Monthly Archive for August, 2009

Being human is a competitive advantage

Published on August 21, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Two people want to sell you something.

They start talking to you about yourself.

Person A is trying to understand you in order to “elicit desired behaviors.” He wants to know you in order to modify your behavior. Or to put it less nicely, he wishes to manipulate you into doing something he wants you to do.

Person B is trying to learn from you in order to understand how he can cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship with you. Maybe you’ll teach him something new.

Person A might offer you a mutually-beneficial deal, and Person B might prefer one behavior over another, so it’s tempting to say that there’s really no difference. Person A would say that in fact there is no difference. What he fails to recognize, however, is that he is seeing the customer not as a fellow human being, but as a behaving thing.

That is why “elicit desired behaviors” sounds so creepy, and why many of us might prefer to remain a mystery to researchers.

Frankly, a functionalist (one who thinks about everything in terms of use) might be very sophisticated within his domain, but his domain is spiritually limited. It is this mentality that speaks of human beings as “resources” which are to be “utilized”, thinks about new customer relationships in terms of “customer acquisition” — whose mania for quantification can grow so intense he is tempted to deny the value of anything he has not yet figured out how to quantify (nothing wrong with quantification — but all value is ultimately rooted in quality). Everything is reduced to use.

The dominance of this kind of stunted soul is what has given the word “corporate” its icky overtone.

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When people are given a viable alternative to soulless, hollow, insincere, inauthentic, self-interested manipulation, they take it. Customers prefer the human, and so do employees.

We all dislike being manipulated. We all love being respected. (Re- “back” + spect “look” — to treat one another as one who looks back at you.)

The User Experience industry enjoys talking about its respect of users, but its own language reveals its functionalist bias — the same bias that makes corporations so corporate: It utilizes its techniques to understand users and provide those users with useful, usable and (to sweeten the deal) desirable experiences. Why? To elicit desired behaviors, to which it has attached a monetary value to each individual instance.

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Let’s imagine someone approached by Person A has intuited what he’s up to. How would that person describe it? Maybe:

  • “He just wanted something from me.”
  • “He struck me as insincere and manipulative.”
  • “I felt used.”

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Being human to your fellow humans is a competitive advantage.

This can’t be faked, and it should not be faked.

Blatant provocation

Published on August 19, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I will start this post with a blatantly provocative statement:

Uncritical application of a user centered design approach to a branding problem can harm an organization’s brand more than it helps it.

  1. UCD tends to lead organizations away from sustainable differentiation toward commodity strategies that market leaders are  well equipped to defeat in the long-term.
  2. The kinds of improvements UCD discovers tend to be atomistic and easily imitated, and are therefore provide only unsustainable competitive advantage.
  3. Because the typical UCD understanding of brand is inadequate, attempts by UCD to create “branded experiences” tend to actually cooperate with and reinforce the market leader’s positioning. The vision of an ideal offering implicit in users’ perceptions and decision criteria are often learned from the market leader who is far better equipped to deliver on those criteria than contenders. To “discover” these criteria and present them as objective truth, and to attempt to position an organization in accordance with them is to fall into playing a rigged game.

The fundamental insight of synetic branding is that at its essence brand is a vision — a way of seeing — so compelling that reality is organized and seen by this vision. The goal of synetic branding is to discover a way of seeing that reveals the organization’s own offering as superior. This name for this way of seeing is synesis, a social form of understanding which binds an organization together with all its internal and external stakeholders.

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Now for the verbose version:

User Centered Design (UCD) is the right approach to take toward a design problem when two conditions are true:

  1. The design problem can be approached as being already adequately understood — that is, the outline of the solution to the problem is given and only the details are in question.
  2. The understanding of the design problem results in a design solution that serves the aims of the sponsoring organization in the near- and long-term.

If these two conditions are met, and this is not the usual case, UCD is sufficient.

The weakness of UCD is it fails to ask whether these conditions are met. Instead, because it lacks the awareness and the tools it needs to ascertain its own suitability, it bypasses this question and gets right to work on answers. Accordingly:

  1. UCD unconsciously assumes whatever first rough sense of the problem it finds, however rough and unclear the conception is, is an adequate understanding and starts elaborating its answer, which is usually conceived as discovering and addressing as-yet undiscovered needs (adding new useful features) and filling in gaps in the offering and refining the usability and charm of the whole by fully adapting it to the preconceptions of the user (making features more useful and desirable to the user). UCD tends toward atomistic solutions.
  2. UCD assumes that doing a better job of what everyone else is attempting to do will give the sponsoring organization a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, UCD habitually ignores the crucial question of sustainability: how long can this competitive advantage be held? How easily can a competitor imitate and incorporate UCD’s discoveries into its own offerings? Atomistic solutions are easily stolen and incorporated. It’s a matter of adding on this and polishing that.

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Generally the best candidate for UCD are market leaders whose vision of its offering is the predominant one, which everyone else unconsciously accepts and works within at a disadvantage.

A market leader emerges where one organization has persuaded the market to see as ideal the offering it is most suited to offer. The followers, because they are unable to see an alternative and lack awareness of the possibility that an alternative could exist, chase this same ideal.

And when UCD goes out and researches how users see, what they find is often only this ideal. They unearth only what the market leader itself has buried in the users’ minds. When UCD designs according to this understanding, all it does is reinforce the perception that this understanding is truly the “objective standard” of the industry.

Automatic application of UCD reduces a client to becoming amplifiers of the market leader’s brand and a cheap R&D department that toils to find new ways to invent and polish easily imitated offerings the market leader better equipped to deliver.

Donald Norman – Cognitive and affective components of design

Published on August 16, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

For whatever reason, I’ve found myself mentioning a passage a lot recently to clients. It’s from Donald Norman’s Emotional Design, and it is about the role emotion plays in usability.

A few points I found interesting:

  • Anxiety inhibits creativity: Anxiety tends to make people less curious, less open, and less able to find new solutions to problems. Anxiety tends to make people very linear, constricted, and closed off to new approaches. Anxious people tend to cleave to what they already know and follow that whether it is appropriate to the problems at hand or not, which leads to the second point…
  • Anxiety exacerbates usability problems: In a state of anxiety users will tend to fixate on details, lose the big picture and just repeat their mistakes over and over again, which leads to frustration and more anxiety.
  • Anxiety is not always bad: It can help a user concentrate on the details when this kind of concentration on details is needed. Norman even suggests ways to build slight anxiety into an experience.
  • The design process benefits from alternation between relaxed and anxious states of mind.

Here’s the passage:

… Everything you do has both a cognitive and an affective component — cognitive to assign meaning, affective to assign value. You cannot escape affect: it is always there. More important, the affective state, whether positive or negative affect, changes how we think.

When you are in a state of negative affect, feeling anxious or endangered, the neurotransmitters focus the brain processing. Focus refers to the ability to concentrate upon a topic, without distraction, and then to go deeper and deeper into the topic until some resolution is reached. Focus also implies concentration upon the details. it is very important for survival, which is where negative affect plays a major role. Whenever your brain detects something that might be dangerous, whether through visceral or reflective processing, your affective system acts to tense muscles in preparation for action and to alert the behavioral and reflective levels to stop and concentrate upon the problem. The neurotransmitters bias the brain to focus upon the problem and avoid distractions. This is just what you need to do in order to deal with danger.

When you are in a state of positive affect, the very opposite actions take place. Now, neurotransmitters broaden the brain processing, the muscles can relax, and the brain attends to the opportunities offered by the positive affect. The broadening means that you are now far less focused, and far more likely to be receptive to interruptions and to attending to any novel idea or event. Positive affect arouses curiosity, engages creativity, and makes the brain into an effective learning organism. With positive affect, you are more likely to see the forest than the trees, to prefer the big picture and not to concentrate upon details. on the other hand, when you are sad or anxious, feeling negative affect, you are more likely to see the trees before the forest, the details before the big picture.

What role do these states have in design? First, someone who is relaxed, happy, in a pleasant mood, is more creative, more able to overlook and cope with minor problems with a device — especially if it’s fun to work with. Recall the reviewer of the Mini Cooper automobile, quoted in the prologue, who recommended that the car’s faults be ignored because it was so much fun. Second, when people are anxious, they are more focused, so where this is likely to be the case, the designer must pay special attention to ensure that all the information required to do the task is continually at hand, readily visible, with clear and unambiguous feedback about the operations that the device is performing. Designers can get away with more if the product is fun and enjoyable. Things intended to be used under stressful situations require a lot more care, with much more attention to detail.

One interesting effect of the differences in thought processes of the two states is the impact upon the design process itself. Design — and for that matter, most problem solving — requires creative thinking followed by a considerable period of concentrated, focused effort. In the first case, creativity, it is good for the designer to be relaxed, in a good mood. Thus, in brainstorming sessions, it is common to warm up by telling jokes and playing games. No criticism is allowed because it would raise the level of anxiety among the participants. Good brainstorming and unusual, creative thinking require the relaxed state induced by positive affect.

Once the creative stage is completed, the ideas that have been generated have to be transformed into real products. Now the design team must exert considerable attention to detail. Here, focus is essential. One way to do this is through deadlines just slightly shorter than feel comfortable. Here is the time for the concentrated focus that negative affect produces. This is one reason people often impose deadlines on themselves, and then announce those deadlines to others so as to make them real. Their anxiety helps them get the work done.

Oh no — not another “paradigm shift”!

Published on August 16, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

This passage from James Gleik’s Chaos is a reminder of one of the major challenges user experience professionals face when we speaking to the uninitiated — to those coming from a deployment-centric perspective:

To some the difficulty of communicating the new ideas and the ferocious resistance from traditional quarters showed how revolutionary the new science was. Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. A physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Joseph Ford, started quoting Tolstoy: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

The expectation of those we are speaking to is that we will add to their existing process, without deeply modifying what they do. In fact, we are introducing significantly deep and disruptive methodological changes.

Further, we ask for something truly difficult, not only cognitively but also affectively: We ask them to shift their perspective and see what they do from a different angle. The more we can recognize the anxieties that accompany this kind of shift the more compassionately and effectively we can address it.

Authenticity and tact

Published on August 16, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Authenticity means that someone stands for something. They come from a perspective. That perspective is truly how that person sees things, and that perspective is held steadily. In other words, the person is sincere and can be counted on to stick to his view and behave consistently in accord with it.

Tact means that someone is sensitive to those around him. He knows others have different perspectives from his own, and that these perspectival differences add considerable challenge to communication. Tact is the art of navigating differing perspectives.

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Authenticity and tact are mutually dependent.

Without tact, authenticity degrades into ideological insularity: rigid, narrow, simplistic enslavement to unexamined concepts.

Without authenticity, tact degrades into a soulless exedientism that says whatever it believes will ingratiate it to its audience.

We should not attempt to avoid being “flip-floppers” by becoming rigid and insensitive to other people. We should not attempt to avoid being rigid, inflexible and insensitive by conforming ourselves to the expectations of others. (If a slope tilted in one direction is slippery, does tilting it in the opposite direction make it any less slippery?)

Nor should we try to find some compromise by averaging the two. This produces embarrassingly bland equivocating, convoluted, and barely-principled half-way solutions. It only serves to reinforce extremism.

The solution is dialogue, and it requires the marriage of authenticity and tact. Dialogue is mutual teaching and mutual being taught — knowing how you see, learning how the other sees, sharing how you see, deepening your vision: mutual growth is the soul of dialogue.

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Organization-centrism is generally bad news. It shares the characteristics of authenticity without tact.

User-centrism is generally a great improvement over organization-centrism. It at least understands a user’s functional problems and addresses them with superior utility, which the “user” finds more useful and more usable (notice all the “use” language). Unfortunately, user-centrism shares the characteristics of tact without authenticity. Like many utilitarian things, it tends to lacks charisma, excitement, genuine felt inspiration. Its self-effacement can give it a generic or hollow quality which is only accentuated by attempts to increase its appeal by infusing it with “desirable” qualities.

User experience is at its best helping commodity businesses become incrementally improved commodity businesses.

This improvement, though, can actually do harm. What makes a commodity a commodity is that it aims for the same ideal as its competitors. Everyone is chasing the same thing. But to chase an ideal is to endorse an ideal. Is your company in a better position than its competitors is to deliver on that ideal in the long term? If so, you should pray that your competitors employ user-centered approaches, because whatever gains they make will be easily imitated and they will reinforce a vision of your offering that serves your organization. Your competitors will be an inexpensive R&D department for you.

If this is not the case, however — and it rarely is — You might want to ask yourself some questions: Where did customers learn to see the products they buy? On complex purchases, customers learn to think about what they are about to purchase, and this way of thinking projects an ideal. Is this framework fixed and inevitable? Is it changeable? Would changing conceptions of the ideal product make the purchase simpler or more exciting?

Don’t worry if you cannot answer the question. Recognizing that the question can be asked and then really asking it is the hardest part.

The methods of synetic branding help you discover-invent the answer.

Gadamer on dialogue

Published on August 16, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

This passage gets very close to the crux of synetic brand:

When we try to examine the hermeneutical phenomenon through the model of conversation between two persons, the chief thing that these apparently so different situations — understanding a text [NOTE: or a design] and reaching an understanding in a conversation — have in common is that both are concerned with a subject matter that is placed before them. Just as each interlocutor is trying to reach agreement on some subject with his partner, so also the interpreter [ / user] is trying to understand what the text [ / design] is saying. This understanding of the subject matter must take the form of language. It is not that the understanding is subsequently put into words; rather, the way understanding occurs — whether in the case of a text or a dialogue with another person who raises an issue with us — is the coming-into-language of the thing itself. Thus we will first consider the structure of dialogue proper, in order to specify the character of that other form of dialogue that is the understanding of texts. Whereas up to now we have framed the constitutive significance of the question for the hermeneutical phenomenon in terms of conversation, we must now demonstrate the linguisticality of dialogue, which is the basis of the question, as an element of hermeneutics.

Our first point is that the language in which something comes to speak is not a possession at the disposal of one or the other of the interlocutors. Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language. Something is placed in the center, as the Greeks say, which the partners in dialogue both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. Hence reaching an understanding on the subject matter of a conversation necessarily means that a common language must first be worked out in the conversation. This is not an external matter of simply adjusting our tools; nor is it even right to say that the partners adapt themselves to one another but, rather, in a successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding [synesis] in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.

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Synetic branding is neither organization-centric, nor is it user-centric.

Synetic branding is relationship-centric, which means all parties, through dialogue, come to a mutually transformative  shared understanding.

Synetic branding is the method of generating dialogue between an organization and those who participate in the organization (stakeholders). “To reach [synesis] in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.”

Synetic branding sees brand neither as the possession of an organization, nor as the image of the organization in the minds of customers, etc. Neither is exactly wrong, but neither is right enough.

Synetic branding is participatory, which means that brand is a whole that exceeds each of its parts, which both influences and is influenced by its parts. A participant in a synetic brand, whether he participates as an executive, an employee, a shareholder, a partner or a customer, sees by way of the brand’s vision, but to some degree changes the brand’s vision through his participation. The object of this vision is the field with which an organization concerns itself and its offerings within that field, but the vision extends far beyond the object, and influences aesthetic (thus brand identity systems) and how related offerings are perceived (thus brand equity).

Synetic branding means taking responsibility for cultivating mutual understanding among all who participate and recognizing that the essence of a brand is precisely the mutuality of the understanding. Everything, including all the things people commonly mistake for brand itself, such as the image of the company in the minds of whoever), follows from this. Failure to recognize this fact is what has made so many companies into decorated commodity clones. They see everything the same way, manage themselves the same way, follow tweaked and relabeled versions of identical processes, make the same kinds of trade-offs and basically aim for the same ideal as everyone else.

Synetic brand uses large-scale dialogue between an organization’s participants to discover new unifying perspectives on an organization’s offerings that otherwise would remain invisible to everyone.

These perspectives open new questions and new possibilities in the organization’s field of concern. This is the foundation of meaningful innovation and sustainable competitive advantage.

Nietzsche, proto-brand strategist

Published on August 14, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Standing in line for several hours to buy my iPhone I had plenty of time to contemplate the question of whether I really wanted to pay $1800 (est. total cost of ownership) for a mobile device. In the end I consoled myself with the thought that I was not only going to have a very cool device, I was contributing to the Apple cause.

I believe in what Apple believes in. I identify with them. Their products make life more interesting and joyous. I want them to thrive.

When I considered the expenditure both a purchase and a sort of secular tithe, it became something I was very happy to do.

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I’ve learned a great deal from Nietzsche, including this:

The respect-tax. — When someone we know and honour, whether he be a physician, artist or artisan, does or makes something for us, we are happy to pay him as much as we can, often indeed beyond our real capacities: on the other hand, we will pay someone unknown to us as little as we can get away with; this is a struggle in which everyone fights for every foot of land and for which he makes everyone fight him. In the case of work done for us by someone we know there is something beyond price, the feeling and invention he has put into his work on our account: we believe we can express our sensibility of this in no other way than through a kind of sacrifice on our part. — The highest tax is the respect-tax. The more the competitive market dominates and we buy from strangers and work for strangers, the lower this tax will be: whereas it is in fact the standard of measurement of the degree of commerce between human souls.

The entire purpose of synetic brand is to raise the respect-tax.

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User-centric is only incrementally better than being organization-centric. A real relationship is mutual and reciprocal. Cultivating this kind of relationship is the purpose of experience strategy and design.