Excited to be hosting an advance screening of InVision's Design Disruptors next month at Riot Games.
Please RSVP using nvite if you'd like to attend.
We'll be hosting it on Riot's campus in West LA at the Skywalker Theatre — which just happens to be George Lucas' old screening room!
Marc
We are pleased to be partnering with Netflix to chat about all things design (with some great cocktails!) #DesignOnTheRocks
If you're designing experiences for interesting products and services -- and happen to be in the Venice area on Thursday, September 15th -- certainly come out and hang with us!
A colleague recently shared a great piece from HBR regarding Collaboration Overload. In short, it discusses how knowledge workers are becoming increasingly distracted and pulled in multiple directions by both a flood of incoming information and collaboration requests, especially leaders and high-performers.
As you become better at what you do and move up in an organization, your input is largely sought after more often, which means more choices, time constraints, and trade-offs. You therefore tend to stretch yourself even thinner - ironically, because hard work is what got you there in the first place - and sometimes even become a bottleneck for others actually getting things done. The article offers some practical advice on how to keep information flowing, as well as a framework for handling collaboration-intensive requests.
I've been thinking a lot about priorities lately; both professional projects and personal passions. Thought this topic also dove-tailed nicely into a book I just wrapped entitled Essentialism. (If you don't read it, at least check out Greg McKeown's inspiring talk at the Authors at Google series.)
Overall, I think an Essentialist mindset is a nice antidote to some of the above issues. As the author eloquently puts it:
"Creating an essential intent is hard. It takes courage, insight, and foresight to see which activities and efforts will add up to your single highest point of contribution. It takes asking tough questions, making real trade-offs, and exercising serious discipline to cut out the competing priorities that distract us from our true intention. Yet it is worth the effort because only with real clarity of purpose can people, teams, and organizations fully mobilize and achieve something truly excellent."
Word.
Marc
Sometimes, it's just good to get back to basics. Revisit what got us here.
NN/g (Nielsen Norman Group) did just that recently with a nice summary of what design thinking is (and means) with their Design Thinking 101 article.
Sarah Gibbons writes: "Design thinking is an ideology supported by an accompanying process. A complete definition requires an understanding of both." I also like how they call out the need for more "design doing" -- not only as part of the implementation step, but in general.
Not to mention that their infographic elegantly captures the process well...
The piece is definitely worth a read.
Marc
Looking forward to joining the Industry Advisory Board for the University of California, Irvine's new Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design program!
Their Department of Informatics is kicking off a world-class curriculum centered around design, research, and core HCI skills. Their interdisciplinary approach will aim to help students create the next-generation of amazing products and services!
Check out the program deets here.
Marc
I recently purchased one of Dyson's Air Multiplier Tower fans. It's a beautiful appliance/object with great customer reviews. (And yes, it's more than I thought I'd be paying for a fan.)
I did a bunch of research on air velocity, flow circulation, energy usage, etc. The specs for this unit were solid.
However, I have to also admit that one of the selling points for me was the following contained in their product description:
"Dyson encourages failing - at least as far as creating successful products goes. Engineers start with a problem - something that doesn’t work properly - and figure out how to make it work better. Along the way, failure is a guarantee. But at the end of the process, there’s an innovative solution. Sketching, prototyping, and testing all go into Dyson’s full line of vacuums, hand dryers, fans, and motors, all of which efficiently - and aesthetically - end up making those everyday problems no problem at all."
The approach to product development is obviously significant enough in their minds to live alongside the description of what the thing is, what it does, its dimensions, warranty info, etc.
I'm a sucker for design deets. Hope the product lives up to it!
Marc
It's been a while. Life happens, kids are born, and blogs sometimes sadly wither.
I've been incredibly fortunate to have had a wonderful year being a new Dad. It has given me a new perspective on patience, a greater appreciation of focusing on what is essential, and an intense understanding of meeting the needs of your users (albeit, ones that are sometimes screaming at 3:00 a.m., throwing up on you, or just saying "no" repeatedly these days! ;)
On the design front, I've had a chance to travel pretty regularly to tech hubs; namely the Bay area, Seattle, and New York City. The goals have primarily been recruiting-focused and to deepen our connections within the design community. In talking with these really talented folks, you also can't help but get a grass-roots sense of what's happening within the field of design across lots of different orgs and verticals.
Here are some general takeaways from the last year of lurking on design blogs, speaking at conferences, and from many-a-coffee with some immensely talented people...
Design is a thing. Although there are certainly differences in maturity throughout organizations, design as a competitive and strategic advantage is here to stay. Regardless of whether you call it UX, Experience Design, Interaction Design, or Product Design, companies have recognized the very real value that the craft brings to their customers (and therefore bottom lines!)
A seat at the table isn't enough. It's what you do with that seat that matters! Designers are in influential positions, but a theoretical appreciation of design principles isn't enough. Being able to articulate why design excellence matters in the context of very real product decision-making with Product and Engineering leaders - and then substantiated it with real data - is where it's at. (And yes, you can measure things like engagement and fun if you happen to be working in the entertainment space).
Outcomes matter. Understanding the experiential and emotional goals that products and services hope to achieve are arguably becoming as important as business planning itself. (My favorite overheard line at a recent VC pitch session went something like: "That all makes perfect business sense, but how will you invent the future in this particular space?")
Talented Designers are scarce and jobs are aplenty. With the stated needs above, great designers are usually pretty busy working on the future. And, the pipeline for creating great design talent isn't catching-up any time soon! A stat I saw recently indicated that there are currently over 20,000 'design' jobs available and something like less than 1,000 designers coming out of the more well-established design programs annually. Wow, the numbers are in our favor and companies are even building out design education programs internally to keep up with demand (e.g., IBM's Design Studio).
I'll definitely go a little deeper into some of the above topics soon, especially the one on attracting great talent. I've spent a fair amount of my time in this area lately and can hopefully share some perspective on how to build world-class teams.
Marc
Had a great time talking with some students this past weekend from the New York Film Academy's game design program here in Los Angeles.
In my mind, there's a fair amount of overlap between product design and game design. Great digital products go beyond usability (that's just table stakes!) and are truly engaging. Game designers are tremendous systems-thinkers and have an uncanny ability to think through a lot of different perspectives, which all experience designers should consider.
I've always said that Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design is one of my favorite, straight-up UX books. All of those lenses matter when you're creating immersive experiences, regardless of the domain.
New York Film Academy in Burbank, California (Photograph by Marc Sasinski)
Special thanks to Lara Federoff for the invitation to speak - and to the students who attended on a Friday evening!
Marc
I recently got back from speaking at the Forge Conference in Philadelphia. Had a wonderful time!
The startup scene in Philly is rad and there's a ton of energy there. We had the good fortune of meeting with the President of Greater Philadelphia's Chamber of Commerce to learn more about their initiatives to foster an entrepreneurial climate in the tech sector.
Independence Hall (Photograph by Marc Sasinski)
As for the conference, the awesome team over at O3 World organized a fantastic event! The talks - as well as the Skybox Event Center venue in the Fishtown neighborhood - were inspiring.
My colleague, Weszt Hart, and I gave a talk about designing engaging experiences. He spoke to a case study for a recently launched feature; and I framed the problem space and introduced how we think about and manage experience design.
Fantastic Venue in Philadelphia (Photograph by Marc Sasinski)
A few, key takeaways from my section to an audience of Designers, Product folks, and Makers included:
Evangelize through Doing: UXers love to talk about process. I'm certainly guilty of it! ;) Tying into the spirit of the maker movement, our point here was that design thinking evangelism becomes much more real when you do things that demonstrate value.
For example, our team's design footprint extends well beyond player-facing stuff; we also actively lead and Product Own initiatives around internal experiences for our employees. That includes service design, which is a lot of fun and moves into the land of I/O Psychology.
Although upfront product discovery and definition is incredibly important, the takeaway here is that nothing builds credibility like leading through example. It shouldn't just be about our design process (e.g., User research, affinity diagramming, [insert your very own, go-to UX process issue here], etc.)
Understand Context and Culture: Regardless of whether you are creating responsive sites, web apps, or mobile products, at the end of the day we're all solving problems for people. And since more and more products are inherently social, why not leverage the work of Social Psychologists early and often? We work closely with psychologists to help us frame problem spaces and to better understand the ability to influence behavior - well before we put pencil to paper or move pixels around.
Our other point here was the usability is table stakes these days. Simply allowing the user to get from point A to B won't define your product.
What differentiates are engaging and immersive experiences. We feel that leveraging principles from the world of Game Design can help achieve some of that. (For example, one of my favorite User Experience design books is The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell).
Emphasize Experiential Goals and Outcomes First: If you work in the world of Agile, chances are you've encountered user stories.
As a < type of user >, I want to < some goal > so that < some reason >.
Um, yeah; about that. "Some goal." "Some reason." Sounds like Mad Libs.
Somewhere along the way, the spirit and intent of a bunch of user stories and their epic simply gets lost. Backlogs grow, priorities are argued over, and it's too easy to loose the forest for the trees.
Instead, we challenge you to start with experiential goals and outcomes. Really focus on what you want your users to feel and achieve by using the thing. What's the emotion that you're seeking? How do you want the feature to feel? Trust me, you can ask that of even the most seemingly mundane of services to help make that emotional connection.
Our audiences are becoming increasingly sophisticated. It's hard to create deeper and more meaningful experiences unless you start with clear goals and the outcomes that you want to achieve first.
You can learn more about some of the above considerations through an interview that we did with UX Booth: Forging Ahead in the World of the Web.
And last, but certainly not least, I got an incredibly-detailed, commemorative bobblehead doll of myself...
America’s Oldest Brewery and My Bobblehead (Photography by Marc Sasinski)
The likeness is pretty, darn uncanny and my baby daughter loves it! So fun :)
Marc
Excited to be speaking at Forge Conference in September! Definitely looking forward to spending some time in Philadelphia, as well. Great, American city.
Marc
Riot Games is proud to have sponsored the 2014 IA Summit in San Diego earlier this year. The theme was The Path Aheadand it was the conference's 15th year!
Riot Games honored to sponsor the 2014 IA Summit in San Diego, California (Photograph by Marc Sasinski)
Thanks to everyone who came by the Riot lounge to say hello. It was great to reconnect with old friends — and to make some new ones!
Best,
Marc
Back in October, I thought I was done for the year as far as attending conferences goes. But, when I saw the lineup for Gigaom’s Roadmap, I just had to attend. The conference certainly didn’t disappoint.
The focus was on the intersection of design and experience. There were lots of Designers-as-Founders and discussions about rethinking verticals from top to bottom.
Software and hardware, too. And by ‘hardware’, I mean everything from wearable computers to electric cars.
Atoms to electrons.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California (Photograph by Marc Sasinski)
Here are few nuggets of wisdom that stood out for me:
Robert Brunner from Ammunition described how technologists like us are now in the fashion business. Fashion is both substantive and superficial. What you wear is what you aspire to be and references your tribe. That very much applies to wearable computing. (I dislike that term, by the way. It sounds so old-school).
Jack Dorsey talked about how Square built the product for themselves, not merchants. They didn’t want to wait in line at boutique vendors like Blue Bottle Coffee. Square wanted to build a seamless stack; but also focused on the tiniest of details, like a receipt, which he described as a “communication channel” and an artifact from that transaction.
The company also has a unique and transparent culture where all meeting notes and minutes (including board meetings) are broadcast internally so that everyone knows what’s happening at any time.
Tony Fadell from Nest gave an incredibly insightful talk on choosing to go really deep within a vertical (home thermostats and fire alarms) and rethinking an experience from top to bottom. He described some of the challenges inherent in getting VC funding for physical products because you generally need a physical thing to show off how it acts and feels. And unlike prototyping software, that simply takes a lot longer and is much more complex.
The success of physical products hinges on processes, manufacturing, and supply chain stuff.; not just getting eyeballs.
With all the buzz around the Internet of Things, Fadell described how not only is it costly to house and maintain all the data, but that sometimes just because you can connect stuff, doesn’t mean you should. The end user’s experience should dictate what data is accessible, where, and for how long.
Balancing the relationship between utility and emotions is also key for home products such as Nest’s. Creating those magical moments, from the time a user starts using a product, to some point down the road (e.g., Lower heating or cooling bills) is also critical.
Value. Early and often. Check.
Carl Ledbetter, the Principal Industrial Designer for Xbox One gave an interesting talk about how their goal was to make this next-gen console feel like a welcomed member in the family living room.
They saw lots of opportunity with voice-enabled controls in addressing simple things like a television’s programs menu - which basically hasn’t changed since the 1970’s! (And yup, my Xbox One Day One Edition has finally arrived!)
Jonah Jones and Bernhard Seefeld discussed some of the possibilities for Google Maps moving forward. They talked about how the physical world is their biggest competitor in that business locations change quite often, etc.
What’s to come in the world of interactive maps is really exciting. We’re now seeing a tipping point where a map is a canvas for much deeper personal experiences. Location is simply the query and the context.
Those possibilities around context and knowing things like when you have dinner reservations for 4 people at particular location are also tremendous.
And looking back at how cartographers used to to tell a story with their maps about a particular area is also inspiring. Folklore, history, regional quirks, etc. (See Edward Tufte. Please.) Funny how we sometimes need to look back to truly move ahead.
Networking. With wine and Google Glasses (Photograph by Marc Sasinski)
Kevin Systrom from Instagram talked photos. Photos as messages, that is. It’s all about friction-less communication, which Instagram pretty much nailed. The rest is history.
The use of data will be key for them moving forward. For example, knowing when a bunch of photos are coming from a particular location. Maybe there’s a major event happening, etc. Layering meta data onto that could be really powerful. As is proximity. As he put it, ‘you don’t have to be the First Person Shooter in order to be a part of the story.’
On the future of mobile products, his take was that it was all about apps as utilities with a narrow focus. He also described how bland decisions create bland products. You need a point of view. Word.
Gentry Underwood from Mailbox was one of my favorite speakers. (Love the iOS apps, BTW!) Hearing about the evolution of the product was really interesting in terms of how they originally intended to start with a productivity app, but quickly realized there was a huge elephant in the room: ELECTRONIC MAIL. (Think about how often you email yourself reminders. Yup, exactly.) So, they decidthat paradigm by embracing it and ended up killing off their first product.
“When you want to make something better, it also has to be familiar.”
They began looking at how much time people spend ‘housekeeping’ in terms of putting emails into folders and organizing content to make better sense of their virtual worlds. Then,
The evolution of how people interact with touch devices was also discussed. Gentry described how people are much more comfortable "in glass" these days, given the evolution - gesture-wise, the use of skeuomorphism, etc. - over the years.
The mobile era is also clearly in a multi-screen environment where we expect continuity across devices.
Being a car guy and all, Tesla Motors’ Chief Designer, Franz von Holzhausen, was a great interview. He discussed how design was a huge part of their vertical integration. Even the smallest of things mattered. For example, rethinking the door handles - if you haven't seen them, they pop-out when you reach for them - was an initial and memorable touchpoint.
They also made the onboard screen much larger and the affordances bigger. Removing lots of knobs and switches also means a car ages more gracefully and doesn’t look totally out of date when the next models roll out.
They also prototype and get stuff into driver’s hands often. As a matter of fact, they have a charging station in front of the design studio where they observe!
And I’ve been a big fan of Behance and 99U for some time now, so it was great to see Scott Belsky. He described how Adobe is slowly moving into the creative services end of things. Experience is also leading the way there (i.e., “You don’t need 100 Photoshop filters when you’re moving from screen to screen.”)
Interestingly enough, at Behance, they basically removed the Product Manager role to make sure that it was more design-driven and to enhance communication within teams.
Product leaders that are design-driven are in it for the long haul - short vs. long-term greed :)
That tied-in nicely to the spirit of the conference overall.
Thanks for reading.
Marc
On the eve of Twitter's IPO, I came across an interesting piece in The New Yorker magazine - entitled Two Hit Wonder - about Jack Dorsey, Twitter, and Square.
There were lots o’ good nuggets in the article about the history of Twitter, some juicy in-fighting deets, and stuff on Dorsey’s quirky personality.
However, two sentences really stood out for me around his take on Square’s hiring practices. The company basically avoids hiring from within the payment or credit card industry so as to be able to truly reinvent it:
“Of the six hundred people here, only ten ever worked in finance.”
Wow.
Say what you will about Dorsey, but that takes vision and guts. In order to truly reinvent something, you sometimes need to do away with what you know or look at it through a completely different lens.
With Square, that approach appears to be paying off. (No pun intended. Well, maybe a little.)
Marc
As a UX team grows and scales to meet the needs of a business, so do the team’s internal challenges. This is especially true with things like team communication, having a shared understanding of what good quality looks like, and simply ensuring that what your users see is consistently awesome.
Even with stuff like pattern libraries and the likes of Experience Architects doing their thing, a team of about 8+ designers can find it hard to design holistically and know what’s going on all of the time.
Folks get focused on their output and silos emerge. That’s just the way things go. And in highly-entrepreneurial environments where teams are empowered and given a fair amount of autonomy (ahem, like at most tech companies), what sometimes emerges is a fragmented end user experience.
I’ve found that having regular collaborative design (CoDesign) sessions can be incredibly helpful. It gets folks who don’t traditionally have insight or input into other projects to gain and provide just that.
It also helps build a sense of collegiality and shared ownership within the team. That's incredibly important!
I’ve tried to capture a few thoughts about hosting these types of sessions. Some goals and logistical considerations that come to mind include:
We generally do an hour every week. I try to not calendar mid-week and avoid stressful times. The goal is to stay relaxed, but focused.
3 - 4 designers tops. Anything more than that, and it becomes a bit unwieldy. Also, the designers attending shouldn't necessarily be working on the same stuff. Actually, it helps if they're not to provide more of an outsider's perspective.
Everyone gets about 15 – 20 minutes to:
Generate ideas for a problem that they're trying to solve.
Present work-in-progress for feedback. This is both about the content and design rationale, as well as presentation style.
Talk about process issues and blockers. A lot of this is just straight-up mentorship on the part of the more senior-level designers in the room, but the ovearching goal is to enable a group discussion so that everyone learns. The trick is for it not to turn into a bitch session. That's the facilitator's job.
By the way, a lot of this should involve each individual clearly articulating the design problem at hand first (i.e., Why are we doing this? What is the goal? What do we expect a solution to accomplish?) Recognizing that proposed solutions are a hypothesis is important.
And what's cool, is that after a few sessions, the folks in the room will have more and more context. So, Designer X knows more about Project Y and can contribute in more meaningful ways moving forward, etc.
For managers and team Leads, considerations in terms of facilitation include:
Make sure everyone understands that they don't need to be totally buttoned-up and have everything solved ahead of time. This should be a safe space to collaborate and ideate with your peers.
If there's a problem statement, have everyone jot down an idea first to get some skin in the game. Less random brainstorming. (There's lots of good, recent research why groupthink brainstorming isn't all that it was thought to be, BTW).
Make any critiques about the work, not the individual. No-brainer here.
Let their peers judge, not you. The trick is to not to come across as the expert because you're the most senior person in the room or whatever.
The designer still owns the solution and the responsibility of executing on the idea. Leaders should help them refine their ideas.
And of course, be flexible. Like with anything else, iterate on the meeting format to optimize what works best for the group.
At the end of the day, a UX team is probably the only group within an organization discussing these holistic, common thread experiences across projects. CoDesign sessions not only level-up your team members' skills, but they also uncover potential gaps and opportunities that product roadmaps and spreadsheets can't.
Calling that stuff out is a huge part of our jobs as UXers, after all.
Marc
I recently had a lot of fun providing some mentorship to several teams at Startup Weekend LA.
Startup Weekend recently started tackling verticals and this was the first time that one was devoted exclusively to entertainment and media. There were some incredibly talented folks generating some really cool product ideas!
Working with TEAM REALDANCERS in Venice Beach
If you're not familiar with Startup Weekend, it’s a global non-profit that basically puts teams together for about 48 hours. They generate ideas on Friday night, self-organize, work through the weekend, and then pitch a concept (e.g., working prototype, business plan) to a group of judges on Sunday evening. Teams generally consist of a Product person, developers, and of course, a UXer.
Much of my work with the teams involved providing advice on how to go about embarking on a path to product discovery, coaching around delivering a proof of concept to then validate with users, as well as trying to rein in a few pretty grandiose ideas such that they could deliver incremental value. In other words, focus. Interfaces come later.
Overall, it was so fun. I can do this stuff all day long - and was almost late to my wife’s birthday dinner because of that! Doh.
Best of luck to all the teams boot-strapping it or seeking some early round funding!
Marc
I recently attended the inaugural UX Strat conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Yes, it was hot. Damn hot. And yes, several streets there are named Peachtree something or other.
THE INTERSECTION OF PEACHTREE PLACE AND PEACHTREE STREET. SERIOUSLY. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARC SASINSKI)
The conference itself was enjoyable. Some of the broader themes that emerged dealt with the more strategic issues that UXers are facing at a time when we’re getting out of the deliverables business and beginning to shape business strategy 4 realz.
Things like changing organizational structure and culture to meet the needs of a more holistic end user experience, as well as telling a more complete story using BOTH qualitative insight (which UX is good at) AND quantitative data (not so much).
Customer Experience (CX) was also a hot topic. Not necessarily within presentation content, more so in-between sessions and at the pubs. Attendees tended to see it as either A) an ally; or B), a threat to our discipline and a land grab. Oddly enough, the conference didn’t address it square on, which I found a bit odd, frankly. Seems like a missed opportunity.
Overall, the presentations were solid. Nathan Shedroff from the California College of the Arts really stood out for me. His workshop was inspiring and there were lots of wonderful takeaways, including:
The frontlines of dealing with customers IS the brand and UXers understand them about as well as anyone in a company outside of maybe Customer Support.
He questioned what the hell traditional MBA programs are teaching if they aren’t bringing design thinking into the core curriculum?! Gotta love that one.
MVP candidates have been bastardized. The concept of an MVP comes from a culture of investment-optimizers, where it was more about funding the least amount possible to get a product out the door. However, “we don’t live in a Minimum Viable World anymore.”
Business strategy (e.g., Intent, mission, and culture) and tactics (e.g., Usability, price, and features) are very different. And by the way, MBAs get this wrong all the time, too.
“Design is a plan for action.” - Charles Eames
Apple clearly understood the experiential mandate that people like to carry no more than three things in their pocket prior to their iPod introduction. Yup, you guessed it: keys, wallet, and [insert digital device here]. They also made a fundamental shift to become a phone company after their initial engagement with Motorola created a sucky product. Does anyone remember that first attempt at a phone?! Shudder.
A typical SWOT analysis is a pretty lazy approach to strategy overall because it lacks rigor and tends to be rooted in individual assumptions. Businesses sometimes treat it like Mad Libs when they should actually be inserting empirically-derived research within each category.
UX Strategists need to be looking at what’s happening with tangential competitors and markets to see opportunities and threats. This type of analysis is essential for continued innovation.
A great example cited of how demographical data can be rubbish and how behavior matters is what’s known in the travel industry as hybrid travelers. These folks tend to want to mix up their experiences when visiting a destination. So, they may be well-heeled and go to the best restaurant in town; but, they’ll also hit the local foodtruck scene and check out a sketchier part of town if it’s an authentic experience, etc. This drives marketers crazy because they can’t box them in.
The point where business strategy meets experience is meaning. Values are derived from core meaning. And, relationships and value are built through experiences.
Lastly, I loved Nathan's take on how business is the future of design and that everyone is pretty much in the experience business. Well put!
Some other nuggets of wisdom from various speakers included:
It’s time for UX to start thinking about managing outcomes and impact; not just tracking design deliverables. For example, instead of agreeing to give stakeholders a new sign-up screen, we should reframe it as "well, we’ll gladly work on increasing the sign-up rate.”
Karen Pascoe from PayPal talked about how Lean UX is actually the process of defining the experience. Agile is then more about building it into the stack.
Intuit is doing some rad stuff. They apparently spend about 60% of their time on mature products; 30% on repeatable business; and, about 10% on trying to create products people truly love.
Aarron Walter from MailChimp discussed how UX is great at research, but what we really need to get better at is connecting all of the data(s) in order to see a broader strategy. It's also our responsibility to share and educate.
The story of Tony Shea's Wizard of Oz approach was told in how he pretty much piloted the existing Zappos business model early on. He wanted to know whether or not users would buy shoes online. So, he went and photographed inventory at local shoe stores and then began posting online (based on that inventory) to see if there was demand. He also wanted to see whether the value prop of free shipping might work. The rest is kinda history.
All in all, since UX has finally gotten a seat at the proverbial table, it's time for us to start delivering on the promise. Let's lead with an experience vision that's aggressively tested in the wild - and communicate it in increasingly creative and compelling ways!
Onwards.
Marc
I was fortunate enough recently to be invited to speak as a panelist at Silicon Beach Fest LA. The name of the panel was The Art of Games and it centered around creating immersive and meaningful experiences for increasingly sophisticated audiences.
The panel included some incredibly talented folks:
Daniel Romano, Head of UX at Disney Interactive (@dromano)
David Collins, Sound Design Manager at Sony Entertainment (@DavidWCollins)
And Austin Wintory, Grammy-nominated Composer (@awintory). Love the Journey game soundtrack!
SILICON BEACH AT SUNSET (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARC SASINSKI)
We discussed everything from the meaning of art and design, to player engagement and the science behind actually being able to quantify it through applied psychological models. Measuring stuff like mastery, autonomy, and relatedness is a real thing. And, one could even argue that the gaming industry is coming around to it as player-focused experience strategies begin to influence product roadmap priorities.
The creative aspect of scoring a game's soundtrack and functional sound design was also discussed. Sonification is a critical component of the holistic experience and it was great to get some insight from passionate speakers that just totally get it.
Audience questions ranged from considerations around personalization and customization options, to how to strike a balance between the display of vital information and content overload vs. core gameplay loops. (Um, yeah; it’s not easy).
Thanks to everyone that attended! And a special shout out to Deborah Beckman (@Debblues) for moderating the panel!
By the way, the so-called "Silicon Beach" area here in Los Angeles was ranked the #3 startup ecosystem (behind Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, respectively) in a recent Startup Genome report. Some major props to the tech scene here in LA!
Marc
I crashed the UX Book Club here in LA this past week. Actually, I did technically join the group right before attending, but I didn't get a chance to read the book.
The title was Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf. I had heard a bit about it and wanted to get some perspective from the author first. Kind of backwards, I know.
The discussion was great and Jeff had some really solid insights! Here are my notes from the conversation:
It became apparent that if UX and Agile were going to coexist, the whole notion of creating products needed to change.
We should always focus on outcomes, not things like features.
Small, self-reliant, and cross-functional teams get stuff done. Preferably ones that are co-located; or, at the very least, in the same time zone. (And what’s the optimal team size? Well, Jeff Bezos likes to say one that can be fed by two pizzas).
Consider product design as a series of rapid experiments rather than hard and fast 'requirements.'
The overall goal of Lean ‘anything’ is to reduce waste. Here, we’re especially concerned with the UX wasted on creating deliverables for stuff that never gets built.
Our job as design leaders should be to extract ideas out of people’s heads around the problem statement (i.e., “We believe that doing [this] will achieve [this] outcome.”) You then have something of a hypothesis and a starting point. UX then essentially runs a series of experiments against that hypothesis.
A backlog of user stories is basically a backlog of (ahem) assumptions (i.e., Do the users that you are targeting have this particular pain point? Let's find out...)
During estimation exercises, have the entire team sketch their understanding of what they’re going to be building. This uncovers lots of issues and gets at a shared understanding. That’s huge and ties into the author’s notion of “continuously deploying sketches.” Good stuff!
Consider introducing the concept of UX Debt to your teams and organization. This basically borrows from traditional technical debt, which engineering teams surely understand and Product Managers rarely question. By calling attention to experience shortcuts taken in this fashion, you can then allot a percentage of time in the next sprint to address some of the issues.
Lastly, setting the expectations associated with a Lean UX process is key. UXers should communicate what services they will provide, but more importantly, they should outline what they expect from their teams in return, as well. The entire product team needs to be committed and involved from the very beginning and throughout. You can’t do things like prioritize a backlog without their input. (I’ve seen that happen way too often and it amounts to frustation within teams and a sub-par product.)
I really like this last point because it gets at UXers delivering more in the way of experience strategy and facilitating the type of thinking needed to create truly exceptional things.
Jeff also brought up a fun anecdote about having previously pitched the process to a prospective client... He and his firm were going up against a more traditional agency - one that asks some initial questions and then goes off for a few months to then come back with a grand "solution."
After having described his approach, the client paused for a bit and then said something like: “So, with your process, we actually have to contribute and do stuff?”
Bingo.
That was pretty funny and nicely illustrated how the collaborative process should work in practice with Lean UX.
A big thank you to Jeff for chatting with us!
And yes, I just picked up the book. Look for some more thoughts on it soon.
Marc
Just catching-up after attending the Convey UX conference in Seattle a little over a week ago. Some of my key takeaways are listed below. Food for future thought, as well as some tried-and-true reminders.
More human-to-human instead of human-to-computer, please. One user, one computer, and one task just doesn’t work anymore. Usability testing needs to embrace an ever-increasingly inter-connected and social world. Dana Chisnell gave a nice presentation about how traditional testing isn’t necessarily equipped to handle everything that we need to learn around social (e.g., Privacy and ethics). It’s a bit too one-dimensional.
She cited the Google Buzz disaster (I know! Remember that thing?!) and how lab testing didn’t uncover any of the underlying privacy concerns people had upon launch because exposure to real relationships was never tested. We need to start thinking about tasks more as activities such as sharing and interacting with others, as well as goals that change over time. Satisfaction and engagement aren't just about task completion.
Moving forward, user research will need to embrace more of a mash-up approach and borrow more from areas like linguistics and the social sciences. Context matters and relationships evolve over time. We can't continue to ask users to play make-believe about that stuff anymore.
Hypertext is dead. OK, that’s me projecting, but the future of HTML5 and browser-based experience possibilities is fascinating. Couple that with things like WebGL and you’ve got some wonderfully immersive opportunities on the horizon.
Peter Lubbers from Google gave a solid talk and demoed some of the rich animation capabilities and input mechanisms (e.g., Touch for general navigation coupled with a mouse for precision; using a laptop's camera to capture motion gestures a la Kinect). Definitely check out Webplatform.org to learn more - and to contribute to the movement!
THE SPACE NEEDLE. A SEATTLE LANDMARK. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARC SASINSKI)
Big screens invite big gestures. Luke Wroblewski presented some insights from his work on mobile. In short, touch-enabled does not equal touch-optimized. The majority of sites out there now are swell if you have a baby-sized finger, let alone that of an actual fully-grown adult!
Using people’s gestures as a sign of intent and then designing accordingly was really interesting. Gesture discoverability was also discussed. One way that tribal interaction knowledge - like pull to refresh - is passed around is through what Jared Spool calls “socially transmitted functionality.” Good stuff, but I suddenly had this urge to wash my hands.
Content is not like the stuff you make sausages with. It’s much, much more. Erika Hall gave a great talk on how content strategy should be more about ‘composing’ content rather than simply 'creating' it. Writers and designers need to embrace cross-functional teams so as to answer things like what is valuable to whom and in what circumstance? Don't let the "content" be something that you don't question. Writing is interface design!
And definitely avoid testing with lorem ipsum placeholder text. That’s a huge fail in terms of getting the most bang for your user testing buck. I think we all sometimes fall into that 'we'll just add the final copy later' trap. Good reminder.
INTERIOR OF THE CHIHULY GARDEN AND GLASS MUSEUM. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARC SASINSKI)
Embrace uncontrolled environments. John Dirks talked about how Blink tested the unboxing of the Xbox Kinect internationally. Because Microsoft was introducing a whole new interaction language, the initial set-up was crucial.
He provided great insights on how the relationships between kids and parents, spouses - and even pets! - contributed to the findings around configuration. Of course, cultural differences and context totally matter. For example, there tends to be a fair amount of space in homes and apartments here in the United States, but not so much in places like Japan, where jumping up and down to set-up your Kinect means potentially pissing off your downstairs, high-rise neighbors. Also, ceiling fans can be problematic. Ouch.
Lastly, Jared Spool prolly summed it all up best: Intuitive design is invisible. It's like good room temperature; you don't notice it unless you're hot or cold. That segued nicely into his advice on making incremental improvements, iterating, and measuring (like amazon does) instead of large-scale redesigns where users' acquired knowledge can sometimes get lost. When users have to relearn how to accomplish their goals and go from working knowledge to target knowledge, that sucks.
And majority of real innovation out there happens by applying something that already exists to a new context. In other words, innovation basically means adding value to where there was none before. Pretty simple, eh?! (Kidding, of course).
Lastly, yes; Rem Koolhaas’ Seattle Public Library is extraordinary. Given the cold materials used (i.e., lots of steel, glass, and the exposed imperfections in concrete), it was somehow inviting. It made me want to curl up and read in one of its many, naturally-lit nooks.
SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY'S "LIVING ROOM." (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARC SASINSKI)
I also recommend the library tour, which highlights several of the project’s design challenges. No building is perfect and it was interesting to hear about some of the issues faced and the areas where the architect stood his ground. Overall, a pretty Coolhouse. (You see what I just did there? ;)
Marc
I recently reread Marty Cagan’s Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love. It was my second go-around. I found myself nodding. Again.
What continues to resonate is this idea of spending quality time with users, understanding their very real pain points, and validating product design assumptions. Yes, assumptions.
The way I see it, anything we design or build is basically an assumption until it has been validated in some way, shape, or form. (And don’t even get me started about how the term “requirements” gets tossed around like gospel from on high that is never to be questioned. Alas, that’s a blog post for another time).
Cagan writes that “Testing your ideas with users is probably the single most important activity in your job as a product manager.”
“Single most important activity.”
Wow, that really gets right down to it, doesn’t it? As a UXer, that’s pretty much second nature. Validating is just what we do. But for other folks, maybe not so much. I’ve seen first-hand how this type of activity can somehow be interpreted as being beneath them; and even secondary to marketing the thing.
Given the above, I couldn’t help but think of changing diapers. Let me explain.
Do you know how some people - ahem, of a certain stature - tend to sometimes outsource their menial activities and chores? That makes perfect sense on a lot of fronts, frankly. However, there are still things worth doing that are super-important and immensely rewarding.
Things like, oh, I don’t know, playing a key role in raising your kids and spending quality time with them perhaps? Hiring nannies to handle everything during their formative years means that you’re kind of missing out on some pretty important stuff; stuff that can potentially shape the both of you. (Translation: Outside agencies and consultancies doing all your key research, for example.)
Well, I think that same type of distance from the good stuff can affect product managers who rely solely on things like market forecasts, projections from so-called industry experts, as well as high-level Forrester reports for crucial product decisions and priority calls. This is also especially true during the formative years of a product.
As a quick example, when Airbnb was working out their strategy and value propositions early on, the founders flew to New York to spend time with their core user base. It was there, in the very apartments that would be listed on the site, that they got to see what interacting with their service was like.
In the flesh. Down and dirty.
They did things like take photographs of the spaces because those were areas that hosts needed help with in terms of quality and uploading capabilities.
They witnessed scenarios around exchanging money, including what happens when a traveler doesn’t have the correct change upon arrival; or, their currency happens to be foreign because New York is a popular international destination. Hint: It amounts to awkwardness in any culture. (By the way, great Soapbox podcast about Airbnb from the fine folks at Zurb: zurb.com/soapbox).
Of course, designing great products and services means having a big-picture strategy. However, success also means reducing even the tiniest points of friction, which amount to very big wins at the end of the day, especially with digital goods. And it’s hard to know what those pain points are unless you experience them first-hand.
So, get in there and get to know what that friction feels like. Getting your hands dirty with the pain point poop that is your users’ frustration is critical - and maybe even a little like changing diapers. How else can you get that much-needed sense of empathy to help influence key product design decisions?
And yeah, agreed. I took that poop metaphor a little too far.