Sparkle-ize My Napkin (or, Backing Out Design Thinking)
There’s a scene in the (alas, canceled) television show “Smash” in which an inexperienced director tells the leading lady how to say a line, a faux pas known as a “line reading.” (See the expression on the pair of dancers when the director does it.) Theater is an old profession with a well-established etiquette and being given a “line reading” is considered demeaning and humiliating. The director is essentially saying, “The best contribution you can make is mimicking me well.”
Designers know this feeling. We've all had a colleague, boss or client drop by with napkin sketch in hand and ask, “Can you just take this drawing and make it pretty?”
These requests make us bristle, sigh, throw up our hands and even sometimes quit. (Since I’ve been asking people about napkins, one person did tell me she quit her job in identity and packaging design because all she ever got was napkins.) Why? Because to designers they feel like the moral equivalent of a line reading: directives that ignore our professional contributions, training, and experience, and cut our process short or ignore it altogether.
Napkins: A Design Thinking Alternative?
For us, designing is much more than just putting a nice patina on an existing drawing. “Design” is a verb. It’s a process that includes everything from defining user needs and concepting to prototyping and testing — a process called “Design Thinking.” Stanford’s d.school has done a lot of work here and has a nice and broadly-adopted model of Design Thinking that illustrates the idea well:
Napkins, by my definition, are prototypes in themselves: a skipping to the end that leaves us out, the end of the conversation.
Designers are not the only people who run into this assumption that their work is an end-of-process activity, a simple task that can be knocked out in an hour or two. Nothing makes a communications professional crazier than a request for a “press release” about something that isn't news. Writing and distributing a release can’t turn a new package design into important industry news. You'd be hard pressed to find a developer or product manager who hasn’t wrangled with sales and marketing over a new feature the CEO dreamed up in the shower. A product marketing colleague has complained to me about a researcher that routinely comes to her with recommendations. Not findings, recommendations. That’s a napkin too. A recent chat with an aesthetician about her pet peeves revealed that she got ‘napkins’ in the form of clients who arrive already knowing everything about their skin and what services they need — before she even had a chance to look at them, much less bring her training and experience to bear.
“Just make it sexy.”
Every professional has a process and set of knowledge that allows them to contribute their best to any given solution. That process is gets short-circuited when they're handed a literal or figurative napkin. What the deliverer seems to be saying is: “We don't need your or your contribution. Just make this pretty and we're good.” Often these sentences start with, “Just…” As in: “Just jazz it up a bit.” “Just be creative with it.” “Just fill in the details.” “Just make it sexy.” “We need more eye candy.” “This just needs more pizzazz.” Or as I call it: “Sparkle-ize it!” (I did honestly have someone ask me once to “make it sparkle”.)
Defining Napkins
For my purposes then, a crisp definition of “a napkin” is the outline of a solution that kills the chance for others to make meaningful contributions. It’s important to note that not all napkins are napkins: if they are meant to begin a conversation, then by my definition they’re not napkins — they’re not skipping to the prototyping phase (although they may be skipping to the ideating phase, that is a different problem that we can work with more easily because if they’re starting a conversation with us, so there is an implicit assumption that we have something to offer!)
Design Napkins
Wireframing tools like Balsamiq and Axure offer great efficiencies for UX design but on the down side can be the digital equivalent of the napkin sketch. Here’s an example:
The yellow notes provided very specific instructions on how a user should interact with the page. When we looked closely at the sketch and the notes, we uncovered some conflicting issues both with the page and the larger system to which it belonged. Concerned that we may have misunderstood our client’s goals, we decided we needed to uncover the thinking process behind their UX design.
So we backed up, found the points of departure from our understanding of the basics and put together a set of questions to see if we could unpack the problem with the client. We walked them through the following decision tree and then showed examples of how each decision flow would manifest in a UX design.
From a design process point of view, these questions are working on two levels. The obvious level is the ‘selection’ of the actual UX design. The less obvious, more subtle purpose is to uncover the role of design in the client’s own process and work culture. Do they see these questions as choices? Do they understand how these decisions effect overall UX flow and, ultimately, users?
Unfortunately, as you can see from the illustration below, the client didn’t respond as we might have hoped.
Some answers were “both”, some answers were neither. I’m afraid we only frustrated our client by asking these questions. Particularly revealing is the note, “I’m not sure by answering these questions it gets us an answer.”
The remaining comments presented us with what was actually another “napkin” — this time sketched by hand — another detailed description of how the application should function.
Clearly, getting another napkin is not the ideal result of trying to understand the thinking behind a napkin. If we’d like encounters like this to go better in the future, what do we do differently? Is there a systematic approach to improving how we respond to directives and dictates from colleagues, bosses or clients?
Consider 4th-Order Design
When a metaphorical ‘napkin’ seems to be squashing our creativity and ambition, instead of getting frustrated, I think it’s time to level up and apply design thinking to our own problem. Richard Buchanan, a professor of design at CMU known for extending the application of design into new areas of theory and practice, calls this approach third– and fourth-order design. First and second-order design involve the creation of things and third-order design addresses activities and organized services, fourth-order design focuses on cultural systems or environments for living, working, playing and learning.
Buchanan first articulated this idea in the Spring 1992 volume of Design Issues (MIT Press), which astonishingly and tragically didn’t include any drawings — happily after the article was published Toby Golsby-Smith picked up the idea and gave us a model for it:
So how do we go about this fourth-order design thinking process? The Stanford d.school’s model for the design thinking includes five steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Fourth-order design applies these steps not to the problem on the napkin but the problem of the napkin, which is the manifestation of a larger misunderstanding of the role and process or design.
Though the requester may believe that they are at the prototype stage of the product design (which is what a napkin is), you will be starting with step one of the system design, which is: empathize. Talk to the person handing you the napkin to understand their goals, motivations and needs. Here are some typical motivations and beliefs underlying “Sparkle-ize It!” requests:
- It’s not optional — some contract somewhere has this literal or figurative napkin stapled to it, and unfortunately this time around you just need to roll with it.
- There’s no time to think about or discuss alternatives. The requester needs a picture for their demo or presentation now.
- The best solution is on the napkin. They’ve done the heavy lifting, all they need now is a ‘design.’
- They think it’s your job to make their work look pretty and classy, and they don’t understand how to use you better.
- It’s hard to explain the idea with words, but a picture would make it all clear.
If “not optional” or “no time” are the driving forces behind the napkin, there isn’t much room to do more than follow directions. But if questioning uncovers other motivations (your “define” step), you have a lot of flexibility to step back down into the design process, specifically at the ideation stage.
Have a Napkin Story?
By this point, I imagine that everyone is thinking of that napkin they got last week, last month, or The Big One that drove them over the edge at that last job. As part of expanding our understanding and thinking about what it means to get a napkin and how to deal with it, we’d love to hear yours, and imagine it will be entertaining and interesting to read and see one anothers’! To that end, we’ve put together a quick site at thenapkinsite.com to support sharing.
The TL; DR: Everyone, in work or in life, has had someone kill their opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to a situation or a product by outlining a solution for them. This is getting a “napkin”. By employing 4th-order design thinking, we can start to think about the system in which we’re getting a napkin, and how to make that system better. By doing so, we can also make the situation or product better.
Up Next
In subsequent posts, I’ll share seven techniques for backing into ideating from a prototype, and also the dreaded anti-napkin. These techniques will not be about tossing the napkin, which can be insulting, painful, and will certainly lose useful information. Rather, they’ll be about mining the napkin (my metaphor starts to fall apart here) for all it’s worth, and backing it from prototype into ideas.
The first one: I Saw You Draw
