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Category: Design
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The Shredder framework
The Shredder is a method I’ve developed to try to unravel strategies whether they are for companies or products. The process of understanding requires gathering information and information in the world can appear in many different formats, it’s almost like going through a company’s shredded confidential paper bin and trying to connect it.
The Shredder can help you:
Understand your own company – Let’s face it, most of the employees in most companies don’t understand the company’s strategy, and are trying to suggest things that seem to be randomly accepted by management. Using The Shredder you’d be able to understand decisions better.
Be clear about your own strategy – If you work in a startup or any fast pace situation you might not have a strategy and are developing it gradually whereas your employees are thirsty for clarity. The Shredder will help them give you feedback, and together you’d be able to identify actions and lead them towards a tactic (the series of actions you do instinctively). From there it’ll be logical to measure what worked and develop that into a strategy.
Understand other companies’ strategies and anticipate their future actions – No one works in ether, we all have competition and we all need to understand where they are at and where they are going. The Shredder would allow you to understand your competitors’s strategy better and identify what worked for them and why.
The Shredder helps people identify the pieces and figure out how to connect them. This isn’t an exact science and you’ll create informed theories, but as time progresses you will be able to improve your accuracy of predictions, and in any way, this is a great way to get a team up to date with a situation in a company or another and align between people.
The Why
The Shredder session is a strategic analysis framework I created a long time ago and in this constellation, it was catered to help our newly born product function at iwoca to learn how to think strategically by analyzing competitors. Analyzing other companies is essential for self-improvement and is a muscle that when used right can yield massive improvements in how we approach product development.
In preparation for a Shredder session, you select a company or a product to focus on. The participants will get specific homework in preparation for the session. The homework will include researching the company and documenting it in a very specific way that will later on feed into the overall framework. This is plainly healthy meeting culture, set agenda and come prepared. The company that we choose isn’t necessarily competition, but rather a company we can learn from. At times we will focus on public companies which allows us to get more pieces of information together. In the end it’s about the construct of the people in the room and the area we want to explore. The parameters I consider when preparing for a session is how macro is the thing we are shredding in relation to the time we have.
No matter what role you do in the product team it’s always good to escape from the day-to-day product activities to look at other products, different user needs, doubting things and asking the five whys – to get to the source of actions, and ways of operating. A strategy is an organization’s set of choices of what to do and what not to do. Exploring these leads to tradeoffs that we want to find and take advantage of.
Framework
The metaphor I want to use for The Shredder session is of a tree (sapling). Even though what we find at the end are shredded pieces of information they all come from the tree. During the session, we are trying to understand and map the company as a life form. Essentially we are doing reverse engineering, therefore we can’t start naturally from the trunk. In fact, we will start with everything but the truck in order to find out how it looks and what flows inside.
The company’s world / parts
Reproduction [visible]
Fruits – These are the product that the company launched. They can be either fertile or premature. Inside the fruits, there are seeds that breed more trees. This is what companies sell.
Flowers – pre fruit are pollination mechanisms and can be investors, customers, API endpoints, partners. This is how companies have sex with others.
Collection [visible]
Leaves – Every successful meeting or relationship creates leaves. This is how people photosynthesise from one another on the way to the products that are built.
Branches – These are the paths that teams take to breed products. Not all paths lead to successful products, some just to leaves or nothing. Sometimes companies need to cut branches to focus on core products.
Base [invisible]
Trunk and what’s inside – This is the strategy and how teams function internally. It’s all hidden inside a thick layer of protection and even if you cut through it it’s hard to understand exactly how things really work inside. The only way to do that is to penetrate which is illegal.
Roots – These are the founders, the c-suite, the team and how they are orchestrated to feed into the strategy and the company goals.
Effectors [visible]
These are a sum of external things that affect the growth of the tree.
Eaters – The tree can feed a lot of things, but this refers to customers across their types.
Fertilizers – investors, partners.
Parasites/Insects – These are life-sucking creatures that feed on the company but don’t contribute to its growth.
Soil – This is where the company seats in terms of industry, addressable market etc.
Weather – These are a set of conditions that allows the company to grow, from regulation (air), to how other companies operate (water), hype (sun).
Notice I labeled what is visible and what isn’t. Everything that is visible is out for grabs and can be researched and utilized in our path towards understanding a company’s strategy.
The process
In order to shred a company, we first gather information through different lenses, by different disciplines of people. This happens in the homework phase, but even more when we lay it all out in the open and people look at it through different lenses. When we conduct sessions, we’ll bring product managers, analysts, designers, developers, etc. This allows us to break down a company or a product into the smallest bits. It’s similar to mimicking their org inside our room. Breaking their organization down to these pieces allows us to estimate where they invest and where they need to improve.
Information top & bottom
This is where we look at anything we can find out in the world. It’s also plausible to call and ask the company different things if these types of methods are up in hand. In this section we will use tools to analyse org charts, to see investments and growth of team etc.
Theorising distribution / Make connections
Based on the fruits and roots, we can theorise how the branches look like and what connects to what. We essentially categorise and are searching for where we see coherent streams of investment. We cross-match what we gathered in order to produce a set of assumptions and look for validation.
Think of it as a detective trying to figure out a crime. A detective would construct a picture and look for proof to support their theory. However, unlike a detective we’re working as a group which allows us to look at a situation from different angles. What we end up with is a lot of information and some possible theories. Even though we conduct the session once in a sprint or in parts, it is still valuable to update and look at a company again once in a while, especially if we see that something interesting and new is happening there. Then, we can follow and keep building up in the future while we keep collecting and validating.
Match to known flows and identifying dependencies
After scoping and breaking down an organization top to bottom, it’s always good to switch lens and look at it horizontally across services, customer needs, pain points, and flows. Changing this lens allows us to see gaps in a different way, map value chains and see where there are dependencies internally and externally. Looking at these stream allows us to see where the branches connect to the trunk and can help us see where they don’t connect and how that tension affects the tree.
Finding impermants and leakages
There will always be things we cannot connect, or explain. It is important to highlight them and single them out as anomalies. This section can teach us a lot about motivations inside the company and things that don’t work well or are perhaps about to change. These are essentially seeds or branches with weird growth trajectories.
Strategy
This is where we try to figure out what decisions were made and why. Moreover, this is where we try to understand what they can and can’t do based on their strategy. There are reasons why branches grow the way they grow. They are related to different external conditions but mostly to how resources are distributed from the roots.
Where do they go next?
Looking at their strategy, what’s out there and where the market is (which is a different story) we can start scoping where we think they can go to next. This helps us inform our own strategy and update it based on movements in the market.
Summary
Companies are live organizations that need steering and have a planned growth trajectory. The parameters that affect the growth are derived from leadership, strategy and how the market reacts to them. In order to analyze and inform our own strategy we shred other companies in a session, looking through different lenses to see as much of the picture as possible. The end result of the shredder is a map of a company in the form of a tree. We start with a question mark in the middle and end with a few assumptions to validate. Even though we will never know exactly what happens in other companies, we use time to tell us if we were right and we act based on facts and information we gathered.
This article is a part of a series of articles about Shredder which will dive down into the details of each session and tell you how to do it in your company.
Design tasks are here to stay, and I like it
Recently I’ve encountered a lot of conversations around design tasks, for and against, pros and cons. I support giving tasks during the interview stage in most cases, and I’ll try to demonstrate why it is important. Bear in mind that most companies who hire a lot and dedicate tremendous amounts of attention to their hiring process have tasks in their pipelines for candidates.
Let’s define a design task:
Usually, tasks are the second stage in design interviews. The first step is usually some sort of phone or online screening. Designers usually prefer to see their future boss, see the atmosphere in the workplace and then consider whether they are willing to invest the time in doing a task. That is statistically different to developers who on average prefer to know if they can do the job and come confidently to an interview. Designers would also prefer to know what they’re destined to work on, so they can assess it and see if that is interesting for them.
What’s a task good for?
In an interview process, there are a few unknowns about the designer you are seeing. The goal of the task is to decipher these unknowns. It is true that you can potentially dig into a person’s behavior, idea generation and problem-solving in an interview, but I would argue that 60 minutes isn’t enough time and that someone put on the spot would yield mediocre answers at best unless we are talking to a really senior, thoughtful designer.
The things I find out from a task:
“Great portfolio, what did you do?” — It is standard procedure for designers to send over their CVs and portfolio and get filtered towards a first interview using these. I’ve noticed designers can talk for hours about their projects, which is expected. The explanation for this is that they have spent a lot of time working on them. Additionally, they’ve heard other people pitching these projects and are therefore able to reiterate that. Hopefully, these are successful projects (otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up in their portfolio). Moreover, the designer has probably pitched the projects in other interviews, so they are fully trained in talking about them. Consequently, this can make it hard for an interviewer to tell what they did in these projects as opposed to what others did. What elements were they truly responsible for?
To counter that I’d usually try to structure the interview and limit the time for portfolio walkthrough. After 15 minutes I’d start digging into a specific project. I’d expect candidates to have prepared a case study (which most don’t). I prefer to see three projects in depth rather than 20 one-pagers. I’m also going to be quite disappointed if the candidate just takes me through the portfolio they’ve already sent. I expect a different, more detailed version; after all, I’ve looked at it and read through it thoroughly before I invited them over.
Change of context — I find that many times people who are good at communication can speak very eloquently about anything they know. They can sell the case study even if it doesn’t exist. Putting them in a different context helps flesh out their improvisation skills and shows how they approach a design problem rather than a communication problem. It’s the difference between seeing a Jony Ive narrated advert and seeing how he speaks in an interview. The gaps are outstanding! (sorry Jony, you are still great).
Assess speed — It is always good to know when things got done and how long they took. But time and estimations are a slippery concept for doers (ask any PM). There is also a huge difference between a sketch and a finished product. Designers sometimes spend weeks on their portfolios, which are the accumulation of years of experience. When you set a task you can really see if there is a gap between the time someone spent on a task and what they say they did, and whether they can measure time accurately. Because it’s an after work hours activity, it forces them to spend less time and focus on speed. Measuring scrappiness is an important skill as some projects they’ll encounter will have tight deadlines. Dealing with scrappiness is also an ego measurement. How does the designer deal with the fact that they’ve submitted something half-baked? That, later on, helps you assess their approach to feedback when you ask them about the details in the task. If every answer is “well I didn’t have time” rather than “I think that my next steps should have been XYZ,” you can tell what kind of attitude they have.
Assess commitment — Commitment is a provocative concept since some managers would argue that workplaces should respect people’s free time and not hammer them with tasks. After all, people have families and can potentially be doing other workplaces’ tasks too. It can become a burden on people’s lives.
However, it is essential and useful to question their motivation, and to know how much a designer would like to work for you; for their sake and for the longevity of their employment in your company. I’d specifically look at this factor if I’m hiring for a company that the candidate hasn’t heard of. Is the designer looking for a job because in your industry you pay more? Is it because you are just one out of hundreds he applied for in his search (it can be easy to click the apply button)? On the contrary, is it because your company is famous? Some companies have more fame and status in comparison to others. In these companies, people may come to gain a reputation rather than because they really want to work there. Not every company is Epic or Nike. It might be interesting to know how long that person would stay in your company but that is really hard to guess.
Commitment is measured unfortunately by how much time people spend on the task and your ability to see it in the result.
Assess market understanding — Some designers will have pre-knowledge that is useful to you. Perhaps they’ve worked in your industry or fields. But usually, designers move horizontally and don’t stay in the same industry for very long (curious bunch). A task can show how fast the designer can get up to date with the quirks of your industry and how thorough their research skills are.
Process and planning — Since the task time frame is short, the manager can measure how systematic the designer is. Seeing how far they took it when they stopped helps to understand the designer’s planning skills. It is also important to see if the designer flagged open questions, what assumptions they made and whether they thought of what’s next (if they could have spent more time on it).
Related or not related to your business? — Many designers will feel used if you ask them directly about your business. “Oh, they are just trying to source ideas from us”. However, if you design a task that is completely unrelated to what you do it might destroy your chances of measuring how they do research about your industry or understand your domain. So my advice is to set a task that’s kind of related, but detailed enough for the designer to feel that you’re not just going to take their ideas and implement them tomorrow without giving them a job.
Tasks also always have cons to them
Too big or vague — that’s on the company to figure out. A task’s goal is not to trip up the designer, it’s to learn more about them and flesh out your understanding of them. Unfortunately, sometimes you’ll need to throw the task over to people to see how well it’s understood and then improve it as necessary.
No time — it’s hard to assess how long candidates spend or will spend on it. It is very important to be very specific about the time needed or the results we expect. For example, are you looking for pencil sketches or a high fidelity prototype?
No place — consider giving designers the option to have a room in your company’s offices for them to do the task and for you to see that it is done in the time required.
Flexibility — tasks are not flexible, you give it to someone and they complete it or they don’t. Consider accepting different people’s processes. Some designers might not be able to do a task because of a physical disability or a true lack of time. I suggest you have a different route that supports such cases (if you value diversity).
Exceptions
As a designer, I’ve seen people invent tasks or send materials before the first interview. That helps to leapfrog ahead in the interview process. Obviously, this demonstrates a lot of will power and extreme excitement and commitment towards your company. Not sure I’d recommend to always ‘try this at home’. But there are better ways to approach it if you want to be noticed. I would also argue that people who do personal projects — through which they demonstrate that they are passionate about design in their free time and that it’s not just their way to make money in this world — deserve to be cut some slack when it comes to doing tasks.
Ideas on alternative approaches to giving a task
I always love places that tell me who I will meet and what we will talk about. It seems to be a recruiter’s thing but I think it should transition to the business side too. Based on that I think that it might be a good approach to give talking points to someone rather than a task and have them do research so they’re prepared to come in to talk about it or take on a small thought process task on the spot.
I don’t see tasks disappearing anytime soon. It’s a good way to see how someone thinks in a scenario where you can’t hire them for a week to test how they might fit with your company. Converting freelancers to perms would be too hard in that respect. The benefits of tasks are too big to ignore. I would also argue that the designers themselves can learn a lot by doing a task; such as whether they’d like to work for the business, how smart the task is, or what interaction within the workplace looks like.
Yes, you need to do stuff that is out of your normal routine if you want to work for a particular place. Transitions require time and attention, as well as resources and that’s only fair. If someone doesn’t have holiday days, weekends, free hours then they should just dedicate themselves to what they want to do, self-select, do one task rather than ten. Sure, that will mean it’ll take them longer to find a job but very much like a relationship, if you invest you yield and if not then…you don’t.
Escape routes from dead end Design careers
Entering the design profession is sometimes like love at first sight, but it can also be something you simply want to do and learn to respect. Design is one of the most popular fields for people to move into from other professions.
Design has been called many things in the past, but even as a definition it’s referring to a multitude of activities across times. Within the design profession there are people who are more creative and some that are more scientific in their approach. Some people can draw, other can write, and some can think, but designers have to study all of these and continually try to be better at them all. At this given point of time the most popular design roles are UX, UI, and Graphic Designer and I’m focused on these when I refer to ‘design’.
In this article I will explore the reasons for transitioning in and out of design, the have baked approaches that companies have developed towards sustaining designers on a career path, and the developing skill set of the designer who aspires to be an executive.
Transitioning
In my article Are you boxed in? Getting to beyond professional roles and job titles
I talked about the main drivers behind people who want to go through the process of changing career.
Within a person’s work life the two main key problems are interest and progression. Interest is hard to maintain now that we work for 55 years on average. It’s impossible to be interested in the same field for that long. Progression is another stumbling block because within those 55 years the thing that keeps the best people alive is constant change and challenge.
You would think that the design profession supports multi-disciplinary people, but it doesn’t.
Transition from another discipline to Design
Many software developers, economists, and lawyers have transitioned into the design profession. Changing career usually leads to a temporary step down in salary and status. I’m not sure about the statistics but I’ve personally met more people who have downgraded their salary to ‘design level’ than people who’ve upgraded. The main reasons I’ve heard are all linked to the fact that design is essentially social. People transition into design because they want to do something they love (and it can be cool at times).
I have found it quite hard for a developer to excite a CEO, or even friends at dinner, with the things they do. A developer expects to get a project done fast, but built properly and, of course, to come up with meaningful ideas to solve problems. The difference between the designer and the developer is that the developer is usually solving problems that are quite complex, have a lot of interdependent issues to deal with and must understand a lot of abstract, technical stuff. Whereas the designer is usually solving problems that people can see, and they solve them by talking to people and testing it with people. This is something that people find easier to talk about over dinner, something that everyone can have an opinion on. That’s why design problem solving can be more exciting for the CEO, a marketing executive, and people in general.
For many people being a designer is a dream: very few try to learn more about how to live that dream and even fewer succeed at living it. I have learnt that when something looks easy, it probably means I know nothing about it. The design profession suffers from appearing easier than it is, but once people dive into design, its complexity unfolds. Design is a social role. Designers talk to people, do ethnographic research, user testing, build stuff fast, launch, fail and learn. It’s a diverse field and that means it should be open to people from diverse backgrounds.
Transitioning from Design to another discipline
People in design usually love it, so if they are ‘leaving’ the field it happens because of three reasons:
- They don’t like the fluff, and they prefer to answer to a clearer set of instructions. I call it the “either it works or it doesn’t” attitude.
2. Designers sometimes discover that they are really good at their craft, or art, and want to be their own masters.
3. They have power and economic aspirations, but in their organisation being a designer means they continually need to fight their corner and educate others about the value of design.
* By mentioning changing career away from design I’m only referring to designers who were professionally doing design. Looking back at my BA, and even my MA, the average percentage of people who learnt design alongside me and actually are working as designers is 50%
Let’s look at the design profession roles over the past few years…
The ever-changing professional design environment is where the problem for the cross-disciplinary person starts.
Here are some of the jobs that come within the design category:
Graphic designer, Human-computer interaction, Interaction designer, Designer researcher, Motion designer, UI designer, UX designer, Product designer, Design manager, Principal designer, Design Ops, Head of design, Creative Director, Director of Design — and that’s without adding Intern, Junior, Mid-weight, Senior, Executive and Global to each level. Two-thirds of this list are roles that were invented in the past 10 years. As you know, ‘Design’ is quite a new discipline, and as I grow older, I see more and more job titles that were created to sustain the 45-year-old designer, most of which never existed before.
I was recently exposed to this Progression.fyi by Jonny Burch which aggregates career ladders and measurements for designers inside enterprise companies. Looking at many of these companies’ ‘ladders’ it is obvious that this is still a work in progress and that a lot of that progress is being made by designers who need to invent their own career path while at the same time trying to get more leadership roles.
You can argue that design is not that new. It exists in commercial art, architecture and interior decoration, and the marketing and branding agencies established it as a profession many years ago. As the years pass many big tech firms started forming their own internal design agencies, as design departments which therefore adopted the hierarchy. But, I would argue that working for an agency with a fast-paced project versus working on a setting within the security settings submenu for a whole year are two extremely different experiences.
The leading Silicon Valley companies have a different take on this phenomenon. Companies like Google et al solve the issue of a traditional hierarchy within a sector by stripping away fancy titles and just call employees, “Designer’. ‘Manager’ or ‘VP of something’. You can see examples of this in many people’s LinkedIn profiles where they have gone from Senior Creative Global Director to UX designer.
The differences in ‘roles’ are often dependent on who the designer defines as their client. Is the client a Head of Design who has the mandate to enforce good design work, or a person from the marketing department looking for an inspirational piece of design? The brief, the client, the environment, the time frame and focus are the things that completely change the depth to which a designer can dive.
But design is everything: it is vision, research and ways of shifting the organisation — right?
Even though the designers are doing a great job of selling themselves within organisations today, their future is still moot. The plethora of jobs that were created in the past 10 years shackles designers to a slow career progression. Companies don’t have any new roles to give to these people: they can’t promote them to management, but they want to retain them, so they invent a new role. Yet the role of the adult designer might result in bathos. Maybe in 20 years, there will be a CDO (Chief Design Officer) role in big companies, but as long as there is no such role I foresee designers struggling and feeling unchallenged, especially when they are aware of their real potential.
What prevents designers from taking leadership roles?
There are areas and roles outside of design that unfortunately only great designers consider. For example, many designers see ‘Business’ as a Pandora’s Box that they are afraid to open. Development (coding) is another area that many designers ignore. Personally I’m extremely interested in how things are being built because it affects what I can and cannot do as a designer at a later stage, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many designers choose to focus on the vision and design things without any constraints, such as use case or budget. In leadership it can never be just about the ‘vision’; it’s about the business and measuring your results. It’s about setting up goals and achieving them while taking responsibility for specific outcomes. Especially in leadership the role of the design educator never ends. Very much like a CMO it needs to be reinforced with proofs, that’s a different story.
To be an executive you need to be a leader and a part of that role requires widening your knowledge about all areas of the business. Ideally at any point of a designer’s growth path they need to interlink with other departments but it amplifies the further up you climb up the ladder. At that point the discussion should include passion and sense, deep understanding of the user, but also of the the technological stack, the organization’s DNA and the business goals. The best people to do that kind of job are people who have a richly varied experience: multidisciplinary people who sometimes have a background scattered around different professions, but can weave a sense and a story into their decisions and career progression.
Design doesn’t have an expiration date and I truly believe in design leadership. I think that every company should have an equivalent to Chief Design Officer in management. However I think that in many companies talented designers will have to go through product or marketing roles in order to uplift design and change the management’s perspective on what design is and how closely it should be aligned with business, product and development.
To the future CDOs 🥂
What happened Gmail?
I’m a Google Inbox user, and since Inbox for iOS hasn’t been updated to match the screen size of iPhone X (which seems quite a trivial thing to fix) every time I saw an update on the AppStore I jumped for joy thinking that the fix was coming. Each time I was disappointed and instead it was bug fixes, security, and the awful removal of the feature to ‘Swipe up/down’ to close an email that was replaced by a back button. I was left wondering, what’s going on? What is that team at Google doing? Then came the new Gmail and I realized that the resources had been shifted towards that. Optimistically, I tried it yesterday but unfortunately, it’s disappointing.
It is true that some nice, cool features have been introduced including: confidential mode (not really private), security features (a worthy inclusion), offline mode (amazing), Self disappearing emails (cool for my Inbox’s storage, not sure it’s not a gimmick from messaging apps like Telegram though), emails you cannot copy / print (unless you screenshot them), surfaced content in email, snooze, smart replies, and nudge (features that come from Inbox and are truly good), and side panel (don’t get me started).
In reality, they’ve done amazing development work but the design, and especially the user experience, got left behind in my opinion. Creating value is the core of UX and that’s probably the reason why people are still using hideous experiences like eBay, but Google works to a much higher standard than eBay. Google are the creators of one of the best design systems every created in tech, Material Design.
Here are the three main areas where I think the new Gmail misses big-time:
Orientation
Google is a search company and their goal is to map and organize the world, but unfortunately, they can’t organize our emails. For example, the other day my wife said she couldn’t use Google Drive anymore because she had run out of space and didn’t know how to free up more space. It took me some time to find the reason. She had 17,542 emails hidden in the Promotion and Update tabs, which ended up being 6GB.
Another example, how often do you have unread emails but you have no clue where they are? The solution to finding them is to search for Unread.
Google are doing a great job in findability, using the search box, but a poor job in surfacing what’s relevant for the user. Google know that they are doing a bad job at orientation and interface design. The number of ways in which you can organize your Gmail are proof of that. From Priority inbox, to Important, Unread, Automatic Tabs like Promotions and Updates, Labels, and Filters — they have tried a lot of things and kept them all within Gmail too. The only place where they made a good decision, in my opinion, was inside Inbox. I know many people who didn’t like Inbox and I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s doing a better job in every category I’m about to mention than Gmail is.
Material Design
When Material Design was introduced in June 2014 by Matías Duarte it was a historic moment for design. Google Material Design opened opportunities internally and globally for design standards, guidelines and a new way of creating design. Material Design is based on basic principles of papers, shadows, and elevation. It also added motion design as an important wayfinding mechanism for orientation across all of Google’s products. Sticking to basic principles helped reduce complexity and increase focus.
Gmail was never fully Material Designed though, and the new version is even further away from the design language that made Google and Android so good. For example:
- The Compose button in Gmail got this weird, unexplained Lego-like treatment and kept its place rather than becoming the floating action button. It’s a wild dream of someone who thought it looked fancy.
- The New G-Suite button is weirdly pixelated and has nothing to do with Material Design either. It looks like senior people in the company just said: “Make my logo bigger”.
- If the user decides to shrink some of the gazillion menus around the core reason for opening Gmail, they will see a series of unexplained icons. That is unlike many other Google services, which just let a minimised menu disappear. As a user, if I choose to get rid of it, I don’t want any relic of it for the time being. The hamburger button closes menus across all of Google’s services including: Inbox, YouTube, Analytics etc. but not in the new Gmail.
• Drop-down menus within drop-down menus and the inbox types we spoke of before. The copy is especially entertaining: “Try them all, keep what fits”; aka “We have no clue what works and we couldn’t decide so we passed this decision to you” (instead of placing it in settings).
- Menus, menus, and some more menus.In many of them you have unrelated actions.
For example: In the top menu you have (from left to right)
- Hamburger button — to shrink the left menus.
- Gmail logo — to refresh the page.
- Search bar — for searching in Gmail.
- Apps button — to go to other Google apps.
- Notifications button — from other Google apps.
- Profile picture — to manage your profile.
So they are at the same level and look the same, but on the left what you have is drop-down menus that take the user out of Gmail, while on the right and center are actions that relate to Gmail.
From a business perspective I understand that there are more people using Gmail than Calendar, Keep or the new Tasks, but the way Google has attempted to bring people into the fold and have them use add-ons and the rest of their products is just crazy. It’s a designer’s nightmare and it transports me back to the 90s when only developers were building web apps. Why do I mention the 90s? Well, it’s because it happens to look very similar to Outlook, AOL, and Yahoo, all from this era. All of these services still work amazingly well, but it’s not accurate to call what Google has done new. It’s the same thing in a new box, with the same problems and over complexity. It comes as no surprise that companies like Slack succeed by solving these problems.
“Google has 4 million people paying for G Suite right now, compared to 120 million Office 365 commercial users….1.4 billion people are using Gmail, compared to 400 million on Microsoft’s Outlook.com service.” (The Verge)
There is more functionality and design here than on an airplane dashboard.
Innovation
Cross-selling, merging, and doing a Frankenstein is not innovation. Moving features from one service to another is also not innovation. Even though it’s impossible to innovate every year, I would hope that within one of the core products at Google there is a willingness to innovate. When I hear of a redesign I’m always excited, and I’m still excited about the fact that something has changed with Gmail, even if it’s not enough to get me to go back to using it.
Here are a few of the innovations that are needed:
- A good method for telling users what’s important to read and what can wait for later.
• A way to help users handle the amount of emails they get.
• An efficient way to categorize, filter and search content.
• New ways of passing information (from media types, to supported files for preview).
• A tool to help users fix mistakes they’ve made, such as sending someone the wrong email, or spelling something incorrectly.
• Providing an efficient way of sending big files (Drive works to some extent, but it’s cumbersome in many cases).
• Allowing users to handle their business better through Gmail (e.g. sign documents, approve things, review things).
• Allowing users to design their emails in a better way.
• Letting users know if someone read their presentation and what parts interested them (DocSend).
All of these are focused on the core usage of Gmail: communicating with information. Ideally, you don’t need emails to schedule a meeting because emailing is slow, complicated and sometimes requires too much coordination. That’s why you have tools like X.AI (Amy), Calendarly and Doodle. Tasks are also way better informed by chatter rather than an email.
Google’s product manager Bank said, “Inbox is the next-gen, early adopter version, whereas Gmail is the flagship that will eventually get the best new features”. If Inbox is the next-gen then why isn’t it updated on iOS? If Gmail gets the best features does that mean it will become a pile of features without real focus for the true purpose of what an email service is? When does Gmail remove things that don’t work, or at least hide them?
In the new Gmail, instead of innovation, there was aggregation. A KPI hungry complexity. I’m sure this design will rattle up numbers, but I’m also sure it’s not iterating to address users’ problems.
Facial recognition as a UX driver. From AR to emotion detection, how the camera turned out to be the best tool to decipher the world
The camera is finally on stage to solve UX, technology and communication between us all. Years after the Kinect was trashed and Google Glass failed, there is a new hope. The impressive technological array that Apple minimized from a PrimeSense to the iPhone X is the beginning of the way for emotion dependent interactions. It’s not new, it’s better than that, it’s commercialized and comes with access to developers.
Recently Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that a lot of Facebook’s focus will be on the camera and its surrounding. Snapchat have defined themselves as a camera company. Apple and Google (Lens, Photos) also are heavily investing in cameras. There is a tremendous power in the camera that is still hidden and it’s the power to detect emotions.
Inputs need to be easy, natural and effortless
When Facebook first introduced emojis as an enhanced reaction to the Like I realised they were onto something. Facebook chose five emotions that would be added and essentially help them understand emotional reactions to content better. I argued that it is essentially a glorified form of the same thing; but one that works better than anything else. In the past Facebook only had the Like button while YouTube had the Like and Dislike buttons. But these are not enough for tracking emotions, and cannot bring too much value to researchers and advertisers. Most people expressed their emotions in comments, and yet there were more likes than comments. The comments are text based, or even image/Gif which is harder to analyze. That is because there are many contextual connections the algorithm needs to guess. For example: how familiar is that person with the person he reacts to and vice versa? What’s their connection with the specific subject? Is there sub text/slang or anything related to previous experience? Is that a continued conversation from the past? Etc. Facebook did a wonderful job at keeping the conversation positive and prevented something like the Dislike button from pulling focus, which could have discouraged content creators and shares. They kept it positively pleasant.
Nowadays I would compare Facebook.com to a glorified forum. Users can reply to comments, like (and other emotions). We’ve almost reached a point where you can like a like 😂. Yet it is still very hard to know what people are feeling. Most people that read don’t comment. What do they feel while reading the post?
The old user experience for cameras
What do you do with a camera? Take pictures, videos, and that’s about it. There has been huge development in camera apps. We have many features there that are related to the surroundings of the main use case; things like HRD, Slow mo, portrait mode etc.
Based on the enormous amount of pictures users generated there was a new wave of smart galleries, photo processing, and metadata apps.
However, there has been a change in the focus recently towards the life integrated camera. A stronger combination of the strongest treats and best use cases for what we do with mobile phones. The next generation of cameras will be fully integrated with our lives and could replace all these other input icons in a messaging app (microphone, camera, location).
It is not a secret that cameras were amongst the three main components that have been constantly developed at a dizzying pace: The screen, the processor, and the camera. Every new phone that came out pushed the limits of that year after year. For cameras, the improvements were in the realm of megapixels, movement stabilization, aperture, speed and, as mentioned above, the apps. Let’s look at a few products that were created by these companies to evaluate the evolution that happened.
Most of the development focused on the back camera because, at least initially, the front camera was perceived to be used for video calls only. However, selfie culture and also Snapchat changed it. Snapchat’s masks, which were later copied by everyone else, are still a huge success. Face masks weren’t new, Google introduced them way back, but Snapchat was more effective at putting them in front of people and growing their use.
Highlights from memory lane
In December 2009 Google introduced Google Goggles, which was the first time that users could use their phone to get information about things that are around them. The information was mainly about landmarks initially.
In November 2011 on the Samsung Nexus, they introduced facial recognition to unlock the phone for the first time. Like many other things that are done for the first time, it wasn’t very good and therefore scrapped later on.
In February 2013 Google released Google Glass which had more use cases because it was able to receive additional input other than just from the camera, like voice. It was also always there and present but it essentially failed to gain traction because it was too expensive, looked unfashionable, and triggered an antagonistic backlash from the public. It was just not ready for prime time.
Devices so far only had a limited amount of information available at their disposal. It was audio visual with GPS and historical data. But it was limited: Google Glass displayed the information on a small screen near your eye which made you look like an idiot looking at it and prevented you from looking at anything else. I would argue that putting such technology on a phone for external use is not just a technological limitation but also a physical one. When you focus on the phone you cannot see anything else, your field of view is limited, similar to the field of view in UX principles for VR. That’s why there are some cities that make routes for people who are on their phone and traffic lights that help people not to die while walking and texting. A premise like Microsoft’s Hololens is much more aligned with the spatial environment and can actually help users interact rather than absorb their attention and put them in danger.
In July 2014 Amazon introduced the Fire Phone. It featured four cameras at the front. This was a breakthrough phone in my opinion; even though it didn’t succeed. The four frontal cameras were used for scrolling once the user’s eyes reached the bottom, and created 3D effects based on the accelerometer and user’s gaze. It was the first time that a phone used the front camera as an input method to learn from users.
August 2016 Note 7 was launched with iris scanning that allows users to unlock their phones. Samsung resurrected an improved facial recognition technology that rested on the shelf for 6 years. Unfortunately just looking at the tutorial is vexing. Looking at it made it clear to me that they didn’t do too much user experience testing for that feature. It is extremely disturbing to hold this huge phone and put it exactly 90° parallel to your face. I don’t think it’s something anyone should do in a street. I do understand it could work very nicely with Saudi women who have covered their faces. But the Note 7 exploded, luckily not in people’s faces while doing iris scanning or VR, and this whole concept waited for another full year until the Note 8 came out.
By that time no one mentioned that feature. All it says is that it’s an additional way of unlocking your phone in conjunction with the fingerprint sensor. My guess is that this is because it’s not good enough or Samsung wasn’t able to make a decision (similarly to the release of the Galaxy 6 and 6 Edge). Similarly, for something to succeed it needs to have multiple things you can do with it, otherwise, it risks being forgotten.
Google took a break and then in July 2017 they released the second version of Glass as a B2B product. The use cases became more specific for some industries.
Now Google is about to release the Google Lens to bring the main initial Goggles use case to the modern age. It’s the company’s effort to learn more about how to use visual with additional context, and to figure out the next type of product they should develop. It seems that they’re leaning towards a camera that is wearable.
There are many others that are exploring visual input as well. For example, Pinterest is seeing huge demand for their visual search lens and they intend to use it for searching for familiar things to buy and to help people curate.
Snapchat’s spectacles that allow users to record short videos so easily (even though the upload process is cumbersome).
Now Facial Recognition is also on the Note 8 and Galaxy 8 but it’s not panning out as well as we’d hoped it would.
Or https://twitter.com/MelTajon/status/904058526061830144/video/1
Apple is known for being slow to adopt new technology in relation to its competitors. But on the other hand, they are known for commercializing them. Like, for example, the amount of Apple Watches they sold in comparison to other brands. This time it was all about facial recognition and infinite screen. There is no better way of making people use it than removing any other options (like the Touch ID). It’s not surprising, last year they did this with Wireless Audio (removing the headphone jack) and USB C on the MacBook Pro (by removing everything else).
I am sure that there is a much bigger strategic reason to why Apple chose this technology at this specific time. It’s to do with their AR efforts.
Face ID has some difficulties that immediately occurred to me, like Niqāb (face covers) in Arab countries, plastic surgery and simply growing up. But the bigger picture here is much more interesting. This is the first time that users can do something they naturally do with no effort and receive data that is much more meaningful for the future of technology. I still believe that a screen that can completely read your fingers anywhere is a better way, and it seems like Samsung is heading in that direction (although rumors claimed that Apple tried to do it and failed).
So where is this going? What’s the target?
In the past, companies used special glasses and devices to do user testing. The only output they could give in regards to focus were Heat Maps – using the mouse they were looking at interactions and they were looking out where people physically look. Yet they weren’t able to document users’ focus, emotions, and how they react to the things they see.
Based on tech trends it seems like the future involves Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. But in my opinion, it’s more about Audio and 3D Sound, and Visual Inputs; gathered simultaneously. This would allow a wonderful experience such as being able to look anywhere, at anything and get information about it.
What if we’d be able to know where the users are looking, where their focus is? For years this is something that Marketing and Design professionals have tried to capture and analyze. What can be better to do that than the set of arrays a device like the iPhone X has as a starting point? Later on, this should evolve into glasses that can see where the user’s focus is.
Reactions are powerful and addictive
Reactions help people converse, raise retention and engagement. Some apps offer post reaction as a message that one can send to their friends. There are some funny videos on YouTube of reactions to a variety of videos. There is even a TV show dedicated solely to people watching TV shows called Gogglebox.
In Google, IO Google has decided to open the option to pay creators on its platform, kind of like what the brilliant Patron site is doing but in a much more dominant way. A way that helps you as someone from the crowd to stand up and grab the creator’s attention called SuperChat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9szyPvMDTk
I keep going back to Chris Harrison’s student project from 2009. In this he created the keyboard that has pressure sensing in the keys and if you type strongly it basically read your emotions that you’re angry or excited and the letters got bigger. Now imagine combining it with a camera that sees your facial expression and we all know people express their emotions whilst they’re typing something to someone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=88&v=PDI8eYIASf0
How would such UX look?
Consider the pairing of a remote and the focus center point in VR. The center is our focus but we also have a secondary focus point, which is where the remote points. However, this type of user experience cannot work in Augmented Reality, well unless you want everything to be very still and walk around with a magic wand. To be able to take advantage of Augmented Reality, which is one of Apple’s new focuses, they must know where the user’s focus lies.
What started as AR Kit and Google’s ARCore SDKs will be the future of development not only because of the amazing output, but also because of the input that they can get from the front and back cameras combined. This will allow for a greater focus on the input.
A more critical view on future developments
While Apple opened the hatch for facial recognition to trigger reactionary Animojis it is going to get much more interesting when others start implementing Face ID. Currently, it is manifested in a basic harmless way, but the goal remains to get more information! Information that will be used to track us, sell to us, learn about us, sell our emotional data and to allow us to have immersive experiences nonetheless.
It is important to say that the front camera doesn’t come alone, it’s finally the expected result of Apple buying PrimeSense. The array of front-facing technology includes an IR camera, depth sensor etc. (I think they could do well with a heat sensor too). It’s not necessarily that someone will keep videos of our faces using the phone, but rather there will be a scraper that will document all the information about our emotions.
Summary
It is exciting for Augmented Reality to have algorithms that can read our faces. There have already been so many books about identifying people’s facial reaction, but now it’s time to digitize that too. It will be wonderful for many things. For example, robots that can look and see how we feel and react to those emotions, or on our glasses to get more context for what we need them to do. Computationally it’s better to look at the combination of elements because that is the thing that creates the context that helps the machine understand you better. It could be another win for companies that have ecosystems which can be leveraged.
The things you can do if you know what the user is focusing on are endless. Attaining that knowledge is the dream of every person that deals with technology.
Goodbye Stereo, hello 360º Sound
In the past five years, there has been a paradigm shift in the speakers market. We’ve started seeing a different form factor of audio capable devices, 360-degree audio speakers, emerging. I want to have a look at the reasons behind the appearance of this form factor and the benefits it brings us.
First, it is important to look at the market segmentation reasoning:
1. Since the inclusion of Bluetooth in phones there has been a variety of (mainly cheap, initially) speakers that sought to abolish the need for cables. Docs and Bluetooth speakers were the answer. But at the time there was no premium solution for Bluetooth speakers and besides sound quality, there was room for more innovation (or gimmicks, like a floating speaker). To luxuriate the Bluetooth speaker one of the solutions that were created was a 360° speaker.
The original Bluetooth speakers were directional speakers and since it is unknown where they will be placed, how many people need to listen to them and where they are sitting; having a directional speaker is a disadvantage in comparison to a 360° one.
2. From another perspective, 360° speakers function as a cheaper alternative to hi-fi audio systems. Many customers are just interested in listening to music in their home in comfort and do not require a whole setup with wires and receivers. They also mainly play music using their mobile phones.
So it fits right in the middle. Now let’s look at some use cases:
Parties — It can be connected to other speakers and have increased sound. It’s also relatively easy for other people to connect to it.
Multi-room — It can allow you to play music whilst controlling it with your phone in all sections of your house. It can also be controlled remotely.
Conference calls — or actually any call. It’s also possible to put it on speaker on your phone but that’s sometimes hard to hear.
Smart — Today we have assistant speakers with arrays of microphones that sometimes come in the form of 360. It’s a bit different but a 360° microphone array is as useful as a speaker array.
I want to focus on the 360° form factor and discuss why it is so important and a real differentiator. To be able to understand more about 360° audio, its advantages and the future of 360° audio consumption, it is important to have a look at the history of sound systems.
The person as sound — Before there were speakers there were instruments. People used their own resonance to make a sound and then found resonance in drums, and string-based instruments. That led to a very close and personal interaction which could be mobile as well. People gathered around a singer or musician to hear them.
Phonograph and Gramophone — This was the first time music became reproducible mechanically. However, it was still mono (one channel). From an interaction perspective, it was a centerpiece with the sound coming out of the horn.
Stereo systems — Stereo was an ‘easy sell’, after all we all have two ears. Therefore speakers that can pleasure them both are fabulous. Some televisions were equipped with mono speakers but more advanced televisions had stereo speakers too.
Surround — 3/5/7.1 systems were introduced mainly for the use case of watching movies in an immersive way. These systems included front, back, center, and sub speakers (sometimes even top and bottom). It is still quite rare to find music recordings that are made for surround. Algorithms were also created for headphones, to mimic surround.
But there is a limitation with these systems. Let’s compare it to the first two reproducible sound systems: the human voice and the Phonograph. They both had more mobility. You could place them wherever you wanted to and people would gather around and listen to music. I can’t say it’s exactly the same experience, but it doesn’t hurt the premise of the instrument. However, with stereo systems and surround systems, you need to sit in a specific contained environment in a specific way to really enjoy their benefits. Sitting in a place where you cannot really sense that spatial experience makes these systems redundant.
Audio speakers in the present
Considering current technologies and their usage, our main music source is our mobile phones. It’s a music source that doesn’t have to be physically connected via cables. Our listening experience is more like a restaurant experience where it’s not important where the audio is coming from as long as it’s immersive. 360° speakers then were able to provide exactly that with fewer speakers. But we lost something along the way, we lost stereo and surround. In other words, we lost the immersive elements of spatial sound.
Audio speakers in the near future
There are huge investments in VR, AR and AI and all of these fields are affecting sound and speakers. In VR and AR we are immersed visually and auditory, currently using a headset and headphones. At home we’ve started controlling it via our voices, turning lights on and off, changing music and so on.
Apple’s HomePod has a huge premise in this respect. Its spatial algorithm could be the basis for incredible audio developments. Apple might have been late to the 360° market but they have tremendous experience in audio and computing and this is why I think this is the next big audio trend: “The spatially aware 360° speaker”.
Although they sell it as one speaker it can obviously be bought in pairs or more. The way these understand each other will be the key to this technology.
Spatiality is important because in a 360° speaker a lot of sound goes to waste, and a lot of power is inefficient. Some of that sound is being pushed against a wall which causes too much reverb. Most of the high frequency that is not being projected at you is useless.
Here are the elements to take into account
- Location in the room — near a wall, in the corner, center?
- Where is the listener?
- How many listeners are there?
- Are there other speakers and where?
In Apple’s demonstration, it seems that some of these are being addressed. It’s clear to see that they thought about these use-cases and therefore embedded their chip into the speaker which might become better over time.
The new surround
360° speakers can already simulate 3D depending on the array of speakers that are inside the hardware shell. This will be reflected in the ability to hear stereo if you position yourself in the right place.
But things get much more interesting if the speaker/s are aware of your location. If you are wearing a VR headset and have two 360° speakers you can potentially walk around the room and have a complete surround experience. A game’s experience could be super immersive without the need for headphones. Projected into AR, a room could facilitate more than one person at a time.
Consider where music is being listened to. In most instances, a 360° speaker would be of greater benefit than a stereo system. In cars, which usually have four speakers, offices and clubs, 360° speakers would work better than a stereo system. Even headphones could be improved by using spatial awareness to block noises from the surrounding environment and featuring a compass to communicate your orientation. Even a TV experience can be upgraded with just HomePods and some software advancements.
What about products like Amazon Echo Show?
A screen is a classic one direction interaction. Until we have 360-degree screens which work like a crystal ball with 360° audio, I don’t see it becoming the next big thing; after all, we still have our phones and tablets.
The future of 360 in relation to creation and consumption tools
Here are a bunch of hopes and assumptions:
- Music production and software will adopt 360° workflows to support the film and gaming industry; similar to 3D programs like Unity, Cinema 4D, and Adobe.
2. New microphones will arise, ones that record an environment using three or more microphones. It will initially start with a way to reproduce 3D from two microphones, like field recorders, but quickly it’ll move into more advanced instruments driven by mobile phones which will adopt three to four microphones per phone to be able to record 360° videos with 360° sound. Obviously, it’ll be reflected in 360° cameras individually as well.
3. A new file type that can encode multiple audio channels will emerge and it will have a way of translating it to stereo and headphones.
I can’t wait to see this becoming reality and having a spatially aware auditory and visual future based on augmented reality, using instruments like speakers or headphones and smart glasses to consume it all.
Here are a couple of companies/articles that I think are related
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