Notes from 52nd International STC Conference
Seattle, Washington, May 8-12, 2005

Keynote Address: Creating Economic and User Value

Patrick Whitney

Patrick Whitney is the director of the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He has overseen many ambitious and innovative design projects, including a patient restraint system customized for the specialized needs of infants during surgery, a communication system that delivers customized traffic information to travelers, and software that renders complex ideas into intuitive graphics. Whitney advocates human-centered design, driven by user characteristics, user needs, and user requirements.

Session Description: Information designer and marketer Patrick Whitney explained how the trend toward a user-centric international marketplace would open up new opportunities both in marketing and in technical communication.

• Trend is toward user-driven marketplace.
• "We care about total user experience." People use the phrase without understanding what it means, particularly from a design and development standpoint.
• Prototypes are used to simulate user experience very early, well before traditional usability testing, while there is still time to influence the basic design.
• Designers' knowledge is oriented to technology and business models, which is current, but their model for users' daily lives is antiquated (e.g., the assumption is still of married couples with 2.3 kids who eat together as a family every night, while the majority of families no longer fit that model).
• Thus, designers know how to make anything but no longer know what to make.
• Physical human factors: what people are like (includes aspects such as the increasing disabilities of the aging "baby boomer" population).
• Cognitive human factors: what people know
• Social human factors: how people interact as a group (e.g., teams at work)
• Cultural human factors: takes in the entire realm of intercultural relations
• Objects, environments, messages, and services are cross-matrixed against user characteristics (physical, cognitive, social, and cultural) so as to influence product development and product characteristics as well as product documentation and marketing.
• Hong Kong student survey showed several new product and marketing opportunities: buying fresh food, families staying in touch, helping kids learn, managing the apartment, storage, and balancing the budget.
• Opportunities for creating user value = opportunities for marketing and business growth.
• Organic business growth can be achieved by innovation and by paying attention to the base of the user pyramid (the 4 billion people in the world who make $6 US a day or less). Even though purchasing power is very limited, the sheer numbers make this a significant user market today and definitely the largest market of the future.
• $100B is wasted annually on improperly taken medications ... this is an information problem, creating a major business opportunity in correcting that problem. This leads to electronic products that provide reminders for taking meds, reminders on refills, etc. (e.g., Med-Checker).
• Similar products have semi-automated med-taking recordkeeping at nurses' stations in hospitals (e.g., electronic record board) tied to palm-held devices that nurses take into the patients' rooms.  Absent the electronic link from the palm-held devices to the master board, it all comes down to nurses’ memory and post-it notes on a bulletin board ... leading to serious risk of errors in administration of meds, especially during shift changes. Fixing this problem becomes a business opportunity that spills over into technical communication.
• Low-income areas ("slums") are proliferating at such a rate in Asia and the Third World as population explodes that it exceeds the combined capability of governments and charitable organizations to meet the human needs. Therein lies an opportunity for socially responsible corporate involvement: identifying and selling products that help people survive, even flourish, in such a situation. NOTE: This creates a built-in opportunity for exploitation. Much rests on the ethical principles of the corporations involved ... to serve, albeit at a profit, rather than to exploit.
• Example: a corporation invested in trucks to bring fresh water to low-income areas, sold the water at a fair price (thereby saving people the effort to go get the water and meeting a basic need), and then also used the trucks for other profit-making transportation activities. Thus, the people were legitimately served by filling a user market niche at a fair profit.
• The initiative is to find economic sustainable enterprises that improve living conditions.
• Summary:
   
• What to make? Those who are closest to the majority of the users will make the right products.
• Look for unarticulated user needs in inefficient or ineffective arenas of daily life (e.g., medication record-keeping).
• Link increased user experience to growth in profit, market share, and brand value.