Master-Planning Software: Looking Beyond Your Industry For True Innovation

Rasmus Skjoldan at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/tVlVuPJvCL4

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

A book about the internet and an academy for one

[00:00:59] I look back to 1995. It was a book unlike any other I'd ever seen, and I found it in a very curious place, comet in a white girl making work[?]. What was most curious about it is that it was a book about the internet[?], and so it was my very first exposure to the internet, in this physical book. For me, what a strange thing to discover. I was in high school, and I started looking at it, and it was treating other protocols on the web at the same level as the protocols we use today to access web pages, and Gopher[?].

[00:01:57] I was around 17 years old. I loved computers, and I especially loved visualizing things, because I could not write five lines of BASIC code. So I was much more into designing, and I can't refuse to be a wonderful tool for[?]. Now, we got through that. I quickly found the very first internet cafe in Copenhagen[?], called Babel, and that was my first real-life exposure to the real internet. Not just what I was meeting in this strange book, but actually experiencing the internet on a computer, which was outstanding[?].

[00:02:44] What happened then was that the internet changed my life forever[?]. I think I became completely obsessed, not with the internet itself, but with the access to knowledge. If I wanted to learn everything there was to learn about my subject[?], which I really wanted to back then, I could, super easily, already back in 1995[?]. But because of that obsession I never went on to university. The education system was not really able to move quickly enough, and I was into web design and interaction[?] and all those things. I was quite active, and I had several options for an education for myself at that time.

[00:03:37] So I came to the completely obvious conclusion that I had better start an academy myself, for myself. So I launched[?] a design academy, and forgive me, I was crazy, but I couldn't find the kind of digital design education I wanted back then. So I surrounded myself with very, very experienced teachers and administrators[?], all for the purpose of educating one student.

[00:04:20] Back then it was the year 2000, and I obviously had no problem at all finding an agency who was super keen on sponsoring that education. So I asked if I could reinvent the education system just for myself, with an academy with one student, and they said, sure thing. That was back in the early 2000s. You were able to do such things back then. What really happened was this: the independent artist's belief that you could just invent everything we need in this changing world. Your kids and my kids are probably not going to have the same opportunities, the same crazy drive under certain[?]. They're really going to be working together with robots and AI. They'll be quite well[?]. Thank you.

Moving freely between fields

[00:05:36] Today I work at Magnolia, at the leapfrog man group of the content management system[?]. We're serving this amazing range of clients that use our content management system to build digital experiences. Here in the UK, real names such as Virgin Holidays[?], the Post Office, Tesco and Thomas Cook are working with the system.

[00:06:26] All that background is important because of this: there's really a great habit in constantly searching. And what I also learned back then was that I didn't have to stay within one field, because I didn't have the educational background that would have limited me to a particular space. I could move quite freely around different areas. A few years ago, a friend of mine, Sabbath in at all[?], said that we're moving from knowing to having access[?], and that is a huge thing. You don't need to possess knowledge, you need very easy access to it.

Three beliefs in user experience design

[00:07:23] Now I'm going to get to the real topic of the talk. I'd like to challenge some beliefs that I come across all the time in user experience design. As you'll see, it is all connected to being less careful about categories of knowledge, because of my lack of educational background. There are certain methods and concepts that we subscribe to in user experience, and hold on to, from the early internet application days[?]. We simply came to a point where it's pretty great, actually. We didn't have to read the books; we could just come up with the way we wanted to work. And user experience emerged over a brief moment here, over the past 20 years, which is quite remarkable.

[00:08:39] While working on user experience of web[?] applications since around the '90s, I came to the conclusion that there had to be something to learn from completely other spaces. Because I went to all these conferences and I read all these books written by people just like me, Cooper[?], formulating our work, but there had to be something else out there that could inform practice. That's the wonderful thing. That seems very obvious, of course, but I think what happened is just this: we were simply excited, because it was an open field[?]. We could design our own practice.

[00:09:28] Now, when we look at our practice today, there are three particularly strong beliefs we tend to hold on to. The first one is: the simpler the use case, the better. The second one I'd like to talk about is that change is good. The third one is about rapid prototyping, that rapid prototyping is completely, totally awesome. So those are the three topics that I'll go through here, if my clicker works. No.

[00:10:11] So instead I went out looking at completely different fields, and I wanted to explore them in order to (inaudible). Let's see, this is much better. I went out and I started looking into completely different fields than user experience design, in order to discover, and today we'll look into architecture and theology and sociology and industrial design. The three more specific areas that I draw inspiration from are master planning, in the world of architecture and urban city planning; the next one is something called ritual theory; and lastly I'm going to move into concept cars, together with the fashion world. I won't get away without explaining just how they are connected, but they really are. This is where I'm really blissfully ignorant, and I can take advantage of not having an education, and I can look at different fields.

When you cannot know the use case: master planning

[00:11:42] We'll start out with this one: the simpler the use case, the better the user experience. There's a tremendous amount of emphasis on simplifying use cases and narrowing things down, figuring out what is the simplest way to work with this. As a user experience designer, that's kind of a gospel, and you will most likely shout out roughly 90 thing[?]. But you're also acutely aware, as a user experience or service designer, that the world around us is just too complex to always simplify down into very simple spaces. Everyone's trying to do that, especially on the buy side[?], always trying to narrow down and find, okay, what's a simple way to work with this complex problem?

[00:12:51] Here's the thing. I've stumbled into this many, many times in my career, on projects where I've been working on a problem where I simply could not know the end use case, the way our software would work. That's a very challenging thing for a designer, because you're not really able to go out and empathize with your people, as design thinking teaches us, to have empathy with our users. It's very difficult to do if you don't know how your software will eventually be used, which is the case in many of the larger platforms, such as the ones I'm working with.

[00:13:44] Let me just give you an example from master planning here. This is the heart of Copenhagen back in 1930, I believe. Back then it was all about trade and military concerns, so the harbor area was designed in such a way that it would facilitate trade and the military. Now, this is the same harbor today. And here's another picture of it. What I'm saying here is that there is no way that the architects, or anyone influencing the harbor design, could have known what the harbor would eventually be used for, many, many years later. That is the same way it happens with software quite often. We're building something where we simply don't know the full picture of what will happen with it later, which is kind of a challenge.

[00:14:50] In many places around the world, urban planners have to deal with this when they're laying out completely new cities. There's a long-term vision[?] going on, but they cannot say exactly what it will be. The questions about what changes will unfold in the coming years are plentiful, of course, and they'll have a massive impact on the way cities are being built.

[00:15:21] So I ended up in that spot when I completely redesigned a content management system some years ago. I did that for two years, and I stumbled into this problem: it was impossible really to pinpoint all the use cases, and it was also impossible for me to say who would be using the software. Of course there were some areas, or some user types, that I was extremely familiar with, but it was also quite clear that new people were starting to use the software in new ways. So I went to (inaudible), who was an urban planning architect for the Greater London Authority, and asked her to teach me about master planning and architecture.

[00:16:18] It just turned out that master planning knows a lot about how to design for inclusivity of the unknown. There's a long list of principles, from transport-led development and wayfinding, to respecting the boundaries between what's private and what is public in master planning, that you can completely use in software design. It's very easy, actually, to apply those principles, and it turned out that they work exceptionally well when we're designing larger software applications. So I came to the conclusion that when the simple use case approach breaks down, turning to master planning was quite effective, and it changes the questions that you suddenly ask yourself in the user experience process.

Change aversion and ritual theory

[00:17:24] Now, the next topic I'd like to talk about is the belief that change is always good. From the organizational side, there's this thing called change aversion that I guess you all know about. Organizations seize a particular opportunity that forces them to change, or instills a change, and on the other hand our users become averse to many of the changes that they face in their daily lives in digital services. What does change aversion really mean? It means a state of discomfort or anxiety when something familiar is replaced by something unfamiliar. That's something we all have to deal with as users, when tools we depend on change, and as organizations we have to manage that change process.

[00:18:37] In many projects I have had to figure out how to combat change aversion. There's a great framework for that by Google, and I found all kinds of different methods to minimize and mitigate the problems of change aversion. But the most interesting one I found was ritual theory, from theology and sociology; they kind of share that field. I went into that space, and it turned out that there is a way to work with our habits as human beings. Typically, in a user experience design process, you tend to look for user goals. That's a very common way to work. But when you are changing a software application, relying on looking at transitioning habits turns out to be a really, really good way to approach things. Because then you can change a lot of stuff on the UI side, but if you keep some vital habits stable in the transition process, you enable yourself to mitigate change aversion. And that line of thinking came from a completely different field.

Rapid prototyping and the single-product focus

[00:20:05] The last belief I'd like to talk about is that rapid prototyping is always great. Don't get me wrong, I really love rapid prototyping, and I do that all the time. I'm a big believer in design thinking, and rapid prototyping is a natural part of that. But because I work in product management, and have to look at portfolios of products, not just one product exclusively, I see something hidden inside the belief in rapid prototyping, which is the focus on one product at a time. You see that quite often. So again I went out and looked for inspiration outside of our field, and I found something very, very interesting. There's a pattern that stretches across both concept cars and the fashion industry.

[00:21:09] The problem I was really looking to solve here was that I often see product people throwing away a lot of great ideas because they're focusing on just one product at a time. In addition, I see product teams who narrow down their innovation space because they believe in rapid prototyping. By insisting on getting a sellable product onto market as soon as possible, which is kind of the gospel nowadays, you also limit yourself. Now, the automotive world and the fashion world kind of solved that problem decades ago. There are a ton of things to learn from these fields here.

Concept cars and haute couture

[00:22:00] So let's look at the difference between the way prototypes are considered and treated in lean, and in concept cars and fashion. First of all, lean, I think, is very suitable here. At the top of the triangle you have the sellable product, and at the bottom you have rapid prototyping going on. In the middle you have the candidates for the sellable product. This is all about failing as fast as possible at the bottom, doing five-day prototypes and that whole line of thinking, and then moving towards the sellable product as fast as possible. So essentially, after the process is done, what you have is something of value, hopefully, at the top, and everything else is just kicked out.

[00:23:07] Now, concept cars and haute couture[?] treat prototypes in a completely different way. Imagine another white triangle here: here is a concept car, for example. What they do is take multiple trends and ideas and technology, and merge that into a concept car, which is not intended to be sold. They put a lot of effort into producing something that you cannot buy. There's a good point to doing that, because when you have a great concept car, you are able to optimize it into multiple products afterwards. So here the black triangles are several products that all derive from a concept car. So again, if you look at it this way, there is value in the concept and interaction model. What's important to understand here is that when you look at concept cars over time, they take bits and pieces from the concept car, and again maximize it.

Look beyond your own industry

[00:24:41] This is a very, very superficial way of going through three very large fields. There's a lot to each one of them. But what I'm really saying here is that it's been fascinating[?] that we managed to come up with a complete practice, with methods and concepts and everything, in user experience. But it just turns out that there's a lot to learn from different spaces. I'd simply like to encourage you to start looking beyond your own industry, because some of the problems that we're dealing with in user experience design have already been solved in other industries.