Crowdsourcing innovation involves bringing together ideas from different communities through processes like co-design workshops, online communities, and hackathons. UX plays a key role in facilitating idea generation and collaboration by bringing together the needs information from users and solution information from developers. Lead users who are at the leading edge of market trends can provide valuable ideas. While technology develops quickly, human behavior and adaptation of technology is even faster, so UX has an important role to play in technological innovation by ensuring inventions are meaningful and useful. UX should play a bigger role in crowdsourcing and facilitating the process of turning ideas into inventions through collaboration.
Definitions:Crowdsourcing is realising that you can't have enough good ideas on your own. Whether you are a single person or an organisation. More brains are better than one brain. More people see more, know more, come across more problems, and can find more diverse possible solutions. It's about getting excited together.Innovation is a process that involves having lots of ideas, coming up with problems to solve. It's about making things happen. Inventions become innovations when people use and adopt them - innovations are ideas that have an impact.
Throughout 2009, plenty of barcamps and hackdays took place, and large organisations tried to boost innovation by engaging with developers. Calls for participation in competitions and design challenges were mainly aimed at developers. Innovation was about improving technology, frameworks and tools, and also about making the world a better place through technology, about innovation for social change. Looking at everything that was going on, I got the impression that innovation equaled technology, code and apps, while the crowd were developers. Because they are the ones who build stuff. I asked myself, what role does the UX community play in all of this? What role should UX play? So, I had a look at projects going on within Vodafone, and events that were held throughout 2009, to find out more.
The 24-hour-hackathon where this photo was taken was thematic: CharityHack aimed to create tools for charities. At the event, several sponsoring companies presented their APIs, and charities were present. Good for me: the attendees were quite multi-disciplinary, from product managers to entrepreneurs to developers to charity volunteers (some of these roles could be found in one person). We formed a team with the vague goal to make a mobile application, and I hoped that my visual design skills would keep me busy. However, I found that I could contribute much more. After the API presentations, our brainstorming was driven by the available technology and its boundaries. It was the first time some of the APIs were being used, so a goal was to test and improve them. My UX skills were put to use throughout: facilitating the discussion of what to do, defining the user flow and features based on a usage scenario, planning the screen layout, down to interface and visual design and writing copy. True, I did sleep when the guys were coding. The experience was a great example for multi-disciplinary teamwork. The sponsors got lots of ideas for their APIs, and our project was continued to be a 'real' mobile app. After CharityHack and Ecomo, I've come to the conclusion that hackathon is not the right word for this kind of event. Yes, 24 hours are enough when it's about hacking, improving code, experimenting with APIs. It's not enough if it's about 'bigger ideas'. For this, a longer-term collaboration is necessary, with face-to-face events, hackathons or design challenges, and a separate online or offline space and community. So, while the word hackathon might scare designers away, I found that it's about technology and the use, the meaning of it.
Mozilla Design ChallengesMozilla are a great example for engaging a crowd (community management, Mozilla Labs forums, open innovation ambassadors who mingle and advocate)Mozilla is taking open innovation seriously, and aim to bring dev and design togetherDesigners are the second group of important lead users to improve FirefoxGoal: build an open source library of UX design files
- Make things happen, prototype, etc- Designing for – and with - participation
Ecomo is a project about sustainability, focused on mobile technology. The aim of the project was to develop concepts for tools and services that can help individuals and communities understand their impact on the environment, and to take action to lessen that impact. Ecomo was driven by the UX concept team, UX-initiated. The goal was to create not only concepts, scenarios and visualisations, but something tangible. However, the UX team did lack the resources to make functional prototypes. This drove the decision to make everything open and public - a big step for Vodafone.
Co-design - collaborating with lead users, aka progressives, to innovate - is one of the key skills of the Vodafone UX team. The Ecomo team worked with a different kind of lead user: sustainability experts who are actively engaged in sustainability initiatives and thinking, and also people concerned about the environment, who are not experts. Interviews and workshops generating ideas and designing scenarios to generate concepts took place.
All material was made available online on Betavine, an open community platform for mobile technology run by Vodafone R&D, to inform the 24 h developer hackathon that took place after the concept phase.
The UX team also looked at potential data sources, and organised workshops as part of the hackathon. Several API presentations, eg API that gives access to the most up-to-date carbon and environmental data. During the hackathon, participants also discovered and shared new APIs, opened up ones they had brought along, and created additional ones. All prototypes were licensed as open source. The idea was to use the Ecomo project as a starting point for a sustainability code database, to create a repository of tools, to facilitate the collaboration between leading thinkers, activists, designers and developers. However, the project was descoped due to organisational restructuring, but work continues as part of Corporate Responsibility activities.
The UX designers acted as informants, idea generators and collectors, connectors and facilitators. Ecomo brought together both solution and needs information. Rather than only looking at current user behaviour through user research, the team identified lead users in the field of sustainability, the niche experts, and brought their ideas together with developer lead users who can make these ideas tangible. The team also looked into solutions information, providing APIs. It's worth mentioning that the project facilitated a collaboration between the platforms that provided data and APIs that continues beyond Ecomo. What did the project team learn from Ecomo? Firstly, it took time and personal commitment to find and engage with both sustainability and developer lead users – attending relevant events, barcamps, hackathons, engaging with the existing Betavine community. Secondly, a closer collaboration between these communities should have taken place – including interested developers in the co-design workshops, and encouraging sustainability experts to attend the hack event.
Examples for lead users who hack, change, adapt existing products, or create new ones, include surfers, mountainbikers or scientists. These lead users are experts in their field, designing for themselves. Lead users are part of a specialised community. Hippel points out that "customers don't innovate in a vacuum", but are part of "user innovation communities" who share experiences and learn from each other.Hippel talks about 2 kinds of information that are necessary to innovate: need information and solution information. He writes:
I started my journey with the work by Eric von Hippel, Professor of Technological Innovation in the MIT Sloan School of Management. His book Democratizing Innovation (2005) is one of the key resources if you're interested in open innovation. In 1986, Hippel coined the term 'lead user'.
So, if innovation is about evolving technology and frameworks, then developers are the lead users. They are expert users of tech tools, and they are able to hack and tweak them.The first Vodafone project I'd like to talk about is about exactly this: evolving a platform with the help of lead users, in this case the developer community.
Eric von Hippel describes solution information and needs information. The JIL platform right now is more about innovating solution information. The solution information we define now has to be usable in order to open up mobile and to have more people, not only developer lead users, tinker with it. This is the key learning from the JIL project for me. Doing what we are expected to do, eg providing visual design guidance, opens the door to get more involved. JIL still needs a lot of work, eg the innovation commons, a discussion and ideas space, needs to be better. There needs to be more openness, more sharing of code, more collaboration. Designing and working with lead users has given the UX designers a good understanding of what's needed to make JIL a success.
- engaging with a lead user community is hard work- the interesting ideas are hiding in the niches- UX skills are useful in projects such as the ones I presented
And human dreams!
to be part of innovation, we have to get more involved in the innovation of technology. The sooner we put technology in people's hands and enable them to tinker with it, the earlier we can observe, improve and adapt - helping technologies to become meaningful innovations by adding meaning and making them useful, by paying attention to how the crowd interacts with the technology and what needs are emerging.