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The clarity argument brings your internal organizational structure and its strategies into the picture. You need a clear design strategy that will act as a container around all of the solutions you create.

Pay Attention to the “Whole Experience”

The “whole experience” includes all the ways an organization interacts with its users: stores, account statements, customer service calls, product ordering web sites, packaging, and so forth. Jared Spool, the founder of User Interface Engineering, writes a comparison[8] about whole experiences between MP3 players from Apple and SanDisk. He says, “SanDisk hasn’t created what Apple has built: a powerful user experience for listening to great music. While possibly technologically deficient, the iPod combines the player

hardware with the iTunes software, the iTunes Music Store service, the Apple stores for sales and support, and the prestige that comes from the Apple brand…SanDisk can’t compete if it only focuses on the hardware engineering.” Businesses that pay attention to the entire spectrum of customer interaction, and get it right most of the time, win attention and loyalty. Because the mental model depicts the whole of the user’s environment—it is not focused on one aspect, service, or tool—it represents the user’s perspective of the whole experience.

Emotion in the Experience

There is a lot of lingo with X in it these days: UX (user experience), MX (managing experience), and UX strategy. The X stands for “experience,” which has to do with the whole environment in which a person interacts with your solutions and your organization. The concept of “the user experience” has been around for a long time, especially in disciplines other than human-computer interaction, such as architecture and retail store design.

For an experience to be considered successful, people have to be able to use it and want to use it. I’ve heard this described as useful, usable, and desirable. It applies to all sorts of fields—toys, buildings, silverware, electronic devices, etc. Here is a quote from a Swedish furniture showroom owner that sums this up nicely. “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful. But if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.”* There is an emotional component to the use of a thing that businesses are becoming more aware of.** Mental models capture not only the cognitive intent of a person but also the emotion, social environment, and cultural traits of a concept. The alignment of possible business strategies completes the picture.

* House and Garden magazine March 2007 article, “The Design-Obsessed Traveler– Stockholm,” quoted as “the credo of Design House Stockholm, a top city showroom.”

** See Donald Norman’s book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.

Peter Merholz, one of the founders of Adaptive Path, puts it this way. “An experience strategy is a clearly articulated touchstone that influences all the decisions made about technology, features, and interfaces. Whether in the initial design process, or as the product is being developed, such a strategy guides the team and ensures that the customer’s perspective is maintained throughout.”[9] He also strongly believes that you should stop designing products. “When you start with the idea of making a thing, you’re artificially limiting what you can deliver…Products are realized only as necessary artifacts to address customer needs. What Flickr, Kodak, Apple, and Target all realize is that the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing that our customers care about.”[10]

Use Design as a Business Advantage

Brandon Schauer, a design strategist at Adaptive Path, has been talking[11] about the increasingly important role of design in businesses. He says because competitive advantage is shrinking, the focus has started to shift towards what kind of top-line value can be gained for the business, both internally and externally. He references a seminal 1996 essay written by the celebrated Harvard Business School professor of competitive strategy, Michael Porter, which stated, “A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers or create comparable value at a lower cost, or do both.”[12] Brandon is exploring what levers exist and can be adjusted. In 2005 Brandon interviewed innovation and strategy consultant Larry Keeley of Doblin, Inc., who had this to add: “A growing number of business [and government] leaders…have come off of two decades of trying to find greater efficiencies…And the evidence is overwhelming that that has worked. But I think it’s equally clear to good leaders that they can’t continue to expect…massive improvements in efficiency each and every year…Now most good leaders are saying, ‘I’ve got to figure out a way to get to organic growth; I’ve got to figure out a way to do something powerful and new.’…[A]nd unless they’re newsworthy, and unless they’re startling, and unless they really compel customers, they tend to fail.”[13] So Brandon’s point is about marrying this focus on top-line value with attention to the whole experience a customer has. Do this and you have a new competitive advantage.

Experience Strategy

The strategy that you develop for your product ought not evolve in isolation. Even though the value of user experience* is clear, your over-arching reasons for providing something should be considered with equal weight. Jesse James Garrett describes the phrase Experience Strategy thusly:

Experience Strategy = Business Strategy + UX Strategy**

A mental model helps you visualize how your business strategy looks compared to the existing user experience. Thus, it is a diagram that can support your experience strategy.

* See the diagram by Bryce Glass, “The Importance of User Experience,” from March 2006:http://www.tinyurl.com/ysmcrn

** Jesse James Garrett in his introductory address to MXSF 2007, “Experience Strategies — The Key to Long-term Design Value. ” See Jesse’s blog at http://blog.jjg.net

Evolve Your Organization

Perhaps you need to transform your organization into an entity that pays more attention to user experience. You need a strong tool to assert change within your organization or get the attention of people who can spread that change. The sheer visual force of a mental model, covering several feet of a wall when pinned up, is enough to make people stop and look. They are easy diagrams to read and understand. Post them everywhere you think people might have time to glance through them. Post them outside your work area, in popular conference rooms, in the lunch room, even outside the bathrooms. Jacqueline De Muro’s team at Agilent Technologies, Inc. occupied a building with limited wall space, hence her inspiration for placing the diagrams outside the bathrooms, which was the only space available where people would come and go on a daily basis. I encourage you to post them in other departments and in other buildings, where someone you’ve forged a relationship with can sanction their presence. Any opportunity to break down the wall between your organization and your customers is precious. Similarly, the opportunity to reach across chasms among departments is priceless.

If your team uses the sticky-note approach during analysis of the data, you will have large surfaces covered with little square paper notes. Craig Duncan of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, has created a few mental models. He says, “The walls of sticky notes create a perfect opportunity to get management and other colleagues to engage (and be impressed by the process). I strongly recommend holding a Tpng or other small office party while the Post-Its™ are all up. They start conversations, and convert people to the fact that IA is indeed a legitimate discipline.”

How Did Mental Models Help Your Organization?

“It helped us talk to our users rather than about them.”

—Simonetta Consorti, Information Architect on the UN Prevention Web Team

Adopt the Customer’s Perspective

In the past couple of decades a paradigm shift took place in large corporations towards the philosophy of putting the “customer first.” This paradigm traditionally applies to service and support, but also has been applied to product design. Companies are finding that as global competition increases, fewer people are beating a path to their doors. Rather than creating a product internally, and then hiring marketing and sales people to persuade customers to buy it, companies are taking a closer look at what customers need. They are designing products that will sell on their own merit.[14]

How Did Mental Models Help Your Organization?

“Mental models are like user perspective goggles.”

—David Poteet, President of New City Media

I often work with groups who have adopted the “customer-first” philosophy but don’t quite have the vocabulary for it. Employees in these organizations tend to answer questions about customers in terms of internal business goals. At the beginning of each project, I interview all the people who have a stake in the project’s outcome. I ask each of them: “What benefits will your customer see from this project?” Most stakeholders will respond with an answer that morphs from a vague customer problem directly to their business goal. To protect the innocent, I’m not going to name names. Here is an example paraphrased from what I hear: “Right now, the navigation on the site is really just a bad experience. We’ll make the experience a lot easier for them. Rather than generate lots of content, we’re going to be smarter about it and help them filter it. Customer satisfaction scores will go through the roof.”

This echoes what they’re thinking from an employee focus; therefore, the answer is from a business perspective. What I hope to achieve by developing task-based audience segments and mental models is to persuade business stakeholders to speak at length from the customer perspective. I want to hear these employees answering the question with something more like this: “As a customer, I will get appropriate content that is relevant to my problem. I won’t have to sort through so many content choices. I will be able to quickly filter all the information for what I need.”

Adopt the Customer’s Verbs

To start this subtle paradigm shift, I encourage everyone in the organization to start speaking in verbs. People are usually already aware of the customer perspective and ask questions such as, “Well, what is the customer trying to do?” The answers often echo the question: “The customer is trying to deploy the system.” There is peril in this approach. The “customer is trying to” phrase puts a barrier in place. It telegraphs that the speaker is someone other than the customer. It means that the speaker is describing his understanding of what that customer is doing. I ask people to cut to the essence. Most companies know something about what their customers are doing; state these actions confidently. Use verbs that describe actions from the customer’s point of view. Choose expressive verbs that are representative of a specific situation. If the customer really is “trying to deploy the system” because they are not sure they can actually deploy it, the illustrative verb “attempt” might be a better choice. These verbs naturally have to come from the customer’s point of view rather than the business employee’s. Either “Figure out how to deploy the system” or “Attempt to deploy the system” is a better choice. Or perhaps there is no problem deploying the system, so “Install the system” or “Roll out the system” may better describe what the customer is doing.

Being inside your customer’s head is powerful. You can see how using the customer’s verbs expresses their view of the world. Try to be aware of the way you speak to colleagues at meetings. Use the customer’s verbs. Verbs are the most powerful way of getting people to shift towards “customer first” for product design.

Verbs from the Customer

Katie is a business user of a suite of office software created by a certain well-known Seattle manufacturer. Here are some of the verbs she uses to describe her work day:

 Learn details of using company products

 Write help guides for company products

 Read cases from customer support

 Argue for product improvements to software team

 Recommend marketing approaches to marketing team

 Study XML manuals for writing XML-based help guides

 Attend XML training

 Create help guide formats/templates in Word

 Organize Word files

 Submit bug to software team

 Help co-worker format his Word templates

 Look up Word formatting question

These descriptive verbs help you see Katie’s world from her eyes.