Afterword: Seeing the World Through User-Friendly Eyes PDF

Afterword: Seeing the World Through User- Friendly Eyes by Robert Fabricant The easy and the simple are not identical. To discover what is really simple and to act upon the discovery is an exceedingly difficult task. —John De...

Afterword: Seeing the World Through User- Friendly Eyes by Robert Fabricant The easy and the simple are not identical. To discover what is really simple and to act upon the discovery is an exceedingly difficult task. —John Dewey, Experience and Education In 2014, when Cliff and I conceived of this book, our vision was not just to lift the veil on a bunch of important but little-known stories about design. Rather, it was to help make the book’s readers into informed, critical consumers of design—and, in particular, the user-experience design that bleeds into new facets of our lives every day. As a designer, I believe that a user-centered ethos should be applied to all our experiences. We should never expect less. So this book is meant to be a user experience thoughtfully crafted around your needs as a reader: You are this book’s user, and the user at the center of the user-friendly world. Now that you’ve read the story of how user-friendly design came to be and the principles that underlie it, my goal is to provide you with a brief look at how design works from the perspective of a day-to-day practitioner. This approach to creating user-friendly experiences, developed over twenty-five years of design practice, can be applied not just to the sparkly new things in your life, such as apps or wearables, but also to the really mundane stuff, such as the statements from your health insurance company. When I first began working as a designer, I saw these outputs as vastly different design challenges. They do require some different, specialized skills to fully execute, but they can—and should—be approached with the same user- centered mind-set. While the added detail in this section may not turn you into a designer, I hope you will be able to take away a few things that you might consider testing out in your own work, whatever that might be. And I hope, most of all, that you become more critical of the myriad user-friendly experiences designed with you in mind. After all, when did you first become aware of the pervasive role of marketing and advertising in your daily life? Back in the 1950s and ’60s, public understanding of the influence of marketing on consumer culture was just beginning to emerge. In today’s world we take that understanding for granted, doing our best to make sure that our children grow up savvy and discriminating in their response to marketing, instead of taking these messages at face value. We are at a similar inflection point in the user- friendly world, as Cliff has so beautifully articulated. One way to get there is to try seeing the world as a series of experiences ready to be remade. Like Donald Norman, and Henry Dreyfuss before him, I have always viewed my environment through user-friendly eyes, constantly aware of how things could be made to work better for people and better reflect their values. I am always impatient with how many experiences still fall short of this basic promise. Consider the self-service checkout experience at your grocery store, with its mishmash of poorly engineered interactions: touchscreen menus for selections, sensors for scanning items, card readers for payment, keypads for entering your PIN, and a stylus for signing your name (a legacy interaction that goes back thousands of years but is meaningless today). Like me, you may have finally learned how to successfully orchestrate each of these disparate interactions in the proper sequence, only to be chastised for not placing your items in the bagging area. It is obvious that each of these interactions was developed separately and designed in a vacuum. I feel those seams, and they motivate me. As a designer, I want to work on every piece of a puzzle, not just one part, whether it’s the keypad, touchscreen, or store layout. This is a significant shift from what I imagined a design career to be when I began working as a graphic designer in the mid-1980s. I started out designing logos for big companies like the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. Working in a team of designers, we would spend weeks exploring the current state of the health-care system, developing a new perspective on how hospitals might change in the future based on our own experiences—all just to produce an abstracted brand identity. I found this process both inspiring and profoundly frustrating. Why bring so much creative thinking to the table for a logo, even a beautiful one, that doesn’t improve the way the system works for people? I could say the same thing about designing a new hospital bed, waiting room, or digital bedside monitor. To improve something as complex as a health-care system requires not only a host of different skills—from industrial design to service design to environmental design—but also the wherewithal to combine them. That is what I and many of my peers desperately wanted the chance to do, particularly after the original dot-com boom and bust in 2001, when so many digital-only businesses disappeared overnight. I was lucky to land at Frog Design, one of the few places that had a broad range of design capabilities under one roof. Bringing those capabilities together was exhilarating. It opened up new frontiers for user-friendly design, as well as a host of new responsibilities (as demonstrated by Frog’s work on Disney’s MagicBand, discussed in chapter 8). To what ends should these capabilities be deployed? Answering that question became a personal obsession. But the only way I could find an answer was to stop focusing on what we were making. As the acclaimed Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa—an early IDEO employee—eloquently put it, the best designs “dissolve into behavior” so that they become invisible rather than stand out for their artistry. In other words, the success of our work was not to be found in the beauty of the result, but rather in observing how it fit into and supported people’s actual behavior.1 That lesson, though perhaps obvious to you after having read this book, nonetheless goes unheeded quite often. Consider, for example, the spectacular failure of Google Glass, despite its being backed by a brilliant team of designers and engineers. I am fond of telling new designers on my team that “behavior is our medium,” not products or technologies. This idea couldn’t be more different from where I started, fiddling with fonts and colors (which wasn’t my greatest talent anyway) and building user interfaces. It represents a shift that can be both liberating and frustrating, because “good design” turns out not to depend on any singular talent. Instead, it can only be found in the way people react and respond to a design. This shift also means that designers must accept the consequences of their work in the world, not just the intentions that went into designing them or the beauty of the result. These consequences can encompass environmental concerns (for example, not wanting to produce more disposable junk) as well as the broader societal impacts that come with influencing people’s behavior. To address issues at this level, more and more designers like me are seeking out different clients and partners to work with, particularly the public-sector organizations making up the core of the practice that I began with my partner, Ravi Chhatpar, at Dalberg Design in 2014. But what makes us qualified to tackle broad societal challenges? After all, what we do is not without risk. Tucker Viemeister, one of the founders of Smart Design, whose father designed the Tucker automobile, is fond of quipping that design is “the most dangerous profession in the world.” Designers are not medical doctors or electrical engineers—we do not go through any form of certification before jumping into the design of a self-driving car or an HIV self-testing kit. But we are highly trained tinkerers, with a robust set of prototyping skills that make up for our lack of formal credentials. We find ways to identify user needs, rapidly develop and test solutions, and gather user feedback while relying on the principles found within this book. I hope that these design principles are beginning to seem like common sense—start with the user, gather feedback, try again. But how do you leap from a set of principles to create a satisfying user experience, whether that user is a customer in a drugstore looking for cold meds or an aging family member trying to stay connected to her family and friends? What does it feel like to follow a user-centered design process, step-by- step? 1. Start with the User Imagine you’ve been asked to design a home appliance or a personal-health app. How would you know which users and which needs are worth designing for? You could always start with yourself, but this can quickly become a trap, as you will naturally assume that your needs are the most important ones. The better thing might be to start with a group of people who are like you in some way, such as your coworkers, friends, family members, or people who also shop at your local pharmacy. That is a reasonable point of entry, since you will be able to relate to the situations and expectations of those users. But even with that common ground, individual needs often diverge quickly once you start observing what people actually do. Just look at the different ways that people order something as prosaic as a cup of coffee. In today’s hyperpersonalized culture, how do you uncover the sort of insights that reflect the needs of more than one person? When I worked as a designer at Frog, we developed a number of approaches to help our teams avoid these biases. When conducting research in a new context or situation—whether that was a trading desk on Wall Street or a savings-and-loan group in Rwanda—we often worked with users to visually map each of the links in their decision trees to get a better understanding of whom they turn to first and trust the most. This sort of exercise often leads to unexpected insights. For example, when we were asked to redesign the customer experience for a large U.S. health-care company, I would never have predicted that my team at Frog would end up speaking with a group of hairdressers in Pensacola, Florida. But one of our first activities was to ask typical customers, “Who do you turn to for advice when your child is sick?” A number of women we interviewed mentioned that they frequently discussed personal health issues with their hairdressers. Unlike a pharmacist or even a doctor, a hairdresser has nothing at stake in selling health products, which makes her at once trustworthy to her clients and a potentially very valuable resource for exactly the sort of user insights that the health-care industry lacks—as well as a source for inspiration. Unlike doctors, hairdressers generally spend a little extra time making their customers feel comfortable and taken care of in very basic ways, such as shampooing their hair or massaging their scalps before they get started. We found that consumers were much more willing to listen to health advice when it was paired with suggestions for other, more appealing ways to treat themselves, such as a certificate for a massage or pedicure. This insight shaped our recommendations for how to redesign a program offering health coaches to support patients with expensive chronic diseases such as diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. Once you identify an interesting group of people to learn from, you have to meet them on their own terms. One mistake that marketing-led organizations often make is to start by developing a new product and then try to make it attractive to their customers. It rarely succeeds; this is the main reason so many new products seem immediately superfluous. Companies should instead start by understanding the needs of their users and then work backward to develop the right product, feature, or message. This is why you should always meet users on their turf, and why you should also conduct research in a way that puts them in the lead. They should be the guide to their own world. (The Stanford design professor Dev Patnaik calls this the “Grand Tour.”) Very often, it is the mundane objects in their lives that prompt the most illuminating stories and lessons, whether at home or at work. Designers have developed a number of clever techniques to open up fresh windows into users’ lives. For example, you might try asking someone to unpack their handbag, backpack, or satchel while narrating the reasons they choose to keep certain objects with them at all times—from the practical, like keys or lip balm, to the sentimental, like a trinket from a recent trip. One of my former colleagues at Frog, Jan Chipchase, dubbed this technique “bag- mapping,” which he perfected in his days as a globe-trotting researcher for Nokia. “Bag-mapping is a useful exercise to become acquainted with the norms of a society,” he said. “What we do or don’t decide to carry is a reflection of ourselves and the environment in which we live and work.” In other words, we use these techniques not to learn about the objects themselves (though that can be interesting) but to get at the deeper motivations behind people’s choices, particularly their habitual ones. It is one way to explore the gaps between what people say matters to them and what they do in their day-to-day lives. In many ways the apps on our smartphones are an alternate version of similar choices, which is why Jan perfected bag-mapping for Nokia, at the time the largest mobile phone company in the world. 2. Walk in the User’s Shoes One of the basic premises of user-friendly design is that the best work starts with a clear understanding of user needs—and not with the desire to produce a cool product or interface.2 Henry Dreyfuss was the first designer to truly live by this design ethos. Dreyfuss loved to “walk in the shoes” of his customers, which could mean driving a tractor, sewing in a factory, or pumping gas. For today’s designers, Dreyfuss-style immersion in the day-to- day experience of a typical user is a given. The challenge for the designer is to see the routine with fresh eyes, a practice that may sound easy but actually takes a great deal of patience, particularly given the range of distractions in our overstimulated world. You might find yourself, for example, observing how commuters navigate a bus stop or train station, paying special notice to people who seem the most lost and confused. How do they find their way when the station is packed during rush hour? Whom do they ask for help? This sort of observation, which we often conducted in pairs at Frog, can go on for many hours a day over the course of several weeks in multiple cities. And it might be equally important to observe the situation both during late- night hours, when the station is virtually empty, and at rush hour, when it’s humming. Designers often begin by testing out new experiences—say, an exercise routine or an online food-delivery service like Blue Apron—for themselves, to better empathize with user needs and behaviors. We pay close attention to the highs and lows, the moments when we feel most confident as well as our hiccups and failures.3 Though it sounds obvious, it is amazing how few executives have experienced their own product from end to end, whether that means signing up for a new 401(k) account or trying out a new form of contraception. The former CEO of the stylish budget airline JetBlue, David Neeleman, was well known for taking time to work as a flight attendant several times a year. He did it to be closer to his customers and his staff and understand their day-to-day needs and pain points. Unfortunately, in my experience, these sorts of executives are rare. In 2017, my team at Dalberg partnered with a group of organizations developing a new reproductive health product for young women in southern Africa. During an initial workshop with the client team, our creative lead was curious to know how many people had given the placebo version a test- drive. She had, but the only other person to raise her hand was the CEO of the company. This provided us with an important insight, as our client didn’t seem to fully understand how strange the first-time experience with this product would be for the young women they were trying to serve. Among other things, our follow-up research identified a series of metaphors that could make the product easier to understand. For example, we encouraged users to chew gum during our sessions and reflect on how the flavor dissolved over time in their mouths, the same way that the antiretroviral medicine to prevent HIV would dissolve in their bodies and eventually run out and need to be replaced. As in the above example, designers often have valuable perspective as a new user, someone who is not already accustomed to the way things are supposed to work. When they can’t test a product or experience it themselves, it may make sense to go “shopping” for fresh perspectives. I often encourage designers to experiment with radical shifts in context. For example, if we were asked to improve the waiting experience at a CVS MinuteClinic, we might begin by observing the experience in a crowded emergency waiting room at midnight and then check into a high-end spa. Our designers would try switching roles where possible. As Jane Fulton Suri noted: “The critical component is to not just notice what people are doing, but to really try to understand what’s driving it,” which can be best understood from a variety of perspectives. Sometimes you might even get behind the sales counter and see people’s behavior from the other side. Dreyfuss frequently did this as a pastime, visiting stores and shopping centers whenever he was in a new city, regardless of what he was working on at the time. Underlying these design practices is a larger truth about the user-friendly age: The world is not chaotic or random, even if it appears that way at first. People’s behavior and choices follow certain patterns and routes that do not always appear logical when you first encounter them. But if you tune in to their patterns and truly walk in their shoes, you can get at the hidden truths that drive their daily routines, whether they live in Pensacola, Florida, or Kigali, Rwanda. 3. Make the Invisible Visible As Cliff observes, feedback surrounds us every moment of every day, helping us to make sense of the user-friendly world. If feedback is well designed, we generally take it for granted. Head out to work in the morning and you step into a series of habitual feedback loops that guide your daily routine. You feel the satisfying click as you lock the front door before heading out to your car. Your phone buzzes with an alert about an email as you walk across the yard and down the block to where you are parked. Press your key fob and your car chirps to let you know that it is exactly where you left it and ready to go. Feedback is the fundamental language of user-friendly design. But the big challenge with designing feedback is figuring out when and where to provide it. I am awed by the ever-expanding universe of ways designers provide feedback. And yet feedback is often a nuisance—just think of the phone alerts that always seem to appear at the wrong time. It turns out that appropriate feedback is a harder design problem to solve than you think, and we are all intuitively aware when it misses the mark. Try walking into the New York City subway system and swiping a MetroCard. For daily commuters like me, this gesture has become habitual, almost unconscious; the motion of swiping and stepping through the turnstile have become one. However, if your swipe is not smooth and self-assured, the turnstile will lock up and you will slam your thighs into a cold stainless-steel bar. Who designed that? You probably didn’t notice that your motion was accompanied by a faint tone to confirm that your swipe went through. The noise probably worked perfectly when it was tested in a design studio, but no one can realistically hear it in a loud Brooklyn subway station.4 When I started out as a user-experience designer back in the early 1990s, most of the experiences I worked on were self-contained, such as the interfaces for early ATMs. They were not unlike those boxes invented by Dr. Skinner (see chapter 9) with simple feedback loops between the machine and the user. The design challenge came down to very basic mappings to get the physical buttons and the information on-screen to support a single, fluid interaction. This challenge is not unlike the sort of problems described by Donald Norman in The Design of Everyday Things. Action and reaction. Satisfying solutions that could be developed once and applied over and over again. But feedback has slipped out of simple Skinner boxes and into the user-friendly world, where it needs to be tested extensively, or millions of commuters will suffer the results.5  This sounds like a daunting amount of work, but it doesn’t have to be. Many designers I know are fond of a technique called “Wizard of Oz,” in which we use smoke and mirrors to simulate the behavior of a smart system to see if it makes sense to users long before our clients invest in building it. This is a technique both Padgett and Holmes relied on when developing new user experiences for Carnival and Microsoft, as described earlier. The basic idea is quite simple: Figure out how you and your colleagues can perform the feedback that is missing, maybe by flashing a light or making a more effective sound to confirm an action. Then test it. Timing, placement, and sensory feedback can all be approximated without any fancy design tools. One of our teams at Frog got quite skilled at using this approach for the design of voice recognition services such as the ones you experience when using Siri to search your iPhone. The Wizard of Oz technique allowed us to simulate the artificial intelligence component of the service and responded with different screens of information based on queries from our user research participants. How do designers stay sharp and develop a “second ear” for fine-tuning this critical layer of the user experience? We’ve each developed our own tricks. I always pay particular attention to the mechanics of new experiences when I am traveling (just as Patricia Moore did during her visit to Russia for Loewy Design, as described in chapter 7). I can remember the first time I visited a hotel in Europe or Asia and the lights in my room wouldn’t turn on. I flipped the switch and the feedback was missing—nothing happened. Eventually, someone showed me how to insert my card key into the slot by the door with a satisfying thunk, and miraculously the entire room was lit. Even better, I didn’t need to worry about turning the lights off when I left. I just grabbed the card key from the slot and walked out. This time, the missing feedback (the lights stayed on momentarily as I walked out) was somehow liberating. Why couldn’t we do this at home, say, with a smart controller? A whole new way of thinking about personalized spaces can open up with a shift in feedback from the micro (the physical affordance of a light switch) to the macro (environments that adapt to your needs). It is precisely the little differences between what you expect to happen and a slightly new experience that can radically shift our assumptions of what a product (or smart environment) should be. I often use travel for inspiration, but there are plenty of opportunities at home. Switch between an iPhone and Android or between Google Maps and a competing app like Waze, and all the little design decisions are thrown into relief—just like visiting a foreign country.6 As Michael Margolis, a user- experience partner at Google Ventures, is fond of saying, “Treat your competitors as your first prototypes.” Take advantage of all the effort that some designers have put into their work and learn from it. This is a great way to understand the choices that various designers have made when faced with the exact same challenge: designing feedback. 4. Build on Existing Behavior I often encourage the designers I work with to observe a situation as if they were cinematographers, zooming in and out from small details (the way someone folds a napkin or splits the check) to the larger scene as it unfolds around them (the flow of people, particularly those who manage and run the restaurant), looking for patterns that emerge at each level. What objects are people using? Where do they seem completely confident and engaged versus hesitant or frustrated? Where do groups gather and why? I instruct my teams to make careful note of what is surprising or confusing. Patterns of behavior will emerge naturally.7 Using this approach, you will start to notice behaviors that stand out from the norm. Designers are always delighted to stumble upon these outliers in the course of user observation. If you watch six or seven people in a given situation, often one or two will stand out in the way they behave or respond. The beauty of this approach is that it only takes one outlier to give you a fresh perspective, but you have to follow up and engage the outlier one-on-one (without judgment) to better understand how his or her needs or motivations veer from the norm. Perhaps this person has evolved a different mental model for celebrating special occasions with family or entertaining clients that could be a valuable insight for OpenTable, LinkedIn, or American Express. Designers generally prefer to build on existing behaviors we can observe in the world today—even if they might seem pretty unusual at first—rather than potential future behaviors dreamed up by marketing executives. Are people likely to order their groceries by talking to a fridge? Who knows. These can be difficult questions to answer, particularly when there might not be existing users you can easily observe. For that reason, user research often involves looking beyond the target customers for a given product or service. You might turn to a family with ten or more children for insights into new meal-planning services. Or you might speak with immigrants who are baffled by health insurance to better understand how to design concierge services for hospitals. The key is to consider users who have an outsized or pronounced need that would require them to develop behaviors outside the norm. Underlying this approach is yet another key principle of user-friendly design: Today’s niche markets will become tomorrow’s mass markets. Small investments in studying the behavior of outliers today can drive future adoption on a large scale. At Frog, we viewed extreme or outlier research as an important point of competitive differentiation, because it often inspired solutions that wouldn’t occur to our clients who were too deeply immersed in their fields to see them. At Dalberg, where we work across many different cultures, unexpected patterns of behavior surface all the time. One thing we often notice, particularly in resource-constrained environments (like that of Renuka, the woman in Delhi discussed in chapter 5): People often string together several products or services to meet their needs. Working with the Office of Innovation at UNICEF, we engaged users in three cities—Jakarta, Nairobi, and Mexico City—to better understand how they manage their health or get their kids to school safely. We spoke with a woman named Jessica who supported her family by selling meals to customers across one of the largest slums in Nairobi. She used YouTube to look up new recipes online and then posted lunch options to her growing network of local customers via WhatsApp. You may do the very same thing in parts of your life—switching among several apps to plan a night out with friends, for example. While you may feel that each app does its job perfectly, designers will see an opportunity for a more integrated solution whose value is greater than the sum of its parts. Consider your exercise routine, which might involve a mash- up of gear, apps, and classes. The fitness company Peloton saw an opportunity to create a premium experience that seamlessly integrated home exercise equipment, streaming media, and virtual instructors. Each of these elements could easily be found elsewhere, but through clever design the result is much more convenient and user friendly—a value proposition that users are more than happy to pay for and investors are rewarding, with Peloton having achieved a $4 billion valuation as of 2018. Some users are not satisfied with everyday jury-rigging and will go one step further by adapting or augmenting their world to better suit their needs. Most designers are trained to pay particular attention to work-arounds and augmentations to existing experiences, even when these so-called hacks have become invisible to the users themselves. In such situations, you will observe a host of interesting bespoke adaptations, which Fulton Suri refers to as our “little systems.” A common example is the Post-it notes people place on their computer screens at work or the list of instructions next to their DVR or set-top box. I was recently delayed at JFK and watched a fellow business traveler transform his rolling suitcase into a mini movie theater by using the adjustable handle to prop up his iPad in a perfect viewing position. People will often apologize for their hacks as if they are a sign of weakness, a gap in their own abilities, rather than a resourceful way to make their world a bit more accommodating. Users tend to be surprised when you show interest in their work-arounds and mental assists, but they are invaluable sources of insight. They might even help a designer identify a major gap in the current experience that can be filled by a whole new product or service (see Apple Shortcuts, page 151, and IFTTT, page 298). Find a few hundred Jessicas and you may have found the opportunity to launch a one-stop home-cooked meal- delivery service, as the founders of Holachef have done in Mumbai, building on the long tradition of dabbawalas8 in India. Or you may see an opening to provide a new income source for refugees who can offer meals out of their homes showcasing their unique culinary traditions, as the founders of League of Kitchens are pioneering in New York and Los Angeles. 5. Climb the Ladder of Metaphors As George Lakoff explained (see chapter 5), we all use metaphors to understand our world. They are a powerful tool for designers. Inspiration for metaphors can come from almost anywhere, even the candy aisle. According to one of my former Frog colleagues, Cordell Ratzlaff, who was in charge of the OS design group at Apple for many years, Steve Jobs once taped a Life Saver to the computer monitor used by one of his user-experience designers as a metaphor for the colorful, glossy buttons that would delight end users of Apple’s newest operating system, OS X. The difference today is that metaphors have gone beyond surface personality to shape the way products behave and to suggest how we might interact with them over time—the “ladder” described in chapter 5. Designers are always looking for metaphors that can help organize and guide a broader set of relationships. For example, you might think that the metaphor for the Disney MagicBand came from jewelry, given that it is worn like a bracelet. But that was just the physical shape of the band. The guiding concept for Frog’s Disney work came from the biblical metaphor of “the keys to the kingdom,” in which the visitor has been given special privileges (like royalty) to enjoy the park in exactly the way they see fit. This metaphor encapsulates a host of qualities and behaviors that are embodied throughout the park, with the potential to elevate the user’s experience to a whole new level of “magic.” In some cases, the designer’s job is much easier once a dominant metaphor has emerged within a product category—such as the widespread adoption of the feed metaphor, established by RSS and later popularized by Twitter, to organize the flow of information that we receive through our social networks (see page 134). Individual designers at a place like Snap will typically look to improve upon the way that Facebook or Twitter have designed their feeds —but they are unlikely to abandon the metaphor entirely. The noted usability guru Jakob Nielsen, Donald Norman’s partner in Nielsen Norman Group, has described this effect, which is now known as Jakob’s law: “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”9 We can see this effect well beyond the digital world. Automobiles still owe much of their familiar form to the metaphor of the “horseless carriage” that originally emerged at the turn of the century and was eventually adopted by all the major automotive manufacturers. As we have seen in chapter 4, the role of the car in our lives is fundamentally changing.10 What is the most useful metaphor for a self-driving car? I worked with an executive at DaimlerChrysler who saw the future of the automobile through the metaphor of a workspace, not a carriage—a combination of office and lounge where productivity, not just moving from one place to another as efficiently as possible, is the goal. As designers, we are often brought in to help bridge the transition as familiar products morph into something new and different. At Frog, we experienced this firsthand working for the leading provider of jukeboxes in the United States. What is the point of a physical jukebox when we walk into the bar with a complete library of our favorite music in our pocket? How might these two devices communicate? What metaphor might help support the transition to that new experience? Luckily, metaphors tend to surface organically through the normal course of user research—you just have to pay close attention to what people say and do. Our design team at Dalberg recently interviewed potential customers for a mobile savings service in Indonesia, and found that they understood and appreciated the value of their savings if it were converted into more familiar units, such as kilograms of rice or liters of cooking oil. This is particularly true for the digital savings accounts that our client, a mobile operator, was bringing to market. Digital money is much less tangible than physical currency, so the metaphor of oil or rice increased confidence for new users of the service. You might be tempted to see this shift as merely a bit of slick consumer marketing, but the metaphor reveals a much deeper truth about customer behavior. If you are poor, then your stored wealth must always work hard for you. It must do more than one thing. Our Western mental model of “locking things up” is clearly not the right metaphor for these and the billions of other unbanked people throughout the developing world. It’s not that they don’t understand the purpose of “storing funds”—it just has very little value in their day-to-day lives when money can be put to much more active use in the form of a cow, or a dowry, or a loan to a friend who is starting a small business. 6. Expose the Inner Logic The title of this book was inspired by my father, Richard Fabricant, who is an extremely sharp and active eighty-eight-year-old with little patience for technology. Whenever he gets frustrated with something new, he turns to me and remarks, “I thought the iPhone was supposed to be so user friendly!” Never has “user friendly” sounded so cutting. These days, whenever we get together, he hands me his Kindle with a set of clippings from The New York Times Book Review so that I can purchase and download whatever caught his eye, for him to read at his leisure. I have walked him through the steps of searching for titles any number of times, but the mental model just won’t stick. He has a hard time understanding the switch between searching on his device and searching the digital store. These can be very challenging conversations to sort through, as language quickly breaks down. We think we’re talking about the same thing, but we are not. Mental models live below the surface. Users generally have neither the self-awareness nor the language to articulate their deeper, conceptual understanding of how a product or service works. Yet we rely on unconscious mental models to function every day. We feel our way through the world by constructing our own inner logic, particularly when faced with new experiences. For that reason, most designers have developed techniques to expose a user’s inner logic through guided exercises that test the boundaries of their mental model. As with any of the activities I have described above, the designer should not assume that there is a correct mental model for a product or service. People usually blame themselves for not understanding something. It is the designer’s job to take the user’s side and blame any flaws on the product—or the product designer—whenever possible. This can be tricky, particularly when you are the one who designed the thing in the first place!11 The fact is that we are all pretty confused at times. How did my exercise routine become an app? How did my coffee grinder become a pod? In the user-friendly world, products are being redefined less by what they can do and more by the novel, often digitally enhanced ways we interact with them. The very concept of a product is becoming much more confusing than it used to be, whether we’re talking about a book, a TV, or an automobile.12 What does it mean when a product can talk back to you, follow you, or send you recommendations for how to use it better? In this new era, we build mental models as we go, largely through feedback loops. The job of the designer is to surface these mental models so that products can be better tuned to user expectations and easier to integrate into our lives. One common approach that I have used throughout my work is to ask the user to sketch the way something works from memory. This exercise can be particularly good for dense interfaces such as a television remote control. Most users will remember the basics, such as the volume and channel buttons, but their mental models diverge from there. More complex tasks, such as managing the amount of available recording space on a DVR, can expose interesting variations in the mental models among different users within the same family, for example. How many episodes of SpongeBob should we keep? Should we always keep the most recent ones at the top of the list? And what about Game of Thrones? The key is to ask the user to draw and label the various options and choices from memory so that you can get a deeper window into their understanding (remember, the user-friendly world does not come with captions). I try to pay particular attention to what is left out of the picture, not just what is included. I then ask the users to narrate the steps they go through to complete a simple task (something designers call a “think-aloud”). And I ask the users to narrate a series of actions, the ones they are accustomed to as well as ones they might not have tried, like searching their TV for shows that star Kevin Bacon. (Yes, your cable box can probably do this!) Exercises like these can reveal the limits of the mental model the user has constructed for how and why something works the way it does. You will come to understand why tailored features on a car (cruise control) or microwave (the “baked potato” button) or television remote control (picture in picture) are so rarely used despite their practical benefits. These features may not be intended for everyone, though they have become standardized. But even those people who might benefit greatly from their use can find it hard to bolt them onto their existing mental models, and they ultimately forget they are there. They become invisible. You will also come to understand why there is tremendous resistance against any significant shift in our understanding of how something works. Take, for example, the transition from a standard car to an electric vehicle, which can lead to unintended emotional consequences like “range anxiety”—a fear of being stranded by a dead battery—which a number of designers are actively working on addressing through improved dashboard visualizations and other forms of feedback. Back in 1958, the cognitive psychologist George Miller was one of the first to document the concept of cognitive load, based on his studies of the limits of short-term memory. This led to the popularization of Miller’s law: The average person can keep only seven (plus or minus two) items in their working memory. There is some controversy as to whether seven is or is not a magic number. But most designers have an intuitive appreciation of the principle behind this law, and they “chunk” related options together to reduce cognitive load and reinforce a more coherent mental model. You probably wish this design strategy were more consistently applied to a number of bewildering products in your life, including remote controls, with their dizzying array of strangely labeled, shaped, and colored buttons. I know I do. 7. Extend the Reach One of the principles our book highlights is that user-friendly products should build stronger connections with users over time. How do designers anticipate and plan ahead to create satisfying experiences across a product journey that could last years or decades, such as owning a car or managing an online collection of family photos? Extending your design task can feel very challenging, as it introduces so many more variables. Even in a product journey of a few hours, users are often distracted, juggling many different needs and goals at one time. Companies lose sight of this basic fact and assume that their users remain focused on one task or activity at a time. This is why it is important for user-friendly designs to connect the dots for their customers, over both the short and long term. Unresolved or disconnected elements of any experience can undermine our confidence in a brand or service provider. Why did I type in my account number when I called customer service only to have the agent ask for it again? This observation is not just a feature of the design process but ties deeply into cognitive psychology. In the 1920s, the Soviet psychiatrist Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik conducted a study in which she found that uncompleted tasks are easier to remember than successful ones, a discovery known as the Zeigarnik effect. User experience should support the entire user journey, not just a single moment or interaction.13 Consider everything that happens between reserving a hotel room online and touching your head on the pillow, then checking out a few days later. Each step should be interlinked through a series of feedback loops that propel you forward, like a daisy chain, while providing a consistent feeling of comfort, confidence, and ease. Even successful consumer-driven companies such as Marriott and Disney can find it difficult to step back and look objectively from the customer’s point of view across every step of their journey, given how their businesses are typically organized into functional silos such as marketing, product management, and customer support, and channels like retail and digital. It is always an eye-opening experience when you map out in detail all the different hoops that the average user must jump through. These blind spots can be a huge barrier to an effective user-friendly experience, which is why John Padgett (see chapter 8) is such a strong voice in this book. It is tempting to think that one simple medallion or wristband can make up for many shortcomings. But it is rarely that easy, given the fact that different parts of an organization are typically in control at different steps, as Padgett’s story illustrates. One of the most important issues we try to address as designers is when the user’s journey actually starts and ends. This is not always obvious. Your client might assume that it all starts when the customer walks into their store or opens their app, when in fact there might be many factors, and earlier experiences, that shape the user experience long before any direct point of engagement. These neglected spaces—before, between, or after direct product touch-points—are often the best design opportunities, as they can be strengthened with feedback to better connect the dots across the entire journey in unexpected and often delightful ways. Sometimes user journeys can extend across many years, even a lifetime. I do a lot of design work in global health, where there is an increasing focus on tracking progress across the entire health journey of a newborn child or an adolescent mother. What does that look like? One answer is, not too dissimilar from the story about Carnival Cruise Line, but extended over a much longer period of time and designed around personal rituals and life events. I recently served as a mentor to an organization called Khushi Baby, which has developed a low-cost wearable amulet to store a baby’s unique identifier and capture the baby’s health-care data across multiple events during the early years of life. The product is currently undergoing its first deployment and randomized controlled trial in more than seventy villages in Udaipur, India. The key to its appeal does not come from any technical innovation—all the technologies are remarkably basic—but rather from a novel design mothers can relate to. The approach started with talking to hundreds of mothers in villages and observing children wearing amulets on a black thread to ward off disease. The cultural fit of the necklace strengthens its potential for long-term sustainability, as a ritual and habit that can be passed down from one generation to another within families. How do you extend these cultural insights across the health journey for a mother and child? Ritual-based, habit-forming design is a frontier for our work at Dalberg and a long-term goal for many designers tackling broad social issues. 8. Form Follows Emotion Designers are often surprised by how much user satisfaction is driven by the emotional rather than functional benefits of an experience. But the right emotional connection with a user can make up for many of the challenges I describe above, from poor feedback to a convoluted mental model. (The connection between emotional aesthetics and perceived ease of use was first documented in 1995 by researchers from the Hitachi Design Center who tested variations of an ATM user interface with more than 250 participants.)14 Our job as designers is not just to make things work better so that users can get on with their lives. It is to surprise, delight, and build a meaningful relationship over time. Consider all of the effort that companies like Starbucks put into fine-tuning the aesthetic and emotional experience around what is a relatively brief encounter each morning. The emotional payoff of the perfect cappuccino is pretty clear. But what about preparing our income taxes, something we do once a year and would rather avoid entirely? Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit, has become a vocal advocate for emotional design, which may be surprising given that his company is best known for tax-preparation software. Adopting a user-friendly approach to research, his team at Intuit discovered a great deal about the emotional layers driving user perceptions of their product: “Consumers spend 6 billion hours each year using software to prepare their income taxes; anything we can do to reduce that time will be a gift. At the end of the process, most taxpayers are owed a refund—and for 70 percent of them, that refund is the single largest check they’ll receive during the year. In this context we began to think less about the pure functionality of our software and more about the emotional payoff of reducing drudgery and speeding the way toward a big windfall.” Under his direction, the Intuit product development team spent tens of thousands of hours “working alongside customers to see how they actually use our products.” Smith said, “As we did, we made notes with smiley faces next to elements that customers enjoyed and sad faces at places where they hit a snag —an example of using design to simplify the feedback mechanism. We’ve emphasized to engineers, product managers, and designers that functionality isn’t enough anymore. We have to build emotion into the product.”15 I sometimes ask my designers to think of the product journey as a form of romance, complete with emotional highs and lows. We even ask users to write breakup letters to products and services that no longer work for them. What you learn from these letters is that user-friendly design is about much more than usability. Frog’s founder and my former boss, Hartmut Esslinger, was one of the first product designers to truly celebrate the power of emotion to drive positive user experiences,16 and his motto, “Form follows emotion,” still sets the bar for the design team at Frog.17 Even Don Norman has come around to this sort of thinking, despite his emphasis on the scientific nature of design, writing an entire book on the topic in 2003 called Emotional Design. But few companies have truly embraced this mind-set, which is why it is so surprising to see a financial services software company lead the charge. It is equally surprising that a company such as Apple, which crafts products that inspire such deep emotions from its users, will occasionally drop the ball. Consider how long it took Apple to recognize the power of emojis and build them directly into iOS. I will never forget when I bought my daughter, Evie, her first iPhone at the age of thirteen. We took it home and set it up, and she immediately went to text her best friend, Isola. Yet when she began to type her message, there were no emojis available, as we hadn’t installed any special keyboards. She looked at me, crestfallen, and said, “Daddy, you bought the wrong phone!” Her moment of truth was a major fail. The Designer’s Moment of Truth While user-friendliness has become orthodoxy within the design world and institutionalized within corporate America, there is no guarantee that you will create a great product by following my advice. In many ways, the approach that I have described above is just the entry point into the world of user-friendly design. Much of the most critical and arduous work is in the details, tested and prototyped repeatedly until they come together. The moment of truth will come sooner than you think: when you first put your design in front of someone, with no direction or explanation. As most designers will tell you, time slows down as you wait to see what this first user will do. How will they engage? How will they respond to the elements that you have so carefully crafted? I always find that in the seconds before the first user even responds, I can see aspects of our design clearly for the first time. Perhaps it is empathy at work. The first moment when you see your work through the user’s eyes is priceless. You are confronted with so many tiny problems that somehow remained hidden, despite your best efforts. You often wish you could stop time and take your prototype back to the shop to change just a few small things. Soon enough, you can, and you will continue to refine the design … over and over again. The feedback cycle between designer and user is the beating heart of the user-friendly world.18 Each time you put something in front of a user, you will notice different things. Back in my Frog days we were designing a microdermabrasion device for a large consumer products company. It was simple from an engineering perspective, so we had freedom to test out different form factors as well as subtle placements for the controls. During multiple rounds of user research, we set the table with about a dozen different prototypes and paid special attention to which ones our young female users picked up first and which they held on to the longest. At first, there didn’t seem to be an obvious logic to their preferences. But our user research lead, who was a young woman, noticed how these users looked at their often nicely manicured hands while they held the different models we had created. They were drawn to the products with a form that flattered their hands, making them look more elegant and graceful.19 This became an easy test that our industrial design team could apply as we further refined and finalized the physical shape and surface textures of the product.20 The positive response to the design among younger women gave our client the confidence to shift its strategy for the product toward a different audience, which resulted in a bestselling device when it was introduced to the market.21 Such insights sound clear in hindsight, even obvious at times. But it doesn’t feel that way when you are in the thick of it. The design process can be arduous for long stretches with no easy answers in sight. Teams frequently get frustrated and demoralized. So it is incredibly satisfying when the pieces finally start to fall into place, particularly when you are tackling the social issues that are at the core of my current design practice. In some cases, it may take years and years before you see any sort of real progress. In 2008, I began working with a team of designers, as well as a local NGO partner in South Africa, to create a self-service experience that would allow anyone (particularly someone young who will not visit a sexual health clinic for fear of being judged) to test themselves for HIV in a private and discreet manner. Four years later, I found myself sitting in the office of a large public hospital in Edendale, a small city in KwaZulu-Natal with some of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. In the next room a nervous young woman opened a package containing an HIV self-test kit. We had carefully designed the kit, along with a service that offers access to a trained HIV counselor via cell phone. The combined experience was meant to work as simply as a home pregnancy test. We had stayed up two nights in a row, making dozens of minor adjustments to how the test packet was folded and how exactly three drops of blood, not two, were represented in the printed instructions on the inside cover of the kit.  The woman opened the packet and slowly went through the instructions, printed in Zulu. At one point she picked up the cell phone and considered connecting to remote support, but she decided against it and completed the process herself, correctly determining her status, which was negative. We breathed a huge sigh of relief, and follow-up tests revealed that her self- diagnosis was as accurate as the one she subsequently received from a trained HIV counselor at the hospital. This successful result was repeated hundreds of times over the subsequent months, with countless refinements to improve the ease and accuracy of the experience. Slowly and painstakingly, we took a dreadful experience that failed 64 percent of the time and redesigned it to be 98 percent accurate in a clinical study.22 As Joshua Porter, cofounder of 52 Weeks of UX, is fond of saying, “the behavior you are seeing is the behavior you designed for.” The next time we ran a self- testing session in this community, youths were lined up outside for the chance to participate. I share the story of this young woman so that you don’t come away with the false impression that user-friendly design is simple to achieve. It is not, and many within the design world feel understandably frustrated when they watch a complex design process being taught with a formulaic problem-solving approach to business and engineering students around the world at places like the Stanford d.school. But we also cannot treat design as some sort of alchemy, a black box that is opaque to the world around us, to users like you. The beliefs and assumptions underlying user-friendly design must be exposed to the light of day for examination and questioning by a broad audience, considering the risk of massive unintended consequences, particularly given the breadth of the issues we are tackling now. Ultimately, it is you—the user —who must hold us accountable to the principles outlined here. How else can we take on the vast sweep of user experiences surfaced in this book and make them work better for us and society at large?