All posts tagged as "Strategy"

I remember several years ago, the Nielsen Norman Group published a field usability study looking at WAP usability. They made a number of assumptions, many of which were questionable. Their assumptions yielded incorrect results. One chain of reasoning went as follows: data services in the UK are more developed than in the US, Nokia & Ericsson devices are the best designed, so we’ll look at Nokia & Ericsson mobile web access in the UK and draw our conclusions for the entire industry.

A chief complaint in the study: you had to have an uninterrupted data connection to successfully complete any task, so WAP is crap. Never mind the fact that the Phone.com/Openwave browser was explicitly and multiply designed to not have that problem.

It wasn’t really their fault. They didn’t know mobile and its ecosystem. But they damaged an industry with their research. (No, I’m not claiming they killed WAP.)

We continue to get this. A company who has done design work for a manufacturer at one point will assert “our designers know mobile.” They do, a little bit. But they don’t know how the industry has shifted, nor do they know anything outside of handsets. Device design is a different environment than application design: in the former you get to set the environment, in the latter you have to optimize for whatever environment the application finds itself in.

We’ve done web, application, and device design. When we don’t have to worry about the environment shifting underneath us, I get a little giddy. It will work exactly as we plan it? Wow! We don’t have to worry about distribution? Wow! We can rely on certain hardware and data resources to be available? Great!

The users, of course, don’t know the difference and don’t care.

Mobile interaction design is not a separate profession from interaction design. But it is a complex space, with a similar degree of complexity as health care. As I’ve focused on keeping up to date with the users, devices, technologies, platforms, and industries in mobile, my web and desktop application skills have dropped. Sure I can design a web site, but it won’t be as good as somebody who really knows the space.

Khoi Vinh has asserted the need for the new designer to be able to successfully design native to web, mobile, print, and more. I agree, to a minor degree: any of us claiming a degree of seniority need to be able to understand each of these channels, how they can interact with each other, basics of design for each, and what is an appropriate degree of consistency between them. And to have deep expertise in at least one of them.

We need to have a good understanding of what each channel can do, set the strategy for each channel, then let specialists in each channel detail out the design.

Strategy will involve how to use each channel and how to have them interact. That is one design discipline. Each channel interaction is another design discipline. All are the same profession.

I applaud the new set of MBA programs (California College of Arts, IIT, and others) focused on merging design thinking and business thinking.

There are other paths to the same practices, perhaps closer to home. You can’t do what I’m about to say in a highly structured MBA program, but if you find a program that looks at essentials plus “majors”, then doesn’t require a major, you can do some really neat stuff. Your requirement for such programs: design training and experience. That’s it.

The University of Kansas Graduate School of Business provided me exactly this opportunity. I was able to not focus on mergers & acquisitions, operations, IPOs, advertising, PR, and the like. Instead, based on my background, I took some marketing courses, some organizational design, some entrepreneurism, and some strategy. Not enough in any of those to designate a concentration.

I learned some really replicable methods of product innovation; I’ve incorporated these methods to help me and my team break up design log jams.

I continue to learn some wonderful information about organizing for innovation from such design-savvy sources as Jack Welch, Wharton School of Business, and Harvard Business Review.

I don’t assert that all students in the program got out the benefits I did. Nor do I assert that even if they had taken my set of courses they would have gotten the same information. But when you combine design training and product design with the information, the result was quite useful.

Right now I’m sitting in a presentation listening to a series of assertions about “what every MBA knows” and, by inference, what they don’t. Well. I don’t know anything about IPOs other than as an exit strategy for entrepreneurial ventures. I can talk about the strategy behind mergers, and why they usually don’t work well.

So if you are thinking about a design MBA, you can go get one. But many flexible MBA programs will provide you what you need.

While I’m not thrilled with the introduction of “yet another social network”, I do see social networking and mobile social networking continuing to grow. Just in different ways.

First, there is a growing number of companies providing single application access to multiple existing social networks such as Flickr, Facebook, AIM, and so forth. To a degree, Yahoo is doing this. Several startups, some of whom we have helped, are working to compete in this direction.

Expect the majority of them to fail, but some will get the user experience right. Success in this arena lies in connecting to enough relevant social networks, allowing cross-network movement of data and sharing, ease of use, and user-targeted advertising.

Second, mobile social networks are proliferating. I tried out MocoSpace pretty early on, meaning that I got a simple user name. About once a week now I get password reminders, suggesting that people are trying to use the application. Sorry, Barbara, whoever you are.

If you are building one of these applications, you’ll really need to think about your target market. I imagine in places with long train/bus commutes, you’ll do well. Otherwise, when are people going to spend time on social networking on the phone? In class? In meetings? In short, be sure you understand why you have a mobile focus and then design features accordingly. Do not copy MySpace or Facebook.

Third, there is the “everything is a community” applications. Have a movie site? Add ratings and commentary at a minimum; incorporate group chat and group coordination for people to go see the movie together. More advanced: track when a user is at a movie theater. When leaving the movie theater, detect other users leaving the same theater. Invite them to meet outside the theater to go talk about the movie with other movie goers.

I think that the “everything is a community” applications are where mobile gets really useful, either as mobile components of multiple-target applications or as exclusively mobile applications. Increasing interaction with your brand and your content is a good thing.

We’ve been “adding community” to appropriate mobile applications for a few years now. The nice thing these days is that our clients are more receptive to it.

Call it Mobile 2.0 if you insist, though I don’t recommend it.