THE ART AND THE ART AND SCIENCE OF SCIENCE OF

ENGINEERING ENGINEERING EXPERIENCESEXPERIENCES

There has been a great deal written about “design thinking” in the past few years. Much focus has been placed on its value in helping define business strategy, with industrial design firms around the world claiming that they have evolved beyond their role as developers of products into a new role as business visionaries. It seems nearly every firm with a design practice has a “proprietary and unique” problem-solving process that will unlock the magic combination of customer experience, brand vision and strategy - transforming any company into the next Apple.

This is only half false.

Design is a process that helps people develop systems that other people will use. This process can be applied to software, buildings, space-shuttles, tea kettles and organizational structures. CX design is about applying problem-solving capacity to align a business to face its customers. It needs to work across digital and physical channels and media, making it different from other fields. Software designers make software. Automotive designers make cars. CX designers enable experiences.

No one owns this process. The design process turns up in some form in several disciplines. Its origins are ancient and its effects are ubiquitous in the modern world, permeating every facet of our lives.

This is the story of how this process came to be, how it works, and how it can be leveraged to build a better connection between a business and its customers.

DESIGN THINKING AND CXPaul Conder, Lenati LLC. 2014

“Explore - researchCreation - concept design

Reflection - prototypeImplementation”

- Jakob Schneider, Marc Stickdorn from This is Service Design Thinking

"The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency.

- Ign al-Haytham

"The electric light has caused me the greatest amount of study and has required the most elaborate experiments... I would construct and work along various lines until I found them untenable. When one theory was discarded, I developed another at once. I realized very early that this was the only possible way for me to work out all the problems.”

- Thomas Edison, paraphrased by George S. Bryan 1926

Ign al-Haytham was an eleventh century Persian Scientist who debunked theories on optics developed by such scientific heavy-weights as Ptolemy, Euclid and Aristotle. But just as importantly, he articulated the process behind his work. Empirical evidence drove his ideas, which were tested using an iterative process of experimentation, continuing until he knew his ideas worked in the real world. This was one of the first well-documented examples of the scientific method, and while he wasn’t the only one to work this way, his successes in the field combined with his well-known intellectual rigor helped spread the word.

Some version of this process can be seen in fields as diverse as mechanical engineering, physics, visual art and customer experience design. The basic principles are:

1. Learning as much as you can about a problem or opportunity - We call this area of focus Discovery

2. Asking questions, developing hypotheses to test - We call this area of focus Ideation

3. Testing those ideas to learn from them, feeding back into discovery - We call this area of focus Testing

A version of this process is taught in virtually every design, art, engineering and science school in the first year. The process itself is renamed from field to field, but the components remain basically the same. In science, it’s called “the scientific method”. In engineering, it’s usually referred to as a “problem solving process.” And in design, it’s usually called “design thinking” or “the design process.” No one owns this process and it is flexible enough to adapt into virtually any creative field.

ORIGINS OF THE PROCESS

“Design projects must ultimately pass through three spaces... We label these inspiration, for the circumstances (be they a problem, an opportunity, or both) that motivate the search for solutions; ideation, for the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas that may lead to solutions; and implementation, for the charting of a path to market.”

- Tim Brown, Ideo, Harvard Business Review.

“Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences – “which is the mostest? which is the leastest?” They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.”

Despite its ancient history and diverse origins, today the design process is usually associated with the fields of industrial design, consumer product development and with the broader field of invention. The focus in these fields is on developing manufactured products. But there is always an understanding that those products have to work for people. At each phase of the process, questions around how people value, purchase, use, store, maintain and eventually dispose of a product sit side-to-side with how the product actually works to satisfy those needs. The question “would the user like it?” has the same weight as “does it work?” For this reason, designers became schooled in how to understand users needs, market trends and cultural frameworks.

As design went beyond the focus on the product to a focus on the user, each phase in the process was affected. Discovery centered around research into a user’s needs, perceptions and wants. Ideation employed techniques like role-play, use-cycle-analysis and participatory-design (bringing users into the creative sessions.) And testing involved taking mock-ups of the product concepts to the users to see how they would interact with it and to capture their thoughts on its value. Each area of focus started to employ techniques to help connect people’s preferences and perceptions to the product. Many of these techniques were borrowed from the social sciences, where practitioners were already working to build an understanding people’s perceptions and behaviors in response to different environments.

“Identify the Problem, Criteria and Constraints. Brainstorm Possible Solutions and Generate Ideas. Explore Possibilities and Select an Approach. Build and test a Prototype and Refine the Design.”

FROM PRODUCTS TO EXPERIENCES

photo: Nic Redhead

photo: Raneko

photo: NASA

- Buckminster Fuller

- NASA engineering process

The design process was later adopted by people who were designing software and digital products. As they worked to make new technologies usable and valuable to a larger audience, they grabbed hold of the tools that had long been employed by industrial designers and applied them to digital products.

One of the most important tools that was adopted by this new group was the “journey framework.” (An example is shown on the next page.) This set up a visual representation of each step of the user’s experience. The product wasn’t the primary focus here. It was about mapping the interactions, experiences and perceptions of a user in the real world, and predicting how the product should intervene in those interactions, patterning the behavior of the user and delivering some kind of value. Larger maps could be constructed that showed the systems that supported the product, the lifecycle of the relationship between the user and the product, multiple users interacting through the product’s connected features, cyclical patterns and repeated interactions, etc.

This tool (often resembling a kind of storyboard or process diagram) helped systematize the design process. Ideas could be worked out as part of a larger system of interactions. It’s hard to imagine the development of today’s software or interactive products without this tool, and without the larger process to enable it. This technique is the origin of customer journey mapping which is a key process for anyone in the field of customer experience.

“Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

- Leonardo da Vinci

“Any system that sees aesthetics as irrelevant, that separates the artist from his product, that fragments the work of the individual, or creates by committee, or makes mincemeat of the creative process will, in the long run, diminish not only the product but the maker as well.”

- Paul Rand

photo: Richard Huppertz

DESIGNING FOR A JOURNEY

This is an example of a journey framework, where a customer’s experience is visualized using a combination of storyboarding and process mapping. In this case, the project involved a series of orientation, customer service and sales interactions at a mountain resort. Rather than focus on the touchpoints themselves, the framework focuses on how the customer’s experience is fostered by the physical, digital and mobile environment, all from the customer’s point of view. This was used later to develop the physical and digital infrastructure of the resort, from websites to interior spaces to exhibits to customer service and sales strategy; and to ensure each touchpoint supported a positive customer experience.

Within a few years, the process that used to be known for designing tea-kettles was used for designing interactive systems and experiences, even businesses. Its business applications connected marketing and customer insights with operations and distribution, helping entire companies to become more customer-centric. The process was making things work for people, but now, the things were fast dissolving into services, environments, software and media. The people were becoming more and more diverse and inter-connected, and the channels through which people connected were fragmenting and overlapping.

Who could possibly be an expert in all of these fields at once?The simplest answer is “no one.”

Bill Buxton has developed the idea of a “Renaissance Team.” In essence, he said that the design challenges of today are too complex and involve too many disciplines to be solvable by a single expert. The Renaissance Team takes over from the notion of the Renaissance Man. The collective knowledge of a diverse group outweighs the capacity of the lone genius.

The design process, the teams who applied it, and the types of problems it was aimed at solving, all evolved simultaneously. The process became a unifying force for innovation behind extremely diverse teams and businesses. In our work at Lenati, a typical team is comprised of experts in design, analytics, business strategy, marketing, digital and social media, and communications to solve these kinds of problems. Where the process used to focus on physical products, it has become a powerful methodology for developing complex, people-centric systems of any kind. It has shifted the conversation away from the supply chain and towards the customer.

“It’s not a renaissance man or woman that we need to be cultivating, but the renaissance team. In today’s world of specialization, the problems are such as to require a great deal of depth in each of a range of disciplines. We have already mentioned a few: business, design, engineering, marketing, manufacturing and science. No individual can possess all these skills at the level that is required to execute in a competitive way..”

- Bill Buxton, “Sketching User Experiences.”

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

- Thomas Edison.

“Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.”

- Bruce Mau, “The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.”

photo: Eddao

photo Cory Doctorow

photo: SparkCBC

DESIGN AS A TEAM SPORT

The design process is usually modeled as a linear sequence. But from our experience, that’s not how we work best in the real world. In this model, the structure of the process - made up of the basic building blocks of discovery, ideation and testing - becomes less rigid. It’s not about following three steps in sequence as much as shifting focus from place to place, depending on the needs of the team and the types of questions they are asking. (Others have pointed this out too, for example, Tim Brown from IDEO.)

Making the process work has a lot more to do with the diverse capacities and perspectives of the team than it does a formalized step-by-step process. Even the team itself isn’t static. Different people - the client, analysts, researchers, stakeholders, and sometimes the customers themselves - come into the process to offer their perspectives when it’s relevant to the problem.

The next three pages examine each of these building blocks to show how they apply and add value to the process of designing customer experiences.

You usually enter here with a hypothesis, question, problem or opportunity in mind.

You should probably exit here. Sometimes you enter here, for example

when a great idea comes your way and needs some research and testing to prove it out. Most literature on the design process tries to play this down because it is difficult to predict when you will have a great idea.

THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DESIGN

DISCOVERY.Research the opportunity, problem, context, culture,

stakeholder and customer patterns. Use whatever

research tools make sense for your context.

A CX team can employ a wide set of research tools, from ethnography and surveys to internal analysis of sales and marketing efforts, to online analytics and sales performance to build a deep understanding of the customer in the real world - identifying better opportunities to engage, and also building knowledge of the terrain. But jumping into these tools isn’t a good place to start if there isn’t a clear question or hypothesis to answer with all the research.

Additionally, it can be very difficult for companies and teams to align on (or sometimes even notice) real problems or opportunities without substantial evidence being compiled first - leading to a chicken-and-egg question. You can’t start the research without identifying a problem, and you can’t settle on a problem area without research.

To get around all these challenges, a good starting point is to formulate a simple question from what you already know. “How could we make this transaction simpler or more effortless?” “How could we make this touchpoint more engaging?” “Can a new technology eliminate a customer’s time spent waiting for service?” None of these questions pre-suppose a solution, but they put the customer in context and identify a potential opportunity to improve their experience. These are the kinds of questions that can kick off a successful CX project by framing the context, tools and resources needed for the research required. From there, a clear research plan can feed useful information into the process.

IDEATION.Develop conceptual approaches to realize the

opportunity, to solve the problem, build better ways to

do something, and foster a more compelling

experience for the customer.

Ideation often seems to be the moment when the magic happens, when a new concept comes out of all that knowledge, usually out of sight of the client. There has been a lot written about creative techniques that can help spur this along like rapid visualization, generative approaches, free-association, lateral and visual thinking, oblique strategies and brainstorming; techniques to get a group to work up new, more diverse ideas faster. These techniques work by helping to frame new questions about the customer and their context, or to gain a different perspective on an opportunity.

Many say that these tools will be effective in the hands of anyone who has access to them, but we don’t believe that’s the case. Creativity is not something that “some people have and others don’t;” it is a skill that is learned. And it comes in a lot of forms. Many confuse drawing ability with creativity, a mis-conception that has kept many important points of view out of the conversation. Success here comes from being inspired by the group around you, the richness of the knowledge at hand and what you have taken from the people you have worked with in the past. The best approach for CX design is to build a team that is well-informed about the customer’s experience and context in the current state, and one that makes up for each other’s blind spots. The more diverse it is, the better. And once that team is up to speed on the research and the hypothesis to work through, let the group learn their way to a solution together. Foster an open and positive environment that gets all the team members to interact and cross-pollinate their ideas through conversation. Don’t force people to work in visual media if they aren’t comfortable. And make sure you capture all the ideas.

TESTING.

Test your ideas on paper, in the lab and in the real

world. Learn as much as you can from the test. Feed

it back into the system.

The importance testing as a part of the design process cannot be overstated. It is the only opportunity to make a mistake, learn from it, and improve on tactics without exposing them to the entire customer base. Still, it’s amazing how many companies overlook or downplay this critical step. Even smaller-scale initiatives like email campaigns or individual marketing tactics would benefit from accurate A/B testing and measurement to understand their performance before they are rolled out.

The key to getting this activity right is to prototype initial CX concepts quickly - using simple, inexpensive means - and to let them fail. Then, feed the learnings back into ideation and discovery quickly to get new concepts. In a recent Lenati project, we developed a simple set of prototypes that could be tested and modified very easily. The models were tested on site based on customer input and observation, and quickly evolved into designs that delighted customers at a fraction of the cost of the original concept. Input was collected via social media and through email. A crew of digital and industrial designers acted as a dedicated response team - altering prototypes in the field based on customer input. The solutions were nothing like the ones that the design team originally imagined - they were much better. This kind of approach can save an enormous amount of money and effort, and yield far superior results, than simply pushing a concept into the field with limited CX testing. By integrating customer feedback into the process at all points, you have a much better chance of engaging them when the concept is implemented.

Lenati LLC

Seattle WA, San Francisco CA, Vancouver BC.

info@lenati.com

1 800 848 1449

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The design process puts a different spin on the

scientific method. It is a self-correcting system, where

hypotheses come in, and validated research comes out

- to be fed back in to inform the next round of new

ideas. A CX designer’s role is one of keeping focus on

how people, products and systems interact - using the

process to explore new ideas before they are brought to

market. Those ideas become the building blocks of

brands because they will be the main touchpoints for

customers. For that reason, they can have a great deal

of value to both the customer and the business.

The difference between CX design and all the other

types of design (architecture, graphic design, UX,

service design, industrial etc.) is that a CX designer is

not tied to a single medium. Architects work in

construction, graphic designers work in 2D media,

service designers create service systems, industrial

designers work in manufacturing. But a CX designer

works hand in hand with all of these professions (and

several others) to create a holistic experience for a

customer across all media and channels. This design

thinking needs to be combined with analytical

horsepower and fluency in business management in

order to understand the financial impact of the work.

It also needs to be mixed with a deep understanding of

research methods to build an understanding of the

customer, their preferences and patterns. In our next

article, “The New CX Toolbox”, we will discuss these

research and analytical methods in greater detail.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Sketching User ExperiencesBill Buxton, Morgan Kaufmann

Change by DesignTim Brown, Harper Collins

This is Service Design Thinking.Mark Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider. Wiley Press

LifestyleBruce Mau, Phaidon.

Making Ideas HappenScott Belsky, behance.net

Buckminster Fuller Institute - bfi.orgartcenter.org

Since 2005, Lenati has helped transform businesses to

make stronger connections with their customers. We help

our clients find, acquire and retain customers through a

focus on customer experience, marketing, sales and

loyalty strategy. We emphasize deep research, design

thinking and rigorous testing to prove out new ways to

benefit both the customer and the business. We have

worked with a wide roster of global brands, including

Starbucks, Microsoft, Adobe, T-Mobile, Capital One,

lululemon, Expedia, Nordstrom and Google.

Find out more at lenati.com

The Art and Science of Engineering Experiences

by Paul Conder

Images by Paul Conder, except as noted.

2014 c