Living with complexity

Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things has become a touchstone for those of us with a penchant for design.  It has introduced hundreds of thousands to his elegant view of the world and uncanny ability to pinpoint the essence of why some things just FEEL well designed.

His most recent book, Living with Complexity continues along those same lines, though pursuing a contrary tack to popular thinking.  Despite the growing popularity of stripped down, simple designs, Norman argues that simplicity is not always the right direction to take for a design.

Norman references Tessler's law of the conservation of complexity, which states that every application has an inherent level of irreducible complexity.  The only question is who will have to deal with it: the user or the developer.

He argues for a moderate view saying that some complexity is OK, even preferred.  Objects that are too simple can be boring, while things that are too complex are confusing or upsetting.

This discussion of simple versus complex is playing out now in the mobile software space.  Sophia Voychehovski, a UX designer for Turner, says the idea that mobile users are 'on-the-go' and therefore don't want or need the capabilities of the desktop site on their mobile device is false.

She said that users today don't want or prefer a stripped down version for mobile.  They don't want things simple in this context...they want equivalent functionality presented in an intuitive way.

Going further, overly simplified software also faces the danger of feeling too flimsy.  The lean startup concept of the minimally viable product has led to a series of software attempts that are flashy yet flimsy in the hope of attracting further funding.  In some cases, I find that overly simplified interfaces seem to feel more gimmicky than elegant.

It can be too easy for companies to see the work of Google and Apple and assume that a stripped down interface is what symbolizes a modern company.  Their examples, while simplified, reflect deep design work that caters to the well-researched needs of users...and the requisite complexity is just a layer or two away for those experienced users that crave the ability to tinker with the specifics.

Life has no error messages, Norman points out, and in this way software should emulate life more closely.  In life, if you try to fill a five gallon bucket with eight gallons of water, it'll overflow and you'll see water spill out.  There is no error message, you just see the result in front of you.  Instead of scolding the user for not following the parameters of its software, well-designed code should assist the user in how best to continue.

It is specifically in that moment, right as the user has taken a mis-step that they are most receptive to learning: they can learn best when they face the need to learn.

This reminds me of the implementation model Alan Cooper discusses, in which a software interface reflects the inner processes of the software instead of presenting only those options that correlate with what the majority of users are trying to accomplish.  The two men's ideas taken together advocate for software that helps users complete their goals while reflecting the requisite complexity behind the tool being used.

Striking that balance between elegant simplicity and overwhelming detail continues to be a challenge for user experience designers, and Norman's book helps to crystallize those issues into a continuing discussion of the merits of each.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Alan Cooper begins with a clear analogy: in all other construction disciplines the architects and engineers plan the construction strategy and the craftsmen execute that strategy.   It is only in software that the craftsman is also the architect.

This becomes the basis for his premise that The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Cooper argues that we are deficient in our development process, not the development tools themselves.

"Programmers aren't evil" he insists, "they work hard to make their software easy to use.  Unfortunately their frame of reference is themselves, so they only make it easy for other software engineers, not for normal human beings."

Alan Cooper, being a former software developer himself, discusses why he believes software developers ill equipped to design usable software:

Clearly, one side of software - the inside - must be written with technical expertise and sensitivity to the needs of computers.  But equally clear, the other side of the software - the outside - must be written with social expertise and sensitivity to the needs of people.  It is my contention that programmers can do the former, but it takes interaction designers to do the latter.

The intuitive thinking here is that since developers know the software at it's most granular, then would be best equipped to ferret out usability concerns.  While intuitive, Cooper shows the fallacy of the argument throughout the book.  The skills that make for excellent programmers are not complementary to those needed to uncover and address usability issues.

Software developers (who he refers to as Homo Logicus) are different from normal humans.  Cooper defines the specific characteristics that make for great software developers work against them when trying to address usability issues.  For example, developers:

• trade simplicity for control
• exchange success for understanding
• focus on what is possible to the exclusion of what is probable
• act like jocks

On the third point he says that obsession with edge cases makes great programmers, but poor usability.  Normal people care most about likely uses/situations, "whereas programming is defined by cases at the edge of the paradigm, design is defined at the center."

I've found that it can often be easy to be lulled into the belief that working with a product on a daily basis means that you instantly know how new people will use it.  While it's tempting to believe that's true, it's also completely wrong.

Jared Spool says that the best companies (Apple, Disney, Netflix among others) are great companies because of their focus on feedback among other things.  He says he tests companies by asking random employees if, in the last 6 weeks, they have spent at least 2 hours watching someone using your design, or a competitor's design.  He asks this of everyone who influences the design.  Not just programmers or usability experts, but the entire team.

Great companies realize how easy it is to lose focus on what your users go through, and these sessions provide the opportunity for everyone on the product to see how people interact with it.  It's crucial to have people from all over the company participate, because those people will notice something that the UX team or the developers may miss from being buried in the details.

While the details can make something ordinary into something transcendent, they can also narrow your focus so much as to lose site of the broader picture.  It's crucial to have developers who obsess over those details...great developers have the genetic code that replays the details of a problem over and over again until the solution works itself out...but that same characteristic can also lead you lose sight of what's important: how typical customers interact with your product.

And no amount of brilliant design can bring back a customer who has tried and been turned off by your product.

The Ridiculous Race

I think I initially read about this book in Wired magazine...and added it to my Amazon wish list. I got it for Christmas, and it's been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. When I flew to New York last week, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to do so and brought it along.

Before my flight was over, I'd devoured 150 pages of it...nearly half the book!

The Ridiculous Race by Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran is a true story about a drunken wager made between two professional comedy writers: who can travel the entire globe (every line of latitude) first without airplanes. The winner gets a bottle of 40 year old scotch (a Kinclaith 1969 )...and stories to last a lifetime.

It combines the clever writing of two former Harvard Lampoon members (one of whom now writes for the TV show American Dad) with enthralling stories ranging from the mundane (the bathrooms on the trans-siberian railroad) to the exquisite (The Cambodian temples of Bankor Wat).

Interspersed within the funny writing are mind-opening observations about the rest of the world from two people who have done as much international traveling as most americans (read: none)

One section near the end was so well stated I thought it warranted repetition here:

I got to thinking that America isn't like a bully, or a jock, or a cool kid. In the high school of the world, America is like one of those girls that's just effortlessly beautiful. So beautiful you can't even have a crush on her. A girl like that isn't deliberately mean, it's just that she can't possibly understand how lucky she is. And people always do what she wants, without her even realizing it, so she never bothers becoming smart, or savvy about the other kids in school. Just with her airhead remarks, she's always accidentally screwing up the whole order of things. She doesn't even realize it.

Now, when you have a girl like that, the other kinda-pretty girls sort of like her but sort of hate her. That's maybe Germany, or France. And the ugly girls talk about her in the locker room, but are still totally afraid of her. That's Venezuela and Iran. The regular-looking dudes can't help but be awed by her. Maybe they try to woo her with poems. That's Great Britain. And the really twisted kids develop unhealthy obsessions about destroying her, just because they're so infuriated at how unfair things are.

The quick chapters, fast-paced writing, and juvenile gamesmanship of it all kept me in rapt attention all the way thorough. I didn't expect a book endorsed by Seth Macfarlane (creator of Family Guy) to provide such a good read on so many different levels. If you have a few hours, and want to be entertained with the TV off...check it out.

How the states got their shapes

How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein (who looks so strikingly similar to Ben Stein that they could very well be related) had potential to be painfully boring and dry, or thrillingly exciting and full of obscure, interesting bits of knowledge. It was, at times, both. Here's my top five favorite bits of trivia:

Why does Tennessee's northern border seem to stagger instead of riding a straight line? Because people along that border bribed surveyors so that they would be listed as residents in their state or county of choice...and they bribed those surveyors with locally made moonshine.

What state is Ellis Island in? It's in New York and New Jersey. The original boundary between those two states was an invisible line under water between the two states. Jersey got to keep everything attached to their mainland, and the land underwater to the official border running along the bottom of the Hudson (which is why when riding in the Lincoln Tunnel, you cross into New York halfway through the tunnel. Developers expanded Ellis Island in the 1890s due to the crush of immigrants coming to the country, and did so with land dredges from the bottom of the Hudson. In 1998 the Supreme Court ruled that all the parts of the island made up of the dredged silt (about 80% of Ellis Island) belong to New Jersey.

Which is the widest state? Actually, from east to west, Hawaii expands over 1,000 miles.

What's with all those square states in the west and midwest? The US government wanted to make the new states as equal as possible...so, where they could, they made them 3 or 4 degrees tall and 7 degrees wide. The founders of our nation wanted our rules and our map to convey the ideal of equality.

Why even bother with Rhode Island? Well, it was developed as the first colony devoted to the idea of religious freedom...much unlike Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland and others. They got their colonial charter and expanded beyond the Aquidneck Island to encompass more land...and got their official royal charter in 1663.

For someone who has driven or ridden through 48 of the 50 states, this is the kind of stuff that hits just the right nerdy buttons...though it was even a bit too nerdy for me at times. Some of the semantics of the border disputes seemed more clinical than passionate. That said...It was definitely a worthwhile read, and something I'll likely go back to before taking a trip to another state or making another long drive.

The Ghost Map

Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, a story about an 1850s Cholera outbreak in London surprised me in a couple of ways.

Initially, I expected the story to somehow surprise me in a very fundamental way...but that's not really what Johnson was going for here. WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get), it's the story of how a disease outbreak unfolded, and the two men who ended up cracking the code of its cause and cure.

Once I got past the let down of failing to find a mind-blowing surprise waiting for me (Johnson does little to hide the cause or resolution during the telling of the story - this is no mystery novel) I grew to enjoy the clear way in which he describes the approach and thinking of John Snow and Henry Whitehead. The book allows you to understand the way in which they approached the problem and the (assumed) thought process they undertook.

The epilogue of the book brought me to the kind of writing that I really enjoy from Johnson - multi-threaded contemporary commentary from a scientific and cultural bent. The reason for the meat of the book is a bit more personal.

Johnson's undergrad thesis was on epidemiology, and his graduate work in literature focused on Victorian society...so the intersection of those tow ideas in this book made for a natural confluence of interests. Though the amount of detail in the book is substantial, it's not overwhelming, and it is explained in Johnson's usual fashion of approachability without condescension.

That said, though I appreciate the reasons for his departure from his (in my view) traditional style...I certainly appreciate the final chapter of the book where he returns to the style for a few fleeting moments. His fascination with the topic grows on you as you read it...but I personally have a rough time trying to practically absorb the problems and world-view from so long ago and let it color the way I now see the world.

It's that adjustment of the way I now see the world that separates good books from those that truly fascinate me, and sadly I didn't find this book to cross that line.

The Medici Effect

Frans Johansson has taken on an interesting, albeit potentially fruitless task. Johansson teaches in his book The Medici Effect, how people and corporations can embrace and encourage innovation from among their ranks. The only problem is - very few corporations will ever implement the necessary changes.

Don't get me wrong - the book is brilliant. One example: Johannson talks about the concept of risk homeostasis. Don't let the term intimidate you; the concept is simple and brilliant: people are hard-wired to allow for a certain amount of risk in any given situation. If the situation itself is dangerous, they will approach it with care, but if the situation is relatively benign, then they'll be more careless.

For example, when your local department of transportation spends millions of dollars to make a road or highway safer, the end result is NOT fewer crashes - because people drive on those safer roads MORE recklessly (to meet their hard-wired allowable amount of risk).

Another example: child-proof lids to medication have actually been found to INCREASE the number of poisoning among children. Why? Parents are more careless about leaving medicine around their kids, now that it has a child-proof cap.

The entire book is very well thought out and researched, and chock full of examples to follow so that individuals can get a better sense of how to really create groundbreaking innovation. He talks about working 'at the intersection' of two different fields, then using the combination of skills and concepts within those fields to generate truly innovative ideas.

I found the thing very helpful personally, as it speaks to the kind of mindset that generative and creative PEOPLE need to cultivate in order to become innovative and creative individuals...but the idea of foisting these concepts onto an organization is just downright silly.

Perhaps whether these corporations actually implement the ideas isn't really the point; the point is to be available for expensive speaking engagements, and to realize your clients will FEEL more innovative, without genuinely applying these ideas. If a company is to truly foster innovation among the ranks of all its employees, further ideas should be considered.

• Companies should regularly host gatherings where staff members from different divisions congregate to come up with new ideas, and those ideas should receive genuine feedback.
• Focusing on low-hanging fruit (really easy-to-implement ideas) is a cop-out for taking on the work of real innovation.
• Innovation should be encouraged and mentored within different parts of the company...and mandatory implementation of ideas should occur.
• A regular meeting where a tiny portion of the budget is allocated to implement an idea every quarter should happen, and people from all segments of the company should be encouraged to participate. The money MUST be spent in that quarter, mandating action from senior executives as well as input from staff.
• The implementation of innovation must be the sole focus of one person or group, and their evaluation must include metrics for the QUANTITY of ideas followed up on (instead of on the number of successes, removing the focus on from how polished an idea is to the sheer brute-force mindset of quantity of ideas).
• The economy continues to falter in the US, and companies are looking for places to balance their expenses. Cutting of R&D and innovation are the first places to look - especially at large, publicly-traded, quarter-to-quarter focused enterprises. Companies that fall into that trap will become cautionary tales for the coming generation of business leaders.
  

The Medici Effect will give you a lot to think about, both in terms of its potential effect on the corporate sphere and in your personal evolution. Johansson has succeeded in compiling an amazingly insightful book - but I wonder if he gets discouraged by all the lovely feedback he gets from corporations, only to see them follow the same directional line of development they always have. For his sake, I hope he views a successful speaking engagement is a victory in itself - or else he may become a very discouraged man.

Unassuming intellect

Malcolm Gladwell has written a pair of famous books: Blink and The Tipping Point...both of which are worth reading. In fact, some would say they're increasing become part of the conversational pop-science lexicon...you know, one of those books (like Sun Tsu's Art of War) that people like to talk about at parties...and that other people pretend to have read - even if they haven't.

Gladwell has an interesting characteristic I'm growing to appreciate more and more - unassuming intellect. I worked with a reporter in Orlando named Scott Fralick, and he told me something that's sat with me for years. He pointed out that intelligent people like to be challenged on a piece of knowledge, because they want to find out about things they don't know, so they can learn more. Not-so-smart people will be intimidated by someone who calls them on something they don't know, because their identity rides on being all-knowing about everything in a certain field. They get defensive and brutal when challenged, falling back on their educational credentials or breadth of experience.

I'm still trying to understand these different types of people (and try as hard as possible to be the former), but much like Steven Johnson, Malcolm Gladwell is definitely one of the natively intelligent ones. He's smart, and conveys that intellect in approachable ways that all of us can appreciate. If you haven't read one of his books (which, you kinda should, since they're short and really enlightening) just read this latest piece of his about how football coaches and schools try to find the best people for the job.

Yes, it's in the hoity-toity New Yorker...but don't let that throw you - it's good stuff.

If you'd prefer, you can also listen to a discussion with Malcolm Gladwell at the 92nd street Y at Robert Krulwich's Giants of Science series on iTunes (Robert Krulwich, also, is an intellectual bad ass when it comes to simplifying complex ideas, though I've mentioned that before).

Who else do you think is smart, and makes you smarter just by being exposed to them? Let me know what you think...leave a comment.

Steven Johnson is smarter than you...

but don't feel bad. He's smarter than me too.

I first came across his work after he was interviewed in an episode of Radiolab titled "Emergence" (also the title of his phenomenal book on the subject). Radiolab is a radio show from WNYC that delves in scientific, technical, or metaphysical issues in a way I've never, ever encountered. The team that puts it together (Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich) is the perfect combination - Abumrad is a sound engineer and audiophile, Krulwich is an award winning science journalist from ABC. I'm sure I'll blog about them more in the future...suffice it to say they're bad ass.

(listen to a stream of the Emergence episode or download it...you'll be hooked after 5 minutes)

I finished Steven Johnson's book "Everything Bad is Good For You" last month, and it's made for great conversation ever since. He approaches the 'common knowledge' that pop culture is making people stupid (especially TV and video games) and is rotting the brains of our kids.

He starts by taking on TV and engages the reader by suggesting a comparison of the TV shows of today (Lost and 24 are two good examples) to popular TV shows from a couple decades ago (Cheers, Murphy Brown). The sitcoms of yesterday had a predictable layout, a joke at the beginning, a plot that played out among a few key characters, a story arc that followed one story line, and a joke at the end that tied in to the opening scene. Today's shows, in comparison, don't follow just a few characters...they have multiple ongoing sub-plots involving dozens of characters engaged in deep social interactions. Each show ties in to the previous shows in specific ways that only have context in comparison to earlier shows. Even recent comedies (Seinfeld and Simpsons) can be enjoyed again and again, since they have subtle jokes and references that play out the more you repeatedly view the shows.

Even the trash TV of today - reality shows (Survivor, the Apprentice, the Pick Up Artist) should be compared to their equivalent from the recent past - game shows. Compare Survivor to Family Fued, and the added levels of complexity are plainly obvious. Earlier (and even current) game shows give you the rules up front, and have an obvious beginning, middle, and end...but reality shows often don't tell you the rules as the play out, and each successive show build on the previous one.

He starts addressing video games by explaining them to people who may not have played them - pointing that video games of today are not about who can push the buttons as quickly as possible or memorizing button combinations. Games like Pac Man and Asteroids are nothing like the games of today...but not just in terms of how realistic they look. Current games, like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto depend on the player to figure out what the rules are, how to interact with the environment, and how to proceed. It's a much more complicated proposition than simply shooting everything or eating all the power pellets.

Steven Johnson has a new book out this week, and though I haven't bought it yet don't get the wrong idea. The only reason is that I got his earlier book The Ghost Map as a Christmas gift, and I'd like to read that first. He has a blog on the interwebs as well...but don't let the fact that he's on CSPAN or in the New Yorker intimidate you. He's not one of those arrogant intellectuals who use complicated words in the name of precision (when, usually, it's just to show off all the research the author has done or education they've endured) - Johnson is a fantastic writer, and a model for the way nerdy people everywhere should be: pragmatic, approachable, and genuinely interested in the way the world works. Most importantly, he knows how to explain it to the rest of us.

Marketing to the Social Web

I'm currently reading "Marketing to the Social Web" by Larry Weber...a brief, though comprehensive look at the new applications of marketing on today's internet . The book was written in 2007, which is important as anything over two or three years old feels dated (especially in the realm of social networking, which has only really taken off over the past 4 years or so).

It feels like the most coherent and professional thing I read so far, as relates to such a nascent field. He takes you through all the steps of developing a marketing campaign for the web, and utilizes a few case studies to emphasize the considerations that specific companies would face (as well as how he would choose to go about solving them).

It is these case studies in particular that give you a really great sense of how smart this guy is, and his ability to apply laser-focus to the issues big companies face when trying to take advantage of the immense capability of the internet in general (and social media in particular).

He references successes in advertising on the web, such as the Gillette campaign designed to counter the popularity of the scruffy, unshaven look on guys (see one of the viral videos they posted on the site, which is now, unfortunately, down) as well as failures such as fordboldmoves.com (which has also since been taken down.)

The Ford site, the company proclaimed that it was genuinely looking for customer input to take a bold new direction in the way they do things, and became, in practice, a series of ads with little user input (comments of even the slightest negative or constructive tone were deleted and ignored, and only positives left on the site...leading to its demise.)

Among the most patently obvious (though often ignored) pieces of advice for corporations is this:

As technology and markets evolve, you can't simply create a site and leave it unchanged. If you don't regularly improve the community's benefits on terms that make sense to the members, your site could fade away. Remember Friendster

I was a bit surprised at how tricky it is to find insightful books about marketing on social media (or, actually, anything at all)...but Weber's book has been full of insight. Check it out on Amazon here...or wait for the second edition, slated to come out next month. He also has a website related to the book. Do you have any suggestions on other insightful books to read? Leave me a comment!