Sharing Life on the Go

Design Management Review, Summer 2004 by Beaudet, Doug, Zacks, Carolyn

More than a one-time initiative, this story is about a change in corporate culture. The company that for generations prided itself on permanently documenting the world around us was now exploring how it might share the fleeting realities of life "on the go." Doug Beaudet and Carolyn Zacks reveal the origins and results of this fascinating program and suggest how it has given Kodak a new focus for the twenty-first century.

There was a time at the "big yellow box" in Rochester, New York, when we did not use words like spontaneous, transient, and mobile to describe pictures. Kodak was known as a company you could trust to capture and preserve your most cherished moments in life. Silver halide photography created a permanent record of any scene, a permanence that could be recreated and relived for decades after the event. And the relatively inexpensive cost of processing and printing film caused many of us to fill shoeboxes and albums with thousands of prints. Would not our history, our heritage, carry this paradigm forward into the digital imaging future? Perhaps. But maybe we were at the start of a new technological era that would enable us to capture and share representations of life in ways we had never imagined. Maybe digital imaging would satisfy new needs for spontaneous images, as transient and temporal as email. Such progressive ideas would be a tough sell at a company with a 100-year-old winning formula for creating a lifetime of prints.

Kodak's Corporate Design and Usability Research (CDUR) division conducts research with an eye toward envisioning provocative and profound concepts in user experience. In mid 2001, CDUR noticed that a number of its own research projects were exploring the use of wireless technologies in their concepts. When the project leaders were asked, "Why wireless?" they answered that these new technologies solved a number of emerging and unmet user needs for connectedness. Not long afterward, Kodak put together a Share Life on the Go project team to investigate these needs.

Imagining Life on the Fly

The team's research explored new products and user experiences for the mobile digital age, envisioning mobile systems that promoted imaging as a principal component in wireless communication. The idea was to enable the easy, spontaneous sharing of images as a way to allow families and friends to stay connected.

The Share Life on the Go venture also brought together several projects that had been working independently. The hope was that creating a single, multidisciplinary team would lead to more profound concepts. The challenge of envisioning a mobile imaging user experience was new for Kodak, but we found that our user-centered design process could be applied to this new problem space. A team of designers, human factors specialists, ethnographers, and image psychologists came together quickly and laid out an aggressive research plan. The team drew up a schedule and deliverables based on our user-centered design process (see figure 1 previous page), but there were many surprises along the way.

User-Centered Design Process

Our design process follows a fairly conventional flow. It begins with a clearly articulated opportunity-for example, a question, an inspiration, a problem. In this case, it was, "How will people share life on the go in a highly connected world?" We investigate user needs by applying a blend of ethnographic and human-factors research methods, combined with good oldfashioned investigation into markets, technologies, and trends. We leverage company business strategies, growth initiatives, and brand management plans to strengthen our research focus or at least to let us know when we are challenging the status quo. Once user needs are understood, we ideate concepts to address unmet and latent needs. We might generate more than 100 ideas and distill them down to a handful through refinement, synthesis, and iteration. Ideas become concepts through storytelling; a good concept fulfills a user need in a real-life situation. In R&D, we are encouraged to pursue profound and provocative solutions, even if they might require technical breakthroughs or inventions. Filing patent claims and disclosures on applicable research is critical to acquiring and protecting intellectual property.

Each project defines its own assessment criteria, depending on the research objectives and business opportunities, to assist in the concept selection process. Concepts that don't make the final cut are documented for later consideration. For selected concepts, we develop them into mockups and prototypes through iterative design and usability-that is, build, test, and refine with target users. We find this cyclical process invaluable in keeping us in touch with the true user needs and in honing our concepts. Users don't have to love or hate our concepts, but we do want to understand what excites them and, more important, what annoys them about the concepts.

Final concepts are demonstrated through user-experience scenarios, interactive prototypes, and concept videos. Parts of our research are often leveraged into other projects going on in the company. The greatest reward is when a concept generates valuable intellectual property for the company-for example, patents-or contributes to the success of an innovative Kodak product in the marketplace.