Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Peter Jones

Peter Jones — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:16:42 GMT

David – I totally agree with your expression of organizations as ecologies rather than problems, in terms of dynamics. In terms of failures, organizations are wired up for self-defense, and their ecological network turns inward to defend itself from internal breakdown. A full ecological description is very hard to render as well, within a case study.

This is an attempt at an ecological description, while keeping it simple. That’s the point of the timeline figure, to illustrate interactions that occur between processes and projects. And it is still a fairly long, 2-part article at that! The second part may shed some more light on the inter-system interactions, by continuing with a case study.

Yes on your point about planning as well. The very act of planning helps the organization create artifacts that aid distributed cognition and maintain a series of anchors (in time and location) that inform participants about expectations and agreements. Like Eisenhower said “The plan is nothing. Planning is everything.” Creating insightful planning aids can lead to powerful consensus and commitment to action, perhaps to back up Christina’s point, an effective contribution we can make to organizational IA.

Peter Jones — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:11:08 GMT

Yes, Sam – I am suggesting that things are particularly bad, from my perspective. And there is distortion when people have something to gain. I’ve watched (and studied) North American organizational culture over a career that’s longer than I care to mention. And large organizations dealt with change and failure better in the early 90’s, for example, when the quality movement still ruled in many firms and “associates” were given lots of training, development, and respect. Team development, process improvement – these management trends, while pooh-poohed by many, helped create a more collegial environment than I observe in those same firms now.

Where is HR? Seriously downsized in many places, and lacking authority in most others. But the large-scale failures I’m pointing to are more ecological, and happen over time. They are wicked problems in that each mini-failure is just a symptom of another, and nobody has line-of-sight over the whole system. Decisions made in one domain (e.g., marketing) affect another (say, product development) with such a duration gap that there may be no opportunity to challenge the decisions once the impact starts showing up.

Why UX (rather than IA, really) can have an impact is that product design decisions can be tied to customer experience and real customer data. We can take a stand, over and over again, until other stakeholders realize the customer-centered stand makes good business sense. We don’t need our own C-levels to accomplish this – I’ve done this through a kind of socialization of UX practices through significant projects that build new routines in the organization. It takes time, but it builds highly resilient lateral decision networks. Some of this is in Part II.

Peter Jones — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:20:58 GMT

I’d like to post a couple of responses to the most recent comments. Thanks all for really reading the article – I was concerned of its length for B&A, and its more of an organizational studies article than a trad IA piece. Part II is up already now thanks to your responses! Marianna had contested the poisition of UX in the figure – I should clarify that the org processes indicated there are part of a real company in the case study, and are not in any way recommended for any other organization. But this is a traditional position for a large development company – and in this firm a weak position from which to promote organizational and product change. And, even as a small group without much authority, UX was able to assert real changes in the overall process across product lines through this organizational interaction style (not a method or process) we call socialization.

This also helps address Praveen’s comment. I guess it depends where you work and whether you take your job as defined in the organization, or are willing to take responsibility for helping push some of the changes that allow IA and UX to influence product strategy, marketing, and development. At this point, design decisions can be seen as not just user-centered, but as commitments from your firm to your users. Keeping a product healthy in the marketplace is everyone’s job, and as part of an organizational ecology, it takes a healthy organization to sustain a healthy product line in a competitive marketplace. Just like “innovation” is something everyone can do, standing up for the right decisions is part of our everyday jobs. There are also decisions that only we can see when they are happening, and they can reveal a lot. I’m just pointing out these types of organizational interactions from a real case to share some of how large-scale failure is a wicked problem that has no single cause, but we all have a part to play in detecting and raising the issues from our understanding as a situation emerges.

Peter Jones — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:59:22 GMT

James, Masood – Thanks for your comments. There’s a lot more to tell, but we were unsure about an article as long as this in the first place. And as you’ve intuited, creating an organic demand for UX is the key thing in a socialization approach. You know It’s working when – you find others around the organization are seeking you out and trying to work it out with your boss to get you on their team! I am familiar with a number of large organizations, and the socialization takes off when UX people are given the organizational support to diffuse the practice and your value to other product lines and new projects in their planning phases. Even giving informal presentations outside of your reporting line helps spread the value of UX practices. But in practical terms, we need to find ways to be advocates and part-time advisors to other projects, which will create demand back to the UX organization. I’ve seen this work with only 2 UX people in a large organization. Gotta go now, I’ll try to say some more later!

Peter Jones — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:48:47 GMT

Thanks, this is very thought provoking. Scanning the comments I’m prompted by jiKim’s realworld story about the obvious impediments (or lack of flow) during peak customer volume during the busiest seasons for hotels in large cities. This raises a few questions relevant to flow, such as: How is individual flow affected when multiple players are involved? (For example, you need a critical mass to make a multiplayer game, or Second Life, compelling enough to flow – there are tradeoffs between individual and group experience of flow).

jiKim very neatly segues into some of the complexity involved with designing FOR flow. This gets to the world beyond interactivity,which is where work and play live for most. So where is the focal experience of the flow? In the interactive experience or in the activity that the interaction supports? (Most of my design work is in the latter, so interaction is often maximized for task efficiency to maintain a realworld cognitive flow). The attempt to design-in flow states to an interactive experience could be counter-productive to total flow. Think of the design requirements for medical decision making – the flow is happening in the consult room, not in the information display. (It could be, but that’s another focal point!)

Also, there could be multiple interactions involved that trade-off “more flow” or enjoyable challenge in one state versus more radical efficiency in another. Take an eBook reader for example (a project I just finished). If an eBook vendor designs their platform for the purpose of maximizing reading flow while online, they may inlcude features or navigation that impedes the flow state of the researcher, who is attempting to understand a thread of ideas across a number of publications (common task), or who is maximizing the number of references to an idea by finding all the citations in and across books.