David Hoang — Writing — product

Creating value with artifacts

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Artifact: An object made by a human being, typically an item of cultural or historical interest.

Artifacts are powerful objects. They guide, galvanize, and hold history. These are tools that move humanity forward. In building products and companies, digital artifacts are crucial.

What great artifacts do

An artifact is a document, but not all documents are artifacts. I talk to my friend Ha Phan a lot about different ways to make artifacts. The short answer is there is no wrong way to do it. Each one is unique and serves a purpose. Let's reflect on some of the attributes that make an artifact great.

Abstract complexity

Systems and concepts can be hard to interpret. One wrong word and someone might spawn a completely different mental model. That's where a simple artifact can create quick alignment.

Push stories ahead

Have you ever presented in a meeting and people start asking questions before you can finish? I've probably done this myself. Moving the story along allows people to pay attention and follow your tempo. Sharing an artifact can give people something to pay attention to. It could even be a MacGuffin. What's a MacGuffin? If you saw Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, you asked yourself, "Why are they looking for this random dagger?" That's a MacGuffin—an unnecessary object that moves things forward. The equivalent of a MacGuffin in design storytelling is when you wave the magic wand and ask people to move forward with assumptions. It helps move you to the point. Aspire to create something more than a MacGuffin though. All I'm saying is you can keep it dead simple.

Leave a clear footprint

Artifacts capture and memorialize certain moments. A danger is when artifacts become redundant or misinterpreted without context. Avoid those working docs that are never updated by someone who isn't at the company anymore.

When someone can review and can clearly understand the context of an artifact, you know it's good. It should not require voiceover or verbal context. Otherwise, the artifact is pointless. Guiding artifacts have a nomenclature and visual language that's easy to understand. If you try to be too sophisticated, the barrier to comprehending makes it pointless.

Examples of artifacts

There's no wrong way to make an artifact and there are multiple fidelities. The main purpose is you use them, share them with others, and have them guide you. I'll share a few I've made at One Medical as examples. Though I'd love to share some artifacts that I use today, it's too soon to share them in public!

Drawings

At times, you don't want artifacts to be too prescriptive, especially when you're leading other people. Avoid making artifacts that feel too solution-oriented or prescriptive. I loved sharing low-fidelity sketches with the product designers and researchers on my team to generate ideas. This is a sketch of some of our initial ideas for our virtual therapy platform.

This is one of the development points of my drawing style. Strive for high-fidelity conversation and low-fidelity production.

Maps

I love Alissa Briggs' talk Maps and Markers and refer to this often. Maps help plot where you need to go. A strategy, in its simplest form, is a map that guides you to your goal. This could be someone drawing on the dirt on a hiking trail or putting sticky notes on an ecosystem map. We plotted an ecosystem map with product and clinical leaders in this example. What you see (blurred) were key conversations memorialized in what would be a digital artifact.

Mapping our One Medical Ecosystem (intentionally blurred)

Maps encourage people to refine and build. The act of a map is to start the journey.

Making a vision book

One project I was most proud of at One Medical was a vision book we shared with our board and execs on where the future of the company could go. We created a pitch book, just like one in my agency days. It was really fun to put together and tell a story.

We printed out several copies and shared the narrative with our coworkers and stakeholders. This invited people to participate in a vision vs. it being handed down to them from the mountains. Their markups allowed us to infuse their perspectives in the vision and make it a part of the updated artifact.

Try making artifacts

Don't underestimate the power of making an artifact. If you don't know where to start, make a simple drawing or diagram. Share it with a colleague to see if it's helpful. As you build a conversation around it, it'll prove its value. Finally, making artifacts is fun. I wish you luck in your artifact-making.

Originally posted on Proof of Concept

Give users choice: Design ecosystems, not paths

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Originally posted on Webflow Blog

User-centered design doesn't actually center the user anymore.

Underneath a benign name, "user-centered" design journeys are just rigid, biased environments where the user doesn't have the freedom of choice. They only have freedom to move along the arbitrary pathways that the designer gives them.

There's a term for what happens when users rebel against these constraints. In urban planning — it's called the "desire path." For example, an urban planner may lay out a nice brick path for pedestrians, but pedestrians don't stay within the path's boundaries. Instead, they depart from the plan and tread through grass, making their own shortcuts that cut corners.

Designers have historically been afraid of this type of unpredictability, but there's a way to design with it in mind.

Enter, ecosystem design. A truly user-centered design journey that allows for a matrix of possible interactions and empowers users to create their own pathways and build for their own communities using their own tools.

User-centered design is not enough — ecosystem design is the future

So, what sets ecosystem design apart from user-centric design? For starters, ecosystem design is a lens for product design that anticipates and welcomes inputs from the user and the other tools they use.

User-centered design assumes users will behave predictably and stay within the bounds of your design. But users have evolved quickly, and there are too many external and internal factors constantly influencing the choices they make. This means that by the time you tidily map out your user journey, the user will have likely changed their mind or performed an action you haven't anticipated.

By contrast, instead of anticipating user behavior in a point A to point B sequence, ecosystem design anticipates user misbehavior. The user subverts and breaks boundaries naturally as they interact with a product. Ecosystem design recognizes that users don't create in isolation or behave in a straightforward manner, and that as a designer, you're responsible for creating space in your ecosystem for users to choose their own renegade journeys.

No-code takes this one step further. With no-code tools, users now have more agency to "talk back" to designers with their own designs. This growing base of no-code users isn't seeking one fully-designed solution to build in. Instead, they want to design in an ecosystem using integration points between platforms that allow learning and iteration through plugins, tutorials, and shared knowledge. Think how much more useful Airtable is to you as a creator when you integrate it with Zapier.

This makes it absolutely necessary that designers think about not only customer experience but the complete ecosystem experience as well.

Instead of seeing misbehavior as a form of user rebellion, I would like to offer this perspective: when someone off-roads away from the user path you thought you understood, you probably should embrace that direction and even enable it.

Responsibility in ecosystem design

At the heart of ecosystem design is a commitment to uphold the users' ever-evolving needs above your own bias or ego — much like the original goal of user-centered design. Now a designer's commitment must extend to letting users blur the lines between your design and others' because trapping your user within a tiny linear system within one platform is now the least user-centered decision that you could make.

The ecosystem of open-source software was supposed to be the best example of this ideal: A true commons where ideas could be freely shared for the betterment of mankind. However, that commons — to its detriment — has ended up being more code-centric than people-centric. As Don Goodman-Wilson pointed out: "Openness is not an end in itself, but a tool that we can use for good or ill."

Truly user-centered design leaves space for gray areas and for the user to make their own choices you wouldn't have thought of — but it also provides transparent guardrails while recognizing that those guardrails must constantly be reconsidered, too.

If an ecosystem is healthy, it encourages biodiversity. For an ecosystem to survive, you also can't let it be burned down.

Ecosystems are designed for interoperability

While we may compare design teams to sports teams or compare UX design to building roads for users to get from one place to another, it's truly more complicated than that. For myself, design is a big community garden with new members joining every day — bringing their own tools, processes, and perspectives. Even though there might be some rows and planters that provide order, for these gardens to yield fruit, they mostly have to be allowed to grow in whatever direction they need to. Similarly, design should be interoperable, meaning for it to thrive best — its environment should be organic and free-flowing.

At Webflow, having an ecosystem design mindset means we design to enable and encourage that organic flow between our own platform and other tools. In nature, nothing functions in complete isolation. Ecosystems are interdependent, full of symbiotic relationships. Likewise, ecosystem design works toward interoperability, where the whole system functions best and becomes more resilient the more it adapts.

I know this because we live it here every day. Webflow started out as a tool for developers and designers, but has evolved into a tool for other types of users, like marketers. Instead of keeping them out or creating new narrow lanes for these types of users or just solving this design problem with add-ons, we made Webflow into an ecosystem — where every user can make what they want (even if it means working with other tools) without having to be shoved into a box.

Interoperability is a sacrifice. It's hard to let go of controlling your products in order to serve the user's real needs of flexibility and inter-dependability. It's also the most important thing about ecosystem design. If you're truly being user-centered, then you have to connect a tunnel between your platform and others. You have to be vulnerable enough to keep those tunnels open and allow two-way communication between them. You have to be ready to learn where you failed to design for the user and expand your ecosystem to make room for them. You'll need to develop your prediction skills, to read the tracks in the dirt, to better anticipate change, to follow the user's evolution in real time. Keeping the user at the center will always be the right call. Now, you have to give the user the power of choice, too.

Jodorowsky's Product Roadmap

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I’ll share two stories you may not have heard of. These are stories of “the greatest film never made” and “the most important dead company in Silicon Valley.” This is a story about what happens when projects with uncompromising visions collide with the production process to make it happen (and keep it alive).

In the 1970s, film director Alejandro Jodorowsky took on what people said was the impossible task: a film adaptation of Dune. If you don’t know who Jodorowsky is, he is a filmmaker known for his avant-garde and wild ideas. Dune is a science fiction novel written by Frank Herbert in 1965 and considered by some critics to be the best science fiction book ever written—the bible of science fiction. A film adaptation was often believed to be impossible due to the epic length and many storylines of the novel.

From the beginning, Jodorowsky had a grand vision, and names such as Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Pink Floyd were set to star in the film. He even offered to pay Dalí a fee of $100,000 per hour. Personally, I think that’s a pretty good rate in 1974. Jodorowsky had an uncompromising vision, proclaiming that there would be no script notes, and the film had to be produced 100% aligned with how he imagined it.

In addition to the star power of the on-screen talent, the designers who Jodorowsky recruited might be lesser known to the general public, but perhaps had a larger impact. This design cast included Chris Foss (a well-known science fiction cover artist), Jean Giraud (better known as Moebius in the comic book world), and H.R. Giger. Jodorowsky would lead his team of spiritual warriors who would make Dune come to life on the big screen.

The team of spiritual warriors spent $2 million of the $9.5 million budget on pre-production, with the film being about 14 hours long, and he wanted the film to be 20 hours. No rational production studio would take the risk on Jodorowsky’s massive vision, and the hope of this film actually being produced collapsed. With the project dead, the rights were sold to producer Dino De Laurentiis in 1984 (yes, he’s the grandfather of Giada from The Food Network), who ultimately hired David Lynch to direct. All that was left of Jodorowsky’s Dune was a book of concepts and storyboards the size of a Yellow Pages phone book.

The dream was over.

Jodorowsky’s Dune is a prime example of an uncompromised vision that never made it to reality, and there are many other industries that have similar stories, such as technology and startups. Let’s take a look at another story in Silicon Valley. You may not have heard of General Magic, but you are likely familiar with the iPod, iPhone, and Android phones.

The year was 1989 and Apple Inc. was headed by John Sculley, the former Pepsi CEO whom co-founder Steve Jobs hired, and who ultimately fired Jobs. Without Jobs at the helm, the computer company was looking for new product innovation. Apple employee Marc Porat, known for his entrepreneurial spirit and big ideas, convinced Sculley that the future of computing would be a partnership of computer, communications, and consumer electronics companies. Known as the Paradigm project, the initiative lacked traction internally at Apple. Porat took the initiative and spun it out as its own company separate from Apple. General Magic was born. Porat recruited two key Apple engineers, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson, to join this ragtag team of magicians to build the future of computing.

General Magic worked on an operating system called Magic Cap designed with mobile computing in mind, which was a wild idea in the early 90s when you still had to call the internet to connect. Magic Cap used the metaphor of rooms as a virtual office you could navigate on your mobile device. General Magic was able to get further in production than Jodorowsky simply by existing and still having money to work on their vision.

As the General Magic team continued to innovate, Apple would release a portable digital assistant called the Apple Newton. This was done with Sculley still as CEO of Apple and without General Magic’s knowledge. The product was a flop. From a vision and execution perspective, if General Magic was Jodorowsky’s Dune, then the Apple Newton was David Lynch’s Dune.

General Magic was able to get further than Jodorowsky’s Dune in terms of tangible results, but they also struggled with compromising on their vision. Somehow, the company was able to IPO in 1995 without an actual product, likely with investors making a bet on the team’s vision that still hadn’t been productionalized. Four years after their IPO, a product was finally rushed to market without major adoption by consumers.

The dream was over.

The greatest film never made and Silicon Valley’s most important dead startup never achieved their visions. Or did they? How is success defined? Is there such a thing as being too ahead of your time, or the vision being too big? Without such big dreams, would we continue to build a faster horse?

Should these two visions have compromised in order to survive? In hindsight, some may argue they should have, but would it have been the same impact?

What remained in the concept art from Jodorowsky’s Dune lived on in a way the film director likely hadn’t hoped for. George Lucas would create a little-known film called Star Wars in 1977. In one of the most iconic opening scenes in film history, it was very reminiscent of Dune’s storyboards for the opening. H.R. Giger, one of Jodorowsky’s artists on Dune, went on to work with Ridley Scott on the sci-fi horror film Alien. Giger brought his work style into the film that let the world know that in space, no one can hear you scream. Ridley Scott was also approached by Dino De Laurentiis about directing Dune (the David Lynch one). Due to a personal tragedy, Scott dropped out and upon returning instead directed a film called Blade Runner, which borrowed work from Moebius for the art direction.

The list of former General Magic employees reads like a hall of fame of tech giants. Tony Fadell went on to invent the iPod, co-invent the iPhone, and start Nest. Megan Smith went on to be a VP at Google. Kevin Lynch went on to create design/code editing software called Dreamweaver and later became a lead engineer on Apple Watch. He’s also the Apple exec often mistaken for Bill Gates due to their resemblance. Andy Hertzfeld invented Google Circles, which led to Google+ (he did useful things too!). Andy Rubin went on to invent the Android operating system, later acquired by Google. He also is a really terrible human being, so we’ll stop there. Even the low-level employees found success after General Magic. Pierre Omidyar left the scrappy startup to start his own company, which he called eBay.

Forty-six years after Jodorowsky first put together his phonebook-sized vision book, acclaimed director Denis Villeneuve would take on the ambitious project of Dune. With films like Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049 on his résumé, there is no doubt that the work of Jodorowsky’s concept book inspired Villeneuve.

Tony Fadell was just a college grad when he worked at General Magic and endured a decade of trials and tribulations working at the struggling startup. As Fadell once said in an interview, “I literally had a decade of failure.” Fadell would later go on to invent the iPod, be co-creator of the iPhone, and create the Nest thermostat. It is quite possible the greatest value General Magic shipped was Tony himself.

As someone who works in startups and tech, there are multiple definitions of success and failure. For an investor, success might be scaling to a lucrative IPO for huge returns. For a founder, it might also be that, however, it could also be pursuing an uncompromising vision to change the world. The majority of startups die before their vision is even realized and never make it to market. However, some uncompromising visions often explode like a supernova, spreading their cosmic influence for others to continue the work.

Perhaps the greatest failures at fulfilling a grand vision bore spores of inspiration for others to continue the work for countless generations.