Marshmallows and Prototyping

I just watched a new video from the TED 2010 conference by Tom Wujec and since I used to work at a company that sold software prototyping solutions, I just had to share these ideas in a blog post.  Tom is a Fellow at Autodesk and is passionate about sharing his ideas around design thinking, visual collaboration and team creativity.

Tom has developed a simple 18-minute experiment called the Marshmallow Challenge to help teams “experience simple, but profound lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity.” The basic premise is that each team is given 20 sticks of spaghetti, one marshmallow and 36 inches each of masking tape and string .  The challenge is to build the tallest structure that can support the marshmallow on top.

After conducting this challenge more than 70 design workshops across the world, some surprising insights have emerged from the study:

• Kindergarten graduates do better than MBA graduates
• Specialized skills plus facilitation skills yields higher success
• Play and prototyping is essential
• Design is a contact sport

Comparison of MBA Students vs. Kindergarten Students in The Marshmallow Challenge from Tom Wujec's TED Video

Tom explains that the reason business school students are looking for the single right plan and wait until the end to put their marshmallow on top.  On the other hand, kindergarten students perform better because they build prototypes along the way and refine their results from multiple iterations.

Below is Tom’s 5 minute TED presentation and you can also learn more about how to conduct your own marshmallow challenge by visiting the Marshmallow Challenge website.

Bridging the Gap Between Brand Strategy and Design

I found this great presentation on brands that Marty Neumeier from Neutron, LLC, put together recently.  Marty is also an author who has written several books, including The Brand Gap and Zag.

Marty’s presentation is visually interesting and worth looking at from a pure design standpoint.  It also encompasses 164 slides, but you can flip through it in about 5 minutes.

Marty starts out with a definition of brands by stating what brands are not:

• Brands are not a logo
• Brands are not an identity
• Brands are not a product

Instead, a brand is what people (your customers) say it is.

From there, Mary segues into a discussion of the 5 Disciplines of Brand Building that include:

1. Differentiate
2. Collaborate
3. Innovate
4. Validate
5. Cultivate

Finally, you can read more about Marty and his view of brands in this interview posted on the Neutron website.

All of Us Need To Become Design Thinkers!

I’ve spent some time over the last few months pondering the idea of design thinking.  Part of it was driven by the webcast that Linda Yaven gave on “Making Thinking Visible” for the Catalyze Community and part of it was driven by what I see are the key competitive pressures in marketplace.  It seems that more companies and organizations are starting to talk about increasing their innovation and improving time-to-market instead of cutting costs and reducing errors in their software development process.  But there seems to be a gap in the discussion about how they’re going to get there – which brings up design thinking.

What is Design Thinking? Design thinking is a creative process of ‘building up’ ideas (vs. critical thinking which is generally associated with ‘breaking down’ ideas).  Design thinking is inherently collaborative as groups of people from different disciplines get together to brainstorm, communicate and develop new and creative solutions to problems.  Since there are no judgements or fear of failure in the design thinking process, design thinking encourages maximum input and participation.

In Linda’s webcast, she noted that design thinking is not a genetic trait, but that all of us are capable of learning how to be design thinkers.  She also pointed out that design thinking is a method and a mind-set, and involves learning by doing or what she referred to as immersive thinking.  While design is subject to personal tastes and whims, design thinkers share a common set of values that drive innovation.  These traits include creativity, curiosity, ability to visualize, neutrality, environmentally centered, optimism and teamwork.

Why is Design Thinking Important? Design thinking improves collaboration and will drive innovation.  Companies that apply design thinking will become the market leaders that develop new and innovative products and services.  Since they will be able to test and experiment with many ideas, they will have a built-in evolutionary advantage over companies stuck in a purely analytical mindset.  As noted in an article on Design Thinking by Tim Hyler (referenced below), “Design as an innovative problem-solving methodology is fast becoming an imperative business strategy.”

How Does Design Thinking Relate to iRise? Design thinking includes the following processes or stages (courtesy of Wikipedia):

1. Define
2. Research
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Choose
6. Implement
7. Learn

iRise fits squarely in the middle of the design thinking process as we enable companies to rapidly prototype or simulate different ideas and alternatives.  In fact, it could be argued iRise is the tool that makes design thinking practical and possible for most companies.

Where Can I Learn More About Design Thinking? Design thinking is just starting to gain mainstream visibility in the business world and there are many sources with additional information.  Here are a few to get you started:

From the Catalyze Community:

• Making Thinking Visible webcast and presentation
• Design Education Applications for Business article by Linda Yaven
• Intro to Design Thinking article from Red Hat Magazine

iRise Blog Entry – Are You A Design Thinker?

Making Ideas Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Some Ideas Die

I was reading an essay titled “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike” in the NY Times recently. The essay went on to describe the Curse of Knowledge – and how this curse impacts innovation and stifles new ideas. The author described the curse as the reason why managers sometimes have trouble convincing others to adopt new programs and why engineers design products that are ultimately only useful to other engineers.

There is a way to exorcise this curse. The essay mentioned a book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Some Die written by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. Chip is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Dan is a consultant for the Aspen Institute. In their book, the brothers take apart sticky ideas (natural ideas, urban myths, proverbs, rumors and other ideas) and figure out what why some ideas are more memorable and why others die.

Based on their research, they identified six principles of successful ideas. The six principles can be summarized in a checklist for creating a successful idea: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story which form the acronym SUCCES:

• S – Simplicity (the message must be both simple and profound)
• U -Unexpectedness (the message must generate interest and curiousity)
• C – Concreteness (the message must be clear)
• C – Credibility (help people test ideas for themselves)
• E – Emotions (make people feel something)
• S – Stories (stories act as mental flight simulator)

The book also mentions that not every idea is ’stick-worthy’. In fact, the range of stick-worthy ideas for most people ranges from one per week to one per month. They also point out that creating sticky ideas is something that can be learned.

What’s the take-away? “A little focused effort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a difference.” Using these six simple steps, we can take our ideas and transform into ’sticky’ and powerful ideas.

To learn more about making ideas stick, here are several link to follow:

• Made to Stick website
• Made to Stick blog
• Made to Stick excerpts

Why Prototype?

I ran across an interesting presentation (”Sketching in Code: Using Prototypes to Visualize Interactions“) that David Vreba, Director of Technology at Adaptive Path, delivered at the UXWeek conference in August.

In particular, two slides in David’s presentation with the titles “Why Prototype?” caught my attention.  These slides sum up in a nutshell why prototyping is so important:

• Visualize your requirements – save a lot of time and effort by not creating so many paper-based requirements that are difficult to review
• Get to market faster – generate a lot of cash by getting a better product to market faster.

Effective prototyping can reduce cycle times throughout the entire software development lifecycle.

David also presented 5 key reasons to prototype including:

1. See problems more clearly
2. See some problems at all
3. Gain buy in from stakeholders
4. Foster collaboration
5. Help everybody understand what is possible

I think #2, “see some problems at all“, is one of the more overlooked reasons to prototype.  In many cases, stakeholders may not even be aware of problems with usability, flow and design until you actually show them what you had in mind.  This is because reams of text-based requirements written down on paper do not come close to showing someone what you meant.

Point #4 – “foster collaboration” – is probably the least expected side benefit of prototyping.  Without even knowing it, sharing a prototype gets groups talking that may have never talked in the past.  This then facilitates better communication throughout the rest of the project and has carryover benefits into the next project and beyond.

Most people need to visualize something and even better try something to truly understand it.  And it is much better to show them early in a prototyping phase than near the end of the development lifecycle when the final product is almost complete.

You can learn more about David Vreba’s presentation, and download the slides and audio at this link.

Are You A Design Thinker?

Are you taking advantage of design to generate strategic business differentiation?

I got turned onto the topic of design thinking from Cone Johnson – an iRise user who helped organize an event around design thinking in Dallas today.

So what is design thinking?

From the Design Thinking event site, they talk about design thinking as follows:

“Classic business models are threatened—the economics of competition have changed. Quality, efficiency and price are quickly matched. Being different requires flexibility—it’s squishy. Squishy seems to imply risk.

Such is the conundrum of the balance between science and art—a balance readily facilitated by Design Thinking, fundamentals for strategic business differentiation.”

At the Corante blog, Paula Thornton describes design thinking as “leveraging implicit elements of design practices, as a means to approach problem solving” and calls it a “critical factor for innovation”.   Paula also notes that “Good Design Thinking is the ability to see things not readily apparent to others (that’s where market differentiation can occur).”

The Noise Between Stations blog provides 6 building blocks of design thinking:

• Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
• Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
• Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk
• Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
• Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
• Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions

The net-net is that design is good – and that design can and should be leveraged to even greater heights by coupling it with business strategy to generate new innovations.  I’d love to hear comments about how others are using design to solve problems.

(For some additional background information, here are some del.icio.us links on design thinking provided by Cone.  This entry was originally posted in the Catalyze Current Wisdom blog.)

10/25 update – Here’s some more information I ran across this morning on Design Thinking from Bruce Nussbaum’s blog (NussbaumOnDesign) where he compares Design to Design Thinking.

Protocasting – Taking Prototyping To a New Level

I ran across an interesting blog post by Robert Hoeckman, Jr. today on “protocasting” and wanted to share it with the Catalyze community. 

What is a protocast?  I am a big proponent of prototyping or simulations as words alone just do not do justice when trying to explain a new system or functionality.  However, Robert’s techniques takes prototyping to an entirely new level.  Robert’s definition of a protocast is: a combination of a prototype and a screencast.  Robert creates them by filming and narrating a simple prototype using a tool like Camtasia (for Windows) or Snapz Pro (for Mac).

Why does Robert make protocasts?  “The less time I spend on what should be simple explanations, the more time I can spend doing other important things for my clients.”

Read more about protocasting in Robert’s blog entry.  Protocasting may be something to consider on your next project.

Perspective in Design – A Presentation by Jay Morgan, Information Architect

I had the chance to listen to Jay Morgan’s presentation on user-centered design at the World Congress of Business Analysts today in Boston.  Jay addressed three key areas:

• Seeing the customer
• Seeing the product
• Seeing the total experience

Under Seeing the Customer, Jay examined three techniques:

• Scenarios – Scenarios are short stories that describe a user’s behavior and interaction with a system.  Scenarios have a beginning, middle and end – and are written in the first person.
• Mental Models –  Mental Models are maps of user goals to a product’s features and they describe how your users see the experience.  Indi Young from Adaptive Path has been one of the leading proponents of Mental Models.
• Personas – Personas let you discover the archetypes or idealized models of your user population.  You can analyze reasearch data from qualitative studies to form the ideal personas for your application.  Alan Cooper has written extensively on Personas.

Under Seeing the Product, Jay discussed the three key techniques:

• Heuristic Evaluation – The concept behind heuristic evaluation is to evaluate your product or website against a scorecard.  Forrester’s Web Site Review checklist provides a good list for evaluation.
• Usability Testing – Usability testing involves having real users evaluate the product to achieve real goals.  Usabiltiy testing lets you explore, assess and validate.  Open and close card sorting are two methods to do some low-end usability testing
• Prototyping + Simulation – Under prototyping and simulation, you build a functional, interactive model of the product.  Jay stated that “simulating changes the game in a big way, so you should expect significant returns”.

And under Seeing the Total Experience, Jay discussed:

• User + Product Perspectives
• Iterative Design

In summary, Jay made three key points:

• You will bring a new perspective to work that will improve your products and your process.
• UCD is a way of “Getting the right design” versus merely “Getting the design right”
• Designing the total experience is based on an adaptive process of iterative design.

Jay is also one of the community leaders for Catalyze, so I know he will be posting more insights and will be available to answer any community questions on user-centered design.

Bill Buxton on “Sketching and Experience Design”

Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, talked on “Why Design” and “Sketching and Experience Design” at the November 2006 BostonCHI meeting held at Sun Microsystems in Burlington, MA.  Bill Buxton is a designer and a researcher concerned with human aspects of technology.  His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, film making and music.  Buxton’s research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers,  technology mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing.

In December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design, where his time was split between working  for clients, lecturing, and trying to finish a long-delayed book on sketching and interaction design. As well, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he still works with graduate students.

Bill maintains his own website with more information on sketching and other links.

Bill explains design better than I can, so I recommend watching his presentation.

Creating the Adaptive Interface

Stephen Anderson from Sabre presented on the topic of Adaptive Interfaces at the IA Summit 2007.  Adaptive Interfaces are interfaces that learn from user actions or reveal additional functionality as a user gains experience.

Here is the introduction from Stephen’s blog entry on Adaptive Interfaces and the complete blog entry.

“With the proliferation of rich Internet applications and interactions more closely aligned with how people think, we face some interesting challenges:

• Do we design for one common audience and common tasks, or tailor applications around specific audiences and their unique activities?
• How do we resolve the tension between creating simple applications that ‘do less’ and the demand for new features that some people really do need?
• As we move beyond usability to create desirable interfaces, how do we handle a subjective domain like emotions?

These types of challenges could all be addressed by creating a truly ‘adaptive’ interface. More than removing unused menu options or collaborative filtering, this would include functionality that is revealed over time as well as interface elements that change based on usage. Imagine the web-based email client that begins offering three forms fields for attachments instead of the default one, because it ‘noticed’ that you frequently upload more than one file. Or the navigation menu that disappears because it is not relevant to the task at hand. Sound scary? Look at the world of game design, where inconsistency has never been an issue and where users learn new functions over time, as needed. In the same ways that ads are becoming more targeted around context and behavior, we can also create interfaces that respond, suggest, or change based on actual usage data.”

The IA Summit presentation is also posted here.