Adaptive Path Blog

I pulled together a slidecast, with audio, of “10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment.” Bryan Mason and I gave this talk at SXSW 2008 Interactive. I’ve already described the talk here (we gave a version of it at Web 2.0 Expo SF in April) but the SXSW folks recently made the audio available.

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The good folks at Boxes and Arrows have made the audio available from my IA Summit presentation, How to be UX Team of One, and I’ve synced it to the slides on Slideshare.  This presentation features lots of tips and tricks for anyone who works as a solo UX practitioner from time to time. It also includes some dirty secrets and ends with a Howard Dean style whoop and holler. Enjoy!

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A while back I was talking with Jeff Veen about working at Adaptive Path, and he said something that has always stayed with me. He said “People here not only like to think about things…they really like to make things.”

So, for all you Makers in the Bay Area, don’t miss the 3rd annual Maker’s Faire this weekend!

Sponsored by O’Reilly Media (publishers of Make Magazine and Craft Magazine) the Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things.

I went the first year, and it was a marvel: CNC for couples, hacking disposable cameras, knitting madness, fire art and tons of electronic little glowy things you can build yourself. It’s a downpour of creativity and audacity. This year promises to be chock-full of interesting people, ideas, projects, plans and tools. So head down to the San Mateo Fairgrounds and make out like a bandit.

See you there!

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Bryan Mason and I gave a talk last Thursday at Web 2.0 Expo ‘08 San Francisco called “10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment.” As we promised attendees of that talk, we have posted the slides here. We will soon be posting a slidecast of the same talk with audio from SXSW.

For the talk, Bryan and I talked with several creative groups, including the Neo-Futurists, the writers of Avenue Q, a writing collective called The Job Factory, and Ryan Freitas about his experiences working at Aqua, a San Francisco restaurant. We also drew on our own experiences in stage management and classical music. We chose these groups primarily because they, like design teams, create as groups, are schedule-focused, and are trying to do something different with the creative process.

From the research, we looked for common problems and techniques the groups used to deal with those problems. During the presentation, we share the stories and techniques we found.

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It is no secret that a lot of us were science fiction geeks growing up, so it was with sadness that we learned of Arthur C. Clarke’s passing yesterday. In our own ways we remembered his influence on our lives:

Jesse James Garrett:

Not the year, but the movie. Arthur C. Clarke died today — yes, but did you know he invented the communications satellite, complete with math, decades before it was technologically possible? — and I’ve seen this link in a few places about the creative process behind the film:

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0073.html

As you probably know, I love hearing about the dead ends and abandoned concepts in any creative project, and this diary is rich with them: he describes their initial schedule as “hilariously optimistic”, recounts working through at least two Christmases, and the blow-by-blow accounts of directions considered and abandoned (and crucial last-minute rewrites) show that even the path to great work requires innumerable wrong turns along the way.

Jeff Veen:

His Three Laws are still inspiration to me, even if contemporary usage
has pushed them to cliche:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something
is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to
venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke’s_three_law

Kate Rutter:

That last one [Law #3] is still my favorite. During one recent project, the similarities between what we were designing and the World Of Harry Potter kept me up at night.

As for me, books like the 2001 series, The Songs of Distant Earth and short stories like “The Nine Billion Names of God” have remained with me in many ways. Last weekend I unpacked my books after my 14th move in 12 years. Arthur C. Clarke’s books have been with me for every one of those moves. They remain some of my favorite stories and they even got me through college astronomy. Not only were they factually correct on the particulars of our solar system, they were way more entertaining than the stuff the professor assigned.

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In 1998, the Internet bubble was growing by leaps and bounds, foosball and Red Bull were the drugs of choice and Flash (looky here! things can move!) was the new girl in school.

Interactive marketing departments and agencies rode the wave and launched an endlessly creative and exhaustive set of irritating, pointless Flash site intros that showcased their brands, showed off their knowledge of the newest tools, and revealed their utter contempt for people who wanted easy, quick access to information. Remember folks…the 14.4k modem was still in play. Companies seemed to think it was okay to force-feed people animated marketing fluff as the cost of entry to a Web site.

The hack Skip Intro was the perfect commentary on Flash madness. Set to an oh-so-current musical score and using all the best of Flash’s moving and shaking features, Skip Intro danced itself into user experience fame by throwing back the curtain on the true perceptions of the Flash site intro.

A few years after it made the Internet meme rounds, Skip Intro disappeared. Now I’m happy to discover that it’s back online, thanks to creator Yacco Vijn cleaning out his digital attic.

It’s 10 years later, it still has the power to amaze and delight. View the madness at www.skipintros.com. You get double points if you saw this the first time around.

Happy birthday, Skip Intro. So glad you’re back.

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In my mind, it seemed perfect: Technologists and transit-enthusiasts coming together to rethink the transit experience. A chance to bring the experience design gospel to an industry in need. Brimming with missionary zeal, my transportation planner husband and I headed off to the Bay Area TransitCamp.

I wasn’t prepared for the culture shock. My idealism was greeted by a ragtag bunch consisting of khaki-clad engineers, frumpy transit riders and suit-wearing transit officials. The engineers preached the possibilities of open-source data. White-haired transit riders screeched frustrations about their particular pet issues. And the transit officials defended cuts to bathroom-cleaning with the hard, cold facts of their bureaucratic reality.

Welcome to TransitCamp.

Could this possibly be the crowd that would transform transit? It felt like anarchy. “No complaints without solutions” was the only rule, and organizer Tara Hunt had to reiterate it again and again. Yet as idealism and realism collided, something impressive happened. We learned from one another. iPhone app developers learned that 40% of riders are below the poverty line. Cost-conscious officials learned that dozens of techies are eager to develop solutions — for free.

I realized that making a difference requires a humble and listening posture. Transit is an interdisciplinary problem that requires interdisciplinary understanding. While it produced interesting ideas, TransitCamp’s greatest triumph was fostering an atmosphere of learning and collaboration between unlikely bedfellows.

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“Is there such a thing as sustainable experience design?” In our internal discussions of The Designers Accord, Jesse posed this question. Not being industrial designers, we generally aren’t qualified to address product life-cycle issues such as materials & processes or transportation logistics in any meaningful way. But, as Jesse suggested, perhaps we can bring a new perspective to the sustainability conversation that other disciplines haven’t yet considered.

Experience is closely tied to sustainable behavior: People act un-sustainably because it’s often much easier or results in a better experience than doing otherwise. (It’s much more convenient and pleasant to drive my car wherever I want.) Thus, experience designers are uniquely-poised to encourage sustainability by capitalizing on what we know about human behavior as well as business strategy. We have the capacity to:

Make sustainable experiences more compelling than the alternatives. How can we make doing what’s best in the long run more attractive in the short run? (e.g., Make transit a better experience than driving.)

Understand and appeal to people’s motivations, values and aspirations. As ethnographers, we know how to tap into the subconscious motivations that unwittingly shape behavior. How can we appeal to these tendencies at points of decision so that right choices become the most natural choices?

Harness the power of information to help people make better decisions. As information designers, we know how to make the abstract concrete and make hidden costs visible, visualize the future, and tell stories. The right information can not only influence decisions when presented at critical moments, it can also shape underlying attitudes and values — a necessary component of lasting change.

Promote a service-mindset vs. a product-mindset. As Liya Zheng put it in her post on Service Design and Sustainability: “Think about how to appeal to consumers and businesses with a complete solution that goes beyond the product itself, and where possible, minimize the use of products by delivering great services.”

Communicate the business value of sustainability. Green sells! Businesses for whom green is central to their identity, value proposition or business strategy are more successful than businesses that adopt a cause just because they ought to. As design strategists, we can help companies find ways to turn sustainability into profitability.

But while it’s easy to identify how we COULD contribute, the tricky part, especially for us as consultants, is finding real opportunities to exercise these skills. While design educators can shape future generations of designers and business-people, and in-house designers can shape their company’s culture and product/service strategy, we’re often brought in for specific, often screen-based projects that seemingly have nothing to do with sustainability.

Does it really make sense, as the Accord calls for, to have a sustainability conversation with every client? How can we avoid coming across as pretentious do-gooders?

What best practices can we promote in our interaction design work (e.g., strive to reduce computer use by promoting more energy-efficient means of information access such as mobile)?

How can we identify clients and projects where the skills outlined above can be applied?

These are the questions we’re left wondering about and debating. If anyone has any thoughts or perspectives, we’d love to hear them.

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Internally to Adaptive Path, we have a series of mailing lists that help us keep in touch with each other, discuss design topics or even just talk about current issues.

A recent post came from Dan Saffer where he pointed us all to these tongue-in-cheek stickers that could be used to call out “bad design”. These stickers offer warning label-style comments such as “Consult a typographer” or “Severe lack of creativity” and “Good idea wasted by poor execution”.

Dan’s intention was to share a funny take on the honest frustration that many designers feel when they see design that could have been better. The result he got on the mailing list was a very typical and spirited debate. Rather that writing a post about the stickers myself, I thought I’d just share the conversation.

First, here is the site: http://www.design-police.org/

Dan: We need a set of these. And to make a set for IxD/IA!

Kim: Absolutely brilliant. We should definitely make some for IxD/IA!

Peter: I’m sorry. This is the kind of holier-than-thou crap about inconsequential bullshit that has encouraged marginalizing designers because they behave as a bunch of mindless aesthetes with no concern for issues other than appropriate typography, and little interest in things that actually matter.

Dan: Since when is good visual design inconsequential bullshit? Aesthetics matter, and good typography and composition are essential parts of that. It’s all part of a chain: bad type –> bad visuals –> bad experience. Ignore this stuff and you get sloppy, ugly work.

Is it more mindless to not care about how something looks, or to practice good visual design? Good experiences are made up of good details.

Jesse: I completely agree with Dan that aesthetics matter, but to Peter’s point, if I were a bettin’ man, I wouldn’t wager that “Kern this!” is the most important or valuable message a client needs to hear.

Dan: Oh god no, I’d never use these for a client. I assumed these were stickers for internal reviews.

Peter: I’m not saying aesthetics aren’t important. I’m saying that the attitude exhibited by this set of stickers is indicative of a mindless condescension that has lead to the marginalization of the practice of visual design. It’s no different than “usability engineers” who decry the state of the Web and want to impose their small-minded ruleset.

While your point (”bad type –> bad visuals –> bad experience”) has validity, what it doesn’t recognize is that tone matters. And this catty attempt at humor represented by this design-police is exactly why they are ignored.

Kim: I saw these as a joke - funny, haha, humorous, poking fun in the same way the video “make the logo bigger” is funny. I never saw these as a serious endeavor or something to be used in a professional setting.

Creating them for IxD and IA would be a way of poking fun at ourselves and the things that we continually hear in our practice.

I cannot tell you how many times my husband (a print advertising graphic designer) looks at print ads with disgust and espouses “Man, they need to kern that!” He thought the stickers were funny, but was disappointed that they lacked the traditional copy editor marks, using text instead.

Andrew: I’m not a fan of these. I remember a while back when there was so much discussion about make Design a licensable practice. I thought it was arrogant then, I think it’s still an offensive idea.

That’s not to say that these stickers (which were created as an obvious joke) embody this sentiment. I simply feel that there might be a more positive way to express the inside joke. I love the KERN hoodie from Veer. I think not only is it clever, but it conveys a wink-wink to other designers without offending the ignorant. These stickers seem to take the joke a little too far.

Like Kim’s husband, I’ve done it a thousand times where I get angry at poor typography, incorrect color balance in duotones, mis-registration or poor copy. Jannine’s heard an earful. But, if I were ever to express that to that designer or that secretary, I’d probably try a more educative and sympathetic approach.

That’s not to say we can’t have our fun with poor design. There is a some seriously shitty work out there. So, if the spirit of things like this are meant to be playful or as an inside joke, there’s fun in that.

What’s the interaction design equivalent version of the KERN hoodie?

Kate: Interesting points. While I agree with Peter that the “I’m entitled to judge because I know more and better than you” is mean-spirited and plays to the worst of egoist-designers-as-gods, there is the opportunity to have something like stickers that highlight moving toward a greater good.

For example, “legible from space” and “Microscope required” are a comment on “hey, buddy! Folks aren’t going to read this because of a *serious* flaw that you oughtta fix.” That’s more like the Billboard Liberation League’s public service messages than the League of Self-Appointed Extraordinary Designers self-serving know-it-all.

I’d be happy to have similar stickers (depending on message) and I would use them. But I also want a set that celebrate effective design. Red=no. Green=yes. We should support honest celebration of good things…not center ourselves on being police and judges.

Domino magazine has stickers that you can use to tag ideas you like. It’s helpful and warm and engaging. If we could bring a “make the world better” smile into the stickers, it would make them much more human…more like us.

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There you have it. A brief insight into what we talk about at the office. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the stickers, on criticising design or if you’d like to hear more of our ramblings.

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Just before the holiday break, I was driving on the 24 freeway right at the Caldecott tunnel when I saw that someone had put up one strand of Christmas lights in the dirty window of the little office that sits at the base of the tunnel. When I thought about it, I realized that someone did that intentionally to create a little holiday spirit in an otherwise bleak location.

When we talk about experience design, we discuss it in terms of intentional efforts to create an experience for a product or service. There are meetings, decisions, consultants, plans and well-made executions – all of this with an eye towards producing a purposeful, desired experience for an individual or group of people.

But, the person that put those Christmas lights did all those things, too. Maybe not in a conscious or thought-out manner, but there was an intention to create an experience.

So, my question is, do human beings always intentionally design experiences – even unknowningly?

Outside of acts of God or nature (things that we cannot control), we create experiences for ourselves every day. We organize our closets in a certain way to make dressing in the morning efficient, we walk certain streets because we find them pleasant, we cook our food for taste, we decorate at holidays to create a mood and tradition.

What causes us to do this? Do we simply like it? Or is there a deeper need?

As experience designers, are there ways to build upon this trait? Can we somehow expand on this assumed, basic human behavior? Are there ways to recognize these natural tendencies and leverage them when we design experiences?

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