I collaborate with clients about how to scope and staff project work, and they often have questions about when to bring a visual designer into the process. In the early part of my career, I wouldn't have had a good answer; it likely would have been something like, "at the end." But after 20 years of working in-house and as a consultant with product teams in various capacities — and having no background in visual design myself — I have a much different perspective on the value that visual design thinking has throughout the process of building a product.

Visual designers bring a unique perspective to product vision

First, visual designers are uniquely skilled at defining the overarching experience strategy, called attributes, for a product or service. These aren't specific design principles, but rather descriptions of what the experience should feel like for users, customers, and anyone interacting with it.

One way to define experience attributes is to conduct an experience workshop, where you facilitate a brand and "look and feel" discussion with stakeholders. Framing the discussion by using visual artifacts (pictures of products, cars, buildings, interfaces, art, etc.) helps stakeholders to engage at a visceral level instead of relying on cliché's or generalizations. Visual designers, on the other hand, are great at this, as they are skilled at talking about how the things we see translate into certain feelings and emotions, and how visual elements relate to brand perception.

Facilitating an experience workshop with images makes it easier for participants to articulate what visual approaches feel appropriate and inspiring. A visual designer is skilled at using this input to shape a visual strategy.

Even for companies with a well-defined brand and digital branding assets, it's vital that the product team has a good understanding of what the brand means in the context of the product or service you are designing. This isn't just about proper logo use and the corporate font. It's about knowing how your company wants users to feel when they are using your brand, and about how your users want to feel while using them. Understand that intersection, and you have gold.

Look at things differently during field research

During design field research activities, a visual designer can focus on things like the visual look of the physical environment in which people use the product or service we are investigating. For example, in a medical setting, the visual designer may pay special attention to the signage and décor within a hospital. We wouldn't mimic this in an interface, but getting a feel for the environment can give us clues as to what kind of visual styles may fit—or not fit—within that setting.

Jayson, a visual designer at Cooper, gets to experience user research firsthand at a doctor's office.

I recently worked with Jayson McCauliff, a visual designer, on a product for a large technology manufacturer. The product's users were internal, so Jayson took photos of lobbies, wall art, the small in-house museum, and even the cafeteria. The effort was worth the funny looks he got, as the images later helped give him inspirations for some subtle background textures that made a direct appearance in the interface. (See more about how visual designers work at Cooper)

Early design thinking should include visual language explorations

While the interaction designers begin a design solution phase by exploring key interactions and high-level workflows, the visual designer can explore high-level visual style approaches. Because stakeholders may not be used to or comfortable talking about aesthetic and brand, having someone who understands visual design but can communicate about the effects that color, shape, white space, etc. have on users and brand are vital to making sure that everyone is aligned. It takes skill to talk about style concepts without having the conversation degrade into an argument about the specific shade of blue in a style study, so it's important to have someone who is proficient in facilitating these discussions and in creating artifacts that solicit the right kind of feedback.

Visual language studies keep initial visual strategy conversations focused.

Defining and building a winning product includes attention to the aesthetic and overall experience

Last, visual design isn't just about producing beautiful visual assets for the development team. It's also about creating a coherent product or service in the first place. A visual designer brings a unique perspective to problem solving that augments the other design team members. We find that having the visual designer involved early in design exploration activities makes our design concepts better and more well-rounded. When we are fleshing out the design framework, early and consistent involvement from the visual designer ensures that the interaction design isn't getting too crowded, and that the overall experience is achieving the experience strategy we defined early in the project.

During detailed design activities and implementation, the visual designer needs to be able to react quickly and fluidly as the design and implementation iterate and get refined. If the visual designer has been involved with the project from day one, it's easy for her to work in an agile way while still maintaining the original spirit and intent of the design, and she'll be able to make good decisions and recommend improvements because of that greater understanding.

As you plan your next redesign effort, make sure that a strong visual designer is part of the team from day one. You'll not only gain efficiencies when it's crunch time during implementation, you'll gain a valuable strategic partner and an overall better experience.

Sign up for the visual design course

Learn more about the role of visual design, experience attributes, experience workshops, and effectively presenting visual design to stakeholders in Cooper's Visual Interface Design course on February 6 - 7.

At Cooper, we’re quite fond of pair design as a way to get to the highest quality design quickly. (Even if you have to cheat your way there.) Most of our client engagements involve a pair of interaction designers dedicated to projects full time. Over the years, two specific roles have evolved out of this paired practice.

We struggled to come up with descriptive titles for each of the roles. Though the debate was a tough one, we erred on the side of accuracy at some cost of accessibility, and call the roles generator and synthesizer. (We’re aware that that makes us sound like machines, but with the quality of design teams are able to produce in this way, maybe that’s apt?)

Generator	Synthesizer
The generator is the one whose job is to fearlessly generate design ideas; to walk up to the whiteboard or OneNote page, draw some designs, and say, “OK, here’s how I’m thinking it will work for the persona.” The gen, working with visual design, makes the design solution visual; first with hand drawings, then in illustration software.	The synthesizer is the one whose job is to insightfully keep challenging, improving, and synthesizing the design into a whole. As the “gen” posits ideas, the “synth” will ask questions, help analyze, improve, and iterate it. The synth describes the behavior in words, incorporating the gen’s drawings to create a design specification.
Together they…
…identify and evolve designs, so that the persona using the system we’re designing accomplishes their goals in awesome ways.

Some asides about these distinctions:

1. These roles aren’t cast in stone. Sometimes when the gen is out of ideas, she might hand the pen to the synth so he can draw what he’s thinking, and she’ll “synth” him.
2. We’re experimenting and refining our methods all the time, as with our new integrated product development offering. Not all projects need two interaction designers.
3. Our team structures include additional, invaluable members like visual designers, industrial designers, engagement leads, etc. This article is just about the relationship of paired interaction designers.

This is some heady stuff to explain, whether to our parents, at a cocktail party, or interaction designers applying to work with Cooper. For this reason, we often find ourselves employing metaphors to explain the relationship. Since this is usually when the lightbulb goes off, I thought I would share some of the more effective and engaging ones.

Have you ever used a public service that understood your needs? We all have horror stories of waiting in seemingly endless lines at the DMV or hunting forever to find the information we need on poorly designed city websites. Who is making sure that government uses effective design and technology to meet the needs of citizens in the 21st century?

Introducing Code for America

Code for America is a brand new non-profit that is taking on this challenge. And part of the challenge is understanding the target users of the technology. To help in that effort, Suzy Thompson and I taught a day-long workshop on Research for UX Design to the fellows at Code for America.

Code for America signage at their offices in San Francisco, autographed by the 2011 fellows

Code for America helps local city governments leverage the power of the web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory. Built on a model similar to Teach for America, CfA encourages developers and designers to apply for a year-long fellowship, during which they will create open-source technology solutions for city governments. Out of over 300 applicants, CfA chose 20 fellows for their inaugural year, from a wide variety of backgrounds including Web 2.0 startup entrepreneurs, developers for local city governments and school districts, open source contributors, a researcher for the New York Times, a digital journalist, an intellectual property lawyer/programmer, and a museum exhibit designer.

Code for America 2011 fellows (image used by permission from Code for America)

Code for America Institute

The fellows are spending the month of January in San Francisco at the Code for America Institute, learning from guest speakers about a wide variety of topics, including treating government as a platform (Tim O'Reilly), building local communities (Danielle Morrill), being a change agent and nurturing social network communities (Caterina Fake), and taking an entrepreneurial view of their city projects (Eric Ries).

Host City Projects

Each of the fellows is assigned to one of four city teams, each with a target project:

The fellows will spend the month of February in their host cities, learning about the IT infrastructure and interviewing city stakeholders and users of their system. They will return to San Francisco in March to design and develop the open-source applications. They will present and hand-off the applications to their host cities in the fall.

Cooper Training

Because Cooper has extensive experience connecting user research to product design, Code for America asked us to come in and present a one-day workshop. From our courses on interaction design and design communication, we carved out a day's worth of materials on finding stakeholders and users, preparing an interview instrument, conducting interviews, debriefing interviews, and synthesizing and presenting research findings. We also gave them a look-ahead to personas, scenarios, and framework design.

The fellows got a chance to plan an interview instrument and conduct a 45-minute interview with members of the CfA staff. Conducting good ethnographic interviews takes practice -- I think the fellows came out of our workshop with a sense of confidence in talking to their city stakeholders and application users in February. I look forward to hearing about what they learn about their users, and to helping them create personas and scenarios from their findings. And I can't wait to see the amazing applications that result from their work.

Great Government Research and Design

A question to our readers: Where have you seen user experience design principles applied to government applications or services, to achieve an amazing outcome? At Cooper, we're currently working on a project with CalSTRS (California State Teachers' Retirement System), and in the past have done pro bono work with the SF Department of Health. I have also read about fellow Cooperista Renna Al-Yassini's service design work for the Roudha Center in Qatar. What user experience design work in the government or social service sectors has impressed or inspired you?

Kia ora. In an earlier blog post, I asked if Kiwis would be interested in a January Cooper U, and despite it being in the “dead zone” of the summer holidays, the answer was an enthusiastic, “Yes!” So, we’re happy to open registration for a Kiwi Cooper U Practicum between 10-13 January.

At Cooper, we spend thousands of hours designing systems around the goals and motivations of the people that will use them. We travel across the country, continent and world to have conversations with real users to ensure that we understand their needs and that our design decisions will make their everyday tasks easier and more intuitive to accomplish.

But perhaps we can improve our methods by considering an inverse approach: What if our intent was to frustrate, rather than ease? What if we intentionally made things subtly challenging and unintuitive?

Aside from simply malicious design, is there anything that intentionally facilitates a bad experience? Why would someone do that to other people? For what reasons might something be made to suck?

Making walking suck (for strength)

I was first thinking about this a few months ago when I was with my brother who just had his first kid (making me a first-time uncle). We were at Target to buy some diapers when a woman in her thirties walked by wearing a pair of shoes that were anything but ordinary.

Take the typical athletic shoe company: In general, they've probably been trying to make the shoe experience better by iterating designs and materials in an attempt to make it easier to walk, run or jump.

The woman at Target was wearing a pair of shoes that had, well, a different goal. Despite being sold in the same retail space as shoes that boast comfort and support, the shoes didn’t make walking better; they made it worse. In fact, the intent of the shoes was to make walking suck.

The shoes are called “Shape Ups.” Because walking in them is more difficult, wearing them is considered “exercise.” And a thirty-something mother in the diaper section at Target might figure she doesn't have the time to exercise anymore, so she made walking suck in an attempt to get fit.

Making everyday experiences more difficult is actually common in exercise equipment. Lifting weights, for example, adds resistance to common arm and leg movements. Shape Ups just apply this principle to walking. They make walking suck so that their users can become stronger doing everyday activities.

Making you feel sick (for fun)

In sixth grade, those of us nerdy enough to be a part of Safety Patrol—the early risers who helped classmates cross the street—took a field trip to Adventureland, a theme park in our home state of Iowa. It was a reward for a year of hard work.

One of my good friends got on a popular ride called the Silly Silo. To participate is simple: Stand inside a silo while it spins around and around at a quicker and quicker rate.

While many products aim directly at making you feel good, the Silly Silo is designed to make you feel horrible. Participants exit feeling dizzy and motion sickness. For my friend, the result was puking into the nearest trash can.

If a piece of business software caused you to feel dizzy, motion sickness or induce vomiting, it'd be a disaster. But in the world of amusement, engaging our body's natural gag reaction can be a great thing. Rides like the Silly Silo, those that drop you thirty stories, or roller coasters that flip you upside down are among the many common amusement park attractions that generate fun out of the rush a horrible feeling provides.

Making ugly websites (for good business)

A local store in the Silicon Valley asked me to create a website for them a few years ago. I jumped at the chance. I loved the owner's vision, his dedication to the community and his desire to create it with beautiful design. But something felt strange about creating such a professional site for a small shop.

Around that time, in 2006, Luke Wroblewski wrote a blog post titled “Make it Ugly” in which he described clients that wanted ugly websites so that the sites would feel more “genuine.” Luke made an argument against the idea, but desiring ugly in search of authenticity isn’t an unusual thought. Fourteen years earlier, in 1992, Ellen Lupton wrote “Low and High” in Eye Magazine, which discussed the history of graphic designers exploring low-brow aesthetics.

Nothing says local like Comic Sans. (Flickr by marblegravy)

I didn't make the store's website suck. But after they closed their doors—a year after I designed their site—maybe I should have. After all, littering your store with Papyrus, Comic Sans menus or having a dated website screams to the visitor, among other things, "Hey, I'm local. I’m the real deal." Conversely, professional typography, an elegant color palette, and rock-solid IA might communicate, "I'm a chain. I’m corporate." Making these elements suck a little might have better communicated the store’s local, personal approach.

Making airport seats suck (for prevention)

In 2008, I was sitting at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport exhausted, depressed and trying to fall asleep. I had run through an airport in Colorado, faced a long-delayed flight in California and, by the end of the night, had been re-routed across the country to Chicago in hopes of catching an early morning flight to make the funeral of a close friend that had died days earlier in Iowa.

Despite being emotionally and physically drained, I couldn’t fall asleep on the seats at O’Hare. I tried resting my legs on my bag, sleeping sideways in a corner, extending myself across two rows of seats and just about every possible other position to get some sleep. None of them worked. Even though O’Hare has a history of Eames design, the Chicago airport's oddly shaped seats and large armrests made it impossible for me to get comfortable. Of the hundreds of things that are frustrating with air travel, why would anyone be cruel enough to top it all off with terrible seating?

Air travelers in Paris attempt to sleep. (Flickr by Pinelife)

A few weeks before my experience in Chicago, Chris Noessel, a co-worker at Cooper, posted on this blog about slanty design (or what some Cooperistas call “design friction.”) The idea of “slanty design” came from an article by Russell Beale in which he described slanted reading tables at the Library of Congress that prevent visitors from setting down drinks and risking spills. Since the tables suck to eat on, they discourage visitors from bringing food that might ruin the library’s collection. (Beale’s article has a few more examples if you’re curious.)

The Library of Congress didn’t actually design their reading tables to prevent visitors from eating food, it just works out that way. But the chairs that I couldn’t sleep on at O’Hare were designed to prevent sleeping. The large armrests in-between each seat are intended to make sleeping suck so that people don’t sleep at airports.

There are plenty of other examples of design intended to prevent behavior. Speed bumps, for example, discourage speeding. Or, similar to the airport seats, some bus benches have ridges to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. These things make a particular behavior suck to prevent it from happening.

Why it's made to suck

Making conventional interactions suck seems counter-intuitive and cruel. But there are plethora of products and services that aim to suck at common expectations for good reason. Among the many possibilities, things that suck can lead to strength, fun, good business and can introduce friction to prevent improper usage.

As my fellow Cooperistas will attest, I’m passionate about a lot of things: interaction design, birthday cake, shoes… But product packaging? No, I wouldn’t have included that last one in the list - at least, not until I caught myself swooning over Amazon’s new Frustration-Free packaging.

Suddenly, it all came back to me in a rush of emotion: the anger, frustration, and threat of serious injury when struggling to extract a tiny memory card from its giant plastic “clamshell” package. The tedium and anxiety of twisting countless plastic-coated wire ties in a seemingly never-ending effort to release toy components from incarceration before the child loses interest and starts playing with an empty box instead. The disbelief and disgust over the trail of excessive plastic waste left behind after opening a single product. And I am not alone. To tap into the packaging-frustration zeitgeist, Amazon has encouraged customers to post pictures and videos of their worst experiences to the Gallery of Wrap Rage, and the responses are pouring in.

These consumer-hostile packaging practices are a perfect example of business needs trumping user needs. For far too long, companies have designed packaging that serves only two masters: product marketing and theft reduction. Mark Hurst's This Is Broken features a particularly rich example of product packaging that fails to address the need to get the item out of the package.

Because Amazon doesn’t have to deal with retail display or shoplifting, they were in a unique position to sidestep the usual drivers for package design and think (pardon the pun) “outside the box”, focusing on customers’ goal of liberating products from the package so they can actually use them! And as Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos notes in his letter to customers introducing the program, “in addition to making packages easier to open, a major goal of the Frustration-Free Packaging initiative is to be more environmentally friendly by using less packaging material.” According to their FAQs, products with Frustration-Free Packaging can often be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box.

Just in time for the holiday consume-a-thon, Amazon delivers human-friendly, eco-friendly package design. Now really, who wouldn’t be passionate about that?