Marney Morris on the Art of Interactive Software Design
An Interview by John Gehl

Educom Review:
How do you explain your profession to someone who asks you what you do?

Marney Morris:
Well, I'm an interactive designer, so I would want to know a little more about that person before I answered. But I would primarily say that I am a designer, working with a very bright team of other designers to adapt information technology to learning. This new medium has several advantages that we haven't had previously in books or audiovisuals or anything that went before. First, there is real-time delivery, so that you know what you are learning is the latest. Second, there is collaboration, allowing you to talk to anybody in the world about common interests. Third, there is interactivity, so that when you take an action the medium can respond with immediate feedback. Those three things combine to make the new technology very different from any learning tool or experience we've had before, except that provided directly by other human beings.

ER:
What kinds of clients does your company do work for?

MORRIS:
We worked for worldwide clients, primarily with communications companies like AT&T and Disney or retail companies like The Limited and Clinique. I started the company in 1984 and so we did work for most of the major hardware and software companies that were just launching products. We did rollouts for Apple, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft's and Adobe's new products; we were there for most of those beginnings.

ER:
Give us an example of what you did for any of them.

MORRIS:
Well, when companies needed a screen-based component to their marketing or their rollouts, they would come to us. For instance for Microsoft, when you went into a retail store, you would see an attract loop about Excel or Word running on a computer. Then you would click, and learn the features and benefits of the product. What we really became masters of, was engagement, because you could see people walk away from a screen, and you'd say, Oh, I've got to change that; it didn't grab or interest them.

ER:
And how would you figure that out?

MORRIS:
Well, that's the most wonderful thing about designing for this medium, because you would figure it out on the fly. We'd do things for trade shows. We would set up a demo the first day, before the show started, when everybody else was doing setup, and then we'd watch people walk by and look at our demo. If they walked away or they didn't like something, we could change it right then, which you would never do with video.

ER:
What kind of thing would you change?

MORRIS:
Frequently we would shorten the text, we would change the timing, we'd put things in a different order. We'd take some things out if they didn't like them - why bother having them? The nice thing about communication is that the more time you have to design a piece, the briefer it can be. Lots of times we'd delete things if they weren't sufficiently engaging. This real-time editing with this medium is so wonderful. You just couldn't do it with video or print. And one of the funniest things about designing, you can ask the users and they will tell you just what they think, they always will, and you can change it and ask again, Does this work? Yes or no?

ER:
What was your background?

MORRIS:
I have a degree in physiology. My interest was in metabolism and endocrine systems, which actually isn't that far off the mark because a lot of what science teaches you to think rigorously, and a lot of the systems that I was interested in translate into computer systems, or the way computer programming is going. So it's kind of the same thought process. I also have a degree in fine art - painting. I pretty much put myself through college doing graphic design. So it all merged together.

ER:
When did it merge, and how?

MORRIS:
It merged in 1983, the first time I used a personal computer. All the lights just went on, and I knew this was what I wanted to do. I moved back to Palo Alto, where I grew up, and started a company. I never looked back.

ER:
What are the most important things you've learned since you started?

MORRIS:
I'm so lucky, because we have worked with some of the best people in the industry. I mean, they really trained us. But what I've learned personally is to trust your instincts and always trust the user. Show them things and get response. We've also learned a process of iteration, which is get things up on the screen as quickly as you can and get them in front of people and change them and change them and change them. It's the only way to design for this medium.

ER:
You've seen a lot of other multimedia efforts that are out there - what your general rating of their quality?

MORRIS:
Well, I think everything is an honest effort, because it is hard to work in this medium. I think you have to view everybody's work in terms of what they are learning. A lot of work is very heavy on the technical side. And you just have to say, well, that's what they were pursuing at that moment. Our work is much more skewed towards the communications side. The technical requirements brought an influx of technical people into multimedia, and we've tried to move it more toward the communication side and let all the technology fit beneath it. As technology evolves, you can swap out the technology below the interface. We are interested in the communication with the user - the top-level design. Of course, we are very conscious of the technical design below because you always have to design for your technical constraints. But we always say that the primary thing is to connect with the user. Technical stuff is secondary. And I think a lot of the work I see is the other way around.

ER:
And that's just because the people who do this tend to be technical?

MORRIS:
Yeah. That's what's more interesting to them. Inevitably people work on the part that's interesting to them. It's like photography. A lot of photography magazines are devoted to lenses and cases and all kinds of technical things. If I read a photography magazine, it's Aperture or something more on the aesthetic side. There's room for everybody, but that's how I would evaluate other people's work - in terms of our sensibility, which is more on the communications side and the visual side.

ER:
How big is your company now?

MORRIS:
Well when we were a service company, we were up to twenty-two people. This was a year and a half ago. Now we're just doing one product. We've pared down to nine people now and most are people that I have worked with over the years. It's the dream team. It's just the best group of people I've ever been privileged to work with. And they are all very excited about this SprocketWorks project, and I think that's why a couple of old employees are involved - because they really wanted to work on this.

ER:
What kinds of people are they?

MORRIS:
We divide our company pretty clearly into designers and engineers. That is not to say that they don't work closely together. But the engineers are computer scientists and they have a strong background in problem-solving in a technical language. And the graphic designers all have graphic design degrees and are very brilliant in visual language and visual communication. And both groups have such respect for each other that they work together very well.

ER:
Well, tell us more about SprocketWorks.

MORRIS:
SprocketWorks. It's a learning product to help people form a model of the world and how it works. For example, say you want to know about classical music. You click on Topics and you see all of the topics you might want to choose from. You click on Music. You go to a time line of classical composers and as you drag across the name of each composer, you hear his music. If you click on his name, you see a screen with selections of his music that you can click to hear. So very quickly you hear the music, you know who the composer is, you see his relation in time, and you also hear a body of his work. We have very little text in our product. It's all about understanding the structure.

ER:
Give us another example.

MORRIS:
Another good example would be the Solar System. Choose Space as the topic. You click on Solar System and you see all the planets orbiting around the Sun. When you click on any planet you zoom closer to it. We're reality based, so all the images are real photographs. The more you click, the closer you go to the planet. If you click out, you come back from the planet, out to the planet orbits, then out to the Milky Way. So everything is designed to be simple but to be the way information is organized most naturally. Once you have a structure, you can go to lots of other places - teachers, parents, encyclopedias - and learn detail. But we just want to provide a structural map to start with.

ER:
Contrast it to the way the Web works, in general.

MORRIS:
Oh, well, the Web is just an exuberant place, isn't it? When I described the solar system - all those beautiful planets in there came from the Web, the NASA web site. The Web is a great place to find anything you want to look for - but without a structure, you could wander for days in the Web and never know whether what you exactly wanted to see was right there! We feel that our greatest contribution would be to create a general view of how the world is structured before sending someone off to the Web to find all the rich details about a subject. The Web is such a wonderful collection of idiosyncratic efforts that you are never going to see it all structurally defined.

ER:
So what you are adding, among other things, is structure?

MORRIS:
We are adding a mental structure. We are not trying to organize the Web, because there are lots of browsers that are trying to do that. But, yes, structure - a place to start. You know, most learning is common sense. If you give people a place to start, a place to stand, they can take it from there. For instance, if you're interested in animals, you see a taxonomy structure on our site and you can understand how animals all relate to one another. You can see that dinosaurs are closer to birds than to reptiles, and that sort of thing. Kind of see how everything fits.

ER:
Would you be willing to say that SprocketWorks lies somewhere between the complete freedom of the Web and the rather strict linear format of a course, or a textbook? In other words, you are not just sending a learner to the library and saying there's a lot of good stuff in there, or sending him or her to the Web and saying there's a lot of good stuff out there and go find whatever it is. You are taking it topic by topic and presenting it somewhat the way a course or a textbook would.

MORRIS:
I think that's a good characterization. We'd like to take the best of both worlds. So you have the structure of a course, but you have the sense of freshness that you get on the Web.

ER:
Is it possible for someone simply not to click enough - and therefore miss out on many of the ideas embedded in the material? Do you worry about that?

MORRIS:
Yes, it's a big worry. We put SprocketWorks in front of people all the time and if there's a place they don't click, we notice, and we fix it. For a lot of our topics we have Forward and Back arrows in the lower right corner and people wouldn't see them, and we pondered about it for a long time - we didn't want the arrows to blink or be annoying but we really wanted people to know that there was more in there that they hadn't experienced. For example, in our material on flying, you go to the instrument panel of a plane and you roll over the instruments and you hear what they are. And people went, Oh, that's nice, and then they left without realizing that on the next screen you could roll over the flaps of an airplane and make them move and hear what they were called. So we put a little sprocket, because our product is called SprocketWorks, in the lower right corner, and made it turn there, which kind of works with the interface of the whole product, and every time you see that sprocket turning, it attracts your attention but it's not annoying. It's almost like a fish in a fish tank. It's pleasant. You know it's there. And we found that when we did that, people then see the arrows below it and click to go ahead if they want to. I mean it's fine if they don't want to click, but our job is to make sure that they know they can click if they want to learn something more.

ER:
How did you choose the name SprocketWorks?

MORRIS:
Naming things is so hard. And I have to say I deferred to the team. The guys who were working on Sprocketworks named it. We worked with naming professionals and pestered everybody we knew for ideas, but ultimately the SprocketWorks name stuck. I'm sure a lot of things get named that way. I finally had to say, "You guys have your hearts in it and this is a name you like and I'll go with it. Fine." So SprocketWorks pretty much means that when you get to the product you see all these sprockets turning around and you can click on the one that says 'Topics' or the one that says 'Go Online' or whatever. The whole thing kind of feels like a happy machine. And sprockets turn out to be a good metaphor for the things we are trying to do - seeing the relationships among things.

ER:
So far, you've been working primarily at the elementary school level, is that right?

MORRIS:
Well, initially we thought the age group would be 8 to 15. But the funny thing is, when we've shown this product, we've found that people of all ages like it. Three- and four-year olds like it because the interface is so simple, and that text has voice associated with it, so even if they can't read, they can interact. And teenagers and college students like it because basic concepts that might be frustrating to them can be made clear. For example, we have a model of a cylinder filled with gas and you can compress the volume, or let more molecules in, or turn on a Bunsen burner. And you see the molecules speed up. Well, eventually, you can blow it up if you want to. So it turns out to be fun for elementary school kids, but very seminal for kids who are just learning basic Chemistry. PV=nRT. I've been dreaming about this project since I took Chem. I, which was a lot of years ago, because it was so hard and frustrating for a lot of my classmates - and me, too, sometimes - because there wasn't much conceptual modeling, mostly equations and number problems. I've rambled a little bit, but the point is, I think kids will use it from age 3 or 4 to college. And then we have a lot of adults who say, "Forget kids; I want this product for myself." So that's pretty wonderful.

ER:
And you're not tempted to go that way?

MORRIS:
Oh, yeah, we are; we've stopped saying there is an age group for this product. We took the product over to our friends who have a kids research company here in Silicon Valley and they said, "Stop saying it's an age-group. Just put it out there and let the market do what it will with it." That's pretty antithetical to current software marketing strategy, but I think it's going to work. We'll just have to see, but the response has been good.

ER:
You're teaching now at Stanford; what are you teaching?

MORRIS:
Interaction Design, in the engineering department. Terry Winograd has put together a wonderful program there. For years he's been bringing people in from the community to be guest lecturers, and sometimes it evolves into having your own class. That's what happened to me. It's an interesting group of students-undergraduates as well as Ph.D. and Masters candidates. They are very keen and very bright, and it's really a great experience. It's an interdisciplinary course. The class is in engineering but people come over from design, psychology, business, even art. It's more engineering than anything else, but they do come from other places.

E.R.:
What do you find hardest to get across to students?

MORRIS:
You know, every group is different, because everyone has their own concerns. So I think the hardest thing to figure out is not how to get material across, but how to understand what the audience really wants and needs. I always try to start with a basic structure, but modify on the fly. Sensing who they are is the hardest thing.

ER:
Well, that's the hardest thing for you. What's the hardest thing for them?

MORRIS:
Okay, let's see. I think the hardest thing for them is letting go of their preconceptions. You know, the old 'every problem looks like a nail if you have a hammer'. So, for example, an engineer might think, Well, this is an engineering problem, or this is a hardware problem. Not to generalize about engineers - some of the best designers I've met are engineers. But I think that, in general, the problem for any designer is letting go of your expectations and really listening to the user and always taking it back out to them and paying attention to their responses. We've had clients that did user testing but they wouldn't look out the one-way mirror at the people using the product. They'd be having lunch and talking with each other! So even though they'd be going through the motions of user-testing, they weren't really that interested in the users. Of course, that's an exception; in most user-testing, people do pay attention. But I would say that, to me, the most significant thing is just letting go of your preconceptions and watching what the user's actually doing. Being surprised and then adjusting.

ER:
Are interactive designers usually artists?

MORRIS:
Well, I think that people who study the visual arts have a big advantage. We tend not to hire anyone who doesn't have a graphic design degree. Well actually, we did hire two people from architectural school and they were both great. But you really have to have a solid graphic and visual language and a certain way of thinking, I think, as a foundation for interactive design.

ER:
You mentioned people coming over from the business school. Are they artists who just happen to be in the business school?

MORRIS:
No, those students have a different interest, rather than just straight interaction design. And I think that - I'm conjecturing here - most business students are interested in the area as a market - you know, there's so much involved in launching a product besides designing and building it - funding, marketing, sales channel - all those business issues that revolve around software. So maybe they are not wanting to be hands on professional designers, but still finding it a very fascinating and interesting area.

ER:
Let's talk some more about your methodology. If you were going to work with the people at, for example, the Medical School, to develop a huge collection of modules on medicine, what would you start doing? How would you do a project like that?

MORRIS:
The first thing we would do is find people in that school who really cared about that subject and who were communicating it already. This technology is fabulous for certain learning paradigms, but so much learning is still based on all the other talents and skills that people already have developed. For example, when we started working with The Limited, which is a clothing company, we talked to all the buyers and asked them, "What are you doing now to work with the computer systems that you have?" We got what they called their 'cheat sheets', these pencil-based sheets with which they were actually doing their work. The best buyers had two or three assistants who carried all these binders around and erased and wrote in new things. We looked carefully at what they were doing. And we asked them all what they liked about their existing computer systems. So the very first place to start with a large project is to find people who are already working with those issues and look at how they are starting to solve them. And then make their job easier by applying the technology to their design. If I were going to be even more methodical about it, I would say you would start by identifying all your parameters. What are your technical limitations? Does it have to be on the Web? Is this a CD? Is it in-house? Is it behind a firewall? You start with your technical limitations and then you look at all your resources. What is the whole scope of material that needs to go in there? And then you consider the political issues. Who do you have to please? Where is the funding coming from? When do those deliverables have to be met so people will buy into it and agree that you can move it on? Doing a large project always involves a lot of agreement and requires studying people's expectations and getting them excited about it. Because you want everybody to participate and feel a part of it. That's a giant part of doing a large project. So once you know all those things, you immediately start putting things on screen and showing them to everyone who's part of the project and getting their feedback and then making changes. Always making changes!

ER:
Is it conceivable to you that you or someone you know will have that kind of project - to create the materials for a substantial part of a degree, let's say a medical degree?

MORRIS:
You know, it's interesting. I think that people are chipping away at pieces of that. Things look very different now than when I took anatomy at UC-Davis twenty years ago. I mean there are some fabulous anatomy products in the consumer market. You can learn more about anatomy than you ever could, even with real subjects, because of the computer's image. Although sometimes there's no substitute for tactile feedback. So people are solving subsets of medical education right now with technology. The people that have the best interfaces and do the best jobs might expand that into other areas. So conceivably someone could do it all if they are good and the market embraces them. But it's a very big task and it's also valuable, I think, to have different points of view in a whole curriculum.

ER:
How much effort does it take to produce some unit of learning? What measure could you suggest in terms of explaining how much effort goes into a product?

MORRIS:
You know, every project is different. So if you are doing a very data-intensive project, you are going to need data-flow models, data entry people, more block-and-tackle work. If you are doing something like we are doing with SprocketWorks you need highly creative people with a willingness to iterate. So, not to avoid your question, but the answer is really very project-dependent. We've always erred on the side of having fewer people who are very talented because I think you are more nimble when you have a smaller group. But over the years, we've learned to be realistic. We try to work normal hours, because after the first few years of business we realized that you can't deal in crisis all the time. But I think that we do tend to have people work in a very focused way and work well together, and that allows us to have fewer people. I've seen a lot of projects that just had too many people and they were bogged down exponentially because of that.

ER:
Has your company always had reasonably smooth sailing?

MORRIS:
Well, because we were a service company, it's been pretty smooth, because there's not a lot of capital needed. But we had two periods when we had to reinvent ourselves. And I think those were not as smooth, because change is difficult. When we moved out of the technology business and took on clients in other business areas, that was hard. Our first client outside technology was Domino's Pizza. That was a difficult transition because we started having clients in the Midwest and New York, and I was traveling a lot, and it really disrupted the way we had gotten used to working. That was a big change. Doing SprocketWorks, instead of service is our second big change. I think it's hard for any company to change, but for us as designers it has been imperative. You have to continually reinvent yourself or it doesn't stay interesting. You have to keep solving problems that challenge you or you just get stale.

ER:
And what's going to be your next reinvention?

MORRIS:
After Sprocket Works? I don't know. We picked a big one this time. This can go on for awhile.

ER:
Put a scope on that. How big could it be?

MORRIS:
You mean in time?

ER:
No. In concept?

MORRIS:
We have a new brochure. It's at the printers. It's great. It's tabloid size, and on the front it says, "Good news for parents and teachers. Your job is simple. All you have to do is explain everything in the known universe." Then you open it up and it says "oh" in little letters.

ER:
You're done when you've finished the known universe.

MORRIS:
Yeah! My goal is for SprocketWorks to have a life of its own. It's designed so that people will e-mail us and tell us what we should improve and change and add. I hope people will want to work on it when they see it - people with special interests - and that communities will grow around it. So in scope - I want it to have a life of its own. And if it does it will be a function of the people who get involved. It could be really significant, I think, for people who are looking for people with the same interests. I'm taking a wait-and see approach. I'll be very excited to see how it develops. We're just giving it a good foundation and watching it and we'll see what happens.xx