The iRise Blog

This morning we shared some success on a new customer, ePrize, a 350+ person interactive promotions company that works with such household names as Sony, Yahoo! and American Express to extend their brand through online promotions. That story speaks about how ePrize leveraged iRise’s visualization software to pitch new business (in this case, it was a major social networking platform whose name we can’t disclose).  As experts in developing interactive promotions for clients, they wanted to paint a picture of the kinds of branded online promotions they could develop and proactively answer the usual client question, “What’s it gonna look like?”

ePrize turned to iRise because of its ability to deliver a life-like representation of what could be built, even before coding.  ePrize was able to meet a tight turnaround time to deliver the pitch by rapidly creating high fidelity mock-ups of several promotion concepts.  The bottom line is they won the business hands-down.  By using iRise, ePrize cited a 25% improvement in time savings not to mention the elimination of rework. 

On a related note, ePrize team members are active in Catalyze, a community offering content and discussion for user experience (UX), business analyst (BA) and product management professionals, amongst others.  The site also offers an iRise-only section.

To read about another interactive agency’s use of iRise, check out the story on ad2.  iRise’s customer success story page can be found here, and showcases companies in other industries who use visualization to communicate concept vision to their clients such as Digital Insight and a major insurance carrier (name cannot be disclosed).

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Wachovia’s Director of User-Centered Design, Carter Hansen, will present on the topic “Test Early, Test Often” today at the UPA International Conference 2008.  His engaging presentation will:

• Show how iRise has empowered the user experience (UX) team at Wachovia, the 4th largest bank in the United States. With iRise, Wachovia no longer has to rely on developers to help create interactive prototypes for usability testing. Without this limitation, the bank can afford to test interactive prototypes more often and with higher degrees of fidelity.
• Share examples of high-fidelity simulations, including unconventional interfaces like green screens and mobile phones.

Event details:

• Where: 3rd Floor Grand Ballroom Salon IX-X, UPA Conference, Baltimore Marriott Waterfront at 700 Aliceanna Street 
• Date & Time: Wed., June 18, 5:30 p.m.
• Bring your questions. Mingle with other user experience pros. Libations on iRise.

About Carter Hansen

Carter Hansen is the Director of User-Centered Design at Wachovia, where he has led the Web design and usability practice for nearly 10 years. Thanks to the tireless and heroic efforts of a talented and dedicated team, Wachovia’s online user experience is heralded as best in class. Rating agencies like Keynote and Change Sciences agree that Wachovia leads the banking sector when it comes to customer satisfaction and user experience.  Carter’s responsibilities encompass Wachovia’s Internet and Intranet sites, including User Research, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Usability Testing, Visual Design, Online Brand Management, Accessibility and CSS and HTML Design Standards.

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SOA or service-oriented architecture is a chronically hot topic - and there are as many opinions about it as there are IT vendors.  According to Wikipedia, SOA is “is a computer system’s architectural style for creating and using business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle. SOA also defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes.”  And for a more humorous definition of SOA overload, check out Greg the Architect in the “SOA This, SOA That” video from YouTube.

We recently had an interesting internal email discussion on how iRise deals with SOA and I have excerpted the highlights below:

From Sherrick Murdoff, VP of Alliances and Business Development:

• “SOA is most often interpreted as back-end plumbing only, but this is not the case.  SOA includes the back-end plumbing, but you don’t start with the back-end plumbing and you don’t start with building web services
• What many CIOs and industry leaders have learned and are promoting is to start with the customer experience – this should drive your SOA implementation more than anything. iRise lets you visualize the customer experience and iterate with both end-users and IT to gain alignment on what needs to be built that drives the “how”
• Visualizing SOA is important to let the customer experience drive the requirements for what infrastructure you need to put in place
• iRise aligns well in any SOA discussion and brings the customer back to what is important – visualizing “what” you need before you begin to think about the “how” you want to implement.”

From Matt Smith, Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager

• “Most people over-think the relationship between SOA and simulating applications.  SOA basically means there is a provider (machine) and a consumer (machine or human) of a service. 
• The processing of the service is all the back-end wizardry that goes on within the SOA, which iRise doesn’t diagram in the traditional sense of architecture modeling tools, but it does simulate the action.
• The line of business manager and end-user don’t care how the SOA actually processes the service request.  iRise simulates the important bit from their perspective of application usability.”

From James McWethy, Enterprise Solutions Director

• “SOA…three loaded letters.  I’ve seen companies spend years talking about defining and implementing an SOA strategy.
• Why not simulate the end-user experience that will result from the tiresome SOA planning process to: (1) Verify that the information being delivered via the service (informational or transactional) will be of value to the end user, and (2) simulate a set of components (portlets, widgets, gadgets, web parts, etc.) that will show the end result of a system comprised of multiple services.

iRise Customer Success Story - At Fusion ‘07, the Customer Experience team from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan gave a presentation on how they used iRise to simulate a technical proof of concept for their new member portal.  The presentation is available here and can be viewed here.

So, why risk building your SOA infrastructure without using iRise to engaging your end-users?  By simulating the end-user experience with iRise first, both business stakeholders and IT will win.

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Emmet Keeffe, iRise CEO and Co-founder, had an opinion piece published this week in SandHill.com.  SandHill.com is the premier destination online destination for strategic information on the software business. The site and its newsletters are read by thousands of top software industry executives every week.

Emmet talks about “The Requirement Challenge” and why “Accurate Specs are Key”.  He finishes with “The Benefits of Visualization” which I am paraphrasing below:

• Business people can fully experience the product and make changes early in the process, saving significant time and downstream costs.
• Developers can catch design and functional errors before an application goes into production.
• The process can speed through multiple rounds of functional visual edits to quickly reach decisions on business needs and customer experience.
• Managers can increase final adoption of system with upfront agreements of the application’s process flow, experience and visual look and feel.
• User experience professionals can rapidly iterate proposed designs directly in front of customers, dramatically improving customer experience.
• Software sales teams can demo potential products to customers to get feedback before actually developing the application.
• The professional service teams can test a potential product for possible needed changes to speed implementation and integration.
• Sharing visualizations with global sourcing partners is not only easier but cheaper. Visualizations eliminate confusion with global development teams because everyone is speaking the same language.
• Resellers can sell a solution by showing a visualization of what a specific application could do when integrated into the customer’s environment

He wraps up by repeating his vision, “by 2020, all business software will be visualized before its built, just the same way that every car, airplane and semiconductor are visualized today.”

The entire piece is worth a read and can be found at SandHill.com.

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A new article by Heather Havenstein about how UPS is bolstering their web application development with iRise came out in Computerworld.com yesterday. The article summarizes how UPS has overhauled it process of designing user interfaces for all of their new and upgraded web applications.

This story is not new to anyone who attended Fusion ‘07 last year as Guy Hamblen was one of the our featured speakers. In fact, you can read the blog post and listen to Guy’s presentation from this October iRise blog post.

Here are some new quotes from Guy:

• “The biggest challenge that an application development team has is eliciting the correct requirements at the beginning of the development effort”
• “By modeling the user interface in the requirements phase, the design team can be sure that it knows exactly what the user wants because it has used a simulated version”
• “That allowed us to improve our time to market with application-development releases. That is the fundamental business driver that iRise enabled for us”

The complete Computerworld article is available here.

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Is your software simple and usable?

There was an interesting opinion piece at Sandhill.com last week titled “Simplicity: What’s Next in Business Software” by Anthony Deighton of QlikTech. 

Anthony pointed out that the gap between what software users experience in their workplace and in the rest of their life is widening while the line between work and home continues to blur.  Business users are starting to expect that the applications they use at work be as clear, user-friendly, intuitive and simple as the other software they use.

The bottom line is that enterprise software vendors must “simplify or die” by embracing a philosophy of simplicity or risk getting left behind in the future by innovative and emerging vendors.

There are several characteristics of “simple” software that Anthony lists in his piece, including:

• Continue to offer robustness - “simple” is not the same as “lite”
• Focus on the user - enterprise software vendors need to focus on the user for a change
• Revamp the value chain - make sure you pick partner vendors and service providers who embrace the simplicity vision
• Deliver a fast sales and implementation process - the product must be easy for users, but also deliver quick value to the business
• Relentlessly pursue simplicity - you have to keep focusing on making your product usable and faster to deploy

Check out the full article and complete discussion thread from this link.

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I ran across an interesting blog post this week from Chris Woodill on how to be an effective stakeholder.  This post intrigued me because it examined the project team/stakeholder relations dynamic from the stakeholder angle rather than the putting all of the onus on the project team.  I have summarized some of Chris’ vision of the expected stakeholder roles and his counsel to stakeholders on “how not to drop the ball”. 

“Good” stakeholders need to:

• Make decisions - making decisions is the stakeholder’s primary responsibility
• Approve documents - timely approvals of decisions and documents
• Offer opinion and feedback -provide actionable feedback that can be translated into actions, revisions or improvements
• Solicit feedback - help explain, sell concepts and capture feedback from the broader community
• Support the team externally - evangelize the project, boost team confidence and help get organizational buy-in
• Maintain a high bar of expectations - demand excellence from the team 

In addition, “good” stakeholders should:

• Be prepared for all meetings - take the time to do your homework before all meetings
• Make decisions and offer feedback in a timely manner - don’t delay the project by being late
• Be nice to the team - don’t bully the team
• Articulate requirements clearly - if you are the domain expert, you need to provide clear and complete requirements to the team
• Embed themselves into the team as much as possible - refrain from making us and them distinctions

Being a “good” stakeholder can make a massive difference in the success of a project and minimize project risk at the same time. 

If you’re on a project team, you may want to forward this to your stakeholder.  If you’re a stakeholder, you may want to look in a mirror and ask yourself “am I a good stakeholder?”.

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The CIO of CompuCredit gave a compelling talk this week on how to drive ‘disciplined innovation’ at the annual Computerworld Premier 100 conference in Orlando, FL. Dr. Guido Sacchi was honored at the conference as one of the top 100 CIOs in the country and is one of those CIOs that could easily be a COO or CEO in any company. He has that unusual ‘right brain - left brain’ combination that is powerful stuff in a business leader. According to Dr. Sacchi, ‘disciplined innovation’ is characterized by companies that have a high degree of execution skill, along with a high attitude for risk - another unusual combination of (corporate) skill sets. In his lively talk he spoke about the challenges that many CIOs face today: governance, too many ideas with too little execution and long cycle times; all of which tend to mire innovation in the mud of good intentions.

At CompuCredit they’ve solved these problems with leadership, focused execution of innovative new ideas and leveraging visualization as a strategy to dramatically reduce cycle times. CompuCredit has established an ‘innovation council’ made up of senior executives and other people in the company. They’ve also launched an ‘Idea Factory;’an internal Website that gives employees a platform to voice new ideas.

Using iRise to visualize applications during rapid, iterative and collaborative definition phases allows CompuCredit to “fail cheaply and fail fast,” according to Dr. Sacchi. And visualization is allowing the company to create “iPod equivalents;” applications that are so intuitive they require no training nor user manuals. Dr. Sacchi noted that iRise is also helping the IT organization drive higher quality applications to market faster, along with giving the company sourcing options that would not otherwise be available.

If you’re interested in learning more about CompuCredit’s approach, watch this video of Dr. Sacchi speaking at the iRise user conference in October.

What are some of the unique things your organization is doing to drive innovation? Any additional tips you can share?

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I was reading an essay titled “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike” in the NY Times recently.  The essay went on to describe the Curse of Knowledge - and how this curse impacts innovation and stifles new ideas.  The author described the curse as the reason why managers sometimes have trouble convincing others to adopt new programs and why engineers design products that are ultimately only useful to other engineers.

There is a way to exorcise this curse.  The essay mentioned a book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Some Die written by brothers Chip and Dan Heath.  Chip is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Dan is a consultant for the Aspen Institute.   In their book, the brothers take apart sticky ideas (natural ideas, urban myths, proverbs, rumors and other ideas) and figure out what why some ideas are more memorable and why others die.

Based on their research, they identified six principles of  successful ideas.  The six principles can be summarized in a checklist for creating a successful idea: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story which form the acronym SUCCES:

• S - Simplicity (the message must be both simple and profound)
• U -Unexpectedness (the message must generate interest and curiousity)
• C - Concreteness (the message must be clear)
• C - Credibility (help people test ideas for themselves)
• E - Emotions (make people feel something)
• S - Stories (stories act as mental flight simulator)

The book also mentions that not every idea is ’stick-worthy’.  In fact, the range of stick-worthy ideas for most people ranges from one per week to one per month.  They also point out that creating sticky ideas is something that can be learned.

What’s the take-away?  “A little focused effort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a difference.”  Using these six simple steps, we can take our ideas and transform into ’sticky’ and powerful ideas. 

To learn more about making ideas stick, here are several link to follow:

• Made to Stick website
• Made to Stick blog
• Made to Stick excerpts

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At the World Congress for Business Analysts (WCBA) in Disneyland today, Richard Sheirer from Guilani Partners shared lessons learned from 9/11.  Richard was the director of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) at the time of the crisis. 

His message was that there are similarities between the business community and public safety.  He stated that planning, preparing, practicing and execution are as important in public sector as in the business sector.  In addition, communication is the key to success during a crisis.

In terms of practicing, Richard noted that simulating events is critical and that NYC held drills and simulations for many different potential castastrophes - and that practice was critical to their response on 9/11.

Before concluding with a photo montage from Ground Zero, Richard highlighted 10 lessons from the events of 2001:

1. think the unthinkable
2. factor in for Murphy’s Law
3. appreciate that catastrophic events don’t recognize turf
4. accept policies over reason/science
5. be prepared for the knucklehead factor
6. value and encourage strong leadership 
7. rely on your frames of reference
8. appreciate the need for redundancy and think outside the box
9. recognize the importance of communication
10. commit to relentless preparation and practice

Richard wrapped up by saying that America and American companies are and will continue to be major terrorist targets - they will likely strike something unlikely and we can never let our guard down.  Natural disasters like Katrina and the Southern California wildfires will pose greater threats.  Finally, planning, preparation, and practice contributes to prevention.

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