As part of our ongoing internal tribute to Steve Jobs, Lorena Proia, our Director of User Experience, and the brains behind Percussion CM1 usability shares her thoughts on the passing of Steve Jobs below.
Thank you Steve Jobs. Thank you for being an innovator and most of all, thank you for being the champion of design.
Steve Jobs has done for design what Henry Ford did for the automobile. More than anybody else, Jobs understood what design is and he brought it to the masses much like Henry Ford brought the Model T to America. As Steve Jobs himself put it “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” This fundamental understanding and his appreciation for design drove him to include design in the first Apple Computer. It started there and he continued to push until he made the consumer products world stand up and take notice.
Previous to Apple, American corporations believed that “Americans don’t care about design.” In the 80s and 90s we were awash with bad design. The US automakers pumped out badly designed cars, logos looked like they were created by committee, kitchen gadgets and household goods were ‘designed’ to conform to the machinery that produced it, not the other way around. It’s no wonder then that the software we began to use went much the same way.
I can’t begin to count the amount of times I’ve heard some variation on “American’s don’t care about design, they care about price.” American’s don’t care about design? It’s not that American’s didn’t care about design, it’s that no one ever offered them a well-designed product! For what seemed like an eternity, designers fought the uphill battle of bringing design into corporate America and weren’t getting very far.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs understood something fundamental about design and incorporated it into every aspect of his company and it’s products. He understood the design axiom “form follows function”. Design follows the needs of the user, not the technology. Design can’t be slapped on as an afterthought, but needs to be integrated into the fundamental understanding of how the object, the website, or the software product will actually be used by the people consuming it. The technology then makes that vision come to life and great products are born.
Opening a new Apple product would be a thrilling experience for me. From the moment the box was opened, their products began to speak to me. As I removed layer, upon layer of design excellence I enjoyed every aspect of the journey and reveled in the nuances they brought into everything, right down to the power cord. As Apple rolled out their candy colored machines and their iPods, other computer companies began to notice something…those funny looking things sold. They didn’t just sell; they became THE thing to have. They became more than just “hot” products, they became icons. Suddenly knock offs started showing up, slowly stores like Target came along and were selling well-designed household goods, and Americans bought them. They finally had a choice, and they began choosing design.
Here at Percussion we’ve begun the journey of design and it’s not always the easiest journey. Sometimes it takes longer to think through the best way to communicate to users without words, or to research the best practices on certain design decisions. But finally, after all of these years working in design I have a shining example. “Look at Apple! Look at what Steve Jobs did. ” He didn’t compromise and he built a successful company. He loved design. He believed in design.
So thank you Steve Jobs. Thank you for proving what I’ve believed since I was in school all of those years ago: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
-Lorena Proia, Director, User Experience
There have been some suggestions recently that Percussion has been ignoring the so called “Web Experience Management,” or WEM, market. It seems that by not plastering it across all of our communications we are somehow not that “into it.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
We share the views of other thought leaders in the industry that WEM is an important business strategy for our customers, and by extension a true business process. However, the issue is that when you try to equate technology with process you run the risk of falling into the same trap that we all fell into with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) almost a decade ago.
There are some beacons out there helping guide the way though. Scott Liewehr of Gilbane has held firmly to this view for a long time now. Fellow expert Robert Rose delivered a presentation at Gilbane Boston 2010 titled: “WCM is Dead, Long Live WCM” that was an elegant explanation of how the words may have changed, yet the problems are the same.
Over the last decade WCM has been written off a few times. Most of us remember when the NASDAQ peaked on the Ides of March 2001. When the bubble burst and we all gasped for air, the focus for content management became compliance. The market place quickly moved to ECM, Smart Enterprise Suites and EDRMS’. Off the market went chasing document/records management systems and portals--with a cursory web publisher bolted on, almost as an afterthought.
And yet WCM refused to go away. Or at least the problem of managing web content did not go away. There was a spectacular IPO in 2004 of a little company called Google and we were introduced to a sexy new term called "Web 2.0.” Suddenly the race for WCM began all over again. Forrester reminded us of the importance of persuasive content management; Personalization came back again and the social web was snowballing. And that hasn’t stopped. We have freely available web analytics solutions and email marketing is practically mainstream. The social web led by Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and now Google+ mark the next chapter in this journey.
As the industry continues to focus on the process of web experience management, or customer experience management or online channel optimization or some other “C M”, we seem to continue chasing the nirvana of a single technology stack as the solution.
Sadly, some vendors and some buyers still believe that the complexity these dream product stacks introduce is somehow worth it. That it’s OK for the “solution” to involve herculean efforts in implementation consulting and take months, even years to complete. After all, they say, think of the great benefits we will receive when we finally get it all working.
Of course by that time, the web will have changed, and then you can start all over again.
