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Speaking at Agile UX New York City

Jan 30, ’12 6:06 PM

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the upcoming Agile UX conference here in New York. I’ll be talking about the how the relationship of design to the world of startups has recently shifted from a question of necessity to a position of criticality. To succeed in this new environment, designers need to adapt their strengths. Specifically, I’ll talk about my experience at betaworks and how designers innovate in an early-stage startup environment and transform ideas into products then companies.

Join me if you can!

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The Commuting Surplus

Jan 4, ’12 7:48 PM

The share of automobile miles driven by people aged 21 to 30 in the U.S. fell to 13.7% in 2009 from 18.3% in 2001 and 20.8% in 1995, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration’s National Household Travel Survey released earlier this year. Meanwhile, Census data show the proportion of people aged 21-30 increased from 13.3% to 13.9%.

According to the experts, young people don’t want to drive anymore, and the Internet is to blame! Aside from criticizing journalists for lazily falling back on not one, but two tired tropes (kids these days + the Internet) to generate interest in something that is not incredibly newsworthy, I wanted to see what else might be causing a decline in US car culture.

I see automobiles as the most prominent (and for many years, almost the only) designed object in most American’s lives. For years, they were also an overt expression of identity. In movies, in cities and towns everywhere, life seemed centered around the car. Sections of cities were destroyed and new cities built for them. Like any strategy predicated on growth, it had to come to some end, right? With the design force Apple and multiple websites and interactive products, there are other options Americans to express themselves.

It may be that American youth is less interested in what’s being offered by auto manufacturers. I don’t have any data, but perhaps cars today are too conservative and aimed at broader market segments, with fewer interesting variants to be appealing. Smaller, cheaper cars for years have been overlooked by manufacturers as worthy of their attention. Practically speaking, people must be doing something with their time, and it seems they all want to be online. All along cars have been just a means to socialize, and now its a lot easier to do that using Facebook and Twitter and mobile apps. It’s very hard to use these while driving.

Another aspect not covered is how the rise of hacker and maker culture comes into play. Cars can’t be hacked so easily anymore (exception noted), with blackbox computers and sophisticated engines and drivetrains. Computers and websites can be easily customized and are vastly cheaper than cars, too. The economy has been in a prolonged recession and new cars are inaccessible for many.

Lastly, it seems collaboration and environmental concerns are powerful motivators for people to consider public transport, sharing services, and living in denser urban areas.

Compared to older generations, Millennials participate in and are more open to collaborative consumption programs, such as media, car and home or vacation sharing. – Millenials Prefer Sharing Over Ownership

In many ways, they are trying to undo what their parents and grandparents did when they fled the cities for “greener” pastures.

The challenge for designers is systemic, and has been for some time. Its a massive service design challenge in some ways, and one that seems to be coming from the bottom up, rather than the corporate-driven suburbanization effort. Better urban planning and a much wider array of transportation options are needed for people who want to use their cognitive surplus.

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Who “Gets” Product?

Dec 15, ’11 12:28 PM

Like many in my field, I’m always amazed when poorly conceived or executed products find their way to market. While every case study of failure is unique, starting with a great product team is a variable we’d like to have under control. Finding people who work in product development with a compatible outlook and skillset is difficult, but identifying higher-order abilities in those people is hard. How do you know if someone “gets” product?* You want to find these people, but what are you really looking for? This is a deceptively hard question, and the easy (but unsatisfying) answer is that you can’t. The other easy answer is that there are many answers. I’ve shared my own perspective, but I also asked a number of people to hear what they thought.

What I Look For – The Short List

  • X-ray Eyes
    People I know that get product can “see through” a product along multiple dimensions to understand all of what goes into making it and where it can go. What the decisions were, the trade-offs and meetings during the process of development. How many times did they test a part, and did they fix it? What will happen over time? How are they planning for the unknown?
  • Mostly Makers
    Skills in making, editing, and curation are very important to me, but are only part of a holistic skill set and outlook (and many great product people aren’t makers). Curiosity about how and why things work and succeed (or fail – why does Hollywood make so many bad films?). A good track record helps, but being flexible about what success is may be necessary. Some of the best product people I know I’ve known for a long time, but its hard to get that insider perspective.
  • Well Spoken
    I like it when someone can articulate the stance a product takes. Is a company trying to break out or fit in? They see how people use it (can they use it, is it meaningful, do they like it, will they keep it) now and in the future, and everything orbits around that. More literally, can people talk about products with clarity and directness (and metaphor). Many fields have a specific language set so insiders can be very specific, and product people should be well-versed or be able to adopt the local language.

From the Experts
I asked several friends and colleagues to share their experiences, and was delighted with their responses. Several commented on the difficulty of the question itself, but all took up the challenge. I’ve synthesized their responses below, but thanks to Charles Adler, John Borthwick, Dan Boyarski, Liz Danzico, Alex Rainert, and Khoi Vinh for taking time to respond. Here are their key points:

  • Its About People
    People that get product understand that fundamentally this is about people. Product people use products. They talk about products in the context of use (as opposed to the features) and about the emotional engagement that exists for them. Development is a human process, and requires an understanding of the interaction of the roles involved and, of course, who the audience is.
  • It Takes Holistic Thinking
    Getting product also requires (or may be an outcome of) holistic thinking. They think about all aspects of the product: market, technology, operations, support, design. They can talk about and balance the relationships among them.
  • Bring a POV
    Despite being able to balance across disciplines and requirements, they have opinions that they hold strongly and can trust and defend them. They can say smart things about products – their own and other people’s. They understand where they’ve failed and can build on that.
  • Prove It
    Being able to demonstrate the ways they go about solving problems is important. Seeing past work is one measure, and seeing the results of in-person problem solving is used often. They understand the roles required, and they actually have experience shipping something.
  • Legacy
    Perhaps the most elusive, but in some ways critical quality, is whether someone can be trusted in the future to continue, extend and grow a product.

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*By “getting product”, I mean people who can understand how and why products are made and succeed (or don’t), and can articulate and repeat that outcome.

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Big Screen Chartbeat

Dec 9, ’11 5:05 PM

Chartbeat is often displayed on large screens inside newsrooms and offices, usually in a static mode. In this shot, John Borthwick is using it on a giant touchscreen (an 82″ Perceptive Pixel LCD Multi-Touch Display) at the Gizmodo Gallery (there are some Betaworks folks at the 22 second mark in the video). I think it’s still holding up well after over 2 years without a significant change.

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Behind the Bitly Mascot

Dec 7, ’11 3:00 PM

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Ok, so its a bit of a puff piece, but I was interviewed by Mashable about the origins of the Bitly mascot.

How did the pufferfish develop?

We started looking at renderings of pufferfish, and one of the things that I hit on was why not show two pufferfish and show them in the states you would encounter it, puffed out and shrunken down. Once we played with that, we hit on the relationship between these two. So we invented a backstory that the little is always pranking the big one and the big one is sort of clumsy. The little one is the smart one because it’s a shortened link and there’s a lot of data and valuable attributes that are useful to people, where as the big one is the sort of big, dumb long link that breaks in emails when you send it to people or IM it.

The full post is here.

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Brooklyn Alpha Slides

Oct 30, ’11 11:59 AM

I gave an opening talk for Brooklyn Alpha, a conference in Brooklyn that was a companion to Brooklyn Beta.

Bk alpha3.ppt
View more presentations from Neil Wehrle.
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Surfaces

Oct 6, ’11 10:55 AM

A couple quick quotes on the meaning of design:

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” – Steve Jobs

“…you cannot have depths without surfaces. They communicate with what is within; between the two there is always a great dialogue.” – Linda Grant

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Whole-team User Research

Apr 15, ’11 5:17 PM

In the 15 or so years I’ve been designing interactive products, I have always tried to involve the intended audience (users) in the course of product development. A recent article by Jared Spool on UIE.com articulates something different that I’ve felt but rarely had the data to support: involve the rest of the team in deep exposure to users. I’m in complete agreement with this approach, as long as sensitivity to team structure and dynamics are understood and managed well.

Resistance to conducting research (broadly speaking, from field research to usability testing) can come from unexpected quarters, but the usual suspects include Sales (who fear losing control of the relationship they have with their clients), Technology (who look at it as something that will slow down develpment time), and Product (who’ve invested too much time in their MRD and PRD documentation). The Design team, too, has their share of those who fear user input will impinge on their freedom to create, among other reasons.

I started my career at Morningstar working on Windows-based software, where our team used a waterfall process and testing was difficult. We had to wait until the product was nearly done, which was the only way it could stand up long enough for us to test it with users. Even then the feedback was invaluable, but we rarely had many of the front-line developers on hand to observe. Also, much of the development staff were from mainland China and had a more limited command of English.

Later on at Razorfish, I learned valuable lessons on how not to run user research. One of the failures of the agency model is how often work is done in an assembly-line fashion, with little room for iteration and teams that are separated from each other. My team did excellent work, but too often we weren’t tightly coupled with the IA, Design, and Tech teams to provide user feedback in a timely manner. It was also trimmed or eliminated from pitch budgets since it always appeared as a line item.

At Yahoo!, we had a much more tightly integrated UX team, but we weren’t physically or organizationally close to Tech. In between us was a firewall of Project Managers (necessary in any large endeavor, I might add). This inhibited our ability to get everyone on board, although we did manage to get some of the front-end developers to some usability tests.

Right now I’m at betaworks, and the situation is different still. Here teams are very small and fast-moving. I don’t have a team and everyone is super-busy and its hard to find time to squeeze in anything other than core job responsibilities. There are vastly different outlooks on what roles are critical, and products serve very different markets (although they all have UIs). In a startup environment, there is a lot of pressure to maintain a clear vision and course in the face of all manner of obstacles, users included.

Here lies the challenge: how to integrate user feedback into a team’s work so that its not considered unusual or can be sidelined. A few takeaways:

  • Convince teams that something that feels so counter-intuitive is actually better. Spending more time on understanding users, planning and designing actually makes the development cycle shorter (and saves tons of time post-launch).
  • Convince teams that this is as important a part of the process of developing interactive products as continually testing for and fixing bugs.
  • As Spool points out, every discipline needs to be involved to avoid the kind of infighting that comes about when people are basing decisions on assumptions about user goals, not empirical evidence.
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Data Overload in the Military

Jan 17, ’11 2:55 PM

…the screens in jets can be so packed with data that some pilots call them “drool buckets” because, they say, they can get lost staring into them.

It appears the military is bumping up against the limits of peoples ability to absorb and make sense of the streams of data they encounter in their rapidly digitizing field of operations. Myths about people’s ability to multitask continue to lead managers astray, I fear. Scientists comment that multitasking actually impedes performance in simulations. If you’ve ever tried to complete this awareness test, you’ll get some idea of these limits.

While well-intentioned, the impulse to add another monitor or another data stream only makes the problem worse for soldiers facing extremely stressful situations. Fundamentals in usability have roots in the military, when aircraft crashes were unexplainably high and researchers determined that standardization of control layout and developing controls with significant tactile differences dramatically reduced error rates. Efforts to “rewire” soldiers to aclimate them to information overload seem foolish to me, as there is only so much change the human brain can accomodate. There is nothing significantly different about the brains of today’s 20-year-olds and yesterday’s. No amount of video games has made their brains different, but it has acclimated them to this kind of work.

A closer look at integrating data into more holistic dashboards, making data more actionable, and offloading onto the system some tasks so that soldiers can operate better all seem like useful directions, and probably significantly cheaper. This last part is probably of no interest to the contractors supplying expertise and hardware to this effort, however.

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Interface Design Concepts

Jan 3, ’11 12:49 PM

A nice roundup of some interface design concepts over at the Fast Company design blog: www.fastcodesign.com/1662959/12-of-the-years-best-ideas-in-interface-design-slideshow

I’m particularly taken with both the DJ turntable concept because it doesn’t shy away from expecting users to develop a knowledge of how the system works, and isn’t a slavish replication of both the appearance and interactions of a real-world system. The Mozilla Seabird phone concept is quite compelling too, since it breaks the screen entirely, extending it into the adjacent space for users.

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    • Jan 30, ’12 Speaking at Agile UX New York City
    • Jan 4, ’12 The Commuting Surplus
    • Dec 15, ’11 Who “Gets” Product?
    • Dec 9, ’11 Big Screen Chartbeat
    • Dec 7, ’11 Behind the Bitly Mascot
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