archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’m posting slides for my ‘Understanding Frameworks’ portion of the Beyond Findability workshop on strategic practices just given at the 2010 IA Summit.  This portion of the full-day program emphasizes understanding and identifying the common things that make up a design framework, concentrating on the simple structure that designers need to grasp in order to create their own effective frameworks for solving design challenges. I hope you find it informative and useful!

Design frameworks offer substantial benefits to all parties involved in creating high quality user experiences for products, services, digital media, and the emerging interaction spaces of augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, and cross-media storytelling. Frameworks allow designers to better adapt to the rapid shifts in the digital environment by leveraging increasing modularity, granularity, and structure, and accommodating the far-reaching changes inherent in the rise of co-creative dynamics. This presentation – part of a full-day workshop delivered at the 2009 & 2010 Information Architecture Summits – identifies the elements common to all design frameworks, and offers best practices on effectively putting frameworks into immediate use.  Altogether, it is a short course in the creation and use of customized design frameworks for addressing the complexity of strategic experience design.

This weekend, some of my earlier posts discussing the user experience of Lotus Notes surfaced in the Notes community. Ed Brill – in a posting titled Mary Beth has been taking on the critics – referenced my mention of how the head of the Notes UI team was employing user research as a bridge to customers. Ed complimented the design team for reaching out to critics in public. This is a well-deserved pat on the back. Yet it falls short of recognizing the more important point that direct user research should be a basic component of any company’s overall strategy and planning for long term success (or survival).

Why? User research helps build customer relationships, further design efforts, and identify new business opportunities when applied across audiences (internal and external constituencies) and perspectives (marketing, sales, product development), and with an eye for needs beyond immediate feedback. This sort of engagement with customers of a software product (or any kind of product) should *not* be special or noteworthy – it should happen all the time. Continuously. I’m thinking of Jared Spool’s remarks during his keynote at UI10, to the effect that the user experience perspective is most successful when it it is a basic component of a company’s culture, and thus an assumed aspect of every initiative.

In fact, in a socially transparent, networked, and aware environment like the current FuturePresent, user research serves as a fundamental, indispensable form of research and development that companies and organizations must support as part of their portfolio of methods for seeking broad based environmental feedback (also here). I’ll go so far as to say that user research may move beyond the realm of essential corporate R&D, and qualify as genuine basic research.

BTW: maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it a bit ominous that the tag line for Notes 7 is “Innovate. Collaborate. Dominate.” ? Sounds like something the Borg might say if you asked them how to make breakfast…

Using the automotive industry and an analogous variety of software mega-packages with three-letter acronyms as examples, we’ve been discussing the death of the traditional enterprise for a few weeks. We’ve observed that enterprise efforts relying on massive top-down approaches become inefficient and wasteful, if not counter-productive. They also either fail to support the health of the individuals or groups involved – customers, users, sellers, employers – or in fact directly reduce the relative health of these parties. With Conway’s Law as a guide, we discovered that the structure or form of an organization influences or determines the nature and quality of the things the organization creates.
This all concerns the past: so now it’s time to look ahead, at the new enterprise. Of course, scrying the future inevitably relies on a mixture of hand waving, vague pronouncements, and the occasional “it’s not possible yet to do what this implies” to point the way forward. What’s often lacking is a present-tense example to serve as clear harbinger of the future to come. I came across an example today, drawn from the debate surrounding the proposition that the U.S. Army is close to a breaking point. In an episode of On Point titled Are US Forces Stretched Too Thin?, several panelists (names not available from the program website yet) made three telling points about the Army that show it as an organization in transition from the old model enterprise into a new form, albeit one whose outlines remain fuzzy. I’ll paraphrase these points:

To support this practice, company commanders created a forum for sharing innovations amongst themselves, called CO Team: CompanyCommand. The description reads, “CompanyCommand.com is company commanders-present, future, and past. We are in an ongoing professional conversation about leading soldiers and building combat-ready units. The conversation is taking place on front porches, around HMMWV hoods, in CPs, mess halls, and FOBs around the world. By engaging in this ongoing conversation centered around leading soldiers, we are becoming more effective leaders, and we are growing units that are more effective. Amazing things happen when committed leaders in a profession connect, share what they are learning, and spur each other on to become better and better.”
It’s the third point that gives us a clue about the nature of the new enterprise. CompanyCommand.com is an example of a ‘knowledge marketplace’ created and maintained by an informal network within an organization. Knowledge marketplaces are one of the components of what McKinsey calls The 21st Century Organization. Knowledge marketplaces allow knowledge buyers “to gain access to content that is more insightful and relevant, as well as easier to find and assimilate, than alternative sources are.”
McKinsey believes that these markets – as well as companion forms for exchanging valuable human assets called talent markets – require careful investment to begin functioning.
“…working markets need objects of value for trading, to say nothing of prices, exchange mechanisms, and competition among suppliers. In addition, standards, protocols, regulations, and market facilitators often help markets to work better. These conditions don’t exist naturally – a knowledge marketplace is an artificial, managed one – so companies must put them in place.”
On this, I disagree. CompanyCommand is an example of a proto-form knowledge marketplace that appears to be self-organized and regulated.
Moving on, another component of the new enterprise identifed by McKinsey is the formal network. A formal network “…enables people who share common interests to collaborate with relatively little ambiguity about decision-making authority – ambiguity that generates internal organizational complications and tension in matrixed structures.”
In McKinsey’s analysis, formal networks contrast with informal social networks in several ways. Formal networks require designated owners responsible for building common capabilities and determining investment levels, incentives for membership, defined boundaries or territories, established standards and protocols, and shared infrastructure or technology platforms.
My guess is that CompanyCommand again meets all these formal network criteria to a partial extent, which is why it is a good harbinger of the forms common to the new enterprise, and a sign of an organization in transition.
Can you think of other examples of new enterprise forms, or organizations in transition?
In the next post in this series, we’ll move on from the structure of the new enterprise to talk about the new enterprise experience, trying to track a number of trends to understand their implications for the user experience of the new enterprise environment.

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Proving that a well-developed sense of humor is required for success in product design — especially for Lotus Notes — Mary Beth Raven, who leads the design team for the next version of Lotus Notes, recently posted a rather funny comment in reply to my suggestion that the Notes Design team offer customers a choice of unpleasant but related user experience themes. She used this as the occasion to invite all members of the community of Notes to users to register as volunteers for usability testing.
I’ve made three postings to date specifically discussing the Notes user experience: Lotus Notes User Experience = Disease, Mental Models, Resilience, and Lotus Notes, and Better UI Tops Notes Users’ Wish Lists. I’m not sure which of these prompted Mary Beth to reach out, but I’m glad she did, because doing so is smart business on two levels. At the first level, Mary Beth plainly understands that while vocal critics may seem daunting to user experience designers, product managers, and business owners, engaging these critics in fact presents design teams with opportunities to build strong connections to users and gather valuable feedback at the same time. What better way is there to show the strategic value of user research?
I learned this at first hand while working on a redesign of the flagship web presence of a large software firm several years ago. Some of the most insightful and useful feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the user experiences I was responsible for came from ‘disgruntled’ customers. The user research I was doing on site structures, navigation paths, and user goals established a channel that allowed unhappy (and happy) customers to communicate about a broad range of their experiences with PTC products and services in a more complete way than by simply buying a competing product, or renewing an existing software license.
Based on these and other experiences building user research programs, I suggest that product managers, user research leads, and user experience designers first collaborate to define a user research strategy, and then define and create a simple but effective user research infrastructure (like registration gateways to volunteer databases, community / program identifiers and incentives, contact management tools, specific personas that technical and customer support teams can learn to recognize and recruit at all stages of the customer lifecycle, etc.) that will support the creation of channels to users throughout the design cycle.
At the second level, it allows the Notes team to directly explore collaboration methods, products, and technologies related to the very competitive collaboration suite / integrated electronic workspace / office productivity markets in which IBM, Microsoft, and several other giant firms are looking to secure dominant positions in the new culture of collaboration. [Note: I’ve posted a few times on Microsoft products as well – Backwards Goals: MS Office Results Oriented UI, and Microsoft’s Philosophy On Information Architecture.]
Members of the community of Lotus Notes users can register as volunteers for usability tests during the design of the next version of Notes at this URL: https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/usentry.nsf/register?openform.

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