What is futurecasting (and why should you care)?

No one can predict the future. But smart innovators still try.

There are two paths to innovation. One resides in our timeline just beyond now—solving a problem that exists today with technologies and resources available today. For comparison’s sake, let’s call it simple forecasting. The other path resides in our timeline years into the future—solving a problem that is, at least according to the tea leaves of trends and R&D pipelines, imminent, using technologies or resources that may not be currently available. That’s futurecasting.

Why would an organization spend time and resources today solving a problem that may not exist for years? 

For starters, it aids in long-term strategic planning. Simply informing your forward-looking opinions with as much research and forethought should add an increased level of confidence in those opinions and resulting decisions. Second, and perhaps more important, preparing for that predicted future you’ve so meticulously mapped out might take substantial research and development. 

Further, you may require the entirety of that time span to be prepared to offer the most relevant product at the right time. But you won’t know what you’ll need or how to get there unless you spend the time speculating, planning and resourcing today. So, as we navigate the innovation path long into the future, what are the steps we need to ensure we’re heading in the right direction with the proper resources?

Futurecasting using the Narrative-Based Innovation process

Narrative-Based Innovation was created to maintain continuity of purpose and clarity of vision throughout any design-thinking project. It’s an extraordinarily useful framework for something as fraught with uncertainty as futurecasting.

1. Empathize — Understand the core human needsWhether you perform deep ethnographic research, conduct focus groups or scour secondary research sources, do whatever you can to understand the breadth of factors, conditions and influences that drive people’s emotional motivations for engagement in whatever industry or category for which you intend to innovate. Understand what they’re getting from current transactions—satisfaction and disappointments alike. Understand what jobs they’re hiring your product or service to do today. Understand what drives decisions around alternatives and substitutes. Of course, you should document the behaviors and transactional WHATs of your market, but for futurecasting, the more important aspects to understand are the emotional WHYs that might inform the need for a new solution in the future. Now, document those drivers and motivations. You’ll need them when drafting your narrative!
   

2. Personify — Create your hero(es)At this step, you should have a decent understanding of the type of person(s) who is, or might be in the future, engaging with your innovations as well as what emotions are driving their decisions and engagements. In this step, start to build a day in the life narrative for these heroes. Systematically think through and document how these heroes might experience the world before, during and after engaging with your business.
   

3. Project — Set a time frame, consult your road map, map out trends Understanding exactly how far out into the future you wish your innovation to exist is critical to the potential success of your process. As anyone in technology or fashion will tell you, timing is everything. It’s also critical to managing scope within your project.So, pick your time frame—two, five, 10 years—and focus exclusively on understanding what will (or probably might) be different about the world, your customers, your markets, technology, etc., at that specific moment. Do you have projects in your R&D pipeline that should be in the market by then? How are the breakouts of consumer segments predicted to have shifted in your markets and the general population? How will social, economic, cultural norms have shifted?Every business or industry would have a unique set of factors and drivers they would need to consider. The point here is to build as much dimensional understanding of the prevailing environment and motivations influencing your heroes’ decisions.The outputs of this step can take many forms. You could write a series of “headlines from the future.” You could create a “top 10 list of things every time traveler should know” about your specific date in the future. You could write the CEO a letter from your company’s annual report for the year prior to your future date. No matter what format you choose, give those predicted values and trends as human a face as you can imagine.
   

4. Build & Define — Walk your hero(es) through your future worldHere, you’ll want to envision emerging challenges or opportunities your hero might encounter in the world we just predicted. What of the factors you mapped out might have an influence on your heroes’ behaviors, motivations or ability to engage with your business? What are the basic human needs driving those behaviors and motivations? And what within those challenges or motivations might represent a foundation for innovation? Here, you’ll write the beginning of our hero’s journey (or heroes’ journeys) as they navigate this future world. You’ll want to explore how they encounter the challenges you’ve defined/predicted.Walk them through a typical day. As you document the what and where of their day, dig into the emotions and motivations that directly and indirectly affect the hero’s relationship to their surroundings. What personal or professional relationships matter to them? Bring them from their general world to a moment of joy or frustration that represents a solvable moment for you to innovate around. Can you make a great moment better? Can you reduce friction or eliminate some form of frustration entirely?Hold the story here and use that moment to craft your “How might we…” statement to use as the fuel for your ideation, coming next.
   

5. Ideate solutions for those challenges. Now that we have a narrative beginning to build around our hero and the challenges they face in the world at the specified future point in time, it’s time we do that hero a favor and imagine all of the ways we might solve for whatever challenge we envisioned in the previous step. How to conduct an ideation session is a bit out of scope for the level of detail we are covering here, but within that session, all participants should have suitable familiarity with the hero and the circumstances that led them to require our collective problem-solving. But coming out of the session, you should have a shortlist of prioritized solutions to serve as the foundations for the next chapter—the prototype narrative.
   

6. Create the (prototype) narratives of the heroes’ encounters with the solutionIn this step, you can use a story to work through the most important moments of engagement between the hero and the solution(s) imagined in the ideation phase. Don’t skimp on the details here. It’s critical that the full experience be considered, described and rationalized. The trick is to be thorough enough in the telling of the encounter that anyone with no prior knowledge of the solution should be able to envision the experience and make a rational judgment as to its potential desirability because next, we share and test those solution narratives to begin to quantify what the viability and market prospects of these solutions.For testing, you may want to create prototypes that take the form of text-based stories, storyboards, explainer videos, dramatic enactment video, etc. What level of fidelity and production value will depend on the level of confidence you expect to glean from the outcome. Generally, the broader the concept you’re testing, the lower fidelity your prototypes need to be.
   

7. Share/Test—Testing can take a number of forms. If you want to understand raw market potential, you may do more quantitative testing, like an online survey. If you’re looking for more nuanced evaluations and feedback, something qualitative, like focus groups, individual interviews or dyads, makes more sense. In any case, present the narratives and document the response. Is this a concept people find desirable or, given the unexpected nature of some of the ideas you’re likely to present, even believable?
   

8. Iterate — No one should expect to get every innovation right on the first try. If you’re creating something new, unexpected issues or reactions will always arise. Hence that whole testing phase. If you think, after testing, that you’re still confident in the problem as defined, take stock of the feedback received in testing and circle back to the ideation phase and have another go! If the feedback points to a rethinking of the problem itself, circle back to the definition phase and re-craft your “how might we…” question and, once again, head back to ideation. Rinse and repeat until you have a clean answer to your hero’s challenges.
   

9. Craft the happy ending — As you envision your hero at the end of the story, having experienced your solution, document in your narrative how you expect the hero would feel. What expectations have been met? What needs have been satisfied? How might they express the engagement from their own point of view?

Even the future deserves a good first draft.

It would be great to say that the inevitable result of this process would be an ironclad road map for what’s next, but it’s more likely that the process acts as a great compass for pointing toward what direction to wander, and, more importantly, where your competition might be heading as well. I’ve said before that the best way to be wrong is to try and predict the future. But I also believe the best way to improve your odds is to create that future yourself.

5 ways to maximize the value of your UX research

It’s all about putting humanity in human-centered design.

Qualitative user research, in the form of interviews and observations, is an incredibly important aspect of UX design and experience design. It’s in users’ stories where you find true points of differentiation and previously unknown opportunity. Here are five considerations you should keep in mind to help ensure you’re getting the most from your UX research investment.

1: Be clear on what you want to learn.

It’s easy to jump into the methodology of who you’re going to interview, how those interviews will be conducted (i.e., online or in person) and the questions you want to answer. If this sounds familiar, stop right there and take a step back!

There are different ways to use qualitative user-experience-based research, and prior to agreeing to a methodology, you must be clear on the overall objective(s). For example, is your goal to learn more about your users—their wants, beliefs, needs and thoughts? Or, are you undertaking this research to test hypotheses and evaluate designs?

The first objective is more exploratory in nature. The knowledge gained should help us uncover and understand the needs of “real” users. These insights help inform products and services design to create the best outcome without our personal biases in mind.The second is much more evaluative, allowing users to interact with products or designs to ensure that we’re achieving what we were aiming for throughout the design process.

Taking the time to clearly write down what you’re hoping to learn and ensuring all stakeholders agree will ensure the best methodology is developed for your research initiative.

Action plan:

Write out your goals, specifically and succinctly. Prioritize them if you’ve listed more than three.

2: Determine who you really need to learn from.

When it comes to user research, it’s easy to fall into one of two categories:

1. Assume you can talk to a few users and get the insight you need to benefit all of your user segments

2. Get overwhelmed by the vast number of user groups and feel the need to “boil the ocean” by talking to all of them to gain insights before moving forward

While ultimately the decision of who you need to interview and how many interviews you need to conduct are tied to many factors, including overall objectives, timing and resource constraints, it is imperative to take the time to determine and prioritize your audience segments.

Action Plan:

Conduct an audience-prioritization exercise. Follow these three easy steps:

1. First, write down your segments on sticky notes. Be specific on what makes the segments different.

2. Then, arrange these sticky notes to prioritize them from primary users to secondary and tertiary users.

3. Review your prioritization against the goals you wrote down and determine the segments that are imperative to gain insights from vs. those that would be “nice to have” insights from.

While there is no firm guideline on how many interviews are “enough,” you must interview multiple people to ensure you don’t make decisions based off of singular individuals who may be outliers. “Enough” interviews is when the data becomes saturated and additional participants don’t provide any additional insights.

For usability testing, within the first couple of interviews, you may recognize you have a problem you must address, and it may be worth resolving that issue prior to additional user testing.

In more exploratory research, we typically look to conduct a minimum of 5–7 interviews per segment and 15–21 interviews total for an initiative to ensure insights are robust and decisions can be confidently made from the data.*

3: Create an interview guide.

While these interviews should be conversational in nature, creating a guide ensures the interviews stay on track.

Take the objectives determined in Step 1 and then establish what questions or usability tasks will lead you to reach your objective. Have your team of stakeholders do the same. Then look at all of the questions and organize them appropriately. Any questions that are leading in nature will need to be reworded.

A research guide should never be used as a checklist, and questions or usability tasks shouldn’t be based on preferences (ex: what color is more likely to make you click this button).Instead, in usability testing, it should ensure the user can achieve the desired tasks without having to “think.” And in exploratory research, it should help uncover the “why” of certain behaviors or decisions and ultimately dig into the “why” of the “why” to gain deeper levels of insight.

Action plan:

Have the entire stakeholder team align the questions they’d like to ask against the agreed upon objectives.

4: Use an experienced interviewer.

While it can feel like a simple task, conducting interviews while listening between the lines of the answers and then being able to shift and redirect questions to dig deeper is a skill set that requires practice.

An experienced interviewer knows how to set aside their own knowledge and beliefs on a topic and engage with research participants in a way that makes them comfortable explaining their thinking and points of view. Experienced interviewers know how to redirect conversations when necessary and how to direct questions in different ways to dig in deeper.

Most importantly, experienced researchers, especially professionals, are able to remain objective. It is easy for non-experienced interviewers and those too close to a project or desired outcome, to unconsciously believe they are hearing one thing from research participants based on their own beliefs without being truly objective.

Action plan:

Find someone with significant experience or hire an outside expert to conduct objective interviews.

5: Take your time analyzing findings

Record the interviews, if possible, and transcribe them for the purpose of deep analysis. It’s easy to make assumptions based on your notes and memory; however, when going through transcripts, you often find insights and opportunities you missed in real time.

Invite team stakeholders to be involved in the analysis process. When involving additional stakeholders:

1. Ensure everyone reads the transcripts

2. Ground the team in your research goals

3. Conduct a workshop to uncover insights with the larger group

4. Cluster themes that arise from the workshop for your final report

Using a team-based approach for analysis not only allows all stakeholders to build empathy with the user but also creates a greater understanding of the concerns or challenges that need to be solved through user-experience design.

Action plan:

Host a stakeholder analysis workshop.

*Note: This number is highly dependent on audience size and projected incidence rates, so this should be used only as a guide.

Apple vs. The Mad Men: Can marketing and privacy co-exist?

Apple is drawing a line in the sand around privacy.

Digital media networks are claiming that the release of iOS 11 will introduce the greatest threat to the Web as we know it. That’s because Apple is introducing strict new privacy protection in its mobile Safari browser on the iPhone. The update to Apple’s Safari browser prevents ad networks from effectively tracking your browsing history through the use of cross site tracking. According to this blog post by John Wilander on the WebKit.org (author’s note: WebKit is the open source code foundation for Apple’s Safari browser), the new intelligent tracking prevention features stops third-party sources (e.g.: major ad networks) from effectively creating a copy of your browsing history via tracking cookies stored on your device.Here’s how John describes the process in his post: “Imagine a user who first browses example-products.com for a new gadget and later browses example-recipies.com for dinner ideas. If both these sites load resources from example-tracker.com and example-tracker.com has a cookie stored in the user’s browser, the owner of example-tracker.com has the ability to know that the user visited both the product website and the recipe website, what they did on those sites, what kind of web browser was used, et cetera. This is what’s called cross-site tracking and the cookie used by example-tracker.com is called a third-party cookie. In our testing we found popular websites with over 70 such trackers, all silently collecting data on users.”While advertisers claim the process is benign, Apple deems the process overly intrusive, offering a data cache rich enough for any interested party to effectively reconstruct your complete browsing history. In the hands of a malicious entity, that information could surely be used to nefarious ends.

And the ad industry is living up to the term, “Mad Men.”

According to a sternly worded press release, penned jointly by a coalition of industry associations which includes the 4A's—American Advertising Federation, Association of National Advertisers, Data & Marketing Association, Interactive Advertising Bureau, and Network Advertising Alliance (hereafter referred to as the Industry)—the Apple update will effectively break the commercial Web. Or, at least, make it prohibitively difficult to monetize. In the joint press release, these industry groups assert they are “deeply concerned about the Safari 11 browser update that Apple plans to release, as it overrides and replaces existing user-controlled cookie preferences with Apple's own set of opaque and arbitrary standards for cookie handling.” Ultimately, they claim “Put simply, machine-driven cookie choices do not represent user choice; they represent browser-manufacturer choice.”

Did consumers ever really choose?

Running a company that makes its bread and butter crafting digital experiences, I can wholeheartedly and unquestionably agree there that browser cookie technology is fundamental to ensuring users have a seamless and personalized experience on the Web. But it is tough to agree with the industry’s position that the highly aggressive tracking and consumption of users’ effectively unfiltered browsing history was in any way a user choice that Apple is now violating.I guarantee that if I was ever presented with any detailed terms of service outlining how, and what detail, my browsing history would be collected and reported back to third-party ad networks, I cannot remember the moment I accepted them. I would assume most users’ experience around that issue is similarly clouded by the fog of our myriad collective browsing experiences.

Is Apple overstepping their authority?

Put simply, I don’t think so. The company is, at its core, a purveyor of hardware and user experiences. If they deem the best user experience on their platform to be founded in a more conscientious protection of their users’ privacy, it’s difficult to see how their approach isn’t the smartest means to that end.So, what is apple proposing? Again, the WebKit.org post describes it thus: “If the user has not interacted with example.com in the last 30 days, example.com website data and cookies are immediately purged and continue to be purged if new data is added.”And, further, they simplified it into this easy-to-follow chart:

Ad-infinitum?

It seems the Industry would prefer that in the long run, with enough data-sharing and partnership agreements, everyone would be, by virtue of any number of unread terms of service, opted into everything, in perpetuity. It’s a convenient position in the short term, but one that ultimately, I believe, will lead to consumer backlash far less manageable in the long run than their current Apple problem.

Can’t we all just get along?

It may be tough to remember at this point, but we used to have a political system in the US where two conflicting parties would discuss an issue over which they differed and come to a compromise that was workable, even if both parties were slightly unsatisfied with the outcome. Ultimately this is where I think this issue should and will end up, in a compromise.A day may be too short a time to allow tracking cookies to work their personalization magic in a way that satisfies the commerce needs of content providers and the ad networks that drive their revenue streams, but it’s hard to imagine a world where unlimited access to browsing histories doesn’t constitute a massive violation of privacy. In the end, it’s a question that needs to be resolved. Publicly. With open debate and full transparency for consumers. And when no interested party is fully satisfied with the outcome—Apple, the industry or consumers—we’ve probably derived the right solution.