Davy Rennie’s Unfiltered SXSW Diary – Day 2 + 3

Davy Rennie, experience design director, The White Agency is covering SXSW exclusively for Campaign Brief.

Welcome to ‘Unfiltered SXSW: Day Two.

Where design and tech meet and what it means for your business

As an agency, we are defining the role that technology and design play in our structure. Is tech first in? Or is it a practice of a foundational department? Should we be more creative when it comes to technology?

Kicking off the presentation is John Maeda, Global Head of Computational Design + Inclusion at Automattic, whose work explores how business, design and technology merge. An incredibly smart and well-versed bloke introduced his Design in Tech trend for 2017, and it’s a cracker.

He launches into an exploration of businesses that have embraced design, are continuing to show gains in productivity and successful customer outcomes, and even echoes a sentiment that was shared on my panel last week; that the phrase ‘Design Thinking’ makes people nervous, whilst ‘Design Making’ does not. I personally agree with the latter, it initiates a solution, being a tangible outcome for our business partners – they want to see an outcome.

One of the key themes we see across industries at the moment is the importance of inclusion; be that race, gender or sexual orientation. Design and inclusion are inseparable. Inclusive design creates scale for digital products by increasing the size of the products total potential market and as a result, driving product success.

I think that the biggest threat to the design industry is overcharging for things that aren’t as complex as they seem, and being slow to get them out. Products need to be released quickly to keep up with technology. To do this you have to get the user in the room on day one, not wait for testing. Too much time goes into upfront research that acts as nothing more than a justification of the hypothesis. Instead, getting users into a room to design together will expedite and reduce the cost of product launches, I feel there is way more to chat about on this, but I’ll post about that later.

A major player in the industry is China, due to the speed at which they manage to get products to the market and we have to look at them for their progressive use of digital.  Chinese design trends are leading the world, but are frequently overlooked. They use and reuse optimisations as a base layer and are constantly improving from that. The pace at how China revolutionised the smartphone market is proof of that.

Voice and chat in China also continue to be an enormous tool, and it is clear we are lagging behind massively in Australia. This has to change, and quickly, small bot projects are spinning up left, right and centre, but their roles aren’t defined yet. We need to alter that, and strategically plan the role of Voice and Chat to increase its potential and success.

One of the major challenges for agencies is scale and growth, and more specifically commoditising repeatable assets so you can deliver at pace and for less. This means creating products, that can be customised for specific partner requirements but also allow plenty of room for personalised changes to satisfy all needs. One problem we share together is design agency toolkits and programmes. Agencies must unify their approach to tools so they can scale at pace.

The state of Design in Tech is extremely encouraging for the Australian market, we continue to lead in many spaces such as FinTech, but we must look at news ways in which consumers are engaging and attract the right talent and pace to do so, meaning we need more hybrid designer/engineers who can MAKE and not just Think.

“Design isn’t just beautiful it’s a tool for business and it’s about market relevance and meaningful results” – John Maeda

Human Centred Design for Future needs

Another design discussion, this time it’s a panel with 3 super design geeks. Buzzed, Meetup and Shutterstock introduce us to HCD for future needs. It’s so packed here it obvious how important this is for designers and business folk alike. One thing that strikes me instantly, the panel are Product Managers, where are the designer at?

We all know I bang this drum hard, but focusing on humans is the single most important thing for any business, my business included

What is Human-Centred design?

They agree that it is designing with the human smack bang in the middle, human’s needs first, business challenge second. One will solve the other. Solve a problem, test it simply, did it work and solve the problem? Yay or nay.

It sounds simple, but it’s not. Mixing business needs is intrinsic with successful delivery, but can you reframe the business need to align with customer outcomes. The most successful companies like Airbnb and Pinterest balance business goals with user needs.

User needs don’t always drive business goals but do drive engagement and trust.

There it is, EMPATHY. That has to be the word of #SXSW2017.

Stop being so me, myself and I.

Changing the way you measure success can tie business needs, try and measure common metrics, ie. What experience is the business trying to provide for their customer and did they like it. Measure experience metrics, not just business outcomes.

Designers, need to get out of their own head. Just because they know what good design is meant to be, doesn’t mean the user will like it. I am guilty of this, I don’t know enough about my customers to be certain my design and my teams are right until we focus on challenges of real people.

Ask questions. Use simple mechanisms to ask questions like a happy/sad emoji response to a simple question. People are more likely to say how they emotionally feel when they are engaged. Measuring Human Emotion in real time can change the way you measure success.

“At Buzzfeed, we use emojis to start a conversation with consumers in real time, short questions, real insights.” – Chris Tindal

Mobile accelerated HUMAN-CENTRED DESIGN.

Simple things like where your navigation is has to be designed in context. Think what someone will be doing when they use your product. For example, what are the users doing with their other hand when they are using their phones (Minds out of the gutter please).

You can do this by asking people, simple scenarios can give you real insights into what people will do. Don’t just guess. Don’t just translate data. Don’t fake it. Speak to real users, find out what they want, what they don’t and test quickly. And that doesn’t just mean test the product. Test your hypothesis. Test your personas. Test everything.

Millennials rule the future

People are fundamentally and frustratingly individual, give them the ability to shape their own experience. It’s
hard to force someone to change their behavior or follow a new channel, focus on what your users are familiar with, and make it amazing with iterative improvements rather than massive changes. Speaking to focus groups can only give you insight into certain types of people, people who go to focus groups(get a job). Instead of focus groups, you need to see what real users are doing, in the real world.

New generations are more and more impatient with products that don’t seem personalised, or aren’t simple (bloody impatient millennials). But they are right, products shouldn’t be impersonal, they shouldn’t be hard. Our technological advances allow for highly personalised environments, use it, invest in it, keep improving it.

If you have a product that isn’t dripping solutions to specify human challenges, there is a very high chance that your product will fail. Just because you think as a professional you are correct, until you find out what a customer’s’ challenges are you will fail. Everyone on the panel agrees, they have all failed, and still do, but they have all removed their egos, and now make their life easier by using humans.

Snapchat is one of the fastest moving products in the millennial market, it was designed with HCD, and continues to be improved with that, and we all know how well they are going.

WHY. WHY? WHY!

As we wrap up, there’s a big buzzword, Northstar. Businesses need to set a Northstar for direction, based on what the customer’s needs and problems are. Use your Northstar to define your WHY. Start with the WHY! Simon Sinek said it a long time ago, but it is true. Why is your purpose, it’s your reason for doing business. It is your Northstar.

Giving design a seat at the lean table

The last one for the day, it’s all about Lean Design. Here’s hoping after two strong sessions, we get the trifecta.

Our panel is going to introduce Lean, and what it can do for today’s agencies and businesses. We discuss a business world that is full of extreme uncertainty, and to stay on top of this we need to constantly build, measure and learn.

Lean + Design

We all know most designers who are passionate about creating meaningful products that solve a challenge or problem by thinking holistically, creatively and analytically. This can complement the principles of lean, one of them, in particular, make design and lean a match made in heaven.

The principles of lean

⁃        Get out, speak to people, customers and stakeholders;

⁃        Prototype early and often;

⁃        Iteration;

⁃        Managing uncertainty (Design is great at identify and solving this)

The panel present 5 steps to use lean:

1. Hybrid teams

Mix the competencies of teams, designers who focus on more than just the aesthetics and can be technological or strategic. I fully agree with this, designers need to be more to demand the high salaries and design managers need to have mixed skills to manage them.

2. Define your Horizons

Use horizons to define the program’s purpose. I 100% agree on the horizons, I don’t agree with the fixed titles they use,

1. BAU

2. R&D

3. VENTURES

I fully believe businesses of different maturities can define different purposes for each horizon, so I wouldn’t get too caught up on that.

3. Borrow from designer’s toolkit

Visualise the ideas, don’t just talk about it. Use visuals to define and share purpose. It gives your team a Northstar. Go back to it. Remember your WHY. Tick.

4. Look for opportunities to diverge

Explore multiple options, do it at pace but be prepared to take a step back. “Let design happen” give it time to happen, it will shortcut the program. Big tick.

5. Don’t mix empathy and experimentation

Just because you are speaking with someone doesn’t mean you are being empathetic, actually use their needs to deliver products. There we go again, empathy, otherwise know as HCD buzzword off the year.

I like the idea of Lean being used for HCD projects, it is essential for successful product designs. But we have to get better at it, it’s still young, it still has many many pitfalls that need to be addressed, the major one being diverse team members.

Designers are notoriously ambiguous creatures, when we look at the principles of lean and mix that with the ambiguity of designers during the process. There is a powder keg of emotion. But at The White Agency we have recognised this before, that’s why we use a Hybrid approach where we can use the rigor of waterfall cost and scope control with the rapid, affordable output of lean.

Subpar session to finish and I duck out early for a look at the IBM Experience. And shit. Best. Thing. So. Far.

It’s incredible, it’s a mash of AI, Beer, Healthcare, Education, Personalisation, Machine Learning and FREE stuff. I start off with the beer matching tool, and it’s epic, it uses three questions defined from a previous survey of beer drinkers, that defines three beers that I might like and it has a range of the chance I will like that, but it’s hidden. I rate all three beers, a bit harshly as I clear my ‘International flight induced cold’ from my throat, but the winner is the correct pick. Well done Watson, well done indeed.

Next Watson profiles me, and we have a jolly old chat, it’s still a bit mechanical, but the questions are good and he profiles me fairly-correctly (easy going, fun, handsome, not opinionated) and gives me a unique t-shirt, that was already printed, odd.

The best of SXSW & Austin:

⁃        IBM Experience

⁃        John Maeda(Legend)

⁃        the SXSW App and bot are awesome

⁃        Bahn Mi Tacos

The worst of SXSW & Austin:

⁃        Some design content is epic, some is a bit same, I want to know what’s next

⁃        Weather – I’m now wearing my badly fitting IBM t-shirt like a right idiot

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Welcome to ‘Unfiltered SXSW: Day Three.

Wow, Sunday is weird. It’s cold, it’s dry and it is super quiet. I think a few people may be suffering from the sniffles after the torrential rain of yesterday. 4 seasons in 3 days.

Self-Driving Cars – first session from NVI
DIA

So what is the current state of play in this industry?

We quickly move from talking traditional cars to computer games, and how the machines they use to power these crazy games are now powering cars. One single computer can now do over 43 trillion actions per second or the same work of 150 MacBook Pros.

We know that AI and Bots are the future in most sectors, and this still holds true in the automotive industry. AI and deep learning will write the code for the future, no more coding, all will be based on machine learning and reacting to this data. This creates a real-time iteration model, expediting Tesla’s view that “the first day you own the car is the worst it will ever be.”

People do not have the capacity to absorb and process all of this data, but machines do. They can be programmed to recognise the patterns and predict the future. We just have to go along for the ride and accept AI, and its ingenious ability to augment our designs using data. Whether you like it or not, Al simply designs better, more efficient, and smarter products that are beyond the scope of human capability.

Whilst unflattering to our ego, it is likely that we have been building things like cars, bridges and buildings wrong (or at least inferiorly) this whole time. When you see the different structures AI delivers, they are different, they are strange, but they are arguably safer and more efficient.

This makes me think if you could start again, would cities and spaces look like they do today, or would they be simpler, like Canberra (the place, not the people).

“If you think about it, you are like a machine. You are seeing Pixels. You just see the edges and the colours that fill them in.”

The Wall of Same

Stepping into the trade show hall, we are immediately hit with a mass of energy, with people and product as far as the eye can see.

First stall and it’s a good’un: AR for marketing- a cool product in and of itself, but the ability to design and build yourself, minus the developer, clever.

Unfortunately, however, that’s where it stopped being interesting. The next two hours were filled with a confusing mixture of anticipation and bewilderment.

We see product after product that promises better ROI, AR/VR, health etc., but it was hard to find a single USP anywhere. There were literally zero, which was hugely disappointing.

Disappointing. Back to back session tomorrow on the future of UX should help the tech hangover.

The best of SXSW & Austin:

·       The future of automotive is crazier than we could ever imagine

·       NatGeo Further House is epic

The worst of SXSW & Austin:

·       Wouldn’t mind some food that isn’t Tex-Mex fusion

·       Trade show is poor