Feature: The Reach of Sapient Collaboration

In a room in the heart of Sapient sits Kris Cohen, researcher from the University of Surrey, who now has 18 months to conduct a project on mobile technology. He's focusing on entertainment, and within that, imaging tools, so there is a good chance that the new breed of phones that take photos will be part of his brief.

As the work develops, traces of what's been involved in the research will appear on the walls of the room. People will start dropping in to see how it's taking place and chat. Kris will be making the journey to the Sapient offices, right by the Bank of England in the City of London, at a regular time each week – establishing a routine as he processes new data, plans his next expedition and discusses his methods with visitors from within the design company. His is the second project in this collaboration between academia and business; the first on the use of public internet spaces having just come to a close. The results of this study, primarily on internet cafes and kiosks, are now circulating within the company. It is experience with this first UK project, and others before it in the States, that make Kris and his collaborators fairly sure how the next one will proceed.

The collaboration was the brainchild of Rick Robinson, chief experience officer for the US wing of the company, who met Nina Wakeford - director of the INCITE lab at Surrey where Kris is employed - at a conference about the time that Sapient was taking its brand of design work to London. Sapient supports the cost of the researcher as many companies do; less typically, the company is also promoting direct collaboration: both in the immersive space that Kris occupies and out in the field. Surrey offers a specialist mix of innovative ethnographic practice and innovative methodology in relation to technology. Staff bring a cultural and sociological perspective to the research that is generally not possible to adopt at the direct design and build level of much commercial work. They talk in terms of 'creating a parallel layer of knowledge to that which Sapient already knows that feeds into other projects'.

'It was intended to be a collaborative thing,' says Nina, 'so that Sapient people have been out into the field with us. Not just one of those projects where they say: "Go and do this and come back".' Nina stresses that the data collection trips are real joint working. Sapient's user experience researchers share a grounding in HCI, some are experienced in ethnography too, and it is a chance for an exchange of skills and experience.

The big question, then, is whether the knowledge gathered in small parts of the business around Kris gets spread more broadly into those other projects and how? And to answer this, we must look both at how the research feeds into the company and how the rest of the company fits together.

'That's our big challenge here really: building really good channels within the company so that we can disseminate the knowledge that comes out of this project,' says Elizabeth Anderson, Sapient senior manager in user experience research.

She acknowledges that despite enthusiasm, in principle, for the opportunity to do work and use skills that might not occur in run-of-the-mill user research, staff do not always take up the chance in practice. Pressure of work and constant deadlines impinge. 'You don't get everyone of course. You get a few people and then they might talk to other people about their involvement, or people might make time when they are between projects, or use their own time.

'We say "Here's the schedule, here's what's going on this week, one of things we are going to be looking at is out in the field" and hope that some people will partner up with Kris.'

At the user experience end of the company the qualifications and interests of staff are much the same between university and design house. 'It's not really an "us and them",' says Nina. 'People like Elizabeth have PhDs. We are very much speaking the same language so we are all translators of our research in different levels within the company. I can't talk to the technology guy, but I can talk to Elizabeth and she can talk to him.'

Elizabeth says they try dissemination beyond the research group in different ways. 'We schedule sessions that are pure design: concept sessions, which can be a lot of fun. So what we are doing a lot is setting up dialogues with different audiences within Sapient and, for example, running facilitated sessions on kiosk design to generate concepts so that we can actually go out to market.' Giving business development people access to this kind of information allows them to explain how they can sell that on to clients, she says.

Nina and Kris offer design sessions, create reports for circulation, do presentations on their findings, as well as keeping the room full of images and text notes. 'The project room actually helps a lot,' says Kris, 'because what you do is find ways to represent the work you are doing that are ongoing, so that when people have breaks they can fit themselves in.'

These then are the mechanisms for involving Sapient staff in the research collaboration, but it takes a corporate culture of openness, experimentation and collaborative working at large for the benefits of such a scheme to really make themselves felt. Darryl Feldman, director of user experience, explains the company's attempts to integrate all staff.

'It is very, very difficult getting people from an academic "Let's ask questions" frame of mind working closely with designers who have a "Let's get it done" kind of approach. The two types of discipline are pulling against each other somewhat.'

A year ago, this division within Sapient was tackled by merging the creative and experience modelling departments to make the user experience group. 'What that has done, I think, is allow the designers to ask more questions and the people who were traditionally asking the questions are now being more solution focused, because they are just a lot closer in how they are working on projects.

'There are so many different facets to what we do; the more kinds of life experiences you can bring into the team, the more of those facets you'd have covered off. We do have people here who have come from a very traditional design environment. We also have people who have come from a much more academic environment, from software, HCI, an ergonomics background, or an ethnographic background. We have people who have designed websites, or that were architects, that did advertising, were in print or graphic design - so it's a real mixed bag. I think that's the key to it: having that mixed bag.'

But this introduces its own challenging dynamics: 'The team is made up of very different types of people. Then the question is how do you get them all on the same page?'

Nina and Elizabeth have already raised this communication issue. Darryl points to the particular methodology that Sapient employs as the integrating factor. 'We have a set of tools and methodologies that we work to. So when we use a term for something, it doesn't matter which discipline you come from – business consultant, sales person, technologist, designer or researcher – you're going to know what that means. It's that; it is also the business objectives. We tend to map everything back to the business objectives and that tends to be something that isn't a specific language. If you can map the thing back to business, then that is something that everybody should be able to understand. But it is not easy.

'One thing people usually get is an induction into the company, so they will be sent to what we call a 'Sapient Star' to be taught the Sapient approach, how we work, a bit of history, a bit of context. As soon as they come out of that, they are on a project fairly quickly and really it's working on projects where they pick it up.

'The good thing here is that people have a lot of time for people and they are very supportive and because we are very collaborative in the way we work, there would a support system in place to make sure that they knew what they were doing and what this language was and what it meant.

'It's all about integration, I think it's around flexibility, about getting people with the right mindset, who are prepared to go out the box a little bit and learn new stuff – willing to share ideas and work really collaboratively, rather than say: "You do this and I'll do that and I'm going to pass my bit to you". Which kind of worked a bit better before when there were generally more people.'

Like elsewhere, the current economic realities of the digital design business have not left Sapient unscathed: 'Teams are generally smaller, yet we are still doing the same amount of work so there is just an economic need for people to multi-skill and do more than one thing.'

But openness to other people, to user-centred design, to new ways of thinking cannot be commanded by economic necessity. It comes from the individuals themselves, the beliefs round them and the culture they generate. It is about just whom you bring into the company.

'Looking back three or four years ago when I was trying to find people, it was really hard. People just didn't generally know what you were talking about. They were interested but they couldn't really picture it, it wasn't tangible. Whereas at least now we are at the next step in the evolution and there are more people who do know what we are talking about and they have done it somewhere else. So it's not quite such a black art as it was,' reflects Darryl.

'I think user-centric design practices are becoming more established in various companies. And there's more courses out there now, more books, more information generally, so it's becoming less of the knowledge of a very specific niche group – it’s becoming more mainstream now. People realise that unless they take it on, their product's not going to be successful. It's as simple as that: it makes commercial sense to adopt user-centric design. We're back to sanity, thank God. They don't want magic, they want something that works.

'The irony is that people are saying that everything is tanking and the work's not there any more, but if you think about it, people are doing the most amazing stuff: they are doing things that a year or two years ago, it would have been "No way". Now they are actually attempting to do them. Again it comes back down to the industry maturing – experience design is now actually a profession that people can understand.

'There are restrictions now that maybe there weren't before, but that is only going to push us as designers to be more ingenious. It pushes you to think harder to make something special.'

And maybe that is what is going on in that room, deep in Sapient, where Kris is starting to pursue research that represents an impressive integration of theory and practice – in terms of the form of the collaboration as well as the content of the work. Impressive, but vulnerable... just as long as the harsh commercial realities that compete with the idealism of the staff don't squeeze either the time to benefit from it and the money to fund it out of the system.

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