There is some problem you are trying to solve. In your life, at work, in a design. You are probably solving the wrong problem. Paul MacCready, considered to be one of the best mechanical engineers of the 20th century, said it best: “The problem is we don’t understand the problem.”

Story time.

It’s 1959, a time of change. Disney releases their seminal film Sleeping Beauty, Fidel Castro becomes the premier of Cuba, and Eisenhower makes Hawaii an official state. That year, a British industry magnate by the name of Henry Kremer has a vision that leaves a haunting question: Can an airplane fly powered only by the pilot’s body power? Like Da Vinci, Kremer believed it was possible and decided to push his dream into reality. He offered the staggering sum of £50,000 for the first person to build a plane that could fly a figure eight around two markers one half-mile apart. Further, he offered £100,000 for the first person to fly across the channel. In modern US dollars, that’s the equivalent of $1.3 million and $2.5 million. It was the X-Prize of its day.

Paul MacCready holding a “Speed Ring”, a device he invented for competitive glider flying.

A decade went by. Dozens of teams tried and failed to build an airplane that could meet the requirements. It looked impossible. Another decade threatened to go by before our hero, MacCready, decided to get involved. He looked at the problem, how the existing solutions failed, and how people iterated their airplanes. He came to the startling realization that people were solving the wrong problem. “The problem is,” he said, “that we don’t understand the problem.”

MacCready’s insight was that everyone working on solving human-powered flight would spend upwards of a year building an airplane on conjecture and theory without the grounding of empirical tests. Triumphantly, they’d complete their plane and wheel it out for a test flight. Minutes latter, a years worth of work would smash into the ground. Even in successful flights, a couple hundred meters latter the flight would end with the pilot physically exhausted. With that single new data point, the team would work for another year to rebuild, retest, relearn. Progress was slow for obvious reasons, but that was to be expected in pursuit of such a difficult vision. That’s just how it was.

The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. He built a plane with Mylar, aluminum tubing, and wire.

The first airplane didn’t work. It was too flimsy. But, because the problem he set out to solve was creating a plane he could fix in hours, he was able to quickly iterate. Sometimes he would fly three or four different planes in a single day. The rebuild, retest, relearn cycle went from months and years to hours and days.

18 years had passed since Henry Kremer opened his wallet for his vision. Nobody could turn that vision into an airplane. Paul MacCready got involved and changed the understanding of the problem to be solved. Half a year later later, MacCready’s Gossamer Condor flew 2,172 meters to win the prize. A bit over a year after that, the Gossamer Albatross flew across the channel.

What’s the take-away? When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

Related posts:

1. Iterative Design: Towards the Perfect Paper Plane

This blog post is by my cofounder Sutha Kamal, who is Massive Health’s fearless CEO. He is by far the smarter of the two of us. He has previously sat on the other side of the VC table and most recently was the acting-CTO for Fjord, which is the mobile design firm responsible for making the a lot of the mobile experiences you have every day as good as they are. As a side note, the best gift I’ve ever received is having the funds we raised for Massive hit our bank account on the day I turned 27.

Aza and I have spent the last few weeks trekking up and down Sand Hill road, speaking with investors and looking for firms and individuals who share our mission to help people get healthy, and can help us build a great company. As a result, we’re excited that we’ve raised a $2.25 MM seed round from Felicis VC, Greylock Discovery Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Collaborative Fund. We’ve also got some amazing angels behind us, but our PR folks have asked us to keep the list short.

And now that we are funded, we are hiring.

Our goal at Massive Health is to bring the kind of innovation we expect from the Internet world to health care. As Aza mentioned, we’re excited to encourage a design renaissance in health care. We’re also excited to bring “big-data” analysis and other techniques to discover insights that improves lives. Crowdsourcing, game mechanics, and social networking are cool, and applying it to helping someone get and stay healthy? That’s exciting. That’s powerful.

There are some great companies in the consumer health space today, so what makes us different? Massive Health sits at the intersection of health care and consumer products. There are some great wellness and fitness apps out there. Whether it’s Nike+, or Cyclemeter (my personal favorite), if you want an app to help you get and stay active, you’re spoiled for choice. But what if you’re actually ill? Then there’s nothing sleek or sexy to help you manage your disease. You’re back to the world of clinical health applications that aren’t especially friendly, easy to understand or use, and certainly aren’t social. Today’s apps don’t appreciate that you’re a person. That’s simply not good enough.

We’re not proposing giving you a badge for eating your broccoli or letting you check-in and become duke of ranch dressing. Tweeting the details of your health isn’t particularly useful either. We are talking about tight feedback loops and deep insight into the interface which is your body. There is something magical in the intersection of health, motivation, data analysis, and your social graph. That’s where habits are formed, behaviors are changed, and people get healthy.

Doug Soo—our engineering lead—was employee #6 at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. They make enormously scalable systems and a product that’s fundamentally about people. It’s not a coincidence that he’s joined us.

We’re still in ninja mode, so we’re keeping the specifics under wraps. What we can say is that we’re looking for great people who believe in the social mission of helping people get healthier. Not just for wellness, but for the real health problems that plague our nation and the world. If our mission resonates with you, and you’re a great engineer with a lot of passion, we’d be honored if you’d check out our open jobs list. Otherwise, stay tuned… we’re excited to share more soon!

Related posts:

1. Leaving Mozilla, Starting Massive Health
2. Vote! How to Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use

Jef Raskin, my father.

Twenty five days before my father died, on my birthday exactly six years ago, he gave me a present. He had the sparkle back in his eye—the one that had been reduced by pancreatic cancer to an ashen ember—when he gave it to me. It was a small package, rectangular in shape, in crisp brown-paper wrapping. Twine neatly wrapped around the corners, crisscrossing back and forth arriving at a bow crafted by the sure hands of a man who built his first model airplane at age seven.

This small brown package will be the final gift my father ever gives me.

My family does gifts strangely. For instance, we have our own mangled interpretation of hanukkah, where each person of the family has a night to give out presents. If we have five people home for hanukkah, we celebrate only five of the eight nights. The joy of gifts are in the giving, not receiving, so before opening your present you must first guess what’s inside. This tradition is “plenty questions”, a more forgiving version than the standard twenty questions.

“Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?”, I ask.

We are in it for the game of teasing the gift out of the gifter. It’s like extracting a ball of yarn from a kitten. The tugs, pulls, and misdirections are the fun. The question must answerable by a simple “yes” or “no”. Naturally, the later into the questions we get, the more liberal this rule becomes. We don’t break the rule exactly, but answers become not-exactly’s and yes-but’s. In past years, the givers have often spent hours creating elaborate disguises for the gifts. I’ve shaped styrofoam into a fantastic reptilian shape to disguise a pair of earrings for my mother. She guessed them perfectly anyway. There may be collusion going on.

“Mineral”, my father says.

We often waste questions on silly asides. We ask about refrigerators and ostrich eggs when the gift is clearly book shaped. But my father is sick. Where there was once the thought that a cure might be found, only fleeting misplaced hope remains like a high school summer fling dissipating in the face of college. We know there isn’t much time. Still I ask.

“Is it bigger than a bread box?”, I stare at the package in my hands. In it is my father. The man who invented the Macintosh and misnamed what should be the “typefaces” menu the “fonts” menu. He never forgave himself for his incorrect usage of English. He groomed with exacting use of language and considered that mistake a failure of being young and reckless with semantics. The man who invented click-and-drag was now the man who could hardly keep his gaze focused on his son. The box is, of course, smaller than a bread box. It’s a question we always ask. My family smiles out of habit.

“No”, my father says. A long pause. “No”, he says again, “it is smaller than a bread box. Smaller and sharper.” He speeds the guessing game along. Time.

“Sharper?”, I ask. A knife? The box is too small for a typical kitchen knife. It could be a Swiss Army knife. Jef always carries one. The big blade is for food, the little blade for everything else. He gets a bit indignant if you borrow it and use the wrong blade. I have a Swiss Army knife, but I haven’t carried it since airport security theater ramped up after nine eleven. It probably isn’t a knife. Maybe a razor? One can’t just ask outright, that doesn’t give enough information when you are wrong. Something sharp could be many things. Seeking something more strategic I ask, “Can it be found in a bathroom?”.

Long pause.

“Yes”.

Three days before he passed, Jef had an accident. He needed to use the restroom, so—stooped under his arm—I supported his weight as he hobble to his business. There was something quietly unsettling about escorting my father to a toilet that had been taller than me when we first moved into the house twenty years earlier. I sat him down, walked out, and closed the door. Moments later, a crash jolted the house. I slammed the door open. The metallic smell of water fresh from a pipe whipped my nose and water flooded the floor. The toilet was dislocated from its base like an arm from its socket, and lodged between the toilet and the wall was my father. Despite his size, he looked small and meager. He stared up at me with eyes full of innocent surprise. Why am I on the floor, they asked? Why am I wet? The shocked curiosity in his wide-open eyes is the single most haunting image I have of my father. Into the dark space between closing my eyes and falling asleep, that image sometimes steals. When it does, there is no help for it. I have to get out of bed and go for a run. Otherwise, sleep will be overshadowed by those confused, guileless eyes.

“It must be a razor?”, I ask. He nods his assent with a satisfied smile. He gestures for me to open it. Carefully undoing the knot, the twine, and the paper reveals a cardboard box on which he has written “For Pogonotomy”. Of course there is a word for beard trimming, and of course my father knows and uses it. In high school, I played a trick on my teachers: in every essay I used my own made-up word. I used “indelic” to mean something between “endemic” and “inextricably entwined”. No matter how many times I trotted it out, not one of my teachers caught me. I used it once in passing with my father and he immediately but gently pointed it out as a non-word. Some men spend time meticulously trimming their beard. My father trimmed his vocabulary. Language is communication, and my father was fastidious about it. Often when we got into particularly deep conversations, he’d pause and continue the rest of the discussion in written form where he could distill his thoughts into a sharp crystalline relief.

The razor itself was a vintage safety razor. Looking at it, I understood his intent. It is an inventive and simple design. The razor takes a flat blade and arches it under a metal shield, giving the blade both greater mechanical strength as well as a protective sheath that keeps you safe. It’s the kind of clear insight for which all designers and inventors strive: beauty in the simplicity of using constraints as advantages.

It’s that message, rendered in steel and wood, that was my father’s final gift to me. A way of looking at the world through the lens of playful questioning. That razor remains with me as a physical reminder of an incorporeal way of thought. Twenty five days later, the razor remained but my father did not.

Jef, I miss you.

Related posts:

1. Enso Released: In Memory of Jef Raskin

Almost all Mac users have used, at least once, Apple’s solutions to windowing woes: Exposé quickly rearranges all open windows in an ad-hoc grid for quick perusal, and Spaces enables separate virtual desktop which lets you divide your workspace into sensible areas. It’s the second feature I want to discuss. Switching between each Space is quick and easy, but with a simple redesign tweak it could be greatly improved.

Current Condition

The default setup for Spaces provided by Apple is four spaces placed in two rows and two columns. Switching between spaces imitates physical world movements, so the user moves by pressing control plus the arrow key in the desired direction. This grid setup, while seemingly innocuous, is at the heart of a number of usability issues.

Movement

The first problem is the arbitrary distinction between solid and fluid boundaries. User can always go right and left (illustrated by the green and blue arrows), but can’t always go up and down (shown by the red arrows). That is, the topology of Spaces is that the left and right edges connect, but the top and bottom edges do not. Stranger, perhaps, is exactly how the left-right boundary conditions are treated. The mental model is as if you took a horizontal strip and rearranged them in a grid. Moving right from the top-right space moves you to the bottom-left space. In essence, it’s a topological spiral which results in a strange breakage of symmetry. While I can see the argument for why this makes sense, in the heat of the moment, it’s just confusing.

The true problem that comes from all of this is a lack of habituation. I have to know which space I am in order to figure out how to get to the space to which I want to go. Even if I know my email is in the lower-left space, without knowing which space I am in, I’m not sure which direction I need to move. That breaks my train of thought by making me think about the system-state and not what I’m doing.

The Solution

Before you get in a tizzy over whether Apple could ever make a design mistake, here is a simple solution that solves all of these problems. Just rotate the layout of the spaces by 45°.

Here’s why it is better:

• No matter which space I am in, the keyboard shortcut to move to any other space is always the same. To move to the top-most space, I can always use the up arrow command. The same is true for the other three directions. If my mail is in the left-most space, no matter where I am, I can use left to get there. Unlike Spaces as it stands now, with this tweak the interface becomes habituatable.
• There is no strange wrap-around behavior. It’s a much simpler mental model.

That’s about it. A change in orientation seems to solve all of the problems.

Aza’s Note: An open question with Luka’s solution is how to extend it to more than four spaces. If you’ve got a solution, put it in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Redesigning the iPhone’s Buttons

Earlier this year, Mozilla convened a privacy workshop that brought together some of the world’s leading thinkers in online privacy. People from the FTC to the EFF were there to answer the question: What attributes of privacy policies and terms of service should people care about? This lead to a proposal presented for the W3C, among other places, which further refined the notion.

We are now ready to propose an alpha version of Privacy Icons that takes into account the feedback and participation we’ve received along the way. We’ve simplified the core set dramatically and tightened up the language. While the icons don’t touch on all topics, we do think they significantly move the discussion on privacy, as well as the general level of literacy about privacy, forward. We do not want to let perfection or devotion to taxonomy get in the way of the good.

Keep in mind that the target adopters of Privacy Icons are 2nd-tier sites—the sites where differentiation based on privacy matters to their users. Think about the large number of sites which vehemently promise to never share your email address when you sign up for their service or mailing list. Those are the kinds of sites, which make up a significant fraction of the web, that would adopt Privacy Icons.

The Icons

References to Data mean data that is either personally identifiable (including name, ip address, or email address) or associated with some personally identifiable aspect of your identity (such as correlated with your ip address name, or email address).

This means that data is only collected and used to carry out the interaction you are engaged in with the website. The website is only using your data in ways that are functionally necessary to carry out the relationship as users intend. This means if you are buying a pair of shoes, your email address is collected to confirm the order, provide updates on shipping status, etc. An intended use of your email address would not include sending you marketing messages from other companies or for other products.

The European Union has spent time codifying and refining the idea of secondary use; the use of data for something other than the purpose for which the collectee believes it was collected. Mint.com uses your login information to import your financial data from your banks — with your explicit permission. That’s primary use and shouldn’t be punished. The RealAge tests poses as a cute questionnaire and then turns around and sells your data. That’s secondary use, is undisclosed, and feels scummy. When you sign up to use a service you should care if your data will only be used for that service. If the service does use your data for secondary use, they should disclose those uses. If they share your data with 3rd parties, then they should disclose that list too.

This means that your data is collected and used in ways that go beyond what is necessary for the interaction. For example, in addition to collecting your address to ship you a pair of shoes you just bought (which is an intended use of your address), the web site might also sell your address to data aggregators who sell it to junk mail companies.

The site that is collecting data about you is not trading or selling it. It will only share your data with other organizations in order to carry out the intended transaction.

This means that a website is collecting data about you and selling or trading it with another organization, government, or person. An example of this is where a shopping website collects data about your shopping preferences, frugality, and ip address and sells that info to data aggregators or to other e-commerce sites directly.

Besides the information exposed via on-page advertisement, the site does not share the data it collects about you with advertisers.

This means that a site either shares the data it has about you with marketing or advertising companies or allows those companies to collect info about you while on its site.

Your data is deleted before 1, 3, 6, or 18 months from the date of transmission have elapsed, respectively. Alternatively the data is never deleted.

This means that when an organization gets a phone call, letter, or other legally insufficient request for your data, they don’t comply because the law requires the government to take additional steps before getting your data. These organizations require the government to comply, at a minimum, with the legal process provided by the law before getting users’ data.

These organizations might provide your data to a government that asks for it without following the legally required process. They might just send a letter or make a phone call to the company to ask for your data.

Bolt On Approach

Privacy policies and Terms of Services are complex documents that encapsulate a lot of situation-specific detail. The Creative Commons approach is to reduce the complexity of sharing to a small number of licenses from which you choose. That simply doesn’t work here: there are too many edge-cases and specifics that each company has to put into their privacy policy. There can be no catch-all boiler-plate.

Here’s the solution: Have Privacy Icons “bolt on to” an existing privacy policy. When you add a Privacy Icon to your privacy policy it says the equivalent of “No matter what the rest of this privacy policy says, the following is true and preempts anything else in this document…”. The Privacy Icon makes an iron-clad guarantee about some portion of how a company treats your data. This method means that without ever having to delve into the details, everyday people can glance at the simple icons atop a privacy to know if and how their data is being used. At the same time, it gives companies the flexibility required to create comprehensive and meaningful policies.

Nobody Will Use the Bad Icons?

Some of the Privacy Icons have potentially poor normative value The question becomes, why would any company display such an icon in their privacy policy? Wouldn’t they instead opt to not use the Privacy Icons at all? This is the largest problem facing the Privacy Icons idea. Aren’t we are creating an incentive system whereby good companies/services will display Privacy Icons and bad companies/services will not?

First, because the target implementers of Privacy Icons are the second-tier sites, a privacy market-place has a chance of growing. Sites already try to differentiate base on privacy concerns, and these icons simply codify what they are already doing. Second, if Privacy Icons become widely adopted (and I think Mozilla is in a unique position to help make that happen) then the correlation of good companies using the icons and bad companies not using the icons becomes rather strong. The absence of Privacy Icons becomes a warning flag for when you go to sign up for new service.

Asking people to notice the absence of something may be asking the implausible. People don’t generally don’t notice an absence; just a presence. The solution hinges on Privacy Icons being machine readable and Firefox being used by nearly 500 million people world-wide. If Firefox encounters a privacy policy that doesn’t have Privacy Icons, we’ll can automatically display icon with the poorest guarantees during the sign-up phase when Firefox implements identity. This way, companies are incentivized to use Privacy Icons and thereby be bound to protecting your privacy appropriately. There are other options as well; like crowd-sourcing tentative Privacy Icons for a website whose privacy policy does have icons yet (and deferring to the company’s as soon as they put them up).

Get involved

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, and alternate constructive proposals are welcome. This is an alpha proposal for highlighting the parts of a site’s privacy policy you, as a user, should care about. For a more detailed set of thoughts on how these icons can be made enforceable, please read the original blog post. You can also get involved at the Drumbeat Privacy Icons project page.

A huge thanks to Mozilla’s Associate General Counsel, Julie Martin, who wrote the text descriptions for the Privacy Icons.

Related posts:

1. Is A Creative Commons for Privacy Possible?
2. The 7 Things That Matter Most in Privacy
3. Making Privacy Policies not Suck

If you sit and watch people use an iPhone there’s a mistake made often and reliably: They hit the home button when they mean to just go back to the app’s main screen. Going home has heavy consequences—to recover you’ve got to find that app again, sit through its splash screen, and fiddle the app to where it was before. The home button is the grunt-and-touch control of physical affordances. While iconically simple, the one bit of information it lets you indicate is too little.

Android and Palm’s WebOS have a different but related problem. Instead of providing a home button, they provide a “back” gesture/button in addition to a home button. At first this appears to be better with its strong allusion to the ubiquitous browsing metaphor. But back on the phone is unpredictable: it might mean return to the last screen, the last area, or even the home screen. You never know where back will take you. Worse, there is no undo to “back”; without “forward” back becomes a minefield of maybes and didn’t means.

Another subtle problem of “back” is that it adds cognitive overload: you have to choose which to use, back or home. Because the functionality of home and back overlap this adds a non-insignificant Hick’s law penalty. It makes it hard to form a lasting habit, and lasting habits are the hallmark of a good interface.

Solving Simplicity

The home button is too simple, and the back button’s mental model is too complex. What’s a better solution? We need a solution which is as simple and iconic as the iPhone’s home button, but provides a richer range of expression without the complexity of the Android/Palm back mechanism.

The joy of the iPhone’s home button is that no matter where you are, or what confusing app you’ve got into, you can always escape. On the other hand, users often want a way to return to an app’s home-screen, and avoid the sometimes befuddling inter-app navigation. That’s why people make the mistake of hitting the home button when that’s not what they want. They want to escape whatever hierarchy they’re in and get back to the top of the app, but the one-grunt button brings them to the phone’s home instead. So instead of trying to define the ambiguous back from Android, let’s extend the concept of home a bit to have two levels: phone-level home and app-level home. The first goes to the phone’s main screen, and the second returns to the app’s main screen. An escape lightly and escape fully.

The elegance of this system isn’t apparent, however, until you get the physical portion of the interface right. For instance, you could have two disparate buttons, but that wastes space, looks inelegant, and means you have to decide a priori over which button to move your finger. A better solution comes from camera shutter buttons.

Cameras have a two-state shutter button.

Camera shutter buttons have a two-stop action. Half-press them to lock focus and aperture settings, fully press them to take the picture. There’s a delightful tactile indent at the half-way mark so that your fingers know what’s going on. Let’s borrow this two-stop action for the home button. Press half-way to go to the app’s main screen, all the way to go to the phone’s main screen. If you need to fully escape mash the button. If you just want to head back to the main-screen of the app, tap lightly. You can easily convert a light-press into a heavy-press mid-action. It’s as naturally a mapping as you are going to get.

The two-state home button is a more subtle and humane solution than what I’ve seen, while still retaining the iconic simplicity of the current iOS solution. Personally, I hope an Android OEM decides to make it happen. Are they any better solutions? If you’ve got one, put it in the comments.

Related posts:

1. The Seduction of Simple: Hidden Complexity
2. Redesigning the iPhone’s Buttons
3. Track anything for $40?

Firefox is a project you never want to leave, and Mozilla is a company of which dreams are made. No matter where I travel in the world—from Rome to Tokyo—there are engaged Mozillian communities that immediately whirlwind me to a local pub to talk shop. I’ve been extremely lucky to participate in the world’s flagship open-source movement.

After helping to shape and ship the world’s leading browser to nearly half a billion people, there’s little one can do which seems meaningful. Where does one go? It’s been an action-packed time: I’ve started projects from Ubiquity to Jetpack; designed the Firefox Mobile concept and the original W3C geolocation specification; led projects like Firefox Panorama and given a TED talk; helped scale the open source design community; and even invented new forms of phishing. The scale of impact and ability to work in the open for a public-benefit company has been a life-defining experience. The last two and a half years I’ve been inspired by, and lucky enough to also inspire, the best and brightest in protecting and enhancing the open Web—arguably the most precious resources of our time.

Come January 1st, however, I’m leaving to found a new company. Massive Health.

Each of us has a unique ability. I want to use mine—the knowledge to make products which are disruptively easier and more enjoyable to use—to change people’s lives. Life-changing not in the sense of a new social website or better email, but in making people’s lives materially better by helping them get and stay healthy. Anyone that’s been sick, overweight, or had to deal with a doctor knows that health is a field in dire need of humane design.

Health is personal. My entire family – save me – is overweight. My mother is a well-known nurse practitioner and runs a hospice in San Francisco. She’s decisively smart and deals first-hand with the ramifications of the catastrophic affects of obesity on patient’s quality of life. Why then does she struggle with her own weight? It’s because people did not evolve to cope with the calorie-glut we live in now. Worse, the human brain famously doesn’t deal well with delayed gratification. The reason why weight is hard is because the feedback loop is too loose: The cake I eat today doesn’t materially change my body for the rest of today or tomorrow. It’s the incremental amount of cake I eat or don’t over weeks and months that makes me fit or fat. Our brain’s pleasure circuits lead us to optimize short-term happiness (cake!) over long-term healthiness (obesity, coronary heart disease, diabetes).

Think about it like driving a car. While you know it is bad for the environment to drive, that knowledge doesn’t really change your behavior. When the Prius introduced a large screen with instant and average MPG with a pretty graph, Toyota created a small breed of hypermilers and a much larger populace that changed routes and driving behavior to optimize that number. Toyota had tightened the feedback loop and pushed people to drive more green on a daily basis. In fact, people changed their behavior so much that when BMW did an experiment in making the instantaneous MPG readout even more prominent, BMW had to stop the study midway as the rate of accidents dramatically increased due to drivers trying to maximize their MPG instead of driving safely.

And it is not just weight. A couple years ago I was dating an entrepreneur who had type one diabetes. Through that relationship I got to know the condition and the deleterious state-of-the-art. She was silicon-valley technically savvy and despite leading her company to a successful exit, the best technology she had was still just writing down her blood glucose levels and squinting at a column of numbers in an attempt to gain insight into her condition. Even when she painstakingly put her information into a spreadsheet, there just wasn’t enough tool there to give her data actionable meaning. It was clear that a little bit of design could go a long way to giving people back control of their bodies and lives.

With health-care costs rising faster than inflation, a crisis is on the horizon. We need to apply cognitive psychology, the principles of design, and tighter feedback loops to our own health. Health care needs to have its design Renaissance, where products and services are redesigned to be responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.

Massive Health, we think, can help make that happen.

Related posts:

1. Massive Health: Raised Money, Spending On New Hires

To put it another way, the value of an idea is zero unless it can be communicated. Below is the video of my talk on How To Prototype And Influence People. Not only that, but the video also includes a demonstration of live rapid prototyping! Now is your chance to see me code and debug in front of seventy-five people. It’s like pair programming with an entire room.

For those who do not want to sit through the 30-minutes romp and my rapid prototyping, here are the principals of prototyping that I explain fully in talk:

1. Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it.
2. Aim to finish a usable artifact in a day. This helps you focus and scope.
3. You are making a touchable sketch. Do not fill in all the lines.
4. You are iterating your solution as well as your understanding of the problem.
5. Treat your code as throw-away, but be ready to refactor.
6. Borrow liberally
7. Tell a story with your prototype. It isn’t just a set of features.

The Rapid Prototype: A Zooming Twitter Streamer

The Slides

Related posts:

1. Enso Developer Prototype
2. Taskfox Prototype: Ubiquity in Firefox
3. Enso 2.0 Prototype

What if this wasn’t hypothetical?

From research in cognitive and behavioral psychology, we know how to perform inception. It’s easy. We need to understand the predictable failings of human memory and internalize its ramifications, otherwise our personal past, and hence our future, will be rewritten by the marketer. It’s your life experience, brought to you by Coca-Cola.

This was my keynote for the John Seely Brown Symposium at University of Michigan. The three previous keynote speakers were Danah Boyd, Brewster Kahle, and Lawrence Lessig. I was a bit nervous.

No related posts.

Getting started in user experience can be difficult. Our profession has an identity crisis. You need look no further than swarm of acronyms that we hide behind: CHI, HCI, UI, UE, UX, IA, ID, IxD, IxSD,… the list goes on.

Our identity crisis means learning our field is like trying to inhabit the mind of a multiple personality disorder sufferer. For an aspiring interaction designer, figuring it all out is daunting. For anyone, it’s daunting.

This is my top-five list of what I’ve found to be most important to do and master if you want to get into design.

1. The Hardest Part Of Software Is Culture. Get A Book On Negotiation.

The hardest part about creating software isn’t software. It’s people. Creating a killer interface is meaningless unless you can convince the rest of your team, client, or company that it is worth the investment. Your job as a user experience person is to cultivate a culture where good design has a leading voice at the table. If you cannot communicate, you will fail. If you can not convince, you will fail. If you cannot listen, you will fail.

Much of what I look for in a designer is the ability to balance, persuade, and negotiate without compromising on design. To design is to inspire participation. Unless we can let our ideas become other people’s ideas—get others to want to champion design as their own—we will not be successful.

Getting To Yes is an invaluable guide in design: learning the art of listening and negotiation.

Learn to make mockups, prototypes, and videos. Learn how to create at the right level of fidelity to convince others: sometimes a sketch will do, sometimes pixel-perfect mockups are what you’ll need, and sometimes only an interactive demo will suffice. Learn to talk in use-cases to product managers and business-speak to business development people. Get a book on negotiation. It will be your best friend.

The hardest part of your job isn’t being creative or brilliant; it’s communicating and culture.

2. Know Cognitive Psychology.

You are designing for people; you need to be well versed in the abilities and frailties of the human mind. There are fundamental truths about of what we are capable that runs deeper than culture and language. How much can you store in short-term memory? What are the properties of your locus of attention? A priori, how long does it take to choose an item in an ordered list? How does habituation affect design?

If you can’t answer these questions, you need to get yourself a copy of The Humane Interface, How We Decide, and The Resonant Interface.

When I’m hiring, I don’t look for credentials, I look for knowledge. If you don’t at least know what GOMs analysis is and the cognitive science behind why undo is better than a warning, I know that even if your designs are good, you don’t understand why. That’s dangerous. Your gut can often lead you in the right direction, but it can also make stupid and avoidable mistakes. Potentially worse, you won’t be able to communicate and convince others of your ideas because you can only argue with feelings.

Interface design is as much a science as it is an art. Know the science, else you are walking blindly through a minefield of harmful design.

3. Learn to Program, Even If Poorly.

2,500 years ago, a Greek writer told us something about creating software: Thucydides wrote, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” The optimal society is one that mixes scholar-warriors and warrior-scholars. The same is true for companies that schism their designers and engineers. The most important trait a team can have is empathy. Without it, the implementers will not care, and the designers will not be realistic. When companies complain of specs and code being “tossed over the fence”, a lack of empathy is to blame.

The most powerful tool for creating empathy as a designer is prototyping. It meets the rest of the team half-way, is the second most persuasive artifact (the first being a narrated video of the prototype), and gives you a sense of what’s hard and what’s easy to implement. Having thought through the edge-cases and being able to speak an engineer’s language gives you street cred. You don’t need to be a great coder, but you should at least be able to get your idea across in in HTML and Javascript.

To design is to inspire participation. To do that, you need to be respected. For that, you need to be a designer-coder.

4. Create, Create, Create.

Great designers do design all of the time. They get mad in an elevator when the buttons are in a confusion order, or when the buttons on a ATM are incorrectly labeled. Then they take a picture and blog about it. If you don’t love creating and designing, you shouldn’t be in the field. You’ll need thousands of hours of practice to rise to the top of your game. In the end, you are designing for people so you need to intimately know people, and people are messy.

If you don’t have dozens of little projects you’ve created, learned from, and even discarded, you are doing it wrong.

5. Study Graphic Design.

I used to be a hard-nosed interaction designer, and eschewed visual design in favor of experience design. While it is true that getting interaction right requires a deeper understanding of human psychology, a read through Emotional Design shows that looks matter. Looks affect usability. Looks are just one aspect of designing for emotional beings—you need to think about the whole sensory experience of an object, from sound to touch—but looks are often the most immediatly apparent.

Study typography, study the Swiss grid system, learn how to make your designs pop even if it means being heavily inspired by others’ style in the beginning.

You are in the business of selling ideas. Unfortunately, an ugly mockup of a brilliant idea is often overlooked for a beautiful mockup of a derivative idea. To compete, you need to learn how to be an adequate graphic designer.

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