Visde Blog

After 10 years of consulting, one gets a good feel for not only a variety of work places and work styles, but what makes a project successful. Number one is always the people involved. A multidisciplinary team that can work together without stepping on each others’ toes or egos is the foundation of any good organization. The ability to literally step on each other toes, however, is often useful when it comes to communicating.

The reality of doing business in a global climate is that teams are often scattered across time zones, adding logistical challenges to the organizational ones. I’m a good example. Working in the Visde California office, with my team in the Central time zone and clients 9 hours ahead, makes scheduling meetings challenging. Our team meetings start at 7am.

I was initially concerned about working in this type of arrangement. Quite frankly, the reason I work has less to do with making money and more to do with the satisfaction of wrestling a project to the ground with the help of some really great co-workers. How was this going to work with me out here, alone, in my satellite office? It turns out that not only does it logistically work well, but it adds perspective to our research. What’s typical in Chicago is not necessarily typical in California or Denmark, and it’s a lot easier to gather a wide range of user research information when not everyone is drinking the same Kool-aid (or coffee). I really enjoyed sharing my research visit to Santa Cruz, where a user complained about his wall-mounted wave machine interfering with his hearing aids during meditation.

If you’re contemplating this type of arrangement, here are some words of advice:

1. Get a good home espresso machine. Working in a coffee shop for a few hours is nice, but gets old pretty fast.
2. Get a good telephone head-set, with a microphone mute, so your team can’t hear when you’re steaming milk during conference calls.
3. Be willing to travel. There is no substitute for face-to-face during critical decision-making phases.
4. Don’t use your cell phone for conference calls unless you have to. Not only can it be expensive, but it often adds a lot of background noise to the call for everyone else.
5. Take full advantage of your flexible schedule. Have lunch with friends. Go for a run. You’ll be working at odd hours anyway, so you might as well take the good with the bad.
6. Shower and get dressed before the first call of the day, or you might find yourself eating Doritos in your pajamas at 3pm and not realize it until the UPS man looks at you strangely when you answer the door.
7. Join a firm that has interesting people in it - they need to be quirky and different in unexpected ways, with a variety of backgrounds and skills. You will undoubtedly find yourselves stuck in some airport together during a snowstorm and you owe it to yourself to enjoy the experience.

Have you heard the story about Dell and the missing printer cable?

Here it is, in brief…

In July 2007, Dell placed an ad in a British newspaper advertising various products and accessories including the Dell Photo All-in-One Printer 926.

After a reader questioned the absence of an essential PC to printer cable in the “all-in-one” package, Dell made this statement: “the company does not supply cables as standard with printers because it believes that purchasers are likely to possess one already and would not necessarily need or want a new one.”

Although the ad stated that the price included “VAT & Shipping”, Dell argued that the ad did not give the impression that a cable was included. Dell said further that if a customer needed a cable, they had the opportunity to purchase one in addition to the “all-in-one” package for £14 (equivalent to $28.00).

The complaint was taken to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which agreed that the £14 cable should have been included.

“We noted that it was essential to have a cable to use the printer and that a cable was likely to cost approximately £14. We considered that this was a significant cost in relation to the price of the printer,” the ASA ruling stated.

“We considered that the ad gave the impression that the printer could be used in conjunction with a computer without the purchase of any further equipment, and that the natural expectation among customers was that a cable would be included in the advertised price unless the ad specifically stated that it was not.”

From a story written by Robert Jaques

WHOLE PRODUCT MODEL

So in steps Geoff Moore – who wrote his book Crossing The Chasm in 1991 in which he lays out the concept for the Whole Product Model (attributed to Theodore Levitt) for marketing technology.

The gap he identified is between the marketing promise for technology and the ability of the shipped product to meet the promise. In terms of the model, this could be stated as a gap between the generic product and the expected product. The most elementary difference between what the producer thinks the product is and what the buyer thinks the product is, or in Moore’s words, “the minimum configuration of products and services necessary to have any chance of achieving the buying objective.” In today’s terms, this is sometimes described as the “out-of-box” experience.

The Dell story, 15 years after Moore popularized this concept, is a classic example of a violation of the whole product model.

You can read more about Moore’s discussion of the Whole Product Model at several sites including his own, http://geoffmoore.blogs.com/.

In short, at the center of the bulls-eye (see Moore’s model diagram) is the Generic Product. This is the product as envisioned by the product managers if they are not savvy about user-centric methods and the full customer experience. The Generic Product can be considered a basic product but it lacks attention to the customer, purchaser, user or their experience.

The Expected Product is probably what the complaint filer had in mind – a product that could be used as advertised “out-of-box”. This is what the reader thought he or she was buying when they made the purchase. According to Moore, the Expected Product is the minimum configuration of products and services necessary to have any chance of achieving the buying objective. The Expected Product is the second ring of the bulls-eye.

The next layer building out from the Generic Product at the center is the Augmented Product, a product enhanced to provide the maximum chance of achieving the buying objective. In the photo printer example, the Augmented Product would include not only the cable but also a service to refill or replace cartridges of ink, a customer hot line and readily accessible service centers.

The outermost ring on the bulls-eye represents the Potential Product, the product’s room for growth as more products come on the market that could utilize a photo quality printer, perhaps a feature set supporting the printing of photos taken on a mobile phone.

The moral of the story is this: we have known the consequences of products designed in a vacuum through sources such as Moore for as long as many have been practicing this discipline. As product designers, may we get out of our boxes long enough to look around at our customers and our markets and design products in the holistic way.

Let me introduce myself, I’m a graduate student @ Northwestern University studying Engineering Design and Innovation. To contrast on my previous R&D engineering work, I’m interning at Visde during the break to further understand what a designer does and experience being one of them.

 Visde jumpstarts me right from the moment I walked in to their office. The environment feels dynamic and fast paced with a great working areas (hooray: no more drab beige cubefarms!). I was introduced by Rachel to a group of friendly and extremely helpful people and immediately started working with them.

 1st day: Part of the first project is Problem Area Ideation -> Discussion with Visde team to identify areas or activities in life that requires help. After an hour of brainstorming, we came up with approximately 20+ problem areas. My task is to determine the subjects that are critical and interesting to be my project. The second project is Visde’s new website, I’ll be helping the team with photography related parts. My task for the weekend is to learn about stop motion animation.

2nd day: Managed to select the problem areas down to storage and workspace. With some of the ideas, e.g.: Wayland’s problem, it seems that the best solution for him is to hire a maid, so we’re not going to pursue that idea further. As per Marlena’s advice, I’ll be concentrating on product research for the shoes/boots storage solution, and on product design/prototyping with the laptop case/ portable workstation. Also worked with Matt on the homepage ideation, created  a stop motion origami video. We also captured a bunch of cool pictures of Post-it leaves to capture Visde’s innovation, wholliness, and collaborative motto. Who knew Post-its could be so much fun (we made a post-it leaves mini tornadoes and flying bird leaves…).

 3rd day: After deciding on the shoes/boots storage, I explored around to get more in-depth understanding of the problem. Did user interviews with the client: Tatiana, and from that gathered quite a bit of information about the current products that are in the market and her current workaround to overcome their weaknesses. So, the next step is to compile all types of shoe storage that are in the market and run a Blue Ocean analysis with visual access, accessibility, aesthetics, customizability, space consumption, and boot acceptance as the grading criterias. Made a half-scale paper prototype of the laptop workstation. This project is a great mechanical challenge. I also photographed assets for Visde’s new website. We took mugshots and full body shots of the team (minus one person, she’s away in sunny California while we’re in weather confused E-town). I kinda destroyed their living room area to setup the lights and find shooting space, but I guess messiness is part of creation, right?

 4th day: Business card ideations (ninja stars!), more assets’ photos, refine the Blue Ocean and laptop workspace prototype …  (tbc)

Several months ago while attending a friend of my daughter’s birthday party, I had a discussion with an Ombudsman from Canada. Upon the initial introduction of who and what each other does, I explained that I was a Designer. I briefly explained the field of human factors and user-experience design. He immediately got the connection and started asking questions about a situation he was dealing with in his municipality and how human factors design could be used to solve a problem he has been working on for years around the issue of noise pollution in the community. Which got me thinking… How does Service Design best benefit Municipalities?

By definition, Service Design is defined by “the field concerned with the development of services to meet specific needs” (Shedroff). In my search for a definition, I found many ambiguous definitions that left me even more confused and say “duh, that applies to every aspect to design in general.” Wikipedia lists it as, “Service design can be both tangible and intangible. It can involve artefacts and other things including communication, environment and behaviours. Whichever form it takes it must be consistent, easy to use and be strategically applied.”

As a consumer, I can grasp the notion of Service Design as it applies to my purchase and follow-up customer service experience for purchasing tickets with United. Or the experience of visiting the local Starbuck’s to purchase coffee. As a coffee addict, I expect the best service from the time I open the door, to waiting in line, to ordering my coffee, to dumping out half in the garbage can then only to add 3 inches of cream and sugar, to taking the first sip of that hot-but-now-lukewarm-from-too-much-cream cup of joe. Only to then re-experience my coffee trip one more time… errrr…. 2 or 3 more times in an afternoon. With a glutton of coffee shops in the college town where I live and work, there are many choices to choose from. If my expectations aren’t met, then I go elsewhere.

But how do we as Design Professionals take that coffee shop experience or latest software design and apply it to municipalities? As Designers, we design for our users. We go through an extensive design process where we conduct user research, conduct field studies, user observations, write surveys, determine and evaluate user needs and behaviors with new or existing systems, create prototypes, create mental models, user and task flows, create countless wireframes, visual comps, apply and implement a visual design that will meet and hopefully exceed both user and stakeholder expectations.

Municipalities want the same for their communities. They create rules and governances that will best meet their community needs. Municipalities want to have wi-fi, ideally have it be free. They want to be eco-friendly; recycle; have a sustainable culture with their urban planning and sustainable building development. Municipalities look at things like we do Change Requests, on a case-by-case basis or do we propose a law or bond to meet the larger community needs?

Service Design is good design. It applies to the whole experience of use in a different context. Then the question is how do we as Designers apply our skills to the community and the greater good? What tips can we share to help make our communities a better place to live for everyone? The Ombudsman has a real problem he has to solve that affects his community as a whole. I recommended that he do the following.

• Write a problem statement. Define what it is. Decide whether this is a case-by-case basis or a community need that needs to be escalated to the Government.
• Send out a survey to update demographics and gather data to determine community needs about noise pollution.
• Hold a community meeting in order to gather additional information to better understand the problem.
• Visit locations around town to observe, document and rate specific areas of noise pollution.
• Make recommendations to solve noise pollution based on the data collected and community inputs.
• Conduct a gap analysis of recommendations with existing law and proposed laws, acts or government initiatives.

If this were a product-based project following a waterfall methodology, the next step would be to move from the investigation phase to the design phase, then implementation and finally testing. Although our conversation did not get to this while we were eating lemon cake with white frosting, I would then recommend the following steps.

• Propose a new or updated law if needed.
• Put the proposed law on the ballot of needed
• Implement the law, act or government initiative
• Submit a new survey or use another research mechanism to assess whether the new law is working.
• Recommend changes to existing as community needs change over time.

Although I am not a very government-knowledgable person by trade, I do strong think that user input is key to working with a community. As a Design Professional, I think we Designers have much to offer our communities and give new meaning to Service Design as in evolves into a business and knowledge practice.