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Often called “The father of User Experience,” Norman coined the phrase some two decades ago. He’s the co-director of the dual-degree MBA and Engineering program at Northwestern University. Professor. Author. Ground-breaking usability theorist. Being taken to school by someone in his league, I can deal with. I arrived at his Palo Alto home with pad, pen, and camera crew to chat with him about the “Engineering of Want,” the theme of our maiden issue. I left with a surprisingly environmentalist critique of product design, a preview of his new book, Living with Complexity, and the idea that the ultimate state of UX is for it to disappear. Oh, and he accused me of being a marketer. Norman began our lesson as soon as I asked him our first interview question: “What were the fields of User Experience and HCI like when you started?” He chuckled and pointed out that, back in 1989 (when he wrote the seminal The Design of Everyday Things), there was no HCI. “My research group and I had been looking at the problems of Unix and the problems with these clunky terminals. We didn’t yet have graphic displays.” These early days of (non-)UX were marked by a lack of decent user interfaces. “In the beginning,” Don explained, “We really had to think about usability because the early computers, and for that matter almost all early products that used computers, were unworkable, unusable, not understandable—because they had tended to be [designed] by engineers, who were much more concerned with ‘Could we even get the thing to work?’…And we had done the book called User Centered System Design, which, I guess, you could say was the early days of HCI." Norman agrees that the field of UX has come a long way since then—in our thinking, if not in execution. “Now, lots of products are still unusable, but the principles of how we should make them usable are very well known, and they’re really not changing.” “I think that we no longer need to focus. The usability people really have to focus on doing best practices or making sure that what we know, how we know to do things should be applied.” Norman’s take is that we, as an industry, should agree on UX best practices and move on. To where, we wondered? He was glad we asked. Norman’s impending new book, Living With Complexity, covers what he feels is the next level of usability—being part of a system. Lest you suspect that the author of The Design of Everyday Things has joined the Borg, he provided an example from everyday life. For a taste of his teaching style, here’s a short transcript:

Don Norman: Look at the iPod. Why is it successful? Is it a great music player? Yeah, but is it much different than the other music players? No.

Want: One might suggest it’s a more elegant interface design.

Don Norman: Barely. The others are easy to use. They’re often less expensive. They often have more memory. The basic player is not why the iPod is successful.

Want: iTunes?

Don Norman: Well, no, but you’re in the right direction. You may remember that in the really old days, it was hard to get music, and on top of that, it was illegal to do so. You really had to be pretty technical. Apple was the first company to do the licensing. So, first of all, they made it legal; second of all, they made the price sensible. Then they took a big database, an SAP database, and they made it usable, and that became iTunes. They made it easy to go there and find the music you wanted. They made the download effortless. You plug the iPod in and without doing anything, your iPod is up to date. And they also allowed other people, third parties, to build all sorts of accessories like external speakers. Those people are part of the ecosystem that Apple provided.

“So,” Norman said, summing up his definition, “We have a system that, under the surface, is incredibly complex, but at all touchpoints, is easy and enjoyable to use—from the licensing on the one end of music, to the licensing on the other end of third parties who are providing all of the accessories that expand the utility of the iPod. And everything is effortless.” Complex under the surface, but easy to use: that’s the future of products and services, according to Living With Complexity. “People think the opposite of complexity is simplicity, but it’s not.” Don explained. “People who say, ‘I want it simple,’ want it understandable and usable.” Norman’s new book argues that just because a product is complex, doesn’t mean it has to be difficult to use. “The problem with complexity,” he says with his trademark grin, “is that it often leads to being complicated. ‘Complicated’ is in the head. If we can make a complex thing that is understandable, then, in fact, we like it, because it gives us a lot more power.” What is key to understandability? Good design plays a big part, by helping to make things modular. “You do that,” he suggests, “by providing a good, cohesive model so there’s a conceptual model; you do that by adding structure; and you do that by also learning it in small hunks.” Your product or service should provide a simple return from basic comprehension, and offer greater returns the more you learn it. Take iTunes: playing a song on it is easy. But as you learn each of its features, like playlists, the Genius function, syncing it with a portable device, you get more enjoyment out of it. Norman cited cars and cell phones as other examples of this—but the one that he kept coming back to was cooking. “You learn cooking slowly, over time. You start off by making, I don’t know, boiled eggs, and you slowly learn how to make scrambled eggs and omelets, and so on. You work your way up. “Every little tool that we use in cooking is pretty simple. Cooking itself is made up of many simple steps, but the large number of simple steps, and the need for proper timing and the need for knowing what goes together, makes it a complex activity.” Keeping with our theme for Release 001, we asked him if it was possible to engineer “want” into a product or service. “It’s interesting,” he remarked after a thoughtful silence, “that what we’re doing is sort of moving the user experience and design world into the world of advertising.” And so the interview took a fascinating turn. The single question gave him plenty of reason to opine about consumer industry and its drive to iterate constantly in order to drive sales. Don, ever the academic, believes that advertising and marketing “create desires and wants and needs that never existed before.” “Think about the environmental mess that we have…Is it really necessary to discard your cell phone every six months or every year or even every two years? Is it because the advertising community has figured out ways of, oh, wow, giving you some new feature you can’t live without? So maybe it’s not a good thing that we create these wonderful desires for something new that we don’t have.” “Remember,” he advised, “the design world and the advertising world are not that far apart.” Lest my Editor-in-Chief and I (both marketers at points in our careers) feel completely to blame, Don let us off the hook by tracing the origins of this iterate-to-sell point of view. “It came from automobiles: deliberate styling to make your automobile obsolescent in one to two years. So there would be a model change every year in automobiles and every three or four years there’ll be a big change. And then the advertisers made it feel that you were evil—out of date—if you didn’t have the latest version. “But is that any different than, ‘See, you have one of those old, clunky iPhones or one of those old, clunky iPods?’…The new ones are prettier and smaller, but the music sounds the same.” “See,” Don offered with a wide grin, “The user experience community thinks they’re pure. “’No, no, no!’” He added, lightly mocking product designers and usability experts everywhere. “’We don’t do that evil advertising stuff. We’re not doing evil marketing. We’re simply finding what people really want, and we’re providing it for them.’ Every six months, though, we provide new wants. Come on, what’s the distinction between that and what marketing does and what advertisers do?” Norman does concede that product line evolutions can offer significant leaps, rather than wasteful stylistic iterations: going from cell phones to smart phones, for instance. In fact, that’s the direction he sees the future of computing heading. “What I’ve always advocated…and I think is happening, is that the computer disappears. [Take for example] the book reader, the specialized device just for reading books. Inside, it’s a computer, but who cares? A music player--a specialized device for listening to music--is a computer.” Does this mean that we’ll see more products containing PC-level computers? Norman believes so, for better…and for worse. I mentioned the debut of a new line of microwave ovens with web-browsing ability, which amused him to no end. “Too many times the technologists say, ‘Oh, gee, we could make a microwave oven that browses the Internet.’ Well, what for? ‘Oh, you could look up recipes on it.’ But if you actually think about the way people work, they don’t want to stand in front of their microwave looking for recipes.” Which brought up a computer that he did consider a helpful device in the kitchen: The iPad. “Suppose I’m thinking, oh, let’s have something different for dinner tonight. How do I do it? First of all, I peruse my memory and my knowledge of cooking and also my knowledge of what we have in the house to figure out what we might do. But I might turn to my cookbooks. I have a row of cookbooks there, and I might pull one out and read it. “But why not…a portable reading device? It’s convenient to use. I don’t have to go to my office and sit under my desk. I can go to my couch, or I can sit here at the table. The new Apple iPad…would allow me to find recipes, maybe browse the Internet for cooking sites and see pictures, or if I’m not sure how to do the preparation, there’s a little video…People will start writing cookbooks not with photographs of the food, but with videos. “But the nice thing is…not that suddenly the Internet gives us information—it already does. It’s that it gives it to me in the way I want to think about cooking. That’s what I think is going to be so powerful. These devices now will fit our lifestyles instead of us changing the way we work. “When we look at the way things will come together, it’s going to be based around people’s activities, not because the technology suddenly makes it possible for your refrigerator to show TV programs,” he added with a professorial smirk. And yet, we still hadn’t gotten Norman to address “the engineering of want” to the level we, well, wanted. Perhaps we never would. But it was worth another try. We decided to address it from an angle he had established in his book, Emotional Design. There, he outlines three levels at which people process the products they buy and use: visceral (styling & perception), behavioral (look & feel) and reflective (one’s self-image that comes from the owning/using of the product). Then we asked him how one could use those levels of emotion to instill want or desire into the creation of a product…and then he went off on a bit of a rant. But just a bit. “Hmmm, here we go again. Doesn’t that make designers somewhat into advertisers or marketing people because we’re asking, ‘How do we make it so people should enjoy the product?’ Now, that’s not entirely fair, because why not make it so people really enjoy the products?” A fair question. “But yeah, make it attractive. Make it so it really feels good. That’s why we like precision tools. That’s why as a cook, I really like a well-balanced knife and good tools for cooking.” “The question is the balance. We don’t want to sell things simply because we figured out how we can sell things: ‘Whether or not people care about it or need it, we’re going to make them care about it.’ “But if you can sell things that people really need, that really do make their lives better and do not destroy the environment, then sure, the distinction between designers and marketers, I think, is very small. Both of us are trying to do what the customer wants. The goal of marketing is to understand what people are willing to buy, and the goal of designers is to try to understand what people really need, and these groups really ought to be working closely together.” All edifying and fine food for thought. But we still wanted to find that secret sauce. I pressed the issue from yet another angle:

Want: You’ve also written about how emotional attachments trump practicality. How much of that can be an exploitable trait when seducing audiences, when creating customers and of course the making of successful products?

Don Norman: Gee. You really are a marketing person, aren’t you?

Want: How did you know?

Don Norman: How much of that could be used to seduce the customers, to have them buy this, or have them overlook the horrible flaws we have on this side because this part is so wonderful and attractive?

Which brought up an interesting point: How much of marketing and advertising is about promoting a product’s good points—and how much of it is about covering up flaws? “You know, it’s interesting that all of this can be used to exploit people. Because…when something is really good and pleasurable, we do overlook the minor faults…We recognize that we can’t make everything perfect, and so we try to make a total great experience. “One of the standard stories I tell is going to, say, a Disney theme park. I ask people what they hate; invariably they hate the lines. ‘[But] would you go back?’ Yes, most people would go back. “The point is, the lines from Disney’s point of view are unavoidable. There’s no way they can prevent the lines because the only way really to prevent the lines is either have the rides be shorter or have more rides. But rides are very expensive: $10 million, $20 million a ride. They can’t put in many more rides. So here’s a case where all that I’m saying works: by making the total experience a great one, people are willing to overlook the minor problems of, you know, boredom and standing in line. But they didn’t deliberately put a negative in. They didn’t know how to get rid of the negative, so they made the surrounding experience positive. That’s what I like.” “And so, with all of our products, which may have some unavoidable negative components, yeah, make it good, but I wouldn’t seduce them by saying, you know, we actually know this part is crap, so we’ll make this part really wonderful and maybe they won’t notice.” “I would hate to have that used, though, as a way of deliberately allowing ourselves to have faults and making up for it by some other thing, say, by the packaging or by the styling or something else. I would hope that we do our very best.” Recently, Norman announced that he’d be retiring from his position at Northwestern University later this Summer--which, as he writes on his website, “…will let me do more consulting, travel more, stay longer, and be more spontaneous (but I'm booked until early 2011).” Even after three-plus decades of ground-breaking work, Don Norman is by no means slowing down. Anyone who might suggest that he’ll be teaching less has not had the pleasure of interviewing him. [amazonshowcase_c7a3f4c4f42630293196d51bb7af4bb1]" ["post_title"]=> string(30) "Don Norman: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(444) "A simple interview with whom many consider to be the father of User Experience turns into a lesson as Don takes us to school. In our interview with Don Norman of the Neilsen Norman Group explains how User Experience predates computer interfaces, and that the destiny of the field of User Experience is to disappear. He gives us a preview of his upcoming book, LIVING WITH COMPLEXITY, and accuses product designers—and us—of being marketers." 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Often called “The father of User Experience,” Norman coined the phrase some two decades ago. He’s the co-director of the dual-degree MBA and Engineering program at Northwestern University. Professor. Author. Ground-breaking usability theorist. Being taken to school by someone in his league, I can deal with. I arrived at his Palo Alto home with pad, pen, and camera crew to chat with him about the “Engineering of Want,” the theme of our maiden issue. I left with a surprisingly environmentalist critique of product design, a preview of his new book, Living with Complexity, and the idea that the ultimate state of UX is for it to disappear. Oh, and he accused me of being a marketer. Norman began our lesson as soon as I asked him our first interview question: “What were the fields of User Experience and HCI like when you started?” He chuckled and pointed out that, back in 1989 (when he wrote the seminal The Design of Everyday Things), there was no HCI. “My research group and I had been looking at the problems of Unix and the problems with these clunky terminals. We didn’t yet have graphic displays.” These early days of (non-)UX were marked by a lack of decent user interfaces. “In the beginning,” Don explained, “We really had to think about usability because the early computers, and for that matter almost all early products that used computers, were unworkable, unusable, not understandable—because they had tended to be [designed] by engineers, who were much more concerned with ‘Could we even get the thing to work?’…And we had done the book called User Centered System Design, which, I guess, you could say was the early days of HCI." Norman agrees that the field of UX has come a long way since then—in our thinking, if not in execution. “Now, lots of products are still unusable, but the principles of how we should make them usable are very well known, and they’re really not changing.” “I think that we no longer need to focus. The usability people really have to focus on doing best practices or making sure that what we know, how we know to do things should be applied.” Norman’s take is that we, as an industry, should agree on UX best practices and move on. To where, we wondered? He was glad we asked. Norman’s impending new book, Living With Complexity, covers what he feels is the next level of usability—being part of a system. Lest you suspect that the author of The Design of Everyday Things has joined the Borg, he provided an example from everyday life. For a taste of his teaching style, here’s a short transcript:

Don Norman: Look at the iPod. Why is it successful? Is it a great music player? Yeah, but is it much different than the other music players? No.

Want: One might suggest it’s a more elegant interface design.

Don Norman: Barely. The others are easy to use. They’re often less expensive. They often have more memory. The basic player is not why the iPod is successful.

Want: iTunes?

Don Norman: Well, no, but you’re in the right direction. You may remember that in the really old days, it was hard to get music, and on top of that, it was illegal to do so. You really had to be pretty technical. Apple was the first company to do the licensing. So, first of all, they made it legal; second of all, they made the price sensible. Then they took a big database, an SAP database, and they made it usable, and that became iTunes. They made it easy to go there and find the music you wanted. They made the download effortless. You plug the iPod in and without doing anything, your iPod is up to date. And they also allowed other people, third parties, to build all sorts of accessories like external speakers. Those people are part of the ecosystem that Apple provided.

“So,” Norman said, summing up his definition, “We have a system that, under the surface, is incredibly complex, but at all touchpoints, is easy and enjoyable to use—from the licensing on the one end of music, to the licensing on the other end of third parties who are providing all of the accessories that expand the utility of the iPod. And everything is effortless.” Complex under the surface, but easy to use: that’s the future of products and services, according to Living With Complexity. “People think the opposite of complexity is simplicity, but it’s not.” Don explained. “People who say, ‘I want it simple,’ want it understandable and usable.” Norman’s new book argues that just because a product is complex, doesn’t mean it has to be difficult to use. “The problem with complexity,” he says with his trademark grin, “is that it often leads to being complicated. ‘Complicated’ is in the head. If we can make a complex thing that is understandable, then, in fact, we like it, because it gives us a lot more power.” What is key to understandability? Good design plays a big part, by helping to make things modular. “You do that,” he suggests, “by providing a good, cohesive model so there’s a conceptual model; you do that by adding structure; and you do that by also learning it in small hunks.” Your product or service should provide a simple return from basic comprehension, and offer greater returns the more you learn it. Take iTunes: playing a song on it is easy. But as you learn each of its features, like playlists, the Genius function, syncing it with a portable device, you get more enjoyment out of it. Norman cited cars and cell phones as other examples of this—but the one that he kept coming back to was cooking. “You learn cooking slowly, over time. You start off by making, I don’t know, boiled eggs, and you slowly learn how to make scrambled eggs and omelets, and so on. You work your way up. “Every little tool that we use in cooking is pretty simple. Cooking itself is made up of many simple steps, but the large number of simple steps, and the need for proper timing and the need for knowing what goes together, makes it a complex activity.” Keeping with our theme for Release 001, we asked him if it was possible to engineer “want” into a product or service. “It’s interesting,” he remarked after a thoughtful silence, “that what we’re doing is sort of moving the user experience and design world into the world of advertising.” And so the interview took a fascinating turn. The single question gave him plenty of reason to opine about consumer industry and its drive to iterate constantly in order to drive sales. Don, ever the academic, believes that advertising and marketing “create desires and wants and needs that never existed before.” “Think about the environmental mess that we have…Is it really necessary to discard your cell phone every six months or every year or even every two years? Is it because the advertising community has figured out ways of, oh, wow, giving you some new feature you can’t live without? So maybe it’s not a good thing that we create these wonderful desires for something new that we don’t have.” “Remember,” he advised, “the design world and the advertising world are not that far apart.” Lest my Editor-in-Chief and I (both marketers at points in our careers) feel completely to blame, Don let us off the hook by tracing the origins of this iterate-to-sell point of view. “It came from automobiles: deliberate styling to make your automobile obsolescent in one to two years. So there would be a model change every year in automobiles and every three or four years there’ll be a big change. And then the advertisers made it feel that you were evil—out of date—if you didn’t have the latest version. “But is that any different than, ‘See, you have one of those old, clunky iPhones or one of those old, clunky iPods?’…The new ones are prettier and smaller, but the music sounds the same.” “See,” Don offered with a wide grin, “The user experience community thinks they’re pure. “’No, no, no!’” He added, lightly mocking product designers and usability experts everywhere. “’We don’t do that evil advertising stuff. We’re not doing evil marketing. We’re simply finding what people really want, and we’re providing it for them.’ Every six months, though, we provide new wants. Come on, what’s the distinction between that and what marketing does and what advertisers do?” Norman does concede that product line evolutions can offer significant leaps, rather than wasteful stylistic iterations: going from cell phones to smart phones, for instance. In fact, that’s the direction he sees the future of computing heading. “What I’ve always advocated…and I think is happening, is that the computer disappears. [Take for example] the book reader, the specialized device just for reading books. Inside, it’s a computer, but who cares? A music player--a specialized device for listening to music--is a computer.” Does this mean that we’ll see more products containing PC-level computers? Norman believes so, for better…and for worse. I mentioned the debut of a new line of microwave ovens with web-browsing ability, which amused him to no end. “Too many times the technologists say, ‘Oh, gee, we could make a microwave oven that browses the Internet.’ Well, what for? ‘Oh, you could look up recipes on it.’ But if you actually think about the way people work, they don’t want to stand in front of their microwave looking for recipes.” Which brought up a computer that he did consider a helpful device in the kitchen: The iPad. “Suppose I’m thinking, oh, let’s have something different for dinner tonight. How do I do it? First of all, I peruse my memory and my knowledge of cooking and also my knowledge of what we have in the house to figure out what we might do. But I might turn to my cookbooks. I have a row of cookbooks there, and I might pull one out and read it. “But why not…a portable reading device? It’s convenient to use. I don’t have to go to my office and sit under my desk. I can go to my couch, or I can sit here at the table. The new Apple iPad…would allow me to find recipes, maybe browse the Internet for cooking sites and see pictures, or if I’m not sure how to do the preparation, there’s a little video…People will start writing cookbooks not with photographs of the food, but with videos. “But the nice thing is…not that suddenly the Internet gives us information—it already does. It’s that it gives it to me in the way I want to think about cooking. That’s what I think is going to be so powerful. These devices now will fit our lifestyles instead of us changing the way we work. “When we look at the way things will come together, it’s going to be based around people’s activities, not because the technology suddenly makes it possible for your refrigerator to show TV programs,” he added with a professorial smirk. And yet, we still hadn’t gotten Norman to address “the engineering of want” to the level we, well, wanted. Perhaps we never would. But it was worth another try. We decided to address it from an angle he had established in his book, Emotional Design. There, he outlines three levels at which people process the products they buy and use: visceral (styling & perception), behavioral (look & feel) and reflective (one’s self-image that comes from the owning/using of the product). Then we asked him how one could use those levels of emotion to instill want or desire into the creation of a product…and then he went off on a bit of a rant. But just a bit. “Hmmm, here we go again. Doesn’t that make designers somewhat into advertisers or marketing people because we’re asking, ‘How do we make it so people should enjoy the product?’ Now, that’s not entirely fair, because why not make it so people really enjoy the products?” A fair question. “But yeah, make it attractive. Make it so it really feels good. That’s why we like precision tools. That’s why as a cook, I really like a well-balanced knife and good tools for cooking.” “The question is the balance. We don’t want to sell things simply because we figured out how we can sell things: ‘Whether or not people care about it or need it, we’re going to make them care about it.’ “But if you can sell things that people really need, that really do make their lives better and do not destroy the environment, then sure, the distinction between designers and marketers, I think, is very small. Both of us are trying to do what the customer wants. The goal of marketing is to understand what people are willing to buy, and the goal of designers is to try to understand what people really need, and these groups really ought to be working closely together.” All edifying and fine food for thought. But we still wanted to find that secret sauce. I pressed the issue from yet another angle:

Want: You’ve also written about how emotional attachments trump practicality. How much of that can be an exploitable trait when seducing audiences, when creating customers and of course the making of successful products?

Don Norman: Gee. You really are a marketing person, aren’t you?

Want: How did you know?

Don Norman: How much of that could be used to seduce the customers, to have them buy this, or have them overlook the horrible flaws we have on this side because this part is so wonderful and attractive?

Which brought up an interesting point: How much of marketing and advertising is about promoting a product’s good points—and how much of it is about covering up flaws? “You know, it’s interesting that all of this can be used to exploit people. Because…when something is really good and pleasurable, we do overlook the minor faults…We recognize that we can’t make everything perfect, and so we try to make a total great experience. “One of the standard stories I tell is going to, say, a Disney theme park. I ask people what they hate; invariably they hate the lines. ‘[But] would you go back?’ Yes, most people would go back. “The point is, the lines from Disney’s point of view are unavoidable. There’s no way they can prevent the lines because the only way really to prevent the lines is either have the rides be shorter or have more rides. But rides are very expensive: $10 million, $20 million a ride. They can’t put in many more rides. So here’s a case where all that I’m saying works: by making the total experience a great one, people are willing to overlook the minor problems of, you know, boredom and standing in line. But they didn’t deliberately put a negative in. They didn’t know how to get rid of the negative, so they made the surrounding experience positive. That’s what I like.” “And so, with all of our products, which may have some unavoidable negative components, yeah, make it good, but I wouldn’t seduce them by saying, you know, we actually know this part is crap, so we’ll make this part really wonderful and maybe they won’t notice.” “I would hate to have that used, though, as a way of deliberately allowing ourselves to have faults and making up for it by some other thing, say, by the packaging or by the styling or something else. I would hope that we do our very best.” Recently, Norman announced that he’d be retiring from his position at Northwestern University later this Summer--which, as he writes on his website, “…will let me do more consulting, travel more, stay longer, and be more spontaneous (but I'm booked until early 2011).” Even after three-plus decades of ground-breaking work, Don Norman is by no means slowing down. Anyone who might suggest that he’ll be teaching less has not had the pleasure of interviewing him. [amazonshowcase_c7a3f4c4f42630293196d51bb7af4bb1]" ["post_title"]=> string(30) "Don Norman: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(444) "A simple interview with whom many consider to be the father of User Experience turns into a lesson as Don takes us to school. In our interview with Don Norman of the Neilsen Norman Group explains how User Experience predates computer interfaces, and that the destiny of the field of User Experience is to disappear. He gives us a preview of his upcoming book, LIVING WITH COMPLEXITY, and accuses product designers—and us—of being marketers." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(10) "don-norman" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 07:51:26" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 14:51:26" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(25) "http://wantmagazine/?p=12" ["menu_order"]=> int(1) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(2) "71" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } [1]=> object(stdClass)#322 (24) { ["ID"]=> int(290) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "1" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2010-07-20 00:01:30" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-07-20 07:01:30" ["post_content"]=> string(12810) "Anarchy in the UX: Engineering Desire the Malcolm McLaren Way Malcolm McLaren departed this world in April 2010, leaving behind more than just The Sex Pistols, Bow Wow Wow, and the proto-hip-hop single “Buffalo Gals.” He left a legacy that we as designers, marketers, and other UX acolytes would do well to examine. No, seriously. I can hear the flame war already. What can the life of the man who allegedly invented punk rock and brought hip-hop to Britain and suburban America teach we who design smart phone apps and touch-screen PCs? More than you’d think. McLaren took a startup venture—consisting of four pimply youths who frequented his London fetish shop--and guided it to international recognition and a social impact that popular culture continues to reel from. He did it by applying a fascinating mix of strategies--some, like denying customers access to his product, would lose today’s UX experts their jobs. Others, like conducting user testing and enforcing a focused product strategy, UX’s leading lights follow every day. From the beginning of his career, McLaren had a talent for picking up existing cultures and philosophies and re-framing them to create something new. The latter skill came from his late-60s art-school education, where he discovered the political movement, Situationism. Founded by Marxist philosopher Guy DeBord, the Situationists advocated provocative, even absurd actions both as political statement and performance art. McLaren would eventually apply Situationist ideals to sales, management, and eventually, product strategy. He began his career in retail. In 1972, McLaren and then-girlfriend Vivienne Westwood opened up a clothing store in London’s trendy Kings Road district called Let It Rock, selling Teddy-Boy-style-apparel like leather jackets and skin-tight trousers. Then, during a trip to New York, he discovered the DIY culture of punk rock and the hardware-heavy fashion of S/M fetish culture. This influenced McLaren and Westwood to change the name of their store to Sex and sell leather and vinyl bondage gear. McLaren would later tell Vice Magazine, “I wanted to sell things that were normally sold in brown paper bags under the table. People were afraid to come in. It was fantastic.” The store served as his Situationist comment on retail: “A shop in which nothing in it was for sale. I liked the contradictions of that. It turned our shop into a place that people found impossible to leave.” [Swindle Magazine] Selling such disreputable items in a Kings Road boutique created the political volatility on which McLaren thrived. “We were raided twice by the police and went to court, but I didn’t give a damn…all the kids thought, 'This is the coolest place on earth.'” [Vice Magazine] The store failed to cultivate a customer base--but it built a hungry audience. McLaren would leverage this audience for his other products--not the least of which was a band, consisting of four of his most loyal non-customers. As he moved into the music industry with the Sex Pistols, McLaren continued to leverage his Situationist tendencies. He made sure every piece of media the band actually released had some element of inaccessibility--the beginnings of an anti-marketing strategy he would dub “Cash from Chaos.” This strategy, unheard of today, had dual positive outcomes. One outcome was the creation of publicity. The record, “Anarchy in the UK,” needed to create an eruption. After all, it was just a record and somehow that didn't seem to be enough. I refused to put a pretty picture of a band on a cover. Instead, I instructed the marketing department to produce a plain black cover with no hole in the middle, no name, no title, no record label. Nothing. [The Guardian] The other outcome was a targeted, passionate audience, much like the one he cultivated among the kids at his store. EMI were not happy. How, they asked, will anyone find the record? They didn't understand that I didn't want just anybody to find it. I wanted only those who cared. [The Guardian] But the chaos—and the cash—had only begun to accrue. McLaren made it a point to keep the band away from its fans and the press—partly to maintain that sense of mystery and exclusivity; partly because the Sex Pistols were actually terrible musicians. Creating an inflammatory image helped. The Pistols lobbed f-bombs on national television—unheard of at the time. Most infamously, during the twenty-fifth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's accession to the throne, McLaren rented a boat and had the band float up and down the Thames performing “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the UK.” This offense on the media actually allowed him to keep his product under wraps, making the idea of the band more popular than their music ever could have been. Instead of having the band play, I had them judge beauty contests. Town councilors were conducting press interviews. Whole towns and cities across the nation formed vigilante squads, not only to ban the group from playing but to prevent them from entering the city. Congregations were praying they just might self-destruct. The national debate was on. [The Guardian] Creating this firestorm around the band, as he did with Sex, did the trick. “The fact that (people) couldn’t be at the event made the event an enigma that could never be resolved.” He told the musician Momus in 2002. “And that’s what kept the Sex Pistols on the top of the media pile for eighteen months.” Keeping one’s product away from prospective buyers rarely leads to platinum sales, as it did with Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. But looking at the techniques and opinions of some of the leading minds in UX--specifically, those interviewed in Want Magazine’s Release 001--McLaren might not have been all that off-base after all. 1. Have a tightly-focused product strategy. Take Luke Wroblewski’s interview, wherein he praises the efficacy of the single-focus product strategy: Many times that (drive) comes from an entrepreneur who has that very, very strong desire. That personal drive to bring something to the world…is an incredibly strong focus point. I think this is why a lot of early-stage companies can deliver something new to the world. 2. Don’t Listen to your users. Watch them. McLaren relied on user testing--or at least his version of it. He founded punk style by observing the clientele of Sex, his Kings Road boutique. He noted the ones who most frequented the store bought very little, but rather, hung out for the scene, for the style. Malcolm described them in an interview as “The dispossessed fans of David Bowie, Roxy Music, et cetra, who were looking for something of their own.” 3. Find your user’s unmet needs or wants—and meet them. In our interview with Cordell Ratzlaff, Cisco’s Director of User-Centered Design, he mentions that “A lot of the emotional connection that people have with products goes back to satisfying a need that they didn’t even know that they had.” As McLaren developed an understanding of what his audience wanted—even before they themselves did--he created ways to capitalize on them without compromising his product’s authenticity. Volatile publicity stunts like the Queens’ Jubilee boat trip resulted in “God Save the Queen” reaching #1 on the British pop charts--building the band’s anti-authoritarian image and moving units at the same time. 4. Cover flaws with an overall enjoyable User Experience. The cleverest UX strategy applied by McLaren is one referenced by none other than Don Norman. In Norman’s Want interview, Norman applies it to the most un-counterculture experience around: amusement park lines. Norman points out that amusement parks can do little about the lines for their rides, and so try to make every other aspect of the park experience pleasurable. By making the total experience a great one, people are willing to overlook the minor problems of boredom and standing in line…When something is really good and pleasurable, we do overlook the minor faults. Which, of course is exactly what McLaren did—i.e., use a publicity smokescreen to hide the fact that the experience of watching the Sex Pistols play was actually unpleasant. While this is a strategy Norman acknowledges, it’s not one he’d have recommended. I would hate to have that used, though, as a way of deliberately allowing ourselves to have faults and making up for it by some other thing, say by the packaging or styling. As such, it’s unlikely that Don Norman would approve of the Sex Pistols. McLaren melded disparate elements of culture and politics as a UX designer or strategist does with metaphors and design patterns. He knew how to create ideas at the big-picture level, and shape and lead a team that could execute on them. Was his ability to combine fringe cultures of late-70s New York City with fashion retail to create a million-selling rock band terribly unlike today’s product innovators? Is it so different from Steve Jobs, who looked at a hotel concierge desk and thought “Genius Bar,” or Jonathan Abrams, who took a Match.com profile as his inspiration for Friendster? Can’t innovation come from anywhere, into any industry, provided it’s sufficiently fueled by passion and imagination? If Malcolm McLaren’s career is any indication, of course it can. Part P.T. Barnum, part Fagin-esque entrepreneur, he spent his life trusting his gut and failing as often as he succeeded. Yet his successes influenced design and technology in ways most of today’s innovators can only dream of--all with a minimum of cash and resources; mostly wit, drive, and an eye for talent. Perhaps it’s that path to DIY success where McLaren truly resonates with us in the UX field. His work permeated our culture in a way that today's tech start-ups aspire. “If you play your cards right,” He ranted in the film The Great Rock N Roll Swindle, “You can capture the imagination of the entire world.” by Ken Grobe Managing Editor, wantmag.com Ken Grobe is a UI writer, editor, and award-winning copywriter. When he's not helping Want Magazine to increase the general profile of User Experience, he writes comedy for San Francisco's Killing My Lobster." ["post_title"]=> string(10) "Reload 001" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(392) "Can today's UX experts and start-ups learn something from the man who brought us the Sex Pistols? Want Magazine's Managing Editor Ken Grobe thinks they already have. In this bridge between Want_001 and Want_002, Ken explores the career of the late, alleged "inventor of punk" Malcom McLaren—and shows how today's UX luminaries agree with McLaren's techniques (whether they know it or not)." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(10) "reload-001" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-07-20 01:56:22" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-07-20 08:56:22" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(38) "http://wantmag.com/2010/07/reload-001/" ["menu_order"]=> int(14) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(2) "21" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } } }

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