Background: This references a previous essay. You probably want to read it first. But you don't, you know, have to.
Exercise:
I'd like to know what you're against.
And how you'd pivot that view, and change it into being for something.
I'll go first:
I'm against bad design, lazy design, incrementalism, me-tooism, focusing on problems, and sloppy thinking. I'm against spending all my time fighting with requirements and doing work for people who won't let me do my best. I'm against trying to please everyone.
I'm against trends. I'm against doing things the same way they've always been done. I'm against focusing on the mechanics, and tools, instead of the process, philosophy, and results.
I'm especially against the fallacious (and horrible) idea that invisibility is the best you can hope for, as an interaction designer.
I'm against design writing with the same old, easily-digested, regurgitated tips and tricks.
I'm against talking big, but never producing—and producing, but never finishing, and never sharing it with the world.
.
.
.
I'm for fanfuckingtastic design, toe-tinglingly great design, designs that support the right user in the right way, and make you smile at the same time.
I'm for software that respects its users' time and intelligence. I'm for attacking pursuits with tenacity and devotion, going whole hog, asking the hard questions, taking advantage of all all the wonderful research that's available on the subject.
I'm for writing things that take a lot of work, and time, and won't appeal to everyone—but that will reach certain people in a deeper way than the easy stuff.
I'm all for shipping, and using software as a leverage to create a better, happier world.
Which of those paragraphs is more inspiring to you?
Have you ever met somebody who imagines that their whole life is one long battle?
Somebody who defines himself in terms of what they are against? Against the war, against government, against corporations, against animal cruelty, against compulsory schooling, against Apple, against censorship, against copyrights, against his heritage, against his parents... whatever.
You probably have. They're everywhere. It's a popular and convenient pose to have.
When you're reacting to circumstance, you're a puppet of circumstance
Being against something paints you in a corner. Being against something means that it's got you on the run: if it acts, you must counter-act. You don't have any choice, if it's part of your identity.
By its very definition, being against something means that you let that something hold all the power. And all the strings.
If it changes, you have to change with it.
If it does or creates something good, you either have to come out against that new, good thing, or suffer the severe discomfort of admitting you're wrong, and changing your mind/outlook/self-image. (And we frail, silly humans so rarely take that second path.)
And what happens if that thing—that thing you're against, the being-against-ness that is a cornerstone of your self-image—suddenly went away?
The X Killer
This isn't just an abstract social phenomenon, restricted to crunchy tree-huggers, G8 protestors, and college students.
Unfortunately.
As designers, we're extremely vulnerable to crafting our self-image as opposition. We're against Web 2.0 rounded corners. We're against non-standardized HTML. We're against Flash. We're against bad usability. We're against unclear communication. We're against spec work. Sometimes we're against other people and corporations.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than The X Killer.
The iPhone Killer
And nowhere is The X Killer better illustrated than The iPhone Killer.
Every mobile phone company is scrambling to catch up to the iPhone. They want to beat Apple. Their products look like knock-offs at best, and incompetent crap at worst.
These companies—giant, prosperous, world-changing companies—have allowed themselves to fall into the trap of opposition. They are defining themselves and their work as a response to Apple and the iPhone.
It's pathetic, and it's sad, and most importantly, it will never work.
Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than a bunch of CEOs of Verizon, and Google, and Sony Ericsson, and Nokia, sitting around the table, and going "How are we going to answer the iPhone
?"
Apple is very successful at what they do, but let's be honest: those companies are bigger, richer, and more powerful. E
xcept in one area.
Apple is the David (relatively speaking) that's got these Goliaths on the run. And instead of spending their massive R&D budgets to come up with something new and di
fferent and noteworthy, they're trying to catch up.
Instead of inventing the Next Big Thing, they're all working on multi-touch smartphones with app stores.
Sound familiar?
When you're reacting to circumstance, you're going to get left in the dust
We've seen this pattern before, with the iPod, and before that, the iMac. Just when the big guys figured out something they could make to compete with Apple's current products, Apple ripped the rug out from under them:
Just when other computer makers were starting to make bright, rainbow-colorful plastic goodies, Apple switched to icy white, grey, and metallic.
Just when other MP3 player makers were starting to make simple, usable, delightful music players (well, relatively speaking), Apple brought out the iPhone.
Just when the other cell phone makers were starting to improve their smart phones, Apple brought out the App Store.
Just when other cell phone makers / operating system makers started to create their own App Stores...
By focusing on reacting—by trying to "kill the iPhone" instead of coming up with something different—these companies are dooming themselves to always being behind, and never killing a single damn thing.
This is the fallacy of solving problems.
By letting the problems dictate your actions, you're dooming yourself and your projects.
I'm not saying that problems don't exist, only opportunities! (I hope I don't seem like I'm that full of crap. ;)
But save the problem-solving for after you come up with your own thing. Save it for the polishing stage.
Don't start with "solving a problem" because what you are really doing is polishing before you have a thing to polish.
Which means that you're probably polishing somebody else's vision. Which means you're probably polishing shit.
And when you polish shit, all you get is shit that's shiny.
There's no amount of polish in the world that could turn a Blackberry into an iPhone. There's no problem-solving route from there to here. Apple didn't take regular smartphones and eliminate problems, one by one. They chose their own radical path, they decided what they were for and they acted on it. And then they polished.
Warning: I'm going to beat on this dead horse until it falls to dust.
Last night, I started to reread the extremely excellent (& perhaps only book you need) about changing habits and changing your life, The Path of Least Resistance:
We have been trained to think of situations that are inadequate for our aspirations as problems. When we think of them as problems, we try to solve them.
When you are solving a problem, you are taking action to have something go away: the problem. When you are creating, you are taking action to have something come into being: the creation.
Notice that the intentions of these actions are opposite.
(Paragraph breaks mine.)
There's a big, and qualitative, difference between focusing on taking away, and focusing on creating something new.
Later on in the book, the author talks about the two main ways that people face life: the reactive-responsive orientation, and the orientation of the creative:
When people talk about problem solving and creativity in the same breath, what they usually mean is finding some unusual way out of difficulties. The use of the word creative here is strictly about style and not substance. It has nothing to do with the real creative process as practiced for centuries in the arts and sciences.
He says that an artist does not paint to solve problems. They create. And they create for the love of the thing that they want to bring into creation.
Why you shouldn't solve problems
Solving Problems sounds like a good objective. After all, nobody likes problems. Right? It's like the Clean Air Act—how can you be against clean air?
But like the Clean Air Act, which is really a license to pollute, Solving Problems doesn't fulfill the promise of its name.
The problem—ha—of focusing on problems to solve is manifold:
Who defines the problems?
How do you know you're solving the right problem?
It's easy to get obsessed with the immediate visible "problems" rather than the underlying cause
Deceptive local maximums abound
Beyond all that, there's the problem that problems never disappear.
In the Secrets of Consulting, Gerald Weinberg writes about universal human issues and gives them each a funny name. One of my favorites is Rudy's Rutabaga Rule:
Once you eliminate your Number One problem, Number Two gets a promotion.
Or, to put it another way: It's problems all the way down. Problems never go away. When you focus on solving problems, as soon as you've solved one problem, you're faced with another. Your former #1 problem may be gone, but now the #2 problem is your biggest problem. And so on, ad infinitum.
Because nothing is ever perfect. If you're focused on problems, how do you know when to stop?
And more importantly, is taking away from a thing as useful and productive as coming up with a new thing?
Can you imagine a path whereby you'd "solve problems" that Blackberries have and come up with an iPhone?
Problems are deceptively sweet
But it's hard to sit down and break out of the problem-solving mindset. Problems are easy. They're there. Everybody can see them everywhere, all of the time. Incrementalism is so tempting because it doesn't require a lot of work and, yes, it does offer returns—for a while.
Fritz (Path of Least Resistance) goes on to say that one of the patterns of the structures that determine our lives (and the state of the world) is the oscillating structure. And this unfortunate structure is propped up by problem solving.
It goes something like this:
The problem (urgency) leads to
action to solve the problem, leads to
less intensity of the problem, leads to
less urgency, leads to
less action to solve the problem, leads to
the problem sticking around—even resurging
The same is true of big things (poverty, corruption, government) and small things (trying to quit smoking, lose weight, or even design good software).
But these structures don't exist on their own.
By taking a different approach to the world—oh, yeah, and our work—we can cut this cycle off at its knees.
A poem from the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, as translated by Ursula Leguin in this book:
The Uses of Not
Thirty spokes meet in the hub. Where the wheel isn't is where it's useful. Hollowed out, clay makes a pot. Where the pot's not is where it's useful. Cut doors and windows to make a room. Where the room isn't, there's room for you. So the profit in what is is in the use of what isn't.
Note: The first allusion, the wheel spokes meeting in the hub, refers to the hole in the hub of the wheel for an axle. Without a place to join a wheel to an axle, the wheel's useless.
Ursula goes on to say:
One of the things I love about Lao Tzu is he is so funny. He's explaining profound and difficult truth here, one of those counterintuitive truths that, when the mind can accept them, suddenly double the size of the universe. He goes about it with this deadpan simplicity, talking about pots.
In short, the talk is about the massive, god-like leverage that we can apply to the world. Sound hyperbolic? Maybe a little too self-aggrandizing? Think that it's a plague on the Race of Designers (and Race of Developers) that we always tend to walk around thinking that we're god's gift to, well, everything?
I agree that those are valid questions. Heck, I thought of them myself. I have accused both designers and developers, as a whole, of being waaaaaay too into themselves.
But.
If you think about it, we are in a unique situation to change the world. The phrase "change the world" usually means ideals such as creating world peace, ending poverty and hunger, and fighting injustice. Those are all obviously noble and unimpeachable pursuits.
The goal of all those noble pursuits, of course, is to alleviate suffering and create happiness.
Poverty, hunger, and injustice aren't the only sources of human suffering. Pretty much everything in this world causes suffering, in fact. Technology, in suffering as in everything else, is a great multiplier.
There's no comparison between a starving child and an office worker who has to fight 8 hours a day with their tools. And there shouldn't be. ("First world problems," anyone?)
But.
Imagine the accumulative effect of all the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people who struggle against their software every day. If Excel causes one person 2 hours of headache a day, fine. But Excel is used by millions. Multiply those millions by 2 hours a day and you have a pretty colossal amount of suffering indeed.
That Whole "Alleviating Suffering" Thing
The best reason to become an interaction designer is a love of people. Or at least an interest in them.
And here's why:
As designers, if we spend 1 extra hour adding a tiny smart feature, we've spent an hour of our time. But—if we do it right—that 1 hour can have a huge impact on the lives of others.
Think about it:
If 1 hour of extra effort on your part...
...can save each user 15 minutes
...over the entire course of the product's life
...and you have even just 16 users...
You just turned 1 man-hour into 4 man-hours. That's not a bad return for anyone, or anything. (As I joke in the presentation, that makes you either the lamb of God or a wizard. Either one will do.)
And those assumptions are really conservative. Say you spend 8 extra hours turning one function of your app into a lean, mean, time-saving machine. Even unsuccessful apps will often have thousands of users. Successful ones even more. Again, this is crying out for a comparison to Windows, but almost none of us will ever reach that level of adoption.
Then again, every time somebody logs time in Freckle, we're helping them shave at least 3 to 5 seconds off their work time. More like 20 - 30 seconds when a new project is involved. And there are hundreds of thousands of time entries logged so far by our users.
That's a lot of time savings. Worth shaking a stick at.
Where's the best place for you to push?
If you've taken the time to skim through the presentation, and read this far, I wanna know.
Where do you see opportunities for massive leverage?
What do you find yourself doing over and over, every day?
In what genres have you found all of the software to be essentially copies of each other?
This is the kind of stuff that's so helpful to discuss, when it comes to learning to be our best.
I even had fun getting aggravated. It was great! How often do I get to argue with other people about design stuff on this level? Almost never.
So, thanks everyone for participating.
Why I didn't deliver solutions
I wrote what I wrote intentionally to challenge people (that means you). I didn't present solutions because the last thing I want this site to be about is me telling you what to think.
There are lots of people out there already who are willing to just listen to whatever I have to say. I'm sure that sound like a good thing, but it's actually crippling in its way.
If people praise your work no matter what you do, you begin to wonder: Can anyone even tell when I'm phoning it in?
So, let me say it again: I'm not here to give solutions. I'm here to raise questions.
I don't want to preach to you
You are going to have a different experience and opinion of forums than me. You are going to spot different problems than me. You are going to come up with different solutions than I am.
We're going to disagree.
And that's the beauty of it, isn't it?
I want to disagree with you. Disagreement means that we are having a discourse on a deep enough level to be important. If two people are disagreeing on something, they are also implicitly agreeing that the thing is worth disagreeing about.
I want to get smarter. Don't you?
When you get to be really advanced in a field—whether it's user interface, development, or rocket surgery—it's hard to find people who can challenge you to do your best. Who can even tell if you're just phoning it in.
We're all going to emerge smarter from this.
That's why I can be strenuously objecting to your vision of a forum—actually feeling angry and hot-blooded—and be enjoying the hell out of it at the same time.
So.
The basic premise of this site is...
I'm going to challenge you, and you're going to challenge me in return.
In response: 17 tweets, several "I KNOWS!" and 3 retweets. One of my most popular tweets ever, in fact, just going by the amount of accumulated frustration and rage.
I feel like I've tapped a nerve.
What's wrong with forums?
So, what's wrong with forums? This is a question we can't answer unless we first look at two things:
How people communicate, really
How people use forums
How do people communicate—really?
Forums are asynchronous communication, so let's look at behaviors that are pretty global with any kind of asynchronous communication:
Concealed / private writing and editing process
Messages are "composed" (even if people are lazy about it), which means two things: A) people can decide consciously what to communicate (and usually rein in their emotions, if they choose), and B) it goes towards building a public-facing identity, because it is editorialized
Messages are "complete", and then followed by another person's complete "reply" (like ping pong)
Because of their composed/complete nature, messages often address multiple topics (or people) in one go
Messages are also concrete / nailed down, as opposed to live verbal communication which is ephemeral
Quoting or referring to earlier messages
Summarizing (an alternative to quoting)
Forgetting what the original topic was
Re-reading previous messages to refresh one's memory of the flow of the conversation
Getting off-topic
Fizzling out—somebody has to be the one to stop and rarely with a real conclusion
Ability to refer back to it, whenever
These traits are broadly applicable, whether the communiqué in question is a written letter, email, or voicemail.
And it's not a complete list. I just sat down and brainstormed them up just now. You could go so much further (and even refer to real academic papers, if you wanted to be precise).
How do people use forums?
Now it's going to get interesting.
When I want to design something that's a different (hopefully better) approach to something that already exists, the first thing I look at is...
How do people hack the system?
How do people work around the system to make it do what they want? This doesn't mean code or templating, modifying or tweaking. It's usually about processes. Even the least self-aware person comes up with internal rules and processes that they apply to a tool they use over and over.
Put another way, you could also ask:
How do people try to compensate for the artificial constraints of the poorly designed system?
And here's a short list of
common forum hacks:
Hate
the newbs. Because forums are chrono-centric, they rely on search or memory to know what came before and has been buried by time. And newbies are so annoying, because they always ask the same questions. So, telling newbies to "Search!" or "Lurk before you leap," or bombarding them with a hundred links for them to sift through is standard procedure.
Bumping.^bump! Again, chrono-centricism: a useful thread—useful because of the fun of the interaction, or the value of the information—has gotten buried. Users will add an artificial post, just to bring it up to the top again, so people know it's there.
Sticky threads. Sticky threads are a formalization of the bump. While they're permanently attached to the top of the forum pages, they are not otherwise different than normal threads.
Locked threads. An admin says "STOP!" Whether because the information should be preserved as it is, or because people are getting nasty.
README FIRST!!! Many times in combo with a sticky thread, a thread is marked as ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL TO READ. This is usually an attempt to save work that would be required by Hating the Newbs.
Tina, John, Bobby... Because most forums are flat, and many threads have a lot of participants, the actual conversation becomes awkward. A poster often wants or needs to address multiple people in one reply, because posting multiple replies -- one for each person -- is also disruptive. But even this hack causes additional fragmentation. (Threaded threads—ha—cause other problems.)
Signatures. Most people probably wouldn't consider sigs a hack, but I do. It's true that they are built-in features, but the extent to which people use (and update) them shows that something important is missing in the "support for building a public-facing identity" department. There are scores of web sites out there for generating your own custom animated forum sig banners; for creating tickers, to show progress towards weight loss or days til your baby is due; and so on. It's an industry. An industry based on a hack.
Status posts. On many forums for weight loss or other goal-oriented things, there is a subforum (another hack) just for posting updates on status. How was your weekly weigh-in? How did your fantasy football team do this week? What were your readership stats on your newsletter this month? These are an awkward repurposing of the forum's sole content type: threads.
Sub-forums. An attempt to rein in the chaos by self-categorizing threads. But it's often a question of where something really belongs.
Reload, reload, reload. Has someone commented on a thread you also posted to? Did it actually have anything to do with you? Did you get a new "private message"? Are there new threads in your favorite subforum? Did your favorite people post anything new lately? How do you ensure you don't miss something you're interested in?
This just barely skims the surface.
And there are other issues with forum design, in my opinion, that can't be addressed by studying people's hacks—because nobody has even thought about the possibility that things could be radically different.
When you ask a person what they'd change, it's always incremental.
Is the issue poor software, or with the basic nature of forums?
Tony gets right to the point (after asking if I'd seen the PhotoJojo forums, which I hadn't. They're pretty, for a forum).
The thing is, he asks two questions:
Is the issue with poor software?
Or is the issue with the basic nature of forums themselves?
But the thing is, what is a forum?
It is a piece of software, used by a community. The community is not the forum, though. The forum is just a tool. But the tool shapes what is made with it.
The concept of "forum" and "forum software" are not separable. The thing that is a forum, is only defined by its software. It doesn't "really" exist.
The problem is with software, because software creates the very concept of the forum, and all its interactions... even the hacks that people use to work around that concept and its interactions.
Changing the software would change the basic nature of forums themselves.
Those existing software implementations of the idea we call "forum" are the reason that "Forums are awful ways to store/share information."
What next? What would you do to remake the very concept of the forum?
[W]hen you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is continuous transgression.
Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure, and if you are professional, your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.
This is not a site about how to write friendly error messages, or how to optimize buttons for their clickability. You will not read about personas or user testing on a budget here. We will not discuss best practices in color selection, or grids, or new techniques in paper (or software) prototypes. You will find no unquestioning respect here for other people's statistics, much less their assumptions.
This is not a site where you will find the same low-hanging drivel that you find everywhere else.
This is not a site where the same old pedestrian errors will be highlighted, week after week.
This is not a site that panders to amateurs who want to be merely good enough.
This is not a site that panders to professionals who will be content with merely being "great."
This is not a site for people who believe that the greatest thing they can hope to achieve with their work, is "invisibility."
This is a place for people who demand that their interface and design work qualify for—or, at bare minimum, reach enthusiastically for—the title of Fan-fucking-tastic.
This is a site for people who believe that the world is plagued by horrible software, and lie awake at night meditating on the hundreds of thousands of hours of human suffering caused by that horrible software every day.
This is a place for people who believe, fervently, desperately, that design can change art, business, life, and the world.
This is a place for people who believe that design can be better than just annoyance-free, that it can be outright joyous. And that it can, and should, be experienced consciously.
This is a place for people who are willing to say "No" to the wrong customers, in order to better serve the right ones. A place for people who are motivated not by fear of "being wrong", but by the desire to create greatness.
A place for people who know that such greatness is not created by the subtraction of problems, but by the addition of sweat equity and the devotion to do whatever it takes.
This is a place for people who are not afraid to choose the hard and rocky paths, or forge their own, if it that's what it takes to get where they want to go.
This is a place for people who are deeply committed to their art, and who are willing to break with tradition and risk ridicule, even failure, in search of the truly amazing.
This is a place for people who believe that work and philosophy are two sides of the same coin.
