Natalie Hanson, Ph.D.

Tag: delight

  • Smiling city

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    This week I was talking to one of the Principals at ZS, helping him to prepare for a client engagement.  His consulting team is putting together a proposal regarding the use of iPads for sales enablement.  They are preparing to do ride-alongs with local pharmaceutical reps, and they wanted my help to help them prepare.  I’m hoping I might get to join in, both for the ride-along and for the analysis of the customer’s requirements.  If so I will definitely write a post about my experience, as it’s been ages since I did any field research of my own, and I’ve never observed pharmaceutical sales.  It would be a great learning experience!

    One of the questions that came up during our prep session was regarding measuring impact.  Some die-hard social scientists and designers argue that if you get into those conversations, you’re in a losing proposition.  I just don’t agree.  I think it’s normal to expect that business people will want to measure the impact of their investments, whether services, hardware, or software.  So we talked a lot about how to measure usability.  I explained the ISO 9241 guidelines for usability, summarized by one of my former SAP colleagues Johann Sarmiento in the diagram below:

    Then we got to talking about how you really assess satisfaction.  It is a subjective measure, but not to be underestimated!  Satisfaction relates directly to adoption and (if you’re working in the consumer space) critical indicators like Net Promoter Score (NPS).  As mentioned in earlier posts, I like to use the word delight rather than satisfaction, because sometimes I think we mistake efficaciousness of a process or tool with satisfaction.   So today as I was skimming my RSS reader, I came across an article from Flowing Data.  It’s absolutely one of my favorite blogs!  Nathan wrote a brief post about a temporary art installation which used data from a camera to analyze faces and interpret the mood of the city and project a happy face or a sad face on a tall building visible throughout a city in Germany:

    And that got me thinking … what about the reflexive impact of this type of installation?  I can think of a few people that I’d like to provide with one of these feedback mechanisms.  What if we had one of these in the office, and if people were grumpy it helped them recognize that and seek to change their behavior?  Ok, maybe that’s a stretch!

    The Flowing Data blog post questions what the threshold is for a happy city.  I would go further and ask … I wonder if Lindu Germany got more smiley based on this publicly visible feedback loop?  And, for me the question often comes back to … what can we learn about this as we strive to make better, more consumable, more usable enterprise software?  How can we build awareness of what it means to deliver delight, and where are the mechanisms that provide us insight and feedback into how we’re doing?

  • Visible joy in 7 minutes

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Gamification is a hot topic on SAP’s internal social media channels these days.

    You have to wonder why enterprise software developers are talking about gaming.  Or, if you’ve ever used enterprise software, maybe you know why – it has to be better than talking about SAP R/3!  A couple of years ago I wrote about the idea of Project Delight, and in follow up posts, I questioned whether it is possible to experience delightful engagement while working with mandatory enterprise applications.  I agree with trending discussions (both inside of SAP and elsewhere) that make the case that elements of social applications and gaming could transform enterprise systems in powerful ways.

    SAP co-CEO Jim Snabe spoke about these ideas in a recent article on Silicon.com:

    Snabe added: “If I look at how my kids are consuming software, if it’s not desirable immediately, they throw it away. Can you imagine what happens to your IT landscape when these people come into business? I don’t know how you want to keep your IT strategy going so we’d better make our software delightful as well.”

    The SAP co-CEO told the conference that he had also been inspired by a visit to games developer EA Games.  “They have one rule – if they don’t see visible joy in seven minutes the game will be a flop, so I told that to our developers: visible joy in seven minutes. We’re still working on that.

    Visible joy in 7 minutes.  In the enterprise?  Yeah.  Yeah!  And I love that Jim is also using the term delight!

    So what’s next?

    Members of my User Experience (UX) team are trying to figure out how to draft off of all the great, positive, creativity energy in this arena right now.  At the same time, we are beginning to articulate the relationship between gamification and user experience, and how the two could work in concert to solve some of our current challenges.  We have some work ahead of us to meet the expectations of our co-CEO and our savvy, gaming SAP employees.  But this one, at least, should be a fun ride!

  • Delightful steps

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    At work I often wonder … if you’re in the business of making something utilitarian, can you really make things elegant, compelling, or delightful to enterprise users?  I called the hypothetical effort Project Delight.  Maybe I’ve overly naive and optimistic, but I think it’s possible.  And the next time someone doubts me, I’m going to show them this video:

    In fact, I like this so much that I may show it at the beginning of every participatory design workshop!

  • Enterprise UI Summit – prework

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Elsewhere, I’ve written about SAP’s intranet (called the Corporate Portal), which runs on the SAP NetWeaver platform.  In addition to our intranet, at SAP we have an instance of the Jive Clearspace Suite installed for collaboration both inside and outside the firewall.  I have enjoyed my use of the ‘Collaboration Workspace’ so far, though I do sometimes find it frustrating that it exists independent of the rest of our landscape; it makes it ‘above the flow’ rather than ‘in the flow’, as Michael Idinopulos said.  Nonetheless, my experience with Clearspace has been quite positive so far, so when Jive CMO Sam Lawrence tweeted that he had open seats remaining for the Enterprise UI Summit in Aspen, I jumped at the opportunity!

    I am traveling with Kirsten Gay, my User Experience Manager.  We leave for Aspen on Wednesday morning, and I’ll be home very late Friday night.  Sam will be writing about the Summit on his blog Go Big Always, and as part of our pre-work, he asked participants to answer some questions about enterprise user interface.  You can read my responses (and see the responses of other Summit participants) on Sam’s blog.

    If these topics are of interest to you, Jive is also hosting a community they’re calling Clearstep:

    Clearstep is a site focused on best practices and education around starting, managing and growing online communities and enterprise social networks for employees, partners and customers. … There has been a lot of demand for this type of community from our customers and we are excited to hear what you think, both about the community itself and your company’s use of social software.

    You can learn more about Clearstep and request access here.  I hope to Twitter and/or blog while I’m at the Summit in Aspen, so stay tuned!

  • Project Delight

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    In the coming month or so, I will step down from the governing body of our intranet, the Portal Business Group (PBG).  I helped formulate the concept of the group in 2003 and was one of its founding members.  During my tenure I was responsible for representing the interests of a quarter of SAP’s employee base – ten thousand sales and marketing employees globally.  From my point of view it has been one of the most successful virtual teams I’ve ever participated in, but after five years it is more than time for a change.  Fortunately, one of the guys that worked for me had sat in for me during my maternity leave last year, and so I had a clear successor. 

    In May last year, I worked with my User Experience Manager to conceptualize and run an information architecture workshop for the PBG.  Based on multiple user research studies and a lot of research on best practices, our work has led to a multi-year plan to redesign the corporate portal.  It was great to bring our expertise to such a large scale effort!  And then in January of this year, the Jakob Neilsen group announced that we had been recognized as a Top Ten Intranet based on our initial launch of the portal on the NetWeaver platform.  With those two achievements, I feel that I have made a significant contribution to the organization, and I also feel that the value of my User Experience team is well understood across the multiple Board areas that are represented in the PBG.  So I am definitely leaving on a high note, though with such a large, complex system, there is always more to be done. 

    There were a couple of people in IT who I have collaborated with since the launch of the corporate portal, and I felt it only right to let them know of my plans before announcing them more widely.  So while Dirk was in the U.S. this week, I let him know that I would be stepping down in the coming weeks.  He has been ready to make a change too, so we spent some time reminiscing, and then got to talking about what we hoped to do next.

    Towards the end of our meeting, we got to talking about the Sonos music system that he wanted to buy and bring back to Germany.  The Euro continues to gain against the dollar, so it seemed worth the trouble of getting it home on the plane.  I had purchased a Sonos when they first came out, and couldn’t say enough good things about it.  Prior to the Sonos I had been listening to my music through my home theater on two 400-CD jukeboxes.  Although I was frustrated with the lag as the system switched CDs, I loved the shuffle feature by genre.  I felt that my setup had transformed how I listened to music, and in fact enabled me to listen to a much more varied selection of music than I would have by selecting individual CDs.  

    But the jukeboxes were getting full, and I didn’t want to buy another one.  We had moved from our small row house in the city to a larger house in the suburbs, and the home theater was not in the main room (family room / kitchen) where we spent most of our time.  In addition, I was buying more and more of my music from iTunes, and I was having to burn one CD for the jukebox, and another for my car.  It was time consuming, felt redundant, and I had a hard time keeping track of my new music.  The Sonos has changed all that.  I used the wireless network to position amplifiers and speakers on all three floors of the new house.  I download music from iTunes to a network-attached storage device (NAS) and I can sync both my iPod and the Sonos system with the library.  The playlist feature is easier and more powerful than the one in iTunes.  And now I have an iPod jack in my car, so I don’t have to burn CDs at all.  I can listen to new music in the house and in my car just as soon as it’s downloaded.

    Dirk and I got to talking about user experience, then, and why it is so hard to bring that type of compelling, easy flowing experience into the enterprise.  If we could launch a Project Delight, what would it accomplish, and how would it enable and entice our users?  It’s a good question, and one that I continue to think about as my work at SAP grows and changes.