Don’t Be an Apphole

I occasionally run brainstorming sessions and design studios. Normally, these sessions have less than a half-dozen participants rapidly sketching ideas on paper in Crazy Eight or Six Up fashion. The sketches are meant to be explorations into possible designs and solutions for a stated problem or objective that had been presented earlier to the team.

In every single one of my exercises, there’s at least one person whose entirety of ideas and sketches represent mobile apps.

I call these people (and with all due respect, of course) Appholes.

And I don’t want you to be one.

In this rapidly changing, hyper-ambiguous, and opportunity-laden world of ubiquitously connected devices, commercial quadricopters, petabytes and petabytes of data, an onslaught of wearables that are more powerful than the computers of yesterday, domestic manufacturing, and many other forms of user interfaces that don’t even have their own categories yet, being locked in the confines of a mobile device seems passé.

Whereas the Killer Apps of yesterday were singularly-contained software programs that did a single or small collection of valuable tasks on the user’s handheld device, tomorrow’s Killer Apps won’t really be apps. They will be a web of multiple interfaces, protocols, tools, and form-factors with a possibility of there being a smartphone app at the center of it all. Maybe.

User Experience doesn’t start and end on your smartphone. It exists in everything we do, starting with what drives our behaviours and motivations, and spilling over into our feelings and emotions and memories that we carry with us onto our experiences with other devices, products and services.

I would argue that society’s most pressing problems aren’t getting more complex. Instead our tools are finally reaching a form of simple sophistication that finally unlocks the realization that the most pressing problems today are in fact multidimensional. The toughest problems transcend mediums and interfaces.

And so should your solutions.

So how does one avoid being an Apphole? Here are some starters:

1. Take ample time to understand and map out the user journey from the very beginning, i.e. the moment the perceived user feels a pain and decides to do something about it. And then try to understand what happens BEFORE this moment. What are some scenarios that lead to this particular pain being felt.
2. Dig deep into WHY someone is having the problem. What emotions and motivations does the user have to see the problem fixed. This requires getting up close and personal with your users. If you don’t have time to do this, make time. If you’re faced with the time-boxed and room-boxed constraints of a brainstorming session, for instance, then make assumptions about your perceived user and stay true to them.
3. Develop a systems-thinking mindset. Many of the best innovators who ever lived displayed a great ability to balance artistry with science, which enabled them to see the interconnectedness of things that were seemingly disconnected. Once you begin seeing the system in which a problem exists, your solutions will start to manifest these systems, too.

So the next time you’re brainstorming a solution for a real problem, think beyond the screen on your palm.

If you liked this piece, you can read more of my stuff on product design, innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship on my blog, The Innovator’s Odyssey. Feel free to reach out on @alirtariq, too.