The Innovation Paradox or How to Keep Things Simple with Emerging Technologies

Who's having a great conference? Excellent, excellent, excellent! Now before we get started, you know I'm a designer and it's really important to understand my audience and my users. So just really quickly, who here is perhaps from an engineering background? Anybody? Okay, I've got a hand up there, some in the back. Yes, quiet bunch, but that's alright, your hands are up.
How about do we have any product colleagues in here, or are you all in Plenary right now? No? Okay, good, excellent - paying attention, superb. And what about some designers? Very good, excellent!

Personal Background

So now I know a bit about all of you, why don't I tell you a little bit about me and why you should even probably listen to me - I mean, I don't listen to myself. There's a few of the team in the audience, and they take any chance they can to avoid hearing me speak.
On this day 35 years ago, I started my journey, and that journey took me through a number of different things that have kind of made me. I think it's important that when you as a designer are giving advice to people, you let them know what makes you and what you make.
Let me tell you the first thing that makes me:

• I'm an avid gamer, I always have been
• I was building custom PCs when I was a kid
• I love a bit of DIY (DIY doesn't love me - I have several scars, injuries, etc.)
• I do enjoy cooking, to varied success
  I've also been very fortunate to be an extremely small part of big teams working on things for companies like:
• Now TV
• Nintendo
• NBC Universal
• Sky (where I am at the moment)
  Really, all of these different things have helped teach me and formulate my approach to design and innovation. That's why I'm here to speak to you today. I want to tell you a little bit about some of the things that I've learned along the way from my colleagues and lots of different people, and all the mistakes I've made, and hopefully help you guys from repeating them too.

Why Innovations Fail

There's a common saying that "the road to purgatory is paved with good intentions." Now, I have a slight variation on this - I actually think it's paved with failed inventions. And why do inventions and innovations fail? Well, let's talk about that for a sec.
These are some of the things people like to say when their innovations don't work:

• "It was ahead of its time" (my personal favorite - most of the things I've worked on have been ahead of their time)
• "They didn't see the use case" (Hm, they didn't? Interesting. But you did? Or maybe you didn't see what they wanted)
• "It was complex and unnecessary" (So why'd you do it then? This is strange, this is bizarre behavior frankly)
  And that's because these are all excuses. Building innovative products is way easier than you think, and it requires reframing what you think innovation is.

Three Key Lessons

Let me tell you some lessons I've learned from history, colleagues, and the industry. Bear with me if you will - I'm going to take you on a journey and a story, a story that you shall tell your grandchildren about (and they're going to be pretty bored of).

Lesson One: Lateral Thinking with Weathered Technology

From Japanese, "Katagijutsu" means lateral thinking. I want you all to remember that because at various points in this conversation, I'm going to be asking you which of the lessons apply.

Lesson Two: Overthinking

Please don't do it. I do it all the time - I spent a good five minutes thinking about which color jacket I was going to wear on stage today, and the honest answer is I only brought one jacket, so it's a bit of a waste of time.

Lesson Three: Relatability

Innovating and building the future is scary for me every day. It's scary for people who do it every day, but you know who it's scariest for? Those people that you want to use this product. Make those innovations relatable.

Case Study: The Game Boy

Let's take a journey down the first lesson - lateral thinking with weathered technology. Let me tell you about Gunpei Yokoi. Does anybody know who Gunpei Yokoi is or what he did? More importantly, anybody in the room? I mean, I do, and I'm in the room, but perhaps somebody else in the audience? No? Fair enough, let me tell you.
Gunpei Yokoi was a company man. He worked for a very long time at a Japanese company that had their roots in playing cards, and he liked to invent little things on the side for the company. His real job was looking after the factory technology in their factories, and he invented this: the Game Boy.
The Game Boy is a seminal product in technology history. I believe you can draw a direct line from the Game Boy to the iPhone, and they wouldn't have happened without each other. But let's talk a little bit about what this meant for innovation, because this was the competition: Game Gear.
The Game Gear was an innovative product:

• 16-bit color graphics
• A backlit LCD screen
• Most importantly, it's black (in an era when the majority of computers and home technology had the same color as a shop mannequin)
  But there's a problem because we all remember Game Boy but not all of us remember Game Gear, and there is no Game Gear today. Why is that? Well, let's think about lateral thinking here, because Yokoi-san understood something deeply important: he understood battery life.
  That backlit LCD screen, those 16-bit color graphics - they went through AA batteries like I go through tuna, which is to say extremely quickly and way too frequently. Yokoi understood that no parent wants to take their kid on a long drive while also lugging along 16 2A batteries. So what he did instead was put a low-power black and white LCD screen inside the Game Boy, and it was paired with amazing games.
  This is what lateral thinking with weathered technology is - you take old technology that has a low BOM cost, that has wide consumer adoption and understanding, you take that technology and you find a really cool new way to use it.
  I would be remiss to say that we all have our peaks and troughs, and sometimes we make mistakes. The one time he didn't follow his advice, we ended up with the Virtual Boy. To go back a few slides, I would suggest this was perhaps ahead of its time. When I was a teenager, I was very fortunate to work at GameStop, and my boss there was a lifer. He told me many a funny story of an 8-year-old projectile vomiting while trying this product.

Sky's Remote Control Evolution

Lesson two: you must have a point of view. I learned this lesson at Sky, and I learned it from the chap who runs the entire organization, Anthony Davies. I also learned it from my colleagues in Industrial Design.
This is the previous Sky Q remote. This was developed some years ago in a time where our UIs had not caught up to the modern era. They were very innovative for their time, and you can see there's a number of buttons there. It's hardly a remote that looks easy or good to use.
This is the Sky Glass and Sky Stream remote. This remote is syndicated all over the world to multiple countries, and you can see it's a much simpler remote, namely because we're taking advantage of the D-pad. We had a point of view that there were things you could do in the user interface that weren't possible back then to be able to reduce the amount of buttons on that remote. If you look at it, we knew that that D-pad could do the same thing as 10 individual buttons.
The data didn't support that conclusion though. The data said people are using all those buttons, they're pressing them all the time. Much to the industrial design team's chagrin, they understood that their creative view was that you could replace these things. By having that point of view, we moved forward in innovation. You cannot let the data dictate what comes next - you can use it to inform you, but you have to use your superpower as a designer or an engineer or a product person to see through that and understand you put your stake in the ground when you're making innovations, because if you don't, you'll never move forward.

Making the Future Relatable

Finally, you've got to put your users at ease with the future. What do I mean by this? Let me give you a couple examples.
This is the Dyson 360. Look at this thing:

• Big camera in the front
• Hoover made by a legendary company
• Tank treads (and everybody knows tank treads are superior to wheels)
  When you look at this product and you look at what people say about it - just go look at its reviews on Amazon - people often say things like "it's very efficient" (not a bad thing). They also say things like "it's a bit scary" and "it creeps me out, I don't like it."
  Now imagine if this product had been the robot vacuum that came out 20 years ago. Do you really think that people would have been comfortable putting it into their homes, especially when you're talking about things like robots, where people have this natural reaction to immediately think of Sarah Connor in The Terminator?
  Instead, we had the Roomba. The Roomba is:
• Round (which is very cute)
• Chirps and whistles as it goes about its day
• People talk about its personality and how much they love it
• It's relatable - people aren't afraid of it
• Uses relatively basic technology like bump sensors and basic vacuum components
  If you're paying attention, which lesson does that follow? I'll give you a hint - lesson one: lateral thinking.
  On top of all of that, it's the only vacuum that pets also like. Honestly, for years dogs have been involved in warfare with vacuums, and somehow they enjoy this thing. It boggles my mind, I don't get it.

Sky Live Watch Together App

Let's talk about these lessons in practice, or rather, let's talk about a time I didn't put these lessons in practice. Last year we released a product called Sky Live, which is an interactive motion camera sold as a peripheral for our line of televisions. Sky Live essentially allows you to do things like:

• Motion gaming
• Interactive workouts
• Video calls
  We see that entertainment's evolving. We're creating the best TV experiences that connect people together with the content they love and the people they love. We want to bring people together through those shared experiences, and we genuinely believe that stuff like this is way better on the big screen.
  Our challenge was to take the very best of our content on our streaming TV and pair it up with the interactive camera we developed, bringing synchronized content together with video calling. Not many people are doing this - I can think of one other fruit-based company that has a similar product but much less content.
  Initially, I misunderstood what my challenge was. I thought, "Ah, we're going to show all our users they've never seen this sort of thing before, we're going to wow them with innovation." The first place we thought we would do that is in how you actually join one of these calls.
  We went through several approaches:

1. QR Code scanning with the camera
2. Sonic codes ("harmonic code" - TM) using the array of five microphones
3. What3Words sharing system where you speak three words to join
   My colleague in product, Helen Blackburn, who had spent a long time working in video calling technologies, suggested that I might have collectively lost my mind.
   Let's think about those three lessons again:
4. Lateral thinking with technology: These technologies are cool, but are they right? We designed for a huge user base, and it's sometimes hard when you're a group mostly in your 20s and 30s who are super tech-forward looking at things that you think are cool.
5. Overthinking: We might have been just a little guilty of this. It's important in design to go wide, but you also have to bring it back down to earth.
6. Relatability: Do people understand these concepts? Can you literally stop someone in the street and say "use your harmonic code to join a Sky Live watch together session"?

The Simple Solution

The designers in the team had a brainwave. Going back to the notion that you want to make these things relatable, think laterally with technology that's already available to you, and make sure you're not overthinking it, we looked at what we had: the humble remote control.
The remote control is the most understood interface paradigm in the world, bar none. In the same way that LLMs are succeeding right now because they use a text box which everybody understands how to use, the remote control is widely understood. I don't care if you're 102 or you're two - you will figure out how to use a remote control because it's key to life in the 21st century.
To join one of our calls, you needed to enter nine digits. The number pad on the remote was the perfect solution - an innovative layout that already exists. You get the code, type those nine digits in, and you're in.
The product itself is innovative because it's doing something with both the content you love and the people you love and putting them together in a way that isn't being done. All the stuff around it is easy and simple and everybody understands. You don't need to make everything all singing and all dancing - you need to think about what people are going to take away from this product.
When we launched this product last year, a lot of the reviews mentioned that compared to other video calling products out there, especially on TVs, this was really easy to use. That for me is a huge personal win because that's what we're trying to do as designers.

Conclusion

Often the simplest things are the most impressive, and it doesn't matter what you make - whether you're working on enterprise software or you're building an app for kids, or like we do, you're making video games - just focus in on those three lessons and you'll get to innovative outcomes that are successful.
For those of you who know me, you know no detail is too small, no idea too big. For those of you who don't, my name is Omar, and if you'll indulge me, I'd love to answer any of your questions.

Q&A Section

Q: How to encourage a culture of innovation within team and a company where companies have their own priorities?
A: In terms of building a culture of innovation, you have to start small. Building great environments for innovation to happen isn't about process - of course it is secretly. What you have to do as quickly as possible is show results. If you start on that small scale and you have results and you build them up, it's great. There's nothing senior leadership likes more than five slides saying "I did this, it was successful, here's how we can use it." What they hate is when you show up with 30 slides of process diagrams and lots of big images with quotes from famous world leaders. To build cultures of innovation, my firm belief is that as designers and product people and people working in tech, you have to reframe it - don't focus just on solving problems, go seek out opportunities and then prove them out as quickly as possible.
Q: Your umbrella - what's the deal?
A: This is my emotional support umbrella which has been lent to me by the staff of UXDX. I feel it helps with gesticulation and pointing. To quote Ra's al Ghul from Batman Begins, "Theatricality is a powerful ally."
Q: Are there any great processes for teams to best identify if they are going down the wrong track with innovation?
A: The most important thing is to not just remember these three lessons but also to "think about it." Take a step back and think: Why are we doing this? What's it going to solve? What's it going to do? It's very hard - a lot of this depends on the size of organization you work in. If you're a small team of five, it's quite easy to redirect a ship. If you're a team of 5,000, that becomes increasingly more difficult. It comes back to oversharing. While I do believe you have to view ideas as very delicate, you also have to be thinking about how this will look when it gets out there. Focus on the opportunity - do you think this thing will be successful? If you don't think it'll be successful, why? Then try and work backwards.
Q: Is lateral thinking a muscle you can train? How do we get into that mindset?
A: Yes, it is a muscle you can train, but lateral thinking requires information. You can't all be the world's encyclopedia, but what we can do is look at the things we're making and really go deep into what adjacent technologies are there. For example, harmonic code was inspired by the history of remote controls - the very first remote controls used reverberating columns that fired off hypersonic sounds to your TV to change the channel. By looking at the history of remotes and bringing it back to using those nine digits, we found our solution. It's about being educated on the technology sphere you're working in and then looking at new ways to apply that knowledge.