Why Interaction Design Matters

This morning I came across the below video on “interaction design”.   What struck me from this video is not only the topic itself but rather how the topic of interaction was explained. It was simple, yet brilliant.

The video refers to interaction design “as the design of interactions between people and things.” (1)

Rich Ziade says in the attached video that "the design [in the general sense of giving form or structure to something] around the interaction actually thinks about the dialogue and the flow of the experience that [a customer] is going to have with a product." (2)

As I think about the brand of Saint Mary’s Press, I think about the hundreds of thousands of titles that are sold each year. And then I think about the words that our customers have consistently used over the years to explain their experiences of interacting with our product. They use words including:  

accessible - engaging - relevant.

Those words are not just nice descriptors that we should use in marketing, but rather point to and mark the type of interaction our customers have had in the use of our products, as they have been in dialogue with our products, as they have interacted with our products and as they have forged a path through our products. 

Those words and the reality they point to are labeling not a product, but an experience, not just the words or the look of the product but the sum total of an interaction.

No matter what type of product we are developing, whether we are creating a digital product, a website, or the three legs of the development stool are gathered around a table revising a curriculum, it is the following we must keep in front of us. 

What we are creating and influencing on a daily basis are the dynamics of the dialogue or the interaction between our products and our customers,  “the flow of the experience that [our customers] are going to have  with our product”. (3)  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeL5ByBwt0&context=C3c99e45ADOEgsToPDskIH_KgIc0Rp7J24kEYRr5eD

1-Sketchcaster. "Why Interaction
   Design Matters." YouTube.
   Web. 31 Jul 2007.
2-Ibid.
3-Ibid.
4-Ibid.

How HP Simplifies the User Experience

To be honest, I first learned about user-centered design through the work we've done here at the press.

However, as I continue to research the best practices of incorporating the customer clearly and concretely into our work, I've come to realize that we are not alone in using this particular approach.  Further, the number & caliber of corporate powerhouses that have embraced this philosophy and understand the value of incorporating these principles is worthy of noting.

Take a look at how HP, a multi-billion dollar company, simplifies the user experience. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTxmiovW848

Data is Meaningless

Last June during a company meeting, John (our CEO) had a conversation with us about metrics and data. He began by saying, "In and of themselves, data is meaningless." (Truth be told, my ears perked up at that point, considering my entire position is framed around data gathering and maintenance of data integrity.) 

He went on to say, "The interpretation and insight generation from the data that leads to improvement decisions is the ultimate aim and value of the performance metrics. In other words,it's not about the metrics and rubrics and data; it’s about the conversation generated from it, and the insight and improvements that flow out of the conversation."

 "It’s about the conversation generated from it, 

and the insight and improvements that flow out of the conversation."

I spent the majority of yesterday in a retreat with about 12 other coworkers around a topic central to one of the markets we serve. To be honest, I found myself shocked at what I was witnessing and came away at the end of the day a bit in awe at what I was blessed to behold.

What occurred to me throughout the meeting was that I was witnessing the fruit of last year’s direct user observation metric. Sure, I had remembered those words, "It's not about the hours, it's about the insight", but now I was hearing conversations that were so strikingly different to those I've heard previously that I felt compelled to share and articulate what I see unfolding. 

Certainly, we all come to meetings, gatherings and project retreats with those insights formed by our own individual experience. But yesterday, a new- more widespread-certainty permeated the De La Salle room. I found myself in the midst of conversation so steeped in customer insight and customer experience that I was surprised again to recall how far we've come in just one year. 

At least 20 different times during the retreat (ok, after 20, I stopped keeping track) I heard the words, "What I've seen in my site visits", "What I've learned from my time with the customer", "When I was at a parish..."

The conversation from our retreat yesterday is one that was generated uniquely from data we've gathered and the insights we've gleaned from our time with the customer. All in all, it's a conversation that finds it's starting point not in the hours of observation, but in the insights we've gleaned from those hours. 

Our conversations will eventually set in motion improvements we will make to solve the problems we know our customers have and the needs we anticipate they may have tomorrow.

But for now, as the insights and wisdom from yesterday's retreat continue to percolate, we can be assured that the new dynamics that help to shape our conversations today, bring us even closer alongside the man in whose footsteps we follow, for St. John Baptist De La Salle never lost sight of the reality of those he served. He stayed with them in many different ways. And in staying with them, he understood better, how he could serve them.
 

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.  

The Insights are Endless

Every site visit brings with it the opportunity to learn some insight into the reality of what it means to teach,  what it means to teach the faith, or what it means to serve those tasked with that great mission. 

Each time I have had the privilege to observe parish faith formation sessions,  a catholic high school religion class, or a third grade classroom, I find myself amazed time and again at what I encounter in these moments.

Sometimes I glean just as many insights personally as I do professionally and I can’t believe I am allowed to have this experience as PART of my job.

I have the opportunity to learn about what tasks they are trying to accomplish and what tools teachers need in order to accomplish their tasks but I also see the commitment teachers and catechists have to teaching the young people in front of them.  I’m surprised by the patience and sacrifice they have in the presence of these energetic and lively students. I am in awe of the amazing way they guide and develop the hearts and minds of these young people entrusted to their care.  I am struck by the witness of these men and women and their willingness to light the way for those at an earlier place on the path. 

I am humbled in the presence of these people.  

The visits we’ve had this year--and those we will continue to have--will continue to bring us insights,  professional insights that will help to guide:  the conversation, further insight and the improvement and/or innovation of resources for those we seek to serve.  

These visits may also be insightful, inspiring or generative to us personally.

Either way, the insights are endless.

What is one insight you've gleaned in this year of visits, learning and listening? Share below, so we can learn from one another.

To read John Vitek’s insight from a recent site visit, click here:    http://themindfulheart.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/kindness-heals/