Jekyll2023-01-23T15:59:07+00:00chausse.org/feed.xmlJeff ChausseJeff Chausse is a Boston area UX design leader and hands-on interaction designer with nearly 20 years experience.Everyone can design. Not everyone is a designer.2020-06-05T13:32:00+00:002020-06-05T13:32:00+00:00chausse.org/2020/06/05/everyone-can-design-not-everyone-is-a-designer<blockquote>
<p>The following was originally posted as a Twitter thread in June, 2019. I happened to stumble across it and figured it deserved a proper blog post.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be in marketing, because it was fun to come up with clever tag lines and promotional gimmicks. Then I learned that that stuff was just a tiny sliver of what marketing pros actually do.</p>
<p>Marketing, as a job, is mostly spreadsheets, data analysis, emails, meetings, meetings, and more meetings. In fact, the clever tag lines and promotional gimmicks might even be outsourced.</p>
<p>But the good marketers are the ones who don’t run away from that grunt work, but rather jump into it headfirst, power through it, and even relish it. It’s the same thing with design. If you attended a brainstorming meeting and sketched out a wireframe, you designed!</p>
<p>But…</p>
<p>Did you then break that design into reusable components, document them, and plan their implementation via a set of iterative user stories? Did you attend grooming sessions, kickoff meetings, and daily stand-ups to see all that stuff to fruition?</p>
<p>Did you send 50 emails, Slack posts, and chat messages clarifying the finer details of your designs, and did you collaborate with developers to explore alternative designs because the tech stack doesn’t support your original idea, or the time and budget didn’t allow for it?</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong. Everyone can design. Everyone can be a part of the process. I tell junior designers “your job is not to create the ideal design but to select it. In fact, you should only create a new design if you can’t find it somewhere else”. Ego has no place in design.</p>
<p>So, can everyone design? Yes. Can everyone be a designer? Yes. To me, the real debate is about whether there is a place in industry for dedicated designers, or can our responsibilities just be divvied up among others?</p>
<p>To that, I say HELL YES, there is a place for us. There is a place for us because we are the ones who are actually passionate about the 90% of the job that no one else even THINKS of as design. That is what makes a successful designer.</p>
<p>And that’s what I think is hitting such a nerve with us folks in the trenches. Our career is not just the fun parts. We put blood, sweat, and tears into learning tools and techniques, and we master them the only way they can be mastered: constant, long-term practice.</p>
<p>If you put words on a page, you are a writer. But you’re not a published author. That shit goes way beyond stringing words together and is <em>hard</em>. It’s the exact same thing with design, except we don’t have the right words for it.</p>
<p>I welcome anyone and everyone to participate in the design process where I work. I welcome critique from anywhere. I want others to design, to be designers, if you will. But always with the knowledge that those inputs will never be more than 10% of what I output.</p>
<p>I do the boring stuff, the tedious stuff. I do the necessary stuff to turn “designs” into real shipping products. As a dedicated designer, that is your primary responsibility. If you want to become a dedicated designer, know that that is your true responsibility.</p>
<p>And for God’s sake, if you are a dedicated designer, know that you are valuable. Know that you are critical. Know that you are needed. Don’t let some purveyor of hot takes make you think you are replaceable, or that your role is meaningless. Keep the faith, my friends.</p>The following was originally posted as a Twitter thread in June, 2019. I happened to stumble across it and figured it deserved a proper blog post.How to use OneDrive for Mac on an external drive2019-09-27T15:31:00+00:002019-09-27T15:31:00+00:00chausse.org/2019/09/27/how-to-use-onedrive-for-mac-on-an-external-drive<p>I recently needed to reinstall OneDrive on my Mac and it refused to install to my 5TB external drive. Installing on my anemic internal SSD was not really an option.</p>
<p>I KNEW it was working just fine previously, but my web searches turned up nothing useful. It seemed absolutely unsolvable. Then I had a vague memory of something I did earlier, and sure enough, it was an absolute piece of cake, and OneDrive was up and running.</p>
<p>The solution is simply to “Get Info” on your external drive, and check this box down here:</p>
<p><img src="/uploads/2019-09-27_11-30-10.png" alt="2019-09-27_11-30-10.png" /></p>
<p>(You may need to click the lock icon and provide your password).</p>
<p>That’s all you need to do. I love when something that seems impossible to fix can be fixed by literally checking a box!</p>I recently needed to reinstall OneDrive on my Mac and it refused to install to my 5TB external drive. Installing on my anemic internal SSD was not really an option.Making Firefox more “Chromey” with userChrome.css2019-09-10T15:25:00+00:002019-09-10T15:25:00+00:00chausse.org/2019/09/10/roomier-firefox-chrome-with-userchrome-dot-css<p>I recently made a commitment to try to switch from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox, due to Mozilla’s passionate devotion to improving the web both users and developers, as well as Google’s general privacy ickiness. But I’m a very persnickety software user (comes with the job), and the UI chrome (no pun intended) for Mozilla just felt very cramped to me, so I set about to customizing it just how I liked (which happens to mean very Chrome-like).</p>
<p>Firefox offers user themes, and has some easily accessible customization options, but to truly tweak things (and you can tweak almost anything), you need to learn about “userChrome.css” and how to set it up. You can do that at <a href="https://www.userchrome.org/">UserChrome.org</a>. Take special note of the extra steps you need to take to activate it on Firefox 69 (and beyond, presumably).</p>
<p>Once you have your userChrome.css file in place and enabled, here are the modifications I used to make Firefox feel more like the Chrome… chrome.</p>
<div class="language-css highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="nf">#personal-bookmarks</span> <span class="nt">toolbarbutton</span> <span class="p">{</span>
<span class="nl">margin</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">0px</span> <span class="m">3px</span> <span class="m">2px</span> <span class="m">3px</span> <span class="cp">!important</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="nl">padding</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">4px</span> <span class="m">4px</span> <span class="m">4px</span> <span class="m">4px</span> <span class="cp">!important</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
<span class="nf">#personal-bookmarks</span> <span class="nc">.toolbarbutton-text</span> <span class="p">{</span>
<span class="nl">font-size</span><span class="p">:</span><span class="m">12px</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
<span class="nf">#nav-bar</span> <span class="p">{</span>
<span class="nl">padding-top</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">3px</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="nl">padding-bottom</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">3px</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="nl">padding-left</span><span class="p">:</span><span class="m">4px</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
<span class="nf">#TabsToolbar</span> <span class="p">{</span>
<span class="nl">padding-top</span><span class="p">:</span><span class="m">10px</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
<span class="nc">.tab-text</span> <span class="p">{</span>
<span class="nl">font-size</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">12px</span> <span class="cp">!important</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
<span class="nc">.menuitem-iconic</span><span class="o">,</span> <span class="nc">.menu-iconic</span><span class="o">,</span> <span class="nt">menuitem</span><span class="o">[</span><span class="nt">image</span><span class="o">]</span> <span class="p">{</span>
<span class="nl">padding-top</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">3px</span> <span class="cp">!important</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="nl">padding-bottom</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="m">3px</span> <span class="cp">!important</span><span class="p">;</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>Here are the “before” and “after” images of my Firefox UI.</p>
<p><img src="/uploads/userchrome.png" alt="userchrome.png" /></p>
<p>Interestingly, most userChrome.css hackers are obsessed with <em>removing</em> as much whitespace as they can. But I like to give my UI a little room to breathe. This design feels much more comfortable to me.</p>
<p>On a side note, I’m an obsessive window-mover, and the default Firefox UI is very hard to drag around because it doesn’t put any space above the tabs. Fortunately, there is a simple option under “Customize…” to turn on the title bar (like I did), or just add some “drag space”, Chrome-style (Look in the bottom left-hand corner). No userChrome.css needed.</p>I recently made a commitment to try to switch from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox, due to Mozilla’s passionate devotion to improving the web both users and developers, as well as Google’s general privacy ickiness. But I’m a very persnickety software user (comes with the job), and the UI chrome (no pun intended) for Mozilla just felt very cramped to me, so I set about to customizing it just how I liked (which happens to mean very Chrome-like).Design like a detective2019-09-05T23:24:00+00:002019-09-05T23:24:00+00:00chausse.org/2019/09/05/design-like-a-detective<p>One of the first obstacles a new designer needs to overcome is the fear of failure. The way to overcome this is to constantly remind yourself that you’re in the business of solving problems. Anything that brings you closer to solving the problem is good. Anything that leads you in the other direction is bad. And as Thomas Edison famously said:</p>
<p>I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.</p>
<p>When a design I created universally fares poorly in user testing, I’m thrilled. Before testing, every design decision is a hypothesis. Experience and wisdom will help you come up with better hypotheses, but no amount of experience can guarantee the right solution. A universally hated design is a neon sign pointing you in a better direction. You don’t get those signs while seated at your computer tinkering with different layouts and interactions. That’s just the process of fine tuning your hypothesis.</p>
<p>You will go through several levels of maturity as you grow in your design career. At first, you’ll hate being wrong. Eventually, you’ll learn to accept and tolerate it. And finally, the day will come when you learn to love it.</p>
<p>Always remember that as a designer it is not your job to create the best solution, it’s your job to find it. Sometimes, you’ll create a new whiz-bang UI that solves your client’s problem. Sometimes, someone else will propose an idea that solves it. At which point, it’s your responsibility to humbly accept that fact and do your best to fine tune and shepherd that idea through implementation.</p>
<p>Design is like a detective story. No detective ever solves the case immediately, on their own, with no help from others – or without making mistakes. The evidence may lead them to countless dead-ends, but the best detectives are undeterred – and even energized – by these setbacks. Approach new design challenges like a detective and you’ll ultimately have more satisfied clients and users, and you’ll even have more fun along the way.</p>One of the first obstacles a new designer needs to overcome is the fear of failure. The way to overcome this is to constantly remind yourself that you’re in the business of solving problems. Anything that brings you closer to solving the problem is good. Anything that leads you in the other direction is bad. And as Thomas Edison famously said:Yet another article about design vs. art2015-07-22T12:00:00+00:002015-07-22T12:00:00+00:00chausse.org/2015/07/22/yet-another-article-about-design-vs-art<p>This is my thinkpiece on the difference between design and art. There are many like it, but this one is mine.</p>
<p>There are hundreds, if not thousands, of think pieces out there about what is design, and what is art, and how they overlap (or don’t). Can art exist without design? Can design exist without art? Is graphic design art or is it design? Does art have a role in UX design?</p>
<p>The world hardly needs another article on this topic, but I feel like if I’m going to have a blog about design, I should make it clear what my stance is here.</p>
<p>First up: Design.</p>
<h2 id="design-is-the-reduction-of-friction">Design is the reduction of friction</h2>
<p>This is another way of saying that design is about removing all the things that make something not work as well as it could. In user experience design this means making something easy to use by removing everything that makes it difficult to use. There are millions of articles out there about how this works, but design isn’t just about usability. There are other kinds of friction that can be eliminated with creative design — including literal friction.</p>
<p>I recently bought a Nissan LEAF electric car. As you can see in the picture below, it has a couple of really funky looking raised headlights.</p>
<p><img src="/uploads/leaf.png" alt="A Nissan LEAF car" /></p>
<p>Those funky headlights aren’t purely stylistic. They’re designed to reduce drag over the side mirrors. Both mileage and safety are important to car manufacturers. Since side mirrors can’t be eliminated or made perfectly aerodynamic, a creative designer found a way to use a completely different car part to mitigate one negative impact of their presence.</p>
<p>Design can also be used to reduce friction in marketing. In marketing, friction is anything that prevents a user from selecting your product over a competitor’s. A marketer’s goal is to make the decision to use their product as close to a “no-brainer” as possible.</p>
<p>If I’m considering two different restaurants and one offers online reservations and one doesn’t, I’m almost always going to choose the one with online reservations. This may not truly be “in my best interest” (maybe the food at the other place is better), but I absolutely hate feeling like an idiot when I call for a reservation just to find out they’re booked for weeks. That’s friction a restaurant needs to remove if they want to do business with me.</p>
<p>What about Graphic Design? Is Graphic Design… design? Or is it art? That’s where the art vs. design debate tends to get pretty heated. My take is that it’s a little bit of both, but it’s mostly art. So let’s define art:</p>
<h2 id="art-is-the-use-of-craft-to-tell-a-story">Art is the use of craft to tell a story</h2>
<p>Entire college courses and entire careers are dedicated to defining art, but in actuality most discussion centers around what makes art good or bad. I am not qualified to have those discussions. I stick with a definition that makes no judgments about quality.</p>
<p>All art is story telling. An artist wants to make you feel or think something, so they tell a story they hope will get that reaction. It doesn’t have to be a literal story. It can be a mood created by clever use of typography or colors (or interpretive dance, or music, or architecture). It can be a feeling of wealth and success created by selecting exotic materials for a luxury car.</p>
<p>Design always solves problems. Art doesn’t have to. Sometimes art’s only goal is to make someone think “Wow, that’s weird.” If art gives the viewer/listener/reader the thoughts or feelings the artist intends them to have, then it’s successful. Design is about the goals of the user. Art is about the goals of the creator.</p>
<h2 id="how-design-helps-art">How design helps art</h2>
<p>Artists use design to create art. If art’s goal is to tell a story, the job of design in art is to reduce the friction in getting that story across. The most common design tool in art is technical skill. If you want people to understand the story of Swan Lake, you need to be able to dance. If you want to tell a visual story about the passion of Jesus Christ, it helps to be able to draw an accurate representation of Jesus (or at least of a human being).</p>
<p><img src="/uploads/eccehomo.png" alt="Photo of original and ruined Ecce Homo painting" /></p>
<p><em>Ecce Homo, a 1930 painting “restored” in 2012 by amateur painter Cecilia Giménez</em></p>
<p>But art can also make use of clever design decisions unrelated to technical skill. Mark Rothko is famous for extremely simple (looking) paintings containing nothing but large fields of color. There’s little story that this type of painting can tell beyond setting a mood.</p>
<p>Rothko’s paintings are large. If a painting’s goal is to set a mood, it’s much easier to set a mood with a huge wall of color than with a postage stamp. The size of his paintings was a design choice made by Rothko with the goal of reducing friction in setting a mood.</p>
<h2 id="how-art-helps-design">How art helps design</h2>
<p>It’s almost impossible to create a successful experience that doesn’t tell a story. Human beings are not rational creatures. Science has proven repeatedly that human decisions are driven by emotion, not logic—even to the extent that people with damaged emotional centers in their brains are incapable of making decisions. People are influenced by stories.</p>
<p>Particularly in the consumer world, stories drive purchasing decisions. When you buy a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, you aren’t buying cotton and thread, you’re buying sunny afternoons playing croquet at the country club. When you buy a Lexus, you’re not buying four wheels and a engine, you’re buying a corner office, power lunches, and a killer golf swing. These stories help marketers sell products. If these stories speak to you, they reduce the friction that would cause you to buy something else. When it comes to selling products, these stories are just as important as good UX design on the respective companies’ websites.</p>
<p>I recently came across a Medium post entitled “Well-designed interfaces are boring.” I respectfully disagree. Firstly, Donald Norman famously demonstrated that attractive things work better. Why? Because we feel more relaxed around visually appealing things. This state of relaxation encourages us to explore alternative ways of using something, whereas a state of tension causes us to give up in frustration.</p>
<p>Secondly, the primary example author Matthew Ström gives as a boring interface is the Bloomberg Terminal. You know, one of these things:</p>
<p><img src="/uploads/bloomberg.jpg" alt="A Bloomberg Terminal" /></p>
<p>He’s right that every design aspect of this thing was chosen for a good reason but — I’m sorry — this thing is not boring. Sitting in front of this terminal would make me feel like I’m an all-powerful wizard controlling the universe! That’s a hell of a story that’s going to affect the way I think and act. Based on the reputation of elite Wall Street bankers, I’m pretty sure that’s the desired (and proven) effect.</p>
<p>Good design does not need to be boring. Good design should not be distracting, but that’s absolutely not the same thing.</p>
<h2 id="lets-talk-flat-design-of-course">Lets talk flat design (of course)</h2>
<p>Nothing has fired up the art vs. design debate more than the twenty-first century “übertrend” of flat design. Is flat design devoid of art? Is flat design devoid of design? Either way, are we better or worse off?</p>
<p><img src="/uploads/ios6v7.jpg" alt="iOS6 and iOS7 Home Screens" /></p>
<p><em>iOS 6 vs. iOS 7</em></p>
<p>Well, let’s see how flat design fits into my two definitions of design and art.</p>
<p>Proponents of flat design believe that it removes friction by eliminating distracting UI details. But detractors believe that it adds friction by making it harder to decipher content hierarchies. I believe that both flat and non-flat design can have non-distracting UI’s and clear content hierarchies if done well. So, I don’t find either style inherently superior — from a UX perspective — but there is clearly a design strategy behind each.</p>
<p>The other argument flat design fans make is that flat design is somehow more “natural” for a screen-based interface, that it’s somehow more authentic and real.</p>
<p>If that’s not storytelling, I don’t know what is. There’s no such thing as an “authentic digital experience”. Humans invented computers and they invented display screens. Saying that there’s one “authentic” look and feel for screens is like saying there’s only one “authentic” way to build a table. Like screens, tables don’t exist in nature. Tables can be made of wood, plastic, metal, glass, or iron. There is room in the world for all of these, and the ideal table at any given moment depends on intended usage and fashion trends.</p>
<p>Flat design is absolutely an artistic choice and by no means some kind of platonic ideal of visual design.</p>
<p>I believe we exist in an endless cycle of flat vs. intricate design. Some believe intricate-to-flat is a one way street. If so, how did we go from Swiss design to grunge, then back to flat design? Intricate design will be back. There is far too much craft and elegance in graphics like 2010-era OS X icons for their likes never to grace our eyes again.</p>
<p><img src="/uploads/macicons.jpg" alt="Mac App Icons from 2010" /></p>
<p><em>Mac app icons from 2010</em></p>
<h2 id="cant-we-all-just-get-along">Can’t we all just get along?</h2>
<p>There is room in the tech world for art and design. There is room for designers who are good at art and for artists who are good at design. There is also room for designers who aren’t good at art and artists who aren’t good at design — as long as they collaborate well with their counterparts. Art and design are both tools. They’re independent yet highly symbiotic. If you want to build something great, strive to make use of the best design and the best art available.</p>This is my thinkpiece on the difference between design and art. There are many like it, but this one is mine.You are a UX designer, you are a hero2015-07-15T12:00:00+00:002015-07-15T12:00:00+00:00chausse.org/2015/07/15/you-are-a-ux-designer-you-are-a-hero<p>Ask me why I love being a user experience designer, and I’ll tell you it’s because I enjoy being a hero who saves lives. No, I don’t work in medicine or on devices used by first responders. Right now, I mostly work on a website that helps people read reports online.</p>
<p>But I’m still saving lives. Allow me to explain.</p>
<p>When I was a software engineer in my 20’s, I had a “quarter life crisis”. I questioned the impact of my work on the universe. I enjoyed programming, but I felt like what I was doing was in no way noble, and certainly not heroic.</p>
<p>In my first job, I did QA testing on software used in industrial automation equipment. So, I was testing software written by other people that went into hardware that went into a factory that made the plastic lining that goes into paper sugar packets. (Did you even realize that was a thing someone had to manufacture?).</p>
<p>Most real world tech jobs are like that — far removed from directly helping out humanity in any profound way.</p>
<p>I wasn’t saving lives, or curing cancer, or ending world hunger. I was just using technology to grease gears in the innermost bowels of the gigantic machine of capitalism. I certainly was not, as Steve Jobs would say, “putting a ding in the universe”.</p>
<p>Despite having no spare time or money, I looked into what it would take to do a massive career pivot and become an optometrist. Why an optometrist? Well, preserving the gift of sight was clearly heroic and noble. And as far as the medical professions went, it was one of the least icky specialties.</p>
<p>Eventually, common sense got the better of me and I stuck with my tech career. I focused on working at companies that endeavored to make peoples’ lives legitimately better in some way. My first long-term job was at Groove Networks. Groove genuinely wanted to revolutionize the way humans communicated across time and space.</p>
<p>But I still felt like I, personally, was just greasing gears – not changing lives. (Ultimately, Groove didn’t really change many lives either. Microsoft acquired Groove, along with founder Ray Ozzie, and stripped it for parts that live on as bits of other software.)</p>
<p>I eventually gravitated from engineering into user experience design. UX design allowed me to focus on the parts of software development that I loved while avoiding the parts I didn’t. Ultimately, though, I was still working on the same type of end product. It felt good to make things easier for people, but I was making it easier to do things that weren’t really that important, in the grand scheme of things.</p>
<p>In 2012 I came across a speech by Paul Ford called “<a href="http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/10-timeframes/">10 Timeframes</a>”. It was a keynote speech given to a graduating class of interaction designers. I welcome you to read it before continuing with this post. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read — period. It put my work into a completely new perspective. The line that stopped me dead in my tracks was this:</p>
<p>The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats.</p>
<p>Every “user”, no matter the tool or system, is a living, breathing human being. One with hopes, dreams, plans, fears, passions… and a beating heart. As UX designers, we are in the business of giving people their heartbeats back.</p>
<p>Every second someone is not struggling with a piece of software is a second their mind can be free to hope, dream, and plan. Every heartbeat not spent focusing on making something work is one spent on something that really matters. And those heartbeats add up.</p>
<p>The average human lifespan is about 70 years, or about 3 billion heartbeats. Let’s say you design software used by 2,000 users. And let’s say your design skills save each of those users 10 minutes a day they would otherwise spend struggling with software. In 8 years, you will have given over two billion seconds back to humanity that would otherwise be wasted. You will have saved an entire human lifetime.</p>
<p>In a 55 year career, you will reclaim about a dozen human lifetimes that would not have otherwise existed.</p>
<p>If you do the same work on software with 30,000 users, you will save over 100 lifetimes in your career. And if you work for Facebook, with over a billion users? Well, if you save each of those users a mere 2 seconds a day for 55 years, you will save over 13,000 lives.</p>
<p>These lives — created from thin air by nothing but your skills and passion — are entire lifetimes spent dreaming about the future, making plans with loved ones, and exploring passions that extend far beyond whatever tool you are working on.</p>
<p>If you’re a UX designer and ever feel like the things you’re working on don’t really matter, remember this: it’s not the tools you create that give your work profound meaning. It’s the little spaces in time you create when people don’t have to think about those tools. Those little spaces save lives. You save lives. You are a hero.</p>Ask me why I love being a user experience designer, and I’ll tell you it’s because I enjoy being a hero who saves lives. No, I don’t work in medicine or on devices used by first responders. Right now, I mostly work on a website that helps people read reports online.Emotional UX2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:002013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00chausse.org/2013/08/15/emotional-ux<p>When software first came into the world, technological limitations made for a very low “experience” bar. Software either could do what you needed it to do, or it couldn’t. If it required a fifty page manual to explain how to calculate the product of two numbers, then that’s just how it was.</p>
<p>With the dawn of the <strong><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh">Macintosh</a></strong>, “usability” slowly came into vogue and the experience bar was raised. Nowadays it’s expected that software actually be <em>easy</em> to use. Gone are the fifty page manuals, in are self-describing interfaces with strategically designed virtual <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance">affordances</a>.</p>
<p>We are on the verge of an era where the software experience bar will be raised even higher. No longer should we only be concerned with how easy it is to do something, but with how a user should <em>feel</em> while they are doing it.</p>
<p>I recently worked at a company called <a href="http://www.kokofitclub.com/">Koko FitClub</a>. Koko is a fitness center franchise, but one unlike any other. It was designed for people who hate the traditional gym experience. Part of that “traditional gym experience” is the aggressive personal trainer who pushes you out of your comfort zone, harasses you to show up on a fixed schedule, and berates you for imperfect performance. Koko’s philosophy is adamantly opposed to all this. Its attitude is that every step you take toward fitness – even if it’s only one workout a week – is a positive step toward better health, and should be celebrated.</p>
<p>This philosophy went beyond the in-club experience and marketing materials. It went right down into the functionality of the member web site. We had enormous volumes of member data to work with but what we <em>didn’t</em> present to the user was just as important as what we <em>did</em>. The site never commented on how long it had been since your last visit. It never challenged you to visit more often or lift more weight than your fellow members. And it never graphically displayed how much further you had to go on your predefined program before moving onto the next one. We had the technological capability to do all of those things, but we very intentionally chose not to.</p>
<p>Every visual element and interaction on the site was designed to give you a feeling of “I’m doing OK, and if I do more, it’s reason to celebrate”. This type of emotion-based design goes beyond usability. Usability is binary – something is either easy or it isn’t. Emotion is not – it’s very brand-specific. The ideal emotional design for Koko would not be the correct one for a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossFit">CrossFit</a> “box” or a <a href="http://www.goldsgym.com/">Gold’s Gym</a>.</p>
<p>When designing a website or an app, remember to consider how a feature will make someone <em>feel</em> before deciding if it belongs in your design. Your brand isn’t just reflected in your logo or visual design. It goes all the way down to the widgets on a screen.</p>When software first came into the world, technological limitations made for a very low “experience” bar. Software either could do what you needed it to do, or it couldn’t. If it required a fifty page manual to explain how to calculate the product of two numbers, then that’s just how it was.Regular Users, Power Users, and Why Microsoft and Apple Need Two Operating Systems2013-02-11T20:31:00+00:002013-02-11T20:31:00+00:00chausse.org/2013/02/11/two-operating-systems<p>When Apple first announced the iPad, I was skeptical. It seemed like an interesting enough proposition – a specialized, simple computer great for kids, seniors, and “people who walk around a lot and occasionally need to look at complicated stuff” (e.g. doctors). A great adjunct device, but certainly not something that would replace “real computers”.</p>
<p>Then, far more quickly than I ever expected, the iPad started becoming way more popular than “real computers.” “OK”, I thought, “We need to remember that there are a lot more ‘regular’ people than people like me —who eat, sleep, and breathe computing.”</p>
<p>Then something happened that made me feel… <em>threatened?</em> Apple had their “Back to the Mac” event, in which a lot of iPad-like functionality was migrated “back” to desktop and laptop computers. Then OS X Mountain Lion came along and took this trend even further. This bugged me, for reasons I couldn’t quite elucidate.</p>
<p>If iPads were for regular, every day people, and “traditional” computers were for “power users”, why is everything converging in only one direction? If iOS was the computing platform for “regular people” then why wasn’t OS X being optimized somehow for power users? It got me thinking about what, exactly, that meant. What differentiated a “regular person” from a “power user” and how should operating systems differentiate between the two?</p>
<p>As usually happens, the answer struck me while I was in the shower one morning.</p>
<p>It’s all about <em>contexts.</em></p>
<p>In 2009, Google released a video entitled “What is a Browser?” In it, 50 random people on the street were asked, well, “What is a browser?”</p>
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<p>It’s easy to laugh at their responses — but for anyone paying attention, this was a huge wake-up call. The average person had a very hard time grasping what “computer people” consider one of the most basic, fundamental principles of modern computing — that computers run programs called browsers, to access services called search engines, which return results, which lead to web pages, which (hopefully) give you answers you need.</p>
<p>Hey, wait a minute. That doesn’t actually sound that simple.</p>
<p>Most of the “mom and dad tech support” that people like me suffer through center around problems with context. We tell people to “click the ‘OK’” button — but is that button part of a dialog, a document, an app window, or the operating system? This is madness, when you take off your Computer Wizard hat and really think about it.</p>
<p>Herein lies the “magic” of the iPad. With the iPad, you are either “doing a thing” (running an app), or “picking a thing to do” (using the home screen). Not a lot of room for confusion. But not a lot of flexibility, either. Power users want that flexibility. Regular users don’t.</p>
<p>Well, they do a little. But for “regular users”, cutting and pasting something between apps is an infrequent, exceptional situation.</p>
<p>Power users do that stuff <em>all the time</em>. It’s our bread and butter. In a given day, I’m reading requirements in Word docs, feeding information from them into a project management tool, exporting data into Excel, writing code in a text editor, and shuffling files around using various transfer tools.</p>
<p>That got me thinking of the following simple differentiator between “regular users” and “power users”.</p>
<p>Regular Users are people whose primary computing tasks involve working <em>within one context</em> at a time. Power Users are people whose primary computing tasks involve transferring information <em>between contexts</em>.</p>
<p><em>This</em> is the key, irreconcilable difference between two types of computing that should be addressed by having two different styles of operating system. Both Apple and Microsoft are tripping over this dichotomy — Apple by having two ways of doing almost everything (Launchpad vs. Finder, full screen vs. windowed, iCloud vs. file system) in Mountain Lion, and Microsoft by almost comically slapping two radically different, and awkwardly isolated, modes together into one system, in Windows 8.</p>
<p>Some people think that tablets are for regular people and “real computers” are for pros. I don’t think that’s the case at all. Both form factors can work for both types of users – it’s the supported workflow that matters. Microsoft got this half right with Surface, and could actually nail it if they had the guts to release pure versions of “Metro” and “Desktop” operating systems for their RT and Pro models.</p>
<p>You can’t be a family sedan and a construction vehicle at the same time. Hopefully Apple and Microsoft (and Google) figure this out in the next round.</p>When Apple first announced the iPad, I was skeptical. It seemed like an interesting enough proposition – a specialized, simple computer great for kids, seniors, and “people who walk around a lot and occasionally need to look at complicated stuff” (e.g. doctors). A great adjunct device, but certainly not something that would replace “real computers”.The Danger of Redesign2013-01-19T20:38:00+00:002013-01-19T20:38:00+00:00chausse.org/2013/01/19/the-danger-of-redesign<p>I just got back from <a href="http://www.aneventapart.com/2012/boston/">An Event Apart Boston</a> – an amazing experience every year. The presentation that wound up sticking in my head the most was Jared Spool’s – in which he talked about “intuitive experiences.” The intuitiveness of a system is not an absolute property of that system – it is variable based upon the experiences of the system’s user. And if you’re not careful, a redesign intended to make things better for everyone can be a disaster for your bottom line.</p>
<p>Complex systems can be intuitive to the right user. My mother certainly couldn’t develop a Ruby on Rails site – but talk to anyone who’s been doing it for a while, and they’ll say Rails is <em>incredibly</em> intuitive. It’s all a matter of experience.</p>
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<p>The intuitiveness of a system is the inverse of the distance between the user’s “current knowledge” (what they already know how to do) and the “target knowledge” needed to use that system.</p>
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<p>There are two ways to narrow that distance: You can <em>increase</em> the user’s current knowledge via training (never a good approach on the public web – <em>no one</em> ever reads instructions on how to use a website), or you can <em>decrease</em> the target knowledge required to use the system.</p>
<p>So, simplifying systems is a good thing, right? Well, maybe. Simplification changes the nature of the “target knowledge” needed to use a system, but doesn’t linearly move it closer to the user’s knowledge. Simplification invariably introduces change, and change invariably requires adaptation by people familiar with the system being simplified. A system <em>can</em> be redesigned to be more usable (and intuitive) to brand new users, but with a website, that is never the full picture.</p>
<p>Because here’s the kicker. <em>A system is, by definition, intuitive to the people who are already using it effectively</em>. This is why people get so up in arms when sites like Facebook and Twitter change their design. Outsiders may think the changes are good, or at least barely noticeable – but people who use those sites <em>constantly</em> have to change <em>highly-ingrained</em> behavior. The reason Facebook gets so much attention for “constantly changing for the worse” is because it has the most <em>highly efficient users</em> of any site in the world.</p>
<p>So, here’s where it gets really interesting. In Jared’s talk, he discussed a large eCommerce site with over $1,000,000,000 in annual revenue. Like all eCommerce sites, only a small fraction of people visiting the site actually make a purchase. In this company’s case, their “conversion rate” was 1.6% – out of every 1,000,000 visitors, 16,000 people made a purchase. But out of <em>that</em> 1.6 percent, 20% of those users (heavy, active users) accounted for 80% of all revenue.</p>
<p>So, if you’re this company, and you want to generate more revenue with your site, what would you do? Well, what most companies try to do is get more people into the “heavy” group (or at least the “actually made a purchase” group) – and they’ll do this by redesigning their system to be easier to use. But, again, <em>any</em> redesign makes a system less intuitive to its most active current users.</p>
<p>Let’s say frustration from these changes cause the heavy users to spend 13% less money on the site. That means a loss of over 10% overall revenue for the company – in this company’s case, over $100,000,000 per year! Now, if things went according to plan, this loss will be buffered a bit by new customers, or possibly “light” customers who buy a little bit more.</p>
<p>But you are taking a <em>huge</em> gamble that you’ll make up this difference. In one real world case Jared discusses, a major retailer made a $100,000,000 major site redesign and lost 20% of its site revenue – from which it took three and a half years to recover!</p>
<p>Ever wonder why online flight-booking systems never seem to get easier to use? Why they’re always so complex? Well, even moreso than most companies, airline profits are driven by “power users”. Any change will have a major ripple effect in their profits.</p>
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<p>The harder your site is to use, the more invested your power users are in having it stay just the way it is.</p>
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<p>It’s a weird, counterintuitive fact - the harder your site is to use, the more you risk by changing it!</p>
<p>What are the takeaways?</p>
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<p>The best thing to do is make your site easy to use out of the gate. Hopefully, that’s a no-brainer.</p>
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<p>Risk is just that – risk. Risk is taken with the hope of reward. You may take this type of gamble and come out ahead. But, you should go into a redesign asking yourself – if we lost <em>all</em> of our current customers, would the customers attracted by this redesign make up for it (and then some?) If you can confidently say yes, then you’re probably in a good place to give a major redesign a shot (because in reality, you’ll never lose <em>all</em> your existing customers due to “change frustration”)</p>
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<p>The safest approach to take is to do slow, gradual redesigns – which incrementally make things easier for light or non-users, but don’t risk significant frustration from heavy users (and you can easily A/B test your ideas to quantitatively measure the <em>actual</em> effect each change on your revenue). This is the approach Amazon.com has always taken. Look at today’s Amazon vs. the Amazon of 5 years ago, and you’ll see a very different site, but you’ll be hard-pressed to think of any point at which it made a radical redesign – the closest change which comes to mind is when they abandoned the top navigation “tabs” – which they were forced to do because they ran out of room. Even in that case, they approached the change very cautiously, and with a large amount of testing.</p>
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</ol>I just got back from An Event Apart Boston – an amazing experience every year. The presentation that wound up sticking in my head the most was Jared Spool’s – in which he talked about “intuitive experiences.” The intuitiveness of a system is not an absolute property of that system – it is variable based upon the experiences of the system’s user. And if you’re not careful, a redesign intended to make things better for everyone can be a disaster for your bottom line.Who Owns Your UX Philosphy?2013-01-12T20:44:00+00:002013-01-12T20:44:00+00:00chausse.org/2013/01/12/who-owns-your-ux-philosphy<p><a href="https://feld.com/archives/2013/01/who-owns-your-ux-philosophy.html">A great post by Brad Feld</a>:</p>
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<p>I’ve come to appreciate the important of a single person in the company owning the UX with this person being the arbiter of discussion around how to implement the UX. There’s nothing wrong with lots of different perspectives, but a single mind has to own it, synthesize it, and dictate the philosophy. But first, they have to understand the difference between UI and UX, and – more importantly – the product-oriented execs who approach things from an engineering perspective need to understand this.</p>
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<p>Product Management (or Product Ownership, in Agile terms) has historically been the domain of Marketing. These days, more than ever, the Product often <em>is</em> the marketing and the stewardship for product development needs to be in the hands of someone completely obsessed with the experience of the user. Anyone who disagrees apparently missed about 15 years of Apple becoming the biggest company in the world.</p>A great post by Brad Feld: