lucid plot

“Subject to Change: creating great products and services for an uncertain world” is Adaptive Path’s new book, written by Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, and David Verba. It’s an excellent book, clearly written and easy to follow, and it provides a combination of historical perspective, an analysis of the present, an explanation of what design actually is, and methods and tips on actually practising design in real life.

I don’t know exactly what I expected from this book—something aimed at a design audience perhaps—but in fact the book reads more like a manifesto for the discipline of experience design—and especially for its use in corporations. At times the book is surprisingly radical, quoting non-mainstream sources like the Cluetrain Manifesto and the Agile Manifesto, taking aim at business school thinking and its obsession with efficiency and benchmarking, and scathing about advertisers’ and marketers’ view of customers as mere consumers, or sheep. They even attack the “Homo Economicus” view of people as rational utility maximisers, the part of Economics that’s always annoyed me the most.

The book’s key audience might be somebody working in a corporation who wants to improve some aspect of their users’ experience—the usability of a website or product, say. The authors’ message is that although there may be lots of improvements you can make on that little product, unless the organisation takes a holistic view of the experience—an experience strategy, incorporating design as an organisational competency—sooner or later you’re going to hit a brick wall from the point of view of the user experience.

They cite the example of being asked to work on the user experience of a banking website, when the key frustrations of the bank’s customers concerned their interactions with branches, paper statements and telephone banking—parts of the organisation that were out of bounds for the website team.

This isn’t just a moan about how clients and organisations make designers’ jobs impossible. The authors’ argument isn’t that organisations need to change in order to make design easier, but that if they don’t make design a central part of what they do, they’re going to have a very rough time trying to establish a competitive advantage.

From the first chapter:

The key to succeeding in the contemporary marketplace is to fundamentally change your relationship with customers. Once you stop thinking of your customers as consumers and begin approaching them as people, you’ll find a whole new world of of opportunities to meet their needs and desires.

A thought-provoking, considered book—highly recommended.

“Subject to Change: creating great products and services for an uncertain world” by Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, and David Verba. Published by O’Reilly, April 2008. ISBN 10: 0-596-51683-5. ISBN 13: 9780596516833.

I’ve established a web design agency called Together London, based in Soho, London.

From the site:

Our approach to web design is user-centred, collaborative and strategically focused—resulting in a website that achieves the aims of your organisation, is easy to maintain, and offers a pleasurable user experience.

Read more on the Together website.

In the autumn of 2006 I spent a month travelling in Vietnam. Riding a taxi into town from the airport in Ho Chi Minh City, I noticed several fancy billboards, featuring soft-focus photography and slick English slogans, advertising the brands of large foreign corporations. They seemed out of place, like an Armani suit in a student common room — and I realised that the airport road was the only place in the country where I’d seen this type of fluffy marketing. Elsewhere, where I’d seen billboards at all, they looked less polished, they marketed specific products, and they used the local language, Vietnamese.

So why were these masterpieces of advertising guff reserved for the airport road? The answer was obvious. I’d assumed that the billboards were aimed at the companies’ customers — the people who bought their products — but they weren’t. Their audience was the people who pay the advertising agencies’ bills: company executives, and ultimately the CEO. These people aren’t likely to see much of a country — they’ll fly in, take a car to their hotel, and perhaps attend a conference, or tour the company’s facilities. Amid all the rush of a whistle-stop tour, they might assume that the whole country is plastered with billboards just like the ones on the airport road — and that therefore, the great international branding strategy is working exactly to plan.

Flattering the client

The billboards in HCMC were an example of flattery masquerading as marketing — a corporation paying an advertising agency to make executives feel good about themselves. This isn’t necessarily a terrible thing — many corporations can afford it, and a few fluffy posters and magazine ads don’t do any harm. But on the web, designing to flatter the CEO leads to disaster.

Ego marketing doesn’t work online

I use the term “ego marketing” to describe inward-focused, self-congratulatory marketing that takes an organisation-centred viewpoint rather than a user-centred one. With the exception of sites that aren’t supposed to be communicative, like vanity sites, ego marketing doesn’t work on the web.

The client will ultimately judge the success of a website project by user feedback and results, not personal aesthetics or preferences. Ego marketing annoys users and weakens the site’s message, so any use of it will tend to work to your disadvantage, negatively impacting the client’s judgement of success. What’s more, the client will expect you to have thought this way from the start, even if he or she didn’t, because you’re the web professional. Don’t design for the CEO — he won’t thank you for it.

The temptation to pander

During the web design process, it’s tempting to give in to clients’ personal aesthetic tastes, naive preferences, and ignorant prejudices, instead of challenging them to think from their audience’s point of view. For example, a client might ask for a colour scheme that he personally likes, an information architecture that fits his internal view of the company, or a crowded, cluttered layout because he “doesn’t like vertical scrolling”.

Paul Boag proposes some useful methods to deal with these unhelpful requests in “10 Ways To Get Design Approval” — particularly relevant are “define the role of the client and designer” and “control the feedback”.

Who pays the bills?

Design agencies get their income from clients, and so tend to be over-sensitive about doing exactly what the client asks for. Whether or not your boss is looking over your shoulder, muttering, “she pays the bills!”, there’s often pressure to do whatever the client seems to be asking for — even if it’s a stupid idea, and you know it isn’t what she actually needs. To make it worse, clients and co-workers are often accustomed to less user-centred fields, and so genuinely expect websites to be designed for the client.

Visualising how abstract concepts will work in real, living websites is notoriously difficult, especially for those unfamiliar with web design — which makes unworkable or inappropriate requests common. Processes like wireframing and prototyping help to mitigate this problem, but they don’t remove it.

Technically, the client pays the bills. But figuratively, the users pay — because if you don’t design with users in mind, they’ll be turned off, and eventually you’ll lose the client.

Success is judged by others

Although it might not seem like it at the beginning, the CEO will judge the success of the website on feedback and results. If users like the site, and it achieves its aims, he’ll be happy — but if they hate it, and the site fails, he won’t feel any better for knowing that he got his way earlier on. In fact, he’ll expect you to have advised him well from the start — even if that meant you had to challenge some of his assumptions and preferences. Nobody likes to be told that something’s their fault when it’s too late to fix it — and as web professionals, it’s our job to advocate the user’s point of view throughout the design process.

Don’t annoy your users

Suppose the CEO requests one of the all-time classics of ego marketing, the splash page, and you go ahead and implement one (with a really big logo). You know what will happen — users will be annoyed, because instead of helping them find what they’re looking for, the site is wasting their time by pushing empty marketing guff into their faces. Perhaps that’s an extreme example, but the same principle is true of all ego-marketing — users are unconvinced, and so feel annoyed — weakening your message.

Make it user-centred or pay later

In this article I’ve argued that if you give in to unreasonable client demands upfront, by designing for the CEO, you’ll pay for it later. Even if pandering to requests for ego marketing pleases the client in the short term, once the site is live she’ll judge it on feedback and results, and then you’ll be blamed for failing to advise her properly. Even though clients pay our bills, user-centred design is complicated — we’re paid to help clients communicate with their audience, not to make them feel good about themselves.

The payoff

If you manage to steer the client away from designing for the CEO, by advocating the user’s interests and resisting ego marketing, you’ll get a big payoff when the site launches and the client starts to get positive feedback from users. Ultimately, your clients will love you for thinking of their users first — which will make you more successful in the long term. And if they’re still not happy, you could always design them some big fluffy posters…

Right now everybody’s talking about Facebook, “the social utility that connects you with the people around you”. Thousands of people register on the site every day, and the mainstream press drones endlessly about whether it’ll get bigger than MySpace, and then presumably take over the world. And even though I haven’t signed up yet, I know from looking over people’s shoulders that an incredible number of my friends and acquaintances are active Facebook users. Perhaps I should just give in, and sign up.

But is Facebook really the ultimate social networking site, the last one you’ll ever need to add all your friends to? Of course not: in a year’s time, some other site will be the trendy hangout that you can’t afford to miss out on. But the good news is that this constant migration from network to network isn’t going to carry on for ever — because we now have interoperable, open standards that will make the idea that all your friends need to be on the same social network seem quaint. The combination of microformats and OpenID will allow open websites to compete with the key selling points of walled gardens like Facebook — privacy and network effects — and as a result, kill their business model.

Walled gardens

As Jason Kottke says, Facebook is the new AOL — a walled garden, which you can’t access from the open internet unless you’re a signed-up, logged-in Facebook user. Signing up to yet another website, and then approving all your friends for the 14th time is clearly a pain, so why do so many people do it? Because walled gardens offer two key features that open websites don’t: privacy and network effects.

Privacy: only my friends can see it

When you add content to your Facebook profile, you can make sure that only your friends can see it. So the fact that you’re feeling grumpy today isn’t broadcast to the whole world, just to your network — and the photos from the party last night can only be seen by people you trust. This kind of privacy feature isn’t unique to Facebook, of course: you can achieve the same effect using Flickr or Twitter, for example — sites which aren’t usually thought of as walled gardens. But I argue that whenever privacy features are used on these sites, they behave like walled gardens — because in order to restrict access to a network of friends, all of your friends need a profile on that site. You effectively lock out any of your real-life friends that haven’t signed up for that website: a walled garden approach.

Network effects: all my friends are already here

The success of social networks like Facebook is clearly helped by network effects — the fact that if lots of your friends are already active users, joining looks much more attractive than if you’re the first to join. This applies equally to adding comments to other people’s photos on Flickr and writing on a friend’s “wall” on Facebook.

The business model

The business model of these walled gardens goes something like this:

1. Offer our users privacy (and other services).
2. Exploit network effects to get as many of our users’ friends as possible to join.
3. Sell advertising to our massive captive audience.

At the moment, this model works — just look at Facebook and MySpace. But notice that during the second step, the site isn’t getting users to sign up primarily because they like the service, but because their friends are already on the network. Walled gardens exploit their users’ personal relationships to grow their proprietary systems — and on the internet, that’s never sustainable.

An open alternative

So what’s the open alternative to this walled garden approach? Microformats for relationships and OpenID for identity.

Microformats

Microformats are “a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards” — often referred to as the lowercase semantic web. Jeremy Keith outlines how the existing hCard and XFN microformats could be used to create portable social networks, so that each new website you join could automatically fetch a list of friends from a URL you provide. This wouldn’t have to be hosted on a blog or personal site — a profile page on a site like Flickr could automatically provide this information, just by using microformats in the markup. But what about privacy?

OpenID

OpenID is an open, decentralised identity system. The central idea is that if a person can prove that they own a URL, that’s enough to identify them. Simon Willison describes how OpenId could be used to create decentralised social networks, “with profiles tied together across multiple sites and relationships easily portable between services” — that is, you can restrict access to your group of friends even if they’re not members of your social networking website of choice.

If a social networking site combined these approaches, you could instruct it to restrict access to a group of friends that:

1. Is defined elsewhere, without having to be manually entered, and
2. Doesn’t require your friends to be members of the site to access your content.

This is the killer combination for Facebook’s business model.

Goodbye, exponential growth

Why am I so sure this will happen? Well, it might not work exactly the way I’ve outlined, but some kind of interoperable, open standard will eventually replace proprietary, closed social networks, because open systems always beat closed ones on the internet. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the sites I’m calling walled gardens are doomed though — they just need to open up, and rethink their business model.

Once you remove the exploitation of personal relationships I’ve described above, exponential growth of users is much more difficult to achieve. Now, new users won’t sign up just because their friends’ content is in your system — because they can access it anyway using an open identity system. To get them to sign up, you’ll have to convince them that your service is better than all the others — which means you have to offer the best user experience, not the largest network.

Selling advertising to a captive audience also becomes more difficult, because your audience isn’t really captive any more. If your users’ friends use RSS to access content, for example, they won’t see your site at all — and anyway your users are free to migrate to another site whenever they want to, because they now own their data in an open format. Perhaps this will result in more targeted, niche advertising — or even a service charge (gasp!), paid in return for a well designed, pleasurable experience. Either way, the Facebook model will fail — which means that sometime soon, we won’t have to join a new social network every six months. I’m looking forward to it.