How I came to stick a lot of post-it notes on walls
My talk at Curated By… on 5th December 2018, organised by the graphics team in the Design Department at Sheffield Hallam University. It was a talk intended for a largely student audience, about the things that influenced my career.
Hello. I do user research and service design and have done this at the BBC, and Co-op and have worked for clients like Channel 4, the Science Museum, Umbro, 3, and in government.
I’m not a traditional designer, but I work in the field of design. And the field I work in is growing, and it’s going to be around for a while, long enough I’d wager to offer you jobs when you graduate.
This is an example of the kind of thing I do. This is a service to make your own will I did at the Coop. We researched, tested, designed and built this over the course of 9 months using discovery, alpha and beta phases (you might be familiar with them?).
Another example of something I researched (via the Open Identity Exchange and Cabinet Office): a service to verify your identity. A government — or Government Digital Service — product.
This service has made it far far simpler for most people to renew driving licenses, get a passport and apply for a disabled parking badge. It’s a great example of designing a service, something that isn’t just a website, but that has the veneer of a website. It’s actually a very complex machine made to be simple and usable through design.
And this is a bit of what my day-to-day job looks like. Post it notes. Sketches. Talking, although obviously you can’t see any talking! More post-it notes.
I work in a team of 6–10 people and our interface is the wall.
I’ve broken my talk into three parts.
1. Before I started to put post-it notes on walls
Before I begin I want to talk about my pet hate. It’s the belief that creativity is somehow engendered by bean bags, pool tables, nice coffee bars. You see it in cool agencies, and less frequently in client world.
I believe that being uncomfortable, and things being hard, can produce a far more creative habit. I trace this belief partly back to my upbringing near Burnley where we didn’t do bean bags, and partly M E Smith.
Mark E Smith, who died last year, was synonymous with a band called The Fall. They released 32 studio albums from 1979–2017 (32 albums in 38 years). It’s a prodigious output. And as you’d expect from such an output — it was very varied. Some of the most critically acclaimed music in the 80s and 90s, and yet also some utter dirge.
He didn’t believe creativity just happened. He believed you sweated at it. And he valued delivery above perfection.
In the 80s when he developed a cult following amongst students and miners for his strident music, he said things that could be perceived as being right wing, something that flew in the face of his loyal fans’ values: he is said to have had a liking for Nietzsche for example, in his idea of Superman (Ubermensch), and yet also detested the tories. He didn’t do things to win favour, and he wasn’t a sop to his fanbase.
He was a renegade. He went against the grain and refused to be a sheep.
One example of these punk DIY values came 1984 when he collaborated with an avant garde dancer called Michael Clark on an opera about William III (William of Orange) and his glorious revolution, and produced an album called I am Kurious Oranj. Here’s a taste of what that was like. It was brilliant and subversive. I was 13 and I was hooked.
The desire for change, and an uncompromising style also produced less pleasant consequences — people were seen as replaceable: there were over 66 people in the band over 35 years. There’s even a wikipedia page given over to figuring it out.
The reason people were seen as replaceable is that PUNK DIY had a give-it-a-go ethos at its heart. It was anti-elitist. When a drummer left the band quite unexpectedly in 1980 on the eve of their first tour to the US, and a gig in Birmingham, a solution was quickly found…
‘How much time do we need?” says Kay (Carroll) in a tone that indicates she’s already got someone in mind. She eyes everyone in the room in turn before fixing me with an intent look. “Steve (Hanley), what about that brother of yours?”
“What about him?”
“You’ve been banging on about what a good drummer he is. Couldn’t you have him ready in time for Birmingham?”
Everyone stops supping for a moment to stare at me while I try to figure this out. Having been to every gig we’ve played in North West England, my kid brother Paul does know most of the songs and he’d give his entire comic collection for a chance to be on stage with us. But he’s only ever played live once in our local Catholic club. I might have mentioned he’s learning to play the drums once or twice. I didn’t realise I’d been banging on about it. He’s only had that clapped out kit for six months and Birmingham is in two days.
“Steve? Hello. Are you still with us? Can you get him ready or can’t you?”
“Well, let’s see,” I’m speaking before I’ve had a chance to think it through properly. Our Paul’s sitting his mock O-levels this week. “The next gig’s Bimingham on Tuesday isn’t it?” I think it’s maths that day. “I’ll have to show him a couple of the newer arrangements… but I reckon I can have him sorted for Friday”. (The Big Midweek, by Steve Hanley and Olivia Piekarski p78–79)
And so Paul Hanley became a drummer in The Fall at the age of 16 and he did go to the US.
Paula Scher the amazing graphic designer gave a talk in this same theatre five weeks ago and one of her points was that to be creative you need to push back against something.
Orthodoxy, elitism, laziness, being a sheep and a healthy scepticism for power. That’s what I push back on, and I got some of that from M E Smith.
This is a man called Bruno Latour.
I became a total fanboy to this french academic in the 90s when I was doing my second degree — I’d be 22–23. Bruno became my hero. Iconoclastic and an intellectual renegade. He rebutted most contemporary social science. He did this by arguing that things that happen are not the result of human agency: that, for example, I am not controlling this performance today like a puppeteer might, acting on these inanimate objects and making them do things for me — but that the performance today is the result of networks of association: assemblages of human and non-human things.
This was radical stuff. He was a punk! I mean how dare you give this macbook pro (as good as it is) the same status as me?!
If we wanted to understand society we had to study the connections between things: why some were stronger networks, and some weaker.
This appealed to me greatly. Not just because it seemed new and different, but because to my mind it made sense. We’ve given humans primacy in our thought because we’re human, we’re biased! What about these non-human things? Like spreadsheets, door handles (srsly) or even words. Put simply, it means that effects, like me talking to you today are only possible through the use of material things. And some things, when put together have stability and through that stability form power.
To study this world you needed to be an ethnographer (or anthropologist of the everyday), someone who could look, and look again. The world became far more interesting and it kick-started my love of ethnographic work — studying behaviour (of human and non-human things) through observation and description.
I want to read an extract from one of his books, Science in Action. It’s about the court of Louis XVI, and the desire to trade globally — and in order to do that they needed to know the world they would trade with, to domesticate it. This extract is from page 217, and concerns the explorer Lapérouse on the ship L’Astrolabe to ‘Sakhalin’ , seen as an important trading destination.
But they are not only in a hurry, they are also under enormous pressure to gather traces that have to be of a certain quality. Why is it not enough to bring back to France personal diaries, souvenirs and trophies? Why are they all so hard-pressed to take precide notes, to obtain and double-check vocabularies from their informants, to stay awake late at night writing down everything they have heard and seen, leballing their specimens, checking for the thousandth time the running of their astronomical clocks? Why don’t they relax, enjoy the sun and the tender flesh of the salmon they catch so easily and cook on the beach? Because the people who sent them away are not so much interested in their coming back as they are in the possibility of sending other fleets later. If Lapérouse succeeds in his mission, the next ship will know if Sakhalin is a peninsula or an island, how deep the strait is, what the dominant winds are, what the mores, resources, cultures of the natives are before sighting the land. On 17 July 1787, Lapérouse is weaker than his informants; he does not know the shape of the land, does not know where to go; he is at the mercy of his guides. Ten years later, on 5 November 1798 the English ship Neptune on landing again at the same bay will be much stronger than the natives since they will have on board maps, descriptions, log books, nautical instructions-which to begin with will allow them to know that this is the ‘same’ bay. For the new navigator entering the bay, the most important features of the land will all be seen for the second time — the first was when reading in London Lapérouse’s notebooks and considering the maps engraved from the bearings De Lesseps brought back to Versaille.
What will happen is Lapérouse’s mission does not succeed? If De Lesseps is killed and his precious treasure scattered somewhere on the Siberian tundra? Or if some spring in the nautical clocks went wrong, making most of the longtitudes unreliable? The expedition is wasted. For many more years a point on the map at the Admiralty will remain controversial. The next ship sent away will be as weak as L’Astrolabe, sighting the Segalian (or is it Sakhalin?) island(or is it a peninsula?) for the first time, looking again for native informants and guides; the divide will remain as it is, quite small since the frail and uncertain crew of the Neptuna will have to rely on natives as poor and frail as them. On the other hand if the mission succeeds, what was at first a small divide between the European navigator and the Chinese fishermen will have become larger and deeper since the Neptuna crew will have less to learn from their natives. Although there is at the beginning not much difference between rthe abilities of the French and the Chinese navigators, the difference will grow if Lapérouse is part of a network through which the ethnogeography of rhe Pacific is accumulated in Europe. Asymmetry will slowly begin to take shape between the ‘local’ Chinese and the ‘moving’ geographer. The Chinese will remain savage (to the European) and as strong as the Neptuna crew, if Lapérouse’s notebooks do not reach Versaille. If they do, the Neptuna will be better able to domesticate the Chinese since everything of their land, culture, language and resources will be known on board the English ship before anyone says a word. Relative degrees of savagery and domestication are obtained by many little tools that make the wilderness known in advance, predictable. (Science in Action p217–8)
I learnt to be critical from Latour. To look at the world in detail, seeing how things — often mundane, material, everyday things — come together to effect power. It’s something I draw back on again and again. My job is often to point out the things that seem less significant, indeed often barely visible, and to describe them and their role. That’s part of being a user researcher and a designer, but it’s also about being a good observer.
A practical example of this observation, and application of Latour’s work, came on one of my first days whilst working at the Co-op. Me and a couple of colleagues made a trip to the Crewe funeral care home, which was a significant size. We wanted to know how it worked, and where any opportunities existed to help make the user experience better, and the operation more efficient and effective.
We spoke to people involved in different roles, and we observed how different material things were involved in enabling outcomes to happen: the whiteboard in the main office, for example, provided a schedule and rota and acted as the main source of truth to the funeral directors, and only visible to a few.
The thing I remember most about that trip however was that we collected eighteen documents from different staff in the home, all used to process a ‘client’ (dead person). There was duplication and inconsistency amongst these document-actants. It wasn’t a badly run operation. Far from it. Customers were very satisfied with the service, and the standards of the staff were exemplary. However, ‘local’ deals had to be done, people were translating (interpreting) information that was presented and creating work-a-rounds for tasks: the centre of calculation in head office was weak, the different actants in the system were not well aligned, it took significant negotiation to process a funeral.
We (Co-op Digital teams) changed that by re-designing the end to end service, the process used by staff to manage a funeral, from initial visit, working around documentation such as GP visit and death certificates, to managing a car, a fridge space, the wishes of the client, any embalming and ID, to the funeral itself. This service had been rolled out nationwide. Key to the success of the service (and it’s not been without its difficulties) is transparency, and the collection of data at the right time, in providing this in the context where it’s most useful.
There is now less asymmetry of knowledge between the different roles.
As designers you need to understand the network of actants to design for it, to enable effects! You’re designing a network or system, not websites, or logos, or objects. Services are how these things combine, together. Perhaps some other examples will help…
Drawing on some local work, we have Ian Drysdale’s service GoodGym, uniting people who want a work out, with doing some good at the same time. It has many touchpoints with its users and what looks a simple ‘thing’, is actually a complex service with trust at it’s heart.
And Tom Tobia’s project Makerversity providing a service for creative businesses. Again, not just a website and a space for businesses, but a network of legal documents, agreements, commitments…
Then there’s the service most of you in this theatre use. A service to get a degree — who are the actants here? What’s the network(s)? Where are the strengths and weaknesses in it?
2. Starting to put post-it notes on walls
What I’ve described until now are the things that have informed my approach to work. What I want to talk about now are the things that have specifically helped me in my craft: in working to help make products and services.
My time working on digital products and services coincided with me, leaving work as a lecturer in geography, working at the BBC and being a dad. It was around 2000.
It wasn’t glamorous work. I was working as a researcher for history documentaries and then for a BBC current affairs programme, Correspondent. I started helping out the “webmaster” working on Panorama. And we got talking and I started to help out making websites, and thinking about else how we could get our audience engaged in the programmes we made.
This is when I read a bit about design. I was influenced by a bunch of designers and researchers at the BBC, a brilliant bunch — such as Tom Coates, Matt Locke, Tom Loosemore, Fiona Romeo, Matt Biddulph, Alice Taylor, Dan Hill, Matt Jones, and Matt Webb (lots of Matts). These people have gone on to be hugely influential in what we call digital.
But first was something called usability.
Unbeknownst to me, there was this whole new industry that had sprung up around Human Computer Interaction, and more specifically usability. It was my gateway into thinking beyond websites, applying Latour and being critical about how things were designed. Because the internet, and the web, were new mediums and we were having to think anew about humans and behaviour.
From the introduction to Alan’s book The Inmates are Running the Asylum.
What do you get when you cross an computer with an airplane?
In December 1995, American Airlines flight 965 departed from Miami on a regularly scheduled flight to Cali. Columbia. On the landing approach, the pilot of the 757 needed to select next radio navigation fix, names “ROZO.” He enetered an “R,” and the pilot selected the first of these, whose latitude and longitude appeared to be correct. Unfortunately, instead of “ROZO,” the pilot selected “ROMEO,” 132 miles to the northeast. The jet was southbound, descending into a valley that runs north-south, and any lateral deviation was dangerous. Following indications on the flight computer, the pilot began an easterly turn and slammed into a granite peak at 10,000 feet. One hundred and fifty two passengers and all eight cremembers aboard perished. Four passengers survived with serious injuries. The National Transportational Safety Board investigated, and — as usual — declared the problem human error. The navigational aid the pilot was following was valid, but not for the landing procedure at Cali. In the literal definition of the phrase, this was indeed human error, because the pilot selected the wrong fix. However, in the larger picture, it wasn’t the pilot’s fault at all.
Poor usability could have huge consequences. This wasn’t just the domain of pretty and whilst I was designing websites, programmes and forums for the BBC and not aviation interfaces, I knew that getting this right mattered. And now if any senior manager questions the seriousness of interaction design I point them to examples like Alan’s above.
The world of usability can be dry stuff however. Important, but dry. Thankfully, Kathy Sierra provided a new lens on this world for me. One that focused on ways to design for users, not just through making things usable, but creating products and services that met their needs. She introduced me to a new language that I could start to use around user centred design. Her blog Creating Passionate Users was a home for at least five years to 2007, when she stopped blogging (due to being harassed and threatened). It’s still a great resource more than 10 years on.
And I loved how this world of user centred design was interested in how users interacted and behaved around stuff more generally, not just websites — what can we learn from the material world and its interactions and apply that for the new world of the internet.
Nicolas Nova’s blog Pasta and Vinegar was my home for 3–4 years around this time, he documented (usually daily) the world through observations and ethnography. Latour would have approved!
So, above, we have a shutter as newspaper rack. An unintended consequence, a way in which a material thing has been co-opted into the world. And below, a map scarred by use, developing a patina through wear and tear.
(This patina metaphor idea was used in a BBC project once. The BBC website would change visually depending on how you interacted with it. To give you a visual feedback loop. The move from physical world to digital screen was too big a jump, and it didn’t live long.)
The patina, scarring also takes shape as a desire path, a path created by erosion from foot traffic (usually) and that generally coincides with the quickest and easiest way of getting from A-B.
Interestingly, many planners and designers of urban landscape will now leave a space to be used for a while to let these desire paths form, before paving them.
This metaphor of desire path is a powerful one in digital design today: putting the focus back on the user to define their path through a service, a path with the least effort and most value.
The desire path can also be seen in folksonomies, taxonomies or category systems driven by users; tags to me and you.
When I was working at the BBC in early 2000s Clay Shirky came to talk. He spoke about a number of things but the thing that stuck with me was his story about how people were tagging content they produced on the blogging platform Livejournal. Back then tags were novel, unlike now.
And this is where Clay talked about Peonies, the flower. And how #peonies was a means for flower lovers to be found by other flower loving bloggers. But that some of these #peony tags were polluted with photos and stories of #ponies. Ponies are not peonies. But many people had spelt their tag incorrectly, and the world of peonies and ponies became inseparable. Fortunately tags weren’t seen as a ‘pure’ taxonomy, so people weren’t too bothered by this mix of flower and animal, if anything it created a sort of serendipitous navigation.
Clay’s talk back in 2004 ish was instructive to me about the internet and what it enabled. Historically publishing was far too costly for most people, so elites owned what was distributed and said. Social media changed that. And with it the way we define things, categorise them, and find them. Folksonomies and tagging are an instance of what Nicholas Nova describes with his window shutter and map, above, only they’re with words. Words are approriated, mistakes creep in, and our world fractures a bit differently. What Clay described that day was a new behavioural form (and a largely democratic one), that had significant implications for how things were found and shared. They weren’t just ‘tags’.
3. When the post-it notes started getting out of hand
Up until now I had been applying principles of usability and been starting to think about how some of the behaviours I saw in the real-life world could be applied to digitally mediated experiences. But I hadn’t got far with that. This changed in 2006 onwards, when I started an agency with some friends, built an online marketplace for craft, and started to do work which felt — at least at times — interesting and worthwhile. Part of this was down to meeting a bunch of new people, and being part of a small team of designers, developers and researchers who could work and deliver at speed. And part was down to using more of the learning from behavioural psychology in the design work I did. A key influence was Scott McDonald.
Scott McDonald describes how we process the world and he does this through the form of cartoon. He goes beyond usability to look at why we interpret some things the way we do. His book Understanding Comics is the best user experience primer I know of. And better still it’s in comic form.
One of the key things covered early in the book is about how we interpret agency and ourselves in what we see and read.
From the above panel, the more abstract we represent the human face, the more our brain works to interpret it and to bring ‘us’ into the picture. On the left only one person identifies with this high fidelity face, as it’s a facsimile of only one person. As we move right and the image becomes more abstract, more people identify and crucially see themselves as the ‘person’, literally their brain reads themselves into the face. I love this!
You’ll be more familiar with the phenomenon of #iseefaces (pareidolia) which works on the same principle outlined by Scott McCloud.
This works the other way too, at least partly. When things start to become too photo-realistic our brains don’t like it. We start to get creeped out when things are almost real. This phenomenon is called the Uncanny Valley. And it’s quite common in games such as Medal of Honour: Warfighter.
If our brain is hard-wired from these abstract forms, to see faces, what else is it hard wired to do, and how does that affect what, and how we design?
What I’ve described so far in Part 3 is particularly valid to imagery, graphics and 2D design, but I’m interested more broadly in services and products and how they exist in the world, as material interactions, not just graphics and images.
But it does extend into the real world. Scott, again…
Borrowing from Marshall McLuhan, Scott describes how when driving a car it is more than our five senses which are affected. We start to embody the car. So if one car hits another more likely to say “(s)he hit me” rather than “(s)he hit my car”. That subconscious reaction to being in a car accident seems very revealing.
You perhaps expect embodiment with things that are ‘on’ you, for example mobile phones and wearables, but it’s the things that we have a relationship with more remotely than that which interests me, things like Alexa and Google Home and, taken further, ‘home’ itself.
Scott’s book opened up psychology to me. At least that strain of psychology dealing with human behaviour, and I became interested, along with many others, about how you design with intent, with a view to working with these hard-wired behaviours.
Dan Locton’s set of prompts for designers take psychological evidence and uses it to help inform the design process. The commitment and consistency card, above, plays to our desire to want to be consistent with previous behaviour.
Consistency is just one example of 6 ‘principles of persuasion’ that was identified by Robert Cialdini in his excellent book Influence, the psychology of persuasion. From Cialdini…
People like to be consistent with the things they have previously said or done.
Consistency is activated by looking for, and asking for, small initial commitments that can be made. In one famous set of studies, researchers found rather unsurprisingly that very few people would be willing to erect an unsightly wooden board on their front lawn to support a Drive Safely campaign in their neighborhood.
However in a similar neighborhood close by, four times as many homeowners indicated that they would be willing to erect this unsightly billboard. Why? Because ten days previously, they had agreed to place a small postcard in the front window of their homes that signaled their support for a Drive Safely campaign. That small card was the initial commitment that led to a 400% increase in a much bigger but still consistent change.
As designers we are employing these weapons for both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The likes of Booking.com use scarcity to make us convert to booking a hotel room for example, by stating that “10 people have booked in the last hour”. We get wise to these things, but our hard-wired behaviour is still predictable in its response.
How can we use these things to do more good, to make things better?
I want to end this talk by looking at one area that I think is desperate for our design and to design with intent: Attention. Our ability to give something undivided attention has changed markedly in the last 30 years. As an example, I suspect everyone in this room has checked their phone in the last 50 minutes, or not got this far in the article before reading some notification.
We have an attention deficit which manifests as not seeing, hearing, or relating as well as we deserve to. How do we design for our most precious commodity (at least in the west), attention? There are other things like privacy which are hugely important too. But I want to focus on attention, both designing for it (attention) and being conscious of the fact that as designers and researchers we can get distracted easily and we can stop looking at the world, and as I mentioned earlier, we need to be attentive to the world, to see it, in order to critique it and to design for it.
Fish: a tap essay. Robin Sloan, produced this tap essay in 2012. It’s wonderful. If you have a iOS go look at it now, and if not go borrow an iOS device, and try and give the tap essay your undivided attention. It’s fun, it shouldn’t be too hard.
(I went through the tap essay with the students, you’ll have to do it solo.)
Thank you for reading and thank you to Pam for inviting me to talk at Sheffield Hallam’s Curated By… series.
