[DEVit 360] Opti-pessimism: Design for the best case, build for the worst

OPTI-PESSIMISM:
DESIGN FOR THE BEST CASE,
BUILD FOR THE WORST
CHERYL PLATZ
OWNER, IDEAPLATZ
PRINCIPAL DESIGNER, MICROSOFT
TWITTER, MEDIUM: @MUPPETAPHRODITE

CHERYL PLATZ - @MUPPETAPHRODITE
Hello! I’m Cheryl Platz, a
designer with experience
across e-commerce, SaaS,
PaaS, and AI-powered
consumer products.
I’m here to share some of
the emerging trends I’m
seeing, and to encourage
you to reframe the way
you think about your
products.

CHERYLPLATZ-@MUPPETAPHRODITE
Is your glass half full… or half empty?

20 years ago, design on the internet was one
big worst-case scenario.

As design thinking spread, we focused on
optimizing for common scenarios.

Have today’s themes and libraries solved all of our
common scenarios? What’s next?

Responsive design is just the tip of today’s iceberg.

WE’VE BEEN ASSUMING THAT
OUR GLASS IS HALF FULL –
A “HAPPY PATH” WAS ENOUGH.

BUT GLASS-HALF-FULL OPTIMISM ISN’T ENOUGH IN AN
INCREASINGLY COMPLEX ENVIRONMENT.

Customers are coming to expect
experiences that transcend the desktop.

Artificial intelligence is changing the nature
of customer engagement.

And GDPR brings a
new level of backend
complexity and risk
when it comes to
tracking user data.

PROGRESS BRINGS HIGHER STAKES.
OUR WORST CASE IS WORSE THAN EVER.

As technical complexity
increases, so does the need
for design engagement early
in your product lifecycle.

Our experiences are now decentralized,
and increasingly uncertain.

Crowded markets mean there’s little room
for design misses before engagement stops.

And the harm our products can
cause has never been greater.

SO HOW DO WE COPE?
GET OPTI-PESSIMISTIC.
Three techniques to apply to your product design process to consider
the best – AND worst – of what your product has to offer.

1.
LEAD WITH
THE HARD
QUESTIONS
Cheryl Platz - @muppetaphrodite

How does
your product
fit into the
big picture?
How will this make the world BETTER?
• Does it include more people than other solutions?
• Does it solve a previously unsolved problem?
• Does it solve a problem in a uniquely beneficial way?
How will this make the world WORSE?
• Are we introducing useless noise into a customer’s life?
• Which customers might be excluded by our product?
• Are we manipulating customers or putting them at risk?

Is your experience worth the spent resources?

What
happens if
our success is
not customer
success?
If we’re too successful, how could customers
be harmed?
• Addiction
• Stress
• Broken relationships
How will customers abuse our product?
• Impact of leaked data
• Malicious mob behaviors
• Out of context use

Your customer’s success may not match yours.

What is the
WORST CASE
impact our
product
could have?
This is no longer a quantity discussion.
It doesn’t matter if your worst case “only
happens occasionally”.
What matters is the proportional impact that
worst case has on a customer’s day or life.
Even if that’s just a single customer.

What if our feature brings back painful
memories?

What if a
conversation
is recorded
without
consent?

According to two anonymous sources who talked to
Efrati, Uber's sensors did, in fact, detect Herzberg as
she crossed the street with her bicycle. Unfortunately,
the software classified her as a "false positive" and
decided it didn't need to stop for her.
Timothy B. Lee, regarding the fatal Uber autonomous car crash
ArsTechnica – May 7, 2018

EXPLORE THE TOUGH
QUESTIONS BEFORE THE
COST IS TOO HIGH.

Use tools like Artefact’s Tarot Cards of Tech
to help you identify your blind spots.

2.
EXPLORE THE
HUMAN
CONTEXT

DON’T BUILD PRODUCTS
THAT YOUR CUSTOMERS
DON’T NEED.

“Your scientists were so
preoccupied with whether
they could, they didn’t
stop to think if they
should.”

Higher stakes
demand greater
attention to the
context of use.
To answer some of those tough questions, it’s
more important than ever you get answers
from the source: your customers.
But the most successful products don’t start by
testing an idea.
They start by observing customers as they are,
and identifying real problems to solve.

It’s time to move your research beyond
surveys.

Surveys are the most dangerous research tool—
misunderstood and misused.
…Yeah, surveys are great because you can quantify the results.
But you have to ask, what are you quantifying? Is it an actual
quantity of something, e.g. how many, how often—or is it a
stealth quality like appeal, ease, or appropriateness, trying to
pass itself off as something measurable?
Erika Hall, Mule Design
“On Surveys”

QUALITATIVE DATA
DOESN’T HAVE TO
BE SCARY.
If you can’t rely on surveys, what can you do? Qualitative data can help.

Consider adding
ethnography to
your toolkit.
Whether you conduct ethnographic
research on your own or work with an
outside company, the investment of time
and money may save you millions in
misdirected product work.

Six Sigma, Kaizan, Big Data or various and sundry other
innovation strategies start with the company’s needs. These
methods tend to have the company’s standpoint, not the
consumer’s.
Ethnography in the private sector starts from the
consumer’s standpoint and defines products, services and
marketing messages according to that standpoint.
Sam Ladner, PhD
Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Public Sector

Meet your
customers
where they are.
Investigate online diary study tools like
dscout, or online user research tools like
usertesting.com.
User Voice or even a Discord can also
help, but take care to make sure you’re
not introducing bias into the feedback.

Ethnographic research can lead you to new
problems and new solutions.

Use storyboards to convey customer context -
and the risks you face.

CONSIDER A WIDE
SPECTRUM OF USERS,
ABILITIES, AND
CIRCUMSTANCES.

Not every customer is an early adopter.

Microsoft’s Inclusive Design toolkit includes
activity cards to jumpstart your thinking.

Inclusivity also
means asking the
right questions.
Tracking the wrong data about customers
can lead to erroneous or painful
assumptions.
Gender and pronouns alone are fraught
with risk and provide decreasing value.
What do you really NEED to know about
customers? Start there, and be judicious
about adding additional data.

3.
DESIGN FOR THE
BEST CASE, BUT
BUILD FOR THE
WORST.

It’s time to
look beyond
the experience
on a single
device.
Traditional site architecture
Profile data is available everywhere, but task state is
stored in the UI layer on the device where it starts.
Telemetry is tracked in isolation.
Device-agnostic architecture
Customer state and telemetry data are stored in the
cloud and available on any device, just like profile data.

Go beyond the happy path by enabling your
customer state to transcend devices.

Experience,
interrupted
We can no longer assume that our
customer experiences will span a single
session.
Build a system that can sustain
interruptions, and a system that doesn’t
inundate customers with its own
interruptions.

Seek out and conquer your experience cliffs.

Design an
experience that
can scale across
devices… with
opti-pessimism.
OPTIMISTIC ASSUMPTIONS
• Your customers will want to interact with you on a variety
of devices.
• You’ll be able to track customer behavior and learn from
it all the time
• You’ll want to scale beyond websites to voice,
conversation, augmented reality, and beyond
PESSIMISTIC ASSUMPTIONS
• Your core scenarios will be interrupted, and span devices
• Your telemetry won’t be useful for a long time
• Many of your customers won’t have access to emerging
tech

Your customer’s
relationship with
your product is
more than just
first-run.
OPTIMISTIC ASSUMPTIONS
• Your customers will use your product long enough
that you’ll have the opportunity to teach them new
features over time.
• Your product will be so successful, your expert
customers will need help with scale.
PESSIMISTIC ASSUMPTIONS
• New customers won’t stay with you without a strong
onboarding story.
• Most of your customers will struggle with their first
few interactions.

Design for AI requires
embracing uncertainty.
More attention must
be given to the error
experiences than the
desired outcome.

Embracing
uncertainty:
design for
natural
language
OPTIMISTIC:
• “Set a timer for 15 minutes.”
PESSIMISTIC:
• “Set a timer.”
• “Timer for <unintelligible>.”
• “Set a timer for cookies.”
• “Timer for 2 parsecs.”
• “Umm, can you, um, set a timer for um, 5 minutes?”

Build a system that helps you
respond to surprises.

Most AI can’t explain itself. We can’t predict its
behavior – we can only prepare to respond.
Image output from Google’s “Deep Dream” neural network

ADOPT OPTI-
PESSIMISM IN
YOUR PROCESS

Re-evaluate your
product process. If you have access to designers:
• Engage design in pre-production on envisioning
exercises to explore impact.
• Consult design during system architecture to ensure
you’ve accounted for likely use cases.
• Make sure your process allows for reacting to
research feedback and emergent issues.
If you don’t have access to design:
• Work customer outreach and brainstorming aids
more deeply into your process
• Incorporate these techniques to help you cope with
increasingly complex products effectively.

1.
LEAD WITH
THE HARD
QUESTIONS
• What is the primary customer problem we’re
solving?
• How do customers solve this problem today?
Are we really better, or just different?
• What’s the worst thing that could happen?
• What’s the riskiest part of this project?
• What are our blind spots?
• Is this product worth building?

2.
EXPLORE
THE HUMAN
CONTEXT
• What are the worst conditions under which
our product will be used?
• Where will the product be used?
• What devices will our customer prefer?
• What surrounds our customers during the
use of the product?
• How will our customers feel if we fail?
• Who are we excluding?

3.
DESIGN FOR
THE BEST
CASE, BUILD
FOR THE
WORST
Design for the best case
• Architect an experience that allows your customers to
interact with you on multiple platforms and devices.
• Think through long-term relationships with your
product over time – from Day 0 to Day 365 & beyond.
Build for the worst
• Assume your customers will get interrupted.
• Design for when your system gets it wrong.
• Create tools and processes that let you adapt to
emergent use cases and customer feedback.

THE GLASS IS HALF EMPTY.
AND HALF FULL.
BE OPTI-PESSIMISTIC.

MAY YOUR CUP
RUNNETH OVER.
CHERYL PLATZ
OWNER, IDEAPLATZ
PRINCIPAL DESIGNER, MICROSOFT
TWITTER, MEDIUM: @MUPPETAPHRODITE

[DEVit 360] Opti-pessimism: Design for the best case, build for the worst

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[DEVit 360] Opti-pessimism: Design for the best case, build for the worst