Why Tech Will Embrace Typical Processes Over Screens | Design Strategist for Google, Golden Krishna

When the design process for new technology begins, it often starts brilliantly. What's good about that? An elderly senior citizen is asked about her daily foot rub. The path is fantastic. Hmm. A painter watching his paint dry is looked at with genuine curiosity, his techniques and typical processes well noted. It's journalistic, qualitative, without fail enlightening. It's a practice that can unmask new opportunities, uncover unknown yet common problems, illuminate regular routines, and find those things that are actually important to the end customer. And just a few weeks of these open-minded observations and conversations with customers is a marvelous first step that many smart people in technology use today. But then the creativity stops. The amazing stack of unique problems is forgotten. The rich pile of specific insights disappears. Instead, from the unique opportunities emerges the expected. Organic insights are morphed into mechanical results. One of a kind is turned into a square peg for a square hole because screens come before problems. We do this, draw a rectangle, and again and again and again, no matter the client, the industry, or the problem we're trying to solve, the creative process for developing technological solutions repeats the lazy act of drawing a screen. Where does the logo go? How big is it? As makers of technology, we're here to solve problems in the most elegant ways possible. Our research allows us to identify new and unique problems to solve. Our creative drive to discover what motivates our customers is a fantastic way to start. But then so often we commit the common terrible mistake. We learn fascinating things, then we draw a lazy rectangle. We start asking what generic pattern libraries we should use and toss in a parallax scroll or whatever's trendy at the moment, like the hamburger icon. We end up asking questions like, how can we help this 82-year-old diabetes patient using this form field? Unique problems don't have generic answers. Yes, in some cases a graphical user interface is a decent solution. But so often we throw away our best stuff, our opportunity to do something new and different, the very moment that marker hits whiteboard. Before we can even solve a problem meaningfully, we throw away the opportunity to do something better. Digital products can do so much more than have a fancy front end. Even if your company's core product is an interface, not everything that comes after has to be an interface. If things were that rigid, Apple Computer, the personal computer company, would never become Apple Inc., the world's largest consumer electronics company. If companies didn't go after opportunities beyond what they do today, Netflix would still be mailing DVDs in red envelopes. Great thinkers adapt. Great companies offer their customers the best possible solutions, whether they have a graphical user interface or not. Alan Cooper, who brought user research to the software world back in 1992, once wrote to Technologists, our most effective tool is profoundly simple. Develop a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish. What he wishes to accomplish is rarely to use a menu, a dropdown, or other outcomes of lazy rectangles. That section's talking about the first principle, which is to embrace typical processes instead of screens. This is some video footage of Dr. Michael Rothberg. A number of years ago, something undocumented in the medical field happened to him. After this psychological event happened to Dr. Rothberg and he found no documentation of it, he found a colleague of his at the hospital he worked in and they designed a survey for the medical staff. They found that astoundingly 68% of the other medical staff had had the same undocumented psychological experience as Dr. Rothberg. After they published their results in a reputable medical journal, the study was repeated at another university with undergraduate students. This time they found that 90% of those college students had the same undocumented psychological experience happen to them. What was it? What plagued Dr. Rothberg? Something called ringxiety or phantom vibration syndrome. The idea that your phone is buzzing and beeping when it's not. Kleiner Perkins has found that average smartphone users get about 150 notifications a day. And earlier this year, British studies showed that people in the UK often check their phones about 221 times a day. It's all these addictive services. Buzzing and beeping in your pocket screaming, let me out. I think there's a different way of making technology. There's a smarter way of going about it. This is the original icon for the Moves app. It was released a number of years ago. They've been acquired by Facebook. They have a different app icon now, but conceptually there's something really interesting about this when I first saw it. Visually, it's not stunning, but conceptually it It shows a phone in a pocket. It says, we work best when we just sit in your pocket. It's a sort of back pocket app. It's a digital pedometer. It tracks where you've been, the number of steps you're taking. And unfortunately, to really get any value out of the Moves app, you have to look at this data dashboard that no one really wants to look through. But there's something interesting about what they were scratching, what they were going towards. Here's a different problem. Losing your keys happens to a lot of people. It frustrates a lot of people when they can't find their house keys. This startup called Lockotron tried to launch an app. There's an app for that. Let's try to solve the problem. The way their app worked was you put a piece of hardware over your deadbolt. And then you have your app. And your app has this pretty straightforward and simple UI where it just has an unlock and lock button. Lockotron looked at this and they thought, OK, our UI's not bad. And they looked at the sort of larger user experience. It looks something like this. Step 1, you walk up to your front door and you want to open it. Step 2, you want to open your door, so you pull your phone out of your pocket. Step 3, you want to open your door, so you wake up your phone. Step 4, you want to open your door. At the time with iOS, you had to slide to unlock it. Step 5, you want to open your door, you enter your PIN code. Step 6, you want to open your door, you hit the home button to exit the last open app. Step 7, you want to open your home door, so you hit the home button to exit the last open group. Step 8, you want to open your front door, so you swipe through a sea of apps. That's right. Step 9, you want to open your front door, so you find the Lockatron app, you hit tap to launch it. Step 10, you want to open your front door, but you gotta wait for the app to load. Step 11, you want to open your door, and so you hit this giant unlock button. Step 12, you open your— you want to open your door, so you open your door. Something felt wrong to them when they looked at the actual user experience, when they actually drew people in the environment. So they thought, well, what if we embrace this first principle that's talked about in this book and we just try to look at typical processes instead of screens? And what if we just got rid of all those steps that have to do with the graphical user interface? Is this possible? Can we just have someone walk up to their door and unlock it and open it? Well, when they looked at it this way, they thought, yeah, we could just put a Bluetooth radio into our deadbolt and Activate a Bluetooth radio when you walk up to that deadbolt. And someone could just walk up to their door, and the door unlocks, and they open it. It was a back-pocket app. It was an app that delighted you by not leaving your pocket. It went from the screen-based thinking that we've been doing for the last 2 decades to screenless thinking, embracing the data and the sensors, the things that are available to us now, And where I think we're headed. When they played that video on Kickstarter, they generated over $2 million. That's really good for a door lock. There's other companies who have experimented with these sort of back-pocket apps. Square for a while had this feature called AutoTab. You turn it on, and when you walk up to the store, the cash register gives information about you to the cashier. Your name pops up along with your recent orders. Then when it comes time to pay, your picture is there, and you just kind of grab your sandwich or your coffee and walk out of the store. You never take your phone out of your pocket in their experiment, even to pay. It's a back pocket app. It's pretty interesting. There's this startup called Ginger.io, which looks at a number of healthcare products. They do some interesting things. One of the things they do is create a back pocket app. Take someone who has severe depression, and they have this back-pocket app, and it's hooked up with their sort of healthcare provider. And as they sort of— it monitors as they sort of get up in the morning, who they talk to, whether they're leaving the house or not, whether they're seeing friends or family, and it looks for those triggers to identify if someone who's at risk for severe depression to be in severe depression. It's looking at emotional qualities While just sitting in your pocket. Pretty neat.