After waiting six months on a pre-order waiting list, I finally got my Fitbit two months ago. I was really looking forward to it — as a big fan of the Nike+ running tracking system, I was excited about Fitbit’s promise to not only track my running and walking, but to track my sleep patterns as well. And the design was extremely seductive — small in size, elegantly combining form and function (it doesn’t have a clip, it is a clip), and with a magical blue led screen that is invisible when the device is off. How could I resist?

And I was right: I love the Fitbit!

But I don’t want to use it any more. How is that possible?

First, though, you may be asking “What is Fitbit?” Fitbit is a personal health tracking system consisting of a small electronic device that you clip to your body to track your movements and a web site that uses the data from those movements to give you detailed reports and analysis of your fitness and health. The Fitbit device contains an accelerometer to detect anything from a single running stride to tossing and turning in your sleep, and it wirelessly syncs to your computer via a small radio transmitter. The Fitbit has a small digital display indicating the number of steps you’ve taken, how far you’ve walked or run, and how many calories you’ve burned.

Basically, you clip the Fitbit on your waist all day long, and to a wristband at night, to collect 24/7 data about your body’s movements. The Fitbit web site then slices and dices that data to present some pretty fascinating insights into your personal health.

Sounds simple? It’s supposed to. There is an emerging trend in personal electronics and software to stop bothering users with long explanations of “how it works”, and to instead keep the interactions simple and just make sure the damn things work.  Fitbit is right on that wave. The documentation doesn’t say much about how it works, the web site doesn’t have a big “how it works” page. You’re just supposed to start using it.

So Fitbit cuts to the chase in most of their user experience designs. In fact, I can’t find anything on the Fitbit home page that says “Fitbit is …”. Fitbit is what it does, which is count your movements and interpret that information.

I think that’s part of Fitbit’s strategy: to experiment with giving users a minimal level of explanation to get people focused on changing their behavior and thus their health, and not on requiring users to constantly be manipulating the technology.

Getting Fitbit

Let’s first discuss the centerpiece of the Fitbit system, the Fitbit device itself. It’s about the size of a money clip or a small pack of gum, clips easily to clothing and fits easily in a pocket. Some users complain that it is easy to lose, and while I managed to hold on to it for two months, I can only attribute that to luck. I am really impressed by the “clip” form factor (versus a wristband, a strap, a card, a keyfob). Given the required size, it’s a clever solution.

The digital display is incredibly nice to look at. When it’s off, it’s just a detail-less smooth black surface. When you press the Fitbit’s single button, however, the display shines through the now-translucent plastic like shining a flashlight through your fingertip.

When you bring the device near the charging/base station, it automatically uploads the latest data from the device. The base station is clever, but I think it over-fetishizes the Fitbit itself by literally placing it on a pedestal, as many upright docking stations do for the iPhone. And its 18″ cord is overkill. While it is quite clever to allow the device to sync automatically, you still have to turn your computer on in the first place, and if you’ve got a laptop you have to plug in the base station anyway. So syncing isn’t invisible for most people, I suspect, but is rather a conscientious and deliberate daily act.

A syncing solution like the original iPod Shuffle’s, where the device itself had a USB plug built-in, would permit charging and syncing without an additional base station device and, as I contend, without adding an additional sync action for most users. A Bluetooth version to sync with high-end laptops without charging would be even better.

The web site is fantastic. The data displays are lovely, and it’s easy to get around and play with your data. I do have problems with many of the specific information design and charting decisions, but I am not going to complain because the Fitbit folks are constantly evolving and improving the site, tweaking features, responding to user feedback, adding new stuff.

Interestingly, you can use the Fitbit web dashboard without owning a Fitbit. First of all, the site lets you manually enter your food consumption information in order to establish your caloric intake each day. Also, it lets you manually enter your exercise activities as well.

I actually suspect the designers must have conscientiously kept the site device-agnostic, to support future Fitbit devices and to invite non-Fitbit users to join the web community.

Using the device as a pedometer, which is by far Fitbit’s core function, is simple. I can see the distance I’ve walked at any time during the day, and when I get home I can see a day-by-day report on the web of how far I’ve walked, and how far I walk each day on average. The device’s step-counting accuracy is astonishingly accurate: I did a test, walking and counting up to 1000 steps in my head, then checked the Fitbit and saw it counted 1004. That’s plenty accurate for me.

For running, Fitbit detects the nuances of difference between a running and walking motion, and then recalculates your distance traveled (based on longer stride length) and calories burned accordingly. There is simply need to tell Fitbit that you’re running and not walking. It’s smart enough to tell, based only on the nature of the data it’s collecting. As for running accuracy, I wasn’t able to do a counting test, but the distances Fitbit reported on several over-5-mile runs were 10-20% different from the distances reported in Google Maps. Far from ideal, but on par with the similar inaccuracy of Nike+.

Where Fitbit gets really clever, however, is with sleeping. Obviously a motion sensor isn’t able to tell if you are sleeping or just lying on your ass watching TV. Fitbit requires you to press and hold the devices’s single button for a few seconds, putting the device into a kind of “special activity” mode. Fitbit comes with a surprisingly non-obtrusive wristband that holds the Fitbit device while you sleep. As you sleep, the Fitbit detects your body’s movements and uses these cues to determine how long it took you to actually fall asleep, how many times, and precisely when, you moved around in the middle of the night, and when you woke up. In the morning, you press and hold the button again to indicate that you’re awake and walking around again.

The sleep data collected is fascinating, and this alone is worth the price of admission. You probably have no idea about how long it takes you to fall asleep, or how often you toss and turn. I certainly didn’t, and was delighted to see the results. I found it incredibly interesting to see the day-by-day durations of my sleeps for an entire month (little more 2 hours more than a few times, around 6 hours most of the time, and 12 hours on one blessed Friday night).

For other activities, such as cycling or weightlifting, Fitbit isn’t so smart. For such things, Fitbit literally requires you to manually manipulate the data. Again, for people in highly-structured weight loss programs where counting calories in and out is important, Fitbit’s web dashboard offers the ability to manually enter your non-walking or running activities to make sure your overall caloric burn rate is kept accurate.

An amusingly large number of people in the forums ask about the fitbit’s ability to measure calories burnt during sex, some with a measure of sexual bravado (”wear on my hip?”), others innocently but rather seriously dedicated to counting every calorie burned. While I admire the free spirited nature of these inquirers, I cannot offer any additional insight into this matter as I, perhaps overly romantically, still beleive that some things remain well beyond quantification.

The Fitbit Ecosystem

The Fitbit web site is constantly changing, and they keep adding features to the site, extending the functionality of the fixed hardware system. This is part of the clever concept that the features entirely lie in the interpretation of data. It’s a radical simplification of what software is all about: Fitbit’s one motion sensor and one binary button (ternary if you count the long 2-second press, and potentially more if you add longer presses, or even double and triple presses as on the iPhone earbud controller) have the potential to enable a lot more interaction and communication than one might think at first blush.

In a way, they are squeezing as much functionality out of the tech as possible. Fitbit is a small embodyment of Don Norman’s recent claim that technology leads and design follows. For Fitbit, it’s an inspired design response to the question “how many things can we do with just this one bit of technology”?

To contrast this with Nike+ for a moment, Fitbit feels far more like a living thing, run by engaged people dedicated to incremental changes in response to the actual usage by their community and feedback in their incredibly active and helpful forums. It’s a Web 2.0 product. Nike+, however, is a more traditional product, with huge and infrequent X.0 product launches. Nike+ stagnated with the same beautiful and innovative — but buggy and slow — web site for years, only to upgrade this year to a new, buggier, and unfortunately even more awkward user interface. Nike+ still never remembers users passwords, for example. I wish Nike+ would follow Flitbit’s lead when it comes to incremental, simple improvements. Focus on a UI that can scale and evolve, and not on one that is sexy and “bold”.

Product Conclusions

There are probably two kinds of Fitbit customers. First, casual users: people who want to know more about what they do with their bodies, people who are curious about their health and the potential to use technology to keep closer tabs on how well they’re doing. This describes my interest in Fitbit.

The second group is serious users: people who are actively trying to change their personal health behaviors and want a way to measure those changes. If you’re trying to change an overly-sedentary lifestyle, to lose weight through careful monitoring of calories burned versus consumed, Fitbit might be a huge help. For people involved in a structured weight loss program, a device that adds to that regime is perfectly normal. But I walk plenty each day (4-5 miles every day). I am an athlete and run often, but I don’t count calories. I’m not trying to lose weight. I use Nike+ to measure my special activities (running), but I don’t want a new device attached to me all the time just to give me data about my normal activities, just to satisfy my curiosity.

So while I found Fitbit useful and delightful, it was only temporarily. But that’s okay. It’s a fantastic tool for self-analysis, to get to know your sleep patterns, your typical daily walking distance. Great information. But once you have that information, if you’re not engaged in a program to change those things, you’re done with Fitbit. I know everything Fitbit can tell me. Maybe I’ll try it again in six months or a year, to see if I’ve changed. I’m a casual user.

The Fitbit is not what I and other casual users might have hoped it would be. It’s not going to be a permanent part of your life, a constant and consistent way to monitor your health. The biggest obstacle to this, I think, is unfortunately still technological. It’s just too big to carry with you in every possible context, so you end up taking it on and off over and over again all day. When you change clothes, you have to move it from one garment to another. At night, you have to strap on a wristband and clip it to that. You have to take it off in the shower.

Inevitably, I ended up forgetting to bring it to work occasionally. Or I’d have it unclipped for part of a day. Which is far worse than it sounds: If you miss a day of walking in a week, it completely ruins the accuracy of your weekly average. Miss a few days in a month, and your monthly average is shot to hell. Fitbit lets you manually enter your information, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to do Fitbit’s job for it! You’ve got have your Fitbit on your person almost 90% of the time for it to produce accurate trends and summary results, the kind of results that justify integrating it into your life in such a serious and committed way.

If the Fitbit was the size of a fingernail, attached with waterproof glue or embedded under my skin, well, then we’re talking. But because of its size, it becomes one more thing to inhabit my intimate attention space, something I have to remember to never leave home without, like my phone, my wallet, and my pants. It’s like having a little adopted pet you have to take care of all day.

In short, you just can’t lead a normal life with Fitbit. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Fitbit experience, a lesson about the future of personal informatics, it’s that we simply won’t have accurate and reliable personal systems until the devices themselves are immune to these everyday emergencies and accidents and inconveniences. Until they’re virtually invisible and forgettable, probably embedded under the skin, we will be forced to consider personal informatic hardware as intrusive medical devices rather than as the ethereal, ambient data sources I think many people envision.

If you want an informatically-based weight loss program, with increased walking as a core element, and if you want to count calories in and out, Fitbit is for you and might help you with your program over the months and years.

If you are interested in just finding out about your body and how you use it, it’s great for that, too. Give it a spin, then hand it off to another person. Want mine?

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I’ve submitted two talks for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference. As you might know, SXSW’s selection process includes a period of public review to gauge general interest in the panels submitted (they call them “panels” even though many of the submissions, including my own, are single-speaker sessions).

I would be deeply grateful if you, gentle Graphpaper reader, would put in a vote for my sessions. If you want to comment on my ideas — and I’d love it if you would — please do so at the SXSW site. (You have to register to vote, but it’s an easy and painless sign up.)

Here are my proposals (click the title to see the voting page):

• The Human Interface (or: Products are People, Too!)
  More and more, users are interacting with web sites and software on a conversational, physical, psychological, and emotional level — just like we’ve always interacted with other people. UX designers, then, must stop thinking about interfaces as dumb control panels and begin using technology to envision interfaces (literally!) as human beings.
  .

• Re-Invent the Wheel!: Redesigning your Design Process
  It’s the start of a new project. You’ve got requirements, guidelines, data, research. Now what? Like an artist staring at a blank canvas, designers of interactive products often don’t know where to start. Instead of following a rigid methodology or waiting for the perfect idea to appear out of the blue, designers must invent new tools and tricks to foster real UX innovation.

I’m particularly excited about the first one, as it ties together so much of what I love and/or things I know a lot about: interaction design, science fiction, culture and literature in design, artificial intelligence, human behavior and emotional design. It’s kind of like “The Graphpaper.com Experience, Live!”

Sharing the love

There are a few other talks I think you ought to consider voting for, as well, from people I like and think people should be listening to: MORE…

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Two weeks ago, BusinessWeek’s next Design and Innovation blog asked for my thoughts on this month’s Facebook home page redesign, as a kind of follow-up to my thoughts in those same virtual pages a year ago.

I was asked to opine on the new design without having viewed the actual live site, which was launching the following week. This seemed reasonable to me at the time given that the site’s new features were announced, illustrated, and widely-known ahead of time (via a very comprehensive home page preview announcement) to anyone who was paying attention to that kind of thing.

I was really excited about the real-time feed user experience described in the home page preview. My exact words:

The new FB real-time home page is pretty cool, actually… it’s crossing the line between the old-fashioned page-based web and the live experience of television and broadcast media. In this case, it’s broadcasting from friends to friends — which it always was, of course, but now it’s more visceral and more real. I think people will love it. They’ll be glued to their screens, and will want to add more friends and applications just to increase the flow of content on their home page.

This is “Web 2.0 Complete”: When web people use the term “Web 2.0″, they mean two different things. First, they mean the social web, where *people* make (and are) the content. Second, they mean the pageless web, where web sites react dynamically and fluidly, without page reloads and refreshes. The new Facebook design combines both of these.

I thought it was kind of clever, if a little corny, of me to note that the new Facebook home page was simply conforming to some kind of basic “Web 2.0″ bandwagon orthodoxy, bringing the two flavors of Web 2.0 niftyness into one delicious treat.

But a week later when the new home page actually began to roll out and replace millions of Facebook users’ old home pages, the backlash was immediate and seething and nearly unanimous (a Facebook poll found 94% of users didn’t like the new design). Oh man was I embarrassed! To have praised a user experience so breathlessly only to have my opinion immediately contradicted by the public’s rabid scorn!

Turns out, however, that users were complaining about the new page’s lack of real-time status updates from your friends. And yet Facebook had already clearly and prominently promised that feature as part of the redesign. In fact, I based the core of my analysis of the new site on that very feature, which they had already promised to deliver. They deployed the new design with much fanfare but without real time status updates.

Betrayed! Betrayed by a press release! There I am, praising a non-existent feature. Like an idiot.

Well, happily my premature praise no longer needs to cause me so much shame: Today Facebook has announced that the real-time reporting is going to occur after all. So the BusinessWeek report won’t be such an embarrassment to me after all.

Of course, this is the second time Facebook has announced this feature before delivering anything. Fool me once…

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The Innocent Eye, 1981 Mark Tansey

In the web design consulting business, there’s always been an unspoken assumption that our clients just don’t get the web. I’m sure this is true with many other consulting businesses, but for web consultants this has been particularly true.

And it’s easy to see why: Until recently, it actually was kind of true. Clients used to hire web designers and developers to do something they had no clue how to do themselves. Sometimes they were even desperate, lost in the woods.

Until about 1999 or so, almost all web design projects started from scratch. If someone hired you to build a web site, it was likely that almost nobody on the client side had ever built a web site before. And the few individuals who did have any experience often operated in a culture of ignorance and inexperience, requiring a tangible dumbing-down of the whole client-vendor relationship. Consultants with a few site launches under their belts would have to spend a lot of time explaining to their clients some very basic concepts about the Internet and HTML, or were forced to repeatedly illustrate how the client’s ideas were impossible to implement or would create impossible user experiences.

On the other hand they could also get away with some blatant snake-oil salesmanship and techno razzle-dazzle, and often didn’t have their work closely scrutinized by their clients. God knows how many pre-dotcom-bust web consultancies built thriving businesses whose revenues were possible only by virtue of this expertise disparity.

But around the end of the last decade things started to change. Site designs became site redesigns. One-off static web sites became ongoing dynamic web businesses. Experienced consultants jumped the rails and joined client teams. Clients built up their own internal competencies in all areas of web site strategy and implementation: design, technology, usability, marketing.

By the early 2000s, web services vendors would frequently encounter clients who had more experience working with the web than they did. Now it’s an everyday occurrence.

Today’s clients know as much as we do.* It’s now hard to find a person responsible for a company’s internet strategy who hasn’t been making web sites in one way or another for a decade or more. Sure there is the occasional outlier, people who have landed or kept their jobs despite manifest technological incompetence, but no more so than in any other corporate arenas.

And yet I still regularly hear designers and consultants stereotyping their clients as if it were still 1999, as if they were still dealing with people who had never bought a book online and don’t know how search engines work, much less joined a social network or had their own blog. This is just wrong. This kind of attitude doesn’t help you as a consultant, nor does it help designers and consultancies as a whole. If this sounds like you, I suggest you drop it. You’re making your clients mad and probably coming across as more than a little condescending.

[* Perhaps you noticed the asterisk above. I want to be clear that I am not implying that consultants are irrelevant, or that our clients don’t need us anymore. Naturally clients hire designers precisely because we know things they don’t, because we have experiences, talents, skills, and competencies they lack. And there are huge swaths of corporate culture who are still clueless. It’s our job to be at least one step ahead of our clients (and our peers for that matter, to think about and tackle problems with an eye towards learning lessons that can apply to future challenges and future clients. It’s our job to bring fresh new ideas to our clients. That much has not changed and should not change.

My point, really, is that by assuming your clients are profoundly ignorant about technology and design, you are missing a chance to collaborate with people who may be your peers in a lot of ways, people who often know their own businesses and objectives extremely well. You are missing a chance for a truly harmonious relationship where client and designer bounce ideas off each other to produce greater results than the designer, no matter how visionary they are, could have accomplished on his or her own.]

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In his Time Magazine Person of the Year interview, Barack Obama said “it turns out there’s some spending that has to be done on information technology, for example, that we can do very swiftly.”

If recent speeches by the new President are any sign, I sure hope he’s talking about rural broadband access. Like many others, I don’t think we can be complacent about America’s lagging IT infrastructure, and for a good many reasons.

Some aren’t so sure, however, at least about the rural part of that equation. My friend Adam Greenfield is a well-known advocate for humane connectedness through pervasive urban digital infrastructure (I know “advocate” is not the right word — Adam’s work is equal parts caution and possibility).

From near-term omnipresent wireless broadband to a futuristic cloud of RFID gizmos mediating our social and municipal interactions, the vision of living a seamless networked experience using benevolent technology seems both exciting and inevitable.

And, by all accounts, this will happen most noticeably using the city street as the primary test and launch platform. The urban environment is the easiest and most logical place to implement this vision since the “last mile” (moving information from the big pipes that cross the globe to the little pipes that lead into our homes and mobile devices) will always be an costly obstacle, and since so many people can be reached in a small physical area.

But another friend, David Sleight, opened my eyes to another perspective — the view from the country. Although David is currently a Manhattanite, his family roots are in the woods of upstate New York where for many the idea of getting even regular ol’ wired high speed access to the information superhighway is still an impossibility. David loves the country and would, all things being equal, prefer to live there, but for him urban living is quite simply a necessity for a career in the information and technology economy.

And all things simply aren’t equal.

Millions of Americans still live in rural environments where broadband Internet access is not even an option (except through unreliable and expensive satellite connections). Much of the nation is still unserved by 3G, Edge, or even mobile voice access at all. Living in the country pretty much excludes you from participation in the aforementioned technology economy.

So this is what I hope (and predict) Obama is talking about: Bringing the Internet — the *real* Internet, not the dial-up Web 1.0 of 1998 — to the millions of Americans currently living without it. I’m not just talking about high-bandwidth experiences like Flickr, YouTube, and Hulu. I’m talking about the less-glamourous low-bandwidth experiences that happen every day on the Internet: co-workers exchanging PowerPoint decks, transferring medical records to rural clinics and hospitals, downloading hundreds of emails from friends and family, people debating politics on blogs and message boards, or even just regular everyday surfing through dozens of websites without waiting endlessly for them to load.

Some will argue the current situation isn’t so bad given the disproportionally rural residency of our country when compared to broadband leaders like South Korea, Denmark, or Iceland. Some even argue that people in the country don’t really need or even want broadband access.

I don’t buy either of these arguments. I don’t think we should settle for inequality just because we’re a less urbanized nation than our global competitors. What’s more, I really don’t think people who lack access to technology have any idea about the user experience they are missing. It’s not like we’re talking about force feeding cable TV to the Amish here.

Some, like Adam, might say that people who choose to live in the country have by definition chosen to live a technologically backwards (and, importantly, increasingly unsustainable) existence. That the responsible and ethical choice for any modern human is to live somewhere easily and affordably accessible by wires and roads and mass transit (and food and water), in an economically-efficient and environmentally-benign way — i.e., what cities do best.

I find this argument immensely appealing. But I, too, happen to love oceans, forests, lakes, and mountains almost as much as I love the city. I often entertain a fantasy of living at least part of my life in a beautiful, remote rural setting. Perhaps this fantasy is selfish and wasteful, but I also wonder if ever information technology finally replaces the combustion engine as the primary medium of human economic activity could we not, in fact, flatten this ethical disparity a little and make rural life a little more appealing to those of us who want to leave a slighter carbon footprint?

Want vs. Need

Is supporting rural broadband, then, merely a way to make urbanists’ retirements more luxurious, or to explore an impossible utopian future? Is this a matter of want or need?

I’ve never thought that we should cease to push the boundaries of our science and technology in order to ensure that more down-to-earth and pressing needs are met. We need to find a cure for cancer and land a person on Mars, for example. They’re both noble goals.

And although I am deeply critical of its implementation, I never really opposed the One Laptop Per Child project on principle, nor did I ever think that the money would be better spent directly on food or medicine. We need both experimental and conventional programs.

Broadband for rural America should be seen as a “great work” project, like the Internet itself, whose benefits may take years to be fully realized.

In short, we should be investing in technology for everyone, in cities and provinces. Clearly we should pursue subsidized free public WiFi for densely concentrated urban areas, transit systems, and public facilities — it’s the cheapest way per capita to bring our citizens and our economy to where they inevitably want and need to be. But we should also invest in the likely-far-costlier enterprise of bringing broadband and digital cellular access to people in the country: those who can’t walk to a corner Starbucks, who don’t ride a subway, and who can’t possibly use some cool iPhone app to find a great Korean barbecue only a few blocks away.

Economic Benefits

So why do this? Well, most convincingly there is the economic argument: Can it hurt to have tens of millions more people shopping online, consuming online media, opening vast opportunities for information and education and, most importantly, enabling millions to participate in a future of information-based labor through rurally-situated technology industries, telecommuting and self-employment? Can one argue against having as many people (Americans, if you’re patriotic :-) ) as possible learning to use and navigate what will undoubtedly be the primary medium for any future world economy?

This is a matter of global competitiveness. America has fallen from 4th to 17th in the world in broadband penetration. The US began our critical interstate highway system in the 1950s — 20 years after Germany began building their autobahn network. We shouldn’t once again wait until we are two decades behind to do this.

Social Benefits

Beyond of the plain economics of it, I also can’t help but to advocate this idea as a matter of sociopolitical principal: It does harm to the group psyche to perpetuate a have/have not culture, where one cohort is participating in the emerging cultural and economic hegemony and another is excluded. The free market alone cannot make this happen any more than it could bring about universal education, the interstate highway system, or the Internet. This will take government action.

But it’s more than a simple question of fairness to me. As long as rural America is kept in the slow lane with respect to access to information and culture, the more they will feel isolated and resentful of the mainstream “connected culture”, viewing them, incorrectly, as out of touch elites. They will then, I fear, vote regressively and conservatively. I’ll admit this thinking may be a matter of unjustified faith in certain (liberal) ideals, but I actually believe that exposure to diverse ideas and people, combined with full and equal participation in a healthy economy, produces, in general, increased social tolerance, better education, and cultural and intellectual progress. Wisdom, peace, and prosperity through connectedness.

Perhaps best of all, wouldn’t broadband for the sticks enable an actual reversal of the polarization of our culture, ending the “The Big Sort” phenomenon where conservatives and liberals are increasingly locating themselves in self-segregated homogenous counties. Hell, decent Internet access might make life in the country attractive to snobby urban sophisticates who might otherwise find the boondocks economically and culturally untenable. If I can meet city clients online and connect with city friends online, why do I need to live in the city?

Ultimately if you like to walk to the store to buy food, if you like bright lights and hustle and bustle, if you enjoy bumping into hundreds of interesting and diverse people every day, then no amount of broadband access will draw you from your urban world. You can certainly count me in that camp. But I can’t bring myself to simply write off non-urban America to a life of electronic destitution and information poverty — their deprivation does affect my happiness. We’re all too closely connected to let the digital divide continue to grow.

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Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek’s editor and blogger on the design and innovation beat, has declared that “‘Innovation’ is Dead” and that “Transformation” is the new “key concept” of 2009.

He correctly observes that the word “innovation” is overused in the business world. This, of course, has been obvious for a long time to a great many people — in particular, I think, among practicing designers. But it’s fascinating to think about what his declaration reveals about the nature of the whole innovation craze Nussbaum helped start.

The conversations around innovation over the past few years have in large part focused on producing innovation where it does not exist. It hasn’t been about innovation itself, but rather about cultivating innovation. It’s been about transforming groups of people who, without clever and forward-thinking leadership, would utterly fail to innovate. The literature, then, is aimed at people who fancy themselves as that same clever and forward-thinking leader.

To those of us whose everyday job is to innovate — e.g., designers — the hype around “innovation” has always seemed a little weird. As if not innovating has ever been an option for a designer. We do this all the time!

So what Nussbaum and the innovation cheerleaders have been talking about all along has not been about how innovative people can be more innovative. It’s been about how to take teams that cannot or will not innovate and getting them to actually come up with new ideas. Which is why, I think, he has chosen to zoom in on “transformation” as the key word. It’s always been about change.

In fact, I would go one step further and posit that what he’s really talking about is therapy. How to take a damaged or under-performing body and build it into something that works. To repair broken methodologies that produce the same-old solutions. To build up capabilities that have atrophied, or that may never have even existed.

The innovation conversation, then, usually begins with this (usually unstated) presumption of dysfunction and failure. You can probably insert a subtitle under most headlines: “How to fix your backward company”. Even Nussbaum’s new “transformation” implies that organizations need to implement radical change just to keep up. But what about organizations who are already keeping up really well? What about organizations that are already leading the way? What relevance does “innovation” and “transformation” have to someone cruising along on the cutting edge?

Transformation is for when you’re doing it wrong. Therapy is for when you’re injured.

But what do you do when you want to really perform?

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice.

Practice is what athletes and musicians and actors do constantly to stay on the top of their games. And practice is what great designers do. All day every day.

For those of us who are designers, then, the whole innovation conversation often leads us to think about the difference between practicing and managing: A great design leader may or may not practice their craft every day, any more than a great coach or choreographer needs to break a sweat every day. Whether a design leader does hands-on design work, however, isn’t as important as that design leader pushing their team to do that work. Not to talk about innovation, but to actually do design work. If your team isn’t innovating, then chances are they simply aren’t designing enough. Make them design new stuff. Make them practice.

And, of course, there’s talent. Many assume that innovation comes almost exclusively from talented people. I tend to think this way, too. But a great team is a team of great people working together. Innovative people will doubtlessly fail to innovate in the wrong environment. Managing innovation may simply boil down to leading innovative people to practice their craft more, or maybe even simply creating a space for innovative people to thrive on their own. But it most certainly is not about transforming a mediocre team into an effective hive mind.

This goes the same for organizations. You want an innovative organization? Make ‘em design. All the time. Make them practice.

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Debating the merits of competing design ideas is fun and, as I’ve argued in parts one and two, can be extremely productive. But some design disputes are, I think, unanswerable. And it’s important to realize when a debate has crossed over from something you can resolve to something you will never reach any definitive conclusion over. Matters of personal preference, style, and taste.

Any given product or application’s appeal and usability success, or lack thereof, might ultimately come down to each individual user’s personal taste. There is a broad landscape of different approaches to UI and UX design, and the variance often adds up to a question of style — not of simple “good” or “bad” design principles.

The eternal which way to roll the toilet paper controversy, and the more academic terminal serial comma debate both come to mind, where empirical measures of success may indeed be possible but are nonetheless trivial when compared to what different kinds of people actually prefer. If someone likes their toilet paper oriented the “wrong” way, rolling it the “right” way will utterly fail to satisfy them, even if it makes the TP user experience more efficient in every measurable way.

In short, one can decry the very real and plainly egregious usability violations of any particular design decision, and you can even “prove” you’re right in usability testing. But you can’t argue against real users who actually prefer it any more than you can argue with people who prefer boxers over briefs or blue over red.

This doesn’t mean you simply throw up your hands and give up simply because you can’t please everybody. Because guess what? You can never please everybody.
It simply means that in the design process you have to make a choice to make some people happy and other people not so happy. Of course you can give users options or preferences, making life for both groups a little more complicated. Lots of (inelegant and bloated) products do precisely that.

But you can also choose to declare that your product is just for people whose personal idiosyncrasies and tastes are compatible with the product’s nature. And then you simply write off everyone else, letting the market fulfill their needs with a different product. It doesn’t help anyone to be greedy and try to make the same product work for all kinds of people when you are up against factors that cannot ever be decided. Find these factors as early as you can and make those hard decisions, one way or the other.

[tp configuration images by Brian Mathis, whose opinion, by the way, is just plain wrong ;-) ]

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You can’t really validate or invalidate a design idea just by looking at it and declaring it a success or failure because of some best practice or design heuristic that usually works. You’re just talking about theories. Ultimately, no design disputes can be settled convincingly without making a model and testing it out.

But a theoretical debate about the strengths and weaknesses of a design is a critical first step that design teams must pass through before actually going off and testing their designs. To me, a good design critique is a kind of low fidelity user testing: using our imaginations instead of using a lab and test subjects.

Regarding the inspiration for my previous post, the absurd-looking application “Bulk Rename Utility“, the debate was almost predominantly based on “gut opinions” — albeit by many people with expertise in UI design. And I think that’s great. In my particular gut, I suspected that this app would surprise people and do well in testing. Others felt in their guts (and present compelling arguments, too) that this app would fail miserably in a user test.

What’s great about having this kind of hypothetical discussion at all (especially when the debate might seem to be easily and quickly settled by simply testing the application with real users) is that we learn more about the kinds of things we would need to think about and the questions we should be asking when we actually do test the application. Without debating the options we might not have uncovered (for example) these kinds of questions to ask during testing:

• Would different types of users react to the app in different ways?
• Do different apps with the same stated purpose serve different use cases?
• Is efficiency important, or a feeling of efficiency?
• Is preventing error of primary importance, or permitting error correction?

Sometimes the expert critiques and gut reactions are so compelling (whether positive or negative) that an experienced designer will know right away that formal user research would be a waste of time. Sometimes it’s just obvious — but only becomes obvious once you’ve thought it through, especially if you’re talked it through with other people.

And, of course, testing can be dead wrong. Seinfeld was famously rejected by test audiences, and finished last in the ratings in its first season.

Then there are the “unknown unknowns” (a Donald Rumsfeld-ism that I think is entirely valid and sensible). There are some design decisions that seem so obvious, and may even test well, but fail miserably because of an completely unforeseen factor in real-world practice. Our goal as designers considering design options is to try to minimize the number of unknown unknowns. And again, the best way to uncover unknown potential problems is to imagine as many of them as possible through lively debate from diverse viewpoints.

Whether you user-test your product or not, there’s no doubt that a lively, opinionated and adversarial discussion about any complex design decision, especially a user experience design decision, can only help the overall product development process.

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Disagreeing with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as I did two weeks ago, is like walking into a minefield. Although Gruber has a cutting wit, he is thoughtful and respectful when it comes to discussions of technology and design. But when you spar with Gruber, you also step into the ring with his readership, tens of thousands of people who have strong and spirited opinions about design. People not afraid to say what’s on their mind.

It’s eye-opening, to say the least. And not just Daring Fireball’s readers. Any large group of opinions is going to produce surprises. As seen in last week’s post on Lizard People, when you look at the reactions of large groups of people you get a fair share of what Malcolm Gladwell has called “outliers“, folks whose ideas and opinions don’t quite fit in nicely on the map.

Going out on a limb and taking a position on an issue — even if you’re not sure you’re right about it — will always inspire debate. And from the churn of debate, good ideas can emerge. The more churn, the more likely a surprising outlier will emerge.

This is the essence of collaboration.

The only thing that will put a damper on this healthy churn is disrespect. Respect is absolutely essential to fruitful collaboration, especially if you want to glean powerful insights from a lively debate. And respect is multidirectional — in any group there are going to be power dynamics. For example on a blog the blog’s owner has the power of the soapbox (and the moderation toolkit) to suppress or censor debate. And some commenters exploit the power of anonymity, tossing firebombs with no regard for any common objective.

It is the responsibility of all who want to benefit from discussion to do what they can to flatten these power relationships by bending over backwards to respect their collaborators. Those with more power must frequently cede it. Those with less power must not resort to rhetorical violence to assert it.

This also applies in organizations — managers, bosses, and clients often have to relinquish the leverage they posess (the ability to rule by fiat, or to veto at will) if they want their teams to really open up.

Khoi Vinh recently wrote about a project his team at the New York Times has been developing and has just released, called Times Extra. It’s an optional user feature that introduces links to related content on other web sites. It’s a pretty radical idea, guaranteed to ruffle many feathers. Khoi and his team really went out on a limb with this, and they knew it. Khoi described the trepidation they felt (and managed to get over, thankfully) as a kind of “Fear of Design“.

Times Extra is an experiment in modestly redesigning the user experience; whether it’s a success or not is up to you and all of our users. Hopefully enough people will find it useful for us to evolve it further; I don’t think any of us suppose that this is really the last word in how third-party links can be expressed on the site. My point is that, as designers, an aversion to flouting the rules of visual decorum often doesn’t serve us well. Nor for that matter does a fear of failure.

The opposite of fear, of course, is courage. It takes courage to present your design ideas when you are sure you will face criticism. When even you yourself are unsure of the correctness of your idea. Simply put, you will never be a good designer without taking risks.

Team of Rivals

I am extremely pleased with President-Elect Obama’s Lincoln-like “Team of Rivals” approach to building his cabinet. Great ideas simply can not emerge from single-minded groupthink.  Greg Storey sees this as extremely relevant to design collaboration:

The more you live and work around people who rarely present a different viewpoint, the softer your brain gets, the more complacent you become…

I am a big fan not just of permitting multiple perspectives, but mandating it. Forcing yourself to come up with more than one idea. Requiring a team of designers to all contribute multiple low-fidelity solutions before focusing on only one. This is why I love sketching as a formal practice — it permits the creator of an idea to put any single idea aside and work on another one without too much investment (of time or emotional energy).

• Jerome Ryckborst has a great slideshow describing his company’s “Five Sketches or Else” approach to ideation.
• Victor Lombardi encourages a breadth-before-depth approach to early-stage concept development.
• Of course, Apple works this way, too.

Okay, so we’ve got multiple voices and ideas out in the open. How shall we decide which to believe? Next post…

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I am a 37-year-old user experience designer, and I don’t have a driver’s license. I don’t even know how to drive a car. I moved to New York City when I was 18 and I just never really needed to learn.

Moreover, I don’t even find automobiles all that interesting or seductive, at least not the ones I see on the streets today. They’re certainly not, as they were a half-century ago, a glimpse into some hopeful and mind-boggling future. Rather, to me, the automobile is a symbol of a bygone era of American industry, culture, and lifestyle.

Because of my obvious dispassion for car culture, I think I can offer an unconventional and hopefully useful perspective on the struggling American auto industry.

I mean, everybody else seems to have a theory about how to save Detroit. And I’ll admit that I find myself reluctantly sympathetic with those who are calling for a radical, technology- based transformation of the business. Whether admonishing the industry to “Stop Building Cars“, encouraging a conversion to a design-based auto industry (some flat out asking “What if Steve Jobs ran GM?“), scolding the automakers while debating bailing them out (it’s amusing to hear Senator Richard Shelby chiding the automakers for their lack of “inn-o-vation” in his Alabama drawl), or Andy Grove pushing Intel to invest in critical battery research for electric cars, it’s clear that many people think the American auto industry’s ultimate salvation will be in cutting-edge technology and design.

I find myself frequently nodding my head at these suggestions. The tech geek in me agrees that there is something the tech business is doing right that the auto business is doing wrong.

What is it? Well, it’s two things.

The ‘58 Bulgemobile Catalog, from Bruce McCall’s Zany Afternoons.

Design

The first problem, what everyone focuses on, is the product itself. The design. The whole “car experience”, which really hasn’t changed much in decades. AFAIK, the only truly important developments in the last 25 years have been hybrids and GPS.

And from the industry’s perspective the most significant and successful design innovation has, ironically, also been the instrument of its recent decline: the outrageous and gluttonous giganticness of SUVs (which really isn’t all that innovative when you consider the gigantism rampant in automotive design of the 1950s).

It all seems so dead to me. My desire to learn to drive — to the extent that it exists at all — feels on an emotional level similar to my desire to smoke a cigarette, own a beeper, rent a videotape at Blockbuster, or sign up for 600 free minutes of AOL. Which is to say that the whole idea (of driving!) seems silly and old fashioned and lame.

It’s easy for me to imagine a hundred ways that cars could be better — from energy efficiency to user experience to aesthetics, or even fundamentally rethinking the infrastructure of highways and roads and parking. Plenty of other people are also describing Detroit’s many design and technology shortcomings elsewhere. If it were not for the fact that the auto industry is still an integral part of my country’s economy and the livelihood of millions of Americans, and if the auto business hadn’t in previous generations worked at technology’s bleeding edge, I’d be completely apathetic about the whole question of automotive user experience design.

Unlike many of my peers (most of whom drive, of course), I can barely muster up enough interest in the fate of the auto industry to bother to speculate about the details of how cars might be improved from a design perspective. It’s like trying to get excited about designing a new kind of whaling harpoon or devising a new kind of portable CD player. I mean, who cares? What good will it do?

But that is precisely the problem: How can we expect innovation from Detroit when creative and technology workers like myself have no desire to lift a finger to help the automotive business? And forget about me, middle-aged and settled in my web career: Why should a 22-year-old technology or design whiz kid want to build cars when they could be working with far cooler, more exciting, and less environmentally-damaging technologies?

Designers

Don’t get me wrong: Plenty of extraordinarily talented and inventive people work in the auto industry. But it’s just not at the same level as the excitement and innovation we see in design on the web, on our mobile phones, and on our desktops. It doesn’t resonate with the public imagination.

I ask myself this question: “Would I want to work there?” Or one of my friends and colleagues? A talented young software engineer? A recent design-school graduate? As a future-thinking knowledge worker, someone like me should be strongly tempted to work for an auto company.

The biggest problem is not that the auto companies are making products consumers don’t want — people will continue to buy cars and muddle through the lackluster design and user experiences, the outrageous fuel costs, the physical danger, and the unconscionable pollution. No, the real, long-term problem with Detroit is that the automakers are just not the kind of companies the next generation of innovators will want to work for.

I don’t know the answer to this, particularly from a public policy perspective, but it’s important that we all frame the real question correctly. It’s not about the design, it’s about the designers. It’s about the workers.

(NOTE: I hate to seem sympathetic with the techno-futurist camp. There’s something terribly elitist about scolding Detroit for not being like Silicon Valley. It’s unforgivably crass to suggest that we just let the automakers precipitously fail and let their workers drift into unemployment and poverty. There is knowledge and talent in the industry today, know-how that needs to be used to make the new auto industry even better. A sudden lurch into industrial calamity, with an eventual triumphant rebirth in California garages, sounds like an idealistic and romantic story. But it’s not so romantic to the hundreds of thousands of people without a paycheck. The solution needs to be driven by practical needs, not dramatic storylines.)

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