Adaptive Path Blog

It’s hard to believe that iTunes Music Store just turned five years old yesterday, that there was a time (for two years!) that the iPod (iTunes’ better-looking older sibling, the Marcia to its Jan) relied on either users slowly converting all their analog CDs to digital, or simply stealing music online.

While iPod gets all the press and adoration, it seems clear that iTunes, for all its faults, is the little app that could. iTunes is the secret sauce of the iPod experience, and the music store is, if not at the center, than at least an incredible piece of that. Imagine trying to put a major ecommerce store in the middle of another application (Word, Photoshop, etc.) and it becomes clear marvel that is iTunes Music Store.

Of course, the store itself is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to that marvel. Were it not for the amazing technical and business infrastructure backstage (which remains (as it should) mostly invisible), we’d be downloading donated MP3s. Slowly. And forget about movies, TV, podcasts, etc. The store has expanded so that the “music” in iTunes Music Store seems almost silly. iTunes Media Store is more like it. But I quibble.

Happy fifth birthday! You don’t look a day over four. Now could you please go get Twin Peaks for me?

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It’s easy to forget when hearing someone give a presentation that the talk is a product too. And like products, the designer doesn’t always know what’s going to happen when the talk meets the users (the audience). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And like a product, good designers go back and revise the beta. Put out a better version.

This is a long preamble to saying that Kim Lenox and me have taught the interaction design day at UX Intensive four times now: in Chicago, Amsterdam, Vancouver, and San Francisco and each time was different. We’ve spent the last year tweaking the content until we (and the audience) were happy with it. As it turns out, it’s tricky to teach interaction design in a day. We went from a nearly all-lecture day to one that is mostly a hands-on, activity-centered workshop that tries to create a studio environment. It even requires having a first-aid kit on hand! I’m really happy how the day has evolved.

If you are interested in learning (or brushing up on your existing) IxD skillz, we hope you’ll join us at UX Intensive Minneapolis in June. Use the discount code BLOG and get 10% off admission!

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I found myself at a design conference listening to still another demand that clients give us designers that coveted place at that legendary table where all the big decisions are made. Sitting next to me was one of my favorite clients, someone I treasure for her levelheadedness and good humor. “I’ve spent hours at that table,” she whispered to me. “It’s not that great, you know.”
Michael Bierut, You’re So Intelligent

Adaptive Path’s MX Conference is about to kick off. Design managers and executives are descending up San Francisco to learn and talk about how to make their designs more effective, to speak to management better, how to innovate their organizations. Part of these discussions I’m sure will be the perennial talk of How to Get a Place at The Table. I’m here to offer an alternate view: our place as designers isn’t at The Table. It’s to smash The Table.

Perhaps the natural state of design—and thus designers—is to be outside the circle of power, and thus better able to tell the truth to power. At The Table, it is easy to have other concerns instead of just creating the best products possible: political concerns of gaining and retaining power, or financial concerns of running the company, or resource concerns about personnel, or the million other details it takes to run a business–many of which fight against putting out great products. Yes, a seat at the table can guarantee that a product gets made, but it doesn’t guarantee it will be good. Witness: Foleo, which Jeff Hawkins was able to push through but was so roundly criticized, it was pulled before it was even sold.

And of course, yes, we want and deserve respect (we’re changing the world, dontchaknow??), but that respect should flow from the products we create, not the number of meetings we’re in with the CEO.

Designers work better outside, looking in, the wise fools at court. The view outside is clearer, more open to other influences, less susceptible to groupthink and myopic viewpoints. (This outside viewpoint is why so many companies hire consultants.) Being outside allows designers to be advocates: lobbyists for what is the right thing to do for the users, the integrity of product itself, and even in some cases for what is best for the business.

This idea of Designer as Outsider is nothing new. In the 1950s, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss had brown suits made so that he would stand out from his corporate clients in their blue and grey suits.

As Dreyfuss knew, sometimes it benefits us to be more like artists than scientists. Design is, after all, a combination of science and art, and it is often art’s job to shine a light on what is uncomfortable or hard to do: the strange and unusual. The Truth with a capital T (which also means Trouble). We just need to draw on that legacy more often. Telling a CEO her vision of the product is the wrong one is not easy. It requires two things: courage and allies.

Rather than expend energy to get to The Table, it’s better to have allies there. People who know how to read the room, who can seem impartial but also lobby for you and help you make your case. The best clients, Tibor Kalman rightly said, are smarter than you. We need to cultivate these allies through the strength of our work and our ability to explain our work in terms of the value it brings to the users and to business. Only then will our voices be heard and respect given. We don’t need a seat at The Table for that. We just need allies there.

And here’s the most subversive thing: if we do our jobs right, The Table will change. It will get bigger, move, transform, and, yes, even get smashed. The best products change companies, markets, and, yes, possibly even the world. And when that happens, attention will be paid, respect given. You will be thanked for smashing The Table and giving them a new one.

And then you will go and do it again.

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With the “topless” (as in laptopless) meeting idea getting so much coverage, I thought I would put up the “rules” I came up with back in 2006 when I jokingly coined the term. (Note that this banning of laptops can and should spread to other attention-sucking devices. I’m looking at you, Blackberry. You too, iPhone.)

The guidelines:

• Topless meetings must be announced when the meeting is scheduled, not directly before or during so that people can plan to be topless.

• The meeting shouldn’t be more than an hour long, unless there are scheduled breaks for email/IM/etc.
• The meeting should never be more than 4 hours long in any case.
• The “topless” designation should be used mainly for brainstorms/design reviews/essential discussions.
• If you can’t be topless, you shouldn’t be in the meeting. Join when you can be topless.
• One exception made for a single note-taker/documenter of the meeting.
• Could be used for internal and client meetings

I’m as guilty as anyone of getting sucked into an email during meetings, and the divided attention (and the lowered discussion) really lowers the energy and productivity of any meeting.

And if you are one of those people who think all meetings are a waste of time, I say: nonsense. Meetings are not just about communication, though they are often treated as one-to-many information distribution sessions. Meetings are a waste of time when they are used to talk about work that’s already been done or work that is yet to be done. They are valuable so long as everyone is there to contribute and pay attention. People dread meetings because they are often not focused and drag on for longer than necessary–which is what happens when people don’t contribute or pay attention.

Meetings enhance productivity when people use them to do the kind of work that is best done in collaboration with others. Good meetings are about getting somewhere: a decision, a new idea, etc. Working through ideas often means making those ideas tangible through sketches on whiteboards, quickly showing examples, etc. That needs face-to-face time and focused discussion. It needs topless meetings.

Kudos to Jesse, Andy, and Todd for eloquently stating why meetings still matter. I ruthlessly stole and mashed up their thoughts for this post.

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If you’ve ever used a bot like SmarterChild, pause and pay a moment of respect to the late Joseph Weizenbaum who died March 5, the news of which is only now making the rounds. Weizenbaum was the creator (in 1966) of ELIZA (play with the web simulation), the first software program whose purpose was to make the computer seem like a human being, with human-like responses. ELIZA was (and remains) ridiculously seminal in HCI circles, and its influence can be seen in everything from IM to text-based adventure games to Clippy.

Weizenbaum had some wrong-headed, disparaging things to say about the internet (”a garbage dump”), but his caution about the possible evils of computers sounds like he was warning us about SkyNet long before anyone else was. He had a great concern with the ethics of technology and strongly advocated that computers never replace human decision-making.

Another one of the old guard is gone, and we are all lessened for it.

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Michael “Rands” Lopp, a senior engineering manager at Apple and the author of the great book Managing Humans, let slip in a talk at SxSW a little about Apple’s design process. Since, up until now, their design process has mostly been such a black box, even this tiny view (as reported by BusinessWeek) is pretty interesting.

What struck me most was this:

10 to 3 to 1
Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good,” which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

While it is standard practice in visual design to come up with three strong concepts to present and choose from, I’ve found that it is rare to do so in interaction design. And especially to the level that Apple seems to do it, down to pixel perfect mockups. For months. This also echos what both Alan Cooper and especially Bill Buxton had to say at Interaction08, with both urging interaction designers to plan to throw several designs away. Obviously, if Apple is any indication, this is sound advice.

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Like, well, every year, a gaggle of Adaptive Pathers are headed to SXSW Interactive. Find us at the parties, BBQ joints, and our sessions:

Friday:

Todd Wilkens reads from Adaptive Path’s new book Subject to Change from 4:00-5:00.

Ryan Freitas and AP Founder Lane Becker dole out the punishment in Battle Decks II from 5:00-6:00.

Monday:

Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson offer up 10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment from 3:30-4:30.

I’ll be Feeding the Creativity Beast in a core conversation from 5:00-6:00.

Tuesday:

Ryan Freitas provokes a core conversation by asking Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done? from 5:00-6:00.

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At UX Week 2007 and UXI Vancouver 2007, I did a presentation on where to look for ideas when designing. I finally got around to posting the slides. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see the video clips here, but I urge you to track them down if you can.

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A podcast from our own Todd Wilkens from the 2007 Emergence Conference at Carnegie Mellon, discussing the end of products. Listen and enjoy!

P.S. Lots of other great podcasts there too, including the closing keynote from Dick Buchanan.

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The talk I gave last fall at the Institute of Design’s 2007 Design Research conference is now available as a video!

It’s probably one of the funniest (and most fun) talks I’ve ever given. Enjoy!

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