What is interesting about Wikipedia? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not how it it is made.

A “wiki” is a content source powered (in general, completely powered) by social software technology, with people collectively creating and refining the content. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the quintessential wiki — while there are other major wikis, from the addictive TV fan site Lostpedia to the new and astoundingly-awesome online typography reference Typedia, Wikipedia is still the mother of all wikis. Wikipedia has so thoroughly conquered our mental model of what an information reference is supposed to be that its most salient concept (social editing) has become inseparable from its fundamental purpose (complete information).

(In fact, I’ve started to notice people using the wordlet “pedia”, rather than “wiki”, to indicate “socially-powered content”. It seems that, for some people, a “wiki” and a “pedia” are the same thing, which to me is tantamount to thinking the “hi” in “hijack” means “airplane”, justifying “carjack” as a legitimate word.)

The “pedia” in Wikipedia is a nod to the “encyclopedia”. The wikipedia, we are supposed to infer, is an encyclopedia powered by a wiki. It’s beyond encyclo, it’s wiki!

The word encyclopedia means “complete or well-rounded” (i.e., encyclo) + “knowledge or learning” (i.e., pedia). So, interpreted one way, “Wikipedia” can mean “People getting together to record knowledge”, which of course is exactly what Wikipedia is.

But Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales could just as well have called it “Encyclowiki”, meaning “people getting together to describe everything”, which in many ways is what Wikipedia, in its blossoming omniscience, has ultimately and more resonantly become.

For it is no longer impressive, at least to me, that Wikipedia is community-generated. Big deal, I get it, I agree with it. I buy into the Here Comes Everybody premise. I take the wisdom of crowds for granted. Like millions of others, I am thoroughly sold on Wikipedia, especially after seeing topics I thought I knew everything about described in informative, passionate, and sometimes astonishing detail. It’s the content that draws me, not the phenomenon that caused the content to get there (if anything, the phenomenon has, and continues to be, Wikipedia’s biggest perceived weakness).

This is why I am glad that Typedia is Typedia and not Wikitype or Typewiki. Typedia is, above all, a compendium of knowledge about type. The fact that it is socially-powered is something we can and should take for granted (and, of course, participate in). This kind of comprehensive one-stop collection of esoteric knowledge simply isn’t going to happen, ever, without social participation.

Basically, we’re all wiki now. We already work together. It’s the pedia part, the knowledge itself, we’ll always be striving for.

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There are two ways of writing nouns in the English language: you capitalize proper nouns and you don’t capitalize common nouns. There is an unfortunate tendency, however, for people to think that you can elevate the importance and even the definition of any old common noun simply by capitalizing it. To me, this is the typographical equivalent of using “unnecessary” quotation marks to indicate emphasis.

There are some words, of course, that legitimately have this quality, for example God with a capital G is different from god with a lowercase g. Brand names often co-opt common nouns, too, and create new proper nouns: There is a difference between “facebook” and “Facebook“, for example.

But we can’t just make new proper nouns up for no good reason. I am thinking specifically about the increasingly common use of the phrase “Design with a capital D”, or even the unqualified casual use of the capitalized “Design”, whenever a writer seeks to discuss the broader category of all design disciplines from the many smaller, more focused design fields which also use the one-word “design” to describe themselves (fashion design, interior design, graphic design).

Even at a purely grammatical level, this is wrong: you simply cannot capitalize the word “design” because it is not a proper noun. There is no grammatical rule that says that you can use capitalization to indicate the importance or scope of a word — I can’t capitalize “Sports”, for example, and say it means the philosophy and values of sportsmanship as opposed to the lowly playing of games. If you found a company or wrote a book or named your dog “Design” you might have a case for the capital D. But the concept of “design” is already in the dictionary as a common noun, with a lowercase d.

But, more importantly, I don’t think we need to be making this kind of in-your-face overt distinction in the first place. The concept that design has several layers of meaning and scope is quite valid and useful, but the word itself is perfectly capable of encompassing both meanings.

The English language, like many others, has some lovely ambiguities and idiosyncrasies in it. These gaps and imperfections may sometimes frustrate us, but they also make us think about words more, what they mean and where they come from. They force us to pay more attention to context, which we really ought to be doing anyway.

When it comes to the various disciplines of design, I want to be frequently reminded that making a flowchart for a user interface and making a fabric pattern for a dress are closely related disciplines. I want to know that my own design discipline can learn from all of the others.

I would rather have readers assume that the word “design” by default means all of the diverse design practices — unless the author or speaker indicates otherwise, implicitly or explicitly. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, though: most designers think of their own niche design discipline whenever they hear the word “design”. Still, capitalizing “design” is a crutch for both writers and readers, a short cut that excuses writers from explaining the interconnectedness of design, and excuses readers from embracing design more broadly.

Instead, let’s just write and read more carefully, and let’s keep talking about design as a family of practices. And let’s also begin assuming the broader definition by default, unless told otherwise. Writers and readers will have to do a little extra thinking sometimes to figure out the meaning in any given context. But eventually the concept of design as a general way of thinking with many specific ways of practicing will take hold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What do you do with a video camera? You video.

I’ve always wanted to coin a phrase or invent a word, to have a term of my own invention be spoken by thousands or even millions of people every day. An astonishingly large number of my friends and peers have done exactly this, some spectacularly so. From ambient intimacy to ajax, blogs to folksonomies, topless meetings to everyware, veterans of the Information Architecture scene have been a prolific lot.

I’ll admit that while I don’t spend a lot of time trying to invent catchy and useful new additions to the lexicon, I do harbor a hope of someday joining this group with a worthwhile word of my own.

For now, then, I wish to formally submit for peer review a humble nomination (so to speak) in the rough vicinity of true coinages. It’s not exactly a real neologism, as the word itself as a string of letters already exists. It’s more like a newly permissible usage:

• video (verb) to record motion pictures to a medium other than film, such as video tape or digital media, whether recorded directly from life with a camera or transferring from one motion picture medium to another non-film medium.

The word’s current definition doesn’t include a verb form. I think we need one. Examples:

• I will video my daughter in her school play tonight.
• Make sure you set the DVR to video the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica next weekend.

We already have one-word verbs for most technological communications: mail, film, photograph, record, tape, phone, and fax. We email, IM, Google, and tweet. We even used to use the one-word verb videotape when video was recorded on whirring VHS, Hi-8, and DV cameras. Why must we bend over backwards linguistically to say “shoot video” (as if cameras were guns) or “record with my digital video recorder” just to avoid the anachronistic “videotape” — when “video” does the job so succinctly?

Interestingly, the Latin origin of the word is a verb: “video” means “(I) see”. And in the future “nadsat” vocabulary of A Clockwork Orange, the word “viddy” is used as a verb, meaning both “to see” and at another level “to understand” or even “to dream”. Perhaps we need to go that far and start using a whole new word for recorded visual experiences as we enter an era where the line between fantasy and reality, truth and fiction, media and life itself, is becoming blurred.

We can always viddy later. For now, however, we need to video.

Finally, I will confess that one of the main reasons for writing this post is to shamelessly and selfishly lay claim to this usage call for making this usage acceptable in the new official history of early 21st century humanity (i.e. Google’s index). Yoo hoo, Google? Guess what? “Video” is now a verb.

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A follow up thought to the user personas discussion among Steve, Jared, Joshua, me, countless other people, and in particular to Peter Merholz’s thoughts about the value of personas created through design team conversations.

Let’s begin with a simple premise that I think most practicing UX designers would agree with in a heartbeat: The worst possible way to employ user personas in a design process is for the designers themselves to have no role in the creation of the persona documents themselves.

Or to put it another way: It sucks when the creator of the research artifacts is not also the designer of the product. If personas are created by a specialized “research team” and then handed off to a specialized “design team”, that design team doesn’t actually experience the substantive benefits good personas can provide.

This is true because, in my view, the primary benefit from creating personas is bestowed upon those who actually make the artifacts, via the thinking, collaboration, and conversations that occur during their creation. The best insights emerge during the investigations and discussions about the data.

Typically we think of a research-based design process being boiled down to a simple equation: “research + design”. I think this model is too simplistic. To me, there are three steps, not two, in any good research-driven design process. Between researching users and designing a product there is an additional critical step, something we all do but don’t recognize as a distinct stage in the design process: research interpretation.

The creation of compelling and useful research artifacts, whether personas or modemaps, mood boards or mental models, is a process of interpreting plain data into meaningful structures and systems that are sensible and useful to designers. It is a synthetic and analytic process at the same time. It’s a creative process. It is a design process.

The Second Step

Let’s look at these three components or stages in a research-driven design process, in particular the second step:

1. Gather research data
2. Interpret the research
3. Produce the design

Ideally all three steps would be conducted by the same team, with the same individuals doing the data collection, documentation, and design work. This is easy when the whole team is made up of skilled designers with good research skills.

But on some projects good user research doesn’t yet exist. Someone will need to conduct surveys, observe users, run tests and analysis, interview domain specialists, and do all kinds of of direct, primary research.

Meanwhile on other projects the research may already exist, in great quality and quantity. The only real research necessary is for the design team to ingest these pre-existing reports and data into their design process.

In either case, however, the second step needs to be taken. Somebody needs to transform the data into something that lays the groundwork for the design.

Getting Creative with Research isn’t a Bad Thing

For example, when we create personas we make editorial decisions about how many different types of users we will define. We may choose to represent several types of users in our group of personas. As an example, let’s say for a news web site we define the following four primary personas based on how dedicated they are to visiting the web site:

• The Temporary Visitor
• The Occasional Repeat Visitor
• The New Subscriber
• The Long-Term Subscriber

Does this breakdown of users not immediately suggest a navigation scheme or a UI design model? Doesn’t it seem likely that all four of these user types will want their needs addressed in some explicit way on the web site, something that manifests itself in a big way in the final design?

But what if we chose to define them this way instead, focusing on their content desires rather than on their devotion to the site?:

• The Sports Fan
• The Political Junkie
• The Concerned Parent
• The Well-Rounded Person

Would this alternate way of thinking of users and of interpreting the data not have a fundamentally different effect on the subsequent UX design process? Wouldn’t the resulting designs be different from the design that came from the first set of personas? The data behind these personas may be the same, but the effect of the interpretation of that data on the rest of the design process may be profound.

There are many other ways, of course, to structure a set of research-informed user personas from the same underlying data. My contention is that this process of transforming data is right on the edge, and maybe over it, of being a design process. Sometimes a dataset may reveal clear design solutions (if 30% of your users speak only Spanish, you may want a link to en español somewhere pretty obvious), but more often than not these kinds of structures are far from obvious in the data. Usually it demands creativity and abductive thinking.

Todd Zaki Warfel likes the phrase “Data Driven Design“. I prefer Data Inspired Design. Data-driven implies that the best design solutions are inferred from or deduced from the data, like Michaelangelo removing David from a block of marble. I don’t think design happens that way, even when data is deeply integrated in the design process. In my mind, the data exists to inspire the designers to new ideas, to point them generally in the right direction towards a solution. Not to provide the solution outright.

This is where interpretation comes in. Interpretation and inspiration. This is the magical part of great design, the part where being a good researcher isn’t enough and where being a good designer isn’t enough. It’s where the designer understands research, and where the researcher understands design.

To be a good designer or a good design researcher, you must master the second step of interpretation.

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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’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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Leisa Reichelt coined the term “ambient intimacy” to describe the genre of social computing apps led by Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce. She was interested in the constant sense of closeness users feel with their circle of friends, no matter how far-flung, through technologies that informally reveal us to each other.

Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku (and newly minted Googleplexian), called this phenomenon “peripheral vision”, your ability to informally or even unconsciously know what’s going on in your social circle.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that my Twitter stream contains a lot more than just what people are doing. They’re starting to use Twitter to express their emerging ideas and to begin tentative conversations about things they are thinking about.

In fact, even as I enjoy the ambient intimacy of having the incidental knowledge about what my friends are doing, I’m finding that the sharing of ideas is the most valuable part of Twitter. My Twitter friends send links to interesting sites, they announce their latest blog posts, and they talk about the new ideas they are reading about and hearing about, usually at the moment they first experience the idea. Or they’ll ask a provocative question (”Does anyone use friendster anymore?”) and see what it generates.

But most exciting of all is when someone shouts out their own half-baked idea (in 140 characters or less), and the rest of the group piles on to shape the idea further. Spontaneous “collective musing” occurs. This whole process is over in only a few minutes, and then the whole dialogue fades away into the ether. The ideas, however, live on in our heads, and eventually some even take more concrete form.

The Twitter medium allows these informal and impromptu communications to occur in a way that, for example, posting to a mailing list, publishing a blog post, or posting a question to a Q&A social site can never quite do. It’s something just a little bit less than a conversation.

In the same vein, Bruce Nussbaum today quotes Roger Martin from the Rotman School of management, who says “Blogging is intellectual prototyping.” If that’s the case, then Twitter is intellectual doodling.

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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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