Today is the seventh anniversary of the incorporation of Behavior, the humble web and user experience design consultancy I helped found in 2001. Happy birthday to us!

My four awesome partners and I started the company in what at the time seemed like the worst possible economic climate to launch a new business. The one-two punch of the dot-com bust and the 9/11 attacks were knocking many companies out, including the company we’d all been working at together for the previous several years. It seems crazy, but it actually made sense to us at the time. In fact, since we all lost our jobs at the collapsing web consulting firm, we almost had no choice but to band together to keep working doing what we loved to do: designing user experiences.

Now that our economy is in recession again (and apparently has been so for a year now), we’re thankful that we honed our business skills in a climate of scarcity (I call it our crucible) rather than a climate of free-flowing venture capital. Over the years and through many changes, this experience has always been immensely valuable to us.

In this season of giving thanks, I want to thank all the talented people who have worked with us over these seven years, and who continue to work with us today. Without you, of course, we wouldn’t be here at all. Cheers!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extending the User Base

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

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

But there’s another kind of bespoke design approach.

The One True User

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

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

Sun’s Tim Bray recently wrote:

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

John Gruber (who provided the link above) agrees:

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

Jason Fried, too:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s Already Happening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From “The Seduction of the Interface“

Saturday’s New York Times (in the Business section, of course) had an interesting article about “design thinking”. For starters, it included by far the clearest summary of what design thinking is that I’ve ever read, including from all the design thinking leaders:

While definitions vary, design thinking usually involves a period of field research — usually close observation of people — to generate inspiration and a better understanding of what is needed, followed by open, nonjudgmental generation of ideas. After a brief analysis, a number of the more promising ideas are combined and expanded to go into “rapid prototyping,” which can vary from a simple drawing or text description to a three-dimensional mock-up. Feedback on the prototypes helps hone the ideas so that a select few can be used.

The Times article also quotes IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown:

“Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about divergence… Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough.”

They hype around design thinking has been a little troublesome to many practicing designers, myself included. As I’ve said before, to me design thinking is intended to steer “business thinkers” in a new direction, opening their minds to new idea generation processes — a way of thinking and working that most designers are already intimately familiar with (so much so that most practicing designers find it almost impossible to understand what the heck “design thinking” means, kind of like explaining “wetness” to a fish).

But the Times article focuses on one aspect of design thinking that I am glad to hear: that the idea of design as merely a marketing tool needs to be retired.

The headline makes this clear: “Design Is More Than Packaging”. It’s conceptually in synch with my recent blog post, “Don’t Design the Box“, in which I argue that a design process that begins with trying to seduce the customer with the product’s superficial packaging — rather than seducing the customer with the actual product and the actual user experience — is increasingly going to be doomed to fail in a Web 2.0, customer-driven, design-centric marketplace.

In fact, this concept was also a key point of my recent “Seduction of the Interface” talks. In the talk I discuss how the traditional business structure (in which product design, development, marketing, and sales are all separate disciplines) needs to break down. For new digitally-distributed products, there is often no difference between the product’s user experience design, the product’s underlying engineering, the product’s marketing and advertising, and the “store” the product is sold from. All of these can, and increasingly should, be wrapped up into a single, holistic user experience.

In this new business model, design plays a key role in every aspect of the process — there are no walls between design, development, marketing, and sales. And even within design itself, there is no wall between product design and packaging design.

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When I was just 20 years old, I went on a student exchange program to Amsterdam to study sculpture at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Those six months I spent in Europe, impoverished and starry-eyed, shaped a lot of who I am, both personally and creatively.

I’m delighted to say that I will be back in Amsterdam this week, from Thursday to Monday, for the 2008 Euro IA Summit, presenting version 2.0 of The Seduction of the Interface on Friday morning. I look forward to meeting some of my European peers as well as walking (or biking) around my old stomping grounds again.

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Last week I delivered a brand new presentation at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo, right here in New York City, entitled The Seduction of the Innocent: Merchandising in Interactive Product Design.

(I’m presenting it again this Friday at the Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam, hopefully with a few enhancements.)

The topic itself went through an interesting evolution. I started out thinking that my talk would simply be about the idea of merchandising as a user experience design challenge.

But over time, the word “seduction” in the title started to seduce me. I began to see opportunities to tie the two concepts together, to link persuasive user experiences to the timeless arts of seduction. Once this idea took hold of me, so much of the talk kind of magically fell right into place.

Anyway, if you saw me speak last week I’d love to hear your thoughts on how the talk went and how you think I might improve it. In general, the feedback I’ve gotten so far has been pretty good, but I’ve also gotten some really helpful advice on what to change. If you liked it, I’d love for you to toss some stars my way over at my Web 2.0 Expo crowdvine session page (where so far I have 14 votes, averaging 3.64 out of 5 stars).

Welcome to New York City

I was also on the Advisory Board for the New York Expo. An explicit part of our mission was to bring a distinctive New York flavor to the topics, speakers, sessions, and attendees. I hadn’t realized before how rare it is to actually have a web or design conference in New York City. So many conferences in my field are held elsewhere, presumably due to the high cost of holding events in New York.

Attending a conference in your home city has its advantages (no airfare or hotel), but the unfortunate part is that everyone you work with knows you’re still in town and easily accessible. Because of this, I ended up working during much of the conference. I didn’t get to attend very many of the other sessions, including quite a few that I really wanted to see. Also, I wasn’t able to connect with dozens of out-of-town friends and colleagues visiting for the Expo.

One session, however, that I knew I could not miss was Jeff Jarvis’s interview with John Byrne and Stephen Adler from BusinessWeek, discussing BW’s various forays into social media. The biggest of these is BusinessWeek’s recently launched Business Exchange, a new social media product developed by BW — which, I am proud to say, had a little user experience design help from our team at Behavior.

The BX, as it’s called, is a whole new way to look at business news and information. Structured as a collection of topics (covering just about everything important to business professionals), it gives users access to information not just from BusinessWeek’s deep editorial expertise, but also from their peers’ suggestions and contributions from across the web.

Anyway, it was a thrill to see our pixels unveiled in such a grand and public way.

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As promised, I’m going to begin featuring some of my favorite Mad Men scenes in which Don Draper practices exquisite creative communication. Today’s episode: Lucky Strike.

One of the most thrilling parts of my job is pitching our creative ideas to clients, whether it’s when we’re trying to win new business or during the actual development of a project. In either case, several creative communication challenges arise:

1. Getting the client to understand our ideas
2. Inspiring the client to give us productive feedback on our ideas
3. Convincing the client that our ideas are good

The first two cases are simply a matter of good two-way communication: every one of our presentations is a conversation between the creative team and the client, and our ideas can and should be shaped by that conversation.

But the third challenge kind of flies in the face of the first two. It’s a sales process, where we need to stand tall and back our ideas with confidence, selling the ideas, convincing the client that our idea is correct — sometimes even if the client’s feedback pokes a few holes in our concept. Of course the best way to keep a client happy is to simply have great ideas and great follow-through on those ideas. But without confidence in your ideas, you’re risking preventing great ideas from succeeding.

All creative people question their ideas — If I thought about it more, would I come up with something better? Has this idea been thought of before? Am I totally off base? But if you can’t stand up for your own ideas, then those ideas wont be given a chance to develop and get better. Ideas are like living things, weak when born but growing stronger as they overcome challenges, learning from failures and mistakes. Without confidence to drive it along and protect it, a perfectly good idea might be nipped in the bud before it becomes truly great.

Lucky Strike

This clip exemplifies all of these challenges. A little background: Don Draper, in typical Mad Men fashion, has been, shall we say, distracted from work and has arrived at this pitch meeting completely unprepared (I don’t advocate this, but hey, that’s Don Draper). The client is the maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

The year is 1960, and America is just starting to learn that cigarettes are actually dangerous to your health. Many people forget that cigarettes used to be marketed as great for your health, helping you stay slim, fighting infection, and all other manner of ludicrous medical claims.

First, let me say that I love watching the dramatics of Sterling Cooper’s pitch meetings, which happen in almost every other episode of Mad Men. As it is with Behavior’s pitches, the Mad Men agency team has a functional dynamic — one person focuses on the company’s credentials, handing off the creative proposal to another. Unlike at Behavior, however, Sterling Cooper’s creative team is embroiled in a cutthroat competition as Don Draper and the young Pete Campbell. I suppose that’s life at a large agency.

In this pitch, the client is given a chance to explain their situation to the agency first. Don Draper listens intently, but when he steps up to bat he immediately strikes out. Okay, so far Draper’s lack of professionalism here is unforgivable. Pete Campbell has a backup idea. But his idea is even worse, and doesn’t take into account the client’s profound belief that cigarettes are wholesome.

Draper, however, has been mulling over his client’s concerns. His initial thinking, when he finally unleashes it, is inspired completely from what his clients told him about their product — that they are really no different from their competitors. But that’s just the start. He immediately engages the client in a conversation about his concept, looking for something meaningful to latch on to, to complete his idea.

After a rapid brainstorming exercise with the client, the idea crystallizes: It’s Toasted!

Then, critically, Draper stands behind this idea 100%. He’s even willing to argue with the client over the idea. “They’re all toasted,” says the client. Draper’s argument makes no logical sense. But he believes in it, and will argue passionately for it, because the idea is a quintessential Don Draper idea, one based on emotion instead of logic. He has transferred the conversation from one about medical health to one about happiness and assurance.

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep these copyrighted — but used here under journalistic fair-use — videos posted here. And please stay tuned for more!

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The NeXT Cube and the Apple Mac Cube. Are they iterations?

Discussing his upcoming biography of Steve Jobs, author Leander Kahney describes Apple’s prototyping process:

It’s a process where they discover the product through constantly creating new iterations. A lot of companies will do six or seven prototypes of a product because each one takes time and money. Apple will do a hundred — that’s how many they did of the MacBook. Steve Jobs doesn’t wake up one morning and there’s a vision of an iPhone floating in front of his face. He and his team discovered it through this exhaustive process of building prototype after prototype.

Clearly Jobs wants to see his team exploring hundreds of prototypes of his products before a final version is sent to manufacturing. But when asked in a video interview about his experience hiring the legendary graphic designer Paul Rand to design of the NeXT logo, Jobs said he admired the fact that Rand (perhaps arrogantly) proclaimed that Jobs would only get one logo for his engagement fee. Rand would not show Jobs a menu of variations to choose from, nor would he show a selection of rough drafts and allow Jobs to provide feedback so that Rand could go back to the drawing board to produce a final candidate. There would be no process at all, no open exploration — Rand would simply give Jobs the best logo he could provide, and then Jobs could take it or leave it.

Why would Jobs admire Rand’s process so much when he runs Apple’s design team in exactly the opposite fashion? Is it simply a matter of Jobs being a sucker for Rand’s monumental ego (and, of course, his stunning track record) while still being a absolute monarch with his own internal team?

This touches on a bigger issue in the design profession: When should a design process spend time on a broad exploration of many options, and when should a designer or design team focus on perfecting a single promising idea?

My inclination is almost always to explore as many options as possible, only settling on a final direction when practical constraints force me to get busy finishing the product.

Of course, this is just one school of design. Clearly many other designers prefer to finish their explorative thinking early and to then invest the bulk of their effort on perfecting the product. Still other designers are simply incapable of coming up with more than a small number of ideas — or they are temperamentally prone to become extremely emotionally attached to their earliest ideas.

In which contexts is a quality-based process actually preferable to a quantity-based process?

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I am going to be speaking today, June 17th, at the OMMA Publish conference here in New York City, on a panel entitled “Optimizing for Performance: Adding Value to Your Site”. OMMA is focused on online media marketing and advertising, publishing several trade magazines and sponsoring several conferences each year in these areas.

My panel will discuss the seemingly straightforward topic of making media sites more engaging and (critically) more profitable. The session will cover the spectrum from tactical solutions — new features that increase stickiness and page views — to strategic solutions that fundamentally change what your media web site can be for the audience and users.

And then, of course, there is the middle ground between tactics and strategy, the recognition that all of the little things we do to improve the user experience and to delight the user actually add up to a strong overall brand experience.

This is my first conference in which I am not speaking to an audience composed almost exclusively of design professionals. While there will certainly be peers and colleauges in this conference, many of the attendees will be members of that elite, special class of individual I call potential clients. I’m usually a pretty good pitch man, so I think this will be fun.

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Two months ago, I tweeted the following cry for help:

Over the last several months I have made some tough choices about what to devote my time to. And “blogging”, unfortunately, didn’t make the cut.

In short, I have been extremely busy doing things other than blogging. In the next week or two I will try to write a few more detailed update posts about my recent shenanigans, just to get it all on the record. But for now, here’s a rundown of some of the things that have been keeping me away from graphpaper.com:

• I’ve been intensely working on some big time client projects at Behavior. We’ve launched a few major awesome web sites.
• I presented a workshop at the IA Summit in Miami, and had a technology misadventure.
• I went to SXSW, but thankfully I wasn’t a speaker this year.
• I attended and made a short presentation about iPhone design at an iPhone BarCamp, and showed off some iPhone design experiments I’ve been working on.
• I’ve been serving on the advisory board for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo NYC.
• I did a couple of interesting magazine interviews.
• My triathlon training has gotten more intense. I raced in a duathlon and placed 23rd out of 120+ competitors.
• I had some great times with friends and family. Seriously, this was the best part of getting off the blogging wagon.

And here are a few things coming up in my future:

• I’ll be a presenter at An Event Apart Boston in June.
• I’m taking a personal vacation in LA right after AEA.
• I’m competing in the NY Triathlon in July.
• I’m preparing to start teaching again in a new MFA program in interaction design.

Finally, a word on the weather.

It’s well known that everyone (at least those of us who live in climates with seasons that change) undergoes a certain degree of seasonal affective disorder, where the dark cold months of winter dampen our mood and our energy and where the sun and warmth of spring and summer lift them up again. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly susceptible to this phenomenon, but this year I learned that I am, and profoundly so.

Which is to say that now that spring is here I feel great and have a new sense of purpose, optimism, and ambition for the months ahead.

I am back!

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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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