Innovation Silicon Valley Style

Internet of Things & The IP Address Shortage

2010-11-02T14:13:00.001-07:00

The experts at Cisco calculate that total network traffic on the Internet will increase nine times (9x) by 2013 from 5 exabytes a month in 2007, to 56 exabytes a month in 2013. What does that mean in layman's terms? It means that by next year (2010), 35 million devices will be connected to the Internet. That's about six aircraft per person worldwide. By 2013, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior forecasts that the number of devices connected to the Internet will reach 1 trillion, up from 500 million in 2007.

How is such astonishing growth possible? Originally, computers typically were networked only to local area networks, to allow users to communicate with one another within their own companies. Today though, there is an "always on" mentality - those same past users of limited local area networks now consider it their birthright to communicate with everybody, everywhere, "always". Most of these communications now take place over the Internet, via the 1 billion (and growing) Internet-connected networked computers worldwide. With the emergence of smartphones, Android, RIM and Apple have exploded the number of Internet-connected devices even further. This global number of Internet-connected cell phones is accelerating, surpassing the number of Internet-connected computers. A tertiary wave of Internet-connected devices - sensors - is expected to overtake them both. Computers, smartphones, sensor devices - there is an Internet-connected device population bomb.

Internet-Connected Sensor Devices

The next wave of Internet-connected devices will be small sensors embedded in just about everything... and placed just about everywhere.... For example, The 2010-2014Harbor Industry Report forecasts growth in "health monitoring devices on the body, telematics in vehicles for safety, automated service scheduling, and driver convenience as well as smart grid equipment and meters that can monitor real-time electricity usage -- all delivered via the Internet." As well, most of next year's anticipated energy management devices and water management devices will each require their own Internet address (known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address).

By being part of the Internet, these devices can connect with web services and thus can be both managed and monitored remotely. They also can connect to one another, in what is called machine-to-machine (MSM) deployments. Machine-to-machine deployments go far beyond typical business applications, reshaping entire industries. For example, one solution expected to require an M2M deployment is the creation of the Smart Energy Grid. To accomplish a national Smart Energy Grid, the United States will need millions of sensor devices to communicate with one another over the Internet. Similarly, commercial solutions involving networked security cameras and sensors connected to home appliances and HVAC equipment, ITS infrastructure for traffic and parking management, etc. each such sensor will require their own IP address (device address).

A post on Harbor's Smart Systems blog states: "As Moore's law takes over and the price of embedding intelligence and connectivity into devices continues to fall, networked devices will push further and further into the mainstream. This process is somewhat self-reinforcing as low prices are driven by high quantities, and vice versa, making these devices increasingly prevalent in our lives and businesses."

We're Running out of Network Addresses

This is a highly desirable future, but it will come at a cost. Our current IP addressing scheme, known as IP version 4 (IPV4) was never meant to handle the coming demand for addresses! Soon, the IPV4 addressing scheme will no longer function properly, because there will be no new addresses to hand out to new devices on the Internet. The addresses will run out. A similar point was reached by the US ZIP Code addressing scheme, and so it was upgrade with a four digit extension. So too, there is an upgrade for the IPV4 addressing schema.

The Answer: A System-Wide Upgrade to IPV6

To handle this ever-increasing need for device addresses, a new networking standard has been developed known as IP v6 (IPV6). IPV6 ensures that there will be enough IP addresses for every known star in the universe by supporting 4.8 trillion IP addresses. However, progress to this new standard is slow, so you can help by voting for IPV6 the next time you purchase a device. The transition of the Internet to IPv6 is the only practical and readily-available long-term solution to IPv4 address exhaustion. Although the predicted IPv4 address exhaustion is approaching its final stages, most ISP software vendors and service providers were just beginning IPv6 deployment back in 2008...

Green IT: Leadership in Energy Management

2010-10-01T18:34:00.000-07:00

Most of America, and perhaps the world, view Ricoh as a provider of office equipment and thus, are startled when they learn of Ricoh's deep commitment to climate change. To many Americans, any manufacturer of copiers must be the antithesis of eco-friendly, because to most American's printing is not eco-friendly. This couldn't be farther than the truth when in comes to Ricoh. Our corporate commitment to the environment began no less that thirty years ago, and has only strengthened over time. Ricoh has won many awards for its deep commitment to the environment, see below:I have two reasons for speaking out. First, Ricoh is an extremely green company, and one that should share its wisdom on CO2 reduction with its customers. The economic, environmental and climate costs of our current energy systems and use patterns are condemning our children to a world with serious constraints unless significant changes are started now. The scale of the global threat creates a fertile ground for innovation and meaningful action. There is great potential to improve our situation, but first we must engage the American populace with meaningful, transformational information that measures energy use and provides individualized use information that empowers personal change Such a change must include both a robust, public investment in cost-effective innovative energy technologies as well as national policy reforms to deploy technologies on a large scale. A recent report by Ernst and Young indicates that large companies are moving forward despite uncertainty.

Most plan on investing.5-5% of top line revenue into energy initiatives. The report, surveys 300 global executives, in companies larger than US$1b annually, and spanning 16 countries and 18 industry sectors.

Second, there is a vast yet untapped potential to spread innovation from the IT and data management sectors into the energy sector. Most of the technologies that underlie the current energy system were invented over sixty years ago and are understandably brittle, costly and incompatible with modern information management best practice.

I believe that new technologiescan be game changers that are worthy of research and investment. Ricoh Innovations is actively supporting Ricoh's worldwide efforts to green the planet and lower CO² levels.

SaaS, Mobility and "Shamrock" Organizations Support More Home-Based Skilled Work

2010-01-12T13:50:00.000-08:00

Ricoh's North American market is changing -quickly. Trends such as the volatility of the job market, frequent down-sizing and the recession are behind a new organizational structure known as the "Shamrock Organization" and vast numbers of highly skilled home-based workers known as homepreneurs. New data indicates that these homepreneus class will only grow.

It represents a very real and profitable customer base that B2B players should address. These are the corporate workers who are still business people, but work from home. In the future they will create virtual organizations. They are a new demographic that is very likely to adopt SaaS + device solutions because they are simply, and mobile.

Shamrock Organizations Have Emerged, Giving Rise to Homepreneurs

Predicted by the Irish economist, Charles Handy in 1989, the three leaves of the "shamrock" represent the three components that make the organization work:

The core staff
A set of contractors on the fringe of the organization
A significant temporary workforce

Shamrock Organizations Support/Harmonize with the Trend toward Self-Employment

In the "shamrock" organization, a permanent core of managers and employees inside the company is supported by independent contractors and part-time workers. To a large extent, these contractors are homepreneurs. We can define homepreneurs as white collar workers primarily working for large and mid-size firms.

Laptops, SaaS and Cell Phones Allow Support Work Anywhere -Supporting Homepreuring

As the popularity of cell phones, personal printers and other hand-held devices complemented the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, location began to matter less and less. Now, with most of the American economy performing knowledge work -- as opposed to the manufacturing of physical goods -- it's become possible for workers and entire businesses to thrive in the home setting.

That trend, in turn, is giving rise to even more new technologies that facilitate the phenomenon of leaving the traditional office behind. Cloud computing, online collaboration tools, Web conferencing, and smart phones have all become part of the modern home office.

As the technological feasibility of home-based businesses has increased, there has also been a subtle shift in attitudes. For example, the corporate world once viewed businesses run out of the home as hobbies or else as quaint, marginal operations not worth noticing. But today, large and mid-sized firms increasingly recognize home-based firms as useful suppliers and valuable customers.

More Than Half of US Businesses Are Run From the Home Today

According to BusinessWeek,¹ more than half of all the businesses in the United States are run out of someone's home, not in traditional office space -- and their employees collectively account for more workers than all the companies backed by venture capital firms

According to a report published by Business Know-How, a major factor behind the homepreneur trend is the increasing number of layoffs and the lackluster jobs market 4. Combined with new technologies and diminishing economies of scale, this economic uncertainty has caused more people to feel that they stand a better chance of succeeding by being their own bosses. Many employees see their present jobs as dead-end, due to frozen salaries and a lack of opportunity for advancement, as higher-ups stay in place for fear of entering the job market.

Home Businesses, on Average, Are More Profitable Than New Ventures or Corporations

A new report from Emergent Research² in Lafayette, California -- which is itself a home-based business -- analyzed data from the U.S. Census, the Small Business Administration, and the Small Business Success Index. It found that only 35 percent of these home businesses have revenue of more than $125,000, and yet they compare favorably to traditional small companies in the benefits they provide for workers, their approach to marketing and innovation, and their access to capital. For home-based businesses, the main areas of concentration are professional services, construction, retail, and personal services.

Home-based businesses employ more than 13 million people, usually in businesses that have only two employees. By contrast, the National Venture Capital Association reports that the traditional businesses backed by venture capital firms employ only 12.1 million people.³

Likewise, home businesses keep more of their profits -- 36 percent, versus 21 percent for conventional operations -- because they have lower overhead per dollar of revenue.

Future Forecast: Homepreneurs Will Create Virtual Corporations

According to Trends Magazine, by pooling resources in the virtual world, homepreneurs in a particular field -- say, accounting -- could garner significant market share, without having any fixed headquarters. Corporate customers will value this arrangement because managing full-time employees and temps in your office is not the same as managing far-flung entrepreneurial workers who can shift allegiance at a moment's notice. Expect to see new firms arising with the specific aim of coordinating contractors for larger companies. This is already showing up in the form of Web-based firms that provide connections between larger companies and homepreneurs.

References:

BusinessWeek Online, October 23, 2009, "The Rise of the 'Homepreneur,'" by John Tozzi. © Copyright 2009 by Bloomberg LP. All rights reserved. http://www.businessweek.com
To access the Emergent Research report on home-based small businesses, visit the Grow Smart Business website at: http://www.growsmartbusiness.com
To access the National Venture Capital Association report on traditional venture-capital-backed businesses, visit the PricewaterhouseCoopers website at: http://www.pwc.com.mu
To access a report about increased layoffs contributing to the home-business trend, visit the Business Know-How website at: http://www.businessknowhow.com

Twitter: The True Voice of the Customer on the Web

2010-01-07T17:28:00.000-08:00

When it comes to delivering information about products and services and getting instant customer feedback, the hottest tool out there right now is Twitter. Twitter is the micro-communication service that gives users an opportunity to express their thoughts in 140-character "tweets". It s a big hit in the social media world, and many companies are benefiting from it.

In fact, 20 percent of all tweets now contain requests for product information or responses to the requests. In ads, many companies now display the logo of an animated blue bird holding a sign that says follow me.

According to Associate Professor Jim Jansen, at Penn State University, People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with products and services.
And he goes on to say that "tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services".

Jansen's research team investigated microcommunicating as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. The results were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology. The researchers examined half a million tweets during the study, looking for tweets that mentioned a brand and why the brand was mentioned, and found that people were using tweets to connect with the products.

With more than six million active users daily, and predictions of more than 20 million users by the end of 2009, Twitter is now seen as the "next big thing" on the Web. Even though Twitter is still in its early stages of adoption, businesses are starting to make profits from it, using it in creative ways to market their products. Jansen's study is among the first in the area of micro-communication within the business sector. And the research team is now conducting a focused study specifically on how companies manage and use their Twitter accounts.

Ricoh Innovation's WBR (Web Business Research) group is actively "tweeting" to attract users to its beta software trials. WBR is also monitoring Tweets that include the word "Ricoh" to capture the voice of Ricoh's current customers.

Information Source: businessbriefings.com October 2009 issue

SaaS Model Pros and Cons and Implications for Document Capture

2010-01-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

I get asked frequently about the big trends : cloud computing, software as a service and cloud services. In this article I’ll expand on these ideas to explore the difference between SaaS (software-as-a-service), cloud computing and traditional software business to shed light on why apps that are “native to the web” (built for the cloud) versus simply web-enabled (built as traditional software offerings with an added web capability) bring very different customer value and require very different business models that few small document capture/processing companies can readily afford.. I’ll also give you an idea of how Ricoh Innovations is experimenting with cloud computing to offer beta-level document/image processing services that can be combined with SaaS offerings or used alone to improve business communication, collaboration and corporate workflows.

Saas – A Definition

Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS providers operate using an Internet-based multi-tenancy model. This means that all customers use a single instance of the application. Customers can only access their information — their data and unique configuration requirements are virtually partitioned from other customers. The multi-tenancy model means big servers and economies of scale, making it less costly to manage when compared to the cost of running the same software within most corporate firewalls. Furthermore, the SaaS model drives innovations in security, redundancy, reliability and increase software capabilities at levels that any individual customer couldn't do without great cost on their own.

The customer benefits of the SaaS model are clear: software rental without the burden and distraction of hardware and software maintenance, higher up time, lower start-up costs, and often, better accessibility from remote locations. The benefits of the SaaS model for providers is also clear: there is only one main system to upgrade – so upgrades can be rolled out in waves, system analytics give both the provider and the customer much better information/analytics on the system and its use, and revenue comes in monthly over a multi-year contract.

How Saas is different than the traditional software model

Software companies that provide packaged software and sell it in a traditional software model enjoy different benefits than SaaS businesses. The traditional software company must invest heavily in a direct sales/support channel, and focus only the deals large enough to support the expensive direct sales channel model. However, traditional software companies benefit from the ability to recognize revenue upon shipment and thus, have much higher revenues than most SaaS companies. This increased inflow of revenue means that traditional software companies can invest more in creating variations of their products, or add-ons to increase and deepen existing customer relationships and create new ones.

SaaS companies also require large sales/support channels, but not as large as enterpri

se software firms, and therefore do not have to limit themselves to large deals. SaaS vendors can offer their product to any size firm because it can be demoed on the web, and easily trialed by any company with an Internet connection. Thus, the SaaS model has proven to provide an enterprise-level offering on a pay-as-you-go model that small and mid-size companies can afford. This is one powerful driver for the adoption of the SaaS model.

Limitations of the SaaS Model

Now that we have a working understanding of the benefits of the SaaS model, let us round out our knowledge by discussing its drawbacks. Let’s revisit the Internet-based multi-tenency of SaaS I discussed earlier. Multi-tenancy means that all customers use a single instance of the application. Thus, SaaS is both easier to support, but much more difficult to customize. Until a compelling portion of the user base requires a new feature, the SaaS vendor may be reticent to provide and support it. Furthermore, the implicit workflow of the SaaS offering may not allow the customization required needed to provide optimized workflow for a single corporate user.

For example, let’s imagine there is a SaaS-based information management offering that is used by our corporation. It provides a solid value for the money, and unburdens our internal IT staff so they can focus on customer issues, rather than server upgrades. However, the corporate workflow, say invoice processing, that we work in, requires that paper as well as digital documents be added to the SaaS system/ The paper documents arrive as image-based data, with limited data about the document (metadata), making them difficult to properly fit in the SaaS workflow.

What our imaginary invoice processing workflow needs is the ability to string together a custom set of document/forms processing capabilities – say, identify what type of document it is (an invoice from our biggest supplier, for example, then convert the document from image to text and place it in the system both in the invoice process and tag it as related to our biggest supplier.

Unfortunately, document capture/processing software is not available in a SaaS offering today. It seems a pity that to achieve the advanced capture/document processing capabilities today we we would need to purchase, via a traditional software model the hardware consulting and software system. Why hav

e document capture vendors yet to take up the SaaS model? I posit that since most are relatively small companies, they do not have the financial fortitude to invest in a SaaS offering that would have an immediate negative impact on their profitability. Marketing a SaaS offering would dramatically decrease their current year revenue forecasts as they trade revenue today, for much smaller subscription fees for the future. . From a financial perspective, SaaS can be a nightmare for traditional software companies. How will th

ey attract and maintain their best salespeople on deals that are not recognizable in one lump? How will they explain to shareholders that they gave up software revenue today, for much lower subscription fees? And then there is the investment required for building a state-of-the-art facility to house and maintains your SaaS offering. SaaS requires a competency in running/maintaining a large software system that is not necessarily required in the traditional software business. Seen in this light, one can readily understand why niche software companies are not keen to jump to a SaaS offering. Large software companies, like Oracle, recognized this m

arket change quickly and now offer both SaaS “On demand” offerings as well as traditional software. Smaller vendors likely do not have the financial strength to do so in our recovering economy.

Ricoh Innovations Plans to “Beta” Document Processing SaaS Services

Ricoh Innovations believes that as the SaaS model continues to gain adoption, customers will need flexible ways to add processing solutions that proceed and follow the existing SaaS offerings of their SaaS vendors. Therefore, via our beta labs site Ricoh Innovations intends to offer world-class document processing services as SaaS offerings that can either be:

· integrated with Ricoh’s App2Me widgets and sent to a SaaS offering

· called as web services directly from a browser and sent to a SaaS offering

· accessed via handheld devices such as Blackberries, iPhones, etc and sent to our SaaS offerings

· strung together to create custom workflows via our IKON consulting channel

Ricoh Innovations is leveraging the emergence of cloud computing platforms to offer these services in a robust “beta” format that ensures up-time and scalability beginning officially in April 2010.

User Experience, Not User Needs Drives Real Value

2009-05-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

Many people understand the value of identifying user needs, but this is really not the core value of what a customer research team (like mine) provides. In this entry, I'd like to explain the difference between user needs and the user experience design work we undertake at Ricoh Innovations.

The advanced customer research team that conducts in-situ customer research and prototype development/iteration at Ricoh Innovations was founded in 2003 with the goal of identifying the hidden customer needs that users cannot themselves articulate. Via this definition, user needs are split into two distinct groups:

1) needs of which the user is aware and communicates via suggestions, complaints or a service call and,

2) needs of which the user is unaware and therefore unable to communicate. Let's call this latter type of need "hidden needs". Ricoh's vast network of direct and indirect sales/support channels respond to suggestions, complaints and service calls (type 1 needs). ABC focuses on the second category of needs - hidden needs, some prominent types being:

Needs that exist among a workgroup of users- with no one user having enough knowledge of the entire workflow to articulate or suggest possible solutions to the issues

Needs that occur due to a lack of a simple, approachable technological solution within the customer's budget- a good example being the drudgery of re-typing information into a computer system (even though expensive systems are available to solve this issue)

Needs that remain unsolved (even though approachable solutions exist) because the current solution is simply too difficult to discover, learn and apply for the average user (without dedicated IT help). Anyone who has tried to print when they do not have access to a network or the correct printing driver knows this type of need well.

Counter Intuitive: Identifying Hidden Unmet User Needs is Not Enough

You might ask: If one can identify these broad categories of hidden unmet needs, and provide explicit examples, isn't the job done? One might think so, but the truth is counter intuitive. Simply knowing about a problem is very different than knowing how to solve it. Our efforts have shown that reporting hidden needs to product planners is not very helpful to them. Product planners need to understand the hidden needs, but they also need to know what type of solutions the customer finds most valuable. Experience design research is the official term for this type of research.

Wikipedia defines "Experience Design as the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience functionality of the design.^[1] An emerging discipline, experience design attempts to draw from many sources including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, product design, information design, information architecture, ethnography, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking. ABC is on the forefront of this growing field and continues to improve effective transfer techniques so that valuable user experiences are available to product planners to encapsulate in the software, hardware and services that make them real. and culturally relevant solutions, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving

The Key Value is Experience Design

My team pioneered a rapid research process that quickly finds hidden user needs through on-site ethnographic research at customer sites. By presenting users, managers and other stakeholders (IT, etc.) with the specifics of how their work is currently done, our clients are able to imagine better ways to: work together, brainstorm things that would add tremendous value to their work, and ultimately, add value to their end customers. Our role in this process is to facilitate discussion, capture ideas and infuse promising ideas with our extensive knowledge of current technology breakthroughs, market trends and work best practice.

With our client's ideas in hand, you might think we'd end our research and report what we've learned, but we don't. We've learned through experience that what people think and say is not usually what they do or ultimately need. If we stopped here, the rest of Ricoh may very well spend millions of dollars building the wrong products and solutions. So, we push on, and quickly cobble together a very rough prototype of the concept they think they need and ask them to test it for a few weeks. Even though what we deploy is usually bulky and slow and certainly nowhere near how a commercial version would be architected, these things do not matter. The customer is enthusiastic to test "their" idea, and so they give it a try, and together we learn what they really need.

Put simply, our customers are smart people and can be considered "domain experts" at their work. They are not, however, skilled technologist, designers or engineers and thus usually do not know the scope or depth of what solutions are possible. They start with a limited understanding of their issue, and a limited understanding of the solution possibilities. Our job is to expand both their knowledge of the need and the possible solution directions. Together, we find the best overall user experience and , more importantly, identify why and how to quantify its value. Once we understand the user's needs, have a tested and accepted design, as well as data on its qualitative and quantitative value to the customer, do we pass on what we've learned. For this reason, we stay on a research theme for a few years, learning how a successful design is valuable to our customers in different industries and work group sizes.

Our past clients report that this eye-opening process is where they find real value from our work. The understanding and new ideas that come out of our conversations provide them with insight required to improve their business. We believe this is why they many want to work with us again, and recommend other potential candidates.

We Live in Exponential Times: Innovations Enabled by Technology

2009-05-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

User Experience as Design Guide and Strategic Weapon

2009-05-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

Many companies dislike and try to avoid unpredictability, yet our world today is undergoing tremendous change at an accelerating pace. Making accurate prediction is almost impossible so many companies try to insulate themselves from change by carefully pursuing business models resistant to economic cycles, competitive shifts and consumer fades. Ricoh is quite adept at insulating itself from change. Fourteen straight years of profitability in our core MFP business testify to this fact.

As social, economic and technological landscapes grow more intertwined and complex, there will come a point when resistance to unexpected change will no longer be a viable strategy. At some point, just like the rice in the field, Ricoh will need to flexibly adapt, instead of resist change in order to succeed. Such flexibility will come in many forms including: flexible design process to adapt to new insights and desired user experiences, flexible development process to adapt to new technological opportunities and flexible, transparent decision-making processes to keep us competitive in new market realities.

Ricoh executives are already well-aware of the need to embrace change, and have undertaken a series of important steps to improve our: knowledge of our customers, flexibility in our development process and adaptive marketing processes. Our dream here at Ricoh Innovations is to support Ricoh in creating a customer-focused approach to the implementation and marketing stages of product development that preserves on user needs and desires that we've uncovered and confirmed in customer research.

A Great Opportunity: Dramatically Improve the Print Experience

From our direct interactions with customers, we know printer manufacturers are sitting at the crux of a fundamental shift in how businesses engage with their customers. A major shift that is occurring in North America is the shift towards integrated solutions from standalone products and services. Consumers and corporate buyers more and more are expecting solutions to work smoothly out of the box. For example, American workers don't desire printers. They don't go to work to print; they print to work. When their work requires printing, they want printing solutions that make it easy and efficient to get their work done.

Customers cannot understand why they can physically see a Ricoh printer, but not be able to print to it. They can see it, they select the "print" from their application and nothing happens...They have no idea that the proper printer driver is required, and that it must be properly configured and that they must be on a network (or directly tethered to the device) and they have no, and I mean absolutely zero, interest in learning. Thus, from a user experience perspective, the entire printing industry has failed them. Somehow they can easily stream music to their MP3 Player or phone, but they still can't print.

I see this user need as a big opportunity. It is a bounded problem for which a printer company controls most of the major components. We can improve the experience of printing dramatically, but it will require a subtle but important shift in our thinking as a company. We can no longer think about what we produce as a product. We must consider it a solution in and of itself. That's right, by itself. "But isn't that simply a product," you ask? A printer, to be more precise? My answer is "No". We may market our printers as "solutions" but to customers, they are not easy enough to use to meet their criteria of a "solution".

Currently MFPs (multi-function printer/copiers) and printers are pieces of hardware that require software to be separately installed and configured to make them work. They are not a solution out of the box. To customers they are not intuitive and easy enough to use, in accord with the user experience customers highly desire. The user experience that our customers desire is one of simple elegance. They want to plug in our device, and have the device make a friendly sound while it "wakes up" and automatically explores its new environment. They want our device to communicate that it will spend the next few minutes introducing itself to the network, and other networked devices to better understand how it can support work in this particular office. As part of this "start up process", its display will which ask which way it should introduce itself to the users - via a personalized email, with a link to the software (residing on our device) which will be automatically installed on the user's PC, or would it be easier for everyone if it just pinged everyone's machine with a pop up message on the deskbar?

Whichever option that is chosen, the user experience must remain elegant and simple. To the user, it should feel like a polite new person has just introduced himself and is immediately adding value by increasing the ease of printing. Users expect that the setup procedure will be minimally intrusive. The print capability should be installed automatically (as a background process) and should re-appear only to point out that the new solution is both more efficient and eco-friendly and should it make itself the default?

Solution Design Goal: Make it Elegant and Simple (1-2-3 Simple)

The design experience just explained is by no means impossible, but it does require a relentless focus on the user's experience and the customer's expectations. In practice it means that everyone involved in commercializing a solution must be committed to driving the product plans based on meeting or exceeding the desired user experience. A historical example of the benefits afforded to a company that meets or exceeds its customer expectations can be found in 1888 with George Eastman.

Eastman understood the power of photography, but knew that the current products were simply too difficult for the average consumer. They were also expensive, and clunky. He determined that in order to create a breakthrough product, he'd need a device where "You press the button, and we do the rest". It became his advertising slogan for the original Kodak camera. The camera was an unparalleled success, because of it was so approachable and easy to use. The user simply 1) Pulled the cord (prepared the shutter), 2) Turned the key (advanced the film) and 3) Pressed the button (releasing the shutter). This type of simple 1-2-3, yet elegant design is very powerful.

The Economic Value of Simplicity

Throughout the 20th century businesses largely ignored the lessons from Eastman's experience. In fact, Kodak itself forgot the important of this lesson when its customers wanted the benefits of digital photography and instead of adapting; it tried to protect its massive film business and underfunded digital research and development. We all know what happened, Canon now owns the consumer market which Kodak once dominated. As we move into the 21st century it's becoming clear that we'll need to heed George Eastman's lessons to succeed. Otherwise, our customers will move to the provider of the superior customer experience. Just look at Apple as an example. It failed in the PC race of the 1980's and 1990's against Intel and Microsoft, but is now steadily gaining ground in both the notebook and smartphone markets based on its unrelenting focus on a superior user experience. As PC margins fall, Apple Notebooks margins remain healthy. As mobile phone vendors struggle for margins, the Apple iPhone lands the number 3 spot in the worldwide smartphone market,growing at over 245% this year .

Apple has embraced complexity and transformed it into elegant solutions. In a quote uttered 17 years before the introduction of the iPod or the iPhone, Steve Jobs stated the essence of user experience design:

"When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple,
you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then
you get into the problem, ad you see that its really complicated
and you come up with all sorts of convoluted and difficult solutions.
That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people (companies) stop...
But the really great companies will keep going and find the key, the
underlying principle of the problem--and come up with an elegant and
beautiful solution that works."

Source: Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of the Macintosh, The Computer that Changed Everything (Penguin, 2000) p. 139.)

The lesson we should learn is that those companies that cut through the complexity and offers a truly elegant user experience will be handsomely rewarded with higher volumes, customer loyalty and word of mouth promotion. By staying true to the simple user experiences required by our customers, we can avoid failed products and use technology as a competitive weapon to simplify, instead of complicate our solutions. Anyone interested in improving their approach to user experience would benefit from reading Subject To Change -予測不可能な世界で最高の製品とサービスを作る by Peter Merholz,Brandon Schauer,David Verba, and Todd Wilkens (単行本（ソフトカバー） - 2008/10/27) that discusses ways that Adaptive Path (a design experience firm) have succeeded in driving user experience through the commercialization process at many types of companies.

Design Empathy for Analyticals

2009-03-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I attended the BayCHI Talk Stanford Professor Larry Leifer on "design ambiguity". A few things he said struck me as very valuable insights.

Promoting Design Empathy in Non-Designers

Leifer stated that the real value and goal of Stanford's Design School (d.School) is not to teach design, but rather to sensitize non-design types to the value of design. I'd say he pretty much summed up what I do everyday. I try to demonstrate to product planners and software engineers that looking at a task from the point of view of the user's experience is not optional anymore, it is essential to business success.

I see it as my job, and the job of my organization, to create compelling new customer value wrapped in an experience that is simple, elegant and memorable. To do this, we must remember that most of the product planners and engineers that currently populate companies came out of school long before entities like the d.School existed, and have very likely never been formally introduced to user experience as a discipline. Furthermore, it is even more unlikely that they understand how user experience design relates to the code they write and the products they ultimately produce. It's the job of the business people to enlighten them. Designers have another important task to perform.

Designers Must Protect Ambiguity

According to Leifer, designers must protect ambiguity because the business people, engineers, product managers and finance folks certainly won't. It is the designers that must protect and nurture the idea that we don't know everything, that we can't be inside a users thoughts, or imagine every possible permutation of an answer. There remain things we simply don't know or don't realize are correlated.

For example, business people that specialize in groceries can tell you that dry cereals are a very profitable item. In fact, they may well be the most profitable (hence the space allotted for them). But when asked what the key competitors to cereal are, most think linearly and respond: eggs or bagels or some other food item.

Actually, the key competitor to breakfast cereal is sleep -specifically the fifteen meets more of it you can get if you decide to skip breakfast.

Ambiguous? I'll say. Someone has to suspend analytical thought and put themselves in the context of the drowsey user in order to make this connection. That someone should be the designer a surrogate for the user.