortensen-BarkerBT

3.1 Introduction

We were interested to understand whetherthere are organisational, communication andcultural issues within companies whichneed to be addressed in order that people-centred design (PCD) methodologies can besuccessfully deployed within organisations.If issues exist: What are they? What are the impacts? What can be done to addressthe problems?

If there are organisational or cultural barrierswithin UK companies which are obstacles toPCD adoption then we need to identify andunderstand them, otherwise we may fallbehind. There is evidence that some UScompanies have had success in realigningtheir structures and processes to gaincompetitive advantage through the use ofPCD methodologies. It is important that UKcompanies benefit from this knowledge and,where appropriate, use the learning toreshape their organisations and processes toembrace it. In this way, UK companies canremain competitive and may even gaincompetitive advantage.

All the companies acknowledged that, to agreater or lesser extent, organisationalbarriers and internal cultural issuespresented significant obstacles to theadoption of PCD – either within their owncompany or in their wider experience. Insome cases, design groups withincompanies had initiated change within theirorganisational structures to facilitate betterdesign practice and implementation.

3.2 Guiding organisational change

Those not directly engaged in manufacturingbut providing design services andconsultancy, such as IDEO, Adaptive Path,Jump Associates and Aaron MarcusAssociates, increasingly saw their role asinforming and guiding organisational changein order to improve the product developmentand design process for their clients.

3.3 Working in teams

BMW Designworks reported that their designmethods had begun to influence the structureof their company and the product designprocess in a number of ways. Designworksdesign for third parties, and have movedbeyond their roots in automotive design into,for example, lifestyle products, fashion,communication devices, high technologyproducts and other areas. Their involvementin other sectors cross-fertilises differentprojects and also necessitates use of a rangeof design methodologies. As car designbroadens to include features and technologiesdrawn from computing, communications andother sectors, the structure of the teamsresponsible for designing key componentshas altered.

Neil Brooker of BMW Designworks reported that the teams have becomeinterdisciplinary and the overall design isapproached in a much more holistic way.Increasingly, the design concept is informedby various research methods, including userobservation, ethnography and trend analysis.Examples of this would be head-up displaysand electronic information displays on theexterior (body) of the car. For example, ateam designing the ‘A pillars’ which support

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the windscreen will no longer be just anengineering team tasked with delivering thestructural part of the vehicle, but mightinclude electronics specialists, softwaredevelopers, researchers, all working as avirtual team rather than in isolated ‘silos’within the company. Increasingly, thestructure of the product teams is modelledaround the user experience rather than thestructure of the car.

The resultant aesthetic and engineeringdesign is not simply the result of inspirationon the part of a designer (although that isstill an important element) but is alsoinformed by user research, iterative designand user testing of prototypes. This isachieved through horizontal linkage ofvarious disciplines across the organisationwhich has had the effect of disrupting manyof the traditional structures previously foundin the car industry.

3.4 Creating internal communication

Appropriate, targeted and efficientcommunication of PCD methods, andproviding actionable input to design teamswithin organisations, is key to success.Companies that had been successful inimplementing PCD have used their designskills to translate research output intoactionable information, and provided toolssuch as personas and scenarios fordevelopment and design teams to use.

(a) Language

The necessity to provide a language forcommunicating PCD concepts and researchoutput across multidisciplinary teams was arecurring theme with all of the visited

companies. Microsoft use personas andscenarios as ‘part of the pie’. Microsoft’sJohn Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin say:

‘Personas might help a designer focus.However, their greatest value is in providinga shared basis for communication. One ofthe most important functions of usabilityengineers is to communicate to thedevelopment team, as clearly as possible,who the users really are. When designersand developers don’t share a distinct imageof their user, they carry differentinterpretations of ‘user’ around with them.As a result, they are prone to developing aschizophrenic interface’ 1

Microsoft report that personas andscenarios can ‘provide the language’ tocommunicate the issues and requirementsbetween different teams working on aproduct, for example: marketing, productand software developers. They alsostressed the importance of making thelinks between personas and data explicit inorder to provide a solid basis for eachpersona. This avoids them being seen as apurely creative device.

(b) Working at team level

Microsoft tend to embed PCD professionalsinto product teams, saying that:

‘If the usability engineers are seen too muchas a centralised unit, they can be seen as anexternal obstacle or even ‘the enemy’ by theproduct groups.’

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1 Pruitt, J and Grudin, J (2003). Personas: Practice and Theory. ACM 1-58113-

728-1 03/0006 5.00, http://research.microsoft.com

/research/coet/Grudin/Personas/Pruitt-Grudin.pdf.

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At an organisational level, Microsoft say thatsenior managers usually ‘get it’ in terms of theimportance of PCD and that resistance is morelikely to be encountered at the mid-level. Thereis a danger that competition betweenproduct groups or teams can act against thecustomer’s viewpoint. It was suggested thatone of the reasons for this is that, culturally,Microsoft tends to reward success at theindividual rather than at the team level. Thisresonated with the experience of PCDpractitioners from the UK, who said that theway that product managers are incentivisedin UK companies tends to act against thecustomer’s interests, particularly if, forexample, their incentives are dependent ontimeframes and budget rather than in-lifeperformance of a product, or customersatisfaction metrics.

(c) Working with a ‘champion’

Microsoft and Intel both said that it wasvery important to recruit a champion atsenior level for what Microsoft call ‘UX’ –user experience. They reported that theyhad overcome some of these problemssimply by adding UX criteria to managers’objectives and scorecards which are used tomeasure the performance of individuals(see Chapter 1).

(d) Models of communication

In terms of communicating the benefits ofUCD within the company, Microsoft’srecommendations to UK companies were:

• ‘Anthropology and ethnography can tell avery compelling story and we use it’

• Use pictures. Visual communication hasgreater impact

• Use design skills to communicate thestory. For example, inspirational videos andposters

For many projects, a personas website iscreated to which teams can refer.

3.5 Translation of research findings

Intel acknowledged the need to overcomesignificant organisational and communicationissues in order to arrive at a user-centredapproach to product concepts and design. Herman D’Hooge underlined theimportance of PCD practitioners translatingtheir research findings into design principlesrather than simply providing data or reports.He said:

‘The biggest hurdle to innovation isorganisational inertia.’

One of the team gave this analogy to explainone aspect of resistance to PCD:

‘These sort of design methods often drivechange and challenge preconceptions. This inturn can challenge organisational boundariesand structure. Whenever this kind of changeoccurs, the ‘antibodies’ often arrive toprevent the disruption.’

D’Hooge also echoed the importance of usingdesign to communicate their messageswithin the company:

‘When you know you are different as a groupfrom the rest of the organisation, there is anextra burden on you to be consumable by therest. You also have a responsibility tounderstand and fit with the rest of thecompany’s strategy, as well as to influence it.’

A number of suggestions were made whichare clear pragmatic pointers as to how tosocialise and promote PCD, particularly withina large corporation:

• Use the power of a tangible model or demo• Use visual communication tools• Overcome gatekeeping functions by

using appropriate language. For example,speak ROI

• Be consistent in communications or riskloss of credibility

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• Begin a pitch with big picture demographicsbefore funnelling-in to the issue

• Change conversations• Set standards• Think of success as when our words come

out of other people’s mouths• Only deal through upper management (not,

for example, through those whose role it isto manage contracting-out)

• PCD practitioners have a role as specialiststory tellers. It is their secret weapon

• When trying to evangelise, relate directlyto the audience’s situation and objectives

• Show rapid results. Strive to demonstrateprogress at the earliest possible stage

• If no budget is available, do ‘guerrillaresearch’. If necessary, go under the radar

3.6 Conclusion

As in the UK, in the USA there are still somebarriers to the full acceptance of the benefitsof user-centred approaches to design inindustries as diverse as software and theautomotive industry.

However, many of the PCD teams operatingin the USA seemed to have a clearunderstanding of what the obstacles wereand the reasons for them. In many ways, theyhave moved further ahead than theircolleagues in the UK. Rather than simplybeing confused as to why their message isnot getting through, they have adoptedsimple and pragmatic tactics and strategiesfor influencing the organisations they areengaged with.

3.7 Recommendations

• UK companies must move towardsbuilding multidisciplinary teams fordesigning products. These disciplinesneed to be linked up throughout thedesign cycle, not just during the finalphases.

• These teams spanning the organisationshould base some of their key designdecisions on research such as ethnographyand user-needs analysis which must betranslated into design principles andstrategy. The output must be actionable.Scenarios, personas and other user-centredmethodologies provide some of the keytools to enable that translation.

• PCD teams should use their designexpertise to tell the story and influence keymembers of organisations.

• PCD teams need to seek champions atsenior levels, who will themselvesinfluence working practices through anunderstanding of the benefits of PCD andthe means of delivering it.

• Design teams within companies shouldnot expect the rest of the company to ‘getit’ as if it is self-evident. They must usetheir design skills to communicate thebenefits of PCD and to provide the tools tomake it work (eg Microsoft’s use ofpersonas) and if necessary speak ROI.

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4 TRANSLATING RESEARCHINSIGHTSPaula NealPDD

4.1 The translation point

A common dilemma for people in the UK andthe USA who work in human factors researchand ethnography is how to get design andbusiness to act on people-centred researchinsights. The successful translation of researchinsights should help to ‘get the right productand to get the product right’. In all the UScompanies that we visited, it wasacknowledged that the way in which researchis communicated had a big effect on its uptakeand impact for product and service design.

This chapter highlights the mechanismsused by the US companies visited toimprove the impact of research insights,therefore accelerating PCD innovation.

4.2 The end of research is not theconclusions

Conclusions need to be translated intoactionable outcomes together with thedesign team.

It has been long established that giving a two-hour presentation and then dumping a 100-page research report on a designer’s desk isnot the most effective way of communicatingthe richness of research for design innovation.This ‘throw it over the wall and hope for thebest’ mentality is an inefficient and naïvemethod of communication. In the USA, wefound evidence that the research and designcommunities in companies such as Microsoft,Intel, SonicRim, IDEO, Cheskin are workingtogether to prevent research becoming lost intranslation. These companies are challengingthe way to increase the meaning andimplications of research to guide new productdesign directions and decision-making.

The translator is not a person, it’s a process

US companies acknowledge the need for therole of the ‘translator’ – a person(s) whotranslates between one language (research)to another (design, development, business).However, the responsibility of who thetranslator is appears to vary betweencompanies. For example, at Nike thedesigner is the translator, as they traditionallyconduct their own research to influence theirthinking, whilst the Windows Client UsabilityGroup at Microsoft are responsible forinitiating and managing the translationprocess with the development teams. It isgenerally agreed that the translator shouldnot be a single person, but rather translationis a process that involves collaborationbetween those responsible for generatingthe research insights and those who are therecipients of the insights (eg, design,development or business).

There is a need to take research one stepfurther

The role of the researcher is changing fromsolely the producer of knowledge (eggenerating recommended changes to aninterface based on a user trial, or building amodel of human behaviour from observationresearch) to an extended role as a ‘facilitator’,with the aim of taking research one stepfurther, by helping the design team tocollectively generate actionable outcomesfrom research. Tom Dair from Smart Designemphasised the need to integrate designersin the research process and researchers inthe design process (see Chapter 1). Exhibit4.1 illustrates this extended collaborative roleof the researcher within the innovation processto improve the integrity and effectiveness ofthe translation point for PCD.

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4.3 A shared, collective perspectiveabout consumers will lead tobetter strategic design, faster!

The impact of research is lost or won by theway that it is communicated. This mightseem obvious; however, under commercialpressure of deadlines, researchers have toadapt their communication channels to suit.For example, if the time required to absorbthe research is cut, this may leave very littletime to get the main points of the researchacross to the design team; or when theoutput of research is aimed at bothdesigners, who want context, but don’twant to read it in a PowerPoint or aspreadsheet, and business, who want fivebullets and a supporting video – theseclashes of agendas and communicationsrequirements are everyday challenges forresearchers to balance.

Carefully consider the means ofcommunication

Design researchers at Cheskin emphasisedthe importance of outlining, from the start ofthe project, the needs of the researchrecipients including the type of

communication that will work within aparticular organisational culture. Theydescribed creating a tactile environmentwhen presenting research findings to Levis’design team and using an online photographyrepository to communicate ‘home life’ togeographically dispersed Motorola designers.

Sometimes there is a need to shock peopleinto listening to research by usingvisualisation techniques. Intel’s People andPractices Research (PAPR) group used animage (Exhibit 4.2). The small dot in themiddle of the square represents middle-classAmerica in size proportion to otherdemographic groups. This image helped toopen up the minds of their colleagues to‘see’ things that may contradict their

DISCOVERY CONCEPTION EVOLUTION REALISATION

KEYTRADITIONAL RESEARCH PHASEAND END POINTS

EXTENDED RESEARCH PHASEWITH TRANSLATION

Exhibit 4.1 Extending research involvement in innovation – the translation point

US MIDDLE CLASS

OTHER

Exhibit 4.2 Intel’s demographic visualisation

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assumptions. The image was used todescribe the huge potential of researchingsocial groups other than US middle class.Others, such as Aaron Marcus from AaronMarcus Associates, value the ability ofresearchers to form narratives and use storytelling to communicate the richness andvalues about consumer behaviour to engagedesign and development teams.

Power of involvement – involvingdesigners in fieldwork

A powerful mechanism used in research isintegrating designers in fieldwork. Being ableto observe first hand, rather than reading areport, the lifestyles, behaviour and attitudesof consumers can have an ‘enlightening’effect on the design team. The observationnotes made by designers are often different,but complementary, to those made byethnographers, as both disciplines absorbdifferent events. These corresponding pointsof view can help to enrich the team’sunderstanding of people for design and canlead to more effective translations of insightsinto solutions. However, this directinvolvement needs to be carefully managedto prevent the design team acting on whatthey have seen in one visit, eg a designengineer at Microsoft goes off and tries to fixa problem they have observed, withoutwaiting for the study’s findings. The cost ofinvolvement can also be a barrier, as time outin the field can be expensive.

Microsoft has used a number of remotemechanisms to involve the design team inresearch fieldwork without having to leavethe office:

• Photo Stories, a Microsoft Plus! applicationto provide daily ‘real-time’ reporting tocolleagues located in the USA about whata team of ethnographers had justexperienced in the field when studying thelives of Brazilian families. The softwarepackage allowed the ethnographers to

compile a series of photos, in achronological order, to represent a day’sobservations. An audio narrative wasoverlaid to explain specific details in thephotographs. These photo-stories were e-mailed back to the office and posted onthe intranet for the development teamswithin Microsoft to track the progress ofthe study as it happened. One interestingconsequence of using this software wasthat the ethnographers received e-mailsfrom Brazilian colleagues who hadobserved the daily field accounts reflectingon the researchers’ interpretations.

• Remote monitoring of fieldwork withinMicrosoft also has involved using a livevideo feed to monitor the work practices ofsoftware programmers. In this study, theresearcher and design team were able toobserve and to communicate with theprogrammers via a phone link to probedeeper into an individual’s behaviour.

A number of the companies visited,especially SonicRim, use participatoryworkshops to involve designers, consumersand clients in co-creation exercises togenerate ideas and opportunities forinnovation.

Power of involvement – involving clientsand executives in research

A few companies were successfully usingtechniques to involve clients or businessexecutives in research, as a means of openingtheir eyes to consumer needs. Theseimmersive exercises need to be well managedbut don’t demand extensive periods ofresearch time. For example, IDEO sent topexecutives of a consumer information serviceon a scavenger hunt and made them completevarious tasks using their own product. Theresult was that the executives had to rethinktheir consumer experience as the huntrevealed shortcomings in the service offer.

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4.4 Visualisation techniques

Visualisation techniques can helpcommunicate the rich context of humanbehaviour to inspire creativity

The language used to communicate researchfindings is critical to connect and engage thedesign team to stimulate creative thinking.Many of the US companies visited on themission used visualisation techniques to helpfocus and inspire design and business mindson research insights at the innovation fuzzyfront end1.

Power of tangibility at the fuzzy front end

US companies confirmed that ethnographyhas had to work hard at developing techniquesto succinctly communicate results tocommercial audiences without compromisingthe richness of understanding about humanbehaviour that this methodology provides.Rick Robinson, from NOP World, created‘experience models’ to aid ethnographicpresentation, when working at E-Lab in the90s2 (see Chapter 2). The construction of theexperience model is a collaborative taskinvolving research and design. The aim of themodel is to help focus the developmentteam’s attention on important aspects ofhuman behaviour for generating concepts,prioritising and evaluating directions, and as ashared reference throughout the developmentprocess. Rick Robinson advised that modelsmust be simple enough for anyone to draw ona white board in five seconds, and uselanguage that is memorable so that the designteam can use it internally.

There are many different forms of visualisingthe output of ethnographic and HF researchthat are being used, including the use ofpersonas (see Chapter 5), opportunity maps,storytelling scenarios, video footage. Thefollowing examples give a flavour of thetechniques that US companies and academiaare using:

• Intel’s designers recreated the desk spaceobserved in a Chinese home during anethnographical study. This literalrepresentation meant that the designerskept this in mind when developing aprototype home PC for the Chinese market.

• BMW Designworks created a ‘Hollywood-like’ movie to communicate future trendsand design visions.

• A student of Phil Van Allen at the ArtsCenter Pasadena overlaid video images ofpeople coming out of an office building toshow how individuals use mobiles in asimilar manner.

• IDEO create mind maps to communicatethe explosive array of connections gleanedfrom design research illustrating insightsand opportunities.

• Microsoft made a video to communicatethe problems people have with Windows,demonstrating that the language peopleuse to talk about computers is not in bitsand bytes. This image was contrasted withthings of beauty to shake up and inspirethe development teams to think differentlyabout future possibilities.

1 Deschamps and Nayak (1995) define the phrase ‘fuzzy front end’ with a

process they call ‘idea management’. Idea management drives the product

creation process using creativity in context with collected intelligence (on

markets, competitors, technologies, etc). The core activities of idea

management are idea generation, collection, evaluation screening, and

ranking. Surviving ideas emerge from the idea management process as

high-potential concepts, which then enter the organisation’s product

development process.Ref: Deschamps, Jean-Philippe and Nayak, P

Ranganath (1995). Product Juggernauts: How Companies Mobilise to

Generate a Stream of Market Winners. Boston: Harvard Business School

Press. 1: 14-15.

2 Blomberg, Jeanette, Burrell, Mark and Guest, Greg (2003). An

Ethnographic Approach to Design; in The Human Computer Interaction

Handbook – Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging

Applications. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. 965-984.

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4.5 Conclusion

Mechanisms to translate people-centredunderstanding in order to accelerate designinnovation is a topical challenge for both USand UK researchers. Both the research anddesign communities are championing theneed for better mechanisms to communicateresearch insights to help guide designdecision-making throughout the innovationprocess. US companies are using anddeveloping different tools and techniques tomake research more meaningful tostakeholders, from involving designers in theresearch fieldwork to creating visual artefactsfrom research that make insights moretangible. Successful research and designcollaboration should lead to a shared,collective perspective leading to morestrategic people-centred designs, faster!

4.6 Recommendations

• Create a new stage in the innovationprocess – called the ‘translation point’ – tobuild actionable outcomes from researchunderstanding about the people for whoma design is aimed.

• Encourage and reward research and designcollaboration. In successful companies, thedividing line between research and designshould be blurred.

• There is a need to stretch the role of theethnographer and HF researcher – fromthe producer of knowledge about peoplefor design, to a collaborator in designinnovation.

• Invest in developing new communicationtools and techniques that make researchinsights more tangible – beyondPowerPoint and spreadsheets – to inspireand focus the innovation team’s attention.

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5 EVOLVING TRADITIONAL UCDTECHNIQUESAmy BrantonSkybluepink

5.1 Introduction

This chapter presents the currentmethodologies of leading US technologycompanies visited by the mission delegates.It will focus on how these companies areevolving traditional techniques found in thefields of user-centred design (UCD), human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) intowhat we call people-centred design (PCD).There is a particular emphasis on howpersonas – fictional characters representativeof real users or user groups – have emergedas an important tool to bridge the gapbetween research, design and business.

The US companies have developed a rangeof PCD techniques to better understand theneeds and goals of users and consumers,with the overall aim of improving thecustomer experience. These techniques playa dual role within the companies: theygradually change a technology-led culture to amore customer-centric one (Microsoft),providing an awareness of existing andemerging global markets (Intel); and they actas tools for product innovation and design(Volvo and BMW Designworks). A major toolin US companies is the persona.

5.2 Personas are evolving in UScompanies

Personas are now an established techniquewithin the technology-design community, andat their most basic (and common) level areused to represent the needs of users. This isreflected by the fact that both researchersand designers at Microsoft and Intel havebeen using them for the past few years.

The concept of the persona was originated byAlan Cooper, and featured in his book ‘TheInmates are Running the Asylum’ 1, toencourage technology-led softwaredevelopment teams to empathise with, anddesign for, the behaviour patterns and goalsof potential users. Cooper’s persona is afictional character based on a synthesis ofstakeholder interviews and ethnographicresearch, whose goals and needs arerepresentative of a particular group of people,identified as potential end-users. IDEO havedeveloped similar devices called ‘CharacterProfiles’ in their deck of Method Cards2, andfeature a text-based description of a person,key quotes and representative photos.

In recent years, the nature of the persona haschanged to meet the challenge of emergingtechnologies and the changes in the role ofdesign and research. In the UK, personas areoften used as a strategic tool to communicateand manage qualitative research within abusiness environment. Much depends on thegoal of a persona, but following Cooper’soriginal idea it is usually the synthesis ofqualitative and quantitative research, focusedaround an individual. It enables social,emotional and cultural needs to berepresented in a way that keeps the findingsalive within a multidisciplinary team, andmakes use of the range of skills designersbring to any project – graphics, animations,illustration, video, sound etc. Our vision isshared by Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path, whoduring our meeting commented that:

1 Alan Cooper (1999). The Inmates are Running the Asylum. SAMS, USA.

www.cooper.com

2 IDEO Method Cards. www.ideo.com

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‘Designers have the ability to visualisesomething from fragmented information andcommunicate that – that’s a great value tobring into organisations.’

UK companies such as Skybluepink havetwo main uses for personas, and theirformat and content will vary accordingly;they can be the more traditional tool in theuser-requirements stage of technologydevelopment, and more uniquely, whenbased on open-ended ethnographicresearch, used as a tool within workshopand brainstorming sessions, for innovation.The mission found that personas are playingan increasingly important role in the UScompanies because of their ability to bridgegaps in multidisciplinary teams, and becauseof the need for the companies to moveaway from their technology-led culture to amore customer-led one.

5.3 Communicating personas

Over the past four years, Microsoft haveadapted not only the form and content ofpersonas, but also the methods ofcommunicating them internally to suit theirspecific organisational needs and differentproduct types. Microsoft’s personas areindividual fictional characters – an aggregateof a user group from a particular marketsegment – defined by detailed ethnographicresearch. The Windows Client UsabilityTeam have found that personas servemultiple purposes within their team inmultiple formats:

• They can be used as a basis for narrativeand storytelling, validated by explicit linksto research data, and are a successfulmethod for getting product developmentteams to understand a user’s goals, notjust their tasks

• They utilise many different methods ofcommunication to engage product teamswith the personas, including websites, beermugs with printed information, and posters

on the inside of toilet cubicles (also used atIntel) ensuring a captive audience!

• The team have currently been workingalongside the marketing and brandingdepartments to co-create personas,ensuring they work affectively across thesedifferent departments and that everyone isstarting from the same user perspective

5.4 Tailoring personas for specificdesign challenges

Microsoft reported that the mobile marketpresents a different set of challenges thatrequires a fresh perspective on personadesign. Interaction designer Tim Brooke andanthropologist Donna Flynn from the Mobileand Embedded Devices, User Experience,Design and Research (MUR) team aredesigning a new set of personas to aid in thedesign of software for mobile communicationproducts for both business and personalneeds, with a focus on the mobile informationworker, a priority business user. Theirglobalised personas are relevant forinternational markets and so they are keptintentionally ambiguous in terms of origin(they avoid being tied to any one country).Their form and content have been designedspecifically to reframe internal perceptions ofmobility, by focusing them around the conceptof spaces (home, social, shopping, work,transit) and activities (organising, playing,packing, coordinating). They believe that thisencourages product development teams tomove the focus of mobility towardsbehaviours within social, emotional andcultural contexts, and away from technologyand feature implementation. This behaviour-ledapproach to persona creation ensures theiruse as building blocks in the development offuture scenarios. They enable research anddesign to impact at a higher level, leading tothe creation of technologies that connect withpeople’s professional and personal lives on amore holistic level, rather than continuing tobuild scenarios around technology-led tasks.

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Whilst the MUR team recognises the value ofethnographic research as a way of opening upnew innovation opportunities not revealed bywell-used market research techniques, thebarrier to its use remains the need forresearch to ‘live for a long time’ due to thecosts involved. Because of this, the team areaiming to develop more ethnographicallydriven personas as a way of reframing internalperceptions of their technologies, andtherefore facilitating a change in attitudes thatwill eventually lead to better user experiences.This approach, of translating ethnographicresearch through the use of personas, is stillrare within UK companies. Althoughethnographic and other qualitative research iscommonly used, there is still a failure to takethe necessary steps to translate it into a formsuitable for business; the wealth of rich data,insights and understanding, struggles to havethe right impact on business. This is exactlythe issue the personas of Skybluepink havebeen developed to address; merging richresearch findings with creative processes canunlock competitive insights and facilitatemaximum impact at a strategic level, andbeyond in design and development.

5.5 Personas for innovation strategy

The Innovation Strategy Team (IST) at Inteluse personas as part of their process, touncover new potential computingapplications, to shift people’s perceptions, andto impact on Intel’s business model. Thisdiffers to Microsoft, whose persona use is forinforming the customer experience oftechnology-led innovations.

The IST personas are based on marketresearch with additional ethnographicresearch provided by the People and PracticesResearch (PAPR) group, whose particularfocus is on new markets in China and India.One of PAPR's research projects, The NextTen Percent, is based on multi-sitedethnographic fieldwork investigatingemerging economies in Asia and Latin

America, with the aim of identifying newusers and usage models – looking at howneeds differ outside the USA and what newtechnologies are required to serve them. Keyfindings and details (some countries'individual ownership of technology may neverbe possible, there are infrastructure issues interms of power distribution and connectivity;and that even a country's climate can be anissue) are used when appropriate, by IST intheir generation of personas, to encouragenew ways of thinking about Intel's futuretechnology development and businessmodels for both new and emerging markets.

5.6 Diversifying techniques tochallenge technology-led design

Companies such as Microsoft face thebiggest challenge to becoming morecustomer-focused, due to a deeply ingrainedtechnology-led culture. Competitiveness isactively encouraged across product groups.Technology innovations are held in highesteem and rewarded. This means thatdespite their usability team growing from 20 to over 150 people now working withinthe product teams, Microsoft’s strategy forinnovation remains technology-led. Despitea more frequent understanding at seniormanagement level of the value of UCD,communicating this in a way that leads toeffective change in attitudes, towards morecustomer-centred approaches throughoutthe entire product development process, isoften slow and arduous.

Working within this environment means it hasbeen necessary for PCD teams to developingenious ways to ensure that softwaredevelopers they work alongside becomeinvolved with the reality of users. GaynaWilliams, user research manager for theWindows Client Usability Group, describesthe challenge:

‘Every day, we’re charged with ‘what canyou do to actually impact the product?’

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Exhibit 5.1, adapted from a figure in ‘DesignResearch’ edited by Brenda Laurel3, illustrateswell-known research techniques currently usedwithin the research and design community(red squares). Additions to this diagram (bluesquares) illustrate the techniques that werediscovered on the mission.

At IDEO, we heard about:

• Draw the experience – asking researchparticipants to visualise an experiencethrough drawings and diagrams

• Extreme user interviews – identifyingindividuals who are extremely familiar orcompletely unfamiliar with a product – ashoe fetishist, for example

• Cross-cultural observations – comparingbehaviours between countries to revealimportant cultural differences

Exhibit 5.1 Research tools

3 Brenda Laurel (Ed) (2004). Design Research. ISBN 0-262-12263-4.

Cambridge, USA: MIT Press. Page 33.

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BMW Designworks and Volvo both talkedabout a future-casting technique based ontrend predictions. This involves envisioning ascenario of life in 20 to 30 years time,developing a design based around thisscenario and then pulling back the idea till itfits within current expectations fortechnology development.

5.7 Developing direct contacttechniques

Due to the organisational culture withinMicrosoft, Gayna Williams and her team havedeveloped more direct contact PCDtechniques in order to engage softwaredevelopers with the micro level of users.These approaches mean that techniques andtools such as personas, that present themacro level of information more suitable forthe multidisciplinary teams and developmentwork, are accepted.

Affinity exercises involve usabilityresearchers and software developersobserving users to collect ‘data points’ aboutcomputer usage, which are then aggregatedto reveal users’ patterns of behaviour. Anexample of a typical data point is ‘She alwayssaves her photos to the desktop and thenputs them into folders later’.

Rather than just focusing on what softwarefeatures could be developed next, in atechnology-led way, affinity exercises help thedevelopers think about software developmentin a more task-centred way, ie the user wantsto put media on their desktop. Sheri Lamont,a usability researcher working in the WindowsClient Usability Group, described the points-based incentive scheme that ensuresdevelopers’ involvement: points are rewardedfor completion of affinity exercises, and whenthe required number of points are attained,the developer is eligible for highly desirableinternational visits.

Another technique, ‘Adopt a Family’, was useda few years ago as a very direct way oflinking developers to end users. In thisexercise, developers became personal ITconsultants to families who used theirsoftware, with the families calling thedeveloper directly whenever they had aproblem. This provided the developers withnew insights into how usable their softwarereally was.

A current tool, developed by the team, is‘Customer Love’, a web-based volunteerpanel where data is collected from 6,000Microsoft product users, interpreted by userresearchers, and then fed back into productdevelopment. In Microsoft’s time-pressuredenvironment, the advantages of utilising theweb come from the quick processing andcommunication of feedback from end users.

5.8 Conclusion

The US companies we visited have variedexperience with PCD. It was encouraging tosee researchers and designers as a part ofmultidisciplinary teams, and that techniquesare evolving to incorporate not just the needsof the users, but the needs of the developersand other stakeholders within the company.

As was illustrated most pointedly at Microsoftand Intel, personas are the tool to bridge thegap between research and design anddevelopment. They provide the framework tocapture the essential information, and theflexibility to communicate it in ways thatspeak to the different audiences of adevelopment team, whilst retaining theemphasis at all times on ordinary people andtheir everyday lives.

This mission found that although there is stilla long way to go, the US companies wevisited are ahead of UK companies in theiruptake and understanding of PCD and therole it plays in the development process. Thatrather than introducing PCD techniques at the

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end of a product development cycle wherethey have minimal impact on user experience(as many UK technology companies currentlydo with their perception that it is aboutusability), the US companies have foundpractical ways to integrate PCD techniques attop management level, which therefore havea much bigger and longer-lasting impact.

5.9 Recommendations

• UK companies should explore new PCDtechniques within their developmentteams, involving at the most basic level anadvocate for PCD; but ultimately,qualitative researchers and designers needto be incorporated into teams at the firststage of the development process.

• UK companies, who already have a historyof commissioning qualitative research, willfail to capitalise on the knowledgeacquired, if the required tools to dispersethat knowledge are not in place. Theevolution of personas into a rigorousbusiness tool provides a tried and testedmethod for achieving this aim.

• UK companies need to recognise theirtechnology-led culture and the limitations toinnovation that this presents. PCD providesthe opportunity to reframe perceptionswithin an organisation, leading to thedevelopment of technologies that exceedthe expectations of those who use them.

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6 PCD AND ‘BRAND EXPERIENCE’Andrew McGrathOrange

6.1 Introduction: design is fromVenus, brand is from Mars

‘Marketing and advertising view product as avehicle for the brand. Design views productas something to be branded. Understandthat these are two worlds and you will neverconvert one to another.’ (Steve Diller, Cheskin)

It seems that just as PCD principles are beingunderstood and accepted into UKdevelopment processes, the extension ofbrand into the same space threatens toundermine the ground gained by the PCDprofession. The brand profession isdeveloping a strategy that takes its influencebeyond graphics and copy, into the completeexperience of using a product or service.Brand is becoming ‘brand experience’.

Needless to say, this complicates thepractice of developing people-centredproducts. The idea that a product is a vehiclefor the brand does not sit easily with PCDtechniques. Developed to bring people tothe centre of the development process,these techniques do not usually considerbranding as an element to reconcile or alignwith user needs. PCD may have foundpurchase in the development processes oftechnology-led innovation, but whenproducts are instead brand led, how will thetechniques evolve to ensure that productsare still people centred?

This challenge of integrating brand with PCDis further deepened by the increasingtendency for product and service offerings tobe amalgamated out of individual brandedsolutions, into single offerings. Can PCD toolsand techniques be modified to drive the

development and specification of theseexperiences to be both people centred and(multi) branded?

The mobile phone is an example of such anamalgamated experience. Assembled fromdisparate sources (rather than fullyconstructed to order), the resultant product ismore difficult to coherently orchestrate.Simultaneously, branding on these productsis extending itself into interactions andproduct flows. It is this kind of situationwhere conflict between brand direction andpeople’s needs occurs.

The UK’s success in brand identitydevelopment, and increasing expertise inorchestrating experiences (rather than beinga builder of experiences), makes it criticalthat we understand how to align PCDprinciples with brand led experiences. UK companies must evolve and usemethods for developing world-class brandedproducts with an uncompromised people-centred experience.

6.2 Successful integration of brandand PCD

‘What other potentially lethal, ninetythousand dollar product, do we expect usersto be able to get into and drive away within five minutes of seeing for the first time?’(Neil Brooker, BMW Designworks)

Such issues are not entirely new to thedesign profession. The automobile industryhas a history of successful integration ofdeeply branded, people centred and, bynecessity, usable experiences. In fact, thesuccessful integration of brand with customerneeds has been central to the industry.

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The necessity to maintain the identity of thebrand against the powerful tendency towardsa core of experience (similar across allvehicles) has created a design discipline thatwe can learn from. Both BMW and Volvohave very strong branded products alignedwith a core of underlying usability. During ourvisit, Lars Erik Lundin from Volvo ConceptCentre stated that when they design they‘make it Volvo, first and foremost’ and thatthey keep close to the brand ‘DNA’ throughan immersion in Scandinavian design andculture and a non-malleable approach to theircore values of ‘safety, environment andquality’.

BMW Designworks have a similar approach.Neil Brooker speaks of using the BMW brandDNA as ‘a sieve to pursue innovation’. BothBMW and Volvo design houses were carefulto explain that their respective brand valuescan be aligned with the underlying coreusability. For BMW, the core values of ‘activedriving’ and ‘authenticity’ can be positivelyaligned with user needs, while Volvo’s brandvalue ‘safety’ allows them to focus on a clearcustomer need. Finding brand principles thatare easily aligned with people’s needs is thewellspring of their differentiation, innovationand design.

6.3 Differentiated experiences intraditional physical products

But how is differentiation of experiencemanaged? Volvo, aiming to lead the market incustomer safety, prototypes and developsinnovative experiences such as side impactprotection and see-through columns forgreater all-round vision. These innovations insafety are a differentiator. Volvo has realisedthat safety, while being an attribute withwhich to lead the market, is also an areawhich they must release back to the market ifthey are truly customer centred. Volvo givesup its safety innovations after one year ofexclusivity. Their brand position is to be theleader in safety, not to be the only safe

automobile. Each Volvo experience developedaround safety cannot be kept as adifferentiated experience forever. Volvobelieves safety has to be ’open sourced’ backto the core experience of driving. They valuethe differentiation but also understand thevalue of non-differentiation. This appreciationof non-differentiation allows the branddifferentiation ‘space to breathe’. As BruceKilgore from Nike observed, ‘Nike brand issubliminal, and subliminal needs its space’.

Nike’s brand is about ‘performance’, and thisprinciple is also well aligned with theusability of their products. Nike productshave always been about uncompromisingcustomer-centred design. In Nike’s case, thecustomer was always the athlete. Currently,Nike’s brand is still about ‘performance’ butthis is subtly shifting. Nike, like IDEO,understand that looking at extreme users aspart of their PCD processes can illuminateproduct development. Focusing on athletesis focusing on ‘extreme users’ even if Nike’sfinal target group is a less extreme group.Nike admit that only around 20% of theirproducts are used for the purpose theywere designed. Nike is subtly moving itsbrand from ‘inspired by athletes’ to‘athletically inspired’.

6.4 Brand differentiation beyondphysical products

Under the auspices of its brand ‘DNA’, Nike isbecoming interested in products beyond thepurely physical. They are keenly interested inwearable technology, ‘focused on the contentof performance’. For example, the projectionof a Nike ‘experience’ from a person’s trainersto their pedometer would be pared down tothe delivery of pure content, speed, calorieburn etc. For Nike, the customer’srelationship with the product is moreimportant than the experience with the Nike‘swoosh’. Nike acknowledge that they areonly beginning to understand how this willplay out for them.

For Nike, as for Volvo and BMW, thecoherence of their approach to brand andPCD is not extended to less physical aspectsof the experience, to the subliminal orinteractional side to products. All areexploring how to integrate the non-physicalwith the brand experience. Volvo, forinstance, no longer employ a UI designer intheir California design centre. For BMW, themuch vaunted ‘build quality’ aspects of theexperience are still handled at arm’s lengthfrom the California Designworks office. Nike,Volvo and BMW understand the way tointegrate brand with their physical PCDprocesses and have marked strategies inmanaging this differentiation, but we mustlook elsewhere for tools for creating such ahealthy ecology of brand and user needswhen looking outside these purely physicalproduct domains.

6.5 Brand and co-creation,developing tools for branddifferentiation

‘Participatory design is a technique useful forgently destabilising a false brand view.’(Uday Dandavate, SonicRim)

SonicRim believes in the power ofparticipatory design, of customers co-creating experiences. Extending theownership of the design process beyonddesigners and user researchers into thehands of real customers has led UdayDandavate of SonicRim to face the death ofa long-held personal dogma. Uday describesmoving from a feeling that the designer was‘God’, to the understanding that‘Surrendering the control of design frommyself to the people means true people-centred design is developed’. This lessonapplies equally to brand. The development ofbrand into experience, its aspirations to be‘all that a customer touches’, has positionedit where design used to be; in effect, brandhas replaced the designer as ‘God’.

How can we use participatory design todevelop people-centred brandedexperiences?

Aaron Marcus considers the five elements ofUI to be useful as a means of finding the right‘space to breathe’ for brand experience toexplore, and also to help frame participatorydesign sessions. The five elements are:

• Metaphor• Mental models• Navigation• Interaction• Appearance

Brand has traditionally focused attention on‘appearance’. When we say that brand isbecoming brand experience, it is useful tothink of this within these five elements. Whataspects of the experience is it useful orappropriate to explore in brand differentiation?If this approach is combined withparticipatory design, we can imaginecustomers exploring branded navigationalelements, branded metaphors and so on.

IDEO and Adaptive Path have evidence ofsuccess in utilising participatory design tointegrate and align brand with userexperience to develop and specifyexperiences. IDEO have developed a numberof processes (collected in their Methods cardpack) for developing people-centred productsand services. They have used one of thesemethods, co-creation or participatory design,to help position brands within multi-brandedexperiences. Adaptive Path also use co-creation methods to accurately position abrand within co-branded interactionexperiences. They describe how this methodclearly shows that brand experiencedevelopment is more fruitfully discovered,not ‘forced down on users but rather theview back up from users’. Exploring howbrands and features fit together wassomething that people participating in theworkshops understood and to which theycould actively contribute.

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6.6 Cultural sensitivities in brandexperiences

The experiences of Adaptive Path and IDEOare focused strongly on a content, web andmedia-centric client base. Brands in this spacehave evolved a cooperative (but stillcompetitive) model that allows complex co-branding to coexist within a language thatusers understand, and a topology that brandowners know how to share. What is not soclear is whether this transfers well to the UKmarket, as co-branding in media is extremelyculturally sensitive. The co-branding of mediain the USA is generally different to that in theUK, so one would expect problems in astraight transferral of results to the UK market.

In addition to these cultural differences, therewill be issues arising through the transferralof any developed languages and models frommedia and content onto more interactive andconstrained experiences, ie experienceswhere screens are smaller, and where highlyactive and constrained products are the norm.It is clear that, though care must be taken inapplying the results, the techniquesthemselves, if modified appropriately, shouldbe transferable successfully.

6.7 Orchestrating multi-brandedexperiences to be people centred

Some US companies have useful experiencein developing products they do not control.Both Microsoft and Intel are adept atorchestrating multi-branded experiences, andco-exist their brand experience on productsthey do not completely control. Bothorganisations have developed tools to assistthem in this complex ecology that they inhabit.

Jenny Lam of Microsoft has discussed thedevelopment of a ‘perfect prototype’. This is acombined hardware and software experiencethat Microsoft uses to evangelise with theirmajor OEMs (original equipmentmanufacturers) for a better final customerexperience. Microsoft is also developing a

terse, non-media-centric approach to brandingsoftware. They are choosing carefully theexperiences that they want to own, and wantto focus their experience interventions andcontrol on the areas where they add the mostvalue through the use of widgets andconnecting experiences associated withMicrosoft brand values.

Some aspects of the Microsoft brandexperience strategy are very pragmatic. The‘Start’ key has a name (a symbol on its ownwas considered and had the advantage of notneeding translation) because it is easier forcustomers to contact a call centre and talkabout clicking on the Start key than try anddescribe a graphic. Orchestrating brand in anuncontrolled product area as a strategy has itsown unique dangers, For example, Microsoftknows that some web pages attempt to mimicmore trusted parts of the Microsoft operatingsystem to fool and exploit the customer. Onwhat look like standard Microsoft buttons,customers are invited to click, an action thatthen behaves unexpectedly or against the corevalues of Microsoft. These links do not ‘look’like Internet links; they look like buttons, andlead to unexpected costs or unwanted contentfor customers. Ironically, this kind ofmisbehaving brand experience is built on thesuccess of the Microsoft experience, and hasforced Microsoft to consider policing its brandto guard against such behaviours.

Intel is also practised at orchestratingexperiences beyond their complete control,and have a clear approach to doing so.Christine Riley, Head of People and PracticesResearch (PAPR) group at Intel, speaks oftheir success in ‘influencing the ecosystem’.The phrase shows their understanding oftheir important but non-controlling position inthe computing environment. While the ‘Intelinside’ branding has been around for over tenyears and has been very successful, thePAPR group are aware this is not enough.They have to make sure that a deepunderstanding of user experiences arereflected back to the technologists, and

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importantly, influence their commercialpartners to build based on this research. Intel‘do the research’ for their partners and, inChristine Riley’s words, ‘develop a body ofknowledge before anyone knows to ask forit’. This kind of proactive research seems tobe a practice that organisations thatorchestrate multi-branded experiences needto develop, and ensure they have methodsfor sharing effectively with their partners. Forexample, Intel are aware that there is atendency to transfer the success of the PCmodel directly across into the mobileenvironment, and spend research effort inundermining this assumption and passing onthe findings to the OEMs building theproducts, because ultimately these productsmean a success or failure for Intel.

6.8 Recommendations

UK businesses that want to developdifferentiated brand experiences that are alsofully people centred, need to:

• Integrate the development of brandexperience into PCD techniques. Forexample, adding a brand experienceexploration though participatory designactivities.

• Use Aaron Marcus’ five elements of UI todemarcate where the brand can focusdifferentiation.

• Include in specifications a clear indicationof which parts are brand differentiatedexperiences, and which are not.

• Make efforts to understand and act oncustomers’ notion of your brand and how itfits with the underlying experience.

• Understand the relationship betweenbrand ‘DNA’ and actionable brandprinciples. For example, develop interactionprinciples based on the brand thataugment underlying usability.

• Challenge brand experiences or principlesto justify their relationship with underlyingcustomer needs.

• Design a demarcated space for the brandto inhabit, and continue to differentiatethrough user involvement and brandprinciple development.

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7 ADAPTATION, PERSONALISATIONAND ‘SELF-CENTRED’ DESIGNDan Hill BBC

7.1 Introduction

With the increasing acceptance of user-centred design (UCD) practice within industry,some practitioners are beginning to questionits limitations1 2. These criticisms include asuspected inability to scale to large-scale,complex, multi-faceted situations (eg theBBC’s various Internet-based products, orMicrosoft Windows). There is also a highdegree of successful innovation in the socialsoftware space online, from products born oflittle or no formal UCD processes. Lookingforward, it’s essential that UK industry isinformed by critiques of UCD process as wellas advocating wholesale acceptance of itscore principles.

7.2 An amateurisation of design –social software

Adaptive Path’s Jeff Veen explained theimportance of examining/taking seriouslydevelopments in social software. Socialsoftware can be loosely defined as highlypersonal social interaction via softwareproducts, generally Internet-based, such asmessage boards or instant messaging, butoften making use of ‘network effects’ basedon aggregating behavioural patterns (iesocial networking, music taste-sharing,photo-sharing, link-sharing etc). Veendescribed this practice as an‘amateurisation’ of design, and pointed toseveral examples3, including theincreasingly popular photo-sharing service,Flickr, and the intriguing social bookmarkingapplication, Delicious.

These products are often built rapidly,deployed and iterated on the web, bydesigners and programmers who are

immersed in a community for which theyknow how to build. They are highly situatedresponses, based around open standards andintense, distanced collaboration, withconstant observation, public critique andspeedy iteration in situ. They may developuseful, personally meaningful solutions, butemploy very little user-centred design process– what could be called ‘self-centred design’.Problems emerge with scaling and quality ofdesign but there can be little doubt they areproducts characterised by innovation,meaning and usefulness. Problems alsoemerge for the practice of design itself,namely, what is the role of the designer inthis space? Veen argued that there is certainlya translation role necessary to take theseproducts and extend and communicatebeyond the ‘early adopter’ market for whomthey currently (largely) cater.

However, apart from Veen’s discussion, therewas little discernible evidence that thesetechniques of situated (Shirky 20044), oradaptive (Moran 20025), or self-centred, oramateurised design were really being exploredby many of the firms we encountered.

1 ‘Beyond Human-Centred Design’ panel at DIS2004:

www.sigchi.org/DIS2004/mid.php?page=Panel+sessions#BeyondHCD

2 ‘Designing for Hackability’ panel at DIS2004:

www.sigchi.org/DIS2004/mid.php?page=Panel+sessions#DesigningForHac

kability

3 www.flickr.com; http://del.icio.us; www.upcoming.org. See also

Audioscrobbler (www.audioscrobbler.com), Bleb.org/tv (http://bleb.org/tv),

PublicRadioFan.com (www.publicradiofan.com), Steam

(http://members.cox.net/flixtonsoftware/Steam/index.html), for example.

4 Clay Shirky on Situated Software, 2004:

www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html

5 Tom Moran on Adaptive Design, 2002:

www.cityofsound.com/blog/2002/08/tom_moran_on_ev.html

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7.3 Amateurisation means speed

There is no evidence that the developmentsin amateurisation are informed by formalethnographic user research, and may be self-limiting as a result. However, the pace andform of development in this area was suchthat Veen suggested these inhibitions may beoutweighed by the benefits. For example,the lead times on research at FXPal andrelease cycles at Microsoft were oftenmonths if not years. Compare the pace ofdevelopment achieved by a team working onFlickr6. Flickr can be released, modified andre-released in situ in a matter of weeks,enabling instant iteration. The productdevelops from within. Similarly, 37Signals,creators of the popular web-based projectmanagement software Basecamp7, havewritten about deliberately not scalingdevelopment teams in order to retain speedand flexibility8.

7.4 Adaptive design

In the field of informational product design,there has been much recent focus on socialsoftware, as well as ubiquitous or pervasivecomputing, and mobile data products9. Allthese advances relate to potentially newmarkets and applications, and are increasinglyhighly personal:

• in the case of the cellphone, virtually wornon the body

• in the case of ubicomp, an always-connected life, from RFID tags in theirshopping through to ‘home media hubs’

• in the case of social software, it’s aboutrepresentation of self across multiplefacets of your life (conversation, diaries,photo and music collections etc)

All these spaces feel quite different todesigning a generic cooking utensil for massmarket or building Microsoft Word.

Although there was no discussion aroundthese implications at our various encountersin the USA, it could be argued that, in thissocial software context, ‘user agency’ is morerelevant than it’s ever been; that the user’sability to mould these software spaces intheir distinct image may necessitate a wholenew kind of practice. A participant in thesekinds of markets and spaces will feel theneed to adapt a product to their own image,their own needs, far more so than previoussoftware products, which have generally beenbased on efficiency obtained throughgenerality and economies of scale (arguablyhence the effective but generalising tools ofpersonas and scenarios.)

In the mision seminar in San Francisco, SaraBeckmann (Hass School of Business), JaniceBecker (Adaptive Path), Dev Patnaik (JumpAssociates), Aaron Marcus and otherscontributed to a debate around attempts tomeasure the intangibles of meaning, delightand other such highly personal responses, inorder to extrapolate some metrics for ROIaround UCD, generally with little agreementon a valid approach. Perhaps an alternativeapproach would be to enable users to createtheir own returns on their own investment inthe design of the product?

6 Flickr, and the pace of development process:

http://sylloge.com/personal/2004/09/heres-example-of-why-i-love-work-

so.html

7 www.basecamphq.com

8 37Signals/Basecamp, and not scaling development teams:

www.37signals.com/svn/archives/000881.php

9 ‘Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction’, Paul

Dourish, MIT Press 2001

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At SIG-CHI’s Designing Interactive Systemsconference in 2002 in the UK, IBM’s TomMoran presented the concept of ‘adaptivedesign’. He described the limitations inherentwith the practice of ‘professional design’: it can’t predict usefulness; it can’t trulyadvocate the users, despite UCD; it’s aninward-looking community, sometimesculpable of giving in to the ‘pull’ of over-designing. In what he described as ‘genericdesign’ – where ‘everyone designs’ –designing is a type of cognitive activity, anapproach (as opposed to, say, diagnosis orclearer decision making) where designproblems are ill-defined and ill-structured.Designing here is specifying, stealing (or rather, reusing domain knowledge!),collaboration, negotiation and userparticipation. There were some echoes hereduring the San Francisco seminar. The pointsmade by Jeff Veen indicated that the role ofthe professional designer might now includethe following functions:

• Translating product design for non-designers

• Being transparent in one’s practice ratherthan obscuring the process of design

• Leaving products open for others tocomplete

• Nurturing well-designed solutions frompeople, rather than attempting to completegeneralised products

7.5 Adaptation and new markets

On the mission, we encountered a fairamount of talk about new markets beyondearly adopters, of more meaningful socially-oriented or highly personal design solutions,and of working with cultural difference.However, we found occasional evidence ofparticularly new techniques such as thosediscussed above.

There was some sense that UCD techniquesmight not scale, and that gettingethnographic research would always provedifficult. For instance, Microsoft were awarethat they’d ideally deploy far moreethnographers than even they could – jokingthat the ideal would be one per user! This isobviously not tenable, but there didn’t seemto be extensive consideration that enablingthe user to be their own observer and‘product-shaper’ was a potential alternativesolution. Few of the companies seemed toconsider stepping back, stimulating ornurturing the creation of products rather thancreating products themselves.

So there was little real evidence of adaptivedesign techniques, but there was someevidence of a broad scale, if scattered,movement in that direction.

PRODUCT CONTINUUM

NIKE’SPERSONALISED

TRAINERS

ADAPTIVE PATH’SREDESIGN OF

BLOGGER.COM

Exhibit 7.1 Product continuum

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Drawing on the mission visits, we canidentify a continuum in the productsthemselves, from basic personalisationthrough to adaptation (see Exhibit 7.1). And inthe practice of design, there was evidence ofa continuum from increasingly involving usersin the design process through toamateurisation of design, which was nurturedthrough a transparency of practice.

In terms of the product continuum, Nike haveenabled users to personalise their trainers,creating designs and patterns within a tightly-bounded shoe design. There was anunderstanding that 80% of their products arenot used in the context Nike intended, ordesigned for, ie their shoes are designed ashigh-performance footwear for sports and yet80% of their use is not for that purpose.(Nike gave the example of a businesswomanwearing trainers with her suit, heading towork.) This appropriation of their products hadled Nike to create a new division – ‘ActiveLife’ – focusing on products for this market,and to consider the role of observing this‘creative misuse’ of their product design. Itremains to be seen how Nike reconcile‘creative misuse’ upon the platform of theirbranded shoes and apparel.

At the other end of the product continuum issocial software. Veen specifically discussedthe role that Adaptive Path had played in theredesign of the Blogger software. AdaptivePath took a relatively successful butadmittedly unfriendly piece of bloggingsoftware and, using a well-worn ‘self-centreddesign’ technique of putting it live andobserving users run all over it, theydiscovered where to focus their designefforts. Their technique involved linking it fromthe Google homepage. Blogger’s redesignwas about extending it to a new market,beyond the early adopters who could forgivethe geeky toolkit. Adaptive Path created aninterface and system for Blogger which didn’tnecessarily extend its functionality, but didextend the type of users who could use it.

The role of the professional designers atAdaptive Path became translating thelanguage of design for these new users. EvanWilliams, co-founder of Blogger, said:

‘Our goal for this redesign was to enablepeople who had never even heard of a blogto be publishing their own blog in less thanfive minutes.’ 10

These could certainly be seen as adaptivedesign techniques, or enabling self-centreddesign. What’s interesting is the relationshipbetween the PCD techniques that AdaptivePath will have deployed and the rapid-prototyping style common in the blog world.This overlapping of techniques, and ofdeploying ‘professional design to enableamateur design’, will be returned to inconclusion, but this was by far the clearestexample of adaptive design uncovered onthe mission.

7.6 Evolving adaptive designprinciples

The University of California computerscientist Paul Dourish spoke compellingly ofstudying existing patterns of user agency ininformational products, particularly of the‘embodied interactions’ in ubicomp – and ofcommunicating the principles of computerscience outside of that discipline11.

Additionally, Phil Van Allen (Art Center Collegeof Design, Pasadena) refuted the ‘experiencedesign’ theory which has been prevalent overthe last few years in informational productdesign (Shedroff 200112). He suggested thatdesigning an experience left little ‘productiveinteraction’ for the user; that the designer as

10 Adaptive Path, and the Blogger redesign:

www.adaptivepath.com/team/pr/archives/051004

11 ‘Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction’, Paul

Dourish, MIT Press 2001.

12 ‘Experience Design’, Nathan Shedroff, New Riders 2001.

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author attempting to define the experiencemeant that ‘consumption was the goal’ ratherthan interaction design, which was about‘creating meaning’ and allowing ‘the audienceto produce’13. In a similar way, Nirmal Sethia(Cal State Poly, Pomona) stressed ‘values-centred design’. His example of working withpoverty in India, looking at Hewlett-Packard’sefforts to take digital cameras there, indicateda focus on adaptive design. HP’s strategy hadto take on the implicitly adaptive approach totechnology that the rural poor in India had.Their business model had to switch to rentingthe camera (with solar panel power) ratherthan purchasing. Sethia spoke of mobilephone transmitters run from motorbikeengines relying on the fact that twentypeople in the village would know how tomaintain the motorbike engine. Theadvantage of focusing on ‘the poor’, otherthan it being a potential market of 1 billion orso, was as a source of innovation, particularlyregarding sustainability, which has someoverlap with adaptive design (see alsoPrahalad 200414).

Overall on the mission we discovered someevidence of high degrees of participationbeing espoused by several companies. Mostcompanies present at our seminar in SanFrancisco discussed how central the userwas to the design process, as in classic UCD

methodology (cf Smart Design, IDEO,Adaptive Path, Aaron Marcus Associates,Swim, IIT etc). SonicRim went further,discussing techniques of participatory designand co-creation – providing design strategyand consulting services for companies basedaround highly involved workshops withconsumers – ‘exploring collective creativity’ –whilst also providing anthropology and otheruser research services.

7.7 Encouraging clients to becomedesigners

We also saw evidence of a shift in severaldesign firms towards consultancy arounddesign of strategy, and incorporating designprocesses into client companies. Forinstance, IDEO had developed their IDEO-UInnovation Workshops ‘because our clientsasked us to teach them aspects of ourinnovation process and methods’15. Theseworkshops provide clients with a basic toolkitof design and innovation techniques.

SMART DESIGNet al

SONICRIM INTELIDEO

PRACTICE CONTINUUM

Exhibit 7.2 Practice continuum

13 http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1088538463.php and

www.productiveinteraction.com

14 ‘The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through

Profits’, C K Prahalad, Financial Times Prentice Hall 2004.

15 IDEO on IDEO-U: www.ideo.com/about/offerings/info.asp?x=2

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When discussing their intervention intohealthcare markets in the USA, IDEOsuggested that their approach involvedenabling nurses to become ‘junior designers’,unlocking their ‘latent ideas’16. IDEO’stechnique of ‘teaching ‘em how to fish ratherthan selling them a fish’ can also be seen onthis continuum of design practice towardsenabling adaptive or self-centred design.There is a question mark as to whether thisreduces the market for professional design –if companies can increasingly do it forthemselves – or simply displaces it.Cheskin’s interventions suggested similarsentiments about introducing design aspractice into companies at a seniormanagement level.

7.8 Transparency and nurturingdesign

In terms of stimulating a market in wayswhich would seem counter-intuitive from atraditional business perspective, but wouldseem to be aligned in terms of adaptivedesign, there are two further interestingtypes of activity: at Volvo and Microsoft, andalso at Intel. Volvo’s work in designing safetyfeatures ensures that any innovations in thatfield are effectively ‘open sourced’ and sharedwith the industry twelve months after Volvodeploys them. This is a tangential connectionto an adaptive or self-centred design process,where it could be argued that the designer’sresponsibility is to communicate and sharethinking as much as enact it.

At Microsoft, we saw some evidence oftransparency in the design process, via theiranthropologists deploying the latest bloggingand photo-gallery software to share researchresults (see Chapter 4). This was only withinthe company at this stage – issues ofpersonal privacy apply in terms of sharingethnographic data. However, elsewhere atMicrosoft, developers have been bloggingabout their work to the developmentcommunity at large17.

Intel’s approach, as a chipmaker whoseproducts are embedded in the majority of theworld’s PCs, is to do R&D on behalf of theindustry as a whole. They performethnographic research-led design processesto uncover new product ideas, which areoften left to the original equipmentmanufacturers (OEMs) – such as Dell, Sonyetc – to exploit. This, on the basis that if theyall feature Intel chips, increasing total marketvalue is as important as increasing marketshare – ‘If the tide goes up, all boats rise’.Herman D’Hooge described this as ‘givingthem Lego bricks’. At a highly ‘macro’ level,this could be seen as a nurturing, supportingform of design communication – enablingothers to design and build products, based onyour lead. Note that the objective here isn’taltruism but business, despite it seeminglyinvolving ‘giving design away’.

7.9 Conclusion

Whilst it was possible to see some trulyinspiring design work at these companies,only a few were investigating the possibilityof these alternative movements in adaptivedesign to counter the potential limitations ofUCD (scale, user agency, pace ofdevelopment etc). But a handful of productsand processes are beginning to intimate atthe possibilities of harnessing anethnographically-informed people-centredprocess to the rapid prototyping and highinnovation of the ‘self-centred’ or‘amateurised’ design world in order to createproducts which enable adaptive design. Thedifference in pace between these twotechniques will require careful integration.Ethnographic research is deliberately slow-moving and thorough; self-centred designpractice is inherently rapid and iterative.

16 IDEO on their health care example:

www.ideo.com/portfolio/re.asp?x=50185

17 Microsoft‘s Channel9 developer blogs: http://channel9.msdn.com

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Interestingly, these processes were morecommonly accepted amongst smallcompanies and academics rather than thelarger companies. It may be the circuit ofinformation and discourse is currently ‘belowthe radar’ of the larger design practices. Thelanguage of design itself – always in flux –may need addressing as a result of thischallenge to design practice. The role of thedesigner also shifts towards building productswhich people can adapt and shape to theirown purpose; becoming experts in translationand teaching the practice of design to non-(professional)-designers.

However, our challenge seems clear: can welink grounded ethnographic research to thefreer self-centred design techniques toeffectively take adaptive design productsbeyond the early adopter market?

7.10 Recommendations

• UK companies should observe and learnfrom this emerging practice of 'self-centred design' and use it as a rapidprototyping methodology in order to enrichand inform the results from lengthierresearch-led design.

• UK design practice – incorporatingeducation, trade bodies, media andindustry – should identify product areasmost suitable for pursuing adaptive designtechniques – focusing on social software orsocial computing, ubiquitous or pervasivecomputing, and mobile data products –and engage in initiatives which producepragmatic, transferable research.

• UK design education should critique andevaluate the principles of adaptive design,in order to feed them into design-relatedtraining and design discourse.

Exhibit 7.3 User research – rapid prototyping

8 DIALOGUES WITH ACADEMICRESEARCHNina WakefordUniversity of Surrey

8.1 Introduction

Advanced R&D groups require specialisedknowledge, and this is often soughtexternally, sometimes by links to academicsor through collaborations with universities.Extensive social science research isgenerated in non-commercial contexts thathas direct relevance to PCD, and could beintegrated into the innovation processthrough PCD. How did US PCD practitionersdraw on such research? How weredialogues with academic researchgenerated and maintained? The focus of thischapter is on techniques for PCD thatoriginate in the qualitative methodologies ofanthropology, sociology, social psychologyand design.

8.2 Connections to academicdisciplines

In the USA, PCD practitioners have a longhistory of applying theoretical frameworksand methodological techniques originallygenerated in academic contexts. Individualswho were early innovators in the field, such as Rick Robinson and JeanetteBlomberg, have maintained strong linkswith academic disciplines, in particularanthropology and design.

PCD techniques have often been adaptedfrom their academic origins, and many coreassumptions can be traced backed to theirbeginnings in specific fields of study. Asignificant influence in current user researchin technology firms such as Microsoft andIntel is the form of ethnography developed atorganisations such as Xerox PARC and E-Lab.

Jeanette Blomberg and her colleagues atXerox PARC built a model of innovation thatstressed understanding people’s currenteveryday experiences:

‘Innovation = Imagination of what could be,based in a knowledge of what is’ 1

This model put the stress on user researchthat could provide a rich descriptive account ofpeople’s lives, influenced by the specialisedfield of ethnomethodology. Data collectioninvolved observation in everyday settings,rather than in a laboratory. As outsiders to theexperience being studied, such ethnographerswere interested in understanding how theinsiders view a situation, even what they viewas ‘technology’. This approach is also based onexplaining user behaviours in terms of widercontexts, in the same way as Jane Fulton Suriexplained of motorbike riders (see reportIntroduction).

In the USA, the concept of ethnography hasoften come to influence the field of designthrough a field called computer-supportedcooperative work (CSCW), which deals with how people interact with computers in the workplace2. This has led to thesharing of methodological approachesbetween researchers in universities andthose in industry.

The US companies varied in the extent towhich they made explicit use of frameworksand methods from academic disciplines.

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1 Jeanette Blomberg, Mark Burrell and Greg Guest: ‘An Ethnographic

Approach to Design’ in The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook

(Lawrence Erlbaum, London 2003).

2 For a description, see Christina Wasson: ‘Ethnography in the Field of

Design’, Human Organisation. Vol 59, No 4, 2000.

PAPR researchers at Intel talk of havingbeen influenced by the ideas of ‘deephanging out’ and ‘multi-sited ethnography’.3Nirmal Sethia from Cal State University,Pomona, suggested that US businesseswere just as much, if not more, influencedby popular business books such as C KPhahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

8.3 Participation in changing researchagendas

Rick Robinson informed us at the LAseminar: ‘I became an ex-academic throughmy involvement with design!’ Despite suchcomments, many of the PCD practitioners inthe US companies, including this speaker,are active members of academicprofessional associations

As one might expect, individuals atresearch-led facilities such as FXPal,although not explicitly PCD focused, couldmost easily integrate research conferenceparticipation into their working lives. OtherUS companies such as Intel saw clearbenefits of encouraging participation inprofessional associations and conferencesoutside the traditional engineering andtechnical arenas. These researchers arechanging research agendas externally, to thebenefit a wider field of PCD. Such activitieswere part of ‘influencing the ecology’ (seeChapter 6).

At Intel, most of the PAPR group havegraduate qualifications, either in anthropology,psychology or design, and regularly givepapers and run workshops at academicconferences such as the AmericanAnthropological Association and relatedmeetings in technology studies. Theseresearchers could also clearly articulate howthe issues within internal projects related to,and indeed advanced, existing research withintheir academic field.

8.4 Collaborative projects

Jay Melikan from the Illinois Institute ofTechnology Institute of Design spoke to theSan Francisco seminar about the challenges ofdeveloping collaborative projects betweenacademic and commercial organisations.These can involve multidisciplinary teams bothat academic institutions and the commercialsponsor. The On/Off project(www.id.iit.edu/on-off) was a year-long projectbased at the Institute of Design in whichacademic researchers aimed to explore anddocument social aspects of the use ofcommunication technologies in the USA,Brazil, England and China. It was funded bythe Tangible Knowledge Research Consortiumwhich included Motorola, Steelcase, SBI/Lanteand Zebra Technologies. The research teamincluded documentary photographers andfilmmakers as well as designers andresearchers, and in keeping with the findingsabout translation of findings, the results werepresented partly as a short documentary film.

Academics have been funded for some yearsby Intel, which has a formal Research Counciloffering grants on a three-year basis. However,a recent innovation was the establishment ofIntel Research Lablettes in close proximity tomajor research universities, and having aculture of openly sharing research projects –there are no NDAs – with the affiliatedinstitution. Eric Paulos from Intel Research,Berkeley, talked about his work in the labclosest to San Francisco. Being located closeto the University of California, Berkeley, hasallowed him to develop his work on ‘urbanprobes’ and ‘lightweight interventions’ withthe use of affiliated graduate students as wellas interns from other universities.

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3 ‘Deep hanging out’ was a phrase originally developed by Stanford

anthropologist Renato Rosaldo

(www.stanford.edu/dept/anthroCASA/people/faculty/rosaldo.html).

‘Multi-sited ethnography’ was a term suggested by George Marcus of the

Anthropology Department, Rice University

(www.ruf.rice.edu/~anth/people/faculty/people-marcus.htm).

8.5 Ad-hoc inspirations

Developments in PCD involving universityresearch do not always emerge from formalcollaborations funded over many years.Companies may choose to organise one-offworkshops with a variety of external thinkersabout a topic of interest. Volvo had organisedsuch a workshop at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara. It focused onscenario planning, and rethinking ideas ofmobility. The Volvo team wanted to ‘makethese ideas tangible for designers to use’.They also recognised that the workshopcouldn’t just be a traditional seminar. They hadto create experiences for designers.

Other evidence of ad-hoc use of academicresearch is evident from the web pages ofsome of the companies visited. For example,SonicRim’s web page includes a ‘ReadingList’ including recent research work fromsocial psychology on gender differences inways of thinking4.

8.6 Developing PCD amongststudents

At Art Center College of Design, many of thecourses are taught by practitioners in localtechnology companies, or like Brenda Laurelwho is head of the graduate media designprogramme, teachers were early innovators inthe PCD area (see report Introduction forrelated publication).

Phil van Allen sees the future of PCD in‘productive interaction’ (see Chapter 7). Thisapproach is being encouraged in his coursesat Art Center, and given the high standing ofthis educational institution, it is likely to haveimpact on the next generation of PCDpractitioners, especially interaction designers.Phil van Allen also emphasises that designshould be seen as research. One recentstudent had developed a project on clothes ina project investigating sweatshop labour. Oneach piece of clothing was printed the actual

cost of fabrication. The research process andthe design process were integrated, yet thefinal output – including a book in which theclothing was pictured – was clearly a designresponse (in contrast to a ‘findings’document). The implication of many of ourmeetings with US companies was thatpractitioners who could integrate such designand research skills would be highly desirablein PCD practice in the future. IDEO speaks oftheir ideal employee being a T shape – havingdeep knowledge of one discipline, but beingable to work across many areas.

Multidisciplinary teams are used as anintegral part of teaching design research atIllinois Institute of Technology, as described byJay Melikan at the San Francisco seminar.Local companies have been collaborators indesign projects for student courses.

8.7 Barriers to academic dialogues

Two major barriers to the effective use ofacademic research were identified in thecourse of the meetings.

The first barrier, shared with PCD as a whole,was the difficulty of dealing with specialisedterminology and contrasting frameworks forproblem solving. The language of businessteams rarely sits easily with that ofanthropologists or many PCD practitionerswho are committed to innovating from thepoint of view of the final user. JeanetteBlomberg, of IBM Almaden, has noted:

‘Insights from ethnographic studies do notfacilely map directly on to designspecifications or straightforwardly generateuser requirements, but instead must beactively engaged with design agendas andactivities.’ 5

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4 Belenky, M et al: ‘Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self,

Voice and Mind’. Perseus Books, 1997. See other readings at

www.sonicrim.com ‘Who we are’.

5 Blomberg et al, p 984.

Early entrants into this field such as RickRobinson have developed ways of translatinginsights from areas such as cultural theory ororganisational studies for clients as part of‘experience models’ (see Chapter 4). Just asresearch generated in the course of a PCDproject needs to be actively involved in atranslation process, research generated fromexternal academic agendas is also most easilydigested by an active engagement with designprocesses. BMW Designworks pointed out:‘White papers are useless, even when read!’.To create their own communication tools, theyuse their proximity to the Hollywood industryto develop film as a translation tool. As theyput it: ‘Real Hollywood technology to explainwhat real user-centredness is’.

The second barrier is a lack of clarity amongstUS companies about how to measure thepositive ‘value-added’ of academic research,in particular in comparison to user researchgenerated by consultancies. Research-ledorganisations such as FXPal, or large researchgroups such as PAPR at Intel, are the mostadvanced in being able to make thisargument. BMW Designworks has a wideremit which consists of ‘Being the ears andeyes in the world marketplace for BMW’. Assuch, they try to integrate a huge variety ofknowledges, including a project conductedwith Stanford University.

Academic research may itself get caught up inthe dilemmas that PCD faces in being drawninto debates on ROI. Darrel Rhea’s insistenceon clearly differentiating between the kinds ofethnographic offerings so that clientsunderstand specific benefits of extendedversus short-term research is just as relevantin understanding how to engage with debatesabout the value of different forms of academicresearch. Paul Dourish of University ofCalifornia, Irvine, who is an Intel-sponsoredresearcher and author of EmbodiedInteraction, points out that one of the issuesis to explain that long-term ethnography canhave generative power, rather than justproviding descriptive accounts.

8.8 Summary

Many PCD practitioners in the USA haveconnections to academic disciplines, both interms of early training as well as currentengagements in research agendas. They mayattend professional conferences as well aswrite research papers. Some US companieshave developed extensive research funding orcollaboration with those involved in PCD inUS universities. Others show more ad-hocuse of academic research. Educationalinstitutions such as Art Center College ofDesign are educating a new generation ofPCD professionals with new paradigms forinteraction design. However, barriers to usingacademic research remain, particularly in thearea of translating research findings andtalking about the value of different kinds ofacademic research.

8.9 Recommendations

• The communication of academic researchshould itself be considered a designchallenge which is best tackled by amultidisciplinary team of researchers and designers.

• UK academics should consider how theycan actively engage with design agendas;UK design researchers should considerhow they can actively engage with theagendas of academic disciplines.

• UK companies should use current fundingmechanisms such as ESRC CASEstudentships to develop collaborativeresearch projects with UK social scientists.

• UK government should encourage afunding base, particularly for SMEs, to beinvolved in collaborative research with theUK university sector.

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Appendix AMISSION TEAM

Dr Nina WakefordDirectorINCITEUniversity of Surrey

[email protected] www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/incite

Dr Wakeford is the founder and director ofINCITE. She holds a PhD in Sociology fromthe University of Oxford, and is currently aReader in Sociology at the University ofSurrey. She has written widely about thesocial and cultural studies of technology, andnew social research methodologies.

The mission of INCITE, at the University of Surrey, is to develop collaborationsbetween social scientists, designers,engineers and artists involved in theproduction of new technologies.

Large research projects at INCITE have beensponsored by Sapient and Intel, and threeCASE postgraduate research studentships arefunded by the ESRC. Collaborative projectshave been undertaken with many otherinternational companies including FXPal, BTand Orange.

The work of INCITE is described in 'Workingwith New Media's Cultural Intermediaries', inInformation, Communication and Society, Vol 6, No 2, 2003, 229-245.

Gary Mortensen-BarkerDesign Programme ManagerBT plc

[email protected]

Gary manages a team of user-centred design(UCD) professionals for BT Design Group. BT is one of Europe's leading providers oftelecommunications services. Its principalactivities include local, national andinternational telecommunications services,higher-value broadband and internet productsand services, and IT solutions. BT DesignGroup apply UCD principles to some of BT'sproducts and services, focusing mainly onuser interface and interaction design acrossplatforms including the web, telephones,mobile devices, PCs and TV.

Prior to this, Gary worked for several dot-comcompanies, including ClickMusic and Adhoc,and was Multimedia Director for YTKO. Earlierin his career, he managed multimediaresearch projects for the IndependentTelevision Commission, was a prototypeservice designer for the CambridgeInteractive TV Trial, and was the founder ofthe Anglia Telematics Research Centre at APUCambridge. He has lectured in the field ofcommunication studies, specialising intechnoculture and hypermedia. He has alsoworked as a freelance web designer.

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Andrew McGrathOrange

[email protected] www.orange.co.uk

Orange is one of the world’s most advancedand fastest-growing mobile communicationscompanies with over 12 million customers inthe UK and over 30 million customers in 20 countries worldwide. Orange is also oneof the world’s strongest and most recognisedbrands built round a vision for a brighterfuture, where people can communicatewherever, whenever and however they wish.

Paula NealHead of People Centred InsightsPDD Group Ltd

[email protected]

PDD is the UK’s leading design consultancyspecialising in product innovation. Weachieve results by harnessing four powerfulsources of inspiration: strategic thinking,human behaviour, creativity and technicalknowledge. Our vibrant, inventive culturefocuses on the full new-product cycle from strategic research and visioning,through to detailed design and completeengineered products.

PDD’s 70 specialists offer a range of coreskills, including innovation planning,behavioural research, ergonomics, industrialdesign, engineering and model making. With25 years international experience spanningthe consumer, medical, packaging,telecoms, commercial and industrial sectors,we offer a wealth of expertise. Our clientsinclude AT&T, Sony Ericsson, Levi’s, Clarks,Hasbro, Tetley, Orange, Nestlé, Electrolux,Nike and Baxter Healthcare.

Paula has over ten years experience workingin people-centred design (PCD), creatingproducts and services that are borne out of

an understanding of human needs ratherthan technological advancements. She is thehead of the People Centred Insights team atPDD, the UK's leading design consultancy.The PDD research team uses skills inpsychology, ergonomics and social scienceto develop methodologies to betterunderstand people for design innovation.One of the dominant methodologies used bythe team is observational research tounderstand consumer needs during earlydesign exploration.

Paula joined PDD from the NCR KnowledgeLab where she was the head of a consumerresearch team conducting leading-edgeresearch into the interrelationship betweenpeople, technology and e-commerce.Previous to this she worked at BTLaboratories researching human factor issuesassociated with the design and developmentof advanced communications products andservices. Paula's main focus for the DesignMission centres on debating methods thatare used to effectively translate consumerinsights into design decisions.

Rachel JonesDirector of Research and DesignInstrata Ltd

[email protected]

Instrata is a people-centred strategicinnovation and interactive designconsultancy, developing new ideas forproducts and services for major technologycompanies. Instrata offers a creativeperspective inspired by putting people atthe centre of the innovation and designprocess. Services include: marketinnovation, new product development,customer research, and interactivesolutions. Instrata is an eight-strong team ofdesigners, anthropologists, technologistsand strategists with over 15 yearsexperience, operating across Europe.

Instrata is currently working on severalinnovation and design consultancy projects forMicrosoft to identify new opportunities, definenovel concepts and design feasible solutions.Projects have included: a series of studies ofweb usage at work and in the home toidentify and design new features that arebeing considered for Internet Explorer; a studyof home media devices and broadcastservices to identify opportunities in theconvergent and ubiquitous spaces; andidentification of opportunities in location-basedservices for mobile devices.

The Automation Partnership (TAP) engagedInstrata to design the user interaction for anew series of robotic machines, including thefirst-ever automated cell culture system forthe pharmaceutical industry. Instrata had toconsider many different ‘people’ issues, suchas: user experience of an automatedprocess; the perceived loss of control with asystem designed for minimal operatorintervention; and how the user could interacteffectively with the system. In addition todesigning an LCD user interface, Instrataneeded to develop novel representations tosupport awareness of experimentalthroughput, experimental planning, andexperimental status.

Instrata designed the user interface forGizmondo, the most advanced convergenthandheld gaming device to hit the UK market.It provides cutting-edge gaming utilising GPS-capabilities and messaging over GPRS, anMP3 music player, Mpeg4 movie playingcapability, and a digital camera.

Rachel Jones founded Instrata in 2001. Shehas worked at the two foremost pioneers ofcustomer-centred techniques in design –Xerox EuroPARC and Sapient (formerly E-Lab). Rachel has a PhD in ComputerStudies, over 20 international publications,and has authored 10 patents.

Amy BrantonCo-founderSkybluepink Ltd

[email protected]

Skybluepink brings a people-centred processto the creation of business conceptinnovations and the development of engagingand desirable products and services. Our approach gives our clients a freshperspective on their customers by focusingon the social, cultural and emotional aspectsof people’s lives rather than thinking of themas ‘users’ of technology. At the heart of ourpeople-centred process is the design-ledanalysis of qualitative research; turningvaluable insights into actionable ideas anddesigns for our client’s business.

Skybluepink was founded in 2002 by AmyBranton and Sarah Morris, who hadpreviously worked as interaction designers forleading design, technology and mediacompanies on both sides of the Atlantic,including Pixar, Razorfish, Symbian, IDEO andRagdoll. They both have Masters degreesfrom the Royal College of Art in ComputerRelated Design. Recent projects include:

Creating multi-sensory personas fromqualitative research for Orange, givingproject stakeholders a deeperunderstanding of and empathy with theirconsumers; helping them to design bettercustomer experiences.

Working in partnership with NestaFuturelabon the development of a language learninggame for 4 & 5 year old children usingqualitative research methods includingparticipatory workshops and contextualobservation. This project was recentlyselected to receive further funding as part of NestaFuturelab’s businessdevelopment programme.

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Designing user interfaces for medicalproducts based on qualitative research forPDD, a product design and innovationcompany.

Collaborating with INCITE on a project todesign ICTs for minority populations in theUK, based on research into a homelessmothers and babies shelter in West London.The aim is to enhance the lives of residentsby turning research into actionable ideas fornew technology-based services to improveinteractions between government policymakers and residents.

Dan HillHead of Interactive Technology and Design,Radio & Music InteractiveBBC

[email protected]/radio www.bbc.co.uk/music

BBC Radio & Music Interactive is adepartment set up to position the BBC’s radioand music brands and content on digitalplatforms and ensure that they take bestadvantage of the opportunities offered byeach platform.

On the net, the department maintains anddevelops websites and services for each ofthe BBC radio networks, as well as a musicportal service, programme sites andlearning initiatives built around radio andmusic brands and content. These attractover 6 million users per month. We also areresponsible for the BBC Radio Player, whichbrings together over five hundredprogrammes from across national andregional stations along with the WorldService and enables listeners to hear themon the Internet for up to a week after theyare first broadcast. This receives around 1.5 millions requests for programmes per week.

The department also runs the DAB DigitalRadio area for the BBC, working closely withStrategy, Distribution and Marketing, dealingwith manufacturers, retailers, commercialradio and other international stakeholders topromote DAB as a technology as well aspromoting DAB to audiences.

Radio & Music Interactive also runs anumber of digital TV initiatives – over 8 million people in the UK listen to radio viadigital television every week – and wasresponsible for bringing Eurovision andGlastonbury to interactive TV as well as theinteractive TV Proms service.

Finally, the department also positions BBCRadio and Music’s brands and content onmobile devices, building incoming andoutgoing SMS and MMS systems, withofferings such as the Radio 1 10-HourTakeover (150,000 incoming texts fromlisteners in 10 hours, deciding what records Radio 1 played) or the Archers textclub, texting out synopses of this radiodrama’s storylines.

Ellie RuncieDesign Council

[email protected]

The Design Council enhances prosperity andwellbeing in the UK by demonstrating andpromoting the vital role of design within amodern economy.

Ellie Runcie leads the Design Council’sTechnology Campaign. She is responsiblefor working with the investment andtechnology communities to ensure that theyunderstand and exploit design as a strategicbusiness tool.

The strength of Britain’s science base isworld renowned. Unfortunately we arecomparatively poor at converting our

discoveries into winning business ventures.If the UK is to compete against the mostdynamic industrial economies, this has to change.

The goal of the Design Council’s TechnologyCampaign is for the UK’s 70,000 technologybusinesses – in particular emergingtechnology start-ups – to use design skillsand methods from the earliest point oftechnological development. Early deploymentof design drives innovation that connects toneeds in future markets, creates a dynamicculture, develops a compelling brand andboosts the chances of attracting investmentby reducing risk.

After graduating from the University ofBrighton in 1993 with a BA in the History ofDesign, Ellie joined the British Museum’sArchitecture Department where she workedon the award-winning Great Court scheme.She went on to manage the sales office fora fashion start-up business before becominga project manager with Bereford’s Design, abrand communications consultancy.

Ellie joined the Design Council in 1997. Priorto her work on the Technology Campaign, shecoordinated national programmes for thedesign industry and small business sector,managed the annual 'Design in BusinessWeek' initiative, and developed a nationalinnovation network related to new technologyand the role of strategic design.

In 2001, as part of an International DesignLearning programme, Ellie visited andresearched a community-based project inIndia – ‘The Hole in the Wall’ – a project thatexplores how children learn and the socialuses of technology.

Sarah TurnerInternational Technology PromoterDTI Global Watch Service, Pera

[email protected]/itp

Sarah Turner is the International TechnologyPromoter (ITP) for digital media, NorthAmerica. The ITP network is sponsored bythe DTI Global Watch Service and managedby Pera Innovation Ltd. The network facilitatestechnology and knowledge transfer into theUK by brokering partnerships between UKand overseas companies.

Before becoming an ITP, Sarah was ManagingDirector of Wired Sussex, a private agencyworking with high technology and mediacompanies to help them grow and establishSussex as an internationally recognisedcentre of digital expertise. Sarah was also afounding director of TIGA, the tradeassociation for computer games developersshe helped to establish, and prior to WiredSussex was Head of Multimedia at Maxim(now Knowledge Pool), a Brighton-baseddigital media production company.


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Appendix BHOST COMPANIES AND SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS

LOS ANGELES, CA

Seminar participants

NOP Worldwww.nopworld.comRick Robinson, Global Director, Observational and Ethnographic PracticePaul Leinberger, Global Director, NOP World

Cal State University, Pomonawww.csupomona.eduNirmal Sethia, Professor of Management & Director of Center for Business and Design

Art Center College of Design, Pasadenawww.artcenter.eduPhilip van Allen, Professor, Interaction Design

Host companies

Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center (VMCC), Camarillowww.volvocars.usLars Erik Lundin,VP, GM VMCCBenny Sommerfeld, Concept Business ManagerDirk Koring,Concept Business ManagerDoug Frasher, Strategic Design ChiefIch Sugioka, Science OfficerJohn Kinsey, Senior DesignerKolita Mendis, Structures and Safety Engineering ManagerMatthias Westerlund, Studio EngineerTisha Johnson, Senior Designer

BMW Designworks USAwww.bmwusa.com/about/designworksusa.htmNeil Brooker, VP, Designworks USAAlec Bernstein, Director, Advanced CommunicationsLaura Robin, Creative Director, Advanced CommunicationsMonika Zych, Creative Director, Advanced Communications

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA

Seminar participants

SonicRimwww.sonicrim.comUday Dandavate, Principal

Intel Research Lab, Berkeleyberkeley.intel-research.net/pauloswww.prop.orgEric Paulos, Research Scientist

Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A)www.amanda.comAaron Marcus, Founder and President

Haas School of Business, UC Berkeleywww.haas.berkeley.eduSara Beckman, Senior Lecturer

IBM Almaden Research Centerwww.research.ibm.com/almadenJeannette Blomberg, Research Scientist

Swim Interaction Design Studioswww.swimstudio.comGitta Salomon, Founder

Illinois Institute of Technologywww.id.iit.edu Jay Melikan, Senior Research Associate

Smart Design USAwww.smartnyc.com Tom Dair, Co-Founder and PresidentAbby Godee, VP and Leader of MarketingSheila Foley, Director of Design Research

IDEOwww.ideo.comKristian Simsarian, Co-Leader, SX (Software Experiences)Duane Bray, Co-Leader, SX (Software Experiences)

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Adaptive Pathwww.adaptivepath.comJeff Veen, CEOJanice Fraser, Founding Partner

Host companies

FXPalwww.fxpal.comLes Nelson, Senior Research ScientistAndreas Girgensohn, Senior Research ScientistGene Golovchinsky, Senior Research Scientist

IDEOwww.ideo.com Kristian Simsarian, Co-Leader, SX (Software Experiences)Duane Bray, Co-Leader, SX (Software Experiences)

Cheskinwww.cheskin.comDarrel Rhea, Principal

Jump Associateswww.jumpassociates.comDev Patnaik, Principal

SEATTLE, WA

Microsoftwww.microsoft.com Gayna Williams, User Research ManagerJoey Benedek, Usability LeadTracey Lovejoy, EthnographerJenny Lam, Creative Lead Branding UX for Windows ClientSheri Lamont, Usability EngineerJulie Nowicki, Usability LeadDonna Flynn, EthnographerTim Brooke, Interaction Designer

Microsoft Researchwww.research.microsoft.comJonathan Grudin, Senior Researcher, Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group

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PORTLAND, OR

Nikewww.nike.comBruce Kilgore

Intel

People and Practices Research Lab (PAPR)www.intel.com/research/exploratory/paprChristine Riley, PAPR project leaderKen Anderson, ManagerScott Mainwaring, Senior ResearcherRichard Beckwith, Research PsychologistTony Salvador, Design EthnographerJohn Sherry, AnthropologistMichele Chang, DesignerEsam Khattack, Intern

Pro-active Healthwww.intel.com/research/prohealthEric Dishman, Manager Margie Morris, Clinical PsychologistBrad Needham, Lead Software EngineerTerry Dishongh, Lead Software Engineer

Design Centerdeveloper.intel.com/technology/itj/q42001/hdhooge.htm Herman D’Hooge, Manager

Technology Group Flex ServicesJulie Bennett, Manager, Agency Services

University of California, Irvinewww.isr.uci.eduPaul Dourish, Associate Professor, Department of Informatics

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Appendix CPHOTO GALLERY

Exhibit C.1 Nina Wakeford with FXPal researchers Exhibit C.2 FXPal Plasma Poster

Exhibit C.3 Mission team with Benny Somerfeld (Volvo) and Malcolm McLean (Vice Consul, Science &Technology, British Consulate General, Los Angeles)

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Exhibit C.4 Mission team with Kristian Simsarian and Duane Bray, IDEO

Exhibit C.5 In San Francisco. Left to right: Sharima Rasanayagam (Consul, Science & Technology), Sarah Turner, Nina Wakeford and Martin Uden (British Consul General, San Francisco)

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Appendix DLIST OF EXHIBITS

Exhibit Page Caption

1.1 16 Increasing degrees of innovation

1.2 17 Cultures of innovations

1.3 19 People – prototypes – products

1.4 20 eBay practice

2.1 22 People-centred innovation techniques

2.2 23 Innovation process used at BMW Designworks

2.3 24 Innovation process used at Intel

4.1 33 Extending research involvement in innovation – the translation point

4.2 33 Intel’s demographic visualisation

5.1 40 Research tools

7.1 50 Product continuum

7.2 52 Practice continuum

7.3 54 User research – rapid prototyping

C.1 68 Nina Wakeford with FXPal researchers

C.2 68 FXPal Plasma Poster

C.3 68 Mission team with Benny Somerfeld (Volvo) and Malcolm McLean (ViceConsul, Science & Technology, British Consulate General, Los Angeles)

C.4 69 Mission team with Kristian Simsarian and Duane Bray, IDEO

C.5 69 In San Francisco. Left to right: Sharima Rasanayagam (Consul, Science &Technology), Sarah Turner, Nina Wakeford and Martin Uden (British ConsulGeneral, San Francisco)

Appendix EGLOSSARY

AHRB Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK)CEO Chief Executive OfficerCSCW computer-supported cooperative workDAB digital audio broadcastingDMI Design Management Institute (USA)DTI Department of Trade and Industry (UK)EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK)ESRC Economic and Social Research Council (UK)GPRS General Packet Radio ServiceGPS Global Positioning SystemHCI human-computer interactionHF human factorsICT information and communication technologyINCITE Incubator for Critical Inquiry into Technology and Ethnography

(University of Surrey, UK)IST Innovation Strategy Team (Intel Corp, USA)IT information technologyITP International Technology Promoter (DTI)LCD liquid crystal displayMMS multimedia messaging serviceNDA non-disclosure agreementOEM original equipment manufacturerPAPR People and Practices Research (team at Intel Corp, USA)PC personal computerPCD people-centred designR&D research and developmentRFID radio frequency identificationROI return on investmentSMS short message serviceTV televisionUCD user-centred designUI user interfaceUK United KingdomUS(A) United States (of America)USB universal serial busUX user experience


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Global Watch InformationGlobal Watch Online – a unique internet-enabled service delivering immediate andinnovative support to UK companies in theform of fast-breaking worldwide business andtechnology information. The website providesunique coverage of DTI, European andinternational research plus businessinitiatives, collaborative programmes andfunding sources.Visit: www.globalwatchonline.com

Global Watch magazine – the website's sisterpublication, featuring innovation in action.Distributed free to over 18,000 UKorganisations, this monthly magazine featuresthe latest technology developments andpractices gleaned from Global Watch Serviceactivities around the world now being put intopractice for profit by British businesses.Contact: [email protected]

UKWatch magazine – a quarterly magazine,published jointly by science and technologygroups of the UK Government. HighlightingUK innovation and promoting inwardinvestment opportunities into the UK, thepublication is available free of charge to UKand overseas subscribers.Contact: [email protected]

Global Watch Missions – enabling teams ofUK experts to investigate innovation and itsimplementation at first hand. The technologyfocused missions allow UK sectors andindividual organisations to gain internationalinsights to guide their own strategies forsuccess.Contact: [email protected]

Global Watch Secondments – helping smalland medium sized companies to sendemployees abroad or receive key people fromanother country. Secondments are aneffective way of acquiring the knowledge,skills, technology and connections essentialto developing a business strategically.Contact:[email protected]

Global Watch Technology Partnering –providing free, flexible and direct assistancefrom international technology specialists toraise awareness of, and provide access to,technology and collaborative opportunitiesoverseas. Delivered to UK companies by anetwork of 16 International TechnologyPromoters, with some 6,000 currentcontacts, providing support ranging frominformation and referrals to more in-depthassistance with licensing arrangements andtechnology transfer.Contact: [email protected]

For further information on the Global WatchService please visitwww.globalwatchonline.com

The DTI’s Global Watch Service provides support dedicatedto helping UK businesses improve their competitivenessby identifying and accessing innovative technologies andpractices from overseas.

Printed in the UK on recycled paper with 75% de-inked post-consumer waste content

First published in December 2004 by Pera Innovation Limited on behalf of theDepartment of Trade and Industry

© Crown copyright 2004

URN 04/1863

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Am I borrowing this? · 6.5 Brand and co-creation, developing 45 tools for brand differentiation 6.6 Cultural sensitivities in brand 46 experiences 6.7 Orchestrating multi-branded