Creating tangible value with design, Parts I and II, Brandon Schauer and Steve Toomey

This presentation has two great sets of slides available. I wrote most of my notes right on the slides themselves, so they’re a really good resource. Brandon and Steve did a great job of creating a presentation that tells a good story, even off-line on paper in black-and-white.

I’ll present my notes and ideas for this talk (and most of the others save the keynotes and panels) in bullet form. Post a comment if you’d like me to provide some clarifcation or elaboration.

• Design is the "Third Place" in peoples’ lives: it’s very much the experience that people have in between home and work; it’s a pretty huge chunk! Does that create value? If done well, design can create a massive amount of value. [my thought]
• Starbuck’s. The Nexflix package. Flickr. Good designs. Great experiences.
• (Slide 26) Taylorism -> the work of Fredrick Taylor
• (Slide 35) Why does Flickr succeed? They " stay tuned to what [their] business does well and what [they] know how to create." Flickr didn’t try to cover all the bases: they picked a few and did them better than anyone else could hope.
• (Slide 39) The "Portfolio Mentality" - Google makes a ton of products. A ton aren’t successful. But, because they follow the idea of the portfolio (see GE and the 95,000 things it makes), they achieve growth: the cash cows more than pay off the losses of the dogs.

End of Part I

• Steve and Brandon took a moment to state that the Adaptive Path report "Leveraging Business Value" addresses many of the business-related points of this talk.
• (Slide 65) Left-hand side percentage = interest rate; right-hand side = return demanded by shareholders.
• (Slide 66) Hurdle rate == (weighted average) cost of capital
• (Slide 67) We’re using the hurdle rate as the discound rate in this calculation.
• (Slide 72) Just focus on 1-2 key metrics your project is changing. Don’t worry about explaining how it’s tangentally improving something in Q3 ‘08.
• (Slide 73) The two-way street: what is the measure of success for my work? What do I send up? What do they send back?
• (Slide 79) Stage Gate is a product dev. / go or no go software package.
• (Slide 80) How do we make more of an impact? We work further upstream in the user experience value chain. It’s something I always try to do in my work: if you can catch something early, you’re in much better position to help correct it (speed it up, help it, slow it down, move it around) then you are at that moment it’s dropped in your lap.
• (Slide 83 - black) Model the business -> of UX before your project, after you helped launch that new product, etc. Did you help? Did something else hurt and you could say, "See? Let’s learn from that."
• (Slide 86) Preface this with "How does UX start to affect…"
• (Slide 98) This is a form factor of a medical device, created by IDEO. (I thought it was some kind of toy gun :-)).
• (Slide 103) Panel 1 - Relationship to current experience. Panel 2 - Who gets this? When? Panel 3 - Metric: Click-through
• (Slide 104) Is this an activity we want to engage in? Are we capable? Put your prototype on a scale with vividness and effort on the axes. Lo-fi prototype < --> Comic Scenario < --> Box (cereal box packaging your idea) < --> "Artifact" from the future.
• (Slide 105 - black) Model the business -> connect business with user behavior -> prototype the strategy.
• This process helps drive design decisions. You need this input before making that design decision; it can guide you in the direction, but not if it’s already too late!

Q&A

• How do you apply this when people making the design decisions aren’t the financial backer in a B2B environment? (ex. IT user goes to to buy.)
  [You need to determine whether you're] looking for other kinds of value (financial metric -> cost reduction or revenue generating [and gear your design that way].
• Managerial judgment governs decisions when it comes down to opportunity costs. (Most managers would disagree, but you can’t do everything at once). Managers must decide "how much money are we missing?" "What’s possible versus what we have to go after?"

I wound up this session with the following quote: "The Universe is enormous; we can only see fragments" (Stephen Baxter). I’m not really sure how it popped up, but it’s an interesting thought, especially in light of the final "opportunity cost" discussion: we never really know if we’re doing the best thing for business; we can only really stick to our guns (and cross our fingers and hope).

This is a point that popped up a lot during the conference: design has the power to create a ton of tagible value because it really shapes almost all of peoples’ lives. You’re at work: your sitting in a chair that was designed to fit your body, working on a desk designed to promote productivity, typing into a computer designed to trasnlate your ideas and thoughts into "the next big thing". Good experience design, and good design in general, almost blends into the background: it’s so seamless, you’re not even aware how good it is. It’s the "delightful", "witty" medium in which you move from place to place. Good design is a positive experience; or, more rationally, a positive experience stems in no small part to good design. Bad (experience) design? Think of how much you enjoy waiting in a long, long, slow, long line to get your driver’s license renewed. Exactly.

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