Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Getting design strategy right

Companies such as Google and Apple use a design process of storytelling and iteration that creates deep engagement with the consumer, says a new book

Jon Kolko

December 15, 2014 Last Updated at 00:14 IST

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WELL-DESIGNED: HOW TO USE EMPATHY TO CREATE PRODUCTS PEOPLE LOVE
Authors: Jon Kolko
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Price: Rs 1,250
ISBN: 9781625274793

A design strategy should, like any other strategy, be formalized in an artifact. Put another way, if you don't write it down, there's little chance that anyone will remember it, believe in it, or act on it. And because a strategy is about a future state, it's useful to include means with ends - to show both the road map that will be used to achieve the strategic results as well as the intended strategic goal.

PowerPoint is the go-to medium for the development of most strategy documents, but strategy documents are too important to be relegated to such a conventional, boring medium. For maximum effect, use a really big, floor-to-ceiling timeline of value-based activities. When you print things really big, they come to life. People can't help but notice them. If you hang a thirty-by-fifteen road map in the lobby of your building, you can bet that people will notice it and talk about it. They'll absorb the totality of the road map, realizing that strategy is long term and requires patience. There's a sense of practicality to a strategy when it's accompanied by a timeline of actions. It shows both vision and realism at once.

A design strategy takes three artifacts - an emotional value proposition, a concept map, and a product road map - and combines them into a single tool. Keep in mind that a design strategy is more than just a tool or document, because it can act as a powerful reminder of purpose. A good strategy becomes ingrained within the DNA of the company and becomes second nature to the people who need to execute it.

Identifying emotional value proposition
The first part of the design strategy is the emotional value proposition. A value proposition is a promise to produce value for a customer. The promise is communicated to customers comprehensively; it's both explicit in the value line (and communicated through marketing) and also implicit in the design decisions that define and shape the product (and communicated through product use).

To understand your value proposition, ask - and answer - this value question: what can someone do after using or acquiring your product that she couldn't do before using or acquiring your product?

Value is often described in an economic sense as a form of wealth that's created, such as money, or another scarce resource, time. It's tempting, then, to answer the value question from a standpoint of utility, describing the practical things your product helps someone do. For example, if you were just starting a search engine to compete with Google, you might describe how your product "helps people find information." That makes sense; it's even part of Google's mission statement, "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Its little publicised value line, Search, Ads, and Apps, echoes this.

Google's value statement is about getting things done and increasing efficiency. It is clear, straightforward, and can easily be tracked and measured. You can use a statement of value as vetting criteria for new features and functions, or even for the organization of the company. When someone has a great idea for a new product, you could ask, "How will this new idea support our value line of search, ads, and apps? How will it help people find information? How will it help organize the world's information?"

But these comments of utilitarian value are only a part of the story. A customer will buy or use a specific product not just because of what it does, but also because of how it makes him feel. To begin to understand the emotional connection between a product and a person, think about feelings, aspirations, desires, and dreams. Ask this revised question: what can someone feel after using or acquiring your product that he couldn'tfeel before using or acquiring your product?

Developing a product stance
The second piece of your design strategy comes from determining the product stance. This highly subjective quality common in digital products floats between brand and utility. Product stance is the attitude your product takes, its personality. Stance is manufactured and designed, and from a particular product stance flow features, functions, language, imagery, and other formal design qualities. Stance is similar to, but different from, market fit, usability, or usefulness. Stance can be applied purposefully or haphazardly. It can evolve from an existing brand language, or it can be created from scratch. Product stance can evolve from an understanding of users, from an understanding of market, or from the attitude and approach of an individual designer. Product stance is about feelings. But feelings are hard to formalise. Conversations about feelings in analytical environments are hard to find.

The design approach to product management focuses on people rather than business or technology: Jon Kolko

The design approach starts with the question, “What will our product help people feel that they couldn’t feel before buying or using it?” Jon Kolko tells Ankita Rai

You run against the conventional wisdom by saying that most people don’t buy products because they are superior or have more functions. They do so in order to connect with it on an emotional level. How can the design process be used to forge connection with consumers?
Many product development processes recognise the need for user research in order to direct and inform product direction. But these research methodologies typically focus on what people say, rather than what they do. A survey, focus group, or customer interview, is removed from actual engagement. As a consequence, the findings are thin, and often inaccurate. More importantly, they don’t give the product team a view into human aspirations. A design approach to product management focuses on these human qualities rather than defining functional criteria. It is about answering the question, “what will our product help people feel that they couldn’t feel before buying or using it?” To get to an answer to this question requires two steps.

First, the product team needs to observe real behaviour in order to build an empathetic, rather than an analytical, connection with the people who will use or benefit from a product. This means watching people work, live, and play; immersing yourself in the environment in which these things happen; trying the activity in an apprentice format; and forming a personal connection with the people you are serving. For example, in designing a new travel product, rather than asking people to “describe how you typically travel”, watch people actually travel. This takes more time, but yields more depth. You don’t need a lot of data points to form an empathetic connection with travellers; watch around 10 people travel rather than a statistically large population.

Next, translate this data into statements of truth about people. Form concrete statements that describe human behaviour at an emotional level. For example, you might see a business traveller working her frequent flier miles, and another identifying quiet places in an airport to recharge her laptop. After synthesising this data, you could arrive at an insight like “business travellers appreciate the game of travelling, and benefit from subtle ways to ‘win’ during their experience.” This isn’t a functional requirement — it is an emotional directive.

What are the key pillars of a design strategy? How is it different from designing digital products versus physical products?
The design approach to product management builds upon immersive research in order to develop a provocative point of view about emotion. This process works in developing physical products, digital products, services, and even policies or governance models. It focuses on people, rather than business or technology. It is grounded in empathy.

Jon Kolko
Vice-president, consumer design, BlackBoard inc

http://www.business-standard.com/article/management/book-extract-getting-design-strategy-right-114121400513_1.html

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Creative Art of Selling a Book by Its Cover

Peter Mendelsund, Book Designer, Debuts as a Writer

By ALEXANDRA ALTERJULY 28, 2014

Peter Mendelsund has designed about 600 book covers, but he was initially stumped when it came to his own book.CreditJoshua Bright for The New York Times

Peter Mendelsund often says that “dead authors get the best book jackets.”

Mr. Mendelsund, who has designed striking covers for departed literary giants like Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Joyce, dreads working with picky writers who demand a particular font, color, image or visual theme. “It ends up looking like hell,” he said.

Then last year, Mr. Mendelsund, the associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf, became his own worst nightmare. He started writing a book himself. Coming up with a cover for his book, “What We See When We Read,” a playful, illustrated treatise on how words give rise to mental images, was excruciating, he said. As the author, he felt as if no single image could sum up the book’s premise. As the jacket designer, he had to put something on the front, or resign in disgrace. His first attempt was stark and off-putting: a plain black cover with small white text. “It was like stage fright,” he said. “I just seized up.”

Stage fright isn’t a chronic affliction for Mr. Mendelsund, a 46-year-old “recovering classical pianist” who taught himself graphic design. More often, he suffers from a surfeit of ideas. In the past decade, Mr. Mendelsund has designed about 600 book jackets, ranging from a sober, sophisticated cover for Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” to his whimsical Pop Art-like treatment of Kafka’s novella “Metamorphosis,” to the hypnotic fluorescent swirls on Stieg Larsson’s thriller “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

Mr. Mendelsund has long been regarded as one of the top book designers at work today, taking his place alongside design luminaries like Chip Kidd, Alvin Lustig and George Salter. Now, he’s making his debut as a writer, with two books coming out next week. Both explore the peculiar challenges of transforming words into images, and blend illustrations with philosophy, literary criticism and design theory.

In “What We See When We Read,” which is being published by Vintage Books next Tuesday, Mr. Mendelsund tackles the mysterious way text yields vivid mental pictures, even when the author supplies very little visual detail. Most readers, for instance, feel as if they can perfectly describe Anna Karenina, even though Tolstoy gives us little more than gray eyes, thick lashes and curly brown hair. In short, illustrated chapters, Mr. Mendelsund argues that reading is an act of co-creation, and that our impressions of characters and places owe as much to our own memory and experience as to the descriptive powers of authors.

On the same day, PowerHouse Books is releasing “Cover,” a 267-page coffee-table book with more than 300 of Mr. Mendelsund’s most arresting book jackets, and dozens of rejected drafts. The images are interspersed with notes on his process, along with essays by authors of some of the featured books, including the best-selling Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo and James Gleick, author of the nonfiction books “Chaos” and “The Information.”

“Most designers look for a central image to sum up a book, but Peter isn’t looking for an image, he’s looking for an idea,” Mr. Gleick said in an interview. For the hardcover edition of “The Information,” Mr. Mendelsund repeated the title about 60 times, so that it looks like a flood of code.

For much of his life, Mr. Mendelsund felt “visually illiterate,” he said. He grew up in Cambridge, Mass., the son of an architect and a high school history teacher. He started playing the piano at the age of 4. After studying philosophy and literature at Columbia University, he spent two years at a music conservatory and tried to make a living as a professional pianist. But he struggled on a classical musician’s salary, and, after several years, he found himself married with an infant daughter and no health insurance.

He decided to try graphic design, though he had no formal training. He read design books and picked up a few freelance projects, sometimes working free. A year later, he was hired as a designer at Vintage and Anchor Books.

"Sea horse" evokes different images but similar characteristics, Mr. Mendelsund explains in his new book.

John Gall, the former art director at Vintage and Anchor, said he saw Mr. Mendelsund’s artistic potential right away, but was even more impressed by his knack for literary criticism. “He combines very strong, very smart conceptual thinking with beautiful, risk-taking execution,” said Mr. Gall, who is now the creative director of Abrams Books.

To come up with a cover, Mr. Mendelsund begins by scribbling notes on a manuscript and underlining key thematic sentences. He hangs the marked-up pages above his computer. Then he begins cataloging his ideas on a piece of paper covered with 16 rectangles, filling each one with a word, phrase or tiny sketch. He picks the most promising concept and creates a draft on the computer.

Once he has a rough design in place, he will often switch to illustrating by hand, drawing with an ink brush, layering on paper collage or filling in blocky shapes with gouache, a dense watercolor. Finally, he prints out a mock cover, wraps it around a hardcover and leaves it on his bookshelf for a few days. If his eye is spontaneously drawn to it a day or two later, he considers his direction on the right track. If the cover disappears into the background, he knows something is missing.

He often repeats this process dozens of times. For a new edition of Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel, “Hopscotch,” he created 60 covers before choosing one with a pattern of blue footprints imposed on white squares. “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was even tougher, taking nearly 70 attempts. Theresulting cover became ubiquitous as the novel went on to sell about 10 million copies.

Sonny Mehta, the chairman and editor in chief of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, said the surprisingly cheerful cover probably helped make the novel a blockbuster. “I didn’t want a gloomy Nordic landscape,” he said. “It was unconventional, and it worked.”

Hannah Depp, a floor manager at Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, said she has seen customers respond to Mr. Mendelsund’s designs, particularly for classic titles that are available in multiple editions. His cover of “Ulysses,” a lush green with “Yes” scrawled in black marker within the title, echoing the last word of the book, outsells other editions, as does his minimalist black-and-white cover for “Crime and Punishment,” she said.

Of the hundreds of covers Mr. Mendelsund has designed, none has been quite as taxing as the one for his “What We See When We Read.” (He also created the design for “Cover,” but said that one, a photo of a red book against a white background, was easy.) The subject seemed to defy illustration, because Mr. Mendelsund’s central thesis is that readers often invent images that the text does not support. “The whole point is not to show something,” he said.

Finally, he found a solution. “It’s still very minimalist, but it’s a way to show the feeling of not being able to see something,” he said. He added a small, reflective gold keyhole to the plain black cover. The keyhole’s metallic finish catches the light, drawing the eye to it like a candle in a dark room.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/books/peter-mendelsund-book-designer-debuts-as-a-writer.html?emc=edit_th_20140729&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=61733211&_r=0

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Apple’s Design Process and Product Philosophy - Jonathan Ive

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/jonathan-ive-on-apples-design-process-and-product-philosophy/?_php=true&_type=blogs&hpw&rref=technology&_r=0

By BRIAN X. CHEN and MATT RICHTEL

JUNE 16, 2014 4:05 PM

Fred Lee/ABCJonathan Ive, center, Apple’s design chief, on the set of “Good Morning America” last year with Bono, left, of the music group U2.

When Steven P. Jobs led Apple, he created a core principle for the company’s designers and engineers: stay fully focused on making great products.

That philosophy continues to guide Apple, even under its new chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, says Jonathan Ive, the company’s head of design. Mr. Ive, who rarely speaks publicly, said in an recent interview for an article about Apple under Mr. Cook that the company’s design processes remained unchanged, vibrant and healthy. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

What does innovation culture look like at Apple under Tim Cook? How has it changed, if at all?

Innovation at Apple has always been a team game. It has always been a case where you have a number of small groups working together. The industrial design team is a very small team. We’ve worked together, most for 15 or 20 years.

That’s a fairly typical story here: Creative teams are small and very focused. One of the underlying characteristics is being inquisitive and being curious. Some of those personal attributes and hallmarks haven’t changed at all.

Often when I talk about what I do, making isn’t just this inevitable function tacked on at the end. The way we make our products is certainly equally as demanding and requires so much definition. I design and make. I can’t separate those two.

This is part of Steve’s legacy. Deep in the culture of Apple is this sense and understanding of design, developing and making. Form and the material and process – they are beautifully intertwined – completely connected. Unless we understand a certain material — metal or resin and plastic — understanding the processes that turn it from ore, for example – we can never develop and define form that’s appropriate.

Steve established a set of values, and he established preoccupations and tones that are completely enduring – and he established those principles with a small team of people. I’ve been ridiculously lucky to be part of it. But Tim was very much part of that team – for that last 15 or 20 years.

I remember clearly a time when we made plastic portable computers, and Steve and Tim and I sat down and said we wanted to build an incredibly thin and light portable computer. There was a whole range of challenges from an engineering point of view: How it worked in a new material, titanium. That meant we had to completely redesign and discover new partners to work with, hire a whole new organization.

I’ve worked for the last 15 or 20 years on the most challenging, creative parts of what we do. I would love to talk about future stuff – they’re materials we haven’t worked in before. I’ve been working on this stuff for a few years now. Tim is fundamentally involved in pushing into these new areas and into these materials.

Over years you develop a process – we, a team, develop a process – that process is incredibly vibrant and healthy and continues to grow and evolve.

You recently assumed leadership of software interface design. Has this altered the company’s design process?

I provide some leadership and direction in terms of user interface – a subset of software. Just as I work, I’m working in the same way with the user interface team. Just geographically, we’ve always been close. The core creative community is very small but is also very close – there’s been changes there, but the change isn’t perhaps as dramatic as you might assume.

One of the values of things I learned absolutely directly from Steve was the whole issue of focus. What are we focusing on: focus on product. I wish I could do a better job in communicating this truth here, which is when you really are focused on the product, that’s not a platitude. When that truly is your reason for coming into the studio, is just to try to make the very best product you can, when that is exclusive of everything else, it’s remarkable how insignificant or unimportant a lot of other stuff becomes. Titles or organizational structures, that’s not the lens through which we see our peers.

What is it like working with Mr. Cook? Can you give us any examples or anecdotes that demonstrate his leadership?

We meet on average three times a week. Sometimes those meetings are over in his space, sometimes here in the design studio. We all see the same physical object. Something happens between what we objectively see and what we perceive it to be. That’s the definition of a designer – trying to somehow articulate what contributes to the way we see the object.

Heading on for two decades working with Tim, one of the things I have always admired is the quiet consideration he gives to trying to understand how he perceives something. He will take the time. I think that testifies to the fact that he knows it’s important.

Is it hard to be patient with yourselves while investors and fans alike are clamoring for the next iThing?

It is hard for us all to be patient. It was hard for Steve. It is hard for Tim. At any point in time, working on something, it’s always hard to just keep focusing on the product. One of the things different between us and some of our competitors is we just focus on the product, developing good products.

Honestly, I don’t think anything’s changed. People felt exactly the same way when we were working on iPhone. The iPhone was broadly dismissed. The iPod was broadly dismissed. The iPad was probably more copiously written off as a large iPod.

My focus is incredibly narrow. I can’t talk with any authority other than design and development of product. When I look back over the last 20 years, you have this sense that, you’re working on something that’s incredibly hard, when you’re working on it, you don’t know whether it’s going to work out or not.

The benefit of hindsight is we only really talk about those things that did work out. You have this sense that you’re working on something incredibly hard. When working on projects, you have this determination. You just keep going. If doing anything new, you’re very used to having insurmountable obstacles. At some point you have to make a call — at some point you have to say, “We’ve stretched this and we’ve come up against laws of physics, which we cannot change.”

When that’s your day to day, you’re so consumed by the products and the problems and the challenges, that it’s actually quite easy to be impatient.