Hello everyone And welcome to the switch statement podcast It's a podcast for investigations into miscellaneous tech topics
jon_raw:This is episode 10 in our series on the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Hey. John. How are you doing?
jon_raw:Hi Matt. I'm doing really well. How are you doing
matt_design_thinking_theory:Doing okay. Excited to talk about design theory. Design practice
jon_raw:design theme thinking. Yeah.
matt_design_thinking_theory:How do you think like a designer.
jon_raw:Well, for one thing, when someone gives you a problem, don't solve it.
matt_design_thinking_theory:You ignore all of the things that they just said
jon_raw:Yeah. Their feeble attempt at defining their own problem.
matt_design_thinking_theory:corner and just do what you think you should do.
jon_raw:Yep. This is how society should operate.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Dude dot Norman. He's the epitome of just like that, the grumpy curmudgeon. Like, you know, you, you know, he's the, the like wise elder. Like, you go over, you're like, oh, Mr. Norman, like
jon_raw:Please, sir.
matt_design_thinking_theory:serious problem. And he's like, he just like smacks You in the head. And he's like, that's not what you're trying to solve.
jon_raw:That's a symptom.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Dude, that's not the deeper problem.
jon_raw:he must be. Really?
matt_design_thinking_theory:you need to use double di. You just completely ignored the double diamond
jon_raw:And then he name drops all the members of standardization committees that he knows.
matt_design_thinking_theory:that he is in, in cahoots with. Um, okay, but so today, what is this, what is this chapter design thinking? You, you dropped it. This chapter, chapter is called Design Thinking.
jon_raw:Yeah, so I, I feel like I'll attempt to summarize this chapter and then we can discuss if I'm right or wrong. Uh, he basically goes through the theory of how to design, you know, you have some problem that you're attempting to solve. How do you actually redefine that problem so that it's hitting the heart of the matter, and then how do you go about implementing a solution for that problem, whether it be a, web application or a faucet or whatever, and it goes through, the theory of how to do that, which consists of a bunch of, you know, stuff that we can talk about. And then he goes through some examples of like putting that, that theory into practice and sometimes where it falls over. Why it falls over and pretty interesting.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm realizing that it's like a web app is almost certainly never the right answer to, uh, to a problem,
jon_raw:Yeah, as an engineer, it's a web app is rarely the right answer. It's just what we wanna do. You know, everything looks like a, a nail cuz we have a hammer.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Well, right. He goes into that in the, in the chapter where he talks about how like new features are only ever developed for two reasons. One is because one of your competitors did it, and then two is because of some new fangled technology. Uh, so I think that's all web apps ever.
jon_raw:Yep. Yeah. It's sad but true. But he talks about the two, like two big components to design thinking, human-centered design, which is ensuring the needs of humans are met. And, and in a bit we can talk about the four stages that you have to go through to implement that. And then he also talks about double diamond diverge, converge model of design,
matt_design_thinking_theory:yeah.
jon_raw:I just thought was an awesome name.
matt_design_thinking_theory:and, You, you refer to these as components and like I might nitpick that a little bit. It's like, I think it's, Yeah. it's like frameworks that you like in a certain context you might be able to deploy.
jon_raw:Yeah.
matt_design_thinking_theory:so, but yeah, let, let's, let's get into it. So he leads well. I know we were joking about the, the problem, but maybe, maybe it makes sense for us to just, um, explain his point there. Um, like in a, in kind of a non comedic way. Like why does, because he actually does, you know, you're, you were joking, but he does say he never solves the problem that the customer asks him to. And it's like, why is, why is he doing that? Like, is he just a jerk?
jon_raw:Yeah. Which actually, I mean, yeah, we were joking, but we experienced this all the time in our line of work. Where someone attempts to define a problem, even, even me or even an engineer might attempt to design a or define a problem, but they're actually missing a real underlying problem where that's the thing that should be tackled instead of this sort of higher level symptom of that underlying problem.
matt_design_thinking_theory:I think this is really kind of pithy, embodied in the whole like faster horse, uh, parable o of, uh, Ford, Right. It's like if, if I'd listened to what my customers wanted, I would've built a faster horse. Um, but then like, if we're picking that apart, it's like, The customer would come to Ford and was like, Hey, like I want a faster horse. But then Ford is like, well, actually, like what this person really wants is a, a, a faster way to get around.
jon_raw:Right.
matt_design_thinking_theory:and they're coming to me with like a, actually a solution, um, when in reality, like the deeper problem is that they just want to get from point A to point B and like the horse is in implementation detail.
jon_raw:Yes. Yeah, he has a section, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but he has a section about activities versus tasks and how, an activity might be something like getting food for the week. And each task might be like, drive to the store, get a shopping basket. You know, so tasks are kind of like components of a larger activity. And he mentions why Apple was so successful with a product like the iPod because they took the entire activity of like enjoying music, listening obviously, but also like exploring new music, trying to, attempting to find new music, organizing your music. Like all these things are part of that larger activity of enjoying music, and they kind of solved that entire activity slash problem. And that's part of the reason why that product was so successful.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Yeah. Yeah.
jon_raw:So it's, it is important. I mean, it, it, we were joking, but it is important to take that step back and think about, okay, what is, what is this demographic really trying to do? You know, what is the real activity they're trying to accomplish?
matt_design_thinking_theory:Right. So, so you had alluded to this, uh, double diamond, uh, Expand. Contract. Contract, was it?
jon_raw:Diverge, converge.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Converge. Um, I think, and I think like figuring out what problem you need to solve is like directly feeds into this approach. So, I don't know. Do you want to explain what, what that means? The diverge, converge.
jon_raw:Yeah, my understanding of the double diamond diverge, converge and he had a nice diagram that looked kind of like, uh, like the infinity symbol except, it was like two. Sort of squares. It's two diamonds, you know, hitting each other. And the left diamond is finding the right problem, which is basically an exercise where you ideate, you sort of, you know, you start with the original, what you think the problem is. You expand outwards to try to think of what the true problem might be, and then you sort of converge inwards on what the actual problem is, and then the right hand diamond. Is finding the right solution, which is a similar exercise where you know, you, you think you know what the right solution is. You try it out in the real world, maybe you like put it in front of real people, and then you realize what the flaws are and you go back to the drawing board. And it's this process where you're expanding outward, taking in new information, and then converging inwards towards a solution. And, uh, I think, I think the way it works is you kind of repeat this process over and over again. So you're, you know, you go through these phases where you're like ideating and then converging inwards, implementing, and then rinse and repeat.
matt_design_thinking_theory:It is interesting. I, it alludes to, you know, one of the important parts and, and maybe the human centered design is gonna be important enough to this conversation that we should just, uh, explain that and then we can kind of get back to. Discussing how they interrelate. Um, so let's, let's get into it because like I was gonna start referring to parts of the human-centered design.
jon_raw:well, we can at least define the four stages, I think. So four stages of human-centered design, observation generation, which generation could refer to like idea generation, prototyping, and then testing. he goes, he goes way deeper on each of these four stages throughout the chapter. So we'll allude to them frequently, I imagine.
matt_design_thinking_theory:It's interesting because I, I don't love testing as that fourth, fourth step. I, I kind of would prefer for that to be. It's interesting because I guess you're gonna have something where it's not like a fully released product yet, but you, you get it in front of users and then you observe again. And I guess in software, like these cycles are so tight, so it's like, not like we're gonna be, Yeah. we might have some, uh, beta tester group, but. Uh, you know, in a lot of cases we just put it out out there for everyone, especially if it's kind of smaller. Um, so it's kind of like observe, idea, prototype, deploy, and then observe again, and then that kind of completes the full cycle essentially. Um,
jon_raw:Yeah, I agree with you. Testing and, and maybe this is just our vernacular or our like language that we use, but testing to me refers to something else.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
jon_raw:But yeah, he's saying testing to refer to, like putting it in front of actual people, whether it's like an alpha group or a beta group, and, uh, a, i, I want to use the word observing, seeing how they react to the product, seeing if the product actually works for them.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Well, right, and I do think when you say observing, like I think it is actually the start of the next, you know, the next phase,
jon_raw:yes. Yeah. Which was interesting because he did, you know, he goes into describing, observing. And he has that whole bit about following people into the shower, which I was like, Don getting creepy. He's not afraid to get creepy. But the idea is that like as a user researcher, you really need to like understand your user. And he's saying follow them into the shower as sort of this absurd way to say like, Tru, you know, truly understand their life. Like you're gonna do a better job if you truly understand the day-to-day problems that they're facing. Um, and he calls it applied ethnography, uh, yeah. So, which ethnography? I looked up the word ethnography. It means like the scientific description of social customs. So anyway, applied ethnography is just like, Putting that into practice. Generally ethnography refers to like anthropology, where you're studying some historical group of people like the Romans or something, whereas he means applied ethnography to understand your user base basically. Um, so anyway, the whole reason I'm talking about this is there's that initial phase of observation before you've even started developing your product, uh, where you're trying to understand your user. And this obviously continues even throughout. Product development. But then there's this other stage of observation that's slightly different where your product is like out in the world and you're sort of observing how people are using your product, where the rough edges are, uh, and all those things. Um, and it's interesting. It's all, it all falls under the umbrella of observation, but it's kind of two different, like two different types of observation.
matt_design_thinking_theory:a hundred percent. And, and I think like to your point about anthropology, I think his point about, or the term applied ethnography is kind of like, We wanna zoom in on kind of the micro scale where it's like we are gonna talk about a very small group of people and we're gonna try to learn things that. Or, or learned behaviors that are evolving on short time scales, like over the course of a year or whatever. And you know, whereas like in the field, you wanna make these broad claims about large swaths of society and it's like, no, no, we need to sell this to teenage Japanese girls. So like, we're just gonna see like how their behaviors are developing in the last two, three years. Uh, so which, um, which is interesting.
jon_raw:Yeah.
matt_design_thinking_theory:There was, I did, there was a point at one point that I did wanna go back to about the double diamond design, which, you know, the human-centered design problem, like that whole design cycle, like I feel like that's pretty well understood. I am less familiar with the double diamond design. I'm curious, how do you do idea evaluat? Like problem evaluation? Like how do you know? Like when you're trying to winnow down the set of possible problems, how do you know if you're solving the right problem? Like, does, does he get into that?
jon_raw:Yeah, that is interesting. I I've seen it happen in the industry. Um, so we could talk about that a little bit. And it's just, I feel like this is especially easier once you have a product. And once you can put it in front of people, cuz you, you realize fairly quickly if you're, if you're solving the actual problems that users are having. You know, he talks a lot about idea generation. Um, and maybe this plays into this where when you're trying to figure out what the actual problem is, you go through this idea generation exercise where. You really, really broaden your scope. You're trying to come up with as many ideas as possible. You're trying to ignore constraints. You're questioning reality itself. Uh, so I think all these things probably helped in that, you know, expansion of the problem space to try to identify the right problem.
matt_design_thinking_theory:I think you do need to rely on information you've gathered from. Observation and I don't know if like observing users is part of that pro, that process. And I think it also is just like you have a group of people, decision makers, who are like, come to an agreement about, okay, now that we've generated this broad set of possible problems we could solve, now we focus on, what the right ones are.
jon_raw:Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure if he explicitly stated this in the chapter, but I really see these frameworks, which I really like the word you use frameworks as working in concert with one another, like you're constantly. You know, as part of the Double D diamond diverge, converge, you're going through this iteration cycle of observing, generating, prototyping, testing, and even in like the generation of ideas, you can use the double diamond diverge converge model in order to generate ideas. And it just feels like they're, they're very interrelated. Did,
matt_design_thinking_theory:Yeah, a hundred percent.
jon_raw:yeah, so he mentioned, let's see. I, I guess I already talked about the idea generation part of things. Oh, I skipped over, uh, design research versus marketing research, which I thought was an interesting section.
matt_design_thinking_theory:I'm glad you brought this up.
jon_raw:Yeah. Um, so I guess I'll, I'll start this, this topic off, uh, with an observation that he called out, which is design research, generally speaking, much more granular. You know, it's more of this applied ethnography. Uh, that we mentioned where you're really, really focused on probably a small group of people and you're really trying to like understand what makes them tick, whereas marketing research. You know, generally operates at a higher level. You know, you're trying to understand huge swaths of people and their buying habits and why they might purchase a product, why they might not purchase a product. Marketing research. Maybe this goes without saying, but it's, it's usually focused on people spending money. Um, so there, there's also two slightly different goals there. Um, and yeah, he, he also mentions things like big data, which have kind of revolutionized. At marketing research at least, uh, where, you know, today we have the capabilities of processing entire global scale data and sort of figuring out what huge, huge demographics, like understanding more about the habits of huge, huge demographics. Like this is why Facebook is such a valuable company cuz they have all of this data, they have all this understanding of why people might make certain decisions, which helps these marketing researchers sell products.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Right. And you really do need this aggregate understanding because you need to come up with something that you're gonna be able to show to 10 million people, uh, you know, in display advertising campaign on. You know, on the internet, so you, you need to understand people in the aggregate. But it is funny though that you say that because I guess we've learned that there is more and more like micro-targeting. Um, like I remember a blog post of a guy who, like, he literally wound up targeting a single person he was able to create like this email list, uh, that met the minimum size, and then he was able to show ads to a specific person. So, you know, we might, we might wind up with a world where, you know, the data is so customized and, you know, uh, I haven't heard about this, but like, AI generated ads like, I'm like, I'm a little nauseous just saying that phrase, but like you could imagine something where you could give a person a tail completely tailored ad to write to them.
jon_raw:Actually this leads into another part of this section, which is a huge part of our business AB testing,
matt_design_thinking_theory:Mm. Right.
jon_raw:which is essentially where you take little micro variations of. Uh, you know, like, let's say a digital ad, for example, you know, you might have a digital ad that's like a picture of a beautiful person smoking a cigarette or something. Um, and in one version of the ad there's, I don't know, smoke coming out of the tip of this cigarette, but then you might try a version of the ad where there's, you know, no smoke coming out or something. This is like the worst example of all time. But anyway, you can show different people, uh, one ad and the other ad and you can compare their performance. This is the whole purpose of AB testing. So you know that the ad that performs better has attributes that are evidently, you know, more likable by your, your demographic that you're targeting. So you can sort of lean into that, those things that made that ad better. So going back to your point about ai, I can imagine AI being able to do these super tight loops where it's like, oh, let's use AI to generate some crazy image. And do little micro variations, show it to different people in the demographic and just very quickly updating those images to try to get this like, you know, hyper specific ad that works super duper well
matt_design_thinking_theory:Do, we're gonna wind up with a, with an image that like, you know, I feel like this has been the plot of multiple movies where it's like an image that actually just like hacks the human visual system and like, it, it doesn't look, you know, to look at it like you wouldn't even, it just looks like a jumble of pixels,
jon_raw:It's like a magic eye.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Yeah. Yeah. I didn't have anything else from the theory side. He has a, he goes into a bunch more, uh, on the practice side.
jon_raw:yeah, yeah. We're sort of reaching the point where theory and practice start butting heads. So I think this is a decent, uh, stopping point.
matt_design_thinking_theory:Yeah. So maybe we leave it there and then you can tune in, in, two weeks and. We'll talk all about, uh, the practice of, design
jon_raw:indeed, I, I look forward to it. Tune in for the epic battle between practice and theory.