All You Really Need to Know About Users You Learned in High School

All You Really Need To Know About Users

You Learned
in High School
Dan Willis, Sapient Government Services The Midwest UX Conference April 10, 2011

D design g n
e s i patterns
Lean UX
Thinking
AGILE
Embrace What You Already Know
Gamification
social media
Emotional Design
Today’s Sermon is about Demystiﬁcation.

You come to conferences like this to learn new things, but what gets lost is just how much you already
know. We knew plenty before we ever heard about taxonomies or wireframes or task ﬂows. And it’s
essential that we embrace what we already knew.

In fact, most of what we need to know to be quality user experience professionals, we learned back in high
school. This morning, I’m going to highlight some of those lessons.


Hall passes are bullshit.
(Control is an illusion.)
Do you remember the moment when it ﬁrst occurred to you that a piece of paper with a teacher’s signature on it
had no real connection to your ability and opportunity to pee? So if go to the bathroom with that magical talisman
I’m okay, but without it, I’m doing something illicit?

The whole system is based on the illusion of control. That scruffy hall pass offered no real control.


Andrew Hinton’s 60-second history of the Internet

The idea of controlling user experiences is an illusion as well.

To see why, let’s take a look at Andrew Hinton’s 60-second history of the Internet. This was part of Linkosophy,
Andrew’s presentation at the the 2008 IA Summit in Miami.

It used to be that a computer was a solitary, highly structured object. It had a dependable, predictable, and
conventional structure. It was organized into a tree hierarchy. You could move through it like a set of rooms.



In time, a bunch of these systems were connected through the Internet. Connections were very conventional and
controlled.



In the early 90s, the World Wide Web came along and tech-savvy people who had system access could connect things
however they desired.



Then the Internet expanded its user base and all hell broke loose. Anything could link anywhere.


The volume of information and the connections between that information continues to grow exponentially. We may feed content
to part of one or even a few of these dots, but there’s no way to control how people get to that dot or which dot they go to next.


What you already know

The user controls the content
and the context.

In high school we learned that control is an illusion and so it was no surprise when we realized that each user
selects the content they’re going to look at and each creates their own context.


The cool kids liked you for your car.
(You can’t trust new friends.)

Day after day, you walked to school or you rode the big stinky school bus in until one day, maybe the day after
you passed your drivers license exam, Mom let you drive the family car into school. Suddenly, people who had
ignored you for years, maybe even across more than one school, started to treat you differently. Pretty
cheerleaders were saying hi to you or maybe football stars asked how you were feeling.

You wanted to go with it, right? Hey, maybe they’ve ﬁnally realized just how special I am, it just took a little longer
than you thought it would ... but no. You knew what the real deal was all along: You knew you couldn’t really trust
all these new friends.


“No one trusts anyone.”
- Seth Godin

“Online friends are not
‘move your couch’ friends.”
- Kivi Leroux Miller

And this lesson from high school has been valuable as you started to do user experience work, where the concept
of trust is complex and the word “friend” is so overused. We have followers on Twitter and connections on
LinkedIn. Do you have friends on Facebook? Really?

Are they like the friends who wanted you to drive them to the mall after school?

Or are they the kind of friends that would give you bone marrow if you needed it? Could you leave your kid with
those kinds of friends? Would they loan you enough change to get a soda from the soda machine?



User trust is thin and fleeting.

So what high school prepared us for is that when we talk about trust, we’re talking about it in its weakest form.

Just to be clear about this metaphor, we, as user experience professionals, are the ones looking for a ride to the
mall and its our users who have learned to invest as little trust as possible in our relationship.

You want to know the strongest trust we can expect on a regular basis? If we’re extremely skillful, we will earn a
user’s trust that we’re not going to waste their time, at least not THIS time. And the best we can expect to do is to
renew that trust again and again throughout a particular experience.

And that’s as good as it’s going to get.


You’re wearing what?

So what else did we learn in high school that we can use today? If you had any doubts that high school was a
competition, you had to give them up once you saw the uniforms that each clique suited up in every day.


In fact, it’s impossible to talk about high school and cliques without some reference to this.
It’s 1985’s The Breakfast Club where the taxonomy of teenage existence was deﬁned with ﬁve distinct categories:
the jock, the geek, the most popular girl, the social outcast and the rebel. Notice how distinct each of their
uniforms is?


You’re wearing what?
(People act like sheep.)
All right, so now back to the ponytail girls. You know the one in the front, with her head cocked just so, is the
leader. You can just imagine her setting up a Skype conference to tell everybody that red would be her signature
color this week so back off! Oh, and shiny plastic hoop earrings for everybody.

So what we learned in high school is that in things like clothes and attitudes, people act like sheep.


Traditional marketing depends on people acting like sheep. This image is part of what will likely be considered the
most successful social media campaigns of all time.

This is Isaiah Mustafa the spokesperson in a wildly popular Old Spice campaign this past Super Bowl. When the
company wanted to extend their success, they launched a campaign where Mustafa responded to fan comments
with 180 individual YouTube videos.

Just about every marketer on the planet thought this was the greatest campaign ever. Everybody’s holding it up as
the perfect case study for using social media to sell product. Everybody except one guy.


“All P&G needed to do was sprinkle a
little bit more pixie dust by humanizing
their business and ensuring long-term
relationships with their customers,
but they gave up.”
--- Gary Vaynerchuk

Who here knows who Gary Vaynerchuk is? He wrote a book called Crush It and he has a new one out, The Thank
You Economy, and he looks at the Old Spice campaign and it just kills him. Not that he didn’t think the 180 videos
and near real-time response wasn’t cool, he did. What drove him nuts was the way Old Spice treated its users.


To understand Vaynerchuk’s issues, you have to know a bit about him. He runs a family wine business, but the
reason he speaks at SXSW and writes books is that he has a very intense approach to 21st century social tools.

This is typical for the Old Spice Twitter feed. About once a week, the company tweets these funny, manly
comments, like “Does anyone have a link to the proper form for doing planet thrusts or tractor curls?”


Now take a look at Vaynerchuk’s feed. Almost every tweet is a response, and if you could see the time stamps,
you’d see that he does them in these huge dumps, all at once, multiple times a day.


Following Followers Listed
Old
Spice 713 124,302 4,592
Gary
Vaynerchuk 13,364 866,513 13,145

Vaynerchuk follows a lot of people, Old Spice is more distant, but that’s as much about style as anything.

What’s more telling is that Vaynerchuk’s in three times as many lists as Old Spice.

And what’s the most telling about Vaynerchuk’s approach is this column. Old Spice is sold by Proctor and Gamble
and is represented by Weiden+Kennedy, one of the largest independently-owned advertising agencies in the
world. As far as I can tell, Gary’s got a few folks to run his wine business and support him in all his other
endeavors.

Despite the millions spent on the Old Spice campaign and all the love the campaign is getting from the industry
about its increase in followers, Vaynerchuk is kicking their asses at more than a 6:1 ratio.


Old Spice video response campaign

DAY 1 6 million views on YouTube

DAY 3 20+ million views

DAY 7 40+ million views

Twitter followers +2700%

Oldspice.com trafﬁc +300%

Here’s the huge numbers on Old Spice’s response campaign.


Vaynerchuk’s criticism comes down to this: Old Spice treats its followers like sheep. The campaign collected lots
and lots of sheep, got great press, and then sat admiring the ﬂock. They had huge success in the short term, but
they’ve done nothing to build future success. The campaign will soon be a distant memory, just like the fashion
choices these girls made will be in a few years. “Can you believe those earrings?” they’ll giggle; “But everybody was
wearing them!” they’ll snicker.


When I was in high school, the companies behind these fashions made a fortune, but none of them survived the
80s in any real way.



Treat users as humans,
not just one of a flock.

And that’s what we learned in high school: People may act like sheep, but they’re NOT sheep. The only way to
build sustainable success is to treat them like individual human beings.


People go to parties to get drunk
and have sex with strangers.
(Superﬁcial is as good as it gets.)

This wasn’t one of the harder lessons to grasp, but it did lead to one of the more cynical realizations:

Not everything is meaningful in this world.


Frequently, users just want a quick feelgood and it’s the corporations, our employers, who talk about love and
lasting relationships.

Late last year, I used a wizard like this to try to get a price quote on a Jeep with a limited, speciﬁc set of features.


8/17/10 8/17/10

Dear Dan Willis, Dear Dan,
Thank you so much for your Internet request
Thank you for submitting your request for on the 2010 Jeep Wrangler. Your business is
more information on a 2010 Jeep Wrangler. very important to me and as the General
We will be in contact with you shortly with Sales Manager I like to get personally
the information. involved with all of our customers.

If you have any further queries please feel
Our goal is to give you all the information you
free to contact us again at (888) 585-2605
need to make your purchase and easy one! If
or by email at tnardelli@fairoaksmotors.com.
8/17/10 you would like to talk to me personally please
give me a call at 703 961 9900. We are a very
Thank you,
Dear Dan, easy place to do business!
Fair Oaks Chrysler Jeep Dodge
Thank you for your request on the 2010 Jeep Wrangler. We have great availability of the
(888) 585-2605
2010 models, with new inventory being added daily. Now is aNardelli
Tony great time to take a look at
http://www.fairoaksmotors.com
all of your options. General Sales Manager
703-961-9900
In order to make sure I have all the information necessary to find the right Wrangler I
may need some additional information.

I have your email address, but I do not have your phone number.

If you prefer to speak to the Internet Manager at Fair Oaks Chrysler Jeep at (703)
961-9900, we can take a few moments on the phone and get the exact options you are
looking for.

The next day, I get a request for more personal information from the “Jeep Internet Team”

Plus I get an automatic response from a local dealer saying they got my request and will follow-up soon.

And for the third email of the day, Tony Nardelli, the General Sales Manager at the local dealer writes to tell me
that he likes to “get personally involved with all of our customers.” He also tells me that his goal is to give me all
of the information I need to make a purchase.

He fails, however, to actually give me ANY of the information I requested.


11/1/10 11/15/10

Dear Dan, Dear Dan,

At Fair Oaks Chrysler Jeep Dodge we take At Fair Oaks commitment to give our take
pride in our Chrysler Jeep Dodge we
customers satisfaction and service. I want to thank you for giving me the
pride in our commitment to give our
opportunity to assist you. customers satisfaction and service. I want to
thank you for giving me the opportunity to
Remember that the reason we are the premier dealership in sales, service, and customer
assist you.
satisfaction is because we truly care and want your business. Please call if you have any
questions. You can reach me at 703-473-8968 for a test drive. reason we are the premier
Remember that the
dealership in sales, service, and customer
Thank you, satisfaction is because we truly care and
want your business. Please call if you have any
8/18/10William Granby questions. You can reach me at 703-473-8968
Sales & Leasing Consultant for a test drive.
Hello Dan, Oaks Chrysler Jeep Dodge
Fair
4170 Auto Park Circle Thank you,
Chantilly, VA 20151
Thank you for contacting our Dealership concerning the NEW 2010 JEEP WRANGLER-X 2
DOOR. 703-961-9900 inventory of instock NEWWilliam Granby CERTIFIED
We have a large 2010 JEEPS, and
PREOWNED JEEPS. Sales & Leasing Consultant
Special financing is available with approved credit,4170 you could receive $1,000 over
and Auto Park Circle
Kelley Blue Book fair value on any trade-in. Please let know when you can visit us for a
test drive, and a great estimate on your trade-in.

William Granby 703-473-8968 direct

The next day, I get an email from William Granby who runs a different local dealer. He doesn’t give me any of the
information I ask for either, like whether or not they have the car in stock, but he does tell me about how their
trade-ins work.

Oh, and I got an email ad ... for a Dodge.

A week later, Melanie Funkhouser from the ﬁrst local dealer drops me a line to ask if my Internet request was
handled properly and if I got all the information I asked for. She seemed to have a lot of questions for me. (She
must really care about me.)

Oh, and I got an email ad ... for a Ram truck

Three months later, William Granby was back thanking me for opportunity to assist me, because that’s how much
he values customer satisfaction.

Oh, and I got an email ad ... for a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Can you guess what happened next?


12/6/10
12/17/10
Dear DAN WILLIS:
Dear DAN WILLIS:
Thank you for your online inquiry of a JEEP WRANGLER a few months ago.
Last week, an invitation was emailed to you requesting your participation in a survey
It is important that we understand how a vehicle buyer arrives at their purchase
regarding your online vehicle shopping experience.
decision. To help us do so, we invite you to complete our brief survey regarding your
shopping experience. Your feedback is a valuable tool to help improve the experiences of
If you have already responded to this invitation, please accept our sincere thanks. If you
our customers as well as guide future product development efforts. Your participation in
have not yet responded, we are requesting your assistance. Your feedback is a valuable
the survey process is completely voluntary.
tool to help improve the experiences of our customers as well as guide future product
development efforts. Your participation in the survey process is completely voluntary.
Please complete the survey at http://shopping.cdjcustomersat.com
If you are prompted for a password, please enter the following: 7uqatee6tr
Please complete the survey at http://shopping.cdjcustomersat.com
If you are prompted for a password, please enter the following: 7uqatee6tr
Thanks again,
Thanks again,
Doug Betts
Senior Vice President, Quality
Doug Betts
Chrysler Group LLC
Senior Vice President, Quality
Chrysler Group LLC

So early this year, Doug Betts, the Sr. Vice President for Chrysler asked me to take a survey about my shopping
experience.
And he asked again a week later.

Oh, and I got an email ad ... for 2011 Compass.


Companies don’t just sound desperate for deeper relationships during the sales process. For Breast Cancer
Awareness Month, ULTA invited people to write letters about their breast cancer experiences and tape them on the
stores’ windows.

ULTA sells makeup.

Just for the record, I don’t want to talk about my experiences with prostate cancer when I buy mens cologne. I also
don’t have any interest in discussing erectile dysfunction with the NFL and I won’t be chatting about irritable bowel
syndrome with the folks who sell me toilet paper.



Users want superficial relationships;
it’s organizations that want more.

We learned in high school that sometimes superﬁcial is good and now we know that it’s dangerous to get too
needy with users.

DLean UX
design g n
esi patterns

Thinking
Gamification
AGILE
Don’t Believe The Hype

social media
Emotional Design
The lessons we learn everywhere in our lives inform our user experience work. As we embrace all that we already
know, we also have to watch out for the noise that can get in our way.

Don’t Believe the Hype

The Myth of Runaway Technology
Oh help us! The world is experiencing unprecedented technological change! What will we do? But what does that mean? “The world” doesn’t
experience technology, individual humans do and their capacity isn’t influenced by the historical volume of change. From the perspective of each
human, change is defined by what they personally experienced before. This is true today and it was true centuries ago.

This is the home of a relatively well-off peasant in 15th century Europe where people would be born, live their lives and die without traveling any
great distance away from their home. This house had a single room with a fire at its middle. There is no chimney; smoke escaped through a hole in
the roof. The floor is dirt and straw is used as bedding. Chairs were expensive so people sat on benches or stools.

At night in the summer and all day in the winter, the peasants shared their huts with their animals with parts of the room screened off for the
livestock.

This is the only world generations of Europeans knew. When we think of being overwhelmed by technology, we need to consider what it must have
felt like living here and visiting, perhaps just once in their lives, this:

Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes and this cathedral in Albi, France is loaded with it.

Stability depended on interaction of ribbed vaults, pointed arches and flying buttresses.

Ribbed vaults: Intersections of barrel vaults, allowed for windows higher up and supported new heights

Pointed arches: Channels weight onto bearing columns at a steep angle and allowed for dramatically vertical design

Flying buttresses: Arches on the exterior of the cathedral that carry the weight of the roof. Before flying buttresses, walls had to be five feet thick,
but with could be 16 inches or less.

There was also technology behind what a first-time visitor would hear:
The choir used a comprehensive notational system and sang polyphonic compositions, two or more independent melodic voices.


The Myth of the Cutting Edge

Nothing we deal with is new because while devices and interfaces may change, the human brain is pretty much the
same. It hasn’t added new functionality like jumping. 99 percent of all species that ever existed are extinct. There
were only 2,000 or so of our direct ancestors and the thing that set us apart and allowed there to be 7 billion of
us, was the human brain.

So with that context, how signiﬁcant are these recent developments?


iPad photo by Jens Schott Knudsen, cartoon by R. Crumb
The brain interprets the data it gets from the body’s senses and essentially projects that movie for the conscious
mind.

From the brain’s perspective, there’s not much difference between the way it interprets a video conference ...

... and the way it interprets a live conversation


iPad photo by Jens Schott Knudsen, cartoon by R. Crumb
The motor skills involved with reading a digital device on the subway might be a bit different ...

... but otherwise there’s nothing new about the experience.


Scale is almost meaningless to the brain so there’s nothing new about this ...

... from something like this.


The Myth of Web 2.0

The term “Web 2.0” was born out of hype by people with a vested interest in deﬁning the original Web as
computer to computer and Web 2.0 as person to person. Sir Tim Berners-Lee has always been a big critic of this
deﬁnition.
I think sometimes Sir Tim comes off a little like that guy yelling at the neighborhood kids to stay off his grass.


The Myth of Web 2.0

But when the creator of the Web says that it has always been about connecting humans and that the Web is only
now starting to fulﬁll his original vision, I’m going to take him at face value. So not only is Web 2.0 a myth, it
seems like Web 1.0 hasn’t even shipped yet.

Don’t Believe the Hype Worldwide Internet users
Worldwide desktop PC sales
Worldwide mobile PC sales
2 Billion Worldwide iPhone sales

1 Billion

1995
2000
2005
2010

The Myth of the Mobile Web

The myth of the mobile Web deﬁnes it as portable with constant connectivity and with smaller and more limited
interfaces.

One problem with that is that it hasn’t just been mobile devices that have taken advantage of improved and
ubiquitous connectivity.

Another problem with the myth is the reality that mobility has been a facet of the overall Web for about a decade.
You can see in this chart that the number of Internet users has grown relentlessly since the late 90s regardless of
the types of devices used. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 revolutionized the smartphone industry, but it’s
had no unique effect on Internet usage.


Photo by Vivie Hsu

Apple disrupted the mobile device industry the ﬁrst time with the iPhone. And they disrupted it again with the
iPad. Tablets like the iPad blur the line between smartphones and desktop displays and that lets even more air out
of the myth of the Mobile Web.


So this device evolved into this one.


Which then made room for this one.


Which led directly to this approach.


Which helped expand the deﬁnition of mobile devices.


And designing for them became more and more like designing for this. This kind of universality is well-timed
because it should help us successfully design for this kind of thing ...


“Augmented (hyper) Reality: Domestic Robocop”
by Keiichi Matsuda
(http://vimeo.com/8569187)

This is a ﬁlm produced by Keiichi Matsuda. He wanted to look at the social and architectural consequences of new
media and augmented reality.

DLean UX
design g n
esi patterns

Thinking
Gamification
Be a AGILE
Designer

social media
Emotional Design
We clutter our minds with all sorts of distractions. We forget the lessons we learned long before we were dealing
with taxonomies and wireframes and social media and iterative development. We need to clear all that out of the
way.

It’s often a mistake to oversimplify the past, but it can be a good thing when it comes to design. I’m going to
make the argument that design isn’t tethered to speciﬁc job titles or professional backgrounds. And I’m going to
suggest that to do it well, you need to ﬁrst untie the knots you may have collected over the years.

Be a Designer

Intuitive
Ease of use
Beautiful design
Delightful design
Visual design
Information design
Interaction design

Stop using meaningless targets like “intuitive” and empty concepts like “ease of use.” Forget about the adjectives
that people use to wedge design into overly deﬁned boxes. Set aside “beautiful,” don’t get distracted by “visual
design” and “interaction design.”

Be a Designer

Design is what it does
and what it does is solve problems.

Instead, focus on a more holistic use of design. Use it to solve problems.

Be a Designer

Problem
70 million digital natives think about their
finances differently than previous
generations.
User expectations
‣ Constant access to data and money
‣ Seamless functionality
‣ Fluidity between digital platforms

PNC hired IDEO to design banking for a speciﬁc set of users: Digital natives. Based on their research, the team
deﬁned the perspectives unique to people who had never known a non-digital world.

Be a Designer

www.pncvirtualwallet.com

They took advantage of three traditional, inter-related accounts, but rather than forcing their users to learn how
banking worked, they built a unique system on top of the traditional structure. The system focused on a
comprehensive, highly visual view of ﬁnancials that included money coming in, going out and storing up.

Although the App version is supplemental, I’ll use it here because it’s such a nice example of the use of physical
and digital interactions that accomplish base tasks. Money is moved from one area to another with sliders and
screen punches and data displays respond directly to user interaction without requiring that user to interpret or
track down implications

Be a Designer

Problem
In 2005, 90 percent of children in
Malawi are malnourished.

Unicef couldn’t get quality data to address the malnutrition issue in Malawi.

Be a Designer

This is a big part of the problem: Data was collected from the children irregularly and health workers had to store
the data on sheets of paper which were stored until they could eventually be delivered to the government where it
would often disappear or take a very long time to be processing.

Be a Designer

Malnutrition indicators
‣ Age
‣ Height
‣ Weight
‣ Upper arm circumference

500 million cellphone users in Africa,
including all the Malawi community
health workers

The metrics for measuring malnutrition are simple. This, along with the deep penetration of cellphones in Malawi
led the team to an interesting solution.

Be a Designer

RapidSMS

Health workers used SMS and their own cellphones to send timely data to the government. Governments and
NGOs used the robust data for forecasting and logistics.

But here’s the really cool part. As a basic part of the system, health care workers received thank you text
messages each time they submitted a child’s data. The care for malnutrition is predictable and based directly on
the severity of the case so instead of thank you texts, the system was adjusted so it could send individualized care
instructions back to the health care workers. And children got much better care and the error rate is now below 3
percent.

Be a Designer

Problem
Consumer digital
photography disrupts
park revenue model.

Before the consumer digital camera market blew up, Disney Park photographers offered an alternative to lugging
around ﬁlm cameras and all the friction around photo development. Once every family could take hundreds of
photos without incurring development costs, the park photographers and the addition of Disney’s overhead
charges had an impact on the revenue stream.

Be a Designer

Disney introduced a system that improved on the old paper-based archive solution and took full advantage of
Web ecommerce tools. Instead of ﬁghting the use of consumer digital cameras, the system treated customer
photos as equal to the ones taken by park employees and focused on ﬁnding places to use both sets of photos.

Lots of places to use both sets of photos.

Be a Designer

Design is what it does
and what it does is solve problems.
1. Who are your most important users?
2. What are those users’ most important goals?
3. Which of those goals can you actually satisfy?

Unencumbered by boundaries and distracting deﬁnitions, a foundation can be structured based on the answer to
three questions.

Who are your most important users?
Digital natives, health care workers, digital-phototaking Disney park visitors

What are their most important goals?
To manage ﬁnances, to report data, to collect physical memories

What problems are you going to solve? Let me make some suggestions about how you go about it:

Be a Designer

Design without control.

Control is an illusion.

The user picks their content and the user creates their own context (and they always have.)

Design experiences like one designs a rollercoaster ride. The user is a co-designer and you provide some of the
elements that make that experience possible. You can design turns and car speeds and seats cushions; you can’t
design companions, or the amount of food in their stomach or their attitudes about the ride.

Be a Designer

Design without defensiveness.

The pervasive handoff system is a reflection of organizational and personal insecurity.
Each cog in the machine stays in their space.

The Requirements cog collects and formats information and tosses it over the wall to the Design cog who designs
a solution and painstakingly documents every detail.

They toss it over the wall to the Development cog who ignores specifications that don’t fit the model they think
will best solve the problem. They complete development and passes it on just in time for the next packet to come
hurtling over the wall.

Be a Designer

Design without defensiveness.

Be the ﬁrst one to throw your box away. Earn respect, rather than expect it. Let you ego shrink as your conﬁdence
expands.

Was anybody here a fan of the original Pee Wee’s Playhouse? The character of Pee Wee has no defenses. He’s open
to the expertise of others, he’s curious and enjoys discovering things he didn’t already know.

Be a Designer

Design without boundaries.

The days of designing a single interface for a single channel seem almost quaint now.

This is a diagram by Dave Gray’s company XPLANE that illustrates a platform for patients to collect, store, and
share health information. It shows the kind of complexity in users and data and devices that I think is headed our
way as all channels eventually rise and then converge.

We are going to have to design experiences that involve platforms we won’t control, devices we may not be aware
of and datasets we won’t have the luxury of structuring.

No variations on traditional handoff-based development processes are going to be sufficient to address these
kinds of cross-channel challenges.

So what will it take to be successful in the future?

Be a Designer

First, we have to take a new approach on a ancient challenge.

Everybody thinks they’re a designer, right? With the increasing complexity of challenges, we may ﬁnd more
success embracing that than ﬁghting it.

Everybody actually is a designer, but very few people are any damn good at it.

Be a Designer

So the key is in protecting expertise and I’m going to suggest that we introduce a ﬂexible, sliding scale to make
that happen.

When there’s a design conversation, all thoughtful comments should be encouraged.

But when some people speak, they do so with the voice of the expert.

When other people say things, their comments should be considered as input from smart people in the room. This
doesn’t only work for designers, depending on the topic, a person can toggle from expert to smart guy in the
room, back and forth all meeting long. This model can also be extended to the larger process and offer a powerful
alternative to traditional handoff systems.

Be a Designer

Subject matter experts

Requirements Development
Design

Users

This sliding scale can be used in a requirements phase that includes all parties, but protects the expertise of the
requirements folks.

During the Design phase, designers are protected

During development, developers are protected. Instead of handoffs, the phases overlap and allow for deep
involvement for all players during all phases. Designers, for example work with Requirements people to translate
requirements as needed. (If you think about it, this is what prototypes do.)

All phases can take advantage of users (for research, testing,etc.)

The entire process should also have access to subject matter experts as needed.

This is wildly over-simpliﬁed, but I’m suggesting it as a way to think about how to accept all team members into
the design process without letting it become just another way to argue about what shade of blue to use.

Design’s walking dead

Designing without control, without defensiveness and without boundaries will cause some casualties. I’m arguing
that plenty of things are already dead, but they haven’t realized it yet.

I think interior decorating is dead.
You know the drill: Come up with three treatments and the stakeholder is supposed to pick one, but will always
say that they want a little bit from each of the three. This has always been a lousy way of doing business because
it re-enforces the assumption that visual design is a superﬁcial (if skillful) skin for a solution. Moving forward,
interior decorating has to die because solutions will be complex, multi-channel and iterative. The question won’t
be “which one do you like”; it’ll be “what’s the initial version that we’ll start revising right away/”

“Creatives” as an organizing principle is dead.
This isn’t about word choice; it’s about expectations. We solve problems by designing experiences. “Creatives”
harkens back to an era and industry where work focused on what it looked like and treated design as an end
rather than a means to an end. That won’t cut it when trying to tackle multi-channel solutions.

Ambiguity is dead
I’d like to say that bullshit is dead, but bullshit is more resilient than a cockroach and those guys are going to
survive nuclear destruction and global warming. Problem solving is making an earnest, heads-down climb up the
value chain. Deﬁning the primary problem that a project needs to address is essential and unavoidable with truly
complex challenges.

Be a Designer

Design is
what it does
and what it does
is solve problems.

I told you when we started that today’s sermon would be about demystiﬁcation.

The days of designing a single interface on a single platform will be played out soon.

Ideally, as our challenge gets more and more complex, our approach should get simpler and simpler.

We need to embrace the things we already know, things we learned before we knew anything about the user
experience.

We need to identify hype in order to stop it from distracting us.

We need to make design inclusive at the same time we bolster the value of design expertise.

If you already have design in your job description, I encourage you to drop any adjectives you may have collected
along the way. There is no hard plastic barrier that separates information architecture from visual design from
interaction design.

If you don’t have design in your job description, well, welcome aboard. Let’s get to work.

Regardless of your employer,
regardless of your title,
regardless of your expertise,

Be a designer.

Thank you for your time this morning.

All You Really Need to Know About Users You Learned in High School

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