Where do you start when you're approaching a complex software design problem? If you work on a large development team, you know that software engineers and UX designers will often approach the same design problem from radically different perspectives. The term "software design" itself can mean very different things to software architects, system programmers, and user experience designers. Software engineers typically focus on the architectural patterns and programmatic algorithms required to get the system working, while UX designers often start from the goals and needs of the users.
In the spring of 2009, I participated in a research study that looked at the ways in which professional software designers approach complex design problems. The research study, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was led by researchers from the Department of Infomatics at the University of California, Irvine. The researchers traveled to multiple software companies, trying to better understand how professional software designers collaborate on complex problems. At each company, they asked to observe two software designers in a design session. At my company, AmberPoint, where I worked at the time as an interaction designer, I was paired with my colleague Ania Dilmaghani, the programming lead of the UI development team. In a conference room with a whiteboard, the researchers set up a video camera, and handed us a design prompt describing the requirements for a traffic control simulation system for undergraduate civil engineering students. We were allotted two hours to design both the user interaction and the code structure for the system.
Jim Dibble and Ania Dilmaghani at the whiteboard in their research design session
The World Series is barely over, which means most of my thoughts this time of year get colored by baseball. Events in game five got me thinking about design exploration, of all things. I'll try not stretch the metaphor too much.
I work throughout the year with product managers, technologists, and executives at companies ranging from small startups to Fortune 100 megaliths. Many of these companies have a vision for creating a game-changing product within their industry, “the iPhone of the xyz market.” They mean it, too. But as conversations progress and a project plan begins to take shape, many of the project owners start piling on technology constraints before any design work has even begun.
“We need to use these off-the-shelf components.”
“Don't explore any solutions that won't let us use our current technology platform.”
“Actually, what we really need is just a facelift of the presentation layer.”
Not exactly the words I imagine Steve Jobs used to drive the creation of the iPod and iPhone.
Sometimes this slow degradation of vision is a result of poor or conflicting communication...which brings me back to last night's baseball game. St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, already a two-time World Series winner and owner of the most wins by an active manager, had a vision for which pitchers he wanted to be warmed up in the late innings of a tight ballgame. He called the bullpen coach (using a land-line telephone in the dugout), and, amazingly, not once but twice, the bullpen coach misheard LaRussa's instructions and warmed up the wrong pitcher.
I don't know if that's happened before in a World Series game, but in the corporate world, we see the wrong product get sent into the game all the time. Executives have a vision for the future, but don't clearly articulate it to the product owners (other than specifying a deadline which is often arbitrary and not tied to actual work milestones), so what gets built isn't visionary at all but driven by the calendar...which means introducing lots of constraints from the beginning. The result may be an incrementally better product, but not a game changer.
We like the saying “reality bats last,” one of Alan Cooper's original design principles. For us that means for any design we create to actually be a solution, it needs to be buildable by our client. It has to live within their unique technology, price, deadline, and resource constraints. However, we have been pushing more and more for the opportunity with our clients to do at least some unfettered, unconstrained design exploration on every project, even ones that have a narrow scope. We don't completely ignore constraints (especially things like regulations which are out of our client's control), and we won't explore designs that rely on telekinesis or nuclear fission, of course. That said, we will definitely push the envelope on what's possible—for a few days or even up to a week—so we can begin with the mindset of the absolute best experience for the user. Over the course of the project we'll push to achieve as much of this game-changing vision as we can.
Allow some your design team to let their imaginations run wild before they get saddled with constraints. (photo by Peter Duyan)
Typically, the output of this design exploration is a collection of hand-drawn sketches that target key plot points in the most important scenarios, and signature interactions (parts of the system fundamental to the experience). The sketches often explore a range of ideas, some that can be implemented within all known constraints, but also others which may bend (or break) constraints. After that, it's really a business decision our clients need to make about how to proceed. Sometimes it makes sense to restructure deadlines, add resource, buy a technology, or abandon a legacy infrastructure to get that “killer app.” Other times it doesn't make sense...but as designers it's our job to imagine the future and enable business decision makers to make the most informed decision they can.
Which brings me back to baseball. You are the manager of your company: what's your strategy? Reality is a heavy hitter, but it shouldn't bat in every slot in your lineup. Can you really afford to play it safe every game? Even if your competition is miles behind, spending time to imagine a better future for your product will position your company to more nimbly take your offering to the next level when constraints go away.
And while you are at it, I would recommend upgrading those bullpen phones.
Platfora, a new startup in the Hadoop business intelligence space, is working with Cooper to design an elegant, intuitive interface to bring clarity to the chaos of big data.
After Platfora received 5.7 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz; Cooper worked on a rapid, collaborative two-week timeline with a team of five designers to create their website, www.platfora.com. Platfora CEO Ben Werther said, "we wanted to convey the clarity and simplicity that we are striving for in our product experience — without showing actual screenshots. Cooper's design work on our website conveyed this message perfectly."
Credits: Jim Dibble, Golden Krishna, Martina Maleike, Doug LeMoine, Nick Myers
A clean sans-serif designed by Minneapolis type foundry Process combined with rich, vibrant visualizations designed by the Cooper team combine for a unique and beautiful site we're proud to have been linked to in the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and New York Times.
Immediately after launch, the site received rave reviews on Twitter:
Like it or not, the digital world has changed at a wicked pace, and more and more interactions between companies and their customers now happen via an interface. Software serves us everywhere, and the user experience now shapes these interactions every day. At the center of all this change sits the brand. TV and print advertising now regularly feature digital experiences from the likes of Apple, Google, Toyota, GE, and Amazon. The visual interface has become the new face of your brand. This means that the role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) is now harder, and their influence must reach further into the organization than ever before.
More customer interactions are now digital, and the brand sits at the center
Expectations are now much higher. My wife, for example, has lost all patience with technology. She hates how TiVo doesn't record her programs on time; her Dell laptop seems to break frequently; her iPhone is too slow. It's not just my wife, though. I see it frequently in healthcare and financial services. Even employees in larger enterprises have lost patience and expect better.
At Cooper, I see clients struggle with traditional marketing practices to deliver software that lacks the deeper level of engagement that customers are looking for. Some of our clients have changed their approach to marketing and product design and are reaping the rewards with a place on Forbes' Most Innovative Companies list.
TaskRabbit’s service connects people who want help with simple tasks—anything from walking the dog, standing in line at the DMV, or moving furniture—with “Rabbits,” a network of background-checked and pre-approved individuals who have the skills and time available to complete tasks.
With a design ideal for mobile task posting, the app provides a simple, seamless process for securing extra help.
Cooper designers collaborated closely with developers at Pivotal and the TaskRabbit team to design a user experience specifically optimized for busy, on-the-go people, offering timely help for folks with unfinished errands or other tasks. With just a spin of the wheel and a few taps, the app enables a task to be posted on the TaskRabbit service network in a matter of seconds with minimal, if any, typing.
Credits: Faith Bolliger, Jim Dibble, Glen Davis, Tim McCoy and Nick Myers.
TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month and they just opened the service in New York City.
Congratulations to the TaskRabbit team, as the new app release has been featured on Mashable, TechCrunch, and Forbes and has received great reviews.
Download TaskRabbit at the App Store and start getting stuff done!
Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of people and their goals causes us to notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. We can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.
Almost everyone enjoys a great meal out with friends, but splitting the bill can be unnecessarily complicated. In this Drawing Board, Cooper designers turn their attentions to the way groups of people pay the check while dining out.
At the recent Interaction 11 conference, I spoke of the growing importance of visual interface design to both brand and user experience in an increasingly digital world. In this new world, visual interaction designers face big challenges and bigger expectations, from both users and clients.
While designing visual interfaces for dense, complex products, designers can also influence brand perception by creating experiences that are both memorable and useful. In my session, I discuss how to design a unique visual interface that puts the needs of the users first; how to add surprise and delight to critical moments of the experience; and how to use craftsmanship and attention to detail to set your design apart in a visually complex medium. Finally, I talk about how visual designers can effectively frame conversations with stakeholders about brand and experience by using personas, experience attributes, and stories to convey design ideas. Enjoy!
Presentation on Slideshare
You can also view a crisper version of the slides on Slideshare: Slideshare.
In partnership with Janice Fraser of LUXr, Cooper hosted a two-day workshop to share our emerging thoughts around lean user experience and agile product stewardship with a group of designers, developers, and product strategists from Cooper, Adaptive Path, Hot Studio, 500 Startups, and several other organizations.
We spent the first day exploring the intersecting arcs of lean startup, customer development, user centered design, and lean and agile development. Each of these approaches to making software look at the puzzle from a unique perspective: lean startup and customer development come from the world of business and entrepreneurship; lean and agile development practices strive to build healthy collaborative teams and coerce order and purpose from the sometimes chaotic world of programming; user centered design emphasizes understanding and empathy for people served by the software we create. Lean UX and product stewardship seeks to weave together best practices from all of these approaches.
Material from first day of the workshop is available on Slideshare.net at http://goo.gl/aJwdm
The next day, the group put their new thinking to work helping Change.org envision and clarify a new initiative. It was fascinating to see founders of early stage startups and consultants to Fortune 500 companies find common ground in their approaches. Some were learning to recognize the particular value of narrative to provide context around features, others identifying places where their existing processes could be more lightweight or robust. When we were done, the fine folks of Change.org had three promising approaches and everyone understood a little bit more about how to move our practice forward.
I'll have much more to say about the ideas and practices behind lean UX and agile product stewardship and I'm excited about sharing our experiences and learning from yours.
Why is Google Maps on a mobile device so amazing and delightful? Why does Word Lens feel so mind-blowing? Why does a Prius feel so good when you get in and go? Why does it feel satisfying to look down at the lighted keyboard on the Mac?
It is noteworthy when the design of an experience is so compelling that you feel wonder and delight. When designed right it feels totally natural, some might even say it is truly "intuitive." No training is needed, no set-up, no break in flow, the tool fits seamlessly, improving without disrupting your experience; it's like a little bit of magic.
So how to design the delightful, magical experience?
In the digital world magic experiences are more likely to follow technology breakthroughs. New ways to give input (touchscreens, gestures, sensors), output (3D, haptics), and raw processing (speed, power) all provide opportunities for unexpected delight. These days passive input is an especially rich field because devices have many more sensors, and the raw processing power is ample enough to provide real-time turnaround on data-intensive tasks.
I'm using passive to describe input which is largely listening and processing signal which is self-identified, as opposed to active input where signal is initiated by the user with specific intent. Active input is keyboard, mouse, touch, and gesture. Passive input is background processing of optical, audio, kinesthetic, or other signal, and programmed response to this. In reality there's more of a spectrum between active and passive, not a strict divide.
If you'e got a smart phone, a Mac, or a new car, chances are your experience is augmented with passive input magic. GPS, accelerometer, light sensor, mic, OCR, RFID, and facial/object recognition are all used as passive input. But passive input signal alone isn't going to deliver delight. It's what you do with the signal which is where the magic happens.
Fully passive input, quietly helping in the background
Some sensors run in the background, quietly listening for the right signal which tells them to kick in and help. The fact that you don’t need to switch into a mode first makes the experience smooth and seamless, the magic just happens.
Your Macbook pro uses an optical sensor to evaluate the amount of ambient light. When the light falls below a certain threshold, back-lighting under the keyboard improves your ability to visually target the keys.
It's a small feature but it's super delightful. Your computer "knows" when to assist and jumps in to provide illumination. You don't need to interrupt what you're doing, but an automatic and subtle shift in the experience makes it better.
As more cars adopt it, the keyless entry and ignition of the Prius may seem unremarkable, but the design is still delightful.
Walk up to your locked car with your keys in your pocket, without using your keys reach for the handle and the car opens. Sit down and press the start button with the keys still in your pocket. Security is a necessary evil, allowing it to recede to the background of the experience is delightful.
Imagine speeding along the freeway, you become lulled into a less aware state, and suddenly traffic ahead is at a full standstill. Your reaction time is not what it should be, you didn't notice until it's too late to stop. But your Volvo S60 has been paying attention, it's been watching out for you and when it senses the stopped traffic it applies the breaks for you. Its finely tuned system adjusts the breaking to match the distance and your car stops a few feet from the bumper of the car ahead of you.
The radar system in your car searches for possible collisions with other cars or pedestrians, warning you and even taking action if you don';t. There's lots to go wrong if the system doesn't correctly identify and react to danger, but if it works as designed the experience is magic. Your car ceases to be a dumb hunk of metal hurtling around the roads and becomes an intelligent agent, working to keep you safe and protected. If the system only gave you a warning the experience of driving would be interrupted, instead it takes action and assists, improving your ability to drive safely.
Modal passive experiences, input with a little prompting
The form factor and design of hand-held devices often forces you to open an app (entering a mode) before delivering passive input goodness. The limited processing power, battery life and screen size simply doesn't allow for the activity to fade to the background. Also, no good interaction paradigm has been created which allows for automatic, smooth and intelligent switching between passive input modes. If it existed this would facilitate less modal choices, delivering instead the right assistance at the right time, without requiring a prompt from you.
There are a number of great apps that work with passive input once launched which deliver super delightful experiences.
Open Google Maps on a mobile device and it not only displays a map, but it pinpoints where you are and shows it. Move your device and the map moves to reorient based on which direction you are facing.
It's a magical experience because the map ceases to be an abstract puzzle. Its sensing and orienting to your position makes the map personal, it becomes an augmentation of reality, another view of where you are. This transformation is subtle, but deeply satisfying. The map unifies with the territory, its utility shifts from planning the route to navigating it in real-time.
Recent versions of iPhoto come with an amazing feature, the ability to automatically recognize and tag faces in your photo collection.
Once established the accuracy with which iPhoto performs this task is amazing. Add new photos to your collection and iPhoto figures out who's in them and organizes appropriately. It's a satisfying and delightful experience once you've trained it. It doesn't take a huge amount of time, but training anything takes away from the magic. Somehow training feels like doing work, you are part of the magic trick, not fully able to sit back and enjoy the show.
Nuance's Dragon voice transcription software used to take hours to train to recognize your voice. The experience was tedious and time consuming. This upfront work made it hard to feel wow'ed once it started working.
Today you can download a free app for your iPhone and simply start speaking. It's a pretty delightful experience because it just works. Your voice is instantly transformed into text.
The first version of Red Laser was novel, but failed to delight. What shifted the experience was eliminating the management and preparation required.
Version one required users to take a clear photo of the bar-code within a tight frame. The second version just asks users to point the video camera and loosely target the bar-code. It feels easier, more natural, more like how the eye operates. The experience improved and adoption rates shot up.
Point Word Lens at a sign in a foreign language and instantly read it in your native tongue.
A lot is going on under the hood to deliver this magical experience. Optical character recognition of the foreign text from a video grab, translation of it, and overlaying the video with replacement text, all in real-time. Of course you don't see any of this, and that's part of the magic. Your experience isn't interrupted, you see video that one instant is Spanish and the next is English. The video feed just got a lot more useful. Of course they also need to get the translation at least part-way right or it doesn't matter.
Pleco is another iPhone app that translates printed text. Like Word Lens it uses the live video feed. Unlike Word Lens the translation is fed back to you in a text box at the bottom of the screen instead of overlaid into the video feed.
This may seem like a small difference, but it interrupts and abstracts the experience. If your goal is to learn another language, seeing both at the same time would be useful, but for simply understanding, replacing the foreign language in place is a far more delightful experience. It feels more natural, and the interface itself doesn't dominate the presentation.
Sometimes all you need to do is give permission for the magic to happen. When you land on a web page in a foreign language, Google Chrome browser automatically takes action and offers to translate the page for you. If you accept, the page quickly transforms before your eyes, into language which you can understand.
What makes this delightful is that you are prompted at the right moment, with assistance which is immediate, and doesn't take you out of your browsing experience. The page maintains its layout, but suddenly the words are all familiar. Links still work, images still show up, it's almost as if a part of your brain has been turned on which can suddenly understand Japanese.
The promise of Jubbigo is huge: you speak into your phone in English, your phone translates what you say and speaks it in Japanese.
In practice Jubbigo gets the job done, but it never feels magic or delightful. You aren't forced to switch modes which is good; you speak words in and a spoken translation comes out. But your experience is still interrupted with the significant amount of processing time between input and output. The lag time between speaking and hearing the translation is more than noticeable, it dominates the experience. To be delightful you need near-instant performance. Google Maps works well because it finds your location immediately, Word Lens wows because the words are replaced in near real-time.
What makes a delightful, magical experience?
Transformation must occur, adding utility, meaning, or even useful action
It must happen without delay
The transformation must maintain fidelity and accuracy to the original
The transformation shouldn't interrupt the larger experience
The less abstract, the more magical
The less management/preparation the more satisfying
Take a look through the examples above. The ones that really delight are those that meet more than a few of these principles. When experiences show promise, but don't deliver you can see they fail to play by these principles.
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:
An educational services platform that allows the city to track the effectiveness of academic and after-school programs, and allows developers to create apps for student learning outside of school.
A platform for using social network media to help citizens network and contribute to public safety programs. Also helps city leaders to quickly locate and organize neighborhood leaders.
Civic Commons: a platform for municipalities to share custom-built technology solutions, so cities can leverage their development investments and avoid reinventing the wheel.
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?
Jim Dibble and Ania Dilmaghani at the whiteboard in their research design session
