Foreword

What a joyful cornucopia of a book! What a delight to find a fresh and practical approach to involving stakeholders in rethinking the design of “products.” The practical usefulness is broad, going beyond products per se to an expansive range of designed experiences. It is full of refreshing ideas and real-world examples, rich with images, visuals, and charts, all very helpful in articulating the practicality of the Presumptive Design (PrD) approach. This book offers a much needed balance to the well-documented and oversubscribed traditional usability and user-centered approaches. Historically, user experience design (UXD) professionals have focused on refining details of an artifact instead of considering what the product space might be. Frequently, too little is known about the problem space and domain, which can hinder more open-ended meaningful and participatory conversations. In this book, we learn how eliciting such conversations can ultimately lead to better product design solutions.

For example, during years of experience in teaching students, urging them to take a user-centered approach to product design, I’m used to their reluctance to start with rough prototypes. Rather, they push back, suggesting they cannot build artifacts unless they have access to specialized tooling. I asked one student to find something he could use to make a physical artifact. He struggled and eventually said he liked baking bread. So I said he should bake a bread artifact, which he did as his first handheld artifact. What a difference this book would have made (and will make going forward) in helping teach! Now, with PrD in hand, students can increase their understanding of how best and effectively to achieve a successful design; the approach legitimizes being rough, fast, and iterative. Thankfully this book will help focus students’ time and attention on a critical part of the product design process: the very early ideation design stages— when they are just starting to grapple with the problem.

This book explains clearly how to use open-ended, almost humorous artifacts as key tools to begin conversations with stakeholders. The many examples in this book highlight the ease with which team members can participate in creating such working “tools.” More than just a cookbook on rapidly producing rough prototypes, this book offers details on how to help when things go wrong. Our authors offer detailed examples of “engagements gone wrong,” suggesting clear ways to change the discourse and improve the outcomes of stakeholder conversations. These insights and examples are realistic and immensely helpful; they effectively let us learn from these two masters.

I could have used this book so many years ago! In 1999 while designing a portable audio device for a music museum, my team “accidentally” designed a feature-rich device. We started to develop the prototype way too late into the product development cycle, believing we understood what was needed based on our (misguided) ideas of who was the typical visitor. We started our process by refining those perceived needs. But as this book clearly states, we should have started our thought process by ideating early and often with very rough notions of what visitors might want from the experience, and then try those assumptions out with real users. PrD would have also given us the tools to illustratively support and defend the process of how we got to where we landed, how we derived our solutions, and how our interdisciplinary team pruned our thought processes. Sadly our resulting product suited few visitors, functionally doing way too much! PrD would have been very helpful at defending a much simpler, useful product following a team-based, fast, and defensible process.

PrD requires the designer to take on unusual practices such as failing fast, throwing away ideas, and feeling safe about feeling foolish! It is often hard to “design rough,” or to “design for failure,” to “actively listen” to receive truly open input about “any” loosely defined artifact. But as these authors successfully defend, it is far better to try “something” out than wait and refine later “draft” product artifacts. This book makes a compelling case that throwing away these artifacts is far less costly than merely refining something already in place—less costly, as long as the designers offer the artifacts directly to end-users and are prepared to throw them away. And, if they are willing to quickly go through many iterations to get closer to what is really needed. The whole approach sounds so much like common sense I’m surprised it has taken so long for it to be legitimized! I wonder why we have not had such a book before; it makes so much sense—really!

On a personal note I know how much more I’ve learned from my failures as opposed to successes. The authors embrace notions of failure as an alternate way to move designs forward, to view failure as a positive opportunity to experiment and explore new territory. When we are pursuing disruptive innovation, the authors suggest that the fastest way to reduce wasted effort is to rapidly and iteratively fail. “Management is rewarded for efficiency not effectiveness,” so they quote. The authors challenge the tenets of industry by their celebration of failure; they triumph lack of success in multiple small ways as the least expensive way to ultimately succeed big. This book shows ways we can legitimize the need for failure to make the resultant designs more effective. This book begins to challenge the status quo within our corporations, which is always a valued provocation.

The authors liberally sprinkle memorable phrases and images throughout this book to help readers easily remember the PrD approach. “Roughly right is better than precisely wrong” (from Keynes), “Messy artifacts are ambiguous to encourage engagement,” and SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (from Doran’s seminal paper). The photos of real people practicing PrD techniques alongside humorous vintage touches are lovely and enjoyable. This book is carefully crafted and an easy read. I hope it becomes required reading for design and business students; most critically it is a must-read for business and UXD professionals. With its quick lists, reminders, easy recipes, and tips, it can be used “just-in-time” as a go-to reference, even as it makes compelling arguments for improving UXD’s impact on the bottom line.

This book offers UXD professionals a palette of work products to accelerate return on investment (ROI) when exploring new product territories. By incorporating PrD into their work processes, companies will reduce the risks of innovation. The authors position PrD within agile product/engineering management: Managers and business leaders will learn how best to fit PrD into their current business operations to improve their innovation processes and team productivity.

Thank you for putting the time in to create this fun and excellent resource for us all. I believe this book will have a place in our vocabulary for a long time.