Design / Redesign

As one of the participants in last month's IAI-sponsored workshop on UI Design for Physical Spaces (at MAYA Design and the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh, CLP), I've had a little time to think about some other implications of the workshop and how it might apply in other domains. Peter Merholz wrote up a terrific review of the workshop, which he organized with MAYA on behalf of IAI. His outline of the process and his insights are well worth reading.

There were a few things that stayed with me though - first of all, MAYA's approach should not be viewed as a generic, global approach reusable in any integration of UX with architectural design. The project was uniquely structured to fit the needs of the Carnegie Library, which was looking for a holistic design to solve several problems (as pointed out in Peterme's discussion). Their user-centered design approach accounted for persona types, typical patron goals and needs, and the flow of interaction between 3 "organizers": Space, other people (librarians, etc.), and "categorizations." Categorizations included the catalogs, content descriptions, messages that guided flow within content.

The library redesign project provides an excellent case study for:

• Process, as achieved by the CLP and their design team triad of architects, visual information designers, and UX designers,
• Product, notable in the end result of a greatly improved physical environment and user-centered flow,
• and People, or the resulting experience for the library patrons.

See more shots at Flickr:


While this approach works well for the problem as explored, there were a few design paths not explored in this approach that might be considered in other physical information spaces.

• Discretionary use of public space: Design for the itinerant mobile office and other emerging patron types.
• The "space of the content" : Design for the content experience, for locating and branching from books and topics of interest to the patron. This flow was left to the traditional library systems.
  
• Future Planning: Design for an immersive, sensor-driven, ambient intelligent space.

I could be missing something here, but if one of the main tasks of the patron is to locate a specific book or article, or to browse certain ranges of content types, the design model appears to miss this opportunity. There are several ways that content could be retrieved and engaged at the point of need, in a sort of stepped-flow of ambient information:

Step 1 Ambient Info: Kiosk display or printout based on recognition of patron and recent check-outs
Step 2 AmInfo: Recommendations of new books on topic, recent magazine articles indexed to topic or author, etc.
Step 3 AmInfo: Online, website: Instant renewal, leading to recommended or reserve queue
Step 4 AmInfo: Recognition response at library alerts librarian to provide reserved books, media, etc.

Another opportunity is found in observing actual uses of the library physical space over a longer timeline. What do repeat patrons do when they show up day after day? A lot of library use is discretionary and not task-related. People have time to kill while waiting for an appointment - what do they tend to do? Does the space support them? (See Peterme's and James Melzer's shots of the Squirrel Hill branch to see how people are camping out).

But another emergent use, pointed out by my CMU colleague Yang Cai, is the use of the public library as a mobile office. Yang camps out with his laptop and cell phone, to actually get work done away from CMU. In his opinion, the arrangement of space for his purposes is wanting - he is looking for a bit of privacy, not a sharing of public space like the Coffee Shop or reading room. Perhaps the library does not want to encourage this though? Something else to observe ...

Toronto's Bruce Mau, of Massive Change, wrote up the Incomplete Manifesto for Growth in 1998. Although those were "different times" from now, in many ways, the precepts boost thinking and inspiration, and prod action in the way we tend to think of New Year's resolutions. I post a few (there are 43) to boost 2006:

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

As #9 says, Beginning anywhere.

Sometimes I have to wonder about starting a blog - there's no easy way to stop! Instead, it seems better to morph from a journal of developing ideas into a more frequent posts of any ideas that catch my interest and have a life of their own. Most of my "personal" ideas are never posted in blog form anyway, since they are either half-formed in journal notes, or I keep working on them till fully formed. So what makes it to the blog?

Note to readers: whoever some of you are, it would be great to know what you think. People have different motivations for blog writing, but any motive involves some kind of readership. I've perhaps pre-conceived the readership of Desigb/Redesign to be from the User Experience community, other product/interaction design or user research people. That's the original framing of the blog, and its fit within what others have done.

But there's a difference between writing for other professionals in my field of work/consulting, and journaling the kinds of ideas that open toward different, interesting futures. In winding down 2005, I notice what I have been writing here, and it reads like I'm editing a professional journal:

KM World Conference, World Usability Day, (and other conferences)

Recaps of Articles that others might not subscribe to:
- Minding your User's Business (interactions)
- Building a User-Centered Organization (UX Magazine)
- Designing from the User's Experience (DMI Bulletin)

And what occurs to me, reviewing the year, is that many UX professionals will have already seen the articles somewhere else. Its a convenient way to share my writing across readerships, but its not sharing much of the new stuff, the wild variety of issues ranging from alternative learning, cognitive engineering approaches to product design, design of information ecologies for professional practice, concept science and IA, ambient intelligence in information work, redesigning education and eLearning for "humane learning," scenario facilitation and organizational decision-making, and embedded values in organizational life as tacit knowledge.

Perhaps its also more useful to throw out more undeveloped ideas and issues and see who connects.

Nick Kizirnis and I collaborated on a workshop delivered (for the first time) at KM World 2005 in San Jose last week (Nov 14). Although only a half-day workshop, we attempted to create exercises for simulating the experience of group decision-making on critical portal design process decisions. We learned that the workshop materials, method, and approach worked - but Portal! The Game ... will take a full day in the future.

Workshop materials are posted for participants, and colleagues to find, share, read, and respond.

Key workshop discussions:

• Know your business' drivers (industry, competitive) and understand organizational needs
• Know your Infrastructure and understand Features
• Planning: Gather Resources from everywhere, anywhere
  
• Follow an Agile Process - From Planning, Requirements, through Deployment
• Adopt user research methods for requirements and usability
• Learn from Nielsen's best practices
• Adopt Information Architecture practices for portal design

The KM World conference includes Intranets, Content Management, and Streaming Media now. It has become a multi-purpose consultant exchange and trade show, and has morphed nicely to accommodate the evolution of technology and themes. When I last attended in 2000, I delivered a workshop and paper on Knowledge Strategy. The paper has been republished twice in India over the last few years. (But I have dropped the workshop from current inventory.) In 2000 there were over a hundred tech vendors - this year, maybe 2 dozen real tech vendors, but they have working products and can demonstrate real value. Ones to

(In Industries, not disciplines)

This article was published in ACM interactions Nov-Dec 2005, as:

Minding your User's Business

The User Experience (UX) field has evolved numerous distinctive niches and disciplines: user researcher, ethnographer, usability analyst, interface designer, interaction designer, information architect. There are real differences among the skills needed for these different UX approaches, which I refer to as “skill disciplines.” Clearly, the jobs of UX and HCI have become more specialized, in terms of such skill disciplines. However, another issue is the question of specialization within an industry or content domain. In the past, if working in one industry, such as automotive or insurance, we expected our skills to remain portable across work domains. That may be less viable nowadays. We hear of employers requesting “T-shaped” skill sets (with a deep ascender on the T), with the expectation of disciplinary mastery. So how deeply must we understand the business of our users to effectively design for them?

Why Specialize?

User experience is no longer a general practice of applying human factors principles to software and product design. To some extent, we all specialize in skill disciplines. However, it appears fewer of us explicitly constrain our practices to industry or domain. Rather, most in our field attempt to position themselves as cross-domain generalists. Although many UX consultants claim they can learn a user’s work domain equally well across clients and organizations, there are reasons to question this practice.

One, if we are honest, we may realize we do a much better job at research and design when we deeply understand the user’s work and the business drivers behind their practices. When we work across many types of projects we have insufficient time to build this understanding in a line of business. When we specialize in just a few domains, we have both skill and domain expertise to offer.

Two, we do a better job at UX process consulting with our clients when we understand their industry and the special needs of their users. If we are contributing to an organization’s usability practice, their product design process requires more than generic UX guidelines and best-practices. Different industries and organizations have different user relationships, which may require developing unique processes and methods. Our process recommendations have better staying power when we have a credible grounding in the client’s business.

From here I just list the buller points of the article. For details, find a print version!

• Knowing an industry’s state-of-the-art and practice leads to better UX
• Specialized domain knowledge makes us more efficient
• Domain expertise moves UX practice into business consulting
• Specialization can make us more effective at communicating with and influencing our clients
• The most useful user knowledge is often tacit and embedded in the domain practice
• We conduct better user research when seriously committing to a domain
• To specialize in skill, domain, or both?

Specializing is a choice, and it does not make sense for everybody. I have found that between the two dimensions of skill and domain, it often works to specialize in one and generalize in the other. However, from my vantage point, it appears that our field has over-emphasized skill specialization, and de-emphasized domain specialization. I think it is time to shift the balance toward industry specialization in UX. We provide extraordinary value by bringing an objective perspective to design problems, but grounded in an authentic understanding of the business and grasp of the user scenarios, content, and drivers in that industry. We can improve the credibility of our reporting and design recommendations when customers and decision makers are more likely to adopt our design proposals knowing they are grounded in a realistic understanding of their industry and competition, not just the superficial knowledge gained in a single project. We can build trust and credibility to advise at the organizational level, not just within defined projects. Working within a business area develops long-term relationships, connecting to industry networks and communities, expanding the range of value offered. Finally, commitment to an industry may also promote genuine caring, a desire to make a difference in the work lives of people we know well and whose problems we understand.

Brain Surgeon or General Practitioner?

I am not saying everyone in UX should specialize, but consultants should consider the value of dedicating practice to a few areas learned well. In all professions the highest-value practitioners specialize, from medicine and law to accounting and management consulting. The narrower concentrations often demand higher compensation. Having knowledge and personal networks in a practice area increases the economic value of advice, whether in pediatrics, tax law, or retail. In professional practice, domain specialization is a significant strength, not a liability of overly narrow application. And business strategists and top designers usually specialize in a field, such as retail, automotive, consumer goods. Why not in UX?

There seems to be a resurgence of discussion of the best organizational fit for User Experience, and I could almost be convinced by both Peter Boersma's and Richard Anderson's discussions on this. There are quite good points arguing in favor of companies instituting a Chief Experience Officer position. I'm intrigued, but not sold on it yet.

Peter B summarizes my argument for institutionalizing UX/usability, and then offers a worthwhile critique.

He (Peter J) argues:

We will create a more sustainable practice, and more quickly, by cultivating an internal demand than by acquiring formal organizational status.

To me that sounds like a "build it and they will come" approach. Or "proof is in the pudding". Or even "laissez faire" (not to be confused with laissez-faire).

Now, those are all viable approaches, but they do leave you vulnerable to unfavourable interpretation and small fluctuations in quality or project success. You're basically as good as your last project.

A CXO will be focusing on long-term issues, strategy, policy, approach, and ROI. He or she can afford a mistake or two on the project level, as long as the long-term strategy is not in danger. This "protects" the user experience professionals in lower level sof the organization from that vulnerability. See also Richard Anderson's description of the role in his article The Chief Experience Officer.

I just published this article in the UPA's UX magazine, so was hoping for some point-counterpoint. In that brief article I did not have the space for other points such as this. But I am not advocating a "let's do a good job and see who likes it," and its not laissez-faire. Instead, its pragmatic, based on empirical observations with many organizations. Note near the end of the article I mention:

"Yes, in some small companies, we may have CXOs or the like. Start-ups live and die by one product which they have to get right, and tying one product to a user experience strategy may be the best workable approach. But following one good design, much of the game is in marketing (see iPod). After all, start-ups also live and die by their sales and investors.

I could extend that to design consultancies, but not to larger firms or larger consultancies. There are several reasons, based on the organizational issues that occur in larger companies, and on my understanding of institutions and embedded values. First, the organizational research I follow (see Boland, Orlikowski, and Ciborra for example) argues against the idea of creating top-level organizational structures for managing the evolution toward new practices, even with consensus toward that change.

First of all, the idea of a CXO sounds great, but let's be real. First of all, Chief (Anything) Officer does not mean much in a small company (only the CEO). In start-ups, consultancies, and e-Business firms, we can make up any title we want, so there's no significant issue whether we have a CXO or not. The real question is whether to have a CXO in a company with other senior executive positions like COO and CTO? Then we're on shaky ground for an argument. The Chief Anything has authority because they have a budget and significant operational responsibility. They oversee huge budgets, and are responsible for making the company run. They are not supposed to be glorified staff positions, which the CXO sounds like, (unless its Disney, which creates experiences that millions of people pay real money for.)

Peter B also suggests a CMO:

However, I do see value in Peter Jones' argument that "management wants an integrated approach to organizational problem solving, and not a 'new fix'" and I wonder if it would be better to have a Chief Methodology Officer (CMO) in place that deals with how any aspect gets integrated in the way of working, be it quality assurance, agile approaches, or user experience.

I know of one organization where that role is in place (well, two if you count me too): Adaptive Path's Peter Merholz's title is "Director of Practice Development". From the discussions I have had with him and a couple of others, that means he has to deal with putting the right methodology together for his company. The fact that it will definitely be a user experience methodology is an added benefit ;-)

But again, the same with Methodology Officer. I guess that's fine if a consultancy can afford the overhead for this. But for large companies (like the clients I advise), do we really need a "cop at the top" to be sure people work well together? I have a doctoral thesis that explains the problems with imposing top-down process in innovation, when at the practice level innovations emerge, conflict, and are discounted due to power inequalities, once you make Process a Big Deal. My thesis starts here.

That's my rant against Top-Down management as well, because for innovation, and research, it just doesn't work. The problem with (these atypical) Chief Anything positions is that they have too much visibility and not enough earned social capital. I really believe we have to earn the advancement through diffusing the success and values of UX throughout the organization. (See, whenever you make something "new" a management discipline, it becomes a fad, like KM or Quality, even if its worthwhile. Your competitors in the large organizations will always outlast you or take you out. Then UX will be remembered as a fad, not as a good idea that didn't work out).

We always hear about the importance of "buy in from upper management," but that's just a hygiene factor. Necessary but not sufficient. It is no guarantee of success to have such support, and depending on the CEO, it could be the kiss of death to UX, to shoot too far and fail (see competitors, above).

And there are books on institutionalizing usability- these processes are still too top-down. In line with Boland, managers who take on UX should treat their job as if they were designers, not "leaders." Their materials are the organization, processes and practices, and projects. But each organization differs, and there are no cookie-cutter methods for institutionalizing UX. That's why, for each organizational project involving processes, I work with a small team on growing practices that work

UX work is also inherently creative, and needs the space to evolve without being in the pressure-cooker of the corporate suite. Companies have their business cycles, and when there's a downturn, CxO's (that's x as in variable) are often booted, especially if they can be considered non-essential to revenue. In the larger firms where UX is deeply embedded into processes, designers, usability people, and their managers are well-accepted in the product and development world, they own their domains to a large extent, and they survive downturns as well as upturns in the business. And innovation flourishes in a bottom-up, collegial, self-organizing organizational environment. This is harder to achieve, not easier, once you position UX on the hierarchy. Formal authority is not always a good thing to have. In our work the implicit power that emerges from peer respect, from an identified and evolving practice, and by designing winning products, is longer-lasting and inherently sustainable.

From User Experience magazine: Vol 4, Issue 3, 2005 (Article not available online)

In venues ranging from online discussions to conferences (and UXNet), consultants and employees are advocating for a strategic role in their organizations. The UX Summer issue even elevated this focus to its cover story. It sounds simple – if we acquire more responsibility and advance organizationally, user experience will inexorably drive through the company’s DNA and infuse projects and processes with the customer’s voice. Perhaps, but real management practice has a way of uncomfortably adapting to business change. I think we have a good debate started, but wonder if we are proposing the solution (“move up the ladder”) without understanding management as a problem domain.

How do we design a user-centered organization?

As UX professionals, we continue to explore ways to improve our services to employers and clients, toward designing better products. In fulfilling our mission of ensuring delightful customer experiences, we find ourselves working with people within and across the organization unfamiliar with our mission. In some cases, we find ourselves dealing with business processes and management practices adversely affecting our ability to champion the user. We often find inflexible project management practices, date-driven projects, and tight budgets. These frustrations would disappear if we were in charge, we may think. Do we then, as Don Norman has famously suggested, “change the company” to get better usability? Well, as we say in our customary response, it depends.

Organizations are usually not user-centered, and we admit surprise that the user experience value proposition is not self-evident. But executives are not centered around users, or even customers. They are business-centered. They are largely rewarded for accelerating progress toward financial goals, and extend rewards to those who capitalize on markets and turn products into market share. Usability becomes another trade-off, as much as safety, reliability, supportability, accessibility, and other product factors are traded-off and even compromised, unfortunately. As champions of user needs, we often play devil’s advocate to business needs. So to what extent do we champion (however we define it) business success?

We should step back and reflect on what we really envision for the organization. Do we want superior products with world-class ease-of-use? Do we want to create innovative products with a higher market risk and bigger long-term possibilities? Do we want organizations that listen to the user and adapt products to meet their explicit needs? Do we want organizations that drive innovation down deeply into processes, and evolve products with user participation? Do we want to help our good company become “great?” These are very different objectives, and each one assumes a different context of management. None of these visions are met in the same way. Furthermore, we all must start from where we are located in the organization now.

Now reflect on what we want as individuals. What do our values, commitments, and career call us to do? Different professionals have different personal missions. Some of us are designers, and delight in creating bold and moving products. Some of us are researchers, driven to understand human behavior and interaction, producing powerful data for business and product decisions. Others are entrepreneurial, finding better ways to do business focused on the user. How many of us are currently managers as a professional practice?

So why do we think we must become managers? To have sufficient influence? To develop and institutionalize better design practices? To oversee product development? It may be fair to say we want to have more influence, more say over products, and better organizational practices for achieving the objectives of user-centered design. But I question the need to advance in a management track to accomplish this objective.

Having been in management consulting (along the way), I have found the hierarchy often inhospitable to the UX value proposition. It is not enough to just pitch usability or good design higher up the chain. Management consultants are hired to achieve business goals, within which user experience seems a troublesome fit. It is not operational excellence, and is not necessarily a growth strategy, and its certainly not cost management. We are not even marketing, but if we push too hard for a seat at the table, we may find ourselves in marketing’s fate. Which is serving the business, and not the user.

We sound good in theory, but its not just a matter of showing return on investment, which managers know how to manipulate better than we do. It’s a problem of cultural fit in the decision-making process. At some level in the hierarchy, and it may be even be in the middle, we find our glass ceiling. Is it really worth breaking through? Do we really know what a “CXO” does? Most large firms do not even have Chief Marketing Officers.

I find the "push" approach the reverse of what really works in most organizations. User experience must get “pulled in” to its best workable level within each organization. It is not hard to locate enthusiastic sponsors in most organizations anymore – UX is not a risky value proposition. The question is, at what level does it make sense to lobby sponsorship?

Jakob Nielsen addressed the institutionalization of usability in a recent Alertbox. He identified two phases of internal support: Early evangelizing “from User Advocate to Usability Group,” and Late, “from Usability Group to Usability Culture.” If our goal is to move from one UX and no group to Usability Culture, it will not be achieved through promotions. But I consider the power of the usability culture is in making the practice so desirable, that every product and every process will want what we have. We will create a more sustainable practice, and more quickly, by cultivating an internal demand than by acquiring formal organizational status.

Yes, in some small companies, we may have CXOs or the like. Start-ups live and die by one product which they have to get right, and tying one product to a user experience strategy may be the best workable approach. But following one good design, much of the game is in marketing (see iPod). After all, start-ups also live and die by their sales and investors.

But does it make sense for IBM, or even Apple, to have a CXO? How do we effectively champion every user at that scale? Upper management turns experts into business generalists (see Microsoft). Management wants an integrated approach to organizational problem solving, and not a “new fix” from an underappreciated discipline that may already be successful right in their midst. User experience design and research advocates such an integrated approach. The key may be to integrate it as a competitive advantage within each of our organizations, uniquely. Then we may find our success in integrating UX, and with it our human and user-oriented values, within the business processes that affect the user experience. Such an integration of practice and values into process will necessarily raise UX to decision-making levels.

User experience becomes infused into projects, processes, and practices through people. Winning over the people in one project, and then one significant product, at a time. Building formal processes only to the extent projects and practices can handle, and then capturing the gains and promoting the successes. Then, we will find our project and product managers championing the successes of user-centered design,