Step 4: Innovate Around Your Ecosystem

You are now basically ready to innovate user experience improvements for your ecosystem. Again, you want to invite a group of people (including, e.g., lead users) to an open innovation session.

As mentioned earlier, innovating around your ecosystem requires you to get out of your box. You will need to think how you can improve the interfaces in various parts of your ecosystem, and you might even want to remain open to entirely new sources of content for your product. You might even suggest including functionality from third-party software developers or web pages.

Figure 12-2. Ecosystem for the e-book reader application

User Needs, Core Tasks, and Pain Points

A concrete method to start innovating around your ecosystem is to directly apply target user needs, core tasks, and pain points to each of the identified ecosystem elements, and try to come up with truly innovative solutions for these needs, tasks, and pain points. You will be surprised at how these elements can also be extremely useful for user experience innovation for your ecosystem.

Displaced Simplicity

Another possibility is to use a method called displaced simplicity. Displaced simplicity refers to using an alternative platform or software product to solve a task that may be complex to solve with your own product.

If you are designing a mobile device, you might for example want to move complex tasks to PC software. If you are designing a remote control for a TV, you can move complex setup of the remote control to onscreen menus on the TV. If you are designing a PC application, such as an e-book reader, you might choose to displace complex functions to a supporting web page. And so forth.

When displacing functionality to another platform, it is seldom a good idea to simply copy the original functionality to the other platform. For users to actually spend the time and effort to use a different platform, you have to provide a true benefit for them. Simply moving your original functionality or copying the same interaction to another platform without any obvious reason or benefit may end up introducing a pain point instead.

E-book Reader Example

In the case of the e-book reader, the result of the innovation session could end up looking as shown in Figure 12-3.

Figure 12-3. Example of ecosystem innovation