Adaptive Path Blog

There were a lot of interesting and challenging ideas that came up at UX Week in San Francisco this year. But it’s clear to me that the ideas were only part of the value. This year we set aside two whole afternoons for workshops that allowed people to put these ideas into practice. Personally, I found that to be the most rewarding experience of the conference. There’s something about getting a bunch of smart and talented people in a room to really engage with each other and a set of ideas that seems to be the real core of pushing the field of user experience forward.

That’s why I’m so excited that we are hosting two more of our UX Intensive workshops this year. The whole idea behind them is to engage the most compelling and influential ideas we’ve come across in our work in a hands-on workshop setting. But rather than 3 hours like we had at UX Week, we spend a whole day on each of four major UX topics: Design Strategy, Design Research, Information Architecture, and Interaction Design.

We already announced our workshop in Copenhagen, October 13-16. We’ve got a great set of attendees already but there are still plenty of seats left. Use the code BLOG to get a 10% discount.

Now we’d also like to announce that we’re hosting an Intensive workshop in Austin, TX, December 8-11. We opened a new studio in Austin at the beginning of 2008 and things are going pretty darn well, thank you. We decided to close out the year with this great event. Come celebrate our second home town, connect with other practitioners, and we’ll push our UX skills to the next level. Or just leave winter behind and come eat some barbeque. Mmm, barbeque. BLOG will get you a 10% discount for Austin too.

Two years ago I inaugurated the IDEA Conference, an attempt to recognize the power of information architecture to help in all manner of our lives, not just on the web. I continued working on it last year, and this year, I handed the reins over to the very capable Jorge Arango. Jorge has put together a great program this year (including Jesse talking about Aurora!), spanning a range of interests, but all with IA at its core. Check it out!

Just a quick note that we’ve sold out for single day registrations for Days 1 and 2 of UX Week 2008. We’ve still got single-day availability for Days 3 and 4, and we still have spots available for people interested in registering for all four days.

In 2003, Adaptive Path conducted research and wrote a report on how considering ROI can positively change user experience work. One of my most satisfying project experiences involved working with a client, and using the approaches we identified in that report, and help them tie design work to actual financial outcomes. We found out later that the business cases we built around the design work helped our client team get another $20 million in funding for their project, because it became clear that design was not a cost, but an investment.

My colleague on that project was Brandon Schauer. He has been able to take the ideas from that initial report, and, through project work with a range of clients, develop tools for communicating business value. This is the subject of his upcoming virtual seminar, “Showing the Value of UX,” taking place August 6 at 10:00am Pacific Time (1:00pm Eastern, 1700 GMT). This course is a must for those who’ve recognized the strategic importance of their work, but have had trouble articulating it to their colleagues.

Sign up with the promotional code BLOG and receive 10% off!

I recently chatted with Jensen Harris, commonly known as the man behind the Microsoft Office ribbon interface. Jensen will be joining us in 2 weeks as a UX Week speaker. I find it interesting that both Jensen and Adaptive Path share a strong belief in using what we call “design principles” and he calls “design tenets”. Whatever name you prefer, these are well defined goals that drive the creation of your product. It is critical that the entire team working on a product share ownership of these principles, be it management or design or engineering.

Here’s a snippet from the complete interview:

DH: We sat on a panel together at MIX discussing techniques to “Get It Right” when developing software. You mentioned the use of what you call “Design Tenets.” What are these and why are they so important?

JH: Design tenets are a list of shared design beliefs that a team uses to help them make consistent design choices. Think of it as your team’s design philosophy. It’s the way we were able to end up with a design that has a coherent voice despite the fact that many people contributed to it.

For Office 2007, we had six design tenets. One of them was: “Give features a permanent home — prefer consistent-location UI over ‘smart’ UI.” Another was: “The user’s focus should be on the content, not on the UI; help the user work without interference.”

Before you start designing, you need to explicitly agree on the tenets your team believes in — those which are consistent with the kind of user experience you want to create.

Once you have your design tenets, you can use them to help make decisions when you have several design alternatives to choose from. If everyone consistently makes decisions based on the tenets, your user experience will hold together and feel like it was designed with a single voice.

There’s still space for UX Week, and if you register with the promo code BLOG you get 10% off.

In college, I spent a period of time working in the University of Arizona Art Museum as a gallery guide. I learned many valuable lessons there:

1. Do not do anything, anywhere in a museum that you would not do on camera, because you are.
2. There are art works that grow on you over time. Staring at a painting for hours on end makes a difference.
3. Traditional art museums are like churches to art.

It’s the museum-as-church phenomenon that impacts me the most. The rituals and protocols in a museum are well-defined. Do not touch the art. Don’t even really get close to the art. Speak quietly so you don’t echo. Don’t take pictures with a flash. Don’t use a pen anywhere in the galleries. There’s a lot of don’t goin’ on.

As a studio artist, I’m involved with the hands-on practice of art making…the sheer physical, emotional, intellectual and visceral effort it takes to create a piece. I get inspired by the excitement of experimenting, playing, seeing the work evolve, developing a visual language. My goals in art-making are first and foremost about the experience of art-making, and much less about the results.

In contrast, the sterile, hermetic, hands-off environments in traditional art museums seem bereft of any life or engagement. The artworks sit there, suspended in time, protected from poking and prodding, isolated from the environments in which they were made, and in many cases, the environments for which they were made. The white wall of a museum bears little resemblance to the original environment in which this work lived. How do these artworks impact people? Why is there so little context in a museum? How can people fully understand the impact, meaning and importance of works that they have not created themselves? What are the stories that bring these works to life? I grappled with these questions during my gallery guide stint in college, and I grapple with them now.

Reading the above, it sounds like I’m anti-museum, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I highly regard museums as the keepers of cultural touch-stones: art, history, music and other works that define and connect people with their cultural heritage. The work that museums do to preserve great works and the education and perspective they provide are true gifts to society. I’m a great admirer of the staff, volunteers and patrons that keep these institutions vibrant and thriving. The new ways that are being explored to engage people from all kinds of backgrounds and experiences to deeply connect with art is inspiring.

So it was a great pleasure to have a long conversation with Peter Samis and Tana Johnson about exactly these questions. Peter and Tana work in the Interactive Educational Technologies team at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and their challenge is to bridge the gaps between visitors and art. They have a wonderful perspective on how technology plays into this challenge. As a result, SFMOMA and the IET team have received awards and wide recognition from sources as diverse as the American Association of Museums, the Webbys, Communication Arts, and I.D. Magazine.

You can read the entire interview here.

Members of the IET team are speaking at UX Week, on day three: Play and Immersion. They’ll be speaking about the designing contexts for connecting with art. If you’re interested in seeing the team up close and in person, you can register for UX Week using the code BLOG for 10% off.

So, I keep posting that UX Week 2008 programming is finished, but we keep adding to the program. The program is now for real and truly complete.

We’ve added Jury Hahn, from MegaPhone, who will talk using mobile phones as game controllers in the real world, and explore the intersection of game design, interaction design, and environments. Jury was recently featured in Wired magazine.

We’ve also gotten confirmation on the presentations we’ll get when we visit the Exploratorium on Day 3. The first, Instrumenting Chaos - Understanding the Visitor Experience in a Free-Choice Environment, explains the research projects, methods, and technologies by which the Exploratorium assesses visitor’s behavior, and what is learned. The second, Designing Over Time - Evolving Exhibits At The Exploratorium, reveals the museum’s famous exhibit design process, one of iteration and evolution on the museum floor.

So. That’s it. Really. At least, until we get another good idea and figure out how to squeeze it in.

You can register for any combination of days, and use the promotional code BLOG to get 10% off!

At UX Week 2008, our Day 4 keynoter is Dr. Michael B. Johnson, who runs the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar. He’s been gracious enough to engage in an email conversation with me, which I’ll be sharing here. For more Michael, register for UX Week. Use the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off!

Peter Merholz: UX Week 2008 is devoted to the discussion of experience design, and we’re excited to have you on the program because Pixar is the premier studio for delivering consistently high-quality cinematic experiences. When it comes to animated filmmaking, the folks reading our blog will be familiar with the roles of the writer, director, editor, animators, voice actors, music and sound effects, those things that are apparent when sitting in the theater and staring at the screen. I suspect, though, that if they even know that such a thing as a “pre-production pipeline” exists, they have no idea its function in the filmmaking process. So I was thinking it’d be best to start there. Given that WALL•E has recently opened, it might be helpful to use it as a point of reference. When did you begin working on the WALL•E production? How did you and your team support it?

Michael B. Johnson: Historically, you can look at the Pixar film making process as one of building a prototype version of each film (known as “story reels”) and then moving on to building the fully realized one. This process has continued to evolve over time, where (perhaps surprisingly) the polish of the story reels has been rising even faster than that of our final films.

The Incredibles really set a new bar for the effectiveness of story reels. I think that had to do with particular leadership in place on that film - director Brad Bird, head of story Mark Andrews and director of photography Andy Jimenez. They’re all super talented, and on The Incredibles their skills perfectly complemented each other. The reels for The Incredibles are jaw-dropping. I think they’re good enough by themselves to be a released film. Rough, 2D, black and white - and completely compelling. They really show what story reels can accomplish - getting a 3D crew to see them and just think to themselves “now I just need to not screw that up” :-).

In the midst of Incredibles (2002), I was part of a team that put together a review/sketching system for Brad Bird, discussed in this article.

I also started working on a digital storyboarding tool for Pete Docter, who had just finished Monsters Inc. I originally called the tool “Pete Docter’s Tool”, a nod to Pixar’s original animation system “Motion Doctor Tool”, but then Angus MacLane suggested “Pitch Docter”, which is what we went with.

Before The Incredibles, storyboards were drawn on paper and then delivered to Editorial, where they were scanned and brought into the computer. On the Incredibles, scanning moved back to Story, where Mark Andrews (the Head of Story) would do a pass in Photoshop to make the images have a consistent “look”.

I showed what I was doing with Pitch Docter to Brad Lewis and Jan Pinkava (producer and co-director of Ratatouille, respectively) and asked if they were interested in trying this for storyboarding on their film. They said they were, and that really started the current incarnation of a “pre-production pipeline” here that my group has been working on since 2002.

On Ratatouille, for the first time we had many of the story artists working full-time in Photoshop, leveraging its brushes, layers, and actions to streamline their workflow. They used Photoshop in conjunction with Pitch Docter, which let them time out their pitches, add sound and dialog, and round trip with Editorial. I’ll talk a lot more about this is in my talk.

The other department that’s vital to the early development of the film is the Art Department. These are the folks who design the look of the film — the characters, the world.

The issue with these folks is not so much their internal workflow, as much as the way they share their work with other departments - when, what, and how. Again, this is something I’ll speak to in my talk.

The important take-home point, though, is that Pixar loves their films so much, we make them twice :-). Compared to the final product, the first time we make it is sketchy and rough - but the most important thing is that it’s still a film. To be clear - our prototype exists in the same medium as our final product. This allows us to judge it by the same standards that the final film will be judged.

I think this is an important lesson for a User Experience Designer to understand - paper prototypes and ethnographic research are great, but if you’re trying to build a prototype that you want use as a blueprint, it should exist in the same medium as the final product. My group (which does lots of ethnographic research and Photoshop/OmniGraffle prototypes) firmly believes in this, and practices it daily.

With WALL•E, my group got involved in early June of 2004. We were in the midst of working on Ratatouille when WALL•E started gearing up. Originally, we started helping their Art Department understand their technological choices available, and then pretty quickly we started helping them understand what was involved if they wanted to storyboard their film digitally.

In talking to Andrew Stanton, we quickly realized that WALL•E would be pushing our process much harder than any earlier Pixar film. Part of this was his approach; with less character dialog, there was a need for more images to make the story explicable. Also, Andrew was reasonably comfortable with technology; as long as our tools could keep up with his thought processes, he was interested in using digital sketching to do his reviews (our efficacy at this waxed and waned over the course of the production, which was itself very educational with respect to the “user experience”).

In short, WALL•E was a great proving ground for a lot of our technology, and was a wonderful cauldron to prove (and disprove) a wide range of approaches we took to bringing digital technology not only to the artists’ desks, but also to the director, where the tolerances are much tighter.

Anyway, I’ll have lots of great stories to share about this at the conference.

PM: Fascinating background. I love that you produce a completed (though sketchy in appearance) film as a prototype. At Adaptive Path, we’ve been moving towards this approach ourselves. As the experiences we design get necessarily more complex, it’s not sufficient to design them as static sketches, and hand them off to others to implement. We’ve been creating richer and richer prototypes, not as an end-product of design, but as a step in design exploration. If you’re going to design for experience, you’ve got to understand what it means to physically engage with your design as quickly as possible, and be prepared to change those designs as need be.

Your commentary raises two distinct questions for me.

First: To make the entire movie twice seems like a significant cost. How has it been deemed worth it?

MBJ: Actually, it more than makes up for the cost. We know we’ll fail a lot; if you don’t fail you’re not doing anything new :-).

We’d much rather fail with a bunch of sketches that we did (relatively) quickly and cheaply, than once we’ve modeled, rigged, shaded, animated, and lit the film. “Fail fast,” that’s the mantra. With a team of 10-20 people (director, story artists, editorial staff, production designer and artists, and skeleton production management) you can make, remake, and remake again a movie that once it hits 3D will take an order of magnitude more people to execute. The complexity of the task does not ramp up linearly.

PM: Second: There seem to be an awful lot of people and roles to coordinate. In our work, one of the biggest challenges we see facing organizations is how to coordinate the efforts of cross-functional teams, often comprised of people working in distinct organizational silos. Most organizations approach this by engaging in some form of the waterfall approach, where product development is handed off from silo to silo in the organization until completed. I get the distinct sense that Pixar’s approach is a lot more “all hands on deck.” How do you coordinate the efforts of so many distinct contributors?

MBJ: I would by lying if I said we knew what we’re doing :-). I think we’re starting to get the hang of it after 9 feature films, but it’s hard. Production management is a hard, hard problem. Like all things at Pixar, casting the right people in the right roles is the most important starting point, but we’re constantly refining/reinventing our processes to work for the problems we have with the people we’ve got.

I always stand in awe of good production management (which we are blessed to have). They keep a lot in their heads, and they juggle a ton of data within a complex web of constraints. Part of my job is to make sure that we track the right things, and make that data transparent to them, so they can generate the decision making information they need. A film is a big pipeline, and there are hand offs between departments, but there’s a lot of iteration and back channels. A lot of it is getting the right people talking to each other, removing barriers to communication.

One of my heuristics for thinking about how we (the designers and technologists) can help with production management is to look at where people are getting mad each other. This usually indicates some frustrating breakdown in the information flow. When people are getting bad/late/incomplete/stale information, they get frustrated. These projects take a long time to make, and like any business, there are always going to be areas where communication breaks down. When that happens, our team works on fixing the information flow.

Morale is super important; assuming a competent team, it’s probably the most important thing for a long project. Brad Bird has a great quote in the interview he did with McKinsey a few months ago:

“In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget–but never shows up in a budget–is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.”

PM: Brad’s comment about morale is revealing. Pixar has achieved remarkable success — with the release of WALL•E, it looks like you’ll be 9-for-9 in terms of hit films, all of which have received favorable criticism as well.

No other studio even comes close. And not for a lack of trying — there are many truly gifted people working in film. The challenge, I think, is that on the production of a major motion picture, there are so many parts, from concept to casting to production to marketing, and then so many things out of your control (weather, economy, current events, the societal Zeitgeist) that it’s seemingly inevitable that when you mix these elements together, sometimes you’ll get a dud. The exact same people can make two different films, and one will be great, and the other not so much, and it’s because of all these other elements.

You’ve been at Pixar for 13 years, and I believe your time there has exposed you to pretty much every aspect of film production. From that insider’s perspective, what can you impart about how Pixar is able to be so continually successful? What have you figured out that others have not?

MBJ: Fundamentally, people at Pixar respect each other, and in most cases, even like each other :-). We are making movies and shorts that we want to see. We’re not afraid to take chances, and we know we’ll fail along the way, but we do a good job of making each failure part of the process and use it to get to something that we’re happy with.

As Edna Mode says, “Luck favors the prepared, darling”.

As you say, we’ve been at this for a while, but we are under no illusions that we know what we’re doing. We do have some real experience under our belt, but I don’t think anyone here would tell you they’re done learning/growing/challenging the processes we use. A lot of the leadership of the films (directors, production designers, creative and technical leads, production management) have been working together in different configurations on films here for over a decade. We have animators, our actors, that have animated on almost every film we’ve made. I like the line: “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”

I also like a comment I’ve heard Andrew Stanton say, which is “talent isn’t fair.” I’m lucky enough to work at a company where I don’t have a chance of being the smartest person in the room, and I like it that way. I won’t lie; it’s hard to work with so many talented people, you have to have a certain diamond hard sense of self or you can come home bummed out after a hard day at work. But it does cause you to bring your A game. Luckily, we tend to do a very good job of hiring people that are actually nice, and really want to work with other people.

I think it speaks to the fact that you need to assemble the right team of talented people, and inspire them to work on something great, and they will. It almost certainly won’t be the thing they thought they were going to make, but as long they keep true to the high level vision of making something that appeals to them, they’ll be successful. I think it helps that our creative leads here have sensibilities that resonate with the audience at large, and I honestly don’t know how much of that is about the earnest and truthfulness of the execution and how much of it is the subject matter. But at this point we’ve been successful with movies about rats in kitchens and trash compactors on a dead planet, so I have to think it’s the love of the story showing through and catching the audience.

Doubtless many of the readers of this blog have looked at the world of startups and thought, “I bet I could do that.” And many probably stopped right there, not knowing where to begin.

That’s where Adaptive Path co-founder Jeffrey Veen, and Adaptive Path’s COO Bryan Mason come in. They’re putting together The Start Conference, a one-day event on August 7th in San Francisco dedicated to those who want to take their ideas and turn them into businesses.

There’s an amazing collection of presenters, you’ve got the blog publishing trifecta of Evan Williams, Matt Mullenweg, and Mena Trott, investors David Hornik and Dave McClure, and one of Adaptive Path’s favorite people, Lori McLeese, who assisted us with HR issues for years (until we hired the inestimable Jennifer, but that’s another story.)

The event is only $200 (they can’t expect your company to pay for a conference that encourages you to leave!), and takes place at the Cowell Theater in Fort Mason, right on the bay. Adaptive Path has long had a foot in the startup world, and we’re proud to be a sponsor.

This event will sell out, so sign up soon to guarantee entrance!