Two Yahoo! employees shared ways that innovation is encouraged at Yahoo!
- Hack Days—24 hour brainstorms
- Google 20%--engineering dept spends 20% of time to work on own projects/innovate
- Scrum—agile, short cycle (2 week) product releases
Need to overcome fear of:
- wasted time,
- high cost,
- diverted resources,
- failure,
- missed opportunities,
- unknown
To overcome fear, start small.
- Design Day—took user reearch; 1 day, several people; storytelling
- Local Field Day—45 people, split into 3-person groups, local stakeholders, went to users on same day, made poster boards to ID problem areas
- Design Exploration—2 days, 2 designers, work into low time; follow with stakeholder review
- Water cooler conversations—don’t freak people out, plant a seed instead; when multiple people planting a seed, it's important to not go on and on (eventually falls on deaf ears); then escalate; allow the other person to have their own thoughts
- Consider your sphere of influence--advocate at the level where you do have influence, and then let others influence up the chain for you
Build trust
- Transparency and visibility; give people ability to see into the process
- Make clear design deliverables for stakeholders
- Have a low barrier to entry into the team
- Do less design deliverables like wireframes and more cartoon storyboarding, prototyping, product simulations to give feel of experience—communicates with others and works through design process (Wireframes as not communicating the concepts or feel).
- Get more people involved in idea/scope; less involved later while trying to crystallize ideas
- Brainstorming across functional areas of the organization. Recruit the design team to help the rest of the organization think through the needs.
- Keep stakeholders informed. Visualize ideas in a way that stakeholders can understand right away. (ex: Video showing user experience—storytelling how a user uses the site; ex: flash video of personas—short and sweet)
- Build track record
Making Believers
- User research; field studies
- Interviews, diaries, watching users in their environment
Overcome fear by making time
Building trust by involving people
Making believers so it can happen
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