Xperience This!

So I’m a little late jumping onto the New Year prediction band wagon.  And maybe I cheated a little because my prediction is actually based on what’s already happened in the first couple of weeks of the year. Nevertheless, you heard it here first – 2010 is the Year of the Experience.  This will be the year where Experience Design (XD) becomes widely understood and embraced as a competitive advantage for businesses.  The evidence: Domino’s Pizza’s new ad campaign and Steve Kroft ’s January 10th 60 Minutes story about a multi-billion dollar border security project gone bad.

But I’ve gotten ahead myself.  This has been a long time coming. The last 10 years have certainly heralded our arrival.  Starting in 2000 with a butterfly ballot design that was the cornerstone of a disputed election, “usability” was bandied about in the public lexicon.  The years that followed were nothing short of revolutionary: a smorgasbord of digital media, online commerce, immersive gaming, mobile madness and social networking; all of which contributed to the radical and permanent change in the way most of us live and communicate.

Seismic shifts in our behavior, spread across a diverse global audience, have by natural extension brought the tenets of user-centered Experience Design as a strategic imperative to a growing number of companies ranging from LEGO to Ford to Merck.  Even at C-level, the role of Chief Experience Officer is far less exotic than it was just 5 year ago.  And as a portentous bookend to this first decade of the millennium, US News and World Report declared “User Experience Specialist” as one of the 30 Best Careers of 2009. Defining the evolution of this industry in a paragraph will never do it justice; suffice it to say it’s been a fun, exciting and enlightening ride thus far.

So, what makes me say that 2010 is so special?  We’re just two weeks into January and I’m seeing TV – yes, the 800 pound one-way push media gorilla - speaking to the same interactive XD principles I’ve been talking to clients about all these years.  Things like know your audience and undertand the broader context of the experience you’re designing.

The first example: a Domino’s Pizza commercial where they revealed … get this…customers think their pizza tastes terrible.  Their commercial hits you straight between the eyes, directly referencing customer feedback as the key to driving them to change. Executives hang their heads in shame watching focus group sessions where regular folks make acidic comments about how awful Domino’s had become.  And you can see it all, and the resulting “new” media buzz on the website they created to allow other media outlets’ and the general public’s commentary to continue.  Call it standard market research and a smart cross-channel marketing campaign if you want, but Domino’s didn’t just say “Check out Domino’s new spicier recipe.”  They let their customers do the talking…and they listened.

The second example is way more compelling.  About 10 minutes after seeing the Domino’s commercial, I was watching 60 Minutes.  The first story was Steve Kroft’s look into the multi-billion dollar Mexican border security project for the Department of Homeland Security.  Three years ago, Boeing won a project to implement a high-tech, virtual fence solution.  It involves towers, video imaging technology, field support laptops, and monitoring stations in a monumental three year effort.  The 2000 mile system was to be completed this month, but to date only 28 miles is complete, and that is still considered a prototype.  A typical 60 minutes expose, but what struck me was the punch line: the core reason cited for the failure of this project was squarely put to the lack of border patrol personnel involvement in the design.

To quote Mr. Kroft, “The biggest problem, and you might find this hard to fathom, was that no one at the Department of Homeland Security or the engineers at Boeing bothered to ask the people who would actually be using the surveillance system what they wanted, or how they wanted the system to work.”

I admit I was practically screaming at the screen when the new project director admitted, “We didn’t iterate with them…we didn’t do that and it should have happened.”  Steve Kroft saying, “That’s a pretty big mistake.”  And the director saying, “It’s a huge mistake!”

Later Kroft says, “Isn’t that one of the first things you ask?  What does the customer think?  What does the client want?” And the government auditor answers, “Well, you would think so.”

To illustrate one problem, Kroft shows a ranger in the field with a laptop installed in his SUV.  “If anyone had asked the agents, they would have learned that laptops are hard to operate bounding through the desert, and the dust would prove inhospitable to the equipment, and that the agents would be unable to get a signal over vast stretches of the desolate region.” Amazing -  Check out the story here. If you don’t have time to watch the whole segment, skip to minutes 8 through 10 of the archived show (after you watch the mandatory commercials, of course).

For those of you on large enterprise initiatives where your advocacy for iterative involvement of the people who will be interacting with your systems is still seen as a ‘nice to have’, I suggest you send this link to whoever owns the launch of your product, service or application.  When venerated TV journalists can speak the way we speak, encapsulating the core of what we do, calling out those responsible in such an elegantly public way, you can’t help but feel something good is coming.

NBC had a slogan to describe a solid lineup of shows: Must See TV.  I welcome the coming decade where more and more companies will introduce products, services and applications designed using methods that seek to create the best possible experiences for the people that will use them.  I call it “Must See XD” - Bring it on.