West Coast Attitude

From a Rolling Stone interview with Bono on Steve Jobs (emphasis added):

What's the essence of his legacy? 

This dude, my friend, and I’m proud to say, my colleague – he changed music, he changed film, he changed the personal computer. It’s a wonderful encouragement to people who want to think differently, that’s where artists connect with him. The picture of Einstein with his tongue sticking out, that’s actually the very heart of the brand, and that’s the punk rock piece, the attitude, and the anarchic mind that dreamt up the 21st century. That’s a real encouragement for people who didn’t go to an Ivy League school, who don’t know how to use a knife and fork, who don’t have the right accent. That anarchic West Coast “fuck off” attitude actually rules the 21st century. That’s what's happening on the streets of Cairo, that’s what's happening in North Africa – received wisdom is being balked at. A gnarly, singular point of view, like Steve Jobs, feels like a lighthouse spinning: When you’re in the fog, you just go, “I'll go over there.”

Business leaders take note, I’m not sure it’s only artists who identify with this point of view.

(If you have five minutes, the entire Q&A is a good read.)

Groups of Fear

On Google+, Dave Gray asked about effective ways that humans organize themselves into groups. A combination of that question, the general political environment in the US right now, and some projects at work got me thinking (which can be dangerous).

One particularly effective way I think we humans organize ourselves is around common fears (or at least perceived common fears) – fear of an idea, a group, a person, a practice, etc. This is what political types call blocking coalitions, groups of people that ordinarily have nothing in common except their opposition to something (or someone). Their common fear doesn’t even have to be that well thought out or clearly articulated for such groups to be wildly effective. “Not this” or “not that” is usually sufficient, the enemy-of-my-enemy sort of thing.

As a group, people organized by fear can be a powerful force – though not always one for good.

Seems to me there is a design challenge in there. Because while these sorts of fear- or anger-based groups can be good at stopping things or steering a conversation to their interests, how often do they really address the root issue, rather than the thing that brought them together in the first place? My guess: not often.

This sounds like the sort of big meta-design problem we designers should be able to help reveal.

The Microsoft Ribbon, what’s up with that?

Microsoft has created some great tools over the years, but the ribbon isn’t one of them.

Two trends make me wonder if the good people at Microsoft have been paying much attention when it comes to user interface:

• Over the last ten years, the proliferation of LCD screens that are generally wider than they used to be.
• HD TV has made the 9:16 aspect ratio much more common for lots of people.

Enter the ribbon. Putting aside the task-centric structure for a moment, the ribbon takes up valuable screen real estate and cannot be moved. On a laptop, the result is a smaller effective work area that is cluttered, visually noisy, very short and very wide. This is not useful for most work.

Other companies, like Adobe, have figured this out. These companies seem to realize that people have work to do, and that those people may want to customize the software interface to more effectively do their work. For these crazy need-to-get-work-done people (aka “users” or “customers”), these companies have built “palettes” into their software, allowing people to move and resize those palettes in a way that makes sense based on their needs.

Heck, Microsoft has done this before. Office Mac 2008 had (wait for it) a “Format Palatte.” It wasn’t perfect, but it was on the side, and you could move it. I guess that camp lost the UI Battle of Redmond. Pity.

The ribbon does reveal additional functions, as it was designed. But it does an equally good job of hiding existing functions from people that regularly use them. I’d argue the net effect is neutral at best (gain some things, loose others).

So now the ribbon infects everything and appears to be here to stay. I wonder how much productivity in business has been and continues to be lost because of the ribbon?

Of Mice and Hotels

My wife was online the other night and started laughing uncontrollably. I asked what was so funny, and she brought her laptop over and pointed me to a hotel’s homepage, asking if I noticed anything unusual. I looked, and I really couldn’t find anything unusual until she pointed to the dropdown menu list:



Mice?

It turns out that mice is an acronym (Meetings, Incentives, Conferencing, Exhibitions). Who knew? Still, with bedbugs in the news, I wouldn’t expect to see mice on the homepage of a hotel.

I guess for people who know what mice means, this is fine. But I wonder how many people who visit this site are not mice-aware? And then there are OCD visitors like me that start investigating the mice section and forget about the rest of the site.

Just an amusing manifestation of the curse of knowledge.

My Grandfather’s Map

For Christmas, my mother gave me one of the most meaningful gifts I have received for some time. She had framed a map my grandfather drew when he was in his Tertia year at Penn Charter (the 1915-1916 school year, I think). I get weepy when I really think about it.

Though he was only around 15 when he drew it, it shows an attention to detail and craftsmanship that I have always associated with my grandfather, and also reminded me why I think making real things is so important.

Some disclaimers:

• I loved my grand-pop and have long considered him to be the spiritual source from which both my father and I inherited our respect of and devotion to making well-constructed things. (My wife probably labels this trait as compulsive and occasionally annoying. Sorry Hun.)
• I love steel pen-and-ink drawings. The line weight variations that are introduced as one changes pressure on the nib are a wonderful artifact that says a human being has made this.
• I love cartography and maps – the more detailed and well-designed the better. They may be one of the last graphic forms where the combination of good design and good printing yield something that just cannot be duplicated electronically.

You can’t read it on the image, but the title (in carefully lettered capitals) is Historical Map of the British Isles. It documents Heptarchy boundaries (I had to look that up), Roman roads, battles, and treaties. I assume it was done as part of a history study.

This map required homework and some serious thinking to execute – no Google Maps in 1915. For example, look at the latitude lines. If you had to draw a smooth, thin, shallow, 12-inch long arc with pen-and-ink today, how would you do it? (The map is about 12 x 18 inches.) You may not be able to tell, but the latitude lines are very thin and very smooth. And this is a 15-year old kid.

Ok, here’s the point…

This sort of thing matters today too. Everyone has Powerpoint and everyone can draw boxes and arrows and lines. And we know that everyone can add bullets galore. But evidence suggests that not everyone can draw a useful diagram, or construct a meaningful 2x2 model. And giving a presentation with really good typography and well-crafted graphics is a rarity.

Details matter.

I’m not sure if you can test for it, but the really good presentations that are continually referenced (Jobs, MLK, Godin, Gore, etc.) all reflect really good craftsmanship – these people pay attention to lots of details. And you should too, especially if your presentation includes tangible stuff like on-screen slides or paper handouts.

It doesn’t matter if you’re building a deck, carving a turkey, or drawing a map, paying attention to the details matter.

Update: AK-47 as story-telling success (or propaganda)?

In March, Dave Gray wrote a post where he referenced using the AK-47 as an example of good design thinking: designing stuff to work in the real world. He was not praising the gun, he was just using it as an example. He also mentioned that using the Kalashnikov as a subject for his speech probably gets people engaged better than some dry facts. I liked Dave’s post so much I pointed to it too.

Part of his story is retelling the development of the AK-47: how “Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47 because his homeland had been invaded by an enemy with superior weapons. He wasn’t a ‘hired hand of an industry, doing whatever was needed.’ He was a tank mechanic who saw fellow soldiers and civilians gunned down and wanted to ensure that it would never happen again.” It’s a great story, and one that has obviously succeeded for years. Only one problem:

It’s not true.

According to Wired, the AK-47 was the result of a multi-team effort to design a better gun. And the story about Kalashnikov? Soviet propaganda.

The “design for the real world” part of the story is still true, if not enhanced because it was a team (or teams) that created the weapon, not a lone genius. And in the real world, it’s often teams that need to create useful stuff, and that means checking your ego at the door sometimes and working together for the good of the client and the project.

But...

It is a weapon, hardly what we would call “useful stuff.” And the story about a tank mechanic defending his country isn’t true. It’s a good story. It’s lasted 50 years. And it is stickier than “industrial complex invents better gun.” But it is a lie in service to a political cause. (Or a former political cause.)

I’m a big proponent of good story-telling, it’s at the heart of good presentations and good branding. But isn’t there also an ethical component to developing a great narrative?

I think there is. I think the basic story has to be true. Exaggeration or hyperbole is fine, making stuff up is not.

Google News: design for democracy

Bruce Tognazzini has a great post on the bad redesign of Google News. He raises lots of good points on both the interface (which has gone very much backward) and the process (which seems to have ignored all sorts of user feedback and UI design theory), but his number one reason that the new Google News sucks is the one I find most interesting: political drift introduced.

He suggests that Google News has (prior to the redesign) helped Americans find the political center of any story because it has presented so many different sources in a reasonably un-biased way. He also points out something I have long believed: that while customizing news is seductive, it ultimately hurts one’s perspective by presenting narrower and narrower viewpoints.

It is disappointing that a company that has gotten so many design things right over the years got this one so, so wrong.

Business book mashup

Weird idea when you combine two recent business books’ ideas:

1. Design Thinking (Roger Martin). Basic idea: innovation requires balance of exploration and exploitation to move ideas from mystery to heuristic to algorithm. Organizations need exploration (creativity, few rules, etc.) to move stuff from one knowledge stage to the next, but need exploitation (classic business administration, streamlining, etc.) within the heuristic and algorithm stages to really make money at it and leverage an organization’s scale.

2. Drive (Dan Pink). Basic idea: traditional incentives (money, carrot, stick, etc.) only work as motivators for simple, straight forward, algorithmic tasks; but those motivators don’t work for more complicated, conceptual tasks that require creative thinking. Not only do they not work, they actually have a negative effect, proven again and again through countless psychology, sociology, and economic research.

This suggests that goals and metrics should depend very much on the context of a situation – more traditional metrics and rewards where exploitation is the goal (most easily applied when knowledge is at the algorithm stage), more intrinsic motivators when exploration is the desired outcome (that is, moving knowledge from one stage to the next).

New media, newer media

Interesting post by Seth a few days ago, his last line stuck out:

I saw a two-year old kid (in diapers, in a stroller), using an iPod Touch today. Not just looking at it, but browsing menus and interacting. This is a revolution, guys.

Whatever business you’re in, this applies to you. There may even be an inverse relationship between the strength of your disbelief or denial and the relevance to your job, business, industry.

We have met the enemy, and it is first-draft design

Excellent commentary by Nancy Duarte on the recent NYT article. (A more readable version of the original alarming graphic is also available.)

A few things about the graphic:

1) This is an example of a diagram that was probably developed by analysts to help them understand something. Think brainstorming. The presentation mistake here (aside from the general bullet bullet bullet approach) was trying to use the same diagram to explain things to people who were most likely not part of the original discussion. Of course it stinks for that purpose. To build on Nancy’s commentary on our first-draft culture, it’s easy to imagine the excited consultants transposing this diagram from a whiteboard into PP, then – confusing the effort that went into drawing it with its value – it subsequently showing up in every PP deck that discussed the topic for the next year. What appears to be missing was the second (or third) iteration: translating the understanding into a diagram that explains the important points.

2) As a consultant, and not knowing the full story, I am disappointed and embarrassed that this diagram ever made it out of the working group and onto the screen of a client. On the surface this seems like a pretty serious delivery failure. In my own experience I have often seen (and created) some pretty confusing diagrams and models in the course of trying to understand a complex problem or system. But those things usually end their life on a white board or as a scan, they rarely survive in their original form as a deliverable because they were never intended to be such. The final deliverable often bears no resemblance to the original because after we think we understand an issue, the focus changes to explaining it. And those questions are different (see Dan Roam), so the results are usually different. I have referred to this as iterative design but for it to work, you have to actually do the next iteration.

So the moral of the story is: do the second iteration, your audience will thank you.

One Little Thing

A little story about how one little thing makes a difference.

I am not a big TV tech guy. We watch TV, but are hopelessly non-digital, non-HD, non-Blu-Ray, etc. A month or two ago, our cable provider (a very large profitable company based nearby) sent us a nice note that said “if you’d like to keep watching your extended cable channels, you’ll need to get these little digital converter boxes for free, you luddites.” (Ok, they didn’t call us luddites.)

So I go online and get the boxes sent to us for self-installation. I’m fairly tech-savvy and figure that this will be pretty simple. The boxes came with good, clear instructions and setting them up was fairly straight-forward. So far so good.

I go online to activate the devices, and one out of three get turned on immediately. Still, no big deal, so I call the activation number and wait on hold for about 15 minutes. I’m ok with this – they let me know that their call volume is high, give me other options, so I’m patient and I wait. While I wait I look through their online FAQs and troubleshooting guide, but nothing about the situation at hand. I speak to a very friendly and helpful person who, after the requisite “is it turned on?” questions, activates both other boxes.

I think.

One of these boxes is larger and all the instructions clearly say “set your TV to channel 3” and “leave it be for 45 minutes while it loads your channels” and “it will turn itself off when it’s done.” So I eat, do some chores, come back. The box is still on, the TV is still nothing but static. I go online to see if this is normal. Back through the all FAQs etc., and find one that says: “if nothing happens after 45 minutes, try again.” So I do. And wait another hour. Still nothing but static. I call the support number again. This time I’m on hold for 30 minutes, maybe longer. When I finally get to a human being (also very nice), after I explain the situation (reset it 2 or 3 times, still no picture), the first thing she asks me is “is your TV on channel 3 or 4?” I switch to channel 4 and – wait for it – everything is working just fine. For all I know it was working just fine the first time, but in all my hunting I hadn’t seen one FAQ, instruction, troubleshooting answer, knowledgebase entry, or the like that said “try channel 4.”

I wondered if there had been something and I just overlooked it, so I went back to the site and hunted. Nope. I wondered if there was a hardware switch that I had overlooked. Nope. I looked back through all the simple instructions. Nothing there either.

This was not a huge big deal, just a minor annoyance. But my otherwise good experience (from getting the notice to ordering to setting up the hardware) was dramatically affected by one little thing (try channel 4). All the stuff I encountered was very helpful and explained very clearly what should happen and how do deal with certain known issues, but trying channel 4 wasn’t one of them.

If the company had included some additional tips online (the sort of thing I imagine is available to their call center staff), I could have been trying that at noon instead of 4:30, and my total experience would have been different.

One little thing.

Japanese Industrial Design

Reading about the new Mac OS – how it’s a lot of under-the-hood improvements but not many sexy new features – I got thinking about this from Wired, September 2001:

“In Japanese design, every little part, every little line, every little button is well thought-out. It’s as if each element is saying, ‘I am a part of this machine and I have to do my job, too, no matter how small.’ Next year’s model may not seem new, but it’s improved. And it’s not just consumer electronics. Look at a company like Honda. They’ll make a convertible sports coupe that could eat a Porsche Boxster alive on the racetrack, but it will look like a slightly pointy Civic. As a culture they’re not necessarily choosing to innovate: They choose to perfect.”

Gray Holland is part of the brain trust at frog design, the firm responsible for everything from Apple’s early look and feel to the new Ford Th!nk, an all-electric concept vehicle.

Eight years later it still seems to be true.

Design is contextual

Duh.

That design is contextual, or rather, good design is contextual is a bit of a duh. But still worth reminding ourselves from time to time.

I was reminded reading Garr Reynold’s recent posterous on Japanese elections. What I noticed first was how colorful the screen shots of election results from Japanese TV are and I have to admit my first thought was “wow, you’d never see that on CNN.” But that’s the point. As Garr noted, Japanese TV likes lots of color, it’s part of their visual grammar. So in context, it may be good design (the first chart is clear and makes its point) even though it probably wouldn’t ever appear on any US cable news.

But you don’t have to go overseas to find different contexts that call for different design. For example, creating a great presentation that works well in ballroom speech to 300 like-minded technical colleagues probably won’t translate in explaining (aka selling) the same idea to a small group of non-technical potential customers (buyers).

Getting it right versus getting it perfect

I’m a big fan of iterative design – getting something out there quickly and refining it along the way. I also recognize the limitations and dangers of this approach:

Too little planning. Rushing to get something out doesn’t release you from thinking about what you’re really doing. Lots of bad presentations happen this way – in a rush to get it done, no one seems to remember why or what they’re actually doing (audience, messages, etc).

No additional iterations. Just because you’ve hit the first milestone doesn’t mean the product is good or even halfway evolved. You can’t stop at the first draft, you have to actually keep developing to take advantage of the value if the approach. Usually fairly quickly (sometimes hours, not days or weeks).

Ego. To take advantage of a group’s collective insight (no matter how small the group), one must set one’s ego aside and really listen to comments and suggestions, adopting the ones that best serve the projects’ objectives. Not so easy.

But maybe the biggest challenge of iterative design is getting started – just doing it. There seems to be a basic human apprehension (at least among some of us) to put something out there if it’s not absolutely perfect. Of course, sometimes this is a good thing – I don’t want to use a bridge that was built off a napkin sketch – but often (especially within small teams) getting the first cut out quickly for some live feedback has real advantages. And if (or when) things change, then they change. No big deal. (As long as everyone knows that they may be looking at a work-in-progress.) Feedback from real users (the audience, customers, clients, etc.) has a great way of quickly focusing attention on what really matters.

Solving things ... or not

Human nature, and lots of us within our businesses, often rush to solve things – after all, that's what our clients pay us for, right? But sometimes, lots of additional dialog without a solution yields more value. The more complex an issue, the more unlikely it is that the immediate answer is the best one.

But listening can be difficult, especially when we really care about something or someone and believe that we know the answer. It can take time to really understand a different perspective, regardless of whether we agree with it or not. And many of us are impatient (I know I can be).

As we take more of our own conversations online, can we resist the lure of solving something before we really understand it?