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

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.

The Association of Alternative Newsmedia's 2012 Web Conference was held in San Francisco and attended by publishers, editors, and owners from over 130 of North America's alternative news organizations. Stefan Klocek spoke about how alternative news organizations can bring their content to the emerging platform of tablets in "The Revolution will be Portable: Understanding the Tablet Opportunity" session. He highlighted unique qualities of the tablet for local news consumption and gave an overview of how organizations with a cultivated and established brand presence can deeply engage with their audience. View Stefan's presentation below or download it.

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.

Design research has been a key component of most of the projects I've been involved with at Cooper. Since it adds time and cost, sometimes we have to go to great lengths to convince clients to include research in a project. But design research isn't just about giving the design and product team a leg up on understanding user goals and needs. It's also about minimizing business risk and validating—or challenging—the current strategy. Typically, the insights we gain by talking with and observing users help our clients look at their business goals through a different lens. In addition to providing necessary input for designing successful products and services, this new perspective helps them make better decisions about the long-term trajectory of their product roadmap and approach. For some products and companies, it can be even more transformative, as the insights they gain help them re-imagine not only how to design and deliver better products, but also how to better structure their internal organization to do so.

Of course, companies can only make these kind of strategic pivots if they have the appropriate decision-makers engaged in the initiative, with time set aside in their decision-making process for integrating the input that may come out of user research. I've found that the business executives who treat design initiatives as a strategic endeavor and not just a tactical execution of product definition get much more value for their design dollar.

Cooper is proud to announce design strategy expert Indi Young will be coming to our studio on November 14 to lead a one-day workshop in techniques for creating mental model diagrams.

Understanding users' workflows and work environments is key to developing appropriate products and services, but to really create an experience users love, you have to understand how they think. Indi Young has pioneered techniques for getting at these key understandings during user interviews, and for translating that understanding into powerful communication pieces called mental model diagrams.

The workshop gives users hands-on experience in the process she describes in her book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. Creating winning design solutions starts with the mantra, "Know thy user." This means more than just identifying users' workflows and work environments; it means understanding how they think.

This one-day workshop will reveal how to capture the thought processes and intentions of your audience into a simple and persuasive mental model diagram, and how to use that diagram to steer the course of your organization immediately and for the long term.

Participation is limited to 20 attendees, so register now!

As a business person, you may consider your software to be an operational tool, part of the sales or operations of your organization. But to your customers, it is a pipeline to your corporate soul. The behavior of your software indicates what is really valuable, what is truly important to your company, and there is really no way to hide.

Websites let your customers access your products and services, but as a side effect, they also access your corporate values. If your website is clumsy or slick, easy or confusing, it tells them a story.

Most clients hire Cooper to solve superficial problems. When they first approach us, they ask us to help make their websites “be more friendly” or their software “easier to use.” Sometimes they just want us to “make it pretty.” In every case, we find that hard to use, unfriendly, or even just ugly software is a symptom of deeper problems within the organization.

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.

I just changed from a Wintel machine, which I've used for over 20 years, to a Mac. I had dragged my feet with Office 03 so long that people were starting to notice. I no longer could put off upgrading to the "new" Office interface.

Yes, I do not like the ribbon, but that really wasn't the problem. The real problem was that the changes Microsoft made to the Office Suite accomplished nothing and yet came at a high cost.

The new Office UI is very different but is not better. That is a complaint only old farts make (because they know the old ways), so Microsoft can just move ahead ignoring it. I wrestled with it for awhile, and then I figured, if I have to learn something new, why not learn Mac Keynote? I tried it, and found it was a modest improvement over PowerPoint, but that it didn't aggravate me so much because I no longer expected it to behave the same as the old version as I did with PowerPoint.

Pip Coburn, in The Change Function, says that users will change when the benefit of changing is greater than the perceived pain of making the change. That's the operative element here. There was no benefit and lots of pain. Microsoft didn't improve PowerPoint, they just moved the deck chairs around. That's pathetic and not the behavior of a market leader. FAIL.

Just for the record, I reject the argument that it is a zero-sum game between experienced and new users. That trade-off does exist, but only when physical manipulation is involved, such as twitch games, aircraft controls, and the like. Good UI is, in general, good for both experts and beginners alike.

I do not believe Microsoft's assertions that the ribbon is easy to learn. If you feed someone rotten fishheads for a while, then switch them over to a diet of fresh fishheads, they will be happier. You can then tout the statistical "fact" that "users prefer fresh fishheads," even though the truth is that they HATE fishheads. That, I believe, is how Microsoft gets its rationale for UI changes.

We are thrilled to announce that Cooper will be partnering with Rock Health to provide design consultation and education for their inaugural class of health care startups. Cooper designers have always been keenly interested in design for healthcare environments, and Rock Health is the first seed-accelerator exclusively for health startups! It aims to provide an ecosystem in which these startups can succeed, including mentorship in tackling design challenges. Announced this year at SxSW by the CTO of the White House, Aneesh Chopra, the startups are backed by companies such as Harvard Medical School, and Nike.

Rock Health co-founder Halle Tecco and a a passionate team have assembled a fabulous group of mentors and partners who will guide the start ups. Over the next few months, Cooper will be providing a crash course in design research, interaction design, visual design and hands-on mentoring .

We're super-excited to get started, so stay tuned for more posts on our Rock Health workshops.