Ghost in the Pixel

When I’m confronting a new design problem or thrown into a situation demanding some deep interaction design analysis, I consult a set of starter frameworks that I’ve evolved over the years to help me gain a firm initial footing. They also help me prepare a set of initial questions to help me interpret the situation. These frameworks succinctly identify the essential issues, focusing on the activity, the experience, and the value thereof.

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** The Activity: For example, “Doing a conference call with colleagues at the office” or “Editing photos at home, to share with grandparents”. An activity is typically shaped by three key elements: people (the actor performing the activity, as well as residual/contextual participants, their intent/motive/expectation, etc.), place (the primary scene of activity, both physically & digitally & even cognitively), and information (the material — content and functionality — that’s being engaged with, at the center & periphery of the activity’s successful completion).

** The Experience: What’s the quality of the encounter? This is typically shaped by the visceral expression of the material engaged with, a sense of empathy for the actor’s experience (assumptions/expectations in particular), and of course the emotional aspect on the activity’s participants in an affective manner.

** The Value: Finally, what’s the resulting value? Value is an admittedly overused term, suggestive of corporate buzzwordism. But in terms of design, “value” is a critical, even the most paramount, issue of all. I believe value arises as an emergent quality of effectively mediated conversation, well-crafted embodiments, and a meaningful engagement that establishes a relationship.

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Just saw this posted via twitter, a short yet interesting interview with the legendary founder of Frogdesign.

Some of my favorite lines:

“Excellent products require more then just a good designer or a good design agency—they require humanistic and cultural vision, courage and discipline in execution.”

“Ideally a designer—or the internal design team – has to report to the CEO or the one executive in charge of vision and true innovation.”

“…design is only relevant when it improves human lives by appealing both to the mind and the heart.”

Exactly!! Alot of this fits well with my design philosophy as well…

So after 8+ years of designing at a range of companies/agencies in Silicon Valley, I think I’ve finally come to a point where I can start articulating for myself what may be termed as a “design philosophy” or statement of personal approach/attitudes, based upon core beliefs listed below. This is the result, of course, of exposure to and experiences with various designers, projects, clients, contexts, organizations, all set against the ambient background of the “CMU way of thinking”. Here it goes…

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Design for me is a humanistic act, creating vivid, smart, innovative solutions, not tediously preserving the bland rigor of test-driven corporate mediocrity. You gotta want to design, pushing novel aesthetic visions. Design is also a rewarding, difficult pathway towards meaningful engagement with people & technology & commerce built upon abstract ideals of cultural expression and human ingenuity. It’s about the relationship, and connecting with people’s unstated aspirations in the course of the interaction with the design. But it all must start with a magnanimous vision borne of personal talent, cultural empathy and a genuine desire to solve problems with passion, imagination, and skill.

My approach is evolving. It is thoughtfully intuitive yet principled, knowledgeable yet speculative, eagerly striving to push the novel, yet recognizing the need to be cautious and focused. It’s heavily influenced by my talent for visual arts (drawing, painting, photography) and intellectual bent for the deeper essences of a problem. I don’t do formulas or recipes. Patterns, models, frameworks are my game as well as concept sketches and systems and strategies. I truly believe you can always improve anything with good design.

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** A designer is an informed, talented visionary, with a blend of knowledge and imagination–not a short order cook addressing every user’s whims or marketer’s data or tester’s results.

** Emotion, aesthetics, and cultural expression are vital for creating vivid, engaging experiences. Aesthetics matter, period. If you’re not designing something that’s emotionally resonant and beautiful, then what are you doing?

** Take lots of salt with customer/user research. Users often don’t know what they want or how to describe it. Be careful!

** Stories, experiments, sketches–and yes intuition–can spark innovation. Empathic and cultural insights are valuable, often more than just “test data”.

** There is no perfect design. So doing what’s “necessary yet sufficient” (per Herb Simon’s “satisficing” concept) is often needed, because there will always be a version 2, etc.

** Yet strive for the supreme achievement, not mediocre parity. Design requires bold risk; if you can’t handle that, then maybe you shouldn’t be in this. Design isn’t for everyone.

** Speculative concept sketches are a great way to jump start design activities and inspire new thinking. Sketching is a form of research, whether in pencils or pixels. Get the ideas flowing!

** Excessive testing adds slight marginal value, killing the original design vision. I agree that data can be whipped hard enough to confess to anything! (from Jared Spool)

** Collaboration is wonderful, but has coordination and political costs so must be managed well. Sometimes a design dictator is needed to move progress forward. Design should never be done by committee or solely reliant on “test data”.

** Design process is like a Swiss army knife kept in the back pocket but used smartly. Design requires flexible thinking and jumping around alot. It’s neither scientific nor formulaic. There is an art to it, requiring anticipation and judgment.

** Start someplace and start doing something! And keep on sketching and iterating…and remember to enjoy it!

I felt compelled to respond to some basic myths about interaction design captured in a recent article on Core77 whereby the author Carl Alviani tries to grok what exactly is entailed by interaction design and how it differs from web design or industrial design. He professes 5 “inaccurate yet specific” definitions, playing the role of devil’s advocate, to summon up response and clarification. Clever approach! Indeed, several former peers from CMU’s IxD master’s program like Dan Saffer and Jamin Hegeman have responded, as well as Dave Malouf of SCAD & IXDA fame. But still I feel I need to further project my voice in the attempt to untangle some of the stated confusions :-)

(BTW, fellow CMU-IxD alum Jack Moffett has written up an excellent response regarding the requisite skills needed for IxD on his blog here–highly recommend reading it!)

Below are Carl’s 5 definitions, with clarifications/replies to each, one by one.

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1. Interaction Designers do touchscreen interfaces for mobile devices.

Yes, that’s true. Interaction designers are typically the ones charged with the responsibility for designing the user interface, information design, and overall flow & architecture for products involving a touchscreen or otherwise embedded screen for presenting pixel-based information, whether it’s Cisco VOIP Phones or a Linksys router with an LCD screen or the TurboChef digital oven controls.

2. Interaction Designers are web designers who prefer to draw diagrams on whiteboards first.

I disagree, meaning “diagram drawing” isn’t the difference. Having attended An Event Apart, which is a conference explicitly for web designers who truly go deep into HTML/CSS/javascript, I know folks in that space often create diagrams as assistive aids in understanding the problem or the client’s needs. However, overall there’s an issue of focus.

I know I’m simplifying here, but “web designers” are typically those very talented folks focused on artfully constructed, media-savvy, rich content sites with complex CMS yet maybe not so much complex transactions (beyond the usual e-commerce features). They are also focused on specifically the web as a medium and its restrictions/constraints/technologies like Flash, CSS, javascript, per some browser, etc.

However, interaction designers typically start with a technically agnostic view to designing very complex products/software/services/systems… Like, for examples, e-business software applications (like accounting, sales, customer mgmnt, call center mgmnt), OR professional tools (like graphics, publishing, or 3-D modeling software), OR other products/services having multiple user transactions and behaviors for creating, editing, managing, administering, for multiple types of objects and properties…and for multiple possible mediums: web, desktop, mobile, kiosk, car dashboard, refrigerator screen, router LCD display, robotic HUD, etc. — not *just* a website. The team at Microsoft that created the Office Ribbon or Apple’s iTunes store or Adobe’s Creative Suite palettes are interaction (or user interface) designers, not web designers. In other words, lotsa buttons, controls, actions, ways to get lost or make errors! IxD’ers have to deal with all those situations and then some. (Plus interaction designers often work on non-software situations as well…more on this here)

But basically there are a complex series of interrelated actions (“flows”) involving diverse content organization structures (“architecture”) conveying some dialogue between the user and product/service/system. Imagine designing a web browser like Firefox or an inventory tracking system. Beyond searching and shopping, to the level of designing an OS file/folder system or networking or communications utility. Designing an email app or medical diagnostics system or flight ticketing service demands interaction design, not just “web design”, even if those apps live within a browser (as most do these days with cloud services, etc.).

Hope I conveyed that there is a very crucial distinction that’s often lost on new folks which is rooted in the phrasing. To say that you’re Designing a website is VERY different from designing software/digital product, implying all the complexity inherent in that way of framing of the problem. It takes a different mindset, beyond a largely static site towards a complex living, organic, behavioral entity that must respond and communicate with people, and change accordingly!

3. Interaction Design is a subset of…something.

Yep, there’s contention about this, with lots of talk about “user experience” and how IxD is part of that. Sure, I play along too as a matter of pragmatics and lingua franca, for the past decade or so. It’s largely a business issue to relay to managers, HR, marketing, etc. I have no real practical issues, because I speak that way too with clients so I can get paid :-)

Philosophically, however…I’ll just point to this diagram for now.

Also on IxDA I described other issues I have with “user experience” as a term, and Jon Kolko followed up with an excellent articulation for why IxD needs to be addressed in its own right, not as “user experience”.

4. Interaction Design won’t have a well-defined skill-set until it has an educational establishment behind it.

I agree, but that has been established and is growing as schools like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford D-School, SCAD, RCA, Hong Kong Polytechnic, and others pursue the constant evolution and definition. Note that CMU’s IxD program has been around for a decade now, fairly well established. Jack Moffet has a nicely detailed account of the IxD skills needed.

In my view, these skills are different from “web design” skills and “industrial or graphic design” skills in terms of the artifacts created, but primarily in the mindset and perspective brought to bear upon the problem. Deeply contextual, situated, rhetorical, blending visual, logical, behavior/flow/architecture, with product strategy all at once. It’s not just creating icons or making logos or wireframes or flow diagrams, but all of them in concert in identifying the levels of problems: systemic, architectural, flow, screen, widget/component, data levels, all along the continuum. Mastery of leaf/tree viewpoints is essential just like for any designer, but especially so for IxD.

Also note, IxD skills are wonderfully supplemental and complementary to ID or GD skills, as a higher-order extension from paper and plastics towards pixels/time/behavior/flow kind of thinking–which is often invisibly apparent in other design traditions, just not as overtly expressed as it is in IxD.

I actually have a background in industrial design (Michigan, ’98) and believe that the best IxD’s come from either ID or Architecture backgrounds because they are already predisposed towards thinking about product complexity, contextuality, and functionality and variables of time, space, and motion.

5. Interaction Design is a religion.

Hmm? I’m not sure where or how “religion” as a concept fits into understanding IxD as an activity or profession. I’d be very careful about this. Could this not be applied to other design fields?

Perhaps what’s being implied is the strongly vehement nature of the debates on IxDA mailing list regarding boundaries, outcomes, titles, skills, etc. IxD’ers do hold very strong passionate opinions, which is simply the pluralistic nature of this emerging, still evolving profession of such expansive reach, from web to mobile to services to organizational design issues.

However, if this sentence suggests that there’s no common principles or “facts” and it’s all just personal belief, well that’s just not true. Jenifer Tidwell’s design patterns book, Mullet/Sano’s Designing Visual Interfaces, and Cooper’s About Face books all articulate clear fundamental, tested or otherwise empirically verified approaches, heuristics, guidelines, patterns, that serve as powerful references when confronting design problems…which is growing everyday as new situations are discovered and solved.

And for Carl’s final question: Do they constitute a new branch of design though? Emphatically the answer is YES. This is of course witnessed by the conferences, journals, job titles and salaries and HR assignment/organazational structures at almost every tech company, and more non-tech companies like P&G or Target are becoming enlightened about this. Perhaps even more though, is the potential for the field beyond just the immediate products and markets. From Dick Buchanan’s syllabus for his famous seminar on Interaction Design at CMU:

Interaction design emerged in contemporary consciousness around problems of the digital medium and the relationship between people and computers. However, interaction design has a greater significance than its application to digital products. It offers new ways of thinking about visual communication, physical artifacts, activities and services, and the systems and environments within which all products exist. For his reason, interaction design is more than a new branch of professional practice. It offers a new approach to design thinking in general. It provides the basis for a fundamental critique of the entire field of DESIGN and the place of design in human culture.

There’s so much more to interaction design, which is what gets me excited and passionate about it! Hopefully more will participate in the journey…

Perhaps the hottest story among IxD professional circles in the past week, since I got back from touring Hong Kong, was the sudden, unfortunate departure of talented web designer extraordinaire Doug Bowman from Google. Much has been written about it, and I have my own thoughts which I’ll share soon (given my own past experience with sudden departures and short tenures at a few choice companies :-), but I just wanted to itemize various links for all the good reading about this interesting story:

** Andrei Herasimchuk of Involution Studios first posted this on the IXDA mailing list last week, which ignited a rather lively thread of responses on the value of “data-driven design” and personal vision vs. organizational fit:

http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=40237

(Note: it’s very long discussion, but the notable replies IMHO are by Larry Tesler (a Valley legend as well, formerly at Yahoo), Jenifer Tidwell (a current Google UX designer), and Dave Malouf (of SCAD))

** Another Google designer, Graham Jenkin, wrote a blog post entitled “Hello Google”, which I personally interpreted as rather salty reaction to Bowman’s departure (at least that’s my own take in my jetlagged, no sleep, 12 hour plane ride mental state ;-)

http://www.grahamjenkin.com/blog/

** Finally, another person commented on this whole affair,
focusing on the core conflict of “data vs imagination”, saying that
designers add that extra something which computers and engineers may
lack– visual, imaginative abilities to suggest a better alternative, even citing Einstein in that regard:

http://theocacao.com/document.page/600

** All of which relates to something I wrote about here on the
role of intuition in design, and why it’s sacred and necessary when designing (actually a response to an interview I had read in Innovation, the journal of IDSA):

https://www.ghostinthepixel.com/?p=189

All of this has been quite fascinating to read and observe from the sidelines… and of course, I’m eager to see what Doug Bowman does next and how people react to his next move! Good luck and congrats on deciding to pursue a path respecting your personal visions and convictions as a successful designer. Life is simply too short to do otherwise.