Level Up Your Work & Personal Relationships

Almost all aspects of our lives, personal and professional, are grounded in relationships. And, the quality of those relationships determine our success and happiness. However, we rarely consider what contributes to the quality of relationships. 

The key ingredients to a successful relationship, whether professional or personal, include listening to, empathizing with, and truly understanding each other. I'll address how to level up your skill in each of these areas in turn.

In conversation, most people concentrate on and even rehearse what they're going to say next. How well do you think they're listening to the other person in the conversation if they're doing that? Not very well. And, what's the result of doing this? The other person is aware they're not being listen to, they don't feel validated or valued, and the quality of the communication is compromised. Or, as George Bernard Shaw famously said, "The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished". 

I do a listening exercise in some of the workshops I run that has people quietly listening to another person without saying anything and then playing back to the other what they heard and understood after they truly listened. That's what I call authentic listening and involves completely focusing intently on what the other person is saying and synthesizing what they're saying. I also recorded a podcast with advice on authentic listening in which I suggest that listeners spend the next day saying as little as possible so that they can truly listen to others in their lives whether professional or personal. I find it fascinating to read the emails I get from people who have been in the workshops or listened to the podcast episode saying that authentically listening to others was a profound experience for them and that it had a transformational effect on them leading to deeper relationships through more effective communication. 

So, authentic listening is an incredibly important skill to level up for any effective communication to happen. Developing empathy is the second. This essentially involves not only listening but also truly trying to see things from the other person's point of view, and as some would say, "to walk a mile in their shoes". Its important to not see the situation with your usual lenses that may well distort the reality they're describing. See the situation through the other person's eyes, hear it through their ears, and feel the situation through their heart. Get out of yourself, your life experiences, your biases, and truly experience things the way the other person does. For more specific advice on developing empathy, have a listen to my podcast on the topic.  

Authentically listening to and empathizing with the other person will provide you with deep insight about the other person which you next need to internalize and synthesize yourself in order to better and more fully understand. Listening to and empathizing with another person doesn't mean that you have to agree with their views or opinions. It also doesn't mean that you can't have your own point of view. What these methods provide is the ability for you to better understand other people in your business and personal life. They, in turn, also appreciate the fact that you take the time to listen to them, to see things from their point of view, and to more deeply understand them. If they then do the same, and reciprocity here is common, the effectiveness of your interactions increase and you improve the overall quality of your relationships.

I purposely used the term "level up" to also stress the importance of needing to practice these skills so that they become habits by focusing on them and spending the requisite time honing them. Most people recognize the need to master the skills and techniques in a video game before being able to level up to a higher level. They realized that you can't just get started playing a video game and expect to level up immediately without having the requisite mastery developed. But, when it comes to interpersonal communication, everybody thinks that once you learn to speak as a child that you know how to communicate. They may well be able to speak but they need to develop the necessary skills of authentic listening, empathizing, and understanding to level up to true interpersonal communication and effective relationship building. So, start practicing your listening and empathy skills in the game of life in order to level up your work and personal relationships.  

The Innovation Trap

Innovation is the buzzword of the times. Everyone wants it. Very few are finding it. And, there is considerable confusion about how to get it. 

I find it fascinating to watch some early stage startups. They often sit in really trendy creative looking incubation spaces heads-down staring at their MacBooks hoping to find that spark of insight for a new innovative product or service. I've noticed that some established companies have recently been hiring senior executives who are assigned the responsibility for innovation. Both the startups and the innovation officers of established companies do have meetings to come up with innovations and to visualized what's often called "the art of the possible" but both are falling into what I refer to as the innovation trap. 

The innovation trap is believing that you need to be innovative and that innovative ideas will just come to you. It doesn't work that way in my view. First of all, innovation is in the eye of the beholder. Only when the intended user of what you're producing considers it amazingly helpful, engaging, and indispensable will it be deemed innovative. So, instead of focusing on being innovative, focus on what problem you should solve or what opportunity to improve something you'd like to address. But how do you go about doing that? You close your MacBook, get out of the building, and start to observe, listen, and probe.

A term that is often used for this is user research. There's a lot to learn in order to do it really well, drawing insights and techniques from disciplines like ethnography, anthropology, and psychology. However, everyone can get started doing it. Simply focus on the domain you're interested in exploring, be it healthcare, travel, finance, and observe what people do today in particular parts of that domain. Learn what the current users are like, what do they do, say, think, and feel. Capture what you observe and probe with open-ended questions anything you don't yet know enough about. See the world from their point of view or in other words, empathize with them. Identify what pain points they current experience in doing what they do today and/or look for aspects of what they do today that could be improved whether they see it as a problem or not. Also get direct feedback from them on what they consider to be most problematic. However, don't rely solely on what they tell you, also make sure to observe their behavior yourself. People aren't terribly good at remembering events or introspecting about their reactions to them. It's often better to observe them instead. 

Once you have a good set of problems to solve and/or opportunities to address, you're finally able to start to explore solutions. Here again many people try to come up with that one killer solution. They often run with the first idea that comes to them. The first idea is rarely the best one. In order to come up with a great idea, you have to have many, many ideas and then choose among those. It's also important to provide an optimal environment for ideation, one that encourages diverse views, one that minimizes polarization, and one that is structured. Make sure to include a diverse set of people from different disciplines and life experiences. Prevent polarization of views by first having everyone capture their ideas privately, on Post-it Notes for example, so that the group isn't influenced by the ideas presented by the loudest, most influential, or most senior person in the room. And, you should structure the ideation session so that it starts by diverging, generating a lot of ideas from everyone, and then moves to converging by using a variety of methods to vote on the best ideas. Interestingly, if you do use Post-it Notes, the ideas written on them tend to become disconnected from the people who wrote them. As a result, there is less individual ego involvement when the group is evaluating the ideas and it fosters more effective teamwork. After that, you have to make a quick and cheap mockup or prototype of the solution and get feedback from a few real users on it. You keep iterating with feedback as you continue to make the solution higher fidelity and more real.  

We practice this approach to first understanding and then ideating solutions with our teams at IBM as well as in the work we do to help our clients. It is our approach to avoid falling into the innovation trap and is an essential part of what we call our IBM Design Thinking framework. You can read more about the framework and our use of it and other foundational design practices in a piece published in the New York Times as well as a Forrester Research report.  

Wearables, IoT, and the Quantified Self

Societal and technology trends are converging and have the promise of being fully integrated in the future. I’ve been fascinated by the societal trend toward health, fitness, and optimizing behavior and the ways in which technology trends such as mobile, wearable, and what is referred to as the Internet of Things are converging. I tend to be an early adopter of anything tech so I’ve been exploring these technologies personally. I’m often asked about all of this so thought I’d share my experiences in this post. 

My iPhone now has an M9 motion coprocessor integrated into the A9 chip that connects to the accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, and barometer to measure my running or walking pace as well as my steps, distance, and elevation changes. Using the iPhone with my Apple Watch with it’s Activity app, I can now select what fitness activity I’ll be engaged in and then track my progress directly on my wrist. I also get taptic feedback discreetly on my wrist when I’ve met particular milestones. I also get that taptic feedback as a reminder to stand for at least one minute per hour as well. The Activity display nicely visualizes how I’m progressing toward my goals for standing, moving, and exercising. I try to become “whole" each day by having complete circles for each activity by the end of the day. 

I’ve also been using the MyFitnessPal app on my phone and watch. The app allows me to track what I eat and drink and also what exercise I’m doing each day. I used apps like this some years ago and it was so difficult at the time because you had to manually input all the information. With the current app, all I do is search for or select the food or drink or simply scan the UPC code of a product in front of me. The app intelligently estimates the serving size almost perfectly but you can also modify it. The exercise metrics are captured automatically from the iOS Health app on my phone and also from the Activity app on my watch. 

In addition to my phone and watch with their apps, I also use devices from Withings including a scale that measures weight, body mass index, and fat mass, and also a blood pressure cuff that provides measurements of systolic and diastolic readings and heart rate. All of these data are also automatically captured by the iOS Health app and thereby to the other iOS apps like MyFitnessApp.  

I’ve recently been using one other device which tracks my driving. It’s a small telematics device that connects to my vehicle’s OBD2 port. It tracks and transmits distance travelled, the time of the day I travel, sudden braking, and rapid acceleration. My insurance company provided an incentive of a 5 percent reduction in my insurance premium for installing the device and up to a 25 percent reduction for really good driving behavior. I actually just wanted to try the device. The app allows me to see the details of every trip I take and gives me a summary of the key measurements including any “events” which are instances of what it deems to be bad or risky driving. 

As you can see, I now have sensors which are quantifying many aspects of my life and through the Internet of Things technologies together with mobile and wearable devices, I can view the data at a glance on my wrist. So, how has all of this changed my life? It has changed me in some pretty dramatic ways. I’m way more aware of my health and what impacts it. Being able to see at a glance how many calories I’ve consumed versus how many I’ve expended by itself has made a huge difference. Drilling down into the details and seeing the impact of certain foods in terms of their caloric and nutritional value and also the health benefits of particular activities has been eye opening. This is truly actionable information and I regularly change my behavior based on it. It’s important to point out that it wasn’t just the activity monitoring, or the automatic uploading of my scale information, or recording what I eat. It was all of it integrated together via the iOS Health app and visualizing it together on my phone and in particular my watch that made the real difference. I’ve significantly improved my health indicators.

The assessment of my driving behavior has been interesting. The act of monitoring and visualizing things like my acceleration and braking has had a substantial impact on my driving. While I may have driven aggressively at times in the past, I no longer do that at all and my family has noticed the difference too. I’ve introspected about what this change really was all about and I’ve determined that it is mostly that it has gamified good driving behavior. I feel good at the end of a week when I see five stars with no so called events, or bad driving behavior. 

It used to be that medical practitioners would provide you with the measurements of your health when you go for an annual checkup and if those measurements were significantly off the norm, they would suggest corrective action often involving expensive medications or surgical procedures. These new directions in technology enable individuals to track their health in real time and make changes in behavior based on them proactively and preventatively. Similarly, driving behaviors that are more risky in the past would have resulted some of the time in accidents and expensive repairs. Whereas now with these technologies, a driver is able to assess and be motivated to have optimal driving behavior resulting in a lowered likelihood of accidents and resulting costs.

I think the future looks bright for the quantified self enabled through the Internet of Things technologies together with mobile and wearable technology.

The 7 Myths of Design Transformation

Many companies from the smallest startups to the largest enterprises in the world now recognize the need to infuse design into their organizations. Many are investing heavily in design but are often using a silver bullet approach, making the assumption that one specific change will be the right one. I've spent time over the past few years working directly with many of these companies and meeting others at conferences. I've also worked with leaders of academic programs preparing business, design, and engineering students for this new world. I regularly encounter the following seven myths which I think hamper success in transforming companies. Of course, all seven of the myths aren't held by all organizations and not all organizations hold these myths. However, sufficient numbers hold some of these myths to warrant this post. I summarize the myths and provide some insight based on our experience at IBM to help dispel them.   

1. You just need to hire designers

Clearly, properly trained designers are critically important to a design transformation program. They are necessarily but not sufficient. Many companies think that they can simply hire designers right out of design school and then wait for the magic to happen. They are learning painfully that simply hiring designers isn't sufficient. Mike Monteiro gave a talk recently with the title, "This is the golden age of design! ... and we're screwed". He outlines well the opportunities and challenges. He also points out that one company in particular is doing a good job in this space. That company is IBM.

When we hire designers at IBM straight out of design school, we put them through a three month bootcamp to ready them to take on the responsibilities of being a designer at IBM. We don't rely solely on college hires either, we also have professional hires who have significant experience in industry. They too go through a bootcamp, albeit less than three months. We also make sure to hire the right balance of design specializations including visual design, user experience design, user research, and front end development. Even after having done all of that, we don't rely on designers to be solely responsible for the client experience. We believe that design is a team sport and that business, engineering, and design need to work together using what we refer to as radical collaboration. IBM Design Thinking provides the framework and methods for that collaboration.  

2. You just need open workspaces

Workspaces are clearly important. Putting people in offices or cubicles is the fastest way to suck collaboration and creativity out of them. Open workspaces encourage collaboration and create the conditions for greater creativity. However, building out open space facilities isn't enough. In our experience at IBM, the employees who work in those open spaces need to be allowed or even encouraged to make the space their own. They need to put design assets on walls, be able to draw on any wall, have sufficient movable whiteboards in order to collaborate visually, and, most importantly, customize the space for their team's needs. In our studios, that means that any piece of furniture should be able to be moved by the team and often is. I often visit our main studio in Austin, Texas, and see a completely different arrangement of desks, whiteboards, sofas and TVs each time. We now have some 26 studios worldwide. So, are beautiful, open workspaces important? Yes, but how they're designed and operated makes a difference. And, of course, just like hiring designers is necessary but not sufficient, so is having open workspaces.  

3. You need to quantify everything first

There are two types of thinking in business, analytical thinking and design thinking. Both are important. Analytical thinking is best for things like making businesses efficient, optimizing supply chains, target marketing, and driving down defect rates. Analytical thinking is best applied when a product and/or business is well established. However, analytical thinking is incapable of driving innovation. That's where design thinking has it's strength. Many established companies are reinforced every day for their use of analytical thinking so they often mistakenly think that they can use it to innovate or they look to use design thinking but expect to apply analytical thinking parameters. Design Thinking needs to be allowed the time to flourish and to create innovations that at first won't yield quantifiable benefits. Over time, of course, analytical thinking can again be applied. Many business leaders received their training in MBA programs and to date, many of those programs focused exclusively on analytical thinking. However, there are now innovative business education programs being developed that incorporate design thinking and analytical think. I'm helping to develop such a curriculum with the DeGroote School of Business Executive MBA program.   

4. You just need to code MVPs quickly and iterate

Many companies, particularly, startups, believe that you just need to get a brilliant idea, code the minimal viable product, release it, and then iterate. I was on a panel in silicon valley on which all the other panelists were from startups. Some of them argued for this approach. However, I pointed out that they were the successful ones, the 10 percent of startups that are successful. I pointed out that the company I work for needs better odds than that. The 90 percent of startups that fail, often do so because they didn't understand the market or users and didn't have the right skills or approach.  

5. You first need to visualize the "art of the possible" 

The designer's version of myth number 4 is to start work by ideating with colleagues and then creating high fidelity mockups of what is often referred to as the "art of the possible". The coding MVPs and the art of the possible visualizations feel good because everyone sees results really quickly that actually run, in the case of the MVP, and are beautifully creative, in the case of the art of the possible visualizations. The problem with both of these approaches is that they leave out a critically important step, understanding what the problem is that they're solving. Our IBM Design Thinking framework reinforces the need to first do user research to understand the intended user, what they do, think, say, and feel, what their current experience is, and what pain points are most important to them to address. Once we have that information, we're ready to ideate many different possible solutions to those pain points and quickly and cheaply prototyping those using pencil and paper to get feedback on them prior to choosing the optimal designs to start to code and then iterate on.  

6. You should make small changes to what you do today

Many companies believe they're already doing most of what they need to do and thus simply need to tweak things a bit. That's what IBM did for years, with less than optimal results. It was only when the company took stock, decided to launch a full new program, and provided the requisite investment that dramatic transformation happened

The new program we put in place at IBM focused on addressing each of the myths discussed here. The formula we used was simply: people plus places plus practices equals outcomes. These three Ps of transformation all need to be addressed. People includes hiring designers from design schools and from industry, educating and activating them through bootcamps, creating open workspace design studios that they can and should customize, adopting an enhanced design thinking framework optimized for business and linking it directly with agile development, educating business, engineering, and design leaders in the most important projects on the framework, and then tracking progress and holding regular pivot meetings to rapidly make changes. Further information on our approach can be found in a recent New York Times article as well as in a Forrester Research report as well.   

7. Transformation is easy and shouldn't take too long

Lastly, many believe that a design transformation of an organization should be pretty straight forward and that it shouldn't take too long. However, it's important to understand the extend of what needs to change in most companies. Very few companies have a culture of design excellence and the myths outlined here illustrate the types of attitudes and practices that need to change. Although there are clearly differences between organizations but most companies should set an expectation of years rather than weeks or months to make a dramatic transformation in becoming design led.  

Design transformation is difficult. While we don't have all the answers, we've learned a lot in transforming IBM. And, we're working with other companies everyday to share what we've learned and to help them realize the benefits of a design led company. 

The Power of Design for Business

Most of my career has been focused on the methods, skills, tools, and overall approach to design as well as on optimizing design outcomes. I've written a book and numerous articles and blog posts on those topics. I've spent time over the past few years on the business of design and on the design of business. And for both, the words of IBM's second CEO Thomas Watson Jr. are as relevant today as they were in 1971 when he spoke them, "Good design is good business".

We spend about 11 percent of our time on entertainment but more than three times that on work. Much of the investment in design over the past few decades though has been spent on the design related to that portion of our time we spend on entertainment. Comparatively little has been spent on the design of things we use at work and the ways we connect with companies digitally. Just take a look at the screens that can be viewed in public like those used by airline agents, store clerks, doctor's office staff, restaurant servers, and most office workers. Many of those screens look like they should be in a technology museum. Small wonder that 80-90 percent of workers feel stressed. No doubt this isn't entirely due to their experiences in using technology on the job but it likely represents a significant portion of it. Included in this world of work are the clients of companies who often have to struggle through badly designed websites and apps. And, increasingly, it is the digital experience with a company that is the primary and most important experience clients have with a company. 

The company I work for, IBM, was the first to introduce a corporate wide design program in 1956 and we are again focused maniacally on design, in fact, directly addressing the design of work and design for the enterprise. Transforming the company to work in this way is described well in a recent New York Times article and in a Forrester Report.  

Most companies realize now that they need to focus on design as they move rapidly into a digital, cloud-based, big-data, social, and mobile enabled world. They often appropriately look for professional help in creating their new digital properties. Given IBM's experience in driving a major design transformation, I'm often asked to meet with clients to outline the key ingredients of a successful design transformation. In addition to sharing our lessons learned, I also like to talk less and do more by actually involving the senior executives of companies in a workshop that provides them with an experiential, hands-on feel for the power of some of the approaches. They glean insights, gain new perspectives, and learn how our design framework and transformational practices can help them not only drive the design of an awesome client experience with their digital properties but also in transforming their entire companies. 

While the craft of design guided by a framework can be used to create products, apps, and systems, the general approach of the framework can be used by all employees of a company to ensure a maniacal focus on the client experience at all levels. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience for me personally to help companies learn how they can use the power of design for their businesses and how our services organizations can then help them realize that power for their business outcomes.     

Apple Watch: Awesome but not Perfect

I've now had my Apple Watch for two weeks. I've provided early experience reports via social media and promised that I would provide a more complete review here when I'd had a little more time with it. Has Apple designed an awesome new platform? Yes. Is it perfect? No.  

The out-of-the-box experience was the best I've experienced with any product, including previous Apple products. It was obvious what to do and doing it was straightforward and, in fact, thoroughly enjoyable. First use was similarly intuitive and the product has imbedded itself into my personal ecosystem completely. I pointed out in a prior blog post here that while I tried using my iPhone and also a Nike Fuelband previously, I went back to wearing a watch because I need what I called ambient time visualization. Probably 90% of the time, I just need to be able to glance at my wrist to get a sense of where I am in an hour. I therefore don't want to have to take my phone out of my pocket nor press a button on the Fuelband to quickly and often unobtrusively get a sense of what time it is. Given that use case, an analogue view is therefore preferable to a digital one too. So, Apple Watch close to perfectly satisfied that use case. I can glance at my watch and get an analogue sense of what time it is. I say close to perfectly because having the display turned on all the time would perfectly satisfy my needs but I understand that's impractical at the present time given the need to minimize battery drain. 

Let's explore the gesture used to activate the device a little more. While the act of moving your wrist in front of you in order to look at the watch is a natural one for a society that still has many people wearing watches, the action itself also carries with it some social etiquette baggage. That same action is also often construed to be indicative of someone being bored, in a rush, and/or uninterested. By adding non-time related functions to the watch, such as notifications, Apple has increased the number of times people typically check their watch. I've had friends and colleagues mention that they find people who are checking their Apple Watches a lot really rude and even more rude than if they were checking their phones. I've purposely minimized the number of apps that I've configured to send me notifications so that I don't get into this situation. However, I suspect that this is going to be another category of annoyance. Having said that, it is important to note that unlike when people are on their phones, virtually everything you can do on the watch is very time limited so often it is literally just a glance. 

A few of you who have used a Smartwatch like the Pebble or Samsung Gear may be wondering why I'm speaking as if Apple established the category. Let me clarify. While Apple was rumored to be working on an iWatch for a few years, these other companies took first mover advantage and did a respectable job of putting out early versions of the technology. However, very few people bought those and they were typically the tech enthusiasts. Apple's introduction into the category with the Apple Watch effectively moves Smartwatches into the mainstream not only with widespread use by the general population but also in terms of providing an ecosystem for apps from all the major players. 

As I mentioned, Apple Watch is awesome in many ways but also not perfect. Let me briefly summarize what I think is great and what I think needs work. 

I think Apple, no surprise, got the design spot on including the nuance of the aesthetics required to make it a piece of jewelry with the many choices of bodies and bands. I chose the one shown above after asking my friends on social media and a couple of friends in person to help select the right one for me. I think they were absolutely right and I love the choice. And, of course, I can buy extra bands and I may well do that in the future. Its interesting too to hear friends and colleagues describing their choice of watch body and band say that they think they chose the perfect one for them. 

There were early worries that the battery would be insufficient to power the Apple Watch for a full day. My battery has never come close to running out in a day and most days I have half to three quarters of a battery charge remaining even after fairly heavy use. Of course, Apple achieved this by not only focusing on including a great battery in the device but also controlling battery use by apps. Because the display is OLED, only pixels that are lit up use battery power. A black background doesn't use any battery power. Now that Apple has demonstrated that battery capacity isn't a problem, I wish they they would make the duration of glances longer or configurable. The duration of a glance for the time app is perfect but is too short in my experience when reading some notifications. I do appreciate that Apple restricted app developers in their use of the lit up pixels and provided the time app faces themselves so as to have optimal battery life. 

The Siri integration in Apple Watch is well done and quite appropriate given the form factor. However, it does sometimes feel strange to be talking to your watch but then also somewhat futuristic. However, my recommendation to Apple to future improve Siri and voice more generally on the watch has to do with staying in audio mode for both Siri and the user. Right now if you want to send a text using the watch, you can quite beautifully simply say for example "Hey Siri, text my daughter." However, then Siri replies not using audio, as she does on the iPhone, but via the watch display prompting the user to dictate what to text. And, after that, the user is prompted again only on the watch display whether the user wants to send the text via audio or text and then there is still a step requiring the user to tap "send". There are ways to optimize this flow by changing the settings for messages so that it only sends texts and you can say "Hey Siri, tell my daughter that..." and then say "Hey Siri, send". That keeps the dialogue in audio form on the user's side but it would be perfect if the entire dialogue were to be conducted with audio on both sides. I'm sure that's coming. 

It is interesting and quite useful to hold telephone conversations using the watch. In this case, the speaker on the watch is used for the people you're speaking with and the microphone for what you're saying. The people I've spoken to in this way say that the audio quality on their end is surprisingly good. You can also use your voice to start and stop music and to launch many apps.

The apps on the watch are first generation and the non-Apple ones were developed without the designers and developers having access to the actual hardware and without first hand knowledge of and experience with an Apple Watch. I absolutely love the Activities app and find that it is more motivating than any of the fitness trackers I've used. I customized the time app face that I use so that I see the time, the date, the temperature, my next meeting, and a small visualization of the Activities app. The latter is brilliantly designed with circles, one for the number of calories you've used, another the minutes you've exercised, and the third the number of hours in the day that you stood up for at least one minute. I quick glance at the bottom right of my time app screen shows me how complete my activity has been thus far in the day. If it's half way through the day and the circles show as half complete, I'm tracking well. If I'm less than that, I know I've got to up my game and if it is more than that, I'm exceeding my plan for the day. 

Some apps look promising but not yet useful enough. The Uber app allows you to tap to call a car but you can't provide the address you're going to, something I find extremely useful with the iPhone app. A voice interface and audio interface would be a great improvement. The maps app is good especially because you can ask for directions verbally. The taptic feedback is wonderful too. However, where this app fails is in the base Apple Maps functionality. When I didn't follow the directions exactly, the app wasn't able to reset it's directions based on where I now was but instead it continued to issue the audio instruction to get back to the recommended route, something that the Hertz NeverLost system used to do years ago (I called it the ForeverLost system as a result). Similarly, the Air Canada app is very useful in displaying in a glance my flight information but right now I have to tell the app on the phone what flight I'm taking when that app should have that information directly from the rest of the airline's systems. In a similar way, my bank app is there but too limited to be useful yet. In contrast, the Yelp app is quite complete as is the Evernote app. The New York Times, Happier, Slack, Weather, and Calendar apps are also quite useful. I haven't found the app navigation menu to be particularly useful. I find that glance versions of apps are very helpful but only so when you limit the number of glances because you have to navigate them serially. 

In sum, the Apple Watch has already become a core part of my personal ecosystem and regular workflow. I also find that I now infrequently pull out my phone, preferring instead to interact with my watch. This device will establish this category and I'm very much looking forward to getting apps designed and developed by people who have the device and have had personal experience using it. I also look forward to the enhancements Apple will make to the operating system and base apps as well over the months to come. Hats off to Jony Ive and the rest of Apple for having designed and built another winning device that will become core to our experience in interacting with technology.                

Insights on Creating Great Design

LinkedIn discussion groups are great. A few months ago, I posted the following question to the User Experience group: "What would you say is the single most important factor in creating a well-designed product, website, or app?" I expanded a bit on the question with "Many factors determine the likelihood of a product, website, or app having a great design. I'm interested in learning what you, as a user experience design professional, believe is the single most important factor influencing the likelihood of delivering a product, website, or app with a great design."

There are now over 150 comments and I encourage you to read the insightful individual comments by going to the LinkedIn User Experience Group. However, I thought I would summarize the key insights from the discussion here. 

Many of the comments were rich in detail and often commentaries on previous comments. For the purposes of this summary, I captured the essence of the comment with a few words and then created the Wordle shown above which illustrates with increasing font size the frequency of the items being mentioned.

The cluster of items mentioned most often is made up of user goals, empathy, and user testing. The second most important cluster includes user and business goals and understanding the problem. That's followed by a cluster of simplicity, elegance, and collaboration. The remaining many items were only mentioned by few professionals.

Even though each person was asked to identify the single most important factor to them, which many found difficult, this collection paints a comprehensive picture of professional design experience. It reinforces the importance of connecting with the intended users, determining their goals through empathizing with them and understanding the problems they're experiencing, also factoring in business goals, making sure that designs are simple and elegant, collaborating with team members, and testing designs with users. 

It's interesting to note that items like ease of use, usable, useful, consistent were only mentioned by a few suggesting, in my view, that most professional designers now believe that focusing on the main items in the Wordle will yield these basic attributes and go well beyond them. 

While any one designer may not take this comprehensive view, the collective wisdom of this crowd of professional designers articulates well in my view the most important factors to address in order to create a great design. However, as pointed out in my "The State of Design Practice" post earlier on this blog, many designers know that these are the most important things to do but are not able to do them due to a number of challenges they experience in the organizations within which they work. Addressing those challenges and then focusing on the items identified here should be the goal of every professional designer and design organization.

I'd like to thank the members of the User Experience LinkedIn group for their insightful and articulate contributions to this important discussion.  

Is Creativity Enough?

The intense interest in design is leading more and more companies to strive to achieve design excellence. However, many of them fail to achieve that excellence because they don't understand the key ingredients. There are many ingredients to driving design excellence and many misconceptions. I plan to address some of these in this and upcoming blog posts.

Many people believe that you should simply be creative and intuit a great idea. One of my fellow panelists from a startup in the Bay area argued for this approach at a conference I was speaking at recently. He worked at a startup that has seen some success but I pointed out that he was in the minority, in that the vast majority (90%) of technology startups fail. In order to increase the probably of success of a startup or of a product or system within an existing company you have to understand your users and potential users.

So, how do you do that? Some people believe that you need to do extensive and rigorous empirical research. I don't. You essentially need to empathize with your users or potential users, understand their lives, their environment, their work (if that's relevant), and very importantly, their motivations, aspirations, concerns, worries, and their emotional reactions. You have to get inside their heads and hearts. You can do that most effectively by spending time with a small representative number of them in person. Simply observe them (ethnographic observation), talk to them (structured interview), and capture their environment (screenshots, photographs, journals).  

In the early stages of a healthcare project, for example, our design team visited several cancer clinics and observed all the staff to determine who did what, when, with what. We also held in-depth interviews with key members of the clinic team such as the Oncologists. In addition to understanding their role, we also asked them questions like, "what keeps you up at night?" It was this type of probing that yielded some of the most interesting and useful information.

Once we had a deep understanding of the users and potential users, we could start to explore creative solutions to problems we identified and innovations for opportunities we observed. Without this user understanding, we would have been shooting in the dark.

So, is creativity and innovation important? Absolutely. However, you increase the likelihood of success for your creative and innovative design solutions if you start with a context of who you're designing those for. So, is creativity enough? No, it first requires understanding before you develop creative designs.

Opening the Design Aperture

Design is experiencing a phenomenal surge of interest, attention, and power. This is due in large part to the leadership of Steve Jobs who through the delivery of several game-changing Apple products proved to even the toughest critics that Thomas J. Watson Jr. was right when he said that "good design is good business". Apple's success led to a realization across many industries that they should pay more attention to design and to see design within a broader context than they did previously. 

View fullsize

This is all of course great news to designers. However, I'd like to suggest that with their newfound importance and power, designers also have much greater responsibility and in turn need to open the design aperture. Many experienced designers have learned to live within a world of severe constraint dominated by an engineering culture. If they took it upon themselves to mockup a total redesign of a product in the past, they would be informed that such a redesign wouldn't be possible due to time, resource, engineering difficulty or all three. Many designers have such mockups on their hard drives. Over time those designers learned to be more modest in their designs and, in turn, to severely limit the potential of applying their craft to make products great.

Those same designers now find themselves in a world of greater opportunity for design with fewer constraints on it. I found a Tweet by Michael Leggett, an experienced designer at Google, interesting in this regard. He was responding to someone who liked their new design and who had said "Google finally hired some designers". His response was "We've always been here - just finally being given the authority to do something bold".       

Doing something bold requires designers to open their design aperture, to take a broader view of the project they're working on, and to exercise design muscles they haven't used for a while. Here's a list of practical ways designers can hone their skills in this regard.

• Empathize with and thoroughly understand the users of your product, their goals, desires, and preferences, as well as the experience they have in using the designs you create for the product they use. 
• Observe design trends, your own use of products setting those trends, how well those trends are being accepted, how people are using your product, and whether any of those design ideas may work for your product design. 
• Explore established interaction design patterns to see whether they would work for your product design. In addition to emerging design trends, it is often wise to be aware of and use design patterns that have been established for years because they represent what users have a natural expectation and mental model for.     
• Sketch extensively and often so that you're ideating visually and capturing many alternative designs quickly and inexpensively. Resist the urge to move too quickly to a preferred design and also to a fully fleshed out high fidelity version of it.
• Critique designs with other designers regularly to glean the benefits of their combined expertise, experience, and skill. Focus on the design (not the designer), start with what's good about it and should be kept, and then explore ways the design could be improved. All designers should get experience in both the presenting and critiquing roles.

It's a great time to be a designer. There's also now great opportunity to hone design skills and to open the design aperture in order to design absolutely awesome products. 

I'd appreciate any thoughts you may have on this topic communicated via the social networks I post this on as I no longer turn on commenting on this site. The social networks include LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Thanks.

Becoming a T-Shaped Designer

Some years ago, Tim Brown of IDEO introduced the term "T-shaped" to describe people who have depth of skill and experience in one discipline, represented by the vertical stroke, while also having breadth via skills and experience across other disciplines, represented by the horizontal stroke. He argued that the latter provided empathy for other disciplines and, in turn, fostered greater collaboration.  

View fullsize

I think the concept is key to the creation of amazing products and the term perfectly captures the essence of the concept. I've been thinking a lot about our design disciplines and what designers should do to make themselves optimally effective given current trends.

It is often the case that user research specialists go off and carry out ethnographic observations, interviews, surveys, and other user studies. Interaction designers write personas, stories, and create wireframes. Visual designers create high fidelity mockups, graphics, and blueprints. Design developers build working prototypes. However, the visual designer may have no knowledge of writing code, the interaction designer may have no visual design skills, the user research specialist may not know anything about interaction design, and the design developer may know nothing about doing user research. That isn't healthy. It limits the empathy one team member will have with the others and, in turn, limits the quality of the collaboration with those other team members.   

I share Tim Brown's view that everyone should strive to be more T-shaped but I've also come to believe that designers of different disciplines should minimally be familiar with but optimally develop a working level of skill in the other design disciplines. A good test of whether different types of designers are becoming more T-shaped in my experience is to look at the presentations they create. Some would argue that you should only expect to see a visually engaging and highly effective presentation coming from the visual designer. I disagree. I see no reason why any of the other disciplines involved in design can't be expected to do the same. I've been reviewing a lot of portfolios of designers from various disciplines and again have an expectation for all of them to appropriately understand what their users want from the site, to have an information architecture and navigation that is sound, be effective and engaging visually, and be implemented well. Of course, it makes sense for designers to have deep skills in one of those areas but to still have a reasonable level of skills in the others too.  

I argue that the need to become more T-shaped for designers goes beyond optimizing for collaboration. I think it is critical as a design professional to have some level of skill in all other design disciplines. I would also argue that all design schools should teach and give students experience in the full range of disciplines. Of course, it would be expected that the quality of work wouldn't be as high for the non-specialist but it should be passible. 

So what should practicing designers do? I would suggest three things. First, recognize and internalize the need to be more T-shaped. Consider the benefits of developing a broader set of skills. Second, start to acquire those additional skills by leveraging online or even classroom resources and also look to develop a mentoring relationship with a colleague or friend who is a specialist in the discipline you're interested in. Third, broaden your skill set not only to include other discipline skills but also a variety of interpersonal communication and collaboration skills as well. One source is my own Life Habits podcast series which is available in iTunes and on the shownotes site at lifehabits.net. In particular, I would suggest listening to episodes on topics such as authentic listening, leadership, relationships, working remotely, presentations, effective meetings, teamwork, difficult people, assertiveness, taking things personally, confirmation bias, mastering gratitude, growth mindset, and workplace challenges.     

I'd appreciate any thoughts you may have on this topic communicated via the social networks I post this on as I no longer turn on commenting on this site. The social networks I've posted this on include the User Experience Group in LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.  

Design Patterns for the Display of Time

One of the most important constructs we typically deal with in a day is the passage of time. Despite time zone differences and whether we count to 12 twice a day or once to 24, pretty well everyone in the world has the same units of measurement of time. We wakeup at a particular time, we have meetings that start and end at specific times. some of us still watch television shows that are available at certain times, and so on. Many of the activities in our lives are governed by time.  

Given its centrality to our lives, I've found it fascinating to study user interfaces for time and people's uses of them. The study of time UIs is simplified by the realization that they are pretty consistently divided into two primary patterns - analogue and digital.  

View fullsize

Analogue is of course the older of the two and simply represents time with two main "hands" on a space with twelve sections or markers. The shorter of the two hands indicates the hour and the longer of the two the minutes (and a third optionally indicating seconds). A digital display indicates the time by showing a number of hours to the left of a colon and the number of minutes to the right of it. I provide a detailed explanation of how each works here because some of you reading this, similar to the topic I dealt with in my last post, haven't had much experience particularly reading the first of these.    

I've used a combination of these two time user interface patterns over the years and still do. The above display on the left is the clock I used on my MacBook Pro desktop and the one on the right is the Nike+ Fuelband I've recently been wearing on my wrist.

I wanted to get a sense of which of these design patterns are used most frequently among my friends and followers so asked on Facebook and Twitter, "What do you typically use to check the time and is it digital or analogue? " The results showed that about 73 percent use digital most frequently and most of those virtually exclusively often on their smartphone. Those who mentioned that they used a combination typically described which clocks in houses or places of work happened to be one or the other design pattern but a very small number (1.0 percent) also made reference to a differential preference based on task or objective. I didn't explicitly add the question of why in the initial request so more people may also take this perspective than the few who made reference to it would suggest.  

I, like the minority of respondents, have always been of the view that these two design patterns solve different problems and shouldn't be used interchangeably. Let me be more clear, they can be used interchangeably but not optimally. Each has a strength that the other doesn't. I use a digital display when I want to be precise and accurate while I use an analogue display when I want to get a general sense of how much time has passed or, mostly importantly, how much time is left within the hour. The latter requires the clock to be persistently visible whereas the former can be displayed on the press of a button which is the arrangement I have with the clock on my computer desktop persistently visible whereas a press of a button on the Fuelband or the iPhone is required to display the time digitally. I find that the analogue display of time is like a temporal data visualization whereas the digital display is a numeric metric. My actual preference as a user is to have a toggle available on any time between an analogue and a digital display.      

I've been reflecting on my last blog post about the trend in handwriting usage and how the trend in the display of time is similar in some respects and dissimilar in others. The overall trend toward all things digital due to the increasing pervasiveness of technology in our lives underlies both of these observations. Similarly, the result, due to the technology dictating the experience rather than the humans, impacts both of these. In the case of the display of time, the technology is entirely capable of rendering either of these design patterns for time. However, the digital pattern appears to be the one most often used and it appears as well largely due to its pervasiveness that many people now appear to prefer it as well. Is this another instance of HCI having failed users? Please use the social networks to discuss this further in response to my posts there as I'm no longer accepting comments on this blog (see my previous post as to why). Thanks.

Handwriting Recognition

We worked on the design of a tablet some years ago which had a major requirement to recognize handwriting. How things have changed in a few short years. Now many young humans can't even perform handwriting recognition themselves.  

View fullsize

The ubiquity of computers, smartphones, tablets, and game systems with their physical and software-based keyboards as well as touch, gesture, and voice input devices would seem to have made cursive/long-hand handwriting largely unnecessary. The only handwriting I do these days is limited to signing my name. I wondered how common that experience was among my social media friends and followers so, naturally, I asked them. 

I asked the following simple question on Facebook to my friends and followers, "what percentage of the writing that you do during a typical day uses cursive/long-hand?". The results showed that cursive is used on average 17.8% of the time but the distribution was bimodal with a significant majority (75%) using cursive for less than 5 percent of the time. Those friends and followers thus were much like me using handwriting for little more than signing their name. Interestingly though, a few still use cursive for the majority of their writing and find great utility in it.

This direction suggests that computer manufacturers wouldn't have much of a market if they created a tablet with handwriting recognition. That was a rather hard problem to solve anyway so I'm sure that manufacturers aren't too upset by the shrinking of this market. It also means that handwriting skills are also not being practiced and, in fact, many school systems don't teach it anymore either. Given these trends, cursive handwriting may well go the way of calligraphy, a rare skill practiced by a select few practitioners.

I also find it interesting to ponder what happened here. This is a case of humans adapting to computer interaction rather than computer design adapting to the way that humans desire to interact. This is particularly the case regarding keyboards. Had handwriting recognition become really effective, maybe humans wouldn't have had to adapt to using the very unnatural physical or software-based keyboards. Maybe handwriting wouldn't now be in such decline. Did HCI fail users in this case?
 

Is Blog Commenting Dead?

I recently moved my blog site to a new responsive design platform and as I made the move I gave some thought to what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to drop. One of the elements of the blog that I'm considering dropping is commenting. While commenting was rather central to blogging in the early days of the technology, there are now three reasons why I'm considering dropping the capability: spam, the decline of RSS readers, and the increased use of social media services. 

View fullsize

It appears that even though email spam still exists, companies providing email services have largely won the battle of preventing most of it from getting to users. That isn't the case for blog commenting spam. Likely due to the desire to improve search engine optimization, automated systems now regularly submit text and some links as comments on blogs. Marking those as spam and deleting them takes a surprising amount of time for blog authors. So much so, that this itself may well be enough of a reason to turn off commenting on my site. Other bloggers have experienced problems with trolls which had led some of them to turn off commenting or to abandon blogging altogether in favor of sending out newsletters instead in a couple of instances. I haven't experienced that problem thankfully but the spam comments are bad enough. 

I've also noticed that over time the number of legitimate substantive comments has gone down. I think that's partly due to the fact that I don't just write a blog post and leave others to find their way to it. You used to be able to do that because many people used RSS readers and would thereby subscribe to a feed and then be notified of a new blog post that they could then either read in the RSS reader itself or on the blog site. Google realized that the use of its own Google Reader service was drastically declining and therefore decided to kill the service. While there have been complaints and a rush to alternative services, most of the attention given to the demise of Google Reader was by journalists who naturally still used the service. Most regular people simply don't anymore.

People now write a blog post and then tell others about it via the social networks. A natural outcome of that method of notification is that those services also have a built-in commenting system. It's much more natural to immediately comment on a Tweet, Facebook update, or LinkedIn post in-line then to go to the blog itself and leave a comment there. I've posted links to many blog posts and had healthy discussions about them on the social networks while virtually no comments were left on the blog site.

I'm therefore considering turning off commenting and simply using the blog as an authoring and publishing environment. I'd appreciate your thoughts on this and any experience you may have on this (likely via the social networks where I'll post a link to this).

Extremes in Design Practice

I've worked my whole career within a design environment that was expected to yield product revenue as a result of customers realizing substantial direct business benefit from using the product. While I regularly celebrate the increasing importance of design in all aspects of society, I worry about two particular trends that I'm seeing that are less positive for the discipline.

View fullsize

One trend involves the use of design to simply attract more eyeballs. Startup companies know that they need great design, particularly visual design, to initially make them interesting to early adopter eyeballs, then to investors in order to be seen by even more eyeballs, and finally to have enough eyeballs to be sufficiently interesting to companies like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! in order to acquire them. The latter companies, in turn, are simply interested in increasing the number of eyeballs staring at the digital properties they own so that they can sell advertising that will motivate some of the people attached to those eyeballs to buy actual products. I worry how sustainable this direction is with so much of design concentrated on essentially the advertising business. Of course these large companies do other things too that are of direct substantive value but the vast majority of their revenue comes solely from selling advertising. The role of design in advertising has a long history too but it is the redirection of product design into serving the needs of advertising that is unhealthy for the discipline in my view. 

Another trend could actually be considered to be the opposite to this one and that is the competitive direct selling of design services on a massive scale online. Online sites are emerging which claim to have a quarter of a million designers signed up and who compete with one another for design work projects. This isn't conceptually a bad thing in that it would seem to provide a ready marketplace for designers to make a living without having to first be hired into design firms. However, what worries me about this trend is the potential cheapening or commoditization of the discipline's work. Just like huge big box department stores who maniacle drive down prices to the point where suppliers end up with razor thin profit margins and have to do everything they can to reduce costs, this trend in design services similarly may well lead to driving lower prices and reducing costs.

I think we need to balance these two trends with an additional direction which involves companies who produce actual products realizing the importance of great design to their success. The effective leveraging of design by these companies is also happening and will yield real business and personal value for their customers and users. We must remember that it is these companies who are the advertisers that sustain the first category mentioned above and we need both for a healthy ecosystem for commerce and design. 

Academic Design Research & Commercial Design Practice

All disciplines and professions rely on academic research to improve their practice. Medical doctors, for example, rely on academic medical research to improve their diagnostic and treatment practices and outcomes. They also rely on industry research as well to augment the academic research in specific areas such as pharmacology. And, of course, there is always pure academic research that explores furthering human knowledge which also occasionally impacts medical practice.

Design should similarly also have solid academic research on which to base its practice and the improvement in that practice. However, I'm concerned that it doesn't, or at least not commerserate with the increasing importance of design.

I attended the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Paris, France a few weeks ago, after not having attended for some years. Although there were notable exceptions, I was struck by the lack of relevance to commercial design practice of the vast majority of presentations, papers, and posters at the conference. One of the notable exceptions was a paper specifically exploring this topic. It was a paper by David Roedl and Erik Stolterman of Indiana University with the title, "Design research at CHI and its applicablity to design practice". There were two parts to the research they presented, the first an analysis of previous CHI papers and the second a set of interviews with design practitioners about academic design research.

For the first part, they examined all the papers that were part of the CHI conference in 2011. Of a total of 468 papers, they found 35 that made some reference to the work presented being relevant to design practice. Strangely absent from their paper is the observation that this number in itself is rather on the low side.

View fullsize

Only 7.5 percent of all papers presented were actually related to design practice! They go on to analyze the few papers that were intended to address design practice and found that even these had significant issues that limited their effectiveness. The issues all had to do with a general lack of understanding of real-life design practice and/or a desire to address the complexities in such environments. For example, the issues included the over-generalization of design situations, the lack of respect for the complexity of group decision making, the lack of consideration for the burden of limited time and resources, and the priorization of design exploration (divergence) rather than synthesis (convergence). The second part of the study involving the structured interviews with 13 design practitioners yielded results further questioning the relevance of academic design research to commercial design practice.

I should point out that I'm fully aware of the various models of academic research having served on the NSERC University Education Committee for some years. University research programs should have a balance between programmatic research which involves a series of studies investigating a specific set of questions of direct pragmatic relevance and what is often called "pure research" which involves investigators pursuing entirely "blue-sky" exploratory directions aiming to simply further human knowledge and understanding. Both of these types of research are incredibly important to pursue and design research has to broadly include these two types as well. The problem is the balance. While a 50/50 balance need not be the target, we have to do a lot better than 7.5/92.5!

I've been thinking about this topic since the CHI conference and in particular duing my recent trip to China. I met with professors and students at two design schools in universities in Shanghai and Beijing and was struck by their extremely pragmatic focus and their desire to directly impact commercial design practice. Their focus was perhaps a little too heavily weighted to commercial practice. However, it was refreshing to see.

I'm again increasing my involvement with design schools and universities over the next while and am planning to advocate for a more healthy balance in their design research focus to ensure that a larger proportion of the design research that is carried out is in fact directly relevant to commercial design practice.  

A Balanced Approach to Design

In my last post I talked about the need to find the right balance between skeuomorphic and flat design. I mentioned that Apple had just release an updated version of their Podcasts app which removed the controversial reel-to-reel visual progress animation. Some have concluded that Apple has embraced a flat approach to design. I don't think it has. I think Apple is taking an appropriate balanced approach to design. There are some elements that are essentially flat, such as the fast-forward control. Other elements have subtle but very effective depth, such as the back button and the sliders. These elements don't scream skeuomorphism nor take up huge amount of space with overly crafted real world objects. However, they do still resemble physical controls and very effectively communicate affordance. It is clear what the user can do with these controls, the fact that they can put their finger on small knob and slide it to the left or right along the slightly recessed bezel. This is exactly what I meant when I said that we need a balance. This is not a garish photo realistic use of real world object visualization but rather a suttle but amazingly effective reminder of a physical object sufficient only to communicate affordance and pleasing depth. Of course, much of design is subjective and people differ in what they prefer. And, there are changing trends in design. However, as I pointed out in my previous post, great design comes from true empathy with users and not simply following design trends unthinkingly. As one would expect, Apple again came through, in my view, with an appropriately balanced approach to design.          

Great Design Requires Skeuomorphic AND Flat Approaches

I've been thinking about the skeuomorphism versus flat design debate for some time now, seriously considering both sides. For those who may somehow have missed mention of the debate, it is between those who favor designs that look like physical objects (skeuomorphic) versus those who favor digital-based designs (flat) devoid of visualizations of real objects. Although the term skeuomorphism predates computers, it is almost exclusively now used to refer to an approach to visual design of software.

View fullsize

View fullsize

The first software designs that experimented with the use of skeuomorphic techniques that I'm aware of appeared in the mid to late 1990's with Microsoft BoB and IBM's RealThings. These were early experiments designed to make computer software more  approachable to novice users. These users tended to be reluctant to use  computers because the machines were perceived to be difficult to use and  intimidating. The idea was to make the design of the computer program  look (and operate to some degree) like their real world physical  counterparts. The Microsoft BoB checkbook (and check register) looked just  like a paper-based checkbook and the IBM RealPhone looked and somewhat operated  like a phone system common at the time. Microsoft released their work as  a product whereas the IBM's effort remained an experimental project being worked on in the research labs. Microsoft BoB wasn't very  successful as a product, in my view due largely to the poor choice of a  cartoon, childish visual design of the overall system and not due to the  introduction of skeuomorphism within components like the checkbook.  Microsoft BoB had some devoted fans (some of whom I knew at the time)  due to the skeuomorphic apps like the checkbook despite the rest of the  unfortunate visual design of the rest of the system. Those fans much rather worked with the BoB checkbook app than the complicated Microsoft Access database on which it ran. It was unfortunate that skeuomorphism was deemed to not have been successful during that period due in my view to a very poor choice of visual design (and of course the precursor to clippy as well).

View fullsize

When Steve Jobs and his team at Apple ushered in new mobile hardware form factors that drastically simplified computer technology, they also chose to use skeuomorphic approaches to design to make the software on those devices be perceived as simple, familiar, and approachable. The camera includes a shutter animation, iBooks includes a wooden book shelf and books with pages that flip, the Notes app looks like a physical yellow lined notebook, the Voice Recorder app has a picture of a big microphone and a VU meter, the calendar looks like a physical calendar, the compass looks like a physical compass, maps looks like physical maps, the contacts app looks like the physical counterpart, the Calculator looks like a Braun calculator, Garageband includes visuals of piano keyboards, drums, etc. I believe that the use of skeuomorphism helped to make and continues to make these devices extremely popular, especially given their adoption by many people who aren't in the traditional technical markets for computer technology.

View fullsize

The last few years have seen the introduction of skeuomorphic designs that in my view are completely gratuitous. It is important to note that these came out during the post-Jobs era at Apple. The best (or worst) example of this is the Podcasts app and its use of a reel-to-reel tape recorder visual animation as a progress indicator. This animation only appears if the user swipes up on the podcast album art so it isn't serving the purpose of making the user feel immediately comfortable with an existing object. What makes this the most gratuitous example is that podcasts only came about as a digital medium so there isn't any real world analogue. This is pure eye candy. While it may provide visual interest, it really is over the top in terms of skeuomorphism. In fact, Apple apparently agrees, as evidenced by the version of the app that was just released. They've removed this control completely from the app.

View fullsize

On the other extreme from skeuomorphism is flat design. Proponents of flat design argue that we no longer need to use physical object visuals because digital versions have been around sufficiently long that we can simply use purely digital visual representations. Many designers have adopted this point of view and now scoff at designs that aren't completely flat and purely digital. Many of these designers also believe that Microsoft's Windows 8 is a good exemple of this flat approach to design.

View fullsize

Much of this debate is heated, emotional, and dogmatic in nature. I thought it might be good to get some user input on the question so I asked via social media "If you needed to toggle something on or off in an app, which of the following alternative designs would you prefer, Design A or Design B?" and I then showed the alternatives design illustrated below. While not a huge sample of respondents, 30 people indicated their preference and all 30 preferred Design A. Of course, Design A is skeuomorphic and Design B is flat. This confirmed my believe that we need to balance the interests of purist design models and trends with user preference and behavior. In my view, there is no place for a purely gratuitous use of skeuomorphism like the reel-to-reel tape player visual animation in the original version of Apple's Podcasts app but I equally worry about the use of completely flat controls that show no affordance as to what may be done with them such as Design B which is Microsoft's Windows 8 toggle control.

Great design will come from a deep understanding of the users in the target markets expected to be served by a product, a sincere empathy for the ways they think, feel, and want to interact with the world, analogue and digital. Designers have to use that information to design user experiences with the right balance of controls that have depth, and possbly analogues in the real world, along with purely flat controls that exist only in the digital world. Of course, these approaches need to be part of a meaningful and unified design system but it is clear that an unthinking adherence to an entirely skeuomorphic or flat approach to design is not the best way forward for designers if our goal is great design outcomes. A more naunced approach is required.     

Fingers and Thumbs

Mobile devices have transformed the way we deal with computer technology. We now have amazingly powerful computers that fit into the palms of our hands making it possible to have them with us at all times and be able to do many of the tasks we used to only be able to do on computers and more.  

View fullsize

The miniturization of this technology has given us amazingly high quality displays and the integration of multiple capabilities such as cameras, GPS, accelerometers, and the like. However, getting information into these tiny devices, while improving, still has a ways to go. Even though speech technologies are improving, most people still use software keyboards. The use of software keyboards isn't uniform either though with some people using their thumbs, others using their fingers, and yet others preferring the swipe type keyboard alternatives. As usual, I thought I would ask my social media networks what they do. I asked "Do you use your thumb(s), finger(s), or voice when entering information into you Smartphone?" The results are shown to the right. Voice input was predictably low at 8 percent and alternative keyboard input technologies that involve swiping across the keys yielded an even smaller number (but then I didn't specifically list this as an alternative).  The majority of respondents indicated that they use their thumbs but, surprising to me and to others on Twitter who commented on this, fingers were preferred by fully 34 percent of respondents. Of note as well is that 2 percent of those who use thumbs actually only use one thumb and 4 percent of those who use fingers, just use one.

I rarely use Siri now and use both thumbs when entering information into my iPhone.  I thought that most people were roughly the same and was surprised to see people using their fingers. However, these results indicate that I was wrong and I suspect that others may be surprised by these results too. 

What implications does this have for designers of mobile apps? First, absolutely minimize the information that a user has to enter into your app given that it is still a suboptimal input mechanism. And second, don't assume that users are using their thumbs. The designers of Flipboard (an app that I love and many, many others do too) decided to adopt an entirely new interaction pattern when they moved their app from the iPad to the iPhone with the former optimized for fingers and the latter optimized for thumbs. These results call into question the assumption that Smartphone users use their thumbs. Of course the majority of Smartphone users use their thumbs, according to my unscientific study, but a sizable percentage of users actually use their fingers.

Lastly, we smug thumb Smartphone users should stop snickering at the occasional friend or family member who uses their fingers on their Smartphone and realize that there are more of them than we initially realized.

The State of Design Practice

I wrote a book some ten years ago with a couple of colleagues (Scott Isensee and Carol Righi) called "User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach" which outlined a comprehensive system for introducing UCD to an organization and specified the key methods that should be carried out. This work was an elaboration and extension of the pioneering work of Don Norman and colleagues. I followed the book up some years later with an article in the Communications of the ACM entitled "The State of User-Centered Design Practice" which reported the results of some research that some colleagues (Ji-Ye Mao, Paul Smith, and Tom Carey) and I had conducted getting information from UXD practitioners at more than 100 companies and investigating, among other things, the differences between what is known to be best practice and what actually is carried out inside companies. Even though the importance of design was increasing, practitioners in most companies reported a significant difference between the known best practice and their day-to-day experience.

Design is seen as even more important now, as pointed out elsewhere in the blog thanks largely to Steve Jobs and Apple. I thought it would be good to have another look at the state of actual practice so I turned to the LinkedIn "User Experience" discussion group and asked the question shown here.

Although I posted the question some time ago, the responses picked up significantly recently and have been fairly extensive and from a variety of different companies. The discussion is ongoing but I thought it might be good to summarize the key themes at this point here. There were five key themes among the comments which each were mentioned by a substantial number of practitioners.

Management Understanding/Buy-in: An overriding theme mentioned by many concerned the lack of understanding regarding the need for, execution of, and requisite resources required for User Experience Design. This resulted in insufficient importance given to design and inadequate resources being applied to it. 

Missing or Vague Requirements: Many practitioners mentioned the challenges they faced in attempting to carry out User Experience Design activities when the projects hadn't been given appropriate business requirements from Project Management. The requirements were either missing entirely or sufficiently vague as to have little value.   

Resources to do User Research: Practitioners overwhelmingly reported dissatisfaction with not having the resources to carry out one of the most powerful design methods: user research. This finding is consistent with the results I reported in the Comunications of the ACM article mentioned above. The combination of missing or vague requirements and little nor no user research leads to designers essentially working in the dark.

Everyone Thinks They're a Designer: Another common theme reported by many respondents dealt with the problem of project managers, executives, and developers all thinking that they're capable of doing design themselves. One respondent also astutely observed that designers are often guilty of assuming the developers know nothing about design which is also problem.

Suboptimal Day-to-Day Practices: The above themes were reported about equally by respondents as being substantial major problems. A fifth theme emerged that dealt with a variety of day-to-day frustrations or suboptimal practices. These included the following. 

• Being handed a design by development and being asked to "make it usable" or by a project manager and asked to "clean it up". 
• Presenting a wireframe when the expectation was the finished, polished design. 
• Not being able to iterate on the design based on user feedback and simply being expected to come up with the completed design in one iteration. 
• Being told that it is too costly or will take too long to build the design or that it will be addressed in the next release. 
• Being expected to adopt designs that are perceived to be industry leading. 
• With no audience definition being told to "design for everyone". 
• Not addressing the findings from user research when it is carried out.
• Having to deal with everyone on the team thinking that they're the user. 
• The difference between UI and UX not being understood. 
• Losing sight of the primary objectives of the project and getting distracted by other tangible results.
• Unrealistic deadlines and evolving scope creep. 

The experiences of the User Experience Design practitioners that responded to my question clearly articulated the challenges that remain to be addressed in many companies. As I pointed out in my Communications of the ACM article, companies may have the mistaken notion that design is being carried out effectively simply by having hired designers. However, these results reinforce the need for companies to more deeply understand User Experience Design and to address the issues summarized here.

Although some methods and technologies have evolved, the essence of the integrated approach that was outlined in our book ten years ago still applies and my experiences with leadership teams validates it as well. The integrated approach that my coauthors and I published stresses that the commitment to design excellence and the investment in it has to start at the top of the company, clear business objectives must be set by Product Management, user research needs to be carried out to provide the foundation for design informing personas and scenarios, design needs to be carried out by those trained in the disciplines of design and start with low fidelity prototypes evolving through iterations involving regular user feedback and innovation explorations into high fidelity prototypes and code. Product management, design, and development need to work collaboratively and iteratively leveraging each other's skills. The entire team has to share the commitment to achieving the established business objectives with the effective leveraging of User Experience Design. While this isn't easy, it does yield significant dividends when deployed and executed optimally.  

I'd like to thank the members of the LinkedIn User Experience discussion group for their experiences and insights. 

Innovative Mobile App Designs

The number of mobile devices is increasing exponentially and so is the number of apps being developed for those devices. The design of many of those apps while effective, often isn't exemplary. However, the mobile space is seeing its share of true creativity and innovation. In fact, the introduction of a novel design often sets the direction for other apps to adopt aspects of that design as well. 

I try to stay on top of innovative designs myself by following podcasts, reading blogs, and exploring app stores. However, as usual, I thought I'd also leverage the wisdom of the social media crowd. I asked, "which mobile app would you say currently has the most creative, innovative, and usable design?" The feedback I received is summarized in the wordle on the right. A larger font size indicates a greater number of people having chosen that app. The results illustrate some clear front runners: Flipboard, Path, and Clear. While the remaining apps have some interesting features, we'll focus here on the apps which were mentioned by the most people. I also followed up with the people who selected particular apps to ask them what aspects of the design of the app they most appreciated.

Flipboard first came out on the iPad and set a design direction there with its novel design patterns and when it came out on the iPhone it did it again but, importantly, with different design patterns. It provides the capability to aggregate content from a growing list of providers but importantly from Facebook and Twitter. The design attributes people mentioned as being exemplary include "a fluid and simple UI", "amazingly beautiful graphics", and "overall ease of use", and "integration". Flipboard truly transformed the aggregation and rendering of content. For example, information from Twitter in most other places is shown as a continuous stream of text which sometimes allows for the inline rendering of photos, visuals, and videos. However, Flipboard turns that content automatically into a beautiful multicolumn magazine style layout which maximizes the rendering of non-textual information and the appropriate clustering of textual and non-textual information together. The navigation model Flipboard uses on the iPad is hand/finger gesture based with horizonal page flipping whereas on the iPhone it is thumb based with vertical page flipping.  The page flipping is reinforced with a suble, yet satisfying page turn animation.  Both form factor designs have an opening category selection screen which provides the home base that can be returned to with a tap or two. Individual content items can be drilled into by tapping.  Flipboard is the app I use on my iPad and iPhone to access social media, news, and blog information. Pulse News is also an information source aggregator and it is instructive here when discussing Flipboard to point out that Pulse is similar in some ways except that it uses a navigable grid with sources being able to be navigated vertically and content items horizontally. Selecting a story in Pulse brings it in as an information card animating from the right and partially overlaying the base content grid in the iPad version and as a full page story on the iPhone. The design patterns used by both Flipboard and Pulse are really effective for the type of content they provide.

Path is another app that was recommended as being among the most creative, innovative, and usable.  Those mentioning it used words like "amazing" and "beautiful design".  Path is an alternative social media service for just those friends and family with whom you have a close relationship.  The number of "friends" you can have on Path I believe is currently about 150. The app is beautiful visually and is fast. However, I find it's controls to be particularly effective. Path has an animated control that appears once you start scrolling down the timeline and shows you the date and the time of the updates being shown. It's nice for the use case when you know there was an update at on a particular day and time that you'd like to access. It's important to point out that it isn't pervasively visable and the dynamically updated clock adds visual interest and relevant information which also appropriately draw your attention to the control even though it is quite small.  The second control of interest is a menu that appears when the plus sign at the bottom left of the screen is pressed. The menu animates fan-like with a satisfying bounce when opened and includes a rather whimsical spinning and springing back into the plus sign when it is dismissed. The control provides a quick way of indicating what type of update is being created (photo, people, location, music, thought, or sleep/wake). The number of likes are shown with a happy face and a number. Path does a particularly good job of optimizing space for content which is rendered beautifully but it does this by also minimizing the screen real estate that is used by controls. When controls are used, they include animations and visuals that are engaging, informative, and whimsical.  

Another innovative app that was mentioned was Clear.  It is essentially a to-do list organizer. Those recommending it particularly liked its "gesture based interface", that it was "simple", and its use of "color". The design pattern that Clear uses is one where virtually everything is accomplished on a single screen via direct manipulation with the content, and only the content, showing on the screen. This app is the ultimate in getting rid of any controls or app-specific chrome. All you see is the content. It is also the ultimate app for doing everything intuitively by direct manipulation. If you'd like to add an item at a particular point in your list, you simply pinch apart the items above and below and then proceed to add your item. You indicate that an item is complete by swiping across it left to right and if you'd like to delete an item, you swipe from right to left. To move an item, you just tap on it and drag it to where you'd like it to go. You can also swipe up and down to access a menu and multiple lists. I actually only use a single list and thus only ever deal with what you see in the photo on the right. 

I love how these apps have pushed the design envelope by driving greater engagement through beautiful visuals, effective animation, efficient and natural navigation and actions, and minimal use of controls that are persistent. The mobile design space is an exciting one with new apps like these appearing regularly which raise the bar on innovation, creativity, and usability.