Victor
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Keep status meetings to .5 hour, but do them every week Establish a natural way for the team to share what everyone is doing — eating together, or tasks we all do together — while protecting personal time to think and work individually Set up a team mailing list and liberally copy everyone on everything;…
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No-Click is the New Click
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1 min read
I’m bummed I’ll miss Dan Saffer’s talk tonight on Tap is the New Click (though happy I’ll finally get to try Five Points as I take a client out to dinner). But on that topic, I just came across some examples of interaction design that do away with the click altogether. It’s radical enough to…
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You need a great design to please your customers, and a great business model to pay for the design, so we’re offering classes on both topics to help user experience practitioners, managers, and entrepreneurs thrive in New York City. For 10% off any class, enter the code NBS when registering. If you plan to attend…
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A Schedule for Planning a Presentation
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1 min read
I tend to think and think and think and think and, at the last minute, throw together slides that represent what I want to say. This time I resolved to be more prepared. Here’s my deadlines: Aug 29 – Make schedule; list all potential points I could make; filter points to ones I should make…
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How Recruiting iPhone Designers is Like Raising Kids
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2 min read
When two of the really amazing thinkers I admire — Ken Bain and Jeanne Liedtka — both say they admire Carol Dweck, I figure it’s time to figure out who Dweck is. Her latest book, Mindset, provides some fascinating psychological support for the power of play and prototyping, as she says… People who believe in…
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Using Real Options to Value Design Concepts
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3 min read
The common way that financial people will judge the potential value of a project, or a design concept representing a potential future concept, is by building a model, usually a discounted cash flow model like Net Present Value (NPV). The calculation essentially asks, if we do this project and gain the profit we think we’ll…
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I’m happy the concept design research and development I’ve been doing has received some attention, even though I haven’t had much time to share my work. That will start to change next month when I present some tools for generating concepts at the 2008 European Information Architecture Summit in Amsterdam, where I’ve been honored with…
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The Age of Heretics, Updated in 2nd Edition
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1 min read
Art Kleiner revised The Age of Heretics and the 2nd edition is on it’s way to my greedy little fingers. It explores heretical ideas in management starting in 1945 through several case studies to find that: People are basically good at heart; they are fundamentally trustworthy. Only workplaces that give their members the chance to…
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Studio 360 on A Pattern Language
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1 min read
This morning Studio 360 broadcast a piece on Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, and the influence of patterns in software development. If you know the story, you know the story. Still, I always like hearing Alexander speak, and this is the first time I’ve heard Ward Cunningham’s voice.
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Concept Design: Name the Baby!
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2 min read
When you create a product or service concept, you should give it a name. Sounds like a no-duh idea, but in the heat of the moment we forget to do this. Sometimes… we give them numbers or letters. “You see the change in materiality here in concept 2…” or “Clearly Concept C is a total…
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Two Things Design Experts Do That Novices Don’t
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2 min read
In my research on concept design processes, I’ve come across two ideas that jumped out as vital behavior that differentiates expert designers from novices. The first comes from Nigel Cross of Open University, UK, who seems to have studied designers and their processes more than anyone I’ve come across. In his Expertise in Design (pdf)…
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Someone just brought it to my attention that a student named Feng Xia who received a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Ohio University in 1998 did so with a thesis paper that steals from others’ works, including my master’s thesis. It’s so bad, that after cobbling together various works, Feng couldn’t be…
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Monitor110 was a business/site that tried to filter information for institutional investors. This post mortem from a founder probably won’t reveal any new lessons, but it’s always powerful to see theory — in this case the value of the beta release — played out in the form of failure… …By mid-2005 the system worked, but…
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How To Tell A Story
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4 min read
I remember the first time someone impressed upon me the usefulness of storytelling. Back in 2000 a researcher came to Razorfish to study how we worked in order to improve our knowledge sharing. He told me how Secret Service agents studied storytelling so that, if they suddenly found themselves in the back of a car…
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Smart Experience Video Tutorials
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1 min read
In my time spent at consulting firms, client sites, teaching, etc. I see a need for more just-in-time design education. No formal program can keep up with the rate of change in digital design. People need on-demand materials they can use during their work day in-between tasks. The materials currently addressing this need leave a…