Category: Good Books

Good book: Do you matter?

Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company by Robert Brunner, Stewart Emery, Russ Hall

I’ve been reading this book co-written by Robert Brunner, former director of Apple’s Industrial Design Group and principal at Pentagram, the globally renowned design firm. (and according to Valley Wag, helped design the Amazon Kindle) Designed by Pentagram, the book offers a nicely digestible account of design’s value to business success, particularly for business folks (execs, directors, managers, etc.) who may still be unconvinced of “pursuing good design” as a fundamental business mission/prerogative.

For designers like myself, I feel there’s really not much earth-shatteringly novel or mind-blowing–we’ve all heard these points before of course. Yet they bear repeating with refreshed examples, from Geico to Samsung to P&G and others, as Brunner, et al does in the text.

The vital takeaway is the point about designing for the “emotional connection”–ensuring that your product and/or service is conceived as a portal to a total, integrated, cohesive “customer experience supply chain” that is memorable and rewarding. While I wholeheartedly agree, personally I find that particular phrasing (“customer experience supply chain”) a bit awkward and Dilbert-esque. Yet I must admit that it strongly parallels what I’ve been advocating lately, for an “integrative aesthetic experience” where the core elements (like Dan Saffer’s touchpoints and service moments) resonate into a coherent whole–a true experience in the Deweyan sense.

Ultimately, it’s about delivering an experience that propels a customer’s sense of being alive, as the authors state in the concluding chapter. This of course is a deeply emotional, personal, and HUMAN aspect that number-crunching CEO’s often don’t grok well, but designers do! Personally it’s great to see someone talking about this in a design book aimed at business suits, directly reflecting the language of Joseph Campbell, which address profound social/humanistic issues beyond profits and sales…but influence such economic success metrics.

Below are some of the most memorable and noteworthy quotes from the text that I will certainly keep referring back to:

  • Effective design establishes the emotional relationship you develop with a brand through the total experience, to which a service or product provides a portal.
  • You matter to your customers only to the extent that you have become connected to their emotional needs and desires.
  • You don’t sacrifice the user experience for growth; you drive growth from the quality of the experience.
  • Design-driven companies don’t design to the way they manufacture (code); they manufacture (code) to the way they design.
  • Executing great design is everybody’s job, not just the designer’s.
  • Being design-driven is a process, not an event; unless you’re willing to make fundamental changes, you’ll go back to doing the same old thing.
  • If design resided in research alone, there would be more great design.

The Gladwell “trilogy”

Whew, I just wrapped up Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, which completes an intellectually amusing trilogy of sorts bound by the common theme of observing ordinary phenomena to deduce obvious yet fascinating patterns to lead to massive gamechangers. As more of a quick note to myself, below is my own rundown of the core idea or “golden nugget” if you will of each of Gladwell’s bestselling books:

The Tipping Point: over time and through the interconnectedness of people, ideas, organizations, certain concepts primed per some moment in time/history/context become massively popular, spreading like viruses in epidemic fashion

Blink: through well experienced, judicious, and carefully honed sense of “thin slicing” of a situation, you can gain equal or more information and thus make accurate decisions, than via tedious, laborious extensive research studies and quantitative analyses

Outliers: genius is not just luck or self-made per the typical myth we tell ourselves, but is in fact ecological, or dependent upon some specific patterned history of events and contexts (social, economic, political, educational, etc.)

Great quotes from Ive and Jobs

I’ve recently been re-reading “Inside Steve’s Brain” which I had previously blogged about with great affection and enthusiasm–every designer and (more importantly) product manager, director, and executive should absorb its valuable lessons! Here are a few particular noteworthy passages:

“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”– S Jobs

** IMHO, that part about truly deeply madly understanding something is vital to ensuring that a designer is NOT treated as a lipstick artist but instead instrumental to defining and shaping the quality of experience, and must be respected as such from the beginning, not thrown in at the end of a clean-up phase prior to release.

“We have assembled a heavenly design team…By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare. In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work.“– J Ive

** I love this part about the shared social/cultural/behavioral memory of the organization outlasting the artifacts of the process and teamwork. Very tantalizing concept that few managers really get in large company environments, design-based or otherwise.

On the central task of a designer, Ive says the task is to

“solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so you have no sense how difficult this thing was.” Conversely, the designer fails if the design is too obvious, complicated, creating more problems, and calling attention to itself and distracting from the fluidity of the user’s experience/activity…

And on prototyping’s essential value to the design process, Ive continues:

“We make a lot of models and prototypes, and we go back and iterate. We strongly believe in prototyping and making things so you can pick them up and touch them. We make lots and lots of prototypes: the number solutions we make to get one solution is quite embarrassing, but it’s a healthy part of what we do.”

Good book: Inside Steve’s Brain

Inside Steve’s Brain by Leander Kahney

I’m still making my way through this relatively compact book (about 200 pages)–typical of me I tend to read multiple books at once–but so far I can say this is a fabulously compelling and insightful look at Apple’s product innovation process and philosophy, all emanating from perhaps one of the most extraordinary individuals in the business. This is not some gossip rag (although there are some admittedly juicy morsels of his temper). In fact it’s more like a business case study, with examples from Apple as well as Pixar, and references to Chiat/Day.

As the author describes, there’s a fascinating mirroring between Steve’s personality and Apple’s business/brand/design–his persona truly manifests and makes their business, perhaps unlike any other company that I can think of, short of Disney (Walt Disney), Ben & Jerry’s, or Dyson (James Dyson)! Most enjoyable (and valuable takeaways) are the “Steve’s Lessons” at the end of each chapter itemizing classic Steve-isms like “Everyone’s either a bozo or a genius” or general principles such as the obsessive drive to focus and simplify (hint, hint all you product managers chronically infected with featuritis!) or pay attention to details, even at the pixel level.

The mix of quotes and anecdotes from Jonathan Ive, Steve Jobs, and various others (including my former Cisco VTG UX boss, Cordell Ratzlaff) provide delicious fodder for those clamoring for examples/evidence to point to in the face of design skepticism at the office. Every product manager, engineer, QA engineer, and related professional engaged in hi-tech innovation simply must read this book. Every designer should read this book (particularly if you are jaded, cynical, or have given up) to re-energize your passion and imagination…and fire up the will to make “insanely great” products.

On a bit of a downer note, the author’s writing suggests that a hi-tech company desiring breakthrough products can only achieve it if the CEO truly *gets* design, users/customers, innovation, and has that amazingly innate knack for “picking a winner”. The CEO’s personality must equal the business. Which is probably why companies like HP, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Dell, AT&T, and similar corporate behemoths whose CEO’s don’t give a damn about good design (or have at best a weak, commercially hyped sense of “user experience” as insipid lip service) will never achieve the Apple level of perceived excellence. In that regard, Apple and Steve Jobs exemplify a powerfully unique model that may never happen again in silicon valley. So soak it up now!

Good book: Dreaming in Code

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

This insightful read provides an engaging and sobering look at the trials and tribulations of software development from the programmer’s perspective, by chronicling Mitch Kapor‘s unfulfilled attempt at designing & coding a novel piece of PIM software (code-named Chandler), during the last few years up in San Francisco. At times a bit tedious in the arcane coding issues, but presents in mostly layman’s terms concepts like refactoring, source control, object modularity, inheritance, etc. as well as project management debacles, heavy processes, the human dimension of it all. And it showcases so well the inherent hell of building good software…and that many top coders are more like artists than we think :-)

There’s a few chapters about UI design, but the story revealed a flawed sense of how design should intersect and coordinate with software engineering. Or even prototype-based innovation! I find it ironic that Kapor is the author of “the software manifesto” in 1990 which extols user experience as a paramount goal, yet this story shows he has no real understanding of how to propagate it throughout a software dev process. The coders are itching to code, alot of folks are simply volunteers, there’s a lone graphic designer handling it all, with constant language confusion between backend and GUI folks, etc. Plus the requirements are being written while the product is being coded… It’s quite literally the same damn story everywhere in the valley!

What I really enjoyed: the author injected notable software history as well, from Alan Kay to NATO (did you know that the first software engineering conference was held by NATO, b/c of the impending crisis of software complexity overwhelming human cognition and planning efforts? (stemmed from a failed IBM project, the RS/360) So clearly it had no effect: Windows is still many million lines of code! :-)

But the ultimate moral of the story as Kapor says it, “software is hard.” I think it’s a great lesson for designers to understand as well, and the Chandler project reveals the difficulty and pain. It might be just “pixels and code” you can tweak at a keystroke (or mouse click) but that doesn’t make it easy!