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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We love sending video clips to each other. Links to YouTube videos of cute animals, spectacular accidents, inspiring speeches, nostalgic memories, and music videos fly back and forth through our email inboxes all day long. We gather around each others desks and call family members to our laptops to spend a few minutes watching a cool clip we just found.

It occurred to me that finding and sharing these videos is, or can be, an art form: creating curated mixes of many shorter video clips is, to me, analogous to the existing form of the DJ mix tape (or, in today’s digital terms, a playlist).

In fact, I love making mix tapes. And mix CDs. Making video mixes would be a natural fit for me.

I have friends who are video artists, combining original video work with found-video editing and collecting techniques. Some even use the term “VJ” to describe the curation and mixing of the videos together, more in the Christian Marclay or DJ Shadow sense than in the MTV sense.

Before digital video became as easy as it is today, and before YouTube made finding millions of source videos possible to anyone with a web browser, creating curating video mixes was solely the purview of these dedicated video artists, who had both expensive video editing equipment and mountains of space-consuming video tapes that they’d painstakingly collected over many years.

But now that the web has rendered both of those constraints moot, I’m surprised that I’ve not seen an easy way for web users to grab a bunch of video clips and create a single sharable curated playlist out of them. Sure you could download videos and use a desktop editor to string them together into a new piece (and, in fact, I’d love to see this sort of art form emerge, too), but a more democratic and reasonable way to do this would be for YouTube to allow users to create mixes on their own.

You would begin by filling out a form with a string of interesting video URLs. Click submit, and then YouTube collects those videos into a single page and a single video player, perhaps with credits or annotations appearing in a subtitle form between the clips. You could then send this new video mix as a single URL to your friends.

So here’s my first mix, minus the single unified player part. Ideally there would be single video player here, and all I would have done to create it was enter these six URLs into a form. For now, just play them one at a time, scrolling down the screen.

This space intentionally left blank!

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Last night was the second U.S. Presidential Debate. One of my favorite new election-based interactive user experiences (in addition to CNN’s approval graphs and CNN’s magic wall) is Twitter’s election.twitter.com. Here’s a sample of what you would have seen during last night’s debate:

TechCrunch reviewed this site last week. Here’s their review in its entirety:

It sounds like a decent idea on paper: take every tweet about the candidates and stream them on a single, constantly updated site. Unfortunately, while it may be fun to look at for a few minutes, election.twitter.com is far too noisy to be worthwhile. There are no cohesive threads of arguments, and every quote that raises an eyebrow gets repeated ad nauseum. Verdict: Vetoed.

I completely disagree with TC’s analysis. It seems focused on extracting actionable, accurate, or even just coherent information. They’re disappointed in the quality of individual posts and the lack of consistent dialogue. It’s just “noise” to them.

Interestingly, the critique is identical to the initial criticism many people have of Twitter, before they actually try it and, hopefully, “get it”. They say it’s “just noise.” They say “who cares about everyone’s mundane, idle thoughts?”

Similarly, the nature and mechanism of election.twitter.com’s social function is, like Twitter itself, ‘ambient‘: It’s about getting an informal, general sense of what’s happening, not about following specific threads and individual thoughts. Just like with ambient music, you’re not supposed to actually listen to it in an attempt to extract something specific (for example a catchy melody, or a telling quote).

The “hot topics” keywords at the top of the page, extracted from the totality of the current twitterstream, are also extremely revealing. If you only look at that part of the page you’re already getting a real feel for the memes currently in circulation. Bite-sized but potent.

Bottom line: the site is not about finding content with immediate, actionable value. It’s about visiting repeatedly, or watching it flow by in your peripheral vision, without paying close attention. The goal is to synchronize with a certain public pulse.

(This is, coincidentally, what the New York Times home page does for me, albeit at a slower pace. I want to see what everyone is seeing and talking about today, and I trust that the Times home page will show that in a single page view, even if I don’t actually click through to any articles. It’s not about diving deep — it’s just about the broad overview of the zeitgeist.)

This new Twitter feature — this “topic-focused channel”, or whatever they call it — is a great new idea that I’d love to see extended to other areas and topics. It’s ideal for live events like debates, election night, live TV, sporting events, etc. Also for conferences, or even for private groups (a much-requested feature Twitter hasn’t yet delivered on). The idea is that you are really paying attention to something else — Twitter is just the back channel, the pulse of the topic. I can’t wait to see future implementations of this simple but powerful view.

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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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There’s a classic [1] product design exercise called “Design the Box” in which a product’s packaging is conceptualized first, before the product itself is designed. The idea is to view the product from the consumer’s point of view as they are thinking about buying it, to think about who the customer is, what is important to them, what will make them desire the product, and what makes the product different from the others on the shelf.

This thinking is nothing new. It’s called merchandising. Merchandising is the strategy and implementation of how a product is displayed in stores, how it shows up in photography, how it is described on a web site. It’s a consciousness of — and responsibility for — the final step in the product supply chain.

(It also happens to be the very subject of my talk this week at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC and at Euro IA in two weeks — consider this post a bit of a preview.)

Merchandising is critical to traditional product design and marketing. But in the world of interactive product design, the word merchandising is rarely even uttered. How did we get here?

Henry Dreyfuss, the great mid-20th century industrial designer (and, in many design historians’ minds, the father of ergonomics and user-centered design) was a great champion of product merchandising. To Dreyfuss, merchandising is one of a designer’s fundamental responsibilities and core skills, right up there with things like usability, style, and business and technology constraints. Merchandising, traditionally, is the aspect of a product’s design that makes it desirable before the consumer owns the product — even before they’ve seen any advertising or heard any facts about the product.

It’s important to note that merchandising has two very different aspects. The first is showroom-centered, where a store displays the products it is selling in compelling ways. Think of a retail store’s window displays, the tables with featured products, the blouse-wearing mannequins. This form of merchandising is generally managed by the retailer themselves. In the interactive world, the analogy would be the design of an e-commerce experience: The products that are featured on a home page, the personalized recommendations for users, the ability to zoom in on an item, or to view other users’ ratings.

The second form of merchandising is centered around the product itself, and is controlled by the product’s manufacturer, developer, and designer. This ranges from the design and appearance of the product itself to the product’s packaging and display.

In consumer product design, merchandising is alive and well. Physical objects are designed to allow shoppers to imagine carrying them in their pockets and installing them in their kitchens.

In interactive design, I’m not so sure this is the case. That’s actually the subject of my upcoming talks. For now, I want to focus on the difference between merchandising via packaging versus merchandising via the product itself.

Obviously I agree that merchandising is a critical part of design. I question, however, the idea of worrying about it too early in a design process, because when you do so you are engaging more in a marketing exercise than a product design exercise.

The real power of merchandising is its ability to make a given product look better and more desirable than it actually is. Great merchandising, however, can exaggerate features, hide flaws, promise miracles. It’s certainly a great idea to show your product in the best possible light, and I’d argue that there’s always a measure of deception inherent in product marketing (will the latest web To-Do list really make your life easier?), but I think that the deceptive component of marketing and merchandising cannot be the first step in a design process because it prevents us from focusing on the user experience. Which is critical because, in today’s market, the actual user experience itself (not the promised UX given in the showroom, in the ads, and on the box) is likely to be the most important factor in ongoing user satisfaction.

So how useful can the traditional attitude towards merchandising work, then, in a marketplace where the customer and corporation have so many more touchpoints than just the showroom floor? Today’s consumer is more focused on the user experience than ever, and has more ways of evaluating that experience than ever before. Word of mouth, online reviews, test-drive videos and unboxing photos, and free beta products allow consumers to get past the bullet points and sunbursts.

The “design the box” exercise can be a powerful tool for generating ideas and for getting into the mind of the consumer. It is also, I fear, a trap insofar as it refocuses the designer from user experience to salesmanship.

The classic video seen here, “What if Microsoft designed the iPod box” is a great illustration of this. The video imagines Microsoft’s marketing department slapping bullet points, stickers, and exaggerations onto the iPod’s classic minimalist box. Imagine a product designed with this methodology and you can. (I’ve not used a Zune, but I suspect its simple design would have been a very hard sell at Microsoft if it were designed before the iPod redefined the market for everyone else).

Designing the box was once a great product strategy idea in an economy where a clear line could be drawn between the pre-sale consumer and the post-sale consumer. If a product’s cool features couldn’t be explained to consumers in a box on a shelf, they might as well not exist.

But now, with Web 2.0 products and services, that that line between pre- and post-sale is blurred or even completely lost. Now I think we should focus on designing the product as if the box — illustrations, bullet points, specs, everything — was an inherent amd permanent part of the product, not an entirely separate entity.

[1] As far as I can recall, “design the box” has been an industrial design school exercise for ages, but like many compelling ideas the concept has many parents. Jess McMullen credits Joel Spolsky, who in fact learned it from Jim Highsmith, who claims it was invented by Bill Shackelford.

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There are about a dozen people I follow on Twitter whom I’ve never actually met (or whom I’ve met only briefly) but who after months of exchanging tweets I can honestly call good friends.

In other words, we have formed our friendships completely on Twitter, from scratch. This is probably happening to a lot of people, too. Maybe even you (if you use Twitter).

You might follow someone you don’t really know for any number of reasons: You may have seen the person’s name in another friend’s tweet and thought that they sound interesting. You may want to follow a well-known peer. You may have met someone in passing in real life and wished you could hang out more with them, so you search for them on Twitter. You may look at other people’s follow lists and decide that whoever they follow you should follow.

A mutual friend may even make an introduction by simply suggesting “you should follow @johndoe” — which is kind of like saying “you should meet John Doe” except that, because Twitter is basically one-way, the other person isn’t obliged to acknowledge or participate in any formal introduction.

It’s a kind of passive introduction network, where by “following” someone and monitoring their lives (and their conversations with other tweeple) you can get to know them fairly well before actually engaging them in @name public conversations, and eventually in d name direct message conversations.

This probably happens on other social networks, too (for example on Facebook’s walls where you can peek into the conversations of other users and find people you would like to meet), but because most social networks require mutual approval of friendship links, the friend-making dynamic is fraught with a far more emotional and social complexity. Twitter’s fundamental one-way nature lightens the emotional load of making new friends in ways that most other networks just can’t do.

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Using some clever detective work (about which I will say little except that Google was really all I needed), I think I’ve uncovered the master plan behind the Mad Men Alternate Twitterverse that I’ve been enjoying lately.

I could be wrong, but here’s my theory of how this all works:

First, there are a large number of participants in this operation — not a single, lone writer playing many different roles as many suspect. These people are writers, advertising professionals, bloggers, performers, and marketers. Basically clever people.

And few, if any, of them work for AMC. I suspect some mastermind (Deep Focus, it seems) was hired by AMC to manage this campaign. They subcontracted the work to a dozen or more Twitter “actors”, each playing a character from the show or from history. Some actors may be playing more than one role, but I suspect that most actors are assigned to play a single character.

These actors use Twitter in basically the same way normal Twitter users do — updating “what they are doing” every so often, responding to direct messages, having many side conversations. But always in character. The actors tweet each other and they tweet the “real world” people they’ve been following. Each actor has their own writing and Tweeting style — some stick firmly to the 1962 universe, others slip into occasional 2008 anachronisms.

They also socialize differently, with behavior that mirrors the broad range of real Twitter user behaviors. For example, @peggyolson follows nearly 1,800 people — basically following anybody who follows her. She even trolls through other characters’ follow-ees and starts following new people, just like many Twitter users do.

@David_Ogilvy, on the other hand, has over 200 followers but only follows 23 people — just as some Twitter celebrities often do, carefully controlling who they wish to interrupt them.

Lawyers and Money

So what happened last week when the project was briefly cancelled? Well, it seems that AMC’s right hand sometimes doesn’t know what it’s left hand is doing: the lawyers who hunt down copyright violators apparently didn’t know that AMC’s marketing department was behind these fake Twitter accounts. Once this was cleared up, however, Twitter was able to reactivate the accounts — pointing the way, perhaps, to Twitter founder Evan Williams’s projection that Twitter is going to try to monetize through corporate contracts.

Perhaps facilitating alternate universes will somday become Twitter’s bread and butter? Selling official account names for fictional characters across hundreds of fandoms? We shall see.

Why This Matters

In any case, I am completely impressed with this work, if only for the fact that it radically refocuses where and how digital marketing dollars can be spent while still exploiting Web 2.0 social media in a profoundly savvy way.

Think of it this way: How much would you charge to spend a few minutes every few hours (even while working at your normal job) to write snarky, chatty Tweets in the voice of a character from a really good TV show? Even if they pay you as much as $2 per tweet, then the person playing, say, Don Draper would have earned around $500 in the first few weeks of this project (he’s posted about 250 tweets overall).

So let’s do this for all 20-30 characters for a few months, and let’s throw in a supervising editor and a project manager to keep the project humming along. It seems to me that the whole project’s budget couldn’t cost more than $75-100k — a fairly typical, even low, budget for many TV-show promotional mini-sites.

That’s $100k for a PR-generating, sophisticated, far-reaching digital marketing effort that requires no HTML skill, no information architecture work, no programming or server configurations, almost none of the normal digital marketing skills we normally think of as part of this kind of work. All they need is some good writers, a good idea, and an open-minded client.

Well done.

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