It starts with a feeling

So where do novel design ideas come from? Indeed there are many sources of inspiration for creative ideas, both material (like books, films, products, or nature) and immaterial (values, beliefs, attitudes, philosophic assumptions, and cultural origins).

Often however, the path towards the discovering of a novel solution begins with a simple yet vague feeling, something my former CMU Design prof Suguru Ishizaki termed as a “felt difficulty“. This is where you sense something is a bit off, somehow not quite right thus not providing the optimal experience. Maybe it’s the controls, or the messaging, or the interaction, etc. But something needs to be corrected, perhaps re-invented… Maybe a new product or interface or service would solve things, delivering previously unmet potential and expectations.

From this “felt difficulty” then arises the principal question you’re trying to answer. Just as Trinity said to Neo in the club scene in The Matrix, “It’s the question that drives us.” What is it you’re striving to answer and seek out with improving upon the original felt difficulty? The question maybe something about the customer experience, the market, the features, the technology, etc. But what is that ONE question? (For ex: How can the user access music easily)

Once after identifying the question, then you need to identify the driving problem. What’s the consequence and level of impact/intensity of ramification of not solving the problem? Is it urgent enough to warrant significant design effort, etc. (For ex: the problems is about navigation and utility, which drives the product’s overall user experience value and customer market potential for sales, the consequence of not resolving this problem is user frustration and loss of sales)

Finally, to help establish and shape the overall design motif, metaphor, language/style, it’s worth spending time to consider the overall theme and values…in a sense, what is the humanistic value proposition of the product design solution. Is it a sense of beauty, trust, freedom, human dignity, expressive potential, etc. Identifying this will help you determine the emotive qualities and materials to support them: the text, fonts, colors, imagery, visual style, and so on. (for ex: joy/whimsy and elegant simplicity, with freedom of interaction)

This basic framework can help begin to shape a journey of critical discovery and realization about the design motives/goals/purpose that leads to novel, powerful solutions.

Good description of empathy

One of the cornerstone qualities of a good designer, is empathy. Daniel Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind” describes it like this:

Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling. It is the ability to stand in others’ shoes, to see with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts. It is something we do pretty much spontaneously, an act of instinct rather than the product of deliberation. But empathy is not sympathy–that is, feeling bad for someone else. It is feeling with someone else, sensing what it would like to be that person. Empathy is a stunning act of imaginative derring-do, the ultimate virtual reality–climbing into another’s mind to experience the world from that person’s perspective.

One point I’d tweak is about deliberation. I’d say that as a designer, undergoing rigorous persona and scenario development via observational studies and participatory activities, those are deliberative methods at forging empathic connections, and shaping that “imaginative” aspect of feeling, sensing, and knowing…

A team of rivals: digital product development

The popular phrase of the last 8 weeks, since Barack Obama’s historic election and swift announcement of cabinet picks (in particular, Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, and keeping Robert Gates at Defense) has been “team of rivals”, from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best-selling book about Lincoln’s cabinet (which I just started reading– it’s quite fascinating). But after about the first 100 times of hearing this phrase (as a recovering political junkie I’m exposed to waaay too much media), it occurred to me that this is not really a “trendy new phrase” but it encapsulates exactly what a designer contends with daily on the job–designing with a “team of rivals” bound by a shared common purpose (ostensibly delivering the best possible product) yet guided by often competing interests and goals (feasibility, profitability, usability, aesthetics, etc.).

Digital product development is fundamentally a massive challenge of balancing & coordinating the goals/values/motives of the diverse teams involved (much more so for convergent products: hardware + software + netware), which largely intersect in the “user experience” aspect of the product. Inevitably it seems the lead interaction designer emerges (or should emerge) as the one to primarily mediate, facilitate, and coordinate among the various viewpoints from teammates, to arrive at a sensible solution that satisfies users as much as possible. Basically, shepherding the team and driving the conversation. Why is that? Often in the course of problem discovery and solution generation featuring product analysis, architecture diagramming, and taskflow mapping, the designer needs to develop a “necessary yet sufficient” level of understanding of the linkages among disparate facets of the product to ensure a seamless experience across features, modules, components, etc.

As Henry Petroski says:

Designing anything involves satisfying constraints, making choices, containing costs, and accepting compromises.

Relatedly, Bill Moggridge says:

The convergences of objects, services, environments, and technologies indicate that more and more design problems can only be solved by teams from different backgrounds working together.

And that’s the basic gist in my view when collaborating with rivals…and what makes design so difficult, beyond the pixels and specs. It’s the coordination cost and collaborative effort surrounding the resultant solutions and residual artifacts that really ensure designers earn their paychecks!


Going a bit deeper, what is it that motivates and grounds the thought and action of diverse teammates, like engineers or product managers or quality assurance (QA)? What’s the rhetorical purpose and philosophic assumption upon which they rest their arguments and positions? Here’s my personal take based upon 8 years of observation and engagement in the Valley at companies like Oracle, Adobe, and Cisco:

Engineer
Logical, analytical, systematic assessment of the technical feasibility, in a quantifiably controlled manner with definitive empirical and repeatable results. Focus on constraints of technical capability given limited resources (memory, processor, API’s, coding practices, etc.)

Product Manager
Focus on business product strategy and portfolio of offerings (SKU’s) in a similarly analytical, quantifiably validatable manner. Cost control, pricing, etc. The steward of the product, gatekeeper of features and owner of business requirements.

QA Engineer
Focus on identifying technical coding flaws/bugs/defects, corollary to user experience goals of “good design” but insufficient by itself. Lots of testing protocols, bug triages, and roundtripping with Dev to ensure “good code”, but not necessarily “good design”.

Technical Writer
Focus on documentation of intended design, making sure it’s thoroughly, extensively detailed with words and images, with substantial review/feedback cycles. Provide inputs for customer service, and user guides/manuals.

Sales Engineer
Technical achievement that leads to good demonstrations of the technology for customer benefits. What can the software/hardware/netware do that supports a customer’s needs and how to customize it accordingly within limits.

Product Marketing
Focus on customer demand and market potential, examining sales and pricing configurations accordingly to ensure profitability of desired solutions. Sell, sell, sell! Channels, registrations, adverts, etc. Also focus on the customer purchase-to-pay, rather than customer experience of the product usage overall.

Of course, these are generalizations, must be taken with several grains of salt :-) Nevertheless, this diversity of perspectives and assumptions of course naturally impacts the decision-making that ultimately renders features and products as shipped/released or not and in what state of completion per original aims.


Returning to Obama’s “rival”-based cabinet picks, his rationale is to cultivate vigorous healthy debate, hearing diverse and strong opinions from the best and brightest minds, featuring a mix of seasoned experience and fresh insights to address dire challenges facing the nation, which is all well and good. But could things fall apart amid pervasive contention and fractious, even ruinous conflicts (namely big egos that can’t be controlled)??

As Obama stated emphatically (perhaps a bit defensively) in a press conference,

“But understand where the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from me. That’s my job — is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure that my team is implementing it.”

I believe that’s the core job of a lead designer for a product’s user experience & design, in command of a compelling vision, leveraging her experience, judgment, intuition, and savvy personality/charisma skills to artfully engage with her teammates and shape their attitudes and behavior–thus corraling them behind the driving product vision, selling them on what is best for the user and the business. It’s not easy, but when you have good trustworthy rivals eager to prove their value, it certainly keeps you on your toes and makes the final result that much more rewarding and memorable!

(Another analogy for basketball fans may be Coach Phil Jackson’s ability to juggle the incredibly strong, fickle egos of superstars–from Michael Jordan to Dennis Rodman, or Kobe & Shaq–guiding them with a vision of becoming championship-winning teams)

Good book: The Adventures of Johnny Bunko (seriously!)

I think it’s a fairly common storytelling refrain among popular career and business advice books to portray a hapless white collar “knowledge worker” glumly pining for a more fulfilling job, complete with perplexing axioms that read like Zen koans echoing the spirits of Deepak Chopra & Peter Drucker. But how many of them present that in the form of a manga comic book?? (complete with Japanese phrases and fantasy spirits??) That’s what grabbed my attention while perusing Kepler’s Books yesterday, when I discovered Daniel Pink’s Adventures of Johnny Bunko. The format of a manga made the usual “self-help” book memorable, engaging, humorous, and altogether inspiring. Just like the Scott McCloud Chrome comic-style introduction by Google (exhaustively) explaining their new browser, Pink’s book creatively relays typically dry prose info into a more inviting format, which as a designer I greatly appreciate!

Key takeaways

— Approach your career with “Enlightened pragmatism”: judiciously making choices per rational evaluation yet with emotional idealism, taking advantage of serendipitous moments as they arise

— Base a career/job choice upon “fundamental reasons” (inherent value of enjoyment and self-enrichment) rather than “instrumental reasons” (temporary stepping stone to something else, extrinsic rewards, etc.)

— There is no plan: Contrary to commonplace convention, in this era you can’t just “plan out your career”, instead use “enlightened pragmatism”, smartly tuned to changes and opportunities, adapting smoothly yet keeping true to your goals/values/strengths

— Strengths, not weaknesses: Focus on building upon your strengths, rather than wasting time/effort on your weaknesses.

— It’s not about you: Most successful people improve their lives by enabling other people’s success (their team, their manager, their organization)…hints of the “virtuous cycle”?

— Persistence trumps talent: Hard work, persisting despite the roadblocks and lost pathways towards making the project succeed. Talent still matters, but is to no avail if you easily give up and run away.

— Make excellent mistakes: All designers know this, fail fast and fail often and learn and iterate, continually.

— Leave an imprint: (more long-term, but worth thinking about now) What’s your contribution, do you matter?

What do you want to learn?

I had a good conversation with the Apple Online Store’s creative director last week over some fresh hand-made pizza at Apple’s cafeteria (apparently it’s Steve’s favorite :-) I agree, quite tasty yet not heavy). We met awhile back when I was at Oracle and he’s a Valley veteran (Claris, Adobe, Yahoo, etc. whew!) so he’s a great person to chat with about general job/career issues…

After some chewing and chatting, he asked me, “So, what do you want to LEARN in your next job?” Hmm, a good question! Usually it’s “what do you want to DO in your next job”. Honestly haven’t thought of it that way, but it makes sense. Amid the pressure to “get a good job” at a “brand name company”, maxing out on benefits/options/salary and great promotional possibilities, it’s easy to get lost in the overly competitive drive to land the right job with the right job title, etc. — especially these days amid grim economic times. And thus you lose sight of what’s the educative benefit of the job… What do you hope to gain from it, that will keep you growing, learning, thriving, and evolving as a person, and as a professional? What would stimulate you despite the inevitable mundane corporate rigors, pushing you to the next level of accomplishment and inspire others even?

A good question worthy of serious thought.