Good looks like this

Recently, I’ve been hearing some variation of the following statement quite often…

In the time I’ve been here, I have not yet heard a clearly expressed product vision, roadmap or strategy

It doesn’t have to be this way, teams should have clarity on their vision and if no helpful one exists they should draught their own.

Vision = problems + influences + purpose

In my experience of working through this type of problem, I find that the strongest visions are a synthesis of problem space (which problems are root causes, which are symptoms), environmental factors, and purpose. Or put another way, a great vision is a dream of a future where the root problems have been overcome in such a way that we are delivering our purpose and following a plan that navigates the forces that are trying to prevent us getting there.

Organise the activities

There’s a lot to do here, and almost all of it fairly abstract and hard to communicate. You may well get push-back on your plans (“we know that already”; “why would we want to do that?”).

I use a “we do this so we get this” chart. It’s hard to map against dates, I used to put a week down to cover each workshop (counting planning, prep, synthesis etc.) but these days I’m lucky if I get a day. Either way, a chart like this can help explain to reluctant stakeholders why they would want to attend your workshop (it’s actually a little bit like a P.O.S.T. but a little prettier)

The Vision Canvas

I’m a big fan of product teams and their stakeholders working through these things together.

I know the c-suite decides the critical business stuff and in public sector a policy team may want to set some things down before engaging, but things really do work so much better when you consider these issues as a team.

To try and help with this, I created a workshop canvas for teams to build out their vision. It’s called the vision canvas and you can grab the PDF and use it or hack it with your team).

You build the canvas content up over a series of short workshops (YMMV of course based on your team’s problem space etc.)

1. Problems

In most cases you’ll be working with teams who have already spent considerable time looking at user insights and technical and process challenges. This can be a way to unblock or think about issues with a fresh outlook.

For this exercise, you need your group to have a good degree of domain knowledge. Take a couple of hours and write down problems that are close to your heart, group them in clusters and then rank them by causality. Like all service design methods, this doesn’t always work as expected, but the idea is to build a fishbone diagram that shows which problems are root causes (or at least get a common understanding of what issues are driven by).

2. Purpose

Next, you need to ask your team to complete a “purpose butterfly” exercise. Simply put, this is a Venn diagram with in one circle a statement of “what’s wrong” and in the other “why is it up to us to fix it” (This can also be expressed as “what’s unique about us”).

The intersection of the two circles is your organisation’s “elevator pitch”. Write this down and stick it to the canvas. (The purpose butterfly tool isn't mine. I learned it from [Melissa Andrada](https://twitter.com/melissaandrada) at [Wolff Olins](https://www.wolffolins.com/))

3. External factors

I often get groans and sighs when I ask people to do a PEST or PESTLE workshop. Sure, it can devolve into a long thing but if you keep people on track, the idea is capture the factors that really matter and if you use illustration to express the issues it can actually be fun:-)

In a short workshop don’t go for an exhaustive list, go for the ones you care about, as a team. Another great output from this session is you can jumble up the letters to read “STEP” and make illustrated cards (“STEP Cards”) for stimulus in future ideation workshops. (lovely example here)

4. Bring it all together

With these three items written down, come together and think about what you need to achieve.

Balance the purpose so it’s not just an idealistic thing but one grounded in your actual team constraints. On the board you capture the purpose and then agree guiding principles.

With this common understanding, deciding what to do next becomes more manageable.

When I first put this tool together my desired outcome was clarity around strategic themes. I wanted us as a group to talk about what ambitious things we could do and rate them by viability, relevance etc. Each strategic theme was a project or programme of work focused on solving one of the problems that we all agreed were part of “The Right Problem to Solve”. You may not need this, but the approach also works to look at possible roadmap stages or simply as a foundation to ideate “what if” scenarios as part of speculative design.

The key is to do it together.

Make it better:-)

Can you imagine this working for your team? Reckon it won’t? Have you downloaded the canvas and got stuck? Made changes? Please do let me know and I’ll publish your changes and updates here:-)

The biggest challenge of CSAT survey handling is how to create a question/answer flow that allows the customer to describe the problem while ensuring this data is correctly stored and acted on.

I just had a hickup in a shopping experience and filled in Carpetright's CSAT + NPS survey (not sure what Bain would make of that, the mix of the two ways of measuring?).

As usual, the questions are written in such a way as to make it difficult to report the actual problem (poorly orchestrated service components) but luckily the survey included a catch-all text input which I used:

I love the carpet, it's very clever (suggests sisal at a fraction of the cost and with greater cleaning ability)

But as ever, your NPS survey is structured in a such a way as to prevent the sharing of the actual problem. The issue is one of service design, in other words how all the parts of your service fit together to ensure a satisfied customer.

The problem with my delivery is I now have two very heavy doors sitting off their hinges in a room upstairs.

The surveyor (who appeared to do a very thorough job) should have flagged this to me (that the lack of underlay would mean a risk that doors might not have enough clearance) so that I could have arranged a chippie on site. Or, the delivery team (two strong men with tools), having already sweated the removal of the doors, could have quite easily trimmed or rasped the clearance off the bottom of the doors.

Either way, this was not handled well as a service. You need to avoid the scenario OR you need to brief installers on the proper handling similar scenarios.

I now have to get a carpenter to sort this out at my expense:-(

It's a challenge, the problem might have been caused by the driver's actions (ie straightforwardly incorrect behaviour) or it might have been that the driver did everything by the book but the book didn't include instructions for what to do in a given situation, say what to do about the other driver from a different company delivering at the same time, or how to factor in the rain/snow weather and so on.

How to capture that data in a format that supports making the data actionable?

To borrow from KM systems, the data needs to be seen as accurate and be findable. In the context of CSAT, how does this feedback get played back to the right stakeholders in the business?

I would argue there are some great CRM/CX consultants out there but could it be time for businesses to start sensing the emerging properties caused by the design of their systems? I think it is, and this means a requirement for in-house service design:-)

Love this graphic from a talk by Meghan Casey at ‘Digimarcon Canada’

A lot of my clients and workshop attendees tell me that they don’t have a clear idea of what they hope to accomplish with their content. Or if they do have a clear idea, it’s not written down. Sound familiar?

Really elegant way of focusing team efforts around content marketing initiatives. Not having a clear idea is about not exploring the problem methodically enough which is always a great place to start:-)

I’ve been working with some developers recently and decided to evaluate a website production workflow built around Jekyll, a static site generator (I’ve been interested in these for a while, not least because this site is generated and hosted using Movable Type, the daddy of static site generators.

We’re launching our new website before it’s ready. But Dug, there are bits that don’t work; there are pages missing and also some weird copy?!? What’s up with that?

Well yes, you’re right, there are.

The rough edges will evaporate over the next few weeks as our teams rapidly iterate from our first minimum viable product (MVP) release through our subsequent rapid iterations.

This isn’t random, it’s a choice we’ve made. How often do you have the chance to rethink your website and in the process run a live-ammunition test of the principles you’ve been suggesting your customers live by? Well, not everyday but this time we’re grabbing the opportunity and jumping in at the deep end.

We want to practise what we preach, eat our dog-food and keep our possibilities as real as we can.

So what has this meant in detail?

Well, as is fitting for cross-silo digital thinking, the decisions we made to organise the design and production teams and the decisions we made about application architecture and design were all intertwined and taken by a connected group of experts. We decided we didn’t want to break just the traditional technology/design silo but also the geography one as well. For this project we wanted round-the-clock connectivity between our associates working in remote locations and our two studio-based teams in Edinburgh and London.

We decided to go for it and experiment with technology.

Collaborating in the digital workplace

For this project we are collaborating using a network of services that connect each designer’s laptop to a distributed version control system. The copywriting and development environment is compiled on each machine and connects to the central hub. We are using an always-on Slack channel to ensure feedback is rapid and everyone stays up-to-date with project developments. We are experimenting with using Github as the digital asset manager (DAM) to handle both graphics, content and code version control. Documentation and training on the new platform is also being handled using Slack.

• Team collaboration around assets and content was managed on Github which allowed painless version control
• Code was managed on Github with seamless localhost working using the Ruby environment and Foreman
• Deployment happens automatically so communication between design and development teams focused more on creativity and quality and less on support and action requests
• Designers in all locations shared the same spec of local build so connectivity was not required at all times to continue working

What we feel is going well

• The teams have successfully adopted new tools
• Great use of Slack allowed consistent chatter, design reviews and easy debugging
• Great use of GitHub allowed collaborative development, issue tracking and version control
• Rapid development, deployment, feedback, iteration loop
• Jekyll and templating
• Local development environment was reproducible with very few hiccups
• The team managed to ship the mvp release on time

Continuous deployment

We defined our MVP as delivering one clear message and it does.

Also, from kick-off to DNS migration took 10 days, not bad for a corporate website. Even better when you consider release 1.5 is due in a few days and r2 will ship shortly after that. With every release we’ll improve the quality and clarity of the copy; make the imagery stronger and better positioned, fix bugs and add missing content.

To be clear, we’ve not lost our marbles.

We understand our customers need lovely reliable tools like Sitecore and AEM to drive their experiences but these agile and lean approaches are an area of digital technology that is quickly evolving and becoming ever more flexible and efficient. We want to make sure we live the experiences we ask our customers to live. We want to help customers benefit from our knowledge and experience in these new approaches.

To be honest, it’s a little scary working in public this way but you just can’t buy the energising effect it has on our team and we want to share that energy with our customers.

Onwards to the next iteration:-)

So a friend of mine recently gave me a book on mathematics which has got me thinking about stuff in new ways. Early on in the book the author introduces the impact of linear relationships on how we reach conclusions about the rights and wrongs of situations.

So here’s a thought: Agencies increasingly understand that accountability is important in winning and retaining customers. Linear reasoning would say that if a little accountability produced good results, then more accountability would produce even better results. This is the “more is better” way of thinking.

Now what happens if you map employee engagement to agency accountability? Imagine a studio at the early stages of a relationship. Leadership is trying to introduce new processes and ways of working that are going to increase customer satisfaction and help grow the business. Everyone is involved, working and learning together and trying to do a good job. My guess is this would help grow enagement.

The question I had was would employee engagement and agency accountability map in a linear way? If the effort and team-work to start increasing accountability brings about a positive-feeling leading to greater designer engagement then would further accountability initiatives lead to even greater engagement?

My guess is the reality is closer to the curve plotted in the chart above. At a certain point, the extra effort, speed and transparency would begin to grate. As designers, we would begin to feel like the magic and specialness of what we do was being pushed to the side. Eventually, as the environment became more strict, life would begin to feel like a sausage machine. Not what we signed-up for.

But this is just a thought, I could be wrong:-)

Have you experienced a strong design culture that survived growth challenges like this?

Well... good question:-)

I think it might be worth pulling the problem apart a little bit. What do we mean by wearables?

If I could chip my 13-year-old daughter I possibly would. This would make her body part of the cloud and the chip a sort of wearable.

Same thing applies to other devices that are either permanently online or can trigger a beacon. I backed Tile and bought a card https://www.thetileapp.com and it's pretty cool. I've got a few attached to things I carry around in my laptop bag.

Does that make my presentation clicker a wearable? I guess not but you can see how these things fit into a wider ecosystem of connected stuff related to a given human.

In terms of actual "wrist" wearables like Apple Watch, I think we have to look at things like Nike Fuel and Fitbit in a different category.

Apple watch is different, from the moment they first talked about it you could tell they were entering the world of "Haute Horlogerie".

I used to wear a watch made out of Zirconium Oxide with a bullet-proof Sapphire glass. The face was made out of sandwiches of almost radioactive material handled by a team of 35 specialists in Florence and the one I wore was only made in 1000 units.

I recognised this kind of language in the Apple announcement. The use of the word "complication" for example which I'm pretty sure 90% of iPhone buyers had never heard used in the context of a clock, the details of the straps and even the impossibly rare materials priced at "Haute Horlogerie" prices.

The picture would be made complete if the "Edition" watch was impossible to find, only available from tiny boutiques known only to a few cognoscenti...

I think the Apple Watch is interesting because it is disrupting a market that I'm guessing really didn't see this coming.

That said, Swiss Watch company Mondaine has launched a smart watch (http://www.mondaine.com/files/mondaine_helvetica_no_1_smart_...) which is a traditional automatic mechanism in a traditional steel case but with fitness sensors included and an integration with Android phones. A few others including Tag introduced smart watches at http://www.baselworld.com this year.

I recently backed a Kickstarter project called Pebble and am counting the minutes until I get my fabulous steel smartwatch.

The Pebble is different. It's more focused than the Apple watch and from a user experience point of view is designed from a more holistic, service design perspective.

For example, the clock face of the Pebble is designed to be used in darkness and light. After all, what's the point of a smartwatch that you can't read in sunlight? Its face isn't a screen but Kindle-like "digital paper" display readable even in bright sunshine. As a result of this approach, the battery life is much much longer than Apple Watch's.

Pebble also introduces a new interaction metaphor. Apple Watch has a groovy winder but as far as I can tell, the screen interactions seem very similar to what you're used to on a phone. Pebble on the other hand has re-visited the entire interface to follow a "time" metaphor. Everything you do on the Pebble fits into a timeline concept, where am I now? what is the future? the past etc.

I think these devices all look awesome and I want them now, but the ones I find most satisfying from a design perspective are the ones that explore the areas closest to the human (so Apple, try a little harder and how about a menstrual cycle calculator in your fitness app? No? Oops I forgot, not so many women on the design team) looking at the full journey of what we are all trying to achieve every day.

I had to pop this one in here. I know it's pedantic and errors can happen to anybody but this guy actually tried to sell his personalisation expertise with this note...

Hi Dug,

I came across your profile as we are both connected to [COMMON FIRST LEVEL CONNECTION] and I thought I would introduce myself. My name is Picard and I work for Inversaly; and I am a Cross Device and media Personalisation Specialist.

It's a simple & powerful idea - Individually personalised media.

If you would like to see any case studies on how our platform can drive ROI, or any part of the above for [COMPANY NAME] please let me know and I would be happy to share them.

Thanks,
Picard

Here's hoping all of us at <$companyName$> do well in <$currentYear$>;-)

Folk have been asking me about this since I mentioned it in the BCS talk I did a few weeks ago. Just to be clear, "adoption" is the service creator's objective. For an ecommerce retailer it could be conversion or loading a basket or even agreeing to opt-in to something. For an enterprise customer adoption means the change will be painless because the user base is getting exactly what they felt they needed. For a marketing customer adoption will mean opening emails, setting a "like" flag, clicking on a banner or signing up for a sponsored download etc.

Different types of objective but similar framework (original post below).

Have just received a brief from a prospect who wants to increase user adoption. Nothing unusual with that, expect that the wording of the request got me thinking. The request states that the solution is greater usability. In other words, that the level of adoption of a service is directly proportionate to its degree of usability.

I had to stop and think a bit. At first that makes sense, particularly if the current version of the service is really terrible.

But I think usability is the wrong measure. By modelling what the business wants to build into the service and aligning that with what the end users are trying to get out of it an increase in adoption is very likely.

Still, experience is more than alignment. We could get the service exactly right but if a roughly similar service has nicer music or offers free child-care we're likely to go with that alternative.

So it's a balance of alignment and value (in financial terms; emotional; physical; in terms of meaning and self-actualisation etc).

So not being a maths guy, does that make the formula:

adoption = alignment x value over context

What do you think?

It's hard to work somewhere when you don't feel a strong sense of purpose. Equally, it gets you drunk with hope and belief to work somewhere the mission is clear and strong.

I've been researching statements of purpose from senior digital folk and came across this one from WPP:

To develop and manage talent;
to apply that talent, throughout the world, for the benefit of clients;
to do so in partnership;
to do so with profit

Not sure about the way it scans but put another way, if Martin Sorrel's network of companies didn't exist there would be less developed and well-managed talent in the world. While I don't see empirical evidence of that it's a strong statement and one I can get behind:-)

Incidentally, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr Sorrel in the ballroom of the Pierre on E61st in Manhattan when he announced his takeover of my employer's parent company (JWT) to the assembled troops. I've had a thing ever since and actually ended up in the UK because IBM didn't think they should keep their business with us after the merger.

But that's another story...

Oh yes:-)

I can now complain in different ways - video, audio, blog, forum, microblog, and on any number of third party sites - Twitter, YouTube, AudioBoo, Plebble, ComplaintCommunity, Facebook, and there is even a complaint aggregator - Amplicate.

Social media has given all of us the tools of engagement, enabling us to be far more inventive, novel and vocal in expressing our displeasure when a company has simply got it wrong.

Really well put. All change: The four trends reshaping customer service

Hi, if you're here it might be because you've just had a chat with Dug at CEM and pointed your device at the QR on my badge.

Really looking forward to the panel this afternoon. particularly looking forward to hearing from GiffGaff's Claire Kavanagh:-)

If you want to keep in touch, you can visit about.me/dug
or even read twitter.com/dug
and if you really want to get serious you can use linkedin