It's a few weeks now since I got back from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in LA. This was a different conference for me. Normally, I would be at a conference to present on topics like Experience Design, Digital Innovation, or some user interface related technology / design topic. And this would be to a mixed audience of business people, designers and developers.
However, there I was at a conference with 6,000 of the most technical... well, the word they would use to describe themselves is 'geeks', so I'll use the same word! I have to say, 90% of what was going on went completely over my head. As they all dived into their "300" and "400" sessions I took comfort in the Microsoft shop and got some Zune accessories!
I was there because we had been working with Nick Lansley, Head of Research & Development at Tesco.com. Tesco.com is the world's largest online grocery retailer, and is a significant part of everyday life in the UK and other parts of the world.
What we had been working on was an innovation project. A project that was aiming to drive additional value for Tesco customers, whilst at the same time as driving Tesco's business. Its working name is Tesco@Home and it lives in your kitchen or close by!
Here's what we did:
The Day 2 Keynote - Tesco and Conchango are at 1h34mins - high quality WMV
A more in-depth walk-through on Channel 9 with technical depth from Matthew
At Conchango, we do a lot of innovation work. In fact, this work is increasing day by day, as many of our customers are realising that simply keeping their heads down, and trying to carry on as usual despite huge changes in the business and consumer environment, they would rather generate new value through innovation. Not only are these new business models that work better in today's climate, but they are driving brand and emotional connectivity to their customers. If we make things memorable and differentiated the customer is likely to repeat their interaction and is likely to tell others (loyalty+experience=advocacy - something I'm now calling "Carbone's Law" after this guy).
Total Experience Design is what allows us to uncover potential solutions that are outside the 'usual channels'. This is work that is very tightly focused on an insight into users or customers, and aims to drive out through an experience planning process, things that will make a tangible difference not only to a business bottom line and brand perception and differentiation, but also to customers' lives. The nirvanah for these projects is to create functional brand utility. Something that is tightly associated, or even locked into, the brand, but is just quite simply 'useful'.
This isn't a case of going out and asking customers what they want - although we do this, what we don't do, is just go ahead and do what they ask. As Henry Ford is often famously quoted as saying; "If we had gone and asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'". Our job is to understand the feedback that customers give, and derive through insight and careful process, their true needs and motivations - then to create solutions that help them meet those needs. In this way, we can come up with the car, when people thought the best they could get was a fast horse.
We ran this process with Tesco, and acknowledged and gained more insight into a variety of needs from customers. Mostly these were around the fact that although they were incredibly loyal to Tesco, the online grocery shopping experience is fundamentally flawed. Not through design, but simply by its nature. An online grocery shop means you have to coordinate your own personal diary and those of the other people in your household, it also means finding 50 or 60 items in a store that holds 30,000 products.
A lot of initiatives on Tesco.com have been around trying to reduce the headaches that these fundamentals cause customers and they've done an exceptional job at making what at first use might be a 90 minute process down to about 20-25 minutes.
With this project, we wanted to go further though, and create a tool that would surprise customers.
Once Total Experience Design drives out the customer touchpoints we believe we can affect, the Experience Planning process sets out a series of Experience Principles. These are things that we know our solution needs to be, or needs to feel like. They are not tangible solutions or designs, but they inform that design and help you know when you've succeeded.
In the context of this project, these principles, were things like "Surprise Me" - this principle was about getting away from the perception of some that Tesco is trying to take over the world. The result of this principle was that we allowed customers to plug in their own messaging, email and social networks, as well as their own calendars using public services like Windows Live Calendar or Google calendar. All that Tesco do is provide a useful tool to bring them all together in one place. The expectation from customers is that Tesco is trying to own their lives - so we upset this perception and pleasantly surprise them by offering an open tool that allows them to use what they want, and away from any potential 'big brother' fears that Tesco is spying on them.
The other experience principles drove out things like the ability to create shopping lists as and when you think of things, with minimal interaction or friction. For example, simply waving a barcode at your webcam when you've run out of something without having to write it down, or wait til you 'go shopping' to remember what it was.
Leaving aside the insight on Tesco customers, and our ongoing insight into technology, social and other trends, that we have been gathering and learning over the last two years, the actual design and build process for this application took about 10 weeks. From idea to working prototype. Not bad.
The result is an application that is well crafted from a design and user experience perspective, and incredibly well architected technically. It only requires a small amount of re-plumbing work once the relevant API's from Tesco, Microsoft and Google are in place, to make it appropriate for taking out to test in real customer's homes.
The classic way businesses would have done this was to envision such a project, create a business case, probably then validate that business case using expensive management consultants, and then secure a large amount of money to deliver the whole thing and take it to market. This way of approaching innovation is quite frankly crazy. For every idea that you have that might actually work, you'll throw away 5 or 10. As Bill Buxton says: "Don't be precious about your ideas, just be good at having lots of them".
So, creating small innovation projects that last no longer than 12 weeks, that have relatively small budgets, and takes them out to test market quickly is exactly the right approach. You have to be prepared to throw a lot away though; but in the long term this is still more cost-effective, as the £3million you saved when you didn't roll out a huge new service that then turns out to be a big white elephant and ultimately gets canned, goes a long way in several 12 week chunks... and then ensures that when you do put a 'bet' on something, that its value to the business and to customers has already been proven in the real world and it's a pretty sure thing.
The other thing that made this project work, was that it had buy-in and support from the top level of the organisation. When you do things that are potentially business changing, the only way you can drive them through to the general blank looks you get from many of your colleagues is if you can say "The CEO wants this" - in this case, we had that level of support and it helped the project get delivered under-budget and ahead of schedule, as well as hitting all of Tesco's objectives for it.
Innovation is the way to survive global recession. Those that do it well will profit in a way that is not at the expense of their customers, but in their interests. A clever trick, but one that's been done before many times. This isn't the first downturn we've ever had...
Finally - back to the Tesco@Home project... An interesting thing about this was that we developed this application to work on the PC's that Tesco customers have in their homes. Consequently, it was designed to work on Windows XP and Windows Vista. So you can imagine our slight recoil of horror when Microsoft told us that they were going to run it on an unreleased brand new operating system: Windows 7. So it was a pleasant surprise when we loaded it up and it all worked! Testament to the engineering effort that's gone into Windows 7 I guess. Oh, and the quality of our engineering too!
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. We had a great team from Conchango and Tesco working on this - and some unbelievable professionalism and support from Microsoft during the latter stages and into PDC itself. Anyone who says that Microsoft "doesn't get it"... well, see for yourself before making your mind up.
Nick enjoyed it too! You can see how much right here: (Nick Lansley's blog on the topic).
Thanks all for making this thing happen. Looking forward to getting into your homes soon to help us test it out in real life!