Digital Product Design Considering Physicality
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This document discusses the importance of understanding physicality and context in digital product design. It emphasizes starting with user research to understand how people currently interact with products and finding opportunities to simplify their experiences. Designers should look for ways to exceed people's expectations by making interactions more convenient and magical while protecting product quality. The best designs align with what users desire and solve real problems in meaningful ways.
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Digital Product Design Considering Physicality
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- 5. Blurred Lines Considering Physicality in Digital Product Design Adam Polansky @AdamtheIA
- 7. What problem are you solving? …and for whom? @AdamtheIA #evolveUX What will be the outcome?
- 8. A solution without a context is an abstraction @AdamtheIA #evolveUX
- 9. Begin by looking at the world where the problems live @AdamtheIA #evolveUX
- 10. What to look at What are people doing? Where are they doing it? Why are they doing it? How do they feel about it? THIS is where you find opportunities How are they doing it?? @AdamtheIA #evolveUX
- 11. Expectations Screen screen form screen screen screen screen… Fluid interaction, Anticipation, Simplicity, Ease, Success, Access The best experiences align with what you desire in your world. @AdamtheIA #evolveUX
- 12. Do the Research Contextual Inquiry Field Observation Usability Testing Analytics @AdamtheIA #evolveUX
- 13. What can be made simpler and more convenient and F***ing Magical? What to look for @AdamtheIA #evolveUX
- 14. Quality needs protection. It can’t speak for itself on a spreadsheet tomorrow. @AdamtheIA #evolveUX
- 15. Understanding Physicality makes worth Time & Cost Or else it’s out on the curb @AdamtheIA #evolveUX You get 1
- 16. Quality is easy to defer and nearly impossible to recover @AdamtheIA #evolveUX
- 18. The DMI Design Value Index © DMI.org, 2014
- 20. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2015: © Gartner, Inc. 2015
- 21. “To Design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” -Herbert Simon @AdamtheIA #evolveUX The Science Of Design Creating The Artificial, Vol4. No.1/2 Deigning for the Immaterial Society (1988) pp. 67-82
- 22. Look at the world for real problems in need of real solutions Expectations already exist. Exceed them! Commit to the value of Quality @AdamtheIA #evolveUX
Editor's Notes
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- About forty years ago, a guy named Ray Ruby figured out that if you put a drop of liquid in one end of a tube of a specific diameter, you could predict exactly how much force it would take to break the surface tension holding it to move that liquid to the other side of the tube. Surface tension is what holds a drop of water on the end of your finger before it falls. What could they do with this knowledge Ray and some others put 4 of these tubes in a round plate that would show the tubes turning red if they were shaken or dropped.
- The plates were used in Disk-Packs, the industrial grand-daddy to the floppy disc. Disk Packs where about the size of a Tupperware cake carrier and sat inside a disk drive about the size of a dish washer. Problem was, if you dropped or mishandled a disk-pack you wouldn't know if it was damaged until you put it in the drive and it crashed. But…If you looked at the 4 little tubes in the top of the pack and any of them were red, that could tell you the pack had been dropped or something. Everyone thought this was great! Honeywell, the manufacturer of the disk-packs and drives became their first customer. Now they just needed more customers like that. So they hired a guy to find them. His name was Dick
- Over the next two years, Dick learned that there weren’t any other clients like Honeywell but he did make an observation: All over the world, people were putting things in boxes and shipping them without any idea what was happening to them in transit. What if there was a way to monitor your shipment? Dick recommended putting the tubes in stickers on boxes. If you received a box with a red indicator on it, you didn’t accept it. That’s what they did. But you might not guess what happened. “Instead of people buying “clips” and slapping them (gently) on their packages, the shipping companies bought them. They created awareness programs for their employees and promoted the fact that they were proactively looking-out for the condition of your stuff. Companies saved money by not accepting potentially damaged packages, they saved money in replacement parts, shippers where more careful when handling goods. The Shockwatch changed the way people behaved because observing their behavior in the first place led to a solution to a problem different from the one they set-out to solve.
- Dick’s last name was Polansky and he was my father. I grew up around smart people who solved problems by understanding the physical nature of the environments their products occupied.
- How often does a conversation like this occur. The C-somebody EO, MO, TO … says “We need a program, a mobile app, a web site, an Internet of things because…reasons; It’s going to be big, we need some of that, we need to be in that channel. When that happens, does anyone ask “Why” because those reasons aren’t reasons. Someone needs to ask “Why?” and keep asking until the problem can be clearly stated and the weight of need (if there truly is any) can be understood.
- What’s broken that needs fixing? What works but could work better? Who benefits? Who loses? When it’s all said and done what will be the result?
- You can’t build an abstraction You can’t estimate the value of an abstraction You can’t predict what an abstraction will do You’ve heard about solutions in search of a problem? Begin with the problem.
- You don’t have to look far. Usually no further than the people who use your products or services. There is almost always something that can stand to be improved. It may not be your product but it may be the support. A solution might be operational but it may also be solved on-line, with a mobile device or wearable. Somewhere you can find a way to ease or remove steps or move the solution closer to the point where the problem occurs.
- What are people doing and where are they doing it? Home, Office, The park, the train, the bathroom? Don’t laugh! How many of you have done this? (Walk away, stop, turn around and grab phone, walk away) How and why are they doing it? Is it a direct result of what and where? What are the connections.? How do they feel about it? Are they happy, pissed-off, indifferent? These are the elements of a journey map - one of several tools used to characterize the context around an activity.
- For the longest time, we designed for roughly the same environment. A person sitting 18-20” from a screen with a keyboard and mouse; desktop, laptop. Now, technologies have raised the bar for what people expect from it because devices like personal digital assistants, PDAs and Blackberry’s moved tasks from the desk to our hands A little over 8 years ago. We got an app store and a limited environment opened-up even more to the point that a mobile phone serves as the only computer many people need or own. New considerations come with that. Luke Wroblewski described the need for an application to be manageable with one eye and one thumb. Back In the mid-nineties people were talking about WANs, Wide Area Networks, LANs Local Area networks but they were just whispering about PANs personal area networks. That term may have died but look at what we have! We’re personally connected to our homes, our cars, our music, our families and our care-givers. We maintain relationships of a sort with people around the world. I know what beer my friend in New Zealand drank with dinner before the appetizers were finished. Expectations. We’re designing for more than one generation that grew-up on games with rich interaction and responsive controls. These folks don’t just hope the tech they use professionally and personally will be similar, they expect it. They expect it to surpass…routinely. The best experiences align with what you desire in your world.
- So how do you meet those expectations? You may have participated in one or all of these data gathering methods. Interviews to hear what people are thinking, Field Observation while you’re in Discovery to see what people are actually doing, Usability testing of early prototypes and completed apps to hedge your bet that people can actually use them. Analytics after launch to extract what’s really happening with your products. Rinse and repeat. No one method will give you all the insight you need. It’s the combination and repetition of methods that gives you a more complete picture.
- I remember our first microwave oven. We’d put a piece of cheese on a Dorito and watch it sit there. Suddenly the cheese would bubble-up and melt across the chip. This was like time-lapse photography in real-life. That’s all we had to compare it to. We watched it like TV for weeks; “Hey Jason’s gonna make a hot dog!” Now, my dad also was with Amana when they developed the first radar range so he understood the principles involved and he explained basic microwave science. Our response? “Yeah, that’s cool dad. Gimme another piece of cheese. Look at your favorite apps, look between the screens at what really happens when you tap on something. Does the screen just become a new screen or are there truly cinematic transitions. Does one image evolve into another? Do they set a tone? A box or image that glides-in says something different than one that bounces. They aren’t quite subliminal but the aggregate effect of these transitions can create an experience that is calm, enrgetic, practical, or frantic. Magic is what we call somthing that can’t be explained. An experience can be so good the device disappears and you forget you’re holding a little computer. Yes logically, we know there are real explanations like mocrowaves but we like to suspend that knowledge because frankly, it’s more fun to believe in magic...even if it’s just for a little while.
- These details speak to to finesse, completion, fit and finish. All these things roll-up to Quality. Quality needs protection because it can’t speak for itself on spreadsheet tomorrow. What do I mean by protection?
- Every project is acted-upon by three factors. We know this. Time, Cost and Quality or Good, Fast & Cheap. There is a general belief that a product owner gets to control two of these dynamics at the expense of the other. That’s a lie. You get one. I say this because if you decide that time and cost are going to be controlled, you WILL have to break that tie at some point downstream and it will cost you time or money. You can help yourself by determining which of the three has the least flexibility when compared to the other two.. Which has the most and what’s in the middle. Here’s the problem: People in charge like predictions. They want to know when they’ll go to market because they are coordinating other efforts. They want to know what the expense will be so they can predict what the ROI will be. People can and do make those numbers up arbitrarily. How do you estimate the ROI of Quality. How much time does quality take? Quality isn't a direct cause/effect dynamic. There are phases in between before it's realized. Some people don't have the patience for that. Here’s another fact. People will do the most nonsensical things to avoid pain. When a project gets going it doesn’t take long before time or money is causing pain. When we’re in pain, we lose trust in others especially if we think the pain is their fault so we’re less likely to take advice. We also want pain to stop RIGHT NOW so we lose sight of longer term benefit. Since we want the pain from time or money to go away, we cut scope, that scope usually includes the refinement that gives a product quality. Quality ends-up on the curb because the pain from bad quality can be deferred – remember we want the pain to stop NOW. Quality needs protection because it can’t be dissected into pieces on a spreadsheet and put back together again in any way that works. If you begin by understanding the real needs to real people and using that as your context, you make that inflexible, it will be worth the time and money. How much? I don’t know but I do know it will be more if you don’t keep quality in the picture.
- Because recovery means more of the time and cost you thought you were saving. By the time you realize it, It may be too late You have to win-back lost credibility with stakeholders and the people using the product who got shorted on the first go-round. People won’t care what it cost. People won’t care how long it took unless they’ve been led to expect it which only raises anticipation and magnifies the disappointment if the quality is poor. That, after all is what they do care about. In the long-run, quality abandoned will always cost you more than quality implemented.
- Without being deliberate about your design and quality, people will have an experience by default. Why wouldn’t you want to influence that in the right direction? Do you need another example of why it’s important to commit to quality?
- It’s profitable. This has been around for a couple of years. This list of successful companies share the fact that they put design in a central role in corporate strategy. Here’s a quote from Jeneanne Rae from the Harvard Business Review The bottom line is that companies that use design strategically grow faster and have higher margins than their competitors. High growth rates and margins make these companies very attractive to shareholders, increasing competition for ownership. This ultimately pushes their stock prices higher than their industry peers. The returns in our Design Value Index were 2.28 times the size of the S&P’s returns over the last 10 years. Neither hedge fund managers, nor venture capitalists, nor mutual fund managers came anywhere close to these results. As I said, You can equate good design with quality. If you short one, you’re shorting the other.
- Most of you know what a 2D graph looks like; two planes – X & Y axes. But…add a Z plane and you are working in 3D now. Why is this important? Because all the things that happen in the world you’re observing happen in the Z space. What do you think is so attractive about Virtual Reality …Augmented Reality? It offers an environment like the one we live in with physics we can readily understand. That said, if you think a VR project is necessary, you have to observe the world you want to create. What is the physicality of that world? Will it mimic the physics we know or will it go beyond giving people extraordinary powers. Also be deliberate when you determine its value not just to your enterprise but to the people who’ll us it. Innovation is measured by comparing the effort to produce something to the value it brings. Do you want to teach with it? Inspire? Entertain? Be productive? Challenge? Has anyone not seen a sci-fi movie that shows someone interacting with a virtual environment? Does it ever occur to you that if you did that all the time, your arms would get tired? American Sign Language interpreters work in teams of two for that exact reason. Cool might have a short life-span if it isn’t sustainable. Why is the Z Space so important?
- This is called the Hype Cycle – it’s a narrative framework that shows the journey of ideas. I love it. Beginning with the "Technology Trigger"; the origin point. You travel up the hype cycle until you reach.. The "Peak of Inflated Expectation"! Then it's dooooown into the abyss or the "Trough of Disillusionment". Slowly. If your idea really does have has legs and hasn't died yet, the hero's journey (That's what this is right?) continues up the long "Slope of Enlightenment" until finally, it reaches the "Plateau of Productivity"...and they all lived happily ever after! This particular chart shows the path of emerging technologies and I just want to point-out that well over 50% of these techs exist beyond the app. They operate in the Z space. They face different challenges; the supporting tech may be too immature, infrastructures may not be in place, economies of scale still hard to realize or predict or... maybe they discovered people’s arms just get tired. These are problems. More specifically they are design problems.
- Milton Glaser is best known for the I heart New York logotype but he's done so much more and if you paid attention over the years you'd recognize a lot of it. He recently gave an interview with the best definition of Design I ever heard when he paraphrased Nobel laureate Herber Simon. He said “Design is the process of going from an existing condition to a preferred one. He went on to say Observe that there’s no relationship to art.” He went on to talk about how things can be rendered many ways; not just by an artist. He used to say that Design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.” Still not a direct reference to art. Yeah, art directors are responsible for design but so are engineers, strategists, product owners even quality assurance because they all inform the end product toward a purpose – a desired state - a preferred condition. Great design doesn’t just look good. It works well and it’s a vehicle for great experiences for the people who use it. We can equate quality with good design.
- So…while that’s ringing in your ears, let me wrap this up with a few reminders. The best solutions fill needs. They need the best minds to tackle them not just MBAs but designers of all definitions. People have expectations. Meeting them is great. Exceeding them is better. Finally, commit to the value of quality. I’ll say it. There is no piece of software in the world that can replace creativity in the moment. That’s where the kind of quality we see as magic emerges. Everybody wants it but it needs protection in the form of championship, enterprise commitment and vision to see the longer horizon and the outcomes that can’t be achieved any other way. There are no short-cuts. Quality is yours - Own it!