A white paper written by: Harry Max, Vice President of Experience Design

1. EXPERIENCE DESIGN AT RACKSPACE
A White Paper written by:
Harry Max, Vice President of Experience Design
Experience Design at Rackspace | Page 1
© 2012 Rackspace US, Inc.
RACKSPACE®HOSTING | 5000 WALZEM ROAD | SAN ANTONIO, TX 78218 U.S.A

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Introduction 3
What Is Experience Design? 3
Rackspace Core Values 4
Why Did Rackspace Deploy Experience Design? 5
Experience Design in Action at Rackspace 6
Conclusion 10
Experience Design at Rackspace | Page 2
© 2012 Rackspace US, Inc.
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3. EXPERIENCE DESIGN AT RACKSPACE
Introduction
At Rackspace, we are committed to imbuing our core values into the entire range of
Experience design helps experiences around our products and services. In providing customers with exceptional
designers not only create customer service, branded Fanatical Support®, we take into consideration a much broader
the right products, but also range of issues than the typical software design principle of user experience. We design
design them right. the experience for a complete ecosystem of people who interact with our products, and
importantly, with each other. The experience a developer, DevOps engineer, support technician,
operations manager, or any other Rackspace employee has is just as important as the
customer’s experience, because ultimately, it helps make the customer’s experience even better.
Our systems need to be user-friendly for everyone. We’re enthusiastic about the design of our
products and services, and we work diligently to make sure they work as a coherent whole.
We have embarked on a journey to instill our core values into every aspect of the Rackspace
experience, inside and out. To achieve this, Rackspace uses a discipline called experience design.
What Is Experience Design?
Experience design helps designers not only create the right products, but also design them
right. Designers use a broad set of information so that they can create something that has a
better chance of making users happy. That information incorporates roles, people, and usage
categories, not only in terms of the user experience, but also across systems, services, and
interactions. It accounts for all the various stakeholders and constituents and their experiences,
no matter how they come into contact with a product or service. Unlike other design disciplines,
experience design does not try to eliminate the virtuosity of a unique asset or person because
these touches may be what make a product or service truly excellent.
Experience design is synthesized from many time-tested design practices, ranging from user-
centered design to the architectural principles of wayfinding. Experience design evolved from
traditional principles of human-computer interaction, as well as business process and service
design. It examines the ways people come into contact with processes, services, and interfaces,
whether physical or virtual, with the goal of creating products and services of high utility.
Experience Design is Not (Just) User Experience
It is tempting to confuse experience design with user experience (UX), a significant quality factor
Experience design accounts in software design. But user experience is one small part of experience design. UX focuses on
for all stakeholders and their the user’s interaction with software. Experience design is about interaction coherency—not just
experiences, no matter how consistency—across the experience of a product or service, regardless of who’s interacting with
they come into contact with a it. That includes developers, support staff, executives, operations staff, and, of course, users.
product or service.
We have incorporated experience design into our own practices to drive our core values into
everything we produce.
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4. Re
Results First
Committed to
o
Greatness
Full Disclosure
Di
and Tr
Transparency
Passion for Our Work
Treat Fellow Rackers
Like Friends and Family
Rackspace Core Values
To become the service leader in cloud computing, Rackspace operates around the following
core values:
Fanatical Support in All We Do
We strive to create software, systems, and interaction models that echo the exceptional
customer service ethos and empower our customers by providing the information they need to
accomplish their tasks and objectives—producing outcomes that matter.
Results First: Substance over Flash
Rackers (Rackspace employees) would rather see smooth functioning code that gets the job
done efficiently than a flashy user interface. If you need to move a filesystem into the cloud,
code that makes it fast and easy is more important than a pretty, but less efficient, interface.
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5. Committed to Greatness
The Rackspace design process addresses each key moment as a value-for-value exchange.
While few people can describe what’s distinctive about the Rackspace experience, the design
team looks at key experience moments to make sure what’s special about Rackspace surfaces
through every interaction.
Full Disclosure and Transparency
What we do with our We work big and we work visual. The early part of the design process involves exposing our
customer feedback results in thinking to get early feedback. From there, creating a minimally working version lets us get
quality. insights and supports the core value of full disclosure and transparency. Rather than waiting for
something to be perfect, the sooner we internally circulate a working version for feedback, the
more transparency we get into the development process.
Passion for Our Work
The result of user research and usability testing is information, not quality. When we get
feedback in the form of suggestions, complaints, questions, or confusion, we assume positive
intent and take it to heart. What we do with that information results in quality.
Treat Fellow Rackers Like Friends and Family
Building awesome products for our customers is simply not enough. The experience our
customers have with our products is only part of the relationship our customers have with
Rackspace. As a result, we see the customer-facing part of the design process as only half of the
equation. Focusing how to deliver value-for-value exchanges means that we design employee-
facing systems that perform well.
Why Did Rackspace Deploy Experience Design?
Rackspace’s purpose is to make cloud computing simple for business. Experience design was
introduced so that the Rackspace experience would incorporate the company’s core values into
the product development process as deeply as possible.
Rackspace has historically been a managed hosting company that provided a secure, offsite
Rackspace’s purpose is location for companies to run hardware and software. The experience of running these assets
to make cloud computing offsite didn’t have to be substantially different from doing so in one’s own facilities. We could
simple for business. design familiar interfaces because customers were used to managing their infrastructure, and
the relationship between the physical hardware, operating systems, and applications.
Once Rackspace began offering cloud-computing services, we recognized that the experience
would need to be different. Because, with the cloud, the architecture is different. And there
is less of a direct correlation between the dedicated computing configurations a customer
historically needed and the kind of cloud infrastructure required to solve the same kinds of
business problems. Cloud products, by their nature, are abstracted away from all of their
constituent parts. Now we’re building products on top of a cloud-computing platform that
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6. requires its own way of thinking and relies on different assumptions. Yet the products need to
be familiar and intuitive so that people can understand them and derive a high level of utility
from them.
Rackspace has built a new service organization to create new products on top of a cloud-
computing platform. While this includes new assumptions about product design, one
Business is people, and fundamental assumption won’t change: business is people, and technology is here to serve
technology is here to serve people. That’s why Rackspace has an experience designer to build and lead the Experience
people. Design organization and to create and develop products that are both useful and useable—for
everyone who touches them.
Experience Design in Action at Rackspace
Fundamentally, we believe that:
„„ It’s not good enough to just design great products. Products need to reflect the values
embodied by our employees—simple and intuitive.
„„ User interfaces (not just technology, but all touch points) need to be consistent with the
Rackspace brand. This is about fundamental experiences, not just appearance. Before we
worry too much about look and feel, we must consider whether we’re designing the right
product and how well it is designed.
„„ Interactions with employees and the product need to be part of a coherent experience. In
other words, the interactions themselves need to be perceived as supportive.
„„ When we design systems, we must think of them not just as pieces of software, but also
as a whole chain of cause and effect moments that makes up an experience, which can
include user, employee, and electronic (automated) actions.
Each of our Core Values is embodied in one or more mottos. Here are a few examples.
“Documentation Is Defect”
Fundamentally, we believe design should be intuitive. That’s why, when a developer designs
a product feature that needs documentation to explain how it works, we consider that a
Design should be intuitive. defect, and we send them back to the drawing board with a specification for a redesign. We
aim to create user interfaces so intuitive that they don’t need documentation. If and when we
document, we want it to answer questions, add insight, and deliver real value to an audience
such as software developers, who need information that goes beyond what the user interface
can deliver.
“Nothing is a No-Brainer”
Just because we’re designing an intuitive experience, that doesn’t mean we operate on gut
instinct to put our ideas in motion. Quite the opposite. “Nothing is a no-brainer” means every
stage of design receives a thorough review. We look for patterns, and once we find them, we
can codify some methodologies. This still leaves room for creativity, problem solving, and unique
design solutions.
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7. “Coherence Over Consistency” – When Core Values Conflict
Consistency cannot interfere with high-utility design and value delivery. It’s far more
important that the experience be coherent than consistent. Designing the right thing, and
designing it right, means that sometimes a product needs to be different to deliver the
highest value. In those cases, we let it be different.
For example, Rackspace recently set out to create a consolidated knowledge base for the
support team. We discovered that four of the five preexisting knowledge bases had similar
architectures, but the fifth, aimed at email and applications support, was anomalous. Its
search capability, and relevance ranking differed significantly from its peers, and much of
its value would have been lost if it were folded into the macro-architecture.
In defense of coherence, we halted shipment of the unified knowledge base, instead
shipping the four similar knowledge bases together as planned, alongside the fifth
product, which retained its architecture. We added a feedback channel into all the
knowledge bases so that customers could tell us what was working.
Experience design was applied in this situation because the defensible motivation of
passion in all we do was potentially conflicting with the core promise. It wouldn’t be right,
in the name of consistency, to release a product that was a step backward in terms of
finding information to solve mission-critical problems.
The story has a happy ending. In the next release, the unified knowledge base
incorporated the superior information architecture, interaction model, and functionality of
the fifth knowledge base across all of the others.
Customer Feedback and Experience Design
Rackspace collects an enormous amount of customer feedback in order to provide the best
possible experience.
For quantitative, and high-level anecdotal data, Rackspace makes extensive use of the Net
Promoter® Score to calibrate the experience. Net Promoter works best as a trailing indicator of
customer satisfaction for features and is not as effective as a leading indicator, so we don’t use
Rackspace collects an it as a predictive model. However, its ability to communicate direct customer anecdotes and
enormous amount of comments to the team is highly developed.
customer feedback in order
to provide the best possible In the near future, we will be adding in a higher-fidelity model that follows a real-time closed-
experience. loop feedback model, which will collect unstructured data and better help bring the voice of
the customer directly into the design and development process.
For example, we’re currently redesigning our control panel, with faster OpenStack®-based APIs
that will allow shorter turnaround times for adding and deleting servers, or resizing storage
capacity. However, we realize that even if the APIs are faster, it doesn’t matter unless the
customer perceives them as faster. Creating that perception requires a more holistic take on
design than simply upgrading the underlying technology.
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8. Design Tools to Support Execution Flexibility
Rackspace has instituted a set of design tools to help align the various parts of the company
involved in product design, yet we leave room for flexibility when it comes to executing the
designs. These design tools include:
„„ Desired Outcomes: A thinking framework that creates a compelling description of the
target design in a way that makes the concept easily digestible and understandable for
product managers, engineers, and designers, without the need for a prototype.
„„ Mental Models: Mental models are visual maps of how a person thinks. They showcase
the gaps between how people think about what they want to accomplish and what the
designs actually support. At Rackspace, we have an Indi Young-style mental model 40 feet
long and 4 feet high of our latest control panel design.
„„ Experience Moments: Experience moments map a desired outcome against a sequence
We leave room for flexibility series of points in time. It’s a technique for “threading the needle” of requirements that will
in executing designs. meet or exceed the user’s expectations, that is, the sum of their needs and wants in a given
context.
„„ Behavioral Personas: Behavioral personas create representative users, based not on their
demographics and attitudes, but on their goals, objectives, and actual task-based behaviors.
They embody behaviors that are common across a segment of the system. Behaviors can
refer to actions undertaken by people or computer systems.
Driving Organizational Development
We’re big believers in empathy at Rackspace. Our version of the Golden Rule is “Treat fellow
Rackers like friends and family.” We believe that the only way to offer excellent customer
experiences is to make sure our own employees are having a great experience. We also believe
in the old adage of “walking a mile in another man’s shoes.” Those beliefs apply to several key
aspects of experience design and find their way into our practices, such as:
„„ Embedding Practitioners in Business Units: Experience designers need to be in the field
with their product lines. This makes them the best representatives for the needs of a product
and the design of the product for use in different customer segments. At Rackspace, each
product line has a design leader. This person is a single point of contact and helps the
product line be successful from an experience design point of view, encouraging thinking
about the system holistically.
„„ Assuming Positive Intent: Designing great products and providing exceptional customer
support isn’t always easy. Humans are vulnerable to misunderstandings. We employ the
maxim “assume positive intent.” In other words, Rackers assume that whomever they are
interacting with had the best intentions, but may not have had all the information they
needed. This promotes respect and productivity.
„„ Hiring customers to get their view: Sometimes our customers have such great, detailed
ideas, we listen to them. They really bring the customer perspective.
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9. „„ Optimizing the Racker® Software Experience: We apply experience design to every
The only way to offer
aspect of the Racker experience. We ask questions, such as “who is affected by an interface
excellent customer
or a process, and how?” We take the same care we do when designing customer interfaces,
experiences is to make sure
streamlining the number of steps to do a task.
our own employees are
„„ Giving Priority to the Racker Point of View: We don’t let executive priorities override
having a great experience.
the employees’ perception when making design choices about products they will use. We
recently launched a pilot to study employee experiences and perceptions when interacting
with the products.
Without
Experience Design
With Experience Design
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10. Crafting the User Experience
We believe that how you say it is just as important as what you say. That’s why we are always
How you say it is just as working to improve our dialogue with users, no matter how they encounter us—in person, over
important as what you say. the phone or through an electronic interface with one of our products.
„„ Voicing: Rackspace does a good deal of modeling to achieve consistency in the language
we use, both in electronic and human interfaces, which we call voicing. The goal is not to
be robotic, but respectful of context and respond in a way consistent with the brand.
„„ Word choice, tone, and clarity are all important. When we’re trying to help, we try to
distinguish when it is best to ask questions and when to give directions. When things break,
neither computer nor human should make rude comments.
„„ Diagramming: Currently Rackspace is diagramming all its error and informational messages
to improve them, striking a balance between informative and informal.
Conclusion
At Rackspace, we introduced Experience Design to support a design philosophy that is
comprehensive and coherent, and which pervades our efforts to provide the best possible
experience for everyone who builds and uses our products and services, whether they’re
prospects, customers, developers, or Rackers.
The cloud has unleashed a new, more abstract paradigm in the way that people interact with
computer hardware and software, and it demands a responsive collection of products that
reflect that reality. But even as computing becomes more abstract, the concrete human values
of transparency, respect, and empathy are more important than ever to our mission. When our
employees and customers tangibly perceive our core values in every interaction they have with
Rackspace, we take that as evidence that this experiment is working.
Harry Max is Vice President of Experience Design for Rackspace. Harry’s role includes
responsibility for everything experience: from product design to customer service tools to the
employee experience.
Before joining Rackspace, Harry worked with executives, UX management, software and
Internet technologists, startup founders, and visionaries. Clients included Google, SAP, Skype,
Adobe, Symantec, PayPal, and others.
Prior to this, Harry was on the forefront of Internet-based application design and development.
In 1994, as a cofounder of Virtual Vineyards (wine.com), Harry designed all of the user
interaction concepts behind the first secure Web shopping cart.
Even as computing becomes more abstract, the concrete human values of transparency, respect, and
empathy are more important than ever.
Experience Design at Rackspace | Page 10
© 2012 Rackspace US, Inc. All rights reserved. This White Paper is for informational purposes only. The information contained in this White Paper is selected from public sources which we believe
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