interactionary

This site has sat for a year, defaced by an exploit to an old version of Wordpress. Today I noticed that Dreamhost has a 1-click upgrade, so, 1 click later, interactionary is revived. I’m not sure what I’ll be posting here - most of my thoughts of late are about the intersection of business and design, and I’ve started a new blog, bplusd, to talk about ideas like framing, design maturity, and innovation.

Jason Fried posts about 37signals Getting Real process, with step #1 being No Functional Spec. Instead, use some simple scenarios and then start designing the UI.

Interesting thoughts - and a worthwhile departure from traditional IT approaches.

 Getting Real, Step 1: No Functional Spec

The Soft Landing Scenario

Macroblog fills in the outlines of its soft-landing scenario:

macroblog: Exactly What Was I Thinking?: Actually, the story I was telling was all about reversing the big capital inflows and trade deficits, one that starts with the presumption that foreigner’s taste for absorbing ever more dollar-denominated assets has come to an end.  The current account side of ending the capital account surpluses — that is, the accumulation by foreigners of U.S. Treasury securities and the like — is a shrinking trade deficit, as the weaker dollar stimulates export demand and restrains the demand for imports.

In this scenario, spending by American consumers and businesses will have to be satisfied by domestic production.  That will almost certainly result in upward pressure on interest rates, which ought to work in the direction of restraining domestic consumption and increase saving rates (and business investment on plant and equipment, of course), as required.

To restate: (1) the dollar falls, (2) as a result net exports rise, (3) export and importing-competing industries hire workers, (4) unemployment falls, (5) wages start rising and bring rising inflation with them, (6) the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to stop any inflationary spiral, (7) the economy cools off as higher interest rates reduce construction and investment spending and raise unemployment back to its natural rate.

It could happen–if exports react rapidly and substantially to the falling dollar, and if the rising long-term interest rates that diminish employment in construction and investment-goods production are somewhat delayed…

 

from Brad DeLong

Working on personas last year I was struck by how task-focused the goals I included were - it was a really impoverished view of these people as real people. Real people don’t have goals that are exclusively focused on the system I’m designing, and I felt it was arrogant not to acknowledge the richness of their motivations and the reality of the different dimensions of hopes, needs, dreams, and desires in their lives.

So I started to think about what other kind of motivators and goals can help me to truly know a customer, and came to Maslow’s hierarchy as a good starting point to look at the varying goals, instead of simply feeling like task-based activities were the be all and end all. That lead to the model here, which doesn’t mirror Maslow, but crosses different dimensions of goals. It helps in my thinking about how well a product fits those goals, with a visual conceit of receptors accomodating different goals across dimensions.

Getting started in strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. Five core questions offer straight-up strategic perspective that addresses the fundamentals: Why Bother? Who Cares? So What? Is It Better? How Do We Get There?

1. Why Bother?
   For your team, and for your organization, ask: Why are we addressing this issue? What are our goals? What are the basic benefits we hope to achieve?
2. Who Cares?
   Markets are conversations, and you have to know who you’re talking with: Who is affected and involved? Who are the stakeholders, and what are their goals? What are their hopes, dreams, needs, and desires? What does their social network look like? Do we have a rich picture of our customers, our users, our stakeholders? What do they eat for breakfast; how do they get to work? What do they read online and in the bathroom? Do we really know them? On a first name basis? Do we empathize? Can we walk in their shoes? What about our competitors? What (and who) else competes for attention with our product or service offering?
3. So What?
   If we go forward, what are the outcomes and impact? We should consider benefits and costs - not just financials, but across the spectrum from brand impact to the triple bottom line and corporate social responsibility. Are there second order effects to consider, and can we anticipate unintended consequences? Are there potholes and roadblocks in realizing our anticipated benefits? What about potholes for our stakeholders?
4. Is It Better?
   Too often, projects make things worse and generate negative ROI. Compared with how things are now, will they be better? How? Will they be better by an order of magnitude? Will customers say ‘Wow’? How will we measure success? How will we incorporate these metrics into a feedback loop for ongoing improvement? Do our measures balance across dimensions of both business and customer value?
5. How Do We Get There?
   Answering how we get there is the bridge between strategy and tactics. Given a green light, what’s the path to achieving our objectives? Do we have a clear mandate? Budget? Staffing? Buy-in? Timelines?

More on this later…

Here’s a model I use to explain the interactions in a productivity focused system - not much time for explanation, so I’ll just throw it up with some quick comments.

The individual user gains productivity by making connections to

• people - other people, inside or outside the organization.
• tools - applications or appliances
• information - structured or unstructured data.

In turn, one kind of connection can lead to another - a person might refer the individual to some information, which may lead them to a particular tool.

These connections are the catalysts for moving things through a value chain, and the more efficient these connections are, the higher productivity will be. Efficiency isn’t just about time to take a specific action or make a decision - it’s about making the right connections at the right time. Using the model for systems analysis or experience mapping is helpful when looking at the number and kind of connections, as well as their outcomes - is the connection a reference, requiring further process, or does it create an action or decision that moves the process along? How can we optimize connections so that people can make better decisions and take more effective action?

The server that interactionary was hosted on melted down, and hasn’t been revived, so I moved the site over to a new host…now I just need to rebuild it…

A quick tip for persona creation when you don’t have access to actual users: read blogs, personal homepages, listservs and chatrooms centered around the relevant activities for your project (tourism to a particular destination, healthcare, extreme sports). Amateur accounts of individual experiences can provide an unfiltered view of hopes, dreams, needs and desires—the core to creating useful personas that predict feature priorities.

The mental effort required to consistently assign keywords outweighs the benefits for most frontline contributors to content, document, and knowledge management systems. Contrary to KM World’s recent facets summary, faceted classification can actually compound the problem. Facets are oversold in situations where info-civilians have to classify content that they have created themselves. Expecting facets to solve the metacrap problem is naive.

Facets do relieve the tyranny of the taxonomy that demands that “everything has a place and should be in that place”. But that flexibility comes with a stiff price—because the number of terms and their combinations are expanded, faceted classfications multiply the number of decisions required to classify a given document. This complexification adds significant cognitive cost to classifying a particular document, since more decisions are required when selecting from a controlled vocabulary for several facets . Too often, this cognitive investment outweighs the benefits for an individual, and so faceted systems suffer the same user malaise as taxonomy based systems.

There are three related reasons I see for this imbalance between invested mental effort and perceived return:

Between future discounting and the fact that classification is largely for the group, classification is vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons where people prefer looking for classified documents, but don’t invest the effort in classification themselves.

So if facets aren’t the silver bullet, what is? Well, to have active participation in classification requires that the benefits outweigh the necessary investment. Most KM programs work on this by including punishments and incentives, like tying participation to performance reviews. That carrot and stick approach still doesn’t address the systemic imbalance inherent in structured classification systems, whether faceted or hierarchical. What we need is a way to make the system work better itself before resorting to extrinsic motivation.

One partial solution could be social classification. Services like Flickr and del.icio.us allow ad hoc tags added to entries. Popular tags get promoted to the top. Gene Smith has a good post about social classification and folksonomies – classification schemes based on this folk categorization, and Stewart Butterfield points out that ad hoc tags take less effort to create than mapping content into a structured scheme. Ad hoc tagging acts as a low-investment bridge between personal classification and shared classification.

However, social classification by itself still poses findability challenges because of its imprecision. That might be an acceptable tradeoff for participation. In the enterprise, social classification can be complemented with a scaled investment in other classification approaches: automated keyword extraction, tag suggestions built into the tagging tool as the tag is typed, mapping ad hoc tags to structured facets, and top down classification oversight by information professionals. Who knows—people might actually spend some time classifying documents without carrots and sticks.

So over lunch, Gene and I were chatting and I brought up the idea of TiVo in sports bars. It’s probably already happing some places – though it’s enough to scare media companies silly. The benefits of watching the game without commercials for a large audience is interesting – right now most of the rhetoric around revenue losses due to PVRs are about individual households. Will media companies start looking for content licenses from places that show TV in public? Probably, knowing broadcasters track record with PVR technology, if a lawsuit doesn’t come first.
So, here’s a thought to head off the licensing issue: proactively license content. But not just for live games – a sports bar could have a video server with a terabyte or two of clips from great moments in sports and the last couple months worth of highlight reel from ESPN. Then let bar patrons order a highlight from a menu for free with a drink or meal, and charge them for more clips (like a video jukebox).
What does that have to do with user experience? Well – it makes the experience in the bar more participatory. Right now, the participation comes from being with a crowd of fans. Letting individuals express that individuality by having input into specific programming would make the experience more a dialog than a monolog, and more social at the same time (the people around you are also shaping the experience).

There’s an assumption that consultants have some sort of secret sauce. And consulting firms often go to great lengths to uphold that assumption – witness the bevy of trademarked proprietary methodologies (RUP, Macroscope, WAVE) touted by firms big and small. However, when it comes down to it, most of the methodologies are describing the same thing. That hasn’t kept me from coming up with my own twist on the iterative approach – a twist that distills the essence of good design by acknowledging that at its heart, design is largely about problem solving. So here’s my basic recipe for secret sauce:

Simple, short, sweet, and it keeps users top of mind. But the U.S.E.R. approach is about more than simplicity, and about more than user-centered design.

U.S.E.R. is a generalized problem solving approach that applies to any problem solving situation – not just every part of the project lifecycle, from strategy to launch to maintenance, but also to situations from consultative selling to buying a new fridge. It’s the essence of good consulting – diagnosis before prognosis. It also frees our practice from a rigid, prescriptive methodology by encouraging a toolbox approach – choose the right method for the job. For understanding user goals, we might use a participatory design session, or contextual interviews, or a series of community workshops, depending on the project. However, the real secret sauce is even simpler – the insight and direction gained from different tools depends on the experience and insight of the practitioner. People can see better results by adopting UX methods – but how much better is going to be inseparable from the people using the tools. But you knew that secret already.

One of the user experience community’s greatest weaknesses is confusing means and ends. The problem is that ux practioners feel that their practice has intrinsic value – but it doesn’t. Whether that practice is information architecture, interaction design, info design, usability, or something broader, there’s no value in the practice itself. Instead, value lies in the results of the practice, rather than in a discipline or set of methods.

Theodore Levitt famously said that people don’t want a quarter inch drill bit, they want a quarter inch hole.
Even more, the person doesn’t want a hole – they want to:

1. join pieces of wood together
2. to make a playfort for their child
3. who will spend idyllic adventurous afternoons in the backyard
4. and so bring parental fulfillment and
5. a few hours of peace and quiet.

Right now, most ux practitioners seem stuck on drill bits – the tools of the trade – and on the fact that we are drillers – people who can use those tools. But really, so what? Who really cares about personas, or contextual inquiry, or wireframes or the difference between IA and ID? Practitioners care – but the people who hire practitioners don’t. What those business decision makers care about is value – the end results, the benefits of a particular practice. The steps along the way are just one possible means to an end.

Until we stop confusing ends and means, promoting professions at the cost of promoting results, we’ll have a hard uphill road to follow – and when we arrive, we’ll find that we’ve reached the land of irrelevance. Next time you have the chance to evangelize user experience, ask yourself – what is this person’s fulfillment? How can UX give them a few hours of peace and quiet? Start with the ends first, and then the means become relevant…

So, I’ve been thinking for some time that I need someplace besides iaslash to blog. ia/ is great, but is largely a link aggregator. I need someplace to spout nonsense without an obligation to maintain a decent signal:noise ratio ;-) And so here it is – a brand spanking new WordPress install at interactionary. Now I just need to make it look ok…and have something useful to say. It will be a work in progress…from rough to something better. Stay tuned.