Small Change, Big Difference

This is the final part of a Design Story from Mollie Callahan and Michelle Pomorski. You can start with Part 1 here.

Small Change, Big Difference

What does innovation mean? For Michelle and Mollie, it’s not about flashy interfaces or earth-shaking user experiences — often it’s small changes that change how a user feels or acts in subtle but important ways.

Mollie:

I’m thinking back to the manufacturer we’re working with [that was introduced in Part 1]. The lesson wasn’t about any one individual design experiment that was introduced, it was about quantity. The model that we used was to do a week of process design and generate eight possible experiments, all aimed at solving different problems around indirect workload management. We introduced them all at once to several different teams and encouraged the teams to accept any subset, but all of them were potentially on the table.

There were some teams that bit off a larger chunk of experiments to start with, and others less, but over time we noticed that each of the teams started to scale back the number of experiments they were doing. While this initially felt like a bit of a failure, what we learned was that the scaling back was actually critical to the success of a much smaller subset of the experiments. And what’s interesting is, part of the design challenge itself was getting each individual experiment to be so basic.

Jeff:  

So teams could have done as many as eight experiments at once?

Mollie:  

Right. We left that as a possibility, and but no team actually bought into all eight. There were a couple that bought into four or five. Then every single team scaled back. Some scaled back to a single experiment, some scaled back to two or three. Scaling back actually gave them the time and space they needed to manage their learning curve. To us, what they did felt very basic, but now there is a step to build upon. As we work on phase two of this project, introducing a new set of experiments and new teams, the original experiment group is deepening the small set of experiments they started, while expanding into the others that they never tried or that they tried and immediately gave up because it was too complicated. It’s scaffolding the design process, essentially.

Jeff:  

You’re distributing the process of creating choices and making choices, right?

Mollie:

Yes. Something about the organic nature of that learning has been very, very powerful. And whole question of scaling is a non-issue because it’s happening organically. You don’t have to explain it, you don’t have to force it, you just have to get the right people in the right proximity with access to the materials and a certain mindset, and it takes off.

You need support and feedback, but now they even have their internal groups advising the direction of the first phase of that project. In addition to introducing solutions, we are introducing capacity that helps them become self-sufficient in carrying the work forward.

Jeff:

You’re training them in design, really.

Mollie:  

Right.

Michelle:   

One thing I wanted to touch on is the whole question of what innovation can mean. In a lot of my project experiences, innovating is really just finding the simplest way to do something. The simplest thing can make a huge impact on the user, and it doesn’t necessarily make the user say, “That’s the coolest thing, I can’t wait to use it!” Rather, success means that it was a seamless experience for them, and that whatever we’ve designed doesn’t get in the way of their end goal. For example, nobody goes to an ATM with the end goal of just logging in. But you have to log in to check your balance or take your money out, so how do you design that login experience so it doesn’t get in the way of what you really want to do?

My favorite story around that has to do with with the flow cytometry project. [A long-term Menlo client makes flow cytometers, an instrument for analyzing blood samples to find markers of cancer or other diseases.] This story is about how if you deeply understand your users, you figure out how to innovate for them, even if it doesn’t feel like you’re rocking the industry, though sometimes you end up rocking the industry.

Before this product was developed, only specially trained technicians were allowed to run analyses. Because the blood samples were so expensive and rare, they were very concerned about not wasting them. We knew that in a lab, they had a strict protocol. You had to be certified separately for each and every test. So you might be allowed to run only one kind of test in the lab, even though the lab does twelve, because you’ve only been tested and certified to run that lab. They don’t want you screwing up other stuff. There were so many opportunities to screw up.

At one point we met with a research assistant to engage with a paper prototype we had made. We gave him this scenario: “You just got this new cytometer in the lab, and you’ve got a list of samples you need to run.” He said, “Well, I haven’t had training yet on this tool, and I haven’t seen the manual, so I wouldn’t do this.” And we said, “Oh, yeah. We understand that that’s your lab protocol. Imagine you’ve been trained.” But he was physically rocking in his seat in the discomfort of imagining doing this because it was so outside of his world. Finally we got him comfortable enough to just look at it and give us his thoughts.

And you know what? Within minutes, he had set up all the samples in the application, run them, analyzed the results, and generated reports, using paper mockups. And then at the end, he just said, “Okay.” He didn’t say, “This is going to revolutionize my life. This is the greatest thing ever. You guys are awesome designers, this is so innovative.” But we watched this man who went from physically rocking in his chair at the idea of doing anything without hours of training and a person by his side, to actually being able to simulate doing his job with paper mockups.

Jeff:

What was the breakthrough for him?

Michelle:   

I think we had to get him to realize it was a safe enough place when we said, “All these are just paper mockups,” to eliminate that fear so he could play along. When it got to that point, he was like, “Well, I could give you some feedback.” But he could never imagine using something in a different scenario.

Jeff:   

Their interface with the world is so fraught with danger, but it’s dangerous only because they don’t expect a design that will allow them to understand what’s going on. They expect a design that confuses them, that requires training, and where you can make terrible mistakes.

Michelle:   

I love that you flipped it to the user side of things, because I was trying to point out that it’s a designer’s flaw to think that there are only certain types of design that can change the world. And there are assumptions around certain benchmarks of innovation.

Jeff:  

What’s radical is that your design fully takes into account that person’s perspective. You started with empathy and perspective taking for one user, and you ended up rocking the world.