Ghost in the Pixel

Last week I attended this interesting design panel held at Hot Studio in downtown SF, moderated by Wendy Owen of Hot Studio: Make It Real: How Product Concepting Drives Business Innovation 

A wide range of panelist perspectives were represented… from a UX consultant (Lane Becker) to prominent design executive (Kaaren Hansen of Intuit) to design-driven change agents at two of the nation’s oldest companies, GE and AAA (Andrew Crow and Michael Crane, respectively).  Below are some of my personal takeaways to share…Enjoy!

 

** It’s extremely challenging but rewarding to overturn legacy attitudes embedded within teams and organizational structures, often manifested in internal heavy artifacts like, “it has to be in Powerpoint” to be even looked at. 

** Remember that you are doing “radical disruption” by suggesting even small tweaks like whiteboarding or sketching before spec’ing. This requires some “appetite for ambiguity” on part of the change agents (designers) AND the product teams, to figure out the best relationship moving forward. 

** Principles can often trump process: Forces key stakeholders to let go of the crutches of a process and focus on what matters most, values of user-centered thinking like empathy, prototyping fast, and learning from mistakes. 

** You have to design your way forward with constant, continual, iterative experimentations and learnings based upon humble framing–“I don’t know, but let’s try and see!”.

** Don’t get hung up on “validation” (which Kaaren says presupposes a correct definitive answer, can constrain your ability to see fringe ideas, inhibits openness to new possibilities unforeseen during testing). Avoid the arrogance of pre-defined correctness.

** When concepting, inspiration matters more than validation. When refining and evolving a business model, customer feedback (validation) is more valuable. Know when to focus on either one.

** Prototypes tell stories, not Powerpoints. Forge emotional connections with the stakeholders, but more importantly, get them to try it out themselves and experience the reality of making something that physicalizes their assumptions.

** Having a “change manager” in addition to the typical product & program managers can help within teams, assuaging fears of radical change. Basically for relationship management (calming therapy ;-) 

** For many organizations “failure” is the, ahem, F-word ;-) Gotta move beyond that, and instead adopt a “learning-first” attitude through rapid, mistake-prone, iterations of trial-and-error with assumptions and goals. It’s scary but rewarding!

** Kaaren cited a 3-tiered way of thinking about project planning, called “Horizon Planning”, based upon an HBR article (I think it’s this one: To Succeed in the Long Term, Focus on the Middle Term by Geoffrey Moore) It focuses UX Investment planning so you’re not caught “boiling the ocean” which always fails (in a bad way). 

** Instead of “20% time” (which is a branded effort popularized by Google), foster “unstructured time” for collaboration and exploration. Equivalent to organizational day dreaming…let the minds wander. Need space and time for that.

** When presenting your post-project debrief to execs after the project shipped, focus on: how the project originated, what efforts did it take, really show ALL the work it took, and indicate the persistence required. Makes it real! 

** Fun analogy from Andrew Crow of GE: baking vs cooking. When baking, you’re following chemically defined recipes that are essential to achieve exact results. When cooking, you’re experimenting and it’s okay to screw up. There’s messiness and play! And if it fails, that’s ok…you can always order a pizza ;-)

 

Recently at work I had a useful discussion with an eager, yet unsure product team about a new UI element to be designed for a specific aspect of our “desktop virtualiztion” suite. Just wanted to share how I led and structured that conversation in such a way that we didn’t get into “when can we get the icons” typical rigamarole ;-) Please see below…

I basically led a multi-disciplinary conversation (incl Prod Manager, Tech Lead, UI Designers, Back-end Devs) by asking the following questions to focus attention:

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.