April 10, 2012
First Thought: The Appification of Things
There has been a ton written and talked about ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Most notably, Mike Kuniavsky’s thoughtful series of talks, blog posts and his book Smart Things provide the most complete overview of where the smart object world is headed. At its heart, our world of things is becoming more connected as the things themselves gain sense and intelligence. At this point, it’s a matter of “how and when” rather than “if” this will happen.
Recently, we’ve also seen a wellspring of articles from main street publications like Wall Street Journal to tech rags like Tech Crunch discussing the rise of “Appification”, eg. to modify a service to make an “app” of it. Apple recently gave away a $10,000 iTunes (App store) gift card to Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China to celebrate its 25 billionth! app download. Revenue for all mobile app stores in 2011 was pegged at $3.8 billion. Looking forward, research firm IDC projects total annual mobile app downloads–Apple’s combined with those from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other app stores–to jump to over 182 billion by 2015. Just yesterday, the Instagram social mobile photo app was acquired for $1 billion by Facebook. Let’s face it: apps are successful by any measure.
In fact, it’s becoming clear to me that the “Appification of Things” will be the first wave of truly ubiquitous computing. People’s comfort and engagement with apps takes the fuzzy, intangible notions of pervasive computing or smart objects and makes them gettable, tangible and personal. It’s a natural, incremental step in a larger shift. Let’s look at a few product announcements from the last several months to illustrate.
Nike led the charge back in 2006 with its introduction of Nike+ sensor and iPod kit. We didn’t realize at the time that this was just the tip of the “Appification of Things” iceberg. 2012 has revealed the extent to which Nike is looking to pervade our lives with Nike+ Fuel (band), Nike+ Training and Nike+ Basketball. Nike’s Fuel measure and wristband product looks to make the measurement of daily general activity while its Training and Basketball speciality offerings look to make activity measurement smarter and more effective for specific sports. Having just spent my first week as a proud owner of a Nike Fuel band, my own behavior is a prime example of how smart objects help us change behavior: I haven’t taken the elevator at work since wearing the band; I make a conscious decision to walk home on occasion. We could expect Nike to continue releasing products with built in measurement integrated with apps which enable owners to talk to their sporting equipment, and by proxy, their bodies–the appification of sport products.
In October of last year, there was a huge announcement in the world of thermostats, which is a bit bizarre given it’s the world of thermostats. The reason? It was reported that famed iPod creator Tony Fadell wanted to reinvent the HVAC industry with the introduction of the Nest Learning Thermostat. A smart app-connected home-heating controller, Nest learns the tendencies of its owners, programs itself and, ultimately, helps owners save energy. While Nest is a beautiful object and can be used solely by itself, it becomes more capable and more aware when accessed through its suite of Web, iOS and Android apps. As the company itself says, “its apps now give you more control, more info and easier access.” It’s the appification of home HVAC products.
A month later, in November, two MIT grads1 behind a company called Supermechanical announced a Kickstarter project dubbed “Twine: Listen to your world, talk to the Internet.” With a small, rubbery piece of hardware connected to a variety of sensors–temperature, moisture, movement, etc.–and a related “Spool” web app, Twine makes it super easy for the marginally geeky to connect our everyday objects to the Internet. Initially looking for a goal of $35,000 in funding to get their project off the ground, the inventors were astounded when they took in more than $556,500–the third highest Kickstarter total ever at the time. This type of demand for an offering which is explicitly created to connect basic physical products or aspects of our home, shows how much appetite exists in the appification of things.
German Medisana launched their first appified products last year but were only covered widely in the English-speaking press in the last month or so. Their VitaDock family of offerings “visualizes your health.” Specifically, they offer blood pressure monitors, body scales, blood sugar monitors and thermometers. Each product connects to a free associated VitaDock iOS app which aggregates data across these various measurement devices across days, weeks and months. While there are programs to help keep track of these details manually, appifying the products themselves allows us to do it fluidly with little effort. Rather than focus on measurement and cataloguing, we can put it where it belongs: behavior change. I predict the Quantified Self movement will have a wave of popularity off the back of these appified products. Many users won’t really even know they’ve joined the
Finally, I learned about the French company Withings last week when a friend posted excitedly about a new baby monitor he had purchased. The company, a competitor to Medisana, looks to be doing great things with products like connected body scales, blood pressure monitors, baby monitors and soon, a baby scale.
Withings’ vision statement is worth a read:
After modifying our daily relationship with the computer with the web, then with telephony and television services with telephony and television on IP, permanent broadband access to internet networks opens the way to a profound revolution of everyday objects. Increasing the capacities of an object by network resources is giving it access to infinite calculation and storage capacities without increasing the cost. The object's interfaces are also ported to appliances like mobile phones or computers, to benefit from their resources. The everyday object thus sees its performance increased tenfold, its user interface and design improved, and enters an ecosystem of permanently connected appliances.
Withings’ founders get it. It’s not just “connecting” an object that matters but also porting an object’s interfaces in the form of apps to really enable connectedness. It’s the appification of home health products.
Nike, Nest, Twine, Medisana and Withings: five examples illustrating the first era of truly pervasive computing–the Appification of Things. Apps mediate the fuzzy data behind the things themselves to help humans interact more successfully with their products and also with each other. More specifically, apps introduce a set of “ smart attributes” to physical offerings which would not otherwise be easily accessed. Smart attributes which enable us to understand and change our behavior include: measurement, visualization, optimization, distribution and connection. Next week, I’ll unpack these attributes in more detail and illustrate their importance.
1 Full disclosure: One of the two inventors of Twine, John Kestner, was a colleague of mine at the IIT Institute of Design where we worked on the User Insights Tool project together. Here he is (on the right) inspecting some work with another colleague of ours, Enric: John at the IIT Institute of Design. John, where’s my Twine?!
March 06, 2012
First Thought: Apple’s Move in Financial Services
Apple has made a lot of noise in becoming the biggest, most watched company in the land. One by one, the little fruit computing company that could has made end runs on the titans of industries including music (iPod/iTunes), mobile phones (iPhone/Appstore) and personal computing (iPad/iCloud). Many believe a similar end run on the television market is right around the corner, maybe even as soon as tomorrow. In each case, a similar story unfolds.
A rumor suggesting Apple will introduce some innovative product circulates through the technology press. Endless speculation ensues about this or that iProduct. Occasionally, the rumored product is indeed launched to much fanfare. Tech pundits decree the iProduct in the following week as either category changing or, not good enough. A year later, competitors respond with copies, half-hearted attempts to deliver Apple value with marginal, complimentary benefits (eg. barely lower prices or so-called “openness”), and after another year hilarious quotes are dug up to illustrate how out of touch these CEO’s really are. The story ends with Apple skewering an industry with the major players never really even understanding what was happening until it was too late. Thus, the end run is complete.
Right now, everyone is focused on the iPad3 as well as the rumored iTV. Both are huge announcements so the focus is warranted. Given its explosive growth and the potential for tablets to actually surpass PC’s in units sold by the end of 2013, iPad3 is expected to be another blockbuster hit. The next version of Apple’s TV “hobby”–whether an incremental AppleTV or the hyped iTV–should be another deft step showing that even the biggest company in the world can dance. Of course this news is important.
But what if the world, while obsessed with tablets and TV’s, missed Apple’s moves in an even bigger game, namely, financial services?
Consider this image for a patent–the iWallet–which was granted to Apple today:
Combine this iWallet with Transaction, an App and host of related patents for NCF payment and financial services:
Apple seems to have developed a set of patents critical to how people will make payments on mobile devices in the future, while keeping in mind the 220M+ credit-card enabled iTunes account holders that aregrowing exponentially. The logical next step is pretty astounding: Apple should be at the heart, or taking a cut, of every mobile transaction. Their IP will force the issue while their massive customer base greases the gears.
I’ve worked with enough financial services clients to know this type of end run on their bread and butter is absolutely unthinkable. Banks and credit card companies are just too big, too old and too profitable to believe anyone but the government could unseat them. Big financial services look at the Simple banks of the world and they just don’t see a threat.
But what if Apple provided all of the function—mobile payment, connecting the dots between different accounts, integrating with a set of financial services “smart rules” and an already impressive ecosystem—in everyday financial transactions while banks themselves just provided accounts? In this world, it would be easy to see how Simple really could become a viable alternative. What if Apple worked with Simple to make it really easy to open an account launched from iTunes?
We’ve seen Square go from nothing to processing sales for $4 billion worth of goods in just two years. This disruptive innovation is possible because it sits on the back of the massively successful iOS hardware and app infrastructure. Is it so much of a leap to imagine how this could extend further to consumers and our everyday experience?
Maybe this is all just a bit of fantasy fueled by a few disconnected bits of news and some crazy late night thinking. But maybe, just maybe, it’s the game no one is talking about Apple playing.
February 22, 2012
3 Myths of Customer Experience
I recently gave a presentation at an event organized by the the UK Usability Professionals’ Association. The event, focused on UX & Strategy, featured talks by Tom Wood from Foolproof UX, noted speaker and UX professional Leisa Reichelt as well as myself. Tom and Liesa outlined their thoughts on the definition of experience strategy and how it could (or couldn’t) be successful in companies today. With luck, they’ll both post their presentations soon.
I presented a related set of ’3 Myths of Customer Experience’ which sought to address some of the biggest red herrings in UX today. Ultimately, I want to turn ’myths’ into ’truths’ and introduce my definition of Experience Strategy as well as the critical notion of the ’Aspects of the Experience’. I took the time to record a voice over for the presentation and enabled a “Screencast” within Slideshare. The total running time is just under 18 minutes. Tweet me if you have any comments or questions. Cheers.
References made within 3 Myths of Customer Experience:
You Can’t Design Experiences
Can Experience be Designed? by Oliver Reichenstein
Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed by Helge Fredheim
USER-EXPERIENCE CAN’T BE DESIGNED by MAGIA3E
Free Download: All icons from This is Service Design
Nothing is New
Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson
Patent by Telautograph on Free Patents Online
Separated at Birth? by Jim Edwards on c|net
What is iPad? by Apple
What is Newton? by Apple
Creating Value through Experience Strategy & Service Design
The Business Case For (Or Against) Service Design by Brandon Schauer
Experience Strategy & Modeling
Five Questions to Build a Strategy by Roger Martin
Experience Modeling by Margaret Morris and Arnie Lund (from Sapient)
E-Lab by Christine Canabou
Boundary Objects entry on Wikipedia
IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, USA
SapientNitro, my employer and pioneer in Experience Modeling
February 08, 2012
Innovation Suicide:
10 Ways Companies Kill Their Own Good Ideas
In late November, Patrick Whitney, Dean and Professor at the IIT Institute of Design1 in Chicago gave a talk and took part in a discussion as part of Smart Design’s Smart Salon series. The talk and the discussion was focused on “Innovation Suicide” and explored the ways companies kill their own good ideas. Patrick was joined by Steve Smith, a seasoned venture capitalist interested in some of the seemingly more esoteric yet increasingly more useful ways to “value” potential in the market.
Not enough people have seen the talk (only 182 plays as of January 29!) so I wanted to promote it. For those of you who don’t have the time to watch it, I’ve captured Patrick’s “10 Ways Companies Kill Their Own Good Ideas” and commented on them each below.
Smart Salon with Patrick Whitney and Steve Smith from Smart Design on Vimeo.
Patrick counted down from number 10 to number 1 in his talk, so I’ve outlined his ten in the same order.
“There is a disconnect between the way the world is beginning to work and the lenses companies are using to run their businesses and understand consumers.” - Patrick Whitney, Dean IIT Institute of Design
Innovation Suicide: 10 Ways Companies Kill Their Own Good Ideas.
10) Send innovative ideas into the normal development process.
The “normal” product development process, as documented in typical company product management materials, is filled with stage gates and governance meant to limit risk and predict value. The problem with this notion is that ideas representing incremental innovation and those representing breakthrough innovation are so fundamentally different that they really can’t be delivered in the same way. First, we have to look at new ways to identify disruptive opportunities, then we need to spin those out as Lean Start-ups or skunkworks.
9) Do not fail early, often and cheaply.
Let’s face it, most companies don’t like to fail at all. Entrepreneurs and individuals who accept failure as a part of growth, thrive on risk and creating the new are often times those who don’t fit in corporate culture. As a result, they are marginalized or pushed out for those with “proven track records” of predictable growth. Whether focused on an incremental feature change or a “breakthrough” service, building out early versions of an innovation and failing with them internally, with partners or customers is the fastest way to bridge the gap between conjecture and reality.
8) Conduct research on existing users while ignoring non-users and extreme users.
“I think there is fraud being committed by much of the user-centered design community when we look at 5 people, 10 people, 30 people, sometime 1 person and then talk about what users will do. The sample isn’t big enough. We all know that. The value with that work is what users might do and to help people who have lots of experience make better, less conventional and wiser decisions.”
Patrick levels a bold pronouncement here at the user-centered design community. I’ve always said to my clients that contextual research isn’t about learning what all customers are doing but what some of them are doing which may suggest the future. As William Gibson smartly said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” Experts need to connect a nuanced understanding of customers (and potential customers) from contextual research to macro trends and a relevant potential future for their clients and companies. At the end of the day, it’s not an isolated “fact” from user research that should drive decisions but how a fact connects to a larger story.
7) Research products instead of activities.
This may seem obvious to the initiated but is difficult to fathom for company management obsessed with their own products. Unless our goal is incremental innovation (which is a fine goal if that is specifically what we’re focused on) of our current offerings, we should be looking at people’s (note I didn’t say customer or user) values and everyday activities rather than how they use a specific product. This is especially true given a larger movement to services. Obsessing over current products will guarantee the next iteration of that it has a button in the right place, but doubtfully what the next product should be.
6) Focus on How before What.
In the 1950’s, there were a handful of toasters one could purchase at the local appliance store. Brands really “meant” something because there were very few, relatively slowly evolving products associated with each brand in each category. My grandmother still refers to her refrigerator as a “frigidaire” because it, and many other brands like it, were singular and iconic of the mid-20th-century. Times have changed radically because we can now really build anything and consumers have a paradoxical riches of choice. Enter any modern day Target or Tesco and walk to the toaster aisle: an entire aisle is needed because there are so many varieties. Do a search for “toaster” on Target and Amazon and you’ll have 180 and almost 9,000 results respectively. As a result, a shift from the “how”–the focus of traditional offering development processes–to the “what”–the focus of what we decide to develop–is more critical than ever before. What’s the point in building out yet another variation of a theme on the same product over and over again?
5) Want a delivery date and proof of success before starting.
This mistake could easily be categorized as “absurd but true”. Of course we can’t actually foretell hard dates or outcomes in a murky future! The level of detail MBA-driven financial accounting frameworks put in predicting the success of an innovation, sometimes five or more years in the future, borders on insanity. Having worked in both private and public firms, this problem is exacerbated in public firms as the focus on so-called “shareholder value” results in short-termism betraying an organization’s ability to invest in unpredictable, yet necessary for the future, explorations in new products and new markets. Good innovation planning absolutely can up the hit rate on delivering new products and services but applying predication methods–NPV or PMP–designed for relatively straight forward projects or financials just isn’t sensible.
4) Do not know that perfection is the enemy of success.
The little, but just as destructive, brother of failure is an obsession with perfection in delivering an offering to market. Unfortunately, too many people confuse sweating the details with delivering perfection across the board. The former is acceptable and necessary in the aspect of an offering where a new product or service delivers new value to customers–you’ve got to really nail it. The latter often results in bloated products filled with “features” that don’t fit together or products which never ship. Think about how the first iPhone shipped without the “cut and paste” feature. It was obvious that “cut and paste” would have made it a more “perfect” product but rather than focus on unnecessary “perfection”, Jobs, Ive and co. sweat the details on how the different functions came together in one device because that was the real value.
3) More comfortable being precisely wrong than roughly right.
“Just because you can’t count something doesn’t mean it’s not important.”
Analysis paralysis is stereotypical of modern-day corporations for a reason. Comfort with highly “precise” Excel-based decision-making has executives waiting to have answers delivered from a spreadsheet. Uncomfortable with a decision? Add a few more columns to make the analysis more robust. At the end of the day, executives need to be willing to make decisions without having all of the “facts” to prove a single direction. Pat rightfully suggests that an interdisciplinary design process, with a range of perspectives driven through quantitative and qualitative analysis and tangible synthesis, can help those same executives trust their intuition. Hard decisions are never going to be easy but they can be easier.
2) Think that transformative and incremental change are the same thing.
Companies tend to spend a lot of time refining their development process. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In my time at Yahoo!, we used the “PDP 2.0”; SAP had a different, yet similar, acronym and my clients since joining Sapient typically have a formalized process to bring a product or complex IT program through to fruition. In every case, the variability of those processes is pretty minimal. Similar techniques, similar measures and similar gates are used. Occasionally, something really innovative forces its way through the process, but the reality is, it rarely happens. So why don’t company leaders realize you can’t just expect innovation out of an incremental process? As noted earlier, we have to identify disruptive opportunities, then we need to spin those out as Lean Start-ups or skunkworks.
1) Want to innovate as long as it does not require change.
As Pat jokes in his talk, this is funny because it’s true. Companies are built to be optimized around a set of offerings which inherently reduces the flexibility to change. The whole point of introducing an innovation process should be to help manage the forces of creative destruction rather than having them unexpectedly manage you. Ideally, we identify and develop distinctive value so relevant to our current and potential customers that our own products, and our own organizational structures become obsolete. Innovation equals change, so you better embrace it.
Pat concludes with one major message. He says the biggest issue company’s have is that they:
“Use yesterday’s lenses to view challenges of today and tomorrow.”
By way of illustration, he introduces this “Brief history of the 20th century in one slide with no words”:
Handmade production moved to assembly lines with Henry Ford, and this disruption became the norm–everyone could have a car as long as it was black. Alfred Sloan came along and said there could be a car for every person and every purpose, and with him market segmentation and platform development moved from a disruption to the norm. Marketing and styling took over. Toyota and the Japanese focus on quality ended up being a disruption which has now spread to every other major corporation... but what is next?
“We don’t know what’s coming next. My sense is that it’s something that deals with intangibles, deals with behavior, and deals with helping companies become more comfortable in an uncertain world.”
I would say Patrick is being a little sneaky here suggesting he doesn’t know “what’s next”. He has been an active proponent of this being the current era of Continuous Innovation and a leading thinker on how to navigate situations with extreme ambiguity. I would bet he’s working on something to share in the future. We need more companies producing valuable new things and less committing Innovation Suicide.
1 It’s important to note I’m both an alumnus of the IIT Institute of Design as well as a current adjunct faculty.
February 05, 2012
First Thought: Asynchronous “Super Bowl Ads”
Living in London and being a fan of American football is a tad rough. Watching games aren’t necessarily easy given lack of access and the time difference. Also, there happens to be another kind of football which is a little more popular over here in Europe. Luckily, the Super Bowl is playing on BBC1 as my beloved Patriots look to have their sweet, yes I’ll say it, “revenge” against the same Giants team that ruined their perfect 19-0 season back in 2007. A big part of any Super Bowl is the ridiculously expensive, over-produced television commercials. Because I doubt I’ll see the US commercials here in London, I sought out the ads on the web. What I found: Super Bowl ads really aren’t for the “Super Bowl” anymore.
First off, there are multiple places you can watch Super Bowl commercials now before the Super Bowl. In fact, you’ve been able to watch quite a few of them for a week or more on FastCompany or SuperBowl-Commercials.org. The latter already has a ranking system built out for the best rated. We already have a pretty good idea of what spot will be deemed most successful.
Second, the most successful TV spot for 2011 is widely believed to be the The Force by Volkswagen. It’s an endearing and funny ad featuring a young “Darth” trying to use use “The Force” around the house with success coming only when dad’s Passat enters the driveway. I would be shocked if you haven’t seen it but not surprised at all if you didn’t see it on a television. You see, the ad really had its fullest life on YouTube where it, as of Sunday, February 5, has over 50,172,097 views. Volkswagen’s follow up this year, The Dog Strikes Back, was posted last Monday and already has over 3,800,953 views.
So, “Super Bowl commercials” really aren’t necessarily for the Super Bowl anymore. They, like many elements in our evolving multichannel experience, are asynchronous.
a·syn·chro·nous [ey-sing-kruh-nuhs] adjective
1. not occurring at the same time.
Whether a product, a service, or a piece of communication, it is now impossible to design or create touch points out of context of people’s larger experience. At a very minimum, we need to give people options for how they consume an offering. This is what most companies strive for: to enable customers to “use any channel” or “shop any where”. This is perhaps the second to lowest level of multichannel integration. I’m going to tackle levels of multichannel integration in a future post. Until then, here are my picks for the 2012 “Super Bowl” commercials.
Best Ad/Best Beer Ad: Flash Fans: 2012 Budweiser Official Big Game Commercial
Could the best spot be a beer ad which never airs in the USA?! To be aired in Canada, the commercial features two local hockey clubs playing a game which becomes “Super Bowl”-like in its intensity and emotion. Powerful stuff and a great idea by Budweiser.
Funniest Ad: "Transactions" Extended Version - 2012 Acura NSX Big Game Ad
I’m a sucker for Seinfeld–his sitcom still remains the funniest TV ever–so this extended version of him working hard to become the first owner of the new Acura NSX is a winner. We’re privileged to see the return of a few of Seinfeld’s best sitcom characters and the special, unexpected guest at the end pushes it over the top.
Best Car Ad: Chevy Sonic "Stunt Anthem" | Chevy Super Bowl XLVI Ads
Let’s face it. Super Bowl ads are all about beer, cola and cars. This car spot easily takes top billing. Chevy’s introduction of the Sonic couldn’t be any more “extreme”. The car is sent through a series of jumps, rolls, music making with the band OK Go, dives all with (insane) people in it. It also looks like the kind of really great, sporty, fuel efficient small 4-door or hatchback US auto manufacturers need to be releasing in 2012.
Best Customer Generated Ad: 2012 Chevrolet "Route 66" Super Bowl XLVI Commercial - Happy Grad
It doesn’t exactly feel “home brewed” so I’m assuming the team that made this has some serious education or experience with film. That said, it is as great or better than many of the ads featuring superstars and costing millions of dollars to make. My favorite part, the top post on YouTube: “PERFECT: For the Generation that Thinks They Deserve Every Thing For Nothing!!” by 3martijns. So true.
Most Busy Super Bowl Supermodel: Adriana Lima, the Brazilian-born Victoria’s Secret “Angel” who appears in at least two ads.
The first: Teleflora Super Bowl Ad - Adriana Lima 2012
Adriana isn’t exactly mincing words in this one: “Give and you shall receive.” I’ll leave it up to you to decide what she’s suggesting.
The second: Kia’s "A Dream Car. For Real Life.”
It’s an amusing ad documenting what goes wrong when too much pixie dream dust is dumped on an unwitting, sleeping man in his bed.
Both campaigns feature additional “added value” content on the web, including this (ridiculous) five hours worth of supermodel Adriana Lima waving a racing flag in slow motion:
Most Confusing Ad: GE (and Bud’s?) Power and beer.
I’m not sure if this spot for GE is an “official” partnership with Budweiser (I’m assuming it is) but has there ever been a more odd couple than GE and Bud? The commercial features one of the most awkward exchanges in recent Superbowl TV history: “So you guys make the beer? No, we make the power that makes the beer.” It’s a spot that makes you go, “Huh?”
I guess we always knew the Super Bowl was bigger than one day; these ads just prove it to be.