Scaling Accessibility Through Design Systems

Incorporating accessibility can be seen as a daunting task, especially for products that have already been released. Alexis Lucio, Senior Accessibility Lead at Splunk, will share her journey in making accessibility a first-class citizen within Splunk Design System. Topics include: how to advocate for accessibility, utilizing use cases to optimize design and dev, how to utilize user input, and ideas on how to collaborate with cross-functional partners.

DesignOps: A Conduit for Inclusion

Accessibility and inclusion, two extremely important topics for every organization, and certainly of paramount concern to the design function. What role can DesignOps play in advancing these initiatives? As the new Director of Design Operations, Laura sees the numerous opportunities across the business – in research, communications, tooling and more. She is leading the way, forging a path, and allowing other teams to jump aboard.

Takeaways:
How Design Operations can directly and indirectly improve the experience of prospective employees, and also to our customers on the receiving end of our products by helping everyone design for (all) humans.

Pain and Curiosity Precede Successful Design Systems Change with Dan Mall

While we’ve been developing design systems for years, we’re only just now learning how to create systems that are successful and sustainable. Dan Mall is the author of the soon-to-be released Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice, which explores the cultural elements that contribute to sustainable design systems.

Not surprisingly, it’s usually pain that motivates change. In fact, companies occupying the number one spot in their respective markets usually have the least incentive to change. As the saying goes, “Number two tries harder.” But even in the most-ready-for-change scenarios, design systems sit, at best, at a third level of priority. Dan asserts that the challenge is to approach design systems as a byproduct of the products and features that bring customers value. Otherwise, design systems will always be on the backburner.

Dan and Lou discuss tricky topics around design systems:
– Designers’ fear of job loss to design systems.
– As we move toward sustainable design systems, who should make the decisions? Who does what and when?
– How to approach design systems in a sustainable way.
– The best way for product and systems teams to collaborate.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
– Why culture, rather than product maturity, will determine whether design systems are successful
– How to address fears of job loss as a result of design systems
– How to keep people motivated through a systems change
– How product and design teams can work together efficiently
– How design systems have changed over time
– The role of governance in systems change
– Why following precedent within your company will get you farther faster

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:32] Introduction of Dan Mall and his book Design that Scales – Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice
[0:04:49] On reaching cultural alignment
[0:07:01] What prompts design systems change
[0:09:26] When jobs feel threatened
[0:12:21] Cultural signs and markers of design system success
[0:16:59] November 29th, 2023 – Design in Product Conference
[0:18:20] On governance and sustainability
[0:24:44] On collaboration between product and design teams
[0:27:33] The evolution of design systems for ICs
[0:30:35] Design Systems University
[0:32:38] Dan’s gift to listeners

Distributed DesignOps Management (Videoconference)

• Selecting meeting/project collaboration tools
• Maintaining healthy team culture
• Inclusivity
• Managing critical meetings
• Dealing with feelings of isolation
• Consistent documentation and processes

For Prospective Authors

Writing a Rosenfeld Media Book

Thanks for thinking about writing a book with Rosenfeld Media! We’re a small publishing house that collaborates closely with its authors to develop and promote books on user experience design and related topics. We typically publish between four and six books annually, and we lavish each title with tender loving care throughout the processes of writing, production, and promotion.

Writing a book is a difficult, time-consuming, and occasionally painful undertaking. Even proposals are a lot of work! So, like the rabbis who turn away prospective converts at least twice before saying yes, we’re going to encourage you to give this a lot of thought before committing. Start by asking your loved ones if they can cope with having quite a bit less of you in their lives for a good year or two. Then, before you do anything else, read the rest of this page.

What We’re Looking to Publish

Most of our books cover user experience design principles, tools, and methods. UX is a broad field that synthesizes ideas from many disciplines—from architecture to graphic design to human factors to librarianship—with the goal of helping people use and enjoy their experiences with all kinds of products and services. Our UX books teach craft and actionable skills to designers, researchers, writers, and other people who care about delivering great user experiences. These books tend toward practical advice: a rule of thumb is 25% “what and why” content, and 75% “how” content.

As UX is becoming increasingly critical to business success, we recently introduced a new imprint, Two Waves Books, that explores the convergence of business and design. These books make the design world’s big ideas accessible to a growing audience interested in learning more about how design can help them address common personal and business challenges.

In all cases, we emphasize a house writing style of warmth and accessibility. Through the use of plain language and a conversational tone, and an emphasis on stories and examples, our authors serve as “trusted guides” rather than authoritative experts.

Our books tend to be short (our sweet spot is 45,000-70,000 words) and rely on illustrations to make for a more enlightening reading experience. We publish an annual article describing the topics we’re hoping to sign in the coming year. And we prefer topics that are “evergreen”: while some of their examples might be especially current, each book’s principles and frameworks should stand the test of at least a few years’ time.

What We Avoid Publishing

Never say never, but we generally avoid publishing books that are:

• On topics we’ve addressed in a recent book. We avoid covering the same topics twice in the space of a few years; it’s simply not fair to our authors. Please review what we’ve published or are planning to publish and make sure we don’t already offer a recent book on your topic.
• Already written. Most publishers love receiving a manuscript that’s “ready to go.” We’re not one of those publishers. We prefer to pool your ideas with ours about the topic, its audience, your research, and the writing and production of the book. If you’ve already written a manuscript, it’s actually more work for us to produce your book.
• Compilations written by multiple authors. Regardless of how good the editor is at herding cats, compilations often suffer from uneven coverage, voice, tone, and quality.
• Repackaged blog entries. “Writing short” can be a good way to test your ideas and content in public, and it can get you part of the way toward a full manuscript. But a book is more than the sum of its parts; you’ll still need to make significant changes to your individual entries before they work together as a book.
• Based on a proprietary process or method. You or your company may do uniquely brilliant work, but will other people be able to repeat it simply by reading your book? Given that you’re the only person familiar with it, will anyone else take the idea seriously?

What’s Different about Our Approach

• We’re in this together. We work with you from the very start—developing your idea into a proposal, your proposal into an initial draft, and your draft into a beautiful, well-written book. Throughout the process, you’ll work closely with our publisher, editors, and marketers. If you’d prefer to go away and write your book in a garret, we’re probably not the right publisher for you.
• Research equals promotion. Collaboration goes beyond you and us. We’ll work together to engage influencers, subject matter experts, and the broader community with your ideas with two goals in mind: to help you improve your content, and to give them a sense of and stake in the final outcome. The more people who feel a part of your book’s development, the more who will support and promote it once it launches.
• We invest, you invest. We assign a developmental editor to each book. They work with you as a writing coach/project manager to get you through the process. And our marketing team works directly with you from development through launch. Both of these things are rare in our industry. In return, we expect you to be an equal partner in creating and launching your book—not just writing it but working hard to promote it.
• Speak with, not to readers. We want the world to be a better place thanks to your ideas and expertise. So we work with our authors to avoid jargon and other forms of poor communication that can get in the way of our readers learning from our books.
• We don’t play favorites. Our books receive an equal amount of editorial and marketing support, and all are consistently produced to meet our uncommonly high quality standards. If we’ve signed you, we are about you as much as any other author.

Other Stuff to Know

• Business terms. We pay royalties twice annually on net sales (the money left over after production and printing costs are covered). Our royalty rates are typically higher than the industry standard. We don’t pay advances.
• Book formats. Our paperbacks are 6” x 9” (15.24cm x 22.86cm), and are printed on high-quality paper with four-color covers and interiors. Our ebooks come in three DRM-free digital formats: ePUB (for iPads), MOBI (for Kindles), and DAISY (for people with impaired vision).
• Distribution. We sell directly via our website and fulfill orders globally. We also sell via Amazon and via retailers and wholesalers that do business with Ingram Publisher Services.
• Covers. We’re glad to have your input, but the final design up to us. We’ve worked with the acclaimed design team from The Heads of State to develop each of our covers.

What Happens Next

Ready to pitch your idea? Great!

Unless you have a fully fleshed-out book proposal to share, please complete our one-page “pre-proposal” (details here). It’s short, but it’s not easy: your challenge is to communicate the essence and value of your idea—and your voice and tone—within some tight constraints.

If we’re interested, we’ll work with you to grow your pre-proposal into a more formal proposal (with a writing sample). We’ll ask a few industry experts we know to provide feedback, which we’ll then share with you. If your proposal successfully jumps through all these hoops, we’ll send you a contract. Then the real fun begins.

As you might imagine, we receive a lot of proposals. We do our best to review them at least once per quarter. Please keep that in mind if you don’t hear from us right away. And if you decide to go in another direction, please let us know.

PS You might find this writing advice from the Rosenfeld Media editorial team useful, whether or not you publish with us: voice and tone for UX books, how to develop your book’s structure, and ways to stay on track while writing your book.

Frequently Asked Questions

We’ve identified some common questions about web form design. The short answers are provided here; and longer ones are available, of course, in the book.

1. Why does Web form design matter?
   Forms enable commerce, communities, and productivity on the Web to thrive. If you are in online retail, your goal is to sell things. But standing in the way of your products and your customers is a checkout form. If you are developing social software, your goal is to grow your community. Standing in between you and community members is a form. If you’ve built a productivity-based Web application, forms enable key interactions that let people create and manage content.
2. How should I organize my Web form—within one Web page or across several?
   Who is filling the form in and why? Answering this up front allows us to think about our forms as a deliberate conversation instead of the inputs for a database. When you approach forms as a conversation, natural breaks will emerge between topics. When these distinct topics are short enough to fit into a few sections, a single Web page will probably work best to organize them. When each section begins to run long, multiple Web pages may be required to break up the conversation into meaningful, understandable topics.
3. If my form spans several Web pages, do I tell people what page they’re on?
   When the questions that need to be answered before a Web form is complete are spread across multiple Web pages, you may want to include an overview of the number of Web pages involved (scope), an indication of what page you are on (position), and a way to save and return to your progress (status). Though closely integrated, these three progress indicators perform different functions.
4. Should I top-, right-, or left-align the labels for input fields?
   When you are trying to reduce completion times or if you need flexible label lengths for localization, consider top-aligned labels. When you have similar goals but vertical screen real estate constraints, consider right-aligned labels. When your form requires people to scan labels to learn what’s required or to answer a few specific questions out of many, consider left-aligned labels.
5. How are smart defaults used in Web forms?
   Smart defaults can help people answer questions by putting default selections in place that serve the interests of most people. There are many opportunities within Web forms to utilize the power of smart defaults to reduce the number of choices people have to make and thereby expedite form completion.
6. When should I include help text on my forms?
   You should consider adding help text when: forms ask for unfamiliar data; people question why they are being asked for specific data; people may be concerned about the security or privacy of their data; there are recommended ways of providing data; and certain data fields are optional or required when the bulk of the form is not.
7. How should I indicate required input fields?
   If most of the inputs on a form are required, indicate the few that are optional. If most of the inputs on a form are optional, indicate the few that are required. When indicating what form fields are either required or optional, text is the most clear. However, the * symbol is relatively well understood to mean required.
8. What’s the difference between a primary and secondary action?
   Actions such as Submit, Save, or Continue are intended to enable completion, which is the primary goal of just about anyone who has started filling in a form. As a result, they are often referred to as primary actions. Secondary actions, on the other hand, tend to be less utilized.

back to Web Form Design

Sample Chapter: Surveys That Work

This is a sample chapter from Caroline Jarrett‘s book Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys. 2021, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1: Goals: Establish Your Goals for the Survey

In this chapter, you’re going to think about the reason why you’re doing the survey (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1
It’s easier to hit a target if you know which one you’re aiming for.

By the end of the chapter, you’ll have turned the list of possible questions into a smaller set of questions that you need answers to.

Write down all your questions

I’m going to talk about two sorts of questions for a moment:

• Research questions
• Questions that you put into the questionnaire

Research questions are the topics that you want to find out about. At this stage, they may be very precise (“What is the resident
population of the U.S. on 1st April in the years of the U.S. Decennial Census?”) or very vague (“What can we find out about people who purchase yogurt?”).

Questions that go into the questionnaire are different; they are the ones that you’ll write when you get to Chapter 3, “Questions.”

Now that I’ve said that—don’t worry about it. At this point, you ought to have neatly defined research questions, but my experience is that I usually have a mush of draft questions, topic titles, and ideas (good and bad).

Write down all the questions. Variety is good. Duplicates are OK.

Give your subconscious a chance

If you’re working on your own, or you have the primary responsibility for the survey in a team, then try to take a decent break between two sessions of writing down questions. A night’s sleep gives your subconscious a chance to work out what you really want to find out. If that isn’t practical, then maybe try a walk in the fresh air, a break to chat with a friend, or anything else that might provide a pause.

Get plenty of suggestions for questions

If you’re working with a team or you’re in an organization, then often when word gets out that there’s a survey ahead, colleagues will pile in with all sorts of suggestions for their questions. This can feel a little overwhelming at first, but it’s best to encourage everyone to contribute their potential questions as early as possible so that you can carefully evaluate all of them, focus on some goals for this specific survey, and have a good selection of other questions available for follow-up surveys and other research.

If I’m too restrictive at the very beginning, I find that everyone tries to sneak just one little extra essential question into the questionnaire a day—or even an hour—before the fieldwork starts. By then, it is too late to test the little extra questions properly, and they could sink my whole survey.

But while you’re still establishing the goals for the survey? Great! Collect as many questions as possible. Encourage everyone to join in—colleagues, stakeholders, managers, whoever you think might be interested. If you’re running a workshop, give the introverts some space by having a bit of silent writing where everyone captures their individual question ideas by writing them down.

Create a nice big spreadsheet of all the suggestions, a pile of sticky notes, or whatever idea-gathering tool works for you.

Ideally, make it clear that there’s a cutoff: suggestions before a particular date will get considered for this survey; miss the date, and they’ll be deferred until the next opportunity. This helps to encourage the idea of many Light Touch Surveys.

Challenge your question ideas

When you’ve gathered or created question ideas, it’s time to confront them with these four detailed challenges in Figure 1.2:

• What do you want to know?
• Why do you want to know?
• What decision will you make based on the answers?
• What number do you need to make the decision?

Figure 1.2
What decisions will you make based on the answers?

Ask: What do you want to know?

Surprisingly, I find that the question suggestions that I create or collect from colleagues often do not relate to what we want to know. Many times, I’ve challenged a question by saying, “OK, so you’re thinking about <xxx question>. What do you want to know?” and it turns out that there’s a gap between the question and the reason for asking it.

Probably the most common example is the question: “Are you satisfied?” The question is OK but very general.

Ask: Why do you want to know?

I’m usually working with someone else when I’m doing a survey. To help narrow down from ”every possible suggestion” to a sensible set of goals for the survey, I ask “Why do you want to know the answers to these questions?” and we then go on to challenge ourselves with the three questions in Figure 1.2.

If I’m on my own, then I find it helps to add “this time” or “right now”—to help me focus on the practical matter of getting my ideas down to something manageable. Come to think about it, that’s not a bad idea for a team, too—it helps all of them realize that they don’t have to ask everyone everything all at once.

Ask: What decision will you make based on the answers?

If you’re not going to make any decision, why are you doing the survey?

Look very hard at each of the suggested questions and think about whether or not the answers to them will help you make a decision.

Don’t worry at this stage about the wording of the questions or whether people will want to answer them. You’ll work on those topics in upcoming chapters.

But if the answers to a question won’t help you make a decision, set that question aside. Be bold! The question might be fascinating. You might be looking forward to reading the answers. But you’re trying to focus really hard on making the smallest possible useful survey. You don’t need to waste the question—it can go into the possible suggestions for next time.

At this point, you’ll have some candidate questions where you know what decisions you’ll make based on the answers.

Ask: What number do you need to make the decision?

In the opening chapter, “Definitions,” I emphasized that a survey is a quantitative method and the result is a number. Sometimes you’ll realize at this point that although you have candidate questions, you do not need numeric answers to them in order to make the decisions. That’s fine, but it also means that a survey is probably not the right method for you. Your work so far will not be wasted because you can use it to prepare for a more appropriate method.

Choose the Most Crucial Question (MCQ)

If you were only allowed answers to one of your candidate questions, which would it be?

That’s your Most Crucial Question (MCQ).

• The

Most Crucial Question

is the one that makes a difference. It’s the one that will provide essential data for decision-making.

You’ll be able to state your question in these terms:

• We need to ask _______.

So that we can decide _______.

At this stage, don’t worry if it’s a Research Question (in your language, maybe even full of jargon) or the question that will go into the questionnaire (using words that are familiar to the people who will answer).

Test your goals: Attack your Most Crucial Question

Try attacking every word in your Most Crucial Question to find out what you really mean by it. Really hammer it.

Here’s an example: “Do you like our magazine?”

• Who is “you”? Purchaser, subscriber, reader, recommender, vendor, or someone else?
• What does “like” mean? Admire? Recommend? Plan to purchase? Actually purchase? Obsessively collect every edition? Give subscriptions as gifts?
• What do you mean by “our”? Us as a brand? A department? A team? As a supplier to someone else?
• What do you mean by “magazine”? Every aspect of it? The paper edition? The online one? The Facebook page? The article they read most recently? Some parts, but not others? Does it matter if they’ve read it or not?

I found a great attack on a question by Annie Pettit, survey methodologist. She starts with the question:

“When was the last time you bought milk?”

Here’s how Annie attacks “bought” and “milk”:

• Wait, do you care if the milk was purchased? Or could it be that we have an arrangement whereby we don’t actually pay for milk? Perhaps people who live on a farm with dairy cows, or people who own a convenience store?

Do you mean only cow milk? What about milk from goats, sheep, buffalo, camel, reindeer? Or what about milk-substitutes from nuts or plants like soy, almond, rice, and coconut that are labeled as milk? Were you really trying to figure out if we put a liquid on cereal? (Pettit, 2016)

(And she added a whole lot more about topics, like whether or not chocolate milk counts.)

Decide on your defined group of people

When you’ve really attacked your MCQ, look back and think about your “defined group of people”—the ones who you want to answer. Add them to your statement like this: We need to ask (people who you want to answer). The question (MCQ goes here). So that we can decide (decision goes here).

If your defined group of people is still vague—“everyone” or something equally woolly—then try attacking again. A strong definition of the group you want to answer at this point will help tremendously when you get to the next chapter, “Sample.”

But before you proceed to Chapter 2, let’s pause for a moment and think about your plans.

Check that a survey is the right thing to do

Is your research question something that you must explore by asking people, or would it be better to observe them?

Do you want to know “why?”—qualitative—or “how many?”—quantitative?

Let’s look at this definition again:

• >A

survey

is a process of asking questions that are answered by a sample of a defined group of people to get numbers that you can use to make decisions.

I’m going to contrast that with this definition:

• An

interview

is a conversation where an interviewer asks questions that are answered by one person to get answers that help to understand that person’s point of view, opinions, and motivations.

Both of them rely on asking: the interview is about “why”— qualitative—and the survey is about “how many”—quantitative, as in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3
Contrasting interviews as qualitative and surveys as quantitative.

Must your MCQ be answered by people?

One of my favorite questions was on a printer manufacturer’s survey:

“How many pages do you print in a month?”

I had no idea. I knew the answer was more than one and less than a full box of paper because I hadn’t bought a box of paper that month—but I didn’t feel sufficiently motivated to work out how many pages are in a full box. I guessed, wildly. Very poor data.

The real irony, though, was that my printer was connected to their customer feedback program and was giving them the exact figure all the time: their analytics should have told them.

Here’s another example that arrived in my inbox recently:

We need to ask visitors to our website whether pop-ups make them feel less like buying from us so that we can decide whether to remove pop-ups.

I’m sure that client must have some good business reasons for using pop-ups that make them hesitate about removing them, but asking people whether they “feel like buying” is a notoriously unreliable thing to do. They may feel like buying, but not actually buy, or feel unlike buying, but buy anyway. (We’ll return to this topic in Chapter 3 when we look at the “Curve of Prediction.”)

There’s a much better quantitative method for questions like this: A/B testing, where you publish two versions and use analytics to decide which one contributes better to the desired outcome. A/B tests and the many other different types of analytics silently observe what people do without bothering them with questions. These are contrasted with surveys in Figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4
Analytics and A/B tests are ways of observing how many people do something without asking them.

Do you want to find out “why”?

You may have spotted that we’re sneaking up on the four-way matrix in Figure 1.5. The quadrant we haven’t yet looked at is the top-left corner: observing to find out “why.”

It’s not always obvious why people are doing something. For example, if people tell you they can’t find things on your website, then search log analytics will tell you what they are searching for—but not why they are searching. Did they try searching straight away? Did they try a few clicks without success? Did they see your term for what they’re searching for but not recognize it because they had something different in mind?

Here’s another MCQ that I see quite often:

We need to ask visitors to our website the question: “What do you dislike about our site?” so that we can decide what to improve.

Figure 1.5
A matrix for choosing the right method.

Leaving aside the problem that “What do you dislike” doesn’t have a numeric answer, you’ve got the more fundamental problem that there isn’t a direct connection between “What do you dislike” and “What should we improve?” You need to know why people dislike something in order to get ideas about how to change it.

You might turn to interviews, but it’s unreasonable to expect most people to retain all the little details that made something easy or difficult. Observing them as they use the thing is much easier for them—and much richer data for you.

In a usability test, you can observe a participant who is tackling some tasks—often in a research facility. Or you can go out to observe people in their natural setting, a field study.

Consider “why” alongside “how many”

A four-way matrix always makes it look as if the ideas are separate, doesn’t it? Of course, in reality, the techniques complement each other.

• The route in Figure 1.6 is one that I took around the matrix for a client recently.
• Analytics showed that sales of one product had dropped.
• Usability tests revealed that people thought the website was no longer maintained, so the product must also be out-of-date.
• Interviews at the same time revealed that people often left a long gap between deciding to buy the product and actually using it.
• A survey told us that the out-of-date problem was affecting more people than the wait-to-use problem.

Figure 1.6
One of many possible routes around the matrix.

I would love to encourage you to try some triangulation.

Triangulation

is when you use a mixture of research methods and compare the results to improve your overall insights.

A draft presentation can help you decide between “why” and “how many”

A couple of years ago, I was chatting about surveys with user experience consultant Natalie Webb. Her tip was:

“Create a draft of your presentation, based on the results you expect to get from your survey.”

It seemed a strange idea to me at first, but the more I’ve tried it, the more I like it as a way of testing whether I’ve really thought enough about what I want to ask and whether the number that I will get as a result of my survey really will help me to make a decision—the “so what” of surveys in Figure 1.7.

Figure 1.7
A draft presentation helps you to think about the “so what?” of your survey.

I worried that by drafting the presentation first, I’d be somehow constraining the direction of the research—preventing my team from thinking freely about what they were doing, closing down what they might learn.

Gradually, I realized that this is part of the power of surveys. Because you’re finding out “how many” of something, you need to understand the “why” before you start. If you don’t yet know enough about “why,” then you should be choosing to start with observation and interviews.

Think about what sort of number you need

Thinking about the “so what” and the number that you’ll need for the decision you’ll make also helps with another point to consider now: what sort of number do you need as your result? It may seem early, but statisticians will tell you that you must work out your statistical strategy before you collect the data, not afterward.

Do you need to know the actual number of people who answer a question in a particular way? For example, when I helped with a survey about planning an office move, I wanted to know how many people said that when the office moved to the new location, their commute would become excessively long.

Is it the proportion who answer one way rather than another? For example, I wanted to compare the proportion of people who claimed they would leave if the office moved to a new location to the proportion who said they would be likely to accept the change.

Are you looking for a mean (the arithmetical average)? For example, I might have considered whether increasing the mean commute by more than an hour would kill the idea.

Are you looking for a median (the value right in the middle when you place them all in order from largest to smallest)? Means can get easily distorted by one or two outlandishly large values. If one person’s commute suddenly became nearly impossible—10 hours or more—that would greatly increase the mean, but the median wouldn’t be affected very much.

And for design, I’m often looking at ranges and modes. The range is the difference between the largest and the smallest values, so with a 10-hour commute and another commute that’s zero because the person lived in an apartment above the possible new location, my range would be 10 hours. The mode is the most frequent value, and something that I find I have to consider very carefully for many design challenges—both to design for the people who answered with the most frequent value and to make sure that I’m not accidentally excluding people who don’t fit “the norm” for any reason.

Or something else? You may be doing a comparative survey so you’ll be considering what you want to compare from this survey to the next, or a modeling survey where you’ll do all sorts of advanced statistical manipulations, or something quite different.

Whatever you’re planning to do with the answers to your survey, some careful thought at this stage about those statistics will be well worth the time you put into it—and may send you back to have another review of your Most Crucial Question and how you plan to use it.

Determine the time you have and the help you need

So, you have a Most Crucial Question, you know the decision you’ll make, and you’ve thought a bit about the type of number you need to make that decision. It’s a good moment to think about timing and who needs to be involved.

First, think about the time available:

• When do you need to have a result, and how much time can you put into it?
• If you’re lucky enough to have team members to work with, how much time can they spare?
• When will you deliver the report from the survey?

Next, think about the tools:

• Do you or your organization already have a survey tool?
• Do you know how to use it?
• Will you need to buy or subscribe to one?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, who else is involved?

• Who needs to be involved in the survey but isn’t part of your team, such as the privacy or legal people?
• Who will get the results from the survey?
• Who is involved in making the decisions based on the results?

Interview first, survey later

A common mistake is to think that you’ll do a survey first and then do follow-up interviews with some of the people who answer.

The rule is: interview first, survey later. Two especially useful types of interviews are:

• Interviews to find out what your defined group of people think about the topic of your survey (covered in Chapter 2)
• Cognitive interviews—a special type of interview just for survey questions—to help you discover whether the questions are working (Chapter 3)

And, in fact, to get the best results from your survey, you’ll complement these interviews with two other techniques from the matrix, aa noted in Figure 1.8:

• Usability tests of the questionnaire (Chapter 4, “Questionnaire”)
• A pilot test between the usability test and the survey itself (Chapter 5, “Fieldwork”)

Figure 1.8
We’ll use techniques from other parts of the matrix on our way to the survey.

If you want a couple of ideas for how to fit all those activities into the time you have available, then skip ahead to Chapter 8, “The Least You Can Do^TM.” A recent survey where I worked hard to get a single Most Crucial Question took me four days—spread out over a month, admittedly, but only because I had a week’s vacation in the middle.

What could possibly go wrong with the goals?

For many years, I was quite a purist about surveys. If you’d asked me “What can go wrong when choosing a goal for your survey?” I’d have answered, “Insisting on doing a survey when it’s the wrong method for the research problem.”

These days, I’ve mellowed. I know that sometimes colleagues or clients will carry on with a survey for all sorts of reasons, good and bad, when it’s not the ideal thing to do. If that’s happening to you, don’t worry. Keep making good choices, aim for a Light Touch Survey, and iterate as much as possible. No matter what the outcome is, you’ll definitely learn a lot about how to do a better survey next time.

Strictly between you and me, I’ve also become more relaxed about some of the other aims of this chapter. Couldn’t get down to exactly one Most Crucial Question? If you still have dozens of MCQs: definitely not. But five or six candidates for MCQ? Not so bad—you can whittle them down when you start working on them in Chapter 3. Not entirely clear about the decision you’ll make? Have a go, and revisit it when you’ve done some more steps. You can iterate, after all.

But I wouldn’t often admit that to the team or the client because I know that when we can agree on one Most Crucial Question with a clear decision to be made, the rest of the survey process is going to be much easier and quicker. So I try pretty hard to persuade them to get there.

To be valid, the goals and questions must match

This brings me to the first of the challenges that you’ll meet through the steps of the survey process. In this chapter, you’ve been looking at the first tentacle of the Survey Octopus: “The reason you’re doing
it,” as shown in Figure 1.9.

Figure 1.9
Lack of validity.

There’s always an error between each tentacle and the next one. In this case, it’s “lack of validity.”

Lack of validity

happens when the questions you ask do not match the reason why you are doing the survey and what you want to ask about.

Or in other words:

A survey is valid when the questions you ask are a good match to the reason why you are doing the survey and what you want to ask about.

So work really hard on the reason why you are doing it, the decision that you’ll make, and that Most Crucial Question.

At this point, you will know

To have an easier ride with the next steps in the survey process, it helps a lot of at this point if you know:

• The resources you have for the survey
• Who you want to answer your question—your defined group of people
• The decision you’ll make based on the results
• The Most Crucial Question to help you make the decision
• Whether the Most Crucial Question needs to be answered by people or not
• Whether a survey is the right thing to do

Back to Surveys That Work

Pain and Curiosity Precede Successful Design Systems Change with Dan Mall

While we’ve been developing design systems for years, we’re only just now learning how to create systems that are successful and sustainable. Dan Mall is the author of the soon-to-be released Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice, which explores the cultural elements that contribute to sustainable design systems.  

Not surprisingly, it’s usually pain that motivates change. In fact, companies occupying the number one spot in their respective markets usually have the least incentive  to change. As the saying goes, “Number two tries harder.” But even in the most-ready-for-change scenarios, design systems sit, at best, at a third level of priority. Dan asserts that the challenge is to approach design systems as a byproduct of the products and features that bring customers value. Otherwise, design systems will always be on the backburner. 

Dan and Lou discuss tricky topics around design systems:

• Designers’ fear of job loss to design systems.
• As we move toward sustainable design systems, who should make the decisions? Who does what and when? 
• How to approach design systems in a sustainable way.
• The best way for product and systems teams to collaborate.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Why culture, rather than product maturity, will determine whether design systems are successful
• How to address fears of job loss as a result of design systems
• How to keep people motivated through a systems change
• How product and design teams can work together efficiently
• How design systems have changed over time
• The role of governance in systems change
• Why following precedent within your company will get you farther faster

Quick Reference Guide

[0:00:32] Introduction of Dan Mall and his book Design that Scales – Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice

[0:04:49] On reaching cultural alignment

[0:07:01] What prompts design systems change 

[0:09:26] When jobs feel threatened

[0:12:21] Cultural signs and markers of design system success 

[0:16:59] November 29th, 2023 – Design in Product Conference

[0:18:20] On governance and sustainability

[0:24:44] On collaboration between product and design teams

[0:27:33] The evolution of design systems for ICs

[0:30:35] Design Systems University

[0:32:38] Dan’s gift to listeners

Resources and links from today’s episode:

Design in Product Conference on November 29, 2023 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/design-in-product

Design Systems University https://designsystem.university/ 

The Useful School https://usefulschool.com

Sample Chapter: Interviewing Users (2nd edition)

This is a sample chapter from Steve Portigal’s book Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd edition). 2023, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1

Interviewing Addresses a Business Need

A few years back, I worked with a company that had the notion to turn a commodity safety product—the hard hat—into a premium product. They would incorporate advanced features and then charge a higher price point. I don’t actually know where their idea came from, but one can imagine that they had seen all kinds of everyday products be reformulated to generate a higher scale of profit (think about Starbucks, gourmet salt, smartphones, Vitamix blenders, or horsehair mattresses). They sketched out a set of features that would improve the functional performance of the hard hat.

When I interviewed people who wore hard hats for work, I didn’t ask them to evaluate the features my client had been considering. Instead, I asked them generally about their work, so I was able to uncover insight into the most significant aspects of their experience. What they were concerned about fell into an entirely different category. They talked about leaving the job site to get lunch (for example) and how awkward they felt among other people while dressed in their prominent, brightly colored safety equipment. Indeed, makers of other safety equipment like bicycling helmets, safety footwear, and safety goggles had already redesigned their products to echo fashionable caps, boots, and sunglasses, suggesting this concern was being felt broadly.

If there were to be a TEDx version of this story, then this team would have become very excited about this new and surprising area of opportunity, despite it being different from what they had already invested in (financially, intellectually, and even emotionally). They’d have torn up those plans, drawn up new ones, and eventually raked in the dough. But you know that isn’t really how these things play out! In these interviews, we uncovered a significant business risk in pursuing their existing idea, so they stopped product development for their hard hat with extra functionality. On the other hand, these interviews identified another opportunity: to produce a hard hat that would address the issue of social performance. That wouldn’t have fit with their organization’s technical or cultural competencies, so they chose to avoid the business risk of developing a fashionable hard hat. What we learned from these interviews informed their decision not to bring any product to market.

When you get down to it, that’s what we do as user researchers: We gather information about users in order to inform critical decisions about design, product, or other parts of the business or organization. To do this means that we go to people’s homes, their offices, wherever their context is. We ask what they do. We ask them to show us. We get stories and long answers where we don’t always know what the point is. We want them to explain everything about their world to us.People may not have a ready answer as to why they do something, but we have to listen for why. We have to ask follow-up questions and probe and infer to try to understand, for ourselves, just why some-thing is happening the way it is. We make sense of this disparate information and show the way to act on what we’ve learned.

Interviewing is a specific method in user research to accomplish these goals. (User research is also referred to by other terms such as design research, user experience research, or UXR.) This book is about interviewing users (also referred to variously as site visits, contextual research, or ethnographic research) as a method to conduct user research, so beyond an in-depth examination of best practices for interviewing users, we’ll also consider user research in general. And we’ll also look at other user research methods that can be integrated and combined with interviews.

Nomenclature aside, the broad outline for interviewing users is:

• Thoughtfully planning out objectives, who we’ll interview, and how we’ll go about it
• Deeply studying people, ideally in their context
• Exploring not only their behaviors, but also the meaning behind those behaviors
• Making sense of the data using inference, interpretation, analysis, and synthesis
• Using those insights to point toward a design, service, product, or other solution

Learning About Users to Inform Decisions

Typically, when you interview people, you visit your users in their homes, their offices, their cars, their parks, and so on. But this isn’t always the case. When planning a project, ask yourself if it’s more insightful to bring participants in to see your stuff (say, prototypes you’ve set up in a facility meeting room) than it is for you to go out and see their stuff. Overall, your objective is to learn something profoundly new. (There are situations where quickly obtained, albeit shallow, information is beneficial, but that’s not what we’ll focus on here.)

Note: Every organization can benefit from research

Sometimes, companies declare that they don’t need to do user research. What they typically mean is that they don’t need to do generative user research (learning about people in order to identify product opportunities), but they are probably doing evaluative user research (testing the thing they are developing to make sure it’s usable by people). Denying the value of generative research (because, as they might say, people don’t know what they want and it’s the company’s mission to invent that anyway) belies a poor understanding of how user research is conducted and applied. For one thing, it’s not simply asking people “what they want.”

For another, it’s not credible that they possess an innate talent for building stuff that people love. Even if they themselves are users of the snowboards, photography equipment, or mixing gear that they make, they will choose and use those solutions differently than someone who is not inside their industry. They will be blind to differences in income, access, use cases, and so on. And they will have difficulty expanding their offering in an innovative way, because they are stuck in this model of being the user.

Often, the stated goal of interviewing users is to uncover their pain points. This approach mistakenly characterizes research with users as a sort of foraging activity, where if you take the effort to leave your office and enter some environment where users congregate, you’ll beheaded home with a heap of fresh needs. You can observe that people are struggling with X and frustrated by Y, so all you have to do is fix X and Y, and then all will be good.

Although this may be better than nothing, a lot of important information gets left behind. Insights don’t simply leap out at you. You need to work hard and dig for them, which takes planning and deliberation. Further complicating the foraging model is that what people in problem-solving professions (such as designers and engineers) see as “pain points” aren’t necessarily that painful for people. The term satisficing, coined by Herbert Simon in 1956 (combining satisfy and suffice), refers to people’s tolerance—if not overall embracing—of “good-enough” solutions.

Once while settling in for a long flight, I noticed that a passenger in the row in front of me had fashioned a crude sling for their iPhone using the plastic bag that the airplane blanket came in. They had twisted the bag into a makeshift “rope,” which they looped around the body of the iPhone and then jammed behind the latch that kept the tray table closed. They now had a (slightly askew) solution for watching their own device for the duration of the flight. Initially, I was critical of the ugly, inelegant result. But eventually, I realized it was beautiful in its own way—it was fashioned from the materials they had on hand. Since then, I’ve seen other examples of passengers making their own viewing solutions, and I’ve made a point of taking a picture. (See Figure 1.1 where the passenger has made an iPhone viewer out of the airline’s credit card brochure and some beverage napkins.)

Figure 1.1 An airplane passenger viewing stand, made from the materials found on board.

Contrast these good-enough solutions with a more purpose-built accessory (see Figure 1.2): the passenger would have to have known about it, purchased it, remembered to bring it, and carried it with them. Of course, the ideal solution—not just the raw materials—would be provided by the airline itself (see Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.2 TabletHookz is an accessory designed specifically to hold a mobile device in an airplane seat back for hands-free inflight viewing.

Figure 1.3 A device holder built into the airplane seat-back allows passengers to watch videos on their own devices.

Sample Chapter: Duly Noted

This is a sample chapter from Jorge Arango’s book Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes. 2024, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1

Notes Are for Thinking

When I was a boy, the beginning of school was one of my favorite times of the year. One day always stood out: when my mom took me to buy stationery. I loved getting new pens, pencils, and notebooks. A fresh notebook held the promise of clarity, order, and better grades. I mostly used Mead Trapper Keepers, a popular brand of loose-leaf binders. They represent how I managed notes as a kid: I’d write down what I heard during class and stash pages in that subject’s section, in chronological order. While studying, I’d revisit those notes. Occasionally, I’d discard old ones to make room.

By the end of the school year, I had a binder full of transcripts. They’d served their purpose, so I could toss them. Next year would bring new teachers, new classes, and new notebooks. I seldom revisited old notes. This basic approach was the start of my note-taking life. I’ve since learned that notes can be more than a means for capture and recall: they’re also a medium for thinking.

What Are Notes For?

My Mac’s dictionary defines a note as “a brief record of facts, topics, or thoughts, written down as an aid to memory.” But as with other common words, “note” has more than one meaning. We also speak of some financial instruments as notes. And, of course, notes are also the stuff of musical melodies. But in this book, we mean the first usage: brief written records that aid our minds.

Not everything you write down is a note. For one thing, as the definition says, notes tend to be short. Think sticky notes, not essays. Intent also matters: you make notes primarily to aid your thinking. Sometimes you write notes for others, but most often you do so for yourself. Some notes you “dash off,” while others you ponder. Most aren’t meant for publication; I’ve made many notes while writing this book, but writing the book’s text is different from note-taking. All notes augment your mind in different ways.

Remembering

Remembering might be the most common reason to take notes: you hear or see something you want to recall later. This is why, when you call a company’s help desk, the agent suggests you have a pen and paper at hand. It’s good advice: such calls yield case numbers, dates, and other details that you’ll forget quickly if you don’t write them down.

Transcribing

A common reason for taking notes is to recall what you heard during a lecture or video. For example, when attending a presentation, you may type into your laptop or scribble in your notebook. Doing so has a dual benefit: it helps you pay attention and produces a text that reminds you of what the speaker said.

Recording

Some professions, such as research scientists and medical doctors, benefit from keeping records of their work. This is a kind of remembering, but a bit more formal. It’s worth examining separately since such notes also provide legally admissible evidence when outcomes are contested. People in professions that require it take great care with their notes.

Learning

Sometimes you write things down not because you’re trying to remember a particular detail but because you’re trying to learn about a subject. Learning entails more than just remembering facts. For one thing, you must connect ideas at different levels of abstraction. For another, learning often happens in sessions spread over several days, weeks, or months, as in a class. Much of the note-taking discussed in this book focuses on learning.

Researching

When researching a subject, you want to recall the salient facts. And if you’re interviewing someone, you want to keep track of the most important things they said. In either case, you’re ultimately looking to synthesize what you learn so you can make better decisions. Notes aid the process.

Generating

Sometimes you take notes not to remember or learn something, but to generate new ideas. This is one of the most exciting uses of notes: your notebook becomes a collaborator in the thinking process. Putting thoughts down on paper (or on the screen) gives you fodder for reflection, leading to other ideas that you also capture.

You’ve experienced this when brainstorming using sticky notes on a whiteboard. Seeing notes on the board suggests other ideas. You move them around to form clusters, suggesting further ideas. A virtuous process follows.

Planning

Many people live by their agendas and bullet journals. When you have many things to do or track—as is often the case when managing long and complex projects—it helps to write things down. Sitting down with a calendar and a sheet of paper will help you plan more effectively than if you had to keep everything in your head.

Imagine you’re going on a trip, so you make a checklist of items to pack. Seeing items on the list will remind you of things you may have missed at first. You may also consider the priority of items on the list. (For example, your passport should probably be first.) Visualizing items and the relationships between them helps you prepare for the trip.

Communicating

Although you take most notes for your own sake, you also leave some for others. For example, I sometimes find food containers in our refrigerator with a sticky note that says, “Papa, don’t eat!” My kids know that, without this note, their snack might soon be gone. This fits the definition of “brief record,” even if it’s not meant for “recall.” These notes turn your surroundings into shared cognitive environments.

Fidgeting

While writing this book, I asked people on Twitter why they take notes. Bastiaan van Rooden memorably replied, “To slow down the monkey in my head.” I can relate: many people pay better attention when their hands are busy. In this case, the primary benefit of scribbling things down is keeping your attention focused; the marks on paper are a nice secondary benefit.

Note-Taking Media

Not only are there many reasons for taking notes, but there are also just as many different ways to do so. You can doodle with a pencil in a notebook, write with a marker on a sticky note, type into an app on your phone, draw with chalk on a sidewalk, or tie a string around your finger. In a pinch, you may even write on your skin.

While walking around Tahoe City, CA, my daughter saw a store she wanted to return to. Lacking paper, she wrote down its name on her hand.

Which is to say, you can make notes from whatever is handy—what matters is catching and preserving fleeting thoughts and observations. That said, it helps to be intentional: different note-taking media are suited for different needs.

Pen and Paper

There are good reasons why paper-based notes remain popular. With a bit of care, paper lasts a long time. Paper requires no batteries, and you don’t need a special app or device to read your notes; the paper itself is the medium. Paper is also portable and fast.

But paper also has its downsides. Copying paper-based notes requires specialized equipment (e.g., a photocopier) and lots of time. While notebooks are portable, large paper-based repositories (e.g., collections of notebooks) aren’t. You can’t search paper or link notes easily to each other. And with bound notebooks, you can only view notes in the order they were written. (Unless they’re indexed, which also takes time.)

Here is part of my collection of paper notebooks, spanning two decades. The only way I can find stuff in most of these books is if I know the date when I wrote the note.

Index Cards

Index cards are a convenient way around the constraints of notebooks. Since cards aren’t bound together, you can easily re-sort them. They’re ideally sized for note-taking: smaller than regular sheets of paper, but large enough to capture a single idea in some detail. And because they use thick stock, they stand up to manipulation.

You can use boxes to keep cards organized. When archived carefully, index cards provide one of the advantages of digital notes: random access. That is, you can jump directly to the note you need without having to flip through the rest. They don’t need to be stored in the order they were written; you can archive them alphabetically or in any other organizational scheme.

Because of this flexibility, index cards are a popular thinking medium for researchers and authors who keep and refer to lots of notes. Ryan Holiday, author of several popular books, says that his index card–based note-taking system:

has totally transformed my process and drastically increased my creative output. It’s responsible for helping me publish three books in three years (along with other books I’ve had the privilege of contributing to), write countless articles published in newspapers and websites, send out my reading recommendations every month, and make all sorts of other work and personal successes possible.

Holiday’s system consists of individual index cards with a single thought or quotation on each one. He writes a category label in the top-right corner of each card and stores these cards in one big box. But when working on a specific project, such as a book, he uses a smaller dedicated box for the project. Holiday learned this approach from his mentor, the author Robert Greene. Other authors, such as Vladimir Nabokov, also used index cards to organize their work.

Marginalia

Underlining key sentences and writing ideas on book pages is a common way of taking notes while reading. The obvious advantage is that note-taking happens in context: you capture ideas near (or on) the texts that sparked them, so they’re easier to understand later. But this is also their main downside: since they don’t stand on their own, these notes are harder to reorganize or relate to other notes.

E-books have an edge here. Digital marginalia can be more easily referenced, searched, backed up, and synced. But some people like to mark up physical books with a pen or highlighter. Many of the ideas in Holiday’s index cards come from his reading: he annotates books and articles as he reads them, marking passages that stand out and writing thoughts in the margins as he goes along.

Sticky Notes

Personally, I don’t like writing in books—but I still want the advantages of taking notes in context. Sticky notes provide a way around this dilemma: I read with a pad of small stickies and a pencil. Whenever I find an idea or passage that resonates, I write a few words on a sticky note and paste it on the book’s margins, so it protrudes from the page. In this way, it doubles as a bookmark.

Of course, sticky notes are helpful for more than annotating books. They’re also a mainstay of workshops, design studios, and other situations that require groups of people to think together. Using sticky notes, it’s easy to turn walls, whiteboards, windows, tabletops, and other ordinary surfaces into temporary placeholders for ideas. (More on this in Chapter 10, where we’ll discuss collaborative note-taking.)

Sticky notes’ main advantage is that they can be attached and reattached nearly anywhere on a smooth surface. Because of this, they’re ideal for exploring relationships between ideas. You can paste notes in any sequence and reorganize them later. That said, larger sticky notes aren’t suitable for storing ideas long-term; it’s impractical to keep walls and whiteboards covered in notes. (Of course, this doesn’t apply to the small sticky notes used to annotate books.)

Photographs

One way to get around sticky notes’ ephemeral nature is to take pictures of the wall or board before taking down the stickies. While photos aren’t strictly about making marks, they can be an effective way of capturing ideas and observations. For example, whenever I park in a large, unfamiliar parking lot, I take a photograph of a nearby landmark so that I can find my car later.

I took this photograph in the parking lot of Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park. Note I didn’t bother with proper framing; I didn’t expect to use this photograph for anything other than finding where I’d parked.

People used cameras as note-taking devices well before personal computers arrived on the scene. Around the mid-Twentieth Century, film-based cameras got small, fast, convenient, and inexpensive enough to serve effectively in this role. In a presentation to shareholders, Polaroid founder Edwin Land described the original (1944) concept for instant photography as

a kind of photography that would become part of the human being, an adjunct to your memory; something that was always with you, so that when you looked at something, you could, in effect, press a button and have a record of it in its accuracy, its intricacy, its beauty—have that forever.

The main advantage of photographing things you want to remember is convenience. You likely have a phone with an excellent camera in your pocket; no note-taking method is faster than taking it out, pointing it at something, and shooting. The obvious downside is that you’re limited to capturing what you see in the world—great for remembering where you parked, but less so for recalling abstract ideas.

Audio and Video

One way to remember what you were thinking is to record yourself saying it. Recording equipment used to be fiddly, bulky, and expensive, but smartphones have made recording ubiquitous. Software can transcribe your recordings so you can read and search for what you said.

Recordings are most effective at capturing what somebody says with high fidelity. While you may lose some thoughts when handwriting or typing notes, a recording will capture everything verbatim. This is also its downside: recordings don’t benefit from the real-time synthesis you do when using a slower medium. Still, some people love to record themselves “speaking their minds.”

Digital Notes

Most of the note-taking means we’ve highlighted so far existed in some form before computers. But now, we’ll focus specifically on digital note-taking. Almost five billion people have a smartphone, and many also use laptop or desktop computers. Most of these devices include note-taking apps, and people use them to write down all sorts of things, ranging from shopping lists to book notes.

Many digital note-taking applications mimic the abilities and superficial characteristics of analog (i.e., “real-world”) note-taking media. For example, Macs include an application called Stickies that lets you place sticky notes on your computer desktop. Well, not really: Stickies places a series of pixels that look like sticky notes on another series of pixels that function like a “desktop.”

WORKING NOTE: Install Obsidian

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, new digital note-taking tools appeared that brought to market capabilities previously available only via specialized software and often in research contexts. Several are worth exploring and investing in. But to make the ideas in this book more tangible, we’ll focus on one such tool: Obsidian.

Obsidian is a commercial software application created by a small team. As of this writing, it’s free for personal use and available on all major desktop and mobile computing platforms. It embodies key principles we’ll explore in this book, so it’s a great tool for learning. That said, you could use other tools to implement these practices. We’ll just focus on Obsidian for illustration.

(If you’re already using Obsidian or a comparable note-taking app, feel free to skip the rest of this section.)

To start, download and install Obsidian on your computer or mobile device. If the former, you can install it by visiting https://obsidian.md and following the instructions. If the latter, you can search for Obsidian in your device’s app store and install it from there.

Obsidian’s first screen gives you several options. If you’re using the software for the first time, you can either select Quick Start or Create a new vault. (The other options are mostly for use by existing Obsidian users.)

When you first launch Obsidian, you’ll have the choice to create a new vault. In Obsidian, a vault is where you store notes. You can create and manage as many vaults as you want. For example, I currently manage two vaults: one where I manage projects and another that serves as my primary long-term knowledge repository. To use Obsidian, you must create at least one vault.

Under the hood, a vault is simply a folder on your computer containing plain text files. So, if you decide to move on, you can still access your data in a universally compatible format. Go ahead and create your first vault and look around Obsidian’s user interface. In the next chapter, you’ll create your first note. But for now, just become familiar with the software.

After you create your first vault, Obsidian will open without any note selected. This is understandable since you haven’t created anything yet.

Obsidian’s user interface has a panel on the left that lists your available notes and a panel on the right that shows the currently open note(s). The parenthetical plural is because Obsidian lets you open several notes simultaneously, which you can view either in tabs or side-by-side.

Think of a typical war movie scene: a ragtag platoon planning an attack. The soldiers huddle close to the ground and, absent paper and pens, draw (literal) lines in the sand and move rocks and twigs to represent targets and units. The commander might say something like, “Hutch, you and Charlie stand here and give cover while Mack and I rush the compound.” One soldier might ask a question, and another will contribute an idea—all facilitated by a few rocks and dirt.

The improvised map gets the platoon “on the same page,” so to speak. By representing the battlefield as tangible things they can manipulate, they can better think through and communicate their plans, spotting obstacles and opportunities they might miss if they were trying to imagine the situation in their heads. You may have had similar experiences when working with colleagues around a whiteboard.

Once you understand that you think with things, you can explore ways to augment your thinking. The battlefield map and the whiteboard are examples of augmentations that are useful when collaborating with others. Notes are a similar augmentation. As with the whiteboard, you can use them to think collaboratively, but they’re also very useful when thinking by yourself.

In Genius, his biography of Richard Feynman, James Gleick writes about the role of notes in the physicist’s work. Starting from an early age, Feynman worked out problems in his notebooks. Later in life, in an interview with MIT historian Charles Weiner, he explained the role of his notes. Gleick writes,

He began dating his scientific notes as he worked, something he had never done before. Weiner once remarked casually that his new parton notes represented “a record of the day-to-day work,” and Feynman reacted sharply. “I actually did the work on the paper,” he said. “Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. Okay?”

To emphasize the point, notes aren’t merely a way to record your thinking; they’re part of where thinking happens. They are the means through which you understand and make sense of things. When making notes, you’re thinking on the page and beyond, experimenting with temporary models that describe how a part of the world might work. It’s a creative, generative act of discovery and clarification.

NOTABLE NOTE-TAKER: Gretchen Anderson

Gretchen Anderson is a product consultant, coach, and author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. While working on her book Mastering Collaboration, Gretchen built an outline using her computer. She used this outline to think through the high-level ideas in the book. However, the outline became constraining as she got into the details. “I started to lose track of it,” she explained. So, she switched to using physical sticky notes:

I was doing this at home, where I don’t have a whiteboard…But I do have lots of windows, so at one point, I busted out the sticky notes and had the medium-sized ones and one color for chapters and smaller different colored ones for main points and the stories that would buttress them so that I could create that kind of map that I could see all at one time. Interestingly, that happened late in the process, maybe three-quarters of the way through. You know, I was kicking myself like, “Gretchen, you know that you could have done this earlier!”…I probably couldn’t have done it any other way. I started out with an outline, I changed that outline to be something that was looser so that I could fit everything I was learning into it, and then I needed to kind of remix it again to make it something that people could follow and not just have it be a laundry list of stuff I learned.

By commandeering her walls and windows, Gretchen literally expanded her thinking surface. Moving from an outline to a two-dimensional map of ideas allowed her to see everything at once and “remix” it into a sequence that her readers could follow. Note that she used sticky notes of different colors and sizes, which allowed her to distinguish different structural elements at a glance.

Outlines are great for exploring hierarchical relationships, but not as effective when you want to visualize lots of stuff at the same time. Switching how you’re taking down ideas is a common way to get unstuck in complex creative projects. Different media have different capabilities and constraints: it’s important to be aware that you might have to switch at some point depending on what you’re doing.

Endnotes

As you see, there are many ways of taking notes and many reasons for doing so. But ultimately, you do it to extend your cognitive abilities. Thinking clearly is fundamental to everything you do, so mastering notes will help you in many aspects of your life.

As I mentioned in the introduction, this book focuses on digital note-taking. We’ll look beyond comfortable metaphors to new means of exploring ideas that are only feasible with computers. You’re not building a better Trapper Keeper, but something entirely different and more exciting. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before you start building your note-taking system, you need to cover a few fundamentals.

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