Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek’s editor and blogger on the design and innovation beat, has declared that “‘Innovation’ is Dead” and that “Transformation” is the new “key concept” of 2009.

He correctly observes that the word “innovation” is overused in the business world. This, of course, has been obvious for a long time to a great many people — in particular, I think, among practicing designers. But it’s fascinating to think about what his declaration reveals about the nature of the whole innovation craze Nussbaum helped start.

The conversations around innovation over the past few years have in large part focused on producing innovation where it does not exist. It hasn’t been about innovation itself, but rather about cultivating innovation. It’s been about transforming groups of people who, without clever and forward-thinking leadership, would utterly fail to innovate. The literature, then, is aimed at people who fancy themselves as that same clever and forward-thinking leader.

To those of us whose everyday job is to innovate — e.g., designers — the hype around “innovation” has always seemed a little weird. As if not innovating has ever been an option for a designer. We do this all the time!

So what Nussbaum and the innovation cheerleaders have been talking about all along has not been about how innovative people can be more innovative. It’s been about how to take teams that cannot or will not innovate and getting them to actually come up with new ideas. Which is why, I think, he has chosen to zoom in on “transformation” as the key word. It’s always been about change.

In fact, I would go one step further and posit that what he’s really talking about is therapy. How to take a damaged or under-performing body and build it into something that works. To repair broken methodologies that produce the same-old solutions. To build up capabilities that have atrophied, or that may never have even existed.

The innovation conversation, then, usually begins with this (usually unstated) presumption of dysfunction and failure. You can probably insert a subtitle under most headlines: “How to fix your backward company”. Even Nussbaum’s new “transformation” implies that organizations need to implement radical change just to keep up. But what about organizations who are already keeping up really well? What about organizations that are already leading the way? What relevance does “innovation” and “transformation” have to someone cruising along on the cutting edge?

Transformation is for when you’re doing it wrong. Therapy is for when you’re injured.

But what do you do when you want to really perform?

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice.

Practice is what athletes and musicians and actors do constantly to stay on the top of their games. And practice is what great designers do. All day every day.

For those of us who are designers, then, the whole innovation conversation often leads us to think about the difference between practicing and managing: A great design leader may or may not practice their craft every day, any more than a great coach or choreographer needs to break a sweat every day. Whether a design leader does hands-on design work, however, isn’t as important as that design leader pushing their team to do that work. Not to talk about innovation, but to actually do design work. If your team isn’t innovating, then chances are they simply aren’t designing enough. Make them design new stuff. Make them practice.

And, of course, there’s talent. Many assume that innovation comes almost exclusively from talented people. I tend to think this way, too. But a great team is a team of great people working together. Innovative people will doubtlessly fail to innovate in the wrong environment. Managing innovation may simply boil down to leading innovative people to practice their craft more, or maybe even simply creating a space for innovative people to thrive on their own. But it most certainly is not about transforming a mediocre team into an effective hive mind.

This goes the same for organizations. You want an innovative organization? Make ‘em design. All the time. Make them practice.

Newsweek invited four “hot” design firms to “reboot” the brand of the Republican party to appeal to younger voters. Not an easy challenge. And while the design work itself looks good, I think each of them missed the big picture objective by failing to speak to core Republican values.

First up is Pentagram.

Pentagram proposes a solution that zooms in on the “Re” part of “Republican”, tying the prefix to a list of positive, progressive, change-oriented objectives. It frankly and straightforwardly admits that the party needs to do some soul-searching and needs to rebuild some of their ideas from the ground up, but spins it in a positive
way as if the change is complete.

Awesome Obama flag flying proudly outside Pentagram’s Manhattan headquarters

I’ll admit, however, that I was shocked at Pentagram’s solution from the first moment I saw it: Two years ago I proposed that, in response to the GOP’s habitual use of the term “DemocRAT Party” (rather than the preferred term “Democratic Party”), Democrats should respond by simply using the term “RE-publican”, suggesting that the party’s ideology is just old-fashioned, backward-thinking slapped with a new paint job. But here’s Pentagram using the “re-” prefix as some kind of positive, forward-thinking signifier.

Newsweek explains that Pentagram’s “re-” approach “shifts the dialogue” from potentially negative connotations by commandeering the prefix for positive purposes. I think it does just the opposite, inviting us to fill in our own descriptive words. In fact, I think Pentagram may have already used up almost all of the positive “re-” words in this single design. All the rest are pretty awful: retread, regressive, repressive, retarded, reactionary. I don’t see why any party would want to be “re-” anything, in particular the Republican Party.

In fact, just yesterday a candidate for RNC chair pre-emptively rejected (no pun intended) exactly this approach:

“I’m trying to avoid the use of words that start with ‘re,’ words like renewal, rebuild, recharge, re-this and re-that,” Steele wrote in a memo to RNC members. “I’m convinced we should not re-anything. Instead, we must stand proudly for the timeless principles our Party has always stood for.”

In fact, it’s hard to see Pentagram’s design as anything but anti-GOP propaganda. The editors at Newsweek claim that these four firms are “non-partisan”. I don’t know about the other three, but in the case of Pentagram I suspect they might have a sleeper cell on their hands. If so, seriously: Bravo Pentagram!

Our next redesign comes from The Groop, the only boutique firm in this mix. I didn’t know much about them before, but their portfolio and clients are really impressive.

Newsweek describes The Groop’s design approach as “Out: ‘old money,’ ‘faith-based.’ In: ‘new wealth,’ ’spirituality-based.’”. And I think right there is the problem. How many Republicans would ever want to replace “faith” with “spirituality”? That’s the kind of thing that Republicans make fun of Democrats for! This is great liberal design.

Next up is Razorfish, who proposes, essentially (and I hate to be petty), that the GOP should copy Barack Obama’s groundreaking iPhone app almost verbatim, with the biggest differences being fewer features and using a red background instead of blue.

Yes, I know the point is to show that the GOP should use social media more. But seriously, “GOP Issues Trivia?” I don’t even think there is an idea here.

At least Razorfish isn’t asking the GOP to abandon their policies. Let’s move on.

The fourth firm is Frog Design, who focuses on emotional qualities of freshness and vitality without a radical shift in ideology.

Frog, I think, hit the nail closest to the head. There it says, plain and simple, “small government”, not just getting the GOP’s ideology right, but predicting what will likely be the right’s biggest critique of President Obama’s policies and leadership in the coming years. And while the photo suggests diversity, it’s not too diverse.

My criticism of this design, however, is the weakness of it –  weakness in contrast with strength. Compare it to John McCain’s or George Bush’s graphic design, both of which evoke muscular military and sports brands. Hand-written lowercase lettering and a cute sumi-e elephant don’t quite evoke the “daddy party” strength that the GOP has traded on for decades as its core emotional and psychological attraction. Without this fundamental strength on display, I wonder if this branding would alienate as many Republicans as it embraces.

Perhaps it’s the initial framing of the problem itself that’s distracting these design teams: They were asked to reposition the party to appeal to younger voters. But how can a party appeal to a demographic who already cherishes certain values (such as diversity and tolerance) that are permanently and irrevocably diametrically opposed to the values of at least a third of the party’s base? Not an enviable challenge.

But maybe it’s an even bigger problem, one that branding cannot solve. Re-branding cannot help the GOP any more than re-branding VHS can help it compete with DVD. The product itself is obsolete and needs to be changed.

All these redesigns attempt to paint the GOP as something it is not: an organization in favor of scientific and technological progress, social change, a capable and pro-active government, and cultural diversity. But the party itself has, with great success, for almost five decades specifically defined itself against these things — that’s what loyal Republicans like about their party.

If these four firms really addressed the re-branding challenge correctly, they would have focused on selling the Republican Party’s values to sympathetic customers, not on presenting the party as something it is not. All four approaches would clearly speak directly to the party’s core values. Despite a change of voice and style, the re-branded message should still speak about the GOP’s actual policies: That taxes and regulations are oppressive, that abortion is wrong, that homosexuality is wrong, that excessive cultural diversity is undermining American society, that a strong military is what makes America great, and that individual freedom trumps even well-meaning government intervention.

What’s probably true is that the party itself needs to change and needs to actually embrace some of the values on display in these designs. It seems likely that these design teams were, in a way, suggesting to the GOP that they need to change who they are, not just how they present themselves. But that’s a long way off — a generation of Republican politicians will need to retire and die before the party will bend on many of these policies. These redesigns might be useful in 2025. For now, however, I doubt the GOP will take any of this advice.

Until then, perhaps some of these branding ideas could still be useful: Recycle them and give them to the party they best fit: the Democrats.

Are you a Republican? Do these redesigns speak to you?

UPDATE: This article by Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica outlines exactly how clueless the Republicans are when it comes to using social media and technology to communicate about their message. But more fundamentally it argues that the party itself doesn’t have a clear message in the first place. What’s more, it’s only remaining message — opposition — is weak:

The dangerous temptation right now, especially for a party in the minority, is to seek to recapitulate the Cold War coalition model through oppositional self-definition, when something more robust is called for.

I feel like I better stop before I give the GOP any more good ideas.

What do you do with a video camera? You video.

I’ve always wanted to coin a phrase or invent a word, to have a term of my own invention be spoken by thousands or even millions of people every day. An astonishingly large number of my friends and peers have done exactly this, some spectacularly so. From ambient intimacy to ajax, blogs to folksonomies, topless meetings to everyware, veterans of the Information Architecture scene have been a prolific lot.

I’ll admit that while I don’t spend a lot of time trying to invent catchy and useful new additions to the lexicon, I do harbor a hope of someday joining this group with a worthwhile word of my own.

For now, then, I wish to formally submit for peer review a humble nomination (so to speak) in the rough vicinity of true coinages. It’s not exactly a real neologism, as the word itself as a string of letters already exists. It’s more like a newly permissible usage:

• video (verb) to record motion pictures to a medium other than film, such as video tape or digital media, whether recorded directly from life with a camera or transferring from one motion picture medium to another non-film medium.

The word’s current definition doesn’t include a verb form. I think we need one. Examples:

• I will video my daughter in her school play tonight.
• Make sure you set the DVR to video the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica next weekend.

We already have one-word verbs for most technological communications: mail, film, photograph, record, tape, phone, and fax. We email, IM, Google, and tweet. We even used to use the one-word verb videotape when video was recorded on whirring VHS, Hi-8, and DV cameras. Why must we bend over backwards linguistically to say “shoot video” (as if cameras were guns) or “record with my digital video recorder” just to avoid the anachronistic “videotape” — when “video” does the job so succinctly?

Interestingly, the Latin origin of the word is a verb: “video” means “(I) see”. And in the future “nadsat” vocabulary of A Clockwork Orange, the word “viddy” is used as a verb, meaning both “to see” and at another level “to understand” or even “to dream”. Perhaps we need to go that far and start using a whole new word for recorded visual experiences as we enter an era where the line between fantasy and reality, truth and fiction, media and life itself, is becoming blurred.

We can always viddy later. For now, however, we need to video.

Finally, I will confess that one of the main reasons for writing this post is to shamelessly and selfishly lay claim to this usage call for making this usage acceptable in the new official history of early 21st century humanity (i.e. Google’s index). Yoo hoo, Google? Guess what? “Video” is now a verb.

Debating the merits of competing design ideas is fun and, as I’ve argued in parts one and two, can be extremely productive. But some design disputes are, I think, unanswerable. And it’s important to realize when a debate has crossed over from something you can resolve to something you will never reach any definitive conclusion over. Matters of personal preference, style, and taste.

Any given product or application’s appeal and usability success, or lack thereof, might ultimately come down to each individual user’s personal taste. There is a broad landscape of different approaches to UI and UX design, and the variance often adds up to a question of style — not of simple “good” or “bad” design principles.

The eternal which way to roll the toilet paper controversy, and the more academic terminal serial comma debate both come to mind, where empirical measures of success may indeed be possible but are nonetheless trivial when compared to what different kinds of people actually prefer. If someone likes their toilet paper oriented the “wrong” way, rolling it the “right” way will utterly fail to satisfy them, even if it makes the TP user experience more efficient in every measurable way.

In short, one can decry the very real and plainly egregious usability violations of any particular design decision, and you can even “prove” you’re right in usability testing. But you can’t argue against real users who actually prefer it any more than you can argue with people who prefer boxers over briefs or blue over red.

This doesn’t mean you simply throw up your hands and give up simply because you can’t please everybody. Because guess what? You can never please everybody.
It simply means that in the design process you have to make a choice to make some people happy and other people not so happy. Of course you can give users options or preferences, making life for both groups a little more complicated. Lots of (inelegant and bloated) products do precisely that.

But you can also choose to declare that your product is just for people whose personal idiosyncrasies and tastes are compatible with the product’s nature. And then you simply write off everyone else, letting the market fulfill their needs with a different product. It doesn’t help anyone to be greedy and try to make the same product work for all kinds of people when you are up against factors that cannot ever be decided. Find these factors as early as you can and make those hard decisions, one way or the other.

[tp configuration images by Brian Mathis, whose opinion, by the way, is just plain wrong ;-) ]

You can’t really validate or invalidate a design idea just by looking at it and declaring it a success or failure because of some best practice or design heuristic that usually works. You’re just talking about theories. Ultimately, no design disputes can be settled convincingly without making a model and testing it out.

But a theoretical debate about the strengths and weaknesses of a design is a critical first step that design teams must pass through before actually going off and testing their designs. To me, a good design critique is a kind of low fidelity user testing: using our imaginations instead of using a lab and test subjects.

Regarding the inspiration for my previous post, the absurd-looking application “Bulk Rename Utility“, the debate was almost predominantly based on “gut opinions” — albeit by many people with expertise in UI design. And I think that’s great. In my particular gut, I suspected that this app would surprise people and do well in testing. Others felt in their guts (and present compelling arguments, too) that this app would fail miserably in a user test.

What’s great about having this kind of hypothetical discussion at all (especially when the debate might seem to be easily and quickly settled by simply testing the application with real users) is that we learn more about the kinds of things we would need to think about and the questions we should be asking when we actually do test the application. Without debating the options we might not have uncovered (for example) these kinds of questions to ask during testing:

• Would different types of users react to the app in different ways?
• Do different apps with the same stated purpose serve different use cases?
• Is efficiency important, or a feeling of efficiency?
• Is preventing error of primary importance, or permitting error correction?

Sometimes the expert critiques and gut reactions are so compelling (whether positive or negative) that an experienced designer will know right away that formal user research would be a waste of time. Sometimes it’s just obvious — but only becomes obvious once you’ve thought it through, especially if you’re talked it through with other people.

And, of course, testing can be dead wrong. Seinfeld was famously rejected by test audiences, and finished last in the ratings in its first season.

Then there are the “unknown unknowns” (a Donald Rumsfeld-ism that I think is entirely valid and sensible). There are some design decisions that seem so obvious, and may even test well, but fail miserably because of an completely unforeseen factor in real-world practice. Our goal as designers considering design options is to try to minimize the number of unknown unknowns. And again, the best way to uncover unknown potential problems is to imagine as many of them as possible through lively debate from diverse viewpoints.

Whether you user-test your product or not, there’s no doubt that a lively, opinionated and adversarial discussion about any complex design decision, especially a user experience design decision, can only help the overall product development process.

Disagreeing with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as I did two weeks ago, is like walking into a minefield. Although Gruber has a cutting wit, he is thoughtful and respectful when it comes to discussions of technology and design. But when you spar with Gruber, you also step into the ring with his readership, tens of thousands of people who have strong and spirited opinions about design. People not afraid to say what’s on their mind.

It’s eye-opening, to say the least. And not just Daring Fireball’s readers. Any large group of opinions is going to produce surprises. As seen in last week’s post on Lizard People, when you look at the reactions of large groups of people you get a fair share of what Malcolm Gladwell has called “outliers“, folks whose ideas and opinions don’t quite fit in nicely on the map.

Going out on a limb and taking a position on an issue — even if you’re not sure you’re right about it — will always inspire debate. And from the churn of debate, good ideas can emerge. The more churn, the more likely a surprising outlier will emerge.

This is the essence of collaboration.

The only thing that will put a damper on this healthy churn is disrespect. Respect is absolutely essential to fruitful collaboration, especially if you want to glean powerful insights from a lively debate. And respect is multidirectional — in any group there are going to be power dynamics. For example on a blog the blog’s owner has the power of the soapbox (and the moderation toolkit) to suppress or censor debate. And some commenters exploit the power of anonymity, tossing firebombs with no regard for any common objective.

It is the responsibility of all who want to benefit from discussion to do what they can to flatten these power relationships by bending over backwards to respect their collaborators. Those with more power must frequently cede it. Those with less power must not resort to rhetorical violence to assert it.

This also applies in organizations — managers, bosses, and clients often have to relinquish the leverage they posess (the ability to rule by fiat, or to veto at will) if they want their teams to really open up.

Khoi Vinh recently wrote about a project his team at the New York Times has been developing and has just released, called Times Extra. It’s an optional user feature that introduces links to related content on other web sites. It’s a pretty radical idea, guaranteed to ruffle many feathers. Khoi and his team really went out on a limb with this, and they knew it. Khoi described the trepidation they felt (and managed to get over, thankfully) as a kind of “Fear of Design“.

Times Extra is an experiment in modestly redesigning the user experience; whether it’s a success or not is up to you and all of our users. Hopefully enough people will find it useful for us to evolve it further; I don’t think any of us suppose that this is really the last word in how third-party links can be expressed on the site. My point is that, as designers, an aversion to flouting the rules of visual decorum often doesn’t serve us well. Nor for that matter does a fear of failure.

The opposite of fear, of course, is courage. It takes courage to present your design ideas when you are sure you will face criticism. When even you yourself are unsure of the correctness of your idea. Simply put, you will never be a good designer without taking risks.

Team of Rivals

I am extremely pleased with President-Elect Obama’s Lincoln-like “Team of Rivals” approach to building his cabinet. Great ideas simply can not emerge from single-minded groupthink.  Greg Storey sees this as extremely relevant to design collaboration:

The more you live and work around people who rarely present a different viewpoint, the softer your brain gets, the more complacent you become…

I am a big fan not just of permitting multiple perspectives, but mandating it. Forcing yourself to come up with more than one idea. Requiring a team of designers to all contribute multiple low-fidelity solutions before focusing on only one. This is why I love sketching as a formal practice — it permits the creator of an idea to put any single idea aside and work on another one without too much investment (of time or emotional energy).

• Jerome Ryckborst has a great slideshow describing his company’s “Five Sketches or Else” approach to ideation.
• Victor Lombardi encourages a breadth-before-depth approach to early-stage concept development.
• Of course, Apple works this way, too.

Okay, so we’ve got multiple voices and ideas out in the open. How shall we decide which to believe? Next post…

I have two pieces of advice for user experience design professionals visiting their families over the traditional end-of-year holiday season.

First, take this opportunity to do some intimate, informal usability testing with your family and loved ones. I’ve written about this before, but I am encouraging it again: There’s a good chance that many of those you will spend time with over the next few weeks will be, when it comes to using interfaces, “regular people”. Perfect test subjects.

What’s more, when you observe user testing in a lab, chances are you know next to nothing about the people behind the glass. But when you’re home with your family, you know your subjects deeply. You know their idiosyncrasies and interests, their weaknesses and strengths.

So that big web site you’ve been working on all year? Don’t just show it to Mom and Dad. Make them sign up for it and use it. And watch them.

I also suggest something new: Interview them. Video them.* Especially the older ones.

For the last decade of her father’s life, my wife would interview him for an hour or more almost every time we visited her parents, videotaping each interview. For his funeral, she edited all the tapes into a single 45-minute movie where he tells stories from his incredible life. It’s hard to understate how happy this video made a lot of people.

More and more people are collecting stories from their families and sharing them with their families and even the public. So this holiday season, why not kill two birds with one stone: video your family but in particular talk to them about what is important to you, trying to find out the historical roots of your own life and interests. You might, for example, ask about user experiences and interaction design in their younger lives. You could ask what using computers, phones, or other machines was like when your parents or grandparents were young.

Lots of people shoot video of their families. But not many really step back and approach it as a formal interview by having some questions and topics in mind when the conversation begins, letting the subject know that what they say serves a purpose.

You’ll learn a lot about history and design — but most importantly about yourself and your family. And you’ll have a recording you’ll treasure forever.

[* Yes, I am using the word “video” as a verb. The word “videotape” is already in common usage as a verb, but it’s ludicrous to use it to describe tape-less video. Hell, “tape” is a verb, too. The phrase “shoot a video” is unwieldy when a single word will do just fine and when “shoot” is, er, a loaded word… as the title of this post demonstrates. Besides, it’s kinda cute to say “video” as a verb. Trust me. Just say “video”.]

I am a 37-year-old user experience designer, and I don’t have a driver’s license. I don’t even know how to drive a car. I moved to New York City when I was 18 and I just never really needed to learn.

Moreover, I don’t even find automobiles all that interesting or seductive, at least not the ones I see on the streets today. They’re certainly not, as they were a half-century ago, a glimpse into some hopeful and mind-boggling future. Rather, to me, the automobile is a symbol of a bygone era of American industry, culture, and lifestyle.

Because of my obvious dispassion for car culture, I think I can offer an unconventional and hopefully useful perspective on the struggling American auto industry.

I mean, everybody else seems to have a theory about how to save Detroit. And I’ll admit that I find myself reluctantly sympathetic with those who are calling for a radical, technology- based transformation of the business. Whether admonishing the industry to “Stop Building Cars“, encouraging a conversion to a design-based auto industry (some flat out asking “What if Steve Jobs ran GM?“), scolding the automakers while debating bailing them out (it’s amusing to hear Senator Richard Shelby chiding the automakers for their lack of “inn-o-vation” in his Alabama drawl), or Andy Grove pushing Intel to invest in critical battery research for electric cars, it’s clear that many people think the American auto industry’s ultimate salvation will be in cutting-edge technology and design.

I find myself frequently nodding my head at these suggestions. The tech geek in me agrees that there is something the tech business is doing right that the auto business is doing wrong.

What is it? Well, it’s two things.

The ‘58 Bulgemobile Catalog, from Bruce McCall’s Zany Afternoons.

Design

The first problem, what everyone focuses on, is the product itself. The design. The whole “car experience”, which really hasn’t changed much in decades. AFAIK, the only truly important developments in the last 25 years have been hybrids and GPS.

And from the industry’s perspective the most significant and successful design innovation has, ironically, also been the instrument of its recent decline: the outrageous and gluttonous giganticness of SUVs (which really isn’t all that innovative when you consider the gigantism rampant in automotive design of the 1950s).

It all seems so dead to me. My desire to learn to drive — to the extent that it exists at all — feels on an emotional level similar to my desire to smoke a cigarette, own a beeper, rent a videotape at Blockbuster, or sign up for 600 free minutes of AOL. Which is to say that the whole idea (of driving!) seems silly and old fashioned and lame.

It’s easy for me to imagine a hundred ways that cars could be better — from energy efficiency to user experience to aesthetics, or even fundamentally rethinking the infrastructure of highways and roads and parking. Plenty of other people are also describing Detroit’s many design and technology shortcomings elsewhere. If it were not for the fact that the auto industry is still an integral part of my country’s economy and the livelihood of millions of Americans, and if the auto business hadn’t in previous generations worked at technology’s bleeding edge, I’d be completely apathetic about the whole question of automotive user experience design.

Unlike many of my peers (most of whom drive, of course), I can barely muster up enough interest in the fate of the auto industry to bother to speculate about the details of how cars might be improved from a design perspective. It’s like trying to get excited about designing a new kind of whaling harpoon or devising a new kind of portable CD player. I mean, who cares? What good will it do?

But that is precisely the problem: How can we expect innovation from Detroit when creative and technology workers like myself have no desire to lift a finger to help the automotive business? And forget about me, middle-aged and settled in my web career: Why should a 22-year-old technology or design whiz kid want to build cars when they could be working with far cooler, more exciting, and less environmentally-damaging technologies?

Designers

Don’t get me wrong: Plenty of extraordinarily talented and inventive people work in the auto industry. But it’s just not at the same level as the excitement and innovation we see in design on the web, on our mobile phones, and on our desktops. It doesn’t resonate with the public imagination.

I ask myself this question: “Would I want to work there?” Or one of my friends and colleagues? A talented young software engineer? A recent design-school graduate? As a future-thinking knowledge worker, someone like me should be strongly tempted to work for an auto company.

The biggest problem is not that the auto companies are making products consumers don’t want — people will continue to buy cars and muddle through the lackluster design and user experiences, the outrageous fuel costs, the physical danger, and the unconscionable pollution. No, the real, long-term problem with Detroit is that the automakers are just not the kind of companies the next generation of innovators will want to work for.

I don’t know the answer to this, particularly from a public policy perspective, but it’s important that we all frame the real question correctly. It’s not about the design, it’s about the designers. It’s about the workers.

(NOTE: I hate to seem sympathetic with the techno-futurist camp. There’s something terribly elitist about scolding Detroit for not being like Silicon Valley. It’s unforgivably crass to suggest that we just let the automakers precipitously fail and let their workers drift into unemployment and poverty. There is knowledge and talent in the industry today, know-how that needs to be used to make the new auto industry even better. A sudden lurch into industrial calamity, with an eventual triumphant rebirth in California garages, sounds like an idealistic and romantic story. But it’s not so romantic to the hundreds of thousands of people without a paycheck. The solution needs to be driven by practical needs, not dramatic storylines.)

Today is the seventh anniversary of the incorporation of Behavior, the humble web and user experience design consultancy I helped found in 2001. Happy birthday to us!

My four awesome partners and I started the company in what at the time seemed like the worst possible economic climate to launch a new business. The one-two punch of the dot-com bust and the 9/11 attacks were knocking many companies out, including the company we’d all been working at together for the previous several years. It seems crazy, but it actually made sense to us at the time. In fact, since we all lost our jobs at the collapsing web consulting firm, we almost had no choice but to band together to keep working doing what we loved to do: designing user experiences.

Now that our economy is in recession again (and apparently has been so for a year now), we’re thankful that we honed our business skills in a climate of scarcity (I call it our crucible) rather than a climate of free-flowing venture capital. Over the years and through many changes, this experience has always been immensely valuable to us.

In this season of giving thanks, I want to thank all the talented people who have worked with us over these seven years, and who continue to work with us today. Without you, of course, we wouldn’t be here at all. Cheers!

In Minnesota, they are currently recounting the ballots in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. As part of the process, they are re-analyzing thousands of ballots that were discarded during the initial optical-scan machine count due to problems with the ballots themselves — usually stray marks and incompletely-filled-in dots. Usually, a human being can figure out the “voter intent” when the machine failed in the initial count.

Sometimes, however, the voter intent isn’t all that clear. Minnesota Public Radio has put up photographs of some of the more interesting examples of disputed ballots. And, in a weird kind of democratic recursiveness, is asking visitors to vote on the votes!

This is especially fascinating to me as an interaction designer because it emphasizes yet again how our users are not at all the rational, predictable beings we sometimes assume they are. They’ll click on anything and everything, and will fill in forms with the weirdest stuff you can think of. These ballots remind me of the kind of weird stuff you see in usability testing sessions and when analyzing the actual information users input into, say, e-commerce order forms (putting their name in the zip code field, for example, or writing angry profane messages in the address field).

My favorite is this guy who seems to have voted for Al Franken, and then risked negating his vote by writing in “Lizard People” as a write-in candidate (thinking, presumably, that it won’t count because he didn’t also fill in the circle next to it). Mischievousness, civic service, and abject nihilism are clearly fighting for this guy’s very soul — and the outcome is clearly too close to call.

(Hopefully, this is one of the last election-themed posts I make for a while.)

John Gruber invites public ridicule to the UI design of this file renaming application. And yes, it certainly looks terrible, like a stereotypical case study in haphazard, bloated, bad UI design.

But is the UI design really that bad? I’m not so sure.

As someone who has had to do all manner of complex and esoteric batch file renaming over my career, this tool looks pretty darn powerful to me. I’ve had to do some absurdly massive batch file renaming (hundreds or even thousands of files) about twenty times in my life, and every single time it’s been a unique and bizarre challenge.

This is one of those tools where, at a fundamental level, more features is better than less. Fewer features make this tool less likely to serve its core function: saving your ass during a freak once-in-a-lifetime file renaming emergency. Even the wacky features like renumbering the files using roman numerals doesn’t seem absurd to me. This tool is intended for people without ninja-like mastery of the black art of regex construction (and, for that matter, for office production workers who may not know how to program anything at all, for example a photo editor).

So if it’s not the number of features that’s bad, let’s focus on the UI itself. The signature quality of this design is that every single feature is shown on one page. There are no layers of dialog boxes, no multistep wizards. The fields are numbered, too, which seems to suggest the order the transformations are processed. The entire transformation is right there for the user to see, no surprises. What’s more, showing all the possible transformations on this one screen educates the user on what the application can actually do: No poking around through menus and manuals to find out what this app is capable of. It’s all right there.

My only substantive critique, in fact, would be aesthetic: the grid of the page and the layout of the form elements could be more pleasing and better organized from an information design perspective.

Is that the nut of Gruber’s critique? Or is he being a little hasty in his judgement here?

It looks like big-name real-world celebrities are getting into the Twittering business. In addition to the presidential candidates, lately I’ve seen Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Britney Spears, and many more.

Whenever one of these new Twitter celebs crosses your path, I don’t think you should necessarily accept it at face value. Ask yourself: What is really going on here? What kind of twitterer is this?

• An Imposter: A fan (or maybe an enemy) Twitter-squatter who has claimed the celebrity’s identity and has not yet been shut down or replaced by the real celeb.
• An Agent: A public relations agency has been hired by the celebrity to use Twitter to publicize their activities. The celeb has little to no knowledge whatsoever about what the hell is going on in their name on Twitter, or for that matter even have a foggy idea of what Twitter is. I suspect a large number of celebrity twitterers are of this type, and of course their fans either fall for the ruse or don’t care (in the age of professional wrestling “sports entertainment”, is there any difference?)
• An Assistant: The celebrity has an aide, perhaps their secretary or personal assistant, who writes the tweets for the celeb. When I first started using Twitter I imagined a corporate CEO fatcat barking orders to their beleaguered secretary — in the same voice they would have used in the 1950’s to say “Judy! Take a memo!” to get their secretary to grab a pen and paper and ready themselves for dictation — shouting “Take a tweet!”
• The Real Deal: The celebrity ho blog themselves, with their own bare hands, using a real computer or mobile phone to tell their fans and followers what they are really doing.

I also wonder about the emergence of another, parallel phenomenon: the dual-identity Twitter celeb. This is where a celebrity holds two Twitter accounts. One serves as a public-relations communication channel for the celebrity’s “brand”, letting the celebrity reach out to thousands of followers just as a business would. The other account, though, is a personal account and is kept secret. It may even have an false name, a nom-de-tweet. This account is used for the same thing Twitter is used for by most other people — as a way to keep informally in touch with their real friends and loved ones.

If you’re in NYC this Thursday, you should come to see From Sketching to Experience, the first of Liz Danzico’s Dot Dot Dot series of small, informal (and free) lectures. These lectures are the ramp-up to SVA’s new MFA in Interaction Design program. I’ll be one of the speakers this Thursday, and am also going to be on the SVA faculty as well when the program starts in 2009.

This lecture should be fun — four speakers from different backgrounds in a short-and-sweet presentation format. Please join us!

From the official site:

Crossword constructors sketch in pencil before ever laying a grid down, filmmakers rely on storyboards before ever picking up a camera, and cartoonists go pane by pane before designing a strip. Before interaction designers go high fidelity, sketches provide the method by which they communicate process, flow, layout — and importantly, story. Learn from four practitioners of divergent backgrounds how they practice sketching to get to their final product.

Speakers
Join us for the first lecture to hear from:

• Tom Bodkin, design director, New York Times
• Jake Barton, founder and principal, Local Projects
• Andrew Sloat, graphic designer and videomaker
• Christopher Fahey, founding partner, Behavior; forthcoming faculty, MFA Interaction Design

Details
Thursday, November 13
6-8PM (RSVP)
White Rabbit
145 E Houston Street (View Map)
New York

This is a website Behavior made for the Smithsonian’s American Museum of National History during the 2004 Presidential election campaign. It is the web companion for Vote: The Machinery of Democracy, an exhibition of artifacts from America’s long and colorful history of voting technologies.

It was a fascinating physical exhibition. And I’m still proud of our interactive exhibition, too (both the Flash and HTML versions). It’s just as relevant today as it was four years ago in our first post-chad Presidential election (although the interactive map is a little out of date by now — to see a more up-to-date but less-detailed view of how voting technologies are distributed today, use the SciFi Channel’s new map from their surprisingly-good coverage of this topic).

As tomorrow’s historic election approaches, and many Americans will find this year’s voting user experience to be different than what they might be used to, I think it’s helpful to reflect upon the long and complex political and technological paths that got us here. For some colorful tales from yesteryear, see this New Yorker article from just last week. And it’s probably a good idea to learn where we are today: this New York Times article from January 2008 is a great place to start.

The Politics of User Experience

I just want to add one more thing, speaking as a user experience design professional:

It is a profound embarrassment to our profession that touch-screen voting exists at all in our country. It is an inferior system in every thinkable way, including — right up there with reliability, security, and cost — pure empirical usability. User experience experts should be up in arms over the very existence of these machines. Except perhaps for assisting with certain special needs voters, there is no excuse for a state government to have purchased these machines except for either old-fashioned corruption or a sad, abject gullibility for slick marketing presentations by election machine company salespeople. We Americans who call ourselves usability advocates should make it a goal to rid the USA of these machines by the 2012 elections. Who’s with me?

What if someone paid you thousands of dollars to design a user interface or an application for just one person?

Most design work is done for audiences: whether designing mass market products or niche objects of desire, we seldom have a single, real person in mind when we work. We think of audiences as groups of people with diverse needs and expectations. Even highly specialized equipment like NASA space suits are designed to fit a range of individual needs.

In the world of design very few endeavors revolve around a single person. Interior design and architecture are exceptions that come to mind, where often the final product is a private space for an individual, such as an office or a bedroom. And fashion design, too, where tailored suits and “bespoke” garments can still be custom-commissioned as an expensive alternative to the standard prêt-à-porter options we find on department store racks in sizes S, M, and L.

But very few other design practices, from graphic design to industrial design, ever require such a narrow focus. This is especially true for user interface design.

Perhaps, however, this is changing. Perhaps a new sort of interaction design client is emerging, users who desire and are willing to pay for bespoke user interfaces, interactive products designed for the exclusive use of one person.

John King and his “magic wall” at CNN is the de facto case study of the bespoke user interface. As any political buff knows, CNN has been flying high in the ratings for election-specific coverage, no doubt due in part to King’s compelling and dazzling maps. It’s hard to watch more than a few minutes of CNN’s prime time election coverage without seeing John King zooming in and out of the map, manipulating voting projections and simulating election outcomes, all with a few swipes of his fingers.

The magic wall emerged in the beginning of the 2008 primary season. Built by Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel, the magic wall has over the past 10 months introduced dozens of new features, allowing King to do more and more complex simulations, present deeper examinations of polling numbers, and reference encyclopedic historical data going back many decades.

And every time a new feature is introduced, King is already a master of it. Rarely does he tap the wrong state or switch to the wrong page. The map was made for King, and clearly he “trains” on it for each new feature. Now that’s user-centered design!

Extending the User Base

Actually, there is a second user. Last week Perceptive Pixel created a “remixed” version of King’s magic wall for Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen. The results: pure comic genius.

I should point out, however, that there are several kinds of bespoke design philosophies even among designers who design for larger audiences. For one thing, user personas permit designers to envision their target audience more narrowly, to view the user experience challenges on an individual basis rather than imagining their design being used by an amorphous faceless demographic group.

But there’s another kind of bespoke design approach.

The One True User

There is a single user that we all design for all the time. Some of us try hard to avoid talking about or even thinking about this user. Others, however, openly admit or even embrace discussions of how important this user’s opinions are.

I am speaking, of course, about “designing for yourself”.

Sun’s Tim Bray recently wrote:

Everything I’ve done over the years that’s worked out well—software, standards, writing—everything, without exception, was something I did for myself. I’ve done the other thing too: built things based on guesses about what people out there might want or need. Never worked, not once.

John Gruber (who provided the link above) agrees:

The most successful thing I’ve ever made is Markdown, and the one and only user I had in mind for it was me.

Jason Fried, too:

Designing for ourselves first yields better initial results because it lets us design what we know. It lets us assess quality quickly and directly, instead of by proxy. And it lets us fall in love with our products and feel passionate about what we make. There’s simply no substitute for that.

We’re like chefs. We make food that we think tastes good and that we believe in. We make it for customers who have the same sensibilities that we do. It might not be for everyone. That’s ok. But for people who think the way we do, and appreciate the things we appreciate, it’s perfect.

And if enough customers tell us our food is too salty or too hot, we may adjust the salt and the heat. But if some customers tell us to add bananas to our lasagna, we’re not going to make them happy at the expense of ruining the dish for everyone else. That doesn’t make us selfish. We’re just looking out for the greater good.

I find both perspectives rewarding: When designing for a client whose users are pretty different from me, I firmly believe that user research helps us design for the user-who-is-not-me. On the other hand, when designing for those users who are like me I definitely have a lot to bring to the table. What’s more, I would argue that the best interaction designers possess a great deal of self-knowledge about how they behave, react, and feel during user experiences, self-knowledge that improves their design abilities.

Put it this way: it’s better to have a designer with deep self-awareness and no end-user knowledge than a designer with no self-awareness and mountains of user research.

The two approaches can and of course should co-exist in any healthy project. It is, in fact, inevitable: No matter how much user research you do, there will be thousands of little design decisions for which you have no user to reference but yourself.

In the future, I can see bespoke user interfaces happening more and more. Wealthy executives will want personalized “dashboards” for their desktops. Presenters seeking dynamic displays for board meetings and public speaking. As design tools become simpler and more cost effective, this might be financially reasonable for reasonably successful individuals in business and in their personal environments.

It’s Already Happening

Finally, I thought I’d throw in this little case study on bespoke user interfaces.

You don’t have to be a celebrity to have a customized user interface built for you. Back when Behavior first started, we worked on a project for a successful former colleague who was spending some of his dot-com spoils on a new house. Part of his domestic vision was a home automation system — a system of touchscreens installed throughout the house to control the temperature, the lighting, and the audio on a room by room basis. A “smart home”, if you will.

Because our client was a designer himself, he found the out-of-the-box interface design for his new home automation system appalling to his good taste. Like many remote control devices, it was a manifest usability atrocity. But it was also a graphic design nightmare: beveled faux-marble textures, Times New Roman everywhere, and those ancient Windows 3.1 green check and red X icons we still occasionally see on shareware apps.

So he hired Behavior to redesign the UI, just for his house. We researched the technology behind the system, and working with the installation team we provided a new set of stylish screen assets that could replace the ugly default set. It wasn’t a huge job in time or dollars, but the results were, for him, profound: If you’ve can afford it, why not spend some of those interior decor dollars on a domestic user experience you are likely to use many times a day?

In fact, we’ve done a few other similar jobs. We did an animated (though linear) Flash presentation for a single P. Diddy press conference. We’ve done interactive Flash presentations for executives at IAC and Allen and Company to present data in a compelling way to management and investor meetings. In short, there already is a market for this kind of work.

I’ll put up screenshots if I can dig them up. They’re here!

We love sending video clips to each other. Links to YouTube videos of cute animals, spectacular accidents, inspiring speeches, nostalgic memories, and music videos fly back and forth through our email inboxes all day long. We gather around each others desks and call family members to our laptops to spend a few minutes watching a cool clip we just found.

It occurred to me that finding and sharing these videos is, or can be, an art form: creating curated mixes of many shorter video clips is, to me, analogous to the existing form of the DJ mix tape (or, in today’s digital terms, a playlist).

In fact, I love making mix tapes. And mix CDs. Making video mixes would be a natural fit for me.

I have friends who are video artists, combining original video work with found-video editing and collecting techniques. Some even use the term “VJ” to describe the curation and mixing of the videos together, more in the Christian Marclay or DJ Shadow sense than in the MTV sense.

Before digital video became as easy as it is today, and before YouTube made finding millions of source videos possible to anyone with a web browser, creating curating video mixes was solely the purview of these dedicated video artists, who had both expensive video editing equipment and mountains of space-consuming video tapes that they’d painstakingly collected over many years.

But now that the web has rendered both of those constraints moot, I’m surprised that I’ve not seen an easy way for web users to grab a bunch of video clips and create a single sharable curated playlist out of them. Sure you could download videos and use a desktop editor to string them together into a new piece (and, in fact, I’d love to see this sort of art form emerge, too), but a more democratic and reasonable way to do this would be for YouTube to allow users to create mixes on their own.

You would begin by filling out a form with a string of interesting video URLs. Click submit, and then YouTube collects those videos into a single page and a single video player, perhaps with credits or annotations appearing in a subtitle form between the clips. You could then send this new video mix as a single URL to your friends.

So here’s my first mix, minus the single unified player part. Ideally there would be single video player here, and all I would have done to create it was enter these six URLs into a form. For now, just play them one at a time, scrolling down the screen.

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