IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

drinking from a fire hose

i know the general sentiments are in favor of facebook’s recent changes, but i’d like to talk about why more is not always better.

specifically, why i can’t stand facebook’s new frictionless sharing. a feature that overdoses me via a deluge of random tidbits from my friends’ lives. i don’t need a play by play update on every thought, song, like and share from the people in my life. imagine if a friend called you and proceeded to recount the minutiae of her day in painstaking didn’t-have-quarters-for-the-parking-meter-forgot-to-pack-tampons-i-love-the-new-coldplay detail. i give most people 30 seconds before they hang up the phone and blame AT&T.

what this latest change tells me is that facebook continues to miss the nuance of human behavior. i only care what some of my friends think about music. and those are not always the same friends i trust for movies. definitely not the same people i get book recommendations from (that list is very short). and there is exactly one friend i have on FB whose fashion advice i take.

and the reality is, lists or no lists, i have no great way to teach facebook which of my 300 friends really matter to me and in what context. most of the photos i look at are from friends who live far from me, and usually mostly about their kids. the best links i get are from people who share my political predispositions or with whom i’ve worked (as in, great tech coverage).

relationships are nuanced, fluid, and context specific. giving me a firehouse doesn’t give me the useful content i want from the right people at the right time, it just gives me more noise and makes it more likely that i’ll ignore more of it.

the irony is, if i had the right tools to ‘mine’ my relationships through facebook, not only would i have more control and context, facebook could make very good, re-discoverable use of what is currently a mostly transient data set…

worth laying out

i know in the aftermath of steve job’s death there has been an endless re-posting of quotes, but i felt these two in particular were worth highlighting as they represent what i believe to be the two most important qualities in people who make products. not just designers, but anyone who touches those products in an impactful way. 

Creativity is just connecting things

“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” [my italics above]

Life experience makes you creative

“Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. [Wired, February 1996] [again, my italics above]

minimum viable experience

yes. i know most of you reading this have just rolled your eyes and thought ‘she’s a clever girl that kristina.’ and that minimum viable experience is really just a clever repackaging* of minimum viable product.

you would be both totally correct and absolutely wrong. is MVE a repackaging of MVP? sure. but is it an important and nuanced one, yes. because if you were to believe the esteemed george lakoff, semantics matter. put another way, the way we say things triggers the way our brain thinks about those things.

so when we talk about “minimum viable product” the dialog that follows is what we as a company think our product needs to be. the language is very internally focused on us, our products and our companies. we talk in terms of “the product needs to have” this or that before “the product can launch.” it all makes me want to invite the product over for dinner.

by contrast, a minimum viable experience is focused on the user.

the language we are forced to use in order to have a conversation about the MVE organically reframes conversations in relationship to the needs of the users. now we start to hear things like “what is the minimum viable experience that a user will accept” for this or that. instead of asking ourselves what the product needs before it can launch, we end up asking “what is the minim viable experience a user needs” to complete a task. now we’re talking more about the user and less about the product. we debate what users need because we’re debating their experience, not product requirements.

subtle repackaging or important nuance? you decide. but before deciding force the conversation in your next product meeting and just watch & see what happens.

*special thanks to @francis for the great conversation that led up to this

off-label product usage

i’m on this not-so-new kick to learn italian. actually i don’t care much about learning italian as much as i care about speaking italian. or, to be more specific, arguing politics, love, film, and food — in italian. i think it would be so sexy to rattle off about heirloom tomatoes with the same fervor that i might bitch about the debt crisis.

but i’m still a busy lady, so i’ve been trying to cobble together ideas for how to make space, get support, and stay motivated to speak italian. i’ve given myself a personal goal of 3 hours a week. now that may not sound like much, but i have an incredibly hard time finding 4 hours a week to work out, so adding another 3 hours of personal time into my week is a real ask.

especially since i spend an hour + a week watching TED talks (ok, yes, i also re-watch talks, which i know is super inefficient). i can’t help myself. i am addicted. i was watching like my third talk in a row when remembered the subtitles feature…

the video i was watching was, in fact, translated into italian and OMG OMG OMG i was in heaven. i re-watched the video i was on. twice.

i’m not saying that i represent a popular or even an important use case for TED, but as a product designer i couldn’t help but be reminded that people use products in ways that we never intend. and there is so much to be learned from that crazy lifehacking behavior.

how to design a great product in four easy steps

designers spend a lot of time talking to one another about what makes for great design and how to produce that great design using an assortment of tools and processes and philosophies.

but the rub of it is that it’s usually what’s happening outside the design group that has the biggest impact on the greatness of the end product; all those other types who like to get involved. so this a quick refresher course for all the technologists, marketers and PMs in the room:

step 1 — believe that design has strategic value.

believe it & preach it. for better or for worse, we judge the words that come out of people’s mouths based on the preconceived notions we have about their value. when your design team is presenting, everyone else in the room should be thinking “how’s this design going to improve our business?” not “why did they pick those colors?”

when you create a culture where design is valued as a strategic partner at the business decision-making table — and not the coloring table — you’ll open your brain up to hearing things you would have never otherwise seen.

if you can’t bring yourself to believe this, call me. i’ll introduce you to at least five people who’ll change your mind.

step 2 — don’t hire the best people, hire the right people.

don’t hire someone just because they’re an award-winning designer (or because they have an ivy league MBA, for that matter). hire them because they’re incredibly good at what they do and because they’re passionate about the product and because they play well with others. designing products is by nature a collaborative process, the chemistry of the players matter. i’m not a guy, but i’m sure there’s a baseball team analogy in there somewhere.

also, learn how to interview designers. don’t ask us to name our  number one strength or weakness. ask us to present our work, to explain our thinking, and, especially, to defend it. believe it or not, 80% of our job is keeping you from messing it up. great designers aren’t just great thinkers; they’re great communicators, outspoken advocates, and strong shepherds.

lastly, if you can’t find the right designer, find the right studio. get them excited about your product; let them design something great. when they’re done, they won’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. great designers know other great designers; they’ll help you find the right person for the long haul.

step 3 — incent those people to make the right decisions for your product

people act in their own best interest. so when the various people whose job is on the line to think up, produce, market, and manage your product aren’t all being evaluated against the same metric, they won’t be working towards the same goal.

you can’t evaluate your designer based on the quality of the user experience, your product manager on the number of features released, your marketing director on the number of acquisitions and your technologists on the speed with which they make it all happen. 

so pick a goal, like “increase time on site by 50%” and make it your mantra: everyone lives and dies, or at least, is employed by it.

step 4 — stay out of their way

if you believe in the strategic value of design, you hire the right people, and give them the right incentives, the best thing you can do is stay out of their way.

these people will be making choices that affect your business every day. so yes, you should question them, challenge their assumptions; but believe in them. good business is often about making hard choices, which is exactly what great design is about.

so when your team shows you something that solves a problem, is beautiful, and easy to use, resist the urge to muck it up. because if you’ve done steps 1-3, well then you’ve done your job. now let them do theirs.