Published: May 7, 2008

It’s not uncommon for projects to lack the time, money, or resources to conduct ideal user research activities. There are many reasons why this occurs:

• Sometimes we’re brought onto a project late.
• Perhaps we’re new to an organization that doesn’t really get UX.
• Maybe a company is rushing to bring a product to market for some reason—and there are plenty of good and bad reasons this might be so—and there simply isn’t time to “go big”.
• Perhaps your client or organization is following an Agile development methodology.

At such times, it can be tempting to just throw up our hands in dismay and do nothing or lament the fact that everything isn’t perfect. But the simple fact is that, as UX professionals, we can always add value, at any stage in a project—even if a project team can’t act on our advice straight away.]]> By Steve Baty

Published: May 7, 2008

It’s not uncommon for projects to lack the time, money, or resources to conduct ideal user research activities. There are many reasons why this occurs:

• Sometimes we’re brought onto a project late.
• Perhaps we’re new to an organization that doesn’t really get UX.
• Maybe a company is rushing to bring a product to market for some reason—and there are plenty of good and bad reasons this might be so—and there simply isn’t time to “go big”.
• Perhaps your client or organization is following an Agile development methodology.

At such times, it can be tempting to just throw up our hands in dismay and do nothing or lament the fact that everything isn’t perfect. But the simple fact is that, as UX professionals, we can always add value, at any stage in a project—even if a project team can’t act on our advice straight away.

Focus on Winning Small Victories Often

Regardless of the cause for your company’s resource crunch, focus on getting small wins as often as possible throughout your involvement in a project. This is a fairly common piece of advice that crops up time and time again, but it’s very much worth repeating. And it applies just as readily to both situations where time is short and those when there’s just not enough of you to go around.

This advice is equally valid for UX professionals who find themselves in new positions as the sole user experience person. It’s common for new hires to ask: “How do I sell the benefits of UX?” The answer is generally something along the lines of: “Focus on small wins.” In other words, don’t waste your energy putting together a series of case studies on how other people have created value at other organizations. Instead, do something positive and tangible—however small—and it’ll carry a lot more weight.

Go for Impact

Concentrate on getting bang for your buck. Depending on your circumstances, you may not get many opportunities to demonstrate the value of UX, and when time is short, there can be a tendency to just do something—anything. It’s an urge you should try to resist. If you want to have a greater impact, ask your project team—the project manager, the development team, and the business stakeholders—a few pointed questions before you get started:

• What are the critical features of the Web site or application?
• What features would be hardest for the developers to change once they’ve developed them?
• What are the areas of greatest ambiguity in terms of user requirements, audience groups, or competitive offerings?

And then ask a few more questions:

• How can I best document my user research findings, so the project team can used them?
• Do we have time for iterations? And if so, how many?

With this information, you can start planning some activities that focus on the most important elements of the project—the critical features for success; the features that are hardest to change; or the gray areas of the project—and deliver some real value.

It’s all very well to say “do something small,” but what, exactly, can you do?

Early Days

You can demonstrate the value of UX during the early stages of a project—such as scoping, initial designs, general requirements, and so on—when there’s the potential for more leeway in the feature set of an online service and more ambiguity around users’ needs. Some activities that can demonstrate value early in the process—and may even alleviate some of your resource constraints further down the track—include the following:

• user interviews or contextual enquiries—Get out of the office and meet some of your prospective users. This is a really low-cost way of rapidly building up an understanding of your users’ needs and their context of use. You’ll also learn in what ways users differ from each other and may uncover some surprises. The best part is that—aside from the cost of your time—it’s largely a free activity. 

• competitor reviews—Help map out the current state of the domain, allowing your team to set better targets. Look at the existing offerings of your competitors to identify the things they do really well and the things they’re failing to do well. Competitor reviews also provide you with a baseline set of features that represent the barrier to entry and can also help to identify opportunities the obvious gaps represent.

• internal stakeholder interviews—If you don’t have direct access to your audience, go and talk to the business stakeholders and ask them about the decision-making process by which they selected and prioritized features. This can help you uncover assumptions that you can test as a project progresses. It can also provide insights into the mental models in operation for the project.

• About Mud Maps

  A mud map is a drawing scratched into the dirt. You can use mud maps when there are no other materials at hand and draw them with a stick or boot. Mud maps are low fidelity, but contain the main characteristics of the terrain.

  mud map personas—There’s a good chance you won’t have the time or resources to conduct the in-depth user research you’d need to turn out well-defined audience personas. However, low-fidelity personas that capture all of the information you do know about your audience segments can be valuable as time progresses. While you can flesh out these mud maps as you learn more about your audience, they also serve to demonstrate how little your team currently knows first-hand about your target users.

What About Card Sorts?

Conducting a card-sorting exercise early in a project is desirable when the concept space is not well understood. Early on, you’d typically perform an open card sort, which may require more time and resources—for recruitment, implementation, and analysis—than you have.

Although it is possible to design, recruit, conduct, and analyze a card sort in a matter of days, the question remains whether you might spend that time on another task, offering higher impact to the project. However, there are times when nailing the information architecture is the most critical element for the success of a project, and a card sort would be the best use of your time.

What to Deliver?

Although your time may be short, don’t abdicate responsibility for an information architecture to others. Do wireframes, even if you show only some elements in detail. The critical features of your project will drive your choice of what elements to detail. You might spend your time designing the elements that are most important to the success of a project, leave less important elements to the development team, and iterate the design of those less important elements later on, when you have more time. Alternatively, design and test complex elements that it would be costly to redesign and reimplement at later stages in a project.

As Time Goes By

As a project moves out of its early stages and into the implementation cycle, you can start shifting your attention from requirements to refinement. At this stage of a project, useful activities include

• user walkthroughs
• closed card sorts
• usability testing
• definition of metrics

User Walkthroughs

You can do small-scale user walkthroughs of wireframes, a paper prototype, or a stack of screen shots for very little cost. The aim is to generate feedback from real users—or, at least, realistic users—on the design of features at a relatively early stage in a project—that is, before too much development work has taken place.

This activity doesn’t necessarily have to be a big deal. Take a stack of paper printouts to a local cafe and ask people if they’ll walk through a task or two with you, in exchange for a coffee or snack. Don’t take up too much of any one person’s time. It’s better to get several different people to try out a feature or two rather than possibly annoying people by demanding too much of them. They’re trying to relax after all!

Iterate this process if you can.

Closed Card Sorts

A closed card sort is a little easier to conduct than an open card sort— and, in my opinion, a lot easier to analyze. Using decks of cards representing a site’s structure as you’ve designed it, ask people to find their way to particular low-level pages. You can plan your card sort based on the major user tasks, critical features, or areas of known ambiguity.

You can easily conduct a closed cart sort just about anywhere, and it should take only a few minutes per task. For each task you test, note the path each user takes—that is, the card a user selects at each step—and whether a user successfully located the low-level page.

You can carry out a test like this in a single day, including its setup. Since time is short, focus on task failures and look for common mistakes participants make. Report only such issues, but make the full test results available to your project team. You don’t want to be the bearer of only bad news. Instead say: “A lot of stuff worked well, but here are some things we need to look at changing.”

Usability Testing

Using whatever version of a Web site or application you have available—whether wireframe printouts or a low-fidelity prototype—conduct a more formal usability test, during which you ask each participant to complete all tasks. Although this can be time consuming, a usability test with six participants takes just a few days and can provide valuable insights for your project team.

You can take this opportunity to test your whole design solution. Alternatively, you can concentrate on high-impact features, according to your time, people, and budget constraints.

As a finished Web site or application becomes more tangible, continue doing iterative, small-scale usability testing. There will come a time when you can’t incorporate the findings from your testing into the upcoming release, but your recommendations can form the basis for a subsequent version.

Define Metrics

If you’ve joined a project very late, there may be very little you can do to influence the finished product. However, you can still add value to the project by defining a set of analytics that can help the project team make design decisions during the product lifecycle. So, get the team to record page-completion times for a multi-step transaction process, make sure you get good search logs and reports, and give yourself an opportunity to learn something about how customers are interacting with your site.

Don’t be disheartened if your project team can’t incorporate your changes straight away. Start laying the groundwork for the next iteration of the product or service and stay ahead of the curve if you can.

Summary

If you don’t have the resources of a large UX team, with the budgets and timelines to undertake the ideal user-centered design (UCD) or activity-centered design process, you can still make a valuable contribution to a project. Undertake small, tactical, iterative user research activities throughout the course of the project. Focus your efforts on the areas of greatest impact, and produce documentation that your project team can understand and use efficiently.

If you demonstrate value through a series of small, high-impact UX activities, the extra budget, people, and timeline flexibility you need will eventually come your way. Then, you can come closer to implementing your ideal UX process.

I’d like to thank Ruth Ellison, of Stamford Interactive, Daniel Szuc, of Apogee, and Russ Unger, of User Glue, for motivating me to write this column and for their input into the ideas it presents.

Published: May 7, 2008

After working on five books as an editor or co-author, Lou Rosenfeld became disenchanted with the traditional book publishing model. So, in late 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house that develops short, practical, useful books on user experience design. Rosenfeld Media published their first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, in early 2008. I recently had the opportunity to interview Lou—along with Liz Danzico, Senior Development Editor at Rosenfeld Media—about starting a new publishing house and “eating their own dog food.”]]> By Joshua Kaufman

Published: May 7, 2008

After working on five books as an editor or co-author, Lou Rosenfeld became disenchanted with the traditional book publishing model. So, in late 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house that develops short, practical, useful books on user experience design. Rosenfeld Media published their first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, in early 2008. I recently had the opportunity to interview Lou—along with Liz Danzico, Senior Development Editor at Rosenfeld Media—about starting a new publishing house and “eating their own dog food.”

Joshua Kaufman (JK): When you started Rosenfeld Media, you recognized that book publishing has been a relatively unchanging and unhealthy industry over the last few decades. What are the big issues within the industry, and how will you be confronting them as a publisher?

(Lou Rosenfeld (LR): Established book publishers are locked into a really difficult legacy business model, relying heavily on sales staff and middlemen to reach customers through retail channels. For publishers, selling retail means giving away 55–70% of the book’s list price to make a consignment sale. Those are some ugly numbers to live with, so Rosenfeld Media has opted to sell through two primary channels: direct from our site and via Amazon—which is inescapable. In any case, I just don’t expect our books, which are so focused on the user experience community, to be purchased on impulse at your local Barnes & Noble. I do expect it to be attractive to purchase directly from Rosenfeld Media. For the same price as you’ll pay at Amazon, you’ll also receive the digital edition, optimized for on-screen use. ( More on this below.)

Also, established publishers aren’t quite ready to jump into the UX waters with both feet. It’s still a relatively small and misunderstood market, so you can’t blame them. I’m convinced that the UX community will grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years, so I’m willing to take a chance that more risk-averse publishers are avoiding. I’m looking forward to serving that community with short and practical books that will collectively constitute a Swiss Army Knife for the field.

JK: The About page for Rosenfeld Media says one of the core ideas behind the company is “eating our own dog food.” How will you be doing this?

LR: By using UX methods to inform the design of our own products and infuse our services. That means doing little things the right way—like quickly and personally answering every customer query—and it means big things—like investing in the design and testing of both our print and digital books.

JK: One research technique you used to learn more about your audience was show-and-tell sessions. Tell me more about how those were run and what you found.

LR: I facilitated four show-and-tell sessions with groups of five to fifteen participants, generally as lunch-time brown bags. Three groups consisted of UX practitioners; the fourth group was made up of design students. Collectively they represented a healthy variety of design-related disciplines, including interaction designers, visual designers, usability engineers, ethnographers, developers, and information architects.

I asked each participant to show a few user experience books that they loved and a few that they didn’t and to tell us about the features that made the difference. Not surprisingly, UX people are passionate about their books, and some stimulating discussions broke out. (I tried my best to stay out of the way.) I gleaned a lot of good ideas about book features—for example, optimal book size, margin width, relative importance of tables of contents versus indices—as well as usage context—such as between stops of the subway or during a medium-length plane trip. I also learned what just about everyone’s favorite book was, hands down: Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!

JK: What aspects of Don’t Make Me Think! made it such a stand out book?

LR: Aside from the fantastic writing, the humor, and the illustrations that always work perfectly? Well, first and foremost, it’s short. And that’s especially important when a book often serves as a gift for a manager. Its physical dimensions (7"x9") make it stuffable. (We’re taking the dimensions down a little more with our titles to 6"x9".) Don’t Make Me Think!’s sections and chapters are very short and digestible, and his tone is conversational. We’re trying to emulate those qualities, too—although we have to balance them with the individual style and tone that each author brings.

JK: In retrospect, did you find the show-and-tell sessions valuable?

LR: The show-and-tell approach worked quite well, given my limited time and budget and the fact that I had no design of my own for users to evaluate. It wasn’t as useful and rigorous as, say, a field study would have been, but certainly better than a focus group, which would have provided almost no value whatsoever. It provided me with a huge list of features to incorporate into the Rosenfeld Media series design, and it helped me identify a good book as a model for that design. In fact, I hired Allison Cecil, the interior designer of Don’t Make Me Think!, to develop our series’s interiors.

But perhaps the most important benefit was that it forced me to think more critically about something that I—and most of us—take for granted: the design of books. With some exceptions—like an FAQ for each book—the resulting design is still very much within the boundaries of conventional book design, but I’d have always regretted not having explored opportunities to push the envelope a bit.

If you’re interested in reading more about the sessions, I’ve shared most of my notes:

• Dec 19, 2005: Woof (or, what makes for a good design book?)
• What makes for a good design book?
• More on what makes for a good design book

JK: Once Mental Models was complete, you tested a print prototype version of the book. What did you learn from this?

Liz Danzico (LD): Above all, I learned that usability testing can be done on books in print. When Lou first suggested testing, I was hesitant. Can we really test a medium that’s been in use for centuries? Because we weren’t looking to revolutionize book design—only to publish the book—I hesitated.

But as it turns out, you can improve a book’s usability! We learned a lot about how people leaf through a book through observation. Watching users flip through the print prototype—essentially a version of the book we ordered from LuLu—revealed good information about where the chapter information and chapter subsections should be displayed.

Through task analysis, we learned that participants relied on the front matter—particularly the Table of Contents—much more than we’d anticipated. When trying to judge a book, participants did a first flip, thumbing through pages in the middle of the book to get a feel for its content, then went directly to the front to find context and an introduction to the book’s content.

What was surprising to me: Participants did not rely on the back cover. The blurbs or the quotations that typically appear on the back of the book from other authors were not seen as trustworthy. People—even though they said they trusted Rosenfeld Media as a publisher—did not tend to trust the quotations. They saw them as marketing.

JK: Later, you tested a digital version of the book—a PDF version optimized for on-screen reading. Why test a separate digital version, and what did you learn about how readers use on-screen PDFs?

LD: The PDF version was where we had the most questions, and developing a test plan for an on-screen version was much more similar to developing a test plan for a Web site.

Participants, when retrieving information in the digital version, become search dominant. In the print edition, participants had to rely on the Table of Contents and Index to retrieve information. Even though the digital version has those elements—and they’re linked, so participants could interact with them—they chose to use search instead.

One of the primary questions we had was about size: Was the larger point size appropriate, and what were its side effects? The goal of a larger point size was to relinquish the need to scroll or resize the document. But in doing so, we increased the overall page count to over 500 pages! That is okay, since we suspected that participants wouldn’t be printing out an entire book, but the potential shock value of this many pages concerned me.

First, we found that participants didn’t even notice overall page count, and when it was pointed out, they didn’t blink. Size, as defined by page count, is not a meaningful or even appropriate metric by which participants measure digital books.

Second, we found that, while the type size seemed appropriate and participants seemed to be able to comfortably read the content, all participants resized the document anyway. We suspect that this may be partially due to the testing taking place on a foreign computer, but it may be a habit prevalent in digital documents. Either way, the size we ended up with works for the participants we studied.

JK: With the introduction of the Amazon Kindle, there may be a greater expectation for more books to be available as ebooks or specifically in Kindle format. Will Kindle owners be reading Rosenfeld Media titles on their devices anytime soon?

LR: Most likely! But the Kindle is only a few months old, so we’ll be taking a wait-and-see approach with it. PDF is, naturally, a larger digital book market, so that’s where we’ve focused our digital ambitions. And we’d want the time to invest in designing and testing a Kindle-friendly edition.

That said, we’ll be paying close attention to our customers’ requests. If the market wants our books in a Kindle-friendly format—or papyrus for that matter—we’ll be more than happy to oblige.

JK: What else will we see from Rosenfeld Media in the next year?

LR: At least three more books published: Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks should be out in April. Donna Maurer’s card sorting book, and Rich Wiggins’s and my book on site search analytics are slated for spring/summer. Todd Warfel is writing on prototyping, and we’ve just signed Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks to write a book on storytelling for user experience design. We’re hoping for more exciting new titles, as well as finally launching the UX Zeitgeist service and co-producing some Webinar content in the second half of the year.

It’ll be a busy time!

Published: May 7, 2008

There is increasing interest in the simplification of information technology (IT). The IT industry is recognizing the need to simplify software technology as businesses express their increased interest in governing the return on their IT investments. Two goals are surfacing as explicit mandates to which all software vendors are responding:

• lowering the skills required of software users
• increasing their productivity

Although this simplification mandate is most essential to small- and medium-sized businesses, where people with high-end technical skills may not be affordable, an awareness of the damage complexity inflicts on users is spreading to the enterprise market as well. Commoditization pressures make it necessary for the IT industry to reduce skills requirements as well as service and maintenance costs.]]> By Lucinio Santos

Published: May 7, 2008

There is increasing interest in the simplification of information technology (IT). The IT industry is recognizing the need to simplify software technology as businesses express their increased interest in governing the return on their IT investments. Two goals are surfacing as explicit mandates to which all software vendors are responding:

• lowering the skills required of software users
• increasing their productivity

Although this simplification mandate is most essential to small- and medium-sized businesses, where people with high-end technical skills may not be affordable, an awareness of the damage complexity inflicts on users is spreading to the enterprise market as well. Commoditization pressures make it necessary for the IT industry to reduce skills requirements as well as service and maintenance costs.

This article postulates that we cannot address the issue of simplification exclusively by analyzing the physical and computational parameters of technology. Instead, we must understand the goal of simplification in light of the knowledge, tasks, and processing-load demands on its users. We can approach simplicity as an engineering endeavor by controlling the impact on these three usage dimensions.

Software’s Complexity Complex

Software, like any other technology, has an intrinsic tendency to become more and more complex. In response to market forces, software developers struggle to differentiate products from those of their competitors by making them more and more functionally sophisticated. This has become a major problem for software vendors.

What are the dimensions of simplicity in software technology? Can those attributes be engineered? What do we mean by simplifying technology? What is simplicity?

Technology, unlike science, must be understood in light of its usage elements. To understand technology, we need to understand the individuals who use it. We cannot define complexity in technology solely in terms of objective physical parameters. If we accept the assumption that technology intrinsically involves human endeavor, we must accept the ergonomic, social, and mental agents that both build it and consume it. We must accept that its makers construct the complexity in technology.

The impact on technology of the physical and biomechanical properties of our bodies is well understood. The physical characteristics and limitations of our bodies constrain the optimization of users’ sitting postures and hand/arm alignment while physically interacting with hardware devices. For the most part, however, when it comes to information technology, complexity is in the mind.

Since the advent of constructivism in Cognitive Psychology, we have come to recognize the role of the mind in constructing reality. [1] The mind constructs reality for human beings, literally. This is not simply a matter of interpreting what we perceive—its significance or its meaning. The very perceptual systems through which we see, hear, and feel do more than mirror reality. Perception builds reality from external as well as internal elements. A constructivist view does not imply disassociation between the external world and the way we perceive it. Evolutionary psychology has eloquently made the case that our brains have evolved to meet the challenges of our physical and social surroundings. [2] The human mind constructs our world, but it doesn’t do it arbitrarily. Its building tools and methods have evolved to keep us alive and adapted to an environment that is subject to physical laws and social covenants. Nonetheless, our minds use the internal elements that are at their disposal. They build current outputs upon previous ones. Human minds project the past into the present, which they then recycle, abstract, categorize, and put to use at every opportunity. We call this knowledge.

User Knowledge

The most important factor determining simplicity in software technology is users’ knowledge—at multiple levels:

• common knowledge of the world users have inherited or absorbed in childhood
• conceptual knowledge users have learned through schooling
• semantic networks and categorization schemes users have acquired through secondary and higher education
• facts, generalizations, and abstractions users have accumulated in their professional lives and through specialized training

Software pioneers in the early 1980s used world knowledge their contemporaries commonly shared as their metaphors for the first software user interface designs. The technological transformations personal computers brought to us took place under the impetus of a major leap in simplification: People’s interactions with personal computers became predictable by inference from their well-known behaviors with everyday, common objects such as folders, windows, drawers, pens, boxes, buttons, and so on. By relying on the physical gestures people make when interacting with three-dimensional physical objects such as notebook tabs, calendars, and menus, the tasks of locating, browsing, and changing the properties of complex virtual elements became simpler.

Technological complexity is relative. Although we can describe and measure the complexity of certain chaotic, adaptive systems independently of the observer, we can understand the complexity of any technology only in relation to the user—in the case of information technology, in relation to a user’s information-processing ability.

What a user either knows or ignores is the raw material from which we can engineer technological simplicity or complexity. This becomes even more obvious beyond the realm of the common, knowledge-based metaphors graphic user interfaces exploit. Higher knowledge requirements in specialized domains result in more complex software. For example, what a marketing analyst must know about the productivity applications he routinely uses involves less sophistication than the business-oriented knowledge he has acquired on the job—such as knowledge about procedural and scripting languages, architecture, and the programming models and tools with which he crafts business applications. This knowledge, in turn, is less advanced than the knowledge an object-oriented software developer has accumulated after earning a Masters in Computer Science and polished by working on advanced projects in the research and development division of a multinational software company.

If complexity is in the mind, does that mean it is beyond the realm of software engineering?

A relativistic view of complexity does not mean that we cannot address simplicity objectively, and ultimately, engineer it as part of software design and development. It just means we need to take into account a user's knowledge system.

Cognitive psychology draws a distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge, as follows: [5]

• declarative knowledge—knowing that—Stores facts, or declarations that we know to be true knowledge; knowledge of semantic structures that we relate and enrich with facts and instances, and categorize, abstract, and enrich through learning and experience.
• procedural knowledge—knowing how—Takes knowledge beyond the realm of the higher mental processes by involving the organism as a whole.

For example, athletes train by making a particular movement over and over, in the hope of instilling muscle memory that will automatically optimize a movement or position without thought—that is, without bringing attention to the task. We can safely leverage this procedural aspect of knowledge. Business users of productivity applications who are skilled at using word processing or email applications can accomplish goal-oriented tasks without necessarily comprehending what it is they are doing. As technology becomes more sophisticated, skills require a more disciplined combination of declarative understanding —in the form of computing architecture, data structures, algorithms, and so on—with arduous practical training. Computer analysts, software developers and architects, and network administrators and designers have learned the conceptual underpinnings of those technologies, but they must also acquire the specific procedures that let them put the technology to work to solve a particular business, application, or system problem. Computer scientists spend many hours solving problems in the classroom or the lab to achieve a level of skill that is similar to that which a gymnast attains after long hours of practice at the rings or parallel bars or a surgical resident gains at a teaching hospital.

The level of knowledge and skills an IT professional must possess has increased dramatically over the last 20 years. The skills today’s professional computer programmers with five years of experience have accumulated are an aggregation of knowledge about operating systems, computer-science architecture, computer-language syntax, data structures, algorithms, tools, and best practices. It also demands skills managing the life cycle of the code produced, its compilation, change, integration, and performance optimization. Moreover, given the incomparable dynamism of information technology, those skills need continuous updates through life-long learning. New APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), languages, architectures, frameworks, tools, and coding practices appear in rapid succession. New technologies supersede existing ones without completely replacing them, resulting in legacy layers of coexisting technologies that interrelate in intricate patterns very few fully understand. The resulting technology is complex because of the knowledge and skill using it requires.

Technology is simple only to the extent that we can efficiently develop and manage the skills to operate it. Are 21st-century automobiles complex? Not to drivers, who need to know only a limited set of skills to operate most of their functions—at least the critical ones that let them get from one point to another. Today’s automotive technology is reliable enough to become transparent to users. How about for the mechanic? Fixing an air conditioning unit or a carburetor failure often requires just a simple turn of a screw. Behind such a seemingly simple maneuver often lies a body of knowledge that guides the skilled professional to the right screw to turn.

We are astonished at the ease with which athletes, artists, surgeons, or craftsmen can accomplish tasks that would be insurmountably complex to the inexperienced. Skills forge simplicity. We can automate cognitive and sensomotor routines as a result of practice. [6, 7] The trained eye can transform complex stimuli into meaningful, easily recognizable patterns whose meaning and significance an experienced person can not only quickly assign, but also include call-to-action routines. Like chess patterns to a master player, x-rays to a diagnostician, or java code to a professional software developer, knowledge informs its possessor what to do next.

Tasks

Despite its fundamental role, knowledge is not everything. Technology imposes task constraints even on the most skilled user. Complexity is impacted by the number of tasks accomplishing a goal requires, as well as the hierarchical, semantic, and structural relationships among those tasks.

The sheer number of steps a user must perform is the most conspicuous aspect variable in the task dimension. For example, the number of distinct steps a user must follow to migrate an existing document or presentation to the latest version of a productivity application affects the perceived complexity of that application. The ultimate simple solution is to not require any action on the part of a user: Backward compatibility does its job by ensuring that a new piece of software will work with artifacts users created using previous versions. Even a one-button migration increases complexity relative to a totally transparent approach that requires no user action. Could this single button click make a difference? Yes. The consumer needs to be aware that this single action is required. Here is where the need for knowledge surfaces again. The difficulty is not in the need to click that single button—the task itself—but in the fact that users might not know that such a button exists and that they need to click it.

One of the most common and unfortunate assumptions software developers make is that users know what they need to know. They project themselves into the user population. In reality, requiring even trivial pieces of knowledge of users can be very costly to knowledge workers, who may already be overwhelmed by coping with the large amounts of knowledge their core domains demand. The myriad of peripheral, single actions different vendors’ tools require of them in their daily chores can add up. Furthermore, those simple actions are often buried on Web sites, so to reach a simple action, users may need to overcome obstacles that increase their chance of failure or, at least, add complication.

As the number of steps required to accomplish a goal increases, so does the complexity of the task. For example, the number of steps IT administrators must perform to install and configure middleware technology can be very large. First, they need move the files among various media, perhaps involving a number of CD-ROMs, downloads, or archive utilities. During installation, they may face storage, software, or hardware incompatibility problems, which may necessitate their branching into additional installation subtasks. Failures may also result in problem determination tasks that require additional tools or information such as logs or support sources.. Beyond installation, administrators must tune parameters across multiple components. Once setup is complete, administrators must test the system in a staging environment to ensure compatibility with existing technology. Then, finally, they deploy and run the software in a production environment. IT administrators must carry out such tasks in business-critical environments where failure is not an option. The required tasks involve adherence to processes that an IT organization has put in place to preserve its system’s integrity.

Beyond installation and configuration, IT personnel perform routine management and operational tasks that require careful sequences of steps to diagnose, administer, monitor, and update software systems. The tasks involved are many and are constantly changing. The fragility of the technology requires that highly trained personnel perform these tasks. Such tasks require a solid body of knowledge on the part of the consumer.

The interaction of tasks and knowledge becomes even more apparent in software development. Software engineers develop code. The body of knowledge they bring to software development includes the constraints of code practices, programming interfaces, tools, and development processes. Tools and programming interfaces demand a certain number of tasks. Function calls follow a prescribed sequence. Editors, debuggers, and ancillary utilities force software engineers to follow a series of steps to create, import, compile, build, unit test, and debug code.

Besides the total number of steps performing a task requires, the relationships among those steps affect the complexity of the task. Tasks with a fixed step sequence—or without a prescribed sequence—are more demanding than tasks in which the next step depends on the outcome of the previous one. As the number of paths in a decision tree increases, so does the complexity of an interaction.

Processing Load

In addition to knowledge and task demands, there is a third dimension that determines the complexity of technology: the processing load it places on users. Processing load is the information-processing workload a tool imposes on a user’s perceptual and cognitive channels. [8] Good user interface design is optimized for the user’s perceptual system by taking into consideration color and text perception. Cluttered user interfaces overwhelm users and reduce their ability to focus on the important elements in the visual field. Overuse of animation can overpower a visual system that humans evolved to respond to the intrinsically alerting nature of movement in the visual field. On the other hand, sensible use of color, screen real state, layout, and fonts optimizes a user interface for the human perceptual system.

Notwithstanding the unquestionable role that perception plays in software consumption, most of its processing demands fall on the user’s cognitive channel. Knowledge workers spend most of their daily lives scanning for keywords; reading; recognizing patterns; retrieving knowledge and episodes, or past actions, from memory; making inferences about the meaning of options and actions; generalizing, recognizing, and discriminating options; and comparing decision paths. IT professionals engage in cognitive processing that expands into the realms of pattern recognition, diagnosis, and deductions from antecedents. They apply deductive rules and build mental models from which to predict future behavior. In solving problems, they engage in heuristics that place heavy demands on controlled processing.

Those without advanced expertise and knowledge engage in difference-reduction heuristics, which seek to reduce the difference between the current state of a problem and the desired goal. [9] For this purpose, novices establish series of subgoals representing states that are closer to the final solution. They focus on operators—such as program variables, configuration attributes, deployment properties, and function parameters—that they deem are relevant in means-ends analysis. Without advanced knowledge, they must maintain all possible states of the problem at hand in an active state, storing all those operators and keeping them active in working memory.

On the contrary, problem solvers who are expert in a given knowledge domain learn over time to recognize common configurations in the problem domain as single perceptual units. [10] Skilled IT professionals—like skilled chess players or physicists—work forward rather than backward. Instead of intentionally searching the problem space, they recognize common configurations as single perceptual units that trigger applicable knowledge that is relevant to solve their problems.

Conclusion

In summary, the following attributes determine the simplicity of the software technology we consume:

• how much knowledge the technology assumes
• how well the required user interactions suit the strengths and limitations of our perceptual systems
• the cognitive processing demands it places on our limited mental resources
• the length and intricacy of the tasks we perform using the technology

In other words, the complexity of technology is a function of what it demands its users to do, know, and process, as shown in Figure 1. These dimensions are not independent. Knowledge, the gift that keeps on giving, provides context to our perceptions and, in advanced stages, harvests expert skill over time. Expertise, in turn, eases processing demands through the development of recognizable patterns that reduce demands on costly conscious mental processing.

Figure 1—Complexity’s inertia

Since knowledge requirements are fundamental in increasing the complexity of software, should instruction and learning be the primary means of simplification? After all, if increased knowledge demands also increase complexity, diffusing knowledge should be an effective answer. Assisting technology consumers with appropriate instructional materials is an important element in simplification. Software products can and should afford some level of user assistance in the form of courses, tutorials, and other materials. However, much of today’s software technology requires users to build knowledge pyramids on foundations that take years of dedicated and formal training to develop. The educational costs are prohibitive. Advanced knowledge comprises more than problem-specific instruction. It requires aggregations of principles, concepts, relationships, procedures, and practice that only elaborate and expensive curricula can offer. As it turns out, the most important factor in learning is what the learner already knows. Knowledge builds knowledge.

An engineering approach to simplicity counters the inertial forces that drive functional sophistication toward increasing levels of complexity. As user experience engineers, we are equipped to understand and control the effects of software attributes on the three usage dimensions of complexity: knowledge, tasks, and processing load.

References

[1] Anderson, John R., Lynne Reder, and Herbert A. Simon “Situative versus cognitive perspectives: Form versus substance.” Educational Researcher, 26, 1997.

[2] Shaw, Robert, and John Bransford. Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977.

[3] Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. “On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation.” Journal of Personality, 58, 1990.

[4] Ludwig, Jessica. “Stanford Web Site Documents the History of the Macintosh Computer.” Chronicle of Higher Education.

[5] Anderson, John. Rules of the Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1993.

[6] Chase, William, and Herbert A. Simon. “Perception in chess.” Cognitive Psychology, 4, 1973.

[7] Larkin, Jill, John McDermott, Dorothea Simon, and Herbert A. Simon. “Expert and novice performance in solving physics problems.” Science. June 20, 1980.

[8] McCracken, Jack H., and Theodore B. Aldrich. Analysis of Selected LHX Mission Functions for Operator Workload and System Automation Goals. Technical Note ASI 479-024-84 (b). Fort Rucker: Anacapa Sciences Inc., June, 1984.

[9] Newell, Allen, and Herbert A. Simon. Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

[10] de Groot, Adriaan D., and Ferdinand Gobet. Perception and Memory in Chess: Heuristics of the Professional Eye. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1996.

Published: April 22, 2008

This is my first column on the management of UX. In my column, I’ll articulate what I’ve learned from my experience as a senior leader and several years in intensive senior leadership development programs.

Have you ever known a manager you felt shouldn’t manage people? Maybe you’ve worked for one. Most of us have at one point or another. On the other hand, most of us have also had great managers. What sets great managers apart from bad ones? That’s one of the questions I’ll explore in this article.

Almost weekly, I talk with a UX designer or researcher who wants to become a manager of a UX team. For some people, this is a good choice. Both they and their teams thrive. But for many, it’s honestly not the right goal, and the end result is that neither they nor their teams are happy. The book Now, Discover Your Strengths [1] suggests that we tend to be good at the things we love doing, and we love activities at which we excel. I find that we do our best work when we’re in a playground. (I’ll explore this idea more in my next column.) Isn’t life too short to pursue a path we don’t enjoy?]]> By Jim Nieters

Published: April 22, 2008

This is my first column on the management of UX. In my column, I’ll articulate what I’ve learned from my experience as a senior leader and several years in intensive senior leadership development programs.

Have you ever known a manager you felt shouldn’t manage people? Maybe you’ve worked for one. Most of us have at one point or another. On the other hand, most of us have also had great managers. What sets great managers apart from bad ones? That’s one of the questions I’ll explore in this article.

Almost weekly, I talk with a UX designer or researcher who wants to become a manager of a UX team. For some people, this is a good choice. Both they and their teams thrive. But for many, it’s honestly not the right goal, and the end result is that neither they nor their teams are happy. The book Now, Discover Your Strengths [1] suggests that we tend to be good at the things we love doing, and we love activities at which we excel. I find that we do our best work when we’re in a playground. (I’ll explore this idea more in my next column.) Isn’t life too short to pursue a path we don’t enjoy?

I believe that being a manager of people is no better or worse than being in an individual contributor role. For the most part, managers don’t produce the actual artifacts that drive results. In a fundamental way, it’s the researchers and designers who produce the great work in our industry. Don’t get me wrong: A great leader can direct a team to produce the best work of their careers and tune their teams to perform at their peak—and this is important. But it’s not more important than having great designers who can produce market-changing ideas. On a sports team, you need a great team and a great manager to win. The challenge I see is that a large number of researchers and designers want the word manager in their title—either because they feel it shows career progression or for the respect they think such a title would afford them. Taking the sports analogy further, a baseball player doesn’t want to be the team manager—he wants to play great ball. So, why isn’t it this way in the world of UX—and high tech in general?

An important question then is how we as an industry can give equal weight to great individual contributors and great managers alike, because a great company needs both. At Yahoo!, we have some truly world-class designers who make a huge impact on everything they touch. While I would be happy to see them mentor other designers, I feel it would be a waste to make them people managers. It would be like taking Michael Jordan in his heyday and turning him into a non-playing coach.

Perhaps more importantly, because we promote people into management roles who are not great leaders, we diminish the level of expertise in leadership across our industry. Many people with whom I speak believe design managers—for instance—should just be better designers and leadership characteristics aren’t important. Let’s take that issue straight on: Should a company make a UX practitioner a manager simply because she is a really great researcher or designer? When asked in this way, the typical reaction is: “Well, of course not!” And yet, I see senior leaders promoting good researchers and designers to people management roles, just because they were good at their individual contributor roles—even when they haven’t proven they have any capacity to lead effectively. The path from a particular domain such as user research or design into management is not a natural progression. The skills you gain in your role as a researcher or designer are not the skills you’ll use as a manager and leader. Of course, a good leader of a research or design organization needs to understand and be good at research or design. They must be able to provide guidance for their researchers and designers. My premise is that being a good UX practitioner is necessary, but not sufficient to someone’s becoming a good UX leader.

We, as a functional domain, need to focus on what it takes to grow our next generation of great leaders. While we must always produce great designs, we also need to value the quality of leadership itself. We need great leaders who can facilitate their teams’ working together at higher levels than anybody thought possible. Who can take an average team and make it very good. On the other hand, an average leader can take a great team and make it average. I’ve seen both happen. So, isn’t our first step defining what makes a great manager great?

Manager Competencies and Values

Just as we know the competencies and strengths that are required of great researchers and designers, we need to understand and define essential manager competencies if we are going to produce great leaders.

Recently, I worked with a management team—other than Yahoo!—to define this set of six management competencies. Successful managers are:

• accountable—Take responsibility for results and hold themselves, peers, and direct reports accountable for achieving established goals and objectives.
• customer focused—Clearly communicate what a team can do to achieve stakeholder or customer expectations, without over promising, and understand the cost/benefit ramifications of their recommendations to stakeholders and customers.
• results driven—Willingly establish and apply performance measurements, set high performance standards for themselves and direct reports as necessary to achieve customer expectations, and implement significant consequences—positive and negative—for achieving or not meeting performance expectations.
• open and effective communicators—Create an atmosphere in which high-quality information flows smoothly through an organization and to stakeholders, in a timely manner, and encourage the open expression of ideas and opinions. Creating such an atmosphere means you must wait for another person to finish his or her intended message before responding, disseminate more than the minimal amount of information people need, and respond positively when stakeholders or direct reports voice negative issues.
• effective managers of talent—Hire individual contributors who are as smart as or smarter than they are; surround themselves with the greatest talent; strive to bring out the best in others, regardless of their current performance levels; delegate authority and responsibility to others, allowing them to use their abilities and talents effectively; give feedback, coach, and appraise employees at every opportunity possible—every week, if not every day; not just at review time; and respects and tolerates differing opinions.
• team builders—Promote and generate cooperation and teamwork while working to achieve collective outcomes, give credit for success and recognition to the team rather than seeking credit for themselves, and encourage individuals to contribute to the organizational strategy. As Jack Welch says, they “get every mind in the game.”

These competencies embody a few key points. There is an overwhelming amount of research [2] and expert opinion [3] showing that, in addition to the six competencies I’ve listed above, great managers and leaders are:

• respectful—Treat individuals on their teams as professionals and address them with appropriate respect. They are not out to make themselves look good, but to help their employees execute their responsibilities well, and—yes—to build employee confidence.
• natural mentors—Are great coaches and find deep joy in helping their employees grow their careers and execute at a very high level.
• emotionally intelligent—Are direct, yet compassionate and tactful. [4]
• able to see the big picture—Look out not only for their teams, but for the larger organization and company.
• decisive—Make hard choices quickly and recognize they may need to make frequent course-corrections.
• life-long learners—Seek feedback regularly from peers, direct reports, and their managers and have a passion for improving themselves.

There are eight to ten discrete characteristics for each of these management competencies. It is also critical to define the necessary competencies and essential values that are specific to management within your own organization, because every environment is different. In addition to defining management competencies, I also recommend you define a competency model for individual contributors.

If you are a senior leader and believe that defining such competencies is useful, you might find it useful to start with these competencies. However, if you want help defining a competency model for your own organization, contact me, and I’ll put you in touch with experts who can help you. I’d love to get your feedback on the competencies and values I’ve defined here. What other professional competencies do you think managers of UX organizations need to have?

I find that the truly great managers and leaders care very much about their employees. Some of my peers have pointed out to me that this sounds rather bleeding-heart. In response, I’ve told them it’s as selfish as giving away stock options. Companies give their employees stock options, because they believe it makes employees more dedicated to the success of the company. Likewise, when I care about my employees, I work hard to help them succeed and grow. The result? My employees are more loyal and more effective. Devin Jones is one leader who embodies these characteristics, and articulates this message better than I can. Check out his blog: www.devinetics.com.

Organizational Challenges

The problem is that, in most organizations today, if an employee wants to advance in his or her career, management is the only choice. In such organizations, leaders make more money, garner more respect, and often make the strategic decisions that impact career opportunities—or the lack thereof—for individual contributors. So, if a highly successful engineer wants to make more money, she has to become a Manager, then a Director, even if she does not want to. In such companies, rising to the level of a Director as an individual contributor is prohibitively difficult. If this is the case in your company, either try to change that mindset or find another company! I’d love to hear from you: Does your company permit individual contributors to grow in parallel with people managers up to and beyond the Director level—say as a UX Architect or Principal Designer? I’d love to talk about what we can do as an industry to change and provide appropriate growth, compensation, and recognition for highly skilled individual contributors.

If you are a senior leader, my suggestion is this: Do not promote an individual contributor to a manager role unless he or she has the required competencies—particularly the ability to manage talent in a way that brings out their best performance and build an atmosphere of teamwork. This is easier said than done in practice though. Many senior leaders are tempted to—and do—promote great individual contributors to manager roles even though they have no strengths in leadership. They do so even though this erodes organizational effectiveness and undermines corporate culture. Truth be told, I learned this lesson the hard way. Please do me a favor: Don’t repeat this mistake—don’t promote the wrong person under any circumstances!

To illustrate one example, I know one senior leader who is highly competent, yet deliberately promoted “assholes”—as defined in the book The No Asshole Rule [5] —into management roles. Why? His top two individual contributors both threatened to leave the company if they were not promoted to manager. The result? He promoted both of them, after which all of the other top performers on the team quit. These managers did more harm than good, negatively impacting the entire organization.

We should not pursue a path because it is the only path that apparently permits us to grow. The book Now, Discover Your Strengths [1] can help you understand what competencies you possess. I had one employee awhile back—we’ll call him Roy—who is a great designer and wanted to become a manager both to gain respect and for career growth. Because I had already worked with Roy for several months, I’d noticed three key factors that together told me he should continue growing as a designer, not as a manager:

• In my experience, Roy has the ability to solve any design problem you might throw at him, and he is very good at facilitating product teams’ accepting his designs.
• He does a fine job of reviewing the designs of the people he mentors.
• He does not possess any interest in or competencies for performing the tasks that help employees grow along multiple dimensions. He really did not care about managing employees at all. He just wanted to be a manager for the respect.

Roy would be a horrible manager. He simply wanted the role for the perceived credibility it would afford him. It’s important to note that he’s now happy as a principal designer. He does not want to be a manager and is happy with his choice. Even though learning this was a difficult—and, at times, painful—process, it was worth it to me: Roy is happier, my other employees are happier, and the whole organization is more productive and runs more smoothly. Everyone plays the positions at which they’re best.

The problem is that most people who want to become managers do not want to hear that they should consider a different path. It’s often an emotional issue. This was the case with Roy as well. It took literally months to help Roy see, first, that he could become the equivalent of a Director, but as a designer, not as a manager. Good leaders help their employees find the right path and feel good seeing them grow—even if the employee outgrows the leader’s organization. Poor leaders don’t spend the time to help their employees grow and find their direction. Instead, they control or subtly belittle. (In a later column, I’ll talk specifically about how to coach employees to perform at their best.)

If employees want to change direction and are highly motivated to move out of their current roles and into management, we should absolutely help them. But, we need a set of criteria for evaluating whether they will be good leaders and help them as they experiment to see whether they can develop leadership skills. But such skills are not a given, any more than becoming a great researcher or designer is a given.

Looking at Precedents

The book Now, Discover Your Strengths [1] suggests that the legal system has gotten it right: When an attorney enters a firm, he is given cases that reflect his training and skill. As he progresses, he may become a partner. But as a partner, he is not required to manage people, unless he possesses people management skills. Each partner is given a task that fits with his or her inherent skills. Some will become managing partners, because that’s what they’re good at. However, the majority of partners will continue to work in their areas of expertise. They will mentor junior attorneys to increase their firm’s expertise in their areas of specialization, but they will not manage them. Management is a specialized skill. Just like any sport, some people are good at it and others are not. All of the great management and leadership books point out that we should pursue our passions. That is, if we have a passion for an area, we are probably good at it—or at least have the ability to improve rapidly in it. Take any sport or other recreational activity in which you just love engaging. If you truly love it, it’s play, and you practice it as often as you can. When you do, you improve. You become competent, and if you work at it long enough, you become highly skilled.

Is this how you feel about management? It’s no different. If you are drawn to management, because you want to help employees grow, because you want to devise strategy and enjoy what to others would be maddening administrivia, then jump in! If you feel like you can give the people who report to you credit for success rather than seeking accolades for yourself, become a manager. The book Good to Great [6] suggests this is one quality that defines the best leaders.

Why Do We Have Bad Managers?

If we have the ability to define the necessary competencies of successful managers, and there is so much valuable literature about how to be a great manager and leader, why do we continue to have managers in place who are not good coaches or have had no management training? I’d like to hear from you about that. In actuality, bad managers sometimes get lucky, and their teams do well despite them. I’ve seen many such teams. However, in every case, such success is only temporary. Bad managers eventually get found out. I’ve got some great stories. Perhaps I’ll tell some of them in upcoming columns.

Just as some bad managers succeed, the opposite is also true: Sometimes, good managers and leaders get into difficult situations and are not successful. I really appreciated it when Jared Spool pointed out on stage at CHI 2007 that he’d been let go a couple of times. (For more about Jared’s remarks, see Pabini’s review of CHI 2007 on UXmatters.) It happens to the best of us—Jared fitting that category. Such situations present opportunities for a leader to learn and grow. Negative experiences often provide valuable lessons—perhaps even more so than positive ones.

Pursue Your Passion

Are you a manager? Do you want to be? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, ask yourself whether you embrace the competencies and attributes of great leaders. It’s okay if you don’t—really. But if you don’t, find a company that is willing to give you credit for the skills you do have and promote you as an individual contributor.

Be careful with your self-analysis: A majority of people have a hard time accurately evaluating their own skills. I recommend you try 360-degree feedback with a coach who can help you put feedback in perspective. Then, make your decision about whether you want to be a manager. Don’t become a manager because it seems to be the only open avenue to advancement. In the end, your decision is about consistently producing top results and about your career.

But just as I’d ask about any career choice, my question for anyone who wants to become a manager is “Why?” If the answer is “because being a manager and all it entails energizes me,” do it. Pursue your passion. You’ll make a positive contribution to your company, and you can help your employees be more productive and happier. What is it that you love and are good at? Whatever it is, do that!

References

[1] Buckingham, Marcus, and Donald O. Clifton. Now, Discover Your Strengths. New York: Simon & Schuster Trade, 2001.

[2] Buckingham, Marcus, and Curt Coffman. First, Break All The Rules: What The World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. New York: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, 1999.

[3] Welch, Jack, and Suzy Welch. Winning. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

[4] Goleman, Daniel, Richard E. Boyatzis, and Annie McKee. Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.

[5] Sutton, Robert I. The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007.

[6] Collins, Jim. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Published: April 22, 2008, Earth Day

Whether we’re designing the user experience for a digital product or a physical one, as UX professionals, we are uniquely positioned to influence the behavior of other people, for good or ill. Our employers or clients charge us with responsibility for not only defining a design problem from multiple perspectives, but also finding solutions that are better than the ones that came before.

Increased energy consumption, materials waste, and the resulting climate change are the chief difficulties our generation of designers and thinkers must address—or ignore at our own peril. But for most UX professionals, sustainability—unlike usability, technical feasibility, aesthetic appeal, and even business viability—is not yet a baseline factor that we take into account when designing a product or service.

In honor of Earth Day—which occurs this year on April 22, 2008—let’s explore some different ways we can think about, influence, and change the design of digital products in ways that will alter both our own behavior and that of others and foster respect for our planet and its resources.]]> By Jonathan Follett

Published: April 22, 2008, Earth Day

Whether we’re designing the user experience for a digital product or a physical one, as UX professionals, we are uniquely positioned to influence the behavior of other people, for good or ill. Our employers or clients charge us with responsibility for not only defining a design problem from multiple perspectives, but also finding solutions that are better than the ones that came before.

Increased energy consumption, materials waste, and the resulting climate change are the chief difficulties our generation of designers and thinkers must address—or ignore at our own peril. But for most UX professionals, sustainability—unlike usability, technical feasibility, aesthetic appeal, and even business viability—is not yet a baseline factor that we take into account when designing a product or service.

In honor of Earth Day—which occurs this year on April 22, 2008—let’s explore some different ways we can think about, influence, and change the design of digital products in ways that will alter both our own behavior and that of others and foster respect for our planet and its resources.

A Sustainable Design Strategy

Adam Richardson, Director of Product Strategy at Frog Design, discusses sustainability as design principle in his article “Tragedy of the Commons,” in the Frog Design Web magazine Mind. In addition to the traditional factors contributing to product conception and development—business, technological viability, and people’s goals and desires—Richardson proposes that we should also consider a fourth factor: the environment.

“To quell the ecological damage being caused by our current industrial production system, we must contextualize feature requests within this broader understanding. User desires are no longer justification enough for production. We must add an Environmental factor to the historical rubric of Business, Technology, and People. And just as we sideline products and services that fail to adequately meet standards of viability, feasibility, or desirability, so too must we reject initiatives that are not sustainable. Ignoring this “E-factor” should be considered poor business practice and poor design—no matter how much consumers might seem to demand it.”—Adam Richardson

In one sense, we’re already considering sustainability as a factor in our designs—because all products require materials, manufacturing, and energy. We just don’t give the environment much weight in our deliberations. The results often are unsustainable design solutions.

To truly deal with the problem of sustainability, we may need to elevate the environmental factor above other design considerations, because it plays such an important role across the board. Looking at design from this perspective, we can and should view design for sustainability as the design of a complete product lifecycle—from creation to disposal.

Is this an expansion of the mandate of user experience or will this require an entirely new design role? Richardson doesn’t specifically call for the creation of a separate discipline to implement and support sustainable design, but his message is clear: We need to design for sustainability. And, just as the people who use products need an advocate on their design teams, so do we need advocates for the larger ecosystem in which we develop and use products and, ultimately, to which they return.

Strategic Complexities

We’re at a strange crossroads for green design. From a business perspective, sustainability remains an expensive proposition. But from a marketing perspective, sustainability has achieved great momentum as the buzzword of the moment. In terms of desirability, the green trend has reached a critical mass. And for UX professionals who consider people’s goals paramount, this critical mass can drive eco-friendly design innovations. It’s a brave new world, in which there are no established heuristics, no rules of thumb for sustainability across the broad expanse of product creation. And the arguments and proofs justifying sustainability as an important factor in design are only beginning to take shape.

Let’s examine one example that shows the intimidating complexity of sustainable design: the struggles of materials scientists striving to create biodegradable plastics. A plastic that degrades in salt water would be highly advantageous to shipping and cruise lines, who produce and store outrageous amounts of waste while at sea. However, one of the arguments against the production of such biodegradable plastics in general—besides their great expense—is the tremendous amount of power such manufacturing processes require. In fact, the amount of energy we’d use in their production and the carbon dioxide emissions that would result are more damaging to the environment than the benefits of having a plastic that degrades over an extremely short period of time.

Sustainable UX

What can we really do as UX designers? When it comes to sustainability, aren’t professions like architecture and industrial design better positioned to create substantive change? While it may seem so at first glance, the answer is a resounding no: We have a significant role to play.

Just as print designers can choose the types of paper and inks to use and the method of printing, so, too, can UX designers select the materials that go into a digital experience. After all, the digital lives we lead are only half virtual. We require physical devices to provide and access digital experiences—including servers, desktop and notebook computers, mobile devices, and phones.

The Short, But Sweet Life of Computer Hardware

In his award-winning paper for CHI 2007, “Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse,” Eli Blevis describes a framework for evaluating product design and its environmental impact.

“On further reflection, it is apparent that software is material that prompts physical qualities, in the sense that it drives the demand for new hardware, and as such, it causes premature disposal of perfectly adequate physical materials through obsolescence—too often, software may be almost wholly defined as that insidious material of digital artifice that causes the premature obsolescence of physical materials.”—Eli Blevis

Much as we all benefit from technological advances and increasingly inexpensive computing power, rapid obsolescence is not a sustainable solution. Forcing consumers to replace their computers and devices every few years is wasteful. As a Mac user, I’m excited by their operating system advances, but have felt disheartened by the fact that I’d need a new machine to run the latest version.

Looking at software from this perspective—as the driving force of our digital lives—UX professionals really do have direct input into the process of making our products sustainable. However, like the materials scientists making biodegradable plastics, we may find ourselves stymied by the complexities of the problem of sustainability. To avoid premature hardware obsolescence, should we design user experiences only for the computers and devices we have now? But, if not, how can we find ways of using and reusing new hardware rather than disposing of it, adding to the mountains of computer waste? Should we advocate for new computers and devices that are made with chips that use less power and constructed of recycled materials that last longer? Or, is it possible we can be satisfied with what we’ve got?

As designers, we may not have immediate answers to any of these questions, but this is a discussion that is worth having. For further exploration of the sustainability question, have a look at Richard Anderson’s blog post “On ‘Green Design’,” which includes some links to other interesting resources, and the summer 2007 issue of Mind, which Frog Design devoted entirely to this topic.

The Digital Life as Sustainable Solution

Despite the seemingly endless complexities and difficulties that sustainable design may pose, as UX professionals, we can take heart in the many positive contributions we’ve already made to the digital world. We design digital transactions and interactions that provide ways for people to conduct their lives with a smaller carbon footprint.

Virtual Business

Communication and collaboration tools—from VoIP communications and videoconferencing to wikis and screen-sharing applications—reduce travel. And virtual companies—in which employees work from home or wherever else they choose—require no offices or other public spaces at all. Their operation requires no buildings that, while empty at night, waste electricity for light, heating, cooling, and computer equipment, and employees need not commute to get to work.

Reducing Paper Use

Just one family’s converting from paper to electronic statements for banking and credit-card transactions can save a lot of trees. The PayItGreen Alliance released a study in March 2008 that showed “one household ditching paper statements for Web transactions would save 24 square feet of forest a year.”

Digital Goods

And, of course, when consumers purchase digital products online—downloading software, music, and movies instead of buying them on CD or DVD—we eliminate both packaging waste and the need to expend energy in shipping the products.

A Sustainable Mindset

As UX designers—and just people who are concerned with the fate of our planet—the most important actions we can take are to incorporate sustainability into our professional and personal thinking and make it the basis of the actions we take in our daily lives.

If our goal really is to achieve sustainability, in the long term, we must effect broad cultural changes as well. To this end, there are several professional-practice pledges you can endorse, including The Designers Accord and Design Can Change.

As I puzzle through the possibilities and complexities of sustainability and the designer’s role in achieving this goal, I often think of my grandparents and their World War II experience. People living in the United States recycled every scrap of metal for the war effort. The government rationed fuel. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was wasted. Their frugal material existence laid the groundwork for the prosperity of the years that followed the war. I can't help but think their perspective might be helpful now. Waste nothing. Find ways to reuse what we have. The principles remain the same no matter what words we use to describe them.

For now, a rule of thumb that we can all immediately apply is that less is indeed more when it comes to sustainability. Solutions that are eco-friendly inherently strive for less—less waste, less power consumption, and less product and packaging. Even a very simple action like powering down your computer or other devices for a day would be a good start.

Published: April 12, 2008

When you think of persuasion, what comes to mind? Tricks such as the name repetition and personality mirroring touted by Dunder Mifflin sales representatives? Devious emotional pleas like those Bart Simpson wields on his dad? The constantly shifting rhetoric of unctuous politicians? Deceptively “free” software that actually is spyware?

Such funny and frightening examples are not really persuasion at all. They are forms of manipulation, and they give persuasion a bad name. As I discussed in my previous column, elements of persuasion are important to creating winning content. To help safeguard content from becoming manipulation, we need to understand its distinction from persuasion.]]> By Colleen Jones

Published: April 12, 2008

“Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.”—Aristotle, Rhetoric

When you think of persuasion, what comes to mind? Tricks such as the name repetition and personality mirroring touted by Dunder Mifflin sales representatives? Devious emotional pleas like those Bart Simpson wields on his dad? The constantly shifting rhetoric of unctuous politicians? Deceptively “free” software that actually is spyware?

Such funny and frightening examples are not really persuasion at all. They are forms of manipulation, and they give persuasion a bad name. As I discussed in my previous column, elements of persuasion are important to creating winning content. To help safeguard content from becoming manipulation, we need to understand its distinction from persuasion. As a step toward that understanding, this article

• provides basic definitions of persuasion and manipulation
• explores the key differences between them
• describes some consequences for UX content

Persuasion and Manipulation—Loosely Defined

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines persuade as “to move by argument, entreaty, or expostulation to a belief, position, or course of action.” Most academic definitions I have encountered are fairly similar. As this definition states, the means of persuasion are “argument, entreaty, or expostulation,” which implies the persuader is not using other techniques such as force to “move” the user. It hints at a fairly equal relationship between the persuader and the user.

The same dictionary defines manipulate as “to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one's own advantage” or “to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose.” This definition implies the motives of the manipulator are selfish, the techniques may be dishonest, and the manipulator may have some degree of control or power over the user.

A Note About Persuasive Technology

When dealing with content, we usually are dealing with some form of argument, so the typical definition of persuasion largely applies. However, it is important to acknowledge B.J. Fogg’s significant expansion of the definition for the digital age. In Persuasive Technology, Fogg defines persuasion more broadly as “the attempt to change attitudes or behaviors or both.” Notice this definition does not specify the technique for the attempt, so technology rather than argument can be the means. Consequently, according to this broader definition, the concept of persuasion loses some of its egalitarian implications, Therefore, Fogg outlines ethics for persuasive technology to compensate.

Digging into the Differences

These definitions highlight some key differences between persuasion and manipulation. Let’s examine them more closely.

Motivation

Dave Lakhani, author of Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want and the blog How to Persuade, identifies intent as the primary distinction between persuasion and manipulation. He explains in a recent blog post entitled “The Semantics of Persuasion” that manipulation is “inwardly focused on what you can get another person to do for you regardless of the outcome for them.” Persuasion involves concern for your own interests and the user’s interests. In other words, a persuasive situation is win-win, while a manipulative situation is potentially win-lose. For example, if your company has a useful product or service to sell, by persuading a user to buy it, your company makes money and the user benefits from the product or service. Convincing users to buy products and services that a company knows don’t work or don’t live up to their promises enters the realm of manipulation. Other examples of manipulation include convincing users to do something at their own peril—such as taking on a payment they can’t afford or a long service contract they can’t break. If whatever a company convinces users to do benefits only the company, not the users, the company is probably manipulating users.

User Choice

While intent is certainly a key difference between persuasion and manipulation, it’s not the only difference. Another distinction is user choice. Though Lakhani does not explicitly mention choice in his blog post, “The Semantics of Persuasion,” he does note that in a persuasive situation, people have “…raised their hand and asked to be moved from one place (confusion, ambiguity) to another (new homeowner, member of your church).” For example, when users visit a Web site to research a product, they are asking to be moved to a new product. When users opt in to your email newsletter, they also are asking to be moved. In a manipulative situation, users have not necessarily asked and don’t particularly want to be moved. For instance, in the Tagged.com example Joe Lamantia described in his recent ethics article on UXmatters, the company invaded users’ personal information. Tagged.com unscrupulously sent invitations to users’ contacts without consent from the users or their contacts.

User Control

Related to choice, I see user control as a dissimilarity between persuasion and manipulation. In a persuasive situation, a user can accept more or less of the persuasion, as desired. For instance, a user shopping for a product can choose to view the basic information or to delve into more details such as comparisons to other products or customer testimonials. At any time, the user can stop exploring the details. In a more manipulative situation, the user does not have as much control. Disruptive popup windows or layer ads the user doesn’t choose to view border on manipulation. Also, any technique that tries to trap the user into viewing or listening to certain content—such as disabling the Back button or automatically playing a video—can be manipulation.

Additionally, in a persuasive situation, a user has all of the information he or she needs to provide the appropriate response to an attempt to persuade. As shown in Figure 1, the Club Pogo signup form provides all the information a user needs to decide whether to become a member—benefits, price, terms, links to more details, and so on. However, in a more manipulative situation, a Web site might withhold, hide, or misrepresent essential information, so the user is not truly in control. Not informing users that their credit cards will be charged when a free trial expires would be an example of manipulation. Simply put, a persuasive situation lets users make an informed decision. A manipulative one does not.

Figure 1—Club Pogo signup form

Avoid Manipulation: Focus on Relationships

Persuasion and manipulation are very different, but the line between them in a real-world situation can be fuzzy. Whenever that line seems fuzzy, I think about people. Our Web-based interactions are replacing many human interactions, so our winning content needs to speak like our star salesperson, customer service representative, technical support expert, and so on. Our content needs to persuade in the same spirit as our company’s best people influence and build relationships with customers. Focusing on the relationships between your company and the people who are your customers offers some principles for staying on the persuasion side of that line.

Be Sincere

Perhaps my favorite book about persuasion is not an academic treatise or a psychological handbook. It’s How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. A little dated, sure, but its continued popularity suggests it does something right. The underlying theme is sincerity. Carnegie stresses, in every section, the importance of genuine and honest character in successfully influencing people. Here is an example:

“A show of interest, as with every other principle of human relations, must be sincere. It must pay off not only for the person showing the interest, but for the person receiving the attention. It is a two-way street—both parties benefit.”—Dale Carnegie

Sincerity naturally flows from the persuasive motivation to create a win-win situation. We cannot contrive sincerity, but we can let a sincere quality imbue our content in ways such as:

• Maintaining a consistent message and tone. We need to strike the right tone—one that is true to our brand and resonates with our users—then preserve that tone as appropriate to all of our content.
• Being believable and accountable. We need to stick to claims, promises, and guarantees that our company can fulfill.
• Showing enthusiasm. Some of the most influential people, in sales or other contexts, possess a genuine enthusiasm. We can convey enthusiasm in the tone of our content, the quality of our content, and possibly the amount of content on a topic.

Show Respect

Healthy people respect their friends. Healthy companies respect their users and customers in ways such as respecting their privacy. I think another sign of respect is staying relevant. If we truly have our users interests in mind, we give them content that is relevant to their interests where and when they want it rather than forcing unrelated content on them where and when we want to. Moreover, if users have entrusted us with their personal data, we take care in using that data to enhance the relevance of our content.

Tell the Truth

People generally expect a company or organization to put its best foot forward—but without hiding the other foot. Users expect us to emphasize what will appeal to them, but still inform them about things that might not appeal to them—such as terms, disclaimers, or risks. Perhaps the temptation to conceal or misrepresent the truth might seem greater when we do not have to look someone in the eye while doing it. So I think about having to look someone in the eye and explain myself.

Think Long-Term Relationship, Not Short-Term Gain

Earlier in this column, I discussed how a manipulative situation is win-lose. The company wins and the user loses. When considering a long-term relationship, manipulation is actually lose-lose. Engaging in manipulation may bring a company a temporary boost in conversions or a brief increase in profits, but it makes repeat business unlikely and a loyal customer following impossible. Manipulative content is losing content.

Summary

Persuasion, not manipulation, makes for winning content. While UX professionals do not intend to manipulate, they occasionally face pressures from employers or clients to toe the line. To understand when content may be crossing the line from persuasion to manipulation, we need to understand the difference. In summary, three areas of distinction include motivation, user choice, and user control. To help safeguard your content against manipulation, think about your relationship with the people who use your products. Be sincere, show respect, tell the truth, and focus on creating a long-term relationship with them. The payoff is trustworthy content that wins customers over now and for a long time to come.

Published: April 12, 2008

In the first installment of this series on ethics, I examined the way ethical dilemmas can impact the design of user experiences, describing how one scenario played out in the unfortunate experiences of some social networking service users in 2007. With that cautionary tale as reference, I explored how unresolved conflicts between stakeholders’ values or perspectives frequently manifest themselves as ethical challenges for designers. Looking ahead at the future of UX design, I described fundamental shifts that are occurring in our culture and technology around permeability and centralization. In the future, designers will lead the creation of increasingly multilateral, multidimensional, and co-created experiences. Such integrated experiences could introduce substantial, new potential sources of conflict—thanks to their greater interconnectedness and complexity. Therefore, I suggested this clear imperative in response to this potentially conflicted future: Design must find effective ways of managing conflict, encourage the creation of ethical experiences, and avoid ethically unsatisfactory compromises. Finally, I offered three goals designers must work toward. ]]> By Joe Lamantia

Published: April 12, 2008

In the first installment of this series on ethics, I examined the way ethical dilemmas can impact the design of user experiences, describing how one scenario played out in the unfortunate experiences of some social networking service users in 2007. With that cautionary tale as reference, I explored how unresolved conflicts between stakeholders’ values or perspectives frequently manifest themselves as ethical challenges for designers. Looking ahead at the future of UX design, I described fundamental shifts that are occurring in our culture and technology around permeability and centralization. In the future, designers will lead the creation of increasingly multilateral, multidimensional, and co-created experiences. Such integrated experiences could introduce substantial, new potential sources of conflict—thanks to their greater interconnectedness and complexity. Therefore, I suggested this clear imperative in response to this potentially conflicted future: Design must find effective ways of managing conflict, encourage the creation of ethical experiences, and avoid ethically unsatisfactory compromises. Finally, I offered three goals designers must work toward:

• Create ethical experiences. Ensure the user experiences we create are ethical in every aspect.
• Focus on design, not mediation. Remove design from the uncomfortable position of acting as an ad-hoc mediator, resolving conflicts between various perspectives and stakeholders—conflicts that get passed down to design for resolution.
• Make design compromises to solve design problems. Eliminate or at least reduce the practice of making design compromises to resolve external conflicts. Design compromises should resolve design problems, not ethical dilemmas or conflicts between stakeholders.

Building on this foundation, this article considers how design can achieve these three goals, using a practical ethical framework, and suggests ways of dealing with conflicts that arise during the creation of key artifacts that are common to the UX de