Before you can toss up a quick Hail Mary, marketing says that the opt-in for marketing solicitations has to be defaulted to yes, and you can feel your soul sucked out of your body through your nose as a simple one hour meeting turns into a 3 hour discussion over the pro’s and cons of inline validation while your stomach grumbles because you just missed lunch.

I have heard this war story many times from many interaction designers and information architects, with little variation except in the details. What we need is air cover in this battle to design better forms. Now, it’s here.

“Forms Suck!”

And so Luke Wroblewski begins his new book on web form design with a canon shot, providing just the air cover and ammunition interaction designers need; and every review, including this one, begins with a first impression.

Mine was: Boffo.

(bof·fo (bf) slang, adj.: Extremely successful; great.)

Wroblewski opens “Web Form Design” with a strategic exploration of why users interact with forms. News flash: It’s not because they enjoy it. Interaction designers need to confront the truth that a user’s goal is to get to some successful outcome on the other side of a form – as quickly and painlessly as possible. We want our iPhone, tax return, or account with Facebook. We don’t want to fill out forms.

bq. Forms suck. If you don’t believe me, try to find people who like filling them in. You may turn up an accountant who gets a rush when wrapping up a client’s tax return or perhaps a desk clerk who loves to tidy up office payroll. But for most of us, forms are just an annoyance. What we want to do is to vote, apply for a job, buy a book online, join a group, or get a rebate back from a recent purchase. Forms just stand in our way.

Wroblewski has researched everything from the basics of good form design, to labels and most-direct route, delivering his explanations, patterns and recommendations with a casual urgency that avoids preaching. This book is a useful guide for both the novice interaction designer and the battle tested UX guru, offering salient, field tested examples of the good, bad, and often times ugly forms that have proliferated the web like so many mushrooms after a good rain.

Wroblewski has also invited many seasoned professionals to contribute sidebars, including Caroline Jarrett’s no-nonsense perspective on designing great forms by advising us to “start thinking about people and relationships,” instead of just diving into labeling our forms and choosing where to put the Submit button. I especially appreciated her strategic guidelines for picking what questions should go into a form in the first place, which she aptly titles “Keep, Cut, Postpone, or Explain.”

Wroblewski is aware of how challenging most readers will find good form design. It comes as a relief, for instance, when he writes that we should think less about forms as a means of filling a database, and more as a means of creating a meaningful conversation between the user and the company.

He generally succeeds at adopting the warm tone of a confidant who can win you over with self-deprecating, you-too-can-make-dynamic-forms-every-day enthusiasm. The more subtle points of user-centered design or goal-driven design are not discussed explicitly; only the trained ear will detect them.

What’s In the Book?

“Web Form Design” is part of a wave of User Experience books from Rosenfeld Media – books focused on bringing practical, actionable and well-researched methods to actual practitioners in the field. This literature is going to have a powerful effect on our community of practice, maybe as powerful as the effect the Polar Bear book had on our grandparents’ era. This volume is broken out into three sections:

Section one: “Form Structure” begins with an overview of why form design matters and describes the principles behind good form design, followed by Form Organization, Path to Completion, and Labels (hint: your form design should start from goals). Working quickly through strategy to tactics, Wroblewski gives numerous examples – within the context of usability studies – so that you are not left wondering whether these patterns are recommended based just on his opinion.

Section two: “Form Elements,” is a useful, clearly written exploration of each of the components of form design: labels, fields, actions and messages (help, errors, success). Wroblewski attacks each one of these by defining particular problem spaces, and then shows good and bad solutions to the problems while highlighting how these solutions faired in controlled usability tests, including eye-tracking. He then finishes each chapter off with a succinct list of ‘Best Practices’ that I suggest are good enough to staple to the inside of your eyelids.

Section three” “Form Interaction,” includes chapters on everything from Inline Validation to Selection-dependent Inputs (a barn burner). Here we move from the world of designing labels, alignment, and content to designing the actual complex interactions between the system — that wants to be fed like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors –- and the world-weary user that just wants to get to the other side of the rainbow. As Wroblewski explains in his opening of chapter 9 “Inline Validation:”

Despite our best efforts to format questions clearly and provide meaningful affordances for our inputs, some of our questions will always have more than one possible answer…

Inline validation can provide several types of feedback: confirmation that an appropriate answer was given, suggestions for valid answers, and real-time updates designed to help people stay within necessary limits. These bits of feedback usually happen when people begin, continue, or stop entering answers within input fields.

To establish communication between the user and the form, provide clear, easy-to-read feedback so that the user doesn’t get the “select a username or die” travesty that we see in registration forms all over the web. You know the ones: you type in your name, choose a username, enter your email address, and your password (twice), hit the submit button…and…bad things happen. The username is already taken. Worse, the form is cleared and you have to enter all that information all over again. Wroblewski provides advice for validation (without set-in-stone rules), and a bulleted list of best practices.

The final, and perhaps most interesting chapter in the book, covers the topic of Gradual Engagement. This is particularly timely given the kudzu-like proliferation of Web 2.0 applications and services as well as social networking sites and micro-blogging sites. Instead of starting your engagement with a new company that all your friends are raving about with yet another registration form – as Wroblewski writes:

bq. “We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how they work and why they should care enough to use them.1 I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.”

He continues by highlighting the benefits of moving a user through the application or service – actually engaging with it, and seeing it’s benefits, while registration is either postponed, or handled behind the scenes. He explores web applications like JumpCut, where the user steps through the process of creating, uploading and editing their video — and only when they actually want to publish and share it, does the user encounter a form — at which point they have already learned the service, it’s benefits, and it’s value. This is certainly a more engaging experience than being confronted with a form and a captcha before ever realizing the value of the web application. He ends this compelling chapter by providing some advise and best practices :

bq. When you’re exploring if gradual engagement might be right for your Web service, it’s important to consider how a series of interactions can explain how potential customers can use your service and why they should care. Gradual engagement isn’t well served by simply distributing each of your sign-up form input fields onto separate Web pages.

Wroblewski showed three excellent examples of web applications that seem to very successfully utilize this new strategy for engaging new users while avoiding or at least postponing the ubiquitous registration process. This is certainly welcome news. The key is to rethink how new users become engaged with your company. Does the conversation start with a form? Gradually introducing new customers to your service and it’s benefits – letting them actually use it and learn it first seems like a better way to start the conversation.

I wish this chapter had more to it, as it covers an exciting exploration of web application design innovation. Wroblewski wrote a very compelling article in “UXmatters”:http://www.uxmatters.com/ back in 2006 titled, “The Complexity of Simplicity”:http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000151.php, which was a predecessor to this chapter of the book. After an extensive search online, this was about the only source I could find other than some blog posts referencing that article. One article on “ReadWriteWeb”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/, “Good UI Design: Make It Easy, Show Me You Care”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/good_ui_design_make_it_easy_show_me_you_care.php,”" did include two more examples – “FuseCal”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/finally_sync_any_calendar_to_any_calendar.php, a calendar syncing online application, and “Twiddla”:http://www.twiddla.com/, an online whiteboarding service.

Another spot that could have used improvement were in the last chapter. Perhaps this was either my reading of it or the way it was presented. _What’s Next_, certainly made me feel that he would be exploring his vision of the future of form design, and forms in general — which he certainly does in the section on the disappearing form, and proceeds into a very brief discussion of game-like elicitation methods (GEMS). These are welcome additions, I wish that he had gone a bit deeper into this chapter, especially about GEMS. It’s a fascinating discussion point, and we will see more examples in the coming year.

I also wanted more resources and references to studies that a form designer, information architect or interaction designer could use to bolster their design decisions. Many good designers out there know how to design good forms. The hard part is the politics and the negotiation process with stakeholders — and numbers always help.

I am reminded of a conversation I had over lunch about a month ago here in D.C. The UX professional was giving a short presentation on form design to an in-house crowd and was trying to subtly indicate the value that often times less is more in form design. He wanted to show to stakeholders that the concept that adding one, two, or four more form fields in a registration process has a cost, even if the design and development cost is minimal. I suggested that a simple info graphic that showed how, as the number of form fields increased, user signups decreased. His immediate reaction was that some stakeholders would immediately want to see metrics to back up the assertion.

I am unaware of any numbers about fall-off rates, but from my professional experience tells me less is better than confronting a first-time potential user with a long form to complete. Perhaps it would be sufficient to include a “Further Reading” section divided up into sections like Academic Research, Field Studies, and Conference Papers. The book may not the best place to put something like this — I wonder if the online companion to this book has such a thing. Either way, it would be a valuable addition.

Summary

What is likely to win the most converts, though, is the joy Wroblewski takes in designing. This impression becomes clear as you page through the book. He isn’t just an ardent evangelizer, following the rituals of going to conferences selling snake oil. He’s been there in the trenches, just like you; he’s done this a hundred, maybe a thousand times. He’s tested these ideas and provides a framework for you to use from day one. Half the battle in good form design is defending your decisions to stakeholders. This is your air cover, so call it in!

You can get Web Form Design from “Rosenfeld Media”:http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/ or “Amazon.com”:http://www.amazon.com/Web-Form-Design-Filling-Blanks/dp/B0018S232Q/boxesandarrows-20. Just keep in mind that, for the same price, Rosenfeld Media tosses in a nicely formatted digital version which you can use to quote from when you have to sell a good form design to a team that wants to bicker over form labels.

Don’t forget the discount for Boxes and Arrows readers: Get a 10% discount by purchasing the book “directly from Rosenfeld Media”:http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/. Just use the code WFDBA.

Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
By Luke Wroblewski;forewordbyJaredSpool.
RosenfeldMedia: May,2008.
ISBN:1933820241
Buy from: Rosenfeld | Amazon

The 200-plus pages of email etiquette in Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home can be summed up similarly. Be sensitive. Consider that every choice made while crafting an email is an exercise in decision-making, tact, and manners. And the stakes are high: with the click of a mouse the whole world can know just how poorly you’ve behaved. We all remember ex-FEMA head Michael Brown emailing his staff, as hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans, “Can I go home now?”

If you’re like me, the thought of reading an entire book about email may sound tedious, and much of Send is indeed a bit of a yawner. (See, for example, the lengthy discussion on when to sign your message “sincerely” versus “best”). Digital design professionals will also be dismayed that there’s little mention of making email messages easier to retrieve through a search utility, nothing on the increasing use of email accounts as record-keeping systems, and zilch on the arms race between Gmail, Y! Mail, Outlook, and other mail programs.

What Send does best is provide a cautionary guide to communicating better, detailing the countless ways to screw up your messages or publicly embarrass yourself. Take, for example, the software executive who humiliates his secretary over email only to find his message forwarded, with commentary, to the entire company. (He later stepped down). Or, consider the op-ed writer emailing the New York Times editorial page with a request to publish a very “contemporaneous” piece. (What he really meant was “timely”). Much of it is obvious—turn on your spell-checker—but for those of us who often cringe with regret upon reading our own already sent messages, some of their arguments are worth examining.

For example, consider the recipient list. This is an area where many of us operate on instinct. But Send argues extreme caution. Recipients, for one, should appear in order of seniority. This may strike you, the sender, as prissy, but someone who’s worked their way into a position of responsibility may think otherwise.

Another good point: Before you pile on too many names in the “To:” line, keep in mind the rule of diminishing returns: the more people you send a request to, the less likely anyone is to respond. Send also gives a funny yet telling example of the power of Cc:

DEFCON 1
To: Saddam Hussein
From: George Bush
Please let in the weapons inspectors.

DEFCON 3
To: Saddam Hussein
From: George Bush
Cc: United Nations Secretary General, NATO, European Union, Joint Chiefs of Staff
Please let in the weapons inspectors.

Send argues that if you can’t formulate a simple, coherent subject line there’s probably something wrong with your message. Their recommendations should sound familiar to readers of Jacob Nielson, who in 1998 threw down the wonk gauntlet and categorized email subject lines as “Microcontent.” In Send, the authors describe email as “ruthlessly democratic”: there’s no more level a playing field than the inbox, where all messages are relegated to 100 or so characters in which they can plead their case to be read.

The golden rules of subject lines include not using the “hot pepper” icon (if everything is urgent then nothing is urgent) or all caps. From there, the laws of user experience begin to kick in and crafting the perfect subject line becomes a design exercise: bring your most important words to the front to improve scanning. Be specific. Consider the context.

The same rules of “content strategy” that many of us dutifully apply to web page and application design can be put to use in the email message body. Indeed, many of our messages are read in a web browser. Here again, Send’s rules of thumb dovetail nicely with what we already know about web page usability:

• Important information should be offset on its own line and , if possible, brought to the front
• Jargon is to be avoided; likewise to using big words when small ones will do
• Be sensitive to the way content is distributed (e.g., it’s tough to read a PDF attachment on a BlackBerry)

Email’s power is that it’s easy to send and can be distributed widely and instantaneously. As such, its natural state tends towards informality, and we tend to work with it quickly and at times thoughtlessly. Authors David Shipley, an editor at the New York Times, and Will Schwalbe, editor in chief of Hyperion Books, argue that there’s a lot to be said for treating this mode of communication with a bit more care and sensitivity. As professionals in the realm of digital communications, we’d be wise to heed their advice.

From the introduction: "Why Do We Email So Badly"
The 8 deadly sins of email:

1. The email that’s unbelievably vague. ("Remember to do that thing.")
2. The email that insults you so badly you have to get up from your desk. ("HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE DONE THAT THING!!!")
3. The email that puts you in jail. ("Please tell them that I asked you to sell that thing when it hit $70.")
4. The email that’s cowardly. ("Here’s the thing: you’re being let go.")
5. The email that won’t go away. ("Re; Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: that thing.")
6. The email that’s so sarcastic you have to get up from your desk. ("Smooth move on that thing. Really smooth.")
7. The email that’s too casual. ("Hiya! Any word on that admissions thing?")
8. The email that’s inappropriate. ("Want to come to my hotel room to discuss that thing?")

Excerpted from Chapter 3: How to Write (the Perfect)

Email The fact that email is a searchable, storable medium means that you have to compose your message with special care. And the fact that you are writing—constructing sentences, choosing words, making grammatical decisions, adding punctuation—with previously unimaginable swiftness makes the situation all the more vexed, as does the delusion that email, because it’s electronic, is somehow more ephemeral than, say, a letter.

Also, because it’s often acceptable to be lax about the rules of grammar on email, there’s the misconception that it’s always acceptable to be lax about them. That’s not the case. We aren’t gong to offer a guide to style and usage here—lots of books have done that already and done it well. What we are going to do, though, is outline the implications of taking risks with your English in emails and review the stylistic traps that are peculiar to the medium.

In Japanese, the status of the person you are addressing governs the words you use. A sentence directed toward a peer, for instance, requires different word forms from one directed to someone higher or lower than you on the social ladder. (You use one word form when speaking to your boss, another to a colleague, yet another to a child.) Learning Japanese, then, requires learning multiple ways of saying the same thing. The need to remember which kind of word form to use is one of the elements that makes it hard for native English speakers to master Japanese.

What many people don’t consider, however, is that in this respect English is arguably more complicated than Japanese—precisely because English doesn’t offer the convenience of different words to signal that you know the nature of your social relationship to the person with whom you are speaking. In lieu of specific words to show deference—or familiarity—English relies heavily on the delicate manipulation of tone.

More than anything else, vocabulary conveys tone and reveals you as boss or subordinate, buyer or seller, seeker or sage. The words you choose can be formal, casual, or somewhere in between; they can be literal or figurative; they can be precise or vague; understated, correct, or exaggerated; simple or complex; common or rare; prosaic or poetic; contracted or not.

Certainly, some words are inherently safer than others, but if you never venture beyond them you become yet another unmemorable correspondent, ceding the chance to make an impression in your email. Think of your own inbox. When wading through an ocean of email, don’t you yearn for one to jump out? After a hundred people email you that they “look forward to meeting you” so that they can share their “qualifications” or “describe the benefits of their product” or present you with a “business opportunity,” you crave something by someone who took the time to choose words with personality, rather than simply cribbing phrases from the modern business lexicon. The trick is to be vivid and specific—even, perhaps, revealing—without forgetting your original relationship with the person to whom you’re writing.

On the most elemental level, the deal is this. Before you set finger to the keyboard, ask yourself one question (and don’t write until you get the answer): What is my relationship to the person I’m writing? Then, make sure your word choice is appropriate.

About the Book
Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home
David Shipley and Will Schwalbe
2007; Knopf ISBN-10: 0307263649

Contents

• Introduction: Why Do We Email So Badly
• Chapter 1: When Should We Email?
• Chapter 2: The Anatomy of an Email
• Chapter 3: How to Write (the Perfect) Email
• Chapter 4: The Six Essential Types of Email
• Chapter 5: The Emotional Email
• Chapter 6: The Email That Can Land You in Jail
• Chapter 7: S.E.N.D.

Today the poverty of attention seems especially pressing. Technology makes it easier and cheaper to store information of all kinds, far outpacing our ability to convert that information into meaning and knowledge. On the plus side for B&A readers, this situation seems likely to keep information architects gainfully employed for some time to come.

But on a broader cultural and historical level, what strategies has society employed to collect, manage, and store information, even with the constant threat of oversupply, and still make this information accessible and meaningful to people over time?

An answer to that question—in fact, many answers—can be found in Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages, a sweeping new book from Alex Wright about the history of the information and information management systems across disciplines, time, and even across species (bees, ants, primates, eukaryotes.)

Wright, a librarian turned writer and information architect, is no stranger to the Boxes and Arrows community, and in fact, he draws on material from two B&A articles (on IA and sociobiology, another on Belgian bibliographer Paul Otlet) in his new book, now set in a broader narrative. Glut is an informative, ambitious, and at times frustrating work, as Wright juggles three different roles in shepherding his material: tour guide, curator, and essayist.

Wright The Tour Guide

As a tour guide, Wright is a patient, well-informed, and focused narrator, exploring the roots of information systems including writing, classification schemes, books, and libraries. In this mode, his sweeping connection-making is somewhat akin to the work of science historian and BBC documentarian James Burke (a fan of Glut) in its quest for hidden connections between seemingly disparate subjects and causes.

Wright informs us at the outset that he will avoid the lure of utopian techno-futurism and excavate the story of the information age by looking “squarely backward.” Just how far backward? Two billion years ago for the information architecture practices of multi-cell organisms, and for Homo sapiens, try the Ice Age (about 45,000 years ago.) That, Wright tells us, is when our cave-dwelling ancestors started banding together for survival in the face of tougher hunting conditions.

While today we think the biggest challenge of glut is the ensuing time and attention management crunch, Glut reminds us that information acquisition did not come easy in the early days of empire building. A central challenge for many cultures was the amassing of material for that key information storehouse—the library—and trying to protect these centralized physical and intellectual assets from violent destruction:

“From ancient Sumer to India to China to the Aztec kingdom, the same pattern manifested again and again: first came literacy, then the nation-state, the empire, and ultimately the intellectual apotheosis of the empire, the library. When empires fall, they usually take their libraries with them.”

Among some of the other intriguing stops and observations along Wright’s tour:

• Beads and pendants served as a very early symbolic communication for Ice Age Homo sapiens, allowing people to create bonds and achieve more complex social connections.
• “Meta” text of a sort dates as far back as 2300 BC; archeologists have found 2000 tablets including lists of animals and locations as well as listing other tablets.
• Google’s controversial book-scanning effort seems not far afield from the acquisition policy described by Wright for the Alexandrian library: “The Alexandrian rules built the great library not just as an act of imperial generosity but also through fiat, confiscation, and occasionally, subterfuge.

Wright The Curator

Part of Glut feels like an information management museum in book form, and Wright evinces a strong curatorial preference for the quixotic. There’s a sense that he hopes to shift our cultural focus from history’s hit makers to a number of lesser known but meritorious information management ideas from the past that deserve further airtime today.

For example, when Wright works his way up to recent computer history, he avoids focusing on the already well-told and well-documented human-computer interaction story of ARC, PARC, and Apple. Instead, he favors lesser-known milestones in the history of hypertext, with a fresh look at Ted Nelson and several groundbreaking experiments at Brown University (Wright’s undergraduate alma matter).

The Brown University story culminates in a project called Intermedia, which included many features that Wright finds lacking in today’s Web framework, including bi-directional linking (both pointers and targets “know” of the link), and real-time dynamic editing and updating. The project vanished for lack of federal funding in 1994, just before the World Wide Web stepped onto the global stage.

But central exhibit in this wing is Otlet, the 19th century Belgian bibliographer whom Wright dubs as the Internet’s forgotten forefather. Otlet is best known as the developer of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), a flexible and faceted library classification system in widespread use today worldwide across 23 languages.

Glut focuses on Otlet’s vision for something remarkably similar to today’s World Wide Web, and his efforts to realize it with a kind of manual database comprised of 12 million facts kept on index cards in an office he called the Mundaneum to which readers could submit queries for a small fee.

Otlet hoped that ultimately anyone would be able to access all human knowledge across forms—books, records films, radio, television—remotely from their own homes on multi-windowed screens, and even went so far as to the words “Web” and “links.”

Due to financial constraints and dwindling government support, Otlet found his Mundaneum squeezed into progressively smaller accommodations including a parking lot until he finally shuttered the project in 1934; a few years later, Nazi troops carted it away.

Wright argues that in some ways, Otlet’s ideas not only foretold but also surpassed the current Web: “Distinguishing Otlet’s vision… is the conviction—long since fallen out of favor—in the possibility of a universal subject classification working in concert with the mutable social forces of scholarship.”

Wright The Essayist

One of Wright’s central themes is the pas-de-deux between networks and hierarchies, and the need to balance Web 2.0’s bottom-up, technology-enabled crowd wisdom with a classic sense of the individual expertise, scholarship, and merit guided by human hand.

Decrying what he describes as the utopian view that “hierarchical systems are restrictive, oppressive vehicles of control, while networks are open democratic vehicles of personal liberation,” Wright pursues a throughline across time in which networks and hierarchies are seen not only as competitive but also as potentially complimentary and reinforcing—even essential to one another:

“Networked systems are not entirely modern phenomena, nor are hierarchal systems necessarily doomed. There is a deeper story at work here. The fundamental tension between networks and hierarchies has percolated for eons. Today we are simply witnessing the latest installment in a long evolutionary drama.”

Wright the essayist is an elusive fellow: he combines humanism and pragmatism, and eschews the received techno-hype that is coming back into vogue in the Web 2.0 era. Yet he does not seem prepared to grab the bullhorn from Wright the historian or Wright the curator. Among the arguments Wright puts forward, as best as I can tease out:

• Google’s page-rank algorithm risks reducing the presentation of information to a popularity contest; previous models throughout information management show the possibility of a more balanced and durable approach between classification by human hands (top down) and social meaning (bottom up).
• Today’s Web links are inferior to the bi-directional hypertext linking explored in projects at Brown and envisioned by Ted Nelson and others, in which one linked resource would “know” about other links to it. The current state of hypertext doesn’t realize its full promise of helping to navigate information overload in a way that might better help advance human knowledge.
• Aspects of the Web’s infrastructure (other than nascent Web 2.0 tools) favor one-way consumption rather than two-way discourse, and there’s an ongoing risk of excessive control by corporate interests and unseen technology gatekeepers.

On the book’s very last page, Wright touches on Wikipedia as a modern-day meeting ground for the pull and tug between networks and hierarchies, and notes Wikipedia’s creation of a new hierarchal review process to bolster its credibility. Coming so late and remaining so brief, the discussion seems an afterthought rather than what could have been a convergence of the book’s themes.

Information architects—and anyone curious about the roots of information management—will find much of interest in Glut’s thought-provoking tale. Given the stimulating and contrarian nature of Glut’s ideas, one only wishes Wright would occasionally return from the corridors of the time tunnel and bring his well-informed perspective back to our present age.

To get deeper into the book, “read the excerpt”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the-encyclopedic.

About the Book

“Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages”:http://www.amazon.com/Glut-Mastering-Information-Through-Ages/dp/0309102383/boxesandarrows-20
Alex Wright
2007; Joseph Henry Press
ISBN-10: 0309102383

Despite the proliferation of books in the years after Gutenberg, three hundred years later books still remained prohibitively expensive for most Europeans. By the mid-eighteenth century, a typical educated household might own at most a single book (often a popular devotional text like the Book of Hours). Only scholars, clergymen and wealthy merchants could afford to own more than a few volumes. There was no such thing as a public library. Still, writers were producing new books in ever-growing numbers, and readers found it increasingly challenging – and often financially implausible – to stay abreast of new scholarship.

At the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, a handful of philosophers, inspired by Francis Bacon’s quest for a unifying framework of human knowledge[1], started to envision a new kind of book that would synthesize the world’s (or at least Europe’s) intellectual output into a single, accessible work: the encyclopedia. Although encyclopedias had been around in one form or another since antiquity (originating independently in both ancient Greece and China), it was only in the eighteenth century that the general-purpose encyclopedia began to assume its modern form. In 1728, Ephraim Chambers published his Cyclopedia, a compendium of information about the arts and sciences that gained an enthusiastic following among the English literati. The book eventually caught the eye of a Parisian bookseller named André Le Breton, who decided to underwrite a French translation.

Enter Denis Diderot. A prominent but financially struggling writer and philosopher, Diderot occasionally supplemented his income by translating English works into French. When Breton approached him about the Cyclopedia, he readily accepted the commission. Soon after embarking on the translation, however, he found himself entranced by the project. He soon persuaded Breton to support him in creating more than a simple translation. He wanted to turn the work into something bigger. Much bigger. He wanted to create a “universal” encyclopedia.

Adopting Bacon’s classification as his intellectual foundation, Diderot began the monumental undertaking that would eventually become the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (“Encyclopedia or Dictionary of the Sciences, the Arts, and the Professions”), published in a succession of volumes from 1751 to 1772. A massive collection of 72,000 articles written by 160 eminent contributors (including notables like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Buffon), Diderot turned the encyclopedia into a compendium of knowledge vaster than anything that had ever been published before.

Diderot did more than just survey the universe of printed books. He took the unprecedented step of expanding the work to include “folk” knowledge gathered from (mostly illiterate) tradespeople. The encyclopedia devoted an enormous portion of its pages to operational knowledge about everyday topics like cloth dying, metalwork, and glassware, with entries accompanied by detailed illustrations explaining the intricacies of the trades. Traditionally, this kind of knowledge had passed through word of mouth from master to apprentice among the well-established trade guilds. Since most of the practitioners remained illiterate, almost none of what they knew had ever been written down – and even if it had, it would have held little interest for the powdered-wig habitués of Parisian literary salons. Diderot’s encyclopedia elevated this kind of craft knowledge, giving it equal billing with the traditional domains of literate scholarship.

While publishing this kind of “how-to” information may strike most of us today as an unremarkable act, in eighteenth-century France the decision marked a blunt political statement. By granting craft knowledge a status equivalent to the aristocratic concerns of statecraft, scholarship, and religion – Diderot effectively challenged the legitimacy of the aristocracy. It was an epistemological coup d’ étate.

Diderot’s editorial populism also found expression in passages like this one: “The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty.” To the royal and papal authorities of eighteenth century France, these were not particularly welcome sentiments. Pope Clement XIII castigated Diderot and his work (in part because Diderot had chosen to classify religion as a branch of philosophy). King George III of England and Louis XV of France also condemned it. His publisher was briefly jailed. In 1759 the French government ordered Diderot to cease publication, seizing 6,000 volumes, which they deposited (appropriately enough) inside the Bastille. But it was too late.

By the time the authorities came after Diderot’s work, the encyclopedia had already found an enthusiastic audience. By 1757 it had attracted 4000 dedicated subscribers (no small feat in pre-industrial France). Despite the official ban, Diderot and his colleagues continued to write and publish the encyclopedia in secret, and the book began to circulate widely among an increasingly restive French populace.

Diderot died 10 years before the revolution of 1789, but his credentials as an Enlightenment encyclopedist would serve his family well in the bloody aftermath. When his son-in-law was imprisoned during the revolution and branded an aristocrat, Diderot’s daughter pleaded with the revolutionary committee, citing her father’s populist literary pedigree. On learning of the prisoner’s connection to the great encyclopedist, the committee immediately set him free.

What can we learn from Diderot’s legacy today? His encyclopedia provides an object lesson in the power of new forms of information technology to disrupt established institutional hierarchies. In synthesizing information that had previously been dispersed in local oral traditions and trade networks, Diderot created a radically new model for gathering and distributing information that challenged old aristocratic assumptions about the boundaries of scholarship – and in so doing, helped pave the way for a revolution.

Today, we are witnessing the reemergence of the encyclopedia as a force for radical epistemology. In recent years, Wikipedia’s swift rise to cultural prominence seems to echo Diderot’s centuries-old encyclopedic revolution. With more than three million entries in more than 100 languages, Wikipedia already ranks as by far the largest (and most popular) encyclopedia ever created. And once again, questions of authority and control are swirling. Critics argue that Wikipedia’s lack of quality controls leaves it vulnerable to bias and manipulation, while its defenders insist that openness and transparency ensure fairness and ultimately will allow the system to regulate itself. Just as in Diderot’s time, a deeper tension seems to be emerging between the forces of top-down authority (manifesting as journalists, publishers and academic scholars) and the bottom-up, quasi-anarchist ethos of the Web. And while no one has yet tried to lock Wikipedia up in the Bastille, literary worthies and assorted op-ed writers have condemned the work in sometimes vicious terms, while the prophets of techno-populism celebrate its arrival with an enthusiasm often bordering on zealotry. Once again, the encyclopedia may prove the most revolutionary “book” of all.

About the Book

“Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages”:http://www.amazon.com/Glut-Mastering-Information-Through-Ages/dp/0309102383/boxesandarrows-20
Alex Wright
2007; Joseph Henry Press
ISBN-10: 0309102383

References

fn1. cf. Bacon’s Novum Organum of 1620

The Dutch are, historically, very good designers, seeing design as a facet of their culture. Like architecture, design is a public necessity and a purveyor of improvement (or ironic comments on improvement). So, when something becomes improved, like the design of an interface, it is a success, but it’s still only a stepping stone to the next improvement. This idea hints at the problem with success stories. They capture the moment very well, but lead to the feeling that you have reached the end of the improvement, when quite regularly it is the opposite–you have simply just stepped a little farther towards a relatively unknown goal.

Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge[1] does an excellent job of revealing the people and the work behind many of the most important interactive products of our time and discussing their impact on the field of interaction design. The products with stories in this book have dead simple design approaches behind them and should give us pride as designers, knowing that the best things out there have come from a relatively painless approach. We should be honest, however. This isn’t the whole story, as most of these products come from the efforts of multiple people, from integrating the opinions of the general public, to copying other designs, and, in fact, almost always some combination of all these things.

While it’s a great read, this book might lead you to believe otherwise, slightly, as it is biased towards the perspectives and histories of a few ‘successful’ designers, and not the entire output of any given design culture, never mind the much larger international culture of interaction design. One of the central themes is summarized early on in the book saying that the core skills of design are synthesis, understanding people, and iterative prototyping. While most designers can agree that this statement is very insightful, especially coming from Stu Card, one of the computer science brains at Xerox Parc in the seventies, it doesn’t take into account simple influences like access to production lines, distribution, backing, and the aforementioned. In that light, the statement comes off like a sales pitch to gain access to things that are necessary, but only relevant when you are already part of the industrial complex.

Still, a huge amount of valuable information lies in this tome, and the book should go on your shelf for a resource if nothing else. Be forewarned that there is a certain amount of social network back patting and ‘Apple Glorification’ in this book that is kind of scary. I’m a Mac user, always have been, but not because it is the supreme operating system design, but because it is slightly better, if that, than the only other major competitor on the market.

Now, not to get strung into the old debate, Designing Interactions does a good job of summarizing how the current mouse and windows operating system came to be. It does not provide tons of insight into what else was happening at that time. I’d like more stories from ‘the innovative seventies’, and how some of those ideas might have been able to help us if they had evolved. We all know we could use a period of cultural R&D like that in this field again, especially without the computer science (CS) focus. If you’re looking for a book that tells a bit more, check out Howard Riengold’s, Tools for Thought[2].

When pining for a period of innovation without the CS focus, I’m not saying that pure ‘design talent’ can solve all design problems, though it definitely helps, as you’ll see by reading the stories in Designing Interactions. The problem is that designers (through agencies, firms, shops, and individuals) are only responsible for a very small percentage of the designs out there, leaving many to be designed, by other means, technical, industrial, or other random approaches. As a result, most people get rare access to “decent” design.

Perhaps this is just a numbers game for establishing creative organizations. If there were more creative approaches out there, the market would reap the rewards and the creative approaches would prove their worth. As that has yet to be proven (or “proves” impossible), perhaps we should shift into a more creative approach?

To turn the coin on it’s head, before I get too strong minded about creative approaches, as much as that design is indeed an art form, design also has too strong a focus on the notion of “the elite,” and Designing Interactions certainly reflects that. To be part of true public awareness anyway, like in countries like the Netherlands, design requires a certain amount of separation from the industrial complex, or at least from the companies that are fixated on it. Creative development seems more about the culture in which it is created, and less about developing the best products for the highest bidder.

The book tends to be agreeable to this principle on average, including some examples of more responsible people designing for the culture they live in, not for “the future” or “the market.” Three examples in particular shed light on how design could be done, how the technology industry is indeed very backwards, and how most of us just twiddle our thumbs when it comes to creating making decent and responsible products.

Purple Moon, for those unaware, was a very innovative research project-turned-games company, led by Brenda Laurel, a guru in the interaction communities. Most innovative about the company was its focus on a completely untapped market in the IT industry in general, young girls. For that part, it was successful. Even its crash–like so many other decent dotcom era projects–fails to negate real success.

Not only did the Purple Moon empire have a huge member base, it was the first successful product, in perhaps the history of computing, with the young female market. In some ways, we’re actually talking about the Facebook of it’s time for little girls. To put it more bluntly, Purple Moon was the only product out of Silicon Valley, in it’s history, that would have appealed to any of the young mothers I know today. It’s a shame and a disgrace that nothing even remotely along these lines has been substantially perused since.

Another example of a responsibility-based project, in this book, is some of the work that the Live|Work outfit out of London put together. They focus on Service Design, looking at the ecologies of interactive systems, how things like banking and automobiles effect our everyday lives, and looking at solutions to some of the problems that these larger systems have in terms of interaction.

Live|Work thinks above and beyond everyday products and looks at the systems that those products operate within. Moggridge highlights one project, an automobile network for the UK, where new fuel-efficient models of cars, the Fiat Multi+, would be released on more of a licensing model, than an ownership model. Seeing the infrastructure realities of the automobile in Europe, particularly the cities, this project entailed working with the Italian manufacturer and the UK government to implement a more cost effective model of transportation, resulting in a more sustainable impact on the culture and the overall ecology surrounding it.

Another story revolves around something more elegant and well-designed than even the iPod. For an Epson “conceptual design” project, a group of design researchers at Ideo Tokyo created a set of printers more like furniture than appliances, more like tables and shelves than objects typically sitting on top of them. One printer even simply had a sheet draped over it, so that the printout slid out from underneath–very elegant and mysterious. The Epson project exemplifies an exercise where the focus is not on the technology, but the aesthetic impact on its resident environment.

Projects like this uncover that people’s unsaid desires. They would actually like to have printers like these. Less than “better designed,” “more elegant,” “fancy,” or even “Japanese,” we simply enjoy looking at these artifacts. They may even be “presentable” even and would make the most elegant computer (including a Macintosh) look robotic and foreign. Something hard-edged lies in our current technology, something unfamiliar. Projects like this showcase the potential of comfort with technology. As things become more ubiquitous, the need to create devices that are unobtrusive and familiar will be a governing factor.

While reading another story about the Will Wright and the making of SimCity, I overheard someone sitting next to me in the cafe say, “He makes nice scones.” I wondered to myself, can this guy behind this video game make decent scones? While he might be able to, would he share the recipe? Should we just ask him how it was done, or is it a “family recipe” secretly handed down through the generations? As Wright says in the book, SimCity is not one of those stupid shoot-up games. Perhaps it’s a valuable contribution to society then. Why not let other people know how it’s done, like those tasty scones? Or at least give us the basic ingredients.

This last thought implies the real problem that Moggridge works to reveal. I feel, though, that it is far too subtle in it’s approach to really “hit the nail on the head.” The primary theme of this book, other than the success stories of our favorite collectibles, is how most of the most popular designs were created with a “popular approach,” by an individual drawing on a napkin, guiding a secretary to imagine, to fantasize the ideal text editor on a blank monitor, chatting informally in the hallway, or packing up and going somewhere else where they were willing to listen. Just like cooking scones, these are everyday, ordinary scenarios, and that’s how great design is created. This book does a wonderful job of showing how success stories are just regular accounts.

For me, at least, with the success stories of the most creative companies out there, like Ideo, the focus lies in blending the business process with the creative. Even at these design-driven shops, they tend to lean heavily toward the process and not the creative as the real explanation of the work, or at least it’s value. There just aren’t many completely creative focused interaction design organizations out there. There are a ton of research, design, analytical, and technological driven organizations, all blending their offerings with creative to an extent, but only an extent. In this light, Moggridge paints a relatively pretty picture of a new wave of possibilities by showing that success is born not out of a process, but happens organically like everything else.

For all practical purposes, Designing Interactions is about Ideo and its connections to Silicon Valley, with the occasional Tokyo or MIT connection. The subtlety ends up being only partially gratuitous, with the connections thrown in for what seems to be a comparison. It’s an important book in that it bridges a relatively huge gap in understanding between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world in terms of what we should be doing with technology. Moggridge does a great job of bridging that gap by focusing on the projects at MIT, which have over the years resembled a lot of what the labs, artists, and design communities outside of North America consider to be part of interaction design.

While this book has the histories of Apple, hyperlinks, Google, SimCity, I-Mode, the iPod, the Palm Pilot, laptops and tablets, the main question that I feel this book stirs up is, “How are we going to reflect our culture with all this technology?”

From reading these success stories, my answer is, “We can’t represent our culture if the creation of all of our artifacts is done in secret.” Most cultures take part in the design of their handicrafts, their instruments, tools, utensils, equipment, toys and decorative artifacts, but what are we doing with technology? Quite the opposite.

Designing Interactions gives access to a very detailed and adept summarized history of commercial interaction design. It’s an invaluable resource to anyone who wants to know what happened to get us to this point, especially with the computer interfaces. But, again, it does beg the question to be answered, “Why did these few people have such an effect, something that more designers producing more varying designs could have had?”

To end with a final thought is based on an old expression, nature never produces the exact same thing twice. Should we all not be working to achieve this state of natural variation and symbiosis? We’ll not get there focusing just on success stories or processes, but we can certainly learn how they can help us feel confident in our own methods.

fn1. Moggridge, Bill. “Designing Interactions”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10934. MIT Press; 2007. Buy from: “MIT Press”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10934 | “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interactions-Bill-Moggridge/dp/0262134748/boxesandarrows-20

“Rocket Science” is one of those expressions that conjures up a lot of thoughts, but mostly it means something is incredibly smart, basically breaching the impossible. Now, I find “The Impossible” breathtakingly exciting, the idea of something not being able to happen just somehow thrills me to bits. For example, it really makes me tick that it’s practically impossible to design a reasonably easy to use, or aesthetically interesting, computer interface. But, there are a thousand good suggestions on how to get started on such an endeavor this in this book.
“Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction”:http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470018666.html [1] is cunningly released at a time when acceptance of Interaction Design as a discipline is reaching a critical mass. The book precipitates a huge turn in the creation of interactive technologies toward the more research/creative or human-centric model, approaching the subject of this change from different angles and illuminating historical insights.

The concept that practical research leads the way to good design is a good thing, but Interaction Design misses an opportunity, in some ways, by highlighting so many decent designs from only a research or technology-driven perspective. I never really understood how the field of Human-Computer Interaction is scientific anyway, so I’m glad to see the subtitle, “Beyond Human-Computer Interaction,” on the book, meaning a move toward “design and creative” in the discipline from a focus on hard-nosed research. It always struck me as an art form, to design computer software, and not a viable practice for using measurements and methodologies. Call me biased, but I feel science does a lot of legwork in trying to justify itself in the design of computer interfaces. Whereas, most people understand that designing a screen interface requires a creative approach.

The book sheds light on this aspect of HCI being a creative endeavor, but stays within the realm of the research, or semi-scientific, approach. Even as a social science, the dominant belief HCI research as the most effective way to design interfaces leaves too little room for real creative design talent. This book serves as a sign of the times by reflecting on this outlook.

It’s not that research isn’t appreciated in the design world (especially the findings), but my position is that some results could be found through sheer design approaches. The majority of successful applied designs include the conceptual, aesthetic, and semantic as well as input from the research-based approaches in this book. In my mind, however, sometimes the results of the research can be talked out in a few good casual conversations with other designers about the technology, placement, and end users.

The book does highlight quite a few good approaches that I use as a practitioner, so it certainly covers the reality of doing interaction design. In fact, every possible ethno-social-human-factors method under the sun is in this book, and it would be impossible to integrate many of them, even partially, into a real world project. It’s an excellent reference book for the shelf, and I know that I’ll refer to it often, even if I can’t use every approach in my projects.

It would be ideal to be able to use all of the information here. However, the reality of everyday design work is such that most of this research only really occurs in academia, amongst the most dedicated usability professionals, or within the lab environment. Unfortunately, these environments are not well known for their ability to produce interactions that are regarded as aesthetically pleasing by the general public. That said, I have employed a number of these approaches and have heard of almost all of them being used in the field, just likely not with the degree of formality that practitioners of traditional HCI tend to expect.

As a textbook for third or fourth year university students, graduate students may find parts of Interaction Design very interesting. It firmly plants the history of HCI accessibly for design students and takes the edge off of the more rigorous image that has accompanied user interface design research in the past. So, it’s a great book if you’re studying, working with a university or college, or just want to get up to snuff.

With the majority of material backed by research, it should be noted that this book is not light reading. While the approaches themselves are typically not about doing extensive research, an element of practicality pervades the discussions. Some students might find this attitude misleading, especially if the course they are on has more of a creative slant. But, if that’s your angle, there are tons of activities and processes in this book which will keep you learning for months.

Science and art can be combined wonderfully, especially when they are used in flexible and semantically meaningful ways. Students who read this book should be given the freedom and persuasion to integrate these techniques into their own approaches, so that they may avoid getting bogged down by the practicality of these methods. Products in the real world have used research and other practical approaches to create a more humane final design, and this book has a smattering of these example projects and products. Keep in mind that a personal touch helps humanize these approaches to fit them into creative design projects.

Interaction Design provides a lot of examples of successful design and will prove a great reference for the more pragmatic designers out there. The rational bent will help designers looking for explanations as to what it takes to do something well to why certain things work (e.g. iconography, different types of analysis).

The background information behind almost every approach and model out there is included, but alas, only a few of the examples are, unfortunately, elegant. They are research projects, so, they are not meant to be elegant. You might say that these types of projects are the stand-by of practitioners who recognize a problem, but who are not prepared to think of a more acceptable and effective approach. While the end design serves the purpose, unfortunately it does not do so with the inventiveness and personal value that shines clearly in products like Google Maps or the iPod Click Wheel.

Some examples of such technological determinism:
* The cascading menu: It’s an obviously difficult method of interacting with a system, but the researchers, developers and the people who put together the operating system SDK did not spend the requisite time inventing a more elegant approach.
* Speech interfaces: The reality of interacting with the system pales in comparison to the theory or the research behind it. Some companies now exploit this flaw by merely promise customers no phone trees or that calls will be answered in 2 rings or less.
* Pen-based (gestural) interfaces: Handwriting recognition software worked a lot better on the Newton than even the Palm OS, never mind the current offering on the Tablet PC.

In some ways, Interaction Design the practice is a field that seems obsessed with process over product. Experience has taught me that if overall the team lacks creative and artistic skills, the product is doomed to become unfriendly or inelegant. Essentially it boils down to politics, even within the smallest team. If there isn’t a general “agree-to-agree” mentality and a good amount of trust in the more creative members of the team, no amount of process, or developing a new one, will help make products that the customers want.

I approach the field from a design perspective, meaning two parts visual/creative, one part analytical public needs representative. When reading scientific books, journals, textbooks, I usually glance through them, looking for something inspirational, something logical, something that would make sense to the analytical side of my brain. I’m interested in the possibilities of the approaches, how they will affect my projects, and how they help me breach the impossibilities of science. I find it amazing how research and science struggle for elegance unless they also bring creative parts to bear.
Interaction Design, the book, presents many valuable approaches and background on the industry. Still, one should realize that learning this material is like learning to play the piano. You can follow many leads and avenues, especially in terms of extending your practice, but you’ll need creativity and artistry to exercise them well. Buy this book to support that good work, because you can never have enough background knowledge to do your job well.

fn1. Helen Sharp, Yvonne Rogers, and Jenny Preece; “Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Edition”:http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470018666.html; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2007.

The importance of innovation

Innovation is a hot topic at the moment. Actually, innovation has been a big thing for last hundred years or more, but perhaps we needed the profusion of business magazines and books to bring this observation into sharp focus. With the tech sector on the ascendancy (again), driven in part by the Web 2.0 movement, examples of innovation are everywhere. We’ve moved beyond the notion of the knowledge economy to recognize that innovative ideas can be the foundation for disruptive business models. This factor makes Berkun’s book timely, as it sheds light on the underpinning truths that surround innovation. This is what the dust jacket promises:

In The Myths of Innovation, bestselling author Scott Berkun takes a careful look at innovation history, including the software and Internet ages, to reveal how ideas truly become successful innovations–truths that you can apply to today’s challenges.
Using dozens of examples from the history of technology, business, and the arts, you’ll learn how to convert the knowledge you have into ideas that can change the world.

So, does it deliver?

Debunking myths

To explain how innovation works, Berkun starts in the opposite direction and first exposes ten commonly-held beliefs about innovation:
1. The myth of epiphany
2. We understand the history of innovation
3. There is a method for innovation
4. People love new ideas
5. The lone inventor
6. Good ideas are hard to find
7. Your boss knows more about innovation than you
8. The best ideas win
9. Problems and solutions
10. Innovation is always good

In each chapter a myth is introduced and then progressively unraveled and debunked with great wit and charm. This approach helps to structure the book and it offers an easy way to explore innovation. Berkun has a fluid writing style and finds the right balance between informality and powerful word-smithing.

Berkun uses a range of examples from the Renaissance to eBay and Craigslist. Each case study is carefully researched and accompanied by footnotes pointing to further reading. In many instances, Berkun takes unexpected angles on historical cases, presenting new perspectives on stories that have been told and retold for more than a generation. For example, most people are familiar with the story of Post-it notes: The 3M miracle product that evolved from a glue that didn’t stick properly. Far fewer know about the product that preceded Post-it notes (masking tape), and the company’s corporate history. 3M actually stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing and the company started out drilling for underground minerals to manufacture grinding wheels. It was only after a lab assistant needed a way to mark borders for two-tone car painting that masking tape was developed and the rest became history. Another example explores the challenges in getting the telegraph adopted and how the company built on that discovery, Western Union, eventually became the protector of the status quo when new innovations came along–namely the telephone.

Through these examples, Berkun demonstrates that while inventions seem inevitable after the fact, the path to adoption is almost never certain. Great ideas fail, while commercial imperatives drive the success of other innovations.

Providing answers

Readers looking for an innovation checklist or a how-to book will be dissatisfied. One of the myths that Berkun debunks is that there can be a step-by-step guide to innovation. Instead, innovation is a complicated and unpredictable process with many paths–more jigsaw puzzle than a straight line. By its nature, innovation explores uncharted territory. It is also the product of a lot hard work, unexpected insights, the collaboration of many individuals, and sheer, random chance.

When I reached the end of the book, I was disappointed to discover there was not a summary chapter wrapping up its message; something akin to, “So therefore, based on these myths, this is how you need to do innovation in practice.” While a concluding chapter would have neatly closed the narrative arc at the end of the book, Berkun was right not have included one. Instead, the onus is on the reader to review the book again and allow the many gems scattered throughout the text sink in more.

In particular, Berkun outlines a number of key principles and barriers to innovation. They are presented in unassuming lists that belie their value. For example, he outlines eight challenges all innovations must confront and overcome, including sponsorship and funding, capacity for reproduction, and reaching the potential customer. In addition to these challenges, Berkun discusses elements that can influence the speed of adoption, challenges associated with managing innovation, and factors that have influenced historical innovations. Berkun also offers a comprehensive set of checkpoints that can be used to assess approaches to innovation.

What we can learn

There are many heroes idolized within our industry, whether it’s Flickr, eBay, Craigslist, 37 Signals, IDEO, Yahoo, Google, or any of the hundreds of Web 2.0 businesses. All of these organizations are regarded as paragons of innovation, featured prominently at conferences and in case studies. Berkun points out that while much can be learned from these organizations, the myths that surround them can also blindly lead us down the wrong path. If we recreate the funky, fun-filled spaces of the Googleplex, do we automatically become innovative? If we develop functionalities that mimic Flickr, will we be able to take on the world?

When starting down the path of innovation, we must do more than just blindly copy the formulas so neatly captured and communicated from these leading companies. Yes, we would like some measure of their success, but we would do better to learn from the myths outlined in this book. When we are establishing our design teams, building our startups, or consolidating our consulting firms, we need to consider the ideas presented in The Myths of Innovation. The lessons I took away from the book include the following:

• Good management has a huge impact on the success of in-house innovation.
• Innovation is paired with collaboration.
• The best outcomes derive from a mix of self-awareness and the ability to recognize and explore opportunities when they arise.
• Oh, and the need for perseverance, no matter how hard the road ahead.

The universal principles and insights captured by Berkun certainly apply to design and user testing. On page 66, Berkun makes the following observation:

“[Innovators] grow so focused on creating that they forget that those innovations are good only if people can use them. While there’s a lot to be said for raising bars and pushing envelops, breakthroughs happen for societies when innovations diffuse, not when they remain forever ahead of their time.”

Information architects, therefore, have an important role to play in innovation, particularly when making use of ethnographic research techniques. At the end of the day, we don’t win awards for demonstrating how smart or creative we are if no one chooses to make use of our wonderful new innovations. The more we understand our users or customers, the better we’ll be able to create innovations that make their lives easier. Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation, nor is it the result of being struck by a falling apple (or even a falling Apple?). Innovation occurs in the real world, drawn from an understanding of needs, and delivered through a design process that makes the idea into something that will change the world. This is where IAs can contribute.

Conclusion

I started The Myths of Innovation in a positive frame of mind, generated by my interest in the topic (and the excitement of seeing my photos in print). I ended the book similarly enthusiastic. While it isn’t a long read (I started in Cambridge and finished before I touched down in Los Angeles), good books don’t need a lot of words to make their point. Scott Berkun clearly presents his arguments, demolishing many of the misconception about innovation. For those of us running businesses or developing new products, it’s a must-read.

About the Book
“The Myths of Innovation”:http://www.amazon.com/Myths-Innovation-Scott-Berkun/dp/0596527055/boxesandarrows-20
Scott Berkun
2007, O’Reilly
ISBN-10: 0596527055

Authors note: If you want to view more of my book-worthy photos, you can find them on “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/shingen_au, or on the site from “my first photography exhibition”:http://www.artbytwo.com.au/index.html.

We, the people, as users of these architectures, experience the downside of not having enough peace in the process of interacting with a poorly designed system. With almost a billion computers on earth and millions of unsatisfying interactions every minute, we are looking at massive amount of unintuitive interactions.

Where Are My Glasses?

Compare it with looking through a bag for a pair of glasses, while this might be one of the more frustrating moments of your entire day, it still has a logical conclusion, “glasses” or “no glasses.” The new reasoning here, when interacting with computers is that you have many other possible answers, finding the top half of the glasses, someone else’s glasses, things that think they are glasses, or having the bag just disappear on you.

If you lose your glasses, there aren’t many conclusions for outcome of this “scenario” in the real world. The glasses are either there or not. Within the computer the list is potentially unlimited, and most of the conclusions are mentally exhausting. Computers are tiring, constantly offering you options you don’t want and providing you with answers that don’t make any sense. More to the point, computers are designed to be complicated, much more complicated than a bag and glasses, hence, they aren’t designed to be obvious.

Web 2.0 UI for Dummies

In the current computer experience, there is a certain lack of “the design providing the answers,” something which is repeatedly addressed in Designing the Obvious, by Robert Hoekman, Jr. His bold use of language addresses not only the frustrations users experience in having an unrelaxed state of interaction, but also rightfully condemns the people behind these unhealthy and unintuitive user experiences. The book covers how to design a system that will tell the user if it has or doesn’t have “glasses” in it, and also how to prevent the computer from telling the user all sorts of other irrelevant information.

This book is very honest, amusing, straightforward, and extremely relevant. Besides providing strong a framework for designing more “obvious” applications, it also serves as a “Web 2.0 UI for Dummies” guidebook. Hoekman provides great Web 2.0 working examples, details what works about these new applications, discusses how they are successful, and explores what the people behind them have to say about their designs.

Diagnosis: Be More Mental

Reading this book was a pleasure. The amount of critical thinking and the solid diagnosis of the field of software design has to be admired. In fact, writing a book like this takes what I call, “balls.” Few designers out there can honestly say that they haven’t had some of these thoughts or wanted to say the things that are in this book. While Hoekman may be occasionally overstating the need to convince clients and sell services, in my opinion, he makes some brilliant conclusions and eye opening metaphors, such as the notion of links behaving like doors to other rooms, and the idea that “bad design” is actually ‘rude design.’ His eye for successful interactions and his approach in communicating what’s essential really sets the tone for this sort of detail-level design in the world of Web 2.0 applications.

One of his main thoughts in the book is the criticism of Implementation Models and his support for Mental Models when designing a product. While not in the book, a prime example is the Wacom input tablet, a direct representation of the typical interaction humans have had with information for thousands of years. Wacom is a translation of Japanese, Wa for Harmony, and Com for Computer. There is a strong movement towards more harmony with Web 2.0, and Designing the Obvious is a very good reference for anyone hoping to create more harmony in their designs.

Zen and the “Practice”

Zen is the art of practicing meditation in everything you do and existing solely in a mental space. Envisioning surroundings as full of peace creates an image of actions as poetry. If information architecture is poetry, it gives just meaning, placement, and timing to an overall message or theme. The flow of numbers, letters, images and sounds together form a medium for the mind, a zen space of constant understanding.

Another key concept in this book is the notion of designing for a minimal set of options or fluid interaction, another zen concept. While I don’t think that this is the future for all software development, he is likely right in leading most applications down this path, away from desensitizing the visitors with featuritis. He gives many methods for dropping the unnecessary, saying that “less is more, so aim low.” This notion of the minimal is hugely important within the teachings of zen, turning into the idea that you channel the energy, or features, that are interesting to you as a user.

Eating, Not Thinking About It

Hoekman also reiterates the important idea of using your own software regularly (referred to as eating your own dog food). I prefer to think of it as turning your own arrows into flowers. A long standing metaphor in the Buddhist philosophies that you can take any arrow aimed at you and turn it into a flower; I think that if you are shooting arrows out at someone else you can also turn them into flowers. As you use the software, Hoekman says to drop anything that stands out as being too difficult, unnecessary, or in the way. Let those petals fall where they may.

The book concentrates on the activity and not the concept. Just like this article’s namesake novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the activity of fixing and riding bikes is the real heart of the book, not the concept of looking inward, or any of the other meditation concepts. Interestingly, we remember the story of activity from Designing the Obvious, not all the concepts that were tied into it along the way. I can only surmise that Hoekman recommends a focus on activity because that is the most conscious of the interactive processes. While there is a huge movement in the design world regarding concept driven designs, I recommend this book to any design-oriented person as an eye opener to activity-based design.

Effective De5Sign

Hoekman provides some very interesting insights to the Japanese world of industrial design, including the activities of Kaizen and the 5S approach which are very successful in terms of creating appreciated designs in Japan. Kaizen is “change for the better” or “improvement,” and is most easily done in iterations. Kaizen was originally used as a management technique and is credited as the reason Toyota consistently builds high quality and long lasting vehicles.

The 5S approach was originally developed for the manufacturing industry, and represents these five words, and their translations: seiri (sort), seiton (straighten), seiso (shine), seiketsu (standardize) and shitsuke (sustain). In brief, 5S aims at reduction and refinement, both essential elements in creating long lasting and sustainable designs.

Implied, Not Stated

One thing I wish he mentioned more would be the notions of talent and skill. While he comes from a development background, Hoekman obviously has a great deal of inherent ability to explain what works and what doesn’t work surrounding these Web 2.0 applications. What amazes me, and not just with this book, is the lack of explaining design talent and or skill, other than just making case studies or glorifying the design’s end result.

A perfect example is how Hoekman gives a lot of kudos to a bunch of 2.0 teams, particularly 37signals, and quotes them explaining their process in the book. While in many cases this does lead to an impression of these companies being very talented and skilled, it seems to me that they shroud this is process and technique. Hoekman does a fair enough job at giving compliments to the actual applications though, that the skill and talent behind them does indeed shine through. A chapter about these facets would be greatly appreciated.

Springboard

All in all, Designing the Obvious is an amazing book, crafted together from years of experience in understanding applications and deep insight into how the latest and greatest Web 2.0 applications are designed to be obvious. From countless examples and an amazing amount of techniques, both before and during design, Hoekman provides a wonderful platform from which more amazing, and dynamic applications can be built. If you are at all in the market for designing web based applications, especially Web 2.0 applications, this book is hands down a necessity, particularly for those who are still meditating on their last purchase.

If you like what Clifton says here, buy “Designing the Obvious”:http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Obvious-Common-Approach-Application/dp/032145345X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-5610083-7341514?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178611116&sr=1-1/boxesandarrows-20 now.

*About the book*

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
by Robert Hoekman Jr.
Paperback, 264 pages
New Riders Press, (October 2006)
ISBN: 032145345X

I’d recently redone the standard review of persona articles on the web. I breezed back over the chapters in About Face 2.0 and Christina Wodtke’s Blueprints for the Web. A colleague even loaned me Steve Mulder’s new book, The User is Always Right, which I kind of thumbed through.

Given my review of what’s out there, The Persona Lifecycle is the most comprehensive book on personas I’ve come across. If you’re so inclined, it can taking you from novice to expert. The authors, Jonathan Pruit and Tamara Adlin, take advantage of extensive teaching experience and punctuate their discussion with lots of real-world examples, case studies, anecdotes, bright ideas and handy guidelines.

That being said, it’s not an easy read, and it’s not for everybody.

Persona school

Pruit and Adlin use the lifecycle as a metaphor to frame the different stages personas go through, from birth to retirement. To highlight their process, a fictional case study runs throughout the book tying everything together. Because design doesn’t happen in a vacuum, the authors talk about how to ease the adoption and communication of personas at different levels of your organization. In fact, the book covers the two most important facets of personas: making them and getting them used.

Overall, the book is very rigorous and thorough. Chapter one is the best overview and history of, introduction to, and case for personas I’ve ever seen; it should be required reading for everyone.

Though the writing aims at being straightforward, the authors tend towards the academic. That is, they use big words to make things clear. Pruit and Adlin developed the lifecycle as a way to teach personas, and at some point in chapter two, my hazy school days came flooding back to me: The Persona Lifecycle is a textbook.

Information overload

Todd Warfel was disappointed with the book. Todd’s a smart guy: passionate, extremely knowledgeable, creative and driven to perfect his UX game. Like a kid waiting for Christmas, he eagerly awaited for his copy to arrive. When someone like Warfel says they didn’t like the book, it should make you wonder.

In Warfel’s words, the authors included everything but the kitchen sink. Don Norman’s cover blurb hints in a similar fashion: “–it truly is for everyone: the practitioner, the researcher, and the teacher.” Warfel and Norman are right. The book has everything. It’s like reading an encyclopedia, and after a short while, the stories, guidelines and examples start to blur together.

Doesn’t work as a reference

I was torn between reading the book cover-to-cover and flipping to the sections where I needed some perspective for my current project.

As a flip-through reference, the PLC is hit and miss. There’s no comprehensive table of contents, and it’d be great if there was some sort of index for the numerous stories from the field. I’d like to reference a couple, but I can’t remember where I read them or who wrote them. Similarly, many of their useful broad guidelines are lost to time and the pages of the book, because I can’t find them on a second pass.

Creating personas

There are two ways of creating personas: a short way, and a long way. The book mentions the short way, but mostly, Pruit and Adlin focus on creating personas the long way with lots and lots of research and lots and lots of analysis.

They present all the steps so you have them in your toolbox, not so you’ll use all of them on every project. Still, I found myself breezing through or skipping over sections on topics I was already familiar with. Even though the authors may intend the book to present the entirety of the toolbox, they end up presenting the toolbox as a temple of rigor.

Using personas

There were a couple of sections I liked. In chapter two, they digress for a moment to look at how the persona lifecycle might fit in to your current design process, and in chapter three, “Family Planning (Planning a Persona Effort),” they spend a lot of time helping you position your persona effort for maximum acceptance throughout your company. I don’t agree with everything they recommend, but the perspective is interesting and educational.

“Birth and Maturation” (chapter five) focuses on communicating personas to the different levels of the organization and getting personas used. The fact that they even use a phrase like “communication strategy” when talking about deliverables wins them big points, but I found myself having to strip the good bits out of the background noise of the super-bureaucratic enterprise for which we’re apparently working.

Recommended, but with caveats

Despite all this bitching, I do recommend the book.

Some readers will appreciate how the authors painstakingly dissect and analyze every part of the persona process. If you’re one of those people–and you know who you are–you’ll love this book. It’s a bible, a handbook, an encyclopedia of wisdom about personas. And you like reading textbooks and encyclopedias.

If you’re a guru looking to become a “superhero,” reading The Performance Lifecycle, front-to-back is probably like adding two to three years solid experience under your belt. You’re guaranteed to level up. Maybe twice.

However, if you’re like me, a busy practitioner balancing the need to learn with the need for help with current projects, The Persona Lifecycle is less than useful. In the end, though the lifecycle is a great way to teach personas it may not be the best way to present them in book form. Had the authors written two books–one on creating personas and another on using personas–I think the added focus would have been fantastic.

If it sounds like just the book for you, buy “The Persona Life Cycle”:http://www.amazon.com/Persona-Lifecycle-Throughout-Interactive-Technologies/dp/0125662513/ref=sr_1_1/104-5610083-7341514?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178609076&sr=8-1/boxesandarrows-20 now.

*About the book*
“The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (Paperback)”:http://www.amazon.com/Persona-Lifecycle-Throughout-Interactive-Technologies/dp/0125662513/ref=sr_1_1/104-5610083-7341514?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178609076&sr=8-1/boxesandarrows-20
by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin
Paperback, 744 pages
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann (April 24, 2006)
ISBN: 0125662513

Still need a holiday gift for your favorite designer or writer? Current and former Boxes and Arrows staff talk about books that have thrilled them recently, as well as books they continue to go back to year after year. Holiday pairs give you something old and something new to choose from.

Jorge Arango

“Oldie”

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BraidDouglas Hofstadter
January 1999 (20th Anniversary edition)
A brilliant, challenging, witty study of the nature and structure of thought—human and otherwise—that draws on formal systems, zen, artificial intelligence, music, paradox, recursion, and other fascinating topics.

“Goodie”

Universal Principles of Design
William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler
October 2003
100 design principles—concepts such as affordance, constraints, figure-ground, etc.—clearly explained. Includes many examples and illustrations. (As you’d expect, it’s also beautifully designed.)

Pat Barford

“Oldie”

The Elements of Style
William Strunk Jr., E. B. White
July 1999 (4th edition)
Best book ever about writing well. The source I always go to when in doubt about word usage, sentence structure, or those niggling little language problems that exist—whatever the medium. Readable, compact, and jam-packed with valuable information There’s also a killer online version.
Editorial note: the online version is only half the story; it’s all Strunk and no White. Spend a couple bucks and enjoy it in print!

Liz Danzico

“Oldie”

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman
May 1959
Like Henry Dreyfuss who used his background in theater design to define the field of ergonomics, Goffman relies on the metaphor of theater to reveal elements of human behavior—elements key to interaction designers. Pointing out that an interaction is not just about the performer, but about the audience as well, Goffman presents us with a text critical to any interaction designer. Although written in 1959, this book still brings new evidence about how to build coherency in interactive models today.

“Goodie”

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (9th Edition)
Joseph M. Williams
December 2006
You write. You write all the time: stacks of email messages, instant messages, text messages, reports, rants, and reviews. And you follow rules. You follow rules you learned in high school: don’t begin a sentence with “But,” don’t end a sentence with a preposition, and never use fragments. In a time where writing happens more often than not and where the rules no longer apply, we need a book to tell us how to break the rules elegantly. Truth is, they were never meant to be followed in the first place. Williams, in this 9th edition, presents a stunning set of guidelines on how to break the rules, and how to diagnose the problems with your own writing.

Alecia Kozbial

“Oldie”

The Design of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman
September 2002 (Reprint)
Norman looks at the design problems that occur in our everyday lives. This book is an excellent introduction to usability and smart design.

“Goodie”

Designing Interfaces
Jenifer Tidwell
November 2005
I have found Designing Interfaces to be an invaluable resource. It is a collection of well-organized UI design patterns for a wide selection of platforms, desktop, web, mobile, and other digital devices.

George Olsen

“Oldie”

Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques
Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano
December 1994
Graphic designers have had five centuries of beta testing to figure out communicate effectively. While written for designing applications (in the pre-Internet era), Mullet and Sano show (in a visual manner rather than theorizing) how to apply graphic design principles to interface design.

“Goodie”

What Management Is: How It Works and Why It’s Everyone’s Business
Joan Magretta
June 2003
A jargon-free primer on how business (and not-for-profit) organizations work from the perspective of management. More of a comprehensive exploration than traditional how-to, it’s a good way to see the bigger picture and understand the point of view of the “business side of the equation.”

Lars Pind

“Oldie”

Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques
Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano
(Editor’s Note: So good, that it’s on the list twice.)
I’m an engineer, not a designer, but this book has given me the vocabulary and tools and theory I need to understand and make decisions about design, not as decoration, but as an integrated part of the communication between software and people. I love it.

“Goodie”

Against the Odds: An Autobiography
James Dyson
April 2003
A beautiful entrepreneur story. I’m a big believer in the renaissance, in the combination of art and engineering in one individual, in engineering and design being fundamentally inseparable, a belief I share with James Dyson. On top of that, the 13 years of meticulous iterations and the suffering of setbacks before the final breakthrough is just a plain old good story.

Javier Velasco

“Oldie”

The Tree of Knowledge
Mumberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
March 1992
What is life? What is a human? How does our perception work? These are some of the questions that this brilliant team of neurobiologists confront in this book. It’s had an impact in many areas of current knowledge.

“Goodie”

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld
November 2006
I just got my copy of the Third Edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Morville & Rosenfeld. The previous editions have always been favorites and a must-have for all of us. This is a book that has been critical for the development of our field. It seems like the book has been thoroughly revised; I see new screenshots and new subtitles everywhere. It has been updated to include social classification and navigation concepts, and all those other things we’ve been discussing since the last edition. Some advanced findability notions are also considered, as well as more depth on user needs, enterprise IA, and strategy. There’s also more on deliverables than ever before. While sticking to roughly the same amount of pages as the Second Edition, this book seems completely refreshed. I look forward to have a chance to sit down and read it cover to cover.

Emily Wilska

“Oldie”

Chicago Manual of Style
University of Chicago Press
August 2003
So it’s not exactly the sort of thing you’d curl up with on a Sunday afternoon. It is the place to look to find the answer to any style-related writing question you’ll ever have (such as whether to hyphenate style-related).

“Goodie”

MacBook
I know, I know: it’s not technically a book. But it’s the perfect example of the power of good, thoughtful design, and of the value of making common tasks (like connecting to a network) as simple as possible. Plus, it’s stunningly pretty.

Christina Wodtke

“Oldie”

Managing The Professional Service Firm
David H. Maister
June 1997
Should be required reading for anyone in a service profession, including in-house service teams. Teaches you how to (among other things) navigate the treacherous waters of being paid to give advice.

“Goodie”

Making Comics
Scott McCloud
September 2006
A strangely compelling combination of “how to”, and “philosophy of” words and pictures working together. If you loved Understanding Comics, it’s worth the perusal. It’s not quite the concise masterpiece that Understanding Comics is, but it’s so chockfull of insight, you forgive the meandering moments.