Many companies tend to spread their innovation across everything. You may stumble over web pages where seldom-used functions have been shined up radically, but where the basic navigation still lacks a lot. You may find devices (e.g., mobile phones) where small and irrelevant functions have been updated visually and user interactions have been improved, but where core functions (e.g., adding a contact to the contact list) still remain troublesome and old-fashioned. You may find web pages where the graphical experience has been improved radically, but where performing a task has not changed a bit.
These are examples of wrong focus on user experience innovation, and they show how focus is essential when creating successful user experience innovation. If you create a great innovation in a small and rarely used application of your product, then it will most likely not contribute to the overall success of your product.
The mistake in the previous situations is often that the core tasks of the product haven't been identified. Or they have been defined with, for example, a marketing or branding focus rather than a user focus.
The remainder of this chapter will describe a concrete approach to innovating potentially successful innovations that solve the core tasks in new ways. The approach consists of these six steps:
- Identify target users, user needs, and core tasks.
- Identify potential future core tasks.
- List current solutions for the core tasks.
- Evaluate the current solutions for the core tasks.
- Innovate solutions.
- Document the results and process the output.
Throughout the chapter, I will use a concrete example to explain the methods. In this chapter I have chosen to use a low-cost mobile phone, with a traditional keypad and a small black-and-white display. Figure 6-1 shows this phone.
Figure 6-1. Example used in this chapter: a low-cost mobile phone