Category Archives: Professional Pontification

Of brainstorms and quiet breakthroughs.

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I’ve always been a little suspect of brainstorms. Brainstorming, has always seemed to me to be the application of quantitative methodologies to what is inherently a qualitative process – ideation. So. I read with great interest an article in the NY Times on The New Group Think.

Personally I always felt the staged environment of brainstorms worked against breakthrough idea generation. The concept of it sounds right. Pack a room with smart people and you should come up with something brilliant. But the forced environment of brainstorming has always seemed to yield ‘extension’ ideas rather than true breakthroughs. By this I mean, ideas born in brainstorms tend to solve a problem the way it had been solved in the past. Advertising issues solved with funny TV ads usually got more funny TV ads. Promotional ideas using sweepstakes tend to get more sweepstakes. This has much to do with the business line of the people thinking about the problem. Which is exactly the problem. Brainstorms tend to assemble teams of people who solve problems in the same way. These people naturally, if subtly, influence each other in the brainstorm, skewing the whole exercise in a particular direction.

Most people in the idea business come to realize that in order to have ideas, they need time to think, and that thinking is usually best done in quiet isolation. This thinking time primes the pump of ideation. Conversely, the first half of every brainstorm I have ever sat in has been an exercise in spouting out the ideas everyone is having. It’s group priming and it seems a waste of time given the high cost of having all those people in a room together.

This segues into another problem with brainstorms – their timed nature. You get the invite on your iCal, you show up. Everyone sits down. Okay, now be brilliant. Of course it doesn’t work that way. And if advanced knowledge and briefing on the problem has been given (which is rare, and when it is, is usually only hours in advance), most people attending a staged brainstorm have not had the time to think about the problem. So when they sit down they are starting cold, on someone else’s schedule. No wonder the first volley of ideas thrown out feel like the low hanging fruit.

Then there are the divergences. Any brainstorm I’ve been in has been an open-ended conversation. And creative minds, by nature, tend to wander. This inevitably leads to joke making (I am highly guilty of this) and going on topical tangents. Brainstorms, by their nature, aren’t very focused and so are arguably inefficient from an employee time standpoint. Yet neuroscience points to focus being important to having groundbreaking ideas.

There are also the unspoken politics of brainstorms which can undermine ideation. Can you challenge a superior’s ideas? If a superior is in the room, will his/her ideas automatically bubble to the top owing to the politics of the company? Does this diminish the desire to put your own ideas forward knowing someone else’s are already more likely to win out? Are people holding back for fear of sounding stupid? Worse, are they spouting drivel for fear that if they don’t say something they’ll be viewed as either dim or uninterested? Even the best companies with the more open, flat cultures still get snared up in these matters. Compound this with any sense of risk – recent layoffs, struggling accounts, slow sales – and fear can easily stymie innovation.

I acknowledge that brainstorms always yield plenty of scrawling on dry erase boards. They do birth ideas. And sometimes they birth really good ideas. But from an efficiency perspective the value based on the number of good ideas compared to the resources burned in time and distraction is questionable. Additionally, anything I’ve read on ideation, including the aforementioned New York Times article seems to point to the fact that groundbreaking innovation, true out of the box thinking, happens when a mind can focus and really ruminate on topic – ideally without time constraints.

Brainstorms of course inherently work against focus and apply time constraints.

My first job out of college was a Leo Burnett. The agency at that time was famous for ‘gangbanging’ (an charming internal term) accounts in review. They put every mind in the agency on in brainstorms in the hopes something brilliant would come through to save the day. But the politics of the company, the forced nature of the ‘creative sessions’ and the lack of advanced knowledge needed to wrap one’s head around the problem usually yielded more of the same – simple jokes, shallow gimmicks, and funny thoughts that were sometimes questionably at all related to the problem being solved.

Conversely, before Burnett I interned at Mullen Advertising – then still in its mansion in Wenham Ma. One day Ed Boches was reviewing my portfolio (which I admit, wasn’t much to look at at the time). We were talking about having ideas. I distinctly recall him saying (and I’ll paraphrase here), “I never put multiple teams on a project. I don’t do brainstorms. I don’t ask creative people to compete for a project. I hire good people, and I assign one team to solve a problem. I figure that way they’ll go to the wall for it because they are on the line.”

Now, with about two decades of additional experience since that internship, I’ve come to see brainstorms for what they are and aren’t good for. Mr. Boches’ approach feels all the more right now than it did instinctually to me then.

Brainstorms are good for extending ideas or coming up with new slants on the same approach to finding a solution. If you have a primary concept and are looking to flesh it out, having a brainstorm might help. If you’re in a line of work where the expectation is within a narrow category (e.g. making TV commercials) brainstorms will probably yield more TV commercials and some might be good (though again, the cost of these brainstorms against the outcome is something to measure).

Brainstorms, with a multi-disciplinary team, might be good to kick around some early thoughts –  to loosen up the mind a little. Brainstorming can serve the priming function much like cerebral warm up exercises.

But when it comes time to dig in, and dig down into solving a problem, I tend to land where the Times article did. Its a few people, in the quiet, rolling a problem around again and again and again who have the truly breakthrough moments that give birth to new products, new businesses and sometimes new industries.

How about you?
What have your experiences been with brainstorming? Fruitful? Frustrating?   Incubators of innovation? Or factory floors where the same thoughts are dressed in different colors?

Scarcity, Value & Social Media

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When everyone is doing it, its no longer a competitive advantage.

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

This passage came from an editorial piece in the Economist that I think is well worth reading. Coming on the heels of my ‘I was wrong’ post I’m going to stick my neck out and wonder if 2012 won’t be the year social media loses a little bit of its rock star status. Now, I’m in no way saying social media is going away or even that it’s going to decline in quality or importance. Only that like the telephone, television and Web it is becoming a simple fact of life, not a novelty, and that the conversations around social media are changing from ‘how do we get into it?’ to ‘now that we’re here, what do we do with it and what can we realistically expect to get from it?’

Here are some reasons I think social media will find itself facing many of the challenges of other communications media in the coming years.

1. The category is maturing.
Like prior media, at some point a shift will happen when we’ll talk less about the medium itself than about the content delivered through it. That’s starting to happen already. Just as few people outside of specialized industry circles discuss the nature of telephony, television or the Web, we’ve been moving away from social media’s dominant self-referential nature. Still, there are people tweeting such obvious thoughts as “This social media stuff is here to stay” (I literally saw this a few days ago, and by a credible social media guru type no less), which means we’ve not quite squeezed out all the juice from the novelty just yet.

2. Burnout.
There’s also the matter of fatigue. Even if you’re not a Tweeting, Tumblr-toting, Foursquare-checking, Instagram-shooting geek, many of us have dedicated quite a bit of our time to tinkering on Facebook et. al. over the last few years. We’ve delighted in the joys of reacquainting with old friends, meeting the occasional new person and voyeuristically peeking into the lives of people we’re connected to.

Operationally, though, these new technologies have a price for individuals, institutions and corporations. They further divide our time, resources, budgets and attention. And of course, as noted above, the fact that they are everywhere, in great quantity, applies downward pressure on their value – both in terms of the quality of any individual piece of content distributed and in the price points companies are willing to pay for services in the sector.

3. Higher consumer expectations.
Social technology has also successfully infiltrated other aspects of life – from seeking recommendations to validating facts to answering questions to making purchases. It can’t be overstated how much social technologies have fundamentally changed these tasks. By the same token, we humans get used to things pretty quick. Once we’re used to them, they become expectations not attractors. When they’re an expectation we don’t talk about them as much – unless they’re broken. Today including social technologies in consumer-facing business practices is becoming table stakes not a competitive advantage.

4. High expectations & Modest Results
Then there are the ridiculously high expectations of social media from an enterprise growth perspective. In addition to the starry-eyed and often nonsensical expectations of venture capitalists hungry to cash in quick; everyone from marketing agencies to operations teams have come to expect social media to be a sledgehammer against barriers to success. This is happening at exactly the same time our habits are settling in and social tools are becoming an expectation of daily life. Anything that is an everyday expectation is unlikely to be a barrier breaker for long.

Certainly businesses have seen some results, and up to now some of those results have outperformed other media by some (usually inherently favorable) measurements. It’s safe to say though that for most, social media has not been the ‘holy grail of marketing’ originally hoped for. Social is becoming but one more arrow in the marketer’s quiver with its strengths and weaknesses. Every company has learned that while they need to be using it, they can’t count on social media to replace all (or any, really) of the other stuff they’re doing. So budgets are divided yet again as the marketing ‘pie’ is sliced smaller and smaller each time popular culture latches onto the next Twitter or FourSquare or Pinterest.

In fact, its recently come to light that many of the problems marketers have always faced remain the same. As it turns out, 83% of a brand Facebook fans never see that brand’s missives - the same clutter issue facing all advertising media. We’re finding that the proportion of ‘fans’ to ‘talking about’ is also pretty modest for most brands – in the same neighborhood as email open rates and coupon redemptions. And whether you get their names from a business reply card, email signup or Facebook ‘like’ – the size of your list is only as useful as your plan to do something with it. The days of racking up 1MM ‘likes’ and claiming victory are over.

The hype cycle revisited
Anyone who lived through the dotcom boom knows that we’ve been here before. New technologies bring high expectations, lofty visions and sometimes crazy business models. Inevitably though, reality sets in. The Economist piece summarized the realization of that reality. A fundamental challenge for social media is the relation between scarcity and value. Social media works against scarcity and thereby against value creation in the traditional economic model sense.

That social media is now a fact of life means that in coming years it will have to work harder to prove itself and it will have to wrestle with the same challenges other media struggle with. Until now social media has enjoyed a near monopoly on the headlines in the media industry space. Moving forward though, share will be about more than just enabling the act of distributing content between friends. For social media it will mean maintaining share – of our time, our attention and our budgets – by proving its comparative value against other media.

The conundrum of responsive design.

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I remember when Netscape launched its frames tag. I remember how it blew my mind. I immediately tapped out some code that nested frames in themselves rendering a vortex M.C, Escher would’ve been proud of.

I also remember how frames collided with the classical design training I’d received. As did the notion of setting a table width parameter at some percentage, or even better simply ‘*’ to fill the gap depending on the browser’s width.

These were the earliest precursors to a unique problem facing the digital interface designer.

The Golden Ratio does not apply here.
When I began taking drawing and painting in high school and college I spent a lot of time studying laws of composition – from the effects of visual symmetry to the almighty Golden Ratio. An underlying assumption beneath all of it was that as an artist you had full control of your canvas. You chose the width and it was finite and fully contained and would not change. Early on, digital design began to wreak a certain havoc on this fundamental premise.

As digital media have evolved more and more control has been taken away. For the print designer converting to digital in the late 1990′s, it was a shock that the right and bottom edge of the browser ‘canvas’ could change outside of your control. Browsers also rendered code differently, monitors came in different sizes and resolutions. Way back when even certain colors were unavailable. Time passed and the technology progressed. With the move from static page (hard coded HTML) to data driven websites compiled on the fly, designers lost even more control over the consistency with which their choices would render across a userbase. Current best practices in SEO, social media, etc. exacerbate this issue still more today.

Where in print the designer has near 100% control over the rendering of the piece (last minute, crazy client requests, noted) in digital the capacity to define how a page renders is shared between multiple parties and systems. Suddenly the computer science concept of graceful degradation became a part of the problem the designer was tasked to solve for.

Convergent Pipe. Divergent Media.
Now we are embarking on an age where responsive design (the term isn’t even in wikipedia yet!) will likely move to the forefront of the digital designer’s mind. While pundits will say with great certainty that media are converging, I would argue the opposite. Media are diverging. If television, radio, magazines and outdoor are considered ‘media types’, then we today have far more media types than even a few decades ago. Today ‘online media’ is a misnomer as there are a multitude of types. I don’t know about you, but I own an iPhone, an iPad, a laptop, a desktop and a Kindle. Many of my peers do too.

What has converged is the pipeline, not the media. The internet now feeds all of these screens (and increasingly the television, radio and even billboards). It is a common infrastructure underneath a variety of diverging media types. When you experience digital content, you tap into this pipeline with one of a multitude of devices that interpret and render that content as appropriate to the form factor of the device.

Content producers – from publishers to advertisers – have continually struggled to chase after the functional requirements across all these screens. Where once you’d publish to a single format, now your content is served digitally and needs to be viewable across a range of devices, each with their own rules and characteristics. Responsive design seeks to solve this problem with a technological efficiency. Rather than creating a separate experience for mobile, tablet, laptop and TV, responsive design uses code to identify a device and respond to it by serving up the best rendering for the nature of that device.

Interestingly, this very complex problem is being solved with simplicity.

Is keep it simple, stupid (or smart)?
I remember reading years ago Marc Cuban’s post on the Internet becoming more boring and his perspective has stuck with me since (though I don’t entirely agree with it). Borrowing from his premise, it could be argued that the increasing requirements of our data-driven, socially-enabled, multiple ‘last mile’ devices, environment is forcing certain commonalities on digital experience design. Could this, combined with general usability best practices which are predicated on a level of intuitive familiarity and therefore some degree of standardization, be painting us into a corner aesthetically?

At this time I want to clearly stipulate that there is still great diversity in the needs and outcomes within the broad spectrum of digital media. This is not to say all sites are starting to look the same. That said, I do think there are some strong arguments to be made that certain broad formats have arisen which many sites are adapting to out ofnecessity. I might typify some these as the information portal (e.g. a Google, Yahoo, or CNN.com style layout), the blog construct (used for sites primarily focused on publishing information) and the social network framework (profile handling, media sharing, rating and reviewing). There is certainly cross over as well. What each of the above has in common though is a lighter reliance on interwoven graphical elements. More and more the elements of design are moving away from ‘hard coded’ graphics (jpgs, pngs, etc.) and more to those elements that are rendered by parameters entered with code commands (e.g. CSS styles, system-rendered text).

Responsive design places a higher premium on the generous use of system rendered elements and a reduced use of hard graphics. When hard graphics are used, responsive systems mandate that they need to be considered in a variety of configurations and scalable sizes such that they can morph to meet a 320px width or a 1440px width or greater. Likewise copy is best rendered in system text – with its designer-averse limited number font options – such that is rags dynamically. Even the once locked-down ‘navigation bar’ now needs to be thought about in multiple configurations.

That, my friends, is a lot to keep in mind when doing a GUI design. It seems logical then that most responsive design is very open and minimalist. The fewer elements to juggle the greater likelihood of achieving a pleasant aesthetic balance across multiple configurations. That’s the up side. The downside is an increasing likelihood that sites will begin to look more and more alike over time as ‘best practices’ funnel most design solutions into a common suite of tools and tactics.

So in having to increasingly keep it simple, are we in effect dumbing down digital design? Maybe.

But maybe the highest order of usability design is coming to the foreground now precisely because of responsive design.

Looking ahead through print and television.
Among some UX professionals there is belief that a GUI – be it mobile, tablet or browser, should not call attention to itself. The role of the UX designer in this school of thought is to facilitate an experience with minimal distraction by the navigational system being used to do so. In this sense the GUI is the wrapper around content – whether that content is video, static images, sound, touch-responsive activity, a game, or even a passage of text. The site itself is not the art but rather the mat and frame through which the art is presented.

If UX design evolves in this manner, that too will fly in the face of traditional design. Graphic designers who work in traditional media like print and packaging treat every word and element – from the legal copy and nutrition information to the headlines and images – as a part of the final art. What navigation there is in a printed piece (the binding perhaps) is often, though not always, outside the designer’s primary area of interest. Similarly, a bag, box or jar is navigable through its folds and tabs but the package designer tends to work around these elements, not with them (most, though not all of the time).

With radio and television, the first media to contain content changed or disappeared with time, the navigation (turning the dial or clicking the remote) remained distinctly detached from the actual content (the music or TV show). Radio and TV program producers didn’t have to think about the dial used to change channels (except to be interesting enough to keep people from reaching for it). The mechanical navigational systems of televisions and radios were instead given treatment by industrial product designers whose objectives were of usability and style but not communication of content.

Navigation within navigation.
With digital media served on screen bearing devices the lines get blurry. In some ways even redundant. Today’s physical digital device has its own mechanical navigational system (power and volume buttons, etc.). Within its screen is housed a content distributing intermediary (the site or app) with a navigational system of its own. No wonder older people find computers much more difficult to use than televisions. There is twice the navigation to learn.

In this light it is obvious that companies like Apple are trying to evolve past this redundancy. The iconic iPod spinner (and the mouse before it) was an attempt to solve this by simultaneously addressing the mechanical and digital navigation with a single interface. Today Apple is trying to remove as much mechanical navigation as possible as witnessed by its “one button” iPhone and iPads.

Interactive design has until now had two navigational masters, that of the mechanical device and the GUI. Today’s touch-screen systems and simplified physical devices are now pushing the burden of navigation squarely into the digital GUI. Where a TV has a remote which is distinct and separate from the content, the interactive experience nests the navigation very close to the content. This may be why designers have struggled to decide whether or not the navigation is part of the designed content or the container, much like a TV’s channel dial once was.

It would seem that responsive design, if it continues to gain momentum, will begin to force that hand. With responsive design the best navigation is the most simple, fluid, flexible and out-of-the-way. This is contrary to the traditional designer’s goal of styling it to the same degree as the content. This means that the digital GUI, like the mechanical device navigation of TV sets and radios back in the day, will increasingly be under pressure to disappear into the background while the content – a served video, uploaded image, shared post or installed game – will be the focus of the experience.

I am inclined to believe that market forces (cost efficiencies), an increasing reliance on data, and technological innovation (new device form factors) will exert significant pressure toward the adoption of responsive design principles.

How designers address the conflicting agenda inherent in responsive design (simple, intuitive, undisruptive usability) with the commercial needs of content publication and its reliance on differentiation and novelty to garner attention remains to be seen.

Bridging the gap between creativity and usability.

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For the creative person working in marketing and design, ‘be different’ is important. From day one, creatives are trained and usually rewarded for thinking outside the box, pushing limits and breaking new ground. As a result, when a creative person perceives a pattern in an industry, category, approach, etc. their natural reaction is to zag when others zig. In advertising this is often the difference between breaking through work and being lost in the noise.

The agenda of the user-experience designer is different. Someone tasked with managing usability needs to make sure the person engaging with their interface can quickly and easily navigate the system, accomplish their tasks and find their way to the next logical place. This has much to do with leveraging existing paradigms and conventions as appropriate. So where the creative person sees ‘different’ as an advantage. The UX designer sees it as a potential barrier to usability.

Much of the interface design work that goes into websites and apps falls on the shoulders of people who are classified as ‘creatives’. While a digitally native designer might snap to the needs of usability quicker, there is still an overwhelming urge among most creative people to substitute in the ‘new and different’ whenever possible. That could be in anything from the placement of navigation to the use of icons instead of words.

I recently stumbled upon a useful analogy for helping creative people understand where and how creativity and usability should meet and merge. I thought I would share it with you as you might find it helpful too.

My analogy is the automobile. There is all sorts of creativity in automobile design. From aesthetics, to the placement of cup holders, to the shape and position of taillights. However, every car manufactured has some common elements. A steering wheel on the left side is one (for cars in the U.S.). the gas pedal on the right and brake on the left, is another. The shape of those pedals (vertical vs. horizontal orientation) is yet another.

It’s fair to assume that car designers have entertained other replacements for the steering wheel. Joysticks, video-game like controllers, etc. And certainly, some modifications have been made (like adding buttons to the steering wheel for controlling the sound and climate systems). But by and large the steering wheel looks the same now as it did 20 years ago. That’s because the steering wheel is directly related to the utility of the car. If you can’t steer you can’t drive. And if every time you get into a new car, you need to learn to steer again there’d be many, many more accidents on the road.

In fact, when you think about it, if a car’s usability is compromised it can be immediately frustrating. Most of us have rented a car where the lights and windshield wipers are on different sides. Imagine you’re driving. In comes a flash rain shower. You quickly reach for the wipers and accidentally turn on your high beams. Think about what that does as you’re trying to keep your car in its lane and dealing with rapidly diminishing visibility. In a addition to frustrating, it’s also dangerous. Fortunately, digital design usability issues aren’t usually lethal (though they may lead to products being killed).

With web and app designs, it can be tempting to move the navigation or treat buttons in creative ways. Though one should exercise extreme caution in doing so as it can be the equivalent of swapping the wipers for the headlights on the steering column of a car.

Now, you could dig in here and call up the iPod as an example. The now iconic spinner wheel was a huge shift in interface. It was very different, very new and ultimately very successful.  That said, I have two thoughts on the spinner. One, Apple probably spent a small fortune testing usability before it released the product. I don’t know that for sure, but I’m guessing they did. Second, the spinner found its home in a whole new device without a prior paradigm to reference. MP3 players were far different from the mechanical needs of portable CD players. If you’re creating a new product category, the opportunity might arise for a complete break from convention. But if you’re designing for a device with a history – like computers and I would argue even by similarity, tablets (which still rely heavily on the visual concept of buttons) – you’ll likely get better usability by keeping critical aspects of the interface familiar.

By the way, the car analogy is also useful for clients. An agency’s clients often seek to be new and different just like their creative teams. Marketers know that sameness in advertising rarely lead to gains in marketshare. However, websites and apps are not really advertisements. Sure it helps a brand, but by the time someone is on your website or using your app, the goal has changed. No longer are you looking to ‘break through’ or ‘stand out’ in the advertising sense. The job instead is to deliver on a promise and experience. Good experiences can have a degree of novelty, true, but they also should be efficient and easy. They should feel satisfying and never be confusing. Navigating the experience should be quickly familiar even if the screens loaded are full of new information, ideas, games, videos, tools or whatever. This is precisely why designing a website or app is like designing a car. You’re getting into it to go somewhere and do something. Anything that makes that harder in turn makes the vehicle less useful, no matter how sexy it is on the surface.