Just a note to say “thanks!” to Lisa and the organisers of World Usability Day Sydney – it was a pleasure to speak and I hope that it added constructively to the day’s dialogue.

The slidedecks from the two presentations are provided below both as a Slideshare presentation and as a PDF download which contains my notes, links to further information and image credits.

Usability in a sustainable future

In this presentation my aim was to provide an overview of how usability and user experience design practice can play a positive role in achieving sustainability outcomes. It proposes we extend our concept of usability to include pre-use-ability and end-of-use-ability, considering design, packaging, materials, re-use, recycling and disposal, demonstrating the concepts with recent examples.

Usability in a sustainable future slides with notes (PDF 1.65MB)

Exploring the Human Habitat

This presentation focuses on the research process behind the redevelopment of the Future is Man Made (FiMM) site that I managed while working at WWF-Australia. The site as outlined in the presentation was launched just prior to Earth Hour 2007, and the research informed the approach to social media engagement for Earth Hour as well as the FiMM site itself.

Human Habitat slides with notes (PDF 1.59MB)

Over the past few months I’ve heard “Apple doesn’t engage users in their design process” expressed as a reason for not engaging users for their organisation. The argument goes that Apple creates great products, they’re a market leader in the music and mobile phone markets, and the Mac OS X is much better to use than Windows. So if they don’t do user engagement, why should we?

You are not Apple

I’m being deliberately provocative with this sub-title, but allow me to illustrate my point by asking a few questions:

• Does your organisation spend USD$1.1 billion per year on research & development?
• Does your organisation have a design-thinking CEO like Steve Jobs or a Senior Vice President of Design of the calibre of Jonathan Ive?
• Does your organisation have a cadre of top-notch user interface/interaction/visual designers and engineers at its disposal to develop, test and evolve new, innovative designs?
• Do you have a strong base of innovative, design-oriented third-party developers coming up with clever ideas that you can learn from? (remember that the core of iTunes and CoverFlow were both acquired by Apple, and many other successful ideas in Apple products were first implemented by third-party developers.)
• Do you have a strong brand, built through the early years of computing and backed by a passionate fan base who buy into your vision and are willing to forgive you your mistakes (if not actively defend them)?

If you answered “yes” to most of the above, can I come and work for you? ;) If, however, you answered “no” to most of those questions (and I suspect that would be a majority of us) then I would advise caution when considering the way Apple “does design” in the context of your business.

Put bluntly, Apple is an outlier – the success the company enjoys is not something that can be easily replicated. For the rest of us, who don’t have those resources at their disposal, user engagement is a great way to achieve our goals. In fact, somewhat ironically, user engagement can help us to be more like Apple.

Could Apple benefit from engagement?

There’s an underlying assumption here, that I think is useful to express – the assumption that Apple couldn’t benefit from greater social engagement in their design process. For those of us who aren’t part of the religion, I think it’s clear that there are many issues in Apple’s products, from the iPhone, iTunes, MobileMe and Mac OS X that a more engaging approach might help resolve.

Let’s also not forget that significant portions of Mac OS X are open source – the Safari browser being the most prominent – an active developer community of course being an aspect of social engagement, albeit a less visible one.

Learnings from Apple’s approach

Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from Apple’s design success. None of these are new, of course, but worth restating in the context of this post.

Cultivate a passionate user base: Apple have cultivated a fervent customer base who are passionate evangelists about the brand and its products. This has been the case since the very early days of Apple, and seems largely attributable to Steve Jobs’ leadership. However, there are many more examples of passionate users that are borne out of social engagement practices. Flickr is just one such example. Campaign Monitor is another.

Focus on doing a smaller set of things really well: Apple have done this over and over again – simplifying their products and cutting through with great design. The early Macs were the first example of this, and the iPod is a more recent example. For the products that have found traction Apple have then been able to expand and extend that base into new product lines with great success. They’ve had less success with the AppleTV – so not everything is a success – perhaps with further user engagement they would be able respond with a product that is better received in the market? User experience tools such as personas can play a useful role here, as can engaging our users; find out what’s important to them (through engagement) and focus our energy there.

Design for yourself: This is related to the previous point, though not always possible (depending on the organisation/product). Apple started by designing and delivering the computer they wanted. They designed for themselves. Consumer-targeted products like the iPod are also something that you could effectively design for yourself. It’s important, however, to be careful when applying this principle as it’s easy to get tunnel vision and not realise that our designs are missing the mark with the people we’re serving. User engagement techniques can help ensure the great ideas in our head are great outside of our head too!

Listen to users: While Apple don’t seem to engage customers as a direct part of their design process, they do obviously listen to them – learning from what people are saying and applying their R&D and design might to develop creative responses to customer needs, with great success.

“Real artists ship”: this is a quote attributed to Steve Jobs in reference to the practicalities of design – that while you can spend all the time you want getting something perfect, in the end you’ve got to get product to market. I think this is similar in spirit to the principles of agile management practice – deliver working product as early as possible and iterate to improve and enhance over time. I’m sure Apple do this internally with new products, but they also do it across product versions/releases: the first versions of the iPod and iPhone had a bare minimum amount of functionality, but they shipped, learnt from the experience, iterated with a better product released next time.

There are probably other points that could be made – feel free to fill in any gaps in the comments :)

Update: Oliver has put up two additional points in the comments worth noting here relating to the investment in design (over months and across multiple approaches) and prototyping.

Be tactical

I’m not suggesting that organisations should defer to users for all design decisions (although Google arguably does a pretty good job with this approach). I think it’s our job as designers to take the various inputs we have and synthesise those into a coherent and rewarding response. The importance of social engagement is that it provides a valuable input that helps us to think from our stakeholders’ perspective when responding creatively to their needs.

With this in mind it’s important to be tactical in where and how you employ social engagement practices, which I see as including user testing and other user experience tools. But used wisely these tools can help us to be more “Apple-like” and to carve our own successful path in the marketplace.

In doing some research on feature prioritisation recently I came across the Kano analysis model (via Mike Cohn’s presentation) which seems quite useful.

Does anyone have any experience using this model in their work? I’d be interested in hearing more about people’s experience – pros/cons/practicalities etc. Are there any alternative/better models out there?

Over Thursday and Friday last week I attended the Media140 conference held at the ABC in Sydney. The focus of the conference was on how journalists can create value through engagement within social networks.

For someone who’s been following the citizen journalism/”new media” space for some time, there wasn’t a whole lot of new insights from the conference. I wanted to attend in part to see Jay Rosen speak on Friday morning, but also to get a better sense of where the journalism profession is at in relation to this space – especially in Australia – and to contribute positively to the conversations that would no doubt occur in between sessions.

What seems apparent from the discussion, even before Julie Posetti made the point explicit in her closing remarks, was that Twitter seems to have resulted in a bit of a tipping point with journalists entering and making sense of this space. This is undoubtedly a good thing, and while I too found it slightly tedious how much emphasis was put on Twitter overall it didn’t bother me as much as it did other attendees (judging by the Twitter backchannel) – it’s a conversation that needs to happen. If Twitter is the entry point, that’s great…

What I found promising is that most of the presenters and panelists seemed to “get it” – so a lot of the conversation (though not all) was demonstrating positive examples of these tools being used to great effect.

These concepts are not new, of course. Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and many others have been writing about it for some time. Even in the “old media” analogue form of printed books ;) The discussion really kicked off almost 10 years ago when blogs started to gain traction and the “journalist vs. blogger” debates started raging.

Value for journalism

While a lot of the focus was on the non-monetary value of networks – a healthy and positive progression IMO – the “who will pay” theme was certainly bubbling under much of the discussion. The Thursday afternoon “How social media is changing political reporting” in particular was railroaded into a discssion of “you’ll be sorry when journalistic institutions fail.”

It was implied that people “wouldn’t pay” for journalism, and that we’d all be left worse off without publications like the Sydney Morning Herald if they failed. I think this is a reflection of a failure of the imagination and a reflection of the (not entirely unfounded) fear within elements of the industry about the uncertainty around models.

Two asides: No surprise that the most vocal was a News Limited journalist – such a coincidence that just prior to the session I read VisceralBusiness’ post on News Limited needing a “higher purpose” to be successful. I also think that the SMH is doing far more damage to it’s own reputation and readership through ridiculously intrusive advertising than social media is doing – in fact I would suspect social media sharing has increased readership of the SMH (not that I have the facts to back that up).

I missed the opening session, but it seems there was some animosity towards publicly-funded news organisations such as the ABC and BBC as somehow devaluing news and undercutting commercial operators.

Should traditional institutions survive?

There seemed to be a view that institutions such as the SMH and News Limited are the only way that professional journalists will receive a paycheck. There are examples from around the world that point to new models and ideas that suggest that this is not the case. The problem is they are sometimes hard to recognise because they don’t look much like what is traditionally known – and perhaps won’t support the “big business” approach of the past (but is this really needed?).

I find it fascinating that the “industrial media”, who have built their entire model on “indirect funding” (advertising pays for the product for the most part) are really struggling to grasp the new opportunities for indirect funding in this new landscape. Note to SMH: advertising is not the only answer.

I think in part this is because a) there are still relatively few people taking the leap and trying different models and b) there isn’t necessarily single model that will save the day – it will be a variety of models applied in different ways depending on the circumstance.

All of that said, I too am concerned about how expensive investigative journalism will be paid for moving forward (I recall Jeff Jarvis raising similar concerns in the past – though he’s quick to suggest a way forward). Again, models will emerge, but there is no clear winning model at this point. NewAssignment and Newsvine are two such experiments underway. Kevin Sites’ work is another (Sites was sponsored by Yahoo! to cover zones of conflict around the world – thanks for the reminder Tobes.)

From what I can tell, a majority of what is termed “journalism” doesn’t fit the “investigative” description, but protecting this aspect of the industry is used as the justification for supporting traditional models, as though these are the only options. I think this is akin to multinational record companies using concerns for “supporting artists” as their front-line PR approach to get people to buy music. We – the public – recognise, however, that the beneficiaries are by and large the middle- to upper-management and shareholders of these companies – not the journalists themselves (who are the first to get axed in downsizing efforts). With this in mind their words ring somewhat hollow.

I think there are many potential opportunities for industrial media to play a positive role in these new spaces – to re-assert their relevance and value into the future. If they do this, and start ASAP seeking/experimenting/trialing alternative models, they will be well placed to transition. The problem is they’ve had 10 years to start seriously working on alternative models, and now time may be running out…

Fact checking is not an exclusive right

We also didn’t escape the “journalists fact check, social media sources don’t” arguments. Every time this point was raised I couldn’t help think two things: a) it’s often social media participants fact checking and correcting the record of mainstream media sources and b) has no-one ever heard of Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo – crowdsourcing at it’s best where the audience helps the journalist fact check and develop stories (a point alluded to by Jay Rosen). Proof that once you get past a defensive position you can actually be open to the opportunities.

I think, though, that Riyaad Minty of Al Jazeera (an organisation that clearly gets it) provided the best response to this – while making the point that it’s still important he demonstrated how it is possible, and can provide value.

Personal brand

One thing’s for sure – a journalist’s personal “brand” online will become more and more important moving forward, and will become somewhat disassociated from mastheads/publications. All of the speakers that seemed to be successful in this space were establishing their own brands in this space and reaping the rewards.

I am hopeful that, as a result of this growing interest (and perhaps the conference itself), the conversation might progress and that the mainstream media will advance beyond simply allowing comments on articles. But at 10 years and counting, and these same conversations having been hashed and rehashed over that time, I suspect the job is far from done…

Updated 2009-11-18: I saw that Dilbert cartoon today and thought it was a perfect illustration for this post, so I added it…

I have been catching up on some reading the past few days, and came across Joel Makower’s post introducing the Green Confidence Index.

The index is a monthly research report “tracking Americans’ attitudes about and confidence in their leaders and institutions, nationally and locally, on the subject of environmental responsibility, as well as in their own understanding of issues and their willingness to make green purchasing choices”.

Joel has often lamented the irregular survey’s on the public’s willingness to “buy green” in the past, and this seems like a concrete step towards creating a stronger data-set and getting a clearer indication of attitudes.

Two comments in Joel’s introduction stood out for me. In describing the September results of the first component of the index, “Responsibility”, he notes:

Responsibility — how well various groups and institutions are addressing environmental issues: too much, enough, or too little. The groups include the U.S. government, state and local governments, major corporations, individuals’ own employers, their neighbors, and themselves (weight: 40%).

Later, he reports:

Another question asked what sources of environmental information Americans use and trust. The bad news for companies: Corporate websites and blogs ranked last in a list of 13 media types in terms of their use and trust. Word of mouth was seen to be potent: Friends, family, and colleagues ranked highest as the most used and trusted, followed by consumer ratings and reviews. Green blogs and websites had the biggest trust-use gap: they are a trusted information resource, though their usage lags.

I think both of these are reflective of the power of peer networks. In the first, the proximity of a person to their peers creates a tendency to see them as more trustworthy, therefore perceived to be more likely to be doing the right thing. (One could also argue that respondents wanted to not be seen as doing the “wrong” thing.)

The second point is a reflection of the well understood trend, exemplified by Edeleman’s Trust Barometer, that peers hold much stronger influence than corporations.

While I’m clearly biased given my line of work, I can’t help but equate these things back the role that social networks have to play in advancing sustainability…

There’s a sample report available for free if you’re interested in the results of the initial surveys. The service is then charged at an introductory annual fee of USD$299 (usually USD$499).

I read this report from the BSR 2009 conference with interest – especially “BSR’s road map for achieving success in this new world:”

1. Promote innovation for sustainability.
2. Embrace systems redesign.
3. Maximize the power of networks.

My thinking, though, is that by focusing first on point 3 organisations can better achieve points 1 and 2. Thoughts?

I’m looking forward to reading through the remainder of the session summaries from the conference – from what I’ve seen so far it seems like it was a very good event.

One of the more obviously powerful things about Twitter is the ReTweet – where one user effectively “forwards” a Twitter post from another member.

If you are an organisation posting on Twitter, and you are aiming for a ReTweet, care should be taken to keep the character length of your post even shorter to allow for the “RT @<yourid>: ” at the beginning of a message, where “<yourid>” is your Twitter username.

It’s a simple thing (and reasonably obvious), but I find it’s an easy thing to forget when you aren’t used to it, or under time pressure…

(If ReTweeting is important to you, Dan Zarrella’s analysis of ReTweet trends and corresponding report.)

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about “what’s next” for Zumio. Since Zumio’s inception about 18 months ago I’ve had the opportunity to work a bunch of great people on challenging and diverse projects. While I’ve enjoyed the chance to stretch myself in a variety of capacities, a few focal points of interest have emerged that I want to explore more actively.

I’ve found that when I’ve been engaged on a “social media” project, I’ve wanted to bring elements of User Experience into play. When I’ve been working on wireframes, I look to understand the social impacts of the interfaces we’re designing.

In all of this my aim has been to get a deeper understanding of the business and community priorities driving the work we do and looking for opportunities to create win-win solutions – ones where interactions provide value for both my client(s) and the communities they are participating within.

I’ve been searching for a good description for this. To me it’s a deeper engagement than just “social media” – I’ve been invited to participate in a couple of projects that could be best described as “buzz generation” campaigns and recognised that this is not what Zumio does. When I talk about “bottom-line” benefits, they are usually not directly “selling” or “marketing” oriented, in the traditional sense. It’s also not “service design” – though I love the term and think we need more of it.

When I work with an organisation my approach to their “business” (I use “business” in the broad sense of the term – e.g. the business and “bottom-line” of a non-profit organisation is achieving policy or advocacy outomes) borrows elements of User Experience (using tools such as personas and user stories, brand development techniques etc.), but it’s not just about building a tool or delivering a service – my interest is in understanding how these tools can facilitate deeper business change that can generate greater value by embracing the spirit and principles behind “Web 2.0″, rather than just using them to create a great deliverable.

When I heard James Dellow from Headshift talk at Public Sphere recently he used the term “social business design” (a reflection of both Headshift’s and their parent, Dachis Group’s focus), which really resonated with me at the time.

Having since done a series of internal workshops to refine my thinking around Zumio with my friends and colleagues Penny Hagen and Rod Smith, and having read further about what is conceived as “social business design”, I have come to realise that this where my strengths and interests lay. It is the thread that weaves through my seemingly diverse experience, clients and projects that I have undertaken over the past 10 years.

Gaining an understanding of this has been a real “light bulb” moment for me (albeit one that has taken months to formulate) – helping me to understand what it is I actually do. I’m looking forward to developing these ideas further, especially when focused on creating a more sustainable future, both environmentally and socially. I think these two society-changing ideas – social business design and sustainability – will play increasingly important roles into the future.

P.S. you may have noticed some changes on the site recently – this is a reflection of this change in focus. While not 100% right (I wonder if these things ever are?), I certainly think the site better reflects this focus and better represents the services Zumio offers. Any feedback you have would be most welcome.

On Thursday I attended the launch of the Sustainability Challenge programme, being promoted by Models of Success & Sustainability (MOSS). (There’s currently no web presence for the programme, though some information is contained in the MOSS PDF brochure. More info on the Sustainability Challenge website.)

It is quite an interesting programme modeled around a group board game supporting organisations in providing educational material about sustainability, promoting key points for discussion and incorporating anonymous polling (or auditing) tools.

During Thursday’s session we participated in some demonstration rounds of the game within groups. Even though we weren’t able to get the effect of a full workshop (due to time constraints), I was impressed with the promise of the tool.

It is designed to be run in a workshop mode, and it was a well designed tool that incorporated competitive spirit in a constructive way to enhance learning. And while the focus of the session on Thursday was environmental sustainability, the programme itself covers a much broader set of areas, including diversity and other social factors.

The customisation options alluded to by MOSS and Sustainability Challenge International (co-designers of the game, along with input from Swinburne University and Baker & McKenzie) seem quite strong too. There also seems to be a vision of “crowdsourcing” questions and answers for the game as well.

The programme seems ideally suited to larger organisations and CSR departments, though if the costs are reasonable (I’m not yet sure what the programme’s price point is) would also be appropriate for smaller group settings.

When I read Mick Leyden’s Sitting at perfection station… post on Friday, I have to say it resonated with me.

I certainly think I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, explaining the quietness around here. That, and the fact that I have been really challenged recently to assign the time to keep up with reading etc. – the time I have allocated for “blogging” ends up being “reading”.

In any case, I’m kicking out this post as a start in a more free, less “perfectionist” direction…