Category: Uncategorized

Lessons from Target’s ClearRx

Among the staples of my presentation about customer experience is Target’s ClearRx pharmacy system. It’s a great story of design making a difference. What’s more fascinating to me, though, is how such good design made it out into the world. Through reviewing explanations and interviews online, I pieced together some lessons of why it worked so well. I wrote about it for the HarvardBusiness.org blog.

Book Commentary: How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer

How We Decide is the latest book of pop cognitive science to attract significant attention. In it, Jonah Lehrer positions his discussion as something of a battle, or, at least, a give-and-take, between the brain’s deep-seated emotional urges and its rational considerations. One is not better than the other — each excels in certain situations (emotion is great for split-second decisions; reason helps make better choices given a limited number of options) and is detrimental (emotion is easily exploited through reactions to things like loss aversion; reason can lead to overthinking when given too much information) in others.

The book has a lot of information in it; which might also be it’s downfall. It’s clear that Lehrer has attended the Gladwell school of non-fiction writing, anchoring his facts in stories. The difference is that Gladwell employs just a handful of stories over the course of a book, letting each one breathe, having each one carry significant weight. Lehrer stuffs How We Decide with little story after little story, and after a while, you lose the bigger plot. I would have preferred Lehrer to focus on just a few key tales — the firefighter who figured out how to save himself in a raging brush blaze; the kids with the marshmallows; the poker player who embodies the perfect balance of reason and emotion — and let go of the study after study after study that he relates.

Another challenge this book faces is the glut of adjacently-themed texts. Having read Gladwell’s Blink and Outliers, and Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and having heard the marshmallow story (it’s become a surprisingly prevalent flash-meme in the past few months), I was familiar with much of the book, and in an odd way — I kept wondering if I had read the story earlier in How We Decide, only to realize I had read it in another book.

My guess is this is a good book for those who haven’t been keeping up on the latest discussions in cognitive science, and are looking for an informative foundation. I respect Lehrer for not engaging in the type of specious/fallacious reasoning that has afflicted Gladwell’s work. Lehrer recognizes that the sentiment “it depends” is not only valid, but essential to the discussion, and doesn’t propose sweeping generalizations or applications.

Don’t Challenge My Assumptions!

In a post on Maya Design’s blog, David Bishop asks, “Why is it so hard to talk to users?” and presents all the different excuses he’s heard for not engaging with customers in the design process.

In reading his post, I realized the answer to his question is simple, and wrote him the following:

People in organizations are afraid of what their customers actually think. If they had to face this reality, it would call into question many assumptions. People don’t want their assumptions challenged. So, they’d rather a) come up with excuses or b) use unhelpful “market research” tools like surveys and focus groups, tools whose data is squishy enough that it can be interpreted to suit any beliefs.

The reason I’m confident about this answer is because it’s pretty much true of human nature — we resist information that challenges what we already believe to be true. For many, if not most, companies, actual conversations with customers would demonstrate that closely held beliefs are actually canards.

Adaptive Path’s Mobile Literacy Project – Take Part!

Adaptive Path’s latest R&D project has been released: Mobile Literacy, which addresses the design of mobile technology in emerging markets (in our case, rural India).

There’s tons to chew on. I would start with the concepts, the MobilGlyph and Steampunk.

If those intrigue you, then I’d move to the deep research. Our team spent 6 weeks in the Kutch district of Western India to understand the how uneducated and illiterate peoples use technology, particularly mobile phones, in their lives. A big challenge is that these phones are designed for Western (specifically, northern European) audiences, and many of their assumptions don’t hold true in this area.

The most important thing is to rally others to take part as well. That’s why we’ve made all of our research available, and why we’re sharing the design principles that emerged from that research. We recognize that our concepts are just two of many that could address the challenges of bringing mobile technology to emerging markets. I hope we see many more!

Evolution vs Revolution – changing your site’s design

I tend not to talk much about web design any more, but my attendance at IA Summit 2009 brought a thought to mind. I sat in Jared Spool’s talk on “Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon” where he pointed out what others can learn from Amazon’s design decisions.

Among his points is that over the last 15 years Amazon has never “redesigned.” They’ve evolved and tweaked their design so that today it doesn’t really look at all like it did a while ago, but there was never a glorious unveiling of a whole new design. Jared’s been arguing against large-scale redesigns for a while, so this point didn’t surprise me.

What Jared neglects to address is the context in which these design changes take place. Because I’ve seen wholescale redesigns work (I lead one at Epinions), and I also know of many services that currently require a fundamental redesign. Amazon has never warranted a wholescale redesign because Amazon’s basic value proposition has never changed: they sell stuff. And it’s business model hasn’t changed — they make money through selling stuff.

But look at a service like LinkedIn. LinkedIn has done what Jared suggests — many changes over time. The problem is, LinkedIn is a mess from a user experience point of view. I know there’s heaps of value buried in LinkedIn that I cannot realize because I can’t figure out how to use the system. The difference with LinkedIn (compared to Amazon) is that its value proposition has evolved, the services they offer are radically different than what was available at their outset, and their revenue model has also changed. What a site like LinkedIn needs to do is step back, assess who they are *today*, and go back to first principles and design a site that matches their current reality, not a cobbled-together experience that has accreted over time. (And don’t get me wrong — I’m a fan of LinkedIn, and use it frequently. That’s *why* it frustrates me so much, because it’s so incoherent.)

Anyway, my point is that, well, sometimes you do need to blow up what you’re doing and approach your site’s design from whatever fundamentally new position you find yourself. Don’t be locked in to old ways just because they made sense once.