Last week I had a chance to attend Disrupting Markets By Design. What I expected was musings on design as a competitive advantage accompanied by Apple anecdotes. Or maybe a case for lean thinking for designers and the need to fail fast by using quantitative research methods. What I got instead was a compelling and nuanced review of the importance of empathy.
12/11/12 Update:Thank you to all the amazing organizations who were interested in partnering with us for the UX Boot Camp. We received many thoughtful inquiries and were deeply impressed by the work of each organization. Unfortunately, due to time constraints as we approach the end of the year, we are no longer actively seeking partnership for the 2013 Boot Camps, but stay in touch for future opportunities to partner with Cooper for the 2014 UX Boot Camps
Cooper’s UX Boot Camp is a four-day course in our user experience design methodology for designers, developers, and product managers. UX Boot Camp is also an opportunity for nonprofits to explore a real world problem of theirs that can be helped by design and technology. Under the guidance of Cooper senior staff, Boot Camp students perform an in-depth field study surrounding the problem, and the nonprofit receives approximately six distinct design explorations at no cost.
Design practitioners, developers, product managers, marketers, usability professionals, and decision makers who have some experience creating products but want to learn new design methods, get hands-on practice, and help a nonprofit along the way.
Whew. That was close. As every year, there’s a risk that we’ll be overrun with with zombies, werewolves, vampires, sasquatch(es), and mummies before the veil that separates the world seals tight for another year. But a quick tally around the Cooper offices shows that here, at least, we all made it. Hope all our readers are yet un-undead as well. While we’re taking this breather, we’re called to reflect a bit on this year’s interaction design for monsters.
One of the power of personas is that they encourage designers to be more extrospective, to stop designing for themselves. Monsters as personas push this to an extreme. It’s rare that you’ll ever be designing technology for humans who can’t perceive anything, can’t speak any modern language, live nearly eternally, shape shift, etc. But each of these outrageous constraints challenges designers to create a design that could accommodate it, and often ends up driving what’s new or special about the design.
Some of the constraints of the monsters are human constraints writ large (or writ strangely).
So maybe they’re great personas after all, guiding us to great design because they’re extreme, just like the canonical OXO Good Grips story, where designing for people with arthritis led the design teams to create products with universal appeal.
Poor Alexi Devers: Bitten by a "dog," then finding himself naked in a park on the morning after the next full moon, a pulpy mess of unidentifiable victim, dewey and glistening on the ground around him. News stories that day confirm that a terrible murder has taken place by a rabid "dog," and Alexi looks up from the paper with the wide-eyed stare of the recently diagnosed. What will he tell Debbi, his girlfriend? How will he keep her safe? Fortunately for him, after a Google search and a few false leads, he discovers WereSafe, a service for people with "dog" problems just like him. It's expensive, sure, but what choice has he got? One web form and credit card number later, he's joined the service and a special package is on the way.
The WereSafe service has two main service aspects. One to keep the monster contained, and the other to hide the problem from the innocent.
As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper turns its collective attention to the spirit, spook, and creature population. Last year we sought to understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. This year we take the next unholy step and design software, devices, and services around these personas. Today we return to Vladmir and Anton, our conflicted vampires.
Antone grew up in southern Louisiana in the late 1700s, the son of a wealthy landowner. After his childhood sweetheart died, he gave up all hope for life. He told his troubles to a young gentleman who came through town, who promised him an end to Antone’s misery. Instead, he was turned to a vampire, and forced to live a life of eternal suffering, unable to visit his family ever again. Today he broods away his evenings in his family’s decaying plantation.
It was a full house of design thinkers with a Silicon Valley twist. Serial Entrepreneurs. Voice-activation specialists. Tech wunderkinds. An evening of passionate discussion about the future of interfaces.
“I felt like I was back in college — the good parts of college,” Strava designer Peter Duyan told me afterwards.
Peter was crammed in this room of college-like discourse — designed for 35, now seating over 60 — because of a blog post I wrote that went unexpectedly viral.
I had proposed that “the best interface is no interface.” That we should focus on experiences and problems, not on screens. That UX is not UI. Two days after it was published, it was shared more on Twitter than anything ever written on The Cooper Journal, Core77 or Designer Observer. A week later, a Breaking Development podcast. Two weeks, a popular Branch discussion. A month, top ten on Hacker News again. All surprising, flattering, amazing. And that evening, a conversation.
In the spirit of discourse, special guest and design legend Don Norman started the evening with an entertaining retort: “They made a big mistake when they invited me.” (Watch it above, or listen to it here. And if you haven’t read his books, you should).
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Last week, I joined entrepeneur Enrique Allen and designer Leslie Ziegler at Kaiser, where we spoke to doctors from their internal innovation program. We hoped to inspire them as well as to illustrate how design could be used inside Kaiser to improve processes and overall care.
I referred to two case studies—Cooper's work on the Practice Fusion iPad-based EMR, and a visioning project around the patient clinic experience. In these, I illustrated how we identify problems, generate ideas, and drive decision-making during detailed design.
Both case studies highlighted ways in which multidisciplinary teams can make progress by using cheap prototypes that are quickly iterated. In the case of the Practice Fusion app, we used paper prototypes to test and evolve everything from content organization to animation. We did not need to get permission of a hospital IT staff or work with an engineer; we simply needed a new piece of paper and a Sharpie. Prototyping a service starts in a similar manner. Using storyboards and cartoons, we were able to generate and evaluate myriad patient journeys without making costly process and staffing changes.
Many of the questions during the Q&A were symptomatic of a large organization that is beholden to fluctuating regulation. One attendee asked how to get front-line staff on board when they're already suffering from change fatigue. This will require both communication and empowerment. At Cooper U we teach the value of a radiator wall (a wall showing the progress and decisions of a project) in rallying a team and communicating with an organization; this kind of tool could help establish a sense of consistency and direction amid large-scale changes.
All of Kaiser's departments were represented at our talk, from general practitioners to specialists. All are charged with improve patient care and overall quality. I appreciated the opportunity to bring some lessons from my experience in healthcare and design, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they tackle next. Read More
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.
Credits: Greg Schuler, Peter Duyan , Bo Ah Kwon , Suzy Thompson and Chris Noessel.
When the New York Times activated its highly anticipated metering system this week, there was no shortage of opinions on the matter. As opinionated people, the designers here at Cooper started to feel a little left out, so we put our thoughts together on the user experience of the new service. Enjoy, and chime in with your own thoughts and opinions below.
Overall, I think they've done several things right, like the fact that home subscribers (even those like me who now only get the Sunday edition) get an all-access pass to the online content. Also, they're not throwing up a paywall over all of their content — folks can access up to a certain amount of content a month before you're asked to become an online subscriber. And they've thought about how to ensure that folks can read articles that someone has shared via email, FB, etc. We'll see how it goes, but I think that the iTunes store has pretty effectively proven that if you make it easy to do so and provide demonstrable value, people are more than happy to pay - even for something they could get for free elsewhere.
I do worry, though. Because the NYTimes isn't just a business. Their journalism is a public service that everyone benefits from. And unlike a burger or a pair of jeans, where some folks are willing and able to pay for higher quality and some aren't, and the provider can scale back production to match demand, journalism can't be scaled back and still maintain its quality. The fact that I view it as a public service is part of why it's so important to me to contribute financially — just like giving $$ to PBS. Sure, there are some who use it and don't pay for it, and I probably don't use it enough to justify what I pay for it, but I want it to be there and available to everyone. That, above all else, is what worries me about the paid subscription model. Because the prospect of a world in which only Fox News or USA Today can profitably succeed in the news business terrifies me.
I understand why the NYTimes is putting this policy into place. They are my go-to place for US and international reporting. We only recently canceled our NYTimes paper delivery — since I no longer work in Pleasanton, I don't have the long BART commute to read the paper. (Thank you, Cooper!). And it just felt like a waste of resources (trees, ink, and gasoline) to deliver a paper that we typically recycled without reading.
However, I'm utterly confused why readers have to pay more to view content on multiple platforms. In the morning and on BART, I read the NYTimes on my iPhone. At work and at home at night, I read the paper on my laptop. I'm not sure why I need to pay twice as much just because I'm using two platforms. I'm surprised that they didn't follow the kindle sales model, where you purchase a book and own it in the cloud, regardless of which platform you use to access it.
It would be great if they provided a way to ask for articles of interest to you. For example, if I'm interested in reporting on the Middle East, it would be great to be able to have a special category for those articles. It would also be great to have articles that assume that I'm well-versed in a particular region. For example, if I'm familiar with what has already happened in Libya, many of the new articles will review the recent history of what has occurred, so that I have to wade through information that I already know, in order to find out about the most recent developments.
So, after reading the “letter to readers” and looking at the subscription breakdown, I feel a little deflated. Initially, I was actually excited to pay the NYTimes for their digital media, and to help support them as they find a way to continue doing what they do best. However, I don’t like their subscription models at all for a very specific reason. I only read (almost only) the NYTimes on my smartphone, and I feel like I should have the option to pay for mobile-only content. If and when I buy an iPad, I’m pretty sure I would be interested in smartphone and tablet use, but still have little or no interest in the “online” content. Basically, I want to be a mobile-only user and that option isn’t open. From my perspective, they are missing the point if they don’t let their users pay for content on whatever device they choose.
I think journalists should get paid, and I think publishers should figure out a way to make digital journalism pay. I don’t understand people who talk about metering like it’s some violation of their civil rights, and yet I’m also a nerd, so I must admit that I did Google “nytimes metering hack” yesterday (out of curiosity, really), and I found some very interesting CSS (that I did not install).
Still, I do have a problem with the metering service as the NYTimes has implemented it: It seems both too complicated and too stupid at the same time. Why are there so many different options? Why are there different prices for iPads and iPhones? Why is the digital thrown in for free with print? Why is the NYTimes.com version a required baseline for all plans? And why the heck is the Dealbook blog exempted from metering? The investment bankers have been bailed out by the middle class yet again, it seems.
I would bet that these “tiers,” if you can call them tiers, were an effort to try to create “choices.” But the way they’re broken out makes me think that they’re simply the configurations of devices and content that were easier to track on the back end. I would argue that it gives the impression of "choice," without really making sense as a set of choices.
I'll go one step easier with a user-friendly model: How about one price for print + digital, and another for just digital? And how about charging the investment bankers double for Dealbook? That would help the NYTimes recover some of the $40M they supposedly spent installing the metering system.
Adding a paywall is like moving newspapers from the online street corner to the concert hall. Journalists shift from being free street entertainment to performers in a luxury experience that viewers will likely expect to work smoothly and look beautiful. I fear that paywalls will shut the doors on the common, limit access to the kind of information that should be freely available to all, but I am eager to see the good design that results as papers compete for online eyeballs that are willing to pay for their services.
