So you’re sitting there trying to figure out how to design a webpage to explain a key service of your client. You’re doing everything the right way:
- you’ve discussed the service with your client to understand the angle they want you to focus on
- you’ve had the chance to user test the current design with real customers, so you know what confuses them
- you’ve sketched out a variety of possible solutions to tackle that confusion
- you’ve worked with your colleagues to bring a variety of viewpoints into the design solution
And then you stop — frustrated, disillusioned.
“There’s not good solution for how to explain this service, because the service is too damn complicated in the first place. < Sigh.> It’s obvious this service itself is broken. Let me start by fixing the service. Then I can design a good web page for it.”
Or as Don Norman said (way back in 1998), “Want human-centred development? Reorganize the company.”
I think that pseudo-anecdote is shared by most of us in the web design world. And it’s a theme that came out prominently in the last couple weeks.
John Wood: “How design thinking can create better business and better public services”
The first place it cropped up was at our own Boot Camp Future Now seminar, at the start of June. There, our own John Wood gave a cracker of a presentation on just this subject:
He noted how lowly regarded the design industry is in Ireland, how even considering the small size of the country, the industry is far too small with little signs of growth, and how, perhaps most depressing of all, in Ireland designers are often just brought in to do some styling at the tail end of a project, which John memorably captured with this slide:
His talk was nothing short of an impassioned plea for how we can apply design thinking to solve a much wider range of problems out there. What is design thinking?
Well, it’s:
- building to think
- failing often to succeed sooner
- observing real life to see things from the customers’ perspective
- creating choices before you make one
- and adopting a culture of critique
As with most good talks, viewing his presentation will only give you a taste of the talk; you need to see it in John’s inimitable style to get a sense of the depth and conviction of his points.
Peter Merholz: “Upgrading your mandate: evolving from user experience to customer experience”
John’s theme was, as if by design, expanded on in the first talk at the UX London conference, which was the week after our Boot Camp. Peter Merholz, co-founder of Adaptive Path, talked from experience of the challenges of trying to make the move up the value chain. He noted how a major hurdle was a client organisation one: to solve the problems that we’re finding means widening and deepening our exposure in an organisation:
“Customer experience is is not something an organisation buys, it’s a mindset it adopts.”
And a key point of his was a “new way of thinking about design…not just as aesthetics, or as a role, or as a thing, or as a rock star…but as an activity.”
But for me, the most memorable slide was this one: “Prepare for a slog”. Peter made the critical point that trying to have this impact takes times, take failure, requires patience, and hard work. You’re not going to get invited to the boardroom on the first try. You have to prove your value one person at a time.
Luke W: “Influencing Strategy by Design”
Getting into the boardroom to help organisations make better decisions was the precise theme of Luke Wroblewski’s half-day workshop, which took place on day 2 of UX London. (If you don’t know of Luke W, he’s the main design guy at Yahoo, and author of a couple great books on UI design.)
Luke had two memorable exercises. The first was where we paired up with someone and did a little role-playing. We each took 3 minutes to talk about all the problems in our current work — basically a mini bitch-session to a stranger. Then we flipped roles and took the position of the business owner and focused on actions we could take to deal with these problems, even just small steps to improvement. Though it sounded like a silly exercise from an Alcoholics Anonymous session, it turned out to be a mini-revelation:
Don’t let yourself accept bitching as a tolerable end to a conversation.
Or as Luke put it, be “Respone Able”. (Yeah I know, it still sounds like an AA session, but somehow it didn’t come across that way.)
Then Luke went on to map out what “design brings to the table”.
The answer: a lot. Specifically: pattern recognition, story-telling, visual communication, and empathy. The third one stood out — the ability to think visually. One stat Luke threw at us (and acknowledged could be complete BS, but that it feels right) was:
“100% of people learn visually, but only 10% of them can communicate visually.”
Brush up your drawing skills folks!
But Luke really played the point well that just by illustrating the problem in a visually pithy way was often in itself enough to get called into the boardroom. And that’s why Luke’s talk had such resonance, because he spoke of numerous personal experiences where his diagramming skills alone brought him into exec meetings at Yahoo and eBay he otherwise had no business being in.
The challenge: are you satisfied just to criticise? Or are you willing to hunker down and take on the problem?
So, going back to the situation at the start of this post, I think there’s two responses you can choose between:
- Whinge. Gripe. Complain. Bitch to your colleagues about how smart you are and how unenlightened your client is. Then go back and do the best you can with the page and move on to the next project.
- Do the best you can with the web page. Then go back to your client and show the user-testing clips. Explain how you’re only putting band-aids on a broken service, but you can’t get to the root of the problem. Visually illustrate the key issues. Offer to present your findings to other areas of the business. And start the very long, difficult climb towards fixing service design.
Option 1 is easy. Option 2 is hard. Really hard.
But as Don Norman said: “Nothing worthwhile is easy.”
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July 7, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Nice article Brian. I’ve done that the bitch about how unenlightened clients are many times! I also used to be a technical writer creating user manuals for products that just didn’t make sense. I could never quite decide how honest to be!
This not being high enough up the food chain to redesign what really needs to be redesigned is a big problem. I some across the same thing in accessibility. A lot of the time we’re talking to the wrong people – Corporate Social Responsibility people are very cosy to chat with but don’t have much effect on design.
There’s another associated problem though – giving them the right arguments. Even if you get to talk to the right people and tell them their process is fundamentally flawed, chances are they’ll walk away and forget the conversation if you don’t also convince them that it’s doing them damage on the balance sheet. “Who cares if the process is broken? Show me the return on investment from fixing it. If there’s no ROI, then why should I bother to fix it?”. It’s a perfectly understandable response.
I wonder if user-centred design in general is in the same situation as accessibility with a lack of convincing business cases? I’ve just written an article on the CFIT site where I point to recent research that shows that the lack of research giving a convincing business case is one of the main barriers to companies making their products and services accessible. This is because nobody’s done the research and companies aren’t doing it themselves. I argue that instead of trying to make a case for accessibility on its own merits (“it’s good”) or by using business case arguments for which we don’t have any research evidence, perhaps we should be arguing that businesses should research the business case for themselves. I think there’s enough evidence that there may be a good ROI to make it worthwhile for a lot of businesses to research th possible ROI for themselves. Similarly with user-centred design, maybe a good approach would be to try to convince businesses that it’s worth their while researching the ROI from UCD, because there’s a good chance they may come up with some findings that point to new ways of making money. Essentially, they would be researching a new market opportunity.