Andrew Benedict-Nelson: What are some of the things you have learned about the changing way people perceive insurance, particularly across generations?

Brian Winters: The main difference you see across generations is that if you go back just one generation, insurance was mainly about relationships, both with your insurance agent and with the agency. But with the ease of purchasing insurance online increasing, you now have a generation coming up where technology and self-service is their preferred method. They don’t necessarily need to have that relationship. Some people may recall what that relationship between a customer and the insurance agent was like – I recall it – but people much younger than me might not.

They have the same needs, though. There is a lot of security that comes from having that expert come to your house and look it over personally. So how do I get that same feeling from a website? How do I get the same sense of security and feeling that this company is going to be there? Because when an insurance event happens, that’s when those emotional pieces will kick in. They don’t think about it when they’re shopping, especially when they’re younger. They think nothing will ever happen to them, so they just get the basic package.

The challenge for insurance companies is how they tap into those emotions of safety and security and allaying people’s fears through the different experiences that they offer through online, mobile, etc.

Jason Ulaszek: The other thing the insurance industry is realizing is that there is a greater and greater degree of complexity around their products and the situations they are designed for. The average person could go out and purchase auto insurance with a pretty solid degree of understanding. But when it comes to something like homeowners insurance, the level of complexity you need to answer the questions to arrive at a quote is pretty high. You need to know the kinds of materials your home is made of, for instance. It’s not necessarily the case that you can just set up a website and people will come buy it. And is that even the right thing to do?

So it’s completely unlike, say, setting up a site where you sell a bunch of books online and then sequentially add other products to it. There, people just pick the number and kind of products they want and check out. With insurance, people may have many more questions and needs that need to be discovered and understood before they click a button to buy.

BW: Think back to when agents were going to people’s homes. Even if you just walked into the agent’s office in your community, you might say, “I live on this street in this area,” and they would generally have known how old the house was or what kind of materials you might have had in it. That was part of the tacit knowledge of the agent. Once you try to move it to a Web experience, many companies are seeing that there is a big disconnect in that area.

JU: One of the main things insurance companies are missing is that there is a whole emotional component to this purchasing process. If I have an experience on your website that is difficult, frustrating, or concerning to me in some way, I also begin to worry about your ability to take care of me.

Why do people need or want insurance? Are they driven by fear? Are they driven by trust? If those feelings aren’t being addressed by the website, they may start to wonder what the brand is really doing for them in the long run. In some cases, insurance companies may need to just make things less complex so people can use self-service without frustration. In other cases, they may need to collect some information online and then hold people’s hands the rest of the way.

But I think they are often missing the deeper motivations these human beings have to protect themselves. They’re not being included in the design. The emotions induced by the design and messaging are mismatched from how people feel when they buy this particular product.

ABN: What are some of the particular ways in which user-experience design methods contributed to your understanding of this subject?

JU: We did some ethnographic field research where we went out and met with a variety of consumers, both existing customers and prospects. We were trying to get an understanding not just of the particular product we were working on, but the overarching behaviors and attitudes toward insurance shopping itself.

In my mind, two things stick out. One of the things we heard was how much of a role people’s friends and family members have on their decision-making process. People ask each other, “Do you have Allstate? Geico? Progressive? How much are you paying?” They know those other people’s situations – house or no house, kids or no kids – and they start to think about it.

So as we start to see the advent of social media becoming more and more a part of our daily lives, we need to think about how that may impact the decision-making process. There is definitely going to be some sort of convergence between social media and the insurance decision-making process down the road.

BW: WIthout having an agent there, people are looking for validation in many different ways. When we talked to people about insuring their homes, we heard a lot of comments about how people would love to know what kind of insurance their neighbors have. What level of coverage do they have? Do they know something that I don’t know? They tend to trust people they know or people who are like them more than all of the information they think they can glean from tools online. It’s not as simple as going online and getting the “facts.”

It also often comes down to what the claims experience was like – not just how much money you are owed for what, but how it was handled and how fast you get the money you are owed.

ABN: So my hypothesis is that the challenges the insurance industry is facing is another version of the problems facing government. People understand the basic idea that they are paying to be kept safe from everything from crime to natural disasters to economic instability. But they seem to really distrust the mechanism. What do you think are some of the lessons we could learn from how people relate to insurance that apply to how they relate to society?

JU: My mind immediately goes to people’s desire to have very situational examples. In both cases they ask, “How do I know what I really need?” If I get in a car accident, how does it affect my insurance? If I have a driver in my household who just turned 16, what is the best thing I can do to protect myself? How do I understand the appropriate level of insurance? How would I know if I am overinsured or underinsured relative to my peers? People are influenced by the people and the things around them. How do you bring some of those to bear to make decisions more clearly visible?

BW: There are subconscious drivers that need to be more deeply understood so we can reach a satisfying design solution. There is a lot of time spent developing tools to make it easier for users to find things or give them more information. That doesn’t really address those deeper needs.

So when we think about society, what are those deep needs people have? They don’t just need services. They don’t just need Social Security. What is the deeper motivation? Because we’ve found that that’s where much of our decision-making takes place. When we talk about design research practices, I’m not sure if we have a really strong sense of what that stuff is. I think there are opportunities to have a deeper understanding.

ABN: So based on what you say, it sounds as if people’s feelings about their income tax rates are probably pretty similar to their insurance rates. They know how much they pay, they can look up their returns, but it’s hard to deeply understand what it is and isn’t buying because they don’t have a lot of comparison experience. They don’t know what they might receive in a society where they pay a 10 percent higher rate – they only know they would give up more of their income.

JU: There are other interesting parallels there, such as the frequency with which people make the decisions. When decisions are made infrequently, the important of influencers, context, and decision-making tools is much greater than if you make a decision frequently. So I pay my income taxes once a year. Tax law may change, or I may have a life-changing event – those are the sorts of things that would cause me to change the way I file. You see something similar with 401(k) contributions and planning. These are all things where you infrequently encounter decision points. But when you do, they are so important that you need the right information at the right time in the right context so you can properly make the decisions when they do come up.

The other parallel I would draw is what Intuit is doing for personal finance with Mint.com, which addresses how you start to use the aggregate information, almost helping to complete people’s thoughts. They are presenting information, decision points, and insights that really were not available before. Those help inform individuals’ behaviors, and that is the same way that insurance quote tools are headed. I may be in Florida, and the tool may take into account the average number of hurricanes that happen in Florida to help me make a decision about flood insurance.

BW: It would be great if you had a tool like Mint as you went through major events in life. Let’s say you just had two kids – it might tell you that you need to be saving X amount of money or looking for a certain kind of insurance coverage. Right now you may get some advice from a friend or read a magazine article telling you where you’re supposed to be. But imagine if life were more like Mint, where you received warnings in advance of an event. I’m not talking about the basics like saving for your kids’ college – I’m talking about real-time comparison of your data with national benchmarks in various areas to help you make better decisions. You could also imagine those kinds of tools informing how much we pay in taxes and what we get for it.

ABN: You’ve talked about some of the dissatisfaction that the upcoming generation feels with the system of insurance as users. What parallels do you see in the problems those users are having with government and other complex systems in society?

BW: Before social media, we talked to plenty of people about things like having a kid, but those were always people within your own social circle. We didn’t have any way of aggregating that information. Social media might be able to do that, but right now we mostly use it for fun, sharing photos of you and your kid, tweeting that you’re going to Starbucks, that sort of thing. We’re not aggregating society-level information that we could use to our advantage, using that data in addition to our own social circles. If there were this sort of “society program,” what else could we extract out of it? Right not we don’t go deep enough.

JU: I think it depends on your perspective. I recently became a father. I’ve seen things like my wife post a status update on Facebook that may be looking for feedback about certain situations. “Has anyone used cloth diapers before?” It’s sort of like “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” – you poll the audience. These tools that we have, and that will continue to be available, will only give us a stronger ability to get that sort of pulse on various situations.

BW: You’re right. Now that I think about it, there is probably more of that going on, but it has to do with your perspective.

ABN: A lot of young people now don’t view their long-term situation as being as stable as their parents did. So they may be less inclined to buy insurance products designed for the long term. Doesn’t that also seems to be a problem when you are thinking about design in society or government?

JU: The pace of change that people are coming to expect is much greater than it has been in history. Think about Twitter – you throw out a hashtag, see it trend, and suddenly you are part of a movement. People are aggregating more quickly. That starts to impact the way changes occur within society.

BW: It impacts your value matrix too. I was recently at a design research conference where a speaker was talking about a client in the hotel industry. The client was saying that he knew the people who stayed at his hotel, that they were always the same. But the designer pointed out that five years ago, that customer didn’t have a smart phone. Now the matrix he uses to judge his experience is very different from what it was in the past.

You can say something similar about the upcoming generation. They will have different expectations of society than their parents or grandparents did. Those who are trying to improve government or society will need to understand how that value matrix has evolved and how it is going to evolved.

ABN: So how do we actually do that? How do policymakers plan for that kind of change?

JU: Well you have to embrace the change. You have to have a vision for the long term. You have to continually measure and refine. You have to look at society as an iterative development process. You could start by saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had one percent unemployment?” and then design toward that. But there are going to be many different factors you are going to need to measure as you go along and be transparent about your plan and the measurements you are using.

BW: I think that even more important is organizing a structure that can react to those measurements. If you have an antiquated structure that is used to servicing an old value matrix, you are going to have to mirror the kinds of changes that are happening out there. To put it in development terms, government is going to need much more agile development. You could call it smaller government. You could call it efficiency. You could call it whatever you want. But you need to be able to react and service people in the right way.

ABN: It seems to me that, given the scenario you describe, a choice between one party that represents “more government” and another party that represents “less government” is not particularly useful. That’s like asking whether you want a small or large company in order to achieve a particular business goal. It may be true that you need a small company or a large company in the end, but that’s not the first thing you decide on.

JU: You have to describe and understand what you actually want to achieve. You have to be nimble in your approach.

BW: And why isn’t government being nimble or reacting? Well, it has companies like ExxonMobil spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on influencing people’s decisions. That’s not going to help you get to your vision. It’s going to block it. So if you’re talking about agile development, I don’t need a whole bunch of stakeholders getting in my face not adding any value. I need to clear the decks and do the job as efficiently as possible. It seems like the model has been hijacked in a lot of respects.

ABN: That seems like a reasonable account from the control or designer position. What do you think can be done by users to make the system better?

BW: I think it is organically happening. You’ve got this Occupy Wall Street thing going on. You have video cameras everywhere. Things are being exposed more and more. We’re starting to have more conversations amongst ourselves. People are already starting a two-way conversation out of their living rooms instead of a one-way conversation from giant media corporations. They are seeing something come over the boob tube and then deciding to tweet about it or comment on it. That’s how you’ll have more user control and user need driving it. The social networking aspect of our culture is really just beginning. Hopefully it will help us transform things the way we want to transform them.

JU: These tools we have are turning everyone into a potential reporter or mouthpiece or communicator. It creates this shorter-term need for instant gratification. Think about the number of times you go to CNN and it’s not a CNN reporter, but an iReporter. Think about the number of times you are getting footage from the first person who happened to be on the scene.

BW: It’s still in its infancy. People are still trying to figure it out. I’m thinking of the bad examples, like flash mobs. Imagine if there were a flash mob for good. Imagine if there were flash mobs to help homeless people or to assist after an accident.

If people can organize something like Occupy Wall Street, what other kinds of things can we do to help ourselves and empower ourselves? Let’s not wait for the government to get agile. Let’s create something more positive and more valuable for us. But I’m not sure people think that way. We need more examples to inspire people.

I imagine something like people standing in a giant square and voting on an issue that is of concern to everyone. Imagine that it’s done in a way that is totally transparent and that you can see on a giant screen. Imagine applying that to something like a decision to go to war. Want to go to war? Send a text message to everyone. Of course you’re assuming it doesn’t get hacked by some nefarious entity.

But when I imagine that kind of massive societal collaboration, I think some real good could come of it. It could empower us in ways that we are not currently empowered by voting because of all the trickery of requiring photo IDs and redistricting and other problems.

ABN: You often hear a criticism that goes, “So many people vote in American Idol, why don’t they vote in elections?” That’s always struck me as a little unfair, because it’s actually much easier and intuitive to vote for American Idol. And you know your vote will have equal value to everyone else’s. You can’t say that about a presidential election, given the electoral college system.

BW: Right, people feel disempowered. They feel like they don’t matter.

JU: There is a barrier for having things that are entertainment-related that is much lower than the barrier for influencing things like politics or society. What if you were able to vote for elections in the exact same manner as saving someone on Dancing With the Stars? What would be the impact or the upswing in new or additional voters?

BW: We should run that experiment.

JU: It’s hard to change the viewpoint on an organization. But when push comes to shove, that’s the expectation of the upcoming generation. Why do I have to go a mile away in the freezing cold to my poll location? Why do I need to get off work early to use this antiquated piece of technology? Why I can’t text this in?

BW: There are plenty of processes online where you do something once, you’re validated, and then you’re done. You should be able to vote online.

JU: So it seems like society is leaving the Millennial generation so far behind that they may be disenfranchised because it becomes so difficult for them to participate. They have a different viewpoint on how participation should occur.

ABN: So it seems like we’ve come back to the same problem facing insurance companies. There are ways of making choices much more efficient, but you can’t simply implement them overnight. What do you do in the meantime? How do you effectively manage the transition?

JU: I think the most important thing is connecting the user to the people with the most context or the greatest ability to answer their question. Regardless of what you enable through technology, if you are able to give people the support they need to move forward to the next step in the process, you’ll solve the problem. But you can’t leave them staring at a wall.

BW: That comes from a deep understanding of users – not just what we think they need, but really going out there, understanding what they say, and then reflecting that back to them.

Genus: Glyph

Species: Action 

Text: 1. a. delineate, depict; b. to represent in words: state; c. to give or convey a true impression of: show, reflect; d. to make known the opinions or feelings of (oneself); e. to give expression to the artistic or creative impulses or abilities of (oneself); f. to represent by sign or symbol: symbolize. 2. a. to force out (as the juice of a fruit) by pressure; b. to subject to pressure so as to extract something. … 4. to cause (a gene) to manifest its effects in the phenotype; also: to manifest or produce (a character, molecule, or effect) by a genetic process. (Merriam-Webster)

Interpretation: Stable relationships between individuals rely on a constant sharing of feelings so that in a time of crisis, expression comes naturally; relationships between companies and their customers are not so different. As those who work in the social media space have learned, organizations need to provide forums in which users can express themselves. They can also use those same forums to responsibly express the company’s point of view.

We often hear that in today’s business scene, emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence. But when one looks at the full range of emotions, “intelligence” almost seems like a misnomer. How often are our expressions read by others despite our best efforts to hide them? Indeed, how often do we need someone else to tell us just what it is we are expressing in the first place? No doubt emotional intelligence encompasses all of these subtleties, but if so, it must connect with places in ourselves beyond the ego where we normally imagine intelligence to reside. 

A similar argument can be made for organizations in the digital age. In an era ruled by the concept of cognitive intelligence, a company or institution’s decision-making capacity could be thought to reside with the CEO, the board, the home office. Decisions would be made with the best available data, and then they would be expressed through means such as marketing and public relations to the rest of the world. Today, however, decisions need to be made with the speed and sophistication of the reassuring word or the knowing glance.

Leaders do not just need to be making decisions with the best available data from their users; the empathetic relationship with the user needs to be a part of the total decision-making faculty. Expression is key to making this happen.

Commentary: “Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.” -William James 

Connections: Connect at a higher register. Express can be the difference between Transition and the sustained change of Transform or Transcend.

Genus: Glyph

Species: Action

Text: 1. to acquire knowledge of (a subject) or skill in (an art, etc.) as a result of study, experience, or teaching. Also, to commit to memory (passages of prose or verse) … 3. to acquire knowledge of (a fact); to become acquainted with or informed of (something) (Oxford English Dictionary)

Interpretation: To judge by how often we talk about “learnings,” it may seem that those of us who are committed to user experience design judge our mental abilities by the number of facts we have accumulated. In point of fact, though, our methods embody the opposite assumption.

No matter how familiar clients may be with a certain type of customer, they cannot afford not to ask them about their user experience. This applies to designers as well – if someone tells you they already know everything they need to know about how users behave on the Web, they’re not doing their job right. A corollary of this idea is that Manifest and its personnel have something new to learn from every client. That’s why we build user-centered design into every solution; your problem might sound familiar, but the answer is likely to surprise if we go about getting it the right way.

The best in the business know that to truly learn, we must often forget. We empty ourselves of preconceptions in order to accept the real learning. Coaching ourselves and our clients, we’ll say we must see the world through the eyes of a child at times.  User-centered design provides a method for putting aside those assumptions in an orderly way, then learning anew.

Connections: The essence of Transfer. Usefully contrasted with Understand.

Commentary: “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” -Socrates

As the Insight Labs team recently discovered, NASA has these in spades: a fantastic brand, international prestige, connections across the scientific community, and unique identification with some of humanity’s boldest aspirations. Yet they still have trouble getting respect on Capitol Hill.

Jeff Leitner is Dean of the Labs, the nonprofit initiative housed at Manifest. He recently spoke with InnovationNewsDaily reporter Jeremy Hsu about the strategic session the group convened at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Click here to read the full article at MSNBC.

“If they were in Silicon Valley, we’d be worshiping them,” Leitner told reporter Jeremy Hsu. “But they’re NASA, so we’re cutting their budget.”

Because of their magnificent brand, widespread legitimacy, and other resources, NASA can start conversations that others can’t. As a Lab participant asked, if NASA invited Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos to a conference on innovation, would they come?

“The NASA representatives said they didn’t know,” writes Hsu. “‘Of course (they’d come), you’re NASA!’ Leitner and his colleagues responded.”

The Labsters have many more ideas about where NASA can head next. Check out their work on the Insight Labs web site here.

Genus: Glyph

Species: Action

Text: “1. [with obj.] (of a surface or body) throw back (heat, light, or sound) without absorbing it; (of a mirror or shiny surface) show an image of; embody or represent (something) in a faithful or appropriate way; (of an action or situation) bring (credit or discredit) to the relevant parties; [no obj.] bring about a good or bad impression of. 2. [no obj.] think deeply or carefully about.” (New Oxford American Dictionary)

Interpretation: Mirrors have become so common in modern life that looking in one too often is taken as a symbol of superficiality or vanity. But imagine that you are a person of a previous era looking in a mirror for the first time in your life. Would you be pleased? Surprised? Disgusted? Or would there be a basic shock in apprehending yourself that comes before any of those particular emotions?

Remember those feelings, because on a grander scale they are what companies are experiencing now. The tools provided by the Internet as well as accompanying disciplines like user experience research are allowing many organizations to truly see themselves for the first time. Many are reacting to what they see recklessly, fleeing the mirror altogether or making radical changes without seriously studying their appearance. Others are becoming so absorbed in the information gained from the mirror that they forget that the reflection is merely a tool to improve their relations with the world.

Through many years of mirror-making, Manifest has learned how to help clients responsibly work with with users to reflect upon who they are and where they are going. Accustomed to the mirror, companies and organizations can make minor changes in real time rather than regularly bringing themselves in for a costly makeover. More profoundly, they can use the mirror as an object with which to begin that deeper process of reflection in which they reconsider who they are and what they could be.

Commentary: “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are!” -Alice, “Through the Looking-Glass,” Lewis Carroll

Connections: Reflect is one of the faculties that differentiates Transition and Transform. Fixation on Reflect can prevent Transcend or Transfuse. A careful study of oneself through Reflect can lead to a more responsible form of Express.

Now User Experience Director Carolyn Chandler and company founder Jim Jacoby are teaming up with a new educational venture to offer even more ways for the world to learn about user-centered design.

The Manifesters are offering a course through Code Academy, a new company helping people with startup concepts connect to the programming and design skills they need to make them happen. Chandler is serving as the lead instructor for a intensive 12-week Web Design course built around user-experience design principles. Jacoby will serve as a mentor to those enrolled in the course.

Skills taught in the class will include user modeling techniques, visual design with tools like Visio and Photoshop, and front-end development using HTML5 and CSS. But participants will not just leave with some knowledge and a new line for their resume; the Code Academy class is designed to help entrepreneurs actually build their product alongside peers and mentors.

“You’ll leave with something real that you’ve created, something that’s usable by people,” Chandler said.

Chandler is well-known as a leader in the field of user-centered design because of her book A Project Guide to UX Design, which she co-authored with Russ Unger. The Code Academy class coincides with the second edition of the book.

While she may be an authority in the industry, Chandler said she will also come to the course prepared to learn.

“I get so many new ideas from students,” Chandler said in a recent interview about the new version of the Project Guide. “Interacting with students gets me in touch with new ideas and pushes me to understand things about the field that I didn’t know before.”

Since it was founded by Neal Sales-Griffin and Mike McGee earlier this year, Code Academy has seen great success teaching entrepreneurs development tools like Ruby on Rails. Partnering with Manifest to build a course focused on front-end design was a logical next move.

Chandler said she admires the principles Code Academy hopes to build into every course: make it real, make it right, make it matter.

Those standards are similar to those Manifest strives to achieve with every client through the user-centered designed process. As it’s put in the Code Academy course description, “a great user experience is about more than a product’s pixels. It’s about the need it addresses, how it makes users feel, and what motivates them to use it.”

The Web Design course will take place in downtown Chicago. It begins on January 9 and lasts until March 28, but the enrollment deadline is 11:59 p.m. on December 10. To secure your place, visit http://codeacademy.org/programs#design.

This truth was recently reiterated by Daniel Ash of Chicago Public Media in an interview with the staff of Insight Labs, the non-profit initiative conceived at Manifest. Ash, the public media group’s Vice President of Strategic Communication, was one of several leaders who participated in a Lab considering how the well-known radio station could adapt to the digital space. Ash also considered the challenges of being a local station that must simultaneously collaborate and compete with a national public media brand.

Among Ash’s insights into branding was the idea that for a media organization, “the brand” often consists of whatever was just broadcast. In his words: “When ‘This American Life’ is on, we’re ‘This American Life’ and everything that represents to people.” In fact, that principle of immediacy of brand is true for many kinds of businesses and other entities. It is our experience as users that sticks with us; advertising is just an elaborate preview or reminder of that experience.

As users’ interactions with companies grow more dynamic and complex, leaders need to more fully understand what users’ most recent brand experience was like. “The brand” isn’t a set of slogans or your meticulously trademarked image sets – it’s out there, with your users. Listen to them, and you can hear where it needs to go next.

Image: Giotto, “St. Francis Preaching to the Birds,” 1297-1299

On that date (11/11/11) at 11:11 a.m., people from throughout the world (including more than a dozen Manifesters) will gather for a mysterious happening hosted by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. A children’s author, NPR contributor, and all-around creative type, Krouse Rosenthal will also debut her film “The Beckoning of Lovely” at gatherings throughout the world at that same moment.

The story of “The Beckoning of Lovely” began in 2008, when Krouse Rosenthal released a short film on YouTube called “17 things I made.” After introducing viewers to creations as varied as her children, her children’s books, a song, and a sandwich, she invited them to join her in Millennium Park on 8/8/08 to make “a cool 18th thing.”

It was a party – and it ended up including hundreds more people than Krouse Rosenthal initially expected. Together they did all sorts of things, from blowing soap bubbles to handing out flowers to strangers to splashing through the park’s fountains together. Krouse Rosenthal hosted similar “Beckoning of Lovely” events on 9/9/09 and 10/10/10. The film, which she describes  as an “interactive love letter to the universe,” will bring the tradition to a new level.

The group of Manifest employees trekking to the park tomorrow will be led by Helen Tan, Senior Associate for Talent Services. Tan said she has no idea just what will happen at 11:11, “but it will be cool to be a part of no matter what kind of activities there are.”

“It’s beautiful and inspiring,” she said.

More than most, Manifesters like Tan appreciate the new kinds of gatherings that digital technology makes possible. But she said she feels there is a deeper sense in which “The Beckoning of Lovely” and work at Manifest are similar.

“She and the people there are creating something out of nothing,” Tan said. “The people who work here do that every day, whether it’s a website or a mobile app or something else.”

Company founder Jim Jacoby said that it’s the way Krouse Rosenthal’s projects remind us of our ability to create that makes them so life-affirming.

“It doesn’t just make us happy,” he said. “We need it. We flock to it.”

To find out how you can join the Manifest flock at the event in Millennium Park or attend a viewing of “The Beckoning of Lovely” where you live, visit Krouse Rosenthal’s website at http://www.whoisamy.com.

Image of Cloud Gate (a.k.a. “The Bean”) courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Chandler, Manifest’s User Experience Director, recently sat down with Andrew Benedict-Nelson, Content Director of Insight Labs, to talk about the book. Their conversation below explores what readers can expect from the new edition, the ways the UX field has changed in the past few years, and how writing and teaching work relates to projects for clients at Manifest. 

ABN: What were you hoping to accomplish with the first edition of A Project Guide to UX Design and how do you think it has done since then?

CC: Manifest had hired a bunch of people who had come out of places like DePaul’s Master’s program in Human-Computer Interaction. But they hadn’t really worked as UX professionals on a project for a client. After they had the chance to work on a few, we asked them what it was like to move from the academic world of UX to doing work for clients. They said there were a number of things that surprised them, which formed the basis for the book.

In my mind this book was a way of providing a bridge between academic UX and actual practice. There is a pretty good focus on team dynamics, understanding expectations of your role, different approaches you might come across, as well as the various tools of UX.

There were two major audiences in my mind. One was students; the other was professionals in other fields who understood the value of UX and wanted to use some of its methods in their projects. That is why the subtitle is “For user experience designers in the field or in the making.”

In general, I think that book has achieved our goals. It is frequently listed as one of the books people should read when they are trying to get into the field, along with The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett and Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. That is just amazing to me, since the two of them are people who have really defined the field.

ABN: In the weeks or months right after the first edition was published, did you have any changes you wanted to make right away?

CC: There were not that many things I wanted to change, which surprised me – having not written a book before, I expected that there would be detailed criticism.

We did hear a number of people who said they were surprised that there wasn’t more actual design in it – we talk about the tools and talk about projects, but not so much on actual design. So in the new edition I’m including a new section on design principles, covering it in a broad way that will provide references for further reading in visual design, interaction design, and psychology. Russ will go into further depth on facilitation, sketching, and Content Strategy. I’ll be adding some details on remote user research and lean UX, and we plan a collaborative chapter on mobile and gestural interfaces.

ABN: Have there been any other unexpected reactions to the first book?

CC: There were some seasoned people who read it and thought it was too basic for them. But we did try to make clear that it was a guide for people who were entering the field. Other than that, it’s been very positive. One unexpected use has been that I have been able to use it to explain things in greater detail to clients. That’s been wonderful! 

But there are a number of new philosophies out there now about things like “lean UX.” That’s the idea of not focusing too much on documentation and really emphasizing results. There were a number of people in the field who thought UX was becoming too much about charging clients X per wireframe and not enough on results for users. 

The book’s also formed a good basis for a lot of the teaching we’ve been doing at DePaul – Jim Jacoby, Jason Ulaszek, Brian Henkel and I all teach there. I also plan to teach an intensive UX class next year in a different setting.

ABN: It’s interesting – it sounds as if there were so many ways that this book has been useful within Manifest itself that it would have been helpful to write it even if you had never published it to the larger world. Have there been any developments within Manifest since the first edition came out that you think will influence the second?

CC: There is a section of the book where I focus on what I call “the good tension,” which is balancing business needs, design needs, and technology needs. We have been talking about building empathy not just for the user, but helping teams gain empathy for each other and improve communication. 

We’ve held workshops where people created personas of other team members in order to understand them better. Jim and I both enjoy teaching that workshop – people didn’t want to stop, at the end of the session. 

ABN: So when did you and Russ know for sure that there would be a second edition?

CC: Peachpit, our publisher, approached us about it around nine months ago, and they officially signed off on it about a month ago. We have a lot of work to do over a short period of time, since it’s all supposed to be in around mid-January. But it’s not like we’re creating everything from scratch. 

ABN: I noticed that you have been soliciting user suggestions online. What made you decide to do that?

CC: At the end of the day we are here to help the practice – those are our users. So it made sense to find out what they wished they had known more about or what they wish someone had shared with them. We also wanted to learn about the up-and-coming technologies that the next generation of UX designers are familiar with. 

It has been good to learn more about people’s impressions of the first book as well as areas where they wanted more details. More information on design and content strategy is definitely of interest to people.

There were also some new trends that we want to keep an eye on, like the “Internet of things” idea – we have focused on transcending the physical in many ways on the Internet, but now it is coming back in many ways, from gestures to the fact that we carry many of our digital experiences with us. That’s something we learned from Manifest’s work on Bally. 

We have a lot we want to add, but we also only have about 72 additional pages that we can write, so our challenge will be cutting it down to the essential – but that’s what design is. 

ABN: What are some of the other important changes that you think have occurred in the field since your first edition was published?

CC: We’ve talked a lot about the increasing importance of mobile – we’re including a whole new section on that. The key idea is to design for context, and mobile has become all about context. There have also been a lot of new remote research tools that have come out since the first edition. When a lot of those first came out, I was pretty cynical, because I was so used to meeting with users where they are, reading body language, that sort of stuff. I didn’t want to lose the richness of that. But there are definitely some cases where remote research can give you a lot of new insights, particularly if you are working with a large group of people and you put findings in context with designers who are working closely with users. That’s a very strong combination.

I’m also very interested in what is going to happen with augmented reality. It seems to ebb and flow in terms of how ready it actually is for users – the hardware and software still haven’t quite come together yet. But once the systems are in place, there are some really exciting possibilities. Maybe that’s when there will be a third edition of the book, when that is ready.

ABN: As well as the data to make empirical claims about users’ experience of it.

CC: Right. We might just need to keep an eye on them. Speculative lists get dated pretty quickly when you’re wrong. But I think augmented reality will be important, as well as the idea of the quantified self, which Bryan Campen has been working on here.

ABN: Were there any parts of the first edition that you decided to get rid of entirely, or that now seem superfluous or out of date?

CC: No, not really. There are a few sidebars and things that now seem extraneous, but we’re mostly adding things. There are a couple of things we included that some people said they felt were not necessary, but then others really loved them – for example, the chapter on search engine optimization. Some people said they don’t really use it or it doesn’t seem like UX, but others have found it really useful. 

ABN: There have clearly been some major changes in the content of the UX field in the time that has passed since your first edition. Would you anticipate there will be a change in the audience for your book as well?

CC: We have seen more and more companies feeling a need to set up a UX practice and wanting to understand what that entails. I think we are definitely interested in that kind of organizational development and where it will go. It’s potentially a strong area for Manifest as well as an unexpected new audience for the book. I have probably given out more books to clients than to potential UX designers.

ABN: It’s interesting to think of the book as a kind of guide for using Manifest. 

CC: Yes – when people ask us what we mean by user experience design, we can say, “Here’s a detailed answer.” What can you expect from a user experience designer? How can you engage with them? How can they help you and your business solve problems? The book definitely makes those questions less difficult to answer.

ABN: Looking forward to the months to come working on the book, what would you say you are personally most excited about?

CC: I’m definitely excited about the design principles chapter. There are lots of books that have been written about it, but it will be nice to put together a short but broad statement. I’ve been working with some of our visual designers to refresh my knowledge of balance and proximity and white space and typography.

For the teaching I am planning on doing, I am also planning to go back to some coding – when I last worked directly in HTML, you wrote it in Notepad. But I’ll be partnering with folks who are experts in HTML5 and Ruby on Rails. I’m looking forward to gaining some of those skills. Preparing to teach something is always a good way to make sure you’ve really learned it.

You have these connections with other people who have insights, and you want time to explore that. But it’s almost November, so I’ll have a busy two months over the holidays to find the right people and figure out the right way to bring their ideas into the book.

ABN: This might sound like an odd question, but do you like writing?

CC: Yes and no. When I’m in the flow, I really like it. But it can be very frustrating when you know what you want to say, but there are so many ways you want to say it, or so many thoughts that you want to get down that you’re not sure how to get started. I think writer’s block comes in two forms. You either have no idea what you want to write about, or you know exactly what it is you want to write about, but it’s hard to start filtering and decide what direction you want to go in. 

I’m hoping I will enjoy it more this time now that I have a better idea of what I’m shooting for. In the first edition, I think I started too far on the “expert” side and had to rewrite a lot to make it a better introduction for new designers. But I think that will be easier this time. So the hardest part will be the transition from absorbing new information to actually writing. 

What usually starts happening is that I write snippets here and there, and then I start thinking about how I will tie them together into a chapter. But that’s also where you have to kind of kill some of your darlings. You’ll have a thought that you really like that is just not going to fit.

Of course, I love having had the book written. I love that we wrote it. But the process can be difficult. It’s more difficult to get your ideas distilled and user-friendly and simple than most people realize. You forget that pain between a first and second edition. 

ABN: How does writing feel different from your day-to-day work at Manifest?

CC: At Manifest, I don’t tend to work very much with people who want to get into the field. They are usually either already in the field or are clients looking for someone to bring expertise to them. So with teaching and the new edition of the book, I shift to contribute to the careers of people who may not be experienced enough to work here yet, but are moving in that direction. Clients want to know what you are going to do for them; designers getting into the field want to understand clients’ needs as well as the concepts and tools that represent the needs of the user. It’s an audience I really want to keep in touch with, since they will be the designers of the future.

Someone recently asked me, “If you’re doing more instruction, are you worried that you’ll get out of touch because you’ll be teaching and not doing?” But in fact I get so many new ideas from students. There are so many ideas out there that no single person can know about all of them. Interacting with students gets me in touch with new ideas and pushes me to understand things about the field that I didn’t know before.

In conjunction with thinkers from the private, non-profit, and public sectors, the Lab developed various ways that the ICC could promote energy-saving as an “intermediate interest” – something consumers understood would only benefit them over time, but was still on a scale they could access in their daily experience. Many such “intermediate interests” are already pursued in conjunction with employment – think health insurance and fitness programs – so the group proposed a program where people could participate in energy-saving programs through the workplace. 

There are no doubt many such “intermediate” hooks that companies, non-profits, and government could use to engage users. But first they have to investigate the communities and cohorts where those users imagine they belong. Despite the newfound abilities of users to read news from the other side of the world or to make a loan to a woman in a Third World country, there is also an increasing desire by many people to re-connect with the communities around them. Organizations that figure out how to make that happen are likely to benefit when those users are ready to act locally or globally.

Image: Atlas statue from Collezione Farnese, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.