Session Notes, Sessions 1–3: Agile UX Summit, 2/25/12

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Eric Burd: Want to win with Agile? Pivot your culture.

  • If you don’t have everyone on board, you have a problem.
  • How do you get the business side on board with lean/agile?
  • How do you set expectations on Minimum Viable Product?
  • Focus on one clear end goal, and try different ways of getting to that goal; “Keep one foot on Everest”
  • Two groups to win over:
    • Dev Team: they’re the ones who “get it.”
    • Sales, Marketing, Ops people
  • Many articles, books, etc. focus on winning over the tech and product teams; who’s talking about winning over the rest of the business team?
  • Agile isn’t as much about mitigating the tech risk; it’s about mitigating the market risk—building something nobody wants.
  • The business side believes that WATERFALL is about risk mitigation
    • clear beginning, middle and end
    • “campaigns” and “budgets” — long term thinking
  • We can’t get these sides of the business (marketing, ops, finance) into an Agile process, but we can do better at informing them of what we’re up to.
  • Six tips:
    • Find or light a “fire:” tie it to another issue within the organization (e.g. morale of dev team)
    • Listen to the customers; by being user-centric in our thinking, we can build better products. HOWEVER, you can’t get execs to actually listen to focus groups or usability labs. What you can do is bring customers in to have “lunch” with the executives, and customers can help sell execs on the process.
    • Get sales team in on it. Hearing from sales (i.e. people who regularly talk to customers and are trained at knocking down objections) that the process will help the org can make great strides towards getting the rest of the team on board. If the sales team can start hearing that customers are having product-driven issues that you can fix with Agile/Lean, you’re halfway there.
    • Words matter. When we’re using jargon, being self-referential, we’re essentially talking to ourselves. Other folks don’t get it. Start learning the language of the people you’re trying to sell to.
    • Train the exec team.
    • Focus on small wins. Find small wins within the org, and attach those to agile/lean vs. focusing on a “big bang.”

Phin Barnes: Investing in Design

  • The building blocks of the web are getting bigger and bigger, and easier to manipulate by clumsier and clumsier hands.
    • modern languages (PHP, Ruby, etc)
    • cloud services
    • ability to code and test relatively quickly
  • The web has returned to the basics of customer development; design must follow. Four stages:
    • Problem Definition
    • Sketch or Prototype
    • Improve Solutions
    • Implement Best Solution
  • Mindset > Skill set
  • Rules
    • No Unicorns and No A**holes: avoid the person who “knows everything” and doesn’t listen
      • Someone who listens and pivots improves over time
      • Someone who develops a “vision” and argues for it won’t listen to feedback; won’t listen to data.
      • Avoid making multiple minor iterations on the same bad vision.
    • Look at the feedback loop process
      • It’s easy to fake some of these things, i.e. talk the talk
      • If there’s one place where craft really counts, it’s in the feedback process
      • avoid comments that don’t move the project forward, or aren’t actionable
      • Feedback = an effort to understand where the person who created the feedback was coming from
      • Great feedback sessions are:
        • Casual
        • Scheduled
        • Planned out, in terms of what you want from the session
        • Organized in terms of decision points, and problem statements: what are you expecting to solve? What are you expecting the user to do here?
        • Watch people using the product, and videotape them; discuss it with the product team
    • What moves the crowd at your company?
      • Data, or a “visionary unicorn?”
      • At the best orgs, qualitative and quantitative data work together.
      • What are you measuring within your company?
    • If you’re going to adopt a design mindset, it has to be full staff
      • Get the rest of the org on board.
      • Make it tangible; find ways to get folks into the process and want to contribute to the product.

Josh Seiden: Replacing Requirements with Hypothesis

  • @jseiden; proof-nyc.com
  • Requirements and Hypotheses can both be used to frame the work of teams.
    • REQUIREMENTS: create an Internet Mouse that people can use when surfing the internet on their TV from their couch.
    • HYPOTHESIS: I think people will pay for a device that makes it easier to surf the internet from their couch, and you need to figure out what that might be.
  • For most teams, HYPOTHESES are a more effective way to manage your workload.
    • It’s very rare that you’re working in a condition of certainty, hypotheses let you operate in uncertainty.
    • Requirements take the THINKING out of implementation; team has no visibility to user/market needs.
  • When you give a team a problem, you engage the team’s creativity.
  • But you also need to give the creativity some boundaries, to keep moving the team forward
  • When you are building to an established standard, use requirements; if you’re creating something NEW, use hypotheses.
  • Hypothesis = Answer posed as a question; sets up an assumption to be tested.
  • Every design decision is a hypothesis that the market will test for you. If you can reduce the time between the design decision and the market feedback, you can drastically reduce risk.
  • Format of a hypothesis
    • Statement of what you believe to be true: We believe that…
    • A statement about how you’ll validate the hypothesis: We’ll know we’re right when…
    • Example: We believe that people will pay for a device that makes it easier to surf the internet from their living room couches and we’ll know we’re right when people can use our mockups without trouble and when people offer to pay for what we’ve built.
  • Process
    • Identify assumptions
      • What assumptions do you have about your customers?
      • That if proven wrong, will cause you to fail?
      • Who are they?
      • How does this product fit into their work or life?
      • What problem does it solve?
      • When and how is it used?
    • Express as hypothesis
    • Test riskiest assumptions FIRST
      • What are the highest risk assumptions that we know the least about? Put those into a backlog.
    • Break them down into testable parts
    • Use MVP concept to test your hypothesis
      • What is the smallest thing we can create to test our hypothesis?
    • Get out of the building: watch people to get feedback.
    • Lather, Rinse, Repeat
  • Use story maps to get all your requirements on one wall

Book Review: Influence

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Some books you read because you are obligated to—they are required reading in a class, or they are considered the “gold standard” of knowledge in a particular subject. Others you read because they’re interesting, or they bring new light to a subject that the reader has found mystifying in the past.
For those whose jobs ever require getting another person to say “yes,” Influence, by Dr. Robert Cialdini, fulfills both roles exceptionally well. Weighing in at around 250 pages, Cialdini describes six “weapons of influence” that are so adept at guiding our behavior that most of us don’t realize we’ve fallen prey to them until the smoke clears and we realize that we’ve been had. In brief, Cialdini’s primary weapons of influence are:

  • •Reciprocation: the idea that people give back to you what you give to them. Evidence for this rule abounds in human culture; Cialdini cites several sources that suggest it exists in cultures around the world.
  • •Commitment and Consistency: our almost obsessive need to appear consistent with what we’ve already decided to do, particularly commitments made in public. Our need for consistency, while often a good and valued part of being human, also seems to get us into the most trouble; for example, the smoker who knows full well the risks of smoking, but still manages to minimize his vulnerability to those risks (Gibbons et al, 1997).⁠
  • •Social Proof: the idea that we look at what those around us are doing to guide our own behavior. This is another key area where, when we are mistaken in our search for the right action in a given situation, the impact can be dangerous. The so-called “bystander effect,” in which an increase in witnesses to an event actually decreases the likelihood that the person in distress will receive help, is well demonstrated in the chilling example of Catherine Genovese, a young woman murdered in 1964 New York City while 38 of her neighbors watched, each believing that someone else must have called for help (Influence, pp. 112–118).
  • •Authority: the way that we often defer to people who are perceived to have authority or knowledge on a topic. Note here the use of the word “perceived;” the most interesting facet of this principle is that simply having the appearance of authority—for example, a uniform—can have the same effect on our behavior as a legitimate authority figure. Con artists, Cialdini notes, make use of this principle often.
  • •Scarcity: the idea that the more limited the availability of a given opportunity, the more we want that opportunity. This is often seen in retail sales, where customers are warned that stock of a particular item is “going fast!”
  • •Liking: this principle states, quite simply, that we tend to want to help people that we like and trust. This one seems almost a no-brainer; what’s interesting about it, however, is the many ways that influence practitioners can facilitate the liking process, or use our relationship with friends to get something from us. Cialdini opens the chapter with the example of home Tupperware parties, where the attendees are driven to buy more often on the basis of their friendship with the host than a genuine need for the product (Influence, pp. 141–142).

The thing to remember, Cialdini argues, is that in most cases these tendencies are actually good for us; they help us make sense of an increasingly complex world, and prevent us from spending each day in a state of analysis paralysis. The problem lies in the ways that these otherwise adaptive strategies can be used against us by forces who want to get something from us; those that Cialdini describes, in an interview about the book with business blogger Guy Kawasaki, as “Smugglers:”

Smugglers, on the other hand, do know—quite well—what the principles are and how they work. But they import these principles into situations where they don’t naturally exist. An example would be a salesperson who pretended to be an authority on a particular computer system in order to get a customer to buy it. Although the smuggler’s approach often works in the short run, it’s deadly in the long run. Because only one person—the smuggler—wins. The customer, who gets fooled into buying the wrong system, will be unhappy with it and will be unlikely to ever return to that salesperson or dealer for future business.

Cialdini identifies a variety of influence smugglers throughout the book. These range from advertising agencies who use actors to pose as “regular customers” of their products in order to make others think people just like them love the product (demonstrating the principle of social proof), to Hare Krishnas, whose recruitment tactic of giving a small gift to pedestrians plays into the reciprocation principle so effectively that people go out of their way to avoid coming into contact with them. Each chapter cites a wealth of examples, both anecdotal and academic, describing how these principles can impact our behavior; each chapter ends with a reader anecdote on the chapter’s subject.
Another key feature of Cialdini’s book is a section in each chapter called “How to Say No.” In this section, he not only shows readers how to recognize influence principles at work, but he also offers ways to counteract them. It is here that Influence is most useful, but it’s also where Cialdini tends to lapse into a cranky long-windedness that hurts his message more than it helps. In his chapter on the theory of social proof, Cialdini calls for a mass boycott of products advertised with actors representing customers—what he calls “phony ‘unrehearsed interview’ commercials.” But far beyond simply suggesting the reader stop buying these products, he recommends launching an aggressive counter-attack of the company’s “bad social proof:”

“Moreover, each manufacturer of the items should receive a letter explaining our response and recommending that they discontinue use of the advertising agency that produced so deceptive a representation of their product.”

In most cases, the advice given in each “How to Say No” section is useful—particularly in the context of putting these theories to practical use. However, in this case, as well as in his imagined response to the “stunning young woman” who duped him into buying an overpriced entertainment package by playing on his desire to impress her (Influence, p. 94), the advice Cialdini gives seems reactionary, and overblown for the issues that he’s describing.
Despite these flaws, Influence remains a valuable work, particularly for those who work in industries—such as sales, marketing and design—that depend on the ability to use the principles Cialdini outlines in an effective, yet ethical, manner.
References
Kawasaki, G. (2006, April 26). “Book Review: Influence—Science and Practice.” How to Change the World: a practical blog for impractical people. Retrieved from: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/04/book_review_inf.html#axzz1aOW5Edgh.
Cialdini, R. (2009). Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion, Adobe Digital Edition. New York, NY: Harper Collins E-books.
Gibbons, F., Eggleston, T. & Benthin, A. (1997). Cognitive Reactions to Smoking Relapse: The Reciprocal Relation Between Dissonance and Self-Esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 72 No. 1, 184–195.

Talking about Web Type with Jason Pamental

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Rifling through my research files, I came across this great interview with Jason Pamental on working with web type in Drupal 7. Hope you enjoy!

Dani: Talk to me about web type. How do you find that web type plays into this whole Design for Drupal thing?

Jason: very easily, actually. One of the things that led me to go back to working on my own, which now is over a year and a half ago, was being stuck in too technical a role in this agency I was working at in Providence, and not being able to deal with the design and strategy side of things as much as I enjoyed. I think that’s honestly what I’m better at. And that coincided with Typekit being launched, and I had been following what was going on with that, and ended up getting a subscription to it and playing around with it. I’d always really loved type, but never really was taught a whole lot about it. And this was one of my first real chances to play around with it, so I got into it right away.

At first, I just dropped a line or two of Javascript in my theme file and was fine, but then I had this idea that I’d never made a module before, but there really ought to be a Typekit module. Turns out this guy had sort of started one, but had left it sitting in a state that was really, really rough. I saw that as my opportunity, so I picked it apart, I rebuilt the whole thing and figured out the things that were and weren’t going to work, like automatically setting it to load the https script if it’s on a secured page, and adding an external Javascript call — this was for Drupal 6 at the time, so Drupal was a bit finicky about that. So again, there was this sense of figuring out how Drupal worked in order to get this stuff in there in the right way, and it really wasn’t all that hard.

So the module got much better; it was much more flexible and easy to use, and Typekit was a great service to work with and had a lot of really neat stuff. That was my first real effort at doing any amount of community work to make that thing better. But it sort of made me think about both the use and the shortcomings as well; so I started researching that a lot more — how to use web fonts better. How to deal with the things that might not go right. With all the performance enhancements in the service, I started using it more and more, even for body type. It was just this really liberating thing to be able to design with all of these fonts and not have to ever look at Arial on a web page again.

Dani:  you really don’t like Arial, do you?

Jason: you know, it’s nicer than having to pick on Helvetica all the time.

Dani: That’s true.

Jason: but I have to say, there are a few that are really just no better. We have a project at SchoolYard currently that specifies Univers for the body type; it’s a utility font. That’s the thing that really underscores this web font thing: these fonts are there, and they’re used, because they have no impact. They’re easy to use in any scenario because they don’t lend anything to the design.

Dani: I also think that one of the things people look for is something that is universal, I guess. It’s a readability issue.

Jason: well, sure, but there’s a ton of great fonts out there that are extremely readable.

Dani: I agree.

Jason: and yes, I understand that the Helveticas of the world have their place, but when presented with the option to do something different after 15 or 18 years of having to do everything in Arial or Helvetica, it’s time to do something different. And what I enjoy about that is that it shifts the entire tone of the design when everything is different instead of just headers or accents being different; and that’s what makes web design a lot more fun again.

And then extending that to mobile devices and other platforms, and still being able to bring that consistency, makes it even better. So then extending it further into the Drupal world, there’s Scott Reynen with the @font-your-face module[1], which actually blends all the different services together. So then you can use one font from Typekit, one font from Google, and all these different services together without then having to do anything in your theme if you don’t want to.

There’s some interesting possibilities there. I was just having a conversation with him last night about it, and it’s headed in a really good direction. Hopefully we’ll be able to see some really need stuff soon.

[1] http://drupal.org/project/fontyourface

Thoughts on the Logo Garden controversy

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Recently, there’s been a bit of a s***storm happening online in regards to LogoGarden.com, a new cheap logo site that just launched. While most designers I know (including myself) hate these sites for various reasons, this particular site looks particularly heinous. While sites like LogoWorks and 99Designs at least pretend that you’re getting work from professional designers (hint: you aren’t), this site admits to “compiling the greatest symbols from around the globe” in order to give its users the ability to quickly and cheaply “save themselves from the embarrassment of a crappy logo.” The video below, put together by these folks, illustrates the story of both types of sites pretty well:

Intro to LogoGarden

The interesting thing about this video, and about the various things that have been written about the aforementioned site (mostly by its owner), is this:

While the various “cheap logo sites” claim to have professional designers, but more often than not use untrained designers who actively steal other people’s work, logo garden basically admits to ripping off the work of professional designers directly in their advertising.

A few of my friends in the design community, including Jeff Fisher and Von Glitschka, have already spotted several of their logos being ripped off by the site; in fact, both of them seem to have found at least 20 of their logos, if not more, being offered to customers of the site.

This is all horrible, and clearly the dude who runs this site is irresponsible, if not actively malicious. But the more I read about it online, the more I wonder if actual legal action is being (or even can be) taken against these guys. Below is a conversation I had about the subject in response to Jeff Fisher’s discovery of yet another logo of his that had been ripped off by this service.

Dani Nordin: Are you and Von planning on delivering Cease and Desist letters to these guys?

Tom Stephan: Von did one better — he tagged the WWF and asked them if they’d seen their logo ^_^

Dani Nordin: +Tom Stephan That’s great, but I don’t see it as “one better.” Frankly, we can bitch and moan about stolen designs as much as we want on the internet; it’s not going to stop these idiots in their tracks until there’s real legal action behind it.

Tom Stephan: I think hitting them from all angles is best. One flashlight scares a cockroach. Floodlights stun it and make it easier to squash. I’m certainly not saying this situation is funny or amusing; I’ve had my own work stolen (not in this scope or scale) and I’m aware that it’s invariably who has the money to fight the thievery. The WWF certainly does, and that may turn the tide in favor of the ‘good guys.’ That being said, LogoGarden will shut down and reopen in a few months or weeks as “LogoForest” or something, and start again…it is what it is, and one of the unfortunate downsides to a tech-enhanced world.

Dani Nordin: +Tom Stephan I don’t disagree with that, actually; I just find myself jaded when I see several days of angry Internet conversation about something without any kind of formal cease and desist letter… of course, seeing it from the outside, it’s very possible that there has been one, but that fact hasn’t been shared. The sad thing is that these types of idiots will never go away; and at least this LG site doesn’t pretend that their competition is professional designers; in the intro video I saw online, they were pretty clear that LogoWorks, etc. was the alternative for this market. They even called out several of the key reasons that professional designers advise against sites like that; the cheap labor, the dude who knows Photoshop (sorta) and throws things together quickly.

Ultimately, the market for all of these sites is the cash-strapped “entrepreneur” who has a “million-dollar idea” but doesn’t know what’s really required to get something like that launched. In other words, the types of clients that most professional designers (especially independents) find crazy-making.

In which Todd Nienkerk, founder of Four Kitchens, rants with me about restaurant websites

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I’ve been hard at work transcribing some of the interviews that I have done in the last several weeks for Drupal for Designers, and I just came across this great conversation with Todd Nienkerk that didn’t quite fit in the book, but was still a Very Interesting Conversation. I offer it below, for your reading pleasure.

Todd, if you’ve never met him, is one of the founders of Austin’s Four Kitchens, a team that works on big websites for great clients. They’re also the people who co-created Pressflow, a Drupal distribution built especially for large-scale websites, and they also run DrupalCamp Austin, which is happening in November.

The following conversation happened a few weeks ago, and covered a huge range of topics — mostly grid systems, design for Drupal, responsive design and various snarky tangents. In this bit of it, Todd and I go off on restaurant websites, and we also talk about working with clients who don’t understand the cost of creating a good web presence.

Todd: I have noticed that the #1 factor in project success from a design standpoint is: has the client done this before?

If this is a client who has tapped three or four people who are junior-level, or are new to this, and they’re communications or marketing people or something, and the CEO says “hey, we need a new website — you’re sort of in charge of that…”

Dani: yes — “you’ve done HTML before, right?”

Todd: exactly, and the person is thinking, “I’ve never done this, I’ve never built a website before,” they come to us and they say, “hey — I’ve never been through the process of building a website before and I don’t know what to expect.” There are two possible outcomes that come from that. Either they have full faith in us, and their bosses have full faith in us, or they listen to us, and they have full faith in us, but their bosses don’t. Or their bosses are saying “we’re a non-profit that has never really done a serious website, and we don’t really get project management — I don’t really understand why UX is necessary. It seems like a lot of extra fluff to me.”

They don’t take us quite so seriously, or their attitude is, “that looks good enough. I don’t want to spend any more money on design. I just need the website to ‘do’ certain things. I don’t really care how it looks.” Those are typically the people who have never been involved in a web project before.

Dani: I also find that part of dealing with non-profits, especially in the client intake/sales process, is reading between the lines, and listening to how they *say* “we’re a non-profit.” I’ve done a lot of work with non-profits, and I find often in conversations with fundraising/development managers that if you hear them say, “well, we’re a non-profit,” in a certain tone, that it’s often a cover for a host of things that they don’t want to deal with.

Todd: Yes, that ends up becoming code for “we’re a non-profit, so we do everything bare-bones.”

Dani: Yes. We do everything bare-bones, we don’t have a lot of money, and to put a sort of New Age spin on it, it’s sort of a “lack” vs. “Abundance” mentality; you think that because you’re a non-profit, you basically have to spend almost no money on your marketing; meanwhile, if you look at the list of biggest, most effective non-profits with the largest reach in the Boston area, most of them spend about 5-6% of their revenues on fundraising efforts — including their website. They’re spending that money, and as a result, they are getting more donations, and they’re able to do more work, than perhaps 100 smaller non-profits in that space combined.

Todd: it’s surprising, too, how many people don’t seem to understand that the most effective dollar they can spend is on a better website. It’s sort of like, when you go to a restaurant’s website, what do you care about? Phone number, address, menu. That’s really all you care about. Who’s the chef? That’s an afterthought — that’s what you might get into when you’re starting to dig around and learn more about the restaurant.

Chances are, when you’re at a restaurant website, you’re about to leave the house and go out to eat, you need the number for reservations, you need the address so you can look it up on a map, you need a menu to make sure that your friend who’s gluten-free can actually eat something there. Or you’re looking at it — which is even more likely — on your phone, and that address is locked into an image, and you have to somehow put that address into your memory long enough to switch apps on your phone and type it all in to find the restaurant — or the menu is locked into a PDF, and you don’t have a PDF reader on your phone.

This is all super-basic stuff, and yet restaurant websites, more often than not, tend to be about the show, not about the information. That sort of conflicts with what I said about advertising dollars, but I suppose it depends on the industry. In the case of a restaurant, chances are that you’re not going to learn about the restaurant on their website, but on Yelp, or some other thing that is gauging its value. It’s not like a non-profit, where you do have to learn about the non-profit and what they do on their website. I don’t think there’s a real “rating system” for non-profits. You’re going to their website because you want to a) donate, or b) learn more about them.

I find that so many websites just assume that the website is little more than a brochure, or a television commercial, or it is some thing that is not a website.

A website has to do what the users of that site expect it to do. And restaurant websites are a good example of how many websites *don’t* do that, because they’re so egregious. They, on the whole, entirely miss the mark. You arrive on the website, and it’s a fashion show. It’s this Flash thing with all the dishes fading in and out, and all this sliding stuff, and you’re like “no. I don’t need this. I just need your address.”

Dani: well, I also think that, at least in the restaurant world, that you’re going to find all that other information on Yelp. So you don’t “need” to have it on your website.

Todd: perhaps.

Dani: The other problem, I find, with restaurant websites — I’ve actually done quite a few, and while I was able to talk them out of Flash slideshows, I’ve done my share of downloadable PDF menus — the biggest problem with creating a good restaurant website is actually updating the menu. The reason is that most restaurants don’t actually have a marketing person. The person updating the website is often the owner of the restaurant, or the owner’s son/daughter/whatever. They’re a chef, they often don’t have very much tech savvy, they usually work 12 hours a night or more.

If you’re a chain with a big marketing department, or you’re a hometown diner with 20 things on the menu that never change, it’s not a big deal, but if you’re like any of the restaurants that I’ve worked with, where you’re a relatively small place with a focus on local, seasonal food, you’re constantly changing your menu. With one of my clients, I basically just set up a Pages template and showed him how to upload a PDF. Because his menu changed every week, and he didn’t have the time or ability to figure out how to update the code of his website. Another client calls me every time he has to change his menu because it’s written completely in HTML and he can’t figure out how to make changes.

So yes, you’re probably just looking for the menu, or the contact information, but the problem with a lot of restaurants — and the reason I think so many of them are horribly bad — is simply because either they’re sort of “fashion” websites, where it’s not so much about the food as it is about the atmosphere, or they are restaurants where you have someone in charge of the website who doesn’t have time, knowledge or interest in maintaining this website.

Todd: Right.

Dani: So really, either way you’re screwed.

Todd: Yep. I imagine that partly, this is — and I think this speaks to all types of industries, and all types of websites — that so much of it requires buy in from the owner of the website, or the owner of the business it represents. In the case of restaurants, you need the owner or chef/owner to not only update the document where they update their menu and print it out — because no chef, no matter what, would not announce the menu in some way; whether they put it on a black board, write it on paper, or maintain it in a Word Document. Because, duh, you can’t not have a menu.

It should be, in my opinion, and I think that this will change over the next several years; it’s changing now, in fact — it needs to be just as “duh” that you have to update the website when you change the menu. Or maybe, you change the menu on the website and print it off from there. Maybe keeping the menu in a Word document or something similar is doing it backwards. Why not kill two birds with one stone and have a good printable template that’ll print directly from your website?

Dani: See, now that sounds like a Drupal distribution that needs to be made, there, Todd. I think we need to work on that.

Todd: [laughs] That would be be cool.

Dani: I think we’ve figured out what we need to do next.

Todd: You’d need one “menu” page node with a good, printable template.

Dani: Absolutely.

Todd: I like this idea.