The Association of Alternative Newsmedia's 2012 Web Conference was held in San Francisco and attended by publishers, editors, and owners from over 130 of North America's alternative news organizations. Stefan Klocek spoke about how alternative news organizations can bring their content to the emerging platform of tablets in "The Revolution will be Portable: Understanding the Tablet Opportunity" session. He highlighted unique qualities of the tablet for local news consumption and gave an overview of how organizations with a cultivated and established brand presence can deeply engage with their audience. View Stefan's presentation below or download it.

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.

Design research has been a key component of most of the projects I've been involved with at Cooper. Since it adds time and cost, sometimes we have to go to great lengths to convince clients to include research in a project. But design research isn't just about giving the design and product team a leg up on understanding user goals and needs. It's also about minimizing business risk and validating—or challenging—the current strategy. Typically, the insights we gain by talking with and observing users help our clients look at their business goals through a different lens. In addition to providing necessary input for designing successful products and services, this new perspective helps them make better decisions about the long-term trajectory of their product roadmap and approach. For some products and companies, it can be even more transformative, as the insights they gain help them re-imagine not only how to design and deliver better products, but also how to better structure their internal organization to do so.

Of course, companies can only make these kind of strategic pivots if they have the appropriate decision-makers engaged in the initiative, with time set aside in their decision-making process for integrating the input that may come out of user research. I've found that the business executives who treat design initiatives as a strategic endeavor and not just a tactical execution of product definition get much more value for their design dollar.

Cooper is proud to announce design strategy expert Indi Young will be coming to our studio on November 14 to lead a one-day workshop in techniques for creating mental model diagrams.

Understanding users' workflows and work environments is key to developing appropriate products and services, but to really create an experience users love, you have to understand how they think. Indi Young has pioneered techniques for getting at these key understandings during user interviews, and for translating that understanding into powerful communication pieces called mental model diagrams.

The workshop gives users hands-on experience in the process she describes in her book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. Creating winning design solutions starts with the mantra, "Know thy user." This means more than just identifying users' workflows and work environments; it means understanding how they think.

This one-day workshop will reveal how to capture the thought processes and intentions of your audience into a simple and persuasive mental model diagram, and how to use that diagram to steer the course of your organization immediately and for the long term.

Participation is limited to 20 attendees, so register now!

As a business person, you may consider your software to be an operational tool, part of the sales or operations of your organization. But to your customers, it is a pipeline to your corporate soul. The behavior of your software indicates what is really valuable, what is truly important to your company, and there is really no way to hide.

Websites let your customers access your products and services, but as a side effect, they also access your corporate values. If your website is clumsy or slick, easy or confusing, it tells them a story.

Most clients hire Cooper to solve superficial problems. When they first approach us, they ask us to help make their websites “be more friendly” or their software “easier to use.” Sometimes they just want us to “make it pretty.” In every case, we find that hard to use, unfriendly, or even just ugly software is a symptom of deeper problems within the organization.

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.

I just changed from a Wintel machine, which I've used for over 20 years, to a Mac. I had dragged my feet with Office 03 so long that people were starting to notice. I no longer could put off upgrading to the "new" Office interface.

Yes, I do not like the ribbon, but that really wasn't the problem. The real problem was that the changes Microsoft made to the Office Suite accomplished nothing and yet came at a high cost.

The new Office UI is very different but is not better. That is a complaint only old farts make (because they know the old ways), so Microsoft can just move ahead ignoring it. I wrestled with it for awhile, and then I figured, if I have to learn something new, why not learn Mac Keynote? I tried it, and found it was a modest improvement over PowerPoint, but that it didn't aggravate me so much because I no longer expected it to behave the same as the old version as I did with PowerPoint.

Pip Coburn, in The Change Function, says that users will change when the benefit of changing is greater than the perceived pain of making the change. That's the operative element here. There was no benefit and lots of pain. Microsoft didn't improve PowerPoint, they just moved the deck chairs around. That's pathetic and not the behavior of a market leader. FAIL.

Just for the record, I reject the argument that it is a zero-sum game between experienced and new users. That trade-off does exist, but only when physical manipulation is involved, such as twitch games, aircraft controls, and the like. Good UI is, in general, good for both experts and beginners alike.

I do not believe Microsoft's assertions that the ribbon is easy to learn. If you feed someone rotten fishheads for a while, then switch them over to a diet of fresh fishheads, they will be happier. You can then tout the statistical "fact" that "users prefer fresh fishheads," even though the truth is that they HATE fishheads. That, I believe, is how Microsoft gets its rationale for UI changes.

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.

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.

I have to admit that I’ve been steering clear of talking about “design thinking” for a while now. A couple years back, when I first heard about what sounded like an exciting new angle on design strategy, I eagerly scoured the web to figure out what it was all about. At Cooper, we’ve always concerned ourselves with challenges beyond skin-deep ornamentation, and we particularly relish working for clients who value the insights that we can bring to their strategic business decisions. I’m interested in anything that gives us leverage to help businesses get beyond the assumptions that stand in the way of truly serving human needs.

So when I set off to learn more, I was a bit disappointed to discover that all the information I could find about “design thinking” appeared to prominently feature the Keeley triangle, some business success stories and not a lot more. (For those that aren’t familiar, Larry Keeley, an OG innovation strategist, devised the triangle as a way of expressing how successful businesses are balanced in the concerns about the desirability, technical feasibility and financial viability of their products.)

The Keeley Triangle. The d-school site appears to have been refreshed in the interim, but if I remember correctly, at one point, the home page featured a marker sketch of this diagram with the words “this is design thinking.”

To be clear, I have no argument with the Keeley triangle. It was part of the foundation of Alan’s arguments in The Inmates are Running the Asylum (Alan Cooper’s 1999 book about the challenges of creating great digital products), and throughout the years I’ve found it to be an incredibly useful device in explaining how design fits with business and technology concerns.

But I guess I feel like defining design thinking by the Keeley triangle alone is like explaining how to fly by stating the laws of physics. In a 1998 HBR article, one of the first articulations of design thinking, Tim Brown defined design thinking as “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” I have very little to disagree with in this, yet I don’t find it particularly useful or interesting. And it really begs at least one big question—what part of “the designer’s sensibility”? The obsession over details? The ability to create incredibly disorganized Photoshop (or Fireworks) files? The propensity to wear black?

All this said, I certainly see promise in the vision and enormously appreciate the work that Brown and IDEO have done to popularize the idea that human-centered design methods are fantastic tools for improving all kinds of things—not just product skins and interfaces, and that businesses can get vastly more value when they ask designers to participate in the product (or service) conception process, rather than to just pretty-up an already-formed idea. So I was really excited when I finally got around to reading Roger Martin’s The Design of Business and discovered a conceptual model that has really helped me understand what part of the designer’s skillset is really useful for this big picture thinking.

Martin refers to this conceptual model as “the knowledge funnel.” The funnel starts with a mystery—for example, how to feed the newly emergent car-centric middle class of 1950s Southern California. Businesses then can create value by moving along the tunnel first to a heuristic, or simple idea about how to solve the mystery—a quick service hamburger stand; then to an algorithm, or the specific operational rules about how to achieve the heuristic—where the hamburger stands should be located, how they should be designed, what the menu should be, how to prepare every item on the menu, and how customers should be served.

Among other things, what emerges in Martin’s model of design thinking is that this “designer’s sensibility” that Brown speaks of is the ability to use an understanding of customers’ needs (as well as technology and business factors) to move inwards and outwards in this funnel by iterating through many different heuristics and algorithms to ultimately imagine and then validate a way of solving this mystery. Intrinsic to this ability is abductive reasoning— making logical leaps to imagine what might be true in the future.

These ideas really resonate with me, but I struggle with the notion that abductive reasoning abilities are unique to designers. Martin is dean at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and his audience is largely business people. I understand why he wants to differentiate these sensibilities from the largely analytical skills that dominate modern business education. But when I first read and thought about the idea that abductive reasoning is “design thinking”, I had two reactions: first, this is what I’d thought business people were supposed to be doing all along; and second, I know plenty of designers who aren’t at all interested in or good at abductive reasoning beyond their medium of, for example, interaction design, visual interface design or industrial design.

Ultimately, I have grave concerns if imagining a better future becomes solely the province of designers or design thinkers, a world of business and political leaders will be absolved of their core responsibility—making things better. (Not that I’m suggesting either Brown or Martin propose this; in fact, they both very focused on how non-designers can learn to think like designers.) I also worry that the term “design” will lose relevance for all the other meanings we rely upon it to convey. As Michael Beirut recently put it, “Don't say design, say innovation, and when innovation doesn't work, make sure you saved some of that design stuff, because you're going to need it.”

Given the big challenges we face in terms of the economy, environment and society, I think it’s a great idea that everyone learns more about creatively engaging with mysteries through abductive reasoning. Still,there must be a better term than “design thinking” to describe it. Any ideas?