The always entertaining & insightful, Jared Spool- founder & principal of User Interface Engineering- spoke at Yahoo! Design Week about what makes designs intuitive? Some of my notes from his talk:A design itself doesn’t intuit anything. People intuit what is required of them from a design. Individual users may perceive something as intuitive if they can interact with it right away with no learning curve.Designs are perceived as not intuitive when they take too much time to figure out. This often causes people to become frustrated.Things that are innate come from an understanding you are born with. Intuitive is something you learn. For example, once you learn how one scrollbar works, you expect the same elsewhere.As soon as one element of design is unintuitive, the rest falls apart with it.Personal perspective: what people currently know & their previous experience. Intuitive designs are not purely based on previous understanding but also on personal interpretation.Designs seem intuitive to designers because they know how they work because of their involvement.Intuitive Design is evolutionary. It’s part of a path we go through when designing things. First, products and services tend to focus on technology, then we add features that ultimately overwhelm our users. As a result, we have to focus on intuitiveness to help people manage all the features we’ve added.There is a knowledge continuum. People with all the knowledge about a product or service are on one end of the continuum (typically product developers). On the other and of the continuum are people with no knowledge (essentially novice users). There are two points of interest on this knowledge continuum. Current knowledge is what people already know –what they bring to a product or service. Target knowledge is the information they need to complete a task.The “gap” between current knowledge and target knowledge is where design happens.Design solutions can either educate people by moving current knowledge toward target knowledge or they can move target knowledge lower.A design is intuitive when current knowledge & target knowledge are at the same point. This point, a user already knows what to do.A design is intuitive when the knowledge gap is really small. In other words, it’s easy for people to bridge from current knowledge to target knowledge. In these cases, people don’t realize they are being trained.Field studies are useful for identifying current knowledge.Usability studies are useful for identifying target knowledge & the knowledge gapWizards try to eliminate target knowledge mechanically.Intuitive is personal to each user. It is based on current knowledge & required target knowledgeIntuitive designs minimize the gap. In order to minimize the gap, you have to know where it is.Just because something seems intuitive to you, may not be for others- study your users.Tags: yahoo, usability, decision making, simplicity

My How Designers Build Strategy workshop at Yahoo! Design Week focused on why design considerations can add value to strategy development. Specifically I outlined a number of design principles and skills that define the unique perspective that designers can bring to strategic work.

Design Considerations
While design methodologies (processes), and product design deliverables may also have a place in product strategy, this workshop was focused on design considerations. I used design considerations as an umbrella term to cover the principles and skills employed by designers in traditional product design roles. These same considerations can be applied to product strategy. In particular, how designers utilize pattern recognition, storytelling, visual communication, and empathy.

Pattern Recognition
People make sense of what they see by recognizing the similarities and differences between visual elements. Through the process of visual organization, designers manipulate these visual relationships to create meaning. This requires an intimate awareness of visual patterns and the ability to manipulate those patterns to tell a structured story.

This pattern recognition skill can be measured quantitatively through a series of tests known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices. The tests do away with words and numbers and present all questions visually. Participants succeed by detecting the patterns in each series of objects and separating relevant information from irrelevant information. Given the amount of time designers spend manipulating visual patterns when creating product designs, they are likely to be highly proficient in this form of pattern recognition.

The same skill can be applied to strategic work. When faced with complex market information, pattern recognition is invaluable for separating the signal from the noise and uncovering insights. This skill becomes even more relevant when you consider the huge quantities of information available today: market research, user research, Web analytics, and more.

Story Telling
The design of products requires effective communication with an audience. Each product (via its interface design) needs to “tell” people what it offers them and why they should care. This requires the ability to explain and persuade not only with logic but with emotion as well. In other words, it requires story telling.

This ability to craft a structured narrative is also pertinent to strategic work. When compared with the series of graphs and bullet points typically used to communicate a strategy, a story can be more impactful, memorable, and clear. It is well documented that people can recite epic poems from memory but fail to do so when the same content in these stories is presented to them as a series of random words. Storytelling not only makes strategic direction more memorable, it makes it more compelling.

Visual Communication
In order to effectively communicate meaningful stories, designers need to manage the prioritization and relationship of visual elements. Exposing these relationships through visual communication enables people to easily interpret complex information and its implications. Perhaps Tom Chi bests outlines how this skill set is applicable to strategic work:

“Designers can use our skills to powerfully communicate the data we’ve collected. We can represent dozens of viewpoints, influences, competitive factors and more in a single slide. We can get large collections of people on the same page with clear actionable goals in less time than any manager giving a speech. We also think about the form and scale that data is best consumed. Oftentimes, we are beset with either far too much data or far too little. They come in the form of gigantic spreadsheets or organizational meetings filled with platitudes but no content. As designers we know how to deliver data at a meaningful human scale.

Many people are visual learners, but much fewer are effective visual communicators. When these people see a diagram or visualization or competitive timeline that makes sense, the discussion quickly moves to the next level. Sadly, without some visual as a point of discussion, you’ll see these same people in endless meetings pouring through a 24-page document and leaving with less clarity than when they went in.”

Empathy
Designers spend much of their time thinking through problems from the “outside in”. Contrasted with the “inside out” approaches that typify corporate business agendas, this methodology focuses on the perspective of customers and end users when analyzing and crafting solutions. Applying this perspective to strategic work creates more genuine relevance. As an example, when the eBay design team crafted a visual representation of their registration redesign strategy, they used full sized images of what actual eBay customers see to outline their goals within the context of actual an user experience.Tags: strategy, business, communication, design vision, visual communication, yahoo

In a recent workshop, I outlined how designers can apply their existing skills to strategic work. The natural follow on question is: what are these skills?

In the How Designers Build Strategy workshop, I focused on pattern recognition, story telling, visual communication, and empathy.

In Defining Design Thinking, I compiled a number of attributes that constitute a design-driven methodology for problem solving. Some of these directly stem from the skills of the designers doing the problem solving others are tied more closely to specific problem-solving methodologies.

When discussing the Creative Class, I pointed out a few distinguishing factors that distinguish people working in creative capacities. Some of these attributes also directly map to designer skill sets.

My compilation A Difference of Design outlines how design approached to problem solving, validation, patterns, teams, and more differ from traditional business-driven approaches.

In Leveraging Design’s Core Competencies (PDF), Chris Conley outlined the kinds of expertise that are at the core of design. It seems pretty clear that these core competencies are quite relevant to strategic work: The ability to understand the context or circumstances of a design problem and frame them in an insightful wayThe ability to work at a level of abstraction appropriate to the situation at handThe ability to model and visualize solutions even with imperfect information An approach to problem solving that involves the simultaneous creation and evaluation of multiple alternatives The ability to add or maintain value as pieces are integrated into a whole The ability to establish purposeful relationships among elements of a solution and between the solution and its context The ability to use form to embody ideas and to communicate their value Dick Buchanan has also assembled a compelling list:Whole/part: designers look at the whole in relation to the parts; they see the big pictureBring to life/creativity: designers have a passion for making thingsComfortable with ambiguity: openendedness; not prejudging the solution; take chances, take risks; try multiple solutionsPolysensorial aesthetics: an aesthetic of many senses; this is about the actual making: prototyping; drawing; visualizingEmotion/empathy: emotion is a way to engage with the world; passion; designers care about peopleClearly, there are lots of interesting parallels between these compilations that merit further synthesis.Tags: strategy, creative class, visual communication, communication, design vision

You can now download audio of the Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0 panel from South by Southwest (SxSW) 2007 which featured Liz Danzico, Kristian Bengtsson, Chris Messina, Jeffrey Zeldman and myself. We discussed ways to keep teams from getting stuck in process, project, and people muck and responded to audience situations during a “lightning round” of Q&A. It was a pleasure to speak with such a bright group of folks.

Audio from the panel:
Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0 (27.3 MB MP3)

Notes from the panel:
SxSW: Get Unstuck Notes

From the official description
Is your team mired in the goo and muck of old-school thinking? Are your designers and developers divided on their approach and about to throw in the towel? Are you dying to move from a stale world to a more agile, innovative approach? This panel features formerly stuck experts as well as those who have helped clients get out of the muck. Featuring Liz Danzico (Daylife), Kristian Bengtsson (FutureLab), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency), and Jeffrey Zeldman (Happy Cog).Tags: sxsw, process, design organizations, decision making

Design Sessions, the online community for design students, recently asked me to respond to a few questions in an inline interview for their newsletter. A few snippets:

“Unfortunately, we lack an effective way to evaluate designs of this significance. So instead, critics focus on what they know best: aesthetics. Until we develop a better way of judging interaction designs that manage things like global economies or communities, we’ll continue to define success with visual design awards, which is unfortunate because only a portion of my time is spent making things pretty - most of it is spent making experiences that are useful, usable, and more desirable.”

“I also maintain this type of cycle when working with my product teams by spending time taking in research, opinions, ideas, and feedback, and then disseminating information through designs, presentations, visualizations and more. Carlos Santana might have described this process best when he said: music is water; the audience is a bed of flowers so I have to become the best fire hose I can.”

“… I don’t think this spells the end for generalists. In fact, designers that can understand technology opportunities and limitations at a high level, as well as business considerations are increasingly valuable because they can help focus product teams around user experience goals. That requires a cross-disciplinary approach that specialization alone doesn’t provide”

You can check out the full interview on Design Sessions site. Many thanks to Anjula for the great questions and chance to respond.Tags: visual design, visual communication, cross disciplinary

Last month, I wrote about some product design adjustments that LinkedIn made to grow the quantity of social network connections they manage. Anecdotally, these changes seemed to be working. This month, Hitwise released figures that confirmed traffic to LinkedIn is up 323% in the last year and 17% in the last week alone.

In my original post, I neglected to include an increasingly popular landing page on LinkedIn that encourages additional connections: direct access to “people you may know” and the ability to access your webmail address book. The growing (based on my personal experiences) use of this screen implies it may be a top performing solution for encouraging network growth.Tags: social software, UI components

Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO and author of The Art of Innovation, spoke at Yahoo! Design Week about the importance of anthropology in business innovation. Here’s some of my notes from the talk:Innovation is the intersection of design & business.Red Queen Effect: running but not getting anywhere. To get somewhere you actually need to run twice as fast. Companies today need to keep up with the rapid pace of innovationTen Faces of Innovation: positive innovation-supporting roles that people play temporarily or permanently.The Devil’s advocate is an anti-innovation role. Need people to stand up against the devil’s advocate in innovation-positive roles. If you can outlearn the competition, that gives you a way to stay ahead.Organizing Roles: The Hurdler acknowledges obstacles that come along and figures out ways around them. The Collaborator looks for people from multi-disciplinary skill sets to solve problems through new perspectives. The Director sees their job as letting other people shine by allowing talented & creative people to do good work.Building Roles: The Experience Architect looks at the whole customer journey. The Set Designer tweaks environments to change attitude, behavior, and performance of team. The Caregiver is empathetic to the needs of customers. The Storyteller acknowledges data is hard to store but stories are easy to remember.Learning Roles: Anthropologist goes into the field to examine unstructured problems in the world. The Experimenter models ideas to reach effective solutions. The Cross-Pollinator brings together diverse concepts.Of all these roles, the most impactful is the Anthropologist. They provide the insights companies need to drive innovation.Discovery is not finding new lands but looking at things with new eyes. Set aside what you know using “vu ja day”. Look at everything again. You will uncover insights hidden in plain sight.Don’t underestimate the power of simplicity.Tags: cross disciplinary, IDEO, yahoo, user experience, research

Former Director of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. and Pentagram partner, Bob Brunner, spoke at Yahoo! Design Week about his experiences with and perspective on product design principles and deliverables. Though most of Brunner’s talk was a walk through of product design examples, he also offered the following insights:Clients are what is going to help you be successful. You need to work with people you who believe what you believe in.There’s a lot of subjectivity in product design. People can produce a million reasons on a spreadsheet for why not to do something. Having someone (or a culture) that supports you is very important.A lot of the best clients are the ones that are in trouble. They need to change and therefore try something different or take risks.The Apple Powerbook design was not tested with customers –it just felt right. Some usability testing was done to ensure it could be used accurately. Virtually every notebook computer is modeled off the original Powerbook design.Brunner’s focus at Apple was developing a design language –a physical vocabulary of objects- across all products. Apple’s language was rooted in the desktop or office. They wanted to make it more personal: part of you vs. part of your desk.The design team needed to own design language and educate the rest of the company about it.Apple was a company that thrives on icons. It needs things to rally around.You can’t fight the culture. When people are hit with subjective decisions (very frequently in product design) they rely on personal beliefs or the culture around them to decide what’s right. Dell is an operational model not a computer company.At Apple, product equals brand. The company did a study by placing Apple logos on washing machines. Without using the machines, consumers referred to them as fun and easy to use.Experience matters: how people feel, what they can do -it all comes together to create a powerful brand.You can’t divorce yourself from a legacy, you need to build upon it. For the Vista redesign, the team leveraged the good things underlying Windows.Pentagram is not a research company but sets a lot of context for their designs.Everything Apple does now is perfectly executed as a result, most of their time is likely spent managing development. Fighting to get things just right is what drives Jonathan Ive (Brunner hired Ive at Apple).Partnership is what matters. The one thing Brunner missed as a consultant is not being in control all the way through. Designers have a responsibility to own what the world sees. They need to have ownership of the experience and drive to make it right.Tags: apple, yahoo, user experience, product concepts

In my So the Necessary May Speak article I walked through how to simplify a basic data table by eliminating unnecessary interface elements. Since then, a number of folks have offered alternative designs. I wrote up the pros and cons of four of these options from Deva Prasad in Redesigning A Simple Table and thought it might be useful to share some of the other ideas I’ve received as well.

In my original redesign (above), a single column of bold text allows users to quickly see all the key data in the table with one downward motion. Labels for the data are in close proximity to the values. The content is scannable because there is contrast between the bold and non-bold elements.

Andrey Smagin suggests a “simplified” solution that targets repeat users of this data set (people who interact with the application one or more times per day). He relies on frequent users to know the first column in this table is current day, the second current month, and the third previous month. For infrequent users, there’s a rollover to explain the significance of each value. Outside of obvious concerns of information legibility, there may be too much visual noise in this design. Are discharges bad because they are labeled in red? Does current and previous month need a unique visual style (background vs. border)?

Robbin vanEijsden took a different approach and focused his presentation on the most current information in the table: today’s admissions, discharges, and caseload. He also used a table header and footer to put the focus of the table on the data rows instead of the labels, which now only appear in the table header. The previous month data has been replaced with “change”. To quote Robbin: “If the purpose of the "last month" data is to calculate the monthly mutation, the last column offers faster satisfaction.”

Assuming, today’s statistics are the most important values in the table, emphasizing these visually may be a good approach. However, once again it seems we have too many competing visual styles creating too much contrast in the table layout: bold, italics, borders, three different background colors. So this design can probably be further simplified.

This redesign comes from the comments of Anton Vakunenko’s translation of my So the Necessary May Speak article. As a result I don’t have any author attribution or explanations behind the thinking. The layout appears to focus on the content groupings first and the data second. So if people generally only need one section of data at a time, this may be a good solve. However, the layout doesn’t allow for a rapid scan off all the information at once.

If you’re interested in more examples and explanations for this simple table redesign, take at look at:So the Necessary May SpeakRedesigning A Simple TableTags: information design, visual design, UI components

A while back I noticed an increasing number of LinkedIn invitations in my email Inbox, which made me curious. Did the company introduce any product design changes that led to this recent surge of connections? Turns out -yes they did.

Upon accepting or sending an invitation to join LinkedIn, users are now presented with one of the following pages: a list of work colleagues, an invitation to easily import Web mail contacts, or a split screen with access to colleagues, classmates, and Web mail contacts. All these pages are designed to encourage additional connections.

These changes seem to be working. In April 2007, LinkedIn reached 10 million registered users and was adding 130,000 new members per week. According to the official press release: “While anyone can sign up for LinkedIn, most users join upon receiving an invitation from a friend or colleague.”Tags: social software, UI components