UX leadership insight #1: Clear design drivers
UX leadership insight #2: Vague or specific?
UX leadership insight #3: Pick your battles
UX leadership insight #4: Appropriately radical
UX leadership insight #5: Split it
UX leadership insight #6: Milestones are good for you
UX leadership insight #7: Difficulty of UX design reviews
UX leadership insight #8: UX and agile
UX leadership insight #9: Demos are not only for demos
UX leadership insight #10: Tools of trade
UX leadership insight #11: Skill is everything
UX leadership insight #12: The space between
UX leadership insight #13: Bell curve
UX leadership insight #14: Tacit knowledge
UX leadership insight #15: You

I hope you enjoyed! And now something completely different…

This is my last post in this series of design leadership. I have saved the most personal one as last.

The last design leadership insight is about you. Simply, take care of yourself. Most of the time you need to worry about other people: users, designers, stakeholders, managers. If you only do that, you will exhaust yourself. Get your weekly rest. Do something else than work too. Keep in shape.

If you are tired or in a bad mood, it will result in bad judgment and it will limit your openness to new ideas. You will impatiently look for the easiest solutions. The team can sense when you are grumpy, and then nobody will have fun any more.

When you are in energetic and in a good mood, so will the whole team. A team with positive attitude and good spirit is very resistant to any setbacks. Designers will seek for best solutions, not just the ones that work and pass the reviews. In good mood it is easier to be self-critical about the work. This is the key to designs that not just good but great.

It all starts from you. Smile!

In a large project, there will always be some churn in the design team. Some designers will eventually leave, and there will be some new members that join the team during the process. Sometimes, when there are schedule pressure in the project, you can try to catch up by adding a couple of extra designers to the project. New hires, freelancers, agencies – there are always people available (if you have deep pockets).

In a large design project you will have vast amount of tacit knowledge that is never written down. You may have documents describing the original design drivers or goals of the project. However, the interpretation of those drivers take place during the design process. People who enter the project later haven’t been part of that process of creating the shared understanding. They don’t get it.

The soul of the design cannot be documented. Designers must grow into it.

As design lead, you have a key role in transferring the tacit knowledge hidden in the existing design team to the new team members. It will take time – they need to “get it” by copying others work, and through trial and error. You must spend quality time with them, walking through their design proposals and discussing if those are aligned with the rest of the designs. You can try to delegate this to a senior designer in the team, too, by pairing them up.

There are no quick fixes to resource gaps in design projects. Sometimes you have to get new designers to fill in, but be prepared that this will require that you invest a significant share of your time to it.

Bit of a background— at Nordkapp, we work with a fairly systematic process/framework which we apply to each project we do. SuomiTV was no exception—we started with a competitor analysis, which we then turned into some obvious opportunities and design drivers. After presenting the findings to our client, we proceeded to synthesize these findings into a high-level concept, which again was approved and designed into more granular and real world designs screen by screen.

After the workshop 1 it was already obvious we were designing a quite complex system with a very tight schedule. This naturally led us to implement the features into a very clear roadmap touching fairly many facets of the client’s business— and of course to deliver first concept documents and design assets to our agile partner, SBA, as soon as possible. Business as usual, and in a way we’ve handled quite a few projects recently. This whole project took about four weeks from start to finish. Not too much time in our hands, but still quite doable when designing a clear and concise service with clear drivers and all stakeholders working together seamlessly.

So, dear reader, I’m sure you can imagine our surprise a while ago when we received the information from Brightcove that we had indeed set a world record with this one. Our project had indeed been designed and implemented into a fully working system tapped into SuomiTV’s HD broadcast pipeline faster than anyone before. Quite impressive when talking about a platform which runs services for more than 1300 organizations all around the world.

Of course, things like this are more a byproduct of a successful project than anything else, and don’t hold that much of a value unless the main product itself is successful as well. But one thing is for sure— we are very happy and honored to work with partners like this, and especially with a client, Mikael, who trusts us his business and dares to take the leap with us. That is courage we are extremely grateful for.

What comes to the actual product, you can check the first public release at SuomiTV.fi/nettitv. We are currently working on quite a few aspects of the site and the business, but more about that later on. Meanwhile, please share us your thoughts and tell us what you think.

Our team that worked on the project consisted of Teppo (IxD lead), Petri (visual lead), Ilkka and myself. Teppo and Petri’s input spanned throughout the whole project, whereas I was responsible for the initial insight and high level concept, and Ilkka made sure our dialogue with Mikael + SBA was as seamless as possible.

Image credit: bass_nroll on Flickr

As with many other natural phenomena, the skills of designers follow a bell curve. There are always a few super productive ones, lots of in-between, and then some at the tail of the curve. Factors that determine the productivity and quality of design work include training, experience, or simply – if I dare to say aloud – talent.

In a large design project you certainly will have designers from all over the bell curve. Naturally, you probably try to optimize that you can be working with the best people all the time. But the same bell curve will still be there with the group of the best… So my question is this: how to assign different design tasks for different kinds of designers?

The obvious answer would be that you put the strongest in the most challenging and most relevant tasks, and the less experienced in the least significant parts of the design. However, if you do this, you will have one surprising effect. You probably need to spend more time with the inexperienced designers than the strong ones. They need more support, they have more questions, they need your design input and supervision more frequently, their designs will have more comments in reviews, etc. As a result, you will be spending most of your time in the design tasks that you just had decided to be less central to the success of the project.

I think that the key to solving such issues lies in careful teaming: the designers will be split in working teams or pairs where less experienced always work with more experienced colleagues. In this way, the responsibility of tutoring is distributed more evenly. The same challenges will still be there in the small teams, but they will still be more manageable that way.

PS. I have been considering for a long time if I should write about this delicate topic. I sincerely hope that nobody that I’ve ever worked with will take offense.

How should the teams for design be built? There are thousands of handbooks how to build effective teams, so let’s not get into the generics. There’s one specific aspect of design teamwork that I would like to emphasize, and that is the collaboration of interaction design and visual design.

I may have mentioned before, that in a process where interaction designer creates wireframes and then hands them over to a visual designer for decoration, the result often is — decorated boxes. Creating something more, something that is novel, meaningful, effective, fluid, dynamic, alive, and mesmerizing, will require very close cooperation between interaction design and visual design. The boundaries between disciplines are the surfaces where the most communication problems arise, but – I claim – that also the magic happens.

The best designs are such where ingenious interaction design meets ingenious visual design. Therefore my optimal team setup would be such that there are always one interaction designer paired with one visual designer. (This is not unlike the AD + copy pairing so common in advertising industry.) They both need to understand and respect each others work, and get along very well otherwise too. When I see this connection in action, when I overhear these designers sitting side by side and arguing and developing ideas together, I know that we are doing something that very few design studios can.

Mikko Franck, a respected Finnish conductor, was asked to help out and rehearse with an amateur orchestra for a full weekend. He arrived at the site, and just for a trial started to conduct the first composition. The musicians in the orchestra didn’t play particularly well. In fact, they struggled to keep in their tunes. After a few bars he put his baton down and said: “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you”, and walked out.

I’m not 100% sure that this is a true story. Nevertheless, if it weren’t, it wouldn’t make the point of the story any less clear. Just like the orchestra conductor, you as a design lead you should concentrate in the big picture and the nuances of the details that make designs perfect. If the basic skills of the designers that you work with are not there, it will take a lot from your time to simply teach people how to design.

As discussed earlier in this series, you will need a lot of raw material from the designers, based on which you can steer the project. In addition to being able to create solid designs and creative solutions (preferably better than you ever could), the designers must master the basic tools and able to express themselves verbally and visually, and be great communicators. Only then they will be efficiently provide the raw material for you that you need so that you can orchestrate the design.

Naturally, there will be different designers that you will have the chance to work with. Some will be less, some more experienced. You must coach new designers to be part of the team. But don’t let that take all your time.

PS. Sorry for the long gap between #10 and #11. Been busy with fascinating projects – and also the series is now starting to discuss issues with people so maybe I’m subconsciously postponing these as it’s difficult to stay politically correct.

1. Design as a process

In 2006, the UK’s Design Council published their seminal paper on Transformation Design. Somehow things kept bubbling under the radar for a few years, but slowly design started to catch up. Meanwhile  service design and UX had brought the holistic, human centered thinking into into the collective design consciousness, and year 2009 saw Design Thinking in the limelight.  2010 will be quite interesting as design-led thinking keeps on penetrating in both business and technical development, and sometimes even shaping whole organizations, institutions and governments in a new, design-centered form. If you’re in marketing, you should be aware of the impact of transmedia storytelling will have on your work. If not, get busy with it.

More:
Transformation Design @ Wikipedia
Some Design Thinking principles

2. Rise of design generalists

Architect Eero Saarinen noted that designer should always resonate with the next larger context. As one could’ve read between the lines on previous theme, designers today tackle problems far beyond mere artifacts or even services, the larger context becomes more challenging to grasp. Keeping this in mind, design matures to seniority in the sense that it keeps on addressing the several different interaction within a system and hence, its boundaries as a whole. Design tools such as service journeys and experience maps address this level already, but in order to fully grasp the potential, design teams themselves need to involve different types on people.  These people should possess great design skills but also understanding of lateral thinking, even to a degree where they see themselves as generalists. Of course there will always be specialists, but design as a process needs both narrow but deep experts and wide-reaching empathic polymaths. Intelligent, curious and open minded people who are three-week experts on most pre-narrowed topics.

For example, when reaching into humanist sciences such as sociology beyond the surface requires training and experience. At the same time, when sociology is brought to the context of design practice, sociologists themselves need to understand design as well. They don’t have possess design skills, but understanding how design works is essential.  In design itself, interaction designers are already the de facto design generalists, and like all other designers, need to understand the human needs as well, and act as a filter for various kinds of inputs from research to vision to business. As design practice in particular is reaching towards more important strategic role, the role of a individual designer as a catalyst will become even more important.

More;
Systems Thinking @ Wikipedia

3. End of control

It should be pretty obvious by now that the internet has changed everything. And the change will only get faster and more vicious to the industries left behind. On a personal level, this is not that significant as most people are more than well of with a Facebook account, and possibly LinkedIn for the internet-savies. But if you’re in the business of running a company, things get very different. Now the people are in charge, and make no mistake, your brand is what they think it is. Not what you claim it to be.

Regarding content industries things will get interesting. For example, while in Finland the local media companies are busy suing TV-Kaista, Swedish service Voddler is about to launch a Spotify-like streaming video service in Finland as well. The industry is changing, and it will be exciting to see who are the ones prepared to embrace the change and who will get left behind.

More:
After Branding

4. Post-point and click interactions

At this stage it’s not really a question whether the rumored Apple device gets released or not, but the storm that has been built around. Last year saw the release of different kind of netbooks such as Litl, Nokia Booklet 3G, light operating systems such as Jolicloud and Google Chrome OS and 2010 will see many more. Squeezable mobile devices? You got it. Magic wand as a remote control for your tv? Oh yeah. Neural interfaces? Just $299, my friend.

It’s pretty clear interaction and especially web browser is far off from being tied into a form factor of something called “a computer”. Multitouch and gestural interaction guarantees also that the “computers” are just not for geeks anymore— for further evidence, just hand out your iPhone to a 6-year old kid or your grand dad. Oh and did I mention that Amazon’s most gifted item *ever* was Kindle on this christmas? And what comes to Apple, they most probably are onto something big again.

5. Ubiquitous computing

So this is where the things will get super exciting. The year 2009 saw Russell Davies coining the term Post Digital where internet turns around and penetrates physical objects. This co-incided this with the rise of sensors (almost) to mainstream, and Arduino, Pachube et al will keep on providing designers and technologists alike tools to prototype, hack, and visualize the ambient data in ways we’re just about to realize the potential of.

As our friend Adam writes, everything will have an IP address and it will happen sooner than you think. In-eye bionic interfaces? Almost there. Large scale touchscreens? Yes. And when we start pulling all these together, it’ will be magic. Besides, Google is laying the groundwork already.

More:
Mashable: Location. location, location

6. Play and social gaming

While location was all the craze in 2009 already, last year saw the also rise of services such Loopt, Gowal.la and Foursquare into the mainstream. For you not familiar with these, they are websites and mobile applications that build a reputation system around real world places. For example, in Foursquare you can become the Mayor of your favorite coffee shop until someone else checks in at the same place more than you. This encourages play and digital meritocracy on real world locations. Other examples include for example geo-caching.

More:
http://www.avantgame.com/
http://www.greyarealabs.com/

7. Design for people, not just users

Forget users, forget useless focus groups and fluffy market studies. The real innovation lies in combining technical advances with real latent needs of real people. Of course, the future will be mostly unpredictable, there will always be black swans, but at least part of it will be made by the pioneers. And the beauty of it all is that design-led innovation doesn’t always need to be revolutionary. A lot of times, evolution is more than enough. For Bank of America, their Keep the Change-program made more than $1.8b in customer savings while finding an untapped behavior in the existing system.

More:
IDEO’s Human Centred Design -toolkit

8. Aggregation, aggregation, aggregation

In 2010, having just “feeds” or even “real time web” is just not enough. Information on the internet is growing exponentially, and while major services such as Facebook are taking first step on curating the social graph, there’s a huge need for simplicity in terms of content. One of the biggest reasons this hasn’t done yet is because it’s not easy. At all. There are several companies providing services or APIs on mapping the social graph itself, and a few attempts on social curation in general. While the notion of aggregation is not exactly new by itself, my bet(and hope) is 2010 will be the year we see the first major services in the mainstream.

More:
Techcrunch: The dawning of ambient streams
AdAge on 2010: Brands start taking advantage of social graphs.
RWW: Social Graph: Concepts and Issues (in 2007)

Somewhat related

—Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
—Landor’s 2010 Trends Forecast
—Millennial Predictions for the next decade
—Adweek’s Top Digital Trends for 2010
—Sitra: Suomen tietoyhteiskunta 2020

Original photo cc by Oberazzi on Flickr

My intention was to share a point of view from designers’ perspective, and especially on what makes design organizations tick. It was a honor to be invited to give a point of view, as other speakers included Janne Korhonen from Seos, CEO Tuomas Syrjänen from Futurice and MD Iñaki Amate from Fjord.

Looking in from the outside

Watercolor paintings and oil paintings look no doubt quite different. The artist had a vision about the desired end result and then selected the painting technique that is best suited to reach it. In any form of art or craft, the tool is always visible in the end result. The same applies to interaction design.

The most typical process for interaction design is to draw wireframes of screens. After that, a visual designer will start working on the wireframes and designs the visuals. This process and selection of tools will be visible in the end result. Let’s say, if you design with Visio/Omnigraffle/Powerpoint, and then fill in the boxes with graphics, you will get … boxes with graphics: screens after screens, dialog boxes, windows, discrete states, z-hierarchy.

However, discrete (yet pretty) boxes is not my ideal of an optimal UI. What is your view as a design lead, what kind of result would you like to see? In my view, the UIs should be much more dynamic and fluid: canvases that transform to other canvases, objects that flex and transform, use of different shapes, fluent transitions. Interaction, that is genuinely utilizing the continuity of time. UIs that never stand completely still. Interaction that smoothly leads viewer’s eyes, hands and mind.
I’m not sure if there are proper design tools available for this. What would be the next generation of Harel’s state charts to describe and specify fluid interaction? Anyone?