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Doug LeMoine
Doug LeMoine leads the design communication practice at Cooper. In seven years at Cooper, his designs have served a variety of human motivations: Helping orthopedic surgeons more precisely wield a bone saw, revealing risk in mutual fund portfolios, and much, much more. He seeks to distill simplicity from complexity, to balance design ideals with business imperatives, and to craft humane systems that make people happy. He also seeks to make urban bicycling safe, and he would love to take a crack at making air travel fun again. He discusses this stuff and more in his personal journal.
The Birds Nest & the television experience
Amazement operated on many levels during the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. During each performance, my mind struggled to process what I was seeing. What is this? How in the world did they pull this off? Where does an idea like this even come from?
TV: These small boxes will now take the form of a keyboard, and the keyboard will sprout a peach blossom.
Doug: ... Huh.
TV: Now the small boxes, which have made precise, machine-like movements for the last ten minutes, will reveal that humans have been operating them the whole time.
Doug: ... Wait, what? ... How ...
TV: Now a globe will rise, and dozens of people will fly around it in precise circles.
Doug's brain: [explodes]
In a Wahington Post editorial, Roger K. Lewis recently wrote that NBC didn't once mention the architects of the venue, Beijing National Stadium. Hmm. That's funny. I didn't mention them during the telecast either, but that's because my brain had been reduced to a pre-verbal state.
Learning from How Buildings Learn
The BBC miniseries based on Steward Brand's How Buildings Learn became available on the Internet a few days ago. It's chock-full of provocative stuff, and lays out compelling arguments about how structures succeed or fail in satisfying the needs and goals of people. (Let's hear it for design on TV! First Mad Men, now HBL. It's a televisual golden age!)
As I watched the opening episode, I thought of the quintessential local example of a learning building: The Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco. Built in 1898, it served as a ferry terminal for points around the Bay; as San Francisco changed and bridges eased the traffic burden, it gradually fell into disrepair. In 2004, it re-opened as gourmet food court, serving the prosperous downtown lunch crowd. San Francisco changed, and the Ferry Building "learned" to address a new set of needs. Beautiful.
Is architecture really a good analog for IxD?
Aside from all of the fascinating examples of the ways in which our built environment responds (or doesn't respond) to change, what the miniseries reveals to me more than anything is the limitation of using architecture and construction as models for software design and development. Architecture serves as a helpful stand-in when you're talking about the macro stuff — the planning process, the rough apportionment of the screen "real estate," and discussions around extensibility or repurposing — e.g., Is this thing the first piece of the big structure, or is it the temporary thing that we live in while the big structure is built?
But when you're talking about the way people experience things in a digital environment, architecture is a limited analog. Software is made up of subtle, nuanced interactions and ever-evolving technical capabilities. Interacting with software is conversation between two active participants; it's fast-paced and packed with immediate possibilities. For example, changing context in software seems more akin to a change in facial expression than, say, a movement to a different room. (It should, anyway). The ever-evolving technical capabilities have created a world in which we're all often experiencing some particular digital interaction for the first time; in fact, if someone wrote a book about how software is experienced, it could be called something like, "How Software Teaches Us How to Use It."
Solutions begat problems, problems beget solutions
Of course, there's another side of Brand's perspective that's relevant to our work: Most design projects (at Cooper, anyway) begin with what is presented as a straightforward task: Design a solution for the problem the clients have identified. Architects probably experience a transformation similar to ours, because the real problem is often quite different than what the client has articulated. Brand's perspective is interesting to consider here, because our solution often simply modifies (or modulates) the problem -- makes it smaller, hopefully — but still: Will our solution be able to handle the need to evolve to further reduce the problem? Of course, if anything could learn and teach at the same time, it's software. But software that can learn ... Hmm. Something sounds fishy about that. Remember that part in Terminator where they're talking about how the computers took over?
[Start with Episode 1 of How Buildings Learn at Google Video, and thanks to smashingtelly for the tip]
Everything smart is dumb again
Once upon a time, Google made the dumb interface look like the smartest thing to ever hit the Internet. By removing the blizzard of navigation that characterized Excite and Yahoo — and by actually delivering reliable search results — Google removed huge hurdles for millions of users. Still, Google-style search is far from the end of the road; it has always had limitations and drawbacks, and it seems like these things are cropping up a lot in conversations and in the media recently.
Just yesterday, my team and I heard something interesting during some research into a really complex system for analyzing corporate finances. When we asked what had been discovered in previous user research efforts, we were told:
Whatever we build has to be stone simple. It can't be like Google, where you type in how you think about it, and I type in what I think about it, and we both get different sets of results.
Constructing good Google search strings can seem like a black art, but individual users develop personal techniques and styles that help them get more reliable results. Still, the fact that others must craft their own path toward reliability creates a lack of confidence that others will get a similar view onto any given topic.
Search results: Skimming the surface
The act of sifting through results has also created some unique behaviors. Users need to parse them in order to find what they need, and there are a variety of parsing expectations, behaviors and processes that are changing the way that people absorb information. Some see it as somewhat ... Orwellian. The current Atlantic Monthly has an interesting cover story about the effects of search on our reading behaviors and mental capacities. The author attributes the Google-enabled ease of Internet search with a shift in the way that his own brain works:My mind isn't going — so far as I can tell — but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore.
Andrew Sullivan at The Times echoes the above author's sentiments in a blog review of the article:
The experience of reading only one good book for a while, and allowing its themes to resonate in the mind, is what we risk losing. When I was younger I would carry a single book around with me for days, letting its ideas splash around in my head, not forming an instant judgment (for or against) but allowing the book to sit for a while, as the rest of the world had its say — the countryside or pavement, the crowd or train carriage, the armchair or lunch counter. Sometimes, human beings need time to think things through, to allow themselves to entertain a thought before committing to it.
These reading-related pains remind me of writers' critiques of word processors, and the growing popularity of interface-free tools like WriteRoom. There are certain behaviors that require some radical reconsideration of current UI norms. Few would propose that we go back to a pre-search world, but the question seems to be: How to appropriately apply UI and technical smarts to retrieval technologies to foster the confidence and comfort that comes from predictability and structure?
Welcome to the new Cooper Journal
Like most design agencies, Cooper crackles with conversations on a variety of topics. Unlike lots of other agencies, we've mostly conducted these conversations in primitive channels — over email and in person around the large, U-shaped couch where we eat lunch.
We call it "The Departure Lounge"
Up to now, private has been easy. Publicizing our conversation means work — to set up, to moderate, and to keep current. When you also factor in the unknown amount of Alan-wrangling, you're talking about a lot of time away from design, problem-solving, and the stuff we all love.
So why take it public now? Because we want to be part of the bigger conversation, and to bring people into our conversations. Up to now, we've participated in formal, somewhat old-fashioned ways — at conferences, and through our newsletter. We'll still do these things, but we'd also like to talk about stuff happening like, now, and the logical place to do that is via a web-based publishing platform more commonly known as a "weblog."
Our mission is to communicate deep and clarifying insights, to kick around sparky and elegant ideas, and to discuss design methods and processes. And we're excited to bring you, the Internet, into it.
So, without further ado: Welcome to the Cooper Journal!
Going with the Flow: Interaction Design for Healthcare
Healthcare is a target-rich environment for design. Discussing even the smallest design challenge quickly exposes the hacked-together systems and processes that somehow function to help us stay healthy. Designers must understand the context in which they work, yet confronting the complexity of healthcare can be paralyzing. It seems impossible, for example, to discuss the viability of mobile devices at the point of care without discussing the Byzantine network of roles, regulations, and workflows that the device touches: nurse assistants, the lab, the patient, receptionists, regulatory bodies, HIPAA, hospital and lab information systems, IT departments, point-of-care coordinators, ADT systems, and so on.
While it’s important to understand the knotty context of a healthcare design problem, it’s just as important to know when to reach for the sword of methodology to cut through it. To illustrate this point, I’ll discuss some healthcare design challenges I’ve seen during my research and design work and the methods I’ve used to tame the complexity.
Do U SMS? Text Messaging is Not the Hassle it Once Was
Few modes of communication burden the user with as much interaction hassle as text messaging on mobile phones. Without help from word-prediction assistants, the word "Hello" requires 13 button-presses, not including an additional 5 to get from the start screen to the messaging app. Nevertheless, the clear benefits of short text message services (SMS) have lured untold millions into uncomfortable, not to say unsatisfying, partnerships with their mobile phones.
Notable Product: How Nokia´s 8290 Does Something Right
Most people buy mobile phones because they want to be able to make phone calls anywhere, anytime. All the other stuff that's crammed into phones—calculators, game players, text-messaging capability—represents incomplete solutions for problems that are better served by devices dedicated to those needs. If I want to play a game on the go, I won't buy a Nokia 8290.
Still, phones offer a lot of sophisticated functionality to support specific mobile phone needs. Users need a way to quickly change ring-tones, ring volume, and message alert tones—so phone manufacturers allow you to tweak these so that one's phone can behave appropriately as one moves from the construction site to the movie theater.
Interface Design as a Life or Death Proposition
In the mid-1980's, a team of physicians, lawyers, and public health experts conducted a lengthy study of the nature and causes of medical errors. They published their findings, entitled "Incidence of adverse events and negligence in hospitalized patients," in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991.[1] Their research indicated that "there is a substantial amount of injury to patients from medical management, and many injuries are the result of substandard care." While the industry evaluations and renovations sparked by these findings have taken effect, physicians and clinicians have simultaneously adopted more sophisticated technologies to provide more accurate and efficient care. [2]
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