Category: General Stuff

I recently finished reading Insanely Simple by Ken Segall, the former creative head of Chiat/Day, which did Apple ads (print and television) for almost 20 years. Overall takeaway: it’s a very gushy, “Apple (and Steve) can do no wrong” tone, somewhat gossipy read that tries to shoehorn the notion of “simplicity” in various ways. The author personifies a visceral, existential dual between Complexity and Simplicity, relaying anecdotes from Apple, but also comparisons with Dell, Intel, HP and other clients for whom he’s done creative work. 

My friends and colleagues would agree whole-heartedly I’m an “Apple fan” who loves to wax poetically about the wonderful, amazing products and interfaces coming out of Cupertino–but don’t most designers? ;-) I own several Apple devices (including 3 Macbook Pro’s and this Macbook Air I’m typing on), and still have my original iPhone and original Mac mini. I’ve enjoyed all of them immensely, despite various minor flaws here and there; after all, nothing is perfect! From the delight of midnight pre-ordering to the joy of unboxing to the fulfillment of daily use…there is a holistic silhouette of a positive experience carried across, reinforced by the brand of Steve Jobs’ Apple. 

However, today for my first time I reluctantly returned an Apple device, the iPad mini. Shock and disbelief, I know ;-)  But this story is actually more than mere dissatisfaction of a specific product, but hinting at tremors of strategic concern in the back of my mind about the future of Apple as provider of beautiful disruptive innovation. 

First, the iPad mini…Why did I return it? In a nutshell: 

– No Retina display, text rendering was poor and blurry, caused major eye strain
– Smaller touch targets (and I have small hands!), everything seemed shrunk
– It’s yet another device I gotta manage (a more prevalent problem, sigh…)
– It’s frankly not an innovative product, but a reactive one (more on this below)

Thus, I couldn’t from my POV justify $362 (total price with tax). That said, the thin light slate form factor with a clean stylish appearance is exquisitely crafted and was really quite nice to hold and carry.

Second, those concerns in the back of my mind…perhaps more of an issue symbolically, to me at least, is that the iPad mini does not represent the trademark Apple spirit of disruptive innovation, but of “me too” reactionism. This was very clear in the introductory live-streamed event, with the direct side-by-side visual and verbal comparisons to the Google Nexus 7. It’s quite literally an iPad just shrunk down to compete with lower cost and lower margin/no-margin alternatives from Google and Amazon. No doubt the iPad mini will sell millions and make billions, with lots of happy faces this holiday season. But, so does McDonald’s :-) 

So I keep coming back to this question: where’s that authentic Steve Jobs-inspired Apple innovation? Not just for the iPad mini but also iOS at-large, which is feeling rather outdated in 2012 with it’s wiggly icons, and infuriating  multi-tap sequence to just change the damn brightness. Where’s the magical use of NFC to directly send content between devices? Or novel gestures for navigation, orientation, manipulation, particularly from the bezel and edges…or from underneath? Or fresh, engaging cross-device, multi-screen interaction models like Wii U and XBOX SmartGlass are starting to advance?  (Every time I see those cute iPad mini ads with the two iPads side-by-side, I keep thinking something cross-device will happen, like magically I move a photo from one iPad to the other…but sadly no). Or a service comparable to Google Now, which anticipates and provides information on-demand, collated from your prior aggregated interactions? Or go all out like the now-dead but still fascinating MS Courier concept, really pushing the possibilities for hardware and software? 

There’s great opportunity for UI and UX innovation (or even just convenient improvements) that could’ve been tentatively introduced in the iPad mini as a “dipping the toe in the water” before spreading to the iPad, iPhone, MacBooks, etc. So it’s curious and disappointing to see that didn’t pan out yet. Instead it seems Apple panicked and reacted, instead of leaping ahead to what’s next, by-passing the whole argument altogether and envisioning something we didn’t realize we really needed…and would delightfully enjoy. 

** By the way, two recent posts by others go deeper into the challenges Apple faces beyond just “removing skeuomorphism” and the need to fight for innovation as a disruptive voice at the executive level. Both are quite good and deserve more than a few moments to reflect upon. I agree, there seems to be something amiss in this post-Steve era that removing faux leather stitching or reacting to competitors just won’t fix. And all it takes is returning a single product, to expose that.

 

Start-ups face myriad challenges in their initial formative years (or months, actually ;-) … Raising money, validating concepts, ensuring the right killer feature(s), making sure the code is robust, and increasingly, having a persuasive, engaging design that speaks to quality and trust as they introduce a new brand to the world. Indeed, design matters for sure.

From a UX perspective, however, “design” is way more than just colors, fonts, and style treatments (which are all important). “Design” necessarily involves a diligent, thoughtful translation of that beginning “felt opportunity” towards a viable “live product”, ensuring proper fit with the target audience and market situation. To break it down further, there are multiple steps along this translation…and things can get lost or confused, due to lack of proper focus and/or understanding.

Felt Opportunity: the initial vague, fuzzy, nascent notion that something in this domain (healthcare, finance, elder care, child education, etc.) can be improved, ascertained via personal experience with a routine activity, like comparing hotel prices or monitoring server performance or dealing with senior adult care.

Concept Solution:  a rough demonstration of how your product/service solves the issue in a compelling manner.

Business Model: thoroughly detailed (and visualized) statement of market value creation and making money! What’s in it for the investors, customers, users, etc. and how is that achieved with sound growth plans, etc. Creating and capturing and delivering value, particularly returns for investors…

UX Model: combining your primary personas and core scenarios into a well-considered articulation of the service and system elements, flows and activities, critical ecosystem of parts, delivery plans, device use, into a nicely visualized statement. A corollary to the Business Model above.

UI Expression: how is the UX model expressed in the UI in an intuitive, meaningful way that’s technically feasible per platform and device targets. Also, the key patterns and elements and components that will enable this to be a lively interface worthy of use, both satisfying and delightful. 

Live Product: the final vision made real, in actual pixels and code and usage metrics, all validated and iterated cyclically as part of a successful, ongoing product lifecycle and business plan, going forward. And still retains the original “spark of passion” of the felt opportunity, or maybe pivoted accordingly into a new direction via validated learnings along the way. (That’s ok too! Part of the game of startup life…)

There are many more steps, but these are the broad brush strokes that I’m focusing on for now, which could be very well happening in levels of simultaneity. How is the vision translated into something real along the way? It takes conversations and collaborations, with clear statements of intent along the way. Understanding that intent, really chewing it up and spitting it out and recombining all over again for each area. And along the way, you may mess up or realize the translation isn’t working out, gotta go back and revisit…and then you really pivot ;-) Not easy, a truly unenviable challenge, but hugely rewarding if all goes well. 

I’ve often written about the value of rapid prototyping your designs, with an edge towards going high-fidelity quickly so you can glean more accurate feedback from target users, which cycles back into the product design process. There’s also ample value for going low-fidelity too, particularly with rough physical prototypes, made with found materials in the studio, a la Stanford d.school :-)  

I’ve recently been assigned to a UI project exploring various forms of “multi-modal” interactions across devices (phones, tablets, laptops, large HDTV, roaming robots, etc.). There’s understandably much debate around what constitutes the best interactions (voice, touch, gesture, etc.) given the variety of contexts and assumed purposes or core tasks to be completed. Much of that debate gets captured on whiteboards and nice Illustrator diagrams. Lots of sketching ensues of the device screens and possible UI affordances and behaviors. 

But that’s just all very… theoretical. You’ve got to get physical fast. Make physical models of the devices and actively “act out” the interactions…in effect, dramatizing the prototype using “Wizard of Oz” staging techniques or simply “Bodystorming” (Ugh, I hate that word actually…it’s just acting. We all did that as kids!). So why is this helpful?

Drawing sketches, while necessary to get warmed up thinking about and probing the problem space, is actually rather inaccurate for helping to inform tangible decisions impacting the shape and behavior. You’re having an internal debate of how things may or may not function in actuality. Things do get foggy up in the ol’ noggin!  Even the most expert visualizers (who are surgeons, by the way…it’s true!) train and practice with real physical models to test their assumptions and verify actualities. There’s a valuable, rewarding, memorable learning and understanding that happens via the hands, feeling out the materials and textures and angles/joints/connections of physical pieces, separate from the ephemerality of animated pixels. 

Other benefits to physicalizing your prototypes:

* Forces you to consider posture, position, proximity, with your whole body and body space, as well as entire environment. As Raz Al Gul said while mentoring Batman (Bruce Wayne), “Always mind your surroundings!” ;-)

* Alerts you to possibilities, discovering pros/cons as you see it acted out, particularly with gestures and mixed modalities of interactions: In the car, in a cubicle, in a loud busy cafe, on a crowded bus, etc.

* It’s fun! there’s something very collaborative and engaging about creating rough models that folks can play with, poke at, shake around, and try things out. We “know” it’s all fake but can lead to novel discoveries and trigger associative ideas in other peers’ heads, per their unique experiences. 

* You can put them in the hands (literally) of other people, like your target users for initial conceptual high-level evaluations to see if you’re on the right track. And, this leads to great conversation fodder, as users love to play with them, hold and manipulate the artifacts, suggesting other ideas!

Finally, dramatizing also helps communicate your ideas robustly to remote development teams: just record short video clips on your smartphone (using your peers as hand models ;-)  and send along with some verbal commentary. Static sketches simply don’t do justice for conveying complex, multimodal behaviors. You gotta build quick prototypes, to illustrate the intent, and gather support for your ideas.

 

 

Every hero has an “origin story”, which we love to see unfold, whether in the pages of a comic book, or on the big screen at the cineplex. We witness the original motives, historical factors and coincidental elements that conspired to manifest this hero and possible journeys of self-development (villains are often a big part of this). There’s a dramatic path of hope, dread, fatigue, despair, fulfillment, joy… and not necessarily in that order! Ultimately, we achieve a fuller, richer sense of this hero, cheering that character on accordingly.

The same can be said for a start-up. Let me explain…

I recently started advising start-ups as part of the Citrix Startup Accelerator on a part-time basis, in further evolution of my role as a Principal Designer (that’s a whole other post to be written ;-). In my first “UX Advisory” session with a start-up founder, I began rather conversationally, asking for his “origin story”–without PowerPoint! That’s vital, as I really wanted to know what made this founder tick… on the inside.

This person (and his small dedicated team) are spending their own money, burning through lots of midnight oil, to achieve something they believe will change the world in some way…but why? What’s driving them? This relates back to something a former CMU professor once described as the “felt difficulty” that we sense when something is outta whack yet needs to be corrected. It’s that itch in the mind that we just can’t or won’t let go, until we solve it somehow. As Morpheus said in The Matrix, it’s “the splinter in your mind…driving you mad.”

In order for me to offer proper service to this start-up (and others) I gotta understand what’s really driving them, what’s the origin of the “felt difficulty” they sought to correct. Often it may be a lifelong pursuit, or childhood hobby that  has become a professional passion. This reveals the heart and soul of why…the deeper motives that a PPT of a business model doesn’t truly convey. That’s all important, of course, but as a UX Advisor who’s trying to help a small band of pirates try to dominate a market with a novel, disruptive product/app/service, I need to empathize with their predicament that they feel needs fixing. I must understand their origin…how they came to be, where they are now, and where they aim to be in the near future. What’s their mission? What is heroic success to them? 

As I told this fellow, I’m happy to offer input on colors, fonts, icon styles (which I did ;-) …but my chief concern as an advisor is to enable a deft translation of their vision with clear, strong intent into the interface and consequential experience for their users. And for me, that comes from understanding their origin story. The seeds are all there for nurturing a powerful offering which will set the stage for the start-up to truly become a hero for their market.