presumptive design or cutting the looking glass cake

Presumptive Design or Cutting the Looking-glass Cake:

Capturing User Requirements Through Rapid Prototyping

Leo Frishberg Product Design Manager

Intel Corporation SAO TechIgnite 2.0

March 2012

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Presentation Notes

Leo Frishberg 30 + years designing stuff 20 + years in sw development 15+ years in user experience 2 months at current job

“You don’t know how to manage Looking-glass cakes,” the Unicorn remarked. “Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.”

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From Lewis Caroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” Talk inspired by Marty Nelson’s SAO TechIgnite V1.0 talk: Software is Massless – creating ecstatic experiences

March 2007 UCLA Information Studies 279, Information Architecture: Theory and Practice

Crafting World Class User Experiences

Imagine you are a carpenter at SeaTac… – … and you are now responsible for testing counter-terrorism plans

Imagine you are a telephone sub-station technician… – …and you are now responsible for managing 500 television channels

Imagine you are an 85 year old planning a world cruise… – …and your browser is your booking agent

Imagine you need to ship 15 truck loads of parts… – …in the next ten minutes and you don’t have a shipping department

Imagine you are an electronic engineer debugging a circuit...

– ...and you need to find the one wrong bit out of 8GB of data

Frishberg SAO TechIgnite 2.0 3 March 2012

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We all want our products to be embraced But how to know what to do when you aren’t the audience?


The Typical User Experience Design Cycle

Research to find out what users need

Analyze the research to determine what you learned

Build the product from your analysis

Rinse, Repeat


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In the typical cycle we take time up front to research and understand our users’ needs before building stuff. Otherwise, how would we know how to start?


The Presumptive Design Cycle

Build your best guess of what users want

Find out what they think about it

Analyze what you learned

Rinse, Repeat


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The Presumptive Design cycle turns things just 60 degrees: we start by building stuff and then putting that into users’ hands as soon as possible. It’s a really “agile” process – you build stuff and then check it out with the real users. Oddly, the agile community tends to dismiss these upfront efforts as “Big Design” or unfounded requirements.


A Constellation of Design Research Tools


1 day > 1 Month

Intimate User Engagement

No User Engagement Activity Analysis

Affinity Diagrams

Competitive Product Survey

Historical Analysis

A Day in the Life

Behavioral Archaeology

Personal Inventory

Fly on the Wall

Guided Tours Time-lapse Video

Card Sort Paper Prototyping

Scenarios

Long-range Forecasts

Extreme User Interviews

Contextual Inquiry In Situ Observation

Shadowing

Business Analysis

Rapid Prototyping

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Presentation Notes

That’s because Agile was designed to solve a software development problem. Thankfully, the UX community has been using Agile methods for years.


A Constellation of Design Research Tools

7 March 2012 Frishberg SAO TechIgnite 2.0

1 day > 1 Month

Intimate User Engagement

No User Engagement Activity Analysis

Affinity Diagrams

Competitive Product Survey

Historical Analysis

A Day in the Life

Behavioral Archaeology

Personal Inventory

Fly on the Wall

Guided Tours Time-lapse Video

Card Sort Paper Prototyping

Scenarios

Long-range Forecasts

Extreme User Interviews

Contextual Inquiry In Situ Observation

Shadowing

Business Analysis

Rapid Prototyping Presumptive Design

Presenter

Presentation Notes

Presumptive design is one of the fastest methods of identifying the key underlying expectations and needs of your target users It’s really cool because it doesn’t require much more than some office supplies, some designers, good listeners and an expert or two in whatever system you’re trying to build. Oh…and users.


Top 5 Principles of Presumptive Design

Design for failure

Create, discover, analyze

Make assumptions explicit

Iterate, iterate, iterate

The faster you go, the sooner you know

Have fun! Frishberg SAO TechIgnite 2.0 8 March 2012

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These principles sound agile like, right? Presumptive design is really fun because we get to put our best ideas out there, in front of users, almost as soon as the project is conceived of. No messy upfront requirements definition, no fussy wireframes and content definition. Just Do It!


Design for Failure


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As opposed to the real product, during Presumptive Design research we want the artifact to fail because through failure we learn. The likelihood of getting it right without ever having talked to a user is so small, how could we possibly be so lucky? The thing is going to fail.


Create, discover, analyze


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It’s a little bit of a fib to say we don’t know anything, right? We know what our customers want – we’ve been hearing their concerns for years – let’s just go build it already Or We have great ideas that we’ve always wanted in our products, let’s get ‘em in front of our customers!


Make assumptions explicit


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We’ll never discover the next big thing by talking to our customers – they only know what already exists – besides we’re engineers! We’re designers! We’re paid to make things up! Let’s show those users what we’re made of! A funny thing happens, though, as soon as you try and make something to show to a customer: you have to make all sorts of assumptions. Assumptions you might not even know you’ve made until your user points them out to you.



Iterate, iterate, iterate

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You continue to work it until You run out of time You run out of energy You run out of money This is the Agile way, of course, but it turns out, with Presumptive Design Research, those turns of the crank happen really really fast – like…you could have discovered everything you need to know inside a week.


The faster you go, the sooner you know


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And speed is what you’re looking for, because the sooner you know how wrong you are, the sooner you can start to make it right. All without generating any code


Top 5 Risks of Presumptive Design

Believing in our prototype solutions

Investing too much in the wrong solution

Designing the wrong prototype

Failing to cover the solution space

Losing the user’s attention


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The process isn’t without risks, of course. You actually can’t do this without having a cross-functional team well practiced in the art: designers, engineers, researchers and willing participants. It requires courage and a spirit of exploration and learning


Believing in our prototype solutions


Used by permission under Creative Commons license by Katy Stoddard http://www.flickr.com/x/t/0093009/photos/katy_bird/4663369797/

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Accepting a solution because it “feels right,” being blinded by your creation, and/or defending the solution to the customer, sabotages the process. In presumptive design, you always believe you’re wrong. The more the research participant protests, the more likely you’ve done the right thing: gotten it wrong. It is firmly believing you’ve got it wrong when you walk into the session that keeps you honest with your design.

Investing too much in the wrong solution


Used by permission under Creative Commons license by Emily Leahy-Thieler http://www.flickr.com/x/t/0093009/photos/empics/2846078511/

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Because this approach is “inductive”—you create an example of an idea—you can’t know from the outset whether you are on the right track. Rapid prototyping generally creates unattractive artifacts, creating a natural feedback loop that helps reduce the team’s faith in the design. In brief, since you know you’re going to be wrong, no matter how much time or care you put in, just stop pretending and go for it.


Designing the wrong prototype


Used by permission under Creative Commons license by Jason Sweeney http://www.flickr.com/x/t/0097009/photos/sween/4312163948/

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Users may react to elements in the solution that were either unintended or not yet developed. An object implies much more than the minimum inputs used to create it. This risk can only be mitigated through experienced facilitation, often requiring a multidisciplinary team. Users raise questions about low-resolution prototypes that the designer had not anticipated. Sometimes these inspire new design opportunities, sometimes they’re just a distraction. If you’ve provoked your user to react to your design, you know you’re on the right track.


Failing to cover the solution space


Used by permission under Creative Commons license by Deborah Lee Soltesz http://www.flickr.com/x/t/0092009/photos/dsoltesz/3299620076/

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Design resources are a precious commodity; using them to develop one solution reduces their availability for investigating alternative solutions. Here, too, rapid prototyping quickly creates widely variant solutions, improving coverage of the solution space. Also, keeping prototypes more vague improves their utility in Presumptive Design – users interpret our intentions and in so doing, express their desires, assumptions and/or fears


Losing the user’s attention


Used by permission under Creative Commons license by Fantail Media http://www.flickr.com/photos/fantailmedia/282618543/

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Presentation Notes

Messy prototypes are likely to distract the user from your objectives; they are equally likely to provide opportunities for conversation. Participants will likely focus on an unintended detail. The key here is to understand whether there is something truly important about their concerns, or if the prototype itself is merely distracting them. Having a cross-functional team with experienced designers and usability professionals to keep the conversation on track is a key component of the presumptive-design process.


“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” -- Alan Kaye, Xerox PARC ~1970s

Buxton, Bill, Sketching User Experiences, Morgan Kaufmann / Elsevier, San Francisco 2007

Carroll, Lewis, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, The MacMilllan Company, New York, London, 1899, p152

Frishberg, Leo, Presumptive Design, or Cutting the Looking-Glass Cake, interactions, Jan/Feb 2006, p18-20

Koskinen, Ilpo, Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom, Morgan Kaufmann, 2011

Snyder, Carolyn, Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces, Morgan Kaufmann / Elsevier, 2003


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Presentation Notes

While satisfying, merely presenting an idea to users isn’t enough. We must listen to their reactions and act on them. Presumptive design is one the fastest ways to get our ideas in front of users so we can improve on them.