most companies will say that the customer is the centre of their business strategy: all their product decision making comes down to the perceived value the customer finds in the product or service. A good product with value to the customer should be successful in the market place right? So why do products so often fail? Why do customers not always leap to use services or move providers or change products that have been released by companies who envision their products to be centred on the needs of the customer?

Because, simply, they aren’t.

I shouldn’t have to convince you of this. As consumers all of us have been let down by an offering in one way or another. It may simply not work properly, it may be too difficult to learn to use or the act of signing up for and the post-sign up service is so disappointing that we shrug our shoulders and move on elsewhere. Back at the company follow up discussions on why the product is unsuccesful after spending masses of time and money ensue. Depending on the type of organisation heads or put on chopping blocks, frantic fixes are put in place and support structures are quickly arranged to minimise damage while the marketing and PR departments are on on full scale alert to manage expectations.

Sound familiar?

Now, ask yourself, do you work in an organisation where the design of the customer experience, or just plain the design of the service, is represented at Senior Management level? Does is sit under maketing? Perhaps under the CIO? Is it outsourced to a design or advertising company who then outsource it again? Does some design take place inernally while big campaigns managed externally? Is there a single person, high enough up the company ladder, responsible with managing the interaction between customers and the business across all major channels? Is it any wonder that the user experience at most companies is fragmented or just plain not there?

Here’s a question for you: if a company doesn’t have someone responsible for design in a senior management position, how important is design to the business’ strategy? If senior management doesn’t take responsibility for design, is there any reason for anyone else in the company to think it’s important to the business? Put another way, if a company doesn’t have a Head of Sales, how important do you think the rest of the organisation thinks sales are the to the business strategy?

Makes you think doesn’t it?

I will be covering the topic of interaction design and company strategy in the next couple of posts. I’ll talk about:

• where design and specifically interaction design positions can sit within a corporate structure
• the role of interaction design in the development process
• interaction design and Agile Development (SCRUM)
• interaction design as a strategy for success
• the importance of play and discovery in developing online and mobile products with a focus on interaction design.

If you’d like to learn more about incoporating interaction design into your company strategy please mail me at enquiries@backspaceconsulting.co.za

I’ve witnessed situations where the word strategy has confused the heck out of meetings: some people believe it includes the rollout plan while others want a vision statement while others too want it to mean the way we work.  The thing is that any one of these ideas can be true but only if eveyone buys in and agrees that the strategy is the thing and the thing is the strategy.

Thus I call for some revision of what strategy actually means! (Though I don’t propose to know everything there is on the subject by a long way!)

So let us begin at the beginning.

The origin of the word strategy comes from the Greek word meaning General and has distinct military overtones.

The VISION is to win the war.
The TACTICS are the movement of troups.
The STATEGY is the management of the troops as a whole and this calls for knowledge and forethought about terrain, the weather and experience.

In other words:

If a plan (tactics) is how we get from A to B and a vision is what we think of as B, then strategy is how we see ourselves in relation to A, B and the wider world of C. In other words, if a vision is a statement about who we are then the strategy should provide the meaning or context for that vision. Strategy is the environment and it starts at home.

What do I mean "it starts at home"?

Well, a strategy should have meaning throughout a company. From cleaning staff to CEO there is a single understanding of who the business is in relation to the world. A strategy looks at the vision statement of the company and provides the wherewithal to achieve the vision. So if the vision is to build a strong mobile social network aimed at working mothers then the strategy would include something along the lines of employing women with children who are active in the social media space and who are stuck to their cell phones umbilically. It may also include keeping an eye on the competition and being able to manage quick interface changes and marketing campaigns.With these 2 strategic goals clearly stated both the HR team and the Technology team have a remit for all their decision making.

And if the vision statement and the strategy are strong enough, the boss should be able to put his feet up; which is the ultimate vision for most of us isn’t it?

Strategies can change, but vision statements should stick around.

Ultimately a strong company will have a strong strategy that doesn’t chop and change over the years and it’s easy to see why: if the strategy doesn’t change from year to year then the people working there have a strong sense of identity and affinity for the place they work. But in the world after midnight it’s hard for us to hold on to a single strategy and so they do change and mutate over time. This is natural – we dump strategies that aren’t working and adopt new ones that appeal to us. For example marketing strategies may change from a strong emphasis on traditional media to a strong emphasis on social media but the vision will stay the same.

Strategy is not the domain of senior management only.

The key to a successful strategy is simple:

It has to be transparent, it has to have intrinsic value and it has to be constantly reinforced. And to this end, a strong leader is tantamount to the success of any stategy.

If you’d like to discuss principles and ideas around strategic thinking please email us at enquiries@backspaceconsulting.co.za

"Aha!", I said, "this tells me something about the nature of people everywhere: we all like to know where we are in relation to where we’ve been and should we find ourselves in unknown territory, we want to know how to get back to a place we recognise."

People are facintated about their place in the world. This has come to the fore in recent years, what with people moving to live in different cities or countries from the place of their birth, moving away from the known into the unknown has never been so easy. Yet it remains a little unsettling. It is said that, in general, people who relocate to different countries either come back within 4 years, or stay for ever (or as long as for ever means anything these days). The pull to a place of comfort and the safety of the known is a driving force for much decision making. We might be forced to embrace change, to grab it thrillingly by the hand and wander with it into the great unknown, but there is part of us that likes to maintain a connection to the past, to our roots.

If we understand this about humanity, and it’s perfectly obvious when you look at the success of Facebook that it’s true, then we can apply this to designing all manner of online services.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I called the company Backspace Consulting: navigating the web is 60% going forward and 40% going backwards, in a manner of speaking.

I’ve had lots of people ask me in recent weeks what I mean by prototyping online products and services. The argument, before I show them what I mean, is that project initiation documentation and good flow diagrams should be enough for eveyone involved to understand the final outcome of any online  build. But flow diagrams are a part of prototyping and are essential in communicating the desired out come of an online project.

You see, in my view, all documentation surrounding a project constitute part of prototype development. Whether you are using a whiteboard, magnets and stickers or Visio – all these excercises help to gather information about what the end product should look, feel and behave like. For some projects a low-fidelity, paper based drawing of the interface with a detailed navigation map and user journey scope is enough to get people going. This works well for small teams working in close contact who work daily together to fulfill a development requirement.

But:

If you fall into any of these categories then high-fidelity, interactive prototypes can prove invaluable.

1. Large, deep-level website development
2. Application development wth multiple interactions and decision making problems
3. Outsourcing development to a third party
4. Agency developing portals for companies with many stakeholders / decision makers
5. Software / web application development with multiple sources of information

Why?

Because high-fidelity prototypes provide all stakeholders with a flexible, interactive way of pre-measuring the implications of design and technical decisions before a line of code needs to be written.

Because decision makers are more likely to buy into an online product before it’s built if they can see and play with an interactive version.

Because guess work is illiminated from the development process.

Because content gaps can be identified, journey’s developed and decisions made on a more practical level.

Because now you can manage stakeholder expectations based on interactions and behaviour and not only on concept

And finally – because you can test your product with real users before you commit to build so you know if your journeys work or not.

Here is a prototype I built in 20 minutes (it’s basic and isn’t built on any product development premise) so the argument that building prototypes is time consuming and expensive no longer stands.

If your interested in learning more about prototyping and how it can fit into your development process, give me a shout at enquires@backspaceconsulting.co.za or call on +27 71 677 0274

Progress in my view.

The truth about prototyping is that it is neither time consuming nor costly if applied judiciously on a case by case basis. Someone moving from a Wordpress Blog template to a bespoke template from an agency may only need crayons and paper to draw their expectations for the designer. This is also prototyping – low fidelity prototyping – and it’s perfectly useful in the right situations and is always the first place to start. I find a place with lots of wall space ideal for starting the design process.

I’m no designer, in the make pretty and add oomph sense of the word. I’m a designer of people’s experiences and that’s the way I like it. From paper to computerized flow charts and mockups, my true calling is digital rapid prototyping: developing interactive, "what you see is what you get", interpretations of mockups and strategy directives.

To learn more about fitting rapid prototyping into your development process contact us at enquiries@backspaceconsulting.co.za

en tried, tested and found lacking a few years back. The genius of this work has been to prove that usability, while sometimes tricky in application, is a doddle to get to grips with. For example, try the trunk test (p85 second edition) when reviewing a site. By focusing only on what is important the rest of the site’s immaterial material fades into the background and gives the usability practitioner a solid footing for doing what we always try to do: chop the site down by a third.

Thank you Steve Krug for giving us something to hang onto while we swim upsteam.