The Usability of Things

Sometimes my job is teaching people how to behave like children again. The trick is not forgetting everything you’ve learned since then.

Being able to relax into ideas is one of the key tenets of creativity that people forget as they become more and more “professional”. Unfortunately, a dichotomy is created where people are either in full-professional work mode or full-relaxed goofing off mode, forgetting that the most productive time is spent being creatively focused. There are many paths to get to a goal, and you have to be open to taking several of them at once, while having the focus to ditch the ones that aren’t working, bringing that knowledge on the path that does.

Much like people forget to breathe when doing exercise, people forget how to be creative when they are working. There has been a backlash against being professional lately, because people become focused on it to the detriment of common sense. There is even a backlash against Malcolm Gladwell, because people are taking his findings as an ultimatum instead of inspiration.

On the other side, people begin to view creativity as unbridled wackiness with no productive value. Companies have retreats to blow off steam and set up cafeterias with wacky uncomfortable furniture, ostensibly to provide places for employees to relax. At best, all this does is pull focus away from creativity that is actually productive. At worst, this creates office wastelands employees are afraid to enter, lest they be labeled a “slacker”.

Don’t be afraid to relax at work. Just because you are in an office doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. Tear down cube walls. Bring in movable desks that can be a meeting table, a prototyping station, or whatever you need to get your ideas out into the world as soon as possible. Bring in things that actually inspire you, and display them prominently. Be your own cheerleader, doing what it takes to make sure the work you do engages you and makes you want to create the best possible solutions.

Because if you don’t do it, there are some brightly colored hand-shaped chairs they are waiting to bring in that are sure to inspire you.

Distinguishing Expert Intuition from Lay Intuition is the latest in a series of IDEO articles in GOOD Magazine. It does a wonderful job of laying out what the standard blind spots are for judging the quality of intuition, as well as how to compensate for them when talking to people. People can’t say how often their intuition is correct, as the successes stay with them and the failures are just chalked up to being bad guesses. This is the same reason that people still tune into TV shows where people claim to talk to the dead. There may have been a million bad guesses, but that one successful hunch somehow proves amazing insight and intuition to the people watching.

The catch is that in order to become truly good at deciphering other people’s intuition, you need to develop that immediate intuition yourself. Unfortunately, the only way to do this is by putting in the prerequisite 10,000 hours it takes to truly develop your intuition to the point where you can trust it. Once you reach the point where you easily and comfortably intuit your conclusions as well as the reasoning, you have also reached the point where you can no longer teach someone else how to do it, as you no longer remember what it was like to not simply know.

It’s easy to tell a bad interview from a good one from a great one, even to the most clueless person watching. The only way to move from bad to great is by getting in there and doing it yourself. Make mistakes, try new things, and learn from your successes. Talk to people you admire and learn from their work. It won’t be an easy journey, and there will be a lot of failures. One day, however, you will simply know, and wonder how you ever didn’t.

Expanding into new markets is the dream of every growing business. They see all the people that could benefit from what they offer, if only they had access. It’s easy to get swept up in the potential profits, as well as the tactics of just getting into a new area. With all of this going on, you can quickly forget about making sure your product or service solves the problems of your new customers, not just your old ones.

Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, and Domino’s Pizza all saw this potential in China. They all eagerly opened up their own stores, bringing their style of American food to the Chinese masses, and the masses wanted more. However, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s restaurants are now packed, while Domino’s storefronts are closing to the point of near extinction. What’s the reason? Domino’s just opened up the same store in a new country, while Pizza Hut and Papa John’s adjusted everything for how people in China live.

Domino’s has a 16″ American Family Size that was works well in other countries, so they kept it the same. Meanwhile, competitors shrunk their slices to suit the Chinese eating style. Pizza Hut investigated what different kinds of toppings people enjoyed eating, while Domino’s just kept the same toppings that worked in Japan and Taiwan. Both of these could be overlooked, if it weren’t for the one-two punch of not thinking about how people will get their food, and how they will eat it.

Papa John’s opened up restaurants, making them large and clean to provide a pleasant experience where people could enjoy a night out. In contrast, Domino’s kept their stores delivery-only, as well as their “Delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free” policy, which is a sure fire way to go bankrupt in the stand-still traffic of any metro area that crowded.

In China, the price of pizza is higher than standard Chinese cuisine, qualifying it as fine dining. When food is delivered to the households of extended families that permeate the country, it is only polite that everyone gets to eat food that shows up on the doorstep, which quickly makes Domino’s an expensive proposition. Everyone flocked to the restaurants where they could enjoy fine American food with loved ones, and avoided the possibility of waiting on a giant, expensive meal that was difficult to eat.

It’s easy to pass this off as a “Goofus and Gallant” story, but the point is strong. Even if you think you are only selling a product, there is an entire service experience for anyone who wants the product. Getting into the mind of who you want to interact with is an important part of making sure you are solving people’s needs. Without this, you are just shilling an expensive luxury, and people will stick to what they know instead of reaching for your cold, expensive pizza.

I learned this lesson the hard way in an architecture class. For the first assignment, most of the students showed up with intricate, beautiful, and fragile homework assignments. One hardy soul showed up with a pile of cardboard shards, duct taped together hastily into an uneven tree. All five feet of the fiery professor stormed over to this monstrosity, and she began to laugh as she grabbed it by its shredded trunk and waved it around menacingly at the other students.

“THIS is what I want to see!” she bellowed. A nearby student ducked as she swung it. He saved himself from getting decked, but his painstakingly crafted homework caught a branch and fell to the floor in pieces.

“THIS is a prototype! It gets the idea across quickly and sturdily. Do not even THINK about beauty yet!” She swung around again, as if to yell at anyone behind her who had missed her point. This time, the draft alone was enough to knock over another unlucky student’s paper-crafted structure that had obviously taken many nights’ sleep. Unfortunately, that unlucky student was me.

She slammed the tree back on the desk and stomped to the far corner to begin her critiques with a defiant “Explain yourself.”

Ever since, I have laid projects out and built prototypes in front of me early and dirty. I don’t need the perfect shade of ochre to see how everything will come together, and once it happens, it may be cerulean anyway. The early sketches and prototypes over the years have gotten many laughs, both due to their roughness and the little jokes I put in to entertain myself. They are built to get what I need from them. They make sure the design has a solid foundation with no surprises that will sneak up later. When I return to add the polish, I know it will stand up to whatever I throw at it, or whatever I throw it at.

Upgrade Complete is a great little flash game came out recently. Most likely based on one of the amazing conceptual exercises in Rules of Play, it focuses on one specific aspect of gameplay, buying upgrades, and takes it to its extreme. The upgrades you need to buy are to build the game itself, before you can even play it. I won’t spoil the game for you, as it really is quite fun, and it all builds toward a big punchline that makes you rethink how you judge the quality of games.

One of the most common traps people fall into is looking for some new gimmick or angle that will set them apart from the crowd. They focus on this technology and try to squeeze every last drop of “cool” out of it. They end up with a beautiful and clever piece of art that everybody agrees is impressive, yet nobody buys.

At the end of the day, the part of your work that people will remember and tell their friends about is the story. What is the problem that other people aren’t fixing? How does it hurt things in ways nobody has noticed before? Most importantly, how does what you are doing seamlessly fix this problem without causing new ones of its own? If you can’t answer these questions, you need to ask yourself if you should be heading a different direction.

How are you making life better and easier for someone else?