Rosenfeld Media - Mental Models: Try the “Lightening Quick” Mental Model Method

When I was making a lot of mental models in the get-it-to-market-yesterday dot com boom of the late 1990's, I used a technique that resulted in a mental model plus gap analysis brainstorm in the course of one day. Now that it's the not-in-this-economy post economic slump, I think it's time to put this technique to use again. Today, in fact, I got together with a group of nine talented design agency folks and we spent 2.75 hours putting together a set of towers based on 24 individual stories, and then spent rest of the day brainstorming ideas to support those towers. Here's how we did it.

Solicit Some Stories Ahead of Time

A week in advance, solicit stories from people. If your proposed audience segments happen to be online, ask for stories via email, tweets, Facebook, etc. If these folks aren't online, then ask as many people as you can to solicit stories from friends & family in their daily life and write you a summary, using that person's voice. (Use the personal pronoun "I" when recapping the stories.) When you ask for a story, be very explicit about what you want to hear, and give examples. As the stories come in, sort them roughly into piles of similarity.

Read & Write Labels

On the day of the workshop, gather everyone together either in a room with lots of sticky notes, or online with a shared Google spreadsheet. Assign one person to read and comb out verb+noun labels, and two or three people to scribble these labels down, either on sticky notes or in the Google spreadsheet. Assign the rest of the folks (at least one) to organize the labels as they are created. So, yeah, that's four people minimum for this exercise. You probably want to cut off the number of people participating at 10 or so.

The person who reads and combs needs to have some experience combing and labeling, needs to know the rules that make it easy, and needs to know what to skip and when to toss out stories completely because they are not detailed enough. (I tossed three out of 24 stories on the floor, with a memorable flourish.) The reader has the option to read the stories out loud or to herself. Reading the stories out loud is more of a learning opportunity for the whole team, but takes a lot of time. Reading them to herself saves time, but makes the day less interesting to the other folks in the room. No matter which option she picks, the reader will announce verb+noun labels out loud, indicating which of the folks scribbling is supposed to write it down. With multiple folks scribbling, the reader can call out labels in quick succession, without having to wait for each of them to be completely written down. In today's session we managed to produce about 100 labels in 2 hours.

As each label is generated, another person (or set of people) accepts each label and puts it with other "like" labels, grouping by affinity of behavior. Encourage these folks to group into small groups of 5 or so labels. That's not a hard-and-fast rule--some of our groups had 10 and 20 labels, but most groups had 5 or 6 labels.

Re-Organize the Set & Make Headers

Once all the stories are read and the labels are written and in rough groups, as a final pass go through these groups and make adjustments. The team I worked with today had a really good grasp of grouping, yet we still spent 40 minutes re-jiggering things and putting the stray emotional label with the behavior that engendered it. As we adjusted things, we made up headings (again using verb+nouns) for each tower of things. We were careful not to make up a heading based on just one label. Instead, we made a solid tower of labels, stared at it for a second, and then made up a heading for it.

Brainstorm by Tower

As the final step of the day--the one that should take at least half the alloted time, visit each tower and brainstorm ideas for it. Write these ideas up with little notes and align them underneath the tower you are studying. We used red font on sticky notes to easily distinguish an idea from the original set of labels. Start with a tower that seems interesting. Keep brainstorming and building on ideas for that tower until you hit a lull, then move your focus to another tower. You don't have to go in any order. To keep the creative juices flowing, it's better to follow the path of interest. Maybe you will find towers that just aren't exciting, and that's okay. Skip them for now. Come back to them next quarter, because I guarantee your team will come up with enough other ideas to keep you busy for a while.

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This lightening quick approach gets your team going in a day. You still get to work with real outside stories from real people. You move to brainstorming and gap analysis quickly, giving folks in upper management (for whom the word "research" induces queasiness) a sense of confidence and progress. And, if you don't feel experienced enough to do the combing on the fly or the grouping and adjustment of the labels, I'm happy to get you going with a bit of personal assistance.

Panic Blog » The Panic Status Board

This is probably the busiest year in Panic’s history.

This is good. But a lot of things happening mean a high chance that I, the man who lives and breathes Panic and has a giant status board in my head, might not properly explain everything to everyone. Steve and I realized it was high time we made this Cabel Status Board public… using technology!

So, with partialinspiration, Neven, Steve and I builtthe Panic Status Board. Take a secret, sneek peek:

(image)

What’s on the board?

The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:

• E-Mail Queue — number of messages / number of days.
• Project Status — sorry for the heavy censorship — you know how it is!
• Important Countdowns
• Revenue — comparing yesterday to the day before, not so insightful (yet).
• Live Tri-Met Bus Arrivals — when it’s time to go home!
• The Panic Calendar
• Employee Twitter Messages
• Any @Panic Twitter Messages — i.e., be nice! They go on our screen!

Instant Pay-Off

Les, one of our support guys, said it best after a week: “That board is like magic.” Our support turnaround time is faster than it’s ever been. Just the simple act of “publicizing” those numbers — not in a cruel way, but a “where are we at as a group?” way — has kept the support process on-task and, I think, made it a bit more like a video game. (It helps that when all the boxes are at “zero”, a virtual bottle of champagne appears on-screen, and a physical one is likely removed from the fridge.)

We can’t wait to add more data in the future. Open bugs?

Implementation Notes

For the truly curious. Display: I picked the Samsung 460UXN-2 professional display for the thin bezel and lack of branding, airport-style. To my surprise, it had a built-in Windows XP Embedded computer (boo), which meant we didn’t have to waste a machine to drive the display (yay). We loaded Chrome on it, since it has a nice full-screen view — sadly, that meant we had to lose Safari’s beautiful text anti-aliasing.Display Mount: Hard to find a vertical mount! Wound up with the Premier Mounts RFM, and like it.Support Queue: I’m weird, and PHP IMAP libraries felt too heavy for just getting message counts, so I decided to do raw IMAP protocol calls over a socket.Bus Arrivals: this is using the fantasticTri-Met real-time REST API.Calendar: Steve used the PHP iCalendar library to parse our group Mac OS X Server calendar.Twitter: feeds use Twitter’s simple (little-known?) blogger JSON service. HTML/CSS: Neven says, “This baby is all WebKit candy. The only images here are the icons. The rounded corners, the gradients, the animation – all CSS. Learn -webkit-transform and love it! Oh, I tried using Google Chart for the support graph, but it wasn’t flexible enough. Our little graph is infinitely scalable and stretchable.”

From start to finish, this was about a three-week project.

And no, it didn’t slow down development on [insert the app you want the most here]. Check the board!

Rapid Desirability Testing: A Case Study

By Michael Hawley

Published: February 22, 2010

In the design process we follow at my company, Mad*Pow Media Solutions, once we have defined the conceptual direction and content strategy for a given design and refined our design approach through user research and iterative usability testing, we start applying visual design. Generally, we take a key screen whose structure and functionality we have finalized—for example, a layout for a home page or a dashboard page—and explore three alternatives for visual style. These three alternative visual designs, or comps, include the same content, but reflect different choices for color palette and imagery.

The idea is to present business owners and stakeholders with different visual design options from which they can choose. Sometimes there is a clear favorite among stakeholders or an option that makes the most sense from a brand perspective. However, there can often be disagreements among the members of a project team on which design direction we should choose. If we’ve done our job right, there are rationales for our various design decisions in the different comps, but even so, there may be disagreement about which rationale is most appropriate for the situation.

As practitioners of user-centered design, it is natural for us to turn to user research to help inform and guide the process of choosing a visual design. But traditional usability testing and related methods don’t seem particularly well suited for assessing visual design for two reasons:

1. When we reach out to users for feedback on visual design options, stakeholders are generally looking for large sample sizes—larger than are typical for a qualitative usability study.
2. The response we are looking for from users is more emotional—that is, less about users’ ability to accomplish tasks and more about their affective response to a given design.

With this in mind, I was very intrigued by recent posts about desirability testing from Christian Rohrer on his xdStrategy.com(image) blog. In one entry, Christian posits desirability testing as a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods that allow you to assess users’ attitudes toward aesthetics and visual appeal. Inspired by his overview of this method, we researched desirability studies a bit further and tried a modified version of the method on one of our projects. This article reviews the variants of desirability testing that we considered and the lessons we learned from conducting a desirability study to assess the visual design options for one of our projects.

Why Is Desirability Important?

From a usability perspective, an important role of visual design is to lead users through the hierarchy of a design as we intend. Use of value contrast and color and the size and placement of elements can serve to support a product’s underlying information architecture and interaction design. During the early stages of the design process, we focus on these functional aspects of a design and conduct research to ensure that the overall solution offers a compelling value proposition to users. We also aim to optimize usability and make it easy for users to realize the solution’s benefits and, ultimately, achieve their goals.

A product’s having valuable features and an intuitive information architecture and interaction design certainly contributes to its overall desirability. However, there is a difference between functional desirability and the emotional desirability that stems from aesthetics, look, and feel. Visual elements can support a solution’s interaction design, but they can also elicit an emotional response from users. Understanding and exploiting these emotional responses can help designers to influence users appropriately.

Interestingly, Lindegaard and his associates found that a design can have an emotional impact very quickly. In their research report “Attention Web Designers: You Have 50 Milliseconds to Make a Good First Impression!” (image) (image) they outline a series of experiments they conducted to assess how quickly people form an opinion about the visual appeal of a design. As you can probably guess from the title of their report, they found that a design elicits an emotional response very rapidly—in about the time it takes to read a single word.

This is important because the halo effect of that emotional response causes users’ first impressions of a design to impact a product’s or application’s perceived utility, usability, and credibility. Users generally form their first impressions less by interacting with certain functions and more through their initial emotional response to a product’s visual aesthetics and imagery. Researchers classify the effects as positive or negative. For example, if a user has a positive first impression of the design aesthetics, they are more likely to overlook or forgive poor usability or limited functionality. With a negative first impression, users are more likely to find fault with an interaction, even if a product’s overall usability is good and the product offers real value.

This has special implications for a number of domains. For example, in an ecommerce environment, a site’s perceived level of trustworthiness can affect buying decisions or people’s willingness to interact with the site. For interactive applications, a sense of organization can affect perceived usability and, ultimately, users’ overall satisfaction with the product.

So Why Not Just Ask People Which Design They Like Better?

As I noted earlier, within my company’s design process, we try to iteratively improve our conceptual approaches and interaction designs through user feedback and usability testing. Often, during this testing, we use a think-aloud protocol and ask participants to explain which option they prefer for an interaction and why. With visual design comps, it is tempting to simply show participants the design options at the end of a usability test session and ask them which they like better. This sounds straightforward enough and, generally, we’ve found that this is what business stakeholders think of when we talk about getting user feedback on visual designs.

The problem with this simplistic approach is that people’s rationales for the overwhelming variety of their tastes may or may not be related to the business or brand goals for a design. For example, when I’ve asked this question before, I’ve heard participants say they like a certain design because it’s “their favorite color” or “I like things that are green.” Their statements may be truthful, but those types of responses don’t help researchers assess the emotional impact of a design or how it aligns with the intended brand attributes. In addition, some participants have a difficult time articulating what it is about a design they like or dislike. During an interview, participants may be able to select a preferred design, but without a structured mechanism for providing feedback, they may be at a loss for words when it comes to describing why they like or dislike it.

We’ve also found that, when asking for design preferences during a qualitative study like a usability test, the small sample sizes do not align with stakeholder expectations for validation of a given design. Especially for public-facing Web sites and applications, their visual design is one of the most significant depictions of the company’s brand, and business sponsors and stakeholders often want substantial customer feedback to assure them a given direction is correct.

Some Potential Research Methods

Besides simply asking for users’ preferences for particular designs, we explored several other structured research methods that could help inform design selection, including the following:

• triading
• experience questionnaires
• quick-exposure memory tests
• measurement of physiological indicators

Triading

The triading method I described in one of my columns on UXmatters offers potential in this regard, because it is structured around the comparison of several options. The idea with triading is to elicit attributes that research participants and target users would use to compare given alternatives, in a way that is not biased by the researcher. Given three design options, a researcher could ask participants to identify two that are different from the third and describe why they are different. This process helps the researcher to understand what dimensions are important to target users in comparing different designs. We’ve found this method to be very helpful both when evaluating the competitive landscape and for assessing different conceptual options from an interaction design perspective. However, this method is difficult when conducting studies with large sample sizes, and it can be difficult to present the tabulation of results to stakeholders who are looking for research to help them choose the best design option.

Experience Questionnaires

Another possible approach to assessing design options is a comprehensive experience questionnaire. Questionnaires such as SUS (System Usability Scale), QUIS (Questionnaire for User Interface Satisfaction), and WAMMI (Website Analysis and MeasureMent Inventory) are broad, experience-based questionnaires, but do include questions relating to visual appeal and aesthetics. In a 2004 report to the Usability Professionals’ Association, “A Comparison of Questionnaires for Assessing Website Usability,” (image) (image) Tom Tullis and Jacqueline Stetson wrote about a study that compared the effectiveness of these questionnaires. They found that, to varying degrees, all of these questionnaires were effective in reliably assessing differences between Web sites.

For comparing visual design options, questionnaires’ ability to identify perceived differences between design alternatives is intriguing. These questionnaires are also attractive, because they are relatively straightforward and easy to administer on a large scale. But many of the questionnaires also include a significant number of questions about interactivity and require participants to have had a certain level of interaction with a site or application. For a quick comparison of static visual design comps, we felt these questions would not be appropriate. In addition, we were not just looking for a winner among the designs, we wanted to understand what emotional responses each alternative elicited, so we could make better design decisions going forward. The output of these questionnaires did not lend itself to that purpose.

Quick-Exposure Memory Tests

A third approach we looked at was a quick-exposure memory test. In this method, researchers show participants a user interface for a very brief moment, then take it away. Then, they ask participants to recall what they remember about the user interface from that brief exposure. Participants have limited interaction with the site or application, so theoretically, they’re providing you a glimpse into their first impression—what sticks in their memory. During usability test sessions, we’ve tried this method to elicit conversation about home pages and other starting pages, and it is helpful in assessing layout considerations and information design.

There is a service available online called fivesecondtest(image) that lets you solicit responses from visitors and get a decent sample size—that is, 50 participants—in a relatively short period of time. We chose not to use this service as our primary method for visual design comparison studies, because we felt it focused too much on people’s memory of particular items rather than emotional impact, but for a small amount of money and effort, it may be helpful in certain situations.

Measurement of Physiological Indicators

Finally, in researching potential methods for desirability testing, we reviewed the growing body of knowledge about the physiological indicators researchers can measure to assess emotional response. In the article “A Multi-method Approach to the Assessment of Web Page Designs,”(image) Westerman and his co-authors summarize the available approaches:

• Electroencephalography (EEG) measures activity in parts of the brain that you can map to certain emotional responses.
• Electromyography (EMG) measures muscle activity that correlates to excitement levels.
• Electrodermal Activity (EDA) measures the activity of sweat glands, which is said to correlate to arousal and excitement.
• Blood Volume Pressure (BVP) measures dilation in the blood vessels, which, in turn, correlates with arousal.
• Pupil dilation appears to correlate to both arousal and mental workload.
• Respiration measurements can indicate negative valence or arousal.

Similar to eyetracking, during these studies, various sensors track these physiological measurements as researchers show participants particular designs. Changes in one or more indicators suggest a particular emotional response. Researchers often pair these measurements with attitudinal and self-reporting surveys to give a multifaceted view of participants’ emotional reactions to a design. The potential of these physiological methods of quantitatively assessing emotional response is great. However, because of the time and budget constraints on many of our projects, we were looking for an approach we could use outside a lab or even over the Internet, so we could get large samples of responses.

Our Preferred Method for Assessing the Desirability of Visual Designs

Of all the methods we’ve considered, the one that seemed to align best with our goals was the approach Joey Benedek and Trish Miner of Microsoft described in their paper “Measuring Desirability: New Methods for Evaluating Desirability in a Usability Lab Setting.”(image) Working collaboratively with a multidisciplinary team, Benedek and Miner developed a set of adjectives research participants could use to describe their reactions to a user interface. They put all of these adjectives, shown in Figure 1, on product reaction cards with which participants could interact. But the important part is that they developed a list of terms that were potential descriptors of the user interface and were also potentially salient for their research. These adjectives represented a mix of descriptions that people might consider positive or negative. They showed participants a user interface, then asked them to select the three to five of these adjectives they thought best described it.

Figure 1—Microsoft product reaction cards

By analyzing the resulting data across participants, researchers can align certain adjectives with each visual design option and assess how each option aligns with a business’s intended emotional response and brand attributes. Researchers can use this method in either a one-on-one setting or a survey. The advantage of the one-on-one approach is that the researcher can probe participants’ rationales for why they chose certain adjectives and potentially uncover additional insights. Obviously, with a survey-based study, researchers would miss the qualitative aspects of a one-on-one study, but they would gain the impact of a larger sample size. Either way, the structured aspect of the study makes data analysis relatively straightforward. Additionally, reporting participants’ top adjectives for each design option to various stakeholders is both impactful and easy to comprehend.

Our Experience

We tried this approach to desirability testing on a recent project to see whether it would help us refine our visual design direction for a public-facing Web site. Once we’d reached the point in our overall design process where we’d finalized the content, messaging, and information hierarchy, we started designing multiple visual concepts for the site.

The goal of the site was to persuade customers to sign up for a discount health plan that could offer them savings on out-of-pocket medical expenses. Our goals for the site’s design and emotional impact were as follows:

• We wanted to portray a professional and trustworthy image to overcome any objections consumers might have if they weren’t familiar with the brand.
• We didn’t want a site that would appear gimmicky or overly promotional and discourage customers.
• We sought to design a site that potential customers would find friendly and genuinely approachable.
• Given the sensitive nature of healthcare expenditures, we wanted visitors to feel comfortable with the site and let a sense of empathy come through the design.

With these goals in mind, we developed two alternative visual design options. In the first option, shown in Figure 2, we used clean edges and bold colors in an effort to make the site appear conservative and stable. Our assumption was that visitors might find similarities between this site and other well-known brands with which they are familiar. This, in turn, would help them develop a sense of trust in the site. In the second design, shown in Figure 2, we opted for a softer, warmer color palette, with rounded corners and welcoming images to give the site a friendly feel.

Figure 2—Visual design option 1

Figure 3—Visual design option 2

To test which approach would best align with our intended goals, we conducted a desirability test using product reaction cards. Starting with the full Microsoft list of cards, we revised the list to include only the adjectives we felt were important for this brand, after assessing our early user research. We narrowed the final list to 60 adjectives, but kept the 60/40 split between positive and negative terms Benedek and Miner had suggested.

We conducted the study through a survey, dividing participants into three groups. We showed the first group only the first design option, instructing them to select five adjectives from the list that they thought best described the design. We showed the second group only the second design option, giving them the same instructions. Because the designs were static screenshots, participants were not able to interact with either of them. We showed the third group both design options—alternating which design we showed participants first to minimize order bias—and asked which design they preferred. We had hypothesized that data analysis of the results from the third group would be difficult, but our client was keen on our asking the simple preference question, so we decided to do so. Finally, we gave all participants an opportunity to comment on and give their rationale for their adjective choices or preferences. Through our survey, we collected responses from 50 people in each of the three group.

As we expected, the results from the third group were inconclusive. Participants in that group were evenly divided in their preferences and their rationales for their decisions varied widely. However, tabulating the adjectives the other two groups had selected from the list proved to be very helpful. We identified the adjectives participants selected with the highest frequency and tallied the total numbers of positive and negative adjectives for each design.

Contrary to our assumptions before conducting this research, while participants thought the first option was both understandable and clear, they also described it as sterile, sophisticated, and impersonal. The sense of trustworthiness we had intended did not come through as one of the adjectives for that design. As we had anticipated, participants saw the second option as approachable and friendly, but surprisingly, they also described it as professional and trustworthy. Obviously, all of these adjectives were in line with our intended emotional response. Additionally, the second option received a much higher percentage of positive adjectives than the first option.

Compared to the simple Which design do you like better? question, our survey of product adjectives did a much better job of informing and helping us to achieve consensus on our design decisions. Based on our research findings and a review of participant comments, we developed consensus between designers and business stakeholders, selecting the second design option as the starting point for design refinements. Best of all, when others outside the project team questioned the appropriateness of a design element, because they liked other styles, we were able to provide a research-based rationale that minimized preference disagreements and moved us toward successful completion of the project.

Figure 4—Our final design

Conclusion

The prospect of trying to measure people’s emotional responses to different visual design options, then choose the best design can often be daunting. Everyone has a different opinion, and wading through volumes of data on simple preferences seems counterproductive. Plus, research that measures people’s emotional responses to a design is complex in nature. Their experiences of a visual design are multifaceted, and a number of different design aspects can impact their response to a product. Measurement of physiological responses to designs shows promise as a means of assessing people’s overall emotional reactions to a product, but not everyone has access to labs and measurement devices.

The design-adjective approach to desirability studies I’ve reviewed here is both easy to implement and helpful in isolating the emotional impact of a visual design. My company has now used this method several times, and we’ve been pleased with the clarity the results have provided. Not only have our desirability studies helped us to select a design direction, the insights we’ve gained from our research have challenged our assumptions as designers and informed our revisions of our chosen design direction.

Add desirability testing to your research toolkit. Then, the next time a senior executive on a project says, “Make it purple—that’s my daughter’s favorite color!” desirability testing can save the day!(image)

Resources

Benedek, Joey, and Trish Miner. “Measuring Desirability: New Methods for Evaluating Desirability in a Usability Lab Setting.”(image) Proceedings of UPA 2002 Conference, Orlando, FL, July 8-12, 2002. Retrieved February 10, 2010.

Lindgaard, Gitte, Gary Fernandes, Cathy Dudek, and J. Brown. “Attention Web Designers: You Have 50 Milliseconds to Make a Good First Impression!” (image) (image) Behaviour and Information Technology, 2006. Retrieved February 10, 2010.

Rohrer, Christian. “Desirability Studies: Measuring Aesthetic Response to Visual Designs.”(image) xdStrategy.com, October 28, 2008. Retrieved February 10, 2010.

Tullis, Thomas, and Jacqueline Stetson. “A Comparison of Questionnaires for Assessing Website Usability.” (image) (image) Usability Professionals’ Association Conference, 2004. Retrieved February 10, 2010.

Westerman, S. J., E. Sutherland, L. Robinson, H. Powell, and G. Tuck. “A Multi-method Approach to the Assessment of Web Page Designs.”(image) Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 2007. Retrieved February 10, 2010.

Topic: Columns | User Research

Comments (4)

Marco Hout(image) wrote:

Nice article! A reaction was posted at the SusaGroup blog.

Posted on February 23, 2010 5:25 AM

Userfocus(image) wrote:

People might be interested to know that Miles Hunter and I have developed an Excel-based version of the desirability toolkit. You can use the spreadsheet to generate, randomize, and print the word list. (Randomization of the list prevents order effects.) The spreadsheet also contains a worksheet that lets you analyze the data and generate a word cloud. It’s available, free, here. (Scroll toward the bottom of the page for the download link.)

Posted on February 23, 2010 12:58 PM

shoobe01(image) wrote:

I am not sure a general “desirability” rating is all that interesting. As a first step—usually, in an ideal process at least—there’s a lot of thinking about what the goals and design objectives are for the project.

One of those I did this sort of work on was, most of all, interested in trust. So, when it got to user testing, only about half of the test goals were for task completion / time. The rest was suitability of design. Did it communicate marketing accurately, did it express trust, and so on?

This was easier than I expected. Though I am sure any number of methods could be used, we had—aside from a moderator, video, and a stopwatch—an eyetracker and SUS (System Usability Score).

Combine things like “I think that I would like to use this system frequently” with comments on what was verbalized that the participants disliked, and reviewing the eyetracker to see if they avoided or missed features they just asked for. Compare these responses for different sections of the site—and try to get mini-SUS for each of these. Aside from A/B satisfaction comparisons with different aesthetics, but the same interface, doing it section by section allows you to to get a clue about what portion is the problem.

Extending that same example: Bill pay was always induced the most nervousness, so when the system as a whole worked fine, and bill pay could be completed fast and accurately, but had poor “use frequently” numbers compared to the others, we asked why. Changes to aesthetics, language, and layout improved the scores in regularized methods, allowing low numbers of iterations to move the bill pay system to rather good performance without a real change in the interaction.

A research team I worked with also had a really interesting “aesthetic measure” worksheet—rough or precise, mundane or sharp…, which seemed to produce useful results&#8212even for brand revisions—but I did not perform the testing or analyze the results myself, so cannot comment too much.

Posted on February 26, 2010 7:52 AM

Eva Kaniasty(image) wrote:

Mike,

Nice work as always.

I’m curious to know about what kind of range of responses you got, in terms of adjectives that were picked by each group. I’ve tried something similar on a smaller scale as an after-usability-test survey. It was clear that, with a long list of adjectives, there were primacy effects, in that users got tired of reading through the whole list and were more likely to pick the adjectives that were nearer the top of the list. Randomizing the adjective list obviously helps, but I wonder what kind of sample size you need to get a good clustering of adjectives.

-eva

Posted on February 26, 2010 8:44 AM

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Laban Movement Analysis for User Experience Design

By Traci Lepore

Published: February 22, 2010

Excerpt from the Lyrics for the Hokey-Pokey Song

You put your left foot in,

You put your left foot out;

You put your left foot in,

And you shake it all about.

You do the Hokey-Pokey,

And you turn yourself around.

That’s what it’s all about!

And so on…

I am a klutz. I fully admit this fact. So, whenever I’m in a show that requires me to learn any kind of choreography, whether dancing, fighting, or intricate movement details, I start to feel butterflies flutter in my stomach. My own nervousness has been known to get in the way and cause me to stumble. I would probably be fine if I could just learn to relax and go with the flow. But the language of choreography and movement is confusing to me. I just don’t get what I should do. Even as a kid, I always hated that silly game Hokey-Pokey. Case in point: I was in the middle of a reasonably simple dance in a show. We were performing outside, on the grass, and I was so worried about ruts or rocks in the ground that I wasn’t paying attention to everything else. One of my shoes went flying off! Horribly embarrassing! Though I’m sure only the people in the front of the audience even noticed. Did I mention I’m a klutz?

As a User Experience Designer, there have been moments on projects when I’ve had similar feelings of ineptitude—usually when I’ve been faced with a large, complex system or some completely new and foreign domain I didn’t understand. Have you ever experienced an awkward moment as you’ve tried to figuratively dance and negotiate your way through an uncomfortable situation? This often brings fear of making a decision or taking a step forward along with it—maybe even some shoe-flying moments. A recent acting class, in which I learned what Laban Movement Analysis is all about, helped me find a way to get past this fear. When people say knowledge is power, they are most assuredly correct.

Laban Movement Analysis and User Experience Design

Laban Movement Analysis provides a language for notating and documenting physical movement—mostly for dance choreography, but in acting as well. Its purpose is to document specific movements in dance. There are three aspects of Laban Movement Analysis that my experience and research tell me have some interesting implications for UX design:

• Effort Actions—which categorize the ways people perform actions and their intentions, based on weight, time, space, and flow
• Body—which connects the structure and physical characteristics of the body in motion and how they interact
• Shape—which describes the ways in which the body changes shape during movement, in relationship to the environment in which motion takes place

In this column, I’d like to explore the application of these three aspects of Laban Movement Analysis to UX design. Hopefully, you’ll see, as I did, the relevance these concepts have to the idea of a shared language for talking about physical and gut-response design. By thinking about and articulating some of the more physical aspects of a user experience and how they connect with user intent, you can create innovative, successful, intuitive designs for users.

Effort and Effort Actions

One way Laban categorizes movement is by elements of Effort or Dynamics, which take into account the way a person performs an action and his or her intention in doing so. Why are these two aspects so important? Because the difference between punching someone in anger and reaching for a glass to take a drink isn’t all that different mechanically—both rely on extending an arm—but a person’s intention affects the strength of the movement, the degree of control over the movement, and the timing of the movement, which are very different in these two cases. Intention makes all the difference. You wouldn’t punch your drink would you?

These dynamic qualities of movement help us to understand how movement reveals the actor’s attitude—which may not be conscious—toward

• thinking
• feeling
• sensing
• intuiting

Effort has four factors—each having two polarities—as follows:

• space—thinking, attention, where
  • indirect—all around awareness
  • direct—focused and specific
• time—intuition, decision, when
  • sustained—leisurely, continuous, lingering
  • sudden—unexpected, isolated, surprising
• weight—sensing, intention, what
  • light—delicate, sensitive, easy intention
  • strong—bold, forceful, determined intention
• flow—feeling, progression, how
  • free—going with the flow
  • bound—contained and inward

There are eight different combinations of these factors that make up Effort Actions, which combine the factors of space, time, and weight. (See Table 1.) Flow is a constant across all actions. One amazing thing about Effort Actions is that, when you read them, you can understand what they are implicitly. Nobody has to explain Dab to you, do they? These are all things we can connect with on a physical and intuitive level. I’m sure you know the feeling of Dab without thinking about it. Thus, Effort Actions give us a common language everyone understands for talking about a user experience we want to create. We can also help match an appropriate action to an intent if we understand what elements make up a particular Effort Action.

Table 1—The eight Effort Actions

Glide

Direct

Slow

Light

Free

Slash

Indirect

Fast

Strong

Free

Press

Direct

Slow

Strong

Bound

Flick

Indirect

Fast

Light

Free

Punch

Direct

Fast

Strong

Bound

Float

Indirect

Slow

Light

Free

Dab

Direct

Fast

Light

Bound

Wring

Indirect

Slow

Strong

Bound

Not only can the use of Effort Actions help a team talk about a design as they envision, design, and develop it; it can help ensure that the design you create is clear, articulate, and intuitive, as well as fun and engaging for users. The iPhone is a perfect example of the good use of Effort Actions. This is part of why people get such a rush when using it. The iPhone captures us on more than just a functional level. It engages us both physically and emotionally. This, when you get down to it, is the essence of innovative design, right?

While I could write a whole article on just Effort Actions and the iPhone, I’ll refrain and give only three examples of how the iPhone has achieved great interaction design through Effort Actions and successful innovation.

The first example I want to talk about is the Effort Action named Glide. The smooth interaction of unlocking the iPhone is quite clearly Glide—though they call it slide. (See Figure 1.) I would argue they didn’t even need to add the words slide to unlock in the user interface. Everything about the visual affordance begs you to do just that. The action is focused, easy, and isolated. Everything you would want unlocking to be. It meets the intention and the actualization of that intention.

Figure 1—Glide, or slide to unlock, on the iPhone

Another Effort Action the iPhone has implemented well is Press. Moving applications around on your iPhone provides an example of Press. (See Figure 2.) This interaction is focused, continuous—until you’re finished—and has a determined intention. Just as we think about pushing furniture around in a room, pressing to move our applications on the iPhone is an interaction that matches our intent and expectations.

Figure 2—Moving applications on the iPhone provides an example of pressing

The iPhone has also implemented something that, in essence, is a series of connected, little Flicks, and that is shaking. (See Figure 3.) This Effort Action occurs in situations where you can shake the iPhone to get something to happen. For example, in my GPS application, shaking undoes my last action. I would agree that, in some ways, this works, because I can remember the Etch A Sketch® I loved as a kid, which used shaking to erase a picture. But this totally unexpected result also surprised me. I had not intended to undo anything the first time I noticed this functionality. I was merely holding the phone in my hand while talking.

So, this shaking interaction isn’t quite as intuitive as some of the others on the iPhone, because it starts to blur the boundaries of a truly definitive Effort Action. If you want a function to be intuitive and natural, its boundaries must be distinct, not mushy. I think the problem lies in judging whether shaking is truly the right Effort Action for a user’s intent. Flick should be an isolated or sudden action within a particular context—something that makes it easy to divine intention. However, I don’t believe undoing is that easy an intention to express. We must consider the possible disconnects between a user’s intent, the user interface, and the actual physical gesture an interaction requires. Perhaps the correct Effort Action for undo would be Slash.

Figure 3—Shaking an iPhone (From Adweek, December 2008)

Even if there are still a few bugs to work out, what I find interesting is that the iPhone is using multiple Effort Actions in its design, not just one. By using multiple Effort Actions, the designers of the iPhone can match movement to user intent, then use whatever Effort Action is appropriate for a particular situation without worrying about being consistent across different intents and functions. More important, this approach seems to be working for people. When designers make clear and decisive choices, users can understand and are delighted by how easy interactions are. Connecting some of these physical and emotional metaphors for movement to function would be engaging and fun for users.

Actual, physical interactions aren’t the only things to consider. They just have the most literal interpretations. I have just begun to translate these ideas into an experience design and explore how it should feel. In Table 2, I’ll present my initial ideas about what a UX design using Effort Actions might look like, showing how the user experience would feel to users.

Table 2—Examples of proposed Effort Actions in UX design

Glide

Navigating on supercook.com

Provides smooth transitions between elements and selections.

Slash

Creating a Genius mix on iTunes or Pandora

Lets you swipe through a collection of music.

Press

Creating and navigating taxonomies

Lets you create sets and restricts movement.

Flick

Using Image Spark

Lets you quickly flip through images and set the layout to something other than a grid. Feels more like you have just flicked the images down.

Punch

1-Click Ordering on Amazon

Lets you take a quick and definitive action—that you can’t take back.

Float

Creating a tag cloud

Doesn’t pre-determine navigation.

Dab

Adding a purchase to your cart on an ecommerce site

Says I’m not completely committed to something yet, but am touching it.

Wring

Wading through posts on Craigslist

Forces indiscriminate and tedious browsing.

Body

In Laban, Body describes the structural and physical characteristics of the human body in motion. This aspect of Movement Analysis describes what body parts are moving, how they are connected to other parts, and how they influence each other. This is easy to understand if you think about a baseball player who is a switch hitter. How is it different for him to swing from the right or the left? Where does the movement start? How does the swing affect not only his arms, but his back, legs, and the rest of his body? How does the movement flow between the different parts of his body?

More generally, some helpful ways in which you can think about Body and answer those questions are:

• Where does the movement initiate—in what specific body parts?
• How do the different body parts connect to each other?
• What is the sequence of movement between different parts of the body?
• What are the patterns of body organization and connectivity?

If we can answer these questions, it allows us to understand the overall system—or a set of systems working together—that is, how the system actually achieves the movement and how different things impact each other. Any good designer surely thinks about these things. I’m sure this all sounds quite familiar, even when I describe it in terms of UX design. (See Table 3.) The implications of thinking on this level are that a design becomes a coherent, coordinated, holistic system that contains all the necessary functionality to meet users’ needs and intents.

Table 3—Body and UX design

Initiation of movement from specific body parts

User stories and scenarios

Understanding users’ intents and pathways

Connections between different body parts

Flowcharts or site maps of an entire system or structure

Getting an overall picture of how everything hangs together

Sequencing of movement between parts of the body

Workflows or tasks requiring movement through the system

Accounting for all necessary functions

Patterns of body organization and connectivity

Design patterns

Understanding the repeatable and reusable structures and functions

Shape

The aspect of Shape describes how the body changes shape during movement and has factors such as mode or quality. Mode can be about the direction or flow of a shape change—whether for some kind of organic movement or a habitual gesture like shrugging your shoulders. Quality is about the way something is moving. For example, is it contracting, expanding, or rising?

This makes me think about rich interactions, or what we often call Web 2.0 interactions. When designers think about these new capabilities in Web design, we typically focus on the actual affordances—an overlay or a carousel or sliders. But it seems we rarely think about the transitions before and after interactions.

For a good example of transitions, go to google.com, then move your mouse and watch how smoothly features on the page advance into focus. It’s so clean; you almost don’t even notice it happening. Until you show your intent to actually do something, the site doesn’t throw the functionality in your face.

There is more to designing rich interactions than just deciding you want to include a particular interaction. You need to think about how users experience the transitions before and after an interaction. If we throw too much at users without considering how we should use these technological capabilities, we run the risk of overwhelming users and creating a bad user experience.

I’m Ready to Put My Whole Body In

My partner in that shoe-flying dance I described earlier was gracious enough to recover my shoe for me and even put it back on my foot. We carried on with the dance, and thankfully, my shoe stayed firmly on my foot throughout the rest of the performance. But I’ve now learned that the language of movement isn’t really all that confusing if you have a clear way to articulate it and set people’s expectations. Understanding the different ways of thinking about and categorizing movement has helped me realize there is actually some method to what had previously seemed like madness to me. Breaking movement down into intentions, factors, and overall structure has given me a way to calm my butterflies and move forward gracefully. Maybe thinking about UX design in the same way can help us to articulate our designs better and create even more innovative and intuitive products.(image)

References

Bishko, Leslie. “Laban for Animators: Overview of Laban Movement Analysis.”(image) (image) Laban for Animators, 2004. Retrieved February 11, 2010.

Morrissey, Brian. “Target Zeros in on iPhone: Gift Globe App Provides ‘Utilitainment’.”(image) Adweek, December 3, 2008. Retrieved February 11, 2010.

Panet, Brigid, and Fiona McHardy. Essential Acting: A Practical Handbook for Actors, Teachers and Directors. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Topic: Columns | Design Process

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xdStrategy.com » Blog Archive » Desirability Studies: Measuring Aesthetic Response to Visual Designs

Desirability Studies: Measuring Aesthetic Response to Visual Designs

Introduction

Many people have been asking me to say more about “Desirability Studies,” which I recently described in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox article as a method “to measure aesthetic appeal.” Desirability studies actually do more than just measure, as they can also be used to inform and even inspire different visual design directions you may be considering. In the landscape of user research methods I described in this article, it is classified as an attitudinal study that can be qualitative or quantitative (shown below as a “hybrid” method in the middle bottom area):

(image)

The problem of subjectivity

Desirability studies are far less well known, despite how important visual design is to user interfaces. Paul Howe wrote in and said, “I’ve done a lot of testing for aesthetic preferences but it usually feels like the least scientific part of all my user research.” This “less scientific” feeling to studying visual design is due to several causes. It is partly due to the way visual design itself is approached, often coming from the designer’s beliefs about what would best evoke the desired response. However, I would suggest that the approach in creating the design direction is not the only or even biggest issue – it’s the presentation of the design direction, which is often done in a largely subjective manner. For example, when presenting different design directions to a decision-maker, a visual designer might say something like:

“I recommend design C over A and B, because I feel it evokes the right kind of emotional response in our audience that is closer to our most important brand attributes, trust and fun.”

The problem with this type of presentation is that it frames the decision as a subjective interpretation of the design by internal constituents, and a decision-maker might feel his or her interpretation or gut feeling for the design is just as valid as the designer’s. And it is, at least in the sense that they are both just single individuals. Even though the designer ostensibly has years of experience knowing what types of designs evoke which types of responses, the authority of the decision-maker equals things out and, if there isn’t agreement, you often end up in a kind-of stalemate that doesn’t move things forward in a positive direction.

Two problems that Desirability studies could help solve here would be:

1. To inform the design team as to why different design directions evoke certain responses in the target audience (in order to refine the direction); and
2. To precisely measure visual design directions against specific adjectives (such as brand attributes) to help make a final decision.

Doing this puts the subjectivity where it belongs: as the voice of how the target audience feels about the design, not the designer or decision-maker. This empowers the designer and decision-maker to make an informed choice.

Another question is, “How can we predict real world behavior?” The answer is that we can’t do this with Desirability studies, since they are a measure of attitude rather than behavior (and we all know that what people say and what they do are often two very different things). You’re never going to get a good read on predicting real-world behavior from an inherently attitudinal study, but then Desirability is more concerned with the initial stages of the interaction with the product, rather than ongoing ones. The latter are more influenced by solid interaction design and ultimately, meeting an underlying user need. Positive (and subjective) aesthetic responses help get your target audience started using your site, but assuming you haven’t made egregiously bad choices (e.g., poor contrast or small targets), it probably won’t affect overall usability that much.

Types of Desirability Studies

There are two general classes of desirability studies: Qualitative and Quantitative. In the qualitative version, participants are brought into a lab or conference room individually and shown different visual design directions (e.g., mood boards or high-level designs) or visually designed interfaces (e.g., high-fidelity mockups of home pages). Below is an example of 3 different design directions from a Yahoo! Personals desirability study conducted by Jeralyn Reese and Michelle Reamy several years ago:

(image)

Participants are then given a set of index cards that have a description written on each card (usually adjectives), and participants are then asked to indicate which card goes best with each design direction. Below is an example of some of the descriptions on these cards:

Accessible Desirable Gets in the way Patronizing Stressful

Appealing Easy to use Hard to use Personal Time-consuming

Attractive Efficient High quality Predictable Time-saving

Busy Empowering Inconsistent Relevant Too technical

Collaborative Exciting Intimidating Reliable Trustworthy

Complex Familiar Inviting Rigid Uncontrollable

Comprehensive Fast Motivating Simplistic Unconventional

Confusing Flexible Not valuable Slow Unpredictable

Connected Fresh Organized Sophisticated Usable

Consistent Frustrating Overbearing Stimulating Useful

Customizable Fun Overwhelming Straight Forward Valuable

After the participant has selected cards that go with each design, the researcher asks them why they made the selection the way they did. This is the main benefit of this approach: finding out why certain designs cause certain reactions. This provides the design team with what they need to make an improved next version.

Because the sample sizes are small and recruitment into the study likely introduced additional biases, this is not an appropriate quantitative method. A quantitative version of desirability studies was developed a few years after the qualitative version came out. The idea is to represent the design directions in some kind of image that is embedded into a survey. This allows the researcher to gather larger, more representative samples of the target audience, often with results that are more generalizable.

The Yahoo! Personals desirability study mentioned earlier used a quantitative approach discussed here. This was important, because changing the visual design was a big decision: It was the first time the company was willing to change the design of a Yahoo! “property” (Mail, Personals, Finance) to more closely match the visual design style of its competitors, rather than continue to use the general Yahoo! design style found across the network. (The last of the 3 designs shown above won out).

Presenting Desirability Results

Just doing the study isn’t enough, especially when there is contention. One simple way to show the results is with a Venn diagram. Assume we have three design directions called “Simple,” “Modern,” and “Fun.” A summary of the results might look like this:

(image)

However, it may be important to show more methodological detail around the results, such as significance testing on the survey results. Mike Katz, Rian Van der Merwe and Christina Hildebrand pushed the desirability study methodology further at eBay. They used paired opposites in the survey, which allowed them to show the results like this:

(image)

In another study, they were able to show the results of significance testing in the presentation of the results:

(image)

Published Papers on Desirability Studies

Desirability studies were first discussed in a UPA 2002 paper by Joey Benedek and Trish Miner of Microsoft, entitled “Measuring Desirability: New methods for evaluating desirability in a usability lab setting.” Later, Microsoft returned with a case study presented at CHI 2004 of how they modified this method to include a modified focus group discussion to the qualitative method. As far as I know, the quantitative version of desirability studies has yet to be published.

Conclusion

In summary, Desirability Studies are a great way of understanding the aesthetic and visual design directions you may be considering and ultimately measuring how much certain designs evoke certain responses relative to each other. This is most useful when you are trying to make a good first impression with your target audience and invite them to interact more deeply with your site or product so they can discover whether it will meet an underlying need. If all goes well with other aspects of the user experience, they will become a loyal user.

Pleasure and Pain » Can Leadership Be Learned?

The words both start with L-E-A, but can leadership really be learned?

As a consultant, I have the pleasure and challenge to work with a variety of different teams. I am a team of one, but I collaborate with agency teams (such as Happy Cog, whom I’m working with on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum project), internal client teams, freelance designers and developers.

Sometimes I’m brought in by an executive on the client side. Sometimes I’m brought in by an agency who has already won the client. Sometimes I’m brought in by a consultant to the client, who is helping them to build a team.

Almost every time, it’s incredibly unclear who’s leading.

I mention Happy Cog above because I fall over myself with excitement every time I get to work with them. Not just because they’re some of the most talented, most professional, most revered people working on the web today — but because everyone’s role is crystal clear, and every team member can point to the project lead in under 3 seconds. Not only that, every team member respects the project lead and follows their lead. It is in NO way a dictatorship, but it is also not a sociocracy — “a system of governance using consent-based decision.” It’s a meritocracy, where the lead becomes the lead because he demonstrates that he can lead, and that he’s willing to.

It’s a deep honor to work with these people, and have the opportunity to do things right, and well. But at the same time, it has made me acutely aware of the leadership problems that I have faced on almost all of my other projects.

Since I am always brought in as a consultant, I am never the true project lead because it is ultimately not my responsibility to implement the solution and integrate it into the business. One day I would very much like it to be, but that’s simply not the case right now. While I do currently get to lead almost all of the user experience phases of these projects, I still have an overall project lead that I report into — and in order for my work to be successful and impactful, the leader has to possess some pretty specific qualities.

My expectations for a leader are:

• To set clear goals, and to continually articulate them in written and verbal form to the team
• To motivate the team to believe in their vision
• To recognize and nurture the expertise that each person on the team brings to the project
• To assign actionable tasks with measurable results
• To express their appreciation for the contribution that each team member makes
• To be decisive and confident
• To ask team members for their input on key issues, but to always take responsibility for making final decisions
• To stay calm
• To ask for help when they need it
• To put the needs of people above the needs of things

I very rarely come across people who possess these qualities, and who take pride in not just what they do, but how they do it. I’ve been spoiled by working with Happy Cog, and I worry that I’ll have a really hard time working with people who don’t meet these expectations.

Part of my responsibility as a consultant is to clearly and respectfully communicate to my clients what I need from them in order to be successful. But I have to ask myself: Can leadership be learned? If it can, do I have the authority and chutzpah to express my expectations to the person who’s supposed to be my leader, or should I simply use this list as a rubric against which I evaluate potential projects and working teams?

I’m sharing my thoughts with you as I’m going through a period of discovery, so not all of this is entirely clear in my mind. I would love your honesty and guidance in helping me thinking through some of these issues.

Thanks in advance for your advice and understanding.

Related Posts:

• Web 2.0 Expo NY: “10 Tips for Creative Environments” with Adaptive Path’s Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson
• Happy Cog and Happy Whitney
• Whit Hour – Week 4
• Whit Hour – Week 6
• Client Matters: Does Your Client Need a Consultant or an Agency?

Last Tuesday's gathering was lean and mean (weather, reschedulings and mixed communications all contributed.) Though the interest list was long, and ~30-some people had confirmed, we ended up with 4 of us attending. But… hey, perfect, right? Just enough for 2 pairs. We even had the proper split—2 idea people and 2 coders.

Truth be told, I didn't know what to expect when I showed up. I brought a Sharpie-scrawled list of 5 ideas (more on those in a minute) but I was also prepared to drop into the role of stumbling, bumbling coder if need be. Fortunately, we didn't have to go there. I had the honor of working with Craig himself (who was working in his wicked-cool-productive emacs/wiki environment/thingy Xiki) which helped a lot because we had quite a few candidate ideas to consider.

Minus some lost minutes upfront for chatter and administrivia, we had two hours to do something together—anything. The ideas that I brought were (I thought!) all scaled back for achievability. Future Idea People, take note: this is not the venue to bring your “Facebook meets Flickr, but for dogs” grand, sweeping idea. No, you should be ruthless in paring down your ambitions. 2 hours, starting cold with a person you've probably only just met? Think small, fun and do-able.

Here's what Craig and I considered, from my list:

1. I had some decent front-end code (HTML/CSS/JS) for a modest little web store that I've been meaning to launch for forever. I thought we could wire it to a lightweight CMS (Wordpress, maybe) to automate the publishing of new SKUs.
2. I've been thinking of a nice little site to showcase a certain kind of artisan, and goods that they may have for sale on Etsy. With no designs or code to start from, I thought maybe we could scaffold the basic functional outline of the site in Rails and get a simple listing/detail page/submit form running.
3. I have a number of photos (diagrams, actually) on Flickr that have received a lot of comments & favorites. Those people could form the nucleus of a community of likeminded folks. (And I may want to communicate with them at some point in the future.) I thought that a script to grab the Flickr-names from comments and favorites, for any arbitrary photo, would be a handy thing to have.
4. This idea came from Nate Koechley (the very day of protonight, in fact): a Greasemonkey script for Gmail to display an addressee's most recent tweets.
5. And, finally, I had some really nebulous idea that it would be cool to have some Javascript code that would, when inserted on a page, make any formatted phone number dial-able with Google Voice.

How far did we get? Well, we kind of took a 'dip a toe in every idea' approach. We discovered that Craig is, like me, an itinerant tinkerer. So neither of us were too hung up on having something finished at the end of the night. No, as long as our misteps were taking us through APIs and documentation for Flickr, google Contacts and Voice, with a side-foray into greasemonkey, then it was all good.

Ideas 1 & 2 got almost no consideration—too ambitious, and (I suspect) just didn't tickle Craig's fancy enough. That was fine, I was happy to eliminate them. We actually worked a bit on Nate's Greasemonkey request, long enough to run up against Google Contacts authentication mechanism for their API. We decided: more than a 2-hour exercise. We moved on. Likewise the Google Voice thing was first scaled back to a bookmarklet and then 'later'-ed altogether.

We finally settled on the Flickr idea (what I'd taken to thinking of as 'Flickr Ad-Hoc Communities'—the ability to point at a photo and instantly get back a list of all parties who'd expressed interest.) Craig's weapon of choice? Well, by this time, we were getting really spare on time—something like 30 minutes left—so it was nothing fancy: a Ruby script to grab photo pages and scrape the data out. (It turns out that there are API-driven ways to get a photos commenters or favorite-ers but… hey man, clock was ticking and we'd long since past the “dig through the docs” phase of the evening.)

So, some HTTP Gets, a little RegEx love (Craig kindly taught me the 'non-greedy' syntax for matching an expression which is something I really wish I'd payed attention to a long, long time ago. Would've put days back on my life) and we did walk away with a functioning Ruby script that grabs comments only. (The favorites are a little more complicated, cause they're paginated. But I bet Craig would'a got there with 10 more minutes.)

In the end, Protonight was a lot of fun. As a new Dad (and trying to buy my way back into my wife's good graces after writing a book last year) I have to be pretty judicious with my time (especially my evening hours.) But I really wanted to make time for Protonight. I've known and liked Craig for a while now, and I know that he's been instrumental in getting several local tech user groups off the ground. (The CRB Code Jam, and a Javascript interest group among them.) Protonight very much feels like a natural evolution of those types of events: leaner, lighter-weight, a little more directed.

Craig hopes to grow the concept slowly and iron the kinks out, and I know that some of my User Experience compatriots on twitter have expressed an interest (for good reason—the IxDA folks and Protonight should be a match made in heaven.) I too hope to attend again, and frequently. (Tho' um, there's that New Dad thing again… I may have to skip every other gathering or something.)

But YOU?! You'd be crazy not to at least join the list and make some time for an upcoming event.

(image)

Wonder what the conversation is like at someone else's shop? Ever wanted to go backstage at a design firm? We asked Steve Portigal, Julie Norvaisas, and Dan Soltzberg of Portigal Consulting to sit down and share what they're talking about. Here's their open mike/chin-wag/theory slam.

Dan: I envisioned sitting down here to have this conversation and trying to figure out what we're really talking about. So I pulled this statement out of some notes Steve wrote the other day: "The Analog Human; The Digital Machine." I thought that was really provocative, so I wanted to start by asking you to say a little more about this idea?

Steve: I feel like there's this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this conceit that we can take humans—you know, messy, irrational, organic—and somehow cut them open and figure out the binary, rational, predictable, money-making algorithms that determine what they do. You see all this harnessing of science, you know, whether it's neuro-this or lie detector-that or psychotherapy-this that gets used in the service of, not helping people, but helping marketers crack the nut of what people want, where is the desire center in the brain. You know, that we can learn things about people in a way that is "true"—that is predictable and true, and will determine consumption patterns. I find the idea that we should be able to do that just fascinating, because that's not the world of people that we live in as people, so why as marketers or designers or producers do we think that we should turn people into things that they really aren't?

Julie: There's another aspect of that that I find really fascinating too: that you're just talking about it in this dichotomy like there's "us," and then there's "people." Well, we're people, right? We're people trying to understand people and trying to create these scientific methods of doing it is just—I think you're absolutely right—a conceit, and we often kind of remove ourselves from the situation. And I think empathy is a much more powerful tool than science in that case.

Steve: It's easy to harsh on science, but I guess that I'd rather harsh on marketing and the way that they try to corral science to do their work for them. Because every time you see how scientists talk, they actually evince much more empathy and they seem to be a population that has more sensitivity to the human condition, despite the fact that they work—you know, we think of people with Bunsen burners and spreadsheets.

Dan: That's interesting, because that kind of takes me back to what you said about "money-making algorithms," and I wonder if there's something about the purity of science as just an act of—an attempt at discovery—without that kind of consumption-based function that allows it to be more pure.

Biosphere 2

Steve: There was something we were talking about the other day. Some friends took a tour of Biosphere 2. And I guess the story of the tour was that the guides were quick to point out that it wasn't a "failed" experiment. And of course if you know the scientific method, there aren't failed experiments—you have a hypothesis and you either accept or reject that hypothesis. And that's so different from marketing language—you know, "oh we put people in there and we didn't know there were going to be cockroaches, they didn't know this was going to happen." Well scientifically, that's just discovery. And I think scientists are maybe more grounded in sort of pure discovery, and that as a consumption culture we keep framing those things as "failed experiments."

Dan: I think that sense of not finding the answer you're looking for—that you went out there with something already in your mind, and not finding that means failure—is really powerful, and I feel like we see that so much when we take clients out there in the field and we hear "that's not our customer," even though we've just been watching the person using the client's product in front of us.

Steve: That reminds me of my very first encounter with marketing personas in the late 90s. This company had an alliterative description of these different types of people running IT in organizations, and so we recruited people to study who fit that definition. And then when we talked to them, they didn't fit the behavior of this stereotype, and the feedback from our client was, "Well, those aren't 'Sams.'" So it just became kind of self-reinforcing, that, by definition, if they didn't do what we already said customers were going to do, then the people you've talked to aren't actually our customers. So it's like the opposite of the Scientific Method: you've created this paradigm where it's impossible—you reject any information that's new because it doesn't fit the framework of the information you already have.

Dan: And then when a product fails, it's not because it's actually not something people want, it's because there aren't enough Sams out there.

Steve: Well in fact, the reason these guys failed is because they felt like their goal was to educate the customer. The customer didn't understand why they had a better solution, so they needed to educate them, which is another trigger word for me.

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Dan Soltzberg

Dan: So what do you think it is that "the customer" is actually looking for, if not to be educated to the better way, as your clients were thinking?

Julie: Well, there's a lot of higher level goals. They're trying to get stuff done, on a very functional level, and express themselves—you know, I think that's a lot of what the choices people make in their lives as consumers are about. Defining themselves and conveying their identity to the world. Products are how we express ourselves, largely.

Steve: What do you think when you go into a meeting and the people you're working for tell you they're in a "low-interest" category—do you ever hear that phrase?

Julie: Or low involvement category.

Steve: Maybe that's the phrase.

Julie: It's the whole thing of commodity, right? You know, "our product is a commodity, and we don't want it to be—we want it to be a wow product, the next iPod," whatever.

Steve: Sometimes I feel refreshed when they say this is low involvement, because what you learn so often is that people don't really care about your thing, or even what your thing enables.

Julie: Right. Companies often feel like their things are more important in the world than they actually are.

Steve: Right. Because they sit there all day working on it. So they should be really really involved in it.

Julie: I used to show a picture of this jumble of things in a garage—all these different products. Some were products for kids, some were like an easel, and a bike, and bike helmets—you know, this array of products that you know people spent years in rooms figuring out with great care and precision. What these things were going to be and how they were going to help people and solve these needs and be beautiful and all these things. And they're just in a big pile in somebody's garage, covered with dust and rubbing up against each other. And that picture was to illustrate to people that there is a point where it's just some stuff that people are going to use for a while and it doesn't necessarily have to be the be-all and end-all every time.

Steve: That reminds me of Dan Harden, from Whipsaw, talking about when he first found one of his products in a landfill.

Dan: Oh, that's a Tim Brown story. He tells it about someone he worked with at IDEO.

Steve: I wonder if this is becoming—

Dan: —an urban design legend?

Steve: There's two if not three high-profile versions of that story, which maybe isn't germane to this conversation, but that's an interesting discovery—that we in our field create these myths around our own relevance or lack of it.

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Julie Norvaisas

Julie: Right. Then what do we do about that—that fact that half—I think half is probably an underestimation—but that half of what we do ends up in a landfill and not cared about or a pile in a corner. What does that mean to us as designers or as people who participate in this mass-production culture? I think that's a popular story in our field because we don't feel good about it. So what do we do about that?

Steve: I think there's sort of politics behind that, or cultural politics, that landfill—you know it just makes you cringe, that "Oh my God, drowning porpoises," but I think your story about the garage should be equally horrifying.

Julie: And I think it is. It's basically a landfill in somebody's house.

Steve: But it doesn't evoke that "we're destroying our planet with stuff" response. We're just filling people's houses with crap. Which is sort of more tolerable than a sort of Al Gore nightmare or something—that we're contributing to our literal deaths.

Julie: It's a little easier pill to swallow, I guess, but, I mean, the implications are the same right?

Dan: That's another interesting angle on this idea of the Analog Human and the Digital Machine. You know, that we have these life spans that are from beginning to end—it's you the whole way—but all these products come and go in our lives, these things are really finite. It's almost like having a pet, and knowing that your pet's life span is so much shorter than your own, and there's this discontinuity to it. That's a real difference—do you have anything that takes that whole journey with you?

Steve: I don't know if anyone has read Neal Stephenson's Anathem? This is a piece of science fiction that deals with a lot of the issues that the Long Now people kind of deal with. It's this society where, what we think of as cloistered monks, there's no religion to it, they're all dealing with math. There are these "mathic" groups, and they do things like—one group only goes out one day a year, one group only goes out one day every 10 years, one group every hundred, every thousand. They're all kind of separated from each other and from the mainstream society, and so how does this group keep itself constant, and keep its practices constant—do what it's there to do? How do you set these things up when you're going to get no influence from the outside world? It's that idea of designing for life spans that far exceed your own. I had this reflection when Obama gave money to high-speed rail from the stimulus package recently. And they're talking about the San Francisco-to-LA train. And I think, like, that's the kind of thing that if you were ten years old, you'd think to yourself, "wow, someday when I grow up, I'm gonna take a train..." And now I'm old enough and these things are still far away, you know? I'm going to be like, retired, potentially, when these things come out. It's not going to change my life. I wonder about the people working on those projects, and how they have a sense of involvement and engagement if they're not going to live to see it completed.

Julie: Which is an interesting circle back to your observations about science and how it's maybe more pure in a way, that maybe that's because they have a longer view of what they're doing—it's a process of discovery, not answering a single question. And having to have that definitive answer, which, let's face it, we have to have in business. Our clients and we certainly on a project basis don't have the luxury of solving big problems over time—it's not how the system's structured, right?

Dan: There's more of a paradigm in science too of contributing to this general body of knowledge, you know? It's collaborative, as opposed to commerce, where you've really got these entities competing against each other. And in a sense, the active struggle is for others not to know what you have until you come out with it, as opposed to this building collectively.

Steve: So that's why there's a hunger for breakthrough innovation and not incremental—well, I don't know if it's "innovation" if it's incremental, but...

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Steve Portigal

Julie: I think it is, but I know that's up for debate by a lot of people. But even within organizations, there doesn't seem to be either the capability or the interest in building that kind of knowledge base. I mean, in really great organizations, there is that, but a lot of times it's so piecemeal that—needing to get the right answer—and maybe that's the answer you already have in your head—is the primary objective.

Dan: Yeah, there really is a sense that these project cycles are almost like the lifespan of a moth or something—5 weeks, 10 weeks, a quarter, a year.

Julie: I wonder what you guys think of this—you know, I've heard a few little signals here and there that the consumer culture and mass production is kind of shifting, and what we want are more like heirloom objects—and Apple is a company that maybe could be an example of that—it's beautiful, it has function, it's less disposable.

Dan: But is that true?

Julie: I don't know—I've heard some of this—it's another way of addressing sustainability, right? I don't want a plastic cup everyday, or a bunch of plastic cups—I want a beautiful mug that I take with me and maybe have with me for a longer period of my life.

Steve: I feel like you always get these trends and counter-trends, right? So you've got people making electronics out of wood, and then you've got the Always-in-Beta movement, which just says we're gonna make things and they're never finished. The web has kind of created that—there was that whole thing when Gmail finally came out of Beta, and it had been out five years or something like that. It was obviously just a symbolic move at that point, but the idea that people would commit their email to a Beta product for years and years and years...like Flickr was in Beta forever, and it was hosting millions and millions of photos. I think David Armano is someone who sort of champions that as kind of a design ethos—you don't put out fixed monolithic things, you put out something and kind of keep working over it. Which is fine if you don't have to create tooling and...

Dan: Yeah, right, and so I think part of this schism between us, as living organisms, and things is the difference between what it's like to use things and to make things. The different processes a company has to go through like tooling and funding and marketing—these things that are very bounded and very concrete don't allow a company to be analog about how they develop something.

Steve: Even in software, which is sort of easier to be Beta-y about, every client we talk to tells us something like, "there's no shortage of ideas here." That the scarce resource is still actually prioritizing and building stuff. And so the more customer insight and facilitation and brainstorming and ideation they do—they can come up with more ideas. They can come up with hopefully better ideas—I think that's what we feel like we're in the business to provide, is helping them get to better ideas, but they still have the scarce resource of internal attention and internal development capacity.

Dan: It seems like we're hearing that a lot lately—that "there's no one here to work on this." It's like the fruit is ripening on the tree, and there's no one here to pick it.

Steve: It makes me wonder how these companies are set up, especially when they go on these engagements with companies like us to come up with new opportunities, when there's still no one that's available to go work on them.

Julie: Right—knowing full well that it can never really get anywhere. It's just like planting seeds. I think someone said that at one of our ideation sessions: that the primary function is to plant seeds and start things moving in a direction, not to necessarily have a concrete outcome. Which I thought was interesting.

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Steve: Well, if we're in the business of making stuff and helping people make stuff, but really what we're doing is helping people plant seeds—I agree that's what I see happening almost every time we work with companies, that we are planting seeds—but I think that we are in a field where the belief is that "we make stuff." Portfolios are sort of Things That Have Shipped, and a lobby full of plastic objects that have shipped—that's what you do.

Julie: But we're really dealing more in ideas than concrete objects, at the level we're working at, anyway.

Dan: And I think processes are a really important piece of that. It's not just innovating the thing, it's innovating how things come to be, in that particular organization.

Julie: Mm hmm.

Steve: Yes.

Dan: Everyone agrees. That's good.

Steve: Good job, Dan. Score.

Dan: [makes bell sound] Ching!

Julie: I'm just thinking we started thinking about the calculus of how people make decisions and how we unpack that, but it seems like we get a lot of that, and we can get insights from that, but just thinking out loud about this, that our clients need more help understanding themselves in a way than they do understanding their customers. And I know that's something we talk about, that it's both of those things, that we're helping you understand both aspects of that, to help forward your thinking.

Dan: Well, it makes perfect sense, because we're always finding that the customer's world is vastly different from what the client thinks it is, and you know, unless you help them remake their world a little bit, even if they understand what's out there, they're just still going to be so far away from really being able to internalize that in their process.

Steve: But it's sort of something we have to sneak up on them with. They're not coming to us for organizational therapy and understanding themselves more deeply, but—I think we know that the only way to understand what you don't understand about the people you're designing for is to turn it back on yourself as part of that. But, the light bulb has to be willing to change—they have to be in that learning-ready moment. And it's a struggle to say, "we're going to really peel back the onion with you guys and your customers"—they're like, "No, no—we need to learn about our customers." So I think with the methods we use, there are explicit tools and there are implicit tools—the ways we go about it, which help uncover that.

Dan: Julie was talking about how people make decisions and I feel like we get asked a lot by clients to go out and find this precise equation they imagine is out there: you know—if someone has product X and they're in place Y, how do they do task Z? Come back and tell us. And it seems like what we are able to identify isn't a specific equation like that but a set of factors that influence how those situations are constructed and get responded to. And I was wondering—you know it's maybe a dangerous question, but I wanted to ask us as practitioners—is identifying those factors useful? Since our clients are really asking us to come back with something else, is what we are able to see and put our fingers on, is that useful to them?

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Julie: I think that just the way that clients are asking the question and the way it's being experienced in the real world is often reflected in what we come back and tell them—that what's happening in people's lives doesn't map onto your organizational structure and the way that you have it siloed into these different areas—those two things don't compute. So you know—is it interesting...yes—is it useful...sometimes. I think it raises as many questions as it answers often, and the implications of those on an organization—companies often aren't willing to go there. Oh, it means you're actually going to have to restructure your entire organization if you're going to map back to how people actually experience your products. You're going to have to do that: there isn't an offline and an online, people are doing both at the same time, or going back and forth, but you have them separated—why? You know, people in the room are plugging their ears and humming a tune—they don't want to have to do that—it threatens their job.

Steve: Right. To talk about how their customers experience their offering across channels, and as you say, that's how they're structured—across channels. That'd be a funny thought exercise: imagine asking a customer about that. They have no sense of multiple channels—it's all the service.

Julie: Or what I'm trying to get done. It has nothing to do with even—they don't even realize there is such a word or thing as channels.

Steve: It goes back to that analog/digital thing we talked about, that people are behaving very analog, and this idea of trying to create the algorithm...and I wonder if it could be done, if you take someone with a PhD in Communication Theory and you do a five-year study and try and come up with some more in-depth patterns. But certainly at the scope we're working at, if we're coming up with the factors that might come out of that five-year study, I feel like it is useful because it reframes the conversation, it helps them understand triggers, you know, levers that they might start to press on, and opportunities to satisfy and to delight. But at this stage of things, there's unlikely to be a formula, like you were saying.

Julie: And I think that's really kind of what I love about doing this kind of work, is it is really about the mystery of what it is to be a human being, and what it is to make these choices and create these personalities and situations and families and communities that people do—I mean, there is no real way to understand it. You can understand parts of it and get clues and understand influencers and things like that. But I think it would take a lot of the fun out of being a human being if you understood every aspect of why. We're basically like Sherlock Holmes, like you said the other day, more than like Charles Darwin.

Steve: Right—you see garages full of stuff and messy homes and people not being clear how to use technology products and struggling to manage their identity, and doing all the things that we see as thematic patterns over and over again. I think we never stop being surprised by that, and amused and amazed by the people that we meet.

Dan: Yeah, I think you just really see over and over that needs are analog, you know? They're on a spectrum, and a log of solutions are digital, and they're just intersecting with that wide swath of need at a point.

Steve: Tell me more about needs being analog and solutions being digital—that's an interesting idea.

Dan: I just sort of wrapped up what I heard you guys saying, you know, that a person doesn't really experience channels, they experience what they need to get done. And I was thinking, yeah, your needs are analog—they bleed into other things, they're influenced by your emotions, they don't start and stop...

Julie: They're shifting, they're organic...

Dan: They're continuous and shifting—exactly—and solutions, by their very nature of being produced in these ways that we've talked about, are very finite.

Julie: More rigid.

Dan: Yes.

Steve: That's what the Always-in-Beta people would claim—it's a philosophy of product development that has more organic-ness to it.

Julie: Yeah, definitely, it's allowing that element of change and evolution into the process—inviting it, rather than saying "Okay, we got it, we nailed it, what you need is..." and people saying, "Yeah, it's not what I need but it'll do, it'll do for now."

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Dan: It's interesting if you think about, in your own life, trying to solve problems and trying to improve your ability to do the things that you want to do—like there's never a moment where you say, "Okay, I've got that mastered, now onto the next thing." It's like a problem bubbles to the surface and you focus your attention on it for a certain period of time, and then suddenly you realize you're not really thinking about it anymore. It's funny; it's like these low-involvement categories that we were talking about before, in a way a lot of the things that we need companies to produce for us—we sort of want them to be invisible almost. Just to kind of take care of the problem so that suddenly you realize you don't even have that problem—"how nice!"

Steve: It's kind of like film directing. Should you notice a good director or not? If you do, has the director failed? And as people become more involved with things like movies, they become more geeky about it, and choose to think about the set design or the costume design.

Dan: You get a Tarantino or something where you're really aware of that authorial voice.

Steve: That's the auteur theory, right? I'm digressing into film geekdom.

Dan: I'm trying to think of a director who's kind of invisible...

Steve: You don't know their names, though. Because there's not that voice—I mean, there's this meta-Tarantino thing that goes on where you're like, "I'm on this ride, I know the name of the ride, I'm gonna be aware of it the whole time"—that you're kind of in on the joke with them, you're in on the experience.

Dan: So of course as people become more aware of design in the same way, with things like Objectified, and just the public discussion about design, maybe you start to have more things like that—people experiencing their products like that.

Steve: We have to teach people the word chamfer.

Dan: Right. "Hey, check out my new gizmo—look at the radius on that."

Steve: Sweet chamfer, dude.

Dan: We're not so far from that moment, actually, in some ways.

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Julie: Yeah. I don't know—does everything really need to be that designed, though? I mean, this idea of invisible products—there

are heroic products that are a presence in our lives, and some that should just be—like I don't need my toothbrush to look like a racecar—it's alright if it's just a toothbrush. I don't need that constant chaos of design languages coming at me all the time.

Steve: But there are hardly any toothbrushes left that just look like a toothbrush. I think the ones the dentists give away -

Dan: —I like those, actually -

Steve: —and maybe when you're stuck in a hotel overnight.

Julie: I know, but then you get those, and you're like, "Oh -"

Steve: —"What the hell? -"

Julie: —boring toothbrush.

Dan: Julie, when you were talking before about heirloom objects and iPods, I was thinking about how we're starting to see more and more drawers full and shelves full of old iPods. It's almost like that drawer full of old ugly cell phones that we always see is becoming a drawer full of beautiful iPods, but in a way...I'm not sure—is there more value there for the person or not? Because the cycle is still so short for these things. It's like Apple's almost designing against becoming heirloom objects.

Steve: I think they've created upgradeable, replaceable heirloom objects. They've created an ideal. So you keep reconsuming that ideal.

Julie: Reconsuming, I like that.

Steve: I just made that shit up.

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Pasta&Vinegar » Blog Archive » Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things"

Reading about technical objects evolution for the game controller project led me to The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are by Henry Petroski.

Focused on forks, paper clips or spoons, the book asks this basic-but-interesting question: “how did these convenient implements come to be, and why are they now so second-nature to us?”. It basically try to seek answers to “provide insight in the nature of technological development“, and by approaching it with an evolutionary lense:

“Putting implements such as the common knife and fork and chopsticks into an evolutionary perspective, tentative as it necessarily must be, gives a new slant to the concept of their design, for they do not spring fully-formed from the mind of some maker but, rather, become shaped and reshaped through the (principally negative) experiences of their users within the social, cultural, and technological contexts in which they are embedded. The formal evolution of artifacts in turn has profound influences on how we use them.“

Based on a wide array of illustrative examples, he debunks the “Form Follows Function” myth:

“Imagining how the form of things as seemingly simple as eating utensils might have evolved demonstrates the inadequacy of a “form follows function” argument to serve as a guiding principle for understanding how artifacts have come to look the way they do. Reflecting on how the form of the knife and fork has developed, let alone how vastly divergent are the ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have solved the identical design problem of conveying food to mouth, really demolishes any overly deterministic argument, for clearly there is no unique solution to the elementary problem of eating.

it is really want rather than need that drives the process of technological evolution“

Although I found the argument a bit too mono-causal, it’s highly interesting to read this kind of assertion from an engineer. While I agree that form may follow failure (and my interest in design failure is certainly related to this opinion), it is as if Petroski was too quick to dismiss other kinds of influence. There are *other” divers of innovation.

It’s also relevant to see him acknowledging, after G. Basalla, that the existence of continuity in technical objects “implies that novel artifacts can only arise from antecedent artifacts - that new kinds of made things are never pure creations of theory, ingenuity and fancy“. This is a favorite topic of mine, that I already addressed here. Petroski illustrates it with the example of the paper clip:

“the invention of a new paper clip will not occur in some amorphous dream world devoid of all artifacts save imaginative shapes and styles of bent wire or formed plastic. Rather, any new clip will come out of the crowded past of reality.“

Another aspect of the book I was interested in is the vocabulary employed to refer to evolution of technical objects. The evolutionary metaphor is exemplified using the following terms extracted from geography, genealogy or biology:

“a route, detours, layovers, wrong-turns, retracings and accidents, paths… antecedents, ancestors… variations, new models… a vestigial trait/feature, a survival form… precursor… the idea of XXX long survived in such diverse applications“

Why do I blog this? Some interesting insights here about the evolutionary metaphor in the design of technical objects. The book gives plenty of details about interesting examples and is a bit short on theories. That said, given its origin (Petroski is not an STS researcher), there are some good points and pertinent elements we can re-use in the game controller project.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 10:48 pm and is filed under circulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Devo is doing some fantastic promotion as they relaunch their band/brand. They're focusing on one of the most telling indicators of devolution: consumer culture, specifically production for consumption. That means you, dear readers.

Check out their positioning statement, Focus Group Testing The Future

Interesting to see that their use of focus groups is being reported elsewhere on the web and in print mags like Rolling Stone as a straight fact. Sure, you can (and should) wonder if they are pranking us or not, and if they succeed (or not), does that change the impact of their provocation? No doubt there's an "Is it art?" rat trap we could devolve (oops) into, but we'll set that aside for now and just bask in the work.

They've also put out a lovely color survey (and we aren't exactly big fans of surveys) here. It's a gorgeous bit of interactive design as well as (of course) a brilliant satire of the concept.

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Finally, they are sharing the results of their color focus groups.

It was only a few weeks ago that we had Domino's Pizza using customer research to spawn product redevelopment, and then using that process to promote their improved product. See The Pizza Turnaround, and note the negative quotes posted on the walls of their office. Devo flips that whole conceit back around with this campaign. Stay tuned to Club Devo to see where they take it next.