Parrish Hanna

Customer Experience Business Leader

mobile: 847.668.9602

parrish_h@hotmail.com

From a corporate design leader to sought after speaker and professor, Parrish Hanna has a broad array of experience in the world of digital business solution and brand experience development. In his current role, Parrish and his team are responsible for defining Motorola’s experiential strategies for next-gen mobile interaction paradigms across diverse strategic topics including messaging, music, multimedia, productivity, social media, contextual awareness, browsing, web services and more.

With 15 years experience in design, human-computer interaction and related fields, he is interested in “what is”, “what could be” and “what if” in the context of user research, design and innovation and their application to driving business success.

In his previous 5 year role as SVP of Experience Planning, Parrish ensured the delivery of world-class strategic and customer-driven design solutions to Arc Worldwide and Publicis’ clients including GM, Disney, McDonalds, United and others.  He directed an industry-leading team of Experience Planners across all offices and all client engagements.  During part of that time, he also served as a Global Design Advisor to Samsung Electronics across all of its digital product and service divisions. In the late ‘90s, Hanna joined forces with Challis Hodge to form HannaHodge, the industry’s first user experience firm. At HannaHodge, he was responsible for developing and managing the firm’s client relations, process, disciplines and project teams.  Parrish started his career at IBM as an Industrial Designer and later held positions as a Director of Suite Integration and as a Principal in the Design & Usability Practice of IBM Global Services.

Throughout my years of learning and professional practice, a few fundamental principles have emerged that define much of my philosophy, work and actions. I’m hoping that these grounding principles will provide insight and consideration to those that seek to navigate and thrive in the profession of Experience Design. 

Strive to understand business

Look for a new perspective

Create a regular reporting structure

Data is your friend

Appreciate and learn from the disciplines around you

Fall in love with customers

Strive to understand people

Tell customer stories of business success

Tell stories that businesses will celebrate

Strive to develop new markets

Use technology to better our lives

Be thoughtful and deliberate in the design of every interaction with your customer. Reinforce usefulness and bring an experience to life without effort. Focus on the connections between your company (its products and services) and the lives your customer's live. Design emotional connections.

Products, services and systems elicit mixed emotions. Rarely does someone "buy-in" with total brand allegiance from the first interaction.

Talk to at least one customer every week, and empirically study them in aggregate.

Do the math to understand the business potential of your customer set, and humanize their individual wants, desires, expectations, pain, frustrations and disappointments.

Emotions are idiosyncratic, but the conditions that underlie and elicit them are universal.

Focus on surprise and delight as it is unsurpassed in creating brand loyalty.

Realize and deliver embedded courtesies - functions that illustrate that you understand the user at a deep, personal level.

Experiment, test, launch, fail, get smarter, iterate. Fight trade-offs and compromises and be tenacious.

Observe, survey, measure and track the spark and sustaining of emotions.

To achieve success now you can't be invisible, you must be remarkable. That means your products and your company must have attributes that cause people to remark about them.

Many businesses struggle to communicate a clear brand position and value. It's often difficult to understand who they are trying to appeal to and how their products and services are better than the competition's. They often struggle to inspire their suppliers, distributors and even their own employees.

Communicating a mission and group strategy through a PowerPoint deck or spreadsheet doesn't cut it in today's brand saturated, real-time media-centric society. Large quantities of raw data in formatted tables rarely inspire, spark innovation and/or act as a catalyst for change. They surely don't create an emotional connection. On the other hand, people have a positive attitude and expectation to the prospect of hearing a new story. They've heard many interesting stories in their lives and their initial attitude and expectation is positive. Stories allow readers to get inside an idea.

Bring customer segments to life via personas and user scenarios. Tell stories of what success will look like in the context of users and your customers. Know who your most valuable customer is on any given day and celebrate their brand allegiance, their transactions, their comments, their loyalty and their recommendations to thier friends. Use these stories to focus your teams, solve problems, measure and validate the quality of your brand experience, innovate and differentiate.

Technology ought to be used as a means of making each customer experience more appropriate, compelling and satisfying. When a company’s business objectives, organizational make-up and technology plan are informed by user understanding, the results are incremental business success.

Below are some of the user-based issues that businesses ought to be considering to improve the efficacy of their products and services.

Current and potential customers have choices of how they can interact with your brand. From phone, to Web, to store, to mail, to kiosk, to middleman - the options (let's call them channels) are many and convenience is the name of the game. Customers expect choices and they expect each of those channels to operate consistently, efficiently, even flawlessly. They expect each interaction at each channel to feel comfortable, reliable and as a familiar extension of your brand. They want to choose their point and means of interaction, and they may try a few to see what feels best. If you don't provide a "best", then they will try your competitors'.

These points of interactions and subsequent pathways can be anticipated. You should design the anticipated experience at every point. Choreograph, scheme, execute and deliver. Also create a dialogue from one point to the other. Track these interactions and make adjustments to your brand system to better your business.

A group of national design leaders has put together a set of ten design policy proposals to support U.S. economic competitiveness and democratic governance. As Design fields continue to gain recognition as “agents of change”, this proposal potentially sparks an exponential expansion of the visibility and impact of good Design on the citizens of our country.

The team now urgently needs written endorsements posted on their website in order to demonstrate to Congress and the incoming Obama Administration popular support for the Initiative and the policy proposals. Please post an endorsement for this effort if you believe in its merits. The policies that they are encouraging include:

1.      Formalize an American Design Council to partner with the U.S. Government

2.      Set Guidelines for legibility, literacy, and accessibility for all government communications.

3.      Target 2030 for carbon neutral buildings.

4.      Create an Assistant Secretary for Design and Innovation position within the Department of Commerce to promote design.

5.      Expand national grants to support interdisciplinary community design assistance programs based on human-centered design principles.

6.      Commission a report to measure and document design’s contribution to the U.S. economy.

7.      Revive the Presidential Design Awards to be held every year and use triple bottom-line criteria (economic, social, and environmental benefit) for evaluation.

8.      Establish national grants for basic design research.

9.      Modify the patent process to reflect the types of intellectual property created by designers.

10.  Encourage direct government investment in design innovation.

I've had the privilege of working with many different companies across many diverse verticals including:

Automotive

Financial Services

High Tech

Consumer Package Goods

Telecommunication

Retail

Travel

Healthcare

Insurance

Governments / Unions 

“Design for Emotion” lecture

Illinois Institute of Technology

October, 2007

Co-Chair of dux2007 (Designing for User Experience) Conference

AIGA, ACM

November 2007

“After the iPhone Q & A”

Billboard Live Event at CTIA, San Francisco

November, 2007

“Capturing Insight & Delight in Data Visualization & Storytelling” lecture & worksession

University of Nebraska

September, 2007

"Firing Line on Web Design & More"
ADTECH 2005
July, 2005

"Designing for the Human Condition: Variation, Uncertainty & Adaptation" lecture
University of Illinois
February, 2005

"Gathering Data, Using Data"
About, With and For Conference

Illinois Institute of Technology
October, 2004

"Innovative Solutions for Understanding the Web User Experience"
Keynote Systems & Opinion Lab Executive Briefing
Keynote Speaker
March, 2003

"Why are User Research, User Centered Design, and Usability good for business? And how do we prove it?"
CHI Squared, Chicago
February, 2002

"Cost Justifying User Centrism"
CHI Chicago
February, 2002

“User Research and Usability of Mobile Devices”
WEB2001
September, 2001, San Francisco

"Real Life Indicators"  Business Week, 2001

"Understanding User Experience"  New Architect Magazine, 2000

"Sorting Out Site Testing Tools"  Forrester, 2000

"Site Design Requires Hard-to-Find User Experts"  Forrester, 2000

"Why Most B2B Sites Fail"  Forrester, 1999