A great quality for a designer is that way of looking at something that’s become totally accepted and assumed and being able to ask “but how could we make it better?”
If you think about an electrical plug, you could think “they work – what’s still to do?”.
Well, for a start: which plug is which, and how do I know if it is on?
This is a great bit of email marketing by lastminute.com.au to try to persuade former users back to their site. Nicely taps into why people use the site in the first place. But above all, it’s got personality.
I love great food, and nothing tops off great food like great service. In fact, great food can easily go bland in the mouth if the people serving you treat you with contempt or disregard.
But it’s not just food, is it? Really it’s relevant to any service industry or team with an organisation. It’s actually relevant to us.
Which is why I was fascinate that someone has dissected hospitality and come up with a Hospitality Quotient (I guess similar to IQ and the more recent Emotional Quotient – EQ).
Here are the emotional skills Danny Meyer says contributes to a high HQ:
- optimism and kindness
- curiosity about learning [BC: don’t we love the curiosity word!]
- an exceptional work ethic
- a high degree of empathy
- self-awareness and integrity
The other little gem from the post is this great spin on the old “the customer is always right”—> “The customer is not always right. While the customer is not always right, he/she must always feel heard.” I know that’s often the perfect frame of mind as we take stakeholders along the design journey, unfolding the value of our user-centred approach.
It’s always good to be reminded of the power of good writing, purely because it engages you and makes you want to read more, rather than shut off.
Here’s a review of a software development process book (“Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg, founder of that great webzine salon.com), written by the ever-engaging Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware.com).
The [Quick Context}(http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/01/02.html) and the Actual Review.
Even though it’s a little off topic, it’s relevant to user experience, because one of the key points is: make sure the concepts and interactions you are developing are things people actual want and can understand – rather than something that makes sense from a programming architecture point-of-view.
And there is also this gem about designing before programming and the need for solitary thought-space to do this:
[Error] Number two, you hired programmers before you designed the thing. Because the only thing harder than trying to design software is trying to design software as a team. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a meeting with even one or two other programmers, trying to figure out how something should work, and we’re just not getting anywhere. So I go off in my office and take out a piece of paper and figure it out. The very act of interacting with a second person was keeping me from concentrating enough to design the dang feature.
What kills me is the teams who get into the bad habit of holding meetings every time they need to figure out how something is going to work. Did you ever try to write poetry in a committee meeting? It’s like a bunch of fat construction guys trying to write an opera while sitting on the couch watching Baywatch. The more fat construction guys you add to the couch, the less likely you are to get opera out of it.
At least turn off the TV!
Often sites that strive to be all user-centred trip over on the legal text. It’s as if all too hard, and hey, who reads all that stuff anyway. Which says to me that it is more for butt covering than being helpful.
But does it have to be that way?
OXO’s Ts&Cs were are great example of how it doesn’t have to be so.
And this recent example of Linux provider Red Hat cutting their Service Level Agreement (SLA) from 7 pages of legalese to 1 page of simple information:
Meanwhile, back at Sensis…
Recently when designing a new and coming identity system, I was determined that the registration page shouldn’t have the near ubiquitous teeny-weeny scrolling box of legal text that no-one reads, just complicates the interface and says everything in the opposite direction of “we want to be helpful, simple and straight with you”.
So here’s the proposed design:
The text is just made-up at the moment, but you get the idea. Hopefully someone can read this and think “ah, that’s what it means if I sign up to this site”. The concept has in-principle support from our legal department, but I’m sure the devil will be in the detail. Fingers crossed as we fight the good fight.
We’ve seen it again and again. Every company wants to be an innovator. They’ll stick an Apple logo up as an exemplar organisation. Everyone wants to have the iPod of their product category.
But of course you have to do the things that Apple does to get their results. And that is often very hard, and involves change. Hell, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. But just like eating well and exercising regularly to lose weight, it isn’t rocket surgery either. And one of the key things Apple does is give prime attention to design.
Here’s an article about design at Apple.
It’s only a few pages and worth a read, but here are my fave gems quotes:
On spending design time up-front:
…today Apple spends 15 to 20 percent of its industrial-design time on concept—far more than most other computer companies—and the rest on implementation.
On design-by-commitee and consensus design:
[Apple’s former process] was a consultative process – many different points of view and impressions were solicited. But this can lead to a lack of cohesion in the product, when you find yourself asking another manager, ‘What are you adding in?’ … you’d get a cascade of people responsible for various factors injecting their concerns. … The businessman wants to create something for everyone, which leads to products that are middle of the road. It becomes about consensus, and that’s why you rarely see the spark of genius.
On having a singular design vision:
Critical to Apple’s success in design is the way [Steve] Jobs brought focus and discipline to the product teams. [Jobs] had a single, cohesive image of the final product and would not allow any deviation, no matter how promising a new proposed feature appeared to be, no matter how much the team complained. Other companies are more democratic, listening to everyone’s opinions, and the result is bloat and a lack of cohesion.
On keeping features out:
The hardest part of design, especially consumer electronics, is keeping features out. Simplicity is in itself a product differentiator, and pursuing it can lead to innovation. The most fundamental thing about Apple that’s interesting is that they’re just as smart about what they don’t do. Great products can be made more beautiful by omitting things.
On clarity of vision and the difference between Apple and Sony:
[Apple’s design team’s] a small team that takes a very, very hands-on approach. Compared with Sony: the process of approval, and collaboration generally—for everything from shape to engineering—involves tons of people, taking up to 50 percent of the time, watering it down. What makes Apple Apple and not Sony is clarity of voice and vision.
“Just make it simple!” It’s what many of us do for a living. But what design rules are there to help direct the path to simple.
There are some crude ones. “Everything on a site should be just 3 clicks away” has been around for a while, and has recently been given a Telstra make-over as “One Click”.
Steve Krug, in his wonderful book “Don’t Make Me Think!”, refutes this simplistic rule of thumb, saying that users would prefer 5 or more super simple and obvious clicks rather than 3 clicks that each take a whole lot of thinking. Sure, all things being equal, reduce the clicks, but not at the cost of added thinking and complexity (aka “cognitive load”).
John Gruber, of the insightful Mac site Daring Fireball, recently posted Deal with it, in which he echoes and expands Tantek Celik’s statement that, all things being equal, less user interface controls means a simpler interface.
His refinement goes like this: It isn’t so much the number of controls, but how many “things” on an interface you have to “deal with” to get your task done. Again, it’s about cognitive load. Don’t make me think. It’s not just keystokes or fields.
His example is the event entering interface of Mac OS X’s iCal (think: lots of separate fields for every element) and 37signals’s Backpack (a single type-anything-and-we’ll-work-it-out-for-you field).
He hints at it in his article, but one thing we have to be mindful of is the trade-offs between Efficiency and Learnability. For a commonly-used productivity application like a calendar program, you turn up the dial on efficiency and provide ways for a newbie to progress to competent intermediate as fast as possible.
(You can go too far on the single entry field, of course. You can solve world hunger and peace if you know the right words and symbols to type into a Google search field. Most of its extended use has almost zero learnability.)
But it’s a bit tricker with our websites - it’s more of a balancing act. Demote learnability too much and you’ve lost the newbies. Spell out everything every time, and your familiar user starts puckering up to the single field simplicity of a Google map. Would I rather spell out every field individually, or just type in “bunnings fitzroy” into a single field on White Pages and have it find the closest one to me (with an option to disambiguate and remember which Fitzroy I was actually meaning on the results pages)?
But back to “Deal with it”. Count how many things you are asking a user to deal with to complete their task. And how hard is it to deal with each one - how much thinking’s involved? What’s the room for error? And have we consciously made the trade-off between learnability and efficiency that’s appropriate for the situation?
If only simple was easy!
In some environments, there’s such a focus on justifying/prioritising every feature and only building the bare essentials that you end up with something that is perfectly functional, but nothing special. Certainly nothing to talk to your friends about – nothing that would generate word of mouth adoption.
Call it the 105% Rule. From a word-of-mouth perspective, it’s virtually impossible to discuss an experience that is 5% better than the norm on all dimensions. People don’t talk like mystery shoppers, reporting diligently on each relevant feature. People talk about the exceptions, the unexpected, the highlights.
The full, interesting article in Fast Company provides a number of interesting examples – home-made cookies at a mid-level hotel chain, grannies knitting beanies for UK juice packaging. It’s worth a read.
Do we champion and strive to dream up and add that gem that’s really going to differentiate? It’s hard at times in some companies…
Most organizations systematically snuff out anything that’s distinctive enough to spark conversation, usually through processes and committees. Would woolen caps for smoothie bottles have survived a committee decision at Coca-Cola? Could a formal market-research process have justified the VW Beetle’s bud vase? (“Our conjoint analysis has revealed that customers’ willingness to pay increases by $112 with the bud vase.”) When people with different opinions compromise, they meet in the middle, not at the edge. But the edge is what sparks conversation.
In the recent joint Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview they were asked about that they most admire of the other. I think the answer is a good summary of the differences of the two companies and their products, and what you get if you’re frame of reference and driving point is ultimately about people and the products that will make sense and be needed by them.
Bill of Steve:
“Oh, I’d give a lot of have Steve’s taste. He has natural, intuitive taste both for people and products. We sat in Mac software reviews where there were questions about software choices – how things would be done – and I’d hear an engineering question because that’s just how much mind works – and I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that is even hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different and in that sense is just magical.”
Steve of Bill:
Microsoft’s ability to partner with other companies.
Think about that piece of great design that you love. It works so smoothly. There are no rough edges. It has such coherence and every piece seems so logical and obvious.
But of course we know that the process to get to that point is never the easy road. Blood, sweat and tears pave that particular track. Sometimes the steps along that road are big ones. That’s often how you start out as you set your design and product direction and stake out your ambitions. But the really hard slog is all the little steps, often from the middle to the end. Standing firm when it’s so tempting to take the easy route. Yes, so tempting, partly because each one is so small. Does it really matter? Can’t we just let that one go?
But it’s the small ones that add up to something great. God is in the detail.
I was reminded of all this when I was reading Joel Spolsky’s recent post [“A game of inches”](You can read the whole article at: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/07.html). As always, it’s a great piece of writing—> watch as he engages you with the story and then sets up the lesson.
Some gems for the article:
Dave Winer says, “To create a usable piece of software, you have to fight for every fix, every feature, every little accommodation that will get one more person up the curve. There are no shortcuts. Luck is involved, but you don’t win by being lucky, it happens because you fought for every inch.” There are thousands and tens of thousands of these tiny things.
It takes a mindset of constant criticism to find them. You have to reshape your mind until you’re finding fault with everything. Your significant others go nuts. Your family wants to kill you. When you’re walking to work and you see a driver do something stupid, it takes all your willpower to resist going up to the driver and explaining to him why he nearly killed that poor child in the wheelchair.
And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens. The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you ship a truly great product. The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away. The kind of product where that one-in-a-million user doing that one-in-a-million unusual thing finds that not only does it work, but it’s beautiful.
And that’s when you know it’s great software. Ah yes, that constantly critical mind. Find the flaw or blemish, fix it, improve it. Repeat. Until it sings.
