Design Vertigo

More and more, I notice the design work I’m coming in contact with is changing. Very slowly, but very surely, the design challenges we’re tackling are expanding in scope and scale. What once was a product design task has expanded to include an entire product and service ecosystem. We used to create new consumer experiences, now we’re designing whole new business ventures to deliver those new experiences. This isn’t a new observation;  as design’s influence has grown, it’s being used to puzzle through larger problems.

I’ve been wondering why this change is underway. Obviously humans are ambitious creatures and we love ever-bigger challenges, but there has to be something more. Never has any of our technology, engineering or research abilities been more acute than it is now. Why add another, possibly more meta, trade to add to our mix?

Then I started to wonder if maybe if we as a culture have become more interested in design practices because they help us harness potential across our tool sets. When you design you’re more interested in the interactions of things than the tools that create those interactions. In these moments, a design practice allows our instruments to become more than the sum of their parts.

Design is probably being challenged to solve ever-larger problems because as a culture we’re creating more platforms for creation. In so many areas, the barriers to design and develop have been almost eliminated. Software and prototyping tools have turned four-month jobs into two-week tasks. Other platforms allow us to sell and ship our products without ever physically holding them. All these platforms allow us to create more integrated experiences.

It’s always tempting to make design challenges systemic because design is always questioning the greater context of use. And as you focus on how something’s used you move a containing layer of a system. With all these platforms for creations and service, in theory we should be able tackle these problems differently.

Sort of sounds like a great thing, no? That we might now attack systems problems at the systems level, sort of an iron-on-iron moment. That finally, after all this waiting, we can just unleash this hell-hath-no-fury design awesomeness to finally fix all this brokenness that plagues our daily lives?!

I think about this a lot. The sad cold reality is that if designing human-scale interactions was hard, designing systems is mind-bendingly hard. Systems play out over time, they involve moving organics parts, there’s little control and lots of chaos.  Possibly most sinister of all these challenges is the vertigo that comes from trying to think through systems.

I ran across a brilliant, brilliant talk by Matt Jones from Berg London late last year (the talk is older, that’s just when I discovered it). He had a really inspiring example of this vertigo that’s stuck with me for months. (The example is about 5 minutes in, the whole thing is worth a watch). In the talk, Jones refers to a passage by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson that describes a space elevator. He talks about how the engineering of such a structure defies human proportion – if you’re close enough to interact with it, you can’t understand what it’s doing, and if you were far enough away to see how it works, it would be invisible to you. “We’re in it, but we can’t see it”, Jones astutely puts it.

This is sort of the difficulty of dealing and designing for these systems. We have to use design to make progress against the problem at hand, but the problem has so many moving bits, it’s hard to understand how one interaction influences another. In some ways this very much becomes an exercise in faith. You can’t see how all these things work together, but you know they can and they will if the conditions are right.

So, this is what I’ve been humbled and inspired by lately – gnarly problems with lots of mind-bending vertigo. These problems have always been around, but I think we’ll see more of them as a society because we’re becoming better at understanding how these systems work. (we’re also better at discovering linkages between systems. We’re finding it at ever-larger scales (global economies) and ever-smaller scales (microbes and genetics.)

For me, the exciting thing is that as we as a culture wrap our heads around these problems, we’ll fashion tools to help us cope and create within the vertigo. It’s so perplexing now, but things are moving so fast I wouldn’t be surprised if this post isn’t laughable in 5 years. We live in amazing times.

Hacked

Ughhh. So at some point in the last week, this site was hacked. Somehow, a malicious script put a virus on my site. I think, because I was behind on updating my WordPress software. Google picked up on this as flagged this sight with a big, fat content warning. Thanks to @visionaryagenda to tipping me off to the warning in the first place. (I post through MarsEdit, so I don’t visit the actual site that much.)

Anyway, everything’s fixed now. Sorry ’bout that.

Media, Culture, and Evolution

I had an sort of an interesting moment this weekend. While screwing around on the Internet, I happened upon this clip , (go ahead, watch it).

Sort of funny, right? Well I LOL’d, but then I started to wonder, could this video be a fake? Without really realizing it, I found myself dissecting the clip looking for deeper meaning – it looks older, so maybe it predates Internet pratfalls…but the grainy flim technique wreaks of post-production…but the guy does start screaming quite quickly and somewhat naturally…but maybe it’s a comedian and this is a stunt.

Whether the video is real or not isn’t the point. I realized that I was trying to figure out if the video was fake because its authenticity would determine whether or not i would share that video. (Meanwhile determining the clips authenticity was also some sort of odd meta puzzle in itself. If the clip is real, i’ve found internet gold. If its a fake and i share it, I’ve been duped making me the fool.

Why, I feel this way i really don’t know. What interesting to me is that this is an evolved reaction. Had I seen this clip 5 years ago, I would have probably emailed it to half my friends, dishing out a cheap laugh over email. But since i couldn’t decide if it was real, I couldn’t send it.

It dawned on me that viral videos have changed how we consume online content. If we think someone has created something that only intends to trick us into spreading the idea to our network, we may actually not share it…which is the exact opposite effect the creators hoped for. Here’s the root of it. If we’re manipulated into sharing something, somehow we’re saying to our inner circle that we aren’t quick enough to recognize a fake. We care about authenticity because we don’t want to be tricked and we don’t want to trick our friends. This act of filtering/curating is a form of self-actualization – you don’t want to be associated with a fake.

All this made me wonder if it will become more difficult for media to be deemed share-worthy because authenticity and intention matter more and more as we build online identities. We’re in the early days of this movement, but this is playing out very rapidly. As our online identities continue to be more and more important to us, we will redefine what’s acceptable to share. Viral content as we know it now may become quickly become passé.

I started to wonder if this self-editing phenomenon effects how we create media. Sharing is still happening, but the tricking people into spreading seems to be dangerous territory for your brand. Take this Domino’s video from CP+B. The video starts as a full-on, unflinching Christopher Guest lampoon of a pizza photo shoot. It driving straight for prime 2005 viral territory. Then, about hallway through the video a protagonist chef emerges to lead us away from the lampoon and toward the core message – ‘Dominos is the real deal, we don’t need a fancy photo shoot.’ This seems like an evolution of the style; teasing with the lampoon, but pulling back curtain before the joke finishes. The spot’s well done, but I keep wondering if it were only five years ago, would the spot have just been one solid lampoon that wanted to ‘go viral’?

In a very short span of time, i think we’re getting really good at rapidly adapting to the media we consume. Much of this seems driven by our own online identity – we are what we share. So this all sort of begs the question; does culture create the media, or does media create the culture?

Buying Culture

I’ve been really inspired by Amazon lately. They’re great at what they do, but I’m really charged-up by their recent acquisitions of Zappos and Woot! . Both companies are healthy and admirable, but from all accounts Amazon was mostly interested in them because they had a great company culture (which leads to great customer service, and from that a solid business.)

The thing that’s inspiring to me is that you rarely read about a company being bought because it has a great culture. Bankers and M&A people don’t really know how to value a company’s culture that well. And if you can’t value something, it’s hard to price it – everything gets messy in the valuation, so you usually a stick with things that are more numbers-oriented. Companies usually like to pay for things they can count: market share, channel access, IP, scarce resources, etc. Cisco is a great example. From the late-90′s to mid-00′s, Cisco was on a major buying spree to pick up any patents or technologies in their space. They usually bought technology cheaper than they thought they could build it, they rolled it into a product road map and slowly, consistently grew the orb.

That sort of acquisition strategy works great if your a tech company, but not if you’re an online retailer. There’s almost nothing you can do to force customers to come back to your site over and over except serve them better than anyone else can. Amazon gets this, and I think they also get that good service starts with strong culture. Tech companies buy other companies because many times they need some technology they coolant manage to build themselves. By that same logic, culture seems even harder to create (and maybe more valuable) than some of the most brilliant IP. Getting the right culture is like catching lightning in a bottle. It’s the right people at the right place at the right time. You can invest in R&D to build specific IP, but it’s almost impossible to invest with the same intention and build a great culture.

All of this thinking on company culture lead me to one last thought. If traditional retail was all about location, location, location (can your customers find you), and if the early days of the web were all about access, access, access (can you offer all the long tail of goods your consumer could possibly want), retailing on the web now is about personality, personality, personality (brands than connect deeply with how their customers think and feel). Let’s face it, if in three clicks or less we can find anything our hearts desire, isn’t the next frontier buying those things under terms that are personal to us? (Think Zappos and their shoe returns, Woot and their one-item-a-day geekfest, or Amazon and their Prime shipping).

As the internet gives us more and more options, we seem to create more and more fractions in an attempt to create meaning in this ever-expanding sea of access. That’s happening everywhere online; content, services, networks, you name it. Today, it seems perfectly normal to go to the same (online) store everyday just to check out the one item they’re selling at a discount. This sort of evolution can’t come from a well constructed sensical strategy that makes good business sense, it has to come from a company with personality and a culture that’s just crazy enough to try.

Androids, iPhones, and Informal Collusion.

I ran across this recent post on the constant evolution of the Android phone. The post talks a lot about how the Android platform is evolving so rapidly that phones become antiquated pretty quickly. That’s probably not great news for Android customers, but it’s even worse for Google/Android competitors people like Apple.

I started to ask myself this question: If you really wanted to beat Apple, who seems years a head of many phone providers, what would you do? I started to think about Apple’s main Achilles heal – planned obsolescence. Apple may do a lot of radical things, but there’s one thing you can set your watch to; they’ll refresh a product line about every 2-3 years. You can count on each new model to contain amazing new functionality, but that feature set is framed around one single release. (They’re beginning to break this pattern with phone OS updates, but those are rather rare.)

All this Android activity could hit Apple in their weak spot. By using an open platform Google has convinced many providers to constantly evolve a product platform. What this mean is that multiple companies are working to add more customers to the common platform, which will create more apps, and an overall better experience. This open platform is sort of working as an informal collusion amongst many of Apple’s competitors. The platform is their agreement on how the market will evolve. If you notice how rapidly this platform has begun to gain parity with the iPhone experience, you can also see how soon it could actually surpass it. Sure, the fact that the platform doesn’t have walled gardens creates some quality control problem on their apps, but it also allows for some pretty cool features, (mobile, ad hoc wifi networks.)

This made me realize that the products that a company creates can actually be a fleeting advantage. I had a strategy professor in school that used to talk about ‘economic time.’ His big thesis was that no competitive advantage could withstand the tests of time, and you could only create temporary inhibitors (patents will expire, technology will obsolesce, relationships will erode).

As Android (and other open platforms) gain ground, it sort of takes the wind out of planned obsoleteness for Apple. They’re going to have to start pushing more OS updates, they’re going to have to get better carrier partners. They created a solid game, but now a group of players is looking like they’re ready to play harder (which could be rocky for their customers). While working on the same platform will make it more difficult for any one player to surpass the others, that’s still bad news for Apple, who quickly becomes the odd man out.

Apple has a lot of other advantages that hurt the overall Android movement, but if you were Apple, how would you defend?

(Side note: I ran across this ridiculously extensive review of smart phone sales. If you’re interested, you can grab it here.)

It’s the Little Things

So Vanity Fair launch an iPad app this weekend, (more details here). Given the whole sky-is-falling, death-of-print rally of 2009, I felt compelled to try it out. There were a lot of apps that launched with the iPad that felt like they were made custom to take advantage of the launch, but this one feels like a platform for all VF mags. I guess the app’s nice enough, it has all the content and advertising you’d expect. It’s got all of the promises of rich media; embedded video, high res photos, etc. Here’s the one thing you might not expect, the thing crashes like every 5 minutes.

It’s quite a funny experience because they’ve designed every little detail of the experience, yet the app just freezes and you have to hard-restart your device. From a readers standpoint, you would appreciate less flourish and more stability. It’s obvious that a team of interaction designers sweated every last thing, but you can also tell they outsourced the development portion. The app wasn’t developed and run through QA, it was built on spec.

This experience led me to think about capability and depth. There are people at VF that know the most arcane things about magazines; how layouts read, which fonts communicate subtle meaning, how something will look on paper vs. screen – they are extremely deep in the craft of print media. They don’t know anything about software; magazines don’t have bugs, they have errata.

The death of print conversation that drug on and on last year was a business case conversation – the cost of magazines would be too high, digital distribution would blow it to bits. No one really thought too much the capability of an organization, and how it helped delivery. We just sort of assume that you can build a capability if the business is big enough. This experience made me realize there a difference between capability and expertise, the difference between those to is how good you are at the details.

It’s the Law!

I’m fascinated by metrics and measurement. Ironically, I don’t care about the numbers, I’m riveted by how the act of measuring something causes people to act differently. You can see it all sorts of activities. Dieters obsess over calorie intake, businesses track growth measures, we’ve been watching how unemployment rates are tracking. In the past, Ryan’s written about Time To Last Contact, and I’ve mentioned measuring for experimentation – you get the idea. My colleague David Webster puts it well, he says ‘you get more of what you measure for’. By measuring something, you’re telegraphing to the organization it’s important and you’re inviting our competitive attitudes to optimize around whatever we’re following.

(People especially seem to love numbers that go up; The Dow, Twitter Followers, Facebook friends, salaries, and so on.)

None of this is really much of a revelation, but the idea is still significant. Measurement is the bridge that links innovation to execution. It’s how you understand if your good idea is actually good, and it’s how you’ll move from concept to constant.

Given all this, I was really interesting to learn about Goodharts Law (via Boing Boing.) It’s a little wordy, but it basically states that people pay attention to the things that are measured, and because of this extra attention things that are measured change. (That’s is basically more or less what I wrote earlier.) I have to admit, I’m sort of surprised that this maxim hasn’t surfaced sooner, since 60% of the business articles in the past five years seemed to have been about innovation and/or metrics.

So where do we go from here? Well for me, this all makes a pretty good case for being very careful how you design your measures – what you monitor, how you think about it, and how you share this with a larger audience. The small but important point is that no one really said measuring things makes them any better, it just gives them more attention. Where it goes from there is all a matter of design.

Measure the change you want to see – it’s the law.

The Perspective is the Strategy

So every time I drive anywhere in my car I have one continuing, consistent thought – I hate my GPS. I don’t hate it in a casual, mildly annoying way. I hate it in a deep, resentful, this-is-the-worst-UI-ever-manufactured sort of way. I hate the device not for the directions, but for the device experience. It’s poor, it’s clunky, and whoever built it never spent any time using it. I usually look at that little box hanging from a suction cup on my window and think, ‘mock me now, you’re days are over since Google released free GPS for the phone’.

It’s true, those GPS manufacturers are in a pretty bad place. TomTom, Garmin, and other GPS manufacturers had their share price free fall on Google’s free GPS announcement. Why would anyone pay for a device, if they could the same functionality in their phone for free?

I think there’s more than just paid vs. free. I think the difference lies in the difference in perspective a device company has from a service company. If you’re a device company your customer buys a ‘thing’. Once they buy that thing, they’re a cost to retain until they buy again; customer service, upgrades, anything. Garmin has changed nothing about my GPS since I bought it. In the three years we’ve owned that GPS Garmin has never evolved the experience. Sure they’ve fixed bugs, but I will never get a better experience until I buy another device.

It would be a completely different relationship if Garmin was a service company. A service mindset realizes that you only have a customer if you serve them. So beyond the service being free, Google will actually interact with the customers differently that Garmin. If I were to use a Google phone as a GPS, I have assurance that Google will constantly upgrade the service. They’ll be adding ads I’m sure, but I’d also expect them to improve screen flows and consistently refine the experience.

So when people talk about the dark days for physical GPS manufacturers, I don’t really think it’s a free vs. paid argument, I think it’s about how you serve your customer. I have a lot of confidence that if Garmin or any of those players really turned out a significantly better in-car GPS experience, they could hold on to their market share. That doesn’t mean adding photo albums, or fitness feaures…do you honestly think I’m going to go running with my car’s GPS? It means you have to be brilliant at the basics, that’s what people pay you for. Garmin sells a simple touchscreen device. They could deliver a software upgrade and overwhelm their entire customer base and make a big deal about it. If you’re a device company, you can’t see that. Upgrading the interface would just be foolish, you’ve already earned those customers. Something like that would just be a sunk cost.

Good luck guys. It’s going to be a long year.

Of Course…

I was inspired today by Christian Lindholm of Fjord Design (via Om Malik). The two were talking about how product design principles might inspire entrepreneurs. Lindholm said:

Most companies are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an “of course” reaction from their users.

If you really understand your customer and you’re aligned with what they want, shouldn’t they be looking at your offering and saying to themselves “of course”?

• Hey did you hear the new Google phone is a completely open architecture? Of course it is.
• Hey, you know my TV was broken on my Jet Blue flight. There wasn’t an open seat, so they gave me a discount voucher for my next ticket! Of course they did.
• You know, I wanted to go camping on the west coast but I didn’t want to lug my gear. Did you know REI rents camping gear? Of course they do.
• Man, the shoes from Zappos didn’t fit, but returning them was no hassle at all. Of course it wasn’t.

Each of those examples are actually extremely phenomenal in their own right, but in the context of their brand the acts become expected. It’s some sort of higher order of consumer connection. You only reach that place if you take the time to know your customer, know your market, and really know how to deliver.

That’s not “wow”, that’s thoughtful design, incredible focus, and lots of hard work.

Here’s the thing, organizations lust for “wow” moments because that’s how employees get recognized. Those moments build consensus and momentum. Everyone likes to win, so if you’ve got a “wow” on your hands you’ll have no problem funding people with passion for what you’re building. But little of this “wow” business really has much to do with the customer, it’s an internal (selfish) motivation. “Wow” moments are more about the company winning, the customer is just the means to that victory.

Now I don’t discount the ambition and the intention to amaze and delight your customers, I just think you should push for a more meaningful relationship. Your customer should be able to complete your sentences (and you, theirs). That’s doesn’t mean boring and predictable, it means caring about them more than you care about yourself.

“Wow” moments are actually sort of fleeting and superficial. “Wow” is a summer blockbuster movie that makes a mint in 3 weeks and is on DVD by Christmas. “Wow” is a big buzz at the CES convention in January and lackluster sales in the fall. You didn’t want that, right? Of course you don’t.

No License Required

Today, I had the privilege of attending the Boston AdClub’s annual Edge event. It’s one of those industry events when people come to network and get inspired by speakers and panels. Overall, it was a pretty inspiring event but there were a couple of moments when the train sort of skipped the tracks around people and the License to Practice. It probably is no shock this came from a journalist on one panel, and a digital advertising agency on another.

The basic crux of the License to Practice problem is that people have this assumption that you have to spend a certain amount of time in an industry to be recognized by that profession. While I generally think this holds up in disciplines that require certification (medical, legal, architectural, veterinary, financial) it’s a figment in any other industry. You see in all the certification situations I named (and several others), if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could actually hurt people. Architects could build faulty structures, doctors could do irreparable harm, and so on.

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