Creating tangible value with design, Parts I and II, Brandon Schauer and Steve Toomey

This presentation has two great sets of slides available. I wrote most of my notes right on the slides themselves, so they’re a really good resource. Brandon and Steve did a great job of creating a presentation that tells a good story, even off-line on paper in black-and-white.

I’ll present my notes and ideas for this talk (and most of the others save the keynotes and panels) in bullet form. Post a comment if you’d like me to provide some clarifcation or elaboration.

• Design is the "Third Place" in peoples’ lives: it’s very much the experience that people have in between home and work; it’s a pretty huge chunk! Does that create value? If done well, design can create a massive amount of value. [my thought]
• Starbuck’s. The Nexflix package. Flickr. Good designs. Great experiences.
• (Slide 26) Taylorism -> the work of Fredrick Taylor
• (Slide 35) Why does Flickr succeed? They " stay tuned to what [their] business does well and what [they] know how to create." Flickr didn’t try to cover all the bases: they picked a few and did them better than anyone else could hope.
• (Slide 39) The "Portfolio Mentality" - Google makes a ton of products. A ton aren’t successful. But, because they follow the idea of the portfolio (see GE and the 95,000 things it makes), they achieve growth: the cash cows more than pay off the losses of the dogs.

End of Part I

• Steve and Brandon took a moment to state that the Adaptive Path report "Leveraging Business Value" addresses many of the business-related points of this talk.
• (Slide 65) Left-hand side percentage = interest rate; right-hand side = return demanded by shareholders.
• (Slide 66) Hurdle rate == (weighted average) cost of capital
• (Slide 67) We’re using the hurdle rate as the discound rate in this calculation.
• (Slide 72) Just focus on 1-2 key metrics your project is changing. Don’t worry about explaining how it’s tangentally improving something in Q3 ‘08.
• (Slide 73) The two-way street: what is the measure of success for my work? What do I send up? What do they send back?
• (Slide 79) Stage Gate is a product dev. / go or no go software package.
• (Slide 80) How do we make more of an impact? We work further upstream in the user experience value chain. It’s something I always try to do in my work: if you can catch something early, you’re in much better position to help correct it (speed it up, help it, slow it down, move it around) then you are at that moment it’s dropped in your lap.
• (Slide 83 - black) Model the business -> of UX before your project, after you helped launch that new product, etc. Did you help? Did something else hurt and you could say, "See? Let’s learn from that."
• (Slide 86) Preface this with "How does UX start to affect…"
• (Slide 98) This is a form factor of a medical device, created by IDEO. (I thought it was some kind of toy gun :-)).
• (Slide 103) Panel 1 - Relationship to current experience. Panel 2 - Who gets this? When? Panel 3 - Metric: Click-through
• (Slide 104) Is this an activity we want to engage in? Are we capable? Put your prototype on a scale with vividness and effort on the axes. Lo-fi prototype < --> Comic Scenario < --> Box (cereal box packaging your idea) < --> "Artifact" from the future.
• (Slide 105 - black) Model the business -> connect business with user behavior -> prototype the strategy.
• This process helps drive design decisions. You need this input before making that design decision; it can guide you in the direction, but not if it’s already too late!

Q&A

• How do you apply this when people making the design decisions aren’t the financial backer in a B2B environment? (ex. IT user goes to to buy.)
  [You need to determine whether you're] looking for other kinds of value (financial metric -> cost reduction or revenue generating [and gear your design that way].
• Managerial judgment governs decisions when it comes down to opportunity costs. (Most managers would disagree, but you can’t do everything at once). Managers must decide "how much money are we missing?" "What’s possible versus what we have to go after?"

I wound up this session with the following quote: "The Universe is enormous; we can only see fragments" (Stephen Baxter). I’m not really sure how it popped up, but it’s an interesting thought, especially in light of the final "opportunity cost" discussion: we never really know if we’re doing the best thing for business; we can only really stick to our guns (and cross our fingers and hope).

This is a point that popped up a lot during the conference: design has the power to create a ton of tagible value because it really shapes almost all of peoples’ lives. You’re at work: your sitting in a chair that was designed to fit your body, working on a desk designed to promote productivity, typing into a computer designed to trasnlate your ideas and thoughts into "the next big thing". Good experience design, and good design in general, almost blends into the background: it’s so seamless, you’re not even aware how good it is. It’s the "delightful", "witty" medium in which you move from place to place. Good design is a positive experience; or, more rationally, a positive experience stems in no small part to good design. Bad (experience) design? Think of how much you enjoy waiting in a long, long, slow, long line to get your driver’s license renewed. Exactly.

Seasoning with Stakeholders - Charles Warren, IDEO

Could also be titled “Delight” or “Wit” in design.

IDEO (idee-oh) is a design/innovation consultancy.

Charles says we should make big systems "witty". How do we do that? Through inclusion
and tyranny. He wonders: "we’re meant to inspire, but are we selling Chinese food?" That is, are we constantly trying to be innovative just for innovation’s sake? Do we worry about building something that’s cool and new just to build something that’s cool and new?

Warren says we’re "curating an experience" through design; each design is "telling a story" to the end user. If the end user doesn’t buy the story, they won’t buy the product.

Companies nowadays have "business model ADD": they’re trying to do everything instead of
just focusing on being good at any one thing, really selling and improving the experience around that product or service.

Charles once worked on a project with 700 stakeholders. How do you catalogue that many possible ideas and opinions? IDEO built a virtual space to "suck up" all that information.

Warren believes that there’s nothing better you can give someone than visualizing their idea: instead of listening and walking away, designers should throw down that stakedholder’s idea, even if it’s just in a rough sketch or comic.

Charles has three principles for winning over stakeholders:

• "Stakeholderstorming" - Brainstorming with all the stakeholders and remembering to get all their names so you can send them feedback and get their additional
  buy-in.
• Workshops - which all you to gather input efficiently
• Rough concepts - creating a wide range of choices for stakeholders to react to

Warren’s ideal production cycle (or production day), looks something like this: a few people converge; the designer gets permission on a design concept from the big group; the designer stands for the user in any and all discussions; working itensely and alone, the designer builds a product for an end-of-day critique; the end-of-day critique is the place for convergence and judgment.

Warren says we should aim to create a "Delightful Experience" How do we do that? By brainstorming with 5-10 people (or more with rigorous facilitation). In these brainstorms, we aim for divergent thinking instead of convergent thinking. Divergent thinking lets everyone put out their own ideas (everyone writes their idea on a Post-it and sticks it on the board), while convergent thinking features one recorder who can and their own view or terminology to an idea.

Q&A

• What’s the best way to train someone in facilitation?
  Designers are good at being facilitated. You have to practice and coach.
• Case Western promotes “appreciative inquiry,” which Charles recommends. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appreciative_inquiry”>Appreciative inquiry involves asking these three questions:
  1. What did we do that helped the process?
  2. What do we wish we could do next time?
  3. What do we want to try next time?

  Appreciative inquiry helps us to learn faster because we learn faster by repeating things we did right.

• How long do you wait to hand back a design concept?
  As close to real-time as possible. Put materials on a wiki to facilitate debate and review. Vote on concepts.
• Warren believes in openness to stakeholders
• Always brand it, put ideas in physical space
• Getting wit wrong: the Microsoft paperclip. It’s when you miss the basics first (you need to put get the basics of the experience down before you pepper it with wit).
• The core group is the client. Read Growth as a Business Practice, by GE’s Jeff Immelt.
• Can wit be boxing yourself in with an attitude?
  Maybe wit isn’t the right word?
  [Audience member]: Wit is the interface standing in for the human.

I think that my adapted version of that audience member’s session-closing comment is profound. It’s much easier to interact with an interface if the interface is interacting with you. We’d all rather be speaking to a human being, so humanize a design with "wit" or "delight." Think of an error message: the user is already ticked off because something broke. Tell them you get it by giving them the response you would want to receive if you were in their situation. Make the user feel like you’re sitting down with them, you’re sitting down with them, and you’re already trying to find a way to help.

[This was more of an IA review session. I heartily recommend The Polar Bear Book, aka Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, by Rosenfeld and Morville. Here are some of the interesting points.]

• Content is not limited to that served through the web. Services, etc., are also part of content.
• Content analysis is about patterns (relationships between individual items).
• When doing content analysis, one must build know the organizational structure to gear the analysis toward timeline and audience
• The content inventory (think of combing a site, and finding and noting everything. Yes, including that) should not be limited to what you can find on the site: things like ancient press releases, and orphaned pages must be included.
• The content owner and person responsible for updating the content are not always the same person. Find them both.
• ROT status - Redundant, Outdated, Trivial.
• When trying to work out task analysis, interview your users while trying to figure out which content supports what task.

From the Q&A session:

• How do you map things like affilate sites or search engine marketing?
  Use keywords as datafields and treat them as smaller chunks of content.
• How do you find things you’re missing?
  Spider site (to find orphaned pages).
• How do you define tasks?
  Task analysis with users.
• What if you’re missing dynamic content or linear content (content that progresses through stages; press release -> event -> wrap up)
  Dynamic content - if it’s in a database, it’s already structured, making it easy to figure out what’s there.
  Linear content - Capture examples. What is the delta (change between steps)? Start event -> event -> post-event. Capture the event’s lifecycle.
• What’s the best way to create a hierarchy or taxonomy?
  Go from spreadsheet to Visio. Building a hierarchy can be done by looking at your content map.

Steven [Berlin] Johnson gave the week opening keynote, an in-depth look at the thing he got right, and things he got wrong, in his book Interface Culture.

He began by talking about the “attention economy,” the idea that the public will pay vivid attention to whatever is placed directly in front of it. Links, from the blogosphere or any other source, are votes in this economy. If something is voted up (or linked to) enough, it very much becomes the focus of the public eye and crowds out everything else related to it or in the same space.

One of the things that Steven believes he hit on was the idea of “metajournalism”: journalists filtering the headlines down through their own slant. But, sometimes that slant becomes a little too important, and readers, instead of getting “just the facts” end up only getting the facts that they want; they only listen to people that echo their own personal view. (There’s no real cross-pollination of ideas, just enforcement of beliefs).

Steven then touched on “Interface Ecosystems.” This is the mash-up; as Steven stated, “you’ve solved that problem, I point to that and solve this problem over here.” It’s the concept of “information as modules”: if you’ve already figured out one way to do it, why should I spend time figuring out another when I can just use yours? Steven cited the Flock browser as an example of this concept: it’s a rainforest ecosystem, where no energy is wasted. You’re browsing, you’re blogging, you’re tagging without a hitch.

Web 2.0 is when we “lost control of some of our pages, in a good way.” Pages, due to being mashed-up, commented on, tag, blogged, and rebutted, now change and adapt to the content around them; the concept of static HTML pages is slowly falling away. Steven believes this is the true interface, the place between medium and message where creativity and communication takes place.

Johnson next talked about the dangers of the “hive mind,” where people fall into almost a rut of ideas, changing things to their whim and, perhaps changing them too much. He cited Updike (’books are edges, the boundaries of experience’), and Laneer (’the hive mind is a cruel idiot’) to show that we might joining groups and, like sheep, blindly following along without any thought to what we’re actually doing or what consequences we face.

Johnson discussed the power of the “long tail.” The long tail gives rise to the “triumph of the niche”: if you have an out-of-the-way interest, odds are someone else will too; the long tail builds communities from disparate members. He cited the curling blog as an example of a long-tail, thanks-to-the-Internet community. Without the Net and its participatory nature, the people living on the long tail would never be able to connect, they’d remain isolated.

Do we live in a hitcentric world or a long-tail world? Steven argues we live in both. Sites like boing-boing will always dominate the Technorati blog rankings just because of their sheer size. Yet, the curling blog still lives on the tail, connecting people in ways that is just not possible with any other medium. Long-tail statistics still might not rival pure hits of the most popular sites, but the long-tail still thrives in spite of those numbers.

Steven discussed hypertext, which he believed to be the Internet’s greatest power. Indeed, hypertext has evolved from anchor tags in static HTML pages to a whole different interface: richly linked blogs and user-powered tagging sites like del.icio.us show us the true power of hypertext as a medium for connection and communication. Except, of course, for YouTube, which provides the usual: a looming exception to an Internet rule.

Steven warned against falling victim to the making your life online “the daily me,” a life where we “only listen to people with our values.” This trend, siloing oneself into a life of one side of an issue destroys the heart of communication: there is no dialogue between sides of an issue. We need that dialogue desparately so that we can evolve as a society.

Steven talked about the great battle between mass personalization versus spam. Spam is the loudest noise, the most disruptive signal to effective communication on the Inernet. Using a discussion from his blog as an example, Steven showed us how disruptive spam could be: Steven posted (opinion), a reader responded (rebuttal), and WHAM! porn spam (disruptive noise). The battle between effective communication and useless noise is waged daily across the Inernet.

Finally, Steven talked about an inherent power of the Inernet: its flexibility as a medium. TV is inflexible: you can see only what is programmed for you to see; that’s it. The Internet is a “shape-shifting” medium: we can make it whatever we want to be. Yes, spammers might intrude every now and then, but we can ultimately adapt the Internet to turn down their noise and turn up the conversation, the communication, and the connections.

Edit: D’oh! Missed this page of notes. Here they are.
Johnson talked next about the Internet’s power of serendipity: you can always discover something you weren’t looking for (like with the random article link on the wikipedia main page.

He next discussed the bottom-up structure of cities, which parallels the bottom-up nature of the long-tail of the web. There’s a vampire meet-up group on meet-up: that’s the power of the long tail. “Before the web, if you were a vampire it was very difficult to meet another vampire.”

The web (and web 2.0) now lets us leave very visible bookmarks: are favorites are on display, especially on sites like everyone’s favorite collaboration news site, digg.

Johnson summed up the interface culture, now led by companies like Google, MySpace, and YouTube, and the bloggers as a group living under the phrase, “Let’s make it easier…”

I’m currently at Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week 2006 in Washington, DC. I meant to do blog as I went, but I’m behind, so this is a recap.

Jesse James Garrett opened the week discussing the idea of “designed experiences,” which function as the structure for peoples’ lives. Using a Volkswagen commercial as a backdrop, Garret explained how the commercial’s character lived in a world where the character’s experiences didn’t connect with him. This is the stark opposite of what a well-designed, positive experience seeks to do: it seeks to connect the end user (or receiver) to the product, world, or other people.

Garrett stated that design is the “lens through which we understand our relationship to the world,” and might “help us move closer to our best selves” by connecting us with our lives in the world around us; it makes us think. He further argued that designed experiences are both “ancient and deep,” ideas that have been around as long as man and bring us closer to understanding by putting our daily lives and thoughts in context.

Historically, the “designed experiences” of our lives were interpreted by scribes and by shamans. Scribes simplified the world around us with their writings, categorizing and simplifying things as they saw them (Garrett linked them to Information Architects in today’s Internet world, organizing and presenting information so that it makes sense. The second group, shamans, provided structure for our lives by giving us incantations and rituals, perscriptions we could follow to live a good life (Garrett likened them to Interaction Designers, who give us the proper channels into the products, services, and technologies we use every day).

Garrett likened modern-day technologists to the scribes and shamans: they provide structure for everyone’s daily life through the artifacts they build. That word processing program you use every day is just like the ritual performed hundreds of years ago: it is an artifact of a designed experience; a channel through which we can interact with the world.

One only thinks of “designed experiences” as products of today’s marketing culture. This idea that the designed experience is truly “ancient and deep,” something that has been around as long as man really helps build the senses of permanence and importance around our daily work: you’re not just building a website, you’re desinging an expeience and building a channel that someone will use to interact with the world around them.

IE seems to have a rendering bug (!) that causes it to incorrectly render the height of any div that has no text in it, no matter where you place it, or even if you’ve declared any kind of line-height at all in your document (and fall back on the browser default of about 1.2em).

Let’s say you want to use a div to display a background-color only (yes, I know a hr should be used properly here, but then I’d have to mess with margin; absolutely positioning a div is a little easier as its shorter CSS-wise). The below CSS will render a giant div, set to about the line-height of its parent (or the browser default):

 div.aLine{
 width:400px;
 height:1px;
 line-height:1px;
 background-color:black;
}

Yep, perfectly valid code. One would think that would create a one-pixel-high black line. Nope: the line defaults to the line-height of its parent (or the body, or, if no body line-height is set, the browser default). Very odd: one would think that with Internet Explorer’s famous height malfunctions and ability to scale height at will, it would work fine. Luckily, there’s a quick workaround: add a &nbsp; to you div. Voila! There’s the one-pixel-high line, just like you envisioned.

To officially have a Web 2.0 compliant site, you have to make rounded corners part of your design (and big text, and bright colors, and …). How do you make them?

Well, until all browsers support the W3C CSS rounded corner spec, you’re probably stuck designing them for yourself. But, if you use Photoshop, you’re in luck: Colin Smith, at Photoshop Cafe, has a quick-and-easy guide to Photoshopping rounded corners.