(Daddy shovels) snow day

IMG_2264, originally uploaded by jseiden.

Nice surprise on a Thursday morning.

Announcing LUXr NYC

I’m very excited to announce today the first LUXr NYC. The program, founded by Janice and Jason Fraser has been a hit in San Francisco. Now it’s coming to New York.

The Lean UX Residency is a 10-week user-experience program for early-stage startups. One day a week for 10 weeks, five companies come to our studio to work on their products with the help of expert designers. The program costs less than $10k.

Design is unfamiliar to most founding teams and too important (and costly) to outsource. Most early stage companies spend less than $25k on design prior to launch, and yet it’s widely cited as a strategic differentiator.

LUXr gives teams structured time for user experience, aligns the team around solid principles of customer development, and embeds good user experience thinking into the company. The focus is on doing the work together and learning to do it better.

Sound interesting? Learn more here…

Agile UX? Lean UX? Customer Development? A multiple discovery moment

Steven Johnson writes in Where Good Ideas Come From about the notion of the adjacent possible. Coined by Stuart Kauffman, this phrase describes the idea that at any given moment, the game board of life allows certain moves. As civilation has developed, certain ideas come into being, founded on the ideas that came before them. This opens up new moves on the game board. The adjacent possible explains why no-one invented a car in the 1600′s–it wasn’t just that the technology didn’t exist. The basic conceptual building blocks weren’t there either. This idea also explains the notion of multiple discovery. (The most famous example: calculus was “invented” by Newton and Leibniz at roughly the same time.)

I’m telling you this because we’re at a multiple discovery moment as we speak.  The time has arrived that three communities–the business, design, and technology communities–have independently discovered the same thing. That the best way to build new technology products, services, and the businesses that deliver them is to work in small, cross-functional, highly collaborative teams. To use lightweight, informal methods. To use rapid cycles of designing, making, and validating in order to test and learn and improve. To focus on the customer. There’s no agreed-upon name for this way of working yet, but you hear the different communities talking about it in their own terms: Agile Software Development; User Experience Design; Customer Development; Agile UX; Lean Startup; Lean UX. Read the rest of this entry »

Organizational Culture, Don Norman, and Design

I was talking with a friend of mine recently–let’s call him Bob–who is a partner in a design firm. Bob was telling me about a time that he was pitching a project to a big company in partnership with a management consulting firm. During the pitch, a partner from the consulting firm looked at the client and asked Bob, “Hey Bob. Tell the client how you think they will screw this project up.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ton Kiang

IMG_2100, originally uploaded by jseiden.

A photo from Ton Kiang in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I ate this meal ten years ago, and I ate it again the other night. Remarkable that it remains as wonderful in real life as it was in my memory. Prawns with house-made rice wine sauce and pickled vegetables. Pea shoots with garlic. Lovely.

Vicksburg Street

Vicksburg, originally uploaded by jseiden.

I’m back in San Francisco today, where I had the chance to walk around my old neighborhood. It’s always strange and wonderful to come back here. The things that are seductive about the place work such a strong magic on me–the light, the landscape, the architecture, the exotic Dr. Suess trees.

The sense that everything is heightened and stimulating was part of what I loved about it here–and part of what made it hard too. It’s like a radio station that only plays one song and it’s loud and happy and sweet. You sometimes want a slow song, or a quiet one. Or to just turn off the music. And then you maybe start to think: what’s wrong with me? Everyone else seems to like this music.

Anyway, I was up early and took a walk around Noe Valley–got coffee at what used to be Spinelli’s and is now Bernie’s. Sat on a sunny bench and watched Friday morning go by. The grocery store there is now a Whole Foods. Phoenix Books has moved down the street. The sushi place has changed hands they tell me.

Walking up Vicksburg street this morning, I remembered making this same walk, up Vicksburg to Elizabeth where we had an apartment on the 3rd floor of this yellow building. One day there were avocados (avocados!) covering the sidewalk, spilled from the tree across the street. Avocados grow on trees! And another time pulling up in front of the house to see my wife and daughter in the back of an ambulance, about to pull away for the hospital. They were fine, but the ghost of that ambulance was still parked in front of the building today when I walked by.

After I took this picture, I saw a person pass in front of the big bay window in the corner. We never kept curtains on the window either– the light up there was too wonderful. And I guess we thought no-one could see in, or would be interested in looking in on the dailyness that would one day become these ghosts.

My cat fell out of that bay window once. Afterwards, she was fine too.

Elysian Fields, Sept 30

A favorite band. My favorite people. Lovely venue. Beautiful flyer.

Last swim

A quiet morning on Cape Cod. A pond hidden in the National Seashore. Hard to leave this place for another year.

All of Me

Q: What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians?
A: A drummer.

We like to put people into boxes–roles that are defined by simple rules. Like: a musician is someone who makes “complete” music: melody and harmony and rhythm. If a person doesn’t make melody or harmony, how can he be a musician?

Designers? We like to say that we are problem solvers, but the larger culture thinks that we make things beautiful. Read the rest of this entry »

What can you see?

We are often frustrated by journalists who write about our specialties. The things that seem obvious or important to us as specialists are often missing from the coverage of topics we care deeply about. Ever read a review of your favorite movie, or your favorite band? Mostly, it’s not a good experience.

Bike Hugger posted recently about the poor coverage on DesignBoom and other design blogs of the Victor Bike concept by Christophe Robillard. (You can read my comment here.)

I think about this problem frequently, because it is often the case that my own work is invisible to non-specialists. I design the behavior of systems. How can you see that? How can I show it? It’s a problem I haven’t solved, and one that hurts my bottom line: just take a look at my portfolio. Do you think it does a good job of communicating the work I do? Other types of designers can showcase gorgeous hero shots of sexy product designs. But me? Ecology models, behavior models, wireframes. Not so sexy. Or even so comprehensible.

Traditionally trained designers say that you can’t be a designer if you can’t draw, because visual communication is so important to our field. Well that cuts two ways. On the one hand, that training can develop an unbalanced expertise: a training that promotes visual literacy beyond all else. When that happens, you get conversations like the one at DesignBoom regarding the victor bike: so focused on the visual as to be completely inane. On the other hand, it ignores the work done by designers that work in difficult-to-visualize media. Work done by specialists like me can remain invisible because it is so unconducive to visual representation.

Or maybe I just need to work on my drawing skills