Design By Candlelight

Change up the Experience

As a designer, I am responsible for the experiences I create for my users. Whether creating a financial web site or a game, I need to consider how people will interact with that information. What excites me about this video is it takes an everyday object and creates a new and unique experience which changes the behaviour of the user. Interesting.

Another example is Mint.com.

Most people would say that they 1) do not understand finance and/or 2) find it rather boring. I am included in that population. Until the day I found myself working in finance, I can honestly say I didn’t understand it. No one spent time explaining it to me. School never had a class in it. How was I ever to understand it? I was frustrated with money.

Enter Mint.com and all of a sudden you have users who say, “Mint.com has changed the way I view my finances.” Really? Why is that?

Mint adds color and graphics. It talks to you about your money. Shows you where you are spending, where you can cut, helps you budget, watch your investments grow, etc. It provides a simple interface for ease of use and understanding. It has changed behaviour and the user’s understanding of their money.

How much more as designers can we help our users understand things they do not and affect behaviour within applications, web sites, games, and other digital means? What can we look to, to help us explore new forms of interactive understanding? Every project differs. In the case of JunoBaby it simply needed to be a simple module to help users understand the company. In the case of AEG (redesign live soon), it was an interactive flash piece that explained the historical timeline of the company through imagery and video while matching with the historical periods in time to help users better understand the time periods the company was making such decisions.

Tags: design, User Experience

Consumers, Design, & Strategy

I use my Twitter account mainly for work and gathering information from my friends about the latest and greatest going on in the UX community. With following 88 rather active Twitters, it’s often hard to keep up with all the articles they post so in an effort to not only summarize for myself but also pass on to anyone reading, here’s what I have seen over the last week:

Whitney Hess has posted the following:

Jess Bezos’s, the founder of Amazon.com, says, “Obsess over customers“. More importantly:

Obsess over customers: “When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers.”

Invent: “Any time we have a problem, we never accept either/or thinking. We try to figure out a solution that gets both things.”
Think long term: “It requires and allows a willingness to be misunderstood.”

It’s always Day 1: “There’s always more invention in the future. Always more customer innovation. New ways to obsess over customers.”

What I like about this video she has posted is it gets back to a point I have made about never losing touch with the customer. In all my experience with Six Sigma, Change Management, and User Experience, I think the only thing that really touches the customer is a culture of asking and consistently testing and iterating on your product line with your customers (or users). Hence why I have fallen into User Experience as a career.

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On top of this Business Week recently posted an article about the IDEA 09 Design Awards calling the article, “Designing a Better World” where they said, “Business leaders should care about design because it hits the bottom line… more than anything else, design builds a business.”

Tags: business strategy, communication, customer experiencee, design, twitter, User Experience

Digital Government

Both the US and UK (the future of Digital Britian) have recently announced or made mentions of moving towards a digital form.  Many may feel this is long overdue but with the new US president, Obama mentioning online digital records and revamping the White House web site once he took office, a move to digital within the government(s) is underway. The new website is rather impressive and quite a change from the old W site, a rather cluttered mess. You might argue that this says a lot about the state of W’s cabinet but I digress.  The new site does consider good design and leaves me to wonder if the governments of the world will all consider good design as we all move to a digital form of government.

Tags: design, digital, government

Technology Tuesdays: An Introduction

I am starting “Technology Tuesdays”. Where I will find something going on in technology I find interesting. While this will mainly focus on usability, information architecture, and other such career related topics, I will occasionally wander from those subjects to talk about other things that inspire ideas, thoughts, and conversations about the role of technology in our lives, sustainability, and other such hot topics of the day. I am using this to start vetting ideas. Should I move over to M or even if I stay here, I am being encouraged to develop ideas and talk about IA best practices and trends. Most of my thoughts at least in the beginning will come from things I have read that I find interesting or want to explore. These will in turn start to form my thoughts about IA as I hope to move into a space where I can speak at conferences, write for professional blogs, and basically move towards being a specialist in the area of User Experience. While I still hope to explore and play with development and design amongst other skills that I would like to keep fresh, the area of User Experience provides the most challenge and interest for me so it is the area I hope to specialize in.

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For today’s post I am posting some interesting links.

Milissa Tarquini’s Blasting the Myth of the Fold
When I first started my career as a web designer, I remember the old adage “design for the fold” & “don’t make the users scroll too much”. Milissa’s article argues that people are now use to scrolling and that the fold no longer has the relevance it use to. However, you still want to lay out the information and design on the page in order to encourage the user(s) to scroll to the remaining content below the fold.

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Other links of potential interest:
Future of Web Design
Mostly Flex & code based articles – It’s following some interesting things happening in code and flex development through Adobe.

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And a presentation: Design Thinking in Business

| View | Upload your own

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And a video: Who is the T, in IT?

Courtesy of , who stole it from

Tags: business, code, design, tech tusedays, Web Design

Why Design

Article from Fast Company, by Peter Lawrence

Design remains the most underutilized and misunderstood tool at the disposal of business.

Building competitive advantage in our increasingly fast-moving, information-rich world of global access is not easy. For a while, technology was the answer. Engineers developed new technologies, whether a chip or chemistry, that did something wonderful, at least in the eyes of those who came up with it, and their companies rushed it to market and, often, to initial success. But technology alone is not enough. Take, for example, an electronic product laden with features, most of which are never used by the customer. By comparison, today’s biggest winners, such as the Palm V or the iPod, went beyond the raw technology; they used design to simplify technology, delivering it to consumers in a way that’s meaningful, engaging, and easy to use. The exceptional sales results speak for themselves, in these cases as well:

- OXO is the leader in the commodity marketplace of kitchen utensils because its commitment to the design process led to products that literally redefined this category.
- Whirlpool went from no market share in the front-end loading washer/dryer category to a 40% market share in one year through an extensive user-research and design effort that redefined the category and the money that could be made in it.
- Lenovo, which acquired IBM’s PC division, already had the largest market share of computers in China, in part because of its use of design to truly address the needs of the Chinese market.
- Proctor & Gamble continues to build new billion-dollar brands by using design to redefine existing technology. This effort is led by a vice president who reports to the chairman and CEO and whose mission is to “build design into the DNA of P&G.”

As these examples suggest, successful products and services result from joint efforts among marketing, engineering, research, design, and other disciplines. Design is intrinsically linked to a company’s ability to meet its business goals and achieve its mission. Done well, design can become a strategic resource to produce the kind of innovative customer experience that strengthens global brands. Yet design remains the most underutilized and misunderstood of all of the essential resources to achieve innovation and brand leadership.

What is design?

Continue reading “Why Design” »

Tags: Business - General, design

Balancing Information and Design

An old journal entry dated Oct 2001… Can’t believe I was thinking about this for that long.

Balancing Design and Information: Why did you choose this topic?
I chose it because striking a balance between information and graphic design is a daily tug-of-war for me.

:This is so true!

Somewhere along the Internet timeline, designers have been asked to wear two hats. I don’t fully understand how this happened because it seems counter productive to the creative psyche. Information design is such an undefined job description. Some people define it differently than I do, but for the sake of clarification, I’ll attempt to define it in light of the role I’ve assumed in my current position:

Information design is the breakdown of information, in a database or raw format, rebuilt for Internet use with an infrastructure that lends itself to a navigation system that others find intuitive.

: think about this further. How is it Intuitive? What is expected on a site? How do people think about a site? How do they find their way around a site? What specifically is intuitive about it? (ask people in the industry about it)

The description makes my head spin. I’m visually-oriented. I create with the right side of my brain. Yet my job asks me to use the left side of my brain; the side that requires the formulation of words to describe a picture that I already have in my head.

: As a designer how do you work with this? around this? What would help in getting your visual images into words or onto the computer screen?

(Post a new comment)
I was doing some reading online about design and came across this article about balancing information and design. I believe it was written by Danielle Hull.

Tags: business, Data Visualization, design

Forget that MBA and Other Thoughts

LINK “Design is deliciously applicable to almost everything, almost everywhere, the design process is inclusive to the point of non-definition.”

Written by RitaSue Siegel for Communication Arts

Lately, I’ve been thinking about three things. 1. How does a designer learn to become a manager or design leader? 2. Design has become a critical and strategic function in today’s evolving organizations, but will design educators adapt curricula to enable graduates to meet rising expectations for design performance? 3. Will design education embrace experiential learning, through internships, to remove barriers between education and practice?

Must design managers be MBAs?
Many designers aspire to become design managers and some think they will get there faster with an MBA. Not true. First, most business schools do not recognize design management as a critical business function. Second, business schools do not stress the importance of developing skills of persuasion and developing meaningful relationships in organizations in order to get things done. Without relationship-building skills, how will a design manager succeed at guiding an organization through the process of integrating design into their corporate structure?

Has design become too important to entrust to designers? (No!)
Design curricula can adapt to the evolution in business, technology and the social environment by providing students the experience, i.e., internships, to test classroom learning about design fundamentals, research and the process of design in organizations. If curricula do not adapt, design education will be preempted by other specialists who have discovered that the process of innovation, “creativity applied to a purpose,”1 or “design thinking” (called a “business behavior” by Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek), is fundamental to the creation of marketplace value.

Design thinking is critical to organizations in transforming their functions and form to respond to evolutionary marketplace forces. Business has raised its expectations of design process deliverable—more than nice typography, lovely form or space. But will design education adapt so that grads can deliver “more” and move up the value chain to the front-end of product development? Or will traditional design program grads be relegated to executing other people’s strategies and concepts?

What an MBA is or isn’t
My goal is to demystify the MBA, not denigrate it; to remove it once and for all from consideration by designers who seek to become design managers.

As Harvard Business School professors explain in “Is Business Management a Profession”2 (and I paraphrase), “The basis of most business school curriculum today is a functional approach, the grouping of courses to mirror the differentiation of finance, administration, operations and marketing as the major activities of the firm.” (Please note, design is not considered a major activity.) “This structure evolved in response to turning out grads to perform tasks that would be required of them by employers.”

Business students are provided with no more information about getting things done in an organization than are students who study design. An MBA program does not teach leadership skills. And, for the record, leadership and management are not synonymous. MBA programs do not provide study in relationship building, flexibility, collaboration, influencing, presentation and other skills vital for working in organizations. Actually, it is more important to provide experiences where students can practice these skills.

Business schools have lost their way according to recent articles in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review and books about the Wharton School and Stanford Business School. Professors “know too little about how real businesses work and spend too much time cranking out highly technical papers of the kind that the academic system mistakenly rewards,” said the Wall Street Journal.3 “They are locked into dysfunctional competition for media rankings (‘Top 10 Business Schools,’ for example), that divert resources from long-term knowledge creation.”

Can design schools adapt to today’s environment?
Many design educators are also locked into systems that evolved in response to teaching grads to perform tasks required by employers from another era. Most cannot adapt to the need to offer the integrated array of tools designers need, and accreditation bodies have no incentive to encourage change.

Design work is now done in integrated, multidisciplinary teams. Guiding students in building relationships across “the deep gulfs of understanding between design and other disciplines”4 requires experience doing it.

I recommend a requirement that design educators have at least five years of experience working in major consultancies, corporations or organizations. Many become teachers right after graduating from the very schools where they teach. Many do not keep up with design and design process evolution. Many practicing designer/design managers participate in shaping the education process by making presentations at conferences, which educators rarely see, and providing internships. Smart students with career ambitions beyond sitting at a computer screen quickly realize the limitations of their education and so consider an MBA.

To stay current with the latest design thinking, designers and professors should read BusinessWeek, follow the online links, and study the Web sites of leaders like IDEO, Design Continuum, The Idea Factory, Doblin Group, University of Cincinnati and Institute for Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. I suggest learning how design became a critical business function at Whirlpool, JCI, Nissan, Samsung and Ben Q, and scouring the Web sites of the Design Management Institute for conference presentations and other organizations.

It has never been easy to describe design, but ‘they’ get it now
In the defunct British magazine Design,5 I described a panel about American design in New York moderated by Ralph Caplan, one-time editor of ID magazine. The presenters were Jay Doblin, pioneer and guru of design planning and methodology, Lella Vignelli, a designer of furniture, exhibitions and interiors, and Chuck Mauro whose industrial design work focused on human factors. When they had finished, Caplan asked if they were all in the same business. They said, “Yes.” In his new book Caplan writes (a bit romantically), “design is deliciously applicable to almost everything, almost everywhere, the design process is inclusive to the point of non-definition.”6

It has been a long, hard struggle, but organizations now understand that design has more value than simply producing artifacts. Some use the design process, “design thinking,” as an integrator and facilitator for innovation, a means of strategizing about the future, identifying new markets and developing products. And some recognize that a “great product” like an iPod creates emotional bonds with consumers, generates excitement and provides a shorthand for a company to talk about itself and for everyone to talk about the company.

Toward a solution—The professional model for design education
Only the University of Cincinnati is structured to provide students with internships or ‘co-ops,’ real-world educational experiences, during which they learn to collaborate, communicate, strategize, interpret, adapt and lead. Through five non-consecutive internships, alternating with quarters in the classroom, design students test their design, technical, writing, presentation and relationship-building skills. They often work side-by-side with incredible people and are exposed to an array of business and cultural contexts that will become available to them when they graduate. Many companies later hire their interns because of the relationships built and the talent and intelligence they exhibited.

And, equally important, the curriculum is informed by student feedback.

Medical education has always incorporated work experience. The New Yorker magazine, in its Annals of Medicine series, describes Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston as the only hospital in the country “to require surgical residents to demonstrate proficiency in simulated [surgical] procedures in order to advance to the next year.”7

“Though surgical skills can improve with practice,” Dr. Daniel Jones, the chief of minimally invasive surgery there, said, “medical schools shouldn’t encourage students with poor hand-eye coordination or other severe limits in psychomotor ability.” Instead of letting them become surgeons, as at other schools, they are encouraged to move on to specialties that may suit them better.

This kindness should be extended to design students, who through internships, will learn whether or not they have the combination of form, intellectual and personal skills to succeed in a career in design.

Changes in the marketplace
Organizations building brands in the U.S. no longer rely solely upon mass-market advertising to reach consumers. They seek new ways to connect with consumers, or more precisely, to be invited into their lives.

And as a result, the design of products, communications, services and environments, has become more important than ever before. Organizations are eager to incorporate the process by which designers learn about consumer/user needs into their cultures to enable designers to create delightful experiences that enhance consumer’s lives through all of the above.

The future is now
Enrollment in design schools is strong. Design is a hot topic. Now that the value of design and design process are being discovered by non-designers, will the study of design be confined to design schools?

Even designers who become individual contributors need to learn how to get things done through other people.

Today, every designer is involved in design management or leadership (whether or not they are a Design Manager). Many are being asked to take responsibility for how a brand or category of brands is experienced by the customer across all touch points. Many are responsible for developing innovative products, communications, environments and services in ways compelling to consumers who may not have known they want or need them.

Being a successful designer or design manager today also requires an understanding of business, marketing and sales. Why must so many design students wait until graduation to get hit on the head by the real world when they could have gained experience with it through internships?

Tags: business, design

Why is design so important?

In terms of business sytems… (in the larger sense – ie corporate identity, databases, web sites, software, intranet, etc) If a system works and runs as it should, why is the design important? What about design will set apart one system to another? Why is it we “need” design in everyday things we use within business?

Tags: business, design, technology

Tomorrow’s B-School? It Might Be A D-School

Business schools are hooking up with design institutes — or starting their own

Just a few days into an executive management course at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Margaret J. Miller, a senior economist at the World Bank, found herself sitting at a table wearing heavy leather gloves and vision-obscuring glasses, trying to figure out how a person with a physical impairment might experience the process of wrapping a gift. The goal of the five-day Managing Teams for Innovation & Success (MTIS) course: to see the experience through new eyes. “With a few basic tools — just craft materials, really — people could actually start to think about things from different points of view and be creative,” says Miller.

Where to send managers to learn how to be creative is becoming an important issue for top executives. After all, the MBA is a degree in “administration,” and in a business world where creativity and innovation are at a premium, skills in administering organizations have less value.

With MBA enrollments down, B-schools are striving to become more relevant to prospective students. To remain leading suppliers of management talent to corporations, consulting firms, investment banks, and other business, B-schools are being forced to adapt to a changing world. “More and more, companies find themselves involved in exploration,” says Margaret A. Neale, a professor of organizational behavior and leader of the MTIS program at Stanford. “To be competitive, you have to be more creative.”

Mixed Success
Stanford is doing just that by establishing a new Institute of Design that will teach design thinking and strategy to business, engineering, and design students. This “D-school,” founded by Stanford engineering professor David Kelley, also founder of design powerhouse IDEO, may well give Stanford an edge over its B-school rivals as innovation becomes more valued for corporations striving to increase their revenues.

The Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the other top D-school in the U.S., is already sending many of its grads to big businesses. “More than half our graduates are going into strategy, marketing, and research in companies, not just design,” says Patrick Whitney, director of the ID. Large consultancies such as McKinsey & Co. are hiring recent grads.

Business schools have been trying to inject design thinking into their curriculae for well over a decade, with mixed success. Many have worked with the Corporate Design Foundation in Boston to develop design courses. These B-schools tend to offer a single elective or executive MBA class in conventional product design.

Harvard Business School’s course in Managing the Innovation Process, Northwestern’s Product Development & Design, and Georgetown’s Developing New Products & Services are all extremely popular among MBA students. And an elective at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, for example, has had students developing improvements to cars for years.

Problem-finding
B-schools are are now trying to go beyond the single elective in product design by linking up with design schools. One of best programs in the country is the Integrated Product Development track for MBAs at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Designers, engineers, and marketers mix it up in the classroom to develop prototypes of useful products that are commercially viable. MBAs more accustomed to financial analysis and bottom-line issues are pushed to think more creatively. “Innovation is critical in management. You have to innovate to compete and survive,” says Carnegie Mellon Dean Kenneth B. Dunn.

At the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, Sara L. Beckman, a senior lecturer in operations, teaches a course called Design as a Strategic Business Issue. Beckman has teamed up with IDEO, Berkeley’s School of Engineering, and California College of the Arts to teach a course called Managing the New Product Development Process. For many MBAs, it’s the first time they have ever worked with non-business people on projects. “The analytical MBA focuses on solving a problem, but the design process focuses on problem-finding,” says Beckman.

That’s the premise behind the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School executive program — Design, Innovation & Strategy — scheduled for this fall in Milan and Copenhagen. The course, part of the Wharton Fellows program that brings together mostly middle managers from around the world, was conceived by a group of senior executives. Their rationale? Design is often the path to innovation.

INSEAD’s joint program with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., one of the leading car design schools in the world, brings design students to Europe to team up with business students in various courses. Then they go to Pasadena, where students present their designs.

Many companies are going directly to top design firms to set up customized executive-education sessions. Most of these involve getting the CEO and his top managers out shopping for the things their company sells. It’s a game of “be your customer” that, despite its simplicity, can have enormous impact. Samsung has learned a great deal about design by attending various sessions at IDEO and other consulting firms.

Learning how to be creative is one of the great managerial challenges ahead. It was once obvious where managers should go for training. That’s no longer the case.

READER COMMENTS

Tags: business, design

Typography

This is a lot one can do with typography… express emotion… make a statement… with only a word or even a letter… one can say anything. Typography is visual imagery.

Having never taken a typography class this is fun for me!

Tags: design, typography