ADVISOR MEDIA recently spoke with Harold Hambrose, the CEO and founder of Electronic Ink, a company started in 1990 to focus on digital product design (see http://www.electronicink.com). The company has worked with a variety of leading companies, including Fortune 50 companies such as IBM, Microsoft, MBNA America Bank, and AIG. Increasingly, Electronic Ink is working with companies to design Web sites to conduct e-business.

Hambrose isn't the only industry observer to contend that today's information technology is suffering from design chaos. Users themselves are living proof that many Web sites are unusable, which is one major reason why e-commerce shopping carts frequently get abandoned. Industry analyst Forrester Research predicts that e-businesses will spend an average of US$1.5 million annually on site redesign due to problems with functionality.

Hambrose says today's Web site design mentality is analogous to what occurred during the Victorian Era, when designers added elements to furniture, for example, "just because they could do it," even if those design elements didn't serve any valuable function. Ultimately, Hambrose repeats the motto echoed by many technology visionaries, as he heard it from former Apple Computer CEO John Scully during a presentation: "The user experience is your identity." Says Hambrose: "Getting that experience right is not an easy question to answer."

ADVISOR: Electronic Ink promotes the value and competitive advantage of a user-centered design process for software applications, browser-based tools and services, publicly-accessed technologies, and information displays. Describe what makes the design process user-centered, and how can companies ensure that they create applications with users in mind?

HAMBROSE: We're all fascinated by technology, and design is often viewed as aesthetic. Companies need to say right at the beginning of a project that they need to think of design. We [Electronic Ink] talk about design as a process of analysis. I've seen reputable, experienced designers ask me what percentage of our work is design, because they are used to the notion that technology is king, and design often isn't considered. The problem is that products are driven by technology, not human beings - and it's never worked. It is changing, however, and thankfully the browser is forcing people to consider the user experience.

The vast majority of our work is in business-to-business applications. For example, let's talk about a bank using applications to manage money. Those clerks are the same people using the Web to buy their groceries. At work they want to know "Why can't work be as easy as that thing I do at home?"

User-centered design means that the end product will use the language of the end user. It can be as simple as word choice. The key is that if you've considered users at the beginning, you will naturally incorporate their needs and think about what products they will use. You spend time to understand who the users are, and you don't just follow the assumptions of developers. You consider real situations, such as: Is that user sitting at a desk? What about their physical space? Do their kids call and interrupt them while they're at work?

Using this design concept for e-commerce Web sites simply means that the person can do the task that they need to do and be done with it. They can understand and make accurate assumptions about what they can do.

ADVISOR: How is digital product design different than traditional design? What concepts still work well, and which ones don't apply in the online world?

HAMBROSE: You're never going to create a recipe book for someone to be a designer - a designer employs a process of analysis. Designers have a formal training in looking at how things are used. Typically, most companies don't have designers in house. The design community was up in arms when applications [such as desktop publishing] came out [because people assumed that they could use the technology without any design training]. Sure enough, a lot of junk gets generated.

Designing a digital artifact is a very different exercise than designing a print product, for example. But the process for those more traditional objects - they just need to grow to address the interactive nature of information design. The process is the same - designers have been around for a hundred years. The most important thing is how they get there - understanding everything about the user, the market, the task at hand.

In a digital environment, design is interactive. The application implies that the user will respond in a certain way. Understanding why people are thinking thoughts is a more complicated question, so that interactivity is a more complicated question that forces designers to collaborate, whereas traditionally they may have worked in isolation. Now, designers need to work side by side with people who have a lot of scientific data and market research. They need to sit side by side with technologists to understand what I can do with this technology.

ADVISOR: Can you provide some examples of good design?

HAMBROSE: A site I use a lot that bothers me is NBC. News is a no-nonsense subject. You go to the news site and it's cluttered with unnecessarily complex graphics and formatting that doesn't address the needs of users. There's a lot of screen real estate that has ads. How did they make those decisions? Is that the correct answer?

If you go to one of our client's sites - MBNA, for example - I get e-mail from customers saying thank you for our design work. They list other sites and say this one is better because you let me get in and get out. It's going to look just like what they expect it to look like. And people are using this very effectively - it was promoted to 10,000 customers, and MBNA is getting a lot of return activity.

There are people making rules up about what a good design process entails, but rules aren't the answer, because they'll never replace a design process that needs to address each problem individually. I saw an ad last week for software to run against your Web site to assess its usability. A human being cannot be replaced by a piece of software - your experience is more than a number of clicks. This is a very creative process and it is somewhat subjective. Design should be left in the hands of the experts. For example, if you look at automobile manufacturers, they work with certain scientific data to create a baseline design for their car seats. But the user experience is very different from a Mercedes Benz and a Kia. The design is probably based on the same scientific data, but if you compare products and user experience, one company can charge a lot more money for their cars.

Design goes into everything - it needs to be considered for all the tools you give your people to work with. For example, if you go into a hospital, you'll see that the software is totally unusable. We have doctors and nurses that are wrestling with tools that don't support their job . It's absolutely wrong. We spend a lot of time looking at how healthcare environments work.

ADVISOR: Electronic Ink talks about how users have been unfairly made to feel dumb about their difficulty in using technology. This is also tied into the fact that in many companies, software developers have been forced to wear the hat of product designer as part of the software development process. Can you elaborate?

HAMBROSE: This is reminiscent of the Industrial Revolution, with the idea that technology is king and let the human form be damned. For example, we have a lot of phone operators whose jobs take months of training to learn - this is acceptable in the mind of the user. I can't count how many developers that have said "They'll figure it out."

When Electronic Ink works with developers, they say "Oh, this is the fun part of my job." But others who do understand the need for design are thankful that they don't have to sweat the user interface. Then they focus on making the application work as fast as possible and doing things like ensuring that the data gets to the screen.

With many applications, we do find that people get the training they need, but they don't use the product effectively, especially corporate-level purchasing. Or, they don't use the product at all. The software developers say "Let's get users into a room and find out what they want," but you couldn't create a more artificial environment. People might not be able to articulate what they need. Focus groups don't work.

For example, a certain customer's focus group uncovered that users wanted ten phone number fields on a customer's record. We went in and said we'd like to see these people and ask why they need this. As it turned out, they didn't actually need ten phone number fields. [They didn't understand what the developers were actually prompting them about.]

With our focus groups, when we have a format of user groups in a room, they're about story telling: "Tell me about when X is executed, walk me through how it's done." We ask such questions as: Who might interrupt you? Do your kids call you? What might happen if the system goes down?

ADVISOR: Is there a shortage of designers and people that understand the need for design?

HAMBROSE: We call our client list "the enlightened." It's changing, and people are recognizing the need. However, there is a lack of education. Schools are scrambling to teach this, but the design schools are doing a disservice to students. They're teaching them that design is still about static objects - printed matter, and sign systems, and home appliances. Design establishment in academia is comfortable with this concept.

Design is about process - put the person who's going to use this thing in the middle, and always use them as the best measure of the success of this tool.

Design is not a one-time purchase. It's a way of life and needs to be considered from top to bottom. With technology, from the senior office to the clerk's desk, companies need to think about design. Although design includes brand and corporate logo, the aesthetic isn't separable from the user experience.

Around here it's almost a spiritual thing. Consider, for example, how the Shaker community created beautiful objects that supported the most mundane tasks. The form spoke of who they were, and it was associated with their connection with God. Will software ever be in a museum of modern art?

[Incidentally, Electronic Ink has been submitting products to design contests for the past five years (unsuccessfully), which Hambrose notes is indicative of the dismissal of design as a critical component of digital products.]

ADVISOR: What advice can you share?

HAMBROSE: I think it's important to know that this is an untraditional field. Some of our team members range from architects to people who have only studied things that have happened on a computer. We credit ourselves with having technologists that are bright enough, and cognitive scientists that are confident enough to work with designers.

Human factors experts have been good at assessing form, but they're not good at assigning form. They need to work with designers. There are a lot of human factors companies out there that say "We're designers too." With the Web, there are a lot of charlatans out there.