Author: Victor

Google Labs Embedded in Gmail

I think a lot about how organizations and their products evolve quickly rather than remain static, and Google Labs are a prime example of that. By developing many alpha products, releasing several public betas, and getting live feedback they use the market to tell them what works. For many companies the notion of releasing your proprietary ideas is very scary, and yet the effect is the opposite: risk management.

A colleague just gave me a heads up to the Labs section of Gmail (accessible from Settings). It’s interesting for a few reasons:

  1. They’ve turned the labs upside down, embedding experimental ideas as preferences in an application rather than silo’d sites.
  2. Each feature is attributed to the employee(s) who invented it, acknowledging that great experiments often originate with one person, even if it takes a company to implement it.
  3. Some of the features — like “mouse gestures” which lets you navigate conversations by moving the mouse — innovate at the user interface level.

Gmail Labs

Design Thinking to Finance Skyscapers

In her comment to my post on the recent HBR article on design thinking, my friend HK writes, “What the article is missing is some concrete examples — what do designers do at strategic phases of projects, when the problems they’re solving aren’t explicit design problems?” She goes on to describe three of her own examples.

I suspect it’s both very hard and very easy to show examples. Very hard because applying creativity to what are normally analytical activities is a design problem in itself. I’ve found that inventing even rudimentary tools is hard. It’s reinventing how we’ve done business for hundreds of years, and it’s going to take years to build a more creative practice as reliable as our current methods.

But finding examples of design thinking applied to business problems is also easy, there are examples all around us. Financial deals can be quite complex and structuring one requires creativity. I was reminded of this last night while reading Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate, stories about living in New York. In one scene he tours midtown Manhattan with a property tycoon…

It was a cold, crisp fall day, and as we looked at all the great glass skyscrapers of Park Avenue — the Seagram Building and Lever House and the Citicorp Center — he unraveled for me the complicated secrets of their financing and construction: how this one depended on a federal bond, and this one on a legendary thirteen-year lease with a balloon payment, and this one on the unreal (and unprofitable) munificence of a single liquor baron and his daughter…

We can imagine the sort of creativity needed to solve a problem like financing a building costing hundreds of millions of dollars involving several parties, credit instruments, commitments over time, tax structure, and so on. I’d like to know if anyone in finance is studying these deals as creative activities to help us understand how to design them better (and if traditional designers will be interested in this sort of design!).

Dan Hill on the Monocle Site Design

Monocle, as a business, a magazine, and a website, is an interesting story. I’m not sure how well the business fares, but it’s been around long enough and the content is growing in quantity and richness that it seems the affairs are in order.

Dan Hill recently posted about his work on the design of the site. The design reflects their strategy, which in a word could be summed up as bespoke. They’re differentiating on quality of a hand-crafted nature. While everyone else is installing white label social media packages, aggregating content from all over, and throwing features at the readers’ overwhelmed wall of attention, Monocle redoubled efforts to create a beautiful layout, professional writing and production, and a brand strong enough to extend into physical products.

Here’s a few of Dan’s notes that stood out for me:

  • Monocle was conceived as a multi-platform brand from the start.
  • We wanted to make Monocle a journalism brand that you had a weekly relationship with via the internet, as well as the monthly relationship via the magazine. Ultimately, this should be daily, if aspirations come to fruition.
  • I knew from the BBC that getting the broadcasts into iTunes would be the thing that really extended the viewership of the programmes… we waited until we had a critical mass of content before entering iTunes, with a podcast of all the programmes.
  • We’d seen many other broadcast news outlets appear to be getting ever more parochial, and produce editorial with lower quality (…the apparent step forward of journalists filing video reports via their mobile phone is often merely a cost-cutting exercise, and a step backwards in reporting quality). …we wanted to raise the bar in online video: to shoot things in high quality – we have our own Panasonic AG-HVX200 HD cameras and Mac Pro-based Final Cut Pro editing stations – and edit and encode professionally, embedding on the page in 16:9 ratio, to subtly give a sense of high quality broadcast.
  • I’ve conceived the video player… doubling up from it’s smallest size (470px to 960px) and then capable of going full-screen in the downloaded mp4 mode… We encode our programmes twice – once in Flash (using Sorensen Squeeze) for inclusion on the website, both in ‘lean-forward’ mode as embedded on the page, and in ‘lean-back’ mode when the user hits the double-size button; and then again in downloadable .mp4 files, which are encoded at the highest possible quality settings for iPod/iPhone.
  • Critically, we wanted to ensure that the sound is recorded correctly, so we used broadcast facilities in central London… before converting a space in the Marylebone Monocle HQ into a voiceover booth… Many other players have clearly not thought enough about sound…
  • Creating the right office/studio environment was also key… The centre-piece of the office is a large wall on which the issue emerges bit by bit, as useful for us commissioning video content alongside as for talking people through the brand.

    • Monocle's layout wall

    Continue reading Dan Hill on the Monocle Site Design

HBR Finally Runs Their Design Thinking Article

Tim Brown Those of us following the dissemination of the design thinking meme were wondering if and when the Harvard Business Review would jump on board, and the waiting is over. In the June 2008 issue there’s an overview article courtesy of IDEO’s Tim Brown, a logical choice. He makes some key points while sidestepping unnecessary hype. Examples:

  • His cases include Coasting bicycles, Kaiser Permanente nursing shift changes, and the Aravind Eye Care System. But he wraps the piece with a comparison to Thomas Edison:

    • The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too. Thus Edison’s genius lay in his ability to conceive of a fully developed marketplace, not simply a discrete device… Edison wasn’t a narrowly specialized scientist but a broad generalist with a shrewd business sense… Innovation is hard work; Edison made it a profession that blended art, craft, science, business savvy, and an astute understanding of customers and markets.

  • Design applied downstream is tactical, design applied upstream is strategic.
  • The importance of a human-centered approach
  • Brainstorming and prototyping stand as examples for the array of possible techniques
  • Constraints as a springboard for creativity
  • Aesthetics are still important because they appeal to our emotions
  • As more of our needs our met, we crave better experiences

And so on. If you haven’t been introduced to design thinking, it’s a good place to start. If you have, it’s a good article to educate your clients.

Disruption From the Bottom Up: Flip

Flip Video I think it’s fair to say the $100 Flip video camera is a disruptive play. I’m not too surprised it didn’t come from Canon or Sony, but instead from a company who established their capabilities by building even cheaper cameras…

Pure Digital started out, in 2002, making a digital version of the single-use “disposable” camera, sold through drugstores. The company’s research suggested that there might be a market for a similar product that took video images, and it created a one-time-use camcorder. But a number of consumers who liked the camcorder didn’t like the one-use limitation (and at least some of them figured out ways to skirt that limitation).

So when the first version of the Flip emerged in May 2007, its roots were in the point-and-shoot-camera world. That meant the company was far more conversant in how to make do with cheap components and keep prices down than in dreaming up the newest innovation that motivates the bleeding-edge camcorder freak.

Who Needs Reliability When Your Consumers are Addicted?

Twitter logo Lately Twitter’s database crashed. They occasionally have to turn off features for technical reasons. Sometimes they’re down and they don’t even know why (having been a sys admin I feel their pain). It seems they’ve picked a service with a a hard technical problem: scaling a web messaging system. And it’s reached the point of parody.

Do Twitterers complain? Sure. But they keep using it. They even send the Twitter staff pizzas.

Considering we don’t actually need Twitter and could easily go back to life without it, the devotion of Twitterers is amazing. But I realize this is nothing new for Evan Williams, the founder. In the early days of Blogger there were also massive technical problems. As an early Blogger I remember them devoting weekends to keeping the service up as I sent in my donation to keep them going.

This approach feels like a key variation on the beta launch approach: if the app is addictive enough, consumers will hang on and tolerate downtime. So launching a good idea even earlier than the usual beta may pay off despite technical pain later on (e.g. Blogger survived nicely). For many product development and IT managers, launching betas is radical enough, launching unscalable betas will be a tough lesson to absorb.

p.s. check out their nifty over capacity page…

Pundits and the Need for Certainty

The world is getting to be a whole lot more complex, and we seem to be reacting with increasing punditry, from cable news hosts to conference speakers (there are currently 14810 slideshows on Slideshare explaining the future of something or other). And of course I’m guilty of this as the next guy, so I thinking about this. Were we always like this, but now have more means of expressing it, or are we feeling more threatened by change and subsequently striving for relevancy by proclaiming our insights to the world?


Kurt Vonnegut had this to say about the guessers…

We must acknowledge, though, that persuasive guessers—even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in Russia—have given us courage to endure extraordinary ordeals that we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, wars, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead—the guessers gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively.

Without that illusion, we would all have surrendered long ago. But in fact, the guessers knew no more than the common people and sometimes less. The important thing was that they gave us the illusion that we’re in control of our destinies.

Continue reading Pundits and the Need for Certainty

Mismatch Problems When Hiring People

Malcolm Gladwell is working on a book that argues there is a mismatch problem in the way we usually hire people, that we set up qualifications to try and judge how people might perform where what we should be doing is watching them actually perform. Here’s a recent video of him explaining the problem.

The best working relationships I’ve had have started over a meal, preferably at home, where you can get to know each other in a relaxed way, and proceeded to working together on a small, low-risk activity. It might sound like a lot of work compared to the usual interview process, but it’s better than making a bad hire.

Surowiecki on Toyota

Toyota gets Surowiecki’d (a straightforward, insightful summary)…

…if Toyota doesn’t look like an innovative company it’s only because our definition of innovation—cool new products and technological breakthroughs, by Steve Jobs-like visionaries—is far too narrow. Toyota’s innovations, by contrast, have focussed on process rather than on product, on the factory floor rather than on the showroom. That has made those innovations hard to see. But it hasn’t made them any less powerful.

…Toyota’s approach: defining innovation as an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis.

…Toyota’s innovative methods may seem mundane, but their sheer relentlessness defeats many companies. That’s why Toyota can afford to hide in plain sight: it knows the system is easy to understand but hard to follow.

Not a new sentiment, but one that needs to be repeated and accepted more widely.

New Addition to the Team

Posts have been, and will probably continue to be, rather slow around here as I happily bond with the new member of my family, TVL.

Thomas Vincent

Cute, ain’t he?

Tool: Business Design Concept Poster

Each semester I tweak my Business & Design class as I learn more about how to teach undergrad design students about business, and help them to blend business and design ideas rather than see them as two separate spheres (while relating cautionary tales, as with Ford bean counters who show up at the end and revise the design!).

This semester culminated with a poster that could encapsulate the artifact, consumer experience, and business model on one sheet of paper. Once we had all this information in one place, we could see that, for example, it wasn’t going to make enough money, and then use our research and idea generation techniques to tweak some aspect, such as the price, and watch how it changed other aspects, like the target audience.

For a one semester course, it was a lot for them to absorb, and the results will still look elementary to professionals, but they rose to the challenge and I think this format has potential to help designers and businesspeople see the connection between form, function, audience, costs, revenue, and business model.

Here’s three examples. Click through the link to see the high-res versions.

The Ten Distinguishing Properties of Wicked Problems

You may have heard of Rittel and Webber’s wicked problems (problems that are messy, circular, and aggressive). I was interested to see their original paper (pdf) includes ten distinguishing properties “that planners had better be alert to” because “policy problems cannot be definitively described.”

  1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem
  2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule
  3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad
  4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem
  5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly
  6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan
  7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique
  8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem
  9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution
  10. The planner has no right to be wrong

It makes me wonder if any politicians have tried to campaign on a process for solving wicked problems instead of prescriptive solutions.

The Wii’s Blue Ocean Has to Float Partners Too

It seems Wii games aren’t selling as well as competitors’ games. The New York Times article cites two culprits:

  1. Audience: “They don’t buy new games with the fervor of a traditional gamer who is constantly seeking new stimulation.“
  2. Marketing: “Part of the problem, analysts say, is that other game makers have yet to embrace unconventional advertising methods that can reach this broader audience.“

Those are probably contributors, but I would cite one overriding factor: strategy. The Wii is a famous example of Blue Ocean strategy, achieving low-cost through asymmetrical and differentiating product characteristics. In a recent experience, I realized this strategy has to extend through the product extensions created by partners, or the whole system loses momentum.

In 2006-7 I worked with a media company partnering with a fitness company that had gone from a small franchise to an international leader in its category using a Blue Ocean strategy. They wanted to extend the business online, but somehow forgot why their customers loved them: an innovative, different experience that could be had at a lower price. The online product we were asked to create was not different, not better, and not cheaper. Although it’s designed well and effective, it’s not selling well. I’m not sure if the client saw the strategic mismatch, but they certainly didn’t enforce it with their partner.

If I were in Nintendo’s shoes, I would be hammering away at a broad effort to help my partners follow the strategy that has been 20-million-consoles-effective. Example: Guitar Hero shouldn’t be the same price for the Wii as for Playstation and Xbox, it should be a lower price (and it can’t be a whopping $90, who do they think this segment is anyway?). And the games need to work hard to find new, fun things to do with that motion controller. Fun and cheap, the Wii is as simple as that, and partners need to get on board with that strategy.

Pages and Direct Manipulation

Now that we have rich web interfaces and sufficient bandwidth there’s talk of the death of the web page. While that may happen someday, for now we’re on a gradual journey of using pages differently than we used to.

One difference is simply introducing more direct manipulation, such as clicking and/or dragging the pages themselves rather than a link representing the page. About four years ago I created a way to navigate web pages by moving them side-to-side…

backslider

…one gesture the iPhone uses today.

iphone-slide.JPG

Some recent designs are using thumbnails to increase non-linear navigation performance, such as Issuu

issuu.GIF

…and AT&T’s Pogo browser.

No doubt these are some slick interfaces. But of course we’re relying on a visual thumbnail of a page to signal the meaning of what content is on that page. For relatively graphical web pages, that may be fine. For text pages, probably not. As they used to say at Apple, “a word is worth a thousand pictures.” Displaying a thumbnail and a word together could go a long way, at least until we kill the page.