Telling visionary stories takes more than great tech, it takes imagination, warmth and a devotion to showing a world made better by your inventions.

News of Google's Project Glass lit up web chatter of the design and tech community. On the one hand it was a provocative leap forward, Google stepping boldly toward hardware that is category defining, and on the other showing a vision of the future that is largely uninspiring.

The biggest problem with Glass isn't the potential loss of serendipity, nor the messy distractions, how to deal with all the info noise, the complications of making it real, or even the geeky hardware acting as a socially awkward cue that you might not be really paying attention.

We'll need to work all this out, but let's talk about the Google's vision for this amazing tech. Watch the vision video and you see interactions that will all be familiar: Siri like natural language recognition and commands, location and time notifications, weather forecasting, real-time text and video chat, GPS mapping and location sharing, checking in, sharing photos to social networks, etc... There is a subtle shift in stance, from a more sovereign interaction to one that is more transient. With phones we have a more explicit intentional interaction, Glass is more of a dip-in-and-out of the digital experience. Instead pulling out your phone to read your twitter feed for the whole 20 minute commute home, Glass has been envisioned as more of a light technology augmentation to the real world.

But there's little that's emotionally resonant. It feels like a demonstration of how you'd do all the stuff you do on your iPhone today in your Glass tomorrow. The focus is on performing tasks that highlight features. It comes across like a technology searching for an application.

I don't mean to be down on the tech. When I first saw it I was really excited about the possibilities. This is groundbreaking technology making the screen fully portable and hands free, it's about liberating yourself from the effort required to interact with a phone. Of enhancing your interactions with the world around you. Google's got their engineers making really cool stuff, but when it comes to imagination or emotional resonance; telling a story that makes you connect with and desire what they are making, it's just not there.

Let's look at ways the storytelling could have changed more effectively invite us to imagine a future that's better with Glass.

Helpful insights beyond the moment

Pushing the local forecast into your eye every time you look out the window seems annoying and obnoxious. Technology is pushing it's way into your experience.

Apple shows the same need for insight into weather, but it's prompted by the user who asks about the weather in a city she's clearly packing to visit. The value of the information is greater to the traveller who can't just look out the window and get a pretty good idea about the local weather. By giving her a forecast for New York the phone is more helpful, it's giving her information at a moment where she can make the most use of it. We connect with the experience because we know how difficult it can be to arrive at a destination where we've packed the wrong clothes. It's worth noting that Apple doesn't even show you the results, they don't have to, you fill in the details yourself.

The warmth of connection

Next up Google shows your friend reaching out to see if you want to hang out. Sweet right? But no, it feels like you're forced to translate everything into text instead of simply using your voice to communicate. In the Glass interface chat's a silent activity with beeps and bleeps for feedback. What if instead you could simply chat, you know, with your voice, it could still be asynchronous, it doesn't need to be a phone call. Your voice can also be parsed into text, but giving you both allows for a richer deeper connection. You get the warmth and excitement in your friend's voice, not a text message you have to read.

Thinking a little bit ahead

As you head into the subway Google let's you know the subway's not running. Drat. You've already hoofed it here, now your only option is to walk.

How much more helpful if Glass knows that you usually catch the 6 and tells you that service has been suspended before leaving home. This gives you a chance to grab your bike instead.

Setting your hands free

Speaking of bikes, how did bike riding NOT make it into the video?

Walking is an activity slow enough to stop and pause to check directions. Biking is fast and to do it safely requires both hands. Glass frees your hands up.

Getting a little heads-up display action letting you know your speed and your distance covered would be a great augmentation to the ride.

Helping you remember the important things

Reminders are helpful, but hardly the stuff of great narrative. Google shows setting a reminder to buy tickets to a show. Meh. I mean sure it's something you'd want to remember, but as a story there's little to connect with.

Apple's not all that much better, the girl who's running asks Siri to remind her to call Chris when she gets home. Her speed clearly makes it harder for her to type a reminder, and with Siri she can save one without breaking her stride, but it's so generic we don't really connect. Why? Because saving a reminder with your voice is technologically difficult, and doing it well has taken some serious engineering. but really it's about as exciting as watching someone write a list. The magical experience of reminders is when they help you remember the thing you'd have otherwise forgotten, and maybe picking something that would be a real shame to miss.

Walking up to your front door and getting a reminder to call dad and wish him a happy birthday? Now that's something we can all connect to and see the value.

Making location awareness magic

It's this kind of demonstration that seems like a gratuitous use of technology. Isn't the big red signage enough of a confirmation that you've arrived?

Duplicating the busy information density we experience in an urban environment isn't an experience you'd really want to sign up for. If you wanted to go seriously visionary why not propose a not-too-distant future where all the signs and advertisements screaming for your attention have been removed. The beauty and dignity of architecture is preserved as the signage is moved into our smart devices like Glass. Then pushing the bookstore name to me becomes helpful.

So next there's an opportunity to interact with with this guy.

But you don't take it. You ask your Glass eyepiece instead, it gives you directions for walking 20 feet. There's a rosy picture of the future. No more interactions with strangers, no basic self sufficiency.

There's a few ways Google could have taken this to make it more compelling.

Make the store unbelievably busy so that it would be a long wait till you could ask someone for the location of the music section, at least then you're not being anti-social you're just resourceful. But still, bookstores have some of the most dependable signage, finding the right section isn't really all that hard.

What if instead, you could walk into the supermarket and as you walk the isles Glass uses your location and shopping list to simply pop-up items for you to grab from the shelf? Now you're doing something you can't really do today. It's helpful, and kind of cool. There's no way you could ask the cashier to show you where all the items on your shopping list are located. With Glass shopping list assistance you're able to walk into a store you've never visited, grab everything on your shopping list which happens to have been updated by your partner just a moment ago, and leave, sure that you've got everything you need.

Continuing in the bookstore Google shows you checking to see if your friend has arrived at the bookstore yet. No you don't just walk out to the street or wait for him to come grab you, you use Glass to seek his location and it tells you he's half a block away.

Creepyness aside, it's not saving you from a lot of work or discomfort. You could have just stepped out to wait for your pal on the street. Just cause you can do it doesn't mean it's inspiring or visionary. Location awareness of other people is a hard thing to do right. Even with friends there's lots of privacy issues, and anyone who's seriously tried to make apps that leverage the power of tracking has ended up with low adoption or swift negative reactions.

Moving on you follow your buddy to a nearby coffee truck. Your first instinct is to check in. Seriously? OK, maybe Google needed to show it to compete with Foursquare, but come on, this isn't particularly engaging for us viewers.

Also, one day in the future you'll still need to manually check in? If checking in is your thing, can't it just be something background and automatic, or at least less of a process? In the Glass vision it would be the same amount of work to do it with your phone.

Improving connections

So you get a cup of joe and then part ways with Paul.

Sure there's a cut or two to edit out the stuff that's not showing off Glass, but this makes the story mostly about you using your friend Paul to find a good cup of coffee which is something you could have just messaged him about. The heavy focus on showing off the technology has robbed the story of its humanity. First you didn't chat with the bookstore clerk, then you only meet up with a pal to get insider info. You seem like a cold jerk.

Apple takes a totally different approach to telling the story with Facetime. The phone is used to bridge the gap, to overcome the barriers of physical space.

The phone frames the entire interaction but instead of getting in the way it falls to the background. You quickly find yourself transported into a deeply intimate moment, the story connects instantly, and you empathize with the people and appreciate how the technology makes this kind of emotional connection possible. The people here clearly care for one another and value spending this moment together.

After parting ways you come across a cool piece of street art. You want to share it and in a second can capture the image and upload it.

The process is simple, simpler and easier than pulling out a camera. It's effortless and really shows a sweet way to capture images. Here again the magic of the tech is clear, but the story fails. Street art is hip, but people are what matters, humans are innately drawn to faces.

What about grabbing a few photos of your buddy while hanging out?

And how cool would it be if it auto recognized your friend and added the pictures to his image stream too?

The last scene is easily the most enchanting. It feels a bit contrived, but we're willing to overlook it because it actually shows how this technology might bring us closer together.

It's one way video chat at first, and because there's no camera looking at your face your friend can't see you. What's the next best thing? Sharing your view.

It's a delightful ending for an otherwise uninspiring story. But it didn't need to be that way. When we tell stories, especially around a future shaped by new technology it's important to keep the focus on people. Our gadgets and tools aren't the point, they are means, not the ends. Every twist and turn in the story should help us see a world that is made better, not just different. When you present a vision, strive to deliver a story with deep emotional resonance. We don't need the technology to be perfect, or the applications mindblowing, but we do need to see through it to the deeper more essential need, that is our desire to be connected, to have meaning and share life with one another.

Delivering enchanting experiences

Siri delivers a nifty image.

Google, Glass was made to best this! Looking into bright glowing phone to try to match it against the night sky would be a terrible experience.

With Glass you simply look skyward. Glass can magically connect the stars for you.

Now that's the way to learn about the night sky.

It has never been easy to demonstrate the value of interaction design, but the ubiquity of video as communication tool has helped a lot. Video is a great way to reach online audiences: It is easily accessed on YouTube and Vimeo, and it is expected to be short and to the point. With little investment, design firms can capture high-quality video with any number of relatively low-cost cameras, and use powerful editing tools to tell our stories. When a video is done well, it helps humanize the design, and gives a peek into the methods behind it.

At Cooper, we have been experimenting with video, and we pay attention to what others are doing in that space. As we share more about our process, we are also changing our clients' and the general public's expectations of disclosure. While it's a great idea in theory, in practice we find that finding the right formula can be tricky. For example, video is a more spectacular and emotionally effective medium than static blog posts, but subtle mistakes in tone and presentation run the risk of coming off as pretentious, overproduced, off-topic or just downright goofy. Here are three big things we've noted about how to get it right.

Grab the last seats for the Communication & Collaboration course. We geared this course for practitioners who want to take their effectiveness working within design groups and spread it to their larger product and stakeholder teams. We've packed years of experience as consultants into a fun, engaging two-day intensive. The class delivers lots of information with the intent of reframing the focus of your work and many hands-on exercises to get practice before applying your new skills back home.

Some topics include:

• Learn how adopting a new approach to engaging with others improves responsiveness, feedback and support for your work
• Practice new methods for collaborating with your teams which lead to more productive meetings and better working relationships
• Discover ways to empower your organization with tools which will focus work, improve cross-functional partnerships and support more strategic discussions

You'll leave excited and eager to bring this new approach to communicating and collaborating with others. In addition to the course materials you'll receive a sharp set of Communication and Collaboration Method cards to keep in your back pocket for when you need a refresher.

We've got less than 10 seats left, you can register now.

UX Bootcamp Midwest added 10 more spots!

Rock Health classes off to an exciting start

We're proud to be working with Rock Health's 2012 class of start-ups. We're delivering a lightning round of design classes and hosting regular office hours for deep collaboration. Two weeks in and we're really excited by the great ideas, super motivated teams, and new approaches to improving healthcare.

Where do you start when you're approaching a complex software design problem? If you work on a large development team, you know that software engineers and UX designers will often approach the same design problem from radically different perspectives. The term "software design" itself can mean very different things to software architects, system programmers, and user experience designers. Software engineers typically focus on the architectural patterns and programmatic algorithms required to get the system working, while UX designers often start from the goals and needs of the users.

In the spring of 2009, I participated in a research study that looked at the ways in which professional software designers approach complex design problems. The research study, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was led by researchers from the Department of Infomatics at the University of California, Irvine. The researchers traveled to multiple software companies, trying to better understand how professional software designers collaborate on complex problems. At each company, they asked to observe two software designers in a design session. At my company, AmberPoint, where I worked at the time as an interaction designer, I was paired with my colleague Ania Dilmaghani, the programming lead of the UI development team. In a conference room with a whiteboard, the researchers set up a video camera, and handed us a design prompt describing the requirements for a traffic control simulation system for undergraduate civil engineering students. We were allotted two hours to design both the user interaction and the code structure for the system.

Jim Dibble and Ania Dilmaghani at the whiteboard in their research design session

Like you, I’ve been to my share of presentations. I’m that annoying guy near the back who takes a lot of notes during it: jotting down the awesomeness, the nifty sound bytes, the structure, and the ideas it sparks. If the thing is failing, I’ll jot that down, too, and try to suss out the reason to make sure that when I present I don’t make the same mistake.

After years of doing this, I’ve come to group these successes and failures into four big criteria that every conference presentation ought to have. I’m going to share them with you now in the hopes that a) I’m right and b) more presentations will fall into the “awesome” rather than “regrettable” category.

This first week of August has been good fun from start to finish! Jim, Faith, and Rock Health agilely went from stories to a plan of action.

Alan's post on ideas, innovation, and creative teams reminded us of an interesting perspective on innovation from Clay Christensen and Art Markman about busting innovation myths.

We took a break to watch the Giants game with our amazing summer interns Mo and Brendan.

Today, Golden, Greg, and Jenea are doing their part at Device Design Day. Get some design goodness of your own at in the upcoming Visual Interface Design session August 15-16.

Other interesting scoops this week

Over the years, client organizations have taken this advice to heart, with more and more forming user experience teams that focus on assessing and meeting user needs. However, just having a seat at the table is not enough. As designers, we can help shape and facilitate the overall conversation.

To bring designs to fruition, designers need to collaborate effectively. While technologists and business executives value design, they often sense that design decisions are subjective and arbitrary. To get buy-in, designers need to help their partners understand design rationale and decision-making. Through collaboration and communication, designers can ensure that all team members have a shared understanding of the stakeholder objectives, the user needs, and the intent of the design.

Cooper now offers “Design collaboration & communication,” a course that sets the stage for collaborating on design and communicating design decisions. In two days students learn how to involve others throughout the design process, so that the design vision is agreed upon each step of the way. Communicating design throughout the process reduces the likelihood of other team members misinterpreting or altering the design during development.

The course covers the following topics:

• Designing workshops to conduct with stakeholders to ensure a shared product vision
• Choosing appropriate research methods
• Involving others in research synthesis
• Prioritizing what should be built based on business objectives, technical constraints, and user needs
• Articulating the value and benefit of design decisions
• Defending design without becoming defensive
• Determining the right level of documentation for your development process
• Moving the discussion from features and functionality to user goals and business goals

Whether you follow a traditional waterfall model or an agile development process, the communication and collaboration techniques in this course can help you gain buy-in for your design decisions.

This course provides great techniques for designers who want to create buy-in and build credibility within their organizations. The course is also great for cross-disciplinary teams of designers, product managers, and developers who want to communicate more effectively.

Our next public offering of this new course is July 25 & 26, 2011 in our San Francisco studio. A Cooper designer can also deliver the course at your office, and the content can be tailored to fit your particular needs around design planning and collaboration.

(This was originally published on Playwell, Alan's personal blog.)

Elisabeth Hendrickson has recently opened a new test-and-development training facility in Pleasanton CA called Agilistry. It’s bright and airy, well-lit and well-stocked, and it feels like home the minute you walk in. In order to publicize her new facility, she very generously hosted a week-long intensive learning exercise.

She invited eleven different people with widely varied skill sets, backgrounds, and interests. She challenged them to build a website in five days using the best practices of interaction design, agile programming, and test-driven-development. We christened it “AgileUpToHere” (#au2h) and it exceeded everyone’s expectations (you can see our results here).

Since it was my 15-year-old homophone web site that was being rebuilt, I nominally played the role of product owner, but I was an observer, an instigator, a goad, and a participant. It’s hard to remember when I had so much fun or learned so much. If you want to learn to be great, I strongly recommend Elisabeth and Agilistry.

Things I learned:

1. After 25 years, it’s time to lose the Windows computer and get a Mac.


2. Good agile developers are self confident; confident enough to trust interaction designers to do interaction design without distrustful oversight.


3. There are lots of programmers who understand that relational databases are not the only approach to solving problems.


4. It is time to build software.


5. Test-driven-development isn’t fully understood. In fact, software testing isn’t fully understood.


6. When even the leanest developer in the room sees really high quality BDUF (big design up front) for the first time, they get all woo-woo and want some for themselves.


7. Getting good software built demands the contributions of many different personalities, competencies, and roles, most of which are new and as-yet ill-defined.


8. Two programmers pairing can create more and better code in less time than one programmer can (I already knew this, but it’s always good to see it in action).


9. Even this jaded old fart can still get excited about changing the world.


10. There are many undiscovered and unfilled product niches on the Web, and one of them is “quality”.


11. People want a leader with a vision.


12. Elisabeth Hendrickson (@testobsessed) is a magical woman. To paraphrase Tom Robbins, “she’s been around the world eight times and met everybody twice.” Like a great chef or symphony conductor, Elisabeth knows how to combine the unexpected to create the sublime. She brought together a dozen people from all over the country, each with different skills, background, desires, and expectations, and then she blended them together into a cohesive, happy, effective team.


13. The pre-written code I arrived with was called “legacy” with a grimace, and was quarantined until discarded. Moral: Non-TDD (test-driven development) code is properly regarded like a ticking time bomb.


14. For interaction design, you can’t have too many white boards, made from porcelain-coated steel, firmly mounted to the wall. For agile development, that isn’t such a big deal.


15. Story-mapping is a major component of the bridge between interaction design and agile development.


16. Story-tracking software isn’t quite there yet.

It seems that language in software is on the mind of interaction designers. A few bright folks over at UX Matters have thought about whether software should speak to users from a first person or second person perspective. I have been thinking about similar issues after a client recently asked me about whether a piece of software should ever refer to itself. “If we already think about computers as other people, why wouldn’t we?”

What’s he talking about? For those unfamiliar with The Media Equation, in 2003 Stanford professors Reeves and Nass published a series of experiments they conducted which show that humans essentially treat computers as if they were other humans. From Publishers Weekly: 

"People are polite to computers, respond to praise from them and view them as teammates. They like computers with personalities similar to their own, find masculine-sounding computers extroverted, driven and intelligent while they judge feminine-sounding computers knowledgeable about love and relationships."

How do you thoroughly critique a design without crucifying the designer? What are ways of critiquing that result in better designs, rather than defensive justifications?

Scott Berkun explores a model for design critique in a detailed post, but I'm interested in the little stuff that works for your design team in day-to-day practice.

At Cooper, our teams often work together for a year or more. It is important for us to create a dynamic of cooperation, but great design often happens when we push on assumptions and challenge the first iteration. We want to encourage this critique, but make sure that it doesn't derail the meeting.

Why is that good?

It's pretty common to hear a skeptical Cooper designer begin a critique with some variant of the question, "Why is that good?" Many ways to express disagreement have negative effects on the meeting or relationship. "That won’t work because," or "But what about." These tend to bring momentum to a halt. Designers must stop, defend their ideas, or chase objections.

As anyone who has faced a blank whiteboard knows, once the ink gets flowing it is important to run with it and see where the idea goes. Communication strategies of design partners can enhance or detract from this process. By asking to see the goodness, we focus on enlightenment, encouraging our partner to help us see what they see. Also, asking an open-ended question is an acceptably naïve way of pushing your design partner to step up and show you what is going on in their mind.

At the core, we want our teams to feel comfortable in expressing healthy disagreement, and to focus on clarifying rather than justifying.

What are ways that your team has developed to critique design while maintaining harmony on the team?