I’m going to call this selling design, but it’s equally applicable to selling any kind of ux, user study, or people-based research. Even when talking to a colleague in marketing research they had exactly the same kinds of issues.

I’m working on gathering resources on selling this particular kind of knowledge and value. In a very real way this is the topic of my PhD research, but it’s done from a UX perspective. I’m writing this because I recently read an article at UX Matters that was all about this. Of course there is also the this book that I’ve just gotten my hands on called Designed for Use.

What are the ways that people sell Design?

Well of course the most traditional ways of calculating value is ROI, when doing revision of existing work this is measurable. E.g. We’ve improved feature x and we attribute y% increase in sales to this, making our €10k usability test have an ROI of z%. Many of us would love to be able to have such a calculation. Unfortunately when you are doing innovation, i.e. bringing something new to market, then there is no way to measure such things. This is true on any kind of formative rather than evaluative project.

I’ve written about how User-Centered Design (UCD) leaves out some people, and Michael alludes to this same fact in his article when he says to “bring your empathy.” As a researcher I put out the call for UCD people to begin the study of those who actually make the decisions whether to fund UCD activities or not, or to what extent the results of UCD are actually used by the relevant parties or not. I think this is vitally important.

The question though is this: What will you do today to sell your design work? What really works? What have been your experiences?

So how do you sell it? Answer in comments!

Some topics I’ll explore in future posts:

• Opportunities for transformation
• Including everyone’s “language”
• Getting others involved early

Things are getting very busy as CHI gets close.  I hope to see many of you there, come and look for me at the Student Volunteer room (109/110) I’ll be there much of the time.

Here’s a countdown timer until CHI2011 (hopefully it will work!)

Oh man onlineclock.net has let me down… their cut and past java script doesn’t work.
Only 37 days 1 hour and 22 minutes until it starts.

I just downloaded my first app for Google Chrome, the NYTimes app, it’s an almost identical copy of the iPad app, which is a good thing.  When I started thinking about why I appreciated the app there were several reasons.  It’s cleaner, it’s simpler, and in some ways it’s more like reading  a newspaper, without all the dead trees and ink that gets on your fingers.  Really in an appreciable way it afforded the creators of the application to really rethink what the experience of reading the paper is and then attempt, not to copy it, but to transform some aspects of it that really worked into a new medium.  Why didn’t think happen with NYTimes.com, especially in the early years?  The medium was too new, we still didn’t know what could be done, and like almost all attempts to move content from one medium to another it was pretty much copy/paste, not finding what really works for that medium and taking advantage of it.  The current version of NYTimes.com IS quite a bit more like a newspaper, but it has a lot of holdouts from what the web was and has become.  The app eschews much of that for something cleaner and simpler with ads in a context that make sense instead of randomly placed highly distracting banners and other things.

I’d like to expand on this more later, but what I’m saying is that, in the words of my professor Marty Siegel it’s computer imaginative, or more precisely it it’s a better appropriation of new media (Thanks Lev Manovich for you fabulous book).

Similarly if you have an iPad I strongly suggest you download the KayakHD app, it’s free and provides the best experience I’ve ever had for searching for airfares.  While it still falls WAY short on the booking process (you generally have to book through other places) the search experience is as sublime as such a task can be.  It remembers history, shows destinations on a map, and of course it bypasses all the BS and searches more websites and carriers than almost anyplace else.  The history function in particular is nice, I think we’ve all been through 20 different searches and then you can’t remember what you did.  Just check out your history and you see the various date/airport combinations that you tried (We live close to three different airport so we never know which will be the best to fly out of).

If applications for various platforms really can give us the opportunity to rethink the way we design interactions, information, and services then I for one welcome it.  We’ve been too often stuck in old paradigms and not really taking advantage of the medium we are in.

This is not a liveblog but a retrospective account of the first day.

Welcome by Joao Mota of University of Aveiro, the organizer of the Summer School.

The doctoral colloquium organized in an impromptu fashion as the original organizer was not able to make it was done by Balder & Stefan.  We all had a chance to present madness style (1-minute) our PhD work with a poster if we had one.  Stefan took pictures of each person, hopefully these will be available before the end of our time here.

We had a series of negotiation games, which I found very entertaining.  We put two words on opposite ends of a long space, and had to negotiate who we thought ought to be where.  The warm-up was A on one end and Z on the other and we had to line up by first name.  I happened to love that one as I’m very obviously always first.  Then we lined up with Art on one end and Engineering on the other, not nearly so cut and dried and lots of negotiation there.  One where it near and far was interesting and I was wrong.  It was near and far from Aveiro in relation to where you were born.  I was convinced since I was born in Washington state I was the farthest, some of the people from Brazil thought they were farther.  Our Chinese colleagues were there but didn’t speak up too much.  In the end I stood my ground, but it was our Chinese colleagues who should have gotten the far distance as it’s farther by almost 1000km.  And for the record Brazil is MUCH closer.

After a break we had a session with Nigel Cross who talked about Creative Cognition in Design.  Nigel studied with John Christopher Jones after a kind of winding course though engineering and architecture.  We jump into case studies from DTRS 2, the well-known data set that was analyzed by a number of different teams, then there was a symposium then a book was written.  It was very interesting to hear Nigel talk about the different ways the data can be viewed.  It was very good to see that all the different approaches from various disciplines were all respected.

Kudos to Nigel for taking short Q&A breaks throughout his time.  Some people did remark though that the presentation style was not very dynamic, and I tend to agree, but I was fairly enthralled since he’s such a well known figure.

Then case studies with a number of well known designers.  The story of Gordon Murray the F1 race car designer was intriguing as he had some kind of objective measure of success: he wins races.  He was given a set of rules that changed and it wasn’t about staying in the rules, but how can I satisfy them but get around them in some way too.  He also discussed Kenneth Grange, Richard MacCormac, Geoffrey Harcourt, Denys Lasdun, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In some ways the designer will make their job more difficult, by blowing up the conflict, making the problem more grand that it perhaps was to start, but then it makes the resolution even better.  There’s framing of the problem using first principles.

We then met soon for a long and winding bus ride with a few missed turns to a winery out in the country.  The champagne flowed very freely and all but a few of us were tipsy, of course I was one of the few choosing not to partake.  Along with the champagne (well it wasn’t properly champagne but a sparkling wine, but that is not too important I suppose) we had loads of appetizers.  Many different kinds coming around on trays.  There was so much so often we all ate quite a lot.  Not a lot of vegetarian choices and so a few had to suffer.  We then had  a tour of the winery and it was quite nice.  Then dinner we sat down to a table with 5 glasses 4 knives and 4 forks.  I quickly turned my wine glasses upside down and they were cleared away but there were all these different things for people to sample along with more appetizers, then a more formal starter which was fantastic.  A nice goat cheese wrapped in filo dough and then honey drizzled over it along with arugla in a nice local olive oil on the side.  We were all quite full when the main dish came out: a rather large fish dish presented in a tall rather large form.  Greens on the bottom, fish in a nice creamy sauce all topped with bread crumbs on the top.  I only got through 1/3 of mine, though a few people did manage all of it.  The dessert was a pinapple carppacio with fruit coulis and a ball of coconut ice cream.  It was very artistic looking but really not the best.  We stayed at the tables for a time and some of us were restless to leave as it was after midnight.  We got people to start standing up and soon we were on our way back in the bus.  Hilarious conversations of vegetarianism and what that meant and why some people and the atrocity that is food production in America was discussed along with people that smelled of horses and cigarette smoke.  Yes it was bizarre and I have no idea how much of it came up.  We arrived back at the hotel not too much before 1am.  The LONGEST dinner of my life by far.

I am in the throws of defining my PhD thesis research topic.  You can see the original call for my position, and this is clearly there, it still needs to be narrowed down and be more precise.  Under a (very good) mandate from my advisers I’m identifying the two pieces of literature in the field that will guide my research but in the meantime I’ve formulated a kind of elevator pitch for the idea that makes it very succinct.

I invite your feedback as to which is better and your thoughts on them in general.

Here is version 0.4a

“The information needs of research, design, and marketing are complementary. Each builds up a vision about prospective people the interactive product should serve, referred to as ‘users’ and ‘consumers’ respectively and how it should serve them. There is a gap between these visions which should be bridged. I want to see how this can be done in structuring the (work and composition of the) project teams in an R&D organization.”

Here is version 0.4b

“Researchers, Designers, and Marketers all study people to get knowledge about them. The knowledge researchers and designers develop about ‘users’ are the basis for their creation of an interactive product. The marketers ‘insights’ about ‘consumers’ is used to define a strategy, positioning, and to sell. The outcome of the research is a clearer understanding of how these kinds of knowledge about people is complementary.  This will be done through the study of and participation in industrial R&D project teams.”