You've seen the ads selling the wonders of the World Wide Web. Scored to rock and roll, the images and styles tend toward the outrageous and the bizarre. Cowboys herd cats. Hamsters hurtle through the air. The Mona Lisa's head pops off.

What this stuff has to do with the Web is anybody's guess--but it sure is...something.

Harold Hambrose, who lives in a world of signs and symbols, images and icons, is not impressed. Actually, he's a bit put out.

"We joke about these ads," says Hambrose, the 33-year-old president and CEO of Electronic Ink, a Philadelphia-based electronic design company. Sure, he says, technology can decapitate Mona Lisa, but why bother? Why do something just because you can?

"If you go back to the Industrial Revolution," Hambrose says, "it's the same thing. Victorians created wacky objects because suddenly they could mass produce 400,000 piano legs that look like Grecian temple columns--not because that was a great form for that object, but because they could do it and everyone could have them. So, sometimes we take a look at the computer screens today, and we say, 'We're there again!' But we really need to make sure these things start to serve us better."

That's Electronic Ink's mission.

The company's premise is simple enough: If you expect people to use technology, you have to make it appealing to them. That's the principle Hambrose started with when he graduated in 1989 with a degree in design from Carnegie Mellon University. Hambrose saw a problem with the way electronic interfaces were being built. Too often, design came after the technology was in place--mere decoration draped on something that was supposed to be useful. Hambrose wanted to change that and push design closer to technology. His idea, that the way human beings process information is firmly tied to the way information is presented, captured the interest of big technology players.

In 1990 Hambrose launched Electronic Ink. Now the company designs electronic interfaces like intranets, extranets, websites and free-standing video displays for clients in fields as diverse as health care, financial services and telecommunications. For each project Electronic Ink takes on, a unique combination of programmers, human factors analysts and designers work together from the get-go. The result? Software and applications in which function is faithfully married to form.

Electronic Ink's Philadelphia location allows it to draw its talent from many wells, including several local universities, such as the University of the Arts and Moore College of Art and Design, and from the swarms of young designers and programmers seeking to escape Manhattan's nosebleed rents.

Electronic Ink's clients include heavyweights such as MBNA Corp., First Data Corp. and Merrill Lynch & Co. One current project the company is working on is designing video displays for the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Clearly, the big guys are listening to the ideas of this small but growing, 53-person company, and they are starting to accept Hambrose's idea that technology's return on investment occurs only when humans successfully interact with it.

The company walks that humanistic talk, too. From a penthouse overlooking downtown Philadelphia, Electronic Ink's offices have no walls separating employees, making collaboration not just a possibility but a necessity. Members of each of the three core groups--technologists, human factors analysts and designers--sit close enough to touch each other in spaces where the monitors hang below the glass-topped desks, so as not to hide the user's face--that most excellent slab of communications hardware. It is company policy that any employee can buy any book at any time and enter it into the library; so it is that books about Shaker furniture, quilt making and computer programming intermingle on the shelves.

CIO spoke recently with Hambrose and his wife Johanna, 37, who serves as COO and corporate counsel.

CIO: What do human factors analysts have to do with design and technology?

Hambrose: The human factors community has been around for about 60 years in America. They started with the study of how the human form relates to its environment. They provided us with a lot of really good information about the average length of the human leg, the average person's ability to see at specific distances, a lot of the very physical measurements of the average human. That built slowly into cognitive processes as well. How much can the average person remember? What are the cogitative capabilities of the average doctor? Nurse? Average person? They can tell us that the best chairs to sit in for eight hours a day are approximately this deep and this tall and have these sorts of features.

They can now provide us with information about the best digital environments--environments where information is not sequenced too deeply, where average line lengths of information are not more than so many characters. They can give us real data. They can also provide different evaluation methods. They can measure people's ability to perceive information. They can measure the accuracy of those perceptions and really help designers make better decisions when they're shaping these things. So, constant collaboration between this very scientific, psychological side and the design process of creating form is absolutely necessary. It's critical. And you'll find the most successful artifacts, whether they're three-dimensional objects or websites, are ones where designers and psychologists and programmers collaborated closely.

CIO: Where does design's collaboration with other disciplines come in?

Hambrose: I've always sought projects where we're working with psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, as well as programmers, solving the problem together. A lot of people pretend to have all these different skills at their disposal, but you rarely find one person with all those capabilities.

So I really looked to align the company with the human factors community, which was pretty well established in the mid-'80s or early '90s. What I found was a real reluctance from the human factors community to align themselves with a designer because they misunderstood what it was I did. They thought I was just there to make something pretty. But what I've been able to do is bring together human factors people, designers and programmers and really invent the company I wanted to work for.

CIO: How does the user community perceive design?

Hambrose: In the States, it's a very complicated thing to sell design services because our art education stops in about fourth grade. People think that design is just making things pretty and in color. Design is really about process, whether you're an architect or a typographer or a product designer. It's really about how we shape objects around the human experience.

In the European business community, design is recognized more quickly as integral to business success. They consume a lot more design. Design is a lot more mainstream. In some European countries, design is actually government regulated. Not anyone can just hang out a design flag. There are design offices in the government. And if you go into a drugstore in Europe, you'll see in the products, from the labels to the shape of the objects, there's much more attention to design, for good or for bad. Sometimes the objects are more beautiful, sometimes they're overdesigned. But the fact is, design is playing a role in the mainstream.

Here, I think the American design community has not done a very good job teaching businesses how much they have to gain by employing design. Here, you'll see people buying technology first and saying, "Well, we'll worry about the design later."

CIO: How do you get your clients to understand the importance of design?

Hambrose: One of the things that we push at our clients is the fact that even though we're working on intranets, extranets, a website or software applications, it really can be broken down into designing communications, just making sure that technology effectively speaks to a human being. We bring them through this idea of a sender and a receiver and the fact that design is always somewhere in the middle to shape that message. We teach them about seeing messages in their everyday experiences. We show them that people have shaped these messages, people have devised ways of communicating based on the limitations of their audience for the conditions in which they're sending this message.

CIO: What sorts of messages are you talking about?

Hambrose: We can point to some pretty low-tech examples. One is the phone book, an incredibly complex array of data. Its form is not by chance, but through careful evolution. Designers have shaped every part of this device so that an incredibly broad group of users can pick it up, get the job done and get on with their lives. And its form is constant, whether you're in San Francisco or New York City. Another example is the London Underground map. It's a message that communicates for an incredibly broad audience. It was designed in 1933, but it was a designer who took this very complicated array of information and found the most important messages that serve the human being.

And think about your car dashboard. Through collaboration between ergonomics and human factors you can tell things about the physical form of the human being who's going to sit behind the thing. That collaboration can tell us about a person's focus being a certain way. Then designers assign form, so that it not only helps us grip the wheel appropriately, but it adds some aesthetic value, something pleasurable to the experience. Then there are the technologists who are working on the engine and communicating all of this information to those other two teams for the end user.

CIO: How does information technology fit into this?

Hambrose: When we talk about technology issues, whether it's business-to-business or business-to-consumer, it's really about that experience, that communication, that energy of the organization. It's not the graphics or the logo--those contribute to it--but it's really the success of the exchange between human beings and the software product that lead to the success of any venture. And to shape that experience, you need to spend an awful lot of time understanding your audience.

CIO: Is it difficult to convince your clients of this?

Hambrose: Our problem, in many cases, is that the client kind of expects us to cook up an answer and come back. We demand that our clients participate so that, incrementally, they're involved. So when we create a diagram, we want the president of the company to draw on it and fax it back to us, and give us comments.

Then, when the diagram is further resolved through iteration, we can start to take each of those moments in time--each of those displays--and crack it open even further with regard to what is actually going to happen on this screen. What are my choices here? What's the information that's going to be displayed here? What's the word we're actually going to put on these displays? And we present them as simply as possible so that our discussion with our client is still just about function and content; it's not about subjective colors or logos.

As these discussions evolve, we can then worry about colors, logos and identity situations.

CIO: How does the collaboration between the different groups help this process?

Hambrose: What's nice is that the technologist can make better decisions. Those opportunities don't happen unless the design and technology are together from the beginning of the exercise. So much time is saved by having these three groups--technologists, designers and human factor people--working at the same time from the beginning. There's never really a handoff and then going back to revisit. It's interesting to note that our design team has a lot of architects on it. We also have typographers, graphic designers and product designers. What's interesting is that no matter where they came from originally, they all have the same language, same beliefs, same process of shaping things.

CIO: Are the best designs invisible?

Hambrose: That's what design is supposed to be. A lot of people think design is supposed to be recognized. "Oh! Look at that! Isn't that neat! Look at that animation!" No, that's not neat. That's not part of the primary message. The designer didn't do well; they satisfied their ego for the sake of visibility. We have clients who are asking us to look at things like their intranet because their user experience is not positive; designers are not doing their job effectively if users can't use this thing. The programmers made all the decisions. They say, "It adds up the numbers accurately." Well, you need to do more than that.

Johanna Hambrose: If you can go in, perform your job and leave and get back to what you were doing, it doesn't matter what color the background is. If you have a bad experience, you'll never go back. You'll go to the competition. If you have a good experience and something is easy to use, you'll come back, despite what the logo looks like.

CIO: Is technology doing all it should in the modern world?

Johanna Hambrose: You know, we have a whole section of books on Shaker furniture in this office because the utility is so apparent, but also because it's so beautiful. These people had to plow fields, but they also had this spiritual need and a thousand other complicated social things going on in their culture that brought about these beautiful objects that are absolutely utilitarian in their nature. If you take that and you measure this stuff in this digital era, we're still way off.

Senior Writer Meg Mitchell can be reached at mmitchell@cio.com.