Wodtke Consulting: Stories by Christina Wodtke

The Future of IA

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 07:00:00 GMT

Predicting where IA will go next.

The Elements of Style for Designers

Christina Wodtke — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 01:45:45 GMT

”With some exceptions, what is good for words is good for pictures too.”

The creative act of writing is always bounded a bit by the audience: journalism is not writing a novel. The same can be said of design: it is not art. Yet the materials are the same—words and pictures—and it is no big surprise that what is good for fiction is good for nonfiction. The surprise comes when one discovers that, with some exceptions, what is good for words is good for pictures too. And thus we discover The Elements of Style is just as relevant for young designers as for young writers.

E.B. White finishes The Elements of Style with a “List of Reminders.” It could have easily been “Ten Rules for Clear Writing” or “A Writer’s Manifesto” or even “Hanging Commas 99% Bad” but he opted for the gentler term: reminder. He did so because rules were meant to broken—learned first, but broken. And so he reminds us as we innovate and play what those rules were in the first place, and reminds us that breaking a rule can sometimes be hard to pull off. In that spirit, I will try to translate his writing reminders into design reminders. After reading them, you can go off and exuberantly ignore them.

bq. 1. Place yourself in the background.
Write in a way that draws the reader’s attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author.

You’re the best designer in your graduating class; you had three job offers the instant you started looking. Now you are designing a bank site, and someone tells you to use blue. What do they know?

Of course you are good, but no one is so good that her whims should override the conventions and constraints of the design. Just because you have a flamboyant style doesn’t mean it is right for every project. If someone can spot a site and know it’s yours, perhaps you are getting in the way of the work.

bq. 2. Write in a way that comes naturally.
Write in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using words and phrases that come readily to mind. But do not assume that because you have acted naturally your product is without flaw.

The seduction of fashion, the desire to impress or stretch your skills are all pitfalls unless you temper them with your natural skills and temperament. Still, talent is not enough.

bq. 3. Work from a suitable design.
Before beginning to compose something, gauge the nature and extent of the enterprise and work from a suitable design. … Design informs even the simplest structure, whether of brick and steel or of prose. You raise a pup tent from one sort of vision, a cathedral from another.

It’s worth saying twice, both in the thin book and in this article, because it is so often forgotten. Context is everything.

bq. 4. Write with nouns and verbs.
Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.

The nouns and verbs of web design are objects and widgets. If you have chosen the wrong widget, no amount of help text or arrows will fix the issue.

bq. 5. Revise and rewrite.
Revising is part of writing. Few writers are so expert that they can produce what they are after on the first try.

It’s painful when a client or a boss rejects your first design. Sometimes that initial effort seems perfect. But revision is a way to reach a better design. Or sometimes—and only sometimes—shed light on the perfection of the first. When this odd event occurs, it’s best not to be upset because no one recognized your initial brilliance. Instead, remember that design is as much process as result, and part of your job is to get everyone participating in the design to the end goal.

bq. 6. Do not overwrite.
Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.

Beware of gratuitous use of flash, AJAX, and gradients.

bq. 7. Do not overstate.
When you overstate, readers will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise.

How many Verisign and trustE logos do you need in your sidebar? How many awards plaques?

bq. 8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.
Rather, very, little, pretty—these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.

In web design, the “qualifiers” are often styling. Just because you can create your own look and feel for a scroll bar doesn’t mean you should. Many of the browser defaults work quite well; do not overburden your users with your desire to show off your mastery of CSS.

bq. 9. Do not affect a breezy manner.
The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. “Spontaneous me,” sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

Here White speaks to fashion. Just because Jeffrey Zeldman did it doesn’t mean you should. Or Jason Freid. Or IDEO. When you see a hyper-simple site, or one with scrolling photos, or one with 64 point type, ask yourself if you can and if you should pull it off.

bq. 10. Use orthodox spelling.
In ordinary composition, use orthodox spelling. Do not write nite for night, thru for through, pleez for please, unless you plan to introduce a complete system of simplified spelling and are prepared to take the consequences.

White goes on to quote Strunk:

bq. The practical objection to unaccepted and oversimplified spellings is the disfavor with which they are received by the reader. They distract his attention and exhaust his patience. He reads the form though automatically, without thought of its needless complexity; he reads the abbreviation tho and mentally supplies the missing letters, at the cost of a fraction of his attention. The writer has defeated his own purpose.

Web standards. Don’t Make Me Think. Pattern language. Enough said.

bq. 11. Do not explain too much.
It is seldom advisable to tell all. Be sparing, for instance, in the use of adverbs after “he said,” “she replied,” and the like: “he said consolingly;” “she replied grumblingly.”

A lesson I have learned by working with web search is: if you want people to notice something useful, the worst thing you could do is adorn it with lines, colors, or animation. A light touch actually indicates to users that this is worth paying attention to; blue and underlined is often the most effective. The most usable is often also the most used.

bq. 12. Do not construct awkward adverbs.
Adverbs are easy to build. Take an adjective or a participle, add -ly, and behold! You have an adverb. But you’d probably be better off without it. Do not write tangledly.

We can now invent widgets from anything. Anything on the page can open, close, launch, select. Sometimes it is the perfect metaphor for the job—such as clicking a thumbnail to see a larger image—sometimes it just bewilders. Do not design tangledly.

bq. 13. Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.
Dialogue is a total loss unless you indicate who the speaker is.

When you read a rapid-fire conversation in a book, often the author drops the “he said” “she said.” But have you ever had to stop and count forward from when quotes stopped being labeled? It is the same with design; it’s better to have a hint unobtrusively available than to ask your audience to memorize and track everything on the site. It’s always a thin line between assuming your audience is a pack of morons and expecting them to remember the shortcut key you offered on the homepage. Try to strike a sensible balance.

bq. 14. Avoid fancy words.
Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.

Yup. Do I need to translate?

bq. 15. Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.
Do not attempt to use dialect unless you are a devoted student of the tongue you hope to reproduce. If you use dialect, be consistent.

Are you imitating an established style? Be sure that you understand it, and that you can keep it going throughout. The Onion is the reigning king of this proposition; their adherence to being a respected newspaper goes beyond the content to the design.

bq. 16. Be clear.
Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style. There are occasions when obscurity serves a literary yearning, if not a literary purpose, and there are writers whose mien is more overcast than clear. But since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue.

Clarity can only be a virtue. Tape that to your monitor.

bq. 17. Do not inject opinion.
Unless there is a good reason for its being there, do not inject opinion into a piece of writing. We all have opinions about almost everything, and the temptation to toss them in is great. To air one’s views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which, in any event, may not be relevant to the discussion.

You ought not say anything if you can’t say anything nice. Stick to the minimum to make your point. Just because you don’t want that item on the homepage doesn’t mean you have to make it khaki.

bq. 19. Use figures of speech sparingly.
The simile is a common device and a useful one, but similes coming in rapid fire, one right on top of another, are more distracting than illuminating.

Pick your poison: replace the term “similes” with “photos,” “diagrams,” “giant fonts,” “orange,” and so on …

bq. 20. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.
Do not use initials for the names of organizations or movements unless you are certain the initials will be readily understood. Write things out. Not everyone knows that MADD means Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and even if everyone did, there are babies being born every minute who will someday encounter the name for the first time.

How many folks label a button “go” because they haven’t much space, or worse, remove the submit button completely because “everyone” knows you can just hit enter. Bite the bullet and redo the design, and make it clear.

bq. 21. Avoid foreign languages.
The writer will occasionally find it convenient or necessary to borrow from other languages. Some writers, however, from sheer exuberance or a desire to show off, sprinkle their work liberally with foreign expressions, with no regard for the reader’s comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English.

The showy “foreign language” of the web is the language of early adapters. Really, not everyone uses del.icio.us, flickr, Google Earth, and not everyone speaks the language of their interfaces. Be cautious in your adoption of new paradigms.

bq. 22. Prefer the standard to the offbeat.
Young writers will be drawn at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of new vocabularies, the exciting rhythms of special segments of their society, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.

In art school, I was asked to copy master works. I didn’t understand why, until I began copying them; when you imitate you do actually learn. You don’t just copy, you understand why the brushstrokes went left then right, you know why bright green was used in a face. And when writing, I always wrote with the voice of whomever I was reading. Hemmingway made me economical, Salinger verbose.

When you work you can try on many hats but in the end, you have to find a way to once again hear your own voice and see your own design.

Your turn
These reminders are just the beginning. Try adding your own as you learn hard lessons, try collapsing some of his into a simpler reminder set. I often use “clarity, brevity, concreteness” to remind myself what I want from my work. It’s up to you to take from this source, or any other source, and incorporate it into your style and your approach.

I’d like to invite all of you now to share the interpretations or lessons you’ve learned that would enhance a list of reminders for designers. No one has all the answers, but by being open to learning from others we can all get a little better.

_Originally published on 07/24/2006 in Boxes and Arrows

Building a Vision of Design Success

Christina Wodtke — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 01:45:45 GMT

“Alone, the pain that triggers a redesign is not enough of a guide to build something useful to the company. You have to build a shared vision.”

Vision

In the last year I’ve been at Yahoo!, I’ve had the pleasure of participating in three redesigns. They have all gone rather well, though through conversations with colleagues, I’ve come to understand this is not always common. Redesigns are as often crucibles of group anguish as they are opportunities for invention and rebirth. In the entirety of my career, I’ve definitely seen both. So what is the difference that allows one redesign to work and another to turn into months of tail chasing? Fortunately I’ve been part of several post-mortems as well, and I think the key difference is vision. A redesign has some built-in advantages over everyday maintenance; the most useful being focus. And focus is the loam that allows a shared vision to grow. A group chooses to redesign typically because the site is no longer working, and the pain of the site not working is greater than the pain of stopping business as usual and entering into an expensive and emotional project. But once committed, you have to move the project from reactive (something is broken) to proactive (we’re going to build something great). Alone, the pain that triggers a redesign is not enough of a guide to build something useful to the company. You have to build a shared vision.

Shared Vision

A common view of vision is that it’s something handed down by a leader to the troops. When a redesign goes awry, the troops complain, “There was no vision.” Sometimes there was a vision, but the leader didn’t communicate it, or more commonly, no one bought into it. Then the leader complains the troops didn’t obey. But the problem goes deeper than either scenario; the problem is that there was no shared vision. A shared vision is born of collaborative conversations, articulated in a form that is digestible and memorable, and then internalized and personalized by every member of the team. The power of the shared vision is that it is shared—it is held within every member of the team (or organization) and thus needs no leader to carry it forward; every action of the team helps make the vision real. Success, all starts in the way the vision is birthed. A vision can come initially from one of two places: the leader can create it or recognize it. It’s another fallacy that folks think leaders must be the source of all ideas—they don’t. A great leader should be just as capable of recognizing an idea as well as dreaming one up—in fact, more the first, which is more scalable. So: a leader has either come up with an idea (the current site doesn’t allow us to realize a new business model; we need to redo it) or may recognize one (our usage numbers are in decline—marketing says people think we don’t have what they want; user research says it’s hard to find anything on the site, I just read this article on findability—hmm, I wonder if there is something there). This germ of a vision is the proto-vision. To get the proto-vision to a vision, the leader needs to feel comfortable shopping around the proto-vision. When you shop around the proto-vision, you have numerous one-on-one or small-group conversations about the proto-vision with as many people with different viewpoints as is feasible. Again, this is often hard for new leaders, who think they have to be the single resource of all wisdom. More seasoned leaders are eager to do this, as the act of shopping around the vision sets the foundation for a shared vision. It also makes the vision stronger, as it roots out biases arising from a single point of view. Finally, the initial vocalized reason for the redesign is often not a good vision. Let’s say you redesign because your navigation system isn’t scalable. That’s the pain-point that kicks off the work, but is that a guiding force to lead you to a great product? You’ll need to deconstruct “our navigation isn’t scalable” into “we offer the greatest collection of independent movies in the world, easy to find, easy to watch, easy to share” (for example).

Look both ways

Let’s assume, for whatever reason, you will be shaping the shared vision. Maybe you are the leader, or maybe the leader hasn’t provided enough of a vision to make you confident in your project, and you are going to lend a hand shaping the vision. To shape the proto-vision into a vision, you’ll need to do some interviewing. I usually select the people who will help me shape a vision using a few criteria: domain expertise, intelligence, system thinkers and open-mindedness. I always do these in one-on-one discussions. This avoids group think, and I find I can help people speak more honestly if there isn’t any sort of audience. The conversation covers three topics: looking backward, looking forward, and finally, the protovision. To look backward, I find it useful to use Peter Senge’s Five Why’s. This is a very simple technique in which you ask why, and when you get a response, you ask why again. It helps you move from specific issues to uncovering larger underlying problems. For example, let’s say you are the head of user research: Me: Why do you think we should do a redesign? You: Because people can’t find anything. Me: Why can’t they find anything? You: The navigation isn’t intuitive. Me: Why isn’t it intuitive? You: We didn’t do any user research when we designed it, just usability after. Me: Why is that? You: Well, our budget was cut… Me: Oh? (which is what I say when I’m tired of “why”…) You: Well, the company doesn’t seem to value getting user feedback. From this short conversation, I’ve learned several things. The user researcher thinks findability is a key problem, and he thinks research would help, and he feels we don’t invest in it. I can return to any of the places where I asked way, and take a different branch to find out more. I could ask “What makes you think the site isn’t intuitive” to learn more about the site problems, I could ask more about “Why you thought that usability wasn’t enough,” or could continue digging out why the company doesn’t think user research is important or I can spend another five whys finding out if user feedback is valuable and why. To be thorough, I’d probably dig through them all. I’ll finish up the conversation by asking many of the classic pre-design questions, which allows me to look forward: why are we doing this design now? What are the opportunities? What will make this project a success? What would success look like? Later, when I walk through my notes, I’ll be trying to find the concrete problems and positive aspirations. The concrete problems will go into my redesign plan, the positive aspirations are fuel for the vision. My sets of questions would probably lead me to moments of both: “Our site isn’t easy enough to use—our users say they want to be able to find and rent a movie quickly, because they are often doing it at work.” From here speed and ease arise. “Our users are sick of all the blockbusters they can get at the local store; they want to find movies they’ve never seen before.” From here comprehensiveness or unique collections arise as an aspiration. As you get to your fifth and sixth conversations, you’ll find you start to have a more defined set of aspirations for your proto-vision which you can use as foil for your discussions: Me: Do you think we need to offer access to every movie on the net? You (business leader): No, I think we are positioning ourselves as an alternative to Netflix—it’s more critical to be comprehensive on independent movies. Me: Hmm—can you tell me more? (another why alternative) You: It’s an underserved market—we can build our strengths there before trying to get share from the big guys. Me: What does it take to satisfy this market? You: Better talk to Sally in research, if I recall right she said it’s going to take 500,000 films to appear useful. Me: With so many films, how can anyone find anything? You: Well, that’s your problem… Me: But it needs solving? You think we need to make sure the site is easy to use? You: You bet—we’ve got to satisfy this market; they influence others. I’ve now gotten a more senior individual to voice his belief that a large selection that is easy to access, is a goal critical to the redesign. Even though his original kickoff to the redesign might have been about navigation, he has now revealed and/or bought into the larger vision to provide user satisfaction, built on ease of access and selection. You may think this technique is a consultant’s tool, but even though I’m in-house, I still go forward asking these questions. Just because I think I know the answers doesn’t mean my answers are right. Let’s say I thought we planned to offer every movie ever made—I’d discover I was wrong. Moreover, these conversations tie us together in our inquiry, giving us an infrastructure of shared knowledge that will lead to shared vision. These conversations can be quite delicate and require one to have a certain amount of skill in interviewing. It’s critical you do not lead the conversations with your ideas and that when you introduce elements of your proto-vision you are doing so in a way that tests the concepts and builds shared vision, rather than trying to get a quick buy-in (which will bite you in the patootie later). User researchers are excellent in subtle interviewing techniques; if you haven’t got the skills, you may want to go to a researcher for coaching, take a class or read a book (some resources listed below).

Digest, and articulate

At the end of each conversation, you have hopefully noticed some common themes. If you didn’t, you went through your notes and pulled them out. Then you took the themes to the next conversation, as you worked your way across disciplines and up and down the hierarchy. Maybe there have been three conversations, maybe there are ten, maybe they were all a tidy hour, maybe some of them were five minutes in the cafeteria…but you should now have what you need. You have a collection of critical aspirations for the site. Now take a pass with your user base. In the past, I’ve successfully used a variation of an older technique which involves word-importance. You take a set of 100 words/two word phrases that represent qualities of products you offer and have a larger sample of users pick ten to fifteen of the ones that matter to a (mail, shopping, research) site. For each product, replace some of the words in your standard list with ones that are relevant to the product—in this case, your redesign. For example, a news site might need the word authoritative, a personals site might replace that with warm. Next you ask the users to rank them in order of importance. When you analyze this survey, you should see five words rise to the top—these will become touchstones for your work. You can also later use these words at the end of a usability evaluation (on a scale of 1-5 how authoritative was this site?) or to test visual comps in surveys. At Yahoo!, we print them and hang them in our war rooms to provide focus. Once you have the words from users, and the interviews, you can see if they don’t match. God help you if they are completely different. Odds are good, though, there will be a fair amount of overlap, and a bit of nudging will ferret out a set of final qualities, valued by business thatusers also aim for. If time is an issue, you can do this at the same time you are still conducting interviews. If you don’t have access to large user numbers, I recommend skipping this exercise and using a different concept testing technique. And shocking as it may be, you may not get to have user input at all—in this case, hold as many interviews, with as many folks as you can, and include a few target users by going to the mall or asking questions on web bulletin boards. Honestly, you may even find you are forced to begin to design with the final vision unformed…it happens. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue to push toward a vision: a vision coalesced halfway through a redesign is still better than no vision. Now take the time to articulate the complex vision made up of proto-vision and the user and business knowledge you are holding in your head into a simple vision—preferably one sentence. This will be hard, it’s almost like creating a mission statement. However, it’s not a vision for a whole company, so don’t kill yourself. Just get to a simple, clear sentence or phrase that is the essence of what you are striving to accomplish. I’ve seen redesigns driven by even the simplest set of words, provided they are the right words. What is critical, is that it captures the essence of what you hope to accomplish, collectively.

Market the vision

Now that you have your vision seed, you are going to do almost the opposite of what you have been doing. So far you’ve taken as many diverse elements as possible and boiled them down to the essence. Now you have to take that essence and make it accessible for the folks who will hear your vision. You have to articulate what that vision means—for example, if fast is a part of the vision, it’s worth it to clearly articulate that you mean, fast loading (for engineers to concentrate on optimizing on the server-side and designers to avoid graphics) , the illusion of fast downloading (for your web developers, so they can look into things like progressive rendering) and fast-to-scan (for your designers, to concentrate on clarity). Next you need to market this eloquent vision. Some potential forms for this include:

PowerPoint presentations: The first sentence of the vision is the first slide, and then you go on to explain what the meaning of the vision is, what the aspects of the vision are, why this is the right vision and what it takes to get to it.
Posters: We’ve used posters as a great tool to keep the vision in front of our eyes as we work. The poster consists of a simple strong image capturing the essence of the vision, with words or phrases elaborating the vision around it.

Simpler than a poster, you can print out the vision statement in a large font and hang it up in every cube, in every meeting room, and in the war room.
Memes: These are catchy phrases that hold a single key concept. You use them while reviewing work to hold the work accountable to the vision. If an aspect of the vision is speed, embodied in a fast download, then a meme might be “Every pixel has a job to do.” A catchy phrase is a godsend for keeping everyone focused…if you’ve got someone on your team with a talent for a turn of phrase, use them. If your memes are catchy enough, they’ll be internalized and every act of creation will be in context of these simple instantiations of the vision.

Not only do these techniques communicate the vision to those who did not help create it, but also act as a reminder of a shared vision to those who did. In the hectic day-to-day madness that accompanies any large project, reminders of a shared vision are invaluable.

In praise of vision

In a redesign, a vision can be the difference between a clear, cohesive design and a hodgepodge of various stakeholders’ urges. In the worst case, it can produce a work so inferior to the original that months are lost when the work is scrapped. Or it’s launched and customers flee in droves. In our working life, there are many things we do without a vision. And we do the work like a zombie, without our heart, or we do it passionately, but at odds with the larger goals of the company. But if we incorporate vision into our work, our work is more targeted, more effective and more meaningful. A status report becomes a tale of getting closer to a dream; a banner ad becomes a promise of delight to a customer that is fulfilled upon a website visit. This is just a simplified version of the techniques my colleagues and I have used to capture a vision to ensure a successful design process—you are welcome to expand, embellish, reduce and streamline it for your own purposes. Just remember: the vision must be clear, meaningful and shared. A top-down vision that is not owned and internalized by all members of the team is not a vision at all, but a wish. And if wishes were horses…

On shared vision: The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385260954/ref=nosim/boxesandarrows-20
On visioning: The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World by Peter Schwartz http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385267320/ref=nosim/boxesandarrows-20
On research techniques: Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies) by Mike Kuniavsky http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1558609237/ref=nosim/boxesandarrows-20

_Originally Published on 12/11/2003 in Boxes and Arrows

Career Choices for Designers

Christina Wodtke — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 01:45:45 GMT

Yogi Berra once said, “When you see a fork in the road, take it.” For designers (and engineers and others in the “service” organizations), the fork in the road often comes mid-career, when you finally feel like you are good at what you are doing. Suddenly you are offered—almost required to—do something that is 90 degrees away from what you have mastered. And that is pretty scary.

Fork one: Becoming a manager

You’ll get to understand in a very direct way the trade-offs one has to make between good design, good business, and good human relations.

Before you dismiss this out of hand, let me correct a few myths. Becoming a manager does not mean people will take you seriously, it does not mean you get to tell people what to do, and it doesn’t mean you don’t get to make things anymore. After about six months in my first managing jobs, I realized that I now was designing a place where design could happen. It’s a good idea to read up a bit about what a manager really does before looking into this path (or accepting it if your boss offers). Erin Malone has written an excellent article in this issue on considering becoming a manager; I recommend you take a look.

Beyond that, it’s wise to consider where becoming a manager will take you, and what the opportunity cost is. So often we think it’s a default decision: you get a chance to be a manager and you take it (demand it!). But management is only a good choice if it is something you enjoy, and if it takes you in the direction you want to go. Where do you see yourself in five or ten years? Running a design studio? Starting a small product company?

Becoming a manager will teach you a number of useful skills to get you there. You learn how to lead people; you’ll learn how to manage budgets and make choices in resources. You’ll get to understand in a very direct way the trade-offs one has to make between good design, good business, and good human relations. And don’t tell me they are always or never opposed—life has many happy intersections, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and do things your team will never understand.

So I mentioned opportunity cost. This is a phrase common in business circles, less common in design circles. But I bet you understand the concept: you only have so many hours in the day and if you spend them one place, you can’t spend them elsewhere. If you love what you do, and you know you don’t enjoy being a manager, then don’t agree to become one just to get ahead. Not only is it a way to make your life less happy, it’s also hours spent learning management skills that you could be using to explore your area of interest more deeply, and becoming a guru on the topic…

Fork two: Becoming an expert

First, select the space you wish to be known for. It’s not enough to say, “I am a designer,” any more than you can say, “I am a musician,” and become a household name.

Sometimes your greatest goal is simply to raise your rates or get a higher salary. You love what you do, but you want greater respect and the money that comes with it. In this case, you may want to consider guruhood. No, that doesn’t mean you have to start making outrageous statements on mailing lists, even though sometimes it seems like that is how people do it.

First, select the space you wish to be known for. It’s not enough to say, “I am a designer,” any more than you can say, “I am a musician,” and become a household name. Sure, some rock stars move into jazz or country, but mostly they explore the outer ranges of their chosen genre. This can be translated to design.

You can specialize in web design, like Jeffrey Zeldman or application design, like Terry Winograd. You can narrow within that, and specialize in application or content design, like Alan Cooper or David Seigal (boy, that dates me). You can look at specializing in web genres, such as search, ecommerce, or communities. Or you can cluster your interests; for example, communities and search makes social search. I think you can easily see the advantages of being a communities and ecommerce solution if you wanted to work with companies like Netflix or Amazon. You can become a technique expert—be brilliant at taxonomies or personas. Materials, genre, technique—the important thing in guruhood is to be one of the three or four top-of-mind names in your space. You are a brand, and you have to learn how to build it, and not overextend it.

Like all choices, this one has its downsides also. This works only if your temperament suits it; if you are a dilettante learner, like me, you may find expertise is only fun when you keep adding new things to it. If you are a professorial type, you get joy in deepening and sharing the body of knowledge you’ve obtained.

You also do have the classic publish or perish problem—to reach the heights of guruhood, you need to speak, write, or find another way to be found out about.

Fork three: Become you 2.0

Intelligent and creative people see life a bit differently. And you are always you. You can be a project manager after fighting them your whole life; then go back to design if you don’t like it.

Finally, the path you may choose to take is one of reinvention. This can be a tough one. You give up much of your sense of self—how often do you say I am a designer, or I am an engineer? It doesn’t even seem like a job title anymore. It doesn’t seem like “senior product manager.” It feels like “artist” or “writer”—something inherent in your makeup that chose you, and you didn’t choose it at all. But don’t be fooled! A curious person of talent and intellect can end up many places. A rocket scientist could be just as easily an engineer, a theoretical mathematician, or a concert pianist. The left and right brain play nicely with each other in certain people.

Think of the places where you hit a self-imposed wall in the past: the opportunity to become a product manager, the time you took a programming class and loved it yet didn’t follow through. Was it because you were afraid of losing your sense of self? There is a simple exercise you can use to see how a major change might feel: speak it out loud.

“I used to be a designer, now I’m CEO of a fortune 500 company”
“I was an IA for some years, but now I run the product team.”
“I did usability in the past, and that has made me an awesome marketing vice-president.”
“I came from engineering, and now I’m an entrepreneur, and we just closed our series A.”

Out in the world, you don’t have to reject your past if you feel it might cause upheaveal (externally or internally), but sometimes in private, saying out loud can help you see if it’s something you want or if it’s something you are afraid of. You may find yourself quickly thinking, “Hey! Engineering taught me a lot that’s useful in securing funding.” You may realize it’s not at all a dichotomy, but rather just you taking things in a direction most people can’t see.

Intelligent and creative people see life a bit differently. And you are always you. You can be a project manager after fighting them your whole life; then go back to design if you don’t like it. You find suddenly find you have no enemies after the experience, just people who want to make good products like you but have different ways to accomplish it. Each path will teach you something, and as you choose one, the others are not closed off. Rather if you change paths again, you’ll do so with a new body of knowledge and insight.

The three lives of Thomasina

When I was a kid, I saw this Disney movie about a cat named Thomasina who had three of her projected nine lives without dying, but through transformative change. Who knows why, but that film stuck in my head, and I feel like I live out that movie. I’ve been the guru, the manager, and now Wodtke 2.0. And I may get to experience lives four, five, and six, while still enjoying the knowledge of lives one, two, and three.

I am not about to forget what I know about information architecture, nor what I know about working with teams as I learn about financial projections. I keep being the guru and the manager as I become the transformed. This becomes very clear as I give expert reviews of broken information architectures, or as I take a manager job while I write privacy policies for PublicSquare. The forked paths are really more like spaghetti strands, twisting around and around like the plate of pasta in another old Disney movie. You never know where they lead until suddenly you discover true love.

My advice is to be fearless and curious, attentive and passionate. Two will show you were to go, the other two will tell you how to get there.

_Originally Published on 01/15/2007 in Boxes and Arrows._

Leaving the Autoroute

Christina Wodtke — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 01:45:46 GMT

I recently had the pleasure of traveling across France via autoroute. In the past, my husband and I had taken all backroads for our adventures, but on this trip we need to get from one in-law to the next in a day, and the autoroute was the ticket. The vast expanses of French countryside are gorgeous and remarkably varied—rolling hills and grassy fields becoming bluffs and cliffs; vineyards become cornfields then become sunflower fields; all punctuated by signs proclaiming the next town. The signs caught my eye. Unlike America, where a sign just has the town name, here each name was accompanied by an illustration of the things for which the town was famous: one town is famous for mustard, one town for knives, one for nougat, one for a type of melon… the first time I saw this I laughed. The idea of a town devoting itself to nougat seemed a bit absurd. But specialization has power. The nougat of Montelimar can be found all over France and is known to be the best. Laguiole is recognized as making fine knives not only in France, but around the world. Everyone knows the mustard from the city of Dijon. By committing all their attention to a single craft, often literally over hundreds of years, each town has received the renown that comes with great work. But what happens when you leave the autoroute, lured by one of those signs proclaiming the town’s mastery and claim to fame? You find a town—a butcher, a baker, a pastry shop, a pharmacy. Little gray-haired ladies with their baskets heading for shops, men sitting in the café with a glass of Pastis or playing Petanque in the park. Mothers shopping, pushing baby carriages, tourists eating in overpriced cafes with English menus, a church still frequented by worshippers as well as chubby tourists… in other words, each town has all the things a town must have to be a town. Laguiole has its share of knife-shops, but overall it is still a town and supports the inhabitants that give it life. The knife-maker has a place to eat and drink, work and worship, as well as to see friends for a drink and a game of Petanque. Moreover, as he watches the butcher cut a steak from a side of beef or a pastry chef slice apart a cake, he knows more about what a knife should be. So, other than a chance to reminisce (ah, the oysters of Gujan-Mestras, the macaroons of St. Emilion, the cannelles of Bordeux) what does this mean for us, practitioners of the young and unrefined craft of designing digital systems? What the heck are you raving about, Wodtke? Simply that the passionate debates over specialization vs. generalization are a false dichotomy, and are not serving us. It’s not vs, but and that we should be using. Designers who know nothing of html or image optimization, usability experts preaching without even a basic knowledge of design principles, information architects and interaction designers who don’t understand each others’ skills are weakening themselves, as Laguiole would, if it closed its pharmacy for another knife shop. The health of your craft comes from a rich broad base of knowledge. Recently a well-known usability expert discovered a clue to improving his own site from a web design list. This tip was one of the most basic pieces of design knowledge you learn when you begin to study design. Yet, this specialist didn’t know it—and moreover, it hurt the usability of product because he was not well rounded. Usability sites are notorious in the crudeness of the design, design sites for their lack of usability. Sites by engineers often miss both, while sites without an engineer’s knowledge load slowly and are buggy. It’s not enough to be a specialist—as they say, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. You have to have a broad grounding in the related fields along with a deep understanding of your area of specialization. IBM calls these folks T-shaped people, and seeks them out when hiring time rolls around. Moreover the world beyond our craft teaches us our craft. Poetry informed my ability to be an information architect—you learn about the subtle nuances each word carries and to craft phrases to ensnare your readers’ emotions. This knowledge informs labeling choices of course, but also the more delicate arts of contextual messaging and categorization. Cooking and collecting cookbooks impart a great deal of insight into what makes instructions succeed or fail; travel has taught me to question my most basic assumptions about user behavior. I have also cracked a few O’Reilly books and learned basic coding, I have spent time in usability labs learning from users and the researchers who can interpret what that means, I spend time at designer’s elbows asking them to explain color, line and form, I read business tracts — all have had a direct and immense effect on my skill at Information Architecture and Interaction Design. I don’t consider myself a master-craftsman, but I know that if I wish to become one, it means attending to not just my specific skillset, but to the world in which it resides. You can’t be in expert in everything, obviously. But you can make sure you have enough knowledge to appreciate the craftspeople you work with. So designers, take “Introduction to programming” at the local college. Engineers, attend all the usability sessions and watch what those crazy users do. Usability folks, go read Robin Williams “The Non-Designers Design Book” at least. If you dream of being an expert, read the Sunday paper cover to cover, from business section to comics page and then read a peer-review journal. Take a painting class, study yoga, cook a complicated meal. Learn from your coworkers, and learn from your friends. Specialize, but remember to be a human being as well. And someday you may be as famous as the mustard of Dijon.

_Originally published on 10/31/2002 in Boxes and Arrows_