Adaptive Path Blog

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.

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.

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.

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!

Ever since I got back from the monster IDSA conference and looking towards some of the speakers at Interaction08, I’ve been thinking a lot about the worlds of interaction design and industrial design. Far apart, yet so close. Far apart in that there is still a gulf in that, for the most part, many interaction designers don’t know what industrial designers do and how they do it. And visa versa. From an interaction designer’s perspective, the hardware is just a container for the UI. From the industrial designer’s perspective, the UI is just the screen that gets put in after their design work is done.

Except this is a horrible way to design products. We’ve all suffered through these kinds of devices for years. Look at the Razr. Awesome industrial design, terrible interaction design. Or take most laptops. Decent interaction design, lousy industrial design. For the best experience design, the hardware and software need to be integrated in profound ways. In the same way interaction and visual designers work together for digital projects, with physical products that have a digital component (which is to say, behavior that a microprocessor affords), industrial and interaction designs should work closely to create the best possible experience for the products’ users.

Apple realized this years ago, of course, and insisted on control of both the hardware and software–a risky gamble that nearly took the company down, but has yielded some serious dividends in the last decade. And not just profits: some really enviable, desirable, beautiful devices that work well and feel holistic. Devices that, as we know, have changed markets and how we think about devices in general.

I have heard some amazing statements lately–on both sides of the industrial-interaction design divide–that sound to my ears just painfully ignorant, especially considering the amazing industrial/interaction design devices around now, like the Wii. “So you think industrial designers should work with interface designers?” one industrial designer asked me in all seriousness a few months ago. “Industrial design is just a commodity service,” was a comment I heard just two days ago. The truth is, both disciplines have a gun to the other’s head. “My interface can ruin your form!” “Oh yeah, well, see what happens when I leave out the jog dial, jerk! Let’s see them navigate your menu now!” “If you are going to be that way, I might just forget to put in the controls for your lovely speakers there.” And so it goes. We need to work together or everybody loses.

The fact is that the division between the digital and the physical is slowly but surely being erased. “One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible,” noted William Gibson recently. And it’s true. Is your laptop physical or digital? Your mobile phone? Your…house? (Go find it on Google Maps before you answer.)

We need designers on both sides (and in the middle!) who understand this. We had the “luxury” of having separate design worlds for a while now, which is in fact no luxury at all, as we both could have learned a lot from each other. It’s time to dissolve the artificial barrier. We’re all in this together.

For the last six months or so, I’ve been working with a great team of people to put together the Interaction Design Association’s first annual conference: Interaction08, which will be held in hip, historic Savannah, Georgia, USA on February 8-10, 2008.

I never thought we’d get the killer program we have of both interaction design luminaries and up-and-coming stars, including keynotes from:

• Alan Cooper
• Sigi Moeslinger
• Bill Buxton
• Malcolm McCullough

Our session speakers–Jared Spool, Reginé Debatty, Dan Brown, Molly Wright Steenson, Aza Raskin, Sarah Allen, Jenny Lam, and Matt Jones–and 21 international Lightning Session speakers will be speaking on a wide range of topics, from prototyping to internationalization to concept ideation. Our speakers hail from the United States, The UK, The Netherlands, Norway, China, and India.

Additionally, a set of pre-conference workshops will be taught by industry experts Marc Rettig and Jenna Date, Darja Isaksson, Jeff Patton, and Todd Warfel.

For the complete program and to register, please see the conference website. Early bird registration ends December 15, 2007. The rates are $499 before December 15th and $599 after. Students get in at $299. 1/2 day workshops are $250 each. Come take advantage of the weak US dollar!

Savannah is one of America’s finest small cities, filled with historic homes, cobbled streets, gothic graveyards, and pirate haunts, as well as art galleries, hip bars, and both modern and traditional Southern restaurants. Direct flights can be had from Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Frequent flights connect Savannah to Atlanta, a major transportation hub. Highs in February average 64F/18C.

Hope to see you there!

Conference organizers and associated graphic designers: when you are making conference badges, here is what attendees need to see (in order of importance):

1. First Name. BIG! I don’t want to have to stare at people’s badges any longer than I need to. A rapid glance should boldly display the wearer’s first name, often to just refresh my memory or as a cue if I’m looking for someone I haven’t met but want to.
2. Last name
3. Company
4. Hometown

Possibly Title should be added to this list, but I’m of two minds. One is: who cares about titles? but the other is, well, I do. I want to know what someone does in order to see what kind of conversations I’m likely to have with them.

Not so important: the name of the conference. Duh, I get it; I’m already here. Also unimportant: the sponsors. Not for the conference itself, of course, but on the front of name badges their logos are just visual clutter.

Back of the badge should have the schedule, with preferably both the title and speaker for each talk. If space prevents that, title is more important than the speaker’s name IMHO. Unless the speaker is famous, titles are easier than names to remember.

One more thing: the strap holding the badge should be adjustable. Too often it is way too long. It should hang at chest level, not at belly/waist level. Low-hanging badges can’t be seen sitting down at a table, and if staring at chests is rude, staring at bellies (or below) is probably worse.

This all seems so common sensical as I put it down, but it is amazing how often it is gotten wrong. Even by people who should know better.

Sneaking in last week was Brandon’s essay on The Long Wow. An excerpt:

Deep customer insights and empathetic design pave the pathway to wow moments. By diving deep into a customer’s life and closely observing their behaviors, you can wow your customer by addressing needs that they’d never be able to articulate. By immersing yourself in the customer’s wider world of emotion and culture, you can wow them by attuning the offering to practical needs and dimensions of delight that normally go unfulfilled.

When a company uses empathetic design methods to create moments of wow over and over again, it bonds with customers at a level far beyond the realm of gold-colored plastic cards. OXO introduced over 50 products every year, wowing customers with purposeful improvements through the re-imagination of common culinary tools.

Few companies consistently translate rich insights from their customers’ lives into new and better offerings. The few that do can achieve a Long Wow, continuously delivering wow moments and building a true, deep loyalty that transcends traditional loyalty programs.

Read the essay.

When we design products, we’re often extremely concerned with the features of the product. After all, those are the things we market and spend a majority of our time designing, right? Features are what go on the box or how we pitch the project to users. Especially for those of us who cut our teeth on web design, there wasn’t much else except chunks of features and content. Transitions? The page loading, that was the transition between bits.

But now, with increased processor speeds, new interaction paradigms, and richer interactions possible on most platforms, the in-between stuff–transitions, animations, interaction logic, the connective tissue between features and content, how everything fits together–is becoming ever more important. One could argue that this is where the experience design flourishes the most.

Features will eventually be copied and become obsolete. Right now, someone is out there copying your features! But the experience of using your product is significantly harder to duplicate. You can make a Windows machine look and kind of act like a Mac with some effort, but it isn’t going to work exactly like one. Why? Because of the in-between stuff, the little moments that make a Mac a Mac and a Windows OS a Windows OS. I think a case could be made that the reason a Linux OS was never adopted by general consumers was, in part, due to the lack of the in-between moments that give systems their character.

The in-between stuff also extends to the “under the hood” stuff too. Preferences, settings, and the other bits that are there just to make the rest of the experience better, well, those need to be thought about and designed too. Too often (and I am as guilty of this as anyone), those parts of the system are left until last and hastily designed–if they are looked at by a designer at all. The details count. Details are places for delight and cleverness, for small moments that say that someone, somewhere cared and bothered to think this product through. Design is in the details.