The Usability of Things

There was a time when I would attend one conference a month, talking to people in my field and neighboring fields. While the conferences directly related to what I do were great for seeing friends from around the world and seeing recent progress in interesting projects, I tend to keep up to date through news and friends already. The conferences that were of the most interest to me were the ones that were only tangentially related, when I would wade through lots of fascinating information to find an amazingly useful nugget that I couldn’t have found anywhere else.

Occasionally this happens with news as well, reading an article in an unrelated but fascinating field, when a section pops up that is incredibly relevant. In the middle of an article about 10 Business Lessons Niel Patel Learned This Year, there is a section called “Customers don’t know what they want” that starts off with a quote from Steve Jobs.

You can’t just ask a customer what they want and try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

This is a great reminder that when you ask people what they want, they will give you what they see as the most direct solution, treating a symptom. It’s always good to step back and look at the complete situation, determining the problem from outside. Address the problem that is causing the symptoms, or you will be caught in an endless game of whack-a-mole trying to solve each symptom as it pops up.

One of the most frequent questions I get asked by students and colleagues in the field is “What tools do you use?”. There is always an interesting assumption that software is the key to mind-blowing design, and if they find that latest Adobe beta or esoteric tool by some basement start-up, it will give them the edge they crave over others in the field. They are looking for something to either make their job easier and more efficient, or give their designs some flash and sparkle that will make coworkers gasp and think they are obviously more experienced than they let on.

My standard response used to be “Pen and paper”, though my time at IDEO has mutated it to “Sharpie and Post-its”. I never touch software until I have thought through several iterations of a design, and I often just present sketches. People are much more likely to chime in on a drawing, and there have been numerous times I’ve had someone suddenly stop themselves after a few minutes of illustrating points by drawing on top of my sketches, thinking they have mutilated a rare artifact, not thinking about the fact that I have been drawing with them the entire time.

Sketchiness provides an invitation for change, regardless of how well you can draw. My artistry is actually rather lacking, especially compared to some of my Industrial Designer colleagues. I’ve found that my drawings only encourage people to jump in and give it a shot themselves once you show that you aren’t afraid to embarrass yourself first because it’s the best way to get across a point.

The roughness of a drawing also helps reduce overall complexity. With software, it’s easy to get caught up in making things look amazing or fall into a rut of using the same tools repeatedly. When you have an empty page in front of you and a marker in your hand, no two things will ever look the same, and you work to convey concepts as simply and directly as possible, or the odds are they will take far longer than expected, while only becoming more ambiguous.

Sketching throughout the process opens up the table to everyone, giving everyone a common voice and an easy way to build on ideas quickly and fluently. Even if you are the worst artist in your company, grab a marker in the next meeting and start sketching out concepts instead of just writing interpretable words. You will be surprised how quickly people understand, and once people warm up to how easy and effective it is, you may have to fight to use the colors you want.

Over the years, my work has begun taking on a new direction. I’m still theoretically working in Product Design, but I noticed a while back that my process began shifting. I had less time in front of documentation and more time in front of different groups of people. I’ve seen less and less of my computer as the amount of time I spend teaching clients to think in different ways increases. It’s gotten to the point where the final deliverable may only tangentially be about a product, or not at all.

When I first started out, I remember the thrill of seeing something I designed sitting on a store shelf to be bought by anyone, or catching a glimpse of a billboard or magazine spread I designed as I went through my daily life. I spent a lot of time sitting behind a computer, tweaking details that I would probably be the only one to notice. As I worked on more products, my view began to shift to product families and how they all fit and worked together toward common goals. This soon expanded into how these families interacted with other product families, and the unique ecosystems that people created for themselves. Soon I was thinking about the entire experience a person would go through, from what caused them to look for specific products as solutions to their problems to what caused them to move past that solution when they had gotten their value from it.

I’m sure you see where this is going, but it wasn’t long before I realized that products are rarely the best available solution. There was an interesting shift that happened in my head the first time I was able to say out loud that maybe the world didn’t need an alarm clock with a sleeker, more minimalist design with a gorgeous backlit font and options to play world radio through multiple speakers, it just needed a reasonable way to guarantee someone could get up when they wanted.

There it was, and I couldn’t ignore it. I stopped asking questions like “How can I make this more desirable?”, and started asking questions like “What desire do people have unfulfilled?” to coworkers and clients. In the years following, it became amusing to me how often a client came in confidently asking for a very specific solution, only to walk away thinking about what questions they should be answering to determine which problem they should solve is. After that, it’s business as usual, guiding people through the process of figuring out which problems to solve, and what the best ways to solve those problems are.

My work results in designing less products that are sitting on store shelves these days, instead focusing on getting companies to research holistically to determine if they are asking the right questions to answer. I don’t as often get the thrill of seeing someone grab my design off a shelf, but when I do, I like knowing that it will serve them well for all the right reasons.

There is a sea change taking place right now. People are becoming more aware of the poorly made electronic gadgets around them and realizing they can choose something better. This is a great shift in a new direction, making people stop blaming themselves and start rising up against the real problem. However, there is a long road ahead as people shift from the old way of thinking.

A shining example is an article that was recently published in The Guardian titled “My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots“. The protagonist launches into an array of annoying qualities about his phone that render it nearly unusable. In the event that he does manage to squeeze out a phone call, the process of fighting his way there leaves him flustered and angered. This experience has affected him so much that it has changed the way he looks at phones, and he is spreading the word.

This is a huge step forward from the days where someone would be confused by a horribly designed device and chalk it up to themselves being too stupid to understand it. This particular scenario happens regularly with elders and computers when they hear about all that can be done with a computer. Because they’ve never had a good experience to compare to, the arcane methods used to navigate these little boxes appear overwhelmingly daunting and complex. When it comes down to it, there is a very good reason that elders typically feel this way.

Computers are overwhelmingly daunting and complex.

Not without good reason, mind you. The amount that these little boxes can accomplish is quite impressive, and with a great amount of options comes an equal or greater amount of methods to use those options. These options, in modern day parlance, have come to be known as “features”. It becomes easy to forget that the more features a device has, the more difficult it is to operate. This is why it takes multiple people with years of training to operate the dizzying array of knobs, switches, levers, and dials on a Boeing 747.

Historically, the more features a device had, the more expensive it was to produce. This kept a check on how complex devices became, as soon people wouldn’t pay more for the features they didn’t want. People developed a shorthand of using “feature lists” to demarcate which devices were better than others, and advertisers jumped at this opportunity to quickly and easily have something in writing that made their product stand out. This worked well for everyone involved.

Then along came software. With this advent, the cost to add in things that would qualify as “features” reduced dramatically, as they only had to be created once, and could be freely duplicated. Suddenly we have email with tailored ads, phones you can watch movies on, and video games on everything with a screen. If it adds a bullet to the feature list, throw it in. Because this used to be the most efficient way to determine the best product, people instinctively pick the product with “more stuff” in it over the one that might actually accomplish what they want done.

As a real-life example, a calculator manufacturer recently had two models for sale with the exact same functionality; the only real difference was the model number. Yet one of these calculators was selling much more than the other. Curious, the company hired a research agency to find out why. The agency went into stores where the calculators were sold side by side, and watched people compare feature lists, try out the calculators, and repeatedly pick one over the other. Then they went up to the customer and asked why they chose the one they did. Many of the customers had no idea, some said they just went with intuition, and some explained their process.

After reading the boxes and trying them out, they held one calculator in each hand and comparatively weighed them. They picked the heavier one, because it must have “more stuff” inside.

This method of thinking worked well for centuries, but is painfully out of date today. The mentality that you are missing out by not cramming every possible feature into something you pay for is self-defeating. People forget that for every feature you add, there needs to be a way to access it. Quickly you have gadgets with screen after screen of options, and suddenly you can’t get past the kitchen timer and movie player just to place a call.

A few companies have been producing focused products that accomplish the best tasks for their job, making it a point to leave out features that only get in the way. However, people still using the old way of thinking hold this against them. People dislike the iPod with the reasoning that it doesn’t have an FM tuner. People scoff at the Wii because it doesn’t have a DVD player. They think that if every imaginable feature isn’t squeezed into a gadget, it is less desirable. On the contrary, every feature you add crams more into the same little space. Soon when you want to sit down, relax, and just listen to your music or play a game, you have to fight through all the stuff you thought you wanted. It is far better to have a simple, direct interface that will immediately do what you want almost before you ask. It doesn’t do everything, but what it does, it does well.

The article that I mentioned at the beginning touches on this, but still comes from the old way of thinking. The title of the article focuses on the features that are on the phone, and how horrible they are. As he launches into the article, his complaints focus not on the features, but how unusable the device has become because there are so many loaded on. I haven’t seen a simple, small phone without buttons on every side in years. I regularly hear people complain about this, so the market is obviously there, but not loud enough to drive things yet.

It’s easy to drive the products with feature glut into extinction. Buy the things that do what you want, not the ones that promise to do everything. They already have to give away the phone in the article. Let’s make sure they don’t get made at all.

In the beginning, if you wanted something, you had to make it. You would strap things together, whittle them down, and build your own personal widget that did precisely what you wanted. How well this thing actually performed its task depended entirely upon your skill level in creating it, and someone else may have come up with an entirely different solution to the same problem. You may also have ended up liking their solution better. If enough people felt this way, the person could set up a business making these widgets and people would happily pay for the convenience. Each widget was made by hand and was slightly different from every other widget, which made it easy to personalize the final result to fit your needs. Your widget was built just for you, and it was the only one in existence.

Then along came Henry Ford and the assembly line. Suddenly you could guarantee that every part looked the same, felt the same, and worked the same. Quality control became easier, and production cheaper. Suddenly people found themselves in a flood of identical items, allowing them to quantitatively judge themselves against others. Keeping up with the Joneses became a national pastime. Appliances, cars, clothes, it didn’t matter. The brand of an item became a cachet, allowing people to quickly judge how someone viewed themselves by which of the assembly line products they chose.

Soon production became so inexpensive that it was cheaper to make a new widget than fix the old one. Objects became single-use items that had no long-lasting value or emotional attachment, and disposable culture was born. If something stopped working, you just threw it out and got a new one. Countless electronics don’t even have batteries that are removable, because they know it just isn’t worth it.

However, there is a backlash brewing. People want to have an emotional attachment to the items they have on them all the time. People want their belongings to have a sense of value to them, to be an extension of themselves. They put stickers over their computers, covering the vast flat expanses. They put a meaningful photo or cartoon as their desktop. They want others to know at a glance that this object belongs to them, that this widget is an extension of themselves and their personality.

Corporations are here to help.

Back in the heady dot com days, I bought a pair of Customatix [2000-2004, RIP]. You could go in and choose what kind of shoe you wanted, what colors, what style of laces, even which logo you wanted. The shoes had tags on the side that said whatever you wanted to have embroidered there. No longer did I have to choose from the oppressive colors and designs that the stores deemed worthy. I was free to create shoes that looked like whatever I wanted, and they would even be made in this country. It was win-win, and soon i had a pair of boots that advertised my website. It was much more subtle than it sounds, I assure you.

Now, more and more companies are going this same direction. Nike has spawned Nike iD, a site that lets you pick from most of their products and choose the colors you want in a clean, simple website that guides you through the process. Nike also owns Converse, which released Converse One, a nearly identical interface that allows you to design your Converse. Puma also lets you build your own shoes at the Mongolian Shoe BBQ, going for a completely different method, but with the same results. Puma used to only offer this directly in their store, digging through piles of fabric to pick the pieces you wanted to build your shoe with, and their website does a good job of approximating this. Getting a pair of shoes that express your personality has never been easier.

The world of customization no longer stops at shoes, however. It has been seeping into other quotidian items, like messenger bags. Timbuk2 offers a website that will let you personalize one of their bags with whatever colors you like. Freitag took it a step further, allowing you to “kill a truck” and rip apart the tarpaulin with stencils, picking exactly the area of fabric you want your bag to be built from. It’s amazing how detailed personalization is becoming.

Walking around wearing shoes and a messenger bag you designed yourself still isn’t enough for you? If you can no longer stand that pre-made watch on your wrist, Swiss watch manufacturer 121 Time will let you futz with the details of your own high-end timepiece. Fossil or Blancier will let you do the same, to varying degrees. Why drink what everyone else drinks when you could be sipping custom wine from Elite Vintners? Wearing all of these personalized items, you obviously can’t drive something that looks like what everyone else has, so Harley-Davidson will let you custom-build your own hog, all the way down to your choice of seat and tailpipe.

While riding around on your custom motorcycle, listening to what some snobby DJ on the radio thinks you should listen to is simply too oppressive. Thankfully, the BBC is launching MyBBCRadio, which will let you pick what kind of music you want to listen to. If you can’t wait, Pandora and MusicLens will let you do the same right now.

Enough about running through the daily rat race, what about personalized playtime with custom toys? There is always the Lego Factory, which will let you build anything you want out of legos. You can make your own Hot Wheels or Barbie if that’s more your speed. In any spare time, you can read a PersonalNOVEL created using the names of you and your loved ones as the main characters (providing you read German). And you can pay for it all with a custom credit card from Flexi, that not only lets you personalize how the card itself looks, but choose exactly what your terms of service are for your intricately individual life.

However, personalization doesn’t stop at physical objects, either. Snakes on a Plane recently launched a campaign that allows you to send a personal phone message from Samuel Jackson to a friend. Before long, on a whim we will be able to instantly personalize a touching and memorable song for those delicate moments in life. Just think of the possibilities.