by Kate O'Neill
Alignment is important in business and strategy overall. It’s important to align sales and marketing—reduces operating costs, marketing and technology, customer motives and company motives, etc.
As an aside, I think a lot of what falls into the term growth hacking—a term that sounds dishonest and manipulative—could just as easily be described as alignment marketing, where natural overlaps between the customer’s interest and the company’s interest are force multipliers of success.
There are also force multiples in strategic alignment of product development:
Many of the innovation of 3Ms like Post-it notes, magnetic tape, and photographic films are the results of leveraging its expertise in substrates, coatings and adhesives. RIMs success with Blackberry smart phone is based on designing its features around the company’s strategic focus on enterprise business. RIM’s recent innovation on Blackberry PlayBook is again based on its business-centric features.52
It’s also important to align offline brand experience design with online brand experience design.
That’s a lot of alignment to strive for. Trying to do it all at once can sometimes hold back well-intentioned efforts and allow misaligned campaigns and projects to go forward without consideration.
So just as it’s important to treat the knowledge gathering process as iterative, it’s important to treat alignment as an iterative process, too. You may need to be tactical and responsive before you can be strategic and proactive, but don’t let the first stage keep you from getting to the next.
With strategic alignment, marketing organizations are able to develop measurement architectures or strategies that not only answer the question of “Was this tactic successful?” but also “How impactful was it to the overall business objectives?”53
A key question to ask is:
What are the motivations of the people using your space, and how do they or how can they align with your motivations for designing the space?
The more you can align these motivations, the more you can use technology and data to cement the relationship.
In assessing the capabilities of the organization and what opportunities you have, you might find it helpful to use a framework like this as a starting point for thinking through strategic alignment with your organization—beginning from capabilities, developing deeper data to validate, and refining through iterations over time:
You have to be willing to align internally and externally, to take results and knowledge from validation experiments and not only apply them to ongoing campaigns and external efforts, but also to gaps in talent. You can reorganize and strengthen the organization around what comes through learning.
Effectiveness
There has to be a sense of how to measure or otherwise gauge the effectiveness, or the success, of the designed experience in a physical or digital space. This is where you measure the success or at least clarify what isn’t working. The more you can define up front what success will look like, the more you can use technology and data to measure whether you got there.
In my consulting, I often tell clients that the first time through a new marketing operations process is not necessarily about gaining big wins in conversion rate or revenue or anything like that. It’s to familiarize everyone with the process; to identify who will be responsible for signing off on what; to decide who needs to get the line of Javascript inserted into the code, and so on. Once you get through that process, you can make adjustments as needed and do it again right away, becoming more effective each time you go through it.
Adaptation and Iteration
It happens every so often. I’m consulting with a client and we’ve worked our way through almost a whole strategic cycle, and then we get to the learnings. The results of our efforts show that the product might make more sense without a certain distracting feature, or that the website is hemorrhaging visitors and that the design is probably too unfocused. Or something. Whatever it is, something suggests that in order to make good on what we’ve learned, either the message or the product or the organization or something has to change.
Unfortunately, many organizations—from huge enterprises to small nonprofits—are led with a certain amount of resistance to change. Perhaps it’s because the top leadership fears that change implies they’ve been leading in the wrong direction, or perhaps it’s because change always sounds like it’s going to be very expensive and chaotic, or perhaps it’s another reason entirely.
But resistance to change is real and all too common.
Maybe you’ve tried out a beacon program and learned something about merchandising that changes what you thought you knew about your most popular products.
Maybe you used a location-targeted advertisement to test out a message and it worked so well you now think it might need to inform (and maybe replace) your overall marketing strategy.
It stands to reason that integrated experiences, as they pull in more data, are also poised to bring in more insights about what needs to change in the organization in order to make good on the data and insights
Organizations must have a certain amount of agility and openness to change.
Change sounds big and scary, though. I prefer to use the term adaptation.
Adaptation conjures up images of Darwin and evolution, and that’s okay. (In the marketing world, it has associations with advertising and product groups, but that’s okay, too.) Evolution is thought of as a slow process (perhaps erroneously, but even that’s okay). It happens across an entire species—a collective, an organization—through variations that happen in individuals that prove successful or not.
The organization needs to foster an environment where experiments and variations are welcome, and where the results of those experiments can be understood in context.
Meaningful alignment must include adaptation. There has to be a way to adapt, to incorporate new information and iterate upon what is learned.
Adaptation is a reactive process, but it’s an iterative one, too. It can be done in stages and cycles. Adaptation doesn’t have to be painful.
Be willing to adapt to customer segments as you become aware of them. Even if you don’t break out tailored messaging and experiences for those segments right away, identifying them in analytics and reporting on their metrics separately can help begin the transition to treating this group of customers as a meaningfully distinct group with specific motivations and needs.
Make sure feedback truly loops back. If you’re getting feedback from customers in support calls, make sure those comments get all the way back to strategists and designers who sit at the beginning of the product and service design process.
Adapt the organization to the new knowledge gradually. Increase the amount of empathy they have for the user because they now have more data about the user.
Build in language that incorporates the new understanding. Debates about political correctness aside, the language we and the people around us use can impact the decisions we make and skew our efforts one way or the other. Hotel brands that decide to refer to customers as “guests” are likely to make subtly different operational decisions than brands that refer to their customers as, well, “customers.” In the same way, when experience design leads to insights about the people we interact with, it may be worth noting where our current language misleads us. Here again, as always, seek alignment.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Patterns of Use / Putting It Into Practice
It’s all good and well to talk about the metaphors, but how do we put this into practice? I hear you.
The best way to think about these patterns is across industries: For example, in retail, the emerging patterns point to beacons, daily social media presence, and agility. But any business or organization that wants to borrow from what’s working in retail can begin to think about ways to implement some of these patterns in their own environment.
In this section we’ll look at the patterns and examples common to some of the implementations of integrated phys
ical and digital experience, and how they align with my methodology of Integrated Human Experience Design.
Ownership Versus Access and Privately-Owned Public Spaces
In New York City and other cities like Seattle, Boston, Toronto, and Seoul, commercial real estate developers often make use of a clause that allows them to build beyond their zoning restrictions if they work in public space. It’s a phenomenon known as POPS: Privately-Owned Public Space. It’s an odd thing to wrap your head around, right? A chunk of public space that is privately owned.
But the digital world has its own version of this weirdness: After all, many of the “places” where we spend time online are privately-owned. Facebook, Twitter, all the social media.
We benefit from and make good use of these spaces, but ultimately we are not in control of them. We can access them, but someone else owns them. This is why when they change—such as when Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram pushes out changes to the user interface or to the algorithm that sorts the content feed—it causes great consternation. When both Twitter and Instagram announced disruptions to their chronological feeds in early 2016, people freaked out.
Fundamentally, remembering that this disconnect between ownership and access exists has the chance to teach us compassion for those moments. It’s easy to scoff at people who get caught up in resisting change. But on some level, they’re reacting to that fractured experience.
As physical spaces become more tightly embedded in digital experiences that overlay them, such as with augmented reality, and as digital spaces become aware of and enmeshed in physical places, such as with location-tagging on social media, the disconnects inherent in access-versus-ownership are bound to be more apparent.
For example, after the launch of Pokémon GO, Boon and Caro Sheridan found that a stream of people were lingering and converging in front of their home. Of course, their home happened to be an old church they’d renovated. Since many churches were designated as “gyms” for training the characters within the game, players were merely accessing the construct within the game, regardless of ownership. Eventually, Boon and Caro were able to get Niantic, the makers of Pokémon GO, to change their home’s designation. But the example is a useful precedent for how layered reality may alter our experiences in unexpected ways. (Full disclosure: I know Boon because we both spoke at a user experience conference.)
The access-versus-ownership dilemma is far from new: It’s been one of the central issues in the disruption of the entertainment and media industries, due to consumers’ shifting priority from owning copies of movies and music to preferring broad on-demand access to a massive catalog of entertainment options. The premise of access over ownership also sits at the foundation of the sharing economy.
The economic and legal impacts of this dilemma are outside the scope of this book, but as experience designers and creators, we have some questions to ask ourselves. For example: How do technological capabilities shift our perspective of the priorities of access over ownership? How does that shift in priorities affect our relationship to place and space? And what obligation do we have, as designers of and sometimes owners of the spaces the public occupies, to remember that change is jarring and to consider the public when introducing changes?
Opportunities for New Cues and Sensory Experiences
It’s 10:30 a.m. on an average Wednesday. You’re at work, and you start to feel yourself dragging, so you decide to step out for a cup of coffee. You walk down to a local coffee shop, where there’s a line to order. You notice a sign at the register showing the store’s Instagram handle, so you flick through their Instagram as you stand in line. Their feed is mostly re-shares of customer pictures, which makes you think you should take a picture of your coffee drink when you get yours, too. And now that you think about it, you were planning to order a plain coffee but maybe you should get a cappuccino because the foam is probably more photogenic.
Does it seem ridiculous that such a shallow thing might influence your decision-making? Perhaps for you it is, but subtle cues and nudges have always influenced people’s decisions. (See the earlier section on “Cues, Triggers, and Metaphors: Sensory Experience Design” for examples.) The allure of a tiny piece of social fame is a form of validation that is no less compelling than many of the cues marketers have used for ages.
In thinking about the process of leading someone to buy through integrated experiences, we can also consider some emerging cues and sensory experiences, such as:
proximity
temperature
sensory data—smells, auditory cues, etc.
As technologies emerge and digital sophistication increases, we will have expanding opportunities to use metaphors that are still novel for digital. Consider proximity, where a user’s experience changes in response to their surroundings and nearby resources; or even sensory cues, such as temperature and other bodily metrics that may indicate meaningful response.
I don’t mean to advocate skeuomorphism, although it serves a purpose. Apple has been criticized by designers in some of its operating system versions as leaning too heavily on the visual iconography and interaction metaphors of the physical world to familiarize and dimensionalize their digital counterparts. (For example, using page flips in iBooks; showing thumbnails of books on a virtual wooden bookshelf; making the iOS calculator look like a 1970s model; showing CD iconography in iTunes, etc.) But skeuomorphic designs serve as a transition for new users, giving them cues and handholds into the interactions of a new experience layer.
I certainly don’t mean to sound like I’m advocating for manipulation through these sensory cues. There are plenty of examples where that’s happening, but that’s not an ethical approach to this framework. Still, when we’re designing experiences for a business reason, there is a need to be compelling—which requires us to understand what compels.
You could also look to the RFID tags more and more often being affixed to clothes in stores, and the opportunity to use proximity as a cue for an experience. Even temperature is biometric feedback that could potentially be used through wristbands or smart fabrics or other wearables. That could be the trigger for a mood-related or behavior-related experience.
There are other sensory cues—smells, auditory cues, and so on. The data model might not yet support all of the possibilities we can imagine, but we can already be thinking about how to create an expansive experience of the brand and the product.
Just-in-Time Convergence of Physical and Digital
When you think about how the digital and physical worlds are merging, many examples that come to mind have to do with wrapping a digital layer around something that exists in the physical world, whether beacons, connected devices, or even augmented reality. You might not immediately think about how something can start in the digital world and emerge in the physical world. But the additive capabilities of 3-D printing and manufacturing do just that.
There’s been steady growth in this area that provides what we might call a just-in-time convergence of the physical and digital. Perhaps more to the point, it’s a just-in-time emergence of physical matter through digital means.
Emailing a Wrench to Space
On December 22, 2014, something seemingly mundane happened: Someone needed a wrench to fix something. But that someone was NASA Expedition 42 Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore; and what he needed to fix, in theory, was the International Space Station. So NASA emailed him the specifications, and he printed the ratchet wrench with the on-board 3-D printer.54
In other words: humans emailed a wrench to space.
It wasn’t for live maintenance; it was just a test of how future missions might handle maintenance needs. But it was a milestone nonetheless.
The first hand tool to be 3D printed in space from emailed specifications (Image source: NASA)
This is one of the most fun examples of the convergence of digital data and the physical world. And best of all, it takes place in SPACE!
3-D/Additive Printing
&nbs
p; Aside from maintaining space stations, there are plenty of down-to-earth examples of 3-D printing making exciting things possible.
Printable Fashion
Several designers and cutting-edge startups are using 3-D printing and additive manufacturing to custom-make shoes, or to allow consumers to print their own customized, custom-fit apparel and accessories.
Healthcare
The implications for 3-D printing in healthcare are enormous, offering truly personalized surgical and other medical solutions to patient problems. But the capabilities were perhaps most adorably demonstrated through a veterinary example: by printing a new foot for a duck.
In a classroom duck hatching project, a duck named Buttercup was born with a defective foot. A waterfowl sanctuary took Buttercup in, and they worked with 3-D printing company NovaCopy to print a new foot for Buttercup.
Photo credit: Feathered Angels Waterfowl Sanctuary
via ButtercupTheDuck Facebook page