Another very exciting project was ExactTarget Carbon, where they completely rethought how they were tracking results and activity. KA+A was instructed to think in terms of "what should we be doing in five years?" In a large part the project was all about indoctrinating the whole staff about design thinking.

Kristian stated that "great designers are great sales people". He talked about how design firms such as IDEO, Adaptive Path, and Frog are all good at knowledge transfer - teaching people to know and understand how they think and value what they do.

He gave a great example of how designers could learn from celebrity chefs. They have figured out how to give away what they know (cookbooks and tv shows). This in turn drives utilization of their restaurants and products. Of course, these chefs have their act together in the kitchen as well as in the dining room - where the product is presented.

I asked Kristian how he got to the point where his firm blended both brand strategy with experience design. He talked about how it was predominantly fueled by startups that have been happening in Indy for the past 7-8 years. About three years ago, his firm got to the level where they felt they needed to start focusing on fewer things. Before that they were providing a lot of different services. When prospective clients asked him what they did, he started out by talking about all of the things that they don't do. Throughout this process, two things had to always be there - brand strategy and UX.  About 90% of their clients were software companies and medical/technical firms. He said that they wanted to make what they do worthy of study by academics and payment by CEO's. I thought that was a great perspective on clarifying their purpose.

Kristian said that it is not always easy to articulate his business because it is subjective, intuitive, and based upon taste and preference. The way he was describing it made me think of the craftsmanship model that Eisner talks about. Kristian also talked about the necessity to show the empirical evidence of the value of this brand experience design model. He referred to the UK Design Council study which identified the value of publicly traded companies based upon the importance of design  within their culture. This study roughly indicated that organizations that placed a high value on design had a substantially higher overall value.

Another student asked Kristian about the process his firm uses with a client. A few of the pertinent points were that they conduct generative qualitative research and use that to lead them to secondary research for quantitative validation. When they are conducting interviews for research they do it over dinner, not in some lab environment somewhere. When they enter into the insight stage they start at the feature level, using affinity diagramming as well as generating with problem framing. KA+A doesn't deliver a bunch of paper documentation. They typically skip wireframing altogether, going to fully functional prototypes. He stated that documentation and wireframing is used to keep people from getting in trouble by using it as a safety net to validate that everything was done "properly".

In spite of the length of this blog post, this is a rough overview of what Kristian talked about. I know that I have not given justice to the depth and breadth of the material Kristian shared with us. I encourage you to add your thoughts and insights to this topic by posting your comments below.