Thoughts on "What great design can do for data"

A founder of the design firm Fjord wrote an insightful article for Fortune about design helping companies make sense of data. From the article:

Designers know how to take complex or disparate information and make it tangible, understandable, and importantly, more human. ...

Technologists on the other hand, tend to try to structure data in a flexible way. They analyze it, dashboard it, and cross-reference it to make it more efficient and intelligent.

Both approaches are needed. The data needs to be flexible enough to enable users to manipulate it to find the insights they seek.

Design of the data display and controls to manipulate data need to be clear enough to enable people to work with what they see. From the article:

Here are some ways that design can help companies make sense of their data and identify opportunities to turn it into a benefit for their customers:

• Use data to guide, not dictate: Use data to build a backdrop of understanding and learning, but don't let data trump creative inspiration or minimize the importance of leaps of faith.
• Obsess with your customers: Extend the data insights and value from your organization to your customers.
• Mess up your data: We live in a messy world. How can you make your pure data fit a messy world? Use design to make it personal and emotional, and tell stories.
• Instead of understanding data only, make sure you understand people: You're planning to hire another data scientist to make sense of the growing data mountain you've got? How about hiring a psychologist instead?
• Major on elegance and simplicity: The science of data can be complex, abstract, and ugly. Design will help you simplify and bring clarity. Good design can also present data in elegant and beautiful ways, drawing people in where they were previously turned off.
• Take creative leaps of faith: A creative process that uses intuition and imagination can give you innovations that data alone can't provide. This is crucial if you want to reimagine your business or invent something new.

This list speaks to the fact that data, even well-designed data, needs to have an editorial or curatorial layer that either guides people to the stories that are relevant to them, or otherwise helps to highlight the significance. Getting this right involves deep understanding of what the data can show, knowing who is likely to be interested in what, and using interface and information design to make sense of the display.

User experience for software and service updates

Changes to the things we use every day affect us and how we feel about the organizations that push change on us. Every time we decide to allow an update or buy a new release, we are taking a leap of faith. Sometimes those leaps are rewarded, and sometimes they are not.

Regardless, our time is required to relearn, and this investment is not acknowledged or appreciated. I've read that brand loyalty is at an all-time low. People are happy to try new restaurants and services with a coupon from Groupon, but vendors report that coupon use is not translating into repeat business. I don't know statistics about mobile and computing software specifically, but based on my extremely limited and unscientific example of myself I can only imagine that maintaining a positive customer experience after purchase is valuable.

Four tips for better software update experiences:

• Show me what I can expect. Let me preview what will change visually, not in a readme file after the fact. Google is doing this well with its beta interfaces.


• Let me choose. Give me a choice to retain an old interface. Twitter, Yahoo!, and Google have all allowed users the choice between new beta interfaces and the familiar old ones, even if eventually these choices were taken away.

• The UI should always be a high priority. I've seen more beautiful launches than I can count that degrade with the second release. It's great that the UI/UX were stunning at first, but if feature fixes and additions compromise the UI in subsequent rounds, the initial effort truly was for naught.


• Assume people will hate it. Your organization may think that the update is great and fixes all kinds of issues, but chances are users aren't aware of the problems; they're only aware of the change. If you keep in mind that people will hate the update, it's more likely that changes will be made in a way that has less negative impact on consumers – and communications will be less about what the organization thinks is better, and more about what people can expect.

Where's this coming from?
Recently, I downloaded an update for my Android mobile phone. I didn't think about it much before doing it. I saw the prompt, figured I had enough connection strength and time for the update, pushed the button and put the phone back in my bag.

image source: http://gadgetian.com/5770/verizon-moto-
droid-pro-software-update/

Taking a glance later, it was immediately clear that the interface had changed. One of my favorite things about the phone was the lovely graphic that reflects the time of day. Now, instead of late afternoon sunlight, I saw a generic blue screen and the time. Sigh. A few taps and I saw that the entire black-background, high-contrast interface had been brightened, buttons outlined with white hairlines, more prompts added. Clearly someone was trying to improve something, but even though I am usually on the designer's side in this situation, I was just annoyed that things had changed, that the changes appeared to be for the worse, and that I hadn't been warned. The thought crossed my mind that I could change to another carrier with another phone with a more appealing interface. If I have to adapt, I might as well adapt to something else.

No one likes change, even when it's for the best; it takes time and reflection to realize and appreciate change. A few years ago, I facilitated a working session for an organization to help them decide what values were important to convey as part of a new visual identity. In the session, there was a lot of excitement about the future for the group and its ability to be thought of as cutting-edge. When it came time to review logos that had been designed to reflect the key adjectives the organization wanted to portray, the same group overwhelmingly favored the identity that was least changed and most conservative. Asked to explain their choice, they cited the history of the organization and the need to appear consistent – the opposite of what they previously wanted to convey.

Consumer products and services are user experience-crazy right now, with everyone across all levels of organizations getting that experience matters. (Thanks, Steve!) Despite the desire to create products and services that people love, the software world manages product changes extremely poorly. The phone is one recent example; Netflix's proposed service changes are another. I know graphic designers who are running an operating system and software from 2005 because they are so afraid of the interface changes and the time needed to remaster the software with each release.

Helping customers manage software update changes is a seemingly small way organizations can go beyond saying customers matter and show customers that they matter.

User scenarios beyond the web

User scenarios have been widely adopted by web designers as a useful tool for helping ensure sites provide what visitors need and expect. Less well-known is that they are also a great tool for ensuring offline communications do the same.

Recently I was in Sears. They have created central checkout kiosks at my local store (Cambridge, MA) which is a step forward, because previously, it was impossible to find a cash register and a salesperson at the same time. Now there's a large checkout hub at the exit/entrance to the connecting mall. When I entered the store I came from downstairs – not from the mall. I did not pass a kiosk. I shopped and could not find where to pay. I looked for signs, and found this (pardon the fuzzy, surreptitiously shot image).



The sign points to a wall. There's no pay kiosk on either side of the wall.

This could be blamed on a number of things, but for the sake of this post I'm going to pin it on a lack of user scenarios when the store was planning the pay kiosks. If, when someone in Sears corporate offices was thinking about or planning the kiosks, the context of shoppers making purchases came up, hopefully they would have realized that finding where to pay is just one part of a flow that ends with paying – that paying is a part of a larger scenario.

A few years ago, we worked with the marketing team at Sloan Executive Education. They run programs that are attended by professionals from all over the world. Aware that there was a flow of information, and that it needed to be consistent to ensure that expectations were met, we mapped out scenarios related to how potential participants found out about the programs, registered, made travel plans and arrived at the program. After listing all the recipient types and situations, we could evaluate the communications and see where information needed to be changed, added or made more consistent.

There are hybrid online/offline situations that call for scenarios as well. Hospitals can have complex and inconsistent technical setups that send healthcare workers back and forth between paper and electronic files. Working with a client who provides software to streamline hospital discharge, we needed to design a fax form that would literally connect paper and digital correspondence. Care facilities received faxes from hospitals to let them know there was a potential patient for them. Included in the fax was a unique code that, when entered on a website, would provide the patient details and acceptance information. We used scenarios that captured the full flow of contact – online and offline. Because we looked beyond the web interactions we were able to design a complete system that worked, not just a form or site that only addressed part of the situation.