Point: To design better for customers, put yourself in their shoes.

Story:  What’s it like to drive if you can’t turn you head easily to look over your shoulder? Or to  shop if bending over hurts and the product you want is on the bottom shelf?

That’s what older drivers feel, and every minute in the US, one person turns 66. In seven years, the US will have 55 million people over age 65 – a big market.

To better design for the needs of this market, companies like pharmacy chain CVS are putting themselves in the shoes of aging customers with AGNES. AGNES stands for “Age Gain Now Empathy System.” Developed by the MIT AgeLab, AGNES is a specially-designed jumpsuit that mimics what it feels like to be in your mid-70s. The suit can be be worn by designers, product developers, architects and planners to experience firsthand the physical challenges associated with aging. For example, bungee cords anchored to the helmet and hip restrict movement and rotation of the spine, and elastic bands from hit to wrist reduce shoulder mobility.

CVS will be making store design changes based on learnings from the suit. For example, they’ll be putting carpeting in the stores to reduce slick-floor slipping, and they’ll adjust the height of checkout counters to require less bending and lifting.

Similarly, Ford Motor’s engineers use a similar suit (they call it the “Third Age Suit”) to experience driving with restricted movement and dexterity in hands, knees, neck and even eyesight (goggles simulate cataracts).  Ford also has a bulbous weighted “empathy belt” that simulates the physical effects of pregnancy.  All of these inventions help give designers a better sense of the consumer’s experience of the company’s products and services.

The result: not only will product designers develop better products for the elderly, but their innovations — like Ford’s hands-free automatic parallel-parking system — appeal to consumers of all ages. Simplicity, ease and comfort attract customers of any age.

Action:

• Create tools or protheses that simulate the customer’s experience of the product or service
• Test products and services for ergonomics for a wide range of customers (especially the growing population of those over 65)
• Look for win-win design solutions that improve usability for everyone.

Sources:

MIT AgeLab: AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System): http://agelab.mit.edu/agnes-age-gain-now-empathy-system

Future Demographics – The Silver Book: http://www.silverbook.org/browse.php?id=57

Interview with Dr. Joseph Coughlin on AGNES and the AgeLab: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/coughlinqaa-0414.html

In An Aging Nation, Making Stores Senior-Friendly
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/10/135773106/in-an-aging-nation-making-stores-senior-friendly

In a Graying Population, Business Opportunity
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/business/06aging.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
A Profile of Older Americans: 2011 – Administration on Aging: http://www.aoa.gov/aoaroot/aging_statistics/Profile/2011/docs/2011profile.pdf

Point: Fast-cycle experiments let companies create the best product/service offering with the least risk.

Story: At the World Innovation Forum, Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, described his company’s culture of high-velocity experimentation. Intuit uses an experiment-driven decision-making process throughout the organization. Rather than expect executives and managers to know all the answers, Intuit uses large numbers of low-cost experiments to test new product, service, and marketing ideas.

To illustrate how high-velocity experimentation works in organizations, Cook described how the concept works in Intuit’s 20-person online TurboTax unit.  In the past, this unit ran about 7 experiments during the annual three-month tax filing season.  Now they run 140 experiments.  Not only do they run more experiments, but they run each experiment on a fast cycle so that they can accumulate results and grow more knowledge during each season. Intuit created a weekly cycle for developing, testing, and analyzing experiments that lets each experiment create new information that feeds into the next set of experiments the next week.

Fast experimentation also improves employees’ sense of engagement and ownership.  In the past when the 20-person team did only seven experiments per year, the average team member might only have one of “their” experiments run once every three years.  But with new high-velocity approach, each employee creates and tests a new idea once every two weeks.

Paradoxially, running more experiments and getting more failures lowers the fear and cost of failure.  When a company runs only a few experiments — and every change or new product really is an experiment — then each experiment matters a lot more to the company and to the employees working on that experiment.  If an employee works for more than a year on a single big experiment, then the failure of that experiment surely has an impact on the employee’s career, even if the company professes to permit failure.  But if an employee works on many quick experiments that steadily improve organizational performance, then the success or failure of individual experiments matters little.

In Intuit’s case, 89% of experiments fail, and yet the online TurboTax unit increased conversions by 50% and successfully created a widely-lauded smartphone app that lets people do their entire tax preparation — from taking photos of tax documents, to automatically putting numbers in the right boxes, to electronically filing their forms — all on a smartphone.  The hundreds of tiny experiments let the TurboTax unit tweak and test many variations to come up with the best offering.

Action

• Trust experiments rather than experts to find the truth in a dynamic and volatile business environment.
• Teach individuals how to perform cheap experiments by finding and testing the key assumptions behind every new idea rather than building one big new product.
• Use large numbers of low-cost experiments to both grow knowledge and improve employee engagement.
• Create an accelerated cycle of experiments to reduce time-to-knowledge and time-to-market.
• Coach executives to become experiment-seekers — to use experimentation as a key decision-making tool.

Point:  Technology and innovation enable greater customer engagement through open-ended customizations, apps, add-on, and social features.

Story: At BIF7, John Hagel, author of The Power of Pull, highlighted what he saw as a distinction between story vs. narrative. A story is complete, self-contained, and has a beginning, middle, and end. Stories have audiences: people who passively consume the story.  In contrast, Hagel defined a “narrative” as an open-ended, unfolding sequence that continues into the future.  Narratives frame the world and the people in it.  Under this definition, narratives create participants: active co-creators in the evolving timeline of current and future events.  Whether you agree or disagree with Hagel’s particular choice of words, the key is in the interesting distinction between a closed-ended tale and an open-ended dialogue — and what that distinction means for product innovation..

Although Hagel didn’t say so directly, the concept of story v. narrative can be applied to product innovation: some products are like stories and some are like narratives. Some products are meant to simply be bought and consumed, like the beginning-middle-end of a story.  It’s a “once upon a time, someone used the product and they lived happily ever after” story.

In contrast, other products are like narratives, in which purchasing the product is just the start of a long series of interactions with that product, with related products, and even with other people. Such products let people customize, individualize, and enhance the product. Customers can tap into an ecosystem of add-ons, apps, tracking, feedback, and engagement. Customers can interact with other customers or with the company’s services for on-going enhancements.  In short, the customer joins the narrative and extends it, too..

The most obvious example of the narrative-style product is the Apple iPhone, with its “there’s an app for that” opportunities for customization and engagement. Similarly, Nike converted a consumer good — shoes — into narrative-driven product with strong participant engagement through Nike+.  A sensor in the shoe and wireless connection to an iPhone, iPod, or special watch lets users of its shoes track their exercise. People can then share their runs with others, participate in virtual races, and learn about great running routes from others..

Technology enables more and more of these kinds of narrative products. Companies can now leverage low cost or existing electronics (e.g., smartphones), low-cost software, and low-cost web/cloud services to create an ongoing customizable social experience.  Companies can also use existing social platforms (like FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to create a narrative environment for their product or service.

Action:

• Is your product like a closed-ended tale or can you make it like an open-ended dialogue with your customers?
• Create a brand to encompasses the customer (vs. simply defining the product or the company)
• Create optional tracking or feedback that lets customers record their piece of the narrative.
• Create optional add-ons or apps that support customization or ongoing enhancements.
• Create an ecosystem of partners and encourage open innovation around a narrative product platform.
• Create social engagement that lets customers not just use the product but also interact with the people behind the product and the other users of the product.