Ghost in the Pixel

Just recounting a good nugget from a friend who’s a product manager at Adobe. He recently had the good fortune to participate in the BMW Performance School in South Carolina; so he was telling me all about the skills learned and tracks used, etc.

One of the things that stuck with me is how a true performance driver, when there’s an obstacle on the road, doesn’t look at the obstacle, but instead looks around it. Why? Very simple. Your hands will follow your eyes. If you’re looking at that box in the road, your hands on the wheel steer toward it, but if make a note, and you move your eyes to the path around it, your hands will steer towards that unobstructed path. I like it! Makes sense, right? But we often just freeze up and stare at that obstacle–the immediate threat.

I can totally see this applying to ordinary business and design issues at work:

As designers we’re often stymied by some obstacle (lack of team help, project cancelled, feature cut, usability results not used, etc.) so instead of “looking at” the obstacle, just divert your attention to the positive path around and your “hands” (body, mind, attitude) will follow with practical results. The hard part is to seek out that path forward, while keeping the project moving forward as the path may not present itself for a few days or weeks even! But either way, avoid the head-on collision or ugly skidding/fishtailing by being so focused on the obstacle.

(And if you do fishtail, my friend said there’s some slick maneuvers to get out of it…well, in a Beemer anyway :-)

Per my prior experiences at Cisco and BEA Systems in particular, where I was part of major efforts to establish a user experience program and design process/approach overall… There are many difficulties on the road to design goodness in the corporate realm, but rather than a tedious laundry list, the challenges are best summarized by this wonderfully appropos quote by Niccolo Machiavelli, from The Prince:

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.

Niccolo Machiavelli

To briefly elaborate in practical terms, the major obstacles to a new design initiative are (again, from my own viewpoint & experiences) …

1. Lack of an authentic, obsessive concern for creating world-class products and services (instead, folks are jockeying for political position and ego-saving favors, etc.)

2. Focus on deeply granular documentation rather than imaginative, progressive designs (ie, specs precede the design)

3. Excessive emphasis on formalizing, regularizing, and itemizing every. single. step. of. the. design. process. to the Nth degree…so much so that the design activity is ultimately killed and buried in an avalanche of bureaucratic rigor (and the design value is lost)

4. And just plain ol’ clinging to “what’s been done before” b/c it’s familiar and comfortable, especially in organizations where “Lifers” prevail, preserving the stability of “normalcy” which might be nice and happy but ultimately kills a company (and the customer base) in globally networked & competitive consumer markets

And of course, there’s just tremendous psychological and cultural baggage to overcome, often expressed as fear, insecurity, anxiety, paranoia, or typical political/ego/power/territory issues…Makes me wonder if in some veritable sense designers must function as “corporate therapists” to help companies notice these difficulties and provide a positive path forward, easing them along (perhaps with explosive moments of radical visions and brainstorming, etc.). To do so, however, takes an enormous amount of patience and endurance (like a triathlete) to weather all the storms and navigate all the obstacles to success. Hats off to those who persevere!

Update: Andrei has recently published a column for Print itemizing three pertinent trends for 2009, which incidentally all involve returning to the basics of good software design: visual reductionism, simplifying interactions, and direct manipulation/feedback/selection methods. A very nice reminder that what’s “old” is often what’s needed for the “new” to demonstrate experiential value.

A cornerstone of my lectures in class, talks at events like the CodeCamp, and my practice at the studio, is a set of UI design principles that shape the crafting of a good interface, and thus a memorable, rewarding user experience.

These principles are drawn from graphic design, interaction and interface design…and more specifically from a keystone document authored by Andrei Herasimchuk at his company, Involution Studios (where I was a senior designer for a few client engagements; also Andrei and I co-taught a UI Design class last year).

I’ve taken much of that content, re-mixed with my own thoughts and perspectives, and created the following PDF– User Interface Design Principles– to help other student designers, and those new to the field get a better grasp of what’s involved in a good digital product UI.

Click the image to download the PDF