I love teaching and writing about user experience and design, and have often wondered what would happen if I tried to make a full-time career out of doing that. My main fear (well, apart from the fear of failing miserably) has always been that if I stop designing and building products, those muscles might atrophy.

Bret Victor puts that fear into words in his great piece Some Thoughts on Teaching:

Can you trust a teacher whose only connection to a subject is teaching it?

How can such a teacher know if what he’s teaching is valuable, or how well he’s teaching it? (“Curricula” and “exams”, respectively, are horrendous answers to those questions.)

Real teaching is not about transferring “the material”, as if knowledge were some sort of mass-produced commodity that ships from Amazon. Real teaching is about conveying a way of thinking. How can a teacher convey a way of thinking when he doesn’t genuinely think that way?

It’s a great reminder of the value of making things - especially if we often write or talk about the process.

I enjoyed On Culture and Interaction Design, an interview with anthropologist Genevieve Bell. In one section she discusses how we often design systems based on a cultural ideal, but in practice it ends up solving the wrong problem. She uses the example of security:

We design systems to keep systems safe and people write their passwords on bits of paper stuck to their systems. So, is it that people don’t care about security or is that the security we are designing is securing the wrong things? Or, are they just securing them in the wrong ways? Clearly we know that people care about the security of their homes, their possessions, their digital selves, but they adopt a range of patterns for doing it that are incredibly messy, complicated, and contradictory.

Passwords ensure that unauthorized people don’t get access to a system. But the mere fact that tools like 1Password exist to remove the need to remember passwords should tell us that we’re doing it wrong. Current password systems solve the problem from the wrong perspective: the system, not the user.

The problem runs even deeper. We’re not only solving the problem from the wrong perspective, we’re also introducing unnecessary complexity because of the way these systems are implemented. From a great post on the AgileBits blog:

Security systems (well, the good ones anyway) are designed by people who fully understand the reasons behind the rules. The problem is that they try to design things for people like themselves””people who thoroughly understand the reasons. Thus we are left with products that only work well for people who have a deep understanding of the system and its components.

This is why people have weak passwords and write them down on pieces of paper everywhere. It’s why the experience is complex and messy, and why we have to spend so much time building “Forgot password” flows when we could be spending that time making the core experience of our products better.

So what’s the alternative? I have a huge appreciation for the role that anthropology can play in the design of products and experiences - which is what Genevieve advocates in her interview as well. Ethnography (often called Contextual Inquiry in the user-centered design world) is the single best way to uncover unmet needs and make sure we are solving the right problems for our users.

In Ethnography in Industry, Victoria Bellotti defines ethnography as “a holistic, in-person, and qualitative approach to the study of human behavior and interaction in natural settings.” By using this method to understand the culture and real needs of personal security, we should be able to design a user-centered solution to protecting digital information. One that isn’t stuck in the downward spiral of designer myopia we often encounter in proposed solutions to complex problems.

Security is an impossible industry to reinvent, you say? Maybe. But the problem does remind me of something Matt Legend Gemmell says about innovation in his excellent post Copycats:

The lesson of the technology industry in the past five years is that really successful products dare to NOT copy. They’re pure, in that they’re actually designed from first principles - they’re based on the problem and the constraints, without being viewed through the lens of someon’s existing attempt. You know, the kind of thing you actually wanted to work on when you got your degree and were still unsullied by the lazy, corporate machine.

So who wants to take a crack at it?

This is one of my favorite stories in the Steve Jobs biography:

The result was that the Macintosh team came to share Jobs’s passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.”

He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany’s example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, “We said to ourselves, ‘Hey, if we’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.’”

See also The difference between Apple and Microsoft: product before profit.

Rob Beschizza in What the Vaio Z says about Sony’s little design problem, a brilliant article on the difference between taste and design:

Apple competitors are obsessed with copying Apple’s tastes without copying its central design habit, which is solving a problem and then refining the solution until the problem changes.

This is also what makes the HP Envy such a bizarre rip-off of the Macbook Pro. It all reminds me of that scene in Armageddon where the Bruce Willis character blows up at the contractors who tried to build an oil drill he designed:

Let me get this straight. You had me pulled off my oil rig, flown half way around the world, you stole my drill design, couldn’t read the plans right, and did a piss poor job of putting it together!

I can image hearing those same words coming out of Steve Jobs’s mouth if he could see the Sony Vaio Z and the HP Envy.

It’s not possible to get to know a man just by reading a book about him. And yet, that’s what many of us are trying to do with the Steve Jobs biography. To be fair, we do this whenever we hear stories about people. We tend to forget that ther’s more to a person than the scraps of information we can extract about them from others. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we must place our opinions in the proper context.

I realize that my thoughts on Steve Jobs are not only based on imperfect words on a page, but I’m also reading those words through the biased lens I use to perceive the world. At best, I’m getting an interpretation of a copy of who he really was. And I’m ok with that, because even feint copies of an original can teach us things, which is why we read these human stories in the first place.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, I believe that Steve Jobs’s genius was rooted in two main character traits: Insanely great taste, and an inability to compromise on that taste at all. This inspires me, but the way his unwillingness to compromise came out of him also makes me extremely uncomfortable.

Jobs’s impeccable taste was evident from very early on:

[T]he Macintosh team came to share Jobs’s passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.” He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany’s example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, “We said to ourselves, “˜Hey, if w’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.’”

He understood the intersection of beauty, art, and technology perhaps better than anyone before him (have you notice how recently everything is starting to look like an Apple product?). But his inability to compromise on his almost-perfect taste manifested itself in being a bit of a jerk sometimes. By now, everyone knows the stories about how mean Jobs could be to his employees. My current favorite is the anecdote of what happened when Bruce Horn decided to leave the company. It summarizes Jobs’s volatility so perfectly:

When Horn went in to say goodbye, Jobs told him, “Everything that’s wrong with the Mac is your fault.” Horn responded, “Well, actually, Steve, a lot of things that are right with the Mac are my fault, and I had to fight like crazy to get those things in.” “You’re right,” admitted Jobs. “I’ll give you 15,000 shares to stay.” When Horn declined the offer, Jobs showed his warmer side. “Well, give me a hug,” he said. And so they hugged.

This kind of story is typical throughout the book. He was able to go from “you’re doing crap work!” to “let’s hug” in less than 10 seconds. What makes me uncomfortable is how effective this erratic management style appears to have been. I almost wish we could point to Steve Jobs and say, “see how destructive it is when you’re mean to people?” But her’s the thing: it worked. The Mac team were some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet, because only the good ones were able to survive Jobs’s wrath. And Jobs knew this:

But Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”

Even the team themselves seemed to be ok with this style in the end (yes, they were the A players who “survived”, but still):

“As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe,” he said. “I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing I’ve done in my life.” Years later most of those in the audience would be able to laugh about the “little hard to get along with” episodes and agree with him that creating that giant ripple was the most fun they had in their lives.

So the source of my extreme discomfort with the Steve Jobs story is that I so desperately want to believe that being a jerk to people isn’t a good way to get the best out of them. But Jobs showed that it certainly is a way to get extraordinary results from a smart, dedicated team. My sense is that not many people can pull this off because you have to be able to back up that behavior with the level of taste that he possessed. This could be the reason why most managers who resort to jerk behavior don’t get the same results from their teams - they have no taste.

For my part, I’m going to take the safer road and stick with the advice given in What Motivates Us To Do Great Work?:

For creative thinkers, [there are] three key motivators: autonomy (self-directed work), mastery (getting better at stuff), and purpose (serving a greater vision). All three are intrinsic motivators. Even a purpose, which can seem like an external motivator, will be internalized if you truly believe in it.

I probably won’t make as big of a dent in the universe as Steve Jobs did, but that’s going to have to be ok.

Bret Victor wrote a very interesting rant a few days ago on the the problem with touch interfaces and the future of Interaction Design. The piece got a lot of attention, so today he followed up with some responses to the questions and comments he received.

I particularly enjoyed his thoughts on the limits of voice control. His argument is that voice is a good way to get information or issue commands (yes, like Siri), but that it’s not very good for creating and understanding:

I have a hard time imagining Monet saying to his canvas, “Give me some water lilies. Make ‘em impressionistic.” Or designing a building by telling all the walls where to go. Most artistic and engineering projects (at least, non-language-based ones) can’t just be described. They exist in space, and we manipulate space with our hands.

It’s obvious, yes, but I think we need to remind ourselves of this. Creating things requires “manipulating space with our hands”, even if that means manipulating words onto a page when they’re stubbornly stuck in space somewhere.[1]

---

1. Sure, some people (like John Siracusa) are able to dictate the first drafts of stuff they write, but I’m pretty sure they’re not editing their work through voice control. Editing (which is the hardest part of writing) requires a keyboard and lots of banging your head on it.  â†©

Aaron Swartz in a great piece called Steve Jobs and the Founder’s Pain:

Something that’s perfect just feels much, much better than something that’s almost right. When I’m doing something myself, I can just sit there and work at it until it’s exactly right. It’s embarrassing to launch a product with a bug in it! It physically hurts when I realize that’s what I’ve done. But as projects and companies grow, there are more and more people in between me and those tiny details. And then I face a choice: do I keep complaining until something’s perfect or do I just let go and consider it somebody els’s problem?

The people who are not content to make it somebody else’s problem are the ones who end up changing the world.

(link via @vhata)

I love pretty much everything Frank Chimero writes, and his essay on the meaning of design from a few weeks back still rings in my ears:

We should care more about our craft because w’re granted an opportunity to contribute to the world. We should care more about what we say because each time we speak, ther’s someone there to listen. We should care more about our audiences because they are the ones who give our work value. We might think that design work is about you or about me or anyone else who makes it, or maybe about the things that we make and the artifacts we produce, but don’t let this way of thinking fool you. The things we make are all just excuses to speak with one another and to help one another. We are all linked, and the things that we make for each other strengthen the invisible threads that tie us all together.

Many people won’t agree with this sentiment. Many will think it’s silly to think about something as trivial as web design in this grandiose way. They’ll remind us that we’re just making web sites, not saving the world. And that’s fine - not everyone is going to care as much about design, or even understand why some of us do.

But I do care. I care because I think we have the opportunity to shape a technology that is at once exhilarating and dangerous. A technology that has the massive opportunity to bring people closer together, if we can just keep it together long enough not to destroy each other in YouTube comments and flaming blog posts.

So, yes, I care a lot about this, probably more than I should. But I’m with Frank on this: everything we do is just an excuse “to speak with one another and to help one another.”

Here’s another great example of how differently designers and users see the world. When we hear the word “clutter”, we think of visual noise. But Jared Spool explains what users mean when they say that word:

Over the years, w’ve learned that users have a different meaning of “clutter” than the designers do. It’s not the visual design the users are reacting to. It’s the actual content. Clutter is what happens when we fill a page with things the user doesn’t care about. Replace the useless stuff with links, copy, and content the users really want, and the page suddenly becomes uncluttered.

Here’s the kicker - their redesign was actually more cluttered, but users didn’t care:

We put the old and new pages side-by-side. The new page definitely had more text, less whitespace, and more dense information design. Yet, when we asked the users to tell us which one was more cluttered, they were unamimous: the old design was the cluttered design.

It’s another reminder (sorry, yawn) about the importance of Content First. I keep coming back to Jeffrey Zeldman’s classic essay Style vs. Design:

Most of all, I worry about web users. Because, after ten-plus years of commercial web development, they still have a tough time finding what they’re looking for, and they still wonder why it’s so damned unpleasant to read text on the web ”” which is what most of them do when they’re online.

I completely agree with Gabe Weatherhead’s views on apps made for kids in The Value Of App Reviews:

My number one reason to give a bad rating and review is when an app made for kids has both up-sell and review requests plastered all over the screen. They are trying to prey on small children tapping anything that pops on the screen. If you make a kids app, do not put links to your other apps in the game. Put them in the preferences. Put them in the app description. Hell, put them in some kind of app documentation. But when they are in the game, you are telling me that you’re shady and unscrupulous and I can’t trust your app.

This is a dark pattern, and I simply delete the app if I come across this kind of design. For some better patterns to follow when designing apps for kids, see Luke Wroblewski’s Touch-based App Design for Toddlers.