Ghost in the Pixel

It’s been a long while since my last post, almost two months! gasp. Been a very hectic time at Citrix with our recent Synergy customer conference and some new releases. But I’m always thinking of design issues and topics!

Here are a few upcoming topics I intend to write about soon:

• Why designers dislike A/B testing (from a designer’s own mouth ;-)
• What it really means to be a design “catalyst” (not a slick job title)
• Emotion / Beauty / Soul : what’s the relationship?
• UI design “genres” and “standards”
• Creating the “spaces and flows” of design innovation
• Fundamental truths of design (oh yes!)
• Design mentoring: tips/lessons/challenges
• Business model innovation & UI design
• Designing values, culture, leadership

(whew! consider this my tasklist for the next few months)

Also this summer I’ll be speaking at Hacker Dojo in Silicon Valley, at HCI International in Orlando, and helping organize another Citrix Design Summit this fall. A few talks from notable thinkers for the Citrix Design Salon coming up. And I’m participating in the Stanford d.school “Design Thinking” boot camp with several other Citrites. And gearing up for another CodeCamp presentation this fall on good design. Yep, it’ll be an action-packed summer! More soon…

This has actually been simmering in my mind for almost four years (!) since my days working at Involution Studio in Silicon Valley. What does it really mean to be a designer, as opposed to an analyst or guru or a UX professional? I’ve deferred writing this, as it necessarily involves wrapping some delicate and potentially controversial thoughts into a coherent message that advances, not condemns or offends. After all, we all benefit when the design field thrives via vigorous debate that makes us smarter and better. But it’s admittedly tough to do when I myself am a very passionate designer who lives and thinks in that “mode of being” (how so very existential ;-)

With that as background, today on Twitter I came across this blog post being popularly retweeted, prompting various reactions among my esteemed design peers. After having read the post a few times, I felt compelled to make a few critical points in brief response.

BTW I’m NOT gonna get into the semantics around “UX designer” as that’s been beaten to death elsewhere and we’ve all become quite bored of it ;-)

Yet I do want to highlight a few key issues that I’ve often mentioned before:
– designing anything well involves multiple “postures” at various moments
– designing often involves value conflict / conviction / compromise, making it a tough field for many
– designing requires aesthetics, sketching, and prototyping with earnest effort

Most importantly, IMHO this is what cuts right to the heart of being a designer: designing means you are an informed, talented visionary pushing an agenda for something better, through the influential force of your designs, rationale, personality, so forth. To elaborate further…

A courageous (and believe me, it takes guts to fight against mediocrity and short-sighted teams) designer recommends and advances, without apology, a strong vision of an improved or novel product / interface / service / system, informed by a deep understanding of the business, the user base, and the technology…and just as important, is her personal intuition, judgment, and experience. Some cynically call this “genius” design but the fact remains an experienced designer summons (unwittingly, or naturally) her past experience in identifying patterns and familiar situations and thus, optimizing a good design direction accordingly.

A smart designer listens to users, but isn’t beholden to acting upon each request or comment. More importantly she knows how to prioritize, filter, and yes even reject user data. A very good designer knows how to balance user input against personal taste, preference, and instinct honed by years of study, apprenticeship, and mastery of tools/methods/strategies. It’s an art, not a science. It takes serious practice and patience, and can be frustrating with lots of failures along the way.

A designer strikes an attitude of optimism, even idealism, with empathy, imagination, yet balanced with practical knowledge to execute a shipping product (specs, assets, prototypes). As Steve Jobs said, “real artists ship”. Can’t just stop at wireframes and flows. True designers deliver.

A successful designer takes a position and has an opinion at the table, of personal choice guided by professional judgment…and defends that opinion with sharp rationale beyond “it looks cool” or “i just like it”. A designer knows that the underlying basis of personal preference is a deeper connection to social / cultural / technical / commercial reasons and can suss that out, and articulate it convincingly.

A strong designer practices her craft with conviction, not arrogance. With clarity of purpose, not muddied by wishes and hopes. With acuteness of vision, in collaboration with other experts, but knows when to take a different course or push back (see above: having an opinion).

A bonafide designer knows the difference between using a process and having a process–and is willing to change it as projects change. Or not do some methods or even skip steps if not needed. That so-called “UCD Process” is flexible like improvisational jazz, versus an Excel spreadsheet. Having spent a decade at Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, frog, consulting for Netflix and LinkedIn and now a Principal Designer at Citrix working with the CEO and VP of Design, i know :-) Trust me. Or read accomplished designer Michael Beirut on his process. Might sound familiar to most folks ;-)

The fact is any designer worth her salt has often, justifiably, rejected user opinions, trusted her gut instincts, pushed the UI pixel minutia to challenge technical constraints, deferred edge cases for the majority’s sake, confronted or altered business plans, etc. That’s simply inherent to being a designer, if you accept the premise of “informed, talented visionary” as the predominant posture.

I suspect the real issue underlying that blog post, is the desire to distinguish between “Designers” and what I term “UX Professionals”, those who frankly indulge in excessive user / context analysis and tons of flows/wireframes but stop short of advancing an interactive, aesthetically refined vision of an improved product that leverages design talent, intuition, and experience. After all, talent and intuition are necessary too, just a different type of data borne of personal factors, but no less valid. As former AIGA President and acclaimed designer Clement Mok said, “Design is the art of causing change in accordance with taste and intent.” Sussing out that “taste” in terms of visuals, behaviors, layouts, typography, and overall choreography of the “experience” (whatever the hell that means) is what makes a designer essential to delivering valuable, emotionally-rich products that people love and use. You gotta have conviction, opinions, talent, and drive to be a designer and deliver the strategy / product / service etc, otherwise you’re a UX Professional. That’s not a bad thing, but just gotta be honest with yourself about what role you play in the field. Are you being a designer or something else?

 

Being a designer is not for the faint-hearted, as I’ve often said to my former class and elsewhere on this blog. It takes a certain fortitude of sprit, conviction of purpose, and sharpness of intellect to handle the volatile, sometimes brutal, mix of politics, constraints, opinions, and schedules in any situation–agency, corporate in-house, or freelance.

But what is a designer’s toughest challenge (other than seeing a client / team trash a design while struggling to maintain a calm demeanor)…?

Value conflict. In other words, when you are in a situation of producing or defending a design that you know, in your heart of hearts, you cannot possibly stand behind, that contradicts your own professional expertise/judgment/sensibility. Where someone other than you is dictating a direction of fundamental disagreement (your boss, or the client, etc.). In short, it’s a difficult emotional and cognitive place whereby the design is an affront to your own integrity as a designer and all that you believe in and represent as a bonafide professional.

Perhaps the design reeks of humdrum mediocrity, or lacks functional simplicity or is a mere copycat of a competitor’s product, an ink blot upon an otherwise pristine portfolio of offerings.  Whatever it may be, the reasons vary for each designer yet evoke similar responses. It is an agonizing moment of disappointment, dread, despair. It prompts self-doubt and forces that always profound, critical question of ” is it worth it?” or “What the heck am I doing?” It becomes the most intense of existential crises for a designer, causing one to wonder…should I throw it all in and do something else?

Yet such a value conflict can become the central defining moment of clarity to realize just what it is that makes you want to design, what gets you up in the morning to slug it out and fight those battles for what matters most. It crystallizes priorities and can establish that foundation upon which a designer rests a vital, necessary belief system that propels you to do your best work.

How should a designer respond when confronted with such a deeply personal, intense conflict with professional consequence? There’s no easy answer but reflection on the situation, conditions, consequences, and how to balance that with your beliefs may lead the way. To put it bluntly, borrowing the central tenet of The Bhagavad-Gita, “you must only do your duty” even in the direst of situations. You intuitively know (but may not be able to articulate) what drives you and your values. Making decisions in support of that is the best, perhaps only, path forward, no matter how difficult it may be.

No one said being a designer is easy. The toughest moments can help ensure you are being authentic as a designer.

This past week we held internal product design training sessions for our product managers and engineers. It was quite eye-opening to see firsthand the difficulties of bringing someone from outside the design “way of thinking” into, in their view, a radical notion of reality based upon idealism, humanism, visualization, and (gasp) making mistakes!

This prompted me to have this somewhat obvious yet sublime epiphany: as designers, we need to empathize with product managers and engineers. Ok, maybe it’s a bit blasphemous for those exhausted from fighting daily protracted (often losing) battles with product peers ;-) After all, they often fight back on design requests, and we frequently devolve into dithering about tedious issues like using Photoshop, not GIMP for slicing images, etc.

But at the end of the day, if we want design to be propagated, sustained and applied effectively through a complex organization of peers, as designers we have GOT to understand their perspectives on what makes design mysterious or difficult to perform.

Here’s what I’ve noticed so far:

* Engineers and PMs are raised in a tradition of “pick the right answer” and “execute faithfully (literally)” based upon “scientifically validated facts”. This is radically different from the design-oriented posture of “try and iterate and fail and try again” based upon “patterns, principles, examples, and one’s own inspiration”. There’s a greater degree of risk, ambiguity, and even chaos that designers comfortably enjoy.

* Generating ideas based upon real people and real stories is very tough, without actual examples and material artifiacts to stimulate understanding (photos, videos, recorded snippets, transcripts, etc.) Too often PM’s and Engineers will revert to their comfort zones of code and requirements and market demographics, divorced from real people’s issues.

* Actively listening to sample users’ stories during live interviews is very hard for non-designers. Again, has to do with training and posture of stepping out of their comfort zones (code or profits). Designers have to help direct attention to what matters and what doesn’t.

* An engineer’s default approach is to focus on the code efficiency due to their quarterly bonus goals. A product managers’ default posture is to focus on profilt/loss metrics for similar reasons. It is EXTREMELY difficult for them to take a “try and fail” approach otherwise!

* Drawing is very hard. Yet PMs and engineers naturally do it :-) My hypothesis is we ALL have a natural instinct for drawing/sketching/mark-making as an innate human thing (think of Picasso’s famous quip about all children are artists) , but disciplined sketching of solutions that map to requirements is very hard to do. Scrawls on a whiteboard help but not sufficient. It takes practice and effort for everyone alike.

* PM’s and Engineers are under constant difficult pressure to deliver against absurdly misinformed schedules. As designers we need to keep pushing forward but be mindful of the greater forces that impact their often criticized decision-making. We should assume everyone wants to deliver an amazing product experience; it’s just a question of how to get there.

 

 

 

 

Recently had a lively, thought-provoking lunch with a design candidate, exploring a wide range of issues from “what is user experience” to “design evangelism”. The latter in particular caused me to reflect more deeply afterwards on what it means to be a design evangelist, if that’s even the proper phrase. As my lunch partner suggested, this can be a troublesome concept charged with elitism and arrogance, appearing pedantic and condescending when in fact you are simply trying to help outsiders recognize and support the benefits of good design in their world. Certainly, it’s a loaded phrase that may rub non-designers the wrong way — how comes there’s no “Finance evangelism” or “Logistics evangelism”? — and thus has to be handled carefully ;-)

If pressed, I’d articulate “design evangelism” is the passionate advocacy, education, and coordination of people/principles/practices throughout an organization, using various levers and switches (social, political, economic, technological, etc.), while respecting people’s needs and goals. It’s a human-centric thing, naturally ;-) To delve a bit deeper:

a) Advocacy: Like a public defender that is an advocate for someone wrongly accused, there is a sense of “representing” and “clarifying” the purpose for doing good design, getting non-designers to recognize design’s benefit. There’s cheerleading, showmanship, and passionate argumentation, all emphasizing the role of design…and why it matters, as Robert Brunner articulates in his acclaimed book.

b) Education: Like a good, strong teacher helping an uninformed person learn, understand, and appreciate how design happens, there is a critical need to educate in a helpful, altruistic manner. This includes process, deliverables, tools, practices, patterns, even how to critique a design. All about helping provide the tools to enable Bob in Sales apply design thinking to his job, etc. Be a guide and mentor to help advise, cultivate lasting trustful relationships, and so forth. Goes back to the ancient saying: “Teach someone to fish…feed them for life.”

c) Coordination: Definitely on product-based projects (or other situations too, like helping HR or Finance), you should help coordinate the resources, tools, checkpoints, schedules, so as to demonstrate your passion and DEDICATION to truly making design happen and helping others get their sea-legs to make design operate as a positive habit in their worlds. Offer to facilitate discussions, capture notes, hand-hold some follow-ups but all the while you are teaching (b) and advocating (a). It all fits together nicely ;-)

I believe this trifecta of advocating, educating, and coordinating makes “design evangelism” more palatable in suspicious environments and gives it credibility / utility / focus beyond mere pontificating of trendy buzzwords about design thinking. It’s a strongly existentialist posture, of taking real action (not just talking!) and building on the collaborative potential of sharing / listening / learning in complex team situations.