Adaptive Path Blog

If there’s any company that can be a catalyst for changing an entire industry’s dynamics, it’s Apple (as demonstrated most recently by the iPod). And contrary to popular perception, handset manufacturers (Nokia, Moto, LG, etc.) might actually *benefit* from Apple’s success (as opposed to suffer because Apple becomes a competitor).

Cell phone manufacturers, in general, have been hurt by declining margins because consumers (in the US especially) don’t view phones as a valuable product in their own right. For years now, the network providers have been giving away phones for free or at deep discount as an incentive device. So, while true that the RAZR has done Moto well financially, the networks still control pricing power, not the phone manufacturers. And as a result, the public perception of value is more squarely placed on the network than the phone itself.

Apple is arguably the only company with enough brand cache and product design savvy to turn the cards on the networks and both change how people view a cell phone and alter their purchasing behavior.

Before the holidays, Brandon interviewed IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown about the challenges of bringing an experience perspective to organizations, the need for cross-channel and cross-disciplinary design work, and the use of narrative to prototype experiences. Today, we posted a transcript of that interview.

Tim, of course, is keynoting the second day of our forthcoming MX San Francisco conference on managing experience through creative leadership, taking place February 12-13. Also presenting are Caterina Fake from Yahoo, Irene Au from Google, and folks from Dell, Whirlpool, and others.

Register by January 15 for a discount, and join other attendees from organizations such as AOL, Bank of America, Caterpillar, Comcast, eBay, Intuit, LeapFrog, Nokia, SAP, Sun, USC, and more.

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.

The iPod turned five yesterday and much ink has been spilled in the last week about the product’s success, its ubiquity and impact on Apple. The state of the digital music market at the time of the iPod’s introduction has been relatively ignored though. It’s hard to imagine its embryonic state in 2001 from the perspective of 2006 and five years of hindsight. At the time, everything in the space, from devices to software to services, was up for grabs as various industries grappled with the problem of creating a new model for the music business. Several products already existed, but no one had quite nailed it before Apple came along.

One of the most remarkable things about the iPod’s introduction was the clearly articulated argument that Steve Jobs made when it was introduced. It’s preserved on YouTube and truly worth a look. Jobs’ argument is carefully constructed and compelling on many levels. However, aside from his famed “reality distortion field,” the argument adheres to basic business principles and provides an extremely useful template for the introduction of new products and services into emerging or underdeveloped markets.

Describe the Target Market:

On deciding where to innovate next, Apple chose music. Why?

“We love music, and it’s always good to do something that you love. More importantly, music is a part of everyone’s life. Music has been around forever; it will always be around. It is not a speculative market. Because it is a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market all around the world. It knows no boundaries.”

Although I’m sure he (and his team) examined it in great detail, Jobs stays away from hard numbers such as demographics, market size, dollars spent and average music library size. During the pitch, he keeps the focus on where music fits in people’s lives, not where it fits into Apple’s bottom line.

Know What You Are Not Going to Do:

It’s a given that the digital music player market wasn’t exactly saturated in 2001, but Jobs’ back of the napkin analysis of the opportunity space was clever in its adherence to simplicity. He compared traditional CD players, Flash-based units, Mp3 CD units and hard drive jukeboxes on a simple price per song basis. Again, a basic analysis but one that illuminates the choices available to Apple. More importantly, Jobs was clear about what Apple wasn’t going to do. “We studied all of these and that’s where we want to be.”

State Clearly What You Are Going to Do, Part 1:

Jobs described where the iPod fits into Apple’s product portfolio in one simple sentence:
“iMac, iBook, iPod.” Having established it as part of Apple’s consumer-focused offering, he offered why Apple could go there:

“No one has found the recipe for digital music. Not only do we think we can find the recipe, but we think the Apple brand is going to be fantastic because people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from.”

State Clearly What You Are Going to Do, Part 2:

Jobs described the offering in concrete terms: an Mp3 player that holds your entire music library with CD quality sound that doesn’t limit you to one format. Rather then dwelling on technical specifications, Jobs again came back to a value proposition that describes what Apple is going to do for the consumer:

“How many times have you gone on the road with a CD player and said, “Oh god, I didn’t bring the CD I wanted to listen to. To have your whole music library with you at all times is a quantum leap in listening to music.”

Show How Features Support Purpose (or, If You Must Explain How, Do It Like This):

Jobs then takes the Wizard of Oz tack and gives us a peek behind the curtain by detailing the three breakthroughs that will allow us something heretofore impossible: The ability to fit our whole music library in our pockets.

1. The iPod is ultra portable: Jobs describes the new hard drive and skip prevention technology that makes it possible to “take iPod (and all your music) bicycling, mountain climbing, jogging, you name it, and you are not going to skip a beat.”

2. The iPod is fast: A simple apples to apples (no pun intended) comparison between Firewire and USB demonstrates that the iPod is going to upload 1,000 songs in 10 minutes rather than 5 hours.

3. The iPod is smart: The battery of the iPod is supported by FireWire rather than a separate charger, meaning that there are fewer parts to keep track of. It charges and loads songs, all at the same time.

Jobs cites all three of these technologies to back up his claim that “people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from.”

Demonstrate Strategy Tangibly:

After all the build up, Jobs pulls out the iPod. It’s the size of a deck of cards, and he makes the explicit comparison. What he holds in his hand is the tangible result of what he’s talking about, and it shows.

The iPod pitch is remarkable in its simplicity and effectiveness. It sticks to the basics of Moore’s elevator pitch and doesn’t add much fluff. What is remarkable has been Apple’s adherence to this technique and development philosophy over time. The future was staring us right in the face.

Congratulations to our colleague Dan Saffer on last night’s San Francisco launch of his book “Designing for Interaction.” Interaction designers from Google, Yahoo, Dubberly Design Office, Cooper, Fluid, and others joined friends, family and the AP team to celebrate atop the Hotel Vitale. The pix are here.

We’ll launch Dan’s full-day “Designing for Interaction” workshop in the Adaptive Path offices on September 20, then onto Sydney (September 26) and New York City (October 25).

I moonlight as president of the IA Institute, and among my goals for my time there was to stress the value of events to bring the community together, and to expand the common perception of information architecture beyond typical web confines.

I have been able to combine both goals in my work organizing the IDEA Conference. IDEA stands for “Information: Design, Experience, Access,” and the conference addresses the design of complex information spaces of all kinds.

As such, we have an extremely diverse speaker list, including museum designers, interaction designers, mobile device designers, researchers, information visualizers, librarians, and network gurus. The event is bookended by visionaries Linda Stone and Bruce Sterling.

This event is a labor of love for me — the Institute is a non-profit, and no one is making any money (the only expenses are travel costs and facilities fees). I’m particularly satisfied with the range of contributors, and the freshness of their voices — few are darlings of the conference circuit. These are people who devote their lives to making things.

If you’re curious as to where design is heading, and the confluence and convergence of the digital and the analog, the virtual and the physical, I think this event is for you. The conference blog will be addressing the subjects that will be discussed at the event.

Sign up by August 27th, and you’ll get the discounted registration fee.

Chris Conley, CEO of Gravity Tank always surprises me with some of the most straight-forward and accessible thinking about the connections between design and business.

At an Institute of Design event earlier today Chris drew from Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management: “Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.” From this perspective, financial profit is only a measure of the business’s effectiveness at these two functions.

Chris frames design’s role in marketing and innovation as finding good opportunities and matching them with good execution. This combination can be deceptively simple; see cases like the Segway (good execution, poor opportunity) and the Pontiac Atzec (good opportunity, poor execution) for how easily it can be screwed up.

Part of Chris’s academic focus (he also heads Product Design at ID) is on how to improve the process of moving from opportunity to execution. Looking high and low for organizations that do it better, he pointed out that Pixar has an impeccable record having created 7 hit movies in 7 attempts. There are many interesting practices that can be extracted from Pixar, but my favorite is the ‘dailies‘ — the best animators in the world being critiqued daily from their work the day before. Imagine the quantity of iterations and the incremental improvement that are built into the dailies.

Some other favorite comments from the evening:

• “…it’s easier to do something formulaic — like go from an 8 to a 12 megapixel camera — than actually shape an experience.”
• “…a spreadsheet is just another modeling medium…”

Chris Conley also recently shared some great observations about changing the criteria for the BusinessWeek IDEA Awards (which he chaired this year) in this podcast. We’re excited to have Chris joining us at UX Week this year.

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.

Steven Johnson, who will be keynoting AP’s UX Week in August, will be sparring with Stephen Colbert tonight.

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.