The good news is that I see this changing. Green design, cradle-to-cradle considerations and initiatives like Make Magazine Owners Bill of Rights are percolating across the marketplace. These trends all wrap up into a concept that I call Cobbling.

Simply said, cobbling means working outside of what a product or system was originally designed to do. But it goes deeper than just the product capabilities: Cobbling is fundamentally about the relationship between customers and companies.

Why do people cobble? I believe that cobbling is an important indicator that an underlying system is broken or not serving the needs or the desires of the customers. When cobbling happens, it looks like breaking out, and mashups & remixing. Overall, there is a strong social component to cobbling. There's also belligerence, self-reliance, and the DIY ethos. The word implies (and it's baked into the definition) a sense of roughness and capability. It may not be pretty, but it works.

What does cobbling look like? I see three major ways that cobbling takes form. These are:

* Workarounds - people working outside the system
* Adaptations - making a product custom fit to people's lives
* Explorations - pushing the boundaries to see what's possible
* Workarounds - people working outside the system

Workarounds - people working outside the system

Circumventing the rules by creating a "hole" in the current system removes barriers to choice. One thing is for sure...workarounds are viral...once one person does it, others are able to do it too. Whole markets have been created by working around or bypassing an existing system.

The Legend of Napster

The poster child for cobbling workarounds is Napster. For two years, Napster fostered a vibrant, intense, wildly successful experience. The ability to freely and easily share music digitally was unprecedented anywhere or anytime before. Although Napster was shut down, decentralized, peer to peer ecosystems continue to challenge the business of copyright, trademark and digital rights protections.

Napster was a workaround for a system that was collapsing under it's own weight of "legalese" and contracts. Napster was a loud cry and a success story for creating an outside ecosystem based on openness, utility and sharing. The issues around digital rights management that began with the Napster phenomenon continue to this day.

Jailbreak Rock

It's a common story. Your friend has a great Nokia N95, and you're thinking of upgrading your ancient mobile phone. When you call your mobile provider to ask about getting that new phone, they tell you it's not available on your network. You hear from your friends that there aren't any technical reasons why the N95 won't work. You hear from your provider that it's just not an option. And when you ask about canceling your service, they hit you with cancellation fees and early termination penalties.

But there's another way. You buy an N95 on eBay that's unlocked. You pop the sim card out of your current phone and into the N95. It works just fine. Why couldn't you get your provider to play along?

Peer-to-peer music sharing and unlocked phones are an example of the workaround...finding a way to circumvent a current system. Workarounds look like this:

*Breaking out of a locked system
*Removing barriers to choice
*Closed systems that invite disruption

Now I'm not advocating for illegal activities. But what is interesting is the number of examples that are shaking the legal bedrock of terms of use. As markets change, the expectations of usage, permissions and legal agreements need to shift as well. Cobbling is an early indicator that expectations are shifting, and companies that identify and understand these changes are better positioned to capitalize on the opportunities that these shifts create. Adaptations - making a product fit for people's real lives

Adaptations mean breaking the case open and jiggering products to better fit our lives. When approached with the right spirit, companies that make products designed for adaptation can tap into new markets.

Cracking open the case

Johnny Lee is a human-computer interaction designer, currently at Microsoft. He hacks the Wiimote to do cool things. He's made a cheap interactive whiteboard, and jiggered a TV set to respond to gestural input via 3D head tracking and finger tracking. These are examples of adaptations: cracking open the case, mucking about in the insides to make a product more useful.

Now this is nothing new...people have been doing this for a long time. But Johnny Lee took it to the last step: when he posted his videos on YouTube and the instructions on his website, he showed others how to do it, too. His video has over 10 million views.

Johnny Lee made cobbling social to an extreme. Before, you bought the Wii as part of a system, and you simply used the system. But now you have the blueprints to extend it to work with other things. His premise was to make his mods accessible to the widest possible audience. Everyone is encouraged to adapt their stuff to better work with their lives.

Legal hates the liability of this. Marketing isn't sure. But it's an important way for companies to create new relationships with new customers. Giving up control in your products widens the market for what your product can do. Products that are easy to open, adapt and modify gain market share because they can be used and mis-used in many ways.

Explorations - pushing the boundaries to see what's possible

Put a Ring on This

In October 2008 the singer Beyonce released the song Single Ladies (put a ring on it) which shot to the top of the charts. The music video posted on YouTube featured Beyonce doing a distinctive set of dance moves.

Then it gets interesting. Shane Mercado, a dancer, created a video response showing him split-screen dancing with Beyonce and her dancers. The perfect synchronization is uncanny. Despite the garage look of the split-screen (and the fact that Shane is dancing in his bathroom in his underware) the video is incredibly compelling.

Within hours of Shane's video going live, he had over 200 messages. As of today, the video response has over 3.3 million views, and spawned numerous other video responses. Shane was invited to dance on the national morning news show the Bonnie Hunt show, and the show closed with the TV show team dancing alongside Shane and the virtual Beyonce. The kicker came when Shane and Beyonce met in person. The meeting was captured and posted on, what else...YouTube.

YouTube's viral meme of video response has powered a remix culture that was previously only available to people with specialized skills and equipment, and who had a public venue to share their work. With digital environments like YouTube, Vimeo and other media-sharing sites, the remix culture has gone viral to an extraordinary degree. Cobbling explorations have gone social.

Designing for Social Participation

Sharing work publicly makes it a social act, inviting further explorations and repeat iterations. This can escalate into larger forms of community expression. People now have the tools, the materials, the skills and the motivation to fully participate in a remix culture.

What's compelling about this example is that it takes the idea of cobbling out of the physical world and into the digital world. The speed that things are produced, published, discovered, remixed, published and responded to is escalating and it's not going to slow down. Design for digital cobbling creates the opportunity to facilitate a product ecosystem that fosters active customer participation.

4 simple ways to start

Do you think cobbling may hold interesting opportunities for you? Here are some ideas for how to get started...

1. Accept that cobbling will happen.

Look beyond the threats to see the opportunities. What are people doing with your products? Where are the innovations happening? How can you capitalize on the trends? Moving from ownership to participation extends the capabilities of your product, and as a result extends the reach of your company.

2. Screws, not glue. Make it easy to open.

The Maker's Bill of Rights published by MAKE magazine has 17 guidelines for manufacturers. It's directed towards physical products, but thinking metaphorically, it can extend to digital and service products as well.

3. Choose who will respond: legal or marketing. And decide how to respond.

Are you going to fight cobbling? Encourage it? Work with it? Ignore it? Break down the terms of use into smaller chunks. Creative Commons has a flexible set of use and re-use licenses that facilitate a variety levels of sharing and control. Select granular terms that can be applied to specific ways you will or will not support cobbling. Be explicit about the terms and opportunities to your market.

4. Identify and participate in emerging communities about your products.

Note that this is about participation, not monitoring. Be a part of the conversations that your customers are having about your products. Invest in social media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to be an active voice in the marketplace.

Cobbling is an indicator that changes are happening with your customers and your products. Learning how to work with these changes is increasingly a key competency for companies that are poised to survive and thrive in a consumer-driven marketplace.

The big opportunity is for companies to give up control...to start designing towards a future of open systems. Customer participation in an open ecosystem is a significant way for companies to listen to the market, to be intimately engaged in how people live, and to make products that become deeply embedded in the lives of customers.

OUR WORK IS MADE OF PEOPLE

One of the most important things that I try to keep in mind is that my work is made of people. People are full of concerns, doubts, frailties, paranoia, and have prodigious blind spots for their own failings. They also, at times, may need lots of reassurance, hand holding, confidence boosting, and someone to take the extra step to look out for their best interest. My team members will often tell me what they think I want to hear, not what I need to know. Team members can be too optimistic about deadlines and forget vacations or other obligations that could make it difficult for them to get their work done.

I like to get to know everyone on the project personally and begin building relationships of mutual trust. If my teammates know they can confide in you and share information that they may not want their peers or immediate supervisors to know you can make sure that they and the project survive. Building trust also goes a long way toward my goal of omniscience.

TIP #6 FIND OUT YOUR TEAM MEMBERS' GOALS: Everyone has something at stake in the project. Take a moment early on to talk to each person on your team about the work you will be doing together. What excites them about the project? What’s their working style? Where do they like to meet? What do they want and expect from you as a project manager? What does a good practitioner/project manager relationship look like to them? When they get down about something during the project or lose focus, you'll be able to help them get back on track by reminding them what is important to them.

TIP #7 CAVEAT EMPTOR (or let the buyer beware): Don't assume folks can do something unless they can point to an example. Good projects provide opportunities for people to stretch their abilities and do new things, but you need to know when that is the case. If someone fails to meet a deadline or deliver quality ask yourself: Did they have enough information about the problem? Did they have enough time? As a project manager you may need to start making mental adjustments for everything they promise going forward. End of day Friday might turn into the following Wednesday. You either plan the schedule accordingly or find someone else to do the work.

WORKING WITH A CLIENT

Good client relationships are extremely important in consulting but they are equally important to internal projects. In many ways client work is easier because the constraints are much clearer to identify and adhere to than with internal projects, but a client relationship is more challenging due to differences in company culture and a completely different kind of project related anxiety.

The client-consultant relationship is special because of the difference in perspective and experience. As a consultant you move from problem-space to problem-space working with difference companies in different industries, targeting different users. Every new project is a different kind of challenge and you often meet them with the same approach and mindset, to learn as much as you can about their problem-space while retaining your own perspective. For the client the project is their product, their career, their life. They have been working on this problem for a long time and they finally are successful in getting resources to tackle a difficult problem. They have gone through an RFP process where they may or may not have gotten the consulting firm they wanted. No doubt it has also taken a bit longer to get the project started. This explains why the beginning of projects always has an interesting energy. The client wants to see something good and quick to validate why they asked for the money and why they choose to give it to you. The consultant doesn't want to provide anything that may not be the right direction since it could undermine the remainder of the project.

All the high-profile work that I have done has had a huge impact on the career of the person I have worked with. Remembering these important differences will help you build trust early and explain why the client is so concerned about communicating the process and the plan. And why they are so concerned about what you’re going to talk about with the five senior executives they're not on a name to face basis with.

Here are some simple things you can do to build good client relationships on a foundation of trust more quickly that have impact for both of you.

TIP #8: PUT YOURSELF IN YOUR CLIENT'S SHOES FOR 15 MINUTES EVERYDAY: This is a good practice to keep in touch with their priorities. This should also be done every time you look at deliverables that the client will review.

TIP #9: BIND YOURSELF TO YOUR CLIENT: Well not literally, but at some point during the first few weeks of your project you need to create a pact of honesty. It is imperative that your relationship with your client contact be the source of mutual trust and benefit. The project's success depends on how well informal feedback is carried to the team and how well you can communicate the any potential risk to the project without sounding alarms. I believe the strength and sincerity of a good client relationship is what makes good work great.

Tip #10 CAVEAT VENDITOR (or let the seller beware): Your client picked you and your team for a reason. You are the best group to come up with the solution they need or want. Be careful that your work is honest to its users. Your client may be only giving you information that will lead you in the direction they want you to go in. Keep communicating directly with all the stakeholders to ensure the solution is a success for the organization, not just to fulfill on a manager's vision of the perfect product.

What tips or advice do you have for project, product, program managers? Let us know!

manager (noun) a person responsible for controlling or administering all or part of a company or similar organization.

This is the classic understanding most people have of what a project manager is and does, yet I find that it is possible not only to 'control' a project, but also to come up with creative solutions, while enabling your team to become better at what they do. I call this facilitating a project. Here is its definition:

facilitate (verb) make (an action or process) easy or easier.

The manager is in the center and is the controlling party, while a facilitator is supporting the process and making sure all of the pieces are working together. hat is what I do best; facilitating the creative process. Perhaps a more apt title is creative facilitator instead of product manager, account manager, project manager, etc... but I would hate to add anything more to an already overburdened (and over-tilted) role.

Regardless of the title, people in these roles use and share a lot of the same skills. But from the perspective of a facilitator there are a couple of tactics and tips that may not be as emphasized in traditional project management training.

OMNISCIENCE

As a creative facilitator, omniscience is your ultimate goal. Any project, regardless of its complexity, requires an awareness and knowledge of all the various moving parts. You may be called to stand up for unrepresented audiences, are expected to understand the dependencies, and must calculate the schedule impact of any critical failures in the process. While omniscience may be more aspirational than tactical, the tips below can help you get closer to the ideal.

TIP #1 MAKE LISTS: Make lists in notebooks, your email program, OmniGraffle, project sites (I love Basecamp), spreadsheets, and multi-colored sticky-notes. Your lists help make a map of where you are going as well as laying out the directions for how to get there. Lists provide focus in an environment where you are exposed to a lot of information and distractions.

When making lists, consider how re-usable or shareable they need to be. Does each list need to track items to completion or are your lists an aid to commit them to memory? Determining this will help you make the choice between digital and analog formats, as things that need to be tracked are more likely to be shared at one point or another.

BE IN THE LOOP (ALWAYS)

I ask that everyone on the project team 'cc' me on every project related email. My intention is not to have a say in everything, or to be all Big Brother, but to have visibility into everything so I don't have to ask folks "what's going on?" all the time. Often the response to that question results in complex or summarized threads of information. Being and staying in the loop is critical because it allows me to be proactive about addressing issues rather than reactive.

TIP #2 TRIAGE EMAIL THOUGHTFULLY: Consider setting up a filter or tag on the email that you're cc'd on and triage it from the rest of your email. That way you can separate the project related communication stream you should monitor from the project related email that you need to act on. Information is critical but maintaining focus on what you need to do is more important.

KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING NEXT

Whatever I am doing, I dig into the details, question assumptions, and know the process to the point of being able to explain things to anyone who asks. I want to always be able to talk about what is going on with my project and why any particular thing is important to the overall objective.

TIP #3 PLAN TO REPLAN: Revisit your plan weekly, not just as a reminder to track progress and be aware of upcoming milestones, but to add new information. Ask yourself, "What might we need to do in the next couple of weeks that isn't represented in the plan?" Make a note of it and ask questions about it. You may uncover risks or identify unforeseen tasks.

KNOW WHAT IS ABOVE AND WHAT IS BELOW THE LINE

Scott Berkun, consultant, friend of Adaptive Path, and author of Making Things Happen, describes his experience as a program manger for Microsoft's Internet Explorer as an exercise in holding the line. Every project has a goal. Every idea, concept, or feature that is developed needs to be mapped to a specific project goal. If there isn't a clear relationship between goals and features then that idea is not included. As Scott would say, it is "below the line". It is critical that I am able to identify what is valuable to the overall solution and what is a distraction. Distractions should be held for another release, another product or another lifetime.

TIP #4 REVISIT THE GOALS EVERY TIME YOU EVALUATE: A project's goals and objectives are your guiding light. Keep a copy of them easily accessible and review them when evaluating progress with stakeholders, and use them before design reviews to set the appropriate context for the evaluation.

DON’T BE A PRISONER TO THE SCHEDULE

Good solutions depend on a process that people can follow. Mapping that process to how people work provides a schedule. Schedules have critical points where decisions need to be made or things need to be handed off to other folks. These are often referred to as Milestones. Milestones are often scrutinized as a measurement of how successful I am at managing the project. For some people, progress is measured quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Are you meeting milestones or not? That's what they want to know. But good solutions aren't run like a clock. Good solutions adapt to changing circumstances and deliver what is needed for the project to be a success. My job is to understand how to shift tasks, adjust effort, or change dates to make it a success.

Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin, and another friend of Adaptive Path says, "the person who is best able to describe the problem is most likely to be trusted with solving it." This is important not only to win the project assignment, but also to convince people who have already have had their expectations set, to adjust the plan in order for the project to be a success. I don't believe shifting the plan is a sign of failure. The earlier I am able to adjust the approach and move forward, the better I am at my job. I am responsible for delivering the best solution for my clients and I am responsible for making the case for changing tasks, timelines, and resources to do the best work possible.

TIP #5 MANAGE UP USING QUALITATIVE DATA: Breakout of the status report trap. Measuring progress quantitatively is important but the success of the project will be measured qualitatively when it's done. Incorporate sketches, flows and videos into your reports. Less information is better if you can get people to focus on what is important.

I have more tips that I will be sharing with you in a few weeks, for now let me know what tips or advice you have for project, product, program managers!

]]> 1097@http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/ by Brian Cronin 2009-05-06T13:34:19-08:00 http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/001097.php http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ap_essays/~3/_F-l6xkW8xQ/001077.php Break the ice early

Picture a small theater with seats covered in a dark red fabric. The floor, stage, and curtain are all black. There are no windows. Scattered throughout the first three rows are 15 people. Some look excited. Others seem nervous. One woman looks like she might throw up. One man is bouncing his knee up and down so hard a book on the seat next to him falls to the floor.

Our Improv coach appears and introduces herself. I expect we will remain in our seats while she explains to us what we'll be doing for the next three hours. Instead, she orders us onto the stage and tells us to stand in a big circle, hands down at our sides. I am terrified, but do as I'm told.

We jump right into our first Improv exercise. We each have to say our name, perform some kind of gesture and corresponding sound without planning it in advance. We can't repeat any gestures or sounds that come before our turn. Our coach goes first. She calls out, "Zoe!" then mimes shooting guns with her fingers and yells "Bang! Bang!" She looks ridiculous. We laugh. To make it a little more difficult on us, she has us repeat what the person to our right does before we do our own name, gesture, and sound. The person to our left repeats what we just did, and then they do their name, gesture, and sound. This goes on until we get around the circle, back to the first person.

I'm three quarters of the way around the circle, watching many of the obvious hand gestures get taken. People are doing crazy things with their bodies. The sounds range from grunts, yelps, and screeches, to animal noises. I hear a turkey gobble and someone about four people down moos. I'm growing more and more anxious as my turn gets closer. I have no idea what I am going do. I worry that I will be paralyzed when it's my turn. I'm close to freaking out.

The guy to my right says "Sam", reaches behind his left leg to touch his right heel, then barks like a dog. I repeat everything he does and feel totally and completely humiliated as I bark. Then without thinking I yell, "Pam" then slap the tops of my thighs twice and raise my arms to chest level, giving two thumbs up and then I yodel. I have never yodeled before. I have no idea where that yodel came from. I am overcome by a sense of gratitude toward the woman on my left as I sense everyone's eyes move from me to her and I hear her say my name, slap her thighs and yodel. My little moment of humiliation is over.

By the time we've made our way around the circle we can all feel the change in the room. We're looser, we're laughing, people look relieved. I feel connected to my classmates after just five minutes of silliness. We've just had a shared experience that leveled the playing field.

Not only does an exercise like this break down social barriers, it also forces participation, risk-taking, and sets the tone for future participation. There wasn't one person in our group who didn't go for it when their turn came. For those of us who were shy, it made us feel a little braver and tad more capable of putting ourselves out there during the exercises and scene work to come. Surprisingly, I found that for the rest of the six weeks, I was often one of the first to volunteer when participation was called for.

Imagine how valuable this kind of activity could be at the start of a project kick-off meeting, for instance. Once your stakeholder clucks like a chicken you've set the tone for the rest of the project. Fear of saying the wrong thing or putting a stupid idea out there evaporates in a post-clucking, barking, yodeling world. And you've indicated right from the beginning that you invite (and expect!) your colleagues' involvement

Next time you're running a meeting, giving a talk where you want input or throwing a party, try playing the name game and see what happens.

This is an impossible thing for most people and it was fascinating to watch my classmates learn to accept their flubs and quickly move on to the next thing. For some, having permission to fail was nothing short of transformative. In Improv there is no time to get hung up on wishing you had done something differently. By the time you start beating yourself up about it, the group is on to the next thing and you'd better be paying attention.

Each class began with a few warm up exercises during which there were many opportunities to practice failing good-naturedly. Here are a few of the things we tried:

Ball: Stand in a circle and bat a soccer (or similar sized) ball around the room, keeping it in the air for as long as possible, counting aloud in unison each time the ball changes hands. Start over without missing a beat if the ball hits the ground or the same person touches it twice in a row. If you mess up a shot, throw your arms over your head, do some jazz hands, and yell "Woo hoo!" Repeat as many times as necessary until you get to 30.

Name Game: Similar to the name game mentioned earlier, but instead of just repeating the name, gesture, and sound of the person immediately to your right, you have to perform the name, gesture, and sound of every person to your right, in order. The further you are from the first person, the more in the moment you have to be. Everyone will fail miserably at some point. Woo hoo then move on.

Categories: Six or seven people stand in a line, shoulder to shoulder. Someone who is not in the line yells out a category: diseases or car models or breakfast cereals. Each person in the line has to call out something in that category in quick succession -- Wheaties! Frosted Flakes! Captain Crunch! Whoever repeats something that someone has already called out or yells a non-cereal answer, is out. Throw up your hands and woo hoo! as you exit the line and take your seat.

Understanding and accepting that everyone will and should make mistakes, takes the pressure off of trying to do a scene or activity perfectly. Nobody fears messing up because messing up is expected and required. Some of the most hilarious and magical moments happened when mistakes were made.

In another exercise, again, standing in a circle, we were asked to perform a small movement. Finger snapping, raising and lowering our shoulders, whatever we felt like doing. We were told to keep our eyes on the person directly across the circle and mirror what they were doing. Just when we got the hang of doing both our own movement plus theirs, our coach asked us to add whatever movement the person next to our partner was doing, which in turn, was mirrored by our original person, then by us, so on and so on. As layers of new movement were added, people began to get flustered and make mistakes, and as a result, new, mutant movements were introduced and absorbed into the process.

Improv exercises like these also serve as a great prompt for getting all those creative juices flowing, plus they put you in the right frame of mind to collaborate with others. arty some of these exercises before your next brainstorming session.

Once our class moved on to scene work, the focus moved from I to YOU.

In order for a scene to work, you have to pay attention to what the others around you are saying and doing. To be successful you have to work together.

To illustrate this point, our Improv coach asked for volunteers for a dating scene. It was simple: Doorbell rings, woman opens door, man is at door. What happens after that is all improvised. We were confused though. She had asked for six volunteers. Three of us had to link arms and speak and act as the woman, the other three had to link arms and speak and act as the man.

Each trio had to talk and move in unison. No one was allowed to lead the action. Each word was to be chosen at the moment, unanimously. In order to do this, we had to speak very, very slowly and look each other in the eye at all times, anticipating the next word together. Not only did we have to pay attention and work with our two partners, we also had to stay aware of the other trio and accept and react to their offerings to the scene.

In good Improv scene work, you practice spontaneity, you pay attention, make eye contact, listen, accept the ideas of your partners, try to be obvious rather than original or clever. You also use probably the most well-known improv technique, "yes, and." "Yes, and" occurs when you take an idea, validate then add to it. "Yes, and" keeps things moving while "yes, but" shuts everything down. I'm sure you can think of ten instances where "Yes, and" can be of value in brainstorming and facilitating.

My favorite improv nugget is this: Be fun to play with. There were two or three people in my class I always wanted to do scene work with. They made me better. My constant giggling didn't fluster them; they just worked it into the scene. They weren't thrown off when I couldn't think of anything to say, they accepted my silence and then offered me lines I could respond to. They made me look good.

Have you ever been in a meeting and witnessed someone offer a "Yes, and" or help a colleague put a finer point on an argument they were making? That person is fun to play with.

Bring some Improv into your work and let us know how it goes.

* I took the Foundation 1 class at BATS Improv in San Francisco. See their class offerings video of the 2-headed man.

* This video gives you a quick glimpse of what goes on during an Improv class.

*If you're really good, you can be like Stephen Colbert on Whose Line is it Anyway.

I wouldn't try to ski down a mountain on tennis shoes, but for some reason, I have always assumed that I should be able to pick up a crayon or a quill or an old stub of a pencil and produce the same industrial grade renderings. How foolish of me. Only recently have I realized the importance of having a good kit of supplies, and using the right tools for the right things.

Here's what's in my sketching toolkit, and how each of the tools helps me be a better user experience designer.

I bet I know what you're thinking. A mesh bag isn't a sketching tool. Sure it is! Here's why: it pulls together all of your sketching instruments and makes them easy to grab and go. This means you're more likely to bring your sketching tools with you, and, consequently, use them in more situations.

If you can sketch what people are talking about right there, in the middle of the discussion, you can use the drawing itself to clarify what people mean and give everyone a shared image. Sketches like these that are created in "real time" in conversations have incredible sticking power in the imagination, and they tend to be referred to again and again afterwards. "Remember that picture we drew the other day with the big box and the two circles. I was thinking that there's a third circle we forgot to add..."

If you're leery of bringing juvenile-looking stick figures into your professional business deliverables, the warm gray marker instantly dresses up a sketch. I just use the gray as a highlighter, adding in simple shadows and creating a subtle sense of foreground and background. This gives your sketches depth, and often makes it easier for the eye to decipher the situation.

A valuable tool for the beginning sketcher, the blue photo pencil is used to roughly map out the sketch before going over it again in ink. The blue pencil line is easy to erase, and if you scan or take pictures of the drawing afterwards, the blue isn't visible.

Be careful not use the blue photo pencil as a crutch, though. The whole idea of sketching is that it's not art -- it doesn't require perfection or a fussy attention to detail. And the blue pencil admittedly gives you the ability to be a bit fussier than perhaps you need to be. But for sketching storyboards, or when it's important to render people in certain positions and poses, the blue pencil is a godsend.

To call attention to parts of the sketch, plain and simple. The red marker is especially good for things like arrows and motion indicators.

How I love the chisel tip sharpie. Like any good tool, it's a multi-tasker. I use it most commonly for adjusting the line weight in sketches to call attention to the things that matter most. Adjusting line weight (basically, just retracing over certain parts of the drawing) is one of the simplest and most effective sketching cheats. It instantly creates contrast and visual hierarchy, which makes the sketch more pleasant to the eye and easier for the brain to decode.

The regular sharpie is the workhorse of the toolkit. You'll use it to sketch people, diagrams, labels, interfaces, bounding boxes, arrows, and more. In fact, it's best to have a few of these in your kit at any time, since the tip of the regular sharpie quickly gets worn down and mounded from much use.

The super fine sharpie is particularly useful for sketching interfaces. As a first step in design at Adaptive Path, we'll commonly sketch many thumbnail-sized interface ideas before fleshing out the details in a smaller number of larger, more detailed sketches. The thumbnail sized sketch is so small that it forces you to boil the idea down to basic essence. Headlines, blocks of text, places where photos and features would go -- these become light allusions in the form of squares and squiggles. Rendering all those squares and squiggles in a way that still looks meaningful requires a good fine tip.

I also use the chisel tip sharpie for lettering. Lettering and labels are the unsung heros of sketches, in my opinion. We worry a lot about the image we're sketching, but as Jessica Hagy demonstrated so delightfully in her book, Indexed, a clear, punchy label pointing to the right thing is what really gives the sketch instant "readability."

Drafting dots turn any vertical surface into a display and presentation space for your sketches. These round stickers adhere to most surfaces, leave no residue behind, and stay sticky for a long time (so you can rehang your sketches elsewhere). Hanging sketches may seem basic, but putting them up so others can see turns sketching from a private ideation tool into a group problem solving tool.

So, yes, I kind of have a thing for supplies. Office supplies. Sewing supplies. Don't even get me started on the hardware store. But of course, what really matters is not the supplies at all. Pictures, sketches -- these are not the destination. They're simply there to get you where we're going.

In designing for the frontier future, sketching is perhaps our most unfettered tool for showing how something that currently exists only in the imagination will look, behave, morph, flex, and, most importantly, how it will interact with us. If we designed every new application with the Visio stencil set, we'd be living in a world of radio buttons and dropdowns. That may have been the case in the past, but that's certainly not looking like it'll be the case in the mobile, multi-channel, service-aware world we're designing for now. Which means that it's time to consider new tools, or perhaps old ones.

As designers, we exist in a complex ecosystem, balancing the needs of diverse constituents, striving to do the best work we can. When approached strategically, collaboration can help you communicate more effectively with stakeholders, gracefully negotiate political waters, and use collective experience to generate ideas or inspiration. Armed with rich, first-hand source material, you can confidently make informed, intelligent decisions.

I advocate for a very specific type of collaboration; I call it structured collaboration. It's not rocket science but it can be a powerful addition to your toolbox. Unlike simply going into a room and working together informally, structured collaboration consists of thoughtfully designed work sessions, using visually-based techniques, physical materials (stickies, paper, pens) and planned activities to move the design process forward. Structured collaboration is loosely based on Participatory Design techniques, where users are directly engaged in the design process. Since these users are typically not designers, games, activities, and other visual tools help them express their ideas in ways designers can interpret. Structured collaboration does not replace other design tools; it simply helps designers better understand and balance the needs of a diverse set of constituents.

As designers (in the broadest sense), we focus a lot of energy on technical skills but often neglect or downplay the softer "people" skills. Daniel Goleman calls these skills "Emotional Intelligence." They are as important to our success as IQ and technical proficiency. Qualities of emotional intelligence include, amongst others, social skills and empathy. Social skills, in Goleman's definition, include "proficiency in managing relationships and building networks" and "an ability to find common ground and rapport." If you possess social skills, you will be more effective in leading change and being persuasive. Empathy includes "the ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people" and "skills in treating people according to their emotional reactions." We talk about empathy with our users but we also need to cultivate empathy for our stakeholders, too.

Think this sounds fluffy? Yeah - I used think the same way. I'll make it more concrete. Imagine this typical design process for a home page: you do some stakeholder interviews, you write up a brief, your team goes away, works hard, and spends weeks developing some brilliant concepts. You give your big presentation to your key stakeholders and BAM! You've totally missed the mark, or at least your stakeholders think so. Everyone is disappointed and frustrated.

How did that happen? You've failed to communicate, to find common ground and build trust. Assuming your design skills are rock solid and your stakeholders aren't evil (and they almost never are), you've missed some critical information. This brings us back to social skills and empathy, right? For instance. consider the possibility that your stakeholder hadn't completely thought through the problem until you showed him something. After all, he's not the designer. You are. Or, what if he is worried about his own department's performance? Perhaps, since he lacks a design vocabulary, he is asserting his needs the only way he knows how. His reaction might be more emotionally charged than normal. He's had few other outlets up until this point, so he's using the presentation to let you know his concerns. There could be a hundred other reasons that you are unaware of.

When you take a structured approach to collaboration, you can nip some of these communication problems in the bud. You allow people a chance to weigh in. You establish communication lines and begin to better understand how people work, what results they need, and how to best play to their strengths. By holding carefully planned work sessions, you can use visual techniques and activities to answer questions, foster discussion, and bring your whole team -- stakeholders and all -- together around a specific problem.

How would this work? In the design problem I mentioned above, you might first hold a two-hour visioning work session with your stakeholders. Together, you'll imagine the possibilities for the home page. You might ask them to draw their ideal home page or assemble it from pre-made parts. You might ask them to share examples from other sites that work for them. You might bring in your own examples. The examples or drawings are not the interesting part. What they say about them is. Listen closely for concerns, preferences, and preconceptions. You don't necessarily have to accommodate them, just be aware of them. This is your raw material.

Half-way through the project, spend an hour with the same stakeholders to look at, discuss, and evolve some early concepts. Hang your concepts on the wall. Ask for specific kinds of feedback and post questions you'd like answered on the wall next to the concepts. Point out concerns you have. Recall the concerns you heard expressed in the vision session and show how you've addressed them. Give people sticky notes and ask them to write down their concerns or questions directly on your concepts. Again, you don't have to accommodate all the feedback, just take it into consideration. Your goal is to hear their concerns and needs early while you can still address them. They can also hear your concerns early and take them into consideration.

The real benefit of these two simple sessions is trust. You are building a common ground and sense of rapport. Finally, when you share your work, your stakeholders won't be surprised and they are less likely to nitpick it; they'll have seen ideas evolve from the beginning and better understand how to engage with you. They also know that you've heard their concerns and have addressed them. Your critique will be more productive and informed critique.

One word of caution: you are still the designer and still need to do the design work. Don't get run over. Work sessions are made or broken on effective facilitation. This means that, as the session's facilitator, you need to set the stage for the session, elucidate expectations, and handle conflict gracefully when it arises. If you don't think you can facilitate a session alone, get help from a manager, project sponsor, or another designer. Whatever you do, don't abdicate authority to the loudest mouth in the room. Be polite, but assertive. If the session goes south, table it. Take a break. Re-group. Be clear about what you need and what you can offer. Ask stakeholders what they need from you and be clear about what you can and can't do. If you are critiquing design work, just critique it. Don't solve it on the spot. If you are generating ideas, generate ideas. Don't commit to one.

Build collaboration and work sessions into your practice. It might be daunting at first but try it. Start small and simple, gradually including your stakeholders. Be patient through the transition; there are bound to be fears and missteps. Keep trying to foster strong communication and clear expectations through work sessions. Over time, you'll get better at it and people will trust the process more. You'll be able to make decisions more confidently. The social relationships and empathy you develop will not only make your job more satisfying but will help you design more efficiently, and increase the quality of your work.

]]> 1061@http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/ by Sarah B. Nelson 2009-03-31T10:33:03-08:00 http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/001061.php http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ap_essays/~3/Su2uODiCgE4/001049.php We're excited to bring Sara Beckman from the faculty at the Haas School of Business back into the Adaptive Path fold. We first worked with her in 2003 on our groundbreaking report, Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience.

With one foot in business and the other in academe, Sara brings both a practical and research orientation to her understanding of how design drives business value.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Sara about the value of design and how organizations are approaching this growing challenge.

[KR] Welcome, Sara. It's great to talk to you today.

Sara, your work addresses that "holy grail" of business & design: how to measure the value of design. There's now increasing empirical evidence that substantiates the impact, but challenges remain.

Let's start with the basics: When you say "value of design" what do you mean, and what's the meaningful difference that measuring value makes?

[SB] Well, Kate, in simple terms I think about the value of design as the contribution that design makes to the bottom line performance of a company. In short, how does design add to the profitability of the organization? These days, of course, we talk more and more about "integrated bottom line" performance -- including environmental and social factors along with the traditional economic view of firm performance. This expansion allows design to make an even broader contribution to the firm.

Why should I want to be able to measure the value of design? Because doing so adds credibility to the argument that an investment in design ought to be made. For years we've provided anecdotes or stories of how design has made a difference in any number of settings; having measures and empirical data strengthens the arguments that we've been supporting with stories.

Remember, many of the organizations into which we are trying to sell the idea of "good design" or "design thinking" have been driven by classic marketing and market research approaches -- having lots of data matters. Bringing data that "proves" the contribution of design to the "integrated bottom line" makes designers fit in better with that data-driven approach.

[KR] Unlike classic marketing approaches, however, this is a new message, one that has emerged only in the past few years. How does this message go over with strategic leaders? Are companies starting to "get it"?

[SB] Absolutely. The considerable visibility given to design, design thinking, and their partner, innovation, in recent years has raised awareness significantly. High profile companies like Apple and Google that engage in design and innovation as a way of life are leading other firms to believe in the possibility that design matters. And, in many large established companies, design leadership is being promoted to higher levels in the organization -- there are more and more Vice Presidents of Design, for example.

[KR] One thing that is often mentioned is that the language of design and the language of business seldom align. What's your take on this?

[SB] I'm not sure I think of it as alignment -- designers and business people speak different languages altogether. So, it isn't even as simple as alignment -- translation is required. Designers and MBAs go through completely different educational processes, so it isn't surprising that they would speak different languages, and even think differently.

The world of designers is far more visual, designers engage far more in experimentation and play, and designers learn to regularly engage in critiques of one another's work, an important process for improving and iterating on their work.

MBA students, on the other hand, learn in a world of words and numbers, have fewer places or spaces in which to play with ideas and build upon them, and receive feedback on their work in very different ways than that provided in a crit. With these major differences in how they are taught, to say nothing about the content of what they are taught, it is not surprising that they speak different languages.

Some early research that we've been doing on the students in our new product development class -- that involves MBA, engineering and design students -- suggests that there may be significant differences in the types of students that are drawn to the different programs in the first place. So, it may be that designers and MBAs think and work differently even before they become designers and MBAs.

[KR] With all these natural differences in approach, it seems like we need tools to act like a Rosetta Stone to translate across different audiences. How can design managers address this challenge?

[SB] Well, bridging the design-business divide isn't all that different in many ways than bridging the engineering-marketing divide or the finance-human resources management divide or any of the other disciplinary or functional separations we create in both the academic and business world.

To accomplish the cross-disciplinary or cross-functional goals of an organization requires working in teams that bring together people from the various functions. The members of those teams have to listen carefully to the language used by the other team members, thoughtfully present their own work in terms that the others can understand and over time build enough trust and understanding of one another that they can value, integrate and leverage one another's expertise.

There are many academic programs now -- our new product development class is one, the new Design MBA program at the California College of the Arts is another -- that try to give students a head start in working with others outside their own disciplines.

In short, just as you might do in preparing yourself to visit another country or another culture, design and business leaders must take the time to understand a bit about the place they are visiting -- a little of the language, the customs, the ways of thinking.

[KR] That's a great metaphor. Considering the cultural shifts across functional areas is a helpful way of thinking about the communication issues. And different corporate cultures assess value and measure it in different ways.

You've done original research into the value of design to organizations. Overall, what types of outcomes are most important to measure?

[SB] Ideally, at the firm level, I'd measure impact on the social, environmental and economic outcomes the firm wishes to achieve. Realistically, profitability is probably the most important of those for most firms. Profitability in turn is driven by revenues and costs -- so assessing the impact on growing revenues or reducing costs is at the core of assessing a design.

For a given design project or effort, there may be more specific goals -- capture market share, increase margins, reduce distributions costs -- that design has an opportunity to affect and thus should try to measure.

[KR] So if you could create the perfect world of measuring design, what 3 things would you want companies to do to achieve measurable outcomes?

[SB] That depends at what level in the organization you are trying to measure the impact of design. If you are looking to create a corporate organization that will bring better design to the company overall, then I would look for a set of specific objectives that are important to the company.

Sam Lucente at HP talks about design to simplify, design to differentiate and design to innovate. In a highly cost-conscious environment, design to simplify -- e.g., to reduce the number of different HP logos used on products -- provided a highly measureable objective, quick returns, and confidence that design could contribute. (Read the story at Fast Company.)

So, at a strategic level, it is important to connect measures of design impact to things that the organization cares about.

[KR] And at a more tactical level?

[SB] At a more tactical level, in some ways the answer is the same. For a new product development team, for example, there are generally specific objectives to be met with the new product. In what ways can design help achieve those objectives? Of course, there may be times when design needs to add an objective or two to the list -- is the solution usable, how can the design maximize customer satisfaction?

Now, all that said, before you can achieve measurable outcomes, you have to be willing to try something in the first place. So, companies that haven't tried design just have to rely on the data coming from elsewhere that shows the value of design and be willing to give it a try. In this way, design is no different than, say, the quality movement.

Companies that invested early (think many years ago now) in quality programs provided the results and data that "proved" to other companies that the investment was worthwhile. With results from the empirical studies that have been done in the past few years, and the considerable publicity design has gotten, hopefully we're well on our way with this agenda.

[KR] Thanks, Sara. This is a terrific introduction to thinking about measuring design. We're looking forward to hearing more at the conference.

You can hear more from Sara and others leading the charge in managing experiences at MX 2009. Join us on March 1-3, 2009 in San Francisco.

Slow Food for Thought

Paula Wellings

In the past few years, I've migrated from being a hardcore book and research reader to avidly surfing a rather random collection of online articles, mailing lists, blogs, Facebook updates, and tweets. My writing has followed almost the same trajectory. While there is certainly something compelling about the immediacy of an online conversation and the ability to flit about like at a cocktail party, I often leave reading the web with only a vague idea of what I've read. It's less like I'm reading broadly and more like I'm nibbling on a delicious collection of non-sequiturs.

For 2009, I am resolving to explore what might be considered slow food for thought, including:

• Bringing synthesis and reflection to my miscellaneous web snacking activities or curtailing them.
• Endeavoring to read excellent books and articles that people spent months and years thinking through and crafting into being.
• Committing to writing texts that are longer than 140 characters and address more than what I'm doing right now.

If you are fond of slow food for thought, please send recommendations for especially compelling, delicious books from this past year that have made you brighter, wiser, stronger, faster -- you know, the books that will help me resist the siren call of the New York Times' Most E-Mailed list.

Baby Steps

Jennifer Bolduc

As a working mom with two little girls, life can seem pretty hectic at times. I am always forgetting what time things start or who needs to be where when. I constantly tell myself that if I had my digital calendar up to date, I could save myself time and frustration. I recently received an Evite for a birthday party next Saturday but my two year old has soccer on Saturdays and I couldn't remember the exact time. Before I RSVP'd, I had to open another window, search for the soccer website, search for her class, and see the time. Then I RSVP'd to the Evite saying we'd be a little late. If my calendar had the soccer class on it, this would have taken me five stress free seconds instead of five frustrated minutes.

My New Year's Resolution for 2009 is to get organized and utilize the technology tools that would work best for me. Some of these things are really simple, actually, like figuring out how to sync my iCal with my calendar on my iPhone. But by the end of January, I will have this figured out.

Along with getting the sync to work, I need to do a brain dump and fill up my calendar with all the appointments, birthdays, events, and to dos that currently reside in my head. This goes for both work life and personal life.

Then there's the whole paperwork organization. Maybe I'll save that for 2010. Baby steps.

Continue to explore design's role in society, explore beyond the screen and give it all away

Jared Cole

Continue to explore design's role in society:

My last year of grad school focused heavily on what many might call non-traditional forms of design. Specifically, I was interested in how design might help (re)solve complex social problems. This year, I would like to continue to explore how we as designers can bring our abilities of facilitation, visualization, synthesization, and articulation to the complexities of today's most pressing social concerns. What can we do to help?

Continue to explore beyond the screen:

When we speak about interaction design or experience design, the conversation almost always comes back to the design of web pages and applications. While this is an area that continues to be ripe with opportunity, I belive that the screen is just one small facet of interaction and experience design. This year I would like to continue working in the "non-traditional" and take part in AP's efforts beyond the screen, and into things, services, organizations, and the larger world.

Continue to give it all away:

Over the next year, as I work to fulfill my resolutions, I will likely make a number of discoveries and encounter a few stumbles. In either case, the lessons will be valuable to me, and perhaps to others as well. This year I would like to make greater efforts to publicly share and discuss both the discoveries and stumbles.

Jumping From Tall Buildings, In Leaps and Bounds

Teresa Brazen

In the opening of the James Bond movie, Casino Royale, a man leaps from buildings and runs up walls with nothing supporting or suspending him. Those movements are not fancy tricks; they are part of a formal discipline called parkour. How does someone get to a point where they surpass fear and willingly throw themselves from a building, I wonder? In my exploration of that question, I interviewed Seng Chen, a traceur (practitioner of parkour) on my podcast, Tea with Teresa. I then took a crack at parkour myself, which proved to be a painfully enlightening exploration.

That experience has me thinking a lot about fear, and its impact on how fully (or not) we live our lives. In retrospect, I realize that most of my fears either never came to fruition or were manageable, at worst. So this year, I resolve to do something I am really scared of...which turns out to be enrolling in an improv acting class. The idea of standing in front of a room full of people expecting entertainment on the spot is...phew...frightening. I don't actually expect to get over my fear; I just want to do it anyway, in spite of the fear...over and over again. It is, after all, easier to do scary things the more you do them. And so...off to improv class I go. Granted, it's not the same as throwing myself off a perfectly good building, but, hey, you've got to start somewhere.

New Day, New Me

Nancy Markiet

Due to beliefs that are very dear to me, I don't make New Year's resolutions. Instead, I do my best everyday to apply the new things that I learn, knowing that they will be to my benefit. Everyday I think about what I did during the day and how it affected those around me. Some questions that I constantly ask myself are: What aspect of my personality do I need to work on? How can I remain more positive even if it's not easy to? These are some of the goals that I have for myself everyday. My experiences during the past two years have made me realize that life is precious and you need to take into account how your decisions will affect you and those around you.

Keeping in Touch

Analisa Lono

The past six months have been formative for me in many ways. I made the transition from college student to an actual adult. It was a bit scary, having real responsibilities, to go to work everyday all day, going to bed at a reasonable hour instead of staying up all night, and not having my life mapped out for me anymore. Being left to my own devices doesn't seem as alarming as the realization that since graduation, those people and friends who you were accustomed to spending a majority of my time with have spread to the four corners of the earth in search of achieving greatness.

So this year, I resolve to do my best to stay in contact with those who I have met and befriended in my college years and beyond. It is easy to get caught in the daily grind, to get so wrapped up in what surrounds your life at the moment, that I often put off that phone call to a friend across the country, or the "Hi, how ya doing?" email. I am going to check in with my friends whom I am not able to see on a weekly basis: See how their lives are doing, sharing our ridiculous stories of life's adventures. Who knows, I just might take advantage of the fact that I miss an old friend so much that a visit might be in order.

Record, Capture, Share

Rachel Glaves

My life is pretty eclectic, but you wouldn't know it from my photos or blog (what blog?). This year my goal is to record and share more. I want to visually capture pieces of all the interesting places, people, events and ideas I come across. Last year, I chose to experience life without worrying about recording much. The idea had a lot of old-school charm and it was easy (never lug the camera anywhere!), but I found that I really missed the ability to share my story with someone later. I felt like I had to rely on words when a picture or video would have been better. A lot of interesting things passed through my life like sand through my fingers. This year, I'm going to treat my visual records as art themselves, and then use them to remember, inspire, share and discover.

And the stakes are high for visual design. Every client knows that visuals are, quite literally, what the customer will see, so they have to be on-brand, have to set the right tone, and work for what they have to accomplish. Design firms, meanwhile, know that without a successful visual design, they can't create a great user experience, and they'll have wasted the time and effort they spent on research, strategy, and interaction design.

How can design teams get to a successful visual design with their clients? To find out when to include visual designers, how to introduce constraints, and how to get good input and feedback, I talked to a couple of AP's resident experts -- Visual Practice Lead Kumi Akiyoshi and Senior Experience Designer Andrew Crow -- as well as some of our friends in the industry, including Michael Polivka, Project Management and Design Engineering Team Lead at Hot Studio; Erica Hall, Lead Strategist at Mule Design; and Laura Scott, Associate Designer at Pentagram.

Getting Started: Involve Visual Designers Early & Often

To make sure visual design succeeds, teams need to include visual designers in the initial scoping phase. Getting them involved early gives them the opportunity to share their expertise, and buy into the timeline that they're going to be working with. Just because the research, strategy, and interaction design phases come first in the process, doesn't mean that they're anymore important than the visual design phase. Kumi points out that this also allows them to voice any concerns right off the bat, and communicate what other project phases they need to be involved in. And getting visual designers working with the whole project team can help everyone better understand how the rest of the team makes decisions.

Sometimes it's impossible to include visual designers in every phase that takes place before visual design starts -- every stakeholder and research interview, or every strategy and interaction design session. When this is the case, the rest of the team should bring them up to speed by reviewing themes that came out of the phases leading up to visual design before they take center stage.

Balancing Constraints

As early as possible, the design team needs to know about any constraints on its work, or on how it will be implemented. The best time to get this information is in the course of initial stakeholder interviews.

If a client has style guides, font specifications, or other formatting specs, designers need these before they begin work. Likewise, they need to know what the development team can and can't handle. For example, rounding corners on pictures is notorious for giving developers headaches. Addressing these kinds of issues early can mitigate problems early. Michael from Hot Studio notes, "Comps are beautiful and may look like the right solution for the client, but their internal team or the CMS they've picked out can't support it. Across the board, it's about getting enough technical representation upfront to provide checks and balances." As Michael also mentions, some visual designers may not do their best work if confronted with too many constraints, so teams need to work to keep them to a minimum. (This is especially true if a team is in the less than ideal situation of bringing on a visual designer late in the project.) "It's important not to clip the designer's wings," he says. They need to be able to apply their expertise, and not simply color in the interaction designer's wireframes. Otherwise the visual design phase may not be as successful as it can be, which can lead to the project as a whole not succeeding. After all, it's the goal of this phase to create something that will be the basis for revamping the client's website, collateral, or entire company identity. And clients hire outside design help because what they've been doing in these areas doesn't work any longer.

Collaborating with the Client

When a visual design team begins work, how do they know where to start? In addition to studying previous phases of the project, they can also conduct a workshop with the client team -- a great way to get critical information that would otherwise take weeks to gather in the course of iterating on designs. There are other ways to get this early, but workshops are collaborative and transparent, building a strong working relationship between the design team and the client.

During these workshops, clients have the opportunity to share existing designs that show how their own problems could be solved. Another useful workshop exercise is drawing up a list of words that best describe the client company or its brand -- Laura Scott notes that Pentagram does this when creating an identity for a client. Pentagram's visual designer then creates clusters of similar words, as well as similar visual elements, giving everyone the chance to discuss which combinations work, and which don't. Using simple methods like dot-voting, the client and design team can then decide collectively which words and images should guide designers in their work.

"Lost in Translation" Prevention

When embarking on this trip to a color-filled world with a client team, we've found it's critical to use concrete examples in discussing designs. There's this great scene in Gary Hustwit's film, Helvetica, where two designers talk about what they need by using musical examples. One says to the other "It feels kind of Erik Satie; it needs to be Debussy." This sort of thing can work well when everyone shares the same frame of reference. But this isn't necessarily true when talking with clients. As Andrew points out, "'clean' can mean 'sparse' to one person and 'straight lines' to another."

Asking for concrete examples, and defining what abstract terms mean, makes for more successful design delivery. The delivery process can be much smoother by explaining guidelines to the client, especially how to provide feedback. This in turn will save your project team time, and increase the client's confidence in the design team.

Showing the Work: A Picture is Not Worth A Thousand Words

When presenting the visual design to the client, it's tempting to forego the foreplay, and do the "big reveal" -- but in this case, a picture is not worth a thousand words.

Before presenting the visual design, it's mission-critical to remind the client of decisions that have been made in shaping it, and about all other factors that influenced the design direction -- including the results of the workshop where both teams were present. Also, if the client team includes a visual designer, figure out how they can support the process. Their designer will likely be the person using the work when the outside design firms steps away. It may work best to get the designer's opinion during the visual design process before presenting it to the rest of the client team, and it will likely work well to have that person attend the presentation, if the client team will rely on their professional opinion in assessing the design.

Above all, it's the design team's responsibility never to put work in front of a client that they wouldn't want to see out in the world. As Laura Scott and Michael Polivka both point out, there's an unwritten law that the client will almost always pick the design direction that the project team knows isn't wise. Putting the wrong design in front of a client can mean having to backpedal, or move a visual design forward even though the team doesn't support it.

Rinse Repeat: Improving the Work

A client may not like any of the visual design directions a design team presents. If this is the case, the team should focus on finding out why each approach solves, or doesn't solve, the client's problem. Getting this information from the client, in writing, ensures that the client both articulates concrete reasons for being dissatisfied, and takes ownership of this opinion.

It's also important to be specific about what the design team needs feedback on in each call. Asking for feedback on the photography or typography, for example, can help the client focus on key elements of a design. Likewise, it's important to have the main client contact collect and consolidate feedback from his or her team, and resolve any internal disagreements, before giving that feedback to the design team.

In my conversation with Erika Hall, she made an important distinction between design feedback and art direction. When soliciting input from a client, it's important to get design feedback, "That doesn't work because it looks too much like the Amazon site and we need to distinguish ourselves from them." It's not useful, she says, to get art direction -- "make that green instead of blue." Laura Scott, meanwhile, points out a good way to steer clients away from giving art direction: delivering three very distinct and different design directions, and not three that look similar. This reduces the chance of winding up with a "dog's dinner" design, as a result of the client asking the team to combine elements of different design directions, to create a new one.

I find that it can be very gratifying to get extremely positive feedback on a review call. When a client says, "This is great," I want to dance out of their office. However, as Erika reminded me, it's important to know not just why a client thinks a specific design direction doesn't solve a problem, but why another one does. Requesting this information also sets a precedent, showing how important good feedback is, and reduces the chances that a project will drag on, with additional feedback coming days or weeks later.

Finding the Wizard of Oz

When we're in the weeds of the design process, things are rarely neat and jolly. However, by remembering to: involve the visual designers early and often, gather all constraints early, avoid presenting visuals to clients without first walking through the decisions that influenced the design, and presenting three distinctly different design directions the visual design process can go more smoothly.

Clients can participate more successfully in the design process by working with the design team in workshops or other collaborative activities, provide concrete examples of what they think will solve their problem, and provide feedback as opposed to art direction.

If you follow the yellow brick road, you'll bring your clients to the Wizard of Oz. This place is also known as a happy client that raves about your visual design direction.

About two years ago, Adaptive Path experienced an upwelling of analog approaches. We started using design tools that jumped out of the screen and into the real world. We started using our hands to make things. Alongside our computers there appeared slabs of blank paper. Rather than reaching for a mouse, we started reaching for a Sharpie. Large rolls of paper and drafting dots became part of the lingua franca of client working sessions. Sketching was the new black.

And we saw the impact of these approaches in many ways: more visibility for design solutions. More engagement in collaborative working sessions with clients. More design artifacts co-created in real-time. Our design solutions got faster and stronger.

There's a lot of research to support the idea that visual thinking activates different parts of our brains than language thinking. Pictures allow a holistic view of something. "Seeing is believing" holds especially true when working with a diverse group of people.

Graphic elements create stronger memory and recognition points; it's easier to remember an image than a page of text. Illustrations communicate ideas faster than descriptions, because processing pictures requires less "translation" than written language. This means more meaning in less time. In addition, there is a tactile pleasure to hand sketching that is rich and engaging.

As these approaches have moved virally throughout the company, we've embraced them in a number of ways:

• Last October, The Grove Consultants held a 3-day internal training for AP staff on graphic facilitation.
• Using our new skills, we graphically captured the sessions at the Adaptive Path MX conference.
• Jesse sketches his way through the Aurora concept in this video.
• Leah and Brandon taught a range of analog techniques in Good Design Faster at UX week.
• We hosted Mark Baskinger to teach an internal training for AP staff, immediately followed by his workshop at UX week.
• Peter blogged about the siren song of pencil and paper.

Analog tools of pen and paper have had a major impact on our work. Looking back over the past two years, there are overall themes in the hands-to-paper trend. Below are four techniques that have supported more rigorous capture and exploration of ideas, fostered clearer communication of concepts, and as a result have enabled better and faster design. Each one is illustrated with a visual so that you can see how the different methods shift the nature of the info.

1) Hand Sketching
In order to become adept at capturing ideas and concepts visually, we need to know the basics of hand sketching. For the work we do, hand sketching falls into two main categories: drawing people, places & things; and drawing abstract concepts and ideas.

Drawing people, places, things
Getting comfortable with hand-sketching things, people and objects is key to communicating complex ideas for service design, product design and environments/spaces. We need to be able to communicate scenarios and interfaces clearly and visually, but at low fidelity. Tools in the toolkit are the basics of composition, shape, line quality, color, perspective and creating abstract human forms. Put together, these elements comprise a visual language for telling compelling stories visually and quickly.

What it's good for:

• Illustrating product concepts and product interfaces.
• Creating scenarios and storyboards.
• Drawing physical spaces.

What it looks like:


View the larger image on Flickr.

Drawing abstract concepts & ideas
Conceptual drawing captures the essence and structure of ideas. These are diagrams, models, figures and charts. All can be drawn by hand, and the opportunities are unlimited…new forms and models emerge frequently. Key to this approach is developing the visual grammar necessary to make shapes and lines that tell the right story to communicate compelling information.

What it's good for:

• Using simple shapes and lines to create compelling pictures of abstract concepts.
• Distilling thoughts from a group into a unified, clear picture.
• Creating visuals that "solve problems and sell ideas" (Dan Roam's great quote!)
• Forwarding conversations with product and business stakeholders.

What it looks like:



View the larger image on Flickr.

2) Graphic recording and graphic facilitation
Graphic Recording refers to the act of transcribing a meeting using large display graphics and words without a lot of interaction with the group. Graphic facilitation is the process of combining graphic work with meeting facilitation, sometimes in a team with a recorder, and often alone. Both methods rely on accurate listening, on-the-fly composition, and mixing words and images to accurately record the happenings of a conversation, presentation or event. These concepts were pioneered by David Sibbert of The Grove Consultants.

What it's good for:

• Capturing group conversation and contributions in real time.
• Using visuals and note-taking to guide the conversation.
• Developing a language of symbols to communicate potent concepts.
• Create an artifact of a shared experience.

3) Mind Mapping
Mind mapping explores ideas via radiant and associative thinking. This enables you to delve into an idea space in a structured yet fluid way. By creating mind maps, you discover and reveal the elements at play in and around an idea. Starting with a central concept and radiating out in a free-form star-like structure is a natural and powerful way to explore and flesh out an idea.

What it's good for:

• Pushing your thinking out from a central concept or idea.
• Organizing your thoughts and ideas.
• Breaking away from lists and creating spatial notation.
• Figuring out what the heart of an idea is.
• Understanding the scope of a concept.

What it looks like:



View the larger image on Flickr.

4) Sketchnoting
Sketchnoting is a personal form of capturing and/or exploring information visually. Really, it's simply journaling with imagery. This is not a new concept; visual journaling has been around for ages, but it's gaining a lot of momentum for people who attend events and capture the information in visually compelling ways. There's a lot of overlap with graphic recording, but sketchnoting tends to happen on a personal and individual level, not in front of a group or for the purposes of group share-outs.

One thing is for sure: people love to look at other people's visual stuff. Words? Not interesting. Pictures? You have to beat people off with a stick. It's a natural and wonderful connecting tool. People are enchanted by the visual communications of other people.

What it's good for:

• Capturing a presentation, talk, article, book or personal idea exploration.
• Combining words and pictures to illustrate and evoke meaning.
• Developing a personal style for visual communications.
• Maintaining a strong personal visual practice.
• Sharing ideas with others: friends, colleagues and community members.

What it looks like:



View the larger image on Flickr.

Further Inspiration
We've listed links and additional inspirations on the blog. What methods and approaches have you experienced that have furthered your practices? Please share them in the comments. New tools are always welcome!

Events like VizThink help us learn ways to further our work in interesting ways. And resources like the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods keep us inspired with how many options there are for communicating concepts.

These are only a few of the ways we've found to infuse product and design work with the liveliness of hand-crafted visual elements. I know we've only started to scratch the surface on the opportunities to find new ways for teams to envision, design and communicate ideas that make for great experiences.

It's a vast world of visual methods out there, and we're having a lot of fun and success in using these lightweight yet impactful techniques. Viva the joy of sketch!

• What are the reoccurring themes of the world?
• What does the world look and sound like?
• What does it feel like to be in the world?
• What tools and artifacts can be found in the world?
• What creatures/characters live in the world?
• What is the culture and history of the world?

• What are the reoccurring themes of the world?
  • Optimism, connection, delight, empowerment
• What does the world look and sound like?
  • The world is a mixture of old style bookstore, neighborhood cafe and children’s museum—the look is both modern and cozy with natural materials and high tech materials side by side. Contained within a large dome-like building, the world is bright and airy, with high pale blue ceilings specked with clusters of star-shaped skylights. The sound of slow moving water can be heard throughout the world and it is surprisingly quiet even when filled with people.
• What does it feel like to be in the world?
  • The air of the world is cool and fresh. It is easy to breath and to relax in this world. The open design enables people to see their loved ones at a distance and the floors give extra bounce to the step.
• What tools and artifacts can be found in areas of the world?
  • Exhibit areas: Interactive exhibits supporting exploration and learning. Large tables at varying heights provide surfaces for adults and children to combine materials and create their own inventions.
  • Café: At the center of the environment, a cafe with healthy foods, drinks and digital table surfaces. People come here to talk, rest, and collaboratively explore ideas on digital table surfaces.
  • Exploration areas: Studious spaces where people browse unique components of the exhibits in greater detail and talk with guides.
  • Quiet alcoves: At the perimeter of the building a series of alcoves surfaced with hardwood floors and Persian rugs. The alcoves are filled with mismatched armchairs and digital tables arranged for shared conversation. Here people sit, discussing, planning, and negotiating.
  • Personal technologies: Mobile devices used by people in the world to capture and share experiences with other people and across exhibits.
• What creatures/characters live in the world?
  • Explorers: New visitors to TogetherSpace who have not yet developed additional identities as connectors and guides.
  • Connectors: Repeat visitors and staff that help people connect to each other and to the areas and features of the environment.
  • Guides: Repeat visitors and staff that help people develop personal, meaningful, and relevant connections to the content of the exhibits.
• What is the culture and history of the world?
  • In TogetherSpace all people are seen as creative participants. Failure in this world is celebrated as an opportunity to invent new solutions and share current understandings. This world came into being when people realized that past approaches of competing for knowledge and obscuring understanding left many people alone and isolated. 

Dan Harrelson [DH]: Hi Jensen, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. You are often credited with designing the Office 2007 Ribbon. Can you tell us what went into the interface redesign and what your role was?

Jensen Harris [JH]: Creating the Office 2007 user interface was a team effort, and there were dozens of designers, usability researchers, developers, testers, and program managers involved in different aspects of the creative and engineering process. So many people contributed great ideas to the Office 2007 design that it is truly impossible to single out any single person as being the "designer" of the Ribbon.

My team was responsible for delivering the shared user interface platform for Office 2007, including the Ribbon, galleries, Live Preview, the Mini Toolbar and the rest of the new user experience.

Word 2007 Ribbon - Click to enlarge picture

I would characterize my role as most similar to that of an architect. I drafted the design tenets, and helped make sure that everyone's detailed designs gelled together into a harmonious whole.

One of our fundamental goals was to make the UI "feel as if it was designed by a single person" — even though, practically speaking, we knew that it was much too big of a project to actually be designed by a single person. Achieving a coherent design at this scale requires coordinated, consistent decision making as well as a strong design philosophy.

DH: The Ribbon has certainly garnered much attention and has been touted for the success of Office 2007. What other one or two UI enhancements would you also call out as critical to the software's success?

JH: One of our success metrics for Office 2007 was that we wanted normal people to be able to make beautiful, stunning documents and presentations. We wanted the average user to have access to professional-level results with fewer steps than in the past.

To help make this a reality, an awesome new graphics engine was built into Office — one capable of high-quality, beautiful effects, such as drop shadows, reflections, 3D lighting and surfaces, etc.

We knew that we had to make harnessing the power of this graphics engine incredibly easy because, otherwise, most people would never spend the time to use it. This is where the new UI comes in.

Based on our early user research, we embraced a model for Office's new UI called "results-oriented design." The idea is to show people a graphical representation of exactly what result they'll get as the primary way of surfacing the feature. Compare this to the old model, "command-oriented design" in which you show people a dry list of commands and let the user figure out how to string them together to get a good result.

An example: Imagine that you want to beautify a picture in your document. You click on the picture in Office 2007, and you are immediately presented with a visual gallery of great-looking designs. Each one of these designs technically uses several capabilities of the new graphics engine but, as the user, you don't have to know anything about that. As you hover over each design, Live Preview shows you exactly how your picture would look, directly in the document — ultimate WYSIWYG. It's a kind of instant gratification, and it's very rewarding — and even a little bit fun.

Another small UI feature I'm addicted to is the Mini Toolbar. We wanted to optimize efficient mouse access to the most frequently used formatting commands (such as Bold, Italic, Center, etc.). Taking advantage of Fitts' Law, when you select text in Office 2007, a little ghosted toolbar shows up directly next to the mouse cursor. If you move towards it, it fades in to reveal the top formatting commands. Because the Mini Toolbar shows up so close to your cursor, you can target the buttons very quickly and accurately — even though the toolbar itself is very compact.

DH: Now that we are over a year into the release of Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac is out, what are you using for success metrics? How are you tracking the impact of the UI a year later?

JH: The user interface has been a success on many different levels — the research shows that the new UI positively impacts productivity, increased Office 2007's success in the marketplace compared to previous versions, and how thousands of other applications are springing up with their own Ribbons.

Measuring the productivity impact of something as broad as a new UI is very complicated. With a user base of 400 million Office users, just slightly changing the demographics of a study can vastly influence the results. Do you want beginners, intermediates, or advanced? Advanced with Office or with computers in general? Which version of Office do they currently run? What region of the world are they in? What kind of work do they do? Do you measure the first day they get the new version — or after three weeks — or after three months? Or a year?

There's also the question of how you measure productivity. Is it faster time-on-task? Is it using more of the product than you used to (and thus getting better value)? Is it that you create better-looking or more powerful documents? Is it the way you feel when you use the product?

We spend a lot of time thinking about these questions and trying to come up with meaningful methodologies to make sense of all the data. But it's fair to say that the first year exceeded our expectations.

DH: You describe your design process as starting with research, and with the ubiquity of Office, this means lots and lots and lots of data. What techniques did you find useful in dispersing user research findings to software engineers?

JH: Data is enormously important and interesting, no doubt. But it also tends to be abstract and, with engineers, can sometimes devolve into a discussion about how much we trust the data and skepticism about how it was collected.

When you want to convince a developer to help you make a change to the product, nothing is as compelling as bringing the developer into the lab and having them watch people fail. (Video also works well if you can't bring the developer to the lab.)

Putting a human face on a failure really drives home why it's important to improve usability, and helps everyone to visualize concretely whom we're building the software for. Any developer worth her weight wants to do the right thing for her users, and so you usually just need to show them a test or two, and you'll find that they are much more willing to help you. We bring developers and testers into our user research labs as frequently as possible.

DH: We sat on a panel together at MIX discussing techniques to "Get It Right" when developing software. You mentioned the use of what you call "Design Tenets." What are these and why are they so important?

JH: Design tenets are a list of shared design beliefs that a team uses to help them make consistent design choices. Think of it as your team's design philosophy. It's the way we were able to end up with a design that has a coherent voice despite the fact that many people contributed to it.

For Office 2007, we had six design tenets. One of them was: "Give features a permanent home — prefer consistent-location UI over 'smart' UI." Another was: "The user's focus should be on the content, not on the UI; help the user work without interference."

Before you start designing, you need to explicitly agree on the tenets your team believes in — those which are consistent with the kind of user experience you want to create.

Once you have your design tenets, you can use them to help make decisions when you have several design alternatives to choose from. If everyone consistently makes decisions based on the tenets, your user experience will hold together and feel like it was designed with a single voice

DH: Microsoft is so big that I have to imagine that the number of people working on Office alone is massive. How do you socialize design tenets to be an effective tool?

JH: First of all, you have to repeat them over and over and over again. We presented them at the beginning of every presentation we did for a year. We recorded them in video form and sent them to people via mail. We had them up on internal web sites. We posted them on the wall in paper form.

If you don't feel like you're constantly and annoyingly repeating yourself then you're probably not socializing them enough.

It's vitally important that everyone knows the design tenets — not just the designers. You need the developers and testers to internalize the tenets too, so that they can make consistent decisions in the engineering and verification phases of the product.

One good idea someone on my team had was to use the design tenets as content in our design prototypes. So when we were working on Word designs, the tenets themselves were the content of the document. As people scrutinized the designs they picked up the tenets through osmosis. We did the same thing with PowerPoint and Excel — you could imagine doing the same thing as content for a web site or mobile UI. It definitely beats "lorem ipsum..." as filler text!

DH: You say that design tenets have to be religion. Doesn't that limit the creativity of designers and developers?

JH: Design tenets don't limit creativity: they focus it.

You wouldn't design a living room without understanding how it relates to the rest of the house. What's the style of the house: Victorian? Art Deco? Contemporary? Modern? Should the rooms be dense and functional, or open and airy? What kind of color palette do we use? What kind of paint do we use for living spaces — gloss, semi-gloss, or flat? Do we care about childproofing?

Once we all agree on the design philosophy of the overall house (the design tenets), we can independently go off and design our own room without worrying that the house won't make sense once all the rooms are done.

The alternative — doing the designs without tenets and in isolation — often leads to a situation in which you either have to do a costly and painful set of clean-ups late in the process or, more usually, you just ship an incongruous design and leave the users to sort it out.

DH: Well Jensen, thank you for taking the time to chat with me. I look forward to hearing you present "The Story of the Ribbon" at UX Week next month.

Members of the SFMOMA team are speaking at UX Week '08, so to get acquainted with the language and concepts of museum experiences, I sat down with Peter and Tana to hear their perspectives.

Kate: Welcome Peter and Tana. We're here to talk about the work that the Interactive Educational Technologies team does, and how it relates to the world of user experience. Peter why don't we start with a little about you and your role at SFMOMA. What do you do and what's the overarching goal?

Peter: I'm Associate Curator of interpretation, which is an interesting title and mandate. It includes both analog and digital affordances that are offered to our visitors as they come into the museum and into the galleries. Our goal is to help them have a really authentic and ideally full-bodied, cognitive, emotional connection with the art.

That's a tall order and we're nowhere near achieving it at this point. So that leaves us a lot of work to do, which is part of what's interesting. We know that there are some people who come into the museum bringing an intellectual arsenal, or, if they are artists themselves, they bring a practical, viscerally learned vocabulary and a kind of kinesthetic understanding of the works. And then there are a lot of other people who never took an art history course and never studied art or practiced art themselves and who are quite bewildered by the array of very disparate objects on display on our walls and our floors.

So it's our task to meet all these different visitors, some of them half-way, some of them a quarter of the way, some of them three-quarters of the way in order to enable and empower them to have a really authentic experience with the art that honors the art itself.

Kate: I know you've talked about the museum experiences, "visual Velcro" and the idea of "hooking" visitors. It sounds like psychology is part of the toolset that your team uses to build and create these engaging experiences. I love the Velcro metaphor. Can you tell us more about what that means to you? What are the implications for your team in designing these hook-like, Velcro experiences?

Peter: I think that the human mind is wired in a certain way to recognize and process certain kinds of things -- like faces, bright colors and scale. These are things that go back millions of years.

Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoor

These are relationships in rapport with our own body and our physical experience in the world and so we're attuned to remembering and retaining those things. They can give us an emotional as well as a cognitive jolt, and as a result they can hook into our psyche, our neurons, our neural structure. For example, artists that use either scale or some kind of facial representation as part of what they do hook into these ways of seeing. There are also easy hooks into the very large or the very small in terms of scale.

For example, the work of Anish Kapoor, and his "Bean" in Chicago (Cloud Gate) that enormous public sculpture that reflects the people's own faces back as they look at it, but distorts them and changes them and transforms them and reflects their environment back. That has an impact on people. These are pieces that people can relate to without having an art education.

Then there are other works, like minimalism (I think of Donald Judd or Carl Andre). I think that unless someone has had training and understands something about the phenomenological premises that preoccupied these artists, a lot of people don't know how to approach it. They actually don't know "where the art is." I think of these experiences as being more like Teflon: people just skate right by them.

Untitled, Donald Judd

10 x 10 Copper Square, Carl Andre

Erased de Kooning, Robert Rauchenburg

A lot of pieces in our galleries lack that immediate hook, so it's up to us in some way to take a piece that is as minimal as Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing and communicate why this would be an interesting project and even a compelling and courageous and dangerous project for an artist to undertake. It's our job to restore the context that makes the artifact of that experiment compelling.

Kate: So, if the only hook an artwork has is based on a traditional way of looking, it can be harder to engage with. And works also have a whole constellation of different social or political connections that people may not know about. So other than the writing in a little square gallery card, how does your team work to activate these pieces and rile them up so that visitors have a visceral and emotional response: potentially to the context, if not to the work itself?

Peter: Obviously there are already far too many artworks in the galleries that don't even have that little square gallery card. I mean they don't even have a few sentences in that little square beyond the title, the artist, the date and the medium. Many of them don't have any commentary at all so they really leave you up in the air. And then often the artworks themselves are untitled so if you're looking to the title for a little bit of help or a hook that's not gonna happen. But even if you take the classic case of an artwork with an extended object label (it's what we call them in the museum) often those labels traditionally have been written to cover too much territory in too short a time. So they're highly condensed, compacted and they make reference to lots of things that aren't present in the gallery.

The Bather, Paul Cezanne

Torse de femme, Pablo Picasso

Here's a classic example: say you're viewing a Picasso cubist work and the label says, "Inspired by Cezanne," well unless there's a Cezanne there and you're talking about what it is in Cezanne that Picasso was inspired by and unless someone can look over there and actually see it then you're not helping the untrained visitor.

So what we do with multimedia is we unpack that paragraph. We'll create a multimedia piece that may be two or three screens, and each of those screens might have several examples of other artworks that create a world in which this kind of artwork that we're standing in front of could be born... could in a sense come into being, and the semantic constellation in which this artwork lives. And so without ever saying "what this artwork means" per se we create a network of influences and ideas that are afoot at the time when this artwork is made. This may include the artist's prior works, where the art and artist was going next, peers, what this artist was looking at and thinking about, what the issues were, etc. Then you are able to encounter the artwork on its own terms.

Kate: That's a lot to be responsible for. I know that part of the role of your team is to develop the educational technologies such as kiosks and screen-based tools that help people experience the "semantic constellation" as you say. How do you decide "This is the experience that we think is going to meet people wherever they are and help them get engaged with this work."

Peter: My initial take is that we look at the art and on a certain level we have to listen to ourselves. If we're unfamiliar with this particular artist we say what our own questions are. But we have to go beyond our own questions, so we have to imagine ourselves as naive eye viewers entering the gallery and being confronted by the art -- say like a three inch piece of rope hung 40 inches above the floor. We have to ask "What would be the questions that that a person would have around this?" You know, questions like "why is it art?" "Why should I care?"

These are inevitably underlying questions for much of contemporary art practice because it's so much out of the zone of mass media culture. So you need to create a way to communicate "Why is it compelling?" Why was it compelling to the artist to make this particular concrete form? These are two different worlds we're coming from. We're serving as bridges between these visitors who might just be bewildered (and maybe vaguely hostile) if they're not met halfway, because they think there's a hoax that's being perpetrated on them. And the artists who are in fact, intensely involved, who are very intelligent, very creative, individuals who are completely dedicated to whatever it is that they're pursuing as their particular path through the art world and their own creative career. And so the question then becomes "Why would someone who's not perpetrating a hoax, but who's actually perfectly serious and engaged and wonderfully and delightfully immersed in some kind of a creative path, why would they choose this particular form of expression to be the stuff, the fabric of their life for years on end? What keeps it interesting for them?" So our job is to mediate between these two worlds that normally don't talk to each other.

Tana: We decide the big questions that we think people are going to grapple with. Are they specific works, are they aesthetic issues, are they cultural context issues? Are people really going to want to know the story? Do they need to know more about how to look at the piece to make sense of it?

We break the issues down into various kind of buckets of questions, and then we construct narratives around them. We try and tell stories because we know that people like stories, like to learn. People like to have context so we work really hard to just define what those questions might be, and then we build out those questions with additional images, brief text, video clips, audio clips, any kind of media that we can support, and that can address the question.

Peter: For example, interviews with the artists.

Tana: Right. People love stories, first and foremost. They love to hear what people think, what others have to say and what people think about the art. And they love to hear from the voice of the artist. That's probably the thing they like the most. So whenever possible we will include the voice of the artist in whatever feature that we're designing, because we find that the artist is the primary source, and we know that we're here to help implement the vision for their work. So whenever we possibly can we, we feature the artist's voice.

Peter: To add to that, I think that when visitors actually see the artist an enormous wall crumbles. When they actually hear the artist and they see them as a person as opposed to as a kind of "invisible cipher behind the wall" then it's all of a sudden human-to-human, and there's an inherent kind of sympathy and relief that there's a real person who's thinking about issues that they can express and that the viewer can understand.

Kate: I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how these stories impact the voice of the museum. Institutions, and particularly cultural institutions often speak with a voice of authority. How do you express the voice of the actual institution when you're focusing on bridging visitors and the art?

Peter: That's a very good question. On the one hand, whether we want to or not, we've got an authority voice and we acknowledge that. But we try not to be mono-vocal, and we try not to restrict that voice to one single approach or one single narrative. We try to make a complex weave of different threads so that it actually feels like you could approach this artwork on many different levels.

Tana: I think that in the past 20 years, the museum voice has shifted a lot. I really do think that the museum has started to understand that visitors need to hear from more than just the authoritative museum voice. That's why we got so interested in podcasting, because we found it easy to produce audio that could engage a lot of different voices around art and artwork -- not just people from inside the institution such as curators, but artists, performers, writers, students, young people, all kinds of different people we're really interested in hearing from. And so we really try to create a collective narrative about questions the work, instead of maintaining an authoritative voice.

Kate: It sounds like the whole nature of the museum experience is shifting from being about providing answers to asking the right questions.

Tana: Yeah. I think that we've always known that. This goes back to the focus on teaching: give people the skills to be able to stand in a gallery on their own. Give them the four things that they need to know to walk through and make meaning of the works, even if they only make meaning in a few pieces. We know they're not going to necessarily make meaning in a whole show unless it's an easy show, like a Calder or maybe Magritte.

Big Crinkly, Alexander Calder

Personal Values, Rene Magritte

Repressia, Matthew Barney

Not easy, I shouldn't say that word. Accessible is the word. If you have a more challenging exhibit, like a Matthew Barney show, what are the skills that you can give people to experience the show, and what are the questions that you can help them ask themselves without necessarily providing a didactic "correct" answer.

We've been on the forefront of this idea of inquiry, allowing visitors to own their own interpretation and to not tell them the right answer. To do this, you have to think a certain way. We try to give backstory because I think backstory supports what Peter said: If people feel like they've seen a human, if they've seen the artist in their studio grappling with these issues, then there's an ah-ha moment and the visitor might have more generosity toward the difficult work of art or a less accessible work of art.

Peter: The inquiry is what makes a difficult work of art turn into a solution.

Frieda and Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo

Tana: Yes, and even for more accessible artists, like Frida Kahlo. She's probably one of the most accessible artists. Even though people walk through that show and just breathe in Frida and her amazing work, life and story, they want to find out more about her life and what she cared about, her politics. People just love to know about the artist.

Peter: It's the hungry mind stage of aesthetic literacy.

Tana: Right--and the really wonderful thing about artists like Kahlo that have become icons, is the many creative responses to her output. There's a whole other layer of visitor participation and we're trying to bring this into the galleries as well, just to kind of show that this artist has created a whole other movement in relation to her life and her work.

Peter: Frida-mania.

Tana: Yeah, It's thirty years after her death, and she's still so influential. It's really exciting.

Peter: I want to underline that the sense that art history and aesthetics are only one way to discover meanings about the works museums display. Everyone brings their own experiences, and there are other kinds of ways to make meaning. Finding ways to find the thing that rises up within people when they are faced with an artwork. This is the stuff we end up eliciting and soliciting when we do an interview in the gallery or an Artcast. We hear amazing insights, including people who lived through the times that the artwork is depicting and have very personal stories. It's riveting in a way that no art historian could ever conjure. People share -- and you can mesh that with a quote, or an interview clip from the artist or from a curator, and it triangulates and amplifies the resonance of the work in a beautiful way.

There's a conference in Minneapolis called "Learning in Museums" and we're going to be talking all about this, with an emphasis on the role of technology and informal learning in the museum setting. Topics like balancing what technologies you put in the galleries, what you put outside the galleries, and what you can put on the web. What kind of menu of affordances we can offer to our visitors to provide the information that they need most to have the most meaningful experience and encounter with the artwork, just-in-time and on demand. It's an artful mix. You know I feel like we're still at the beginning of experimenting with these things even though we've been doing it for a number of years.

Tana: And you also want there to be a certain informality so that people feel that they can converse and can engage in dialog. So how do you create this environment that hopefully involves some technology, hopefully involves some comfortable chairs and involves some people, to create a space that is welcoming but isn't overwhelming? That doesn't make people feel like "oh, I don't want to be here."

Peter's really at the forefront of this right now in our institution, looking at our galleries and asking "how could we do better?" How could we make our public feel more at home here and linger longer? To have more time, and give them more resources, i.e. seating, i.e. something to listen to or look at while in the presence of the art? And have these resources not in a corner without the art, but in the presence of it? I'll tell you it's not easy. There's a lot of competition in the galleries for the art. I would say that it's just evolving all the time.

Kate: I can see that it's tricky because the more successful you are at providing these things, in a way, you're moving farther away from the traditional mission of a museum. For example, if people are going there more for each other, for each other's interpretations and the discussions around the art and less for the appreciation of the art itself. I can see that is a double-edged sword.

Peter: But frankly if the art serves as a trigger to really vital issues in people's lives today I don't think anyone would feel that's a betrayal.

Tana: I agree.

Kate: That's great to hear. I put this question out to both of you: If you could identify one thing that you think is important about immersive museum experiences now, what would that be? What's the key idea that is your guiding star when you're doing your everyday work?

Peter: Meet the visitors where they are. And that means if they're at home meet them there: project the art ideas out to them via podcast. Even if they never come into the museum you're already showing them that these objects on the wall aren't just mute squares or rectangles. They are resonant with ideas and world views that are rich and complex and engaging and meaningful; these works can be meaningful to them as well. On the web obviously, we can do this with multimedia programs and rich media interactive features.

Then, when they come in the door you want to meet them by giving them access to tools for understanding things that they might not have brought the knowledge with them to understand. In each gallery you want to make sure that there's some kind of section or gallery-level text that gives a sense of what story the curator is articulating here. Make the implicit explicit. Things like wall labels. These classic things aren't to be dissed; they're part of the puzzle.

Blossoms in the Night, Paul Klee

I think seating is vitally important because on the one hand, we espouse this idea of the authentic encounter with the artwork, but then we don't take into account that we're all in bodies and our bodies get tired and our legs get tired and our feet get sore. Paul Klee said "the first thing you need to do to appreciate an artwork is a chair," and we don't even give people that. So "meeting people where they are" can come to something as physical and concrete as just giving them a place to sit, so they don't have to rush through the galleries because they're just getting tired. This goes for our interactive kiosks as well. We don't want to make them decide "do I click or am I too tired on my feet to explore three or five more minutes of material?" We always give them a chair for that. We should do at least the same for these artworks that we value so highly.

Perhaps having people in the galleries who they can be talking with if they've got questions and reflecting with about a work. We might help them have one more little insight that triggers their own experience in a new way, a la the docent tour if they're lucky enough to be there when the docents are coming through. And at the end of a show how do they consolidate what they've just seen and answer their open questions, while those loops are still open, and before they get sucked into the thousand distractions of their life outside the museum? They came to the museum to refresh themselves, to get new ideas, to have new insights, to have some serenity, perhaps to have some reflective time. How do we allow them to really make the most of this?

Our visitor education center is an amazing resource where we've got artist interviews galore and deep interactive features. And then when they go home they can go back onto the web, look at our blog, or other things online. We have to figure out what the follow-ups are going to be, and some of that has yet to be invented. That's my watchword: meet the visitors where they are, both physically and cognitively. Meet them cognitively where they are depending on what kind of history or idea scaffolding they bring with them (or the lack thereof) as we talked about before.

Kate: Interesting, that's fabulous. And you, Tana, I'd love to hear what you're thinking.

Tana: I would echo what Peter said. And I would very simply say that we've realized we can't just offer a digital solution that's off in the corner away from the art. We really realize now that we need to offer multiple analog and digital tools that are in the presence of the art, in order to really help our visitors connect the dots and to make meaning throughout their visit. We've grown our team from a small three-person team focused solely on the digital, to now having someone who is managing the gallery interpretation side of things. This means helping us create learning lounges, putting up interesting kinds of almost small exhibitions that are educational right in the gallery, next to or very near the artworks.

Peter: You'll see that in the Frida Kahlo show.

Tana: Yes. We've fully embraced the new world of visitor experience and we're really excited to get away from "just hoping they'll come to us," and instead, working to meet the visitors where they are.

Kate: Well this has been wonderful you two. I've enjoyed our discussion, and look forward to learning more about the SFMOMA visitor interpretation work at UX Week.

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Peter Samis is Associate Curator of Interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). In 1993, he served as art historian for the first CD-ROM on modern art, and then spearheaded development of SFMOMA's Interactive Educational Technologies (IET) program. Since then, programs produced by the IET team have received wide recognition from sources as diverse as the American Association of Museums, the Webbys, Communication Arts, and I.D. Magazine. Samis is on the governing councils of two museum-focused open source initiatives: Pachyderm 2.0 and steve. Together with his team, Peter continues to produce innovative content for SFMOMA's galleries, website, podcasts, and Koret Visitor Education Center.

Tana Johnson brings experience in video, teaching, and curriculum development to her position as Program Manager, Interactive Educational Technologies on SFMOMA's IET team. The former Coordinator of School and Teacher Programs at SFMOMA, Johnson spearheaded highly successful youth arts programs: SFMOMA Teen Visionaries, High School M.E.D.I.A., and SFMOMA Matches. Currently, Johnson is co-directing a documentary film on self-taught African-American artists called No One Has Taught Me. Johnson graduated with distinction from San Francisco State University's Inter-Arts Department in 1996.

Kate Rutter is a senior practitioner at Adaptive Path. She actively embraces the term "specialized generalist." Her background in fine arts includes hands-on creation as well as a rather uncomfortable stint as a gallery guide. She's committed to finding interesting ways for people to engage deeply with the practice of art-making as a way of making meaning in their lives.

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Learn more about these artists and their works

1. Anish Kapoor
   • Cloud Gate
     Wikipedia
     Millennium Park
2. Donald Judd
3. Carl Andre
4. Robert Rauschenberg
   • Erased de Kooning Drawing, SFMOMA Collection
5. Pablo Picasso
   • A Hidden Picasso: SFMOMA Interactive Site
6. Cubism
7. Paul Cezanne
8. Alexander Calder
   • SFMOMA Exhibit
9. Rene Magritte
   • SFMOMA Exhibit
10. Making Sense of Modern Art: SFMOMA Interactive Feature
11. Matthew Barney
    • Drawing Restraint: SFMOMA Exhibit
    • Drawing Restraint: SFMOMA Interactive Feature
12. Frida Kahlo
    • SFMOMA Exhibit
    • SFMOMA Interactive Feature 1
    • SFMOMA Interactive Feature 2
13. Paul Klee
    • SFMOMA Exhibit
    • SFMOMA Interactive Feature 1
    • SFMOMA Interactive Feature 2

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Further Reading about Interactive Technologies in Museums

SFMOMA Interactive Technologies team

• About the Educational Technologies Team
• Open Space, SFMOMA blog
• SFMOMA Artcasts (podcasts)
• Paper: 'Artcasting' at SFMOMA: First-Year Lessons, Future Challenges for Museum Podcasters broad audience of use. From Museums on the Web
• Book: The Digital Museum : A Think Guide Published by the American Association of Museums
• Chapter in The Digital Museum : Visual Velcro : Hooking the visitor
• Paper: Gaining Traction in the Vaseline: Visitor Response to a Multi-Track Interpretation Design for Matthew Barney: DRAWING RESTRAINT

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