Thoughts on Interaction Design

Nokia has chosen to dump their Symbian operating system and to switch to Microsoft’s Mobile 7 system. The Fins are so upset the snow must be melting there. There is a whole army of developers for Symbian out there and a large number of people in Finland is working on software for Symbian mobiles. I can image it is bad week for the Fins. Many must be worried about their own job and what is to become of their national icon Nokia.

‘Our first priority is beating Android’

That’s what Elop said today in Barcelona, after denying he was a ‘trojan horse’. Let’s have a look at this from a ‘vision’ and ‘strategy’ perspective. A choice like choosing Windows Mobile is obviously a part of the strategy. Elop indicated earlier that it is not anymore the phone software that matters, it is about the ecosystem around the phone. Both Apple and Google have a strong eco-system around their phones. Everything is connected and the mobile phone is simply one of the points of contact you’ll have with their eco-systems. Nokia has their own small eco-system called Ovi which never really caught on much. Nonetheless it has quite a lot of solid elements, in particular the map service and the some more phone related services such as address book syncing. But perhaps that is also why their eco system is weak. The strength from Apple’s eco-system comes from its music/video content and app store. Nokia’s music store failed miserably and meanwhile has shut down.

Microsoft’s eco-system is actually not that great. Their email service and messaging is heavily used but their other services are not that strong. So why is Nokia dumping their own weak eco-system to switch to another weak one? Does not make too much sense. One could argue that two weak ones could make one strong one of course. But is that really a good strategy or just wishful thinking?

What I really lack is some vision here. If Nokia dumps their own software development and fully builds on Windows Mobile they are becoming what HTC is to Android (and Windows Mobile): simply a hardware manufacturer. Apple has shown that if you want to differentiate yourself and take large margins you have have to control primarily the software and then make kick-ass hardware. Nokia has clearly also lost its vision on product designs as well. Where is was leading the phone design trend for years, it is now trailing the pack.

It seems to me that there is only one winner in this story: Microsoft. They haven’t been able to make a dent in a pack of butter with Windows Mobile 7. Sure it looks interesting and fresh but so far the consumer seems more interested in iPhones and Android phones. For Microsoft this is a super step forward and will help them boost their market share.

Differentiation with Windows Mobile?

Elop said they saw more possibilities to differentiate themselves with Windows Mobile. I am not sure if I understand this. Sure you are different with Windows Mobile: hardly anybody has it! But seriously, there must be some fine print in the deal with Microsoft we don’t know about. Perhaps their Elop sees opportunities by influencing how the Windows Mobile evolves and the apps it contains. But unless those are Nokia-only it wouldn’t differentiate them at all…

Well, we’ll see what happens! I am probably just missing the point of these strategic choices…;-)

In my previous post on Strategy and Vision I discussed what they are and what the differences are. But of course what is far more interesting is how to develop a good vision and strategy. If you already have a vision you are in a luxury position and you ‘only’ need to find the best strategy. If you don’t have a vision yet, you have a lot of work ahead of you. However, it is not as bad as it seems because even if you have a vision there is still a lot to do. Let’s assume for now that you already have a vision. Read the rest of this entry »

I finally got to do a ‘real’service design project. Well, I guess it depends how you see it. Everything I did so far in my design career was a service anyway! For one of the divisions within Philips me and colleagues were asked to help them with their next generation service. Actually it is a service where a product also plays a role. We followed a simple process where we started with an overview of the needs of the customer and other stakeholders. From there on we did the following:

• Identifying opportunities based on the needs of all stakeholders.
• Cluster the opportunities
• Develop service propositions for each cluster
• Evaluate all propositions
• Build the most promising service proposition based on the evaluation

From there on we went directly into paper prototyping and the service/product came to life! Before starting the project we tried to find literature on methods on how to do it. But it was remarkable how little literature there is on methods like this. Or perhaps we didn’t search in the right places. Anybody have any tips?

Even with our method we felt there is still a big need for techniques to do each step efficiently and effective. For example, what it the best way to evaluate which proposition is the ‘best’? I can tell you it is not a trivial exercise. Obviously you then immediately run into issues like:

• ‘best’ is a relative term. So what do you compare it with? How do you avoid apples and peers?
• How do you deal with implications on technology? A proposition may sound good but if you aren’t sure that you can technically deliver on the proposition, all will fail ultimately…
• How do you include potential business models? In the end we are looking for a proposition that benefits the user and the company can make some profit. If the proposition is not clearly profitable we will obviously not continue with it. But how do you make a business model so early in the process?
• …and many more questions like these.

Again, remarkably little literature on this. Any tips?

Nonetheless, we had fun and I feel we delivered something truly valuable. Hopefully it will be launched 2011 and I can tell you what it is….

YouTube's LeanBack

YouTube launched LeanBack this week. I think this is a great step forward in what watching TV could be in the future. You get your our personalized feed but you can also select categories and get a recommendation there.

The good part here is that it is all personalized. So you see what you like! Well, in theory that is. Leanback seems to think I like ‘tractor races’ which I can assure you I don’t like at all!!! Quite some things to improve there. A couple of things are missing still. For example:

• Browse content by type, series, movies etc. Nice to leanback but if I am interested in Top Gear I don’t want to skip all the other rubbish that shows up when search for it.
• Mark your favourites, after all if I watch something it doesn’t necessarily mean I like what I see… So there should be some kind of thumbs up/down mechanism so that personalized suggestions will get better and better.
• Define your own ‘channels’ using tags. So my sport channel would be ‘+F1 +Racing -Soccer’, meaning car racing and Formula 1 but no soccer please.
• There should be a way to see when new content will be available. It matters to me knowing when the new episode of Lost will be first available and will appear in my personal feed. Perhaps show it grey’ed out in my feed?

Anyway, nice to see YouTube is going for it. My guess is that Google TV will look similar….

Three weeks ago a got my HTC Desire after I was impressed by a Google presentation of Android platform. I had a iPhone 3GS before that. Generally I am quite happy with the Desire, but it also has its flaws…

Here are some first conclusions after three weeks of usage:

• The Desire is MUCH faster than the iPhone, although the iPhone is not slow at all.
• The on-screen keyboard doesn’t seem to be as good as the iPhone’s one. I regularily hit the wrong key….rarely happened to me on the iPhone.
• Android applications are generally much less stable than iPhone apps. I guess this is because of the quality control of Apple. Of the 20 apps I downloaded for the Desire at least half regularily crashed. I assume this is the price consumers currently pay for ‘openness’….
• Multitasking isn’t everything. I basically end up having my entire phone memory being filled up by apps and the Desire starts becoming sluggish. I had to install a task manager in order to keep some control.
• When you use the Desire you notice that Google isn’t that focused on a consistent user experience. The applications are inconsistent in where functionality is placed and it just doesn’t feel that polished. The iPhone really shines in this area.
• Syncing with our Exchange server works fine on the Desire just as on the iPhone. On par there..
• The HTC Sense addition is quite nice and allows me to make much more effective use of the home screen. I can completely customize it using widgets. Nice one! Apple should take notice here….

The Android platform certainly has great potential but I feel it will take some time before all the wrinkles have been sorted out. But nonetheless, it is a great phone already and I’d recommend it to everyone who is looking for something else than an iPhone. Oh, and it comes unlocked for a very reasonable price! No hacking need

In my previous article I defined what a strategy is, basically saying it is a ‘plan to achieve a certain result’. The ‘result’ is often called a ‘vision’. So if you don’t have a vision it becomes theoretically impossible to develop a strategy. Therefore it is often the case that when people say they need a ‘strategy’ they really need a ‘vision’, …..and probably also a strategy.

Before we dive into strategy building, let’s take a closer look at some examples of visions and strategies. For my first example consider you are living in the 15th century and you have a family with 2 kids. As a responsible parent you want to make sure they are fed well. Your children haven’t had a full meal with a nice piece of meat in a while. As soon as you wake up you create your vision: “today at 20.00 my children will eat a full meal with a fresh piece of meat, larger than they can eat!’. That is pretty concrete, right? There is a time-line, a quantifiable goal, although the type of meat and the quantity is still left open. But you sort of get it, it is concrete enough.

In order to achieve the vision you come up with several potential strategies:

1. You will go into the woods to hunt, hoping to kill a deer or boar. If you leave early you should have time enough to be successful and have enough time to have the meal ready by 20.00
2. You will bake cookies and try to trade it for 2 large pieces of whatever meat you can get.
3. You will try to get your family invited by the neighbours who always have plenty of meat.

These are quite different ways of possibly achieving the vision. The clear vision has helped us to create alternative strategies to achieve it. However, the real question is not coming up with strategies that may or may not work. We are basically only interested in the strategy that has the highest probability of succeeding! In order to evaluate which strategy is best we need to look at ourselves and our context. If you are a lousy hunter and there are only few animals in the neighborhood you are likely to fail on this strategy. Similarly, if your cookies really aren’t that good compared to the cookies other villagers make you may not be able to trade them for meat. And lastly, if your social skills are low or the neighbors happen to be out to visit the family that day, you will fail as well.

In other words, evaluating strategies means looking at your own situation and the wider context, to made an estimation about the likelihood of succeeding. Basically, educated guesswork!

In the example above the time-line was short, the vision very concrete. In practice it is often not the case. Let’s assume we change the time-line on our example and adjust the vision to “I want to be able to provide my children with quality food on every day of the year”. The time-line is now a year and the challenge is now to achieve a consistent ‘food performance’ every day. For this vision the strategies above are probably not efficient and you will need to consider other strategies:

1. Get a steady job that will provide you with enough money to buy enough quality food for your children.
2. Start an animal farm that will provide you with enough supply of animals for your family and beyond so that you can buy other types of food as well.
3. Marry a partner with money so you’ll have access to enough money without having to do much for it.

These strategies are still potentially good plans but you see that the abstraction level of the strategy is getting higher. Moreover, it is also becoming more difficult to estimate your chances.

Enough about feeding your children, let’s look at real world visions and strategies! The problem with most companies is that their visions are usually very abstract and vague, e.g. “be the leader in industry X”, “be the best company doing X”, “making the best products/service in the field of Y”….and so on. That is if your company has a vision at all; most small companies never even formulate one. The really highlevel vision statements are clear on one side but also very vague on the other side. Take for example “be the leader in industry X”. The first question would be to make the word ‘leader’ more specific. Does that mean ‘highest number of products sold’, or ‘highest overall revenue’, or ‘most profitable’ or ‘most respected’ or perhaps all of these at the same time. Nonetheless, there can be a substantial difference between ‘highest product sales’ and ‘most profitable’. Then there is the question of who you compare yourself with. So who are your competitors? Then there is the question of what your ‘industry’ actually compasses…..My point is that such vision statements are problematic as they don’t really define the desired ‘vision state’ precisely enough for developing strategies.

There are usually 2 things that can happen: 1) the vision is refined before any strategies are formulated, or 2) management states the vision is ‘clear enough’ and strategies are demanded. You can guess the what problems may arise if the latter route is chosen. Basically you’d have to formulate a new vision statement anyway that is more useful because otherwise you will simply not be able to generate meaningful strategies. That’s brings is to the problem of clear vision statements.

If you know exactly what you want to achieve, formulated in a clear vision statement, you have already solved more than half of the puzzle. In a competitive market it is often quite hard to formulate a vision that is ‘good’. Just like with strategies there may be a whole set of potential ‘vision states’ that you could consider. But which one is the best for you company in terms of its business value, the people you have in your company, the knowledge and assets, the competitive advantage you may have and so on? Some of the vision states would be nice to be in but they may be utterly unreachable. Other vision states may be within reach but are business-wise not bringing the company anywhere significant. Companies that have very abstract vision statements or no statements at all really need help with their vision and not so much the strategy! A good vision is one that sets the company in a good business position and is both clear and specific at the same time. Naturally it will be hard to do that using only one sentence. Therefore good vision statements will use at least a paragraph to formulate!

In the next article we’ll take a look at how to build a vision….stay tuned!

I have recently read too many articles about a strategies where the term is actually not used correctly. People present their ‘online strategy’, ‘social media strategy’, ‘customer experience strategy’ or simply ‘business strategy’. Time for some definitions…although you can also simply consult a dictionary.

What strategy is NOT:

• A strategy is not a number. Saying that your strategy is to have 10M EUR revenue is not a strategy. A revenue target is a ‘goal’. A strategy should say how to achieve it. But it is also not a ‘vision’ as it only expresses a financial target of the vision situation. And what a poor vision you have if you can only express it financially…
• A strategy is not a process description. Saying you will study the needs of your clients and make solutions based on what you know about their needs is a ‘process’ and not a strategy.

Here is what a strategy is:

• A strategy is a well thought-through plan. It describes how to go from the current situation to a desired situation, often called the ‘vision’.
• A strategy is grounded in a context of the company/product/service. A strategy is no accident and is created taking into account opportunities, innovations, business models, competititors and so on. Basically the regular stuff you look at when doing a SWOT analysis.
• A strategy is concrete and not vague. Behind the strategy is a rationale that makes the steps in the strategy logical. The steps are clear and should be understood by all stakeholders in the same way. Perhaps the rationale is the actually the most important part of the strategy as it will explain why you make the choices you made.
• A strategy is about making choices. It is about what you will do and what you will not do. Being clear about what you will NOT do is perhaps even more important than describing what you will do!

Bottom line of this: developing a good strategy can be pretty difficult! In a next article I will discuss the process of determining a strategy…..

The first Service Design conference was a big success, at least in terms of attendance. It was sold out as I found out when I tried to register. Bugger….Anyway, I guess it is clear that I am interested in Service Design. After reading some really evangelistic articles of Service Design pioneers I expanded my search using Google. One of the things I quickly found out that it is perhaps not as new as we all may think. Sure, online services are relatively new and bring new challenges and opportunities. But wasn’t even the oldest profession in the world a ‘service’? Perhaps it wasn’t designed by service designers but I guess it proofed its worth. Even more interesting is that I found a serious body of knowledge on service design and management with many books written such as for example ‘ITIL Service Design’. So what is going on here? Are we User Experience people again thinking that we have discovered a new area that we can claim only to find out ten years later that some other discipline has already covered it extensively? Read the rest of this entry »

Computer applications are not humans, they are ‘machines’, we all know that. Yet, they have a behavior, not always very human-like but it is a behavior. Applications show me things, they tell me things, they make sounds and they react in a certain way when I try to make them do something. We interact with each other as I react on what it tells me and vice versa. It is perhaps not always sophisticated behavior and it is perhaps better not compared to human behavior at all, but it somehow almost feels like you are interacting with a person.

So if we think about an application as a person, what kind of person would it be? Is it a rude person or a very gentle one? Is it a blunt person or very tactful person. Does it like me, or is it just doing what I asked? You may wonder why I ask all these questions. The main reason is that as a designer of an application we basically have the ability to determine what kind of ‘person’ the application will be and how it will behave. Read the rest of this entry »

I finally got myself an iPhone, …. and it is reeeaaally nice! Perhaps not the best phone on the market but using it is a real joy. One of the great things about it is that the interaction feels so smooth and sweet. It made me wonder what makes it so nice. One of the things I want to show you in this article is how this actually works in practice and what makes it such a good user experience. Have a look at this small video that shows what happens when you delete an email:

It is just a simple function that any email application has, but what is so special about the way it has been implemented on the iPhone? You have to look at the details of the interaction to understand it.

Read the rest of this entry »