Let’s look at what really happened. We have found certain prerequisites to be essential for any innovation to ship from a company. No company is consistently innovative. Even Apple has had flops: the Newton, the Lisa, and MobileMe, to name a few. But the real question is, what do we mean when we say innovation? Do we mean developing a new technology such as the ARPAnet, which kicked off massive change over time and eventually resulted in today’s internet—but didn’t produce useful and profitable products or services for years?

Now there is a buzz about the “internet of things,” including the Smart Grid, creating a language for things to talk to each other. The ARPAnet, the Smart Grid, digital paper, voice recognition, self-driving cars, and such are what we call foundational innovations. Everything on this list takes 20 or more years until they are ready for regular use. Foundational innovations are new core technologies which ultimately create new materials which, when stable, design teams can use in products for people. Not until they are really reliable, easy to implement, free of hassles, and impose little to no burden on users, can they be used to invent new useful products—what we call practical innovation. Once foundational innovation has done its work, designers can figure out the best way to infuse them into people’s lives appropriately. No one actually wants the electric company to turn off their freezer every 10 minutes out of an hour to save energy, as was suggested in one Smart Grid conference—so what is the right use of that technology? It took years for voice input to be viable, but now it is amazing. There is a lot of work that needs to be done before a team can use a technology as part of a practical innovation that transforms lives.

So transformative innovation takes time and patience. Apple shipped the iPhone in 2007—but registered the URL iPhone.org in 1999. It might have seemed like the iPhone leapt into being, but in reality it was a long process of corporate focus, design, iteration, and a lot of waiting for the conditions for its success to be ready. What kind of readiness?

The iPhone waited for technology readiness. By 2007, wireless networks became available everywhere; smartphones were widely adopted; 3G networks had 295 million subscribers worldwide; and touch screen technology, introduced in 1971, had matured and was reliably used in kiosks, PDAs, grocery stores, GPS devices, and games. Without the maturity and widespread use of these foundational technologies, the iPhone just wouldn’t work.

But the consumers needed to be ready too. Consumer readiness grew until in 2007 most people were using cell phones for email and text (many with the Blackberry); people were used to accessing information and services from the internet on desktops; and real online content from retail, travel, social media, location services, music, and streaming video became part of normal life. Without any content and services, the iPhone would have been just a pretty box.

Technology and content availability had to mature for it to become accessible with a hand-held computer such as an iPhone. But Apple also needed a way to distribute the product and a business model to sell it; they needed distribution and business model readiness. To get there, Apple built on its already successful processes (Fig. 9.1) to design and sell desktop computers, its developer’s network for apps, and the Apple Store; it created a relationship with ATT to distribute the phone and provide the network; and it leveraged its existing iTunes store to sell apps and music. Apple had the corporate knowledge and processes to make roll out of the iPhone real—but this took years to put in place.

But perhaps most importantly the iPhone fit with Apple’s already existing mission and skill. For Apple the iPhone didn’t grow up from nothing. It was simply the next right thing for that company (Fig. 9.1). To reach the goal, Apple had to maintain a corporate focus and commitment to the vision—and they did. They conceived of the product and then started putting everything they could in place while they waited and nudged technology and content along. They tried out different products in the small, mobile space—failing with the Newton and ROKR but succeeding with the iPod. They perfected, learned, and borrowed from the practices of their music products. They already had the iTunes store where customers could buy music—it was simple to add apps to the store. They already had a way to work with developers to build software—apps were just different software to make. For Apple, the iPhone fit with their core competencies. Their vision didn’t require radical change for them—it was just the next right thing (Fig. 9.2).

So what does it take for a company to produce a game-changing product? Technology, market, distribution, and business model readiness (Fig. 9.3) are all prerequisites. But there is one more critical factor—they need to introduce a transformation in user practice. A transformative product delivers a dynamic change in people’s life or work practice. (There may be useful, eye-catching features such as the iPhone’s pinch and swivel but those are add-ons. By themselves, they do not create transformative innovation.) Given that the foundational elements are in place, user-centered design informed by principles such as the Cool Concepts determines ultimate success.

Practical innovation is the sum of all these elements. It speaks to the culture and practices of the whole corporation, not just the work of the design team. Too often a company talks about innovation, they want to ship a game changer, but they don’t have everything in place. No matter what good intentions they may have, they simply cannot deliver on the promise.

We have watched teams generate truly transformative ideas—only to see them buried by short-term fire drills and more important priorities of the core mission of their company. One enterprise company we worked with, for example, hired us to help them understand business to business relationships. Well before WebEx, SharePoint, Dropbox, Skype, or any other collaborative technologies more complex than email, we and the team envisioned all those technologies in support of business collaboration. In the years since they’ve all been shipped—but not by our client. Why not? Their corporate focus was managing enterprise data. All these elements were too far outside their focus, required too much new technology, and demanded new business and sales models. So innovation is not just about coming up with a great idea—it’s about coming up with a great idea the company can ship given the mission and skills of the people in that organization.

Practical innovation rests on technology, market, corporate, and business readiness. These are the larger conditions needed for intentional innovation. But then with the right user data, the right skill on your team, and a process for ideation, you can make innovation and coolness happen on purpose.

Dan Bricklin designed VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, while he was taking accounting classes in business school.¹ He saw the tedious and mechanical work required to manage a paper spreadsheet and realized that with his knowledge of computer systems, he could automate the calculations while maintaining the spreadsheet metaphor in the user interface. WordPerfect, one of the first of the modern word processors, was invented when Alan Ashton and Bruce Bastian were working downstairs from the secretaries who were their customers. They would bring new ideas and new code upstairs on a daily basis for the secretaries to try and comment on.

These people did not innovate by doing what their users asked for—no one was asking for an electronic spreadsheet, and word processors were dedicated machines. As we discussed in Part 1, the section on interviewing, users don’t have a good, articulated understanding of their own practice. They are focused on the day-to-day issues of doing their jobs. What’s more, they have only a limited understanding of what technology might do for them. Rather than responding to explicit requests, we find classic innovators immersed in the culture of their prospective users. Innovators observe problems first-hand and use their technical knowledge to recognize opportunities for using technology in ways users themselves may not see. By talking with people immersed in the activities, building prototypes, and testing them out with users in situ, innovators turn these ideas into real products. (We’ll talk more about the role of prototyping in Part 5).

The spreadsheet and WordPerfect show that no innovation is ever totally disconnected from what went before. Paper spreadsheets already existed for VisiCalc to model; editors and word processors existed before WordPerfect. The physical “face book”—yearbook—existed at colleges before Facebook; music was carried around in a Walkman before the iPod—and the portable radio preceded that. Uber opened up the model of the taxi company to the public and made it work with a great interface building on known GPS technology and reasonable security measures. And the list goes on. Steeped in the world of the user, with the skill to see the possible and realize it, inventers create practical transformative innovation.

Innovation that creates a new class of product and captures (for a time) a new market fulfills the core intents, motives, challenges, and longings already present in the lives of people. But once in the hands of users, that new technology reinvents their lives again in ways no one foresaw. Spreadsheets have grown beyond anything accountants envisioned in the 1980s. Word processing today has very little in common with the creation of documents with typewriters. Uber created the sharing economy—not just rides in automobiles. As people adopt a new invention and begin to explore its possibilities, others see the invention as a model for other inventions, and new market and life transformations emerge.² New practices become a part of daily life and can now stimulate and challenge the next generation of designers.

Practical innovation is absolutely dependent on having a deep understanding of people’s lives. The spark which ignites brilliant design ideas, the niggle in the back of your mind, the flash that excites, happens when designers are steeped in the real lives of the target population. In Contextual Design we create this immersion experience on purpose. Once you collect the field data, interpret, model and consolidate it you are ready for a formal immersion process. Each type of consolidated model puts a specific aspect of the users’ lives into focus. Probing into one model after another in quick succession, leads naturally to a synthesis of the issues across models. The team absorbs one coherent aspect of users’ lives at a time, making the complexity of people’s lives manageable. Discussing each model in turn begins a dialogue about the data, stimulates design ideas, and simultaneously fosters a shared understanding of the data and initial direction for the design.

With a set of models tuned to communicate insight for the purpose of design, the team can hook into the data quickly. Seeing the life as a whole, what delights and what challenges users, naturally stimulates new possibilities in the mind of people with the skill to realize it.

But this is only true if the designers know what technology can do. They need to be masters of the materials of design for their domain. User data may provide the inspiration, but it is the materials of design that are used and recombined to create something transformative. The materials of design include everything that can be brought to bear on the problem: knowledge of apps, responsive design for different screen sizes, appropriate paradigms for presenting information and functions on different devices, use of location information, tracking user actions, active learning, machine learning, accessing cloud data to make the users’ data available, UI layouts and graphic design trends, and foundational innovations ready for prime time—these are just some of the materials of design necessary for successful products today.

When technology changes—as it did with the introduction of the window/mouse interface, and again with the web, again with touchscreens on smartphones, and will again when the internet of things becomes a reality—the materials of design change too. Designers have to relearn the materials to stay current. As a community, we also invent new expectations for what is modern. Whereas once a tree structure UI was innovative, it became dated and old. Whereas users once expected to fill out forms to tell applications their preferences, today they expect products to figure out what they want through their actions. Without a thorough grounding in the materials of design at every level, designers cannot create appropriate products for their markets; they must have these ideas and concepts at their fingertips while they are immersed in the users’ world so that they can respond creatively with invention, while building on modern standards or creating new ones.

At its core, innovation is a recombination of known parts with a twist: Putting together elements of known practices, technologies, design approaches in new ways to realize a vision of the possible.³ Good designers steal and twist concepts from one practice and apply it to another. The iPod is just a USB storage stick, already widely used to transfer files but now made beautiful and given an easy interface. Gaming principles are being applied to nongame applications. One successful design for a network management tool borrowed UI concepts from a video game. If the team doesn’t know its material, then they can’t do a good job. We have seen this over and over with our clients—you can’t have a good interaction design if you don’t have a trained interaction designer knowledgeable in modern approaches on the team; you can’t get a great technology solution with no technologists on the team. A cross-functional innovation team is essential.

This is why in Contextual Design we design in cross-functional teams. When people are immersed in the user data they see it from the vantage point of their own field, skill, and experience. The different perspectives of a cross-functional team determine what kind of product concept they imagine. So the more different perspectives available to the team, the more design options the team can consider. What you invent is dependent on who is doing the inventing.

The materials that are important to the team are more than the hardware and software possibilities. Product management thinks whole product, shipping, and pricing. Marketing has materials and principles of packaging, product structure, and how to talk to a market. Manufacturing has materials of how to build and deliver the physical product. Business analysts or process designers bring a way of thinking about how work is done. Service designers or process reengineering professionals have their own perspective and materials to bring to bear on the overall solution, beyond a technology-only focus. So what marketing sees isn’t the same as what development sees; each profession brings its own perspective and its own materials. Successful innovation requires a command of the materials of design needed to support the project focus.

Beside these functional roles we now know that women, men, and other diverse groups have different points of view on life and product. Inclusion of underrepresented groups such as women on a design team leads to more creative results.⁴ It’s hard to imagine any woman inventing such a painful and awkward procedure as mammogram—and no woman did.⁵ But we are stuck with as the only way to get a clear picture until someone replaces it!

Each person on the team brings their own skills and perspectives, which impact what is ultimately conceived and delivered. Creative design comes from immersing the right people with the right skill into the data in the context of a process that helps them invent a coherent response together. Through their discussions, team members learn each other’s perspectives while they use the skills and technical knowledge they bring to the table. As the whole team dialogues with the data, they reassemble the whole user context in their minds and respond to it from their individual points of view. Then when they participate in a group visioning process, each of their voices can help reinvent the way technology will enhance life.

In the same way, continuing to conceive of products as feature lists or task support tools will not result in products that support the Cool Concepts and will not redesign life. Design for life does not mean just designing for more tasks, or for a different type of task. It does not mean having a product on every platform, or putting bits and pieces of function in a phone but leaving the real work on a big computer. Design for life calls for a new way of thinking than the one the User Experience field (ourselves included!) has been promoting since the 90’s.

Design for life recognizes the unstructured nature of peoples’ activities as they do bits and pieces of work and home tasks on multiple platforms throughout the day. Design for life also introduces a focus on design for time—providing value in moments of dead time, time between activities, and break time. And people care about their important people, community, and their identity. They like tools that provide visual interest and fun. Designers who think only about activities and cognition miss much of what causes people to love a product “Task-oriented design,” though better than feature-oriented design, now misses the mark.

But design for the Wheel of Joy in life is also not enough. Joy in use is essential: the magic of getting things done in moments, the disappearance of every technical hassle, and tools that deliver instant into action use with no learning. A “good enough” user interface is no longer an acceptable user experience for any kind of application. If the product does not deliver value at first glance and interaction, if it holds life hostage with its complexity and confusion, if it expects any learning—well, it simply won’t be adopted.

The time of huge monolithic applications or websites is waning. No more locking the user to their chair inside your application, hoarding users’ data and not sharing with other applications, adding more function and complexity but adding little value, clinging to old style interfaces. Design for life means direct support for users’ intents in small chunks when needed, accessible across multiple platforms in the smoothest, smartest interfaces you can imagine. This is the challenge faced by teams today. Your market may not yet be clamoring for this but it will—and if you are the first to deliver, you will claim the market.

To make this happen, designers need explicit support in using the Cool Concepts and Experience Models to guide design. We have found that, when immersed in this data with a design process that makes use of it, a team’s way of thinking magically moves in the direction of design for life.

The single biggest challenge we hear from design teams is how to use the data they collect to drive new product concepts. People get caught up in their personal hot ideas, what the last big customer said, the enhancement database, and of course longing to be the next transformative product. Some want the data to tell them directly what to do—others fear that user data will constrain them too much. As we have said, data is a tool; it does not direct or constrain. It creates a context for invention. Any product must fit into people’s life structure, improving life activities while juggling life’s demands. The life of the people you are designing for is the water in which your product must swim. A design process needs to guide you in looking at the data so you can see what’s needed to enhance the journey.

At the same time, since product development requires multiple people with multiple organizational functions to collaborate, any ideation process must help people work together to generate product ideas. Discussion and synthesis, in a group, without argument, within a reasonable timeframe depends on a clear process—a set of concrete actions to take. That’s what Contextual Design provides.

In this Part we introduce an ideation process that has been used and honed over the last 20 years. It is built on the principles of immersion, team design, and ensuring the team produces a result that is both impactful and keeps the users’ lives coherent. Successful ideation focuses first on generating wide-ranging impactful ideas and then honing these to something workable—always guided by data. In Part 3 we will walk through the steps of ideation that drive overall concept and direction: the Wall Walk, Visioning, and the Cool Drilldown. In 2–5 days, depending on the scope of the project, the team can generate a set of high-level product concepts stimulated by the team’s dialogue with the data and honed by the Cool Concepts.

In Chapter 10 we describe the Wall Walk where the team immerses themselves in the consolidated data and generate initial design ideas in response to it. The Wall Walk is a prerequisite to participation in Visioning. It is also a great way to share data with stakeholders and other groups who might benefit from the data but may not be on the Visioning team. The result of the Wall Walk is an initial set of issues the Visioning team must address and the first “hot ideas” which can be used to start off ideation.

In Chapter 11 we describe Visioning where the team tells the story of the new life of the user if technology solutions were applied to their activities. In a series of visions the team addresses the issues they saw. Creative design is hampered by agreeing too quickly. It’s important that the design team think widely and consider several alternatives, including radical solutions, before converging on a single approach. The team develops multiple solutions, pulling out different aspects of the users’ situation to address. These different solutions are consolidated into a set of high-level product concepts that the team determines is best to take forward.

With a set of concepts in hand, we next discuss the Cool Drilldown. This facilitated process focuses on enriching those product concepts using the principles of the Cool Concepts. Addressing one Cool Concept at a time, the teams deepen the design, adding detail focused on supporting each concept in turn—based on the data. The result is a set of high-level product concepts tuned for cool and fitting the user’s world.

Contextual Design ideation techniques focus the team on imagining technology in the world of the user—not on generating a list of possible features. This ensures that the technology fits life. It’s important that the design process make these steps explicit. Much of the argument within a team at this point looks like arguments about features: Sue wants to implement a shared online place where everyone traveling can share ideas. Bob thinks that wastes time and that they can just use email, text, and maybe a Google Doc. Joe wants to give the main planner full control, with everyone else just making suggestions. This isn’t just an argument about features—it’s a disagreement about what the most natural and successful travel planning process is, and what people will value. It’s asking which human-technical system is best. So trying to settle the argument by talking about technology or features is futile.

Instead, Contextual Design immerses the team in the actual data together. Contextual Design guides them to consider all the technology available to them to use and ensures they understand the basic intents and motives of the travelers. As a result, those arguments evaporate—the data and Cool Concepts reveal what makes sense for the users. Giving the team time to think about the different aspects of travel planning and the implications for design both makes it easier for the team to have the design conversation together and makes the team more creative.

This is the goal of the Contextual Design innovation steps: to look across the different Experience Models and see a unified picture of the practice; to use the team’s perspectives and skills to reveal the issues; to widely explore multiple possibilities to open up the team’s collective mind; to apply the Cool Concepts to ensure joy is built in; and then the team will be ready to hone the detail so it works for people, the team, and the business. This is how creative solutions that work can be consistently generated. With the right data, the right people, and the right process, practical innovation can be baked into your organization.