archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Conflict is a natural part of human experience. It’s something we encounter every day on levels small and large, and learn to address. And conflict appears at every level of a user experience, from business goals and strategy, user needs, concept and mental models, to task flows, screen-based interactions, terminology, and visual design choices.

Yet many of our user experience practices and approaches do not consider conflict adequately, or at all. User experience design assumptions, artifacts, habits of communication, and working practices combine to bypass adequate consideration of conflict. The result is neglect of conflict as an area of investigation, discussion, and design responsibility. It becomes something we consider only in passing, generally by noting an order of priority for the personas associated with an evolving design

Minimizing conflict may seem pragmatic: exploring conflict makes many people nervous, and stakeholders may not react well unless properly prepared. But this view misses the significance of conflict. Conflict is a pointer to something people care about, pay attention to, need, want, or think is important in some way.

In the same way that smoke equals fire, conflict equals interest, and interest should be a focus for design.

Social Architectures, Experiences, and Environments
Conflict is an especially important area for User experience design to consider now, thanks to the emerging landscape of social media. Social networks, participatory architectures, business and community models dependent on co-creation of content, and collaborative media formats all emphasize social dynamics. These dynamics inevitably include elements of conflict. The continued growth of sharing, networks, interconnections, and complex relationships linking individuals and groups on-line will only increase the role and significance of conflict for successful user experience efforts.

Plainly, if we aim to design for user experiences now and in the future, we must account for conflict. In terms of the evolution of user experience design, the consideration of conflict marks another step in the continued maturation of the field. We might call design approaches that take conflict into account conflict-aware design.

Conflict-aware Design In Practice
Conflict-aware design offers substantial value for designers, stake holders, users – all interested parties, really – with little impact on timelines, costs, approaches, or existing methods. Conflict is simply another aspect of the user experience to explore and understand, share analysis of with decision makers, and direct design solutions to address.

Conflict-aware design builds on and enhances existing practices, adding a layer of context at each stage of the design cycle concerned with the specific conflicts that will impact the user experience. No specialized design documents or techniques are required.

The second part of this essay will consider how common user experience activities and artifacts can be adapted for conflict-aware design.

In an earlier posting titled Goal Based Information Retrieval, I reviewed four modes of information retrieval that my team identified as addressing user goals in a broader and more effective fashion than the simple query and response searching common today.

In this follow-up, I’ll share a set of 10 potentially reusable information retrieval patterns that describe the ways users combine and switch modes to meet goals: Each pattern is assembled from combinations of the same four modes. We found these patterns while analyzing and interpreting user research on the goals and behaviors of a wide variety of users active within a large information environment. This environment provides complex financial services content and capabilities through a product-based user experience that requires a costly subscription. This particular set of patterns emerged from a mix of user research gathered using ethnography, contextual analysis, cognitive walkthrough, and heuristics review, in addition to straight forward interviews with users.

The four modes we found for our users were: seeking, visiting stable destinations, monitoring, and receiving delivered information (full definitions available in the original article). Each mode emphasizes a different combination of lower or higher levels of user activity to obtain information, and greater or lesser stability of the settings users encounter.

The patterns identify consistent combinations and sequences of the information retrieval modes that users employ while undertaking goals.

We’ve suggested names to capture the flavor for the ten patterns we found:

• Seeker
• Regular Customer
• Explorer
• Initial Subscriber
• Vigilant Subscriber
• Skydiver
• Watchdog
• Returned Expatriate
• Vigilant Customer
• Curious Subscriber

To make the patterns easier to understand, the illustrations and descriptions below show the different modes that make up each pattern.
Seeker, Regular Customer, Explorer Patterns

Seeker
The Seeker is looking for something. Once found, the Seeker goes elsewhere to accomplish other goals.

Regular Customer
The Regular Customer visits the same destination(s) consistently for the same reasons. Then the Regular Customer realizes they can save the time and effort of visiting, and switches modes to have the things they need delivered directly to them.

Explorer
The Explorer is learning about a new (or changed) environment; exploring it’s structure, contents, laws, etc. The Explorer may do this for their own purposes, or for others.

Initial Subscriber, Vigilant Subscriber Patterns

Initial Subscriber
The Initial Subscriber seeks what is needed, finds the things needed, goes to their location(s), and then chooses to have these things delivered to allow them to seek other things.

Vigilant Subscriber
The Vigilant Subscriber makes effective use of monitoring and delivery, followed up with visitation of destinations, to ensure they do not miss out on anything that might be useful to them within the environment.

Skydiver, Watchdog, Returned Expatriate Patterns

Skydiver
The Skydiver makes a bold entrance from outside the environment, and lands precisely on target.

Watchdog
The Watchdog first finds things, and then places them under careful watch.

Returned Expatriate
The Returned Expatriate was away, and is back again. They begin by revisiting known places, then seek out what has changed, monitor changes for a while, and eventually begin to have valuable things delivered.

Vigilant Customer, Curious Subscriber Patterns

Vigilant Customer
The Vigilant Customer comes by often, but wants to be sure, and so monitors things from afar for a while before deciding delivery is more effective.

Curious Subscriber
The Curious Subscriber has things delivered regularly, but visits all the same to see what else may be available. And just to be sure, they seek out the things they suspect are here, but cannot see immediately.

Reusing Modes and Patterns
Reuse is rare in the realm of user experience and information architecture. The information retrieval modes we identified are independent of user role, persona, or user type. As a result, the patterns assembled from those modes are also independent of the same contextual factors. Since the modes and patterns are not tied to specific features, functionality, or information structures, this would seem to indicate that modes and patterns may resuable in different environments for user populations pursuing similar root goals.

I hope mode-based patterns like these offer some level of reusability. To that end, I am curious about where and how they help define information retrieval experiences for other types of users and other domains.

If you use them, send me a note about where, when, and how.

In an earlier post on creating Goal Based Information Retrieval Experiences, I offered a list of fundamental user goals that underlays needs and usage of four suggested information retrieval modes. In this post, I’ll share the approach employed to discover the fundamental goals of the users in our environment, with the aim of offering it as one way of understanding goals relevant for other types of environments and user experience architectures.

Since the root user goals we identified are potentially applicable to other environments and contexts, I’ll share the definitions behind the full set of root goals we discovered. Together, the approach and definitions should help demonstrate how capture a systematic and also holistic view of what users have need to accomplish when undertaking information retrieval tasks more complex than searching.

Finally, addressing the perspective of strategic design and user experience methodology, framing broad user goals well offers strong footing for addressing business perspectives, and engaging business audiences in productive discussions on the priority of capabilities and the functionality of the user experience.

Discovering Root Goals
Beginning with raw goals gathered via a mixed palette of discovery and user research (interviews, task analysis, contextual inquiry, or other qualitative insight methods) incorporated into the project, we first called out the different types or objects of information users identified.

Our starting lists of raw user goals or needs looked something like this (though it was considerably larger, and more varied):

• Read operating guidelines
• Review installation instructions
• Scan technical support requests
• Review technical specifications

Identifying the objects in this set is not difficult: technical specifications, operating guidelines, installation instructions, and support requests. The activity verbs are also easy to spot:

• read
• scan
• review

We then compared the activity verbs for similarity and differences, and refined these raw goals into a root goal of “review” that could apply to any of the objects users named.
Recombining the root goal with various objects yields a set of concrete goals:

• Review operating guidelines
• Review installation instructions
• Review technical specifications
• Review technical support requests

This approach is more art than science, but is systematic, and is independent of context and format.

Here’s an illustration of the process.

Discovering Root Goals

Final Root Goals For Our Environment
These are the definitions we established for the root goals we found for all our different types of users. [I haven’t included the objects of the goals, or the concrete goals.]

• To Assess means to make a judgement or decision about, considering relevant factors
• To Compare means to review the similarities and differences of two or more examples of the same type of thing by looking at them in detail
• To Find means to learn the location and status of
• To Identify means to distinguish by the use of specific criteria
• To Locate means to become aware of where and how a thing may be found, and / or contacted. Locate and find are similar, so likely reflect differing but similar usages and contexts in the minds of users
• To Monitor means to track the status and location of
• To Obtain means to acquire and retain for other purposes
• To Participate means to be present and recognized
• To Review means to examine in detail
• To Save means to store and keep
• To See means to be presented with in a manner that makes assumed relationships or characteristics apparent
• To Understand means to consider all available points of view or sources of information on a topic / item / situation, and formulate an opinion and frame of reference for one’s own purposes.

Some example concrete goals for an user experience that addresses travel planning could include:

• Find hotels
• Review hotel accommodations
• Save travel itineraries
• Compare vacation packages
• See optional excursions offered by a hotel
• Identify full-service or all-inclusive resorts
• Locate the operators of scuba diving excursions
• Monitor the price of airline tickets to Sardinia
• Understand how to plan and purchase vacations
• Assess the cost and value of a vacation package

Symmetry and Mental Models
We found the concept of a root goal insightful for helping to design user experience architectures because it is independent of particular user roles, information types, and usage contexts. Being root elements, they point at commonalities rather than differences, and so can help guide the definition of mental models that span user groups, or allow the reuse of an information architecture element such as a navigation component, task flow, or screen layout.

Building numerous concrete goals that are variations on a smaller set of common root goals allows the mental model for the environment to achieve a greater degree of consistency and predictability (we hope – we’ll see what the usability and evaluations bring back). This consistency helps further efforts toward symmetry throughout the information architecture. While most information architects unconsciously reach for symmetry in user experiences by designing repeated elements such as common labeling, rules for layout, and component systems of features and functionality – symmetry is something we should make more conscious efforts to encourage both within environments and across environments.

Speaking To the Business: Goal-based Prioritization of Capabilities and Functionality
With solid root goals and common information objects, it’s possible to build up a simple and consistent grammar that outlines the set of possible concrete goals across user types. This set of goals is a good basis for engaging business stakeholders in choosing the right set of priorities to guide design and build efforts. Systematically articulated goals allow business audiences a comfortable and neutral basis for prioritizing the capabilities the environment will offer users. Of course, choices of capability directly affect costs, effort levels, design and build timelines, and all the other tangible aspects of a user experience. Reference priorities can also help guide longer-term investment and strategy decisions.

In two earlier posts about Starbucks and product metadata, I mentioned the strange sensation of a product experience overwhelmed by packaging – specifically the metadata aspects of the packaging. Now I’d like to share two more examples of packaging burdened with metadata cruft. The first shows an awkward translation that is an attempt to smooth a significant semantic transition or boundary, one created by a high degree of relative cultural and conceptual distance between Dutch and English food categories. The second shows a phenomenon I call brand subsumption. These examples of translation and brand subsumption broaden the original problem into one of inconsistency and misalignment with the overall experience. Starbucks has built an empire on the repeatable, predictable customer experience, and so this inconsistency impacts the Starbucks brand. [At least for those who read the packaging for their food…]

In the first example, Starbucks uses a marketing dictionary to transform stroopwafels into ‘Dutch Caramel Wafers’ that are ‘rich and caramelly-sweet’. I can understand the inclination to change the product name; stroopwafel is a Dutch word that’s likely outside the awareness of most Starbucks customers. And it’s certainly further away in terms of cultural distance than ‘madeleine’. But the resulting translation is awkward because it addresses a very narrow point of view: It’s only if you’ve forgotten the proper Dutch word while trying to explain the concept of a stroopwafel that you’ll need to fall back on a label that reads “Dutch caramel wafer”.

Caramel Wafers Label:

Example two is a branding mashup, involving Walkers Short Bread Cookies and Starbucks. In addition to the standard labeling from the madeleines, we’re now told the maker, the country of origin, and when the maker was established, for a total of six pieces of information. The new elements exactly match the standard branding of most Walkers merchandise. I call this phenomenon brand subsumption, when one brand subsumes another without breaking it down. The Walkers brand arguably has greater international recognition and a longer history than Starbucks, so I imagine the deal bringing their ‘delectably buttery’ cookies to Starbucks counters everywhere required this unusual compromise. The resulting experience is an uneven hybrid; not Walkers, not Starbucks.

Walkers Package Label:

Looking at all three products together, it’s clear the new product family attached to both packages, ‘International Treats’, contributes to the brand impact by introducing a puzzling inconsistency. Compare the original item that started us on this path – madeleines, designated ‘Traditional Favorites’ – with the Dutch and Scottish products labeled ‘International’. Labeling the madeleines French but not international makes no sense, until you turn over the packages: the stroopwafels are made in the Netherlands, the shortbread cookies are made in Scotland, and the madeleines are made in the US. The same product label on one package denotes a cultural category for food items, but on other packages defines the manufacturing location. The product family labels are used for different purposes, which belies their consistent presentation context across products, via similar style, layout, structure, colors, fonts, etc.

Altogether, the combination of metadata quantity, labeling inconsistency, and branding strategies of translation and subsumption, is unexpected from Starbucks – a company built on consistent customer experiences.

A few months ago, I put up a posted called Tagging Comes To Starbucks, in which I attempted to make the point that it’s bizarre when a product’s metadata *overwhelms the experience of the product itself in it’s customary real world setting*.
My example was the metadata encrusted packaging of madeleines – “petite french cakes…” – at Starbucks. Like the famous toothpick instructions Douglas Adams immortalized in So Long and Thanks For All The Fish, this is a strong discontinuity of experience (though not necessarily one indicating things gone awry at the core of civilization) that implies new cognitive / perceptual phenomenon.
New experiences and frames of reference usually lack descriptive vocabulary, which explains why I can’t pin this down neatly in words. But this is surely something we can expect to encounter more in a future populated with findable things called spimes.
The balance hasn’t shifted so far that we’re living inside Baudrillard’s ‘desert of the real’, but we are getting closer with each additional layer of simulation, abstraction, and metadata applied to real situations and objects.
After all it is impossible to interact (smell, touch, taste…) directly with these very ordinary pastries without experiencing the intervening layers of metadata packaging.
Madeleines in situ:

The labeling:

From SLATFATF: “It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization I could live in and stay sane.” ~ Wonko the Sane

Related posts:

Over at uiGarden.net Don Norman clarified some of his ideas regarding Activity Centered Design originally published in the summer of 2005.

I’d like to be comfortable saying that I’m with Don in spirit while disagreeing on some of the particulars, but I’ve read both the original essay and the clarifications twice, and the ideas and the messages are still too raw to support proper reactions or to fully digest. Maybe Don’s working on a new book, and this is interim thinking?

That might explain why the contrast between Norman’s two recent pieces and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things – which also is a sort of design philosophy / manifesto – is so dramatic. Halfway through Shaping Things, I’m left – as I usually am when reading Sterling’s work – feeling envious that I wasn’t gifted the same way.

Sterling is speaking at ETech, which this year focuses on The Attention Economy. No surprises with this matchup, given that Sterling’s devoted a whole book – Distraction – to some of the same ideas proponents of the Attention Economy advocate we use as references when designing the future.

Amazon is offering new Text Stats on “Readability” and “Complexity”, and a Concordance feature, both part of their comprehensive effort to translate the physical book[store] experience into the online medium. The new features build on existing capabilities such as Look Inside, Wishlists, Recommendations, Editorial and Customer Reviews, Citations, and Better Together to create a comprehensive book buying experience. In the same way that bookstores include kiosks to allow customers access metadata and other information on the books for sale in the immediate environment, Amazon is offering on-line capabilities that simulate many of the activities of book buyers in a bookstore, such as checking the table of contents and indexes, flipping through a book to read passages, or look at select pages.

The new features appear on product pages for books, as well as other kinds of works. [Try this intro to FRBR for a look at the conceptual hierarchy differentiating works from items, and it’s implications for common user tasks like finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining items.]

Text Stats may be experimental, but it’s hard to feel comfortable with their definition of complexity, which is: “A word is considered “complex” if it has three or more syllables.” To point out the obvious, English includes plenty of simple three syllable words – like “banana” – and some very complex one syllable words – “time” “thought” and “self” for example.

The Text Stats on Readability seem a bit better thought through. That’s natural, given their grounding in research done outside Amazon’s walls. But with clear evidence that US education standards vary considerably across states and even individual districts, and also evidence that those standards change over time, I have to question the value of Readability stats long term. I suppose that isn’t point…

The Concordance feature is easier to appreciate; perhaps it doesn’t attempt to interperet or provide meaning. It simply presents the raw statistical data on word frequencies, and allows you to do the interpretation. Amazon links each word in the concordance to a search results page listing the individual occurances of the word in the text, which is useful, and then further links the individual occruance listings to the location within the text.

With this strong and growing mix of features, Amazon both translates the bookstore experience on-line, and also augments that experience with capabilities available only in an information environment. The question is whether Amazon will continue to expand the capabilities it offers for book buying under the basic mental model of “being in a bookstore”, or if a new direction is ahead?

Here’s a screenshot of the Text Stats for DJ Spooky’s Rhythm Science.

Text Stats:

Here’s a screen shot of the Concordance feature.

Concordance:

Over at 37Signals, just before the new year started, David made the prediction that by the end of 2006, “Enterprise will follow legacy to become a common insult among software creators and users.”

I think this is already the case, unless the people you’re talking to earn their bread and butter by doing something related to enterprise software – but there’s interesting ground here that I’d like to explore for a bit. On the 37signals site there were some good comments to Dave’s posting – from developers, entrepreneurs, and quite a few other perspectives – but no one made the connection to Conway’s Law, from Melvin Conway’s “How Do Committees Invent?”, which I’ll quote here:
“…organizations which design systems… are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

A good example of Conway’s Law in action is PowerPoint. As Edward Tufte says in Metaphors For Presentations: Conway’s Law Meets PowerPoint,”The metaphor of PowerPoint is the software corporation itself.” [Aside: As a hard-working consultant who spends *waaaayyy* too much time creating presentations to use as discussion vehicles when instead a direct conversation between relevant parties is by far the best use of everyone’s time and money, I can’t say enough good things about Tufte’s campaign to remind the business world how to communicate clearly, by avoiding PowerPoint unless it’s appropriate…]

It’s no surprise then that ‘enterprise software’ as it is installed and configured in many large corporations is generally massive, anonymous, byzantine in structure and workings, indifferent or hostile to individual needs, offensively neutered in all aspects of it’s user experience, and often changed arbitrarily to align with a power calculus determined by a select few who operate at great remove from the majority of the people who use the environment on a daily basis. After all, that is the nature of communication in many large (and quite a few small and medium sized) corporations.

That enterprise software is bad – excruciatingly bad, if you’ve tried to enter expenses using a generic installation of PeopleSoft or Siebel – is hardly news. But it is interesting that David from 37Signals, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path, Jared Spool of UIE, and many others who are less visible but still important in directing the evolution of the Internet, would all say in one form or another that they see enterprise software as on the outs.

It’s interesting because I think it highlights a shift in the realm in which the Web community sees itself as relevant. If there were ever a potential enterprise platform, it is the Web – the new Web, Web 2.0, whatever you want to call the emerging information environment that is global, ubiquitous, semantically integrated, socially informed and / or collaborative, architected to provide readily consumable services, etc. But aside from occasional bouts of megalomania, and potential success stories like Salesforce.com, the enterprise realm has been pro-forma outside the boundaries of the possible – until now…

Will enterprise software die? Not right away, and not totally. Remember, there’s A LOT of big iron happily humming away like WOPR in data centers all over the world that will run the enterprise apps we all know and detest for many years to come. More important, let’s keep in mind that enterprise software is really just one part (the installable and configurable software part) of what is easiest to describe as a way of doing things. It’s a reflection of a command and control, hierarchical viewpoint on how to achieve business goals through standardization. That way of doing things comes from a way of thinking. Which comes from a type of organization that will (of necessity?) be with us for a long time.

But the new stuff, the things that new school CIOs and CTOs will commit to, will likely be very different in origin, manner of working, user experience, fundamental assumptions, and capability. It will come from different kinds of organizations; leaner and more agile multi-disciplinary systems and environment design consortiums or aggregates, perhaps. This matches well with some of Jared Spool’s observations on the nature of organizations that create good designs, from his keynote address at UI 10 last fall.

Closing the circle, Conway confirms what these creators will look like; “Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.”

Proving that a well-developed sense of humor is required for success in product design — especially for Lotus Notes — Mary Beth Raven, who leads the design team for the next version of Lotus Notes, recently posted a rather funny comment in reply to my suggestion that the Notes Design team offer customers a choice of unpleasant but related user experience themes. She used this as the occasion to invite all members of the community of Notes to users to register as volunteers for usability testing.
I’ve made three postings to date specifically discussing the Notes user experience: Lotus Notes User Experience = Disease, Mental Models, Resilience, and Lotus Notes, and Better UI Tops Notes Users’ Wish Lists. I’m not sure which of these prompted Mary Beth to reach out, but I’m glad she did, because doing so is smart business on two levels. At the first level, Mary Beth plainly understands that while vocal critics may seem daunting to user experience designers, product managers, and business owners, engaging these critics in fact presents design teams with opportunities to build strong connections to users and gather valuable feedback at the same time. What better way is there to show the strategic value of user research?
I learned this at first hand while working on a redesign of the flagship web presence of a large software firm several years ago. Some of the most insightful and useful feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the user experiences I was responsible for came from ‘disgruntled’ customers. The user research I was doing on site structures, navigation paths, and user goals established a channel that allowed unhappy (and happy) customers to communicate about a broad range of their experiences with PTC products and services in a more complete way than by simply buying a competing product, or renewing an existing software license.
Based on these and other experiences building user research programs, I suggest that product managers, user research leads, and user experience designers first collaborate to define a user research strategy, and then define and create a simple but effective user research infrastructure (like registration gateways to volunteer databases, community / program identifiers and incentives, contact management tools, specific personas that technical and customer support teams can learn to recognize and recruit at all stages of the customer lifecycle, etc.) that will support the creation of channels to users throughout the design cycle.
At the second level, it allows the Notes team to directly explore collaboration methods, products, and technologies related to the very competitive collaboration suite / integrated electronic workspace / office productivity markets in which IBM, Microsoft, and several other giant firms are looking to secure dominant positions in the new culture of collaboration. [Note: I’ve posted a few times on Microsoft products as well – Backwards Goals: MS Office Results Oriented UI, and Microsoft’s Philosophy On Information Architecture.]
Members of the community of Lotus Notes users can register as volunteers for usability tests during the design of the next version of Notes at this URL: https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/usentry.nsf/register?openform.

Related posts:

In the overview of the new “results oriented” UI planned for MS Office 12, our friends in Redmond offer:
“The overriding design goal for the new UI is to deliver a user interface that enables users to be more successful finding and using the advanced features of Microsoft Office. An additional important design goal was to preserve an uncluttered workspace that reduces distraction for users so that they can spend more time and energy focused on their work.”
Let me get that straight. Your first goal is to make it easier for me to find and use advanced features that the vast majority of people employ rarely if ever, and didn’t need in the first place?
And something else that was also important – but not as important as access to all those shiny advanced features – was to make the workspace uncluttered and allow me to focus on my work?
Isn’t that… backwards?

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