These new floor plans are the product of economics and research about the positive effects of open communication and collaboration. Employers want to reduce the money they shell out for physical space and increase the productivity. Rearranging the office space impacts both. What I’m not hearing in the discussion is the effect is has on the employees’ working experience. Once someone has adjusted to spending 40 hours a week in a non-personalized, public space, do they like it? How does it change someone’s idea of going to work? Is it a good thing for the workers?

Someone's nesting instinct unleashed in cubeland. Ah, the good old days.

I’ve experienced a variety of spaces as I’ve bounced through the years. I once had my very own office with windows and a door for about 4 months (snoopy dance!) My first experience was in an old school cube farm with high walls giving a false perception of privacy. It was easy to forget that everyone around could hear everything and anyone walking by had a great view what you were doing. The most perplexing behavior common in these settings is pretending that you don’t hear things from other cubes. That phone call your coworker just had about their offer on a new house being accepted? Well, you better not just say “Hey congratulations!” Instead,  social convention demands that you pretend that you don’t have that information. I don’t do well with that foolishness, so I’d be the oddball shouting congratulations over the cube wall.

The most difficult work space for me was living in a ‘war room’ also known as a team room with about 25 other people of varying disciplines. It was fun, awful, stressful, uncomfortable,efficient and did I mention fun? No illusions of privacy in a war room. (no fighting either). Each person had about 2 feet of desk space they could call home. The best part was the people who were working on the project were all together, and set apart. This helped us gel as a team, and allowed us to have plenty of impromptu discussions without disrupting people who weren’t involved.  There were times that felt like I was living in a fishbowl which started to grind on us. Perhaps it was the shift in the project’s strategic direction that had soured us on the situation, or it was simply time to rejoin other teams.

Consultants commonly don’t get assigned permanent spaces. At best there is general area for them to park when they are on site. It’s ok. I was able to get used to carrying all of the things I need with me every day and disconnecting my nesting instinct from work. The experience inspired a fundamental shift in my mental model of my work space. Being at the office is focused on getting things done instead of my presence within a corporate machine. With no physical manifestation of position or function, the emphasis is rightly put upon relationships and performance. I’m less firmly planted in my chair. Going over to talk to others is much easier than laboring over the tone of an email. Aspects of this arrangement appeal to me.

The challenge with these open arrangements, is lack of personalization which some people need. Will denying employees the ability to make their work area a home-away-from-home make them less attached to their current employer? All of us are learning how to deal with the escalation of stimuli in our daily lives from technology and other demands. Will the absence of quiet spaces to concentrate and think put undue stress on introverts and impact our ability to have creative epiphanies? There have been some great books about these lately. I recommend Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking for a great perspective.

I also wonder about the shift of recognition and compensation to less visible forms. You no longer see those promoted getting a bigger office, or a new title on a door. In a more egalitarian environment, how do we know people are being rewarded? Seeing what others achieve makes us aware of the possibilities for ourselves. New ways of accomplishing this need to be created.

The world is changing so dramatically. I’m excited to see how things evolve and what works and what flops. When all of us Gen Xers are old and grey(er), we’ll be the ones walking around telling the tales of the transition. “I tell  ya sonny, at my first job, my boss had an office. By the time I became a boss, I had to share one big table with everybody.”

I want to let you, my greatly appreciated reader, know that I am not taking a break from my blog. Posts won’t be at quite the same pace, but you can expect something new at least every month. To reward your patience, here are a few pictures from the past few weeks.

Anyone ever read before using this thing?

The crowd at work.

The first event was at the Innovation in MiKE Council Meeting. This was a meeting of individuals all interested in developing the city of Milwaukee as a design, technology and innovation cluster. Consistent with this mission, Katherine von Jan spoke about RadMatter, a new platform for campus recruiting. RadMatter applies gamification principles to tackle the challenges of talent development and recruiting. Their goal for the event was to generate quality content for their beta launch and forge strategic relationships.

Tip: Select an audience that is invested in the topic or final outcome.

The lively presentation did a good job of grabbing the audience attention. Not only was it a tool that would address an issue in which the the group has a vested interest, there was a solid case made with research and data to explain why it could succeed. Companies represented by the attendees could also get fully engaged in the beta if and reap the benefits. By the end of the presentation, people were nodding their heads and smiling about this new, innovative idea.

Tip: Get the audience excited about your goals and the big picture.

After briefing the audience on the driving principles of the design, Katherine informed the crowd that they would be participating in developing some content. And there would not be much time to do it.  In fact, the crowd had 20 minutes to self organize, brainstorm and distill a single idea into something actionable.

Having an incredibly small amount of time to work made people quickly assign themselves into groups and hit the ground running. Since there was no time to entertain social anxieties or analyze what we were about to do, people focused on doing.

Tip: Tightly time box the exercise.

I’m always fascinated by human behavior in groups. Anytime you get people together who need to make decisions, there are consistent roles that emerge. There is always someone who steps in and takes a leadership role driving the group forward. Someone facilitates, keeping the group on track, watching the time and making sure the rules are followed. And there are others who prefer to be scribes and the hands on people molding the group’s idea into the tangible. In my group, we had been given a theme. We explored several options before selecting the idea to pursue based on the time remaining.

Each of us had received a hand out with the instructions, guidelines and the principles that the result should embody. We all referenced these documents repeatedly. It was a lot of information, but it was laid out in a way that made each topic easy to reference. When questions arose, we were able to find the answer without seeking out the organizers or other groups. This event had over 60 attendees. It would have been disastrous if the organizers would have needed to provide individual guidance to each team.

Tip: Write down and distribute the instructions and supporting information so that the participants can reference it when needed.

Each group was able to submit their work using the actual beta software. This was great because there was an invitation for continued engagement via the software. The interaction gave us a familiarity and head start working with it. In addition to the ongoing involvement, participants would have a way to keep up on the progress of the project through the software.

Tip: Provide ways to continue the participation and make the path to engagement clear.

Tip: Let people see the value that came out of their contribution.

Part of the continued engagement allowed participants to compete for $50 gift certificates to Kohls for each member of the winning team, and tickets to a Present Music Concert in Milwaukee. Who doesn’t enjoy a little friendly competition?

Tip: Reward participants for their time.

The other event was the Leap Day Event for the Creative Alliance of Milwaukee. This organization is in it’s beginning stages of development. The individuals gathered ranged from working artists to corporate recruiters all interested in developing the creative industries in the Milwaukee area. The goal of the event was to have attendees explore the vision and strategic plan of the organization. Facilitating the event, Bob Schwartz and were members of the GE Global Design team.

After a presentation of the vision and strategic plan, the team introduced themselves with great enthusiasm and the project in which we were invited to participate. Everyone had been given a number upon arrival that indicated the group with which they would work. Similar to the RadMatter exercise, each team was given a set of written instructions that clearly detailed the exercise instructions and goal.

The teams were given 20 minutes to complete their project using community stores of supplies. Magazines, newspapers, markers, glue, glitter…all fun things that most of us used as kids. This really helped set the mood and keep participants from worrying about achieving perfection. They even went so far as to disallow scissors. We were exploring abstract ideas such as vision and strategy through visual collage.

Tip: Use materials that focus participants on the ideas not perfect execution.

It was a fun exercise and I was surprised how well our little team of 3 worked together. We brainstormed, revised, distilled ideas, and compromised. We completed our project at the buzzer and felt good. All of the teams then placed their masterpiece in the gallery area and everyone was given time to mill about, network, and look at what the other teams created.

Tip: Make it fun

To wrap up, each team was asked to have a representative present their project to the entire group and explain what they did. It was fabulous to see the excitement and energy created by going through the collaborative effort in such a limited time. The organization was able to capture a wealth of information about the groups attitudes and ideas from this exercise while at the same time energizing those who will become the drivers of the organization. The GE team then created a mural showing the long term vision of the organization. It was a nice, although obvious, metaphor conveying that everyone there could contribute to making the vision a reality.

Tip: Give everyone an opportunity to see what the other teams created.

What did these two events have in common that made them successful?

• Each event selected an audience that had common goals.
• They began by reviewing those goals and getting people energized around the common mission.
• The audience was quickly transitioned into the exercise. No time to belabor they whys and wherefores of what was about to be done. Just get to it.
• Organizing into teams was quick and easy.
• The events were so tightly time boxed that the teams weren’t sure they could complete what they needed to do in that time. This got people moving and removed any anxiety about perfection.
• The directions and relevant information was printed out and the participants could refer to it again and again during the mad dash.
• There was a final product completed at the end.
• Everyone had great opportunity to meet others during the event.
• People understood how their work would contribute to the overall vision
• Invitation for engagement beyond the exercise.

The other factor which had a big impact on their success, was the confidence and enthusiasm of the facilitators. They were truly excited about what everyone was about to do. That energy was contagious. They also gave the teams room to figure things out and didn’t jump in when we had that initial “What are we doing now?” moment. The direction was clearly given, enthusiastically and they trusted the participants to do the work. Perhaps those were the most important factors to successful crowd sourcing.

User Experience projects consistently face the same barriers to delivering value.

User Experience has had considerable time to mature as a discipline. Heck, we even have a cryptic acronym with an ‘X’! It’s surprising that we haven’t broken through the roadblocks that we were fighting a decade ago. At the same time, iterative, user centered methodologies like Lean Startup are gaining significant momentum. The message is the same; make informed decisions about your product based on empirical information. From this we can see that the value proposition is not what businesses don’t embrace. It’s the packaging and delivery of that value. The way that UX presents itself to the market is in need of a pivot.

Stephanie Sansoucie and I have been discussing the shared ideals of UX and Lean Startup. Eric Ries doesn’t make much of a mention to user experience even though UX strategy is the core of what he is presenting. Stephanie and I have concluded that it’s time for User Experience to heed its own message and become more accessible to those we work with and serve. How do we do that?

User Experience has centered itself around design activities, always hoping to get the budget and time to do research first. What would happen if our defacto deliverable was research, and design was what got done with copious time and budget? Think about it. The UX resource focuses on doing the research necessary to develop a UX strategy to fulfill the product vision. He ensures that the project team is exposed to the information they need about users in order for the team to make informed interface and workflow choices. What would happen if our primary role was providing that information and we left the bulk of the designing to those with their hands in the code? I have a theory that the world would become more user friendly.

Which produces the better experience? A skilled designer making assumptions about what will work for users based on experience and no data, or developers making design decisions armed with ample information about their users? We have a world full of digital products produced using the former process. I’d like to see us try a new way rather than banging our heads against the same brick walls. I think it will be the first step to finally gaining wide adoption and having a better way to deliver on the promise of UX.

JustFab.com offers to suggest styles for you based on a style personality test.

When I finished the test, I hit a brick wall. wahh waaah… In order to get my results, justfab.com doesn’t just want my email address. I’m required to set up an account. That means another password to manage, spam to deal with… and they want my ZIP code and birthday too? I’ve seen credit card applications that require less personal information. I was happy to invest a few minutes playing a quiz to see some neat shoes and try a new shopping experience. But I just wasn’t ready to commit to a relationship with an online shoe company.

I just wanted to look at shoes, not start a relationship.

I see this approach frequently from marketers. Usually the logic behind it is that the user is invested in the outcome and they are ‘paying’ for the service/content/experience by giving you their information. Problem is that doesn’t match the way that users see the situation. The potential customer evaluates what will happen as a consequence of giving you this information and weighs the mental cost of creating and remembering yet another password. Will I be getting daily spam that won’t stop even after I unsubscribe 5 times? Will you sell my information to companies who will spam me or worse yet, am I exposing myself to identity theft if you have my birthdate and ZIP code and your site gets hacked? Situations like these are the reason why many of us have email accounts specifically to handle spammy situations.

The unfortunate thing isn’t that they lost one sale. What they did was shut the door on the success of the delightful experience that they invested resources to create. This kind of online experience is exactly the type of thing people like to share with their friends. Due to the fact that they didn’t think about the user’s perspective on how they receive the results, that opportunity was lost. Of course there is still opportunity for change, and I am hopeful that they pivot to make this more accessible to users.

But for now, I won’t be finding out my perfect shoe. You lost me.