Ghost in the Pixel

Well, it’s been a rather hectic & intense year with travel, summits, workshops, etc. Many achievements “unlocked”, so to speak. However, it’s also good to sit back and itemize some critical lessons learned in the course of all the madness of the past year. Here are my top lessons which I will try to carry forward into the new year…

Whew, what an amazingly hectic and crazily productive year it’s been! And again, I’m feeling truly blessed and fortunate to have had some incredible opportunities with a fantastic team to work on futuristic concepts, speak internationally, and interact with design students. Here’s a brief roundup of some big things I’ve accomplished this year while at Citrix as Principal Designer:

This recently came up at work as part of an email discussion thread…Below are some excerpts of my own responses, formatted for public consumption. Enjoy!

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Skeuomorphism is certainly a hot topic in the UX community… but not amongst users, per se. I have never heard a user say the word, or complain about the alleged problems of skeuomorphism (which I myself only learned about just recently, after practicing design for 10+ years). Only designers do! Go ahead, ask a random person at the bus stop and they’ll look at you like you’re from Mars.

The two driving affronts IMHO to “elite designer sensibilities” of the anti-skeuomorph argument are (a) tackiness of visual form like a gaudy faux stitched leather and (b) intense desire to cleanly break from historical, literal metaphors much like the Futurists did in 1900s with painting (recall Marinetti’s famous declaration: “What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?”) . So, taste and history. Hmm…

I don’t know of any actual studies on task efficiency/effectiveness or other usability metrics impacted by skeuomorphs, or serving as basis of anti-skeuomorph arguments, but love to hear of any if folks know about that! :-)

Key value-add aspects of UI chrome & skeuomorphic designs: visual affordances for cuing, framing and anchoring elements to give sense of orientation and focus, sense of place amidst richly interactive space. Really a matter of finding that “sweet spot” of balance between affordance, content, functionality, discoverability…and delight!

This essay in MIT Tech Review has good points too:

“Windows Phone may look like the future, but iPhone looks like home.” I think that nails it! Metro is very slick and cool and innovative, but will customers warm up to it? Time will tell. It’s always a struggle, futurism vs familiarity. There’s no easy answer.

And, as for Citrix Product Design philosophy…We don’t really have a specific point on this. We’re advocating clean, simplified, beautifully engaging designs for useful, coherent admin and end-user experiences across devices/platforms, via our Citrix visual brand strategy, appropriate for markets (Receiver vs Netscaler, for instance). We follow our design principles and common UI patterns for web & mobile, with innovation of course. Would be interesting if design situations arise where more “skeuomorphic” styles are valued and useful.

Of course, it is much harder than it seems, if largely because it seems to be such a struggle to define exactly what it means to be “authentically (or purely) digital”. Does everything get reduced to Atari 2600 graphics and “bare-metal” code? Metro is one approach with many good points but is also starkly utilitarian for many. I respect the “honesty to materials and medium” argument of Modernism which has a certain timeless integrity, but how to support that when “the digital” is infinitely malleable via code and pixel—which are virtual, abstract, and ephemeral? Inherently chameleon-like in nature for mimicry or novel expression. In my mind, “to be digital” is to be “chameleon”, not just Modernistic Swiss, rife with potential.

At the end of the day I still believe that we are messy emotional human beings who value warmth, richness, charm, texture, and delight, regardless of creed or material. Supporting and enhancing our humanity is still the supreme challenge of “designing in/for the digital”, subject to a plurality of interpretations and stylistic manners. It’s finding that sweet spot…Still no easy answers!

This is something that’s been burning in my mind for awhile now ;-) So, perusing current business magazines, books, and blogs you’ll notice a couple things: the popular, dramatic increase in “design thinking” as a topic, and as a corollary, the rise in “failure” being glorified as something to be welcomed and accepted. While it’s admirable “design thinking” has made strong inroads among companies and institutions, for the aims of advancing creative, non-linear approaches to handling complex problems, I’m completely perplexed by this frankly weird penchant for “failure” as a wonderful thing. Who wants to fail? 

So I try to rationalize it in a couple ways:

– “Failure” is a way to shock the linear, rigid, lockstep cultures of guaranteed certainty into realizing they’re not perfect and that it’s acceptable to screw up in a big way (i.e., fail). 

– “Failure” is really a misnomer for “mistakes”. Hey, it’s okay to make mistakes, stumble along, course correct, learn what didn’t work and try again with stronger resolve. That’s how improvement happens, after all.

But for me, I’ve always thought of failure as an absolute– When you fail, you fail. Period. Failure is an ending. It’s horrible, embarrassing, and stressful. It can be quite career damaging and personally traumatizing, even life-threatening in certain contexts (see also: NASA, Navy SEALs, Hospital ER). Nobody truly craves failure and no process should ever exhort someone to “fail”. That’s absurd and denies the very progressive attitude of ongoing success and learnable achievement that keeps a team going forward. It’s also dangerously nihilistic as failure is a terminal point, in my view.

Maybe it’s “just semantics” to some, but it’s also deeply symbolic and hugely important to apply language usefully. Glorifying failure is at best naive and at worst perverse. 

Instead of glorifying “failure”, we should encourage positive experimentation, recognizing that flaws and mistakes and stumbles will occur–and that’s ok– as we learn something that’s unfolding with no guarantee of success. It’s an optimistic attitude of improvisation and flexibility, speaking to a Darwinian approach to adaptation AND also, a dance-like nature of design as collaborative endeavor, as in we “we all rise and fall together…and help each other pick ourselves up.” But that’s a far cry from “failure”, which is individual and traumatic. Let’s design our way out of this silly “failure fetish” that business leaders have fallen for, and instead popularize trying, making mistakes, and learning forward. As President Obama himself has referenced, “We value those teachable moments.” Empathizing, sketching, and prototyping enable an upbeat model of discovery and iteration where success is valued, not failure. It’s the way to design a team’s goals forward to solving the thorniest of problems, in a supportive collaborative manner, where everyone LEARNS and SUCCEEDS. After all, isn’t that what it’s all about?

For someone like me it’s always fun when a new device comes out, whether a new phone or a kitchen appliance. Shiny, fresh, new, with exciting animations and cool interactions. Slick graphics and brand new features or enhancements . And of course, the specs! Quad core to the floor! With the PureVision HD Pro Gorilla Glass 2, blah blah blah…

When I get my devices (and I’ve got several, trust me! ) I actually don’t get into the specs. I want to entertain what i like to call “the mythology of use”. what’s the story of how this experience unfolds in space and time, taking it out the box, with setup / registration, integrating with cloud services and unified ID, to doing ordinary things in my daily life. How does it feel, what’s the interaction like, how do I navigate, get things done, pivot to other tasks, store on my body or backpack, etc. What’s the relationship that’s unfolding with me and my other devices (if part of a viable ecosystem). How is that being fostered or supported? Is there memory and anticipation? 

In a word, it’s about “meaning”…the significance of the device and its capabilities and how they map to my explicit or unstated needs and desires. Yes, the specs are important but they are implicitly valued in the form and quality of experience that unfolds over time through discovery and use. That’s how product and brand value is generated, not via detailed spec lists and feature buzzwords chanted by marketing/branding teams. It’s comparable to the menu listing of food items and ingredients, which offers a surface-level view into what you’re about to enjoy. But when the food is delivered and consumed, then the experience reveals itself.