Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I constantly hear sentences like "users want such-and-such." I cringe every time. This might sound strange coming from a user experience designer.

Users are not vague outsiders. To misquote Charlton Heston, users are made of people. They're specific types of people, with names and lives. And consciously or not, these folks have to decide whether your product helps them accomplish their goals.

So, you need to know them intimately.

Let's role play.

Pretend you have a recipe Web site. Think your "users" are people who want recipes? Nope. They're people like Mary.

Mary is an unmarried mother of two. She works double-shifts when she can and is studying for her GED. She needs to feed her kids a cheap, nutritious dinner in under one hour because she has to study from 9pm to 12am.

You can picture her right? She might sound like someone you know. You can empathize with her deeply. And since you now know her, you can make informed decisions on her behalf.

Building for Mary.

So back to the recipe site. Assuming people like Mary are your priority, you might decide to:

- Build your database around easy-to-prepare meals.

- Show ingredient substitutions, in case she doesn't have something on hand. Help her minimize trips to the grocery store.

- Add a "Find recipes that use..." search tool, so she can find recipes that use ingredients in her pantry.

- Allow recipes to be filtered by total prep and cook time.

- Write a series of articles called "One Pan Dinners."

- List nutritional data with comparisons to daily allowances.

- Let her scale ingredients by the number of servings.

- Create a tool that scrapes Kroger's sale items and emails her a customized weekly menu, replete with shopping list and coupons.

Furthermore, this newfound focus helps you decide what not to invest in. Knowing Mary, you might not:

- Spend time adding recipes that use squid ink and other Iron Chef-caliber ingredients.

- Court advertisers like Viking ranges, Le Creuset or Whole Foods.

- Build a MySommelier app for recommending wine pairings.

Here's the point.

Real people use your product, not users. If you can't describe them like they are your next-door neighbor, then you can't design for them. Get to know them intimately and banish the word user from design discussions.

Need more convincing?

Sam Farber saw his arthritic wife struggling to control a carrot peeler. With this person and her situation in mind, he started prototyping kitchen utensils that were singularly focused on ergonomics. After testing and refining with real people, his work became the OXO Good Grips line. By considering real people deeply, his kitchen utensils redefined a household commodity and created a new market.

Now go read OXO's story.

Visual thinking, best explained by Kermit the frog. Some things are timeless.

Kermit Scats

Imagining Shapes

About a year ago we started Capstrat Green, an employee-led group that helps us collectively understand sustainability. By doing this we’ll know the sacrifices individuals may need to make, the expected outcomes and understand the balance needed to make both work.

We approach Capstrat Green as a living experiment to provide both external and internal learning.

• We help our clients better understand how sustainability plays into Corporate Social Responsibility by being a living example. We learn to communicate sustainability efforts with credibility.

• We inspire our colleagues to think creatively, yet pragmatically to solve problems. We get paid to do this every day. This program helps keep us in top form.

In short, sustainability is the ultimate in “step ahead” thinking. We’re required to learn, explore, analyze, refine and implement solutions that have a guaranteed impact on our company’s culture, our client’s business and the environment.

Our core team leads our company to find creative ideas that can be practically implemented.

It’s worth noting, this is not planned as a Capstrat cost savings initiative. It’s reasonable to assume that conserving environmental resources may also have an impact on our spending. However, we are looking for the biggest impact we can make with the smallest sacrifice. The team solicits sustainable solutions to learn from and inspire others.

Criteria

Ideas must be implemented within reason. The team reviews ideas for:

• expected environmental impact versus cost to implement

• ease to implement and adopt

• results that can be documented

•originality

The team promotes Capstrat Green throughout the company to drive behavioral change. More importantly, the team shall drive creative thinking with a purpose that balances all the moving parts to understand all sides of an issue. Then they promote innovative thinking to design a solution that works fairly for all concerned.

As more companies want to understand their impact on the world, I imagine we’ll see more internal teams pop up like Capstrat Green.

What do you do with 1500 pounds of spent coffee? We do something a little unheard of in Class A office space, we reuse it. Eeeewww! Not what you think! We only brew our creative jet fuel once. However, every week 30 pounds of used coffee grounds are reincarnated in compost. Those rich Columbian relics of countless brainstorms, late nights and waaaaaaaay too early mornings have a lot of energy in them. Specifically, soggy nitrogen which cooks with dead leaves, grass clippings and other stinky kitchen scraps.

Shortage of landfill space makes compost recycling an easy process for converting decomposable waste into rich, clean, natural fertilizer. Modern composting originates from early 20th century European organic farming. With the 1999 issue of the Landfill Directive to “prevent or reduce as far as possible the landfilling of waste", the EU elevates that whole reduce, reuse, recycle thing even further.

Shouldn’t we learn from them?

The Coats household is trying. We started composting 2 years ago but not being a lover of the dark beverage, we needed coffee grounds to balance the dead carbon stuff. I see a colleague tossing used coffee grounds in the trash. Shazam! Right under my nose, the triple bottom line.

We can save valuable landfill space, create an endless supply of free fertilizer and invest in fair trade products with the savings. I encourage you to set up a coffee collection in your office. Besides being good for our environment, it promotes discussion. No, compost doesn’t smell when finished. It’s magic. Mama Nature handles it. No, it doesn’t take long to decompose. Usually about 1 month. Yes, it does look intriguing, though. It looks like fertile teamwork and forward thinking.