Designing experiences not screens

Welcome everyone to a new episode of the Product Bakery podcast. Finally another episode again from Christian's couch. We're breaking a little bit like or we're officially not breaking the rules because two households are allowed even in corona times in Berlin and there was one thing that we discussed. I think it's a really good idea to try to not only have interviews regularly on first day but to also maybe have like more casual sessions where we simply talk about everyday topics about our own experiences and try to discuss what's currently important in the product design engineering world. Yes it's a little bit hard for me though to talk to Alex because when I look in his face I see he's super tense at the moment coming back from his Portugal trip. Well it's probably also not the thing to share. I think so. Officially we're not traveling right? No but to be honest we're we all know current times right and I think getting out every once in a while from the house is super important and I went to Portugal mainly because I had to visit a friend of mine he just recently became dead and he's not only a very good friend of mine I was also the best man when he got married to his wife so I think it was like a very important life event that I definitely didn't want to miss. So despite corona I think even with all the measures in place traveling is I would almost say even safer than it used to be before because like airports are empty and you can keep a healthy distance from people without being the person who needs too much private space so I think from that aspect and I tested negatively. Did you travel with public transport a lot or did you rent a car for your trip? No we were entirely like we flew to Faro which is in the south of Portugal where we rented a car to then pretty much like drive through Portugal like we went all the way up to Porto where my friend lives and I think that's actually like a really good thing because speaking also about user experience topics that are generally always on top of my mind when I'm doing things when I'm looking at things there was one thing that stuck with me from riding from Faro to Porto which was we the rental car we had was a small VW Polo so like really nothing crazy and no advertisement here like we're not affiliated with Volkswagen in any way but I think there was one thing so I'm not a big fan of air conditioning so I would simply Portugal still has very good weather. Why are you not a fan of air conditioning? I don't know it's usually too cold. What that's the best invention on the planet you can you can configure how warm it should be. No but it's yes and no because I don't want like this cold air in my face I really love having this breeze of air that you get like when you open the window and so for me usually if it's not like Dubai with 50 degrees Celsius. But you have even in Germany at hot summer days 50 degrees in your car when you are stuck in traffic. Okay yeah and then air conditioning is definitely a good reason but I don't want to get too deep into air conditionings yes or no because there is that there's good reasons for air conditionings there are places where in my apartment I wish to sometimes have one but so what what do I do like I generally like just open the window to get some fresh air and one while doing that I realized that there was still air coming out of the air outlets from the air conditioning. While the window was open? Yes and the air conditioning was off and I was like okay fuck Volkswagen they screwed something up here if I turn off the air conditioning I don't want to get air until a few hours into the drive I realized that whenever I would close again the window there is no air coming in from the air outlets. So obviously like my technical mind I wanted to understand this a little bit better so I tested around and whenever I press the window button automatically like the airflow also did not only come through the windows but also from the outlets in the car. Were there any lamps blinking? No. I just want to double check. Nothing was blinking nothing was and I think usually you would probably not even realize it but so my assumption here is that whoever was in charge of figuring out how to best solve their air system in the car thought about why would someone open a window and obviously okay there are just a few reasons why you open a window maybe I don't know bad smell in the car okay you want to get some fresh air maybe you don't like air conditioning and you prefer to get like air from outside you would open it and I think it's or you are at McDonald's at the drive-in or that true that fair points I'm not a big McDonald's guy but this was a lie if there's one person on this planet who loves cheeseburger it's Alex yes okay got you there but I'm not like I don't feel like a McDonald's person it's more like this starving when you haven't had any food for a while back to the topic yes let's go back to I think it's about understanding the intention of what you want to do when opening the window and anticipating also a little bit like that and combining it with in that case allowing me to get more air so they know I want to get air I open the window so therefore they open the gates however the technology behind it works to let the air flow in through all outlets and I could still close the outlets individually and I thought about it it's such a small detail but it's like really also where the whole product work comes down to it you need to anticipate the intention of a user for whatever you do and still in the same car I had another example that I that showed me that which is I love driving with a cruiser so it holds my speeds especially when I drive for a long time and yeah it's a little bit also like to keep my gasoline to not consume too much and whatsoever and as it was just a small car there was no cruiser but there was a limiter which is the one that you can set so that you can hold the speed limit and so I set the speed limit that I don't get over whatever 200 kilometers per hour it's a polo think about that with some wind coming from the back yeah no offense with 200 hour with 200 kilometers an hour you don't open the window but so you have the limiter and the limiter doesn't let you go over a specific speed limit and the interesting thing is I was surpassing a person on a car on the highway and I simply went full into the accelerator and suddenly with a beep the car gave me the hint that it turned off the limiter and and it allowed me to accelerate and also here I was thinking okay it's actually against what limiter means because it should limit me to hold the speed but at the same time there is someone thought about why would I in that second kick into the pedals and I would accelerate because I want to gain speed and I think purely by looking also in the way I would accelerate they understood my intention and anticipated that they need to turn it off so that I can actually surpass this car and yeah I think it's just two small examples that in the physical world that actually made me thought about a lot of things and like just last week I was in Portugal and just this week at work we were like on the project that I'm currently working on we were interviewing some customers and was like for a financial service and there was this one girl and she was talking like girl and she was talking like we were talking about also the way she books for her vacations and so on looking a little bit like into also how digital her experience is or how tech savvy she generally is also in the way she would use apps to book flights trips and so on and there was one thing that was interesting because she was a very tech savvy person she had literally every single digital device that you can think of is it a smart watch is it the e-reader ipad iphone computers like really kindle everything everything more digital than me probably I don't have a smart watch and she told me that she when she goes on a big trip she does the the check-in at the gate why is that yeah I was like why would you do that why not and the thing was like she does it because she wants to get to print a ticket as a memory and then puts it in her physical photo album and it's it's like all these little things like you you need to think about what is like the intention of someone when they do something what is the job to be done yeah exactly and in her case the ticket was more about more than just like getting onto the plane it was like this whole experience also of having this memory of this nice trip and it's obviously different from okay I'm traveling to Africa for three weeks and doing some safari to I'm just like going on a short trip in the city and I think this is also like where the whole topic of user experience becomes so wide and where research also becomes so important and we had it in our past episodes it's really also about for each little thing understanding why do people do it how do people do it what's the motivation behind and I think that's also something Nikki pointed out like really in a nice way and you need to focus on this motivation and try to design the experience that oftentimes is more than just an interface I think on an airport it makes sense to print out a ticket for many reasons right there are legal reasons your phone couldn't work etc but if you go back yes and no because I've I haven't printed a ticket in ages but you you have a smartphone and you are tech savvy old people are not she had that smartphone too and she did it for a different reason so yeah it's it's not about like for her the ticket doesn't solve the job that it solves for other people who do it because they are not tech savvy or they're afraid of not being able to use their phone or low on battery could also be a job for her the job was like I want a memory and it's about advocating for that I'm not like I haven't thought it further in terms of how could I give her the same experience also in a mobile world the question with the car from my side is what is the job there or what is the experience they are the builders the car builders and the people who develop the software we're thinking of because if I look at the car industry in general I still have the feeling they are years behind why am I thinking this is very easy now we're or these days cars are getting developed we're getting smarter and smarter so you have a you have a technical ecosystem within the car that does more than for example only playing music or showing you where to drive but if you just look back five years ago I was once at a talk I don't remember which conference it was but there was a user experience designer from Volkswagen and she was talking about the navigation systems they are building within the car and I asked her hey why are you not just building cars without a navigation system I just stick in my iPad with a 3G connection or 4G connection and have 10 times more user experience functionalities and abilities within that piece of hardware in my car than buying what you are providing out of the house and I still think that the whole car industry needs to wrap up when it comes to the whole user experience within the car and do way more research on understanding with the technical tech stack that is available right now how to build the best user experience but I think the first example that you made is partly solved by things like CarPlay from Apple and I think that's really good because absolutely the car gives me this interface that I want to have I would never bring my iPad into my car and put it in and I think like also for compatibility reasons like you would have to design for just like endless amounts of devices that people might have and internet as you said is also a topic I think what cars solve really well that you can use their navigation system pretty much everywhere without having to access internet but when you have a smartphone when you have the internet connection being able to simply drop it and with NFC technologies and so on like you literally just drop it in the car it automatically connects I have the same interface on this on the car screen and I can use both my phone and my car screen even though I shouldn't use my phone when driving kids this is now a short educational part whenever you make your driving license don't use your phone while driving don't drink and drive and yeah whatever you get the point but I think that's partially solved there nevertheless I think it's these little details though that go beyond now the touch interface of whatever I can do in the car but like really also I see the industry trying to understand much more the user the driver in that case that's sitting in the car and to understand all the different jobs do you think looking at the two examples you gave it's research and thought through enough I personally as a user no I personally in that scenario I think it's really well thought through now one thing that I was wondering is like how much was it actually on purpose because I think that's also something like if it was on purpose I think it's very well thought through there might be different parts but I think like generally the technology that we nowadays see purely also on the driver's assistant side and I'm not talking about entertainment side in the car because that's I think the point you're referring to a little bit when we talk about the driving assistance there is a lot of intelligence and research that goes into the cars things like detection of how tired I am based on the way I steer because it's a lot of people it's fun that I have so many conversations about the cars but I had a lot I had this conversation with quite some people about this when whenever the car tells you that you're tired and you have to go to the next stop there is not a camera that looks at your eyes in most of the cases and it's also not a timer that's oh yeah you're driving three three hours now you better should take a stop but that analyzes the way you steer the way you react to some things like if you have faster reactions every once in a while and so on the car interprets this based on also patterns that they analyze over and over again and I think it's so beautiful actually that all these cars are also connected nowadays that it is a massive growing infrastructure of data and there is so much knowledge I do think that a lot of these things are already being leveraged quite well and at the same time I'm very curious on where this whole industry goes to do you believe in autonomous driving I definitely do and I hope I really hope it's something that comes rather earlier than later not because I don't like driving but I think thinking also about sustainable driving and the biggest pain for example which is traffic jams and stuff like that I personally believe that you could remove a lot of these pain points by having autonomously driving cars that leverage the whole infrastructure that know who's on the streets how fast they're driving if you don't have anyone who abruptly breaks for no reason in the middle of the highway you don't have traffic jams but we would need to filter these people just out no I think if a computer drives they're steady like you can keep a steady speed usually it should flow much more naturally but but there's also this aspect of the technical possibilities and the potential on for example reduced traffic jams etc but on the other hand what about the user acceptance because from my side I would definitely love to take advantage of the benefits but on the other hand I just like to drive what's bigger the advantage of having a self-driving car using the time productively or having the joy of driving you can still go to whatever racing court and drive I just should pick up my Ferrari and go to Nürburgring yeah you can give me that car these product coaches but yeah I'm not too afraid that it's about that the acceptance problem is too big I think the bigger challenges and I'm probably not the best person to talk about it because there are people who are much more into the topic like for me it was more about pointing out the two small details that I found but as we're talking about it the bigger problem is first of all adoption because for the system to like really if I talk about a natural flow of cars it means you need to have a hundred percent adoption rate every car in the street needs to be fully connected and automatically driving to avoid such things otherwise you still have the human error factor in between and then secondly and this is a super interesting topic the whole ethical question of machines taking decisions and I would probably stop it here because I think it would be great if maybe also someone from the audience or if someone knows someone who is like really deep into these topics could even join us for a chat in the podcast but I think the point I was trying to make earlier wasn't necessarily going in the direction of like self-driving cars or the car industry necessarily I think to wrap it up it's more about when you think about user experience thinking of the overall user experience and the end-to-end interactions that the users has looking at all the different intentions that the users have and the goals and motivations behind it to pick up the words that also Niki used talking about research because I think the biggest delights happen especially in these details and the biggest and the most successful and best experiences are the ones that are invisible that are like the foundation of how you use the different products and not only the visual interface that translates then the interactions and I also believe that it is a huge work to completely understand what kind of jobs someone wants to do in a car because there are people who spend maybe a whole day in a car hours days weeks months they are doing so many things in a car and since we are all humans there is no end to the interactions that we are having and we are doing on a regular basis but even more than that right in so many different places we work together on SumUp also there we had this small device to accept car payments or SumUp still has the small device to accept car payments but also in in the research there were some things where we tried to look beyond also the interfaces and we had some we had some graphical studies in different shops where we only tried to look at like the end customer trying to pay at this device to understand the full context and just to paint you the picture usually when you go into a shop and you buy something it's a Saturday and you've been to another shop before you maybe have your shopping bag in your hand you're standing at the counter everything like it's nicely packed so that you can also take that bag with you you already hold it in your hand now you're already struggling to get out your wallet or your phone for apple pay and suddenly you're standing there with your two bags in your hand the wallet i don't know under your arm the card in the other hand and you need to interact with this little device and if you only think about the interaction on the device there is so much that's being lost when you don't look about the whole ecosystem and when you don't think to also anticipate what is like the intention that someone has and what is like the whole context that someone wants to perform the topic like opening the window might be as you said at next drive i probably have a different intention than when i'm driving with 70 kilometers per hour versus again when i'm driving on a highway with 180 kilometers per hour as we're sending from germany here yeah i think it's really about the whole end-to-end experience and about trying to understand that one to its best if you are from the car industry artificial intelligence industry etc drop us a line at hello at product-bakery.com and obviously if you have some feedback to this new format if we should continue doing it like this as said earlier the interviews will remain on every first day and every once in a while we will also make sure to share some of our personal thoughts cool alex thank you very much and looking forward to talking to you again