Adaptive Path Blog

I just finished working on a project where half of my team was in our Austin office and half was here in San Francisco, which meant 2 different time zones. In addition, our client was in yet another city. Since this was my first time working with such a split team, my learning curve around remote communication, meeting facilitation, and maintaining a strong team dynamic was pretty steep. I thought I’d take a moment to compile those learnings and share.

Tackling Time Zones

• Adjust daily schedule for both offices: A couple of days per week, work on the other team’s schedule/time zone (and vice versa).
• Create a clock for the other time zone on the dashboard of your computer for easy reference.
• People naturally assume you are talking about their time zone, which you may not be. So, make it a habit to always give the time in both times zones when discussing scheduling, no matter what the mode of communication (conversation in the hall, phone calls, IM, email, etc…).

Make It Feel Like Your WHOLE Team Is Right There With You

Use a monitor with dedicated web cam in your project room—sit it at project table (permanently) as if the remote team member(s) is sitting at a spot at the table. It makes them feel a bit more like a real person. (Note: use a Logitec web cam if you can afford it ($100)—quality is much better than iSite webcams.)

Remote Meeting Facilitation

• Adobe Acrobat Connect seems to be a great tool for me thus far. It has video (so you can see the other person/team), document sharing (everyone looks at the same thing at the same time), and the ability to mark on documents (you can point out, specifically, what you are talking about/needs changes).
• During remote meetings, I find that typing live notes about what is said on the shared screen really helps. That way, everyone sees and confirms what was heard and you get double-clarity/reinforcement.
• The downside of Adobe Acrobat Connect: Document resolution is so-so, so don’t use for visual design. Or, send the visual design documents and use the Adobe Acrobat Connect screen simply for reference/orientation during the meeting.

File Sharing

While I don’t like the interface, DropSend.com has biggest file limit out there for the price (it’s free depending on your use).

Shared Calendars

I like creating a shared Google project calendar and embedding it in Basecamp. I give the appropriate people (client team and internal team) the right to add/edit events, meetings, etc. And, you can also make Basecamp milestones feed directly into the calendar.

This is my list of learnings thus far. Please add to this post if you have good tips and tricks to share with the rest of us! And I’d love to hear about tools that you like better than the ones I’ve listed — I’m always on the lookout for better ways of doing things.

I propose that we never use the phrase “look and feel” again. Ever.

Visual design is often subjective and can be difficult to describe or judge. Often, people lack the language or understanding of the work to accurately express their opinions. Consequently, we use simple terms of the way an object “looks” or how it “feels”.

Speaking in terms of these qualities does a disservice to the design. We cheapen the value of the work by paying attention only to the superficial aspects.

What people are really trying to do is express their thoughts about the design’s effectiveness.

There are many criteria for the effectiveness of visual design. Certainly, the way something looks – its aesthetics – is the most obvious one. The emotional response that people receive when encountering a product is also critical. This is what many try to explain when they talk about “feel”.

But there are other criteria that we should be aware of when speaking of visual design.

Product managers and sales people are keenly interested in how many products are sold. They pay close attention to how visual design can be used to grab consumer attention and move product off the shelves. A product’s ability for discovery can make or break its success.

The visual aspects of a product are also used to reinforce, or even introduce, brand attributes. The way a product looks often conveys what’s important to the company’s brand. Is it friendly, is it sporty, does it offer reassurance or pleasure? People rarely buy a product without somehow buying into the brand’s promise.

Additionally, an object’s meaning is derived from the way it appears to people. For example, the color and size of buttons tell the user if they should use their fingers or their whole hand. Visual cues can convey safety or danger and prompt a person to have an appropriate response. A fluffy bunny on a bottle of poison is much less appropriate than a skull and crossbones.

Certain criteria are more important than others, and not all products or things should be subjected to same evaluations. Sometimes a pretty object is just that. The level of evaluation could be kept to simply “like” or “dislike”.

But during the product or service design process, I believe it’s important to push to the deeper levels of how visual design plays its part.

I understand that nebulous concepts need to be simplified for daily conversation. And, I agree that it’s important to remember the audience with whom these thoughts are discussed. But I worry that too much emphasis is placed upon the superficial when we talk about visual design. Adjusting how we speak of it will help educate and raise the level of discussion – and ultimately produce better products.

What is it like to use a mobile phone if you’ve never used any technology like a computer, an ATM, or a remote control? How can you make a call on a mobile phone if you don’t know how to read or write? How can mobile phones improve people’s lives in areas where traditional infrastructure is scarce? We went to rural India to learn how people in these areas use mobile phones and how mobile infrastructure is impacting their lives. Based on our research, we have developed design principles and mobile phone interface concepts for emerging markets.

On May 28th from 6:00-8:00PM at Adaptive Path we will present the concepts we’ve created, and the findings from the primary research of our latest R&D project. Please join us for an evening of sharing and discussion about how design can increase the positive impact of technology on the lives of people in emerging markets. Panelist include: Rachel Hinman, Natasha Alani, rural India Design Researcher, Brian Cronin, Alexa Andrzejewski, and Rachel Glaves.

Please RSVP on Upcoming, if you’re coming.

This week, we bring you an Adaptive Path Founder Emeritus to our blog.

Indi Young is an accomplished author, speaker and friend of Adaptive Path. As a founder she helped set Adaptive Path on it’s course and continues to inspire designers with her book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.

To learn more about Indi or to find some of her essays, head over here.

The other evening at the dinner table, I happened to look at the pamphlet my boyfriend was unfolding from the stack of mail. It was from the human resources group at his company. My boyfriend is a research scientist for Bayer, just so you get a tiny idea of where his mind is half the time. Me—you’re already familiar with my kinds of thoughts in user experience. So he and I were a little surprised to read:

I had a sneaking suspicion that I was reading a message aimed at someone other than us. Why the reference to a car? Which groups make cars a significant emblem in their lives? To be completely honest, neither my boyfriend nor I take our vehicles to the car wash. I barely get my car in for an oil change on time once every eight months or so. If we were the types to polish our Mustang in the driveway, then maybe this analogy would work, but we’re not. As members of the 40-50 set, my boyfriend and I spend much more time looking after our health than looking after our cars. Likewise, we are pretty familiar with the details of our medical plans.

So why did Bayer waste the paper sending us this message? It read like a non sequitur mouthed by a distracted elderly relative. So we opened the pamphlet to see if a different message was inside that we might want to learn. We saw this:

“Use your preventative care benefits.” Ah, here was the crux of the message. They wanted to remind us of this benefit.

The rest of the page I can only rant about. So skip this paragraph if you’re inclined. The “Exercise” message we ignored, since we both run, swim, cycle and compete in race events. “Cut out one can of regular soda,” well since neither of us drink soda at all, the message was pointless. And there was that vague “Manage” verb describing what to do about stress. Curious, I read the final paragraph and got annoyed. “Walk a little farther, drink more water, and snuff out that cigarette.” For gods’ sake, Bayer! Why pester us about stuff we don’t have problems with? I didn’t even actually read the little introductory paragraph until the day I wrote this. Check it out. What a pithy piece of wisdom, don’t you think? Who does the writer intend to lecture wish such banalities?

After reading the pamphlet, I felt completely offended by the Bayer human resources group and I threw the thing in the recycling. Was that the reaction they had intended when they spent the money to write and distribute this message? Obviously, no … They intended to urge people to spend a little on preventative checkups so they could perhaps net a few unhealthy folks and help get them on track, thereby reducing costs overall on health insurance for their employees. That’s a reasonable goal, sure.

I guarantee Bayer has a database of its employees and knows whether a person has ever checked an “I smoke” box on a form. I guarantee they can ask the various health insurance providers to look up the names of folks who haven’t been for a routine exam in five years. It would take less than 30 minutes for the lowliest IT intern to get that set of names to the human resources group. Is this illegal, to target messages at people who smoke who haven’t had a checkup recently? Is it illegal to ask for a record of employee visits to the doctor’s office in the past five years? Perhaps.

As for the soda-drinking, since that isn’t a sin that has made it to a checkbox on a form yet, the writer could have asked rather than accused. The way the piece is written, the writer assumes the reader drinks at least two cans of regular soda a day. And the walking is an accusation, too, that the reader just sits on the couch, and isn’t already training for a trail marathon or going mountain biking and rock climbing with her friends. Then there’s the title—don’t get me started about gerunds as the first word in a title, “Taking Control.”

But this isn’t an essay about how to write better messages. It’s a reminder to choose specifically defined groups of people to write to. It’s about focusing on the reader rather than department assignments like “get more folks to sign up for routine physicals” and “remind people that smoking and regular soda is bad.” Can you clearly see the person you are writing to? If not, then your message is too broad and will fail to connect with the majority of the readers. Worse, it will annoy those it isn’t intended for, or even offend them. Envisioning the reader is something we all learn in our writing classes, but forget as soon as the stern pressure of “the assignment” bears down on our shoulders.

With chagrin, I feel like a communist revolutionary chanting, “Power to the people!” But here, unlike communism, “the people” refers to different groups exhibiting different behaviors and motivations, examined within myriad scopes—the developer who reaches out to team mates at their organization for help solving a problem versus the developer who is self-reliant and does not discuss his way through solution-finding.

Behavior & Motivation Differences in Groups

I say my message over and over. Whatever you produce must be in explicit support of a particular group. Whatever you produce: pamphlets, web applications, toothbrushes, requirements documents … I expect the folks that do the actual work and make the approvals “get it” and change their ways. Stop producing one product for the masses and start producing three or five products for the conflicting personalities and goals of different groups. Spend more effort and money and time up front to connect with the hearts and minds of the people in these groups, rather than tramping unshod over their uniqueness. Each individual truly believes she or he is unique, yet they will also tell you of the special interests they have in common with others and feel happy to be grouped by those concerns. Let us undertake simply to support them. And, if necessary, let us undertake to change laws that were written with one intent in mind, but inadvertently prevent us from doing something good.

Superman is known for his strength and superpowers. He does all the work. He can save people all by himself without the help of anyone else. Why shouldn’t he do all that? After all he’s, “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” Some people may die when Superman does his work, but he is a superhero and will save the world from bad things.

Leaders on the other hand empower others. Leaders don’t do all the work on their own, but instead inspire other people to create something amazing, to work towards a cause, or to move a project or humanity to a better place. When a leader is present, everyone works and often together. Gandhi is known for renouncing violence and empowering others to do the same. Really, what good is creating anything for people if everyone is injured or dead? JFK is known so well for asking people what they can do for their country. He empowered others.  When a leader is truly leading, people aren’t left behind, but brought along and inspired into action.

In the design practice we also see these two extremes. We talk about genius design and design as the silver bullet. We also talk about participatory design and user innovation.

The distinction of these two extremes occurred to me during a leadership class I recently took. It wasn’t explicitly part of the curriculum, but it occurred to me how much time I’d spent trying to be a hero in my work when I thought I was being a leader. Trying to be a hero only worked out so-so. I’m now committed to empowering others in their work and ideas. I don’t always do this perfectly, but I sure  find I’m more relaxed and able to cause and create new things I didn’t think were possible.

What about you? In your work, are you a hero or are you a leader? What has worked? What hasn’t?

The web world is watching the transition of power from the old administration to the new Obama team with keen interest. Already we’ve seen the switch between the previous version of whitehouse.gov to the new version. (The new version validates to W3C standards, by the way.) With this redesign comes better access to information, a more approachable design and a new Creative Commons license for it’s content.

Additionally, Kottke points out that the robots.txt file has also changed from almost 2400 disallows down to only one. That’s a serious change in transparency.

But one of the more visible examples of the shift in our government’s use of the web comes with the change in guard of TheWhiteHouse Twitter account.

Below is a screenshot illustrating the Bush team’s use of Twitter and the change to Obama’s team. Both are using it to announce key events or PR-like topics. But notice the differences in formatting – Bush’s team never made it under the 140 character limit. It’s almost as the text in the Twitter stream is grabbed from the first couple of lines of a press release. (I can’t verify this as the links are all broken now that the new whitehouse.gov site is live). After the shift, you can see Obama’s team making better use of the brevity that Twitter encourages. The messages are concise and to the point. Nothing is obscured by trailing or sentences being cut short.

This is another clear example of how the new government gets it. It’s also an indication that the brilliance that was the campaign’s use of social media will continue on into the new administration.

We’re conducting a survey about our online communications.
It’s short, and will help us to provide you with the most relevant insights and information about experience strategy and design. If you choose to participate you’ll receive 15% off our next virtual seminar scheduled for December 3rd, 2008 10:00 AM PST with Kate Rutter.

TAKE THE SURVEY NOW and thanks for your help!

When I moved to California, my going-away gift from my ever-hands-on coworkers at the design research firm, Lextant, was a metal lunchbox filled with inkjet-printed and hand-written magnets — a personalized magnetic poetry kit. Ever since, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to introduce those printable magnetic sheets to interaction design.

Problem
That opportunity finally arose when I found myself endlessly fidgeting with Creative Suite trying to mock up an Aurora-like mobile device interface comprised of dozens of floating images and words. Since this was a concept refinement exercise, sketches lacked the fidelity and sense of interactivity that I needed. On the other hand, as I was finally forced to admit, the computer was completely wasting my time.

Solution
Enter magnetic prototyping. I ran as fast as I could to the nearest OfficeMax to pick up a pack of Inkjet Magnet Sheets ($12) and a portable magnetic whiteboard ($20). Returning to Creative Suite, instead of trying to lay out screen designs, I simply took all of my data elements and UI widgets and replicated them dozens of times to make sheets of customized UI stickers. I cut out the bits and pieces, and in minutes, I had a working model of my UI idea, complete with movable parts — no ActionScript needed!

Benefits
Unlike typical paper prototypes, I didn’t have to worry about my designs falling apart as I walked around the office, testing the concept with coworkers. Unlike stickers or window clings (or printed wireframes), the pieces could slide around and be rearranged by eager collaborators and informal test participants. Unlike the few pre-made kits out there (http://www.guimags.com/ and http://www.sitepoint.com/kits/usability1/), the pieces were custom-made and represented the specific pieces and parts we needed. If a piece was missing, I could simply draw it on a piece of scrap magnet or print additional elements when necessary. To capture and document the concepts as they evolved, all I needed was a photocopier. Posting the enlarged color copies of the magnetic whiteboard up on our giant sheet of butcher paper, I could easily document the interaction design details with sticky notes.

Limitations
The method certainly has its limitations. Because it relies on pre-made parts, it works best when you have a clear sense of what parts you have to work with, for example, if you’re redesigning a site that you know involves thumbnails, list items, and a sidebar. Having pre-made parts could also be constraining if you’re trying to design new interaction paradigms. There are also a few practical limitations: Since the canvases have to be magnetic, it’s difficult to create multiple pages to demonstrate designs. Being able to write on the canvases with a whiteboard is nice, but fat, greasy whiteboard markers aren’t always the best for sketching interfaces.

Why Use It
Applied to the right project, I found that this customized magnetic prototyping kit expedited concept communication, prompted new ideas through playfulness, and equipped people (who often don’t like to draw) to express ideas quickly. If you’re looking for new ways to do good design faster or to engage clients, users or others in the design process, I’d encourage you to pick up a pack of printable magnetic sheets and see how this hands-on, multi-player design tool might work for you!

We started out the week right, reminiscing about a massive group twister game and balloon fight in Dolores Park, San Francisco. The event? The MP3 Experiment. The culprit? Improv Everywhere. The result? We mused on the lack of PLAY in grown-up lives, resolving to create more of it in our own.

Since we were already on a bit of a philosophical bent, we started thinking about communication and interpersonal relations. After reading about Linguist David Crystal’s perspective on text messaging, we got to contemplating…is texting a corruption, expansion, or of little impact to language? Crystal thinks that a mere trillion texts, “appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language.” Hmmm….doesn’t feel so insignificant to our quickly texting fingers.

Speaking of communication, we’ve been thinking about the webiness of the web – how it is moving outside of its traditional boundaries, sticking itself, bit by bit into other areas of our lives, a la twitter, iphones, etc. We used to “go” to the internet. Now, the internet is coming to us. Or, so says Tim Arnall.

Tim shook us up a bit, but not nearly as much as watching YouTube breaking apart right before our eyes.

That was all just a bit much, so we had to take a mental break and get back to PLAY. And PLAY we did.

First, we got down to the Android Rap Song.
Then, we got our house plants costumed early for Halloween.
While we were prepping for Halloween, we stocked up and ate too much candy, right along with our favorite little French girl, Capucine.

(When you’re that cute, you can get away with anything, we realized.)

Tummies full, brains stretched, and tired from play, we plan to spend the weekend resting.
Till next week….

Peace out.

Tuesday’s event with Dan Roam was a lot of fun. He joined us at Adaptive Path to speak about his book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. Dan is a warm, funny speaker with a wealth of stories about using pictures to solve complex problems ranging from business strategy to product design. You can see some of the photos from the event on Flickr.

I sketchnoted Dan’s talk to capture many of the ideas that he talked about. There was a lot of great info, but the phrase that stuck with me most was “The more human the picture, the more human the response.”

I think this is a wildly compelling idea. By making pictures by hand, we open up the minds of the people we are communicating with, so that they can share in these ideas. Hand-drawn images are imperfect, gestural and natural. And it’s these human qualities that make them so engaging and accessible to others.

I hear designers and strategists talk about communicating design concepts, and one theme that comes up again and again is to match the fidelity of the artifact with the nature of the feedback you are looking for. The general rule of thumb is:

• Low fidelity = High-level feedback
• High fidelity = detailed/low-level feedback

If you’ve ever presented a well-rendered, detailed illustration to communicate a rough concept and been frustrated that the feedback is more along the lines of “that’s not a good typeface” or “that data is incorrect,” then sketching may be just the tool you need.

Simple, hand-drawn pictures can’t escape their low-fi quality. Yet I think their appeal is about more than just being low-fi. People are messy and complex. Perfection may be an aspiration, but when we actually encounter things that seem “perfect” we often suspect they’re fake. Hand-crafted objects feel more authentic than manufactured ones. As human beings, we respond to natural, imperfect things with more empathy that we do to polished perfection.

Authentic, imperfect, natural, gestural. That’s a great list of design criteria. I’m all for making more human pictures that invite a more human response.