Many designers have lots in common with Axl Rose. I know I do. Most of us battle perfectionism because we know that perfect is the enemy of good. But I believe that this can be extended:

In design, perfect is a myth. It is unattainable.

Any given design problem raises an infinite number of possible solutions. Additionally, design seems to more frequently involve decisions between difficult tradeoffs than between definitive notions of good and bad. With so many possibilities and tradeoffs (what Löwgren and Spiekermann call the “infinite complexity” of design), the “perfect” solution likely does not exist, and, even if it does, it’s impossible to definitively know if we have attained it.

It’s understandable that so many designers are perfectionists, though (just after I started writing this, for example, Dustin Curtis wrote a piece outlining his own struggles with perfectionism). It’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the trait encapsulates many symptoms that are beneficial or even necessary to phenomenal designers: an undying devotion to the tiniest details, for example, or the ability to recognize potential problems in a refined product.

Nonetheless, I can’t name a single released product that I believe to be flawless. (And yes, that includes those from Cupertino.) Many designers want to change the world, but change most often comes at an incremental pace and can, believe it or not, arrive with an imperfect product.

Chinese Democracy was okay. But we can choose to be Axl Rose, try our hands at perfect, and fail anyway, or we can utilize our perfectionist talents, rein them in a little, and release wonderfully good products that may have flaws but improve people’s lives regardless.

Sorry, God.

You pulled off some great work with bananas: easy to eat, smells wonderful, even fully sustainable (if only we could keep up with your expertise in green design). Hell, you even showed us the best kind of product packaging that we could ever make: simply peel it off and throw it away (and you must smile sadly over your children as we attempt to match your divine talent with blade-like plastic packaging).

But the problem here is that you mismatched the signifier (yes, Don, I’m adopting your new term for perceived affordance) and the actual control. We look at the top of the banana and think “lever!” before throwing our wrists into action. Our civilization is a sad one, though, and it’s taken us ages to realize the folly that monkeys have always understood: that even though it looks like we should peel from the top, it’s way easier to peel from the bottom.

I was talking to my 70-year old grandmother on the phone the other day; she told me that she had just learned how to open them easily. We know that you didn’t give us bananas in the eighties, God; that’s a whopping 70 years of misguided banana usage.

I understand lots of things have to be sacrificed when you’re working on a one-week release cycle that includes design and development, though. But if there’s another iteration you’ve got in store for the world, just maybe you could fix this one up for us?

It’d be pretty awesome if you could make spinach taste a bit like chocolate, too. Amen.

The following is an excerpt from a paper I recently wrote for a service design seminar at CMU. I’m neither a psychologist nor a service designer, but I hope it’s helpful nonetheless and would love feedback.

You tap your fingers impatiently as you cradle your phone between your head and your shoulder. Your cable has been acting up, and you’ve been on hold with customer support for thirty minutes. You can’t hang up now; doing so would return you to the end of the waiting queue. You have no idea when you’ll be able to talk to someone, nor are you confident that they’ll even be able to fix your problem. So there you sit, trapped and immobile, phone in hand: a slave to poor service.

This likely sounds like a familiar situation; poor services are ubiquitous and often make the customer feel as though they’ve lost control of an experience that they paid for.

Perceived control is a psychological concept that refers to a person’s subjective beliefs about his control over his situation. Related fields have long understood the need for perceived control; indeed, one of Jakob Nielsen’s original ten heuristics for user interface design is user control and freedom, and others (such as error recovery, help and documentation, etc.) certainly relate to control and confidence. In service design, however, there appears to be either a lack of understanding when it comes to this topic or shortcomings when translating this knowledge to actual practice.

This difference may be due to the established view in human-computer interaction that the user is in the driver’s seat, whereas in service design other stakeholders are involved and the user may be seen as simply receiving the service (in much the same way as he would receive a physical good). A dangerously naïve view could assume that by paying for a service, the consumer is willingly giving up a sense of control; however, a deeper understanding will show this to be untrue. A service is by nature co-produced by the service provider and the consumer; thus, considering the consumer’s role as a partner in production, it is only natural (and healthy to the success of the service) for them to retain a sense of control over their experience.

While there are many different types of perceived control, I’ll focus on four specific kinds (behavioral, informational, cognitive, and decisional) and then discuss the related concept of self-efficacy, all with particular regard to how these ideas can be applied to create a better service.

Behavioral Control

Behavioral control is the sense of control gained when one is able to take action and directly affect an event. For example, in the earlier phone support example, there is no behavioral control; the customer can’t speed up his wait or talk to anyone. All he can do is hang up, and even that isn’t a viable option since it would nullify the amount of time he’s waited already.

Even in extremely negative circumstances, like a root canal procedure, the simple presence of perceived behavioral control may improve the experience for the customer. A dentist may tell a patient to make a signal if he experiences too much pain; this gives the patient a sense of behavioral control. Furthermore, there is some speculation among psychologists that when looking at a stressful event in retrospect, a person who had a strong sense of behavioral control will view it more positively than a person who didn’t.

There has recently been a huge trend towards self-service systems with digital interactive touchpoints, such as self-check-out lines in grocery stores and self-check-in kiosks in airports. These are extreme cases of behavioral control, and the design of these touchpoints is crucial in reinforcing perceived control. Classic interaction design principles such as proper feedback, affordances, and feedforward are all critical in making the consumer feel as though he in true control; errors should be handled easily and the customer should never be left feeling helpless.

• How can you provide opportunities to allow the consumer to directly impact his experience?
• Is your customer looking for a “spectator” experience, or does he desire more direct involvement in the service?
• Are self-service mechanisms effective, or are there cracks and possible errors that will cause a customer to lose his sense of control?

Informational Control

Informational control is achieved when the consumer is able to access and understand the information that he requires or wants. Knowledge is a crucial element of control: for example, a self-check-in kiosk at an airport should explain its operation effectively, and useful and well-placed signage should be present to direct people to their gates and destinations.

There is experimental evidence to suggest that simply having a sense of informational control can reduce stress; when people are provided with information about a negative event beforehand, their anxieties are greatly reduced. For example, a dentist who outlines the procedure and its accompanying sensations tends to reduce the unease of his patient.

Providing outlets for learning, too, is sometimes very important. Some hospitals provide libraries where patients and their families can research their illness. Still others may find that the mere presence of internet connections in patient rooms provides an outlet for families to learn about the condition that they’re battling; to encourage the use of reliable material, doctors sometimes predict this and provide lists of reliable sites or educational resources of their own. Regardless of the method, the ability to learn about their illness returns a sense of control to the family, who otherwise may see themselves as a helpless entity with all control in the hands of the doctor, nurses, and – most frighteningly of all – the illness itself.

• Is all the information that the customer wants (wayfinding, instructional material, and so forth) provided to him in an easy-to-understand way?
• Is there any other information that you could make available to increase their confidence?
• If applicable, do you make it easy for customers to learn?
• Is extraneous information distracting from important information?

Cognitive Control

Cognitive control generally refers to the availability of mental strategies that a person can use to cope with negative experiences. For this reason, this type of control is especially relevant for service industries that by necessity involve a strong element of stress, anxiety, or even pain: for example, healthcare, dental care, or even tattoo services.

Cognitive control strategies are usually separated into two different types: avoidant and nonavoidant. Avoidant strategies involve focusing the mind elsewhere: for example, dental services often provide televisions and music to allow the patient to focus attention elsewhere and remove anxiety both before and during treatment. Nonavoidant strategies, on the other hand, are those that focus on certain positive elements of the event: for example, laser eye surgery is not pleasant, but while sitting in the waiting room, the patient may read a provided brochure outlining its benefits. In doing so, he is primed to focus on the positives that will come out of the surgery and is able to cope with the negatives more effectively.

Even services that are not typically thought of as unpleasant may have some adverse factors for certain portions of the population. For example, some people find the initial takeoff of a plane to be a scary experience; meanwhile, electronics are generally not allowed at that point and thus they cannot use that avoidant strategy to “escape.” Providing opportunities for cognitive control strategies is a potential method of dealing with these issues.

• Are there any customers that might feel negative emotions during your service?
• How can you provide opportunities for nonavoidant or avoidant strategies to cope with the necessary adverse parts of the service?

Decisional Control

Decisional control is achieved when the consumer believes he has the ability to decide in various aspects of the experience: which course of action to take, the timing of the service, whether to participate at all, and so forth. For example, a patient may choose between various treatment options, and a customer looking for support may choose between various means of contact (phone, email, online chat, and so forth).

Zappos.com, for example, recognized one of the most important hurdles to overcome with respect to selling shoes over the internet: most people want to try out shoes before they make a purchase decision. In response, they offer and encourage free shipping both ways; people have been known to order a dozen shoes, try them all on, pick one pair, and send the rest back. This particular element of decisional control available at traditional retail stores is thus matched by Zappos, who also touts the additional benefit of having a far wider selection of shoes to choose from and the freedom of shopping from home.

However, it is important to note that too many decisions to make and alternatives to choose from can be overwhelming and may even lead to a loss of perceived control. A balance must be struck.

• Would your customers benefit from having additional choices or more control over certain decisions?
• Is your customer base so incredibly heterogeneous that multiple methods of service should be offered for them to choose from?
• Could the sheer number of choices and alternatives you offer overwhelm your customer?

Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy is not a control type, but is closely related. It is defined as the confidence that one is capable of achieving certain goals; a greater self-efficacy generally leads to a higher sense of perceived control and vice versa.

Self-efficacy is often learned; the first-time flyer will likely experience a great deal of anxiety. However, the next time he flies, he will feel much less stressed about the service experience because he’s been through it before and is now confident in his ability. Because of their lack of experience and the key “first impression,” first-time consumers are often easy targets for improvements to a service.

Self-efficacy is also gained vicariously; in other words, one will feel more confident if they see similar people confidently engaging in the service, and less confident if they perceive similar others to be unconfident. For example, a first-time skydiver may experience slightly less nervousness if he sees that his fellow skydivers portray a sense of confidence.

Concluding Thoughts

Though previous examples mostly focused on the effects of perceived control on customers, these issues pertain to employees as well. If workers feel confident about their control over the situation, their work will likely be of better quality (leading to a better service delivery) and their confidence can be presented in a way that will spread to consumers. For example, doctors at the Mayo Clinic wear business formal attire to signify their professionalism, knowledge, and efficacy; these visual cues of intangible expertise are meant to instill a sense of confidence in the overall service. An entirely different experience would occur if the doctor walked in wearing a t-shirt, nervously looking through a list of your symptoms and fidgeting visibly.

It’s hopefully clear that perceived control and self-efficacy are absolutely critical elements of design. There is little excuse for a situation like the one in the initial phone support example, and it’s time that we started taking measures to rectify these situations.

Jesse Schell had a great little blurb in the September issue of “Carnegie Mellon Today” outlining the necessity for artists/designers and engineers to work closely together.

In this unusual century, artists and engineers will have power like never before. But they can’t do it separately—they must work together to make wonderful things happen. Consider the iPhone—did the world fall in love with it because it is cheap? Because it is efficient? No, they love it because it is beautiful. Engineers never could have built something so beautiful alone. Nor could artists have built something so technological, so overflowing with invention. Only engineers and artists who know how to work together, hand in hand, are able to create magical artifacts of this revolutionary magnitude.

Not a new idea, of course, but very powerfully worded.

Just as design in general is said to be about communication, interaction design draws many parallels with persuasion. A bouncing icon in the Mac OS toolbar persuades a user to pay attention to it. Affordance and feedforward convince the user of an object’s purpose, capability, and functionality: a link’s blue color and underline indicate clickability. A holistic product, too, can certainly have a hugely persuasive role: the presence of a GPS gently encourages exploration, and a pair of evil eyes that attach to an LED light can persuade one to turn off his electronics and save power at night.

With this in mind, I’ve been reading through Richard Buchanan’s writings (Design and the New Rhetoric and Declaration by Design), which cover the relation of design (as a persuasive mechanism) to rhetoric.

Aristotle defines rhetoric as the “discovery of a means of persuasion.” Rhetoric, then, is the discovery of how to persuade, in the same way that design is the process that leads to a persuasive product or service. And, like rhetoric, design has no specific subject matter. Medicine deals with the body and its ailments; chemistry concerns itself with the properties of matter. Design, however, continues to be applied to an incredible (and rapidly growing) variety of diverse fields, in the same way that a rhetorician can craft an argument for any topic.

The most interesting thing, to me, is how Buchanan gives an outline of the parallels between the classic rhetorical proofs (logos, ethos, and pathos) and the pillars of design (usability, usefulness, and desirability).

Logos, to rhetoricians, is the logical argument: the objective content. This can be related to a design’s technical cohesiveness. It’s about the product’s ability to do the job for which it’s intended. This is the communication of usefulness.

Pathos is generally regarded as the part that utilizes the feelings of an individual audience. It can also be seen as the part that relies on the audience’s imagination. The designer encapsulates this in affordance: the way that a design communicates its usage through the user’s mental models (which are shaped by his individual past experience, imagination, and so on). In this way, usability can be seen as under the domain of pathos.

Ethos refers to the speaker’s perceived character and voice. For a designer, it’s about the intended character of the design and its relationship to users. This is all about desirability. The silhouette-focused iPod commercials didn’t focus on the product’s feature set, but rather on the iPod’s character: fun, energetic, and youthful – qualities that people wanted to exude themselves. Richard Buchanan talks about how “branding” and “aesthetics” are often associated with the designer’s ethos. It’s no surprise to me, then, that issues of desirability are stereotypically thought of as the domain of marketers and advertisers (who have a huge role in the branding of the company) and surface-level designers (who have the most control over aesthetics). But desirability is much more than brand and beauty, and needs to be engrained into the psyche of the interaction designer as well.

I haven’t used this blog in eight months. That will change this semester.

Although the time factor is always an issue (“my schedule is too strenuous; I don’t have time to post”), that’s probably an excuse more often than it is a reality. So I’ve wondered: what’s the real problem? At times, I think that my thoughts are too crude or shapeless to warrant a blog post. This is a misguided feeling; in the process of writing I generally end up refining my ideas into something meaningful (much like teachers learn while crafting lessons for their students). At other times, I feel as though my thoughts are too unoriginal or mundane to be worthy of a post. This too is misguided; this feeling of inferiority (which seems to be common of students who immerse themselves in the works of the gurus of their fields) shouldn’t keep me from posting my own perspectives. These reflections might have value to others, but – more importantly – they certainly have value to me.

Note that last bit, because that’s the main point. Using this blog as a place to reflect on my studies, readings, and field work has immense personal value. It lets me think about what I’ve experienced recently from multiple perspectives, not just the one of my professor. Personally, I think more students should adopt this as a habit: set aside a couple of hours every weekend, sit down, and write about the most interesting thing you learned that week. Ponder about how that psychology lecture from Wednesday could help you as a computer scientist. Think about things from multiple directions. Delve deep.

So I’ll suck it up. Saturdays are now blog days. Keep me honest.

A Pittsburgh native once asked me what I disliked the most about Pittsburgh. As soon as he heard the phrase “public transportation” come out of my mouth, he smiled knowingly and responded sagely: “well, it basically doesn’t exist.”

Bus schedules are rarely accurate (and “rarely” is fairly generous). I’ve seen three buses of the exact same route lined up right behind one another, and a 45-minute wait for the 59U is basically par for the course. As a student, it doesn’t help that Carnegie Mellon’s shuttle systems suck too, in my opinion (only because there is very poor communication of transit options to the student body).

Many cities (Chicago, most notably) have implemented AVL systems that track the locations of buses to provide dynamic, accurate schedules. The problem? It costs money, and Pittsburgh Port Authority is — for all intents and purposes — bankrupt.

This semester, I’m joining John Zimmerman and a team of other students and researchers to see if we can design a community-powered bus tracking system. The basic idea is that a bus-rider can report the location and fullness of a bus, and then we can provide this data to other riders to provide a more accurate tracking system.

This raises many interesting questions. Is it possible to cultivate a sense of ownership and responsibility over your city’s transit system? Perhaps not, but can we at least make the recognized usefulness of such a system overpower the work required to contribute, so that people will willingly and actively participate? How do we incentivize participation?

Meanwhile, can we create a solution that, as a side effect, also provides an outlet for communication between the Port Authority and the riders — a relationship that, as of right now, is rife with frustration? And how do we ensure that such a system is fully accessible to the many blind, deaf, and mobility-impaired transit users?

Zimmerman, Daisy Yoo, and others have been working on this for approximately a year; I’m just joining in. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

After a two-year stint at the CUPS Lab, I can repeat: making security features that are both effective and usable is hard — nothing new there. Don Norman summed this up when he talked about the 2009 Symposium on Usable Privacy & Security; it took place at the Google HQ, where “key access, badges, and security guards” governed access to secure areas but were rendered less effective by a desire for usability:

Our meetings were held in a public auditorium that did not require authorization for entrance. But the room was in a secure building, and the toilets were within the secure space. How did the world’s security experts handle the situation? With a brick. The side door of the auditorium that led to the secure part of the building and the toilets was propped open with a brick.

So usable security is a tough problem, but interesting because it forces you to think of the interplay of functionality, context, and usability. As another example, examine this car’s keypad entry (where you type in a four-digit code to unlock it). Not a bad idea, but the execution missed something:

The worn numbers clearly affect the security of the system (to what degree depends on whether a car alarm goes off after a certain number of trials, etc.). This raises highly generalizable questions that should be thought about when crafting a long-term solution:

• How will the design survive and be used over many years?
• What effect will the design have on its context?
• …and what effect will the ever-evolving context have on the design?

Just a thought.

I’ve spent the past few days hunting for internships and suffering through Tartantrak (the Carnegie Mellon job-posting system, which I’ve passionately condemned as the “worst software I’ve ever had to use”). It’s that time of the year.

I really want to focus on the art of the job description; however, let me take a paragraph-long tangent about a job listings site.

If you have a confusing departmental structure, I’ll probably get confused if you categorize job listings according to department. I simply don’t know enough about your structure, and the kind of role I’m looking for might fall under multiple departments. For example, I generally look for interaction design jobs… but in the past I’ve found such roles under “R&D,” “Engineering,” and even “Information Technology”. When all else fails, I result to a variety of searches in succession: “design,” “interface,” “usability,” and even the ubiquitous catch-all “user.” Of course, if your organization is extremely intuitive, then that kind of categorization usually works well, and to address my example, there’s often a simple UX department.

But once I find the role I want, what’s important about the job description?

I recently read a description for an internship; I know the job is wonderful (and so is the company), but the responsibilities section read like this:

Help create heavily trafficked, highly functional, user-centric interfaces. Work in a high-energy, fast-paced environment.

The problem with that post is that I really have no idea what I’d be doing if I got the job. Of course, I can usually guess what the job is roughly about. The difference, to me, is detail; the most successful job descriptions paint a picture in my mind. There are details that allow me to subconsciously craft a story about 10 minutes in my life at your company, and I see myself performing the role. And I apply with passion and excitement, hoping that I make the cut.

Let me say that I’ve met wonderful people and worked at amazing companies through random job listings where I had no idea what I was getting into, and if I’m looking at your job post I’m probably already very enthusiastic about your company (so it’s not like this often makes the difference between me applying and not). But the description is your hook, and if you paint a vivid picture for me, I’m going to even more excited about trying to get in the door.

I don’t care much about how many monitors interns get. I just want to visualize myself doing something specific/impactful while learning from people smarter than myself. That’s the most successful kind of job description, in my eyes.

Occasionally, I’ll have both the free time and the willpower to pop a video game into a console; this so happens to be one of those rare occasions, and I’m quite impressed with Dead Space.

Dead Space’s atmosphere is perhaps unparalleled. In-game controls are melded into the overall experience, extolling the virtues of invisible design. The “health bar” doesn’t float at the top of the screen; it’s melded into the back of your armor. Game menus show up as holograms floating in front of your character and rarely pause the game. The immersion and flow of the entire experience is masterful, simply because so much effort has been put into making things invisible and never reminding the player that he isn’t really in a different world. It made me consider how much more we’ll be able to do in the near future.

In a future of ubiquitous computing, the possibilities are endless. Imagine if the game was actually able to flick off the lights in your room when some unnamed horror cut the power in the game or modulate the intensity of your lighting when you pass by a swinging lamp.

At the same time, advanced gesture recognition can help to provide a great deal of immersion as a background feature rather than a primary control mechanism. Imagine the responses the game could provide were it able to recognize your fright (via gestures like jumping back when startled, for instance, or observing changes in body language and pupil dilation): your character on screen could similarly jump back, startled, or your in-game vision could become blurry while speakers pump out the sound of an increased heartbeat and heavier breathing.

This all seems like stuff out of a Conan O’Brien “In the year 2000…” skit, but the technology is already on its way. Might as well think about it now.