Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Successful design means going far beyond understanding the “cognitive load” or “steps
ofatask”—buzzwordsfromapreviousgenerationofuser-centereddesign.Transformative
products now help us get our life done and celebrate our accomplishments, connect to the
people who matter to us, express the core elements of our identities, and create moments
of surprise and sensory delight—all in a product that just works, like magic, with no hassle
or learning required. That is a tall order, and means that designers must understand a much
wider life context than they ever had to before.
When the iPhone and then Android phones came out, we noticed that the way they in-
tegrated into people's lives radically changed from older technology. The language people
usedwas,“Thisisso
cool
!”Werecognizedthatsomethingfundamentalhadchangedinthe
way that people related to technology, and we wanted to understand it. So we started our
Cool Project in hopes of uncovering the core of the cool user experience.
We went out in the field and talked with more than 60 consumers between 15 and 60
years old about what makes things cool for them. We asked people to show us products
with some technical component that they experienced as cool. Then we talked with them
about their experience, watched them use the products, and discussed how they trans-
formed their lives. We didn't try to define “cool” for them. Instead, we let them define it
by showing us the products they thought were cool. Then we then turned to 30 enterprise
workers to see if these same experiences were relevant for workers—and they were. The
seven Cool Concepts emerged from our analysis of this data.
Later, we partnered with SAP to develop a way to measure these concepts. The Cool
Metric is a set of 40 questions that have been validated with over 2000 people worldwide
software and between devices. It can be used to compare scores across competitors, or to
focus an initial market study. It can be used in between rounds of iteration to see how the
team is doing as it develops new product concepts and tests them with users. It works in
the lab, in the field, and with a large population survey. Together with the design principles
measured by the metric and associated with each Cool Concept we can help our clients
move the dial on their product's coolness.
The Cool Project revealed that we must now design for core human motives and the
whole of the way an activity fits into life on the go—or what we call the
unstoppable mo-
mentum of life
. Therefore, we have had to evolve Contextual Design itself with new data
collection techniques, new models to represent the data, new ideation techniques, and new
design principles. That evolution is what we describe in this topic.
TheCoolConcepts arebrokenintotwocomponents. The
Wheel of Joy in Life
organizes
the four Cool Concepts that define the way cool products touch our core human motives.
