Design Defined

In the first Design Means Business installment, we addressed basic conflict resolution, as a team’s communications-software product can not reasonably be expected to exceed the communication abilities of the team itself. A teams ability to communicate, collaborate, and co-operate is one of the most significant determinants of end-user experience. Put another way, band members don’t always have to love each other, but to make music of interest, they have to play well together (and the same song). Now, let’s see if we know what design is, so to know if we’ve got it.

We all know the word “design,” but do we understand it, and agree its meaning? Words refer either to things or ideas, and design is an idea, so we can’t point to it and instantly agree that the word (symbol) refers to some material thing in the world. Epistemologically, it is more like equality than Bali.

More confusion comes from using design as either a noun or a verb. And the wide range of usages, both nouns and verbs, don’t help at all. So let’s start by simply acknowledging confusion about what design means, and then clarify (separate and distinguish) it.

First; dictionary definitions. Notice that design, by definition, has nothing to do with style. It is first to do with planning, and then the communication of plans. Of its noun and verb synonyms, only plan spans both tenses. Of course, plans are devised according to designs siblings (synonyms), purpose and intent. So design is, by definition, more akin to management and strategy than the communication (documentation) used to convey a plan.

Purpose, use, and design are inextricably linked. This is a key point because it distinguishes design from art. Art doesn’t need to make sense or serve a “particular purpose”. “If it doesn’t make sense it’s art,” said Andy Warhol (and he should know). Design, on the other hand, must make sense to the persons whose purposes it serves, and not for the purpose of aesthetic appeal, which is, as ever, “in the eye of the beholder” (wholly subjective). Design serves the achievement of its user’s objectives, or isn’t design (is art).

Art serves a particular purpose too. This difference is, art’s purpose is exclusively symbolic. The first works of art were expressions of “symbolic intent,” which hasn’t changed. Design’s purposes, on the other hand, are definitively utilitarian. This is the essential distinction, and it will serve us well to use it to outgrow any confusion between art and design.

The etymology of design comes to English, via French, from designare (Norman French shortly ruled England). It shares this root of designate. A synonym of designate is “assign.” Some definitions include “appoint.” In sum, to design is to to specify.

So, though most people confuse design work with its material artifacts, it is planning and strategic decision making first and foremost, and then schema to document said plans, as a secondary matter of course.

If you’re a involved in a project in a business and, or, management capacity, and you’ve had the feeling that the designer on your team is trying to make product or service decisions and affect its strategic direction, you’re right. But if you know the meaning and purposes of design, you can see that one can not be a designer and not make, or at least strive to influence, such decisions. To assume otherwise is to assume they should abdicate their role, and not serve the function for which they are educated, experienced, and hired.

In sum, the designers plan and designate (including name, label, and title tasks and objects), then document product or service schema. Given the designer’s role as one defining “how they would like something to be built or made,” is it any wonder there is often conflict between the designer’s role and that of business or management?

The best way to settle such conflicts, conflict resolution strategies aside, is to measure if the design meets whatever is defined as it’s “particular purpose”. As they saying goes, “if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Usability and user experience (not to be confused with customer satisfaction) are not exception.

For software as a service (SaaS) and web applications, its purposes are inseparable from those of the end-user it exists to facilitate. If not measured by end-user feedback, there is no way to know if the design works, and if we’ve “got design.” You might even say that design is what design does (not how it looks or feels).

Next, Passion Plays: How roles and their structure affect end-user experience.

Socialize Design Means Business II

Context

“Problem, what problem?”

Web-based business software is, literally, the integration of a group of people’s business, design, and technology capabilities. Yet specialists in these disciplines bring quite disparate ways of thinking, seeing, acting, and re-acting, to a project. Combine such disparate approaches with deliverables from such roles defining common aspects of the application, throw in some vague business objectives or strategy, and we’re sitting on a recipe for disappointments, to say the least. Depending on people’s temperaments, it can even get ugly. To say nothing of the software itself.

And all this where only the three C’s; communication, cooperation, and collaboration, can create successful software. Unfortunately, all of our training and experience in our respective knowledge domains, the so-called “hard skills”, do little to help us with these arguably more important “soft skills,” which, paradoxically, are the hardest and most indispensable of all.

The differences between people in design, technology, and business professions come from a mixture of training, personal preference, beliefs, personality, social support (i.e. organizational structure, role definition, etc.) and more. That is, they are learned beliefs, traits, and practices, so can change and evolve.

Bridging the differences between these professions can help control damage. But leveraging these differences is the key to significant success. Recognizing how these differences can be combined to create synergy and become affect multipliers is what makes the difference between thriving projects and surviving ones.

For communications software, the purpose of teaming people of various skills is not to serve some industrial age model of production, but to produce Gestalt affects, for the whole of thier combined knowledge to equal more than a sum of parts. Yet, too often we still operate under industrial age assumptions, and seem surprised by mediocre results.

Now, in 2010, well in to the so-called “information age,” there remains great room for improvement in our work, which is communication. And there is much we can do to prevent the common conflicts that drain way energy and focus, producing unhappy people in our teams and in the marketplace as a result.

Conflict Resolution: Lessons From The Front

The central conflict of our time is, arguably, an ideological one, culminating in the 9/11 attack and now escalating in Afghanistan. Counter insurgency experts have just reported the need for more cultural knowledge for intelligence officers working in Afghanistan. Intelligence officers, says the report, can not answer “…fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade.” Which is to say they’re asking such questions because they have a mission to persuade. That is, to change “hearts and minds”, not merely defeat and control people.

Has conquest has finally found its softer side? Pragmatically, in our case, yes. So, what lessons from the Afghanistan theater can we apply to power politics in our own offices?

As it turns out Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been consulting with Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea. In an interview, Mortenson quotes Admiral Mullen as saying “the three most important things that our troops have to do is

1. Listen more
2. Have respect
3. Build relationships.”

Though seldom a proponent of military endeavors myself, and recognizing some irony in charging our military with foreign cultural understanding, I have only one thing to add; “hoo-rah!”

Our missions and operational “theaters” are quite different than the U.S. military’s, yet in the interest of productive relationships with our own team members, in order to extend them to customers, we too must address “…fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade.”

Our environments vary, but there is commonality among companies of all kinds. Here, in following Design Means Business installments, we’ll look at assumptions design, business, and technology have about each other, plus power (org.) structures and processes, to see how they can affect user experience (UX) and, by extension, business results. Then, we’ll discover what is working best out “in the field”, and see how we can best measure “what works.”

Much as been made of creating personas to represent a given user base as an effective method of ensuring an application supports its user’s needs, desires, and objectives. Can such methods help us understand those in our own teams, as well? Let’s find out.

To follow in this Design Means Business series:

1. Got design?
2. Passion plays: How roles and their structure affect end-user experience.
3. Business, Technology and Design: Separated by A Common Language.
   Or, Can’t We All Just Get Along?

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Jesse James Garrett gives a State of the User Experience Address

UX Week - Video

Jesse James Garrett, author of The Elements of User Experience - User-Centered Design For The Web, who can be considered one of the founding fathers of user experience design as a multidisciplinary practice, and profession, gives his first state of the union (of user experience) address at a recent UX Week, one of Adaptive Path’s training seminars.

Abstract of Jesse James Garrett’s State of User Experience

For those without computer audio or 39:47 minutes to listen to it:

In 15 years we’ve gone from a narrow design niche (web design) to an expansive view of what user experience design can be. Many design schools still teach design medium by medium, which Garrett calls “mediumism.” But as we look at user experience, this begins to seem outdated.

UX design media progression: web > software > digital media (i.e. Second Life) > mobile > to any technology, and even products and services and environments. And beyond all of that, integrating all of these things together in to a larger whole; “multi-channel experiences” that integrate many kinds of design to create a holistic experience for people.

“A database architect makes information work for machines. An information architect makes information work for people.”

So what is a UX designer’s medium? What does it mean to be a User Experience Designer when experience itself is

• Subjective
• Ephemeral
• Intangible

How can you design for a medium that is intangible, that doesn’t seem to exist? By designing for people, a.k.a. “users”.

What do people want from the experiences that we create? The traditional answer is, ‘it depends.’ But it really boils down to something fundamental: engagement. People, says Garrett, want to be engaged by the experiences we have.

“Experience design is the design of anything, independent of medium, or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome, and human engagement as an explicit goal.”

Engagement, as a matter or perception, means engaging people’s sense of:

• Sight
• Sound
• Touch
• Smell
• Taste

Engagement with our senses also encompass engagement with our minds (cognition). And though engagement of the mind is the core competency of experience design, its traditional focus on the mind, in terms of information consumption, doesn’t address engagement of the mind as a whole. After perception, action, and cognition, the fourth dimension of experience is emotion: “engagement of the heart”, as Garrett puts it.

The dimensions of experience are presented as

• External engagement:
• Perception: engaging the senses
• Action: engaging the body
• Internal engagement:
• Cognition: engaging the mind
• Emotion: engaging the heart

These form the acronym P.A.C.E.

The subjectivity of experience is the result of the intersection between people’s capabilities, constraints and context, which exist in all four areas of experience; perception, action, cognition, and emotion.

In order for us to move beyond “mediumism,” we should think in terms of these dimensions and apply them to the analysis of our experiences, and those we create. The goal of this analysis should be orchestration; bringing all of the dimensions together in harmony.

For us to realize the potential of experience design as independent of media we have to embrace the idea that we are not simply creating the parts, but experiences that happen when the parts come together.

“Music is what happens between the notes.”
—Claude DeBussy

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”
—Miles Davis

In sum, UX designers create spaces where experience can emerge.

Socialize Garrett’s State of User Experience

Socialize Upcoming User Experinece Design Events

User experience, and our abilities as designers to guide and influence it positively, “starts from when you first hear about a product,” says Don Norman. And we should listen. After all, he coined “user experience design” over a decade ago.

So what does search engine optimization (SEO) have to with user experience design? If we accept Norman’s definition of user experience; everything. Often the first impression one has of a product, service, organization or person (”brand”) occurs in a search engine results page (SERP).

Why SEO and Social Media Matter to User Experience Designers

As UX designers accustomed to solving the design of a specific network node (website), we can over-focus, and forget its position and associations within the information/service network, or “market” in old world terms. Sure, web/software design itself can over-occupy our days, as it is. Plus there are marketing types for that, right? But if we ignore the larger context of our work, meaning in the larger information/service/exchange network, are we really fulfilling our User Experience Design role, or capacity?

“Always design a thing by considering it in its larger context… a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
—Eliel Sarrinen

A few key facets of user experience design are establishing trust, relevance, and supporting ongoing confidence in our offering. Google’s page rank system exists, in a real sense, to serve these very purposes. Without getting in to the complexities of the algorithm itself, it essentially “votes” sites up or down in the SERPs for a given keyword/phrase search. So link management, and that within the context of a specific keyword space, is critical to web-based communications/software user experience design.

When we see a site well positioned in the “natural” (unpaid) search results for a search representing our particular interests, expressed by text entry, it lends credibility to it as one already “voted” up to the surface by the hypertext link network of many millions of sites. Though still tempered by lack of one’s direct experience, the credibility afforded by a positive SERPs position breeds anticipatory confidence. And such anticipation can enhance our present experience, too.

“The notion that the future can enhance the present is a wonderful and insightful concept. Very nice: ‘The latent potential of a future experience.’”
—Don Norman, on Andrä Braz’s Experience Design Manifesto

Search engine optimization is not, mainly, a visual design discipline. It is one of content and technology. So, many of us with academic and professional roots in visual design may not take to SEO right away. Some of us, however, love text and smithing it for code or content as much as we love visual design. Some even first loved the web because it is primarily a text-based medium. Those of us in the later group may have an advantage when it comes to UX design, in that our broad interests and proclivities, as well as—hopefully—abilities, lend themselves to a comprehensive approach to user experience design… is there any other kind?

“Brand is reputation, and reputation is the sum of customer experiences.”
—Josh Levine

Sites for local search/ratings, Q&A, social bookmarking, and good old fashioned blogs, forums, directories, and such, generally do quite well in search engine results. Unless one searches on an organization’s or person’s name itself, and sometimes even then, their own site is not often the first one listed. It is probably not even on the first few “pages” (screens). Often the first sites listed in the SERPs contain conversations of some sort, rather than professional publications sponsored by a business or organization. If the conversations involve you or your organization, this is your brand in its natural habitat: the brand ecosystem.

Though SEO still means optimizing code and content for a particular site or search engine, it must also be considered as just one cell, or organism, in a network of relationships mediated by social software. This is good news for those less interested in the site-specific or technical aspects of SEO. There are more ways than ever, thus need, to manage one’s “brand” online. And at a time when jobs and clients are waning, social brand/reputation management is one area of growth.

The key word in all this; trust. If we accept or apply anything but the most ethical, authentic, “white hat” approach to SEO or Online Reputation Management (ORM), we undercut the value of participating in it, therefore any investment in doing so. From myspace to twitter, people are hungry, maybe starving, for relevance and authenticity. With increasing yet often bumbling exploitation of social media by private interests, the trustworthy, truly socially-engaged enterprise is not too common. Meaning, those able to engage social groups authentically and usefully will be proportionately rewarded.

The more UX designers take their empathy for others, their facility with patterns of interaction, and their ability to gain and hold people’s trust and confidence, and lend it to efforts to improve their organization’s platform of credibility, trust, and engagement via search and social networks, for a more comprehensive approach user experience design, the better off we will all be. Some in our organizations may even see us designers anew, in light of our passion for people’s entire experience, rather than through an outdated, narrowly defined, or misunderstood definition of UX design.

UX Books

Here are relevant, recommended UX books:

There are very, very few SEO books I’d recommend. Some published this year are already outdated (based on last year’s SEO info/practices). Yet because many aspects of it are little changed, here is what I currently think are the best of the bunch:

Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond, by Aarron Walter

Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, by Andrew King

Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing, by Kristopher B. Jones

Social Media

Crowd Surfing: Surviving and Thriving in the Age of Consumer Empowerment, By Martin Thomas and David Brain.

Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II.

Socialize SEO and UX: Common Goals

Art vs. Design, Form and Function

Good design can seem subjective. Most design award contests are expert-judged, and the judging criteria are seldom formally defined or revealed. This may afford judges lots of latitude in their scoring, but there is a cost to the rest of us. This approach can leave untrained people thinking design quality is subjective; merely personal taste. And though it can sometimes be, it certainly need not be. So let’s make a distinction, for baseline clarity.

One of the main distinctions between design and art is purpose. Art serves the artists expressive purposes, primarily. And anything done with artistic purpose is art. Art is, historically, uniquely useless. As Andy Warhol put it, “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s art.” Art is symbolic in nature. It is form for forms sake. And that can be a beautiful thing… always subjective.

Design is useful and essentially practical in nature. Design serves the purposes of others. That is, design is a craft of service, not self-expression.

Disambiguation

If we confuse aesthetic values with art we confuse art with design, which serves the purposes of neither art nor design. Of course, anything can be done artistically. That is, with emphasis on self-expression or personal creativity. The difference is purpose and use, therefore function. Where form follows from its function, primarily, we are speaking of design.

Exploiting design as a means of self-expression is an abuse of design. It is usually an innocent mistake, however, from confusing creativity with self-expression. Good designers, unlike good artists, decouple the two.

“Design must perform in response to human needs. Design performance should be demonstrable and measurable.”
—Gregg Berryman

Good design is what good design does

Now that we know the difference between art and design, we can get specific about what makes design itself “good.” In sum, good design is useful design. And yes, usefulness can include qualitative (”attractive”) as well as quantitative (”usable”) metrics—the source of much confusion. Yet as good design serves people’s purposes and uses, and use means action, it can be measured by what it does. Therefore, as software experience designers, we can say:

Good Design:

• Thinks like I do
• Makes me smarter
• Is reliable, consistent
• Is trustworthy, revealing, transparent
• Shows me, doesn’t tell (text) me how…
• Isn’t hard to understand
• Shows me how to advance: speed, accuracy, productivity
• Tells me what I can’t do before I do it
• Allows “mistakes”
• Sees from my point of view
• Keeps getting better
• Encourages feedback, complaint
• Gets to know me
• Gives me context, keeps me in it
• Makes me feel good, happy
• Is positively memorable

I expect this entry will evolve in time. It is not, if not already obvious, intended to be comprehensive.

Beauty As By-product of Problem Solving

“I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
—Buckminster Fuller

Designers naturally talk about use in action as behavior, be it “user behavior,” “system behavior,” or “interactive behavior.” Behavior, though anthropomorphic in terms of human-computer interaction (HCI), can lead one to see the characteristics of good design as not unlike those of a truly good friend. And I think we can all agree, good friends help each other solve problems. And this, too, is a beautiful thing.

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Design Bliss, Even In A Down Economy

In the world of software interaction design we talk a lot about empathic design. That’s good, because designing well means understanding well the people we’re designing for. But can we have empathy without compassion? Empathy and compassion can not only make us and others feel good, they are practical, useful tools we can apply to our design craft.

Of course, we don’t only design for “users,” the people who finally want or have to use what we’ve designed. We design for the people who approve our work and sign our checks, and others work with to manage and produce interactive services, too. Providing “customer-centered” design services extends out in both directions from the designer, to the producing organization and end-users alike, even if we more often advocate for the user within our teams.

When we talk about empathic design we can not limit ourselves to “users.” We have to empathize with the needs and interests of the executives, product managers, business analysts, programmers and quality assurance people, too. This is not made easier when our role and potential to contribute as designers are not fully understood by our colleagues, and our best efforts are too seldom realized.¹ But if we are to make a difference, we have to take responsibility for the difference we make.

When it comes to understanding people, including ourselves, Joseph Campbell can be a great inspiration. Having read many of his books, I keep A Joseph Campbell Companion around the house. You can open it any place and find something useful and interesting. In a real sense, when we undertake a career we’re passionate about, we take a journey not unlike most of the protagonists in the great mythic traditions Campbell devoted himself to learning about and teaching. Like them, we make our way past the initial entry barriers, leave the world behind as we once youthfully, or just naively, knew it, and delve in to the metaphorical “underworld” of deeper knowledge, understanding, and capacity for experience.

If we accept that compassion is necessary for empathy, and empathy provides designers a useful, perhaps even necessary, perspective on their work, here’s what Campbell has to say about the problem of how to bring our “boon,” our “gift” of knowledge, skill, and insight back to the work-a-day world, from the “underworld” we’d retrieved it from:

“Bringing back the gift to integrate it in to a rational life is very difficult. It is more difficult than going down in to the underworld. What you have to bring back is something the world lacks—which is why you went to get it—and lacking it, the world does not know that it needs it. And so, on return, when you come with your boon for the world and there is no reception, what are you going to do? There are three possible reactions.

“One answer is to say, ‘To hell with them. I’m going back in to the [metaphorical] woods.’ You buy yourself a dog and a pipe and let the weeds grow in the gate…. This is the refusal of the return.

“The second way is to say, ‘What do they want?’ You have a skill. You can give them what they want, the commercial way. Then you have created a whole pitch for your expressivity, and what you had before gets lost. You have a public career, and you have renounced the jewel [of your self-discovered gift].

“The third possibility is to try to find some aspect of the domain into which you have come that can receive a little portion of what you have to give. You to find a means to deliver what you have found as the life boon in terms and in proportions that are proper to the world’s ability to receive. It requires a good deal of compassion and patience. Look for cracks in the wall and give only to those who are ready for your jewel.”

In our case, as designers of things people use to work and socialize and live, the domain Campbell refers to can relate that in which we often operate; business. In essence, when we do not immediately find a perfectly receptive audience to all we’ve learned, he’s saying the choices are not simply to sell out or roll over, but also to persist in our inspirations, persevere, and patiently yet vigilantly seek out receptive people and circumstances, so that our contributions can improve people’s quality of life. That is, their experience of it.

This third response Campbell offers relates directly to what Luke Wroblewski calls being “response-able”. “You need to become response-able to factors in the organization so that you can begin to build up credibility and the wherewithal to actually make yourself part of strategic conversations.”

And the “means to deliver what you have” Campbell mentions relates to what Wroblewski is talking about when he says, “Designers can transfer their specialized skills from interaction design to the business domain.” Also, he says “…selling [ideas] is not as effective as actually applying your design skills to problems that matter.”

Campbell admonishes, “give only to those who are ready for your jewel.” The implied warning is that doing the opposite, trying to convert “non-believers” to a user experience design value system, is probably putting good energy to bad use. It may also be likened to the biblical admonition, not to “throw pearls before swine.” Strong words. But they can be seen as a matter of respecting your gifts. One way is not to waste them. And the fact is, ignorant authority exists. Sailing in to shallow waters is risky. Find a captain who values “design thinking.”

“If all else fails,” Campbell continues, “you can get a job teaching, and introduce your message to the people who are studying with you. If you can get one little hook into the given society, you find presently that you are able to deliver your message.” To this I can attest. Teaching Web Interface Design through the post-internet-boom era allowed me to work out the philosophical foundation my career continues to develop from. Though lower paying, teaching any subject well is a respectable living. Regardless, “You do not have a complete adventure unless you do get back,” asserts Campbell.

“When the world seems to be falling apart, the rule is to hang onto your own bliss. It’s that life that survives.”
—Joseph Campbell

Finally, let’s acknowledge that finding design-receptive opportunities may be rarer for the time being, due to economic challenges. But constraints can focus our creativity. Even economic constraints. The web, like much of the good that has come from it, did not originate with a business strategy or goal. Quite the contrary, business has merely capitalized (sometimes over-capitalized) on it. “Web 2-0″ arose not from necessity or plan, but from the individual creativity of people liberated by the dot-com implosion of 2000. So whether we’re hanging on to the job we have, creating a job for ourselves with some new venture, or not sure what to do, let’s remember the third way, and why, regardless of opportunity, we chose to be designers: to make people’s lives—their experience of life—better.

1. http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?739
   http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2008/why-designers-fail-the-report/
   http://uiresourcecenter.com/user-interface-design/articles/influencing-business-strategy-through-design.html

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User Interface Pre-cog’s Predict End of the Mouse

We’ve likely all seen it: John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, snaps on his information man-handling gloves and proceeds to literally manipulate the recorded premonitions (future memories?) served up by the pre-cog (not to be confused with a Happy Cog) trinity, deftly summoning those he desires without having to wait for search results, and swatting away those less useful.

Most of us reacted to it similarly, I imagine: “Whoa…”. Sure, it was impressive. Especially for 2002. But between it and Spielberg’s sideways and vertically driven cars speeding up and down buildings, our suspension of disbelief was pulled taut. To near failing, at least in my case. If not so entertained, it might have snapped. And though its affect was dramatic (according to its purpose), is this a practical human-computer interface design solution, or just an accidental preview to Wii Fit?

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
—Albert Einstein, Genius

Authors have traditionally been our greatest “imagineers,” often leading us where no one else has gone before, extending the limits of our collective imagination. Some ideas even catch on. You have Captin Kirk’s communicator in your pocket, afterall. And you can watch Star Trek via satellite, tonight, thanks to Arthur C. Clarke’s great powers of cognition. So will you soon be rushing to Fry’s to get Philip K. Dick’s giant transparent monitor and information-aware gloves? Perhaps. People are working on it, I suppose you know.

With all the emphasis on ubiquity, immersion, gestural interfaces, and attention on 3-D interfaces and operating systems, not to mention 3D browsers, add some very non-traditional controllers and touchpads, one just has to ask, is the mouse WIMPing out?

From some SXSW Interactive presentations, you might think the mouse has somehow failed us. Okay, I’m exaggerating. And yes, I know as well as the next die hard Star Wars fan that innovating for fun and profit is, well, fun and profitable. And, to be honest, this isn’t the path I’d planned for this post. But let’s keep it real here. It’s reality check time.

Mice and windows will, I here predict, remain on a desktop very near you for many years to come. Necessity may no longer be the mother of invention, but a table top computer? I do not see the ‘wow’ factor in laying a touch screen monitor out flat. I’m sorry, Microsoft. Invention is a mother after all. And by the by, Outlook could really use some improvement… still.

“Forecasting 50 years ago was as good or as bad as it is today. And the reason is that human nature hasn’t changed. We can’t improve ourselves.”
—Alan Greenspan, Former Chairman, U.S. Federal Reserve

I really don’t want to rain on the go go gadget parade. But many of these human-machine interface design innovations are not being driven by people’s needs, or good old fashioned design thinking, they seem to be driven by economics. Okay, this is one need, sure. But not one that leads to useful, usable, desirable (not so be confused with seductive) and therefore successful products.

The point here is not that 3D interfaces have long been in the works already (it is not for lack of imagination that you’re not using one now). The point is that self-interested innovation will not move design forward any more than releasing new models every year has moved GM forward. In times such as these I hope any innovation supports our economic imperatives. But let’s not loose focus. For human-computer interface / product designs to succeed, they have to help us do something, do it better, or fulfill our needs differently in a particularly useful way. People make things successful, not technology. And we have not changed that much at all.

Socialize Minority Report Mouse’s Deminse

Alan Cooper Interview, Agile 2008

For those lacking time to watch the entire 45 minute video, here are a few interview excerpts, to highlight Cooper’s ideas about Agile, Extreme Programming, Open Source, and being a knowledge worker/programmer in the post industrial age, working in organization managed around industrial age models. Extraneous conjunctions have been edited for message clarity. Interaction design is emphasized for visual extraction of his thoughts about its role in Agile software development. The last few paragraphs are of particular interest.

“I wrote a book called About Face in 1995 and I wrote a book called The Inmates Are Running the Asylum in 1999 and both of these books were pluming this idea of how does software get constructed and how can it be designed well from the point of view of how it behaves in the world, as though it were a person with a social presence.

“I have built a software design consulting company around that. We are kind of process wonks.

“The fundamental goals of Agile programming are to let programmers who are knowledge workers get to the core of their motivation. And the core motivation of all knowledge workers is to do good work.

“There are a lot of people around the fringes of the Agile movement who don’t get that yet, and who think that Agile is about productivity. It is not about productivity. I think that productivity is a byproduct, but if you set that up as your goal you will fail.

“The thing about open source is that it is self directed, it is self motivated. And in order to be self motivated, you can’t have roosters coming around you squawking and giving you a tangential instructions.

“There is this idea left over from the industrial management that you say ‘we are making refrigerators or automobiles’ and then everything goes down in that pyramid in that classical manufacturing hierarchy and down to the lowest level, the individual tradesmen contributing their bolts to the mechanical device. And we are post industrial, programmers are knowledge workers, they not only don’t think that way, they don’t act that way, don’t have common values to that, and their organizations aren’t structured that way. So it has created this huge vacuum and management is horribly hobbled by their industrial age beliefs.

“And what that has done is that kept them out of the vacuum, that’s the route of the abdication. And the thing about programmers is they didn’t have the right skills, they didn’t have the right talents, they didn’t have the right training, they didn’t have the right motivation, they didn’t have any support at all. All they saw was the vacuum and they stepped into what they had.

“They were doing it without all those appropriate tools. Namely, all of the things that [prevent] software projects [from having] cost overruns, and schedule overruns and to be unpredictable, and unlovable, and often unusable, and frequently a death march that produces a piece of software that just rolls over and dies upon roll out.

“I mean it is a toxic means of software construction that has become the toxic means of business. And the dot com bubble was this enormous distraction. Extreme Programming was a way for programmers to hunker down in their bunker in this hostile environment.

“Things have changed dramatically in the last few years. Extreme has morphed into Agile, and I really think that there is something quite existential here, that you have to hit bottom before you can change.

“[Programmers] finally said ‘Let’s do what is right’. And be damned to the industrial age managers, trying to survive in a post industrial world. And this is where the brilliance starts to come through. I just came from a workshop called ‘The beginner’s mind.’ This is a Zen concept, it’s the way you achieve true understanding, by being a student, by being the beginner.

“And what [programmers] did—I love this about programmers—is they said ‘I don’t know’. In fact I am unclear about anything I’m doing here. I am unconvinced that anything is correct, except what I know is that the way I have been doing things doesn’t work. It doesn’t make me happy, it doesn’t make the business happy, and it doesn’t make the customers happy. So what I am going to do is I am going to question everything.

“And what they did is they opened the beating heart of programming to inspection by others. This is a reflection of the sincerity, the honesty, the profound depth of their questioning, their Zen mind, to open the code up. Then they begun to open up the idea, how long is it going to take us to do this, how do we know what this is? Wonderful, fundamental questions that have been never truly been asked or answered in the world of software, mostly because the world of software has its roots in academia, rather than having its roots in industry or commerce.

“Industry or commerce may have primitive methodologies, but they are always about effectiveness, always about achieving goals. In Academia the goal is to learn, and to fail is to learn, therefore failure is okay. And that’s one of the reasons why I think the software world has long been willing to accept failures as okay. But in a modern digitally interconnected worldm failure is much more noticeable.

“There are a lot of people out there saying ‘I know how to make software development Agile, stickers on the wall and a 3 months turn around’ And neither of them worked, neither of them were honest. So you really have to do it right.

“Yet another wonderful thing about Agile is that by being relentlessly self introspective, it exposes all the weaknesses in the process. And one of the great weaknesses in the process is that there is nobody figuring out what the problem is and what the solution is. There is lots of good people figuring out how to build the solution, and there is lots of people figuring out actually building the solution.

“I mean it is considered normal in the software business… building the solution to the wrong problem is normal, and you will go on from there. And this is why [there are] multiple releases. I am not talking about just builds but I am talking about real product releases.

“That’s the bondware talking, it’s not the way it should be, it doesn’t have to be that way, it’s just toxic old industrial construction methods under pressure being pushed on a community of knowledge workers. It’s heinously wasteful and it’s incorrect and it crushes people’s wills and happiness.

“So it is great that what Agile is doing is actually saying ‘Wait a minute, there is a hole here’.

“Now this is where you are going to accuse me of being self serving, because I am saying right into that gap in the process is where interaction designers go.

“As a community of technologists who are knowledge workers being managed by industrial age managers who are treating them like factory workers, the goal of programmers for the last fifty years has been to survive and most of what they have developed are coping strategies, how do I survive in a hostile environment? Agile is unique as in its goals are not to make it easier for me to deal with hostility. I mean, yes, it does that, but its number one goal is to create good products, successful products that people like and will use.

“So there needs to be an organizational change for Agile to thrive. And there needs to be organizational change for interaction design to thrive.

“What I am saying is this is going to be an epiphany moment, for each individual interaction designer out there…. Are they going to step in and occupy that gap in the Agile team that says ‘I will take responsibility for the quality of the behavior of the human facing side of this software from start to finish’. Because that’s what the programmers do, they stand up and say ‘I will take responsibility for the quality of the execution of all of the software from start to finish’.

“So I very much see a shift from our design organization delivering solutions to management, which are worshiped but not followed, to feeding directly into the Agile cycle, because the thing that motivates good designers is the same thing that motivates good programmers, which is seeing their products get built and having them satisfy the users.

“All the reflectivity that Agile programmers do within their Agile programming organizations are ‘Let’s look at the architecture of the code, let’s look at the code, let’s look at the models within the code, let’s look at the objects, and let’s do all that reflection’, that’s what brings quality. So where interaction designers come in, is they bring the same level of reflectivity to the business problem.

“What interaction designers can do is they can reflect the business problem back to the stakeholders and they can reflect the user definition back to the stakeholders, and this is a step that is missing from almost all conventional or Agile software construction projects, and is one of the reasons why so many projects, even if they are Agile, can go off into the weeds because the project definition itself is incorrect or inappropriate or misaligned somehow.

“The next step is, once the interaction designers who are experts at doing this kind of human research and understanding what the users are trying to achieve, then they can block out the behavioral solution. And they use Agile methods within their own teams to create proposed solutions. And we have simulation tools for narrowing down to a good sense of correctness. But then what we can do is take those proposed solutions in narrative form and in visual form, but primarily in narrative form. Let’s think of it as a user story on steroids… again, this is a process that is typically missing from conventional software construction processes.

“This is this sort of disconnecting… the business people are cycling over here and they hand over one of their hand grenades in the tech group and the tech group cycles with it until they come up with something. And they have user stories and they have got their stakeholders and people come in but there’s never really this formal ‘let’s state the problem, let’s state the solution.’

“This is the skill set that the interaction designers bring to the problem. That’s all done before day zero… Interaction designers are good at user interface design too.

“But user interface design is not what makes your product a success or a failure, but it’s really that deep and profound understanding of the problem and understanding of the solution and making sure that the business side is what they want. Who are the users, what are they trying to accomplish, what motivates them, what tasks are they performing.

“The same way Agile programmers want to know what ‘done’ looks like, interaction designers want to know what success looks like. And those two work together to create a successful product, and that is the missing piece.

“The economics of software are qualitatively different than the economics of industry. In industry there were economics of scale, and what we tried to do is drive the cost of manufacturing down in order to drive the price down, in order to deliver value to the customers. In software there is no ongoing cost, there is no manufacturing cost, there is no material cost, so driving cost down just reduces the desirability of the product. Instead what you want to do is not waste money, not throw money at the problem. But cost reduction is an ineffective tool. What you want to do is create your number one goal to say what do we have to do to elevate the quality, the desirability, of the end product. And when you worry about costs, you hurt that. And one of the great things that I see in Agile is an understanding that says ‘Hey… stop worrying about the costs and start worrying about the quality’.

“And what I am saying is… don’t let that out of your sight. Don’t start thinking about delivery times and don’t start thinking about costs reduction and don’t start thinking about ROI, think about the quality because that’s why we are all playing this game.”

Also see Cooper’s Agile 2008 event presentation: The Wisdom of Experience »

Socialize Agile 2008 Alan Cooper Interview

As you probably know the etymology of “democratic” is Greek; prefix demo- “people” + kratia “rule”. People rule in a democracy. If people rule in your design process, then it is essentially a democratic project. But ask yourself, do they rule… really?

Being a human-centered designer, and applying empathic design practices, are not just a matter of making web forms more usable and useful. It is a point of view, a stance, a way looking at other people that values them for what they are, and do, and want, not merely for what they can give you, or you can get from them.

Web heads have generally been of two types. Those looking to extend the preexisting society to the web, and those looking to extend the ethos of the web—network consciousness—to society. The first internet “boom” was the result of funding from, and for, the former. When that bubble burst, the latter regained some footing: web “2.0″ (an expression I hold 0.0 affinity for) is the result. Lest we forget, the web “2-0″ era originated in a major economic lull. Network consciousness has always ignited our collective imagination. Capital has usually come as a reaction, to establish and re-establish the internet economy. Which in turn has given rise to the experience economy.

The CEO of a private interest embracing social media is not too unlike Mikael Gorbachev embracing Glasnost. The problem is not that people leading companies don’t know how to participate in social media individually, or mistake the role it can plan in a democracy. The problem is of how the principals and practices of democracy can live in, and be expressed by, an unabashedly private, self-interested organization. And do so without coming across as completely inauthentic. Especially when our confidences in private enterprise are very low.

It is said that you can surmise the values of a society by it’s architecture. The purpose of its tallest buildings reflects its values. The evidence for this is historical. In ancient times religious temples and the tombs of kings were tallest. With the renaissance came more prominent civic structures. Now, of course, commercial buildings far, far outreach those of civics and religion. So while principals of democracy have won the in the public realm, the commercial one is the frontier where ideas of democracy and capitalism, private and public interest, are being gained and lost. That is to say; in our places of work.

I’m not advocating for democratic principals or commercial interests, one over the other. They seem to me like tides of influence, but of one sea. And of course one must make a living! But some balance, equilibrium, and sense of co-existence between them is necessary for society to be healthy.

It is interesting to note as an aside at this junction of political history that extreme capitalism in “the west” is waning, while a sense of social justice is waxing, exactly as socialism in “the east” is waning, while capitalism is waxing, and at hyper-speed. But regardless of whether “the company is the government,” as in unregulated capitalism, or “the government is the company,” as in unrestrained communism, social equity is the central problem. Interaction designers and those involved social media experience design have a central role in the future of the digital “cloudescape.”

If we’re serious about the enterprise we have to decide where we stand on social media not as a fad or fetish but as an expression of democratic principals. That is, if we mean to embrace social media in the post web “2.0″ era, and we work in a private enterprise that intends to exploit social media somehow, then we have to determine the process by which democratic principals will be applied in the sphere of private interest. And yes, it is a little daunting. If not, I think we’re not really paying attention.

I am encouraged by these trends. Our better natures have again shown themselves recently, as election outcomes. Given the opportunity—a fair and carefully moderated system to participate in—they often do. But faith remains as necessary as action and interaction, by engaging each other both wisely as cleverly. Because there is, after all, a place for moral skill and practical wisdom in business, as well as politics.

The main shift in focus comes—dare I say it, as web “3.0″—begins to shift our design focus away from creating publications to creating participators in a larger information entity ecosystem. From design of “sites,” to design of systems. Which, of course, is already happening.

“The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.”
—William Ford Gibson

If we try to produce human-centric systems for collaboration and social interaction via non-collaborative, non-social or undemocratic methods and processes, that is, those of the industrial manufacturing age, then we will usually fail.

“Always design a thing by considering it in its larger context… a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
—Eliel Sarrinen

As Don Norman recently put it, “Great design without smooth operations is worthless, but smooth operations without a good front end… good interaction design, is really worthless. So the two really come together.” “A good designer will actually design the company.”

“Web as platform” is not only a matter of computer science. And social media is also a misnomer. We’re talking about systems that communicate with systems so that people can communicate with people. Of all these things, only the people matter. We The People.

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