Interaction Design as Business Lubricant
Justin Petro
Thinktiv
Justin is currently the CEO of Thinktiv in Austin, Texas. Justin's previous experience includes retail and space design, industrial design, e-commerce, and user research. He's worked with clients such as Dell, Pricelock, Siemens, and Merrill Lynch and holds patents in hardware, software and retail design. Prior to founding Thinktiv, Justin worked as the Director of User Experience at Design Edge, HCI specialist for Trilogy Software, and Visual Interaction Designer at Maya Design Group. Justin holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Industrial Design.
We are at an impasse. Our profits are down; costs are up. We fight with our clients as much as we fight with ourselves. They don't listen to us, we don't listen to them, and we certainly don't listen to each other. We design new features rather than optimizing for specific needs; it is more and more common that marketing, not design, runs the show. Is there no end to this business cycle of commoditization? At the current rate, we are to be remembered as a bitter and disenchanted industry, a profession rewarded with paltry salaries for endless hours of pushing pixels and polishing radii. In case your bitter black turtle necked heart forgot for a moment, remember—as you dig in your tight jeans' pocket for enough change to get your double-mocha-skinny-latte fix: we are designers. We are agents for change.
Think back to the pre-internet era ten years ago, and relive the bubble ride again for a moment. Recall the promises we made to our clients, and how our profession began to shift: to embrace technology, and usability, and brand. We wanted to create something larger than a mark or product; we were after the customer experience. Can you remember what made us designers before the bubble burst? How quickly we forgot what made us special.
Do you remember the first time you got a book from Amazon or time shifted television on your Tivo? Our ability to think latterly, to diagnose problems, construct creative solutions, and think outside the proverbial Dell box is what makes us unique. These qualities are our saviors, not our handcuffs. It is our ability to think—not our ability to make—that we need to harness and embrace; further, it is our ability to think—not our ability to make—that should drive our compensation. It is time for a serious reinvention of our industry, ourselves, and what we call “business.”
It's time for us to take back what is—and was—rightfully ours; the ability to create emotionally compelling solutions that our audience falls in love with. We have succumbed to a world where marketers “design,” business people “research,” and the bean counters run the show. We need to reclaim our role at the front end of our process; we have no business in the position we have relegated ourselves to: that of the implementer. We need to remember our oath as Designers and reclaim our role as strategist.
Tradition be damned
As designers, we are thinkers. While today's Designers come from myriad different backgrounds and educations and harbor diverse skill sets, we are still all the same: we are thinkers. In industry, we put up walls between ourselves and between our clients. We like to classify each other and characterize design as “industrial” or “graphic.” But the discipline be damned: it is our ability to think creatively and broadly, not our physical output (be it words, renderings, or diagrams) that defines us professionally.
The focus on a designer as a stylist—on the visual aspect of design—is not surprising. The visual is our tangible deliverable, and appears to be our greatest (and only) contribution. It is far easier to “critique” and evaluate the physical characteristics of a product rather than debate the products' existence or emotional benefits; we concentrate on the “prettiest” picture instead of the best solution. Designers are traditionally labeled as the “makers” of “pretty things,” and as such, we exist at the end of a long process—not where we belong—at the beginning. This placement forces us into a predestined flow dictated by the establishments of marketing, technology, and aesthetics. We are categorically at the whim of conservatism, because, as bizarre, ironic, and paradoxical as it is to the essence of design—designers fear change.
The problem is epidemic; it is not isolated. It is as rampant from academia to Redmond. Our industry and our educational system are both to blame. We both focus considerable time on creating the tangible instead of the intellectual. In addition, the problem is cyclic; academia follows industry and industry is subsequently held hostage by stagnante talent pools.
Professionals spend the majority of their time competing on the level of “cool” instead of the level of “thought.” This battle to create the most “bling” is detrimental to designers, to design, and to our clients. Our inability to articulate the importance of process means our clients focus on “money shot” renderings while they overlook the basic testaments of user centric design; moreover, as project managers equate design to “pretty pictures,” they gloss over the true usefulness of the discipline: innovation and differentiation.
We must change; we have to become strategists, not just visualists—thinkers, not makers. We need to use our skills of design to solve business problems, not showing how glossy a surface, or how pretty a pixel. We need to move away from being implementers of someone else's ideas to creating opportunities in new markets with our own ideas. Strategy means we as designers need to be broader in our focus. We need to be able to write clearly, to speak eloquently, to substantiate our thoughts, and, of course, to communicate ourselves visually. Furthermore, we need to break down our little walls of comfort and learn to work with people who compliment us: people like writers, researchers, engineers, and executives.
Driven—not driving
Given the current placement of design at the end of the traditional business process, it should not be surprising that design is relegated to stylist. If we are not leading the process with our thoughts, then we will forever follow by “doing the plastics” or “pushing the pixels.” Consider how physical products traditionally come to market:
1. A “businessperson” sees an opportunity because he himself has a problem and a deep bank account. A typical suspect is the sole entrepreneur that is so singular in his vision, he forgets that he is in fact, singular. We willingly accept his money, but we have no way to illustrate to him the long-term vision of failure we have seen time and time again.
2. Next, a “marketer” throws out some arbitrary audience description: “design for anyone between eight and eighty.” Some form of long-winded but ill-researched documentation accompanies this description; quotes from analysts hardly compensate for quotes from real people, yet the product requirements document is almost always driven by Forrester or Gartner.
3. An engineer overworks the widget of all widgets, all of the time considering what “he would like.”
4. Finally, when the product deadline is looming and the budget is nearly gone, a designer is called in to “make it look good.” This stage is easily predicted and includes comments like:
“I know it doesn't make sense, but no, we can't
move that, engineering put it there.”
“No, it has to be white—the ipod is white;
that's what the analysts said.”
“User data? No, we don't have any,
that's what we pay marketing for.”
“I don't care what they want, it's what I want—
and I'm paying the bills.”
The song remains the same across our industry; you'll find similar stories in the product, graphic, or interactive design consultancy. We are continually beaten down by technology centric and marketing driven initiatives that all end in a visual deliverable. These processes exist because they worked; at one time, the “bar” of user experience was so low that a “not beige” colored plastic was enough to differentiate a product in the marketplace. But as product design drives towards commodity, and the market of goods is more frequently differentiated only by cost, we realize that it is a business decision to turn the process around. Designers need to be facilitators, educators and administrators, but not implementers; they need to be paid for the quality of their ideas, and must be strategically positioned within the organization to do so.
Doers—not thinkers
We live in an industry that has rules, establishments, organizations, and processes that have been developing for the better part of a century. The blame of conservative thinking in design falls equally on all of us, from businesspeople to researchers to educators, but it is the designers that are most at fault for their lack of understanding the business of Design.
Currently, our ability to make money is directly related to production rather than thought. We are compensated based on the quantity of sketches we've produced and the number of hours on the clock, but there is little mention of how well we solved the actual problem at hand. Designers, and design firm owners, get trapped in an unhealthy and uncontrollable cyclical cycle of following the implementation cash cow. We chase jobs that seem lucrative, only to burn through hours quickly: after all, more hours means more clients, and more clients means more money. The work doesn't need to be fulfilling; a beveled edge on the corner of a remote control pays just as well as the beveled edge on the industry blockbuster. Great designers burn out because the work is mediocre; good designers become mediocre designers as they slip into the rut of “bread and butter” design.
Rare is the designer who does not think he could have done a better job. The amount of hubris in the professional industry of design is rampant. Paul Rand, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Philippe Stark are all viewed as “geniuses.” Some were, and others still are, tyrannical, often both in personality as well as in their approach to design. These are the figureheads that most equate with design; these “visionaries” are the exception, yet we herald them as the rule.
It is no surprise, then, that designers fear change. We have been taught to be ivory towers unto ourselves—not collaborators or group workers. Fear creeps in from other industries; the young designer is berated with images of Karim Rashid bleating “I want to change the world,” yet the consultancy of today allows him to change nothing of substance at all. Who would have thought that an industry that is so focused on change is also so fearful of it? It almost appears as if the progressive and “hip” field of design is the most conservative field of all.
If we pause for a moment and look at similar “knowledge” and “thought-based” industries, we can see the pendulum swings wholly in the other direction. Law is perhaps one of the most profitable (albeit not necessarily moral) businesses for the strategic mind. Computer Scientists, too, are well compensated for their work and their quality of thinking. Computer Scientists, especially, are rewarded by the intellectual property of their thoughts; IPO anyone? Even politicians enjoy some degree of reward based on the quality of their idea.
In short, we have it all backwards. Our inability to assume risk—to change—is, in fact, the biggest risk of all.
No silver bullets
While we need a fundamental change in our philosophy about design and design process, there are many other forces that effect this transition. If “thinking different” were enough, we'd all be using Apple quality products and software. But an obvious barrier to this utopia of “design as strategist” and “designer as leader” is cost: thinking different costs money; sometimes, a lot of money. As is usually the case in business, the more something costs, the less the bean counters want to hear about it.
Thus, communicating—and objectively justifying—our intentions and visions is critical. Communication between all the parties becomes the most critical issue in transitioning design from a skill-based industry to a knowledge-based industry.
The lack of communication in any business context is bait for disaster.
There are two things at consummate odds in our industry: a designer's vision versus the cost of achieving it. The ideal—not idea—that “if you build it, they will come” deserves an asterisk: only if it's affordable, trust-worthy, and desirable. We are at odds with our clients. While we want to create ideas, they want to create profits.
Communication in this context does not mean more emails or lengthier phone calls. Communication is the lynchpin of a good design program. It's the difference between good and great; coveted and forgotten; icon and fad. But, how can we improve communication between ourselves, our clients, and our suppliers?
The answer lies in processes we already know. Design is typically described as a visual discipline. However, that is only a partly true. Our discipline has historically welcomed disparate professions into our fold like computer scientists, researchers, cognitive psychologists, and business analysts. Globally, however, we tend to forget that this is a historical precedent, not a trend. As such, we should embrace their best practices and processes to achieve successful communication of our visions. In order to improve, grow, and evolve, we must focus on iterative communication.
1. Don't just listen, start writing. Communication needs to be structured. Help your team by creating communication templates. Templates can range from initial engagement, needs analysis, Persona development, and so on. A formal system of communication involves your clients in the process, ensuring that all parties agree on goals and deliverables, and minimizes redundancy by clearly identifying the boundaries of the scope.
2. Be iterative, cyclical, and consistent, but not occasional. Stop putting so much prominence on the “final presentation.” Consider how the software industry relies on short iterative cycles of development rather than a long, drawn out release that climaxes in some pinnacle presentation. For example, a classic industrial design job: a week of late-term development sketching. Over this week, a designer can create about ten quality sketches a day. If we waited for a review, we might have a wall of one hundred sketches. But a review at this stage is too late; even if one of the sketches is acceptable, none of the sketches are refined. Instead, if we are iterative and cyclical, we present—to the client—ten sketches the first day representing our 10 directions. The client can immediately disregard nine of them. This allows us to concentrate on a very specific set of instances, instead of floundering trying to meet our “quota.” Moreover, it is a far more strategic approach where “thought” trumps “production.” This may seem like an obvious solution; but it's seldom practiced in our industry.
3. Lead by design. Every problem we face is a design problem, and should be approached as such. If a meeting is getting bogged down with a fight over features, take control of the room and consider the problem from a “design point of view”: write the ideas down and begin to find connections between ideas. If a marketing or businessperson is struggling to communicate an idea, sketch it. We all too often forget about our strongest assets when we're in meetings with non-designers. Yet, it is these times when it is most important to remember the power of design thinking.
Thinking is the new black
There is a reason why computer scientists, doctors, architects, and lawyers are wealthy: they use their brains as their bartering tools. They are knowledge workers and strategists, and while they all “create,” they are not only implementers. Daily, we sell ourselves short by allowing ourselves to be described as ”makers.” An architect certainly does not describe himself as a draftsperson; we must lead with our minds—not with our pencils.
Design strategy is comprehensive. It is far deeper than the superficiality of brand strategy. “Make it all white, like the ipod” is about as far from design strategy as one can get. Strategy is the ability for design to unite all the members of the product development process: Business, Marketing, Engineering, Research, and Clients. We are the glue that ties all these parts together, and the grease that makes them move freely and quickly. We, as a discipline, need to be active in demanding a more responsible role in the design process.
Business (and design) has long been overseen by “project managers”: people who lust over timetables, budgets, and specs. Innovation does not exist where time and budgets are commodities. Design needs to sit where it is most useful, in the beginning, as a strategic tool; a place where vision and the future are paramount. This place is as close to the CEO as possible. Jay Mays at Ford, Jonathan Ives at Apple, and Michael Graves with Target have all clearly illustrated the power of design as a strategic business motivator.
Enter the Interaction Designer
While the end goal may be “designer as board member,” the interim solution is to utilize the Interaction Designer as program manager.
A Designer as manager is an invaluable asset. The strongest quality a designer can possess is the ability to empathize with people and understand their needs. The first rule of good design is to understand your audience; this applies when developing a product, but it also applies when facilitating in the boardroom.
Designers have the uncanny ability to think above a situation and yet continually judge the ramifications of a group decision. This is extremely different from traditional project managers, people who may have gained their position because of their abilities to balance a budget or build a spreadsheet. A good designer looks at everyone's position at once; he is able to remain un-mired in engineering's rat-holes or marketing's hyperactive vernacular jargon speak.
A Designer as strategist can take seemingly disparate haystacks of information and rearrange them to make sense—even to someone who is a layman. Consider the principles of information architecture applied not to a website but to an entire corporation. Along with empathizing with people's problems, good designers can organize schedules and deliverables, group tasks, and arrange ideas far more creatively than any other discipline. Designers are built to recognize disparate patterns across verticals. This is invaluable when developing products that span different mediums, such as a digital music player that interacts with a software application.
A Designer is a generalist. Once well educated and experienced, they understand all areas of the product development process and their effect on the overall product. In fact, as design education continues to evolve, the lines are blurred between communication, industrial, interactive, and interior design. While there will certainly always be specialists who concentrate in one area, a new breed of designers—those who focus on the overall experience of a product—are becoming more relevant. Within these people is the knowledge of multiple design disciplines; these people consider the interaction—or experience—one has with a product (moreover a Brand), and are able to see the forest and the trees.
These new designers understand business. They know what it takes to make money; they understand their audience and design for their needs. They understand the ramifications of technology, engineering constraints, and materials science. Finally, they know that their audience needs to be able to purchase their products; they understand the power of the internet, marketing, and the new retail experience. This designer is at the same time technical and creative, pragmatic and visionary.
A designer has a tool belt of skills that is as much art as it is science. Design can seem magical: designers have the ability to make the intangible real. The designer's innate ability to empathize with people, organize tasks, synthesize information, and think laterally makes him the most valuable asset in an organization.
Implementing strategy
I have pursued this vision of Interaction Designer in upper management relentlessly over the past 5 years. From my experience, I have discovered three activities which must be employed to achieve this vision successfully. They work serially to build upon each other, and they are not easy.
1. Philosophize. Change the way people think. The biggest barrier to successfully implementing a new process based on design is the philosophical change the organization has to go through. This is unequivocally the most difficult task of the three.
Designers are conservative, and worse, territorial. This is true in other disciplines as well, and no one wants to be told they now need to be subservient to a new set of practices. The last thing a Principal of a company wants to hear is how broken his business is. However, if you can convince him that the opportunity far outweighs the fear, then you can begin to gain ground; Philosophizing must begin at the top.
One must convince the “powers that be” that this is the way of the future. In order to do this, the process must be clear, concise, and substantiated: the process must be directly related to the bottom line. Prior success speaks volumes; in order to illustrate prior success, those successes must be documented.
While philosophizing, one can expect to hear defensive prattle like:
“We've always done business like this, no need to change.”
“You're a “make it pretty” guy, you don't know about business.”
“I'm smart; I don't need to know what users think.
I'm smarter than them.”
“You can't sell that here, we're a product company—
we don't need research.”
“I don't need strategy. I use my business intuition—
it's better than any of your research.”
To quiet the naysayers, one must be extremely clear how Interaction Design will be integrated, will positively effect business, and will be utilized. The best way to illustrate these is to allow your audience to find them on their own: empower your executives to think. Help them see design as an answer to their struggles.
2. Indoctrinate. Once people understand that change is coming, it's time to make your team, company, and boss believe in the “force” in order to make it happen. Here is where designers do what they do best: visually communicate the Philosophy. Put simply: make a diagram and create a vision.
Almost all organizations have some degree of problems related to business, culture, workflow, and process. Our goal as designers is to solve these through simplicity. Utilize design to communicate these problems and to show how the natural process of design implicitly solves these problems. A good business process diagram will show who the stakeholders are, where they affect the process, and how each stakeholder interacts with each other. At this stage, your goal is to address the specific concerns of people throughout your organization. You need to indoctrinate them not only with the philosophy of design, but also with its vernacular, process, and ideals. In short, begin to address specific concerns from above:
“We've always done business like this, no need to change.”
Show that the addition of integrated design services will help to add bottom line results by expanding the business at the front end, and then throughout the process. Further, show that core business has been eroded steadily because of their “lack of change,” cheap outsourcing, and shift of the industry away from implementation.
“You're a “make it pretty” guy, you don't know about business.”
Show that designers understand “people,” and people buy products. Thus, we know quite a lot about what appeals, what constitutes a good market opportunity, and how to drive innovation early in a process; this increases the likelihood of getting to market early, generating intellectual property, and increasing market share.
“I'm smart, I don't need to know what users think.
I'm smarter than them.”
Arrogance is a recipe for disaster. Anytime the “I'm an expert” argument is raised, inquire how over-budget the program was, how successful the product was, and how many times did work need to be done over. Moreover, how happy was the client? Strategy is the insurance policy for the designer. If we are clear in our vision, we will be clear in our designs.
“You can't sell that here, we're a product company—
we don't need research or strategy.”
Design can be infused in any organization, from a real estate agency to a potato farm; nearly all business case studies accurately describe design, yet use words that are familiar to the MBA. Reframe a traditional business case in light of strategic design and planning.
“I don't need strategy. I use my intuition—
it's better than any of your research.”
If your organization traditionally does a one-eighty every development cycle because they wait till they have a product nearly complete before they talk to users, show them how design will put the user first; illustrate how research and strategy won't cramp their style, but in fact will bolster productivity by providing a framework for innovation.
Why use a diagram to convey all of this critical information?
The answer is simple; it holds us accountable. It ties us to a formal communication of our intentions; it disseminates easily, and it allows us to create a repetitious call to action. Our goal is to educate and indoctrinate an organization about design philosophy by show-casing how designers solve problems: creatively, visually, and tangibly. By being visual, it forces problems into the open. Principals, naysayers, and mediocre staff can't hide behind three by five foot printouts. A good visual solution to this problem stirs communication, creates momentum, and drives change. It positions the designer as a thinker, something the organization may have had no previous exposure to.
3. Entrench. The difficult job becomes harder; you must establish your relationship to the core competencies of the business. Identify the area you can “own,” and expand from there. In a product design company, attach yourself to something that is as close to the audience as possible: the controls, buttons, materials, icons, and ultimately, the audience. You may find yourself doing more communication design than Interaction Design at the start, but it is a means to an end.
This process may take months—or even years. It is tedious, time consuming, and personally exhausting. But when all is said and done, you have successfully “laddered up” from simply impacting individual programs to creating strategic recommendations for future markets.
It's Design, not design
Being a designer should be one of the most rewarding careers a thought leader can pursue. For some of us, it certainly comes close. It's fulfilling, irresistible, and enthralling when it goes well. Yet we still face an uphill battle, and many of us will tire of the constant evangelism necessary to gain the respect we deserve. Each of us is responsible for making the whole of the industry—nay, the world—understand the importance of design. It is not enough to make things prettier; we need to make them more “usable, useful, and desirable.” We need to educate our co-workers, our friends across the globe, ourselves, and we must be relentless in the communication of this education. Else, we run the risk of selling ourselves short, undermining our worth, and remaining just “makers” and not “thinkers.”
Henry Ford said it best: “There is no man living who isn't capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.” Henry must have been talking about a Designer.
Copyright for this article is held by Justin Petro; reprinted here with permission.
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