Designing from the Inside-Out: Behaviour as the Engine of Product Design

Imagine I asked you to design a product. Maybe a website. For sharing medical information.

The product is for the blind. And the deaf.

Could you do it? Where would you start?

Designing from the Inside-Out: Behaviour as the Engine of Product Design Dan Saffer, Kicker Studio

Users experience products from the outside-in, namely from the interface and the physical form. In other words, as far as users are concerned, the interface is the product.

But. The best products are usually not those that are designed with only the outside in mind.

Those delight briefly. But prolonged use turns delight to anger and disgust. They are quickly discarded, replaced, and forgotten. They are the junk food of products.

It is easier to focus on form than behaviour.

Likewise, it is equally easy to focus on the mechanics: the technology that makes the product possible.

Easier not because the work is easier (it isn’t). But it is easier to talk or demonstrate or even think about how a product looks or will be built than it is to design how it will work.

This isn’t to say we should ignore aesthetics or technology, because that would be foolish.

The best products are designed from the inside-out. Meaning, everything flows from behaviour.

Behaviour How the product acts (feedback) The tasks the product allows users to do Maximising the abilities of the product A focus on actions it (you) want to engender through use

An honest job of design should flow from the inside out, not from the outside in. Henry Dreyfuss, 1955

We mold clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes the vessel useful. Tao Te Ching

The best products are aesthetically-pleasing are plug and play have personal or professional value seem transparent offer clear affordances/instruction put functionality on the correct platform have responsive feedback use conventions... ...or something radically better make it difficult to make mistakes are aware of context of use have moments of delight respect time and effort

The best way to achieve most of those characteristics is by focusing on behaviour as the starting point.

But then we’ve got this problem. If The Interface is The Product, how do we design from the inside out?

A lot of products have been made from the inside out that you’d never want to own or use.

Step 1: Behaviour as Design Strategy

Avoid what Nicholas Nova calls the utilitarian fallacy: “a tendency to think that people want/must have products to optimize their lives.”

Behaviour can be a major product differentiator.

Differentiators have traditionally been features. But we can make behaviour the differentiator. In not only how the product behaves, but the behaviour it engenders.

Behaviour is one defense against feature-itis.

People love features. We enjoy comparing products side-by-side and choosing the one with the most features.

Obligatory Don Norman Quote [P]eople are not willing to pay for a system that looks simpler because it looks less capable…[Make] the actual complexity low, the real simplicity high. That’s an exciting design challenge: make it look powerful while also making it easy to use. Don Norman

Companies love features, too. It gives them something to easily market and talk about. It also allows them to simply replicate what their competitors are doing without having to come up with real differentiators.

It’s easy to replicate features. But is is hard to copy how features behave if care is taken to design them well.

Step 2: Behaviour as Design Research

Stop looking for people’s goals and preferences, start looking for what they do and why they do it.

Motivations Expectations Actions

Translating goals or (worse) preferences into a design will probably lead to something terrible.

Step 3: Behaviour as Product Structure

How does the system behave when users engage with it? In other words, what is the feedback like?

The same feature can feel completely different based on how it responds and how it is accessed. Transitions matter.

What activities does the product need to support?

Especially figure out what is the core activity. This will determine the product’s Buddha Nature.

The core activity also determines the Hero Task.

What behaviour do you want to encourage? Discourage?

It is hard to change learned behaviour. Once people get used to do something one way, especially if they do it very regularly, it is hard to get them to change. It is often easier to change the non-human parts of the system than it is to change human behaviour.

It can be helpful when concepting to consider metaphor. If this product was an action, what would it be?

There is a big difference between: Design a shower and Design something to clean a person

How would it work if it was magic? Alan Cooper

Where does your mobile phone’s ringer “live?” Where does Twitter live? Where does a product like Last.fm live?

Functional cartography Should the controls be digital, physical, or both? When and where will the feature be used? What’s the feature’s priority? Does it need to be available all the time? Frequently? How much resources should be spent? Consider ergonomics. Will a physical control ruin the form? Will a screen? How tangible should the feature be? Does the feature need a visible presence (affordance)? This can also spread cross-platform too.

Start from the behaviour, and then figure out what should control it: the physical form, UI elements on a screen, or even gestures in space. For users, the interface is the system, and they don’t care which discipline(s) designed it, only that it looks good and works well.

This is how we overcome the interface/inside-out paradox. Behaviour drives the form and the mechanics.

So am I saying form follows function? Somewhat. But don’t quote me.

We’re often not making things better, we’re just making things different. Peter Saville

Go make things better.

Thanks. dan@kickerstudio.com odannyboy on Twitter

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Designing from the Inside-Out: Behaviour as the Engine of Product Design

by Dan Saffer

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