I have a problem

I have a problem. It's not been unknown, but I'm forcing myself to put it into clear and simple words.

I am addicted to busywork and distraction.

It is easier for me to think about what little thing to do next or look for one more interesting article posted on twitter than it is for me to do meaningful work.

Easier to read the news than read that design theory book.

Easier to read about religious debate than to mediate on truths.

Easier to check statuses than to write that heartfelt email.

Easier to read inspiring stories about someone else's social work instead of being part of a solution.

Easier to think about what should be done instead of doing it.

I have plenty I say I want to do. But the truth is I don't do much of it. I don't like this about myself and I want to change.

This not to say there are no meaningful priorities that I work on. Relationships with my wife, daughters, and son get a lot of attention. And over the past couple of months I've renewed and even improved my guitar practice. But the truth remains that I am not getting other important things done because of my bad habits.

Why do they exist? Does it matter? It probably does matter in that I can use the knowledge in the future to help my family or colleagues. But I'm not sure it matters right this instant. What I think I need right now is acknowledgement and reflection that will deepen my revulsion for this idolatry and laziness and lead me to resolve to change.

And yes, I am aware that resolve is typically not enough. I know of tools and techniques to help me change and will use them. In time. Soon.

But right now I am staring my problem in the face and I want it to know that it sickens me. Habits that were never consciously started can be the hardest to end. But it is time to end this.

Good Design: Artful but not Art

Art seeks to create beauty-truth that others find valuable for in its provocation and impact. Design seeks to create value-truth that others find beautiful in its effective utility.

The act of design aims to find the best fit between identified problems and possible solutions within understood contexts. Inside that frame, design should be artful in its completeness and detail. But true art -- purely creative and beholden to no one -- may be almost never appropriate, possible, or even desirable. Even what seems like a truly new, artistic, solution by necessity must and will be broken down into visual and interactive concepts that match to the human capabilities present in the context of the solution, many of which remain relatively static over time. Thus the truly new is prevented and novelty is relegated at most to surface level representations, which, if used, often lead to confused offerings that are trying to appear new but succeed only in covering yesterday’s ordinary object in a shiny facade. The new then obfuscates meaning and use, defeating the entire purpose of creating a solution in the first place.

This does not mean there is no place for decoration, fun, artistic touches, and even whimsy, but they do not belong at the focal point of a solution, where clarity, purpose, and satisfaction must reign supreme. Rather than by artistic expression, these more important characteristics are produced by design craft: the thoughtful, deliberate application of knowledgeable, principled, and wise solving actions. This craft imbues the solution with a value derived from usefulness and usableness primarily, though they can be enhanced by desirability. Creating desire, though, is not the same as creating artistic attraction. The audience and purposes served are entirely different. Success of a designed object occurs coincident with a satisfaction enabled but not produced by it. Success of art takes many forms, but satisfaction of the beholder is rarely among them.

Good design demands a level of passion and care-taking on par with the creation of art. Exercising design at that level can result in artful, desirable solutions. Good design is not art, however, and is more valuable for that.

Hey, the new kid is cute!

Multiple developers and PMs have asked me about how they could "get started" in UX design. My response is always to ask them what their goals of exploring this question are. Do they want to become better at their job by understanding design? Do they want to augment their job by being able to do some design? Or are they looking at exploring a career change?

My questions are mostly so they start thinking about why they're really asking, since usually this is simply infatuation and the long term hasn't been considered. UX Design is currently in some ways the cute new kid getting lots of attention in class at school and everyone is wondering how to get a little closer. So I don't really care what their answer is, because the curiosity is a good thing and I want everyone to know more about design. But just as importantly, I want people to know why they pursue a certain thing. Life seems to work best when your pursuits have passion behind them.

The next step is to give them my favorite getting-acquainted-with-the-heart-of-design reading material, two books and an article that focus on how design is for enabling and delighting people as they try to make life happen. These three cover or touch on most of the things I still think about daily as I pursue my second decade of design. Maybe they'll help you, too.

The Inmates are Running The Asylum

The Design of Everyday Things 

So you want to be an interaction designer

Now, sometimes I get the response that they've been copying Microsoft or Apple design, or using designs they've found on other websites. I reply that this is good. Emulation is a good way to learn design technique. To really understand how to design for other people, though, requires learning how to create design solutions by identifying, analyzing, and solving problems before you apply design techniques. If that’s the desired direction, one should start by reading the above and see what is inspiring. If the passion to make things better through creation comes to life, then a whole world of design knowledge and skill to absorb will open up in front of you.

Not enough making in the past few years, and I'm trying to correct that, so here's a little impromptu bit. Didn't take much more than a realization I was in the right place at the right time.

vision over visibility

There was a time when I could rightly be accused of being a rabid U2 fan. Those days are gone, but some of their older music is still among my favorites. By the time No Line on The Horizon came out in 2009,  though, I was quite disillusioned with the band and only gave the album a cursory listen or two.

Somehow however, 3 years later, I am completely taken in by a deep cut from the record, Moment of Surrender. The solitary mood, the plaintive lyrics, the languid music. It's been a soundtrack by itself for me for the past couple of months. And I couldn't even tell you how I heard it again after several years of avoiding U2.

Have a listen.

In a few weeks or so I expect this to wear off, but for now it simply fits, no matter how I used to feel or feel now about the band. That's music. Sometimes you find it. Sometimes it finds you.

Get busy living

Probably my favorite movie, The Shawshank Redemption, has the only movie line I can almost quote accurately. Red and Andy are sitting in the prison yard after a horrendous series of weeks that Andy’s spent in solitary confinement. As the two of them discuss the desperation of prison life, Andy seems to have had some sort of breakdown while Red has apparently given up all hope of living outside the walls. Their ideas of the future diverging, Andy tells Red, “I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dyin’.”

I’d like to say I’ve lived every day like that line since seeing the movie, but the most I can say is that I’ve wanted to and often it has helped me make sense of life and its choices. That in almost every circumstance I can step back and see what leads me toward life and what leads toward death, even if it’s “just” a deadening of mind or spirit.

It was with these sorts of thoughts that in 2009 I prepared to face being laid off months before those who decided that knew they would. And those thoughts propelled me into making myself into a noob again in order to learn how to be a serious designer in other mediums beyond speech recognition. And to go further in 2011 by applying to and attending CCA’s Leading by Design Fellowship program (recommended!) long distance and on top of having teenage kids and a demanding job.

Now, in 2012, I feel drawn to life in even bigger ways. I’ve moved with my family to Seattle, WA to pursue a new job and new opportunities. I’ve decided I need to find a way to gain the equivalent of a master’s degree in design management without going back to school. And I need to write.

Opposite from, and opposing, all that, there are things I need to let go of. Unhealthy ways of thinking. Unproductive uses of time. I need even less getting busy dyin’. I need even more getting busy living. So here goes.

Live from Punxsutawney - The groundhog emerges

WOW! I'm really sorry I let so much time go by. My apologies to the folks that were actually reading once in a while!

To catch you up, I was on a GREAT project in the fall, working for Liz Bacon at Devise to design a browser-based revenue management system for hospitals. It was so cool to learn from her and work with talents like Neil Doxtader and Stacy Westbrook, as well as our cool customer.

Unfortunately, last year's dry spell was more than the project could make up for, so I had to make the difficult decision to go back into FTE-land (sleep for now, dol). However, I landed a great gig with Microsoft (very unexpected for me) with a solid group of designers. I'm in an org called  Speech@Microsoft (formerly Tellme), part of the Office team, and am helping partners understand the value of great UX/UI Design, how to do it, and how to measure it. It's a brand new role for MSFT and for me. So far, things are going well. And I really like working for Bill's little company. It's an exciting time to be there. A time when design matters more and more everyday to success. Ask me what it's like. I'd love to share. There's much more!

Personal life has been crazy, but I won't get into that here. I'm just hoping to come at you with more design thoughts and teaching moments, starting now. Don't let me stay away so long next time. (Maybe there won't be a next time!)

More isn’t better, but (help me with) Something Else is

Sometimes it occurs to me that we designers have tools in our toolbox that we use trustingly but haven’t explained why to others. Such a tool is usually rightfully worthy of our use and trust, but should be accompanied by sound theories and reasons. To that end, I thought I’d spend a little time on the origins of the VUI design component “help me with something else” and its variants.

Ideas around it first began back in 2000 or so on a project at Intervoice for a British Columbian transit company. We were designing a menu of options and were dissatisfied with the in vogue wording used to point to choices that were on a secondary menu. I.e.:

“You can say ‘plan a trip’, ‘get a schedule’, ‘paratransit’, or ‘more options’.”

That sort of phrasing seemed to be clunky and out of character for the design feel we wanted to deliver and we just felt it was inadequate for callers to latch onto.

In an informal discussion, one of my team members said “we need something else”, referring to the current choices being used in the design world, such as “more choices”, “other”, “none of those”, etc. When he said that, we looked at each other and said, “why not try ‘something else’ in the prompt?” So we began thinking about this:

“You can say ‘plan a trip’, ‘get a schedule’, ‘paratransit’, or ‘something else’.”

We liked where that was going, but quickly thought of a semantic problem in that the instruction seemed not to refer so much to additional choices but rather to telling the caller that they could say just about anything else. That, of course, was not the case and would cause interaction issues. Plus, the phrase seemed overly ambiguous, maybe even more so than “more options”. So after a bit of round-and-round about it, we determined that we wanted to try the phrase “help me with something else” (HMWSE).

“You can say ‘plan a trip, ‘get a schedule’, ‘paratransit’, or ‘help me with something else’.”

Though it might seem pedestrian now, this was a pretty novel idea at that time. The “more options” construction came directly from DTMF IVR menu structures, meaning it was deeply ingrained as the default presentation. Furthermore, in the early days of voice interaction design, there was an emphasis on pithy phrasing and HMWSE seemed like a mouthful. However, it had several strong characteristics that appealed to us. It was clear, used more common wording, and we actually heard similar phrasing in everyday conversations around us.

Fate, though, had other plans then. For a couple of reasons, we weren’t able to use the idea in that current design. But I held on to it for several years and finally had the opportunity to try it out again in 2004 at Voice Partners. We were working a significant redesign for a mobile carrier’s customer service line. As you can imagine, there were many functions for callers to choose from in the application. As soon as I saw the struggle with how to represent the concept of other things the callers could choose, I suggested that we try out HMWSE. I walked through its origins and we had some good discussion about why we though it would work. So we tried it in usability testing in opposition to the traditional “more options” and it was then that the strongest reason for the superiority of HMWSE emerged.

As we watched and listened to participants move through and struggle with the menus, two patterns of behavior became clear around their decisions to access more choices. Many of those who used “more options” seemed to be exhibiting surfing behavior triggered by that phrase. That is, they wanted to hear and think about all possible choices before committing to one because “more options” seemed to mean “more options that you might want to hear before you make a decision”. This frequently led, though, to failures in the menus as callers encountered cognitive load problems having to hold all the choices and their possible meanings in mind. Callers who heard and used HMWSE, however, did not encounter nearly the same number of problems. They were not surfing but rather, and this is the key point, they were listening to and then rejecting previously heard choices when they said HMWSE.

“Help me with something else” allowed them to hear, absorb, then discard choices they did not consider valid and specify to the system that new choices should be presented.

This was a major eye-opener for me, and my co-designers. While we had suspected that HMWSE was better, we had discovered a solid cognitive reason for it. Callers clearly preferred not to surf, but to have a way to eliminate choices rather than play a guessing game. Thus, HMWSE became a new best practice for use when menus exceeded a certain length.

Failing menu: “You can say ‘my bill’, ‘my plan’, ‘technical support’, or ‘more options’.”

Winning menu: “You can say ‘my bill’, ‘my plan’, or ‘technical support’. You can also say ‘help me with something else’.”

Now, to be clear, all the other principles of good menu design still apply. Choices must be clear, unique, and aurally distinct, among others. HMWSE is not a ticket to allow “anything goes” menu construction. But, when used with a solid set of menu items that need to span more than one presentation instance, it is the best choice for letting callers know that if they do not hear what they want in the initial list, they have a clear way of indicating that they want to discard the first list and hear another.

“More Options” for HMWSE

In the several years since that discovery, the use of HMWSE has grown in two ways.

First, I’ve encountered situations where a variation of HMWSE works better than the original wording. Semantically the concept is the same, though. An example is:

“You can say ‘car’, ‘bus’, or ‘train’. You can also say ‘I need different transportation.’”

Additionally, we began using a variant of the idea with open-ended prompts. Until the last couple of years, the standard was to coerce the caller into saying anything at a “What are you calling about today?” type prompt in the hopes we could pin a meaning on it. However, many callers are just not sure what to do or what will happen and so are reluctant to give an actionable utterance. At Voice Partners, then at SpeechCycle, rather then “erroring” into a menu, we began very successfully using “what are my choices” and “give me some choices” as ways callers could specify that they preferred a menu over the open prompt. Such phrases allow caller choice and control versus locking them into a specific interaction method.

The other area of growth is a more widespread use beyond up-front menus where HMWSE can still mean “I don’t want any of those so give me different options”. Some examples are follow-up menus after tasks are completed, lists of items to select from, and lists of global actions. Again, as the previous area indicates, these additional contexts sometimes require variations on the wording.

A Note: SE <> HMWSE

One thing I want to be clear about is that the use of HMWSE is better than just offering callers the phrase “something else”. In the past couple of years, I’ve heard systems presenting simply “something else” in menus, and that’s a mistake for reasons mentioned above. It fails on a semantic level to be a clear instruction to obtain other menu choices and instead at best sounds like an invitation to say anything. I strongly discourage its use.

So, don’t be afraid to offer your callers a good range of choices in more than one menu. In HMWSE you have a tested tool to use for that. Yes, there is research that I consider valid that shows that menus with more than four or five items can work well. However, there are contexts in which doing so might not be the best approach. Because of that, HMWSE helps round out the set of tools to help create great voice interactions when offering choices to callers.

This can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship

An interesting thing about going to tech-oriented conferences that mix business managers and implementers is the tension between messages. There are often competing and conflicting voices promoting technology and customer (user) experience. The technology vendors publicize the latest new thing, the upgrade that brings it all together, and the surefire way to get more customers spending more money. The experience folks shout that whatever is to be done must be done based purely on customer need and desire; that user experience (UX) is all that matters.


Now, it's no secret which side I've been on in most of these public discourses. Though I've been on the tech side in some cases, mostly by far I've preached from the gospel of good experience. And in the situation that it's clear that moving toward a certain technology would harm customer experience, my position would be unwavering.

However, the primary argument and distinction is no longer valid and true to me. I now see these two as elements on a continuum. Even as elements to alternate during and maybe even between projects. They are interdependent, and maybe even codependent.

The way I see it, many of our advances in customer experience have relied on or been part of new technology or new use of existing technology. From the other side, technology relies on good customer experience for successful adoption. Look at Amazon during the emergence of the commercial web. And then there's everybody's favorite example, Apple's iPhone. Both involved a push forward in customer experience AND the use of technology. Neither would be as successful without the blend of both. And neither would be as interesting if one aspect won out over the other.

Where I'm going with this is to request a truce in the tech versus UX battle. Both are good and both are needed. Tech creators need to acknowledge that they need good UX design to win the hearts and hands of consumers. UX-ers need to acknowledge that good technology is needed to advance parts of our cause and that new (good) tech gives us a chance to shine.

Before the truce can be fully agreed to though, we have a little catching up to do in the basics. Too much technology, useful as it can be, has been put out there without the needed UX crafting to accompany it. Because of that, both the users (consumers) and the technology are getting short shrift. Users feel ignored and abused. The tech vendors are getting slammed for very correctable reasons. We need to stop the train for a bit and get the interaction with the technology to the point where users can easily and satisfyingly do what they want to. Get the basics to the right level, then continue with a balanced approach.

(Aside: Not all tech implementations are redeemable, I know. But I am setting those cases aside for now and assuming that much of it can be helped.)

To illustrate, think again about what happened in the iPhone. For all its glory, it introduced very little new technology. Its primary features existed in other released or demoed products. The "new" about the iPhone is the better way that Apple blended the technology and UX.

Alternatively, there is also evidence that drawing back the level of technology used while improving the user experience is also effective. Wired magazine shows the examples of the Flip video camera and Skype, among others, in a recent article. Now, I disagree with the assessment they make that these simpler and easier to use products are just "good enough" since the implication is that they are inferior to the more feature-rich products. By typical standards such as profitability and rate of adoption, the new breeds are superior to their overdone predecessors.

There are many other areas where one approach or the other is needed, and I'll point to voice interaction as my prime example. A great many applications out there use speech recognition technology that is only a few years old. But most of the applications were designed using old or no design principles by people with negligible design training, if any. Furthermore, the technology is often under or incorrectly used. And the consumer reaction has been predictable. Interactive Voice Response is one of the most maligned technologies in our current age. On top of that, it often fails to meet the business goals for which it was brought in. This was avoidable and can be made right. It requires simply taking a break from the bumbling techno-lust and focusing on getting the UX in line with the level of technology chosen. Or even reducing the use of technology while improving performance through a UX focus.

So, it's time for a reset. For catching up and scaling down. We could make a huge positive difference in both business success and customer satisfaction by improving the user experience to the level of being on par with the state of deployed technology. And then we could grow both together. Satisfyingly, profitably, successfully.

Care to join me?

Patterns and Experience

Enjoyed giving my two presentations last week at SpeechTEK in New York. Both seem well received, especially the patterns talk. It's gotten 150+ views on Slideshare since, which is very gratifying!

See them both for yourself:

IVR Design Patterns

View more presentations from Phillip Hunter.

People Get Ready

View more presentations from Phillip Hunter.

Sorry for the formatting issues in the second one. They appeared after the upload. Not sure what's going on.

Later this week, I'll offer thoughts on SpeechTEK, and some talking points I covered in the presentations.

Good to see lots of folks!

A few thoughts on Consistency

While going through the Apple human interface guidelines, the section on consistency of the interface spurred some thoughts. This has been an discussion-provoking topic within interaction and interface design for some time and most especially for voice interaction.

Many times I've altered a recently seen screen heading, a repeated phrase of instruction, a past sequence of events, or a previously-used command for context and have been accused of "being inconsistent". Most of the time, I've been able to effectively point out how the context allows or even demands the change. Other times I've simply had to say "let's see what data we get." Other, other times I've had to accede to uneducated demands. And I'm sure I will have those arguments again, but, for the record and perhaps the education of a few, here are reasons to be consistent and times where consistency is bad.

Consistency is important for:

- Meeting user expectations and allowing predictability. A thing that looks like a button should be press-able or click-able. If a task seems like it could be done more than once, users should be able to, easily. Be consistent with the good and useful things users know and expect that they learned elsewhere.

- Promoting understanding and predictability of meaning. Users want to get what is happening and will happen. In speech, this is why using good synonyms is so important. We wouldn't (I hope!) dream of telling the user, "Say the same thing you did last time." We'll allow "checking", "checking account", and "debit account" all to mean the same thing. Because they do. Consistency here is the continuity of meaning, not the continued use of identical words.

- Infrequently given instructions and commands/actions. If a user needs to remember something, it should be predictable between tasks and especially sessions.


Consistency is bad when:

- It becomes distractingly repetitive. Hearing or seeing a menu for a third time in a task sequence shouldn't be like the first instance. Repeated instructions and events are easily ignored or glossed over. Items offered in context are more easily absorbed.

- It makes the user wonder if they are in a loop or a previous action was ignored. Let the interaction adapt and implicitly let the user know that the UI is "aware" of the evolving engagement that is occurring.

- It mimics behaviors we would consider highly unusual in people. I.e., "You can choose either your savings account or your checking account. So, just say 'savings account' or 'checking account'." A person being that consistent with the word 'account' would be looked at sideways. Implicature works for machines, too. Better: "You can choose either your savings or your checking account. So, just say 'savings' or 'checking'." Even better: "You can choose either your savings or checking account. So, which one?"

The moral here is, like other design principles, consistency is a fantastic and powerful concept to employ in the right places and ways. Used thoughtlessly, it can cause confusion and discomfort. If you're unsure, study it, ask questions, and most of all, bounce your design ideas off others and listen to feedback. Consistency is not a hammer to use to pound on a design you simply disagree with. In fact, doing so usually is a sign of ignorance of proper design practices. And no one likes to seem ignorant.

Design well.

Update: Take back the beep!

David Pogue reports some success in his crusade to have the 4 major mobile providers change the way their voice-mail interacts with callers.

If you haven't yet, send an email to Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, or Sprint and let them know what you think.

With better tools you can build more crap faster

Last week I attended a lecture given by a software development company offering a new development tool for mobile developers. They are tapping into the moves by Google and Palm toward the mobile web app framework versus the native app focus of Apple. While that is an interesting business battle to watch, the central point of the lecture focused on something more disturbing and worth our time actually engaging in as designers.

They started by pointing out stats that most of us know or expected: the apps in Apple's store are mostly failures. Many never capture a significant number of users and many that do show an initial spurt of purchases, then fall dramatically. The number of apps that have significant purchase and use over time is very small. To make things worse, the lecturers indicated that iPhone and other mobile apps typically require fairly large amounts of time and effort, meaning that the ROI for the vast majority of apps is very negative.

As a designer, my response was of course that the failing apps do not meet the criteria that any software must for successful adoption: usability, usefulness, and engagement. Meaning that most developers are really wasting their time in addition to the consumers and even Apple's. This company's response was far different from mine, though. They essentially are resigned to the current state that the widespread development of crappy apps is a permanent condition. Their solution to the problem as they see it is to greatly shorten the time and effort needed to develop. So, if we can build apps faster, then we can build more apps. And if we can build more apps faster, we increase our chances of getting lucky that one of them won't be crap.

While I can understand this logic, and it has a fine product marketing tradition backing it up, it is very flawed. Let's look at a few reasons:
- Consumers are rejecting these apps. Putting them up faster will not change that. Statistically, it will actually worsen the percentages.
- Building more apps will vastly increase the clutter that consumers have to deal with, leading to the probability that good apps will get lost in the madness.
- Failures lead to zero or negative ROI. Getting there faster is not a bad thing, but it is not a good driving goal for software tools.
- We are in the beginning (I continue to hope) of a design revolution. Aims such as this company's waste precious talent and time that could be used to make progress toward good design.

To be fair, the product looked interesting and useful. Perhaps it could be used to build better apps faster. And I certainly agree that experimentation and failure are part of the marketplace. However, creating better products for consumers is accomplished in large part by aiming to build better products, not simply more of the status quo, faster.

Share your thoughts about this below.

Good design in 2009.

Take back the beep!

Mobile phone company pre-recorded intros have bugged me for more 6 or 7 years. So I got fairly excited when I saw David Pogue's "Take Back the Beep" campaign start this week. Evidently he's had enough, too, of the 15-second blather that callers hear when they reach someone's mobile phone voicemail. You all know them. Those silly instructions about things you have no desire to do that stand in the way of what you want to do: leave a message.

So, Pogue has started a campaign to make those instructions optional and off by default. They waste time and money. I couldn't agree more! I'll enjoy watching, and helping, this develop for several reasons:

1) I hate this underhanded way of sucking more money out of customers. When will companies finally get that we will pay for good service? We hate paying for crap like this.

2) Much of the publicity for this is happening on Twitter. As with Facebook's TOU debacles, it is very interesting to see how the potential power of online social networks can make a difference.

3) I just love a good ol' public call on the carpet.

4) It's just the right thing to do.

So, see Pogue's articles above and here. You can take part, too. Write a quick note using the links and guidelines in the second article. Help bring a smidge more sanity to our increasingly mobile lives.

Step up to the microphone

Ah, wow. It's been 3 months since I posted last. That's not good. So, I am stepping back up to put my humble and not-so-humble thoughts out to you. At least lots has happened. design - outloud is up and going. It's parent company, Watch Me Media, is a legal entity. We have paying customers (Be one!). I've been asked to act as CTO for a health care start-up project, and, last but not least, we were able to spend time in Colorado. And then there's all the kids activities, family stuff, watering the grass, etc.

Sounds pretty good, but it's also been a difficult time as multiple projects have evaporated due to economic conditions. Maybe more on that later. And soon I will start posting again about design and the business and practice of it.

For now, we persist.