>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm very pleased
to welcome Brian Solis to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. He's here to discuss
his book, X, in which he explores the importance of experiences and how to design for them.
He's a principal analyst at Altimeter and focuses on digital transformation, customer
experience, culture 2.0 and the future of industry's trends and behavior. He's the author of
seven books, including The End of Business As Usual and Engage. Lastly, he blogs about insights
into the future of business, new technologies and marketing@BrianSolis.com. Please join me in
giving him a very warm welcome. [applause].
>> Brian Solis: Thank you. Thank you. Amy, that is such a soothing voice. I got so relaxed.
Thank you very much for being here. I very much appreciated to all of those who are online.
Thank you very much. I'm an author, yes, seven books. This is number seven, lucky number
seven, I guess. But I also feel like it's my first book because when you're talking about the idea
of experiences, there is a great irony in talking about experience design in a book format,
because it's 2016 and we live in an always on world where you could swipe right, pinch and
zoom and do all of these things. Yet, we haven't really re-imagined what a print book could be
now. And it's the same thing that you look around everywhere. What could we do differently
today if we just took a step back to realize that maybe we are just taking these processes or
things for granted and reinvented them for today? So I started with the idea of what could a
book be now and I used teenagers as sort of my inspiration. When I started the book, it took 3
1/2 years to make this book, partly because the subject was a little bit crazy and the other part
was just having to think about a book. Teenagers 3 1/2 years ago when doing their homework
could focus for six minutes before reaching for some kind of device. I thought at that time what
am I going to do in six minutes? How do you engage someone in six minute bursts? By the
time I was done writing the book it had dropped to 60 seconds. If you think about what
happened in the last 3 1/2 years, smart phones became more pervasive. We got more devices.
We got more tablets. We got more YouTube. We got more Snapchats and technology
essentially permeated every aspect of their lives and now the ability to focus for six minutes
would be a luxury. That is where this story begins because now everything changes because
you have to capture attention. You have to be relevant, and you have to be engaging in these
little micro-bursts of attention and they have to matter. In that regard everything could and
should be different today. That was part of the inspiration for this book. The other part was we
all talk about experiences. We all love great experiences. We all hate bad experiences, but
when I ask people what makes an experience matter to you, I got a thousand different answers
and then I started to look up what is the definition of and experience. I just couldn't find
anything like that that I could hold onto and then write a book around. So starting from scratch
with what a book could be, what could and experience be or what should an experience be and
then how do we design them? For those who get the book you will notice firstly that it's a
different shape. I used the iPad Air or a Surface, depending on which one you want to look at,
as the inspiration for familiarity because that's a blank canvas, and it's a familiar canvas. As the
textbook is sort of our floppy disk. It just doesn't necessarily have to have relevance today.
And then you'll notice that there is no table of contents. It turns out that when you study
today's brain and how it engages online and also how it engages in the small screen, we tend to
look for things very quickly and grab onto them and move on from there. So I reverse
engineered a lot of this. We studied UX. I studied UI. I studied how people engage some of
their favorite apps and tried to bring those insights onto paper. Rather than try to create the
coolest digital experience, why not show you what it could do in an analog world, because if
you could take all of those insights and apply it to a paperbound book, imagine what you can do
with everything, because it affects preferences. It affects decision-making. It affects values. I
also had to relearn how to write sentences, which is crazy, because as an author the first thing I
tended to do was start writing. I have all of this expertise and I want to share it with you. But
then no one would read it because the brain would shut off or retention would go down or the
willingness to want to turn the pages would just sort of dwindle. And then how many
sentences can you put together before you need whitespace or before you need a visual or
before you maybe are inspired to translate a paragraph into visual learning? To say that my
mind was blown is an understatement. I was completely debilitated. I didn't want to finish the
book. I wanted to give up. I missed about five deadlines to get this thing out. That was all
because it was a very human experience to go through. In order to share with you also, then
how do you build an experience? It starts, quite literally, with an out of body experience. One
of the quotes, or one of the things that inspired this book was a commencement speech by
David Foster Wallace where he talked about This Is Water. How many of you have seen that?
Oh, just a few, then I'll explain it. He is speaking to a group of university students and he tells a
story about some fish swimming in a fishbowl. And these two fish are just sort of starting their
morning and another fish passes by and says hey boys, how's the water? And the two fish look
at each other and say water, what's he talking about? And the story to me is a metaphor about
how we sort of live life. We go through everything with the processes and the systems that we
have and we try to be innovative within those environments. That's that perpetual box that
we're supposed to think outside of. But in the concept of this is water, I think about water as
sort of a canvas. These are the things we go through daily yet we take them for granted when
we could actually look at them as opportunities for inspiration, because you get to consciously
decide what has meaning and what doesn't. The more connected you become, I found, the
more empowered you become and the more empowered you become more demanding you
become. This is why we see so much disruption today, because people have choices and
they're starting to exercise them differently because things are starting to feel foreign. Things
are starting to feel old, and when they do that is someone's idea to come in and just change the
game. And one of the most often used examples is Uber. Nobody who uses Uber goes back to
taxis, but at the same time, it is the quintessential customer experience because it brings
something to you and you can track it. I've also studied how long patience lasts for Uber. I
think the number now is four minutes or less. Anything above that you're canceling. Yet you've
got a car coming to you and you can track it. Wow! It's like the Louis CK, I don't know if you
further his rant about Wi-Fi in an airplane. It's the same sort of thing. And so I looked at
experience them from all aspects, from music to movies to brands, and brands seem to be the
one that stuck the most because business is really in dire need of reinvention. The same things
I've learned about business and brand I've learned about education. I've learned about the
government, all of these things about how technology is changing us. We have to reinvent all
of these things. But the idea of it is that there's what we say we do and then there's the reality.
What do people experience? And more so, what do they share, because the shared experience
is actually what matters. And then in today's online society none of these experiences
disappear. They just compile and collect and they become indexable. I think part of our work is
to study what the experience divide? Our promise versus what people do, no one tweets
United Airlines because they're happy. Yet, if you look at United's site they talk about how
amazing they are. And I'm sure they're trying, but the reality is you have to design for human
beings and you have to design for the moments in which they experience your products and
services, because how they react is reality. That is then what is experience. I don't think we
have really sat down and swallowed this one yet, because once we do I think there's an
empathetic pill that we can start to create. I close my eyes, and these are the first words of the
book. Close your eyes and try to remember that last moment that really touched you, that
really moved you, that really inspired you. What was it about it? What made you feel special?
What inspired you to do something differently? Because it's moments like that where an
experience begins because it's something you feel. It's something you sense. It's supposed to
affect what you do, and that's the power of and experience. And the required design and today
we leave those moments, those deep moments up to chance. We could get away with it for a
long time, but now we're starting to see that we can. Everything is ripe for disruption. And I
think if we are waiting for somebody to tell us what to do, we're on the wrong side of
innovation. This is that moment where, not just in this book, but in all of my research and study
in innovation, it starts with perspective. It starts with seeing things differently in order to do
things differently. All businesses have to have some type of emotional attachment to their
customers now. I just wrote a paper, Everything Every Business Could Learn from the State of
Music Industry. Except the music industry, of course. When I was a kid I used to put posters of
my favorite artists on the wall because they were going to be around a while. I wanted to be
like them. If you think about artistry today, most of the time people don't have time to put
posters -- well first of all, they don't even know what posters are, but second of all, there's no
artist that really lasts long enough to be relevant in the moment except for Drake or Beyoncé or
what's her name? Taylor Swift. But think about to the level at which they have to compete.
They have dropped in surprise albums. They're taking over concerts. They're creating
experiential things all over the country to try to stay relevant. Any idea of what happened is
that people stopped looking at artists as the things that they were, that they wanted to be.
Now I call us accident on the narcissists because technology has shown us that we are at the
center of everything that we want to do. Now we take celebrities and we take artists and we
make them part of our ecosystem. They are just little satellites and we pick and choose who we
want to represent us. That's sort of the reality of business today. Businesses and brands are no
longer created. They are co-created. And the idea of an experience, a shared experience is the
thing that becomes defining is the ultimate metric. Did you experience this and everything the
way that I designed? Because that's the way it should be, yet, we still create products in the
absence of actually thinking of where they should go and what they could do. We still shout at
people using all kinds of traditional forms of marketing. We use new forms of technology in
order to do the same things we used to do. I call that mediumism. We get all of these social,
mobile apps and networks, but we don't necessarily bring in new philosophy to it. We don't
recognize that part of the power of all of these technologies that are happening today is the
fact that they are completely democratized. That they are driven by us, not from the top down,
and the minute we understand that is the minute we could become part of it instead of trying
to dictate it or talk to it or talk down to it. So there's design and there's creativity and there's
reality. I've gotten in a time of debates with people saying well Brian, we you're really talking
about is just creativity and design. But the answer is no. No I'm not. What I'm talking about is
what I did with the book is reverse engineering people, how they behave, their aspirations
because they're different and let it start to affect me differently in order to do something
differently, because that's where true innovation starts. It's unlocking new value that
otherwise is just iteration, which is just doing things maybe better. That's X. The book is called
X because we have all of these desperate movements within an organization, brand experience.
We have user experience. We have customer experience. With you we have Xbox, but at the
end of the day X is experience. It is going to happen whether you design it or not and the thing
about business today is we are all customers of some business. And there are aspects of
businesses I'm sure you love and there are aspects of businesses that I'm sure you hate. But
why does that have to be the case anymore, because anything can come along and change that
now? I think that experience is rooted in the little things and you have to design for them. You
have to design for the things that you want to be special, that you want to stand out. I work
with one company that after they talked to a customer, and believe me this is not as scalable as
a contact center, but after they talked to the customer they will send a handwritten note. It
just blows people away. And of course they're retention numbers soar and then word-ofmouth then kicks up acquisition and it's like oh, there's some ROI. Who knew? Because I
always wondered like what is the I in ROI, if it stands for ignorance. What happens if we don't
do anything? And I realize some of the greatest sources of innovation came from outside of our
normal day. We tend to look at our markets, our usual competitors and I have found that that
absolutely limits our creativity. So you look to other things. How are people engaging folks
today? How were they engaging folks yesterday? For example, at Disneyland the bricks in all of
their buildings get smaller as they get taller. And that's to force, as we were talking earlier,
perspective, so that you as an adult can feel like a child again in the park which is supposed to
rekindle your inner child. But to the extent at which they go to that detail, there's no reason
why we can't go to that detail. These are experiences. These are things you remember. These
are the things you love, and everyone of these moments counts. Technology, I think, is best
when it's invisible. There was a time when it didn't have to be. I grew up programming DOS
and Fortran and all of these things that I'm glad I forgot, but this is a moment where technology
comes to life. I also look at this as being an example of customer experience, as being some of
the greatest. It's not just about what she's wearing; it's about what's happening behind the
scenes. In the fact that a company like Disney had to build an entirely new infrastructure to reimagine the customer experience. This is the magic band. To her, she can get into the park.
She can get into Fast Pass. She can open her hotel door. She can pay for souvenirs and food.
It's got proximity devices in it so that if she makes a reservation at one of the restaurants it
knows when she is coming and it will greet her on the front wall. And there are people that I
have to debate with that said that is just creepy. Nobody wants that. That's violating my
privacy. But that's the way it used to be, but I promise you that the word privacy doesn't mean
what it used to mean. Privacy now is a currency of which we exchange for value. To her, those
are all things of value and the backend of Disney is studying all of these movements. They're
studying all of these engagements and they're looking at ways that they can innovate the park
design in ways to reduce the queue. They got rid of all the turnstiles. They are thinking about
new ways of currency within the park. So they're taking this and improving the experience. For
now they're trading that data for experience and it's intentional. It's purpose driven. That's
why I believe it's all just a matter of perspective and that's what unlocks, or better yet, it
unleashes possibilities. I get in my way every time I tried to write, every time I try to research,
every time I try to design something new, and it's just good old psychology, cognitive bias and
validation bias. I don't see the world as it is. I see the world as I am and then make decisions
accordingly. Our entire life, our entire career, our entire education has brought us to these
moments that are now may be partially relevant. The one thing that I've learned is that
perspective actually triggers learning. When you shift perspective, if you learn something you
allow yourself to learn something and this is when I realized I was just a student. I had to relearn everything and I still have to re-learn everything and I'm not saying that you all have to go
out and start learning new things, but this is the heart of experience design. And when you
shift perspective you can see it in everything. How many of you have seen this picture before?
Just want her to? Okay. This is a picture wanted to share with you because it represents sort of
the challenges that we have today. Every executive I meet with will look at this picture and say
this is exactly what's wrong with society. No one can live in the moment. They're all on their
phones. They can't look up, except for this dear sweet woman right here in the front. She is in
the moment. Look at that smile on her face. But you could argue with the shift of perspective,
well, I want the people who are on their phones sharing this moment with every single one of
their audiences who have audiences with audiences because now that moment is bigger than
just whomever is there. And look at this selfish woman here in the front, not sharing this
moment with all of her Facebook friends that couldn't be there. So the idea is you can see what
you want to see in anything. And validation bias, cognitive bias, especially for those of us in the
room who are parents, we tend to sort of let that get in the way of innovation. This is an art
series where the photographer removes the phone from every day scenarios. [laughter]. And I
use it to illustrate the point that we live in an ecosystem. Everything is so counterintuitive
about design and the idea of what an experience is. What an experience is to be versus what
an experience is to someone who lives a digital lifestyle are just radically different. I would
have just written another book had I not gone through this. And the one thing that it unlocked
in me was empathy. I realized that empathy, I always thought I was empathetic, but I realized
the closest I ever got was sympathy. I could feel you, but I didn't go through life as you. And
the minute you do it changes the game. This is a sidewalk in China where you walk on one side
with your phone and on the other side without your phone. It's very real, by the way. I
promise you we're going to have this in airports because I can't seem to get around anybody.
Or this. [laughter]. To them, it is the best party ever. They're telling each other that. They're
telling everybody that. They're Snapchatting these moments. There's probably 1000 selfies
going on. Or things like Tinder, right? Some of us think it's a dating app. But the point of it is
that all of these things are sort of changing your expectation. Each one of these apps, each one
of the services, each one of these technologies is basically programming people to know that
they are the center of the universe. Every app tells them that. Or the idea that if you think
about Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs you would get a whole different set of answers from people
who live online or people who live a connected lifestyle, yet we tend to design still for the world
that we know, not for this hype. I mean, people freak out in moments like this. One of the
things that I didn't share with you which changed my whole world is I may digital analyst by
trade. But about 10 years ago I became a digital anthropologist as well because technology is
accelerating and the ability to track all of the technology networks, apps, devices, all of these
things, I track it in the wheel of disruption, which gets crazier every single year. But
understanding technologies impact on us was a bit slower, but more so, it was a bit more
meaningful. And it was these stats that I want to share with you that really started to bring
things to life for me. We right now look at our phones on average about 1500 times a week,
which adds up to about 177 minutes a day. And I promise you there is all kinds of science that
shows that not just millennials, but all of us, that we'll reprogramming our brains as we do so.
We are becoming a little less patient. You are becoming a little bit more, let's just say
optimized in what it is you're trying to do. Time, suddenly there's not enough of it. And as a
human being this is affecting you as you make decisions around the companies you do business
with. And over time this means that whom you are working with and how you are working with
them is now changing your expectations. This is why an Uber comes along and decimates the
taxi industry. While I was writing this book the reason I decided to look at how people engage
with digital and mobile and social and then apply that to paper was because of a video I
watched many years ago of a one-year old baby using a tablet. It was just all very intuitive. Her
father thought it would be funny if he handed her a magazine. And of course the first thing she
does is this and it doesn't work and so she starts crying. Her father says, to my daughter a
magazine is an iPad that doesn't work and it will be that way for the rest of her life. And I was
like, pow, mind blowing, because here I was on YouTube just having avoidance behavior
syndrome and it ended up changing me, because it was a demonstration of cognitive bias. I
had to learn what a tablet was. I had to learn what a smart phone was. There's an entire
generation and another generation behind them that had to learn what a magazine is. And if
you bring that to an intersection of how you would make a decision versus how they would
make a decision, it's radically different. And so we were designing the world with hoops and
touch points and journeys that were completely outdated from the get go. But it's not just
about younger generations. I've got all kinds of studies that show that we are all becoming just
a connected society, of course, but I can promise you that a 55-year-old who lives in active
digital lifestyle makes similar decisions or exhibits similar decision-making behaviors as a 25year-old. And now that means our opportunity for engagement, for experience design now has
to take extraordinary leaps of moving forward to the point where now there are groups
studying the effect that Tinder has on younger brains and whether or not they can take that
into testing, because if you think about it, they are getting really good at left, right, yes, no, A, B,
and it's engaging. So that then if we can make things more engaging, if we can reinvent a book
-- I wanted to take all of these insights and that's why I am taking all of these insights and giving
them away to textbook companies so that they can hopefully do something a little bit more
relevant. But if you play this out in the daily environment, whether it's business or whatever it
is, the way people go through life now is very clunky because they are now having to go
through these touch points that we've put out there that are just rooted in pre or internet 1 .0
sort of philosophies and perspectives. Again, remember, the design we've put out there versus
the design that people take is different. And so I used ketchup as a metaphor, because there's
years that none of us challenged the ketchup bottle. We all even came up with strategies for it,
45 degrees, or the soft part of your hand. No, no, a knife, knife is what's going to do it every
time. And then someone came along and said you know what works? Gravity, with a bit of a
squeeze. That's going to work. That's far more effective. But it is an example of experience
design. And so we tend to just go. Bottles have been the thing that everybody has always
done. I live in Silicon Valley so, but it's the way it's always been done is a quote said by no
successful entrepreneur ever. And so everything can be re-imagined and I work a lot with
Google and they found these crazy things called micro-moments that now take experience
design to a whole new level. Imagine, Google, or Bing, you think traditional search. When
people aren't actually using search engines on a smart phone because in those moments what
comes back our websites and nobody loves a mobile website experience, for two reasons. Even
if you have responsive design, we haven't re-imagined the definition of the website since 1995.
It is still brochureware. Yet now, we have so little patience. Remember, 60 seconds on the high
school student front, now you have to make a decision. They've found that in these moments
they are going to other places. I think one of the biggest threats to search engines right now is
Amazon and YouTube because people just want things fast. But one of the stats they came
back with just blew me away which is 90 percent of people who go into a micro-moment to
make a decision are brand agnostic. So now, when you're thinking about creating experiences
the nature of and experience has to be what's going to get your attention based on what you're
trying to do and then how are we going to move forward together. Because most people in
those micro-moments who get information that helps them, they will move forward with them.
Now everything is up for grabs. The idea of why are companies being disrupted by startups
that come out of nowhere, well here's why. Because these things are relevant, and when it
boils down to what it really is all about, it's perspective. It's what you leave here today with,
whether you look at things the same way or you're open to new possibilities. But I get it. Part
of the process is the process. I work with people who are booked all day, every day on the hour
perpetually running a few minutes late to every meeting because the other one ran up against
the hour and then they have e-mail on top of that and they are supposed to try to do new
things. We can't do new things if we don't do new things. And so I've found all kinds of
examples. I could be here all day with you. I had so many examples of things that we take for
granted every single day like quotes like Henry Ford, if I would've asked people what they
wanted they would've told me a faster horse. Or be the change you want to see in the world. I
found all of these things that we take for granted every day and it turns out that those really
weren't the sources who said that stuff. Or, 1971 TV Guide, for some of you in the room we
used to get this magazine that showed us what was on television for the week. So you have
essentially a brand new device of which to explore television, yet we haven't innovated much in
how you navigate this beautiful screen. Because no one saw the opportunity to say what could
this experience be for a new generation of people? What could television programming be? So
what's happening now? This experience basically is what it is, but now you have things like
Netflix. You have programmatic content. You have things like YouTube. You have all of these
different apps that are starting to change how you think about programming. I wonder why.
It's because we never really re-imagine the opportunity. It's everywhere. Everything you do in
life could be re-imagined for a modern experience. This sucks. It sucks so bad that in part of
the book I studied it. What happened? It turns out that going back to the 1950s we decided
that what we should do is just add more buttons. Remote controls on average have 70 buttons
today in a world of this. The first app for the television was a remote control, just a bunch of
buttons on your smart screen. This is iteration and this is what we tend to do when we are
introduced to new technologies and when we are gifted with this opportunity of re-imagined
experiences. We can't really take an iterative approach because you'll end up with the remote
control. You have to take a completely different approach. Parking signs. Think about that
moment when you have to park. You probably are under pressure. There's cars honking
behind you and you're trying to make a decision about whether you can stop here. So the city
of New York says this is bad. We hear you. We are going to come up with a whole new parking
experience, so they opened it up to creative agencies and they got a parking sign. So there's a
great artist in Los Angeles who said I don't know if that's any better. Why not something that
we could all understand based on how we visually take cues from the screens that we use all
day long? I guess I'm in the red at this moment. So sympathy versus empathy. This is an app
that turns the camera on your phone so that you can text safely without getting hit by cars or
running into streets or poles. It's also not the most popular app because it's hard to do that.
But it is a metaphor for seeing the world differently, because it is different. It is so different
that in order to design meaningful experiences we have to be inspired by how people are
different. And I look to the good old days of Disney and storyboarding because there's a magic
to storyboarding that I think a lot of us didn't know. I didn't know what storyboarding really
was about. I thought it was about basically putting together snippets of the story and just sort
of test it out before you went into the animation process. It turns out that it's a way of
humanizing the characters, making them believable, testing the story, forcing you to act them
out so that other people around you can say yes, say no. And Airbnb about three years ago,
and this is a seven year old start up, so about four years into their life decided that there was a
problem with Airbnb in terms of its scale. If you remember all of the news reports back in the
day about Airbnb, that's the place where you go to have drug and sex parties, or you get your
stuff stolen. So they realized, look, what we need to do is go through -- they were inspired
through the storyboard process that Disney used for Snow White. And they got all of their
customer data. They got all of their user data. They also got data from some of the best, like
the Ritz-Carlton, like what made a great Ritz-Carlton experience, and they put all that data into
storyboards. They first came up with these characters. Who are the types of hosts we have
and who are the types of hosts we want? And who are the guests we have and who are the
guests we want? And how do we bring those stories to life in ways that Airbnb can then be a
real alternative or real central imperative to them? It turns out that there were a lot of things
that they took for granted in their journeys and also in their hosts and in their guests'
experiences. That was this. Things like if you are a guest and you were in traffic on the way to
the property, or you encountered some of the wonderful people at TSA at the airport, all of
those things were contributing to the guest experience. So for them they realized that the
Airbnb brand was in the hands of their hosts, so they needed to better understand their hosts.
Why were they hosting? What were they looking to get out of this? How could we be sort of
their partner in delivering experiences that matter to them and to the guests? They realized
that they had to invest in experience architecture, which is almost like saying this is what
people are going to feel. This is what people are going to leave with and this is how we're going
to make that happen. For example, a good host now is being trained and conditioned to help
their guests build a relationship before they get to the property so they can understand what
are your preferences? What do you like? For example, I just went to one in Santa Cruz and all
of those questions came to life in the form of my favorite wine on the table, a nice handwritten
note and just a wonderful journey, a wonderful experience that was intentional. And all of that
because of this storyboarding experience. They hired a Pixar storyboard artist. His name is
Nick Sung and he came out and brought this all to life. And I brought him out once I heard this
story to help me storybook what I wanted my book to be based on who the reader really was
and what a day in the life was. And it was such a profound experience that I had to start over. I
had to trash the book and start over. I hated him for that, but I love him for that. And so I
actually believe that all of these different disciplines, UX, CX, BX, these are all the things that
just bring up the letter X and the letter X to me is part storytelling, part user centered design,
definitely human centered design, but coming together in a meaningful experience architecture
of which then literally transforms the entire dynamic of business. Every thing someone touches
around your company, whether it's employees or customers, affect the experience. And
believe it or not, none of these things work together today. In fact, often times they are
competitive. But now in an age of accidental narcissists or the ecosystem, every bit of this has
to be optimized, streamlined and integrated to deliver something that people want because if
they don't they will leave. They will go somewhere else and there is a science to all of this. This
can all be drawn out. This is an experience map around a particular moment and it's made sure
that everything is accounted for. This is an experience flow that shows you how all of those
moments come together to play out, and I actually believe that when you design for people
based on how they are, not how you are, a lot of really cool things happen. So I want to leave
you with this. Innovation is something that begins with a shift in perspective. It's never
technology. Technology is a byproduct of how you shifted perspective and how you knew
about something you didn't know before to design it. Experience and innovation is something
you have to feel. You have to be motivated and inspired to want to do something differently
about it. And then it's about action. But it's got to be the type of action where it's okay to try.
It's okay to take risks. And one of the biggest things to prevent any kind of innovation is fear or
politics or egos or just a lot of stuff. But in reality, there is no choice. This is what I want to
leave you with. This is a blank canvas and I realized the only way that I was going to get this
book out was to just start from scratch. It was harder and easier to do so. But if you think back
to the beginning of This Is Water and the story of the fish, this is space and it's yours to design
in a time and in an era that's different than what we came up in. And that's okay, right?
Because that's how we can continue to earn relevance, not just with our roles, but think about
what this means to what you are going to mean tomorrow. And more so the relationships with
your colleagues and with customers and their customers and everybody that results in the
process, because now what you're essentially doing is recognizing that innovation is something
that starts with you. So thank you very much and we'll go to questions. [applause]. But not all
at once. [laughter]. So who has a question for me? Yes?
>>: The business model for a beautiful coffee table book that has great business insights seems
disconnected, not just the price point here, but just in the marketplace itself. How did you pull
that off?
>> Brian Solis: His question was actually a part of what I forgot to tell you, because his question
is this. The economic model of my book like this, versus cover price, versus the infrastructure
that it took to get the book out, how did I pull it off? It was a very, very difficult series of
conversations because there is one thing to kind of come up with a beautiful book, but if any of
you have ever bought a coffee table book, you'll notice that they are much more expensive.
That's because the production process of a coffee table book is not at the scale of the regular
textbook or regular business books. That's why regular business books all at the same. My idea
was I had to make the case to the publisher. There was a little bit of history. I don't think I
could have done this on the first or second book. But I had to also help them find a new
economic model to produce this book because it would have been easy to do it at $100 price
point. However, I had to bring it into the neighborhood of a traditional business book. So we
had to find an entirely new supply chain for this book. And we were able to bring the price
points down. In fact, as you saw, I don't know how many of the first ones there were but they
were only $10. We were able to find a whole new supply chain model to build this book. This
was hard. It wasn't easy. In fact, the first 10,000 copies that came off the press, about four or
5000 of those were hand fed because we were just trying to get it, to make it work. But then
we found the right processes with which to design and build it and now it works and so it is
thicker paper. The color saturation had to be able to sustain that. It wasn't easy. However,
every author after me is going to have it easy because now there's a whole infrastructure for
this.
>>: I'm curious if you could elaborate a little bit. During the course of your research when you
talked to different organizations about how they approached design, have you come across
new models of how to integrate the whole practice of design. And when I say design I mean
the big design, visual design that makes the icon look a little bit nicer into the whole business
operations. Because I think that's something that companies are wrestling with including ours
where we are moving from the traditional functional hierarchy to one that is supposed to be a
lot more matrixed.
>> Brian Solis: Part of that, so I study this also in my research and a lot of it falls under what is
called digital transformation. So there's this movement within organizations that are realizing
that a lot of their infrastructures to compete in a digital economy are, let's just say slow and
process driven. This prevents decision-making which prevents speed and also prevents
collaboration. So the closest a lot of organizations get our sort of matrixed. But if you look at
some of the companies that I think we have all celebrated for years like Disney or Nike, they
have a design culture. It's just that way. But how do other businesses get there? It's really
difficult. One of the things that is a catalyst, it turns out, is the customer experience. And
they're looking at the digital customer experience specifically to show where they are weak and
then they form groups over time. And all of this research is free that you guys could just
download, my name, Brian Solis and digital transformation. Because I show exactly what
they're doing to create the case, how they create the case. The way it's done is they look at the
differences between the digital customers and the customers they think that they are designing
for and they look at where the friction is, where the differences are and where they are and
where they need to be, and they come up with this prioritized roadmap. And then the
conversations begin by saying what do we need to do to get there? What we need to do is
bring this person and this person and this person together to start forming, so it's almost like a
matrixed approach but they actually end up forming new divisions within the organization. So
it's process reinvention. It's model reinvention and a lot of these things start as little pockets of
innovation, if you will, to solve big problems or solve for bigger opportunities now. That plays
out over time which becomes digital transformation because they get momentum. They always
get momentum, and then that starts to grow. In two weeks I have a report called the six stages
of digital transformation that specifically details how companies get from one stage to the next
so that companies like Microsoft can just say okay. Here's where we are. We can benchmark
ourselves here. Here's what other companies are doing and now let's prioritize these things.
By the way, one of the guest challenges of this is an intention. And everybody I think wants to
do the right thing. It's just culture. Culture gets in the way a lot of times. Yes?
>>: How does brand relate to experience design?
>> Brian Solis: I think brand used to be something that was creative. We used to bring the life
with imagery, with messaging, with scenarios. I think that the best way is to look at what is the
experience you want someone to have? Disney, the grow with a smile, that's a Disney
experience and that is also a Disney brand. It's just meant to invoke sort of this smile in
everything that you do and to remember that whatever age you are you are a child and you are
allowed to be imaginative and you are allowed to be creative. That is all though Imagineering.
Everything that Disney does is based on architecture. And they apply that thinking. It's rich
throughout the culture. They have a university in Florida that teaches this type of thinking and
they try to bring businesses through to say it's not -- you can't just have a brand. A brand has to
be something that is experienced. And then in turn the measurement is well what did you
think? This is what I felt. And that's perfect because that's what we designed for. Disney takes
Imagineering all the way down to everything they do. Like their cruise ships, the rooms, they
thought of all the little things that families were going to be in these rooms, probably too many
people in one-room but they designed the rooms to where the desk becomes a bed. This thing
folds down from a wall to make another bed. The bathroom and the sink are split in a tiny little
cruise ship quarters so someone can use the restroom while someone is taking a shower.
These things are all intentional, but they all ladder up to the Disney experience, which is then
the Disney brand. So it's human centered and reverse engineered in that regard. Yes?
>>: Do you have any ideas around ways to get your voice into customer? I'm running a service
right now. I just feel like I have to go grab it out of my users to figure out ways to improve.
>> Brian Solis: There are two schools of thought that I think should be merged. One is the
voice of the customer. And then there's the voice of the customer you don't want to have.
Starbucks, for example will say that they don't look at other coffee companies as their
competitors. To your point about digital transformation earlier, they have a new division that
starts with merging an aspect of IT but specifically for innovation and specifically around mobile
and payment. A group around basically a chief digital officer in order to build architectures to
rapidly test and learn. And they do this because they think that their biggest competitors are
PayPal and other companies like that. Because they're finding that the mobile payment sector,
there's a ton of things that they could learn about that customer that they could designed for in
Starbucks, which is why Starbucks just came up with the deal with Instantcard so like Uber you
can have your coffee brought to you and people do that. How do you then activate that? A
part of it is a voice of the customer program sucks if you are really just trying to yank things out.
You might as well be a dentist. Or you can build a community, an active community, a thriving
community of which that thing is always on and there is value of being in that community and
there is value of belonging. And then part of that is your providing insight and information and
benefits to them and you're getting something in return which is feedback and insights. But
what ends up happening is as you build up the community, and there's a lot of cases of these
out of companies like Lithium, for example where you can get how this is done. It turns out
that the more you invest in communities as your VOC program, the more, I guess the better the
feedback is because the more engaged people feel, the better the satisfaction. A lot of these
things, retention goes up all because you ended up doing something to get something that
ended up becoming something better.
>> Amy Draves: You have a lot of questions online. One is, although anyone, including
engineers can design products with empathy, you've done a correlation between innovation
and companies that are structured around non-engineers. The example is at Apple the
designers and marketers lead on product development and the engineers just execute on
designers' and marketers' visions.
>> Brian Solis: He brought up Apple. I wasn't going to. I know one of the original six on the
iPhone design team. He's a good friend of mine and the story he tells our just incredible. And
one of the things, he's part engineer, but he's also part design thinker. One of the stories he
tells was how they were originally forming the team for the iPhone and they went out and they
found all of the best engineers in the game to bring onto the iPhone team. They presented to
Steve about their ideas of who the superstar team was going to be. And Steve did one of those
things and basically said no. I don't want anyone who's ever worked on a phone to work on the
iPhone. And so that is sort of, if you think about it, he wasn't an engineer either. What you
have to bring in to that moment not just empathy, but vision. So there is an aspect of what
people do that unlocks empathy of which you feel, which is supposed to unlock innovation
which you see. And then you bring in the team of engineers and architects to bring this to life,
because it can't just be any one aspect of it. We are not all going to change overnight. We are
all going to bring our little cognitive biases to that meeting. But that's why we have to work
towards this vision and somebody has to have that vision because then that gives everybody
purpose. And that is a very complex answer, but that's the way it's always done. That's how it
happened. And by the way, nobody said going back to Uber, what if we design an application
of which. It was driven by a moment where we all got stuck in Paris in the snow. Because if
you get just a sprinkle of snow on the ground, all of the taxi drivers decide to take the day off.
And so we were stranded from a conference called LeWeb in Paris and that was driven by an
idea of pain. And then Uber became well what can we do to solve for that now? That's just
one approach. Okay one more.
>> Amy Draves: There's another question online. I'll use it.
>> Brian Solis: Amy, please, represent the voice of the online customer.
>> Amy Draves: There are several questions around sort of, similar to what you were just
saying but in nondesign organizations, like HR. How do you get this perspective into an
organization that doesn't typically think this way?
>> Brian Solis: Which is ironic because it's human resources, right? When I talk to HR, this is
why my next focus is on culture, because this is actually the crux of what we are starting to talk
about. When I talk to HR about this, how do we design an employee experience? And I look
and I say what is your greatest challenge? You know what the answer I get is? You are going to
love this. The answer I get from HR is that their biggest challenge is millennials. What do you
mean? It's just a blanket statement like that. Well, they don't work within our processes. They
always want to be reviewed more than the review processes that are there. They don't like
their management infrastructure. They want a little bit more freedom. They want to be able to
switch jobs and, you know. And so I said okay. So you're just going to basically change the
fundamental nature of who they are? Are you asking me how to do that? Because I have kids
and I'm asking myself how do I do that. So I walked them through a scenario. I said just give
me a real world problem, something that you are dealing with today. And they said okay. We
can't hire millennials and we need them because they are the future of the company. I said
what do you mean you can't hire millennials? Because they go in Green Door or Glassdoor.
They are going to YouTube and they are typing in our company name and they are getting a lot
of things back that say that we are not the best place to work. So I said what are you guys
thinking about doing? We were going to produce a bunch of great YouTube videos about how
great it is to work here. I said that sounds fantastic, but are you lying? I mean, are you looking
at the problem? The problem is that they don't want to work here because of probably things
that don't relate to their values or aspirations or their goals. Those are core questions you have
to ask yourself. Are you willing to design for them? Because everything is evolutionary. It
doesn't mean that just because that's the way we always have done at that that is the way you
are supposed to do it. It's called creative disruption. It's a long time standing economic term.
Something new comes along and completely, that's the definition of destruction, by the way.
And I'm going to apply this to HR. Iteration is doing things better. Innovation is doing things
that create new value and disruption is doing things that make the old ones obsolete. HR is
obsolete. If you do not disrupt it it will be disrupted for you. And I said let's just come up with
core values of what the organization could be because that's a leadership thing. I think we are
caught in the rut of management. The second thing is what if I wanted to apply for a job? How
would we do that? We bring in these forms. You enter this job code, which brings up another
form. I said let's go through it. I got out my phone and I said give me that URL. And they said
oh no. You can't. It doesn't work on that. I said exactly. So you're asking someone to conform
to you when you are human resources and your job is to basically cater to the human being
inside the organization and look out for their well-being. And that's the hard part because
human resources is the perfect example of how -- same as call centers. They're all just perfect
examples of how we lost touch with human beings and that's why I'm a big believer in empathy
in terms of any experience design. Everything can be re-imagined and has to be.
>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much.
>> Brian Solis: Thank you so much. [applause]. Thank you.