Mr. Kelley’s presentation, “3 Steps to Design Thinking“, was lively, engaging, and thought provoking. Here are a few of my take-aways.

Step 1

Start with Empathy

“The real act of discovery consists not of finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

The act of human centered design begins with seeing the world from a new perspective, and empathy is how you gain that new perspective.

Seeing with fresh eyes.

Mr. Kelley reminded us our employers hired us because of a specific skill, which is great, but not always sufficient for seeing a problem with a fresh set of eyes. Bringing multiple disciplines together to solve complex problems widens our perspective and allows us to see the challenge from a new perspective.

Step 2

Treat Life as an Experiment

Creating an environment that discourages the fear of failure allows for people to take the risk of being innovative.

Step 3

Leverage the Power of Storytelling

Referencing the book “Made to Stick“, Kelley spells out 6 keys to crafting a compelling story.

1. Keep it simple.
2. Introduce the unexpected.
3. Use concrete reference points.
4. Build credibility.
5. Keep it emotionally engaging.
6. Craft it in a story format.

Wrapping it up

Start with empathy, experiment all the time, and leverage the power of storytelling and you’ll be well on your way building an innovation centered strategy.

I recently spent a week with fellow co-workers and UX professionals at Cooper’s UX Bootcamp in Columbus, OH. It was held at Spark Space, which is hands down the best team meeting space I’ve ever had the privlage of crashing.

Although UX took center stage during the bootcamp, leadership and team dynamics were my biggest learning spheres. During each designated time of reflection, I found myself focusing on these two topics.

The instructors (Kendra @kshimmell & Teresa @TeresaBrazen) delegated the majority of team structuring and problem solving to the UX cadets. Had Kendra not been the skilled facilitator that she is, this would have been a complete train wreck.

As the week unfolded, the group was presented with several opportunities to work towards consensus, even amongst some extreme deadlines and uncertainty. The conditions were ideal for anxiety and fear to flourish.

These were also conditions for leadership to shine.

Without diving into the specific scenarios that promoted these reflections, here are some of the points that stuck home with me.

I’d rather work with a cohesive team than be apart of a disgruntled fraction.

I found that I value “the Team” more than I value uniqueness or being in control. I knew this about myself, but there were several opportunities throughout the week where I had to choose between “the Team” and being part of a fraction. Personally, I hate that sort of social pressure.

Working in pairs is not the same as working in teams.

There is a subculture within software development that exemplifies the qualities of not working alone – it’s called pair programming, and is truly effective in many circumstances. Pair programing requires a learned set of skills in order to be effective, but it’s important to realize that these skills don’t equate to being a effective team player.

Dominant personalities, when paired with a few degrees of less dominance, can get away with being a bully. In a team, however, this sort of behaviour is toxic. Learning to work with a broader team than two takes a new skill set – even new values.

Designing a team takes steady leadership.

It’s not enough to just put a bunch of smart people together and let them try to solve a problem. You have to know how to balance leadership styles and personalities. You have to know which personalities to bench and which ones to hand the reigns to. If you don’t, dominant personalities will… dominate.

Leading a design challenge requires asking hard questions.

As a designer (big D design), I’m frustrated quite often when I don’t feel like the right questions are being considered. Design is fundamentally about solving a problem. I like solving problems. I like solving the right problems more than just the exercise of solving problems though.

As a designer who often gets tasked with “make this pretty”, it’s frustrating to be left out of the “real” problem solving stage.

You exponentially decrease the value of design the further you remove it from the problem in which you are trying to solve.

Personal Leadership Challenge

As a result of a UX Bootcamp, I’ve found a deeper commitment to build my own personal leadership skills, specifically in these areas:

• Identify, early on, the fears and anxiety that leads to toxic behaviours.
• Learn how to direct those fears and anxieties into a healthy resolution or activity.
• Be bold in asking tough design questions in order to solve the right problem.
• Sharpen skills in building consensus, even when dominant personalities try to bully their way to a solution.
• Better understand how to design a team for success.

As designers, regardless of craft, it’s our job to advocate for, and empathise with the user. However, that doesn’t imply that we bend to the user’s every wish.

The mobile application market is a shining example of how this pattern tends to work.

At first blush, many of us would applaud Application B for listening to users’ requests by adding more “value” to the application with each feature. However, upon closer evaluation, Application B may be building itself into extinction.

I think this quote and graph explain this quite nicely.

Create more and more features, for fewer and fewer people, until we’ve created everything for no one.
– Neil Martin, IDEO London

Know When To Say No

Knowing when to say no to a user can be complicated. I’d like to offer a few simple ideas that can help filter out the onslaught of feature requests.

1. Have a product vision.
   Having a product vision gives you a clear picture of what the application is, but also, what the application is NOT. Knowing what it’s not is often the missing key.
2. Measure requests, don’t react blindly to them.
   Knowing how many requests, who made the requests and how often the request was made can give you insight into actual value.
3. Dig deeper and understand motivations.
   Quite often, there is little value in turning a request into a feature. Taking the time to understand the users’ motivations for making the request can yield a variety of solutions that can potentially deliver a more meaningful engagement.

Further Reading

Human motivation as a way to understand user goals

http://www.cooper.com/journal/2008/10/motivation.html

Getting Real: Forget feature requests

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/getting_real_forget_feature_requests.php

Michigan Crush is in rolling out in full force this year at www.michigancrush.com!

You can also stay up to date with #micrush on Twitter.

Unfortunately for many, lack of understanding for what design is and what it can do for products, goods and services traps them in a monotonous rut of lack luster performance.

Nailing down a universally agreed upon definition of design is challenging, but I think this is a good place to start:

“design: (noun) a specification of an object, manifested by an agent, intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment, using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set of requirements, subject to constraints.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design

Yes, that’s a mouth full. Illustrated, it looks like this:

GOOD Design asks:

What is the problem we’re trying to solve?
Who are we solving this problem for?
What are the constraints?

Pretty broad definition. Hence the confusion and misunderstanding around the D word.

It’s helpful to break it down a little further.

Design functions at 3 levels: Strategy, Process, and Tangibles.

Design @ Strategy

Design serves to connect the strategic, policy and mission agendas.

Design @ Process

Design serves to connect teams, process and systems of specific business units.

Design @ Tangible

Design manifests itself in the physical, tangible, services and experiences that a customer (user) would interact with and touch.

Source: Sean Blair

By now, the lights are coming on for some of you. Design is critically important.

Job titles don’t often include the word “Designer” at the strategic and process levels. At the tangible level there is a wide range of titles, from Creative Director to Graphic Designer.

At AO, some of the best Strategic and Process Designers aren’t Tangible Designers at all! To be clear, this shouldn’t be viewed as a progression of value in the design food chain. Each level of design expertise is critically dependent on the other. It should also be noted that designers at the tangible level are quite often not interested or qualified to execute at the strategic and process level.

As Shawn recently posted, design isn’t art or even a mystery. It’s a lot of hard work, but there is a process that good designers use that helps clarify, manage and measure their efforts.

Design ABCs

Breathe In

Set aside your assumptions and take in something new, and not a new spreadsheet or marketing report. Good design starts by understanding who we’re solving the problem for – which means getting out of the office (in most cases) and getting close to our customers, with one objective – to learn. Not to impose our assumptions or our intuition, but to learn from them – first hand.

Synthesis

Identify patterns and anomalies. Smash your qualitative and quantitative data together and identify gaps, opportunities and bloat. Be prepared to see things that hurt and make you uncomfortable. Don’t flinch if you realize you haven’t even been asking the right questions and you need to get back in front of your customers again.

Brainstorm

Based on your new insights, begin asking how you might solve the problem. Push boundaries, wonder aloud, be specific, don’t be too specific, don’t over analyze, question constraints, have fun, and for heaven’s sake, don’t form a committee.

Prototype

Give your ideas a glimmer of hope. Risk more. Risk longer. Give new ideas a chance to prove themselves. Iterate on what works, and don’t be afraid to fail.

Be prepared, at any stage, to loop back and begin again.

Next Steps

Now that you have a fuller understanding of what design is, I’m sure you can see bits of “design” in the work you do, day-in and day-out. Your title may not have “Designer” in it, but, if you’re solving real people’s problems, under specific constraints, you design.

In my own vocabulary I often use “Big D Design” to distinguish Strategy and Process from the Tangible, where I often use “Visual Design” to describe the craft. I’ve found this helpful in communicating the value of design to stakeholders and clients, as well as gaining a shared understanding of the D word.

Design is the heartbeat of innovation.

Kedron is a recent graduate of Ferris State University, receiving an MBA Certificate in Design and Innovation Management.

There are, of course, many reasons to adopt a topic that you’re passionate about, and champion it whenever you have the opportunity.

The danger comes when you get on your soapbox and it’s clear to everyone around you that you don’t practice what you preach. It’s a lot like standing up on a soapbox with your pants down.

Just sayin.

I worry, therefore, I'm better than you!

Maybe that seems obvious, but here is why I’m voicing my option on the matter: A few short days ago I was conversing with a fellow designer who relayed a conversation he was apart of in which a developer suggested that designers can’t/wont be good project leads because they aren’t the worrying type.

Confused, I asked him to clarify what the developer meant by that statement. He proceeded to explain to me that this developer holds the opinion that designers are too carefree to be trusted with worrying about the level of detail a project lead is responsible to care for.

As a responsible, professional designer, I’m completely offended by that statement (on many levels).

First of all, that kind of blanket statement is generally made by the arrogant and naive – a disgusting combination.

Second, since when is worry a quality to be sought after? Worry is absolutely unproductive! Worry is a negative trait that should be avoided by mature, responsible people. (Which is not to say that mature, responsible people should not have concern for things, on the contrary.)

It’s up to the individual developer and designer to nurture the necessary skills to be a project lead - both of which have predisposed strengths and weaknesses – both of which have proven to be excellent project leads.

Following the directions in my mind.

Having young kids has forced me to put my creative process into a framework in which I can explain it to them. It’s pretty simple:

Follow the directions in your mind.

I tell this to my kiddos every time they ask, “Wow dad, that is so cool! How did you do that?”

I follow the directions in my mind.

I’ve come to realize that visualizing something before it’s created is a skill not everyone has, and one that takes consistent effort to maintain. If you’re in a creative profession, you know just what I’m talking about.

Here are a few simple tips that I use to help visualize the unseen:

Focus. First and foremost, you have to be able to shut the noise down in your mind in order to construct anything with detail. Building the unseen is nothing more than a house of cards, and with one little distraction or wondering thought, the whole thing can come crashing down.

Get detailed. Construct as many details as your mind can maintain before you begin manifesting your creation.

Use milestones. As you strengthen your ability to convert your creative thoughts into reality, you may need to get really rough prototypes out early and often in order to keep building. Getting a rough prototype out is also a great way to save a seed of an idea that you can build on later.

Practice daily. Seriously.

Fill in the gaps. If you find yourself struggling with visualizing your idea, do some research to help flesh it out. Knowledge gaps can often be filled pretty quickly and shouldn’t hold up the process too much. Feasibility gaps are a whole different story.

What do you do to help visualize, before you create?

Last Thanksgiving, my dad announced he had cancer. It’s been rough watching him fight this disease, and I can’t imagine the toll it has taken on he and my mom. He’s beating it, and things are looking good.

In honor of him, and in effort to raise awareness for men’s health issues, I’m participating in Movember. The aim, grow a mustache & raise a few funds along the way.

Join me this N(M)ovember by:

1. Prodding your loved ones to get in for their annual checkup.
2. Spread the word.
3. Make a donation.

Kedron Rhodes: Taming Application UX with a UX Library from Mutually Human Software on Vimeo.

Download @ GitHub

Set these 3 variables to get started:

1. rowHeight
   This is your line-height (most of the time)
2. columnWidth
   This is your column width – it’s BEST to use a number that divides the gridWidth evenly!!
3. gridWidth
   This is the width of the area being gridded

Example

$.simpleGrid({
rowHeight: 20,
columnWidth: 30,
gridWidth: 960
});

What You Get

Once you’ve added the tiny bit of JavaScript to your page, you will get a pink dot in the upper left corner.

Clicking the pink dot will toggle the grid on and off.

DEMO – Try it!

Credits

A GIANT thank you goes to Patrick Bacon
for his coaching and coding input.

Dustin Tinney has been a solid source of inspiration and ideas along the way as well! Major thanks!

Download @ GitHub

If you missed out on what Michigan Crush was all about, check out the kick-off page!

Michigan has been part of the union since 1837, which I didn’t know off the top of my head. Thank you Wikipedia. I thought a simple reminder of the heritage we Michiganders all have would be a nice way to end this little project. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. It’s been a challenging and rewarding experience.

Although this little challenge is over, my Michigan crush continues. You’ll see more posts in the future, but for now; enjoy.

Photoshop + Smart Objects

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The Michigan state tree is the White Pine. This, however is not a white pine. This is the pine cone. This is a beautiful tree, and one of the only green signs of life during the cold winter months.

Photoshop + Smart Objects

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The brook trout is the Michigan state fish, and here is my vector version of it. Enjoy!

Photoshop + Smart Object

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I realized the other day that I hadn’t created a cut-away of the state yet. So here it is.

Photoshop + Smart Object

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Confession; I bit off more than I could chew on this one – only because I wanted to put so much more detail into it.

So, here it is – a lighthouse. Michigan’s coasts are lined with these magnificent structures. Although I’ve never been on a lighthouse tour, I hear it’s grand!

File: Photoshop + Smart Objects

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I attended 5×5 last night and one of the presenters noted that he had gotten quotes from China for a product he’s looking to manufacture, and as it turns out, he can get the product manufactured for a fraction of the cost if he does it locally. Why? Because Michigan KNOWS how to make stuff.

File: Photoshop + Smart Objects

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Michigan has a perception of being ALL manufacturing, and therefore, not a green friendly state. Although it’s true that we have some cleanup to do in spots, we’re far far far from anti-green. In fact, in 2010, Grand Rapids was rated the most sustainable mid-sized city in the entire US. No joke!

File: Photoshop + Smart Objects

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