Lean is a set of principles and practices developed with the goal of making businesses more effective. [...] Agile software development practices (in which the focus is market-focused, incrementally-shippable software capabilities) complement Lean in numerous ways.  Both are ways of thinking about improving a company or a team in relationship to stakeholders and customers.  Each also focuses on iterative improvements, and empowering people executing the work to make it better.  However, Lean is bigger in focus than daily work processes, and provides a framework for organizational change that is not the focus of Agile.  Of course, in a small organization like a high-tech start-up, they might feel like one and the same thing.  But in a large enterprise, Lean will help to drive change in areas well beyond software development (customer support, marketing, etc.).

After a lot of discussion (and heartache from me), I eventually dropped the Agile portion from the chapter in favor of a clear message I could deliver well in under 6500 words.  I will find a way to get my story about Agile (and about the synergies between Lean and Agile) out in the world at some point – maybe here!  But now that I’m done grieving the Agile portion, I can say with enthusiasm that I think the revised chapter focused on Lean is much stronger, and I’m thrilled to have a piece on it’s way to publication.

As a sneak preview to the chapter, I’d like to share an earlier incarnation of the methods part of the chapter.  I hope will be of use to those who find themselves in a context where Lean ways of thinking and working are present!

Lean Principles

The five principles of Lean have been documented in numerous places, including the Lean Enterprise Institute and others.  Here they are:

• Describe value from the end customer’s point of view.
• Document the value stream.  Identify and eliminate activities (waste) that don’t create value for the customer.
• Ensure the process flows smoothly towards the customer.
• Enable customers to pull value from the next activity.
• Pursue perfection.

These simple guidelines have led to a wealth of practices that in many ways are consistent with a user-centered approach to research in a business setting.   In the next section, I outline a few of those practices, with a focus on those that are the most relevant to user experience and user research professionals.

Lean Practices

Although I have spent my career in the business world, I bring my anthropology training to bear on my work all the time.  I’ve always been a fan of diving into the deep end, watching and learning what people are doing before making recommendations of any kind.  I first came to appreciate Lean methodologies when I heard that managers are encouraged to genchi gembutsu, or ‘go see for yourself’.  This has also been described at ‘walking the shop floor’, which has a very manufacturing feel to it.

The focus here is on observation, not participant observation in the traditional ethnographic sense.  But there is also no reason why a more engaged methodology could not be used.  This commitment to understand the daily lived experience of employees is so powerful, and absolutely aligned with a user-centered approach to evaluating problems and designing solutions!

In reality, in large companies with a diverse range of work being done all over the world, it’s unlikely that a senior executive can effectively walk the shop floor of all his/her organizations on a regular basis.  Ethnographic researchers can serve as a proxy and an advisor to those executives, visiting various locations, sharing compelling or poignant research insights through various media, and recommending areas for possible improvement.  However in an environment where a Lean approach is pervasive, the role of a researcher is most effective if they are able to share package those insights using the language of Lean – for example, describing the findings in terms of flow, the seven types of waste, etc.

Many teams practicing Lean have borrowed the Voice of the Customer methodology from Six Sigma.  This exercise involves articulating who the customers are for a given process or outcome, and then thinking through what would be the most valuable for them.

In manufacturing terms, the value might be to deliver an item that was ordered on the date specified.  This may seem almost too obvious, but it’s extremely surprising how few people in the business world actually think about their day-to-day work in this way!  Many years ago I worked on a large-scale knowledge management project.  The team was struggling to define clear goals and plans.  With the help of a Lean coach, the team did a Voice of the Customer exercise and realized that they had three very different customer groups with different needs and expectations.  That exercise finally allowed the team to move forward with clarity and confidence in planning and communicating their work.

This is not market or customer research per se.  Rather, the team uses their existing knowledge to focus improvement efforts.  However, their understanding could benefit from further refinement based on ethnographic or other research methods.  Even if the insights aren’t available at the outset of an improvement effort, the iterative nature of lean methodologies should enable insights to be incorporated as they become available.

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is another powerful tool in the Lean toolkit.  Do you know a qualitative researcher that doesn’t like whiteboard sessions or Post-its?  VSM is essentially a participatory design method, in which individuals engaged in a particular business process use a whiteboard or sticky notes to describe the steps of their process, and then identify and discuss areas of waste and possible improvement together.  This collaborative approach enables the team members to develop a common understanding of the challenges and opportunities they face in improving their work processes.

In order to give the team focus and a sense of accomplishment, a Lean coach may the team focused on the problems that they can address on their own.  For example, they can’t change their management team!  In this case, what is not addressed during a VSM exercise may be just as valuable to a researcher for understanding the challenges at hand.  So for example, in one VSM exercise with an Operations team in India, all issues with the software they use were black-boxed, which is to say they were acknowledged but put aside, so that the team could focus on areas where they were able to effectuate change.  Although it might not be the right focus for a VSM working session, a researcher with a broader scope might be able to explore those issues in another way.

The 5 Whys is a methodology in which the team seeks the root cause of a particular problem by asking a series of five increasingly penetrating questions.  Although you might feel like you have regressed to your days as a toddler by continually asking why, this is a very simple and powerful way to help a project team arrive at a root cause analysis, so that the team can understand and solve for the right problem(s).

An example might be (1) Why are the managers in this department quitting at an usually high rate?  Because of work-life balance issues. (2) Why? Because in their exit interviews they complain of excessive evening work.  (3) Why? Because they are not able to complete their core work during business hours. (4) Why? Because they are constantly interrupted to generate specialized reports. (5) Why? Because they are the only ones with the system access and knowledge to run reports that are needed by other departments. At the end of this sequence, the team has arrived at a specific, solvable problem, making the reporting process more efficient.

Although there are many other tools in the Lean toolkit, I did want to mention one last area that may of interest to researchers who find themselves in this context.  This is the idea of a 5S Visual Workplace.  The 5Ss once again come from the Japanese ( Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, and Shitsuke), which are often translated as Sort, Straighten or Set-in-Order, Sweep or Shine, Standardize, and Sustain.  These are principles for making sense of and organizing the physical workspace.  Getting a walkthrough of such a space – or helping to create one – would be a powerful vehicle for understanding what is expected of workers in a given setting.

In Closing

I hope that you’ll have a look at The Handbook of Business Anthropology (and my chapter of course!) when it comes out.  In the complete version of the chapter you’ll learn more about the ways in which social scientists have contributed to an understanding of organizations, a brief history of the origins of Lean, two short case studies (that bring Lean and ethnographic methods together) from my tenure at SAP.

In the meantime, though, I hope that this excerpt will help you understand the synergies that I’ve seen between Lean and user experience / user research / user-centered design!  I look forward to your questions and feedback in the comments.

1. You keep hearing references to Lean that don’t refer to Cuisine or cuts of meat.
2. You keep hearing Japanese terms like kaizen or muda.
3. People are talking about Flow, but they are not referencing the positive psychologist Csikszentmihalyi.
4. You hear references to Value Stream and you’re not sure what people are talking about.
5. You’re told that the team is trying to achieve Customer Pull, but you’re not sure you want to be pulled by a customer.  You learn later that this means a rate of production based on customer demand; that in turn means the manufacturing process is so fast that items can be made to order.
6. You’re told that your goal is to understand the Voice of the Customer; you fervently hope that has something to do with user research and not singing.
7. You are told to genchi gembutsu (go see for yourself).

This is a teaser for a post I wrote about Lean and User Experience that will go live tomorrow, so I hope you’ll come back and check it out.

We introduced oat cereal to our oldest son shortly after rice cereal (around 5-6 months), and quickly figured out that the resulting skin rash and prolific vomiting warranted serious medical attention.  In working with a childhood allergy specialist at Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP), we learned that he had protein-induced enterocolitis, which is an intestinal auto-immune response to certain proteins.  In his case it was oats and barley, so we eliminated those items from his diet by essentially going gluten-free until he outgrew the condition.  I’ve written extensively about this on our family blog, and would be happy to share more with other parents going through the same thing – just contact me using the form below.

As I mentioned in a blog post called Neurotypical last year, my oldest was also diagnosed on the autism spectrum several years ago.  Once the shock subsided we’ve been committed to doing everything in our power to help him be his best self.  We’ve been lucky to have access to amazing state-sponsored support in Pennsylvania and Illinois, but I always wonder if there is more I could do.  Perhaps due to the centrality of food in my life (my mom is French and taught cooking for many years), plus everything we went through with our son’s diet at a young age, I’ve been reading extensively on the relationship between behavior and diet (see Learn More, below).  I came across a groundswell of literature – from families and scientists alike – that advocates a gluten- and casein-free diet for kids on the spectrum.

Right around the holidays last year, we got numerous reports of our son’s bad behavior at school. Perhaps most seriously, he had hit a few kids on the bus, and we were asked to find alternative transportation for him.  Our sweet, gentle little boy, a bully? It just seemed so out of character!  But we learned that he found the noise on the bus really overwhelming, and that was his way of acting out.  Getting an email from your child’s principal when he’s still in kindergarten is quite a wake-up call, let me tell you!

Since we had two weeks at home around Christmas, we decided to take the plunge.  In the past weeks we have seen subtle but remarkable differences – definitely enough to keep at it. He plays more readily with his younger brother and is less likely to have an aggressive response if he doesn’t get his way.  He is making better eye contact, appears more calm and focused, and is coming home with amazing progress in school (and a very good first report card).  But it’s not just us … his teachers, too, have remarked that his behavior is different, in particular his interest and willingness to engage in play with his classmates.  So challenging as it can be at times, there is no question we’ll persevere.

Of course, everyone in the house is affected by his dietary changes (we don’t cook four separate dinners, after all!).  So I’ve been close to gluten-free for a few weeks too.  The big dark circles that I get (which I also get from eating dairy) have all but disappeared.  Based on what I’ve read I hope that it will help with cyclical fatigue and migraines, but it’s way too early to tell yet.  At first I dreamed about bread and pastries (croissants!) or baking, and then I shopped obsessively for gluten-free alternatives.  But as I’ve gotten used to it I feel better.  And perhaps because of that intense and sort of additive response, I’m even more committed than ever to sticking with it both for my son and for myself.

I’ve continued to read to learn more about wheat allergies, gluten intolerance, leaky gut, and more.  There are two books that I would highly recommend for individuals in similar circumstances.  The first is The Kid-Friendly ADHD & Autism Cookbook (pictured above), and the other one – for me at least – is a relatively new book called Wheat Belly.  The remainder of this post is focused on the later book by Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist.

Here are the a few of the most interesting things I learned:

Between 1940 and 1980 (after World War II and before there was testing for the genetic modification of foods), the Rockefeller Foundation funded research with the Mexican department of agriculture to hybridize wheat. They chose Mexico because could grow two crops a year and quickly arrive at the desired outcomes. The admirable goal was to feed the world’s starving after the war. These efforts created a crop that was more hearty, easier to harvest, had a bigger yield, and made fluffier bread (did you know that it costs manufacturers about .05 to make a 3.99 box of cereal?!). In other words, practical for farmers and terrifically profitable for food manufacturers.  One of the readers on Dr. Davis’ blog commented that in a one hour span of watching television, she counted more than forty commercials about wheat products.  And in the book he talks about the explosive growth of companies like Kraft, whose success has been fueled by those foods.

The kicker (for me anyways) is that the genetic modifications were really significant and never tested for human safety. Yet wheat with that genetic makeup comprises the vast majority of what we consume today. The grain that most closely approximates the original genetic composition of wheat (einkorn) is still available in some places (including the Middle East and the South of France), and it actually doesn’t create the same sort of allergic or autoimmune response in most cases – crazy, huh?

I am not rabidly opposed to genetically modified foods (GMOs), though I will admit it creeps me out a little bit. And I have felt (since dealing with the severe allergies of my oldest son at the age of five months) that there has to be a connection between the explosion of childhood allergies and celiac disease and what we’re doing to our food. I remember in one of his pre-school classrooms more than 50% of the kids were allergic to something. There are countries in Europe (like Austria for example) that don’t permit GMOs. You just don’t hear that sort of visceral parental panic about peanuts – or God forbid blueberries – ending up in a pre-school classroom. You buy bread and it grows mold or gets stale in a few days – as it should. It just doesn’t have an infinite shelf life like bread in the US does. And it doesn’t cause you to gain weight in the same way. Anyways, the view from my soapbox is distracting, so I digress … where was I?!

All the changes to wheat from the 1940s to 1980s was actually just the result of fast hybridization – which farmers have been doing forever. It wasn’t GMOs as done today (which may be more radical but at least regulated). Maybe it’s something about the big business involvement in that (unsupervised!) in those early changes which gives me the willies. That and the lack of testing for human safety – that’s nuts. As an anthropologist I have to prove that I’m protecting my human subjects, but the food industry didn’t?

Here’s the other thing: wheat as it exists today is the only food which triggers a response in the central nervous system. Specifically, “digestion yields morphine-like compounds that bind to the brain’s opiate receptors [this] induces a form of reward, a mild euphoria.” Dr. Davis quotes one of his patients saying “bread is my crack – I can’t give it up!”  In some 30% of cases, withdrawal can be severe and require medical support or even intervention. In case that isn’t convincing enough, there is an opiate-blocking drug (used to bring heroin addicts off a high!) called naloxone. When given to study participants, they ate ~400 fewer calories a day due to lack of cravings.

Thea author goes on to say that the food pyramid in the 1980s (which encouraged more ‘healthy whole grains’) directly correlates to the explosion of weight in America. And because it is in so many things (as an ingredient or an additive), he provides convincing data that pervasive consumption of gluten – and not other processed sugars like soda – are the reason for our obesity epidemic.

Dr. Davis devotes a chapter each to many of the most serious and pervasive health issues in America today, including obesity, celiac disease, diabetes, aging, brain / neurological disorders (including autism and schizophrenia), and the skin. Although the chapters were dense I found them to be pretty accessible and very thought-provoking.  In particular, he shares the insights of a woman who has re-analyzed the thirty years of data from The China Study.  Her startling conclusion was that his biased analysis (focused on a plant-based diet and reduction of animal protein) totally misses the high correlation between wheat consumption and various diseases, as shown in this graph at right.

I’m not one for fads or fad diets; the only thing like that I’ve done in my life was very gradual weight loss on Weight Watchers.  I felt (and still do) that was a significant lifestyle change, not a diet – which is why it works.  But by the time I got to the final chapter (13), I was pretty much hooked and was trying to figure out if I was ready to give it a try. What he describes makes good sense to me. In the very simplest terms, the high-glycemic carbohydrates that we ingest cause insulin spikes that wreak havoc on our health and create a cyclical desire for more of the same. The only way to break the cycle is to significantly reduce carbohydrate intake – most especially wheat and other glutenous (?) grains, but also limiting the amount of fruit and (obviously) processed sugars you ingest. The resulting caloric gap should be replaced by vegetables, protein, and healthy fats, e.g. avocado, nuts, etc.  This allows the body to return to it’s natural metabolic state, which results in gradual weight loss and ultimately improved health.

Dr. Davis goes on to say that it will not serve to replace wheat, barley, rye, and others with gluten-free alternatives – though that’s where we started in our house!  Although they don’t have the addictive properties of wheat, these grains still result in many of the other undesirable effects on our health. In fact, Dr. Davis advocates about 50-100 grams of carbohydrates a day – no more than a half a cup of rice or potato or quinoa in one sitting.  This is extremely challenging when you think about the prevalence of wheat in the American diet. What to have for breakfast, if not cereal? What to have for lunch, if not a sandwich?  So I was totally hooked, and then … wow … the changes are much more substantial than I realized. But the sample week-in-the-life meals and recipes helped me understand and realized that I could (with enough willpower) make it work.

Yesterday was the first day that I made the transition from gluten-free (e.g. just using alternative flours) to a more complete change in what I was eating. I am not quite ready to give up Weight Watchers yet, but I found it really useful to look at my food intake through the lenses of both programs, as below:

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed right away is that for the first time (since before being pregnant) I am not hungry all the time.  Food is fuel, but I’m not obsessed or driven by a meal schedule.  For example, yesterday I had a pretty small breakfast.  But I wan’t all that hungry at lunchtime, and just had the yogurt and flax mixture at 1:30 pm.  I was under my Weight Watchers points (target is 26 at my current weight), and also at only 50% of my recommended carbohydrate intake according to USDA guidelines.  Coming back to the Wheat Belly recommendations and focusing on the carbs specifically, the daily target is 50-100 grams, so I was well over that.  It’s pretty obvious why now, but this exercise was a real eye-opener for me.  I knew about apples, but I had no idea that bananas are so high in carbohydrates!  The soy chai latte was yummy but probably not worth that much of my carbs for the day.  And the rest was not bad … though it’s obviously going to take some practice to get in the recommended range.

I do appreciate the simplicity of Weight Watchers, but I feel that – especially since I understand the science behind it – it will be worth it to give a thoughtful, gluten-free life a go.  I’ll probably continue to do both programs in parallel for awhile while I get the hang of it.  If you’re on this path yourself – or if you’re likewise in an exploratory mode – I’d love to hear your input and feedback in the comments!

Learn More

Here are some of the most compelling materials I’ve read:

At the beginning of the summer I wrote a post about Digital Hoarding, so I was especially interested in his reference to a well-written article about online curation from the New York Times:

There’s a German word for it, of course: Sehnsucht, which translates as “addictive yearning.” This is, I think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing. From Carina Chocano’s New York Times article entitled Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation’.

I highly recommend his blog if you don’t already follow it!  And, bonus points if you can find a way to use Sehnsucht in a sentence at the office.  :)

Humanizing Business Technology

View the complete presentation on SlideShare.

Abstract

How can methodologies from the social sciences – and from other fields like design – inform our understanding of and influence on technology?  In this presentation, anthropologist Natalie Hanson talks about her transition from academia to the software industry, and what she learned along the way.

Biography

Natalie Hanson has been working and researching at the intersection of business strategy, technology, social science, and design for nearly fifteen years. She serves as Associate Principal for User Experience at ZS Associates, a management consulting company. At ZS Associates, Dr. Hanson’s team provides user research, user-centered design, and User Interface (UI) development for the company’s cloud-based solutions and UX support for client engagements. She is responsible for identifying emerging trends from market data, executive messaging, and user experience research, and using those insights to create and execute innovative and pragmatic programs aligned with firm strategy.  Prior to her current position, Natalie worked 13 years for software company SAP in a variety of User Experience and operations management functions.

In 2002, Natalie founded a listserv called anthrodesign. This active online community is composed of nearly 3000 members worldwide that are interested in engaging in dialogue about cross-disciplinary collaboration, with a particular focus on the use of field research (ethnographic) methods in the business context. Natalie’’s research explores the ways in which institutions respond to macro-economic, industry, and regional trends, and how those organizational changes affect the lives of employees. Her dissertation focused on traditional management practices (HR, Finance, Marketing) as well as emergent practices like self-management (in the tradition of Foucault) that are critical for corporations to control their increasingly mobile and remote workforce.

Natalie received her AB in Religion and Biblical Literature from Smith College, her MA in Whole Systems Design from Antioch University Seattle, and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from Temple University in Philadelphia.

Conference Theme  - Qualitative Research and Technology

From the conference website:

The first qualitative research technology were the researchers themselves. As the primary instrument qualitative researchers used their human senses to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the world around them. Through these channels researchers generated data and then used their cognitive abilities to make sense of the qualities represented by this data. As qualitative research progressed, the beginnings of new technologies could be seen in the enterprise. Pencils and paper in the field and typewriters in the office led to handheld devices on location and qualitative data analysis programs in the clouds. All along this evolutionary pathway, these technologies not only help researchers perform their instrumental duties, but also helped the change the nature of these acts themselves to the point that the prominence of the qualitative researcher as main instrument in qualitative research may be called into question by the dominance of technological advancements.

Qualitative researchers are not alone in these challenging encounters with technologies in their everyday lives. Each of us in our daily activities can observe the greater and greater place technology plays in how we live, work, and play. Discovering how we utilize these technologies, how we experience them, and how we enact change with them are all wonderful areas in which we as qualitative researchers can engage our inquiries.

At TQR2013, we want to explore technology and the qualitative researcher by featuring works of and on qualitative inquiry that exemplify the presence of technology in life and in our research about this technology-infused state-of-living. To this end we encourage prospective presenters to submit their paper and paper panel proposals that will inspire conference attendees to consider technology’s ubiquity in all its forms. Be it in business, education, government, healthcare, recreation, and home life, we are interested in studies which such a focus. We are also very interested in presentations on the application of new technologies in the practice and performance of qualitative research. As always, we are also open to receiving creative presentation forms and content especially those proposals incorporating technology in effective and creative ways.

A couple of years ago I was a member of Creative Good’s UX Councils, and I had a chance to hear Barry Schwartz present a keynote based on the insights from his book Practical Wisdom. He is also the author of bestseller Paradox of Choice. That presentation continues to inform my thinking and the connections I’m making to other ideas, so I thought I would recap some of the most influential elements here.

When I heard him speak, Barry introduced his presentation by telling us that what prompted the book (co-authored with Ken Sharpe) was the sense that we had was that everything is at least a little bit broken. If we have children, we are dissatisfied with how they are being educated, and we think it’s because teachers don’t know and care about our kids enough. If we go to the doctor’s office, they meet with us for seven minutes with us and most of that time is spent looking at their laptop screens. But the reality is that the dis-satisfactions we feel as patients, parents, and clients are matched by the providers’ dissatisfaction. We think, for example, that lawyers care more about billable hours than making sure they are focused on the right services … but they have the highest suicide rate. So we really need to consider more holistically what is happening.

When we sense that something is not right, we have draw on two tools to fix it – rules or incentives. Following the financial crisis everyone asked: How do we regulate the bankers? Or how can we create smarter incentives (by ensuring that what’s good for bankers is good for everyone)? Those are the only weapons or tools we have – sticks and carrots. We can certainly use better rules and incentives, but those are ultimately not enough. What we need is something else that is not discussed, and that is that we need virtue, character. We need people who want to do that right thing, and that know what that is. Aristotle called it Practical Wisdom.

The goal of Barry’s talk was to:

1. explain why we need virtue in general and practical wisdom in particular
2. describe what practical wisdom is
3. show that unwittingly we make things worse because we don’t cultivate wisdom
4. encourage people to transform the institutions in which they work

It is not enough to treat other people the way you want to be treated, but that is not the question. The real question is how does that person want to be treated?

In Practice

Wisdom is understanding when and how to make exceptions to the rule. It’s also about when and how to improve – it’s “moral jazz”. It’s about the ability to choose among virtues when they conflict. Sometimes you can’t be both honest and kind. And it’s not a rare event, it happens all the time. There is a right answer in every situation, but taking the perspective of another person and empathizing with them is extremely complicated. It is not enough to treat other people the way you want to be treated, but that is not the question. The real question is how does that person want to be treated? If you can ask that question and get an intelligible answer, it required perception, sensitivity, and knowledge of the other person. If you can achieve that understanding, then a wise person uses these moral skills in pursuit of the right aims – to serve and not to manipulate.

In the book he talks about the War on Wisdom. He gave the example about Chicago teachers all following the same script about a book called The Bath for kindergartners. There was a 75 item script to read kids a 35 page picture book. The fear is if we let the teachers use their judgment, disastrous things will happen. So the goal of the script is to make the reading of this book judgment-proof for teachers – but in protecting from disaster it also constrains innovation. It deprives people the opportunity to learn from experience and truly consider what a child needs at a particular moment in the day.

Teachers are not interested in teaching kids if the goal is incentives. Teaching kids to do well on tests breaks any commitment to true learning. Teachers will eventually ignore the kids that will very well or very poorly, and focus on the kids on the bubble. This is not why teachers became teachers, but the incentives of No Child Left Behind motivate this kind of behavior. It de-moralizes professional activity and it demoralizes the teachers. More deeply, it also de-moralizes the practice itself – under these conditions, teaching no longer has moral significance and value. It becomes about salary and bonus, and it creates addiction around incentives. Withdrawal requires another dose. Getting teachers to do anything about anything will require another incentive.

Schwartz relayed details about a study of hospital custodians by someone at Yale. Custodians are at the bottom of the food chain, they are essentially invisible. They have a long list of official job duties and related duties. But the good ones know when do to what’s not written in the job description. In one case there were family members sleeping in a visitors lounge at the moment he was supposed to be cleaning, so he came back later. In another story, a custodian cleaned a patient’s room a second time (the father hadn’t seen the first cleaning) so the father could feel that his son in a coma was being cared for. Behavior like this makes patients and their families feel better, and it improves patient care. There is nothing in the official job description or list of work tasks that involves interaction or working with another human being in any way – they could be working in a mortuary! But through their work they were also providing treatment and easing concern for hospital patients and their families.

A custodian will tell you that they are trained in 20 minutes. But real care requires experience, training, and time. The kinds of interactions that are valued are care, kindness, empathy … but their job descriptions don’t cover that. They have the will to do right by other people, and they have the skill to determine what doing right requires. This is consistent with Aristotle. Will without skill is a loose cannon, and skill without will may use their skills to further their own self-interest. The wise person knows how to make the exception for every rule.

In another example, Schwartz described a situation where doctors had to figure out how to substantially reduce patient costs in a low-income patient group. This group of patients were costing several hundred thousand dollars a year, so the medical professionals looked for ways to reduce their use of medical services. The recommendations are obvious – the patients were overweight, smoking, eating fried chicken. But the doctors realized it wasn’t the lack of knowledge about making those changes. The critical thing is was to get patients to do things that serve their long term interests. They accomplished that goal by developing a relationship between caregivers and their patients. They focused on hiring employees that know how to talk to people, and then taught them what they needed to know to provide accurate recommendations for the patients. In this way the medical facility reduced patient services by 50% and made their patients healthier. In a society like ours we have solved acute disease. But we don’t know how to solve chronic disease, and it’s a growing concern. This is a unique problem for affluent society, and it requires being managed not cured by the patient. We need to treat patients as people in order to do that.

Schwartz also provided a really powerful example from an Israeli daycare center about how ‘smart’ incentives can backfire. Parents were coming later and later, so the Director was exasperated and started to fine them. Basically, it created a negative incentive on lateness. Unfortunately, the outcome was that lateness actually went up, because people felt it was worth it – the cost for those 15 minutes was worth it! The fine was simply the price for coming twenty minutes late. The Director was trying to say that the fine is not a price, but the only way to have it be effective would have been to make it a capital offense to come late. And then the Director gave up, and lateness went up even further – because it was an even better deal! In summary, prior to putting the fine in place, parents had an obligation to the daycare staff to follow the rules. Once the Director gave them a second rule, it undermined the first one, leaving nothing except a calculation of cost and benefits. There was no moral obligation. The lesson learned here is that financial incentives encourage people to calculate relative costs and benefits, and not think about what is right.

The reality is that if people have jobs in which the primary objective is to make money (investors, for example), it’s nearly impossible to focus on morality. They get out of bed and go to work every day to make money. It’s not about greed per se, it’s the goal of their job. Until the goal of that work changes, there is no incentive that’s going to result in a meaningful change in behavior.

Implications for Customer Experience

Schwartz then tied this back to his Creative Good UX Councils audience. He asked (rhetorically): is bad customer experience bad for business? Yes, but that’s not good enough. Is bad customer experience bad for customers? That’s better. You have to be interested in the welfare of the people you serve. Is it bad for the employees, too? That is why customer experience matters. Business, customers, as well as you and your colleagues suffer. It becomes something you tell your children avoid. Following scripts and chasing incentives is not how most people want to work.

What can we do?  Not more courses on ethics! They are a waste of breath and money and faculty and student time. When you ghetto-ize these issues into a course, you imply that no-one really cares. Ethics needs to be infused in the day to day practices of how people work. If attending physicians treat patients with disrespect, interns will learn the same. Provide the example! The truth of the matter is that we are all teachers of somebody, and we are teaching all the time; students learn more from teachers in between lessons. The kind of examples that we set is going to be the real ethics course.

There are some positive examples of reorienting training and education to nurture wisdom. Research has shown that medical students have maximum empathy for students on the first day of medical school, and it declines from there. Emotions don’t always cloud judgement. At Harvard Medical School students see someone over the course of the year. They get to know the person and their circumstances, the complications that make it impossible to find the straightforward answer. As a result, those physicians in training people stop treating diseases and start treating people. They learn by watching their mentors and their fellow students behave in the same way. in this way the culture of medical education and treatment has changed. Some might ask if we can afford it. But Schwartz asks … can we afford not to? The current approach to medical care is not affordable or sustainable, so something has to change.

The exercise of taking executive stakeholders out for fieldwork is a wonderful way to create shared understanding, build empathy, and make more people-centered decisions as a project team!

People who do the right thing cultivate both character and wisdom. Work is more satisfying and meaningful and relationships with other people will be more satisfying and meaningful. What makes people happy? What we now know with reasonable certainty is (1) meaningful engaged work and (2) close relationships with people. That means that if you can get organizations to change the mindset and cultivate wisdom, they will help business and customers … but they will also be happier. The reason for optimism is to imagine that it would be self-sustaining, and that all levels of the organization could operate with the same level of thoughtfulness and empathy as the wise janitor.

Learn More

Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin P. Cartwright Profess of Social Theory at Swarthmore.  You can watch his videos on TED and the Gel conference websites.

For me one of the interesting trends this year was to see how central big data and sophisticated computing have become to our election activities.  There were a whole series of terrific posts during that time, and I wanted to share a few of them in this post.

But first <ahem> a little confession to let you know where I acquired the visual below.  One of my guilty pleasures is following the Barack Loves Michelle blog.  The blogger posts behind-the-scenes candid photographs of Barack, Michelle, and their family, including shots of Barack playing basketball, patting the family dog, snuggling with his kids.  And more recently, the blogger posted a great portrait of Barack and Michelle.  I know, what a dork, right?  I did say it was a guilty pleasure!

On a more serious note, the blogger (who – anonymously – claims to be a private citizen) also posted this amazing graphic:

It’s really astounding to me how little has changed in all this time …

If you weren’t hiding under a rock (or putting a pillow over your head!) during the late stages of the campaign, you probably heard mention of Nick Silver’s blog FiveThirtyEight, which is now part of the New York Times website.  His analysis and prediction of the election outcomes was amazing.

I also really enjoyed an article from The Atlantic entitled When the Nerds Go Marching In, which tells the story of the ‘dream team of engineers’ that supported Obama’s re-election.  I also enjoyed reading 5 Ways The Obama Campaign Was Run Like A Lean Startup from Fast Company magazine, which was an article about some of the things the Obama campaign tried in 2008, and how they made adjustments for 2012.  Many of their lessons (the difficulty in collecting data from the polls, the need for careful planning about infrastructure breakdowns) were the technology failures of the Romney campaign this year, as described in this Ars Technica article called  Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown.

Maybe one of my favorite pieces was an article called What Republicans Are Really Up Against: Population Density, also from The Atlantic Cities column.  It was co-authored by Richard Florida, a sociologist that consults, researches, and writes about what he calls the Creative Class.  He shows a fascinating connection between population density and voter choices:

Crazy, huh?

That reminds me, there is a (relatively) new company in the Bay Area called Inflection that is doing some super interesting work at the intersection of user experience, big data, and cloud-based software development.   Their charter is the democratization of public records, and they bring that together with available personal data, all the while respecting individual privacy.  Great stuff.

I’m still fascinated by this topic and the data visualizations that accompany it, so I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you have other articles to share!

One of the first posts I read in this vein was by blogger Luke Wroblewski, who evaluated the behavior of Read It Later (now Pocket) and LinkedIn users.  His research and analysis showed how users of the same service used multiple devices to engage with the site at different times of the day.  The whole article and the embedded links are a good read, but his visuals tell a powerful story in their own right:

Having this sort of analysis is a great start, but when you start to look at a user’s complete context and experience – and not just their engagement with a single piece of software, the story gets even more complicated.  Part of my interest in writing this post is to reflect on two recent articles that I thought did a particularly good job exploring that issue:

The first was a blog post from Precious Design Studio describing patterns to support designing multiscreen scenarios.  It’s called Multiscreen Patterns: Patterns to help understand and define strategies for the multiscreen world.  The author provides a link to a thoughtful and well-structured presentation about those patterns, but the visual summary also does a nice job delivering the key message:

Here is the complete presentation on SlideShare, if you’re interested.

The second is a study by the Google Mobile Ads team on their blog, which also does a great job describing the usage of different devices for a single user:

And how in turn that creates a host of design challenges and opportunities for providing a high quality experience on all sorts of tasks:

The Google report is available on Scribd if you want to read it in it’s entirety (which I’d recommend!).

I think almost every UX professional must hear “Oh, we should enable that on a mobile device!”  These pieces certainly give me pause … and make me realize how informed and thoughtful we need to be before we take that on in  a way that will actually enable how our users work.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this material, and the insights it offers on both mobile usage patterns and the challenges we face in designing mobile and multi-device user experiences!

Some of you may be familiar with an A&E television show called Hoarders.  It is a fascinating and disturbing show about people who – usually due to depression or other mental health issues – find themselves collecting stuff uncontrollably, to the point where their home become unsafe and/or unsanitary.  Although our house is more or less in order, I am still feeling a little overwhelmed by all the stuff that we have that needs to be thrown out or given away.  Thus, it’s no surprise that I found this ecard particularly hilarious:

I am super organized, but there are moments where I fear the volume of stuff we have is going to get the best of me, and that I’m going to end up on an episode of Hoarders.  Yikes!

At the same moment that I’m working to discard or donate all of our extraneous stuff, I have really started to explore Pinterest in earnest.  For those of you that are not familiar with it, Pinterest is the latest darling of the social media aficionados.  Through the collection of pins (visual images accompanied by brief descriptions) onto boards, users are able to collect, curate, and share content they find online.  It brings together the best of sites like Flickr (photo sharing), Delicious (social bookmarking), Etsy (website and member-curated gallery of handmade items) and others.  At the same time, Pinterest has helped to define a new space that some are calling social shopping, which is enticing many companies to explore its potential as a new platform for product marketing.

Pinterest founder continues to find investors, and he and his team are having great success and visibility in the media.  The site has very quickly become a significant driver of traffic for online retailers, and it drives more traffic than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn.    In addition, “20 per cent of Facebook users (an impressive 2-million people) are sharing on inboards daily“.  It should be very interesting how they monetize what they are doing without irritating their users.

Here is a little window into my current Pinterest boards:

If I’m honest with myself, I can admit that it’s really a platform for digital hoarding.  So for those like me that are trying to clean up their act on the home front in real life, this platform is perfect!  Someone could probably do a psychological analysis on me based on the boards I’ve defined, the things I’ve collected, and my preponderance for things that I have categorized as Beautiful Things (357 pins), Funny (249 pins) or Quotes & Inspiration (232 pins).

Speaking of funny, there are a lot of snippets online which do use a metaphor addiction in talking about Pinterest.  Here are a few of my favorites:

Besides it’s dangerously addictive qualities, there has been quite a lot of discussion about Pinterest on other fronts.  For example, there are lots of ways to pin images incorrectly, leading to a (often unwitting) lack of proper acknowledgement to people creating original or copyrighted content.   This has led to a flurry of blog posts (like this one) and discussions recommending that users abandon Pinterest.  The main concern is that the terms and conditions of Pinterest put the onus for those violations on the person doing the pinning.  The terms & conditions of the site have recently changed, but it’s not clear to me that those issues have been completely resolved.

I’ve also read some interesting posts about the gender distribution on the site, and the belief that its users are primarily women.  There have been some hilarious, true, and sometimes overstated remarks about that, including things like “Men are from Google+ and Women are from Pinterest“,  it’s “social networking for cat ladies”, and “Girls Gone Gluegunning”.  In an article called Pinterest’s Gender Trouble the author says:

57 percent of Facebook and 59 percent of Twitter users. In contrast, Pinterest’s U.S. demographics shake out very differently — hovering between an impressive 68.2 percentand an overwhelming 83 percent female audience.

There have been a few attempts at creating similar sites for men, including Gentlemint, Dart It Up and Manteresting.  There has been discussion elsewhere questioning whether such sites will ever have as much success for men as Pinterest has, given that women are inherently more likely to make lists and collect things.  I’m really not sure those stereotypes hold true, but it will be interesting to see how all of these sites – both Pinterest and its competitors targeted at a more masculine audience – will fare.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue to slog my way through mountains of bridal hairdos, wedding day floral arrangements and table decorations, and people’s fuzzy photographs of their own sloppy nail polish.  So, you can be sure that if I haven’t updated my blog it’s because I’m fervently pinning all the beautiful things I come across online and in my Pinterest feed.  Some of my other sites (like FaerieWigs) are also languishing because I’m more focused on consuming or collecting content than I am in making my own.  All those critiques aside, I am enjoying browsing, collecting, and curating nonetheless.  One of these days I’ll get back to writing and creating my own stuff again… after this one last pin – I swear it!

It’s hard to say who is more obsessed with Lego bricks – my kids, or their parents!  My partner and I both feel that our childhoods were poorer for not having had our own Lego toys.  We’ve made up for it by having more Legos in the house than we could possibly ever play with!  The kids received small Lego kits for Christmas and Easter, and I am always stepping on some half constructed piece or part.  For Christmas the boys also received an annual pass to Legoland, which is not far from us.  I took my oldest during his Spring break (see picture taken in the lobby, above).  He was smitten from the moment he arrived!

In an era where computerized everything seems to prevail, Lego continues to achieve remarkable success.  In fact, an article in Businessweek explains how researchers on staff were able to transfer relevant insights from gaming:

Lego saw it had drawn the wrong lessons from computer games. Instead of focusing on their immediacy, the company now noticed how kids responded to the scoring, ranking, and levels of play—opportunities to demonstrate mastery.

All I know that those little bricks are magic … my kids are so focused and quiet when they are digging through bins and assembling their latest inventions.  I didn’t play with Lego toys much when I was a kid because they really seemed like toys for boys – and apparently I’m not the only one who felt that way.   Research has shown that both boys and girls play with Duplo (the larger blocks), but then something shifts.  The article in Businessweek described the role of researchers in shaping the future of Lego for girls.  The company realized that they were missing 50% of the market, and that they were going have to understand girls’ preferences before they could expect to get their attention.  It’s quite a long article, but here are some of my favorite excerpts:

Lego won’t say how much it spent on its anthropology, but research went on for months and shattered many of the assumptions that had led the company astray.

Encouraged by what it had learned about boys, Lego sent its team back out to scrutinize girls, starting in 2007. The company was surprised to learn that in their eyes, Lego suffered from an aesthetic deficit. “The greatest concern for girls really was beauty,” says Hanne Groth, Lego’s market research manager. Beauty, on the face of it, is an unsurprising virtue for a girl-friendly toy, but based on the ways girls played, Groth says, it came, as “mastery” had for boys, to stand for fairly specific needs: harmony (a pleasing, everything-in-its-right-place sense of order); friendlier colors; and a high level of detail.

The key difference between girls and the ladyfig and boys and the minifig was that many more girls projected themselves onto the ladyfig—she became an avatar. Boys tend to play with minifigs in the third person. “The girls needed a figure they could identify with, that looks like them,” says Rosario Costa, a Lego design director. The Lego team knew they were on to something when girls told them, “I want to shrink down and be there.”

The team did express some concern about reinforcing stereotypes about how girls play, color preferences, and so on.   But at the same time, Lego is confident enough in this new direction and the potential to make inroads into playtime with girls that they opted to wait until after the 2012 Christmas holiday to launch their new line.

More recently, there was an article in Fast Company Design about how General Motors is using LEGO bricks as a data visualization tool for their production problems.  And when I shared that article via Twitter, one of my former colleagues from SAP responded with another article about how one software developer keeps track of where his time is spent using LEGO bricks.  Nowhere near as fun as researching girls at play alongside other anthropologists … but still pretty cool that this highly tactile, visual way of looking at data has value in the work environment too!

And finally, as I was pulling the material for this post together, I came across another blog post referencing Lego.   The article is called Want To Be More Creative?  Get Bored.  The author conducted research for Lego in the 1990s, during a time when the company was concerned about the tendency of computerized toys to switch children into a “passive-interactive mode”.   During some observational exercises with children, the network broke down and the children engaged much more actively with the Lego bricks during the downtime, and even after the computer came back online.  The author cautions against our lack of downtime and boredom, because that lack of structure can provide the ideal conditions for imagination and creativity.

And finally, if you haven’t heard the buzz, there is a new kid on the block in this genre of toys.  They are called Nanoblocks, and they are in a tiny little niche that Lego hasn’t claimed.  Nanoblock are extremely tiny blocks, and they provide kits to reproduce famous landmarks and little animals.  I’ve been working on one for weeks at the office (the Neuschwanstein, which also comes in a deluxe 6000 piece version) – it requires a lot of concentration, and I just can’t find the uninterrupted time to get it done.  The pieces are small but well made, and the finished pieces  have a wonderful amount of detailing.  I know, because although mine is still mostly sitting in a ziplock, many of the guys on my floor have finished the different kits.  So if you haven’t already, check them out!

Last but not least, I came across a fun post the other day entitled Famous Cartoon Characters in Minimalist LEGO Form.  Since I’m not all that knowledgeable about popular culture, some of these elude me.  But since I am raising two young boys at the moment, this one hit me over the head, and I thought you might enjoy it too:

Amazing, isn’t it?!