Putting people together to create new products

This article originally appeared on the Cooper website in October 2001.

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When companies plan out a new product (or service, or business process) they often think of the effort as the coordination of two teams solving different problems. Engineering addresses the question “what can you make?” Marketing addresses the question “what can you sell?”

You could engineer a combined toaster and cell phone, but you could never sell it. Marketing would tell you that you have a product no customer would buy. Likewise, you might successfully market a car that runs on tapwater, but the impossibility of building one makes it a meaningless product idea. Smart organizations know that they need to combine the insights from both marketing and engineering to find products that they can both make and sell. 

You might think that those two perspectives cover everything you need for a success. Certainly, many products have had modest successes this way. But to have a big success, you need more than just engineering and marketing.

If you want to sell a new spaghetti sauce, for example, engineering can set up how you will cook and jar the sauce, while marketing can come up with ways to advertise, distribute, and promote it. But if you want loyal, satisfied customers who tell their friends to try the sauce, you have to make it taste good. Design addresses the question “what will people like?” It makes sure that the sauce tastes good.

A separate design team

Many companies give their marketing group responsibility for determining what people will like, but marketing must focus on customers and their purchase decisions. This differs subtly from design’s concern with users and their satisfaction. To succeed with a spaghetti sauce for children, you need marketing that will motivate adults to buy it, but designers need to give it a flavor that appeals to children. Marketing and design apply different skills to different problems.

With interactive products like software, consumer electronics, and Web sites, design means determining how the product will behave when people use it. Since engineering creates the software which generates the behavior, many companies leave it to engineers to decide what behaviors the product should have. But leaving the design in the hands of engineers tempts them to create behaviors which they can build more easily, or which may make sense to them but not to users. Engineering and design also apply different skills to different problems.

Responsibility, authority, and resources

Any organization draws its shape from the responsibilities assigned to its members. As most people in business know, if no one has ownership of some area of responsibility you can expect that it will not get done. Your organization’s success comes from the sum of your employees’ successes, so you must measure your employees’ effectiveness against their responsibilities. Your organization will only get what you measure.

You also need to give people the resources and authority necessary to meet the responsibilities that you give them. This governs how the different groups in your organization work together.

Design should have responsibility for users’ satisfaction with the product. Look carefully at your company—many organizations do not really hold anyone responsible for this! In order to accept this responsibility, designers need to have the authority to decide how the product will behave. They also need to gather a lot of information: they must talk to potential users about their needs, to engineers about the technological opportunities and constraints that define what the product might do, to marketing about market opportunities and requirements, and to management about the kind of product to which the organization will commit. 

Marketing has responsibility for the product’s appeal to customers, so they need to have authority over all communications with the customer. In order to do this, they need a lot of information resources including the results of designers’ user research and customer research of their own. 

Engineering has authority over all of the system architecture that users do not see. For the design to deliver its full benefit, engineering must have responsibility for building the behaviors that the designers define, on budget and on schedule. Too often, engineers get handed a schedule and vague product requirements, leaving them to guess what will satisfy management. Engineers need to get better resources in order to fulfill their responsibility, in the form of a clear description of the product’s behaviors which guides what they build and drives their time and cost estimates. 

Management has responsibility for the profitability of the resulting product, and therefore has the authority to make decisions about what the other groups will work on. In order to make those decisions, they need to receive information from all of the other groups: design’s product description, marketing’s analysis of the volume of sales they project, and engineering’s projection of the time and cost to create the product.

Design and engineering

In order to make this work, the design and engineering groups need to have an effective working relationship. They have the greatest opportunity for friction, but also the greatest opportunity for mutual benefit if they work together well.

In many companies today no one has specific responsibility for the satisfaction of users, so, by default, in those companies this falls under engineers’ broad responsibility for the quality of the product. As a consequence, engineers tend to regard designers’ plans for product behaviors as suggestions rather than directives, and instead implement behaviors that make sense to their engineering sensibilities. Software engineers, in particular, tend not to respect mere authority, and may call a design “impossible” in order to take control when they distrust designers’ judgment. But if management makes it clear that the designers have accepted real responsibility for users’ satisfaction, designers will have the respect of the engineers who, in turn, will fulfill their responsibility to build what designers specify.

Furthermore, designers must serve the engineers well by writing very clear behavior specifications. Engineers find vague requirements directives frustrating, because they expect that they will lead to requests for changes later in the process, wasting their time when schedules get tight. Engineers value designers who can give them a specific picture of what the product should do.

Engineers also may fear that unsophisticated designers will demand the impossible. Designers have an obligation to understand the technology involved well enough that engineers can really implement everything they design. However, designers should not concern themselves with ease of implementation, only possibility. Evaluation of the ease of implementation should only happen when engineering takes the design and creates a time and cost estimate to give to management.

The relationship between design and engineering shifts when the designers complete the behavior specification. Before that point, the designers draw on the wisdom of the engineers in order to understand the technological opportunities and constraints that control the vocabulary of behaviors which the product can use. This ensures that the designers deliver a design that the engineers can implement. 

After the designers have created the behavior specification, the situation reverses and the designers become resources for the engineers. No specification can anticipate every possible behavior and situation, so the designers must support the specification with explanations and elaborations as the engineers proceed with the creation of the product. This also acts as a check on the designers, ensuring that they deliver a clear specification.

The benefits of a good organization

Setting up the right responsibilities in your organization reduces costs and risks throughout the entire product development process. Engineering efforts become easier to manage because you can measure engineers’ work against the behavior specification, without mid-course changes. This makes it easier to keep costs and timelines from spiraling out of control. It also means that marketing has more lead time to prepare a campaign for the new product because they can get a good picture of it before engineering has finished their work.

The end result: great products. Your business benefits because a well-designed product spurs users’ enthusiasm, making it easier to sell, support, and market. Beloved products help to build your brand. And everyone in your organization can take pride in what they have produced.

Turning requirements into product definition

This article originally appeared on the Cooper website in August 2002.

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In his newsletter article last month, Ryan Olshavsky outlined an overall process for defining new products and services, taking a look at the start of that process. But how do you get from understanding your users to a vision for an innovative product which will appeal to them?

Avoid roadblocks to innovation

For many companies, identifying what they should create in the first place is the hardest question in developing new products and services. They know how to build things, but they don’t have a good way to decide what to build.

Many technology companies simply follow the technical opportunities they see, hoping that the technology they create will find a market need. This strategy is high-stakes gambling. Many innovative products do come out of this strategy, which can result in huge profits—but many, many more “great new technologies” don’t go anywhere. This is why you want a user-centered process, not a technology-centered one. Start from an understanding of users, and find technology to serve them, rather than the other way around.

Other technology companies grow existing products by responding to the feature requests which their customers give them. In the short term, this guarantees that the product will serve a market. But you won’t get anything truly novel out of this process, just refinements of the product you started with, which may or may not be significant improvements. In the long term, you will have a product weighed down with feature creep, ripe for a competitor to come along and steal your market with an innovative new system that serves your customers in a better way. This is why you want a needs-driven process, not a customer request-driven process. Proactively figure out what your customers will want, rather than just wait for them to tell you.

Similarly, many companies have strong marketing groups who do quantitative surveys of their customer base. That kind of work is essential—it tells you where there are dollars to win—but it cannot give you true innovation because it only shows you how the market works now, not how it could work with the introduction of something new.

Innovation means delivering products and services that address needs that no-one else has seen. Development driven by technology delivers innovation, but inconsistently, because it just hopes to stumble across those hidden needs. Development driven by conventional market research doesn’t deliver innovation because it only identifies how many dollars are out there to pay for products that address the needs you already know about. Development driven by customers’ requests doesn’t deliver innovation because your customers tell you about the features they want, not the underlying needs that could be met with a truly innovative product.

To keep from leaving opportunities on the table, you have to target innovation directly by looking closely at what people need, and by giving planners the responsibility to invent new products that address those needs. Done right, this can produce not just a single product but a portfolio of products and services that address a range of needs for a range of users and customers.

Frame the question to find opportunity

This is why you want to marry traditional quantitative marketing research together with qualitative user research. In last month’s newsletter article, we discussed the importance of talking to users, and in an earlier article, Reconciling market segments and personas, we talked about applying different tools to thinking of people as users and as customers. An understanding of your potential user population provides the most powerful fuel for the definition of new products.

You also need to have a general picture of your capacities. What kind of organizational resources do you have to apply? Do you have some basic technologies you need to think about up front? Do you have a clear picture of how your products and services fit together? Planners need to have answers to these questions in order to make sure that the organization will get behind the product.

That said, some companies go overboard with talking about their capacities at this early point in product development. Big companies often want to get all of the organizational players lined up at the start, and technology-driven companies often dig deep into the technology from the very beginning of product development. Committing to a specific technology, working group, or budget before you have a product definition to talk about can mean missing opportunities that lie along a different path. Giving planners just a little background in these areas goes a long way.

Structure your company to include planning

Making use of a keen understanding of users is not just a new technique. It demands political change in your company, realigning the way that your company distributes the responsibility for developing new products. Because technology and marketing alone are not enough, you need to introduce a “planner” role that has responsibility for defining new products. I talked about how the responsibilities of these three groups fit together in my previous article.

Planners are a small but essential component in a company that creates innovative products and services. They are the ones who should be responsible for defining new products, and they are the ones who have to create the form and behavior specifications that will drive managers’ decision-making and engineers’ development work. That’s a heavy responsibility, but an important one: if no one in particular within your company is held directly responsible for coming up with innovative product concepts, then your company cannot do it consistently.

Maintain planning team continuity

At least part of the planning team involved in the creation of the product should stay involved from beginning to end, from the initial research to the final testing.

Continuity with research provides enormous benefits: nothing can substitute for the subtle benefits of direct exposure to users, especially during the definition of a form and behavior specification. Even when others have done more thorough or skillful research, planners will commonly benefit the most from research where they have the intimate familiarity of having participated in the process.

Similarly, after the creation of the form and behavior specification, its authors will have a facility with its contents which no one else can match. Keeping the planners involved as the work proceeds helps maintain the integrity of the product vision, and saves developers time and energy.

Keep the core planning team small

Once they’ve recognized the range of things that will go into making a product, many companies try to involve numerous players in the early planning process: engineering, marketing, managers, and so on. In practice, this weighs down the process with coordination and communication overhead. It slows the process and demands enormous organizational effort. It also leads to uninspired, compromised products that are plagued with feature creep, rather than distinctive products with a strong vision.

You want a small, fast-moving, decisive core planning team. Involve other people in the company, but have those supporting people respond to the core team’s requests for information and discussion, rather than the other way around. This will help the planning process go more smoothly. At Cooper, we generally assign a core team of just two planners to a project, supported by others as necessary, because a team of two can communicate closely and work quickly.

A small planning team also helps protect you from committing to ill-conceived products. If the product defined by the planning team doesn’t make sense to develop, it won’t yet have the momentum of many people’s involvement.

Think about structure first

The process of defining a product can easily get lost in details. Planners tend to start looking at details as soon as possible, but this pressure can also come from outside the planning group: In web and software projects, managers often like to see screen mock-ups as soon as possible, in order to have progress they can see. This creates problems: looking at one element of the product in detail, planners discover problems in some unexamined assumption about the product, which means making some changes to that structure, which then requires revisiting the details of some other element which had been discussed before, which has implications somewhere else. The planning gets bogged down in interdependencies within the product itself.

To avoid this, planners should split the time they spend working on the form and behavior specification in two. In the first half, they work on structure: the major elements of the product, the basic scenarios in which people will use it. Inevitably, this will demand a little bit of dipping into details, but planners should stay disciplined about focusing on structure. Once they have resolved the structure and switch to looking at detail, they need the opposite discipline, resisting the temptation to revisit and change the overall structure. Again, planners cannot avoid a little bit of cheating, but they need to minimize the backtracking as much as possible.

Take a short vacation from feasibility

Many companies, especially technology-oriented companies, start their thinking about new products by looking at the technology available. This makes sense: a form and behavior specification that describes a product you cannot build, or a service you cannot deliver, does no good. But stepping away from thinking about those real constraints for a little while, at the beginning of the design phase, can lead to better products that sometimes even turn out easier to build.

Setting aside feasibility for a bit frees the planners to think entirely in terms of the initial requirements, clarifying their vision. This often prevents feature creep, because the resulting product vision does not include any elements that are there only because the technology permits it. Occasionally, you can produce real breakthrough ideas from unrealistic brainstorming. As they work toward the form and behavior specification, planners infuse more and more reality into their thinking, progressively scaling back the idealized product they initially conceive.

Articulate product ideas in coherent chunks

Everyone knows that product design benefits from an iterative process, where the team proposes, reviews, and refines ideas. Your planning team will have to brainstorm and reflect on a number of product possibilities, but do not to try to expose the whole organization to these ideas. Your early ideas probably will not yet have reached a point of coherence where people can communicate and discuss them well.

Nor do you want to ask your planners to create heavy written documentation of their interim ideas, or bog them down with doing too many status reports. The whole point of checking in with the planners during this phase is to provide feedback to them as the product concept takes shape. Creating heavy documentation at the middle tempts planners to defend interim ideas too strongly, and confuses the organization about what the true “blueprint” is. Interim discussions with the company stakeholders should take the form of small, informal working sessions, where planners can speak from simple sketches on a whiteboard, or in a PowerPoint file. At Cooper we call these “chalktalks.”

Ultimately, you want the company to work from a form and behavior specification that provides a final and coherent description of what the product is and how it should work. Next month, we will talk about this kind of document in greater detail.

Not all web sites are alike

This originally appeared on the Cooper website in April 2003.

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With the Web now completely ubiquitous and familiar, and the frenzy of getting on the Web for novelty’s sake long past, companies routinely turn to the Web to address many types of challenges. A Web site can offer a simple brochure for communicating with customers, a way to disseminate information to people within a large organization, a tool for running complex business processes, and much more. Because different sites try to address different problems, creating them requires different kinds of planning and development.

Although it may sound like a truism, many people have a hard time talking about the distinctions between different kinds of Web development, which makes it difficult to decide how to proceed. This article offers a quick survey of various Web projects and of the techniques that address them.

Basics

All Web projects call for a measure of Web production: creating the HTML, images, et cetera that will manifest in the browser. Though basic, this work remains challenging, even with the many tools and skilled professionals available in the wake of the Web boom. Making appealing, readable pages that load quickly and work for readers with different browsers on different devices remains tricky and demands careful craftsmanship. This goes hand-in-hand with the planning of the site’s look, even if the site does not have ambitions toward flashy visual design.

Where Web projects differ is in the planning they require before production begins. What a Web site must accomplish determines the kind of planning effort it requires.

A company site facing customers or partners should present the company’s brand identity. Companies with solid brand guidelines must provide Web developers with these guidelines and give clear direction about how the site fits into them. New sites, new companies, or Web-oriented companies may call for Web-oriented efforts in developing branding, rather than just an extension of an existing brand identity. This may not require a major effort, but it will require clarity up front.

Any site with static content—in other words, any site—will demand not only the creation of that content but also the definition of the information architecture that defines the navigation for the site. Even the simplest site, with just a dozen static pages, demands a little thought about the information architecture before production begins. And almost any corporate site is more complex than a small online brochure.

Complex sites

Web sites grow complex for three broad reasons. A site may have a lot of content, which makes ensuring that people find what they want tricky. A site with dynamic content makes it difficult to ensure that changing information is current and that it goes to the right place in the site. Last, a site may enable users to take some action, which introduces the possibility that they will not succeed in taking the action they want.

Often, a site involves some combination of these three elements. A news site may have content that is both dynamic and plentiful. An online database may combine large amounts of content with the ability to take action by creating reports. An e-commerce site may combine all three, with a large amount of dynamic catalogue information and the ability to take action by placing orders. Each kind of complexity demands its own combination of planning processes, development skills, and supporting technologies.

Big sites and information architecture

Everyone has encountered sites where they cannot find the information they want, though they suspect that it must appear somewhere in the site’s many pages. Organizing large amounts of information presents challenges that did not start with the Web—authors, librarians, and file clerks have wrestled with these problems for centuries—but doing this on the Web calls for a unique set of skills in constructing “information architecture.” Pages must link to other pages in ways that make sense, allowing users to easily navigate the site and find what they want.

For a site with even just a few dozen pages, information architects perform extensive planning before their work goes into production. Choosing appropriate labels and categories for information can call for research into the information domain, analytical exercises applied to the content, and usability testing with potential users of the site.

Database technologies typically support the organization of a site; any major site today consists of content served through a database, rather than just a collection of fixed pages. While that database may simply make it possible to change the top banner of links on the site without changing pages individually, turning to databases creates the opportunity to do much more, including dynamic content.

Dynamic content and content management

Over time, a site’s content changes. This must happen in a way that doesn’t cause the information architecture to break down. In the case of a mostly static site, this may mean a periodic redesign to accommodate new content. But when a site’s content changes quickly—as on a news site, for example—the site needs to have a structure that accommodates that change in order to prevent the information architecture from degenerating into chaos. This requires its own kind of planning and supporting technology.

The database for a dynamic site must do much more than it does for a static site. For instance, it must know when content first appeared and when it will become “stale.” It may need to know rules for publishing bits of dynamic content to a homepage or other index pages, which requires planning for the way information will appear on the site, the decisions the site will make about what content to present where, and the supporting structure of data associated with content.

Planning for a dynamic site involves not only the basic visual look and information architecture but also logical structures for deciding what to publish where. Complexity arises from looking at how content changes over time or how it changes when personalized for different people; thus, creating a different kind of information architecture work than what goes into a large static site. A dynamic site becomes an exercise in “content management:” the system’s ability to choose the right information to present depends in large part on how people put content into the system.

Many companies have learned that when a site grows big enough, it starts to face many of the same problems as a smaller dynamic site. Information grows stale, authors no longer work directly together, and different readers need to see different elements. Very large sites become less useful as they grow if they don’t have a foundation of good content management in place.

Taking action and interaction design

The Web began as a medium for presenting information, but many sites actually provide something very different: tools for taking some kind of action. Many people miss this very important distinction, even though it dramatically affects the planning that will shape the site and the technology that will support it.

Creating a Web tool means programming software, just like with a desktop application or a client-server system. The more complex the behaviors of the Web tool, the more sophistication the software development group will require and the more your “Web project” will become a software project.

Though most people find Web browsers fairly easy to use, this does not necessarily mean that a tool delivered through a browser will be easy to use. Making usable Web tools presents the same challenges as making usable software or electronics. In fact, delivering a usable tool on the Web can be harder than in a desktop application. If the best way to serve users involves a dynamic drag-and-drop system, you won’t be able to keep them happy with a click-and-wait Web site.

It is imperative to consider usability from the beginning of the requirements-definition process. Doing so requires thinking about some basic questions in your planning, for example: Will people use this tool just once, or will they use it again and again? (If just once, you will want to focus on usability testing to analyze first-timers’ experience. If repeatedly, you will want to research your users’ working context in order to understand their real-world needs.) Will this tool serve customers or people inside your organization? If the latter, do you need to think about how you will train users?

Considering users and usability in early requirements clearly supports defining the behaviors of a Web tool, which in turn provides the software development group with a good picture of what the organization expects them to build. The result is a software development project that is speedy and effective.

Where do product managers fit?

This article originally appeared on the Cooper website in September 2004.

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People often ask how interaction designers should fit into their companies. If the company cannot take good advantage of it, the most brilliant interaction design in the world won’t help as much as simple, workmanlike interaction design will benefit a company that uses that design well.

To talk about putting interaction designers into your organization, it helps to start by talking about some other people—product managers. In the past several years, many companies have started introducing a product management (PM) role into their organizations. The way PMs play out at different companies often varies dramatically in what PMs do day-to-day, in how PMs fit into the organization, in what skills and background the company expects a PM to have, and so on. But most organizations agree at the most fundamental level about the PM’s charter: the PM has responsibility for ensuring a product’s success.

Hard questions about product management

PMs face a range of challenges. A few organizations frame the role in such a way that it becomes obviously difficult for the PM to succeed. They may give a PM responsibility for too many disparate products, or too little support from above for their authority, or unclear divisions of responsibility with other people in other roles. More often, though, companies have not made mistakes so much as struggled with hard decisions about how to define the PM role.

For example, many companies have internal disagreements about whether to place the PM as part of the marketing group or part of the development group. Putting the PM into marketing makes sense, since the ability to win customers for a product very directly measures the product’s success. But putting a PM within marketing can cost the PM credibility and effectiveness in the development group that actually creates the product, compromising the PM’s ability to affect the shape of the product itself … which of course has a direct link with the product’s success or failure. On the other hand, putting the PM under development makes it hard to keep the PM connected to customers’ needs and responsible for the product’s sales success.

This conundrum suggests that the PM might best stand outside of either group, but this presents its own problems. Working relationships become hard to define. If you have a big, complex product, then the product has both a development lead and a marketing lead.

How does the PM fit together with those? As a peer? How, then, does the PM act to control the product, without authority over marketing, development, or anyone else? As their superior? How, then, does the PM interact with these leads’ superiors within the development and marketing groups?

Who does a product manager manage?

The interaction design connection

To answer that question, let’s bring interaction design into the picture. When I describe what I do to people who have not encountered the term “interaction design” before, I say first that “I look at users’ needs, figure out what kind of product best addresses them, and create a behavior specification for that product which the development team then uses as requirements to drive their work.” Often people say, “In my organization, we call that a ‘product manager.’”

Whoa! My description didn’t describe me managing anything. Why should my description of “interaction design” ever correspond to anyone’s notion of “product management?”

This connection surfaces because organizations see that the description of product requirements strongly affects whether the product will succeed … and they recognize that the development team won’t actually follow requirements that don’t have the backing of management authority. Thus the person who drives the decisions of the development group by setting requirements must become a “product manager,” placed in the organizational hierarchy at or above the level of the development lead. So even though the PM doesn’t manage the people in either marketing or the development team, we call that person a “manager” as a way of denoting their level of authority.

In practice, the term “product management” does work well as a descriptive title because PMs concern themselves with a product and in fact do management as their day-to-day work. They talk to people in the organization, individually and in meetings, offering information and making decisions.

What does this have to do with talking to users, figuring out behaviors, writing requirements—the stuff of interaction design? In an organization lacking an explicit interaction design role, many PMs recognize that as the owners of product requirements, they have to also author those requirements. The development team cannot author their own requirements, the marketing team typically cannot write requirements that serve the development team well, and executives above the PM will not set requirements at the necessary level of detail. So the PM must do it.

But a problem emerges: the work of interaction design—all of that talking to users, solving interface problems, writing detailed requirements documents—takes a lot of time and effort. Doing this work thoroughly takes more time than a PM can spare from the work of managing. Plus, few people have strong skills in both management and design. Either the PM’s management work suffers to spare time for interaction design or the PM’s interaction design work suffers to make time for management. This spells frustration for the PM and problems for the company.

The interaction design role

Thus the organization really needs a separate person with a distinct role as an interaction designer (IxD). The work of interaction design done well demands so much time, attention, and skill that it takes a person’s full attention as a full-time job. (Indeed, at Cooper we find that a team of two or three IxDs works much better than a lone IxD.)

Does this mean that you need IxDs instead of PMs? No. You still need management authority supporting any behavior specifications that IxDs create. Anyone with management authority will end up doing management work, which becomes incompatible with interaction design work.

This distinction also helps to keep interaction design from becoming too important. Good IxDs think in terms of users’ needs and advocate for them. But though addressing users’ needs plays a very important role in determining product success, many other concerns have at least equal importance. You need a product that you can make and sell at a profit. You may have a gatekeeper customer making purchase decisions, someone quite different from your end user, who needs to see some characteristic in the product that does not matter to users. You may have partner agreements to satisfy. And so on.

The PM must weigh and integrate the various elements of success. If that PM also has responsibility for the interaction design, then either their effectiveness in product management or their effectiveness in interaction design will suffer because of their divided priorities.

Working relationships

Without IxDs, you have PMs in the Dilbert situation of trying to arbitrate “he said, she said” disagreements between development and marketing. The addition of IxDs creates a completed system of groups with interlocking concerns and responsibilities, giving a PM the ability to make informed decisions about product strategy because she has people speaking for all of the components of product success.

My earlier article, Putting people together to create new products, included this diagram showing how the different groups have different domains.

The organization thus considers these three groups as peers, separate from one another, but all working at the direction of a PM. The PM manages these three groups, receiving information from all three, giving them direction about how to use their time, coordinating their efforts.

Product creation

Consider how product creation works in this kind of organization. 
The company may start with a market they want to serve, identified by the marketing group. IxDs talk to users in the space, identifying a few different classes of users and spotting opportunities to serve them with new products. Marketing turns around and takes those classes of users and connects them with customer demographics, determining how much potential revenue those users could represent.

Meanwhile, the IxDs take what they learned about users’ needs, market requirements, and technical constraints (from talking to users, marketing, and development, in turn) and put together a product definition, describing its behaviors in detail in a behavior specification. Development then takes that behavior specification and produces a technical specification and a development timetable.

Now the PM has the information available to make intelligent business decisions. She can ask marketing, with a well-defined product and intended audience for it, how much money can we expect to make with this product? She can ask development, what time, money, and resources will it cost us to make this product? She can ask executives, does this product match our vision for the company’s business?

The PM can now act to integrate the concerns of the different constituencies in the organization. For example, if developers express concern that an element of the designed product will take a lot of time and money to build, the PM can then ask if it makes sense to defer that component to a later release. Development can answer what the costs become, breaking the product into multiple releases. IxDs can answer whether the more limited, early release product will still satisfy users, and what a more limited product will look like. Marketing can answer the impact on customers, revenue, and marketing the multiple-release strategy.

Each of the groups owes information to the PM, who then in turn makes decisions, and can hold the group accountable for executing on those decisions. IxD provides a clear picture of target users and product behaviors, and has accountability for user satisfaction. Marketing turns target users and product definition into a marketing plan, and has accountability for sales. Development turns a behavior specification into a development timeline and a finished product, and has accountability for robust engineering and meeting their promised timeline.

The PM, in this world, not only has a charter to deliver a successful product—she has the ability to actually deliver one.

The Web, Information Architecture, and Interaction Design

This article originally appeared on the Cooper website in September 2005

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The impact of digital technology—from the Web to mobile phones to the silicon in your toaster—has meant a proliferation of terms for the work people do to define digital products and services. People talk about “customer experience,” “user-centered design,” and so forth. This talk can confuse even people who do that work for a living, as you often find different people using different terms to mean the same thing—or using the same term to mean very different things!

Many people say that this reflects a breakdown of disciplinary distinctions in designing for the new world of the digital. “It’s all just design.” I disagree. I see a few major types of problems in the digital world, and I believe that each of these has its own set of tools and methods that work well to solve that type of problem.

Two of these types of problems lurk behind the terms “information architecture” and “interaction design.” As I said, we live in times with slippery terms, so I want to admit that I’m using these expressions in a way that may differ from the way you or your colleagues do. Though I have some good reasons for thinking that I use these terms in the most useful and appropriate way, I want less to advocate for certain language than to make clear something about two different kinds of problems that emerge in designing for the Web.

To understand why the distinction between these problems can become obscured, it helps to look back over the history of Web design. Early in the growth of the Web, many graphic designers with backgrounds in print media migrated into Web design. They discovered that the specifics of good graphic design in print don’t always work so well on the Web, and creating good Web sites required some new techniques. But graphic design for the Web was still graphic design.

On the other hand, as Web sites grew larger, with more and more content, Web designers came to realize that creating effective Web sites requires solutions to some problems very different from those addressed by graphic design. Not only do individual pages need to look appealing and readable, but you need to organize and label links so that people can find the content in a large site. We now call those “information architecture” (IA) problems. The methods of graphic design don’t help with IA, and for a time Web developers struggled with IA problems, even having trouble recognizing that these problems even existed. But at this point Web development organizations understand the distinction between graphic design and IA, and recognize IA as its own distinct discipline with fairly-well understood methods and techniques.

Because the culture of Web design remains strongly rooted in graphic design, many conceive of IA as “all Web design that isn’t graphic design.” But that misses another important distinction.

Just as the growth of Web sites created problems in organizing content, giving rise to the discipline of IA, so too the appearance of Web sites generated by complicated software generating unique pages that people use as tools, calling for a discipline I prefer to call “interaction design.” (IxD)

Let’s unpack that distinction.

IA means defining information structures to answer the question “how does a user find the information they want?” Thus navigation links for a big corporate Web site reflect IA: where can I find directions to the company’s main headquarters? When you talk about content, page hierarchy, and taxonomy, you probably have an IA problem.

On the other hand, IxD means defining system behaviors to answer the question “how does a user take the action they want?” Thus the pulldowns, buttons, and checkboxes in a Web email application reflect IxD: what must I do to reply to the sender of this email?When you talk about action, controls, and dynamic elements, you probably have in IxD problem. Some problems include both components: consider how Amazon includes both large amounts of static content and some very complex dynamic behaviors.

It turns out that the techniques for doing these two things differ dramatically, at least as much as they differ from the techniques of graphic design. IA calls for exercises like card sorts, usability testing for category labels, hierarchical structure diagramming, and so forth. IxD calls for exercises like workflow analysis, usage scenarios, wireframed walkthroughs, and so on. The work done, and the skills needed to do it, differ considerably between the two. Just as few people can fully master the skills of both graphic design and IA, few people will master the skills of both IA and IxD. It serves both organizations and practitioners for people to specialize.

So when thinking about a new Web site, first ask what kind of problem you have, to make sure that you bring the right people—and the right tools—for the job.

Intuition, Pleasure, and Gestures

This was originally published on the Cooper website in October 2007:

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“Intuitive.” We use the word a lot when talking about interactive systems, but it misleads us.

When people say they want a system to be “intuitive,” they typically think they mean that users should immediately understand how a system works when they encounter it. But you cannot really do that with many systems … not even with most systems people talk about when you ask them for an example of something “intuitive.”

Consider the mouse-and-cursor. Most of us have forgotten the first time we encountered it, and thus forgotten how unintuitive we found it the first time we used it. A little box on a string with a button or three on top? If you have just arrived from the 23rd century, you might pick it up and try talking to it. But with ten seconds of demonstration you understand it completely and have some sophisticated applications of it immediately available to you, and even if you didn't see a mouse again for the next ten years you would still remember how it worked.

There you have what people really mean by “intuitive:” easy to explain, powerful in its implications, impossible to forget. You get that through systems that possess a clear, coherent internal logic that feels natural and obvious. Of course, it can take hard work to figure out those “natural and obvious” behaviors; we interaction designers call that work “interaction design.”

From time to time the talk at Cooper turns to the deeper philosophical waters of our work. Some years ago, we discussed the ultimate objectives of our work, and the expressions “intuitive” and “easy-to-use” started coming up, but didn't quite hit the mark. Some systems have an inherent difficulty; having worked on tools for doctors and NMR spectroscopers and rocket scientists (yeah, really) we have seen how some systems can never really become “easy-to-use.”

Now in a lot of cases you can improve an interactive system by simplifying it, stripping things out, and thus making it easier to use and understand. Most interactive products and services out there could benefit from this treatment, which can paradoxically result in the simplified version delivering more functionality to users because they understand it better and take better advantage of it.

This has its limits. You can’t make that rocket scientist’s satellite orbit plotting system “easy.” But you can make it “intuitive.” With that comes a surprise benefit.

Remember when a lot of folks started taking to the Palm Pilot? It seemed like everywhere you went, people were tinkering with their Palms all of the time, obnoxiously wanting to share with you, “look at how you can do this!” Why?

Because the Palm has “intuitive” interaction design, which makes using it pleasurable.

I believe that this hits us at a deep, animal level. Just as we get pleasure from the form and tactility of good industrial design, we get pleasure from good interaction design, both as we learn it and as we work with it. Learning things that make sense, working with tools that work right; these things make us East African Plains Apes happy right down to our DNA. So instead of saying “intuitive” or “easy-to-use,” at Cooper we often talk about designing interactive products that deliver power and pleasure to the people who use them.

With so many folks talking about the iPhone right now, it surprises me how few people remark on the effect of its lovely interaction design. Notice the difference between the advertisements for the iPhone and every other phone on the market. Other phones show people talking on the phone, snapping pictures of each other, dancing around, getting into kung fu battles with phones as weapons, everything except what the iPhone ads show you: how you use the phone. Think about that. They sell the iPhone by showing you thirty seconds of someone using it, assuming that this will make people want it … which it does, because people recognize that using a product with good interaction design feels good.

Part of that lies in the harmonious way that the iPhone transitions between its functions, the thing that folks often call “navigation,” because finding your way between functions in a system with bad interaction design can feel like navigating your way through a maze or a trackless sea. Another aspect that I find particularly interesting lies in the iPhone's gestural interface.

A few key functions rely not just on touching the phone, but dragging your fingers over it: flipping through pictures and song lists, resizing pictures, and the cunning mechanism for unlocking the phone. This really struck me because for the past few years, instead of a mouse I have been using an exotic trackpad made by a now-defunct company called FingerWorks. [I would later learn that they were acquired by Apple ....]

My trackpad looks a bit like an ordinary mouse pad, and like the iPhone’s photo-resizing function it can recognize when I touch it with more than one finger, so it does more than just move my cursor. By pinching my fingers in a certain way, I can cut something to the clipboard; if I reverse the gesture, I can paste it back in somewhere else. A dozen other gestures enable me to do things like open new documents, close windows, scroll, resize things, and jump to my home page in my web browser. Colleagues say that sometimes when they see me work it looks like I have cast some magic spell: I wave my hand and things happen on the screen.

When I use an ordinary computer I miss my trackpad, and not only because it provides me with a little convenience. It also feels good.

I believe that part of why I enjoy it so much comes from something we don't get to do much when working with computers and other interactive tools: I do the gestures from muscle memory, rather than cognitive memory, just like I do with my typing on my computer keyboard. Most of the time tools that run on software tax our cognitive capacity but leave the intelligence that lives in our bodies relatively untapped, which makes us East African Plains Apes a little uncomfortable; using those gestures makes me a happier animal.

I think many of us know on some level that we suffer this imbalance, which explains why we ooh and aah over things like tablet computers, Jeff Han’s big touchscreen, Microsoft’s Surface table, and the computer from Minority Report. Even if these examples seem unrealistic in some ways — I have a hard time imagining what anyone would actually use the fantastically expensive MS Surface for, and I assume that Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report has such broad shoulders because the poor guy has to wave his arms around all day just to use his computer—they appeal to us because we yearn for the pleasures of using the intelligence of our bodies together with the intelligence that lies between our ears.

I wondered for a long time whether I was right to suspect that using gestural input like on my trackpad really would appeal to most people, or whether it just reflected an eccentricity of mine. The iPhone seems to have demonstrated that gestures really do have a broad appeal. I hope that companies other than Apple learn the lesson, if only because I want to use — and get to design — the products that will include them.

Settler colonialism, Israel, and history

Note that this post was originally written in 2021, though I have made an ongoing series of refinements and additions since then

Because of the [2021] horrors undertaken by the state of Israel, a friend said something characteristic of a lot of American lefties who have had to un-learn both pro-Israel propaganda and US propaganda about our own history:

Israel is exactly a parallel of the US. It’s a settler-colonial state that displaces and claims the territory of the people who were there before [⋯] That’s also why the US supports Israeli actions so much.

I got long-winded in my frustrated reply, and that led to this short history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, in which I try to iron out some common misunderstandings.

US support for Israel

First I must dispense with an obvious canard. No, the US does not support Israel out of some weird settler colonialist solidarity. There are a few big factors behind strong US support for Israel:

• The US military is very interested in being able to intervene in a lot of places in Israel’s neighborhood and it helps to have an ally who will let US planes land and refuel on their airbases.
• Republicans support Israel’s policies because they are in the grip of Evangelicals who believe that Israel is an integral part of realizing Biblical prophecy. (I would think that one would want to devote our foreign policy to preventing Armageddon, but what do I know?)
• Democrats support Israel’s policies because they are in the grip of the hardline Israel lobby whom liberal Jews have been too feckless to purge from the coalition.
• Americans on both sides of the aisle are prone to anti-Muslim bigotry which sharpened in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack, leading to a reading of Israel as a natural ally against the villainous Arab world, and a reading of Arab Palestinian resistence to oppression by Israel as nothing other than villainous Muslim terrorism.

The USA is different

The other part of my friend’s comment — the question of Israel’s settler colonialism — requires unfolding a lot of history. At the bottom line, Israel is the result of a settler colonial project and that project is ongoing in the present crisis, but analogizing it to the history of the US is irresponsibly misleading.

Prior to the founding of the USA in the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, the British colonies in North America starting even at Plymouth Rock were engaged in settler colonialism: seizing land with the intention to make it their own for every following generation, with total disregard for the indigenous people of the continent. By the time of the Revolution what would become the US had more than a century of expansionist settler colonialism with an overt program of total genocide to establish British sovereignty over territory; the program of genocide continued through the closing of the frontier, a legacy which is alive in the present day.

Israel’s history is bloody and ugly but it is very different.

Zionism before Israel

The Zionist project can be seen as beginning with the First Zionist Conference in 1897, when what is now Israel was still part of the vast, weak Ottoman Empire. It is important to understand that the Zionism conceived then did not seek to establish the state of Israel as we now have it. The Conference in 1897 defined their project thus:

Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.

In this we can see how Zionism is indeed an ethnic nationalism but not quite what one might naïvely imagine from the succinct description “Jewish nationalism”.

First, the 1897 statement shows Zionism explicitly rejecting a religious project; “the Jewish people” are framed in secular terms, as an ethnic people. The Magen-David ✡︎ emerged as a symbol of ethnic Jewish identity at this same time, distinct from the seven-branch menorah which was the predominant symbol of Judaism as a religion in Europe. The use of this symbol on the flag of Israel underlines that Israel is a secular state, not a theocracy.

Second, the pointed use of the word “home” deliberately avoids identifying a sovereign Westphalian nation-state like Israel as it exists today as the defining goal of Zionism. Yes, that was the dream of many Zionists, but not all, and it was not the plan. Partly that reflects how at that time there was no imaginable path toward carving a new sovereign nation out of the vast Ottoman Empire which included Palestine. Partly that reflected how many leaders in the Zionist coalition actively rejected founding a nation-state as desirable at all. It is neither accidental nor incidental that this original definition of Zionism is at least compatible with a pluralistic society; many from both camps in the Zionist coalition rejected a vision of an exclusively Jewish society. (More on that in an earlier post on the origins and consequent meaning of “Zionism”.)

The Basel Program adopted by the 1897 Conference called for Zionist “settlements” in Palestine, and many key Zionist leaders did explicitly describe that project in terms modeled on the settler colonialism undertaken by the European colonial powers. But one should not misread this as plans for settlement simply paralleling European colonization of the Americas. Zionism could not conceive itself as an extension of the European colonial project since it was a response to oppression by those powers and had nothing like their capacities.

Instead, “settlment” took a form more comparable to the Pennsylvania Dutch, buying and homesteading land to create ethnic enclaves in territory under Ottoman governance. That is not to say that one should picture early Zionists as just like the pacifist Amish! Zionists created many enclaves on land purchased fair and square. And those enclaves they were protected from hostile neighbors by Jewish militias which were hard to distinguish from other settlement militias which seized territory by force of arms, even terrorism. We must recognize both that brutality has been an integral part of the Zionist movement from the beginning and also that alternatives & opposition to brutality have equally deep roots.

Palestine before Israel

Again, in 1897 Palestine was the European name for a region within the much larger Ottoman Empire rather than a country with its own identity. Indeed, the first time someone called themself a “Palestinian” was the year after the First Zionist Conference. A map of “Palestine” would often include not just what is now Israel but also most of what is now Jordan; you can see an example at the top of this post.

The poetic resonance of Jews’ ancient roots in both history and myth was not the only reason Zionists chose Palestine as their site. There was a significant population of Jews already living among the Arab majority. And the weakness of the Ottoman Empire enabled local communities subject to relatively little government interference.

Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was so weak that it collapsed with WWI. Palestine became a colonial holding of the British Empire for the three decades which followed; they divided the region into the Emirate of Transjordan in the east (nominally independent but a “British protectorate”) and Mandatory Palestine (subject to direct British rule, which included a bit more than what is now Israel and its occupied territories) in the west.

Zionism was tolerated by both the Ottomans and British rather than sponsored by either of them, as reflected in the British government’s Balfour Declaration of 1917, which neither implied plans for a sovereign Jewish state nor subjected the British Empire to any binding commitments to the Zionist project:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Meanwhile, the British did not even tolerate the growing Arab Palestinian nationalist movements of the era which were animated by frustration with British rule and by European Jewish immigration. Some of those movements sought independence for British Mandate Palestine as a new independent Arab state; others understood themselves as part of a broader pan-Arab nationalism which rejected dividing the Arab world into multiple states. In the late ’30s Palestinian nationalists’ armed revolt suffered British suppression with their characteristic colonial brutality.

Founding Israel

That in the wake of WWII the US & Europeans re-drew borders all over the world — that it would primarily be Britian who would adjudicate the competing claims of Jews and Arabs in Palestine — was not Zionist colonialism but the legacy of European colonialism.

By the late 1940s, there were an array of different Jewish populations in Palestine. There were non-Zionist Ashkenazi & Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had migrated there from Europe centuries before Zionism. There were Mizrahi Jews who looked just like their Arab neighbors, living in the same houses their great-great-grandparents had been born in under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the 19^th century. There were Jews born in houses their Zionist grandparents purchased at a fair price at the dawn of the 20^th century. There were Jews born in houses stolen by Zionist militias in the 1920s. There were Jewish refugees who fled the Nazis in the 1930s. And there were growing numbers of Holocaust survivors who found that the Eastern Europeans who helped Nazis ship Jews to concentration camps were equally dangerous as administrators of Soviet domination, who had been turned away by the governments of the US and every nation in Europe, whose only hope for survival was the Zionists who brought them to Palestine to join their cause.

In 1947 & 1948, there were a series of partition proposals for Palestine sponsored by the then-new United Nations and others which framed a nation-state of Israel with boundaries very similar to what Israel would come to actually hold over the decades to come, plus Arab sovereignty over something close to what we now call the West Bank of the Jordan river, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the state of Jordan.

From the British perspective, converting most of British Mandate Palestine into Israel was apportioning to the Arab majority most of the Palestinian territory the British Empire had controlled, with a smaller territory for Jews where they were already most numerous. The oddness of the Green Line map of Israel in these proposals likely also reflects the British Empire’s long habit of preserving their power by setting administrative borders which produced local conflicts.

These proposals were rejected by most Jews and practically all Arabs. The architects of what would become Israel wanted more land, while Arabs refused to accept Israel at all. States in the region took shape not through negotiation but through bloodshed, in a tumultuous process between 1947-9. Israel emerged as a nation-state with borders very similar to the Green Line plan; Jordan eventually differed more from Transjordan under British rule, but not dramatically. The West Bank, the Golan, and Gaza never existed as independent states; Jordan, Syria, and Egypt absorbed them. I don’t have the expertise to untangle (much less summarize) this process well, not least because much of the history remains vigorously disputed by good faith scholars.

One can see why salty Israel apologists say that we already have a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict: Jordan & Israel. One can see why salty advocates for Palestinian liberation call Israel an illegitimate product of European colonialism. One can see why salty critics of pro-Palestinian movements ask why we hear so much about the oppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel but never by Jordan, Egypt, and Syria (and more on that in a moment). All of these arguments are whataboutism but they are far from entirely bullshit.

Early Israel

One might very roughly parallel the founding of Israel with the partition of South Asia into India & Pakistan: border disputes, population transfers, local atrocities on all sides, and lasting instability.

Mizrahi Jews migrated to Israel from all over the Middle East, often (though not always) escaping severe oppression and deliberate efforts to displace them. In 1948 Holocaust refugees made Ashkenazim from Europe the majority of Jews in Israel; though Sephardic & Ashkenazi Jews continued to move to Israel from Europe and the US after ’48, there was so much migration by Mizrahim that they would become the majority of Jews in Israel … while they practically disappeared from the rest of the Middle East.

Israel apologists often sincerely believe that the 700,000+ Arab Palestinians who fled the newly-formed Israel departed “voluntarily” because the new Arab nations’ leaders directed Palestinians to clear a path for their armies’ attempts to destroy Israel. For a long time, the best available scholarship supported that telling of history, but in the last few decades it has become clear that this account was almost entirely a fabrication of Israeli propaganda. Zionist militias which evolved into Israel’s army murdered thousands to drive Arab Palestinians out; advocates for Palestinian liberation call this genocidal nightmare the Nakba, meaning “the catastrophe”. Arab states almost entirely refused to accept immigration by displaced Arab Palestinians because they believed doing so would legitimize Israel. Most refugees in the West Bank eventually became citizens of Jordan (as Jordan held the West Bank from 1950-1967) but many Palestinians displaced by Israel remained in legal limbo, stateless people living out the rest of their lives in refugee camps.

About 150,000 Arab Palestinians remained in Israel and became citizens … but second-class citizens subject to brutal military rule.

During this early era, Arab nations continued to refuse to recognize Israel’s legitimacy at all, declaring their plans to literally wipe the country from the map, as did the nationalist terrorists of the Palestine Liberation Organization founded in 1964.

During its first two decades, Israel fought a series of wars and border skirmishes with all of its neighbors. Israel hardliners describe these as unprovoked attacks by conquerer neighbors; historians find that Israel sometimes faced existential threats, while other times they were spoiling for a fight in hopes that they could seize more territory.

Echoes of this early era persist in the attitudes of all of the players in the region to this day. Many Israelis see themselves as still facing a constant threat of national destruction by an implacably hostile Arab world, with Arab Palestinians nothing other than the most intimate manifestation of that threat, despite Israel being far stronger than it was in its early era. Many Arabs still see Israel as nothing other than a final imposition of overt European imperialism and colonialism, despite the Mizrahi majority among Israeli Jews and decades of European animosity toward Israel.

The Six Day War, and occupation

In 1967, Israel fought the Six Day War with Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. At this point in this telling of the history, it should be evident why it is hard to say simply Who Started It.

Remember the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights from British Mandate Palestine, which Jordan, Syria, and Egypt seized? Israel suffered ongoing rocket attacks and shelling from them, with the narrow segment between the Mediterranean Sea and the West Bank especially vulnerable, just a bit over nine miles wide at its tightest point. Israeli planners yearned to annex territory both for these strategic military reasons and as places for Israelis to live.

At the end of the 1967 war, these were now all in Israel’s hands … along with the Sinai Peninsula to the south, which had more than twice the area of all of pre-1967 Israel. In violation of international law and UN resolutions, Israel then subjected all of these territories to military occupation and built settlements for Jewish Israelis.

Israel would fight one last major war with its neighbors in 1973, retaining all of that land. After that Israel started emphatically denying that they had nuclear weapons … in a way that meant that they wanted everyone to know that they really had them. Border conflict never really stopped, but the full-scale wars ended.

Israel’s occupation of the Sinai did not last; under the Camp David Accords signed in 1979, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. (I confess to frustration that Israel’s critics somehow forget this when they insist that Israelis refuse to even consider any real sacrifices in pursuit of peace.)

Israel continued to lay claim to the Golan Heights to the north; the construction of settlements never stopped. Ongoing fighting over this territory — which has included Israel making military incursions into Syria & Lebanon beyond even the Golan — has a very complicated history, defined at least as much by internal strife in Syria & Lebanon as it is by fighting between those countries and Israel. That history may qualify as even more complicated than the history of Israel, and I confess that I do not understand it well enough to even attempt to summarize.

Within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, Israel lifted military rule over their Arab Palestinian citizens in 1966 so that theoretically they shared Jews’ rights protections under the law, democratic representation in government, et cetera. In practice Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel continued to suffer severe oppression. Today they account for about 2 million of Israel’s 9½ million citizens.

Oslo and afterward

(updated and expanded in late 2023 and after, to help contextualize the Hamas attack and Israel’s bloody response)

Gaza and the West Bank remained under Israeli military occupation; Israel continued to build settlements for a growing population of Jewish Israelis. In the late 1980s, vigorous nonviolent Palestinian protest & resistance known as the First Intifada made it clear that this was not sustainable.

In the early 1990s, “peace process” negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders resulted in the Oslo Accords, an agreement which created the Palestinian Authority to govern both Gaza the West Bank. The PA is elected by Palestinian citizens of those territories, but the PA’s sovereignty is limited, with countless intrusions large and small by Israel. In the West Bank, the terms of Oslo allow for Israeli settlements under Israel’s control which break Palestinian territory into cantonized fragments; Israel populates those settlements with rightwing hardliner assholes prone to confronting their Palestinian neighbors with harassment and worse. Optimists hoped that Oslo would create an opening to further negotiation toward a more just resolution, but efforts which followed like Bill Clinton’s doomed 2000 attempt at Camp David foundered on distrust and hardliner intransigence on all sides.

Israel also had soldiers & settlers in Gaza after Oslo, but when the hard right Likud coalition won control of Israel’s government in 2005, they withdrew that presence. But conditions for Arab Palestinians in Gaza have actually been worse than in the West Bank. Israel’s military policing of Gaza from the outside is brutal, including a blockade of goods entering or leaving, a “buffer zone” which prevents cultivating much of the arable land, and hugely disproportionate reprisals by Israel’s military whenever radicals fire a rocket into Israel from Gaza, or even when Israel attributes a terrorist attack to Gazans. The common refrain that Gaza constitutes “an open-air prision” because of crowding and the brutality of these conditions is an exaggeration, but not much of one.

In a 2006 election, governance of the Palestinian Authority split between Gaza versus the West Bank. The corrupt, kleptocratic, secular Fatah party which sprung from the PLO retains power in the West Bank. The theocratic, authoritarian Hamas party overturned Fatah in Gaza; they have not permitted an election since.

During the post-Oslo era, radicals on both sides have violently sabotaged any movement toward reconciliation, peace, and justice. Optimism that relations might improve after Oslo was dashed by an Israeli hardliner assassinating prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for signing the Oslo Accords, followed by Palestinian terrorist attacks killing hundreds of Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. To advocates for Palestinian liberation, the Second Intifada was the inevitable, even justified, escalation of resistance to ongoing oppression. Many Jewish Israelis read the Second Intifada not as a demonstration that the post-Oslo order was unjust, but rather as a demonstration that concessions to Arab Palestinians only compromise Jews’ safety … which led to their support for the Likud political coalition which has tried to repress Arab Palestinians through more brutal military policing … which feeds Arab Palestinian support for violent resistance. Every softening of the conflict during this era has been cut short by provocations by one side or the other.

That cycle continued until the horrifying Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s even more horrifying response.

It is absurd to accept Israel apologists’ claim that Israel’s Likud leadership seek only the release of Israeli hostages taken on 10/7. I also think that it is dangerously foolish to read Israel’s attack on Gaza as an attempt to annex Gaza after eliminating its Arab Palestinian population. I believe that the attack on Gaza began as a panic response to distract Israelis from the Likud policy of endless military policing of Gaza & the West Bank failing to keep Israeli Jews safe, then quickly became an attempt to destroy Hamas and reconstruct Gaza into a form similar to the West Bank which would enable even more brutal military policing, using overwhelming military force which callously creates immense civilian casualties. If that read is right, we still must register Israel’s attack on Gaza as genocidal because it is an attack on the people of Gaza as a people and threatens to escalate to even greater horrors.

If you want more detail about the dynamics of the 2023-4 crisis, I like this explainer.

The bottom line

Roughly a couple of million Arab Palestinians are brutally oppressed by Israel in Gaza & the West Bank; this includes Israel’s bloody attack on Gaza and ongoing displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank to build new settlements. Another couple of million Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel suffer significant oppression as well. Israel holds the unmistakable upper hand in an endless cycle of violence.

This emerges from and continues to reflect settler colonialism. This is unjust military occupation & policing. This is an unjust apartheid state. But students of American history should recognize from the particulars I have presented here how different they are from our horrors, so we should resist projecting our own patterns onto a very different situation.

If you have read this far, and come to wonder what “Zionism” means in a post-1948 and post-1967 world, I have an open letter to an anti-Zionist which may interest you. In short, “Zionism” means not support for Israel’s current border, political order, and policies; rather it means neither more nor less than support for the continued existence of the state of Israel — the only home which millions of people have ever known — in some form. It is important that we do not misrepresent what “Zionism” means.

More commentary on settler colonialism

Tzvi Bisk’s liberal Zionist novel The Suicide of the Jews offers a tidy summation of how Zionists tend to rationalize their project as distinct from the history of colonialism. Each of these points offers apologetics neither simply true nor simply false. Criticisms of Israel & Zionism should grapple with these peculiarities.

1. Every colonial enterprise represented or derived from an existing mother country or group of countries — Zionism did not.
2. No other colonial enterprise viewed itself as returning to its homeland — Zionism did.
3. No other modern colonial enterprise was driven by the desire of the colonizers to escape persecution and discrimination — Zionism was.
4. No other colonial enterprise viewed its colonial ambition as being part and parcel of their national cultural, psychological and moral renewal — Zionism did.
5. No other colonial enterprise satisfied itself with only one colony — Zionism did.
6. No other colonial enterprise desired so passionately to settle a land devoid of natural resources — Zionism did.
7. No other colonial enterprise desired to create an independent state (all the others saw themselves as dependent colonies of the mother country) — Zionism did.
8. No other colonial enterprise desired to create an entirely new society — Zionism did.

But Ha’Aretz offers the article Israel Is a Settler Colonial State — and That’s OK addressing some of the deceits of Bisk’s list and defending the framework of “settler colonialism” as a necessary goad to a more just future for Israel.

In fact, rigorous scholars who study the applicability of the settler colonial framework for the history of Israel / Palestine need not subscribe to a political agenda committed to the end of the State of Israel. Moreover, claiming that structurally, Zionist settlers are comparable to American pioneers or South African Voortrekkers, does not necessitate the denial of a historical connection between Jews and the Holy Land, the unique nature of European anti-Semitism, or even requires having sympathy for the Palestinian armed struggle against Zionism. As a matter of fact, even prominent Zionists made explicit comparisons between their own political movement and those of settlers around the world.

The indispensible Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has a long, instructive post about double-edged particulars which make Israel unique among colonial projects:

Jews have not been part of colonial projects in the same way that colonizing nations have.

But we have been, often, part of them. It’s all both / and.

Often, Jews have been simultaneously settlers and refugees.

[⋯]

Jews generally did not leave the places we were living in order to steal, but rather: we were seeking safety.

And yet: Jews benefitted mightily from that exploitation, extraction, destruction and land theft.

There’s a difference between a major European power’s relationship to colonialism and Jewish refugee’s.

But the Jewish refugee is nonetheless participating in colonialism.

I highly recommend clicking through to read the whole thing.

And if you want even more, I have a later post with a grab bag of links & quotes further expanding on many of the particulars.

Return

I have long felt that Palestinians’ call for Right Of Return for all refugees was among the political claims which present a frustrating paradox: the fundamental moral claim that every loss should be made whole is indisputable, but actually persuing it was so hopelessly intractable that keeping it on the table only stood in the way of either justice or peace. But Peter Beinart’s essay Teshuvah: A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return has turned me around. The moral case is even stronger than I registered. The pragmatics are hard, but not as impossible as I feared.

In 1977, Palestinian American graduate student George Bisharat traveled to the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbiyeh and knocked on the door of the house his grandfather had built and been robbed of. The elderly woman who answered the door told him his family had never lived there. “The humiliation of having to plead to enter my family’s home ... burned inside me,” Bisharat later wrote. In 2000, by then a law professor, he returned with his family. As his wife and children looked on, a man originally from New York answered the door and told him the same thing: It was not his family’s home.

But after Bisharat chronicled his experiences, he received an invitation from a former soldier who had briefly lived in the house after the Haganah seized it in 1948. When they met, the man said, “I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong,” and then added, “I owe your family three month’s rent.” In that moment, Bisharat wrote, he experienced “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples, and make things possible that are not possible today.”

There is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former Haganah soldier: Teshuvah, which is generally translated as “repentance.” Ironically enough, however, its literal definition is “return.” In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. Which means that the return of Palestinian refugees—far from necessitating Jewish exile—could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organized Jewish life. “The occupier and myself—both of us suffer from exile,” Mahmoud Darwish once declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.” The longer the Nakba continues, the deeper this Jewish moral exile becomes. By facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, both Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home.

Transphobia, antisemitism, and the far right

I believe that in the 2020s, transphobia has come to serve the function that antisemitism did in far right conspiracy theories of the early 20^th century. Against the possibility of Twitterpocalypse, I have captured some threads about it from there:

Blyth Crawford — May 2021

Something that basically everyone who’s spent any time on far-right social media is aware of is that transphobia is one of the biggest narratives pushed by the far right. But so often this goes unexamined, so here's a quick thread on far-right transphobia.

The far right often adheres to really stringent gender roles i.e. men = warriors & wage earners and women = the domestic realm. Often this is based in “traditionalism” and a desire to return to an idealised “simpler age” where men and women had strictly defined roles.

To extremists, trans people are seen to violate their ideal of strict roles, and the concept of gender fluidity is seen to threaten their stereotypical world view of what men and women “should” be like. Often the “concept” of transness is seen by the far right as a by-product of modernity and of the corrupt modern age which deliberately seeks to undermine the traditional familial structure, and threaten (white) Western culture. Often transness is referred to as an “ideology”, framing trans people as part of a political agenda, and falsely suggesting that being trans is a choice. This alleged “agenda” is seen to wish to stop men from being "masculine" and women from being traditionally "feminine".

In more extreme far-right circles this "transgender ideology" is seen to be controlled by Jewish people, fusing far-right transphobia with traditional far-right antisemitism.

Commonly, the far right also frames children – the paradigm of innocence – as the most “at risk” from this so-called transgender ideology. They suggest children are preyed upon by “trans-advocates” who push them to surgically transition at a young age against their will.

This is really clearly exemplified by the legal battle between Anne Georgulas and Jeffrey Younger over custody of their transgender daughter, which in 2019 became a huge flash point for the far right. Younger (the girl’s father) denied his daughter was trans, claiming her mother was forcing her and wanted to immediately “chemically castrate” her. His custody campaign spread wildly throughout far-right social media where fundraising campaigns for Younger were promoted.

The idea that children are targeted by “transgender ideology” is partially based in a fundamental misunderstanding of how gender reassignment surgery works. Transphobes claim that children are at risk of being “mutilated” or forced into “irreversible” hormone therapy.

However, this is far from the case. Gender reassignment journeys begin with many consultations with medical professionals and the process of beginning hormone therapy or getting access to surgical options (if they are wanted) can take years. Hormone therapy also simply delays puberty to give a young person time to make the choice that is right for them. It is reversible.

Also, not all trans people will choose to surgically or medically transition.

The idea that children are forced to surgically transition at a young age is therefore a myth perpetuated by the far right to frame transgender people as evil and preying on children, and a tool to help extremists recruit more followers to their cause.

Transphobia is such a powerful tool for the far right because unfortunately it has been part of mainstream political discourse for some time. It is a major conservative talking point, and is also a cause taken up by some on the left. In the same way that, for some, misogyny is what initially sucks them into the far-right, extremists seek to harness the popularity of transphobic narratives to recruit “normies” into their movements and into escalating extremism. Therefore far-right transphobic narratives are often a more extreme reflection of the discourse that already exists at a more mainstream level, and allows them to attempt to attempt to gain more followers.

In our recent report, we highlight that extremists have attempted to capitalise on the appointment of Dr Rachel Levine by the Biden administration, as an excuse to ramp up their transphobic propaganda and recruit newcomers. Groups like the Proud Boys have used Levine as a symbol for their transphobic hatred, and have deadnamed her repeatedly, refusing to recognise her gender identity, and sharing photos of her prior to her transition.

This shows that groups like the Proud Boys, which claim to be accepting of homosexuality (although this claim is super dubious), still have particularly acute anxieties about transgender people, and view transgender people with a particularly intense hatred.

Why is this important? Not only is it necessary to understand far-right transphobia because it’s one of the biggest ways the far-right recruits newcomers, and we cannot counter this without first understanding it.

But also, trans people are at a disproportionate risk of violence, and of suicidal ideation. In 2015 98% of trans people who had experienced 4+ instances of discrimination and violence in the past year had thought about suicide. 51% attempted it. Trans people are also being targeted by anti-trans bills in multiple US states, and in the UK where plans to enable trans people to legally assert their identities were scrapped in 2020 after pressure by transphobic groups.

Transphobia should be given far greater academic attention and should be recognised as a key part of security discourse as it is such a major tool used for recruitment by the far right, yet on the whole, it often goes undiscussed. Of course, I’m not claiming our recent report is the only one to ever highlight this issue! In 2019 SPLC observed that transphobic threats from white nationalists were escalation, and I would recommend this as essential reading on the topic. However, in general far-right transphobia is deserving of far greater attention. This thread only covers (some of) the basics of extremist transphobia, but I really hope this is something that will be given more recognition in the future in the field of security studies.

weary mourner — Oct 2021

sigh

deep breath

rubs at the bridge of his nose

Maybe you should research trans communities in Berlin during the 30s. Not a picnic but for the time trans people had a measure of freedom back then. It was certainly better in Germany in the 30s for trans people than it was for trans people in the US during the 30s.

1. No.
2. The Nazis saw queer existence as a manifestation of Jewish “corruption” & a Jewish “weapon” against the German people. This is inseparable. You cannot isolate their transphobia from their foundational antisemitism.

As a Jew I am extremely irritated by every aspect of this Discourse, because I can already feel the claim coming - indeed saw it claimed in this thread — that we’ve somehow paid too much attention to Jewish victims or that the Nazis did not have a special bias against Jews.

Which is, of course, The Point of the whole rhetorical tool — it’s designed to exploit bad-faith rhetorical tendencies on here where “Bad person says X, not Y” & then the foes of Bad Person immediately radicalize themselves into “actually Y is far more important than X & fuck X”.

Which, when you've wielding the Holocaust as a tool — and exploiting the seething left-wing resentment about coverage of the Shoah — is designed to goad people into Shoah erasure & antisemitism to isolate them from “normies.”

Remember, and I will say this for the N^th time:

NAZISM IS NOT INTERSECTIONAL, IT IS CONSPIRATORIAL.

Nazism sees all the “corruption” of the world as the product of a few demographics viewed as masterminds.

that makes the hirschfeld book burnings make even more sense. target a wedge group, that they viewed as “proof of a spreading corruption” or some other horrible justification for their crimes.

That’s the thing, friend: you’d assume that, because you’re a reasonable person whose approach to this is “pragmatic” and utilitarian, & wants to acknowledge intersectionality. You have it backwards. To Nazis, queer people are a symptom of Jewish action.

Now — and this is an uncomfortable topic — Nazism generally imprisoned non-cishet men and trans women on a systemic scale. They were sent to the concentration camps, but not necessarily (to my knowledge) the death camps. But that’s hardly “Nazis were OK with queer folks!”

(Apparently he Nazis didn’t target queer cis women or trans men under Paragraph 175 for at least a significant period, but they were still totally socially ostracized and faced persecution at home. And those who were sent to the camps suffered horribly.)

It is never a pleasant topic to debate “who had it worst under the Nazis” because honestly you’re going to piss somebody off. I’ve obviously got some biases here, because in my opinion it’s a bad idea to apply notions of “fairness” here. But being goaded into that minefield is a blunder. And it’s a pretty blatant ploy to try to push somebody who means well into that territory.

I dunno one day when I feel real self-destructive I’ll tweet more about this, but for now: look, just don’t, OK? Don’t even get into the terrain of “well the Nazis targeted (x) first / more / etc.” Just don’t. It is ground with no victory, and you’re really just gonna piss Jews off.

I’m hardly endorsing their monstrous pseudoscience. I’m not trying to deny antisemitism is the original bigotry or that the Jewish people the worst consequences of Nazi hatred. A roughly equal number of other people died in the Holocaust too, they had hatred to spare.

Please don’t do this. I know you mean well, mate, I really do. I know you’re trying to ensure Everyone Has Their Day of Grief. But when it comes to Nazis, their atrocities toward some demographics — Roma, Sinti, Jews — were above and beyond the already-horrific cruelties they doled out to others.

That’s part of the unique horror of Nazism — you have “ordinary” levels of already-damning evil towards marginalized and occupied victims, and then you have the places where they went into the realm of the borderline demonic, where the impact of their crimes still echoes today. How’s somebody to possibly give everyone their fair moment and spotlight of grief when faced with that?

sigh

And there it fucking is. There's the inevitable person minimizing the primacy of Nazi antisemitism.

Motherfucking A-! Excuse me I’m just gonna primal scream here a bit. Please can we retire the “everyone thinks the Nazis hated Jews but ((they)) don’t want you to know that akshually they targeted (insert demographic here) first / as many victims / etc”? Please?