I've been watching the new hit TV show "Gold Rush," about amateur gold miners in Alaska and the Yukon. Their struggle to find gold reminds me of the quest for innovation in technology companies. It's interesting to compare the two quests.

Illustration by Scott Cooper

In Gold Rush, a semi-documentary, semi-reality show, big, burly men battle the elements (and sometimes each other) to find gold in the endless miles of wilderness in the 49th state. These days gold is around $1500 an ounce, so a couple of handfuls is all these guys need to have a successful mining season.

Often, all a new technology company needs to become a juggernaut is a couple of handfuls of invention, a few ounces of insight. Google, for example, didn't invent search, they simply added the brilliantly simple idea of ranking search results by the number of references they found. Building their massive search engine and finding a way to monetize their service remained a huge task, but the innovation was just a single nugget. Ironically, the Gold Rush miners almost never work directly with gold. The big problem in gold mining isn't the gold itself, it's dealing with everything that isn't gold. All of their attention and equipment is focused on the not-gold. While they dream of a few handfuls of yellow metal, their day-to-day world is dominated by countless tons of everything else. For the miners to collect a few ounces of gold, these tough, XXL guys have to bulldoze acres of forest, pump rivers of water, dig tons of rock, and move mountains of dirt. They need giant tractors and huge excavators. They need rock and sand sifting machines the size of houses. They also have to contend with trees, wild animals, harsh weather, cash flow, fickle girlfriends, and internecine friction.

Most of what goes on in innovative companies is the simple hard work of designing, coding, and deploying software. It's the quotidian blocking and tackling of everyday business: finding bugs, getting the pixels right, answering the phone. One seed pearl bright idea can occupy a technical team for a year or more, building software and shoveling an endless wilderness of bits. Regardless of the creative brilliance, building a company or a product is mostly just hard work.

The Alaskan gold is just lying there, pure, untarnished, ready to be picked up and sold. They don't have to coerce or cajole it. They don't need to identify or interpret it. Gold is easy to spot, but it rarely comes in a big, fortune-making nugget. It comes in millions of tiny flakes, deposited over the millennia in ancient stream beds.

Innovation is often the same, made up of thousands of tiny shards of creativity. Like gold, creativity rarely comes in giant dollops of obviousness. It tends to arrive in many tiny increments, only the whole of which add up to something revolutionary. So, while the miners have to discard ten-ton boulders, the gold flakes hiding underneath must be handled with exquisite delicacy.

Like mining gold, the quest for innovation is dominated by what isn't innovative. Mostly it's cubicles of conventional work, and it's easy for the delicate innovation to be inadvertently smashed by some hard-rock business process. Just like gold mining, business demands a deft combination of brute force and subtle precision, of massive infrastructure and sensitive awareness.

If you visit a gold mine, you won't see very much gold. If you visit a very innovative company, you won't see crowds of shock-haired Albert Einstein's riding around on Segways reinventing the space-time-continuum. You'll see teams of young men and women working hard at mostly mundane tasks, moving mountains of information, winnowing their way to something of immense value. What lurks there is a respectful awareness of the unique nature of creativity, and how to nurture it. Managers who want innovation don't need to demand it, they merely need to not let the mountain moving of commerce obscure the precious, delicate, dust of invention.

Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software for medical professionals, has published a nice recap of their user conference, Connect11, where Alan Cooper spoke about the role of interaction design in health care. Among the questions answered - "what do you get when you cross a computer with a doctor's office?"

At the 13 minute mark, Stefan Klocek presents a prototype of Practice Fusion's new iPad app.

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.

Alan, Chris, Kendra, and Tamara joined Innova, Russia's premier game development studio, for design education sessions and industry events focusing on the future of gaming and technology in Russia and around the world.

Kendra led interaction design and design communication and collaboration sessions for Innova's designers and technologists. The team immediately began using their new skills, creating a road map to establish goal directed design throughout their organization.

We co-hosted sessions with members of the Russian design community focusing on the current state of design in Russia and the world and the future of interaction design and technology.

Now that we're back in San Francisco, we realize, after all the opinions, ideas and laughter were shared, we are as inspired as our newfound design friends in Moscow to continue developing world-class methods for user-centered design.

The old saying, "History repeats itself" seems to be true in the recent history of book selling.

When the big chain stores of Borders and Barnes & Noble moved into town, the local independent bookstores all quaked in fear or squawked in high dudgeon about how the soulless giant franchises were ruining the business.

Borders failed to compete with Amazon and has since filed for bankruptcy

But the chains taught the independents a valuable lesson: that some books were a commodity. The price and availability of New York Times bestsellers was more important than was the sales clerk's expertise.

The weaker independents closed their doors while the big chains grew fat and happy. The surviving independents continued to disparage the big chains, but the chains delivered a better experience. They added cafes, benches where you could read for hours, and offered a much larger selection of books.

Then the World Wide Web came along, and after some initial jockeying for position, Amazon emerged as the Internet bookseller to beat. Now the shoe was on the other foot. The big chains squawked in righteous rectitude about how they couldn't compete with a company that didn't need to invest in bricks and mortar.

But Amazon taught the chains a valuable lesson: That all books were commodities if you already knew what book you wanted, and it was easier to purchase online, and the online vendors could stock far more titles. What's more, the supporting information on the Web was far more valuable than anything a harried, youthful sales clerk could offer.

Both Borders and Barnes & Noble took huge body blows as the new business model assaulted them, but the Web delivered a better experience. Barnes & Noble created their own online presence and has managed to stay in the game. Borders, however, not only failed to grasp their role in their brick-and-mortar world, but they foolishly gave their online business to Amazon, and so filed for bankruptcy last month.

What's wrong, you might argue, with keeping costs down? Quite a bit, it turns out. If your objective is to design a product people want to use, or to invent something brand new, you must embark on a journey of creativity and innovation. That might seem like normal, every day business, but don't make the mistake of trying to run your creative organization like a conventional one.

Business sage Peter Drucker asserted creative employees "are not labor, they are capital." This has profound implications on the way you should manage and account for your business. As Drucker also asserted, "What is decisive in the performance of capital is not its costs, but its productivity."

In other words, if there is something you can do to enhance the creative abilities of your people, it doesn’t really matter how much it costs, or how long it takes. If it results in a successful invention, or a compelling design, that’s what really counts.

Business people trained in industrial age thinking cut costs from force of habit. After all, expense reduction was an excellent strategy when manufacturing costs were dominant; they are easy to measure and provide instant benefits. In the post industrial age, manufacturing costs are neither dominant nor elastic, so reducing them reduces your quality without improving your desirability. Today, trying to make your product cheaper just makes it frustrating to use and unlovable without making it any cheaper to buy. It’s no longer a valid competitive strategy.

This first week of August has been good fun from start to finish! Jim, Faith, and Rock Health agilely went from stories to a plan of action.

Alan's post on ideas, innovation, and creative teams reminded us of an interesting perspective on innovation from Clay Christensen and Art Markman about busting innovation myths.

We took a break to watch the Giants game with our amazing summer interns Mo and Brendan.

Today, Golden, Greg, and Jenea are doing their part at Device Design Day. Get some design goodness of your own at in the upcoming Visual Interface Design session August 15-16.

Other interesting scoops this week

“The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas.” That’s one of my favorite axioms and, in my experience, it is universally true. I have many ideas, every day, and some of them are very good. Mostly, though, they are bad.

A small fraction of my good ideas made it to market, but time spent on good ideas is never wasted. There’s always abundant insight to be gleaned from working on a promising thought, and sometimes working on an auspicious idea can lead to other, even better ones.

I’ve wasted plenty of time, though, pursuing my bad ideas. The time and attention I’ve invested in bad ideas in the quixotic hope that they will somehow morph into good ones has been, by far, my biggest waste. Not only did it cost me time and effort, but I could have been working on something much better instead.

Pursuing bad ideas instead of good ideas is a significant and largely hidden problem of innovation. Economists call the waste “opportunity cost.” It's the cost of what you didn’t do while you were busy doing something else. That is, what good idea did you ignore while you were busy working on a bad idea. I would argue that opportunity cost is the most expensive in all of business.

The obvious solution is to only invest time on good ideas, but that isn’t a realistic solution because of the conundrum of innovation:

Bad ideas often look really good in the beginning, and that’s when good ideas almost always look bad.

For example, the people who worked hard on the Microsoft Zune really thought at the time it was the best music player ever, and many observers of Google a decade ago thought it was just another silly Web startup with an equally silly name.

Frankly, it’s really difficult to find good examples of this phenomenon because of some very powerful cognitive illusions. In hindsight, all good ideas look good and all bad ideas look bad, even though this is not at all the case in the heat of the moment.

We are thrilled to announce that Cooper will be partnering with Rock Health to provide design consultation and education for their inaugural class of health care startups. Cooper designers have always been keenly interested in design for healthcare environments, and Rock Health is the first seed-accelerator exclusively for health startups! It aims to provide an ecosystem in which these startups can succeed, including mentorship in tackling design challenges. Announced this year at SxSW by the CTO of the White House, Aneesh Chopra, the startups are backed by companies such as Harvard Medical School, and Nike.

Rock Health co-founder Halle Tecco and a a passionate team have assembled a fabulous group of mentors and partners who will guide the start ups. Over the next few months, Cooper will be providing a crash course in design research, interaction design, visual design and hands-on mentoring .

We're super-excited to get started, so stay tuned for more posts on our Rock Health workshops.

Startups don’t have capital to burn or luxurious schedules for big-design-up-front. But unless your idea is by-and-for-engineers, design isn’t something you want to skip on your way to market. For a startup, design may mean the difference between simply shipping, and taking the market by storm. But with tight budgets, and aggressive timelines, how to include design and get the best value for the investment?

Eric Ries proposes a cyclical model for development in a startup: Build > Measure > Learn (repeat). Lots of smart people think he’s onto something. While Ries coined this model to explain how developers work in a lean way, the same model can be applied to design, only our “build” uses different tools, and the work products are at a different fidelity, but it’s still build. Our hypothesis is made manifest and testable.

In a recent Lean UX workshop hosted by the fantastic Janice Fraser (Luxr) and Cooper’s own Tim McCoy and Suzy Thompson (also of Cooper) suggested that the cycle was right, but that it begins in the wrong place. She suggested Learn > Build > Measure (repeat).

I buy it. After years of starting projects off with research (as little as a couple of hours in some cases) I’ve seen the power of starting off informed. Framing the problem before you start solving it is not only wise, but major opportunities for innovation often arise before anyone proposes a design solution.

So we have a cycle of Learn > Build > Measure (repeat). For a startup we can’t afford weeks of research, with the developers on the bench waiting for the voice of the user with thoughtful diagrams and artful persona back-stories. We need full-speed-ahead; design can’t afford to be the slow kid or the bottleneck.

Faster

How fast can we run the cycle? I’d suggest that design can run at a sustained pace of 3 days for a complete cycle. I don’t think you could do useful design faster. We often take 5 days for a cycle where we have time and budget, but 3 days is about the fastest you’d productively move. It bears noting that it takes a remarkably agile client to keep up with a 3 day cycle. Early stage startups with focused stakeholders and unlimited access to users for testing are the most likely to keep up with this pace. Larger enterprises benefit from a slower 5 day cycle.

Once we get the upfront work of personas and high-level scenarios done, cycles take on a regular pattern.

What do we get? Speed and low waste. We iterate quickly, with a 3 day cycle time we get moving quickly, we get rapid insights up front, ideas almost immediately up on the board, and pixel proofs within 24 hours. Sure they’re rough, but we don’t need high fidelity to test if the direction works, if users and stakeholders are getting what they need. All we need is something that gets the idea across. We’ll refine as we get deeper. And because we’re not letting design get too far out before getting it in front of users we’re keeping waste to a minimum. Our ideas will be tested early and often. We can throw out what isn’t working after a low amount of investment and focus our time on what is.

At this point the major win for startups is speed; design is incorporated without slowing things down. We also reap huge benefits from operating with such a low waste level. Days and dollars are spent building and refining the solutions that are most promising. But speed has a downside, we have little time to solve more complex problems. This may result in grabbing for obvious or standard patterns where a more thoughtful innovative approach might ultimately yield a better product. Also, design is an iterative process, the rapid cycles may seem like iteration, but the speed leaves little opportunity to revisit or reject and rework something. The first solution may easily end up the final solution. This may be acceptable for some projects, but when a startup is striving to innovate, it’s not enough to be first, you really need to deliver better.

More, better

There’s a way to supercharge this process in a way that produces predictably better solutions, and more of them. Add a second interaction designer. Pair design transforms the equation, from pure speed, into rapid insight that one designer with twice the time couldn’t produce. It’s not a case of twice as much in the same amount of time, speed isn’t increased, we’ve already maximized that. What we’re maximizing now is the quality. Two designers working together, paired in the right way delivers more, and better design.

The way we do pair design it’s not just any two designers locked in a room, struggling to wrestle the marker away from one another to prove how much better their idea is. We pair two interaction designers to maximize on the energy in polarity. We divide and conquer. One takes takes on the assertive role, the other the reflective. One takes on the drawings and interface, the other the patterns and words. One dives into details, the other keeps the big picture. One presents, the other captures. Through pairing and focusing on polarized responsibilities, we increase the value of the thinking and the product.

Let’s start with the first cycle:

Learn

While interviewing users and stakeholders we’ve got two observers, two sets of ears, two perspectives on what was learned. Our understanding is richer, fuller and more complex than any single practitioner could bring.

Build (personas/scenarios/early sketches)

One of our pair takes on the role of generating ideas, proposing solutions, getting something onto the board. The other is a dedicated thought partner. They hold back, poke holes, prompt, help evolve the ideas while they’re still forming. It’s a period of intense, rapid iteration. Roles can and do swap. We go wide, exploring much more quickly than a single designer could. Bad ideas are killed earlier. We develop clarity more quickly. We’re more confident of our decisions and more articulate about our reasons because they already went through the crucible of our partner.

Build (pixels and patterns)

Our pair differentiates further. One jumps into putting the ideas into pixels, the other into articulating the patterns that underlie the design decisions. Each works from the earlier design work, but refines it in very different ways. As we push our design though increasingly detailed scenarios it evolves. The two different approaches helps us triangulate on places where the design fails, and helps to identify fresh new opportunities. Two brains churning on the material coming from different directions, forces us to see more objectively, we can’t remain blind to the ideas we love that should be thrown out. The paired design team acts as an editorial cross-check on the thinking of the other. A single designer would be forced to choose between pixels or patterns, or struggle to articulate both poorly.

Measure (stakeholder/user feedback)

Pair designers divide up the work, focusing on a single aspect, presenting or capturing. One walks users through the flow, the other observes and captures notes. It doesn’t matter who’s doing what but each role is dedicated and focused. One designer would struggle to demo the design and really notice how users’ actions diverged from their verbal feedback, often critical distinctions which when noticed strongly inform future design decisions. With a pair of designers we capture the feedback accurately. We also have two perspectives on each test. We are less prone to fall into our own bias because we’ve got someone to check us.

More, better, faster is an investment

By pairing designers, we gain tremendous advantages. You’re running a startup and it’s easy to buy the process of a speedy cycle. It’s simple math and it maximizes cash, with quick early results. At first the idea of pair design may seem like a hard thing to sell to your board or investors. “Twice the designers, huh? Can’t we just get one and do more cycles?” Sure, people do it every day. But one designer doesn’t make more, better. Even a rock-star designer can’t generate enough polarity to come close to the “more, better” brought by two damn good designers who know how to work together as a pair. You buy a pair, you get more design; not twice the volume, but twice the quality. This isn’t that fine-china sense of quality, but the kind of quality defined by pure raw goodness. It’s the quality of solutions that people fall in love with. It’s the ephemeral but very real sense when you first make contact with the product that someone really truly understands you. Not all problems need or deserve this level of attention. There’s many times when one designer may perfectly address the need.But when your startup wants to design more, better, faster, go all the way, invest in it. Expect faster, and demand more, better. Your investors will want it too.

Related Reading

• Take the Design Collaboration and Communication class
• Lean UX workshop recap
• Lean UX, Product Stewardship, and Integrated Teams
• Integrating solve and do
• Explaining pair design (metaphorically)