Posts Tagged: Product Development

Business / Culture / Relationships — No Comments
21
Nov 09

Caught thinking in the rat maze of consumption

The shortest distance between a person becoming aware and buying – the act of exchanging currency at a higher rate than the service or product costs to produce – is the marketer’s benchmark. As such their motives should inherently be held suspect and yet we believe what they want us to believe.

Time is one of the key battles marketing message fight. Given enough time, anyone can sell anything (ideas or products), some better than others. People have been told time is money and usually that is true for the other person – your time is someone else’s money. Someone else’s time is likely yours. As such, marketing messages are short and repetitive – visually and aurally. It gets cleverer when the messages appear genuinely – products placed in unassuming ways that relate activity or quality to the product or service. Simplified messages attack the largest audience to force an action – thought or behavior. How much of what we know is fabricated?

Science and technology folks are all about details and complexity. One cannot fully appreciate wonders without understanding the complexity – one of the reasons we know less than we should. Scientists strive for truth or work with it to change it. Exactness is important. Any fudge work is noted and already calculated to be insignificant in the context of a more import result. They are biased, but their motives are purer. Of course corruption exists everywhere, so absolutes are tough to swallow. Scientific evidence is often positioned to accentuate the beauty but hid the wrinkles. We hold beliefs that are not always proven by a scientist or better yet ourselves-we call this faith. What do you have faith in?

I am not as interest in what people have faith in as much as that they do so readily. With good marketing, people believe and behave under the influence. People are generally anxious about mind control yet almost everything has been fabricated and more importantly specifically for you and people like you. As much as we are individuals we are actually more alike than not – scarily alike when it comes to what you think, what you believe and what you buy.

We are all participants in being under the influence

We are all participants in being under the influence

It is no wonder that so many people in the fields of communication, branding and marketing feel so powerful – their message in total create so much of the world. They start as the rock falling into the pond allowing ripples to hit us as they may. They drop more pebbles at the right times reinforcing messages, creating relationships and intimate richness. They are the origin and orchestration of the following conversation in what appears to be naturally occurring ripples. As individuals we faithfully internalize, reform and repeat – generating thoughts and actions that others listen to. These messages become defining attributes. Many people like fine wine, food, clothes, automobiles and the latest personal technology. Many desire upgrades to their current lifestyle in those ways and aspire for private jets, multiple homes in multiple countries and more. People consume what is made consumable. The rate of new content production for the individual is slower than the rate of content an individual produces based on someone else’s content. How much of what you think is new? When you talk, how much of what you say is something someone else said? How much of what you feel is yours?

Marketing messages create physiological changes in our understanding of reality – they are not artificial impacts. What is suspect is the initial message we chose to have faith in. If we inspected every message for such qualities we would crawl to a halt. It is not practical and, for better or worse, we are unavoidably consuming. This is excellent news for those who actually know how to communicate. The power to create the world’s thought and behavior is in the hands of those that strike clear and simple messages, rooted in fact and garnished in fashion.

Business / Culture / Design / Innovation / Psychology / Technology — No Comments
25
Oct 09

The state of the art is falling short of dreams

Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y.  11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.

N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.

Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.

In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.

There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.

Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?

Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.

What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.

Business / Technology — No Comments
10
Nov 08

Prototyping can lead to remarkable outcomes

Prototyping is something software builders leave to user experience professionals and that is completely insane. Prototyping should inhabit everyone’s being. It is an opportunity at any step of any process or creation. There are too many first drafts called final drafts, especially in software.

Regardless of your software development methodology, agile or waterfall, there is always a notation that says, “Take time to prototype.” Practitioners speed by this phase as if it were distracting from the final form. Project leaders receive pressures to deliver more, in less time and at or under budget. Where in that formula is prototyping placed at the top?

Some companies handle this by creating smaller development teams, housed in research and development or branded agile extensions of the larger delivery organization. This is where people think the prototypes come from. Does location, context or reporting structure have any bearing on how real software is?

pro⋅to⋅type [proh-tuh-tahyp]
noun, verb -typed, -typ⋅ing. –noun

  1. the original or model on which something is based or formed.
  2. someone or something that serves to illustrate the typical qualities of a class; model; exemplar: She is the prototype of a student activist.

1595–1605; < NL prōtotypon < Gk prōtótypon, n. use of neut. of prōtótypos original.

When I joined a skunk works team at IBM directly from college, everyone said they created prototypes. These prototypes were designed and delivered to scale to the entire enterprise. People called them prototypes to set expectations and help the traditional brass understand why a one-year project might be delivered in three months. Rarely was there anything approximating a prototype – well maybe the very first version.

There have been notable individuals that would have the courage to rewrite what they had coded to achieve greater aesthetic or optimal execution. It is a humbling, empowering and inspiring experience to throw out your current work in attempt to write it again better than before. This is the closest I have seen to developers creating prototypes and this is a rare occasion because we so easily rationalize how there is so little time, so little money and so much more to do.

First drafts make lame software, hence we iterate in hopes to accelerate the separation of curds and whey. In the end, this is not prototyping. Prototypes offer the opportunity to understand what is uniquely delivered by the solution, what is important to end-users and how the way the solution is built helps or hurts those two points. This is why the process often ends up being a user experience deliverable. The challenge and thus opportunity, is that maybe what is deemed important is unfounded. Maybe the feedback users provide is based on a poor articulation or misguided offering.

Prototyping in software development educates the architects, the developers and, in turn, the user experience professionals. By building relatively low investment prototypes through rapid development tooling, the notion of throwing the resulting build away seems palatable. It offers the opportunity to learn without entering the software delivery cycle – skipping the prototype is the quickest way not to have freedom to try things. Once there is focus on solution delivery, everyone creates a context that prevents the exploration of what is right. Everyone is left to struggle with making what gets delivers as good as it can be, given the circumstances.

This is all likely generalizable to many professions. Creative types work through revisions as part of their craft. Prototypes educate you, your team and others to the importance of the end direction. It forces everyone to approach the real work with purpose and limits the exposure to making poor decisions under pressure or pretense. Spending the time up front pays everyone back during and after delivery and yet it is not prioritized as such. Instead, we hope that professionals executing a good enough approach will deliver something remarkable.

Business / Culture / Design / Innovation — No Comments
12
Oct 08

Creating the future while minding your business

The last day of the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney delivered many surprising moments of genius. Visionary and inventor, Buckminster is an innovator’s innovator. He saw the value of drawing upon interdisciplinary fields to inform a unique and faceted view of the world. His work is grounded in helping people with a do “more with less” attitude that extended to environmental impact. While it is easy to hand wave this exhibition as an old time futurist, his philosophy alone was worth absorbing.

There are many ways to go about change. Over the last couple of years, innovation has become all the rage. It is seen as the fundamental approach to growth. Companies exist to deliver value to customers through the creation of products and services. Through the innovation contributed by products and services companies compete for higher sales, larger market share and if they are lucky the hearts of their clients and customers.
Companies also consider innovating on their business a key model for transformation. Many change makers push against the system to get it to change, to innovate and evolve. In the end, the fastest and most exciting opportunities are those that usurp the existing establishment. They politely and subtly thumb the current way of thinking, in favor for an alternative approach, one that could change the landscape completely. Apparently, Buckminster Fuller saw this approach as the only viable approach to change.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The resistance to change, even from the most progressive is an adversary that drains the innovator directly. More time is spent talking than doing. People argue about subtle points to maintain the current course and speed. My father taught me at a young age that if you always do what you always have done, then you always get what you have always gotten. What is difficult here is that it takes the majority of workers to deliver on today; after all, it brings in the money to create for tomorrow. In order to remain viable companies need to invest just as heavily in inventing and innovating for tomorrow. Traditional R&D organizations are no longer the primary source of innovation and there is lots of research that suggests answers is in the masses. This is an area where maybe only a few are required to institute change.

Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

No one wants what he or she has today, but if that is all the people of a company spend time doing, then how could any expect anything more than a game of catch up? Something far more radical would be to create an organizational structure that enabled the pursuit of both present and future with equal vigor.

Change is a critical part of business. Fuller’s attitude toward creation, focused on his contribution without regard to if the world was ready. The world catches up and regardless of success is influenced by the doing.

Business / Culture / Design / Innovation — No Comments
18
Sep 07

Agreeing on experience design

Back in May, Adam Greenfield contributed a great article for Adobe’s Design Center Think Tank space called On the ground running: Lessons from experience design. He begins with an insightful – on hindsight obvious – observation that the distinctions between products and services is blurring. Adam introduces the roll of experience design as the agent helping blur these lines, highlighting three examples of XD gone awry: Nike+, Acela and Puma’s Trainaway. He ends with a resonating statement about conversations and not control, suggesting that while very often, tight experience design requires a greater level of control, but opening solutions up to user modification, the ultimate in end-user collaborative design.

While Adam’s examples illustrate his points well, there is another side of the conversation worth consideration. Obviously the three examples all result in some level of failure, which might lead to the conclusion that each was not worth doing. The thing about failure is that if the vision is grand enough, any action toward achieving that goal sets the stage for tomorrow’s experience. Nike+ (the iPod nano, Nike bio telemetric transponder shoes and the online data visualization) might not have been the hit people were hoping for – I actually did not know they lacked popularity – but the offering shows that someone over at Nike is thinking about how we reinvent the running shoe, a completely commoditized product with endless air pockets, gels and spring. Even if it fails, then notion that your shoes might have some electronics in them has come to pass in popular culture. It is no longer limited to the shock activated flashing LED. A recent post by Jonah Lehrer jokes about your iPod being made of biological flesh and yet continues on reviewing some research where scientists have shown circuits can be constructed out of biological material. It is all fantasy until someone tries to commercialize it and then the world gets to add it, flop or not, into the accepted realm of possibilities. This approach is probably not the best way to run a business, but its wonderful at winning the hearts and minds of people.

One of the areas Adam shines focus is the challenge in trying to control the end-to-end solution to deliver great experience design with a quote from Nokia’s Chris Heathcote. It might be the case that designing for one person is not practical; however, I also think we tend to try to make a single solution apply to too many. Narrowing the target audience may limit overall breadth of success, but it ensures at least one population is thrilled. For those early-adopters, runners and techi types, the Nike+ might have been a great geeky trip. Is this not just the long tail of XD?

Seth Godin posted on his obsession with improving alarm clocks, ending with the fact that products could be better if we tried to make them better. If the distinctions between products and services are blurring – a very sophisticated undertaking – then maybe the reason some have failed in the past has less to do with experience design and more to do with people agreeing its worth trying to make things better. As Adam explored, it only takes failure in any one of many things to challenge the overall experience.