Author: smackellar

I’m often fascinated by embarrassing design mistakes. This isn’t because they’re a chance to point and laugh. Instead, they are an opportunity to learn how to avoid the same thing happening again. To do this it helps to understand the process that lead to the mistake in the first place.

When the refurbished Birmingham New Street station was launched last year, part of the striking design is a reflective surface showing the tracks below to people at street level. The builders were keen to point out that they had modelled the path of the sun at all times of the day and for every day of the year to avoid dazzling the train drivers below with solar glare.

I couldn’t help wondering if this was an indirect reference to 20 Fenchurch Street in London also known as the Walkie Talkie building, which during the summer of 2013 was alleged to be melting parts of cars in the street below. While some reports may have been a little dramatic, it can get sunny in London occasionally and concave surfaces can concentrate the suns rays on specific days of the year.

Ultimately this was an avoidable mistake and one that contributed further to the bad PR of an already unloved London landmark building.

Mistakes are valuable

In hindsight it is easy to see the flaws in the Walkie Talkie design, but at the time of development it is probable that tracking the sun’s rays was not a priority.

Realise your mistakes early

The bigger the negative impact, the bigger the future cost. The problem is that we are human and prone to psychological bias. Conservatism can make organisations slow to react because you’re less likely to face criticism for doing what worked before. Even in innovative, agile environments I’ve found there is a tendency to trust the de facto way of doing things until strong evidence emerges to the contrary.

Share often even if it causes discomfort

There is a tendency of groups to talk about information they are all familiar with, known as Shared Information Bias. Sometimes we like to talk about the information we and our co-workers understand the best as this avoids having to expend effort educating others about unfamiliar concepts. The problem is that project risks often live on the fringes of our understanding so talking about what’s familiar is unlikely to get you any closer to unearthing them.

Be honest about failure

With something like the building melting cars incident it’s easy to see a single effect and say that should have been spotted all along. This is hindsight biasalso known as “I told you so” syndrome. Surely it’s better to say that the process could have been improved and let’s learn for next time.

Be self aware

Organisations and people can get stale. That’s why staying just outside the comfort zone forces us to constantly re-evaluate and improve. Fortunately, this is easier when it comes to developing software products, but ultimately we’re all human and can easily be misled by our own cognitive biases.

A little bit of self-awareness goes a long way. Instead of just seeing a problem and searching for a matching solution, consider “Why am I thinking this?” and “Is this how I always solve this type of problem?”. Evaluating our thinking processes is always valuable even if it only confirms that our cognitive process was sound all along.

Sometimes I find being aware of cognitive biases is overwhelming, but as with anything that isn’t immediately tangible, giving a label to a thought process helps understand it better and objectively.

It is surprising how often good design equals obscurity. When something fulfils its purpose well, we seldom think about the person behind that design. There are exceptions to this such as Jonathan Ive at Apple and James Dyson with his Dyson vacuum cleaners. It does help though if you name the company after yourself.

Even in these cases I would argue that the personalities are still recognised much later than the product. It is debatable how many people sat and thought “Who was behind this design?”. Even now, Ive’s name is far less recognisable than that of the late Steve Jobs.

Unsung hero
It was watching Margaret Calvert on a re-run of the motoring show Top Gear that really drew my attention to the plight of the near-anonymous designer. She was behind the lettering used in British road signs for the last 50 years known as Transport typeface. Her manner on the show was unassuming and she clearly wishing she was somewhere other than in James May’s spotlight.

Taken in isolation, Transport font is unremarkable yet instantly recognisable to road users in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Greece and the Middle East. The fact that the typeface and UK roadsigns have changed little in half a century is testament to a design that works. This was no coincidence. The design team spent many hours in the field recording what lettering would be clearly visible at distance, at speed, in poor light. This showed remarkable dedication for a team working in a government department.

Good design needs no explanation
So to be a good designer it seems you need to be heard through your designs without appearing to say much. This principle can apply whether we talk about household appliances, road signs, phone apps or websites. If you have to explain it then you are talking too much and the design is not working for you.

Good designers communicate well
They can sell their design ideas when they are little more than ideas.

Good designers communicate sparingly
Good designers believe less is more and that the design should be able to speak for itself. The design should get out of its own way and just function.

Good design takes time
Unfortunately getting to a good design takes time, effort and focus, which is unlikely to be fully recognised unless it causes problems. And while everyone is busy using their legible road signs, a designer will just have to resign themselves to quiet satisfaction.

In the last six months as a product manager I have been trying to master the art of thinking clearly. Decision making is at the heart of what I do, which seems odd for someone who was labelled as indecisive for many years by friends and peers.

The reality is to move forward with anything, we need to constantly make decisions. Not doing so means being swept along by life’s currents and like a leaf on a stream we are taken wherever the flow wants us to go. This can be fine, but it’s not necessarily where you want to go or, as in my case, the way you want the product to go.

Infinite toolboxes with infinite possibilities
Developing a software product has endless possibilities constrained by time and resources. I almost said “unfortunately constrained” although I’ve learned that constraints are good and that often imposing them artificially can help us make us better decisions.

Small chunks beat analysis paralysis
Take the product delivery method I use, where every two weeks we incrementally improve the product. That two week window forces us to break things down into achievable chunks. The chunks we decide on are big enough to learn from, but small enough to not be too intimidating and generate analysis paralysis, the nemesis of much creative technical work.

Visions are important. Visions may change
Behind nearly every great creative project, there is some kind of vision. It’s hard to drive something forward without a vision and it’s often hard to have any sort of clear vision. The mistake I used to make was waiting until I had a clear visionary moment to proceed. The reality is that moment rarely happens without putting in some actual hard work first.

Accepting the fog of the future
I’ve now come to accept that the future is foggy and that the process used to move forward is more important than trying to squeeze out moments of clarity. Think, act, get and review and the clarity will come. That’s why working in an Agile product development has worked for me. That two week cycle is just enough to achieve something, learn something, make more decisions. And move forward.

In the last few months as Product Manager of LiveDataset I’ve been contemplating the creative process and how it differs in a technical context.

Three years ago I was at a talk in Denmark by Lego, who have since become the world’s leading toymaker. They were emphasising that for them creativity is a process and that having a defined process is the only way they can continually innovate and churn out a diverse range of Lego sets.

Inspiration
The process went something like this. First decide a theme such as tractors. Then immerse the design team in a world of tractors. Read about tractors, look at pictures of tractors, surround your workspace with tractors.

Then comes the inspiration. When you’ve been dreaming about tractors for a few weeks, it should be possible to design a really cool one.

Evaluation
Evaluation follows. How much will it cost to build? Will the kids be able to build it and might it self-destruct when they play with it? Or will they even bother to play with it? The easiest way to find out is to get some real kids in to mess around with the new creations, observe and go right back to the start of the design process if necessary.

Resistance
I’ve experienced cycles of inspiration and re-evaluation myself. The point is that without the process, it’s very easy to either get stuck looking at a blank piece of paper or lost on a journey towards creating something that no one needs, wants or likes. All this involves far more doing than thinking. Doing is necessary to create the environment for inspiration to land. And doing is required to push through the resistance encountered when it feels the way has been lost or it’s just too difficult to create anything of worth.

Conquering resistance is worth a book in itself. My favourite is the War of Art by Steven Pressfield

My point is that resistance is inevitable whenever trying to do something new, whether it’s building a tech product, visual arts or getting fitter. The only way to conquer this is to do something, even if it means just inching forwards a little at a time. This applies in all domains requiring creativity whether they be tech products, construction toys or fine art.