I used that phone until November of 2011, when I was able to get upgrade pricing on an iPhone, and I haven’t looked back. I want to share my experiences and thoughts from this time before I forget the good and bad things about Android, as there are too few designers who have significant experience on Android. That isn’t to say that those who use Android temporarily (John Gruber, for example, or many of the folks he quotes) and then go back to iOS are not helpful, but it’s at least something of a different thing when you do it for so long.

The hardware

This, then, is the Incredible. You can see it’s certainly not a bad design, from a hardware perspective. It’s obviously borrowing a lot from that version of the iPhone (but who isn’t?), and it does have quirks that separate the two.

A big one is the presence of hardware buttons. Android seems to be gradually moving away from these, as they just don’t fit well with the long-term development of a mobile operating system. But when the Incredible was released, there were still lots of Android phones that had physical keyboards. So there’s that, and I knew this was a better alternative than any of those.

Aside from that, when I compare it with the current iPhone, the 4s, it feels very toy-like. More fragile, less well-made. This is possibly an unfair comparison, as I didn’t spend a lot of time handling anyone’s iPhone that had a comparable age, but I do think it’s worth mentioning.

But again, overall it wasn’t particularly disappointing while I was using it.

The battery

The battery on this phone deserves posts dedicated to itself. It is truly unimaginable how bad it is. I was only able to use the default battery that came with the phone for a few weeks. It would be completely drained before the end of an eight-hour workday, starting right after I had charged it overnight. This was without running WiFi, Bluetooth, leaving the GPS on, or doing significant work with it while I was at work. Maybe I’d make a couple of calls, send or receive a few texts, open up an app or two. Not heavy usage, is the point.

So because that battery was so bad, I bought a battery upgrade for $50. It made the phone a lot bulkier, as it was thicker and required a different back for the phone, but I was willing to deal with that. With the same restrictions on WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and the same typical usage throughout a day, I was usually able to get through most of the evening – the battery would end up dying around 10 or 11 pm.

But note that again: I had to keep the GPS off if I wasn’t using it to navigate somewhere specific. I had to keep WiFi off. I had to keep Bluetooth off.

Since I’ve had the iPhone 4s, I have yet to turn off the GPS, Bluetooth, or WiFi. I use the GPS functionality much more often (I’ll talk more about this further down), I use WiFi constantly when it’s available, and I use more apps at random throughout the day. As it now stands, at 10pm after a day of at least normal usage, I still have 25% of my battery left.¹

The Incredible’s battery life is so bad that it’s disgusting that it was allowed to leave testing.

The operating system

It’s rather difficult to evaluate Android on its own merits and demerits because any handset maker or carrier is allowed to, and clearly feels the need to, customize the system in any way they see fit. They fill it with apps that can’t be deleted, they customize the user interface, and so on. So this is an attempt to look at the system the way it is on the Incredible.

I’ll say this: I really like the layout of the keys on HTC’s custom keyboard. I like the way special characters (from the dot to the @ symbol and many others) are accessible by holding down a key on the main screen. It’s better, I think, than Apple’s method of going to the next page to get those items.

And of course, Android (especially when the Incredible was released) had a far better notification system than the iPhone did. It’s still better, I think, but not like it was (people have showed me the previous system).

That’s where the benefits end. The presence of Flash? Useless, annoying, and a battery killer. The other customizations from HTC? Sum them up by observing that on the default home screen, there were two clocks. Why does anyone need two clocks taking up screen space at the same time? Just because one is big and bubbly doesn’t mean it has a right to exist.

But the biggest issue I ran into were bugs. Genuine, documented-but-never-fixed-because-there-were-almost-never-updates, bugs. For example, my Incredible had an SD card in it, and it had internal storage as well. I never so much as filled up the internal storage, much less the SD card, but constantly the phone was alerting me that it was full and I wouldn’t be able to add any apps, get updates from existing apps, etc. without deleting things.

At first, this would happen every month or so, then every week or so, then every day or so, then every hour or so. Finally, I would get frustrated and delete all the data held by any app on the phone. Contacts, email, social apps, whatever. All data gone. Then I’d have peace for a month or so, after which it would start again, and then before long every hour it would be “full” again.²

Again, it’s disgusting that any company would let a device pass out of testing with a bug like that, especially knowing it would be next to impossible to fix any bugs due to Android’s insane carrier and device fragmentation.

I don’t know if this bug is as common, but I also had constant GPS issues. I spent some time in Minneapolis in August, for example. Until the day I deactivated the phone in November, the Weather and Calendar apps thought I was still there, and occasionally the Maps app did too. This was after clearing data a few times, restarting several times, and wasting time wondering why my directions were so off. This also showed itself in apps like Foursquare, but I didn’t realize this until I switched.

I’ve yet to run into a bug on the iPhone. That’s not significant yet, of course, but what is significant is that I’ve already gotten more operating system updates since I bought the iPhone than I did in the entire time I used my Incredible.

Applications

The stereotype, of course, is that the iPhone has better apps than Android. For the most part this is true, but I want to give credit where credit is due and look at the exceptions.

Google Apps

Google apps, as you’d expect, are really good on Android. The Gmail app shines, and is (I think) better than any mail app I’ve used on the iPhone so far. The Google Reader app is very good (though there are apps that far outshine it on the iPhone – Flipboard especially). Google Maps is very good, and Google’s Navigation app is even better (and, of course, not available for iPhone).

But for me, that’s pretty much it. I thought I’d miss Google’s apps when I switched to the iPhone, but the only one I miss is Gmail (but when the Gmail app for iPhone gets multiple account support, I’ll be happy). Flipboard is amazing to the point that I don’t ever use Google Reader on the iPhone. And Google’s Navigation app is, for me, overcome by Waze.³

Non-Google Apps

Now, there were some nice other apps on Android, but the thing is this: all of them are as nice or better on the iPhone. Things like Mint, Facebook, Twitter (and the myriad of other Twitter apps – each one beats anything available on Android), Foursquare (maybe due to the GPS issues I mentioned earlier), Scoutmmob, NPR, WordPress, etc. are far better in every way on the iPhone than they are on Android. Then there are the countless apps that are available only on the iPhone, and this is where the stereotype is most true. The iPhone just has better apps, and it has more better apps.

Many folks think, of course, that this is because developers like iOS better. I think this is true. I also think it’s true that very few, if any, designers have any inclination to work on Android apps, and thus they all end up getting created by developers. Case in point is a crazy brilliant little app that only runs on Android called Tasker. When I first bought it, it was $6, but it seemed so great that I didn’t have an issue with that.

In essence, it allows you to automate almost anything the phone can do. The phone can turn on WiFi when you reach a certain location, turn it off when you leave, turn on the GPS when you open certain apps, turn it off when you close them, silence itself at bedtime, turn the sound back on in the morning, and any number of other things. It truly can do almost anything you can imagine.

But here’s the thing: you basically have to be a programmer to do things with it, or to read its documentation. This is because it was created by a Java developer. A brilliant Java developer, no doubt, but still a Java developer. Not a designer, and not a person who understands how users think.

And that’s the essence of Android apps, from my perspective. If they aren’t matched or outmatched by equivalents on the iPhone, they just aren’t designed well for people to use them, even if they have amazing functionality. I’ve long been clear that design isn’t about making things pretty, but it is about letting people do what they need to do.

Overall

So the overall experience I had with Android is terrible when compared with the experience Android users could and should get, or when compared with the one that iPhone users get. The reason for this is that Google isn’t interested in the attention to overall quality first, and specific details second, that Apple is. They seem to be taking tiny steps in that direction with some of their devices, but everything I’ve seen of their current models suggests that even now, the two companies could not be more different in the ways they approach their systems.

As a designer, then, I couldn’t recommend an Android phone of any kind to anyone, unless it was for device testing, development, or other professional use.

1. And again, this is the iPhone 4s. The one that most people say has worse battery life than the previous version, and the one on which Apple says it has been working out battery life bugs.
2. Most people I know who had Incredibles also had this issue. But not all of them, and that’s maddening, but it was a documented bug that Google, HTC, and/or Verizon chose never to do anything about. It’s still happening to my friends that have Incredibles today.
3. This lovely free app not only does turn-by-turn navigation like Gooogle’s Navigation app, but it also changes directions for you based on public traffic data, road conditions data, and the social data it gathers from its other users to give you a faster drive to wherever it is you are going. I haven’t missed Google’s app since I installed this one, and it regularly saves me time, even on a daily drive like my commute to work.

If you make stuff for websites, take the survey. It’s an important part of what you do.

The really interesting thing to me about this is the unique opportunity it gives us, as web designers or UX designers or whatever, to be the connection between people and fields that typically don’t understand each other at all. Let me elaborate.

One of the stereotypes about technology people – whether they are hardware people, tech support people, engineers or programmers, or whatever – is that they can’t communicate well with non-technical people. This stereotype isn’t always true, of course, but it often is true. Sometimes this is because they genuinely don’t know how to express the concepts they’re discussing in non-technical ways, and sometimes it’s a more ideological attempt to keep people from challenging their established positions (and it often works, because those they’re communicating with don’t have the language resources with which to challenge).

Designers usually don’t fall into this specific stereotype (we have our own issues, of course). Sometimes this is because designers are not that technical, but as we’ve learned from Zeldman and others, good web designers write code, and they understand programming as well. They understand what web servers and databases and programming languages are capable of doing, and some degree of how to do that stuff, because that’s how their designs get accomplished.

Good web designers also understand user experience design. Whether they are UX designers themselves or not (I don’t want to get into the battle over titles) is irrelevant – all good web designers know how user experience affects their work, and how their work affects user experience. They know what it means for something to be intuitive, and what their role is in that.

It’s the combination of these things – an understanding of technical stuff and an understanding of user experience – that gives us as designers the opportunity I’m speaking of, and it’s the opportunity to be the connection between technical people and non-technical people. To the extent that we do this, the stuff we all make together gets better, and that’s a beautiful thing that happens too infrequently. But it’s also true that to the extent we do this, we become better designers.

Building better stuff

Designers who are able to be a bridge between technical and non-technical people will always be an enhancement to web projects, beyond the obvious stuff that we do as part of designing things. We are able to translate what is actually being said by each group in meaningful ways.

When this happens, technical people understand why it is that the non-technical people want or do not want something, and non-technical people understand why it is that the technical people want or do not want something. Understanding that, on both sides, makes it easier to say “No” when it’s necessary, instead of getting bogged down in jargon, on both sides, that obscures whether or not something is actually good for a project.

When it doesn’t happen, technical people feel attacked, or like no one understands what it really takes to accomplish something. This leads to unrealistic stuff that gets done badly. Equally important, non-technical people feel stupid. If you’ve ever been part of these conversations, you’ve heard someone ask you to “explain it to me like I’m stupid.” But that’s not really what they want. What they really want is for you to explain it in their own language, or in a language that makes sense to them, and designers are uniquely qualified to do this.

Granted, it can be difficult for a designer to get into this space. Often it’s hard for technical people to really trust a designer, but it is possible, especially when designers really do understand what the technical issues are and what they mean. Designers can be the people who make those translations make sense, and they can do it in a way that doesn’t make anyone feel stupid or attacked. It’s worth it; it makes better stuff.

Becoming better designers

It’s also true that designers who are able to function in this role will, in an overall sense, become better designers.

The reason for this is that the skills we use in these roles are the skills we use when we actually design things. One role creates, and inspires, the other role.

Most businesses have their own language. They have their own acronyms, their own internal structures of things, and their own ways of understanding whatever it is that they do. Developing this language is natural, and it can help make it possible for people to function within large organizations. But the problem is that these languages don’t make any sense. They themselves are not natural, and people don’t understand them without being stuck in the organizations.

So, most of the time when we’re designing something, we’re not designing it for the people within our organizations who already understand that language. This makes most design projects fairly complex, even if they otherwise wouldn’t be, because we have to avoid making people feel stupid. They’re not stupid, in all likelihood; they just need to hear stuff in their own language, or one that they understand.

But again, it gives us as designers the unique opportunity to communicate between people who understand the language of that business and people who just want to buy something, or use something, or get something done.

To do this, we need to understand what languages it is that the organization uses, and why it uses them. It’s hard work to do this. But we also have to understand what languages it is that users understand, and this gives us the chance to get to know them.

Doing these things is worth it. It makes better stuff, and it makes better designers.

This fact is also causing profound attempts from some of the best designers (and also fascinating companies) in the world to think about how to design reading experiences in the digital age. These attempts are trying to wrestle with the vast amounts of interesting information available to us, as well as innovations in product design, interface design, and technology around the ways we read content.

I’m fascinated by all of these things. I’m a designer, of course, and hope to be involved in some of these attempts to shape the reading experiences we have. I’m also a person who loves to read, and hope to experience the things we shape. I love to read intensely into subjects I’m passionate about, and have no interest in losing that part of my life. But I’m also a deeply curious person, and I love to learn about all kinds of things whether I’m qualified to do so or not.

As designers, one of the initial things we need to do when we try to design things is figure out what problem we’re trying to solve. If we don’t know what the problem is, we need to stop designing until we do. With reading in the digital age, there are likely enough problems to keep us all busy for decades, or to overwhelm us into not doing anything. These problems will at times have solutions that attempt to solve several of the problems at once, or that only attempt to solve one of them, and both courses of action are necessary.

How do we digest the content available to us online?

At the moment I want to look at one of the problems: how, as readers and people who want to know things, to digest the content available to us online. For most of my life (aside from some awkward years growing up), I’ve been given and have developed a curiosity and willingness to try to learn things, and this only increased when I got the chance to spend most of my teen years growing up with the web. The two things fed each other, but they also focused each other. In a very literal sense, my life would be nothing like it is without the web and my experiences with it.

Partly because of this, I have a way that works for me to digest the insane amount of content that is available and interesting to me, and I think it has something to offer to this problem in a broad sense. This, then, is the goal I’ve learned to use and encourage others to use:

Find something(s) that you care deeply about. Read deeply into those things. Branch beyond them by following the trails led for you by people you trust.

Here’s how it has worked for me.

Find something(s) you care deeply about.

As you know, I care deeply about spirituality and theology, and specifically the kingdom of God as Jesus defined it, lived it, and invited us into it. This means a number of disciplines (ecclesiology, missiology) and practices (of creating a life rooted in that kingdom) are very important to me.

I also care deeply about design, or “how things work” in addition to how they look and feel, as Steve Jobs has defined it, and specifically design on the web. This means that the code and disciplines (web standards, interaction design, typography, user experience, etc.) that create good websites are very important to me.

And finally, I care deeply about justice in the world, or “what love looks like in public” as Cornel West has defined it. Again, this means that the struggles for and against justice that occur among the oppressed, the oppressors, and everyone in between are deeply important to me.

Of course I think these things are worthwhile passions, and I love to share them with anyone who will listen, but at the moment I’m suggesting that everyone can find the things that they care deeply about, and this is no less important now than it was in the age of books made of paper, and I think those who suggest that it is have failed to understand the internet, and failed to understand human nature.

Read deeply into those things.

The three things I mention have defined my life in a very real sense. Each one feeds into and is fed by the others, and together they shape the things I try to do and the person I try to be. While it has also happened in relation to offline content in books and things, I have learned to read deeply into each of these things online.

Certainly I don’t read everything written about these things, as this is impossible, but I’ve developed relationships of trust (sometimes just me trusting these folks, but often mutual trust) with people in each of these areas who have deep things to say, and they help fill my mind and my heart each day. I’m a better person, I think, and also better at the things I do because of this.

This can be true of anything that anyone cares deeply about, and that’s the beauty of the web and the ways it shapes us. Whatever the things that people are passionate about have the potential to shape the ways they read and use content online. This, again, is part of human nature and is not unique to the web, though the amount of stuff certainly is. But it is one of our core tasks, as designers of reading spaces, to create opportunities for people to experience these things deeply.

Branch beyond them by following the trails led for you by people you trust.

This is the part of my goal that is most unique to the web. Few people with things to say online are only interested in one thing. They usually talk about a number of things, and there is literally no end to the trails down which the ones you trust can lead you. This is the way that the web broadens our worlds. It should never cause us to leave our physical, embodied spaces behind, but it can always make the ways we live in those spaces different by helping us see what else is out there.

There is not necessarily any need for these trails to become things we’re equally passionate about. But maybe they will, and maybe we will find other people we want to trust on those trails. I wasn’t always passionate about Africa, but it has become a thing that drives me, and leads me to people I love and trust, because of the web. On the other hand, I don’t understand quantum physics and am not particularly passionate about it, but I will often read things about it because people I trust link to them, and I find it fascinating.

I think creating these experiences is also one of our core tasks as designers of reading spaces. It doesn’t have to be contradictory to helping people read deeply. Rather, the combination can give such work structure and ways to evaluate it.

Putting it together again

As I said, the goal I’m looking at is this: Find something(s) that you care deeply about. Read deeply into those things. Branch beyond them by following the trails led for you by people you trust.

There are tools (especially Twitter, Google Reader, Readability, Instapaper, and some others) that help people to do these things, but it’s only beginning. If I am able to contribute anything to the evolution of reading online, my hope is that it will be in designing things that help others to adopt this for themselves as I have, and see where it can lead them.

I found one specific pair of products to illustrate what I’ve learned better than anything else, and I wanted to share it, both as a tip for parents of babies and as a tip for designers of anything that people are expected to really use.

We were fortunate to be given a changing table a few weeks before our daughter was born. It’s a nice, wooden thing. It has some drawers in it for clothes, diapers, and holds random things like hairbrushes quite nicely. On top of it, of course, you’re expected to change the baby, and the baby industry has created some kind of pad surface thing to put there so the baby doesn’t have to be on a wooden surface. It requires a sheet, so we put a purple sheet on it. Purple is far better than pink, and it (in it’s darker hues) is my wife’s favorite color.

We also acquired, either through a gift or a purchase, a travel changing mat. It is a simple, plastic thing with a black side and a white side, and it closes up with velcro so you can put it into a diaper bag and take it with you. When you unfold it, of course, you can change the baby on it.

Now at face value, you might think the changing table and its associated pad surface is a better product. As a set it has a permanence to it, looks nicer, looks like it might be more comfortable, and so on. The travel mat looks cheap; a product for when parents are in a rush.

Recently we’ve moved Leila from a bassinet next to our bed into a crib in her nursery. This has gone over fantastically. It meant, among other things, that we decided to make more use of the changing table. We thought we could just put the baby there each time she woke up.

If you’ve been a parent you may have seen this coming all along, but the first or second time I did this I had an intense diaper to deal with. I did the best I could, but a good bit of mess got onto the changing table’s pad. I looked at it and thought, “Now I have to wash that sheet!” Then of course it became clear to me that this was going to be a regular thing.

With the travel pad, we had experienced this as well, but the beauty of it is that it is made of a material that can be cleaned with baby wipes. No need to buy multiple sets of sheets for it. No need to put it through a washing machine. It just gets cleaned, right where you are with things you have to change the baby anyway.

The comparison of the design of these products was so striking to me that it summarized everything about the baby industry. Someone probably created the changing table pad while thinking about changing tables, and how they are designed and sized. It was made to be customizable and cute. But apparently, no one thought about what happens to this product when babies are actually put onto it.

The travel pad, by contrast, was clearly designed with thoughts of parents and babies actually using it. Someone created it thinking about being with a baby in a place that doesn’t necessarily have easy access to a washing machine, and thought about what actually happens when babies get changed. Stuff gets dirty. Stuff gets full of germs. It has to be cleaned instantly, there are already wipes to clean the baby. No one keeps the baby on a changing surface for a long period of time, so it doesn’t need to have pillow-like comfort (though if you put it on top of a pillow for some reason, it basically does).

And this is good product design. It thinks beyond making something cute and comfortable, and instead thinks about what it’s actually being used to do (not cute or comfortable) and how long it’s used to do it (as little time as possible). It’s good for babies, and it’s good for the sanitary concerns, electric bills, water bills, detergent usage, and maybe even environmental consciences of parents.

My opinion is that the motivation for creating the network, then, is that the company wants to be social, rather than because it has seen a need that needs to be met. Because of this, I think the network has a flawed design at its very core, and I’m skeptical that it will succeed. I’d be fine if I were proven wrong, as I’m not a huge fan of Facebook’s design, but I’ll be surprised if that happens.

Design is a misunderstood topic these days, from any number of different angles. There are those who think design is nothing more than “look and feel”; reducing it to something akin to icing on a cupcake, so it can be done at the last minute after everything else is already done. There are also those who think it’s nothing more than typography, color, imagery, and making things pretty, which often allows it to be isolated from its content and the people who use it.

Certainly there’s something to both of these things; design is about how something looks and feels, and it is about visual principles, but it’s so much more than that and we do everyone who uses things that are designed a disservice when we don’t realize this.

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that any design is destined to fail, at least if it’s trying to disrupt something, if it does not first have a definable problem that it is trying to solve. This thought isn’t entirely original; it stands on the shoulders of brilliant folks who have changed the design world for the better by reminding us that we need to know about the people who use or will use our designs¹, and that’s one way we know whether there is a problem we can solve. But I think it needs to be plainly said: we need to define problems when we design things.

Let me unpack this a little further. Apple is often used as the best example of a great design company. It is this not because it designs things before everyone else does (it usually doesn’t) but because it (usually) enters a market after it has had time to see what is there, and what frustrations users have with what is there. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad are all examples of this. There were crappy MP3 players, crappy phones (including smartphones) and crappy tablets before Apple entered these markets, but it is now almost universally agreed to have the best user experiences in all these categories, because it found problems it could solve, and then solved them.

Google has done this in the past, as well. Google Search itself is a great example of this. We had bad search engines before Google started, and they were easily tricked by nefarious website owners. This is still possible today, of course, but much less so than it was. Google Maps and Gmail as well. Facebook followed this principle, at least at first, in that it realized that MySpace had a terrible user experience, and it simplified and improved upon the concept and then expanded its own capabilities with its own design principles.

This is why I think Google Plus is destined to fail in its lofty goals. I believe they have neglected to find a problem that users have with Facebook or Twitter (and in this case, it has to be a problem that tons of users have, or it won’t cause a big enough disruption) that they could solve by watching people use them, and focused their attention on solving it. I think instead they have tried to learn from the huge failures of Google Buzz and Google Wave, and to take advantage of the amount of stuff people do on Google’s sites (contact lists, doing searches, reading email, etc.). Certainly they should have done those things, but that’s not where they should have started.

Again, it may be that they have done these things, and if they have it may be that Google Plus will succeed. But I wouldn’t expect it. If it doesn’t, it will be because it didn’t do design as problem solving.

1. Jared Spool has been saying for years that the best designers spend at least two hours every six weeks watching people use their design or a competitor’s design.

I mention this because it resulted in our inability to keep Leila with us for a day or two (the days are still blending together at this point). While we waited for her, we spent our time watching cartoons, observing the oddities of the medical system around us, and (in my case) wandering around to get ice or juice or fruit, or go home, eat, and feed the cat. While I did all this, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much our experience lacked design.

I don’t know anything about how healthcare systems (of universities or otherwise) staff themselves (beyond the obvious doctors and nurses and such), or who they contract to build things that they use, but it’s clear to me that there is massive opportunity to improve the stuff that doctors, patients, and staff in these systems use. Ideally, we could all notice this.

I want to emphasize that the hospital’s doctors, nurses, and staffpeople who interacted with us were wonderful; it’s just the stuff that’s built for them to use that needs help.

Inside the delivery room

We arrived at the hospital, and the room where they put us in the maternity ward, the first day at around 3am. They hooked my wife up to a few things, and started to figure out whether she was close enough to stay (she was). One of these machines showed a bunch of squiggly lines all over the screen, and seemed to be printing them onto a roll of paper below it. It was apparently designed to measure something about contractions. Maybe how far apart they were? Maybe how intense they were? Maybe both, or something else entirely? A few times we might have been told what we were looking at, but mostly the folks there seemed to think the squiggly lines were self-explanatory, just like theologians think everyone knows what a pericope is.

This isn’t a problem for the doctors and nurses; part of their training involves this machine, and the other ones in the room that made even less sense to us. But it is a problem for the patients. I’m confident that these machines could have usable interfaces that interpret the data they display so patients could understand it, and I bet the medical people would be able to read them more easily. It’s true that we’re in an age of overwhelming amounts of data, but there are increasingly brilliant designers working to visualize that data for us.

Outside the room

Whenever I left the room where my wife was, whether we went to see the baby or I needed to go find juice, the area was built to make sure that people couldn’t leave with the wrong babies. Parents had a little bracelet thing that matched one on the baby, and the whole place went on lockdown if something went wrong. This was all appreciated.

Aside from that, the area had lots of doors that locked behind us, and we needed to get someone to open doors into other areas, or back into the areas we left when we came back. Each door had a button on the wall that staffpeople could use a keycard on, and also a phone that patients or visitors could use. We would pick up the phone, and it would ring and someone would answer and then open the door.

At first I didn’t think anything of this, but on the second or third day someone told me that it wasn’t possible to tell this phone apart from the regular phone. People sitting at the desk said they could mistake the doorbell thing for someone on the phone, and vice versa.

I think this is silly, and I know it’s because no one bothered to design the system with the people using it in mind. Any normal house has a doorbell that sounds like a doorbell and a phone that sounds like a phone. There could be way better systems for this kind of task, computerized alerts or something tied to the bracelets or any number of other things that could be beautifully designed.

Hire some designers

These were just the things that stuck out to me the most. There were several weird things (like machines attached to the bed that never got used and didn’t have any apparent purpose), and several annoying things (like the TV’s sound being played through the remote control so it was hard to hear), but I can think of reasons for all of these.

It’s these specific things that make me think there really are design problems in the medical industry, and that there really are opportunities for designers to make hospitals and doctor’s offices better places for the doctors, nurses, staff, and patients who spend time in them and use their tools. So I consider this post to be two things – a chance for me to share something we laughed at while our daughter was being taken care of, and also a half serious request that the medical industry invest in some user experience designers.

Likewise, one of the things I love most about being a designer is user experience. It gradually came into my life, initially through A List Apart, and then through UX Week three years ago. But since then, it has increasingly become a passion of mine to create designs (as a visual designer and a developer) that improve the lives of real people, as this is what it means to me. UX Week, as well as other conferences, books, in-person conversations, and countless bloggers and Twitter folks have given me ways to think about that and practice it in what I hope are significant ways. I’m deeply grateful.

The other day, I was sitting with dear people at our faith community exploring the next stages of our own place. We were dealing with some complex data, and needed to start to figure out what the voice of God and our community was inside that data. In doing this, we had some seminarians, an accounting-type, a city planner, and me, and I felt this was a beautiful mixture.

As I looked at the things before us, it felt like user experience design had a great deal of things to say to us, and that the disciplines that we practice as designers could, along with the other disciplines, help us as a faith community to ask the right questions and create the right structures from our data. We then hoped to present these things to our community, and ask them to seek the voice of God for themselves and our community to see where it would lead.

I still think this, and I think we were able to get to the right places, but I wasn’t able to articulate what I wanted to bring from user experience design into our conversation. Realizing that, especially in light of my own feeling that one of the places that inspires my life is the intersection of design and faith, made me want to think about how to articulate it.¹

People at the heart

At the core of user experience are the users who experience the design. This is exemplified in visual design, product design, content strategy, (even sometimes in programming) and all the other areas where folks work to make things people like to use. The beautiful thing about this is that it often really does try to make people’s lives better while creating something they like to use. User experience has had a few years to think about activism. Many of its leaders are concerned about making the world a better place, and I think this is because they’ve learned to think about people as more than consumers. If the field realizes (even some of) its potential, it will affect all of us in ways we can’t yet imagine.

Ecclesiology does not (exclusively) have people at the heart of its thinking. Ideally, it has God at the heart of its thinking (though this is not at all a given). But missional ecclesiology (and others, over the years) has what God is doing in the world among the people that he loves at the heart of its thinking. It seeks to involve people in experience of, and pursuit of, the kingdom of God. Again, it thinks of them as more than consumers, and this is a deep shift that cannot be overestimated.

How we figure out what God is doing among people, and how to go with them toward the kingdom of God, can be deeply impacted by the disciplines of user experience. We can’t know what God is doing among people until we know them and find out from them, and this is one of the most important things good design can teach us to do.

Helping people to do more than consume

At its best, good design helps people to do things more than it helps them to consume things. It does involve consumption, as does any part of our economy, but this is not where it thrives. It thrives in helping people to do things. Google, Twitter, and Apple, to name a few, all do this. They give us things they want us to consume, but they also give us deep opportunities to do things in the world, whether it be learning to organize information or catalyze deep cultural change or create entirely new ways for us to do what we already need to do, or even simply to look at the world as a bigger place (all three of these companies do all of these things).

The church, as well, exists to help people do more than consume things. It typically just wants people to come in, consume religious goods and services, and then pay some money for them, but this is not where it thrives or where it is called to be. Inviting people into the kingdom of God means is inviting them into something that is far bigger than they are, and giving them opportunities to do something there.

Usable

I put this last, as I think it can be the easiest to misunderstand. Good design always creates things that real people can really use. Things that are unusable make it harder to do things, whether they’re beautiful things that change the world or stupid things that numb us into thinking there is meaning where there is none.

This doesn’t mean it has to be simple, though simplicity is a wonderful thing that most designs could use a lot more of. It means that the design should be as simple as it needs to be in order to be used and experienced properly. If we’ve added complexity for complexity’s sake that makes people frustrated, confused, or unable to do what they want, we’ve designed badly. But if we’ve been simple for simplicity’s sake and neglected features that are necessary, we’ve still designed badly.

This could lead us, again, to think of the seeker-sensitive church. And it’s true, they’ve done a great job at making usable things. One could walk into any megachurch in any suburb, and know exactly where to go, what to do, and what to expect next if it wasn’t the first time.

But can you imagine walking into one of those for the first time, without prior experience of Christendom? If you can, or if you’ve ever been involved in planning for one of them, you’ll know that the last thing they are is simple, and often they are simply not usable. And this is the question for us who seek to form communities for post-Christendom: how do we make our communities usable? How do they allow people to be invited into the kingdom of God without the equivalent of things that are not links but look like links, things that are links but don’t look like them, and forms that ask us questions that don’t make any sense (to name a few)?

Toward a user experience ecclesiology

In designing these communities, we in more missional settings typically have the freedom to be more organic and shape things as we go, but my argument is that we can consider these disciplines that allow us to think about how people will actually experience what we create.

This will lead us to ask questions that we wouldn’t otherwise ask, of ourselves as shapers of community, of others who join us, and further (as people who would at least like to be incarnational types) of the people around us who are not yet part of our communities. We’ll need to think about how to see people as deeply equal participants rather than consumers, how to help them see themselves that way as part of something huge, and also how to make our simplicity deep enough and our complexity understandable enough to reach into real lives.

We need to think about ecclesiology in a number of other disciplines as well, and they’ll all have deeply valuable things to contribute as well, but design can be one that gives structure to the stories we’re telling.

1. Initially, I thought a direct parallel of user experience design and ecclesiology would lead us to the seeker-sensitive church of the last century, most exemplified by Rick Warren’s Saddleback. I remember reading the story of his development of that church, and while I don’t have any interest in that model there was good content in there. But of course, it’s thoroughly an attractional model. Personas were created of the citizens of Orange County, and then programs were created to attract those folks. It has worked well for them of course, and that’s fine, but it’s not the kind of missional community that we have sought to create and be a part of.

Part of the post takes a look at some perceived myths about why Mint ended up being more successful. Then there are some reasons that the author sees as different from the myths that really do indicate why Mint succeeded. One of these myths, and the reasons that the author does recognize, are the reasons I’m writing this post.

The myth quoted is that Mint had a better name and better design, and examples are given for companies and services that have been beaten by competitors that had worse design, while still admitting that design is important and that Mint’s is very good. Further down he indicates that Mint did win because a) the system it used to import bank data gave it a much easier user experience, and b) Mint “focused on making the user do almost no work at all,” while Wesabe “prioritized trying to build tools that would eventually help people change their financial behavior.” The two reasons led to a much easier good experience on Mint, and to reaching that good experience quicker.

Now I write this as a person who tried both services, sticking with Mint in the end because it did have a better experience (after switching back and forth for a few weeks). Because of this I’m not an unbiased observer either, but I do have insights that I think are relevant to what’s being said.

I believe that the problem with the post is that it doesn’t understand that Mint’s design is it’s user experience. Mint didn’t beat Wesabe because it has pretty green colors, nice typography and imagery, shiny Ajax, and a clean interface. It beat Wesabe because it cared about user experience and saw that at the core of what it provided more than it cared about technology. The post just reinforces that by reflecting a view of design that is still all too common. Instead of seeing design as the way people experience something and as a thing worthy of our deepest attention as people who create things, it sees it as the superficial stuff on top of something that makes it appealing, and can help people to trust it (while both are true, this isn’t what design is).

I want to emphasize that Wesabe is not, by any means, the only website that sees design this way. I’ve worked with many people who see design as something that can be boiled down to “look and feel,” by which they mean colors and photos and maybe typography if we’re lucky, and by doing that they think it can all be done at the last minute, changed without thinking deeply about it, and done at all stages by people who are not passionate about it. This results in experiences that users don’t like, don’t want to use, and may abandon if there are better alternatives, even if those alternatives cost more, have inferior technology, or were created later. I’m not saying (because I don’t know) that Wesabe viewed design in this way, but the post’s separation of design (as a myth for why it lost) from user experience (as a reason that it did lose) indicates that at least to some extent it did, and I do know that Mint did not view design in this way.

The best designers on the web don’t see design like that, and the best products and services on the web don’t either. Design as a deep, broad way of creating experiences of something is the way that the best designers look at their work, and the best companies look at it this way as well. They allow this to influence the way they do everything. It doesn’t always result in the prettiest products or the most cutting edge technology, though it often does, because these things can improve the ways that people experience something.

This is the kind of work I want to do, and these are the kinds of things I want to use. It’s important to write this kind of post, even though there are all kinds of people wondering (on one side) whether user experience designers are really web designers, and other people wondering (on another side) if the term user experience is even useful after it has been so watered down by people using it as a buzzword in resumes and job descriptions and job titles.

Writing this is useful because in spite of all this, designing things for people is still not common practice in our field and many other fields, and understanding design that way is still not common knowledge. It is relevant to entrepreneurs, certainly, but it is also relevant to companies of all sizes and industries, and deeply relevant to everyone who creates things that people use.