There are a lot of disruptive products in consumer market, and many of them are driven either from technology or business. (Kinect vs. Netflix) However, it is harder to see design-driven break-through products. Design has been a good contributor of incremental changes (so as design research as Don Norman speaks), making things more usable and desirable.
Are we set up ourselves right for cultivating and integrating disruptive ideas? The complexity is that it is hard to make good ideas survive to all the way through product release because the constant battle between alignments with the existing product and the need of reinventing. (There is fine line between crazy idea vs. break-through idea)
Then, how can we create process, team and culture that help design can drive break-through products? We should consciously try different models to how it cultivates the culture and process in a way that can balance alignment and disruptive ideas.


Integrated Design process

“What are good benchmarks for setting up a corporate design team?" 

These are the questions I have been trying to answer in the last couple of weeks. Nothing academic, just a ‘guesstimate’. For that purpose, I contacted a bunch of colleagues who work in web companies in the Silicon Valley and tried to collect a basic amount of data that would allow me to abstract some learnings and hopefully also metrics.

The companies I chose to talk to have revenue well above $1B, employee numbers on the 4-digits range and above, and have successful on-demand products used by literally hundreds of thousands of people globally.

The reason I picked large web companies with a constant stream of revenue from their products is because 1) they have more established and efficient organizations (not dramatically growing like a start-up, neither shrinking like a decaying company) and 2) because by having products with such large amount of users in the market, is hard to argue their products are not well designed given the low cost required by consumers to switch to other on-demand applications and services.

Here are some of the lessons learned:

• Corporate design teams are chronically understaffed
  Not all product teams have design resources assigned to them. Only the products that are more strategic or are top priority get assigned design resources (even when they get them assigned, they are not always dedicated to it full time). A common practice is to have 'design office hours' so product managers in need can get some advice from designers. Sometimes, designers end up helping out product managers in their spare time either because they are passionate about the product and want to see it launch or because they would like to have on their CV a line that talks about their involvement with a product that hit the market (an asset quite scarce sometimes among designers). Not surprisingly given the potential savings, companies encourage their product managers to apply design thinking as much as possible so they don't have to rely always on the design team for basic product design tasks and product development can be sped up. 
• Wide design diversity within the team
  People within these design departments have different skills and different tasks. No radical homogeneity. All bundled together under the same leveling label ‘design’. The most common disciplines by far are interaction designers, followed by visual designers, and the tiniest group, user researchers. Some of the companies also have a special group of design strategists who engage in new product development rather than “product maintenance” of an existing mature product, but that is still not really common among large companies.
• The corporate design team golden ratio is 1:100
  As I was looking for a metric that would allow me to compare a company with each other, I realized that a good indicator could be the investment each company dedicates to design resources. Since I had no access to design departments budget, the assumption I made is that the size of the design team in comparison to the number of employees a company could be a good proxy to measure the corporate understanding of design value . Triangulating the data I got from my interviewees with some public data from finance.google.com I managed to calculate the ratio, and surprise surprise, most of the companies had a very similar number: 1 design team member for every ~100 employees.*

Do this learnings resonate with the the way your design department works within your organization? Does your company have a more sophisticated way to organize design departments? Does the designer vs. employee ratio apply to your company as well?
 

* Disclaimer: the subject sample is on the single digits but still, I thought this initial metric could be a good starting point for further and more accurate benchmarking

Photo credit: Guardian Eyewitness

Today Michelin announced the list of restaurants that have been selected to feature in their 2011 San Francisco, Bay Area and Wine Country guide. To many people's surprise, Chez Panisse, the restaurant known as the birthplace of California cuisine, lost their star.

It has barely been three years. On October 23rd, 2007 Nike bought Umbro for $582.2M, paying a 61% premium on that day’s share price to discourage potential counterbids. At that time, Umbro was a company in clear decline. Their only valuable assets were the contracts it had signed to supply uniforms for multiple club and national teams (being the one with the British Football Association one of the longest lasting in the industry, spanning more than 20 years) and its history as a company that has deep roots with professional football since 1924.

Why buy another football apparel company? To keep the contracts and kill the brand? As a late newcomer to the football business in the 90s, Nike was not so much interested in the contracts but on the brand heritage. The global market for football kit and equipment is around $5B, and Nike's rationale to add another brand to their football portfolio is the same they had when they diversified their basketball brand portfolio: to segment the market not just by product category but by brand promise.

Nike Basketball started its brand multiplication process in 1997 by spinning off the Air Jordan brand (who in his sane mind would not turn the most recognizable logo of basketball into a standalone brand?), then bought Converse in 2003 ($305M for the brand that invented the very first basketball shoe), and by now it is becoming clear the LeBron James brand will become a solo subsidiary pretty soon.

With football, a sport mainly dominated by deep-pocketed European clubs that until recent years did not benefit from the sophistication of American marketing, we are witnessing the start of the same maturation process: a departure from a strategy based on a single lowest-common-denominator brand that tries to appeal everybody equally, to a more sophisticated strategy based on a multi-brand ecosystem that has the agility to be more diverse and vibrant. And this trend will only increase in the next years as football’s audience grows even bigger and more global.

Without quite going multibrand for football yet, Puma already started the lifestylization of football few years ago by positioning itself as the brand that “really loves football” (in their own Milton-Glaser-esque 'I <3 football' they replace the heart with a football). In their campaigns they frame African football as the purest and less money-fueled manifestation of the sport in order to leverage their sponsorships of African national teams. That's what they sell now: the innocent and untarnished soul of football.

With Umbro's acquisition, Nike went even further and enriched their portfolio by adding additional dimensions to it. Just take a look at how complementary the brands are:

The way the Nike Football brand has been developed in the last years makes it stand for performance, high technology, and success. As a token, just look at their latest performance boots, the Vapor Mercurial Superfly II. These are boots that go for ~$400 and embody everything the brand wants to be: they are the lightest thanks to the materials used and the way the boots are built; they come in a wide range of screaming colors because, hey, if you are the best and you know it, you want to signal this to the rest of the world, right?; they have special cleats with exclusive advanced technology so you can have an edge over the rest and win; and they are endorsed by arguably the most famous and notorious football player now, Cristiano Ronaldo.

In contrast to all this edgy 21st century agressive brand attitude, Umbro clearly positions itself as a more emotional organization. The company not only is based in Manchester, England but it is also proud to be British as their tag reads: "Tailored by Umbro in England". Having started so early in the 20th century in the land of football (the foundation of association football rules were established in a London pub in 1863) is not only a key identity asset; this is something that virtually no other brand in the world will be able to brag about ever no matter how much money they have. And that's exactly what Nike was buying when they shelled out $582.2M for a dwindling company: a symbol in football history.

Umbro had potential. And they saw it. Fast forward three years to today and all the signs indicate there has been a massive turnaround: Umbro stands now for incomparable football heritage and craftsmanship, creative lifestyle, and a strong passion for the game beyond the competitiveness of winning or losing. How did Nike manage to do this? What strategic decisions were taken that had a positive impact on the Umbro brand? More on this in follow-up posts.

The qualitative user research field might have reached a significant milestone today on its path to mainstream. Techcrunch, the place-to-go for news about start-ups, published today:

“Denver-based GutCheck is trying to offer a self-described do-it-yourself platform for qualitative market research. [...] The startup, founded by CEO Matt Warta, Carl Rossow and Jen Drolet, has just raised $2 million in a Series A round led by Highway 12 Ventures. [...] GutCheck’s goal is to be the SurveyMonkey for qualitative research by simplifying the process and bringing it all online.”

Wow. A $2 million investment for a qualitative user research tool. What is going on here? Have venture capitalists completely ran out of ideas about where to put their money? Did Gutcheck founders simply pitched the right product to the right VCs (actually they have an advantage here: one of the founders is actually a former VC)? Is Gutcheck sensing something no one else is?

Let’s look at what is under the hood: the app basically provides marketers with a service to identify research subjects based on a target demographic from a large database (populated by revenue-sharing partners) and the communication tools to interview them by means of an online chat.

Looking at the features, there is nothing revolutionary from a mainstream marketing methodology point of view but surely an incremental shift that will appeal to many marketing managers willing to try something different, but not that different. Not sure how many social researchers would call this a ‘qualitative research’ tool (maybe the label ‘real time interactive survey’ would apply better?), but there is something in there for new product development projects that care about empathizing with users at some basic level.

Why VCs are starting to invest just now in this area if the widespread buzz around user-centric innovation has been around for a while now (the famous BusinessWeek special 'Get Creative'on innovation dates back from August 2005)? What took them so long?

One explanation could be the fact that people are now sharing online more than ever and marketers realized the power of online media to have easier and faster access to consumers. Sentiment analysis tools for blogs and public tweets are just the tip of the iceberg. The amount of information of each one of us in the internet is only going to get bigger,and marketers can't wait to have access to all this information.

So what is next in the VCs investing pipeline? Is this the start of a trend? Are on-demand solutions so fast, so cheap, and so hot nowadays that we are going to have an explosion of applications related to finally truly understand users and markets?

Maybe Gutcheck's case would lead us to believe that we are witnessing the nascent of a new product category of solutions. But it may be surprising to some to know that this application space has already existed for a while. Yes. Even before VCs or marketers looked at it.

In the last years, more and more innovation consultants, design strategists, ethnographers, researchers, etc.. all over the world who have been practicing for years and had been frustrated by the shortcomings of existing digital tools, have decided to stop complaining and to apply their own knowledge to build the tools that would help them and many other user researchers get their job done better. First 'scratch your own itch' and then (since the cost of bringing to market an on-demand app to the whole world is so low...) why not try to make a business out of it! As an example, here a handful of solutions I have been looking at in the last years, and in some cases test-driven or even used:

• Revelation, an “online qualitative research software to help your market research project capture reality” developed by Steve August “after many frustrating years of using blogs to do ethnographic-inspired online qualitative research”
• Guapovideo, an “online video collaboration for market research pros” developed also from Chicago and used and endorsed by ID IIT professor Chris Conley
• Piipl, a tool to “easily gain insights by involving piipl [sic] in innovation processes” is developed in Denmark by an ex-Jump Associates consultant
• Ethnoken, a "visual market intelligence" tool developed from Chicago and “created by ethnographic researchers for ethnographic researchers”
• 7daysinmylife, an "online research environment in the form of a diary’ started by Dutch consultancy Zilver innovation

The level of product maturity in many of them is still not 100% market ready but there is not a lack of great product ideas out there. And the interest and money to be made with this kind of apps is only going to grow. And VCs will surely follow.

It would be very interesting to follow how this market evolves in the next years. Will bootstrapped startups sell part of their business to VCs for faster growth? Will they try to do it solo and grow their business without backseat-driving investors dictating the pace of development and the features that have to be released first? Will they have a huge expertise advantage over entrepreneurs coming from traditional quantitative marketing simply becoming entrepreneurs to make a fast buck? Will established design consultancies (that rely on quality user research) develop similar tools to increase output, productivity and (most importantly) margins? How long before larger, more powerful and better funded marketing companies start swallowing these startups as they mature their offerings and increase their user base?

Update: Matt Warta, CEO of GutCheck has shared in the comments section extra insightful bits about the vision behind his product and the potential reasons why VCs are interested in the space. Additionaly he has also provided some additional examples of related solutions in the online market research application space:

• Markettools, the same creators of the early Zoomerang , provides a full and diverse range of “software and services for Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) and Market Research”. The company has been around for quite a bit now and it definitely seems one of the bigger and more mature ones out there. (Based in San Francisco and 471 employees according to Linkedin)
• Communispace. Claiming to be “The Leader in Online Consumer Insights”, Communispace story has been covered by the popular book Groundswell written by Forrester analysts. They pitch themselves to potential clients not as a technology company but more as a ‘strategic partner’ probably alluding to the fact they offer strategic expertise through professional services. Check their multimedia area for an interview with CEO Diane Hessan. (Based in Massachusets and 281 employees according to Linkedin)
• uSamp . With a more traditional survey methodology approach, uSamp’s strong points are (according to them) better subject matching, higher data quality, and a large pool of subjects. We can already see a numbers 'battle' going on between competitors: uSamp talks about “3.1 million actively engaged panelists” while Gutcheck promises a pool with “roughly 4 million subjects”. (Based in California and 61 employees according to Linkedin)
• Vovici Offers basic online survey capabilities with additional analysis reporting tools. (Based in Virginia and 98 employees according to Linkedin)

While searching for quotes related to design I accidentaly stumbled on this Larry Keeley quote that Bruce Nussbaum captured at the last ID IIT design conference Innovate Now :

"Leonardo Da Vinci made money as a defense contractor"



A designer in camouflage

It is definitely the fad du jour in the field of innovation: customer development model (if you look it up on google today you will find 322,000 results). People ‘in the know’ are throwing left and right its signature terms: customer discovery, pivoting, minimum viable product, lean startup, etc. And it is not just start-ups, consultants, tech visionaries, and VCs the people who are talking about it. People in big companies as well! (especially the ones in the Silicon Valley). Corporations want the cool factor as well and to be perceived as relevant actors in the valley, they have to claim they are also innovating. And how are they backing their statement? They will confidently tell you they have a handful special crack teams that ‘operate like a start-up’ right inside their headquarters.

Just for the record, I have nothing against applying a start-up mentality to traditional product development. In fact quite the opposite. I am a total believer of Steve Blank's model. I even read his book “the four steps to the epiphany” and I was ecstatic to discover he managed to write the book many people in the design field have tried to write for years but have failed miserably: a book that defines a needs and customer-driven product development process (which not surprisingly shares many customer-centric principles of the design thinking process) in a way that anyone can understand. Along the way, the author, with his clear and well-defined process, manages to demystify the ‘secret sauce that can’t be taught’ in the innovation process that many innovation and design consultancies are happy to charge a premium for when passing the bill to their clients.

Perfect then. Corporations now have a roadmap for how to increase the chances of success when innovating. The rest should be easy, correct? Just a matter of highlighting the interesting parts of the book, evangelizing them to the whole team, and following them step by step, right?

Well, not quite. Reality is that as much as maverick product managers would like, they will never be able to operate as a start-up inside a big company. Why? It could be because any or a combination of this factors:

• Internal Politics: executives/founders making undebatable decisions that affect your product
• Dependencies with the larger organization: product/technology platform related, budget decisions, shared supporting processes, etc.
• and probably most important, the rewards and risks involved in operating as a start-up: why would someone in a big corporation work 80 hours a week if the upside is maybe a 10-15% extra bonus compared to working at a start-up where you can make 200-300%?

The only way large organizations can successfully apply customer development model is by funding truly independent startups inside the company: no strings attached to the mother ship, no interference whatsoever, and all the incentives in place for its founders to do what is necessary. These companies should feel comfortable giving shareholders money to a group of 4-5 employees and invite them one year later to see what they have come up with. For the rest who are not brave enough, the highest they can aim is to foster a culture of customer-centeredness, comfortable with chaos and change, and most importantly willing to learn from failure.

[Photo: Dawn Endico]

Recent studies by psychologists in California and British Columbia have shown that being exposed to nonsensical data improves ability to find patterns. This probably doesn't come as too surprising to most of you (after all, it supports the fact that creative types tend to be explorers, travelers, experimenters, always looking to experience something new), but what if we could prime ourselves to be better at our office design jobs in a way that doesn't require investment in air travel or special equipment? What if all it took to be more analytical and synthetic in our work was to read a Kafka story every before as a warm-up?

A recent visit to Paris's Dans le Noir restaurant got me thinking about visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (VAK) learning styles and what happens when one of the most heavily relied-upon modalities among seeing people is taken away from them.

This restaurant chain (in Paris and London) sells a unique dining experience by removing all light from their dining area and employing legally blind persons as waitstaff. You enter into a (lit) bar waiting area, empty all of your belongings and sources of light (including cell phones) into a locker, order your meal (a set menu with several mix-and-match course and drink options--we chose not to know the actual dishes before we ate them), perhaps enjoy an apertif, and then you're led by your blind waiter through two black velvet curtains to your table, which is in a room so dark that you cannot see your own hand 2 inches in front of your face (though one of my dining companions insisted he could--and later joked that he spent much of the evening waving his hand in front of his face while his mind filled the images in his head). You drink your wine, pour your water, and eat your dinner with a knife and fork completely in the dark. The noise level of the dining room quickly elevates as people who normally rely on vision for so many communication cues are forced to focus their auditory sense on identifying speakers and maintaining conversations; the waitstaff must come in to shush the room periodically throughout the service.

I am a predominantly kinesthetic learned myself, so my first instinct was to feel out my surroundings and understand the size and shape of the table, where the table settings were located, what material the furniture was made of, and how far the wall extended behind and beside me. My eyes instantly interpreted the tactile information into a mental picture of my surroundings, and I used this mental map to "see" the world as dinner went on. As soon as the dinner plates came to the table, there was nothing I could do but stick my left hand into the food and feel for textures, heat, and moisture. Most of the ingredients were eventually recognizable by smell and taste (we later cross-checked with a photo-album menu in the waiting area) but, to quote my fellow contextresponser Enric, "Food should be enjoyed by all five senses." Perhaps we are particularly sensitive to the visual aesthetics as designers, but I realized during this meal how much my enjoyment of food is influenced by visual data--and how this particular meal was less culinarily meaningful to me because I couldn't see the structure and the colors on my plate.

Nevertheless, a trip to Dans le Noir is truly a "walking in someone else's mocassins" worthwhile experience for creating empathy. I'm sure people with other learning styles will have different stories to tell about how they adjust to the darkness.

This post is coming to you from above. WiFi's new dimension: get connected while flying high. And, no, this is not a medical marijuana joke. I am blogging from my flight back from Boston to San Francisco from seat 13C, Virgin America flight #...who cares, I'm online. So far, I've skyped with my work colleagues, caught up on some work emails, got on HuffPo, paypal'ed a friend. What better to do on a flight than pop open your laptop and take care of some errands?

So Virgin America takes one of the first steps and offers onboard WiFi. At first, I am elated. I can get online and make this 6 hr flight go by a LOT more quickly than trying to sleep or listen to my iPod. Then I imagine more and more people with their laptops on the plane, kind of a scary thought, but then I imagine the tiny netbooks now and I'm less anxious.

Back to the WiFi. I am impressed.

Signing up was a charm. Finally, an airline who gets experience design. From the boutique-hotel style check-in to signing up for WiFi in a jip, this airline is getting my attention. I appreciate the screens on the back of the seats, but full-on access to the interweb is my cup of tea.

Most people who know me would characterize me as fundamentally an honest and upstanding person. I've broken very few laws in my life and suffer from a torturous amount of guilt any time I feel like I've wronged someone. True, I run the occasional stop sign on my bicycle when there are no other vehicles in sight, but on the whole I'd say I'm a law-abiding citizen who has no intention of cheating others and would immediately attempt to right the situation if I felt I had.

You can imagine how frustrated I am, then, when the ill-conceived experience design of Caltrain ticketing labels me a criminal for forgetting to validate my 8-ride pass a couple of times. Now, the first time I got a citation was a fluke: I'd never used an 8-ride pass before and didn't even know what it meant to "validate" the ticket, much less when and where to do it. My assumption had been that the Caltrain official would stamp or punch one of the rides on my ticket as he made his rounds through the car. Instead, the official unforgivingly cited me for fare evasion, when anyone who looked at the pass could have plainly read that I'd purchased that ticket exactly 11 minutes before he laid eyes upon it.

I have been racking my brain trying to come up with reasons for a ticketing and boarding design that punishes (criminalizes!) honest but forgetful people, but I have yet to come up with a good one, so will offer my critique, propose a new solution and invite the rest of you to share your perspectives....

The problem

The basic reason why the ticketing experience sucks is that there is no consistency in how riders are accountable for these different passes. You can buy a number of different kinds of passes for Caltrain: one-ride passes, round-trip passes, day passes, 8-ride passes, monthly passes, etc., and this is great because different riders have different needs and should have options for the kind of ticket that best suits their riding habits. What's not so great is that, as a rider, you are responsible for remembering different behaviors depending on which pass you happened to have purchased the last time. I purchased a monthly pass for April and all I had to do was get myself to the station, get on my train, and pull out the pass to show the conductor if/when he passed through my train car during that month. Being that my project is finishing up this week and the monthly pass is no longer the best economical choice for me in May, I purchased an 8-ride pass last Friday to use for the rest of this month's estimated rides. Yesterday, I showed up at the Redwood City train station 20 minutes early and passed the time studying for an exam, completely forgetting to validate the ticket and not even realizing I'd forgotten until the official was coming through the train car. I didn't bother arguing with her (she didn't make up the rules, after all) but was doubly pissed off when I later discovered that she hadn't even written "VOID" across one of edge of my pass to validate it and hold me accountable for that ride.

In every other transit system I've ever ridden, there is a single point in the experience at which all riders--no matter what their transit needs or pass types, and no matter whether they swipe or insert or drop coins into a hole--have to provide proof of payment for that ride. On Muni, it's when you board the bus. On BART, on DC's Metro system, on Chicago's CTA, and on most metropolitan public transit systems around the world, it's when you go through the turnstile to get to the platform. Why, then, would Caltrain require some people to do something extra to a ticket they've already paid for before they board the train, when the rest need only to show their ticket aboard the train?

The solution

This is really such an easy problem to solve that I can't believe Caltrain makes it so hard for everyone involved--especially for all those officials who have to deal with pissed-off riders when they issue citations. All 8-ride passes already come with an expiration date, so what is the need for additional validation? I only have 2 weeks to use it, anyway. Call it a 2-week pass, if you want, and charge a little bit more money--but do away with the ride limit. Or, keep it an 8-ride pass and don't make me validate it beforehand if an official is going to pass through my car to check it, anyway; Caltrain officials always carry little tools with them to punch mysterious strips of yellow paper, so it can't be any more work to punch one of my rides as validation.

In the larger scheme of things, Caltrain needs to think about redesigning a better system of ticketing and payment so that it won't need to employ so many grumpy officials to be ticket police. We frequent riders appreciate the service and are willing to pay for the convenience it provides in our life, but everyone could be a lot happier--and things would run a lot more smoothly--if a more considered and use-centered approach to design were applied to the overall experience.

A friend's Facebook status message recently read that she "is really only on FB for about 60 seconds every other day now that the design sucks." Here's why:

1. Feed takes up more screen real estate
Less dense information = more scrolling to ingest everything.

2. Unclear use of grid/column spaces
There are photos on the right, photos in the middle, status/Twitters in the middle, random events ("Highlights") that have nothing to do with me on the top right. What gives? Where is the logic? My favorite part of the screen is the extra white space on either side of the content when I maximize my browser window. Ahhhhhh.....

3. Awkward information hierarchy
Here is why I completely glaze over the rightmost column (aside from the "Highlights," which seems like it should be relabeled "Ads"): because hell if I know that my friend named her new photo album "Living la vida loca," I just know that I like to see Jane Smith's photos, and photos of Jane Smith. Um, it's "social networking" for a reason--make the people the focal point!

4. I have to work harder to get to the stuff I care about
...Therefore, I am less likely to stick around to find it. If Joe Bob is an OCD status updater, I have to read 5 of his status updates in a row before I get to learn something about my other friends. If I "x" him out then I lose all of his status updates. Shouldn't there be a middle ground, like being able to see just his latest status update? Also, don't make me filter people out. Software should be smart enough to track the people who's photos I comment on most, the profiles I visit (read: stalk) most often, and the organizers of events I attend.

5. Redundancy
What's the difference between the "Home" link and "Friends" link on the top nav bar? If I don't pick a drop-down "Friends" option, it appears that it just takes me "Home." Similarly, what's the difference between the "Profile" link and "Joyce Chen" link? We get seven links for the price of five, which in interaction design is not that great of a deal.

This is cute: graphic design inspired by music. My only complaint is the user experience: I don't want to have to click to the next page/song and press Play, although I understand that the former feature could have been purposefully implemented to prevent a listener from missing all of the visuals if he Tabs away listening to the tunes and forgets to for the visuals.

I always enjoy Nicholas Felton's Annual Report and this year is no exception, although I find the triangle pattern obtuse at times and I wonder if there is a way to use such meticulously collected and organized data to tell a more rich and human story?