This is the best definition of Interaction Design that I’ve encountered so far: not engineering or styling, but fit. It describes the role as one of connection, rather than invention (though invention may occur in the process). IxD Designers are not primarily responsible with creating technologies, ensuring proper functioning, or aesthetics, but rather with the way these components come together for the experience of a human. An ixd designer thus must have the humbleness to appreciate the expertise of specialists, and the informed empathy to understand the people who will use the product or service.

I recently tested the service Airbnb, “a startup that allows people to rent out their own spaces – everything from an extra room to a private boat, a castle in Italy or a treehouse overlooking the San Francisco bay” (CNN, Money). I sketched out a mindmap of the service, and describe it below.

The Culture of Trust

The experience of Airbnb begins for most people, as would-be travelers, on the beautifully designed homepage. First time users are welcomed by a slideshow featuring moderately priced, delightful rooms in nearby and faraway places. This is the first impression in a series of interactions that serve to shape the tone of the culture of the service. While most of the interactions occur online, when hosts and travelers finally meet (the culmination of the airbnb service), they have been inculcated into this culture which in turn shapes their interaction with each other; something that Airbnb cannot control directly, but that they do nevertheless through the subtle influence of the online experience.

The culture of trust is built around allowing users to develop their credibility in incremental steps. As a first step, both hosts and travelers can add a photo and link their twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook accounts to their Airbnb profile. They can also ask friends to write a general recommendation vouching for their character. This provides proof that the users are who they say they are as well as drawing on some of the social equity of their friends and the social networks to which they subscribe. In this way, the service could be described as connected.

Airbnb further promotes trust by always maintaining the appropriate level of transparency between hosts and travelers. When a traveler is viewing properties, they have just enough information for evaluation. They also have the option of initiating a dialogue over the in-application messaging service, or even requesting an encrypted phone call, protecting the phone numbers of both parties. The location of the property is only alluded to by giving the street name and general vicinity, but not the address. Only when reservations are confirmed do both parties receive each others direct contact information allowing the interaction to progress organically without the mediation of the service. In this way the service gently raises the translucent vail of anonymity as the intimacy grows between once strangers.

The Adaptive Learning Curve

Another quality of the service is the continual influence on users to improve themselves as both travelers and hosts. This is done primarily through reviews, responsiveness ratings, and a search algorithm that takes into account the number of accepted reservations. The service could also be described as responsive to users, because for example, if a user becomes inactive and stops responding to inquiries from travelers or never books a reservation, their listing will fall to the bottom of search queries.

The market of Airbnb is unique because the products of competitors (namely properties of other individuals renting on the site) are completely visible to all users. The tendency of hosts to ‘one-up’ competitors makes the experience for travelers exceed their expectations for their stay. For example, a host family I lived with recently, made me breakfast and served me coffee regularly; granted they were genuinely friendly people, but it certainly didn’t hurt that I was more likely to write them a great review, which in turn would improve their profile. Likewise, as a host myself, I felt obliged (not required) to do little things to make the visit special for my guests including buying soaps at Sabon and having a friend design a local map of some of my favorite West Village spots.

The open market visibility also allows hosts to copy each others marketing (including photography art direction, copy, and even amenities), and generally drives up the quality and drives down the prices. Airbnb amplifies this phenomenon by featuring especially well-priced and/or incredible properties through collections, such as “Airbnb Top 40,” “Unique New York,” “oui, oui, Paris,” and “Planes Trains and Automobiles.”

In addition to peer-to-peer education, Airbnb offers top-down training through guides such as the 6 Golden Rules, FAQs, and even host educational meetups with local Community Coordinators. Contact Sheila Karaszewski for the next meeting in New York! Airbnb also guides users right up to the point of human-to-human contact, by emailing reminders of upcoming reservations, and maintains an open channel of communication throughout the duration via 24/7 customer support.

Again, while most of these interactions are occurring online, through the digital component of Airbnb’s service, they are influencing the human-to-human interaction, the piece that Airbnb cannot control directly, and can only remediate through costly PR clean-ups such as the now infamous vandalization in July of 2011.

Engagement

One final valuable characteristic of Airbnb is it’s ability to draw-in users and elevate their level of participation with the service. While the entry point for most first time users may be as travelers, they are quickly converted into more advanced users (i.e. hosts). By offering free photography, and limiting the costs of hosting to only the 3% credit card processing fee, Airbnb leaves very little reason not to give the service a try.

Conclusion

It is partly for these reasons that Airbnb not only raised an initial $119.8 million from series A investors including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and SV Angel, but also, recently, another $112 million from venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and General Catalyst.

Onward and upward!
(no I don’t work for Airbnb)

I just had a pleasant conversation with Naftalik Chepkoit. After moving to the United States from Kenya, Naftalik studied information sciences before going into finance. He then worked as a retail manager for three years. “People don’t appreciate how flexible things are here. You can work as a doctor, then go back to school and become an engineer.” He had a cheerful demeanor and seemed genuinely curious about how I liked New York, what I was studying, and where I was headed in life.

I was running late as usual, and had to lock-up my parent’s house since they had left for California the day before. When I brought my bag to the cab, I told Naftalik I’d be right back, but then spent another 15 minutes in the house downloading my dad’s photos to my external hard drive so he could show us his slideshow. I could see Naftalik from the window, standing outside the car. I was ready for him to scowl at me or curse me in silence as I jogged down the driveway. I apologized, and was surprised when he said sincerely, “it’s no problem.”

Despite the woe about the loss of jobs to mechanization, computers could replace many more of the services that are still provided by people, especially in direct to consumer interactions. Take, for example, the checkout at the supermarket. There’s no special task that requires a human in the process of scanning your groceries; hence, the self-service check out.

The ability to perfect the multitude of possible scenarios in any given service interaction, through software engineering, and then scale that solution to locations throughout the country makes out-sourcing to computers even more sensible. If you think having a computer drive a cab is outlandish, see Google car. Regardless, companies still rely on people to fill these tasks and act as the ambassadors for their brand. Unlike software, people are unpredictable, emotional, and much harder to program. They’re also harder to observe—a program you can constantly monitor and rely on to continue to react exactly how you ask it to; not so with humans, especially humans interacting with other humans. One day, your taxi driver might be friendly and respectful, but if his wife cheats on him, or a customer is exceptionally rude, he may not behave the same in the future.

I’m not advocating that computers take over more jobs. But it’s fascinating how I continue to have highly variable experiences with brands depending on the individual ambassador I encounter on any given day. How do you reliably hire and train for the kinds of characteristics that can make or break a service experience?

One of the adjustments that’s occurred between the first and second class of SVA’s Interaction Design program is the doing away with of grades. Individual students of the second class can request (opt-into) grades from faculty but none have done so to my knowledge.

This policy has been received with mixed reviews. One redeeming quality of grades is that they give students a metric for personal success, a metric they have likely become accustomed to over the course of their previous academic experience. Given that interaction design is a doers discipline (by that I mean that success depends not necessarily on how well you’ve absorbed the material, but rather how effectively you can apply your talent/knowledge/experience to real-world problems) any reassurance from grades would be misleading.

More importantly though, after listening to Robert Wright discuss Nonzero I’ve come to believe there’s an even stronger reason for not providing grades in this particular environment. Grades are designed to stratify a class of students so that future employers and academics can have insight into how students compare. Teachers that use grades often go to lengths to make sure this stratification occurs by employing techniques such as the bell curve. The downside is that students’ awareness of this naturally creates a competitive, non-collaborative environment.

In contrast, in a class of 15 design students who will likely become colleagues in the future, it’s advantageous for the institution to create an environment that most resembles a nonzero sum game, an ecosystem in which the success of any one student correlates positively with the success of any other students. The dominating psychology be it zero-sum or non-zero will directly affect students’ willingness to work in groups, share ideas, and to generally be productive in a creative environment.

Last semester I adopted “ship it” as a mantra to encourage breaking through those nagging inner voices that say “it’s not good enough,” or “finish it later,” or “I wonder if it’s been done before.”

I’ve been somewhat successful. In any case, today I thought of a new project in the spirit of doing. As designers, separate from muggles, we have a responsibility not just to point out what’s wrong, but to offer solutions. As Benjamin Franklin said “Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.” Even better, Michelangelo challenges us to “criticize by creating.”

So every week I’ll seek out something in the world and fix it…literally and physically. By fix, I don’t mean I’ll take an old broken radio, for example, and make it work again. I mean I’ll take things that are probably functioning as designed, but need fixing nonetheless. Or I will add something to a situation that is not running as well I imagine it could.

The key idea here is the making. I don’t mean to change the world (in any big way anyway); these will be simple things. I also don’t claim my fixes will be the best solution; in fact they may just make things worse. This is really just an exercise in doing rather than thinking.

For example…

For the longest time, while doing dishes my sink would fill up with soapy water. This is not a situation I ever intended for. It happened because the drainage filter would inadvertently go into plug mode. So I added a little rubber band which keeps that little black cylinder raised.

The cylinder is attached to the plug underneath. Thus the plug is kept from dropping down and covering the drain. Problem fixed.

A classmate of mine recently told me in response to some writing I had submitted to a group project, “Nice, it reads well.” The writing was for what’s called a user journey among interaction designers. Look it up if you care. The point is that the document and the writing therein, like most writing, was intended to surface insights on the subject matter. I clearly hadn’t done so, but my classmate was right in saying that the material read well. The words were carefully chosen, sentences flowed together, and lists were composed in threes. But I hadn’t really said anything of substance. I think this problem plagues a lot of writing right now, especially on the web…maybe even this blog post. Mere eloquence passes for critical, insightful, thought. There’s not enough time to think deeply about anything so we have to rely on our first impression of writing’s palatability over it’s long term affect on our minds. And bloggers, design thinkers, and journalists are becoming increasingly good at using techniques like nice typography, evocative photography, and whit to disguise shallow thought.

I don’t mean to rant, I just mean to caution, dear reader (i.e. Mom), don’t be mesmerized by the shiny words and the flashing lights.

I’ve been preoccupied lately with Tim Brown’s description of T-shaped people, the backbone of IDEO’s culture. He describes them as follows:

T-shaped people have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter “T” to describe them. The vertical stroke of the “T” is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. Tshaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.

I absolutely buy into this concept. In my experience working on design projects, it is absolutely indispensable to have someone with deep knowledge in a particular field, not too mention focused talent. That said, for better or for worse I think I’m shaped more like this…

What shape are you?

A current trend in music is the creation of “mashups.” What’s a mashup, you ask? This is a mashup. All the young kids are doing it. Anyway, the same thing is happening in design and web development. Products that revolve around pixels, 0′s and 1′s, and information make reproducing an innovative idea very easy. Some people (lawyers) worry about that, and rightly so, but I’m surprised by how rarely this is actually happening. Why in some parts of the interweb are things done so well and in others so very very poorly? Here’s an example, try printing an article from A List Apart, any article, it doesn’t matter. You don’t even need to print it, just check out the print preview. See how nice that is? Look at the formatting. The images aren’t pushing all the text all over the place, the typography is nice, and there aren’t five extra pages with two words each. In business speak this would be referred to as “best practices” (at least as far as printing goes). And managers always seem to talk about applying best practices. And I would argue that A List Apart has the best web-to-print formatting in the entire world; find me one better if you disagree. But why then, if this excellence exists, is it not being employed at even the most reputable publishing outlets. Take nytimes.com. Not only do you have to click the little “print” icon, and travel to a new page, but even then you get a grossly formatted page that doesn’t even have page numbers. Didn’t we learn in high school to put page numbers on things?

Who cares…so everyone should should make their websites print better? Big deal.

Well, I think this is representative of a much larger pattern. It’s happening everywhere. It’s happens at an individual level, at an industry level (as mentioned), within academia, between nations, and probably in a lot of other contexts that I’m not mentioning. The reason there are these rifts between people doing certain things excellently and others doing those same things poorly is that we can’t be good at everything. Pretty obvious. I’m currently studying toward an MFA in Interaction Design and I’m constantly reminded of how people are doing things better than me in so many ways. But the magic is that if we could somehow connect those ‘people’ doing things great with other ‘people’ doing the same things not so well, the pace of human evolution could take-off.

So what about this dream job? My question is: why in this world is there no one who specializes in creating these connections, or is there? I know of some examples of people who have related job functions. But who, when faced with creating a new product, is tasked with brainstorming all the people in the world who might be doing things the best? For someone with non-clinical ADD like myself, that actually sounds like a pretty swell job. And don’t tell me, well you can just go on Google. You really can’t. As long as google asks us to type our search queries as words, it’s never going to be able to handle the much more difficult task of serving quality content. Sure, we potentially have access to all the world’s information, but most of this information is crap. Little communities are cropping up that locally host curated, quality content, but who is connecting those sources with the people that need it? Sure, designers do it all the time. It’s called ripping each other off. But what about when public health needs to rip off design? Let’s use a better word, how about leverage? When Obama leveraged design it was amazing. The Harvard Business Review just coined the term, “hybrid value chain” as partnerships between for-profits and citizen-sector organizations. I think these sharings of knowledge across seemingly disparate disciplines could be pretty revolutionary. Thus, unless this whole line of thinking is totally ridiculous, I’m officially making my job title masher-upper. On a side note, I think there are a whole slew of skills that relate to this job function but I’ll save that for later.

Fig. Logo for Versions - Mac Subersion Client

The process of creating this icon “took about 6 weeks of full-time work spread out over half a year” – Hugo van Heuven, Sofa

I think this is a good lesson for anyone endeavoring to create something of quality. In Malcom Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, one of the chapters explains how many of the people we think of as exceptional did not manifest their talent right out of the whomb as we sometimes like to romanticize. In fact, for most, it took about 10,000 hours (that’s roughly ten years) to become who we know them to be…the Beattles, Michael Jordon, Mozart, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.

This understanding can be applied more specifically to the every day projects we all engage in. If you want to create something that is truly unique and exceptional, (“don’t worry about being unique, just make it good” is what Paul Rand says), but also recognize that it won’t happen over night. The great idea may come to you in a flash and you may decide to scrap all the work you done so far to get there (as Hugo did to get to the final versions logo), but this doesn’t mean the toiling was not of absolute value. Straight from the horses mouth.

Want to read more? Then check out two other great write-ups on logo designs: MailChimp logo redesign and the Typedia logo design. ß

Tweet

Fig. Design Thinking Diagram

In August Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, shared some of his recent thinking around the idea of Design Thinking to the audience at TED. I think it has interesting implications for the role of the individual designer. He references Roger Martin, from the Toronto Business School, who pioneered the concept of the art of integrative thinking which is “the ability to exploit apposing ideas and apposing constraints to create new solutions.” What Brown says that means for design is “balancing desirability (what humans need) with technical feasibility and economic viability.”

I wonder if this balance is something the design industry as a whole should strive for or if it can also be possessed by the individual. On the one hand, my previous posts, such as Zen and the Art of Logo Design, would suggest that quality can really only be achieved by going deeply into one discipline, having a “core capacity”, or the vertical part of the “T” Brown often mentions. Would taking an integrative approach force one to become a “jack of all trades, master of none”? Maybe not. Maybe the core capacity of the integrative designer could be simply that: the ability to connect or integrate seemingly unrelated disciplines in a way that creates a novel solution. ß