Hitch x Design: 5 Product Design Lessons From the Master of Suspense
Adapted from a presentation I gave to the UED team @ LinkedIn as part of our focus on Storytelling x Design.
My Dad and I didn’t have a lot in common growing up.
From his vantage, weekends were a time best spent outside doing yard work in his garden or flawless lawn; for my brother and me, weekends were an opportunity to sleep in late, ingest copious amounts of cartoons, and a generous helping of Super Nintendo to round things out.
Now as I quickly become my Dad, the virtues of his thinking have become more clear. But try telling that to the 9-year old me below:
But there was one weekend activity that we could always agree on: the Saturday night trip to the local video store.
My Dad wasn’t a highbrow film aesthete by any means, and my brother and I were wholly responsible for cajoling him into renting our fair share of low-brow classics like Troop Beverly Hills or SpaceCamp, but I remember the heightened excitement in his eyes when he led us to a particular aisle in the video store: one dedicated to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
My father’s excitement was palpable. I could read it on his face! The budding designer-to-be in me found interest in the highly graphical quality of each film’s packaging, as Dad explained, “His films have great design”. I didn’t know enough — or have enough foresight into my future — to decode the meaning of that further.
So here I am today, managing designers building experiences that hopefully, on a good day, do more than just get the job done. There are opportunities to engage on different levels, to delight and surprise, to elicit feelings reminiscent of those I experienced the first time I watched The Birds or Rear Window.
I was curious, “Are there any relevant design lessons or themes of inspiration for today that we can draw from ol’ Hitch?”
Lesson 1: Onboarding — The Power of Motion to Set Tone
Hitchcock engaged Saul Bass, a prized advertising designer, to up-level the game when it comes to the main titles of his films. In the hands of others, movie titles merely listed off the contributors to a film; in the hands of these guys, the titles manipulate shape and color with motion to break the viewer down, convey a state of mind, and ready them for immersion into the world of the film — no different than what a great onboarding experience can do when you launch an app.
I love this quote from Saul:
Lesson 2: Restrictions — An Inspiration Driver
So many times as product designers, we deal in managing limitations: tech debt from old engineering that a project team refuses to toss, designing within the small viewport of an older iPhone, making room for ads and promos, etc.
While many would say Vertigo is Hitch’s best color film (ah the romance, beautiful SF locations, luscious score… but damn the glacially slow pace), my money goes to Rear Window. It’s what this movie accomplishes with such a restrictive setup that is so inspiring.
Our protagonist (ie. the good guy), L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart), a photojournalist, spends the movie stuck in a wheelchair because of an accident he suffered pursuing a great shot (all of this information is conveyed in the opening shot without words or dialogue). Check it:
The entire movie happens from his single vantage point. We only learn things as he sees them and from his view. It’s Hitch’s post purely cinematic gambit, and his audacity is inspiring to this day no matter what medium or mode we are designing for. He said:
Lesson 3: Surprise and Delight — And Don’t Fear Your Personal Brand
Time and time again, we are taught and conditioned as people solving broad design problems to take ourselves out of the equation, invoke our strongest stab at empathy, and put ourselves in our user’s shoes to the point we are transparent.
But with Hitch, we are talking about a hardcore Steve Jobs-approach. Forget the trademark glasses, turtleneck and jeans, Hitch took it there with a trademark suit, inimitable accent, and talk about embracing your flaws, he turned his rotund silhouette into his own venerable logomark (one he designed by his own hand):
And here it is in motion — from the start of Hitchcock Presents, 1955–1961, his popular anthology mystery-suspense series on TV:
One of the things we’re told that makes putting yourself in your work a “no-no” is that it implies you have an ego, that it’s about you and not the user, and all of this is certainly true. So how does Hitchcock get away with it? Humor.
He proclaims himself the “master of suspense”, but undercuts any projection of hubris, ego or piety by posing with a pretzel, shoving himself in a canon, covering himself in hot dogs:
By making himself the butt of his own joke, Hitch empowers himself and “hitches” his art to his identity in a way that embued him with more artistic (ie. design) control. I am not advocating we start sticking ourselves into our designs, but it does open a door to thinking about how injecting a sense of self-branding, when appropriate, can give us power and freedom to design our best work.
Lesson 4: Gamification — Fun Can Take Many Forms
Whether you’re collecting points on an airline app or self-destructing coupon codes that you must apply before they expire, games are fun and encourage repeat engagement with your product. Hitch found all sorts of devious ways to get and keep his viewer’s in the game.
Find the Cuts
In Rope, Hitch challenged himself and his team to stage the material like a play — rehearsed, prepared. Instead of constantly shooting from multiple angles and over multiple takes, the movie is made of 10 long takes. They would shoot a scene until the magazine of film ran out which meant, at that time, no single take could be longer than 20 minutes.
While some of the edits are obvious, others are subliminal in nature. The choice of moments to cut is very strategic and underlines and highlights certain moments of action, or certain epiphanies between the characters. It also creates a fun game for the viewer as they have to try and spot the cuts.
Spot the Director
You could also file this one under Lesson 3, but is there any better Hitchcock reoccurring gambit than his cameo appearance in every film? Some are blatant, some are fast, some more discrete, but regardless his viewers (ie. users) loved the gambit:
Lesson 5: Providing Endless Value — Great Design Lives On
As we toil away on multiple iterations of concepts or designs, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the pressure to incorporate the latest trendy UI element or micro interaction, some of which will persist and last forever, some of which will feel out-of-date by the next big release. So I find solace in the timeless, always-in-vogue key art of Hitchcock’s films:
Tastes, techniques and tactics change, but the fundamental appeal of these designs will never fade.
And it’s the power of these classic designs to influence future generations of designers that gives pause — and hope — for the future. A quick search of Google Images yields endless reams of examples of young designers inspired to explore their own aesthetic riffs, their own homages:
Or even direct homages like the Burn After Reading poster:
Thank you Hitch for pushing yourself and your collaborators to do their finest work in the service of engagement. And thanks Dad for planting the seed, you just might make a gardener out of me yet.
David Hildebrand is a Sr. Design Manager at LinkedIn in San Francisco and Sunnyvale. Before that, he worked for Sony, Westfield and Groupon/LivingSocial. He currently lives in the Dogpatch.
If you’d like to learn more about the UED team at LinkedIn, and open opportunities, visit us at design.linkedin.com.
