Adaptive Path Blog

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.

Dan S: So Dan, I hear you’ve written a book. What’s it about?

Dan B: It’s funny you mention it, Dan. I have written a book. It’s about documentation for designers, covering ten different types of deliverables. Each deliverable (from personas to wireframes) has a dedicated chapter, and focuses on how to create the deliverable and how to use it in the context of a project. The book avoids specific methodologies or tools and emphasizes the contents of each type of deliverable, and how it serves as a communication tool between members of the team.

I understand your book is hitting the shelves this summer, too. What’s yours about?

Dan S: Well, Dan, mine’s an overview of interaction design, covering everything from its history to its future. I go into stuff like the different approaches to interaction design, user research, the characteristics of good interaction design, interface design, as well as some advanced topics like what’s being called “service design” and designing for adaptation and hackability. And, of course, design tools like wireframes and personas.

Perhaps since both our books cover those, we should talk about those a little. I’ve always felt most people do personas wrong and that’s why a lot of people dislike them. Dan, what’s your take on them?

Dan B: I agree with you, Dan. Many of my clients have a “so what?” attitude toward personas because as documents, personas can require a lot of preparation but have very short shelf-lives. Unless the design team has expertise in leveraging persona information throughout the design process, it’s easy for the document to gather dust soon after its creation.

Since my book focuses on the presentation of information, I don’t spend any time on how to do user research. Instead, Communicating Design provides strategies for preparing documents with whatever information you have on hand using a layered approach. The contents of every deliverable are described in a series of three layers—the first layer having the most essential elements, the second layer having useful details, and the third layer having contextual information. It’s important to understand that for the purpose of this book, layers are meant only as conceptual groupings, not as a visualization technique. In the case of personas, the first layer of information contains elements like the name of the persona and a basic account of the persona’s goals and needs. For the second layer, I recommend direct user quotes and behaviors—information that can make the persona seem more real. If so inclined, designers can also include optional contextual information like a personal background or technical expertise. I consider these to be third-layer elements.

My personal biases definitely show through here. For essential information, I believe personas need to be grounded in user needs and motivations. Demographics and personal background information can be entertaining, but ultimately of little use—even distracting—to the design process. From a documentation perspective, “doing personas wrong” means capturing information that ultimately has little bearing on the design process. The upshot is that a handful of bulleted lists may be all you need for a set of personas.

By conceiving deliverables as a series of layers, designers can focus on the important information first, communicating the essentials and adding further detail as necessary.

Staying on the topic of personas, Dan, how do you recommend designers incorporate users into interaction design projects?

Dan S: Before I answer that, Dan, I want to poke at your layered approach to documentation. Is each layer meant for a different audience, or is each layer about getting deeper meaning out of each document? Are the layers created at the same time, or added on to?

As far as personas go, aside from helping the designer empathize with users, I think they are most useful in three ways: prioritizing features, creating task “pathways,” and for evaluating design solutions. The features of your product need to address the needs of your most important persona, so personas should help determine where design and development effort should go. Next, the behaviors that should demarcate each persona should give an indication of how each persona could or would use the product, so you can design towards those behaviors. Creating storyboards and written scenarios using the personas often help with this. And then, once you have a design, you can ask, “Would Elaine use this? Could Roy?” instead of just the generic “the users.”

Dan B: In short, Dan, the layers categorize the different elements of a document by how important they are to the document. Elements on the first layer are essential—without nodes and connectors, for example, you can’t have a site map. You could include groupings of screens and tie-ins to personas on your site map, but these aren’t essential elements to site maps, and depend more on circumstance and specific project need. So though there isn’t a direct connection between the layers and the audiences, you may decide to leave information out of a document because it doesn’t suit your audience. Communicating Design helps designers distinguish between essential and non-essential elements.

As for creating the document, the designer should start with the basic information (first layer elements) and add further elements as needed by the situation and what information they have on-hand. To get back to personas, I describe a photograph as a third-layer element—nice-to-have, but not essential. This means that designers shouldn’t worry about searching Google Images unless they strongly believe that a generic photo of an abstract user will help the document in some way. Frankly, they need to be nailing down goals and behaviors first.

I like the emphasis on behaviors and prioritization, Dan. Your book describes four different approaches to design—user-centered, activity-centered, systems, and genius. In what way do user research and personas play a role in each of these approaches?

Dan S: Dan, user research is usually involved to varying degrees in all of these approaches, except for what I call “genius design.” Genius design is when the designer presumes to know enough about the users and the subject area to simply proceed with designing with little or no validation from research. This happens either because the designer simply doesn’t have the time or resources to conduct research, or simply is uninterested in it.

In the other approaches, we see designers using user research to undercover insights about the users, such as behaviors, environments, tasks and goals. They then take the research data and make models out of it: “things to think with” as the models have been called. One type of model is, of course, personas, because they should be based on research, not on what the designer (or marketing department) thinks the users are or should be. These types of models help designers (and, very importantly, others!) understand what they’ve just witnessed in the research. They are what I (and others of course) call “conceptual models.”

Is this what you call “Concept Models” in your book, Dan, or is that something different?

Dan B: In Communicating Design, Dan, a Concept Model is a variation of the concept mapping technique developed by Joseph Novak for use in education. In concept maps, nouns are connected by verbs, like Owner –> walks –> Dog.

Web designers use more elaborate concept models to illustrate the relationships between the important aspects of a project, like users, stakeholders, processes, documents, systems, or anything else. When I start a new project, I’ll typically use a concept model as an internal document to help me understand all the nuances and different players. As you say, these models may be the result of research, but concept models don’t necessarily focus on users exclusively.

Bryce Glass developed a concept model to describe Flickr. Bryce was kind enough to let me use the illustration in my book. (I’ll never get tired of pointing people to that thing.)

Concept Models illustrate a good general principle throughout the book: documents are flexible, and may be used in a variety of situations. I hope I’ve laid out the book to help people take advantage of this flexibility, and see ways they can use documents that they haven’t used before.

Part Two

A podcast interview with me, Dan, about interaction design and my book, Designing for Interaction by Brian Oberkirch.

This is a continuation of my conversation with Pentagram partner Michael Bierut. If you haven’t yet, you might want to read Part 1 first.
Michael is giving the opening plenary on Day 2 of our User Experience Week 2006, August 14-17 in Washington, DC.

Peter Merholz: Okay, I’m going to pick up a different thread here, though I think it’s related to your comment on an ideal life in design.

My colleague Dan Saffer has just finished writing a book on interaction design and the last chapter of his book concerns ethics. Many of us at Adaptive Path are admirers of Tibor Kalman, as well as the book you helped put together about him. What is your sense of the role ethics played in Kalman’s work? Was it explicit, or is it just that he couldn’t imagine how to work any other way? How do ethics inform your design work?

Michael Bierut: One of the sad aspects of Tibor’s early death is that it puts other people in the unhappy position of having to speak for him, which I really can’t. Working on his book with him, I came to know Tibor as a person who, simply put, was uncomfortable being comfortable. His intuitive reaction to any status quo situation was first to disrupt it. This is an interesting characteristic to bring to the world of commercial graphic design, where you’re constantly being asked to accomodate yourself to your clients’ goals, very few of which will correspondend perfectly to your own. Tibor’s genius was that he didn’t attempt to separate his work and his life as working designers do. Ethics played a big part of that with Tibor, I guess, but it seemed to me to be a larger attempt to fully integrate your values as a person with your values as a designer. After his death, this has all boiled down to an image of “Saint Tibor” that I’m guessing he would have found pretty aggrevating, to tell you the truth. He was more complicated, and more interesting, and just plain more fun than that.

I think that designers who are interested in ethics tend to focus on specific issues of dramatic conflict: Would you work for a cigarette company? is a favorite. That implies we can all pick and choose those special moments where we “have to be ethical.” I also sometimes hear that, for instance, design and politics don’t mix. Sure they mix. Everything mixes. The goal is to seek an integrated life, which is what I think Tibor did. You may be a designer with special expertise, and certainly that’s why a client would retain your advice. But try not to answer as a designer. Try to answer as a citizen, as a human being and as a designer.

It helps, of course, if you’re in a situation where you think you have a sense of agency, where you think you can walk away from situations that you don’t feel are right. And of course, you always do: the only question is what it takes for your to exercise it. My biggest failings as a designer is that I’m very polite, adverse to conflict and eager to please. As a result, as I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to get better at choosing my clients. I find that when I work for people whom I personally like and who are doing something that I admire or find interesting, I’m happier, the people I work with are happier, and we all do better work.

Peter Merholz: You mention the mix of design and politics. A colleague of mine pointed me to your contribution for Partisan Project. Apart from some ethical stands (which, as you so pointedly demonstrated, mostly relate to the type of clients we would not take), we at Adaptive Path have been careful not to get too political with our design work, mostly out of respect of the array of viewpoints / prospectives within our organization.

How political a designer are you? I’m only familiar with the Partisan work—are there other examples out there of your political design? Have your politics ever made it… awkward in your client work? Also, what politically-oriented design work of late has most impressed you? What seems to be having an impact?

Michael Bierut: During the Republican convention, Pentagram New York hung a NO BUSH banner outside our building, so I guess we don’t hesitate to take political positions as an office or as individuals.

The Partisan Project image was, in fact, an earlier design for the banner that was rejected by my partners for being “too subtle.” Hmm!

I’ve found that any reluctance I’ve had to doing more of this “political design” has to do with my own fear that things like T-shirts and posters are usually feeble tools to address the enormous problems we face as a society today. Sometimes, of course, something really clicks, but in my own work I dread the sense that I’m using something bad in the world as an excuse to make a clever design. Often, it just makes more sense to me to simply support a candidate or donate money to a cause.

I’ve seen some propagandistic design work that I’ve liked—I’m thinking of the campaign that Number Seventeen did to launch Air America (I did a DO post on this called “Catharsis and the Limits of Empire”)—but what I really admire is clear information design. Nigel Holmes did a piece in Harpers several months ago (tragically unavailable online) on America’s addiction to debt that was really amazing. Similarly, I admire the way that Mgmt. translated Al Gore’s Powerpoint show on global warming into the book that accompanies the movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Speaking of Harpers, Art Spiegleman also did a great article last month in which he analyzed—rated, really—the notorious Danish Mohammed cartoons. Absolutely fascinating. Not available online either!

Peter Merholz: Okay. I’m going to switch gears here. Another Adaptive Pather, Ryan Freitas, has mentioned you a couple times on his blog, and I wanted to follow up his thoughts. His first post came after your appearance at SFMOMA, where you spoke about Pentagram’s work with United on developing the identity for Ted. He was struck by how effective the Wall Street Journal articles from the future were at communicating your vision.

His second post came a little later, prompted by your entry “Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content”, and he quoted this passage:

Over the years, I came to realize that my best work has always involved subjects that interested me, or—even better—subjects about which I’ve become interested, and even passionate about, through the very process of doing design work. …To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you’re interested in, the better your work will be.

What I was wondering, re-reading Ryan’s posts, was how these two notions might be connected. How your work for United was influenced by your multifarious passions. And, perhaps related (you tell me), how you hit upon the Wall Street Journal mockups as a tool to communicate your concept. Have you used such “tangible futures” in your work before?

Michael Bierut: Being able to make vivid counterfeits is one of the joys of being a graphic designer, and one that we don’t take enough pleasure in. One of my partners in London once mocked up a whole issue of Fortune to help a client see his business differently.

One of the hard lessons I had to learn as a designer starting out was that good design is not a self-evident imperative for most people. I tell students that they are spending time and money in design school acquiring an abnormal sensitivity to design that most regular people should not be expected to share. Yet various groups of these “regular people” are usually the ones who initiate our work, fund and approve it, and ultimately are the audiences for it. So the biggest challenge we face is figuring out how to meet people on their terms, not ours.

I never talk about “educating the client.” I hate that phrase. Almost always it’s the designers who need the education, not the client, not the audience. Yet designers and clients both tend to recede into their areas of expertise, and it takes work for us to wrench each other out of it. Making prototypes that help people imagine the effects that design decisions will have in the real world can be a very potent tool. Those fake Wall Street Journal articles were supposed to do exactly that: remind a client who had spent six months showing themselves Powerpoint presentations that there was a real world out there filled with people who didn’t share their fascination with their business strategy or, actually, care at all whether they succeeded at all. It’s a good reality check, and it helps to shift the design work from an internal exercise that’s done for management approval, to work that’s done because you’re seeking results with real people in the real world.

So of course—to get to the other part of your question—dealing with the real world means being as interested as possible in stuff that’s not about design. All of the work I’ve done that I’m proud of somehow emerged from the fact that I’ve gotten really interested in that other part: the subject matter of a book, the business of a client, the content of an exhibition. Luckily I can get interested in nearly anything. And I have learned the hard way that there are a few things I’m just not interested in, and can’t seem to do good design for: I avoid these projects now.

Esteemed graphic designer Michael Bierut will speak at our User Experience Week 2006. Michael is a partner at the design firm Pentagram, and a former president of the AIGA. Though we at Adaptive Path love him for his impassioned contributions to the Design Observer blog.

To help us set the stage for his talk, he agreed to join me in a conversation. I will post the discussion in parts. I encourage readers to pose questions for Michael in the comments section.

And now, the discussion!

Peter Merholz: One of the reasons we’re excited to have you speak at our User
Experience Week event is because you’re willing to publicly challenge design orthodoxy. Two of your Design Observer posts stand out in this regard: “Innovation is the New Black” and “The Obvious, Shunned by So Many, Is Successfully Avoided Once Again.”

What has led you to take such stances that are not widely held? What experiences have shaped these design philosophies?

Michael Bierut: If it’s true, there may be several reasons. One is that my wife Dorothy isn’t a designer, she’s an MBA. We started dating when we were in high school in Ohio, and now we’ve been married for 26 years. Dorothy has always been the first to roll her eyes at some particularly choice design affectation, and she certainly won’t let me get away with any herself. I often find myself wondering what a “normal” person would think about my work. By normal I usually mean Dorothy.

All that said, I don’t really try to be argumentative or confrontational. I think there are a lot of ways to practice our craft, and almost all of them have some kind of merit. Some people have said that rather than challenging orthdoxy I’m more likely to be a defender of the status quo. It may be because, for designers at least, self-conscious difference for its own sake creates its own kind of orthodoxy.

PM: You mention that your wife has an MBA. As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s a lot of activity in the “business and design” space. The Institute of Design’s Strategy Conference took place last week, AIGA’s Gain conference is coming in October, BusinessWeek and CondeNast are planning “design and business” publications, business schools are preaching “design thinking” as a new way of solving old problems, et cetera et cetera.

In your practice, how do you bridge between “business” and “design”? In your client work, how do you demonstrate business impact?

MB: Too many designers enter the field spouting design jargon and, predictably, meet resistence or indifference from their clients. So they switch to business jargon, which is usually worse. I did this for a while, got good at it, and then got disgusted with myself.

I’ve come to believe strongly that one of the roles of design is to bring humanity, intelligence and beauty to the world of business, and indeed to everyday life. In my experience, good clients and good designers don’t see this goal as being opposed to—or even separate from—achieving business goals, but rather an integral part of it. It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of “strategy” but of common sense, taste and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this, and create garganuan superstructures of bullshit to provide a sense of security. Not only do designers enthusiastically collude in this process, but many have found ways to bill for it.

I measure success the same way anyone does: increased sales, better response rates, higher profit margins. At the same time, I’m painfully aware that design—especially graphic design—can only make a partial contribution to these outcomes, even at its most effective. This, of course, is useful to remember when the numbers don’t go your way.

PM: I agree that we have a responsibility to bring “humanity, intelligence and beauty” into these practices. But, and I’m going to beat this horse just a little bit longer, how do you hold yourself accountable? How do your clients hold you accountable? How do you
justify (what I assume to be) your high rates? The top designers seem to command their position through the development of an aura of brilliance. Is cultivating an aura what it’s about?

Before you answer, I want to posit an assertion—from what I see, graphic design is becoming something of a commodity practice. Adaptive Path doesn’t promote graphic design services (though we offer them) because competing in that space means battling over ever-shrinking margins. Graphic design seems to have two huge forces working against its viability:

1) an immense supply-side, with so many designers offering virtually indistinguishable services, and
2) an almost allergic reaction to demonstrating explicit business value, so that pricing graphic design is something of a voodoo art.

MB: Peter, it’s funny when you talk about graphic design’s commodity-based supply-side, with so many designers offering the same services: that’s what many of my partners have said for years about web consulting.

Your questions combine issues that have to do with providing value to clients’ businesses, and running one’s own successful design business. To address the first question about accountability, I’d like to know the answer to that one myself. Has anyone ever proven, really proven, a connection between good design and a client’s business success? “Good design,” first of all, is hard to define: for instance, I find most of the examples of work in Design Management Journal pretty mundane. Second, I think you can argue that good design can make a good business even better, good design alone can’t make a bad company good. IBM and Enron didn’t succeed or fail because of their logos, both of which were designed by the same guy, by the way. So if a client asks me if I can prove that my work has had an effect on my clients’ bottom lines, I have a short answer: no.

Instead, I tell them that the best thing design can do for a company is to express that company’s personality accurately and compellingly, and in so doing permit that organization’s inherent strengths to prevail. This can be through graphics, product, environments, or experiences. The way Pentagram is set up creates a bias for this answer, of course. We’re owned by partners who are all working designers, and whose practices span the disciplines I mentioned above. The clients who hire us work directly with those partners: we have no account executives or client handlers. Each partner has a pretty distinct point of view and doesn’t attempt to conceal it. Our clients are people who want to work with smart, talented, committed designers who they like spending time with. Clients who don’t value that go elsewhere.

This is also a pretty efficient and stable model financially. Each partner runs a pretty small, autonomous team. The overhead is low. I write my own proposals and negotiate my own agreements. I can ask for whatever fees I want, but we basically try to cover our time and expenses plus a 20% profit margin. So much for the the voodoo art of pricing.

So it’s efficient and stable, yes. But I suspect it wouldn’t be of much interest to, say, an ad agency holding company. They would look for growth, which we really don’t care that much about. And they’d get exasperated by the idiosyncracies of the designer / owners, and try to replace them with people who could deliver a more reliable product with less muss and fuss. That’s what you mean by a commodity, right? I think we might make more money this way, but we’d give up what is a pretty ideal life in design.