This post is part of blogging a new publication “Opportunity Mapping: A Working through Screens Sketchbook.”

Three opening thoughts that will kick off the sketchbook:

Research has become a new normal for designing powerful, engaging, and productive technologies. It’s generally accepted that researching users, systems, activities, behaviors, motivations, and attitudes can help technologists of all stripes build empathy for design problems. But how can teams better examine, distill, and communicate what they learn so that they generate more compelling design ideas — ideas that can make a real difference in peoples’ working lives?

“…solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”
Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“We are not starting from scratch here. Many affective representations of complex phenomena have been developed in recent times. Physicists have illustrated quarks. Biologists have mapped the genome. Doctors have found ways to represent immune systems in the body. Network designers have mapped communication flows in buildings. Managers have charted the locations of expertise in their organizations. Our world is filled with representations of invisible or complex phenomena… So the design challenge… [is] how to deploy new representations in such a way that they influence wider groups of people.”
Jon Thackara, In the Bubble

More to come on this topic, eventually to culminate in a new Application Concepting Series book.

@J_Burghardt

Opportunity maps are a way to thoughtfully bridge UX data and conceptual design

Product teams may find it difficult to make the leap between researching knowledge work and designing concepts to improve it. In many cases, teams move into the spreadsheet mindset too soon, rationalizing and prioritizing individual ideas in disconnected lists.

Top 10 “Breakdowns” and “Painpoints” marked on process diagrams may provide a basis for many important innovations, but they can also leave a whole range of opportunities for improving knowledge work on the table. Where are the opportunities to make complex conclusions clear for users? Where are the delightful flows that surpass workers’ goals in unexpected ways?

Opportunity maps can represent both the “loud” and “quieter” insights from design research, providing a connective brief that communicates pointed and strategic questions for design ideation.

Opportunity maps focus a product team’s design efforts

It’s not easy to understand a complex job or established profession. When teams are scattered, they may reach for the comfort of visualizing detailed, literal design particulars before they finish considering big picture questions about their offering’s direction.

The poet E.E. Cummings said, “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” A design brief of thoughtful questions, based in data, can propel a team forward by narrowing the problem space where they are looking for solutions.

The act of mapping opportunities can help teams to have more strategic conversations about how insights should be distilled and communicated, steering their competing visions in a more cohesive direction.

Opportunity maps can range from exploratory views to distilled stories

These visual tools can fall on a continuum ranging from raw and granular to synthesized and summarized.

On the early side of the continuum, opportunity maps can become a tool for collecting insights that a product team generates when looking at their data through different lenses.

In the middle of the continuum, where the team has worked to generate a range of insights, opportunity maps can showcase selected insights and begin synthesizing opportunities for design ideation.

On the summative end of the continuum, opportunity maps can present distilled, strategic directions for improving users’ experiences, communicating a legible vector for what a knowledge work offering could be.

Opportunity maps can be built from 100 “Working through Screens” ideas

Product teams often fall back on a limited set of contemporary patterns and “at hand” design ideas when identifying insights to propel their computing tools forward.

It’s easy to overlook existing information about the role that computing can play in knowledge work. To push a broader perspective, teams can hold useful concepts next to their research findings, trying them on like different hats, in order to identify new insights.

The 100 application envisioning ideas in “Working through Screens” can be used as lenses to identify potential design opportunities in user experience data. Product teams can use the 100 ideas as a flexible checklist of possible contributions to the knowledge work that they are targeting with their system.

Opportunity maps can fit into any system envisioning process

The toolbox for product teams designing workplace systems is already overflowing with exacting, often prescriptive, methods.

Step-by-step formulas do not guarantee success when creating a design brief, especially when the goal is to support complex, cognitive professions by advancing the design of a product or service.

The visual language on the following pages is intended to broadly inspire, not inscribe a concrete approach. Opportunity maps could be created before, during, or even after conceptual design – whenever a range of opportunities need to be better understood and communicated beyond a small group of researchers and designers.

More to come on this topic, eventually to culminate in a new Application Concepting Series book.

Any and all comments appreciated, or tweet @J_Burghardt.

Teams designing tools for the knowledge workplace commonly research how users work

Today, most product teams creating tools for knowledge work understand that they can benefit from connecting with the workers that they are striving to design for.

Researching user needs has become a conventional part of the application design process, providing inspiration that can fuel innovative systems.

While breakthroughs may come from purely technological developments, insights into user needs and behavior can uncover opportunities to advance workplace systems in powerful, engaging, and productive ways.

The communication of design research outputs has room for improvement

The wall of post it notes has become a typical symbol of design research and sense making, showing how a product team’s design brief can inductively emerge from a collection of disordered ideas.

It turns out that the core team that makes sense of this data does most of the learning. Communicating deep insights beyond the ordered wall of paper particles can be difficult. Many important ideas remain in a small group of people, essentially shelved or forgotten.

Researchers and designers could benefit from exploring new ways of communicating their early, formative learnings, with the goal of making more lasting and traceable impacts in their organizations.

There are ongoing opportunities for transformative design in knowledge work applications

The problem of communicating a range of insights from the field is often a major obstacle for organizations that design tools for the knowledge workplace. The connective tissue between a product team’s learnings and resulting design outcomes can be tenuous.

Knowledge workers’ practices can be difficult for product teams to understand. Outsiders can find it difficult to meaningfully critique the systems supporting specialized jobs until they have built real empathy for the work.

For a knowledge worker, thoughtful function can be truly beautiful. However, teams envisioning workplace interactions often overlook or under-communicate key opportunities to make a transformative impact with design.

Designing the design problem can lead to new visual languages

How could new forms of visual communication help product teams to understand and evolve workplace systems, highlighting where to invest effort in order maximize value and meet user goals?

How could thoughtful information design allow teams to move past post-it note particles of information to more systemic frameworks for design ideation, pushing the boundaries of what’s considered core for workplace user experiences?

How might these frameworks become distilled throughout the design research process so that they communicate a strategic point of view, accelerating innovation for knowledge work?

More to come on this topic, eventually to culminate in a new Application Concepting Series book.

Any and all comments appreciated, or tweet @J_Burghardt.

So with all of the feeds that focus on designing compelling technology, why one more stream of thoughts and resources?

The designer Bruce Mau has said “The word ‘studio’ is derives from ‘study’. Our object is not to know the answers before we do the work. It’s to know them after we do it.”

Looking back across the @FlashbulbUX feed, it’s been a great way to formalize ongoing learning, continue to evolve a point of view, and pull together disparate ideas that may be useful for anyone who defines or designs workplace tools. It’s also been an excellent way to start conversations with colleagues and clients about emerging trends.

It’s interesting to scan some of the most popular tweets from the last year, tracing the interests of people who have “paid attention” to Flashbulb Interaction’s updates:

• Overstated but relevant – If biz tech doesn’t catch up with UX we’re used to at home, workers may ditch corp network http://bit.ly/aYbT6u
• Concern that current usability research methods are inadequate for evaluating complex, domain-specific tools http://bit.ly/9Jr6h5
• A POV on app requirements “the collection of constraints that must be honored, or thoughtfully traversed” http://bit.ly/98IeIM
• An emerging area of knowledge work – synthesizing and making sense of a there’s “data for that” world http://bit.ly/aQZVOg
• To be successful, outputs of knowledge work must evoke knowledge in a recipient http://bit.ly/cZBzDm
• Building Info Modeling “lets you discover ways of construction and sequencing and optimizing shapes for cost” http://bit.ly/aQZVOg
• Case Management is the coordination of multiple tasks, planned or unplanned towards a concrete goal http://bit.ly/9aFSTc
• Another POV on what UX strategy work can include http://bit.ly/a7Gx6X @inspireUX — Also thinking about opportunities http://bit.ly/aLnRde
• One individual’s graph of own knowledge work, by outputs – reminiscent of Licklider’s formative introspection http://bit.ly/9GG8rg
• Concept video on emergency response w/ apps for large displays. Familiar futurism + work rationalization http://bit.ly/baukj5

In 2011, look for more 140 character, “bite size” updates about the studio’s projects, including some broad-stroke learnings from our client work.

Also, watch for ten different trend names attached to many FlashbulbUX tweets (instead of the “Resource” identifier). Updates on these trends will also be a fixture on this blog:

• Display Expansion
• Interaction Options
• Personal Assemblies
• Connective Hubs
• Collaborative Everyday
• Unobtrusive Guidance
• Informated Choices
• Cacooned Concentration
• Delightful Narratives
• Data Deepend

Each of these macro trends for the emerging workplace may grow sub-trends over time…

@J_Burghardt

The researchers and practitioners selectively showcased in this film self-consciously understand that they are at the forefront of a new frontier of knowledge work. In the new “there’s data for that” world, new specialties in analytics are emerging all the time, along with a stream of new applications and design approaches.

As mentioned in a previous post, I’m doing some studio research on how diverse user experience opportunities can be mapped for product team decision making and alignment. From that vantage point, two underlying information design tensions in the film ring true:

Another point that struck me while watching this film was how detached the appearance of many visualizations are from their subjects. I think the design problem of how to inject more context into abstracted data displays is genuinely interesting. For example, without reading the title or the key of a typical information visualization, one wouldn’t necessarily know whether one was looking at a representation of obesity rates or new auto sales. I’m not advocating chart junk, just wondering about more refined approaches for triggering a viewer’s understandings – beyond the current minimalist, excessively data-rich fashions.

Many, but not all of the examples in the documentary have the heavy quantitative emphasis that is propelling the visualization field forward. However, I’m also curious about how the craft of information visualization can apply to mixed qualitative / quantitative data sets. A bit of the “everything can become numbers” mindset, but also more humanized somehow, without excessive distraction from primary content.

Flashbulb Interaction is increasingly basing design decisions on clients’ large stores of un-mined data about user behavior and subjective satisfaction. Although I quickly browsed some of the tools mentioned in this film (e.g. Swivel, Many Eyes), I am definitely going to give them more of a test drive in the near future.

What stands out to you about this documentary? What impact do you think the work of these pioneers will have on future threads of knowledge work?

@J_Burghardt

The opening question was very broad, asking for input on why some implementations of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are failing to meet expectations. The resulting conversation (over 700 comments) brought up a range of thoughtful points on the root causes of these failures, and I have summarized some of them here in no particular order:

Deployments of EMRs, and the adoption of tech in the healthcare industry generally, provide great models for understanding how to augment cooperative work in layered cultures of established work practice. And it seems that a flock of designers have tuned in: the broader thread on healthcare design is inspiring, though the emphasis often seems to fall more on patients rather than caregivers.

The leading points in the list above can be humbling for designers, emphasizing that the primary factors for success or failure in workplace applications are often in the hands of project and organizational leadership.

I’m reminded of a quote from years ago by David Childs, a SOM architect working at Ground Zero: Something along the lines of “It takes a client to make a building.” I think of it often, and read it two ways: both as a statement of crass commercialism in the face of more civic-minded design intent, and as a basic truth of design services.

I love so-called “paper architecture” and open design exploration, but I’m also driven to promote real improvements in user experiences for people practicing their chosen vocations.

In a hand-waving sense, there are always plenty of abstract arguments about the benefits of computing tools in organizations. Shared industry beliefs, fashionable truisms, and rehearsed marketing pitches. Designers generate conceptual projects that show compelling advancements in user experience. In a conference room, futuristic applications can seem like near term inevitabilities.

But to successfully implement a system like an EMR — a messy, long term bet, involving systemic interventions — requires highly motivated leaders who have bought into a big picture.

Effective designers in these situations are facilitators of pragmatic process, collaborators in service of a vision, willing to dive into the unexpected hurdles of real world adoption. Else, design’s contributions are simply more visionary images projected on the wall, mismatched to the reality of what a client will actually follow through on, to be filed away on some repository and forgotten.

Caregivers and patients deserve better.

Know any great resources on the success or failure of Electronic Medical Records? Have any of the bullet points above impacted your projects?

@J_Burghardt