Most UX problems aren’t the middle stuff. Most folks can reasonably string together a few screens, hook up the basics of an app, and design the basic parts of a product. This is the middle – not the big strategic, hairy issues, but a bit bigger than the itty bitty details. These things, typically, aren’t tough.

Where most products separate themselves is on either end. In UX, the middle is scooped out – the big, hairy strategic issues on one side, the small, seemingly insignificant issues on the other.

The big issues are the major ones: huge strategic product problems, like how someone adopts the product, how it provides value over time, how that value changes and adapts over time, how it fits into other aspects of the user’s life, and so on. BIG, nasty, issues. The big stuff isn’t as concerned with screens – it’s about the intangibles that make up the overall experience for the user. This is hard stuff, and worth fretting over.

The small stuff is just about as important, but often overshadowed by the large and middle issues. Small things are really small. For instance, tonight, my wife was looking at hotels on a travel site. As is standard, she entered a check-in date in one date field, and then proceeded to the next field to enter the check-out date. As she clicked on that, she recoiled in disgust, saying “Oh, this stupid thing put the date back to this month! That sucks”. Obviously, she expected it would stay in the month she’d put in the check-in field – 8 months past the current date. Instead, it acted dumb, starting at the current month, instead of intelligently understanding what the user was trying to do.

Simple. Small. So important.

The small things are just about as difficult as the big, not because they’re hard strategic problems, but because there are zillions of them, and recognizing them takes interface literacy – learning, fluently, the language of those small things that make a difference.

For the big issues, you need to either have top gun UX or product strategy chops on your team, or you need to hire it in. It’s important enough. For the small issues, you need to spend time training your team in this interface literacy – getting them to recognize these small moments and build them in by default. These issues go from the calendar defaults, to error messaging and to form labeling. They’re everywhere.

So, don’t be fooled by the middle. The meat of UX is at either end – the big, hairy, strategic experience stuff, and the itty bitty details that make the experience tick. Take care of those, and you’ll be golden.

[Postscript: It just occurred to me that the "scoops out the middle" phrase may not be familiar to all readers. This refers to audio engineering, where "scooping out the middle" means using EQ to pull out all the mid range frequencies, only leaving the high and low frequencies. -JD]

Now, don’t get me wrong – many of them are very successful. They employ a bunch of folks, and those people are talented and genuinely great at their jobs. No doubt about it. However, the agency model doesn’t usually produce world-changing work. Yes, occasionally it happens, but usually not.

So, why? If we have buildings of talented folks, working on tons of projects for high-profile clients, why aren’t most making remarkable things?

Agencies suffer from at least two faults that prevent them from cranking out awesome work, and in my experience in working with an untold number of them, these two issues are remarkably consistent across most agencies.

Problem 1: They Can’t Say No

Most people know that saying no is a critical component of living a balanced and successful personal or professional life. The problem is, most agencies don’t know this. This creates big problems: the client drives the project, from engagement to solution, with the agency merely acting as a production house, instead of as a professional partner.

As an agency, your job is to be a partner with your client, lending expertise about what they should and shouldn’t do, and as a professional, your job is to control the process. Your client can’t do what they’ve hired you to do – you’re the expert, act like one. If they request bizarre functionality, say no. If they request unreasonable deadlines or deliverables, say no.

The point is not to be unreasonable or uncompromising – far from it. As the expert, you should take your side seriously, and giving in to functionality you don’t think belongs or a process you think will deliver subpar results harms both of you. Saying no, respectfully, retains your professional integrity, and ensures the client gets a solution that is the absolute best.

Bonus point: sometimes, this means a client goes somewhere else. That’s OK. You haven’t gotten to where you are because of a sales problem – you’ll have another walk into the office next week, and with that new client may come the opportunity to do truly exceptional work. Let the bad ones go!

Problem 2: Trying to Outrun the Negative Cash Flow

Agencies are service companies, and with true service companies often comes a business model problem: negative cash flow. Negative cash flow simply means you’re spending more than you’re taking in during a particular time period. In most agencies, this is caused by a typical billing structure: 50% deposit, 50% on completion (or some variant, but most follow a similar model).

Negative cash flow is a powerful motivating force. Watching the accounts receivables dribble in during a month causes anxiety, and that anxiety causes management to get antsy for the final deliverable. After all, the final deliverable means the second part of the project fee, which smooths out the earlier dip in cash flow caused by the period of working at a deficit. (Yes, I know the accounting of agencies is quite complex, and there are lots of ways to smooth out this cash flow. However, the fact is – most agencies work on a fundamentally negative cash business model based on commonly accepted billing practices, and that causes these problems).

Where this becomes an issue is with bandwidth, culture and quality. When the negative cash flow squeeze is on (and it’s always on to some extent), it accelerates projects. No longer does an agency have the luxury to say no to a ridiculous deadline or increased scope (see above point), they need to keep things moving to close the cash flow loop – and too often, it results in crappy work. Things get rushed, employees get burned out, and quality suffers – all because of the pressure from the business model, and the unwillingness to say no to the client. And it starts all over again next month.

I wish it was different, but years and years of experience have showed me it isn’t.

So, what’s the answer? First – agencies need to develop more backbone and respect themselves as professionals. Set the terms of your deals, establish a process and stick to it, and say no to unreasonable clients. Secondly, solve the business model problems: productize offerings, work on retainers, change billing structures to be more cash flow positive in nature, or develop other methods for releasing the pressure of the final check.

For me, the most unfortunate part of this situation is the talent and good work going to waste. There are seriously talented people working in agencies, working with seriously important and public brands. These people should be creating some of the best work in the world, and unfortunately, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should, too often due to a lack of professional discipline on the part of the agency.

Let’s find better ways to work. Let’s find more beneficial arrangements that establish clients and agencies as peers, working collaboratively (not as mere vendors) to create awesome work.

The temptation, when standing at this recurring fork in the road, is to opt for flexibility. Potential customers flash though your head as you imagine the myriad of scenarios your product will need to support: “But, what if someone needs to make it turn upside down and inside out? We need to be able to support that!” And, while you’re undoubtedly well-meaning, you’re also probably being irresponsible.

Here’s why:

Flexibility isn’t cheap. Flexibility – especially in an enterprise context, where this kind of nonsense can get radically out of control – incurs cost for your organization in at least three ways:

• Design Cost – with increased flexibility comes increased time and effort needed to mitigate the inevitable cognitive  overhead you’re going to dump on the user. Additional features means increasing complexity. And while we know we can’t get rid of complexity in a product, we have to do something with it. That something is design, and if it’s done well, it won’t be cheap.
• Development Cost – it goes without saying (hopefully), but extra flexibility is also going to incur extra development cost. Building features and options takes time sitting down and writing code, and code costs money. Often, lots of it.
• Market Opportunity Cost – this is the sneaky one, and it’s based on a fairly simple principle: additional flexibility doesn’t translate into a linear increase in user satisfaction or market adoption. The fact is, additional flexibility increases complexity, which increases risk in the product. This risk puts increased pressure on design and development to deliver a solution that mitigates complexity in a way to reduce the attrition due to a degraded product experience. Unfortunately, the pressures of most product development cycles short circuit this critical design and development attention, and the product goes into the marketplace with a sub-par experience, costing the company product adoption, all in the name of “being attractive to as many customers as possible”. Ironic.

So, how do you know what to include?

Understand your market, and understand your go-to-market strategy.

Understanding your market is about research – know who your users are, why they’re using your product, and what they need out of it. Go talk to them! Find out what their lives are like, and use that understanding to carve out a set of offerings that meet the major pain points.

Secondly, understand which customers are important, and when. This is about understanding, clearly, how your product gets to market, and what your initial period of adoption looks like. Which core customer group is going to be the most important in gaining that initial product traction? What are the major things we can solve for them that provides real value? How do you deliver the value proposition to these customers, and what features are required in the delivery of that value?

The key in this is understanding who’s not important. Knowing which markets you’re likely to go to market with initially helps you trim features and flexibility that other markets may want or need. Being able to say, definitively, “That’d be nice, but it’s not going to be a deal killer for our first 12 months of customers” is an absolutely critical level of awareness if you want to get out the door quickly, and with a product that’s lean and excellent at what it does. And, this is exactly the kind of awareness that most companies aren’t able to get to, at least on their initial product offering (hopefully, by product #2 or #3, they’ve learned the lesson).

Do me a favor. Next time you sit down to spec out your next product, start with what it won’t do in this release. Intentionally cut things out. If it makes you feel better, put them on the roadmap for the next release. Do whatever you have to do to say no to yourself and your team.

This is all about balance. Your goal, as you spec your product, is to come up with as little functionality as possible to make it viable until the next release. Be absolutely ruthless on your quest to cut things and limit flexibility, and you’ll find yourself launching a much more focused and effective product.

It’s trite to quote it, but Mies Van Der Rohe did have it right – less is more.

On a recent project involving a major insurance company, we were designing a tool for advisors to manage their clients’ portfolios. In the initial spec and designs, we had a simple feature: a lightweight inbox for managing communication with clients through the application, so that these advisors had a centralized location to manage these relationships.

As we started designing, something didn’t feel right. On its face, the feature seemed to make sense, and inside the context of the application, it was a natural extension of the functionality. The problem was, this feature didn’t consider what was happening in the entire experience ecosystem. In the end, we decided having this inbox functionality was going to create some big problems down the road, and we removed this large chunk of otherwise helpful functionality.

So – what happened? Why did we decide to remove a feature that seemed, on its face, to be a great addition to the product experience?

We looked outside the application and considered the entire experience.

The revelation came as we started to talk through what kind of messages would be sent through the app. A team member innocuously asked: “What is this, an email?”. Bingo – lightbulbs.

That question was pivotal, and led to an avalanche of logic. If these messages were basically the same as an email, what would happen if the client and advisor started communicating through traditional email, outside the app? What if one of them just opened Outlook and fired an email to the other? Where would it be?

The answer, naturally, is that it’d be in the email inbox, not the application inbox, meaning both parties are now managing two disparate communication channels with one another. Ouch. For either party to gain a holistic view of the total conversation, they’d have to manually (read: in their head) aggregate the two streams to piece together the whole picture. (Imagine, for a moment, a picture of a user printing all the communications out and putting them in a binder, just to have them all in one location. Not exactly the experience we had in mind…)

As you can imagine, that’s a problem, and one we didn’t want to create for the users. So, we completely dropped the entire piece, removing all inbox/messaging functionality from the app, intentionally restricting the features available to the users.

The interesting thing about this isn’t that we didn’t include a feature – any good design should demonstrate restraint. What’s interesting is that the feature-set of the product wasn’t informed by the product itself, but on the effect that the feature would have on the entire communication ecosystem that users were managing. Like a good chess player, being a good designer is often about thinking about what effect your moves will have, several steps down the line.

So, next time you’re designing something, and advocating for MOAR FEATURES!, remember to step back and look at how they affect the big picture. What seems logical and desired on its face may end up creating a mess for your users in another area of their life. Look at how your product fits into the entire ecosystem of their life, and make sure you’re respecting the entire picture.

Check out the job description below, and if this sounds like you, get your stuff to us today!

Position: Junior User Experience Designer

We have a problem.

We are getting more and more cool clients – with cool work – and we need helping handling it all. To help us out, we’re looking for a user experience designer with a passion for designing innovative technology products and a passion for understanding the people who use those products.

What You’ll Be Doing

You’ll be part of every step of the design process (depending on the project, of course), including:

• User research and observation
• Persona development
• Content auditing for information architecture development
• Information architecture design
• Sketching and ideation of flow and interface for interactive products
• Wireframing and prototyping
• Documentation and deliverable creation

This is a full-time position, on site in our offices in downtown Tampa, FL.

What You Should Be Great At

We’re looking for someone with a delicate and slightly obsessive sensitivity to designing interactive products so that they deliver great experiences to the end user. We want someone who is able to carefully balance sexy design with real usability, and back up their design with research and thought. In short – we’re not looking for an artist, we’re looking for a designer.

As for tools, you’ll need to be familiar with Axure, the Adobe Suite and general prototyping concepts.

What the Ideal Person Looks Like

This position is not a graphic design position. While you may be talented at graphic design (and that’s certainly a plus), we’re looking for a user experience designer. Chances are, if you know the difference (and the challenge of explaining the difference) we’re talking about, you’re the right kind of person.

While we don’t expect you to have read every page of information about user experience design, we’re looking for someone who is steeped in the base of knowledge out there, and can talk UX shop with us. Whether or not you’re a fan of Nielsen or Spool, you should at least know who they are.

You should enjoy (even prefer) collaborative, team-based work environments.

Not only should you have the chops, but you should have passion. You should constantly be looking at ways to make interactive products deliver a better experience with an inescapable desire to innovate. You should be able to demonstrate experience of working to define the experience of an interactive product, and clearly articulate how an understanding of people has contributed to your past work.

Guess What? You’re Employee #1.

We’re not going to lie. You’re going to be the first full-time hire for Madera Labs. With that comes some exciting opportunities and different expectations. We’re not looking for someone who just wants to show up, design, and go home. We’re looking for someone who has a passion and honest interest in building a new design company. So, while you’ll be working on client work with us, you’ll also be working on our company with us. You have the chance to help shape what Madera Labs becomes.

In return, we’ll give you a fun, relaxing and exciting environment to flex your design muscle in and amazing growth opportunities. You’ll be challenged to innovate and given wide latitude to take risks in your design work.

Madera Labs is a small shop with big aspirations. We’re looking to become the world-class leader in interactive product design and innovation where technology meets humanity in an exceptional and exciting way. Want to join our crusade? Get in touch now.

Send résumés, examples of work and anything that clearly demonstrates your passion for and approach to design to:

Madera Labs
401 S. Florida Ave
Suite #203
Tampa, FL 33602

Or, email to:

careers@maderalabs.com (also, any questions? Hit us up here)

Here’s why:

When UX is done right, it’s strategic. It asks tough questions about people using a product, the product lifecycle, how it fits into a market, and the ecosystem it lives in. While it also deals with screens, flows and technical aspects of crafting an experience, this strategic component guides that work and directly impacts the design solution. When those questions start being asked – Why would someone do this? How would they go about that? When during their day would they use this? – the foundation of a product changes. All the sudden, new requirements emerge: “Oh, wait, if someone is doing this, then that means it’ll affect that. We haven’t even thought about that yet”. Happens every time. Often, until you see something partially built or designed, you don’t even realize you haven’t thought of something. Iteration, and the ability to quickly scrap work and change direction, is key.

This is why requirements-based design is flawed, or at best, limited. A strictly requirements-based design (“Here, design to afford these tasks”) misses the value that UX can bring – that is, carefully examining and evaluating the DNA of the product, and building from a strategic understanding, instead of a checklist of requirements.

This can be frustrating. During this weird, iterative design process, things feel chaotic. That’s OK – it has to be. Without that chaos, without the constant “Oh crap, we didn’t think about this” moments, you aren’t getting to really great design. Embrace that chaos and understand it’s part of the process. Design isn’t neat and methodical – the faster you accept and understand that, the faster you’ll get to great products.

This morning – a Monday – I jumped in the car to go to the office, and heard the slow crank of the battery. Knowing that the battery was on its way out, I opted to swing by Sears on the way to swap the battery. I left about 30 minutes early, thinking that, surely, that extra buffer would guarantee I make it to work close to my normal time. It’s worth noting that I chose Sears due to a warranty on my now-dying battery, and wanted to take advantage of that warranty replacement.

What transpired over the course of the next four hours is a case study in how not to handle customer service, especially via social media.

I arrived at Sears Auto Center in Citrus Park, FL at 8:15 a.m., just 15 minutes after they opened. No other cars were in the garage, so I assumed a really quick swap. I gave the rundown to the guy at the counter, and took at seat in the waiting area.

An hour passed. Another customer arrived – and left – having had a battery replaced. “No big deal”, I thought to myself – they must have had an appointment.

Another hour passed, and my frustration made it out onto Twitter:

I’m now sitting here, almost 3 hours after my initial tweet about this experience, and this is Sears’ last tweet (sent at my 3 hour mark, and after a bulk of the tweets seen above):

Really, this speaks for itself. No comment is necessary at this point.

Here’s the bottom line: companies, your world had changed. You don’t have the advantage, we do. The more this kind of crap continues, the worst you’ll look in the courtroom of public opinion. And I’ll make sure to call out this kind of BS every time I see it happen.

If you agree, make sure to spread this post around. I really want Sears to see how much of a liability it is to ignore your customers when they’re literally shouting in your ear.

Good luck, Sears. Heh.

[UPDATE: 3:54 p.m., same day - Sears finally woke up. Seeing as this post has been RTed around the twittersphere, and a plethora of @ replies have been made with their name in vain, I'd hoped it would only be a matter of time before they pulled their head out of the sand. They've contacted me, and said a manager from the store will get in touch. I'll update if and when I ever hear from someone. - JD]

[UPDATE 2: 5:00 p.m., same day - Got a call from the manager of the local store who profusely apologized and offered a full refund from today's service. He sounded sincerely concerned, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't change the fact that Sears' social media seems to be phoning it in with regards to response time, but at the end of the day, they did pull it off, so I need to give credit where credit's due. That said, it's a shame it took this much work to get a resolution. Hopefully they learned something from it.]

This is especially prevalent on the web, where switching costs are so low. For users, it’s so easy to hit the back button and go to a competitor, that getting people in the door and attached is a key part of grabbing some market share. Seems like common sense, huh?

Well, you’d think. Unfortunately, a majority of products on the web don’t do a great job at getting users in the door easily. Instead, they present users with arcane signup forms, difficult setup flows, and generally a whole bunch of pain. This generates much griping among the team, who start reading articles about conversion rates and tweaking the colors of buttons in a desperate attempt to lure more people through the elusive conversion funnel. Generally, this misses the point grossly, dooming the innocent product to a life of anemic adoption, and potentially, complete failure.

So, what’s going wrong?

It has to do with something I call the “Incline of Death”. The Incline of Death is a moment in a product adoption lifecycle where pain overcomes perceived trust and value, causing the user to bail out – too little trust, too much pain.

Illustrated, it looks something like this:

This sketch shows the problem. As a user progresses through time, experiencing your product for the first time, they’re balancing two different emotional states: trust/value and pain.

As they get to know your product, and they start to perceive real value from using your stuff, their trust rises along what I call the “Curve of Value”. This curve has awesome staying power – make it high enough (by providing a whole bunch of value), and people will be much more likely to stay around.

In the dashed box, you can see the danger zone. This is the Incline of Death. The Incline of Death occurs when the amount of pain experienced by a user rises before the Curve of Value kicks in. Trust is low, pain is high – people bail out (unless they’re forced to use it, as with company expense reporting software and about any government product).

The Incline of Death claims many lives on its silent and insidious quest to sink new products. Many companies don’t even realize it exists, until they interview potential users and hear the string of curse words attached to their brand name. Ouch.

So, we know the Incline of Death is out there. What can you do about it?

You can beat the Incline of Death in two ways:

• Move the Curve of Value up in time
• Flatten the Incline

Moving the Curve of Value up in time means demonstrating value and establishing trust before requiring much work on the user’s part. Comprehensive demos, easy trials and no-account-setup strategies are ways move the Curve. With all of these, it means somehow engineering a way for the user to derive real value before having to experience setup or commitment pain. And no,  a page of screenshots labeled “Tour our Product” doesn’t count – you need to provide real and lasting value to really move the Curve.

Another technique commonly used to help move the Curve of Value up is gradual engagement. Gradual engagement allows a user to begin using your product with the smallest possible commitment up front, for example, by removing sign up forms and letting users jump in immediately (with signup coming later, after value has been demonstrated).

In short, find a way to demonstrate value quicker. Even if you can’t flatten the Incline of Death, moving the Curve of Value up can give users the will to fight through the pain.

Flattening the Incline of Death means redesigning setup to reduce the total amount of pain. Removing form fields, delaying the collection of certain types of data and completely removing setup altogether are some ways to flatten the Incline. Often, flattening the Incline is much more difficult than moving the Curve of Value up. Stakeholder positions and business culture can sometimes demand certain amounts of setup complexity, and in some instances, the product itself requires a certain degree of setup to work at all. In those instances, stretching the Incline out (basically flattening it by stretching it) by breaking setup into steps (with value-based feedback and encouragement) or moving advanced setup into interior areas of the product can help. For instance, if a user is signing up for an email account, let them choose a username and get started. Delay advanced setup – adding friends, contacts, etc. – until later in the product lifecycle (or at least offer it, and let a user skip).

The fact is, sometimes you simply can’t make setup less complex. As Tesler’s Law of Conservation of Complexity states, there’s an inherent amount of complexity in interactive systems. The only option is to either move complexity from the user’s perspective to the system’s (by automating tasks, using intelligence, etc.) or by stretching complex task flows out over time, reducing the shock users experience at any given step.

When it comes down to it, flattening the Incline of Death is mostly about restraint – what pain can you delay, until after the user has already experienced enough value to put up with it?

The Curve of Value and Incline of Death are critical pieces for product adoption. We’re more likely to forgive something for causing us pain when we trust it. Master this, and you’ll massively increase your chances that people start using your product.

For those not familiar, here’s how it works (at least, here’s how the ones in Tampa I’ve been to have worked…): a mass of food trucks descends on a location, usually a big parking lot or field. These food trucks line up and open for business, with hoards of people coming out to sample their wares.

The last one I attended in Tampa was great, except for one thing: the experience was terrible.

As I walked around the rally, I was trying to get my head around what made the experience bad. It was in a beautiful area of South Tampa, on a gorgeous day, but there was something that was making it less than ideal.

Then it hit me: food portion sizes. The food portions were too big!

Let me explain: At a food truck rally, the implied goal is to circle a bunch of food trucks to allow attendees to see and taste food from food trucks around the city. The problem is, when you’re serving entree-sized portions, no one samples. At that point, there are at least a couple main issues that make the experience bad:

1. Entrees mean longer lines: because entrees are usually cooked-to-order, the experience doesn’t scale. Each person generates X minutes of prep time, which doesn’t enjoy much economy of scale to speed things up. At the rally gets crowded, lines get longer, and frustration increases on the part of attendees.
2. Entrees don’t lend to sampling – the entire point of a rally like this: this is really my biggest beef, because I’ve seen this violated at food festivals as well. Vendors serve meals, not samples, meaning attendees end up going to a single place (or maybe two, in the case of a couple, but the waiting time is doubled, or you’re separated from your partner for some bulk of time, decreasing the quality of experience). If the point of a rally or festival is to allow attendees to sample food from various vendors, then serving entree-sized portions completely flies in the face of the reason the festival exists. For attendees, the benefit of a rally – a variety of vendors in one location – is completely removed. Put simply, I’d be better off finding a food truck the next day, and just driving to where it is to order.

This experience is broken, and it goes for food festivals as well (the recent John’s Pass Seafood Festival in St. Pete comes to mind). For a successful food festival/rally experience, the focus need to be on allowing attendees to sample, meaning vendors serve smaller portions that are potentially pre-prepared, thus shortening lines and widening the breadth of total allowable food samples.

There are a myriad of ways to solve this problem: serve preprepared samples, allow remote ordering via mobile with pickup notices pushed to a phone (someone want to build a food festival app for this?), put servers in the crowd delivering samples for cash on the spot, create multiple smaller tables around the trucks to increase order efficiency, etc. Whatever the solution is, it has to involve smaller sample sizes, period.

So, next time you’re at a festival or rally, take a look at the experience. Note whether they’re really gearing the experience toward allowing attendees to sample, and how line lengths are dealt with. These are the kind of service experiences that can be made remarkable, if we just give it a little more thought.

When we all started jumping onto the web in the mid-to-late 90s, it was exciting – the new frontier. We rushed through the Dot Com bust, inventing entire new ways of interacting with each other (Myspace, Facebook, Twitter) and creating an entire ecosystem to support our lives that never existed before. From then, up until now, it was pretty exciting.

But now, it’s getting boring. We’ve moved from a pioneering spirit to one full of static and parity. With the economic downturn, companies reduced spending on web-related projects, often stripping them down to merely content repositories and distribution channels.

Additionally, the web has decontextualized much of our daily life. As we sit down in front of the computer (the way the vast majority of people still consume the web throughout their day), technological support of our human context has been framed up inside a plastic black bezel. Put bluntly, so much of our web experience is stripped of sensory experience. Our sense of touch is mostly limited to the glazed tops of keys and a curved mouse (or even worse, a flat touchpad). Our sense of smell and taste are completely removed from the experience, and even our sense of hearing is limited to a few forms of media-based audio: mostly that of videos and music, piped through to us on demand as we continue the quest toward our fattening consumption of various media.

Yes, the web has become a stale experience, comprising mostly of social support frameworks and heaps of consumable media. As user experience designers, our job has mostly been to try to create a nicer facade for these compartmentalized experiences. While momentarily exciting, the caffeine rush is temporary: an exciting world of technology, progress and complete social change, neutered down to headers, blocks of text and sexy real-time error delivery in forms. Boring.

I know this sounds rather dark and pessimistic, but I want to look at this as an opportunity to call technologists and businesses to action.

I know a bunch of brilliant – and I mean brilliant - technologists. People who astound me with their understanding of how code and machines work. These folks can code anything, making any machine do their bidding. What a waste to spend that talent building another sidebar component for a CMS, or making Ajax work quicker to validate a form.

As we look toward the future, I want to challenge technologists and businesses to look outside the web. Yes, the web is always going to play a role. Yes, mobile will probably always be around. But, let’s look further. Let’s look at how technology can make the bus riding experience better. Let’s make the TV experience better. Let’s make the furniture shopping experience better. And, let’s do it not using more mobile apps to add a layer of augmented reality on top of our world – let’s fundamentally change how we do things, by leveraging technology in more boundary-breaking ways.

So, next time you sit down and code another header or incrementally improve the way a slideshow transition works on a mobile device – ask yourself this: are you really using your talents and vision to their fullest extent? While, yes, someone has to take care of these details, I believe they’ll be taken care of as a natural part of a larger innovation picture. If you find yourself bored with the web, get off the web and build something in the real world.