Closer To The Ideal

The often interesting robert hoekman, jr:

Our Stories should be an experience rich site. It should offer an engaging environment that compels users to explore and connect emotionally to the storytellers. But it doesn’t offer this at all. Instead, it offers what looks like any other Google design. It’s plain, minimalist, and it’s focused entirely around the information and not the experience.

Google apparently thinks it has hit upon the secret formula to all successful websites - simple, minimalist designs that offer information in a concentrated form. In reality, this formula only works for certain classes of sites, of which the original Google website was the par exemplar. Google fails when it attempts to build a site that needs a philosophically different approach. As Hoekman explains:

 If Google’s goal here was to create emotional connections, they should definitely have considered something other than the business-as-usual, sterile design work that has become Google’s signature. Granted, some of the site’s pages are geared towards showing people how to conduct interviews for the site, and those pages are probably best left alone, but the main attraction here is an environment of storytelling, not another Google search results system.

…Design is meant to communicate content. With the right design, you can always meet your goals much more effectively. If you want emotional connections, design something that encourages them. If you want people to take action, design to encourage action. Don’t let your usual design style get in the way of doing something great.

A very nice point by Robert Hoekman:

We hold up usability as laudable because, sadly, most companies still have serious trouble putting their pants on correctly when it comes to usability. They need the gold stars.

Anyone in the interaction design or usability profession worth his salt knows that usability is a single piece of a very large “experience puzzle”. You need a strong value proposition to get users in the first place. You need a compelling product or service. You need good customer service when things go wrong. You need marketing prowess. You need something that makes you different, and better, than everyone else in your space.

For a product or service to be great, you need all these things. But you also need a usable touchpoint. A strong value proposition gets people interested in your product, but once you have their attention, a high level of usability helps motivate people to keep using it. A low level of usability deters people from using your product.

Actually, the title should be “Kaizen is an attitude, not a skill level?”. The question mark is needed because these are issues I’m still thinking about.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming had a method of increasing the quality of any business process, but he was unable to get a hearing in America till towards the end of his life. After their defeat in World War II, the Japanese were desperate to rebuild their country and they were open to new ideas. And so Deming found an audience in Japan, and he taught the Japanese how to make high quality products. It wasn’t till the 1970s, when Japanese competition was hurting American companies, that American companies finally took an interest in Deming’s ideas.

The production of software and web sites can beneift from Deming’s method, which is neatly summarized as the Deming Cycle. Robert Hoekman has a nice, short page summarizing the Cycle:

The Deming Cycle is a proposal for handling changes. It includes four steps that repeat in a cyclical pattern:

1. Plan a change
2. Do the change
3. Check the results
4. Act on the results

Hoekman also has a page on the Japanese practice of Kaizen, which has made companies like Toyota the best in their industry. The software industry has a lot to learn from the practice of Kaizen.

Kaizen (pronounced “kigh-zen”) is the time-honored practice of continuous, incremental improvement. In the software industry, it’s the practice of actively improving designs, code, processes, and everything else, continuously, now and forever, to create a complete customer experience. The principles of the Kaizen Software Manifesto are:

1. Make continuous improvements in every aspect of the business.
2. Actively pursue a superior, complete customer experience.
3. Continually improve designs, code, and processes.
4. Strive to increase agility (binshou) while reducing costs.
5. Use the Deming Cycle to minimize disruption from change.
6. Prevent errors (poka-yoke), in software and in business.
7. Respect people, leverage expertise, and trust staff.
8. Reward suggestions, improvements, and progress.
9. Always move forward.

This last year, I’ve been working with Bluewall, and they’ve been trying to hire additional programmers and designers. I started off thinking that we could hire relatively inexperienced people and train them on the job. Perhaps this strategy will pay off in the end. However, the last two hires have both been extremely talented people, and it is a relief to work with them. They require very little of my management time, for the most part they manage themselves. This recommendation by Hoekman combines with my own recent experience to change my thinking about who we hire:

Build a kaizen team

Create a team of “change agents” to manage change and make it less interruptive.

One team, in fact, can be dedicated to improving the whole customer experience. Staff from different parts of the organization – marketing, development, management, etc – can all be part of this team. The team should have a clear goal of keeping an eye on the big picture of how customers experience the company and improving it in every way possible.

Of course, a kaizen team is not necessarily made up of highly experienced people. Kaizen is an attitude, not a skill level. So long as people have the right attitude then, given time, they will achieve improvement, which over time will amount to dramatic breakthroughs.

But these are things I’m still thinking about. I sometimes think that a kaizen team must have some experienced members, who can informally act as leaders. Otherwise the team makes improvements, but at a slow pace. Without experienced members, one would have (at least initially) a team of highly motivated individuals who are unsure what to do.

I should add, I have hired one person in the last year who was inexperienced but who has worked out wonderfully. The person is ambitious and dedicated to learning fast. So attitude is more important than skills. All the same, when one can find those rare individuals who have both the right attitude and advanced skills, then, I think, one should always hire such people, to the maximum extent that one’s budget can possibly allow.

Robert Hoekman is the author of Designing the Obvious, which all web application designers should read.

In a recent post he talks about the right way to listen to feedback from one’s users:

I have also long maintained that once you have a product available, you should then plug in and start listening to your audience. In doing this, however, I’ve said you should pay attention to the overwhelming trends - the requests that bubble up to the top over and over again - and not the idiosynracies of individual or small niches of users.

He then quotes a statistic from the Opera web browser development team that shows that a feature that users had frequently requested, and which has been implemented, is never used.

He concludes:

Clearly, even paying attention to trends can be risky. I’ve seen this myself in a couple of situations. It seems that a large number of people can all have the same wrong idea….

Our job as designers is to interpret and define problems, and to create solutions. Very often this means ignoring everything you hear and paying attention only to what you see. When you pay attention to what people actually do instead of what they say they do, you can devise solutions that exceed their expectations.

Instead of building exactly what they ask for, figure out why they’re asking for it. Then find a solution that solves the real problem.

I have occassionally heard designers respond to criticism with the words “I did exactly what you asked me to do” This response, it seems to me, can arise for only two reasons:

1.) The organization for which the designer works has no real respect for design. The designer is not empowered to do actual design work. Instead, the designer is told to follow orders or be fired.

2.) The designer does not understand the actual work of design. The designer needs to spend more time listening to the client/boss so they can figure out the why of a request, rather than the what.

There is no easy fix for #1, which is an epidemic sapping potential economic value out of millions of businesses worldwide. However, for #2, all that is needed is greater design education.