A Design Primer for Engineers
For a word that can so vastly change the fortunes of a company, it’s worth noting that no generally accepted definition of the word design exists. This means when your boss stands up in front of the team at that all-hands and says, “We’ll have a design-centered culture,” there’s a good chance he’s saying nothing at all.
But you keep hearing this word. More importantly, you hear the urgency behind the word. You hear that choosing to design a thing is an important thing to do and the person saying it is also important, so you nod vigorously while silently thinking, “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about and I’m pretty sure neither do you.”
There is no more evidence required that a magical focus on design can transform a company. In order for this to happen, engineering and design need to party more together, but there’s a fundamental tension between design and engineering and understanding that tension is a good place to start thinking about design.
A Fundamental Tension
To understand the historic tension between the designer and the engineer, you need to go back to when software became mainstream, and in my mind that was with the arrival of the Internet. Software had been around and making piles of money long before Netscape, but it became a worldwide phenomenal when anyone, anywhere could mail anyone else a picture of their cat.
The arrival of everyone (and their cats) presented a challenge to these early software development teams. These teams were used to working with early adopters and their particular needs. See, early adopters are willing to put up with a lot of crap — it’s part of the deal we have with them. “You get to play with the latest and greatest, but it may explode at any point.” Early adopters are cool with these explosions because early adoption makes them feel, well, cool.
When everyone arrived, everyone didn’t want explosions — they just wanted it to work. Engineers hear “just works” as “they want fewer explosions”, but that’s not what everyone wanted. They wanted to send a picture of their cat in the simplest way possible. They didn’t care about JavaScript, security, frames or plugins; they just wanted to mail a picture of their goddamned cat without the application exploding.
Design results in the tangible translation between engineering thought: “fewer explosions” and user thought: “reliable, one-click cat photo mailing”. Good design manages to both showcase the best of engineering efforts while simultaneously hiding them from the user.
After working with a wide of variety of designers, my opinion is that the role of design is:
- Understanding what most users want.
- Prioritizing and focusing on the most important of those wants.
- Using this knowledge to exceed user expectations.
In the mid 90s, we, as traditional engineers, were not equipped for the role I described above. We’d been trained as builders of bits, and we believed that because we could build bits that we could build usable bits, but we were actually good at designing good product for ourselves… not everyone.
We don’t see an explosion as a bad thing because we’re intimately aware of how the sausage is made. We know that when a program crashes, you just re-launch the application and get back to work. Most humans on the planet do not see a crashed application this way. They are, at the very least, alarmed when something explodes. They’re wondering, “Did permanent damage just occur?”
A Note to the Designer and the Engineer
With apologies to the incredible menagerie of design folk out there, this primer primarily focuses on the design denizens and design practices that surround software development. Furthermore, this primer is being written by an engineer for engineers. While I’ve spent a good many years soaking in design, I’m not a trained designer and the following descriptions of your history and your craft will piss you off with their simplicity, imprecision, incompleteness, and engineering bias.
But we’re doing the same thing to design folk. We are well intentioned, but because we haven’t repeatedly experienced the essential details, we are ignorant of them. We assume the act of describing the work somehow is equivalent to doing the work and, wow, are we wrong, but we are in good company because every eager master of their respective craft does this.
Engineers are uncomfortable with ignorance, but worse, we’re bad at asking for help outside of our domain of expertise. This primer is the first step at building a solid bridge between our professions. So, chill. This is not a definitive design guide, it’s a place for engineers to start thinking about design and if you happen to learn something about how we think — super.
The Acronyms Matter
The phrase “we need a designer” is likely the first time you’ll hear about design as a freshly minted software engineer. You wonder, “Well, what are they going to do that I’m not already doing?” The answer is an impressively long list of work that is beyond the scope of this article, but a good place to start is three key acronyms.
Like any profession, design is chock full of acronyms, but I’m going to focus on the three that are going be bandied about now that your boss has decided that design matters.
#1 GD — Graphic Design
How they see the world:
Unfortunately, the most common name used to describe the graphic designer is, confusingly, the designer. The reasons are two-fold: first, he was the first person hired to work on the product who had any skill set outside of engineering, and second, he was placed in charge of the “the pretty”. Someone in charge saw the first working prototype of the product and said, “This looks like an engineer threw it together”, (you nod) and “We need a designer to fix this up” (blank stare).
You: “Fix what up?”
Person in charge: “I don’t know… it just needs to… look prettier.”
Designers who have not yet bolted from this article, yet, are now standing on their chairs screaming at the screen as they read this: “I KNOW THAT GUY.”
Yeah, I know him, too. He’s an idiot, but he has good intentions.
The craft of the graphic designer is a visual one. Via applications like Photoshop and Illustrator, a graphic designer gives visual form to ideas. Yes, the work they do is pretty, but it isn’t just pretty. It speaks. It has an opinion about what it is and anyone who looks at it can see the opinion. Yes, a designer gives your application or website an air of clean, credible professionalism, but a well drawn anything does little to make your product easier to use.
A breakdown occurs when the person in charge walks into the graphic designer’s office and says, “You’re the designer — can you help de-engineer the product?” Now, like you, the graphic designer wants to do more — they want more responsibility — so even though they don’t know how the product works or who your users are, they sign up, thinking, “Sure, I’m a designer, right?”
And they produce. They generate an eye-pleasing prototype in Photoshop that you just want to lick. The graphic designer has done something most engineers cannot, and while important design work has occurred, the design is not remotely done — your product simply has a pretty face. And while it does matter how your product looks, it’s equally important how it works.
For the end of each section of this primer, I’ve selected a set of three design-related books that have shaped my design opinion. Let’s start with design essentials:
#2 IxD — Interaction Design
How IxD sees the world:
The interaction designer has a fascinating gig: they abstract function from form. Think of how you regularly navigate your favorite application. You follow a familiar path that we’ll call a workflow: it’s a series of mouse clicks and drags accompanied by your rapid-fire keyboard wizardry. This is your interface with the application.
The interaction designer’s gig is the care and the feeding of the workflow. Via the deft usage of wireframes and flowcharts, the interaction designer defines and refines the step-by-step process by which a user can traverse the application.
These low fidelity descriptions of the functionality are confusing to those who don’t understand their intent. Is this how the application is going to look? No, this is the interaction. These are rough approximations of the user interface intended to describe how it will work, not how it will look. But how is it going to look? Could we get drop shadows on that text? I love drop shadows and blue, I love words with a punch. Yeah, ok, right — you need to leave now. The door is down the hall on the left and it’s a lovely shade of blue.
The separation of function from form involves making a mental leap and there are those who believe one cannot be considered without the other. I believe the answer is somewhere in the middle. While I don’t believe you need pixel-perfect comps in order to think strategically about interaction, I do believe working prototypes with sample interaction and animation is a far richer place to have a debate than a whiteboard.
A low-fidelity scribble can describe how your product works, and it does remove many of the subjective elements of design that are apt to derail a perfect good design conversation into a useless debate about drop shadows. But color, typography, spacing — all of these elements contribute to the feel of your product, and how your product feels is equally important to how it works.
There are two other acronyms in close orbit to IxD that you’re likely going to discover that are worth mentioning:
IA or Information Architect is a title falling out of favor in recent years. Perhaps the best model for thinking about IAs is the role of a librarian. The mindset of information architects is what gave us the Dewey Decimal System: a classification system for information. An IA does not sleep well until information has been organized. I haven’t run into one of these folks in a while.
HCI or Human Computer Interaction is another title you’ll discover. It appears this title is one granted exclusively from University and those sporting this title first self-declare their degree, then pause, then add their University. Yes, I have a PhD in HCI <pause> from Carnegie Mellon.
My experience with the HCI folk is that they are often brilliant researchers. If you want to understand every possible workflow your users are trying on your application, the elapsed time to complete these workflows, and the enumerated set of quantified emotional damage these workflows are inflicting on your users, find an HCI guy, give him 18 months, and you’ll be <pause> dazzled.
Continuing with the reading list. These books were selected because I believe they are approachable by anyone. Reading these will not give you a complete design education, they will give you a good solid taste of the different parts of design:
#3 UXD — User Experience Design
Finding the one image that describes how UxD thinks is tricky, so here are three (click on any for further detail):
User. Experience. Design. What do they care about? Well, you care about the whole damned thing. You care about the visual design; you care about the interaction design; but mostly what you care about is the experience of the user.
In my experience, the folks sporting the UxD title have nothing like a degree in UxD. It’s a title they’ve adopted over the years because they know what I know: the title of designer is too general to be useful. Graphic designer and interaction designer are too specific. The user experience designer likely had an acronym in her past, but somewhere in the journey she decided it was to her advantage to care about the whole damned product.
Awesome.
There are a pile of design disciplines that contribute their acronyms and abilities to product design efforts and there is a time and place for each. The reason I seek the person that labels or thinks of herself as UxD is because I’m looking for a person who is willing to step up and be accountable for the entire experience.
The last part of the reading list includes absolute design classics. Yes, a book about comics:
Party. More. Together.
Usability as a design discipline is conspicuously missing from this list. Thing is, even if it had a clever acronym I wouldn’t include it.
Prior to Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, there was a decent centralized usability team equipped with those fancy rooms with one-way mirrors and video cameras. I’m certain these folks did significant work, but when Jobs returned, he shut it down and he cast the design teams to the wind. Each product team inherited part of the former usability team.
Now, I arrived after this reorganization occurred, so I don’t know the actual reasoning, but I do know I never saw those usability labs used once and I would argue that in the past decade Apple has created some of the most usable products out there. My opinion is that the choice to spread the usability design function across the engineering team was intended to send a clear message: engineer and designer need to party more… together.
I can’t imagine building a team responsible for consumer products where engineers and designers weren’t constantly meddling in each other’s business. Yes, they often argue from completely opposite sides of the brain. Yes, it is often a battle of art and science, but engineering and design want exactly the same thing. They want the intense satisfaction of knowing they successfully built something that matters.
A design-centered culture is at throwaway empty phrase unless everyone responsible for the culture of design is in each other’s faces. Titles and acronyms give you a starting point for understanding what a person might do, but what really matters is the respect that comes when you take the time to understand how they build what they love.
2011 in Review
Over a half a million unique visitors stumbled on Rands this year and as the year winds down, I wanted to take a look back at the year in articles. These are articles that turned out to be popular or just pieces I loved to write:
Bored People Quit. From a traffic perspective, the clear winner for 2011. This is article is a good example of a piece where I’ve no idea how it will resonate until I hit the publish button. There are articles I feel have a good chance before they are published: they target a specific group and cover a topic I think will appeal to that demographic. This was not one of them.
The Rands Test. However, this was. This homage to The Joel Test is actually a collection of threads teased out from the entire archive. This gave the piece a chance to resonate. Finding the precise number of relevant questions and points was the tricky part of this piece. Yes, the math is fuzzy - it’s actually quite hard to get 12 points.
You Are Underestimating the Future. Most articles stew in a Dropbox folder for weeks. This article was written in an hour, straight out of my head, the day Steve Jobs passed away.. Another notable: titles normally mutate a few times as a piece is being written and rewritten. This piece started and finished with exactly the same title.
Fred Hates It. Any time I get to disassemble a part of conventional business wisdom, I am content. Taking apart and rebuilding off-sites was payback for every off-site that wasted days of my time. I also liked the Fred character that was built around the piece. He was not central to early drafts, he just showed up — yelling. I couldn’t ignore him, so he got the title.
A Bag of Holding. Writing obsessive research-based articles about things you love feels like a guilty pleasure. As I wrote in the newsletter, these pieces seem to just get longer and longer and I briefly worry that I’ll lose the audience. Reading the comments on the piece is a good reminder that obsession loves company.
Lastly, there are still charity shirts available. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you like reading, so why not share that love with someone less fortunate this holiday season.
I’m thankful for all of you who showed up in 2011 and wish you a spectacular 2012.
Happy Holidays.
A Bag of Holding
The fundamental goal I have for a wallet via its design is that it prevents me from randomly collecting crap.
Years of folding leather wallets with myriad pockets and flaps all yielded precisely the same result: a Costanza-sized monstrosity that contained random crap that at one time I thought I needed, but eventually became useless clutter. This collection sat in my back pocket as a constant reminder of a tidying task I never did. Meanwhile, the massive collection of clutter ultimately destroys the wallet because no wallet is designed to perpetually hold everything.
The current wallet is perfect.
It’s perfect because:
- There are zero moving parts. Whether it’s a flap or a mechanical money clip, moving parts fail.
- There is limited capacity. The card sleeve barely allows me to hold eight card-shaped objects. Eight. This means that each time I attempt to keep a receipt I think I’ll need I have to fold it and slide it into the money clip. This means each time I handle my cash, I have to make a critical decision about the receipt — do I still need it? You’d be surprised by the half-life of items in your back pocket that you recently thought were important when you’re forced to look at them an hour later.
- I’m not constantly stressing the architecture of the wallet attempting to contain everything. The current wallet has already lasted 4x as long as its predecessor.
It’s with this wallet design win that I embarked on a quest for comparable bag.
The Bag Requirements
My requirements for a bag start with those of the wallet, but with an important essential addition: my bag has multiple use cases. My bag needs to adapt to whatever journey I’m currently on, whether it’s a trip to work; a trip far, far away; or a trip where I’m sleeping in the dirt under the stars. A trip is either work or play, and since I work a lot more than I play, I chose to focus on work scenarios for my bag research.
I’ve heavily used two different types of bags over the past five years, and each has some win. To understand my initial requirements for a good bag, let’s quickly look at each.
A Christmas present, this Johnson & Murphy messenger bag was the first work bag I loved. I find it gorgeous. A large, comfortable shoulder strap and decent space made this my go-to bag for years. All that was missing was the addition of a Incase sleeve to give my MacBook a little cushioning and I was set.
In the past few years I began to travel more, and the travel exposed a core weakness: the bag doesn’t scale to far, far away. I found myself stuffing, shoving, and reorganizing headphones and power supplies in the bag, and while the magnet clasp works fine for a trip to work, when the bag is at capacity, it feels like it might pop open at any moment. I had a similar over the shoulder Tumi bag that was my workhorse for far, far away, but after sitting in a lot of airports, I’d seen a new development. Folks were wearing backpacks again.
I’m scarred by backpacks. My memory of backpacks was of these massive canvas-like bags full of immense and dense text books, crumbled paper, and a distinct smell of partially rotten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I remember constantly losing important papers in what was the seemingly infinite space contained within my bag, and I wasn’t interested in returning to that frustration.
However, after countless hours watching travelers sport backpacks, it was time to get past my scarring and give backpacks another try. Tom Bihn’s Smart Alec backpack was a chance to test this development.
After six months of steady use of my Bihn backpack, not only do I understand why people love them, I also better understand the complete set of questions and requirements I have for a good bag.
Does this bag make me look like a nerd? (Because I am.)
Bag religion is rampant. The only thing I’m looking forward to more than finishing this article is the crazy, foaming at the mouth bag nuts that are going to comment on this piece. My research is far less complete than in prior obsessive excursions, so bring it. I want to hear it. I’ve seen a lot of different bags, and my first requirement is that while I need my bag to be nerd-compliant, I don’t want it to scream “nerd”. This was part of my love affair with my messenger bag. It looked like I was part of the Pony Express when I was actually just a nerd hoofing my nerd crap hither and yon.
My bag needs to walk a delicate line between form and function. I need it to elegantly contain my various nerd crap, but I don’t need to broadcast to the world that, yes, not only am I sporting my nerd gear, I also have a back-up of the aforementioned gear because I’ve built in redundancy. That’s how I roll. I’m a nerd.
The messenger bag is a slight winner in this very subjective category. While the Smart Alec avoids most design disasters that remind me of JanSport-esque high school backpack monstrosities (straps, zippers, every kind of fabric everywhere, minimal pockets, and the color taupe), it makes less of a statement. It’s slightly more function than form. However, it is a better answer to the question…
Am I going to beat you through the security line?
The hands down collective best measure for any bag is its relationship to your situation in the security line at the airport. Let’s start with my mindset when I’m standing in line at security. I’m furious. Everyone’s furious. While we suspect the security line is essential, as we stand in that endless line, we know — we’re absolutely sure — there is a better way.
I’m fuming with this frustration when I finally get to the front of the line, but more importantly, I want to prove a point: I will now demonstrate to everyone the value of efficiency. Grab two trays, slip shoes off and put them in tray #1. Stuff wallet, iPhone, and boarding pass in shoes, belt off — NEXT TRAY — MacBook Air in second tray. Bag behind second tray, luggage behind that. And done. Why yes, I can do this and move the trays at the same time — WHY CAN’T YOU?
No where in the above process did you see “futzing with my bag and looking for shit”. In times of stress, a good bag demonstrates a couple of essential design points:
- Easy access to the items I commonly need. This means my computer is a single zipper away, but this ease of access does not mean the safety of these essentials is compromised. The Smart Alec is a clear winner here. In addition to the main compartment, there are two external side pockets that are large enough to hold the answers to most travel questions.
- Simply amazing zippers. My messenger bag has a magnet clasp and that works, but when I’m moving quickly, I’m wondering when this bag held together with a magnet is going to explode. When I close any pocket on my bag, I want to be left with the clear impression that the pocket is seriously closed.
- A minimum of crap hanging from the bag. Each strap is an opportunity to snag myself on a random piece of crap that I didn’t happen to see at the least opportune time. Traditional backpacks are the worst offenders when it comes to these straps. The designers seem to think I’m always mere seconds away from base jumping off a bridge where I need my backpack affixed to me in seven different ways. I don’t. I need two straps. That’s it.
However, I do want to know…
Can I go ninja?
The rule is: the further you are from your cave, there’s the exponential increase in the chance something will go wrong at the least opportune time. The best example of this is standing in front of 1,000 people who are expecting you to smoothly and expertly talk for the next hour and you’ve just discovered your MacBook doesn’t connect to the venue’s projector.
In my bag, I’m certain I have video connectors for most projectors on the planet. Furthermore, I have a universal power converter, a power supply, two presentation remotes, and sundry other essential white cables. All of these items are expertly collected in what Tom Bihn calls a Snake Charmer bag. This mesh bag is not only of a size that it can handle all of these items, it takes oddly shaped items such as power supplies and Jamboxes and molds them into an easily transportable rectangle that fits inside of my bag.
To allow for ninja-like moves, a good bag is designed to maintain state, which means:
- There is a knowable set of intelligently aligned pockets of a size and shape that make sense. This is where my messenger bag fails. In order to maintain that Pony Express feel, the messenger bag design assumes that everything I’m going to lug about is roughly shaped like a stack of 8.5x11 paper. While the MacBook and the iPad are paper-shaped, I have essential items that aren’t square: delicate sunglasses, clumps of pens, and bizarrely shaped collapsible headphones. When I attempt to gear up for the long trip, it’s clear from the resulting lumpiness that the messenger bag was designed for a pleasing form and not useful function.
The Smart Alec backpack not only has a sensible number of pockets, they are of a size that accounts for the fact that oddly shaped items follow me on my travels. More importantly…
- In time of stress, the items are readily accessible, remain safe, and don’t shift around. I can’t predict when I need to go ninja. I don’t know when it’s absolutely essential that I have a pen ready to go in five seconds. When this moment does arrive, I don’t want to be digging feverishly around my bag, placing various items on the floor as I search the bottom of the bag where the small stuff has fallen. The Smart Alec backpack not only has a sensible number of pockets, they are readily accessible and not cavernous. At this moment I can tell you: right side external pocket is notebooks and the essential small crap bag (which I’ll explain in a moment), left external pocket is pens, mints, and playing cards, and the internal top pocket is safe and easily accessible for sunglasses, random small pieces of paper, a passport, and the occasional stash of hard candy.
All my stuff, readily accessibly at a moment’s notice — that’s pretty ninja. Still…
Is my bag smarter than I am?
Everything is exponentially and unnecessarily harder when you’re stressed, and it’s in these moments that you appreciate the design of a good bag. A well-maintained state allows me to go ninja, but knowing precisely where my stuff is safely located is just the first step. A well-designed bag is thinking for you when the last thing you’re doing is thinking. Some examples:
- Sub-bags. In addition to intelligent pocket size and positioning, Bihn pushes an idea to help me maintain state: sub-bags. For everyday trips, I have a single sub-bag that I’ll call “essential small crap”. Everything I’d normally lose or constantly be untangling is in a small bag that is transparent on one side, and which sits well contained precisely in the same pocket.
- An unexpected sense of space. This is a direct contradiction to my requirement that my bag prevents me from randomly collecting crap, but part of being ninja is the need to scale. I will randomly need to lug around a randomly shaped something from here to there and my preference is that my bag does this without fuss. The messenger bag fails here, especially on longer trips. I’m at max capacity on a long trip, which means I’m shoving newly acquired items in coat pockets or onto fellow travelers. As for the Smart Alec bag, I never felt I’ve filled it. Sure, I can lug your randomly shaped something… anywhere.
- Agility. My agility test is relatively simple: how many people are impacted/aware when I attempt to retrieve my MacBook while sitting in the middle seat? Any answer higher than one is too many. For the messenger bag, I first need to find the handle, which, given how it was shoved under the seat in front of me, is trickier than it needs to be. Then, I slide the bag out, lift the flap, unzip the Incase, and slide out the hardware. If you’re sitting on either side of me, you’re going to be well aware of this process because of my odd elbow gyrations.
The backpack is shaped like a bullet. You slide the base easily under the seat in front of you, leaving the tip pointed directly at your feet. When I need something, the handle is at the tip of my toes, the zipper is easy to grab and works every time, and the Brain Cell holding the MacBook is right there. If you’re sitting next to me you’ll end up wondering, “When did he pull his computer out?” Whether it’s shoved into an overhead compartment, slid under a seat, or thrown in the back of a taxi, my bag needs to remain accessible and useful. This means I can get to it, and once I get to it, I can perform whatever action I intend without annoying every single person around me.
- Full range of motion. The defining aspects of a backpack are its most obvious — it’s on your back. After many years of single-strap messenger bags, I was shocked when I moved to the backpack and suddenly had two hands. A messenger bag does not full occupy one of your arms, but your shoulder is in a constant balancing dance with the bag to make sure it’s in the right place. With a backpack, this is a non-issue. When it’s on your back it’s gone and you’ve got a full range of two-handed ninja motion.
Through its design, a good bag makes me look smarter by giving me deft answers to most travel disasters, but I have one more request.
Can I take a bullet? Do I look good after I’ve taken a bullet?
As my bag accompanies me everywhere on the Planet Earth, it’s apt to encounter small random disasters. Briefly dragged on the asphalt, being drenched by half a cup of airplane coffee, or being unceremoniously thrown in the back of a cab. When these micro-disasters are going down, I need two things of my bag:
- Everything in it needs to admirably survive and generally remain in the same location, and,
- The disaster results in the bag acquiring additional character.
Sturdy is the word you’re thinking. Good solid craftsmanship. Yes, this is all true, but the art lies in building a bag that doesn’t look tired after the unexpected has occurred — the bag needs to look like it’s lived.
The messenger bag is a solid winner here. The bag has had the shit kicked out it, but it doesn’t look like it’s beaten, it looks worldly. The Bihn bag is well constructed out of impressive sounding materials such as ballistic nylon. It looks sturdy, it looks like it can take a bullet, but once the damage is done, I don’t know what story the damage will tell.
Efficient Disaster Management
When I stand up to go somewhere, the routine is precise. Right pocket, wallet. Left pocket, iPhone. Keys in hand, grab my bag and go. It’s this sort of workflow precision that allows me to stay cool when the unexpected occurs. My inner dialog during the situation is, Well, see, I’ve got my shit together, so even though this unpredictable thing is going down, I’m doing my part to support predictability.
Whether it’s a wallet or a bag, its design needs to encourage and support my irrational worldview that with the proper level of organization those disasters, large and small, are all manageable.
