[ Preface ]

Why I Wrote This Book

“A Psychologist Doing Product and Service Design? How Interesting…”

A common response when I introduce myself as a psychologist who does product design is surprise: “Isn’t that the job of designers? Oh, you must really get into the customer’s head! Are you analyzing me right now?” [No comment! ;)]

While often intrigued, these people don’t know how knowledge about human cognition and emotion can be applied in digital product and service design. They are not alone. After giving a talk at SXSW, I had more than one person say, “That is so cool! I wish I knew how to use that in my products…”

So Do You Want the Secret to Designing a Great Experience?

Start by thinking of a truly great experience in your life. Was it one of life’s milestones? The birth of a child, marriage, graduation, etc.? Or was it a specific moment in time—a concert with your favorite band, a play on Broadway, an immersive dance club, an amazing sunset by the ocean, or watching your favorite movie?

You might remark that it was “brilliant” or “an amazing experience” to a friend.

What you probably didn’t think about was how many different senses and cognitive processes blended together to make that experience for you. Can you almost smell the popcorn when you think of that movie? Maybe the play had not only great acting but creative costumes and lighting and starred someone you thought was good-looking and moved with amazing grace. Was it the dancing with festive fans nearby? So many elements come together to provide a “singularly” great experience.

How might you go about designing a great experience for your product or service? What are the sensations, emotions, and cognitive processes that make up your experience? How can you tease them apart systematically into component parts? How will you know you are building the right thing?

This book is designed to help you understand and harness what we know about human psychology to unpack experiences into their component parts and uncover what is needed to build a great experience. This is a great time to do so. The pace of scientific discovery in brain science has been steadily increasing. There have been tremendous breakthroughs in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and human–computer interaction that provide new information about distinct brain functions and how humans process that information to generate that feeling of a single experience.

How Humans Think About Thinking (And What We Don’t Realize)

Your thoughts about your own thinking can be misleading because there are limits to your awareness of your own mental processes. We all know what it’s like to struggle over a decision about which outfit to wear for a big date or a job interview: Will you meet their initial expectations? Will they get the wrong impression? Does it look good? Do you look professional enough? Are those shoes too attention-grabbing? There are a lot of thoughts there—but there are still more thoughts that you are unable to articulate, or are even aware of.

One of the fascinating things about consciousness is how much of our thinking is impenetrable to our own awareness. For example, while we are easily able to identify the shoes we plan to wear to an interview, we do not have insight into how we recognized the shoes as shoes, or how we were able to sense the color of the shoes. We generally don’t know where our eyes are moving to next, the position of our tongue (yikes!), how we control our heart rate, how we see, how we recognize words, or how we remember our first home (or anything), to mention just a few examples. As a result, we must identify and understand not only consciously accessible cognitive processes, but also those that are unconscious (like eye movements often are) or deep-seated—like the emotions related to those concepts.

I was trained in my PhD program as a cognitive scientist, studying memory, language, problem solving, and decision making. Now, aftermore than 15 years of consulting, I’ve learned how to interview and observe customers, learn what makes them tick on the inside, and identify opportunities to make exceptional products or services that grow their businesses and provide a great experience for their customers. I now work with some of the world’s biggest companies influencing product strategies for global products. I hope you benefit from what I’m sharing here and enjoy the process of understanding your customers as much as I do!

Who This Book Is For

I wrote this book to help product owners, product managers, designers, user experience professionals, and developers to: (a) identify the cognitive processes that together form a brilliant experience, (b) learn how to extract information about these through contextual interviews with your customers, and (c) apply that knowledge in your product and service design processes. This is meant to be a practical and hands-on book, not an academic one.

Why Product Managers, Designers, and Strategists Need This Information

No product, service, or experience will ever be a runaway success if it does not end up meeting the needs of the target audience. You want someone exposed to your product or service for the first time to say something like a Londoner might: “Right, that’s brilliant!”

But how, as a corporate leader, marketer, product owner, or designer, can you be sure that your products or services will create an exceptional experience? You can ask customers what they want, but many don’t know what they need or can’t clearly articulate their needs. You might work from the vantage point of what you would want, but do you really know how a 13-year-old girl wants to work with her “Insta” and “Finsta” (Instagram)? How a high-net-worth investor wants to “seek alpha”? Or how a 75-year-old attorney wants to search for tax law regarding reverse triangular mergers? So how should you proceed?

This book is designed to equip you with the tools you need to deeply understand your customers’ needs and perspective. As a cognitive scientist, I feel like “usability testing” and “market surveys” and “empathy research” are at times both too simplistic and too complicated. I think they sometimes miss the mark in helping you—the product team—to understand what you need to build.

I believe there is a better way: by understanding the elements of an experience (in this book I will describe six as a start), you can better identify audience needs at different levels of explanation. Throughout this book, I’ll help you better understand what the audience needs at those different levels and make sure you hit the mark with each one.

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Rethinking “the” Experience

Part I is designed to share some of the fascinating properties of human cognition that you as designers, product managers, and developers need to be aware of:

• Chapter 1 introduces the notion that “an experience” is actually many different experiences and cognitive processes all rolled into one human experience.
• Chapter 2 gets you thinking about vision and attention—what draws you in, what you are seeking, and how much of your thinking happens without your conscious awareness.
• Chapter 3 reminds you that a huge part of your brain is wired to help you represent space, and gets you thinking about how you might harness that machinery in your virtual space (e.g., an app or website). Did I mention the part about Tunisian ants in the desert? Have a look!
• Chapter 4 is there to emphasize how much of your experience is actually manufactured and filled in by your memories, and how quickly you go from concrete objects to abstract thoughts. What are your customers filling in with their thoughts?
• Chapter 5 reminds you that you aren’t your customer. Your customers rarely use the language you do, and you can quickly lose their trust by being either too simplistic or overly technical with the words you use. And do the words you use mean the same thing that your customers think they mean?
• Chapter 6 gets to what we typically think of when we are thinking: solving problems and making decisions. However, this serves as a reminder that in many cases (escape rooms are a good example) what we think we’re trying to solve is often not what we actually have to solve. What problem do your customers think they need to solve with your product or service?
• Chapter 7 describes how our best intentions for wise decisions in Chapter 6 are often co-opted by our emotional selves. What will appeal to your customers, enhance their lives, and awaken their deepest passions—and allay their deepest fears?

After reading Part I, you will (hopefully) know much more about human cognition and how an experience is composed of many thoughts, cognitive processes, and emotions than you did before.

Part II: Exposing Secrets

Part II is designed to make every member of your team a valuable member of the customer research team. This part shows you how you can watch your customers work, and interview them, and in doing so expose valuable insights about the cognitive processes described in Part I. This is practical, “boots-on-the-ground” stuff. You do not need to be a psychologist to do this!

• Chapter 8 introduces how I want you to conduct what I am calling a contextual interview—a hybrid of a simple interview and watching someone work (what researchers often call contextual inquiry). This chapter covers a lot, including: Why do interviews at all? What do I need to capture? And once I have all my notes, how do I organize them to get product insights out of them?
• Chapter 9 helps teach you how to gather lots of valuable insights about what captured your customers’ attention, what they were seeking, and why. I’ll share how I used this very same technique to help security teams at major buildings and stadiums keep people safer by better managing all the cameras and bells and whistles and beeps constantly alerting them to everything from open doors to stuck elevators to faulty water heaters!
• Chapter 10 shows you how to carefully record the words your customers are using, and what they mean to them. You’ll learn how we helped to organize every single malady at NIH.gov for both world experts and ordinary folks—a common challenge at many organizations.
• Chapter 11 gets you thinking about your customers’ mental model for your product or service. Where do they think they are in your app or service? What do they think they should do to move from step to step?
• Chapter 12 reminds you to harness what your customers already know. What knowledge are they bringing with them? How do they think your product or service works? What experiences inform that? I share the example of designing products and services for small business owners and quickly realizing there are two hugely different groups with completely different needs, suggesting two different sets of products and services should be offered.
• Chapter 13 helps you to discover what your customers think they are trying to solve, and what they think they can do about it. You’ll see that part of a great experience might be helping your customers to realize that they actually have a very different problem to solve. I describe why first-time home buyers are often a great example fo this.
• Chapter 14 helps you intuit what was never spoken in the interview. What are your customers’ biggest goals? What are their fears? What do they need to know to be able to say yes to your product or service? I’ll describe how interviews asking first about what credit cards are in a customer’s wallet can quickly turn into revelatory experiences for them (hugs may be coming!). This is when you might realize that you really need to refocus your product line to help your customers achieve their biggest life goals.

Part III: Putting the Six Minds to Work in Your Designs

OK, you’ve discovered some fascinating insights into what attracts your customers, the words they use, the emotions they have, the problems they are trying to solve, and more. But how does this change your product? Read on!

• Chapter 15 is all about “sense-making”: how to identify patterns in your data and how you might segment customers by using what you know about their thought patterns and emotions—which might be a very different way of thinking about your customers than focusing on their zip codes, average sales, or years of experience! You’ll find out how we put this to work for groups as diverse as Millennials managing their money and families that have experienced fraud.
• Chapter 16 gets you thinking about how to make your product a success for each of the groups you identified in Chapter 15 by marketing it appropriately. How do you appeal to them by recognizing what they think they need, enhance their lives, and ultimately awaken their passions and helping them to achieve their biggest goals in life?
• Chapter 17 covers how to test your product or service idea. Why not get to success and launch faster? Learn how we integrate the Six Minds into a lean, Agile approach (my apologies to any of the buzz words I may fail to mention).
• Chapter 18 is a summary of sorts. I want to show you how my complany launched some of the top one hundred websites in the world and had the Six Minds in mind as we designed. I also want you to think about how the Six Minds aren’t static. The elements that are most crucial may change over time (e.g., during the buying process).
• Chapter 19 is forward-thinking. You can’t swing a cat in Silicon Valley lately without having an artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) strategy (no cats were harmed in the writing of this book). I encourage all of you, especially product owners and technical leads, to take a step back and think about what you are really trying to accomplish. I argue that knowing more about the humans you will be interacting with will increase the likelihood that your costly and risky endeavor is a smashing success. Think about how ML and AI can support humans so they attend to the right information, get fed the right words at the right time, and ultimately make better decisions and solve more problems.

Now go! Read on, and with your new knowledge, tools, and skills make the best products and services your customers will ever experience!

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

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Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues at Brilliant Experience, especially those who got me to start writing and to finish. To my friends and colleagues at User Experience Professionals Association, nationally and here in Washington, DC, you inspire me every single day. I hope you find this helpful! To my editors and the team at O’Reilly: you have been patient and helpful whether I deserved it or not. Thank you! And to my family, who might have wondered what I was doing as I typed away in the office or coffee shops all those hours, I’m back!

A Final Note to the Psychologists and Cognitive Scientists Reading This

Bear with me. In a practical and applied book I simply can’t get to all the nuances of the mind/brain that exist, and I need a way to communicate to a broad audience what is relevant to product and service design. There are a myriad of amazing facts about our minds which (sadly) I am forced to gloss over, but I do so intentionally so that we may focus on the broader notion of designing with multiple cognitive processes in mind, and ultimately allow for an evidence-based and psychologically driven design process. It would be an honor to have my fellow scientists work with me to integrate more of what we know about our minds into the design of products and services. I welcome your refinements. At the end of each chapter I will point to further citations the interested reader can pursue to get more of the science they should know.

Let Me Know What You Think

The conversation is just beginning. Google me! Share your thoughts and help me refine my thinking.