A Word of the Year

(Hey, look what I found in my drafts folder! Too late for a resolutions post?)

A word of the year works for me.

Rather than a list of resolutions that are more wishes than determination to better myself, I choose one word every January to guide my life for the year, to send me off in one direction.

It's not an original idea.

I trace it back to a post on the Happiness Project blog a few years ago about setting the tone for the year, and this one with a video about choosing a one-word theme, and this recent one that I just discovered, one-word theme.

Then there's this author who believes you can change your life with just a word. (Haven't read it, so I can't recommend it, but it seems like a popular idea.)

My daughter told me she was doing it as a way to simplify and still move forward, and, of course, remove the guilt when resolve usually fails.

Who needs one more thing to fail at, feel bad about, or stress over? Not I.

How I choose

Every year I ponder on something that I think will benefit me personally and possibly others. I try to keep it broad, but not nebulous; focused and measurable, but not restrictive and too defined. I ask others, but not to copy, just to be inspired. I make lists, look at a thesaurus and dictionary sometimes, but essentially it just comes to me at a random moment.

The implications

I like this one-word approach because I already put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed and improve, and I don't need the extra pressure of a long to-do list. Besides, at this point in life I've exhausted the long lists (either as impossible, fruitless, or trivial).

So here's why I choose just one word:

• It's easy to hold in my mind.
• It can apply in so many ways. 
• Anticipating how it will manifest is half the fun.
• Every year can be a success.
• The outcome usually surprises me.

A few examples

One year I chose Color. I felt life was a bit drab, a bit boring, a bit colorless.

So I focused on buying fewer gray or neutral pieces of clothing and more items with color. I didn't realize that I was always pulling beige-colored or gray pants off the rack to try on.

I live in a house with beige carpets and off-white walls. So I took a risk and bought richer curtains, rugs and towels, and a red chair!

More colorful food is better for you, richer in vitamins and variety, better for digestion and cancer-fighting goodness, instead of the processed, soft, white, starchy diets many of us have. I choose colorful food.

That word color continued with me through the years since that first one. I think about color more and not just in clothing, food and home decor. Color lifts my spirits. I look for that really blue sky in October and really green grass in May (and the azaleas!)1 and all the shades and seasons in between. I notice the "pops" of color that make life good and interesting.

The point was to get out of my comfort zone, or climb out of a rut or two, and get some variety and zest into life.

The year I chose Authenticity, I strove to bring my home self, my work self, my church self, my family self and my inner self more into alignment.

I stopped myself from pretending when I didn't really feel it, and smiling when I didn't want to (or when someone told me to!). I started keeping quiet when my opinion wasn't really needed, and speaking up when it was important.

I cherished real life moments (good and bad) rather than rushing to the next thing or wishing away a situation. A lot of healthy goodness came from that year.

For example, it was a relief and a revelation when I finally said to self and family I hate to cook. In our culture it's just assumed that women like to cook and nothing pleases them more than feeding their families. And for some that is true. I gave up trying to fit a mold when it comes to cooking. I now put together nice, simple, balanced meals to nourish us, but I'm equally fine with picking up prepared meals on the way home from work, eating leftovers, or warming something from a can. It's all good and doesn't reflect on me personally, or as a wife and mother.

The point of Authenticity is that my thoughts and opinions are a valid as any other, how I express myself in word and dress and action is unique. My preferences are mine, and I value those ideas.

Last year I chose Truth. As the year unfolded I did a lot of pondering and listening to my heart and soul for answers. I ended up writing in a journal a lot more than I have in years. It was so good to take the time I needed to just think about what's important in life and to me. I knew I had a whole year to figure a few things out and I wandered (and wondered) down many avenues of thought, sometimes aimlessly and sometimes with dogged determination.

What felt serious and heavy at one point gradually flattened out, thinned, and dissolved away. I equate the feeling to a Bible scripture, John 8:32, "and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."

The point is that some things can't be forced, but need time to mature or resolve. A year to focus on one word provides that for me.

If resolutions don't work for you or you just don't want another thing to do, give a Word of the Year a try, instead.

Share with me and I'll give you a thumbs up and whatever cheering and validation you need.

Meaning in our lives and work

I started blogging in 2006.

The thing I like best about those first posts were the quotes that related to the topic. Here's one from this early post.

Quotable

“The least of things with a meaning  is worth more in life  than the greatest of things without it.”  

—Carl Jung, “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”

It's true. The small meaningful gestures, words, and acts of kindness of those around me are worth a lot to me. Those connections make life meaningful.

They feed us better than the barrage of words and messages we receive every day through the media, our interaction with technology or the marketing messages vying for our attention.

I'm a designer in the worlds of finance, marketing and technology. It's my job to make your experience on our website a pleasant one, a trustworthy one, a (dare I say) delightful one. The challenge is to make the empathy I feel for you and your experience evident to you through the design and technology. Believe it or not there are many of us who care deeply about getting it right in all the big and small ways that are meaningful. So that we can connect with one another. So that our work and your experience are meaningful to both of us.

I ended that early blogpost with this.

The future of successful design is not in new technologies alone,
but in connecting with users to make meaning in their lives.

I still believe that.

What's on Your Home Screen

Whenever someone shows me their iPhone I'm always curious about what's on their home screen and what it may say about them.

Here's what I have lately.


Wonder what it says about me...stays in touch, loves reading and baseball, curious, surfs, tracks, and saves?

Here's the thing. My apps have to audition for the home screen.

Tell me about yourself...uh huh. How many clicks do you get? Are you a rookie that needs a trial run? How much distraction will you be? Are you seasonal? Will you make my life better or easier? Will you entertain me when I'm bored? You know, if I don't use you much you're off to join the jumble of apps on deeper screens? I'll have to separate you two, Camera and Clock, if you keep fighting with each other.

Here's my second screen.


There's a lot of pushing and shoving here to earn a spot on the home screen.

That Good icon will never make the home screen. Too loud. Just screaming to be buried. (It's actually my app to access my work e-mail, making it a good candidate for relegation to the heap.)

There's not a lot of special interests going on here because my phone really is about communication and usefulness, including the church stuff.

And, no, I haven't upgraded to 4.1 OS.

My husband did though and it screwed up a lot things...his wifi settings, and his Mail access and a few other things.

And, yes, I know you can group your apps into folders with the new OS, but now his phone is just a nondescript jumble of icons that all look the same...black with tiny dots of color representing the contents.

Indistinguishable.

You have to read the tiny labels under each group to know what's in it. It's no longer visual and easy to find the app you want.

Icons are powerful little colored gems that save space and create an identity that's easy to recognize. They are there when I need them without extra fuss. And I don't need reading glasses to navigate!

What does your home screen say about you?

e

3 Things

There are three things that take time:

1. Making friends
2. Raising children
3. Creative work

There is no rushing through.

I have to remind myself.

These are the things that bring the most meaning to our lives...lasting relationships, our families and the creative work of our minds and hands.

And they are worth the time and effort.

Wise words repeat in my head. "Do not labor for that which cannot satisfy."

In the workplace, hoping to build a quick relationship in order to "leverage" that relationship, is phony and easily spotted. Be genuine and caring.

At home, rushing kids from place to place, through meals and into bed, will bring regret and missed moments of joy and contentment. Let chores and "me"-dia time go.

In creative work, meeting a deadline with something slapped together in short burst between meetings, will never satisfy you or the client or the audience. Don't over promise.

Take the time.

“All Meanings Depend on the Key of Interpretation”

So said George Eliot, of poetry.

Since I like to look for meaning in everything, I find it interesting to think that meaning can change based on new findings, a key, or a change in context.

Lately I’ve been reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer, my new favorite author.

In Proust he looks at authors and artists (Whitman, Eliot, Proust, Cézanne) who knew and expressed truths about man, the brain, and science long before 20th century science. The science of their time, perhaps, forced them to look inward for the truth. They tried to understand the mind and were “most accurate, because they most explicitly anticipated our science...this art endures, as wise and resonant as ever.”

George Eliot in Middlemarch wrote “we are a process and an unfolding.” Only until recently biology held that the brain was a genetically governed robot, a set of cells that did not divide, unlike every other cell in our body.

Neurogenesis Is Born
Through a series of experiments misintrepreted or ignored, this belief held firmly. But in 1989 new observations began to alter these scientific “facts”.

Elizabeth Gould at Rockfeller University, discovered that chronic stress was devastating to rat brain neurons, but that the brain healed itself when the stress was removed. Over the next 8 years she painstakingly quantified her findings in rats and monkeys.

The science of neurogensis was born. “The textbooks were rewritten: the brain is constantly giving birth to itself,” Lehrer writes.

Now here is where it gets interesting to me.

“The mind is never beyond redemption, for no environment can extinguish neurogenesis. As long as we are alive, important parts of the brain are dividing. The brain is not marble, it is clay, and our clay never hardens,” Lehrer writes.

“High levels of stress can decrease the number of new cells [regenerating]; so can being low in a dominance hierarchy.” But when changing to living in an enriched environment, adult brains recover rapidly.

The implications are worth pondering. Think of the repression of women in a dominance hierarchy, think of slavery, think of those who live in poverty, think of good zoos and bads zoos, think of stark work environments, think of isolated young mothers, and so on.

How we think about these situations now has new meaning. And there are further implications to growth and happiness.

A New Key
The ramifications are profound and just now, in the last 10 years are being explored.

For example, scientists have discovered that antidepressants work by stimulating neurogenesis, implying that depression is ultimately caused by a decrease in the amount of new neurons, and not by a lack of serotonin.

We have a new key for intepretation.

Newborn brain cells make us happy.

Again ponder the implications, we need to be ever learning, seeking to enrich our environments for ourselves and our children, making workplaces more about cooperation and less about dominance, and excising stress from our routines and helping others to bring about these changes.

Learn something lately
As Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, the “mind [is] as active as phosphorus.”

“Since we each start every day with a slightly new brain, neurogenesis,” Jonah Lehrer points out, “ensures that we are never done with our changes.”

Ellen

More reading:
Antidepressant action in mice, NIH
The Science of Prozac

Earlier Posts

May 26, 2007

...that in a flattened world where everything is digital, virtual, and mobile, immediate results are expected.

Not only expected...demanded. As designers we may be given an assignment with one breath and then in the next asked "when can we see screens?" This kind of flattening of time and respect for the creative process is damaging to the designer, good design, and eventually the whole experience.

I recently had the good fortune to sit in on a truly collaborative, creative discussion and work session. We had full blocks of time where ideas, markers, white boards, and people were all that mattered. The birth and growth of a new and living concept were all that mattered.

We put aside the deadening effect of business philosophies—'implement, implement, implement', 'faster, better, cheaper', and 'digital, virtual, mobile'—for living thought and design...slow, careful, provocative, manual, interactive, searching, collaborative, old-fashioned, deliberate, exciting.

The pure creative process reverses the flattening of the world and makes it full and rich, vibrant and living. Adequate and abundant time and space, and real respect for the creative process will always yield results in a way that technology, politics or demands never will.

Designers crave it, good managers protect it, smart companies foster it.

Quotable

“Slow design is not just about duration or speed, but about thoughtfulness, deliberation, and—how else to put it?—tender loving care.”
—Michael Bierut, 2006

“Slowness is not time-based. It doesn't refer to how long it takes to make or do something, but rather describes the individual's elevated state of awareness in the process of creation, the quality of its tangible outcomes and a richer experience for the community it engages.”
—slowLab/ideas

October 16, 2006

...about making meaning.

I'm always looking for meaning in everything. Experience design and designers make this possible in a way that has not happened before.

Meaning is the point where you connect with the user on a deeper level. Does this design/concept/product make a difference in their life?

New technologies should make things more meaningful to the user. Users are asking "Is this good for me? Does it improve my life? Why should I care about your product/website/service?" We as designers should have these user goals in mind as we design, and not just the traditional better/faster/cheaper goals of some technologies.

For example the know-how behind weblogs allows bloggers to use technology to try to make sense of their lives, and to connect with others who may have had the same experience. They are looking for meaning, shared meaning.

The new rebranded iLife 05 packaging makes an effort to bring meaning to the use of technology. As Cameron Moll of ALA puts it, "Personal computing was no longer something done to accomplish something else more efficiently, but rather a part of everyday life, even critical to communication and social interaction...the organic styling and seed metaphor--a perfect representation of "life" itself--steal the show."

I know of two projects within my experience where two different designers designed the same page with different goals in mind. One from a user experience standpoint, and the other from a data representation/ compliance point of view. Both complied with standards and systems requirements, but one design on each project was more focused on adding meaning for the user rather than just presenting the numbers or functionality. Users want meaning..."What do these numbers mean to me?" "Show me the content grouped in the way I think about my tasks". In one case usability studies proved out the more meaningful display, and in the other, schedule and politics forced an acceptable but technology-based, systems-driven solution.

The future of successful design is not in new technologies alone, but in connecting with users to make meaning in their lives.

Quotable

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” —Carl Jung, “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”

August 23, 2006

...that the greatest potential for growth is in your areas of strength and not weakness.

In the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, authors Buckingham and Clifton with the Gallup Organization introduce a program to help readers identify their talents and build them into strengths. It introduces 34 dominant "themes", and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success. In developing this program, Gallup has conducted psychological profiles with more than two million individuals over a 25-year period to identify these strengths.

I took the StrengthsFinder® Profile questionnaire and here is what surfaced for me. These are the top five areas that come more naturally to me and make me a better graphic designer.

Learner – I love to learn. I prefer a classroom setting where I can process and think after each session, but I also enjoy reading and researching on my own. Digging in and learning about a client’s business, what they need, what they want, etc. is very important to beginning to visualize a design solution.

Analytical – I like the statistics behind a business objective or user research; I want substance to back up my designs. What do users want and do and think? What’s happening in the industry and with competitors? What is the client concerned about and why? This gives me the reasoning and explanation behind a design solution.

Responsibility – Combined with my ethics this theme makes me utterly dependable. Give me a project I’ll get it done, whether it’s helping a new employee adjust, resolving an issue with a developer, juggling multiple projects, meeting a tight deadline or being prepared for the next presentation.

Restorative – I’m a problem solver. I like to fix or restore something that’s gone awry or help make an experience more efficient or easy or fun…whatever the goal is. Good effective design is problem solving and not just a “make it pretty” exercise.

Intellection – I like to think. Paired with Analytical and Restorative I tend to be very focused. I am an avid reader and read widely just for the constant hum of mental activity.

Focusing on areas of strength leads to satisfying personal development and success in a way that focusing on “areas of opportunity” never will.

Quotable

“Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses.” —Marilyn vos Savant

July 31, 2006

"It's more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement." —Mabel Newcomer

I was unable to discover the context for this quote, but the meaning is clear to me. To skip usability research and studies, to jump into requirements without adequate visioning, to begin development without good planning is to guarantee project swirl, political posturing, a forgotten user, and shabby results.

I hear "there's no time or budget for that usability study or overarching design work", or "just get it out there and we'll fix it later". This short-sightedness is characterized by the existence of work-arounds, low usage levels, user dissatisfaction and frustration, and rework.

Worthwhile achievements are based on sound strategy and sufficient planning and, especially for quality websites, adequate design and usability involvement.

Quotable

“Why is there never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over?” —Old adage

June 21, 2006

...that web designers have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression. An interesting study in the Behavior and Information Technology Journal points out that the initial response to a website is physiological and immediate “reflecting ‘what my body tells me to feel’ rather than ‘what my brain tells me to think’, with cognitive appraisal occurring after this first response.” The “data suggest that a reliable decision can be made in 50 ms”.

The article points of earlier studies that state "the strong impact of the visual appeal of the site seemed to draw attention away from usability problems...Thus, in the presence of a very positive first impression, a person may disregard or downplay possible negative issues encountered later."

A negative first impression also creates a bias that fails to be overcome even in the case of subsequent positive evidence. “Hence, even if a website is highly usable and provides very useful information presented in a logical arrangement, this may fail to impress a user whose first impressions of the site was negative.” The study goes on to detail just how long it takes to make that first impression.

We always talk about successful websites as being useful, useable and desirable. But what this article says to me is that desirable is the first and foremost attribute. This is another way that designers add value to the brand and bottom line.

Next time the project team or business lead question color, images, layout and icons, I have my reply...desirability is number one.

Quotable

“[Users] make their credibility-based decisions about the people or organization behind the site based upon the site's overall visual appeal.” —Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, 2002

“If a site is perfectly usable but it lacks an elegant and appropriate design style, it will fail.” —Curt Cloninger, 2001

May 15, 2006

...that everyone loves a good story. Good storytelling is accomplished through pictures and dialog, and has many positive outcomes. In the business world this is call visual explanation. The main goal of visual explanation (diagrams, narratives, graphs, mapping, models, rich pictures) is to create a shared understanding. Some of the outcomes include having a clear shared picture of the project, “completing the puzzle”, establishing a background or baseline, explaining a concept to others quickly, knowing how to apply a concept to a new situation, defining a problem, and discovering missing pieces.

Read more about it:

Communication is design. Use it as such. Luke Wroblewski

Visual Thinking School, Dave Gray

Dynamic Diagrams white paper

Mind Mapping explained

Storytelling with Conceptual Comics

May 11,2006

...that designers have the ability to actually show the problem visually in a more compelling way than a bulleted Powerpoint deck or complicated flow chart ever will. Diagrams or narrative storyboards that illustrate what is happening and why go much further in convincing others of needed change. Visual thinking and communication is about using pictures to help you define and solve problems, think about complex issues and communicate more effectively. Having this communication ability gets the designer invited to the table earlier in the development process where strategy is shaped.

A good designer is a strategic partner. So, share the vision, tell the story, provide the context, illuminate...communicate.

May 8, 2006

...that experienced knowledgeable designers, thorough user research, and imagination should drive the technology solution for a project and not vice versa.

The limitations of an assumed technology solution make it easier to estimate costs before initiating a project, but if it does not suit user needs/wants and possible interface innovation, the hands of a designer are tied and often the user is the loser. The potential of creating an interface that is not as useful, usable or desirable is high.

Involving a designer early on during project ideation and visioning opens the door for an innovative solution that will meet user needs and expectations, and allow for the most appropriate technology to support the best user experience. Some time and resources are expended before dollars are committed to a project, but the efforts are likely to lead to a more successful project outcome, and a win for the users.

A good designer and wise managers know that the technology is only a means to an end, not the end itself. What really counts is how and why you use it.

March 21, 2006

...that working with a team to envision a web site is not easy. Sometimes, to lift a phrase from Edward Tufte, it's BOGSAT design...a bunch of guys [and gals] sitting around a table designing. They all feel they know what the user wants and needs. Or it's BOTE...back of the envelope design, where one strong voice puts down the first thought that comes to mind and is rarely opposed.

But, occasionally, there is pure synergy where all ideas are considered and valued; where one idea builds on another or a great thought spawns an even better design.

I'm the first to admit...that I don't have a corner on the market of ideas and designs. While I may be the assigned designer on a project, other team members have great ideas and love to design. I let them. I listen, I guide, I sketch, I help envision, I influence, I persuade...and I listen some more! It empowers.

I've learned that you get power by giving away power. Give it to the users and they'll love the web site and tell their friends about it. Give it to the developers and they'll be more likely to jump through hoops for innovative ideas. Give it to the business or project sponsors and they'll defend the design. Give it to the project managers and systems analysts and they'll make concessions in the schedule.

I don't always get the credit, but the design is better.