Spirited Thought

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.

Creativity is a big deal to me. It is central to how my mind works. For me creativity is playful – there is no question that the kid in me is alive and well, it just so happens that the playgrounds change and I have discovered more of them.

I was musing on one of the author descriptions in The Big Moo – Hugh Macleod. Among other things Hugh spends his time drawing cartoons on the back of business cards. My first thought was, what an interesting use of limitation. Anyone who has taken a decent college level art class will known what I mean.

I remember back to the summer of 2003 when I entered the Rhode Island School of Design pre-college program. My focus was photography, but they expose you to a sample curriculum to help explore the possibilities. One of the best parts was looking at the illustration majors. Every piece of work was enormous, sometimes 5 x 7 feet. It impressed upon me that I did not have to feel confined by someone else’s notion of size – in this case the 19 x 24 Canson Bristol pad. So, Hugh’s decision to work with a smaller format evoked a similar inspiration.

The back of a business card is one of the best places to take notes about anything. It is small, so thoughts need to be crisp – a creative distillation process in of it. If I use my card and it is ever lost, I have a chance of actually getting it back.

What I love most about Hugh’s business card limitation is that is artificial. He can obviously render ideas and I bet has done so on larger pieces of media. It is a creative concept. What happens when we place artificial boundaries around our creative process? Does it help focus our ideas and expressions? Do we lose something that the RISD illustration majors are gaining? If we consciously impose a set of rules, do we need to pop back out to make sure those rules still apply and are helping and not hurting or is it the fact that we are conscious of imposing the rules that keeps us aware that we are not really limited?

Remarkable is my new favorite word, inspired by a new book I picked up, The Big Moo. I never read The Purple Cow, but I have to believe it has to do with being remarkable. A purple cow does not seem to cut it anymore, and so, we have the big moo.

The cover captured my attention, “Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable.” It has 33 authors some of which I have read before and others which were foreign. The idea that I would get to read remarkable stories from 33 thinkers, sold it. Opening the book on a cross-country flight reconfirmed it. All the profits go to three charities, the Acumen Fund, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International and Room to Read. Another thing that got me was that readers are invited to copy the pages of the book, similar to open source, helping build a community about being more than good enough.

I never thought of myself as striving for perfection. To be honest, I was never shooting for remarkable either – seems too easy. Godin points out, if you do something that makes someone remark then by definition it is remarkable – see? Too simple. On the other hand I feel the sentiment loud and clear and The Big Moo reminds me to stoke the flame and not mind standing up and out.

My first real introduction to email was a local BBS run be a local users group in Connecticut ~1990. In 1994, I went off to college and was, excitedly, one of less than a dozen PC users on a Mac dominated campus – email was a given and I remember being able to reach out to friends who were now scattered at other institutions. By ~1999, email was no longer my favorite medium.

My once eager relationship with my mail reader is no longer – the technology supporting email has stalled. The software community has failed to solve the real problems of information overload and left it to the users to develop information management skills – the process of scanning, deleting, staring, sorting, archiving, categorizing, building filters, workflows and, of course, reading. We have made huge improvements on reducing malware, viruses and spam before the email even reaches the In Box. However, between email, news and the million other things that suddenly have content syndication, current tooling fails to deliver necessary increases in productivity.

In November 2005 issue of Communications of the ACM, Business Email: The Killer Impact says there is no problem, with only 2% of people saying it is prohibitive to their job. I would argue that people tend not to know how productive they can be. The article is worth the read, it is a great survey of how people use and perceive email.

IBM has plenty of know how and research in the space. Contrary to popular belief, Lotus Notes is actually not an email client, but a platform on which database driven applications can be developed, it just so happens that world class email, calendaring and other collaborative tools have been built upon it. Lotus Notes email has the usual email management accoutrements (e.g. folders, filters, search etc.) and tons of other things that most clients lack. For example, wearing my developer hat, I can easily hack up my In Box view to categorize emails based on if it was sent only TO me, to me but CCing others, or if my email address was in the CC. But all of this rich customization and workflow management does not solve the real problem. At the end of the day I am modifying a client so I can filter more efficiently.

Projects like Remail (reinventing email) identified some core challenges and proposed some ideas to help induce a course correction. So, there is no lack of thinking in this space – IBM is not alone.

Google’s release of GMail highlighted at least three really important design points. First, highly interactive, simple, web applications should be what people strive for. Second, stop deleting and managing mail, just save and search. Third, and most pertinent to this line of thinking, collapse the In Box, collapse the conversation. GMail uses a "stack of cards" approach to viewing a threaded discussion, showing the most recent email only with easy access to each email that came before. In the In Box view conversations are displayed as one entry instead of individual back and forth transactions in a date/time sorted view. There is something delightful about it – different from the threaded view in Lotus Notes which has never done much for me. The tool is prescribing a best practice of helping me filter.

Google recently offered a feed reader, Google Reader, which is actually very nice. Simple, direct and lets a user scan their news quickly. It lacks any real filtering. I have to believe they will introduce some of text analytics and theme clustering aptly found in their Google News offering.

Assuming the rate and volume of information will continue to increase, the industry really needs to change the “users will learn to filter” approach. Successful people learn and build strategies to thrive in the information loaded world, but why should they have to? More importantly, instead of approaching the problem with our Darwin hat, why not enable any user, especially users who lack computer savvy and information triaging strategies, to consume thousands more new pieces of information every day. The Internet allows everyone with a PC and a network connection the ability to author. The challenge is to empower everyone with the ability to read it all.

Ambient devices are seductive. They seem like they would have so much potential. I have an Orb from Ambient Devices – currently listening to a stock market index – currently yellow green. I got my dad the Executive Dashboard, also from Ambient Devices, which lets you slide in different displays in a very retro needle display. He can actually monitor three different channels, while I can only deal with one. Philips has been advertising some of their new vision for the future with flat TVs with Ambilight – where the dominant color on the screen is projected to the sides of the TV.

The thing about ambient information is the need for context. My Orb, at best, is relevant to me, because I know what the colors represent and what channel it is listening to. When visitors come over and check it out, they have no idea what it represents. So in this case, the primary owner provides the context.

Now, my dad’s Executive Dashboard has three channels that can be switched up by changing the little card which both tune the channel but also provide the visual meter. For example, he can monitor local traffic congestion by slipping in the display/card. The problem here is that there are three places to insert the card and all cards look similar and all the needles look similar. Suddenly you need to actually read which card are you viewing, what is the scale of the card (temperature, percent, high, low etc) and then where the needle is pointing on that scale – we moved further away from ambient to get a more retro matter of fact feed listener. This device loses all the intuitiveness of the Orb, where as the owner, I provide context to the meaning. In my dad’s case, his device provides the context, but the user needs to actually help build the context by reading what is being displayed – hardly ambient.

Philips Ambilight offers a better application than either of the above. Philips is actually running an algorithm (pretty simple) to pull the dominant color and use LEDs (guessing) to virtually extend that color off the edge of the display and on to the surrounding wall. I have seen this ad in print and on TV and said, “that is dumb.” Then I start looking around and realizing, they might actually have something. First, the context is provided by the TV. Second, the viewer does not need to interpret the ambient information. The context is set by the media playing on the display, the display provides the ambient interpretation and the viewer simply does what they have always done. I bet a month after the owner buys one of these TVs, they no longer notice the ambient effect. I certainly do not look at the Orb all the time to get the current pulse on the stock market, but I know when it has changed.

Ambient information is a challenging space. The fundamental question is, what can be projected to a user that enhances their experience. Clearly, the better the ambient effect ties into the context of the activity the user is experiencing the more useful and apt to be used it is. Additionally, the easier it is to interpret the information the better. Context might actually help here, but if the ambient display takes too long to read (in this case not just text, lets include taste, touch, smell) then it is really more of a dashboard which shows you information around a given context but still requires you to make sense of it. (e.g. a stock trading dashboard will show you the indexes, your portfolio, the trends, the market, the news etc. but it is up to the trader to make sense of it) There is a sweet spot in making ambient information palatable and while we have examples today, none of them have really penetrated the global psyche.