Spirited Thought

I just came across an article by John Biggs on the new Creative Zen Vision:M in the Circuits section of the New York Times. Creative’s new personal media player is positioned to compete with the Apple iPod, and it will undoubtedly fail.

Very often, businesses and people identify the best practices of the current time and employ them to better their position. In many occasions this is a prudent course of action. In Creative’s case it ensures that the Zen Vision:M will never be remarkable. Creative’s new offering looks like a copy cat with its rounded corners, large display and minimal controls. It is priced in the same range as an iPod. It plays various bits of media – more variety than an iPod. It offers a touch sensitive scroll bar as its primary navigation interface. Creative’s brightest minds can only hope that consumers are looking for an iPod alternative – maybe they can take some of Apple’s potential customer base.

As the new owner of a black video iPod, I might be biased, but I doubt it. I just finished up Donald Norman’s Emotional Design. Apple is all about their emotional brand and their emotional designs. A purchase with Apple grants access to the identity and mystique of what Apple and, in this case, the iPod have become to the modern world. What do white ear buds mean to you? What do you see when someone draws a rectangle with a circle in the lower half? Those who are not members wish they were or, at the very least, are curious as to what it might be like. For all we know, the Zen Vision:M and the iPod are manufactured by the same company and in the same factory in China, but no matter what Creative does, the emotional component of the personal music player remains with Apple.

About two years ago I was recommended a book, The Art of Innovation, by Tom Kelley. It was my first introduction to IDEO, one of America’s foremost design firms.

Recently, while looking for follow-on IDEO work, I stumbled upon Thoughtless Acts? and I wanted it for the experience it might impart – it is not your average book.

At a street price of ~20 USD, there is probably no other like it. At first, it appears to be a hard cover book and then you notice how comfortable it is to open and hold – the spine is similar to tape binding, this one reminiscent of duct tape. It is hard to miss the die cut semi-circle in the cover. Regardless of which side of the book opened the reader is greeted with text in the right orientation. The book does away with all the extra pages (extra blanks, lengthy copyright, oversized ISBN barcodes etc.) – everything is designed.

The content of the book is presented in a series of photographs followed by some text explaining the intention of the book and an index with some concise descriptions of the images. There are seven sections organizing the photos: reacting, responding, co-opting, exploiting, adapting, conforming and signaling.

The intention of the images are to help the reader get out of their box and see everyday behavior as an opportunity for innovation. Every photo offers a social landscape for critical review of things we often discard as noise. The number of inspired questions and ideas that follow seem endless.

Talk to any software development shop and you will hear the terms “iterative development.” While there are many formal methods supporting iterative development processes, the commonality and rough translation is that software is prototyped, reviewed, revised, developed, reviewed, and revised and so on until declared “ready.”

Reading Norman’s Emotional Design reminded me of his earlier work proposing the value in iterative design. Most technology is built by technologists, hence the over-abundance of technological widgets and considerable lack of remarkable technology. Often, iterative development has nothing to do with iterative design. Iterative design should begin before iterative development. It can then overlap as the iterative development realizes the evolving design points. Finally, as the application nears completion, iterative design continues to influence resulting in both a technological and design winning outcome. There is no shortage of excuses for why most products never benefit from such design/development intertwining.

If you want a successful product, test and revise. If you want a great product, one that can change the world, let it be driven by someone with a clear vision. The latter presents more financial risk, but is the only path to greatness.

Donald Norman, Emotional Design, page 98

Iterative design is “design by committee” and while apt to please more people, often produces less than dazzling results. Norman suggests that visceral (universally appealing, pre-wired/pre-programmed) and reflective (more sophisticated, fashion and cultural trend sensitive) design is best lead by an individual with a clear vision. By logical conclusion, greatness is not derived through behavioral design. Assuming that the product delivers behaviorally (i.e. performs its intended function), game changing experiences employ design appealing to both the visceral and reflective sides of the end-user’s psyche.

The minimum rate of change required to nurture and fuel adoption is relative to the percentage of people adopting. Geoffrey Moore is well known for adding on to Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory the idea that a chasm exists between early adopters and the early majority, where the early adopters often appreciate the benefits of new innovation regardless of its early faults and where the early majority often appreciate innovations that have demonstrated benefits and stability. The chasm is the biggest hurdle to overcome, but yields what is often thought of as the bandwagon effect, where adoption proliferates rapidly. Donald Norman discusses how things can be in vogue for a period of time (See Chapter 2, section: The Personality of Products in Emotional Design). More importantly, the leaders of society are not interested in acting like the majority – it is the differences that distinguish them.

Both Norman and Moore use the idea that the general population can be subdivided and that design or innovation needs to be directed to those different audiences. Early adopters are leaders in the adoption of innovation. When an innovation crosses the chasm and is adopted by the early majority, continued innovation re-engages the early adopters fueling the innovation’s brand within the community, easing the future transition of add-on innovation, solidifying continued adoption.

I started reading Donald Norman’s Emotional Design today. I have not read anything from him since college, so I thought this 2004 publication might give me a good refresher.

Norman is well known from his book, The Design of Everyday Things. I remember being intrigued by his thoughts on why we love or hate the objects in our lives. But, as Norman points out in his forward, if you made him your only master you had “functional but ugly” objects. The good news is that most people do not seem to adopt the mindset of a single individual, but instead remix the work of many others with personal experiences to construct a set of truths all their own.

More good news is that Norman has gone ahead and integrated a critical component of how people understand the world – emotion. As a side note, this reminds me about a different book I keep seeing at the local Barnes and Noble, Beyond Reason: Using emotions as you negotiate. People have an emotional filter, but often fail to acknowledge its presence – rationalizing facts hopefully justifying feelings. It will be interesting to see if Norman’s recent work offers me more than the obvious.

I was reading a post from Amit Gupta on Neopets, an online virtual pet site, and thought, brilliant! I remember a few news cycles growing up that positioned cartoons as a vehicle to sell products in toy stores. They engage viewers in thirty to sixty minutes of story and ads leaving them visually stimulated about, presumably, toys they have or want.

Over the last few years there was increasingly more attention placed on the use of product placement. It can be subtle, a view at a café might have a soda can one table over, but unrelated to the stars in view. Alternatively it can be the car that a main character is driving – vastly different in impact. People often bring their own filter into the movies, immersing their reality into the world of fantasy. When the star has a fantastic home in Miami or an exotic Italian sports car, viewers are also imaging themselves with those things. Viewers are both relating to the characters and exploring how the story presented fits with their own. This level of involvement is entirely within the viewer and the more engaging the movie, the more the product placement moves from a series of brand impressions to a “click through” of virtual use.

Nothing is more effective than actually getting a consumer to try a product at home or in whatever context makes sense. Marketing efforts often send out samples of products to target audiences to see what people think of their new thing. Often the receivers of the product can evaluate their general like or dislike immediately, and while the answers to the accompanying survey are important, it is the fact that all the participants have first hand experience with a product the did not buy, but could. The product is no longer in a movie where viewers are passively watching, it is in their hands, in their world. There in lays the buzz machine.

Neopets delivers all of the above. The first level of advertising is the virtual pet game itself. Like what you see on screen? Well, there are booster packs, magazines, plushies, t-shirts, jewelry and more – all Neopet inspired and branded. Amit points out that advertising is embedded as sponsored characters and mini games, extending the brands of many to the experience in a virtual world. Finally, participants are not simply viewers. Participants are interacting and experiencing how their virtual pet intermingles with the virtual world. All of this makes Neopets a compelling interactive experience that is as sticky as they come.

Images used in this post are Copyright 2000-2005 Neopets, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission.

Recent articles talk about Microsoft attacking Google Base, with a new offering code-named “Fremont.” Fremont is focused on delivering classified ads based on social networking filters. For example, someone might want to advertise a situation wanted that goes out to people in their contact list. Not exactly Google Base killing material, but it is interesting enough on its own.

“Google Base is quite confusing,” said Mr. Wiseman. “We are just about classified ads and community. Google Base is more of an open data store.” – Microsoft Unwraps Fremont, Red Herring

Garry Wiseman, the product unit manager for Fremont, expresses confusion around Google Base, but quickly articulates it as an open data store. My guess is that Base confuses Wiseman’s PR representatives. This is definitely a, “wish we had done that moment,” for Microsoft, something they had articulated way back in 2001 with .Net My Services. As Elias Torres points out in his Google Base is nothing new but… posting, no one wanted to store or manage data on a Microsoft server.

Google does not seem to have that kind of ogre image yet. But with GOOG pushing above $400 a share, with 1000 millionaires in the company – imagine almost 1 out of 5 people you walk past – makes you wonder how long Google will be seen as friendly as their holiday logo treatments.

The interesting thing about Google Base is that instead of a search engine crawling the web, people are tagging and pushing content into Google. It is similar to a website owner submitting their URL to a search engine, telling it to crawl the website. The difference here is that Google will store all the content and provide a simple user experience to manage it all. That might seem complicated to some, but, if it works, it is something way beyond Wiseman’s current vision.