The rule of functionality

Design has certainly to do with arts and crafts. But it is neither one of them. Good design is rather based on analysis, experience, cause and effect—all together rather scientific definitions—than it is an art. If something was designed well, it is unobtrusive, and using it will feel smoothly. It won’t make you think a lot about how it was made, about how pretty it is, or how well you can use it. A good designer has removed all barriers that made using the designed matter a rough and unpleasant experience.

Reducing design to its core purpose, functionality, doesn’t make it less pleasant. It doesn’t mean design has to be dull, boring, or making the designed matter uninvitingly cold. The point is, whatever is added or used for the design, needs to fulfill a purpose. Every little detail needs to serve the core, the essence of the matter that is designed.

The rule of attraction

Decorative elements in design have a purpose too: To give you a certain feeling about the spirit of the thing you are using. Be it a car, a building, a picture frame, file folder, headset or the food on your plate. A decorative element has the purpose of completing the image, of expressing the values you see in this matter.

Seeing the beauty of a design bears a danger of focusing on making it look good instead of making it work. Making a thing work the best way it can work isn’t an easy task. It requires a sharp eye for details, combined with a mindset that is able to grasp the big picture. It requires you to think outside the box, find and focus the essence of what you are designing and at the same time you need to be able to cut things off, simply because they don’t work. And this is what seems to be the hardest thing for most designers. They can’t let go of “pretty”.

So you see drop shadows, color fades, flower patterns, ornaments, frames, outlines and round corners all over the web, because these are the things that make something look nice. It is of course a debatable question wether the use of those graphic elements do or don’t fulfill a purpose. But in most cases they don’t.

If design looks beautiful, it should come out of simplicity and elegance, and because it makes you want to touch and use it. You can see this with everything you decide to get. From a mountain bike to a house—even the choice of your life partner is based on what you like about them. Beauty may be a part of your reasons, but in the end, you like who or what they are and how well they go with you. The mountain bike of your choice will be the one you spend a lot of time with, and the reason why you chose it over other bikes was not the pretty sticker on its frame. You chose it because it was the best designed on many levels, the best bike you could get for the money you had.

Beauty is a result of good design. But if you set beauty as your goal, you the surface in charge of your judgment. You can easily lose track of what is important. Suddenly, your choices for color, typography, any graphic element you used in your design become irrelevant and replaceable. Which is the main reason why your client should never be able to say “Can you show it in green?”.

The rule of consistency

Every web- and print designer knows this sentence. It’s replaceable with “can you enlarge the font” or “my wife didn’t like pink in the logo”. In short terms, all these sentences mean the client didn’t get your design. And neither did you.

Because if you can not explain why you chose red over green, you didn’t do your job properly as a designer. This goes back to “every element has a purpose”. If your client asks “can you show it in green” and you did your homework, then your answer can be a confident “no”. But it shouldn’t come out of stubbornness or wrong pride. It should be the right answer, because you did your job and went through a thought-process to find the best set of colors. Irrelevance and randomness are your biggest enemy here, not the client asking for variation.

Clients asking for variation happens out of natural reasons. Clients are insecure about their choices, just like you are insecure about which is the best mountain bike you can get for money. You want to do some research before you settle for a solution, and so does your client. In order to make him understand why you chose red over green, you will have to guide him through your thought-process. You will have to show him what made you think red was better than green and have him agree with you. Following this pattern, selling your work will become a lot easier.

Be consistent with your decisions. If a client’s brand is about human spirit, then it should show in your resulting work. If it is about sophistication, then your design choices should naturally result in expressing sophistication. And contrary to popular belief, true sophistication is not about making it golden or glittery. It is often more about simple and pure elegance, a subtleness that makes one stop and look closer.

Whatever your direction is, it should be singular, and you should stick to it. That means you consequently leave away cluttering elements and anything that doesn’t support this one direction. But in order to know that direction, you first have to find it.

The rule of direction

Just yesterday I was asked to show someone a variety of styles. I don’t blame the client; it is a valid request. If you are involved in any sort of design, be it information architecture, software design, development or interface design, you should know your arts and crafts. You should be capable to use the tools that get you there.

But the reasons why you are hired shouldn’t be your versatility in styles. It should be because you know how to take something, find its essence and make that core work in the best way it can.

This ability is what makes you a great designer. From that point on, your job title may bring more responsibility, it may be based on your leadership skills, your ability to analyse or conceptualize and create streamlined results. You may be a great sales person or a creative director. At the core of taking something and shaping it to a useful idea always stands design.

A great designer has one style, and that is to make people understand what he or she is doing. It is not always something that can be explained easily. But it should become visible through your work.

Say, you are a creative director in an advertising agency. It was my position for several years, so I know what I’m talking about. Leading several creative teams, and making them find the path that leads to the best result you can deliver to your clients, is never a trivial task.

As a creative director, it is your primary job to give direction. And you do this best by taking what your creative teams show you and pin-point the essence of what you are finding. It doesn’t only mean working with them closely and repeat processes until they are going in a good direction. It also means challenging them and yourself over and over, asking the root questions of what the designed matter is about: What does it do? How can we make it work the best way?

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Rethinking what the web is about

With the little background I had, I had delved quite passionately into the whole web thing. It seemed challenging and right from the beginning there were a number of things I noticed, which seemed wrong odd to me.

For an example, I saw very few websites that had a real conceptual idea. There seemed to be all sorts of ‘innovative’ navigation concepts, but little was done in terms of reasonable content and a good user experience. Let alone usability or accessibility. In 1999, it was common practice to force users to download proprietary plugins, to block visitors from seeing the site, forcing them to install new or different browser versions, or to simply fail delivering the content at all. I remember that some banking portals simply didn’t work on Macs, just because its developers had closed them out by purpose. The web was evil in these days, and it was driven by people who had no clue about what makes people use a website.

Here in Europe at least, the vocabulary for usability, user experience, information architecture, intelligent user direction, social web, the brand experience online — everything we consider part of the web experience today — didn’t even exist, or was only used in exclusive HCI software development. When talking with JWT, I had to explain to them what an Information Architect does. It’s not surprising in retrospective.

1999 was a time when every new gadget that hit the market had a new interface of its own. There was no Symbian. There was Palm, but no Windows Mobile. There was no iPod or iTunes, no usable GPRS in cars, no consistent cell phone interfaces or standards (Nokia made an exception, applying a standardized interface throughout its own cell phone generations, a policy they seem to have given up on meanwhile). Windows 98 was just becoming business standard. Mac OS X was in early plans, but had not been released yet, so all Macs used in advertising- and printing industry were running antique Mac OS 8 or 9 for at least another two years.

In other words, each technological development, independently of its use, followed a different design approach. That included the web, which had been booming early and was considered not much more than a poof of warm air shortly after. In the U.S., the dot-com bubble had just burst and Europe was in this arrogant mode of “Didn’t we tell you not to invest in empty ideas?”.

Remember boo.com? What was meant to become the next Amazon for clothes, a 328 million dollar investment, lay in ashes in May 2000. What remained of it was popular coffee table talk. Speaking of Amazon, it wrote red numbers back then and a lot of people still doubted it ever would become profitable at all.

Google had been born just one year earlier, and virtually no one knew there was online search different than Altavista or Yahoo.

It was this time when JWT was asking me to found a new web company. Early in our talks it turned out that this was what it was about: to help an advertising companz putting a foot in web business. Their idea didn’t lack certain logics. As an ad company, they didn’t have a clue about Web business. But they knew a lot about communication. And the principles behind the Web are not much different than in other communication driven businesses. Except for the fact it is not a monologue like ads in magazines or on TV. The Web is about interaction, and naturally that was what ad business was interested in.

For years they had been talking to their clients, trying to establish a consistent brand experience. The ‘new media’, as the web was often quoted back then, offered a new perspective. Brand experience carries on throughout the connection points where customers meet the brand. Even back in 1999, it became obvious that each web site works like a store front, no matter if you have a web shop or not. Your impressions on the web add to your overall brand experience.

Let evolution do its work

Just before JWT had asked me to create a rolemodel web company, I had been thinking about issues like online culture, people and the social impact of the web. I was aware of brand trends, tribal culture, image positioning losing power and public opinion taking over. The nineties had been penetrated by Nike’s advertising, emphasizing on tribes and a “we are like you” kind of customer-approach.

In conservative Switzerland, back in 1999, talking about the brand experience was revolutionary in itself. So I was impressed about the quite innovative approach JWT showed in this regard. They wanted the new web company not to become technology driven, but powered by branding.

After initial talks we quickly found agreement. I was given free hand to develop a concept, and set up a master plan to realize the new company. Within two weeks I wrote a document called “Economy, the Web and the stuff in between”. On 24 pages I layed out analysis, reason and conclusion, plus a concrete plan of company structure, growth, handling of management and a project work approach. (This concept is hopelessly outdated now in 2006. But a lot of ideas in it have carried on and became flesh in core in 2005.)

In spring 2000, JWT and I officially founded cel4. The name was inherited from the word “cell”, but since cell.com was taken, JWT decided to settle on the next best domain. At the time, it was considered common practice to nail down the next available domain before someone else would snatch it. People bought domain names like “super.com” only because they assumed that these would be worth millions later, and a few people actually did make some money.

Cel4 had a new look and feel, transmitting its revolutionary approach very pragmatically and elegantly. It’s basic idea was to look at cel4 as a company who is a living organism. The concept used the analogy if an organism as a body grown of cells. It was evolution-based, creating a dynamic environment where freelancers and employees could plug in- and out, bringing in newly acquired knowledge and actively participate in the company’s development. An “evolutionary company” meant to grow bit by bit, not get started with a new building and a whole staff of employees. What was needed was added gradually.

For the corporate design, we created a new font called “Genes” which was used for all corporate communication. It was designed with screen and print in mind and used for the first time in the video clip announcing the birth of cel4.

Even when I see a hundred things I wouldn’t do today, or I would do them differently, the concept of cel4 was a great business plan, transmitting a lot of passion and a vision that wasn’t just warm air. In a way, it had become a written explanation of what I was looking for, the answer to why I was drawn to the web.

Everything happening in the web reminded me of the concept of evolution. Behavior patterns in Web development looked similar like natural developments in nature and society. I was perceiving the Web as an evolutionary, ever changing medium. Something that would grow and change its shape, and we just experienced its early stages of evolution. Thinking of a web company as a living being, something that changes and grows along with the Web didn’t seem unreasonable as conclusion, but it was new to most people here in business. And it was a quite daring approach, when we looked at discouraging events around us. Big disappointments in Web business were founded in the fact that you can’t jump evolution stages in a single step. This had been one of the mistakes of investors in startups like kozmo.com and boo.com.

Our concept included social interaction with real life. It was about the Web and its effects in society and what was often referred to as cyberspace. (Quizz question: When was the last time you heard the word cyberspace in context of the Web?) It also included ideas based on 95 Theses made in the Cluetrain Manifesto.

I must admit, when I read the Cluetrain Manifesto for the first time, I felt a little rush. Its content reflected a lot of what I had been thinking all along, and its writing style — bold and clear statements from a user perspective — seemed contradictory to current mainstream perception of the Web in 1998 to 2000. It was this kind of reading experience that makes you say “so true” aloud for several times. You rarely get that from reading a text about the Internet these days. What made the Cluetrain Manifesto special was, it was written by web heads and CEOs, but with a strong sense for customers’ needs. For the first time someone admitted things like “Markets are conversations”. One of the sentences that truly revolutionized the web and has manifested itself as a de facto line for virtually all Web development going on right now. In this sense, Web 2.0 isn’t really new.

I remember well how excited the managers at JWT were about the Internet. They assumed it would revolutionize their own business. Aside of this, they also came up with what would be considered really stupid ideas nowadays. Like Flash ads popping up before you can enter a website. (Note: the fact that this is a common practice today on some sites doesn’t make it less stupid.) People looking at the web weren’t really thinking about the user experience as something valuable, something that needs to be protected and supported to the benefit of doing business.

Hi. My name is cel4.

And there I was, with a concept that emphasized on exactly this. It became a passionate pamphlet that included a plan to action for real-life execution. I had layed out company structure, project management and a workflow for projects, separating projects into steps and tasks. Which was something that I hadn’t seen anywhere back then, even though I’m sure a lot of people were thinking about the same things. In 2005 I learned that Kelly Goto from Goto Media had come up with an almost identical workflow chart, cited in her book “Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works” (now available as second edition).

When you watch the video clip linked at the bottom of this article, you’ll see that the esoteric idea of a living company transmits well. What isn’t shown is the idea of bringing the user experience to the next level and trying a relatively new approach on the web: listen to your customers and don’t assume they want to learn the way of your thinking. For the next year, that turned out to be what I’d be preaching to JWT and its clients. Shortly after we had finished a $140,000 project for Siemens Management Consulting in Munich, I left the company. I had helped giving birth to it, now it was time to move on.

Today I’m cringing when I read “C u soon ;)”, the last line in this video clip. It is so corny. But in the time from 1999 to 2000, it seemed symbolic, transmitting a sympathic, human edge.

In 2000, the head of all Web operations within the JWT network came to visit JWT Zurich. He was blown away by our little clip and took it with him to show it to the management board of JWT international. This little video clip caused some waves inside of JWT international, probably less for its content and more because of its attitude towards communication business.

Keep all this in mind when you’re watching the video clip. It was made in 2000, in a world before 9/11, with the naive approach we had back then, all excited, with an utopian look on the Net. “I’m a company and a living being.” — think about the effect such a line had on a rather conservative crowd, many of them bankers and investors. When I watch this clip today I have mixed feelings. But I still think many ideas of cel4 were ahead of their time, all context considered.

A lot of things you may perceive as normal these days didn’t exist six years ago. It was difficult not to fall for the shining promise of the Internet and to look for substance instead. I tried managing this with cel4, but we also needed to change the mindsets of our clients. Not a lot has changed in this regard in the Internet industry. We still need to teach our clients how the Web works, and we need to grasp it first.

If you look at conversation websites today, with Web 2.0 tending towards an overhype, you can see similar patterns like in 1999. The burst of the dot-com was a necessary lesson, but it won’t happen again. The dot-com failure woke up the business world and it became aware of the fact it needs to do its homework more thorroughly before investing in an idea. The learning was harsh, as usual, but it also made the whole economy more aware of how the Web actually works, and that it’s not only about technology, presentation or business. It’s about the people using it.

Annotations

cel4 is now called “.pulse” and still resides in the same factory hall with JWT+H+F in Zurich. Henning von Vogelsang officially founded core in 2005, inheriting a lot of learnings through the cel4 experience. You can watch the cel4 introduction video clip (Quicktime, 23 MB. Note: The clip features Björk’s track “All Is Full Of Love”, which was not authorized and replaced in the final version of the video clip.)

Resources

cel4 introduction video

Technorati Tags: Strategy

I second that. When I’m looking at what we have achieved and I’m looking at the reality of people using the websites and devices we create interfaces for, I still see a huge gap. Usability does not stop at the interface. It stretches from the very purpose and function of a product to its brand image. If a Sony laptop breaks you think “How could this happen? It’s a Sony?”. If a Dell breaks, you think “It sounded like a decent offer…”

Usability starts with clients. It starts how everyone involved in the process of creating something is ticking. Usability tests may be useful, but in the end, what counts are the minds making the right conclusions.

Virtually every time I get a new communication brief from a client it is mentioning Flash three times. “Get visitors by offering something like a cool game.” is a popular demand. Not from the users though. User studies show a drastically decreasing interest in online games, downloadable ring tones for cell phones and all that clutter, splashing and popping in our faces.

Here is my approach to fight back: Web developers and usability people, don’t get frustrated too easily. Clients, listen to the people you hire to create your stuff. Not necessarely to the Flash designers. Listen to the ones responsible for functionality. Read blogs about user experience. Learn about what people really want. It is happening right in front of our eyes.

Every day I see new evidence for the markets claiming back participation and interaction. Communication is no longer about delivering a message. It is much more about what the receiver wants to do with your message. There’s more to come on this topic. I’m working on an in-depth look at the intersections between usability and brand experience.

Technorati Tags: Strategy

Technorati Tags: Strategy