Design principles and considerations

One thing I like to do to make the time I spend reading more valuable is to write up “book reports” distilling insights that might be valuable for the rest of my team.

This week I wrapped up “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman — here are my takeaways. Note that this isn’t a complete summary; if you find this interesting, I recommend picking up the book for yourself.

The seven fundamental principles of design:

  • Discoverability: It is possible to determine what actions are possible and the current state of the device

  • Feedback: There is full and continuous information about the results of actions and the current state of the product or service. After an action has been executed, it is easy to determine the new state.

  • Conceptual model: The design projects all the information needed to create a good conceptual model of the system, leading to understanding and a feeling of control. The conceptual model enhances both discoverability and evaluation of results.

  • Affordances: The proper affordances exist to make the desired actions possible.

  • Signifiers: Effective user of signifiers ensures discoverability and that the feedback is well communicated and intelligible.

  • Mappings: The relationship between controls and their actions follows the principles of good mapping, enhanced as much as possible through spatial layout and temporal contiguity.

  • Constraints: Providing physical, logical, semantic, and cultural constraints guides actions and eases interpretation.

Definitions and considerations:

  • Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them?

  • Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the controls and settings mean?

  • Affordance: A relationship between the properties of the object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could be used. Jointly determined by the qualities of the object and the abilities of the interacting agent. Determines what actions are possible.

  • Signifier: Any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person. Communicates where actions should take place.

  • Feedback: Some way of letting you know that the system is working on your request.

    • Feedback must be immediate: even a delay of a tenth of a second can be disconcerting.

    • Feedback must also be informative.

    • Every action is associated with an expectation.

    • Information in the feedback loop of evaluation confirms or disconfirm expectations, resulting in satisfaction or relief, disappointment or frustration.

    • Feedback provides reassurance, even when it indicates a negative result.

    • A lack of feedback creates a feeling of lack of control, which can be unsettling.

    • Feedback is critical to managing expectations.

    • When a delay can be predicted, provide time estimates as well as progress bars to indicate how far along the task has gone.

    • It is wise to underpredict, to say that an operation will take longer than it actually will, so that expectations are likely to be exceeded, leading to a happy result.

  • Conceptual model: An explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works.

    • Simplified models are valuable only as long as the assumptions that support them hold true.

    • A good conceptual model allows us to predict the effects of our actions.

    • Conceptual models do not have to be accurate as long as they lead to the correct behavior in the desired situation.

    • People invariably object and complain whenever a new approach is introduced into an existing array of products and systems.

    • Consistency in design is a virtue. It means that lessons learned with one system transfer readily to others.

    • If a new way of doing things is only slightly better than the old, it is generally better to be consistent.

    • It is psychological perceptions that matter — the conceptual model — not physical consistency.

    • Standards simplify life for everyone. At the same time, they tend to hinder future development.

    • Skeuomorphic designs are often comforting for traditionalists. One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old.

  • The Gulf of Evaluation: the amount of effort that a person must make to interpret the physical state of the device and to determine how well expectations and intentions have been met.

    • Feedback and a good conceptual help bridge the Gulf of Evaluation.

  • Flow state: when the challenge of an activity just slightly exceeds our skill level, so full attention is continually required, but is not so difficult that it invokes frustration and anxiety.

    • The constant tension of a flow state, paired with continual progress, can result in an engaging, immersive experience.

  • Failure: a learning experience.

    • To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than our successes. With failure, it is often possible to figure out why, to ensure that it will never (or rarely) happen again.

    • Failures are an essential part of exploration and creativity. If designers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough.

    • It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.

    • Eliminate all error messages. Instead, provide help and guidance.

    • Make it possible to correct problems directly from help and guidance messages.

    • Never make people start over.

    • Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance that allows them to correct the problem and be on their way.

    • What we call an error is usually bad communication or interaction.

    • We can’t fix problems unless we admit they exist.

    • Make it possible to reverse actions — to “Undo” them — or make it harder to do what cannot be reversed. The best systems have multiple levels of undoing, so it is possible to undo an entire sequence of actions.

    • When people err, change the system so that type of error will be reduced or eliminated. If a system lets you make the error, it is badly designed.

    • Present information about the state of the system in a way that is easy to assimilate and interpret, and provide alternative explanations and interpretations.

  • Procedural knowledge: Knowledge of how to complete a task or activity.

    • Procedural knowledge is usually difficult or impossible to write down and difficult to teach. It is best taught by demonstration and best learned through practice.

    • Physical, cultural, and other constraints reduce the amount that must be learned to a reasonable quantity.

  • Skeuomorphism: incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role.

  • Slip: when a person intends to do one action and ends up doing something else.

    • Slips are the result of subconscious actions getting waylaid en route.

    • Slips, paradoxically, tend to occur more frequently to skilled people than to novices, because experts tend to perform tasks automatically, under subconscious control.

    • Memory-lapse slips are difficult to detect precisely because there is nothing to see: when no action is done, there is nothing to detect.

    • The best way to mitigate slips is to provide perceptible feedback about the nature of the action being performed, then very perceptible feedback describing the new resulting state, coupled with a mechanism that allows the errors to be undone.

    • Checklists are powerful tools, proven to increase accuracy of behavior and reduce error. They are especially important in situations with multiple, complex requirements, and even more so when there are interruptions.

    • It is always better to have two people do checklists together as a team: one to read the instructions and verify execution, and the other to execute each step.

    • In many complex tasks, the order in which many operations are performed may not matter, as long as they are all completed. In general, it is bad design to impose a sequential structure to task execution unless the task itself requires it.

    • Make it easier for people to discover the errors that do occur, and make them easier to correct.

    • Do sensibility checks. Does an action pass the “common sense” test?

  • Mistake: when the wrong goal is establish or the wrong plan is formed.

    • Mistakes result from conscious deliberations.

    • Make the item being acted upon more prominent. That is, change the appearance of the actual object being acted upon to be more visible: enlarge it, or change its color.

    • Mistakes are hard to detect because there is seldom anything that can signal an inappropriate goal.

    • If every decision had to be questioned, nothing would ever get done. But if decisions are not questioned, there will be major mistakes — rarely, but often of substantial penalty.

  • Activity: a collected set of tasks, all performed together toward a common high-level goal.

    • Let the activity define the product and its structure. Let the conceptual model of the product be built around the conceptual model of the activity.

    • Although people are unwilling to learn systems that appear to have arbitrary, incomprehensible requirements, they are quite willing to learn things that appear to be essential to an activity.

    • Well designed devices package together the various tasks that are required to support an activity, making them work seamlessly with one another.

    • Apple’s success with the iPod came from supporting the entire activity involved in listening to music: discovering it, purchasing it, getting it into a music player, developing playlists (that could be shared), and listening to the music.

    • Design for activities and the results will be useable by everyone.

  • Task: an organized, cohesive set of operations directed toward a single, low-level goal.

Other lessons:

  • Mappings:

    • A device is easy to use when the set of possible actions is visible, when the controls and displays exploit natural mappings.

    • Natural mappings are those where the relationship between the controls and the object to be controlled is obvious.

    • When mappings use spatial correspondence between the layout of the controls and the devices being controlled, it is easy to determine how to use them.

    • Designers have a special obligation to ensure that the behavior of machines is understandable to the people who interact with them.

  • Memory:

    • How much can be retained in memory depends on the familiarity of the material.

    • From a practical point of view, it is best to think of short-term memory as only holding three to five items. Don’t count on much being retained.

    • Visual information does not much interfere with auditory, actions do not interfere much with either auditory or written material. To maximize efficiency of working memory, it is best to present different information over different modalities.

    • Memory lapses are common causes of error. The immediate cause of memory lapses is interruption.

    • The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary: provide constraints and forcing functions, natural good mapping, and feedback. If all else fails, put the information they need to remember into the world where they will perform the activity requiring that information.

    • To combat memory-lapse errors, minimize the number of steps or provide vivid reminders of steps that need to be completed.

    • Don’t require that all knowledge to operate technology be in the head. Allow for efficient operation when people have learned all the requirements, but make it possible for non-experts to use knowledge in the world. This will also help experts when they need to perform a rare, infrequently performed operation or return to the technology after prolonged absence.

  • Make something too secure, and it becomes less secure.

  • The lack of clear communication among the people and organizations constructing parts of a system is perhaps the most common cause of complicated, confusing designs.

  • Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong. Requirements made by asking people what they need are invariably wrong.

  • It turns out that most cases are “special.” Any system that does not allow for special cases will fail.

  • No matter how much time the design team has been allocated, the final results only seem to appear in the last twenty-four hours before the deadline.

  • In the history of all technological fields, some improvements in usability come naturally through the technology itself, others come through standardization.

  • Concentrate on areas where your product is strong and strengthen it there even more. Then focus all marketing and advertisements to point out the strong points. This causes the product to stand out from the mindless herd. If the product has real strengths, it can afford to just be “good enough” in other areas.

  • Quality only comes about by continual focus on, and attention to, the people who matter: customers.

  • With technology, the brain gets neither better nor worse. Instead, it is the task that changes.

  • Over time, the mix of technologies and tools makes quick and rough creation easier, but polished and professional level material much more difficult and expensive.

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Building the dream team

Since taking the reins at Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella has made a point of cultivating a culture that encourages a personal growth mindset among its employees.

The idea is that rather than orienting hiring, promotions, compensation, and training around the belief that people have certain fixed attributes, companies should trust that people can grow if given the proper space and incentives.

As I’ve written about recently, it’s much easier to build an organization with specific values in mind when starting fresh — new leadership in an established organization trying to cultivate this kind of culture will run into momentum, things people in management have assumed are their mandate, and the reward structure they’ve been operating under.

Those managers are mightily influenced by career risk: they’d rather keep doing what has been known to work (for them, not necessarily the organization) than risk looking like an idiot for trying something that might improve things, but also might blow up in their face.

This behavior can be maintained for shockingly long periods of time in organizations buoyed by a successful hold on a particular market of customers, followers, or members. While I’m skeptical it’s been wholly pervasive, I’m impressed with Nadella making any progress in shifting Microsoft’s course against these winds.

A new group lives or dies based on whether it can maintain a cohesive founding group until it achieves some of that momentum. Instilling that sense requires having visible traction — evidence that the group is making some progress toward its goal — and then sustaining effort in that direction by making improvements to the group’s processes that compound.

Accomplishing this demands leaning into the strengths of a small group: distributing responsibilities that in sum lead to progress in the direction of the overall vision or goal among the team so that it’s clear what each individual is obligated to deliver, and giving those same members the agency to take action and incorporate feedback they get back from their efforts (using this broadly — could be metrics on a product, donations collected, participation in hosted events) to identify ever-more ideal approaches to their specific challenges. Whenever possible, avoid bullshit: “We agreed to do it this way! It wasn’t a bad approach, you just couldn’t execute! Follow the procedure we agreed to before we started!” 

In fact, go further. Reward people for making the tough choice to abandon the script and make a change that fundamentally improves the group’s odds of sustained progress towards its goals. This doesn’t mean bonus compensation — there’s research that indicates that can actually hurt long-term motivation — but instead, offering things with very little cost: appreciation and autonomy.

I’ve been shocked to see how much longer people are willing to spend outside their comfort zone, working just beyond what they know they can do or doing what they know will work, when I thank them for it. 

“That was a tough call but I know it was good for us. Thank you for raising that point, pushing us to make that change. I’m sure it felt like it might be read as a disappointment, but it was the right thing to do and we’re all going to be better off for it.”

“I know you haven’t had to build/design/write something like that before. I’m sure you felt uneasy moving ahead without a clear example of what it should look like. But that work gave us something to respond to, something to iterate on. We wouldn’t have our shared sense of direction without it, so thank you for carrying that burden.”

This gratitude, stated plainly and regularly, creates a safe space for experimentation and innovation. If some of that experimentation leads to negative results — well, that learning is its own progress. It informs thinking that will go into future experiments. 

Over the course of multiple iterations, these efforts should lead to increased confidence in certain elements of the overall approach, and that confidence should be rewarded with additional autonomy. As long as there’s a clear vision and understanding of what progress toward that goal would look like, authority on how to address a challenge should be held by and grow with the person who has demonstrated a willingness to work at the edge of their ability and continually improve themselves. In this way, you can give increased responsibility without it feeling like a burden — instead, it feels like a gift of appreciation and trust. 

Thinking this way changes how you think about building a core team in the first place. It’s tempting to think purely in terms of what a “dream team” would look like — break down the tasks you need to complete, and bring in folks who’ve demonstrated very strong proficiency in those exact tasks (or more commonly and far worse, folks who’ve been affiliated with organizations known for accomplishing those tasks).

But if you know you’re going to instill this kind of culture of personal growth, you can look for something a bit different: people with adjacent skillsets who demonstrate an appetite for learning and agency. Investing in this kind of group member is an arbitrage bet: you’ll end up paying less than someone who looks like an obvious fit, and you can get outsized returns from the fact that they won’t feel the urge to do exactly what they did in their previous role (and therefore their previous organization) but instead optimize for finding and improving on the right thing to do in this specific context.

The team that prospectively looks like like the dream team is almost bound to disappoint. In “Talent is Overrated,” Geoff Colvin exemplifies this point with “All Star” or Olympic teams composed of the best players from different world-class teams coming together and failing to be the sum of their parts. These folks are amazing in specific environments — take them out of those circumstances and ask them to work with people they spend most of their lives engaged with as competitors, and you get a recipe for lackluster results. 

He contrasts this with the case of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway. 50 years ago, no one would have thought that an investor in Omaha and a lawyer in Los Angeles would come together to build one of the most impressive records in the history of investment, but once they started collaborating they nurtured each other’s best habits around building accurate models of the world and making effective decisions. It’s better to build the dream team that only looks that way in hindsight than one that looks like it should be but never gets there.

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Assume agency

In the last year or so, I’ve barraged myself with media that has forced me to reflect on fundamental assumptions about how my mind works.

These assumptions are the theory of mind — the idea that individuals carry with them beliefs and desires that drive their actions — and agency, the idea that we have some control over those beliefs and desires and can purposefully aim them toward some end that satisfies deeply held needs.

I’m a very basic person, so like many in the post-2016 hectic social climate I’ve been spending time on mindfulness, paying attention to what thoughts surface and how my emotions rise in response to circumstances and drive further thoughts. After bouncing off of several paths, I found an app (of course) that clicked, and have since tried to make meditation a part of my daily routine.

One of the first things you discover after getting past the initial hurdles in directing attention inward is that you have very little control over the thoughts that surface in your head. It starts as the frustrating part of getting into the practice: “When I try to sit for 20 minutes, my brain won’t shut up!” But as you progress, and manage to slow down and diffuse attention, it takes on a dimension of epiphany: “I have no idea why my brain surfaced these particular thoughts into consciousness.” This realization can do significant damage to one’s understanding of their identity, beliefs, desires, and sense for whether any of those things are meaningfully under one’s control.

Additional damage to my understanding of these things came from two books highlighting a few threads in contemporary neuroscience. 

“How History Gets Things Wrong” by Alex Rosenberg makes the case that looking to narrative histories to derive lessons about how to act in future circumstances is foolhardy, because there is no way for historians to truly divine the beliefs and desires that drove individual actors in those moments. He then goes further in his attack on this way of thinking about history, drawing on neuroscience’s understanding of how the brain forms memories to claim that there aren’t really beliefs and desires represented in any meaningful way in the brain — rather, there are complex sets of neural connections strengthened by positive rewards to acting on their presence or weakened by negative responses or long periods of irrelevance. 

Rosenberg doesn’t make this connection, but this argument made me think of the phenomenon of preference falsification — of course people put on a front of believing things that don’t ring true, if social responses continually reward espousing those beliefs. And what we see on social media is this phenomenon amped up by interactions with significantly more sources of positive or negative reward, driving polarization in our lines of thinking to extremes and cutting off room for nuance. Ultimately, Rosenberg takes this way of thinking to his own extreme, dedicating a late chapter to stanning Jared Diamond, eloquently making the case that “Guns, Germs, and Steel is right! The only thing shaping history is material circumstances in specific locations! Individuals essentially didn’t matter!”

“Talent is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin somewhat echoes lines of thinking in Rosenberg’s work. It makes the case that there is little evidence of innate talent, of genetic predisposition to or skill for achieving elite performance in particular fields. At most, Colvin writes that there may be some genetic component to performing elements of some techniques that drive early wins when one pursues a particular activity, and that this early progress serves as reward that positively reinforces pursuing that activity, spinning up a flywheel of interest that can transform into long term engagement and growth. But the initial and continued engagement is also largely shaped by external environmental factors, like whether musical instruments or programmable computers were available or whether parents were willing/able to provide coaching or put in the time/money to make coaching available from a young age. 

Colvin ends on a note that’s a bit less environmentally deterministic. While the circumstances around an individual can point them toward an interest and drive their progress in attaining skills, at some point the rate of incline for making progress versus some level of effort becomes quite steep. Colvin argues that what distinguishes those who achieve elite performance is a self-perception that greater performance is within reach, if only one could isolate specific elements of their technique and get feedback on how different ways of attempting the technique translate to different outcomes. If you don’t believe you can sustain personal growth, you won’t, even if you started with some innate advantages.

That conclusion resonated with something that I’ve long felt — that acting “as if” something is true can often be more important than its objective truth. In many cases, acting this way can even reshape reality, with sustained effort leading to changes in circumstances that lead to something foolhardy becoming possible and then inevitable. Even if we’re fundamentally biological automatons, walking wetware destined to act based on our genes and the environment we’re born into, too deeply internalizing that perspective leads to stasis and a bias toward reactivity. I’ve never been a spiritual person, but exploring these ideas has given me a greater appreciation for what it means to have faith. I’d rather believe that neuroscientists will go on to discover how incredibly complex layers of neural connections end up representing beliefs and ideas at higher levels of abstraction, that we’re not simply trained-response machines. I’d rather act as if I have agency, as if I can direct my actions toward specific ends and personal growth, and that cultivating a sense of held beliefs and desires and acting on them will lead to some form of self-actualization. Assuming that you have agency is what gives you agency — or at least, the very powerful delusion that you do.

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You should start a group

About 4 months ago, I took a leap and started a company. It’s still very early days, and every situation is unique, so you won’t catch me writing about how to run a successful fundraise process, how to build a team, or how to transform an idea into a sustainable business any time soon. Reality hasn’t provided enough feedback for anyone to differentiate between skill and luck, good and bad decisions just yet.

But after a few months, I do feel confident expressing some things I’ve felt as part of the interpersonal experience of working with a small team. I also think that these observations would apply to many people, in many contexts — business, athletics, spirituality, politics, volunteer work, recreational or intellectual endeavors.

Here’s why you should start, rather than join, a group to pursue your interests:

  • There’s less bullshit. In a new organization, you can focus on the exact purpose in which you and the early members of the group have mutual interest.Existing organizations have a certain path dependency, a momentum to their ends and means. They’re going to focus on things based on their original mandates, the incentives they’ve operated within, the individuals that have made up the group and especially its leadership. Every organization becomes more locked into its existing patterns and accumulates bureaucratic processes as it makes progress towards its ends and has to coordinate the actions of more contributors. This is an argument Alexis de Tocqueville made in Democracy in America — it’s only in the early days that an organization can straightforwardly follow principles to their conclusions and ignore conflicting interests.

  • Values will translate to action. In addition to the freedom to pursue whatever goals motivated a founding group to coalesce, starting a new group lets you pursue those ends by means that live up to the groups shared moral, ethical, and aesthetic values. Whether you think that startups don’t hire women or bring people of color onto the cap table early enough, or that your local political party affiliate is too hung up on the status quo, or that the book club at the library would benefit from a wider range of genres on its reading list, starting a new group lets you approach things with an uncompromised perspective informing how you decide what actions to take.

  • You will have a stronger sense of agency, responsibility, and traction. This is point is commonly made in favor of joining tech startups, that you will have more independency around how you approach problems, carry more responsibility earlier in your involvement, and see more evidence of the positive impact of your efforts. Whether in the context of business, political activism, volunteering, or helping people meaningfully navigate the big questions we live with, a small, new group has fewer people to distribute responsibilities to and a far stronger sense of mutual obligation to other members of the group to carry your load toward the group’s shared goal. This ownership and responsibility are fulfilling in their own right, but also tend to facilitate rapid personal growth. And as a group, the sense of traction that comes with making progress from a modest start feels far more real than the fairly abstract results of the same level of effort in a larger institution.

  • Motivation when things are tough. As an individual, it’s easy to fall into pessimistic thinking about whether you can make an impact or achieve progress toward your goal. Few worthwhile aims can be accomplished in the first several attempts. Attempts made on your own can feel inconsequential, either due to problems seeming very large or providing no sense of relative achievement. The earliest experiences in larger organization often provide the opposite experience to the benefits highlighted here, and because these existing organizations often trust that there will always be new members, they put relatively little effort into facilitating early positive experiences or encouragement that drives future involvement. New, small teams whose existence depends on everyone sticking around and following through will do a much better job of providing support to get over early hurdles and past ongoing difficulties.

  • Your own space. As we’ve seen in some communities that have shifted conversation from public Twitter discourse to more private group chat apps, it’s nice to be able to express your interests and reactions to things among people that you trust, and away from people who will drive-by criticize your priorities or perspective on how a problem should be solved. This is a fine first step toward starting a group, but with the satisfaction that comes with achieving a shared purpose, I think many would benefit from orienting this communication shift around forming groups that translate discussion to action.

The biggest challenges we face today feel like massive, abstract collective action problems where our individual concern drives escalating dread. Whether you’re bored, dissatisfied with your own progress toward a goal, or worried about where the world is headed, finding some like-minded folk to talk to, listen to, and collaborate with can ease your psychic burden and make the results of your efforts feel far more tangible.

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"Beating the market is not a financial goal" →

Enjoyed this post by Cullen Roche on the viability of value investing after a four year spell of the strategy failing to beat the market:

“I am not a big fan of “alpha” chasing strategies for a simple reason – beating the market is not a financial goal. Yeah, it would be great to do it, but no prudent financial planner looks at a financial plan and says, “our main goal is to beat the market”. No, your goal is to generate a certain return while taking a certain degree of risk so that you have a high probability of having a certain amount of money when you actually need it. If the stock market does 10% per year and you only achieve 6% of that return, but you do it while taking far less risk and beating your required 4% return needs then you certainly did not fail. You didn’t beat the market, but you met your own financial goals.”

 

 

Summer 2016 a16z podcast roundup

I've done a terrible job of keeping this page up to date with my appearances on the a16z podcast. 

To make up for that, here's two fun episodes we recorded over the summer:

 

We Gotta Talk Pokémon Go: a fun episode on the Pokemon Go craze and what it means for app virality and augmented reality more generally.

 

Not If, But How — When Technology is Inevitable: I got to join Chris Dixon for a discussion with Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly. We talked about technological inevitabilities and how we should think about and prepare for them.

 

Why Virtual Reality Will Be the Most Social Computing Platform Yet →

My first post on Medium discusses the importance of interacting with other people in VR apps:

The key to understanding why “social VR” will be important is to think about virtual (and augmented) reality as a computing platform, rather than as a PC peripheral for gaming. Looking at previous generations of computing platforms like the web or mobile, social networks have always proven to be one of the strongest drivers of adoption and engagement, making the underlying platforms vastly more valuable.
While VR going mainstream—and therefore social—is still a few years out, early adopters are already getting glimpses of what’s to come: a re-imagining of interaction through computing that more closely maps to how we work, play, and learn with people In Real Life (IRL).