Giving feedback is a skill.  Anybody can give feedback, but it takes practice and a thoughtful approach to give feedback that will help creatives take their work to the next level.  I recently had the opportunity to work with IDEO and noticed that they effectively have feedback skills built into their core culture. It made me think about what I’ve learnt about giving and receiving creative feedback over the years.

The first rule of thumb is to not make it personal.  Don’t say ‘I want’, and don’t focus on the negative.  Talking about the design in those terms is guaranteed to create ill-will and resentment, if not a blow-up argument.  Is this about creating great work or just pleasing your whims?  Instead talk about constructive, positive changes and the reasons (from research, the project objectives, etc.) they will move the work forward.

Don’t suggest full solutions.  Figure out what’s missing or what problem exists, and give that to the creative to come up with a solution.  It’s OK to suggest some approaches but don’t say ‘you have to do this’ as (a) nobody likes being given diktats, particularly creatives, and (b) they may actually have a better idea than you, particularly if they’re subject matter experts.

Be respectful.  Ideally you have already fostered an atmosphere of trust and respect on your team. If you haven’t you should start working on it now, as giving and receiving feedback happens far more effectively when the people feel trusted to improve on existing solutions, respected in their abilities to do so, and appreciated for the work they put in.

Receiving feedback is also a skill, which is more about fortitude and discipline: criticism of work you’ve done is nearly always a little painful – and you have to develop a thick skin.  It also pays to put aside your ego and not be defensive of decisions and ideas you’ve provided.  As much as it feels in the moment, it’s really not about you and whether you got it right, it’s about the work being the best it can be.  Developing a thick skin and putting away your ego are very tough things to do and even the best creatives aspire to these things rather than achieving them 100% of the time.

I’ve started a new blog called Score 7, which will rail against dissapointing trends in video game media and celebrate the unsung heroes.  If you’re interested in the growth of this industry too, take a look:

Score 7

I’ll still publish to this blog about general digital design stuff, I’ll just have them going in parallel.

I’m fascinated by the lifecycle of TV shows and what makes one survive over another. Ultimately it comes down to the advertising value and the ROI for the series, but it strikes me that the shows that live on tend to be the ones that hit on a good formula.  Get the right formula and the audiences keep showing up for more.

A show like Bones, which isn’t particularly innovative or fresh, has apparently struck a good formula of detective stories and quirky drama.  Most importantly, they have a good grip on what works about the show and keep delivering on the successful formula.  Contrast that with Heroes, which brought something fresh and new, but they don’t seem to know what exactly their winning formula was.

There’s a parallel with successful companies – dig back in the history of a lot of companies and you’ll find the story of a few people who hit on a good formula then built a business by repeating it and scaling it up.  Do you know the formula of your own company?  Does the company know it’s formula?  If you just had a great success, do you actually know what the formula to repeat it will be?

A game with an original premise, intriguing storytelling, artfully crafted visuals, an edgy atmosphere and OK controls recently came out: Cursed Mountain for the Wii. Unfortunately it has been consigned to the graveyard of the middling score.  That’s an ‘OK’ score – not bad, not great – and let’s face it most people looking at game reviews don’t usually get past the big number at the top, particularly if it’s not a high one. With this sort of take on games owning the dialog – there’s even a ‘rankings‘ website to average the scores – the equation is weighted heavily in favour of a few exceptional games (in the eyes of the critics at least) and leaves little room for the games that don’t make the highest mark.

I feel bad for the game developer who probably put a couple of years into making the game. More importantly though, I feel worse about all the people that would probably enjoy the game for it’s original premise, intriguing storytelling, artfully crafted visuals, and aren’t put off by the control scheme. We need to move on from the score as the be-all-end-all of game reviews.  Change up the way we talk about new games so that people can sift through the variety that’s out there and pick out the ones that are right for them on specific merits.

I’ve settled on a simple formula for crafting a promotional message.   The approach is to engage the target audience on a basic emotional level plus a rational intentional level, then have a single obvious next step for them to take.  Granted, some promotions may be simpler or more complex, but for the vast majority fit this formula.  The benefit is that it really gets to the core of what not only captures a person’s attention, but then causes them to follow through and respond to the ad.

The first and most impactful aspect of the promotion should be an immediate emotional hook.  The best way to craft this is to get inside the head of the person and understand what are the emotional buttons for this subject matter, and aim for one directly (I’m talking about doing a little ethnography here).  Chances are the people you talk to will not consciously be aware of these emotive buttons and you’ll need to look deeper than their surface explanations.  This is the part that makes the person really genuinely want to engage.  For example lets say the promotion is for a phone – here’s where you provide an image of style, status, dating or suchlike.  There’s no rational argument, it’s just a raw emotional “I need that” pull.

The moment after you’ve caught their attention, the person’s conscious thought processes will catch up and they’ll be looking for a sound reason to back up their initial instinctive response (an ‘albi’ in Clotaire Rapaille’s lingo).  Here’s where you need to present the offer, argument or statement that will carry the person on to take action.  For the phone, this is probably a price point or new feature that makes rational sense as a cause to engage further.  This needs to be as simple as possible – one idea, one statement, not a laundry list of stuff. Simpler gets you more memorable and understandable.

Finally, now that you have their attention and engagement, give them one thing to do next.  In marketing jargon this is the call to action. Phone this number, go to this website.  Again, something simple and memorable.  You really want them to do this one thing after all, right?

The hard part in all this is translating the insight about the emotional hot-buttons into a relevant, appropriate design.  You can’t beat having a talented creative involved who understands the nuances and how to address them with design concepts.  The rest is just a matter of discipline and not cramming in unnecessary junk!

Bruce Temkin, whose blog I follow fervently, just commented on the design approach taken by Google.  He felt conflicted after reading insights into Google’s method and raised the question of whether good design needs a soul.  It’s a great question. Here’s the comment I made:

There’s no question in my mind that Google does indeed take the soul out of their design. They’re so good at speed and utility that they can get away with it, but if it were an even choice between Google and another search that worked just as well, that had a more delightful design, there wouldn’t be any contest.
That said there’s always a tension between beautiful design and practical utility, and more often it’s better to achieve one really well than make something halfway between which is half as good. That Google chose to take the utilitarian approach meant they could focus on doing their thing without distraction, and clearly it worked out well. It’s a very rare company that can achieve both utility and gorgeous design.

My response is largely based on witnessing attempts (including my own) to achieve both utility and beauty that end in a disappointing compromise.  Apple is the company that does both utility and beauty – and proves it is possible to have both – but it’s very difficult to achieve what they do.  It’s no mistake that few other companies also achieve it.

There’s a quiet user experience revolution going on, and although many people are aware of it on an ‘oh that’s neat’ level, I predict that we’ll see a snowball effect of user experiences in 3 dimensions.

The two big players that are bringing spatial UI into the mainstream are the iPhone and Wii.  Although iPhone is primarily a touch-driven device, anyone who has delved into the world of downloadable apps will find some very interesting uses of it’s spatial awareness features: Games that detect tiny changes in tilt angle for driving a car or balancing a pile of blocks, and apps that change to a different mode based on which way up you are holding it. 

You’re most likely already familiar with the Wii-mote and it’s spatial capabilities.  There are actually two features built into the Wii-mote: tilting (like the iPhone) and also pointing at the screen.  As you play through Wii games the controller takes on different modes – at one point you’ll be pointing at what to do next, then you’ll be tilting it to steer a vehicle, then waving it in ‘gestures’.  There’s been a deluge of sub-par games on the Wii since it became such a success, but look carefully and you’ll find games with highly innnovative interactions. 

Spatial UI has been beautifully brought together in the Siftables prototype, whereby small independent computers react to each other depending on each other’s roles and physical relationships.  Watch the presentation at TED and you’ll see it passes the ultimate test: It delights children. So this may not be a consumer device that people will run out and buy tomorrow, but the potential for UI innovation is fascinating.

Spatial experiences are going mainstream with 3D movies.After years sidelined at IMAX and amusement parks the 3D movie is back with a vengeance and it seems like every animated movie is now releasing in 3D. [update:] James Cameron in a recent Time article claims 2D is inherently harder for the brain to process, as opposed to 3 dimensions which the brain is designed to process.

So what’s next?  It’s hard to predict what will be a good spatial experience, how best to use the new technology and we’ll evidently need a period for people to just play with it and see what works and what doesn’t (there’s certainly been a fair share of both so far).  If you have the opportunity to build spatial awareness into your next product, I advise you to embrace it with fervour but also expect to prototype and go through a few iterations before you get it right.

Something I regularly bemoan: the lack of knowledge, discipline, expertise, mentoring, schooling and respect for those things in UX in the workplace. It’s amazing how many people working in digital UX just make it up as they go along.  Some people really are smart enough to wing their way through but 90% of the time it’s a bad idea.

I encourage anyone in UX to go out of their way to regularly read and learn about how others are doing UX.  Share this with your co-workers and actively attempt to build learnings and improvements into your method.  Your skills and knowledge are never perfect – I’m amazed at how often some new technique comes along that I can use to evolve my own approaches. Every now and then I find somebody who takes this approach and they are an energizer.  What if everyone could energize each other in this way?  A smart colleague pointed this out today and it really struck home with me – having those energizing people around raises the game of your team tenfold.

Looking at other fields where one learns a craft, the tools and techniques, there is a form of apprenticeship.  Why not have this for UX?  You can learn it at university, but what about when you get into the workplace?  As far as I can see you’re either lucky enough to land with a person or people who will rub off well on you – or you are on your own. I predict that the great UX companies of tomorrow are the ones who are actively mentoring their people as apprentices today and for the future.

When I say ‘high fidelity’ for a wireframe, I mean it looks almost the same as the actual interface you are going to publish.  It most likely means there’s no design document (like a Photoshop design) based on the wireframe, and the wireframe is all you need to give to the UI developer.  The wireframe is proportionally accurate in terms of layout, spacing, font size and colours are very close to the actual thing.  Creating such a thing is actually quite easy using modern vector design software (Visio, OmniGraffle, InDesign, etc.).  It should cut a whole design step out of your process and speed up your specification-to-build cycle. However, you should not take this approach unless certain conditions exist:

This is a great approach when the visual design has been nailed down already.  That means there’s a styleguide with design rules and patterns already established and fixed.  Essentially you are dealing with Lego blocks – you have an array of modular features and the wireframe is just to show how you want to stack them together for a particular page or screen.  The best way to know that the modular pieces will fit well together and lay out well on the page is to make them as realistic as possible, and hence the high fidelity approach.  

The scenario when you absolutely should not use this approach is when the design is in flux.  As I’ve stated before, wireframes should never dictate design (nor vice versa). It’s also not the right approach when you’re breaking out of existing capabilities of the user interface, because that’s basically creating new design. This is an important realization if you’ve been in evolution mode for a long time – try to spot early on that you’re not re-using existing features and switch to a concepting and design mode instead.  The high fidelity wireframe is 100% evolution not revolution, and trying to apply it when you need to innovate will end in poor results.

It seems like a fair time to revisit my previous post about the Xbox 360 digital facelift.

I started off by lamenting the work-in-progress nature of console interfaces these days.  Well generally the new Apple-style interface does seem an improvement over the very confusing ‘blades’ system, and the upgrade process was pleasantly fast and effortless.  Could they have fixed their previous interface without totally redesigning it?  I would say yes, but this isn’t so much about redesign…  

It’s immediately evident that the real objective for Microsoft is about introducing their avatars and opening up their marketing/sales opportunities for downloadable content. Most notably, while there are some usability improvements here, the amount of ads and sales channels are borderline irritating and introduce needless steps between turning on the console and playing a game.

Referring again to my previous post, I was concerned that Cover Flow wouldn’t work for the complexity of the menu options. I think I was half right there.  In addition to left-right navigation of the current menu, which is very pleasant and fits very well, they’ve added an up-down channel selection carousel which is rather less successful.  It’s definitely visually pleasing but I often find myself lost.

Comparing the avatars to the Miis on the Nintendo Wii, I’d say they made some mistakes:

Flexibility – Wii avatars allow for detailed customization (eg, choose exactly how far apart your eyebrows are) whereas the Xbox avatars are quite limited in their flexibility (I doubt we’ll see caricatures of famous people on Xbox)

Optional – Wii avatars are an option in many games and are found under a sub-section of the main menu, whereas Xbox avatars are forced upon you and shown front-and-centre whenever you start the console

Style – Although the Wii avatars have a cartoony cuteness about them, their high level of  simplification allows for a wide range of character styles to be made, whereas the Xbox avatars are firmly set in a cute, family-friendly style

Ulterior motive – there’s no doubt that the Xbox avatars are part of a plan to introduce monetized content (ie, pay for clothing upgrades)

Overall, I’ve no doubt that the target audience they are now aiming at will lap this up. The monetization and downloadable content features are also very impressive, if a little too geared towards Microsoft’s interests than the customer’s enjoyment.  One of the biggest factors in brand affinity is simply the question ‘is it me?’ and while they’ve given a new consumer segment good reasons to say Yes, I suspect there’s a large number of people from the established base who are a little doubtful in their answer now.

PS – I’ll save the usability horrors of the PS3 interface for another day – just so you know I’m not only about Microsoft-bashing