Design —
In another case of it’s the experience not the design, Consumer Reports found that BMW and Harley Davidson motorcycles were three times more likely have have serious mechanical problems versus a Japanese brand, but their owners were more likely to buy that brand again. On the other side of the coin though, when asked whether [...]
I just heard a talk at Lean Startup Machine NYC by Jonathan Fields, author of the book Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance. It was only about 20 minutes but had maybe the highest useful content density of any talk I’ve ever heard. Here’s a few notes: A startup at the beginning [...]
Diane Loviglio, FailCon’s Associate Producer, interviewed me for the FailCon blog. We chatted about why it’s a good time to learn from customer experience failures, how one company recovered from failure, and my advice for startup founders.
John Cassidy penned a powerful piece for the current issue of the New Yorker titled, Mastering the Machine: How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund. Part of Dalio’s success in creating massive financial returns while controlling risk stems from his financial wisdom, but the success of his 1000-person organization that runs [...]
I’m in the research phase of my book on customer experience product failures and I’m pleased to find several books on failure that will inform my work. I’m collecting them in a list on UX Zeitgeist: Oh Noes! Books About Failure. I’ll be adding reviews of each book I read. So far, Being Wrong is [...]
…Real Stories and Practical Lessons from Experience Design Failures“. Learn more at the book site.
One of the most important things I learned when becoming a product manager was being able to see my product as an equation. In the startup phase it’s easy, there’s just costs and they’re often tangible: people, hardware, software. Then you add marketing in various forms each with a different cost/revenue profile, then revenue streams [...]
I’m a huge fan of the ‘old’ Readability — I hit a button which sucks out the content of a web page into a nicely formatted view, then I usually hit the Evernote button to save it for reading on my Macs or iPhone. The Readability folks recently amp’d the feature into a business. They [...]
In one of the darker corners of my mind I imagine a future where there are a set of laws and industry standards that dictate the acceptable usability of digital products and services, much like medical or engineering standards. I have to think that as we grow increasingly reliant on computer technology for our safety [...]
Part of my research into concept design is to look at where successful products and services came from. Today, it’s Twitter. Lately I’m also perusing Stephen Johnson’s thoughts on Where Do Good Ideas Come From. In this context it’s interesting to read here and here about Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s years of experience creating software [...]
Can these disciplines be explained in two sentences? Click for a larger version…
After studying concept design for a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that the single best thing designers can do to come up with better concepts is to do more of them. Generating more options increases the chances we’ll find better ideas. With that in mind, I perked up while reading What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?, [...]
Of all the images to come out of the iPad announcement, the one struck me the most was less about the device and more about the experience of it: Lying back on the sofa — isn’t that a nice way to be? And sitting or lying on the sofa with a 9.7 inch screen means [...]
In case you’re wondering how to expose business leaders to the innovative power of design and design research without using those words, read how John Kay does it in the FT: For years research and development scorecards have dutifully recorded how much pharmaceuticals companies spend on the search for new drugs and the expenditure of [...]
As reported in FT: “We are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership … tough-mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and greed, both terrible traits,” said Mr Immelt, who succeeded Jack Welch, one of the toughest leaders of his generation, at the helm of the US conglomerate. “Rewards became perverted. [...]