I collaborate with clients about how to scope and staff project work, and they often have questions about when to bring a visual designer into the process. In the early part of my career, I wouldn't have had a good answer; it likely would have been something like, "at the end." But after 20 years of working in-house and as a consultant with product teams in various capacities — and having no background in visual design myself — I have a much different perspective on the value that visual design thinking has throughout the process of building a product.

Visual designers bring a unique perspective to product vision

First, visual designers are uniquely skilled at defining the overarching experience strategy, called attributes, for a product or service. These aren't specific design principles, but rather descriptions of what the experience should feel like for users, customers, and anyone interacting with it.

One way to define experience attributes is to conduct an experience workshop, where you facilitate a brand and "look and feel" discussion with stakeholders. Framing the discussion by using visual artifacts (pictures of products, cars, buildings, interfaces, art, etc.) helps stakeholders to engage at a visceral level instead of relying on cliché's or generalizations. Visual designers, on the other hand, are great at this, as they are skilled at talking about how the things we see translate into certain feelings and emotions, and how visual elements relate to brand perception.

Facilitating an experience workshop with images makes it easier for participants to articulate what visual approaches feel appropriate and inspiring. A visual designer is skilled at using this input to shape a visual strategy.

Even for companies with a well-defined brand and digital branding assets, it's vital that the product team has a good understanding of what the brand means in the context of the product or service you are designing. This isn't just about proper logo use and the corporate font. It's about knowing how your company wants users to feel when they are using your brand, and about how your users want to feel while using them. Understand that intersection, and you have gold.

Look at things differently during field research

During design field research activities, a visual designer can focus on things like the visual look of the physical environment in which people use the product or service we are investigating. For example, in a medical setting, the visual designer may pay special attention to the signage and décor within a hospital. We wouldn't mimic this in an interface, but getting a feel for the environment can give us clues as to what kind of visual styles may fit—or not fit—within that setting.

Jayson, a visual designer at Cooper, gets to experience user research firsthand at a doctor's office.

I recently worked with Jayson McCauliff, a visual designer, on a product for a large technology manufacturer. The product's users were internal, so Jayson took photos of lobbies, wall art, the small in-house museum, and even the cafeteria. The effort was worth the funny looks he got, as the images later helped give him inspirations for some subtle background textures that made a direct appearance in the interface. (See more about how visual designers work at Cooper)

Early design thinking should include visual language explorations

While the interaction designers begin a design solution phase by exploring key interactions and high-level workflows, the visual designer can explore high-level visual style approaches. Because stakeholders may not be used to or comfortable talking about aesthetic and brand, having someone who understands visual design but can communicate about the effects that color, shape, white space, etc. have on users and brand are vital to making sure that everyone is aligned. It takes skill to talk about style concepts without having the conversation degrade into an argument about the specific shade of blue in a style study, so it's important to have someone who is proficient in facilitating these discussions and in creating artifacts that solicit the right kind of feedback.

Visual language studies keep initial visual strategy conversations focused.

Defining and building a winning product includes attention to the aesthetic and overall experience

Last, visual design isn't just about producing beautiful visual assets for the development team. It's also about creating a coherent product or service in the first place. A visual designer brings a unique perspective to problem solving that augments the other design team members. We find that having the visual designer involved early in design exploration activities makes our design concepts better and more well-rounded. When we are fleshing out the design framework, early and consistent involvement from the visual designer ensures that the interaction design isn't getting too crowded, and that the overall experience is achieving the experience strategy we defined early in the project.

During detailed design activities and implementation, the visual designer needs to be able to react quickly and fluidly as the design and implementation iterate and get refined. If the visual designer has been involved with the project from day one, it's easy for her to work in an agile way while still maintaining the original spirit and intent of the design, and she'll be able to make good decisions and recommend improvements because of that greater understanding.

As you plan your next redesign effort, make sure that a strong visual designer is part of the team from day one. You'll not only gain efficiencies when it's crunch time during implementation, you'll gain a valuable strategic partner and an overall better experience.

Sign up for the visual design course

Learn more about the role of visual design, experience attributes, experience workshops, and effectively presenting visual design to stakeholders in Cooper's Visual Interface Design course on February 6 - 7.

It was one of those, “please, please, let this send,” kind of moments when you hope a weak airport WiFi connection doesn’t disconnect, a low-battery indicator doesn’t shut down your laptop — who knows where there’s an outlet in this airport — and your email actually sends to your million dollar client when the message popped up and your stomach drops: “Oops!”

Like some kind of creepy, American Psycho moment, a hardly-discernible, non-apologetic message from Gmail put this exact dagger into my heart and sent me wondering what went wrong.

Sure, of course, just lemme look up error #001. What?

Google’s Chrome browser gives off an even worse error message that doesn’t make things better, just a wanna-be-hipster-piece-of-software knocking off a Susan Kare classic laughing in your face when you’re frustrated:

Maybe this is part of some awful brand initiative. After all, Google is a place of smiles. An every-color-of-the-rainbow logo, and three square meals place to work with unbelievable benefits. But, then again, Google is hardly alone in this kind of “smile when you’ve fallen” approach to error messages.

Microsoft is sadly considering implementing the same, cutesy thinking in a revamp of their blue screen of death as a part of their otherwise exciting, new Windows 8 operating system:

(windows.staenz.com)

Oh, great. My 14 year-old cousin is writing error messages in Redmond.

Fortunately, Microsoft offers some advice. Just search for the error message, “HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED”…oh wait, this is the blue screen of death. My computer is totally effed.

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.

Visual Design at Cooper. Video credit: Andreas Braendhaugen, Music: Dave Zohrob

Get a quick look at the office of Cooper with some thoughts on the role of visual design in digital interfaces by Nick Myers, managing director of visual design and branding.

Like it or not, the digital world has changed at a wicked pace, and more and more interactions between companies and their customers now happen via an interface. Software serves us everywhere, and the user experience now shapes these interactions every day. At the center of all this change sits the brand. TV and print advertising now regularly feature digital experiences from the likes of Apple, Google, Toyota, GE, and Amazon. The visual interface has become the new face of your brand. This means that the role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) is now harder, and their influence must reach further into the organization than ever before.

More customer interactions are now digital, and the brand sits at the center

Expectations are now much higher. My wife, for example, has lost all patience with technology. She hates how TiVo doesn't record her programs on time; her Dell laptop seems to break frequently; her iPhone is too slow. It's not just my wife, though. I see it frequently in healthcare and financial services. Even employees in larger enterprises have lost patience and expect better.

At Cooper, I see clients struggle with traditional marketing practices to deliver software that lacks the deeper level of engagement that customers are looking for. Some of our clients have changed their approach to marketing and product design and are reaping the rewards with a place on Forbes' Most Innovative Companies list.

TaskRabbit’s service connects people who want help with simple tasks—anything from walking the dog, standing in line at the DMV, or moving furniture—with “Rabbits,” a network of background-checked and pre-approved individuals who have the skills and time available to complete tasks.

With a design ideal for mobile task posting, the app provides a simple, seamless process for securing extra help.

Cooper designers collaborated closely with developers at Pivotal and the TaskRabbit team to design a user experience specifically optimized for busy, on-the-go people, offering timely help for folks with unfinished errands or other tasks. With just a spin of the wheel and a few taps, the app enables a task to be posted on the TaskRabbit service network in a matter of seconds with minimal, if any, typing.

Credits: Faith Bolliger, Jim Dibble, Glen Davis, Tim McCoy and Nick Myers.

TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month and they just opened the service in New York City.

Congratulations to the TaskRabbit team, as the new app release has been featured on Mashable, TechCrunch, and Forbes and has received great reviews.

Download TaskRabbit at the App Store and start getting stuff done!

At the recent Interaction 11 conference, I spoke of the growing importance of visual interface design to both brand and user experience in an increasingly digital world. In this new world, visual interaction designers face big challenges and bigger expectations, from both users and clients.

While designing visual interfaces for dense, complex products, designers can also influence brand perception by creating experiences that are both memorable and useful. In my session, I discuss how to design a unique visual interface that puts the needs of the users first; how to add surprise and delight to critical moments of the experience; and how to use craftsmanship and attention to detail to set your design apart in a visually complex medium. Finally, I talk about how visual designers can effectively frame conversations with stakeholders about brand and experience by using personas, experience attributes, and stories to convey design ideas. Enjoy!

Presentation on Slideshare

You can also view a crisper version of the slides on Slideshare: Slideshare.

Related Reading

• A unified approach to visual and interaction design
• Using research to end visual design debates
• The power of rich visual modeless feedback
• Take the visual interface design class
• The litl: a design miracle!

“We don't finish the movies, we just release them.” -- John Lasseter of Pixar

It’s easy to think of design as an ongoing iterative process, a constant refining that never reaches an objective “end.” It is especially easy to think of software in this way. Because code isn’t static, design of software is relatively dynamic, able in many situations to alter direction or incorporate new functionality without overturning initial design-framework decisions. While this can be true, it is also possible for design to reach a state which is done. Not simply done for the next release, but where design reaches finality. The design no longer carries the evolution of the product forward.

Once design reaches a stage in which the difference between versions is more window-dressing, or a change in interaction approach, rather than a realization of deeper functional improvements, design is done. When the ideas on how to improve a design no longer come, when the designers can no longer see a way to improve the idea, it is done. It isn’t that someone else couldn’t take the idea and evolve it, but that the stewards of the design reach a point where their collective imagination can’t move the product forward.

Design which is not done

It’s easy to find examples of design which isn’t done. Lots of first generation software is released delivering basic functionality. Later versions fill out with functionality, growing to meet the latent potential in the first version. This design isn’t done.

Early designs of Evernote promised much more than was delivered. Successive versions cast and recast the design until the initial flaws could be worked out. Early versions provided little more than a limited word processor that stored stuff in the cloud. The interaction paradigm was a little strange and frustrating. Evernote continues to be a design in process. Functionality continues to evolve and improve with each release; the design isn’t done.

Mature software may not be done either. Photoshop versions 5, 7 and 8 delivered significant design shifts. Paradigms for working with text, the inclusion of vector images and interface for handling of RAW images marked major departures from previous versions. As an 11-year old product the design of Photoshop accomplished remarkable adaptation and revealed the “incompleteness” of prior designs. Of course the design leveraged advances in technology which were not available for earlier versions, but that’s the point. The design wasn’t done, design could still be used to improve the program, to advance what it did and how it did it.

Design of non-software products may also reveal a level of “not done.” A baby stroller from BumbleRide is “done” in the sense that you can purchase one and it works. The design is largely coherent and shows evidence of finish. But even here the design isn’t finished. A comparison of the 2008 and 2009 versions shows significant advancement of the design even though each of the versions was sold as a completed design. Wheels gained quick-release, the safety harness adopted a single button release, and the sun hood extended for more coverage. So is the design done now? I’d argue no. Improvements in ergonomics, materials, and signage all provide ripe areas for the design to continue to evolve.

When it reaches "perfection"

Design isn’t done when it reaches a pinnacle of efficiency or goodness. Done isn’t really a measure of quality or perfection. Many products never reach any level of quality or refinement. They represent evolutionary dead ends, still-born ideas with no potential in which to grow. They are poorly conceived, even if executed well. Crappy products may arguably be done before they are ever built or coded. The lack of vision from the start dooms the product to an evolutionary dead-end before it’s even born. If perfection is the measure of done we don’t have any way to agree on what is perfect or good. Perfect doesn’t give us a way to evaluate done.

When it feels done

Subjective evaluations by the creator may be acceptable in the realm of art. Artists work until the piece is “done;” till they feel the idea has been expressed. Design of products whether software or hardware need more objective measures than feelings. In part, designers need this because the act of creation relies on a whole team, not just an individual. We also need measures because products exist in a marketplace; there are deadlines, ship dates, feature sets, marketing and sales efforts, which require more clarity around when the design will be done.

When the time or money runs out

For consultants, work is “done” when the contract (time) is up. Projects are scoped to meet specific deadlines and requirements which fit those timelines. Design deliverables are iterative, each pass we give moves a level deeper and we work out more of the design details. We give great value for our time, but design is “done” when we run out of time. Our design is rarely done in the sense that every detail has not been worked out, all the possible problems have not solved. We work down from larger more fundamental patterns and frameworks, iteratively filling in the details. The big picture may be done when we deliver, but often it is internal product owners or developers who will actually “finish” the design.

When the requirements are met

It could be argued that design is “done” when the initial requirements have been met. It’s done enough to release a version, but it’s not really done. After the product ships the design team refines the design, adding in features or fixing issues which shipped in the previous version. The designers work to fulfill the full potential of the product. As long as their work produces advancements the design isn’t done.

When innovation plateaus

Design is done when its evolution plateaus. A couple of versions are released with little more than rearranging the deck chairs. Rework or changes to the interface reflect passing fashions rather than fundamental shifts in direction or functionality. Innovations in the marketplace or in technological breakthroughs are not incorporated or addressed in the design. Evolution grinds to a halt, the product ceases to advance in meaningful ways.

Design continues on many products long after the design is done. Design effort is wasted in chasing a market rather than leading one. Products become bloated with features which compromise the clarity achieved when the design reached “done.” Features are designed which don’t evolve the product; they complicate the vision reaching to be all things to all people, ultimately hobbling the product. The design of Microsoft Word has delivered little beyond version 5.1. It is a quite usable word processor, but the design for word processing was solid in 1991, in the subsequent releases little was advanced. Features where added that did little to improve the word processing experience. The design also failed to take advantage of shifts in the marketplace or technology. Five versions later Word is still largely a pretty good word processor. While much has changed in the interface switching interaction paradigms from menus to the ribbon can hardly be thought of as a fundamental shift in functionality. Word hasn’t evolved so much as changed it’s wardrobe.

Some products manage to react to changes in technology or marketplace. The design accommodates changing needs and opportunities. The product evolves through design to include new functionality, utility and continues to add life to the product. While Adobe Acrobat Pro has struggled with its share of bloating and incessant updates, the design of the program has continued to evolve. From humble beginnings of a reader/writer for portable documents, Acrobat has incorporated new functionality unimaginable when the product was initially designed; OCR of text, automatic creation of interactive forms, document markup, digital signing and distributed workflows. The integration of this new functionality has stumbled at times, but Acrobat X delivers a coherent, usable evolution of a product that is more than 17 years old. What was just latent potential in the embryonic design of the first versions of the product has been realized.

Some products are so deeply bound to a specific paradigm that the only reasonable evolution is an entirely different approach. The original design is done. A new product, with a different design, is created to address new technology, and a new marketplace. The original iPod‘s design is done. The scroll-wheel/menu design of an mp3s player was groundbreaking and brilliant, and it was well-executed. At some point it became clear that this design was done; it couldn’t evolve while maintaining the same core design. The only road forward was to abandon this “done” design, and adopt a new paradigm. The result was the iPod Touch. The shift was more than simply adding a bigger screen with touch input; what the product could do radically shifted.

Why does it matter?

It is important to acknowledge that design can reach a place of “done.” If we don’t, we may end up fooling ourselves that we are moving products forward when we are really just treading water. If we can’t step back and evaluate whether a design is done, we may continue to put effort into a product which we can’t improve. We will continue to release products that don’t help people achieve their goals, or worse--damage great products by bloating them with features no one needs. Knowing when the design is done allows us to recognize when our efforts will be productive and when our efforts will be wasted. When design is done it’s time to move on, to take up new challenges or products and start designing again.

At Cooper, we spend thousands of hours designing systems around the goals and motivations of the people that will use them. We travel across the country, continent and world to have conversations with real users to ensure that we understand their needs and that our design decisions will make their everyday tasks easier and more intuitive to accomplish.

But perhaps we can improve our methods by considering an inverse approach: What if our intent was to frustrate, rather than ease? What if we intentionally made things subtly challenging and unintuitive?

Aside from simply malicious design, is there anything that intentionally facilitates a bad experience? Why would someone do that to other people? For what reasons might something be made to suck?

Making walking suck (for strength)

I was first thinking about this a few months ago when I was with my brother who just had his first kid (making me a first-time uncle). We were at Target to buy some diapers when a woman in her thirties walked by wearing a pair of shoes that were anything but ordinary.

Take the typical athletic shoe company: In general, they've probably been trying to make the shoe experience better by iterating designs and materials in an attempt to make it easier to walk, run or jump.

The woman at Target was wearing a pair of shoes that had, well, a different goal. Despite being sold in the same retail space as shoes that boast comfort and support, the shoes didn’t make walking better; they made it worse. In fact, the intent of the shoes was to make walking suck.

The shoes are called “Shape Ups.” Because walking in them is more difficult, wearing them is considered “exercise.” And a thirty-something mother in the diaper section at Target might figure she doesn't have the time to exercise anymore, so she made walking suck in an attempt to get fit.

Making everyday experiences more difficult is actually common in exercise equipment. Lifting weights, for example, adds resistance to common arm and leg movements. Shape Ups just apply this principle to walking. They make walking suck so that their users can become stronger doing everyday activities.

Making you feel sick (for fun)

In sixth grade, those of us nerdy enough to be a part of Safety Patrol—the early risers who helped classmates cross the street—took a field trip to Adventureland, a theme park in our home state of Iowa. It was a reward for a year of hard work.

One of my good friends got on a popular ride called the Silly Silo. To participate is simple: Stand inside a silo while it spins around and around at a quicker and quicker rate.

While many products aim directly at making you feel good, the Silly Silo is designed to make you feel horrible. Participants exit feeling dizzy and motion sickness. For my friend, the result was puking into the nearest trash can.

If a piece of business software caused you to feel dizzy, motion sickness or induce vomiting, it'd be a disaster. But in the world of amusement, engaging our body's natural gag reaction can be a great thing. Rides like the Silly Silo, those that drop you thirty stories, or roller coasters that flip you upside down are among the many common amusement park attractions that generate fun out of the rush a horrible feeling provides.

Making ugly websites (for good business)

A local store in the Silicon Valley asked me to create a website for them a few years ago. I jumped at the chance. I loved the owner's vision, his dedication to the community and his desire to create it with beautiful design. But something felt strange about creating such a professional site for a small shop.

Around that time, in 2006, Luke Wroblewski wrote a blog post titled “Make it Ugly” in which he described clients that wanted ugly websites so that the sites would feel more “genuine.” Luke made an argument against the idea, but desiring ugly in search of authenticity isn’t an unusual thought. Fourteen years earlier, in 1992, Ellen Lupton wrote “Low and High” in Eye Magazine, which discussed the history of graphic designers exploring low-brow aesthetics.

Nothing says local like Comic Sans. (Flickr by marblegravy)

I didn't make the store's website suck. But after they closed their doors—a year after I designed their site—maybe I should have. After all, littering your store with Papyrus, Comic Sans menus or having a dated website screams to the visitor, among other things, "Hey, I'm local. I’m the real deal." Conversely, professional typography, an elegant color palette, and rock-solid IA might communicate, "I'm a chain. I’m corporate." Making these elements suck a little might have better communicated the store’s local, personal approach.

Making airport seats suck (for prevention)

In 2008, I was sitting at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport exhausted, depressed and trying to fall asleep. I had run through an airport in Colorado, faced a long-delayed flight in California and, by the end of the night, had been re-routed across the country to Chicago in hopes of catching an early morning flight to make the funeral of a close friend that had died days earlier in Iowa.

Despite being emotionally and physically drained, I couldn’t fall asleep on the seats at O’Hare. I tried resting my legs on my bag, sleeping sideways in a corner, extending myself across two rows of seats and just about every possible other position to get some sleep. None of them worked. Even though O’Hare has a history of Eames design, the Chicago airport's oddly shaped seats and large armrests made it impossible for me to get comfortable. Of the hundreds of things that are frustrating with air travel, why would anyone be cruel enough to top it all off with terrible seating?

Air travelers in Paris attempt to sleep. (Flickr by Pinelife)

A few weeks before my experience in Chicago, Chris Noessel, a co-worker at Cooper, posted on this blog about slanty design (or what some Cooperistas call “design friction.”) The idea of “slanty design” came from an article by Russell Beale in which he described slanted reading tables at the Library of Congress that prevent visitors from setting down drinks and risking spills. Since the tables suck to eat on, they discourage visitors from bringing food that might ruin the library’s collection. (Beale’s article has a few more examples if you’re curious.)

The Library of Congress didn’t actually design their reading tables to prevent visitors from eating food, it just works out that way. But the chairs that I couldn’t sleep on at O’Hare were designed to prevent sleeping. The large armrests in-between each seat are intended to make sleeping suck so that people don’t sleep at airports.

There are plenty of other examples of design intended to prevent behavior. Speed bumps, for example, discourage speeding. Or, similar to the airport seats, some bus benches have ridges to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. These things make a particular behavior suck to prevent it from happening.

Why it's made to suck

Making conventional interactions suck seems counter-intuitive and cruel. But there are plethora of products and services that aim to suck at common expectations for good reason. Among the many possibilities, things that suck can lead to strength, fun, good business and can introduce friction to prevent improper usage.

I like to think of Interaction Design in its purest form as being about shaping the perception of an environment of any kind. Yes, today the discipline is so closely tied to visual displays and software that it almost seems to revolve around that medium alone, but that’s only because as of now, that’s pretty much the only part of our environment over which we have complete control.

The one field that has come closest to overcoming this limitation is the video game industry whose 3D games are the most vivid and complete alternate realities technology has been able to achieve. Game designers have control over more aspects of an environment, albeit a virtual one, than anyone else.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea that interfaces can be more closely integrated with the environment in which they operate. I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned from the universe of video games and how it might be applicable to other kinds of designed experiences.

In Designing for the Digital Age, Kim Goodwin criticizes the term “Experience design” as being too presumptuous because we don’t really have the power to determine exactly what kind of experience each person with their own beliefs and perceptions has. Even when we work across an entire event from start (e.g. booking a flight) to finish (arriving at the door), there are still countless factors outside our control that can significantly impact how a person will experience it.

Video game designers on the other hand can orchestrate a precise scenario since almost every detail in their virtual world is for them to determine. They can arrange exactly what kind of person sits next to you on a flight no matter who you are or how many times you take that flight.

That isn’t to say that videogames don't have their limitations. Of course, it isn’t completely true that game designers can determine who sits next to you. They can only determine who your avatar sits next to. The most significant weakness of videogames is the inability to truly inhabit a designed environment or narrative. As much control as we may have over a virtual world, as long as we are confined to experiencing it through television screens and speakers, it won’t be anywhere near comparable to our real world.

Fortunately, there’s a growing effort to address this lack of immersion.

A key area of the problem lies in how we’re presented and interact with complex information diegetically, that is, interfaces that actually exist within the game world itself.

Before continuing, it helps to be familiar with some basic concepts and terminology around diegesis in computer graphics, the different spaces of representation between the actual player and their avatar. The diagram above illustrates the four main types of information representation in games.

Non-diegetic representations remain the most common type of interface in games. In first person shooters, arguably the most immersive type of game since we usually see the scenery through our avatar’s view, the head-up display has remained an expected element since Wolfenstein 3D first created the genre.