Where’s Wally? Aka the Value?

If you are developing a new product or service creating value should be at the forefront of your mind, not an afterthought or lost in the noise. Constantly ask questions about what value you are creating and the beneficiary, and ring the alarm bells if value cannot be easily specified or articulated. 

There has been widespread coverage in the press over the past couple of years about large IT projects that have cost millions yet have failed to deliver anything. Many projects are written off, while c-level heads roll. The book of blame is passed from poor requirements, to poor systems, to poor platforms, to poor delivery methods, to poor vendors, to poor management, to poor strategy.

While all this is happening and procurement processes are tightening to avoid repeating costly mistakes I still see projects that make it off the ground, with funding and approval yet nowhere in the business case has value been specified. Or maybe value was in the beginning but as the project has evolved the team has lost sight of what value means and who will benefit from the value created. Another common problem is specifying value for the business but failing to address the value proposition for customers of the business. Having a digital or mobile strategy just because the competition has one will not win the hearts and minds of customers, nor will it win you any favours with the shareholders when you have to explain that you are writing off a £5-10m IT project spend because it failed to deliver any meaningful results. 

If you are developing a new product or new system continually ask ‘what is the value proposition?’ and ‘who will gain from it?’ As well as delivering value to the business, if any part of the system is customer facing then there must be some value delivered to the customer in order for the business to reap the rewards. ‘Value proposition’ can sound all a bit ‘consulting-speak’ but restated in simple terms just ask ‘what’s in it for me?’ with your business and/or customer hat on?’ This simple but effective check can be asked at a macro or strategic level and can equally if not more effective of all the subsequent strata of the project including the lowest level of detailed requirements. If you can’t articulate a true tangible, measurable value for a specific beneficiary at any/all levels of the project then it’s time to ring the alarms bells and stop what you are doing. To continue is to risk waste of time, effort and money. If you don’t know the answer, it is fine to proceed and base your efforts on assumptions, as long a) the assumptions are flagged as such and that you make pains to test those assumptions at the earliest opportunity; and b) that in your assumption you identify both the value proposition and the beneficiary.

Panic Over – Social Innovation wins the day

Lindsay Ratcliffe & guest contributor Jill Irving

ThoughtWorks were invited to participate in design-powerhouse IDEO’s first London-based Make-a-thon, which ran over two days in February. We jumped at the opportunity to collaborate and provide some of our agile application design and development experts to the event.

The ThoughtWorks-strong team went on to win ‘best pitch’ having designed and delivered an interactive web-hosted prototype demonstrate the Amnesty International ‘Panic Button App’ concept in less than day. The team built an alert app and platform for signalling at risk situations using Google Maps and HTML5 technologies. Accessible via mobile browsers by those at risk, individuals can hit the alert button to register when they’re in danger of being taken, sending their location and details. A group of volunteers then monitors the platform and in turn notifies the relevant local organisations.

Making the IDEO Way

The Make-a-thon was the brain-child of Haiyan Zhang, OpenIDEO Design Lead. The idea was to reinvent the ‘hack-a-thon’, keeping collaboration open, but by adding a more of a flavour of design methods and human-centred principles than a typical hack-a-thon would do. The event was a great blend the best of design jams and hack-a-thons as it brought together end-users with design talent, business minds and experienced developers to solve social impact problems in an offline open-collaboration forum.

To start there were eight challenges in all attracting teams of about six people each. Despite the fact the event was self-organising most challenges managed to attract a balanced team with members of diverse yet complimentary skill sets. The first day was spent exploring the briefs with divergent brainstorming and rough prototyping before presenting the initial ideas to the rest of the group. Then on the second day the teams refined their ideas to produce an experience prototype, which was then tested with on-site users or out in the real-world where possible.

Setting the Challenges

In September 2011, Amnesty International in collaboration with IDEO launched an open innovation challenge on the OpenIDEO forum - an online forum for promoting open social collaboration. The challenge was to identify and define ways that technology could be used to help people working to uphold human rights in the face of unlawful detention. Following on from the online challenge IDEO were inspired to hold a real-world Make-a-thon to take progress to the next level.

The aim of the Make-a-thon was to experiment with cross-functional collaboration for social good while tackling a number of briefs for both Amnesty International as well as some local community design challenges. These included making the London Bike Hire scheme (fondly known locally as Boris bikes) more user-friendly for tourists and making it safer for cyclists in London.

Exploring new Ways to Help Amnesty International

The event was a great platform for Amnesty International to explore new ways for people to give to the cause other making a donation or letter writing campaigns. As described by Owen Pringle, Director, Digital Communications at Amnesty International, ‘our traditional model is one of responding: a human rights incident occurs, we send in a subject matter expert and we use the evidence that we gather to affect policy change at a government level – it’s what we’re good at…however we also want to focus on the rights holder and be able to proactively intervene or prevent violations occurring if possible.’

With the Amnesty challenges, the organisers were aware that human rights issues and situations are often difficult. So IDEO and Amnesty collaborated to produce the guiding principles of optimism, solution-focussed and respectful to give the event a sense of purpose and direction.

One of the major differences of the Make-a-thon was the inclusion of users. In the case of the Amnesty challenges the teams had direct access to people who had first-hand experience of being unlawfully detained and interrogated. This was invaluable to help the team understand the emotions, needs, context, environment and constraints, and in fact the whole premise behind user-centred design. The users, along with the business representatives, provided information and stimulus for the concept generation but also feedback as to the suitability and viability of the products as they were designed and developed.

From Pitch to Prototype

The ThoughtWorks strong team, who won ‘best-pitch’, built a mobile web application nicknamed ‘Panic Button App’. The app enables people at risk of unlawful detention to send an alert to a ‘buddy’ if they are in danger, which could include a message (where time ad circumstances permit) as well as their geographic location. In order to allow access for the largest range of mobile devices, it was built with HTML5 and accessed via a mobile web browser. The team also experimented with SMS technology. An important facility was being able to provide support in parts of the world that do not have access to a mobile data network, and also to make the app accessible by non-smartphone users by using the SMS network.

The ‘Panic Button App’ team – Amir, Jill & Yu from ThoughtWorks and Bianca from BBC

The team imagined several different scenarios that considered the time as the critical factor when using the app:

• Option 1: Panic Button only – this could be used in critical situations and would take a matter of seconds.
• Option 2: Send a pre-composed message – where time is still of the essence, but not quite as urgent as above, the user can select a pre-composed message to describe their situation. The messages can be composed at the time of registration, rather than waiting for an event to occur.
• Option 3: Send a custom message – where time permits the user can enter a custom message to describe whatever critical information could help them in their situation. 
• Thanks to the ThoughtWorks developers, the ‘Panic Button App’ team was able to go straight from sketching ideas with marker pens and post-it's to prototyping in code. They uploaded the app onto a cloud hosting service so that it could be used on mobile web browsers. Once the prototype was working in a live environment they tested it with users throughout the rest of the day. After refining the design and interaction based on the user input they then did a live web demonstration of the end-to-end concept to the rest of the Make-a-thon team. 

For the prototype the team made use of Google maps and developed code to track messages, showing the locations of the user as they were entered during the demonstration (although this would not be a part of the Amnesty service is this was developed fully).

Images from the ‘Panic Button App’

A Game Changer

The make-a-thon event proved to be a game changer from the perspective of the organisers at IDEO and also Amnesty as providers of some of the design challenges. The real success was the blend of all the different skills and being able to design and develop and prove concepts at speed.
Haiyan said ‘Thanks for organising to have such fab developers at our event! We couldn't have done it without them.’

Owen Pringle of Amnesty waxed lyrical about the make-a-thon saying “We want to replicate [this event] as soon as possible” He also went on to say “The prototypes were amazing…we’re keen to get one or more of the prototypes into the live environment”

ThoughtWorks were also really honoured to be invited to take part and very proud of what they achieved on the day.

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Thanks to Jill Irving for contributing to this article and helping to make the day a success from ThoughtWorks, IDEO and Amnesty’s perspective.


Jill is a, Lead User Experience Consultant and UI developer at ThoughtWorks - she has loved creating things for the web since she used Netscape 1.1. Jill proudly considers herself to be slightly geekier than your average designer — bringing a rare blend of creative and technical ability to every project.

Cool hunting and Augmented Reality

Cate Trotter from Insider Trends was also presenting at the ThoughtWorks Retail Agility conference the other day. Being a big fan of William Gibson’s ‘Pattern Recognition’ series I was very excited to meet a real-life ‘cool-hunter’.

Cate’s day job is looking for trends, looking for patterns that exist in subcultures that will come to influence main stream culture. She takes businesses on ‘trend tours’, to show them where the hip and happening starts.  She had a dizzying amount of great examples of cutting edge inovation in the retail sector that drives not just compelling customer experiences but also disruptive experiences. Real creative ways of engaging customers and creating buzz. 

One of the underlying themes that seemed to emerge for me was the subtle shift away from ‘hard sell’ and the focus on the immediate returns, to building brand and relationships in a more meaningful and engaging way. Which in the current economic climate is not only refreshing but a very insightful strategy for long term survival. While most retailers are scrabbling to claim their share of shoppers’ limited wallet with sales, discounts and ‘special-purchase’ cheap and nasty give-aways, to secure short-term income, some creating brand experiences that will encourage loyalty long after the event is over. 

Take Airwalk as a great example: They created and ‘Invisible Pop‐Up Store’ enhanced with augmented reality to create buzz around the very limited edition Goldrun sneaker. So cool! Or Wetseal, who have taken the concept of user-generated content and have created the capability to ‘crowdsource’ outfits.

Big thanks to Cate.

Surprised I’m still surprised

I presented at the ThoughtWorks Retail Agility Conference on Agile Experience Design. Specifically I was looking at how retailers can take advantage of AXD to design, develop and deliver compelling, shopper-centric, omni-channel experiences that delight customers and drive business success.

I’ve been doing experience design for a long time. I’ve been doing agile experience design for a sizeable proportion of that time. When I was preparing the presentation I got that pre-presentation feeling, similar to the pre-publication feeling I got when reading the draft manuscript of our Agile Experience Design book. I was worried that I had nothing to say. I’ve been doing this stuff for so long that it has just become second nature to me and feels like common sense.

But no fear! A number of people approached me immediately after the presentation and thanked me for talking about the approach, about how inspirational it was and how it’s really got them thinking about how they can do things differently and most important, make a difference. Perhaps to other experienced practitioners in the same field, what I’m talking about isn’t necessarily all that different but it certainly seems to make a difference to many of the business and IT people that I meet along the way.

I guess that is similar to what James Box and Cennydd Bowles said in their book ‘Undercover User Experience Design’, “The fundamentals of UX design…are easy to learn but difficult to put into practice.” So I guess what I bring to the table is the benefit of my experience and the context of all of my learnings in different situations.

Agile Experience Design - the book

Wow how remiss of me! I have completely failed to blog about my biggest project of last year – the book! In November last year (2011) Marc McNeil and I published Agile Experience Design: A digital designers guide to agile, lean and continuous. To our knowledge it’s the first book to market about the topic of experience design in agile.

How it came about

There has been a lot of banter on the subject for a good number of years on various SIG groups, and lots of great presentations delivered at various conferences and published on the web that have sought to explain how to marry the two. However there was no one go to comprehensive reference point.

I remember when I started with ThoughtWorks (agile custom software experts) as the only UX person in Australia wishing that I could find a definitive guide book on how to do UX in an agile environment. It is a very different way of working but I was keenly aware that someone somewhere must have solved the problem, and that I didn’t need to work it out for myself. The book ended up being the book I wished that I could have read back then.

I joined forces with Marc when I moved back from Australia to the UK and realised we were aligned in our thinking on the subject. We were also still surprised that no one had published a book on the subject and so we set about doing just that.

An non-movable feast

From start to finish we had FIVE months. Prior to signing the contract I talked to Martin Fowler and Jez Humble, both successful authors, about the timescales and the unanimous opinion was that we were mad! Jez said ‘ You need at least 18 months to write the first draft, then you need some decompression time, then you need time to rewrite and edit.’ So we went back to the publisher, in the hope of revising the proposed publication date. However we were faced with a ‘deal or no deal’. Marc and I both laughed and agreed that we might as well die trying as not try at all.

A very non-agile process

In agreeing to the terms we were also asked to commit to the length of the book. At this point all we had written was two paragraphs describing the essence of the book. We had no idea. I flicked through a couple of notable books on my shelf, of the ilk that I thought ours might be, stuck a finger in the air and suggested 100,000 words. When we submitted our first draft, it was 135,000 words long. Naively we had not appreciated that 100,000 words had been cast in stone. We then had a very tough process to cut 35,000 words (over a third of the final book) from the manuscript (and still deliver on time).

Concurrent working

So five months is a doable time-frame, just, if you are a full-time author perhaps. But hey, we both had full-time jobs. This is the job that give us the experience and expertise to be able to write books. We both also have families. So we begged borrowed and stole time and worked bloody hard for five intense months to produce the book. We are grateful to our families in particular who made the bulk of the sacrifices, for allowing us to realise our ambition.

Collaborative and feedback driven

Two aspects that were sacrificed as a result of the timeframe was the ability to collaborate and also solicit feedback from peers and colleagues on the work in progress. We started off with the best of intentions and were able to include some contributions and get some feedback, but not as much as we might have liked. If word count and time had permitted we would have liked to have included more anecdotes and lessons learnt from other practitioners.

Test and learn

This book was only ever intended as a guide, rather than a recipe book. It would be a contradiction in terms to say that there’s a one size fits all approach to agile experience design. Every project will be different because of the budget, timescales and people/process/technology constraints.

However to stay true to the nature of agile experience design I’m keen to hear about people’s experiences and how they have aplied, adopted or adapted some of the concepts and ideas in the book. I promise to share the finding and attribute them to the contributers either on the accompanying website (if I ever get the time to add some content to it) or perhaps even in version 2.0.