Creative Class

As originally published in BusinessWeek, this is the fourth installment in a series about decision-making and design. Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

Without Apple’s willingness to keep modifying and enhancing the iPod, even though it was already successful, we wouldn’t have the marvelous current manifestation or the likely further enhancements that we may not yet be able to contemplate.

It’s uncommon for corporate decisions to have such a smooth and steady enhancement path after deployment. Rather, it’s more likely to be seen as a sign of failure rather than success if a decision is revisited and altered.

In summary, great design is characterized by deep user understanding, visualization of creative resolution of tensions, collaborative prototyping to enhance solutions, and continuous modification and enhancement after launch. The result is design solutions that are easy for users to adopt, delightful for them to use, and likely to get better over time.

Corporate decisions, in contrast, are likely to be driven more by producer desires than user needs, accepting of unpleasant trade-offs generated without intensive involvement of users, and applied inflexibly. As a result, decisions tend to take a long time to make, often unravel, take expensive and time-consuming “buy-in” procedures, and are lower quality than they could be with greater user understanding and input.

With the recent uproar about the redesign of Facebook, is the modification and improvement of existing designs always a good thing?

Read this story in its entirety at BusinessWeek.com

As originally published in BusinessWeek, this is the second installment in a series about decision-making and design. Part One.

[The root cause of badly designed decision is the] fundamentally flawed design of the decision factory.

Typical decision design demonstrates few of the features of great design, which starts with deep user understanding. The designer dives well below the surface to fathom exactly how someone will use the artifact to be designed. The designer goes beyond understanding the user’s physical and functional needs to determine the user’s deeper emotional and psychological needs.

Do decisions even have “users” who need to be deeply understood? Indeed they do: anyone whose subsequent decisions and actions are shaped and constrained by a given decision is a “user.” So if a corporation decides that all divisions will cut costs by 10%, or deploy Six Sigma, or adopt a shared-services model for info tech, many divisional managers will be users of these decisions.

CREATIVE RESOLUTIONS. While it’s fair to say decisions don’t completely ignore the user, it’s rare for corporations to take their needs into account. This is why when the decision in question gets presented to the users, they often rebel, resist, drag their feet, or simply don’t understand the action required by the decision. That’s why companies wind up with massive implementation task forces and extended “buy in” efforts. Deep user understanding typically happens only in the wake of a decision and the problems it has created.

Designers, in contrast, visualize creative resolutions of tensions that balance the needs of the producer and the user rather than accepting unpleasant trade-offs. The designer aims to create a solution that’s easy to understand and intuitively obvious for users who shouldn’t need a complex manual and days of training to implement the solution.

Typically, corporate decisions don’t live up to these visualization ideals either. In part because companies are hierarchical, decision-makers tend to put the needs of the decision’s producer ahead of the needs of the decision’s users. For example, it’s handy for the corporate center to force all the divisions to use the same accounting platform, whether or not it’s helpful to the individual divisions.

Is it really possible to make blanket decisions that will satisfy all users?