Isn’t change exciting!

Change is good. Design is all about change; bringing something into the world that didn’t exist before; changing from an undesirable to a desirable state of affairs; improvement; progress! And now we are even Changing the Change!

I can hardly contain myself with excitement, but I’ll try.

In a day from now a conference starts in Torino, Italy called Changing the Change. It’s an international meeting of people involved in design research. I would have loved to be there but alas my proposal for a paper was not accepted. Hardly surprising for two good reasons: my proposal was cobbled together just after I came out of hospital having had half my liver removed, so I was not at my most lucid; also I suspect that I am regarded as coming from the dark side, especially with the title I gave my proposed paper:

Changing from panacea to prosthesis:
methods and thinking for designing IN the world

Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? The implication is clear. Far from being the new frontier of bold new visions, leading to a better world, my vision of designing is much humbler, a sort of Mr Fix It, a handyman, a travelling tinker.

As I see it, the job of a designer is at worst to paper over the crack in the system, and at best to provide a temporary prosthesis for a broken bit of the world. A long way from the vision splendid and the excitement of Changing the Change.

There is no doubt that there is much in our world that many of us would like to change. Design comes at the end of a long line of attempts to do so: philosophy, religion, politics, war, science, management and a few others have all been championed at one time or another as the agents of change, ushering in a new era and a better world. Will design work better?

Walter Benjamin once observed:

There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p 248)

Design could easily be the new barbarism. But with a little care it might not be, and might make a genuine, if modest, contribution to a better world. To achieve it, designers need to do something that they don’t do now: benchmarking.

Benchmarking is that part of the design process where you ask how an existing system is performing against agreed performance requirements set at the scoping stage of the design process. Putting the matter simply, if you change something and then claim that the change is an improvement, you need to have some before and after measurements.
As I wrote in one of our case histories:

Much design work…… is redesign rather than design from scratch. An important part of redesign is to ask: where are we right now? what is the current performance of this design? what is happening in the world now which we don’t want to happen, or we’d like to change? where do we want to go? what do we want to achieve here? It doesn’t matter if we change our mind at some point, but if we don’t know where we currently are and where we want to go, we won’t know when we’ve arrived.
Often in design projects the urge to get ahead and redevelop doesn’t leave space for actually asking those questions. But benchmarking is an essential stage…. [I]t’s only after one has done the scoping and benchmarking that one is in a position to write the design brief at all. Also, there is a sense in which all design activity is generative; that is, it leads to outcomes that none of us foresee-it opens things up and provides new possibilities. This is why benchmarks are so important-they guide us through the processes and possibilities: we know we’ve got there if we know where we were going to begin with, and we’ll know if we change direction because we knew where we started from.
As well, benchmarks make great before-and-after politically potent stories: ‘When we started it was like this, but look at it now-it’s great’. You can only do this if you benchmark.

So I’m all in favour of change, even Changing the Change. But we need to know what we are changing from. Moreover, we should not assume that everything done up till now has been wrong and that only radical transformation or revolution can solve our current ‘problems’. Unless we look carefully at what we are doing now before making change, we might throw out some good bits.

I suspect that many designers, like the practioners in other disciplines that have gone before, are excited by change for the sake of change, believing, without any evidence, that the changes they make will make all the difference. I prefer to proceed more carefully even if it means being a tinker rather than a master of the universe. But it would have been nice to be in Torino to say so. I hope someone does.

It’s just life!

Isn’t the phrase ‘wicked problems’ a good one? Putting on my best streetwise accent, I can hear myself say “Wicked, man!” But things are not as they may seem.

The academics who invented the term did not have wicked thoughts, let alone thoughts about wicked problems (at least not in the reputable academic publications in which they developed the idea). It’s all much more innocent. In the context in which the idea was first written about—a discussion of planning theory—wicked was not contrasted with good. No naughtiness was anywhere in sight. The term wicked was contrasted with tame.

I suspect that if people knew that in the esoteric context of planning theory, the opposite of ‘wicked’ was ‘tame’ then we would have all been spared the endless repetition of the wicked problem problem. But, that’s the way it is.

It is now fashionable for organizations to have wicked problems. Indeed, if your organisation doesn’t have one, you might as well shut up shop. Without a wicked problem you cannot play with the other fashionable management toys of design thinking and innovation. You are an organisational dinosaur, doomed to extinction, or worse: doing what you do now, only possibly a little better. How dull, and not a bit wicked.

But the whole thing is a sham The world is not full of problems waiting to be solved, wicked or otherwise. There is just life and the messy uncertain business of coping with it.

Horste Rittel and Melvin Webber, the men who coined the phrase ‘wicked problems’, suggested there were 10 defining characteristics of wicked problems. I present them below, substituting ‘life’ for ‘wicked problem’ and ‘person’ for ‘planner’, With some minor grammatical and contextual adaptations, you will see that there is a good fit.

• 1. There is no definitive formulation of life.
• 2. Life has no stopping rule [except death or suicide].
• 3. Life is not true-or-false, just better or worse.
• 4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a successful or unsuccessful life.
• 5. Every life is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to start again, every life counts significantly.
• 6. Life does not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential outcomes, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into life’s plan.
• 7. Every life is essentially unique.
• 8. Every life can be considered to be a consequence of another life.
• 9. The existence of a discrepancy in life can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of what we do.
• 10. A person has no right to be wrong. People are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate

It’s because Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber are offering us a recognisable description of our own daily struggle, not something in the least esoteric, that the idea of wicked problems resonates so well with many of us.

But how can I claim that there are no problems? Imagine an empty universe with no life, just the movement and occasional collision of galaxies, stars, planets, moons and comets. Are there problems in this lifeless universe? No, it just is. Now imagine a world with just animals, plants, microbes and stuff. Where are the problems? There are none.

It’s only when we think of the world we live in, the world of people, that we can talk about problems. Problems are a human invention. Problems are the bits of life that we don’t like and think we might be able to change. If we believe we cannot change things, or do not want to change them, we don’t have any problems.

So calling something a problem is a very human thing to do. As such it is subject to all the vagaries of humanity.

Consider the ‘problem’ of global warming. Today’s best scientific opinion says that global warming is a fact. It is measurable. It is happening. The scientific opinion also says that we—people—are the cause of it. We could just shrug our shoulders and do nothing, put up with the coming apocalypse, but that is not the human way. No, we call global warming a problem and then feel compelled to act, to solve the problem. Caught up in the moral fervor of our time, some people think that to do nothing would be wicked. Would that make the wicked a wicked problem? What a wicked suggestion!

Reference

Rittel, Horst, and Melvin Webber; “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” pp. 155-169, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Inc., Amsterdam, 1973.

I have always felt uneasy about ‘user-centred design’ (UCD).

This may strike many of you as odd. After all, I have been researching, working, and writing about what looks like UCD since the 1960s, and have been a public advocate for what looks like UCD throughout my professional career—particularly with my involvement with public information symbols through standards organizations in the 1970s, and my role in setting up in the 1980s the organisation that became the Communication Research Institute. Over 40 years of commitment to what looks like UCD, how could I be uneasy? Surely this is moment for celebration—I’ve participated in something that was marginal and is now mainstream, and know that I made a small contribution to that happening. But this is a moment when it seems appropriate to question seriously the role of UCD in contemporary life.

If, like me, you became involved in this area because you care about people, and, like me, you wanted to help make an unneccesarily difficult and complex world a little less so, then you may find my questioning of UCD disconcerting. Well, what I have to say might make it more disconcerting.

Step back, for a moment, from your feeling of outrage or defensiveness and have a look at how we designers describe what we do, and the context in which we make those descriptions. When it comes to talking about UCD in its contexts, I’m uncomfortable about the description ‘users’.

Switch context. Where do you find users? The usual context (a distasteful one) is the drug business. This industry seeks to turn people into users if it can. But what has this to do with what designers do? I seem to be equating an obvious evil with an obvious good, an outrageous suggestion.

Switch context again. Before the UCD era, a designer would be hired by a business to help make products that would sell, since the raison d’être for a business is to make money. The advent of UCD has not changed that—and of course the civilities of trade, the trust and respect without which business cannot be conducted, have always been present—but explicit UCD makes it appear that business is becoming humanised, being nice to people, thoughtful and sympathetic; that is, that there’s been a shift in focus from products to people. This is actually not so: product-centred design seems to have become people-centred design (PCD); only it’s not PCD, it’s UCD. Whatever has happened to the people?

Switch context again. Business is governed by economics. It goes to where the money is, and in the last few years the money has moved. Consumer spending as a proportion of total expenditure has grown throughout the last 100 years, so much so that in economies like the USA, consumer spending accounts for about 70% of all spending, far more than government and business combined. So today, if you are in business, you try to get into people’s wallets; and businesses have discovered that to get the money out of people’s wallets and into their own pockets, it helps if they act nicely. This simple fact, more than any notion of business having become humanised, is at the core of UCD. But if only it stopped at niceness—because the next step is where I become profoundly uneasy.

Back to the drug business. To be successful here, you have to turn people into users. Similarly, to be successful in the consumer market, it helps if you can turn people into users. In this case, it’s not a physical, but a social dependency. Add UCD to branding and you have two of the tools used by business today to move money from wallets into pockets. ‘Brand loyalty’ is a marketer’s way of describing social dependency.

Thankfully, people do not easily turn into users. But there is no doubting the intent: ‘user’-centred design is not mere terminology. Employing the term ‘user’ denotes the relationship that businesses would like to have with people. So next time you feel the warm glow of satisfaction coming upon you, because you believe you are doing UCD for the common good, think carefully; it might be that you are actually being the pusher’s pal.

The burden of complexity

In my last blog I suggested that our new government could do a lot better than the previous one when it came to communicating with the public through forms and letters. Since then it has become clear that our new government is intent, like its predecessor, on cutting public service spending, and with the cuts go any hope that the government might improve its communication with the public.

One of the consistent and unchanging features of government administration is the complexity of the laws that govern that administration. Less money spent on government is not matched by fewer laws or laws that are simpler to administer. The burden of complexity remains unchanged.

Spending less money directly on government means that, once again, the administrative burden of government passes from the state to the citizen, resulting in a massive increase in the non-productive labour of compliance that we pay for out of our own pockets. I have commented on this before (too many times!), but for the benefit of newcomers, and those who want to be reminded, this is how it happens.

The public is obliged to comply with government laws and regulations, which are often extremely complex and difficult to follow. The government in turn is there to help the public by reducing these difficulties as far as possible. Research has shown that this can be done by using good information design to manage the complexity of legislation and regulations internally.

Conversely, poor information design, or no information design (the norm in the public service) externalises the complexity and the costs. When faced with cost cutting, bureaucrats produce information on the cheap which is difficult for everyone to use. Each person using government information has to deal with the complexity, and individually bear the costs of doing so.

In the end, this exercise in cost-cutting defeats its purpose. There is a multiplier effect. Spend $1 on good information design, save the public $100 in unproductive labour costs attempting to comply with the law. Conversely, spend less on good information design, and massively increase the amount of unproductive labour that each citizen has to pay to deal with complex legislation and regulation; and, moreover, increase the amount the government has to pay in repairing the mistakes due to public incomprehension.

Of course, if cost cutting was matched by a reduction in laws, or a simplification of laws, then the public burden would not increase. But such a proposal would only be taken on by the Pig Flying Department. No, the reality is grim: our public service will do less, and each one of us will do more.

Between Ritual and Reality

We have a new Federal government in Australia. Are they going to be better than the last lot at communication with people? The rhetorical signs look promising, the practice remain to be seen.

Government communication with the people takes many forms. The most visible manifestation of government communication is concerned with ritual: all the way from the high public ritual of apology to the stolen generations of aboriginal children, to the more mundane media rituals telling us all to stop smoking, stop taking drugs, dob in a suspected terrorist, trust the government to look after our rights at work, and so on. Do these communications bring about desirable social change? The balance of evidence and sound argument suggests not (Shrensky 1998). But then, faced with situations over which governments sometimes have little control, these rituals serve to tell us that our government cares, and the display of dramatic images and narratives through TV and other media, often at great expense, is a demonstration of that caring. At the end of the day, as with other rituals, the government can claim We tried, we did our best. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between genuine caring and mere tokenism, but that is in the nature of ritual

A far more direct though less publicly visible communication between government and people takes place through the many forms and letters we each have to deal with. Year after year, we each fill out many forms at the request or insistence of government agencies, and we receive and try and make sense of many letters from government agencies. In this area of communication the evidence tells a more promising story than the evidence from ritual.

Back in the late 1980s, we undertook a large number of studies of forms for our governments and businesses. Many of these have been reported in case histories and other publications (Sless 1999a). The conclusion from this work, as we explained at the time, was that it was technically possible to make form filling easy for people, provided certain good forms design methods were used and rigorously followed. We estimated that errors in forms completion due to design faults in the form—one of the simplest measures of a form’s effectiveness—could be reduced to less than 1%. That is, in a sample of 100 completed forms that had been well designed, only one of those forms would have a completion error in it that could be attributable to the design of layout or wording. This finding was based on research into well-designed paper forms. For a variety of reasons, we would expect a slightly better performance from internet forms following the same rigorous good forms design methods.

The same is the case for letters. By the mid-1990s we had undertaken a similarly large number of studies of ’standard’ letters (Sless 1999b). These are the sort of letters that individuals receive from agencies such as Taxation, Health, and Social Security—produced by the million, but customised for each recipient. When people read and then act on letters, there is not necessarily a visible trace left, as there is in forms. None the less, in testing we have consistently demonstrated that well-designed letters can be made extremely easy for literate people to read and act on, if the appropriate rigorous design methods are applied. . The minimum target performance level we look for is that any literate person should be able to find 90% of what they are looking for in such letters and act appropriately on 90% of what they find. These are minimum targets, and in practice we would aim above this performance level. Evidence collected after such letters are implemented confirms the test data.

So how well do government agencies perform today when it comes to forms and letters? The answer is: appallingly. As an example, last year we tested a government form which has to be completed by families and discovered that, in attempting to complete the form, every person made multiple mistakes that were directly attributable to poor design. This form had been ‘designed’ using the standard public service methods . In other words, the problem is systemic.

Letters present much the same picture. It doesn’t even need our research to demonstrate the point. Ask anyone you know who has ever had a letter from the Taxation Office or Centrelink about their experience in trying to make sense of and act on such correspondence.

So far successive governments in Australia at federal, state and local levels have failed to address these systemic problems of poor communication. Occasionally well designed forms and letters do get produced, but this is against a general background of appallingly low standards. Will our new federal government do any better? Let’s wait and see.

Sless, D. (1999a). Public forms: designing and evaluating forms in large organisations. In,H. Zwaga, T. Boersema, & H. C. M. Hoonhout (Eds.), Visual Information for Everyday Use: Design and Research Perspectives. pp. 135-153. Taylor & Francis.

Sless, D. (1999b). The mass production of unique letters.Writing Business: Genres, Media and Discourses. pp. 85-99. Longman.

To the people who read this blog, an explanation for the long break is in order.

I returned last August from a fascinating overseas trip. As inevitable happens, I initially got caught up in catching up with correspondence and all the new work we are undertaking at CRI, but then something odd happened.

I went for a routine medical check and one of the blood tests, for liver function, showed some abnormalities. Many tests and scans later it was discovered that there was ’something’ in my liver that should not be there. There was no way of finding out what it was without going in an taking it out. I agreed to the surgery.

A slice of my liver was removed along with the gall bladder. The surgeon was delighted: a simple operation lasting one and a half hours instead of the usual two and a half to three, no need for a blood transfusion, and the liver itself looked very healthy. While I lay recovering from major surgery (a bit like being hit by a bus, and with a hangover) the removed slice of liver was sent off for analysis. The tests showed there was no sign of any malignancy. And the ’something’ in my liver? It had blocked some ducts but nobody was sure what it was, except that it was benign.

People who are critical of my views on communication, information and other matters might suggest, that after long investigation and surgery, the only benign part of me was found and promptly removed. (this is not an original line, but a good one!).

Anyway, such events have a way of refocusing ones point of view on many things, Over the coming months, as my strength returns (I currently have about two to three hours in any day when I don’t feel like sleeping), I will resume my soap box rants.

I have mentioned before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s blindness to evidence when it comes to the design of medicine information. Nothing has changed. But I couldn’t help noticing an ironic coincidence in today’s email notices.

Jakob Nielsen, ever-focused on the web, today published his Alertbox on the subject of Banner Blindness. Yet again, the research on how people read web sites simply confirms and recapitulates what is known about reading in other media (something I have also mentioned before). Put simply, people avoid reading things in boxes because they ignore anything that looks like an advertisement. See our review of research on boxed warnings for a glimpse into what Nielsen has rediscovered on the internet. Blind spots are quite common, even among researchers.

This brings me to the other item in my email notices—today’s FDA News Digest—which announces:

Certain Diabetes Drugs to Carry Strengthened Warnings
Manufacturers of certain drugs to treat type 2 diabetes have agreed to add a stronger warning on the risk of heart failure. The information will be included in the form of a “boxed” warning, FDA’s strongest type of warning.

There is something deeply ironic in this juxtaposition: the rediscovery of a well-established information design research finding in the ephemeral world of the web next to the blindness to the same research finding in the life and death world of medication.

The irony goes further: the advertiser’s convention of using boxes becomes the regulator’s convention of boxed warnings. But to the public, a box is a box. It doesn’t come with a signal saying ‘Ignore me, I’m an advert’ or ‘Read me, I’m a warning’.

Life being short and busy for most of the public, ‘Ignore me, I’m an advert’ kicks in as the default response. One form of blindness leads to another and the result is that life might be a little shorter than one imagined.

I would like to offer a challenge to the people who commissioned the design of the 2012 London Olympics logo, and to Wolff Olins, the agency who did the design.

I was in London on Monday June 4th when the logo was unveiled. At first, when asked to comment, I said that it’s appearance did not matter too much, people would get used to it and it was more important that it met the many stakeholder and technical concerns that such devices had to meet. Now, after two days of extensive media criticism, including at least one negative front page headline and a double page spread in a London daily, I’m not so sure. I have doubts about both the management of stakeholder concerns and the capacity of the new logo to meet technical constraints. Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, summed up public concern about one technical aspect of the design when he said on BBC London 94.9:

If you employ someone to design a car and it kills you, your pretty unhappy about that. If you employ someone to design a logo for you and they haven’t done a basic health check, you have to ask what they do for their money.

The methods for generating such logos and making sure they are publicly acceptable are fairly well understood. They are a subset of information design methods used for generating other types of visual communication: nothing particularly esoteric or hard to explain to a general audience, but certainly requiring specialist methods and know-how.

My quick back of the envelope calculations, based on costing other similar projects, suggests that it would take about 200 hours to complete such a project, including allowing a generous amount for stakeholder consultation—a vital part of such a project.

According to reports, Wolff Olins received a fee of £400,000 for their work. By my calculation that is a fee of £2,000 per hour. Not bad!

So, apart from lots of bad press, what have the London Olympics organizers and the British public got for their Money? The answer is that nobody outside Wolff Olins and those who commissioned them knows.

None of the methods used or results from research on the development and refinement of the logo have been published. Such methods and research, if they were in the public domain, and if they conformed to acceptable standards of professional practice, would go a long way towards explaining why the logo looks the way it does and how it will work in practice. It might even mute some of the public criticism.

My challenge then to the people who commissioned the design of the London Olympics logo, and to Wolff Olins, the agency who did the design, is to release into the public domain a full report of their methods for creating the logo, and the findings from the research they undertook as part of that development. After all, the public who are paying for it have a right to know how their money was spent. Moreover, such a release may go some way to assuring the public that a £2,000 per hour fee was worthwhile. On the other hand…

Yesterday I was sent a powerpoint presentation containing data from one of our recent projects. It was prepared for us by the client—the largest of a number of multinationals in an particular industry sector.

I’m being a bit coy about this data because we have agreed not to release it publicly until Vision Plus 12, the Conference organised by the International Institute of Information Design (IIID) in Austria from July 5 to 7 this year. So until then, I can say very little.

What I can say is that it is important, it fits well into the conference theme of Information Design - Achieving Measurable Results, and it will provide further confirmation of the extraordinary achievements of information design over the last few years.

Now, I’m well aware that the term Information Design does not have the same high profile as terms such as Information Architecture(IA), User Experience Design(UX) or Usability(UB). Ironic, perhaps, as these terms each covers just a part of what information designers do. But the information design tradition of practice, spanning many traditional as well as the more recent media, and in almost every domain of human activity, gives it a much greater depth of practical know-how on which to build, and a wealth of historical examples spanning many generations. Moreover, with this long tradition and breadth there has also been a slow accumulation of methods and research findings on which information designers have been able to draw. Not surprisingly, therefore, Information Design is a mature professional practice and well placed to provide leadership into the future for many of its newer cousins.

As an indication of this, IA UX and UB professionals spend a lot of time agonising about the return on investment (ROI) that their clients might get from what they do. In the ID community, we have had good data on this for over 15 years. Indeed some of that data is quoted in support of claims made by these younger cousins, often without taking account of the full range of activities that lead to this ROI. Our preoccupation in ID has moved on from this. We now ask what level of ROI our clients should expect, and what standard of accesibility, usability, and other features of information people have a right to expect.

The Vision Plus 12 conference will be a landmark event, with some of the most important recent case histories, methods, and teaching on display, much of it concerned with demonstrating the measurable value of information design. I’m told by the organisers that there are a limited number of places left. If you have not already booked a place, do so soon at http://www.iiid-visionplus.net/Registration.aspx

Interestingly, as a research body, we never set out to answer this question. But today this must be the question most frequently asked by organisations that seek our help. Organisations want to know what their return on investment (ROI) will be. They ask us: if we pay the high fees you charge, how long will it take us to recoup the costs of your fees and make a profit?

Here are the answers as they relate to improvements in productivity and profits, based on data from our published research, case histories, and some 20 years of experience.

Minimally, through improvements in productivity, an organisation will recoup the cost of our fees within one year of implementing our recommendations. But the more likely outcome is that for every dollar spent on our fees, the savings will be between $5 and $10. That is an ROI of between 500% and 1000% in the first year following implementation.

This ROI tells us three things. First, the current effectiveness of communication and information design in most organisations is poor. Second, most organisations have little or no idea just how bad their communication is. Third, and reassuringly, we know how to do our job.

But, impressive as these figures on productivity are, they are merely the tip of the iceberg. The effects of good communication and information design on profitability increases the ROI by a further factor of 10, and more. In medium to large organisationss, every dollar spent on our services increases profitability by $100 or more.

In many instances, what we create significantly adds to the capital value of an organisation. In one recent case, an organisation with a market capitalisation of AU$32 billion increased its capital value by $600 million following the introduction of our solution to one of their major communications with their customers.

But there are some important caveats.

1. These results only occur when we are allowed to undertake every aspect of our carefully-integrated communication problem solving method, from scoping through to monitoring. If someone tries to take the bits of our work that they think add value and ignore the rest, or get some of the work done through stand-alone services such as market researchers, agencies or graphic designers, the chances are there will be no ROI. In such circumstances we would issue one of our ‘all-care-and-no-responsibility’ letters, which says that any undertaking we may have given about ROI is no longer valid.

2. The ROI can be significantly eroded if, following implementation, the communication is not routinely monitored. Our experience shows that in as short a time frame as six months from implementation, communication solutions can lose their optimum effectiveness, and they begin to deteriorate quite rapidly thereafter.

We sometimes watch in sadness as an organisation allows these valuable communication assets to deteriorate. Perhaps if we charged higher fees, an organisation might value the investment more and not neglect it! But seriously, and much worse still, we do see organisations—unaware of the value of their communication assets—just abandon them: millions of dollars worth, at the stroke of a pen.

Ironically, as I hinted at the beginning, we never set out to achieve ROI on improved communication, and we still have no real interest in an organisation’s profitability as such. Our principle interest all along has been, and remains, a commitment to improving communication between large organisations and the public, in the public interest.

But we’re happy to exploit the synergy between the public good and high ROI if the result is significant public benefit.

keep looking »

© CRI 2008 David Sless’s soap box