The story about Ogilvy and the blind beggar speaks to the consequences of when the personhood of an individual is amplified or minimized. The human presence changes behavior. Ogilvy created a space for empathy by telling a story, and I think that the decisions of a designer can influence whether or not users empathize with one another when huddled around a framework. Empathy is crucial in these cases, because frameworks are the means to build up things collaboratively. Let me give an example. A few weeks ago, I was using an application on my phone that is essentially a framework for sharing photos with friends. These friends can comment on the photos and favorite them. There is a screen in the application that lets you look at the updates describing who has liked a photo that you have taken, or if new people have shown up and subscribed to your stream of photos. The interface looks, roughly, something like this:
It’s a nice design, and it provides a concise digest of activity around the photos that I’ve taken, but I think it’s a complete failure in reinforcing the emotions that make the behaviors it presents meaningful. I look at this screen often, but the one thing I should feel – thankfulness for the kindness and recognition of others – never materializes.
Except for the one time it did: I opened the application one day to discover a rendering bug had enlarged the avatars on this screen. That one simple change made me feel a part of this photography framework and the community it sustains. Seeing the faces of the ones who liked my photos made me part of a web of mutual appreciation. The people snapped back into focus as individuals.
I began to think about the screen’s original design: it had information density, but it wasn’t a suitable representation of personhood. The design was optimized for consumption of information rather than thankfulness for the interactions and relationships it depicts. Appreciation is a significant aspect of positive experiences; if the design choices have been optimized for consumption instead, it turns an opportunity for nourishing collective resonance into a gesture of empty snacking. All of which begs the question: was the rendering mistake actually a mistake if it fixed the most fundamental problem of the original design? The bug was eventually fixed and the screen returned to the original layout, but I want my big faces back.
Chapter Nine
Delight and Accommodation
“Who ever said that pleasure wasn’t functional?”
Charles Eames
Design doesn’t need to be delightful for it to work, but that’s like saying food doesn’t need to be tasty to keep us alive. The pedigree of great design isn’t solely based on aesthetics or utility, but also the sensation it creates when it is seen or used. It’s a bit like food: plating a dish adds beauty to the experience, but the testament to the quality of the cooking is in its taste. It’s the same for design, in that the source of a delightful experience comes from the design’s use.
There is a tendency to think that to delight someone with design is to make them happy. Indeed, the work may do that, but more appropriately, the objective is to produce a memorable experience because of its superior fit. The times that design delights us are memorable because we sense the empathy of the work’s creator. We feel understood, almost as if by using the work, we are stepping into a space designed precisely for us.
Outside of design, the most delightful memories are some of my strongest. They’re of the idyllic times where I felt like I fit: the world seemed to be orchestrating itself just for me. I was exactly where I was supposed to be at the right time. Of course, these situations weren’t constructed for me, but the experiences felt like they were tailored. They were specific and personal, empathetic and warm. The experiences shine more in their remembrance, turning into a kind of self-perpetuating myth whose importance grows with each retelling. Why shouldn’t delightfully designed experiences be like these memories? Now, it’s far outside of the capabilities of anyone to maneuver the parts of the universe to recreate the idyllic experiences to which I refer, but with each project, designers are given a chance to align the specifics in a fitting way to create that same sort of feeling. Empathy creates an opportunity for skillful accommodation.
Again, design gets wrapped up with how the work feels while being used. All design is experience design – whether it is visiting a website, reading a book, referencing a brochure, interacting with a brand, or interpreting a map. All of these interactions and objects of attention produce experiences of use, and those experiences can be made better and more memorable by skillfully catering to the audience in an accommodating way.
Delight, unfortunately, can be painted as a quick fix or a gimmick that offers a snazzy way to spit-shine a poor idea with novelty. The intentions of creating accommodating work go deeper than just a surface treatment, and are meant to build and maintain meaningful, nourishing, and codependent relationships between the designer and audience. The decisions that make a design delightful are an expression of compassion for the audience and care for the work being done. They should attempt to build up long-term benefits rather than temporary gains. The gestures that make a design delightful can be small, but their implications are meaningful: they are part of an attempt to engage an audience in a consequential, human way, and to maximize the opportunity of the situation for everyone.
The correct choices feel much like an embrace. A space of accommodation has been skillfully created by the designer for the audience to occupy, and the audience need only to step into the space for it to be completed. It’s an architected space crafted through empathy based on the designer anticipating the disposition and needs of the audience to achieve a good fit. For instance, there is a certain small satisfaction when our spell check learns to automatically correct our frequent typos, or when the handbasket appears in the grocery store right as we pick up the extra item that makes it too difficult to carry everything with our bare hands. The fit is the result of a successful decision made in response to the desires and natural behaviors of the audience.
There’s room for a delightful approach in most design, even in the most conventional of exchanges. In Griffin, Georgia, for instance, there’s a road sign hung over the state highway a hundred yards in front of a bridge. The sign warns oncoming traffic of the low overpass ahead by saying:
If you hit this sign,
you will hit that bridge.
There are many different ways that the sign could have been made, but this particular one is effective because all three parts of the design – the message, tone, and format – are treated in a delightful way. The text gains clarity, immediacy, warmth, and humor through the tone of the writing, and the format is manipulated in a pleasing way because of the position of the sign. Placing the sign over the road rather than next to it gives the warning a more direct relationship with the hazard it warns against. It’s not just a written warning, but also a feedback mechanism for the real threat ahead. The sign provides a great example of how to approach a design problem to create delight, and highlights what makes a design delightful: it empathizes with the audience and their circumstances, surprises in its delivery, and achieves a clarity in what it is trying to say or accomplish. A delightful experience is the overlap of these three things.
Surprise is a crucial component, because it is hard to delight someone if they expect what they are being given. Delight fades when there is entitlement or predictability, and that’s why so many of the delightful experiences in commerce involve a customer being under-promised then over-delivered. They get into an engagement expecting a certain amount, and are delighted when they get more than they bargained for.
The simplest form of delightful surprise is serendipity, when we are presented with an unexpected relevancy. Serendipity in design provides a new viewpoint that makes us look at what we are doing in new ways. It is the opposite of purposefully designing for delight, but like a scientist observing natural occurrences in the lab, understanding the natural patterns of things allows us to reconstruct them in our work. One of my favorite serendipitous occurrences is an err
or message that came up one day while writing:
Isn’t it pleasing to think that software has pathos, and that writing is just as difficult for it as it is for us? I admit, most error messages create a large amount of grief because they signify lost work, but when this particular one popped up, I had to laugh. “Application cannot edit the Unknown” (capitalized, proper noun), and all I could do is to accept it and say OK. The computer had been personified for a moment, and in its existential crisis, I felt like it understood my writer’s block. It was comforting to have company when lost in my words. This happy circumstance means that one of the best opportunities to delight the audience is when something goes wrong.
We can also be surprised by delight when the mundane is rethought and elevated. At the Ace Hotel in New York, a required exit sign over a door was an eyesore, and a stark contrast from the considered, detailed wall where it was mounted. Rather than accept the wart as it was, the sign was embraced as a chance to create an experience for the hotel’s guests by integrating the exit sign into the space. Now, surrounding the sign are other letters painted on the wall in a similar condensed style:
Every requirement is an opportunity for delight, even the ugly ones. Sometimes the creative treatment of these warts are the most enjoyable parts of a design.
Delightful design also adds clarity by finding the balance between adding details for resonance and taking them away for simplicity. When the two are balanced correctly, we’re left with a design that shows up when it offers something of value, and then gets out of the way when it is not needed. Sometimes, more must be added to give clarity to the work, such as how a map may have added guidance along with street names to make it easier to navigate; but usually value and delight are created by taking things away and reducing friction.
It is a chore in most hotels and airports, for instance, to get connected to the public WiFi. The process is wrought with roadblocks and complications: login screens, user agreements, registration pages. The web page used to access the WiFi at the Ace Hotel, however, has a simpler approach to that interaction:
The internet button surprises and delights, because it understands what the user wants to do, and eliminates everything else that doesn’t pertain to that goal. Clarity emerges, and delight shows up with it, because we feel like our intentions are plainly understood.
The most important element of delightful design is empathy. Clarity and surprise are only achievable through empathy with the audience. An intimate understanding of the audience means that our designs can be warmer in their communication and more appropriate. We can be friendly and good-natured with the ones who imbue our work with its value. Projects that seem cold or excessively composed are more indicative of a lack of understanding than a mark of professionalism. One can speak naturally and personally when they know someone well, and a friendly, affectionate, and hospitable tone is essential to cater to audiences, encourage dialogue with platforms, and produce the utility and resonance that great design seeks to achieve.
Delightful design attempts to make the work more pleasurable for everyone involved in it, and in doing so, makes the designer and the audience more aware of one another. This seems to be a foolish thing to say, but without the empathy that delightfulness requires, it’s quite easy for the designer to be short-sighted and see the design work as a set of logistical problems to overcome or creative challenges to master, rather than an opportunity to produce something that enhances someone else’s life. The warmth and exuberance of communication and the accommodation to the audience necessitated by delightful design also makes it easier for the audience to spot the presence of the designer in the work. The work becomes more humanized in its tone and effect, so it becomes easy to see that there are people behind it.
Chapter Ten
Gifts and Giving
“Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!”
D.H. Lawrence
There is an old Japanese tale about a poor student who was away from home and living at an inn. One evening, as his stomach grumbled, he smelled the briny scent of fish coming from the inn’s kitchen as the innkeeper made his dinner. He wandered his way outdoors to the kitchen’s window, and sat below the sill with his meager meal of rice, hoping that the scent of the fish might improve his paltry dish. The student did this for many weeks, until one night the innkeeper spotted him and became furious. He grabbed the youngster by the arm and dragged him to stand before the local magistrate, demanding payment from the student for the scent of the fish that he had stolen.
“This is most curious,” said the magistrate, who thought for a moment and then came to a conclusion. “How much money do you have with you?” he asked the student, who then produced three gold coins from his pocket.
The student feared that he would be forced to pay the innkeeper the last of his money, but the magistrate continued. “Please,” he said, “put all the coins in one of your hands.” The student did as he was asked. “Now, pour those coins into your other hand.” The student dumped the coins. With that, the magistrate dismissed the innkeeper and student’s case.
The innkeeper yelped in confusion, “How can this be settled? I’ve not been paid!”
“Yes, you have,” replied the magistrate. “The smell of your fish has been repaid by the sound of his money.”
The Japanese have many tales about this eighteenth century magistrate’s rulings, but the story of the stolen smell is the most often told. The student, despite not paying for the fish, was able to benefit from its scent, enjoying what amounted to an accidental gift from the innkeeper that added flavor to his bowl of rice. I feel similar to the student when enjoying the creative work that most inspires me. I’m working on my own projects, eating my humble bowl of rice, while reading, watching, and using the best that humankind has to offer. I’m awkwardly stringing together words into sentences, and then I get to have the wind knocked out of me by the first paragraph of Moby Dick. I get to be in that work’s presence, to sit under the window and steal the scent of the things I love, in order to improve what I make.
Stop and look around you. How much of your environment is created? How many things that surround you are designed by someone? From the wheat-pasted posters on the street, to the octagonal stop signs on the road; the overstuffed arms of the sofa where you sit, to the milky consistency of the page on which these words are printed, or maybe even the bezel of the device on which you’re reading this. All of these choices are designed, and they all coalesce into the experience of this moment. Most designers realize that much of our lives are designed, but we don’t often stop to think that the work’s widespread presence turns our design choices into significant contributions to the ambiance of life. The lesson of the innkeeper’s story is that the things we make transcend commerce and ownership – they are an experience to have rather than an object to own or a service to access. There is an aspect to the work’s value that can not be described in dollars and cents.
Typically, the success of a design is defined by the economics of the work. Good design is profitable, because finances help see that design endures. But as stated earlier, design is equal parts art and commerce. The dual nature implies that there are opportunities and values in the practice that transcend commerce to enter into a space of collaboration and value creation that can’t be captured on a ledger. Design seeks to create experiences in addition to being profitable, so the price and profit of the work represent only part of its value. I think the most fitting way to think about the best works of design are as gifts.
Lewis Hyde, in his landmark book The Gift, describes how art simultaneously exists in both the market and gift economies, and that the appropriate way to look at the work of a creative individual is as a gift. Hyde uses the qualities of a gift economy to articulate the attributes and value of the creative perspective and to assess the resonance and worth of the creative work once it is shared with others. There is value in a creative work to bond people and engender cohesion in communities, and thi
s worth can’t be fully articulated in strictly commercial terms. Instead, Hyde looks for lessons in gift economies to understand the patterns and opportunities of an arrangement where value is exchanged outside of finances.
The gift lives in the work, but also in the work’s creator. We typically describe someone’s talent by saying they have a gift for it, as if their eye for color or perfect pitch were blessings imbued from someone somewhere else. In our best, most creative moments, it feels as if we are hardly doing the work ourselves, achieving a sense of flow where time disappears, improvising becomes easy, and decisions seem instinctual, like some unknown force is guiding our steps. The ancient Greeks believed that their artists were guided by daemons – divine attendants who delivered creativity and insight to the artists waiting for them. The Romans later called their daemons geniuses. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert, in a lecture for the ted conference in 2009, said that the Greeks and Romans thought their artists were not geniuses, but rather had one – genius being something to be in the presence of, that could come and go as it willed, and not something contained in the artist themselves. The genius bestowed the gift of insight to the artist, and it became the artist’s responsibility to use the material provided by the genius.
The Shape of Design Page 7