Jesse Weaver, Author at Design Like You Mean It

There is so much that goes into pushing great design out into the world. A good place to start is getting the right personalities on your team. Now, no personality is without it’s downsides, but here are a few that I think can be pretty helpful. Keep in mind that these may not be individual people. Depending on the size of the team, they might be all rolled up into one.

1. The Perfectionist

No detail is too fine, no nuance too miniscule. The Perfectionist is the purveyor of consistency. The pusher of precision. They can spot a 2px spacing issue from three desks away, and lie in bed at night sweating about line lengths and font sizing.

Why you need them: Things can get crazy over the course of a project. As the number of files, layouts and versions grow the details can get sloppy. The Perfectionist is there to keep it all on the rails. If they aren’t doing the work themselves, include them in as many reviews as you can. I guarantee they’ll catch things no one else will.

2. The Visionary

The visionary is convinced you should be designing an Oculus Rift experience to control a 3D printed drone. They live on the bleeding edge and watch the latest trends. You may have trouble pulling them away from the latest Chrome experiment in order to get some actual work done.

Why you need them: A team’s energy ebbs and flows. The more you can keep people excited and energized the better their creative output. While a lot of ideas may not be feasible, the Visionary brings a steady dose of creative energy, inspiration and excitement to the table that can push the team to think outside the box and encourage people to go out on a limb.

3. The Closer

Designing is only half the battle. The rubber meets the road when it’s time to get a design from prototype (or comp) to actual living, breathing creature in the wild. That’s where the Closer comes in. The Closer is all about the nitty gritty. They have a deep, unending love for specs and annotations, and the technical know how to wade into detailed conversation with engineers. They are tough and persistent, with enough passion and dedication to push until the very end.

Why you need them: With all the demands on a design team it can be easy to “finish” a design, pass it over to engineering and move on to the next thing. But the best design teams put as much emphasis on shepherding their work through development as they do on designing the thing in the first place.

4. The Straight Shooter

Honesty is the best policy. The Straight Shooter believes this to the core. If they think something is good, they will tell you. If they think something is crap, they will tell you. Feelings be damned, they are going to give you their honest opinion, especially if they think it’s going to make the work better.

Why you need them: Honesty and critique are key to getting great design work out the door. Sometimes design teams can fall into a habit of sugar coating feedback and letting things slip through that might not be at the level you want. The Straight Shooter helps keep everyone accountable and makes it less likely that the team will develop bad critique habits.

5. The Wolf

“I’m Winston Wolf. I solve problems.”

Cool, calm and collected, the Wolf excels in high pressure situations. Creative workarounds and decisive problem solving are the Wolf’s forte. They are reliable, dedicated and level headed, with a killer instinct for cutting through drama to get to the heart of a problem.

Why you need them: Over the course of a project it is inevitable that something is going to blow up. Files get deleted. Scope creeps. Deadlines shift. If not addressed quickly, those things can completely derail a project. Fortunately, if you’ve got a Wolf on your team, you can rest easy. When the shit hits the fan, the Wolf knows how to keep the ship on course.

6. The Producer

Heads down, headphones on. When the Producer is in the zone, everyone knows to give them their space. The Producer is a wizard with their software of choice. They know all the shortcuts and are almost obsessive about streamlining their workflow. They are never more comfortable then when they are churning through work.

Why you need them: Sometimes you just need to get a lot done. Maybe you have to create a ton of content images to fit a new design, or you decided to make a change that now needs translated to all your templates across all your breakpoints. This is the Producer’s sweet spot. Just point them in the right direction and let ’em go.

7. The Politician

The Politician spends more time in meetings then they do in Sketch or Photoshop. But, the Politician thrives at doing the dirty work to sell the design vision, generate buy in, knock down barriers and shield the team from everything rolling down hill. Their ability to design is matched only by their ability to sell it. They manage up and down, carrying the flag of design to the highest levels and inspiring a shared vision throughout the organization.

Why you need them: The process of design is messy business. There are stakeholders to satisfy, a creative vision to maintain, deadlines to hit and expectations to manage. The Politician knows the playing field and the players and is adept at navigating the system. Without them, great design may never see the light of day.

FYI: If you are a team lead, this is probably you. If you haven’t yet, I’d suggest setting aside the next few days to binge some House of Cards :).

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“7 Personalities You Need on Your Design Team” was originally published in Medium on December 28, 2015.

What is your design philosophy? — I was asked this question by a candidate during a recent job interview. Oddly, it was the first time I’d ever been asked that question. As I fumbled through an answer I realized I didn’t really have an articulated design philosophy, or at least not one that easily came to mind. So I decided remedy that.

1: There is art in design, but design is not art

There is a practiced art to creating great design, but the final output of the design process is not art. Art is creative expression intended to provoke questions and individual interpretation. Art is inspiring, emotional and important, but does not fill a specific need beyond humanities’ desire to express itself. Design, on the other hand, is a creative process intended to solve a problem, to fill a need for the people that will ultimately interact with it. Design should not be open to interpretation, but instead should define how it is to be engaged with and should guide a user at each stage of that engagement. Art creates questions, design creates answers.

2: Design must be rooted in reality

As Dieter Rams says, “Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”. Empathy is the conduit to great design and the critical skill for great designers. Without a deep understanding of the end user and the reality in which a design will be used, any decision a designer makes is a shot in the dark. To fill a real need, design must be rooted in reality.

3: Design is never perfect

Design is about creating elegant solutions to address user needs. The tricky thing is that most often we are designing for humans, and humans are complicated. People’s expectations and desires evolve over time. Sometimes design evolves to meet these changes, sometimes design is the driver of the change. Regardless, a designer’s work is never done. This does not mean that design needs to be trendy, design can be timeless, but a great designer has a bent toward iteration and always has their ear to the ground.

4: Design is a set of tools, not a standardized process

Every problem presents its own unique set of characteristics, as such there is no one-size-fits-all process for coming to the best solution. The art of design is about having a diverse set of tools and approaches, and determining when to apply each. To quote Maslow, “…it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail” — so always carry a hammer, a screw driver, a pair of pliers and a hex wrench.

5: Design communicates obvious function

For something to be “well designed” it could be simple, or it could be complex. It could be considered aesthetically pleasing, or it could be considered gaudy. Aesthetics and simplicity are not requirements. For something to be well designed, the key requirement is that its function must be obvious. A person should be able to easily determine how to use and interact with it.

6: Design should delight

A design should create moments of delight for the people who encounter it. There is no steadfast rule as to what is delightful. Delight can come in different forms for different people, this is where empathy comes in, but most likely it is a mix of form, function and value that creates that often intangible emotional connection to a well designed thing.

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That’s my first attempt at articulating a design philosophy. I’d love to hear how you’d answer the question — What is your design philosophy?

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“What is Your Design Philosophy?” was originally published in Medium on December 21, 2015.

“You know, that’s a desk for a fifth grader.”

Two days ago I moved offices from one side of the building to the other. I had a plan for the new space but I didn’t have all the stuff yet. So I set up a small Ikea table in the corner of the room. It’s all I needed to do my job. No big deal, right?

What happened next was a little unexpected, but was an insight into human nature that put a fine point on one of the challenges we run into every day trying to create great products.

In the 48 hours since the move that small room has drawn more attention than anything else in the entire office. Hardly a single person has been able to walk by without stopping to comment.

“You know that’s a desk for a fifth grader.”

“You could us a little more stuff in here.”

“Is that all the furniture they’d give you?”

“Maybe some wall art?”

“Interesting. There’s a lot of potential in here.”

I’ve received literally 30 comments in two days. Given the size of our org, that’s well over a 50% comment rate. Some people have stopped multiple times. One person insisted she get a picture of me (as seen above).

It freaks people out. There is a palpable tension every time someone stops. People clearly think it’s weird, or I’m weird, or whatever. They are uncomfortable. But what’s most interesting is that, inevitably, the conversation steers toward how I’m going to fill the space. What I’m going to add. When I assure people that more stuff is coming they visibly relax. All is right with the world once again.

There is something a little off-putting, but also compelling, about empty space. Honestly, sitting at that little desk in that empty room does make me feel weird. Nature abhors a vacuum and people abhor unused space. We feel a deep need to fill it.

“Interesting. There’s a lot of potential in here.”

We see potential in unused space. Not potential for the sake of it’s emptiness, but potential for what we can put in it. However, great products keep things simple. They solve problems in the clearest and most concise way. The challenge comes in keeping it that way.

A new product starts out with the core features needed to solve the problem. But then that feeling of discomfort starts to creep in. There’s still room for more stuff, why aren’t we filling it? We start to see potential in the empty spaces. So we add features. We extend. We expand. And before we know it our simple, clear product is bloated, overcrowded and confusing. On top of that, you’ll probably find that all those additional features didn’t really add that much value for the user.

Sometimes a tiny desk is all you need to do the job. The more I sit in that empty room, the more comfortable I get.

The more comfortable we can get with the existence of empty space, the more we can understand the significant value it holds. It’s simple, it’s clean, it lacks distraction. There is room to breath in there. One key to great product design is resisting the urge to fill all the empty space. The features you say no to are as important as the ones you say yes to. It feels uncomfortable and it will meet resistance, the urge to fill the space is strong, but if you give your products room to breath your users will thank you.

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“Perils of Product Design: The Empty Space Trap” was originally published in Medium on March 27, 2015.

As the father of two tiny people, I’ve spent a lot of time with big purple dinosaurs, curious monkeys and little backpack wearing adventurers. Interestingly, I‘ve discovered that kids shows can teach us a lot about good product design, especially that Dora the Explorer.

Make It Predictable

Every episode of Dora is the same. There is a clear end goal and Dora has to go through three steps to get there. The goal and the steps are articulated (repeatedly) by Dora and her friends throughout the adventure. This repetitive structure makes the show extremely enjoyable for kids because they can master it. They get what needs to happen, they understand the steps to get there and they know what’s coming next.

People are driven by a desire for mastery. We want to feel accomplished and capable. The easier it is for a person to master a product the more likely they are to feel good about the experience. Predictability goes a long way toward making that happen. There are a number of ways to make a product predictable:
1. Maintain design consistency: Users should know what design elements mean, no matter where they appear in an experience. If tapping a specific icon is supposed to open a navigation menu, it needs to open that menu every time it appears. If it doesn’t, the user loses the ability to predict what the icon means and no longer knows when or how to use it.
2. Leverage established design patterns: It can be enticing to get creative and reinvent the wheel, but using established design patterns for common tasks means less “new” for the user to learn.
3. Use metaphors and animations: Well crafted metaphors and animations help users understand where they are in an experience, what state things are in, what options are available to them and what they should do next.

Use Simple Language

Dora is aimed at little kids so the language is simple and the dialogue is concise.

Your product might not be aimed at kids but there is rarely a downside to simple and concise language. The average adult American reads at a 7th — 8th grade level. Unless your product or market demands technical jargon or higher-level vocabulary, avoid it. This is especially important to keep in mind with error messages, where lack of comprehension has a higher likelihood of leading to user frustration.

Provide the Necessary Tools

On every adventure, Dora inevitably runs into problems. Swiper the Fox steals something, or she has to get past snakes, or alligators, or whatever. But, the ever-resourceful Dora has it covered thanks to her magic, talking backpack and her equally magic, equally talky map. The map keeps her on the right track, and her backpack is full (conveniently) of just what she might need at any given moment.

You can’t always predict what’s going to happen to your users in the wild. You can do your best to guide them down specific paths or toward specific outcomes, but people are complicated. They do what they want. And they will definitely do something you didn’t think of. It is important to always have a set of tools available to help them overcome problems they might encounter.

This includes navigational tools to help get them back on track if they end up in the wrong place, as well as functional tools to help them accomplish tasks, make decisions, and undo mistakes. Delivering just what a user needs right when they need it makes for a magical experience. You might not be able to give them a magic, talking backpack, but if you are thoughtful about the way you surface and design your tools, you can come pretty damn close.

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“The UX of Dora: 3 Design Lessons from a Little Adventurer” was originally published in Medium on March 1, 2015.

Coming out of school as newly minted designers, we often aspire to the heights of master craftsmanship. We envision ourselves creating expertly designed, meticulously implemented products that inspire awe with their beauty, artistry, and execution.

Then the real world promptly smacks us in the face.

Craftsmen spend untold hours creating their masterpieces. They sweat the details and pour their souls into the work. Their final creations are as much art as they are products.

Somewhere in our industrialized rush, we’ve lost our sense of craftsmanship.

We, on the other hand, find ourselves saddled with impossible deadlines that require us to compromise on features and details. It’s all we can do just to get the project done. Our final products are minimum viable. They’re driven by the invisible hand of the market, which relentlessly demands speed so we can squeeze out a few more sales for the quarter. Getting a product out is considered better than getting it perfect.

The craftsman is not worried about speed. The craftsman is worried about the quality and value of the final product.

Somewhere in our industrialized rush, we’ve lost our sense of craftsmanship. To succeed in the future, we’ll need to find it again.

Do We Need Speed?

Speed is cancer to craftsmanship. But the idea that speed is a positive quality runs deep. Like, primordial deep. In the book Metaphors We Live By, authors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain that our positive association with speed dates back to the dawn of humanity, when early man observed that healthy humans walked at a quicker pace than those who were not healthy. The rest, in our primitive lizard brains, is history. Fast is better than slow.

We haven’t evolved much past that.

We assume first to market is best. Yet, according to researchers at Northwestern, late entrants to a market are more successful than first-movers 70 percent of the time.

When a startup does win, it’s often not because they were fast, but because they were focused.

We mythologize the fast, nimble startup that disrupts the lumbering, established market leader. But, like the plane crash that makes us question the safety of flying, these rare, widely covered stories do not represent the full picture. The average startup does not win the battle, regardless of how fast it moves. When Richard Branson weighed in on this, his advice for entrepreneurs was littered with words like long-term, carefully, and wisely. Those words don’t sound fast at all.

When a startup does win, it’s often not because they were fast, but because they were focused. Just as when a larger company is disrupted, it’s not necessarily because it was slow, but because it lacked focus as its business grew to multiple markets and products.

Focus, therefore, is more important than speed.

The Hare was faster than the Tortoise, but the Tortoise won because the Hare lost focus.

The Changing Complexion of the Market

The driving mantra of fast-moving tech companies is out is better than perfect. However, a seismic shift is happening in the way consumers think about products and what they’re willing to pay for. The shift means we may need to rethink that mantra.

Josh Allan Dykstra laid it out in his Fast Company article, “Why Millennials Don’t Want to Buy Stuff.”

To ‘own something’ in the traditional sense is becoming less important, because what’s scarce has changed. Ownership just isn’t hard anymore. We can now find and own practically anything we want, at any time, through the unending flea market of the Internet. Because of this, the balance between supply and demand has been altered, and the value has moved elsewhere.

I’d take this a step further. I don’t think this change is just about scarcity, I think it is also about quality. The world is flooded with worthless crap. Speed drives quantity over quality, and the durability and lifespan of our stuff has been steadily declining.

In the digital space, quality does not necessarily come from how long something lasts. Quality is a combination of utility and design. A great product needs to solve a real problem in a thoughtful, simple way.

So much of what we create does not solve a real problem. And even if it does, it likely wasn’t created all that thoughtfully. How could it be, when the main goal is to just get something out there? This quote from 2010 in Apple’s app review guidelines sums it up nicely:

“We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps.”

As Dykstra put it:

Humanity is experiencing an evolution in consciousness. We’re starting to think differently about what it means to ‘own’ something. This is why a similar ambivalence towards ownership is emerging in all sorts of areas, from car-buying to music listening to entertainment consumption…the big push behind it all is that our thinking is changing.

Couple this ambivalence with growing concerns about environmental and social impact and you’ve got yourself a consumerism revolution in the making.

“The biggest insight we can glean from the death of ownership is about connection,” Dykstra writes. “This is the thing which is now scarce, because when we can easily acquire anything, the question becomes, ‘What do we do with this?’”

We no longer care about acquiring — we care about connecting. With each other, with ourselves, and with our environment.

Creating a product that drives a true connection with a person requires thoughtfulness and a relentless obsession. It requires craftsmanship.

What Do We Do With This?

Speed is not an advantage anymore. In the digital space, the technical playing field has been leveled by open source tools and frameworks. Everyone now has the ability to move quickly. Advances like 3D printing are likely to bring similar change in the manufacturing world as well. Being first is now more irrelevant than ever.

Magic takes time. Magic takes craftsmanship.

More importantly, the consumer mindset is shifting. People are becoming more and more selective about what to spend their money on. Apple understood this before almost anyone else, and they’ve led a design revolution that has changed the expectations of every consumer who chooses to buy a product. Thoughtfulness and great design matter.

It’s no longer enough for a product to simply exist. To succeed, future products need that thing, that je ne sais quoi, that magic. And magic takes time. Magic takes craftsmanship.

Craftsmanship is the new advantage.

Companies have to sweat the details. We can’t be afraid to push our timelines to get something right. As designers and developers, we’re doing ourselves, our companies, and our end users a disservice by cutting corners to hit deadlines and striving for minimum viable products.

We have to stop selling ourselves short.

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“The Case for Slow Design” was originally published in Medium on February 23, 2015.

Software is usually designed as a choose-your-own-adventure affair. To complete tasks, users move through an application by making a series of choices based on available options. This can include choosing an item from a menu, choosing the appropriate tool from a toolbar, or selecting a piece of content from a list. The user is always free to decide for themselves, but the design and presentation of these options has the power to greatly influence the choices they make.

In their book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein make an argument for what they call “libertarian paternalism” in the design and architecture of choices. The idea is that we can design software that allows a person to make his or her own choices (libertarianism), but that we also have the power to “nudge” that person in the direction of his or her best interest (paternalism). Of course, this means we can also nudge people in a direction that is in our best interest. As Thaler and Sunstein write, “There is no such thing as neutral design.”

As designers, every decision we make has the potential to nudge a user down a specific path. Sometimes, the consequences of these nudges are beneficial. Sometimes they’re not. To create a stellar user experience, we must explicitly define when and how we nudge.

Here’s a simple, two-step framework for deciding when to nudge, how to nudge, and what outcome is “best” in a given choice architecture.

Step 1: Defining the Best Outcomes

Whenever you’re presenting a user with a choice, ask yourself: What are the user’s goals at this point? Which options will best help them achieve those goals? What are the business goals in this situation? Which options best deliver on those goals? Do the user’s best options match those of the business?

I recommend setting up a two-by-two grid to answer these questions. I call it a choice outcome matrix:

The choice outcome matrix plots possible choices based on their benefit to the user vs. their benefit to the business. Choices that are good for the business and good for the user are no-brainers; your designs should nudge toward these. Choices that are bad for the business and bad for the user should probably be eliminated from the set of options all together. Choices that are good for one but not the other aren’t as simple. Determining the best outcome here is a case-by-case decision. Ask yourself: Do we value the business outcome over the user experience in this case, or vice versa? In these cases, you can also consider what would need to change to better align the two.

Take, for example, a user signing up for a subscription service in which they’re presented with two plan options: a free, ad-supported plan or a premium, ad-free plan at $9.99 per month.

These choices are plotted on the matrix below:

In this basic example, the free plan is better for the user because it’s free. The pay plan is better for the business from a revenue standpoint, but worse for the user because of the cost. (Note: This assumes a pretty benign ad experience. If ads are intrusive, the plot might look different — meaning, it might be worth it for a user to pay to avoid ads.)

How might this matrix influence a final design? Here’s how Spotify handled a similar scenario:

Behold: Nudging by design. In the green button and banner, Spotify is nudging users toward its premium plan, which is best for the business. In this specific scenario, they also added a 30-day free trial and some extra features (offline listening, additional devices) to the premium plan. These extra features help to better align the best choice for the business with the best choice for the user.

Step 2: Choosing How to Nudge

Once you’ve identified which choice represents the best outcome, you then must choose the best approach to encourage that choice. Here are three basic approaches to consider:

Visual: Spotify is a prime example of a visual nudge. Its designers use color, size, and placement on the page to drive users toward a specific choice.
Social: Humans have a strong desire to conform. We’re often guided by the actions of others, even if we don’t realize it. Presenting social “proof” of the value of a specific choice can be a strong nudge. Amazon, for example, uses social nudges like customer reviews and ratings to guide users toward purchasing the best available products. Similarly, YouTube displays the number of views a video has received as a subtle social nudge to help you choose videos you’re most likely to enjoy (and engage with).
Default: Setting something as a default in an application is one of the most powerful nudges a designer can apply. In a 2011 study, the folks at User Interface Engineering (UIE) found that more than 95 percent of Microsoft Word users surveyed had not changed a single default setting in the application. Of the five percent who did, many were programmers and designers (in case you need more proof that we aren’t normal). So, unless you’re building an application just for designers and programmers, it’s critical that you get your defaults right. As Jeff Atwood puts it in his blog Coding Horror, “Defaults are arguably the most important design decisions you’ll ever make as a software developer.”
In most cases, the default becomes the permanent choice.

Choices that fall in the “good for the user and for the business” area of the choice outcome matrix are a great place to start when defining defaults.

At the time of the UIE study, autosave in Microsoft Word was defaulted to “off.” If you’ve ever lost work in Word because you forgot to save, you’d probably agree this may not have been the best design choice. Using a choice outcome matrix to explicitly map the impact of these decisions before they go live can save users a lot of frustration. Here’s what Microsoft’s map would have looked like:

If defaulting autosave to off were good for the business — maybe because of some technical impact, or because of storage space requirements — using the matrix to explicitly plot the impact would have prompted designers to mitigate these issues in advance. Maybe they would’ve communicated it more effectively to users, or would have been able to build additional features to align the user’s best interest with theirs.

Designing choices is at the core of interaction design. We must be intentional about how we present choices to users. If we can encourage them toward the best outcomes (for them and for us) we can save ourselves a lot of frustration and build trust with our users along the way.

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“A Simple Framework for Designing Choices” was originally published in Medium on February 12, 2015.

Web companies hate losing customers. The cost to acquire new customers is high, and engaged users are the revenue-generating lifeblood we all desperately need to keep going.

We spend a lot of effort creating new content and building new features to bring value to current users and entice them to stay. When users do leave, the prevailing wisdom is that something must have been wrong with the product. We build cancel questionnaires around this assumption, with options that are largely product-centric.

Assuming every problem is product-related drives a product-centric approach to fixing them. But what if problems are more complex than simple fixes to content or features?

An engineer I used to work with once said — and this is incredibly insightful advice for product managers — “People are complicated.”

I work for a video-streaming service with a monthly subscription model (similar to Netflix). A few months ago we ran a survey with a group of users who’d cancelled the service. We asked about satisfaction across three product areas: usability, content (videos), and access (can you access the service on your preferred devices). The results were surprising. Even users who’d canceled the service rated their satisfaction high in all three areas. And their overall satisfaction with the service was rated just as high. Needless to say, we were perplexed. Why would someone cancel a service with which they were highly satisfied?

It wasn’t until a few weeks later, as I was reading Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that the answer became clear.

What makes someone satisfied?

Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel Laureate in economics, dedicates a significant portion of his book to examining the psychological underpinnings of how people make decisions. The part that struck me specifically was his discussion of the way an object’s utility impacts our desire to have it — and, ultimately, how it impacts our satisfaction.

The utility of an object is defined as its perceived ability to satisfy a need or desire. The more utility a person perceives something to have, the more satisfying it is for them. Kahneman explains this from an economic perspective:

A gift of 10 [dollars] has the same utility to someone who already has 100 [dollars] as a gift of 20 [dollars] to someone whose current wealth is 200 [dollars]. We normally speak of changes of income in terms of percentages, as when we say “she got a 30% raise.” The idea is that a 30% raise may evoke a fairly similar psychological response for the rich and for the poor, which an increase of $100 will not do.

To extrapolate, a gift of $10 has less utility (and satisfaction) to a person who already has $200 than it does to someone who only has $100. The basic concept is that everyone who is considering purchasing a product weighs its perceived utility against its cost. If the utility seems high enough to justify the cost, the consumer is more likely to buy.

So, a customer comes to your service. They weigh utility vs. price, choose to purchase it, and are satisfied with the experience. Why would they still decide to cancel?

This is where things get interesting. The original idea, put forth by Daniel Bernoulli in 1738, emphasizing the role of utility in decision making is actually flawed. It assumes that it is the inherent utility of an object that makes a person more or less satisfied — that if you and I both have $100 we will be equally satisfied based on the inherent value of $100. As Kanheman shows, this assumption is wrong:

Today Jack and Jill each have a wealth of 5 million.
Yesterday, Jack had 1 million and Jill had 9 million.
Are they equally happy? (Do they have the same utility?)

It is pretty clear that Jack would be stoked and Jill would be reeling — even though they both have $5 million, which should have the same inherent utility. As Kanheman puts it:

The happiness that Jack and Jill experience is [actually] determined by the recent change in their wealth, relative to the different states of wealth that define their reference points (1 million for Jack, 9 million for Jill).

This was my aha moment.

Satisfied people aren’t canceling because the inherent value of the product has changed. What has changed is the utility they perceive in that moment, based on their current life state.

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As part of our cancellation process, the organization I work for has a simple questionnaire. One of the options customers can click to tell us why they cancelled is “other,” with an open text field. As I went back through the responses, I noticed some consistencies:

Traveling for the summer, will be back.

Got laid off, will be back when I find a job.

Have a pile of books I need to read.

These “other” responses had previously slipped under the radar, but now they were coming through loud and clear. Hoping to retain customers by keeping them on a path of continual engagement blatantly ignores the fact that people have lives beyond your product.

Our current approach to customer retention — improving the product itself — assumes that the inherent value of the product is what satisfies. We’re making the same mistake Bernoulli did over 200 years ago. What we’ve found is that, often, people are satisfied with the product but changes in their life situation have temporarily decreased its perceived utility. That decrease shifts the utility vs. cost equation in their minds.

Not all cancels are created equal

Don’t get me wrong, product improvements do help the overall experience. They’re an important piece of the puzzle, but they’re not the silver bullet for increasing customer retention.

We must redefine “retained customer.”

Loyalty does not mean a customer must stay with you indefinitely. If a user cancels in order to travel, then comes back to the service a month, or two, or three later, did you really ever lose them? A cancel is only a cancel if they don’t intend to come back.

The goal of any business is to create a great experience, and to support the needs of its customers. What if we embraced and respected the fact that people have lives outside of our products? What if we designed for the fact that the utility we deliver will ebb and flow with the changes in their life situation? How would we structure our products to support that?

Spotify starts down this road with their cancellation process. They include an option to say you’re traveling and then, before you make the final decision to cancel, they deliver a nice explanation of how they can support your trip. Here’s what it looks like:

However, Spotify’s approach to the user’s response that “I’m trying to save money” tries to convince the user that Spotify is the best use of his or her money, which I’d argue doesn’t respect a user’s need to manage his or her current life situation.

Think: User-centered retention

Take time to identify the kinds of external events that may temporarily impact the utility of your product. Then, develop retention strategies around those events.

Is your product impacted by nice summer weather, when people want to spend more time outside? Instead of fighting it by convincing them to come inside, develop features that help your users take advantage of the weather — or features that encourage them to take your product along. Or, accept that summer may be a low point and focus hard on having great content and features ready when temperatures drop. TV networks get it. Summer is a time for reruns.

If you have a cancel questionnaire, structure it to be as user-centric as it is product-centric. Give your users the option to tell you why they’re leaving instead of pushing them down a specific path. You might learn something.

Don’t assume everyone who leaves is a dissatisfied customer. Sometimes, life happens. If you make it hard for people to quit when they need to, or pester them to come back before they’re ready, you run the risk of frustrating someone who would’ve otherwise returned on their own.

Instead, respect that your users need to manage their own lives. Understand that your product is only a part of their lives, and you’ll be rewarded with loyal customers who return again and again.

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“To Keep a User, Sometimes You Have to Let Them Go” was originally published in Medium on February 3, 2015.

Unless you are designing zoo habitats your end user is probably a human. Understanding how those humans think and what drives them is critical to creating intuitive and successful products. Here are five books I recommend to help you deepen that understanding. Each one left me with a new perspective on how we function and perceive the world.

Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things, by David Rose
This book changed my view of technology more than any other book that I can remember. Rose explores four possible technology futures and their implications on society, before settling into a comprehensive look at the emerging Internet of Things. But, it is his exploration of the 6 fundamental human drives that gives the book a spot on this list. From telepathy to immortality, Rose walks through a set of universal human desires rooted deep in our mythology and fantasy. He then turns to how the design of future technology will enable us to fulfill those desires. It’s a fascinating look at what our stories say about our innermost wants and how we can design the future to get there.
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, by Susan Weinschenk
Susan Weinschenk nails it with this book. She tackles 100 concepts core to human psychology and perception, and how they apply to design. Things like how people read, how they see, how they remember and how they focus their attention. Each concept is clearly articulated in it’s own concise chapter, complete with practical takeaways. If you only grab one book on this list, this should be it.
Metaphors We Live By, By George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
This book takes a deep dive into how metaphor influences our perception of reality. With the core premise being that the way we talk about things shapes the way we think about them. Covering concepts like time as a limited commodity (How do you spend your time?), to arguments as war (He shot down all my points.), as well as why we feel positively toward “up” and negatively toward “down”. Lakoff and Johnson fundamentally changed the way I think about metaphor, language and how we interact as humans.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel Laureate in Economics, takes an in-depth look at the factors and biases that influence human thought. He lays out two systems of the mind, System 1 and System 2, which represent our “irrational” and “rational” mind respectively, and explores the interplay between the two in determining how we make decisions and process events. Decision making and human motivation (things like “aversion to loss”) are a big focus, and this book delivers a ton of eye-opening observations on both of these topics. The only downside is that it can be a little dense at points.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein
Nudge is all about decision making, both how we do it and how we can influence it (for the better). It looks at why humans sometimes (or often) make decisions that are not in their best interest and identifies practical approaches to help steer people toward better choices. Thaler and Sunstein do a great job of explaining somewhat complex psychological concepts in clear, concise language with simple examples. While the book doesn’t always go as deep as Thinking, Fast and Slow, it has a number of concepts that overlap, and often describes them in a more simplified and comprehensible way.

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“5 Books Every Designer Should Read About the Way People Think” was originally published in Medium on February 16, 2015.

If you dig past the physical practice of yoga, you will uncover two key principles that can take your design practice to the next level.

Yoga is well known as a physical practice. In the United States especially, it is most commonly equated with exercise and physical fitness. But, Asana, the physical practice of yoga, is just the tip of the yogic iceberg. Yoga also has a rich set of teachings and philosophies, and this is where the magic happens.

There are two core principles to yoga: Abhyasa (pronounced ah-bee-YAH-sah), and Vairagya (vai-RAHG-yah).

Abhyasa is often translated as “constant exercise” or “constant practice.” In yoga this means developing a strong conviction and persistent effort to achieve the end goal, which, for Yogis, is self-understanding. This concept goes further to say that effort for efforts sake will not move you down the path. To truly move toward the end goal the effort must be focused and intentional. This requires routine and repetition. The core idea here is that to reach the goal you must never give up.

Vairagya, or non-attachment, means to free yourself of your emotional investment in outcomes, possessions, ideas and expectations. In yogic philosophy, worldly attachments stand in the way of self-understanding. This does not necessarily mean that you completely remove or do without those things. It means that you resolve to release your emotional connection to them. If you have something, or don’t, it doesn’t matter. The core idea here is that to reach the goal you must always let go.

A foundation of the practice of yoga is based in finding balance between these two seemingly contradictory principles: never give up and always let go. And these same core principles could not be more suited for the practice of design.

Abhyasa: Never Give Up

Persistence is the foundation of great design.

For starters, the only way to become a great designer is through constant practice. But not just practice for practice sake. Science writer Joshua Foer, in his book Maximize Your Potential, explores research completed by psychologist Anders Ericsson, in which he finds:

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.”

The way we practice is critical, and to be most effective it must push to the edges of our capabilities. Ericsson’s findings go further:

Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.
When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. … Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

Something my friends and I used to say when we were snowboarding, “if you aren’t falling, you aren’t trying hard enough.” A great designer needs to be willing to constantly break out of her comfort zone and push herself to the point of falling.

Unfortunately, the path of least resistance is often the path previously taken. It takes an intentional and persistent effort to break away this path and push further.

Designing a routine (and sticking to it) can be a great way to consistently achieve this.

The idea of persistence in design is not only manifested in the process of becoming a great designer, but also in the process of design itself.

When presented with a problem it can be tempting to latch onto the first solution that presents itself, but great designers are willing to push on the problem from many different angles and then continue to push until their ideas break.

The process of continual pushing often ends with solutions that were unseen at the beginning and stronger than initial concepts.

The best solutions often come from a persistent, methodical process of working through lots of ideas, especially in the early stages of a project.

James Dyson, for example, in his quest to create a better vacuum, went through 5,127 prototypes before finalizing his design.

Pushing hard on your ideas requires persistence, but ultimately landing on the best solution means you also must be will to kill many of those ideas.

Vairagya: Always Let Go

At first blush the idea of applying non-attachment to design may seem counterintuitive. As designers it is our job to be attached. We are supposed to be the champions of the details. We are supposed to be concerned about the outcomes.

In reality, non-attachment is the central tenet of user-centered design. The point of the user-centered design process is to develop an empathic view of a problem from the users perspective so you can design a solution that fits their needs. In order to find empathy we attempt to eliminate our own preconceived notions, biases and expectations. However, the idea of eliminating those things is nearly impossible, as they are so fundamental to our worldview. What the principle of vairagya tells us is that we do not need to eliminate them. What we need to do is release our emotional attachment to them.

If you do up front work to identify your biases and assumptions around a project, then you allow yourself to be aware of them as they bubble up in your thinking. In this way you can acknowledging them and let them go. This can clear the path for a more empathetic approach to solving design problems. This is the same process as when applying non-attachment to meditation. The goal is not to try and force all the thoughts from your mind — that is a losing battle. Instead, you allow thoughts to come into your mind, you acknowledge them and then immediately let them go.

Practicing non-attachment also allows a designer to be more open to finding the best solution. As I said earlier, the best solutions often come from a persistent, methodical process of working through lots of ideas. If we carry an emotional attachment to our ideas it becomes harder and harder to move past them, which makes it more likely that we’ll stop before finding the best solution.

Being willing to let go of ideas leaves us open to all the possibilities.

For years now, athletes of all types have embraced the physical benefits of yoga to improve their performance. Likewise, designers can harness the deeper teachings of yoga to take their work to the next level.

It just takes practice.

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“Yoga and the Art of User Experience Design“ was originally published in Medium on January 15, 2015.

A lot has been made of the need for designers who can code. A quick google search for “should designers learn to code” yields 25 million results.

To be straight from the outset, I don’t completely disagree with the premise. However, I think the statement, “we need designers who can code” misrepresents the underlying issue.

As the head of a product design team, who can also write code (front and back end), I understand the value of the combined skill set. The ability to prototype, the ability to converse cross-discipline, and the ability to understand capabilities and tweak implementations. But I also know where the boundaries lie. I am not a developer and I wouldn’t want my code underlying a production application at scale.

Saying designers should code creates a sense that we should all be pushing commits to production environments. Or that design teams and development teams are somehow destined to merge into one team of superhuman, full-stack internet monsters.

Let’s get real here. Design and development (both front end and back end) are highly specialized professions. Each takes years and countless hours to master. To expect that someone is going to become an expert in more than one is foolhardy.

Here’s what we really need: designers who can design the hell out of things and developers who can develop the hell out of things. And we need them all to work together seamlessly.

This requires one key element: empathy.

What we should be saying is that we need more designers who know about code.

The reason designers should know about code, is the same reason developers should know about design. Not to become designers, but to empathize with them. To be able to speak their language, and to understand design considerations and thought processes. To know just enough to be dangerous, as they say.

This is the sort of thing that breaks down silos, opens up conversations and leads to great work. But the key is that it also does not impede the ability of people to become true experts in their area of focus.

When someone says they want “designers who can code”, what I hear them saying is that they want a Swiss Army knife. The screwdriver, scissors, knife, toothpick and saw. The problem is that a Swiss Army knife doesn’t do anything particularly well. You aren’t going to see a carpenter driving screws with that little nub of a screwdriver, or a seamstress using those tiny scissors to cut fabric. The Swiss Army knife has tools that work on the most basic level, but they would never be considered replacements for the real thing. Worse still, because it tries to do so much, it’s not even that great at being a knife.

Professionals need specialized tools. Likewise, professional teams need specialized team members.

I don’t want my designers spending all their time keeping up with the latest cross-browser CSS solutions or learning how to use javascript closures. In the same way that I wouldn’t want our developers spending all their time diving into color theory.

I want my designers staying up on mobile interface standards and the latest usability best practices. I want them studying our users and identifying unmet needs. I want them focused on the work that is going to make our product the best that it can be. And yes, part of that work means learning about code, so they can be effective, empathetic members of the larger product team.

Now, implicit in learning about code or about design is getting your hands dirty. So this does mean that developers should be able to look critically at design concepts from a user-centered perspective, and that designers should be able to understand the basic underpinnings of how their design will be implemented. If they can also throw together a rough prototype, bonus. But we need to rid ourselves of the idea (and pressure) that designers should be coders, or that developers should be designers.

Convergence has its place, but this is not it.

If you empower your team to focus on their strengths as well as do some work to gain empathy for their teammates, then you don’t need Swiss Army knives. Instead, you have a toolbox full of experts that now work better together.

That’s what we really need.

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“We Don’t Need More Designers Who Can Code“ was originally published in Medium on December 9, 2014.