Messaging Apps as the Operating Systems of the Future

Photo: Aiden Kenny

I attended an interesting presentation by Paul Adams and Emmet Connolly at the ‘Intercom On Product’ event in the Mansion House on 9 September 2015. Their topic was messaging apps as the operating systems of the future. They outlined three noteworthy factors deserving our attention which are now setting the stage for what they posited as an oncoming ‘post-app era’.

1. The dominance of messenger apps, which are become better attuned to how we operate as social animals.
2. The improvements in contextual predictive systems, such as Android Now and Siri, which are bootstrapping themselves to ever-more sophisticated levels. The availability of ever-larger datasets is accelerating the pace and capability of global-scale machine learning projects. 
3. The rise of push-button service ecosystems, such as Uber. In which the app is merely one surface aspect of the greater ecosystem — which is the true product.

As these three inter-related strands converge they will negate the need to install and use many of the kinds of apps that we all regularly use today. These three shifts in technology and culture have fare ranging implications for us designers. So, to help clarify my own understanding, I have summarised Adams’ main points from his presentation and his earlier writings on the Intercom blog. Some of the key ideas discussed were the role of bots and affordance of card-based interactions.

Photo: Aiden Kenny

Adams’ advises that it is critical for designers today to think in terms of overarching systems, rather than of individual destinations such as apps. For the reason that we should not expect our primary computing paradigm today – that of a screen of apps on a sheet of glass – to persist over the long term. Products and services are already morphing into ‘digital fluids’ that flow into different forms conforming to the affordances of their destinations. That process is only going to accelerate.

Change is one of the defining attributes of the Internet. Today this implies that UX and UI designers have much to learn from the skills and mindsets of adjacent disciplines: such as animators because now they need to design for time, and architects because now they need to design for space. There are many hidden traps in continuing to use tools originally conceived for static design to now create experiences that have change, movement, transition, and flow as innate properties. We need to choose our tools carefully, or indeed build all-new tools fit for purpose.

Designers need to understand that we are in the midst of a transition from an ‘Internet Made of Documents’ into an ‘Internet Made of People’. We humans are social animals. So it should be unsurprising that the most successful Internet companies, services, and products are those that leverage our innate social nature. Adams sees the successful systems of the future as those that can best leverage our information to provide ever-more tailored feeds of personalised content. (Just don’t be creepy.)

Intercom innovate at the level of Product Strategy and Product Concept, and not at the level of User Interface. Adams works on the basis that we are still only in the earliest days of the Internet Era. So, as we collectively shuffle forwards out of the dark, we are going to need to rely less on existing design paradigms. More often we are going to have to rethink from first principles. That means there are now amazing opportunities to investigate, explore, define, and craft novel interactions and design patterns.

One design challenge is that to move large numbers of users along any technology innovation curve, it is often necessary to only introduce iterative changes, so that you do not break user’s existing mental models and habitual workflows. Designers and developers are often early-adopter personality types — eager to move fast and break things. We need to remember that most people are not. Even on a (relatively slow) one-year cycle time, changes to Apple’s iOS are still treated as suspect by many types of users.

Adams explores the idea of replacing a screen of apps with a design pattern based on cards. Cards are one of the atomic units of the web, as explained by Brad Frost. Cards can be considers as containers for content from any app. You can observe this today in the interactive notifications in iOS and Android. So that more often we do not need to open an app now to act. The notification itself can be the complete experience for many activities.

Interface of Facebook’s ‘M’ product.

Increasingly the content of cards and notifications will be brief conversations and interactions initiated by bots. Bots can communicate to users via messaging interfaces (think of Slackbot and Facebook’s prototype personal assistant ‘M’). Bots can already take on many basic interaction tasks, and so leave humans free to address more nuanced interactions. In future a considerable amount of our time spent interacting with companies will be communicating with such AI-enabled systems. Just as we all once had to acclimatise to ATMs instead of bank tellers, so people will adapt to this mode of interaction as well.

Facebook’s new ‘M’ product is one facet of their current initiative to overcome their lack of a native operating system. ‘M’ places a novel AI assistant inside their Messenger app. Users interact with the service using natural language texts. Currently this is only a beta service limited within a strict geographic area. At present the nascent AI still has to be supported by teams of humans to ensure it parses user requests correctly.

However, I wonder whether one master-stream of notifications could ever make sense to users? Even today, my full Twitter-stream is such an overwhelming juxtaposition of friends, bloggers, news organisations, apps, parody accounts, and much more, that it is essentially  unusable. So I depend upon my Twitter Lists to mentally shift contexts and to filter Twitter into a usable and beneficial service. I work with a different mindset, and range of potential actions, when I am reading my ‘Friends’ list than when I am reading my ‘Innovation & Ideas’ list. Classification tools such as Twitter Lists and Google+ Circles still seem to be more of a power-user preference. That said, lists are also a problematic design pattern in their own right. They make us define arbitrary categorisations. Unfortunately they need ongoing curation and regular maintenance to stay useful. Despite years of innovation and iteration no-one has truly cracked categorisation of social feeds yet.

Content within our apps is cumulative. Even the most diligent data-editors amongst us are always adding more contacts into our address books every year, following more people on social media, and accreting more connections on LinkedIn. These, and all the other data silos on our phones, represent ever-more opportunities for unwanted notifications. Any successful card-based interaction model is going to succeed or fail depending on careful tuning of the signal-to-noise ratio. Will that be better served by the user spending precious time curating and adjusting? Or will an algorithmic solution prove good enough? While we know that spending hours triaging email is neither an enjoyable activity nor a productive workflow, many people also spend blocks of time ‘going through Facebook’ or ‘getting caught up on Twitter’. These are the kinds of siloed activities that the proposed new interaction models seek to minimise.

How can design thinking help us to find the balance between people either achieving optimum flow and living in the moment with all timely and relevant information immediately at their fingertips, or descending into the near-adjacent possibility of existing in a state of permanent distraction?

One issue arising from the card-based systems discussed is – as they become optimised to present an ongoing stream of micro-events needing response or action – when will we get the time to sit, to think, and to process the inputs requiring more than immediate reactions? In one sense this is of course a personal question, relating to our own productivity habits and how mindfully we manage our time and our attention. That said it is also an issue that the technology industries need to address. If an ever-increasing number of notifications are not to overwhelm us, then automated filtering and prioritisation become critical problems to solve. Then we also need to consider whose algorithms do the filtering, and what do those entities gain from providing that service?

Adams poses these three questions:

• The first is will this new model operate at the level of the app, or notification or OS?
• Secondly, will these experiences occur in one consolidated stream, or in multiple streams?
• Thirdly, will that stream be owned at a company level, or as an open interoperable standard?

His point is that apps are changing; they are not siloed destinations anymore. Increasingly we engage with them across multiple surfaces: notifications, cards, and whatever comes next, etc. Designers ought to think of apps as publishing systems and not as a destinations.

Notes and Thoughts From The ‘Hidden Rooms’ Conference

I took part in Dublin City Council’s ‘Hidden Rooms’ conference in November. DCC convened more than 350 participants over two days to brainstorm 16 policy issues in a variety of interesting locations across the city. Each room was asked to formulate a pilot project that could be be actioned by DCC in 2015. I was asked to join room seven ‘The Rewarded City’, discussing ideas for incentivising and supporting creative entrepreneurs in Dublin‘s emerging cultural cluster.

On the topic of the Rewarded City 
The one quote that most resonated with me on the day was from Anne Miltenburg, the international contributor to the Rewarded City room. She outlined a massive challenge as: “how to make our cities hard-wired to accept new ideas more easily”.

That challenge is one of the major underlying themes of the Hidden Rooms event (and arguably of last year’s DCC/Pivot ‘Designing Growth’ event as well). It also segues with my own understanding of some broader DCC agendas. Although it is also worth noting Anne’s experience of the difficulties she outlined in trying to get some crowd-sourced innovation projects started in Amsterdam. Their Government believes that people doing things for themselves does not necessarily save any money. As the Government argues that they then have to ‘spend time monitoring what those people are doing’. So that becomes a disincentive for Governments to encourage such innovative, bottom-up activities.

Other interesting ideas that I took away from the conversations about the topic of rewarding creative entrepreneurs were that, as public bodies do not have much money, therefore they are reluctant to put any money that they do have into anything risky. So the State ought to focus to provide enabling mechanisms for creative entrepreneurs, rather than reward mechanisms. Creative entrepreneurs will create rewards, not accept them. Volunteerism is not the solution to anything (in the long-term). The strategic alignment of self-interest is what actually works. True creative entrepreneurs will say: ‘I am going to do this anyway whether you help me or not’. And paradoxically those are the people who get support.

Photo: DCC/Pivot Dublin

On the process and methodology
I have recorded some insights and lessons from the workshopping day of the event. Primarily I made these notes and observations as guidance for myself for whenever I am facilitating any similarly-structured brainstorming sessions in the future.

The central idea behind Hidden Rooms was to gather an interested cohort of people together to brainstorm ideas around key policy areas. With the intention of creating novel ideas unconstrained by the limitations of the perceived conventional thinking.

One insight shared with me about this kind of process and methodology was that ‘people can be enthusiastic and keen to take part; but not have the mental tools to take part effectively’. One participant  observed that in Ireland we do not have a history of working together in large groups. We tend to operate best in smaller groups, or in one-on-one scenarios. That is a general cultural limitation which we all need to overcome. One which initiatives like Hidden Rooms are intended to challenge.

One primary risk of this group brainstorming approach can be that he ideas which the group produce are either too naive or too top-level. That they are just variants of ideas the client has seen before, or tried already. Or that they are merely what the client might expect from a group which has only been thinking about complex multi-faceted issues for four or five hours. (In contrast with the deep domain expertise of the client.) I do not think that possibility was actualised in the outcomes from Hidden Rooms. That can only be known in the longer-term, when the number of initiatives and ideas that were fully implemented can be measured.

Another insight from the workshop day is that, to make ad-hoc interdisciplinary teams work most effectively within concentrated time spans, all of the participants would be best served with a comprehensive background briefing on the project; so that they have a clarified context to operate within. Otherwise, a substantial amount of time is needed simply coordinating the group around the specifics of the topic they are to address. That leads to the issue of what is the optimal amount of briefing time on the day? Working within a fixed timeframe, the ideal should be to maximise the amount of brainstorming time. A related question then is; how much pre-event briefing is too much? If you send people a comprehensive brief, of say ten-pages, will they all read it in detail beforehand? There is definitely a trade-off here.

It turns out that the expertise of the facilitator is hugely critical to the group successfully generating insightful Design Thinking outcomes. This may actually prove to be the greatest influencer on the outcomes within compressed timelines. The facilitator can cloud the issue easily if they do not actively listen to the group and follow the dynamic of the conversations. Yes, the day needs to be managed and the activities must progress within the allocated timeframe, but staying wedded to a predetermined agenda can prove counterproductive to this type of engagement, when conversations are still in flux.

You also need a domain expert in the room (in this case the DCC client). They need to provide the necessary context to anchor the new ideas being generated. But the intrinsic problem is that the expert also has a strong understanding of what is unlikely to work and what has being tried already — which can prove to be a limiting factor on idea generation. It is critical that the facilitator and domain expert work well together. They need to be in general alignment. They need to liaise and coordinate prior to the workshop to ensure that their goals and aims align.

How could the activities of the working groups in each room be improved for subsequent events? Would it be limiting to predefine the necessary sub-groupings in advance? That could ensure that each sub-group includes at least one person capable of taking on the ‘snowplough’ role (possibly an architect in the specific case of the Hidden Rooms remit) and one other person who is an experienced Design Thinking practitioner. Either of whom could run the cooperative idea generation process on their own, if necessary. That approach could either optimise efficiency or reduce spontaneity, so would depend on the personality and dynamics of individual rooms.

Update
DCC have now published the initial outcomes from Hidden Rooms on the Pivot Dublin site. The specific outcomes from the Rewarded City room are at this page.

The Next Challenges for ChangeLabs, IdeaLabs and DesignLabs

John Thackara gave a considered talk on ‘What Makes A Change-Lab Successful’ at Science Gallery on Friday 14 March.

His theme was that “to effect system-level change in health, energy, food, or mobility, a first step is often to reframe the question. Grassroots innovation is emerging wherever people seek new ways to meet their daily life needs. So the question becomes: what are the best ways to support, connect and amplify these experiments?”

John Thackara. Photo by Uros Abram

He began with an overview of what he has learned from his years working in this area. In recent years there has been a proliferation of ‘Labs’ across the world. They use many names: Change-Labs, Design-Labs, Ideas-Labs. As traditional models of economic development have come to an impasse, these labs are exploring new models. People are investigating how to build social capital.

What the work of these Change-Labs has demonstrated is that people have no problem generating lots of good ideas. The greater challenges follow on from the initial ideation process. The first challenge is how to choose the best ideas from those generated. The second challenge is how to take the next actions arising from those best ideas. For many interconnected reasons putting useful ideas into practice is a lot more difficult than anticipated. The third challenge is how to make all the ideas work together in a long-term ecosystem.

There was a definite sense of optimism meets realpolitik to his introduction. But that kind of reality-check seems unsurprising to me.

He looked at the contemporary research area of ‘Smarter Cities’. All cities are already rich in (often vernacular) service ecologies. Many of the solutions Change-Labs brainstorming today already exist. He advised Change-Labs that they need to get better at looking back in time and across to other countries and cultures for applicable solutions. True success lies in minimising the amount of times that people reinvent the wheel.

He asked how can a city be vital in ways other than spending money? Most cities do not acknowledge their hinterlands. They depend on them for the food, materials, and energy they need to survive. So it is worth investigating how to reconnect cities with the land.

Change-Labs try to foster trust to activate their projects. This takes time and effort. He advised that they ought to get better at connecting with the ‘trust that already exists in many local place-based organisations’.

Addressing the role of ‘Design Thinking’, his view is that designers add true value in moving the process from discussing things on to making things. What I call delivering tangibility

Thackara posed a set of questions challenging a common business orthodoxy that only activities operating at a vast scale generate the greatest value.

• What value can accrue from that which cannot scale?
• What value can accrue from within the local living economy. 
• So-called ‘wicked’ problems are more meaningful when they are “unique to here”. 
• What methods of collaboration will succeed within your specific context? 
• What coalitions and platforms are possible within your specific context? 

One particularly interesting statement was his observation that there are lots of one-person Change-Labs out there. “There are innovators everywhere.” How can we create informal social structures that will support those change agents? Otherwise he is concerned that they will burn-out without achieving their true potential. “Change is not a trick we find in a Lab; it needs social supports.”

At a macro level, he suggested that Change-Labs could contemplate how they operate as an integrated combination of: Space, Place, People and Time.

His key insight concerned the issue of project timeframes. Most Change-Labs think and act in short-term and medium-term timeframes, due to the political and cultural contexts they operate in. To effect more significant change they need to begin to act in medium-term and long-term timeframes. In practice this means that the people who finish a project are not those who instigate it. So Change-Labs need to build self-sustaining projects with longevity baked-in.

He identifies the greatest issue facing Change-Labs as that gap between creating the initial big idea and realising the intended long-term impact. Change-Labs have a two-to-five year interstitial period in which to build “coalitions of constellations” that they can work with to tackle their chosen problems.

Thackara’s thesis is that Change-Labs need to transition from their current output-based processes to interconnected ecosystem-based processes. He posited that to be more successful they need to learn how to build “mindful systems-based and time-aware processes” which come after their Design Thinking activities.

Given the research I have been conducting into this topic, Thackara’s experienced-based observations and high-level analysis does raise many valid questions for anyone considering applying Design Thinking to tackle complex problems.

Notes and Thoughts From The ‘Designing Growth’ Event

As part of Design Week 2013, Dublin City Council’s Pivot Dublin organised ‘Designing Growth’ – a panel discussion on how design could be harnessed to drive growth in Ireland. The event was promoted as “a discussion on ways to develop new and better public services, communication platforms, education and business models through design”. These are my notes from the evening’s discussion, along with some further thoughts on my ongoing investigations of Design Thinking.

Four of the five panellists were international speakers:
Marco Steinberg, Founder of Snowcone & Haystack
Robin Edman, CEO of the Swedish Industrial Design Foundation
Maureen Thurston, Design Principal at Deloitte Australia
Enrique Avogadro, Head of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Design District

The fifth panellist was John Moran, the Secretary General of the Department of Finance. Representing the beneficiaries, rather than the providers, of ‘Design Thinking’, John was asking the skeptical questions about what precisely that methodology could add to the public sector and to broader state policy.

Panel of speakers lined up & ready to go at #designgrowth pic.twitter.com/8JZFxmNW9k
— Martina Quinn (@MartinaPQuinn) November 6, 2013

Ali Grehan, Dublin City Architect and Pivot Dublin representative, set the scene by positioning the evening’s event as the starting point for a conversation about a national vision for design. She expressed her belief that Ireland needs to develop a National Design Strategy which addresses our specific context and our particular needs. She stressed that in forming such a strategy we should learn as much as we can from international best practice: hence the panel of international speakers.

Some initial definitions of ‘Design’ and ‘Design Thinking’

Steinberg — Design brings coherence to things. In terms of public policy, ‘Design Thinking’ is another tool to better ensure that the policies you build are robust and fit for purpose. Design Thinking is useful for creating simpler solutions (that is, better solutions). In many regards designers can contribute like economists and engineers, by adding their expertise into a collective process. For example, one of their useful roles on a team is to be the ‘proposition-based’ thinkers; in counterpoint to the ‘analysis-based’ thinkers.

Edman — The key differentiator of ‘Design Thinking’ is that you do not just step through your process and once you have ticked-off all of the actions on your checklist then you are done. With Design Thinking you are stepping into the unknown: you need to be brave. You must iterate and learn as you go along, without knowing precisely where the process is eventually going to lead you.

Thurston — The value of ‘Design Thinking’ can be as an alternative to traditional problem-solving methodologies. More people need to understand and appreciate the values and utility of Design Thinking within the earlier ‘Problem-Finding’ and ‘Problem-Defining’ stages; before using it in to the more expected ‘Problem-Solving’ stage.  A key benefit of teaching people to use Design Thinking is they then learn to approach problems with an open mind, rather than relying upon bringing along their pre-considered solutions (even when such solutions have proved effective for similar problems in the past).

On Promoting Design

Edman’s argument was to stop attempting to promote the Irish design industry and Irish designers. Do not elevate them onto a pedestal and then promote them using the lingua franca of the design sector. Rather you need to promote ‘Design’ by focusing on the buyers of, and the users of, design. (At the same time, he added that the Irish design sector does need to raise its game and learn to position its design services at a higher level, so that it can then become a welcomed contributor to government policy-forming.)

We are talking about #design and very quickly also about start-ups, beta projects and making policy #designgrowth @PivotDublin
— Flora Fleischer (@Daydreamer2105) November 6, 2013

Steinberg on Public Sector and Policy

In my view, Marco Steinberg was the most engaging of the four ‘Design Thinking’ panelists on the night. His particular areas of focus seemed most concerned with public services.

“Redesigning public service can no longer just be about making your existing processes and services increasingly efficient any more. Given the scale of cuts over recent years you now need to totally rethink many public services from the ground up. One critical question then becomes: what is the skill-set needed to re-imagine, re-invent and transform your public services at the required scale?

Too much of existing policy-making uses a general vernacular design process (“This is how we do it” and “It is just common sense”). There is a discipline of ‘Design For Policy’ which is about formally leveraging Design Thinking as part of your policy-making process. You can use those methods to investigate and address these three questions to solve policy issues in an integrated manner:

• What is your culture?
• What are your tools? 
• What are your procedures? 

Policy-makers need to become far more comfortable playing with ideas and with failing. Learning to fail is critical to the Design Thinking methodology. Then, failing faster is a key way of learning and ultimately becoming wiser.”

Steinberg noted that when he advances that particular line of argument he often gets a lot of push-back from the public sector. In their view they do explore already, and they do iterate to develop new initiatives, and they do pilot them. While that may indeed be the case, he argues that cycle times need to be questioned, as most are far too slow. As an example, he claimed that some global corporations may iterate aspects of their services 15 times in a single day.

Most govts like to plan & launch a solution, then find out too late there's a problem - @marcolsteinberg #DesignGrowth
— Martina Quinn (@MartinaPQuinn) November 6, 2013

There is a need is to innovate government itself and ultimately to change the culture of the public sector. For example, he asked, what if the public sector tried to move from providing services to providing platforms, along the lines of the Kickstarter model? This could be a mechanism that channels activism into something more useful. As most activism tends to burn-out over the longer term unfortunately.

A mission critical question is where would such an innovative design capability exist? If you place it at the centre of your public service then it will be crushed by incumbents and vested interests. If you place it on the outside it will be seen as separate and ultimately irrelevant. The optimal point is at the periphery. If it operates along the edges (near delivery of services?) then it will have more of a chance of being effective and engendering substantive change.

John Moran Responds

“A post-crisis Ireland has to be open to reinvention. So we do need the design-process mindset more than ever before. We have to redesign a lot of what Ireland does. We have to design a new economic model for this country. (We tried just selling houses to each other and that did not work out so well!) What I think ‘Design Thinking’ can contribute to that process is a Culture Of Innovation that can help us to find a way for this country to be the best that it can be.

I believe that the underlying ideas being discussed here are correct, but I remain unconvinced about the ‘Design Thinking’ label. What you all call ‘Design’ and ‘Design Thinking’, we simply call ‘Policy-Making’ within the Department of Finance. And I think that lots of other people in other areas already practice such ‘Design Thinking’ as well. Surely many applications of this methodology do not necessarily require designers. Within this new paradigm we have to ask who is a designer, and who is not a designer?”

Do things better or do things differently? #designgrowth
— John O'Connor (@JohnOConnorDIT) November 6, 2013

My Own Thoughts

The topic of ‘Design Thinking’ (and its related field of Service Design) is something that I have an ongoing interest in. I have been wrestling with how to incorporate it into my own professional practice for some time. Its cross-disciplinary nature is a big part of its appeal to me. The fact that Design Thinking is just as a valid topic of investigation for business schools as it is for design educators is interesting. They are both converging on the same topic from different directions.

It is noteworthy that as senior a figure as the General Secretary of the Department of Finance is interested in engaging with design thinkers to investigate what benefits their methodology can contribute. It is disheartening when the design representatives can not then deliver a unified elevator pitch for the benefits of Design Thinking. In that sense I think that ‘Designing for Growth’ was somewhat of a lost opportunity. In my interpretation, one of the (perhaps unspoken) purposes behind this event was to move design thinkers a step closer to a seat at the Big Table.

After this event, I did find myself asking: if John Mahon had wholeheartedly embraced the idea of leveraging ‘Design Thinking’ methodologies within the policy-creating function of the Department of Finance – who would he then turn to for delivery of that service? Which, if any, Irish design firms actually can offer that service at the appropriate level today? Or is it being offered by any of the business strategy units within the large Irish management consultancies? Or would he have to look to international management consultancies at present?

There is also another interesting discussion to be had exploring the reality that there is going to be an inherent conflict between any efforts at bringing a lean, light, fast-moving, iterative, design-informed process into a public sector where innovation is still constrained by cautious, slow-moving procurement policies built to counteract financial prolificacy and wasteful spending. Where are the spaces for the sorts of experimentation needed to investigate the most ambiguous problems?

The malleability of the meanings of the words ‘Design’ and ‘Designer’ in this evening’s discussion has to be telling. The catch-all term ‘design’ being perhaps too all-inclusive to be truly useful in these kinds of discussions, given that it can signify a mindset, an activity, and a practice, as well as an atypically broad industry sector which includes many different sub-sectors of activity with vastly varying business models. (But, having said that, what other term could be used in its place?) As more activities are included within ever-broader definitions of ‘Design’, then the term becomes more vague and less useful. That breadth of definition may be part of what confuses the issue whenever trying to discuss topics such as ‘Design In Ireland’.

Although I think that it is still only somewhat loosely defined within the various design sectors, it seems clear that the phrase ‘Design Thinking’ does make sense within the industry as a useful differentiator that allows certain designers to position themselves higher up the stack and so to capture greater value. So within the design sectors that phrase can be a useful signifying differentiator which is understood as being contrasted against other forms of design activity. While I do not think that those other activities are considered to be ‘un-thinking’, those forms of design activity are necessarily set in counterpoint as being somewhat less analytical or rational. In every field of human activity we always have to account for the Narcissism Of Small Differences. Therefore it is unsurprising when, within the broad church of design, a rationalist tendency should seek mechanisms to define their activities as distinctly separate from (what we can refer to as) a more instinctual tendency.

The communicative problem then arises when that intra-sector signifier ‘Design Thinking’ has to be parsed and interpreted by the purchasers of design services. It seems probable that, rather than considering Design Thinking against other forms of designing, they are considering it against other forms of thinking. I suspect that was one factor informing John Moran’s comments this evening. So it seems to me that one open challenge for the design sector is to find a better way to explain ‘Design Thinking’ in a less self-referential manner.

Design is a problem solver, however, as designers we have to be able to explain this solution using 'non-design' language #DesignGrowth
— DotDash (@DotDashOne) November 6, 2013

Also, to gain broader acceptance of its various methodologies, it is important that ‘Design Thinking’ is not positioned as some form of panacea. That line of thinking is obviously nonsensical, but it does still tend to be a theme that these conversations can circle around. For that reason I found similarities between this event and the discussions at this Summer’s IxDA ‘Design & Thinking’ event.

To me ‘Design Thinking’ can be usefully understood as another tool in the mental toolkit, offering a different perspective that works best within a broader collective process. It can obviously be approached from many different directions, each dependent on the professional’s own expertise. My current notion (well, for today at least) is that some of the most useful manifestations of ‘Design Thinking’ may lie in collaborations between business strategists who can think creatively on one hand, and strategically-minded designers with a bias for integrated thinking on the other. But I still have a lot more thinking to do on this topic.

Postscript

It took me a few weeks to carve out time to assemble my notes from the event into this post. That delay has had one benefit in that during the interval Clay Shirky posted his article ‘Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality’. Shirky’s dissection of the mis-management of the Obamacare online service delivery is as strong an argument as any I have read for the benefits of an iterative, prototyping and testing-based methodology for public services.

Read Pivot Dublin’s own review of this event here.

Disclaimer

It is important to clarify that all of the attributed statements in this post are paraphrased from my own (fairly concise) notes and none are verbatim quotations. As usual, if I have seriously misquoted anyone please do let me know.

Experiments not Features

One of the more interesting conversations that piqued my interest while watching the live feed from this week’s Web Summit was Jay Bregman, co-founder of Hailo, explaining their evolving methodology of ‘Experiments Not Features’. 

During the summit’s ‘Going Global’ session Bregman explained some aspects of Hailo’s business model. (His comment about Hailo eventually becoming a platform for many more service transitions than taxi rides is also something worth a blog post all of its own some time.)

Hailo works effectively as a network because “it is local and it appears local”. What that means for the business is that each of their markets operates slightly differently. The overall global network learns a little from each different market, which then feeds into refinements to the master model for more efficient and effective roll-out in future cities.

Because Hailo needed to be a global company from the offset, they deliberately planned not to have one centralised headquarters. Rather their model is to have “centres of gravity” in Asia, North America and Europe. This makes them more sensitive to the specific localised needs of the cities they are serving.

There are three primary implications arising from that corporate structure: firstly they need superb integrated processes and secondly they need excellent internal communications. The third implication relates to their underlying technology. As they are a global network, they have to look as coherent as possible to all of their consumers. Therefore it is mission-critical that they can identify which proposed technological deviations/innovations are truly beneficial for any local market, and which are merely personal preferences. This is where their experimental methodology kicks in.

Bregman claims Hailo has “had to build one of the best A/B mobile testing platforms”. This is allowing them to run massive large scale tests – with the vision that ultimately they can test everything. So if the Dublin operation wants to modify some aspect of the technology platform in future, rather than request a new feature, they would simply be able to run a live test. Then, if they can prove that it produces better results in their city, they can implement it.

On one hand reading this just sounds like common sense – A/B testing is a not new methodology. But the fact that today’s technology now facilitates companies runnig large scale live experiments in real-time is becoming profoundly disruptive. Behind-closed-doors development of digital services design is counterproductive, iterating in public is becoming the proven methodology for success.

It is worth thinking through how this approach effects product development roadmaps and workflows, increases the pace of innovation, and ultimately delivers greater responsiveness to customer needs.

Here is the video of the Web Summit ‘Going Global’ session which features Jay Bregman co-founder of Hailo, and Niklas Adalberth co-founder of Klarna, moderated by Niklas Zennstrom co-founder of Skype.



PostScript: for a complementary take on this subject, have a read of Dan Frommer’s post from the same date: ‘The Best Part Of Twitter’s New Design Is That It’s Experimenting In Public’.

Instagram and the Startup Branding Conundrum

At the time it was acquired by Facebook in April of this year, Instagram was given a greater valuation than The New York Times (1). Working within the branding industry I find that have trained myself to operate within an accepted convention that the optimum path to business success involves developing and deploying the full suite of conventional branding and marketing tools.

The Branding Design Consultant worldview holds that, in addition to an essential coherent brand story and the necessary connection with its customers, a company also requires the complete formal apparatus of brand identity assets, brand guidance systems, and brand tone-of-voice to achieve optimal effectiveness. What intrigues me is how high potential technology startups can now short-circuit, or even dispense with, most of this apparatus and methodology — and sometimes do so on a dramatic scale.

On Reading Porter's 'What Is Strategy'

Michael Porter is on of those names that I forever seem to be running across. (He seems to be quoted or referenced in The Economist every single week). But up until now I had never read any of his writings.

I work in a Strategic Brand Consultancy and have been delivering Brand Strategy to my clients for more years than I dare to say. So I am familiar with the broad outlines of the ideas he presents in this article. He is mapping the topography of the business landscape that I inhabit. That said, reading this was like coming home to the source material for me. I have probably encountered ninety per cent of his thinking in other places, filtered through lesser authors. A lot of these are ideas that I have already internalised over the years.

I found myself reading this article with a mix of familiarity (for the core ideas) and novelty (for seeing all of them assembled in this fashion). In noting the salient points then, I am just going to limit myself to those aspects which are new to me.

On first reading, Porter’s ideas in this article seem almost common-sense. But on further reading you see that it is only because of the way he states his points and assembles his arguments and examples. What seems obvious after the fact is often not all that apparent beforehand. Equally it does not mean the implications are any easier to implement or to realise.

Porter presents two interlinked concepts: ‘Operational Effectiveness’, how we perform activities better than our competitors; and ‘Strategy’ which leads us to perform different activities than our rivals or else perform similar activities but in a more effective way. Thus strategy relates to differentiation and being different is the key to success. (Just as brand differentiation is key to successful positioning.)

I really think that he made such an insightful point when he says that if there were only one ideal positioning then there would be no need for strategy. That speaks to me about how you and your business always need to be able to adapt and respond. As he says: “new positions arise because of change”.

He says that strategy is about being very clear about what you do not do as well as what you do. Which relates to my own experience of finding that clients who are absolutely focused on the core proposition of their offering succeed better than those whom are all over the shop and tend to go chasing off after shiny new business ideas or business models that they read about in a one-page magazine article on their last business flight...

I think I have long ago grasped his point about knowing what you do not want to do. However, I do think that I need to work harder at addressing his point about always checking that I and my colleagues are not doing anything contra-indicative to our differentiated strategy and actively not doing such things. Particularly in light of the idea that everything is important: that failure or under-performance in any area drags down our whole organisation, confuses or disappoints our clients and dilutes our positioning and our reputation.

All of this segues into leadership, as the leader needs to make the trade-offs implicit in the reasoning above. Thinking strategically and acting strategically requires hard choices more than it ever requires consensus.

So a number of apparent question arise from this article. The first has has to be how do all of our activities and internal processes fit with our strategic positioning? What is misaligned? Which complement and reinforce each other? What wasted effort can we eliminate and what is redundant?

Then, looking outside of ourselves, what has changed in our industry in, say, the last five years that has opened up opportunities for competitors to define a positional advantage against us? Also then arising from that, what positional opportunities are there for us to capitalise on?

On Reading ‘Level 5 Leadership’

I had encountered this material when I read Jim Collins’ earlier book ‘Good To Great’ over the past Summer.

There is some interesting cross-over between this article and Goldman’s ‘Emotional Intelligence’, but whereas Goldman talks more about interpersonal, people-management, aspects of leadership Collins also addresses resolve, vision and direction-setting.

One fact to note when mapping any learnings from this article onto my real experience is that Collins is looking at a company’s performance over a thirty-year cycle and few, if any, Irish design companies have lasted that long. That is not to say that they will never achieve that span of years, just that they have not yet so far.