Buzzkill

I’ve been struggling for days to put into words my reaction to the launch of Google Buzz. But the phrase I can’t get out of my head is “HOW could they screw up THIS MUCH?”

Well here’s how: Google took Gmail, one of the most widely used web services on the planet, and modeled a quantum change in its behavior with an insulated, private, corporate, top 1% tech-savvy user base.

Google Buzz creates an instant social network based on your email history. Google engineers wrote an algorithm to analyze years of correspondence in users’ Gmail accounts. At launch, by default, these associations were automatically linked and shared with everyone else in your "network." [Google has already modified the default behavior twice in response to criticism].

Apparently, Google tested Buzz internally for months prior to public launch last week. Unfortunately, the controlled conditions of corporate email are a poor stand-in for conditions “in the wild” of a public email service.

You could imagine that the post-launch backlash could have been anticipated with a bit of forethought, even an afternoon meeting that went something like this:

AGENDA
1. What types of people use Gmail?
2. What do they use it for? Who do they communicate with and why?
3. Does our internal beta account for those types of uses?
4. If not, how do we introduce this service to people who aren’t like us?

At a bare minimum, identify a set of people who represent a cross section of users: A grandparent who switched from AOL; a high school junior with an active and evolving social circle; a struggling factory worker in a hostile political environment; a professional with a secretive private life.

Then, just as a sanity check, ask “Is there anything problematic with mining the history of their person-to-person emails and creating a single transparent group from that list?”

For many things, Google’s approach—develop, internal beta, release, measure, adjust—is an adequate way to stumble towards a better experience. That approach takes good ideas, puts them in play, then sands down the rough edges and suggests enhancements. For something as significant as combining email and social networking, it’s toxic.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Video of Alan talking about the thinking behind Visual Basic

As you may know, Alan Cooper, our fearless leader and co-founder, is the creator of Visual Basic (or at least the visual part-- Bill Gates is the one who decided to marry it to Basic). MSDN has recently put together an interesting series of interviews around the history of Visual Studio, including this one with Alan.

Regardless of the countless poorly designed applications that have been brought into the world by Visual Basic, it's hard not to see the monumental impact Visual Studio has had on the way software is created. Hear from the godfather himself about the making-of and implications of his game-changing work.

If you're having issues (or have issues) with Silverlight, you can find other formats of the video here on the MSDN site.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

The Barcode Hunt

I'm a frequent Costco shopper—buying things in bulk just makes sense for a growing family. Every trip has the same ritual to it; find the things we need, avoid the things we don't, try lots of samples (a.k.a. lunch) and then... wait in the enormous lines. Many people dread going to Costco solely because of the long lines. I would hazard to guess that this is one of the biggest friction points in their customer experience.

So, what's the problem? While there are lots of small factors that slow things down, one stands out in my mind—I like to call it 'the barcode hunt'.

To illustrate: By the end of my Costco trip I'm ready to be done, and the toddler that's usually with me is WAY ready to be done. So, while waiting in line I try to organize my cart so the checker can scan the large items in the cart and get us on our way quickly. But invariably there are a few things—always heavy and bulky on the bottom of the cart—that need to be moved to find the barcode. By my guesstimation, this box dance burns about 30 seconds per transaction. Multiply that by all the shoppers Costco sees in a day, and you can see why the lines are always so long.

But what could Costco do to speed things up?

Yeah, in a future world of RFID and spimes this problem will wondrously disappear—or so we've been told (I'm still waiting for my jetpack). But in the short term, there's lots of time being wasted.

My modest proposal could save those 30 seconds: Print the barcode on all 6 sides of as many products as possible.

Every item in the cart would be scannable in any position, speeding the checker's task and getting me on my way faster.

A change like this could work wonders for checkout lines everywhere, including self-checkout kiosks. (for some fun ethnography: go watch people using self-checkout kiosks find the barcodes on products—it's an eye opening experience). But I focus on Costco for two specific reasons: motivation and muscle.

Motivation

Costco has one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the country. They sell good products at good prices, stand behind all the goods they sell and go out of their way to treat their employees well. They have crafted a customer experience that, with the exception of the lines, is top notch. Having proven that they 'get' customer experience, it seems that a relatively small change like this could take hold.

Muscle

Costco is an 800lb retail gorilla that uses their market muscle to get better pricing and quality from their suppliers. If they choose to, they could dictate barcode location rules to their suppliers. Costco also has a huge house brand, 'Kirkland Signature', where they have complete control of the final form of their packaging and could easily shift to a 6 barcode design.

How about it Costco, will you make my next lunch visit, err I mean, shopping trip a bit more streamlined?

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

The Drawing Board: Fill 'er up

We find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, 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.

In this episode, we look at car information systems. Sure there’s a ton of useful data in there, but most of it is trapped behind a series of menus, idly waiting for us to enter the correct sequence of commands to unlock it. We imagine a car information system that’s more forthcoming with the data it already has, making us feel like we’ve got a great road-trip buddy in the passenger seat instead of a computer.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Mommy, where do ideas come from?

Last week some designers from Google came to our studio for a discussion about the  practice of interaction design. We each shared a bit about our team structures and processes, and talked about some of the unique challenges that we face as a consultancy vs an in-house design team. But some of the most interesting discussions emerged when we focused on the areas of overlap - the basic bread and butter of interaction design. One of the most provocative questions posed by the Googlers was simply: “Where do ideas come from?”

We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about how we do things around here, but if we’re honest, this is the “then a miracle occurs” step in our design process.

This is where the rubber meets the road for every designer: you’ve done your research, synthesis, and analysis to clearly articulate the problem you’re trying to solve, and now it’s time to produce that winning design solution. You get up, grab a marker, and hope inspiration strikes somewhere along those five small steps to the whiteboard. As seasoned designers, it’s not something we think much about anymore - it just happens (unless it doesn’t). But as mentors, it’s important not to yada yada yada the best part (though we DID mention the lobster bisque).

So this week, we’ve spent a little time looking inward to try to develop a deeper understanding of where design ideas come from. Here’s what we found:

Research matters

Cooper designers conduct our own user research, and many feel that this provides indispensible fuel for design ideas. Experiencing real people in their actual environments fuels our senses of empathy and intuition that helps to guide us towards the ideas that make people happy, successful (and even better looking). Plus, the research phase affords us the opportunity to be fully immersed in the users and the domain for a few weeks at the start of the project, which in addition to providing rich data and empathy, also gives our brains boot-up time to start noodling on the problem and explore possible solutions in the background. Many of our designers confessed that they often doodle during interviews, sketching design ideas when inspiration strikes without the pressure of being expected to produce a solution. At the end of the research and analysis phase when patterns, goals, and requirements have been formally defined, designers can flip back through these quick sketches and easily pick out the good ideas from the bad and begin to improve upon them based on their deeper understanding of the users and the problems that must be solved.

Sometimes, words are worth 1,000 pictures

The first step in our design ideation process comes before any “official” sketching is done: we describe the users’ ideal experience in words. The scenarios we develop at this stage are forward-looking and technology-agnostic, focusing on the personas and how they think, feel and behave rather than on specific interface elements or technical implementations. We also identify experience keywords that describe the emotional response that users should have to the product. Not having to answer the “how” frees us up to think big, imagining the best-case scenario for how the product supports each persona in achieving his or her goals. Then, when it comes time to actually start sketching and exploring interaction, form and visual languages, we’re already united around a clear vision for the kind of experience that would truly delight our users, helping us to focus on design solutions and visual styles that most fully embody that vision.

Just do it

Fear of the blank page can be daunting for all of us. Sometimes, just pushing past that fear and starting to sketch can get the juices flowing. Our designers make sure to have a tablet, sketchpad, or whiteboard easily accessible at all times, and we don’t wait until we have a fully formed thought or idea to use them. We may look like we have a brilliant idea in our heads as we approach the whiteboard, but often those few short steps aren’t where the thinking actually happens - the ideas start to come only after we draw the first few rectangles. There’s something special about the process of sketching - even jotting down some really bad ideas helps us learn about the tensions on the problem and gets us closer to a workable solution. (See Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences for a fantastic exploration of the idea that the act of sketching is integral to ideation and design problem solving.)

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Stratus Air: A Cooper concept project

When we saw the topic of this year's I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review concept category, we thought it would be fun to put together an entry. As frequent travelers, we were particularly inspired by the brief: design a graphic, object, or environment that would improve the experience of air travel.

We thought our approach was a good mix of practicality and inspiration; a premium loyalty service enabled by helpful bits of technology that would ease the pain and smooth the turbulence of business travel. Did we expect to win? Absolutely. Even though the judges didn’t share our enthusiasm, we’re happy with what we came up with, and we wanted to share it with you.

We present Stratus Air.

(To view at full screen HD, click the little icon with 4 diagonal arrows next to the Vimeo logo.)

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Thinking outside the boxee

Yup that’s right. First they had the idea to get the Internet on your TV (remember WebTV?) then it was all about TV on the Internet (Hulu, CBS, CNN, etc. ) and now we’ve got TV on the Internet put back on your TV (boxee).

For those of you not already in the know, boxee is a multi-platform media center with a 10-foot interface for aggregating video, music and photos that exist both offline and online. Others have failed in this space, but the boxee offering pushes the paradigm of content distribution and consumption in some interesting ways.

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Storytelling with found objects

When I saw Christoph Niemann's recent piece in the New York Times, I LEGO N.Y., I was struck by the way that simple physical objects, accompanied by text, can beautifully illustrate ideas.

Both images are from Christoph Niemann's I LEGO N.Y.. He has a blog called Abstract City on nytimes.com.

At Cooper, I find that I'm often looking for new ways to activate design thinking, or to clearly and directly represent ideas. It can be easy to think too literally, to work over the same terrain again and again, and this is why I'm inspired by work like Niemann's — it gets back to basics. It speaks clearly, but also invites interpretation. It reminds me of Bill Buxton's discussion of "storytelling with found objects" in Sketching User Experiences:

As a child, when your parents got a new refrigerator, did you not take the box and transform it into a fort or spaceship? We have all seen and done such things — made free associations between objects and their meaning and purpose. The key observation here is that such transformations are as fundamental to design thinking as they are to childhood imagination and discovery.

I'm curious to hear from the design community: Are there techniques that you've used to radically reconsider familiar concepts? Or to vastly simplify the communication of your ideas?

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

The Drawing Board: Commuter Buddy

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion.

In this edition, we thought a bit about public transit. It's great for the environment and pocketbook, but it isn’t without its own headaches. Managing departure delays and worrying about getting off at the right stop make commuting less carefree than it could be. So how can we make the experience better? Meet Commuter Buddy, a concept application that lets commuters sit back and enjoy the ride. So…enjoy.

The Drawing Board: Commuter Buddy on Vimeo.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Thinking outside the inbox

There’s a meme floating around the interWeb called “Inbox Zero, the gist of which is that we should not be slaves to our email. That’s a fabulous sentiment and I agree wholeheartedly.

Merlin Mann, the creator of Inbox Zero, has some truly excellent advice on how to think about your email, your inbox, and yourself. In particular, not feeling guilty about deleting messages or sending terse, one-line-replies are golden rules. Not to put too fine a point on this, but I agree without reservation with the principles and practices of Inbox Zero.

Yes, and.

I believe that Inbox Zero is a human operational method for dealing with fundamental shortcomings in the software we are forced to use. The very fact that we have an “Inbox problem” is prima facie evidence that the software bringing our email to us isn’t really designed with our goals in mind.

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Feeling passionate about Amazon’s Frustration-Free packaging

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?

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion. So…enjoy. Discuss. Design.

The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator on Vimeo.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

We love ILoveSketch

As Jenea mentioned, several Cooper designers love their tablet PCs, and many love to sketch in OneNote. Recently, Alan sent this video around; obviously, sketching has been taken to the next level. The tool is called ILoveSketch, by Seok-Hyung Bae, Ravin Balakrishnan, and Karan Singh, and it looks kind of mind-blowing.

ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

The creators describe their system as:

A 3D curve sketching system that captures some of the affordances of pen and paper for professional designers, allowing them to iterate directly on concept 3D curve models. The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.

It's hard to see exactly what's going on, interaction-wise, but there are certainly some new and unique interaction patterns in the demo, and a potentially steep learning curve, but nothing that seems counter-intuitive. It allows people to effectively sketch 3D objects without perhaps the extensive skill of perspective drawing. The replicated sketching functionality would also ensure perfect symmetry of an object like that demonstrated with the plane. Most of all, it looks like lots of fun.

(Thanks to Dr. Marty for the link.)

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Google Chrome: The interface is beside the point

There's been a lot chatter around the office and internet about Chrome, the recently launched (or leaked) Google Web browser. I've got to say that much of it misses the aspect of the application that I find most inspirational. Google Chrome exists for one reason and one reason only: To provide a framework for web-based applications to look, feel, and act like desktop applications.

It doesn't seem that Google has real interest in replacing IE or Firefox as the dominant web browser. (The tech business press can't see beyond this point). Instead, Google wants to see the technological underpinnings of Chrome adopted by mainstream browsers. The Chrome team is explicitly inviting other browsers to use their code base — they've open sourced everything — and they have explicitly acknowledged adopting best-of-breed UI features from others.

So how does Chrome elevate web apps to desktop app status? Six ways: Separate processes for each tab; Google Gears for local storage, offline functionality and "native app" behaviors; application shortcuts; a modern JavaScript virtual machine; and minimal-to-absent browser interface, aka "chrome". Let's look at each one in more detail, with snippets from Scott McCloud's fantastic graphic novella product tour.

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Beautiful Monsters: Check your assumptions at the door

Every product, service, or business model is defined in large measure by what designers take for granted. These assumptions can be held so deeply as to be invisible to the designers themselves. And yet their acknowledgment, and negotiation, are key to industrial evolution, profit, and harmonious relationships to various ecosystems.

In the early days, for instance, you could assume that those with access to computers were backed by organizations willing to invest the funds necessary to acquire or build the complex infrastructure required by computational behemoths. But with the advent of microprocessors and other such developments, that all changed. Now the intrusion of computers into every corner of our lives is nearly complete, with 11 percent of the people recently polled saying they’d like their email deliver directly into their brains in the ultimate post-media consumer fad.

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Brainstorm without snapping branches

Ah, the rumble of an impending brainstorm. In some organizations, it is a prized tool that puts a sparkle in the eye and wind in the sails. In others, it's a feared term and a necessary evil.

And what exactly is a brainstorm anyway? Many disciplines, whether design, business, technology, or otherwise, have their own brainstorming voodoo, though it can seem like this vision is transported via secret handshakes and smoke signals. Everyone knows something is going on, but no one really articulates what. After all, it's really just the time when we get together and come up with stuff (hopefully of the clever variety), right?

I've found myself brainstorming to many tunes over the years, from industrial design rock-fests to a modern interaction design synthpop, a visual design rumba to a change management cha-cha. And this often little-understood microcosm of society has an uncanny way of pushing buttons and exposing long-held beliefs right when they're on the way to the chopping block. It's the place where the skeletons come out, and can remain fraught with quicksand no matter how long you've been doing it.

So why bother? Sure, they can be challenging. But they are also where the magic happens. Where the mish-mash of life experiences come together to create something from nothing. And the principles that make this magic happen don't change.

This is what I've learned along the way...

Be present — Put it away.

A single person checking their email or starring out the window can have a ripple effect on the whole room. This is your time! The time for the great idea. Be there for it.

Be the dynamic — Say it, show it, repeat.

Make explicit the desired group dynamic alongside the goals for the session outcome. Discuss the goals with the room, get agreement, and then keep those goals in sight. While focusing on a new idea, people can easily forget themselves and relax into old (sometimes less constructive) habits; it's only human. So stick up those dynamic and outcome goals (to your forehead if you have to) as an ever-present target.

Be a good citizen — Build a community with your bricks.

A highly-functioning brainstorm participant is both an individual contributor and advocate for the group at the same time. Each of their ideas serves a dual purpose - to contribute to the output of the session, as well as to act as a springboard for someone else's next idea. Do both with intention.

Be positive — See the good, and say so (and don't throw those bricks.)

See the good in your own ideas, and articulate the positive in the ideas of others. This is how the momentum gets started, and how to keep it going. Make "Yes, and also..." your favorite phrase.

Be safe — Keep the wolf at bay.

Ask clarifying questions if you need to, but keep those ideas away from judgment or analysis; Try setting aside a separate time for processing later. One wacky idea is all it takes to ignite the twinkle of the idea in someone's eye. Analysis and judgment are the big-idea-stealers in disguise, and guarantee discord will break the momentum before you ever get to the REALLY BIG idea.

Be flexible — Keep the energy up.

Once you have the momentum going, be flexible and go with the flow. And don't forget to pause for the occasional office Nerf gun battle if you're stuck. (You do have an office Nerf gun, don't you?) Sometimes there's nothing better to shake loose those brain cells or energize the room than a little silliness and a good laugh.

So what's the result of all this? You're ready to...

Be highly generative — Have more and better ideas, and have them fast!

Brainstorming is as much about intuition and free-association as it is about brainpower or knowledge. Speed and quantity help break through the 'low-hanging fruit' ideas, and get the brain-juice flowing. The result? You push through to new combinations and insights that will surprise and enlighten you, pointing the way. You'll get to better places than you ever thought you'd go, and I bet you'll win the day.

So what brainstorming voodoo have you picked up along the way? What works for you? What doesn't?

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Startle wayfinding

Axel Peemoeller’s wayfinding system for the Melbourne Eureka Tower Carpark has been making the internet rounds. Props to him, it’s a novel and eyecatching design. (See below for one example from his site.) But something about it makes me think it’s disorienting (and possibly dangerous) for drivers. Let me try and articulate my amateur cognitive science/interaction design theory to explain.

While driving, your brain’s 3D systems are in high gear. (Pardon the pun.) Your mind is tuned to look for positioning cues such as occlusion, parallax, and especially size changes. This last is most important, as your visual system is on the lookout for anything that suddenly grows larger than the things around it, which would be a clear sign that you’re about to hit something. It’s called the startle response, and it happens within about 80 milliseconds, far too fast for any rational processing to counteract it.

So now, think of yourself in the Eureka Tower Carpark. Turning a corner, you’re a little confounded by the strange and lovely colored shapes on the wall. What’s going on here? All of a sudden, your visual system puts all these shapes together in a way that could only make sense if there was something (in this case, typography) jumping out right in front of you. Your gut reaction should be to slam on the brakes, even if your logical brain can decipher the thing a few milliseconds later. Hopefully the driver behind you left enough room.

So I haven’t been there, and I don’t know if this conjecture bears out in fact, but the pictures certainly set off my startle reaction.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Beautiful Monsters: Be the change

The Market Street grid, Courtesy: bricoleurbanism.

This week, San Francisco started choosing sides for another Market Street Mêlée, which we fight once every ten years or so. On one side of the double-yellow line are arrayed various assorted starry-eyed, bipedal dreamers who propose closing down the main artery of our fair city to most carbon-emitting traffic so as to give pedestrians and bicyclists a break, reduce pollution, and increase the beauty and overall mellow vibe of the grid. On the other side stand the self-styled hard-nosed rationalists who see in this as a pedal-powered economic and moral calamity in the making.

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Beautiful Monsters: The odds are in

Beautiful Monsters is a series by David Fore, head of Cooper's consulting practice. It is intended encourage conversation about how interaction designers can grow more sustainable practices, with the goals of improving our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet. Start at the beginning, or read the latest installment below.

Critics may charge that I’m loving on WunderMap too much. But these guys have vision. They provide fantastic resources for visualizing many of the changes afoot, which is a necessary precursor to visualizing solutions. But what they haven’t done yet is provide us the coordinates of our honeybees, one in three of which have disappeared from these parts. Without honeybees we don’t have agriculture as we know it — and, ipso facto, culture.

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Beautiful Monsters: Why on earth does this matter?

It used to be that everybody talked about the weather, but nobody did anything about it. Not anymore. Through the magic of technology, I am empowered to make better decisions about where not to breathe. That’s because the good people at WunderMap have devised a smoke map. For a few days there, the smoke from local wildfires were absorbed by our (formerly) infinitely capacious atmosphere. So I didn’t think I’d need the smoke map. But then temperatures hit new epochal records, humidity took a dive, and the wind began fanning the flames again.

Should our misfortunes expand to include plagues of frogs, boils, and gnats, I know WunderMap will have my back.

In other news last week, the U.S. continued to emit vivid plumes of interactive graphics displaying our industrial might, which nobody can deny … it’s just that my emissions are necessary, while yours are not. World leaders at the G8 Summit in Japan, meanwhile, decided to postpone serious action on climate change for another few decades. Tomorrow’s always the best day to begin a diet.

Why on earth should such things matter to interaction designers? Put another way, why does earth matter to interaction designers?

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Beautiful Monsters: With such a late start, we best get moving

From our position at the confluence of human desire, technology, and business, interaction designers can make a tremendously positive—or negative—impact on the biggest issues facing us today: the sustainability of commerce, human societies, and natural systems. Despite these opportunities, software makers are discouraged from thinking outside the aspect ratio of the computer ’s monitor.

This is the first in a series of articles intended to serve as an ongoing conversation about how interaction designers can move the industry toward an Ecosystem Centered Design to improve our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet.

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About Face 3: Foreword

The industrial age is over. Manufacturing, the primary economic driver of the past 175 years, no longer dominates. While manufacturing is bigger than ever, it has lost its leadership to digital technology, and software now dominates our economy. We have moved from atoms to bits. We are now in the postindustrial age.

More and more products have software in them. My stove has a microchip in it to manage the lights, fan, and oven temperature. When the deliveryman has me sign for a package, it's on a computer, not a pad of paper. When I shop for a car, I am really shopping for a navigation system.

More and more businesses are utterly dependent on software, and not just the obvious ones like Amazon.com and Microsoft. Thousands of companies of all sizes that provide products and services across the spectrum of commerce use software in every facet of their operations, management, planning, and sales. The back-office systems that run big companies are all software systems. Hiring and human resource management, investment and arbitrage, purchasing and supply chain management, point-of-sale, operations, and decision support are all pure software systems these days. And the Web dominates all sales and marketing. Live humans are no longer the front line of businesses. Software plays that role instead. Vendors, customers, colleagues, and employees all communicate with companies via software or software-mediated paths.

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Goal-Directed Service Design

Most people think of Goal-Directed Design techniques as focused on product design, but they work equally well for services. A service is comprised of the various "touchpoints" between a customer and a business. Touchpoints include public-facing systems such as web sites and web-enabled software, but can include other channels as well, such as brick-and-mortar stores, points of sale, interactive voice response systems, email and postal mail, too.

A service model best fits offerings that are intangible, distributed in space, or play out over a length of time, especially on a routine basis. Some obvious examples include: electricity, hotels, mobile phone service, or even a government. The touchpoints you design as part of your service are critical to the user's understanding of your brand. Increasingly, many touchpoints are interactive systems rather than human contact, so paying careful attention to the design of these things from the user's goals is vital.

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Design Research: Why You Need it

Ever notice how often a product that makes a huge splash at tradeshows fizzles in the marketplace? The story goes like this: Product is introduced at show to much fanfare. News media gives Product lots of press, and consumers everywhere express interest in Product's features and capabilities. Product hits store shelves…and stays there. Some early adopters purchase Product, but it never penetrates into mass consumer markets.

What went wrong? Market research clearly identified potential dollars in target markets just waiting to spend money on the new product. So why did it fail?

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Turning Requirements into Product Definition

In his newsletter article last month, Ryan Olshavsky outlined an overall process for defining new products and services, taking a look at the start of that process. But how do you get from understanding your users to a vision for an innovative product which will appeal to them?

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Bridging the Gap with Requirements Definition

Developing a new product or service is tricky. When everything goes well, the product can redefine a market or even create an entirely new one, to the benefit of its manufacturer and its consumers. When the product doesn't click with its audience, though, the costs—development, employee, manufacturing—can be staggering. How do you ensure that your new product doesn't flop? One effective method is to conduct a requirements definition phase before developing a new product.

Requirements definition simply means "figuring out what to make before you make it." This process is not unique to software products. Architects, for instance, go through a requirements definition phase before they start construction on a home. They talk to the future home owner and determine how many floors and rooms will be in the house, where the bedroom should be, if there's a deck, and so on. Similarly, in the product development world, requirements definition enables you to make appropriate decisions about the functionality and design of a product before you invest time and money developing it. By bridging the gap between the needs of the market and those of your organization, requirements definition significantly reduces guesswork in technology product planning, and helps ensure that business and engineering are working on the same product.

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Innovate, One Step at a Time

I believe most things run in cycles: the economy, the stock market, fashion, moral codes, even one's own personal status and influence (your personal "stock price," so to speak)—sometimes you're hot, sometimes you're not. The past couple of years have been particularly harsh in reinforcing a history lesson for us: when the pendulum swings very hard and far in one direction, it will most assuredly swing just as decisively in the other eventually.

During recessions, uncertainty prevails, and like a driver trying to weave his way along a mountain road in heavy fog, many businesspeople eventually tire and just pull their businesses over to what seems like a safe embankment, turn off their engines of innovation and progress, and wait for the fog to lift. But how long can one afford to sit on the roadside? At what point does it become riskier to do nothing than to proceed with caution? One has to wonder if there's a better way, a way to keep moving forward in measured, confident increments, rather than eventually creating an additional element of uncertainty by deferring innovation altogether.

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The High Risk of Low-Risk Behavior

"Necessity is the mother of taking chances."
-Mark Twain

Occasionally I encounter a motorist on the highway who is driving very slowly, some 20 miles per hour slower than the flow of traffic. This driver undoubtedly believes himself to be driving in a reasonable manner, equating his slow speed with safety. Unfortunately, he fails to recognize the greater risk of a much faster car plowing into him from behind. His slow speed has made his car into a barrier rather than part of the traffic flow, and yet he cruises on, oblivious to the squealing tires and honking horns directly behind him.

Is this really a safe practice? Not on the highways in Silicon Valley.

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What We Can Learn From the Fender Stratocaster

I must admit I'm not terribly impressed by the quality of today's software—my benchmark for good product design isn't defined by the output of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or other respected software companies. Those companies produce some good work, of course, but the software industry, though no longer in its infancy, still seems to be working through its gawky adolescent stage. So, when I think about high quality products, I think of BMW automobiles, Eames furniture, and the Fender Stratocaster guitar.

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Innovating for Humans

Innovation is an obsession and a watchword throughout the software industry, and it's been widely adopted as a core business goal. But from the consumer's perspective, innovation is only valuable if it solves a problem or provides a new benefit. It can be a bitter pill to swallow, but any product that innovates without adding human value will eventually be displaced by one that gives power and pleasure to those who use it.

Before starting to innovate, it is important to reflect on how different flavors of innovation are perceived by the people who will eventually use a product and what risks and opportunities are associated with each. Then comes the hard part: figuring out what the right innovations are and how to implement them.

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