Welcome to the fascinating world of design thinking—a new and extremely effective tool that can be applied to the design of innovation, systems, business processes, and the design of businesses themselves.  In a new book by Design Management Institute president Thomas Lockwood called Design Thinking, Molecular’s Brian Gillespie contributes his thoughts on the importance of design thinking in an essay titled “Service Design via the Global Web:  Global Companies Serving Local Markets.”  

Built on case study examples and work done for Molecular’s clients, Brian examines the challenges and opportunities companies face when launching a global Web presence.  In the essay, Brian critiques a range of options, including gateways, scope, user research, uniform versus local presence, language, content development, design, site implementation, domains, and URLs. 

If your organization is looking to cultivate innovation and build a solid brand foundation, Design Thinking is a must-read! But don’t take my word for it – check out some of these rave reviews: 

“A much-needed book, which paves the way towards a better understanding of design thinking and its power. A fundamental reading for all those who like to grasp the multifaceted nature of design.”
—Roberto Verganti, author, Design Driven Innovation; professor of innovation, Poitecnico di Milano

“This collection of work from some of the design industry’s top thought leaders will further stimulate valuable discussion on how, through collaborative and innovative thinking, we can design a better future for all societies and business.”
—Stefano Marzano, president, Philips Design

Have a question for Brian or want to share your thoughts on design thinking?  Be sure to leave your comments below!

Designers partnering in business strategy formation bring many fresh tools, techniques, and perspectives to the process. From methods for gathering information, forming insights, generating ideas, imagining concepts, validating concepts, and articulating a design vision that can make ideas real, design strategists (or strategic designers) bring unique value every step of the way.

One of the most powerful tools at the disposal of the strategy team is the collection of all of the strategic intelligence that realizes the strategy into a single visualization that quickly communicates the forces driving the strategy. From the digital business perspective visualizations often reflect strategies for single or multi-channel products, services, and experiences. The end result may be a completely new web site, a specific set of web-based services for a target market, or a multi-site strategy reflecting a diverse marketing campaign embracing social networks and other discrete touchpoints.

Visualizations can be all-encompassing, covering a full range of inputs that typically include over-arching corporate strategy, brand positioning, competitive positioning, and target consumers as well as outputs such as strategic drivers, principal ideas and concepts translated into prioritized products and services, and brand and design principles to apply when tackling implementation. On the other hand, visualizations can also focus on one contributor to the strategy information stream. A good example is the quantitative and qualitative research driving the establishment of market segmentation and creation of target customer personas.

Strategic design visualizations provide business design strategy a number of great benefits. Here are a few.
1. At a glance they provide a visual framework and a strategic context within which to house a quick view into the extensive research, insights, and findings driving the strategy. The report in word, the extensive presentation deck, the reams of research documentation are all still valid. Yet the visualization allows the viewer to quickly grasp the essence of the strategy and its principal highlights.
2. Visualizations are excellent ways to begin the socialization of strategy process across the organization.
3. Visualizations can be an excellent way to show how all departments within a company play a role in the execution of a strategy.
4. Visualizations can communicate the business logic driving design initiatives. In other words, one can draw a line through the visualization connecting the strategic dots that connect a piece of content, a new feature, a tone of voice, a certain aesthetic, to the core strategy.
5. Visualizations provide support objectivity when brainstorming ideas for new products and services.

Hey reader! If you have used great information design at your company to share your design and business strategies you may also have noticed the benefits. Why not share them here!?

“Design as a Driver of User-centered Innovation”
“Using Design to Drive Innovation”
“Design Thinking for Innovation”
“Fostering Innovation Culture In An Unpredictable Economy”

Wow. You’d want to be crazy not to involve designers in your strategy for innovation! Right?! There is quite the clamor to replace, or at least partner, strategy with innovation, business thinking with design thinking, and technology R & D approaches to innovation with consumer-driven approaches. There are some great stories, making great headlines, about innovative new products and services, which are the result of a design-driven approach. Some are truly deliberate from the start; others had a happy ending and could rewrite history to fit the good story! And this is a good story. One that has lessons and insights for every business with faith in the need for innovation and a desire to continually improve their customer’s experience of their business, however they interact with the business. It also requires a will to lead their industry and leapfrog the competition, to regularly provide new customer value, and to inspire their internal teams to succeed.

So you are a business leader and you have seen the headlines and you have a few questions. So what does innovation by design mean? How does design drive innovation? Innovating what? Design thinking, huh? What do I need to do? Who can help me? How do I engage their help? Should I worry about ROI or just let the designers have at it? How can I afford to invest in innovation during a recession? How can designers help me? So many questions, so little time so today I will answer the final question…and only in part. Here are three ways that designers can help. There are more than three, but we’ll work with three today!

Designers can provide a framework within which to drive your innovation agenda. A simple and effective framework is an essential strategy and innovation process, revolving around three essential activities:

1. Gathering the business and consumer insights that will drive ideas
2. Generating as many ideas or business opportunities as possible,
3. Visualizing and prototyping the best ideas.

The icing on the cake is validation upon which to base your measurement strategy and return on design investment (RODI), which in these recessionary times is often an essential component of the decision to invest. Within this framework designers can draw from a wide range of proven tools and techniques to reveal ideas that can drive innovation. Experience audits, differentiation analysis, customer experience immersion, creative brainstorming, rapid prototyping, consumer participation, and strategy visualizations are but a few.

Designers can work with consumers, customers, and users to drive user-centered innovation. User-centered designers bring empathy to their investigations into opportunities for innovating product and service experiences. Insights revealed by first-hand immersion in the consumer experience are often the sparks that lead to great ideas. Building these ideas on a foundation of business and customer intelligence guarantees that your design strategy lines up perfectly in sync with your business strategy. That’s a good recipe for success in good times and tough times.

One of the principal strategic design tools employed by design teams today is the persona. The persona has come a long way in the past few years and is being broadly accepted by business as a critical component to defining a business strategy for new product and service innovation. The reasons for this acceptance are clear: the best personas are being created from insights developed through a balanced effort of qualitative and quantitative research. Marketing stakeholders are finding that personas, aligned with their market segmentation, really bring to life the characteristics of customers they have become very familiar with over the years, in a very real and dynamic way. In addition, the methods for socializing personas within an organization make them relevant such that they become a readily referred tool for a wide range of business planning activities.

However, the value and use of personas can increase considerably when paired with another empathic design tool…the user or consumer journey. At its highest level, a consumer journey outlines the various stages in the lifecycle of a consumer’s interaction with a brand, from initial awareness through to long-term retention. At a practical level marketers plot the potential channels through which they can acquire, convert, and retain customer’s interest in their products, services, and experiences, both analog and digital. It is becoming increasingly attractive and complex to orchestrate an overall, holistic experience of the brand that communicates in a clear, consistent, on-brand fashion. Marketers have a great number and mix of potential customer touchpoints at their disposal, beyond the direct contact with the product or service. Ancillary experiences through digital touchpoints, such as search engines, social media, digital signage, etc call for a broader understanding of the possible destinations for target markets.

Personas allow marketers to evaluate their options for interaction through the lens of key personas, representing target market segments. When personas are mapped to consumer journeys, digital marketers can be more deliberate about the communication strategies they roll out across channels. For design teams conducting customer research it is important to investigate the broader digital space that target users interact with. Are they bloggers…lurkers or leaders? Do they attend venues with digital signage? How do they use social networks? How are they influenced by others online?  What web sites do they trust for actionable information? What web sites do they purchase products and services on? How do they use search engines? By investigating the answers to these questions designers can piece together insights into consumer’s current experience and how that can likely be stated as a prospective consumer journey over time and the key touchpoints that are likely to expose the consumer to a company’s product or service.

More and more digital designers are being enlisted to provide the insights and intelligence needed to strategize this open digital space. That’s good news for designers and good news for business!

Way back in late September, I had the inspiring opportunity to attend the Design Research 2008 conference and workshops sponsored by the Illinois Institute of Technology: Institute of Design, held at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. This conference, in its 7th year (formerly known as About, With & For) gathers design professionals and students across various disciplines to share insights on emergent and innovative research methodologies as well as to discuss organizational strategies for promoting the value and advancement of design research practices.

Both the challenge and the excitement of attending conferences is finding the kernels of wisdom that are not only going to shift your own processes and perspective, but when shared with enthusiasm, will also inspire others to get on board and take action themselves. Here are my kernels:

Engage your users in the research process

Active co-creation is something of a buzzword in the design research world at the moment, and for a good reason. Engaging users as partners in the research process creates a paradigm shift away from the prevailing “expert mindset” of gathering user data (usability testing, focus groups, surveys, etc) and toward a more participatory model, where the users have more tactile and tangible opportunities to express their goals, motivations, aspirations, and even behaviors.

Shifting the locus of control from the researcher to the user is a significant step in addressing a common bugaboo of user research- the disparity between what people say and what they do. Putting the tools in the hands of the users to create artifacts of their experiences and perceptions can reveal needs and desires other research methods might not uncover. A popular and much-discussed “generative” tool is a cultural probe; a kit of materials assembled to stimulate the user’s self-expression. Common components include journals, scrapbooks, cameras, stickers, imagery, words and the like, limited only by the imagination of the design researcher.

Of course, in fairness, another common bugaboo of user research is the accuracy of self-reporting. Which is why…

Absence is interesting

In what was my personal favorite session of the conference, Laura Richardson, of M3 Design discussed the notion of deconstruction and abstraction for understanding essential truths and searching for meaning. Absence is interesting; what you don’t see or hear can be as meaningful and revelatory as what you do. Combining participatory methods with observational methods can guide design researchers closer to seeing the “hole in the whole.”

Relying only upon self-reporting methods, researchers could miss opportunities for uncovering information and attributes that a user deemed insignificant, arbitrary, or possibly embarrassing. Observing users in their environment (their homes, their workspaces, their gyms, etc) allows the researcher to not only factor in gesture, tone of voice, and eye contact but also the ability to examine the environment itself for clues that make connections and fill gaps in the user’s story.

Methods that synthesize experience, emotion, interaction and context generate purposeful and holistic outcomes for empathic design. Seeing what everybody is seeing, but thinking what nobody else has leads to the poignant and powerful insights that build a foundation for innovation.

Harness the power of design thinking

Speaking of buzzwords, driving innovation with the power of design thinking is what’s on the tip of every executives’ tongue if even a whisper of “leapfrogging” is heard somewhere in the organization. But what does it really mean ? Design thinking is actually grounded in design seeing, acting, and doing, as illustrated in the examples above. However, the true power of design thinking shines through in the synthesis that organizes and interprets the research findings in whatever form they take, making sense of the connections and synergies that illuminate a design strategy.

Methods of design synthesis are based on inferential reasoning that generate hypotheses of what people might do, as opposed to the more deductive reasoning of what people can or are likely to do. Why put my trust (and my budget!) in an educated guess, the client wonders?

The informed intuition that is the foundation of design thinking sets the path for moving beyond the obvious, the known, the easy. Designers (and design researchers) are trained in the art of seeing- perceiving the presences or absences that offer some clues or information about the social or physical world that can be interpreted meaningfully. With time, the data they have gathered and interpreted transforms from knowledge into insights. The magic of a Design Innovation happens as these insights plus a finger on the pulse of emergent design paradigms, market trends, and business initiatives take shape as a design pattern.

So what’s the big takeaway that I’m sharing with enthusiasm? The culmination of two engaging and thought-provoking days was best captured in renowned user-centered design advocate and cognitive scientist Don Norman’s closing remarks:

Simplicity isn’t the goal; understanding is.*

As an overarching kernel of wisdom that sets the trajectory for design research and strategy, reductionist principles to “simplify” forms and functions to their distilled essences are not at the core of user-centered design. Being able to craft and tell a compelling and real story about your users that brings clarity and meaning and resonance to your audience is.

*Read Norman’s excellent essay, Simplicity Is Not the Answer

Service Design Management was the theme at the 5th Design Management Forum in Cologne this past weekend. The title to the conference was “Creating Experience” which got some of us in attendance discussing the difference between service design and experience design.
In my own investigations before the conference I noticed that descriptions of experience design tended to suggest that experience design was actually the super-design practice, responsible for designing products, processes, services, events, and environments utilizing such diverse disciplines as graphic design, interior design, architecture, digital design, theater, exhibit design, theme-park design, game design, environmental design, and communications. I’d like to meet that designer! You name it, they do it!
Since I was attending a conference on design management I could not help thinking that experience design ought possibly be instead considered experience design management. As a design management practice, and not a design practice, it is responsible for orchestrating the distinct design services into creating the integrated whole experience. All the original design practices can continue to call themselves graphic designers, architects, etc., who not only do what they typically do but also at times contribute to a larger entity, the experience, in collaboration with many other design practices. Now as we know bringing different design practices together to work towards a single end is not unlike a very ancient craft…cat-herding! However, ultimately the greatest skill of the designer who also wants to be regarded as an experience designer may be their ability to collaborate.
Parting musings…my pre-conference investigations had experience designers designing services and service designers designing experiences. Is this possible?
It was also suggested that experience design is different than service design because xd is focused on the touch-point itself, the front-line of the experience, whereas service design also considers not just that but also the day-to-day processes that make the service work. That it goes deeper into the organization…and honestly as soon as you start doing that, are we back to being design managers again?

Measuring Digital ROI with Website Data; The Link Between Strategy and Design
Measuring the business benefit of a non-eCommerce website can be quite challenging. Basic “out of the box” metrics like unique visitors, visited pages, site visit duration and number of leads provide useful top-line data, but they don’t generate insights into how well a website is performing against strategic objectives.  For several years, the interactive marketing industry has been hitching its collective hopes on “engagement” as the ROI savior of Internet marketing measurement.  The concept elicits reactions ranging from evangelism to skepticism.  A recent whitepaper by Web Analytics Demystified called Measuring the Immeasurable: Visitor Engagement goes to great lengths to provide an in-depth explanation of how to create general top-line measures of engagement, so I won’t belabor the concept further.  Instead, let’s shift the focus to key performance indicators for strategy execution.

A solid digital strategy identifies the ways the digital channel can be used to achieve broader strategic business objectives and outlines the criteria for measuring success.  In recent years, the interactive industry has placed much of its design focus on user centric design.  However, end user experience is not the only consideration that needs to be taken into account.  Detailed design decisions have a big impact on what metrics can be collected.  You need to design the site to produce the right metrics, a point that is lost on many interactive designers and design agencies.  A good design team will not proceed without a detailed understanding of business objectives.  An effective design team will design ROI measurement into a site.  Here are some typical business objectives, their design implications and some measurement recommendations for tracking and optimizing strategy execution.

While the nuances of each firm’s digital strategy will vary according to its industry, business model, competitive posture and customers, what follows is a framework for typical strategic objectives and their implications on site design:

1. Targeting Key Market Segments.  Best practices in effective website design call for personas as a design tool to represent targeted segments.  A good design team uses the personas to build scenarios for how the personas will interact with the site, then designs accordingly.  But what happens to personas after a website is built?  Often, the personas lie fallow and the question of how the new site is performing in reaching the targeted segments goes unanswered.  A better idea is to use personas as an ongoing performance management tool by documenting key persona scenarios then conducting visitor path analysis to analyze persona traffic.  One caveat is that real world visitors may not follow the exact paths the design team anticipated.  A second caveat is that detail path traffic trends can be very fragmented.  Instead of getting bogged down in complexity, keep it simple.  Create content with specific segments in mind then analyze visitors based on the type of content they access during their visits, not the sequence in which they access it.  The design implication is that content should be highly differentiated between personas.

2. Driving Purchase Consideration.  Most websites share the common goal of driving revenue, but what does this mean from a design perspective?  How can sites be optimized to drive more revenue?  The measurement starting point is identifying key user actions and events (i.e. outcomes) that can serve as proxy metrics for purchase consideration include accessing:
* a store locator (provides geographic insight as well)
* product or service comparison charts
* data sheets and detailed product or service information.
Visitor path analysis that backtracks from these successful outcomes will provide insight into the behaviors leading up to the purchase consideration event.  The insights can be used to create a predictive model that identifies key site paths to streamline and highlight so you can design to encourage purchase consideration.

3. Creating Customer Loyalty.  The immediate and obvious site loyalty metric is the distribution of the number of visits by visitor for a set timeframe.  If a high percentage of visitors access the site multiple times then that indicates site loyalty.  This should be a familiar table for users of Google Analytics, but it is a site focused metric not a product-centric metric.  A good way to foster customer loyalty is to provide content that helps people easily access your service on a recurring basis or to provide information that helps them increase the benefits they receive from something they already own.  Similarly, excessive activity related to troubleshooting and problem-solving can be an indicator that people are having difficulty with a product.  Visits to information about accessories or add-ons can also be interpreted as relevant to share of wallet.  Measuring and tracking these will help create a loyalty index.  Most sites skew toward customer acquisition, not product success or service use.  Consider the needs and interests of current customers in your design and think through how the designs will support measuring their activity.

4. Fostering Advocacy.  Social media tagging tools provide a way for website owners to facilitate advocacy in cyberspace.  Some bloggers have done an excellent job of making their sites readily accessible to sites like del.icio.us and digg by including the relevant widgets.  Interestingly, most branded websites totally omit these simple additions.  Adding them enables you to track activity.  You can also track the number of tags for your website at these sites using functions they provide like the delicious url lookup and tools like the Greasemonkey digg counter.

5. Reducing Cost to Serve.  Self-help is a good thing if self-help sessions are successful.  Success is in the eye of the user, so include a “did this solve your problem?” question at the end of every support listing.  Track and report on the responses to identify the types of content that help and where you need to overhaul.  Also track search activity to identify new support listings that need to be added.  Some companies are going so far as to make capacity decisions for their call centers by using their online help activity as an indicator of self-service adoption.  They are decreasing headcount as online volume increases – a direct contributor to the bottom line and ROI.

6. Accelerating Revenue.  New product introductions create a golden opportunity to track how quickly and effectively your company is creating awareness.  Measure traction and uptake by collecting metrics on new product or service views in a launch date + format (i.e. Day 1, 2, 3, etc.).   Building and tracking separate landing pages for new products and key marketing campaigns also create an opportunity to measure contribution from both digital and non-digital PR and marketing efforts.  Finally, integrating PR tracking (i.e. “earned media” or mentions) with site activity can provide a view of the contribution that PR and digital promotion is making.

Strategy creation, strategy execution, and measurement and analysis are all disciplines, they don’t happen by accident.  Having all three disciplines aligned and pointed in the same direction will go a long way toward answering the question: “Where’s my ROI?”

If you’re looking for a good example of a company leveraging their strategic partnerships to develop both a new technology and a marketing concept in order to leapfrog their competitors, check out the October issue of Esquire magazine at your favorite newsstand in September. It should be easy to find. It will be the one flashing “The 21st Century Begins Now” as images scroll across its cover. To help celebrate its 75th anniversary, Esquire contracted with E Ink Corporation to develop a version of its flexible display technology (used in the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle) that can be used as an electronic magazine cover.

Being able to utilize the digital display technology in a magazine required overcoming two major obstacles: cost and power. To subsidize the cost, Esquire partnered with Ford Motor Company to feature the Flex Crossover vehicle on the inside cover, using the same E Ink technology. The problem of providing a battery to run the display for 90 days, yet small enough to be distributed in a magazine, was solved through a six-figure investment from the Hearst Corporation, which owns Esquire and is a major shareholder in E Ink.

So, what’s the significance of this new combination of technology and traditional media? Either Hearst has come up with the latest equivalent of the musical greeting card, or they’ve looked far enough into the future to see the value of driving a technological innovation, rather than waiting for it to evolve on its own. While the initial use of E Ink’s digital paper technology is limited and could be viewed as just a gimmick, it does reveal some of the potential of digital printing. Plus, Esquire has exclusive use of the technology through 2009.

The big question is: what is this technology’s ultimate capability? Can content be dynamically updated? Can it be interactive? Is this the portable digital platform that the traditional publishing industry has been looking for? Strategically, Hearst has positioned itself in both the technology and publishing spaces to be able to capitalize on the advantages this technology provides over its competitors.

Personally, I’ll be picking up two copies: one to save in my collection of new media innovations and the other to tear apart and see what makes it tick.
For additional information about this story, see:

“News Flash From the Cover of Esquire: Paper Magazines Can Be High Tech, Too” – New York Times

“Esquire Becomes First Magazine to Merge Digital Technology with Printed Pages” – Ford Motor Company

Without a doubt, we often look to the magical world of Google as a benchmark from which to evaluate and even validate exceptional user experiences. How do they do it, we wonder? Well, even if this manifesto of sorts on their core design principles (it’s part of their corporate information) has already crossed your virtual path, it would serve you well to go back for another look. For inspiration, as well as food for thought, consider if and how these principles manifest in your own “digital daily life” of Google interactions. What are the principles on which your design philosophy is built?

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Read the more detailed descriptions at: http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/ux.html

Over the past few months I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, sites are becoming less usable — only appealing to a specific segment of their audience. Marketers are so consumed with creating “brand” and “experience” that they risk creating a frustrating experience for those not considered. While tools such as Flash and Silverlight allow designers and marketers a seemingly unrestricted canvas, unfortunately usability often becomes a secondary concern.

Case in point: I recently went to Spalding.com to search for a basketball hoop. I saw some great Flash animation – it was interesting and helped emphasize their brand attributes. When clicking through to their residential portable systems though, I was presented with only “The Beast” – their $1200 system. Interesting, but what about their other products? They don’t list them. Looking for a search box, I couldn’t find that either. There is no way to learn more about their products. I left frustrated.

What is the solution?

• Understand who is coming to your site, their goals, needs and behaviors, and build usable experiences for those constituents

How?

• Research the market by conducting qualitative interviews with key constituents and follow up with a robust quantitative survey
• Statistically segment the market into the constituents’ behavioral patterns
• Define primary and secondary personas to articulate the human qualities evident within the segments
• Create experiences for each primary persona

Done properly, this type of process takes approximately 15-25 weeks. It’s an investment that will pay dividends both in the short run and long run.

For Spalding, simply considering that some people want to research products beyond retailer’s descriptions may be important. Or perhaps you want to learn more about the company, key executives, etc. Or maybe you want a job. I couldn’t find any of these. [For full disclosure, they may be there, but it took too long to try to figure it out, so I stopped.]