Continuity

A film - large or small - comes together through a long process in which filming is just one component. Individual scenes are filmed, edited, special effects added, edited some more. And the filming of each scene doesn't occur in sequence: the crew doesn't open the script on page 1 and start shooting. No, each 'shot'; each scene of the film is shot separately; out of sequence; and in a schedule suited to availability of actors, locations, equipment & crew.

The final result is the sequenced combination of each of those scenes, after shooting, special effects, and editing - into the integrated whole that tells a tale; entertains us; frightens us; makes us laugh or cry, think or angered. A sequence of small snippets building into a powerful whole.

In a well-made film every piece is contributing to the overall effect. Nothing is extraneous; nothing detracts.

One of the lesser-known roles in film-making - and TV, for that matter - has the job of making sure that everything flows smoothly from scene to scene. They ensure that a watch doesn't suddenly appear as an actor exits through one door and enters the next room because the scenes were shot days, weeks or even months apart. They ensure that a vase full of flowers don't change colour during a scene; or that a rower on a Viking long-boat in the 6th century AD isn't wearing spectacles!

This is the job of the continuity person. And their role is important, because they help to preserve the illusion on which the entire film or performance rests. We need to be immersed in a film; engaged in the story; not distracted by the flaws in the production. Any discontinuity causes us to step back out of the experience, and lose our engagement.

Such disruptions to the flow of a performance ruin our experience and irreparably harm our perception of its quality and value.

The same thing happens with our perception of an organization when one interaction is discontinuous or inconsistent with another. This may be the rude delivery guy juxtaposed with the friendly sales assistant; or the unexpected charges added to a transaction after a smooth online ordering process.

The question is: who's looking after continuity at your organization? Who's job is it to ensure that the spell is never broken? Who's making sure that all of the touch-points and all the separate interactions we design and deliver over time fit together seamlessly, without gaps or inconsistencies?

Who's your continuity person?

What experience designers can learn from the Mini...

The very first car I owned was a Mini. That was back in 1988, just after I finished high school. It was worth about $1,500; was British Racing green in colour; and stuck in third gear when it was cold. It didn't have air conditioning; there wasn't much room in it; and it was nowhere near as good as the cars my mates were driving.

I loved that car. It cornered like no car I've driven since - including two sports cars. The car body is wide, and low to the ground. You could throw it into a corner at 70 or 80km/h and it would just hug the road and turn like it was on rails. When they were first released in the '60s, they came with a guarantee that you couldn't roll one.

[Historical note: Turns out that last part wasn't entirely true, as my older brother demonstrated by falling asleep at the wheel and rolling it down an embankment. Ironically, he wasn't wearing a seatbelt, which saved his life: he fell flat across the front seats as the car rolled and hit a telegraph pole - across the roof. A seat belt would have held him upright in his seat, and his head would have been crushed by the telegraph pole. Instead, he walked away with a split forehead.]

The Mini Cooper S was also a very powerful little car. When combined with it's cornering and general handling, it made an awesome little race car. It's hard to believe when you see the parade of V8 cars going around the race-track today that the Mini won the Bathurst 1000 in 1966. Actually, Mini's came in the first nine places. If you want to know why your Holdens and Fords have good handling today, you can mark it down to the embarassment they experienced getting trounced in '66 by a little Mini :)

The Mini was, quite simply, an enormously fun car to drive. More than anything else, that sense of fun was what made the car unique - as much as its iconic shape.

So in 2002 when new owners BMW re-launched the Mini marque, there was a great deal of consternation felt around the world by Mini owners and drivers all terribly worried that the new version would have lost those characteristics that made the car unique.

A few years back a friend of mine was looking to replace his car - an Audi TT. He had a mind to get something a little more sensible, which in his case meant an Audi A4 Cabriolet. While he was in the process of looking he also figured he might as well test drive a few other cars that he had no intention of buying, but would like to drive at least once.

One of the cars he wanted a turn in was the new Mini Cooper. So he rolled up to the Mini dealership in his TT, wandered in and asked for a test drive. A few minutes later he was rolling out of the dealership in a Mini, ready to put it through it's paces.

Now, I'm not sure this is the same all over, but in Australia the car salesman (literally true) comes along with you. My friend was behind the wheel; salesman in the passenger seat. Away they go.

My buddy drove that car around for a few minutes getting used to the handling (much better than his TT), the performance, brakes etc. But he wasn't really all that thrilled. He even said so to the salesman. To which the salesman replied: "You're driving it like an Audi. This is a Mini. Drive it like you just stole it."

Ten minutes after that he was filling in paperwork to buy it. After 40 years Mini had changed a lot in their car: but they retained the essence of what made the original such a joy to drive. And in doing so, they're winning over a new generation of enthusiastic car owners.

The lesson here is that, having gone to so much trouble to design and build a product that creates a unique, highly-valued experience, it's possible to reinvent the product without losing touch with the core elements of the experience that made it successful.

They're not 'volunteers'...

The October 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review carries a feature story on the ways in which organizations can harness the power of the customer-base to enhance the product or service on offer. The article: "The Contribution Revolution" by Scott Cook - sounds like a good article on the use of customer engagement in business, but instead highlights the lack of understanding of social media in business.

We'll get to the negative aspect of the article shortly. On the plus side The Contribution Revolution puts forward a model for a 'user contribution system' - new phrase; makes a good TLA - UCS. The UCS describes the different types of user contribution - active/passive; aggregates content/stuff for sale/behavioural data/resources. Utilising the power of such contribution can provide companies with a number of solid, fundamental benefits:

• Reduced costs
• Increased scalability
• Competitive advantage

The article goes on to talk about the ways in which user contribution can help your company. These include:

• customer service
• marketing
• employee support (intranet-based)
• capital resources
• design and development
• production

There aren't really any great surprises in here for anyone familiar with social media and customer engagement, with the possible exception of 'capital resources'. So lets take a more detailed look at that item.

Capital Resources
The example offered here is Skype. Their voice-over-IP service was built using existing infrastructure - the Internet - and relies on the processing capacity of your computer instead of needing network infrastructure of their own. This is one notion of social media or user contribution that isn't widely discussed: in addition to contributing their own time, ideas, and passion - they also bring their own hardware infrastructure to the party.

This is true of all the video uploaded to youtube: the production work - what there is of it - is carried out on the contributors' own equipment. It's true of the applications submitted to Apple's appstore (for iPhones and iPod Touch) and those in use on Facebook - strong contributors to the value proposition of those services.

The bad part...
OK, so far we've seen a fairly uncontroversial discussion of the ways in which an organization can open up it's boundaries a little and reap some of the rewards discussed above. However, let me come back to the article title, in full this time: "The Contribution Revolution: letting volunteers build your business".

The choice of 'volunteers' as the label to apply to contributors in this context is rather unfortunate. It reinforces an 'us' and 'them' mentality that is at the heart of many organizations' difficulties in understanding the power of customer engagement strategies and the use of social media.

It explains why the section on Customer Service talks about company-sponsored forums rather than strategies for going out and engaging with customers wherever they may happen to be. This is why we see companies struggling to stem a tide of negative sentiment through strategies centred on the creation of 'controlled' public spaces. The aim is to control the message rather than to seriously understand the issues and address them. And companies are scared of such negativity in the public domain; they don't understand the frustration that drives such negativity; and so they assign reasons and motivations that speak to this lack of understanding rather than recognising the root cause lies with them.

It also explains why the article doesn't talk at all about customer engagement occuring beyond the bounds of the organization in channels such as Twitter. To be honest, the article doesn't cover engagement strategies at all. It doesn't cover the need for authenticity and transparency in customer engagement: look at the recent farce perpetrated by the National Australia Bank with their uBank social media experiment; or the robot-like early attempts by Telstra on Twitter. At least Telstra seems to be improving (@bigpondteam) in that issues are no longer being shuttled off-channel to be dealt with 'quietly'.

To characterise the social media and co-creation movements as a form of volunteerism is ludicrous. These trends represent a blurring of the lines demarcing the boundaries of traditional businesses. They represent a change in the economics of product and service design, and manufacturing; a fundamental shift from concrete and discrete corporate entities to networked entities whose boundaries are amorphous at best.

Willy Wonka for the Age of Information

Over the past couple of months I've had the opportunity to do a lot of thinking about how various companies conceptualize, design, produce, market & support their products and services. I've being doing this as part of the preparation for my presentation at ozIA 2008, but also as a more general exercise in my work as a user experience strategist and architect.

I've taken time to look at how companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Nokia shape their strategies and what the future looks like for these companies. I've also looked at the different ways in which these companies position themselves with respect to that future. And it's been interesting to note that a lot of these companies use scenarios as a planning device.

The Nokia Morph concept, which I showed at ozIA 2008, is a good example. The video shows off a concept of what a consumer electronics device might look like in 10 years time, when nanotechnology has been commercialised; gestural interfaces and direct manipulation are the norm; and the physical world is overlaid constantly with the information shadow of the objects that make it up.

Nokia use this concept in several different ways:

• as a means of galvanising efforts within the organization towards enabling the future as it is envisioned in the concept;
• as a means of communicating in concrete terms the skills, technologies and capabilities staff and departments will need to master in the coming years - both singularly and collectively - to bring that vision to fruition; and
  
• as a means of communicating to us, the public, a possible future in which Nokia plays a more central role in our day-to-day lives.

We were fortunate enough to see August de los Reyos from Microsoft's Surface team provide us with similar insights into the way Microsoft envisions the future of computing. It shares many of the same traits as Nokia's vision, although it takes place at that intersection between business and intelligence.

It isn't necessary to buy in to every aspect of these futuristic concepts - either in the detail or the trajectory - in order to appreciate the fact that these organizations are plotting a course towards a brighter future and asking us to come along for the ride.

But then there's Apple: a company standing apart who's not only leading the way at the present, but demonstrating - through it's new products being released each day - that the future may not be what we expect. That futuristic concepts give us a glimpse of something ultimately unsatisfying on their own.

No, rather than espouse or articulate a vision for the future Apple sets about changing our present. We are not given any insight behind the process; no sneak peaks; no road maps. Instead we are presented with a seemingly endless stream of hand-crafted, unique experiences, that change the way we interact with the world. Steve Jobs has turned Apple into Willy Wonka's Cholocate Factory, and we are left peering through the locked gates of 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino waiting for the next piece of magic to be released.

Apple product releases are anticipated, discussed, debated, dissected and anticipated some more. Like Willy Wonka's "Ever-lasting Gob-stoppers" we never quite learn the secret of how they're made, but we know we want them, and so does the rest of the world. In the meantime, Mr Wonka (aka Steve) has moved on to the next surprise.

The role of the 'future concept' is not invalidated by the success of Apple's genius design approach; nor has the use of such concepts guaranteed the deliverable of ground-breaking products for the likes of Microsoft or Nokia. However, since not all companies have a Steve Jobs at the helm, it's nice to know they're using the tools at their disposal to work towards designing a better future for us regardless.

Questions to ask for any UX project

A question was asked recently on the IA Institute mailing list which read:
"...they asked if I can give them the top 20 recommendations of things to consider or do for every web site they approach. I am struggling to figure out where to even start as I tend to approach each project differently with some general guidelines in mind but I am not sure how to pass on or teach that to the team."

Here's the list I proposed in response, and I think it's a good list of questions a UX team should consider for any project they undertake. Although it wasn't what the OP had in mind, my list seems to have hit the money as far as other UX professionals are concerned.

1. What is the purpose of the site as far as the business/organization is concerned? Sales? Marketing? Service channel? Entertainment?
2. Who will use the site?
3. What will those people be trying to do on the site?
4. For each of those things, how do they think about those tasks?
5. Where are those people likely to be when attempting to do these things (home, work, on a bus or at a cafe) and what will they likely have access to (computer, laptop, mobile etc)
6. Is the organization the only one offering these services/tasks? If not, how will you differentiate yourself from the competition?
7. If you are the only organization offering it, what will you do really well to make it difficult for someone else to do the same thing?
8. What are the things 'behind the scenes' that need to take place in order for the site to do what it needs to do?
9. For each of those things, is the organization up to the challenge?
10. When these people use the site, what perception do you want people to take away?
11. In considering that perception, how will you design the visual elements, the content, the interaction, the customer service, the functionality, and performance to make that perception a reality?
12. What site structure will best support the tasks your visitors need to undertake? And how will they move from one task to another?
13. If people arrive at your site somewhere other than the home page, how will you provide them context and communicate both intent and possibilities?
14. How will people find your site? And how do the activities you undertake to encourage them tie in with your other design consideration?
15. How will people engage with your company? Will you engage with them openly in environments like twitter, or in one-way mechanisms like email or enquiry forms?
16. What search functionality will you provide to help people find things on your site?
17. Including your search, what will you measure, analyse and track to help you determine the success or failure of your site?

Now, the list was thrown together and doesn't really have the structure I'd normally prefer, but then UX strategy tends to be an exercise in integrating capabilities and strategies from across an organization and melding these together into a coherent approach to delivering something meaningful to your audience.

Point 1 addresses high-level organizational goals. What's the "big picture" purpose of the site.
The answer to this question should seem fairly obvious when you hear it, but it's important to ask it, have the client think about it, and provide a response. The purpose of the site should also directly contribute to one of the organization's overall goals. If it doesn't, then why go to the effort?

Points 2 & 3 ask for information about the intended audience for the site/service. The answer can come from your Marketing team, or the Brand Manager, or Product Manager, or eCommerce Manager etc etc. The point is: you should have a clear idea of who the site is being targeted towards and why they'd use it - before you begin.

Answering points 4 & 5 usually requires some research. How much research depends on how well you know and understand the audience groups identified in 2.

Points 6 & 7 deal with competitive positioning and competitive advantage. These are business concepts that should have formed part of the thinking behind the original site concept, but sometimes an organization will come up with an idea without surveying the landscape for possible competitors.

Points 8 & 9 deal with organizational capabilities, infrastructure, resources, people, processes. Some people think of these as competencies, but that's a notion we'll have to tackle some other time. The questions here ask whether or not the organization can execute the intent of the original concept.

Points 10 & 11 relate to your organization's brand value and the core of the user experience you want to deliver. What is the essence of your organization? How would you like people (customers, staff, the public-at-large) to think of you?

Point 12 is a broad-swipe question relating to the information architecture for the site.

Point 14 needs your marketing & communications people to think about how they're going to go about attracting people *from your target audiences* to the site.

And then Point 13 ties those two activities together to ask how you're going to accommodate those people when they arrive at your site, but not necessarily where you expected them.

Point 15 refers to your customer service offering, but also refers to issues around ongoing issue identification & resolution; product/service design for future iterations; alternative marketing & communications channels; and how you draw that arbitrary & imaginary line that delineates "them" and "us". To what extent will you include existing customers in the design of future products? To what extent will you incorporate customer input into the choice & design of componentry or functionality?

Point 16 is fairly self-explanatory, and is related to both 12 & 14.

And finally, 17 should identify any key success indicators; data needed for ongoing assessment & improvement programs; and data needed to learn more about your audiences.

So, our UX strategy touches on and incorporates elements of operations and strategy from Marketing, Brand Management, Corporate, IT, Service, Product Management, Engineering, Logistics and Communications. Essentially everything: because *everything* is what affects your customer's experience with your organization.

I wasn't the only one to respond to the original question...here are some of the follow-on comments related to the list I offered above...

Daniel Szuc, Apogee HK:

"Quick Suggestion : http://www.usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines.html

Note -- you can follow all/some the guidelines (as listed above) and sadly still end up with a product that may not have value to both business and/or target users.

So this is where Steve's list becomes important as it allows the business to ask some of the more "strategic" questions up front to determine the who, what and why, understand value proposition, before moving into the design, IA and writing the content. Its the beginnings of a due diligence :)

Stephen Collins, AcidLabs (edited slightly):

Steve's list is ... absolutely what you should be showing people in terms of their building an understanding of UX strategy. While IA/UX does have aspects that can be codified, you're much better off approaching the whole question the way Steve has, addressing user types, needs and tasks as well as business positioning and differentiation.

Really good UX ... is often more about business and customer strategy applied to the web, rather than menus, navigation and the like. Those things are obvious outcomes, but the drivers should be very much business outcome and people focussed, rather than, for example, expressing the org chart in the web site structure (a mistake I have seen too often)."

And I should thank Stephen for providing the suggestion to transfer the original discussion-list response into this blog post.

If you're interested in hearing me talk about UX strategy in a bit more detail come along to this year's Oz-IA conference in September. Although the schedule is yet to be confirmed, we can always find a corner to chat in!