jen's place: Musings on design & other stuff

Back in December, I asked a question on the design@sun blog, and then posted a summary of the responses. In that summary, I said that I'd write a presentation with more details, which I did. In February, I presented the detailed findings as a "half-baked" talk to SunLabs East. At the end of the talk, an intern or a new employee (someone young, who I didn't recognize) asked me this question: "How can user research help you to innovate, rather than just make incremental improvements?"

I was taken aback. ... What a great question. Nicole jumped in and gave a really good answer about how user research allows us to get at the root problems that the users are trying to solve, and that we're not asking them to tell us what's wrong with the software, per se, but figuring out their goals and how to better meet them. Of course! Why didn't I say that?

But there was a bigger question, which is why I'm pretty sure that I didn't come back with the answer that Nicole did immediately ... and that bigger question is, "When faced with challenges, how do we leap-frog over just solving the symptoms of a problem and do something really innovative? something fundamentally different?"

I have an answer to that question, but before I tell you what it is, I have to put in a plug for the very-much undervalued "incremental improvement". If we continually made incremental improvements to the user's experience, we'd be far better off than we are now. Quite often, the designer says something like, "This [site | application | device | experience] needs a complete re-design", at which point engineering management rolls its eyes at what they think a complete re-design is going to cost. As a result, nothing gets done, and the user experience stays just as bad as it is. So, for goodness sake, make the incremental improvements! They are cheap, fast, and will have an immediate benefit for your users. Now, back to the question at hand...

There are probably a million answers to this question (how to innovate), but I have one, and here it is. Imagine what the solution would look like, behave like, or provide, if there were no constraints. If money were no object. If you had an unlimited engineering team to develop it. If the existing standards that everyone used were thrown out. If you were in charge ... then what would the answer be?

It's only by putting myself in that frame of mind that I have been able to truly innovate. To have a problem and then imagine the ideal solution, without boundaries placed upon it. Believe me, the boundaries will come. There will be functional requirements and business requirements, and of course, user requirements. ... but before then, dream big. Live outside the box. Read Plato's Republic. Think differently.

To borrow a line from Steve Jobs, "innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity, not a threat."

I guess that I was a little burned out on blogging ... I'd said what I wanted to say on my own blog, and had posted a lot on the design@sun blog, so I needed a break. And, at the same time, I started working with a new team in the Chief Technology Office on a really interesting project, and I just let that consume all the time I had.

But then before I left for Florence, Maya asked me to write a blog post on my CHI talk for the design@sun blog. I wrote it in just a few minutes on Monday, and it was fun. And having been away from blogging for over 3 months, now, I have a nice list of things saved up, which I'll be writing about in the coming days:

• My experiences with my new iPhone
• My experiences with my new MacBook Air
• A well-designed UI for a door
• How to innovate, not just create incremental improvements
• My upcoming talk at the Boston UPA Mini Conference
• A little more on Florence, and CHI 2008
• Mentoring:
  • When should you take your mentor's advice?
  • Treating yourself like a business

So, I'm here, and I'm writing again. And for the first time in a little while, I'm really enjoying it.

I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted here (there were some interim posts here), but that's life. The holidays were great, the New Year has begun, and I'm starting fresh ... with work, with my diet, and, hopefully, with my phone. A few weeks ago, I asked, "What do you really want from your mobile device?" (and then I posted the trends in the answers).

I know what I want, but it doesn't exist yet. Not even on the iPhone. Now don't get me wrong, I've been following the iPhone since it was first announced, and I really want one. But what if I buy one and then they release the next cooler version that has something that I really need? ... sigh.

I've even bought the ringtone that I want to use (yes. I spent the 99 cents, much to the chagrin of many colleagues -- it's a dollar, for Christ's sake, not a war of business ethics). I can't wait to use it ... it's the first eleven seconds of the title track to turn.

It was rumored that the next iPhone would be announced before Christmas, so I waited and watched ... Nothing. Maybe they were referring to this. Of course, we still did our share to buoy the Apple stock price over the holidays, but the MacWorld Conference and Expo is only a week away, so I wait ... hopeful.

I loved that movie ... and the music ... Pucinni ... just glorious. And now, in April, it looks like I will be visiting the Arno myself. The paper that I submitted on behalf of my co-author and myself was accepted to the ACM Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference in 2008. That's the cool part.

The less cool part is that hardly anyone I know is going, so I don't think it'll be like last year's CHI conference, which was a lot of fun because there were half a dozen other folks from my graduate program there. So far, I think I'll know 3 people at the conference next year, and only 1 or 2 of them are likely to let me hang out with them (they are pretty illustrious after all). I'm hoping my co-author will go (and give the talk, if she likes)... we had a good time in Aptos. And of course, I'll make a vacation out of it for the family, so I'll spend time with them seeing Italy before or after the conference ... we've never been to Italy before, so it'll be an adventure :)

I've been really busy lately. Even too busy to blog. But I like to keep on top of what my friends are up to, and in return let them know what I'm doing. The most convenient way for me to do that is my Facebook status. Sometimes, a friend will send me a note on my status or I'll send one to them. For example, Paul sent me a Facebook message when I was fed up one day. And I sent Amy a note to let her know that the mystery comment from a former professor sounded positive. And then one to Mark to find out where he was getting Afghan food -- was he still in Baltimore or back in Boston?

But then Tuesday, several of us from my former graduate program gathered at the local watering hole for appetizers and pints of Murphy's, and that's when our Facebook status really changed the nature of what our conversation would have otherwise been. I asked Neeta what she had been counting the days until ... it was graduation, but she's also planning her wedding, now, too! And Manya asked how my daughter's surgery went, and Amy and I talked about where she'd finally decided to travel to (she decided not to travel) and how I'd had 27 people over for Thanksgiving dinner. Now the content of our conversations wasn't necessarily any different than it might have been otherwise, but it was the way it unraveled ... there was no "what have you been up to". We just skipped to, "Tell me about what I read on your Facebook status" ... I hadn't spoken to any of these folks for several weeks or several months, and yet we "see" each other all the time.

I can see drawbacks to this kind of abbreviated conversation, built on frequent status updates ... for example, I probably missed out on some interesting answers to the questions that I didn't ask, (like, "What have you been up to?") ... and yet, I felt like we were able to have more meaningful dialog than we might have otherwise.

As a postscript, another member of a band I like joined Facebook. But he did it as an entertainer, not an individual. More of a persona rather than a person. And I could sign up to be his fan, but not his friend... No thanks. I'll keep reading his blog, and I'll keep Facebook for the people who want to talk back to me :)

When we last talked, I was describing the reasoning behind the McGinn design model, having shared that this explanatory text was developed with my colleague, Jen Hocko.

But, you ask, how can such a model be meaningful to the practitioner on the street? I'm a practitioner, which is why I'm keen on keeping anything I write grounded in research, but applicable to our everyday work.

Takeaways for Designers

First, at the lowest levels, what we know about human sensory perception should be codified in our user interface guidelines or standards — not be discovered during our usability tests. We have decades of research on what humans do naturally, which we should be careful not to forget when we’re caught up in the latest cool project, technology or deadline. For example, a recent article highlighted how a marketing department used usability testing to "discover" that bigger targets are easier to find, and that red sends a stronger signal than blue, when users are searching for something specific on a web page. No one needed to run a usability test to find these things out — they just needed to know how the eye perceives light, and have read up on Fitts’ law, first published in the early 1950's.

Next, one’s perception of what is intuitive and innovative is affected by:

• Variations in individual experience
• Variations introduced as a result of context
• Variations in expectations based on culture

Imagine for a moment that you were born on a remote island. What would your expectations be for the behavior of a switch, a dial, or a push button? You’d have no expectations, because you would never have seen them before. Once you were shown that a light switch could result in a room becoming illuminated, you might be impressed with how innovative it was, but the interaction might not have been intuitive at all.

So as result, creating truly intuitive and innovative user interfaces requires attention to several layers of the McGinn model, not just one or two. Many of us start designing for the user group, either blissfully unaware that we need to pay attention to anything below that layer, or by making broad assumptions that all the lower layers are the same for everyone in that user group.

By asking ourselves with each new design who we are designing for and where in the model we might find variations, we will uncover opportunities for making our products and services more intuitive and more innovative. By evaluating our interfaces against each layer of the McGinn model, we can uncover opportunities for improvement and alignment with the people who will eventually, hopefully, be using it.

Okay, I know, I've been busy. I promised you something that I haven't delivered. So here I am, making good on my threat. Back in part 1 of this thread, I shared with you my frustration at trying to get this new model published. In part 2, I showed you the design hierarchy that comprises my new model. And, now, today, I'm going to put some more words around it.

The only thing that I need to preface this discussion with is a little bit of credit. This model was originally presented as a talk that was given by me and a fellow graduate of my MS program, Jen Hocko, who is a Senior Usability Specialist at the MathWorks. While the model is mine, Jen and I worked closely over several months to craft the explanatory text below, so I'm not sure that I could tell you immediately where my words end, and hers begin. In addition, we had several reviewers of this work: Beth Loring, Chauncey Wilson, Joe Dumas, and Bill Gribbons. As a result, this discussion has been influenced by their review comments. That said, here it is.

A Model for Creating Intuitive and Innovative Designs

One of the aspects that we (Jen Hocko and Jen McGinn) had discussed privately, is that prior knowledge and experience play a significant role in whether users perceive designs as intuitive or innovative. Any useful model would need to account for these factors.

Like the model proposed by Hancock, McGinn’s model advocates an approach to design that incorporates attentiveness to the many factors influencing a user's perception of a design as intuitive and innovative. The old phrase "perception is everything" is the basis for this model: essentially, what affects our perception of any design?

Starting at the base, we believe that designers should rely on the physiological bits of HUMAN SENSORY PERCEPTION, which are reasonably consistent despite changes in subsequent layers. These physiological responses include how humans perceive light and sound, as well as the Gestalt principles of visual organization. Our designs should take advantage of what is common across humans, and those similarities should be codified in all our design guidelines.

The bottom layer is pre-cognitive, and accounts for what is physically similar across humans, while each of the subsequent layers describes what we have learned based on our experience.

The next layer of the McGinn model has to do with the user's CULTURE. Hofstede defines four dimensions of national culture: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity. In addition, other culture-related factors that should be taken into account when attempting to design any interface include reading patterns, cultural aesthetic preferences, and concepts of time. The mental models that we have for what is "normal" come from our experiences living in a particular culture.

For example, suppose we are working for an airline company. The passenger from Israel will have a set of expectations of how that experience will go, from passing through security, to the timeliness of the flight, to the ultimate experience of the flight itself. Compare that to the Russian traveler on Aeroflot, which was notorious for taking off within a day or two of the scheduled flight time. And then, compare those to the expectations of the American traveler, who believes that a flight should be on time within a few minutes, and that security checks should be minimally invasive.

CONTEXT is also an important consideration when designing intuitive and innovative user interfaces. The context in which a person operates is rarely static. For example, when a person who is an expert Windows XP user tries to accomplish the same things on another operating system, he can instantly become a novice. His age and economic status haven't changed, but some aspects of the task at hand have. It is these task-based characteristics that determine a person’s user group; his needs for information and support have just changed, because the context in which he tries to accomplish his goals has changed.

As a result, context and USER GROUP (the next layer) are very tightly coupled. Given the context, the same person may fit several different user profiles: she may be a homeowner with a mortgage, a wife with three children, or a technical professional with an advanced degree. The user group a person belongs to depends on the context in which they are being categorized. A person’s goals and resulting information needs will change with their user group, depending on the context that person is in. Take, for example, the expert user of the Windows XP operating system. When he needs to eject a CD from a system that runs the Mac OS or Linux, he requires different mental models and knowledge for how that task will be accomplished.

Lastly, we can design for the INDIVIDUAL. We don't have to, but there are certainly markets to be exploited this way. Gateway and Dell built successful business models by customizing systems for each person who ordered their products. The Bentley College masters program in Human Factors in Information Design (which both authors completed) is similar in that regard. Virtually no two people take the same ten classes. Some get credit for work study, some for having completed the certificate program, some for taking a negotiating class as an elective, and some for taking a course in statistics. Each course of study is designed to fit the needs of the individual.

But what does all of this mean for the designer or usability practitioner? How can it be applied to what we do? ... Hang on ... I'll post that on Friday :)

Back in part 2 of this series, I suggested that, "Humility is a great quality. Save it for everyone but your boss."

So what did I mean by that? Did I mean that you should take credit for other people's work? No. Did I mean that you should throw your colleagues under the bus by blaming everything that goes wrong on them? Not even. What I meant was that you need to continually communicate the value of your work to your manager, so she or he doesn't have to guess, to read your mind, or to figure it out on their own.

Your manager is busy. Save her some time. When you go in for your next 1-1 with her (you are having weekly or bi-weekly 1-1's with your manger, right?), listen to what ever she wants to tell you first. Then, looking over your notes (you went in with written notes, right?), tell her what you've been doing, the challenges (briefly) that you've faced, and either (a) how you overcame those challenges or (b) what you need for her to do, so that you can move forward. What if you talked about it in your last meeting? Well, if you're still working on it, then give her a status update — tell her what progress you've made. Or, if you are completely stuck or overwhelmed, what kind of help you need.

Here are some tips:

• Schedule regular status meetings with your manager. These meetings can be weekly or bi-weekly, but should not be further apart than every 2 weeks. These meetings should last no less than 30 minutes, and you should come with an agenda (see above).
• Share all the good news. From time to time, you will get emails thanking you for all your hard work. These may come from customers, other managers, or colleagues. Immediately forward anything that has a thank you in it to your manager. I usually add a brief summary at the top of the forward message, like "Nice words from the VP of marketing" or "Thanks from Sarah" or "Kudos from the web team". I'm saving my manger time with the summary, and then he can decide whether to send it up to his manager. Managers love doing that, by the way ... sharing good news. So make sure that you give him that opportunity.
• Ask for feedback from the people with whom you work. So you don't have any of those letters or emails to share? It's okay to ask for them. Really. I had one mentee whose boss told her that she couldn't be promoted until she got some rave reviews from her customers. She knew that she'd worked really hard (often much harder than her colleagues), so she asked her customers to write an email to her or her boss to give feedback on her performance. She got the rave reviews that she needed, and almost immediately got that promotion.
• Show some appreciation. Call it Karma or the golden rule or whatever you want, but the best way to get external appreciation and validation is start by showing some. Thank your colleagues. Publicly. And in writing. That's how you'd like to be thanked, right? And it shows that you have leadership skills or leadership potential, because it's not all about building yourself up, it's about building and sustaining a team.

And, if after all this advice, you still don't believe me, then don't take my word for it. Take someone else's (just scroll down to the November 6th posting, How to move up the ladder).

I was thrilled to hear today's design review, which was a redux of Jakub Franc's World Usability Day talk in Prague. I found it particularly interesting that the personas developed by Jakub's team of graduate students at the Czech Technical University were very similar to the ones that I developed with two classmates, to prototype a "smart" pill dispenser, for a graduate class :)

The college from which I received my graduate degree ran an annual 2-day conference called "Aging by Design" for three years (2004 - 2006). I am fortunate to have been able to attend in 2005 and 2006. Designing for aging populations has been an area of research and design interest for me, since seeing my father's cognitive decline and subsequent interment in a nursing home, before his death in 2005.

If you are interested in reading more on the challenges of how to create good designs for older adults, you can start with the small book, Designing for Older Adults. Other interesting books include The Handbook of Aging and Cognition, Cognitive Aging, and Handbook of the Psychology of Aging.

Last week was tough in many respects — but the positive that I have out of it is that I finally broke through my 13-pound weight-loss plateau! The scale at Weight Watchers on Saturday said that I was down more than two pounds, which means that I've broken out of the plateau that I fell onto, right around my birthday, eight weeks ago. Only 10 more pounds to go, and I'll have reached my goal weight, which I haven't seen since I before my graduate program.

For the first time in a while, I really feel like I know what it is that I need to do to get there. This past week, I started the eating plan on the Abs Diet for Women, and continued with my workout regime of Yoga, Pilates, weights, and cardio machines. Over the last 3 weeks, I've increased the weights I'm using, so I'm feeling stronger than I have in a long time, too.

The next part of my nefarious plan is to continue the eating plan for one more week, and then I'll add in the Abs Diet exercises. Wish me luck!

I worked up my courage and weighed in at weight watchers last weekend ... and the good news is that I'm still down 13 pounds. At least I've recovered from the eating and lack of exercise during my weeks of travel. Maintaining that weight loss is positive.

On the "next steps" front, I've now enjoyed two weeks of adding Yoga, Pilates, and weights to my workout regimen, with the goal of building muscle. Not bulky muscle, just better tone and definition. I've been meandering through the Abs Diet for Women book, and the author promotes the idea of building muscle to lose weight for these reasons: first, a pound of muscle burns 30 more calories per hour than a pound of fat. Second, the effects of aerobic exercise only last a few hours, whereas the process of breaking down and rebuilding muscle (which happens through weight training) takes 24 to 48 hours, so the effects are longer lasting. The result is that, while muscle is heavy, it's beneficial to weight loss ... and it looks good, too.

The Abs Diet is a 6-week program, which I'll shop for this weekend, and start next week. My new goal is to take off another 12 pounds by Christmas. That would be the best present that I could give to myself :) But first, I need to get through Thanksgiving -- we are having 14 adults and 12 children (ranging in ages from 7 months to 14 years) over to our house. Even with two seatings, it's bound to be exciting!

It started like this ... a question came across an email list on usability: what makes a design intuitive?

After many other people responded, I took a stab at it:

So here is the nut of the problem, as I see it. Prior knowledge varies from human to human and culture to culture. The things that don't vary across cultures, the physiological bits of sensory perception, like how a sound reaches our ear drum or how color is received by the cones in our eyes don't help us a lot with design, except for things like size, contrast, and color choices that are limited to red & green for fine discrimination versus blue for peripheral vision. Other things that we could count on across cultural boundaries include the Gestalt laws of proximity, closure, continuation, and similarity.

So, understanding what works (and doesn't) at the level of human sensory perception should be codified in our visual style guides (or smell, if you're designing for a puppy :) . Beyond that, the next level is culture, then the user groups that we are used to designing for. We need to view the intuitive-ness of a thing as having layers of effectiveness (pardon my text pyramid) -- there's some magic point between User Group and Individual that we are always striving to design for.

       
                    /\
                   /  \
                 /      \
                /        \
              / Individual \
             /--------------\
            /   User Group   \
           /------------------\
          /      Culture       \
         /----------------------\
        /Human Sensory Perception\   <- or species, in the case of the puppy
       ---------------------------

There's also a modified Maslow's hierarchy in the paper on individuation by Hancock, et al (Hedonomics: The power of positive and pleasurable ergonomics. Ergonomics In Design.) At the bottom is pain avoidance, and at the top is individuation (personal perfection). In between are functional, usable, and pleasurable.

Later in my discussions with Jen, I added another layer, Context, in the middle, so my hierarchy now looked like this:

But what does this model have to do with creating intuitive and innovative designs? That's what I'll discuss in subsequent blog posts.

It's time. Last May, a colleague and I gave a presentation at the Boston UPA Mini Conference on User Experience and Usability. Since that time, she and I have written a paper on the same topic, and have twice tried to get it published. No luck so far.

It was from a flash of insight, just an answer to a question on an email alias, that I came up with a new theoretical model for designing innovative and intuitive products and services. And the potential publishers, like I tell my daughter with her math problems, don't just want the answer, they want to see all the work.

I'm thinking that I just finished an Masters degree, and the amount of research backing up my model could be a dissertation. But here's as much as I will say now: the McGinn Model, as my colleague Jen Hocko named it, is based on Hancock's Model, which is based on Maslow's Hierarchy of needs.

And starting tomorrow, I'll be talking about the model here. If I can talk it through with you here in this medium, and take my time to research one layer at a time, maybe I'll eventually find the right venue in which to publish it.

Until then, viva la blog!

So Wayne keeps commenting on my weight loss posts, telling me to add weights to my exercise regimen. Thanks, Wayne ;p

Yesterday, I started a weekly class at our gym, called "Women and Weights". And while I'm pretty sore this morning, it re-awakened my inner athlete. Although I haven't worked out using free-weights or weight machines in many (many) years, I remember. Not in the sense of "I know how to do the exercises," but more like a physical memory. I've done this before. I can do this again. I can get stronger and, ultimately, leaner. It was a real epiphany for me. So, okay, I'm sore today ... but very motivated to continue.

I've also signed up for another weekly class on Wednesdays. It's a combination of Yoga and Pilates, which I haven't done for 3 or 4 years. We'll see how exciting it is later this afternoon, with sore muscles ...

But now I know what it is that I need to do, and I know that it's within my power to do it.

Thanks, Wayne.

Yesterday, as we were running some errands, we happened across a rainbow ... and as we drove on a bit farther, we saw that there were actually two rainbows. The second one is more faint, but it's there, to the left of the brighter one :)

Yesterday, as I was driving to work, I felt the need to capture some of what I was seeing. It was a foggy morning, and my drive to work was particularly lovely.

I know, you don't hear a lot of people telling you how great their commute is, but mine's about 20 minutes, and this is the time of year to be out and about. Having only been in New England for 10 years, it still cracks me up that the practice of going out to look at the Fall color is called "leaf peeping". I can't say that I got a lot of spectacular shots -- after all, I was pulling over to the side of the road, rolling down my window, and shooting them one-handed, while watching out for moving traffic :)

If you take a look, you'll see that the trees still have most of their leaves, and only a quarter to a third of them have changed color. So, with any luck, I'll have more shots of pretty Fall color coming soon :)

I know, I said that I didn't get Facebook. But now, I do. It's been over a month since I've started really playing with it, and I'll tell you what I've learned, from a design perspective.

First, Facebook is really "sticky" -- I get this term from Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point. He defines sticky as a marketing term for infectious. How long does a product or brand or a visual stay with you? That's one measure of stickiness. With Facebook, what it means is how often do you visit the site, and how much time to you spend there? For me, it's a couple times a day, and I spend a few minutes to a half hour. But why, you ask.

One element of Facebook is that it sends me friend requests and notifications in email, so I am taken out of the task I'm doing (interrupted) and motivated to go see what gift I've received, what's written on my wall, or who wants to be my friend. It's like the little rush I get, when I see the postal truck coming down the street toward my house :)

Anther element of it's stickiness is the notion of time. I like to view my friend's status updates, which gives me a good idea of who is or was doing what when. As a result, I feel more connected to them on a regular, real-time basis.

Another thing that I enjoy are the applications on Facebook. They are fun, silly, and mildly informative. I have famous quotes, a fortune cookie, a friend wheel, a map of the world that shows where I've been, favorite music, books, ... I could go on. I can view my friends applications and information and they can view mine. We can learn more about each other than we normally would in person. And when I find a friend who has an application that I like, I can click one button to add the application to my page. Very sticky.

Lastly, the meta-finding I have is that Facebook gives me a distributed community of friends -- this access is important, because I don't have physical access to them. I can't walk down the hall and knock on their doors. Several people I work with -- okay, most of the people I work with -- live in other geographies like California and India. What Facebook gives us is a virtual water cooler to gather around. A way to relate to one another that is not just about the task at hand in a meeting. But it also gives me that ability to feel closer to the people I don't take classes with anymore, and people who have left Sun.

I get Facebook. It's about feeling connected to people in a technological world that often leaves us feeling lonely or isolated.

So last night, before the pumpkin seeds and the apple pie, I received an email saying that we could book a vacation to join Great Big Sea and several other bands on a cruise. Apparently, booking started yesterday, and I didn't know that a delay of 18 hours would make that much of a difference, but the cruise is nearly sold out -- and all the exterior rooms are gone.

Rats.

I was thinking that this vacation could be my Christmas present to Tom and myself (and Rachel, who screamed, "We'd get to meet them?"). But I'm too late. All the good cabins are gone :(

It's Fall in new England ... the very best season that this part of the country has to offer. So Saturday, we went apple picking (we got a peck of Cortland), and selected our Halloween pumpkins. I still need to get a dozen or so mums and put them in the ground. It's unseasonably warm -- this was the first year that the boys could carve their pumpkins outdoors.

We just put an apple pie in the oven. It took two trips to the convenience store: first for sugar, and then for cornstarch and butter. Oh well, it's made now. Tom also made apple pancakes Sunday morning, and we roasted pumpkin seeds -- there are really only a couple of things to know about making good pumpkin seeds: use more salt than you think you'll need, and put a piece of parchment between the seeds and the cookie sheet. Then put them in a 350-degree oven until they are light brown. Yum ...

To my knowledge, there are only a few people from my graduate program who have published their work at either the ACM CHI conference or the UPA conference. Some of my friends from the program have asked me to give them advice, so here's what I have:

• Trying is the first part of doing. This is the mantra that I use with my daughter, and we find it very empowering. As the Maryland lottery tag line used to say, "You've got to play to win." You won't get published unless you write and submit.
• Get your article peer-reviewed before you submit. Ask people whom you know to review your article. They will point out where you are vague, where you need to provide specifics, and what other issues you need to address. I generally ask 3 or 4 people (colleagues, teachers, friends at other companies) to peer review the article, and to subsequently review changes that I've made based on their suggestions.
• Appreciate your reviewers. Ask the people who peer-reviewed your paper what is their favorite flavor of chocolate (white, dark, or milk?) or wine (red or white? which grape? Merlot? Pinot Nior? Zinfindel?). And then deliver -- I usually buy $5 or $10 of chocolate from the Lindt store or Godiva store, and when I buy a bottle of wine, I spend between $10 and $20 (and deliver it in a gift bag). The last time I dropped off a bottle of wine to say "thank you for reviewing an article" that had subsequently been rejected, the meeting led to a panel proposal that may take us to Florence, Italy, in April :)
• Well-written articles are more easily accepted. When I was working on my first paper for publication, my co-author had lots of publication experience. She admitted in frustration that a certain percentage of articles would be published not because they had remarkable findings, but because they were well written. I thought "Then this is going to be a very well-written paper!" -- organization, and clarity of thought count.
• Work with someone who has already published. This technique allows you to benefit from their experience, and to get some unofficial mentoring.
• Collaborate. I've always said that writing is best played as a team sport. It can sometimes be frustrating to work with co-authors, but I have always felt that the work benefited from their insights and input.
• Title your paper appropriately. A misleading title can take your reviewers down the wrong path, which we know leads to confusion, anxiety, and anger: three emotions that you don't want your reviewers to be feeling :) Likewise,
• Ensure that your abstract and conclusion sections are the best-written parts of the paper, because, as former graduate students, we know that often those sections are the only part of a paper that are read. And those sections determine whether a reader will look at the material in between them.
• Rejection does not equal failure. Clearly, it's not fun, but the more writing that you do, the more likely you are to get rejected. Take the comments that you receive seriously, consider that you may have written something that is more in line with another publication's audience or style, and try again. The world is full of stories of how innovators' disruptive ideas were rejected.
• Publication does not equal perfection. Don't wait for your article to be perfect. Write it. Have it reviewed. Revise it. And then submit it. Get out there, and do it -- trying is the first part of doing!

Good luck!