Adaptive Path Blog

A recent story, that’s quickly becoming a classic, is the origin and design of the Target pill bottle and the surrounding ClearRx system. It’s an inspiring and instructive story about the ability of design to impact business and to change people’s lives. In advance of her keynote at User Experience Week, I got a chance to talk to Deborah Adler, designer of the ClearRx pill bottle, about her experience:

Brandon Schauer [BS]: Your session at UX Week it’s titled “ClearRx from Masters Thesis to Medicine Cabinet.” Can you give us a quick summary of what ClearRx really is?

Deborah Adler [DA]: Sure, ClearRx is a packing system for people who use prescription medicine. It makes it easier for people to understand how to take their medicine.

BS: But Target didn’t ask you to design this?

DA: They did not. Actually, my project began as a student project. I was getting my Masters at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and the program is called Designer as Author; you have to come up with a product and effectively and eventually bring it to market. At the time, I was coming up with my thesis and my grandmother accidentally took my grandfather’s medicine; they were both prescribed the same drug, but just different dosage strengths. When I looked in their medicine cabinet, I wasn’t at all surprised by their befuddlement because it turned out that their package was practically identical. So that’s when I decided, “Hey, maybe I’ll redesign the prescription bottle for my thesis.” And that’s what I did, and after I did that I brought it to Target.

(more…)

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I was asked to write up a list of favorite design-related books for the newsletter site Freepint. I have no idea when such a thing would be published, and I realized it was ideally suited to the AP Blog. Enjoy! (These are *personal* choices and don’t reflect the views of Adaptive Path blah blah… and add your favorites to the comments…)

The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman. It’s almost hoary to mention it, but it’s one of the few books that changed my life. I’ve written more about it here

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud. A brilliant long-form essay on the nature of creativity, how humans process visual information, and the power of narrative.

Designing for People, Henry Dreyfuss. Written over 50 years old by America’s pre-eminent industrial designer, it lays out a user-centered design philosophy long before the phrase “user-centered design” entered our professional language. Refreshing clear, straightforward, and free of the BS that clouds much design writing.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte. These two are required reading for any one involved in communicating visually. (His later two you can pass on.)

Who Built America?, The American Social History Project. This CD-ROM, based on a textbook, set the standard for what a multimedia digital book should be. Developed in 1993, it’s marriage of text, sound, imagery, and, video, along with it’s engagement with archival sources, still inspires.

The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton. The most recent book on the list, but definitely worth inclusion. A delightful book-length essay on the power that architecture has on our emotional state, fabulously illustrated with perfectly-selected photos.

How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand. This is one of those books that every IA has read, even though it has nothing to do with IA. Stewart looks at how buildings evolve over time, and his book serves as a reminder that all of us are creating things that people are going to *use*.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. Still the best “web design” book out there, with a strong focus on what it actually takes to build great sites. And I’m not saying this just because I was a technical editor.

Interface Culture, Steven Johnson. Getting a little long in the tooth, but Johnson’s book is the first extended piece of critical writing on the subject of interface and interaction design from the viewpoint of a non-designer. Valuable in recognizing how interface engage with the culture that creates them.

The Cluetrain Manifesto (multiple authors). Written in the midst of Web 1.0, this tract on what it means for businesses to meaningfully engage in business online contains deep truths that still frighten most organizations.

Design Research, edited by Brenda Laurel. About half to two-thirds of this isn’t all that valuable, but the remainder of the book more than makes up for it. Brenda probes the boundaries of research, which is essential as we design for an increasingly uncertain world.

Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling. What happens when everything is, well, information? Bruce delves into the subject of spimes and reorients your view of things in the world. And, hey, I even dug the (oft-criticized) graphic design.

And heck, why just books? Why not also, The Films of Charles and Ray Eames? So good. So insightful.

(And, of course, there are the books written by my colleagues… but those go without saying…)

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We have some serious Deborah Adler fans floating around the Adaptive Path offices and are excited to have Deborah keynote day two of this year’s UX Week. I remember the first time I saw her work on the Target® ClearRxSM. I said to myself “That is exactly the kind of work I want to be doing!” She took a serious life threatening problem and, driven by passion and curiosity, elegantly transformed the way an entire industry thinks about the distribution of medicine.

Register for UX Week before May 11 and get early bird pricing!

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Tamara Adlin just launched UX Pioneers, featuring interviews with various user experience folks. I’m honored to be among her initial subjects!

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Interaction design lost a pioneer last week when Robert Adler died in Boise, Idaho on Thursday. The name probably doesn’t ring a bell (there’s not even a wikipedia entry on him), although it should. Adler, along with Eugene Polley, designed The Space Command, which was the first wireless television remote control.

The Space Command was made in the 1950s when both men were working for Zenith. (They won a special Emmy for the invention in 1997.) But Adler didn’t stop there; he’s got over 180 patents, including one filed on February 1st (the guy was 93!) for a touch-screen technology. In fact, he pioneered the use of SAW technology for touch screens, they type of which are now in widespread use in airport kiosks and in museums. A 1974 paper of his on Optical Video Disc Players lead to the invention of DVDs.

Kudos to you, Dr. Adler, and rest in peace.

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At the end of her talk, Sara Ulius-Sabel asked all of us, “How do we sustainably get to WOW?” Her point being, we can get to developing products that deliver a delightful, transcendent experience occasionally, but often unpredictably. So how can we get there consistently?

Well, I tried to answer it by synthesizing the main themes I heard over the course of the event, and turning it into a couple of sentences. (Main themes are in ALL CAPS):

By achieving EMPATHY we realize an EXPERIENCE STRATEGY that gets us to DESIGN BEYOND PRODUCTS (and maintain focus when MAKING MISTAKES).

This requires SYSTEMS THINKING (which in return requires TEARING DOWN WALLS), that produces TRANSFORMATION for your MATRIXED(?) ADAPTIVE organization.

Commentary on the terms:

Empathy — Both Tim Brown and Todd Wilkens really stressed the importance of empathy in the design process, and how it’s the primary value of your research efforts.

Experience Strategy — Jesse kicked it off with a paean to experience strategy, and we heard it again from Adam Richardson, Caterina Fake, and Tim brown.

Design Beyond Products — Jesse talked about taking design beyond thinking about individual products and considering larger systems and services, which Lou echoed strongly, and was really brought home by Jennie Winhall’s discussion of her work with RED.

Making Mistakes — This was a primary theme from Scott Berkun, whose research on innovation showed that a primary contributor to innovative organizations is a willingness to make mistakes.

Systems thinking — Mentioned in Jesse’s discussion, Jennie Winhall also addressed this in her discussion of designing social services.

Tearing down walls — This was an explicit theme from Todd’s talk on research, where he stressed the importance of getting the entire organization involved in research activities, and the idea of multidisciplinary design teams was mentioned in many of the discussions.

Transformation — One of the more surprising themes that emerged was the discussion of transformation, and the importance of evolving organizations to better take advantage of research and design. Todd’s talk was titled “The Transformative Power of Research,” Jennie talked about transformation design (reinventing organizations to deliver new offerings), and, of course, IDEO has made waves with it’s transformation practice.

Matrixed — One open question was how design and experience groups should be organized within organizations. Should they be centralized, and “matrixed” into product teams, or decentralized, where designers work explicitly for product teams.

Adaptive — Caterina mentioned how her team had to be able transition from making an online social game to a photo sharing website, and Scott commented in his talk the importance of trying things, and if they don’t work, trying other things, and bobbing and weaving and adjusting as necessary.

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Sara Ulius-Sabel

Whirlpool is probably bigger and more complex than you probably realize. We’re now the world’s largest manufacturer of home appliances. It makes us less complacent and more vigilant, knowing other company’s are gunning for us.

Have a huge portfolio of brands and are often competing against ourselves. Forces us to think about product development in a different way. Design locations in six locations around the world. Each region focuses on regional design, but we all have to share best practices and things that have global implications.

It’s not just about being usable. We also need to be useful and desirable. User needs for us have been fairly stable for many years. This made us pretty complacent. Why need to research how people wash their clothes? But we had to shake the organization up and say that there might be something better out there we could be offering.

The sea of white: commoditization of appliances. Starting to erode the paradigms of more features (27 cycles on a washing machine!). Consumers don’t need this.

How we approach usefulness: addressing unmet needs. Getting beyond the washing machine. How do you add utility without adding things like more cycles. We do it through research and ethnography. Environments, rituals, processes. What is missing? What are they doing now that is a strange behavior? We found loads of compensatory behaviors. What we did was make a series of products that are outside the machine and that is about the laundry process experience. Simple products, but a big step for us.

How we approach usability. Historically, usable always followed useful. It’s only recently that the usability team has been able to make recommendations to the engineering team. Lots around ergonomics and ease-of-use. Also taken on perceived quality. You need confidence in the appliance (the whooshing sound when you open the refrigerator door). Not only about can everyone use it, but what is the experience using it. Making sure people feel satisfied.

Help users understand the process. Help people build a mental model of what the machine is doing. People want to know what is available to them and the combinations they can create. Make it seamless and in the background–like it was meant to be there all along. Everyone can benefit from accessible design.

Desirable. Why would anyone lust after a washing machine? It’s not rational. It’s something about the product that makes you feel good. By owning the product you took on the characteristics of the products. Products–appliances!–can be desirable. We should seek this out.

Can desirability be added systematically? Contributed by the features, aesthetics (sigh, tough, smell). Not static–as new competitors and new technology comes on the market, it might not be desirable in the future. Want to make it less a fluke. Which is where my role comes in.

My title is design metrics manager. Metrics are a way to communicate design to the rest of the organization in a way they can understand. We use the metaphor of health: checking the health of products.

Each brand has to be something different for different people. How do you drive people to different products, sometimes on the same platform? The users all need a refrigerator, but which one? We need to find the dimensions that trigger an emotional response. Trying to drive different experiences with different brands. Point of the project is to make someone fall in love with products, not better engineering.

Pressure is about measuring vs. creating. Not only having to convince upper management, but also convince the designers that metrics are ok. Not grading their designs.

Question for everyone: how do we sustainably get to Wow? As the competition comes after us, we have to force ourselves to continue to move forward, where every product is capable of triggering wow.

Q: Can you tell us some of the design metrics?

A: They are proprietary, but they are all user facing. Asking multiple questions that help differentiate the products.

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Irene Au (IA) and Jeff Veen (JV), Google.

JV: Tell us about your background.

IA: Electrical engineering background, but it wasn’t for me. Wanted to focus more on the impact of technology and people. Made way to human-computer interaction. A lot of the research at the time was about web, web technologies. Went from University of Illinois to Netscape. Netscape Communicator 4. Then went to Yahoo. The really fascinating projects were the stuff that was going on inside the viewfinder (the browser). Yahoo had just acquired 411 and realized what they were doing was going beyond the directory of the web. Was a small group of graphic designers there and producers would come a week before a product launched and wanted graphics and layout. I wanted to improve the experiences earlier.

JV: How long have you been at Google now?

IA: Four months.

JV: And how has that been going?

IA: It’s like Disneyland. Tremendous opportunity to bring in design thinking into the organization. Great breeding ground for ideas. How do you take it to the next level.

JV: All the difficult user experience decisions often happen in the algorithm level.

IA: The kind of strategies Google employed in the past might have worked for search, but not for more complex experiences. Traditional designer was an HCI generalist who had a good eye and could build products as well. Need a different set and range of functions and skills and backgrounds and focus now. Changing the hiring structure now.

JV: How do you optimize the recruiting process to find the type of designers we’re looking for?

IA: Need to set up a set of skills: anthropologists, HCI, visual designers, best-of-breed people. Don’t want silos though. Want T shaped people: specialization but broad skills too.

JV: How on earth do you prioritize all the projects at Google?

IA: We don’t have the bandwidth to cover everything. Need a strategy for this, so we don’t just come in at the tail end to work on a mock-up. We need to be more thoughtful in how we engage. We need to do fewer things really well. Is the design group a shop, or a really strategic group? Can we get involved early is one factor. We can upsell into strategy sometimes.

JV: Does this happen at an organization level?

IA: It’s like managing a financial portfolio. You need stuff you can turn over quickly, then other stuff that is infrastructure. Over time, people understand what it is we do. The mock-up is the key at Google. But we need do more and find out what people do.

JV: We need to speak the right language to the right people. Speak the language of finance to business people. But at Google, it’s speaking the languages of engineering.

IA: For the projects we do engage in, we need to set ourselves up to succeed. If we don’t, nobody wins.

JV: Some groups are very metrics driven, some aren’t.

IA: It’s important to be adaptable to the micro-cultures within the organization. Some places are top-down. If we try to apply the same kind of management to both, it won’t work. But we do need to take what works well in one area and apply it to others if we can.

Q: What level of management brought in this type of design and what sort of support are they going to give you?

IA: No deliberate decision from the top. No clear vision for how this will play out.

JV: Everyone says we’re very user-centered. But we don’t do certain techniques.

IA: The question is how do you carve out that space to do those things. Everyone needs to be part of the analysis of the research and brainstorming as well. It’s very transformative. At Google we focus on the rigor (GPA, SAT scores), but there is also this other side with the softer skills like communication we need to focus on more.

Peter Merholz: We need to better facilitate meetings. Should the design group be centralized (rest of company as client) or instead be decentralized (part of the product team)?

IA: Early in a company’s life, really important for designers to be centralized. It helps to have a group to share best practices and standards over time so teams can stop re-inventing the wheel. But it’s best when the designer is merged into the product teams. But it is good when there is some sort of combination: connection to a team and to a group of designers. At some point the UX team gets so big, you have to address this question. It depends on the organization. At some point, you get diminishing returns on decentralization.

JV: Google has amazing centralization especially for engineering. One way to write code at Google. How do you go about making a style guide and keeping it up to date?

IA: Universal look and feel. Build consistency without uniformity. Design pattern library: best practices around interaction design. UI code library. Consistently implement models.

Sam Felder: I’m curious if Google’s new hiring practices were affected by designers and how will it affect the company?

IA: I think the changes have been more subtle. The changes have been about clarifying what we want (expectations). And gives the interviewers more confidence about evaluations.

JV: How many of you use design exercises in hiring? [a few hands raise] I go back and forth on that myself.

IA: It’s really important to come up with an exercise that fits everyone–interface designers to design strategists. We need people throughout that range. Need exercises that allow for that flexibility.

JV: You need to see what people are good at. I have a lot of new people on my team. How do you approach mentoring?

IA: It is important to set aside time to do it. Learn from things like pair-programming. Pair designing? But how do we facilitate across teams so that people learn from others?

JV: Office hours at Google. What a great idea. All managers have them. And designers office hours. Time for unstructured feedback and communication.

IA: I have an open door, but it’s nice to have time blocked out.

JV: Everyone has office hours, so it’s great to just go somewhere and answer the question.

IA: Testing on a toilet is also great. When you go into the bathroom stalls, on the doors are code. It would be great to have that for design too.

Q: How do you go about creating consistency between mobile and web?

IA: There is consistency in look and feel and then there is consistency in interaction and you have to find the elements that communicate as one family, but not to be exact.

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Jennie Winhall

Red Project: Addressing social and economic issues through design-led innovation. How public services can be transformed through design skills. In the past, did work redesigning prisons (design for rehabilitation). Did work on domestic energy consumption, and redesigned better interactions with Members of Parliament.

Big push on public sector reform, for the first time looking at the experience of the end-user.

There are limits on modernizing existing services. Shells of services were designed a long time ago and society has changed. Demand outstrips supply. And now looking at a new range of social issues (climate change, obesity, etc.)

Need to help people co-create their own decisions. Which would be fine if people made rational decisions, but they don’t. Easier to build new power plants than to change every person’s behavior.

The public sector needs a new generation of public services. Preventative, co-created, and around individuals.

Health care project: can we use the characteristics of communities of participation to create new health care services? Redesign the interactions with patients and doctors to be more collaborative and interactive. Created a set of cards with issues and statements that the patient can use to talk to doctors about. Shifts the power from the system to the patient. It forces a different kind of behavior. Very adaptive–allows doctors and patients to get straight to the problem.

Exercise project: How do you make exercise social? Activmobs. werearemobs.org Self-organizing system. Rather than try to prototype it ourselves, actually made three activmobs and watched what they did and designed the system around what arose. Social dynamics were very important: support and peer pressure. A number of the tools developed were about increasing self-awareness. What is important to users. Also a lot about progress and visualizing progress. Especially as a group. It’s important to make things visible.

Designing for Behavior Change
Go beyond shaping products, to realizing that the products we make shape behavior. Metrics have to be meaningful to individuals. Self-assessment.

Can’t use a delivered service process. People need to shape the service itself and thus you can’t design the service entirely. You need to distribute tools to people.

Aspiration is important. Users have to want to participate.

Services have to be more desirable than owning the product itself.
New kind of disciple: transformation design.

Transformation Design
Half the skill of design is identifying the correct problem to solve. Problems are complex and require systems thinking and inter-disciplinary thinking. Integrate non-design aware people into the process.

Reinventing the organization to deliver the new offerings. Top-down structures aren’t working. Need to embed a culture of innovation onto an organization so that when designers leave, it doesn’t all collapse. Build capacity, not dependency.

Lots of non-traditional design outputs. Things like job descriptions, not just things.

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Innovation Through Design Thinking

This is the story that I tell to business leaders about why they should invest in design.

Design is everywhere these days. Beyond the beautiful stuff, designers have a unique way of solving problems. Stuff is not the only thing that is important. We call it design thinking. It’s the way we go about solving problems. It can be used to tackle a whole range of creative and business issues.

Design thinking is a great way of thinking about design strategy and the vision for future business. Design thinking can be used to develop whole new markets. Design thinking has been used to create new products and offerings. Design thinking can even be used to create new business models and new applications for technologies. Design thinking can be used to create new ways of connecting with customers. Design thinking can be used also in a place we never expected: in the infrastructure of business.

What is design thinking?

It is a human-centered approach to innovation. You either grow through acquisition or you grow through innovation.

There are three buckets of innovation: technology, business, and people. All innovation is a combination of those things. Lots of people are doing the technology and business. Technology is the main engine of innovation. Most businesses come from a business perspective. But most designers come at it through people.

Three Important Phases: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.

Inspiration. Where do ideas come from? Insights are the fuel of inspiration. You don’t get ideas from sitting at your desk. Use the world as a source of inspiration (not as a source of validation). It starts with empathy and seeing things from other people’s viewpoints, not yours. Aim to understand people on multiple levels: physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and culturally. Method: Analogous Situations. Where else might we go to get a similar type of situation? Insights can come extreme users. Not in the middle of the bell curve of users. Get out there and look, listen, and try.

Ideation. Building to think. Prototypes aren’t milestones. Really the value of prototypes is what you learn as you build it. Learn by prototyping. An idea might go through literally hundreds of prototypes. Better be able to build them quickly and cheaply. Not all prototypes need to be physical, but they do have to be tangible.

Implementation. We tend to forget that we need to be really good at storytelling. Ideas need to navigate through an organization. Storytelling can keep good ideas alive. Stories provide a framework for creating and preserving ideas. Can bring stakeholders together. Stories can be tangible and experiential. Sometimes the story can even be the end result: the strategy, an idea, etc.

Managing Innovation

Ways to grow: extend new (brands, share, leveraging users), create (markets), manage (raising price/usage/share), adapt (expand footprint, winning share).

Three different types of innovation: incremental (existing offerings and users), evolutionary (either a new offering or new users), and revolutionary (new offerings and new users). From least risky to highest risk. This can be tracked and measured. Ways of measuring: portfolio outcomes, time to first prototype, net promoter.

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