Adaptive Path Blog

You know how there are certain topics or issues that come up on a recurring basis in organizations? Well, at AP one of these is job titles. This is an often contentious or at least evocative topic in any organization. It is particularly problematic for us here because of the people that make up the company and the way we work together. We all understand that job titles serve a very important outward facing purpose in a consultancy: clients need to know who you are and what you can/will do for them. This has been the primary driver behind our current job titles. Everyone chooses their own title when they come in to reflect their interests and expertise. The issue that we have been dealing with more recently is the internal function/effect of job titles. Specifically, we are an organization filled almost entirely with people who would be in “senior” or “management” positions in almost any other organizations. In practice, we have very little hierarchy beyond leadership roles on specific projects and the small executive management team. Yet, “senior” only shows up in a handful of people’s titles and this is a constant catalyst for discussion. You might ask, “What’s in a name?” Well, as any information architect or librarian will tell you, classification has consequences. So, we’ve been talking a lot about the organizational effects of these linguistic distinctions that aren’t reflected in the way we actually do our work. Among other ideas, some people regularly advocate abolishing job titles.

I know that the boundaries between disciplines are always fuzzy. But my question or concern is less about disciplinary boundaries and more about hierarchy and power. How does this play out in other organizations that don’t function in a rigidly hierarchical way? I’d love to hear examples from others about what has worked and not worked in their experience.

(FYI, you can see our current set of job titles on the about page.)

“We are dealing with human beings, and human beings always need something more than technically proper care. They need humanity. They need heartfelt concern.” (emphasis mine)

– Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est

…but not just any user research. A while back I posted some thoughts on how user research might begin to take a more complex and therefore more real view of people. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how to go beyond tasks and goals and incorporate meaning, culture, and context. I’ve also talked about this at a few conferences as well. Every time I bring it up, there’s a lot of discussion and general agreement. I think on some level this just feels right, especially to those of us who have made careers out of being advocates for users.

But how much evidence do we have that this really makes a difference in design outcomes? When have more nuanced or more complex understandings of users been instrumental in creating successful designs?

One good example of this might be Ziba’s work for Lenovo. They clearly moved beyond the task/goal framework and had a very successful design as a result.

I have a few other examples like this, many internal to AP, but would really like to find more. If you now of any, please post them in the comments. And please give as much detail as you can.  What did you do? Why?  How did it make a difference? We will all be able to benefit from these either for improving our craft or just making our case to clients or managers.

I recently let my membership to the ACM run out. This marks the end of a 10-year relationship that has been on the rocks for at least the past 5. I gave up on the CHI conference about 4 years ago and was mostly holding on for Interactions, the journal from SigCHI. But it has been a very long time since I was excited or eager for a new issue. Sure, Don Norman or Aaron Marcus usually have something interesting to say and everybody loves Ok/Cancel. But two short columns and a comic are not enough to carry a journal. The content has been getting less and less relevant to the ideas and problems of HCI practitioners, at least for me and folks I know.

Take the most recent issue for an example: Weights and Measures: Quantifying Usability. Does “usability” as it is commonly practiced really need to become more quantitative? Is anyone picking up a copy of Interactions, “the premier publication in HCI,” to learn basic statistics or hear yet another person attempt to answer the “how many participants is enough?” question. (The answer as always is “it depends.”) I don’t want to deride any of the authors in this issue. They are all clearly knowledgeable and do a good job of covering their subjects. But why were they brought together in the first place? Why was this topic chosen over more challenging or timely topics like qualitative research, embracing social science, or service design? Who is this publication written for?

Human-computer interaction as a field has expanded enormously in the last 2 decades and especially in the last 5-7 years. The core of the discipline has moved outside of computer science to include designers, social scientists, and others. Yet this publication still seems to be written primarily by and for computer scientists. Unlike many HCI practitioners and researchers these days, I actually have a computer science degree but that training has become less and less relevant as I’ve had to engage more and more of the human side of HCI. I have grown and changed a lot over the last 10 years and it seems that the ACM and I have grown apart. I’ve tried to make it work but a guy can only hold on for so long. Breaking up is hard to do but, baby, it’s not me, it’s you.

Intersections are exciting, infuriating, wondrous, and dangerous places. Roads, vehicles, people, and destinies all come together and are forced to deal with one another. 60% of all traffic accidents occur at intersections and many cities were founded at crossroads. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Grant McCracken’s blog sitting at the intersection of anthropology and economics is quite a fascinating place. He always has something insightful to say about design, marketing, research, business, and culture. I especially love his “case study” style posts like these recent ones on “the new advertising” and the Zaltman research method. Note, though he may seem a bit academic/esoteric at times, it’s worth it. I recently met the man at the EPIC conference, an intersection between ethnography and industry, where he was directing traffic and stirring up trouble in the best way possible.

I’m freshly back from EPIC 2006 and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. As you can tell from the esoteric name (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference), this event grew out of a small community of anthropology Ph.D.s working in industrial settings — primarily large corporations. This influenced the feeling last year that the conference was overly academic and a bit exclusionary. But it was clear that they made a concerted effort to broaden the audience this year. I think the formal conference content was still a bit difficult for folks without a solid social science background to really get a lot out of but the many opportunities to talk more casually with tons of smart people made it worthwhile for most attendees. Some major themes that I found particularly relevant:

• Developing a clear understanding of different approaches to research on the continuum from more tactical, evaluative to more rigorous, theory-driven and strategic.
• Understanding the difference in perspective and skillset between corporate researchers and those who work in services firms. The different organizational contexts can make it difficult for the two groups to speak directly to each other.

Next year’s conference should be even better. Rick Robinson (bio from another conference) of Luth Research (and formerly of E-Lab) will be one of the organizers. Rick is neither an anthropologist nor a corporate researcher — though he does have a Ph.D. He is also by far one of the smartest folks working in the field.

EPIC also makes a nice counterpoint to About, With, and For, the design research conference at the Institute of Design that approaches some of the same issues from the design perspective. If you’re attending AWF, you might consider stopping by my talk about ethnography and methods.

There’s been a lot of talk about “total experience design”, service design, et cetera and how these point to the changing nature of design generally. There is a growing realization that we are no longer designing products, web sites, or monolithic centralized systems. As the internet and digital networks in general become more ubiquitous, more distributed, and more integrated in our lives, we’re finding that it’s better to think of our projects in terms of services and systems rather than products. As Adam Richardson of frogdesign puts it, his new mantra is: “The system is the product.” Our projects generally involve multiple touchpoints (i.e., the web, mobile devices, and physical spaces) and the need for consistent or complimentary experiences across them. These kinds of projects require design that understands and integrates well with the aspects of people’s lives that have nothing (or very little) to do with the things you are designing. Meaning and culture play ever bigger roles.

Of course, focusing on services means having to deal with a much messier set of issues related to human behavior than in traditional interactive design. This is fundamentally changing the way we all go about doing design. In particular, I’ve been thinking that we may need to move away from a framework of tasks, goals, and states in favor of a framework focused on behaviors, motivations, and contexts. (This change is already under way in the fringes of HCI research and design, but I say it’s time for it to take root in mainstream design.)

Essentially, I am calling for an end to the decades-old framework that HCI, information architecture, and interaction design have been using for understanding users. That’s right, I say take a hike, task analysis! Good bye, user goals! These concepts are insufficient for the new kinds of systems we are designing. People do not live their lives in terms of tasks and goals; most behavior is not task-oriented nor goal-driven. The drivers for action are often complex, subtle, and closely tied to culture, meaning, and context. But it’s nearly impossible to talk about meaning in terms of tasks and goals.

Focusing exclusively on tasks and goals means that you tend to ignore or de-emphasize all of the activities that people engage in that are specifically not goal-oriented. It also means that you will often ignore the messy jumble of activities that take place around but are not oriented toward your system. This is not always problematic but it quickly becomes so when you are designing for multiple contexts and mediums. When it comes to designing for the total experience, the activities that have little to do with the system you are designing are often just as important as those that are central to it. More than ever before, people switch from one context to another rapidly and often. They were in the outskirts of Cleveland mowing their lawn then the cell phone rang and suddenly they’re planning a trip to Thailand.

Now I want to make sure that I’m being clear. This is not just a semantic or linguistic game I’m playing. I’m not just substituting one set of words (i.e., behaviors, motivations, contexts) for another (i.e., tasks, goals, states) while maintaining the underlying structure. Rather, I’m trying to take the insights of the last 40 years of social science and bring them into our way of thinking about designing interactive systems. (Note: I’m using the broadest definition of that term “interactive systems”.) The role of culture, meaning, and context in human life is undeniable. Every field of social science has been integrating culture and meaning into their theories and methods—some more than others—and we as designers should be doing the same. To do that, we need a framework that takes these things into account as well.

The reason I’m making such a big deal out of this is that the models we use to understand and talk about people greatly influence how we can understand a problem or situation. If your framework doesn’t explicitly account for culture and context, then it is unlikely that you will be attuned to these things when you do your research and design.

Practically, this means that simply incorporating “ethnographic” methods into your current process will NOT get you to where you need to be. You can spend six months “in the field” or interview 150 people. But none of it will matter if you don’t have a conceptual framework that actually allows you to incorporate the subtleties of behavior, motivation, and context that led you to use these methods in the first place.

Of course, as a result of these changes in approach, our jobs become much more complicated—but also much more exciting. More importantly, our designs will also be more effective and successful.