The Beginner's Mind

The following is a guest post from John Vitek.

I came across something in personal reading the other day that gave me pause, and gave rise to an insight about our work with user-centered-design.

Shunryu Suzuki says this, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” He goes on, “This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything.”

In many respects I see our efforts at user-centered-design to be the work of the “beginner’s mind.” That is, we are acknowledging that we are not “experts” or even if we do have “expertise” that our minds are open to the realities and needs of the actual user of our resources.

I also have an instinct brewing. Something in my gut tells me that we are on the brink of a break-through as a result of the site observation and usability learning we are engaging. Something tells me that we are about to discover “possibilities” we hadn’t seen before. And, that this is because we are engaging in this work with humility—an empty mind, willing to be open to and ready for anything.

Who knew we’d become little zen-masters J

May we continue on this path of beginning again, and again.

John 



John Vitek currently serves as the president and chief executive officer of Saint Mary’s Press.

And the Winner of the 3 Yard Challenge Is....(drumroll please)

In December, we set a challenge to the house.  The challenge was to “think about what you could hang up in your area that would help to convey the concept of 3 yards. On a football field this is done with spray paint and grass. But it can be as simple as three little candy bars on a piece of paper or three bold lines in a rectangle something than can remind you or me, that we move forward step by step.”

I’d like to thank everyone who participated in the challenge. We had a total of 11 entries (from individuals and teams alike).  While each entry reflected a particular way of expressing three yards or moving forward step by step, there were two entries that really stood out and I’d like to recognize them in particular.

I’d like to announce that the Grand Prize winner of the Saint Mary’s Press 3 Yard Challenge is:

The CUSTOMER CARE TEAM

The customer care team went above and beyond with their branded and customer-centric representation of the 3 yard Challenge. This team will receive a gift certificate to a local restaurant of their choice.

Using the Educator’s Summit as their platform and the faces of our customers as the life of their representation, the Customer Care team conveyed 3 yards and 3 steps in a progression (incremental progression) by showing the three different groups of customers that attended the summit as well as articulating the fact that we gathered different insights from each of these groups.

In second place, with the most creative—and most interesting (read scary) entry in the 3 yard challenge, is the Creative Delivery Team with their representation entitled “You Can’t Stop Progress” featuring markings similar to those found in some modern day crime scenes.

Congratulations to these two teams on their outstanding entries and a great big thank you to everyone who participated in the challenge.

*For those of you off-site, I will send a link to some photos of both the customer care entry and the creative delivery entry.

Onward we go into 2012, step by step…

Our First Year of User-Centered Design

Our professor of User Experience at Texas Tech, (the same professor that came on-site and trained 8 employees in the Certified User Experience Professional Program last summer) had a great question he would pose to us to help us step back & consider our knowledge base around our customer. 

The question would consistently call us back to challenge our own assumptions and help us to gauge our own internal starting point. 

How do you know what you know?

I might say to him, “I already know what the customer needs,” and he would reply back with, “How do you know what you know?”

I might say to him, “Do we really need to do this Discovery step if we already know this information?” He would volley back, “You need to consider how you know what you know.”

I might argue to someone today, “But the tasks our customers are doing now are the same as as they were 5 years ago.” And someone could argue back, “How do you know that? How do you know what you know about the tasks being the same?"

Perhaps the tasks our customers are carrying out is the same, but do they carry out these tasks in the same way? Is there anything new to the way or frequency or the time allotted to carry out the tasks? What if their needs really are the same as those of previous generations?  Super! But how will you know that unless you go out into the field and verify that?

Is the certainty of our knowledge coming from direct contact with customers? Is our certainty of our customers' needs today-coming from the certainty of past success or is it coming from current exposure to our customer’s day to day reality?

This question—How do you know what you know?-- represents well the reason for and a summary of our first year using the methods and tools found in user-centered design, our first year of challenging our assumptions (in this way) about “how do we know what we know about the customer” and then allowing our learning and insights into today’s customer further shape and form the ideas, the process, the design, development, marketing and selling of our products & ultimately, our relationship with our customers. 

Evolution and development is not an easy thing. But in the last 10 months, I believe we’ve done a pretty phenomenal job at beginning to refashion our relationship with our customer and with one another.

Together, we are gathering new insights, learning new skills, building new products and hopefully, touching more hearts.

To all those at the press whose muddied hands reflect the sculpting of the last year—these are highlights of what we’ve accomplished together:

1. 11 people across various functions in the organization were certified as User Experience Professionals by Texas Tech University, specifically around the realities of usability testing and the 4 steps part of every usability test—Discovery, Evaluation, Analysis, Reporting
2. 23 people across the organization were charged with spending at least 10 hours directly observing our customers in their native environment
3. 1 Site Visit Coordinator  began to assist in all the customer visits
4. 260 hours have been spent observing, interviewing and learning from our customers
5. Project Teams began using “Discovery” as the starting point for every new product being considered
6. 5 projects originally proposed were cancelled as a result of the teams “Discovery phase” insights
7. The official Saint Mary’s Press User Experience Blog was begun and dedicated to the continuous learning and sharing of new knowledge and insights 
8. 1 huge Well-of-Insight began being filled and is now being dipped into by current project teams and is the spring for new product ideas
9. 24 people were newly trained in Virtus or Safe Environments Training 
10. 2 offices at Saint Mary’s Press have been dedicated as our very own Morae Usability Lab, where we can test customer experience of products newly in development or those going through usability revisions
11. 10 electronic and print products—including both new products and product revisions  have been usability tested using our new Morae lab
12. 4 products have been tested with state of the art eye tracking equipment, Eye-Guide (by Grinbath)
13. 1st video reports on key customer experience insights (generated from Morae Usability Testing Software) were presented to the Decision to Publish Team and the Saint Mary's Press Board of Directors

May 2012 be a year of continued growth for all of us, in service to and with our customers.