When we create design layouts in tools like Photoshop or Illustrator, does the ease of copy-paste ultimately create artificially dense, human-unfriendly spaces?

Are these interfaces not unlike a cancer, grown without natural physical boundaries of human creation and cognition? Could we make it better, if we forced ourselves to sketch, everything?

A few weeks ago Eric Burke made a great graphic on his StuffThatHappens.com. Showing the typical Apple product and Google product, it was obvious to see that simplicity was paramount with one giant button or one simple search box. Contrasting it to “your product”, it was apparent that no user wants to deal with an interface littered with buttons, dialogs, mandatory and optional fields. (see the awesome comic)

But how did we get this way? I think the productivity tools we use every day might be part of the problem.

Dan Roam came and talked at eBay, discussing his new book “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures”. In his presentation he told a story of developing a piece of dashboard software for a major organization, and he said with a certain amount of pride that all the design was “done in a notebook”. The rough hand-drawn style of the mockups for the dashbord apparently kept execs and designers from quibbling over the little details and everything progressed smoothly.

While sitting there, I imagined trying to capture our eBay homepage with pen and paper, and it made my head hurt. We have so many links and such a dense interface, you would wear out our nib trying to document them. Let alone creating multiple copies to share and discuss.

So therein lies the question? Because it has become so easy to design high-resolution, high-fidelity interfaces; endlessly duplicating elements and text blocks, are we creating structures humans can’t visually and mentally digest?

Is the ease with which we copy-paste both elements and information, forgetting the necessary influences of natural growth, decay, and selection?

If we forced ourselves to design only with pen and paper, would it necessarily create a more understandable interface? Pushing complexity away from the user, exactly where it should be?

Try this experiment for yourself, either in your next design, or your next powerpoint.

If you aren’t willing to take the time to draw each one of those fields and links, I can guarantee that your users don’t want to fill them in.

Are you controlling your brand, or is it controlling you? If you haven’t examined your mission statement recently, you are probably missing out on opportunity.

Many moons ago, each in their separate time, two mega-brands were born: McDonalds and the Virgin group.

One stood for cheap burgers and fries, and one stood for an irreverent take on the music industry. Without digging into financials, it is pretty easy to say that while both generate tremendous annual revenue, only one of the two is widely viewed as innovative, friendly, vibrant and positive.

It would be easy to say that Virgin Group Ltd. is merely the outgrowth of the gregarious and spirited Richard Branson, but in doing so you would miss an interesting choice:

at some point, buried in their histories, McDonalds and Virgin chose separate paths. If leaders of McDonalds had chosen differently, why shouldn’t we expect McHotels, McLube, and McCinema?

We bristle at the idea of McHotels because who would want to sleep in a hotel staffed by burger flippers? But does it make any more sense to fly trans-atlantic with record salesmen?

A McHotel strikes us as so funny because McDonalds chose to build their brand around one business, one industry. In doing so, they necessarily locked themselves into one market, and dependent on one source of revenue.

McDonalds brand promise is painfully apparent when we attempt to imagine this McHotel in our head. Their brand simply isn’t broad enough for us to imagine paying them for anything other than thoroughly standard food.

Virgin on the other hand, chose to diversify, attacking any business where Branson thought there might be a challenge. It seemed, the bigger the challenge, the more he was driven to advance.

In doing so, Branson necessarily built a brand image which stretched to deliver on any business he might imagine. Regardless of the industry, the Virgin brand stands for something a bit more cheeky, stylish, and modern. In other words, Virgin is the brand of youth and the young at heart.

Now, if you take a look at your business, does your brand stretch across multiple industries? If you put your name in front of a hotel, would you laugh out loud, cry, smile?

If you can’t see your company in any other industry, or if the results of your mental business Frankenstein are terrifying, it’s probably time for you to re-imagine your value proposition.

If you can’t see your company standing for anything more than just cheap burgers and fries, then I can guarantee your customer can’t either.

As business moves on from the manufacturing of physical goods, our products are now represented as collections of information and a user interface we design. This is our “one” output, and it must suit all our users and evolve over time. Or does it?

How can we balance the “need” for change against the needs of our customers?

The automotive industry has been a major technology driver throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Progressing from powered carriages (and even racing sleighs) to modern technology showcases on wheels such as the Toyota Prius and Chevy Volt, each model year brought something new, something different.

Unfortunately, technological innovation doesn’t run on a neat yearly or quarterly schedule of change. Pressed by marketing departments for a new model to showcase, often the only difference between model years was a tweak of the trim or subtle change in design.

Detroit automakers are particularly prone to this behavior, as the only real difference between a Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra is the name stuck on the outside. The staff employed to differentiate the two cousin vehicles has plenty of spare time to create new “improvements” for each model year.

The other option of course is to only change what is necessary and eschew yearly updates. Two of the most famous vehicles ever produced followed this pattern with great success. Both the Model T Ford and the Volkswagen Beetle remained essentially unchanged for their production lives. The Model T was produced for 19 years while the Beetle was survived for an astounding 65 years of production in various countries.

Each car was designed to be “transportation for the masses” and functioned quite adequately, even as competitors eclipsed the models in all measurable ways.

Yet these cars still held something special, something upon which strong followings are built. Ford continued producing the Model T’s engine up until 1941 because people simply wouldn’t let go; maintaining and upgrading Volkswagen Beetles is still a major industry world wide.

But this story isn’t about cars, it’s about the internet. If you do business on the internet, your webpage is your one face. At eBay, our site and the guts behind it is our one “product”, the one product all our users see and use. So how do we balance our urge to upgrade against disrupting the natural flow of business with a new interface?

In the automotive world, you can produce a new car while continuing to support the older model, because you are shipping thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of new vehicles. Those who want to upgrade will grab the new shiny and reap the marginal increase in rewards; those who are content with their transportation will stay put and change the oil as they always have.

Not so in the internet world, when you upgrade the site, it’s upgraded for all your users, whether they like it or not. We push everyone into a brand-new Pontiac regardless if they were happy in their Beetle.

Craigslist has followed the “change the oil” pattern very well. While it isn’t pretty, or as “full featured” as modern competitors, Craigslist holds its own just as the Beetle defied the market. It’s simple and effective, enough said.

And if we still feel the need to change? We should take a page from the auto industry: standardize and differentiate.

At eBay, we’ve build a robust set of standard APIs so developer can write an application on version “440″ of our API, and it will continue to work as long as eBay acknowledges that 440 is an acceptable interaction model. At any given time we may support 20 or 30 versions of our API. We can “afford” to keep these models active because we have modularized our data away from the interface. The pieces “just work”.

This is where our 3rd-party developers come in, creating different versions for different people. Some individuals want to see eBay Like It’s 1999, and some are looking for the screaming edge of cool. As long as these applications respect the modular APIs, each user can have their own version that suits them best.

Now, we’re still a long way from total success, our primary interface is still intimately tied to our databases and this is the version that all our customers must use, for better or for worse.

As the web evolves, I see the ability to add, remix, and recreate our experience of it to be a fundamental right, as essential as being able to read the last chapter first, if we want to. Opening up the doors your data embraces our profound desire to make an experience ours, directing our future as we see fit.

Having the job title “Disruptive Innovator”, I am sometimes asked to “tell people the future”. This is a non-trivial request, especially, because they are expecting an answer.

The question may not be phrased in this exact way, it may take the form of: “so what will Web 3.0 be like?” or “what technologies excite you?“

Here are 5 tips for how to respond when someone asks you to “explain the future”:

1. give it your best shot
   There is no “right answer”, they are looking for your viewpoint as a respected individual. They are asking you because they value your opinion so sum up all the thoughts swirling in your head and let fly.
2. use details to color-in your predictions
   Because you are an expert in your field, you follow the news and know more little details than anyone really should. These little details are what lead you to your conclusions, so they the more details you can give your audience, the more reasonable and expected your predictions will seem.
3. or, just tell them the raw facts and let them decide
   Screw predictions, forget about attempting to explain the future. The data that you’ve collected is valuable to your audience so they can make their own predictions. An added bonus of this strategy is that you encourage them to hypothesize which brings you new ways of looking at the situation.
4. be careful, the analogy you choose will be taken literally
   Be careful when choosing your analogy, because it’s going to stick. If you say the future is “mobile computing”, realize that what people will hear is, “the future is the expensive and sub-standard device and service I have in my pocket right now”. To avoid this, present the trend, not the current implementation. “much as telephones lost their copper wires, computers will migrate out from under your desk and into your pocket, internet intact”
5. this is your opportunity to craft their worldview
   If you have a cause, some way to change the world, provide the tools for them to take action with you in crafting the future that is to come. They asked you, so they’re definitely paying attention. Seize this opportunity to lay out the details of your story, extrapolate them into a reasonable whole and deliver with passion.

Hopefully this list is helpful for responding to the question, “what’s next?” and if you have success (or failure) in explaining your personal view of the future, let me know!

Curving lines, a sculpted body, more of an embodiment of passion rather than the shell of an automobile. To view the car above, there is no doubt that it is a thing of beauty. In fact, this car design is so pretty, it made its way to the MoMa in New York.

It comes as no surprise to me that this is an Italian design, crafted by the great Italian designer Battista “Pinin” Farina of later Pininfarina fame. The wholeness of it expresses a singularity of purpose, untainted by design committees or group decisions. This design is essentially the work of one man.

It is the work of one focus, one idea. While many designers likely put pen to paper, all their effort was channeled through one person who had the final say. This master designer controls the ultimate outcome, for better or worse.

In more recent history, we see this same singularity of control and purpose in another iconic product, the iPod and now the Airbook. Both master and commander, Steve Jobs imprints his values and visions on each Apple product with fierce consistency and clarity.

Steve Jobs hates buttons, so the iPhone only has one. He also feels that you should never need to right-click, so all Apple applications have clearly-defined shortcut keys. He designs for integration and simplicity, so the iPod is not only pretty chunk of metal and plastic, but also the entire music-delivery chain including iTunes.

From an organizational standpoint, this is definitely Conway’s Law in action. One king designer equals one ethos alone.

Conway’s Law roughly states that the organizational structure of a group directly correlates to the structure of its output. Five teams that report to one leader will likely create five distinct parts that roughly work as a whole. How well each part interacts with the other parts correlates to how well each team communicates with the others.

And is this so surprising? If part A and B need to function together, teams A and B need to agree upon how that integration happens. Poor communication about the standards between the teams will lead to poor integration between the parts.

In Apple and Pininfarina’s case, one indivdual controls and specifies the output, so it all looks and feels similar.

Compare and contrast this to the design-by-committee world of companies like Pontiac who can’t produce a good-looking car to save their lives. Or the Microsoft Windows world that won-over the personal PC market by opening the platform and increasing accessibility to developers, yet now enforces digital driver signing so that one poorly written (and un-reviewed) device driver doesn’t take down the entire machine.

And perhaps this all relates back to the toy duck syndrome... if you’re managing to a stock price on a quarterly basis, or worrying about wall-street, you’ve bound yourself to lead by committee. By allowing your choices to be guided by the goals and thoughts of an anonymous and unrelenting mass, haven’t you tied your hands against any meaningful decision?

In any decision, there is always someone who will lose out. Leadership is understanding these dangers and making the best decision anyway, always driving to a clear vision of the future.

A few months back, I appended the phrase “pattern hound” to my blog title which was previously just “Rolf Skyberg”.

This morning, I wrote up a page about what a pattern hound is and why I am one. Because I wanted to keep this at the top of my blog, I created it as a “page” rather than a “post”.

So for those of you who only read my blog via RSS, here is the text in full:

We are driven as humans to understand. From our first waking moments, we look at this world with keen eyes and follow how the parts and pieces curve and interact, how this causes that, and in turn rolls towards us. We delight in waving our pudgy arms through the air knowing that, “hey, I’m doing that! now I get it!”

We are natural problem solvers and tool makers because it has been driven into our blood, our very genes. The big ‘ol brain on our shoulders is our advantage, and whoever can figure out this world first, wins. We are formed analyzers. Understanding gets you ahead.

As we experience this world, useful bits are passed on to us by other helpful humans, thing that help us cope. Language becomes our universal communicator to express our needs, wants and desires of the moment. Our mental models help us predict what will happen next.

Sometimes these models are taught to us (theft is wrong!), some we learn on our own (fire is HOT!), some we pay thousands of dollars for (SWOT is one method of looking at business). And usually, the models we base our thinking on are delivered by those most involved with the topic at hand. We learn business models from business people, because they should know, right?

But unfortunately, often these experts are too far into their world to deliver new solutions. It has often been said that you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

And this is where Pattern Hounds come in.

Hounds are a special type of dog, bred to help its master while hunting. Some sniff out the quarry, some lock on with steady vision. Regardless of their methods, hounds lead their masters to “the good stuff” by seeking it out and pointing the way.

I am a pattern hound. I sniff out new ways of looking at the world and deliver it to those who seek it. Maybe your models are stale and leading to dead-ends, maybe your are just starting off and looking for fresh models to form your mind.

I pry out the curious, the patterns, the connections. I deliver them as analogies, parables and observations. Occasionally I stretch them into the future.

With each of these new frames on the world, I hope I bring you a new piece to fit into your understanding of your world.

I hope to help you get closer to the good stuff.

Here are five patterns I’ve hounded in the past two months:

• Avoiding Toy Duck Syndrome - the importance of long-term vision
• Delivering a Useful Luxury - if luxuries are really useful inventions, they eventually become cheap!
• Why Should I Care? - if you are being ignored, you are saying it the wrong way
• When Ugly Is Better - environment shapes attitude, make sure yours matches your capabilities
• Social Networking: Because We Miss Our Friends? - social creatures, seek people through any mean possible
• Zombie Grooming and Social Favors - our “online” activities prove we are still humans

We still have yet to understand what having a globally-available always-connected networked communication device in our pocket means. Our lives, relationships and business models will all morph over time as we explore how being universally connected profoundly affects our humanity.

The current “mobile” experience as it is delivered has some serious flaws. Alexander van Elsas points out there are some pretty obvious problems with our cell and smart-phones:

1. expensive data connection
2. slow data connection
3. data input difficult
4. screen is too small
5. complicated hardware
6. mobile phone isn’t (and shouldn’t be a computer)

And while all of these things are true, for me the future is still undoubtedly mobile.

Not because what we have today is so wonderful, but because mobile is the opposite of some arbitrary decision that our computing and communication devices must be stationary.

The ability to communicate with other humans across vast distances and time is indeed a useful luxury, something which will only become more refined with time.

Barking, grunting and wailing helped our ancestors survive in this world because they were useful. Over time, this luxury of communication became further refined into vowels, consonants and stops. Eventually we developed grammar, poetry, yodeling, and opera as even more nuanced forms of communication.

So for me, the question of “mobile” is not an “if?”, or even a “when?”, but more of a “how?“

This “sixth sense” of mobile, allowing us super-human abilities to communicate is certainly coming, now how do we make it cheap, fast and intuitive?

BTW:

cheap and fast will come with time as mobile providers fight over the opportunity to connect us by delivering this useful luxury, and the right user-interface and delivery will come as we begin to recognize our children intuitively understand that our mobile devices are extensions to our human desire to communicate.

Photo courtesy of Kessiye on flickr.

If you want to make a million (or a billion) dollars in this world, there’s one sure-fire way: deliver a useful luxury.

A useful luxury is a product or service which substantively improves the quality of life for the purchaser.

Examples of obvious useful luxuries would be:

• a personal butler
• TiVo
• a Toyota Prius
• a good cell phone plan
• indoor plumbing
• the polio vaccine

Indoor plumbing? The polio vaccine? You might think these are hardly luxuries, but necessities.

Yet, people lived just fine without them, for thousands of years. The last two are a little different, because we don’t see them as luxuries any more. Now, they are just part of our expected life.

Useful luxuries become multi-million dollar industries.

This transition from luxury into necessity happened because they are indeed profoundly useful. Seeing the universal demand for these “luxuries”, industry swung into action, lowering prices and increasing accessibility through technological, infrastructure and organizational innovations.

Using the lens of “luxury” is still a useful way of determining the future success of products. It foretells the success of Tivo, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, broadband internet, alternative fuel vehicles, supersonic travel, fusion power, and telepresence.

Each of the products, services, or innovations listed above are something that can be had “for a price”. Each is a luxury because it somehow “cheats” the existing way of doing things. Tivo obliterates the arbitrary restrictions on when you watch television; Netflix destroys the stupid “I need to go somewhere to have temporary entertainment” paradigm.

eBay provides a marketplace of buyers and sellers so rich and varied that it might be considered “cheating” to advertise and deliver to millions; supersonic travel knocks down the silly barrier of many hours between where you are, and where you’d like to be.

This “luxury lens” also puts close scrutiny on some topics like “social networking”. Is the value you get out of social networking in any way a luxury?

If you had unlimited resources (money), could you deliver a better and more profoundly useful experience than we’re seeing with FaceBook and MySpace?

If the answer is yes, then you should get on building it, because obviously somebody is not delivering on an opportunity.

“Toy Duck Syndrome” is what happens when a company bases its strategy on what is currently most pressing; let us say, the problem “du jour”.

Specifically, toy duck syndrome is the what the employees feel, as if they were a toy duck, jerked back and forth on a short string. With no end to this treatment in sight, this method of functioning ultimately wears out the workers, Wall Street, and management as everyone wonders “where are we/they going?” In short, it destroys confidence and tires people out.

The solution to TDS involves “lengthening the string” by setting a distant point on the horizon and saying,”Over there, that’s where we’re going.” This horizon point serves as a constant goal upon which to steady our eyes and calm our stomachs.

To understand where TDS comes from, imagine in your head this sad toy duck, being dragged over rough terrain or through turbulent water. The duck bounces and snaps left and right, always trying to re-orient itself to whatever direction the string is pulling now. Internally, intense twisting force is applied with each new obstacle and if you were to ride that duck, you would be very dizzy.

The “string” I am referring to, is the stated goal of management as perceived by both internal and external stakeholders. The internal players take each new goal as a direction (there’s a reason why some people call it a directive), and the external players examine where the leaders are “pulling” now.

The length of the string represents the span of time any one strategy is in effect. Short strings represent rapid and frequent changes, long strings imply a more measured attitude.

One reason management may choose a “short string” is when they are managing to a stock price, or to Wall Street. Because company financials are generally quantified on quarterly or half-yearly schedules, the string is tugging in a new direction every 12 to 24 weeks. This will undoubtedly result in winning each battle while losing the war.

Time spent “hitting the numbers” for one quarter is ultimately borrowed from forward progress in the next quarter; this becomes a vicious cycle.

The opposite of quarterly goal changes is a pattern which sets the “great” companies apart from the “good”. These companies maintain consistent realizable guidelines across years, decades, and even centuries.

At the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference in San Francisco, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com gave a great presentation on what makes Zappos “special”. As he spoke, I couldn’t help but mentally compare him to another of my favorite companies, Southwest Airlines.

Later in the day, my growing theory was further supported by a speaker from the Virgin group (parent company of Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile and scads of other Virgin businesses).

What Zappos, Virgin and Southwest Airlines all have in common is very consistent long-term goals. These fundamental principles upon which they based their business form the bedrock of their company.

Interestingly enough, none of their goals involved hitting sales or growth numbers and all included statements about how they treat their employees and customers.

These statements serve as very long strings to tow their ducks with. While the environment may change around them, only subtle course corrections are required in any given moment as the destination is ever-present and immobile.

With a bit of thought, it’s easy to see why short strings reduce morale (internal confusion), squander resources (activity switching costs and unfinished initiatives) and reduce productivity (having to constantly re-learn the “right” answer.)

Of course, the answer lies in a “balance”, but without a long string, how will your employees know where you will all end up?

UPDATE:

For those of you who never had a toy duck, it looks like this, but it’s a duck.

Image copyright sheeshoo from flickr.

Apparently, W3Top.org thinks it’s perfectly appropriate to take my Twitter updates, post them as part of their “100% Free online dating and matchmaking service for singles”, and create a bogus account for me with bogus friends and an even more bogus location.

[UPDATE: As of February 17th, W3top.org has now reverted to a generic parked domain. Any Twitter-stolen links are now nonfunctional. Looks like their domain expired and they have not renewed it. A link provided on the new parked site has an email mailto link which incorporates the text "Inquiring about the domain w3top.org, with status: Expired"]

If you want to take a look, here’s a specially formatted no-follow link so as to hopefully not increase their search ranking:

http://www.w3top.org/rolfsky

For a period of about two days (October 17th and 18th, 2007), they saved my tweets, snagged my username, and even my avatar. Apparently they grabbed the 10 items from my RSS feed. (Location and contacts information is not included in the RSS feed, so it was easier to fabricate it.)

We’ll suck some of their bandwidth and see how long it takes this counterfeit image to “break”:

<— note, I never uploaded “rolfsky.png” to their servers.

They also fabricated 20 “contacts” and “08 followers” for me, thankfully nobody linked to my actual Twitter friends. Amusingly enough, I also noticed Biz’s old avatar there, but it was linked to the wrong username.

!= “avedely” as w3top.org would claim.

So just whois w3top.org?

A quick whois search will reveal the following:

Registrant Contact Information:
Name: Xasa Networks
Organization: Xasa Networks S.L.
Address 1: Plaza Avelino Avelin Toledano
Address 2: N 2 Bajo
City: Burgos
State: BURGOS
Zip: 09007
Country: ES
Phone: +34.947471134
Email: bitacle@gmail.com

I’m not the first person to have noticed this, as Bitacle is apparently doing the same thing to Jaiku users.

And this isn’t the first time Xasa Networks/Bitacle has run afoul of other people’s data. In 2006, Plagiarism Today explained the “Bitacle debacle” pretty thoroughly:

When you first visit the Bitacle home page, it appears to be nothing more than another personal home page, much along the same lines as Netvibes and Pageflakes.

Much like those sites, it contains a built in search engine for sorting through blogs, Web sites and more. One of the tabs on the search feature points to a search feature called “Aggregates”. A search there pulls results from blog entries, much like the regular blog search, but the results don’t lead to the original site, but to cached copies on the Bitacle server.

So this leaves us with the question, who really owns my Twitters? I wrote them, posted them to Twitter, and merrily went long my way.

Twitter is quite clear about copyright of twitters in their Terms of Service:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.

According to the Berne copyright convention, anything privately created is held in copyright by the creator. Brad Templeton explains this here on his page of 10 copyright myths:

For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not.

So we have a copyright violation (I never granted permission for Xasa/Bitacle to republish my works), but we also have something bordering on identity theft.

By republishing my content along with my known username and avatar image, they are implying that I support and endorse their service. This is, by the way exactly what they want people to think.

Because who wants to use a dating service that nobody else actually uses?

We have yet again run into an area where technology has outpaced the legal and social constraints put around it. But it’s not yet time to run around in a frenzy.

Eventually, we’ll figure this all out as a society but putting in place additional moral, legal and ethical constraints; but until then we wait for the societal immune system to become wise to this threat and start building a response.

Thankfully, no major accounts of a Facebook stalker have come to light yet, but I can assure you as soon as it becomes a “real” threat we’ll make “protecting your privacy” a required course at school.

Because, after all, is spreading a twitter about me spilling soda on my pants farther that my immediate social group, really necessary?