Adaptive Path Blog

When thinking about using design to lead change within your organization, it’s hard to not to consider the works of innovation and design consultancy IDEO. Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, will be kicking off day two of Adaptive Path’s MX Conference — a conference on managing experience through creative leadership.

In this short podcast (download), Tim packs in multiple insights on:

• selling experience within organizations
• the new opportunities for design managers
• prototyping experiences
• engaging with user generated content (note Times Magazine’s Person of the Year)
• and his work with the Acumen Fund

For more thinking from Tim, also see his Fast Company article, ‘Strategy By Design‘, and join us at the MX Conference February 12-13 in San Francisco. Tim will be joined by Caterina Fake from Flickr, notable author Scott Berkun, Jennie Winhall of the UK Design Council, Doug Beaudet and Sara Ulius-Sabel from Whirlpool, and more.

As has already been reported by a number of those who attended, Microsoft invited a group of fourteen “leaders in various aspects of the web community” to Redmond on Wednesday to discuss some of their ongoing projects, including preparations for next year’s Mix Conference. I’m pretty sure I got on that list thanks to Microsoft User Experience Evangelist David Shadle, whom I’ve enjoyed collaborating with over the past year. My invitation came courtesy of Beth Goza, who let us know that the final hour of the all day event would be devoted to a Q&A with Bill Gates.

There was a tremendous amount of material covered in the morning, and some free-wheeling conversation about conferences and outreach during the afternoon. Bill arrived right on time, and was ushered into the room with minimal fanfare. He took the empty seat at the conference table, which happened to be right next to me. After a short description of some of the work he’s involved with, both at Microsoft and with his Foundation, the question period began.

You should follow the links above to hear more about what others asked, but as for me, I asked Bill to what extent he saw experience design having an impact (if it had any) in his Foundation’s work to address issues in health care and education. It was obvious from his answer that he doesn’t think of his work in the terms that we, as practitioners, would - but everything he described involved redefining the way certain problems are viewed, to ensure that solutions benefit those who needed them most.

Bill described a small number of the efforts his Foundation is engaged in, but an example that stuck with me was their work to completely redefine how certain medications are made available to patients in poverty-stricken areas of the world. Multi-dosage treatments that require repeated return trips to see a doctor (e.g. tuberculosis) work just fine in the first world, but represent a tremendous failure where regular visits are difficult or downright dangerous. The Foundation has focused its efforts on distributing a single injection that releases necessary medication over time; in doing so, they’ve reinterpreted the problem to resolve the difficulties needy patients find in their current experience with the treatment.

People all over the world face difficulties imposed on them by tools and systems that were designed with no input from them. In that room with Bill Gates, I was aware that I represented a class of professionals who have devoted themselves to building humane systems and tools, in the hope of making improvements (big and small) in the lives of others. When Bill asked me if he’d answered my question, I realized that he had in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In his willingness to reconsider a problem like TB in a manner that addressed both the medication’s efficacy and how it fit into the the lives of patients, he’d demonstrated a commitment to the same principles we believe in as a community of user experience designers.

It was not in a way I would have expected, nor in the terms any of us would have used, but Bill Gates laid out a framework for providing solutions to the humanitarian crises of today that took a decidedly “recipient-centered” approach. Having been lucky enough to meet him, I believe he is in the business of reconsidering everything, and working for the benefit of everyone involved.

I’m having a two-week conversation with Jim Leftwich and WELL members about interaction design starting today over at the Well’s Inkwell Interview series.

Update: Non-members can participate in the conversation by sending an email with your comments to inkwell [at] well [dot] com.

In the conclusion of Jesse James Garrett’s conversation with author Steven Johnson, they discuss his writing career, his recent bestseller Everything Bad Is Good For You, and his upcoming book The Ghost Map. Steven Johnson’s keynote kicks off Day 1 of User Experience Week 2006, August 14-17 in Washington, D.C.

Jesse James Garrett: One major part of the mass culture that is omitted from Everything Bad is music. Do you think music is immune to the drive toward complexity you see happening in other media? If not, how is that complexity manifesting?

Steven Johnson: I didn’t include music because enjoying or understanding music isn’t quite the same sort of problem-solving experience that you find in decoding a narrative or making sense of a video game. The question of why music is so powerful to the human brain is one of the great, enduring mysteries, but clearly it’s much more intimately connected to the brain’s emotional centers than the kind of abstract reasoning skills I was writing about in Everything Bad. So I decided to carve it out.

JJG: You probably could have devoted an entire chapter of Everything Bad solely to the television show “Lost,” which embodies many of the narrative principles you describe with its multi-layered storytelling that rewards ever-deeper scrutiny. The show’s producers have also been pushing boundaries by extending the show’s narrative into other media, with various fictional Web sites, a novel, and now an entire alternate-reality game, “The Lost Experience.” Is “Lost” establishing a new model for cross-media entertainment that is likely to persist, or is it an oddity that we shouldn’t expect to see replicated?

SJ: Oh, I think it’s certainly a sign of things to come. Interestingly, some of the techniques that you describe — the extensions into other media, integration with Web community and discussion, game spinoffs — are all techniques that have also been explored by the reality shows of late, which are of course the great example of formal complexity and innovation matched with largely trivial content.

JJG: The writer you seem to be compared to most often is Malcolm Gladwell. Do you see your work as covering similar territory as Gladwell’s, or do you think you’re pursuing different goals?

SJ: I’m a big fan of Malcolm’s, and so being compared to him is always flattering. I think because he’s had so much commercial success, and because he has such an easy, accessible voice on the page, people sometimes underestimate how hard it is to do what he does. I’m so glad he’s blogging now, because it’s great for him to have the vehicle — when the books or articles come out — to respond to the critics, and expand the ideas a little.

We have a lot of shared interests, both in topics — Emergence and The Tipping Point are variations on a theme, as are Blink and Mind Wide Open — and in approach. I suppose the most significant difference thus far is that I’ve been more focused on writing books, and he’s been more focused on doing magazine pieces. But that might change, for both of us, I imagine.

JJG: Back when you were running FEED, you seemed to be most interested in cultural criticism, but since then your work has taken a sharp turn into science journalism. What prompted this transition, and what do you see as the connection between these areas of interest?

SJ: The first step was that I looked up at my bookshelf one day and realized that the last 15 books I’d read had been science books. So I thought: if this is what I want to read, maybe it’s what I should write. And then I read E.O. Wilson’s Consilience and thought: I love every bit of this except for the part where he talks about culture. I thought: it would be nice to have someone who came out of a culture crit background who was genuinely building bridges to the science, and not deconstructing it. And really, ever since then, that’s what all my books have been trying to do, in their different ways — to write about culture in ways that are genuinely open to the insights of science, where they’re appropriate.

JJG: Your upcoming book The Ghost Map tells the story of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854. What drew you to this story?

SJ: I’d known about the story for many years, and I’d been looking for a way to write a book that would have a sustained historical narrative that I could use as a kind of scaffolding to support some of the ideas and themes I’m interested in. My other books have all been more-or-less pure idea books, with short narratives occasionally introduced almost as color. The story of John Snow and Henry Whitehead solving the mystery of this cholera epidemic — and, in Snow’s case, solving the mystery of cholera itself — struck me as an amazing intersection of many of the themes I’ve been following over the years: urban life, the connections between science and culture, information design, thinking across scales of experience, amateur expertise, and so on. And as you can tell from reading Interface Culture, my grad school years were spent studying the nineteenth-century Victorian novel, and so I knew the period quite well.

JJG: Edward Tufte has suggested that information design played a vital role in containing the outbreak. What do you think?

SJ: Tufte played a huge role in popularizing the story — to this day, most of the people I meet who are familiar with it read about it in Tufte first. He actually wrote about it twice, originally in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and then a longer section in Visual Explanations. His original assessment was factually wrong on a number of fronts — it greatly overstated the role of the map in solving the mystery of where the cholera was coming from, and the map itself that Tufte included was a heavily modified replica created for a 1912 textbook on public health. In the later book, he got the story right, though I think he’s a little too bullish on the map’s originality as a work of information design.

Basically, the argument that I make at the end of The Ghost Map is that the map was not a tool for solving or containing the outbreak, but rather a tool for explaining to others how the outbreak had come about — effectively, convincing them that the cholera was in the water, not the air, which was Snow’s great insight. But what made the map so original as a document is that it drew upon the local knowledge of the neighborhood itself: both Snow and his collaborator Henry Whitehead were residents of Soho, and had to do a great deal of shoe-leather detective work to figure out who had died, and who had consumed water from the contaminated pump. So the map is not just a triumph of information design; it’s also triumph of a certain mode of engaged, urban amateur expertise: local experts representing their own neighborhoods. There’s an immediate connection here to the whole Neo-Geo wave of Google map experimentation going on, which is one of the themes I discuss at the end of the book.

JJG: Is The Ghost Map an extension of your earlier work, or a departure?

SJ: It’s a departure in the sense it does tell a sustained story, and has — I hope — a page-turner quality to it. But thematically, it is very much an extension — mostly of Interface Culture and Emergence. I describe it sometimes as a kind of fractal way of writing history: it’s the story of one terrible week in 1854, but it’s an attempt at the same time to tell that story simultaneously on multiple scales of experience: from the bacteria itself, to the individual human lives of Snow and Whitehead and their nemeses, to the broader cultural trends of the time, all the way up to the super-organism of London itself. When I was a few chapters into writing it, I was describing it to my editor, Sean McDonald, and I was saying that it reminded me of Emergence, if Emergence had been a disease thriller. And Sean nodded, and said: “Right. It’s like Emergence if the slime mold had started killing people in Chapter Three.”

JJG: Thanks Steven, and we look forward to hearing your keynote at UX Week in D.C. on August 14!

In part two of Jesse James Garrett’s interview with author Steven Johnson, we look at cultural attitudes and innovation in interface design. Steven Johnson’s keynote kicks off UX Week 2006, August 14-17 in Washington, D.C.

Jesse James Garrett: One implicit aim of Interface Culture seems to have been to encourage people to view software as a cultural artifact, both influencing and influenced by cultural trends. To what extent do you think this view has taken hold?

Steven Johnson: I think it has completely taken hold, though people don’t always use the word interface when they express the view. Google is an interface for exploring the Web. Blogger (and Typepad, WordPress, et cetera) are interfaces for publishing to the Web. They are both runaway successes because their interfaces let you do something that previous interfaces weren’t very good at doing. I think it’s fair to say that Google and blogs are widely seen as influencing and being influenced by cultural trends.

The part where it gets a little trickier with Interface Culture is where I talk about the interface as a new art form. Certainly, there are more instances of genuine interface art out there today than there were when I was writing the book. (I think of the great stuff that Jonah Peretti and the Eyebeam folks do, or Rhizome over the years.) But I don’t think it’s quite right to say that interface design became an expressive artistic medium, in the way I described it. But hey, nine years isn’t that long. There’s still a lot of evolution ahead of us.

JJG: Do you still consider interfaces a means by which people understand the world? Do you see designers applying that perspective in the interfaces they create?

SJ: Clearly interfaces are tools for understanding the world. So many of the most interesting debates in the “new media” space revolve precisely around the question of how specific interfaces will shape the user’s view of the world. And those debates play back into the design decisions that shape the next generation of software.

A great example of this is the power law/long tail discussion that’s been percolating over the past few years (and is likely to hit the best-seller lists in the next few weeks, when Chris Anderson’s book comes out). Think back to the debate that swarmed around Clay Shirky’s “Weblogs, Power Laws, And Inequality.” That was effectively a debate about whether the combined interfaces of blogs, blogrolls, Google, and Technorati (not to mention the original linking interface of HTML) was creating a skewed perception of the entire community of blogging voices online, in that some A-listers had a thousand times the traffic of other, potentially equally worthy, blogs. (The “long tail” debate, not surprisingly, is a mirror image of this: emphasizing the army of Davids, and not the A-list Goliaths.)

But this wasn’t purely a theoretical debate. It involved some academics, but it also involved the people designing the interfaces in question. And it shaped a whole generation of tools aimed at amplifying those voices out on the tail. I just went back and tracked down my own blogged response to Clay and his critics / admirers, and what I wrote then is probably a better answer to the question than anything I could write now:

“The most interesting thing to me about Clay’s essay — and the subsequent response — is that the active participants in the power-law system are having a conversation about the distribution and what it means, and whether they want their little ecosystem to look like that.

Most systems that display this kind of behavior 1) don’t have component parts with that level of self-awareness, and 2) don’t have the opportunity to change the dynamics of the system if they choose. We hear a lot about architecture being destiny in the digital world, but the fact is that architecture has never been more flexible, and there have never been so many connected, smart people interested in flexing its joints for good causes. A few years ago, when I was writing in Emergence about the limitations of the one-way linking built into the Web, there were very few practical applications out there that attempted to remedy this flaw. Now the Web is teeming with them (Trackbacks, various Google hacks, Blogdex.) To a certain extent, the increased feedback of two-way linking may have amplified the scale-free phenomena that Clay describes. But the key point is that the one-way architecture isn’t necessarily our destiny anymore, partially because some very smart people started to think that two-way links would be better for the system as a whole, and they set out to add them to mix.”

JJG: In Interface Culture you hold high hopes for the possibilities of 3-D interfaces for information access and visualization. This hasn’t really materialized. Is the transition to 3-D interfaces just taking longer than you thought, or did something happen in the interim that you didn’t expect?

SJ: Do you think it reads like that? That’s interesting. I guess the way I would describe it is that I spend more time writing about 3-D information visualization interfaces than I would were I writing the book today, but almost all the examples I look at — Magic Cap, Bob, et cetera — are pretty much slammed. This is the whole section of the book that starts with the line: “The failings of the present day come from taking that [desktop] metaphor too literally.” Were I writing Interface Culture today, I probably wouldn’t have bothered talking about them at all. (At least as information visualization tools; games and online communities are another matter altogether.) So I suppose the attention was a form of “high hopes.” But to me, the chapters of IC where I’m really bullish on the future are the text, links, and agents chapters, which are not about 3-D at all.

JJG: Since the rise and fall of VRML, using 3-D for non-game applications has pretty much been considered a dead-end — at least until Second Life came along. Do you think the success of Second Life will lead designers to reconsider the possibilities for 3-D environments beyond gaming? Or is Second Life’s success attributable to some other aspect of its design?

SJ: That’s a great question, and I’m not sure I have an answer, except that I feel like something very interesting is happening over there. I suspect part of it stems from the way Second Lifers subtly integrate gaming elements, without making them explicit. Edward Castronova and Julian Dibbell figured this out before any of us: What’s addictive initially about these environments is scarcity — resources, land, objects, talents. Introduce scarcity, and game play naturally develops, as people compete to gather as many resources as they can, or invent new ways of sharing. (The real estate markets in Second Life are fascinating.) The genius of Second Life is to keep those game elements in the background; it’s a social system first, and a game second.

JJG: A lot of people have been asking me lately what I think about Nintendo’s upcoming Wii console — specifically the gestural controller designed to appeal to people who don’t currently play games. Nintendo’s strategy seems to run counter to the argument you make in Everything Bad Is Good For You that audiences are seeking ever more complex experiences. What do you think of Wii’s prospects?

SJ: It seems pretty smart to me. There’s such a huge gap in the gaming world: There are people who play a ton of games, and there are people who barely spend any time with them. It seems logical that that distribution should even out a little.

JJG: Nintendo says a key part of their strategy for Wii is the design of the controller. They’ve found that typical console controllers are intimidating to a non-gamer audience, so they deliberately made this one something you would hold like a remote control — in fact, they actually call it a “remote” rather than a controller. In other words, their hypothesis is that the interface is the obstacle to the growth of the gaming market. Meanwhile, interaction designers are constantly bemoaning the limitations of the hardware interfaces we design for. We’re dying to be able to support more complex interactions than point-and-click can get you. So you have two opposing trends: Nintendo saying the hardware is too complex, and designers saying it’s too simple. Who’s right?

SJ: I tend to fall in the camp that the hardware should be as simple as possible, and the complexity should all be on the screen. I’m not some kind of one-button-mouse purist or anything, but I certainly don’t want my mouse looking like my Xbox 360 controller. I loved those graphics showing Apple’s Front Row remote next to the Windows Media Center remotes, where the Apple remote has literally six buttons and the other remotes have forty. Granted, the Front Row software doesn’t do nearly as much as Media Center — you’re going to need numbers on the Front Row remote if they ever do a DVR — but still the idea is a profound one: people are much more likely to figure out what they need to do if their options are up on a big screen, and not on a tiny device in their hands.

To be concluded.

Brian Oberkirch unearths a podcast interview of Peter Merholz from a looong time ago (March) when you could use the term Web 2.0 without being beaten with wire coat hangers.

And here we end my conversation with Michael Bierut. It has been very informative, gratifying to see it picked up throughout the blogosphere. Michael will be speaking on Day 2 of our User Experience Week, and it’s worth noting, single-day registration is possible. Michael gave me a teaser of what he plans to present:

“I’ll be talking about a single project, a pro-bono job I got into as a favor which ended up overwhelming me in every possible way, both good and bad.

Along the way, I made almost every possible mistake, including misinterpreting the brief, ignoring the client, failing to identify the end-user, attempting to control what I couldn’t control, and failing to influence what I could.

It is to this day my favorite project.”

And now, the completion of our conversation.

Peter Merholz: From 1998-2001 you were president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (now known as “AIGA, the professional association for design”). As such, you had broad exposure to what was being done in graphic design. What did that role help you realize about the field and practice of design that you could not have found out any other way? What insight or wisdom did it provide that can aid others in their day-to-day practice of design?

Michael Bierut: I’ve been involved with AIGA for a long time. I did a mix tape for the very first event of the New York chapter back in the early 80s. I met my future partners at Pentagram — Paula Scher, Woody Pirtle, Colin Forbes — through the AIGA. I met Bill Drenttel and Jessica Helfand through the AIGA, and we announced the founding of our blog, Design Observer, at an AIGA conference. I’ve been inspired by countless other people I could have only known through AIGA. I always thought that AIGA was fantastic at this aspect of the profession.

On the other hand, when I was President of the organization, I always had the sense that people felt vaguely guilty about this social aspect of AIGA. I think the attitude tended to be “I don’t need help making friends.” Instead, what our members always wanted was something else: they wanted AIGA to increase the respect that design gets from the general public, especially from the business community. Now, this is really a challenge. The fantasy was that there could be a kind of invisible gas that could be discharged into the air of every boardroom in America, and all those clients out there would just somehow become mysteriously receptive to suggestions from designers, more inclined to obey us, and of course pay us more. It’s a nice dream, but it’s only a dream. There is no such invisible gas.

The only way design gets more respect is when an individual designer creates a great design for a single client. It’s a war that’s fought one little battle at a time, and with each victory, things get — in some ways at least — a little bit better. The best thing AIGA has done for me, then, is exposed me to people and ideas who have made me a better designer, and a more effective fighter for design.

PM: You mentioned Design Observer and being exposed to people and ideas. You’ve been writing for Design Observer for almost 3 years now. How has blogging effected the way you work? What effect has it had on how you approach design?

MB: I’ve always liked writing, but I didn’t take it seriously until we started Design Observer. There are many things I like about blogging. Selfishly, it gives me a way to think through issues with the discipline that happens when you put things in writing. To the extent that people read the pieces, particularly from outside the profession, I hope it gives them a little more insight into what the world of design is all about. If you’re reading a long comment thread, the really interesting contributions can seem few and far between.

It’s the offline contacts and conversations that have been more rewarding for me. A few times I’ve walked into a meeting and I’ll be surprised by someone who brings up something from the blog. More often than not, this person isn’t even a designer. To me, this means that design is becoming something that normal people are getting more and more curious about.

Has writing a blog effected the way I work? At first I was going to say no, but when I think about it, I realize that it’s helped me get more confident that the issues that we designers deal with are relevant in the outside world. This in turn has helped me think less as a designer faithfully sticking to the task I’ve been assigned, to a person who’s willing and eager to broaden the context for the work. Like I’ve said before, this is the only way I know to make my work better.

PM: Michael, I want to thank you for the time you’ve taken in speaking (well, writing) with me on these various subjects of design, strategy, politics, and practice. I’ve seen your thoughtful comments make their way all around the blogosphere, and I’m thankful to have had a small hand in that!

Your statement about evolving into a “person who’s willing and eager to broaden the context for the work,” resonates very strongly with what we’re trying to achieve with our User Experience Week event. In prior years, we focused on issues of web design; whereas this year, alongside our web design material, are discussions of product strategy and design, design of services, cross-cultural research, mobile devices, museum design, comics, and information visualization.

So, I guess what I’d like you to expand a bit on “the issues that we designers deal with [that] are relevant in the outside world.” Is it that these designers’ issues have actually always been relevant, and the outside world only now realizes it? Or is it that designers are only now addressing these issues relevant in the outside world. Whichever, what has lead to this change? Any examples from your work you could share?

MB: Back in 1975, I was relatively precocious. I knew what graphic design was (most 17-year-olds didn’t), and I entered a university program in graphic design that started teaching graphic design studio classes in its freshman year (many such courses didn’t). I was really into graphic design so I couldn’t have been happier.

It took me a while to discover that graphic design was a fairly new profession, and that many of the designers who did work that I admired had received a more general education than I was getting. This included not just early heroes of mine like Paul Rand, but mentors I’d meet later like Massimo Vignelli and Tibor Kalman. I got a great education in the skills a designer needs. But I slowly learned that mastering the skills of design was only one element to being successful and effective as a designer.

To this day, I’m not even sure it’s the most important skill. I don’t think I’m a great natural designer compared to most of my partners. I probably wasn’t even the best designer in my class at school. But what I discovered was that design — and this is particularly true with graphic design — is a way to engage with real content, real experience. The key to the whole thing is your ability to learn about that stuff — what I called the “outside world” stuff — and if you can do that, your work will resonate in a way that it can’t if your goal is simply resolving the formal “design” issues.

Making room for the real world is even harder today than it was 30 years ago. The amount of technical skills a young designer needs is vast, and the degree of professional specialization is staggering. All of this helps to foster an atmosphere that seems to reward tunnel vision. But in the end, the designers who are doing the most exciting work — and in some cases it coincidentally happens to be the most beautiful work — are the ones who don’t hesitate to claim the whole world as their subject matter.

My book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices is now in stores and is available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

I was recently interviewed by Liz Danzico for AIGA about the book. Here’s one of the highlights:

Danzico: Why is it important to design hackable products?

Saffer: That’s a good question: I’m not sure it is important. People will hack your products anyway! That being said, leaving “seams” in your product for people to customize it to suit their needs is a very interesting practice.

Danzico: Seams?

Saffer: As designers, we’re traditionally taught to get out of the way of the product, to leave no trace of ourselves or how the product was made. Think of the iPod in its hermetically sealed case, for instance. But Matthew Chalmers had this idea of “seamful systems (with beautiful seams)” where, for those so inclined, you could see and take advantage of how the system was created and adapt (hack) it for your own use. Seams afford hacking, in other words.

Companies can get new ideas for new products through exposing the seams and affording hacking, and could even repurpose their existing product to take advantage of the modifications people are doing to it. Of course, it’s also a dangerous practice. People can hack things in dangerous ways that could open up the companies to serious liability issues. If they are going to build in seams for hackers to rip open, designers need to make sure just what it is exactly they are exposing. On a financial website, of example, it’s one thing to expose the CSS so that someone could change the colors of their version of your site. It would be quite another thing to expose users’ financial data!

Danzico: For some time, people have been able to hack their TiVos to view their flickr streams on their televisions. Next, you might imagine a similar hack for YouTube videos, streaming on our TV as well. With users having this much control over the design of their environment, where does the interaction designer’s role start and end? Are interaction designers in danger of losing control?

Saffer: The idea that we as designers control any product is a myth. It’s a useful myth, to be sure, since it allows us to actually make the product. But once it is out of our hands and out into the world, we can no longer control what people do with it. Sure, we can design how we hope people will use it, but there’s no guarantee they will use it that way.

Read the whole interview.

I’ve also posted the first section of chapter one (832k pdf) on the book’s website.

Happy reading!

In this first part of his conversation with Adaptive Path’s Jesse James Garrett, bestselling author Steven Johnson talks about his 1997 book Interface Culture and how his thinking on the design of interactive media has evolved since then. Steven Johnson’s keynote kicks off Day One of User Experience Week 2006, August 14-17 in Washington, D.C.

Jesse James Garrett: It’s been nine years since the publication of Interface Culture. In the world of technology, we tend to think of that as a long time. How much do you think has actually changed since then?

Steven Johnson: It seems like a longer stretch of time for me, actually, because I came up with the basic argument for Interface Culture in the summer of 1994, when I was still in grad school and before Stefanie Syman and I started FEED. I wrote a proposal for the book then, and shopped it around to a few publishing houses. But of course, this was before the Web had become a mainstream phenomenon, so I think people were somewhat baffled by the idea. I was a little baffled myself: The original proposal kept referring to this emerging new “medium” called Mosaic.

I think an immense amount has changed, and much of that change has been encouraging to see. The one constant online — which of course supports one of Interface Culture’s main arguments — is that linked text is still central to the medium and its interface innovations. When I was writing the book in 1996-97 there was a sense in the industry that the textual basis of the Web was just this accident of limited bandwidth and processing power, and as soon as those limits disappeared, the Web would become a multimedia experience, and hypertext would go the way of the command line. Obviously, there’s much more audio and video online today, but the medium — and its new interfaces — are still mostly about doing things with words.

JJG: Speaking of hypertext, in Interface Culture you spend some time analyzing the hypertext style of Suck, the daily essay site that for many people epitomized the irreverent voice of online writing in the ’90s. You credit much of Suck’s effectiveness to the site’s use of hypertext to suggest hidden connections rather than making those connections explicit. This is almost exactly the same argument you make years later in Everything Bad Is Good For You regarding television narrative in shows like The Sopranos. Do you think the ascending complexity of other media can be attributed to the influence of the Web in our culture, or are both symptoms of some deeper trend?

SJ: I think the ascending complexity that I called the Sleeper Curve is in part attributable to the influence of the Web, or at least to the rise of interactive media in general. All other things being equal, a person who is used to making active choices while consuming media is going to be more receptive to complex media, even if the medium is a passive one, like television. Also, the Web supports complexity because there are so many para-sites (as I called them in IC) annotating and explaining every little detail of The Sopranos or The Simpsons. I think Lost is a show that could only have been made in the Internet age, and from the way the creators have embraced the fan sites, it’s pretty clear that they feel the same way.

JJG: What interface approaches are you excited about these days? If you were writing Interface Culture today, what applications would you point to as examples of where the field of interface design could go?

SJ: Like most of the people reading this, I suspect, I’ve been incredibly energized by all the grassroots Web 2.0 applications that have exploded over the past few years, most of them descendants of Firefly in one way or another. (Someone — and come to think of it, it’s probably me — should go back and track all the core ingredients of today’s Web that were visible at Firefly circa 1996.) So my list is the usual suspects: Blogger, Six Apart, Flickr, Delicious, Technorati, 37signals, Flock, all the GMAP mashups, and so on.

JJG: It’s interesting that you mention Firefly, because I’ve often thought that the Web today might be a really different place — and that we might have reached this stage in its evolution much more quickly — if Firefly had remained an independent company rather than being swallowed and buried by Microsoft. Are there other examples that come to mind of early Web innovations that expired before fulfilling their potential?

SJ: It really is interesting about Firefly, isn’t it? I’m curious how you imagine that non-Microsoft scenario playing out. I was and am very good friends with some of the key people behind Firefly, and lived through a lot of that period side-by-side with them, since I was doing FEED at the same time. But I’ve never asked them if they think about alternate scenarios, and what they would have meant. It was just a little too early, I think: They were very Web 2.0 in the whole user experience — it was all architecture of participation/wisdom of crowds stuff. But at the same time, they had a more proprietary relationship to the data they were collecting. If they’d opened the system up — followed the del.icio.us model — it would have gone some other way, for sure. I’m just not sure what way it would have been.

As for the lost arts of the early Web, I wrote a piece a while back about the John Snow archive that’s been collated by a wonderful UCLA professor named Ralph Frerichs. I’ve spent a lot of time there because Snow is the hero of my new book: It’s filled with old maps, original documents, quotes, pictures, bibliographies, links. It’s a great resource, and it’s the kind of thing that academics first started doing in the early days, but then the whole genre kind of died out. I suppose this is the kind of thing that Wikipedia could eventually evolve into, but right now the experience is completely different. It’s the difference between an encyclopedia and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project…

Connecting virtual space to real space is clearly the most exciting area right now, though in a funny way I think we’re living through another phase of being too literal with our spatial metaphors — mapping tools are amazing, and incredibly useful for some applications, but they’re not always the best way to represent physical places. I’m actually working on a project that deals directly with some of these issues, and not to get too dramatic about it, but I’m hoping to be able to show some screens from it in D.C. this August.

To be continued…

Two of the speakers at this year’s UX Week have new books out: Dan Brown’s Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning and Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (both from New Riders). The two Dans recently had a conversation about their books. This is part two. Read part one.

Dan B: Dan, some web designers believe that documentation is a waste of time because it distracts from the purpose at hand — namely, to build a good product. You indicated that Designing for Interaction discusses models as tools for designers. Do you think that models are essential to the design process? Are there other tools that you consider essential to the design process?

Dan S: For me, Dan, models are the design process! Just about everything I do, outside of things like project management, is all about making models. First: modeling the design research in conceptual models and personas. Then modeling user actions in task flows and potential user actions in storyboards and scenarios. Then modeling the design itself in the form of sketches, wireframes, and prototypes. In a sense, to me, all design is about model making.

Part of that is, of course, documenting. It’s in vogue now to shun documentation and go straight to the prototype or even right to building the product. Which is a fine way to work, although it’s not mine. I’m definitely of the “measure twice, cut once” school, because, man, once you get code going or physical models being made, it gets increasingly difficult and expensive to change.

In design school, one of my professors Jodi Forlizzi used to pound into us that the quality of the documentation you make is an indication of your quality as a designer. And although I was annoyed at the time at having to make things like designed CD covers instead of just scrawling a label with a sharpee, I’m come to agree with her. I hate seeing sloppy, ugly deliverables. Whether it’s true or not, it makes me feel that the design itself isn’t very good. I don’t trust the documentation: it doesn’t communicate to me the quality of thinking that went into it. I imagine you talk a lot about this in your book, Dan.

As far as essential tools go, for me the two inescapable tools have been and remain wireframes and prototypes. Wireframes gather up all the thinking–the business rules, the technical constraints, the features and content needed by users, the controls for those features, the states, etc.–that I’ve discovered and brainstormed over how many weeks. They become “the bible” for the product. I’ve found that they get referred to over and over and over again, way more than any other document by far.

Wireframes don’t convey timing, animation, or feeling very well, though. And for those, you need prototypes. Ideas that seem brilliant in wireframes are terrible in practice. And visa versa–stuff I’ve thrown out in the wireframe for seeming too clunky work well in the prototype. Over the last year or so, I’ve been experimenting with low-fi animations made with animated gifs (now that’s old skool!) in order to convey how something should feel and how the timing of, say, a drag-and-drop should be. And some tools you simply can’t experience well until they are working. How can you tell if a drawing tool is going to help you draw until you build it and play with it (and have users test it)?

I’m curious to hear what you have to say about wireframes, Dan. How do you build them using your concept of layered documents?

Dan B: I like your thoughts on modeling because it’s clear that for larger products, it can be difficult to prototype the entire experience all at once. Modeling allows us designers to focus on certain aspects of the product or web site, hashing out obscure business rules or dealing with specific user needs. As you imply, wireframes are a crucial tool for this process.

The chapter in Communicating Design on wireframes is the longest, clocking in at 40 pages. It’s the document that a dozen designers have thirteen different opinions about. In many ways, it’s the ideal layered document because there are so many different kinds of information that you can include in a wireframe.

At its heart a wireframe, as I’ve defined it, displays content and priority–what’s on the screen and its relative importance. These two elements (plus some identifying information) constitute the first layer. That is, the information that makes the document what it is.

Many designers include layout in their wireframes, so the book defines this as a second-layer element. Annotations also appear on the second layer. You can get away doing wireframes without this information, but the wireframes may not be as meaningful for your project team without them. I’ve done some brilliant (if I do say so myself) layout-free wireframes that emphasize priority and functionality, giving the visual designer free-reign over the look of the pages, but the design team needed more direction for layout.

Honestly, I’ve never done wireframes the same way twice. Every project calls for a different focus and emphasis. Some wireframes include detailed documentation of business rules and interactions while others describe the sources of content and production schedules.

A central idea of the book is that designers should not be a slave to our documentation: use it to further the creative process but don’t do it for the sake of itself. If you need to change a documentation standard to accommodate a project’s nuances, so be it.

This is one of the reasons why I wrote the book in the first place. Most design books out there deal with process and methodology, not specifically with documentation. In most of these books, documents are an afterthought and tend to be very prescriptive. These books also neglect how to use the document in the context of a project, so mine also includes a section for each deliverable on presenting the deliverable to colleagues and clients.

Dan S: One quick comment about wireframes before we move on, Dan. It’s interesting that you break up wireframes like that into your layers. I’ve always envisioned wireframes as having three components, which corresponds almost perfectly to your layered approach, although I never thought of it that way. I see wireframes as having three parts: the wireframe itself, the annotations, and the metadata about the wireframe. The metadata (when the wireframe was made, who made it, what changed since last time, issues) would be down on your third layer, I suppose.

Dan B: Perhaps my layers are not what you would expect, Dan. Identifying information is crucial in any document, and should be considered essential–in the parlance of Communicating Design, a first-layer element. Why? If you’ve ever had a stack of wireframes handed to you, you’ll know it’s important to include these bookkeeping elements so you can keep everything straight.

I don’t want to go into great detail here, so I’ll post something on CommunicatingDesign.com that digs into the three layers of wireframes.

Dan S: I totally agree about changing the document to suit the project, Dan. A foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds and all. I’ve thrown all sorts of things into the wireframe: task flows, technical specifications, business requirements, mini-storyboards, screen captures from the existing website, even hand drawings.

But I have to admit, Dan, that I did pretty much what you just said with documentation in my book. “Here’s what this document is for. Here’s what this one is for, etc.” Although I offer up ways to do most of them, I certainly didn’t go into depth on each one or talk about how to present them. But then again, mine wasn’t a book about documentation, more on methods, process, and overviews.

Dan B: A follow-up question to your previous comments, Dan: you indicate that there’s a trend now to shun documentation. I also see that trend, but mostly in the design community itself. Have you had to change how you manage client expectations with respect to documentation?

Dan S: Nope. I have yet to hear a client tell me to provide less documentation. Then again, I try to only give the essentials. At Adaptive Path, we tend to avoid (or at least try to avoid) massive amounts of documentation that no one is ever going to read. If we can get away with a diagram or presentation or set of wireframes, then by god, that’s what we do. We had one strategy engagement in which the deliverable turned out to be a poster. I guarantee that that poster, which reportedly hangs on walls in various client offices, was better understood and used than any standard strategy document would have been.

Dan B: Dan, what inspired you to write your book?

Dan S: It’s pretty simple really, Dan. I taught two semesters of interaction design fundamentals at Carnegie Mellon and never found a book that I felt was appropriate, that approached the topic from in a way that resonated with me and how I worked and was taught. I was putting together chapters from Alan Cooper’s book, and another from Jesse James Garrett’s book, and other articles and blog posts from all around the web: Dan Hill, Don Norman and a host of others. I thought, “This is ridiculous.” So I wrote my own book, and included a lot of those people that I was already drawing on, either simply as inspiration or by including them in interviews.

Dan, I’m assuming you include a bunch of different documentation samples in your book. Are they all yours, or did you gather them from a number of people? If it’s the latter, were there any that really surprised you?

Dan B: Most of the samples I created especially for the book, Dan, though I did solicit some samples from friends and colleagues. The reason you won’t see more samples from other people is purely logistical. I knew it would be difficult for people to secure permission to use their work in a publication, and since I had limited time and resources, I decided to avoid the issue altogether by creating examples from
scratch.

More importantly, as part of the book, I anticipated creating a wiki just for user experience documentation, and I felt this would be a better place for people to share work samples because it’s something that doesn’t have a hard and fast deadline. Additionally, readers should have access to a broad range of examples, and no doubt the web is a better place for that kind of resource.

That said, I did get a few examples, including a site map from James Melzer, a set of wireframes from Stephen Anderson, a content inventory from Sarah Rice, and a workflow from MAYA Design. Todd Warfel sent a photo of personas posted in a meeting room. Jesse James Garrett and the good people at OmniGroup let me use a screenshot of Jesse’s visual vocabulary. Finally, Netflix let me recreate their movie page in a series of wireframes for that chapter. Nothing too surprising: the purpose of the book was to capture the basics of documentation, and it avoided getting into anything too proprietary or specialized.

When I saw your posted interviews, Dan, I had really mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was excited to see such good stuff from some of the industry’s biggest thinkers. On the other hand, I was crushed that I didn’t do anything that cool for my book! Did you find that your interviews corroborated your ideas in the book? Were there any major disagreements between what people said and the design philosophy described in Designing for Interaction? Finally, what surprised you most about the interviews?

Dan S: Dan, I have to thank Peter Merholz for suggesting that I do interviews. I got a lot of great suggestions while writing, but that was probably the best of the lot. There weren’t a lot of disagreements with the philosophy of the book from the interviewees, but then I probably stacked the deck with people I agreed with. Almost all the interviews made me change my mind about something, though. Hugh Dubberly made me realize that systems design isn’t necessarily opposed to user-centered design. Marc Rettig talking about how the seminal moment in interaction design hasn’t happened yet. Larry Tesler on what it means to be an experienced designer. Carl DiSalvo on how robots are both a product and a service. And on and on. I’m honestly flattered these people appeared in my book.

One last question, Dan: When’s the book out?

Dan B: I’m sure the interviews will be a great balance to the concepts you lay out in the book. Another point of jealousy: your supporting website is great! How do you plan, Dan, to extend the experience of the book online? Can we expect ongoing interviews?

To answer your question, Communicating Design should be out any day now. I believe it’s delayed a few days to correct a printing problem found in my advance copy. If you’ve pre-ordered it, it should be arriving in the next week or so. What about you? When can I expect my pre-ordered copy to materialize in my mailbox?

In the meantime, Dan, it’s clear from your personal blog that you need some suggestions for comics. Perhaps when you’re in Washington for UX Week, we can visit my local comic book store. Of course, if you need something to tide you over, I *highly* recommend Warren Ellis’ Nextwave from Marvel. It’s a parody of superhero comics with sharp writing, wicked art, and killer koala bears. What’s not to like?

Dan S: After the interviews came in, I was like, damn, I should do a whole book of interviews! But then I noticed that Bill Moggridge is coming out with a book later this fall that is exactly like that! So oh well.

I haven’t given much thought to how the book will expand online, but I am traveling around with a workshop based on the book. The first locations are in San Francisco and Sydney in September and probably New York in October.

The book itself, like yours, should be out any day now. It’s in warehouses, supposedly.

Great talking to you, Dan, and I look forward to reading your book and seeing you at UX Week! And I’ll have to check out that comic!