Step 3: Innovate Context Awareness Abilities

The next step is to innovate potential abilities from the current contextual information that you can gather about your user. You will want to combine this information with user needs, and how a user spends his or her typical day.

Context-aware user experience innovation is very much about looking at existing knowledge about user behavior and needs, and then combining it with the insights and information that you already have about the user. It is also about identifying new potential information that you can gather using the existing sensing abilities that your product already has.

Since finding current context-aware capabilities of your product is in itself an innovation task, you want at this stage to gather a small team of cross-functional colleagues and ideally some lead users for a session. What you are looking for in this innovation session is new contextual information about the user that can be deduced from your existing sensors and insights.

You will want to look at the combination of current user needs, existing knowledge of your users, and the technologies at hand in order to guess what the user may want to do. This combination will become your starting point for the user experience innovation process.

If you are, for example, designing a washing machine, you may from consumer insights (or from previous usage) know that your target users will often want to fill up and prepare the washing machine in the morning before they go to work. You may from a specific user's usage pattern know that the user typically sets the delay timer to six hours on Mondays, five hours on Fridays, and so on. And hence you already have a valuable insight about the specific user. You have in other words found context awareness information that you can use for user experience innovation.

If you are designing a smart phone, you may know that your typical users commute to work in the morning. Motion sensors or the microphone may be able to detect whether the user is sitting on a train, on a bus, or in a car. Hence, combining information that you already know about the target users with actual contextual information from sensors may give you information that a given user is now most likely on his way to work. If the user is using a built-in GPS to find his way to work, you can actually be sure of where he is going. And you can then use this information to optimize the user experience, or even come up with further user experience innovations.

If you are designing a social website, and you trace what a specific user typically does at a specific time of the day when logging in, you can over time learn about the most desired functions that this user performs at a given time of the day or week. Combining this with insights about who the user is may give you very valuable starting points for further user experience innovation.

If you are designing a low-end mobile phone, and market research shows that most target users charge their phone at night and use their phone as an alarm clock, you may have an insight that can help you predict when a user wants to define a new alarm (e.g., by proposing to define a new alarm when the charging plug is inserted at night time).

In the case of the car used as an example in this chapter, you can try to combine a number of existing insights about the user with the possible information that you can gather about the specific user (where he is, who he is, what time it is, etc.). A tangible method is to use the target user needs as the basis for this task. You may also want to add other potential insights that you have about your users (e.g., from day-in-the-life sessions, market feedback, etc.).

To keep this example simple, I used only the target user needs, and then I created a drawing that combines these with the sensing inputs, as shown in Figure 16-4.

Figure 16-4. Drawing combining user needs and sensing abilities

Anecdote

Now you are ready—in an innovation session—to combine what you know about the target users (family fathers in mature markets) and the sensing capabilities. You also want to be creative and, for example, invite lead users to your session. In this session you are free to combine all the knowledge about what could be detected about the user and his or her context. You want to combine this with known user needs and see what ideas it brings up.

In the case of the car for family fathers, you might look at ways to detect who is currently the driver. You might also want to look at ways to make the target user more confident in the car (e.g., enabling parking assistance, auto-braking when a car in front is stopping, etc.). And you might even be able to provide assistance if a car is coming very quickly from behind. Finally, you may want to use the car's cameras to detect street signs.

The results of brainstorming in such an session might look something like Figure 16-5.

Figure 16-5. Example of user experience innovation around context awareness

As you can see from this example, using context awareness combined with knowledge about the target users can give you a number of insights and innovations.

Anecdote