Thoughts and essays from the guy who coined the word "blog."
I am looking for a graduate student intern to conduct a service design internship at Inflection this summer. This person would help me uncover, craft, and articulate a broader service strategy for our offerings, tying together marketing, sales, business development, product design, and member services. You must be familiar with the tools and techniques of service design (customer journey maps, blueprints, etc. etc.)
If you are interested, please let me know in the comments. Thanks!
For as long as I can remember, if I didn’t know something, I’d look it up. The age of the internet has turned me into a habitual Googler, but as a kid, it was books — most often the dictionary, occasionally the encyclopedia.
And that encyclopedia? It was the Britannica. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when we got it (12, I think, as we had this 1985 version), but it had a prominent place in our little home. Leather bound. Tiny type. And pages upon pages of facts.
Owning it was definitely an investment on our family’s part. Economically, we were lower-middle class (socio-economically, fairly solid middle class). We were not an acquisitive household, saving for my dad’s predilection for VCRs. But when it came to my education, my capability to learn, my access to knowledge, we did not spare expenses. We bought a set outright, which cost $1,249 at the time (which, according to this calculator is $2676.77 in today’s dollars).
Now, I’m typically not one to wring my hands at the death of the printed book. Long ago I wrote about the benefits of ebooks, and this was particularly true for reference works. So I surprised myself at being affected by the news that the new editions of The Encyclopædia Britannica will no longer be available in print form. Most books are transient things, read once, placed on a shelf, and largely forgotten. The Britannica, though, was a different thing altogether, and key to the experience was its gravity (both figurative and literal). It was a physical presence in our house. Heck, it probably weighed more than my mom.
There’s something to the tangibility of information that allows you to grasp its scope. Clearly, what we now have access to at our fingertips is far greater, and I will never suggest “things were better then,” but I do think what we’re missing, and what my children will definitely miss, is a sense of the real scale of knowledge. Our computers and screens have rendered this information as weightless and abstract, and I wonder if this literal lack of gravity will lead to a sense of a figurative lack of (informational) gravity.
Let me begin by saying how excited I am to have Todd Zaki Warfel join our team at Inflection. I’ve known Todd for a number of years, and have respected his passion, commitment, and sharing within the UX community, and know that he’s going to be a tremendous asset in our efforts moving forward.
I’m also intrigued because Todd’s move seems to be part of a larger trend I’m witnessing, and, obviously, taking part in: designers (and particularly design leaders) moving away from the agency/consulting world and heading in-house. I don’t have a huge sample size, but it’s hard to ignore when you see folks like Andrew Crow and David Cronin go to GE, or Bill DeRouchey join Simple, or former APers such as Leah Buley, Ryan Freitas, Ljuba Milkovic, off the top of my head. And that doesn’t take into account the other people who have approached me since my move and told me of their similar plans, yet to be executed.
I suspect that all these folks realized the same thing I did (and most of them did so long before me): in-house is the frontier of design and user experience. And the typical reasons why people worked at consultancies (variety of projects, working with the best talent) no longer holds true. The design teams at many organizations rival and excel what you typically find in an agency, and thanks to the fracturing of the device landscape and the growing appreciation of the need to address a broader customer experience, in-house designers don’t find themselves just spinning wheels, but working across multiple platforms and challenges.
Interesting times!
In a recent post where I argued that the biggest challenge the field faces is understanding how companies can sustainably and repeatedly deliver great experiences, a commenter wrote Bryan Zmijewski from Zurb commented, “UX Design doesn’t exist and designers have only tried to reinterpreted what great product designers, design thinkers and design managers having been doing for many decades before the web ever came along. The only things that have matured are the designers themselves.”
My initial thought upon reading this comment was, “Bullshit.” But upon further thinking, I realized he’s partly right. When you’re designing for user experience, you’re designing toward a desired outcome, the user’s experience, not a thing. If this is true, then user experience design would be the only form of design not defined by the medium, technology, or artifacts of its design, and that’s weird. And so I’m beginning to believe “UX design” doesn’t exist, really.
The label “User experience design” emerged in order to combat the small-mindedness of design for technology that was prevalent in the early 90s. During the technological boom of the last 20 years, with the emergence of the Web, prevalence of computers in all aspects of our lives, and the increasing complexity of the things we are building, “user experience” has been a helpful term in that it continually reminded us to think beyond whatever narrow thing we’re considering at the time, and to consider the entire user’s experience.
And now, in 2012, with Apple, Inc. having the largest market capitalization of any company in the world, and an endless stream of CEOs and pundits talking about the importance of user experience, I suspect the phrase “user experience design” is no longer necessary, and could even be harmful. Harmful because it suggests that the only folks who need to worry about user experience are the designers, when in fact companies need to treat user experience no different than they treat profitability, or corporate culture, or innovation, or anything else that’s essential for it’s ongoing success. The companies that succeed best in delivering great experience are those that have it as an organization-wide mindset.
(Why is the comment only partly right? Because UX design was not simply a matter of reinterpreting that great designers have done in the past. It has been an ongoing attempt to grapple with the newfound complexity of the subjects of design, a complexity that our prior tools and methods were simply not up to the task of addressing. And he’s wrong for using the phrase “design thinkers”–if “UX design” doesn’t exist, than “design thinkers” most certainly do not.)
…And the beat goes on…
If you watched the last Last Chance Kitchen, the edit lead you to believe that Grayson was the winner, which is why it was utterly unsurprising to see Beverly return at the start of the episode. The Magical Elves seem to have a love of ham handed misdirection.
The quickfire was disappointingly insipid, even more so because it conferred the opportunity for immunity and a guaranteed spot in the Final Four. The chefs that second-guess Sarah’s decision to not take the car are only fooling themselves. At every stage of the game, the priority is to advance. Period. Plus, she got to have a relaxed day and decent night’s sleep, which at this stage of the competition is remarkably valuable.
I loved when the mentors walked in and the cooks last their collective shit (well, except for Edward.) It was one of the most honest displays of emotion I’ve seen on television, and Paul’s inability to contain himself had >me choking up while I was on the elliptical trainer, which makes staying in rhythm hard. Even for all the editing trickery that goes on with the show, the authenticness of its participants means that Top Chef taps into real human emotion unlike anything else out there.
There’s not one fan of the show who didn’t know that Edward was going down the moment he bought the smoked oysters.
Given all the grief she’s received, Beverly’s success makes for Good TV.
Paul continues to operate on a plane utterly separate from the rest of the competition. Gail’s blog post points out that the TV edit underplays the quality of Paul’s dish — she says it’s the only truly memorable plate she’d had all season, and among the tops in all seasons.
If he doesn’t win it all, it would be a huge surprise.
Growing up a math nerd in Los Angeles, I was preternaturally drawn to Hollywood metrics. My dad would bring home Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and I would comb over the latest box office numbers and television ratings.
So it was that I was compelled to read Asymco’s lengthy exegesis on Hollywood box office data over the last 35 years.
Of all the charts and graphs shown, I found this the most explicative:
Click for full size.
It shows that the type 5 studios have pretty much remained the same, and that their proportion of overall box office has held steady, too.
I can’t think of a single other industry where this would be true.
It demonstrates just how… hardened the film industry is, and how unreceptive to innovation and new thinking. This graph is a depiction of the industry’s sclerosis. I suspect that this graph is made possible by the overwhelming favoritism our government has shown the film industry (particularly in the extending of copyright), which has created an unfair advantage for incumbents, and made it nearly impossible for upstarts to get a foothold. It’s also why Hollywood throws so much weight behind suffocating legislation such as SOPA and PIPA — if you’re industry has no new ideas, then lobby to protect the old ways for as long as possible.
In the months I spent figuring out what was going to be my next move after Adaptive Path, I spoke with many folks about the transition. And in that process I began to realize something that I had never articulated.
Up until a few years ago there was no better place to push the boundaries of user experience than in design consulting, and within that, no better place than Adaptive Path. This was because the field was undergoing rapid methodological development. Those of us in the field of UX were making it up as we went along, and Adaptive Path had the fortune of an operating model that encouraged codifying these approaches and teaching them.
And then, around 2008, that changed. The pace of development ground nearly to a halt. The territory had been charted. There weren’t new methods to explore. We as an industry had largely figured out how to do our work. It was mostly a matter of applying the most appropriate tool given the nature of the problem. UX. as a practice, had matured.
Given that the field had matured, and we know how to design for user experience, it begs the question, Why are so many experiences so bad? It was in 2008 that I began to seriously think, write, and speak about organizational change, with a 90-minute talk at UI13, “16 Challenging Steps to Becoming an Experience-Driven Organization.”
There are a number of companies with very smart people, talented designers, and an honest desire to do right by the customer, and yet they deliver crappy experiences. And even though I had been talking about it for three years, it hadn’t really hit me until April or so of last year — the frontier of user experience is organizational. How do you get a company to sustainably, repeatedly, dependably deliver great experiences? That’s the biggest challenge our field faces. And while as a consultant I could offer advice or guidance, I wasn’t really solving tackling the problem. In order to seriously address these challenges, it requires a day-in, day-out organizational engagement that lasts for years, a kind of engagement that project-based design consulting simply does not afford.
No spoilers for the first four paragraphs.
This week’s episode of Top Chef was likely the best of the season, and definitely featured the most inspired and, according to the judges, delicious cooking so far. Chef Tom even said it was among the best single meals ever served on nine seasons of the show.
How could that be? The cooking so far this season has been decidedly middle-of-the-pack compared to prior seasons, and then all of a sudden it gets transcendent?
Because this week we saw leadership and vision, presented quite delightfully by guest judge Charlize Theron. Capitalizing on a cheap marketing tie-in (she plays The Evil Queen in an edgy telling of Snow White, coming to theaters in summer), Padma tells them to make something “wickedly beautiful,”. And, intentionally or not, Charlize then demonstrates remarkable leadership. She inspires them (who doesn’t want to please Charlize Theron — even the women love her), she encourages them (“indulge”), and she even gives some creative direction (“think like an evil queen.” This is the first time these chefs have really been given license to go over the top, and just enough structure to have a sense of rules to play by.
And what results is what happens when you give creative people just the right amount of leadership and structure without telling them exactly what to do. Each chef produces a delicious, inspired course, utterly unique, yet, thanks to the clear vision, it comes together in a remarkable whole.
…and now time for the spoiler-ridden commentary…
Hoo-boy! The Mozart of the Palate does it again! Paul’s dish was the hardest to appreciate through the telexision, but clearly his ability to play your tongue’s taste buds like keys on a piano is in full force. I love how Grayson admits her literalness, and I’m surprised she was able to realize that vision so directly. I can’t wait for Lindsay to get booted off in a fit of utter humiliation. I’ve never liked Michelle Bernstein as a guest judge, and I really don’t care for her protégé. The editors know that we diehards pick up on certain cues, because when Chris calls his wife, and we see the photos of the family, every fan’s first thought was, “Chris is going to lose tonight.”
The only thing that bummed me was Beverly beating Nyesha in Last Chance Kitchen. That twist just clearly proved too much, and Nyesha had likely put together a much better, and more flexible, setup than Beverly. Though, according to Tom, the decision came down to a nitpick — seasoning — and I don’t think you can lay that on Beverly’s preparation. I was hoping to see Nyesha pull an Ozzy and make it back into the competition, but I suppose I’ll have to wait until the next Top Chef All Stars.
As I hinted in my post about joining Inflection, I’m looking to bring a number of senior folks on to the user experience team.
My priority is to hire a Senior User Experience Designer.
One way I’ve been thinking about it–I’m looking for someone to be a Riker to my Picard. I can do that, because, I, too, am balding. Not that I’m looking only for strapping young-ish men who will rock a full beard a few years from now.
Here’s how I phrased it in an upcoming revision to the job description:
Are you up to the challenge of incorporating quality user experience into a fast-paced delivery-focused environment? Are you a user experience generalist frustrated at being placed in a specialist box? Do you have 5-7 years experience working on big consumer-facing industry-leading properties (think Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Paypal, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and you know how it should be done?
What’s great about Inflection is that we are not dysfunctional, we respect live/work balance, and we are committed to creating great products. We’re still relatively small (~130 people) and have a strong start-up vibe, and there’s lots of a room to make a difference and establish new and improved ways of working. UX does not mean just “UI”, and when I mention my service design orientation, it is met with acceptance, not blank stares. UX, through me, reports directly to the CEO, and is considered key in how we differentiate and compete. I believe we’re on the cusp of some truly great things, and I’m looking bring great people on to help us see this through.
If this sounds interesting, check out the fuller job description, and take it from there.
As a kid, among my favorite books on my parents’ bookshelf was Light and Vision, from the Time-Life Science Library. 
. And my favorite part of the book were the optical illusions, such as the two-pronged object that somehow morphs into 3 cylinders, or the square of stairs that go up forever. (And, yes, I had MC Escher posters in my dorm room.)
As such, this blog dedicated to “Optillusions” is my new favorite thing.