MULTI-DEVICE DIGITAL
PRODUCT DESIGN
athens - may 2017 - giorgos gavriil

chapter 1:
a brief intro

who i am
Working in Digital & UX for more than 12
years
Been responsible or co-designing numerous
digital products such as winbank, yellowday,
yellow, easypay kiosks + numerous websites
and apps.
Current position: UX & Context Marketing
Director @ Linakis Digital

but something
was amiss…

indications we’re doing it wrong
Our product should have this, and this,
and this, and this feature…
feature creep

indications we’re doing it wrong
Look at a nice feature that this company
from abroad has launched. Let’s do it
too!
COPY WITHOUT DISCRIMINATION

indications we’re doing it wrong
The boss says that this feature is the
most important of all
HIPPO EFFECT*
*Highest Paying Person’s Opinion

indications we’re doing it wrong
Sh%##t, we can’t make the launch date.
Let’s phase out the most heavy features
to implement
OVER-OPTIMISTIC ROADMAP - NO MVP

indications we’re doing it wrong
Chatbots are so hot right now, let’s do a
chatbot too, anything, as long as we
launch it first…
technology as an innovation cushion

released in 1997 for god’s shake! whole new version in 2017
enter contextual design

chapter 2:
DESIGN FOR LIFE
The 7 cool concepts

THE WHEEL OF JOY IN LIFE
Empower users to achieve
all their intents and life
work.
Design with the
expectation that the users
will be distracted, splitting
their attention across
multiple activities.
Support the unstoppable
momentum of life: help
users fill every moment of
dead time with useful or
amusing activities.
ACCOMPLISH

THE WHEEL OF JOY IN LIFE
Increase the intimacy and
collaboration of users’ real
relationships.
Help them make contact
easily, find things and do
things together while
pursuing their separate
lives.
Foster real connections.
CONNECTION

THE WHEEL OF JOY IN LIFE
Support users’ sense of
core self.
Help them express their
sense of sense.
Increase the users’ sense
of being their best selves.
IDENTITY

THE WHEEL OF JOY IN LIFE
Provide the user with
pleasurable moments
through color, sound,
movement and animation.
SENSATION

THE TRIANGLE OF JOY IN USE
Provide immediate, simple
fulfilment of core intents,
ideally instantly, “just like
magic”.
DIRECT INTO ACTION

THE TRIANGLE OF JOY IN USE
Remove all inconveniences,
setup, plugging in etc.
No glitches and technical
hassles
THE HASSLE FACTOR

THE TRIANGLE OF JOY IN USE
Reduce the time it takes to
learn the product as close
as possible to zero.
THE DELTA

chapter 3:
develop empathy

introducing the
experience models

a day in the life

identity model

relationship model

collaboration model

sensation model

contextual research
Talk with users in the context of their
lives: observe how and why they do the
activities you’re interested in all contexts
of their day-to-day lives.
immerse into their lives

some examples

shopping
Start at home, see how they do research
or buy online
Do retrospective accounts of recent
purchases
Visit store to pick an item

travel
Plan interviews with users at all stages of
travel
Use day-to-day retrospective accounts since
it is not a cohesive, heads-down activity.
Be creative: Try to find users vacationing
where you are located

let’s work a case study
together!
Let’s suppose that we are asked to design a
music listening platform. How would you
organize the contextual research?

how would you structure the
contextual interviews?
(when -where - what?)

chapter 4:
DESIGN THE PRODUCT

“We shape our buildings and
afterwards, our buildings
shape us”
winston churchill

war room

the wall walk
Immerse a diverse design team
to the data, own it and come
back to it again and again.
Create an environment for the
data to drive innovation
a 2-6 hrs session with a single goal

like a museum visit!
Each person silently walk the panels, reads the data, puts up sticky notes with
ideas, notes holes in the data and questions/themes to explore in future
interviews.

hot ideas examples
Make travelling planning like a game
a metaphor
Automate everything, never ask the client
for a single document
technology challenge
Put the manager’s whole job on the phone
a user experience challenge

from the big picture to the details
Ideate,
explore many
options,
decide on the
big picture
vision
Start
exploring in
depth,
maintaining
the customer
perspective
storyboards
Define
structure
UED

Creating the vision
step 1

The cautionary tale of the
pottery class
let’s take a break to tell you a story

a vision is the story of the
new world you will invent
for the user
produce 4-7 visions | 20-45 minutes/vision | like campfire stories

vision - an example
example

now it’s time to pick the
visions apart!
we scavenge them for their best elements, synthesising a new coherent vision

we then switch from story-
based to structural mode and
extract product concepts out
of the selected vision
in rough wireframe sketches to reveal function and automation as this
has been ideated so far

product concept
example

product concept
example

Creating Storyboards
step 2

storyboards are step-by-step
scenarios depicting actions
incl. manual steps, interactions
with multiple devices and a very
preliminary User interface
back to story mode
Make 6-8 storyboards for all the primary scenarios of use
that describe the basic product vision

storyboarding

storyboarding

storyboarding

UED and 1st version for
testing
step 3

user environment design
an analogy to a floor plan: details are unimportant for understanding the structure of the house

user environment design
each focus area must have a purpose: if you cannot write a single sentence that describes this purpose,
most possibly the product is not well structured, either because there are many different functions in
the focus area or because it does not support a coherent activity.

high-level interaction pattern

don’t get lost in design discussions.
all design work after the vision is one
the way to testing with actual users,
not implementation
the goal

paper prototype
notice the movable parts that will be inserted of withdrawn during the interview

chapter 5:
BUILDING THE PRODUCT

the work we have done up to now
(vision - product concept - UED) can
cater for a roadmap of 2-5 years.
a word of caution

“Real artists ship”
steve jobs

Make sure you do not water down the
core innovation: what is the one key
change in people’s practice which the
product introduces?
if you should remember one thing

prepare a shipping ued, test it with
users, get into detailed design and
start building…
what’s next

Case study continued

day-in-the-life

identity

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THANK YOU!
Find me on Linkedin: giorgosgavriil