A talk given at various places throughout 2010.

1. Designing for
(and with)
New Technology
Dan Saffer, Kicker Studio
@odannyboy @kickerstudio

2. “NEW”
Let’s talk about NEW for a second. When I talk about NEW technology, I’m not necessarily
talking about the latest technology to roll out of research labs.

3. The bulk of innovation behind the latest
"wow" moment is also low-amplitude
and takes place over a long period—
but well before the "new" idea has
become generally known, much less
reached the tipping point.
Bill Buxton
In fact, as Bill Buxton points out, most of the time this isn’t true anyway.

4. Bill Buxton’s “Long
Nose of Innovation”
The mirror of the Long Tail Effect

5. Example: Touchscreens
1970s 1980s
2000s
An example of the last wave of NEW technology, touchscreens, germinated over 30 years
before wide consumer use.

6. New...
to the world
to the market
to an industry
to a company
to...you?
So when I say NEW technology, it could mean all these different kinds of new. At some point
in your career, you’ll be work with a piece of technology you’ve never worked with before.

7. Technology
I’m also not going to talk about any one specific technology. This talk is specifically
technology-agnostic. I’m going to reference some technology that is fairly “new” but this talk
isn’t only about today’s new technology, but about tomorrow’s, the one you’re going to
encounter out in the field one day when someone hands you it.

8. Almost everything around us is technology of one sort or another. We just forget that at one
time, it was new technology.

9. Examples of current “new” technology: Adding sensors to previously blind objects.

10. Adding networking to a stand-alone device like the Sonos.

11. New algorythms and data visualizations, like this from the Swiss-Spain game yesterday from
the Guardian.

12. Robots

13. Unusual use of old technology, like combining GPS with the mobile phone camera to create
augmented reality applications.

14. Digitizing previously analog activities such as putting a DJ’s turntables onto iPads.

15. Radical improvement of an existing technology. This is an example of an older Canesta
camera.

16. And then there is the radical new technology that change everything. The microchip is the
greatest example. This is an RFID tag which, along with all the related and associated
technologies around near-field communication, has the power to radically transform most
objects on the planet.

17. Where does
technology
come from?
Discovery of the possible through science and engineering.
But what it doesn’t usually come from is via user needs. Scientists and engineers make what
is POSSIBLE, but not always what is useful or usable or even wanted.

18. Although we would prefer to believe
that conceptual breakthroughs occur
because of a detailed consideration of
human needs, especially fundamental
but unspoken hidden needs so beloved
by the design research community, the
fact is that it simply doesn't happen.
Don Norman
Don says, rightly I think, that the technology comes first, then the need for it comes later.
That’s where we come in. Designers help give the technology meaning. People will rightly ask
What does it do? How should I use this? And most importantly WHY should I use this? As
designers, it’s our job to help answer those questions.

19. New technology +
Old product =
The same product
somewhat better
(or worse)

20. Add a touchscreen to a computer, and you can get a Tablet PC.

21. Or you can add a touchscreen to a computer and get something like the iPad.

22. New technology +
Old product =
A different product
What you decide is up to you and your strategic goals. In some cases, it makes sense to not
change the meaning of the product.
but creating a new product that redefines what the product is is a very powerful product
differentiator.

23. Practical Considerations
Expectations
Personality
Meaning
Here’s what this talk is going to cover.

24. Canesta Gestural
Entertainment Center
Throughout this talk, I’ll be referencing a project my company did about a year ago.

25. Canesta Gestural Entertainment Center. Find out more at http://kickerstudio.com/
canesta.html

26. PRACTICAL
CONSIDERATIONS
Before we dive into the more theoretical topics, let’s talk about some things to keep in mind.

27. Extra Time
New technologies, like other large constraints, always seem to take more time than you
expect. The technology doesn’t work right, or has unexpected bugs, or any number of flaws
and constraints you’ll only discover once you start trying to make something with it. Build in
extra time into the schedule.

28. Limitations of the
Technology + Context
You’re going to be wrestling with two things during the course of the project: the limitations
of the technology (what it CAN’T do) and where the technology is going to be deployed. By
context, I mean the physical or digital space where the technology is likely to be used. (With a
mobile technology, this is obviously a harder challenge.)

29. When we did the Canesta TV project, we observed people and ourselves watching TV to see what we
did. This definitely changed the kinds of gestures we were going to choose. [Mute story] This is
Jennifer Bove, another Kicker principal. She’s wearing gloves because the camera couldn’t see fingers
at the time.

30. Understand what’s
already there...
When you’re introducing a new technology into an existing environment, you want to make
sure that you understand you understand that environment, even if your technology is going
to disrupt that environment.

31. ...because you could
disrupt it.
When you’re introducing a new technology into an existing environment, you want to make
sure that you understand you understand that environment, even if your technology is going
to disrupt that environment. You want to be able to predict HOW the disruption is going to
happen, so that it doesn’t negatively affect the environment.

32. Prototyping
Prototyping is obviously more important with new technology, because until it’s up and
running, you might have no idea what it feels like to use. You’ll really get a sense of its
limitations once you start playing with it.

33. Make it work. Make it
work right. Make it work
fast. In that order.
Paul Hammond
It’s fine to start with low fidelity methods for prototyping too. Paper, cardboard, and so called
“Wizard of Oz” techniques with “the man behind the curtain” controlling fake results. On the
Canesta project, because the camera wasn’t ready yet, we had test subjects sit in front of a
regular TV and make gestures, while we changed the channel with an ordinary remote. Use
scaffolding.

34. Help Sell It
You’re going to need to help sell the technology. This will not only help users, it will help you
understand how the technology will be perceived better and what meaning you are trying to
give the technology.

35. For Canesta, we produced a series of marketing images to help make the technology more
appealing and better understood.

37. Words matter.
What you call the technology and HOW you explain it is extremely important for potential
users’ comprehension of what it is.

38. Using the word Find instead of Search helped explain what the Yolink product was.

39. Testing
As with anything new, testing prototypes with users is recommended, with one caveat:

40. Great ideas can’t be
tested. Only mediocre
ideas can be tested.
George Lois
A word of caution about testing from George Lois. If the technology you’re working with is
really a departure from what users are used to, there could be some resistance to even the
idea of the technology, or just a simple lack of understanding of why they would use it.

41. EXPECTATIONS
Human beings’s brains are set up to expect that things will work as they have in the past.
New technology disrupts this process. But even so, users are coming to your product with a
set of expectations about it is going to work, and with new technology, it might not work like
they think it does, or should.

42. We have high expectations for our devices now. And users get used to a level of technology
speed, power, and execution.

43. M A Y A
It’s good to keep this acronym in mind, invented by this guy, Raymond Loewy, a famous
French-American industrial designer from the mid-20th century. He coined the term MAYA:
Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable. You don’t want your design to be SO radically new that users
have no idea where to even start with it. You need to keep the YA Yet Acceptable in mind.

44. Pattern Recognition
This is because humans are pattern recognition creatures. It’s startling to our brains when
things don’t work as we’re used to.

45. Predictability...is so
profoundly soothing...it
gives you a sense of
order, that everything’s
going to be all right.
David Foster Wallace
Creating discernible patterns quickly is incredibly important with new technology. You want
the product, although new and exciting, to seem PREDICTABLE.

46. Once our brains find
a pattern, we make
predictions based on
that pattern.
And if we discover the pattern isn’t there, we feel robbed or cheated or wronged. It’s
dissonance for the brain. It causes tension because we don’t know what’s coming next. We
don’t know how the pattern will resolve.

47. Follow conventions unless
the new alternative is
measurably better.
Alan Cooper
If you can surround your new technology with conventions users understand, the technology
itself stands a better chance of being adopted.

48. Just as one example, look at how much early cars resembled the carriages that came before
them.

49. New patterns
eventually become
old patterns.
Luckily, we adapt quickly.

50. The Of Course Factor
What we should be striving for when working with new technology is this near-immediate
creation of the Of Course factor.

51. Most companies are
looking to “wow” with
their products, when in
reality what they should
be looking for is an “of
course” reaction.
Christian Lindholm
Done right, the new technology itself will provide the wow factor. So we don’t need to worry
about that. What we need to concern ourselves with is the making the use of the new
technology seem OBVIOUS and PREDICTABLE.

52. Affordances
Affordances (or technically perceived affordances) are the visible pieces of an product that
allow users to understand what can be done with it. A cup affords putting liquid into it. A
button affords pushing. And so on. With new technology, being able to understand WHAT DO
I DO HERE? is essential for adoption. This is where affordances come in: do I push it, click it,
drag it...how do I get started? where do I begin?

53. Affordances are particularly important in digital products because a button on a screen
doesn’t have to look like a button at all. If you want people to push it, it should look like it
can be pushed. With Canesta, Some kind of indicator of the gesture you could use to do
something.

54. Attraction Affordance
Sometimes people need help getting started.

55. Metaphor
Asking yourself What that exists is this product like? can help you come up with a design
language and affordances that can help explain the technology to users.

56. Metaphor allows us
to understand the
abstract.

57. People won’t buy a product if they
can’t understand it immediately. They
can’t understand it immediately if their
worldview doesn’t already have a
readymade place for it. And their
worldview won’t have a readymade
place for it, if they’ve never seen
anything like it before.
Amy Hoy
Metaphor can help bridge this gap that Amy is talking about here. If we’ve never seen
ANYTHING like it, our minds flail about and we’re confused. But when you have a metaphor, it
helps the human brain understand what is going on.

58. Metaphor is something the brain does
when complexity renders it incapable
of thinking straight.
Gary Greenberg
The brain can’t stand a pattern it doesn’t recognize. If your users don’t understand what is
going on, they will make up a reason for why something is happening (or not happening). And
that reason could be the wrong one and the user will get the wrong mental model of how the
product works.

59. Only 5 percent of consumer electronics
products returned to retailers are
malfunctioning—yet many people who
return working products think they are
broken, a new study indicates...
Accenture estimates that 68 percent of
returns are products that work properly
but do not meet customers' expectations
for some reason.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/146576/
most_returned_products_work_fine_study_says.html
This is fascinating, I think. The products WORK AS DESIGNED but are designed so poorly that
people cannot figure them out!

60. The average consumer in the US will
struggle for 20 minutes to get a device
working before giving up.
Elke den Ouden

61. Make it a Toy
Few people are afraid of toys, or experimenting with a toy or playing with one. It is a good
go-to metaphor, one we used for Canesta too.

62. Don't be discouraged if what you
produce initially is something other
people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's
a good sign. That's probably why
everyone else has been overlooking
the idea. The first microcomputers
were dismissed as toys. And the first
planes, and the first cars.
Paul Graham
People might dismiss what you’ve made as a toy anyway. Add Facebook and Twitter to Paul
Graham’s list here as well.

63. Design Languages
from Other Areas
One powerful thing about metaphor is that it allows you to bring in thinking from other
design areas.

64. For instance, before he worked at Apple, Jonathan Ive designed kitchen and bathroom
appliances. Having this background allowed him to take some of that design language and
apply it to personal computers.

65. PERSONALITY
One benefit of this, was giving personal computers a different personality. If you give your
product a personality, not only will users be more forgiving and interested in it, but they’ll
become more attached to it as well.

66. What is the voice of
this technology?
Ask yourself: how does it speak to the user? What positive emotion does it make them feel?

67. Failure is an area to
show personality.
When you are designing with more established technology, it is easy to forget about things
like error messages and use cases when something bad happens. With new technology you
can’t do that because it’s guaranteed not to work as expected quite often. Luckily, this is a
time when the product can show off its personality.

68. Flickr, which utilized new technology several rounds of new technology ago, does this very
well.

69. Emotion
Of course, what I’m really talking about here is emotion. If we have an emotional connection
to something, we’re more willing to forgive its faults and experiment with it more.

70. Creating a product
means creating an
emotional connection
whether we mean to
or not.
So we should deliberately MEAN to. How should people feel about the product?

71. Emotion is almost
always found in the
small details.
Emotion isn’t usually in the functionality of a product itself, but in THE EXPRESSION of that
functionality: in the feedback, in the transitions between pieces of functionality or content, in
the small details.

72. Small details are
hard to replicate.
No matter how new, how inventive, how earth-shattering your technology is, sonner or later,
it will be replicated, either exactly or almost-so. But if you’ve paid attention to the product
details, the emotional component will be difficult to replicate.

73. How does using this
technology make
users feel?
Technologies (and their context of use) have their own emotional weight.

74. Sound Design
I just want to put a plug in here for the importance of sound design. The Web almost ruined
sound design with too many horrible sites blaring music at you. But sound can really give a
lot of character to a product.

75. MEANING
Only two things typically create innovative products: technology and meaning. As designers,
we’re uniquely poised to work with both.

76. Any time you have a new
device...it also doesn't make
a lot of sense. It simply
doesn't fit with anything that
we're currently used to.
Ben Fry
In other words, it doesn’t have meaning. What Ben is saying applies equally to new kinds of
websites and software too. As designers we have to help make MEANING of new technology.
Meaning starts by asking this:

77. What is the deepest
reason people would
use this technology?

78. New technology often hides a more
powerful meaning. Eventually a
company discovers and reveals that
quiescent meaning–celebrating what I
call a technology epiphany–and in
doing so becomes the market leader.
Roberto Verganti
The combination of technology innovation with meaning is a powerful innovator.

79. “Beat the Bag”

80. What does this technology do that is BETTER (not just different) from what currently exists?

82. Capture Meaning
in Design Principles

83. Canesta Gestural
Entertainment Center
Be able to use it on a date.
Be as lazy as possible.
Use it with a bottle in one hand.

84. Practical Considerations
Expectations
Personality
Meaning

85. Some people (they are
wrong) say design is about
solving problems.
Obviously designers do solve
problems, but then so do
dentists. Design is about
cultural invention.
Jack Schulze
I want to end with this bit by Jack. Yes, Jack, Yes! New technologies offer us the opportunity
to be inventors of culture, and I hope when the chance comes to do so, you will seize it.

86. Good products
change the way we
think about that type
of product. Great
products change the
way we think about
the world.
Because after all...
I hope you all go out and make great products.

87. Thanks.
dan@kickerstudio.com
@odannyboy on Twitter
http://kickerstudio.com