I spent a lot of time observing the bees - mainly because I was s*** scared of being stung and yes, bees CAN smell fear.
This was my first taste of watching 20,000 visitors, with attitude, do something that totally hooked my attention. I read voraciously and absorbed everything I could find at the library.
I was amazed at how they could engineer perfect hexagons out of wax secreted from their own bodies. I read of Their Queen and her subjects, their complex dances, their calculations of distance - always taking account of wind and the movement of the sun overhead. Like an organic machine, I watched over 50 kilos of honey come from one beehive in the hot summer of 1976 from ceaseless industry and coordination.
But one thing really stood out. That call to action, that small orange dot worn by thousands of bees - one on each leg. Pollen.
This amazing stuff is collected in the wild and used to feed the young. But like any interface or process you observe, there is another layer going on here. The bees are having a two way relationship. In return for collecting this multi-coloured, protein rich substance, the bee performs a vital service for the plant. It acts as the dating website.
Every time that leg is flown around the foraging area, it collects (and drops off) some of that pollen at most flowers the bee visits. And in doing this, the plants are pollinated. Yup, that's where food comes from and if you own a fruit tree for long enough, you may remember what it's like when pollination doesn't happen. No food.
I could write a lot of preachy sentimental stuff here about how you ought to support bees or the beekeeper. Nope. Just go and find a local beekeeping chapter or Apiarist and take a look. Once you see the big picture, you'll support not hammering their tiny brains with chemicals. If they disappear - a lot of the stuff you love will become too expensive to grow in the western world or vanish completely. Fair warning.
But back to this article and my central point!
Pollination - it's the vehicle for message (using DNA) that creates the variety of natural selection for plants.
With reduced pollination, species can't compete or evolve against others and become less resistant to disease. Over a long period, an entire and unique species might vanish. They simply go out of business.
The Pollination of ideas within companies is something I've observed too - working on digital products from startups to lean corporates, small companies to publicly quoted ones.
Here are the key attributes I've seen, where the teams really 'get' the problem space and effectively 'explore' or test the solution space:
So where do the best ideas come from in these teams? Well mainly from customers and the people that support the product at every level.
For example, here is my shortlist for an employee working on an online clothing brand.
As part of induction and every month after that, time should be spent:
Why? Surely these people should be coding, building product or running tests? Yup. But they'll run far better tests and improvements by seeing the bigger picture. Because they'll be designing better solutions to business problems.
In most of these trips outside your comfortable IT, Management or Product bunker you'll be wandering into a sea of interesting psychology. Let's take the call centre or warehouse - you're 'someone from head office' now visiting for a bit - and that doesn't encourage brutally open and honest communication. They're not going to tell you what sucks without a bit of work on your part.
If you practice your interviewing (Steve Krug has good advice for the beginner) then you can get much better answers than direct interrogation.
You have to make people comfortable about sharing stuff they know is wrong but feel defensive or worried to talk about.
If people are so terrified of being honest that you'd have to use torture, I find beer has a calming effect. Take everyone out for beers after your visit - carefully timed to finish at end of shift. Then be honest and open - ask 'What's really grinds your gears about the online stuff?" "What do customers get really upset or delighted about?” Well worth the beer costs. And this is just one of the sources of vital information you might need.
Spending time immersed in different viewpoints or connections that your digital product has across an entire organisation and customer cycle is important.
This helps you see the real customer problems, the major sources of cost or loss and the places where you need to fix things first. You're running a digital business, not a website - it's not a self-contained bubble.
Gone are the days when we'd run a usability test on a site, pronounce the problems being A, B and C and then fix a couple of issues or just ignore the report in favour of some new shiny distraction.
Now we're trying to solve problems of overarching customer experience, cost, complexity, process or flow across an entire business setup. And those are a game changer - as you can focus effort where it really hits the bottom line or causes pain to customers.
A good example of this is maybe a Freemium SaaS product. A company tries very hard to increase their conversion through site testing on 100,000 visitors a week, converting at 2%.
A usability test is run, without knowing the numbers behind the story. The whole team focuses on pushing that metric higher, fixing stuff and burning time. Meanwhile, they're sitting on 8M subscriber emails they don't try to upsell to the paid subscription models. Doh.
And after 13 years working in UX, I still bemoan the fact that many disciplines are the same. Where is the ethnographer with social analytics skills? Where is the usability moderator with google analytics smarts? The multivariate testing and forms usability hacker?
These people are all out there but they're sold, packaged and hired as disciplines - not the business solutions providers I know that some of them are. Although I complain about the roles not moving with the times, I know it's not the fault of the UX staff - more what clients want to buy, what agencies expect to sell and how the time is then broken down to people.
And this is one reason why single disciplines, without pollination or inputs from varied sources, just don't have a place in the teams I build these days.
I need people who can spot problems with the entire flow, understand the bigger picture, see opportunities and then test hypotheses. Hacking the growth of a business requires multiple skills and toolset use. Whether it's a startup or a lean UX corporate team, you all have to roll up your sleeves and absorb problems and data - in order to design the best responses.
And if this doesn't sound much like your job right now, you might actually be a Drone. These are the males, kept around the hive to mate with the Queen. They don't get out of the hive much, they're pretty expendable and they're only a vehicle for DNA, a box to be ticked.
If your company has a lot of these around and you feel capable of more than a single disciplined experience, you need to find a new job. If your agency is selling units of blinkered thinking - assumptions, opinion or guessing - disguised as real insight - then you need to find a newer style of place.
Fast moving digital products need a team who are comfortable breaking way from assumptions and cherished notions, getting out of the office, escaping the hive to forage and find delicious opportunity.
Silos or single discipline approaches are anathema to building wonderful customer experiences - they just get in the way of the best ideas, communication and sharing. You also simply can't layer Agile or Lean approaches onto silos or single discipline process or approaches - it doesn't work because the foundations still suck (Agile Silos anyone?).
The overlap between people who all care about the product (and influence each other’s work) is the intersection and spark of ideas, disciplines, insights and change. If you never overlap within and outside teams, you're missing that pollination.
Given flight, the stuff that's brought back to us and the exchange made by sharing ideas drives survival, evolution and growth of a product. Without it, the barrier to competing with and beating your company is much lower - you're just easier to weed out of the corporate gene pool.
New buzzwords or methodologies (lean, agile, kaizen, kazinga*) aren't the answer, when they're just overlaid on the old BS. You have to fundamentally change the way you build, measure, test and improve digital products and that starts with breaking down silos, removing barriers and running multi-disciplinary teams.
I can still recall the smell of the honey and the sound of 20,000 bees inside my head, as we opened up a hive for the first time. Trying to stay calm inside a cloud of stinging insects is pretty hard work but I relaxed by trying to watch them.
They're incredibly efficient and tiny biological robots. In realtime, they quest for and spot new opportunities (flowers) and react in minutes, weighing up the best options and handing out directions. Can you say the same about your digital marketing teams?
I certainly won't forget my Grandfather, the bees or the useful lessons.
*OK, Kazinga - I made that one up. Just checking you’re awake here. Keepin you lean
Thanks to Craig Sullivan for sharing his advice and opinions in this post which was originally shared via Craig's Google+. Craig is a leading practitioner and speaker on Conversion Optimisation, Testing, Lean and Agile management. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn. We also recommend checking out Craig's Slideshare which has some great in-depth advice on CRO and UX techniques.
By Expert commentator
This is a post we've invited from a digital marketing specialist who has agreed to share their expertise, opinions and case studies. Their details are given at the end of the article.
Turbocharge your results with this toolkit containing 11 resources
The Digital Marketing Strategy And Planning toolkit contains:
Start your Digital Marketing Plan today with our Free membership.
Recommended Blog Posts
Audit your digital media effectiveness to build stronger campaigns and an efficient marketing funnel Reviewing your use of digital media is a crucial starting point for creating or optimizing your digital marketing strategy. But how do you tune in and …..
Are you practicing always-on marketing, and if not, why not? In the pre-digital era, marketing activities were planned in campaign ‘bursts’ around new product launches and promotions. My belief is that to be effective, digital marketing needs a change in …..
Use our updated digital marketing tools infographic to audit the types of marketing technology you use As marketers today, we’re fortunate to have a huge number of free and low-cost digital marketing tools to give us insight into our customers, …..
