Touch Sight, a fascinating “camera” for blind people.

For my entire design career,  my colleagues and I have wrestled with the terminology we use to segment and focus our work, both in our careers and in our critiques. Whether it’s the “information architecture vs. interaction design” debate or the “visual design vs. graphic design” debate, our neat little linguistic boxes don’t always seem to be able to contain the conversations we have about our work.

The term “look and feel” has been particularly troublesome. Too often it is used to simply mean “visual design” — that is, just the “look” part — with the “feel” part understood as simply a polite nod to the fact that visual design has an emotional aspect.

Andrew Crow at Adaptive Path suggests that, because of this kind of abuse, “look and feel” should be discarded.

I propose that we never use the phrase “look and feel” again. Ever.

Visual design is often subjective and can be difficult to describe or judge. Often, people lack the language or understanding of the work to accurately express their opinions. Consequently, we use simple terms of the way an object “looks” or how it “feels”.

Speaking in terms of these qualities does a disservice to the design. We cheapen the value of the work by paying attention only to the superficial aspects.

I think he’s being a little hasty. How is the term “visual design”, which Andrew uses here and repeatedly throughout his essay, any better than “look and feel”?

“Look and feel” at least suggests (indeed specifically acknowledges) that the surface-level user experience involves more senses than just the visual. In contrast, “visual design” often dramatically constrains the conversation about our work, and indeed might even constrain the scope of responsibility for a person working under that title.

I’ve always interpreted the “feel” part of look and feel to mean not just the emotional aspects that are usually associated with it, but also the tactile (or seemingly-tactile) effects of how a UI moves and transforms, how it sounds, the speed and pacing of the unfolding experience, its overall voice and personality, and countless other ineffable qualities of visceral experience. “Feel” can include words and language, transitions, motion, rhythm, haptic feedback, symbolism, melody, texture, temperature, and much more.

So while I agree that “look and feel” is often abused, it is precisely the conflation of (a) the vast potential of that term with (b) simply equating it with “visual design” that is the essence of the problem. Replacing “look and feel” with just “visual design”, as Andrew seems to perhaps unintentionally suggest, would only make matters worse. The scope of the term “visual design” simply cannot contain those aforementioned ineffable aspects of user experience, which is why we cling to “look and feel”.

While I confess to using both terms every day, I do think they are often insufficient for effective design communication. But simply throwing away “look and feel” isn’t a solution. We either need a more powerful and understandable replacement for “look and feel”, or we need to do a better job investing the conversation around “look and feel” to include those ineffable qualities. We need to ensure that we can have broad critical conversations about what Christopher Alexander calls “The Quality Without a Name” (QWAN) and that we can have narrow and focused critical conversations around the technical nuances of visual and graphic design.

I’m conservatively inclined towards the second approach: evangelizing a new and broader understanding of what “look and feel” means in the universe of interaction design. But I’ll admit that, Alexander’s declaration of namelessness notwithstanding, I am quietly and subconciously thinking of new names.

[This post’s title is the a tribute to one of my favorite drone/dub bands, seefeel]

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What if someone paid you thousands of dollars to design a user interface or an application for just one person?

Most design work is done for audiences: whether designing mass market products or niche objects of desire, we seldom have a single, real person in mind when we work. We think of audiences as groups of people with diverse needs and expectations. Even highly specialized equipment like NASA space suits are designed to fit a range of individual needs.

In the world of design very few endeavors revolve around a single person. Interior design and architecture are exceptions that come to mind, where often the final product is a private space for an individual, such as an office or a bedroom. And fashion design, too, where tailored suits and “bespoke” garments can still be custom-commissioned as an expensive alternative to the standard prêt-à-porter options we find on department store racks in sizes S, M, and L.

But very few other design practices, from graphic design to industrial design, ever require such a narrow focus. This is especially true for user interface design.

Perhaps, however, this is changing. Perhaps a new sort of interaction design client is emerging, users who desire and are willing to pay for bespoke user interfaces, interactive products designed for the exclusive use of one person.

John King and his “magic wall” at CNN is the de facto case study of the bespoke user interface. As any political buff knows, CNN has been flying high in the ratings for election-specific coverage, no doubt due in part to King’s compelling and dazzling maps. It’s hard to watch more than a few minutes of CNN’s prime time election coverage without seeing John King zooming in and out of the map, manipulating voting projections and simulating election outcomes, all with a few swipes of his fingers.

The magic wall emerged in the beginning of the 2008 primary season. Built by Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel, the magic wall has over the past 10 months introduced dozens of new features, allowing King to do more and more complex simulations, present deeper examinations of polling numbers, and reference encyclopedic historical data going back many decades.

And every time a new feature is introduced, King is already a master of it. Rarely does he tap the wrong state or switch to the wrong page. The map was made for King, and clearly he “trains” on it for each new feature. Now that’s user-centered design!

Extending the User Base

Actually, there is a second user. Last week Perceptive Pixel created a “remixed” version of King’s magic wall for Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen. The results: pure comic genius.

I should point out, however, that there are several kinds of bespoke design philosophies even among designers who design for larger audiences. For one thing, user personas permit designers to envision their target audience more narrowly, to view the user experience challenges on an individual basis rather than imagining their design being used by an amorphous faceless demographic group.

But there’s another kind of bespoke design approach.

The One True User

There is a single user that we all design for all the time. Some of us try hard to avoid talking about or even thinking about this user. Others, however, openly admit or even embrace discussions of how important this user’s opinions are.

I am speaking, of course, about “designing for yourself”.

Sun’s Tim Bray recently wrote:

Everything I’ve done over the years that’s worked out well—software, standards, writing—everything, without exception, was something I did for myself. I’ve done the other thing too: built things based on guesses about what people out there might want or need. Never worked, not once.

John Gruber (who provided the link above) agrees:

The most successful thing I’ve ever made is Markdown, and the one and only user I had in mind for it was me.

Jason Fried, too:

Designing for ourselves first yields better initial results because it lets us design what we know. It lets us assess quality quickly and directly, instead of by proxy. And it lets us fall in love with our products and feel passionate about what we make. There’s simply no substitute for that.

We’re like chefs. We make food that we think tastes good and that we believe in. We make it for customers who have the same sensibilities that we do. It might not be for everyone. That’s ok. But for people who think the way we do, and appreciate the things we appreciate, it’s perfect.

And if enough customers tell us our food is too salty or too hot, we may adjust the salt and the heat. But if some customers tell us to add bananas to our lasagna, we’re not going to make them happy at the expense of ruining the dish for everyone else. That doesn’t make us selfish. We’re just looking out for the greater good.

I find both perspectives rewarding: When designing for a client whose users are pretty different from me, I firmly believe that user research helps us design for the user-who-is-not-me. On the other hand, when designing for those users who are like me I definitely have a lot to bring to the table. What’s more, I would argue that the best interaction designers possess a great deal of self-knowledge about how they behave, react, and feel during user experiences, self-knowledge that improves their design abilities.

Put it this way: it’s better to have a designer with deep self-awareness and no end-user knowledge than a designer with no self-awareness and mountains of user research.

The two approaches can and of course should co-exist in any healthy project. It is, in fact, inevitable: No matter how much user research you do, there will be thousands of little design decisions for which you have no user to reference but yourself.

In the future, I can see bespoke user interfaces happening more and more. Wealthy executives will want personalized “dashboards” for their desktops. Presenters seeking dynamic displays for board meetings and public speaking. As design tools become simpler and more cost effective, this might be financially reasonable for reasonably successful individuals in business and in their personal environments.

It’s Already Happening

Finally, I thought I’d throw in this little case study on bespoke user interfaces.

You don’t have to be a celebrity to have a customized user interface built for you. Back when Behavior first started, we worked on a project for a successful former colleague who was spending some of his dot-com spoils on a new house. Part of his domestic vision was a home automation system — a system of touchscreens installed throughout the house to control the temperature, the lighting, and the audio on a room by room basis. A “smart home”, if you will.

Because our client was a designer himself, he found the out-of-the-box interface design for his new home automation system appalling to his good taste. Like many remote control devices, it was a manifest usability atrocity. But it was also a graphic design nightmare: beveled faux-marble textures, Times New Roman everywhere, and those ancient Windows 3.1 green check and red X icons we still occasionally see on shareware apps.

So he hired Behavior to redesign the UI, just for his house. We researched the technology behind the system, and working with the installation team we provided a new set of stylish screen assets that could replace the ugly default set. It wasn’t a huge job in time or dollars, but the results were, for him, profound: If you’ve can afford it, why not spend some of those interior decor dollars on a domestic user experience you are likely to use many times a day?

In fact, we’ve done a few other similar jobs. We did an animated (though linear) Flash presentation for a single P. Diddy press conference. We’ve done interactive Flash presentations for executives at IAC and Allen and Company to present data in a compelling way to management and investor meetings. In short, there already is a market for this kind of work.

I’ll put up screenshots if I can dig them up. They’re here!

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The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (the people who run the subways) have done a test installation of a new feature to help riders orient themselves as they exit our often-labyrinthine subway stations. They’re placing sidewalk-level signage to tell riders which way is north and indicating which direction the nearest streets and avenues can be found. The Times has the full story today, and I’ve copied their photo here.

I think these are great. Despite what many New Yorkers will claim, we all get disoriented when we exit subway stations in neighborhoods we are unfamiliar with, and often it takes a minute or two to figure out exactly which way is north. (This has, by the way, gotten a lot harder since we lost the World Trade Center as a landmark).

I like two things about these orientation medallions:

1. They make a relatively high estimation of people’s knowledge of New York City geography. I don’t have any data to back this up, but based on the truly abysmal performance by Americans in general at reading maps, I’m not confident that many people, even in New York, are cartographically literate enough to even know north from west. Such people would certainly find these medallions somewhat hard to use. Designers and urban planners commonly design for the lowest common denominator of their user base, or at best they aim for features that are understood by and useful for a solid majority of their users, and as a result they don’t build features for the slightly-more advanced users of their systems. So cheers to the MTA for trying something that will clearly help those riders who already have a good general understanding of New York’s lay of the land. Who knows, the medallions may even have the happy side effect of educating the commuters who don’t quite get it.
2. I really dig the nice touch of deliberately making the compass a little bit inaccurate in order to conform with the average New Yorker’s mental model of the city. You see, the long slender island of Manhattan is not actually oriented directly north to south. The island and its avenues actually run a little more north-north-easterly, rotated slightly away from the true N-S axis. But most people think of uptown as due north, so that’s how the MTA oriented the compass directions and the street IDs. No hobgoblins of foolish consistency here.

Also, it’s delightfully surprising to me that this idea was originally proposed by a regular New Yorker, and the city somehow made it happen. Nice job.

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We recently stopped for coffee at an urban intersection where a Starbucks and a Dunkin’ Donuts sat on opposite corners, facing off in a classic retail rivalry like Macy’s & Gimbels. Deciding to avoid Starbuckian yuppiness (okay, we drink there all the time), we walked into the Dunkin’ Donuts.

But something seemed wrong… the DD looked a little, er, fancier than normal. The lighting was dimmer and less antiseptic, the signage and typography more upscale, the furniture made of wood instead of plastic. Even the logo had a playful little twist to it.

Turns out we had walked into one of DD’s new experimental brand environments, where the traditionally downmarket store is aiming for a more upscale clientele, or at least to catch up with the aspirational brand feeling of Starbucks. This experiment in environmental design was recently featured in ID Magazine (illustrated above).

We walked out with three medium iced coffees (and please note that the DD medium is equivalent to Starbucks’s biggest size, venti – and the DD large looks like damn near half a gallon of coffee) plus three donuts for $5.81, probably 1/3 what we would have paid across the street. The upscale decor and merchandising apparently does not translate into upscale prices. And the coffee was great.

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Large retail stores and fast-food restaurants have a simple choice when designing their checkout customer experience:

• Multiple registers, multiple lines, one line per register
• Multiple registers, single line

This problem is known in the retail industry as “queue management”. The New York Times today features an article comparing the checkout experiences of several New York City supermarkets, and concludes that Whole Foods’s single-line approach is the most efficient. The article suggests that the multiple-line approach is common in the suburbs, but that a different approach is needed for Whole Foods’s New York stores… so a “single-line, bank-style system was quickly chosen for its statistical efficiency.”

Um, duh. Don’t we all know this yet? Isn’t this common knowledge. Isn’t it just common sense? Well, apparently a lot of retailers haven’t yet gotten it.

But customers know it.

Lately I’ve noticed that when presented with multiple registers, customers (at least in New York City) will naturally form into a single line when given half a chance, even when store policy doesn’t ask for a single line. Maybe it’s because it just seems rude to slide up to an open register when somebody else is already waiting in line behind another customer at another register. It’s taking advantage of another person’s bad luck or complacency.

In fact, the multiple-line system almost deliberately encourages people to treat each other as rivals, asking them to think hard before choosing a line, to make tactical decisions to switch lines to maximize their own efficiency, even to send spouses and children to “hold places” in multiple lines to hedge their bets… all of this adds up to a kind of laissez-faire capitalist, survival-of-the-fittest model of the customer experience. In short, these stores are making the customers do their queue management for them.

This system is not only statistically inefficient, but (more importantly) it is a bad customer experience on an emotional level. It implicitly treats customers as animals, like pigs at a trough fighting for food. While some customers may complete their checkout happily, others will feel screwed because they chose the wrong line, or because they didn’t quickly switch to a more efficient line at the right time. It alienates customers from each other, too, by forcing them to focus on tactics and not on normal social niceties, which can’t be good for the store’s sense of community.

In short, the multiple-line system lacks grace. Customers want to be polite and social, not rude and anti-social. We feel better about our experiences when they don’t bring out the worst in us. We want experiences that enable us to behave graciously.

I can’t believe this is still subject to debate, but many retailers are sticking to their guns. In the local CVS and McDonald’s stores near my office, whenever the customers naturally and politely queue up into a single line the staff has to step in and practically yell at them to break up and form separate lines.

Why do they do this? Is it because, as the Times article suggests, customers are scared by long lines and, presumably, can be fooled into thinking that 10 lines with 5 people in each is a far shorter wait than 1 line with 50 people in it? Is it because of space/design constraints? Is it in order to better discipline and monitor unskilled cashiers? Is it because in many communities customers don’t yet understand the mechanics of the single-line approach? Or is it just plain old corporate inertia and stupidity?

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My IA Summit presentation was an experiment in what is a new presentation style for me. I have long admired the rapid-fire presentation style of Lawrence Lessig (aka the “Lessig method“) and in particular the example of Dick Hardt’s keynote at Identity 2.0. Also, I’ve always wanted to achieve the same aesthetic and pedagogical dazzle that my freshman art history teacher managed to lay down every Friday morning at 9:30 to a room full of overworked and/or hung-over art students.

I knew from the start that I would have a lot of slides – that was part of my basic concept, to show style in action across a broad variety of professional disciplines, as a quick barrage of images to drive home the point. In most of my day-to-day business or academic presentations, “1-minute-per-slide” is a pretty good rule of thumb, but for this presentation I ended up with 239 slides to show in 40 minutes. That’s one slide every ten seconds!

I was shocked that it actually worked – quite frankly I was bracing myself for a train wreck. The biggest reason for my surprise is that although I worked extraordinarily hard on the talk, I didn’t manage to get even one chance to rehearse it to see if it even came remotely close to fitting in at under 40 minutes. But in the end, thanks only I suppose to my intuition about my speaking skills, I managed to get to the final slide with five minutes to spare and without losing too much momentum along the way, even as I had to disappointingly breeze through a couple of segments.

About the Topic

After doing all the research and all the thinking, after diving so deeply into the subject of style, I still feel there’s a LOT to say about it. In fact, I feel like my 239 slides barely scratched the surface. Due to time constraints, I glossed over my discussion of three fascinating topics:

Functionalist Modernism

The first was a more in-depth discussion – a refutation, in fact – of what I call “functionalist modernism”. I touched on it briefly with one example, showing that Charles and Ray Eames were not at all the form-follows-function minimalists contemporary design catalogues would have us believe, but that, rather, they loved ornament, kitsch, bric-a-brac, patterns, and all of the decorative crimes that the true modernist eschews. In other words, they were immersed in an ocean of style.

But my primary target was Le Corbusier, an icon of functionalist modernism whose posture as a scientifically-based designer was, in fact, a self-deceptive sham – in much the same way that I think that much of today’s “lab coat” information architecture (and indeed a certain subset of the broader design world) is, sadly, a self-deceptive sham in which style exists but is deliberately obscured.

I also wanted to heap more praise on Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, a book that I think not only puts the lie to so-called functionalist modernism, but exposes the deeply poetic and humane nature of good architecture – a way of thinking about architecture that, I think, has yet to be explored adequately in the world of information architecture (a connection that, I think, Donald Norman attempted to make in his under-appreciated Emotional Design).

Abductive Reasoning

The second topic I had to skip over was my discussion of “adbductive reasononing”, a type of semi-logical thinking that envisions not what is (as with inductive and deductive reasoning) but what might be or what could be, a type of thinking more common among artists and designers. I wanted to connect this with the concept of “design thinking”, a methodology that is the inverse of the business-based risk-averse process of building products to precisely fill carefully-measured needs… but after reading Dan Saffer’s lament on the topic, I’m reluctant to use that term any more (a post on this is to come) so in a way I’m glad I didn’t go into it too much.

Christopher Alexander’s Design Patterns

Finally, I sadly had to skip over my take on Christopher Alexander’s concept of design patterns. Alexander’s name is dropped frequently these days, especially in the interaction design field, but I see his work very differently than I think most people are currently interpreting it. I consider Alexander’s design patterns to be highly idiosyncratric, deeply creative, overtly political, a wee bit spiritual, and ultimately poetic in nature – which is to say that they are not at all the scientifically-based proven best practices they are too-often presented as. I would even say that Alexander was advocating a certain style of architectural theory.

For Future Development

After all the research and writing, my appetite for this topic is only just beginning. I’m not even entirely sure if the concept of “style” covers the full breadth of what I am seeing here – perhaps it’s more about aesthetics or the re-emergence of the formal and decorative, even the idiosyncratic and poetic, as key drivers of good design.

I have uncovered surprising connections between truly fascinating subjects. I’ve found remarkable authors and designers whose work I was previously unfamiliar with (who on earth is Mr. Keedy and how did he get to be so clever?). It’s clear to me that there is an incredible amount of additional material here, and a lot more for me to think about and say. I would love a chance to continue developing this topic, whether as a longer presentation, more formal articles, or even, heavens, a book.

In the Sausage Factory

If you can stomach it, I wanted to share a little insight into the development of my presentation (or, if you will, the magnitude of my procrastination).

I was working on the speech and the slideshow all night right up to my Friday morning flight, on the plane, off and on throughout the conference, and all night long leading right into my Monday morning session. While in Vegas, however, I did manage to squeeze in a stunning dinner at Bouchon, a drive-in showing of 300 with a few six packs and some excellent soul food, and, on the final night before speaking, a rapid-series of thematic drinks at Quark’s Bar at the Star Trek Experience (including a massive “Warp Core Breach”).

Yes, that’s right, I had too many drinks and absolutely no sleep in the 24 hours before speaking. While the drinking didn’t help any, I do kind of thrive in no-sleep circumstances, actually, as long as a quart of coffee is consumed immediately prior to the moment when top-performance is required (this does not, however, apply to athletic performance, however).

Lou Dorfsman, the great advertising and design luminary, once told my partner Jeff Piazza that his secret to giving a great presentation was to gulp down a shot of Scotch immediately before speaking. I have immense respect for that, I really do, but I guess I’m just made of somewhat different stuff than Mr. Dorfsman.

My work process can be divided into five very distinct phases:

1. Topic Generation (two weeks of occasional work): The topic and the presentation format came to me in the most clichéd of contexts – in the shower. I was a last-minute addition to the Summit schedule after another speaker had to withdraw, so I was already a month or two behind when I was asked to participate (and the fact that I was permitted to skip the judging process only put more pressure on me to do a kick-ass presentation). It took about two weeks from having the initial ten-word concept before I got to the point where I could write a coherent three paragraphs about the topic, and by that point it was too late to get my description into any of the printed materials for the conference.
2. Idea Collection/Research (four weeks of occasional work): Idly and intermittently thumbing through my bookshelf, browsing the web, bookmarking links, jotting down random thoughts in my sketchbook, and writing jumbled blog drafts. At no point in this timeframe did I have an overall outline of the final presentation – I was letting the research and my own unpredictable inspirations shape my thinking.
3. Formal Preparation (five semi-intense evenings): This is where I picked up a few new books and consumed them rapidly, and where I formed the bulk of the overarching concept. During this time I mostly focused on switching back and forth between gathering raw materials (copying or transcribing text snippets into my outline, structuring the outline, and collecting/scanning/photographing images for use in the PowerPoint show) and actually writing my original commentary. I had the final outline 50% done in this timeframe, and had probably written down about 30% of the actual words I wanted to say, but only about 10 slides were actually in the PowerPoint deck at this point. It’s three days before showtime.
4. Frenzy! (four intense days and nights): This was the most schizophrenic part. I was quite literally doing a little of everything during the final four days. I would spend an hour fine-tuning individual slides, aligning images and normalizing fonts, only to spend the next hour completely re-ordering the thematic flow of the whole presentation and writing the final script. Intense and completely random alternation between micro and macro.
5. Purge! (2-3 hours): Only in the final hours before showtime did I actually throw in the towel on some sections of the presentation that I knew I would not be able to discuss adequately. I deleted about 10 pages of what would ultimately be a 33-page script, and maybe 50 slides to bring the total PowerPoint page count to 239. I’ve saved all the deleted material, so they’ll probably come up again in a longer-format version of this topic.

I’m very happy to note that my process was entirely consistent with the basic premise of my talk: I had my final delivery style decided very early on, my fundamental outline was never really final until nearly the last minute, and in any event it didn’t completely dictate the content anyway but rather the concept was as much influenced by the content itself – in the same way, I think, that a product’s style shapes that product’s basic premise as much as the premise sets the framework for the product’s ultimate style.

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It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style.

Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking. So here’s all the stuff:

Slideshow

• Slideshow as PDF (19mb PDF)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 1 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 2 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 3 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 4 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 5 of 5)

Reading List

These readings are in roughly the same pedagogical sequence that the concepts appeared in my presentation. Note that not all of these were actually cited in the talk, but I did have all of them either at hand or in mind as I wrote.

MORE…

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I am speaking next Monday at the 2007 ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas.

My topic will be “Interaction Design Style“. It will be a highly visual romp through a variety of topic having to do with the concept of style and how it fits into the design of interactive systems:

• The definition of style.
• The history and meaning of the concept of “style”, across many disciplines including art, architecture, music, design, writing, and more. Style is not not just fashion!
• How a consciousness of style can and should fit into a user-centered design process.
• How style constrains the design process, through both the anxiety of influence and through the availability of overly easy solutions.
• How style inspires the design process, opening us to new ideas we might never have thought of.
• How style guides the design process through pattern libraries, best practices, and more.

I was inspired in part by Stewart Brand’s 2003 IA keynote speech, in which he dismissed style (and fashion, and art) as an ephemeral, superficial, and ultimately flimsy basis for design strategies, an assertion that rubbed me a little wrong. Lately this has come back to me because style, broadly defined, is not brushed aside at all in so many other worlds of design and development. It’s not a dirty word.

Maybe, I thought, there are in fact major stylistic drivers behind much of what interaction designers and information architects do, in the same way that style drives much of architecture, music, etc. Maybe we shouldn’t reject stylistic influences, but should instead embrace them.

I’m working feverishly to make the most thought-provoking and interesting 45 minutes I can craft. It’s not going to be a research paper nor will it be a case study — it will be something I hope will be at least a little entertaining and educational, but most importantly a little eye-opening and inspiring. There will be lots and lots of pretty pictures!

Monday at 9:30 in the “Mesquite Room”. I hope to see you there!

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