Martyn Ware and his firm, SonicID, specialize in the space of sound association. They design and develop sound that evokes recognition of a brand - also known as sonic branding. This practice of sound design creates memorable moments like the Intel tones or things as small as what a lipstick container sounds like when it's opened. From the sound a door makes on a quality car to the roar of the engine - all sounds are designed to contribute to the aspects of the product and its brand.

I was fortunate to get some of Martyn's time leading up to UX Week 2009. We chatted a bit about sonic identity and what this means to all designers.

Andrew: Sonic ID calls itself a sonic branding identity firm, can you explain what "sonic branding" is?

Martyn: Sure, it's kind of an evolution of the old idea of kind of hey, let's get a jingle for our latest washing powder. It goes beyond that. Although, I suppose the most famous kind of example of it is the Intel Inside sound mark, and it's a spectacularly successful example as well. Really, as soon as you hear that, you don't even need to be watching the TV or listening particularly to the radio. It's just immediately lodged in your brain as indicating that it's associated with Intel, even more so than the actual device that carries it a lot of the time. 

Basically, sonic branding is, (the way that we view it, anyways) a strategic approach to using sound and all its touch points with the public and, internally, within large corporations, for instance. There are many, many examples now of how sound is used a lot of the time without any regard to the kind of integration of it within a grander kind of strategy. We argue that sound is just as important in some ways as visual branding. Companies around the world wouldn't consider not having a kind of brand bible for their brand in the way that it interfaces with the public. Take, for example, a coffee shop. They have their own colors, very specific proportions of the way the logo looks and how it should appear in menus, for instance. There are the types of decoration within the actual coffee shop, itself, especially in chain coffee shops. This kind of integrated approach to visual branding is something that seems blindingly obvious to us and should be integrated from a sound point-of-view as well. All the instances where sound occurs - where your brand occurs - should be all working towards the greater presence of your brand in a very crowded and often visually confusing marketplace.

A: There are many components to a company's or product's brand, right? There's visual design, marketing, copywriting, just to name a few. So how does sound fit into those without overshadowing them? How does that component of a brand fit together nicely with the others?

M: Well, firstly, sound works in a different way to visual branding. Of course, the kind of accepted wisdom at the moment is that the effectiveness of traditional advertising is becoming more and more muted as kind of entertainment and multimedia proliferate. People are less impressed, and they want a more emotional and direct sense of contact with what a brand means. The process with which we engage our clients is all about doing an audit of what their brand is about. It's not just a matter of reading their brand guidelines. It's about how they're perceived in the outside world, what their competitors think of them, what the public thinks of them. All the usual kind of criteria that one would use to, say, build a new brand or to update an existing brand can be used for sound. It's not really a "tone". We don't see it like that. We don't see it as all of a sudden, why should people want sound when they've never bothered with it before?

We just think and we feel and when we explain it to companies and enterprises, they tend to agree that it's mainly because they hadn't thought it was actually something. I'll give you an example. Noel Franus, who is co-director of Sonic ID, was working for Sun Microsystems. He found out a lot about sonic branding from the client's side because he was actually a client, and he realized that this was a growing area. Sun Microsystems wanted different iterations of how they sounded to different areas of their customer base. Some of them were your everyday customers. Some of them were programmers. Some of them were much more technical, and they had different iterations of a similar kind of sound mark according to different criteria that they identified going through this process of analysis for a particular company. Now, the truth of the matter is that you can connect in a more meaningful and emotional way through sound than often you can do through visual components. 

It has other benefits as well. There is a certain playful aspect to it - not quite as literal as visual branding or visual logos. Sound can mutate according to different markets. It can still have an identifiable presence, but affect you in different ways. That is not really possible in the same way with a visual logo. It would just all be a bit too visually confusing. There's many advantages to using audio in terms of getting your message across and just getting your presence, if you like, into the back of people's mind, even when they're busy doing other things. It doesn't necessarily demand your full attention, but it does act in a very effective subliminal way to draw attention to your brand.

A: I'm wondering if there're more appropriate places for sound as an expression of brand than others. For example, if you pick up the latest Harry Potter book at a bookstore, open it up, and it plays the theme song. I can't imagine every book playing music when you open it up because it is attached to the brand. 

M: No, that would clearly be a bit confusing and not particularly attractive. There are a lot of things that you have to be careful of because it's such a powerful tool. In the wrong hands, it could be a nightmare. It's not just Sonic ID, of course, I have a company called Illustrious which does immersive sound installations, art installations, and commercial installations around the world, so the two companies are directly related. A lot of what we learn from the more experimental and artistic point-of-view, it can be fed into how we mediate what we do with sonic branding. 

We're very interested in, the psychological effects of what we're doing - sounds a bit like the evil empire. We're not really out to manipulate people in a negative way, but it is important. To be honest with you, people wouldn't pay us money if they didn't think that we were going to give them something that would actually give them an advantage in marketplace. It's not like some kind of theoretical exercise. A lot of companies want to know that you've done your homework properly and that you've analyzed what they're about. Oftentimes we find that when we work with people and they learn more about their own company and what it means to the outside world, in particular, or even what it means to the rest of the people within their company worldwide than they would've learned before, so it's another ancillary benefit to them. 

You've got to be careful about how you use sound because it's such a powerful tool and for obvious reasons. Places where they expect silence and concentration, you have to approach those environments with a degree of sensitivity or else you're just going to annoy people, and that's not the purpose at all. The purpose is to let people know that when they hear a certain sound, it has a direct attribution, subconsciously, to an integrated brand experience. There are many examples in television advertising where they use tiny sound marks just to let you know that they've got a range of different sub-brand that're all unified by a particular brand. There's a dairy manufacturer called Dannon. It's a French company, but it sells a lot of stuff in the U.K., and they've got a little sound mark that goes (hums the tune). And, this is at the end of every one of their ads on radio and TV. I suspect it's probably on their website. It's probably on their answering machines. It could well be a startup sound for their computers. All these things can be addressed if necessary. They don't all have to be identical. It's like a light motif in opera. It can have the same basic musical DNA, but it can be adjusted to suit different markets.

A: Yes, that makes sense. It's funny. My wife grew up in Japan, and she remembers clearly each train having a specific sound telling you that the train is about ready to pull away. She associates the one jingle of the platform nearest her house, and how she was always late. As soon as she would hear that, this panic would ensue as she ran for train. I found that sound on the Internet, played it, and it still causes anxiety!

M: I tell you, it's very interesting, particularly for audio signage. It's quite an interesting one. We continue to underuse these in cities. Actually, Japan has been an early adopter of these kinds of techniques. Certainly in France for instance, the TGV, the ultrafast trains that they have there, at the stations they have very beautiful sound branding. For like the bing-bong-bing kind of announcements are very subtle and very beautiful, and they have a range of them that indicate different kinds of things. I often think it actually enhances the atmosphere within and creates a sense of identity for the whole of that form of transport, if you like. The key thing is to do it well and properly and to do it properly researched, get in, also, dare I say, on a more practical level. When you're developing all this, you have to make sure that all your key stakeholders are on board, like any other kind of branding process. 

A: You once said that few, if any, companies are actually going for the full package of sonic development. Do you have any examples of how you've been successful integrating sonic branding into established brands? Is there a well-established brand out there that people already knew wabout, but adding sound into maybe either posed a challenge, or how were you able to pull that off?

M: We're talking to a couple of large-scale companies at the moment - Barclay Card and Dolby - but they've had a series of different campaigns throughout their history. Dolby has never really tried to sell its consumers before. They're starting to realize the potential benefits of having a cogent, coherent and continually evolving series of sound marks which will identify them in a crowded marketplace. Of course, the benefit of sound is not necessarily redolent of a particular country or culture, so that is something that appeals to them in particular. How are they relating all these elements together with their website, their hold music? It just makes sense, but especially for very large, multinational companies. It gives a sense of unity. They wouldn't consider just saying, "Oh, I'll tell you what. Write Dolby in any typeface you want at any size. It doesn't really matter." They wouldn't do that because it would be insane, but yet currently, most companies don't have a strategic approach to how these sound in all its touch points.

A: Are there types of products that are best served by sound, whether it's their environment or the type of interactions that people have to have with them?

M: Well, this is very interesting. What we're talking about is to do with the kind of sound content world, if you like, or transmission or diffusion, but if you start relating it directly to individual products, of course, we all now that in this kind of Jetsons vision of the future which seems to be supported by a lot of developers at the moment, all your domestic appliances will be speaking to you or communicating with you in some way. But there are definitely designers who are working on the idea of audio feedback from appliances. Maybe your refrigerator could tell you that you need some milk or that you're running low on eggs. There's a big market in terms of warnings, of course, like burglar alarms are an ancient form of this, but more subtle kind of environmental alarms, for instance. Maybe you're using too much energy in certain parts of the house, or it can give you very subtle audio cues about stuff that you don't normally take notice of but are of importance to your well being. 

We get approached, for instance, on another issue. We've been approached to think about things like the unpleasantness of the experience of things like MRI scanning and various technological medical procedures which sound awful. We've been asked whether there's any way that the negative effects of it all could be attenuated in some way or replaced in a form of distraction. We've been asked on a much more trivial level to, say, one manufacture's lipsticks, said, "There's this particular lipstick and the feedback we've got from our customers is it's a really pleasant sound it makes when you open this. Could you make all our lipsticks sound like that when they open?" It's like a very strange thing to ask, but once you open people's minds to the idea of how ubiquitous sound is, how it's present everywhere whether we like it or not. I would argue that we can improve people's experiences and therefore, make people more loyal to whatever the device or the brand is.

Let's look at another example. Electric cars, for instance, as they become more prevalent and as their popularity grows, one of the major problems is they don't make enough noise. As they approach, people don't generally hear them, so there's a conceptual discussion going on now as to if we're going to impart an artificial noise into electric cars, what should it be? Maybe it could be something to do with proximity senses that could sense. There's all sorts of incredible and fascinating issues because, obviously, if you have something like a Theremin, so when you got close to somebody, of course it would drive you insane if you had this thing go [humming] all the time. You have to think in a creative and sensitive and artistic way to create the most effective commercial solution.

A: There are a lot of ways that visual designers work through the design process, including traditional mood boards and comps and color explorations. How do sound designers arrive at the appropriate solution? You were just talking about thinking about it in an artistic manner. How do you come up with those?

M: It's the same as any other branding process. We take a few initial meetings, and then we put together a sonic mood board which is based around the original brainstorming ideas through which we try to identify and distill the sonic essence of the brand or the intention of what the particular thing is. It may be a particular device or something. Let's say for the sake of argument it's an entire brand. You get the right decision makers involved in this whole process. You usually find that everybody seems to have a different idea. If you ask them to come up with some ideas of what their brand signifies and can you give us a suggestion of a piece of music that might be close to some part of it. You'll usually get some very disparate answers, so we have to kind of hold their hands and guide them through the process until we end up with the rough direction that we want to aim, both in words and in the kind of templates of sounds, the kind of palates of sounds that we want to use. For instance, is it going to be orchestral? Is it going to be guitar-based? Is it electronic? Does it want to sound futuristic? Does it want to sound nostalgic? Is it using human voices? Should it be really abstract? Those kind of questions need to be answered as well. 

Then we would come up with a series of studies, first iterations, really, to see if we're on the right track. We usually get the clients to commit to one of, say three, and then we refine that over a couple more iterations, and then we look at the entire life on the outset. We have to try and understand how many different types of the final composition they want. Is it just one thing? Do they just want one particular sound mark that could be played in all territories? Do they want different lengths? Do they want a two minutes piece that can be played in a cinema which the essence of it can be reduced to a three-second or two-second sound mark? Do they want looping 30-second versions that can play on their old music? Do they want stuff for T.V. ads? Do they want stuff for radio ads?

We try and encourage the client to comprehend the various elements so that they can approach it in a more strategic way, and we can organize their thoughts for them. When we've gone through this mood board process and the iteration process, maybe the most important thing for them, essentially, is to have a very short sound mark initially, but we would try encourage them from the outset to say, "Well, once we've got this sound mark, do you want us to expand it into a two-minute piece? Do you want us to think about the Asian market? Do you want us to think about different cultures and how this would sound in their culture? Do you want us to have an electronic version, say, and an orchestral version?" so on and so forth. We're not just leading them down the garden path. We're not just going, "Oh, let's just keep pumping them for at much work as we can." We try and all the way along encourage them to view it as a strategy. We have to be pragmatic about it as well and hold their hands throughout the entire process.

A: Without a comprehensive approach to sound, you can't find a way to be meaningful. I'm wondering if you could sort of summarize what does a comprehensive approach look like to solving that?

M: I think people are looking for meaning in all things, especially in an increasingly secular society. There's a yearning at the heart of, particularly, people in western society. They're being pumped with more and more information. We're all over-connected and over-stimulated. We need help in organizing our thoughts and our lives. The things that do that in a subliminal or a very real way are the things that seem to do well. I'm a big Mac fan. I always have been. It helps my life. It generally simplifies my life, and as an example of a company that's taken a kind of design-led approach, an integrated approach to how they, I mean, everything about the Mac is about the interface. Conceptually, philosophically, it's all about the interface. I would argue that sound branding, if you don't use sound branding in an integrated way, then you're ignoring a large percentage of the way that you interface with your customers. 

I would also argue that to get to the simplicity that works, you have to go through a research process. You have to understand the problem before you can solve it. This is another problem for us because a lot of the time, we're not cold-calling people and saying, "You need us." They're calling us because they don't even understand the problem that they've got. They've just heard about this stuff, and they want somebody to explain it to them and therefore, some people like us to explain to all the people who make decisions in their company that's it a good idea. We end up spending more time actually educating people and doing the work as to the benefits of all this stuff. It's a challenge without a shadow of a doubt, and it needs quite a lot of time, quite a lot of energy, and quite a lot of evangelistic zeal, but the benefits are going to be huge, especially when the recovery comes in the not-too-distant future. I think people are going to be looking for new ways to do things. Certainly, sound branding shouldn't be regarded as just like a little bolt on that you can put to complete your hand at cards. I think it should be regarded as an opportunity to engage a larger audience than your existing audience in a more emotional way.

A: Right, and there's certainly plenty of evidence of new ways of developing brand or developing products that take awhile for people to understand their value, and then, of course, to be able to integrate that into their approach. We certainly experience that.

M: Oh, my goodness, it always seems to take longer than you think. Also, there's an awful lot of talk currently about experiential branding. Experiential has become a word like innovative to me. A lot of people talk about it and not much of it actually happens. True innovation takes time to implement and takes time to reap the rewards, but I absolutely believe in it, and experiential branding, has got to include sound, has got to include touch and smell, and the emotional contact with a deeper kind of sensibility. It's got to, and sound is an enormously valuable tool in that respect. I'd go as far as to say you can't claim to be experientially branding unless you involve sound, particularly, kind of immersive sound.

]]> 1121@http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/ by Andrew Crow 2009-11-17T13:41:07-08:00 http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/001121.php http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ap_essays/~3/uWxfNYSi_6U/001115.php Until fairly recently, when designers wanted to test an idea or design, they sought out an outside usability agency or, rented a room, some expensive equipment and recruited users to come into an artificial environment to participate in a usability study. In the past few years, technology has become available that has brought the cost and complexity of user testing down to a level where it is available for anyone. In addition, it allows designers to be exposed to users, in their native environment, not a sterile lab across town. You can run a test in only a week for less than a few hundred dollars.

There are numerous reasons remote user testing is valuable:

1. It's cheap - most tests can be run for little more than the cost of your time and the incentive to the user.

2. It's fast - done right, a study can be put together, executed and summarized in about a week. You also get immediate feedback that can be rolled directly into your designs.

3. Mediate conflict - User testing can be used to resolve internal design conflicts.

4. Test ideas - A quick user test can often help resolve a difficult design choice, like labeling or determining whether users can figure out how to use the new drag and drop system for adding items to their shopping cart.

5. Reduce release cycles - Instead of putting a new idea out in the wild and then having to scramble with a follow-up release, running a quick user test can often yield valuable insight that will save you time in the long run.

One of the best reasons to do remote research however, is that it offers you a window into the users environment. In addition to seeing how they tend to navigate a page you will see what kind of electronic interruptions occur, such as IM and email. You get to experience a little bit of their physical environment, is it noisy or quiet? Do they have kids competing for their attention? This is the kind of real-life testing environment that can yield unexpected and extremely valuable results.

One user test we conducted not long ago included a large segment of users that were relatively new parents, meaning there were often kids of all ages from in the background while we were testing. The product had been tested extensively in QA, and the usability tests were almost an afterthought. During the course of our testing, we discovered one very important issue: If the users walked away from the sign-up process for more than a couple of minutes, their session would expire and they would lose all of the information they had input. They had to start all over again. This only came up because one of the users we tested had a small child that demanded constant partial attention, and caused her to walk away from the computer for several minutes. It was one of the most valuable outcomes of the test. More importantly, it was a wholly unanticipated outcome that was only possible because we were testing the application.

Whether your client is an external one, or an internal group, invite them to watch the tests. Clients that listen in on user tests almost always come away with a fresh perspective on how users use their site.

There are many different types of remote user testing, the case above was the result of standard moderated remote usability study. However there are a number of other ways of collecting feedback from users without having them come into a lab.

Card Sorting

Card Sorting is a valuable tool in its own right to help inform the top level navigational structure of a site. It's a common tool used by Information Architects everywhere, and is a cheap and reliable way to quickly get feedback on navigation and findability. This is done by... yes, sorting cards. Each card is labeled with a piece of information or a function. The cards are given to the users who are asked to sort them into logical groups. This helps uncover users expectations, create logical categories and help with naming of those categories. This type of data is very helpful early in the project when you're trying to establish the overall navigation.

The best part is that tools are available online that make it easy to do this sort of testing remotely, which means you can design a card sorting study for dozens, even hundreds of users without the time consuming overhead of managing so many in person interviews.

Online tools like Optimalsort and Userzoom make it easier than ever to run card sorts. Userzoom is newer to the space and appears to offer a really nice output for easy analysis. I'm looking forward to using it at the next opportunity.

Remote Moderated Usability testing

In the case of moderated remote user testing, you can test specific ideas or solutions for a small audience: How long does it take users to find things? What do users think your site labels mean? Can users figure out how to get where they want to go? You can even test multiple designs on the fly, and test improvements as you go along.

It is also valuable to have your clients observe and listen in on the sessions using Adobe Connect or other meeting applications. Meeting applications like these are what allow you to see the users screen. As I mentioned earlier, the insight into the users experience can often foster empathy for the user, which is can be very valuable, if you need their support to improve the user experience.

There are a number of tools available for the lab environment that aren't viable remotely. It's sometimes desirable to do eye tracking or to record the users expressions while running the session. Though we don't typically do this, there are more and more tools becoming available that add this type of functionality for fans of remote usability studies.

One example for recording users is Silverback which uses the cameras built into the Macbook and Macbook Pro to record the user as well as their screen. This is very handy if capturing the users expression while they are going through the test.

Recruiting For Your Session

It's important to test your designs and solutions with the intended audience. For that reason, often the best audience to take advantage of is the one already coming to you. In order to recruit them, all you need is a survey and a survey tool. Your survey should be short and designed to capture a spread of your current audience. It's useful to offer an incentive. Amazon gift certificates make great incentives, and are easy to manage because they can be emailed in bulk from Amazon.com.

There are a whole host of survey tools available for practically free out there. They include Survey Monkey, Wufoo.com, even Google Docs has a survey form option now, and User Experience experts, Bolt Peters , have a very nice, supported solution for a small fee. Once you create the survey, all you need to do is identify the page or pages you want to recruit from, then just put a short line of javascript in the code at the bottom of the page. Depending on how much traffic your site gets, you'll usually want to select the pages that get the most traffic.

Once the survey is up and running, you can start scheduling a pool of candidates, or you can try to recruit them on the fly as they come to the website, and have them join the online meeting.

Designing A Script

One key to a good user test is a flexible script. If you force the user through a pre-determined set of tasks, you'll risk miss out on those unexpected opportunities. Letting the user direct the study. I often like to start the study by asking the user what they came to the site to do originally. This is often referred to as their "passionate task" or the task that they came to the site to do. It can often give you surprising insight into users thought process.

That being said, I recommend taking the time beforehand to map out a series of questions. A good rule of thumb is to try to limit the test to 45 minutes. People often start to lose focus after that long. It doesn't take many questions to fill up an hour, so it's usually a good idea to pick about 3-4 main tasks.

A script should also include all the logistical information up front. Introduce yourself, and give them a little background on the study's subject. You want to ask their consent, give them specific details on how long the test will last and how the software works. When you're done, don't forget to thank them and confirm the address you'll be sending their incentive to.

Screen Sharing & Capturing the Output

The three keys to a successful test are:

• You can talk to the user
• You can see what they're doing
• You can record both the audio and the video for later reference (optional).

This is where the field has gotten pretty interesting lately. There are a number of inexpensive solutions out there for screen sharing. UserVue by Techsmith is still one of the best screen sharing and recording solutions out there, but the rumor is that they will be going away in 2010.

Both iChat and Skype offer screen sharing, and allow you to voice chat. If quick and dirty is your focus, Skype has a large installed user base and is already free. Other solutions include Adobe Connect, which has a little more up front cost, but also a whole range of uses beyond user testing.

If it's important to record your session, Camtasia by Techsmith is one of the best solutions out there, and is now available for the Mac and the PC. And of course, Silverback, which I mentioned earlier, although it's currently for Mac only.

Finally, I'd like to mention a few tips not covered in this overview. The first is that it's very handy have someone sit in with you to take notes. It take a lot of practice, but it is possible to run a test and take notes at the same time. Secondly, save at least 15 minutes between each test to summarize what you heard. This will help you quickly include those insights in your next design.

There you have it, all the basic tools you need to run your own user tests. How about it readers, are there tools out there that you like that I haven't mentioned? If so, let me know.

Matias Duarte (MD): Thanks. I feel I've been pretty lucky in having the chance to lead such a great team on such a ground breaking project. Let me give you a little orientation first. The HI team at Palm is responsible for all aspects of the user's interface with the software. That includes the interactions of the webOS and the set of core Palm applications, the visual design of the system and apps, other creative aspects of the experience such as audio and animations, and the user's interfaces via the hardware. I've intentionally built a small team in order to maintain close collaboration and eliminate layers of management hierarchy from the design process. Because of that, I really feel that webOS is a team effort where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

CP: The experience of the Palm Pre seems to rely heavily on finding harmonious solutions in both the physical product experience as well as in the software. At Palm, does the Software/UI experience and the physical product development maintain the kind of organizational silos that experience design is so often trying to overcome (especially in large organizations), or are some of those barriers falling down naturally with the kind of product experiences being created? Could you tell us about how these groups inside the organization interact and arrive at combined solutions?

MD: Palm is a unique company. To start with, there is a tremendous level of collaboration and cooperation between the physical and software aspects of the experience. A simple example is the gesture area. The ID team was looking for a way to create an extremely simple device, eliminating the profusion of buttons on previous products. The HI team was trying to design a core set of input affordances that were flexible, and forgiving of error. On the face of it, these two needs are in opposition, but we embraced the challenge of supporting the ID team's goals and invented something really different that met everyone's aspirations. In turn, the ID evolved to accommodate the unique new requirements of this innovative input mechanism, including the subcutaneous LEDs and expanded touch-panel.

Just as important however, is the collaboration that exists between design and engineering. At Palm design matters. Very practically that means that trade-offs are made in all aspects of the product design, and manufacturing process to preserve the product's intent. In my experience the key to building this kind of holistic experience and well integrated product, is not in company organization, or job titles, or nominal areas of responsibility, but rather on the values of the entire team. This isn't something that can be imposed top down or built up as a grass roots effort. Every member of engineering from the managers to the interns needs to value design.

CP: You mentioned that there were trade-offs that were made to support design solutions that happen in the organization at Palm, which is certainly different than many other organizations of similar size, scale, and context. Could you provide us with an example of this kind of trade-off &mdash a design solution that might have been challenging in terms of development or production.

MD: Well, I think when you say trade-offs, I wanted to mostly emphasize the kind of DNA that exists inside Palm. If you think about it, any organization that is spending any amount of resources in design is essentially making a trade-offs. They're saying, "We are accepting a requirement, beyond the merest functional requirements, and we're going to spend engineering time implementing this particular UI in this way, adding [for example] this particular animation or these screens or the time to change this layout so it's more intelligible" &mdash even the time required to do iterative design and testing. So there's always kind of a continuum, if you will, of the trade-offs that happens.

What I want to really call out, kind of in contrast, is it's more of a question of degree, right &mdash one of the things that we are lucky to have at Palm is really that commitment and that collaboration between design and engineering where engineering allocates the time in their schedule, the resources to develop features that are driven by design or implementations, quality of implementation, details, you know, anything from nonlinear animation curves to major features like saying, "Hey, you know what? In order to be a product that successfully integrates all these forms of communication, we also need to invest in a new feature like the dashboard to give you a tool to manage those sources of integration."

So all those things are trade-offs against delivering some other technical feature or some other bullet point feature that maybe in other companies would have been prioritized. So at Palm we're really lucky that that willingness to make that trade-offs exists.

CP: I spent a bit of time this past year at Microsoft working internally, and one of the large challenges is in fact, managing to collaborate in-person &mdash something I believe is a requirement to design/development success. In terms of the actual pragmatics of that, how does your team interface day-to-day with those other stakeholders, for example developers or engineers? Are you located in the same place or is it virtual?

MD: We have a very small campus. Palm does have a few buildings, but it's very small, and we try to co-locate the teams as much as possible. You know, I think it's really important to have teams work together and to have teams work face-to-face as much as possible. I mean, you know, tactically and tangibly, one of the things that I think is critical for this kind of design and engineering collaboration is that there needs to be a relationship between the designers and engineers.

It can't be just be a faceless name on the other side of an email address, and it can't really just be the guy that you meet in the meeting that gives you work to do or tells you what work you can't do, right? It needs to be a process where the individuals contributing are recognized as individuals. They meet each other face-to-face. They understand the contributions and challenges that each other face, and they get a chance to commit to each other to work to help each other achieve their goals.

I think it's a big challenge, and that's why I say it's so important to have a culture and to have kind of the key people to make that clear to their teams. I think one of the things that was transformative about Palm is the way that, with the help of elevation, Jon [Rubenstein] was able to come and create some of that culture of collaboration between design and engineering and bring talent that both on the design and the engineering side had this experience, knew what it took, knew the value of each others' expertise, and could then build teams that would embody that culture.

CP: Indeed, key influencers in key places.

MD: Yeah, I think without the willingness or the ability to put those kind of key influencers at the various levels of the organization and have all the people be aligned with that goal of saying, "We're gonna have this kind of design-centered culture," I don't think you can make that point. I think you can talk about it, but it will not lead to action.

I understand that that's not a super happy message, and that's not necessarily the message everybody wants to hear, but if you want to talk about tangible strategies for success, I think that's a realization that needs to happen. It is a team effort, and unless everybody on the team is working towards the same goals, it's very hard to change the team, right? If the team doesn't want to change, you know, it's not gonna happen.

CP: During your CES presentation of the Pre experience, you showed how the Pre makes it easy to flow from one activity to another through the card-like interface design. Enabling this seamless behavior helps blur the boundaries between different kinds of activities like managing work, play, personal time, family, social relationships, etc. Does the experience design of new technologies, like the Palm Pre, have a role to play in helping people disconnect and maintain some of the boundaries that may be constructive?

MD: Absolutely, for every new technology that allows people to stay in touch, the design has to consider the times when they don't want to connect. In my mind this type of consideration comes naturally from the way we think about the design challenge at Palm. Put simply, my team does not design smartphones. Instead I've tasked them to drive the state of the art of human computer interaction in a mobile and ubiquitous context. We're not interested in what the smartphone market does, except as it drives the expected interactions of our future users. Instead we focus on those fundamental user needs. To stay in touch, to organize their life, to create private space and time. It doesn't matter how well these are currently met in mobile, or even on the desktop. For example we invented the Dashboard as an extensible system for notifications, widget controls, and ambient information. Even though I have access to more message sources on my Pre than I do on my desktop, thanks to the Dashboard I can be aware of them without being interrupted. I wish I had that on my desktop!

CP: Smart phones like the Pre and elegant features like Synergy lower the barrier to "staying connected', increasing the quantity and ease of sending and receiving communications that individuals experience daily. With all this quantity, is the quality of the message being affected?

MD: People are incredibly sophisticated communicators regardless of their medium. It's what we do. While the format of the content is changing, much as it did when telephone or telegraph were introduced, I don't believe that it can be objectively judged to be very different in terms of value to the people communicating. If you think of the Ken Burn's Civil War mini-series, it's easy to recall an astonishing number of eloquent and heart wrenchingly beautiful letters written by soldiers to their families. While we can marvel at the literacy and eloquence of those authors, many of whom were farmers, I'm not sure how to hold that up against the regular heartbeat of messages I get from my wife and daughter during the day. A video clip of my one year old giggling and clapping her hands always brings a smile to my face. Right now they are visiting the East Coast, and their text messages, photos and IMs, keep them visually and aurally close to me, in a way that prose alone never could. In many ways this modern quantity has a quality all of its own.

CP: I agree that the comparison of older communication technologies to newer communication technologies is difficult to make. Though, with that comparison aside, I would contend that the quantity and kind of communications that we have these days seems to increase some anxiety, and for example also even impedes our decision-making processes. I've observed couples with cellphone technology whose constant access to communications &mdash being able to send quick messages &mdash has negatively impacted the individuals' ability to make independent decisions...

MD: Oh, absolutely.

CP: Drawing a direct correlation between more/easier communication with staying better connected happens readily these days &mdash do you feel there are negative repercussions to be considered here? Does helping shape the experience mean that design has a role to play in all this?

MD: I think there are certainly ethical considerations to be weighed in all product development. There is the responsibility to deliver a product that performs its intended functions in ways that do not harm individual users, society, and the environment. In this context the drive towards usable products can be seen partially as an ethical imperative. A product needs to be ergonomic to prevent physical damage to its operator. It needs to be usable to reduce mental strain and stress. However sometimes when we consider such factors there is a dangerous temptation to try and protect too much. Any product, whether it's mobile computer or a hammer or an automobile is a tool. It can be used responsibly or recklessly. If the primary responsible function of the product would be hampered then the design has failed its first imperative - to make the best product possible. Imagine a 'safe' hammer with a soft foam head that can't possibly hurt your thumb, or a 'sustainable' one that is made of light weight cardboard.

In the context of computing and communication, the social and personal evils that are most often considered include the concerns about information overload that you mention, the blurring boundaries between personal and work time, and in the other extreme, social isolation that comes from internet consumption or addictive game playing. These are certainly design considerations for folks in our field, but I think it is a mistake to see them as error cases which we must try to cordon off. You can't follow two masters. You can't work to increase communication facility and simultaneously work to reduce it because of fears of abuse. Instead, I consider all of these problems as opportunities for new design and new solutions that give people tools to manage these challenges to the degree that they are personally relevant. To use the hammer analogy, rather then compromise the ability of the tool to concentrate force, consider inventing another tool that allows you to place and hold nails in a way that protects the user even if the hammer misses.

CP: Well Matias, I appreciate all your thoughtful insights &mdash and your taking the time to share them with us. We very much look forward to having you join us this year at UX Week.

MD: Fantastic, it was my pleasure. Thanks for taking the time, I really enjoyed the questions &mdash they are all the kind of questions that are near and dear to my heart, so I very much enjoy the opportunity to talk about them.

In the design community, we are also constantly in a process of learning and building deep understandings of the people we design for people and then needing to share people's stories with others, so that together we can make good decisions and be part of essentially inventing a better world. Your ability to bring people and their stories so powerfully to life fosters an empathy and connectedness for your audience that I wish we could bring to our design meetings and activities.

It was exciting to see your recent performance at TED and emotionally connect with the people and their stories you quite literally brought to life.Sarah Jones' TED Talk

Sarah Jones [SJ]: Hooray. Well, that's always the goal. TED is interesting &mdash there are very few opportunities to engage in that dialogue with people who are literally responsible for everything from the lamp by which you read, to the PDA you use.

I remember standing on stage and thinking I owe a debt of gratitude to so many of the designers in this room for everything from gadgets to important architectural innovations or just thinking about technology and &mdash it's just really interesting to me to stand in a room with people who have such a direct impact on the actual physical shape of our world, at least the manmade aspects, and to a great extent, obviously the natural world as well.

We're looking to designers to help us get out of the environmental mess that some of us weren't wise enough to see coming. So it is really interesting.

PW: One of the things that is really compelling about your work is your ability to create characters that feel like autonomous real people. When I watch your performance, all of a sudden, I'm like, "Someone just totally changed, and now I'm seeing someone entirely different." I am curious to know how you learn about your characters.

SJ: Well, I think it's fair to say my characters meet me halfway. I don't create them out of whole cloth, although I guess whenever I hear writers say they do, I wonder how because we all are so much the products of our environment and our family background. Whatever our narrative is the result of all of the people with whom we interact on a regular basis.

But I seek out characters who are larger than life, in part because I grew up around such people. My family life growing up was maybe still somewhat unusual, although it's an increasingly common story in our world. I have a multicultural family, and so some of the characters you meet with me on stage are really people who sat around the Thanksgiving table with me when I was a kid, even some of the less likely characters like Mrs. Lorraine Levine. She's very loosely based on a real great aunt who I had.

And that's a funny thing for people to think &mdash bridging cultural divides just by passing dinner rolls across the table, but that's what my reality was. So a lot of my characters come from that. And hopefully the empathy I feel for every person I meet, and especially the people who are kind enough to share their stories with me, comes form having grown up with people who may not look or sound exactly the way I do, but whom I think of as family, and who often are actual blood relatives.

PW: Beautiful. I was curious with some of your commission work, like "A Right to Care," and the UNICEF work, if the process of creating characters for those projects was different or if you somehow had a different approach to research for them?

SJ: Absolutely. Especially considering the most recent work I've been doing as a good will ambassador. I feel a tremendous responsibility to UNICEF. Their goal is to raise awareness of the issues that continue to plague so many of the world's children. And as I think about those children's lives, some of their stories aren't dissimilar to people I had in my immediate life. Although, I went to the United Nations School as a kid, I was educated alongside kids from every background.

But as I think about kids who are struggling because of poverty and disease and issues they're facing that are much more serious than sitting around the cafeteria worrying about what you're gonna have for lunch. Those are instances in which I really have to seek out people who are living those realities, and also people who do work very closely with everyone from IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) in various countries to people who are refugees, immigrants to other countries.

It's a very different way to approach research. However, with the "A Right to Care" piece which is a piece that was commissioned by the Kellogg foundation to look at ethnic and racial and economic health disparities in the US, unfortunately, I didn't have to look very far at all. I think even with the same economic background, there are interesting stories. And President Obama actually talked about this recently.

There are many interesting statistics on how someone from the same socioeconomic background, but different ethnic background or different racial background will have worse health outcomes than a counterpart who is not a person of color. So that fascinates me to think about the reality that, for example: perhaps mother-in-law Obama, Mrs. Robinson, may have different health outcomes than, say, Barbara Bush. It's a fascinating thing to think, even at the highest levels in our country, as we become more diverse, we have this reality to contend with. I wasn't aware of it, and I'm African American.

I come from a mixed family where I have people from the Caribbean, people from working class backgrounds that are Irish American or whatever those different backgrounds are. It's fascinating to think about how much the debate around health that's so vital, it's such a critical issue, and it impacts different people's lives in such profound ways that I wasn't even are of, and I'm not just talking about health insurance coverage.

PW: When you're given a commission like, for example, from the Kellogg Foundation, I am curious to know what the process is like from being given the commission to figuring out what the piece will become?

SJ: Well, this is interesting. "Bride and Tunnel," which is a show I did on Broadway and really many of the characters come from that particular show, was originally a commission from the Ford Foundation. So I have had incredible good fortune throughout my career as an artist to have people in the philanthropic world see my commercial work, like when I do something Off Broadway or even off Off Broadway, and say, "Those characters are of interest to us. You seem to share some of our ideas, and we think you could help highlight this set of issues."

And so off I go to write something, for example, on immigrants and what it is to be a new American. That was Ford Foundation grant. And in the case of Kellogg, they had very specific data. And as I said, I wasn't even aware of a lot of what I learned until Kellogg pointed me in the right direction. So they were really helpful in terms of research and helping me narrow my focus. It still was extremely challenging. The issues that people are facing, whether it's a &mdash I don't know &mdash it's across the board.

So it's racial and ethnic, but also economic, farmers in rural communities who aren't people of color, but who deal with certain kinds of health disparities. All of that is information I wouldn't have gotten. I learned about Native American health issues for the first time. And I admit and I'm somewhat ashamed to say this, but I really didn't think about Native American health or Native Americans in general in my life.

The foundations are definitely instrumental in helping me gather knowledge. But then the wonderful thing I've experienced is they're very hands off creatively, and that's &mdash I feel really fortunate that I have such rich resources on the one hand, and then so few constraints as far as how I wanna approach it and what I think the characters would really say, who I think these people really are on the other hand.

PW: How do you know when you have the people right?

SJ: I usually go and perform them for that community. So, for example, I &mdash and this is another interesting thing about the "A Right to Care" piece in particular. I recently performed it on Capitol Hill. The conceit of the piece, the theatrical device that is used to illuminate some of this information, was that I set it at a congressional hearing. So it was a funny thing to find myself in the position to actually perform it on the Hill. And it's such a strange thing to have these fictitious people with this hearing that I had always imagined &mdash when I wrote it in 2005, frankly, the possibility felt really far away. This was before Michael Moore's great film Sicko. This was before &mdash so much of what I know now is trying to address these issues, Kellogg was really at the forefront.

I'm not proselytizing for them or anything, but I think they were really pretty courageous in saying things like, "Hey, listen: There are these racial and ethnic and economic disparities," at a time when that was not popular. That was not something that even people in the health field felt comfortable saying because they felt like it was making inferences about race and ethnicity that nobody wanted to look at. It felt uncomfortable.

And I feel really honored that I was part of it. But I have to say, it was almost surreal to hear President Obama say the word "health disparities" in speech a couple of months ago, and now find myself actually doing this performance where I thought it could never be. So that's where I set it. (Laughs) I set it in fantasyland and now the fantasy has caught up to my reality. It's fascinating.

PW: It's amazing. I want to make sure I don't take up too much of your time today, so I will ask my final question. Is there an iteration or editing process you use as you develop your characters and your pieces?

SJ: Yes, and this gets back to how I know when someone has 'arrived in my midst', and I can really trust the voice of character and know that as I'm writing, the character herself or himself will really vet wherever my creative impulses are trying to take me, and I'll know what feels right.

I find that performing in front of people from an actual background, so, for example, one of the characters who became a doctor in the piece "A Right to Care," is based on a real South Asian woman. I toured all over India and performed this character in various places, long before I actually brought her to the stage for the purposes of "A Right to Care." And it was really nerve wracking at first. The concern is that if I get it wrong, you really can fall on your face in front of an audience that intimately knows what the cultural subtleties and nuances of the character should be. But that helps a lot. That helps with the editing. That helps with really focusing and just honing the character. So I rely a lot on the real people themselves, and they tend to really be generous with me and help me sharpen the work.

PW: Fantastic. It is so very exciting to hear you talk about your work.

SJ: Thank you.

PW: Thank you so much for talking with me today. I'm really looking forward to seeing you perform and speak at UX Week.

We love them. We hate them. We fight over them. (We fight with them.) We celebrate them. We fear them. We embrace them. And we just don't think about designing for them as much as we should.

We are completely reliant on these assemblages of letters and spaces to articulate everything...to share what we think, to connect with others and to better understand the world. So what's the connection between words and experiences, and how can we make it better?

This and similar questions have sparked a lot of recent dialog about content strategy, brand voice, and the trajectory of language. So this year at UX Week in September, we're heating up the conversation with speakers that address these topics head-on:

• On Day 1, Kristina Halvorson, Principal at BrainTraffic and content strategist extraordinaire will cover how content strategy and experience intertwingle.
• On Day 2, Erin McKean, CEO of Wordnik.com, independent lexicographer and fisher of wily and wonderful words will share her enthusiasm and vision of the future of language.

If you use words, don't miss these awesome sessions!

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Erin McKean and asking her a few questions about words, language and experience. Erin is an independent lexicographer and editor of Verbatim, a language quarterly on language and linguistics for the layperson. As a self-avowed Dictionary Evangelist, she was most recently Chief Consulting Editor of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press, and was the editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2e. Her latest adventure is Wordnik.com: an ongoing project devoted to discovering all the words and everything about them.

In addition to her dictionary work, she's authored 4 books on wonderful words, blogs at Dictionary Evangelist and Dress A Day.

Erin's presentation at TED 2007 delighted and inspired the audience and set a new benchmark for lexicographical humor.

I asked Erin 5 general questions. As might be expected from someone who lives, breathes and plays with words, Erin's answers went beyond the everyday and into the realm of the magical.

[KR] Hi, Erin. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.

You've made strong statements about freeing the words, observed that dictionaries have not changed since Queen Victoria, and you've proposed that the current printed form of "dictionary" is no longer effective. Related to this, you mention in your TED talk that lexicographers are perceived as traffic cops to keep the "bad" words out of the dictionary club. You say that instead, there is a need to be a fisher who can net up the marvelous words from the depths.

So...if we free the dictionary from the current printed constraints, what do you think that would do to language? What different behaviors and usage would result?

[EM] Well, one great thing that would happen is that people would feel freer to make up words, to be creative with language. Some people are frightened by this freedom to make new words -- they run around worrying that no one will be able to understand anyone else, the "Tower of Babel" scenario. But most people, when they invent a new word, are doing it to be more communicative, more evocative, not less. So I don't think that's a big worry. If you think of words as tools to build out your ideas, why wouldn't you want to have more options?

I think, also, that people would spend less time criticizing superficial language things -- the "but that's not a word" criticism would go away. You could still say "You could have used a better word," but the implication that someone else's ideas were dumb because a non-standard word was used would disappear. I hope they disappear.

I'd like to see people as recognized for their creativity in making words as they would be for music, or design, or any other art. That would be wonderful.

[KR] You're often quoted as saying "The Internet is made of words and enthusiasm." Isn't there more to it? What do you mean by this, and how can UX folks capitalize on it?

[EM] Well, now that I'm working on a new website, I'm seeing just how much more there is to the Internet. There's servers, for one thing. :-) But really, I think that success on the Internet is all about getting people enthusiastic about you, and you measure that enthusiasm in words: what people are writing about you, whether it's in comments, or on their blogs, or on Twitter.

People like to have meaningful (or at least entertaining) conversations, and to feel a sense of excitement and and discovery. You give people all that and you've made good Internet!

[KR] You recently launched wordnik.com, an ongoing project devoted to discovering all the words and everything about them. What's different about Wordnik.com and what does it do that merriam-webster.com/ or dictionary.com or google don't do?

[EM] There's so much new about Wordnik it's hard to know where to start! But first of all, Wordnik believes that all words are worth learning about, so as soon as we have any evidence for a word -- a sentence, a Tweet, a Flickr tag -- we'll show you what we've got.

Traditional dictionaries can take years to give you information about a word, and that just doesn't fly now that we all live on Internet time. Wordnik is about showing you all the data, so you can make your own decisions about whether or not a word works for YOU.

We also believe that a dictionary shouldn't be a one-way street, so we give people a chance to add information: notes about an entry, tags, related words, and so on. People can mark their favorite words and can even record their own pronunciations!

And although we show traditional definitions, too, at Wordnik we think the example sentences are the stars -- we pull them from a corpus of more than 4 billion words of text, and we update them all the time. We are emphasizing example sentences because we know that's how people learn words -- by seeing them in context. How many of the last 20 words you learned were learned by reading a dictionary definition? More context = more learning.

Most importantly, we want Wordnik to be fun. Words are fun, why aren't dictionaries?

[KR] Erin, you're speaking on day 2 of UX week, where the theme is Expressions of UX. What's the role of words in creating and delivering great experiences? How does interesting language create aspects of an experience?

[EM] Your writing style contributes hugely to the user experience. We know this intuitively -- I mean, think about the difference between "I ain't got none" and "I'm afraid I don't have any"!

Every single word helps to construct the experience you want users to have. And of course the more you know about how words work -- not just what they mean, but how they create impressions and evoke feelings -- the more adept you will be at creating good experiences.

[KR] In your opinion, what are 3 things that UX folks should know about words and experiences?

[EM] These are the things that we all need to keep in mind:

• Petty and thoughtless "grammar" rule-following is really off putting to users. It is something up with which you should not put. :-)
• Don't be afraid to be create a word if you need to, but don't go overboard. (Resist the urge to put a big TM after created words ... it strips all the fun off them!)
• Focus more on the overall feel than on any particular word. If you're building a house, keep each brick in perspective!

[KR] And one last bonus question...As a word-guru, I'll bet you see amazing and wonderful words. What's your favorite?

[EM] I really love the word erinaceous, which means "of or pertaining to hedgehogs" ... but I probably have a new latest favorite word every day. Lately I'm fond of awesomepants and antimetabole.

[KR] Wow, I think I'll have to adopt awesomepants, too. And with that, we are good to go as we go towards good! Erin, thanks for your time with me and see you at UX Week.

More about Erin:

• View her awesome TED talk
• Read her books on words
• Check out her blogs: Verbatim, Dictionary Evangelist; Dress A Day
• Explore new words at Wordnik.com
• Hear her at UX Week 2009!

Your post-design product strategy is critical to ensuring the success of your newly designed site. Ensuring that the roll out is as smooth as possible should be priority #1 for the team. There are several things you can do to ease the transition:

Start a blog. Create an official channel for communications from the site management team to the site's users or community. Do this before you do anything else. Prepare a communications plan for the information you want to share with the them and the order you want those messages to be sent out. You can start by simply announcing the blog's existence and purpose: to update people on the impending upgrade. You can give news, describe new features in detail, answer questions, etc. Once the site is live, the role of the blog will change to announcing news and upgrades as well as status notifications. A good example of this is Twitter. They run several blogs that update community members on the service's status as well as development news: http://status.twitter.com/ and http://blog.twitter.com/. Of course, you could also just start a Twitter feed too…

Set up regular user research panels. The best source of site feedback will combine qualitative elements with the quantitative. You may have already made good progress with the quantitative side of things by instituting regular and comprehensive metrics reporting. The implementation of regularly meeting qualitative user testing and/or feedback sessions with users of the site will allow the UX team to get a fuller picture of what's working and what isn't. This can be done in person or remotely via screen sharing software like Ethnio or Tealeaf. Similar to the way you approached research with the site redesign project, you'll need to set research objectives, recruit, test, and report on a recurring basis. This will also help you set site development goals as the design of the site moves to maturity.

Hone the site's design. Your site's new design is hopefully based on a lot of research, discussions, expertise, and best guesses. It won't be 100% right, and issues will crop up. You should be confident in the overall design direction and IA choices that you have made, but detailed interactions may have to be refined. Your first priority is to identify what's not working, why, and how to fix it. Doing so in a structured manner that prioritizes UX issues is a good idea. Once these have been taken care of, you should turn your attention to improving what you have.

Focus on what's new. The completely redesigned areas of the site. Significant failures in any on these areas will hurt your efforts to diversify the main focus of the site. The value and use of these areas must be told and showcased to the community if they are to gain acceptance.

Generally speaking, there are two approaches to site maintenance and design: a new site launch every few years or more gradual, continuous improvements over time. Neither approach is right in every situation, but at the moment, continuous refinement has the upper hand as sites become more complex and the top to bottom redesign becomes prohibitively complex and expensive on the technical side and fraught with peril on the community side.

Winning the peace is as critical for the ground up redesign as it is for the new product launch. Ensuring that you have a post launch product and design strategy in place can help you learn from the mistakes you have inevitably made and quickly and effectively respond to problems as they arise. ]]> 1110@http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/ by Henning Fischer 2009-07-01T15:25:31-08:00 http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/001110.php http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ap_essays/~3/E1aOdRETQNQ/001100.php When it comes to influencing people's behavior through engaging experiences, the emerging social impact game community is the foremost in both theory and practice. In order to engage with this community, I attended the Games for Change festival and workshop. It was an event for people who aim to make games that create awareness around an issue - social, political, global, environmental, anything. These were people who know from experience that engaging with a compelling game is a powerful way to change the way a person thinks and acts -- the same way engaging with a compelling user experience is a powerful way to affect a person's behavior.

Game Design Lessons for Compelling Interactions

The difference between designing a game and a game-like interaction is that the interaction should work as a piece of the whole. A game can be a stand-alone experience, but incorporating compelling interactions into a larger website or application is an exercise in balance. Based on my conversations with Game Designers and my experience as an Interaction Designer, these are the three important steps to creating a game-like interaction as part of your design.

1. Decide what piece of your system will work well as a game-like interaction
2. Brainstorm game mechanics
3. Prototype and iterate until it's fun

Decide What Piece of your Design can be a Game

Many applications that we spend time using have game-like elements. These elements are rarely the main activity in the application, but they're often the part with which people spend much of their time. Let's take Facebook as an example. I go to Facebook to stay up-to-date with my friends' lives and the site makes it easy for me to find the person I want, read their info, and see pictures of them. Where the site becomes compelling and fun is discovering all the activity and side-conversations in my News Feed. There's an important distinction between my foremost, efficiency-oriented task and what I do after that. These two pieces work best as separate task flows. Efficiency and fun are opposing goals, but they can coexist well in a larger website or application.

Brainstorm Game Mechanics

Game mechanics are the basic design elements of a game. They're the gears that are assembled together to create the complex working machine that we call a game. Some examples of game mechanics are the ability to navigate through 3D space, the ability to create and manipulate an avatar, or the ability to rotate and place a series of blocks descending from the top of the screen.

The starting place for understanding what makes something fun is your own experience. What games have you played that you love? I don't know a single game designer who is not also an avid player of games. I also don't know a single interaction designer who is not also an avid browser of interesting websites or services. Just as Interaction Designers collect interaction patterns (in a literal collection or not), Game Designers collect game mechanics. In both cases we analyze and deconstruct what we find.

An example: a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man">Pac-Man . The mechanics of this game include navigating 2D space, finite resources to collect, pursuit by enemies, navigation of a maze and items that change the rules of pursuit, with a time limit to their effect. Even a simple arcade game has a useful set of mechanics to reuse for your own designs. The Game Designers I spoke to found game mechanic inspiration in mathematical theory, evolutionary theory, science fiction, soccer strategy and internet memes.

One method that I learned about at the workshop is the Grow-A-Game Cards , developed by Values at Play. The cards come in four categories: Challenges (social issues), Games (examples of games), Values (human rights) and Verbs. While the cards come with a set of instructions and suggested activities, in our workshop we drew one Challenge card and one Game card, then brainstormed game ideas that attempted to bring awareness to the challenge. Our group drew Sustainability and Scrabble. Our brainstorming ranged from the mechanic of limited letters to using the board with its challenges of bonuses and placement. This sort of word mash-up technique is one we use at Adaptive Path to brainstorm design ideas by pairing interaction patterns together.

Building on proven mechanics is one way to design a system which is likely to be fun. Commercial games use this technique all the time - that's how genres like 2D Side-Scroller or First Person Shooters have evolved. They're essentially collections of game mechanics and conventions that have proven to be fun for many people.

Prototype and Iterate

There is no formula for designing fun. According to every game designer I talked to, you just have to prototype your game and see how fun it is. The sooner you get to something that works, the sooner you can iterate towards a compelling design. One game developer I interviewed said, "Fun is really hard to design. You make something, then you tweak it until you hit that sweet spot." Game Designers Eric Zimmerman and Tracy Fullerton say that there is no secret method to game design; you just "iterate, iterate, iterate".

There are many resources and tips for prototyping (especially with digital tools like Flash), but one method that's sometimes overlooked is physical prototyping. This includes role-playing with a group of people, setting up a mock game environment and generally playing the game through dialogue and action. One of the most illuminating sessions at the Games for Change festival was an Iron Chef-style competition between three teams of game designers who each were given the task of designing a game from scratch right then and there. Watching the teams work through their ideas was a glimpse into the game design process. Each team brainstormed for a few minutes, then immediately started play-prototyping. Some teams brought audience members up to the stage to role-play, while one team asked the audience to send game directives via email. The effect of iteration was immediately noticeable; a team would try an idea, and it would be boring. Then they would add to or tweak the rules, and it would become a bit more interesting. By the end of the hour, you could see that there were seeds of some interesting game mechanics evolving into something that might actually be fun. To recap the session, Ian Bogost explained that in designing a game for change, the first few iterations help design what's fun - the compelling part. Then the designer brings it back towards seriousness - the issue or message that needs to be communicated. The iterations swing back and forth until an effective balance is found. The same process is effective in designing a compelling, game-like interaction.

I hope these steps clarify the process of incorporating compelling, motivating and fun interactions within a larger system. There's a wealth of existing research around designing fun and designing games.

For more thinking around the difference between gameplay and interaction, I suggest reading Jesper Juul and Marleigh Norton's recent paper, Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay".

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. That 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.