Monthly Archive for February, 2010

What an experience strategy does

Published on February 28, 2010 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

The purpose of an experience strategy is to translate a business problem into a design problem.

A good experience strategy:

  1. is effective: a design solution that satisfies the problem defined in the strategy will, when executed (designed and implemented), will solve the business problem;
  2. is practicable: the strategy can be designed, implemented, deployed and used;
  3. is politically viable: both the client and vendor team (design, implementation, deployment) are fully bought into the strategy and accept it as a standard by which subsequent phases in the project lifecycle will be guided and evaluated;
  4. is clear: the client and vendor team are in explicit agreement on what is required to satisfy the design problem, which means that if the vendor design team solves the problem as defined in the strategy the solution will be approved by the client;
  5. is inspiring: the strategy should provide the vendor design team with the kinds of insights and challenges that impel the team toward an effective solution, and should provide the client with a sense that  what is being designed is worthwhile;
  6. is evaluable: the strategy defines its own success criteria, so that when the strategy is executed (designed, implemented, deployed and used) the client and the team will agree on the degree of its success.

To this end, an experience strategy concerns itself with three domains:

  1. The experiencer — the person for whom the experience is intended (a.k.a. “user”, “audience”, “stakeholder”, or specific segment, such as “customer”, “employee”, “investor”, etc.). This subdivides into a) understanding the experiencer objectively — in factual/observational demographic and behavioral terms and subjectively — and b) understanding the experiencer subjectively, which means to understand how the world looks from that particular person’s perspective. This latter kind of understanding is elusive and perplexing, difficult to talk about and impossible to quantify in direct terms. Nonetheless the existence of this kind of knowledge — insight — is impossible to deny, and, nowadays, hazardous to ignore. Having insight into as well as factual knowledge about people gives as organization an enormous advantage over those that do not. It makes the difference between providing something satisfactorily utilitarian and something people love and enthuse about and welcome into their lives.
  2. The organization who is providing the experience — which also has an inner and outer dimension analogous to the subjective/objective understanding of the experiencer.  The organization’s a) inward dimension is what it is trying to accomplish for itself, what it is capable of accomplishing, and what effectively differentiates its competition; and its b) outward dimension is how it wishes to be perceived by the experiencer, and specifically how it is perceived as different from its competition.
  3. The medium of the experience — both its possibilities and limitations — which extends beyond the designed artifact into the touchpoints surrounding the artifact which strongly influence the quality and effectiveness of the experience.

Qualitative vs quantitative research findings

Published on February 18, 2010 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

The essential difference between what one learns from qualitative vs quantitative research (in their most common forms) is this: Quantitative research helps an organization know things about a person, where qualitative research helps an organization know a person.

To know about someone means to grasp particular attributes of the thing or factual knowledge pertaining to him. When one knows about a person, the person is perceived less as a perceiving, experiencing, knowing entity than as something that is perceived, experienced, known. In other words, the person is comprehended objectively, as an observable, behaving object — a passive non-participant in the process of coming to an understanding.

To know someone means to understand that person specifically as a perceiving, experiencing, knowing entity: a subject. And this someone is an active participant in the researcher’s coming to understanding, not something set apart to observe and analyze. This does not mean the participant is not observed, only that the observations as such are not the primary focus. In essence what is going on is the participant is showing the researcher his world as he sees it.

The type of knowledge gained through qualitative research is not possessed in the way discrete facts are possessed (though facts can come to light through it). The essential knowledge consists in how facts — and more generally, symbols — are interrelated and applied in concrete life.  (I’ve been reading Clifford Geertz, and finding his way of thinking about these problems useful.) This symbol system is bound up with how the person sees life in general, which aspects and details of life are relevant and have particular significance, how he feels about it, participates in it, and tries to influence it.

Another way to say it: quantitative research produces facts about people; qualitative research provides insights into how to relate to people.

Of course, in the language-leveling environment of business, flat facts are often branded as “insights”, but the difference between fact and insight is an important one and the distinction ought to be preserved. The difference between a fact and an insight is that a fact can be subsumed by one’s current mode of understanding without serious disruption. Facts are comfortable. Compared with insights “hard facts” are easy. An insight, to the degree it is an insight, causes disruption to one’s own understanding and effects a sort of perspectival shift or vase-face remapping of understanding, similar to what happens at the end of a mystery novel when the truth comes to light and forces a comprehensive remapping of significance to the clues and incidental facts of the story into a new understanding. The characteristic charms of the mystery novel genre  revolve around the transfiguring insight, the pleasures of attempting to anticipate what will be revealed, in succeeding or even better, in failing. If the novel concluded with just the addition of the missing fact, and the story did not gain a retroactive reinterpretation through it, the readers would be disgusted. This is also how great qualitative research works. A finding of the form of “47% of customers prefer the color red over green” is a fact, not an insight.

The chances of gaining this type of insight is diminished if one remains removed, uninvolved and objective, in accordance with the ideal of physical science. The researcher must engage in dialogue in order to learn how to communicate naturally with the person being researched, which means becoming conversant in that person’s symbol system — which means knowing what the symbols mean — which means not only knowing what the symbols represent, but also how the symbols are used and experienced, effectively and affectively.

But this does not mean one can dispense with rigor. It is completely possible to go drastically wrong subjectively, and as with physical science, the qualitative researcher’s own subjectivity is always the primary suspect in the crimes of distorted  findings — but in qualitative research the researchers stance toward subjectivity as such is completely different. In the physical sciences (at least in the “normal science” mode of research) minimizing subjectivity as such is desirable. In qualitative research for design and strategy, the very “object” of one’s understanding is subjectivity. Again, this is a source of discomfort for people who equate knowledge with objectivity, epitomized by the physical sciences. In qualitative research the charge that one’s findings are “subjective” is to deny the validity of qualitative research as such, seeing that the goal of qualitative research is to understand subjectivity.

In qualitative research the risk is in imposing one’s own subjectivity on the subjectivity being studied, thus obscuring it. However, the  researcher cannot try to eliminate his own subjectivity in the process of research, but rather to make appropriate use of it, empathically substantiating the insights. The insight is not transferred from the research participant to the researcher: the researcher, by way of looking out at the world with the participant, finds a subjective understanding within his own experience that dialogically matches that of his participant.

Crap. Out of time…