It’s not even really up for debate. “Insight” is one of the things we value most in the world of creative problem solving. Despite its value, we tend to throw the term around pretty loosely in creative strategy circles. We talk about insight as though we agree on what the word actually means. And we tend to talk about insights as things that will emerge, predictably, out of research.

“We do the research and that’s where insights come from. Simple, right?”

But what is insight?

in|sight  / ˈɪnsʌɪt

noun
1. the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something: his mind soared to previously unattainable heights of insight

2. an instance of apprehending the true nature of a thing, complex situation or problem: and with this insight, he was able to understand what she had meant by her letter

But how do we actually cultivate this capacity or learn how to identify insights? How can we tell the difference between a mere morsel of information and something that is truly … insightful? And why, for something that is so important, does it seem that there isn’t any agreed-upon way to do these things?

Although my first inclination is to say that ‘insight’ isn’t a science, there has been a ton of research done on the subject – from how insight generation can be supported to methods you can use to encourage its emergence.

But this post is not about that research.

Instead, this post is a reflection on the experiences I’ve had as an insight hunter and a few patterns that I’ve noticed along the way.

As a longtime meditation practitioner, I would say that there is something similar between uncovering insight in a contemplative practice and how insights reveal themselves in a creative setting. If you’ve read any of my other posts, you’ll know that I like using metaphors to structure my thinking, even if they’re imperfect.

Today I’m going to use some common meditation guidelines as a metaphorical framework for how we can approach creative insight generation. It’s not exactly a how-to (or, by any means, a guide to meditation) but more a series of things I’ve noticed that can nurture your ability to identify insights and put them to good use.

Get quiet and make some space
I’m not suggesting that you assume the lotus position in the brainstorm room but it is important to free up some mental space for whatever you’re working on. Trying to work on multiple projects at once for the sake of efficiency usually has the opposite of the intended effect.

It can be difficult to ensure that the projects you work on are given a sufficient timeline to let you clear mental clutter from the last project you were working on. Although this is often outside of your control from a process perspective, try to build in some buffer zones between meetings or dedicate specific days of the week to specific projects. Walk into kickoff meetings with more questions than answers and lots of room for listening. And try to keep your preconceptions to a minimum (easier said than done, as any meditator will tell you).

Be honest about what you’re looking at
It could be argued that the goal of meditation is to see things as they really are. Likewise, the goal of your research and kickoff phase is to really see the situation you’re in. To find the insight that will guide your creative effort. It’s difficult to know the difference between the data showing you something and the data showing you what you want to see. Part of the reason we build the jobs-to-be-done framework into our process is that by its nature it only wants to know what happened. Unlike other primary research methods, it’s not interested in how a participant reports on a solution, it wants to know about the events and problems that led them to a decision. It’s intensely curious.

Since the rest of your peripheral research (into the product, the industry and culture) is going to be biased by the opinions and worldviews of you and your team, it’s good to have a foundation of data that has nothing to do with what you think.

That said, it would be a mistake to assume that the jobs-to-be-done approach is purely rational, linear and only interested in the facts. On the contrary, part of the importance of clearing away our assumptions is to be able to identify the parts of people’s stories that are emotionally driven or activated. Much like contemplative practice, this is where the interesting stuff is.

Don’t get hung up on anything too early
Before we can move ahead in our meditation practice, we need to be able to identify what arises, acknowledge it and move along.

When we see something that looks like it might be an insight, it can be tempting to make it meaningful because it is the first thing to appear. This is helpful to be aware of when we’re trying to make sense out of a mountain of research. It’s a good idea to note what stands out to you as you make your way through the chaos but try not to figure everything out as you identify these things. Just flag it and set it aside until you’re ready to look at the nuggets together.

In other words, be patient.

Focus and make connections
At the end of a meditation session, it can be helpful to take a moment to reflect and to jot down anything interesting about your experience. Likewise, when your research gathering phase is coming to a close and you’ve managed to clear up some space again in your mind, it’s time to take a closer look. What is interesting about what you have identified? What is causing the phenomenon? What implications does it have? Is it still interesting now that you’ve had a chance to look at it more closely? Is it related to any of the other items you’ve set aside? How?

It might make you a bit uncomfortable
This is probably the area of ‘insight protocol’ (no such thing) that gets really hard to turn into a set of instructions. It relies on having done the previous steps properly, most importantly, being honest about the data you’re looking at and making sure you’re not just selecting interesting pieces of research that back up what you already think you know. Instead, I believe that the most interesting pieces of information are the ones that make you squirm a little bit. If you’ve uncovered an ‘insight’ that feels too easy or convenient, you might want to go back and take another look. This might be the time to try to reframe your problem, that is, look at it from another perspective or try inverting your assumptions.

Find a way to put it into action
Much like coming to realize that your state of mind is a product of where you put your attention for most of the day, uncovering a meaningful insight in your work should have the suggestion of a solution inside of it.

Sometimes this means that it instantly solves a problem and other times an insight can nudge you down the road of further exploration. It’s just that now, you have a better sense of why you’re travelling in that direction. Or if the solution isn’t obvious, something to ask yourself might be, “How can this help anyone?” or “Does this open up new ways to solve a problem?”

Being passionate about understanding and helping people will help you connect problems and solutions. In a creative problem-solving setting, finding ‘insight’ basically means finding a key to solving a problem that exists.

Continue with diligence
It is called meditation ‘practice’ for a reason. It is meant to be something you do every day or at least on a regular basis for it to be beneficial. It is a very simple set of instructions that are hard to follow every day. It’s hard because you have to find the time to make the space and be diligent about continuing to follow the instructions even when you would rather not. Likewise, in a creative problem-solving environment, it can be difficult to resist having all the answers and finding a shortcut.

For everything else, there is a bootcamp. A cross-fit approach to success. For insight, you need space, patience and lots of practice.

Thank you to comics artist Dave Coverly for the image. For more Zen (and other) humour, check out his work here.

As a planner, the most intensive period for me on any project used to be in the kickoff and upfront strategic direction phase. Increasingly, and by design, I stay highly engaged throughout the creative process. Not just by checking in and staying on top of meetings, but by sitting side-by-side with designers and developers as a project unfolds.

On a recent concept exploration project that didn’t involve prototyping, I worked in an almost “pair-programming” style with the lead designer. First with sticky notes, then with sketches and finally with fully fleshed out designs and interactions interwoven with a story that held it all together. More recently, I uprooted myself and sat between the designer and developer I was working with so that we could easily talk through anything that emerged while designs and prototypes were being created.

This, in my experience, is an ideal way to incorporate planning into the “making” part of the design and build process. I wouldn’t say we’ve completely nailed down how this works for every team and in every situation but it’s something we’re working towards defining more clearly in 2014.

Although planners, designers and developers share the same ultimate goal, we are responsible for different things and tend to look at things in different ways. Together, we’re more likely to uncover gaps and opportunities as they present themselves. Of course, we often step away to work on things solo but we tend to make the most progress when we work through things collaboratively.

I think it works particularly well when we take up office “residence” together; either by holing up in an unclaimed boardroom (and plastering it with stickies and comps) or simply moving our workstations temporarily so that we can work side by side.

What I really like about this is that we all seem to morph into something larger than our traditional roles – becoming more aware of everything from how the project is managed to the importance of copy to tell our story well. And when we share progress with our client, we all have an intimate knowledge of the design and technical decisions that went into every aspect of the experience. Typically, we’ve covered dozens of bases that aren’t reflected in the design so we’re also less concerned about curveballs (or scenarios that we hadn’t considered).

This kind of cross-disciplinary preparedness seems to foster a healthy relationship with our clients, where we expand this approach beyond our internal team to theirs. Acknowledging the importance and interdependence of all the people on a project helps foster creativity and bring out the best in all of us combined.

It’s called Veta La Palma, an aquaculture farm located in Spain. Wikipedia tells me that it produces 1,200 tons of sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp each year. Unlike most of the world’s fish farms, it does so not by interfering with nature, but by supporting it.

When Barber asked Miguel Medialdea, the lead biologist at Veta La Palma, how he measured success, he pointed to thousands of pink flamingoes blanketing the water and said, “That’s success. Look at their bellies, they’re feasting!” He explains that the flamingoes travel 150 miles every day to feed on his fish “because the food’s better.” His fish farm is also one of the largest and most important private bird sanctuaries in Europe.

Barber asked him, “Isn’t a thriving bird population the last thing you want on a fish farm?” He explains that the flamingoes, by eating mostly shrimp, create an abundance of nutritious algae left for his prized fish. “We farm extensively, not intensively,” says Medialdea.

Barber describes Veta La Palma as:

1. A farm that doesn’t feed its animals.
2. A farm that measures its success by the health of its predators.
3. A farm that’s literally a water purification plant.

As interested as I am in sustainable aquaculture, I find the model compelling as a blueprint for healthy ecosystems of all kinds. Imagine digital environments that could be described that way: places that require little maintenance, that provide value to everyone (not just the ‘farmer’) and contribute to improving the overall health of the wider digital environment.

It seems like everyone is talking about the importance of ecosystems these days, especially in the context of ‘brand ecosystems’. And although I think this is an interesting topic, I am using the ecological metaphor to talk about something a little different.

The Problem: Digital Landfill

Many award-winning digital campaigns are really very empty experiences. You are led along an arduous (though often very pretty) path for a “chance to win” something great. Which is fine – it is what it is – but I don’t think these represent excellence in digital experiences; marketing or otherwise.

Two well-received campaigns that spring to mind are Volkswagen’s “Hitchhike with a Like” and the Shoppers Drug Mart “Spin to Win” contest. Both are brands that I really like, but after going through the motions of their game mechanics (spinning wheels, clicking to ‘hitch’ a ride), I left both experiences feeling a bit used. I didn’t get anything out of them except for that chance to win and the likelihood of winning anything is slim. Both of them present themselves as games, so even if I don’t win, I should be having fun, right? Instead, I left both experiences with a tangible film of regret, my life energy being converted into a “time spent” stat for someone’s impending measurement exercise.

What is the goal of these programs? That I spend half an hour on their Facebook promotion? I know it’s a game, but it’s slow and unfulfilling. It’s pretty, but I expect more from my game experiences these days.

And what happens to these sites when the quarter is over? Some will be recycled but most will drift off toward the garbage heap. Which makes sense because they weren’t built to last.

Made by Many coined the concept of ‘landfill marketing’ or ‘digital landfill’, which is a great way to describe disposable digital marketing efforts. They don’t provide much value to anyone and are a threat to the health of our digital environment. Good digital experiences, on the other hand, are designed to be durable and to provide to long-lasting benefit to everyone involved.

An Alternative Model: Sustainable Digital Environments

How do we create digital experiences that are sustainable and that function in a way that benefits both customers and brands … and even our competition?

I was inspired by Big Spaceship’s case study on creating the Crayola website:

“Unlike many websites, the purpose of Crayola.com is not to keep visitors on the site for as long as possible. The site is a tool for driving product usage so we made it very simple for users to get inspired and start creating.”

Healthy digital environments should leave you feeling refreshed and energized or empowered in some way. But in order for them to do that, brands need to think of them as something that can exist long-term and have that sort of effect from the outset.

How do we do this? Using Barber’s description of the Veta La Palma as a guide, let’s look at digital experience through three lenses we can use to question our efforts. If we aren’t providing value to someone, somewhere, then maybe we should rethink our approach or our motivation.

1. Support natural behaviour (Don’t feed the animals.)
The first lens is probably the most straightforward. Healthy digital environments aren’t about carrots and sticks. When people are self-motivated to participate in something, they are fed by the environment in a more substantial way. They are not taken out of their natural state and asked to do something unnatural. People behave in a certain way already, so it’s important to support them in that rather than distract them from their goals. And let’s not mistake conditioned reflexes for engagement. Think Nike+.

A less obvious example comes from Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter. He talks about how the classic formats for Kickstarter videos have evolved since they launched. He says, “We never told people how to structure the rewards or how to make their videos or anything … there’s sort of a collective intelligence that emerged over time on how to do this thing.” Letting go of some of the control can yield interesting and ultimately more authentic results. If you can commit to supporting the experience, other things will sort themselves out organically.

2. Be generous (Measure success by the health of your predators.)
This quality points to the importance of what Tim O’Reilly refers to “creating more value than you capture”. How this manifests will depend on the goals of the brand. But if we agree that the best experiences are those that provide people with something they need or want, it would indicate some level of success if people want to use, share or outright steal what you’ve got on offer.

A good example of this is how ProPublica uses Creative Commons on their stories to encourage other publishers to distribute their articles. The terms of their license are laid out on a page titled: Steal Our Stories. The result is a substantially wider reach, which supports their mission to have an impact and spur reform.

3. Improve the world around you (Be a water-purification plant.)
The fact is, most of us don’t get to work on world-changing projects all of the time. But there is something inspirational about creating digital experiences for the people of Planet Earth that actually serve their needs. By holding ourselves to some of these standards, we can improve the cultural environment around digital making and marketing.

If you support the environment you rely on and don’t take more than you need, you can improve the lives of your customers (and neighbouring communities) in tangible, and often intangible, ways.

An admirable example is the MAKE phenomenon. It’s a magazine, it’s a festival, it’s a community. Sure, they sell things, but it’s so much more. They describe their audience as: “a growing culture and community that believes in bettering ourselves, our environment, our educational system—our entire world. This is much more than an audience, it’s a worldwide movement that Make is leading—we call it the Maker Movement.” Importantly, this movement is not an accident, it’s by design.

What’s In It for You?
Sustainable Relationships.

Understanding the real relationships that exist between your customers and your brand helps support the development of brand utility. Instead of force-fitting your brand’s product into customer’s lives, the sustainable ecosystem model helps us to ask: What is your brand really doing for its customers? Or, as Ingmar Delange asks in his presentation on brand utility, “What can we do for you?”

It is not possible to create and maintain healthy digital environments for customers without understanding what motivates and supports behaviour in context. A healthy digital ecosystem simultaneously provides sustenance and room to breathe – that is, meeting customer needs while also getting out of the way.

Thinking about digital experience design in this way helps us keep customers in focus – instead of trying to create faux experiences around marketing objectives, we can strengthen the mutually-beneficial relationships that exist in these ecosystems.

Creating personas is something that I find interesting and rewarding — combining third party research and data with primary interview subjects and intuition is a delicate balance. On one hand, you want your personas’ value to be obvious and grounded in fact. On the other hand, you want to create a compelling narrative that doesn’t slip into stereotype and that is nuanced enough to be real.

But something tricky happens when you try to conceive of multiple personas interacting with the same interface on their respective journeys. Meeting needs and anticipating behaviour in triplicate can become a juggling act and designing an emotional interface can be even more difficult. How do you separate who you’re communicating with and when?

What is umwelt?

I stumbled across the concept of umwelt while reading on my holiday. Isn’t that always the way? You’re trying to escape into a book that has absolutely nothing to do with your daily life and instead you accidentally find a new way to frame a difficult task you’ve left behind. In my case, it was while reading John Vaillant’s book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival that I first read about a century-old theory developed by Estonian physiologist Jakob von Uexküll.

Von Uexküll uses the German word umwelt to describe the unique perceptual world of different living beings. Vaillant borrows the concept to examine how tigers and humans interact in some of Eastern Russia’s most remote communities. Both the tiger and the human occupy the same umgebung, or objective world. But inside of that physical space, the two species notice and pay attention to different things or signs that are vital to their survival. Their subjective realities are completely different and as such, they may respond to the same stimuli differently. What is important or significant to the tiger may not even be perceptible to the human.

There is a long, established history between the two species and rules for interacting with each other and respecting each other’s needs and power. Vaillant’s book looks at what happens when that understanding disappears between them. But I digress.

What does this have to do with personas and emotional interface design?

As soon as I read about the idea I thought about how I might apply it to the project I was working on – could it apply somehow to how we use personas?

Maybe.

I started by thinking about how different personas might perceive the same place, or umgebung in the context of a digital environment.

One person might scan a page to find the Store Locator or a phone number. Another person might be in the same space to check in with their community to see what they think about a new product. The functionality available to each user is the same, but what they sense, need and anticipate is what makes them different.

I can imagine, once defined, trying to map the umwelts of different personas to specific pages or use cases. Maybe by creating screen-specific heat maps that correspond to different personas’ awareness levels, needs and emotional resonance, we can further avoid designing all things for all people. Instead, we can use the umwelt concept to examine the primary needs of each persona in specific states and focus on those.

For interface designers, this kind of metaphor might be too vague to be useful. I’m not suggesting that I’ve discovered something revolutionary or that it’s fully fleshed out as a tool. It’s just that, particularly for someone like myself, in a strategic role without a lot of boxes and arrows – I like the concept as a lens. Who are these people in relation to the interface? Where do they overlap? How do they intersect? Can we meet the needs and emotional expectations of some of these people in the same way?

The difficulty still remains defining the right personas and doing so in a valid and believable way. Because really, how do you begin to understand someone else’s umwelt, especially if it is significantly different than your own?

That, as they say, is another story.

If you’re wondering what that means, I highly recommend checking out Gabe Zichermann’s work.

I had the pleasure of catching Zichermann’s session “The Future of Marketing is Gamification” at mesh marketing a few weeks ago. He gave a similar presentation at a Google Tech Talk in October (video here) if you’re interested in seeing it for yourself.

He set up his discussion by talking about the proliferation of games with premises that don’t, at first, seem like fun (e.g. diapering a baby, farming, waiting tables) but that are huge game successes. Ever since, I can’t help wondering what a gamified version of my life might look like – even with all the dull, tedious things I have to do…

I love the idea that all of the things we ‘have to’ do can actually be fun.

It immediately made me think of my experience with using Freshbooks, a cloud-based invoicing solution for freelancers and small businesses. The task of invoicing meets the criteria of dull and tedious in my world and until Freshbooks came along I hated tracking my time and sending out bills. Their system congratulates you on entering time (everyone needs a little encouragement) and they have a way to track your billing stats against industry averages. This feature even has a lightweight gaming function that generates ‘report card banners’ for your website based on your performance in relation to peers in your industry. Overall, the value-adds of excellent customer service and fun, surprising touches make the software a pleasure to use.

Pleasure is the new P.

Zichermann suggests that we add ‘Pleasure’ to the 5 P’s of marketing after Product, Price, Place, Promotion and People (or Positioning, depending on who you ask). And why shouldn’t pleasure be an extension of great customer experiences? For now, great user experience means: It works and it’s easy to use. It meets my needs. I think that in the near future, great user experience will also mean: It’s fun. Even the most dull and tedious things should be fun to take care of. And when you’re rewarded for doing things that you have to do anyway, you’ll do them more often. With gusto.

But what makes things fun? Just because something was fun once doesn’t mean customers will return again and again.

Gamification is like a loyalty program but it’s not about stuff. It’s about status.

Loyalty programs reward customers for their loyal buying behaviour. Generally, they reward customers with ‘stuff-based benefits’ – points, discounts, special offers. Using the SAPS acronym, Zichermann explains that people value status above stuff in this order:

S – Status

A – Access

P – Power

S – Stuff

This might seem counterintuitive but Zichermann makes sense of it this way: When you architect a ‘player journey’ to reward people with status, access and power – you create meaning inside of the mechanics. It becomes more about your identity within the interaction and less about receiving a Pavlovian reward for ‘checking in’ or harvesting your crops.

For example, one of the big problems that I have with foursquare is that there is no record of my past mayorships. That burns. I want the recognition and some historical identity attached to my profile, not the free coffee (not that that ever happened either). Long-term result? My level of engagement has dropped dramatically. And why can’t I see how ‘close’ I am to stealing a mayorship back from the lying/cheating/fake ‘regular’ that currently holds the title?

Leaderboard design is a critical part of the game.

One thing that is in the Google Tech Talk that Zichermann didn’t have time to talk about at Mesh was how the design of leaderboards has changed since the arcades of the 1980s (which you can find at around the 30-minute mark). Good ones are more social and relative now – the player sits in the middle of the leaderboard and shows friends above and below them so that the top players’ scores don’t act as a disincentive to participate. Unless the user is actually in the Top 20. Then you show them the real leaderboard like an old Pac Man game.

Game over. Press start.

I think it’s important that gamification is not seen as a trivialization or cheapening of customer interaction. If, as Zichermann supposes, a modern Shakespeare would claim that, “All the world’s a game,” then it might be time for us to collectively revisit what we mean by ‘game’ and extract the concept of ‘fun’ from the pastimes of our youth. If sending out invoices can be fun, why can’t your customer interactions be fun? With a few exceptions I think it would be a mistake to brush off the concept no matter what business you’re in.

Customer experiences – even the most mundane – can be more rewarding and pleasurable (for all involved) if you think differently about your customers’ motivations. Help them do what they already want or need to do and if you can make it fun or pleasurable and social – even better.

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Image courtesy of Activision’s Pitfall (1982) via grain edit.