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The Simplicity Shift

1. B base stations for MP3 players 99 battery power for MP3 players 99 Bluetooth 18 20 32 33 75 122 23 Boorstin Daniel 23 bugs 158 159 C cars common design for 115 playing MP3 players in 97 starting 29 cell phones see mobile telephones Churchill Sir Winston 57 clocks digital watches 115 116 on heater timer 143 45 147 see also timers complexity 11 tied to flexibility 12 13 computers turning off 29 30 see also Apple computers personal computers consumers innovation life cycles for 24 27 Cooper Alan 2 Index cordless telephones 25 26 corporate culture 39 40 costs of controls for microwave ovens 71 of heater timer design 144 of MP3 players 111 of User Centered Design 3 4 Crosby Philip 4 5 21 D design commonalties and standards in 115 Failing Fast in 124 of heater timer 135 simplicity in 5 6 sketching in 125 29 target users for 41 42 user testing of 130 31 design artifacts 151 52 designers conflicts between programmers and 119 idealism of 123 implementation blindness of 149 programmers working closely with 121 Design Manifestos 152 58 166 desktop interfaces 115 116 digital timers on heater timer 144 45 on microwave ovens 58 60 61 digital watches 115 116 Director program 129 displays fonts for 85 86 on heater timer 135 on MP3 players 93 94 98 99 104 6 E early adopters 24 27 easy hard tradeoffs 17 Index
2. The Simplicity Shift open the e mail first choose the menu item Delete and then answer an Are you the user alert The Delete Mail feature was certainly in the product but this multi step process drove users crazy because one of the most frequent tasks with this product was to delete potentially dozens of e mails a day I was on a project with this exact problem As we went into the product design with this task flow problem in mind I discussed with the programmers the capability to have a deleted folder so items could be deleted but if necessary undeleted from this folder later Because it was early in the project this was an easy thing for them to add We also made it possible to delete an item directly from the list view so you could delete three e mails with only three button pushes This was well received and a significant improvement to the product It wasn t hard to add but it would never have been added if we d discussed it late in the beta testing phase Other task flow problems come not from repetition but from place ment For example many PDA type devices have a mishmash of setting controls to configure e mail making the user go to a modem control panel a networking control panel a phone control panel and more Not only is the flow complex but it also involves considerable nav igation expertise to know where to go to find all these nuggets of functionality Many solutions exist to this type of problem
3. 83 89 91 91 93 95 102 103 105 106 111 111 113 113 114 119 124 132 133 133 137 Contents STAGE 1 FIND THE CORE 140 STAGE 2 EXPAND THE CORE 142 STAGE 3 BOWING TO REALITY 144 CONCLUSION 148 11 Implementation Blindness 149 INTRODUCTION 149 INSIGHT 9 THE DESIGN MANIFESTO 152 INSIGHT 10 THE SWAT TEAM 157 CONCLUSION 160 12 Conclusion 161 WuHy WE RE HERE 161 THE PROBLEM NAIVE ATTITUDES 162 USER BLINDNESS 162 FEATURE BLINDNESS 163 INNOVATION BLINDNESS 164 IMPLEMENTATION BLINDNESS 165 THE SOLUTION ACTIVE INVOLVEMENT 166 Appendix Recommended Reading 169 Index 171 Why Are We Here The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt Bertrand Russell THE CHALLENGE Designing innovative consumer products takes both passion and per spective Passion to overcome the hundreds of problems that always crop up and perspective to know which problems are the most important to solve Any product that s breaking new ground almost by karmic def inition must break a few rules Accepting status quo design solutions will rarely result in superior products Breaking new ground in a corpo rate environment is made even more difficult however because projects often have too little time and too little money Not only must you in novate but you must do it in half the time This is the challenge that professional designers must live with e
4. Of course soft buttons can be used well but they re so easily used incorrectly You ve seen this before in the microwave example where the Power level setting was hidden under a single button so you had to watch the screen to see at which level you were located and how many more presses you needed to reach your goal As a general rule I try hard to avoid soft buttons because they tend to create rather than solve complexity Of course getting rid of soft buttons isn t only a Presentation layer problem You have to change the Task layer signifi cantly to get around the initial design philosophy Screen Design The look on the screen is rather retro PC because it has a scroll bar on the screen This is an example of default thinking which I discuss later in Insight 6 The designers probably assumed most personal com puters have scroll bars so adding them here was an acceptable practice Why this decision is so suspect is because the design of this particular scroll bar is but a pale shadow of the original desktop version it s for information display only Using a mouse or a pen to tap on the scroll bar as you would on a computer isn t possible a The Simplicity Shift For consumer devices such as this scroll bars might an option but they should be used only as a last resort I think most screens for a device like this should be designed never to scroll completely eliminating the need for the scroll bars For cases when t
5. The motivation of this Simplicity was the understanding that only two tasks were used the majority of the time answering the phone and dialing from the phone book Nokia came up with an extremely simple and elegant design to do this Answer the phone Press the big button Hang up the phone Press the big button Call someone Use the arrow keys to get to the right person and press the big button By restricting Le The Simplicity Shift the number of buttons and using them cleverly the phone had an un cluttered look As my teenage son said one day when we were discussing various phones Anyone can use a Nokia SIMPLICITY DRIVES UNDERSTANDING This example shows how Simplicity in this case through choice re duction enhances the learning process and streamlines the use of the product The big button answers the phone and hangs up The up down arrows take you directly to your phone book entries There aren t many options because there aren t many buttons Users can quickly discover the fairly simple functional choices I occasionally hear from power users that designing a simple product is an insult to the expert Simplicity however doesn t have to mean impoverished It simply means prioritized By having the simple tasks clean and obvious you improve not only the learning of the product but also the ease of use With the Nokia example the four button design creates a type of scaffolding which enables you to use the phone
6. onds the vast majority of the time and the second was that this activity of setting the folder privileges was a very low volume task so even if it did take a whopping 15 seconds it wouldn t be done that often This is a great example of the type of work it takes to Make the Easy Easy and the Hard Hard Making it easy brings up lots of issues that make the product team nervous as a simple solution does open up some end cases that may not be handled cleanly There is always a tradeoff that needs to be made balancing the potential for a feature to be used incorrectly and one which makes is slightly slower to use Why It s Important Designing like this making higher end functions slightly harder to use often creates intense arguments from programmers who feel this dumbs down the product This appears only to punish those users who take the time to understand technology and try to use it to its fullest potential This isn t about punishing power users but rather mot punishing the initial users Making the initial design solution elegant and simple has benefits for all users This isn t only about placing higher end features on the top shelf but making sure all the frequent and critical features are on the low shelf This can not only help the user learn the device but it can also help the user use the device in a more proficient way Feature Blindness aj because the simpler design will also be streamlined and faster
7. Figure 8 5 We ve been developing a sense of place without realizing it So far each screen has had a title and contained a list of concrete items to either open or play things The Play button takes you down and the Stop button takes you back With this new design this simple model is changing slightly so I m mixing a function with a list of items The first item Create new track would start a new recording Everything else is simply a previously recorded track This is clearly trade off territory A physical Record button would be the more obvious thing to add but I m convinced the clutter ofa button that might rarely be used isn t worth the trouble I m intentionally making this decision because we re in a higher end corner of the device and I want to keep the gorgeously simple two button design in tact But we must forge ahead and discuss what happens when the Create new track is selected It came out in our recording Scenario Design Break MP3 Player RKU that making a recording isn t only a matter of starting recording a per fect song and then pressing the Stop button Lisa will probably have false starts or pauses in her recording The classic technology approach would be insensitive to this and simply offer the capability to start and stop a recording This means if a mistake were made it would be up to Lisa to stop the recording delete it and then start yet another recording which would be cumbers
8. The Design Issues section is where to spend the most time This is where to save time and money By working through the user blind ness tools determine early what you ll plan to ignore In the case of the MP3 player we were able to ignore many tasks such as playlists and equalization editing What probably will happen is that working through the design issues will also force discussion insight into many of the technical issues This is why discussion must be early and by the entire team Critical aspects of the product can be easily fixed if these areas are discussed early enough How to Do It This Insight is the easiest of them all to explain just fill in the previous form Of course the catch is broad agreement must exist ia The Simplicity Shift The value of this document is the decisions it forces And the process I m afraid isn t easy What s more this Design Manifesto should be short The longest I ve every seen has been three pages It might have an appendix of the Personas and the Scenarios and the feature lists but it s an executive overview document and must provide a strong background of a project quickly I ve seen 30 page long marketing positioning documents Few people read them which makes them a ineffective communications tool I recommend that various groups take responsibility for pieces of this Design Manifesto and propose solutions In one company where I worked my team the design department w
9. The only problem here would be to have all 24 hours available and legible on the dial labels Figure 10 5 shows this design now makes it easy to have an error the user can now set overlapping times with the morning stopping after the afternoon starts e Hot Water only Hot Water and Heating FIGURE 10 5 Dials to set time Design Break Heater Timer KY Morning Evening All Day v On B Hot Water Set Off Hot Water amp Heating Time FIGURE 10 6 Reduced cost design The classic digital approach to this problem would be to reuse the digital clock to view and edit the timer settings This is a serious com promise because the beauty of the original design was that everything was visible at a glance Figure 10 6 shows how this would look We now have to share the digital display so buttons must get you into and out of using the display Morning Start will blink the digits and you can set them pressing Start again would then set the time This is a clear departure from the original design It too has the same error potential as the dial design in Figure 10 5 This design will clearly be cheaper than the slider model because it replaces its more complex part with only five simple push buttons This i The Simplicity Shift is where a designer s job gets hard Would I be able to recommend this design It isn t nearly as good as the original slider but you can only do one thin
10. The problem with user blindness is it assumes everything is important to a multiuser and any discussion is focused on a long list of the features a multiuser will need Personas create a specific target person someone with a name and some details that fleshes them out and makes them real Designing for a Persona makes you walk through the specifics of the product for that person and this exercise forces out issues you d hadn t been able to see before At its best the Persona is a tool to make you slow down and walk through a character forcing you to realize many little things that are clearly important but never make it on to any feature list Example I was in a product meeting discussing how to rework the way messages were sent and received for a new consumer phone concept The design was vastly simpler than existing desktop e mail clients and removed many of the more high end features We had created a Persona called Emma which was a young teenage consumer and had an established use pattern based on our knowledge of current SMS messages This wasn t a complex model but by giving the characterization a name and some details we could focus our discussions What s critical to this example is that Emma was agreed to by everyone in the meeting before we started When we started getting bogged down in a particularly powerful feature which some wanted to keep and others wanted to remove I said We re not designing this for us We re d
11. What happens is that people receive phone calls while the phone is in their pockets If your phone is set on Silent mode for a meeting you d never know the call came in or you might even have intentionally ignored it In either case you now have an unlocked phone in your pocket and you can freely dial random phone numbers or worse speed dial someone and leave them a 15 minute phone message of your meeting filtered through your pocket fabric Notice that this problem is fairly easy to solve You have only to relock the phone when the call is over But the lesson here is that new problems can arise by only addressing an issue in the Presentation layer You usually need to work through the broader tasks in the Task layer to make sure you fully solved all the problems The first step is in understanding that you need to look beyond the basic interface The next step is in using the tools to look further These will be discussed in Chapter 5 User Blindness Example Technical Architecture Is an Infrastructure Problem The previous Bluetooth example is a classic problem of infrastructure creating several problems in the Presentation layer The technical spec ification for Bluetooth treats all devices as potentially hostile and as a result a lengthy set of steps is required to find authenticate and connect to a bluetooth device While there are times when such steps might be necessary the specifications insistence on treating all devi
12. computers will be the source of the music that goes on the device and that most computers tend to have good speakers I would lean toward having the base station if one exists be tied to the computer This also implies that hooking the unit up to a home stereo is possible but this probably isn t its most common use The Simplicity Shift Scenario 7 Recording Lisa would like to record her group in practice sessions This implies all sorts of control issues because false starts will probably occur which will require them to start over or break between sections where Lisa wants to pause the recording A classic computer approach is to start recording then stop recording and then delete the recording to start over This could lead to all sorts of problems and complexities for Lisa in her ensemble Remember Lisa will be wrestling with a cello while she does this so the controls must be fairly simple Lisa will be concentrating on the music not on the device while she s doing this Because Lisa is likely to record several sessions it also seems probable that the device should autoname the recorded tracks with something meaningful such as Date Time so she knows when the recording was made It doesn t seem likely that Lisa will want to rename the sessions on the spot but she might want to mark one as special so she can dig through the sea of recordings and play back those that have value to her Lisa is going to focus on playin
13. e mail 28 29 deleting 77 78 horizontal layout for 126 on mobile telephones 116 119 21 errors complex dialog boxes for 87 88 recovery from 76 77 ethnographic studies 42 expert users 16 F Failing Fast 124 165 feature blindness 7 73 163 64 feature lists 73 74 89 90 features flexibility in use of 83 85 layering 85 86 prioritizing 20 80 82 164 Simplicity in mix of 12 unFeatures and 75 76 79 80 user personas and 44 45 featuritis 62 field studies 45 47 Flash program 129 flexibility 12 13 FM transmitter for MP3 players 97 102 focus groups 45 folders for e mail 116 120 fonts for displays 85 86 functionality 12 G GPRS telephones 35 39 error recovery on 77 scenarios on use of 52 53 H hardware for MP3 players 93 102 headsets for mobile telephones 18 20 122 for MP3 players 96 heater timer 133 34 core design of 140 43 design of 135 personas for 137 38 programming 135 37 scenarios for 138 40 simplified design of 144 48 Heinlein Robert 113 implementation Design Manifestos in 152 57 166 SWAT teams for 157 60 implementation blindness 7 149 50 165 66 infrastructure layer of user interface 28 29 innovation blindness 7 113 14 164 65 innovation life cycles 24 27 innovators 24 interactive demos 129 30 interfaces see user interfaces Internet music on 99 K Kay Alan 73 L layering features 85 86 life cycles in tec
14. steady progress of a stable product concept Products are changing not only with new features but with features that reduce the functionality as seen with the cordless phone example When creating Simplicity in product design the established nature of the product category and the user behaviors of the product must be understood or your product will de evolve creating a product that feels like it s taking as many steps backward as forward THE USER INTERFACE DOESN T Exist In talking about Simplicity to others I ve found the standard definition of what a user interface is no longer works We are trapped by the current definition In fact I ve finally come to the conclusion that user interfaces don t exist Or at least they don t exist in the same way we talk about them The term wer interface implies a single object a bit of code which represents everything the user can do with a product This is misleading and dangerous because it limits your thinking analysis and planning about how to design a commercial product We are in a situation much like George Orwell s famous book 1984 In that novel the government limited the people s vocabulary to reduce their ability to express themselves We too have a limited vocabulary influencing our thinking We need a richer set of words to enable us greater explorations of problems and solutions I suggest three separate layers ultimately compose the entire user experience The Pres
15. t simply happen as an afterthought You must make it your most passionate goal You have to set up a managerial process that values design resolves the issues it a The Simplicity Shift raises and then has the guts to carry the design through You do this by making a shift in your company a Simplicity Shift Simplicity goes beyond a term like good user interface which has become so broad it has little clear meaning Simplicity is a goal with precision Simplicity means streamlining pruning clutter cleaning up presentation and improving the initial experience with a product But Simplicity is more than just making a cute product for technophobes Simplicity streamlines and optimizes use as well Power users don t want to follow a complex sequence of steps any more than the novice user Simplicity has value for everyone The Shift comes in the culture surrounding a product A company doesn t get a simple product only by hiring good user interface design ers While that s a nice start a designer s best efforts have a difficult path to final release To conquer the previously described complexity a company must appreciate the difficulties involved in designing and then shipping a simple breakthrough product The Simplicity Shift is about the tools necessary to shift a company s culture to accomplish this THE FOUR TYPES OF COMPANY BLINDNESS Companies today have little insight into what Simplicity is in a con su
16. they aren t considered because they re seen as too hard to achieve Innovative ideas happen surprisingly often They re simply killed off much too quickly Implementation blindness comes from not understanding that a com plete design is only the first major milestone Getting the product shipped is where the real work begins Many companies don t see that a product design can lose its path a thousand times over when moving from design to shipping The design that usually makes it out the door rarely matches the vitality of the original concept Once a company has been cured of these types of blindness a new product culture can arise A culture that can discuss and dis cover Simplicity make difficult decisions as to what should go in or out of the product execute those decisions and finally bring them to market WHAT THIS BOOK Is Not ABOUT This isn t a book about design tips and tricks I won t tell you how to use white space effectively or about clever ways to use fonts and color to increase information density I also won t cover techniques to improve your user testing reports or new discoveries in field research These topics have already been covered in many good books An appendix at the back of the book refers you to books that cover these topics in more detail a The Simplicity Shift WHAT THIS BOOK Is ABOUT This book is about design insight and management It focuses on the design tools that companies must share a
17. Personas with mar keting or Has that Scenario uncovered an architecture risk These two insights break the mystery of the design process and start sharing it with the entire company Finally these insights are fairly fast and inexpensive A company of any size should be able to pull this off in a few weeks and this is time that can save you trouble down the line Once a company is capable of using these simple and fast tools it can them move up to the more in depth methods of understanding users such as ethnographic studies focus groups and field studies These are all effective tools Recommended books are in the Appendix at the back of the book These tools are most effective though after you have the basic tools in place You must start working on the communication and agreement of Personas and Scenarios before you can absorb and use the information you find from these deeper tools Design Break Microwave Oven Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge Winston Churchill his Design Break is an example of dragging products back to the front of Moore s technology adoption curve Something simple and reasonably well understood by the addition of new technology can become unusable and irritating Using our new vocabulary this shows how what appears to be a simple presentation layer problem also has large task level problems Let s start with a bad microwave and by using a Persona and a
18. S Set 8 HW CH Times as Task B FIGURE 10 2 Original task flow Design Break Heater Timer aj Notice the shorthand I used to make this flow possible to fit it on only one page The shadowed boxes refer to the previous task groupings For me to review all timers I had to go through Task B two times and Task A four times This process is a complex mix of capability Not only can you view the timer values but you can set them and even copy values to other days To do all this functionality you only have four buttons YES NO TIME and TIME This is a limited interaction space so to compensate the device has to lead you through an interrogation which you must answer correctly and precisely to get through the gauntlet of options It s easy to press the wrong button accidentally and copy over the entire weekend timers when you were only interesting in reviewing the current settings ANALYSIS Persona Before we start the redesign let s do our homework and create a target Persona Let s imagine Emma married to David mother of two children ages 8 and 10 Emma works part time as a secretary at a life insurance company and she arrives home in time to greet the kids when they return from school in the late afternoon Her family gets up early on weekdays to get ready for school and comes home around 4 P M David also works and leaves for work about the same time as Emma but returns a few hours later What type of detail
19. Small companies have little to start with and feel that good design is only for the big boys Small companies must realize that most bad design comes not from a lack of design experience but from a series of bad management decisions Bad products are usually set Why Are We Here Aj up to fail from the beginning If you can get the management on board you can make amazing products I truly feel design can be free While throwing money at any problem can certainly help most of the techniques described in this book can be done with moderate cost and still make a large impact on a product s Simplicity I hope this book can encourage companies to start to Think Simple and create that internal creative spark that enables them to make breakthrough products So What Is Simplicity Simplicity is the peak of civilization Jessie Sampter GOOD INTENTIONS Complexity is the most common problem in bad product design Com plexity isn t introduced on purpose of course it simply seeps in When products lack clear design direction complexity is what happens by default It shows up slowly adding an icon here asking the user another question there These additions are always well intentioned because they re trying to solve a valid problem but as I noted in the previ ous chapter the road to complexity hell is always paved with good intentions Simplicity is the antidote and what product design must be about Simplicity comes from a
20. Symbian which had the capability to change the font size for each application Many programmers wanted up front icon buttons in the view to let you choose between small medium and large fonts This was primarily used by power users to switch to a smaller font to force more information in the display Adding these buttons to every view would certainly make this feature easier to see and faster for the programmers but it also clearly increased the parsing shock I made sure the default font was clear and legible so for the initial use out of the box the display was highly legible My goal and my first priority was to reduce the need The Simplicity Shift to increase the font of poorly sighted users Next was to worry about the yahoos who wanted to cram as much text on the screen as possible For them I had a Font size menu item that brought up a dialog box to set the font to three sizes Once set the font was remembered so they didn t have to go back to reset it Some argued this was clunky because power users needed to go through each application and rummage through the menus It was lots of extra work for them Absolutely I can t think of a better trade off because no group can cope more with this type of solution and more importantly this type of font change usually happens only once and then it s stable for a long time so the cost isn t repeated often The benefit was a significantly cleaner calmer screen
21. a product that s too boring or even uncompetitive This is a frustrating but understandable response First you must understand that Simplicity is a feature Simplicity is a key differentiation in a product Second Simplicity isn t about remov ing features it s about prioritizing them Find the core and make it wonderful Then gently layer on the additional features but make sure they don t compromise the core design So What Is Simplicity Ell When Crosby wrote Quality Is Free he created a maturity scale to grade companies as to how well quality was seen and used The higher up the maturity scale a company was located the more likely the quality program would be effective Design is no different I ll use a similar system to Crosby s Level 1 the lowest level of the maturity scale is ignorance which is not knowing what Simplicity or good design is In Level 2 the company knows about and wants better designed products but isn t making the commitment to make this happen With Level 3 a dedicated effort exists where Simplicity is sold incorporated and valued throughout the company Level 4 is a Zenlike perfection where good design is expected at every level The processes are so well ingrained that when a problem occurs with the design of a product explaining why the design was less than perfect is possible Because you re reading this book you re at least at Level 2 Unfor tunately companies have difficulty
22. and emotional anguish This chapter lays out two Insights that address this blindness The first Insight is the use of Personas which breaks up the multiusers into a few precise and detailed customers The second insight Scenarios is a technique to walk through these new Personas so you can understand what aspect of the product is critical to them I ve found that using only these tools as simple as they are provides an effective communications framework to discuss and negotiate product decisions These tools aren t meant to replace the classic deep user study techniques such as focus groups and ethnographic studies but are instead a bridge into using them A company has to start thinking discussing and creating a consensus about the user before it makes use of studies that provide a deeper insight INSIGHT 1 PERSONAS BREAK UP THE MULTIUSER What It Is Personas are a simple tool that breaks up your multiuser into smaller pieces Personas are nothing more than a detailed description of a person who will use your product This description doesn t talk about features a The Simplicity Shift time to market or your company in any way It only talks about specific individual people This description is fairly short no more that a sheet of paper with a reasonable description of who this customer is and enough about that customer to know how he or she would approach using your product Why It s Important
23. and lose the larger customer By inadvertently trying to create a product designed for both of these extremes the situation is nearly impossible Finding true Simplicity is hard To achieve it everyone must be clear on precisely who the target user is Many techniques from focus groups to ethnographic studies give you a deeper understanding and help to identify your target user Even more these types of studies can give you key observations into their work flow patterns and daily frustrations both of which can be inspirational when planning new product concepts Even though these techniques have been around for years they still don t seem to make the type of impact they re capable of and in my experience two broad reasons exist for this naivet and lost understanding Naivet is usually found in small companies just starting to consider the user interface They don t have the experience or the resources to tackle a proper design job Fairly in depth activities such as an ethnographic study appear risky because of up front costs Over time as the companies mature these costs will be seen as good investments But when a young company is just starting up it s often better to begin small and use simple tools to get the team communicating and sharing a user concept before working on studies that explore the user model more deeply Lost understanding comes from more mature companies that have a design department In this case the
24. basic observation all products are used in much the same way the vast majority of the time This is true for expert users as much as for novices Take any consumer product such as a mobile phone a digital camera or an MP3 player Even the most complex versions of these products have to dial a number zoom the lens or pause the playback If these core tasks are cumbersome or complex you affect every user even the expert Unfortunately fancy new features are all too commonly added to a successful product and these core features get compromised and made more difficult to use Offering everything to the user at once simply isn t possible By cramming more features into a product something The Simplicity Shift has to give and often the Simplicity of the core features gets lost in the shuffle Simplicity is about lowering the priority of the high end functionality to make sure the core tasks work exceedingly well Having been in the high tech industry for many years now I can safely say that 99 percent of most product discussion takes place around functionality For example I often hear comments like our new product requires features X Y and Z or we have an existing product that must be made competitive by adding feature Q Meetings and strategy sessions usually focus on adding features Rarely does any discussion occur about simplifying the product or changing the feature mix that already exists This doesn t mean S
25. digital interface and letting it grow too far it has been repositioned from the laggard side of the adoption curve back to the front as an innovator type of product Users of a certain high tech class can work their way through this design but the vast majority of consumers will not Design Break Microwave Oven Ej SuperCook SuperCook 1 Beef Defrost 2 Pork Poul C oF Poultry PowerLevel 4 Fish Weight 5 Potatoes jE 6 Pasta Stop Clear Start SuperDefrost 7 Defrost Meat Auto Minute 8 Defrost Poultry 10min I min 10sec FIGURE 6 1 Example of a digital microwave oven The purpose of this Design Break isn t to poke fun at this microwave Much more important are the generic issues it demonstrates that pervade many modern consumer products Two such examples illustrated here are poorly designed digital timers and confusing button placement This Design Break is meant to be a practical example The goal is not only to improve this design but also to keep approximately the 1 The Simplicity Shift same function and cost The cost constraint is important because most consumer product companies have cost reduction as a primary product motivator For the sake of argument I ll assume digital timers are much cheaper and more reliable than analog dials I prefer analog dials in sucha design situation because they rea far superior solution to digital displays with tiny buttons Besides
26. doesn t appear to be required Scenario 2 Staying at Home On occasional days such as a day at home with a sick child someone will be home all day There must be a way to turn the heat on easily for that entire day And it would be nice if Emma didn t have to change the Master Schedule because the heat could easily be left on the following day This points to a need to make the device have an ALL DAY type of button where the heat can be turned on for this special instance but then have the schedule return to normal the following day Scenario 3 Vacation When Emma s family leaves on vacation there must be a way to turn everything off It would be nice ifthis didn t change the normal schedule Scenario 4 Summer Winter It isn t always cold When spring comes Emma will want to turn off the heat but to keep the hot water These Scenarios give us a good starting point as to how this design would be of value to Emma The following priority core tasks seem to come from this 1 View and set the timer schedule easily 2 Turn on the heat for a single day i The Simplicity Shift Green Red 9 12 15 18 21 24 FIGURE 10 3 Stage 1 design 3 Go on vacation 4 Turn off the radiators As I said before this is a tool to get us thinking it doesn t replace classic user research What we have so far though seems like a good start This work is probably more focused than what many companies do today when
27. forever can be sealed behind protective plastic and are a fraction of the cost of the original analog dial This would typically be seen as nothing but a Presentation layer problem because the tasks which were so straightforward before are still the same The assumption is that by replacing an analog dial with a digital timer the impact will be minor To make this concrete let me introduce an example of a digital timer microwave as shown in Figure 6 1 This product has a lot going on It doesn t reflect simply a small change to a digital timer This is an example of how products once they do move to digital interface styles start sprouting extra features because the addition of an extra button is such a small incremental cost The presentation layer is now significantly more complex it isn t even obvious how to turn on the machine You must look at all the buttons and their double labels to determine which buttons you aren t going to use What makes this design especially difficult to understand is the smaller buttons on the left aren t buttons at all but only decorative labels By pushing the SuperCook button in the upper right corner a number appears on the screen that corresponds to the mode you re selecting 1 for Roast Beef Lamb 2 for Roast Pork and so forth This is a good example of an initially simple device category that was once easy to use and fairly well understood by the laggard type of consumer By adding this
28. going beyond the obvious functions and attempting to make more innovative products The key point of this exercise is this once you focus on a Persona and its core Scenario the design tends to suggest itself By simplifying your requirements you almost automatically simplify your design It practically designs itself Feature Blindness Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible Alan Kay INTRODUCTION In the previous chapters I showed how curing user blindness improves the early stages of the product process It gives you a more precise concept of the target users and a stronger understanding of what is important to them Personas and Scenarios are effective tools at working from the bottom up uncovering the core tasks the product must satisfy for the user Feature blindness is the next blindness we must cure Feature blind ness comes from being blinded by the feature list a checklist of must have whizzy new technology to be included in the product It s all too easy to see a product only as a list of features If the list is small the product appears not to be competitive Project teams are blinded by features because they tend to focus only on cramming as many into the product as possible Feature lists tend to work from the top down bestowing require ments that must be in the product This isn t something to get upset about it s simply a fact of life The world of business is a compl
29. hierarchy added back in Stage 2 as painful as it was gives us the flexibility now to add these two easily This is a good sign our solution is working because we can easily add without changing the Design Break MP3 Player KA Select CDs Individual Tracks Play Lists Recordings Settings FIGURE 8 4 Stage 3 design design significantly Placing them in the list at the bottom is a good way of adding depth to the product yet keeping them naturally in a more secondary role However the wording has to change slightly because we re no longer always Playing the items in the list As you can see in Figure 8 4 I ve changed the wording to Select with a plural list below it Recordings The challenge will be adding in recordings without compromising the current design In thinking about this design initially a Record button below the screen seemed like an obvious analogue to machines today but with the Stage 2 design in place it was clear a new top level button would only be of use in a small corner of the device Once the Stage 2 design came through with only two buttons adding a third button seemed like it would add too much weight to a high end function It was i The Simplicity Shift Recordings Create n track Aug 12 8 15pm Aug 12 8 03pm Quartet Final Quartet Initial FIGURE 8 5 Adding recording time to make the hard hard and to hide this feature away as shown in
30. instance Computers have off switches but you can t use them unless you first choose Shut Down To forget this risks corrupting your hard disk By having these three layers discussing the impact of a product decision and how choices exist for fixing it is much easier For example limitations in the Infrastructure layer almost always have a big impact on the Task and Presentation layers Say you have a portable product with a short battery life You ll probably be forced to put in battery saving measures such as requiring the device to go to sleep This means the user must wake up the device before using it adding to the task load In addition this will require changes to the Presentation layer possibly a battery icon on the screen at all times Things can get even worse When the battery goes dead you might lose or corrupt data so a need might exist for strange dialog boxes which might pop up at strange times to warn of impending danger and so on What s important about the previous battery example is that a bad infrastructure problem is hard to fix You don t want to simply slap up a error dialog box which lives in the Presentation layer to fix deep problems with battery life A bad infrastructure problem also has poten tially significant impact on the Task layer making the product harder to use The same interlayer problem occurs with a poor Task layer affecting the Presentation layer Suppose the product has a bad Task
31. is also helped by the fact that the top window is prompting the user to Play music by and a Play button is below the screen so the Play button as Select is obvious Design Break MP3 Player KUS Also notice that the design uses six lines of text instead of seven as on the original device This allows the font to be larger so it can be more easily read an important consideration for all users This is our first design stage capturing the core Simplicity we re trying to find Notice how easy this was to discover as well By focusing on a basic but universally shared task the design practically wrote itself STAGE 2 Now we have to start earning our keep though We need to begin layering on the additional functionality without compromising the soul of what we ve discovered The Stage 1 design covers only playing entire CDs Now we have to add individual tracks and playlists The most straightforward way of doing this would be to add an additional layer to the previous design Instead of the initial starting point being a scrolling list of artists it will now be a scrolling list of collections CDs Tracks and Playlists It would look like the design in Figure 8 3 Choosing CD goes into our previous Stage 1 design Individual Track goes into a scrolling list of songs where the Play button simply plays the song Playlist goes into a scrolling list of saved playlists where Play just plays the tracks in the same way the CDs woul
32. list This is our final goal a prioritized list that shows you what must go into the product and therefore must be reflected in the design This prioritization is a powerful tool because it eliminates the confusion that comes from a checklist of features In addition those items at the bottom of the priority list should be carefully questioned They needn t be removed Revisiting them is certainly worthwhile Removing an item now is much better than removing it later because this saves considerable time down the road What Goes Wrong The biggest problem with this Insight is working with an unfriendly feature list If you re not careful vague technology items will be on it like Support 802 11 a required industry standard you simply must have for this product Before you continue try breaking this up through Scenarios and unFeatures into subtasks that make more sense from a user s perspective Vague technology items create trouble Another problem is the initial list can occasionally be quite long Once it gets up to more than 20 the voting starts to get cumbersome What usually helps in this situation is to focus on substantial features not small corners This isn t as arbitrary as it might sound A fairly common sense approach can remove such things as bug fixes and small additions to existing features Feature Blindness ef INSIGHT 5 MAKE THE Easy EASY AND THE HARD HARD What It Is Once you prioritized the feat
33. many technical issues must be considered such as battery life sound quality and so forth but the idea could potentially be innovative ea The Simplicity Shift Lisa would like to play her music at home She already has a nice stereo and lots of CDs so it isn t clear if this unit will rival her CD jukebox at home If Lisa were to use this unit at home the FM idea again presents itself but we also have to look at standard solutions If there were only an output jack on the device it could be hooked up directly to Lisa s stereo This is a bit cumbersome though because Lisa would have to switch her stereo to an alternative input source and leave the patch cord next to the machine so she could plug it in more easily As for listening to music purists out there like to have an equalizer or digital effects enhancer to make their music sound its best I don t see the value of this in either of the current Personas If this does become of value however it doesn t strike me as necessary that the full spectrum equalizer control is necessary when listening to music on the move Most likely a small number of presets such as classical or concert hall would be enough and once either Persona picks one they ll probably keep it that way This implies that if this feature is in the product it would be best left up to the PC to create these settingsand only let the device pick from a small set Scenario 5 Playing from a Long List The
34. on these tasks With this homework in place the company must then have the courage to make difficult decisions eliminating extraneous features that add little value and only consume development time and confuse end users When these simplified designs uncover seemingly impossible development problems this is a glaring indication of where innovation is hiding Getting the team together to solve these problems is a surefire means of creating a breakthrough design THE PROBLEM NAIVE ATTITUDES Most companies have blind spots that prevent them from creating and shipping innovative simple designs user blindness feature blindness innovation blindness and implementation blindness These are sim ply bad habits naive attitudes that prevent the broader product and company management from understanding what creates complexity in product design and what they can do to fix the problem Curing each blindness isn t the responsibility of the design group This must be a companywide goal Creating Simplicity starts at the strategic beginning and goes all the way to the bitter bug fixing end USER BLINDNESS User blindness comes from not understanding who the target users are and how they will end up using the product in a realistic way Personas are a step stool to lift a shared concept of who the target user is The Conclusion most important information to know about Personas is they should be simple and understood by the entire team T
35. on vacation and want to turn the unit off I have to push the ADVANCE button for hot water five times to advance its state to the OFF indicator and the same number of presses for the central heating If I want a little extra heat in the evening if I m staying up late I have to use the two ADVANCE buttons to move the indicator to the 1 hr spot If I advance the CH indicator Central Heating but not HW Hot Water I get no effect because I ll only circulate cold water through the radiator Making a mistake with this design is extremely easy Single Interaction Track When programming the device you need to program both the hot water and the central heating timers Each can be started and stopped twice a day This gives a total of eight timers to set for a single day The following Figure 10 2 is the flowchart of the process I had to go through to simply review the current settings The Simplicity Shift Slider set to SET PRG Flash MTWTF Task A Task B Yes Flash CH Yes y Flash Time show 1 and ON Times or Time Change Time T Yes y Flash Time show 1 and OFF Je Time or Time Change Time T Yes k A Flash Time show 2 and ON Times or Time Change Time T Yes y Flash Time show 2 and OFF Je Times or Time Change Time T Yes Flash COPY lt en gt Yes Copy all CH Timers into HW Timers No Set 4 HW Timers as Task A Flash SAT SUN Ye
36. people have enough depth to help you understand what might motivate their behaviors Figure 5 1 shows a sample Persona I used in one of my projects The Simplicity Shift How to Do It Many times when I ve introduced Personas there s a you ve got to be kidding feeling around the room Breaking up the target audience into more precise groups makes sense to most but the large number of unnecessary details makes some programmers laugh out loud I ll admit discussing whether Clifford the bartender has three or four kids can seem a bit surreal at times The goal is to create a range of Personas discuss them and then find those that represent a reasonable target for the product This is best done by the product team as a group not only the designers Having the designers create several sample Personas first as straw men works well Then you can have the product team review this list By product team I mean at least have people from marketing development sales and design If this is a large team it needn t be everyone but have a representative from each team If you don t have the team s buy in you ll constantly be revisiting issues because you won t have shared assumptions in the team decision making This review group needs to run through the sample Personas and decide if they make sense New Personas might even be added Once this is done you must rank the Personas Start with approximately six Personas a
37. primary innovation this product brings is the capability to play lots of music What does it mean to play a CD on a device that can contain over 100 CDs How can Lisa or Steve pick a song easily from this long list Clearly you re going to need some browsing structure here There s a natural hierarchy to exploit by grouping songs into CDs and then into CDs by artist It seems entirely likely there won t be much depth to this hierarchy however so scrolling through 100 CDs will require scrolling through potentially 30 40 artists This will only get worse as the technology matures and even more music can be stored So even before you lay down a single pixel you know you ll need some decent response time scrolling speed on this device This would be a heavy discussion with the technical director to make sure you understand the screen refresh rates and the speed of the processor to Design Break MP3 Player Ea drive the display We can t do anything about that in this book but this is an infrastructure layer detail of the design we d have to nail down A second point would be to discuss the possibility of a scroll wheel on the device to move quickly through the list Ifa fairly low price part exists a large marketing build up of this scroller could occur because it would clearly differentiate the product and make it more appealing Steve also points out that he collects Internet music so he ll have music that will break out of
38. product can handle some of the basic problems that plague all con sumer electronics setup reliability and error conditions task flow and a sense of place More problems can certainly be considered but these are the big four By running Scenarios through these types of problems you can find a new type of feature that should be included in the prod uct These additional features are often much more important than the i The Simplicity Shift marketing driven list and they provide strong potential for creating a design that will meet more users needs The Priority Trick is the Insight you need to tame this ever expanding list of features By winnowing it down to a prioritized list where you have a small set of core features listed you get a critical under standing of what the product must do extremely well If you push hard you can usually also remove a few things from the list The remaining features while important become secondary to the design and will be put in after the core is designed Make the Easy Easy and the Hard Hard is how you then create this design The core features if they really are simplified will free you from the mad unending feature list that makes design so hard By having a much smaller list the basic design is significantly easier to see When you have this you can then layer on the more advanced features but ina way that doesn t compromise the core design This probably will make the advanced featur
39. representative is much more practical As most departments tend to have a manager or a team leader selecting this person is usually fairly straightforward For companies that don t have a cultural commitment to design however getting agreement might not be as straightforward Getting these things written down is hard enough but then getting agreement by the team is usually more than the company can handle This shouldn t be a surprise Getting all groups to agree is difficult even in the best run companies The difference is in committed companies they take the disagree ments for what they are precursors to problems If the teams can t agree then the product itself will reflect this This shows itself in poor inte gration bugs poor performance and so forth Of course every project has these problems because you can t entirely eliminate them But if you can t even get the team to agree on the product overview you re guaranteed to have more problems than normal The Design Manifesto is a tool a simple technique to find the key issues of a project and make sure everyone agrees to them The following is nothing more than a list of questions that need to be written down and agreed to in the format of a template i The Simplicity Shift Design Manifesto Template Introductory Information Project Name Initial Date Product Goal Technology Issues Standards on which this project is based Hardware requirements Most ch
40. rising above Level 2 because most of the team needs to be at the same level for it to work Many examples exist of design departments operating at a much higher maturity level than the rest of their company yet the overall attitude of the company keeps it at Level 2 or less Often the biggest concern about introducing a design improvement effort is it will delay a project and add cost and hassle What I find particularly poetic is that often a simpler design reduces the amount of work and cost in a product making it less expensive and faster to market This is one reason why I say design is free Getting too carried away with the levels and how you go from one to the other is a bit of a tedious exercise The important point is that you don t get Simplicity by hiring one designer and sticking him or her in the back room Breakthrough Simplicity comes from an actively valued cultural commitment measured and managed by top company management CONCLUSION Simplicity once you see it becomes infectious You can see the power it has to sweep away the flotsam and jetsam of creeping complexity The Simplicity Shift But the most serious challenge to getting Simplicity into a product is political It takes courage to create a simple product because some will think it s too simple Power users who won t do exactly what they want have a loud voice indeed For many product managers ignoring a cry for a feature is like ignoring the cry of
41. s easy no problem These guys weren t our enemies They were simply guilty of taking our comments too literally The idea that the Presentation layer could do some work separate from the low level code had never occurred to them They loved this solution because they didn t have to do anything The application writer had to do the work and even he didn t have to do that much So far so good We were making progress here Unfortunately our sense of calm was shattered only a few seconds later Oh but wait This won t work because you can t reply to these pretend messages in this new Inbox They patiently explained that Sync items were a different type from the e mail items and you couldn t reply directly to them In the preexisting system that we were basing the new product on the user had to choose a menu item Convert to E mail which did the correct conversion magic turning the sync item into an e mail item to which you could then finally reply The answer to me was obvious create another fiction Show both types of items exactly the same way in the Inbox effectively hiding the distinction from the user If the user Innovation Blindness PA chose to reply to a Sync item do the Convert to E mail function on the users behalf behind the scenes and then proceed with the reply Their response was Oh that s easy no problem This is why teams need to work so closely together The solution the innovatio
42. see a little more This is breakfast time it s in the morning Fred is tired and he s probably in a hurry to catch the bus He could easily push the wrong button or accidentally cook the bagel on High turning it to rubber This suggests Fred needs a simple power level setting Some type of strong visual feedback would also be good so Fred can be sure what he set is what he s getting Now that we have our basic Scenarios we can consider a new design Remember we aren t going to design the entire microwave We ve identified some clear core tasks and we re going to design only for those This will intentionally avoid other more advanced features By focusing on designing for only the most basic tasks finding a simple design one that will be easy to understand and use becomes much easier STAGE 1 The initial design focuses only on the first Scenario and we don t need much to make this happen Fred simply needs to set the time and start the oven Setting the time is fairly fixed by our constraints We have a digital display and buttons to set the time Given this limitation the ex isting button design seems quite reasonable By having three buttons one for ten minutes one for one minute and one for ten seconds Fred could quickly set the approximate times needed for microwave cooking This makes the design job fairly simple Figure 6 2 shows the initial design Setting the Time on Top With the task clear we can inc
43. see here not that I was able to create a few simplified screen shots but that I followed a simple analysis path that exposed assumptions and generated questions that would drive a team to discuss some potentially significant insights impacting the product concept These couldn t be solved only by a designer because there would be implementation hurdles to overcome to make them a reality By placing the product and its issues on the table with Personas and Scenarios a much more fruitful cooperation can take place between departments that will encourage innovative thinking Asalways this is a starting point Much like the microwave example I would definitely run a usability trial on this design to make sure the basic navigation works the buttons are clearly understood and the labels make sense After the usability test I would fully expect to make several changes to this design Innovation Blindness One man s magic is another man s engineering Supernatural is a null word Robert Heinlein INTRODUCTION Creating a process to guarantee innovation might seem a bit like selling a formula for turning lead into gold There s no way I could make that attempt But I ve seen mindsets through my work that will certainly never be able to find innovation This is what I mean by innovation blindness attitudes that actively discourage innovative thinking Unfortunately it s common that product teams don t even at
44. seen as both required or ridiculous The process becomes opinionated and then little belief exists that any firm decision making is taking place One of the best ways out of this situation is to get some tools or what I call design artifacts which capture key information and decision making during the product process We already discussed a few of these artifacts such as Personas Scenarios and prioritized feature lists in previous chapters These are the beginning of capturing information that must be agreed to by the entire team because they re the basis of making the difficult design decisions I would be the last person to ask for more process to be added to any company I m certainly not implying that reams of new reports should be written but a large gap exists between a long report no one will read and a quick hallway meeting that s forgotten next month These artifacts are tools that are meant to capture information and decision making Getting this on paper is crucial because it does two important things 1 It forces the decisions to be made and 2 It makes these decisions capable of being remembered To solve this problem I ll discuss two additional Insights one you do at the start of the product process and one near the end The Design Manifesto is a short and simple document that if completed will save you untold suffering later in the project The SWAT Team is a management ta The Simplicity Shift technique for th
45. sumer By pushing this the numerous choices that need to be made force the user to interact with the numerical display You have to select the number that corresponds to the automated cooking you want Each press The Simplicity Shift of the SuperCook button changes the number cycling through all eight types You also need to select additional parameters by pressing the other buttons on the right Going into too much detail would be a bit tedious but I hope you clearly see how trying to use such a limited choice of buttons is a large Task level problem The attempt to fix the problem was simply to put some pretty labels on the front of the device a Presentation level solution This of course created further problems because now the labels themselves look like buttons and complicate the design even further In addition this is a classic example of showing too many features to the user at once or what is commonly called featuritis The primary motivation for this feature was most likely as a marketing tool to dif ferentiate this device from the other low end microwaves on the show room floor It was clearly not from a deep understanding of what typical microwave users need You can t tell this from the black and white photo of the figure but the SuperCook buttons are a shade of green while the remaining buttons are gray This calls the user s primary atten tion to SuperCook While this further substantiates the marketing moti vati
46. t come as a surprise that the results of our study weren t acted on immediately You can t force this type of report on people This is why I push so hard that the Simplicity Shift is a cultural change in the company This type of report must be required by management so it s supported and more importantly acted on when completed This is a strong example of how Simplicity and good design must come from within the culture of a company and not be imposed from P1 GFM FEO P2 GFM GJN QC FGC GFM Thi CB487 04 Jenson July 23 2002 20 1 Char Count 0 l The Simplicity Shift behind by a design department Mature companies understand that design is a strategic input to any product process It must be done early and discussed at all levels of the product process If the company doesn t have that culture it s hard to break through This is why this book is targeted to managers even more than designers User Blindness If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well one has at the same time insight into and understanding of many things van Gogh INTRODUCTION When designing any consumer product some target user is always in mind whether conscious or unconscious to help guide your decisions Making any product decision is difficult if you don t have some idea of who will be using it The problem is this target user is a difficult person to know with any certainty Many companies design a product that see
47. the team might only need to meet weekly Near the end of the project you ll probably start meeting daily On one project we met every day at lunch for two hours for the last four weeks of the beta build to get through an enormous bug log i The Simplicity Shift Make Decisions Normally the questions asked would be about bug reports In solving bugs however the programmers often raise greater concerns and large changes to the design of the product are suggested This team must un derstand their primary job is to make decisions about these bugs Using the various tools discussed they have many ways to communicate shared stable information which will enable them to make decisions that aren t a matter of shouting volume but are instead researched information The purpose of the Design Manifesto is to write down the big decisions in a central place so everyone can understand the issues and is motivated toward a common goal Use the SWAT Team to tackle the many little problems that arise aggressively and keep the common goal intact It shouldn t be a surprise that not everyone will buy into the common goal and honorable mistakes will be made along the way Programmers will suggest dropping a button or changing a menu item These are usually reasonable requests when seen only from that small corner of the project When they re seen from the broader view though they would have an effect on the project Most companies have a similar
48. the yin with the yang of the product team otherwise you re not using the skills you have effectively In addition to working together I suggest you work together early rather than late in the project When you don t have time making good decisions is difficult Good decisions are usually early decisions Because most companies don t Fail Fast as discussed in the previous Insight they only discover their communication problems right before the product ships and by then it s much too late Yet time and time again I see companies where marketing throws a feature list over to the design department which then creates a design that s thrown over the wall to development Much like the children s Implementation Blindness game telephone where whispers are passed from one person to the next what comes out at the end has little resemblance to the original Too many assumptions fall apart goals aren t shared or decisions are considered naive by the programmers This process creates a house of cards that will cause nothing but product planning grief Design Artifacts When teams do try cooperative design a common problem is to get mired in design paralysis By this I mean meetings that seem to go round and round It s hard for anyone to identify and discuss alternatives clearly Discussions can easily turn into arguments where broad disagreements occur about what is important or valuable Features of the product are
49. time people doing nothing but writing interactive demos The tool of choice was Director because it was the dominant tool at the time Flash is coming on strong right now because its development tools have become stronger I ve even used PowerPoint successfully to stitch together a series of static screen shots Interactive demos are particularly valuable if you re working with a concept that requires real data such as a list of names to scroll through or meetings to browse You can test concepts that would be months away if you were using a real programming language When I was consulting at American Express a product required a connection to a mainframe This would have meant weeks of work simply to get it communicating but I could mock up a dummy screen in an hour with Director As you drive your prototyping from sketches to screen shots to in teractive demos your product concept becomes more and more refined It also becomes more and more fixed Don t go to interactive demos until you re ready You should have exhausted what you can do with sketches first Demos are more like programming than drawing so they The Simplicity Shift can take longer and slow your cycle time You definitely want to use demos because they re many times faster than code but that s still much slower than sketches Much like paper sketches interactive prototypes are effective in showing other teams what you re thinking about You can produce t
50. to move products back to the front of the curve Either you should make a product super high tech and then rebrand it as an early adopter product or you must realize it s a laggard product and you make sure you don t fundamentally disrupt the ingrained approach to using it One of the first steps in making the Simplicity Shift is understand ing you have a problem If you re selling high tech products into an established market you have to make sure you don t assume a market of early adopters The Simplicity Shift also requires new thinking and new ways of discussing problems Design isn t only about making pretty icon changes to the Presentation layer Instead it s about understanding the Task and Infrastructure layers enough to make the hard trade offs to achieve Simplicity The Task and Infrastructure layers are where the true problems lurk By actively looking at the user experience as something that exists in the Presentation Task and Infrastructure layers you have a means of discussing how your product can develop and meet consumer needs P1 GFM FEO P2 GFM GJN QC FGC GFM Th CB487 04 Jenson July 23 2002 20 1 Char Count 0 Design Break The GPRS Study Months of programming effort can save you days of critical thinking Unknown he purpose of these Design Breaks is to give you some real life examples and exercises to clarify the points discussed in this book I find the problem with examples is the most meat
51. tracks These seem to be the core tasks that must be handled in this order The last power user feature was to put the settings back into the device This last task didn t come out in our Scenario work so it s left for last This type of thing must be in the device because there are always things to set but we ll make sure it goes in in such a way that it doesn t hinder the core design Tll admit to skipping the Priority Trick here and doing a prioritized list myself As discussed before one of the primary benefits of the Priority Trick is the group interaction that occurs when discussing how the various features compare What to Lose The original product attempted to be a standalone device doing every thing on the small screen using its 11 tiny buttons Examples of the breadth of tasks were making playlists naming recorded tracks and set ting the equalizer These are all complex tasks on such an ergonomically impoverished device and so are error prone and of extremely limited value To gain some calm on this device and to regain some Simplicity much of the editing must be moved off to the desktop This would in clude things like creating and maintaining playlists naming recorded tracks and changing more complex settings This doesn t change the fundamental features of the device at all It simply moves the high end complex stuff off to a place that can handle it Make the hard hard This is especially true because the produc
52. user goes from view to view he or she can focus on the task and the data not on wondering where to look As each view required a list of items and then details on that item it seemed reasonable to have the lists have a similar presentation This would help the user who after learning one view can transfer this to another view This pushed me into considering making all the views vertical in layout not the current mixture I had sketched i The Simplicity Shift Tacas Vegt Rats pug Seo hess Pant n laa apte Palid ew Nta Ekt ri z m F l Dezals FIGURE 9 1 Initial sketches Now it became quite clear there was a reason desktop e mail clients have a horizontal layout So much information must be displayed in the message list subject who sent it the date the time the size and so forth that moving to a vertical set of panes was clearly going to be a problem My vertical layout seems to have failed Innovation Blindness P44 But this insight drove me further because my previous work clarified this wasn t going to be a typical desktop e mail client It was more like a mobile phone messaging client which normally shows only the name of the sender This lead me to See the Water and understand that the desktop horizontal layout was a design default which didn t apply here and I could break out of its grip This pushed me back into a vertical layout with careful considera
53. was supposed to happen and what errors were going to occur We had to become much more technical than we had planned but it was the only way to bridge the communication divide between us and the experts In effect we had to speak two languages to be understood Notice we weren t attempting design at this stage We were only trying to understand how that product was meant to be used in a few common situations Even this simple analytic task was extremely diffi cult to complete because getting a consensus was a complex communi cation exercise The inability of the technical teams to know answers to some of these basic user situations was surprising This demonstrates how many project managers think only about the big picture issues of shiny new technology Problems such as errors were considered details to be worked out later Our slide show forced a realization that these were deep P1 GFM FEO P2 GFM GJN QC FGC GFM Thi CB487 04 Jenson July 23 2002 20 1 Char Count 0 Ea The Simplicity Shift questions with messy technical answers which were critical to resolve for the product Discovery 2 IT WASN T ALL NEEDED The second discovery was that the GPRS specification was huge Our team of programmers was diligently implementing the entire standard The problem with most technical standards especially for something as complex as GPRS is the lack of any priority The GPRS spec was simply a long list of functional calls required to
54. HOES What It Is Scenarios are much like Personas and they re a simple concept A Scenario is a short description of what a Persona wants to accomplish such as contacting a friend or checking the weather One critical aspect of Scenarios is they re focused on a Persona trying to accomplish a task using their words and their world A Scenario isn t to download e mails into the inbox but to check for messages from the office This might User Blindness Ej sound unnecessarily picky but by focusing on the broader issue you realize that context drives much more insight than you might first imagine Take the example of checking messages For certain Personas the case might be they don t get many messages and downloading e mails would usually result in nothing Those Personas would prefer a system that notified them when a message arrived so they wouldn t have to waste time needlessly checking their e mail This is one of the reasons the original WebTV set up box had a small LED which would blink when new e mail arrived The way you ask the question forms the answer you will find Why It Is Important One consequence of user blindness is this without a shared under standing of who the target user will be all features appear to have equal weight This creates complexity because you can t layer your de sign Every feature is important so everything gets placed in front of the user at once This usually creates a clu
55. IGN AS ADVERTISING 13 EXAMPLE 2 MOBILE PHONE KEYS 14 SIMPLICITY DRIVES UNDERSTANDING 16 SIMPLICITY TAKES COURAGE 16 EXAMPLE 3 BLUETOOTH LOGIN 18 COMMITMENT TO SIMPLICITY 20 CONCLUSION 21 l Contents 3 You Mean Something Is Wrong INTRODUCTION CROSSING THE CHASM AND DE EVOLUTION THE USER INTERFACE DOESN T EXIST CONCLUSION Design Break The GPRS Study THE PROBLEM ANALYSIS DISCOVERY 1 THEY DIDN T KNow DISCOVERY 2 IT WASN T ALL NEEDED DISCOVERY 3 DEEP PROBLEMS SURFACED CONCLUSION User Blindness INTRODUCTION INSIGHT 1 PERSONAS BREAK UP THE MULTIUSER INSIGHT 2 SCENARIOS WALK IN THEIR SHOES PUTTING THESE INSIGHTS TOGETHER Design Break Microwave Oven PROBLEM ANALYSIS STAGE I STAGE 2 STAGE 3 Costs Wrap Up 23 23 24 27 33 35 35 36 37 38 38 39 41 Al 43 50 54 57 57 60 64 66 68 71 72 10 Feature Blindness INTRODUCTION INSIGHT 3 UNFEATURES THERE S MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE INSIGHT 4 THE PRIORITY TRICK Contents l 73 73 F3 80 INSIGHT 5 MAKE THE Easy EASY AND THE HARD HARD CONCLUSION Design Break MP3 Player PROBLEM ANALYSIS PERSONA AND SCENARIOS STARTING THE DESIGN STAGE I STAGE 2 STAGE 3 Costs SUMMARY Innovation Blindness INTRODUCTION INSIGHT 6 SEE THE WATER INSIGHT 7 EMBRACE THE IMPOSSIBLE INSIGHT 8 FAIL FAST CONCLUSION Design Break Heater Timer PROBLEM ANALYSIS
56. The Simplicity Shift Innovative Design Tactics in a Corporate World SCOTT JENSON HE CAMBRIDGE GE UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building Trumpington Street Cambridge United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building Cambridge CB2 2RU UK 40 West 20th Street New York NY 10011 4211 USA 477 Williamstown Road Port Melbourne VIC 3207 Australia Ruiz de Alarc n 13 28014 Madrid Spain Dock House The Waterfront Cape Town 8001 South Africa http www cambridge org Scott Jenson 2002 This book is in copyright Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press First published 2002 Printed in the United States of America Typeface Garamond 3 12 14 pt System BIFX 2e TB A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available ISBN 0 521 52749 X paperback Contents Why Are We Here page 1 THE CHALLENGE 1 THE SOLUTION 2 THE PROBLEM 3 DESIGN Is FREE 4 THE SIMPLICITY SHIFT 5 THE FOUR TYPES OF COMPANY BLINDNESS 6 WuatT THIS BOOK Is NOT ABOUT 7 WHAT THIS BOOK Is ABOUT 8 WHO THIS Book Is For 8 So What Is Simplicity 11 GOOD INTENTIONS 11 FLEXIBILITY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL 12 EXAMPLE 1 PRODUCT DES
57. The Simplicity Shift exists If the Personas are picked carefully however they ll represent a cloud of other Personas that will have similar needs By building a product that s perfect for Earl you re almost by definition making it good for this cloud Objection Two Is too Few If two Personas are good aren t five better This is a tempting line of reasoning but it s poorly motivated The goal isn t to cover the customer base but instead to focus You can t focus with five Personas The pressure to have many more Personas will come as the product team tries to narrow the list This is difficult to do because choosing only two means you must value one Persona over another This might bring out a little tension in the group It s so much easier on the team to let all five Personas go through By starting with approximately six Personas and narrowing it to two you re forcing the team to make shared decisions I guarantee this team activity will create lively debate as the underlying beliefs of each team come tumbling out This won t be easy because people in general are civil and don t have the energy to come to terms with these deep differences But these differences will be relived every day of the project unless the team works through them Getting down to two Personas will be a communication achievement that will go a long way in making the team pull in the same direction INSIGHT 2 SCENARIOS WALK IN THEIR S
58. The parsing shock was reduced which also enhanced the sense of place How to Do It Make the User Click More This is a slight variation on the previous rule I m putting it into this form because I get it as a frequent complaint But that means it will be an extra two clicks to do this Damn straight The feature that s now two clicks away wasn t at the top of the priority list so it doesn t deserve a top level placement especially because doing so would have a negative impact on those features that are much higher on the list Chapter 2 I discussed a mobile phone manufacturer that replaced a Delete button with three New buttons One justification we were told was that burying the new Fax option under a menu was too many taps away and not an acceptable solution We agreed it was further away but we didn t think making Delete even more clicks than Fax was consistent with our prioritized feature list This type of layering is hard work and usually provokes heated debate This is why I stress that everyone in the product cycle should share in these concepts so you can raise your vocabulary and make decisions everyone can understand This is why I m setting out in such detail the concepts of Personas Scenarios and Prioritized feature lists These are tools that increase your communication vocabulary Now you can say things like This change Feature Blindness El has a major impact on our third core task which you
59. a The Simplicity Shift Also notice that I didn t try adding a full numeric panel to input exact times such as 1 23 I ve kept the original design s three button approach to give Fred only rough time setting This too is consistent with our basic Persona Fred isn t going to cook his pizza for 5 minutes 38 seconds he ll just set it for 5 or 6 minutes When I ve given this exercise out to others they often add a numeric keypad While this gives Fred precision it also gives him many more buttons to cope with Our Persona grounds that tendency by forcing us to ask what he is cooking and how That precision adds too much complexity for the current tasks we re asking of Fred STAGE 2 Stage 1 was the first step We now have to layer in the other task without compromising this design For Fred to complete the second Scenario thawing a bagel he ll need some type of power setting The previous design had a single Power button which you had to press repeatedly to cycle through the 100 percent 70 percent 50 percent 30 percent and 10 percent power levels Once the oven started you had no indication of what power setting you were using because the display only showed the time remaining In addition there was the terrible gaff of only allowing you to change the power level at the beginning just after you set the time We already have the design from Stage 1 All we want to do now is to add the power level setting without causing too muc
60. a hungry baby If you re able to do it it still feels horribly wrong The remainder of this book covers the tools to calm these fears and prioritizes your thinking so you don t design by the path of least resistance but instead you can design by insight You will make difficult decisions but they ll be the decisions that create a breakthrough design which still meet the needs of all your users You Mean Something Is Wrong The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance it is the illusion of knowledge Daniel Boorstin INTRODUCTION Simplicity is a goal that few try to obtain Part of the problem is some companies don t really see that anything is really wrong with the product process There are two central concepts I see misunderstood and misused within companies that must be called out and corrected if we are to make progress on executing Simplicity The first concept I want to correct is a marketing model proposed by Geoffrey A Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm Marketing and Sell ing High Tech Products to Mainstream Customers Harperbusiness 1999 Nothing is wrong with his model I don t want to call that into question The problem I see is how his model is utilized His marketing model is misused when applied to new product development The second concept I need to correct is a confusing and dangerous use of the term User Interface I make the claim that in product de velopment the user inter
61. a product If you don t know what you want complexity is what you ll get as a default High tech companies have historically spent their energy on devel oping and shipping technology innovations As products start to move out of Moore s adoption curve it s becoming clear to most that prod ucts must be more than just technologically competent Trying to add a good user interface on to a product gets the problem backward A good user interface is composed of multiple layers the presentation task and infrastructure layers that must be explored researched and discussed early in the product process Simplicity is a much stronger concept than a good user interface and it provides the focus high tech companies need to design and implement breakthrough products The most promising aspect of Simplicity is it s a goal that transcends the typ ical disciplines within most companies Instead of something that s only The Simplicity Shift a taken care of by the design department Simplicity encompasses man agement marketing project managers designers developers testers and documentation writers The Simplicity Shift is about the shift a company s management must take to manage the design process strategically Companies must realize if they want to create breakthrough products products must be set up to succeed Strategic homework must be done to understand the target users their tasks and the impact of the technology
62. a way of approaching the list in a calmer way so your design can handle the important features first How to Do It This Insight is rather straightforward to explain It might however create quite an entertaining meeting Create a numbered list of all the critical features being asked of the project Be sure to include the ones that come from the unFeatures work Have each member of the product team then rank each feature two ways The first way is for the member to list his or her understanding of how frequently the feature will be used rarely 1 moderately 2 or frequently 3 The next way is to rank the same list by importance to the product low 1 useful 2 or critical 3 All these rankings must be done from the perspective of the Personas you created though not from your own personal position This is crucial because it separates personal beliefs from the needs of the target consumer For example let s take two features of a consumer focused e mail program that works through the television We ll use Earl a retired steelworker as our Persona Reading a newly arrived e mail is a feature that seems like it would be frequently used and of critical value to Earl Adding the capability to create Filters which lets Earl automatically route e mails into folders would rarely be used because he wouldn t receive that much e mail That feature would probably also score a low priority for the product A common pressure in this typ
63. ad such a resemblance to the desktop model One of the first questions that cropped up was Why do we have so many folders We made the rather obvious in retrospect observation that of all the items in the Outbox Draft and Sent folders the vast majority were in the Sent folder Things in the Outbox were transitory and soon ended up in the Sent folder as did the items in Drafts As the Outbox and Drafts items were normally small in number it seemed much cleaner to put them all into a single super Outbox folder and mark those few with different icons This had nice symmetry to the only remaining folder the Inbox massive simplification in folder structure and a much simpler model for the user Example Save and Cancel on a PDA One of my more difficult examples of not Seeing the Water was my work on a project for Symbian This was a handheld device that used a pen for input much like a Newton or a Palm Early on we made the decision this needed to act like a consumer device not a computer and we wanted to remove from the user experience the need for the Save Innovation Blindness KAPA button When you closed any object in the system it was simply saved for you We weren t trying to be cool and different Good reasons were behind this decision First a small digital device isn t a full blown desktop system You aren t changing a 23 page business plan Instead you re changing a seven field contact record The need t
64. agreed to last month We must find a way to keep this core task in place How to Do It Reduce Complex Questions to the User Another form of parsing shock comes from an error dialog box offering an exhaustive list of options The vast majority of the time the user would only need to make a few simple choices but occasionally things get so mucked up developers give users too many options to get out of a messy situation This confuses the users because they re given choices for aspects of the problem that are subtle and beyond their immediate grasp What often happens is what I call the moth to the flame syndrome where users are confused about what to do so to be safe they turn on everything they can to make sure they re covered This is exactly what the original programmers didn t want to happen and this can cause more problems than it creates A perfect example of this is when Personal File Sharing was added to the Macintosh back in System 7 when there was a need for the user to set folder privileges Clearly not a task you want most consumers to deal with To its credit there was a rather nice design that let you pick what you wanted to share and then select from a simplified menu of sharing choices This all worked quite well The problem came with a little check box at the bottom of the dialog box Copy privileges to all enclosed folders The need for the check box was obscure Most people were either sharing a single folder
65. allenging technical issue for this project Key technologies with which this project interacts Key aspects of the architecture that are inflexible Key aspects of the architecture that can change Key assumptions made by the architecture such as a single user fast response time and memory size Architecture technology and infrastructure changes considered but which won t be done Don t forget this one Planning Issues Date work must be done Date programmers need to start coding Number of programmers on the project Graphics work required Time scheduled for user testing code changes Implementation Blindness EZ Design Issues User Personas Key Scenarios Prioritized feature list Product concept sketch Features that will be deferred to a future release Features that will be dropped Several items in the list use the word key as in key assumptions These are hard because they aren t a simple list but a distillation that requires discussion and agreement I strongly urge when putting this report together to force answers to all these questions What amazes me is that projects will start off without knowing the answers to these questions Even worse answers exist but they re different for each team These situations tend to be the primary cause of integration problems and bugs much later in the project Solving these problems in a one day offsite is much easier than solving them months later in late beta testing
66. and Emma should get better comfort and increased heating savings What are Emma s goals for this product At the highest level Emma doesn t want it to complicate her life If this device makes her house too cold too often it won t be worth the trouble If the device accomplishes Emma s highest goal then the secondary goal of saving money will be worth the effort Scenarios Scenario 1 Setup When the product is first installed Emma would like to set the device to match the schedule of her family The first issue this raises is that Emma doesn t have a schedule that can be carved in stone The weekday mornings seem stable but the weekends can vary On some days they take off early while on other days they want to sleep late This seems Design Break Heater Timer RX to point out that Emma might need to tweak this schedule frequently She ll certainly need to change it when winter comes because she ll want to have the heat stay on longer This seems to point out that the setup isn t a one shot action but instead is something that will be continually tweaked throughout the use of the product This strongly suggests that editing the timer settings must be visible and simple to do In addition it seems unlikely that Emma will ever care about turn ing on the heat at 3 18 P M Some time after 3 P M will probably be close enough which gives us some flexibility in setting the time a completely to the minute setting
67. and Scenarios provide little insight into the value of this feature It certainly sounds reasonable to be able to record meetings or lectures and the extra compression would be of big value The bottom line question however is whether this is a top level key feature or a secondary feature to be tucked away Observations The last Scenario above starts to show the limitations of Personas and Sce narios As my Personas are clearly made up I started wandering into the recording territory with very little basis for making sound decisions Re member this is an exercise to start the entire product team thinking out side the traditional features checklist mentality and to try to gain insight into what a product like this would need in the hands of a normal user This isn t meant to replace market research focus groups or interviews but it s clear this exercise has already revealed many issues and items to discuss with the full product team At this stage it seems clear that some type of proper research needs to take place to do more than just shoot from the hip This doesn t invalidate the simple use of Personas at all If it wasn t for this exercise we wouldn t have been able to explore the space and understand the complexities that this type of product uncovers By starting with such a blunt tool you can move your understanding along significantly and even increase the motivation for further research In running through these Scena
68. as responsible for filling in the whole document talking to marketing and development to get the information and putting it all together The rough draft was sent out a few days before a team offsite where we all then ran through the document and didn t leave until we came to a common agreement I ve been in meetings where this Design Manifesto was so easy that concern was expressed as to why we even did it This only meant the team already had deep and shared understanding of the project and no surprise they didn t have any trouble shipping a good product I don t want to try to fool you though Getting agreement on the De sign Manifesto won t always be easy But I can guarantee if you can t get agreement you re not going to ship a good product because the disagree ments you see in meetings will play out all along the development cycle What Goes Wrong The biggest problem that occurs is that disagreements are avoided Everyone wants to get through this document quickly and when dif ferences of opinion exist people won t speak up Don t let disagreements slide Force decisions when only words are at stake Once you start building having a disagreement is much more expensive The Design Manifesto is about getting key issues agreed to and shared as much as possible by the entire product team Getting it written isn t easy The Design Manifesto will cause arguments and it will Implementation Blindness aj seem
69. at many consumers could have a challenging time setting this up isn t dif ficult Now if users were meant to be pairing with up to a dozen devices I can see how such a highly functional control panel would be of some use Initially though the vast majority of use for this technology was to So What Is Simplicity aj hook up a phone to a headset a simple task that appears overwhelmed by this long sequence of steps The feature using radio to eliminate wires seems a good thing but the execution left much to be desired My design team s response was to list what the user needed to have happen and to create a goal from the team s point of view Suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend everything is magic What would be the best solution for the user This seems straightforward Open the box take them out and turn them on They work together The problem of course is that there are many technical reasons why this is difficult to achieve But this is one of the key starting points for Simplicity It isn t technically obvious how to achieve it at first What motivates you is it s the right thing to do You have to suspend technical disbelief long enough to see the user value and then try and be clever enough to figure out a practical solution to the problem I know immediately why my magic solution will face strong oppo sition The Bluetooth technical specification doesn t even begin to talk about how this type of autom
70. at creating a brief suspension of disbelief separating the programming issues the infrastructure issues from those in the Presentation layer I set up the programming issues as fixed so there s no threat to the programmers that I m trying to change the impossible The magic thing I m trying to create exists outside the existing and unthreat ened code This establishes a safe place to brainstorm and negotiate i The Simplicity Shift Creative strategies can be discussed that use the existing infrastructure Once the ball gets rolling though the door opens slightly and simple changes to the infrastructure will also be considered small easy to add things that would never have been discussed previously This type of negotiation can be a win win situation This works because it places each side is a safe place and allows discussion to take place in a neutral space This trick is a good starting point but it doesn t guarantee success Embracing the Impossible works best when both sides have built up a good working relationship and trust each other s abilities Not only does the programmer have to bend and creatively work out ways to make the design work but the opposite is also true The designer must trust the programmer when something just isn t going to work It shouldn t be a surprise that designs can be too aggressive a subset of the original design is often enough When you get this type of give and take you can
71. atic paring could take place Instead it talks about the maximum number of paired devices and doesn t make the rather obvious admission that at least initially only one probably exists All the specification offers is the raw flexibility to allow any thing to be added at any time Of course this flexibility makes the most important item you want to add to your phone nearly overwhelming Flexibility is the root of all evil But if a product team valued and pursued Simplicity a fun and cooperative brainstorming session would evolve a solution that might get close to the magic ideal For example assume that complex control panel solution remains in the product This keeps the high end case of attaching anything to the phone in place and not compromised I m not too worried because at least for now this will almost never happen This reduces the problem to a much simpler one How do I attach a headset to my phone For example what if when the power is on the phone does a quick peek for headsets if it doesn t already have one configured If the phone does find headsets it pairs with them using the default pass i The Simplicity Shift code 0000 which will work for 99 percent of all headsets Voil you have your magic solution I ve been in these meetings enough times that even this modified proposal will provoke strong reaction from the technologists They ll most likely dissent saying that looking for a Bluetooth headset
72. be implemented Only one problem existed our slide show revealed that substantial sections of this specification weren t required Once we worked through the basic Scenarios it was clear that many corners of the spec weren t needed for the type of handsets we were building Once we had a better idea of how the phone was to be used there was a clear version 1 subset we would need to get the basic product out and a version 2 subset which would be much more complete for more high end phones in the future This too was a shocking discovery because this was a tightly sched uled project We had little time to get this product out to market yet here was the programming team implementing most of the spec when some of its difficult and time consuming subsets could have been removed DISCOVERY 3 DEEP PROBLEMS SURFACED The third discovery was we uncovered problems no one had anticipated you can t have always on web access The details are fairly low level but to give you a rough idea it became clear that the specification didn t handle communication well between applications It wasn t well understood how two applications could use the GPRS data channel at the same time So while you could have always on web access you P1 GFM FEO P2 GFM GJN QC FGC GFM This CB487 04 Jenson July 23 2002 20 1 Char Count 0 Design Break The GPRS Study Eaj might never receive your e mail This issue was much more complex than d
73. ble Computer by Donald A Norman MIT Press 1999 and The Inmates are Running the Asylum Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper Sams 1999 have found their mark and corporations are rising to the challenge to start building humane products Much like companies in the 1970s perceived the qual ity movement leading companies see an opportunity to differentiate themselves on the basis of usability The forward looking companies are starting to make user centered design a major commitment If you re not on the bandwagon then you re behind your competition A growing maturity also exists in the UCD community about how to achieve this Instead of following the classic technology led process which is the base of most companies today turn the whole process around Replace the technology process with one based on understand ing who the users are and what their needs are Once this is understood sculpt the product design around this understanding bending technol ogy to fit these well grounded needs Why Are We Here THE PROBLEM Never has an approach been so intuitively correct And never has an approach been so abysmally executed Even when companies that get it do the user studies upfront designs and prototypes much of it ends up on the floor and the actual product becomes a pale shadow of the original design My experience both within companies as the director of the design departmen
74. ces in this way make it extremely difficult for simple consumer products such as headsets and phones to be easily configured and used by your average phone user No amount of pretty icons or informative error messages can fix this infrastructure problem A fix to the overall technology must occur which will allow the presentation to be much simpler This fix can take two forms The most difficult route is to fix the Bluetooth spec itself This is the strongest solution but one that will You Mean Something Is Wrong Ea take much time and energy The other option is to effectively hack the technology and come up with an bandage which will make the problem simpler and clear up the presentation problems A few were discussed earlier such as limiting the problem to headsets or automati cally looking for headsets if one hasn t been set up yet These are usually the types of solutions that make for breakthrough products as they finesse the problem This is also discussed in Chapter 9 Innovation Blindness CONCLUSION Much of the complexity you see in products today is the result of the rapid technological growth which is unintentionally changing mature products back into high tech products which only can be mastered by early adopters Dragging mature and established products back to the beginning of the adoption curve is driving users crazy This doesn t mean the Moore adoption curve is wrong it s simply far too easy
75. company often requiring difficult decisions and forcing strategic changes Design is no different It affects business strategy just as forcefully as these traditional issues Design must have equal weight and be valued by the entire product team from the beginning of the project DESIGN Is FREE This situation with design today is similar to the role of quality in the 1960s when Philip Crosby wrote Quality Is Free At that time numerous misconceptions existed about what quality was and how it was achieved Quality was valued and attempts were made to improve the commitment ofa company to quality More often than not however new improvements were just as quickly lost Quality simply wouldn t stick to a corporate culture Crosby s diagnosis was this a company needed to pass througha clear management maturity scale to make quality properly and permanently an integral part of the company culture Just wanting quality wasn t enough and establishing a quality department wasn t enough A deep Why Are We Here Ej cultural and managerial shift had to exist that reflected the commitment to quality You couldn t treat quality as if it were a fad something to be tacked on to the end of a project The same situation occurs today with Simplicity in design Good radically simple product design has value and most companies want this type of product Just as with quality in the 60s however you don t get it through quick fix
76. company does some type of prob ing user research and deep understanding is found The problem here lies not in the results but in the communication of the results The research does indeed inform the design but only internally to the de sign team itself Unfortunately the research doesn t inform the broader company s thinking All too common in these mature companies is to take a well researched product design and then hobble it by having User Blindness other departments which don t share this deeper understanding make inconsistent product decisions that countermand the original design Examples of these decisions would be dropped features or changes in the hardware specification Naivet is the easier of the two to fix because some fairly easy tools exist to get a company thinking outside its old engineering ways Lost understanding is the more difficult problem to solve because the com pany is doing investigative work but it doesn t seem to seep into the broader companywide decision making Curing user blindness is a two step process the first step is making an attempt at getting a clearer picture of the target user and the second step is incorporating this information into the product process This clarity places your company in a much stronger position You have the understanding and the power to remove things from the product that aren t going to affect it This can save enormous amounts of time development costs
77. concept usually in the form of a bug review board or a change control team The SWAT team is similar except it has a broader team I ve seen a SWAT team integrated two different ways The first is to make the bug team broader to include the SWAT functions The other is to keep the two groups separate letting the bug board handle the many smaller technical issues and only raise the design problems to the SWAT team Merging the two together is the easier of the two methods and works best for smaller projects For larger projects it might only be practical to keep them separate because the number of bugs could easily swamp the SWAT team Example Editing Contacts When working on a digital assistant product many applications were going into the product a phone a calendar a message center and an address book among others We had worked hard to give the original design a common sense of place and we structured the applications to Implementation Blindness RX have a similar layout and behavior This added significantly to the ease of learning for the product Once the high level design was completed it was handed off to a team in another country to complete the development I warned the team about the common pressures and urged them to initiate a SWAT team to keep the design on track Unfortunately the team wasn t able to do that and little changes started creeping into each view Each change wasn t so big but the cumulative
78. covered truth and beauty in their design and anything less is com pletely unacceptable There are times when what is designed just isn t possible Ways through this situation are to ask the designer these ques tions What are your key concerns here Is this part of your design a core task Are there other ways we can meet this need Again the purpose is to get both sides to relax and try to meet in the middle i The Simplicity Shift INSIGHT 8 FAIL FAST What It Is Creating breakthrough designs is a terrible cross to bear No one can conjure up a breakthrough design on the spot but approaches exist that can help significantly I often find it useful to think of design as a process of criticizing your way toa solution When you re just starting or possibly when you re stuck at some point in the design write down a solution any solution as a means of getting something going It will certainly be wrong but that isn t the point By putting pen to paper you visualize your problem shifting out of the logical verbal space into the creative visual space With your problem in front of you in a different way you can then talk about why it s wrong what aspects of it are good what improvements could be made and so on I call this approach to design Failing Fast which is a significant shift in approach and creative liberty Early on in a project I make it clear to the team that we have to run through hundreds of bad
79. create Simplicity it s unnecessarily harsh and it wouldn t have the depth required for repeated or more experienced use This solution wouldn t grow into a user s needs as they transition from initial to accomplished use The solution is more subtle uncover and prioritize the features and discover a core set that must be simple and extremely approachable This will be the essence of the product everyone will use Design first for this core set and then layer on the additional functions so they re in the product but not at the expense of the core design The previous Design Break gave a few hints as to how to do this In this chapter I present three Insights that discuss how to do it in more detail Insight 3 unFeatures is about the types of features usually found by designers but never included in marketing feature lists This is necessary to make sure the feature list isn t only a marketing inspired laundry list but a more thorough list of what the complete product will require Insight 4 The Priority Trick is a simple tool to take a seemingly endless list of features and give it some direction so you know what to design first Insight 5 Make the Easy Easy and the Hard Feature Blindness j Hard is a technique for creating a simple design first and then layering on the addition high end features INSIGHT 3 UNFEATURES THERE S MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE The first step in curing feature blindness
80. cross their senior management project managers and team members to ensure that everyone works together to make the project successful The initial two chapters layout a few terms and concepts that need to be established before we can begin The remainder of the book is organized around the types of design blindness explaining each and giving examples Each blindness will have insights that are specific actions you can take to improve your company s ability to under stand problems discuss them and make decisions that create Sim plicity in your products Intermixed between these chapters are De sign Breaks which show how these insights can be used in real world situations WHo THis BOOK Is FOR Most experienced designers will be well versed in the insights I reference in this book Knowing the tools isn t all that counts though Using the tools with the right people at the right time makes all the difference I hope this book has value to both designers and managers How to do design is becoming well understood How to manage design still has a long way to go I find designing consumer products an exciting and rewarding activity because the potential is great You can design products that will make a difference Ialso hope this book will be useful to small companies without much of an established design culture Big companies tend to have design expertise Their problems lie in learning how to unlock the power of these internal groups
81. ct because it s the tool that puts them in control Another Group Much like the power level this next set of buttons I ve called the SuperCook here is grouped and labeled so it s clear these are extra features you don t have to use initially Green Coding to Mimic the Start Button By coloring these buttons green they become cousins to the Start button so it s clear that pushing them turns on the oven Costs Saving Money The new design is much simpler in software programming because so many fewer interaction details exist The software costs of this new design will be lower reflected not only in building costs but also in software testing and user manual production Some cost savings come from using a completely standard digital display instead of the custom display in the original design I didn t go into much detail about this but six special symbols were around the edge of the LCD display to help give some feedback to the AutoCook process Losing Money The new design does use more buttons than the original but these are inexpensive to add There s additional cost to the LEDs next to the Power buttons but again that type of cost shouldn t cause great hardship Given the savings in the LCD display and the simplified software and hardware assuming this new design will cost no more than the original seems reasonable ia The Simplicity Shift Wrap Up This design hasn t been user tested I m
82. d and you re bundled up This suggests a hardware switch you could switch from headphones to radio transmis sion You could easily see this button being left on accidentally though so it might be useful to make the switch obvious in some way either by making it large and colorful where switching on FM exposes some red paint or to have a blinking LED to make sure you know it s on All of these possible features would need to be brainstormed with the development team to find the most cost effective solution Scenario 4 Playing Music Lisa seems the most likely to want to play her music like a traditional CD player picking a CD and letting it run Steve also would probably use the player this way but he seems to like to share his musical finds with his friends so Steve will most likely want to pick individual songs to play In sharing with friends a problem exists because as a headphone only device they would have to share the headphones one at a time The FM transmitter idea from the previous Scenario is interesting because it means that anywhere Steve can find an FM radio he can share his music Bringing along a small set of speakers or a patch cord to plug into a friends stereo seems a bit complicated All Steve wants to bring with him are the device and the headphones In fact this triggers another idea if the unit had FM headphones Steve could have a cable free experience using the device This sounds a bit radical because
83. d play Trade Offs But did you catch what just happened here Our first layered feature has changed our precious core design Instead of the original two levels of hierarchy we now have three We aren t supposed to do this The core should stay fixed and additional functions should be layered to keep the core design whole This example is a simple version of what can happen as you layer in additional features Initially when you start you create a design that only accomplishes an extremely focused set of tasks in this case it was simply playing a CD collection It should come as no surprise that while this is a great base it can t encompass the i The Simplicity Shift Play music by Individual Track Play List FIGURE 8 3 Stage 2 design remainder of the functions The power of this however is we now have a strong place to start Adding the third layer of hierarchy is making the design more complex but it s built on the same navigational model and button design that came from our initial design In this way the Stage 1 design had the desired effect It started us thinking about an ultrasimple product first which grew slightly to encompass the new functionality STAGE 3 Now we have to add the rest recordings and settings Recordings is the capability to record new tracks and play them back Settings is where you would change more esoteric values suchas the equalizer or backlighting The extra level of
84. design Telling people to be in novative might sound odd but many product teams will assume things must be done the safe way Questioning existing design assumptions is risky and can lead to some fairly wild ideas The team must explicitly The Simplicity Shift be given permission to try some new ideas and fail at least initially I can t stress enough how a supportive management comment in a team meeting can encourage a team s innovative attitude One of the bigger problems with innovative designs isn t always with the creation of the design but in its acceptance by the rest of the company In a time constrained technically fluid world you can t blame product managers for taking the known route if only to gain some scheduling security This is understandable but this isn t the environment that will create breakthrough products Team leaders must not only encourage risk taking but also reward attempts to break away even if these attempts fail In addition an occasional thought provoking jab such as Tell me why you think scroll bars are important can sometimes jog people into Seeing the Water The other problem is this making a simplification never comes free It often has a cost When you get a radically simpler design you usually lose some type of information feedback or some advanced feature In the case of the previous simplified Outbox concern existed that people who composed many e mails in the Drafts fold
85. designs before we find something amazing Through bad designs you are able to understand the problem the constraints and types of solutions I m assuming you ve already done your homework and completed most of the steps in the previous chapters Use this Insight when you re past the homework stages and starting to design actively Many de signers get brainlock and sometimes can t move forward By removing the stigma of suggesting only perfect solutions you can start to think outside the box suggesting odd even weird solutions that everyone knows are wrong But every time you express a solution your mind can t help but analyze and ponder Usually every time you do a bad sketch you get a little closer to understanding what you do want Failing Fast can occur at many levels in the design I find Failing Fast most useful early on when I m just starting to formulate the initial design concepts but this can also continue into the more refined and final stages of design I use three fairly well known techniques to do this Sketching Interactive Demos and User Testing These tools are effective not only for design but also for project management because they re compact and effective communication tools when working across the product team Innovation Blindness ef Technique 1 Sketching Sketching is my thinking tool of choice When I m stuck I start sketching quick and messy I must point out that my sketches are wg y I d
86. e that had a stylus for tapping on the screen The Scenario was simple nothing more than reading a new message that had arrived For this Persona however they happened to be on a bus going to work In imagining them using this product with a small screen and a small stylus while on a crowded bus it wasn t hard to determine this could User Blindness Scenario 8 GPRS Suspension Persona David Prerequisites David is online with the WAP browser using GPRS to connect A phone call comes in while he s browsing Setting the scene While checking football scores David receives a phone call from a friend regarding the trip they are about to make David takes the call talks briefly on the phone and then hangs up He then continues to use the browser to read the rest of the match details FIGURE 5 2 Sample Scenario be inconvenient to many people not only to this Persona This helped us understand that for this product using core functions of the phone without requiring the stylus would be useful This started us down a long path of questioning the value of the stylus and how to consider designing basic tasks without requiring its use Example GPRS Figure 5 2 shows a sample Scenario that came from the GPRS work discussed earlier in the book In this particular case the Scenario was fairly specific and short Note how it carefully calls out the prerequisites so the technical people reviewing it
87. e of voting is that a large number of items are ranked both frequent and critical To force a more structured voting pattern require each person to have his or her votes evenly distributed So if twelve items are in the list you can have no more that four of each type This makes some people uncomfortable because they worry about having too many low votes The point here isn t to remove everything but to prioritize everything It doesn t do any good to make everything a 1 1 vote The votes are collected and the two rankings are added together for each feature The list is then sorted with the features with the highest The Simplicity Shift numbers at the top This exercise isn t as numerically perfect as it might first sound The purpose is to get the input and buy in of the prod uct team By doing this vote as a group activity you ll undoubtedly force some strong discussion Some will vote without regard to the Persona Others will vote only for their favorite feature This should be expected By getting these little differences out in the open you can discuss the types of forces that can derail a product as it moves through production Once the voting has become stable you have one more decision to make The team must draw a line to separate the top critical features of the product The voting will cluster a bit so this is usually fairly easy As a general rule of thumb this subset should be no more than a third of the original
88. e production side of the process to make sure the product stays on track INSIGHT 9 THE DESIGN MANIFESTO The Patient Always Stops Bleeding A story is told of how medics in the Vietnam war were ordered to priori tize certain medical issues when on the battlefield The most important was to stop any bleeding as quickly as possible In a morbid twist of humor that can only come from war the medics reply to this edict was simple Hey the patient always stops bleeding Sometimes I feel a similar attitude exists within product companies they know they need a product plan but whether or not it s a good plan the guarantee is that something will eventually happen Hey the company a ways has a plan The real question is will this plan kill you or save you It s easy to have a plan to go north but when you reach your first wall if half of your team starts digging and the other half starts climbing you don t have a good plan The trick is not to go north but to know bow to go north While most company s think they have a process they ignore or are naive about too many deep issues to ever produce a product with Simplic ity What makes this all the more frustrating is companies are trying to create great product designs and yet they don t change their pro cess enough to reinforce this throughout the product cycle Simplicity doesn t happen by itself Simplicity can die a thousand deaths before your product ship
89. e technical minefield to create a solution that captures the essence of the simple design Sometimes the technology needs to bend slightly and sometimes the design must If both sides are actively and jointly working ona solution together instead of defending their turf an innovative solution is usually possible Fail Fast understands you don t get innovation on the first try You have to start with something anything because this forces you to vi sualize your current design This creates understanding in a way that encourages self criticism The faster you create visions of your product and test these visions the faster you will increase your understanding of the product and uncover problems in your current design Fail Fast is the key approach to innovation because it enables you to evolve the product without having to ship a product This not only improves the product design but also saves enormous amounts of development time because dead end corners of a product with little value to the customer aren t implemented IMPLEMENTATION BLINDNESS Implementation blindness comes from inexperience in managing the challenges of getting a simple design to market Companies that cure the previous three blindnesses can still never get the product to market because they don t watch the little problems that crop up and nibble away at the development What ends up being shipped can be much less than the original design The two Insights that best h
90. each time you turn on the device will waste the battery slow boot time etc etc etc Fine Discuss these tradeoffs and ask how bad they are And if they are all that bad ask what can be done to reduce these problems and so forth Most programmers concerns are indeed valid I ve also found that getting programmers involved with the challenge almost always gets their formidable puzzle solving abilities involved and a fairly good compromise solution is usually found Simplicity begins in trying to see a grander vision that isn t filtered by technology You ll never find Simplicity if you don t try to look be yond the obvious issues in front of you Once you do find something the next step is not to roll over and give up when you find out a beautifully simple solution is difficult or even impossible What you have to do is find a practical way to achieve most of this goal COMMITMENT TO SIMPLICITY This example leads me into the broader point of having acommitment to Simplicity This might seem a bit obvious but companies will never get Simplicity without actively pursuing it Unfortunately most companies don t They don t have the tools to uncover a simpler design or the insight to make the tough decisions to make the simpler design happen When I explain this to project managers they get nervous Of course they want Simplicity but they quickly add not too simple They are con cerned I ll tip the scale too far and create
91. ed hierarchical menus that went six levels deep Could we come in and help him fix the interface The implication was that changing from six levels to five would be a small change How hard could it be This isn t a simple pre sentation task though The reason six levels were there was the Task layer structure of the problem The product had deep assumptions of how to present information and to remove a level involved deep changes to the Task layer of the program Making such a change could never be a quick fix Example Finding Task Problems Most mobile phones have a lock keypad function This locks the keypad so presses don t accidentally dial the phone when it s placed in your pocket Locking the keys at first glance appears to be a Presentation layer problem How do you show users they can lock the phone which buttons are pressed and what is the feedback It s tempting to think that once you have the feature checked off you are done with it and you can move on But now comes the Task layer and what is required to use the phone for basic tasks What should happen when the phone rings and the phone is locked The broader task is answering the phone Automatically unlocking the phone when a phone call comes in seems reasonable This is much better than forcing a manual unlock as the phone is ringing So the phone auto unlocks when a call is received So far so good a The Simplicity Shift The trouble is only beginning though
92. effect was significant By the time the product had reached beta two of the applications those with the strongest willed programmers had a design altered so much that the carefully crafted uniform design was effectively gone Given how late it was in the project fixing the damage was impossible The product had to ship with these grossly different application designs Things That Go Wrong The SWAT team can easily get overwhelmed with bugs issues Most companies have a bug database of some kind and it s best to use this to track the problems The biggest problem faced by the SWAT team is not having enough information A bug will come in to say that feature X must be changed to use a widget instead of a gizmo without any details or supporting information Send the request back to the author The team has too much on its plate to play librarian Make the requestor get the information before approving a change The next largest problem is avoiding the word impossible Many problems will be proposed as impossible and therefore need to be dropped This is often the case but at times a few members of the SWAT team need to work with the problem just as in the Embrace the Impossible Insight to make sure an excellent simple solution isn t available Disagreement within the SWAT team is to be expected What is critical here is that one member must be the primary decision maker and that person has the final say More often than n
93. elp this are the Design Manifesto and the SWAT Team Many products fail because a product is set up to fail Too many issues aren t well understood or there are conflicts in the product i The Simplicity Shift requirements that aren t resolved until well after the product is in deve lopment The Design Manifesto is a simple tool to collect much of the work done in the previous Insights and put them into a simple short document that can be shared and agreed to by the product team This simple exercise usually exposes deep misunderstandings or attitudes between the product teams which must be resolved for an innovative product to make it out the door The SWAT Team is a slight variation on a Bug Review Board common in most companies The primary purpose of the SWAT Team is to make sure decisions made late in the product development are consistent with the original design When problems occur at this late stage it s far too easy to make an honorable but na ve decision that adversely affects the product A SWAT Team can help eliminate some of these problems THE SOLUTION ACTIVE INVOLVEMENT The Simplicity Shift is the political change in a company needed to make sure good product design happens in a thoughtful and effective manner Many companies have been through management improvement pro grams yet few take hold While these programs are always introduced with great enthusiasm the management structures aren t in place to sup
94. em to take because it often keeps unrealistic marketing requests in check Where innovation occurs is when you get design dreamers and pragmatic programmers working together to get a brilliant design implemented with as little work as possible The three Insights in this chapter discuss ways through this The first See the Water is about realizing most solutions to problems are chosen from a limited default set and you have to look outside this set to get any new ideas The second Insight Embrace the Impossible is about getting the sky high designer and the down to earth program mer to work together to get something that neither could have done alone The last Insight Failing Fast is about techniques in visualizing and critiquing design concepts quickly zeroing in on an good design through iterative design INSIGHT 6 SEE THE WATER What It Is A popular parable talks of fish not seeing the water The point is while fish live in water all the time they never appreciate what surrounds them Water so encompasses their life it becomes part of the background Water just fades away and the fish focus on more obvious things like finding food or escaping from predators The same is true of much of design We re surrounded by the com puter culture Two button mice scroll bars right clicks double clicks and Querty keyboards are all part of how computers are just done Innovation Blindness Digital
95. en is the same I would expect the reduction of nine buttons would cover the additional cost of the scroller Also please note my scroller is a vertical wheel on the side of the display Many versions exist of this type of input device and different placements could be used My design is only an initial example to break away from the default idea of having an up and down arrow SUMMARY I believe this design is shaping up fairly well Given that we started with fairly simple Personas and some ad hoc Scenarios we were able to generate significant questions and issues which have lead to an increased insight to how this product would be of value to a consumer While we were able to make considerable headway using these ad hoc tools testing these ideas in a simple focus group or field study would still be useful Many more insights would likely come from this Ee The Simplicity Shift Given this simple tool however we came up with a radically simple design reducing the original complicated screen design obliterating the need for soft buttons and reducing the 11 buttons down to 2 plus a scroller and a volume control This is clearly a much better and cheaper model than the original Also notice that many of the issues raised in the Scenarios would have been useful to discuss with the broader product team Many issues could have been decided that would have significantly changed how this design proceeded This is the real value I want you to
96. entation layer the Task layer and the Infrastructure layer The Presentation Layer The Presentation layer contains the physical graphic representation of the product both in hardware and software The physical case the push buttons as well as the onscreen icons and screen layout enable the user The Simplicity Shift to interact with the product This is what is classically thought of as the user interface The Presentation layer is primarily graphical in nature and is preoccupied with the presentation of the given functionality of the product The Task Layer The Task layer concerns how the user completes tasks when using the device What is the precise sequence of steps needed to complete a given goal For example let s compare desktop e mail and text mes sages on mobile phones Both have a similar goal which is to receive text messages The standard desktop e mail client usually requires 1 configuration of the device 2 choosing a menu item or a button to start downloading new messages and 3 opening the Inbox before reading new messages Mobile phones on the other hand automatically configure themselves and alert the user when a new message arrives of fering them the option to open the new arrival immediately Now to be fair e mail and text messages are different technologies I don t want to carry this comparison too far but at a simple enough level they do have similar goals yet different task models While
97. equire ments consumer products tend to be technology and feature driven cramming in what they can as quickly and cheaply as possible This inevitably creates cumbersome products toys that can do much but are rarely used Consumer electronics is becoming a crowded field No longer is it enough to be there first or to have more features Products must L The Simplicity Shift be simple to understand and use on a daily basis But in an indus try so often driven by cost reduction and technical novelty compa nies are finding that just the desire for a better design isn t enough Shipping a product requires running a gauntlet of challenges each of which can compromise a product and make it more complex The Simplicity Shift is about shifting a company culture to value Simplicity in design and to make it the company s most passionate goal Simplicity is no different than time to market quality or cost reduction Simplic ity is a deep commitment that must be understood by management communicated throughout the product process and rewarded when it s achieved THE SOLUTION The good news is this the need for quality design is becoming more obvious and the use of user interface professionals is steadily increas ing The term User Centered Design UCD has started to become commonly used when discussing consumer products Companies are fi nally starting to get it design really does matter Books such as The Invisi
98. er impact that would come from field work but it can still be effective This also has the advantage of being fast and inexpensive to create The basic place to start is to create the obvious Scenarios such as turning on the device or using it for basic tasks If it s a microwave cook something If it s a digital timer imagine where it would be and give ita realistic thing to time The purpose with this fairly quick Scenario isn t to uncover a new and ground breaking use but instead to take fairly obvious uses of the product and place them in context with a Persona In the GPRS example we were trying to expose task problems so we took about twelve basic tasks that were currently possible with existing mobile phones such as downloading e mail or going into a tunnel These Scenarios tested whether these same tasks still worked with the new technology Where Scenarios are most powerful is in uncovering problems By taking fairly boring tasks and working through a Persona you un cover aspects of the product that weren t apparent before By having a detailed Persona walk through the Scenario the surrounding context becomes more apparent So instead of setting the microwave to cook for ten seconds you have David thawing a bagel before he catches the bus Scenarios try to capture not only the product action but also the environment in which that action is being performed As another example I was working on a design for a mobile phon
99. er would be hurt because their items were now mixed in with other items This was a valid concern but it was minimized because for the most part people didn t create that many draft items Those who did could handle it Make the hard hard One more point to remember when pushing for innovation is that legacy issues are occasionally so strong you can t break away When working on the Newton I designed a spreadsheet around the use of the stylus and gesture recognition What came out of this design was a rather unique model for creating and editing formu las Using the pen and gestures it was much easier both to create formulas and to edit them But this design was incompatible with Excel the industry standard spreadsheet at the time however My approach was too different and it didn t meet spreadsheet users ex pectations The legacy within the spreadsheet world was strong and creating a breakaway design didn t offer enough value to be worth the switch This was a rather naive mistake on my part because I was ignoring some rather basic user inertia in pursuing such a radical design Innovation Blindness AK INSIGHT 7 EMBRACE THE IMPOSSIBLE What It Is Conflict often exists between designers who are good dreamers and pro grammers who are battle scarred realists The problem should surprise no one they both approach their crafts from very different perspectives Programmers take a real beating in the designer c
100. es Companies need to mature their approach to design much like they did with quality You don t get design by simply creating a design department While this is a nice start it only puts an artificial box around the problem The real work comes when you discuss how the design department informs the strategic planning of the company how it helps the project management process and how it works with the development team Once design becomes an integral part of a company s development process design like quality can become free THE SIMPLICITY SHIFT The world is on the brink of taking UCD seriously Companies have been inspired by the good examples and they re making a sincere effort to learn from them Unfortunately the path to complexity is paved with good intensions Although many companies want a good simple product they end up getting much less This isn t intentional This is through a lack of maturity Simple ideas are fragile ideas and a thousand things can turn them into a design disaster Marketing has just decided to add three new requirements to the product Development can t im plement pop up menus Can t you use icons instead The product cost is too high so we ll have to reduce the screen size by half Can you rework the screen shots by next week Complexity is what fills the gaps in poor execution The Simplicity Shift is about closing the gap between the willing spirit and the weak body Good design doesn
101. es is similar in that it s programmed to cook a single potato Pushing it multiple times counts up on the display so you can cook one two or more potatoes at a time The Simplicity Shift Button backgrounds 10 min 1 min 10 sec m _ Gry Start w Start Light Green Stop Light Red High Low lt Gray Power level Defrost Potatoes Popcorn lt 4 Lighter Green AutoCook FIGURE 6 4 Stage 3 design I choose Defrost because it was a SuperCook option that was quite difficult to use because it involved choosing the meat type as well as the weight This was several button presses with little feedback so making a mistake and ruining the meat would be easy This version is intentionally much simpler Press in the time and then press Defrost The customer is in control Defrost something for five minutes and if that isn t long enough try again for another three minutes While this isn t a complete feature as the original was attempting to be it s so straightforward it ll not only be discovered it ll also be used How this Defrost program works is much more transparent to the customer Setting the time for too long is taking a risk When in doubt use a Design Break Microwave Oven Aj shorter time As discovered with the first two Scenarios many tasks are repetitive so over time the customers will become good at setting the time correctly They will gain mastery over the produ
102. es slightly harder to access but because they are advanced features this isn t a significant problem The advanced users will understand how to find them and the new users will have a chance to understand and grow into the product This provides a product with depth that avoids the dreaded parsing shock that typifies most complex designs today INNOVATION BLINDNESS Innovation blindness comes from bad habits that inhibit innovative thinking Innovation can t be guaranteed but it certainly won t ever happen in a company that doesn t work hard to overcome these habits The three Insights used here are See the Water Embrace the Impossible and Fail Fast See the Water is an attitude about actively looking for default thinking the assumed solutions currently in use that are grafted too easily on new design situations The two most common soutces of these default solutions are digital watches and the desktop PC While it s sometimes valuable to use these paradigms as a source of design Conclusion KAJ solutions they should always be questioned The common problem is they re used too easily copying interaction styles that aren t always ap propriate to the task at hand Embrace the Impossible is about an approach to transition from the simple design and the complexities of development Simple designs if well motivated aren t wrong they simply aren t yet possible Innovation occurs in finding a path through th
103. escribed but overall this was a huge step down from the vision of what GPRS could be CONCLUSION The results from this study created some rather unfortunate and nasty high level marketing problems which had a visible impact on the prod uct The company had to go to our customers and explain that we weren t going to have always on web access in version 1 why and when we were going to deliver it next This was a politically messy situation This all came from a four week study Unfortunately with many technology innovations the obvious benefits are clear but the actual path to get these benefits isn t well understood Yet products seem to forge ahead regardless This is not only a bad idea from the user design point of view it s also disastrous from a software architecture point of view The power of this example is in how clearly it demonstrates that user interface issues have a fundamental impact not only on the Presentation layer and the Infrastructure layer but on business strategy as well Because this type of analysis deeply affects the product concept it must happen before development work starts This is especially true because this type of work is fairly fast inexpensive and usually saves product development time A more political issue was how back door our approach had to be The project management team didn t want our help and unfortunately we were in a situation where we forged ahead anyway It shouldn
104. esigning this for Emma Do you think she would be upset by this decision The answer was clearly no and we were able to move on This shows how Personas are usually more powerful in slimming down a product rather than amplifying it In this meeting all sorts User Blindness Ef of crazy high end features were being discussed but it was clear that Emma couldn t or wouldn t use any of them In this case we were able to throw away a feature completely which isn t always so simple Sometimes you must have certain features be cause political or marketing pressures require their inclusion By having Emma as a touch stone however this gives you perspective If it turns out these required features are of no use to Emma you can then approach these features differently Placing them into the product possibly off to the side in a way that doesn t affect Emma so strongly This is discussed in more detail in the Chapter 7 How to Get Them Field Studies The user centered design community has a long and successful history in getting Personas This usually involves field studies or focus groups Field studies focus on watching users doing their jobs using an existing product and observing the problems key tasks and insights into how users go about their work Focus groups tend to bring people together in an attempt to get the same information from an open question and answer session These types of research not only create Perso
105. even for the power users Things That Go Wrong Getting a design based around the high priority tasks is rarely the problem As I stated earlier it almost designs itself The real difficulty comes in layering on the additional functions because they can easily make deep changes to the initial design This is the primary reason I have Design Breaks in this book to give examples of how this works While most things can be placed into a menu or into a dialog box at times a change to the core design can t be avoided No master rules exist to make this process easy for you This in general comes from experience I call out this problem in the following Design Break so you have one example of how such a trade off is made The other problem tends to be political Placing things out of the way seems so counterproductive many people have a hard time accept ing it Two forces are here The first is the core tasks must be preserved and value must be attached to this Otherwise these types of tradeoffs will never be accepted The other force is the real concern that its possible to place a feature a little too far away This Insight isn t license to bury everything under three levels of hierarchical menus This isn t usually much of a problem because a simple design that handles the core tasks usually has a secondary spot to park most of the advanced features CONCLUSION As with user blindness this process must be shared at some level with
106. example was far too boring However the Insight See the Water discussed in the previous chapter is a classic problem and this product is a perfect example By understanding this design dead end you can see and fix this style of problem many times over At first glance this beast is a little grim and practically screams complexity A plumber who installs this unit joked that while some of the kids could use it none of the adults could In fact most of the time no one ever bothered to change the default settings the plumber set up on installation This is a powerful admission The device is so complex it usually isn t used It might as well be a white box with no controls of any kind This is the type of product that mystifies and frustrates consumers The Simplicity Shift FIGURE 10 1 Initial product We re going to take this design apart and put it back together again The major focus will be on innovation issues both discovering them and brainstorming solutions Numerous trade offs will need to be made Brief Introduction to Boiler Timers For those of you who haven t experienced radiator heating let me briefly introduce you This device controls the heating of the boiler for both the hot water and the radiator heating system Keeping the boiler run ning all day is rather expensive so this device turns it on and off with a clock timer to coincide with you being home This usually means turn ing it on fo
107. face exists only as a project planning fiction a bad fiction used by old guard product managers What the user in terface is and how it affects not only a product but also the company itself is much more complex than most people appreciate i The Simplicity Shift CROSSING THE CHASM AND DE EVOLUTION Tent Evolution Slow Continual Evolution Let s take an example from another different business domain camping tents When I was 18 years old I bought a lightweight tent for my grand adventure of bicycling across Europe I bought another similar tent for my sons to use 20 years later The tent industry probably doesn t follow a user centered design process but the improvements in my tent are exactly the types of improvements you see in the software industry The new tent did more cost less was more convenient and even had nice touches such as better zipper pulls and pocket placements The new tent was a better tent in every way In addition the new tent was one half the cost Did a huge design consultancy that specialized in user centered design create this product Not at all All that happened was 20 years passed with dozens of companies iterating hundreds of different tent designs The good companies listened to their customers used their own products and generally matured and evolved better designs slowly This took awhile but I ended up with a vastly improved tent Tent evolution is an example of the gradual steady improve
108. few Scenarios we can prioritize the design to reflect the key tasks By identifying these top tasks the design almost takes care of itself This shows how most of the hard work in design is in the up front thinking Once you prune away extra distracting functionality what s left is fairly easy to mold into a simple and easy to use product There are three stages to this Design Break I begin with the basic task and design just for that task I then layer on the additional tasks keeping the spirit of the previous stage The idea is to make your way through all the features but to layer them in a way that keeps the simple core of the first stage intact PROBLEM The microwave oven seems so simple put in food turn it on and finally take out hot food The early microwaves were about that simple Their ej The Simplicity Shift design was modeled on conventional ovens and they were straightfor ward to use Turn a dial to the time you wanted open the door stick in the food and close the door The oven started automatically Some units had a special advanced feature a power dial which enables you to set the power at Low Medium or High which provided flexibility for thawing food Even that was straightforward and not at all hard to understand or use Now along comes the digital revolution and cost cutters Analog timers are both expensive and more likely to require service The solu tion offered is a digital timer They work
109. from a wizard that papers over the underlying confusion or a more ambitious rewrite of the control panels to reorganize them The point here is you need to use Scenarios to go through a few core tasks to uncover what it will be like to use the product and make sure the user isn t hopping all over the place to use it Sense of Place Sense of place refers to the users having a good understanding of where they are and more importantly where they can go Too many products have a weak navigation model so users don t understand where they are In the next Design Break we ll study an MP3 player that had this Feature Blindness problem Its navigational model was primarily through a large number of buttons on the face of the product These buttons did enable the user to navigate but they were poor at feedback It wasn t clear where you were in the product by looking at the screen which made for a confusing and frustrating product A sense of place is not only about simple and consistent navigation it s about good even redundant feedback so the users have a strong understanding of where they are In one mobile phone product I was working on each application ended up looking much the same containing a list of text items an e mail list a contact list and meeting list and so on I placed a small icon in front of each item This wasted valuable screen space but it was instrumental in helping the user dif ferentiate each list In u
110. g a usability test I d suggest an interactive demo which could be mocked up in a week or two Run it past about six users and see what happens If it passes then you know the design will be good enough but you won t know until you try My gut tells me this design will perform significantly better than the original design we started with at the beginning of the chapter and if only for that reason it would be worthwhile CONCLUSION By starting simple and adding in the functions we were able to create a simple design fairly easily This initial design was clearly the break through we were looking for in how the product would best meet the customer s needs It was the potential cost of the innovation that chal lenged the capability to ship this design The purpose of having an ideal design is to know where the innovation can add value The clear area to focus on for this heater timer would be the slider and if a solution to this could be found it would be a significantly better design This exercise was intentionally harsh continually denying the at tempts at finding an innovative solution This does happen and designers must be able to cope with this By keeping the breakthrough design in mind you can discuss the second and third best solutions that get as close as possible to this idealized design Shipping these degraded de signs because of cost constraints is still an honorable place to be Seeing the light and getting tantalizing
111. g her music not setting up the record ing parameters of this device It seems clear that recording must be sim ple with minimal fuss because it will be used in an environment where many other stronger social issues will be Lisa s focus This raises the ques tion that if recording is to be included in the device a built in micro phone would help considerably It might not have the quality of an exter nal microphone but Lisa might trade off the quality for the convenience In discussing this Scenario with a technical friend he pointed out that you could never offer a Record option so simply You would have to have compression settings because sometimes you would want to compress the sound quite a bit for voice recordings but less for music He raised a good point that wasn t captured initially you could record not only music but also voice and there could be a large savings in disk space for the two This raises two questions 1 Is it worthwhile to Lisa and Steve to have this capability and 2 If so how do we offer it My technical friend s suggestion of the need for multiple compres sion settings has Flexibility is the root of all evil written all over it If this were to be offered there should only be a Voice and a Music setting which could be offered at record time For the power user the definition of what these mean could be left to the desktop software to edit Design Break MP3 Player So far the Personas
112. going to be a problem because even a casual look at the technical specifications showed numerous exceptions and problems that had to be brought to the user s attention These words are almost always a bad sign The programming team was under considerable time pressure a common situation in high tech companies We approached them to help design the product and were told politely they had to get this out quickly and didn t have time for a complete user interface design They would get the technology out quickly and then fix it up ina later release Clearly they considered user centered design a luxury that could easily be lived without which was a decision that came back to haunt them We proceeded with our design work anyway because we could see this was going to be a problem that wouldn t go away ANALYSIS We formed a small team to put together some user Scenarios this is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5 We didn t focus on the obvi ous high end features such as high speed web browsing but instead focused on the more basic activities that covered everyday issues such as roaming out of coverage or going into a tunnel All we wanted to do was to make the impact of this new technology on the average user ob vious by walking through these simple tasks We were trying to make sure everyone understood and interpreted the technical specification consistently Our deliverable was simple a fairly short slide presentatio
113. gressive approach to these problems early in the design process you can solve many of them fairly cheaply and easily The trick is to start this process early when you have time in the schedule to fix them simply and painlessly UnFeatures is a broad set of problems that needs to grow over time The following is a list of the major unFeatures that seem to crop up The Simplicity Shift a in most products I ve worked on This list isn t exhaustive It s simply representative of many problems I ve found in the past Warning the following concepts have been known to cause drowsi ness in product managers Product Setup What does it take to get your product out of the box and working As in my nirvana Scenario for Bluetooth in the introduction can you simply break open the box and start using the product If not what are the steps to setting it up What information is needed to complete the setup VCR Example Most modern VCRs have the capability to search for available stations automatically You usually have to dig around a bit to discover it finding the Menu button on the remote going to the configuration screen selecting channel set up and then choosing something usually called Autoscan My latest VCR offered to do this automatically when I first turned it on Was this lots of extra work No The feature had already been implemented for years and it was a fairly small effort to detect the right conditions where the p
114. h disruption But adding a power level as a percentage of the maximum setting is still a technical way to phrase this What does this mean to Fred It seems likely he ll be cooking on full power most of the time So why does he have so many levels to choose from Our given Scenarios make it clear Fred only needs two High and Low Common sense might indicate that we must have more power levels but we re following the Scenarios at face value for the moment Only put in what the Scenarios call for Listening to the Scenarios first forces a certain clarity which even if slightly naive is worth seeing through to the end This suggests the next stage in the design as shown in Figure 6 3 Design Break Microwave Oven E Button backgrounds 10 min 1 min 10 sec mM Gray Start gt Start Light Green Stop Light Red e High Low lt Gry Power level FIGURE 6 3 Stage 2 design Labeled Second Group Below to Set the Power The original buttons formed a core group that were effective for basic tasks I ve enclosed them in a light gray line so their self contained nature is reinforced The new High and Low buttons are also enclosed and labeled to make their functions clear By placing these buttons just below the first group they re clearly seen as an optional setting LEDs to Indicate Current Setting Fred needs feedback so he can be sure he s cooking at the right power Pushing one of the po
115. h of the problem in the original design the SuperCook buttons The SuperCook feature of this oven is difficult to use It doesn t seem risky to say that most consumers would have a hard time getting all the settings correct As a marketing device its prime use is to look good enough in the store to differentiate the product As with the previous power setting simplification the SuperCook choices need to be simpli fied and made accessible If possible it would also help if they add value to the user of the oven instead of just adding a marketing driven concept of feature differentiation You could easily make a point that these SuperCook features aren t required The Stage 2 solution is more than 99 percent of what the pop ulation would need Consumer products have many pressures however Design Break Microwave Oven and one of them is to differentiate To ship only the Stage 2 solu tion would most likely be more than most consumers need but on the showroom floor it probably isn t the model they ll choose From a purely marketing perspective there must be something special about the unit Lots of variables other than the Stage 2 design would factor into this such as capacity price and styling But most companies want something unique to show their device does something different than the other competing microwaves This is clearly the motivation for the original and unfortunately ill conceived SuperCook design You can ju
116. hard to use Not to the early adopters though because they tend to overlook design problems in order to get significant new capabilities While this was clearly an early adopter design this MP3 player did sell fairly well into this emerging market because its capacity was so much higher that previous players This product would be hard pressed to make it into the mainstream consumer market though as it s currently designed The usability problems would be a turn off to more laggard type users and another more streamlined competitor would most likely steal its thunder This is a good machine for us to redesign because it can show a transition from early adopter to a more mainstream user frame of design Design Break MP3 Player Eaj ANALYSIS Hardware This machine has a fairly generous screen roughly 128 pixels wide by 64 pixels tall for a consumer electronic device It has 11 buttons on the front a surprisingly large number The three buttons at the top are what are called soft buttons which are buttons whose function changes depend ing on context In the previous figure you can see how the left soft button is labeled Back The difficulty with soft buttons is they re a means to creating even more buttons Eleven is already an overwhelming number for a device like this Having three of these buttons change effectively adding even more virtual buttons to the mix makes for a challenging design to understand and use easily
117. hat reflect how this person will need the product is a sobering experience You simply can t create one person who will need everything and this becomes obvious when you try to put the Persona on paper This is the power of this simple tool By writing it down you immediately face realistic expectations of what one person can do Grabbing real people and asking them the same questions is also possible This can be done in all sorts of sneaky ways such as grabbing User Blindness Grant Who he is 32 years old sales representative Married one son small house in Guilford Extended family around Machester area Owns a Ford Mondeo e Enjoys Formula 1 Plans long weekend getaways with family Technology use Moderate day phone user bill paid for by employer eheavy work voice mail moderate mobile voicemail e Light text user moderate fax user Heavy Web e mail user Corporate account Personal Yahoo account e Heavy PC user at work Also at home web surfing digital photos e Has a Palm Has 100 names in phone book Key goals Be instantly available during work hours Get information while on the move e Stay in touch with family and friends FIGURE 5 1 Sample Persona people who call in on tech support lines or in store visits Remember you re definitely not getting a statistically valid sample of who your user is You re simply exploring real people and getting enough details so these
118. hav iors on how to use it But with the new wave of high tech evolution going on the cordless phone is now updated with not only cordless technology but also with built in answering machines caller ID and more Many of these changes are benign but others have significant consequences The Simplicity Shift ea As an example I have two cordless phones in my house After in stalling them my wife was on phone A and she wanted our son to use phone B to pick up the extension Even though this was something you ve been able to do for the last 60 years with normal phones it was completely impossible with this new phone system We could only transmit to one handset at a time so the kids couldn t speak to Grandma at the same time as my wife She was quite frustrated and rightly so This product was a significant step backward for her When faced with purchasing a phone again my wife was fairly adamant that we couldn t repeat this mistake This wasn t a simple technology limitation because the phone was clearly capable of broadcasting to all phones in the house at once When I called the company to ask if it knew of any way around this issue the representative was quite clear this was a feature This company had clearly designed this phone to be like a business phone system where you could have any number of phones and you could transfer calls among them just as you do at the office Of course this phone was sold to homes tha
119. have a good idea of the phone state when this Scenario takes place This might seem like a trivial little paragraph but it brought the house down when we worked through it By forcing the technical team to answer how this was going to work we exposed many problems and misunderstandings about the product E The Simplicity Shift Problems Scenarios are best at taking fairly standard tasks and bringing out the issues that complicate their execution This is a powerful technique in combating complexity because these observations will enable you to fix problems early in the product cycle A common problem in creating the Scenarios is that they aren t generic enough It s much too easy to say Download e mails rather than Check for messages from the office The rewording is important because it breaks free of the existing product concept One trick to doing this is to go ahead and use the established or technical name for the feature and then rewrite it without using any of these words Look to the Persona to give you some inspiration Download becomes check and e mail becomes messages Placing the task in context also helps so I also added from the office This might seem a bit frivolous but by disengaging from your preconceived terms you create more creative space to work in Another problem comes from trying to make the Scenarios too com plex Don t try to set up an e mail filter Start
120. he right user goal of Draft Better and Best the user had the benefit of the choices without the parsing shock of having to understand which was required and when Too much flexibility often hides a misperception of what the user needs If you see the work through technocolored glasses everything needs to be set On the other hand if you see the world through Persona colored glasses you realize that 99 percent of the time users want to do two or three things and you create your design around those tasks not the technology How to Do It Get It out of the Way This is a fairly straightforward trick When you have an advanced feature you need to layer into your core design don t put it in at the top level You should effectively bury the feature in a menu item or some other layered interface level such as a control panel The advanced user will be able to find it and this keeps the parsing load low for the introductory user This often causes a problem because super cool features are buried away which bothers some people If you ve done your homework prop erly however these buried tasks aren t high on the priority list so making the user dig shouldn t be a problem People who can t abide this hiding clearly don t agree it should be lowered in priority You must address this issue by either convincing these people of the priority or by raising it and changing the core design A classic example here would be a PDA I designed for
121. he screen needs to scroll through a long list of songs it will be an alphabetized list which naturally lets you know where you are in the list without the complication of a scroll bar If this analysis seems a bit radical to you look at almost any mobile phone It doesn t use a scroll bar when running through the list of con tacts in the phone book yet the interaction feels natural What is obvious often depends on your initial perspective Another point is this to fit the soft button labels on the screen the display font has been made quite small A font of this low resolution will have strong consequences not only for older users but also for younger ones who want to use it in lower light situations Initial Goals So before we even discuss Personas we have a few guiding principles to remember Reduce button count to simplify learning I Avoid soft buttons for the same reason il Reduce PC clutter to simplify presentation iM Increase font size to increase legibility Last Comments To play music on this device the consumer must understand the concept of queuing music versus playing music For this device music is placed first into a queue and then played This allows more flexibility because while the device is playing one track you can queue up another to be played next To make things a bit easier if you navigate down to an album and press Play the device will queue and play the music all at the same time Thi
122. he tools in this book are basic and meant to capture a rough approximation of who the target user could be Once a company understands and uses this basic concept it can then expand up to more sophisticated tools such as ethnographic or field studies to create a more robust understanding of who the target user is Scenarios are a simple tool to walk through the product use with a Persona By doing this even on a simple level you can discover many problems that weren t previous considered These Insights focus a product team on the user and their tasks They create a real user target that can be helpful in team discussions They create design artifacts that can be shared and understood by the team These artifacts help clarify the product goals and encourage individuals to make informed decisions In general these Insights give you a solid foundation to stand on so you can make some hard Simplicity inducing decisions FEATURE BLINDNESS Feature blindness comes from confusing the need for a feature with the use of it Too often companies are terrorized by the feature list because it represents what must go into the product While marketing realities are harsh the design can t only be motivated by this list because it creates jumbled and confusing designs I use three Insights to cure this blindness unFeatures The Priority Trick and Make the Easy Easy and the Hard Hard UnFeatures is simply an extension of Scenarios making sure the
123. hem fairly quickly and then get a chance to explain your approach and the key concerns in a compact form Technique 3 User Testing User testing is a deep topic that has been written about extensively There are recommended books in the appendix at the back of the book Many companies already know about and do user testing My comments here aren t about the technique as much as the use of it as a tool for team communications User testing is at its core a means of criticism As such it is useful in Failing Fast You use it when you think you have a solution and you want to validate it You discover such things as whether a design works what surprising problems the design has and if the design is capable of enabling users to accomplish the high priority tasks well What most people don t appreciate is that you can user test the paper sketches I discussed previously These are called paper prototypes because you only need a few pieces of paper to show the various states of the design The user speaks out loud saying I ll click this button now and you pull out the correct sketch from your pile and place this in front of him This isn t a classical usability test but it can still determine some clear problems or misconceptions I ve gone from problem to design to test to report in a single day This sounds fast but a growing Guerilla Usability Testing movement is forming originally proposed by Jacob Nielson This move
124. hift STAGE 3 BOWING TO REALITY Several large cost advantages exist with this simplified design The biggest one is that the device no longer needs a custom LCD display to be built a plain off the shelf four digit display will be much cheapter The Simplicity of the software needed to run the device also has a hidden cost savings The controller code for this design will be significantly easier to code as well as test One large dark cloud hangs over the design however the four position slider I don t even know if this type of slider exists and it s the primary reason this device will be potentially expensive or difficult to build For this design to see the light of day someone on the development side of the company must understand the benefit of this design and work hard to find the parts to make this work This is a classic example of Embrace the Impossible Here we have a good and simple design but can we get it to market This is where the real innovation will take place I want to think this part can be found and all the changes suggested here could be put into the de vice without it costing much more than the original But it would take quite a bit of work with the development people to make this possible To make this Design Break more interesting however let s assume nothing goes right and the development hurdles are valid How does the team Embrace the Impossible and keep the essence of the design even though not
125. hing seems to be going our way Let s go through some of the more aggressive design elements and assume they aren t possible We ll try to keep the original design concept intact even though we re forced to use a more conservative approach The Watch Stem The watch stem is a beautifully simple way to set the time I d like to keep this if at all possible However a stem will probably cost more that two Up Down push buttons You could replace the stem with these buttons and not lose too much You have that horrible digital experience Design Break Heater Timer E of pushing 17 times and accidentally holding it down so it goes into Autorepeat mode and then overshoots your target time But setting the time isn t a frequent task so we could survive this The All Day Button The All Day button isn t aggressive it s the On Off light that can cause trouble The lighted All Day button could be replaced with a plain unlighted button with an LED next to it but that probably won t save much One of the obnoxious costs in a product like this is mounting something into the case One trick we could try is to mount the LED on the motherboard near the push button and build the case out of translucent material Turning on the All Day button could turn on the internal LED making it glow through the plastic OK this is a little wacky but once you know what you want you can have these types of brainstorms to keep the concept intact A p
126. hnology adoption 24 27 M Macintosh computers see Apple computers magic 121 marketing additional features added to microwave ovens because of 62 target users for 41 42 messaging application for mobile telephones 13 14 28 29 microwave ovens 57 60 AutoCook buttons on 68 69 costs of controls on 71 design of controls for 72 features on 61 62 flexibility in use of 83 84 functionality of controls for 69 71 persona and scenarios used on problem of 62 64 power level controls on 66 68 timers on 60 61 64 66 mobile telephones bad design in messaging application for 13 14 Bluetooth for 18 20 32 33 122 23 e mail on 116 119 21 GPRS 35 39 locking keypads on 31 32 Nokia s designs for 14 17 text messaging on 28 29 Moore Geoffrey A 23 26 33 57 MP3 players 91 95 111 12 costs of 111 design of 102 3 personas for 95 96 playing music on 103 6 recording music on 106 9 scenarios for 97 102 settings for 110 11 N navigational models 78 79 Newton handheld computer 117 118 Nielson Jacob 130 Nokia firm 14 17 Norman Donald A 2 O Orwell George 27 P Palm PDAs 117 paper prototypes 130 parsing shock 13 personal computers PCs moving e mail to mobile telephones from 119 21 using MP3 players with 99 102 103 110 11 personal digital assistants PDAs display fonts on 85 86 Newton 117 118 personas of target users 43 50 162 63 in heater
127. hoices spending much of their energy trying to understand this vast array of options so they can formulate a problem solving strategy They don t know where to start In effect consumers don t know what to ignore 1 1 3 Edward Tufte wrote about information design and he had a simple graphic rule 1 1 3 The idea is that when you draw a single line you have only that line Drawing a second parallel line however adds two new items to the graphic the second line and the white space in between A strong correlation exists to this rule in product design Having two features on display is more than twice as complex as having only one feature In addition to the buttons a third task is created the choice of knowing which of these two buttons to pick Simplicity comes from being ruthless in what you initially show the users so you can reduce their parsing shock when trying to accomplish the core tasks This reduction usually isn t difficult Having the perspec tive to make this decision and the courage to see it through however is the real challenge This book offers tools to make this easier EXAMPLE 1 PRODUCT DESIGN AS ADVERTISING I was working ona messaging application for a mobile phone a few years ago and saw how complexity can creep into a product The device had a small keyboard and a large screen with no touch screen input For most screen interaction the device relied on four hardware buttons down the right side of
128. hrough a few too many places to get this done This isn t all that hard to accomplish though Other hardware issues exist about the volume control and the FM transmitter The volume control is fairly straightforward and easy to get into the product The FM transmitter is clearly one issue that requires more thought and exploration Clear reasons exist about why this idea is potentially impractical battery life being the most obvious one If some creative brainstorming were done by the product team however this certainly appears to be a breakthrough concept that should be explored further it implies the device is capable of playing in all the places you d like to play music on wireless headsets in the car at home and at someone else s house Core Tasks The previous hardware issues are all vital to discuss and consider for a wider product offering For the sake of keeping this Design Break focused though the remaining discussion focuses on the device screen and buttons These too can be vastly simplified and can make the product appear much more approachable As to the core tasks we d like this design to focus on a safe bet seems that playing CDs is the core Play to worry about This is exactly what we do today with most music stereo systems so is an obvious analogue Design Break MP3 Player KIK After that I d layer in playing individual tracks followed by select ing playlists and finally recording new
129. hysically locking push button doesn t work because at the end of the day it has to pop out again About the only trick I can come up with is to reuse the On LED button next to the clock When the user pushes the All Day button the LED starts to blink I d be grumpy about this change because it abstracts the LED between two different functions so it s possible the user won t get it The blinking is fairly obvious and in their face though so a good cause effect is going on here This is a second best solution but one that could work I d like to user test this idea to be sure The Door The nice part of the door at the bottom is it clearly shows what is primary and what is secondary to the device The new design is so much simpler even the door could go Id rather not lose it though because it clearly separates the two worlds but we could make it work Possible changes to the design would be to make the bottom two switches look diminutive to keep the primary secondary effect working Putting these switches on the side of the case might also be possible 6 The Simplicity Shift The Timing Slider This is the tough one What are our choices The key choice is to keep the interaction direct You could break the slider into four dials one pair for setting the Start Stop time of the morning timer and the other pair for the evening timer You ll get a clunky 2x2 grid but at least you can still view change the settings directly
130. ical and managerial gauntlet that can pick i The Simplicity Shift away at the design until what makes it out the door is a pale shadow of the original design The birthing pains of product delivery always seem to fade and I relearn this truth again and again The last 10 percent always seems to take 90 percent of my energy because the soul of a design will wither and die if it isn t ruthlessly protected and guided through the development cycle Yin Yang Design The central theme in curing implementation blindness is understanding natural tensions occur in any product team Marketing design develop ment and project management to only name the big four have different ways of valuing and solving problems As a product begins nearing com pletion pressures mount to get it out quickly to reach date time and cost targets That the original design never makes it through to the end unscathed is nearly always the case At this stage well intentioned but naive decisions can be made that will make the product sink or swim Trying to keep everything in the product can create delays that will kill the product launch Jettisoning too many features will kill the product s viability How can anyone navigate this mine field The solution is fairly obvious but rarely occurs have the teams work together I assume by this point this statement shouldn t surprise you You need all the skills and approaches to work together You need to use both
131. icated place and valid reasons exist for these types of requirements These top down feature pressures tend to conflict with the bottom up dis coveries that made the Persona and Scenario work however Persona ia The Simplicity Shift and Scenario work focuses the product concept to meet the basic needs of the target user Feature lists on the other hand complicate the design by turning the product into a smorgasbord of options The poor user stares at a busy display stuffed with icons menus and buttons and doesn t know where to start In effect the user doesn t know what to ignore Becoming proficient with these types of products is a compli cated learning curve of understanding what to filter out to do the small subset of functionality necessary To achieve Simplicity you have to tame the feature list and not let it push you around I will relent to a certain amount of outside pressure that brings in required features All professionals must be able to work with these situations but this must be done in a disciplined manner so you control the feature list not the other way around A tiny subset of the feature list is usually used with any frequency the classic 80 20 split applies here as well where 80 percent of the users will use only 20 percent of the product In many cases this is closer to a 90 10 split You might think my solution to this tension is to remove most features from a product While this would help
132. ime What makes innovation work is making it fearless and fast By giving the team some time to work through new ideas you have a chance to discover something that will not only be innovative but also could save you some significant development time The first insight See the Water is the Zen insight trying to break out of the assumptions that pin you down The next insight Embrace the Impossible acknowledges the seeming impossibility of the designs created by proper user centered design However it is by embracing impossible problems that you foster innovation The last insight Fail ing Fast is about the hard nosed persistent aspect of creation Just do something do anything and watch it fail You ll usually learn quite a bit in the process Innovation doesn t flow fully formed through your fingers on to the paper It only comes in fits and starts and sometimes you have to work your way through dozens of designs to find your way to the one that pulls it all together Design Break Heater Timer Increasingly people seem to misinterpret complexity as Sophistication which is baffling the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user Niklaus Wirth PROBLEM This Design Break will rewrite a commercially available heater timer Early feedback on the book indicated this
133. implicity isn t asked for repeatedly in product meetings A product manager who doesn t want a simpler more user friendly product is hard to find The problem lies with a poor un derstanding of what these words mean and more importantly the real commitment and hard work they will take to achieve it Unfortunately when some managers ask for a simple user interface what they re asking is give me every feature possible and fix the interface up as best you can so it doesn t look completely ridiculous FLEXIBILITY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL The majority of the time complexity can be traced to a single design approach offering too much flexibility Notice I didn t say flexibility itself is evil products do need to bend and mold to the user My point is too much flexibility is the root cause of most design problems High tech products with embedded microprocessors are capable of adding large amounts of functionality to a product fairly inexpensively Most product managers believe it s a waste not to offer this to the user The problem with this large offering is it tends to bury the product in options which require significant numbers of decisions from the user just to do something fairly simple What usually happens to most consumers when faced with a button studded remote control or a long list of icons is a type of paralysis I call So What Is Simplicity Ej parsing shock Consumers are stunned by the number of c
134. in a basic manner immediately This not only drives comfort and confidence in the phone for novices but also provides a quick and efficient path for advanced users Once you grow beyond this basic path the Menu area exists for those who want to explore and use all the cool advanced features Simplicity is a win win scenario SIMPLICITY TAKES COURAGE Appreciating the guts it took for Nokia to bring this new design to market is difficult The company already had an existing design in the 6100 series which was generally perceived as working well and a significant improvement to the original eight button design But Nokia understood the consumer benefit of Simplicity and that reduc ing the button count would affect the perceived complexity of the So What Is Simplicity Ea device This doesn t all come free however Some tasks with the four button design are harder to do than with the original six button de sign Editing a contact for example has a few more steps than in the original Nokia clearly decided to make a few secondary functions harder which seems counterproductive But editing a contact wasn t the core use for the product it was answering and dialing Doing this with four buttons instead of six was taking advantage of the 1 1 3 principle in reverse Doing the same thing with 50 percent fewer buttons feels significantly more obvious and easier The new design was clearly a win and made huge inroads for Nokia into the
135. ing work don t fit within the previous obvious ways of doing things At first blush the design appears to be far too ambitious This is also a fallacy because while designs might have grand plans a technical path nearly always exists that can achieve the essence of the design goal without too much pain The third and final perceived cost comes from the apparent expense of using UCD in a product This often comes from bad The Simplicity Shift initial positioning UCD hasn t been considered a first class citizen UCD is usually added near the end of a project when it s too late to change most things and design at this stage of a project usually finds more problems than it can fix When executed in this way design ap pears to cause delays and incur cost Design is seen as expensive because it s set up to fail It s done too late to have a positive impact on the product These perceived costs keep many companies from considering de signs that could lead to innovative products and even cause some teams to actively avoid using interaction designers To be fair many innova tive designs require some additional work and might not be practical or make business sense To achieve simple design you must be able to discuss the issues deeply and make informed business tradeoffs Com panies do this all the time of course balancing difficult issues such as time to market quality and cost These traditional issues are critical to the
136. ir existing approach Many consumer products have scroll bars when they don t have a mouse or even a stylus Digital watches have doomed us to blinking modes and multiplexed mode buttons for years to come If you re designing a small consumer product and use any of these products as a template you have a clear case of not Seeing the Water You ve already seen two examples of this In the MP3 redesign I questioned the scroll bars and had them removed In the microwave the digital timer was reused for the power setting and I moved the timer out into separate buttons High end devices tend to inherit from the i The Simplicity Shift desktop metaphor and low end consumer electronics tend to inherent from the digital watch What makes the digital watch metaphor so hard to ignore is its cost effectiveness By having modes and reusing the display to do several different tasks you can reduce the button count considerably This does have the advantage of saving some money Of course saving production costs is a good thing but don t let it control the design too much Example E mail on a Phone I was working on a new design for putting e mail into a mobile phone Quite of bit of legacy thinking comes from how e mail applications are done on desktop computers The initial design had the typical folders you find on most desktop systems Inbox Outbox Drafts and Sent This was an obvious first place to start but we began questioning why we h
137. ired keys inserted turned held in place if not started but quick release if the car did start Recall that older cars required a choke to be used in cold weather making the task even more complicated If used incorrectly the car could flood and be unable to start for some time An Infrastructure layer example would be the internal technical aspects of the car which dictated much of the starting sequence For older cars there was no option to remove the choke at that time it had to be there in some form How it manifested itself to the car owner whether as a button or a lever was a Presentation layer detail With more sophisticated engines and microprocessors it has been possible finally to remove the choke and even the key turning sequence Without these innovations both the Presentation and Task layers were severely restricted How This Improves Our Discussion Many companies only think of the user interface as the Presentation layer They think of it as a pretty thing that should be added later in the product after the heavy engineering is complete Imagine the problems a designer would have working on a car dashboard if he were told that to use the radio you have to turn off the heater first Not only that but if you don t turn off the heater first you could damage the radio This sounds a bit absurd when discussing cars but it hap pens all the time with computers Take turning off your computer for a The Simplicity Shift
138. is to think outside the box Most companies only think in terms of big features such as adding Bluetooth to the PDA or GPRS to the phone But when you re designing a consumer product you re not only designing features you re also designing a product that fits into someone s life You have to start thinking through the consumer s eyes Big features are important in planning a product but often many little features end up causing several problems later on in the product cycle Because most of the focus is on the big features these little problems usually aren t discovered until late in the product cycle At this point however the product is too far along and these problems get turned into feature requests for the next release A common example would be getting the product configured and set up when the user first gets the product out of the box such as the Bluetooth headset and the mobile phone In focusing on the big feature Bluetooth this configuration problem is pushed off until it s far too late in the product cycle to resolve it This has happened often enough that I call these things wnFeatures which are common things that go wrong with the product and which initially are never put on to a feature list These problems are handled usually badly at the end of a product when the first working prototypes start making these issues glaring and no longer capable of being ignored What s frustrating is if you take an ag
139. isa has a fairly stable set of classic and modern music she listens to regularly but she tends to listen at home She also makes recordings of her practice sessions on cassette tape but finds the whole thing a bit cumbersome and doesn t like the hassle of all those tapes At home Lisa Ea The Simplicity Shift has a nice stereo because when she listens to her music she appreciates high fidelity reproduction Scenario 1 First Get the Product Both Personas are going to need to get this product out of a box and set it up the first time A magical solution would be to have all their music appear on the device Clearly this is a bit of a stretch but what could we do to get the songs transferred Steve seems a little better placed because he s clearly a desktop PC user so he might already have a large collection of digital music files This isn t clear with Lisa A big consideration is going to be getting her CD on to the device easily If this takes hours she probably won t bother This points to a key strategic decision that needs to be made does this product ignore novice computer users or does it make bridging over to this device possible for them If bridging is the goal a strong PC application will need to look up the track names encode and then download the songs to the unit Scenario 2 Going for a Walk Assuming the unit has most of the base songs on the device let s take it for a walk It seems likely this will requi
140. it s liberating to know you can make a big difference in a product design even when you re using basic building blocks ANALYSIS Finding the Task Problems As previously noted this design clearly has some layout problems but this is only looking at the Presentation layer Problems also exist at the Task layer as well Let s walk through a basic task such as thawing a bagel in the morning Analog Microwave E Turn the timer to 30 seconds E Turn the power to low E Put in the food E Close the door il Press Start Digital Timer Microwave E Tap the 10 second button three times to get 30 seconds E Tap the Power Level button four times to cycle down from 100 percent power to 70 percent power to 50 percent power to 30 percent power m Put in the food m Close the door Press Start Design Break Microwave Oven Gj This is a big change Setting the time is clearly more tedious with the digital buttons but this isn t an outrageous problem This is an interaction style that s unfortunately becoming more accepted today The serious problem is with the power setting By having only a single button the users must understand that to set the power level they must press it repeatedly cycling through various power values If they go too far they must keep pressing the button cycling all the way around This is not only difficult to use but more important it s hard to discover In addition to the p
141. ities and an inability to think clearly about what the product needs to do The insights in this chapter are a step in correcting these problems Design Break MP3 Player Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them Adlai Stevenson his Design Break is definitely more substantial than the previous two The point here is to use the previous insights to give you an idea of how they can be used Much like the microwave oven I ll take an existing product and create a new design that improves it while not significantly increasing the cost of the device I ll go a little further though and discuss more innovative ideas that come from the Scenario work PROBLEM This is a redesign of a popular MP3 player that hit the market in 2001 The most distinguishing feature of this MP3 player was the use of a small hard disk instead of RAM for music storage so you could contain over 100 CDs worth of music on the device This was a huge leap forward from other players which had difficulty holding even two hours of music The leap didn t stop there however This MP3 player had the ca pability to record with an external microphone It also enabled you to create playlists and even use special digital processing to change the effects of the playback simulating concert hall or jazz club acoustics EIBRAND NEW Dar ELTIC Roo FIGURE 8 1 Original MP3 design The MP3 player as shown in Figure 8 1 was also rather
142. layer design so the user must complete a complex sequence of steps Historically if the user made a misstep the only design solution considered was to put up a clear and explanatory error dialog box so the user knows what to do This Presentation layer fix to a Task layer problem is clearly limited Fixing a problem in the Task layer is much harder if all you can do is change the Presentation layer Sometimes this is your only choice but usually it s a poor one Whenever this situation occurred at Apple we called it putting lipstick on a pig The HI team was often brought in at the last minute to fix a problem with no ability to change anything technical in the product Everything had to be done with Presentation layer changes Naming these three layers provide a powerful tool It enable you to discuss problems that exist within a specific layer and analyze solutions You Mean Something Is Wrong Ej within that layer as the first solution to discuss Breaking down the user interface into these three layers creates a richer vocabulary to discuss and more important to manage the creation of good design Example Just a Simple Change to the Menus Apple had hierarchical menus like most other operating systems but ours were limited to five levels deep which seemed reasonable at the time A software vender came in and asked a colleague of mine to help with his port of a Unix application to the Mac The problem was his product need
143. like too much trouble But it s many times easier than discovering these problems late in the product cycle INSIGHT 10 THE SWAT TEAM What It Is While the Design Manifesto is about getting a project started properly a SWAT Team is about finishing it properly As a project nears completion a hailstorm of integration problems bug reports and time to market concerns occur If you don t keep the teamwork going naive decisions are made that can severely compromise the product Recruit a SWAT Team The concept is fairly simple Get a small cross department team much like the one that created the Design Manifesto and have the team review the active issues on the product This team should include at least management marketing development and interaction design This is the internal team that reviews the current issues facing the project What helps most is that each person is respected by the rest of their team If you get that person to sign off on an issue the others will most likely agree The team needn t be large I would recommend three to five people who have to meet regularly and work together By having this cross department core team you create a pool of expertise with the ability to make decisions quickly and that will stick When a decision is made everyone has a say and all issues must be discussed This avoids oops mistakes down the line The team meets as often as it takes Normally as development starts
144. line the less patience is exhibited toward high tech products These laggards tend to wait on the sidelines not purchasing a new product until the perceived cost of using the product goes down This is the chasm Moore is concerned about As the high tech industry tends to create products for the early adopters how is it possible to present and sell these products further down this consumer spectrum Moore s book is really about marketing It optimistically assumes the products are relevant and well designed but that the change in behavior required for the adoption of these new products is a significant marketing hurdle Moore s model of the con sumer spectrum and how each group approaches a product purchase decision is a useful one The Surprise Package Moore s Crossing the Chasm model is useful in understanding consumer frustration with many electronic products today As an increasing num ber of high tech consumer products come on to the market more sur prise packages are being delivered to unsuspecting customers A surprise package is a term I use to describe an established or fairly stable prod uct concept that s improved in some high tech way and now requires unexpected and significant changes in a user s behavior A good exam ple of this would be a cordless phone The phone concept is decades old and extremely well established Ingrained expectations of how the product should behave exist as well as a lifetime of learned be
145. lore font and layout issues better Scribbled buttons that easily fit on my drawing become much too wide for the screen The 12 lines of text turn out to be only 6 lines in reality Both paper sketches and computer drawings are simple but effective tools to use when communicating between groups When working on a design I show my sketch to the technical lead and ask for his input He can see where I m coming from and we can discuss high level issues Innovation Blindness quickly This type of simple approach is effective at setting up Embrace the Impossible type of meetings By sharing ideas early and in rough sketch form you can build a common understanding that gets you both working and thinking the same way Sketching is also a great tool because it s so egalitarian Everyone can draw boxes and write words In fact sketching is a useful tool for designers and programmers to use so they can find a common means of communicating Often when I discuss issues with a programmer I hand over the pencil and ask him to draw out what he means This usually surprises him but by asking for a drawing we create a joint concept between us one that doesn t represent his view or mine but a joint view between us This can make a great difference in lowering barriers Technique 2 Interactive Demos Interactive demos are only a fancy version of sketches They re one more step in increasing the fidelity At Symbian I had three full
146. low end phone space Making this type of easy hard tradeoff is at the core of capturing Simplicity It s a tradeoff that s difficult for many to make because making a task slightly harder to access is completely contrary to our natural make everything easy instincts Simply reducing buttons isn t the goal however Many bad products out there such as digital watches have few buttons and are of course excruciating to use The goal is to meet the core user s needs through a simple design which is easy to use If this can be done with fewer buttons the perceived Simplicity of the device will be greatly enhanced Shipping a simple design is much harder than it looks Always pushing and trying to simplify the product takes courage saying this is just good enough is easy Nokia didn t stop with the six button design which was good The company continued to push and came out with a four button design shortly thereafter Making some tasks slightly harder to keep the core tasks streamlined also takes courage This book calls out tools that will help you make these types of decisions although this isn t a mathematical process You can do all the exercises and get a much stronger idea of which way to go but sometimes you must make a judgment call This is where courage comes into play You have to see and appreciate examples of Simplicity to appreciate this tradeoff Tools can help a great deal but you have to use your gut at some poi
147. ly close to the perfect design and then having to back off might be frustrating but it s important to remain humble as a designer and realize the world won t always give your ideas the wheels they need Implementation Blindness The spirit was willin but the body was weak Gospel Spiritual INTRODUCTION The Last Blindness Curing user and feature blindness is about doing your homework to understand who your target is and what are the core things your target needs to do You start creating designs that meet this core need and only then layer on the more advanced functions Curing innovation blindness is about having the courage and teamwork to find a means to implement these new simpler designs Implementation blindness the last blindness is about making sure these designs make it out the door Many companies don t even try to find Simplicity and this is frustrating to me What I find heart breaking is companies that do try but seem to lose it along the way Curing implementation blindness is about keeping your vision on track Most designers have a slightly naive belief that all the hard work in creating a product is only in getting the initial design completed I too fall into this trap because the complete design is such a major milestone it s understandable you should want to rest for a while once it s finished Unfortunately though the real work is about to begin This design has to run a technical polit
148. ment has made a strong point that less is more Testing a design with only four to six users can often find the majority ofa design s problems This doesn t mean no place exists for formal usability tests but when you re in early product concept development these quick tests using small groups of participants and rough paper based prototypes are fast and cost effective This type of usability testing is Innovation Blindness effective at Failing Fast because you can discover issues with real users early in the product concept This is the hidden power of user testing which is effective on simple versions of your product not the nearly final beta code By then the product is too far gone to make many changes Fixing a sketch isn t hard at all Once a company begins to understand the power of user testing it starts to enhance the shared understanding I keep mentioning By asking about and tracking user testing reports management becomes aware of where the design is and what issues are cropping up This is a fairly simple means to get others involved in the design problem Things That Go Wrong If user testing isn t properly motivated however it can go wrong I ve seen political situations where two competing designs are on the table and someone suggested both designs be user tested to determine which one is better User testing isn t a weapon Too often user testing is used as a means of choosing between Option A or B Thi
149. ment of a stable product concept If we had warped my new tent back in time 20 years to my earlier self my younger counterpart would have been able to pitch and use both tents The concept hadn t changed significantly A better tent for the most part is a universal concept Crossing the Chasm The same stable nature doesn t hold with high tech consumer products Moore proposes a technology adoption life cycle which describes how new disruptive technologies are accepted by the consumer public He divides consumers into five user groups At the front end of the scale are innovators and early adopters who quickly embrace technology and its costs Bringing up the rear are laggards who are more concerned with convenience cost reliability and ease of use Good examples of early adopters are those brave souls who carried Apple Is with VisiCalc through the back doors of their companies They weren t highly trained engineers but they were actually a surprisingly broad range of people You Mean Something Is Wrong who had the foresight to see the value of this new tool Most importantly they persevered when it was a challenging tool to use The high tech in dustry exploded by taking these early adopters on board as their primary customers Innovators and early adopters are a considerably small portion of the consumer population The remainder of the consumer spectrum s level of patience tails offs quickly The further down the
150. mer product and how it can be achieved In my experience most companies today have four stages of blindness that prevent them from seeing what they should be doing user blindness feature blindness innovation blindness and implementation blindness These types of blindness are the root misconceptions and bad practices that set up product teams to fail before they even start User blindness comes from thinking you know who the user is Some people implicitly assume the user is someone just like themselves others often marketing managers assume it s a conglomeration of all users a multiuser who requires everything under the sun Both ap proaches prevent you from seeing the true user and understanding what that user needs from your product Why Are We Here l Feature blindness comes from being awash in sophisticated features Usually so many must be crammed into the product the design becomes muddled and hard to understand While the sheer number of features is a large part of the problem the real cause of the trouble is the implied need to show them all at once By creating a cornucopia of features the product ends up overwhelming the users so they don t know where to start with the product Innovation blindness comes in two forms The first is the team not real izing they re surrounded by design defaults that restrict their thinking and prevent consideration of new ideas Once these new ideas make it on the table however
151. ms reasonable without any real attempt to uncover more information about actual target users What often happens in companies that don t do active user research is the companies base their concept of who the user is on one of two equally invalid stereotypes The first is a user who reflects the company culture a person just like them It shouldn t be surprising to know this person is competent and in need of many advanced features in the product The second stereotype is motivated by marketing concerns So many potential customers exist that what ends up being the target is a conglomeration of all possible users This creates an impossibly demanding multiuser who requires every possible feature from the product Both stereotypes prevent you from seeing the actual user and what he will need from your product User blindness comes from thinking The Simplicity Shift you know who the user is You re blinded because you already have a stereotype in mind so you don t bother to look any further Where user blindness costs the most is when the concept of the user isn t clear or shared across the product team Marketing tends to target as many users as possible each feature is as important as the next Development tends to target users who are just like themselves applying common sense ideas that usually aren t By designing for everyone you get a confused product By designing for the obvious user you create a high end product
152. n How easy is it to clean Is the oven large enough Do the foods Fred cooks turn out well in the microwave Even with this basic Persona Scenario combination the questions come tumbling out In a professional situation these questions would be discussed with the product team including marketing research if it exists Many of these questions would already have well known answers To make this Design Break a reasonable length I m going to assume the previous Persona Scenario is acceptable even though it would normally have more detail and discussion There would also be another Persona to capture a different type of user But with this as a given we ll now walk through the basic and advanced Scenarios as a test of this microwave design Approach So let s roll up our sleeves and begin The first step is getting our tasks straight The first Scenario heating a microwave pizza for dinner seems straightforward This looks like it only involves setting the time and starting the oven We could also discuss how to improve the a The Simplicity Shift microwave s pizza cooking capability by having a rotating plate a better cooking surface and so on but these are outside the scope of this Design Break We re going to focus only on the panel The second Scenario thawing a bagel for breakfast is a little trickier At the implementation level we re only adding a power level setting but looking through Fred s eyes can help
153. n is often sitting there waiting for someone to find the fairly straightforward answer The teams simply need to realize each group is talking a slightly different way and they need to work through a compromise that meets both needs This example shows how design is free because we were able to get a much simpler design without it costing much at all How to Do It The best way to make this work is to ensure the teams involved work together The idea is to relax the assumptions of each side slowly trying to find a way to implement a solution that gets as close to the goal as possible This is where the Scenarios help By having the teams walk through the Scenarios together they re focused on the task not the technology When a technology problem occurs you can focus on the task and ask for other solutions some of which are capable of getting close to the ideal solution In the previous example the programmers had it in their heads that I was asking fora deep architecture change something that clearly wasn t going to happen They couldn t separate my design from the threat that I was going to cost them months of work Once they understood I didn t care how it happened we were able to come up with the little trick that was easy and offered 100 percent of the original design The best trick I ve learned to make this easier is to use the word magic as in the magic folder This is a bit playful but it s effective
154. n show ing each Scenario and what questions came up as we were looking at them For example if you were downloading a long e mail and went into a tunnel would the users have to deal with an error what type P1 GFM FEO P2 GFM GJN QC FGC GFM This CB487 04 Jenson July 23 2002 20 1 Char Count 0 Design Break The GPRS Study of error would this be and how would they then recover when they came out of the tunnel We sent this slide show off to the GPRS experts Discovery 1 THEY DIDN T KNOW The first and most surprising result was the technical architects couldn t answer our basic questions We were all surprised that such simple issues had little common agreement Our slide show prompted questions that hadn t even been asked yet We got different answers from different teams When we pointed this out to them there was clear confusion There was a flurry of e mails clarifying our questions and the proposed solutions Then we had a teleconference where everyone came together to discuss all these issues at the same time What didn t help was our Scenarios were fairly nontechnical We spoke the nomenclature of the user not that of the GPRS specification This sometimes created misunderstandings for the technical team be cause our terms were too soft and vague for them We solved this problem by walking through the Scenario and clarifying any vague statements until the loose ends were resolved Eventually we figured out what
155. nas but they also create findings that help focus your product concept and product positioning Every time I complete one of these studies I feel it has returned rich dividends and has always been worth it These studies are most valuable when you re creating a completely new type of product with a fairly complex marketing concept where you need a solid understanding of the consumers to make sure you re delivering the right solution Another advantage to these studies is they uncover big deep issues and inform you of concerns that you had no idea existed previously There s no substitute for this type of research and I always recommend these types of studies when you need this level of understanding How to Get Them The Cheap Way You don t always need this level of understanding though Many com panies have an existing product line and they re trying to improve a The Simplicity Shift device that is being cost reduced These are fairly focused tasks within well defined domains In these situations the design doesn t need deep field insights as much as it needs product clarification In addition field studies can be expensive While this money usually is repaid many times over small companies simply don t have the money to consider this type of work for every project At times a smaller tool can deliver nearly the same understanding without the up front costs When you re in a more focused situation you can create Per
156. nce when I was working on a mail synchronization client for a handheld device we had such a problem The primary feature was to get all the e mail off the PC and a The Simplicity Shift into the phone The design called for the e mail received on the phone and those that came from the PC to be merged into a single Inbox The programming team told us this was impossible The problem was perception The existing synchronization archi tecture was able to copy the PC e mails over to the phone fine but they were marked internally as sync items not e mail items each stored into its own folder To combine them into a single folder would cause all sorts of challenging programming problems which would be difficult to fix The original solution was to abandon the single Inbox and have a two folder approach an Inbox with e mail items and a Synced folder with PC items The developers had made too narrow an assumption thinking our design idea of a single unified folder had to be reflected in the architec ture Backing away from a technology framed discussion we asked how hard it would be to create a magic folder that existed only in the Presen tation layer which took the existing Inbox and Synced folders sorted them together and displayed them as one The architecture wouldn t need to change at all we argued The application would simply present a convenient fiction to the user The developers nodded saying Oh that
157. nd then come up with two and only two I must repeat that these two Personas won t represent the majority of your market What you want to do is to find a reasonable subset that will clarify common use patterns of the product The majority of this exercise is having the product team discussing the Personas This gets the power user out of the blood of many in the team Just having this discussion does wonders to help people realize the range of potential users This encourages sensitivity in the entire team hence my insistence that much of the team be involved The Personas will have additional use in Insight 2 Scenarios Shared Culture I know working through a product concept for a retired woodworker named Earl sounds odd but in understanding that Earl does exist you can start using your product through his eyes What you end up doing User Blindness ef is creating a shared understanding by your product team of what Earl represents Personas are most powerful when they re placed up on the wall with a big picture of Earl at the top This poster becomes a token an embodiment of an approach to the product Hundreds of times decisions must be made by individual members of the team What would Earl do or What does Earl need here are the types of questions you hear when teams have taken Personas on board What this all boils down to is creating a shared culture Earl repre sents a key customer Earl s Persona is detailed e
158. no one has done this you could imagine a text messaging application and an e mail application with a nearly identical Presen tation layer both showing lists of incoming messages using the same fonts and icons Yet no one would ever consider them the same program as they would behave in a completely different manner The Infrastructure Layer The Infrastructure layer concerns itself with the underpinnings of the product What are the enabling factors that allow the product to offer a compelling solution Just as important are the disabling factors that prevent other solutions from consideration In the e mail versus text messaging example the latter s Task layer was much simpler if more limited This was due in part to the auto configuration capability that comes from the GSM phone specification You Mean Something Is Wrong Eaj This capability is part of the Infrastructure layer because it simply isn t possible for e mail systems to provide such as service yet No amount of user interface work will make e mail systems autoconfigure A Car Analogy An analogy to an automobile might help clarify these layers A Presen tation layer example would be the dashboard which displays the dials and gauges that not only make the car look nice but also give infor mation to make decisions A Task layer example would encompass the steps necessary to start the car The latest cars literally start at the push of a button but previous models requ
159. nough that people feel he exists and makes the decisions of the team have real consequences This in turn makes the team sensitive assessing the impact of any particular decision This is one reason making up a Persona is almost as good as using a professional focus group As long as this Persona is precise realistic and shared by the team it will create a culture of how decisions should be made for this product Objection Personas Are too Specific At first people resist using Personas because they appear so focused and not representative of the broader consumer base The concern is that designing for only this one person is much too constraining If Emma for example is a horse trainer are you really going to add a feature to the product that will work only for horse lovers Clearly not but then why the argument goes do we care if Emma is a horse trainer The point here is to create a detailed person who appears real By making Emmaa horse trainer you imagine a product that could be used while riding a horse This might mean the product must be sensitive to being used on the move This has value to a hiker or a delivery boy as well but you might never have considered mobile use unless you d imaged Emma in the first place Personas start you down a path of more sensitive thinking Getting past this minority problem is difficult Everyone would feel so much better if a majority Persona could be created but that rarely
160. nt The more you see and appreciate those good examples around you such as the Nokia keypad example the better able you ll be to make that jump Le The Simplicity Shift EXAMPLE 3 BLUETOOTH LOGIN In another project there was a big push to use Bluetooth in our next generation of mobile phones B wetooth is a radio technology that enables you to share audio and data traffic over a short distance Bluetooth is another one of those cool new technologies that everyone was getting excited about Instead of messy slow wires you can now have your phone in your briefcase while you use a tiny wireless headset Very cool indeed The high level benefits of a technology are easy to get excited about but getting it to work without numerous complex steps is yet another challenge Let s walk through what the users had to do to use something as simple as a headset with their new phones 1 Take your new phone and new headset out of the box and turn them on Navigate to and open the Bluetooth control panel on the phone Search for Headsets ee Et S Select your headset only one will be in the display Choose Pair Type in your headset pass code Close the Bluetooth control panel Open the Profiles control panel po i o Switch to Bluetooth headset 10 Close the Profiles control panel Quite a gauntlet of tasks to get through I find this striking because Bluetooth is a technology meant to be used by millions Imagining th
161. o inform the computer it s time to write file contents out to nonvolatile magnetic storage has long since gone Given that these records are so much smaller the original protection that came from the Save dialog box no longer applies In addition asking users to save 35 times a day starts to get irritating When you choose an option 99 9 percent of the time you have to ask why it is a choice at all Last but not least this no save interaction style was already a well established interaction paradigm Over ten years ago the Newton was one of the first PDAs to adopt this approach and it was quickly adopted by the Palm This wasn t exactly a flighty idea dreamed up on a whim It was a working established model Most of the programmers on the team however couldn t See this Water As a group they tend to love control and they couldn t get past the but what if I make a bunch of changes and make a big mistake type of argument They were so comfortable with the dominant desktop paradigm they couldn t let go Only after we repeatedly displayed the Newton and Palm designs did they finally start to soften The fact that I had to push so hard shows how entrenched this type of mental inertia can be for product teams Things That Go Wrong One of the more significant reasons this inertia tends to exist in design teams is for the simple reason that it isn t clear to the team that they re supposed to be creating an innovative
162. o en sure the value of the device was readily apparent to the user but an enormous cost arose from this decision The device is now much more difficult to use and even more so for advanced users because they get more mail traffic than novices EXAMPLE 2 MOBILE PHONE KEYS One of the clearest examples of a company s continual commitment to Simplicity comes from mobile phones It s widely accepted that Nokia s stunning market share growth from 1996 to 2001 was based in large part on the Simplicity of its interaction design Clearly other factors such as interchangeable face plates and fashionable industrial design also had a strong impact However few people in the indus try would dispute that the Nokia screen design was far better than most Nokia rapidly evolved its phone throughout the 1990s Starting off with the fairly cumbersome 2100 series which had eight main keys So What Is Simplicity De NOKIA 9 309 2100 6100 5100 8 buttons 6 buttons 4 buttons FIGURE 2 1 Nokia s constant push for Simplicity in handset design above the numeric keypad Nokia improved on this significantly with the 6100 series which had only six buttons up down dial hang up left soft key and right soft key The 6100 series was seen as one of the best designs in the industry But with the new 5100 series Nokia went even further and reduced this down to only four buttons up down select and back See Fig 2 1
163. o many knobs which allows the user to set too many options Why settle for only a Low Medium and High choice when you can offer a type in field that enables users to set the field with anything between 1 and 100 Clearly the proper answer depends on the situation but this standard engineering approach is to i The Simplicity Shift offer as much flexibility as possible I would claim they don t understand how the device will be used so they re in doubt about what s important This means they pile on the flexibility just to be safe As an example let s go back to the microwave redesign in the pre vious Design Break The original design had the capability to set five different levels of power This flexibility created complexity as the sin gle Power button now had to cycle through all five power states The first press got you 100 percent power the next 70 percent the next 50 percent and so forth If you went too far you had to press it five more times to cycle around to the correct state This type of cycling button always causes problems because it not only hides a function but it also makes it hard to use and provides little feedback It wasn t at all clear in our Scenario work that the user needed much more than Low and High settings The need to have the power that flexible wasn t justified My redesign of the Power button removed some of the flexibility by only offering two or three levels of power This allows th
164. olve problems for the user instead of simply throwing them up for the user to see An example here would be a desktop computer program that can t find a specific file If it can t be found the common solution is to show a Can t find it error message Slightly better is to offer a Look around button which makes the user paw through the hundreds of folders on the hard disk Why not offer an Automatically Search button that makes the computer do all the work It might take a whopping 30 seconds but it would be much faster than making the user do it Another example comes from mobile phones A common problem is getting a network error when you send a text message For whatever reason the message didn t go through The classic approach to this error is to inform the user The user must then try again to send the message A much more useful approach would be to offer to resend the message automatically in a few minutes This isn t simply about making the user s life a little easier It s about avoiding situations that can cause trouble and affect product acceptance Errors are usually product opportunities waiting to happen Repetitive or Discontinuous Task Flow What does it take to use the product for common usually repetitive tasks It is all too easy to mark a feature as functionally complete but using it can be irritating A classic example here would be deleting an e mail from an inbox In one product I was working on you had to
165. ome If the capability to pause ex isted that might be helpful but if they made a mistake they d still have a mess on their hands Once you re aware of this problem it s easily fixed by making the Stop button a little smarter as shown in Figure 8 6 This gives Lisa a choice when she presses the Stop button Stop and Resume are the classic buttons you would expect in this situation but I ve also added Restart which cleans up the current recording and starts from the beginning This allows Lisa to use this device ina more realistic recording situation without adding much to the design Recordin Recoding Paused Aug 12 Aug 12 Quarte Quartet Initial FIGURE 8 6 Improved pause i The Simplicity Shift Settings We haven t discussed the settings on the original device but this was a sea of many small details that Lisa and Steve would rarely need I won t go through it here but all the possible setting choices should be assessed using the Priority Trick to determine which ones are required for this device The majority of the low priority settings if they re still needed should be set by the PC when it s connected to the device What remains should be very simple It would ideally be a choose from many interface where the user can pick from pre configured settings Figure 8 7 shows the simplified settings For example Equalizer should be a list of a few choices you select and nothing more If you
166. ommunity as the bad boys who mess up products This is rather unfair Programmers don t like horrible design They are realists who want to get a product out the door Their job is to determine how to make something ship and ship soon Unfortunately good design insights get buried behind this pragma tism When a design is reviewed by programmers it isn t uncommon to hear But that would take too long to program This isn t because programmers are lazy Their great strength is that they build and hav ing built they have a whole raft of experiences that prove to them that life is hard brutish and short Designers for their part don t understand why programmers don t relax a bit and try to brainstorm Programmers don t understand why designers don t get the sense of reality the rest of the world shares Assuming your simple design is well motivated by Personas and Scenarios you should never say a design is naive It simply can t be implemented yet In fact when you find a design everyone likes but that s technically impossible you have a sure fire example of innova tion staring you in the face The trick is in determining how to ship a product that still achieves the essence of the design Example Oh That s Easy Impossible designs are often perceived as a difficult technology prob lem which simply can t be done This often turns out as nothing more than a communications problem though O
167. on t have the natural drawing talent that can draw perspective and shading The type of sketching I m talking about is what anyone can do It can be nothing more than boxes lines and scribbled words The key wonder of sketching is it gets you out of rational word mode and starts putting you into two dimensional design mode Problems that block you start looking different when you sketch them You notice how busy something will be or that when you lay it out horizontally the buttons look better on the top Sketching enables you to get down what you think you know and then discover problems or insights through visual inspection Example Web Sketch Figure 9 1 is an example sketch I did when designing a web site It was to have three major sections a calendar a messages area and a contact list I had already done my Scenario Persona and Priority work so I had a good idea of who was going to need what My sketches were simply a fast brain dump and quickly revealed some flawed thinking on my part The first thing I noticed was the varying layout styles My approach to messaging was horizontal with the top pane for a message list and the bottom for each message s content Contacts was a fairly vertical approach and Calendar looked like it could go both ways My work on unFeatures has always shown me that people need a strong sense of place when using any product It s useful to design different views to have consistent layouts As the
168. on as the device is actively accentuating a high end feature it makes the Start button even harder to find Marketing driven design may help a product promote itself but it rarely helps the basic usage of the device Persona Scenarios Before we start designing we have to do our homework Let s begin with a simple Persona Fred Single sales clerk age 25 commutes to work on the bus has friends over frequently Doesn t like to cook and eats prepared foods such as TV dinners microwave popcorn and bagels from the freezer Design Break Microwave Oven Scenarios Basic Heating microwave pizza for dinner Advanced Thawing a bagel for breakfast While this Scenario is extremely simple it will be enough for us to make some headway It might seem a bit odd talking about a guy who takes the bus but I m creating a specific character to work through our choices Imagining Fred in the morning trying to catch the bus isn t hard Fred s in a hurry thinking about his day and he doesn t want his microwave to slow him down Fred is also the kind of guy who seems to do basic stuff You won t see him cooking Veal Cordon Bleu in his microwave He seems like the perfect guy to be using a low end microwave But even this simple beginning starts us thinking through Fred s schedule Further questions come to mind that can help improve the Scenario What other types of food does Fred tend to cook Do they make a mess inside the ove
169. or an entire drive With the case of a single folder this choice made no sense With an entire drive you didn t want to do this because it would take a long time to run through and change all the folders Why even have this option at all Good question The motivation was to clean up a drive s subfolders that had mixed folder settings back into a pristine state a recovery situation for a high end situation gone wrong This feature clearly wasn t needed the vast majority of the time What made this particular check box so bad was that novice users ea The Simplicity Shift exhibited the moth to the flame syndrome interpreting it incorrectly thinking if they didn t check it stuff inside wouldn t get shared so they would check it and sometimes have to wait minutes while useless folder thrashing took place The solution is to layer this in some way Eliminate the check box entirely and have the Save button If the object in question was a single folder no problem set the single folder and you re done If there were subfolders then do a quick test reading if a mixture of preferences existed and then offer a choice at that point with some explanatory text The programmers were worried this type of checking would slow things down running through dozens if not hundreds of folders need lessly This was a good valid concern but of no real consequence The first is that checking this many folders really didn t take but a few sec
170. ork can easily find issues to fix that are clearly beyond the scope of the project The problems that are found that can be addressed however easily make this a valuable exercise INSIGHT 4 THE PRIORITY TRICK What It Is Even though we ve established that the feature list needs to be tamed and prioritized unFeatures usually add more to the main feature list as you discover new previously unknown issues that need addressing This feels like a step backward because the list is now growing The feature list often feels like the enemy because it embodies the unrealistic forces that are cramming too much into the product in the first place and yet here we are adding to this list We re adding things that have a high priority however Our items are well motivated and can be shown to have strong impact on the overall quality of the product The Priority Trick is a simple tool to tame this growing list wrestling it into an order that enables you to discuss and solve the problems in a way that informs the design not complicates it Why It s Important A long feature list isn t inherently bad The problem is in trying to design for all its features at once This pollutes the design by forcing the product to show too many details to the user at once mixing the high volume simple functions along with the low volume complex functions By prioritizing the features based on your Persona Scenario work you ll Feature Blindness have
171. orporate a task flow into the design set the time and start the oven By grouping the time buttons with the Design Break Microwave Oven j Button backgrounds 10 min 1 min 10 sec Gray Start Start Light Green Stop Light Red FIGURE 6 2 Stage 1 design display it more closely ties their use with feedback The button under the display changes the display this is now much more clear Once this is set the task flow then leads you to the Start button which is just below the Time buttons This is a different layout from the original which had the Time buttons on the bottom and the display at the top Tying them together like this makes the design much clearer and sets up a vertical flow to use the machine Grouping Time with Color Coded Start Stop Buttons This isn t clear from the figure but the Start Stop buttons would be color coded green for Start and red for Stop This gives clear redundant cues that you set the time and then press the green Start button to start the microwave These buttons are also unambiguously labeled Notice no double labeling exists as it did in the original design to confuse the issue Notice how incredibly simple it was to reach this design You could even say it s fairly obvious but that s the whole point By picking a Scenario and designing only for that Scenario the design task too is simplified The result is both clear and easy to use t
172. ot I ve had to sit on my hands as the project manager yanked an excellent feature because it would blow the release date I nearly screamed every time but in The Simplicity Shift hindsight I realized it was a mature decision because not shipping on time was the greater of two evils CONCLUSION The purpose of this chapter is not to reinvent a company s design process That isn t practical because no one process can work for everyone The goal is to point out how implementation blindness prevents companies from executing Simplicity The first Insight Design Manifesto is a simple tool to get agreement early at the front of a project to try to uncover and fix the assumptions that usually kill a project The SWAT Team Insight is nothing more than a small variation of a change review board which is more cross functional and tries to make informed decisions to keep the project on track Conclusion Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it WMarian Anderson Wuy We RE HERE Shipping a well designed product is extremely hard This isn t only about overcoming technology and production problems but also about coordinating a creative stubborn motivated opinionated and deter mined group of people to work with not against each other Good design doesn t simply happen by itself It is an active process against the thousands of problems that can derail
173. ower button problem a larger task problem exists when you try to vary the steps slightly If you open the door first the buttons don t work If you try to adjust the power first the buttons don t work If half way through cooking you need to add a little more time the time buttons are dead The previously described steps are the only possible order to follow in starting the unit to cook These types of task problems can make for disastrous consequences For example once you start cooking the only way to make a change is to 1 close the door and 2 press Clear Then you re allowed to start over When you re cooking on low power it s easy to forget that pressing Clear resets the power back up to High If you want to defrost a little more you accidentally end up cooking your food to a crisp Dragging you through the details of this design might sound tedious but this type of problem is unfortunately indicative of many consumer products today Understanding this puts you in a much stronger position to design your own products properly The Presen tation layer is clearly a problem but the Task layer problems have the biggest consequences Feature Pollution I previously noted the apparent buttons on the left side of the panel were nothing more than labels These labels are an attempt to fix a Task layer problem with a Presentation layer fix The feature in question is SuperCook which tries to automate some cooking tasks for the con
174. ower was turned on and to offer it to the user automatically Innovator and early adopter types of users can often cope with prod uct setup problems because they read the manual and spend the time go ing through the entire setup process The more a product tries to capture a mass market however the more it has to make setup as easy as possible Reliability and Error Recovery This sounds so boring but it s one of the most infuriating aspects of using consumer electronics Many times a situation occurs when handling an error is difficult and few options exist to the programmer In these situa tions the user is usually forced to deal with the problem in a completely baffling way Feature Blindness j The example I d use here would be the GPRS study discussed earlier Most new fancy technology is laden with reliability problems so when we did our initial Scenarios we actively looked for this While we didn t find all the possible errors we were able to find some nasty ones This type of information is extremely valuable in planning product strategy A common but misguided belief exists that when an error occurs it must be reported to the user at once This is the high tech equivalent of crying wolf Errors pop up frequently and often the users don t have the information they need or the ability to solve the problem easily Microprocessors have enough computing power that we should expect companies to try a little harder to s
175. ply wasn t practical for the first release so I had to settle for a much reduced version that handled most of what I wanted Things That Go Wrong The biggest reason things sour between designers and programmers is because both sides get locked into their own solution The discussion quickly becomes a version of Why can t you see it my way The best solution here is to step back and focus on the Persona and the Scenario Go back to the task that motivated the design By backing up this far you can usually find a common ground where both parties can agree Separating design from technology is the first step The next step is to relax each side s thinking and try to find a common ground that achieves as much of the design as possible Another problem is a programmer s natural inclination to see any programming as a deep architectural solution that must be able to grow into the future Of course this type of thinking is correct and should generally be encouraged but not on every single thing you do By relax ing the need to make something architecturally pure you can often find a common ground that will get a solution out the door yet still offer the design you need The best way to discover this type of solution is to ask Are you assuming some deep architectural change here which might not be necessary This usually provokes a worthwhile conversation An equivalent problem is the designers insistence that they have dis
176. port the new program The Simplicity Shift is nothing more than a series of tools to make the pursuit discovery and delivery of Simplicity a realistic and engrained part of a company culture Some companies feel they can t afford a strong product design cul ture Other larger companies assume all the product design must only be the responsibility of the design department Both of these approaches will meet with failure This book shows how a strong product design culture is neither complicated nor expensive to start It also shows that good design cuts through an entire company and can t be left to a single department That is why the tools in this book are intentionally simple They mean to make Simplicity a straightforward and inexpensive program to Conclusion be easily integrated into a company s procedures The cross department use of these tools is the important first step Once you have these com munication steps in place they can grow to incorporate deeper tools And these tools can expand and refine the deeper understanding of your target users who will only fuel more insightful and innovative product concepts A analog timers on microwave ovens 58 60 61 Anderson Marian 161 Apple computers 30 early users of 24 25 hierarchical menus on 31 Newton handheld computer by 117 118 Personal File Sharing on 87 88 print options example from 84 85 AutoCook button on microwave ovens 61 62 68 69 71 72
177. possible The time is set with a 24 hour clock because this was assuming a European market but it could easily be changed to A M P M Notice I didn t use an analog clock which is definitely worth considering The main reason I chose this clock is because it matched the number on the slider a bit better but I m not firm on this decision I could go either way Beneath the slider is an All Day button which will turn on the heat for the day It should have some feedback such as an embedded LED so Emma has confirmation when it s pushed that the heat will be on during the day Notice this allows Emma to turn the All Day button off if she changes her mind This design seems like a good start As I discussed earlier in the book when you get this type of Simplicity you drive understand ing So few choices exist on this design that it s hard to be confused by an array of buttons By limiting the choice you provide obvious use The huge secondary win to this simple design is not only does it give immediate feedback about the current settings but it also invites Emma to tweak the settings easily She can increase the settings slightly when the weather gets colder or even experiment by turning off the heat a little earlier to see if it makes a difference You can imagine elements that had to be part of the original timer design such as iz The Simplicity Shift separate timers for the weekend can be a simple button p
178. r a few hours in the morning and again in the evening In addition this device also controls the heating of the house because in the summer you want to have hot water but you want the radiator heating off Design Break Heater Timer KX Original Design The original design not only has many tiny buttons but the LCD also has numerous little labels icons hidden around the perimeter such as ON OFF MTWTEF and YES NO All in all more that 40 items states types of information exist which the user must parse to understand the current state of the system See Figure 10 1 To use this device you must understand two different task models programming and using To program the device you have to open the door at the bottom slide the switch on the left from RUN to SET PRG Once you do this you descend into a serial path of choices offered to you on the LCD display that set the 16 timers necessary to make the device work The details are a bit painful but to give you an idea simply to review the current timer settings I have to push a combination of the YES and NO button 24 times If I get it wrong I can accidentally overwrite my program because in addition to browsing the setting a COPY question occasionally appears on the screen offering to copy the settings from one timer to the next Once programmed to use the device you must push the ADVANCE buttons for the hot water and the central heating For example if I m leaving
179. re headphones Given that Steve and Lisa both will use this while they re in motion it seems likely that volume will be an obvious thing to adjust Many volume solutions are on the market today with everything from controls in the headset itself to something on the device Many options need to be discussed with the team Having the control on the headset seems the most direct and sensible design If it does have to be on the device though then it must be easy to reach because Steve and Lisa will both probably be rummaging around in a bag or a backpack when they re trying to set it In this case the volume control should be a stiff analog dial large and easily visible on the unit Having some means of knowing how far the dial is rotated would be helpful so they should have some visual indication about how high the volume is set before you put on the headsets Design Break MP3 Player Ea Scenario 3 Taking a Drive Steve might want to listen to the music in his car This suggests some way of either plugging it in to his car stereo or using an FM transmitter to play through the radio These both have cost implications but again this needs to be discussed in a broader context because having a device work wirelessly in your car could have a big cool factor for some people One problem with the FM transmitter idea is it might be cumber some to be fiddling with a small screen display while you re getting into a car especially if it s col
180. ree top level buttons with an LED for feedback By reducing the depth of a feature slightly the usability increased greatly Some of you might say this appears to contradict my 1 1 3 rule because I m adding more buttons instead of removing them Well high marks for paying attention I agree we re adding more buttons so we re increasing the number of choices What counterbalances the extra buttons is the Power feature is now labeled as a group of buttons and is now much more visible and easier for the user to parse Originally the Power button was buried in a sea of identical buttons creating parsing shock and making it far too hard to find By grouping the Power buttons I made the feature much more obvious Of course I also removed many of the other extraneous buttons which helped bring out the obvious use of the Power button group Another example was at Apple Computer where I was brought a Print dialog box for a new dot matrix printer All sorts of options were onscreen offering bidirectional printing bit thinning and others which the user had to choose before pressing the Print button In all there were 28 possible combinations At the time Apple had a simple print model that usually gave the user three choices for print quality Feature Blindness a Draft Better and Best For most people these choices were more than enough for the type of output they wanted By mapping the bidirectional and bit thinning options to t
181. rios it s clear that hardware interac tion seems to be a strong theme Moving the songs to the device appears the most critical issue but other issues such as battery life volume base stations internal microphones and FM transmitters all came out loud and clear as big issues which could make this a truly innovative product A surprising outcome is this little seems to surface on what the soft ware should do for this product Playing CDs and individual tracks is clearly important and some lingering issues exist in making the record ings work but this is surprisingly light This implies to me that the software can be significantly simplified from the current design This also implies something that s often found in these exercises these Personas will use this device primarily as a tool Broader more The Simplicity Shift a personal and social issues overshadow the use of this machine In other words let s not get too cute with the design STARTING THE DESIGN Key Insights Are Hardware So what is the Simplicity we re going to shoot for As previously dis cussed to fill up this device with music easily is critical or you ll lose most normal consumer types This points to a desktop PC solution that can encode the CDs easily and download them to the hardware The entire process needs to be as click free as possible insert the CD press Copy and off you go Many CD programs today are close but they make you hunt t
182. s Getting Started While you d like to believe most products start off with a blank slate and you re allowed to build nearly anything the business reality is usually far from this ideal Most of the time you re given the hardware specification when the product must ship and how many people you Implementation Blindness will have to build it The job is to make something innovative within these constraints It s not always so overly prescribed but the hard realistic voice of business grinds it into you that you can t spend millions to create a product that will only bring in thousands The purpose of the Design Manifesto is to put together the basic goals and constraints of the project This manifesto should only be two or three pages It should give anyone a good idea why this project is being done what are the big rocks in the stream that will make this a difficult project and what initial decisions are required This is a fairly standard product management type of document The most important difference is this document must be written jointly by the product team Everyone from marketing development and design as well as other groups which might vary depending on your product such as integration testing documentation and so forth should be included Now by the entire team I don t mean a complete democracy where everyone on a 200 head team has a vote A republican model where each team has a trusted
183. s all sounds vaguely reasonable until you discover Design Break MP3 Player Ej that when you come back to play another album when you press Play again it queues your new request after the first album and starts from the top playing the first album over To listen to only a second album you must clear the queue and play the second album This clearly has benefits if your primary task is to create a long playing list of music from bits and pieces letting you create a mix of music This is indeed powerful but it s worth discussing whether the power is worth the complexity PERSONA AND SCENARIOS I ll create two personas here Steve and Lisa Neither one will be a geek power user but both will be heavy music lovers who have some fairly specific needs Steve Steve is 18 and is still in high school He lives with his parents and drives a beat up Subaru Steve currently hauls around a pack of CDs and a CD Walkman wherever he goes Because Steve s taste in music is well developed his friends often want to know what he s currently listening to Steve is going through an acoustic phase collecting acoustic versions of his favorite groups from the Internet and burning his own custom CDs When he s at home Steve likes to play music with his friends and while he s studying Lisa Lisa is a professional cellist who is age 32 single and lives in an apartment She doesn t own a car and she takes the bus to and from work L
184. s do we know about Emma She is a whiz at her word processing package and can do simple spreadsheet work When ever anything goes wrong with the network or her printer however she calls the support people Emma has a cell phone but she only has three numbers on it home work and David s phone She has a hec tic schedule with getting the kids ready for school in the morning the morning rush is always crazy Weekends can be even crazier with everyone rushing in all directions on Saturday Even Sunday is a bit odd because even though it might be a bit lazy something usually must be coordinated iz The Simplicity Shift A sample schedule of times when heat would be important to Emma would be the following E Waking up early in the morning so Emma can dress the kids for school MM Taking bathes at night E During the rare day when David has to stay home with a sick child I Ona rainy Saturday when everyone is stuck indoors fl When the winter gets colder the heat needs to stay on longer to keep the house warm What does this product offer Emma The whole purpose of this de vice is to save Emma money The device will automatically turn off the heat when Emma and her family are gone Although she could do this with a manual control this could create two potential problems 1 switching off a manual control is easy to forget and 2 the house is cold when Emma returns home The device offers to fix these two problems
185. s is ineffective because Option C which is better than either A or B is always available In addition you only get criticism from user testing Extracting value judgments is difficult A good user test will point out problems in both Option A and Option B Of course if one option works per fectly and one is a failure then you can choose Most of my experience has shown you ll find many problems with both Options A and B how ever so you won t be able to make that choice as easily as you might think The other problem with traditional usability testing is it s too aca demic and slow Classic tests historically ran 20 users through an exercise with task timings and statistical analysis This type of test can indeed be valuable in looking for problems in a well established design but it has a high time and monetary cost The point of Failing Fast is to iterate the design frequently Classic tests can take well over a month to plan run and report Four Guerilla Usability tests could be run in less time and cost less i The Simplicity Shift CONCLUSION Innovation isn t easy to quantify As I mentioned in the beginning it s hard to tell you how to do it but there are many ways to mess it up In general what I find in some companies is a barely coping type of plan where all they want to do is make the next deadline The idea that you should push the envelope and try to visualize the impossible seems a frivolous waste of t
186. ser testing subjects were able to tell at a glance where they were and were better able to know what they wanted to do next How to Do It Management must know that unFeatures exist and ask that they re included in the product discussions Designers must use unFeatures to motivate Persona Scenario work to discover problems In both cases both sides now have a way of discussing these unknown problems and more importantly attacking them earlier in the product cycle Handling unFeatures is nothing more than a variation of the earlier Persona Scenario work The small difference is that management needs to understand these unFeatures almost always occur and need to be addressed as part of the product strategy Things That Go Wrong The biggest problem is that unFeatures are considered too soft and not worth pursuing until later in the project The best way to overcome this concern is by showing how simple it is to address the unFeatures problem It doesn t take long to run a few Persona Scenarios through a The Simplicity Shift the previously listed unFeatures in an exploratory way to create a list of concerns This type of report will always be welcomed because it s a list of potential threats to the product success The challenge in doing unFeature work is you can easily find some fairly obvious problems that aren t going to be fixed any time soon because of costs infrastructure limitations or even bad battery life UnFeatures w
187. sonas in a more low key manner Just as many marketing departments often have a range of target users you can create a range of Personas that cover expected users The trap is in trying to create a completely representative cross section This isn t a segmentation study where you break up all users into a full topology of user types The goal of this insight is to break up the multiuser into a few real people who will give you a detailed consideration of how they would use the product Here s a list of information I d try to capture in a Persona name age marital status number of children and their ages job how they get to work primary activities outside work and a photograph A photograph is important because it turns this flat description into a real person something which you can relate to more easily It s easy to find a photo of someone reasonable on the Internet Then depending on what the product is I d ask lifestyle questions that help understand how the person might use the product In the case of Personas used for phone design we described the common calling patterns of a person who in their life they called and when they called This might seem like a simplistic approach but I find that asking these questions of a group elicits strong responses Instead of working from a high end user down these types of questions as you go through them tend to build a Persona from scratch Answering the lifestyle questions t
188. spreadsheets 118 start stop buttons 65 Stevenson Adlai 91 surprise packages 25 26 SWAT teams 157 60 166 T target users 41 43 162 personas of 43 50 scenarios of product use by 50 54 task layer of user interface 28 technology adoption life cycles 24 27 telephones cordless 25 26 GPRS 35 39 mobile 13 20 tents 24 text messaging 13 14 28 29 timers heater timer 133 48 on microwave ovens 58 60 61 64 66 Tufte Edward 13 U unFeatures 75 76 79 80 89 90 163 64 usability testing 130 31 Index user blindness 6 162 63 User Centered Design UCD 2 costs of 3 4 user interfaces 161 fiction of 23 layers of 27 31 Simplicity in 12 13 users expert users 16 personas of 43 50 reporting errors to 77 research to analyze 42 43 scenarios of product use by 50 54 target users 41 42 user testing 130 31 V van Gogh Vincent 41 VCRs 76 volume control on MP3 players 96 102 Ww Wirth Nicholas 133 World Wide Web 35 39
189. st hear the salesman saying And this baby can do eight additional automatic cooking tasks To proceed a good understanding must exist of what the user needs in the kitchen and then offer it to them so its value is apparent This isn t something I can make up on the spot Some consumer research must be done to help inform this decision A focus group user study I alluded to in the Persona insight would go a long way in understanding what normal people would use and value The key goal is to find three not eight tasks that can have a strong value Reducing their number like reducing the power levels makes it much easier to present and then use these new features By making the new features easier to use they also become easier to explain so they can be more effective as a differentiating factor on the showroom floor Figure 6 4 shows how the Stage 3 design could look Simplified Functionality Instead of a bewildering array of eight choices restructure the buttons to only three The choices m making are admittedly a bit arbitrary My actual choices in this redesign aren t important choosing only three is the critical issue For example the Popcorn button is something I ve stolen from existing microwave designs whose sole purpose is to cook microwave popcorn bags They all happen to be the same weight and size so the task flow is simple put in the bag close the door and then push the Popcorn button The button for Potato
190. sure a quick user study would help iron out a few problems most likely with labeling but of course many other things might pop up I would also pay close attention to the LED feedback on the power level buttons They might not be effective and could need to be more aggressive in getting the user s attention such as blinking or being brighter But given these caveats I have no doubt this unit for the same price as the original would do much better in most homes You could argue that my version of SuperCook isn t fancy enough and you d need to roll in even more features to distinguish the oven This might be so but this unit isn t meant to be a high end microwave only a better version than the one we started with without raising the component costs Even though I only have three features and the original has eight this doesn t make a significant marketing difference Not only is it discoverable and usable but it still exists as a marketing concept that can be hyped on the box for differentiation This design followed a simple Persona Scenario model This Design Break isn t about creating the ultimate low end microwave but instead it s about showing how to follow a simple but effective tool through to a design Most likely more work on the Scenarios would expose further design considerations For example a need might exist for a third power level setting so you would have High Medium and Low Upcoming chapters discuss
191. t and as a consultant has shown me that compa nies can kill good design ideas in a hundred different ways The most common cause is simple naivet the company doesn t understand the deep management commitment required to take an innovative new design and see it all the way through to final delivery Even more striking are the companies that hire the design consultant or have an internal design department and refuse to choose a new design because it appears too costly This perceived cost usually comes in three forms The first is the view that a simpler product has a high opportunity cost A new simpler design is often seen as too radical making too many assumptions about what the consumer needs Fear exists that the power of the product is somehow diminished Simple designs have a tendency to make product managers nervous because they view the design as not having enough features to be competitive This is a bit odd to a designer It seems to mean if a product doesn t look complex enough it can t be used by real customers This is a complete fallacy because designs can be simple yet hide power features beneath the surface Everyone can win The second perceived cost is that the design isn t practical to im plement For example the design could automate a previously complex sequence of tasks but this automation might require some tricky pro gramming These types of design jumps which require initially un known amounts of programm
192. t can t exist without a PC so requir ing it for these advanced tasks isn t putting any additional requirement on the product STAGE 1 Okay The first design stage as shown in Figure 8 2 will be to design only a device to select and play entire CDs As discussed in the microwave Design Break by limiting your design to the core tasks your design practically presents itself to you 4 The Simplicity Shift Play music by Beatles Counting Crows Dylan Eagles FIGURE 8 2 Stage design The screen shows a scrolling list of artists that scrolls using the wheel on the right Pushing the triangle Play button would then offer a similar list of scrolling albums Pressing Play again would then start playing the CD one track at a time The Stop button would either stop playback or back up a level This first stage seems quite a good start because playing a CD only requires three controls a far cry from the 11 plus soft buttons we started with To be fair though we only do a tiny fraction of what the original design did but what we do is now simple and obvious It might strike you as a bit hidden to have the Play Stop buttons also double up as a Select Back pair This is a good example of how Simplicity can work to your advantage however Only two buttons are on the whole device What other buttons would you push This type of Simplicity forces users down a certain path easily discovered and easily remembered This
193. t would rarely have more than two phones in the entire house This design decision didn t reflect the likely demographics of the company s purchasing consumers Surprise packages such as my cordless phone are being created quite frequently today Companies take product concepts that are now far into the laggard range of stability and established behavior and they change the product significantly So much so that the new product is effectively repositioned back to the front of the curve creating a high tech product that can only be used or appreciated by the forgiving and accomplished early adopter group of consumers This is where much of consumer backlash appears as safely mature and benign products such as TVs radios thermostats home phones and even cars are turned back into early adopter products and then sold to an unsuspecting laggard audience It s no surprise consumers are in revolt with all these new digitized products The mistake many companies make is they don t appreciate how their products fit on to Moore s Technology Adoption Life Cycle Dis rupting these behaviors with insensitive and complex design is much too easy What companies need to understand is they aren t only creating You Mean Something Is Wrong EA a high tech product for early adopters but they re also selling into the ultraconservative and easily frustrated laggard group Consumer electronic products rarely follow tent evolution slow
194. tempt a new breakthrough solution Many stick to the style guide approach following the rules set down by someone else They color within the lines This approach definitely has merit when you re working in a well established domain such as a department web site within a large company But for such new areas as consumer electronics few style guides exist You have to break out and see things in new ways Small electronic devices with onscreen scroll bars or radio buttons are clear negative examples Just because these interaction widgets are common on a PC doesn t mean you need to place them on an MP3 player Break out of your prison Innovation blindness occurs because people don t know how to ques tion their surrounding design culture or even to entertain the possibil ities that challenge this culture too strongly If you don t know how to i The Simplicity Shift go about tearing down the walls both around your project and around your ears you re not going to break free But breaking through these conceptual blocks is only the first step toward innovation The next is to implement the designs that come from breaking through these blocks This is the second phase of innova tion because breakthrough ideas don t easily transition into shipping products Development teams as battle scarred veterans of many crazy deadlines tend to refuse anything too far a field from what they know This is a reasonable position for th
195. th paper sketches for a while even taking cleaned up ver sions to a few meetings and discussing them with various members of the team Pen and paper sketches are obviously trial concepts When discussing them with people the conversation stays focused on the big issues If you were to present a design done in Photoshop you d certainly The Simplicity Shift G10 Aug Richard Harper B10 Aug Sally Suarez E Messages j 8 People M Meetings 2 RingTones WorldTel Sena New Forward Reply Deiete E 12 Aug Scott Jenson From 12 Aug David Durham Date 7 pE 2001 12 34 11 Aug Elizabeth Eskasnk Subject Where are we going to meet ask dfjask difas fki aksf di bad 4 kata pep aks ai h see ach ta 3 dd Gxt dk kia David FIGURE 9 2 Higher fidelity sketching get such comments as Why is that button blue and Those icons are too small At this early stage in the design you want to answer the big infrastructure and Task layer questions Color and icon size belong in the Presentation layer and should be left until much later Having explored extensively using only paper and pen I then move on to cleaning it up The computer sketches shown in Figure 9 2 were done in a drawing program Even though this is much slower than pencil sketching it s still fairly quick This example was done in about an hour The purpose of moving toa higher fidelity form of sketching is I can exp
196. the product team It doesn t do any good to tame the feature list and be over ridden by management Features are easy to list and overuse as a man agement and planning tool We have to start treating the feature list as a source of design confusion The three Insights in this chapter can help the team interact with the feature list in a disciplined manner so the design not the feature list is in control UnFeatures make sure the feature list The Simplicity Shift is complete and isn t missing some obvious bits that will significantly affect the viability of the product The Priority Trick drives a team activity that will prioritize the adjusted feature list to make sure the core features are tackled and designed first Once you have a design that meets only these needs then make the hard hard and build a layered design one that adds the advanced tasks with care making sure the core design isn t compromised Notice this chapter doesn t talk much about creating this core de sign Too many domains exist with individual rules and tradeoffs to make such a chapter generic The focus here is on creating a shared team approach that management marketing development and design can all use to create an environment where product decisions can be made to support the product and set it up to succeed As I said before most bad products are bad before the designers ever get involved They are poorly motivated with a confusing set of prior
197. the classic CD categorization This isn t as critical as the basic Play CD approach but it does lead into the playlist concept Playlists appear to be a music power user type of feature where you want to organize your music in a particular order either to group a bunch of songs together as Steve does with acoustic tracks or as a long list for prolonged listening Creating this type of long list is some thing the desktop PC appears significantly better suited to do so while we can offload that task from the device that still leaves the need for the playlist to be selected and played Scenario 6 Battery Power Both Steve and Lisa could easily take this unit with them in the morning and use it throughout the day which means battery power is important so it should be able to run several hours before it needs recharging This makes home use complicated because when they bring the unit home they ll probably need to recharge the unit If the batteries are low this means the device might not be convenient to hook up to the stereo which suggests some type of a base station that when you drop in the unit it not only recharges the batteries but it also hooks up to the stereo The problem with this idea is the computer also needs to have access to the device This is a complex problem but it seems likely that the computer and the stereo could compete for the device Some decision should be made about which is the base location Given that
198. the display with soft labels next to them on the screen In addition a menu button brought up a standard onscreen menu for more choices My team had already put together a simple messaging design They had done their homework and identified the two high priority tasks as the reading and deleting of new messages To make these two tasks simple and easy to use the team used two of the soft buttons on the ai The Simplicity Shift right A third button New brought up a choice of message types SMS E mail Fax in a small pop up The marketing department of our partner company was adamant that the top level view of the messaging application show off the deep power of the device and insisted the top level buttons be Open New E mail New SMS and New Fax This caused Delete to get kicked out the window To get Delete back in a completely separate folder view had to be created which you needed to switch into before you could delete any messages This of course was one of our highest priority tasks and it was now buried into a separate view that you had to navigate to through the Menu button The user who would rarely send faxes or e mails now had to dig through the menu structure to discover how to delete a message Not only that now an additional view existed for the user to understand and cope with This is a classic example of design being massively impacted by business marketing needs I sympathize with marketing s desire t
199. they re creating a product so even this work would make a significant impact on the products they create Let s see where this takes us STAGE 1 FIND THE CORE Let s start with a core design This design should be able to set the time for the heat to turn on and be able to set the heat to run all day when everyone is at home Figure 10 3 is my first sketch of what this could look like I m not taking time making this extra pretty this is only a quick layout to get a rough idea This was put together in a few minutes Design Break Heater Timer pany The digital clock is at the top so the time is always visible This enables Emma to have a rough idea when the timer is about to turn on or off An LED that lights up when the heat is on is next to the timer so Emma has easy confirmation that everything is working This type of extra feedback is useful to Emma because she can tell at a glance that the heat is definitely on There are two pairs of sliders one for the morning and one for the evening By putting them on a single slider you get the day at a glance The left slider of the pair is green and the right slider is red These colorings are an initial thought to indicate START STOP times This might not work in user testing but it seems like a good starting concept This single slider has another subtle but important design it makes setting up overlapping timers which was an error condition in the original design im
200. timer example 137 40 in microwave oven problem 62 64 72 in MP3 player example 95 102 prioritizing features for 81 82 using scenarios with 54 55 playlists 99 105 power level controls 66 68 PowerPoint program 129 presentation layer of user interface 27 28 prioritizing features 80 82 90 164 layering of 85 86 products feature lists for 73 74 scenarios of use of 50 54 setting up 76 product teams Design Manifestos used by 153 156 innovation blindness in 113 innovation discouraged in 117 18 layering of features understood by 89 programmers and designers working together on 121 SWAT teams and 157 60 user personas for 48 working together on 150 programmers 20 conflicts between designers and 119 deep architectural solutions sought by 123 designers working closely with 121 programming of heater timer 135 37 Index Q quality 4 5 21 queuing 94 R recording on MP3 players 100 101 107 9 repetitive tasks 77 78 Russell Bertrand 1 S Sampter Jessie 11 saving data on Quartz PDA 117 scaffolding of functions 16 scenarios 50 54 121 163 in microwave oven problem 63 64 72 in MP3 player example 96 102 using personas with 54 55 screens see displays scroll bars 93 94 115 scroll wheels 99 111 settings for MP3 players 110 11 setup for products for heater timer 135 39 for MP3 player 96 110 11 for new products 76 sketching in design 125 29 soft buttons 93
201. tion for exactly what had to be in each pane I also continued with the Calendar view but I was fairly confident I had a good start Each view would have a strongly vertical layout with a list of items to select on the left and with the details of each item on the right This began to feel like I was on the right track By doing a few simple sketches I effectively blundered into my design defaults and how they created a layout inconsistency Fixing this consistency created immediate problems as well but that too was easily fixed because of my previous user homework Quite an effective return for a few scribbles Increasing Fidelity The early sketches are fast because you have so many things to discover you don t want to waste time and fail slowly My early sketches are rough I ll even draw some text as a wavy line because it usually doesn t matter Once I firm up my understanding of where I want to go though I try to make some cleaner sketches with a better layout I draw out the text properly If I m feeling really confident I start putting the sketches into a drawing or paint program to start getting layout issues and font sizing down What s nice about all the these approaches is they re still about 1 000 times faster than writing code Not only that I can sketch independently of technology concerns I can image the impossible solution and get it down without having programmatic constraints filter it too early I stay wi
202. to turn the central heating off in the summer A single Summer Winter switch cuts to the chase This leads up to the more functionally complete design in Figure 10 4 The choices on the bottom would be hidden under the swinging door panel much like the one in the original design The On Off switch is straightforward but I chose a more verbose labeling for the Summer Winter switch to keep its function more self describing Design Break Heater Timer EX Green Red 0 3 6 9 12 15 18 21 24 v Hot Water only Hot Water and Heating FIGURE 10 4 Stage 2 design One last addition is a watch stem next to the digital clock to set the time Because we have no other use for the display than to have it be a clock we don t need any of that Set mode nonsense If you spin the stem the time changes End of story Of course I d run a quick usability study on the design to make sure it works I d be sure to be sensitive to insights gained understanding users goals the clarity of labels especially something like All Day which I would easily change if there were problems understanding it and whether the slider concept seems to get its point across Assuming the design makes it past this gauntlet it seems to be philosophically correct This design is practically usable right out of the box because all you must do is spin a dial to set the time and it will start doing something reasonable a The Simplicity S
203. truly get some creative work because you have an informed design working with creative technology to get a solution that transcends both disciplines Example Bluetooth At the beginning of this book I gave an example of a mobile phone with a wireless headset based on the Bluetooth standard This came from a real project I was working on Initially I wanted all devices to be discovered automatically by the phone and to eliminate that rather complex control panel I pushed hard working with the team to see if an Oh that s easy solution was hiding in there somewhere Unfortunately the problem was complex and my wonderful magic fix was clearly not going to happen I ended up relaxing my requirements only to worry about the headset that came in the box In effect for the first generation of the product this would be the only type of device that was avail able so solving the general case didn t hurt the product in the short run Once I agreed to solve only the headset case we were then working ona smaller problem one which was much easier to solve The horrible Innovation Blindness 17 control panel was kept in but only as a backup for the secondary devices that might come up I was a bit crushed that a broader solution didn t occur but in this case by relaxing the design ambition we were able to get a solution that was still effective for the broadest Scenario This doesn t mean my original design was bad It sim
204. ttered and complex design I agree that more sophisticated users do have more demanding tasks than novice users but an even more insightful truth is that all users usually have the same core tasks By discovering these core tasks you have your first design priorities set in front of you Design for these priorities first and you ll find Simplicity in your design is significantly easier Start here and the rest will follow Another consequence of user blindness is this with all features ap parently equal only the flashy high tech features tend to get any atten tion The product puts far too much weight on features that might rarely be used This was discussed previously in Chapter 4 s exam ple about GPRS By using Scenarios we could break down the large flashy technology into smaller pieces finding problems with some and removing the need for others altogether The feature itself is fairly uninspiring The user s tasks that require this feature are much more insightful The Simplicity Shift How to Do It Just like Personas established tools such as field studies or ethnographic studies can discover what Scenarios are important These are the types of Scenarios you probably wouldn t know on your own These discoveries are useful because they uncover ways your product is needed that might not be at all obvious Just as a simple way exists to create Personas a simple way also exists to create Scenarios This won t have the deep
205. ure list you re in a strong position to design the core of the product With this design in place you can then add the more advanced features on top The previous Design Break about the microwave oven was a sim ple example but it showed how having a reduced set of features tends to clarify the design and allows it to form much more easily some times almost effortlessly This Insight discusses layering in the remain der of the prioritized features without compromising this simple core design The core design is important You have 90 percent of the battle won because the design handles the vast majority of the user s key tasks This gives you two strong advantages The first is the remaining complex functions are usually done by more sophisticated users They can cope better with a more complex design The second point is a hard one for design purists to accept but it s simply that it doesn t matter as much if you get the design for these more complex features wrong This doesn t mean you should ever make a secondary feature horrible Instead it means the further you get from the primary feature the less pressure exists to get it perfect a moderate solution will do just fine The essence of this Insight is to put the remaining features in but to put them in so they don t compromise the Simplicity you ve already achieved How to Do It Showing too Much Detail with a Single Feature It s all too easy to give a feature to
206. ush which is so simple it isn t required anymore Simple designs that can be completely understood and in addition make the customer feel in control are perceived as more powerful and useful And this design puts Emma in control STAGE 2 EXPAND THE CORE As with the previous Design Breaks we now have the core design The next step is to layer in the additional features Notice though that following this problem from Emma s perspective has led to a large change in the product model from the original design Initially a concept existed of setting the boiler separate from the heating You not only had to change the timers for these two separately but you also had to indicate which one was running or turned off This distinction is completely gone with this design The model here is more of a Turn It On or Turn It Off model This clearly is a bit too simplistic and we ll fix that later This is the type of approach that makes sense to Emma however So in this new expanded design we have to add an On Off switch for vacations a way to turn off the heat during warm weather and a means to set the clock time The vacation switch is rarely used and should definitely be pushed off to the side so it doesn t interfere with the core design A simple On Off switch on the side or hidden behind a little door at the bottom of the unit would work fine As to HW CH stuff the original design was much too complex because its only value was
207. very day The failure of most consumer products today is in how they meet this challenge To deliver on extreme time to market and cost require ments consumer products tend to be technology and feature driven cramming in what they can as quickly and cheaply as possible This inevitably creates cumbersome products toys that can do much but are rarely used Consumer electronics is becoming a crowded field No longer is it enough to be there first or to have more features Products must Why Are We Here The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt Bertrand Russell THE CHALLENGE Designing innovative consumer products takes both passion and per spective Passion to overcome the hundreds of problems that always crop up and perspective to know which problems are the most important to solve Any product that s breaking new ground almost by karmic def inition must break a few rules Accepting status quo design solutions will rarely result in superior products Breaking new ground in a corpo rate environment is made even more difficult however because projects often have too little time and too little money Not only must you in novate but you must do it in half the time This is the challenge that professional designers must live with every day The failure of most consumer products today is in how they meet this challenge To deliver on extreme time to market and cost r
208. want to edit these choices or add another one do it on the desktop Much of the complexity of the original device came from the many variables in the Settings section of the device The vast majority could be removed entirely from the product because they offered too many choices of no real value Those that remain should be Settings Equalizer Language Contrast Backlight FIGURE 8 7 Simplified settings Design Break MP3 Player ail split into editing tasks such as creating equalizer settings and selecting tasks that would only offer a simple choice of a few options This would place nearly all the complexity in the settings squarely in the PC domain which has the interaction tools to handle these tasks much easier COSTS With such a complex product I must be careful in making cost claims Clearly the new design is much simpler because the number of buttons has been drastically reduced The software would also be significantly simpler so it would be less risky and easier to write and debug Things get more complex because I shifted many requirements to the PC software which will require some work To be fair this would add to the product cost However it seems likely that many existing products could be leveraged to take this role so it wouldn t be as difficult as it might first appear In addition the cost of the wheel scroller is also an increase but by how much isn t clear Given that the scre
209. watches or any type of timer device is a prime example of this with the tiny single push buttons blinking displays and mode buttons After you live with a certain style for a while it becomes stan dard practice It s far too easy to slip into thinking of using a menu here or a Back button there We swim in design defaults and never realize it Now nothing is wrong with design defaults Without them driving a car would be a nightmare Most cars conform closely to common design so it s fairly easy to use any car But we aren t designing cars are we We re creating new prod ucts that are exploding with new capabilities This isn t the time for standards This is a time to create new ways of navigating design ing products that are less cluttered and offer value without needless complexity This insight is more a matter of will than process I want to make it clear that you shouldn t throw everything out the window but more often than not conventions are used by the uninspired as a crutch How to Do It When you re developing consumer electronics watch for these defaults Every time you see something taken from either a desktop interface or a digital watch question why it s there Don t remove it question it These two paradigms are two of the most dominant forms of water that exist today Both are entrenched approaches of how things are simply done and it s an easy trap to do something similar to the
210. wer buttons lights up the LED next to the button clearly showing which power level is in use Power Level Can Change at Any Time To fix one of the Task layer problems in the original design these Power buttons should always respond no matter if the door is open Ga The Simplicity Shift or closed or even if the oven is running These buttons should be fully dynamic Power Level Is Stable These buttons should only change through user input Pressing the Stop button shouldn t reset the power to High This keeps Fred in control so as he makes changes or cooks other items the power level remains where he last used it This could be a problem when he returns the next morning however and the device is still on Low power Fred might want to cook on High power and the microwave is still set on Low power from the previous evening The device can t be perfectly set up for either case Either it resets to High when you are doing repetitive work or it stays on Low too long You can t have it handle both situations equally well This is the reason the feedback is so important STAGE 3 The Stage 2 design meets the first two Scenario needs This is a good basic design that given the cost constraints is simple And it s a far cry from the original product we saw at the beginning of the Design Break We aren t done yet though We ve only completed the core tasks but so far I ve ignored the power user features that caused so muc
211. with the basic tasks such as checking messages and work them through Go after Simplicity first The simple tasks must be tackled because they re the ones that cre ate the biggest design win if you can make a significant improvement in their presentation or use PUTTING THESE INSIGHTS TOGETHER These insights produce a drastically different means of creating a prod uct concept The first insight Personas focuses the team on particular users with specific needs not those needs of the team This is a dramatic shift in sensitivity and creative thinking It also fosters a shared un derstanding throughout the project and enables individuals to make decisions that support rather than work against the product design The second insight Scenarios walks you through the basic tasks for each Persona and force understanding of how they would use the User Blindness Ej product This usually uncovers significant opportunities and trouble spots early in the product process I like to think of these insights as the Homework insights They help to research and understand the product space They won t give you a design but they do soften you up opening new ways of thinking about the product and uncovering big problems you hadn t seen before In addition these homework assignments produce tangible results that can be shared with the entire team including management You can imagine questions like Have you verified your
212. y and insightful ones are viciously complex and need far too much background to be practical I hope I found a middle ground showing products of enough depth that aren t overwhelming in detail This first example is more of a sad story than a design exercise but it s unfortunately typical of how early strategic planning can fail If the strategy is wrong getting a well designed product is nearly impossible Subsequent Design Breaks will be more hands on taking an existing product and reworking it using the tools in the book THE PROBLEM At one company where I worked my team was putting together a de sign for a GPRS phone GPRS like most of the technologies in the mobile phone industry is a richly technical function that almost seems to create more problems for the user than the solutions it offers In prin ciple GPRS is supposed to allow high speed data access to the phone so you can browse the Web at much higher speeds than before Not only that but you can always be online instead of the old fashioned P1 GFM FEO P2 GFM GJN QC FGC GFM Thi CB487 04 Jenson July 23 2002 20 1 Char Count 0 Ea The Simplicity Shift modem style approach where you have to dial in This dialing pro cess could take up to a minute and with GPRS it was to be nearly instantaneous The industry was touting GPRS as the next savior of the phone industry and my company was putting it into every product it sold My design team knew this was

The Simplicity Shift

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