Design Thinking to create compelling and differentiated experiences

Editor's Notes

• #3: Hello and good morning! It is great to be back in Sydney. As you heard my name is Joe Dickerson and I’m a lead UX architect in Microsoft Services. Just to let you know, before coming to Microsoft I worked on a big project for Westpac that resulted in me living here for almost two years. And I’d move back in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented itself.
• #4: It is indeed an honor to be here talking to you about Design Thinking, and some of the things Microsoft is are doing in that space. It’s an exciting time in the field – and I’m especially happy to be heare because we are approaching the 50th anniversary of Design Thinking. Herbert A. Simon first discussed what we now call Design Thinking in his book The Sciences of the Artificial. And as I see first-hand Design Thinking embraced by companies around the world, he was definitely onto something.
• #5: This morning I’m going to talk about three things. Balance. Empathy. And the Future.
• #6: Let’s start will balance. And a little history.
• #7: Microsoft has been around over 40 years. And Microsoft started out with what some people called a crazy vision. “A PC on every desktop and in every home.” It was about bringing technology to the masses. The past decade Microsoft has shifted it’s focus. Now it’s not about bringing technology to people, it’s about making the technology usable and accessible to all people. Under Satya Nadella a people-centric model has become our focus,
• #8: This is my favorite quote of his – as a user experience professional, this warms my heart…
• #9: So how do we provide the best experience for users? It’s about balance. Balancing out the needs to the user, the capabilities of the technology, and the business drivers that all companies have. It’s about finding that “sweet spot” where the best experience solves problems, uses the right technology, and drives towards the desired business outcomes. What happens when this balance is not reached? I look at it as three legs of a stool – if the legs are not the right length you will end up with a rickety stool – or falling on your face.
• #10: Here’s an example where that balance was not achieved. Who here has heard of Juicero? This was a startup that a few years ago sold an Internet enabled juice machine. For $700 dollars, you could get this device for your kitchen to select different juices, automatically reorder juice packs, and keep hydrated. The thing was… it was technology aligned to solving a problem that didn’t really exist. Who needed a juice machine connected to the Internet? It even had digital rights management built into the juice packets, so you could use it with other juicing machines…
• #11: Of course, this was easy to hack. Cut the end open and squeeze! Understanding that technology needs to align with how people work and what they do, companies need bring the best solution to market – not just A solution.
• #12: Thankfully, Microsoft has never done anything like that.
• #13: Here’s how Microsoft strikes that balance. We make sure that business stakeholders are part of the conversation, engaged in the design thinking workshops and iterations. We also leverage anonomyzed telemetry data around usage, do user research to understand what people do, and do collaborative design sessions to get everyone’s ideas.
• #14: This is not a new approach for us. There’s a great article on this website Socket 3 that discussed a whitepaper on how Windows 95 was designed. For everyone here who is not old, this was the version of Windows that came out in 1995.
• #15: Here’s a look at the process. This very much aligns with much of the activities that occur in Design Thinking.
• #16: A core focus of our efforts as part of our design approach is to understand the user’s needs. Again, how do people work, what do they do, what are their pinpoints, and what do they need. We always start with the user – and often don’t even think about technology until we define what that experience could or should be. And this baseline is always changing – the baseline of user expectations today around what is a good online experience is very different from what users expected 10 years ago. Or twenty years ago, Keeping that in mind is a key approach. A good example of this is cell phones…
• #17: Here’s my first cell phone. AT the time I was the envy of all my friends and family because I could take calls IN MY CAR. THAT was the new baseline. Now, obviously, we can do a lot more with our cell phones.
• #18: Another key approach to how we apply Design Thinking is Empathy. Understanding who the user is creates an empathy point and allows us to be designing for someone instead of creating something.
• #19: And here’s another Satya quote. This represents the type of vision and focus that is driving our efforts around design thinking.
• #20: And specifically, around Inclusive Design. We have a dedicated team and process around Inclusive Design Thinking.
• #21: The definition of disability has changed. Years ago it was defined as a personal condition – now, it’s thought about as a mismatch between the person and their environment. And we can use technology to solve for that mismatch. As an example of how Microsoft is doing that, I’d like to show a video.
• #23: The Gudiedogs project led to the Soundscape product, which you can now download on your Apple phone. This is a great example of how we applied design thining to solve a problem. How can we create a 3d map using sound for people whoa re visually impaired? It’s a remarkable project and I’m happy my team played a part in it.
• #24: There’s a lot of great material on Microsoft’s site around our Includive Design approach as well as some job aids and tools – I urge you to seek out this information and leverage it to think about how you can apply Includve Design Thinking to your projects. Because if you design for all users, you will often find the solution you produce is better than it would be otherwise.
• #25: Now, I’d like to talk about the Future. And when you look at this image, you can see that the future is not what it used to be. But I’d like to share my thoughts about where I think things are going and some trends in experience design and technology.
• #26: To me we have just finished up a new Cambrian Era of UI design. For those of you here who are not paleontologists, this was the age in which there was an explosion of variety in life on earth – millions of new species and variations began, and eventually this resulted in a much smaller, less diverse set of life. When you look at how web and mobile apps have been designed over the past two decades you can see a similar motion in design. Users have learned how controls work, and designers have aligned to that expectation to make their designs more obvious and aligned with that expectation. Because of this I often tell young UX professionals to focus less on the UI and much more on designing the actual end-to-end experience – As we saw with Soundscape app with advances in technology sometimes the user experience may not involve any scenes at all.
• #27: Another thing that I think the future will bring is a different approach at rendering interfaces. You see here an example of Fluent Design, which is Microsoft’s effort around making UIs be more aligned to reality. Fluent Design looks at aspects such as light, motion, and texture. Google and Apple are also exploring this space… And one of the main reasons this is important is, with augmented reailty, often the interfacees users will be interacting with, both now and in the future, will not be on a screen.
• #28: One other thought on the future of experiences… We talked about the journey Microsoft has gone on the past 43 years… and recently Satya Nadella talked about what I think is the next step in our journey.
• #29: It’s about the technology that is all around us… And at Build last month Satya talked about this… Instead of having a computer on every desktop and in every home… The world is a computer.
• #31: That is an amazing way to look at technology. When you look at ambient computing internet of things, and artificial intelligence, there are some amazing opportunities to leverage this technology to create new and amazing experiences for users.. I’m working on projects that I never thought could be done even five years ago. And now, some of those crazy “green-field, blue sky” ideas that often come out of Design Thinking Workshops… well, now, we can actually start doing some of those things.
• #32: Microsoft reachers have gotten close to 100% accuracy in real time translation.
• #33: So, I talked about three things today – I’d like to close talking about one more thing. Hope.
• #34: Anyone who knows me knows I’m a pretty hardcore fan of Star Trek. I’ve loved the show for most of my life, flaws and all, and one of the main reasons is that it was always grounded in hope. We will continue, we will explore and get better… And in that journey technology will not be the enemy, it will be a tool – well save for the occasional evil computer or the Borg. While there are troubles in the world I still have that hope – a hope that we can use this technology to make people’s lives better. That we can use techniques such as Design Thinking to envision solutions to problems large and small. The future we will invent is about the choices we make, not something that just happens. In closing I’d like to ask all of you to be please, be open to the new ideas the brilliant speakers here will share with you this week… And take those ideas and make great new experiences for your users afterwards. Or, in other words… Boldly Go.
• #35: Thank you!