Voice of the User:
Design research with frog design's Jason Severs

- Jason Severs, Principal Designer, frog design

When Jason Severs goes home for the holidays, he struggles to give his relatives a simple explanation of what he does at work. Even after the elevator pitch about frog design and his role as principal designer there, Jason gets a lot of blank stares.

This article may help Jason’s family better understand how he makes a living. If not, it will at least inform designers (and others) about the importance of research in the design process, and why frog design is adopting design research as part of its drive to innovate.

Inside frog, there is a renewed focus on design research across studios and disciplines. In this conversation between Jason Severs and EffectiveUI’s design director Tim Wood, Jason talks about how his career path led him to design research, and why he believes research is key to unlocking great user experiences.

Tim Wood: Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself, your professional background, and about your current role at frog design?

Jason Severs: I came into the design profession along a somewhat crooked path. Having cut my teeth in fine arts — painting, textiles, bookmaking, printing — I always felt that design curriculum was too rigid. I thought of it as commercial art. That thinking was naive on my part. I didn’t understand design history and it’s value to culture and society. After I graduated and moved to NYC to get into the art world to be Van Gogh, Pollock, whatever. I quickly found that the art business was a lot like what I perceived the design business to be. I became a little disillusioned to say the least.

I hadn’t stopped making artwork, but I began to look for other avenues to explore what I found fascinating about making art, which is basically an exploration of creativity and alternative forms of communication with an underlying socio-cultural dynamic. Much of my process in the studio to this day is about mapping out the creative process. When I started talking to designer friends, I found that they spoke about their profession in similar ways to the fine arts process, and I was really fascinated by that. This was around the time of the dot.com boom, the mid to late 90s. The prospect of doing creative things and getting paid for it sounded good to me.

I went the freelance route and started doing Flash development during the early days of Flash. My work was focused on interactive experiences more than about building Web sites and banner ads, although I did these things. I was interested in making the Internet take on attributes of television, and how I could change people’s perceptions of how they interacted with computers. I say television because at the time I lacked a better metaphor for what I was trying to communicate. I mainly liked the idea of the Web being something other than the static print-like pages.

Previously, I had taught at the high-school level and became interested in how computing could impact the educational experience. I went back to school to get a Master’s in something. I had trouble finding a program that fit my needs. I finally found Teacher’s College at Columbia where there was some interesting new media work being done. There, I found a group that was working internal to the university called the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning that was experimenting with a form of research called ‘action research.’ It was about iterating and editing curriculum development, and providing the media to support curriculum as it evolved over time. They were calling it “Design Research” and I latched on to it. I loved the idea of a formal research process supporting the creative process. I began to research how media was used in classes — a process similar to usability testing that we do now in application development. I was fascinated with bringing people — in this case, students — into the creative process to better design things, which was definitely did not happen in the isolation of a fine arts studio. It seemed so obvious to me! To qualitatively make the class more effective and enriching, work directly with the students to make this happen.

After graduation, I went back to freelancing and did some scientific illustration. I worked with Brian Greene on his book The Fabric of the Cosmos creating around 200 illustrations and information graphics to support his colorful explanations of String Theory. But I really wanted to get back to the notion of having users participate in the design process. I found a program in Toronto with Bruce Mau called The Institute without Boundaries, where they followed a very democratic, informal, ad-hoc approach to design. The Institute was a design team inside the Mau studio. There I worked with a talented group of people from around the world on a book and an exhibition for a project called Massive Change, which focused on how the future of design can transform the world. The IwB has since moved into George Brown College but it carries with it all the principles we shape with Bruce in his Toronto studio.

When I moved back to New York, I interviewed at frog design because I liked their history of focusing on the consumer experience and emotion. Its founder, Hartmut Esslinger, followed the core idea that form follows emotion and that design typically encompasses an emotional element. This philosophy was more interesting to me than that of other studios where I had been interviewing.

When I started at frog in 2005, I did a lot of usability work — there was no formal design research practice per se. We always wanted a process that involved the person in the design, but were doing more of an evaluative approach. Then the firm started to be more about innovation to create visions that companies could bring to market. There was a need to bring unique insights into the design process, and we began more generative research practices in our work and started to formalize it in the studio.

Wood: Has design research now become standard practice at frog?

Severs: My role right now is to shape that practice in the New York studio. I co-lead up a group across the studios to forward that practice internally and externally. We look at the public position and them explore the tools and mechanisms that will help our internal people understand the value of this particular process.

Wood: Many of our readers have design backgrounds, but for those that don’t, can you talk about the value of design research at frog and provide a little more detail about how it works?

Severs: I can start with the frog design elevator pitch. We are a global innovation firm, which also gets lost on people. Simply, I bring the voice of the people into the design process. For me, there’s a three-step process in design research. First, I think about a problem. I try to understand the essence of the problem and how to help my client meet their business goals. Second, I figure out ways to involve people or stakeholders into that process. Then, I figure out an approach to stimulus and artifacts to engage people into the design process and get them thinking about the problem with me. This is a highly simplified explanation but it works for the uninitiated.

Wood: What are some of the ways you do that?

Severs: Artifacts and stimulus are the best ways to engage people. That can include anything from a prototype to an involved worksheet to help people map out ideas. We also use affinity diagrams and concept maps to help understand the users conceptualize the world. I always use some kind of experience that has an artifact attached to it. I never sit down with users empty-handed — although open-ended interviewing and listening to people is also very valuable. My core approach is to engage people with a visual thinking process and learn from their reactions.

Wood: Much of what you’ve talked about is centered on working with users — understanding their needs and helping them to communicate them. How do you put your findings to use when you work with design professionals? How does design research impact guidelines and contexts when designers set out to solve problems?

Severs: That’s a really good question and something I grapple with internally at frog. Some are uneasy about bringing in users very early in the design process. Here’s a simple model that works for in thinking about this negotiation between designer and user. It’s one of Don Norman’s ways of thinking about the designer’s mental model and the user’s mental model. In between the two is a thing called the system image, which is really just a product, or service, or some representation of the designer’s thinking and approach to solving a problem. Too often, designers insert their own mental model into solutions because that’s the way they see it. Then the user has to guess what the designer is thinking. The system image lies somewhere between the user and the designer.

Wood: For me, design research is about closing the loop between the user and the designer.

Severs: I agree. The process introduces a more shared model on the path to the final concept. But as a designer, I try to steer away from like looking at myself as an intermediary. At frog, design research is a separate practice because at the core, it’s all about the methods we apply to design.

At frog, we inherently do most of the things in the design process that we explicitly map out in the design research. We all have the discovery process to immerse ourselves in problem definition. Designers typically discover their way to the solution, but the design research element is about formalizing that process and putting methods and rules in place. You always can change those rules, break them or not use them at all, but they define direction which is critical in selling and executing this work along market timelines. That’s the way that I see it — not an intermediary — but an evangelist and facilitator of design process.

Wood: At EffectiveUI, we focus on user experience and user interface design. I have a feeling that you have a significant view into that process as well. Do your methods change when dealing with interaction designers versus industrial designers?

Severs: Actually, at frog, I’m allocated to the Industrial Design department. My interests lie in that field and it is a personal passion. Although, because of my background I do work across multiple departments: Digital, Strategy and ID.

At frog, we do a lot of convergent projects, which is a core staple of where interaction design is headed. We are headed towards a shift where we’re all becoming interaction designers, although I wish we would stop the label breakouts and just be designers for lack of a better term. It’s a generalist’s outlook but that’s my optimistic naiveté. Labels are necessary for resourcing and scoping our work but I wish as a design community we could reach a generalist outlook on our profession. Some of us may understand manufacturing processes a little better, material a little better. Some of us may understand requirements and specifications in the development process a little better, and create different kinds of prototypes, whether they are digital or physical. And we should all be able to visually communicate.

But where I’m going with this long-winded point is that we’re all creating interactions for people. We are no longer designers working under the consumerist agenda. Product and service ecosystems are too complex. For example, we did work on a set-top box UI and the remote at the same time. You have to understand the industrial side of UI, as well as the digital side. How do hard keys map to UI? How do the services that people want and the businesses want to push play out in UI and hardware? How do you create effective prototypes for both of these interactions? Obviously, you have different kinds of stimuli and different ways of working with people in design research, but design research is the glue between industrial designers, technologists, and graphic/interaction designers.

For me, looking back to Dreyfess and Eames and all the office furniture systems, industrial designers were the original interaction designers using a design research process.

Wood: Earlier you talked about the notion of painting and the idea of craft. What’s your view on the relationship between craft and design?

Severs: Without getting into the whole Ruskin argument about machine versus man in the creative process, I’m referring to the relationship between ‘making’ and ‘craft.’ For me, it’s about collaborative synthesis — manifesting a solution into a physical form. There are many ways to do that, but I think there is real value to thinking through problems and synthesizing data results into a physical form. Whether that’s sketching through ideas and understanding how to map out ideas with a pen and paper, or whether it’s creating elements that you shift around, organize and arrange … that’s something that I really learned from solving problems on the fine arts side.

So when I say craft I mean the patterns of ritual creativity that are exchanged in social situations. It’s not a logical system — to refer to Ruskin. It’s a social art. Craft was a reaction to the ‘soullessness’ of the industrial age. People are meaningful creators not specialized cogs. Design research is a tool of Ruskin’s cooperative ideals. Collaboration can’t be mechanized.

Also, the craft of design research is a response — as many qualitative movements are — to the statistical interpretations of human behavior and emotion. I’m not deriding the value of these interpretations but it can’t be the only lens. In fact, at frog we value the balance of quantitative and qualitative.

But to get back to my original point, there’s that element in crafts about the skill you need to make something — the craftsmanship ability to master something. But for me, it is more about the physical interaction of things, which really is an explicit effort to get outside of a computer. All that points to the main idea of collaboration, an important signature of the design process.

People like Jeff Han are working to support collaboration in a more digital sense. But right now working with tangible kinds of things, physical things and making things — whether it’s an arrangement of post-its or mapping out a process together on a white board, paper-prototyping, or whatever — best supports design collaboration in rapid situation that operate on market timelines.

Wood: Are you suggesting that we need better digital collaboration tools to solve design problems?

Severs: Yes! I think the next realm of digital collaboration is going to come from the way we collaborate in physical spaces right now. We need more of a war room digital process, especially for working across globally located teams, as frog does on a regular basis. A lot of times we can meet in various locations around the world to conduct research as a team but synthesis which is more time intensive and must be done collaboratively.

Wood: What are some of the exciting projects you’re working on now?

Severs:  I’m doing a lot of business development at the moment. Trying to sell research and innovation in this climate is a real challenge but a fun one.

I did just come off a project in the healthcare space. Very cool! We were working to better understand services in healthcare, and how the insurer can empower and engage people to make more of their own decisions in a rapidly growing healthcare marketplace. It was about putting the right things in place to support complex decisions that consumers have to make, like choosing a doctor, navigating medication options, and finding the closest, cheapest place to get a blood test. It’s the whole “nudge” and behavioral economics phenomena that is remerging in design. They refer to it as “choice architecture” but it’s really design. I do love this nexus of emotion and meaningful fulfillment over time. It’s about supporting user engagement and decision-making that is not emotionally or cognitively taxing. And to be fair, this about targeting healthy people who need to shift their mental models from sick care to wellness. Hopefully the government will pick up the slack for people with chronic conditions who will be left out of this new marketplace.

The bigger picture is about how mobile devices are influencing health care and how people with high-deductible plans can better manage the cost of their health care. It was a fascinating project.

Wood: Is the bulk of your work in services or products?

Severs: I’m constantly fluctuating whether it’s working in financial services, healthcare or consumer electronics for personal care or digital media storage. I have a pretty eclectic mix of projects over a year’s time, which is why I like working in a consultancy like frog. We produce a lot of conceptual power and innovative ideas across a variety of industry and at the end of the day we get these things to market. That’s the real impact taht design and design research provide.

Wood: Jason, this has been very interesting. Thank you for your time and insights.

Severs: Thank you for the opportunity.

About Jason Severs
Since joining frog design, Jason has worked on projects for GE, focused on user research and experience design in Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom. He has also collaborated and led design research activity for American Express, AT&T, Neutrogena and Vonage, to name just a few. Jason holds an M.A. from Columbia University in instructional design and technology and a B.F.A from Memphis College of Art in painting and sculpture. He began his research interests working as a research fellow at Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. Find him at http://www.jasonsevers.com

About Tim Wood
Tim Wood is the creative director at EffectiveUI, an award-winning provider of rich Internet applications and breakthrough interactive experiences. Prior to joining EffectiveUI, Tim was the creative director for Design Innovation & Advanced Development at Eastman Kodak, where he received international recognition for creativity and design excellence. For more than a decade, Tim has persistently focused on the radical transformation of business through user experience. From next-generation Web services to consumer electronics, his passion for design has fueled an inherent desire to innovate and promote progressive methods of interaction design.