Great design isn’t about beauty; it’s about knowing the right questions to ask, uncovering the right places to look, and agreeing on the right problems to solve.
At ThoughtWorks Live Australia 2016, Stephanie Rieger (Director of Design & Strategy at Yiibu) talked about three mindsets that combine design, business strategy, and technology to drive growth and embed experience design within your organisation.
2. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmv/3371886
require unprecedented degrees of creativity"
Capitalising on Complexity - 2010 IBM CEO Study
create entirely new situations..."
converging and influencing each other to
at us faster or with less predictability; they are
"events, threats and opportunities aren't just coming
"...these first-of-their-kind developments
3. “The big shift”
Measuring the forces of long-term change
John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison
https://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2253804907/
4. Source: The Power of Pull; An Examination of Firms in the Brave New World of 21st Century Internet Economics by John Seely Brown
years
creation of new
infrastructural technology
period of rapid
disruption
stability
stability
~60 yrs
Stable s-curve over decades
• 18th, 19th 20th century
infrastructure
• goal was to develop
scalable efficiency
The past
5. years
stability?
stability?
period of rapid
disruption
creation of new
infrastructural technology
• 21st century driven by
continuous exponential
advances of computation,
storage, bandwidth…
Rapid set of punctuated moves
(potentially never ending?)
The present
Source: The Power of Pull; An Examination of Firms in the Brave New World of 21st Century Internet Economics by John Seely Brown
12. 26 Amazon Dash Button Hacks You
Probably Didn't Know About
1. Call Uber
2. Order pizza
3. Order beer
4. Order anything from Amazon
5. Track baby data
6. Log your habits into a Google Spreadsheet
7. Add things to a grocery list
8. Track music practice
9. Log your time spent studying
10. Track your work hours
11. Control any power outlet in your home
12. Control Philips Hue lights
13. Control your Tesla's Air Conditioning
14. Netflix and chill
(and can find instructions for online)
they can change it
if something doesn't suit them,
19. a pragmatic mix of beautiful, and ‘good enough’
https://www.flickr.com/photos/yto/4923423098/
some of the world’s largest brands
thrive by designing products that reflect
24. more than 10,000 similar businesses
are powered by Facebook...
over in Thailand,
25. Neither of these examples have been implicitly facilitated by the
platform…they’ve simply been fuelled by the ability to communicate
and share, on any device, and with a wide audience.
26. Find a social vendor1
Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models
27. 2
Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models
Browse products
28. 3
Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models
Inquire via messaging
(WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, Messenger, SMS etc.)
29. 4
Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models
Get payment details
(PayPal, WeChat, Alipay, bank account etc.)
30. 5
Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models
Confirm payment
31. Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models
6 Ship and track
34. Here’s an example of a company that leveraged desire
paths to completely re-imagine their business…
35. Meet yy.com—a “Google
Hangouts” style platform
with over 300 million users
and 11 million channels,
and programs ranging from
karaoke, to “talk radio” and
educational topics.
36. YY.com began as a social gaming site with video chatrooms
so gamers could discuss strategy. The site grew very fast.
They had growth…but no profit.
37. chatrooms, people weren’t just chatting—
some people were singing”
“…until they realised that inside some of the
https://www.flickr.com/photos/saad/2513736/
— NPR Planet Money
40. YY now offers its own virtual currency.
Users purchase credits and use them to
show affection for their favourite stars
by buying them virtual gifts such as
roses and lollipops.
Gifts range in cost from mere pennies to
as much as $50 (£35) and yy gets a cut
of each transaction.
41. “top Karaoke singers regularly make $20K (£15K) a month
off of virtual gifts, with one college student reportedly
earning an astonishing $188K (£150K) per month
using the site to give Photoshop lessons”
- The largest social network you’ve never heard of
42. In 2014, yy IPOed and more than 50% of their revenue now comes
from their virtual currency enabled music business.
57. How different age groups think about technology is important,
but in a global marketplace, it’s the cultural, historical and
societal differences that will often make or break a product.
58. China has 14 cities with populations
over five million...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/decar66/6341327886 Source: Wikipedia, China Highlights
59. ...a whopping 41 cities with
more than 2 million inhabitants
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tahini/10468208216
60. ...and a “middle class” growing at a rate of
80,000 people a day
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tahini/10468208216 Source: China Connect
61. rural residents can be challenging
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lukewebber/4588854679
reaching China’s 600 million
for brands in this market,
62. its close to 700 million urban residents
but no more so than
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tuchodi/5620884999
opening enough stores to service
65. …these factors combined help to
explain why Chinese e-commerce
has developed quite differently
than in Europe or N America
76%
of online retail
involves individual
merchants
of online retail
involves online
marketplaces90%
66. Marketplaces—such as Alibaba’s TMall and TaoBao—provide an economically, socially and
technologically appropriate alternative to missing infrastructure: high visibility, high traffic,
customizable, social-media + mobile optimized commerce.
68. …but what’s important here isn’t China, its the group of
characteristics it represents.
Find similar conditions elsewhere, and you may be able to
replicate aspects of this model.
69. “...most of the people have phones but
there are only 3 malls per 20 million inhabitants*…
It’s a unique time...the right time to leapfrog over ‘offline’.”
- jumia.com co-founder
THE BIGGEST ONLINE SHOPPING MALL IN AFRICA
Egypt | Kenya | Uganda| Ivory Coast| Nigeria | Morocco
*that’s 60K people per retail outlet compared to 7K in APAC and 389 in the U.S.)
70. brands in these markets can experiment…
ignore what’s “normal” and find
the most locally appropriate
https://www.flickr.com/photos/yto/3640718959
with little baggage to weigh them down,
path to profit
72. https://www.flickr.com/photos/wippetywu/14295584182/
a pair of shoes, return it, and then buy the next size…
so we thought let’s encourage them to order two
or three sizes…and pay only for what they accept
- How WhatsApp helped Jumia disrupt Africa
“...we saw that customers would order
74. Russian e-commerce brand
Lamoda has turned poor postal
infrastructure into an excuse to
deliver items you didn’t even
ask for and up-sell you at the
door as you try them on…
81. actors in the ecosystem...
and an increasing reliance on other
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flavouz/3137171590
cost of aluminium?
environmental lobby,
recycling?
IP battles, user ‘hacking’,
knock-off capsules
83. …unless, you design your product, from the ground up to
thrive amidst disruption.
84. On August 11 2014, online media company BuzzFeed closed a
$50M funding round and announced the creation of a new group
called BuzzFeed Distributed.
The aim of the group would be to address a growing problem…
88. Instead of trying to lure eyeballs to its own website, BuzzFeed
would experiment with ways to publish original content directly to
where its audience already spent their time—some 30 different
global platforms.
89. BuzzFeed also built
Pound*, a sharing-
analysis technology that
goes beyond traditional
analytics that only
capture traffic….
what traditional analytics show…
*Process for Optimizing and
Understanding Network Diffusion
Source: Buzzfeed
90. Instead, Pound captures
how stories spread on the
social web from one
person to another,
including downstream
visits across networks and
1-2-1 platforms like Gchat
and email.
what is actually happening
Source: Buzzfeed
91. BuzzFeed uses this data to
inform new experiments
and continuously improve
content fit, and placement.
People making
stuff
Apps
Distributed
Web
content
data, learnings,
$$$
contentdata, learnings, $$$
content
data, learnings,
$$$
Source: Buzzfeed SXSW 2015
92. “…it increasingly doesn’t matter where our
content lives…and that can be a huge
advantage and it’s something that I think lots
of media companies get scared of…but we
think it can make us a stronger company”
— Jonah Peretti
https://www.flickr.com/photos/43097880@N02/13884849857/
Source: Buzzfeed SXSW 2015
101. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tijanav/4885088185
“…data will tell you, if you're very lucky,
what happened. It won't ever tell you why.
If you want to understand why, that requires a different set
of skills, largely in your brain and in your heart”.
Dao Nguyen, BuzzFeed data maven, courtesy Wired
“You have to use a lot of intuition and a lot of creativity,
and the data is one part of the input…”