Every effective story is comprised of little details, all of which are crucial to the gestalt of the bigger picture. The creation of this perfection requires the utmost discipline, for if the whole story is to be focused, then so too must all the micro-stories be. Unfortunately for us, architecting such a system is extremely complicated. Driven by our somewhat unpredictable, complicated and fragile emotions, it’s not easy for us to be objective, maintain focus and articulate our thoughts, even when we do know just what we want to convey. Even this article, for example, is not nearly as clear as what I have in my head, despite the structuring and restructuring I’ve done to get it to where it is now.

Luckily, I’m not alone in this problem – I’ve talked with some friends who’ve helped me focus my thoughts. As I’ve written previously, social design works because it fills the gap between identity and community, helping one person connect with others. It does this by facilitating conversation. But it’s the storytelling in that conversation that really helps us communicate effectively. We tell stories to illustrate who we are, what we feel and what we want everyone to understand. It works because, as social beings, we relate to and empathize with each other through our experiences.

Storytelling has been used as a teaching method for thousands of years, yet despite its ubiquity, we are still unable to help each other tell our own stories. History shows us that we have continually struggled for the freedom of expression, the very thing which acknowledges our individualism. But now, many of us live in a modern world that not only allows this freedom, but encourages it to a fault. Storytelling requires focus, and we’re falling short.

Social technology aims to mimic real society, but real society may not be the best role model. These days, we’re allowed so many choices for so many things that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus on what’s really important. Psychological research posits that we are the unhappiest generation yet, not because of some chemical imbalance, but simply because we are overwhelmed with the number of options we have, more paralyzed to make choices and more unhappy with our decisions. In many ways, it was easier to exist hundreds of years ago because we felt we needed less. The truth is, we need just as little now as we did then – we’re just distracted.

The same is true for communication. On Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the multitude of other social services, anything that might be thoughtful or meaningful gets lost among the dribble. Conversation is more boring or entertaining than it is helpful. At this point, even if someone can articulate some profound thoughts, do we even notice? Can we even hear it anymore?

Having the freedom of expression simply means that we have an outlet for all the emotions we are filled with and a community to listen. Naturally, our friends make up that community now, because they understand us, are quick to validate what we say and are forgiving when we aren’t clear on our thoughts. Outside that trusted group, however, communication isn’t working well. When you give everyone in the world an outlet for their emotions and make it public, you get what we have now: a chaotic collection of thoughts ranging from the most profound to the most dull, from the most humdrum to the most enraging. Furthermore, we see a spectrum of communal results, from new relationships and reunited families to murders, hate groups, riots and political strife. And you get it all louder and stronger because this is the first time people from all over the world can interact in the same rooms.

Despite the ubiquity of Internet communication, we don’t really understand each other any better. We tend to keep to our friends, maintain surface-level chatter and become lazier in our communication. In order for social technology to really help us, we must learn to be more thoughtful, understand and express ourselves better and to help others do the same. Undoubtedly we will find that when we can do this, we are, in fact, all on the same page: driven by the same causes, fearful of the same fears and hopeful of the same hopes. We are simply different versions of the same story.

“Society is commonly too cheap,” said Thoreau in Solitude (Walden), written in the 1800s. “We meet at very short intervals, not having the time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals, three times a day, and manage to give each other only another taste of the same, old moldy cheese that we are.” Even 150 years ago we tended towards the meaningless palaver, of which we only have more today. So as we embrace this new age, let’s strive to make our storytelling richer, more economical and more meaningful, exploring how it can help better us on the whole. It’s not about us as individuals, nor even our children – it’s about that greater story of humanity and how we pushed it forward.

I’ll tell you a quick story. Strand Book Store in NYC is apparently very famous, but I had never heard of it (and I’m from the New York area, too) until earlier this year when I was walking around with a friend and she pointed it out to me. She apparently goes all the time and told me I’d like it. And I did. I even bought a new book from an author I like.

With technology today, we can get answers to anything factual right away. I could have looked up on my phone for bookstores in New York just as I could have looked up how to get to the store and if they carry books by this author. But the value of social is when I don’t even know I’m looking for anything at all.

In these cases and when we are faced with more subjective questions such as, “Where’s a good Italian restaurant?” or “What movie should I see?” or “Where’s a great museum nearby?” we turn to a community of people to help us out. These decisions are emotional, and who better to understand than other people?

Communities can be very useful, almost like a buffer between us and the world. In the wild, they’re an evolutionary defense mechanism against danger: a larger group is more powerful than an individual and the individual can look to the group for social cues on what to do. For us as people, having a community is more of an emotional attachment: we define it by the close people we surround ourselves with—our friends and family. We know them, we like them, they know us and they like us. We share thoughts, feelings, experiences and we turn to them for love and support throughout our lives because we trust them.

And though we have all kinds of relationships in our lives—with coworkers, neighbors or brands, long-lasting or short-lived, formal or intimate—it’s with our strongest ties that our trust lies. And this is the foundation of why Social Design works—because of this trust.

So when my close friend in New York tells me about a place I should visit, I trust her opinion and that she knows me well. And when our experience matches recommendations we get—that is, when we actually enjoy ourselves and learn something new—we not only feel special and thankful for the experience, but we also feel prompted to talk about it and tell our friends about it as well. We do this because we’re expressing ourselves by sharing the things we like and we want our communities to hear.

Trust is built through these conversations and everyday, hundreds of millions of people are having these interactions on Facebook and other social platforms, sharing thoughts, feelings, places they’ve visited, articles they’ve read, movies they’ve watched, and on and on. Social Design aims to harness this conversation, enhance it and build more of these serendipitous and valuable social experiences for everyone.

The Three Elements of Social Design

If we break Social Design down into tactical core elements, we see clearly how it’s comprised of three very distinct components: identity, conversation and community. Put another way: ourselves, other people and the conversations we have with them.

I like to diagram this using concentric circles, with identity in the center, conversation in the middle and community on the outside. The reason for this is because conversation really serves as the glue between identity and community. Conversation is how we express our identities to a community and how we receive feedback from it.

If we were to design a social product with this in mind, one idea might be to start from the center and work our way out. That is, allow people to create an identity, let them talk about it and build a community over time. This isn’t a bad idea at all – in fact, it’s how Facebook and a number of other social networks began.

When Facebook emerged in 2004, it was a simple site allowing college students to create and edit profiles of themselves. The editing was addictive; people kept logging in to see what had changed in friends’ profiles and to change things themselves. And, over time, this became a conversation—a timeline of life—and people built a strong identity and community of friends and family from it.

But now that this is in place – and used heavily by hundreds of millions of people everyday – it makes much more strategic (even practical) sense for social design to take the reverse approach and work from the outside in. That is, to utilize the existing community, define new kinds of conversation and let people continue to build their identities further.

A more iconic representation of the three elements of Social Design: Identity, Conversation and Community. Conversation is the glue between the identity and the community, binding the two together.

Utilizing Community

Facebook profiles have become people’s identities. They’ve spent countless hours curating them – adding friends, posting pictures, commenting on friends’ updates. This is their de facto representation of themselves, and they don’t want to recreate it from scratch every time they start a new product or service.

So rather than create an experience that starts with building a new identity, we should utilize what we can from what’s already on Facebook and build on top of it. Connect users to their friends when they sign up to a new service. Social apps aren’t social without other people and bringing a user’s friends automatically brings the established trust in a community. Use profile information to recommend content – people already know what they like and that’s why it’s on their profiles.

Rotten Tomatoes, for example, with the addition of Instant Personalization, shows users movies that their friends like as well as movies they might like based on the movies they already like, as listed in their profile.

Get the baseline in place so all that needs attention is the conversation – what they talk about and how they do so.

Building Conversation

Conversation builds trust. In fact, any real-time interactions associated with emotion build these strong bonds. It could be anything from sitting together and talking to dancing, protesting, jumping out of a plane, etc. Conversation is simply a generic term I’m using to describe the interactions between the self and the community and the stronger the associated emotion, the stronger the bond.

This is inherently a back-and-forth and therefore is comprised of two different experiences that play off each other. Generically, we can describe these as listening and speaking.

Listening

A listening experience is hypothetically if you were go to a restaurant you’ve never been to before and choose what to eat based on the recommendation of others. You’re essentially listening to the community’s thoughts and previous actions and using these to inform your decisions.

We already see this in many places online. People on Yelp, for example, can make comments on restaurants such as, “Try the hot chocolate.” And on YouTube, you can see ratings for each video that help you determine which ones to watch, since you probably don’t want to watch the bad ones. They say, “Watch this one; others liked it.” On many e-commerce sites such as Amazon, we see the same thing: reviews from people to help our decision-making.

But there’s a big problem here: we don’t always know these people. And they don’t know us. So how do they know what we like? How can we trust them to give a good rating? We can’t. There’s no established trust.

So what Facebook has done is remodel this same paradigm but scope it around your friends. Social plugins, for example, let people “like” things all over the Internet and then surface this activity to their friends. And because you see what your friends and trusted circle like, you’re more likely to care.

Again, because the value of “social” is when we don’t know what we want and we’re not really looking, showing activity spread throughout the experience constantly inundates us with potential conversation points and things of interest. We learn by watching others. It’s social encouragement and a form of mimicry if anything: if we see someone else we trust doing something, we’re likely to do the same.

Spotify, for example, shows a feed of all the songs that users are sharing and adding to their playlists. It’s a personalized way for users to browse some of the latest and most popular songs.

When you connect with your Facebook account to Huffington Post, you see an activity feed of all the articles your friends have been reading lately.

Speaking

The other half of the conversation—and perhaps the most important part—is the speaking and the sharing. People have to engage in the first place, and will do so when they have the right motivation. The good news is that if people are sharing with people they trust, they are more likely to share more often and be open and honest.

Facebook has a number of ways for users to engage, including a number of options in the publisher (status, links, photos, etc.) and multiple ways to provide input and feedback (likes, comments, answers to questions, wall posts, etc.). And all of this activity is surfaced to users’ friends constantly through various distribution channels. We can’t help but listen.

The more contributions that are made to the system, the more activity exists to listen to and engage with. And likewise, the more activity there is to engage with, the more contributions can be made to the system. And this creates a positive feedback loop—a “virtuous cycle of sharing” as we call it—that grows exponentially. This is really the sweet spot: conversation fueling more conversation.

To summarize, a great social experience depends on conversation between the community and the self. And this is based tactically in three main elements:

1. Utilizing personal information and connections to build a personalized experience
2. Showing conversations, social context and activity everywhere
3. Making it really easy to talk, share, give feedback and engage

Curating Identity

The beauty of Social Design is that it plays to the most powerful form of motivation: the self, the identity. We share and interact with others because we want to, because we learn more about ourselves and because we feel better when we feel heard.

Social Design is actually central to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I believe. After our physiological needs of food and water, and after our basic safety needs, we have a very interesting duality between needing love and belonging and our own sense of self-esteem. It stands to reason, given the diagram, that we base much of our own self-esteem in how the community sees us and how accepted we are. In other words, the community helps drive our identity. And it’s when we have that feeling of belonging and love that we can build our self-esteem and reach our full potential.

The experiences I mention already exist in the real world today; we’re not really trying to invent anything “new” here. But the Internet is becoming part of the real world and a reflection of it, a means by which we can communicate with one another more efficiently. With people at the center of the Web, more and more experiences that naturally happen in the real world are starting to happen online. With this in mind, as we design, we should take into account existing social truths, thinking carefully about the identities and respective communities we affect and building the best conversation tools for them.

Ultimately the value of social is bigger than anything material. It’s a way for us to close the gap between the self and the community, just as we’ve closed the gap between our other needs. We don’t have have to worry about food nor spend our lives hunting like other animals. Our ability to trust each other and work together as a species has built a safer environment in which to live. But individually, we do still worry about our futures, finding love, feeling heard, and knowing ourselves. Social Design starts us along this path.

For more information, check out the Facebook Social Design guidelines I wrote.

Like this article? You may also like these:

• One for All and All In One – How Simple Should Social Interfaces Really Be?
• Brand Devolution – A Logo Change Changes Our Trust

I’ve written before about how difficult it is to communicate who you are to people. Everyone is different, everyone hears things differently and everyone expects different things. Thus, it’s not surprising that we have difficulty communicating with everyone. The same is true of brands, except they need to communicate with everyone. So, as a company, if your voice isn’t providing the right messaging – or worse, if your brand isn’t fitting in – then you’d think it’s time for a change.

When companies change their logos, you have to figure that something prompted the redesign, something wrong within the soul of the business. But changing logos is more of a marketing thing; it’s a lot harder to change the core value.

You can usually find out a great deal about company logos if you just do a bit of research. Learning about the time period the logo was made – the political environment, the current state of affairs, etc. – and putting all the pieces together, you can get a much deeper understanding of what is going on here.

Take mayonnaise, for example. It first became popular in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. But ask someone from the west coast to name the brand of mayonnaise they use and then ask someone who grew up east and they’ll say different things. That’s because while Helmann’s mayonnaise was the staple brand on the east coast, Best Foods Inc. introduced and grew its mayonnaise business in the west. And although in the 1930s, Best Foods acquired Helmanns, to this day, they maintain the branding of Best Foods west of the Mississippi and Helmann’s east of it.

It’s the same brand, the same product, heck even the visuals of each logo are the same! But the marketing is different. And that’s because marketing, as a voice, is regional; it depends on context. Branding, on the other hand, is universal and timeless.

Because the brand is at the heart, it’s important that the marketing clearly speaks to you, the user. And if the marketing is ineffectively communicating the brand, it’s time to change something. Often times, old logos convey only one area of focus but as companies expand, their brand may cover others as well. When the Sci Fi network, for example, started struggling as a science-fiction, typically male-oriented TV channel, they felt a good way to stay afloat was to expand. Now they offer social components, applications and a bunch of new programming that appeal to a broader audience. As such, they needed to redo their logo to be less about science fiction only. The new “SyFy” accomplishes this, losing its unique and overt galactic/spacey style – not to mention the obvious reference to science fiction – in favor of one that’s more generic, universal and a bit amorphous.

Sci Fi’s transition to SyFy

But simply changing the SyFy logo isn’t going to change the fact that their brand is clearly struggling as a small, targeted, “old-media” network (just like many other Hollywood / TV brands). The real success will be if they can figure out how to give people what they really want in a new world of technology that provides users with virtually anything they want whenever they want it.

Broadening a brand isn’t uncommon. Along the same lines as SyFy is Walmart, whose original logo design, a tad on the cliché and cheesy side, focused on cheapness and targeted low-income families. But lately, Walmart has started to sell higher quality items, more variety and targets more of the middle class. As such, their logo revision is more elegant, modern and extra curvy to convey a sense of friendliness. The logo graphic may remind you of an asterisk or otherwise, but maybe that’s a good thing (especially when you consider that asterisks can denote “mark as important”).

Walmart’s new friendly, modernized logo

Now let’s move to Gap, a global company which owns a variety of clothing lines, including Banana Republic – the upscale, high quality branch (that, incidentally used to be branded as tropical / Caribbean fashion) – as well as Old Navy. But when Gap first started as a small basic clothing line in the end of the 1960s, it was new, hip, stylish, clean and fun. And its logo represented that brand presence.

The original Gap logo from 1969

But these days, with the advent of many popular hip/stylish clothing lines, people tend see the Gap more as generic, poorly-made clothing. It’s not generic that’s bad – American Apparel is all about making generic clothing super cool. Although their clothes are well-made, they’re not really anything particularly special and its logo reflects that brand: basic, black, Helvetica. But just because Gap adapts a similar logo style doesn’t mean that its core essence as a brand has actually modernized and become more hip. The products and the experience have to show it.

The new Gap logo, very American Apparel.

I suppose we’ll see what happens, but in the meantime, the design of the Gap logo isn’t very effective. Among its poorer qualities is the black text over a blue square (that isn’t even fully saturated, the blue running like a bad dye job). What does this mean? What does its color and placement mean? And perhaps most importantly, how does this logo look in black and white, especially when it’s going to be woven into a clothing label that allows only one thread color, not to mention a resolution of only 72 dpi?

I should note that designs should never rely on color to help convey meaning. Rather, the color should just serve to enhance the structure or shapes that already exist. The only exception to this rule is when color is used to discriminate between sub-brands, which Gap has a chance to do here, potentially. Because sub-brands are geared towards a specific context and/or audience, they are aspects of marketing, the voice of the brand. Here, it’s okay to change the aesthetic, in the same way you might change what you say or what you wear depending on who you’re hanging out with. It doesn’t change who you are or what you believe in fundamentally, but it does help you be more effective at communicating with different people.

Good examples of this can be seen in the Huffington Post, USA Today, FedEx, Adobe and even milk. Milk is among the few food products where you accept its genericness. After all, the hugely popular “Got Milk” campaign isn’t about any specific brand of milk. Milk is milk. But there are different kinds of milk and for years, colors have been used to separate them out: red is whole milk, blue is fat free, etc.

Lucerne milk uses simple packaging with vibrant colors to differentiate the milk varieties.

The many different sub-brands of Fedex, separated by variations of color in their logos.

But while we accept milk as a generic food item, we don’t do the same with other staples. Take orange juice, for example. All orange juice isn’t the same; it depends on where the oranges are from, how they’re processed and when they were grown, among other things. Because of these unique characteristics, branding is much more important to distinguish one orange juice from the next.

Tropicana first emerged in the 1950s, back when it was especially difficult in mainstream society to have really good, fresh juice all the time. The founder developed flash pasteurization and it was the first time consumers could have the fresh taste of oranges from non-concentrated juice. It was new, exciting, exotic. And, as such, its logo reflected that. Giving the Tropicana wording an almost clichéd, decorative font made it stand out more and make a name for itself.

But when Tropicana recently modernized its logo and branding, there was an immense public outcry – so much so, in fact, that it is among the few redesigned logos to be recalled.

Although there were some good decisions in the Tropicana rebranding (such as picking a font that may be more universally understandable than its previous faux-Americana-tropical one), modernizing it just made it look more generic and basic. No one wanted generic orange juice; they wanted Tropicana. It lost its unique personality and with that, its trust from its customers.

Tropicana’s generic new design

A sudden branding redesign to a company you trust is like pulling out the rug from under you. It’s shocking, unexpected, uncertain. A logo and a brand implicitly tell a story and give an experience. Gap used to have a story and experience. They’ve changed the logo, but have they changed the experience? A logo change is simply just tricking people to think the whole company is different. If it really is, then great, but most brands have a hard time changing, just as most people have a hard time changing. Lest we forget, a pig with lipstick is still a pig.

Marketing, as a voice, is regional; it depends on context. Branding, on the other hand, is universal and timeless.

So why are we so big on trust? Why is the branding so important? And why do we tend to hate redesigns? It’s because it gives us a consistency, a constant to grab onto. And the more consistent a design, the better we understand it and the more we build expectation and come to trust it. As humans, our strongest emotional responses map to behavioral patterns learned before we could even form memories. The first few years of our lives are the most formative and we learn a slew of severe life lessons during this time, perhaps most importantly discovering that the world is made of things that can always change. Inherently craving stability, we learn to look for things that are constant and latch on as we develop heuristics to help us grow. We strongly desire a sense of place, of security, of safety in things we come to trust. It’s the second most basic tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right after food and shelter.

Just as you have experiences in life that affect your learning and perceptions, so too do you have them with brands. And if you want to form a bond through these experiences you have repeatedly, then they should be consistent and expected because trust is involved.

Even if you think some of these logo redesigns are better, the bottom line is that every one of them is really just a change in marketing, with many of these companies trying to be something they’re not [yet]. A logo and a design make a promise to its users of upholding an implicit experience and story. And when a company’s brand is undergoing a state of flux, the worst thing they can do is put out a bad logo that makes a promise they can’t actually keep.

Artists engage in the manipulation of a particular medium to produce an aesthetic and personal response. Art is valued for its originality and ability to express an idea. Some people get it, some don’t, and that’s okay. Design, on the other hand, must solve a specific problem relative to a particular user or task, and is evaluated simply by how effective it is at solving that problem. If it doesn’t work, then it failed—period.

Everything in nature is the way it is by design; evolution has no aesthetic or personal opinion. Like art, some people find bugs to be quite beautiful while others cringe at the sight of them. But like them or not, their design is the way it is because of their environment and the obstacles they face trying to survive. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you think; it has to work, or they die.

Design is inherently an objective process, yet when it comes to designing for people, we tend to cloud this truth. As emotional beings, our judgment is often greatly affected by how we feel, and how we feel is often unpredictable, uncertain, and complicated. Therefore, we can’t design for emotion; everyone experiences it differently. But we can design for the fundamental psychological underpinnings and biological traits that influence perception. When we do that, we find design to be much simpler. All we must do is define a core concept—a problem to solve—and make logical, subsequent decisions off it, maintaining focus and keeping in mind the psychology of how we learn and remember things.

How We Learn

Instinctually, we construct myriad mental models of concepts in the world, creating expectations of how objects work, which we learn more over time through our experiences. We’re naturally inclined to believe, for example, that round things are softer than square things, that blue is colder than orange, and that simpler things and, in general, more approachable.

Consider a person who’s never seen a mobile phone before presented with both an iPhone and a Blackberry. Then consider the range of first moves they can make with each product. By probability alone, there’s a higher chance that the person turns the iPhone on faster than the Blackberry. With less buttons and less clutter, the iPhone is much easier to approach and engage with, and that is its first, and perhaps most important, step to success.

In a battle of popular micro-blogging sites, Tumblr and Posterous take very different approaches to their landing pages. Posterous, a Silicon Valley tech company, showcases how it works and what people say about it. On the other hand, Tumblr, a New York design company, simply presents users with a big signup form and one line of text: “The easiest way to blog.” By focusing users’ attention and presenting them with few options, the product is far more approachable. As such, despite Posterous’s powerful functionality, Tumblr has won out in the size of its user base.

Users’ entire experience with a new product is a continual series of new experiences, making the approachability of those experiences key as they learn new facets and features of the product. But there’s a second, more powerful step to engagement: familiarity.

Recognition is among the most powerful forms of memory recall, so it’s no wonder that familiarity is a strong factor in good design. Because we carry with us all kinds of assumptions and schemas from our innate biology and prior experiences, we don’t approach products as a blank slate. The more a product can tap into users’ existing expectations, the easier it will be for them to learn its new features. Many basic calculator software applications, for example, mimic the look of a real calculator, even though a virtual calculator probably makes more sense as a simple textbox that parses expressions.

A product with a familiar interface gives users a tremendous leg up in the learning process, and meeting their expectations builds a valuable trusting relationship that greatly enhances the product’s quality and credibility.

How We Remember

This continual cycle of approachability and recognizability can be described as learnability—that is, how easy a product is to learn. Because this is a crucial component of a product’s success, more complex products will often put new users through a tutorial-like workflow to get them acquainted with the various features and facets. But this approach suggests that the product has an inherently flawed architecture. If the basic blueprint is not intuitive such that users have to be guided through it, the learning process becomes less internalized and less memorable; they are learning to rely on what you tell them, not what they experience.

Workflows designed with a focus on initial learnability can do more serious damage to a product’s usability in the long run. One of the most challenging aspects to selling a design to stakeholders is convincing them that its usability—the speed and efficiency of task completion—is more important than the initial gut reaction, which is all you get from a meeting. Stakeholders often like to see certain elements front and center from the beginning, never mind that those elements may become trivial—or worse, distracting —in the rest of the workflow. If a product doesn’t have a logical architecture from the start, users will lose their way.

In 2007, Microsoft revamped its suite of Office products with “The Ribbon,” a new interface that organizes related commands into a set of tabs. Years of research and iteration lead to this design, which was intended to optimize the user workflow. In PowerPoint (a product on which I briefly worked), research showed that the typical user workflow consisted primarily of creating a new slide, adding text, formatting that text, adding shapes, and formatting those shapes. As a result, the “Home” tab in The Ribbon includes all these apparently related actions together, with other tabs having names and action sets based on other workflows: “Design,” “Slideshow,” “Insert,” “Review,” and a contextual tab depending on what tool the user has selected.

The different toolbar structures for Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote

This structure starkly contrasts the way Apple designed Keynote, another slideshow/presentation application. While its interface also uses a tabbed approach, the tabs are divided by the various types of objects that can be included in presentations: slides, text, shapes, charts, tables, etc., each with its own set of related actions. Because of this more objective and logical grouping (as well as many of Keynote’s other features that obey principles of approachability and recognizability), the product is quite successful and easy to use.

Objective design doesn’t cater to a specific workflow. Rather, it simply provides a logical structure that plays into our innate psychology. This structure is also behind good writing, movies, music, and other widely successful products and experiences. People are inclined to seek out order and hierarchy as a way to categorize, identify, and define the objects and experiences they encounter and don’t respond well to deviations from this natural process.

If someone challenges a product’s design with aesthetically or emotionally based suggestions and changes, they must be reminded that design decisions are based in logical reasoning. It’s this highly disciplined, unemotional, and perceptive ability to break down gray areas into small, inarguable black-and-white building blocks that allow for the most effective communication and, more importantly, designs that just work.

It’s sort of an accident that I’m in the technology industry. When I was in grade-school, I never did anything technologically related: I didn’t program, I didn’t design websites, I didn’t read articles… I did teach myself the basics of a few Adobe programs, but mainly I used computers like the majority of people my age: I chatted with friends, I wrote documents and I played games. But now I find myself in the center of an industry that frustrates me and feel unlike many of my design colleagues. I’m not interested in the latest tech gadget or a new website or the visual subtleties in the iPhone. I don’t read the blogs online, I don’t make pixel-perfect mocks and I honestly don’t want to have to “check in” on a dozen versions of the same service. I just care about people and want to make things they like to use, especially if it makes them happier and feel more connected.

My mindset is one of people, not products. Only recently in the industry has there been a strong push for user-centric design, with dozens of these new roles emerging at tech companies. Before now, technology products mainly focused on productivity tools which helped us increase our efficiency at getting things done. Now, however, we’re focusing on people and their interactions with each other.

Design is about people and spaces, not interfaces.

We are experiencing a shift in the mental and social model; the world is becoming more open and connected. We can see this especially in the younger generation, which takes to computers like fish to water, and is extremely comfortable with the openness and ubiquity of social technology. But the vast majority of people find us moving too far, too fast and they can’t keep up. We’ve pushed to build simpler tools over the years to make them easier to understand, but are we getting too simple too soon?

Now I, like many a designer, advocate for simplicity. After all, Apple has built much of its success on designing interfaces that mimic real-world interactions, simple and to the point without too many complications. But on the Internet, we’ve seen a different trend, more along the lines of a single-service front-end. You can do everything you want from one text box on Google. You can post updates to any one of thousands of people from one text box on Facebook and Twitter. Engineers work tirelessly to build systems that give you supposedly exactly what you want up front. It’s magical, and there’s little under the hood explaining how it works. Productivity-wise, this is pretty good. But if we’re trying to connect people with each other, replacing the face-to-face medium that’s existed for centuries, I think this is approach is a bit ahead of its time.

Design is about people and spaces, not interfaces. The issue we are facing with social technology today is the lack of defined spaces. Technology and tools may grow leaps and bounds over the years, but we are still biologically limited. We are very context-dependent. In order to understand the world, we build mental schemas of how things work and are put together. We inherently recognize the difference between spaces and their respective functionalities – that’s a big part of how we learn about the world. But with the advent of technology, we’ve been able to conflate the mental model and give users the ability and desire for having everything in one place at their fingertips. Some love it, many don’t.

We have an issue that’s twofold: 1) How do we consume information across multiple social circles from potentially hundreds of people and still be able to give the same attention as we would in a face-to-face conversation, which occurs between only a handful of people at the most? And 2) how do we converse with our various social circles in only one online setting instead of what would otherwise be multiple independent groups at different times?

The answer is not really about simplifying, in fact it’s the opposite. We need to be building in a little more complexity and shape the structure of the products themselves to allow for contextual mental models that accurately affect the real world. The hard part is, the industry seems to be moving in a different direction. I find it pretty hard to design for other designers nowadays since expectations are so high. They’re higher in the industry than they are for the real world. Ask a product designer what the difference between two versions of the iPhone is and you’ll no doubt get a 20-page paper. But ask an average person and you’d barely get a paragraph. The fact is, the tech industry has ramped up considerably in the last decade but the rest of the world hasn’t yet.

With so many options in reach, it can be a bit paralyzing for anyone. The message in the book The Paradox of Choice suggests that people need choices to feel free, yet too many choices will have the reverse effect. It supposes that we actually feel better when we have limitations, so making a decision doesn’t feel as heavy. I’m confident that as technology becomes even more prominent in our day-to-day lives, we will shift to a more carefree, open mindset. But at least for now, let’s be a little cautious on the strides we take, a little sensitive to the consumers’ hesitations and let’s make sure people feel comfortable along the way.

We’re very big on numbers in social technology. From connections on Linkedin to followers on Twitter to friends on Facebook, we’ve been made very aware of quantity. And though it doesn’t really mean much, many of us – myself included – have developed a rather unnatural need to accumulate more and more for the sake of growth.

Society is judgmental, and we’re all aware. Oscar Wilde said that society is a “masked ball, where everyone hides his real character and reveals it by hiding.” If you have too few friends on Facebook, people might think you’re a lonesome loser. Too many and you might be deemed a shallow socialite. But the fact of the matter is that everyone’s actual social networks are small, having around the same number of friends at any given point in time (there’s actually a specific value of about 150, termed “Dunbar’s Number”). This is universally true and not surprising – we just have never had to examine it closely until recently when technology started keeping track. It’s biological: our brains can’t allow us to have deep, meaningful relationships with too many people. It’s just too much information. As it is, our short term memory can only hold an average of only six to seven elements.

In real life, we group our friends. On the Internet, everyone’s equal.

But even in that small subset of “real” friends, we hold everyone in a series of concentric circles of increasing size emanating out from the center of extreme intimacy towards an outer cliff of near indifference. And as we move throughout our lives, people move closer or further in orbit with some sticking to the center and many dropping off the outer edge. That’s how it is in the real world and we accept it. But in Internet-land, everyone’s equal. You’re all just “friends” and you always see everything each other has to say. Not only is that inorganic, it’s detrimental – both in privacy and quality.

Let’s take a step back. To be clear, I agree there’s value in maintaining connections to people you meet over the course of your life. After all, to quote A Streetcar Named Desire, a stranger is simply a friend you haven’t met yet. Even so much as a simple interaction with someone can do wonders for building general mutual respect. Perhaps one day we’ll live in a society where everyone is friends with everyone through only a few degrees and thus, we are more likely to treat each other better. Perhaps in the long run, this will allow us not only to glean a better understanding of ourselves but also the world and life itself.

But in the meantime, I worry that the technological focus on quantity has made many people quick to deem others as “friends” before – and perhaps without – ever getting to really know them. It cheapens the relationship and detracts from actual face-to-face interaction which has been the social norm until the last twenty years or so. I’m certainly at fault for adding coworkers as friends before getting to know them. And then, upon getting to know them and seeing the potential for a real friendship, part of me is disappointed that I’ve already added them, almost as if there’s nothing more I can do to grow the friendship.

I’d argue that how many connections you accrue is useful for your own eyes and personal growth but not when showcased publicly to the world. Perhaps if we used these various technology products more authentically, we could stop focusing on what we “show off” to everyone and spend more time engaging with the friends we really know. We’d be less likely to see posts we don’t care about from people with whom we hardly engage and we wouldn’t be as likely to worry about the information we share since our audience would be limited to only the closest of friends. Let’s not try to be something we’re not; let’s just find out and enjoy who we are.

Honestly, if no one knew how many friends or connections you had, would you really be so quick to send those invites? I think we shall find that the more natural and organic we can make social technology, the more useful it will be and the happier we will be for using it.

Design for me is not about how something looks or feels. Although that’s important, it’s purely a manifestation or implementation of some broader concept and core emotional value. Personally, I’ve always concerned myself less with the way, say, a button looks and more on why that button is necessary to begin with. The key to design, I’ve found, is focus. In every good story in *any* medium, every detail works together to maintain focus on one thing – story. The difficulty here is twofold: one, being able to create and understand that story and see all the pieces needed to tell it, and two, ensuring that all those detailed pieces are done perfectly so as not to detract from the story. Most people, when they think about design, think about this latter part – techniques to manifest the concept. And because this second part is difficult as it is, it’s even more difficult when the bigger picture story isn’t clear.

If you look at well-known design/story companies such as Apple and Pixar, you will surely see attention to detail in everything. But all that obsession and pixel-perfect implementation is due to the fact that there’s a central focus and core value driving it all. Pixar makes good movies first, because they ensure they have a great story to tell and second, because they spend massive amounts of energy trying to make the details such that instead of distracting the audience, they actually enhance the story beyond the core concept.

This is very difficult to do. The manifestation of the details of a story takes time, exploration and iteration, not to mention expertise and insight. Never be married to an execution if there’s a shred of doubt in your mind that it might not be the best version. Few things are perfect the first time, if ever. But throughout the process, it’s imperative to maintain the focus on the core story to help you make decisions on what to do. Hence, without that core value and thus, no true focus, your manifestations have no heart.

I find this to be the same paradigm as how we live our lives as people trying to communicate with one another. We each have our own core identity, values, hopes and fears that we want to convey, abide by and on which we want to connect with each other. The problem is that when it comes to the manifestation of our core selves, like designers, all we can do is explore and iterate. And most people aren’t even skilled or insightful at this, so it makes it all even harder.

I really believe that everyone is, at heart, a good person who simply wants to love and be loved. When we hear of people disagreeing and fighting with each other, feeling lost or angry, alone or isolated, arrogant or depressed, I say it’s due to issues with manifestation, since no one really knows how to effectively always come across the way they are, let alone how to forget their own issues and really just try to hear everyone else. It’s this disparity between who you are, how you act and how you’re perceived that I think has lead to much of the unpleasantness we see in the world. Otherwise, it just doesn’t make any sense for someone to be inherently a bad person.

We are often more alone when we are with others than when we are solitary, simply because it’s only in social settings that we must work to explain ourselves and hear others adequately. But if you don’t know yourself well, then you can feel just as alone when you’re by yourself as when you’re with other people. Knowing ourselves is what keeps us focused in our lives on the things that are important to us. With a real focus on our core values, we will be much more likely to understand that the actions we take may not be the best ones and be more introspective on how we can better communicate ourselves.

The problem I’ve found is that few people seem to really know themselves anymore. And if that’s the case, then they have no focus to drive their behavior, which breaks down the whole communication system. It’s hard enough as it is to communicate the same story through various implementations and even harder when no one knows what the story is to begin with. I think that very well may be why we as people tend to be so emotionally tied to good stories – we see through them the possibility that everything can happen the way we want and we identify with the all the obstacles along the way.

These days, we’re so inundated with options, choices, distractions, ways to be entertained and immense freedom to be whoever we want that it’s a lot easier to not know yourself and what you want. And if you’re swimming in a sea of possibilities, it’s easy to lose that focus. It’s the paradox of choice – more options is more paralyzing. Thoreau had said that it’s “not until we are lost that we begin to understand ourselves,” and I think that a lot of people are lost and just don’t realize it.

Trying to find a focus requires an understanding of the big picture, being able to see the world outside yourself, where you fit in and realizing the awesomeness that is humanity. You don’t need to be 100% sure of what you want to do or how you want to act, but you need to have a solid understanding of yourself, what makes you happy and your role in society both among peers and the rest of the world. And that’s pretty much as big picture as you can get.

Part of what helps you find yourself is being alone, contemplating your thoughts and your life and being sensitive to everything outside yourself that you take in. Consider what your friends are telling you, consider what you glean as you go about the world, think about what’s under the surface. Consider what other people are trying to say and realize that they’re in the same boat as you and may not express themselves correctly either. Be sensitive to it all and really take it to heart.

Being certain of yourself is really difficult when everyone around you isn’t. It’s a lot easier to join the crowd and go with the flow than it is to separate yourself and figure it out. I still may not be entirely certain of myself and the world, despite spending most of my time thinking about it. But one thing I am certain of is this: if you do know yourself, are sensitive to the world around you and see the big picture, it’s so much more enriching and meaningful.

When it comes to design, my life, my friends and most things, my refrain has been that the details will work themselves out, which is not at all to say they’re not important. But if we put most of our energy into communally understanding what the big picture is – of a product, movie, each other and our relationship with everything – then the details will fall into place because we all understand the story and can work together to tell it.

If you’ve ever had what has been dubbed as “Mexican Coke,” you’ll probably notice that it tastes a lot better. Why? No, it’s not simply because it’s in a glass bottle vs. a can. It’s because it’s American Coke, minus the corn syrup with real cane sugar instead.

High fructose corn syrup is among the many artificial ingredients that make up much of the food that we consume daily. It’s everywhere, along with trans fat, refined grains and other materials that are so prevalent because they can be easily mass-produced and cost very little.

From food to synthetic fabrics to building materials like particleboard and more, we’ve continually attempted to perfect methods to create artificiality in many mediums for wider distribution and ease of use. And while many of these have had actual positive effects, there seems to be a point at which they stop helping us and start hurting us.

In technology, we’re essentially mass-producing relationships and thoughts through mouse-clicks and keyboards while forgetting that it’s not the real thing. Are we actually closer to each other because of the technology we use, or do we just think we are? While posting something or replying to someone’s post does make the day-to-day routine more interesting and give you something to interact with, does it actually make you more connected to someone? And if not, do you still even care to anymore?

I feel we’ve been led to believe that “connectedness” in today’s society is pretty good, that we’re supposedly working towards some supreme goal of making the world very small and information more available, but that doesn’t mean we understand – or even want to understand – each other better. The fact that people are now walking around glued to their smartphones all the time or that they will interrupt a conversation to text someone is evidence of this.

At times when I feel somewhat lonely or disconnected, I’m often up late online hoping something socially engaging will happen. Then the first thing I want to do when I wake up in the morning is to get online again. It’s fairly okay when it’s just me, but when I’m spending time with close friends, actually reveling in the moment, and I’m still reaching for my phone, eager to check the latest activity online, it bothers me.

Why am I still doing this? Granted, there’s a lot of satisfaction in having these brief encounters with people with whom I don’t have a close relationship. But more importantly, it seems I’ve been conditioned to not want to miss anything “important” or feel left out. These online mediums are my social circles’ way of interfacing and it’s now so ingrained in me that it’s become my social milieu. And even though I know it’s not the realism I want, I still can’t help but want it anyway. “Connectivity is poverty,” says an article from the NYTimes Magazine last year.

“The man of leisure savors solitude and intimacy with friends and is surrounded by original things that cannot be copied or corrupted and shot around the globe with a few mouse clicks.”- New York Times

It’s one thing to try to maintain a balance, but sometimes I think we are neglecting real-life connections for the sake of what we’ve deemed as the best alternative, the high fructose corn syrup of life. It’s not surprising – we’re in an age of extreme instant gratification, where we expect everything to come to us with little to no effort on our part and anything that doesn’t follow this rule simply “doesn’t work well.” Although the artificial ingredients will do the job just fine most of the time, at the end of the day, they’re just plain unhealthy. It doesn’t have to be this way though. It’s fine and great to be able to keep up with your friends’ activities and thoughts but it’s another thing to rely on it as your own means of communication.

The fact is, real connections, real interests and real relationships are harder to come by and take time, dedication, trust and honesty to develop – the last two being harder to discern in the public space that is the internet. Given the economic model of supply and demand, we should all be clamoring for these relationships like we do with diamonds, raspberries and other natural and fairly coveted delicacies. But this takes more effort on our part and that’s just the state of mind in which we seem to be.

Because our social-networking technology is so prevalent day-to-day, millions of people voice their thoughts publicly which greatly dilutes any individual contribution. At this point, I think we’re so used to taking everything on the internet for face value that it’s hard to discriminate between those who really have something to say and those who are writing for the benefit of “pop psychology.” And the worst part is that those people are seemingly rewarded more for being this way. We are on information and commentary overload, a point at which any person, genuine or not, can become a celebrity almost overnight thereby diluting any specialness. How is anyone supposed to hear anyone when there’s so much artificiality standing in the way?

For a pretty long time, I’ve tried to be a very honest and open-minded person whose main goal is to love and be loved by the people I meet. However, the problem with this for me has always been that the majority of people are unable – sometimes unwilling – to do this even if they’ve known you a while. And in my efforts to “speed up” the process, to skip over all the small-talk and surface-level connections and get to the heart of the matter, I’ve often found many people to be extremely hesitant, confused and uncertain.

I’m not discounting what I call “surface-level” interaction. It’s not at all uncommon for us to want to know a few things about someone before we get to know them. It breaks the ice, starts a conversation, leads you down a path. That’s why most interviews, first dates and first meetings always have similar discussions and questions – where’d you grow up, where’d you go to school, what do you like to do, etc. It’s this process that helps us to categorize and define the people we meet so that we may better understand if we’re at all compatible.

But really, just because you’ve connected over a few superficial details and perhaps have a variety of things in common doesn’t necessarily mean that your morals, values or philosophies are aligned – and those are the core issues around which people find a deeper relationship taking hold. As I’ve mentioned before, we all have different ways of expressing ourselves and with society the way it is, it’s so much easier to feel connected to someone for the things you have in common rather than your deeper beliefs, hopes and fears.

Maybe people don’t want to be real with each other anymore. Maybe we like not having to worry about being vulnerable and we just want to enjoy day-to-day interactions around various depthless topics. If that’s the case, then I feel it’s pretty detrimental to a well-functioning society. If we can put in less effort and feel happy with what we get back, then we’ll never want to put in more effort for a real relationship when we won’t see the results as quickly. Perhaps then the very way that social-networking technology is structured – with emphasis on recent activity, life streams and news feeds – can never really allow for anything more in-depth and it’s up to us, individually, to ensure we don’t continue to rely too heavily on it.

In the meantime, what about everyone else, the people who want something more? If not the internet and not real people since they defer to the internet, where do we turn for real, genuine, good old-fashioned relationships? Mexico?

As children, how we learn about love and how we get it shapes our relationship with it for the rest of our lives. Really, until you go to school, your family is the only group of people able to love you and teach you about it. Then when you go to school – hopefully already in a healthy relationship with love – you learn about a different kind of love called friendship. Developing a healthy relationship with this kind of love does wonders for your personal growth and your ability to adapt as you get older.

I, unfortunately, probably did not have a very healthy relationship with love upon entering school. As a product of two parents with incredibly opposing approaches to life yet both equally filled with a lot of love to glean and share, I entered my peer society already unable to connect with anyone who didn’t automatically give me the substantial amount of love I required to feel okay.

For me, it wasn’t just that “kids made fun of me,” because many of us have that growing up and it clearly can’t be that big a deal. It was more the fact that it was so opposite to what my first formative years had been that it hit me especially hard. If a “normal” amount of love wasn’t enough for me, then clearly no love at all was all the more hurtful.

It can be very difficult to enjoy life when you feel you have a lot to say and no way to say it. So as I internalized the effects of the social scene, feeling ever so lonely and unloved, I poured the entirety of my energy into striving to feel heard and forgot to revel in my own uniqueness and enjoy the other parts of life, carefree.

Our experience with love shapes the role we play as adults. If we didn’t feel heard in our youth, we tend to assume the role of the actor – constantly striving for the future, wanting desperately to do something, make something, say something. And if, by some chance, we learned a healthy relationship with love, we are far more likely to be the audience, taking life as it comes and enjoying the day-to-day beauty.

The majority of people seem to fall somewhere between these two extremes, ideally in a good balance between feeling motivated enough to take action when necessary and feeling content enough to relax. It’s no surprise then that people who fall more towards the audience side tend to be happier than everyone else. Rather than feeling unsatisfied with life’s story, they enjoy the good things. Contrarily, I, like other actors, think I can’t relax until I feel life’s story is progressing “correctly” and thus am continually working to try to mold it.

I’ve never been a patient person. When things don’t feel right, I’m continually exceedingly frustrated. And things never feel 100% right, ever. And that’s because, even when everything seems like it should be perfect, feeling heard is only part of it.

The actor is inherently lonely. An audience, inherently not.
As an actor, your happiness is placed in the hands of others. You can do whatever you want to communicate yourself and feel heard but even if you’re successful, you’re still just a guy on a stage preaching to a group. That’s not really love; we just think it is.

You’re really loved for how you love. For me, feeling connected to people on fundamental, emotional levels means more to me than having a bunch of stuff in common. It means trust, openness, honesty. It allows us to be real. We can put ourselves out there and let others decide our merit or we can learn to be content in our own mindset and act as our own audience. If we can focus on this, then we can more easily see that although everyone does things differently, sees things differently and has different interests, perceptions, values and morals, at the end of the day, all we really want is just to love and be loved.

In what I like to call my “spectrum of subjectivity,” I believe people fall on a line between being very objective-minded and being very subjective-minded. Those on the objective side tend to be more left-brained, mathematical and logical in their thinking and those on the other end are more right-brained, creative and emotional. I think most of us fall somewhere between the two extremes, making the majority of us able to communicate in more ways than one. But in the cases where people fall at one of the extremes, I suggest that their ability to communicate decreases in breadth and increases in depth. If you look at the greatest musicians, writers and artists over the centuries, you see a pattern whereby their brilliance and depth of human understanding is evidenced in their work, yet their interpersonal face-to-face relationships suffer. The same is true for the greatest scientists and mathematicians. The latter made strides in understanding how we work; the former in how we feel. If you move along the line to further extremes, I think there’s a threshold whereby you lose the ability to communicate entirely, in any medium, and you just live inside your head, consumed by your own thoughts. Fortunately or unfortunately, we have pills for that now.

Design falls in a tricky mix of these two extremes. We must use logical, objective reasoning to affect essentially unpredictable and emotional beings. It seems almost paradoxical. Yet we’ve continually seen timeless and effective design in a multitude of mediums for centuries that has affected humanity on deep levels, perhaps illustrating that while we’re all very different emotionally, there are fundamental truths we all share. And that’s pretty interesting, especially to someone like me who’s always felt so distant from everyone else.

I talk a lot about my childhood and my relationship with my parents but in no way do I mean to imply that it wasn’t loving. In fact, I’d venture to say I had too much of it growing up which didn’t prepare me for the lack that exists in the real world. I was raised by people in touch with their emotions and express them freely and then cast into a society of peers who deemed it uncool to do just that.

I love being expressive, doing things for my friends, hosting parties, building social circles and “feeling the love.” To many, it seems out of place, so they try to label it with something more familiar to them (and we all love meeting expectations, right?). I’ve continually found it difficult for people who know me to just accept that maybe there is no technical term for the way I am – I just love love.

It’s nice to feel taken care of, considered, respected, trusted. Nice isn’t even the right word; it’s essential. I think we all really want that at a core level but we cover up over time as we find that the world doesn’t always give us what we want. It’s self-defense, really. Otherwise I see no reason why anyone would not naturally be nice, loving or caring about people they meet. The fact of the matter is, I think we’re a bit starved for it in society – some more than others, of course. But we don’t need much – just little things here and there. They make us feel better put together than individually. It’s the Gestalt theory of psychology – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This is key to a brand’s success. As long as they’ve existed, companies have tried to “keep the customer in mind” saying things like “the customer is always right”, “we’re here for you”, “you’re special”, “you’re our priority” etc. But if we don’t see it in the little things, it isn’t really true. When you actually look at what Virgin America, for example, does with their brand, you can see why they’re so successful to the point that people are actually willing to pay more for the experience. Every point along your interaction with them, from when you buy your ticket to when you arrive at your destination, is carefully branded to make you feel taken care of. In general, people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars more to sit in first class for what essentially costs the airline nothing – a meal, a movie, a bigger seat, a pillow. The same is true for Apple, in which every detail is carefully designed and obsessed about. They care and we care, so we pay more.

It’s always seemed silly to me that we tend to think of designers as people who “make things look pretty.” The way I look at it, we’re not that at all. There’s a huge difference between those with the technical skillset to render a nice-looking button and those who observe the world and make inferences on what makes us tick, thereby defining the reason for needing such a button in the first place. The problem is that a lot of designers make things based on how they feel which, though emotional in practice, is internally-oriented and totally subjective. Just because they like a color doesn’t mean it actually speaks to the rest of the world. I think really effective designers are inherently psychologists who manifest their theories in objective principles that guide the design.

As a designer, it’s not about you. I’ve learned the hard way, having desperately tried for years to understand and build relationships with my peers and being continually told that what I think doesn’t matter – it’s about what everyone else expects.

We’re starry-eyed with the idea of “changing the world” and that really means affecting humanity – a never-ending quest. Constantly on my mind and something that can, at times, consume me, I do it out of wanting love and wanting to give it. I wish I could break down these walls that people put up to prevent them from being emotional and really connected. But until that happens, I’ll just continue to help make things that try to nudge us closer.