From the course: Creative Inspirations: Dale Herigstad & Schematic, Interactive Design Agency

Pursuing innovation

Dale Herigstad: I really believe that the audience is prepared and moving and moves faster than business does and the younger audience just picks up whatever is there. It's an iPhone, it's a mobile device, it's a thing, it's a game box and it's just "give me some stuff, give me some media." That could be TV or anything, it doesn't matter. There is no segmenting of that. It just "give me a screen and I will do some stuff with it." Our abilities are kind of to really address that new audience and address the current audience too, the older audience that isn't there yet. How do you make devices simple and intuitive and natural and make design that's great and there is animation and they live, they are living, breathing kind of dynamic interfaces that are so intuitive? Because that they sort of -- when you start just dealing with elements that come on the screen, when you click it, it moves off the screen, it moves in. All those things help lead the viewer's eye, make it a simpler, a better experience. It's not necessarily meaning that has to be something kind of wild and crazy. It's just applying that motion and dynamic as a new component to what we are doing. Trevor Kaufman: We focus a lot on saying we are going to provide transformative results for you. There are lot of companies that will say, we can optimize this, we can do 10% or 15% better than the other guy and what our argument usually is about creating entirely new lines of business. You have never sold direct through e-commerce before. We are going to enable you to do that. You are not a content company now and people don't think of you as a creator of media, of narratives. We are going to change that brand perception and cause people to engage with you on that level and maybe even enable you to make money that way. Things that are really transformative, not again saying we can improve the flow of this or the aspect of this little bit better, and it's that innovation that lots of companies are looking for today because they are often stuck and so many of the things about the way we are doing business are changing and so much about the media business and the retail business and that form of business. All these things are changing so dramatically that they know they have to really radically change the way they do business and so they are looking for companies like Schematic, and there are few others that I think are that specialize in innovation the way we do, to transform their business in that way. Andrew Solmssen: Well, I think at Schematic we have a pretty healthy appetite for risk. We tend to take on a lot of projects that many people might shy away from because at the outset you don't always know how they are going to turn out and sometimes that just means trusting our instincts, trusting our process and trusting the work we have done in the past to serve as a template for a lot of success. The way that we go about these things is that we start at first principles and we really do trust our process. Coming in, we figure out what we want it to be, what audiences it's going to serve and then we really open it up. Then we brainstorm and sometimes we will bring in totally random people who aren't at all involved in the project at Schematic to give their thoughts, maybe they are the right demographic or maybe we just think that they might add a little something more to mix, to get as much as we possibly can. So that we don't throw out any idea at the beginning and that we really have all of the possibilities that we can muster as a company on the table. We need to push our clients to try to make sure that their content, their services, whatever it is that we're marketing is reaching people in the best possible way and I think people come to Schematic in different ways. Some people come because they know Schematic has a real culture of innovation and they have seen our work and they know that we have had real success developing differentiated experiences for other people and assume that we can do the same for them. Others don't see us in that light when they start working with us and it is really our responsibility to show them that that's where we are and as a company that's what they are getting. And there have been companies that have worked with Schematic where we haven't been a great fit for them. Where they've said, you have to stop coming up with these new innovative ways of doing things; we just want you to execute on this thing that we are telling you to do. And honestly, we are pretty straightforward with those companies and say, that's really not what we do as an organization. We may not be the right choice for you. Dale Herigstad: Because this business of digital changes constantly, it's changing so quickly, it's very important to almost do two designs at once. You are designing the future, you are designing what we think intelligently based on all of the research we see, in the sense that what's going on out there. We look at that and we say, okay, let's design this thing that's few years out, this is five years from now. And you let that be what sort of steers where you're going, it's the fresh new things that are in this current project that we will be doing. One of the things that I say is, when you think like that, as a company in this digital world, then they will thank us later. Because you are not doing this redesign, a major change redesign and the customer's getting this brand new, very different thing. Instead it's this evolution of a product that goes out there. And it also with our clients like at the cable companies, I mean, I happened to say that the interface is your brand for them. So the things that are familiar that make that unique, there are certain things that need to stay and evolve and change. Instead of this complete change and you are asking some of your clients to, your customers to learn something new all the time.

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