designcult

Design and managing risk

Ever thought about hanging out your own shingle? If so, you'd better think about how you'll handle health insurance. If you'd be covered through a spouse's insurance, you're probably set, but otherwise you might have to buy individual health insurance, which typically costs more. And that's if you're lucky enough to get individual health insurance, since it could be denied to you for all sorts of reasons -- from serious prior conditions to minor ones like allergies, ear infections, or joint sprains. Or because you'd been a lumberjack or carnival worker. (Here's a list of over 50 reasons health insurers may reject you. It's scary stuff.)

Jacob Hacker talks about healthcare as one type of increasing risk for folks in the US in his book The Great Risk Shift, along with retirement and jobs. It's a great book, full of meaty policy goodness (if you like that sort of thing), but the basic point is simple: in some important ways, Americans are at greater risk of dramatic swings in income, prolonged job loss, massive healthcare costs, and other forms of economic insecurity than in the past. For example, he states that "The chance that a person with average demographic characteristics will experience a 50 percent or larger drop in income over a two-year period has risen from 7 percent in the early 1970s to 17 percent in 2002." So it's not just healthcare risks we have to worry about. He goes on to talk about both the causes of this shift and some possible policy solutions, and I hope we'll hear more about some of those solutions as the various presidential campaigns start heating up.

So, what does this have to do with design (other than discouraging design entrepreneurs starting their own consultancies)? Well, while actually fixing the problems probably requires national policy changes, those can take a while. In the meantime, we can think about designing products and services that can help folks at least manage these risks.

I first started thinking about this when Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, came to talk to the product team at eBay a while ago. He's a pretty engaging speaker, and frames the history of the company as a series of products inspired by deep customer insights -- insights which he cheerfully admits they came to very late in some cases. One such case was the origin of Quickbooks -- for many years Intuit researchers noticed that a significant number of Quicken users seemed to be small businesses. This didn't make any sense, as it was designed for home financial use, not accounting -- until they eventually realized that there was a need for small business accounting software designed for non-accountants.

I was intrigued by his mentioning, as a similar case, a new software product created specifically to manage health insurance paperwork Quicken Medical Expense Manager. It turns out that the inspiration for this came from even closer to home, as this story (PDF) relates:

Dan Robinson's life changed forever in the winter of 2000. His newborn son entered the world with a rare illness that required a life-saving heart surgery -- the first of many, it would turn out -- when he was just two months old ...

At the time of his son's birth, Dan was an engineering manager with the Quicken team and Intuit Inc. As the parent of a child with a serious medical condition, he experienced firsthand how stressful managing medical expenses can be.

By 2001, the Robinson's medical bills exceeded $1.2 million. "I felt overwhelmed by the number of bills and statements -- I was unable to make sense of it all, Robinson said ...

Robinson developed his own basic medical expense management  software program and proposed a more formal software solution to the Quicken organization for development.  At first his ideas was met with skepticism, but eventually he was given the go ahead to pursue it.  The premise was simple: develop a product that could help track  healthcare expenses and insurance for individuals and families.

I think this is an amazing example of product design targeting a real and scary risk (the risk of bankruptcy due to overwhelming healthcare costs) and helping empower individuals to manage that risk. Product designers have a tendency to talk about what good things using their product will do for their customers -- but sometimes the  best path is to help  manage risks, i.e. reduce the likelihood of bad things happening.

Edit: My friend Karen posted about this subject (and dictators and complex systems) a little while ago.

The iPhone and Implications for Design

Yes, this is YAiPP (Yet Another iPhone Post). But after squee-ing about the object itself (and I did), and after pondering the effect of the thing on the mobile industry (and I have), and weighing the implications of pulling both Yahoo! and Google into the mix as visible partners (yep, that too), I'm left to puzzle over how the iPhone might change the practice of design.

Here are some quick thoughts -- and they're not fully baked, more lightly warmed at best:

I'm probably most excited about the multi-touch interface. This is the kind of interface breakthrough we've been seeing from CHI conferences, research papers, and really smart people for years, and yet somehow never gotten into a workable mass-market product. And now we have it! The "pinching" metaphor is compelling, but I can't wait till people really start designing  for multi-touch -- there are scads of other gestural interactions that need fleshing out and could enrich existing applications.

The accelerometer is almost as exciting--it seems to be mostly used for nice portrait/landscape transitions in the demo, but the potential applications are vast. I can think of Wii-like game controlling, tilt controls for maps (PDF), Ping's peephole displays, and more fun stuff.

I am a little concerned about the "button issue." In his presentation (which was superb), Steve Jobs made much of the previous smart-phones' keyboards -- pointing out that they are both ugly (true) and inflexible (also true). Apart from the aesthetic, the inflexibility is a real issue -- it's one of the things that has kept phone/PDA/internet devices from achieving true integration: the controls needed for each are different, and the typical solutions until now have been to either add more buttons (ew) or have them do double duty in some awkward fashion. Jobs is totally right that this sucks, and that having exactly the right controls for the application solves that problem.

But is that worth the lack of tactility? Others (somewhere, I've lost the link)  have noted that it will probably mean it's a very "in your face" product -- you'll need to haul it out and stare at it while using it for many purposes. I think that's fine for the "Blackberry people," as I think of them, as they're kind of like that anyway -- but what about the text-happy kids with their fast messaging? I've always assumed that they achieve the speed by using the physical affordances of the keypads, much like the speed typers of yesteryear. Will that work with a visual-only keyboard? Will they care?

And about those kids! I'm still a little puzzled by whether the iPhone has real location awareness (it's sort of implied that it does, but I can't see mention of it in the tech specs, and like many features, I've seen both denials and affirmations of GPS in the trade press. But assuming it does work, (or if not, gets added to an upcoming model), I think we're looking at another leap in social network applications. I'm imagining location-aware MySpace (or whatever the new hotness is) usage, some sort of Dodgeball-on-steroids mania hitting the youth of today and changing the way people relate to each other.

(Plus, it's OS X, so you can always drop back to a command line and use pine if you're a geezer like me.)

.... whew. Floating gently back to Earth, how do we designers start prepping for this? I suppose we'll have to bone up on the academic literature, re-examine assumptions about what is and isn't possible in our interfaces, play with our imaginations, read developer notes (if they're released), and wait until June.

Sad Update: Momofuku Ando

Sad news: Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, chairman and founder of Nissin Foods, and the product design-oriented president described in Project X: Cup Noodle, has died. He was 96. The Sydney Morning Herald obituary notes that "In July 2005, Nissin introduced a vacuum packed instant noodle specially designed for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to eat during the US space shuttle Discovery's mission." (via boingboing)

Book Review | The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness

Before I talk about the book, a little background on me and iPods.  iPods are the only Apple products I've ever owned. I have used Apple products (at school and work) and have even had to do tech support for them, back in the bad old days when I did tech support. And supporting Macs? That's most of the reason why I never owned one.

I have have owned three iPods, though. One big shiny 20G model. I used it, loved it, left it in a bag in a restaurant, got the bag back without the iPod, cried. Remembering that I can't be trusted with small, expensive gadgets, I got the first generation shuffle-- used it, loved it, laundered it, cried. At this point I came to terms with the fact that I rent iPods rather than owning them, and got the Nano to keep my rent at least slightly low. So I understand iPod love. I have iPod love.

But perfect thing?  I love my iPod, but is it more perfect than my favorite pair of boots? Or my favorite jacket? Not quite.

The Perfect Thing is a little bit of a muddle -- partly because Levy has "shuffled"  the chapter order in a nod to the shuffle iPod function.  About half of the book is the story of the Ipod's origin (and iTunes, and later iPods, etc.) and about half is commentary on the societal impact of the iPod. The first should be in chronological order, the second should be in some sort of order. Shuffling chapters should be kept to avant-garde fiction, please.

On to the substance of the book. The core story -- the development of the iPod itself -- has been excerpted in Wired. The full story gives a slightly different angle on what happened, though, an angle which tweaks some of the cruder mythology around Apple, design, and product development. The expanded story shows that the iPod team was able to move quickly (once it got under way!) because it grabbed people and companies that had already done key work in the area. Even then, though, they wildly understated the impact the iPod could have, and only slowly realized that instead of a nice adjunct to the Mac universe that would help pull some PC users over to the shiny side, they had the chance to completely dominate a consumer electronics category. Once they did realize it they purused it with gusto, of course.

Finally, there's the view of Jobs as an "uber-designer," with a fixed and  singular product vision around which all his troops rally (or else). Well, sort of.  He actually comes across in this book as similar to the Cup Noodle president. He doesn't have a product vision per se -- he has a strong view of the ideal parameters of  the product (for example, requiring that you be able to play a song in no more than three button click). The team worked toward those parameters but had a great deal of freedom in how to get there. This is a fine distinction, but I think an important one, and one that often gets lost when people talk about the role of strong leaders (especially executive leaders) in product design.

I was intrigued, but less convinced by, the more sociological chapters, but that's probably because I wanted less journalistic argument-from-anecdote and more actual sociological research.

I can probably find that elsewhere, though -- overall this was a very entertaining and pretty useful discussion of an almost perfect thing.

Book Review | Project X: Nissin Cup Noodle

I've been reading a bunch of design and design-related books, and I'm going to try to kick off a habit of reviewing one each Monday.

I'm going to start with a pretty non-obvious choice -- Product X: Nissin Cup Noodle, a Manga history of the product development of Nissin Food's Cup Noodle. Yep, it's comics, it's translated from the Japanese, you read it backwards, and it's nonfiction. It was handed to me by one of my fine local comic shop proprietors, who told me "You have to read this." And he is never wrong--it was a fun read! But it's also a great case study in product design.

The short version is that in the 1970s, Nissin Foods, the original innovators in the instant ramen space, were losing market share due to the commoditization of instant ramen. The president of Nissin Foods decided that they needed to do something radical, so he put to a small team the challenge of developing a new and revolutionary product -- instant ramen in its own container. The book follows each member of the team (container development, noodle development, production, marketing) as they meet challenges along the way. And as starving college students and late-night office workers around the world know, they were extraordinarily successful.   

It's pretty gripping stuff (really!), but what I found most interesting was the constant interplay between the individual team members working on their individual challenges and the president, who had a strong vision of the whole product. Each time they came back to him with a solution that compromised that vision, he would send them back to the drawing board -- even over the most minute details of product shape and ingredient color.

In fact, the whole tale -- with a product development team individually striving to meet the exacting standards of a detail-obsessed executive -- started to remind me of something. And that was before the scene with the president gazing lovingly over the perfectly angled, pure white, almost platonic form of the final cup prototype ... but I'll review that book next week.