On Beyond Tinkertoy

By Dave Rogers

Remember Tinkertoy®—the classic wooden construction toy?

You probably had a set when you were young. Those dowels and connectors not only provided hours of fun, but also taught us the principles of structural design. We learned the strength of triangles, the need to support long spans and the value of a solid foundation. We also discovered the limits of dowel-and-connector construction.

In time, we outgrew Tinkertoy and moved to greater challenges like Lincoln Logs or Erector Sets. Most of us eventually gave up the building trade in favor of other pursuits—while a hardy few stayed the course and today engineer real bridges and skyscrapers.

I'm here today to say that usability is the Tinkertoy of Web design. It's a great (perhaps best) place to begin, but its dowels and connectors are inadequate for the now and future Web. It's time we outgrow our obsession with usability and user-centered design (UCD) and break new ground.

Please don't misunderstand, Dr. Nielsen. I'm not advocating the overthrow of UCD and usability; they are essential to the success of every site. So keep those personas, usability tests and card sorts coming in, folks.

I'm also not saying the battle is over. Too many sites still ignore even minimal usability heuristics to the detriment of users and sponsors. And even the most skilled practitioners will honestly admit that we still have a lot to learn about UCD. The Web is, after all, barely a decade old.

That's my point. We're just beginning this Web adventure, just like preschoolers beginning their construction skills with Tinkertoy sets. To assume that we've already found the Holy Grail of Web design in usability and UCD is premature.

Yet to look at the literature, 'zines and blogs out there, that's largely what we're doing. One result is the commodification of Web design. Call it whatever you want—"design patterns," "usability heuristics" or "best practices"—but our sites are beginning to look an awful lot alike.

Now, I like "inverted L" navigation and tabs as much as anyone and, yes, they're quite easy to design and use—but is that all we want people to feel after visiting our sites? "It was so easy to use!" That's akin to patting a child on the head for building a Tinkertoy airplane. It may be a great achievement, but it's not going to fly to Tokyo.

So what are we to do?

In my last column, I wrote about Walt Disney's practice of "plussing." Plussing takes what is already excellent and moves it closer to the edge of perfection with additions, tweaks and adjustments. It was the secret of Disney's success. In just 30 years, his studio took flat, silent, short, grayscale animation and plussed it by successively adding sound, color, dimension, narrative and—ultimately—physicality in the immersive, real world environment of Disneyland.

That's what we need to do routinely with every one of our sites—to plus beyond usability and UCD into new and unfamiliar design terrain.

Where to begin? Because it is at the center of human experience, I suggest that one frontier is narrative and storytelling. The science is compelling:

• "Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought," says cognitive scientist Mark Turner. "Most of our experience, our knowledge, is organized as stories."
• Donald Norman writes, "Stories are marvelous means of summarizing experiences, of capturing an event and the surrounding context that seems essential. Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion."
• "The fusion of memory, metaphor and story enables consumers to create meaning around, or to see personal relevance in, a company or a specific brand," notes Gerald Zaltman.
• Dan Pink concludes, "We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves."

Good Web practice already uses a dash of narrative theory. Personas are stories about archetypal users. Scenarios tell stories about how those personas might use and experience our sites. I'm a fan of site narratives, backstories that shape a site's design by tapping into the creative centers of the project team's minds. Luke Wroblewski tells us how to use visual relationships to tell coherent stories. Our colleagues in game design demonstrate the possibilities of immersive storytelling.

As good as they are, these are only Tinkertoys. The Web is ready for more. Our users are ready for more. We're ready for more. It's time to build narrative into our sites that interact with users' personal stories to co-create the desired experiences and memories.

How do we do this? I haven't the foggiest. But we'll get there by exploring narrative theory and incrementally plussing story into our sites.

In my book, there's no more ruthless place to test your user experience (UX) chops than the restaurant business. UX is everything to a restaurant. The entire package (from the food to the parking valets outside) has to work together or it can all crumble. And user feedback can be in-your-face immediate!

Restaurants are the crucible of cutting-edge UX and offer manifest lessons for digital practitioners. Maybe that's why the restaurant biz has fascinated me since the beginning of my career.

Danny Meyer is the founder and president of Union Square Hospitality Group. Winner of the first James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Restaurateur, Meyer founded eleven successful establishments in the brutal New York market—and did it all based on a philosophy of hospitality.

"I'm convinced that this is now a hospitality economy, no longer the service era," says Meyer. "If you simply have a superior product or deliver on your promises, that's not enough to distinguish your business. There will always be someone else who can do it or make it as well as you. It's how you make your customers feel while using your products that distinguishes you."

In Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, (perhaps the most UX-centric book of the year) Meyer explains more:

Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side... Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you...

Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. Service is a monologue—we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards for service. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on a guest's side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response.

Last time, I wrote that I "dream of building sites and applications with world class UXs—and then plussing them to the spectacular by somehow overlaying personal touches unique to each user's needs and preferences." Meyer convinces me to take that further: hospitality will be the hallmark of the next breakthrough in digital user experience.

Look at it this way. Web sites are a commodity. Incredible technology is freely available. Teens can build killer sites. Two guys in a garage can turn the Web on its head.

Technology, content and service are Tinkertoys. Hospitality—how we make users feel when using our sites—will be the differentiator of the future Web.

Meyer's philosophy suggests two ways to begin. First, we must open more dialogue with users by plussing conversation into our site designs. This isn't just providing a place for user-generated content; it's discovering ways to observe and engage with users while they visit our sites (just as servers do in restaurants). Second, we need to plus our advocacy for users to ensure that our sites demonstrate that we are on their side—that we are doing things for them, not to them.

Web site hospitality won't happen overnight. It may not happen for years. As with narrative-infused sites, I certainly don't know how it will happen. But I do know that it's time to go beyond our current Tinkertoys and start plussing toward the future.

Or as the eminent Dr. Seuss once put it,

So, on beyond Z! It's high time you were shown,
That you really don't know all there is to be known.