There’s an increasing trend I’ve been noticing out here on the net: a growing army of jabbering zombies regurgitating the same slavish uncritical adoration of Google. This level of uncritically always makes me a bit uneasy. Finally I’ve come across a refreshingly different take on Google. Perhaps the great Google might end up being more like the Great Oz. I especially like:

On the Network, The power of people will kick the backside out of algorithms. While computer sciencey solutions are almost always gameable, communities are equally almost always resilient, adaptive, and intelligent.

Philosophically its a very compelling position. Indeed algorithms can necessarily only deal in data (dead letters so to speak). Meanwhile human communities share information, knowledge, wisdom and surprisingly little data. Admittedly wiki’s are not exactly communities of people, their content is socially created and cultivated–no algorithms.

This could explain some of my own personal experience. After reading this I realized that I’m using Google less and less frequently, in favour of Wikipedia. If I need to know something, Wikipedia is now the first place I turn. I still use Google to help me find websites, but for information or knowledge Wikipedia is my engine of choice.

PS.
Here is a visualization of the self-correcting/self-healing properties of social information software like wikipedia. I found this by following a link from peterme.com’s october 12th posting

A scary but liberating aspect of web 2.0 is that it is going to force designers to start relinquishing control. I like that. The relationship between the designer and the user strikes me as very similar to the relationship between the author and the reader. And it has long been understood in literature that the story belongs to the reader and his or her interpretation of it. Once written the author relinquishes all control.

Although I have absolutely no empirical evidence for this, it seem like some of the most successful authors write with this in mind—they write to relinquish control. Designers on the other hand still seem to be greedy for ever more control. We still obsess over pixel perfection.

Perhaps its time to think of ourselves more as authors, and loosen up our need to control. Perhaps we need to think of creating many potential experiences, and more abstract paths to them. I’ve recently started to try this in my own work. It’s difficult for sure, but I feel that this approach can really open things up in terms of innovation.

Sweet Jane
Remake: Cowboy Junkies
Original: Velvet underground
Might be the best remake ever; took a decent tune and without even knowing how to play their instrument, they turned it into something so sopping with melancholy your CD cries every time you play it

Take me to the River
Remake: Talking Heads
Original: Al Greene
The Reverand is good, really good. But the Talk Heads managed to give it the New Wave something Al Greene’s old R&B just didn’t have. Very rare to see some white guys remake classic R&B better than the original.

Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds
Remake: William Shatner
Original: Beatles
Because its about the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard (after Leonard Nemoy’s The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, complete with late 60s music video).

With a Little Help From My Friends
Remake: Joe Cocker
Original: Beatles
Because you can practically smell the bourbon on his breath, feel every word e grinds out, glory in the delicious 70s-ness of it all. Sit down Ringo.

Twist and Shout
Remake: Beatles
Original: Can’t remember
Because I’ve taken 2 from the Beatles already, and their version makes you wan to dance in the middle of a Chicago parade

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Remake: Propellerheads
Original: Soundtrack, Movie same name
The original was good (played during the ski chase scene), but every time the Propellerheads version comes on i start uncontrollably drinking martini’s, seducing random women I’ve never met before, and shooting at things from the hidden rocket launchers in my Aston Martin. Good thing I don’t listen to this too often.

Mr. Brown
Remake: Styles of Beyond
Original: Bob Marley
Claiming a remake of a Bob Marley tune is better than Bob’s version is asking for trouble, I know. But this is a bit more than just a remake. Good cheesy gansta (so 90s i can’t believe I said it) posing with 40 calibre case of glockoma.

I’m paraphrasing a bit, but here are a few tasty bits from a recent conversation I had with a designer of home appliances.

nugget: In order to elevate design as a discipline within the corporation, you need to demonstrate exactly how design solves the executives’ pains.

my reaction: This isn’t as easy as it sounds. This means more than just a laundrylist of why we designers believe design is important, or even a nice ROI chart. Rather the argument must be in their language, speak from their perspective, and must truly understand their more dire pains and empathize with them. To paraphrase an former business school professor of mine, understand your customer’s real pains and you’ve already made the sale.

nugget: The artifact walk-through

my reaction: Learn about the decision maker process of your managers and executives by taking a recently completed product (or other artifact) and walking through with them their decisions and contributions to making it what it is. This will help make the discussion concrete, and take the microscope of them and put it on the artifact (which should make them feel much less threatened and help them open up).

As Emily Dickinson wrote “tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” it seems when studying people we need to “ask the
truth, but ask it slant”

The Cleaner – Use to clean all around the house, with bleach for extra cleaning power, and an easy rinse formula. What more could Donna Reed ask for?

The Greek – Considered the second greatest warrior after Achilles. I heard he just sucker punched people.

The Town – “Celebrates 50 years Remembering the past… Preparing for the future.” Not much happens in Ajax. Just a lot of remembering and preparing. I guess after 50 years of it most people only remember the preparing.

The Game Show Host – Well, he rhymes with Ajax.

Here’s a little reaction I posted to ok-canel in response to an article on Ajax by Adaptive Path’s Jesse Garrett:

“Ajax” signifies a collection of prior existing, relatively mature, mutually supporting web technologies that many of us have been using for years in roughly the same way Ajax describes. So what is it then? Nothing but a snappy label–with an increasingly heavy dose of hype.

Like Cayce Pollard’s allergy to brands, I have an allergy to hype. It starts in the pit of my stomach with a squishy queasy feeling, and then moves up to choke my throat, and finally lands in my sinus cavity with throbbing pressure on my sensibilities. Ajax is starting to give me some mild queasiness.

Some of you may have noticed that Adaptive Path coined the term “Ajax” and is doing a terrific job of branding it (this well-written article is a fine example). Of course in branding Ajax they also brand themselves as THE go-to company for all your Ajax needs (sort of what Cooper has done with personas). This strikes my cynical side as more of an Adaptive Path marketing initiative than a genuine technology.

This is of course a fairly common criticism, even appearing in wikipedia’s entry on Ajax.

On another note I’d like to take exception to the Oddpost vs Google example. Garrett asks “[w]hat’s the difference between Oddpost and Gmail?” And then goes on to imply that the difference is Ajax, and that Gmail beats Oddpost hands-down because of it.

While I agree whole heartedly with the philosophical reasoning that open systems are ultimately superior to closed systems, I think Garrett presents a false dichotomy. The real differences between Oddpost and Gmail start with the fact that Oddpost was created by two unemployed guys with laptops sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop. While Google is a multi-national behemoth that’s starting to make even Microsoft worry.

Despite the resource constraints, Oddpost developed one of the simplest, most elegant UIs I’ve ever used. Its light-years ahead of Gmail and other webapps. It light-years ahead of most desktop apps. And I was happy to pay a mere $30 a year to have it. Meanwhile, I dread having to even look at Gmail, let alone use it.

Gmail is succeeding where Oddpost failed because of branding, marketing muscle, 2gigs of storage, and a $0 price tag, not because it offers a superior experience (which it does not) and certainly not because Google developers followed a CSS/Javascript/XHTML technological implementation that allows a small handful of rabid Safari fan-boys to read their email.

Garrett concludes saying “the recent Ajax explosion signals a new chapter in the history of Web design.” I suspect that’s a bit melodramatic. The web has seen lots of hype come and go.

Author of “Breakthrough Products”, former IDSA president, and former design professor of mine Craig Vogel shared his thoughts over email on activity and personas in design.

“Experience design and activity design are the same. But knowing a person’s preferences is also important because a functional solution should be complimented with lifestyle attributes.

Norman is a psychologist and not a designer. His focus is on human activity which is fine. I think there is more to products than [just the] action analysis but it is an essential component.”

Sounds like Vogel is saying a study of activity is necessary, but insufficient; where Norman says that a study of activity is not only necessary and sufficient, but other realms of user study (like persons) could ultimately be distracting and therefore result in poorer product designs.

Of course Norman could be showing his phsychology bias here. In the integrated new product development process outlined in “Breakthrough Products” Vogel says that good product design results in products that are useful, usable and desirable. Norman appears to be focused on usable at the expence of both useful and especially desirable. And from a phychological perspective Norman’s may be an entirely appropriate reaction. However, from an iNPD perspective his reaction is a bit narrow.

It is hard to ignore the truth of Normans criticisms, that too often the reality of persona development is that it is improperly done and becomes a resource distraction.

Here is the first part of a discussion I had with Don Norman about his recently published articles on the use of personas and activity-based design…

How does (or should) the thesis of your article, if accepted, affect a group’s use of personas as a design tool? Should we forget about them (except as a communication tool) and concentrate on activities as the driving forces behind product design?

Don: Well, we got along quite well without personas before they became popular. I do not think they are important for the intelligent, observant, designer. As I an d you) said, I think they are useful mainly in communicating the decisions to other people.

I think the emphasis on activities is the key.

Is there perhaps too much growing faith in the power of personas at the expense of in-depth understanding of activities and their associated problems?

Don: Absolutely. The persona still says nothing about how to design.

Is a focus on activities perhaps too mechanistic, and blind to all the nuanced subjectivities of experience that contribute to a product’s success or failure, that are better captured between the lines of a persona narrative? (sorry for the awkward sentence, but I could think of how to better phrase it) .

Don: No.

Any single prescription runs the risk of being accepted mechanically. But if you have only average designers, then mechanical solutions are apt to be pretty good — better than they might produce otherwise.

Is a persona centered design approach even a user centered design approach? Or are many of us simply seduced by ease and economy of them compared with studying actual people?

Don: If you don’t study real people, then you can’t produce sensible personas! A persona is, after all, a distillation of the knowledge gathered about numerous individuals.

What is a comfortable balance between understanding people and activities in terms of designing better products? Your articles hint at an answer here.

Don: In no way can you understand activities without understanding people. An activity is the set of actions ( perceptions, thoughts, decisions, and actions) made within t he context of a set of goals. One cannot separate activities from people. Activities are goal-driven, and goals exist only in the heads of people. A major support need is to handle changing goals, and interrupted goal-driven activity — and this involves people.

Does this help at all?

Thanks for writing, and for the useful set of questions.

Don

I posted this to the SIGIA mailing list…

While I tend to agree with Norman’s assertion that activities should be design’s focus, I disagree with the black-and-whiteness of the debates in the wake of “HCD harmful?”

• Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful
• HCD harmful? A Clarification

I believe the real issue is not the inherent superiority of examining either activities or people. Rather I suspect the real issue is how to determine the balance between examining each and under what circumstance one should lead, or take priority over, the other.

Norman’s critique succeeds as a valuable reality check to those with too much faith in personas, and as a reminder that the designers job is to help people better perform activities.

However, his critique also has a couple rather weak points. First, it uncharitably represents personas and scenarios. They are indeed more than just communication tools. To be fair though, Norman’s representation might be a reflection of how he has seen them commonly used rather than their full potential in the hands of an experienced professional designer.

And second, his critique tries to be too universal. What is an appropriate balance between ACD and UCD will obviously vary—a nuance his critique leaves out. Here’s an example. Compare call centers with hospitals. Employees in both are unionized, follow highly evolved procedures and interrelated activities, are strongly hierarchical, etc. You could very successfully model a call center almost entirely on activities without personas, because call centers have evolved to maximize the interoperability of its people, turning people into little more than hot-swappable cogs, so to speak.

On the other hand, even the most complete activity analysis of a hospital would provide only a superficial model that would overlook or minimize the complex web of cultural and personal motivations, goals, and attitudes that make each hospital so unique and that personas and scenarios are so good at revealing.

As a result Norman raises an important issue, but fails to help us develop the tools to prioritize the balance between activities and people necessary to a systematically successful and repeatable design process. Perhaps that will be in his third article soon.