Adaptive Path Blog

Khoi Vinh, Design Director at the New York Times, will be presenting at MX East, our design management conference, taking place October 21-23 in Philadelphia. I had the opportunity to speak with Khoi about his role at the Times and the challenges facing design managers.

Jesse James Garrett [JJG]: Khoi, hello and welcome. Let’s start with your role at the New York Times.

Khoi Vinh [KV]: My title is Design Director and I run the design group for NYTimes.com. A lot of people make the very understandable mistake of assuming that we are responsible for all of the interactive graphics that you see on the site — Flash graphics, interactive charts, and so forth. That’s actually not the case. What we’re responsible for is a bit higher level, and a little bit more invisible. We’re actually designing the platform of NYTimes.com much like a design studio or a consultant would. I have to design a site for editors to work with and for multimedia generalists to produce those graphics. We consult with the graphics folks, to help them with best practices in terms of how to make their graphics in keeping with the overall interaction models for NYTimes.com. We don’t get into the business of being generalists. That’s what they do and they do it better than anybody else. So we try and get out of their way as much as possible.

JJG: Is this a role that existed there before you started there?

KV: Yes, it did. It’s a fairly unique set of requirements. It’s a bit of a creative director role, it’s a bit information architect or usability authority role, it’s a bit of technical generalist. It requires some savvy about how journalism works and how the Times treats news. And it requires a lot of straddling the divide between journalism and business at the New York Times; trying to reconcile that stuff as the company heads towards a digital future.

JJG: This role is pretty unusual in most organizations. Most organizations have a design team on the ground on a day-to-day basis working alongside someone responsible for the content. The idea of someone in a strategic role interfacing between both of those groups is a relatively new idea. How did The New York Times recognize that that they needed someone in that position between those groups?

KV: The Times, throughout its history, has tried to do things in the best possible way with best practices. There is a long tradition of appreciation for really good design here in all its forms. Plus, the people who run the site — the assistant managing editors responsible for the editorial and integrity of the site — play a huge part in directing the evolution of the site. They are all something unique in my experience: They’re actual bona fide users of the Internet, something you don’t find at a lot of organizations. A lot of times responsibility for the online business falls to somebody with a lot of seniority but not necessarily a lot of experience. It’s something that passes into their portfolio as a reward for having brought in $X million of sales. These people are genuine, enthusiastic, passionate users of the Internet and they understood early on that they needed to bring aboard somebody who is actually a web designer and not just a graphic designer transitioning from print; somebody who understands this new medium.

Read the full interview. Sign up for MX East with promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the registration price.

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I’m teaching a day-long workshop this year at DUX 2007 entitled Process Rebooting: Changing your Process to Create IxD-driven Innovations. I’ve been having a lot of fun putting the material together and crafting a day of hands-on activities and information to inspire design leaders to innovate their design processes.

I’ve had a look at the registered participants so far and am pleased to see a lot of creative directors, product and project managers from a variety of companies in web, software and device/product with a mix of strategists, designers and information architects as well. I can foresee a day full of lively discussion and sharing of ideas with this group!

With 3 weeks before the conference begins, the workshop is filling up fast! We have a few seats left, so if you’re attending DUX and have been pondering whether to attend this workshop, now is the time to sign up!

And if this topic isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, check out the other workshops scheduled on the same day given by Jeremy Alexis, Marc Rettig, John Zapolski, Kevin Brooks, Richard I. Anderson and Melody Roberts.

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Chris Conley of Gravity Tank and the Institute of Design spends his time educating young designers as well as clients the finer points of design, business and the process of building a creative and sustainable culture. I had a chance to sit down with him and talk about what it takes to grow and sustain creative excellence within organizations. Here are some highlights:

There is a tacit assumption that making is a production activity rather than a critical, informative one. Anyone who has ever been a part of a productive R&D team realizes that trying things and doing experiments is the fastest way to break into new territory. By putting a priority on thinking and talking (through email, meetings, and PowerPoint) our work activities and environments have become sterile and devoid of the tangible aspects of what were in business to create! You can’t tell by going into the offices of most companies what business they are actually in! Consider how challenging that inherently makes it for new people in the organization to understand and contribute creatively….

The “new” way of working is to re-train the organization. I put scare quotes around it because it is exactly how we used to work. You remember photos from the 50s of all of our great companies like General Motors, Lockheed, IBM? The photos were of folks in rooms full of prototypes, drawings on the tables, and walls that were blackboards with sketches and drawings. They were building the businesses. That’s gone. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that tangible things don’t matter.

Check out the entire interview here. Don’t forget, when you register for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.

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MX East, taking place 21-23 October in Philadelphia, fast approaches. This is the only event focused on what it takes to get great experiences out into the world. Along with our stellar line up of speakers (from such companies a Google, The New York Times, IDEO, the Mayo Clinic, Whirlpool, and more), I thought it was interesting to see what companies are represented in those who have registered. Come to MX East, and you’ll meet design managers and creative leaders from:

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When we began Adaptive Path in 2001, user experience was not a widely appreciated concept. It was confused for “user interface” or “usability,” and companies typically had one or two people dedicated to it.

In the time since then, user experience has emerged as a recognized discipline within many enterprises, valued for its customer empathy as well as the rational approach it brings to design problems.

Here’s the problem with the recognition of user experience as a valuable contributor to the enterprise — such success encourages growth, with the idea that the more valuable something is, the more people should work on it. I know of companies that have literally dozens of user experience practitioners, and you know what? Those teams are typically too big.

How do you know when your user experience team is too big? When team members are working on the bulls*** projects in your organization. You’ve got all this staff, and you need to keep them busy, so it’s hard to say know when other parts of your organization ask for your team’s help, even when you know those projects aren’t truly worthwhile.

But it’s essential for user experience groups to be able to say, “No.” If we want to be considered for a seat at the strategy and planning table, if we want to be taken seriously as instrumental contributors to the companies we work for, we need to make sure that we only work on that which satisfies a true strategic direction of our organization. If we’re willing to work on any old thing, then we’re also easy targets for “headcount reduction” when times get tough.

You don’t need that many people to have a large impact. Excuse me for referencing Apple, but as this article explains, “Apple has always kept its design team small–somewhere between 12 and 20 people, Brunner estimates.” Those folks aren’t working on bulls*** projects.

And I can think immediately of two tangible benefits by keeping your user experience team smaller. The first I already addressed — you deliver only on projects fundamental to the business. The second is focus. One spur for writing this article was seeing UX managers with large teams whose efforts are scattered across numerous bulls*** projects. All of those projects suffer because the leadership can’t bring any focus.

As an advocate for user experience efforts, I feel its essential that we say “No” to bulls*** projects and keep ourselves focused on work that truly matters. To do this, I suspect that some organizations would need to shed quite a few employees. That’s okay — there are plenty of understaffed user experience groups out there who could use them.

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Two years after it launched, the New York Times pulls the plug on TimesSelect. Their rationale?

“Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism.”

I’m happy to see the Times reconsider its poor decision making. It’s refreshing to see an older, more established organization begin to question fundamental assumptions about its business and brand. What continues to mystify me is that it took two years to see the writing on the wall.

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For the longest time, not that many people working in experience design had heard of Irene Au. Which was surprising, considering her background — she began at Netscape when it was going strong, then spent 8 years at Yahoo, building one of the sharpest UX teams in Silicon Valley, and is now Director of User Experience at Google.

In the last year or so, Irene has become much more public. She spoke at our first MX Event (in an interview with Jeffrey Veen), and appeared on a panel at SXSW (which you can listen to here.) Irene’s insights into what it takes to build a successful experience design practice within large, fast-paced (and mostly technology-driven) organizations are definitely resonant, as this blog post demonstrates.

We’re excited that Irene is once again joining us at MX East, where she’ll be speaking solo on what it takes to elevate the practice of design within organizations so that they can deliver great experiences to the world. As always, use promotional code BLOG to get 10% off the registration price.

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Before our first MX event, I spoke with Scott Berkun on what was then his upcoming book, The Myths of Innovation. We didn’t publish the interview before the conference, so it didn’t make the impact it should have. Well, Scott’s speaking at MX East (Oct 21-23, Philadelphia), the book is published (and excellent), and the interview is as relevant as ever, so we’re sharing it here.

Sarah Nelson: I have Scott Berkun here with me today, and we’re going to talk about his upcoming book. But first: Scott, could you give us a little bit of a background and tell us about yourself?

Scott Berkun: Sure. So, my background’s in computer science and design. I went to Carnegie Mellon University. I was a computer science major there, but I also learned very quickly that I was not going to be a great programmer, so I studied user interface design before I left. I got hired at Microsoft in ‘94, and I worked as a usability engineer and as a program manager on Internet Explorer. I did that for maybe five or six years. I did all kinds of management stuff: Led software development, wrote specs, made decisions, treated all its bugs. I left Microsoft in about 2003 to write books, and my first book was called The Art of Project Management, which was published by O’Reilly in 2005. That book did really well, so well that they were willing to let me write another book, called The Myths of Innovation, which is what I’m talking to you about today.

SN: So, what would you say is the biggest myth about innovation?

SB: Well, there are so many to choose from. The first chapter of the book is all about one of the biggest ones: The myth of epiphany, which is the idea that when all the great thinkers and all the great creative minds get new ideas, they just come from beyond with no explanation as to why that happens or who it’s going to happen to. If I had to pick the biggest of the innovation myths, that’d be it: The myth of epiphany.

SN: So, why do you think that this myth is so pervasive?

SB: It’s nice to think that we can just say, “Maybe I’ll be creative today and maybe I won’t; it just depends on what the gods decide. And I’ll be okay if I’m not creative, but if it happens, it’s not in my control.” I think that’s a big part of many of the myths, that they distance us from having to take responsibility for whether we are creative or not.

SN: Creativity and the processes of business sometimes seem like strange bedfellows. Creativity often involves a lot of risk and ambiguity, whereas business seems to value efficiency and guarantees. In your experience, how can you bridge the gap between those two different approaches?

SB: Well, even if you are doing something that you’ve done before, something that you think is super predictable and reliable, it’s still not guaranteed. There are always uncertainties that factor into any decisions you make or any processes you put in place. So it’s an illusion that managers have complete control over their businesses, or complete control over how things are done. Someone has to stand up and say, “We don’t have that much control over the simple things. There’s always uncertainty. There’s always some kind of risk. There’s always some kind of chaos.” And once you get people to acknowledge that they don’t have as much control as they think they do, then the conversation starts to be about how do you introduce new ideas? How do you have processes that support change? How do you have processes that allow us to see what the process is missing? All those questions start to come up, and then you can reach a point where people recognize, “Okay, in order for us to grow as much as we want to grow, we have to change, and change demands risk, so we have to be okay with taking a risk on this project.” I think it always starts with someone having the guts to reflect back on the illusion of control. We always think we have control over everything, yet if you look at what’s really going on, we don’t.

SN: One of the things I’ve been wondering about is the idea of “source of innovation” within a company. Do you think it’s actually possible to create an environment in which innovation occurs?

SB: Oh, that’s a really good question. I think that you can create an environment, and it’s very simple. I think that whoever has power over a budget, and whoever has power over what features are included in a product or go up on the website, they enable innovation by saying “yes.” That’s really the fundamental thing that they have to be willing to do. When someone shows up with an idea — “Hey, why don’t we change the navigation system from this older design to this new design I’ve been thinking of? Can I get some money to go and prototype this?”— all that has to happen is the person with power says, “Yes, I will give you a week to go and prototype that and we will review it when you have the prototype, and then we’ll consider actually making those changes.” And once everyone witnesses the person in power saying “yes” to a new idea, then they’ll be comfortable bringing another idea, or a third idea. And then all of a sudden, you have an environment that is very receptive to new ideas and innovations, as opposed to the more common complaints about environments, where new ideas are like wanted men: They’re shot down pretty quickly.
(more…)

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We’re ending Day One of UX Week, and the conversations just get more and more interesting. On the day-end panel, Peter, Andrew, Kevin and Liz talked about skills for current and future practitioners. Peter mentioned the “t-shaped person” (folks with shallow skills across multiple areas and deep skills in one area). Then he went on to talk about “i”s and “bar”s as an extended concept.

What struck me was Peter’s comment about how team design is critical…having the right people work with the right team on the project. I can imagine that selecting a great team in a “t”, “i” and “bar” world is like playing Tetris.

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I was pleased to be asked to contribute an article to Ambidextrous Magazine (from Stanford’s d.school) in their upcoming “Food” issue (available soon). What’d I write about? Well, it’s been a number of years since I stopped cooking professionally, but I have been struck by what I think some interaction designers could learn from watching how a restaurant kitchen operates. My original pitch sounded like this:

Chefs organize their cooks and their space with a few key principles in mind: maximizing consistency of product, ensuring creative freedom to experiment, and encouraging effective problem solving under incredibly stressful conditions… For those who manage creative organizations, the professional kitchen can provide inspiration for how to balance these principles effectively.

If you’d like to read the article, it’s available here as a three page PDF. If you take the opportunity to read it, please let me know what you think. Huge thanks to Amanda Willoughby and Evany Thomas for their careful editing work, and to Lora Oehlberg and Mike Pihulic from Ambidextrous for making it a pleasure to contribute to the magazine.

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