Noise Between Stations

Month: July 2008

  • Two Things Design Experts Do That Novices Don’t

    In my research on concept design processes, I’ve come across two ideas that jumped out as vital behavior that differentiates expert designers from novices.

    The first comes from Nigel Cross of Open University, UK, who seems to have studied designers and their processes more than anyone I’ve come across. In his Expertise in Design (pdf) he says (emphasis mine)…

    Novice behaviour is usually associated with a ‘depth-first’ approach to problem solving, i.e. sequentially identifying and exploring sub-solutions in depth, whereas the strategies of experts are usually regarded as being predominantly top-down and breadth-first approaches.

    While the protocol studies he cites contradict this, when it comes to digital design I find this explains why I see so little concept design these days. Both product developers and designers have a tendency to jump on the first great idea they generate and head down one path, instead of patiently exploring the space of possible solutions. The pain is only felt far down the line when development makes it obvious what doesn’t work and what could have been.

    The other big idea comes from How Designers Work, Henrik Gedenryd’s Ph.D dissertation. In the third section (pdf), he observes how designers go about defining the problem to be solved, the most difficult part of the project. How the problem is defined can determine the success of the succeeding design task…

    …the two contrasting attitudes make the whole difference between frustration and progress: Quist literally makes his problem solvable, whereas Petra finds herself stuck. The bottom line is that Quist who is the “expert” is acting as a pragmatist, whereas Petra, the “novice”, acts as a realist. And as we have seen, this accounts for a great deal of his superior performance. The choice of either position is not merely a matter of ideology, but has important consequences.

    In short, experts are pragmatists, they re-set or re-frame the problem to make it solvable. Novices are realists, they take the problem as a given and get stuck.

  • Maybe I’m Providing a Better Education than Ohio University

    Someone just brought it to my attention that a student named Feng Xia who received a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Ohio University in 1998 did so with a thesis paper that steals from others’ works, including my master’s thesis. It’s so bad, that after cobbling together various works, Feng couldn’t be bothered to normalize the citation format, or even make the number of citations match the number of references listed.

    Yet, this made it past the thesis committee.

    Why bring it up? One, because if Ohio University doesn’t take the ethical path here I’d like the Internet archive to show what happened.

    Two, I want to gloat a little that large established institutions with extensive accreditations don’t necessarily provide any better quality — and sometimes much, much worse — than my little Smart Experience.

    Just for decoration, here’s some graphs from my thesis I drew by hand circa 1994, probably in MacDraw, with proper references.

  • Woulda, shoulda, coulda. Didn’t. (The Failure to Beta Test)

    Monitor110 was a business/site that tried to filter information for institutional investors. This post mortem from a founder probably won’t reveal any new lessons, but it’s always powerful to see theory — in this case the value of the beta release — played out in the form of failure…

    …By mid-2005 the system worked, but spam was becoming more prevalent and caused the matching results to deteriorate, e.g., too much junk clogging the output. Around the same time we started to dig into natural language processing and the statistical processing of text, thinking that this might be a better way to address the spam issue and to get more targeted, relevant results. This prompted us to not push version 1.0, instead wanting to see if we could come up with a more powerful release using NLP to mark the kick-off. In retrospect, this was a big mistake. Mistake #5, to be precise. We should have gotten it out there, been kicked in the head by tough customers, and iterated like crazy to address their needs. Woulda, shoulda, coulda. Didn’t.

    …We talked about “release early/release often,” but were scared of looking like idiots in front of major Wall Street and hedge fund clients.

  • How To Tell A Story

    I remember the first time someone impressed upon me the usefulness of storytelling. Back in 2000 a researcher came to Razorfish to study how we worked in order to improve our knowledge sharing. He told me how Secret Service agents studied storytelling so that, if they suddenly found themselves in the back of a car with the President for 5-minutes, they could quickly summarize all the pertinent facts about a situation in a format that was more likely to be absorbed.

    And now, eight years later, I’m finally getting around to working on my storytelling skills. Barry McWilliams wrote a great set of guidelines for storytelling in his Effective Storytelling: A manual for beginners…

    Characteristics of a good story:

    • A single theme, clearly defined
    • A well developed plot
    • Style: vivid word pictures, pleasing sounds and rhythm
    • Characterization
    • Faithful to source
    • Dramatic appeal
    • Appropriateness to listeners

    Adapting to our audiences:

    1. Take the story as close to them as you can.
    2. Keep it brief and simple
    3. Stimulate their senses so they feel, smell, touch and listen and see vivid pictures.
    4. Describe the characters and settings, and help them sympathize with the character’s feelings.
    5. Aim your story at the less experienced when telling to a mixed audience

    (more…)

  • Smart Experience Video Tutorials

    In my time spent at consulting firms, client sites, teaching, etc. I see a need for more just-in-time design education. No formal program can keep up with the rate of change in digital design. People need on-demand materials they can use during their work day in-between tasks. The materials currently addressing this need leave a lot to be desired. They’re either canned presentations, unwieldy classroom-in-a-box applications, or simply too long and boring to fit into anyone’s busy schedule.

    Here’s a short preview of a service I’ll be launching at Smart Experience to try and address this need. They’re short, inexpensive videos to teach design skills. This one is on the rather fundamental topic of direct manipulation, but I plan to cover design in the widest sense.

    I’m happy with what I have as a first pass, but it clearly needs iteration. I’d love to hear what you think. If you wanted to build this sort of skill, would you pay for a 20 minute video on this topic that you could watch online or download any time you like?