White Screen of Death

Phylogeny of hominids

2007-04-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

Phylogeny of hominids, originally uploaded by cpurrin1.

Cheney Creep

2007-04-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

This is my new latest fave video. Cheney hiding out in the bushes during a press conference overlain with Radiohead's Creep.

New TLA of the Day

2007-03-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

SCfH
Scope Creep from Hell: When a project adds about 30 new requirements when you are supposed to be completing detailed design.

The best vacation listing evar.

2007-03-26T23:11:00.000-07:00

OK, are you looking for a transformational experience? I am. And I found it. Herein lies god. From the vacation rental rant advertisement...

Butter is Optional at the Redwoods

Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavorings. DO YOU KNOW..the difference between margarine and butter? Read on to the end...gets very interesting! Both have the same amount of calories. Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams. Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study. Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods. Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few only because they are added! Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods. Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years. And now, for Margarine.. Very high in transfatty acids. Triple risk of coronary heart disease. Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol) Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold. Lowers quality of breast milk. Decreases immune response. Decreases insulin response. And here's the most disturbing fact.... HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY *INTERESTING! Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC.. This fact alone was enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of the substance). You can try this yourself: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will note a couple of things: * no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something) * it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value; nothing will grow on it Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast? Share This With Your Friends.....(If you want to "butter them up")!

Awesome bizarreness

2007-03-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

I have been watching this guy's photostream for some time now.

Flickr Photo Download: Sophie Calle's phone booth

His pictures in the Wee planets set are really fabulous. All a bit familiar, but all striking and beautiful. His other photos are worth purusing as well.

Do you think it's fake?

2007-03-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I saw the latest Time Magazine cover, emblazoned with the massive Reagan tear. Someone (it may have been me) asked, "Do you think it's fake?" obvious response: "Duh, I hope so, he's dead!"

I was so happy this morning when I saw the B2 post, 'Interview with "Regan tear" artist'.

Here's a link to the source article, an interview by Debbie Grossman with famous tear illustrator, Tim O'Brien.

Blogged with Flock

An important note on the grape harvest

2007-03-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

I have posted recently to serious about camo regarding Swivel and its awesomeness. Well, one of the Featured Graphs o' the Day recently is Eatin', Dryin' and Drinkin', looking at farmland dedicated to table grapes, raisins and vino. Muy fun.

Hilarious remix of an old skool union ad

2007-03-14T22:09:00.000-07:00

SO good, there really isn't that much more to say.

Chainsaw as mediator

2007-03-12T08:15:00.000-07:00

Oh, I can so relate to this article from BLDGBLOG:

Architectural Divorce Court[Image: From "Splitting," by Gordon Matta-Clark].

"A 43-year-old German decided to settle his imminent divorce by chainsawing a family home in two and making off with his half in a forklift truck," Reuters reports.
The man then "picked up his half with the forklift truck and drove to his brother's house where he has since been staying."

... as my ex and I lob spreadsheets back and forth.

Like, outta NOWHERE

2007-03-07T21:01:00.000-08:00

Ok, maybe I am slow and behind the times or something. I am just minding my own bidness, digging through my huge directory of Sage subscriptions, and I hit a kottke post about BLDGBLOG. I'd been there before; I recall thinking it was fairly interesting.

Hitting the homepage today was literally arresting. I was freakin' transfixed. The amount of content is staggering, the writing is interesting, novel and at times gives me that feeling that I have woken up and it is another planet.

Oh, just another daily read.

90 seconds of world religion

2007-03-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

This little video details in 90 seconds the spread of the world's major religions.

Get 'em

2007-03-05T08:11:00.000-08:00

Thank goodness for Gates. This guy actually seems to be doing a good job. It is so refreshing after years of dealing with Rumsfeld and all his doublespeak.

From Harpers: Kentucky Fried Chicken president Gre...

2007-03-05T07:33:00.000-08:00

From Harpers:
Kentucky Fried Chicken president Gregg Dedrick wrote a personal letter to Pope Benedict XVI asking him to bless the company's 99-cent Fish Snacker.

What

2007-03-05T06:24:00.000-08:00

"Say 'What' again, one more time."

This is a wonderful use of type and graphics.

Patternerific!!

2007-02-28T21:56:00.000-08:00

This is a great photoset that examines the security patterns of envelopes. I wonder who designs these things?

Are they specialists? What tools do they use? Do the scribble a lot?

I have a hard time imagining that there are people out there that spend 40 hour weeks contemplating the best way to destroy light in this fashion. Maybe there are. I am sure that it is an evolving field. Although, paper mail must be a comparatively insecure way to send things, given encryption and secure connections.

New York Times' evil "feature"

2007-02-26T14:22:00.000-08:00

When people watch me read a webpage, they often comment on one of my little ticks: I compulsively select and deselect the lines I am reading. I don't really know why I do this, but it helps me to focus on the text. I'll either click and drag to select or I'll double click on some text in a line to select the whole line or paragraph. Herein, things go sour.

At some point, The New York Times added a new feature which opens a new window with a glossary search on whatever text you double click; I am sure that it helps some people. It reminds me of a feature in OSX's Dictionary app, which drills you down into new words onclick.

Try it. It sucks.

I am gonna

2007-02-23T09:44:00.000-08:00

This is my new theme song.

"Hi my name is Clay and ..."

Hum
it
to
your
self.

Andy channels Bjork

2007-02-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

All I have to say is: Popcorn.

Seriously.

2007-02-15T11:25:00.000-08:00

I am serious about camo. This will be where I start posting my design and business musings. It should definitely include regular TLA complaints, in addition to rants and such.

Wish I was feeling creative...

2007-02-13T20:39:00.000-08:00

But I am not. So here are my notes from Day 2:

Adaptive Path
MX: Managing Experience Through Creative Leadership

Irish Bank:
Beer, starch and grease (the 3 food groups.)

Caterina Fake and Tim Brown spent last week in Davos.

keynote: Innovation through design thinking
Tim Brown
IDEO
The story he tells to business people for why design will make a difference for their business.

How we can connect design with business in a more valid, useful way. We can be who we are.

Design is everywhere.
AG Lafley (P&G) on Fast Company

beyond the stuff, designers have a unique way of solving problems.
the stuff that is beautiful is important, but it is not the only important things

Design is the stuff designers produce, but "design thinking" is what designers do.

it can be used top tackle a whole range of creative and business issues

> new strategies
design thinking is a great way of thinking about strategies, visualizing the future of your business.

"coasting" shimano ... a new category of biking. flat market for the last few years. Tapped out the number of people who want to wear spandex. 90% of the adult US does not use bicycles. How do we build a biking experience for the rest of us. Product innovation; retail shift for a normal person; working with city governments to isolate teh best safe cycling environments (communications programs; cycle parks).
> new offerings
> new business models
> new applications for technology
Keep the change reference (IDEO didn't come up with the idea, despite claims. They actually got fired from the project.)
> new partnerships

Design thinking is a human centered approach to innovation

3 important phases:
1. inspiration (where do ideas come from)
insights are the fuel for innovation -- gotta feed your brain with new insights
design thinkers use the world as a source of *inspiration*, not just validation

generative research (go out and do discovery)
evaluative (qualitative)
predictive

Design thinking innovation starts with empathy, looking at people and seeing things from their perspective, not yours.

aiming to understand people on multiple levels

*insights come from extreme users*
on the edges of the bell curve

2. ideation
building to think --> you learn the most as you build. You are literally thinking while you are building.
an idea might go through literally hundreds of iterations of prototypes
not all prototypes hve to be physical, but have to be tangible.
they make a lot of videos

3. implementation
We tend to forget that for our ideas to navigate through the organization, we need to be really good at storytelling.
Stories help provide the framework for describing a need
can be tangible and experiential

managing and measuring innovation for exec
portfolio outcomes
time to first prototype
net promoter score

Essentially a human centered approach to thinking

In order to shift clients over to design thinking, engage them in the process of design thinking

Experience blueprint is a tool they use to break things down into manageable chunks. The equivalent of a control print. a moment when you have to try to write it all down. You may not be able to, and you may not want to, cover *everything*, but focus on what is essential.

Designing future public services
design for social good: designing new public services
Jennie Winhall
Live|Work
Peterme: Jennie Winhall has a posse!

Worked under the UK design council
Started up the RED campaign.
tackling social and economic issues through design-fed innovation

Interdisciplinary team
designers
policymakers
service providers
experts

RED 02: Design for rehabilitation: Looked at how they could redesign prisons to work for rehabilitation

RED 03: energy consumption
private households contribute to 40% of London's carbon emissions

RED 04: MPs
New ways for Members of Parliament to interact with their constituents
Public sector reform was a focus: the experience of the end user became the focus
Redesign secondary schools
Look at how you can design out medical accidents

In the end, it became clear that these were all projects that affected existing institutions

*There are Limits to Modernism*
1) Society has changed
2) demand outstrips supply
3) emerging social issues
Chronic disease
Climate change
Anti-social behavior
** cannot be fixed nby just throwing money at existing institutions
motivate people into co-creating their own solutions
Decisions are not rational, they are emotional

Easier to build new nuclear power than to get people to adjust their consumption

A new generation of designed public services
designed around individuals
co-created
preventative
Causes -- not symptoms.

Talk about 3 things
New healthcare services
designing for behavior change
transformation design

RED 02: health
an epidemic of chronic disease
The biggest untapped resource is people themselves.

Communities of co =-creation
Wikipedia
grameen
creative commons
sims 2
OSS
FLickr etc

Peer to peer
open source
distributed
non-hierarchical
user-driven

Me2 -- Agenda card system to
ActiveMobs -- fitness groups make a tight social group; supported by website and magazine

These together helped establish how design provides a sapce for individuals and professionals to work together

Type two Diabetes Opportunities
1) segmentation based on character types (personas)
2) interactions that are dynamic, personal, collaborative
3) Tools and services to support people in their daily lives

Rather than the system dictating the agenda, the patient selects cards that describe things they want ot deal with, rather than the doctor asking questions.

Knowing struggler -- able knower
newcomer -- determined niave

Senior Housing estate wellness
ActiveMobs
register mob
gives you certain amount of time with a personal trainer
open or closed mobs

Prototypoing with live mobs
welliemob; timemob; backmob

Work with social dynamics within groups
Works because it is a group of friends doing what they like to do. Having the trainer involved is highly inspirational. Peer pressure and support interplay

Had to tap into and sustain motivations:
Motivation 1: Feeling better
"Wellbeing cards" - Increase self awareness of the benefits of exercise; gives a quarterly report
Motivation 2: Seeing progress
Group progress in visual tools

Designing for behavior change --> Go beyond shaping products into where the products we are building are shaping behavior.

Meaningful metrics --> in the end it wasn't until the doctors explained the ultimate metric: do you feel better?

Co-Created services

Aspiration!

GENERATION 1:
Improving existing services -- incremental innovation

Live|Work
From product desire to service envy: Service Design

we are what we do ...
... not what we own.

In order to do service design, they needed individuals and they needed competition

Each service experience has to be far more desirable than the product itself.

Cars are the ultimate challenge b/c of the attachment people have with vehicles.

Economic, Social, Environmental impact

3 - Transformation design

Characteristics
1) redefine the brief -- more than 50% of time spent writing briefs
2) collaboration between disciplines -- These issues are COMPLEX not COMPLICATED
3) fundamental transformation -- Designing the offering THEN redesigning the organization to support the offering
4) participatory design work -- much of the work and knowledge about the problem is in the front line;
5) building capacity not dependency -- embed a culture of innovation within the culture itself.
6) non-tradition outputs -- cannot predict what the outcome will be. Often results in designers designing job roles

More work than they can deal with.

Service design guidelines.

Design Council RED: All work has been released under creative commons license

they are starting a new organization called participle
--> look at this site hilarycottam.com/participle

jennie at jenniewinhall.net
email a question!!

What kind of mistrust might people have with new programs such as this
A lot of good innovation that occurs on the ground. the problem is not having ideas and making them work, the problem is scaling them up. Personality based initiatives. Can a new service be scaled up? Build/broker partnerships between govs and service providers? What they have noticed is that the big orgs can find it easier to eat up startups than to affect change internally.

What challenges come from the access paths such as the internet.
Try to provide on and offline solutions. A generational issue.

In the design solution, there are all these decks of cards. Curious about that as a design artifact. Cards as a solution. Why cards, were there other things you tried?
Talked about the cards with peter something form IDEO. Cards act as transitional object. it wasn't until the nurses tried out the two processes was not the same as picking out three things and sticking them on the fridge --> ownership oin the patient puts some of the responsibility on the patient.

In next project you want to structure it so that social and commercial groups work together. In US, outsourcing is big. Both sides need to collaborate, how do you deal with influencing collaboration?
Don't know yet. What is peculiar is that they have not had clients up unto this point. The projects have been falling into the gaps between the gov agencies. Everybody's problem and no one's responsibility. Requires that people build partnerships and then take the thinking back into the organization. People in an org often held hostage by outsourced bits. Create a clear idea what can be taken through the process.

The Transformative Power of Research
todd wilkens
Adaptive path
12 step plan to better yourself

when it comes to research as a design practice, the field has become a bit complacent, or at least a bit scattered. Need a good ol' fashioned revival.

Get back to core of what makes what we are doing what it is. By doing so, you refocus|reinvigorate your work.

People
Nothing gets more fundamental than people. UCD is built on the principle that focusing on people will lead to better design.
Research is our way of getting that understanding.

Two basic commandments to research in service design
Thou shalt understand people
Thou shalt get that understanding into your design.

We use research Generate and Evaluate ideas

Evaluate:
Usability
Human Factors
Ergonomics

Gnerate:
Design Research
User Research

What is "good" Generative research?
Where is this field going
Why?

When it comes to generative research, the main thing you are trying to gain is Insight and Empathy
These ideas started the UCD revolution

To create great experiences thou shalt understand people
Companies like to oversimplify their ideas of people
Experience vis a vis design is buiklt on how we think of people
At worst: People are essentially "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash"
Homo Economicus (picture of Spock)
Highly rational
Maximizes utility
Quantity!

Type A Personality (picture of Alex P Keaton)
(focus on tasks and goals)
Task oriented
Goal driven
Efficiency!

Sheep (sheep)
(focus on marketing rather than design)
Docile and Gullible
Stories and Preferences
Messaging!

These are not all wrong, just not really right.

What has been missing?
Emotions, Context, Culture, Meaning -- the messy complexity of human life.

People are erratic: act as individuals, groups, focus on relationships with objects. Mix and match things. Krispy Kreme in Guiness.

Understand people as people. We need to understand them as we understand ourselves. Taking a holistic view of people. Fundamentally change your view of the world in order to do this type of design. *Map our tools to the way we describe ourselves.*

Don Norman in Emotional Design: talks about the importance of the range of human experience in design. Without fun, anger, joy, excitement ... things go flat.

The Rise of Ethnography
BusinessWeek seems to love them.
importance of the holistic view

Not so much about methodology: its really about a new way of thinking about people.

Case Study: The Magic of things
The way people relate to their possessions
Everybody understands the magic of the things they own.

Behviours
more common to less common
Opportunistic showing and telling
Social behaviors
Care protect preserve
Proactive showing and telling
Knowing the value
Stewardship
Behind the behaviors were the motivations
Motivations help us to frame the experience
motivations are triggers that lead to desirable udser \behaviors
reducible moments
help explain the "soft benefits" of what "enjoyment" and "getting the most out of your things" really means

Motivations (lead to) --> Behaviors (establish) --> Connections

Case Study:
Ziba and Lenovo

Ziba contact by Lenovo to design a laptop, desktop and cellphone.

Their approach:
"We needed to create an approach that captured the soul of the Chinese consumer and inspired Lenovo's design teams."
"Turn Insights into Experiences"
"Benefits not Features"

Shift from
Task
Goals
Preferences
to
Behaviours
Motivations
Meaning

Strategy
Technology --> Features --> Experiences

Views of people:
Tech co's do not think much about users
Features oriented think of task goals and preferences
expedience firms think of Behaviors, Motivations, meaning (This is "Todd's Approach"TM)

Embracing complexity --> More Insight

Qualitative and COntgextual --> More Empathy

Empathy is not just innate, it can be developed through your design practices.

Keepign that in mind, how do we get this into the design?

Research --> Observations (Data, pictures, stories) --> Insights (patterns something something) --> Design

Design happens in isolation from everyone else

Successful research has to be actionable and durable.
Clear implications for design
not just a list of todos
durable in that findings have to last for more than just a few days ... most people never return to their report

TEAR DOWN WALLS
Integrating research and design teams
"you had to be there"
integrate empathy into the design process
Intel
Social scientists + designers coupled
Put social scientists in charge of a lot of these objectives.
Can't separate the science from the design
Prototypes are developed in concert with the design process
Samsung
Research and design in the same room
Took all the walls down between cubes
If Intel is at one end of the spectrum, you can even have developers call in on mute and listen to an interview while the design is occuring.
improve communications
Research artifacts and deliverables.
Tim's movie of the pork processes is a good example of communication innovation.
You need to be cognizant of how you communicate.
DO NOT USE RESEARCH REPORTS

The reason they are so problematic is that they are not actionable. Bulky, hard to make sense of.
Primary metric outside the group is by their reports. Because you use a 3 ring binder,

Wilken's Law: The effectiveness of research is inversely proportional to the thickness of its binding.

Good research deliverables:
Clear and straightforward
Engage readers
Tell stories

Personas: Where Insight meets Empathy
easily packaged
WWKD? (what would kitty do)
Not caricatures
Not stereotypes
Based on actual research

Moving from features to experience requires time to adjust.

Creating great experiences means understanding people and getting those insights into the design

Empathy and Humility

Interview with Irene Au
Jeffrey Veen & Irene Au
Google

Talk about a lot of the issues that we have heard about over the last day and how they apply to Google.

JV: Tell us about your background.
IA: Went to school for Electrical Engineering but was not interested in the work, more interested in how people relate to machines and technology.

JV: At the same time that they were developing Mosaic
IA: Yes, lead to working at Netscape

IA: Product development cycle very different at NS than it was at Yahoo, which is where she went next. Netscape was really just building a viewfinder.

JV: And what was your tenure like at Yahoo
IA: They realized they were going beyond the directory, and into the area of interactive experiences. Small group of designers, challenge was how to get involved earlier in the development cycle.

JV: You do the same thing at GOOG now
IA: What I hope to do

JV: You've been there 4 months now, how's that going
IA: Fun. like Disneyland. See tremendous opportunity to bring design thinking into the organization. Build products that are more relevant to people. How do we take the ideas to the next level?

JV: Design culture came out of a very simple interface issue: Search. Even UI decisions are made by an algorithm. It is a maturation process.
IA: Past methodologies may have worked when building search based features. You can see how it is changing now when you look at their hiring process. Cross-functional set of designers. Range of functions, skills, backgrounds and focus. Trying the change the way that the hiring process takes place.

JV: How do you maintain quality in recruiting with the sheer volume of applications
IA: Set expectations around the disciplines. Best of breed people who don't work in silos. Often advocate for "T" shape people who have deep skills in some areas and broad understanding of other issues.

JV: How do you prioritize so much stuff?
IA: So many projects! Everyone is empowered to create ideas. Need to have some kind of strategy around which get prioritized. Need to be more thoughtful in how we engage. Do fewer things really well. Do we want to be known as a shop where we service requests, or do we want to be higher up the ladder? Priorities should not be completely driven by the business needs. How amenable is the broader team interested in working with this team? Upsell on more high impact activities. Find the foot in the door chance, and then offer more opportunities.

JV: Your Trojan Horse idea
IA: Near term, practical; styleguides, etc; initiatives... Speaking to the Trojan Horse thing. Finding the wedge that can be used to communicate with the rest of the team. At Yahoo, the Usability studies were a very voyeuristic view into what was going on. The producers would eat it up. Over time an education happens, and people begin to understand and learn what we are trying to do.

JV: What are you seeing at google that is your oppportunity?
IA: The mockup. First day went into a UI review; looked at some mockups and it became clear that the broader customer experience issues had not been looked at. By looking at people, a design might naturally have come of it.

JV: I know that speaking the right language to the right people. At Google, it is much more about speaking the language of the developers. "Imagine a graph with a million nodes. And you can draw connections between them all." "Wow, cool, what are the nodes?" "Oh, they are people..."

IA: Sometimes you have to let products fail.

How do you carve out the space for a user-centered angle? Do fewer projects really well. At Google, often focus on the rigor around the process (what was your GPA? What about your implementation skills.) There is a softer side: How do you write a report

Peterme: A lot of people have found themselves at a point that could be considered success. The age old question: Should that group be centralized seen as a services group, or should it be de-centralized, going to the product groups, where you often miss some of the deeper opportunities.
IA: Earlier in a company's life, it makes sense for the UX group to be centralized, because it pulls together people from all over the map. Allows people to share and hone methods and standards. UX is most effective when integrated into the product team. Can you do this by matrixing into the product groups. Deep expertise in the product group, but links back to their main area of expertise. At some point the UX org gets so big that you could look at decentralized or centralized. Really have to look at how the organization is structured outside of UX.

JV: Styleguide, some of the techniques around keeping it up to date, current.
IA: Yahoo very matrixed. Product teams started funding their own designers; designs actually were targeted against core competitors. Central resources could not be linked over the styleguide. Implement a tax of 20% time for all designers. Univeral look and feel. Consistency without uniformity. Design pattern library. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Come up with the best way, and people can iterate and build off of that. Code: YUI library. Consistently implement and createa coherent experience

Q: Hiring shift --> was it influenced by your type of people being hired?
IA: Changes have been more subtle than the press may have made it seem. Changes she has been implementing have really been around clarifying expectations. Do we really want someone who can do it all, or are we looking for best of breed. Make sure we have a hiring process where the interviewers have a clearer ownership of the hiring process. With new changes, more consistency across the hiring process.

JV: Like to engage someone on a problem solving activity. Design exercises furing hiring.
IA: At Yahoo they had a design exercise. Come up with an excercise which allows for good GUI designers and others who are good design strategists. Build teams of complimentary skills.
JV: Not to see if they are good, but to see what they are good at.

IA: is it important to set aside time for design coaching. What about "pair designing"? A lot of cool stuff happening, but it is in pockets. How do you facilitate communication within the team? Need to be more open and forthcoming about it.

JV: Office hours: Specific time you can come speak to your managers. Also, putting a bunch of designers in a room and let the whole company come in and ask design questions.
IA: Two other things that are cool: Fix it days (come together on X day and fix Y problem). Testing on the toilet (in the bathroom stall, the door has episodes that teach you how to do testing from the testing group's blog.)

QUESTION ABOUT CONSISTENCY
IA: Consistency is important, but a new version does not necessarily have to carry across perfectly. Have to family well, but not necessarily perfect.

Day One remainder.

2007-02-13T20:36:00.000-08:00

keynote: Connecting Experience Design to Business yaddayadda
Lou Carbone -- this guy is completely hilarious!
Experience Engineering

A lesson from 21 MN winters
"In our haste, we often don't step back far enough to look at context."

Design vs tech... let go of what you know.

"We live, eat, sleep, breathe and unravel the riddle that is the human experience..."

Howard Johnson, created franchising in the US.
Great ad campaign in the last 6months of HOJO, and yet, the customer counts would dwindle after the launch of the campaign.

He then, in 1979, started working for Disney... "Like being struck by lightning."

Problem: People benchmark best practices instead of making the next practices.

Disney, as a cartoonist, understood the importance of the emotional connection of the customer.
The click. The clues.

What can you embed in four frames that would make the connection with a person?

How does the mouse get people to part with cash?

Frederick F Reichheld - The Loyalty Effect. New Book: The Ultimate Question

Satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal customers.

"Would you recommend to a friend or associate"

Net promoter / net detractor scale.

The problem is that they are using a very old framing.

Data == relationship??

Ownership
Not about rational thought.
Harley Davidson is the pinnacle of ownership... people tattooed everywhere with harley logos.
From people who have crawled out from under rocks in the Ozarks to the CEO of Mobil oil

Loyalty
They don't understand how they make me feel, which is how I feel about myself. W/o upgrade to first class: "I am more important than this!" Hero to zero.

Reject (neg differentiation) --> Accept (neutral diff | Community Zone) --> Preference (positive diff)

What most of us have learned is based in the past. The largest opportunity for peolple in the design community is to think of themselves in designing experience. The creative firepower of the world, not rooted in the indstrial age.

*Creative thought more dynamic than a process.*

All experiences are systems --> all components coming together to create a feeling.

Starbucks: Process + Product + Experience

It isn't the quality as much as it is the impact.

The world of make and sell -->

*The worst thing that happened to the banking industry is that they discovered product. Were in the experience industry, and now focus on churning out product.*

SENSE AND RESPOND

Bus drivers to taxi drivers >> prescribed route vs agile descions

Post Industrial MBA at Berkeley --> Can't silo industries because you need holistic value/experience

The goal is to create value. Profits are the reward.

All the numbers we talk about in business are made up of people

Experience Management:
Move from looking at Behaviors to Attitudes to Emotions to looking at

The Brand Canyon

Brand = product "what people feel"

Service = treatment "ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen"

Experience =

===

Brand value - how I feel about the company
customer value - how I feel about the expereience

Need to know how customers think
The power of the unconscious mind (heuristics)
Gerald Zaltman: Book: How Customers THINK
95% of processing takes place at an unconscious level

consciously and unconsciously filter a barrage of clues and organize them into a group of impressions

functional clues - rational
mechanic clues - emotional
humanic clues - emotional

Toilet paper speaks volumes "The toilet paper triangle"

You cannot NOT have an experience; the question is how managed or haphazard is the experience.

> we can systematically and purposefully design exerpience cliues to create feelings that engage and bond the customers

stakeholder + employee + customer

LEARN --> CREATE --> DO

Experience audit

ZMET --> deep metaphor visitation
ClueScan --> immediate fixes

Experience motif

Delivery
"Answer the door" vs "Answer the door and make sure that they feel welcome after their two day trip"

The Practice of Experience Mgmt
Fuse Humanics and Mechanics
Manage Experience Breadth and Depth
Connect Emotionally

Key challenges to Total Experience Management
organization out --> customer back
make / sell --> sense and respond
rational --> emotional AND rational

Lewis Carpone: Book: Clued In

It isn't the delivery vehicle that will win, it is the experience

Designing the experience for the internal group is more important than that of the customer.

Dave Heckel: look for his book

Managing Schizophrenic Projects
Adam Richardson
Frog

Thinking far out in the future while designing in the now.

Frog --> 60% of their work is digital at this time

mom and apple pie:
Innovation -- common application is "spray it on" and call it a day
Competitive advantage occurs in three levels:
Evolve (incremental innovation) ~1 yr advantage
Expand (growth innovation) 2-5 yrs advantage
Envision (breakthrough innovation) 5+ yrs advantage

Typical dist for companies where innovation has stagnated is high on the evolve, very little on expand, next to none in envision
"Measuring Innovation" survey, 2005 Deloitte LLP
Communication --
User Research
Rapid Prototyping

Case Study: alltell
Product: celltop (http://www.mycelltop.com/)
Launched in 12 mos

Concept is to replace the standard phone UI with "cells" which divide the screen in half vertically

Simple from a user perspective, challenging from a technical perspective.

Based on widgets and gadgets

Open system

Schizophrenia
1. Establish the dimensions
Dimensions are enablers not hindrances
Dimensions as walls. some walls are load bearing, you can't do things about them. Others are more decorative, and you can do more with them
For alltell:
1. Monetize
2. Easy to use
3. Quick to implement
4. Differentiated
5. Fit with/influence long-term vision
2. Manage the Communications
In particular, the dimensions have to be well communicated.
Long term metrics are the same as the short term, which tends to kill things.
> Communicate up and down
> No surpises - "Tada type" is no bueno
> No thy organization (see picture)

3. Manage the Design Factory
Stolen from book by same name by Donald Reinertsen
Design is inventory sitting in a factory.
Get stuff out as fast as possible.

> Pay Attention to the interfaces (not the UI in the conventional sense)
break the system up into chunks and then manage the components
For alltell:
every phone is different (88 different celltop apps)
> Manage the queues
a factory is a big queue. You want to manage the batches
Large batch -- take a long time, hold up everything else
Quick turn -- can be done
split things up so that they can be done in parallel so that you can get as many done as possible

*** WHAT IS OUR COMPANY'S VISION ***
need to find ways to break off pieces of tactical vision so that they can be addressed

4. Deply the scouts
<-- illustration <--> prototype <--> partial market test <--> full market entry <--> fast follower -->

try out different pieces of the system with small projects.
fast follower approach is often looked at as a non-innovative approach, but it often allows a company to avoid some of the major costs

for alltell
> can they make the transition from wireless provider to software provider?
> The cells themselves are scouts in that they give feedback into customer desires etc
> developers are scouts

Interview with Catherine Fake
Peter Merholz & Caterina Fake
Yahoo!

CF: Tried to register for Facebook, and was turned down because of her name "Try to use a real name." Cannot fly on Northwest because they throw out her information b/c of her name.

Director of Technology Development Group at Yahoo! Works under Bradley Horrowitz
DTG -- primarily 1) creates culture of innovation and new product design across Yahoo; 2) includes some serious "rockstars" who work side-by-side with the Yahoo dev teams to develop new products, such as Pipes

PM: What is your role?
Brickhouse (she can talk very little about) and Hack (will talk more about soon)

Ludicorp's _The Game Neverending_ evolved into Flickr. Trying to create a game where the reason for playing is to socialize. In some ways, the game itself was a foil for social interactions. Because people couldn't understand the concept, they were unable to get funding. They basically had money for one last thing. The frontend development got 6months ahead of backend dev. They had not done any research into photo sharing. "Fortuitous ignorance." As such they created this thing: Flickr. Convergence of blogging and camera phones and many other things made the timing in 2004 a sweet spot. Before 2003/2004, socially, you needed to have a pretty good reason to have a blog, otherwise you were a weirdo.

First photo: December 15th, 2003: "Dos Pesos, Handsome Fellow"

Flickr was digital native: did not use metaphors from people sharing photo albums, but used all online metaphors.

First iteration of Flickr was an instant messaging program that accommodated pictures. In order to share photos, you needed to be logged on at the same time as your friends.

PM: How were the early design decisions made?
CF: Two founders were both designers. Very design heavy process. Started off fairly clear in what they were trying to achieve in the design. The trick to Flickr was to design something where you could really let the photo be the thing that is shown, without interference from the rest of the options. There was a huge amount of stuff happening on the page. How do you expose the full feature set and yet still let it be subtle enough not to take away from the photo? *At one point they realized that they were doing an average of 10 pushes a day.* Design was done very much in collaboration with the uses. An average of 50posts per day on the forum.

PM: How did the about statement emerge? And how do you maintain coherence in the chaos?
CF: Looking back, we sat down and did soul searching together... wrote down all the reasons. The Flickr About page is what emerged. Had to look at the big picture and then explain it to people.

PM: How useful was it for your team moving forward?
CF: These are the things that will put you on the true path when you are designing a new product.

Q: IN the beginning where did you think the $$ was going to come from?
CF: From the beginning, had in mind a tiered membership program. Free, pay, etc. Some sites, come in as expanded hobbies, and so they have to build a payment and business plan on top of an existing software product. Plus, they were trying to raise money, so they "had a biz plan".
They had been sitting there congratualting themselves. But 6 people in a garage: no problem, blue sky. The real challenge is making something like that happening at an existing company. If you can do that, you are Peter Frampton.

PM: How do you bring these principles into Yahoo?
CF: She brought with her all these practices/prejudices/habits and then she was broadsided by meetings, requirements docs, documentation. "There is no meeting!" >What were the things that made it possible to invent new stuff? One of the groups that was formed was called "Hack Yahoo".
>The way these hacks programs usually work: Red Bull + Pizza + motivated creative engineers + you say build stuff. Give them 24 hrs. At the end, you get everyone together, and you demo.
>When introduced to a field office, they said "We're going to do a Hack Day! OK, we will meet before hand, give ground rule. You must have a PPT, a PRD... etc."
>Hack Days happen once every quarter

Q: Notions about user feedback. One is to look at the user's ideas, the other was to ignore the users because they don't know what they want. How do you know when your customers know what they want?
PM: Firestorm on the adaptive path site about abolishment of the old Flickr accounts.
CF: Cory Doctrow had feedback galore. They listened to everything Cory said. Eventually they realized that his needs were very specific to him and did not apply to most people. A lot of the time, people don't know what they want... they want more of what they already have. In some ways, the best way to go about it is to use the suggestion box, and still work against the ideas you already plan on. Present some ideas that you plan on to the user community and have them vote on them. You have to be careful with how much you listen to the community because there is often a passionate, vocal minority who will disagree with your direction. Listen with compassion.

Q: Ohter than the big changes, the small features can be huge. Is gentleness in the interface a way of giving customers a sense of ownership? eg, geotagging
CF: Don't push features if they look like they are going to be a specialty item.
>Similar to the Yahoo rollout of Pipes. They had underestimated the desirability of the features. Pipes went up to 2000 queries per second shortly after launch!
>SHare amongst some friends, improve it, then go wide audience.

Case Study: Dell 2.0 Designing Customer Experiences
Brooks Protzmann
Dell Computing
Visual identity and Brand Experience

Dell's sales exceed Amazon and eBay daily sales *combined*

Change the way they are servicing the customers and the way things are designed.

Define it right initiative

Dell 2.0: Look holistically at the "Customer Journey"
Add "brand anticipation"

Bring together all aspects of the experience

More conflict within the usability group than anything. the way they are trying to work around it is communication; identifying roles and responsibilities, etc.

When you design for mediocracy for a long time, the best way to sell good design is to show the comparison.

Connecting Design to Real Business Value
Brandon Schauer
adaptivepath

We talk a lot about business "getting" design. What about design getting business?

Does good design create value?
Examples of potential
Razr
Target CleaRx system
jetBlue
Starbucks
Design Within Reach

Maybe not...
Design Within Reach is having a lot of trouble.
jetBlue is not doing so well at scaling up.

UK Design Council did a whole study, and selected top companies because they had won design awards. Is there causality?

Is design really delivering something different? or is it just a fad?

Taylorism - focus on measurement which truely began business management.

sixSigma - defining what quality is. Getting fewer and fewer defects out into the world. Part science, part culture.

Decades of intense improvements in effeciency and productivity. No longer a competitive advantage, because it is so fiully adopted.

As a result: Innovation
Blackberry
Whitestrips
CocaCola Blak

How do you start to reach a good idea of what is going to work in the market.

Instinct that you need to do something new and different.
"How do we become the iPod of insurance?"

Use a value curve
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy

Strategy can be choosing to "zag" where your competitors are choosing to "zig".

level 1: intuition
level 2: user behavior
level 3: project value
level 4: business value
level 5: relevant strategy

User Experience Value Chain

Who cares?

Hoew do you become a better lead of design within your organization?
transformative
transitional
operational -- design is often operational

What can we do as designers to move up that chain?

3 Things every UX designer should know about value:
1. Model the business
Lulu - on demand book publishing
What is the business?
How do they create value?
Then look at how you can affect each of the different aspects
Influencers
Levelers
Opportunities

2. Connect business value with user behavior
(Business opp >> Desired behaviour (design can affect) >> Behavior metric) * value metric = financial outcome
Look at a couple of options and compare them
Business Case Modeling for Design by Henning Fischer
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000654.php

3. Prototype the strategy
It can be super low fidelity. Doesn't even have to be totally representative.
--> "prototype what you don't know" much more likely to find interesting decisions

Customers

Service line

Operations

Capabilities

ANSWER: Design creates value on a project-by-project basis when designers understand their business and design for value.

Day One of Two. (Some of it!)

2007-02-12T22:57:00.000-08:00

Managing Experience Through Creative Leadership

I guess there are actually three, if you include cocktails. I, however, abstained. So for me, it is a two dayer. Big sad face.

An ounce of snarky irony to begin with. I loved that JJG's preso started off with a projector malfunction and then segued immediately into Eastman's Kodak and his slogan of "You press the button, we do the rest," Fabulous poetry which speaks to the a pyramid that JJG references later.

JJG had a slide which I think made a great point, and something that I don't think would be the immediate response of most people: "What's the highest compliment that someone can pay a product?" Thinking I was on my toes, I racked through a series of ideas, but none of them seemed high enough -- nothing struck me as something that would make me feel like I had truly succeeded. His answer, "I can't live without it."

A quick survey of products in my life that fall into this category:

OXO Pick Me Up Kettle
Tom's of Maine Anti-plaque Clear Gel Toothpaste
Converse Chuck Taylors
Wikipedia wikipedia.org
Google Gmail
Beehouse Ceramic Dripper
Peets Coffee & Tea
Carolina Herrera 212 Men
Apple 60 Gb iPod Video

Anyway, to circle back to JJG's projector issues, I think that the differentiator pyramid really centered around this issue: When companies rely on technology for the basis of their product, they cannot succeed. Logically, moving on to features, a variation on the classic "Word with all toolbars" higlighted the problem with a feature focused approach. The emblematic "blinking 12:00" a perfect metaphor for the feature noone can figure out how to use. At the top of the pyramid is Experience, where you find, "The beautiful, elegant thing that works."

JJG points out that Tivo is an example of something people can't live without. Though at this point their mindshare exceeds their marketshare. Ergo they risk running the coarse of Xerox, Band-Aid or Kleenex. In Jesse's mind, Tivo and the iPod are examples of the psychology of interaction: the way that people interact with products mimics the way we interact with people. "Products are people too."

Really quickly, I have to point out that Jesse is the first person I have seen articulate visually what I have always professed, and that is the auto-magical quality of the best products. To me, this is one of the key aspects of successful design: making everything but the core user features invisible.

Lou Carbone stepped up for the Keynote. He started off really deadpan, between that and his suit, I thought for sure it was going to be a dry one. I have to say he was one of the most engaging speakers I have encountered. He presented a video: A lesson from 21 MN winters, which highlighted a struggle between man and nature. "In our haste, we often don't step back far enough to look at context."

"We live, eat, sleep, breathe and unravel the riddle that is the human experience..." A problem in uncovering this riddle Carbone points out is that people benchmark best practices instead of making the next practices. From his time at Disney he learned that you can whittle it down by looking at what can you embed in four frames that would make the connection with a person. He questions the oft relied upon customer data ... just 'cuz you have data on me, does that mean we have a relationship??

One of my favorite quotes of his (largely due to my current place of employment) was: "The worst thing that happened to the banking industry is that they discovered product. They were in the experience industry, and now focus on churning out product." More on this in later posts. It is a bit of a messed up mashup, but I like the pairing of that statement with another of his: "toilet paper speaks volumes," Just check out the TP triangles.

The Medium is Nothing, or, Why I Stopped Being a Tool and Embraced Powerpoint.

2007-01-31T21:18:00.000-08:00

Tufte has this rant he loves. He hates PowerPoint. Ok, I get it. That program blows! I can't even begin to describe to you the horrible Six Sigma slides I have endured as we have run through an "Analyze Tollgate", one of the fun little steps in the DMAIC methodology embraced by my greater organization. I can't stand them on so many levels that it is not even fun to enumerate them.

Here's the thing, though. PowerPoint is the standard communication tool used at an organization the scale of mine ([UPDATED] ~176,600 employees!) That's big, and the executives... they don't have time on a day to day basis to really look at detail. Sure, they will stop and smell the roses. They'll micro-manage as good as the next guy! The fact is, though, that in order for them to do their job effectively, they need broad brushstrokes. They need to have the confidence that their staff is going to tell them what matters. Nothing more.

There is a joke I use all the time, when someone asks me what I will be using for my presentation. I state very matter of factly that I will be doing an interpretive dance. Imagine my surprise when yesterday in a meeting with our executive, a member of the team suggested writing narrative presentations. Thanks a lot Ed!

Very often, I will use a PDF. But my team has gone to great lengths to actually design a Visio template that outputs as if it were a PPT! Why? Because it is what people consider the de facto medium. Nothing else will garner respect or attention. If I follow Tufte's advice and hand out a datasheet for my presentation (which, in theory, I think is a fabulous idea!), I have one word: round-file. That thing is going to be left on the conference room floor with a bunch of doodles on it, or in the recycle bin (in California), or it will end up in a stratified pile of detritus on a desk somewhere.

So, it all comes down to Information Architecture. You have an audience and a message as variables. You have a medium as a constant. Actually... this is freakin' great! One of the major sets of decisions in your work has already been done for you. Now all you need to do is craft your message.

Jon Winet, a great professor I had at UC Davis -- now a great friend, told me this joke once that I think is highly relevant in this case: a printmaker is an artist without many ideas. Maybe that is a crappy metaphor here. Dunno. What I find is often the case with people who loooove to bash PowerPoint is that they are either unable or unwilling to craft a message. They are focusing on the medium, not the message. But the medium is nothing. So shut up and use PowerPoint.

Some fab PowerPoint and PowerPoint-inspired works:
Lawrence Lessig: Google Book Search: The Argument
Dick Hardt: OSCON 2005 Keynote: Identity 2.0
Clemens Kogler & Karo Szmit: Le Grand Content
Clay Newton: Muny (requires IE, unfortunately)

Snap! Annoying or hecka cool?

2007-01-30T13:19:00.000-08:00

Oh, Snap! Not like this is the most amazing, rare conceptually mind-altering thing I have seen in a while, but I do think it prods out a good question: Is this really a good idea?

I like the idea of providing additional context. Frankly, I must admit that I don't know exactly how Snap works. I am curious as to whether it grabs a preview of the exact page to which you are linking, or if it just pulls the homepage, and if you can control what it pulls. From reading their FAQ, it looks like it uses a CSS class to bind the methods to, which is the right way to do stuff such as this, IMO.

Anyway, here is my bet: this type of popup is going to become extremely prevalent in the next 6 months. We are already deploying something of this nature at The Bank. There have been plugins for Firefox that added this functionality to Google for a while now. Yahoo uses similar kinds of functionality both in YM and on their news pages.

Open the Future: The Footprint of a Cheeseburger

2007-01-26T07:59:00.000-08:00

Open the Future: The Footprint of a Cheeseburger: "the carbon footprint of a hamburger"

This is an amazing factoid:

If each of the 300 million Americans hit that "average" burger consumption, we're looking at 75,000-150,000 tonnes of atmospheric carbon annually from burger consumption alone -- that's the equivalent of the annual carbon output from 7,500-15,000 SUVs.

That is incredible, I wonder if it is less for standard hamburgers? What about Chicken McNuggets®? Oh, and this is probably a single patty burger, right? What about Big Macs®, or that other crazy arse piece of meat, the Big 'N Tasty® (w/ cheese)?