Tags to Richness

Based on the neuroscience books I’ve read I’ve come up with a really easy way to explain to someone how the brain works.  Below the illustration I explain the nature of the three components of the brain: You, the Nag and your Body.

You

Your consciousness and personality.  The lump sum of your memory and experience that determines how you make decisions and who you are.

The Nag

The various parts of your biology that you can’t change but that push and pull you to make certain decisions.  The Nag tends to be very simple and straightforward in its needs.  The Nag’s needs tend to revolve around food, sex and survival.  The Nag cannot be reasoned with, only ignored and suppressed.

The Nag is hyper aware of what is outside your body and will scream and yell at you to get something it wants.  If you’ve ever driven by a McDonald’s with a three year old in the back seat you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Your Body

The machine that transports You and the Nag.  Your Body needs fuel and constant maintenance.  Eventually your Body will have too many miles and break down and die.

I’ve spent some time the last couple weeks trying to envision the near and long-term future of interfaces.  I came away with the following useful nuggets.

1. Currently interfaces are moving out into the world where the people are

In my mind the biggest breakthrough with smart phones is that all that functionality that used to be on that computer in the corner is now traveling with me out in the world.  I’m more compelled to use technology now because it’s with me as I live my life.  Mark Weiser called it ubiquitous computing.  My lifetime will most likely see ubiquitous computing reach an advanced level of maturation.

2. But the real event will be when we finally learn to reprogram our biology and the biology around us

Ubiquitous computing in its current state is about making smaller computers that can be a part of a variety of current and future devices.  But I ask you, why waste time creating new devices when you can just reprogram the devices already out there, i.e. our bodies, minds and the nature all around us.  The sad or happy truth is that this will happen some day whether we like it or not.  The six million dollar question is who will do it first and how humanistic will they be? But it’s exciting to me to think about reprogramming the human brain to increase it’s memory speed and capacity, for example.  Or better yet, being able to transfer our memories and our identity over time, defeating death.

3. The mash-up of artificial intelligence and applications

Back to the short-term, artificial intelligence is really the future of apps.  I don’t know about you but I absolutely hate yet another app I have to learn and spend time using.  All those casual consumers who love their Wii’s won’t waste time with Gowalla, only the tech nerds care.  I personally don’t want more apps that require more of my time, I want less apps that do more.  Artificial intelligence, or the creation of an algorithm that can resolve complex problems for me with little input from me is where the real money is.

4. Eventually all those independent AIs will become the singularity

Eventually all the artificial intelligences we invent will merge into a single superintelligence that governs our lives.  This is what Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil called the singularity.  The funny thing is after pondering this for some time I realized that as a species we’ve been designing and iterating on the design of the singularity since the beginning of known time, we’ve just called it God or Gods instead of a supercomputer.  At some point when the pack of engineers sit down to invent a governing intelligence I imagine them referring to all the religious texts and history to devise the initial version.

There’s one other thing to keep in mind here though, and that has to do with reprogramming our biology.  When we start reprogramming our biology and re-engineering our bodies and minds, we may not need a singularity as we conceive of it today simply because at that point we will have become a different kind of species with different needs.

At my company everything the marketing team does falls under our sales funnel.  This means that everything I do as the UX designer falls under one of the segments of this funnel.  With this relationship, it’s easy for me to demonstrate how my UX work affects my company’s bottom line.

You’ve probably heard of the sales funnel before.  Every company has their own version.  I’ve illustrated below the sales funnel my company uses.  Below that I briefly list the UX work related to each phase of the funnel.  My company’s product is a subscription based web application, so our funnel reflects the sales phases that come with a subscription based app.

My company decides what design we should pursue next by taking a look at the current metrics of our sales funnel.  The part of the funnel that is the lowest or suffering the most gets the highest priority.

1. Impressions and Clicks: The UX goal here is to get people to click in less than two seconds and introduce the brand.  UX deliverables: Banner ads that are either static, flash or dynamic. 

2. Trial Taker Rate: The UX goal here is to introduce people to the application and do whatever else it takes to get them to take the free trial.  UX deliverables: Landing pages, homepages and micro sites.

3. Conversion Rate: The UX goal here is to get people to their first success in the application during their free trial, ideally within the first few minutes of their using the app.  UX deliverables: The application itself, especially functionality related to the first success.  It might also include all the detailed functionality and experience.

4. Retention Rate: The UX goal here is to keep people subscribed to the application for as long as possible once they have converted.  UX deliverables: The application itself, with experiences designed to last over time and/or over a desired customer life cycle.

In 2005 I had the privilege of attending a three day workshop by the D.M.A. (Direct Marketing Association).  I recently dug up my notes for a project I’m working on and came across this great list I had put together based on that workshop.  The list is still applicable today as I design UX that sells:

1. Multiple offers in one promotion equals lesser sales.
2. Direct marketing leads the customer to take an action.  Advertising is solely for building brand awareness.
3. Broad based media like TV, Radio and Print are best used to find new customers.
4. 40/40/20 rule:  Direct marketing success depends on 40% on reaching the right audience, 40% on the offer or promotion and only 20% on the creative execution.
5. Features are all about the product.  Benefits are all about the customer.  Benefits are more likely to sell the customer.
6. The direct marketing industry is highly prone to mistakes.  Expect to make a lot of mistakes.
7. Find out what products your customers want to buy and make those, rather then developing a product and then try to find a market for it.
8. Average creative can sell a great offer.
9. Testing equals what, research answers why.

It’s that time of year again, when many designers take time to update their portfolios to keep them from getting stale.  I spent most of my free design time in 2010 fine-tuning my own, here are some of my learnings.

1. The people looking at our portfolios know exactly what we do

I’ve heard many a hiring manager ask a designer, “What exactly did you do on this project?”  These hiring managers know what a wireframe, flow chart, persona, usability lab and a prototype are.  And more importantly, they know that that is exactly what we are going to be doing day in and day out for them.  So that’s exactly what they want to see in your portfolio, your wireframes, flow charts, personas, labs, prototypes and any other artifacts you create.  They care less about the overall project and more about your specific contribution.

2. Always project positive confidence and strength

Your portfolio is your sales brochure.  At this stage of the sales process the last thing you want to do is introduce any seeds of doubt in your buyer’s mind.  Never bring up phrases that say things like “weakness” or “what I learned” even in jest.  Mentally those words, regardless of context, are still linked to negative emotions, and though they may be subtle or humorous, they still take your visitors down those emotional roads.

3. Get people to what they came for right up front

People coming to your portfolio want to see your work: your wireframes, flow charts, personas, labs and prototypes.  If those aren’t the biggest thing on your homepage, front and center, then you’re failing to help your users reach their goals on your site.

4. If your work is company confidential, do a “snap” like dribbble.com or forrst.com

A “snap” is simply an ambiguous corner of one of your drawings.  A “snap” fails to give context, so you aren’t giving away any company secrets, but you are still showing your design work.  Hiring managers will still see what they came for, because they have the knowledge needed to assess your skill even without full context for your wireframe, flow chart or prototype.  You can save the nitty gritty details for the interview.

Agile at my company tends to be a very heads down speedy process in which design and development are always producing customer ready work.  What Agile at my company doesn’t account for yet is any kind of long term planning.  We desperately need a “planning” sprint where-in the design, dev and business teams purposefully spend time on foundational and long-term needs.

In UX long-term needs are things like a sitemap, ux bugs, personas, a style guide and our primary use cases.  For the longest time I kept expecting someone from the product group to create or ask me to create any one of these items.  But they never did.  In our Agile process it became so easy to be focused on sprinting that no one bothered to think about or define where exactly it was we were sprinting to.

In our flavor of Agile, “documentation” tends to be a swear word not unlike the bad blood Agile has towards the word “waterfall.”  But the sad truth is good planning requires good documentation.  This is the fatal flaw of our Agile, in our effort to eliminate time-wasting documentation we also threw out the time-saving documentation.

How I’m doing my part

I known I’ll never be given a formal opportunity to stop what I’m doing and create a foundational element like a persona or a sitemap.  Instead I have to slowly build them and grow them over time, a little here and a little there.

I’ve forced my schedule to include what I call the 5 UX buckets.  I make what time I can along the way to slowly build and document the following foundational UX elements.  And as Dan Brown says in his book Communicating Design, these documents are meant to be living breathing documents.  So I’m ok with the fact that they are never “done” but are slowing growing and evolving over time.

My five UX buckets

1. Sitemap or content audit

Every time a new feature comes up no one can remember all the parts of the site that feature might impact.  With a sitemap I am able to build a mental model that significantly aids in the recall of every nook and cranny of the site.

2. Regular usability labs to generate what we call UX Bugs

Every other sprint we end up asking ourselves what should we do next.  Without the prior groundwork of regular usability labs and a backlog generated from them, we end up guessing in the dark about what we should do.

3. Personas and Customer Segments

For now this is a simple list of the types of people we encounter in our market niche.  What ends up happening is we talk about them off and on here and there.  And as we do I keep a master list of these features that slowly evolves as our understanding of our customers grows.

4. A style guide

When we are designing in some isolated piece of the site it’s easy to get caught up in a design that is unique to that problem but that ignores the consistency of the site as a whole.  Until now we’ve been rushing so fast to get something done that we haven’t had the time to create a proper style guide.  It’s easy to turn a style guide into a massive time-consuming inventory project that no one will end up using.  Instead, as I come across a reoccurring UI or graphics pattern that I know will be too hard to remember later, I write it down in a master list.

5. Primary use cases

What are the critical paths that have to work, and work well, for our customers to get what they came for?  The Primary use cases provide us with a way to prioritize the growing list of UX bugs we are generating from the usability labs.  I can quickly rank a given list of UX bugs when I know which interactions of the site are more important than the others.

Last week I started a preliminary outline to answer to the question what is the UX department at my company responsible for.  This is by no means comprehensive, it’s just a start.

1. Backlog grooming

Backlog grooming is just the Scrum way of saying make sure there is always a bunch of designs ready to go.  My boss should never come to me and say he doesn’t know what to give the dev guys next sprint because there are no designs ready.

2. Continuous UI improvement on the site

This is the really tricky one at a small company like mine simply because at the executive level we never have the time and resources to do anything that doesn’t have a large ROI.  I’m still developing a strategy for this, but for now it ends up being skunkworks projects in collaboration with the HTML guys.

3. Monitor and drive the A/B testing

This is where UX gets its monetary value.  I finally realized that the only way I could sell usability improvements to my bosses was under the guise of A/B testing.  Now they are anxious to try new things.  Improvements inside our application are called conversion rate a/b tests, and improvements that get people to sign up are called trial-taker a/b tests.

4. Create, maintain and own the sitemap of the current site

Site-mapping a large app like ours always seemed too overwhelming and time consuming to be worth the effort.  But I’ve since realized it helps managing the entire experience so much easier.  I don’t build it all at once, that’d take too long, so day to day I add a little more until I have it all charted out.  And now that I have it I don’t forget all the little pages that are out there on the site.

5. Get involved at the top and influence company direction

This one is still in development, but the way I’m accomplishing this is two-fold.  First I get involved with as many executive planning meetings as I can.  And second I spend time pouring over the same reports, stats and email discussions the executive team have so that I’m not only in the loop, but forming a mental model of how they think and why they make the decisions they do.  At some point I’m going to be able to understand exactly where they are coming from and what they are trying to do, even if I don’t agree.

6. Never be invisible

The most important lesson I learned from the book Never Eat Alone was to never be invisible.  I’ve also learned that executives love useful statistics and reports.  So my goal now is to regularly deliver useful reports and statistics they wouldn’t normally have so that I’m never invisible and so that I’m adding value to what they do.

7. 20% time envisioning killer ideas for the company

After 4.5 years I quickly realized we are never going to do anything revolutionary unless I make it happen.  And the easiest way to do this is to say screw it and spend about an hour every day working on some concept sketches of killer ideas for the company.  Once people can actually see ideas drawn up then they start taking the ideas seriously and they start to kindle a desire of their own to pursue the ideas.

1. Interaction design is about designing choose your own adventure stories.  It’s simply a non-linear movie that allows your audience to choose their own path along the way.
2. Understand the difference between designing applications and games.  They are the same thing, they are just on opposite sides of the “purpose” spectrum.  Applications are for getting something done as fast as possible, games are for challenging goals.  Both create happiness and joy.  There is a lot of gray area in-between applications and games, and the best interaction design includes some blend of both purposes depending on what your interactions are for.
3. Understand and force yourself to think separately about Graphic Design, UI Design and Interaction Design.  They are not the same, but they encompass each other.  Graphic Design is fine art with a functional purpose, UI Design includes Graphic Design and is about creating an eye path.  Interaction Design includes both UI and Graphic Design and is about a successive series of UIs that take users to end goals.
4. Before anything else, read about the human brain.  Start with the book Brain Rules by John Medina.  Design is about communicating to brains and though we don’t have the human brain completely mapped out, it is still a machine with a simple set of rules.
5. Understand that what makes a human brain happy is simply choosing goals that matter to the individual, working towards them and then accomplishing them.  This is the basic formula to that chemical reaction we call joy and happiness.
6. Once you understand the human brain machine, study the computer machine.  Your whole purpose in life is to get the computer to talk to a human and guide that human towards a goal.  Someday computers will be humanoid in behavior but until then we have to fake it as best we can.
7. As a general rule, developers have spent more time coding than designing.  They default to thinking more like a computer, and less like a human.   The problem is that the scope of creating software is simply beyond your capacity to build alone.  You have to rely on developers so you must learn how to persuade the developers to do things that benefit humans more than things that benefit them and the computer systems they create.
8. The best way to understand developers is to be one for some period of time.  Most designers hate development, which is natural, but if you don’t do development yourself for a time so you can “get it”, you’ll always be at the mercy of what you don’t know.  Here’s another way to put it, who do you think is going to make a better building architect, the guy who has actually put up dry wall or the guy who hasn’t?
9. HTML is not development, it’s simply a gateway drug.  You must do PHP and MySQL (or something similar) or you’re wasting your time.  When you’ve written your first class from scratch, and you understand how it’s a beautiful thing to write classes then you can stop :)
10. Good interaction design comes from understanding and learning processes, patterns and standards.  In my experience artists tend to avoid this kind of thing.  But interaction design is so complex that these things are the only way to give yourself the necessary constraints to be creative in.  Otherwise you’ll get lost in the complexity and never finish anything.   The good news is that interaction is much more creative and fulfilling than graphic design or UI design alone so it’s worth the time to learn “the rules.”
11. Fine art is about expressing whatever the hell you want.  Interaction design is about what other people want, not what you want.  This was critical for me in my own career development.  Interaction design was not about what I wanted, I had to be able to put my user first.  This is much harder than you might think.  Everyone, even Alan Cooper, struggles with this.  The best way to put your user first is lots of continual research and testing.  “Research and testing,” I thought, “What? I’m an artist.”  Interaction design is about getting inside someone else’s head, understanding how they think and helping them accomplish something they want to do.  Research and testing is the most common way to accomplish this.
12. You’ll also want to study game design because  game designers have been doing interaction design with tons more time, money and resources than the web or software industry.  Companies like EA have been designing interactions much bigger in scale and much more complex than any computer company.  The game industry has found ways to solve problems the software industry hasn’t gotten to yet.
13. Interaction design is about logic and impulse, you have to be a master of both to be successful.  You’ll always fail at interaction design until you can start and stop your impulsive artist side at will.