Tag Archives: design

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.

Reductive Thinking: Ideas worthy of the cocktail napkin

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Sometimes getting to simple takes a while.

Sometimes getting to simple takes a while.

When I was in college professors continually made the point that ‘a good concept can be sketched on a cocktail napkin’. Simultaneously the Mac was finding its way onto art directors’ desktops. Suddenly sketches began to go out of style. Instead, burgeoning designers could view millions of images and ads and content and literally ‘borrow’ images for use in their own work. From hand-rendered fonts we got access to hundreds, then thousands of options. We could easily try out numerous design stunts and tactics distressing type, adding gradients and creating amazing digital effects on images.

About this time the old guard in advertising began to express concern that conceptual quality was on the decline. Young writers and art directors were accused of overemphasizing stylistic elements and spending too little time finding really good, original ideas.

The original advertising model was an additive process. We’d start with sketches. We’d start by coming up with the top of mind stuff everyone comes up with – then struggle, sometimes for days – for the harder concepts. We then would add layers of complexity working through the body copy, the image, the layout etc. Each stage was an added layer of scrutiny that brought dimension to the idea.

Digital technology collapsed and cut short the additive process. Suddenly ideas were as often born from a cool image or some digital doodling. Today we’re all bludgeoned with millions of stimuli. When we sit down to have ideas now, they are born the product of a million influences and are rendered in digital tools that allow us to achieve in moments feats that were simply out of reach back in the day. The trouble is, peel back the tactical polish and often there’s little truly new to look at.

With so many places to draw reference from, and so little time to think things through (‘we need ideas to the client by 4pm’), we shortcut the ideation process and pile on layers of polish that disguise thin thinking.

I am increasingly finding it more useful today to adopt a reductive process for ideation. This is a consequence of one of the great challenges of our age – having too much information available. Life today demands simplicity not because people are too stupid to get layered thinking but because none of us has the time to focus on it.

At the office, we have worked hard on our operating construct Enterprise DNA (eDNA). Largely the brainchild of our CEO, I have proudly participated in refining and nurturing the idea down to its granular expressions – a process that has required some reductive ideation.

We have worked, literally for the better part of a year, refining eDNA. All the while, in the back of my mind I have had the goal of making eDNA something you could sketch for a friend on a cocktail napkin ring while grabbing a beer after hours. Setting this bar meant we suddenly had to stare down that 5”x5” piece of white paper and communicate an entire perspective on business using a ballpoint pen.

As with all ideation, the process was frustrating and there were numerous wrong turns along the way. It’s important to point out here that all of this was essential to the process and it all required time.  The outcome, however, was worth the investment. Today the resonating power of the eDNA concept resides in large part in its communicability. Every one of us in the company can sit down and walk someone through the idea without digital tools (crutches?) like Powerpoint, our website, sell sheets or Flash animations. In short, without the digital tools so often relied upon to make ideas look good.

As we all rush around trying to do our jobs faster and more efficiently, using the myriad of tools opportunities provided by computing, I would offer the model of the cocktail napkin as a litmus test for conceptual durability. If combined with the 4th Grade Dictionary test has helped steer me clear some of the snags that can hang up the conceptualization process.

In my mind, if I can sketch my idea on a small swatch of paper and make it meaningful to someone as I do it leads me to believe there might be some substance to it. Whether that idea requires eventually requires layers of polish is a project-specific matter, but if its powerful naked I am willing to bet it will be able to carry layers of complexity without being bogged down by them.

The sketch accompanying this post is our reduced eDNA schematic. Believe it or not, an entire holistic perspective on operating a business – any business – is captured in that little drawing. If you’re curious, I’d be happy to walk you through it. You buy me a beer, I’ll bring a ballpoint pen.