Beyond layout: Design thinking

This is not merely an aesthetic consideration — but also one of product value and usefulness. If one considers the sole value of design to be making pieces fit on pages, an ‘assembly line’ solution may seem attractive. However, architecting publications to meet reader needs is something more complicated, nuanced and essential.

We see design as identifying and understanding user needs and business requirements, conceptualizing solutions and crafting products that directly address those needs.

Design thinking is a term often used with — at best — a loose definition. Tim Brown, of IDEO, uses it to mean process-oriented solutions, product design techniques and a means of channeling new and different ideas that are responsive to user needs. Certainly Design Thinking is much more than graphic design and layout.

It’s easy to argue that Gannett’s consolidation effort will hurt the graphic design of the daily newspapers: they may feel more generic, less tied to specific communities and designers will almost certainly be less involved in the content gathering process. But, by Brown’s definition, this may actually be an example of clever Design Thinking on the part of Gannett.

This consolidation could allow Gannett to redirect its resources to other things. Put more reporters on the streets, shift more design focus to the online properties or explore new kinds of visual, digital storytelling.

The proof will be how Gannett uses their savings. Passing along the money as dividends or bonuses would just be cost cutting. Use the savings as an opportunity to reposition value resources… that’s Design Thinking.

Mass media can be delineated in three phases: creation, consumption and distribution. Each phase has an impact on revenues and expenses for a media company. And each phase is undergoing significant changes spurred on by new technologies.

• Creation: For decades the capital cost of equipment owned by large publishing houses, movie studios, music labels and news organizations effectively shut out competitors. The generation of new media content has been democratized by a wave of lower cost tools. There are new ways for projects to be funded and new means of automating the production of content.
• Consumption: Changing patterns are making consumers savvier and more fickle about their media diets. Content must be tailored to an individual’s preferences and made available in convenient forms or it will be ignored.
• Distribution: New services and devices are changing how content reaches consumers. The same content may be available in several forms at different price points. And consumers expect content instantly even in forms that used to take weeks or months to create and deliver.

Content Creation
Modern newspaper printing presses can cost upwards of $10 million per press unit and large newspapers have as many 40. The movie Avatar cost nearly $280 million to produce, according to the Los Angeles Times, including developing new 3D technology. But at the same time individuals have access to a $200 Flip Camera can record comparable HD video to cameras that a couple of years ago were only the province of professional videographers with $10,000-15,000 cameras.

For years mass media companies were the gatekeepers of news, information and entertainment in large part because they were the only ones with means to produce content in high enough quality to appeal to a mass audience. The processes they developed and the equipment they used meant that average citizens could never dream of producing content on par with what employees of these companies could create.

News organizations are co-opting user submitted content — often cell phone cameras or consumer-grade audio or video for breaking news content. CNN’s iReport reported by people on the scene — not journalists — have provided valuable coverage of many important stories like the shootings at Virginia Tech and the plane crash landing on the Hudson. This kind of content costs little or nothing for media companies but is only possible because of advances in technology, particularly the Internet. According to the Pew Research Center 37% of Internet users have participated in creating or reacting to news.

But CNN’s competition is not just other TV networks like Fox News, CBS, ABC or NBC. The YouTube video “David After Dentist” has 58 million views and was recorded on a mobile phone camera. According to David’s father, the video has earned almost $100,000 in YouTube ad sharing. Google does not share what the revenue sharing split is, but compare that to NBC’s 30 Rock: A single episode of that show brings in about 7 million viewers and very expensive to produce.

The book publishing industry has been especially impacted by the changing economics. Instead of prospective authors shopping their books to publishing houses who evaluate how likely they are to sell, entrepreneurs can pitch their own book ideas directly to the people who might buy the book. Using tools like KickStarter.com experienced authors, like Robin Sloan, can pitch their books, outline a timeline and explain what the project will cost. Robin thought he needed $5,000 to start his novel, but his pitch ended up earning him almost $14,000 in pledged money. Everyday people can pitch in and once the fundraising hits a target level the writing begins.

Rupert Murdoch-owned MySpace has its own record label — just for artists found on the website. And in 2009, MySpace launched a contest, “Rock the Space,” that has aspiring musicians submit demo tapes through the website. The winner gets signed and their album released. Instead of having to pay record label employees to find the next big thing, Murdoch has harnessed the fans to help tell him who sign. Over a three-week period in 2009 MySpace received more than 19,000 entries, 40,000 votes and 40 million views — according to Saatchi and Saatchi.

The performers, producers and stars are some of the largest costs for most mass media companies. And technology is even affecting this part of the business. Developed here at Northwestern, Stats Monkey is an automated software tool that ‘reads’ baseball box scores and play-by-play and — without human intervention —writes a baseball story. These new kinds of automated stories, pulled from existing data, mean that publishers potentially can cover far more events without ever increasing their staff sizes.

Content Consumption
Part of the changing media landscape is the death of appointment viewing. Media consumers used to have much more predictable media consumption habits:

1. Reading a newspaper over breakfast
2. Listening to car radios on a commute into work
3. Watching television sitcoms or reading a book at night after dinner

But the explosive growth of both the Internet and web-enabled, mobile devices has meant radically altered consumption patterns. Now users consume news, information and entertainment in small bites throughout the day. Televisions shows like NBC’s the Office have created webisodes: short 2-3 minute videos that fit this much more frenetic consumption pattern.

Also families are far less likely to get together to watch television or a movie together. Research from Nielsen and the Pew Foundation has shown many people consume multiple media types at the same time. This means that movies are more targeted and that viewers are much more likely to publicly evaluate and rate them. Instead of having days or weeks to prove themselves, new movies rise or fall based on social media reviews like TwitCritics which gathers tweets about movies and aggregates by them sentiment or Rotten Tomatoes which aggregates reviews from a variety of blogs of other blogs or reviewing sites. This means that content producers cannot ignore social media and need to be an active participant in guiding their products debut.

Content Distribution

“Not that it’s anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.”
— Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider, Jan. 30, 2009

Perhaps most critical to the success of mass media companies has been their control over the means of distributing the content they create. Ensuring their content appears on televisions sets, at movie theaters, in your mailbox or at the bookstore meant that content producers had access to massive audiences and could generate equally large profits. However, the rise of the Internet has meant that individuals have access to all kinds of new tools. These content producers are no longer reliant on the media gatekeepers to get their information, entertainment or news into the hands of consumers.

Digital video recorders, like TIVOs, and the growing importance of web-based distribution have changed television strategies. According to the Nielsen ratings, some entertainment shows like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy or Fox’s House are receiving a full-additional ratings point in the three days after their debut from DVR recorded viewings. Audiences are much less likely to flow from one show to the next on the same channel and television advertisers are no longer guaranteed that their content will be viewed.

When the Chicago tech company 37 Signals wanted to publish a ‘book’ about their process of software creation they completely cut out traditional book publishers. ‘Getting Real’ was offered to readers in three ways: Buy the PDF ($19), purchase a printed copy ($25) or read it free online. The PDF sold more than 30,000 copies and sales of the printed book made more than $500,000. But even the book was not published in traditional fashion. Instead 37 Signals used Lulu to self publish. Instead of earning 10-20% in royalties the companies received 80% of the revenue. Although self-publishers are still effectively blocked from bookstores this revenue disparity may pressure traditional publishers.

Self-publishing is not the only change impacting the book business. On-demand printing and digital books are even more likely to force changes to the industry. The Espresso Book Machine enables the on-demand printing of paperback books. Described as an ATM for books, this machine can produce a book about every five minutes and has more than a half-million titles stored in its database. Much as RedBox competes with Blockbuster with access at grocery stores, pharmacies or fast food restaurants, the Espresso Book Machine device means that a coffee shop can compete with Barnes & Noble. Or a smaller bookstore can offer the same number of titles of a superstore.

Almost all publishers are looking to new platforms to deliver content to consumers on the go. Digital music players like the iPod and platforms like iTunes have hurt most local music shops and are potentially weakening music labels. In the iTunes music store, all music is equally accessible. The Kindle, Nook and iPad make it easy for consumers to take digital books with them and to buy new content on the go. This means that marketing digital versions of movies, books and music does not have to be just about brand and title awareness. Instead consumers properly motivated can buy and begin watching immediately. But just as instantly, those same users can share their pleasure or displeasure about the content they just purchased.

Conclusion
This changing media landscape leaves lots of opportunities for new ideas: new ways of creating content, new models for how it will be consumed and new ways to distribute it. The only thing that is completely clear — historic models will not continue without changes.

The mini-tower is an ingenious little device that boost AT&T’s weak network coverage by translating the cell phone signal and transmitting information over a user’s home network network instead of relying on AT&T’s balky towers. This concept isn’t unique to AT&T (Sprint and Verizon also offer similar services) but astoundingly consumers not only pay for the bandwidth, the cell minutes (which still count against monthly totals) and also $150 for the device.

This new system puts broadband Internet providers, like the cable companies and actually AT&T, in an interesting position. Why should they have to cover the cost of sending AT&T voice signals over their networks? This is not a problem if AT&T is both the consumers cellular and broadband supplier. But since a Federal court struck down the FCC’s right to enforce net neutrality — the principle that broadband suppliers would have to carry all data at the same rate — Comcast or other broadband providers appear to have the right limit bandwidth used by AT&T mini-towers.

Maybe AT&T’s greed in both charging consumers and using their broadband access instead of providing a working cellular network will end up being a good thing… if it forces AT&T to support net neutrality.

1. The closed world of the App Store may be a mistake, but the Internet has enabled cloud-based applications like Gmail, Flickr or Photoshop Online. While you cannot download these applications, you do not need to. That too is a powerful legacy of the Internet.
2. Many iPad and iPhone content producers are confusing Apps with Websites. HTML 5 allows the offline viewing of content. If the only difference between a media company’s Apple-approved App and their Website is off-line viewing they are missing the point. App store items should take advantage of something device specific — like the accelerometer or the microphone. Otherwise just make a Web app.
3. Flash has nothing to do with the legacy of the Internet. Flash technology is every bit the inaccessible Gated Community that the Apple App store is. Worse still, Flash makes Web-content inaccessible and violates most Web standards. If anything Apple, inadvertently, may be saving the Internet.
4. Apple is not marketing the iPad as a replacement for a laptop or netbook. An issue not widely discussed is the fact that the iPad needs to be synced to a computer running iTunes before it can be used. The iPad is meant to be a new kind of device — but most importantly an additional device.
5. As long as Safari still has a prominent place on the iPhone the Internet is alive and well. Will the iPad change the Web? Maybe. But if Websites have been created semantically, a new CSS layer will just present the information differently — everything the Internet is meant to do.

As I explore the relationship between iPhone and iPad applications I started thinking about the screen dimensions and proportions of the iPad screen.

The iPad has the familiar home button and a similar bezel between the screen and the device edge, but so does my MacBook Pro. I fell into the trap of imaging my 15″ MBP display freed of it’s keyboard as a stand in for the iPad.

Not so. After some measuring and basic calculations I scribbled out a paper prototype. The screen is small. Much smaller than I expected or was imagining. Putting it side-by-side with an iPhone was especially enlightening — the dimensions not related and that changes how to handle buttons and other controls. Size matters and it changes how I am designing for the iPad.

Want to save some time, download the form for yourself. Here is a PDF for printing or an Adobe Illustrator file if you want to use it for mockups.

No, it’s not how liberally Steve Jobs borrowed from Orson Scott Card’s vision of Ender’s desk — although that was a good excuse to re-read the brilliant Ender’s Game. But it dealt with where exactly does the iPad fit into the spectrum of smart phone to laptop computer.

For me this question involved thinking about how I would use an iPad. What makes my iPhone smarter than my circa-2000 Denso mobile phone from Sprint is the addition of some very computer/laptop-like functions: e-mail, Web browsing, music playing and other applications. So other than screen size I was wondering what is the difference between the iPad and either my iPhone or my MacBook Pro.

In reading the Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for the iPad I found a distinction I didn’t expect. Apple tells me the iPad is NOT a computer:

Although iPad applications can allow people to create and manipulate files, this does not mean that people should have a sense of the file system on iPad… On iPad, there is no application analogous to the Mac OS X Finder, and people should not be asked to interact with files as they do on a computer.

But that left me wondering what defines a computer — at least to Apple’s user interface designers. Is it the exposure of a file system? As more and more devices share information over the Internet, the dividing line between devices that are computers and those that are not will get harder to draw.

The next generation e-mail using, Web-browsing mobile phones will be so ubiquitous that it will be silly to discuss smart phones — every phone will be smart. But that still leaves a category to be defined. Will the iPad be an example of a tablet — an internet-enabled device larger than a phone, but without a keyboard? A tablet computer? Or despite Apple’s guidelines just a computer in the shape of tablet?

1. Long-form, magazine stories are not easy to read on mobile devices. What is the future of long-form if — as I suggested — journalism’s future is not the Web but new devices? *

   I answered by saying that journalists need to be more sophisticated about serving the right kind of content to the right audience depending on the device the audience is using. On a smartphone audio is always an option. Doing more to reformat the text or break it up would make it more device friendly. And new platforms like e-book readers and tablets may be better options for long-form stories. The key is not to pretend that televisions are radios, that smart phones are magazines or that tablets are laptops. Let each device have the type and format of content most suited to it.

2. Another student asked if I was concerned that proprietary OSes (for the iPhone, Kindle & Palm Pre) and formats (he meant Flash) would limit the potential of content distribution? *

   The proprietary OS issue worries me less — it reminded me of the late 80s when software development was very platform specific. The marketplace forced developers to make the software cross platform and created common user experience regardless of where the software lived. Besides most users are really using an App or a Web browser to get data from the Internet so the content itself is still not locked down.

   But what about Flash and Apples iPhone/iPad? Sadly I wasn’t prepared to quote Jeffrey Zeldman: “Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out” or John Gruber: “Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they’re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous… Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere.”

   The issues with Flash will solve themselves — either mobile devices will find a to run Flash or designers will present their content without it. Technology issues on new platforms are real, but pay walls and and exclusive content deals are a more insidious threat because consumers, just like developers, can decide they can live without journalism if its not accessible.

But what I didn’t anticipate was the social consequence. I was used to scanning my friends’ rows of CD cases to see what was new or different. It was a way to learn about new music and about them. The iTunes-organized digital music that replaced my CD collection was more convenient and practical but so much less social.

The Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet promise more of the same. I’ll be able to take my books, magazines and newspapers anywhere but they’ll be totally private. If I feel like claiming I’m reading Faulkner but secretly it’s Dan Brown no one would know looking at my bedside table.

I have no doubt that I will love how the next generation of eBook readers makes my personal library portable but I know I’ll miss the ladder I will, now, never need.

UPDATE: The New York Times has made it official that they will charge for Online Access.

In essence, news, which readers spent decades paying for and then a decade not paying for, would suddenly have a price tag again.

It would seem to be a difficult challenge to convince readers to pay for something that was free only recently and is free elsewhere — except that this is hardly a new idea. Bottled water companies have been incredibly successful doing just that.

Tap water had been practically free for decades when bottlers started pouring it into plastic containers and selling it for prices much higher than milk or gasoline.

So how could this model help media companies?

• Focus on readers’ fears: Bottled water is trumpeted as cleaner and safer than tap. News companies like the Times need to convince users that all information is not equal. The Times is better sourced and more trustworthy than its rivals.
• Pump up the benefits: Bottled water was prompted as a healthy alternative to soft drinks and coffee. Media companies can focus on the value of informed citizenry and the economic advantages of keeping up with the news.
• Preach portabilty: You can grab water on the go and take it anywhere. Media companies need their information to be available on any device, anytime and anywhere. Charge for information on new devices and platforms. eBook readers, smartphones and tablets can all be new revenue streams because readers don’t have an expectation of free content — yet.
• Emphasize the brand: Water from Fiji probably doesn’t actually taste that much better than tap water. Media companies like the Times and the Wall Street Journal are luxury brands but don’t really portray themselves as such. These companies need focus on showing their products as status symbols.

It will take more than just marketing, but it could be possible to get people to pay for news and forget that they ever minded paying.