Innovation Science

Jobs on Design, Everyone Else on the iPod

I’m reading a book called Sketching User Experiences, which is an interesting dialogue on the philosophy of design, filled with many practical real-world examples. The author, Bill Buxton, has been a part of or exposed to many fascinating design projects over the years that he details in his book.

I want to post a quote by Steve Jobs about design from Buxton’s book:

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. To design something really well, you have to ‘get it.’ You have to really grok [understand] what it’s all about.

I feel like a broken record saying this on my blog, but it’s worth repeating, particularly for new readers to this blog. Design is the science of elegant functionality, which is why having a process for design development is so important. Just like research or development—design is also a well defined process.

Jobs’ quote reminds me of what was told to me recently by a friend who is a researcher at Apple’s top competitor. He complained that, more and more frequently on projects, executives at his company were instructing him and his colleagues to, “make it like the iPod—you know, simple and cool.” I’ve heard this complaint elsewhere and it’s obvious that the iPod has become the sole definition of design in many people’s eyes—some Platonic design ideal that everyone is striving to reproduce.

Also because of the iPod, simplicity has become the buzzword of the year, but this is also a misplaced ideal. I hesitate to discuss this, because simplicity has been a mantra of mine since the ‘90s given the unique needs of hearing aid users (my field) and my general philosophy that products should be intuitive. The design success of the iPod is a result of more than just simplicity, just like the business success of the iPod is a result of more than just its design. Perhaps a better buzzword for the future is intuitiveness, from which simplicity is one solution.

My friend’s dilemma was that this demand to mimic the iPod restricted his creativity to the design language of the iPod—he couldn’t treat each project on its own terms with its unique challenges. There’s no surer way to squelch innovation than to tell someone tasked with creative thinking to mimic someone else’s creation. Not only that, the requirements that produced the iPod design may have nothing to do with the design requirements of these other products. The relationship between a product, its use and its user may require a design solution completely different to that of an iPod, but that design solution can still be brilliantly elegant and functional.

While the iPod is currently an icon of design and probably the most written about product with respect to design, I suspect that it may soon become anathema to designers if executives continue to force their design teams to mimic the iPod style. Soon there will be a growing league of ipodoclasts looking to tear down the iPod and force their own design language to the forefront of consumer product design.

What’s ironic is that companies should actually be trying to mimic Apple’s/Ives’ approach to design and learning from his process of iteration and innovation rather than mimicking the product of its/his process. Until they do (and maybe even if they do), Apple will maintain its design lead. Perhaps the iPhone, another product of Jonathan Ives design team at Apple, will be the product to demonstrate that design success can result from intuitiveness rather than simplicity, at which point I suppose executives will be clamoring for products to be made like the iPhone—you know, intuitive and cool.

I want to say one word to you...Plastics

I used to think that there was a special circle of hell reserved solely for the inventor of the packaging for music CDs—and apparently I’m not the only one. I imagined a mountain of new CDs from which the inventor must forever open new CDs, with the mountain never reducing in its supply.

Well, I now believe that this circle holds an even bigger mountain for an even bigger sinner, and the inexhaustible supply this mountain spews forth contains plastic molding packaging that contains mundane consumer goods. Not expensive consumer electronics but ordinary items that used to come in ordinary cardboard and easily-opened packaging. You know, packaging that didn’t require the use of a blow-torch, surgical laser or chainsaw to open. An didn’t produce bloodied stumps where fingers one protruded after trying to open by hand.

While this packaging is normally only annoying and inconvenient at home, I’ve now discovered that it can actually keep you from accessing the item that you’ve purchased if you are traveling, when you don’t normally have mini-jaws-of-life tools handy.

Two months ago I realized that I had forgotten to bring my razor on a business trip. Good thing there’s a Target nearby, I foolishly thought. By the end of the night, my fingers were sliced and blood lay on the hotel’s linoleum floor as I finally overcame the seemingly indestructible packaging that surrounded the cheap non-electric razor that I bought. No, the cuts didn’t come from the enclosed blades—Gillette engineers are going to heaven, not the inventor of the now-ubiquitous plastic packaging in which more and more items are being sold.

JUMP CUT: TODAY

INT. ROOM — NIGHT

The scene: a nondescript hotel room which one wouldn’t want to see under a black light.

A red-faced man stabs at a package, the veins popping on his neck. He holds in one hand a slim transparent yet indestructible plastic package containing A PEN, and stabs at the package with his other hand holding the hotel’s feeble BALLPOINT PEN.

PSYCHOTIC TRAVELER

Aaaaarrrrggghhhh!

Yes, I bought a pen tonight at Office Depot, only to find out that I COULDN’T GET TO THE PEN BECAUSE SOMEONE HAD APPARENTLY SEALED IT TO SURVIVE A THOUSAND-YEAR BURIAL ALONGSIDE SOME MODERN-DAY TUTANKHAMEN.

The photo to the right shows the hideous remains of my conquered enemy. This time, I survived opening the package without leaving bloodstains to worry the hotel’s maid. But what in the gods’ names (to reference BSG) was such protective packaging doing on a cheap pen in Office Depot? I would advise others to avoid my perils by traveling wherever they go with scissors, but I know that one can’t travel very far these days carrying such tools of modern-day survival if one doesn't check one's bags.

He Put the i in Design, and iPod, and iMac, and iPhone...

For those who can’t get enough information about the new iPhone or those who, like me, are eager to find more information about the Apple design innovation process, here’s a BusinessWeek article from a few months ago on the designer of the iPhone. And the iMac. And the iPod. Given his name, I guess we know what the “i” stands for.

Jonathan Ive heads Apple’s design group, a team that primarily works in San Francisco. The relationship between Ive and Jobs is interesting to read about given Ive’s quiet public demeanor and Steve’s attention-grabbing one. More interesting are the details of Ive’s design process.

I won’t regurgitate details from the article, but there are two aspects of Ive’s process that are worth noting.

Ive works closely with engineers to understand what’s possible, marketers to understand usability and consumer needs, and manufacturers to understand, well, manufacturability. As BW puts it,

Ive’s team at Apple isn’t the usual design ghetto of creativity that exists inside most corporations.

People and companies look at the success of the iPod and Apple’s dominance of design and conclude that they can emulate that design genius by focusing on cool new looks or on the latest business mantra Simplicity. Focusing on design as a creative-only process, as if the iPod dominates its market because someone designer rubbed the right genie bottle one day, misses the point and the value that Ive brings to Apple. His design process is one of intensive hard work and the ability to reduce expertise from multiple disciplines into the form factor of a single product. Great design exists in the harmonious combination of function and aesthetics, and processes to achieve this do exist and are perfected at Apple.

Edison’s maxim, Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, applies to design as well as it does to engineering or science. All three require innovation processes that include trial and error, intuition, investigation, and hard work. The lone genius creating innovations through flashes of creativity rarely exists in these fields. A description of Ive’s career makes clear that his and Apple’s success in design is the product of an incredibly disciplined process and a daunting amount of work. And, of course, terribly brilliant people for whom their job is their passion.

Which leads to the second point worth noting from the story, which is Ive’s process of creating hundreds of prototypes in the process of investigating ideas and refining designs. Ive has invested heavily into advanced tooling capabilities that allows his team to rapidly prototype ideas and quickly determine what’s good and bad about design ideas. While most companies examine designs by looking at 3–D CAD drawings projected onto a meeting room wall, Ive creates the designs as physical objects that he can hold and physically assess, sometimes using materials as simple as sculpted styrofoam, and figures out what aspects work and what ones don’t. This is also part of the IDEO way: to rapidly create prototypes so that designs can be assessed in terms of usability in a way that can never be done just by looking at a CAD design, and to iterate quickly on alternate designs, integrating the best concepts of each prototype to create a superior product.

Reduce to practice, investigate, try again, dare to create faulty designs so that they can inform the path to better ones. Apple’s success (and IDEO’s, and a few others’) has clearly proven this process as a valuable approach to successful design innovation. Not only can other companies learn by examining this approach closely, but other disciplines could probably improve their approaches to innovation as well by emulating aspects of this process. I’m sure that there are several business school dissertations developing those ideas already…

TedTalks Scoops Steve Jobs

I was going to write about something else, but I feel compelled to write a post on Apple’s iPhone that was just introduced. I have no doubt that it is being assessed, critically or not, in almost every tech blog today. So, I’m not going to go over the features or exclaim my enthusiasms for their latest innovation…make that innovations.

I will say that the iPhone appears to be a beautiful example of innovating to meet the needs of the consumer. Also, the audacity of spec’ing a cellphone to have just a single button is pretty amazing. Okay, that was a couple enthusiastic exclamations.

FYI, the unique multi-touch user interface was previewed by a researcher from NYU in this amazing video from TedTalks:

TED Talks, We Listen

There have been lots of links to the recently posted videos of TED talks from the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, a yearly meeting where 1000 influential (board-of-director-level) people are invited to Monterey to think and talk big thoughts. There are currently six 18–minute presentations posted, including one by Al Gore. More are promised.

I wanted to comment on several talks, beginning with one by Sir Ken Robinson who speaks about the need to rework our education system to preserve the creative spirit in people. He suggests that the curricula at public school programs are designed to produce university scholars and that this is too narrow a definition for what schools should produce. Sir Ken says that children are boundlessly creative because “they’re not frightened of being wrong,” and goes on to say that we learn to be frightened as we grow older and that most people are indeed terrified of being wrong by the time they start working at companies, with their creative spirit dissipated. Sir Ken blames our school systems for not nurturing creativity, stating that

We are educating people out of their creative capacities…we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather, we get educated out of it.

Sir Ken is a charismatic speaker and engaging to the audience but unfortunately, to my taste, he spends too much time on jokes and stories and not building his case towards revising our public school goals. This is a particularly resonant topic given the work that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing. With only eighteen minutes to influence some of the top leaders in the US, I would have liked to have seen a more direct focus on his very important thesis.

Al Gore discusses the global warming presentation that he gave earlier in the TED conference and which forms the backbone of the movie An Inconvenient Truth. He also spends several minutes on jokes, at the beginning of his talk and of the self-deprecating kind, but he eventually gets down to business and he is indeed all business at addressing the issue of spreading the word about global warming. Not only is his presentation compelling, but he is clearly reaching out to the attendees and trying to make a difference.

Majora Carter gives an emotional and inspiring talk about bringing green space to the Bronx and the need to consider urban development as a way of moving our society forward.

My favorite talk is from Hans Rosling, director of Sweden’s top university, the Karolinska Institute. Hans gives a tour de force data-driven overview of world development that uses data displays that would make Edward Tufte weep with envy. His presentation was fascinating: compelling and rich with information. Anyone who watches this video and does not finish with an intense desire to do similar data mining in their own fields is a poster child for Sir Ken Robinson’s thesis that schooling eradicates creativity—see above.

Tufte's Seminar of Data Display, PowerPoint and Cognition

I saw Edwards Tufte’s seminar yesterday. I am not going to summarize his more well known ideas since his seminars have been well documented elsewhere. You can find one here and another here. Tufte’s work and thoughts on information display and Powerpoint are excellent, and I’m glad that I went. I’m going to add a few general comments that are perhaps different from the hundreds of seminar summaries published elsewhere, and I'll also talk about some areas where I disagree with Tufte.

Tufte’s Style

Firstly, Tufte practices what he preaches...partly. For most of the presentation, the projector was off and he only used it to show full-sized images or videos. Other than that, it was just him talking and no PowerPoint Phluff.  Not even the usual title slide when you walk in. I suppose we already know the speaker and topic, so a title slide would have been superfluous—makes me think about which presentations of mine don’t need a title slide.

Strangely, Tufte offered little evidence to support many of the design claims that he was making. His theories and ideas seemed sound, but there was no data presented that gave scientific weight to his advice on proper data design. In his seminar, he advocates that you view a presenter skeptically, making sure that they are a "detective" without bias rather than an "advocate" of their ideas. Tufte certainly sounds like an advocate in much of what he preaches.

Ancient Texts

Tufte brought several first edition books that were hundreds of years old to demonstrate data layout by the world’s geniuses. He talks about these examples in his books, but it’s amazing to see original books by Newton and Galileo in person. I felt sorry for the person wearing archival gloves who had to slowly and delicately carry the books around, pausing at each row so the audience could see the book up close.

 PowerPoint

Accommodation of presentation design to cognitive styles is a theme of Tufte’s, which I found interesting given the current discussion of this in the blogsphere and in my own blog. Tufte argues that eliminating bullet points from presentations accommodates a diversity of cognitive styles. While it’s true that many people expect to see bulletpoint summaries of what the speaker is saying, and a few probably assimilate information best in that style, the bullet point mode is not optimal for the cognitive styles of most people. By avoiding bullet points, more people in the audience are better served. 

The PowerPoint structure entices people to reduce their syntactic discipline and causal structure in our thoughts and arguments, so in a way it affects the cognitive process of the presenter as well as the audience. Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint should be read for detailed thought on this topic. My final thought on this is that there must be a way to effectively use PowerPoint that eliminates Tufte’s complaints, but Tufte doesn’t offer such a solution--he recommends that a Word report be distributed at a meeting instead. To that end, Cliff Atkinson is being more realistic in his work and advice on trying to work within the PowerPoint paradigm, and Garr Reynolds at PresentationZen gives practical advice on improving PowerPoint presentations consistent with Tufte's theories.

Sparklines

Tufte spent considerable time talking about sparklines, his concept for tiny graphics inline with text that will be a significant part of his next book to be published, Beautiful Evidence. You can find some discussion of sparrklines at Agile Testing and Anil Dash.

While the concept is innovative, Tufte over-values the amount of information that these can provide. As an example, he considers the plotting of a mutual funds price embedded inline with text (the chart is the height of an uppercase letter and the length around five letters). He argues that this tiny chart consists of over 250 data points with a resolution of at least two significant digits (or, say, over 7 bits of resolution). Therefore, there are 1750 bits of information in the space taken up by four letters. This seems like a reach, since certainly the reader isn’t assimilating that many bits of information. People do a considerable amount of data reduction in their perceptual space, and the amount of bits of information obtained from such a small graph is considerably smaller than the actual resolution of the graph (think of principal components).

The fact that people can discriminate two charts/sparklines that differ in one data point doesn’t mean that they will interpret the two charts any differently—the information to the reader is the same in both. This is the classic difference between discrimination and identification: two images might be discriminable but not differently identified. In my field of hearing, a one-second vowel sampled at 44.1 khHz with 16 bit resolution doesn’t mean that there is over 705,000 bits of information in that one-second sound sample. A vowel with a formants at 710 Hz and 1100 Hz will be identified as an /a/, as will a vowel with formants at 850 Hz and 1300 Hz even though the two data points are considerable different. The two vowels can be discriminated but are not differentially identified. I believe that the analytical value of sparklines is not nearly as large as Tufte calculates.

 Tufte the Artist

Tufte spent a small amount of time showing us pictures of giant sculptures in his garden. While interesting, I’m not sure what the point of this was.

Rules for Startups, and Grownups Too

Ev Williams posted his Ten Rules for Startups, which has advice that can be applied to large companies as well, whether towards sustaining product design, research, or skunkworks projects. I won't point out which ones I think apply to sustaining companies--I'll let you identify the ones you think apply yourself.

Still, here's one of his rules that I like:

#5: Be User-Centric User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it's sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don't get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.

Cognitive Approach to Font Design

The use of cognitive science on the design of Microsoft fonts is intriguingly mentioned by Scobleizer in his post on a visit to MS's Cleartype team (and supports my post on the application of cognitive science to product R&D).

When talking about the team's cognitive scientist, Kevin Larson, Scoble says:

He sticks people inside an MRI machine and asks them to read two pages of text. One with fonts that are ugly and poorly designed. One with beautifully designed fonts and aesthetically laid out.

He says they can’t see much difference in reading speed, but there’s a massive difference in the part of the brain used on each kind of page. Also, they measure the various facial muscles used when reading text. Turns out people frown more when reading the poorly-laid-out text.

The comments on this post mention a fascinating blog by the Cleartype team which discusses the arcane science of font design. I not only learned a lot about the problems and solutions associated with fonts, but why people have a tendancy to (improperly) use two spaces after a period-ending sentence.

I wonder if any of this can be applied to selecting the optimal fonts for Powerpoint presentations that use the Wabi-Sabi philosophy.

HBR: Crap Circles

I rarely laugh out loud while reading humor, let alone while reading a magazine like the Harvard Business Review, but that's exactly what I just finished doing after reading a short article by Gardiner Morse titled "Crap Circles." In it, Morse comments on the sometimes absurd misuse of the ubiquitous circle of arrows that we have grown accustomed to seeing in presentations, articles and websites. An example that I found online is shown on the right. If someone is presenting information on concepts that are inter-related, people tend to represent them as an interconnected circle without thinking of the appropriateness of representing them as one concept feeding into another until the chain feeds back on itself to begin the cycle again. Morse shows egregious examples from unspecified corporate websites. In one example, a project reaches completion only to revert back into a concept phase--a project life cycle only Sisyphus would understand. In another example, a two-stage circle shows product demand growth leading to supply growth which leads back to product demand growth, depicting the business plan equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

 

I'm particularly (perhaps overly) amused by this article because last week I contemplated creating my own misinformed circle for a presentation that I just gave today. I wanted to get rid of my bullet point list of inter-related research with a graphic and initially thought, "Hey, I'll make a colorful circle of labeled arrows!" After some thought (and, thankfully, without actually creating the graphic), I realized that the circle concept made no sense at all for this case: one research project did not feed into another in a linear manner until the chain fed back on itself. The relationship was not so straighforward. So, I eventually created a graphic showing one concept platform supported by two research concepts, with the whole thing sitting on a large foundation representing that theories upon which eveything is based. Visually, it represented exactly how I thought of the research approach, better than a circle and better than a bullet point list.

Attention and Cognition: The Coming Wave

Eleven months ago I started paying serious attention to attention by reading the classic book Attention and Effort by former Berkeley professor and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman.

I now feel like my interest in attention has converged at many levels:

1. I'm involved in two different research projects on attention.
2. I've started worrying about the overload of information in our daily lives, as discussed by A VC in NYC on attention overload and by Om Malik on internet anxiety disorder, and have started using tools described in Lifehacker to try to keep order.
3. Recently, I've also started focusing on how attention relates to presentations/talks, and how Powerpoint slides can be optimized by using basic attention principles derived from the cognitive research of Richard Mayer. A nice summary of his research is posted on this Visual Design for eLearning blog and the research is the basis for the Beyond Bullets blog. I find particularly interesting a Zen take on this issue described extensively at Presentation Zen such as this brilliant comparison of presentations by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

These convergences will be just the tip of the iceberg. I believe that cognitive science issues such as attention are going to have an even bigger impact on the average person in the future. New innovations are going to be driven by the integration of cognitive research into technology design. Traditional cognitive techniques of reaction times or dual-attention tasks have been applied in the past, and recently they have been used to investigate the effect of cell phone talking on attention while driving. But they are going to receive new applications in product development and more sophisticated techniques will be used. Current leading edge cognitive research incorporates electrophysiological measures of brain activity, such as fMRI or evoked potentials, that can be more sensitive to detecting correlations with perceptual stimuli and behavior than strict behavioral measures.

Whichever companies are the first to seriously integrate measures of cognitive behavior into their product design and marketing are going to obtain a huge lead over their competitors. Apple and IDEO without a doubt have cognitive scientists on staff. Google and Yahoo!, maybe. HP, Tivo and Electronic Arts, doubtful. Dolby and Lucas Film, no way. (Just to name a few companies around the Bay). All of these companies, however, can benefit from these techniques to improve their products and better understand their customer. The question isn't if cognitive techniques will become key R&D tools for consumer technology companies, it's when.

How I'm trying to incorporate cognition into the hearing aid industry is partly detailed in this interview I gave.