In his introduction to a very interesting user research case study on the MailChimp blog, Gregg Bernstein writes:

Here at MailChimp, we’re realists—as much as we love email and all the things you can do with it, we understand that building a campaign is a task, not a life event. You want to get in, get done, and get on with things. Duly noted.

The post goes on to explain how they managed to shave an average of 32 seconds off a core email campaign creation task at MailChimp. But it’s that opening sentence I’d like to dwell on for a bit.

I wish more companies understood this crucial point. As designers and product managers we obsess over every detail of our product, but it most likely makes up a minuscule part of our users’ days. Unless you work for Facebook or Twitter users don’t wake up wondering what new features you’ve released, how your conversion rate has changed over time, or what awards you’ve won. They care about getting a task done, and they care about nothing getting in their way — they care about getting on with their lives.

Yesterday The Onion published an article that is such a spot-on commentary on how we’re mostly ignoring this reality. From Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity:

Tired of being bombarded with constant requests to share content on social media, bestow ratings, leave comments, and generally “join in on the discussion,” the nation’s Internet users demanded substantially less interactivity this week.

Speaking with reporters, web users expressed a near unanimous desire to visit a website and simply look at it, for once, without having every aspect of the user interface tailored to a set of demographic information culled from their previous browsing history.

Exactly. We’re in an environment where too often products and functionality are shaped by who we are and what’s technically possible, not by what user needs call for. XKCD called us on it years ago, but we’re just not listening:

The solution to this problem is to get out into the world and understand how our products and services fit into the lives of our users. How we can help them accomplish their tasks more effectively. Mark Hurst summed this up well in his post What is a career in user experience really about?:

Good user research isn’t a matter of learning the steps of some trendy methods, as though one were just following a cookbook. Instead, good UX work requires a genuine interest in observing, listening to, and learning from other people: primarily the customers themselves, but also the organization that owns the product. That observation, and that listening, must stem from a genuine human interest in people.

We can all do with a shot of humility about our products. We might think what we’re making is a gift to humankind that deserves proper respect — and we absolutely should be proud of our work. But a bit of human empathy will show us that most users have only a passing fly-by relationship with our products. That’s ok though. Understanding how our products fit into people’s lives realistically will help us to improve that fit and (hopefully) become indispensable to them. That’s our job as User Experience Designers.

Steve Cheney wrote an excellent analysis of Facebook’s new search tool in Graph Search’s Dirty Promise and the Con of the Facebook “Like”. The problem? Most “Likes” on Facebook are bought by ad agencies, not earned organically. The result:

One direct effect of all this passive liking is an ugly messy data set with a bunch of implicit signals… that are wrong. What happens when your girlfriend types in “restaurants in San Francisco” into graph search and P.F. Chang’s gets spit out because it’s the most-liked restaurant.  Was a bad Chinese chain the kind of serendipity you were looking for on your date? Didn’t think so. 

I also like Ariel Seidman’s take on the challenges Graph Search will need to overcome in Can we make that search box bigger?:

Consumers think in terms of I got a job to do. What product will I hire to do this job? For restaurant searches I hire Yelp. I need a flight to Chicago I hire kayak. I need to start looking for jobs I’ll hit LinkedIn or Indeed. Each of these have their own experience, community, privacy expectations, and detailed data. As BranchOut has shown people do not want Facebook to be the place to manage their professional life, they have hired a different product for that job.

I know I tend to be too skeptical about this kind of stuff, but Graph Search just strikes me as another solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who sent me Julian Baggini’s excellent essay The art of coffee last week (I guess my Instagram feed makes my feelings about coffee pretty clear). It’s a truly great article, going far beyond coffee to the essence of craftsmanship, and the things we value. Here’s Julian on the “perfection” of Nespresso capsules that is hard to match consistently by human baristas:

Surely we appreciate the handmade in part because it is handmade. An object or a meal has different meaning and significance if we know it to be the product of a human being working skilfully with tools rather than a machine stamping out another clone. Even if in some ways a mass-produced object is superior in its physical properties, we have good reasons for preferring a less perfect, handcrafted one.

And further on:

There is plenty that we should happily allow to be mechanised, for the obvious benefits that brings. But there is plenty else we will continue to prefer to be handmade, because what matters is not just the result, but the process by which you get there. Humans are imperfect, and so a world of perfection that denies the human element can never be truly perfect after all.

The article got me thinking once more about the concept op craft as it relates to design and related fields. In 2008 Alan Cooper brought the discussion about craft in design to the forefront with his IxDA keynote An Insurgance of Quality1. He argues as follows for the value of craft in Interaction Design:

Best to market, particularly in high tech, comes about only through craftsmanship. And craftsmanship is all about quality. The goal of craftsmanship is to get it right, not to get it fast. The ultimate measurement of craft is not speed. It’s quality. How good is it. It’s a pure measurement. And a delightful measurement. Craftspeople do it over and over, until they get it correct. And in their training, in their apprenticeship, they build things over and over, learning how to do things correctly, so they can bring enormous expertise to create successful products, and thus the training of craftsman is a long and drawn out personal process.

In Craft in Interaction and Service Design Peter Merholz uses Instapaper as an example of an app that practices this kind of dedication to quality:

Instapaper shows the power of approaching experience design as a craft, as opposed to some kind of massive organizational process. As Marco hones his craft, he is able to evolve the experience over time. Too often companies launch something and then move on to whatever’s next. Instapaper shows what happens when you go deeper and deeper and deeper into something. Unlike Microsoft or Adobe, who simply tack on features with every new release, Marco, instead, refines the design, honing it, polishing it, like his app is some jewel. I’d love to see companies approach service design the way Marco has. It would require a fundamental shift in how they work, but the results could be quite beautiful.

Unfortunately, we live in an environment where most software isn’t designed in this way. In The Thread Dmitry Fadeyev discusses what usually happens in design projects:

The designer’s creative instinct often tries to express itself outside of this frame [of focusing only on conversions] and just as often gets shot down by project managers and marketers who disregard all aesthetic value apart from that which drives higher conversions. Three things are killed in the process. […] The second is the pleasure that people receive from coming into contact with beautifully crafted goods, especially works that infect the viewer with an emotion that the maker wanted to communicate.

It becomes clear from these articles that one of the essential elements for developing one’s craft is time. Time to do things over and over, to make mistakes, to learn, to fail, to try again, to get frustrated, and to become exceptional through small victories. But as I wrote in Who has time for that?, that’s just not how business works these days. Most companies work more the way DHH advises against in Your life’s work:

Working people to death to ship any one feature or product is a poor strategy, as it reduces the capacity to ship the next feature or product (burn out, build-up of bad rush practices). It’s far more important to have a system for shipping that improves over the long term than one that heroically manages one monster push.

So how can we change this, and convince both our fellow designers as well as clients (internal and external) of the value of craft in design? We’ll have to start with design schools, of course. In Craftsmanship Jon Kolko notices a dangerous trend he sees in most schools:

Based on my experience reviewing portfolios from recent business school graduates, I would argue that one of the most fundamental failings of “design thinking” education is the lack of craftsmanship. Students don’t appear to learn a honed, tacit, and careful “innate” sensibility for making, and simultaneously, they don’t appear to have developed an intimate understanding of the medium they are responsible for shaping. Instead, they are equipped with a toolkit of methods.

But we also have to be convinced ourselves that craft is important — that it has real business value because of the way it connects with people. We have to be convinced that it matters when a designer’s personality and care shine through in their work. We have to believe that people buy things not just because of the way they work, but also because of the way they were created. To drive this point home, I love Frank Chimero’s call for us to care more in his essay The Particle:

We should care more about our craft because we’re granted an opportunity to contribute to the world. 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.

There is a part of me that will always design for the joy of making it, but I now understand that the point of it all is not for me to enjoy myself, but for the ones using whatever I make to have some sort of wonder when doing so. We are in service to those that use what we make, to the ones that listen to what we say.

This is a difficult task. We live in an age of data-driven design. Our challenge is to listen to the data and automate improvements as much as possible, but without losing the human element that we all crave so much. Let’s train ourselves to be design baristas, not just machine button-pushers who produce the same perfect, boring comps on every single project.

I’ve created a Readlist of all the articles mentioned in this post. You can send the articles to your Kindle or your mobile phone, or download an eBook. If there’s interest in this kind of thing I’ll start doing it more often, so please let me know with a quick tweet if you like this idea.

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1. It looks like the video for the keynote isn’t available any more, but here is a pretty good summary by Beau Smith. ↩

Preston de Guise wrote a very interesting post on how Sci-Fi interfaces have changed over the years. He concludes as follows in The changing face of computers on screen:

The shift was profound yet entirely subtle, something that a lot of people wouldn’t have really noticed at all – we shifted from portraying computer hardware to portraying computer software. […]

At some point, fiction and the future aligned, and the way in which computers were presented changed to being all about the interface – the software. This was of course just holding up a mirror to society in general: since computers have been around, their usage model has been undergoing a significantly powerful evolution from being a specific tool to being a general purpose piece of equipment; the logical continuance from a “piece of equipment” is an appliance, and that’s the era we’re starting to straddle into now, thanks in no small part to interfaces such as iOS.

Preston includes some great movie screenshots to make his case, so it’s definitely worth reading the whole article. For more, check out the collection of movie UIs in Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them. And here’s a highlight reel of Mark Coleran’s UI work in various movies:

Coleran Reel 2008.06 HD from Mark Coleran on Vimeo.

For bonus points (and if you don’t mind random pagination and small white text on a grey background), check out the Top 10 Worst Portrayals of Technology in Film.

There’s a benefit of sketching and paper prototyping that I haven’t thought of before. Joshua Porter recently wrote an article called What Jerry Seinfeld can teach us about interaction design, and this is one of his points:

Works in low fidelity. Jerry writes his jokes on a yellow pad with a blue pen, and authored every episode of Seinfeld in long-hand in this way. This is like the sketching stage of UI design.

Why write/sketch instead of type/wireframe? Well, there might be a clue in the way Jason Snell talks about writing on the iPad:

Using the iPad slowed me down and got me to think about what I was writing in a way that using my trusty MacBook Air never would.

He likens it to the difference between writing with a pen vs. writing with a keyboard:

Writing with pen and paper felt appreciably different from typing. My mind would try to race ahead, but my pen could only go so fast. I ended up considering every sentence, every word choice, with greater care simply because I couldn’t dash it out and move ahead.

So maybe that’s why there’s so much value in sketching with pen and paper as well. Lines are imperfect. You can only go so fast. Making a mistake can be costly if it means you have to do it all over again, so you take your time to consider design options.

I’ve slowly started moving away from wireframes, and instead now prefer a workflow that includes several rounds of sketching, followed by prototyping in Axure. I think I get better results that way, and maybe the reason is that sketching slows down the mind just enough to do better work.

Even though it’s used quite extensively, I’ve never liked “the fewer clicks, the better” as a metric for good usability. Chasing that metric can easily result in an interface where every feature is within a click or two’s reach, but the thing is so crowded that users have trouble figuring out where to go. In Satisficing Lukas Mathis draws from psychology to explain why this metric doesn’t make much sense:

A great user interface is not one where each goal can be reached with the smallest number of clicks possible, or where the user has to pick from only a small number of choices at each step, but one where each individual click is as obvious as possible. If your users have a clear goal in mind, each level of the hierarchy should have one option that clearly satisfies their goal—or at least gets them closer to that goal. As long as users feel that they are getting closer to their goal with each step, they don’t mind drilling down into a deep hierarchy.

It’s also worth skimming the Wikipedia article on Satisficing for some further background on the theory.

Sacha Greif talks about the dangers of the new flat design aesthetic in The Flat Sink:

Just like the flat sink, this new flat aesthetic looks great and feels refreshing after the unnecessary flourishes of recent years. But it can also be taken too far.

Remove all affordances, and you make it harder for the user to know where to click.

Put everything on the same plane, and you make it harder to focus on a specific section of the page.

It’s a good reminder that a particular aesthetic should always be used because it fits the purpose of the site/application, not because it’s the latest cool thing to do. Besides — even skeuomorphism is ok when it’s used in good taste1.

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1. I wanted to link to Ben Bleikamp’s original post, but it seems to have disappeared from the Internet, so my pull quote will have to do. ↩

Jon Tan’s Science! rounds off another great season on the always interesting 24 Ways. Jon discusses some of the science behind good design, starting from this premise:

I tend to distinguish between these two broad objectives as designing for impact on the one hand, and designing for immersion on the other. What defines them is interruption. Impact needs an attention-grabbing interruption. Immersion requires us to remove interruption from the interface. Careful design deliberately interrupts but doesn’t accidentally disrupt. If that seems to make sense to you, then you’ll find the following snippets of science as useful as I did.

I look forward to next year’s 24 articles already.

I really enjoyed Sarah Doody’s article in UX Magazine called The Flâneur Approach to User Experience Design. Flâneur is a French word that means “to stroll.” Sarah explains:

The flâneur’s mind is always in a state of observation. He or she connects the dots through each experience and encounter that comes his or her way. The flâneur is in constant awe of his surroundings. In the article “In Search Of Serendipity” for The Economist’s Intelligent Life Magazine, Ian Leslie writes that a flâneur is someone who “wanders the streets with purpose, but without a map.”

In the world of product design and start ups, there’s growing pressure to focus prematurely on the solution, to connect the dots backward instead of forward, to design the system before you’ve addressed the story. But, as user experience designers, we know that our greatest purpose is to develop the most intimate understanding of the people we design for and the problems they’re facing. To do this, we must be flâneurs.

It’s really worth reading the whole article to see more of Sarah’s conclusions and advice.

I know I’m late to the party, but I finally saw Looper last night. It is, of course, as brilliant as everyone says it is. After watching the movie I went back to all my Instapaper’d articles about it, and my favorite so far is an interview with the director called Noir to near-future: ‘Looper’ director Rian Johnson talks sci-fi, Twitter, and the fate of film. This answer, in particular, jumped out at me (my emphasis added):

The minute you say “science fiction,” the question of world creation comes up. Was that something you were thinking about when you were writing?

No, that was the production designer. When I was writing I was really just disciplining myself to focus on getting the narrative as tight as possible. To tighten the screws on everything, and to make sure that it ticked and that it ran from start to finish and that it had a solid spine.

And so I was focused on that and I wasn’t even thinking about the world-building elements at all. Which I think was good because it meant the designers and I just worked together. Every design decision, it wasn’t preconceived, it came out of the needs of the story. And so making the world seem like such a desperate place was a way of accentuating that feeling of “you better hold on to your slice of the pie, or else it’s destitution,” you know?

I love that approach, and I think we need more of it in web design as well. Start with the story — the core functionality of the product. Then look at that functionality, and only add the “production value” (styling) that will help tell that story. Nothing more.

It reminds me of a point Ryan Singer makes in his article UI and Capability. In the excerpt below, think of story as “capability”, and production design as “style”:

Affording a capability and styling it are both important. But it’s essential to know which one you are doing at a given time. Style is a matter of taste. Capability and clarity are not. They are more objective. That person standing at the edge of the chasm cares more about accomplishing their task than the details of the decor.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that, just as we’ll forgive a movie’s shoddy special effects if the story is great, users will forgive a style they don’t love if a product helps them to accomplish a goal effectively.