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 roles that define common aspects of the application, so that responsibilities overlap, then throw in some vague business objectives or strategy, and we’re sitting on a recipe for disappointments. Depending on temperaments, it can get ugly. To say nothing of the software itself.

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, therefore they can change and evolve.

Bridging the differences between these professions can help control damage. But leveraging these differences is the key to significant success. When differences can be combined to create synergy they become effect multipliers.

For communications software, the purpose of teaming people of various skills is not to serve some old industrial age model of production, but to produce Gestalt effects, 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—perhaps well past—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 relationship can impact end-user experience.
3. Business, Technology and Design: Separated by A Common Language.
   Or, Can’t We All Just Get Along?

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.

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.

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

Don Norman interviewed by Peter Merholz

UX Week – Video

Don Norman, the esteemed “Ralph Nader of design,” gives us 52:29 of his time to offer wisdom gained from his experience in matters of user experience, design, business, and making our case to management.

Don Norman Quotes

Notable quotables, for those who may not have the fifty two and a half minutes:

“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.”

“User experience is really the whole totality. Opening the package… good example. It’s the total experience that matters. And that starts from when you first hear about a product… experience is more based upon memory than reality. If your memory of the product is wonderful, you will excuse all sorts of incidental things.”

“One of my favorite questions is ‘what do you hate most about when you visit a Disney theme park?’ And the answer is universal, ‘the lines.’ The next question is ‘would you go back?’ and the answer is yes. And so the lines are universally hated. And it doesn’t matter. So you don’t need to have everything perfect… they do a really good job of making the lines as bearable as possible. And that’s what user experience design is about, it’s about memories… that in the end, you love it.”

“Do not go to your executives with a little presentation or lecture about why it is good to treat customers well. Do not try to tell them why it is important to do it. Do not try to say why you have some unhappy customers. They will agree with you. And nothing will happen. Go to them just like the marketing people go to them. The marketing people don’t go with that argument. The marketing people go them first of all with a marketing campaign that looks exciting and second of all with spreadsheets that show, ‘if we do this, this is the expected profit.’ That’s what you have to do. You have to go in there with a spreadsheet. And say ‘if we do this, this here is what we expect to gain.’ The question is where do you get the numbers and so on. And the answer is, where do marketing get the numbers? They make them up! We can make up numbers just as well as they can. They have to be plausible. They can’t be silly. They have to be reasonable. But you make them up. If you’re the CEO of a company or senior executive of a company the most important thing is making a profit… so what you have to do to the executive is prove to them that they’re throwing away money and if they only follow what you say they will bring in a lot more money. And by the way no one ever checks up on you, so don’t worry about it. No one ever checks up on marketing people. And if at all possible find some senior marketing people to be your allies… if you can get marketing on your side and you can use spreadsheets, that’s how you make your case.”

“You have to learn to speak the language of business.”

“Your job is to make your boss successful.”

See all Adaptive Path UX Week videos on Vimeo »

Those seeking user-interface/UI design solutions, or examples of perfect human-computer interaction, will be disappointed. Mr. Norman’s now famous book was copy-written in 1988. There are human-computer interface design references, but they are very quaint, by contemporary standards. But don’t let the age or state of computer science at the time of writing lead to an assumption of irrelevancy. Norman’s book is most relevant because human nature is essentially unchanged. All of the concepts are directly relevant our work as interaction, user interface, and user experience designers.

Don Norman may not have invented all, or even most, of the many elemental concepts he details, yet he certainly innovated their application, and most importantly, made them comprehensible to all readers. And by doing so, has helped make our world better and more useful. He takes pains to make difficult topics, and what could be very academic ones, easily comprehensible to all. His intelligent, and sometimes slightly folksy, prose style and examples of design gone awry, as well as all right, taken from the use everyday things, lend poignancy to the trials and tribulations that people regularly endure in the name of “progress.”

Norman draws on an experience, in Italy at a conference, to break down the doing of things in to its component parts. The presenter attempts to thread film through a movie projector. “What makes something—like threading the projector—difficult to do? To answer this question, the central one of this book, we need to know what happens when someone does something, We need to examine the structure of action.”

And so he does. “…there are four different things to consider: the goal, what is done to the world [the action], the world itself, and the check of the world.” He further exposes the pitfalls most every designer—and so user—has fallen in to when we don’t make clear connections between goals, intentions, actions, and state feedback, to form a continuous feedback loop.

Frequent themes of Norman’s wonderful book are the limitations of conscious thought, the limits of short term memory, and our ability to utilize subconscious thought. “Subconscious thought is one of the tools of the conscious mind, and the memory limitations can be overcome if only an appropriate organizational structure can be found. Take fifteen unrelated things and it is not possible to keep them in conscious memory at once. Organize them in to a structure and it is easy.” This, by the way, is how actors, like the traveling bards before Gutenberg invented his printing press, memorize long texts. Structure, organization, grouping (separating), and many other methods of design, make all arts, crafts, and software applications, possible.

Designing for Error Prevention, Correction, Recovery

In a section of Chapter Five, To Err Is Human, called Designing for Error, Norman distinguishes and classifies for us different types of errors, to help us help others prevent them. “Here is what designers should do:

1. Understand the causes of error and design to minimize those causes
2. Make it possible to reverse actions—to “undo” them—or make it hard to do what cannon to reversed.
3. Make it easier to discover the errors that do occur, and make them easier to correct.
4. Change the attitude toward errors. Those of an object’s user and attempting to do a task, getting there by imperfect approximations. Don’t think of the user as making errors; think of the actions as approximations of what is desired.”

I’ve found The Psychology of Everyday Things, frankly, one of the most unexpectedly useful books I’ve ever read. Norman was ahead of his time, and I believe his time is now… any time we design and use new products. If you’re involved in any sort of design—user interface design, industrial or consumer product design—you can not afford to ignore The Psychology of Everyday Things.

The Friendly User Acknowledgment

UXdesign.com owes special recognition to Mr. Norman, who claims—and no one disclaims it—to have invented the phrase user experience design, “because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow.” The term may be most useful when applied as intended, “to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual.” In other words, he was not just concerned with the product’s user interface, but with the entire brand experience conveyed by a spectrum of artifacts related to the primary product, and it’s design. Indeed, as should we all.

More User Experience.UX Design Books

The Web (yes, it is a place) has expanded network consciousness. As life itself is now widely considered to be a network of networks, inter-connected by information feedback loops allowing co-evolution, will human society’s impact on nature become more, well, natural?

The internet-based hypertext web, so far, has proven a great journey for much of humanity. It has changed our expectations for information access and pushed the boundary of our information rights, both for and against us. And it has greatly increased the frequency (if not always the quality) of our interactions with each other, as well as the mediating technologies.

Apple’s Don’t Fall Far From The Tree

The ‘net began as a defense science enabler, as science technique is almost inherently collaborative in nature (we’re always smarter in parallel than we are in series). Its design stems, primarily, from a need to provide time/distance-independent information transfer, and to de-centralize defence science information, thus survive nuclear attack. Thankfully, it never had to pass that test. But other tests have come, and more are certain to.

Many know that the first website was created at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, aka CERN, (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, originally). Too few know that the first website in the U.S. was at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

Both CERN and SLAC were created to “find out what the Universe is made of and how it works.” The physics knowledge base began, in the modern sense, with Newton. Newton’s ideas made the industrial revolution possible, which was really an economic revolution. The cycle around which our modern lives still revolve, for better and, in some ways, for worse (i.e. family and social fragmentation, environmental degradation/global warming, etc.). It is worth noting, while we’re at it, that if ROI was a factor in initial web development, it would never have been created.

Both CERN and SLAC are particle research facilities, and the main technique they use is collision. Yes, smashing things—very small things—together, so to watch what happens. Let’s call it the first reality show. And maybe not terribly unlike usability research, metaphorically: only by planned testing (aka user science), and colliding a person with a user interface, and tracing their path, can we align interaction models and user’s mental models.

The first particle accelerators were of linear design. And I think we can say, too, that while the research was based on Einstein’s theories, the mental models scientists and engineers had while researching them were still fairly linear, that is Newtonion, so of the early industrial era. And the engineers who built the experiments were mostly linear thinkers (this I offer from personal experience… read on).

While the linear collider is still a valuable tool, the next step in the evolution of accelerators was to form a loop; the cyclotron. And while there certainly are connections between the evolution of physics, philosophy of life, and experiments to prove them, here we jump off the particle physics trajectory, and back on the origins of the web, and look at webs and patterns of life in general, for what they can reveal to us that is relevant to our work, and the work to come for restoring us to our higher ideals, and a healthier environment for all.

In some ways our understanding of ourselves follows from our understanding of our environment; the world which we co-evolved with. It will, I expect, someday be more apparent exactly how patterns of personal psychology and those of physics correlate. We have, however, extended universal harmonies in nature to our architecture, fine arts, and design. And we know intuitively that our own nature relates to us some truths of the universe, connecting us—consciously or not—to all.

“It is said that the Buddha once gave a sermon without saying a word; he merely held up a flower to his listeners. This was the famous ‘Flower Sermon,’ a sermon in the language of patterns… If we look closely at a flower, and likewise at other natural and man-made creations, we find a unity and an order common to all of them. This order can be seen in certain proportions which appear again and again, and also in the similarly dynamic way all things grow or are made—by a union of complementary opposites. …Perhaps the message of the Flower Sermon had to do with how the living patterns of the flower mirror truths relevant to all forms of life.”

As patterns repeat throughout nature, and scale, the orbits and trajectories of atoms and molecules are much like those of planets and galaxies. So also the pattern of lightening resembles a tree branch, a mountain skyline, and a crack in concrete. So we see that patterns themselves, share shaped by their constraints and complementary opposites, qualities which are universal. As our understanding of nature evolves, our models, designed express it, should—and do—too.

Where Newtonian and Darwinistic models once influenced our understanding of nature and our relationship to it, and by extension, to a degree, to each other (e.g. social Darwinism), now those of systems thinking, and interconnected peer networks are slowly, but surely, making their way in to our collective consciousness, and by extension, our socioeconomic institutions.

And as interaction designers our theories and practices have shifted towards closer relationship to people (“users”), greater empathy for them, and more frequent feedback loops, so to co-evolve our design works with discoverable goals, needs, modes, and mental models. This more service-oriented model has obviously proven a boon to us and our industry. And we certainly need not think of services, economically, in competitive, Darwinistic, “eat or be eaten” terms. On the contrary, many of the best web services are simply those we want for ourselves, only shared with others (PDF). And this, I’m here to say, is a model better reflecting natural service exchange.

There’s No Place Like Home

The challenge to user experience (UX, UE), user interface (UI), and interaction designers, as shapers and influencers of popular patterns of interaction between people and organizations via digital media, is to advocate, practice, and advance more organic modes and models of organization, collaboration, and interaction design, by utilizing naturalistic proportions, patterns, and the power of limits to liberate our right to pursue happiness, with ease.

This 4th of July, while we reflect on past triumphs, consider too what is necessary to regain, even advance, personal and social freedom. Iindividual, social and even economic freedoms have clearly lost ground in recent years. And though long and frightful the road home may seem, unlike Dorothy and her hangers on, we don’t need Oz to provide us hearts, minds, and courage. And thankfully: we will need them.

The Founders of the United States lived and died with courage and conviction to bring the individual rights and freedoms they declared inalienable to us in to political reality. At that time political institutions were the most powerful ones. It is said that a society’s values are reflected by the purpose of its tallest buildings. Our values now lay mainly in economic prosperity. Private commercial interests exert previously unforeseen power over our lives and fates, public and private, social and individual. While we have reaped great material benefits from our economic advances, is the bill yet to come?

It took a some thousands of years for democracy to spread from its philosophical roots, through the (pre-capitalism) Age of Enlightenment, to the majority of the worlds political systems. Should we extend our property in rights to commercial institutions, too, and their organizational structures, so that they incorporate our participation in their powers, also valid only through expressed consent?

There is a long way to go yet, before humanity can say it is “home free;” confident we will continue to thrive—or even survive—industrial (economic) affects on the only living environment available to us. There is a lot we can do, as designers and as citizens, to form a more perfect union with the essential patterns and principals of life (interrelated systems), to continue and enrich it. After all, what is more patriotic (and it is the principals that make the country, not visa versa) than asserting our independence from any Form of Government [that] becomes destructive of these ends?

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Post Script: Incidentally, SLAC and I were born in the same year, and my father spent most of his working life there, as an engineer. I have bright and warm memories of my childhood visits there, of the kind, brilliant and hard working people, and of the procurement research travels I’d occasionally tag along on. I attended the 40th Anneversary of SLAC and it was great to hear the reflections and stories of those who’d pioneered the experiments, resulting in profound discoveries, which now affect each of our lives. It was, and I assume remains, an amazing and truly interdisciplinary collaboration.

The way you can tell whether your organization has an interactive media strategy, and is using it, or not, is by how it measures goal achievement. If you produce interactive media and measure success in leads and sales (“conversion”), for example, then you have a sales strategy applied to media design and production. This is not the same as having an interactive media strategy. The way you can tell whether or not your organization has an interactive media strategy is if it measures interaction goals specifically. Because it is the user performing the interaction, user goals drive interaction goals. (This statement doesn’t require agreement.) For interactive media, strategy involves discovering directly the goals of those performing the interaction, and aligning our organizational goals to theirs, to ensure y/our success through theirs.

Brought To You By The Letters WWW: Who, What, Why

Users goals can not be measured by click maps or traffic analysis, any more than measuring traffic through a road intersection can tell you where people are going. Of course, if you track cars through a few intersections, some possible objectives can be deduced. But no goals, motives, or W’s: Who they are, What they really desire, Why that choice, instead of another: selected on purpose?, by accident?, was it partly what they wanted, if so, which part?. was did it meet some need if not the intended one?… and so on.

Scoping Scopes Scope

Strategy is also for managing scope, to make sure you can complete your project. And managing scope requires saying “no.” This can put designers in positions subordinate to non-designer managers in an awkward situation, for both. But that’s another story. Nevertheless, saying “no,” loud and clear, helps ensure success by producing no more than actually required for it. And success with little is a greater achievement than failure, or less success, with much.

Spinning Plate Tectonics

Strategies should be flexible enough to accommodate change (the only constant). The Constitution of the United States of America is a strategic document. Strategies, like constitutions, are about setting limits and defining boundaries. They say no to define yes (can one exist without the other?). When they reflect values worth defending according to essential principals of personal empowerment and happiness, we uphold them, naturally. E.g. “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” (Article Six). A great example of an interaction design constitution is Getting Real (PDF, 468kb), from 37 Signals. Getting Real reflects 37 Signals values and philosophy, as well as providing insight in to design-first methods and organizational models. All of which have been upheld by the tests of time and market success.

Do we get to practice such high ideals all the time? No, but we should strive to, continually according to our values, beliefs, experience, and known methods. That is; our constitution. And if we find our constitution not up to the challenge of continual improvement without sure or clearly attainable success, then we should admit that we have no values worth upholding: we’re just in it for the money, or recognition, etc. Which is fine, if we’re honest: people seeking those goals primarily can better pursue them by other means than planning, designing, producing, and quality assurance testing interactive media, which, by nature, require specific kinds of creative impulses.

Georgio Venturi and Jimmy Troost published a Survey on the UCD integration in the industry, asking the question “Does business management understand that usability and User Centered Design must be part of the business strategy?” Their results: Yes 61%. No 21%. No response/unknown 18%. Not so hot. How would your organization respond? Got Strategy?

This important and nascent work was spawned by the popularity, as evidenced by tens of thousands of downloads, of Garrett’s Elements of User Experience diagram, first published in March of 2000. I first discovered it, somehow, in 2001, while Project Coordinator for Seagate Technology’s web marketing group. I found it inspiring, if a little abstract, yet immediately recognized it’s usefulness as a conceptual model to help professional web designers to better distinguish the unique elements that should, if well and purposfully integrated, equal more than the sum of their parts.

The elements flow in ascending order from abstract conception to concrete completion:

• Visual Design
• Information Design, Interface Design and Navigation Design
• User Needs and Site Objectives
• Functional Specifications and Content Requirements
• Interaction Design and Information Architecture

These elements are then placed in a framework of “planes,” here in descending (and chronological) order, which also align a process beginning with abstract conception and, well, really beginning with concrete completion:

• Strategy
• Scope
• Structure
• Skeleton
• Surface

The implications of his model are many, and great. One is that—resulting from the emergence of “information architecture”—a user’s pleasure could, and should, come as a result of interaction and information design itself, and not just from the application of visual “eye candy.” Another is that the visual element of web design, which was previously confused with user interface (UI) design, is best thought of as an end result of the integration of other design disciplines, and less a means in itself. This is an extremely useful concept. It represented a new way of talking about web design as a collaborative process, with distinct rolls and responsibilities. And just in time: division of labor and skill specialization was by then, if still highly collaborative, becoming the norm for people working on websites of significant scope and scale.

I spent the dot-com-bust era teaching Web Interface Design at Silicon Valley College, where I tried to impress Garrett’s ideas on my students. Then, User Experience was a new concept, and, admittedly, an advanced notion for a new web designer. My real intent was to “front load” it for re-identification later, when the benefits of his ideas could be experienced directly, in the field.

While Garrett proved his humble genius in text I was calling web sites “communications / software.” Well, not too far off I guess. Though I had come to realize that human-human interaction via the web was a greater goal than human-computer interaction, where the first web boom had focused. I was not nearly as articulate as Garrett in all this, but at least recognized the simple beauty of his easily absorbed visualization of UX elements. The Elements of User Experience, his only book, yet, elaborates on and expands the concepts exampled in his diagrams without seeming the least bit pedantic, practicing reader-centeredness in every turn of phrase.

Some phrases can seem a little simplistic to us now. For example: “The practice of creating engaging, efficient user experiences is called user-centered design.” Certainly we now recognize the validity of various other approaches to web design, as well. Yes?

Though the use of “user experience / UX design” is now common, I think it is still poorly understood by the web design and development community as a whole, not to mention the business community that normally surrounds it. There is a great deal of evidence—the too frequently sorry results of any web search—that the need for this book is as great as ever. For web design as much as for culinary arts, the recipe is the thing. And a recipe doesn’t just provide ingredients, it provides the process by which ingredience are combined to equal more than a sum of parts. The process alone determines the relationship between elements. And The Elements of User Experience provides one of the best approaches to web design; for ingredients, process, and responsibilities alike.

Now, in April 2008, though the Garrett’s UX book may seem a little rudimentary to the experienced web professional, this friendly and accessible little tome has stood the test of time (published seven years ago), especially when compared to it’s more ephemeral shelf-mates: the normal life-span of a web design book is shorter than that of a Mosquitofish.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone not already very familiar with UX/UE design, especially those involved in business and strategy, web technology and development, as well as those newer to web design, and looking to deepen their knowledge of the benefits of an user-centered approach to it.

More User Experience.UX Design Books