All posts by jonathankohl

When Product Management Goes Wrong – Part 2 – the Dinosaur

In part 1 of this series, we looked at the underminer. In part 2 we will look at the dinosaur product manager.

A dinosaur is a product manager who is out of date, and they obstinately refuse to consider anything that is current. They have their model of the world, and they refuse to learn anything new. They might be out of date with any or all of the following: the market, competing products, their customer’s current expectations, pricing, monetization models, marketing and sales approaches, current technology and design trends.


Tyrannosaurus image from Wikipedia.

Of all the product management anti-patterns, the dinosaur is the one that I find to be one of the most painful to witness. As a technical product manager who works with new and sometimes cutting edge technology, I run into the dinosaur quite often. It’s painful to observe because you see all these people working so hard, and the team inertia is moving in a direction, yet one person is getting in the way. It sucks the life out of teams, and it’s also one of the most difficult behaviors to deal with.

Dinosaurs are people who for whatever reason have stopped learning. They have a specific approach and they are frozen there. Often dinosaurs are more experienced people who are fatigued with learning new technology, or they might be jaded after too many campaigns. Software is a tough, demanding business.

I get the learning fatigue. As you have more experience and have learned a lot, it is tiring to learn yet another web framework, a new set of productivity tools and yet another design paradigm. Right now I am learning some new approaches to mobile development, and a whole new templating engine for web applications using responsive design. It isn’t as much fun to learn as when I was new in the industry, and I have to fit that in between engagements and deliverables.

However, I have also met dinosaurs who had very little experience, but they have still chosen an approach and refuse to update their thinking.

Recently, two executives asked me to help them with a difficult problem at their company. They were creating a new product to expand their product line and steal market share from an emerging, lucrative market. Their existing customer base was maturing, and there were strong economic forces at play that they felt threatened current revenue streams. They didn’t want to get caught when an inevitable decline hit the market, so they were looking seriously at other sources of revenue that better fit emerging market conditions. They implemented a “20% time” for technical teams to spend time coming up with product ideas, held facilitated brainstorming workshops, and engaged heavily with their enthusiastic supportive customers and trusted industry contacts.

As usual, the problem they posed to me and the real problem were two different, yet related things. They didn’t say anything about the VP of Product Management, other than mentioning them in passing. In fact, they said the problem was an alignment issue between the experienced people in the company, and a young engineering team. The execs gave me the impression that the engineering team on this project were the problem here – they weren’t respecting the more experienced people in the company. But the execs said they would let me figure out what the problem was. All they wanted was a great minimally viable product they could start introducing to the market.

As I met with more people in the company, alarm bells started to go off. I didn’t meet the VP of Product, and it felt like people wanted to shut them out. Any mention of the VP of Product was met with a silent tension. When I met with the technical team, they seemed depressed and were checked out. They sauntered into the meeting with me, and most of them were late. The product owner was the last to arrive, and while she was pleasant and polite, she spent most of her time with her face buried in their smartphone. The lead engineer on the project took me through an abbreviated walkthrough of their prototype, and aside from some UX and design issues and some unfinished parts here and there, it looked solid. In fact, the fit with the market was obvious, and the technology had a lot of potential. I found it exciting, but the rest of the team were sombre looking and weren’t engaged. I started asking clarifying questions and they slowly started to wake up.

They had stumbled on a very difficult navigation problem, and asked if I had any ideas from my UX experience. I suggested looking at game design, because this sort of problem is well addressed in video games, but often poorly addressed in enterprise applications. After a couple of shocked moments, engagement turned to excitement. We brainstormed, some team members started researching compatible game engines, and looked for examples on the web. At the end of the hour, the team asked if they could extend the meeting further, and most of them were able to stay in the room with me. The frenetic pace of excited brainstorming continued for another 45 minutes, and then we realized we were all tired. The lead engineer wrapped up the meeting, and the product owner took me aside and told me it had been the best meeting they had ever had for that product. In fact, in the two years she had been in the company, it was the best technical meeting she had attended.

Next up was a meeting with the VP of Product. They had been in the industry since the early 1990s, and had seen a lot of past success. You can guess what happened next.

The VP of Product spent the first 15 minutes of the meeting name dropping and telling me all about their accomplishments. When they asked me a question, they interrupted before I could finish answering and began to berate me. This continued on for the remainder of the meeting – any time I spoke I was interrupted and ridiculed. When I changed tack and asked for a demo of their ideas, they showed me a PowerPoint slide deck with an outdated theme, and the product screen examples they had created looked straight out of the 1990s. With a bit of probing I found that they didn’t just treat me with derision and aggression, they were that way with just about everyone. It was obvious that a dinosaur was derailing an important product effort and potential new revenue stream.

I advised the executives of what the problem was, and you guessed it, they already knew. Instead of dealing with the issue, they were trying everything else but having a difficult conversation with the VP. The VP still had a lot to offer the company, but not in product management. They had hoped that a consultant would have some sort of magical solution idea that would get them off the hook, and would somehow get the VP on board.

In two other recent experiences, I have met inexperienced dinosaurs. Both were startup CEOs who had product ideas, and managed to attract friends and family investment to hire technical teams. They didn’t have product managers, and had decided they were going to play that role in their company to save money. They had immediately latched onto the first technology ideas that were presented to them, and refused to learn anything else. Unfortunately, in both cases, they had outsourced development to teams that were inexperienced and placated customers, and made complex, risky development efforts sound simple, quick to implement and inexpensive. Both of them approached me because they had spent a lot of money on solutions that didn’t make it to market.

They were afraid. Yet, in the face of losing their businesses, they refused to listen to contrary advice from people with experience and track records of shipping software. They clung onto their initial ideas and conclusions they had made a year or two ago, and refused to budge. This was likely a controlling dysfunction borne of easy wealth and the arrogance that can come with it. They were intimidated by people who understood technical things, even though they had hired those people precisely because they had technical expertise.

The dinosaur product manager:

  • Believes in “one true way” approaches to marketing, sales, products and process. (This tends to coincide with their way.)
  • Scoffs at new technology or pricing models
  • Scoffs at design trends
  • Makes fun of consumers who buy products or services they consider to be fads
  • Talks more about “the old days” than being productive in the present
  • Dismisses ideas that aren’t their own
  • Makes fun of new technology environments
  • Equates every new design, marketing or technology paradigm with one from the past
  • Blocks efforts to update technology or architecture, even when when it’s needed
  • Underestimate the risks, complexities and efforts of their solution ideas
  • Reacts strongly to people with more technical knowledge, and especially more recent knowledge and skills than they have. They may be antagonistic, belligerent, use ad hominem attacks, or they may be passive aggressive and simply undermine them.

How do you deal with a dinosaur?

One of the most difficult things when dealing with experienced dinosaurs is that they are often right about a lot of things. They often express their ideas poorly, so it is easy to dismiss everything they say. Sometimes what seems like scoffing and denigrating behavior is simply an attitude problem borne out of harsh experience. The trick is to figure out when they are blustering due to fear, obstinance or unwillingness to change or if they are complaining about a valid issue. This requires patience and trial and error.

  • Talk to the person, and ask them what is going on, and point out how their behavior can be damaging and misconstrued if it is well-intended. Ask them to work with you and help the team move towards something successful, even if it means compromising.
  • Training and knowledge gaps are common, particularly with more experienced people. See if you can set up training or online materials to help them get confidence in something new and threatening.
  • Set up a safe place for ranting and complaining about new models, even if they seem to be consumer or process fads.
  • Play to their strengths and experience, and divide labor so that they have input and crucial parts to play in direction, but others are in charge of revenue models, marketing schemes, technology and look & feel.
  • Have them do competitor analysis, and have them perform user experience heuristic evaluations and pricing research of competing products.
  • Make sure they engage with customers who have differing views from their views and preferences
  • Take technology, design and other decisions out of the conversation, and have them provide constructive feedback in a neutral way. Their concerns may be valid, and if so, they will be happy to abstract them and present them differently. If they are not valid, they probably won’t do anything but bluster.
  • Let them win at times. A lost battle on a non-core issue is better than losing the war.
  • Be consistent and patient. It can take a while for them to win respect of other people with new and different ideas, and to get on board with new ideas and approaches.

If the person is coming from a place of fear, most of the above points won’t really help. In that case it will likely require some repositioning of their work and power. Following a process that uses team-based decisions and approaches can really help in this case. In many of these situations, a hardline approach is necessary, because a team member who obstructs can kill productivity and hijack business initiatives of the entire company.

Ask the champion of the new approach to present their approach to the group.

Next, hear out any criticisms of the approach, because there may be valid points. A dissenting opinion presented constructively is incredibly valuable.

Then make it clear, once the decision has been made, that the decision must be supported by the team, and anyone undermining the position will be asked to leave the team. (Also make it clear that undermining behavior will be monitored and will not be tolerated.) Often people who appear to be on board with the decision will undermine by amplifying problems and use that as evidence to criticize the decision. Peter Block calls this “resistance through compliance” and it is insidious and dangerous in organizations.

Here are two dinosaur examples with different outcomes.

An organization had grown from a two-person startup to a thriving company with close to 100 employees. They had created an MVP, tested it in the market and attracted a lot of initial investment. Trouble was, the market changed drastically and suddenly. The product manager became a dinosaur, slavishly sticking to their initial idea. Their product concept and understanding of the market had worked for over a decade, but they couldn’t get on board with the new market reality. There were also a lot of retirements and younger people moving in to replace their existing customers. That meant that during purchasing decisions, younger people (who use a lot of apps on smartphones and are more fashion conscious) were brought in to provide opinions. A middle aged CTO might have a social media marketing person sitting in meetings analyzing the offering from their perspective. Their expectations were much different, but were taken very seriously.

The dinosaur product manager became more entrenched and combative, and taking any criticism (real or imagined) quite badly and personally. They became more isolated, and the rest of the team were realizing they needed some big changes. The dinosaur also hated any usability issues and was quite scoffing of UX practices. “Our customers don’t need something that is usable…” was often their response.

One Monday morning, the product manager came into work a changed man. We didn’t know it at the time, but the CEO, the CTO and a major investor/advisor had taken him out to dinner that Friday night. They asked if he wanted to continue being obstructionist, or if he wanted to work with everyone else to solve the problem? After all, the company and a lot of investor dollars were at stake, and his behavior wasn’t going to help the team. They had decided early on that the core members of the team would agree unanimously on decisions moving forward. To get unanimity meant that if a person was a lone dissenter, they would be asked to leave. The manager told me later on that the discussion hit him really hard, and he spent the weekend mulling over options.

He moved quickly once he made a decision. He immersed himself in new pricing models, spent hours with potential customers doing field research, and hired a UX expert and visual designer to help them create a new product. The results were dramatic. They turned around a failing product into a big seller, and they sold the company to a larger player in the industry for a tidy sum.

In another situation at a large, established company, a dinosaur product manager was stuck in her ways when it came to marketing and sales. That was one thing, but she also refused to allow the technical team to pay off technical debt through refactoring, and would rarely allow them to update tools and infrastructure. She was also, bafflingly, incredibly stubborn about the look and feel of their e-commerce site. It was six years old and really showing its age. Any UX improvement or change, no matter how small, was met with enormous resistance.

This was flat organization with an open environment, and anyone could suggest ideas for improvements or new revenue streams, and field reports were frequent. No matter what anyone said, she would argue against anything she saw as a threat. She would often literally frighten away younger employees who had good ideas based on observations.

Senior managers tried to work around her, then ordered her to help implement an add-on feature to help increase sales. She appeared to be enthusiastic when they were around, and made all the right noises, but she was resisting through compliance.

She didn’t understand SaaS style pricing models, and her views of pricing, marketing and sales were hopelessly out of date. The projected numbers were staggering, but every meeting she was involved with was a painful fight. A marketing designer described a particularly painful “pixel by pixel” review meeting of pre-release marketing designs that took hours. Everything seemed to be painful, took way too long, and people asked to leave the project in droves.

Since the team was moving one way with executive directives, and that didn’t suit her outdated ideas, she actually hijacked efforts to secretly develop the solution the way she wanted. Part of the team at any given time were also working on her competing ideas. We found out because there was an anonymous tip about this from an abused employee to a politically powerful person. Her revenue model was so outdated and wrong, the legal department got involved and sent out a cease and desist warning internally. She continued in her undermining and obstructionist behavior, so she was let go. After she was gone, the teams moved quickly, and after 9 months of fighting, implemented the new feature with a completely new redesign in 3 months.

Avoid Dinosaur Behavior

It’s easy to fall behind in a massive industry that is constantly changing. It will happen to all of us eventually. The important thing to remember is that no one knows it all, and it’s ok to say: “I don’t know.” Very few people will look down on you for not knowing something, and if they do, they aren’t worth paying attention to anyway. Here are some tips:

  • Stay current by reading industry news, a little bit each day
  • Talk to your customers and ask them about problems that haven’t been solved yet, and about other applications they like to use
  • Study User Experience and keep abreast of developments in that field
  • Aim to be a lifelong learner
  • Take online training courses. There are a lot of free and inexpensive courses out there that allow you to work at your own pace
  • Attend conferences, workshops and local events in your community
  • Delegate to people who are more current than you are
  • Check your attitude – are you resisting change, or is your discomfort due to a deeper, important issue that needs to be addressed?

Any new revenue generating, marketing, design or technical change will involve problems and stumbling blocks. There will be fear of the unknown, resistance to change, and there should also be healthy dissent. In fact, any decision without some healthy dissent will likely be a poor one. The trick is to not let the dinosaurs hijack decisions or turn teams away from new initiatives just because they stopped learning and don’t want to help anymore.

When Product Management Goes Wrong – Part 1 – the Underminer

In part 1 of this series, we will look at the undermining product manager. The underminer is a manager who says one thing to your face, and does the opposite behind your back. Underminers may also sow seeds of doubt about your competence to others on the team.


Disney’s “The Incredibles” image from Wikipedia.

When product management goes well, it has a big impact on the success of a project. Product managers help get alignment between technical teams, business teams, and end users. They can help teams deliver a polished product/service instead of a “bucket of features” that are packaged together at the end of a release. Great product managers can help teams build the right product, at the right time, at the right price.

But poor product management can cause a lot of problems. Instead of having a positive impact, they can detract. When product managers persist with unhealthy behavior, they can derail projects, demoralize team members and destroy productivity.

Recently, a colleague approached me because they were having misgivings about a new product manager that had joined the team. The team saw the value in the role, and had hired their first product manager. After the initial adjustment of adding a new team member, they were expecting some positive outcomes, but instead, technical leadership were very concerned. They asked me if the behavior they were seeing was normal for a product manager. What they described might be normal, but it was certainly dysfunctional. I was reminded of an article I wrote a few years ago on management anti-patterns so I decided to revisit that content but with a product management slant.

An underminer is someone who says one thing to your face, but does something else (often the opposite) when you aren’t around. Underminers might be motivated by their own agenda and wish to circumvent current plans and work items. If they want something else worked on other than the current work items, they will go from person to person until they find someone who will agree with them. People will often quietly work on items that aren’t being accounted for at the request of an undermining product manager, which skews team efforts.

The undermining product manager:

  • Doesn’t respect estimates and timelines
  • Doesn’t respect team decisions, particularly with regards to product direction, milestones and priorities
  • Gossips about team members when they aren’t around
  • Second guesses decisions behind other team member’s backs
  • Goes from team member to team member until they find the answer they want
  • Agrees with you or the group, then does something contrary to the shared decision when they think no one is looking
  • Constantly blames other people, other groups (and you when you aren’t around) for any fault, real or imagined
  • Seeks out allies to work on items secretly, and to also engage in all of the above behavior

Underminers are destructive because they ruin productivity, create distrust among team members, and weaken the credibility of the people they disagree with.

In a product management role, they are especially destructive because they ruin team alignment and shared goals, which is an important aspect of team success. Sure, once in a while you have to make an unpopular decision or work with some people in private to get things done, but that work still needs to be transparent and working towards shipping the product. In fact, many times a product manager makes an unpopular decision because it helps with goal alignment and ensures the team stays on track. An underminer doesn’t share the goal of shipping software in the manner the team has agreed to do already. The resulting toxicity caused by an underminer also kills individuals’ intrinsic motivation to work on a project, which is a primary driver for our work.

Underminers are motivated in different ways. Sometimes product managers are directed by powerful stakeholders who feel they aren’t getting their way, and that the technical team aren’t listening to them. Instead of dealing with this head on, they prefer to have a plant or someone on the inside who is doing their bidding secretly. In other situations, a product manager may read (or misread) the political tensions in an organization and feels that if they show some initiative and push the team in a different direction, that will lead to their own success and a promotion or similar reward. Still others are in a position that is beyond their expertise, and they are desperately trying to find some control, or deflect their lack of skill by putting focus on others.

Underminers are horribly toxic for teams (and companies) because they are good at marketing themselves to powerful people in the organization, and are quick to take credit when something goes well. Once they have built up enough credibility, they also shift blame onto other team members who can become vulnerable politically through no fault of their own. This means that the people with the most power are the last to see through the undermining behavior. By then, the damage has already been done. They also cost the team a lot of extra money and lost productivity in frustration and a lack of alignment. A project will need to draw on more reserves than initially budgeted due to their behavior, and many won’t survive.

How do you deal with an underminer?

  • Make your process and decisions visible to all stakeholders. When something subversive is going on, it should be obvious.
  • Utilize project management tools for visibility on individual’s work. Daily standup formats are good for this. If people are working on something other than what they have agreed to work on, it should be visible quickly.
  • Ensure team members approach the rest of the team if someone asks them to do something off the record to get their approval.
  • Make people accountable for not working on what the team has agreed on. Often a little public Q&A is enough to get people to realize what they are doing is inappropriate. If it persists, deal with it as an HR matter.
  • Do not tolerate gossip, blaming or calling people’s work or decisions into question. Foster a culture where people stick up for each other. When undermining starts, it should be obviously different from the norm and discouraged.
  • Bring business and other stakeholders into the process so they feel included, and address their concerns in case they feel the need to subvert. When they do, deal with the issue head on and ask to work on a solution other than someone who will cost the team more money and threaten the success of a project.
  • When you discover an underminer who is unrepentant, fire them when you have enough cause.

The underminer is so deadly, not only will a team miss their shipping targets and go over budget, the team will lose confidence in each other, and the organization. I’ve seen teams start to falter and people start to spend their time looking for a new job after two weeks of an undermining manager appearing on the scene. They are nasty, and it’s important to screen for this sort of thing when hiring.

It’s also important to examine our own work and habits as product managers on a team. While we may not intend to undermine, we may exhibit these behaviors from time to time. It’s a good idea to have personal retrospectives periodically, and when we catch ourselves exhibiting underminer habits to take immediate action to correct them. If we are under stress or feeling frustrated with the progress of the team, we can easily fall into this sort of behavior. All it does is detract, so we need to police ourselves whenever we are tempted.

Designing for Smart Fabrics: Wear It’s At – Part 3

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at defining smart fabrics. In Part 2, we looked at some design ideas. In Part 3 we will explore things that could go wrong with this technology, and offer up two possible futures for products using smartfabric tech.

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(image via pixabay)

What are the Potential Drawbacks?

If we can access, visualize and interact with our digital lives with fabric, that brings a whole set of implications to design for (privacy, security, etc.) and the challenges of displaying and interacting with systems.

Imagine the possibilities. We will soon have clothing with:

  • built in displays that can show you information, images and video you would normally see on a PC or smartphone screen.
  • interaction with a system using certain gestures by touching your clothing.
  • powerful, tiny sensors that monitor biological functions.

Pretty cool huh? These technologies are currently being developed, and they could open the door to some fantastic possibilities. They also have a darker side, with potential pitfalls.

The most obvious pitfall is to needlessly annoy the wearer with notifications or prompts to interact with their clothing. Over notifying can over stimulate our senses. If vibration or lighting/color changes are used to get our attention, this might be useful if it is used sparingly. If we get a lot of buzzes against our skin, or our clothing rapidly is changing color or displays or lights are blinking at us too much, smartfabrics products could make people sick.

Accidental interactions can cause unintended results. What if I can control my TV shows with my jeans by gesturing on the fabric, but every time I change positions in my chair, I change the channel? Controlling inputs, determining touch targets and gestures, as well as what to display, and how to notify people of events are difficult to implement well on something that is constantly touching your skin. Over-notify and people will want to destroy their clothing, tickle people and they will go crazy.

Target areas for inputs and outputs are important to consider in clothing design. Inputs and outputs need to be placed very carefully on the body. They could draw unwanted attention to a particular area of the wearer’s body. Even if they aren’t highlighting private parts, they may trigger body image issues if it highlights a perceived flaw in the wearer. It’s also easy to imagine accidental or even purposeful unwanted touching – someone could use the input as an excuse to touch you. If the design encourages interaction, it could be easy for someone to be compelled to touch you when they normally wouldn’t. Inadvertently encouraging unwanted touching in our designs could have very serious implications. Unwanted touching is assault.

On the other hand, in private, intimate environments, that sort of touching can be welcome and fun. Context, as always, is key to understanding interactions with things you can wear.

Beyond unwanted touching, pranksters or “griefers” might think it is funny to reach over and mess with your digital interaction by touching the smartfabric device while you wear it. This could cause your data to become corrupted or trigger unwanted events in a system. (What if you were trying to book a calendar event, your friend reaches over and taps their fingers on your shirtsleeve, and now you have a thousand calendar events?)

We live in public, and smartfabrics might accidentally display personal information that we wouldn’t want others to see. What if a private text or email is displayed to my coworkers in a meeting because it is displayed on my shirt? (You might not want that nude selfie your significant other texts you to be displayed on your suit jacket when you are in a job interview.) What if I work in HR and my boss sends sensitive salary information that is displayed to an entire department I am presenting to? It could also be inappropriate for your dress shirt to display your photostream in church, or if your sombre outfit suddenly played the Benny Hill theme during a funeral. Understanding context and appropriateness of what to display and when, and how much control over who might see it users have is vital to understand and take into account.

Security and privacy is a huge issue with smartfabric devices. Data that is gathered from a user wearing smartfabrics is deeply personal. Any information that is passed to other devices or systems absolutely must be secure. That data should never be intercepted and stolen, it is very personal and could be misused and cause great harm to the user. If data transmitted from clothing or other devices could be intercepted by a 3rd party, that could be very embarrassing and potentially damaging if it is used against them. Also, if servers or cloud-based storage facilities are compromised and smartfabric generated user data is stolen, that could be catastrophic to the people whose data has been collected. The inevitable public backlash could be severe enough to destroy a company. Furthermore, data privacy laws could be broken and an organization could be faced with fines, lawsuits and the resulting bad publicity. Everyone loses if the data generated and used by these devices isn’t kept private and secure.

Private information should not be displayed publicly on my smartfabric device unless I want it to be displayed that way. I need to control what is shown, and when with speed and ease. Other people should not see my current status of what is going on with me and my body unless I want them to.

Smartfabric devices need to have their capabilities completely under the control of the wearer. When a feature isn’t appropriate in a particular context, or if something odd happens, the wearer need to be able to turn it off or mute it. Even active smartfabrics that change their form depending on outside triggers require user control to be able to turn it off.

Under controlled conditions (such as the development lab) you may never see irritating behavior, but in the real world strange things can happen. If your dress changes color depending on light and you are at a dance club, the lighting could cause the dress to rapidly change color. That requires a lot of energy if it happens over and over, so the power source could overheat and cause physical trauma (ie. burning) to the wearer. At best, it might wear your battery down prematurely.

Compatibility with other devices and services will also be difficult to address. What if my smartfabric jeans will only work with Android devices, and I only use Apple devices? What if the clothing that looks good on me and fits my budget is incompatible with my file hosting services I use and depend on? What happens if the smartfabric device manufacturer changes alliances, and my favorite suit company now only supports a platform I hate using?

Reliability is another issue that is difficult with clothing because we have to clean it constantly. How do we create hardware that can survive different weather, food and drink spills, sweat and other bodily fluids, and constant washing and drying? Clothing takes an absolute beating, and we subject it to extremes when we wear it, and especially when we clean it. This is an incredibly difficult environment for electronics to survive in, let alone work reliably in.

Two Possible Futures

The Scary Future

If we design smartfabric experiences poorly, we will distract people from their real world experiences, causing them to live diminished experiences when they wear these products. Instead of using technology to enhance their lives, we could burden them even more than our always connected experiences do already. Also, having more devices reading more and more sensitive and private information creates the potential to track people and make decisions about them based on their movements and biological data. This has incredibly serious, far-reaching implications. If people or organizations use this technology to reward or punish people due to the data that is collected, we could literally have a dystopian future on our hands.

If we aren’t careful, we might just create smartfabric products that are expensive, unreliable, irritating and in some cases, downright dangerous. That will be the kiss of death for the technology. If the solutions aren’t designed with empathy for real people, using them in the real world, not to mention our user’s needs, bodies and state of mind, they will quickly be relegated to the dustbin of history. The good that we could do with this technology would be lost because we did a terrible job with the user experience when we introduced our products to market.

The Awesome Future

Back when I wrote programs to help people on software teams be more productive, we used to joke that we were giving them super powers. They could now get visibility and control within systems that was formerly hidden from them, and use that information to make better decisions, or to diagnose and solve difficult problems. Similarly, even though we have many senses and powerful observation skills, there is a lot about ourselves and our environments that we can’t see. Sometimes this information can be incredibly important to get insight into.

I was delighted when Shannon Hoover (MakeFashion) suggested a similar superpower design theme with smartfabrics. Shannon goes beyond the concept of visibility and control, and he believes smartfabrics will eventually provide us with different superpowers by extending our senses, or replacing those that are injured or defective. Shannon says smartfabrics can help provide “X-Ray vision” by reading and presenting certain kinds of important data that are invisible to us. Just like a radio interprets radio waves and brings sound into a living room, smartfabrics have the potential to show us our current location and alert us where to move if we are travelling and get off track.

There are also applications to help provide us more strength and stability, and while we don’t all have access to a SciFi robotic exoskeleton (at least not yet), they are being developed for commercial and health related applications. Shannon goes further pointing out “spidey sense” activities to sense hidden danger, or important events. If the smartfabric is alerted to something that is important for you to know, it can get your attention to warn you immediately. Smartfabrics can use haptic feedback by interacting with your sense of touch in various ways to get your attention quickly.

Smartfabrics that sense danger and warn the wearer can be incredibly powerful. In particular, if our own senses are impaired due to illness, clothing that can warn us when our bodies are unable to can be life changing. Orpyx have created a vest that notifies people who can’t feel their extremities properly. Diabetic neuropathy sufferers can be warned of too much pressure in their feet by using sensors to vibrate against the wearer’s back to warn them. If your feet are getting injured, but you don’t feel pain, you can cause irreparable damage. Augmenting your body with another system to help prevent damage is an amazing feature to improve the life of people with illness and physical conditions. This also has enormous implications for safety gear and clothing for workers.

Once the wearer gets used to the alternative, haptic feedback, it feels as natural as the normal pain signals your body generates that you no longer feel from damaged areas. The technical term for this is “neuroplasticity”. Smartfabrics have the potential to use this as an “extra sense” to seamlessly interact with us in our environments. Shannon sees a future of products that can provide extra senses even for healthy users, to alert them or aid them as they perform tasks in the world so they are safer, happier and more productive.

Smartfabrics also have more whimsical applications that are also important. Imagine that you are at a holiday party in your new dress, shoes and accessories to match. You’re feeling good about yourself until you spot your nemesis from accounting. “That #$%#! She is wearing the same outfit! Disaster!

What do you do?

Smartfabrics to the rescue! You quickly dart out to the powder room, and with a quick, discrete gesture, you change the color of your dress. Crisis averted! This might seem silly compared to important medical or other applications, but this kind of technology would be incredibly useful for our quality of life.

Conclusion

Enhancing our bodies and our life activities with smartfabrics has the potential to enhance our senses, extend our physical capabilities and greatly inform our knowledge and insight. The choice for what future we want to bring to our users is in our hands. Do we want to enhance the lives of people who will use our products, or do we want to needlessly distract them away from what they should be experiencing?

Once smartfabric technology is reliable and inexpensive enough, we designers have some important work to do and not much time to do it in. Therefore, we need to choose what future we would like our customers to have even before we start designing.

Designing for Smart Fabrics: Wear It’s At – Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at defining smart fabrics. In Part 2, we will look at designing for them.

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(image via pixabay)

Deciding What to Design

Work with a Clothing Designer (someone who works with fabrics)

I can’t stress enough how important it is to work with someone who understands making clothing, and other handicrafts out of fabric and textiles. I spoke with Jen Kot, a professional engineer who makes her own clothing, knits and creates all kinds of interesting objects with textiles. As a technical person, she understands how the underlying technology works. As a crafty person, she deeply understands the application and costs of different textiles, the pros and cons of using different materials, what is easier or more difficult to work with, and what looks good.

Clothing is one of the most powerful tools we have to create and reinforce our image, or how we want the world to perceive us. One of Jen’s criticisms of much of the current wearables such as bracelets, watches and glasses are that they look “nerdy.” To a techie, we might not find this to be important. We may overlook the form for the features, and even find something awkward looking to be appealing. When you are competing in a world where fashion dictates what is available for us to wear in stores, we need to
understand how other people want to be perceived
.

When Jen and I brainstormed uses for smartfabrics, my solution ideas were much more functional. Her ideas were much more whimsical and fun. I kept thinking about how the technology could be applied and impact our lives, while she thought about what would look appealing as well as be engaging and fun.

Shannon Hoover, co-founder of MakeFashion, an organization that brings technologists and designers together to collaborate with wearable tech also reinforced this view. He also understands both the visual and technical worlds that are possible with smartfabrics.

Shannon says that many designers and developers are looking at wearables as a suite of tools (detect with sensor, compute data, send it to something else) but he also believes that isn’t very much fun. It seems very engineering-dominated, where we tend to focus on technology first, then apply it to a problem. Instead, Shannon feels we should also look at wearables from an aesthetic perspective (it looks interesting) and as a vehicle for
human expression. This is an artist and fashion-designer focused perspective.

Shannon goes even further, and says that clothing helps people tell the story about who they are – it is a narrative generator. It also gets people talking to you – it gets their attention and evokes emotions. Clothing is a great conversation starter. So what conversations do we want people to have about what we are wearing?

Using fabrics is complex, you need to understand how something looks on a person, how it feels on the skin, what colors are in fashion and how different cuts and shapes look on people. Fashion changes constantly. To make smartfabrics work, we will need both the technical view (here is how we make the technology work) and the fashion designer perspective (here is how we make the product look great and be appealing to wearers.) As a technology designer, talking to people who design clothing and furniture is exciting and helps generate new ideas. I understand the basics of what they are talking about, but their experience and perspective is completely different. When design materials use combinations of different technologies, our solution ideas are much better when we work together with other disciplines and share expertise and different perspectives.

Beyond Clothing

Making clothing is one way to use smartfabrics, but fabrics are used in a lot more things than clothing. For example, Nomex was used in heat shields for the space shuttle, Gore-Tex is used as a tissue replacement in medical procedures, and Kevlar is used to create high performance vehicle components. In fact, IoT developer and bbotx co-founder Geoff Kratz feels that smart fabrics have even more potential in products other than clothing. For example, he sees using smartfabrics in vehicle upholstery could provide alternatives for inputs and displays and other feedback mechanisms for safety purposes. Geoff also sees furniture as another good candidate. Smartfabrics could integrate with entertainment systems to provide an even more immersive experience. Chairs could sync up with other systems and provide you with reminders or safety information. Carpets could have safety lighting that is triggered by darkness or emergency situations. There is enormous potential for these sorts of ideas as well as interactive, connected art applications for homes, and public areas.

Quilter and chemical technologist (and reviewer of this article) Cindy Johnstone shares Geoff’s views. Since she quilts, she immediately thought of applications for blankets. Cindy says that portrait quilts or family quilts are very popular. She says the resolution of the images would be so much better if digital technology could be incorporated. An active smartfabric quilt that could tighten the batting to make it warmer in the winter and relax the fibres for summer use would be useful. People could use one blanket for different seasons, rather than having more than one blanket. Cindy also sees health care applications where adding in technology into blankets used by patients could provide more insight and control into patient care.

Corporate Innovation

As computing and wireless technology “disappears” into real world devices there is enormous potential to solve more interesting problems. We often look to organizations with well-funded R&D (research & development) programs to set the tone for the rest of us. There will be likely be useful, popular smartfabric products developed by some familiar leaders in the tech sector. The space is also ripe for disruption by some new up and coming organizations we haven’t heard of yet. Due to the combination of physical and virtual worlds, investment in these kinds of products will be more expensive than software alone.

One area that organizations are working on developing smartfabric and similar technology for is the health and wellness sector. Calgary-based Orpyx Technologies is a company that provides a wearable sensor platform for healthcare. In one of their products, they use embedded sensors in footwear to help people with diabetic neuropathy. Those with diabetic neuropathy have nerve damage and often don’t feel their limbs as well as other people do. Because they can’t feel when their feet hurt, they can injure them permanently. In severe cases this leads to amputation. Orpyx have developed a system to warn patients before this happens. A sensor-embedded insert worn inside a patient’s shoe gathers info from the sensors (pressure, etc) and transmits it to a smartwatch which then alerts them to potential problems.

Stephanie Zakala, Marketing and Inside Sales Manager at Orpyx says that they have been watching smartfabrics closely as a next step for some of their solutions. For example, rather than using embedded sensors within shoe inserts, a smartfabric sock would be a fantastic solution. So far though, there are technical limitations with the smartfabrics they have looked at. It is difficult to make socks with sensing capabilities that are comfortable, washable, and reliable over time. Stephanie says that clothing is particularly challenging because it creates hostile environments for electronics. Shoes and under garments are worn in conditions with pressure, high heat and humidity. Also, the high cost of many smartfabrics is currently prohibitive for many mass market consumer applications.

Other organizations are using sensors embedded in clothing to measure heart rate, temperature and other vital signs for healthcare, and athletics.

As smartfabric reliability improves and prices go down, many organizations will find them to be a great alternative technology for some of their current solutions. Beyond that, they will create new products and services by using smartfabrics to solve problems we were unable to address without this technology.

Innovation from Maker Communities

Great ideas don’t just come from companies, they can come from crowdsourcing as well. Craft communities are important crowdsourcing resources where people share interesting ideas for clothing and crafts. In these communities good ideas rise up to prominence because they work and are easy to replicate. Currently, there are knitting and quilting clubs, fashion collectives and maker fairs sprouting up all over, where people support each other socially, teach each other new skills, and most importantly, share patterns and design ideas so that others can make the same item.

As people try different patterns that others have created, they put their own unique spin on things, and improve on the original ideas. With such a large community, many ideas are shared and tested at large scale; far outstripping the resources of most companies R&D budgets and timelines might allow. Failure isn’t tied to profits and loss, so people can experiment without fear, and the best ideas tend to win out by becoming popular and emulated more frequently.

Homebrewing was a hugely vital part of early Personal Computer (PC) development, and this spirit of creativity and doing it yourself is evident virtually in craft communities. Adding technology to traditional materials is a natural step. In fact, while researching this piece, I found more people from craft communities that were interested in smartfabrics than technologists.

One community that reminds me of early PC homebrewing and software clubs is Ravelry. Ravelry is a community for people who knit and crochet, and it has a unique blend of features that allow people to share ideas and patterns. Local real-life knitting clubs have been started as a result of people from the same geographic location meeting virtually on Ravelry, then getting together and helping each other out. Sharing patterns and pictures of finished items is a huge part of the Ravelry experience, and popular patterns that help people create things that look good and work start to emerge.

Crowdsourced ideas from maker communities are often more fashion-conscious and whimsical than their corporate counterparts. Sometimes as technologists we forget that having a product that looks good and is fun is just as important to people as a life-saving device. It just depends on context. In fact, products that look good and are fun have a much larger market appeal. Maker communities are an area to watch because they not only filter the ideas for us, they remind us techies that the world can be a fun, colorful place and we need to incorporate those aspects into our designs.

These communities have access to a wealth of knowledge, and as digital designers, we can learn a tremendous amount from them. Once they have experimented with smartfabrics for a period of time, we can benefit from communities of people figuring out what works best for certain applications. These sorts of organizations are filled with people who like to experiment and create things for themselves and their friends. If you’re wondering where to start, Jen Kot says, make what is interesting and useful to you and then share it. The crowd can create at scale, so the good stuff will get copied and become popular.

Frame Your Design Thinking

Solve a Real Problem

When looking at technology first, and then trying to find useful applications of it, we can mistakenly create products that people don’t like. It’s important that technology solutions are actually useful and will be used by real people. Many wearables are not worn after a few months of use. In 2014, Endeavour Partners surveyed people who use wearables and found that one third of activity tracker users stopped using it after six months. Once people get a sense of the data that is measured and how that is reflected in their activities, they don’t seem to find a lot of value in the wearable information anymore.

It is vital to use technology that actually solves problems for people. Author and thinker Simon Sinek talks about “starting with why” we are doing something. In technology, we work a lot with the “what”. We have access to cutting edge technology, and we need to spend a lot of time learning how to master it and apply it. Many wearable and smartfabric demos seem to reflect this. People talk a lot about the technology and how it works, but they fail to make a compelling case for why it’s useful to me in my life and world right now. Very few people care about technical details, they want something that serves a purpose, looks good and fits their budget.

Think of buying a new pair of blue jeans as an example. When I shop, I look for something that solves my problem (I need clothing, specifically a new pair of jeans), that fits my personal style, that I look good wearing, and that I can afford. Invariably, I am drawn to a stylish visual design and a certain level of quality of materials and workmanship. Unfortunately, that means the jeans I would like to consider buying are expensive. Most importantly, the jeans have to fit my body and look and feel good while wearing them. So I start compromising to see if I can find something that fits my budget. If you are a smartfabric designer, how are you going to convince me to pay more money for something that has electronic capabilities in my jeans? It may just feel like an unnecessary extra. You have to convince me, the buyer, why I absolutely need this new technology in my jeans. Will they fit better? Will they look letter? Will they keep me warmer or drier or more comfortable? Will they provide data or notifications that are incredibly handy, or that I just can’t live without once I have them?

Whenever I design something new with complex technology, I strip the problem down to its essence, and I remove digital technology from the solution ideas at first. If I can use paper, pen, materials readily at hand and perhaps some physical services like mail or parcel delivery, what would I do? If you can fully understand the underlying problem you are solving and provide alternate ways of solving it with different technologies, it’s time to add in the digital technology to form a solution. It’s amazing how your perspective changes, and that pet feature you just loved in the technology doesn’t necessarily translate into an ideal product for the people you are designing for.

An ideal product should be so superior using smartfabrics to other, older technology, the customer will want it and will wonder how they got by without it in the past.

Paul Hanson (bbotx CEO) warns designers for wearables to avoid focusing on technology first, then looking for solutions in people’s lives. Instead, when we design wearables for people, we have to think about the person wearing the device first, what they are doing in their lives and how the technology that the device provides is useful for that person. However, it can’t stop there. Beyond the device itself, the generated data and activities recorded or performed by the wearable are much more useful when you take an entire system (such as your interactions with other people) into account. Gathering a lot of data with a smartfabric wearable and displaying that data on a smartphone has limited usefulness.

What does it mean? What should the wearer do?

With passive wearables, which are usually used to gather data, there is limited value in providing activity data only to the end user. There is infinitely more value if that data can be shared with people who can interpret the data, and have special expertise to help apply that to help you improve your life. In healthcare for example, clothing that monitors heart rate is incredibly useful if care givers or specialists have access to the data to help put context around it and point you towards behaviors that will benefit you. This requires a complex, secure computing system to support not only the wearable and the user, but everyone else who needs to be involved.

Active wearables need to interact with a system too – the immediate real world around us. Imagine a winter jacket that changes form depending on temperature so you are always at optimal comfort, or a shirt that changes color depending on lighting. The data the wearable interprets around them can trigger change in the form or attributes to enhance the experience of the wearer. Ideally, the user should be able to control these changes themselves if they want to override them.

Interfaces and Inputs

In my last article on wearables, I suggested that the real world is your primary user interface. With smartfabrics that can be used as clothing, user interfaces can also be on people’s bodies. Not only do you need to understand where the user is, what they are doing and what the environmental conditions are, you also have to understand where on the user’s body the user interfaces and inputs will take place.

Finally, you have to understand the inputs and outputs and displays themselves. This is incredibly challenging.

On a PC, we are used to input methods (keyboards, pointers, stylus, microphones, fingers, etc.) and output on a screen, from speakers etc. The end user tends to use the PC in more ideal conditions, and we don’t think too much about what else is going on around them. Mobile devices complicate I/O matters, because now we have to think about limited actions, and what else is going on in their world as they use our programs on the move.

Wearables such as smartwatches and activity trackers complicate this further, since they can overly distract from our real world activities, and since we are wearing them on our wrists or clipped on to clothing, we can’t get away from them if they needlessly over stimulate us with notifications and alerts. With smartfabrics used in clothing or furniture, the devices are right up against our skin and have much more opportunity to distract and annoy us. Can you imagine how terrible an experience could be if your clothing was vibrating or lighting up and you couldn’t stop it? It could be embarrassing, irritating, and could even cause injury to the wearer.

Deciding where to provide inputs and outputs on smartfabric is incredibly important for a design. With furniture or objects we interact with, it can be more straight forward, but would still require a lot of user testing with different users to get right. For clothing, it gets much more complicated. What are sensitive areas of the body we would want to avoid for inputs? How about appropriate areas for screens or lights or other outputs? If outputs or inputs they draw attention to private parts of the body, that could be disastrous in public, or just the right thing in private. We do not want to expose our customers to unwanted attention or touching, and they need to be in control of their own bodies and what technology can do to enhance them.

Smartfabric designers need to think of inputs and outputs for smartfabrics:

  1. What is around users in the real world and what activities will be enhanced by the technology
  2. The human body – where and what is useful with regards to inputs and outputs what is and feasible to put on or around our bodies and appropriate given the context of use
  3. The inputs and interface designs themselves

Design for Simple Interactions

On mobile devices, we have learned that we can distract people needlessly and take away from their real-life experiences rather than enhance them. If an app is annoying, people just delete it and move on. As designers, we must understand the context of use, such as the environment around users, and what they want to do at a particular time with the technology. We also know that people have less time and space to interact with mobile devices than they do with larger screens, so we have to develop for quick, economic interactions rather than a long workflow. For example, if I am walking outside with my smartphone, it is much harder to interact with than when I am sitting comfortably at a desk typing on my PC. If I am in a hurry, or I am in bad weather, it is even more difficult.

Now think of clothing you are wearing that is designed with smartfabrics. They are even more difficult to interact with than a small smartphone. What is going on around us and our limited ability to see and interact as we move around are amplified with smartfabrics. Imagine how irritating it would be to not be able to control or turn off notifications on your clothing, or how dangerous it might be if the smartfabric distracts you when you are walking, driving or riding a bicycle. The simple interactions mantra that mobile designers repeat over and over is that much more important to take into account with smartfabrics.

MakeFashion co-founder and UX designer Chelsea Klukas says: “…the most successful mobile products have created experiences that quickly allow customers to continue a task after interruption. With wearables these interactions will become even briefer, and successful experiences will need to be quick with minimal interruption to the user. Interfaces will need to be designed to rely on simple one-tap inputs and voice commands that can be achieved instantly.”

With wearables, the real world should be your primary user interface because that is what holds the most attention for the wearer, not the technology. Wearable technology should be designed to work within that context to complement real-life experiences. Chelsea says: “As wearables gain widespread adoption, we are going to have to be increasingly sensitive to the amount of interruptions and distractions they cause. When used correctly, wearables can be incredibly useful in providing information, wayfinding, or accessibility. When used incorrectly, they can become distracting and provide interruptions to user’s tasks and routines.”

Wayfinding came up a lot when I talked to people about possible applications of smartfabrics. Shannon Hoover suggested that smartfabric clothing that could sync with a map service would be hugely beneficial for tourists and travellers. If clothing provided tactile indications (such as through the use of a vibration motor) and subtle visuals, finding your way in an unfamiliar place could be much more enjoyable than having your face in a smartphone or an old fashioned map. You could focus on your surroundings, and have a richer experience, without worrying about going off your planned route. The clothing would remind and guide you. This could also be safer, you wouldn’t be a target as an obvious tourist to pickpockets or scammers.

Others described ideas using smartfabrics for people operating a vehicle. This technology would not be as visually distracting as looking at a smartphone or GPS map. Motorcyclists and bicycle commuters in particular found this a welcome change. Instead of relying on a hand held or mounted device that would distract their visual attention away from where the vehicle was heading, they could get tactile indications of where to go.

Smartfabrics could provide the ultimate handy interface for quick reference, reminders and interactions on the go, or they could interrupt needlessly and distract away from our real world experiences. Furthermore, since the human body is a secondary user interface, there is really very little difference between touching fabric on your body and touching bare skin. Imagine rubbing your thigh in one spot 100 times a day. How do you think your leg would feel in an hour, in a day, or after a week?

Simplicity is not only necessary for a good user experience, it could be necessary for our health, well being, and our relationships.

In Part 3 we will look at things that could go wrong with this technology, and offer up two possible futures for products using smartfabric tech.

Designing for Smart Fabrics: Wear It’s At – Part 1

Lately, the term “wearables” appears more and more in our conversations. Usually we are describing a smart watch that extends our mobile experience, or a bracelet that tracks physical activity. Sure, those are things we wear, but what about something with computing power that we actually put on as clothing? Now that is something that is really a wearable. This next wave of wearable moves technology beyond accessories to clothing we wear, furniture we use, vehicles we are transported in and art that we enjoy.

This is made possible through smartfabrics. Smartfabrics are textiles with embedded electronics that bring computing power even further from our devices into everyday items. This technology poses new challenges for designers. Not only is the form factor very different from screen devices, it is right up against the user’s skin.

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(image via pixabay)

This is an interesting topic for me. While I have done design work with smartwatches, wearable integration and for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, I haven’t worked with smartfabrics yet. So I reached out to people in the community who have more insight than I do, and asked for their thoughts to share on the future of this technology. This is more of a forward-looking piece than my usual experience-reports, so I will likely get some of it wrong. However, a lot of you have been asking me to weigh on on this topic. Furthermore, the low impact, high value principles behind designing for this technology are important to take into account as we move forward. We might have a limited window of opportunity to get it right.

In my last article on wearables Designing For Smartwatches And Wearables To Enhance Real-Life Experience, I wrote about designing experiences that integrate smartwatches and activity trackers. I mentioned that we have two futures for technology: in one, we are distracted away from our real-world experiences, increasingly focused on technology and missing out on what is going on around us; in the other, technology enhances our life experiences by providing a needed boost at just the right time. Understanding good distractions as well as unwelcome distractions is vital to consider when you are designing for something that you will have right up against your skin for hours at a time on a daily basis. With smartfabrics, we have even more potential to cause harm by distracting people from their lives, or to bring even more good by using powerful technology to enhance our real-life experiences.

As I spoke with people who design with smartfabrics and similar technology, a common theme emerged: smartfabrics aren’t quite there yet for mass market applications. There are some niche players leading the way, but nothing has captured significant mind share. That’s because it’s difficult to bring computing and electronics, power sources, sensors and wireless connectivity to fabrics without making them bulky, impractical, and expensive. However, a lot of great organizations with brilliant people are working hard to create reliable, cost-effective smartfabric technology, so the day will arrive soon. When it does, those of us who are technology designers will be designing digital experiences that are completely different from the screen experiences we are accustomed to. It’s important to understand that we are designing a digital experience that supplements a user’s real-world experience.

Know Your Design Material

Electronics

One way to think about smartfabrics is that they are Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In his talk Magical UX and the Internet of Things , mobile UX expert Josh Clark defined IoT devices as “Sensors + Smarts + Connectivity”. A “thing” is anything at all that we can put technology into. “Sensors” are what make mobile devices and wearables truly special, they can sense movement, direction, and in some cases even biometric data.

“Smarts” refers to computing power and electronics that makes sense of data, and supports inputs and outputs into the system.

“Connectivity” allows us to get information from the thing onto smartphones
and other devices. It is one thing to have a wearable that measures or allows for inputs and outputs, but if it can only work by itself and not communicate with other computers, it has limited value.

Sensors, smarts and connectivity depend on power sources to operate, which means they need batteries to make them work.

Smartfabrics are textiles with IoT-style technology woven into them. Some technologies added to textiles are sensors, wireless, batteries, location services (such as geo-positioning tech), transducers, bio monitors, lighting and displays. New kinds of fabrics blur lines further with electronics in the development of conductive thread for inputs, and stretchy displays, circuit boards and wiring embedded right into the fibers or printed on the fabric. In some cases you can barely tell the difference between smart fabrics and traditional textiles.

IoT devices provide visibility and control into just about anything we can stuff technology in. Paul Hanson, CEO of IoT technology company bbotx points out that they “help create enhanced situational awareness.” In other words, IoT devices can help us extend our own capabilities by providing visibility and control into our environments, our interactions with other people and systems, and within ourselves. For example, health monitoring with wearable IoT devices can provide constant flows of data so the wearer can make better health decisions. With IoT technology, this insight is also available to health experts. What was once a sporadic activity – that required an appointment, specialized equipment and expertise – can now be an ongoing, continuous activity. These systems provide a degree of insight into a patient’s day to day conditions that was impossible before. Patients get visibility into their current condition at any time, and experts can closely monitor changes and recommend treatment options.

Doug Hagedorn, CEO of Tactalis describes two different kinds of smartfabrics: passive and active. Passive smartfabrics are designed towards monitoring and gathering information to for use within a system. Active smartfabrics react immediately to stimulus in the environment and may change physical aspects such color, shape or their digital behavior. Passive smartfabrics have enormous potential in areas such as health and fitness, while active smartfabrics could reduce the need for multiple articles of clothing that have one particular purpose and design.

Fabrics & Materials

If you are a digital designer who like me who in virtual worlds all the time, integrating software with real world physical objects can be a challenge.

Textiles are commonplace enough to appear simple, but they are subtly complex. From ancient times, we have used animal and plant-based materials to clothe ourselves for protection and warmth. Eventually, we brought in metals and other minerals as materials. (The most obvious example of this is medieval armor such as chainmail.)

As technology advanced further, we moved beyond natural resources and started making synthetic fabrics. Today, textiles are sophisticated combinations natural, synthetic, mineral and other materials. We take them for granted because they are all around us, and the complexity is hidden from us.

The choice of material when designing clothing or other textile goods brings with it different strengths and weaknesses for warmth or cooling, comfort or sturdiness, and care when dirty.

To get more out of a particular fabric, we combine different materials to make it even more useful for a particular purpose. Some interesting examples of technology fused with technology are:

  • Kevlar used in fabrics for protective wear
  • Gore-Tex Water repellant technology to keep us warm and dry
  • Nomex provides flame resistance
  • Spandex provides support for athletic wear and underwear
  • Conductive thread in our mittens and gloves allows us to use our touchscreens in the cold.

When you weave these powerful fibers into fabric for use in clothing, it allows the wearer to do things that were previously difficult or impossible. In most cases, you wouldn’t even know that complex technology is in your clothing unless you looked at the label. Similarly, as electronics become smaller, they become a part of the purpose of the clothing. They fade into the fabric so that we don’t even notice them. Smartfabrics have the potential to allow us to do much more with clothing and other objects than we can with traditional fabrics. The key as a designer is to know exactly what kind of smart fabric you require to solve a problem for your users.

Stay tuned for Part 2, as we look at smartfabric design potential.

Designing a Gamification Productivity Tool

Gamification and Software Testing

I haven’t spoken about this project publicly because we never got to a public release. Software testing tools represent a tiny market, so they are incredibly difficult to fund. Some of you have asked me about gamification tools with testing, so I thought I would share this brain dump.

A few years ago, I was asked to help a development team that had significant regulatory issues, and frequently accrued testing debt. The product owner’s solution was to periodically have “testing sprints” where other team members helped the over burdened test teams catch up. There was just one problem: the developers HATED helping out with 2 weeks of testing, so I was asked to do what I could to help.

A couple of the senior architects at this company were very interested in Session Tester and asked me why I had put game mechanics in a testing tool. I didn’t really realize at the time I had put game mechanics in, I was just trying to make something useful and engaging for people. So I started talking with them more about game design, and they encouraged me to look into MMOs and co-operative games. The team played games together a great deal, so I learned about the games they enjoyed and tried to incorporate mechanics

I set up a game-influenced process to help structure testing for the developers, and taught them the basics of SBTM. They LOVED it, and started having fun little side contests to try to find bugs in each other’s code. In fact, they were enjoying testing so much, they would complain about having to go back to coding to fix bugs. They didn’t want to do it full time, but a two week testing sprint under a gamified, co-operative model with some structure (and no horrible boring test cases) really did the trick.

Eventually, I worked with some of the team members with a side-project, and the team lead proposed creating a tool to capture what I had implemented. This was actually extremely difficult.  We started with what had been done with Session Tester, and went far beyond that, looking at a full stack testing productivity tool. One of the key aspects of our approach that differed from the traditional ET and scripted testing approaches was the test quest. As I was designing this test tool, I stumbled on Jane McGonigal’s work and found it really inspiring. She was also a big proponent of the quest as a model for getting things done in the real world. Also, we were very careful in how we measured testing progress. Bug counts are easily gamed and have a lot of chance. I have worked in departments that measured on bug counts in the past, and they are depressing if you are working on a mature product while your coworkers are working on a buggy version 1.0.

One thing Cem Kaner taught me was to reward testers based on approach rather than easily counted results, because they can’t control how many bugs there may or may not be in a system. So we set up a system around test quests. Also, many people find pure exploratory testing (ET) too free form and it doesn’t provide a sense of completion the way scripted test case management tools do. And when you are in a regulatory environment, you can’t do ET all the time, and test cases are too onerous and narrow focused. We were doing something else that wasn’t pure ET and it wasn’t traditional scripted testing. It turns out test quest was a perfect repository for everything that we needed to be done. Also, you didn’t finish the quest until you cleaned up data, entered bugs and other things people might find unpleasant after a test session or two. There is more here on quests: Test Quests – Gamification Applied to Software Test Execution

As I point out in that post, Chore Wars is interesting, but it was challenging for sustained testing because of different personalities and motivations of different people. So we used some ideas from ARGs to sprinkle within our process rather than use it as a foundation. Certain gamer types are attracted to things like Chore Wars, but others are turned off by them, so you have to be careful with a productivity tool.

We set up a reward system that reminded people to do a more thorough job. Was there a risk assessment? Were there coverage outlines? Session sheets? How were they filled out? Were they complete? What about bug reports? Were they complete and clear?  I fought with the architects over having a leaderboard, but eventually I relented and we reached a compromise. Superstar testers can dominate a system like this, causing others to feel demoralized and not want to try anymore. We decided to overcome that by looking at chance events, which are a huge part of what makes games fun, so no one could stay and dominate the testing leaderboard, they would get knocked to the bottom randomly and would have to work their way back up. Unfortunately, we ran into regulatory issues with the leaderboard – while we forbade the practice of ranking employees based on the tool, this sort of thing can run afoul of labor laws in some countries, so we were working on alternatives but ran out of resources before we could get it completed.

Social aspects of gaming are a massive part of online games in particular, but board games are more fun with more people too. We set up a communication system similar to a company IRC system we had developed in the past. We also designed a way to ask for help and for senior testers to provide mentoring, and like MMOs, we rewarded people who worked together more than if they worked alone. Like developer tools, we set up flags for review to help get more eyes on a problem.

We also set up a voting system so testers could nominate each other for best bug, or best bug report, best bug video, and encouraged sharing bug stories and technical information with each other within the tool.

An important design aspect was interoperability with other tools, so we designed testing products to be easily exported so they could be incorporated with tools people already use. Rather than try to compete or replace, we wanted to complement what testers were already doing in many organizations, and have an alternative to the tired and outdated test case management systems. However, if you had one of those systems, we wanted to work with it, rather than against it.

Unfortunately, we ran out of resources and weren’t able to get the tool off the ground. It had the basics of Session Tester embedded in it, with improvements and a lot of game approaches mixed in with testing fundamentals.

We learned three lessons with all of this:

  1. Co-operative game play works well for productivity over a sustained period of time, while competitive game play can be initially productive, but over time it can be destructive. Competition is something that has to be developed within a co-operative structure with a lot of care. Many people shut down when others get competitive, and rewarding for things like bugs found, or bugs fixed causes people to game the system, rather than focus on value.
  2. Each team is different, and there are different personalities and player types. You have to design accordingly and make implementations customizable and flexible. If you design too narrowly, the software testing game will no longer be relevant. If design is more flexible and customizable from the beginning, the tool has a much better chance of sustained use, even if the early champions move on to other companies. I’ve had people ask me for simple approaches and get disappointed when I don’t have a pat answer on how to gamify their testing team approach without observing and working with them first. There is no simple approach that fits all.
  3. Designing a good productivity tool is very difficult, and game approaches are much more complex than you might anticipate. There were unintended consequences when using certain approaches, and we really had to take different personality and player styles into account. (There are also labour and other game-related laws to explore.) Thin layer gamification (points, badges, leaderboards) had limited value over time and only appealed to a narrow group of people.

 If some of you are looking at gamification and testing productivity, I hope you find some of these ideas useful. If you are interested in some of the approaches we used, these Gamification Inspiration Cards are a good place to start.

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

Some of you have noticed that I have dropped off the conference circuit and I haven’t been very active publicly for a while. Here’s what I’ve been working on lately.

In December 2013, I left the testing field and started working full time as a product manager and a software/user experience (UX) designer. My consulting work had evolved so that I was doing a lot of product management and design anyway, and it was time to make a complete transition. It has been quite the ride. I have worked on products and services for web, mobile, smartwatches, wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) in several industries.

What is a product manager anyway?

Sometimes product managers are called “the CEO of the product” or “mini-CEOs” which means you have responsibility to package a product and/or service into something that can be marketed, sold and solves a real problem for real people. You try to help the organization determine the right thing to build, at the right time, at the right price, using just the right technology.

The product manager doesn’t do this alone, and when we get it right, the team gets the credit. When we get it wrong, the product manager has ultimate responsibility for the product or service, just as a CEO has ultimate responsibility for the organization.

It’s not an easy job, and one of my mentors told me that if I didn’t experience times when it seemed like everyone in the organization was angry with me, I should worry I was doing something wrong.

In the book The Art of Product Management, p. XIV, Rich Mironov describes:

… the product manager is responsible for the long-term development and health of a product, and is constantly faced with co-workers (or customers or partners or company executives) who want short cuts to good results.

The role requires a lot of diplomacy as well as a willingness to make difficult decisions to help do the right thing for the product, the customers and the organization. It’s enormously challenging, but hugely rewarding.

What do you do all day?

Product management varies a lot from organization to organization, and from person to person. It can be as unique as the person in the role, and different people have different aptitudes, interests and strengths. Some of my colleagues do more work on the business and marketing side, and some of them are more big picture strategists with a lot of team members doing the hands on work. Others have more of a role in day to day project management. I tend to focus more on UX and design as well as typical product management activities.

Todd Birzer from Kevolve describes four areas where product managers work:

  1. Market Intelligence
  2. Product Strategy
  3. Product Development
  4. Lifecycle Management

When I am doing work in market intelligence, I may be doing market research, customer research, competitor analysis, technology analysis and I am constantly keeping up with media and trends.

Product strategy work involves product/service idea validation, determining differentiators for a product/service, developing a monetization strategy and financial analysis. At this point I am also helping find the right technology fit and validating technical, legal and business requirements are all in alignment. Usually I start to create initial product roadmaps at this point to help us determine a focus on what we would like to deliver when. Sometimes we prototype or build a proof of concept, and I may do the initial app designs and UX work here as well. A lot of work at this stage involves making sure there is an entire product from a marketing, sales, support, pricing and technical implementation. It is really easy to end up with a “bucket of features” at the end of a release rather than a real, quantifiable product. A bucket of features is incredibly difficult to sell because it is vague, and doesn’t have a clear differentiator from the competition.

There are a lot of business and sales areas to explore here as well as the technical implementation. Analyzing financials and forecasting by testing out revenue models is important. In an early stage startup, I am actively involved in business model validation and helping with business plans, investor pitches and other funding applications.

During product development, I often do hands-on activities such as business analysis (requirements work, modeling, etc.), planning, setting up a project management practice, but mostly I do a lot in UX, design and gamification. In some cases I oversee others doing the work, and on smaller projects, I am heavily involved. I also assist product owners on Agile teams, helping them write stories and epics, figure out testable requirements and quality criteria, and make sure they have support from other areas of the business and enough to do.

Lifecycle management involves analyzing metrics and financials and helping stakeholders make decisions about products/services that are out in the market. You combine your market intelligence and product strategy and customer experiences with metrics to determine enhancements, bug fixes, what features to add, what features to cut, etc. You also look at the lifecycle of the product in the long term and plan for obsolescence. Ongoing funding and cost vs. revenue analysis is also important here as well as measuring ongoing customer engagement. The information we provide is helpful for teams as they plan out future development and other activities.

Why don’t we see you at conferences anymore?

When I decided to make a career transition, I tried at first to work in both worlds. For a couple of years I spent some of my time doing work in testing training and consulting, and the rest of my time doing product management things. The transition got stuck so I cut out testing and made the leap to full time product management. Previously, most of my public appearances were for testing topics, or for conferences heavily associated with quality and testing. Now I speak exclusively about product management, design, UX or gamification. So you won’t see me at the same conferences I used to attend.

On a personal level, I have had some health challenges that have been slow to heal which have made frequent travel difficult, and my wife and I welcomed our son (our first child) into the world. Not travelling very much meant we were able to start a family and I can spend more time with them. It is amazing to be around to see our little guy grow and change before our eyes. Cutting travel down significantly is also much healthier for me overall.

I also started feeling strongly about building more locally. Supporting local organizations can be better for the community we live in, for the people we see around us in our daily lives, not to mention the environment. I have been working with companies in Western Canada, and started a local meetup for Calgary-based software product managers.

What’s next?

One of the most difficult things about a career transition like this is that I don’t see most of you face-to-face anymore. I am now exploring options for more remote work so I can collaborate with more of you and share ideas and learn from working with different people and teams.

I am writing more based on what I have learned, so you will see more from me on topics that I described above. I wrote an article on designing for wearables for Smashing Magazine: Designing For Smartwatches And Wearables To Enhance Real-Life Experience and I have more to come in this space.

I will also slowly begin to explore opportunities for more public events, but sorry, no more testing conferences.

If you would like to keep in touch, feel free to contact me. I always enjoy hearing from anyone who I have met in the past, or people who have read my work and want to chat about it or to just say hi.

Who Moved My Cheese Sandwich?

My Dad was a school teacher for 25 years. For several of those years, he had the same thing for lunch: a plain cheese sandwich. My Mom enjoyed getting all of us ready for school in the morning and would make us our lunches, put them in brown paper bags, and label each of them. My sister and I were finicky eaters at best, constantly changing our minds, or feeling jealous of classmates who had “cooler” lunches (usually junk food.) My Dad stuck to what he wanted, and it made my Mom’s job easy. She’d make him a plain cheese sandwich, and he happily took it to work.

Then one fateful day he snapped.

He told my Mom he never wanted to see a cheese sandwich ever again because he was sick of them. She was a bit shocked at first, but we all had a big laugh about it, since it had only taken him years of having the same thing for lunch every working day to get tired of it. Most of us have far less patience and are far more discriminating in our tastes and a need for variety.

I’ve worked for years as a consultant helping software development teams, and I see their versions of the cheese sandwich constantly.

Software development team’s version of the cheese sandwich tends to be process-related. Teams do the same things over and over because that’s what they are used to, because they are dogmatic in their alignment with a process ideal, or because it seems that is what everyone else is doing.

A few years ago, I was helping David Hussman with a book project that eventually became a Pragmatic Press production: Cutting an Agile Groove: The Live Sessions. As I looked over a collection of David’s writings, three key phases of team productivity came to mind:

  1. Getting Started
  2. Getting Productive
  3. Staying Productive

Most teams I have observed are pretty good at getting started and getting productive, but a huge majority have a lot of trouble staying productive. Many teams plateau and even drop off over the life of a project, and especially when they work on projects together year after year. A big part of why they plateau is because they don’t change up their processes and practices, and they get bored.

If the team isn’t willing to change, they won’t. My Mom tried for years to suggest things to mix it up. My Dad stuck with the cheese sandwich. However, once he made up his mind to change, he was ready for it, and he went for it. You can’t force change on people, you can only really support it. It can be frustrating to work with a team that has obvious problems, yet they refuse to look at simple, proven solutions and won’t try anything new.

After slavishly sticking to one thing for so long, Dad got rid of it altogether. Sometimes this is worthwhile, but on software teams this can be overkill. I see this with software development teams all the time – the old way is wrong, throw it all away! This can be unfortunate. There might be good things that are getting thrown aside. What you were doing before wasn’t necessarily all wrong, you are just tired of it and enamoured with something new. Or, it is still a good practice, it just doesn’t work for your team anymore.

Recently, a team I was working with decided to get rid of using a wiki. They had process dysfunction, and saw a fantastic presentation by Ralph Boden “Changing the Laws of Engineering with GitHub Pull Requests” that challenged the usefulness of wikis. The team Ralph was working on got rid of wikis, and had some compelling reasons for doing so. Instead of using this presentation as an example of what worked for one team, the take away was that wikis were bad and now have no place on a software development team. It turned out that for this team, the wiki was a useful tool and throwing it away altogether was premature. We see this a lot in software development communities, often in the form of “___X___ is dead!” pronouncements. No, X isn’t dead, it just doesn’t work for you anymore, so don’t discourage other teams from doing X. Just because your team doesn’t like cheese sandwiches anymore doesn’t give you the right to disparage cheese sandwiches and anyone who enjoys them.

Software development is complex and difficult. It is a huge challenge to get a team together, get productive, stay productive, and sustain this over several product releases. The lesson in the cheese sandwich is to not stick with one process or practice for too long. Just like with food, software processes require variety, serve different needs for different people, have different requirements and restrictions, and will get stale over time.

See Things Change and So Should Processes for more on this theme.

“Don’t Freak Out!” Product Management & Emotion Management

As a product manager, some days it seems like half of my time is spent calming down team members who are freaking out about the project. And on those days, most of the other half seems to be spent re-establishing and maintaining team alignment on a product release. (Usually this is because the people who need to calm down have spread their uncertainty around to others.)

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(image via pixabay)

I used to feel side tracked because I felt that I should be spending my time on market research, helping with monetization plans, supporting sales and marketing, planning and prioritizing features and helping make a decision on a UX improvement or to help the team re-prioritize a feature because of some unforeseen event. I didn’t expect to spend so much time helping keep people calm, and repeating the product vision, priorities and keeping the team on track. I’m a collaborative person, so I always have buy-in before proceeding. Why then, do some days seem like most of what I do is listen, talk, repeat myself, listen, talk and repeat myself some more? Didn’t we all agree on this stuff? What’s going on?

At first, when someone freaked out over something we had settled on and agreed to as a team, it was tempting to just point them the product vision statement written in huge letters and posted above our development board. Or opening a product roadmap, and pointing at it as the person ranting to me insisted we should be doing something else. What happened to the agreement that we had as a team, and more importantly, your agreement and endorsement? What happened?

What I learned is, a lot of times people are just freaking out. Some people freak out more than others, and we all freak out in different ways. As a product manager, I am often the first person they come to when they are freaking out. And, an important part of my job is to deal with freak outs. If I can keep people calm, focused and productive, that helps us reach our shipping targets.

The truth is, we are all emotional creatures and software development projects are incredibly difficult. We all freak out a bit on projects from time to time if we look at the big picture and think of all the work we have to do in such a short time. At any point in time during a software development project, it can be overwhelming if you think about it too much. However, people sometimes also freak out for good reasons.

Techies may get worried that we can’t meet commitments, or implementing a new technology isn’t going as well as planned. Or we may just get bored of the technology, learn about something new, and feel that there is a better way to move ahead than our current roadmap and plan. As business people, we get all kinds of tantalizing offers from potential customers, and we are very swayed by the people who are willing to spend money. It can take what seems like forever for a technical team to deliver a release (because it is so labour intensive), so we may get distracted away from the current release, and start talking about an idea for some time down the road. To be honest, I get freaked out a bit too. Here are some recent minor freakouts:

  • Did we pick the correct web framework? What if it doesn’t support the browser that our first client uses in their organization!??
  • Did I do enough research with our monetization model? What if my research and recommendations and my interpretations of consultations with experts are wrong?
  • Did I misinterpret the usage statistics and engagement metrics from our apps which could potentially mess up our priorities for the next release? At worst, what if we change something that the majority of people are using and annoy our best customers?

See? I can be as neurotic as the next person. I deal with my own freakouts by having my own personal support network. Sometimes I just need to vent to someone else who isn’t directly involved with the team. Other times, I need to bounce ideas off of senior team members to re-evaluate our current path. What if I am missing something important? I also research any freakouts when others agree. And sometimes, we just have to find out and adjust accordingly when we release. If I guided us towards the wrong monetization model and the wrong priorities, we just need to be on top of it and adjust based on market feedback.

Once in a while, someone is right to freak out and disrupt our current path. They had some doubts, researched and realized we are off track and we need to change now. How do I tell the difference between someone who is freaking out and needs a bit of reassurance, and a real issue we need to deal with right now?

Usually, we get unsettled due to reasons that we can’t explain. Some people say our subconscious or our intuition are at work here. When someone brings up an issue but they can’t provide you with a clear explanation of what is wrong, let alone an alternate solution, it is important not to dismiss it. So I always ask for proof driven by research. Can you spend some time looking into the problem to see if it’s a real issue, or just a minor freakout? If we need to change, why? What is the business case? Where is the evidence I could use to show stakeholders we are off track? Once a team member starts to make their freak out defensible, two things usually happen:

  1. once they start to research, they realize their freak out is unfounded, and they calm down by looking at evidence that supports that we are on the right track)
  2. as they gather evidence, they are able to reinforce their misgivings by forming a better idea of what the problem is, and are able to communicate it much more convincingly

In the first case, we just let it go and move forward. In the second case, the freakout turns into a strategic business or technical decision.

Sometimes, freakouts are symptoms of communication problems, poor tools (or poor use of tools) or other issues unrelated to the project itself. These are important to watch for too, because even simple issues can cause people to spend time freaking out instead of working because something is wrong.

As my colleague Aaron West points out, it’s important to provide a safe environment and provide permission for people to freak out. If I am the person they feel safe freaking out to, and we can deal with their feelings in a healthy way, that minimizes them having to go to others and sidetracking them. If the environment is repressive, and there aren’t healthy outlets, people will undermine the mission of the project by releasing that tension in other ways.

When I presented for the first time at a large international software development conference, I was really nervous. The facilitator could tell, and tried to calm me down with a little pep talk. She told me about her office, how outnumbered the technical IT members were, and how they had insane deadlines with multimillion dollar projects all the time. The projects were heavily publicized, so any delay brought embarrassment to the company, as well as the potential to lose money. It sounded like a very stressful environment to work in, but she said she had learned to thrive there. It was a really easy place to get freaked out in, and a small team could waste time and effort if they got freaked out over the wrong things. So, she printed out a huge poster that said DON’T FREAK OUT! and hung it in the development team bullpen. That didn’t stop people from freaking out, but it helped calm people down, and reduced the freakouts over trivial issues. If someone came to her freaking out, they were freaking out for the right reasons. The message was that I really didn’t need to freak out about presenting my talk, there are a lot more important things in life to freak out over than public speaking.

Sometimes I have to tell myself not to freak out and I remember that pep talk and that DON’T FREAK OUT! poster. Is it really worth freaking out, or am I just stressed and worried? Late at night on a stressful project, all kinds of problems seem large and insurmountable. I have to ask myself, is this worth being freaked out over? Do I need to ask for another opinion? When others come to me freaking out, I need to help them either channel that energy into something productive, or decide that they are freaking out about something important, and we do need to change what we are doing.

Different projects have different levels of freak outs, and they occur during more stressful times on a project. I have to remember that helping people navigate freak outs is just as important as the cool tasks in my job description.

New Article – Designing For Smartwatches And Wearables To Enhance Real-Life Experience

I expanded on my blog post on this topic and wrote an article for Smashing Magazine: Designing For Smartwatches And Wearables To Enhance Real-Life Experience.

Now that smartwatches and wearables are in a huge growth phase, I shared my ideas on treating the real world as your primary interface, and developing app experiences that enhance our lives, rather than needlessly distract.