“They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.” Ronald Reagan

Behind the scenes, today’s products and services are very complex. As consumers demand ever improving customer service and more advanced functionality the complexity only increases. The challenge for design teams grows and companies struggle to create the increasingly important illusion of simplicity.

Complexity presents itself in many forms:

1.       Technology e.g. multiplatform, new technologies and platforms

2.       Legal e.g. FSA regulations, EU Directives, data protection, accessibility

3.       Stakeholder e.g. multiple teams, differing objectives

4.       User e.g. context of use, user needs, expectations and abilities

5.       Content e.g. quantity of data, specialist data

6.       Interaction e.g. balance between intuition, learnability and control.

As designers, we know it’s our job to help bring design projects through this complexity. I’m reminded of a great quote (by whom I don’t know):

“Sometimes God calms the storm, sometimes He calms the sailor“.

It’s the designer’s role to do a bit of both. We work in a highly collaborative way to calm ‘the sailor’ and make sure the team is able to make informed decisions. We also work in a user-centred way which enables us to calm ‘the storm’ by designing content and interactions appropriate to the user and the commercial context.

Sometimes interfaces we design are beautiful, some are purely functional some are invisible. We challenge ourselves to deal with complexity so that the end users don’t have to.

That’s great design.

(Thanks to Lenny for use of his image  http://www.flickr.com/photos/lenny_meriel/3587338182/in/set-72157608595536634 )

You are a weary business traveler at an international train station. And you have one pressing problem: you are hungry. Luckily, you spot a baguette chain store and decide to take a closer look. Their baguettes look amazing, especially that one on the right; fresh tomatoes and mozzarella in a crusty French baguette. Yes, that is it. You want to buy it, but no one behind the counter seems to be paying attention to you. “Hello, excuse me?” But there is no response. The staff are ignoring you. “Hello”, you raise your voice, “can I have this baguette please?” The guy behind the counter looks at you, and without a word, grabs the baguette you pointed at. “Anything else – tea, coffee, juice?” replies the guy, evidently annoyed that you bothered him, and hands you your baguette wrapped in a paper bag. “No, thanks, here’s the money. Bye.”

One transaction complete.

You walk away with the precious paper bag in your hand, looking forward to devouring that wonder of a baguette, while trying to forget about the unpleasant guy behind the counter. After all, you got your baguette, so it is all good. You board the train, take a seat, and realise that the baguette looks significantly less mouth-watering than the one you saw just a while ago. It is all squashed and looks as tired as you are. You start unwrapping it...oh no, it is stuck to the paper bag. You wrestle with it for a few minutes. Pieces of the paper got torn away and glued to your baguette. And why is the bag so ill-shaped anyway? Has anyone actually considered how people will be eating the baguette on a train? No. It turns out that the fancy paper bag is completely inappropriate in this situation.

At this point you are rather disappointed with your baguette and all the hassle it has caused you. But it looked so good in the store! Anyway, you decide not to buy this baguette again. What is more, you actually also decide not to buy from this chain’s store again.

More transactions? Unlikely.

What we can learn from everyday interactions

You might be thinking this has nothing to do you and your online business. But it does. Regardless of whether you are selling baguettes or monthly subscriptions to a Software-as-a-Service online CRM platform, you need to consider the same things to create a positive customer experience and build a base of loyal customers that keep coming back.

There are a few lessons we can learn from this baguette fiasco:

• Don’t focus just on your product, but also on how you are delivering it.
  Even the best product could be ruined by a poor purchase and post-purchase experience.

• Don’t ignore customers, however subtle their interest in your product.
  Have customers phoned your call centre to get help because they failed to buy your product through the website the day before? Have they still not bought your product a week later? Then you should be following-up with them.

• Don’t try to up-sell and cross-sell, at all costs, all the time.
  Pick your battles wisely and focus on the most susceptible moments. Customers might not be ready to buy another product right after buying the first one. They might want to learn more about the first product before buying another product from you.

• Don’t assume everyone will use your product in the same way.
  Learn about your customers, their preferred ways of doing things, and their context of use. Then design your product so that it could be appropriated for multiple situations that are likely to occur.

• Don’t design just for the product’s peak usage moments.
  Think also about the moments when the product is not being used, or when it is being shut down. Or thrown away. Let your products disappear from the scene gracefully.

Next time you experience a pleasant or unpleasant interaction with a service or product in the physical world, think how it would translate into the digital world. And vice versa. Both worlds are a great source of inspiration for each other when designing.

It is perhaps fitting that, as we scrambled to the finish line of Playful 11, the last thing we had to do was stack the chairs in Conway Hall so that the ballroom dancing could start on time.  Last time I stacked chairs to make way for dancing was at school, at a time when I thought the future was bright, shiny and full of opportunities.

Bemoaning the future now.

That time was the 1970s. But, as it turns out, not everyone who went to school at that time thinks the future now is as bright, shiny and full of opportunity as it could be. We saw touch screen interfaces. We got the iPad. We saw 3d chess sets, we got the Nintendo 3DS. We saw Logan’s Run. We got the Olympic village. Hal, Siri, etc. We’re creating bits of the future we’d like to have had in the 1970s. We’ve created a ‘middle aged future’. At least, that was the jet-pack thrust of what Marcus Brown (“more of a Mr Ben kind of person”) had to say in his talk, which I rather liked.

It wasn’t just Marcus who had a slightly disappointed view of the future now. One of the recurring themes of the event was a mild annoyance that we’re still looking at the Usborne Book of the Future (pdf) and comparing what we’ve done with what we predicted, like we’re somehow just checking it off on a huge future to-do list. We’re stifled by the science fiction canon. We’re sick of the near future. We’re not making a dent on the world, according to Toby Barnes.

Which might be true. It also might be a bit self-fulfilling. I like a bit of nostalgia and everything, but some people have never even seen Star Wars or Dr Who. Imagine that.

Relishing the now now.

So hurrah for the curious, delightful mix of presenters gathered at the event that had their own diverse, compelling, and ingenious offerings that, for the most part, simply revelled in the possibilities of the now.

The eminently likeable Matt Sheret described cities filled with buildings that can talk back to us and how we can develop personal relationships with epic things placed on a human scale. The utterly charming Chris O’Shea shared his wonderous work in progress on apps that encourage children to build their own physical worlds around them. And, oh my, following Brendan Dawes journey through his virtual shed (“my shed is a mental construct in my head”), I’ve immediately gone out and purchased an Arduino, to play, and make, to become better at my craft.

Slightly tangential, but nonetheless, most brilliant, was Matt Ward’s walkthrough of GREEN = BOOM, a project that started as an interest in a fictional bomb, but became an experiment in designing an environment that makes us feel like we’re in a cinematic experience full of tension – creating a ‘tense event’. This was playfulness at its best, albeit, a playfulness that wilfully stretches the boundaries of taste. In a fun way. With a bomb.

We were also treated to not just one, but two, possibly three design studios that talked about those most playable of things: games. Naughty Dog and ustwo Studios were in the house, but Emil Ovemar from Toca Boca seemed to get everybody most excited. His examples of their kitchen and store apps being used within real-world play scenarios were super-cute and I think half the audience cried a little when they saw the beautiful simplicity of the hairdresser app.

An embarrassment of riches

So chock-full of goodness was the day, that I can’t even give due credit to all the speakers I haven’t mentioned thus far: Al Robertson for his highly engaging discussion of science fiction, play and some wonderful references to H. P. Lovecraft and J.G Ballard’s contrary visions of the future and Martin Luther King’s message to Uhuru; Sami Niemela on how we find comfort in humanising the environment around us and what technology talking back to us might mean; Louise Downe for sharing her experiences at the Tate and how making things easy and fun can disrupt patterns of behaviour. And ferrets; Georgina Voss for her brilliant dissection of safe, sane and consensual play through the ethics of play as evolved in the BSDM community; and Paul Rissen, who proposed a genius reversal of ‘data to fiction to physical’ to encourage constructing data directly from fiction, and the atomisation of gaming.

We even had Scribble Tennis, featuring the fabulous Gemma Correll, Ian Stevenson, Rex Crowle and Mr Bingo battling it out, old-school, on an overhead projector. Happy to say that Gemma won the final, deserved for the Ipswich snowglobe, if nothing else.

The future’s bright.

I didn’t go to the pub. I had to get the train home. But, as I sat on the train and reflected on the day, I realised that the future’s bright. As Brendan Dawes said, ‘I love the future we’re in’. I also love the future we might make. Maybe my children will look back in 30 years and say ‘yeah, I mean, we got our own avatars, but I’m still a bit depressed’, but that shouldn’t stop us trying to make our world a better place. We should make a dent on the world. Let’s get playful and see what happens.

All images © Toby Barnes from Playful 11 on Flickr.

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Most experience design agencies are set up to be able to do exactly this. Most experience design agencies do it pretty well. Mostly.

Commoditisation of service offerings

However, as the experience design industry approaches a critical mass, such that it is able to commoditise its service offerings, those services cluster into a set of repeatable, predictable and marketable objects, like practice moths around a service flame. Some agencies might focus on the research cluster. Some might prefer to lead with the design and build cluster. Some might really be able to deliver them all as an integrated experience design offering.

But we’re evolving into digital utilities.

Designing without borders

While those commoditised experience design services help clients and agencies agree on deliverables, costs and timelines, the resulting engagement might be less collaboration, more subscription. If a client really does have an articulated, addressable problem, and the service offerings have evolved to the point that we can deliver great user experiences without too much operational overhead, thank you, then everybody is happy. But what about the client that can’t articulate their problem? What if they don’t even have a problem? What if they just have a feeling that things could be somehow ‘better’?

That’s where we need to take our experience design practice back to designing without service borders. We still gather insights. We still interpret and evolve. We still detail and deliver. But our engagement is based on our excellence in crafting experiences that delight customers and users. We don’t lead with services, we lead with design. Our designers are visionary. They understand the complexities. They’re vibrant, exciting and unique. They don’t shuffle into that workshop with brochureware, they walk in to that workshop self-aware. They boldly glow, and so they should.