Defining and creating a memorable experience for your customers is no easy task. Product owners and development teams can easily rattle off ideas to designers about what features are necessary to stay competitive. But if you ask them to share their vision for the overall more subtle emotional aspects of the experience, they often get quiet or resort to the familiar old UI clichés of "simplicity, intuitiveness, etc." This means that you often start your design work with less insight than you need to drive visual and interaction design.

Enter the experience workshop - a collaborative meeting and setup where clients can really talk about what a great experience can feel like among a sea of inspirational images, digital interfaces, products, services, brands, cars, textures, and more. Companies that build digital products and services are engaging in a new level of competition; it's no longer good enough to deliver a usable product. Our designs must reach an aspirational vision that elevates the experience beyond mere usability, and a visual, collaborative workshop pushes people to explore and discuss the possibilities.

The workshop helps teams discuss what attributes are inherent in these other experiences that are meaningful to the experience they're defining. After a process of prioritization and discussion, the end result is often a huge cloud of ideas and words that sit on a spectrum from a poor experience to an ideal experience. The examples aren't what's important for our output. We collect insight from the discussion, the words, that help us define the ideal experience.

The workshop brings teams together to learn and collaborate on the experience. What I love most about this activity is the connections made from people across different teams that can relate on a personal level because of their shared experiences. It's not just a visioning exercise for the future; it's a team-building event.

Check out the above video to see a glimpse of the workshop in action. And if you want to learn more about how to conduct a workshop and integrate this new approach into your company, you can sign up for an upcoming Cooper U Visual Interface Design course. In fact, we have just a few spots left in next week's class (May 7-8), if this post left you inspired...

Related links

• Cooper U Visual Interface Design course
• The visual interface is now your brand
• What marketing execs should know about user experience
• Measuring visual designers' strategic value

As long as I can remember, I've maintained an library of inspirational imagery. I'm always consuming visually appealing material, so if I find something, I grab it, whether it's an interesting font, photograph, texture, color palette, icon, or UX pattern. Growing as a visual designer means keeping up with the ever-shifting trends and visual innovations out there in the world, and a library of inspiration can be a place to stockpile the state-of-the-art.

Just about anything can inspire visual creativity. Don't limit yourself to obvious things like icons or UI elements; branch out and explore non-digital works like paintings and illustrations. Over the years, I've collected thousands of these interesting and inspiring artifacts, including fonts, photographs, textures, color palettes, and even code snippets. As my collection grew, though, it became increasingly difficult to maintain it and keep it useful. Enter Evernote.

Why Evernote?

Evernote excels at nearly everything I was looking for in a digital asset management application: it makes content collection, tagging, and sharing a snap. But Evernote's secret awesomeness is in search: it can instantly find text not only in tags, titles, and notes, but also, using very accurate OCR, within the images themselves.

Search inside images

Suppose I'm working on a contact form and I want some inspiration from the outstanding examples in my library. Instead of hunting and pecking for interesting form elements amongst the hundreds of images I've clipped from around the web, I can search using text I think might be included in the images I want. Typing "First Name", for example, finds all of my clips with that text inside the image or its metadata. This is a killer feature - it makes quickly searching my library a whole lot less painful, and also frees me from needing to exhaustively tag every single artifact as I go.

If you find yourself running the same searches over and over, Evernote can save it for you as a shortcut. (See this great article on Evernote power searching for more tricks.)

Dead simple content capture

To build your inspiration library, grabbing content has to be dead simple - otherwise it's a chore and it doesn't get done! Fortunately, Evernote has super fast capture tools for pretty much any situation. In a browser, take your pick from: Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions. Even Internet Explorer gets the love (install the Windows desktop client to get the IE extension).

With the recent acquisition of Skitch, capturing extends beyond browsers to any screen content. With Skitch, you can screen-grab, annotate, and send to Evernote in just a few quick steps. (Here's a video demo of skitch in action.) Skitch works on your Mac, iPad or Android device.

Disclaimer: I worked on the design of the Skitch icon.

Your inspiration library, everywhere

One of Evernote's key strengths is being able to access all your content on any device. Apart from the desktop clients, Evernote has an excellent web interface. In many ways, I prefer the web version - it's a simpler front-end. It's great when I need quick access to my inspiration library.

The Evernote iPhone and iPad apps are some of the best on the iOS platform, hands down. They are free, and offer everything that is great about the desktop and web versions in a mobile form factor. Evernote has an Android app, as well.

More Evernote quick tips

A few other random pieces of advice for those of you using Evernote to capture the inspiration around you:

• It's a good idea to organize and tag stuff as you enter them. You'll thank yourself later.
• Re-title notes to make them more content specific. Titles like "DSC00003" will end up making finding things later more difficult.
• Keep well structured folder stacks.
• Use the Saved Searches feature.
• Another quick way to capture: on a Mac, drag and drop items onto the dock icon.

Go get some inspiration

I've focused on the virtues of Evernote, but whichever application you use, building and maintaining a personal inspiration library of visual materials can be an extremely valuable tool for any designer.

Here are some places I go when I want to find new material for my library:

• http://www.behance.net/
• http://pinterest.com/
• http://ffffound.com/
• http://dribbble.com/
• http://www.thebestdesigns.com/
• http://losttype.com/browse/
• From thenextweb.com: 97 places to find design inspiration

What about you?

How do you use Evernote? Any fresh ideas for maintaining a personal inspiration library? Do tell!

We're working on a larger post about the awesome IxDA 2012 in Dublin last week, but in the meantime, I wanted to chat separately about sketchnoting.

I'm a drawer, there's no doubt about it. I can barely manage to consider a design problem before I'm reaching for a pen and paper, or my Tablet PC and a stylus and cranking open OneNote for an explanatory drawing or mind map. But that got taken to the next level when I attended "Visual Thinking Through Sketchnotes," a workshop by MJ Broadbent & Eva-Lotta Lamm.

In it we covered the basics of sketching and then went further into what that means for capturing the complex ideas communicated in lectures and speeches. I was hooked, and challenged. I spent the next three days both enamored of the excellent ideas being presented (high marks on all four things I look for in presentations, nearly across the board), but also trying my new skills at sketchnoting. Here's the whole set.

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

In our modern digital environment, all businesses have a great competitive need for creative thinking that far exceeds our industrial forebears. In the quest for an institutional source of creativity, the brainstorming session, where several people meet to have fresh ideas, has emerged as the front runner. Brainstorming can be fun, and some prominent consulting firms have prospered proselytizing this technique, but it has a remarkably thin track record of success.

While people think and behave differently when they are in large groups versus when they are alone, I also believe that people behave still differently when they are in the presence of only one other person. This is often overlooked, yet I believe that creative people can be at their most effective when they work in pairs.

I believe that all people share these three modes of behavior: solo, paired, and group. Generally, these differences are noted only as interesting social quirks, and have not been investigated by academia or exploited by business, but their differences have important implications for the creative manager.

Brainstorming's adherents believe that a group of people can together imagine more and better solutions than any one person can alone. I won't dispute that assertion, but just because one is better than the other doesn't imply that either is anywhere close to being optimal.

A recent article in the New York Times put forth the radical idea that brainstorming might not be such a good idea, and cites recent research indicating that working solo is more productive than working in groups. The author, Susan Cain, points out that many of our greatest innovations came not from large groups of ideating peers, but from solo geniuses working in isolation. Her case in point is Steve Wozniak, the enigmatic inventor of the Apple computer.

As a former inventor who worked almost exclusively by myself, I agree with Cain. The problem is that, at the time, I would only work for myself, and like me, few independent creative people can be motivated to solve the problems of someone else's business. Unless you get remarkably lucky, you need to find a way to reliably innovate with people content to have a steady job.

When I began to consult for others, I too faced the challenge of generating consistent, reliable, and predictable imaginative problem solving. After some struggle, the correct solution finally emerged: pair designing.

This year marks Cooper's twentieth anniversary engaged in intensively creative work performed for hire, on schedule, on budget, for a wildly diverse clientele. Our work is nothing if not creative, and we consistently astonish our clients with the depth of our innovative thinking. What's more, we almost never do group brainstorming, and solo problem solving is, while not forbidden here, institutionally frowned upon as being too slow and expensive. Our ability to innovate reliably and effectively is largely due to our insistence that our creative consultants work in pairs.

The World Series is barely over, which means most of my thoughts this time of year get colored by baseball. Events in game five got me thinking about design exploration, of all things. I'll try not stretch the metaphor too much.

I work throughout the year with product managers, technologists, and executives at companies ranging from small startups to Fortune 100 megaliths. Many of these companies have a vision for creating a game-changing product within their industry, “the iPhone of the xyz market.” They mean it, too. But as conversations progress and a project plan begins to take shape, many of the project owners start piling on technology constraints before any design work has even begun.

“We need to use these off-the-shelf components.”

“Don't explore any solutions that won't let us use our current technology platform.”

“Actually, what we really need is just a facelift of the presentation layer.”

Not exactly the words I imagine Steve Jobs used to drive the creation of the iPod and iPhone.

Sometimes this slow degradation of vision is a result of poor or conflicting communication...which brings me back to last night's baseball game. St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, already a two-time World Series winner and owner of the most wins by an active manager, had a vision for which pitchers he wanted to be warmed up in the late innings of a tight ballgame. He called the bullpen coach (using a land-line telephone in the dugout), and, amazingly, not once but twice, the bullpen coach misheard LaRussa's instructions and warmed up the wrong pitcher.

I don't know if that's happened before in a World Series game, but in the corporate world, we see the wrong product get sent into the game all the time. Executives have a vision for the future, but don't clearly articulate it to the product owners (other than specifying a deadline which is often arbitrary and not tied to actual work milestones), so what gets built isn't visionary at all but driven by the calendar...which means introducing lots of constraints from the beginning. The result may be an incrementally better product, but not a game changer.

We like the saying “reality bats last,” one of Alan Cooper's original design principles. For us that means for any design we create to actually be a solution, it needs to be buildable by our client. It has to live within their unique technology, price, deadline, and resource constraints. However, we have been pushing more and more for the opportunity with our clients to do at least some unfettered, unconstrained design exploration on every project, even ones that have a narrow scope. We don't completely ignore constraints (especially things like regulations which are out of our client's control), and we won't explore designs that rely on telekinesis or nuclear fission, of course. That said, we will definitely push the envelope on what's possible—for a few days or even up to a week—so we can begin with the mindset of the absolute best experience for the user. Over the course of the project we'll push to achieve as much of this game-changing vision as we can.

Allow some your design team to let their imaginations run wild before they get saddled with constraints. (photo by Peter Duyan)

Typically, the output of this design exploration is a collection of hand-drawn sketches that target key plot points in the most important scenarios, and signature interactions (parts of the system fundamental to the experience). The sketches often explore a range of ideas, some that can be implemented within all known constraints, but also others which may bend (or break) constraints. After that, it's really a business decision our clients need to make about how to proceed. Sometimes it makes sense to restructure deadlines, add resource, buy a technology, or abandon a legacy infrastructure to get that “killer app.” Other times it doesn't make sense...but as designers it's our job to imagine the future and enable business decision makers to make the most informed decision they can.

Which brings me back to baseball. You are the manager of your company: what's your strategy? Reality is a heavy hitter, but it shouldn't bat in every slot in your lineup. Can you really afford to play it safe every game? Even if your competition is miles behind, spending time to imagine a better future for your product will position your company to more nimbly take your offering to the next level when constraints go away.

And while you are at it, I would recommend upgrading those bullpen phones.

Like it or not, the digital world has changed at a wicked pace, and more and more interactions between companies and their customers now happen via an interface. Software serves us everywhere, and the user experience now shapes these interactions every day. At the center of all this change sits the brand. TV and print advertising now regularly feature digital experiences from the likes of Apple, Google, Toyota, GE, and Amazon. The visual interface has become the new face of your brand. This means that the role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) is now harder, and their influence must reach further into the organization than ever before.

More customer interactions are now digital, and the brand sits at the center

Expectations are now much higher. My wife, for example, has lost all patience with technology. She hates how TiVo doesn't record her programs on time; her Dell laptop seems to break frequently; her iPhone is too slow. It's not just my wife, though. I see it frequently in healthcare and financial services. Even employees in larger enterprises have lost patience and expect better.

At Cooper, I see clients struggle with traditional marketing practices to deliver software that lacks the deeper level of engagement that customers are looking for. Some of our clients have changed their approach to marketing and product design and are reaping the rewards with a place on Forbes' Most Innovative Companies list.

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

Savant. Rockstar. Gifted genius. Many of the ways we talk about creative work only capture the brilliance of a single individual. But creativity also thrives on diversity, tension, sharing, and collaboration. Two (or more) creative people can leverage these benefits if they play well together. Cooper’s pair-design practice matured over more than a decade, and continues to evolve as we grow, form new pairs, and learn from each other every day. While no magic formula exists, all of our most successful partnerships to date share remarkably similar characteristics...

Foundation

We play by the same rules

There’s many different ways people could work together, but when everyone’s playing the same game (and has a shared understanding of the ground rules), things flow more easily. The freedom to make up the rules as you go, according to your own whim creates chaotic, unstable, unpredictable systems. It’s hard to get work done when the basics are continually questioned.

David Bornstein a journalist who studies social innovation, recently described play in the New York times: “Play requires the acquisition of a complex set of skills. It’s not just about exercising or letting off steam. It’s about making agreements with others as equals, stepping into an imagined structure, and accepting that structure even when things don’t go your way.”

At Cooper we’ve got a loose set of agreements which give structural support for playing and producing together. We’re all consultants, doing user-centered design, following an archetypal process (adapted to a given project’s constraints), and we maintain specific roles for working together. These serve as the agreed upon structure or rules of the game.

How it’s played is left to the players. We value lots of autonomy within big boundaries. Every team settles on their own ways of working together for day-to-day project work. It’s as informal as a sketch of a calendar and a quick conversation around expectations. We make explicit what we need to get out of our time together, and what we’ll get done in our time apart. Everyone shows up on time, and ready to work. A quick goal-setting chat gives focus and clarity to design meetings. Starting on the same page gives permission to time-box discussions, and park unresolved questions. In meetings we’re present, actively contributing, and moving the project forward. Shared agreement about the game we’re playing removes stress around participation and supports a more trusting relationship.

At Cooper, we’re quite fond of pair design as a way to get to the highest quality design quickly. (Even if you have to cheat your way there.) Most of our client engagements involve a pair of interaction designers dedicated to projects full time. Over the years, two specific roles have evolved out of this paired practice.

We struggled to come up with descriptive titles for each of the roles. Though the debate was a tough one, we erred on the side of accuracy at some cost of accessibility, and call the roles generator and synthesizer. (We’re aware that that makes us sound like machines, but with the quality of design teams are able to produce in this way, maybe that’s apt?)

Generator	Synthesizer
The generator is the one whose job is to fearlessly generate design ideas; to walk up to the whiteboard or OneNote page, draw some designs, and say, “OK, here’s how I’m thinking it will work for the persona.” The gen, working with visual design, makes the design solution visual; first with hand drawings, then in illustration software.	The synthesizer is the one whose job is to insightfully keep challenging, improving, and synthesizing the design into a whole. As the “gen” posits ideas, the “synth” will ask questions, help analyze, improve, and iterate it. The synth describes the behavior in words, incorporating the gen’s drawings to create a design specification.
Together they…
…identify and evolve designs, so that the persona using the system we’re designing accomplishes their goals in awesome ways.

Some asides about these distinctions:

1. These roles aren’t cast in stone. Sometimes when the gen is out of ideas, she might hand the pen to the synth so he can draw what he’s thinking, and she’ll “synth” him.
2. We’re experimenting and refining our methods all the time, as with our new integrated product development offering. Not all projects need two interaction designers.
3. Our team structures include additional, invaluable members like visual designers, industrial designers, engagement leads, etc. This article is just about the relationship of paired interaction designers.

This is some heady stuff to explain, whether to our parents, at a cocktail party, or interaction designers applying to work with Cooper. For this reason, we often find ourselves employing metaphors to explain the relationship. Since this is usually when the lightbulb goes off, I thought I would share some of the more effective and engaging ones.