Boxes and Arrows: Comments by David Shen

David Shen — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 11:07:29 GMT

Great article Christina! I too have made my way down all these forks and have learned to embrace change as a fact of life, and as a necessity to keep learning and growing, and preventing stagnation. I think being fearless is the biggest hurdle to conquer – change is uncomfortable and it’s too easy to stay safe, even when the place you think is safe actually is harmful to you. I truly believe fearlessness is the first quality to acquire – supress your fears, have confidence that you will succeed, and then go for it knowing that the new fork you walk down will be the better one…or you’ll just find another one!

David Shen — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:26:21 GMT

Great article Erin! I too remember the days when I switched from being an individual contributor to managing a design team.

One other comment I’ll make is that as design manager in a corporation, your job is to push forward the design strategy of an organization in a unified, cohesive fashion (this is less true in an agency where your team members are working on projects for many corporations). This can be extremely hard, given that designers are typically half-artists and artists tend to sway toward individual work and less so towards the cohesive whole. You may find yourself trying to bring a bunch of individualists along the same path, when they are itching to break onto their own side paths!

Heavy handed management can be successfully employed by some design managers, meaning “You’ll design my way, which is the company way since I’m boss, or it’s the highway.” But this can lead to dissatisfaction among the team members and ultimately a high turnover rate.

I would recommend another way. This would be setting constraints and expectations as early as possible, and then employing the concepts in your section, “Giving Orders is Costly.” By early as possible, I mean that during the hiring process you need to let potential hires know clearly that they will be designing to the corporation mission and their ability to express themselves individually will not be the way, but also emphasizing that there is still room for creativity within the corporate mission. Then, you should create and employ design standards which are approved by the organization as a template within everybody operates, and hopefully is flexible enough to let creativity flourish as well. The design standards will set everyone clearly on the same path thereby releasing you as manager of the headache of dragging everybody onto the same path, and they are free to walk the path in an individual fashion, and also the way you help manage it.

Last note: A word on creativity: designers are creative by nature; to deny that is to deny that part of their DNA which is natural and essential to their well-being. Creating constraints, such as design standards, which leave almost no room for creativity will have the opposite effect and produce a dissatisfied design team just like if you were to employ the heavy handed method of design management. Find ways to leave flexibility in the design standards for creativity and teach and encourage people to be creative in a constrained environment, even when they think they are being handcuffed by the standards.

David Shen — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:25:16 GMT

First I’d like to say that simplicity is really nice and helps usability and adoption of a product.

But, the unfortunate thing is that product teams and development are often run by people who try to compete on features, and ultimately in order to build a better product you keep adding stuff. Examples:

MS Word. OK I think it’s BIG ENOUGH now. Stop adding more menu items!

Yahoo! Finance: Are there enough links on the nav bar yet? Is there enough content on the page? Why not stuff some more and we’ll be better right?

An AIWA Walkman clone I owned: It had literally 20 extra little buttons on it, ranging from auto-reverse to selecting the type of tape (ie. Chrome, Metal, etc.). I just wanted to press play and stop!

The problem with adding features is that in the easy sense, you end up increasing complexity and reducing usability. A harder challenge is to add functionality but make a product SIMPLER.

Note that I change my wording from “features” to “functionality”. Features, to me, seem like more discrete things added. Functionality, to me, means the product gets more powerful in a more overall, holistic sense.

That leads to potentially reaching a limit on the amount of “features” a product can have, and definitely a limit to the value of adding yet another button, or menu item, or the 51st link on a nav bar of 50 links. A new solution is called for.

I think Abstraction and Experience Overall are two possible solutions. Abstraction in the sense of rising above the inidividual features and looking at higher level ways to think about the task(s) in different ways. Experience Overhaul means just that; you may (painfully) need to scrap everything and just start over and reorchestrate the user experience and design to contain all the things you know people want to do, but start from the ground up to make the whole thing simpler.

David Shen — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:51:31 GMT

I agree that a natural path for designers is to run the product itself.

I made the transition to product management type activities by learning about all the disciplines peripheral to design, but critical for product design. These are engineering (software or otherwise; for physical products, it would be product design/mechanical engineering), sales (advertising, online and offline, business models), project management (various methods of whipping people onto a schedule), and, of course, traditional product management which is still a growing field in internet product development due to the speed at which products need to launch.

If you are thinking about making the change, I would encourage you to learn as much as you can about the other disciplines, learn enough about them to be dangerous (ha! a menace to those who would trust you with that knowledge!), and gain experience in working in those areas if possible.

Nothing is better than working in an area of expertise. It gives you first hand experience dealing with the issues and gives you street cred to those who look for you for direction in those areas, and also to respect you if you need to make a call in someone else’s area of responsibility.

David Shen — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 22:06:05 GMT

Adding to the problems of CMS systems is the fact that current popular Web coding languages are embedded in page HTML, like Java or PHP. Sometimes content is interlaced with developer code and how do you protect naive users from accidentally changing or deleting important code, or to even know how to insert content in/around code? This problem has not been solved at all. Even the fact that HTML is potentially insertable into the content is problematic. You might have users who do not know what references the CSS file uses and you may have content that looks inconsistent with the rest of the site.

Yes you can dumb down CMSes so that code is never shown, but it may so dumbed down that the content can’t change based on other parameters, ie. a widget that scrolls through images related to an article that is embedded only in this current story.

The interaction between developers, content producers, and product managers through CMS needs further research and thought…

David Shen — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:41:13 GMT

It seems as though today’s internet professionals need to be multidisciplinary. One area that is rarely discussed is the technical aspects of content strategy. Tagging, categorization, etc as it is implemented on the technical side is very important so that information is available to users as well as to internal staff in an easy, accessible way, and not buried in a DB to never be able to be accessed again…or only through months of undoing code because the DB wasn’t built to handle that.

The technical implementation of content is an important part of strategizing the content itself and I’d love to hear more discussion on this topic and perhaps case studies on what has worked and what has not…

David Shen — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:48:13 GMT

Very important topic for us web designers! The one thing I would add is that if you design a long webpage, make damn sure you don’t have a strip of white space where all the content seems to end, and it also happens to be at a place where statistically the bottom of the browser window happens to be for a given monitor size. This can fool users into thinking there is nothing more below this point and they may not scroll further.

This is similar to the point made by folks about giving clues that content is worth scrolling to below the fold. Make sure you don’t inadvertantly design this apparent end to the page just to line things up in a nice way…

David Shen — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:06:54 GMT

I love this. There should be more articles on how to use commonly available software for design purposes, especially if it speeds up the process. How many of us know Flash to whip up something that doesn’t require its complexity to express our ideas? What other programs have people used for design purposes? Logo design in MS Paint? HTML coding in WordPad?

David Shen — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 05:52:44 GMT

One thing I’ve found at Yahoo! and in the startups I’ve worked for is a lack of understanding that all the disciplines described above are all individual career paths with great depth. It is near impossible to find and hire people with great talent and experience in two, let alone three of those disciplines. Companies and teams looking for UX support need to realize that they really need at least 3 people to round out a UX team: Interaction Designer, Visual Designer, and User Researcher. The unfortunate fact is that most people don’t understand that when they ask for a “designer” they think they can easily satisfy that with one person. Educating the hiring companies of this fact is crucial so that their expectations are set correctly on who they are looking for. They can go looking for that one person, but they need to realize that it could take a really long time to find someone who can perform the duties of two or more of those disciplines.

David Shen — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:09:12 GMT

Great article! But can you or someone talk about what to do in the case where a ratings system generates too many 4s or 5s, resulting in a problem for users to determine the minute difference between the two? Thanks!