Defining and creating a memorable experience for your customers is no easy task. Product owners and development teams can easily rattle off ideas to designers about what features are necessary to stay competitive. But if you ask them to share their vision for the overall more subtle emotional aspects of the experience, they often get quiet or resort to the familiar old UI clichés of "simplicity, intuitiveness, etc." This means that you often start your design work with less insight than you need to drive visual and interaction design.

Enter the experience workshop - a collaborative meeting and setup where clients can really talk about what a great experience can feel like among a sea of inspirational images, digital interfaces, products, services, brands, cars, textures, and more. Companies that build digital products and services are engaging in a new level of competition; it's no longer good enough to deliver a usable product. Our designs must reach an aspirational vision that elevates the experience beyond mere usability, and a visual, collaborative workshop pushes people to explore and discuss the possibilities.

The workshop helps teams discuss what attributes are inherent in these other experiences that are meaningful to the experience they're defining. After a process of prioritization and discussion, the end result is often a huge cloud of ideas and words that sit on a spectrum from a poor experience to an ideal experience. The examples aren't what's important for our output. We collect insight from the discussion, the words, that help us define the ideal experience.

The workshop brings teams together to learn and collaborate on the experience. What I love most about this activity is the connections made from people across different teams that can relate on a personal level because of their shared experiences. It's not just a visioning exercise for the future; it's a team-building event.

Check out the above video to see a glimpse of the workshop in action. And if you want to learn more about how to conduct a workshop and integrate this new approach into your company, you can sign up for an upcoming Cooper U Visual Interface Design course. In fact, we have just a few spots left in next week's class (May 7-8), if this post left you inspired...

Related links

• Cooper U Visual Interface Design course
• The visual interface is now your brand
• What marketing execs should know about user experience
• Measuring visual designers' strategic value

Most of us need an extra little boost (or nudge, or shove) to reach a goal. We can't do everything alone, and our friends and families can be powerful support systems. The strength of these relationships is at the core of why we love HealthRally. They offer an intriguing new way for friends and family to motivate each other to reach important goals with rewards. You can post a goal and ask friends to support you along the way. Or, friends can proactively post a reward to encourage you to stick to a goal. For instance, if you want to lose a few pounds, I could offer a shopping trip for a new outfit in your new size as motivation to keep trying to lose weight.

We are thrilled to be working with HealthRally through our partnership with Rock Health, offering design mentoring and training to Rock Health's start-ups. HealthRally is passionate, focused, and mission-driven, and 2012 is shaping up to be a great year for the company. Here are excerpts of a conversation with CEO & Co-founder Zack Lynch about what makes HealthRally so great.

What was the inspiration for creating HealthRally?

You, us and them. Anyone who has ever needed some extra motivation to help reach a goal. Whether it's losing weight, getting better grades, taking medication, or running a marathon, it's hard to stay motivated every day. So we created HealthRally as a way to bring your friends and family together to cheer you on, motivate you, and celebrate your success.

How will you know you've succeeded?

We are already succeeding. Our beta service launched in January and people are changing their lives, friends and family are motivating each other, and people are reaching goals with amazing rewards.

What do you do when you and your team need inspiration?

We go for a brisk walk up Potrero Hill and take in the view over San Francisco. We get energized thinking about all the innovation and passion occurring right in sight. Then, we hike over to Mr & Mrs Miscellaneous, a Dog Patch must, to reward ourselves with some very tasty ice cream.

What have you learned about human behavior through the process of creating HealthRally?

People really do want to see one another to succeed! They'll do anything for each other, from cooking healthy meals to going on walks, as well as putting money on the line to help motivate one another to reach goals.

How are you using design to motivate people?

User experience is everything. Each element, from sign up through motivating your friends, each process must convey a sense of ease, fun, trust, and accomplishment. For example, to improve our sign up process, we designed a way for people to build their rally even if they weren't signed in. This makes the initial product interaction easier and helps people play with our motivation service faster than if we required a lot of info right up front.

How is HealthRally different than other motivation and behaviorial change services out there?

Only HealthRally lets friends and family motivate each other with real money. We do this in a fun and social way to make sure that everyone is involved. We also designed a service called RallyCoach, which monitors the motivational momentum and nudges people to share experiences and motivate each other. We are seeing are amazing results!

Tell us about how you've been working with Cooper to evolve your product.

Cooper immediately seized on the opportunity to evolve the initial customer experience with a deeper sense of emotional relevance. We walked through the users mindsets and redesigned landing pages to highlight the sense of support and gratitude people can have from using our product.

What's your next big hurdle?

Taking advantage of the opportunities in front of us and new ones that continue to arise. Startups are built with great people, so attracting and retaining the best team will continue to be a major focus of our internal efforts.

What goals do you have for HealthRally this year?

Grow! We just signed a deal to be the "at home" version for a new reality weight loss TV series on NBC in Chicago called "Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is" where contestants get paid to lose weight. We want to go national with the show as it gets adopted in new markets, building out brand relationships to complement the rewards being given by friends and family.

What are you most proud of about HealthRally?

Making a service that helps people get excited about and energized to support one another, no matter what it takes.

If HealthRally won a (pretend) award, what would it be?

The Healthy Human Award given out to companies that inspire millions to get and stay healthy!

As the creator of a new app or website, you are intimately familiar with its purpose and you believe deeply in the value it offers. But unlike you, when a new user arrives at your app or site for the first time, he will be neither familiar with it nor confident of its value and trustworthiness. It's your program's responsibility to make the new user comfortable, knowledgeable, and confident about its purpose in the first few moments they are together.

It's very much like when two strangers meet on the street. Even if both parties have good intentions, it is imperative that these intentions be made abundantly clear and unequivocal before any significant interaction can take place. Eye contact, hand shaking, and smiling are the cues used in real life, and the web designer must provide equivalent cues on the screen.

When someone sees a website for the first time, several important questions come instantly to mind. The first, and most important, question is, "What the hell is this thing?" The program should answer that question using no more than a phrase. Sometimes the product name is sufficient, but typically a subtitle or image does the work, but if your program doesn't make this clear in a glance, you have some significant design work to do. It is surprising to me how many websites fail to answer this most fundamental question.

The next questions that will occur to the user are, "What does it do?" and "Why would I want that?" At this point, some text can be used to provide answers. Lighten up the text with a diagram, drawing, or image. You don't necessarily want to burden repeat visitors with this stuff, but your software can easily tell the difference between a first time user and a veteran.

Once the user knows what the website is, what it does, and why that would be a good thing, he or she can understand the advantage of having such a product. So now she will be more willing to pay closer attention to more granular questions, such as, "Wouldn't it be easier to just use something else I already know?" Here's where the site can offer comparisons to similar products and itemize its qualities. Any potential user will be weighing the benefits of your program against the burden of learning something new. Make your program easier to learn and use, then prove it.

At this point, the new user is likely asking himself, "Is this going to cost me money?" and, "Do I have to give it a credit card?" Be up front about this now. Don't be coy by only telling the user that money is involved after they have pushed the "Yes, I Accept" button. Tell them now and disclose the full amount. Honesty now will result in more trust, which means more click-throughs and more happy users.

Everybody knows that money isn't the only thing a website can cost. Experienced users will ask, "Will it steal my private data?" and "How long is this going to take?" Once again, take the time to honestly and completely answer these questions. Give the user the option to use the program without surrendering their private information. If they like your program and use it regularly, you can ask them for it again in a month and their answer might well be different.

Good user experience design will keep any user's time overhead down to a minimum, so you should be able to give them good news in the beginning. Saying something like, "This takes the average user 43 seconds." Big picture information like this goes a long way towards assuaging the user's worries.

After your website and the new user have performed this little pas-de-deux of introduction, the human at the other end will be far more likely to end up being a satisfied, long-term user of your program.

Image source: Nightdeposits.

Let's presume for the moment that interaction design can be perfected and delivered to your organization in a tidy, shiny bundle of brilliance. Have you now got a magic talisman that will protect you from competition and summon market share? Of course not. Design is just the beginning.

Like any piece of good advice, your organization must be able to hear the design and then act on it for it to do any good. Take a look at this checklist to see if your organization is design ready.

I've been watching the new hit TV show "Gold Rush," about amateur gold miners in Alaska and the Yukon. Their struggle to find gold reminds me of the quest for innovation in technology companies. It's interesting to compare the two quests.

Illustration by Scott Cooper

In Gold Rush, a semi-documentary, semi-reality show, big, burly men battle the elements (and sometimes each other) to find gold in the endless miles of wilderness in the 49th state. These days gold is around $1500 an ounce, so a couple of handfuls is all these guys need to have a successful mining season.

Often, all a new technology company needs to become a juggernaut is a couple of handfuls of invention, a few ounces of insight. Google, for example, didn't invent search, they simply added the brilliantly simple idea of ranking search results by the number of references they found. Building their massive search engine and finding a way to monetize their service remained a huge task, but the innovation was just a single nugget. Ironically, the Gold Rush miners almost never work directly with gold. The big problem in gold mining isn't the gold itself, it's dealing with everything that isn't gold. All of their attention and equipment is focused on the not-gold. While they dream of a few handfuls of yellow metal, their day-to-day world is dominated by countless tons of everything else. For the miners to collect a few ounces of gold, these tough, XXL guys have to bulldoze acres of forest, pump rivers of water, dig tons of rock, and move mountains of dirt. They need giant tractors and huge excavators. They need rock and sand sifting machines the size of houses. They also have to contend with trees, wild animals, harsh weather, cash flow, fickle girlfriends, and internecine friction.

Most of what goes on in innovative companies is the simple hard work of designing, coding, and deploying software. It's the quotidian blocking and tackling of everyday business: finding bugs, getting the pixels right, answering the phone. One seed pearl bright idea can occupy a technical team for a year or more, building software and shoveling an endless wilderness of bits. Regardless of the creative brilliance, building a company or a product is mostly just hard work.

The Alaskan gold is just lying there, pure, untarnished, ready to be picked up and sold. They don't have to coerce or cajole it. They don't need to identify or interpret it. Gold is easy to spot, but it rarely comes in a big, fortune-making nugget. It comes in millions of tiny flakes, deposited over the millennia in ancient stream beds.

Innovation is often the same, made up of thousands of tiny shards of creativity. Like gold, creativity rarely comes in giant dollops of obviousness. It tends to arrive in many tiny increments, only the whole of which add up to something revolutionary. So, while the miners have to discard ten-ton boulders, the gold flakes hiding underneath must be handled with exquisite delicacy.

Like mining gold, the quest for innovation is dominated by what isn't innovative. Mostly it's cubicles of conventional work, and it's easy for the delicate innovation to be inadvertently smashed by some hard-rock business process. Just like gold mining, business demands a deft combination of brute force and subtle precision, of massive infrastructure and sensitive awareness.

If you visit a gold mine, you won't see very much gold. If you visit a very innovative company, you won't see crowds of shock-haired Albert Einstein's riding around on Segways reinventing the space-time-continuum. You'll see teams of young men and women working hard at mostly mundane tasks, moving mountains of information, winnowing their way to something of immense value. What lurks there is a respectful awareness of the unique nature of creativity, and how to nurture it. Managers who want innovation don't need to demand it, they merely need to not let the mountain moving of commerce obscure the precious, delicate, dust of invention.

Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software for medical professionals, has published a nice recap of their user conference, Connect11, where Alan Cooper spoke about the role of interaction design in health care. Among the questions answered - "what do you get when you cross a computer with a doctor's office?"

At the 13 minute mark, Stefan Klocek presents a prototype of Practice Fusion's new iPad app.

The World Series is barely over, which means most of my thoughts this time of year get colored by baseball. Events in game five got me thinking about design exploration, of all things. I'll try not stretch the metaphor too much.

I work throughout the year with product managers, technologists, and executives at companies ranging from small startups to Fortune 100 megaliths. Many of these companies have a vision for creating a game-changing product within their industry, “the iPhone of the xyz market.” They mean it, too. But as conversations progress and a project plan begins to take shape, many of the project owners start piling on technology constraints before any design work has even begun.

“We need to use these off-the-shelf components.”

“Don't explore any solutions that won't let us use our current technology platform.”

“Actually, what we really need is just a facelift of the presentation layer.”

Not exactly the words I imagine Steve Jobs used to drive the creation of the iPod and iPhone.

Sometimes this slow degradation of vision is a result of poor or conflicting communication...which brings me back to last night's baseball game. St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, already a two-time World Series winner and owner of the most wins by an active manager, had a vision for which pitchers he wanted to be warmed up in the late innings of a tight ballgame. He called the bullpen coach (using a land-line telephone in the dugout), and, amazingly, not once but twice, the bullpen coach misheard LaRussa's instructions and warmed up the wrong pitcher.

I don't know if that's happened before in a World Series game, but in the corporate world, we see the wrong product get sent into the game all the time. Executives have a vision for the future, but don't clearly articulate it to the product owners (other than specifying a deadline which is often arbitrary and not tied to actual work milestones), so what gets built isn't visionary at all but driven by the calendar...which means introducing lots of constraints from the beginning. The result may be an incrementally better product, but not a game changer.

We like the saying “reality bats last,” one of Alan Cooper's original design principles. For us that means for any design we create to actually be a solution, it needs to be buildable by our client. It has to live within their unique technology, price, deadline, and resource constraints. However, we have been pushing more and more for the opportunity with our clients to do at least some unfettered, unconstrained design exploration on every project, even ones that have a narrow scope. We don't completely ignore constraints (especially things like regulations which are out of our client's control), and we won't explore designs that rely on telekinesis or nuclear fission, of course. That said, we will definitely push the envelope on what's possible—for a few days or even up to a week—so we can begin with the mindset of the absolute best experience for the user. Over the course of the project we'll push to achieve as much of this game-changing vision as we can.

Allow some your design team to let their imaginations run wild before they get saddled with constraints. (photo by Peter Duyan)

Typically, the output of this design exploration is a collection of hand-drawn sketches that target key plot points in the most important scenarios, and signature interactions (parts of the system fundamental to the experience). The sketches often explore a range of ideas, some that can be implemented within all known constraints, but also others which may bend (or break) constraints. After that, it's really a business decision our clients need to make about how to proceed. Sometimes it makes sense to restructure deadlines, add resource, buy a technology, or abandon a legacy infrastructure to get that “killer app.” Other times it doesn't make sense...but as designers it's our job to imagine the future and enable business decision makers to make the most informed decision they can.

Which brings me back to baseball. You are the manager of your company: what's your strategy? Reality is a heavy hitter, but it shouldn't bat in every slot in your lineup. Can you really afford to play it safe every game? Even if your competition is miles behind, spending time to imagine a better future for your product will position your company to more nimbly take your offering to the next level when constraints go away.

And while you are at it, I would recommend upgrading those bullpen phones.

Alan, Chris, Kendra, and Tamara joined Innova, Russia's premier game development studio, for design education sessions and industry events focusing on the future of gaming and technology in Russia and around the world.

Kendra led interaction design and design communication and collaboration sessions for Innova's designers and technologists. The team immediately began using their new skills, creating a road map to establish goal directed design throughout their organization.

We co-hosted sessions with members of the Russian design community focusing on the current state of design in Russia and the world and the future of interaction design and technology.

Now that we're back in San Francisco, we realize, after all the opinions, ideas and laughter were shared, we are as inspired as our newfound design friends in Moscow to continue developing world-class methods for user-centered design.

The old saying, "History repeats itself" seems to be true in the recent history of book selling.

When the big chain stores of Borders and Barnes & Noble moved into town, the local independent bookstores all quaked in fear or squawked in high dudgeon about how the soulless giant franchises were ruining the business.

Borders failed to compete with Amazon and has since filed for bankruptcy

But the chains taught the independents a valuable lesson: that some books were a commodity. The price and availability of New York Times bestsellers was more important than was the sales clerk's expertise.

The weaker independents closed their doors while the big chains grew fat and happy. The surviving independents continued to disparage the big chains, but the chains delivered a better experience. They added cafes, benches where you could read for hours, and offered a much larger selection of books.

Then the World Wide Web came along, and after some initial jockeying for position, Amazon emerged as the Internet bookseller to beat. Now the shoe was on the other foot. The big chains squawked in righteous rectitude about how they couldn't compete with a company that didn't need to invest in bricks and mortar.

But Amazon taught the chains a valuable lesson: That all books were commodities if you already knew what book you wanted, and it was easier to purchase online, and the online vendors could stock far more titles. What's more, the supporting information on the Web was far more valuable than anything a harried, youthful sales clerk could offer.

Both Borders and Barnes & Noble took huge body blows as the new business model assaulted them, but the Web delivered a better experience. Barnes & Noble created their own online presence and has managed to stay in the game. Borders, however, not only failed to grasp their role in their brick-and-mortar world, but they foolishly gave their online business to Amazon, and so filed for bankruptcy last month.

What's wrong, you might argue, with keeping costs down? Quite a bit, it turns out. If your objective is to design a product people want to use, or to invent something brand new, you must embark on a journey of creativity and innovation. That might seem like normal, every day business, but don't make the mistake of trying to run your creative organization like a conventional one.

Business sage Peter Drucker asserted creative employees "are not labor, they are capital." This has profound implications on the way you should manage and account for your business. As Drucker also asserted, "What is decisive in the performance of capital is not its costs, but its productivity."

In other words, if there is something you can do to enhance the creative abilities of your people, it doesn’t really matter how much it costs, or how long it takes. If it results in a successful invention, or a compelling design, that’s what really counts.

Business people trained in industrial age thinking cut costs from force of habit. After all, expense reduction was an excellent strategy when manufacturing costs were dominant; they are easy to measure and provide instant benefits. In the post industrial age, manufacturing costs are neither dominant nor elastic, so reducing them reduces your quality without improving your desirability. Today, trying to make your product cheaper just makes it frustrating to use and unlovable without making it any cheaper to buy. It’s no longer a valid competitive strategy.