Category: General Stuff

What does it take to make breakthrough, game-changing visionary designs that transform human attitudes/behaviors or entire markets? Well in a word, a LOT :-) I don’t have the answers. But my previous post on design readings scratches a bit at this complex surface of design potential. Below are some key insights I’ve gathered in my recent readings and 10 yrs of pro experience…

• To achieve radical insights you need both observation of actual human behaviors in their context AND imagination of what could be (with a healthy dose of empathy). It’s an alchemical blend of analysis > interpretation > synthesis that takes more than a hint of personal ingenuity and clever thinking.

• You must apply a critical lens of examining the activity, the experience, the emotional value, and the fundamental purpose / meaning your endeavor is striving for. In essence, why is this design needed? Why does it matter? Why do you matter?

• You’ve got to tap into some customer invisibles:

>> unmet expectations: What are they expecting to get done, at a basic pragmatic level of performance and utility? How can you go beyond that?

>> tacit knowledge: I love how the new iPad ad mentions “you already know how to use it”. What knowledge/experience/abilities do your users already tacitly possess and employ and how can you leverage that? Metaphors, models, skills from pre-existing domains and situations, etc.

>> latent aspirations: What are your customers / users really striving for? What do they believe in and cherish? What do they dream of??

No doubt uncovering these invisibles takes some subterfuge and nuancing of traditional usability methods. Perhaps the answers are not in the people themselves but in their context, culture, trends, etc…

 

So here’s what I’ve been reading lately on my iPad (thanks to the Kindle App ;-)

 

• ReWork: a brief passionate manifesto by the 37Signals folks, expressing their philosophy of work. It’s fun and catchy and brilliant, although not necessarily appropriate for everyone or every project situation…but a great short read!

 

• DRiVE: another fun insightful book by Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, which I enjoyed. Delves into some new theories of human behavioral motivation, contradicting long-held assumptions about extrinsic vs intrinsic rewards, etc.

 

• Design-Driven Innovation: really good survey on the value of “design-driven” approaches and the primacy of creating meaning when striving for game-changing products/services. (that’s a lot of participles ;-)

 

• Change by Design: by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO. Nice summary of “design thinking” from his worldview of leading a global innovation firm. The money quote: “Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, recognize patterns, construct ideas with emotional value, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols”…lots more!

 

 

Just sharing a few notable links that caught my eye (and mind) recently…Enjoy!

 

• Dan Saffer’s online interview with Want magazine: A bit long but filled with interesting thoughts ranging from personable robots to “designing for the Long Wow” to gestural/touch languages. Highly recommend taking the time to read and view the video!

 

• Marty Cagan’s Open Letter to the design community: Again, a bit lengthy but some valuable insights and lessons shared on truly getting good design done effectively within complex, corporate environments. There are some possibly controversial points, perhaps, going against the grain of typical canonical UCD thinking, but in my view speaks quite accurately about the pragmatics of design issues like… prototyping, design deliverables, exec engagement, and of course job titles/roles/duties.

 

• Why SaaS companies suck at making usable products: An informative summary of reasons why many SaaS enterprise offerings are dreadful in terms of usability, with recommendations for how to alleviate the pain. (much of it inspired by Steve Krug’s popular usability guidebooks)

 

Today I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in SF thanks to a free day pass. Otherwise I probably would not have gone. Why? It’s 2010. Aren’t we supposed to be at Web 4.0 by now? Seriously. I feel that meme has been just so overexploited and grown tired, becomingly effectively meaningless, a typical Dilberty buzzword, vacuous and inane. But hey it was free…and I got a few golden nugget takeaways :-)

Yes, there’s the usual “in the bubble” rah-rah about clouds, social, rich, etc. But here’s what grabbed my attention:

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* The Facebook Era by Clara Shih. Basically rhapsodizing on the Facebook phenomenon, per her recently published book. She spoke of the consumer psychological impact and cultural movement symbolized by Facebook: always on, sharing, commenting, liking, networking, etc. According to her, sites like FB, LinkedIn, Twitter (note the total absence of MySpace–is it dead?) make the “cost of staying in touch so low”. (Dunno about that, in terms of the literal billions of minutes worldwide of lost productivity and fragmentary attention spans, discursive relations, interruptive chats). She spoke of “weak tie relationships” and “ever expanding rolodexes” thanks to these sites, which have become indispensable and have to be leveraged in our apps/offerings.

* Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch on-stage interview. Of course the “elephant in the room” was raised, re: HTML vs Flash and Apple’s strict stance. Lynch made clear that his position is “”freedom of choice on the web is the key question”, to enable people to “express themselves”. He obliquely referred to Apple: “some want to wall off parts of the web”, and cited analogies to the railroad system in 1800’s with various rail gauges/sizes that had to become standardized to enable innovation. Also mentioned Open Screen initiative by Adobe, for cross-device interactive media…and Omniture, which is for “analytics and optimization of web content” to allow A/B testing. Another quote: “It’s now passé to talk about experience matters, and that’s great…we can now focus on APIs, clouds, client apps to enable great experience.”

* Ecommerce disrupters: A series of short presos by various dot com innovators/leaders. Mostly a blur to me, but a few choice ideas: “Simple is intelligence”, referring to reducing the vast quantities of consumer choice online to a few distinct offerings that really matter to a customer’s life. And “Don’t use data to guess…instead build a customer relationship”. Avoid the trap of predicting and spamming and over-advertising (info overload/featuritis). Dig deeper and understand customer motives and loyalty/disloyalty incentives.

* Slideshare: CEO Rashmi Sinha described some lessons learned in building and expanding this popular site for hosting/sharing PPT slideshows (and now videos too). For ex: The social web is visual, citing people’s desire to create, express with images and videos. You should build a strong core, and use multiple platforms for distribution (like facebook, twitter, google, iphone, etc.) to grow customer reach/loyalty/mindshare. Strive to reinvent paradigms, citing HP’s publishing their announcement of buying Palm as a Slideshare preso. (not your typical press release) Finally keep expanding your vision, this case with Slideshare now going beyond PPT slides, now getting into videos/movies by users.

* EBay Simple Lister beta: This was a cool demo of Silverlight 4. The speaker also described the process of designing/coding the product in just 8 short weeks, starting with (of course) sketching with pen/paper > clickable comps with rough hand-drawn style > fully interactive prototype. All using MSFT Expression Blend and Sketchflow tools.

* Clouds/Web 2.0: This session was more about distilling some core concepts and defining them or at least reach some common understanding with the audience. The speaker, from Rackspace, led the discussion by raising simple but important questions: what’s web 2.0? what’s cloud? what’s open? No real closure but interesting debate…

OK so you’ve been invited to present to the design team and meet personally with various designers 1-on-1. What should you expect? How should you prepare? Here’s some general tips to help.

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* Portfolio presentation: Again, show your best work with more elaboration of process and follow-through. Tell a compelling story that presents your solutions, abilities, and approach. I personally like to see a range, with evidence of sketching :-)

* If you are a junior designer, fresh out of school: expect questions about your short-term goals, your insights from class projects, what you hope to learn, appraisals of your passion/eagerness to learn (as well as for the domain) and specific skills for on-the-ground kinda work (creating deliverables, making presentations, taking direction from senior level folks, handling criticism and ability to grow)

* If you are a mid-level designer, with 3-5 yrs of experience: expect questions about lessons learned in your work, likes/dislikes about project phases and approaches, general career goals/paths, collaboration experiences, areas of growth/learning, evidence of adaptability, dealing with multiple projects.

* If you area senior designer, with 7+ yrs of experience: expect discussions about your design philosophy, principles, career vision/path, strategic thinking about problems, staging conversations with stakeholders (including executives), management/directing of designers and projects, etc.

* For anybody, expect a design exercise as a way to feel firsthand your ability to assess a problem quickly and generate solutions on the fly with input from the interviewers. It’s not really about the solutions per se, but your thinking style and design approaches. Do you like to write a bunch of stuff first or draw a lot of stuff? Are you referencing common patterns and models? Are you drawing logical inferences? Are you pulling creative insights from other domains or samples in your past work? Can you speak clearly and effectively and take criticism well?

* And as they always say, be yourself, be authentic and true. Putting on a slick sales job doesn’t help much (unless you’re applying for “evangelist” ;-)

* Finally, if you’re applying for a design position, make sure you really mean it. I know how everybody says they want to do design, research, manage, or somehow avoid “being silo’d” and try to weasel out with some vague, general language when asked “what do you want to do”. Just pick one focus/passion with evidence to back it up. Wanna be a designer? Then man up and show that you deserve to be in that role. (likewise for research, docs/writer, etc.)