Please join me in congratulating Austin Center for Design’s graduating class. These students have completed thirty-two weeks of intense training, reflection, and creative production. The results of their effort are five companies, each founded around principles of social entrepreneurship: these companies generate revenue, and simultaneously drive social impact, pursuing a humanitarian theory of change. The companies, and their founders, are presented below:

Ad@pt, founded by Melissa Chapman and Willy Morgan
Ad@pt provides illustrated adoption timelines, which are designed to give families a bite-size, digestable glance at all of the adoption options. This way, when a family calls an adoption agency, they feel informed and in control. Our product hosts and helps manage digital copies of the adoption paperwork throughout the process so that, in the end, families have an easy-to-access and secure access to this important content on their mobile devices.

Spoak, founded by Callie Thompson, Eli Robinson, and Dave Gottlieb
Spoak is an app that evokes audio stories based on personal photos of artifacts, people, places and events. Transform memories into dynamic stories. Invite family and friends to record their own versions and bring shared history to life.

CareWell, founded by Eric Boggs and Chuck Hildebrand
Other caregiving task management systems are little more than bandaids. They fail to connect caregivers with long-term, motivated helpers. They fail to address the fundamental fear, anxiety, grief and guilt that are a natural part of caregiving. CareWell offers practical and emotional relief for people who are helping an ailing or aging loved one. It equips caregivers with powerful delegation and task management tools to tame overwhelming logistics of caregiving. It also addresses issues of fear, isolation, burn out and guilt through stress-free recruiting of motivated helpers, planning guides and ‘system at a glance’ tools.

Kites and Ladders, founded by Bethany Stolle and Jesse Jack
Kites and Ladders allows families with autistic children to negotiate this communication gap with a shared visual communication system. Our product includes a wearable biometric sensor for tracking emotional state, a camera app for the child to visually express their point of view, and a photo editing app that allows the child to customize photos and share them with a private network of family and caregivers.

Bring Up, founded by Will Mederski and Kevin McCann
By sending parents SMS text messages with classroom highlights each night, bringup gives parents insight into the school day so they may have meaningful conversations with their children anywhere. bringup builds a bridge between the classroom and home.

Congratulations to all eleven of our graduates. We’re extremely proud of you!

If you haven’t checked it out, please stop over and Chuck and I’s site – www.wecallitboost.com.  We are designing an app to help families coordinating caregiving tasks.  A large part of caregiving is staying on top of everything that needs to happen, both for the care receiver and the care giver.  In a typically stressful environment, family caregivers may tend to become isolated and retract from getting the help they need and deserve.  We’re here to help them get the support they need from their network, and to make that coordination as easy as possible.  One way we are doing that is through automated SMS sign-up and confirmation.

This past week, we began piloting, with Chuck and I as the system.   Why pilot you may ask?  To make sure we get the system interaction right.  And in a very cost effective and fun manner, we learned a lot about how to improve the initial interaction model.  Six actual caregivers posing as care helpers received texts regarding activity “asks” such as taking Grandma to PT, visiting, or buying her a sweater.  They then had to respond “y” or “n” and could check task details by following a link to a hosted image page of the fake task.  After accepting (or declining), we sent confirmation texts 24 hours in advance of the supposed task due date to reconfirm their commitment.  The day after, we sent texts asking for updates that would be posted to the system for all to see (imagining use of the actual app by a core team of helpers).

For one, we learned that we will need to plan for uncertainly – helpers will invariably want more information, and there has to be a text option for “?”, at this point, which will likely direct a text to the primary caregiver to determine how to answer.

The goal is to take as much of the matching and explanation responsibility OFF the caregiver, which we intend to do through smart hints when creating tasks, and well as a redesigned message that may include key components of the task in addition to the name.

There’s a creature in software companies called the “product manager” (almost always referred to as the “product guy”, hammering home the unfortunate fact that nearly all software companies are full of men. For fun, I’ll switch it ’round for the remainder of this post.) The product gal has a strange role, in that her focus is on product-market-fit. This means she’s responsible for determining the features the product offers, for bringing these features to market in a certain sequence and by a certain date, and for making sure the features deliver on the value proposition and promise made to end users and customers.

The reason the role is strange is because it serves two masters. The product gal answers to the needs of the market, and so she must have a strong sense of what competitors are doing and what technological advancements are starting to become the norm. Yet simultaneously, she answers to the needs of users, and so she must have a strong sense of what users want and desire. When these two masters line up, everything is groovy. But frequently, what’s good for the market and what’s good for the users diverge, and so our product gal will have to choose a side.

Most of the product gals I know come from either a tech background (they were coders), or a marketing background. When push comes to shove and the market/user fit diverges, these people double-down on what they know best. This might mean pushing new features, or migrating to a new development stack, or analyzing all hell out of web traffic, or conducting survey after survey. But when the product gal has a background in design, and she sees a divergence between market and user needs, a different thing happens.  She’ll leverage an empathetic lens, and she’ll also double-down on what she knows: user-centered design. She’ll focus on helping users achieve their goals and aspirations. This is distinctly a design perspective on product functionality, and it often means removing features, rather than adding them, and ignoring current site behavior rather than optimizing for it. It’s a maternal voice of usability, and will force a conversation of resource allocation. Perhaps creative and development resources should spend their time refining existing features, rather than producing new ones. It might make more sense to track forward progress based on the outcome of behavioral studies – yes, boring old usability studies – rather than lines of new code shipped or backlog pruning. These are definitively non-sexy places to be as a product owner, but in a strange way, they position usability as a strategic differentiator. For all the talk of experience and engagement as product goals, usability may have found its way back in the limelight as a means of achieving both ends. (This poses a subtle irony to last summer’s bandwagon land grab of the Usability Professionals Association, rebranding as “The User Experience Professionals Association.”)

For a designer looking to move into product ownership roles, this has several implications. First, she’ll need to become extremely interested in the competitive product landscape, understanding how market dynamics are shaping alternative approaches to the same value proposition. Next, she’ll need to become aware of more strategic approaches to design, thinking about how a combination of feature decisions, timing, and delivery models contribute to a user’s perception of value in her product. Finally, she’ll need to dust off those old, fundamental skills of think-aloud usability testing, and constantly beat a drum of simplicity and reduction. A designer in a product role is about as far from a pixel queen as one can get; strategic design is about usability, not beauty.

After performing individual research, Kevin and Will joined forces to create a new product and service for use in elementary school classrooms. The product tentatively named SchoolShare, is a tool which gives parents a window into the classroom. Using SchoolShare, teachers can instantly share student’s work with their parents, to encourage parent engagement outside of the classroom with their child’s education. By simply snapping a picture, teachers can easily share a student’s work in school with parents in real time. Yet SchoolShare is more than photo sharing service, it provides parents access to an important moment within the daily life of their child.

The three stakeholders critical to the success of this product are teachers, parents, and students. Teachers desire more parent involvement in the students education, yet their time is very valuable. Students enjoy sharing their work, yet often lose excitement by the time they get home from school. Parents wish to be more involved, but rarely have direct contact with teachers. By designing our service around the critical needs of each stakeholder, we can enrich a child’s education, by allowing parents to be more aware of their student’s daily classroom activities.

Teachers will make the ultimate decision on whether or not to use SchoolShare in their classrooms, yet they will most likely not be the paying customer. For this reason, we must be sure that we design the service to balance the needs of teachers and parents while making it as simple and easy to use for teachers as possible. The teacher’s perspective is the most important as we design our user experience.

Customer Journey Map and Touch Points for SchoolShare

We have created a service blueprint of SchoolShare to map each user interaction with our service. The service blueprint is a tool that we will use to ensure that the needs and limitations of the teachers and parents are addressed. From a teacher snapping a picture in the classroom, to the parent’s receiving a notification on their smartphone, each touchpoint is carefully evaluated from both the user perspective, as well as the required support from behind the scenes. Linked here, is the full service blueprint for SchoolShare.

Congratulations to AC4D alumni Girls Guild for some awesome recent press! They were featured in Tribeza’s November magazine (see page 106), and recently won Best Apprenticeship Program in The Austin Chronicle:

Think of it as Girls Rock Camp for the art set. Bombastic bursts of apprenticeships and workshops put girls into direct contact with women who are making their way in the world as artists and artisans. It’s a great way to build a skill set or spend a Saturday afternoon learning to do something new.

Be sure to catch them on the East Austin Studio Tour, too.

Today was Day 1 of bootcamp, a deep dive into the methods and processes of design research.  Design research is an approach to understanding the context of a subject area (in our bootcamp case, the problems facing education in the US) through emersion and guerrilla ethnography techniques.  To start, we were asked to come up with a problem focus that would drive our next few hours.  Dave, Will, and I, joined together as a group by our commonality of “awesome bicycles”, determined we would go to UT Austin to find out if students of various years had found their passions, and what tools had helped them get to the point of being driven toward that goal.  All of us could relate with a period of indecision in our lives where our future professional directions (and majors or focus areas) were murky and characterized by a number of negative emotions.  By understanding student experiences, our goal was to identify patterns of influences that ultimately defined student’s choices and successes.  Idea synthesis and prototyping (making) come tomorrow.

The most difficult part of the experience for me was starting.  Getting out into context by nature is uncomfortable.  In a certain sense, I felt like those individuals that sweep down onto innocent passers by declaring “give a minute to save the environment?” with their clipboards in hand and me with my head down as I walk off.  Who am I to interrupt a student?  Or anyone else for that matter?  Once we explained our goals briefly – who we were and what we were trying to find – students readily gave their time.  This was an issue that they could instantly relate to.  I’m sure there will be more difficult contexts in which to enter – clinics, hospitals, peoples homes – but having this boot camp will surely make that process easier when the time comes.

Given my inclination to work in healthcare, I can’t help but turn my mind to the value of design research and to comment on an article recently published from the Boston Globe entitled “A new generation of tech entrepreneurs seeks to reinvent healthcare.” You can find the link below.  The main issue I potentially find is that companies may be doing product development in a vacuum without a potential market.  Naomi Fried, CIO of Children’s Hospital Boston, sees that lots of activity is occurring but is unsure that all of this activity will produce (any) long term value.  Reading between the lines, it seems like some of these companies may need to conduct the very kind of research that we were engaged with today, BEFORE spending lots of money on product development and launch.   True human context and needs (do we need headbands that will help us concentrate??) should drive their innovations.

See the article here:

http://articles.boston.com/2012-08-19/business/33247711_1_health-care-healthbox-chief-innovation-officer

Check out this great piece on Girls Guild in Culture Map: Building a community of artistic women through apprenticeships.

Some of my students had a chat with a prospective investor regarding seed capital, and the conversation turned to five year plans and exit strategies. They had neither. I realize it’s mildly heretical, but I don’t think either are valuable tools for social entrepreneurs. Here’s why.

A five-year plan is an artifact of large-scale “traditional” venture capital, and is – at least for the recipient of the venture money – a completely arbitrary time horizon. For the VC, however, it’s a critical length of time. Rob Day, of Black Coral Capital, explains the mechanics of how this works in a great post (forgive the long excerpt, but it really nails it):

The time from initial investment to exit typically has to be 5-7 years at MOST — preferably much less. Factor into the equation that an exit is most likely only going to come once a company has significant and growing revenues, and not when the technology is simply brought to market, and very quickly the VC’s decision-making starts to be clear… the reason for the 10 year fixed life of VC funds is not only because of the LPs’ needs for liquidity, but also because of the time value of money.  Discount rates (not that they’re often used in the industry, but still…) are really high for venture capital investments.  That reflects the high risks associated with launching any new business, along with the high expected returns of the asset class… a VC who knows that the technology in question should work (there’s rarely any “science risk” associated with an internet startup, after all, just market and execution risks) expects to achieve a minimum 40% IRR at least 35% of the time. What I just explained is where the oft-mentioned “5x” (or in other words, “we look for investment opportunities that we think will at least grow to 5x our initial investment”) comes from in venture capital. Because if you return at least 40% IRR over 5 years on a million dollars, you’ve turned it into $5+mm.  If you do that with the kinds of success rates Fred Wilson talks about (let’s say 35% 5x investments, 35% 1x investments, and 30% wipeouts, to vastly oversimplify), you will have returned 17% per annum, not including the management fees, etc.

This speaks to the unique perspective of both parties in the venture equation. Say you are a startup looking for money. Your focus is, predictably, on yourselves and your prospective investor:

But their focus is on their LP’s (limited partners – the people that put the money into the fund in the first place), and on maximizing their return:

And, their focus is on hedging their risk across a number of investments:

The “five year plan” theoretically gives them a view into your likelihood of returning the magic 5x return. But while you’ll write your five year plan from the small, focused perspective of your own company, it will be considered by the funder in the context of all of their other investments.

The (until recently – .pdf link) unspoken joke is that the VC typically doesn’t actually generate the return they expect for their LPs, and I’ll argue it’s because predicting market dynamics five years out is, on a broad level, easy enough to prove useless, and on a detail level, impossible.

Consider that five years ago (May 2007):

• The billion dollar company Instagram didn’t exist, and wouldn’t exist for three more years
• George Bush was still president
• The “global financial crisis” was just beginning
• iPhone 4 hadn’t been released yet
• Justin Bieber hadn’t been discovered yet

Back in 2001, I worked at a company that was first called allmystuff, and later reinvented as Contextual. The company raised about 11M from Dell Ventures, TL Ventures, Austin Ventures and AV Labs. The money was raised in October, 2000, and the board voted to close the company in March, 2002. The five year plan didn’t include two planes crashing into buildings in New York.

I’m not arguing that “black swan” events should preclude entrepreneurs from trying to plan and strategize. I’m arguing that, for a brand new business, any quantitative metrics tied to activities outside of a four-month window are completely made up, and I think most people know that. But we go through the process of the five-year plan because the VC asks for it, because they’ve always asked for it, and maybe, because it makes them feel like they are Doing A Good Job.

Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures has said “Start-ups should be hunch-driven early on and data-driven as they scale.” I completely agree, and at a stage where an entrepreneur is asking for seed money, scale should be about the furthest thing from their mind. The five year road map is a distraction, and when someone asks for one, it should remind you of their intent: 5x, five year return, and a broad focus across their portfolio. You’ll be but one drop in a much larger bucket.

The other side of the coin is the “exit”. An exit implies a large liquidity event: an IPO or an acquisition. It’s how the funders get their money out. An “exit strategy” is the plan for the monumental event that will occur in approximately five years. For design-led social entrepreneurism, the idea of an exit reinforces the problems of design tourism: that you’ll fly into a problem situation, move some post-its around, and solve homelessness. But as I’ve written about before, wicked problems demand a long-term focus and an emphasis on depth. The entire idea of a timeline, as rational as it may be for things like budgeting and resourcing, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Instead of pursuing an exit, I encourage my students to pursue a stay-the-course attitude. It requires dedication and patience, and that’s intimidating and scary. But I just don’t see society making progress on these large, consequential issues in short bursts.

Stop worrying about exiting and planning a five year strategy. Start focusing on impact, today.

I’m advising a startup that’s in a fairly typical “starting” position: they have a team, a good idea of a high level topic (“We’re focusing on financial markets, not on baking bread”), and a series of product features that they know they want to include in the company. They have a timeframe for success, driven by the amount of money they have, their perspective on how fast their competition will work, and, as is usually the case, a bit of arbitrariness. And they have a name.

And now, they need to build a product.

There are lots of different processes for identifying what to build. I’ve outlined one way before. And there are lots of processes in place that describe how to build it. But knowing what to build, and building it, doesn’t get you all of the way to a product or company, because you won’t have answered a critical question:

How does the product or company feel?

That’s a vague and fuzzy question, and so it may not ever get asked, much less answered. Those with an extremely analytical mind rarely consider this type of question, and if they do, they may discount it as being irrelevant. Even if it is considered, it’s hard to know how to answer it, because the concept is subjective and the embodiment of the answer is vague.

A way to arrive at the answer to that question is to ask a different question, one of value. What value will your product or company provide, and to whom?

It’s tempting to answer this question from a standpoint of utility, describing the practical things it helps someone do. For example, you might explain that Google “helps people find information.”  That makes sense, considering their stated mission: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” And, examine their value-line (I bet you didn’t even know they had one!): Search, Ads, and Apps. These are statements about getting things done and increasing efficiency. They are clear, and straight-forward, and can easily be tracked and measured. A statement of value can be used as vetting criteria for new features and functions, or even for the organization of the company. When someone has a great idea for a new product, you could ask, “How will this new idea support our value-line of search, ads, and apps? How will it help people find information? How will it help organize the world’s information?” These are all indications of commodity, which – as aspirational goals – are strange;  I would expect a company to aspire to a more differentiated and rich value proposition.

Of course, you can go in the other direction, too. For the last few years, AT&T’s value-line has been “Rethink Possible.” The absurd grammar choices of big companies aside (HP did it with “Let’s Do Amazing”, and Apple obviously enjoyed success with “Think Different”), the statement is thin because it’s overly broad. Taken as a sentence, it implies that “Our products will help you rethink what is possible.” Rethink what’s possible with what, my dishwasher? My relationship? Everything?

(As an aside to the aside, I feel like Let’s Do Amazing is terrible, but it’s nowhere near as bad as Yum! Brand’s “striving each and every day to put a Yum! on our customers’ faces around the world“. Excuse me, Ma’am, but you have some Yum on your face.)

A larger criticism would be the frequency with which AT&T changed their perception of the value they provide. Consider that at least five lines have been used since 2000:

• Fits you best
• Raising the bar
• Your World. Delivered
• Rethink Possible
• Rethink Possible: It’s what you do with what we do.

Has the value AT&T provides actually changed that much – five massive changes – in 12 years? The justification for the last change is the most compelling, as it signals an attempt to humanize:

“We did a lot of insight research about how people live with technology,” said Esther Lee, senior vice president for brand marketing, advertising and sponsorship at AT&T in Dallas, which included “ethnographies, shop-alongs and spending time in people’s living rooms.”

When the “Rethink possible” campaign was developed, most consumers “felt overwhelmed with technology,” Ms. Lee said…

Unfortunately, it seems that they fell short of truly empathizing with their customers, as Lee goes on to explain:

“… but only a short time later many have “found ways to integrate it in their lives” — and some even “talk about it with love. The real innovation that’s happening is what people are doing, and how people are dealing, with technology,” she added, and “the unique ways they use it to make their lives better.” [Source]

The five statements AT&T has tried indicate a sense of value that is so broad as to be aimless or meaningless. I think large companies have a hard time describing their value to the world because their literal size has diluted a sense of purpose. I don’t necessarily believe the story of the NASA janitor who claimed he was “putting a man on the moon”, because NASA’s engineering culture was so strong, and the organization was so big, it’s unlikely there was a shared vision of anything.

I don’t like utility-driven value statements, like Google’s, because they seem destined towards commodity. And I don’t like the high-level value statements of AT&T because they are meaningless – they are fluff, noise. Instead, I recommend a more human approach to the question of value, which you can arrive at through a round-about manner. Ask, and answer, these two questions: If your product was a person, what kind of person would it be? What stance does your product take when it is confronted? Your product isn’t a person, but it will be used by one, and so these questions force you to consider the time-based interactions and dialogue that will occur when a real live person engages with your creations. You’ll describe the aspirational attitudes that your work conveys, and because your work is a proxy for yourself, you’ll be describing your aspirational stance, too.

Here’s our public presentation of GirlsGuild, a community of makers in apprenticeship.
Check it out and let us know what you think by liking our Facebook page and commenting, or signing up for our Newsletter! We’ll keep you posted on our exciting plans for this Summer!
~xoxo Cheyenne & Diana