Giving feedback to creatives

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.

 

Filed under: creative delivery, method , constructive, creatives, criticism, design, feedback, IDEO, positive, respect, skills

Google’s choice of utility over beauty

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.

Filed under: creative delivery, method, style, user interface, user-centred , apple, beauty, compromise, delight, design, google, method, soul, utilitarian, utility

When to Use High Fidelity Wireframes

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.

Filed under: creative delivery, information architecture, method, user interface , concepting, design, evolution, high fidelity, indesign, information architecture, lego, method, omnigraffle, revolution, visio, wireframes

Customer Experience is Customer Perception

When you are designing a customer experience you not only have to look at what customers want but most critically, what they *perceive* you are giving them.  The customer experience mantra that you need to create ‘user-centric’ design has much more subtlety than many people realise.  The value of a customer experience is primarily determined by psychological perception.  

The importance of stressing this issue of perception is that people have great trouble putting their perceptions into words, not to mention identifying their full range of perceptual experience and how it impacts the value they ascribe to your product.  Perceptions also cover every aspect of a person’s experience at a given time, beyond the particular activity you are considering.

The most skillful user experience practitioners I have come across were often separated by their finely tuned ability to uncover and analyse perceptions.  Next time you are running user research, positioning a brand, mood-boarding a design, solutioning using personas etc. etc. be sure to examine and reflect on the perception filter that customers will bring into the equation.  

To give fair dues – this note was inspired by Bruce Temkin’s excellent customer experience blog: http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/

Filed under: creative delivery, method, user-centred , bruce temkin, customer experience, design, mood boards, perception, personas, user-centred

Making sense of 3D Flash interfaces

You must have seen the 3D web and software design trend, starting with Apple’s 3D-esque interface designs of recent years, and lately boosted by the impressive PaperVision 3D for Flash.  They make for beautiful, layered experiences and the sense of depth is intuitively pleasing. However, it doesn’t take much to turn a trend like this into a for-the-sake-of-it gimmick. 

The key to using 3D well is to think about the psychological value of 3D to a user, and not just turning things into 3D willy nilly.  People have portions of their brains that are dedicated to processing 3D visual scenes, and tapping into that is a powerful way to communicate things that have been tricky with 2D design:

Movement patterns provide a major cue in 3D – when objects move in unison (eg, rotating in a circle) there’s evidently a relationship between them.  The path in space taken by the objects give up clues to whether there’s a finite set and how fast you are moving through them. Apple’s ‘coverflow’  carousel is a prominent example of using movement in space but the approach could be applied in many different ways.  

Sense of place is communicated on multiple levels – 2D experience design relies on esoteric navigation constructs such as tabs and breadcrumbs to show people where they are in the overall structure of content.  Although many are now common across hundreds of websites, they take some learning and are often unintuitive.  In contrast, when you’re looking at a 3D scene with objects located in relative space the structure is immediately evident and familiar.  

Proximity = relevance – when you have many spatial constructs, the ones in close proximity are the ones that you assume are relevant to the matter at hand.  In a 2D space, this type of approach becomes a difficult task of managing clutter. Using size, location and perspective in 3D space is powerful for showing relevance, not just because of the extra dimensions but also because our brains are designed to process things that way.

Real world rules apply – unlike unique constructs built for UIs, the rules of 3D are the rules of the real world, so it’s easy to know whether you are breaking the rules based on what would make sense in the world: Objects shouldn’t appear out of nowhere, things should move predictably and with a sense of weight/mass, and so on.

Bonus: Lessons from 3D games have been learnt over years of experimentation and evolution that can now be leveraged in UI design. Video games have been building complex 3D interactive experiences for years and UI designers can actually claim some reference value from those hours of playing!

Filed under: 3D, creative delivery, information architecture, revolutions, style, trends, user interface, user-centred , 3D, design, flash, papervision3d, psychology