Last.fm’s announcement that they will be allowing their users to listen to full-length versions of millions of music tracks is one of the final nails in the coffin of the traditional recorded-music industry. Owning music is dead. The new business model for making money in the music industry is simple: Design a better music distribution system. Or, simply put, build a better user experience for music listening.

Which, interstingly, is how the enjoyment of music has always been throughout the centuries, with the singular exception of the century recently passed. Live musical concerts and performances have always been about more than the sounds in your ears: It’s also the experience of the venue, the culture or subculture of the audience, the smells and tastes. This also applies to live radio, including satellite and internet radio. Both live performance and live radio focus on putting value on (i.e., charging money for) the experience around the music — on the curation, the immediacy, the communal feeling of listening to the same music as dozens or even millions of other listeners — not on the ownership of the recording itself.

In fact, the ownership of recorded music will someday be seen as a weird historical anomaly, born during a decades-long spasm of corporate enthusiam about — and complete control over — the production and distribution of recorded music… a phenomenon in its death throes now that, finally, the ability to record, copy, and distribute music has trickled down into the hands of everyday people.

The era in which one could buy and sell recorded music lasted only about a century, from the early days of the phonograph in the late 1800s to the emergence in the 1990’s of illegal file sharing and now, in this decade, completely legal free distribution of recorded music. We are back where we started: paying for experiences, not for artifacts.

Today’s digital music scene is about experiences. iTunes, for example, is not so much a tool for organizing your music collection as it is a complete media experience platform: It’s the tool to listen to and organize your music, of course, but with the store integration, partnership with your portable player, accessibility to other users on your network, sharing with your TV and home stereo system, it’s become far more than a simple media player.

Last.fm takes it further: Are you listening to something you really like, and you want more? Well, right there on the page, the page that is playing the music, are a dozen different ways of exploring that music further: Talk to other fans, read about the band’s history, view recommendations based on your own listening habits, listen to artists that are intimately related to the band you’re hearing, find out about new music that came out just today.

Valuing Media

Kevin Kelly recently wrote a really insightful and thought-provoking piece about how the value of copied media can be measured:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

In the case of music, the “stuff which can’t be copied” is (among other things) live, performed music. Kelly’s piece explores a few other ways that stuff can be valuable without being copyable — it’s a great read, please check it out.

Last.fm actually hits several of Kelly’s values dead-on, including Accessibility (the ability to tune in from any browser and not be tied to your own hard drive), Patronage (the artist is getting paid by Last.fm, something that many listeners want to know is happening), and Personalization and Findability (Last.fm was literally founded on the idea of making new music findable through personalized recommendations).

Rhapsody was on the right track, but their catalog lacks the kind of Web 2.0 community-generated depth and recommendation tools to make listening to and discovering new music such a delightful experience. On Rhapsody, AFAIK, you are renting access to a database that allows basic browsing by artist, genre, etc. That’s it. It’s fundamentally still about paying for temporary ownership of music.

But as I said, it’s not about owning the music any more. It’s about providing easy and fluid access to the music, exposing you to new music you will like, immersing you in a music community, and making the listening experience as entertaining and interesting as possible. Ownership is no longer an issue. Today you pay for the experience of a product which, in the peer-to-peer era, you can always get in raw form for free or nearly free.

In the future competition in the music industry, such as it is, will consist of better and better ways of competing, essentially, with old-fashioned radio, nightclubs, and concert halls. Last.fm gets this.

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A quick thought for this fine Friday: Something about the term “Getting Things Done” always bugged me. Now I know what it is. It’s the passive voice.

Instead of the indirect phrasing using the verb “to get”, maybe we really should simply say “Doing Things“. GTD isn’t about getting other people to do things — it’s about you doing things. Even delegation is something you have to actively do.

Or, as Nike said, “Just Do It” (an expression that adman Dan Weiden now says he thought up after reading Gary Gilmore’s last words as he faced a firing squad).

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I have a tendency to be extremely skeptical about user research in the design process. This is mostly because so much of it is, IMHO, (a) fundamentally bad (e.g., employing sloppy research methods or hamfisted statistical analyses), (b) flatly dishonest (e.g., dressing unscientific research in pseudo-scientific drag in order to justify a desired result), and (c) runs against what I think to be effective design methodologies.

I’m beginning to think my distrust runs even deeper. So deep that I fear I may be gaining a reputation as a “research curmudgeon” who’ll always have a knee-jerk dismissal of any new or clever techniques that pass under my nose. This may be true — I may be overly skeptical sometimes.

But now I think I can explain it with a little more nuance than before, and offer a new and largely positive perspective on research as part of a design process.

In the past, my scorn for user research has been aimed at everything from baroque user persona proceses to no-duh eyetracking studies. The latest technique I reflexively scoffed at is “modemapping” (pointed out to me by David Armano), a technique developed by Stuart Karten Design. Thinking more about the potential uses of modemapping made me realize that my scoffing was not directed so much at the technique itself, but that, instead, I have a deeper problem with the formalization of design research in general.

First, what is modemapping? Well, it’s not so much a research gathering technique as it is a method of interpreting data. To produce a modemap, researchers first interview and observe users (no differently than they would for any sort of primary ethnographic research). Then they use the data to diagram each user’s behavior on a timeline-like chart. The resulting “modemaps” visually distinguish between different types or modes of activity a person may find themselves in during a given timeframe, such as during a typical weekday.

To someone like me, a lover of information graphics (and in particular of timelines), modemapping did have an immediate visceral appeal.

When I thought a little more about modemapping, however, I asked myself: Could the observations gleaned from these modemaps really be any different from — or better than — the observations that a good researcher could have gleaned simply by conducting the interviews, reading the transcripts, and watching the videos? Is this just a way to spend an extra week or two of research budget to develop fun graphics? Is this just infoporn that looks hot but doesn’t reveal new information or insights about the underlying data?

But then I realized that this kind of seemingly-pointless abstraction is exactly what I do when I make a jump from facts to ideas, from thinking to designing. For me it’s not the diagram or the artifact that matters. It’s the process of making the diagram that produces innovation. The most powerful design insights do not simply emerge from the diagram for any third-party viewer to read as if they were reading a billboard. More likely the design insights enter the mind of the diagram-maker while they are assembling it. The final modemap artifact simply serves as a tool to explain the designer’s inspirational process to other people (non-designers, especially, but also to other designers) in the hopes that the customers of the diagram (whether they be clients or collaborators) may understand the merits of the design. The diagram may even, in fact, be let incomplete or even discarded upon completion if the design insights may be better expressed through another means.

My Design Process

When I am designing, I almost always do tons of research first. But at some point I will start doodling and sketching different ways of making the data mean something. I try to visualize and organize the facts into systems. I’ll go through dozens of quick and wildly different sketches of how the data might fit together, almost always with no idea of how the sketching process will end up.

Quite frankly, much of this time might even be spent staring into space and just thinking, visualizing the data in my head. Sometimes the resulting sketches will resemble or even closely conform to known data interpretation techniques such as mental models, flowcharts, affinity diagrams, Venn diagrams, quadrants, and many others. I’ve probably used half the techniques in the visualization periodic table without even knowing it.

The “not knowing it” part is where my user research curmudgeon-ness comes in. I have a passion for letting my mind wander freely and letting it discover revelatory and meaningful visualizations. Rather than letting the visualization lead my idea process, though, I let the idea process generate the visualization. Because I prefer this way of thinking and designing, I have an immediate disdain for any methodology that purports that a particular data interpretation or visualization technique is the right one for a job. How can a great designer know what tools they will use before the design process begins? They simply can’t.

It’s a fundamental quality of design thinking, I suppose, to let the ideas determine the process. What veers us away from design thinking and towards (for lack of a better term) business thinking is the formalization of a research and research interpretation process. Instead of asking researchers to bask in the data using whatever methodology suits their temperament and idiosyncratic thought process, commercial design culture often asks the design researcher to fit their research into a proscribed process, in this case the “modemapping data interpretation machine”. The techniques themselves don’t demand this — the demand for pre-planned processes comes from business constraints where customers need to know what they are paying for.

This is a real conundrum for the research-minded design thinker who needs to keep to a budget: How do you sell a research-based methodology if you cannot say for sure what research-interpretation method you will use? How do you productize or justify the value of “staring into space for a few hours thinking about the problem”, or “sketching in a moleskine for a few days”?

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I’m not going to say much about Kindle — as an iPhone owner, I find both the device and the service colossally dumb.

But the breathless excitement over the supposed “death of the book” is even more preposterous than Amazon’s little white elephant, especially to book lovers like my wife and me. For us, books, periodicals, and printed matter of all sorts comprise, quite literally, the very structure of both our intellectual and physical worlds. Books surround us. Our loft is subdivided into rooms using bookshelves. Every surface has a stack of hardbacks, paperbacks, and magazines on it. We both grew up surrounded by the printed word — looking at them, feeling them, smelling them — and we intend for our family to continue in that tradition.

Books are the building blocks of libraries, and our libraries reflect who we are. John Gruber’s critique of Kindle as a profound rip-off for true book lovers is spot on:

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Here’s a far better idea, one that book lovers who also happen to be technophiles would love: Bundle print and digital copies of books together for the same price, perhaps as a very small cost increase (say 5%) to the basic print price. You can think of it as a free digital backup copy, or as a digital reference edition. Other advantages include:

• Scholars, journalists, and reviewers can use the digital copy for searches, citations, quotations, and literary analysis.
• References to external sources can be clickable URLs.
• Since so many digital book owners print them out, the bundling will inevitably save a few trees.
• Having a digital copy precludes the need to print an index in the physical book. There’s no need to even construct one in the first place — let users simply search it digitally.
• While I still think DRM is evil, it wouldn’t be quite so onerous as long as a physical copy was in my permanent posession.

John Gruber includes this fabulous Emerson quote in his review:

If you would know how a man treats his wife and his children, see how he treats his books.

Many of the core lifestyle and business ideas behind Kindle are, frankly, an affront to what I love about books. What is most surprising is seeing Amazon — of all companies! — treating book lovers in this way. This is not innovative thinking at all.

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At the Speak Up graphic design blog, Armin Vit laments the lack of “landmark” or canonical web designs. After giving several examples of iconic designs that are truly landmarks in the history of graphic design, from Paul Rand’s IBM logo in the 1950s to Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters in the 1990s, he writes:

Myself, I could list projects in every category from logos, to annual reports, to magazine covers, to packaging, to typefaces, to opening titles that could be considered landmark projects… But when it comes to web sites, I can’t think of a single www that could be comparable — in gravitas, praise, or memorability — as any of the few projects I just mentioned.

Joshua Porter, however, thinks that Armin is barking up the wrong tree, arguing at his own blog that Armin’s singular focus on graphic design is misguided:

But, frankly, I think Armin has missed his own point. He wants to know what web designers see as canonical, but he’s dismissing the obvious answer because it doesn’t fit into his canonical mold of graphic design. In other words, he’s looking at Google from a graphic design perspective, when web designers necessarily have to look at it from an interaction design perspective.

If Armin were to ask web designers and web development teams what the canonical web designs are, he would get very clear answers.

Joshua then goes on to cite Google and Amazon as canonical web designs because they do what they do exceptionally well — and that doing things is what web design is all about. He continues:

So while Armin doesn’t want this to be about graphic vs. web design, it has to be at some level because web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.

That’s where he loses me. This is, at least to Joshua, just another turf war between interaction design and graphic design, an unfortunate debate that I had hoped had been put to rest in the last decade.

Joshua is buying into the idea that “graphic design” on the web is at best a lesser practice than some other, bigger thing called “web design” (which he says is really “interaction design”, but whose purview also apparently encompasses programming, strategy, content, information architecture, interaction design, and presumably even graphic design itself).

It’s certainly a good thing to talk about web design holistically and to see all of these things as interconnected, but must such discussion be at the expense of graphic design? Is discussing graphic design off limits? It’s clear that Armin was talking specifically about graphic design, but Joshua sees this not as a professional focus but, rather, as a fundamental shortcoming.

Perhaps Armin brought it on himself by using the phrase “web design” when it seems he really means “graphic design on the web”. Given that Speak Up is a *graphic design* site, I would have thought this focus would have been presumed by most readers. But when Joshua compares Google to Armin’s historical graphic design examples, and then claims Google’s iconic stroke of genius lies in its functionality, he is doing the equivalent of claiming that:

• Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster’s “design” includes Bob Dylan’s lyrics
• Vignelli’s subway map “design” includes the engineering of the trains and tunnels of the NYC transit system
• William Golden’s CBS logo’s “design” includes the groundbreaking journalism of Edward R. Murrow.

Joshua is casting too broad a net by claiming that web design is everything when clearly Armin is focusing deliberately and precisely on the profession of graphic design.

Armin is not talking about functionality, and that’s okay! He is talking about the color, typography, shape, layout and all the other formal elements that make up a site’s graphic design. Hell, Armin would probably be quite happy to see just one truly great logo for a web-based product, a logo whose design has the same timeless gravity as the logos from the history of graphic design. Instead we get endless swooshes and reflections.

Is it wrong of Armin to ask for this?

Well, only if it is wrong to want excellence in graphic design. On the web.

Back to the 90s

Why is it that when we talk about web design, “graphic design” is often treated as the red headed stepchild? In other media, and in older times, we can talk about the genius of a particular product’s graphic design independently of the larger system that that design represents or serves. We can talk about the graphic design of the Westinghouse logo without talking about the engineering of a Westinghouse refrigerator. Why should we not be able to do this about graphic design on the web?

My theory is that many web professionals, even graphic designers who work exclusively on the web, look down their noses on the crafts and traditions of “graphic design”. They have been doing this since the early days of the web, back in the 1990s, when it was common for smug young designers to feel superior to print-based graphic designers who didn’t yet know what they were doing on the web. How many of you slick web design professionals remember a time back in the 1990’s when we laughed at the poor old graphic design geezers trying to make HTML pages using Quark Xpress?

Well, those days are over. The joke is old. And you know what? All these years of people believing that graphic design was a lesser discipline, of contending that graphic design is barely an important factor in the bigger picture of web design, have led to precisely the predicament that Armin is complaining about: Web sites, in general, still don’t look as compelling as the historical graphic and visual icons we’ve come to know and love in other media. His point is entirely valid, and Joshua’s attitude only manages to prove Armin’s point. Graphic design on the web kinda sucks.

And as long as we continue to insist that graphic design is a non-entity, we will never have good graphic design on the web.

(I’ve written about this before when I argued last year that the AIGA fell into the same trap when they decided the G no longer means “graphic”. It’s sad that it’s still happening.)

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A running theme here at graphpaper.com is the debunking of shoddy research methodologies and junk science used to lend authority to and help guide decisions in the design professions. I want to encourage my readers, and the industry as a whole, to (a) stop being so gullible about the research they hear about in the press, and to (b) stop performing meaningless research themselves.

Ultimately my objective is to end the cycle of requiring designers to back up their recommendations with the kind of research or data that cannot be accurately or meaningfully collected, a cycle that forces designers and consultants to produce mountains of bad research. Either do the research correctly and make decisions based on sound science, or don’t do it at all and make your key decisions based on wisdom and experience. No research is better than bad research.

Today’s episode attacks addresses the field of advertising research.

Making Up Numbers

I am a man of very little faith in most quantitative research — not because I don’t believe in numbers, but because, usually, when you scratch the surface of a quantitative research report you will find blatantly subjective or qualitative data being used as the basis for the quantitative data.

Don’t get me wrong, I love qualitative research. But for execs who seek cold, hard numbers, qualitative research is often meaningless and untrustworthy. It is seen as fluffy psychobabble or artistic/creative posturing. So when a designer or a researcher wants their insights to be taken seriously, they often feel the need to “translate” their extensive subjective insights into objective numbers, a process that I think is just another flavor of bullshitting.

Here is a simple made-up example of what I mean by “translating” qualitative research into a quantitative report:

I conducted a study on the subway this Monday morning. I examined 50 people’s faces to see if they looked happy or sad. 15 looked happy, and 35 looked sad. Can I say, then, that 30% of the commuters in my study were happy? Sure. But only if you trust my judgement in reading people’s faces. The numbers are a smokescreen — the real insight, the real magic, is occurring in my personal examinations of people’s faces. My own opinion is the linchpin of the whole “study”. If that one part of the process is unreliable — and you have no way of trusting that it isn’t — then the final numbers are also worthless.

Advertising that “Works”

So now here’s a real-world example with similar underlying flaws: An advertising industry study released recently contends that ads that “tell stories” are more effective than those that do not. Sounds interesting. The methodology sounds pretty science-y, too:

Thirty-three ads across 12 categories—from brands like Budweiser, Campbell’s Soup and MasterCard—were analyzed by 14 leading emotion and physiological research firms. The research tools varied from testing heart rate and skin conductance of the ad viewer to brain diagnostics.

The study was looking for patterns among those ads that work better than others. Here’s an example conclusion:

One such pattern was that a campaign like Bud’s iconic “Whassup” registered more powerfully with consumers than Miller Lite low-carb ads that essentially just said, “We’re better than the other guys.” Why? Because Bud told a story about friends connected by a special greeting.

There are many bells going off in my head reading this. Who is to say that “Whassup” tell more of a “story” than the Miller Lite ads? I remember those ads, and they hardly meet my definition of “story” (a story is something in which, you know, things happen). So it begs the question of “what is a story?” We have to trust the researcher’s opinion on that, I guess.

Secondly, how do they know one ad “works better” than another (this, of course, is one of the advertising industry’s biggest existential questions, right after “does advertising work at all”)? What does “registered more powerfully” mean, exactly? Is that even measurable?

This study used “heart rate and skin conductance”, presumably to mitigate the kind of subjective judgement in my face-reading example above. But what exactly do those physiological conditions have to do with the effectiveness of an ad? If my heart rate goes up, for example, does that mean that I am supposed to be more inclined to buy something? Or is it the exact opposite, that physical excitement indicates hostility to the brand while calmness indicates receptiveness to the brand’s emotionally-compatible values?

It sounds like we’re supposed to assume that there is a meaningful correlation here, but I am extremely skeptical. We must question every little aspect of the so-called scientific studies we read, because if any single part of a study is fundamentally flawed then the whole thing is worthless.

Fundamental to the advertising study is the theory that a person can watch an ad and that researchers can then determine if the ad “worked”, in the same way an opthamologist can put lenses in front of your eyes and determine if you can read the eyechart or not. This idea that an ad “works” when it makes you more inclined to buy something is called “purchase intent”, and it is an industry standard term:

In Campbell’s “Orphan” ad, it is about bringing together a mother and her foster child.

Ad research firm Gallup-Robinson, Pennington, N.J., found that the spot, which showed a little girl’s sadness and anxiety melt away into a soft smile once she was given a bowl of soup, generated 80% purchase intent. Most viewers measured said it was believable.

A similar study from Ameritest, Albuquerque, N.M., found it received 42% purchase intent compared to a category norm of 33%.

Okay, big alarm bell here: 33% is the category norm for purchase intent. WTF? Is that supposed to mean that 33% of people who watch the ad actually intend to buy the product? This defies all credulity. The ad industry, of course, loves to pat itself on the back, but 33%? (Maybe I’m just projecting, but I can’t think of more than one or two ads in my life that have ever succeeded in producing a “purchase intent” in me at all.)

What’s more, how do they determine “purchase intent”? Is it from simply asking the test subjects “Do you want to buy this”? If so, maybe the fact that an ad is funny increases the likelihood of answering the question positively, but ultimately has no effect on whether the purchase actually occurs. Is there any evidence that “purchase intent” has any bearing on “purchasing” at all?

Probably not. My favorite paragraph is the last one:

The study does not discuss the ROI of the ads for their marketers. Mark Truss, director of brand intelligence at JWT, New York, said the storytelling theory is correct, but the industry still lacks a way to prove it. “Without the tools to measure and link back to business metrics, marketers and advertisers are not going to embrace [this approach].”

In other words, it’s all crap. Cheers to Mark Truss for, in essence, openly arguing based on his own experience and wisdom instead of relying on the junk science. I’ll always put more trust in imperfect but honest people than in dishonest or meaningless numbers.

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Every person, place, thing, and idea whose name can be found on the Internet has an existence that can be detected and measured by search engines. The relentless spiders of Google will find you and rank you (and let’s leave for another day the techno-philosophical question of whether web pages that have no incoming or outgoing links can be said to exist at all). This measurement is, to me, a kind of “pulse”, telling us how strong — how healthy — any given idea is in our collective digital mind.

So whenever we Google our own names (and you know you’ve done it!), we are in effect checking this “Googlepulse” to see how healthy we are in terms of our visibility and connectedness on the Internet. We are, in a sense, measuring our very digital existence.

This measurement will fluctuate over time as the number and freshness of the links to a particular topic varies, much as a person’s pulse will vary during their life as they grow, get in and out of shape, and undergo the natural effects of aging. In January of 2006, if you Googled “iPhone” you probably wouldn’t see much, but in January of 2007 you’d find a hell of a lot. In a sense, this measurement is like what doctors do when they take your vital signs — pulse, blood pressure, etc — and take note of how they change over time. Google is our digital doctor.

(Of course, Google isn’t the only way to do this. You can also gain insight into a concept’s digital pulse via overall site rankings at Alexa, blog tracking at Technorati (especially Technorati Mini), del.icio.us, blog trackbacks, any news web site’s internal alert systems, Neilsen’s Blogpulse metrics, news and blog aggregators, and of course any other search engine. Even Twitter now allows you to essentially measure your Twitterpulse through an alert system. I’m focusing on Google simply because it pretty much encompasses all of the above.)

Being the health nut that I am (and being highly narcissistic), I am no longer satisfied to simply Google myself every so often. I need a constant blinking light telling me my pulse. Which is why I love Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a new (?) feature that allows you to set up persistent search queries and then receive notifications in daily emails about any new activity with that keyword.

So I’ve set up some of my own Google Alerts for several variations on “Christopher Fahey” and “graphpaper.com”, and it’s fun to see them roll in every morning telling me who is talking about me and where I am showing up. My awareness of my “footprint” on the Internet (to introduce another metaphor) has gone up a bit, I think.

The ironic thing about this is that most of us probably have a better idea of our own Googlepulse than we do the pulse of our own living beating hearts.

UPDATE: I’ve set up a Google Alert for “Googlepulse” to measure the Googlepulse of “Googlepulse”. My haste to move this post from draft to live was inspired by an offhand remark I made on Twitter, and the response I got from David Armano urging me to move quickly. This meta-experiment should be fun. So far, even my original Tweet doesn’t show up on Google. Now that I’ve linked to it, I’m sure it will.

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An article in the New York Times the other day discusses a study that suggests that there are differences between men and women in how pleasant or unpleasant they find certain normal everyday activities. Apparently, for example, men find spending time with their parents far more pleasant then women do, while men disproportionally dislike home repair work (so much for the handyman husband!).

What caught my eye was this: Nestled between “Read books” and “Cooking” was “Computer use”. It says that 13% of both men and women find using computers unpleasant.

This is interesting for two reasons. First, it quantifies the technophobe demographic at about one out of every seven people.

But in the context of the other activities asked about, it’s interesting to note that “Computer use” actually ranks pretty low on the overall unpleasantness scale. Watching TV is more unpleasant than using computers! This suggests that most people (the other six out of seven) seem to think pretty positively about using computers.

This interpretation fits nicely with my belief that people aren’t quite as fed up with digital user experiences as the usability finger-waggers might suggest. People muddle through the difficult parts and aren’t generally aware of where or how they might not be as efficient as they could be.

But this doesn’t mean that user experience designers can rest on our laurels at all. It means we must be more conscientiously competitive, that we must try to aim a lot higher than simply being “not unpleasant”. It’s like what Todd Wilkens wrote at the Adaptive Path blog: that merely aiming to “be usable” is a low target indeed, kind of like having your cooking objective to “be edible”.

A good product must not only be easy to use, but must also be pleasant to use in order to stand out in a universe of computer products that, all told, apparently aren’t even as unpleasant as, say, cooking dinner or visiting your friends.

Naturally, since the methodology of the Times study is unclear, and since I am interpreting only a small fragment of the study’s intended data set, all of this is speculation and not solidly supported by this specific research. Still, I suspect that this interpretation is pretty close and that people in general like using computers.

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In the 17th century, a peculiar phenomenon emerged in England: men with no family or institutional ties to one another would gather informally to socialize, debate, and network with like-minded peers and colleagues, to discuss everything from politics to literature to economics, building social connections between them that hadn’t existed before. They met in taverns and coffeehouses, and they called these gatherings “clubbes”. Most famous of all was the Mermaid Tavern’s “Friday Street Club”, whose members included Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and, if legend is to be believed, even William Shakespeare.

Today, of course, we take the concept of the “club” for granted, but the idea hasn’t been around forever. Four hundred years ago it was genuinely novel to see people regularly meeting for reasons other than governance, religion, defense, family, or business purposes. The club was wholly new idea in the evolution of human social relations, enabling people to connect in ways they’d never connected before.

Today we face a similar step in this evolution. We are witnessing the emergence of a new way for people to relate to each other and to meet new people using the so-called social web. What’s more, this new model has a lot in common with the clubs of the 17th century, and indeed with all the face-to-face clubs that exist today.

I’ve argued in the past that social networks are brands, where people choose to associate with the networks they identify with emotionally in the same way we choose products based on brand affinities. But today’s online communities are also clubs: they are loosely-formed private organizations akin to nightclubs, country clubs, and social clubs. Every social network will, over time, attract people with similar cultural interests and affinities, and just like in the physical world these shared interests are far more important than the amenities of the club’s meeting place. MORE…

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Designers of interactive products and services are having more and more influence on how businesses work, providing guidance that goes go far beyond layouts, flows, grids, colors, and movement — ideas that are fundamentally more that just look and feel. We are helping businesses understand and solve broader challenges, helping them define their core feature offerings, choosing their technology platforms, collecting performance metrics, devising advertising models, and much more.

And I completely agree that designers have a lot to offer with respect to many business strategies that go beyond core visual and interactive design questions. But too often we lump these broader business concerns under the single sexy umbrella term “strategy” without really thinking about what that word really means for a business.

Strategic Defense

Too often, “strategy” is just a sloppy shorthand for the general idea that designers need to understand the business demands and challenges their clients and bosses face. Which is a great and noble objective: I completely agree that designers need to take more responsibility for the big picture around the products we build, not just focusing on pixels and HTML.

But we have to be realistic about the limits of that extended scope of responsibility. Let’s not get too full of ourselves here. A great many absolutely critical aspects of a company’s business strategy have little to do with design at all:

• Operational Strategy: Physical infrastructure (furniture, utilities, amenities) for the corporate offices, maintenance and cleaning of the facility, rents and insurance, even the corporate office’s location…
• Financial Strategy: Accounting and cash flow management, tax preparation, collections, investment management…
• Human Resources Strategy: What kinds of people are needed, how much to pay employees, benefits packages, recruitment efforts, training and conferences, building staff versus leveraging consultants…
• Legal Strategy: Trademarks, patents, copyrights, insurance…
• Marketing/Sales Strategy: What should the product or service cost? How and where should the company advertise? Should the company offer loss-leader services? Will the product be supported by fees or through advertising? If advertising, who should the target advertisers be?
• Corporate Strategy: Mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships, positioning for selling/flipping the business, IPO strategies, investor relations, raising capital.

A company can literally succeed or fail based on the wisdom of a single decision in any one of these fundamental strategic business areas. How many small businesses have failed because they signed an expensive long-term lease? How many great products have disappeared because they didn’t cover their ass with a simple patent search? No matter how great a product’s design might be, all too often it’s the basic, boring operational and accounting strategies that become the real make-or-break business success factors.

But how many of these business questions should a user experience designer address when consulting a client or helping their employer with their “business strategy”?

Very few, I think. A business strategy is what people who actually run businesses worry about every day — so unless you are part of company management, a top-level management consultant, or a venture capitalist with direct control over company management, your purview will almost certainly be limited to some subset of a business’s overall strategy. This is not to say that all of these factors are irrelevant or off limits to designers. But most of them are.

Many will argue that all of the above topics can and should simply be seen as aspects of a holistic capital-D “Design”. Conceptually I want to agree… but realistically I simply cannot agree: Few designers have the experience or training to offer the kind of specialized consulting required to be credible or helpful in almost all of these fields. In short, “business strategy” is more than design.

Why this is Important

I was once in a group discussion at a design conference where the topic was “business strategy”. After about 15 minutes of listening quietly, it struck me that everyone in the room had a different idea of what the topic really was. Some thought it was about how to start or run a business, others thought it was about how to provide ROI metrics for design services, and still others thought it was about how designers can and should learn more about how their clients’ businesses actually work. When I asked the group what we were talking about, I got a lot of blank stares and some people admitted that maybe we weren’t sure but hey, the discussion was interesting anyway.

So can I ask a favor? Can we designers all please stop using the word “strategy” without preceding it with a specific adjective? As in “design strategy”, “marketing strategy”, “customer acquisition strategy”, etc. Let’s be very clear about what we’re talking about when we extend our responsibilities beyond what they taught us in design school. We do have a great deal to say in many aspects of business strategy, but not even by a long shot can we claim a right to play a role in all of them.

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