We have written previously on the topic of Innovating In A Time Of Recession. As corporate earnings continue to plunge and the economic recovery is still but a speck of light in a long, dark tunnel, many of our business partners are looking for cost-effective methods to get the right strategy into action.
A couple of us, Christopher Konrad, and myself recently contributed to a Forrester Research study titled Low-Cost User Research And Usability Testing Techniques. This is a popular topic for companies that are looking to weather the recession without pausing on innovation. Konrad, our head of User Research, reminds me that we are a design firm at heart. We recognize that research is immensely valuable as a way of informing and inspiring product design. Regardless of economic conditions, we often see a desire by our clients to build highly desirable and relevant products, and to do so rapidly. At no surprise, clients want to move into the design of their product or service as quickly as possible. I’ll be going over 3 main approaches that allows us to bring the voice of the customer into product design quickly and without undue costs.
Internalizing user experiences by conducting rapid ethnography, “scavenger hunts” (a method for deep immersion in the usage of an existing product), or participatory design, designers can support the research studies to empathize with users early on. This isn’t anything new, but it’s an important idea to continually practice both internally and with the client’s team. In one of our previous projects, we worked on a mobile mapping application and thought to ourselves, “how well does each device truly help people get around?” We could look at spec sheets and also ask people about what they thought was troubling them, but in reality we can’t always rely on just what they say. Instead, we devised a game that involved both our client’s design team and us. Each team was given a mobile device to complete a set of tasks that a majority of individuals would face on a daily basis. In essence, we had ourselves a scavenger hunt. Exciting, right? We thought so. Plus it was a gorgeous day in Seattle. But I digress. The game turned out very successful with everyone feeling very much in tune with how the different approaches to each device translated into pain points or pleasures. For extra credit, we turned the activity into a comic book that we shared with our client as a means to communicate not only the process, but the outcome as well.
Continually evolving a product design through rapid concept value testing, RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) and inexpensive remote testing methods. These approaches have big implications for cost savings (not to mention headaches). In a previous project, one of our researchers conducted 8 remote interviews with individuals around the globe including Chile, Denmark and Texas using Microsoft’s Live Meeting application. While UserVue is another application we have found great successful using, Live Meeting enabled us to communicate remotely internationally. Here’s how this saves money if you haven’t already guessed: airfare, hotel stay, food, transportation, transit time and of course, entertainment. Now take that value and multiply is by the number of people you need to run a study. Then on top of that include the cost of having your client send a representative as well. And, if the produce team could not attend the live session, the digital recording of the session facilitates viewing later. Video montages can be done simply with free tools such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. Combine that with a Creative Commons licensed track from Jamendo and you have a beautiful voice-of-the-customer video.
Finally, the great thing about remote studies is that they’re part of a greener practice in our field. One less person driving, flying and more driving. Instead it’s going about business as usual and getting things done quickly, effectively and properly.
Defining product strategy. In addition to understanding user needs quickly and efficiently, we apply the same thinking into our research and analysis methods to understand business models and product strategy issues. In the past, I have primarily focused on tying our strategy and research services to design projects. The recession, however, is increasing demand for these services as standalone offerings.
We have found we can go a long way by conducting a thorough inventory of existing market research and free (and often wonderful) Internet resources, followed by market opportunity analysis and strategy workshops.
We are constantly thinking about ways we can adapt our methods based on the climates changes, both economically, and also technologically. It’s not only saving our business partner’s money, but also our own operational expenses. It pays off for both parties to find leaner and more effective means of getting to the right design strategy so that energy can be focused on making the implementation of the design perfect. Leave your comments below on examples you have to share on adapting research techniques in ways that keep the research agile and the design moving forward.
The #1 winner is: Barnes & Noble! This is great information if you were ever curious about leading brands in their respective industries. Check it out!
This might remind you of Microsoft’s Photosynth, but the concept is slightly different. Adobe blends images that are compositional, and semantically (tagged) related and stitches them into an endless canvas. The photos that are stitched together therefore don’t need to be of the same object in the way Photosynth was implemented. However, Photosynth does allow you to create 3D objects and pivot around it in space.
Infinite Images takes any collection of tagged images, not necessarily from the same location at all, and stitches them together in 3D by analyzing their composition and the semantics of their tags (“sky” is above “ground,” for example).
MINI Cooper has just released a new advertisement that uses AR technology. People can see a full 3D models of a MINI on their computer screen using a web cam and IE. (ActiveX required)
We are no strangers to touch based interactions, or pen-based either, so it’s great to see Johnny Lee and others continue pushing the development of the perfectly useful input method.
a new application that runs on Google Android - lets you view the world through Wikipedia-tinted glasses. Simply point your mobile device’s camera at your surroundings and Wikitude will display an augmented reality version of it on the screen - a version complete with information about the buildings and other landmarks you can see, sourced directly from Wikipedia!
At the Forrester Consumer Forum 2008, there has been a lot of discussion around the importance of maintaining momentum oninnovating, even during times of economic woe. Understandably, the B-School will tell anyone that when times are rough, wallets get tight and businesses go into survival mode that diminish opportunities for new ideas. These changes in consumer behavior might be true, but that’s a short-term, short-sighted perspective. We took some notes from Paul Jackson’s talk on Innovating in a Time of Recession, as well as incorporated pieces from James McQuivey’s presentation on “Satisfying Consumers for the Next Decade:”
“The need to differentiate continues even in a recession.”
As strategists, we need to be aware of what is going on in time that will ultimately alter the way people are motivated to act. The focus here is on presenting a value proposition that clearly identifies with the person’s current need. Enough so that they are willing spend their limited source of funds to acquire it. There are four things to look at to help innovate on your business’s offerings:
Watch for what consumers consider luxury vs. essential
Make sure all the fat is trimmed
Squeeze extra revenue out of existing products via component optimization, upgrades and pricing
Fight to maintain funding for innovation
One company demonstrating this innovative push is HTC. This is a brand we are quite familiar with and have recently partnered with to help innovate on their next generation mobile handset experience. We worked togetherwith their design team to conceive and prototype their now developed, TouchFLO™ 3D operating system. The innovation was their recognition in making a social phone for the socially aware consumer.
The TouchFLO™ 3D experience is something that has evolved from an evolution where HTC was just a commodity manufacturer. Over time, they have broken out of that and onto the stage with the rest of the handset competitiors like Nokia and Apple. They’ve created a strong offering that is appealing both in usefulness, and desirability across many products including the Touch Diamond™, the Touch Dual™, the Touch Pro™ and the Touch HD™. HTC transformed itself into a branded offering that let them gain more control over pricing and functionality.
Out of the box, it helps connect consumers with their networks on the web. HTC wasn’t building an entirely new network here, instead they piggy-backed on existing networks so that the customer would feel comfortable with adopting this phone and having it integrate with their existing lifestyle.
HTC is an example of how the company is committed to introduce new and better investments in experiences in order to stay competitive. As John Wang, their Chief Marketing Officer puts it, ”It takes close to 1,000 ideas to turn up a few projects that are worth running.” It’s not about quick wins, but about long term investments that will showcase what it means to provide a premium mobile user experiences long after a recession lifts.
The result of these careful decisions HTC made regarding their approach to hardware and software design made them rise above the crowded market space. That attracted Google to partner with HTC to release an Android phone; the T-Mobile G1 handset.
How do we talk about innovation to our customers?
The four items listed above mention how you can market a product and begin to lay the processes to maintain innovation in a company with a temporary, smaller budget. In conjunction with that list, we can look a little closer at James McQuivey’sConsumer Needs Profiledefinition to help determine which need should be satisfied at their convenience through design.
Consumer Needs Profile(We will go in greater detail on what this means later on and give our two cents.)
In brief, Maslow had something going with the pyramid, but it didn’t account for the way consumer needs fluctuated over time due to their environment, and it implied that the needs were entirely hierarchical (e.g. that a hungry person could not have any need for self-actualization). We all have the same four needs:
Connectedness
Uniqueness
Comfort
Variety
These four are constantly being traded off depending on where we are in life, during the day, or during a time period. As a result, we can look to these to understand how behaviors will change and adjust the way we design experiences to satisfy what’s most important to them at that time.
In a time of an economic recession, connectedness and comfort are going to outweigh the other two because both consumers and businesses (they’re people too) are looking to reduce risk on how they spend their money. In turn, they look for ways to satisfy their need for comfort and safety in their activities such as shopping. They are also looking for greater convenience in connectivity because they might be looking to reach out to others who are going through the same situation as they are (related to comfort).
So what?
Jackson points out that on a typical product life cycle, innovation happens within three stages:
Creation
Growth
Decline
Right now, companies are steering away from innovating within the Creation stage. That might be okay, but we push you consider otherwise. It can be small and it can fail. As long as the thinking is there, these small investments can result in a big idea that stands on its own. Companies can remain competitive and position themselves for exciting long term product growth as long as they can navigate through these ambiguous times early on. Fortunately, there are tools and guides here that can help make those decisions easier.
Innovation shouldn’t stop, or even slow down. Instead, we need to take a closer look at how the trade offs in consumer needs impact our decision making process. By designing functionality that makes it more convenient to achieve the need for connectedness and comfort during hard times, it will be easier for users to identify with a product’s value and ultimately select that brand above the rest.
Folks, we will be attending the Forrester Consumer Forum 2008 next week, Tuesday October 28th until the 29th. As we finalize our prepartions here in the studio, we wanted to give you a heads up that we will be live blogging during each presentation. It’s going to be an exciting event with lots of great insights and demonstrations of what’s going to happen in the future.
If you want to learn more about the event, you can visit the Forrester site. The basic premise is on social computing and mobile technology. These are two hot topics that we’ve had the pleasure to research and design solutions for our clients. This will be a great opportunity to build on our learnings and discuss with other brilliant minds the kinds of things we went through to innovate in a crowded market.
So check back in with us! I will be following the consumer research track, while Agnieszka focuses on product strategy and processes.
We’ll be uploading photos along the way on our Flickr account, dropping tweets on our favorite blue bird application, and serving up fresh entries here on the blog with commentary on what we’re hearing.
For those of you who are attending, add us, follow up, friends us, or all of the above! See you there!
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