apophenic pretentia
Two nice lines to highlight the need for burning platforms in change management:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” – Clay Shirky
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair
I find it wholly admirable, and completely fun, that Peter Merholz ( @peterme ) chose to be so defiantly douchey about how much he dislikes advertising and marketing and loathes what it’s doing to UX. As @armano points out, it’s a refreshing counterpoint, even antidote, to the high-fiving, back-slappy, we <3 ourselves mode that seems to surround the decreasingly useful links in my twitter stream.
On the other hand, it’s unfortunate that the over-done disdain for an entire industry, and the blanket moral judgment on its practitioners (this guilty soul included), gave everyone such an easy out. Alexander Herzen’s line that “one must open men’s eyes, not tear them out” is a good reminder that some statements can feel great to make and rally the existing troops, while completely failing to engage real conversation where it’s needed. I shared the link amongst my soul-less advertising colleagues, knowing the risk of associating myself with such a hater but hoping that the good points might get across, and the only responses were references to seeking help/medication and variations on “what’s with this guy?” More broadly, I even saw friends dismissing Adaptive Path out of hand.
All of this is unfortunate, cuz these are some very smart people, doing very smart work, saying very smart things, and, Adaptive Pathis one of the few places that has the guts and the luxury of doing design for the user, without all those pesky requirements around selling the damn stuff.
So, for my own sanity, a quick recap of the points Merholz makes that are well worth listening to:
Many advertising and marketing agencies are moving into user experience. This is because the work of these agencies is moving/drifting towards something close to product design, or, as I like to call it, product extension. (Peter, whom I don’t know personally but will call by his first name so as not to sound like I’m trying to take him down, refers to this dynamic as owning more “touchpoints”.) That alone should be a wake-up call to agencies that they should be thinking differently, but there are a lot of people who are still invoking the Bernbach/Ogilvy mode of communication and messaging as drivers to interactive design. I doubt there’s a single UX person who hasn’t struggled with this.
Because advertisers and marketing services people are focused on sales, there’s a tendency to put sales and marketer’s goals ahead of user experience thinking. On this point, I think he is spot on. Those of use who were designing for the web back in 2000 were quickly and punishingly taught that people don’t give a crap about funnels and they won’t be treated like so many cattle run through a chute. With TV and print, we rarely saw people’s reactions to the work, so we couldn’t tell if we were aggravating or entertaining them. With the web, you turn the site on, watch the abandonment rates and you had no outs — and no award could come fast enough to justify your work. We gravitated to the idea of “user-centered design” as a way of thinking about what people want and need rather than what we want them to do.
This wasn’t just out of respect for the user, it was also good business — if you insist on pushing people through your funnel, they’ll tell you and your brand to piss off and go somewhere else. The beauty, and challenge, of the web is that if you’re not doing what the user wants, there’s a good chance someone else out there is and it’s only a search or an ask-for-help tweet away, so you can cattle prod the people you want to engage or actually provide what they want. Reading classic and contemporary marketing textbooks, it would appear the field isn’t even aware of this choice.
Advertising tends to treat customers as sheep. This is another excellent point which I’ve spent a lot of time working through over the years. Ever since Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, I’ve been convinced (and tried to convince others) that people aren’t as stupid as we think, that we need more than the single reason to believe, the one truth, the single idea, the unique (one) proposition to engage people. Peter leads with the funny but alienating line about pushing crap down people’s gullets (and Orwell has a fun one about advertising being the rattling stick inside the swill bucket of capitalism), but the larger point that marketing has fallen behind the complexity and intelligence of today’s internet consumer is still worth listening to.
(If you’re enjoying my own douchey rants, click here for more on oversimplification, and here for more on people actually being people not segments, motivations, sheep, or cattle.)
@armano makes the point, in the funfunfun comments section, that @RGA made Nike+ (I made a lot of apps while I was there as well, and we were pretty user-centered, albeit in service of brands) and actually did a lot of good product design work — addressing a wide range of needs and creating a rich environment for humans to add even more value. So there are exceptions (which Peter would have done well to note). But for those of us in the business of designing and selling things, Peter reminds us of some important questions: are we treating customers like sheep? are we ‘driving them through the ecosystem’ and ‘pushing them through the funnel’? If so, do we really think they’re going to respond well to that? Would we respond to that? If what we do is “salesmanship in print”/TV/web, aren’t we being the worst, most obnoxious kind of salesmen?
I think Peter’s heart is in the right place, and the venom, oddly, came from that place: he’s tired of seeing UX talent burnt out. I think he’s also worried that the user-centered sensibilities of the discipline will get diluted . For that, much respect. I only wished he had joined Adbusters or the Ad Nauseum crew and dialed the anti-advertising back from 11 to 10 — and made it less personal to the people he is concerned about. Then, his valuable, dare I say thoughtful, points, would have come through. As it is now, only the statesmen ( like @armano ) or the douches (like @kipbot ) can try to make use of his points.
One of the most dangerous, and therefore regrettable, books floating around in the various design-related industries is John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity. The book is actually great, but in the category of “Learn it in 120 Pages” and “x Rules to Success” books, this is probably the one that creates the most dangerous reflexes. By fetishizing simplicity, we’ve turned it into a weasel word. The success of nearly everything can be attributed to simplicity. Anyone in a meeting can say “let’s make it more simple” and have it pass as useful, insightful, or designery. The trickiest reflex, though, is achieving simplicity by cutting — cutting words, cutting features, cutting links or buttons, and, eventually reducing the overall quality and enticement of the product or experience.
What’s interesting, though, is that Maeda actually tries to prevent this and other reflexes. In the book, Maeda offers a simplicity acronym: S/H/E standing for Shrink, Hide, and Embody. Three paths to simplicity, but only one of them actually suggests cutting. The others suggest design — balancing, trading off, managing form, function, levels of attention, lines of sight and cognition. They suggest it in a way that pulls you into interesting design ideas like paced layering, and which remind us that people use things more than once and that you win when the things actually get better over time (ie, discovering a new feature, finding your own shortcuts, optimizing and customizing, anticipating how it feels.)
In his TED talk, Maeda takes people in a direction that is much more productive. At 2:30 into the talk he points out that simplicity isn’t really what we crave and proves it nicely with pictures of a sunset. The simplest sunset is a 41% grey one:
It’s nice, but not that exciting, not what you want to sit on the deck and watch for an hour. Instead, this is what we love:
Nothing simple about that one but it’s what we <3. Why? Complex thing are interesting, they have crunch, they engage many parts of the brain emotionally and intellectually, they fascinate as they change over time even if they remain static, like a piece of recorded music. (This is familiar territory for fans of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You which has great demonstrations of how we have, over the years, come to demand more complex material and plotlines and characters in TV.)
So what are we getting at? Is there a way out of the pendulum swing of shrinking and adding and shrinking and adding?
One answer was inspired by a passage I read in Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand where he talk about the process of seeking “complexity out of chaos”. It’s a nice phrase in that it highlights differences between chaos, complication, complicatedness, and complexity. Complication is something no one would ever seek — in fact, it’s a much better word to contrast with simplicity. But saying people crave complexity is a little risky — complexity, as a word, doesn’t connote something virtuous. But richness does. People seek things that are rich — things that go somewhere, are worth revisiting (re-reading, re-listening, re-watching, re-thinking in your head, re-ferencing in conversation, making into a metaphor or analogy), things that yield nuance, depth, and new truths and emotions on longer, sustained watching — like a song that builds to a part you love, or the build-up to a great line in a movie.
So you could look at the goal like this:
People want the richness that comes from exploring complex things, but want to avoid complication. So it’s tempting to do this:
Make simplicity out of richness! But that takes design too far — simplifying richness puts a narrowing word too close to the expansive. I would argue that it’s better to think of simplicity as an interface to richness:
This puts you in a place of thinking about designer-y things like affordance, pace, multiple use, conceptual portability (if you’re writing), clear prose, rich metaphor in simple language, use of symbols.
Create richness out of complexity, provide simplicity as an interface to it. Don’t be simple.
Only possible down-side: reminds people that your emails are being parsed for all sorts of reasons. Still, saved me from having to do a “Doh! Here’s the attachment” note.
In general, I think most game players don’t follow stories closely, but there are some for whom the game story is their main dose of fiction:
/via Getner