For corporations, their mantra was different. It was “we know our customers” (this is good, unless you really don’t know what you think you know!). Ideas were drawn on whiteboards, product teams put together and we were promised a beta before the next board meeting. Four months later, it was doing it all over again—this time with more gusto, shinier graphics and extra features. While this made everyone look productive, customers never saw the value in just another “me too” product and time and money was wasted with another unsuccessful product.

In the old days, there was little or no shown empathy for the customer, plans were constructed based on assumptions and gut instincts, and “testing” meant QA and a beta release. Recently, a new paradigm shift has taken place that challenges our old ways of doing things and brings laser focus to customer needs. This customer-centered approach is accompanied by a no-waste policy and ferocious rapid product iteration.

“Business as usual” is slowing changing with the help of three methodologies: Design Thinking, Customer Development and Lean Startup. They are practices that provide a road map to building successful companies and products on purpose rather than by chance. These three methods have so much in common with each other that upon learning about them for the first time, you can’t stop to wonder — “Aren’t they all talking about the same thing?”

Rather than giving a comprehensive analysis of each discipline, I thought it would be helpful to discuss their similarities, emphasizing a new chorus of ideas coming from academicians, designers, corporations and entrepreneurs.

Design thinking has received the most media coverage in the last year with several books out by well known design industry veterans like Tim Brown of IDEO and b-school revolutionaries like Roger Martin. Customer Development and Lean Startup seem to be the new kids on the block, but are gaining attention as tech startups in particular, strive to be more agile, faster to market and more innovative in a world that is increasingly competitive and hungry for all things tech.

While Design Thinking probably isn’t what entrepreneurs think of first when formulating their company’s plans, many larger companies such as GE and Procter & Gamble and business schools like UC Berkeley and University of Toronto have adopted it and made it a part of their curriculum. Even non-profits are using Design Thinking in an effort to help local businesses pick up distressed cities hit hard by the recession.

A close cousin to Design Thinking is Customer Development. Customer Development is a business model for early stage companies first introduced by retired serial entrepreneur and UC Berkeley professor, Steve Blank. Customer Development is promoted as a risk reduction methodology for early stage startups. However, Customer Development isn’t only for entrepreneurs. Its four step approach of Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer Creation and Customer Development can just as easily be applied to any product initiative.

Lean Startup is as the name suggests, about eliminating waste. Waste may be defined as “any human activity which absorbs resources but creates no value.” Lean Startup takes Customer Development and Agile development and combines the two to produce low-burning, fast-releasing, iterative product development. The term was first coined by Eric Ries (a student of Steve Blank) and was born out of three trends:

• The use of open source and free software services
• Agile development methodologies
• Rapid customer-focused iterations

Lean Startup can be used by startups as well as product development teams looking for an efficient, low-burn, customer-goal oriented methodology.

Design Thinking, Customer Development and Lean Startup are summarized as follows:

• Design Thinking – Innovate via customer empathy and rapid prototyping
• Customer Development – Test your assumptions
• Lean Startup – Stay quick and agile with low burn

While they might seem to be saying completely different things, the means to arriving at their messages is more or less the same. In fact, all three teach the following:

Learning and Discovery
If all three practices have anything in common it’s that they are organized around continuous learning and refinement. Many startups might balk at the idea that their first priority be to learn. After all, who has time to learn when there’s a product to be built! They tend to approach it backwards by building the product or service first, and then learning. Unfortunately, by that time they’ve probably burned through all their cash and it’s too late to take advantage of any lessons learned.

All three methodologies put emphasis on defining what the issues are and for who, and doing research up-front before any product launch. The idea is to guide product design on the deeply understood needs, behaviors and attitudes of the customer, not on technology, business needs or on gut instinct. Bottom line: before any building begins, it needs to be proven that a product would solve a problem for an identifiable group of users.

Direct Observation
Steve Blank calls this “getting out of the building”. You have to talk to and observe real people if you want to get real feedback on your business or product assumptions. While surveys and focus groups are helpful, there’s nothing that matches the benefits of being face-to-face with a complete stranger from your target audience. Surveys are helpful, but you’re missing all the hundreds of nuances and ways human beings communicate frustration or pleasure through body language and verbal cues.

Failing Fast
All three practices emphasize failing early and quickly. All three suggest an ideation period where you develop hypotheses and test them rigorously. This enables you to not only fail cheaply, but also to expand and refine ideas via multiple iterations and feedback from your end-users. The idea is to eliminate all the larger issues early while it’s still cheap to do so. Failing isn’t bad as long it’s done quickly and early in the process. In fact, not failing enough in the beginning could be a sign you’re not testing your assumptions well enough.

Test Your Assumptions
Always test your assumptions. Why? Because the sooner you realize a hypothesis is wrong, the faster you can pivot. Eric Ries explains “by testing, each failed hypothesis leads to a new pivot, where we change just one element of the business plan (customer segment, feature set, positioning) but don’t abandon everything we’ve learned.” Many entrepreneurs and business leaders don’t like to test their hypotheses out of fear of being wrong, especially after having already committed several weeks of time and money. All three camps ask, “Why build a company or product on myths when it can be built on facts and knowledge? And anyway, what’s the point of building a product that nobody wants?”

The lesson: test your assumptions every inch of the way and increase your chances for success exponentially. Any company that doesn’t test their assumptions on a continuous basis is simply rolling the dice. While you’re doing it, test for customer validation, usability and feasibility.

Iterative Development
Lastly, all three methods are in agreement when it comes to iterative development. Iterative development allows you to to improve a concept or product in short correcting cycles. Iterations are done quickly with the idea that a concept gains refinement over several re-designs. An example of an iterative cycle is: ideation-design-test-refine (repeat).

While there are many similarities to all three methods, there are also unique elements to both Customer Development and Lean Startup. In general, Customer Development focuses on providing constant feedback, while Lean Startup takes the feedback and goes a step further by applying it to the actual workings of a startup (e.g., technology choices and software development practices). With Design Thinking, the emphasis is mostly on innovating and not surviving.  Nevertheless, Design Thinking also works well on a limited budget and resources, and is excellent for solving “wicked problems” (survival being one of them).

Product and Customer Development Teams
Customer Development suggests that startups have two teams: one for customer development and the other for product development. In reality, they both feed each other to influence decisions, but with Customer Development what product people would normally call the “discovery phase” is done by the customer development team on a continuous basis. This frees-up the product team to focus on the user experience and build while the customer development team provides constant end-user feedback.

MVP (Minimal Viable Product)
Both Customer Development and Lean Startup methods stress the importance of building a “minimal viable product” or one that fulfills the greatest number of customer needs with the least amount of features. If you’re a software engineer, this is music to your ears. The trick is finding the right balance. Too many features and you run the risk of burning through cash and burning out your product team. Too few features and you run the risk of not finding, disappointing or losing customers.

Taking Advantage of Free Stuff and Agile Management Practices
In the past, companies relied on waterfall development practices and licensed software to build their products and services. To counter these time and money burning methods, Lean Startup advocates the use of Agile product development where product builds are done in “sprints” within days or even hours. It also encourages the use of open source technology.

Resources:
The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Successful Strategies for Products that Win by Steve Blank

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development by Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits

The Lean Startup – Low Burn by Design not Crisis by Steve Blank and Eric Ries

The Lean Startup Wiki

Achieving Flow in a Lean Startup by Ash Maurya

What is Lean about the Lean Startup by Eric Ries

The Promise of the Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Lean Thinking by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones

Fast Company: Design Thinking… What is That? by Mark Dziersk

Design Observer: What is Design Thinking Anyway? Roger Martin

Harvard Business Publishing: Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You by Peter Merholz

New York Times: Welcoming the New, Improving the Old by Sara Beckman

BusinessWeek: How to Nurture Future Leaders by Venessa Wong

Business Week: How Business is Adopting Design Thinking by Venessa Wong

Business Week: Design Thinking Can Be Learned Interview with IDEO cofounder, David Kelley

Wall Street Journal: Inspired Design is Essential—and All Too Rare by Gary Hamel

Related Posts:
Design Thinking 101

Tips for Startups

The In-House Design Team
If you have an in-house design team, they are probably your greatest asset for quick turn-around of marketing materials, website updates and presentation graphics. You might also have one or more “product people” on staff who specialize in user experience design, visual design, product management or all the above. These folks are (hopefully) user or customer experts and thoroughly understand both the company’s business goals and their users’ goals.

Good in-house product people have accumulated countless hours studying the needs, behaviors and attitudes of the customer/user in order to provide the best experience for them. They are an investment in time and education with the result that they know the product inch for inch just as a sailor alone out at sea knows his vessel. Companies like in-house design teams or individuals because they are product masters and will probably stick around for at least a few years.

But like everything, in-house teams don’t come trouble-free. In-house design teams and individuals can become stale and dispassionate especially if office politics has got them down. Motivation is typically the hardest for staff designers who over time can lose inspiration and their ability to think out of the box. One person described it like eating at the same restaurant everyday. Coming to the same job and challenges everyday can eventually lack excitement and mental stimulation.

It’s not uncommon for employees (designers included) to be too close to a project for an extended amount of time and lose sight of what’s important. Being too close to something, they are blind to other possibilities and may seek opinions from outside. Companies will spend thousands of dollars to have brand firms remind them what it is they do for a living. Seeking fresh eyes is one of the biggest reasons companies invest in outside design help.

The Design Agency
Companies hire design agencies above all, because they are perceived as having almost magical powers. Agencies are responsible for things like memorable ad campaigns, tag lines that stick, saliva-inducing graphics, jaw-dropping interaction and generally, making a bunch of techies and sales guys look “cool”.

Design agencies know human emotion, how to manipulate it and drive it to bring sales. They know that at the end of the day, it’s not about how it looks or works but how it “feels”, because humans are wired for emotion. Producing a good feeling is a direct route to winning the mind and heart of every user and customer.

Successful design agencies typically have years of experience, have people who specialize in every aspect of the design process and are driven not only by profits but by any projects that will enhance their portfolio and win them awards. They can bring a new sense of passion to a project, come up with whacky out-of-the-box ideas and help drive a company toward innovation. While not being “product experts” from the get-go, they are quick to learn and may even have the tools and drive to dig deeper than a staff employee might.

However, design agencies are viewed as expensive especially in comparison to an art school graduate willing to do the same logo for 1/10 of the cost. Like any business, they have overhead costs to cover and will typically have several specialists involved on one project.

There is quick turn-around in some agencies and the Creative Director or Senior Designers will sometimes begin a project and then hand-off the rest to junior designers or interns to complete. This can sometimes result in less-than-stellar work. I once went for an interview at a very large and well-known design agency to find that most of the staff (several floors of the building) were in their early 20s. What it indicated to me is that the agency was investing in selling, not designing.

Design agencies usually require a “discovery phase” that enables them to get up to speed with the business and user goals. While this is a necessary step in order to design what’s right for the company and customer, this sometimes frustrates stakeholders who see no immediate return on their investment.

Lastly, design agencies typically won’t work on-site, only coming in for meetings. This is one reason why some companies choose to hire freelancers.

The Freelancer
Freelancers are known for their flexibility. On one end of the spectrum there are “consultants”. On the other end, there are “designers for rent”. One will provide well thought-out analysis and design strategies, while the other will be content working on whatever is placed in front of them. Their prices range from just below agency fees to designers just starting out willing to work for close to free. Freelancers offer companies a way to get immediate design help without committing to long-term financial burdens and employee relationships.

A consultant, like agencies, has worked in many different client situations and can bring a fresh view to any project. A good consultant has worn many hats in his or her career and probably has experience spanning product, marketing, engineering and design. They may specialize in one area whether it be interaction design, visual design, web design, mobile apps or working with startups. They see themselves as craftsmen and are eager to share their expertise and experience.

A less seasoned designer may see themselves as simply offering “services”. That is, it’s their job to be there on-site fulfilling whatever task is assigned to them. They are typically very agile and work on an hourly basis. They come into projects like rescue workers, filling in for other designers or offering a helping hand when deadlines approach and things get crazy.

Working with freelancers can also have its challenges. Over time, a company might find they’re investing too heavily in a consultant becoming a customer expert. While there are some situations where this is acceptable, it might be better for the company to just hire someone full time in order to have the customer expert on staff where they always know to find him or her. Consultants may also take a longer time than a design team would to complete design phases where many members working together would get it done faster.

A less seasoned freelancer, not having worked for a design agency or in-house design team before, might be too inexperienced. Less experienced freelancers will sometimes offer to skip important design phases and convince the client they’re a bargain by charging a minimal fee. Unfortunately–like the old saying goes–you get what you pay for and it might take you several junior freelancers and a lot of wasted money before you learn to call the professionals.

Project Examples
With all the pros and cons, there are certain projects and situations where one kind of designer or team is a better fit than the other. Below is an attempt to show the best match-ups.

I have less than $5,000 to spend on designing a new website for my company.
If that’s your absolute limit, your best bet is seeking out a junior freelance designer and planning on giving him or her a lot of direction.

We’d like to build a prototype to show investors.
A seasoned consultant is an excellent choice for this kind of project, especially if you find someone who has experience working with startups. They should be able to recommend a lean process that doesn’t burn through loads of cash and provide a process that validates customer interest.

We need a new corporate identity.
Design agencies are typically experts at this sort of thing and will probably have numerous portfolio examples.

We need someone to closely and constantly monitor the success of our product.
In-house, all the way.

We think the product could use some UI work.
“We think” means you’re not sure and need an expert. A consultant or interactive design agency will help determine what problems you may have.

We have a conference coming up and need extra graphics help.
Call up that freelance guy your buddy always uses.

We’ve had our heads down on this product too long and can’t see what needs to be done.
A design agency or consultant will bring clarity.

It’s Tuesday and I need this done by Friday.
Tough situation. You might try calling a freelancer to check their availability. Most agencies will politely decline without scheduling weeks in advance.

I have the design direction, I just need someone to flesh out the rest.
Try a freelancer.

We have several web assets that need to be maintained on a regular basis.
This might go to any of the groups but most likely, an in-house creative services team would be best.

Users are leaving once they get to the shopping cart page. Why?
A seasoned consultant would be best for this situation.

We need an eye-popping microsite to promote a new product.
Design agencies are masters at this sort of thing.

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Help! My Designer Wants a “Discovery Phase”

The method for building successful products should never, as product guru Marty Cagan likes to explain it, feel like playing darts blindfolded. With companies like IDEO, Cooper, Adaptive Path and 37 Signals sharing their industry secrets, there’s really no excuse anymore for building products haphazardly. It’s my hope the following will help, in some small way, to guide early startups on the right path to creating the next killer app.

Engineers Designer Wanted
10 years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for engineers to both design and build an application. “Graphic designers” were just starting to get their heads around the digital space and for the most part, products were designed and built from start to finish by engineers. While many products “functioned” correctly, often the result was a user experience that lacked empathy for the user (a design skill) and a frustrating process where everyone from product manager to CEO was at the mercy of the engineer’s discretion.

Flash forward to 2010 and what we find are designers doing a lot of the up-front work in order to ensure the usability and perceived value of a digital product. More than anything, what designers bring to a project at the beginning is insurance that what you’re about to build will be successful. How do they do this? They apply design thinking:

• Take risks at the early stages when there’s room for error
• Conduct research to understand the target audience’s goals, behaviors and attitudes
• Test ideas to gather immediate feedback and make any course changes early
• Challenge a product or service’s usability, feasibility and perceived value

All this begins before one line of code is ever typed. Rather than hiring a bunch of engineers to start building from the get-go, the focus is on product discovery via a high-fidelity prototype (HTML with light scripting or Flash) that mimics the user experience. Like building a house, the first step isn’t to begin pouring the foundation, but to work with the architects to create a plan and test the design (with a prototype) before the construction team shows up.

Start out with a good product manager and designer and consult the rest. Between your product manager and designer, you should be able to get your vision off and running, keep costs down and hopes up.

Fail quickly and early (and cheaply)
One of the design thinker’s mantras is “fail quickly and early.” That’s right, go ahead and fail—just do it while it’s cheap and easy to do so.

Prototypes, both low-fidelity and high-fidelity, are a great way to safely test out ideas early in the process. Have a whacky idea that might just be the next Twitter? Test it. Had a heated argument about the validity of a certain feature? Test it.

With interactive prototyping tools like Axure and the soon-to-be-launched Adobe Flash Catalyst, you can put together a wireframe prototype in no time in order to test your vision. And if your idea turns out to be a complete flop? Well…better now than later when it could cost you weeks of code or sending an apology letter to your user base.

Feasible, usable, valuable
So, you have a prototype that matches your vision perfectly and (in your mind) appears to be a Facebook killer. Now’s the time to be asking yourself the following:

Is the product feasible? Somebody grab the technologist because we need find out if what we’re proposing is even technologically possible or if we are light years away. Bringing a technologist into the equation early has both its advantages and disadvantages. In this case, it’s important to understand now, whether or not your concept has wings. A good technologist will also provide insight into what else is possible (i.e., “Did you know we could…”).

On the other hand, some technologists may have a narrow view of what’s possible and you can run the risk of killing innovation. The initial iPad feedback coming from the tech community is an example where technologists don’t see the value in what could be a game-changer for the industry. A good strategy in the early stages is to “shoot for the moon”, drafting plans that are creative and uninhibited by barriers (within reason, of course).

Is the product usable? You “get it,” but will your users? Designers like to use fancy words like heuristic evaluation to describe testing the usability of a product. Some quick heuristics to test are: user control and freedom, consistency, error prevention, efficiency and aesthetics. Again, a prototype along with direct observation of test participants are used to grade the usability of a product.

Is the product valuable? What is the perceived value of the product in the eyes of the user/customer? In other words, will anyone care? An invention only becomes an innovation once others recognize the value of it. Does the world need another Facebook or My Space?…probably not.

I (heart) users
Everyone knows the key to success is building a product people love. Steve Jobs likes to reminds us of this. Are Apple products more expensive that their competitors’? Sure, but it doesn’t matter. We still buy them.

According to the book The Design of Sites, there are four types of design styles. The first is company-centered design where the priorities of the company are put before those of the user. In return, little thought is given to what customers want to do. An example of this is making users register before giving them access to an application’s features.

The second style is technology-centered design. Here, technology is an end rather than a means of accomplishing and end. Just because you can build it, doesn’t mean you should or that anyone will want it.

Thirdly, there’s design-centered design. In design-centered design, “the needs of other people are given less importance than the creative and expressive needs of the design team.” An example is the designer who is only concerned with the emotional impact of the user experience and ignores other key elements such as usability.

Lastly, there’s customer-centered design. This is the sweet spot that “emphasizes customers and their tasks above all, and sees technology as a tool that can empower people.” While it’s important to meet business goals, it’s equally as important to show empathy for the user by deeply understanding their needs, behaviors and attitudes. Lose site of the user and you’re lost. In any case, if you build a product people love, many of your business requirements will already have been met.

Test it, test it, test it

Test it at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. A common misconception is testing wastes a lot of time and money. In the hay day when focus groups were lead by over-inflated marketing agencies, it did. Welcome to the 21st century. Usability testing can now be done in a variety of ways that are both relatively cheap and fast. Sites like UserTesting.com allow for quick turn-arounds and for about $50 a user, you can hire live participants to try out your product at your work place and gather insights. A morning of usability testing at about $150 (3 participants) is time and money well-spent assuring your team they’re on the right track. Learn to enjoy testing and do it frequently. Not only will you find it a nice distraction from looking at documentation and mockups all day, but it could save you a lot of money and everyone headaches along the way.

Build a minimal product
“Build half a product, not a half-ass product” – 37 Signals

Start by building a minimum product to ensure you can get something out sooner rather than later. Build a good foundation and add later as your product gains traction with your users. Many times I’ve witnessed what could’ve been a very nice product launch, turn into something that only the business owners thought was a success. The feeling is “We’ve worked very hard on this and we deserve to feel proud about it.” Unfortunately, your users could care less how many hours you’ve put into it. That’s why it’s important to plan well and bite off only as much you can chew.

“Perfection” is a word people don’t like to use in product meetings. It’s time to bring the perfectionists back with the caveat that the team work on less rather than more in order to achieve both a product that is elegant and do-able by the product team. In the long-run, you’re users will thank you with rave reviews and you can return the favor with frequent updates as you check-off one new feature after another.

Feedback comes in many flavors
While usability testing and free beta versions provide invaluable feedback to your product team, so does social media. Companies now have a variety of ways to gather feedback from their customers, whether it be comments to their blog posts, Twitter feed or Facebook page. Jump on the social media bandwagon early to pick up on the vibe from your users and get people’s reactions to your product early. Consider social media your focus group.

Common pitfalls
As mentioned at the beginning of the post, startups are often lead by people that might not have a lot of experience when it comes to product development. An MBA might buy you business credentials but that doesn’t necessarily equate to being a great product designer. Here are some areas entrepreneurs often get stuck:

“We’ll see what sticks”
The mindset is to throw several concepts at the wall like spaghetti and see what sticks with your users/customers. This brings us back to the throwing-darts analogy. The idea is to test all concepts before they reach your audience. Not only will this save you time and a wad of cash, but it will help maintain a fickle user base while you experiment with other ideas. “We’ll see what sticks” isn’t a plan, it’s a last minute desperate measure to find the right solution.

“Build it and they will come”
Just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should. Just like the Facebook example…does the world need another? Test your concept early to see if people care and whether or not it’s worth spending other people’s money on.

“We don’t have time for user testing”
With all the tools available for usability testing these days, there’s no excuse for not doing it. A little goes a long way with this one.

“We’ll let the users tell us what they want”
While usability testing offers an invaluable means for directly observing your users as they try out your product, it can also turn into a design crutch. Usability testing should only be used to confirm the validity of your concepts and not as a means to arrive to them. The customer doesn’t always know what they want.

U. of Product Design
Lastly, we’re fortunate to live in a time when knowledge is so easy to come by. Many of the top interactive design studios and universities offer courses for those who would like to become better product leaders. Here are a few, all located in the Bay Area:

Cooper Cooper | U
Adaptive Path In-house Training and Virtual Seminars
Silicon Valley Product Group Public Workshops
Stanford D. School Exec Ed

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Design Thinking 101
Help! My Designer Wants a “Discovery Phase”

Frustration runs both ways: designers are disappointed when the client doesn’t value the discovery phase. Client’s attitudes of just “seeing what sticks” or “build it and they will come” can seem naive and reckless to designers.

On the other hand, clients may interpret a discovery phase as “busy work”, a “nice-to-have”, “paralysis analysis” or even worse—a means for the designer to squeeze a few more dollars out of their budget! There might also be a feeling that designers are “artists” and their place isn’t in the conference room helping to strategize the best way to build their product or service. Whatever the reason or bias may be, there’s often confusion around what added value, if any, the discovery phase brings to a project.

Think of the discovery phase as laying the foundation for everything that follows: features, page flows, screen details, branding, copy, coding, launch dates, user traffic and ultimately, business success. Designers like to call this phase of product development “discovery” because what they’re doing is finding out what really matters. Most importantly they’re confirming that what matters to the client is in-line with what matters to the client’s users and customers. Through a discovery process designers are able to rule-out certain directions that show potential for failure and help increase chances for building a successful product. A professional designer isn’t just interested in creating something that looks good, but also something that functions well and that resonates with users and customers.

Some fears clients may have are that a discovery phase will take too long, cost too much and will only produce “opinions”. The attitude might be that any discovery phase should be done on the designer’s own watch and that it’s really for their benefit anyway.

While it’s true that a designer will need to spend some time getting up-to-speed with the client’s business, this is not their biggest challenge. More time will be spent understanding what the users’ needs, behaviors and attitudes are. You might be asking, “Can’t Marketing just provide that information?” Marketing can usually provide demographics, brand assets, copy and sometimes even survey results relevant to the project. However, Marketing may not have answers to specific questions around what kind of experience users are looking for. Also, what customers say is not the same as what they do. A discovery process may also include observing users in their own environment to gain more insight into what the user is thinking. Lastly, Marketing is often good at providing qualitative measurements, but not quantitative measurements such as how the user or customer “feels” about a particular feature.

Clients who wish to see product building initiated immediately may be aggravated by any extra time and money spent doing research. However, in the long run doing your homework could save a lot of time, money and maybe even the company’s life. Not only could it save a company from launching a product that nobody cares about, but it could also save a company from wasting resources in the more expensive coding phase of product development where the burn rate goes up. Another thing to keep in mind is that a discovery phase can easily be customized to match your budget and schedule. In this case, a little bit goes a long way and is exponentially better than doing no discovery at all.

The goal of the discovery phase obviously isn’t to share with the client information they already have (although it might help to confirm it). Typical deliverables include a competitive audit, personas, user scenarios, a project plan and a design brief.

A competitive audit is a deliverable that provides the client with information on what the competition or near competition is doing, what users are already accustomed to, and any areas for differentiation. It’s putting a magnifying glass to the competition and might even go so far as conducting usability testing of their products and services in order to find out what their customers like/dislike about them. Competitive audits are typically delivered with three sections with the first including a summary of the findings and recommendations; the second being a summary of each competitor’s site plus screenshots; and a third being a comparison chart which acts as a tally sheet for who has what. The idea is to not only identify what the competition has, but what they don’t have.

Beyond documentation, the discovery phase also is a time to create some great tools to aid the design process going forward. User experience designers find it helpful to use personas, or fictitious characters that personify user scenarios, to unify the product development team around a central vision and give a voice to the user. Personas are only half-made up—that is, they’re based on audience demographics and research. A product or service might have multiple personas each representing a different category of user. Nevertheless, there’s always 1-2 primary personas. Personas help the product team focus on who really matters versus trying to satisfy everyone. The persona’s demographics, needs, behaviors and attitudes are laid out on a single sheet of paper and taped to the wall for quick reference. It’s not uncommon for team members to challenge each other by asking what a particular persona would do in a given situation.

Lastly, a discovery process gives the designer time to gather technical specifications, prioritize and rate features, create schedules and summarize everything in a design brief—all which is important for demonstrating there’s a process, rallying the troops and making sure the design or build doesn’t go sideways.

Of course, there may be times when a discovery phase needs to be augmented with usability testing or another form of direct observation such as a day-in-the-life study. A new product or service always warrants a thorough discovery phase. If anything, it’s used to reduce the risk of designing and building something that nobody cares about. A discovery phase is also appropriate for re-designs, as the competition has mostly likely changed as well as the attitudes of users. What better time to make sure you understand your users and make any changes than when re-designing your product.

In summary the discovery phase helps to:

• Reduce risk
• Unify the product team under a central vision
• Provide context for the product team
• Advocate users’ needs, behaviors and attitudes
• Know the competition at a granular level
• Justify decisions
• Discover something the user or customer didn’t know they needed/wanted

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Design Thinking 101

It’s truly amazing the success Apple has had these last few years. I mean, I don’t have to tell you that people just love their stuff. Even their TV commercials give you a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing it’s an Apple ad and every time you’re about to hear an announcement from Jobs you can’t help to think, “Oh, this is going to be good!”.

Sure, they’ve had a few bumps in the road launching Mobile Me and the iPhone 3G, but hey, they’re Apple. Rest assured, they’ll fix it. Their products are also not cheap, but they’re just too good to pass up. And anyhow, when you’re a Mac user you wouldn’t think of buying anything else!

How’s your brand doing these days? If your IKEA, Amazon.com, BMW or another design-driven company you’re probably doing pretty well. Have you read that new book that just came out, “Do You Matter? How Design Will Make People Love Your Company”? It’s a good one.

Now, I’m not trying to toot my own horn here—since I am a designer by trade—but they make some good points in the book about design-driven companies and Apple’s success. One of the most important points they make is that you can’t maintain a business based just on spread sheets alone. This might sound a bit abstract to someone like you coming from a numbers background, but customers actually develop an emotional connection to a brand through touch-points or anything recognizable from your company that enters their five senses—everything from your logo to a customer support call.

The problem is you can’t quantify how someone “feels” about a product, service or brand. It gets even fuzzier when you consider that you don’t define your brand, the customer does. They do it, as an unpopular president would say, “in their hearts and minds.”

So how do you support a business on fuzzy math?

The authors Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery state:

“In business we tend to shy away from most things emotional. We’d prefer to rationalize, measure, process, and systematize. Ironically, we tend to put faith in things that are decidedly not humanistic: Science. Math. Machines. When the going gets gray, we sprint for black or white. But to be great at design, you need embrace the human condition and recognize that when it’s all said and done, this is what will you serve you the best.”

The best way is by creating experiences that your customers love, and design is the most direct route to enabling this. In other words, in order to have success you need to design the right experience.

“Schultz [Starbucks Founder and CEO] didn’t think he was in the coffee business, he was in the experience business, and the portal into that experience was a better cup of coffee in a carefully designed atmosphere.”

So how do you create the right experience? Well, it just so happens to that designers are pretty good at this. Many of us have built careers on not just building great customer experiences but being receptive to customer’s needs, desires, frustrations and pleasures. Not only are we concerned with how something functions but how it makes customers feel—their emotional response.

Designers at the end of the day ask, “OK, but how does the customer actually feel about the experience.” Where are the points of friction? Where is the sense of ease? Where is the soul of the product and how do we ensure that we don’t cut it out because we’d like to save an extra $.50 on manufacturing costs?

“You have to ask ‘What are the boundary conditions around that design that are going to break it if we keep trying to pull things out?’ The risk here is you take the soul out of the product. It takes a soft skill set, more of an art than a science, a sort of ‘just knowing’ what it is that’s making the product great and where those boundaries are. And, of course, that’s what makes most left-brain business people more than a little nervous.”

It makes them nervous because you can’t quantify a feeling, right? Fuzzy math indeed. The designer is not only an expert at reading people’s emotions but he or she also has many tools at his disposal to confirm what he suspects.

Take Web design for instance—when designing a better customer experience for an e-commerce site a strategic design process might include creating personas based on the target audience and putting them through different scenarios and tasks. Next, the designer might build a prototype and take the time to sit down and watch people go through the website noting frustrations, surprises or any mental hurdles. At the end, they might even ask “How did you feel after doing x,y,z?”

As designers, we take this kind of information, analyze it and apply it. We know that good design is an iterative process and that it requires constant vigilance and refinements.

This brings me to the last point, shouldn’t all company’s have a CDO (Chief Design Officer) or equivalent? Someone with the background and authority to help direct a company on all matters of design that effect the customer experience? Someone who can gauge your customer’s emotional response to your product and make iterative changes where needed? Think of what the American auto industry could do with a CDO?

I’ll leave the last word to S. Jobs (CDO, Apple):

“Here’s what you find at a lot of companies…You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

And so it goes…

They make the argument that if an Apple closed their doors tomorrow, people would care. And they’re right, people would care. For anyone who uses electronic devices on a daily basis, Apple makes life easier and more fun. Why? Because Apple cares about my experience. For them, it’s not about saving an extra $.50 cents on manufacturing costs or leaving out an important screen because the engineers deemed it too difficult to implement. Apple actually cares about me, the customer and they design all their products with people like you and me in mind.

In recent years, Web design has become a commodity. There are lots of great looking websites out there and if you can’t afford to hire someone to make it look pretty for you, you can always buy a template for a minimal cost and have someone modify it for you in Photoshop. Not only have visual design elements become a commodity but so have forms, newsletters, icons, Flash animation, blogs along with photos, illustrations, audio and video. Developing HTML has become an automated service with all the “you-send-it-we’ll-build-it” websites popping up around the globe.

So, how do you make your online business stands out if we’re all using the same stuff?

According to Brunner and Emery you do it by becoming brilliant at using design to provide an amazing customer experience and by building a company culture that supports it. The difference is in building an experience that resonates with the customer/user and you can’t do that if your focus is on something else.

Too often business leaders write content that only those in the field understand or care about. Too often engineers pour hours and money into features that no one wants to use. Too often graphic designers include gratuitous animation or design to please one person in the company. Who’s missing from the equation? The customer.

The customer/user doesn’t care about your ability to come up with 3 bullet points for everything, your technological brilliance at coding or all the time you spend in Flash to deliver cutting-edge animation. To them, it’s what they feel that matters. Was the experience easy? Was it frustrating and mentally demanding? Was there a feeling of trust at the end?

Brunner and Emery challenge us with the tough questions:

• • Do your customers/users care if you’re around tomorrow?

• • What kind of loyalty do your customers/users have?

• • Does your Internet experience make a positive emotional connection with your customers/users?

• • Does your product, website or brand add value to people’s lives? (i.e. that social networking site you were thinking of building)

• • Does everyone in your company realize to what extent they play a part in the total experience design? (that means you marketer, engineer, designer and business leader—at the end of the day we’re all designers)

• • Do your customers come back because they want to or because they have to? (any happy PayPal users out there?)

• • Are they ready to leave as soon as a competitor comes along? (in the online world that moves at broadband speed, this is all too common. As soon as you launch your new site, it’s a dinosaur. Better to have invested in more than just pretty graphics and “cool” features)

Building something that people love to use means paying attention to every detail and nuance, not just keeping a features requirement list. It means creating an iterative process and actually going to the trouble of creating personas that humanize the design process and taking them through tasks and scenarios and prototypes. The best way to know how people will react to your Web design is to observe them using it and this calls for usability testing where you actually watch a user as they click through the process. Not only is usability testing good at the beginning, but after you launch to test how your online experience continues to rate or those of your competition. This isn’t just about design, it’s smart business strategy.

If you’re trying to earn a living in the online world, you can’t afford to be a commodity. “If your company doesn’t embrace the concept of design…the kind that embodies a positive and emotional customer experience, then it could be on life support sometime soon.”

It might be a good time to carry over this old brick and mortar adage to the online world:

The customer is always right.