Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • Talking vs. Doing and My New Project

    If there’s still anyone out there who follows this blog I’m sure you’re wondering why the post frequency has dropped off and why it consists mostly of quoting the New York Times. I’ve been busy slowly creating my latest passion, a school of continuing education called Smart Experience. I could write a lot about it, but hopefully the website explains what’s going on.

    One fun part about building a business again is the opportunity to design a business as a deep dive, rather than on a project basis as a consultant. While I have a lot of new thoughts about how that happens (and doesn’t happen), mostly I’m trying to write less and do more, so I’ll skip that for now.

  • Bad News Should Travel Fast

    Another reason I like agile management is because when something bad happens, you should know as soon as you can. If you only check project status every week or longer, that can be way too late. It’s like what Robert Duvall says in The Godfather: “I have to go to the airport. The Godfather is a man who likes to hear bad news immediately.’“

  • Funniest Comment on Today’s Conference Call

    Woman from Marketing: “Well, since we’re all going to hell anyway…”

  • Google Earth Convinces Bush to Act on Darfur

    On the bright side, this story of how President Bush acted after seeing a Google Earth depiction of the burned out homes in Darfur is a great story about the power of visualization. But really, was the administration waiting four years to act because the bullet points weren’t powerful enough?

    • At least 400,000 people have been killed
    • More than 2 million innocent civilians have been forced to flee their homes and now live in displaced-persons camps in Sudan or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad
    • More than 3.5 million men, women, and children are completely reliant on international aid for survival

  • Does Strategic Thinking Reduce Stress?

    If you’re a designer, you can become very stressed over a small product detail, something so small most customers may not notice. If you’re a product manager, you may attend to the product details without stressing over them because you see the bigger picture of how the product competes in the market and what the true competitive advantages are.

    And this scenario scales. A business unit manager may fret over a $50 million decision. If you’re Jeffrey Immelt, CEO at GE, that’s not a stressful decision, the big decisions are about billions of dollars. So Immelt spends time coaching managers through the $50 million situations.

    In short, I find the bigger the picture one considers, the less one sweats the small stuff.

  • Having the API Rug Pulled Out From Under You

    John Hagel observes how “the large Internet players are wearying of the high acquisition premiums for attractive Web 2.0 companies and are increasingly deciding to grow their own copy when they see an interesting venture.” So if you’re a start-up, what’s your new exit strategy? Hagel says…

    The only sustainable edge in Web 2.0, as in all businesses today, is to get better faster by working with others…

    There are basically two ways to do this. First, you can accelerate the innovation in the services you offer so that you are constantly one or two (or more) steps ahead of those tempted to copy you. Second, you can find ways to use your service offerings to build trust-based relationships with your users, ideally with some powerful network effects that will make it very difficult for later entrants to pry these people away from your service.

  • Rettig on Market vs. Design Research

    I like just about everything Marc Rettig writes a whole lot, so I need to bookmark
    this new mailing list posting where he compares market research to design research…

    Market research typically attempts to answer questions of general trends, differences across a large group, general attitudes and preferences.

    Design research typically attempts to reveal latent, unspoken or masked needs and desires; can reveal emotions and psycho-cultural aspects; attempts to get at the “why” behind attitudes and preferences.

    …

  • A Tiny, Giant Shift to Design Thinking

    If someone were to ask me to sum up in a tiny nutshell what I thought would be the single most useful change to make to start using design thinking, I’d recommend reducing the frequency of the times we ask, “Can we do this?” and increasing the frequency of the times we ask, “How can we do this?” It seems a small change, but in practice it involves changing how people communicate and make decisions, and therefore into culture. And cultures don’t change easily.

    But — except for a few dozen very passionate people — no one is asking this question, which is perhaps another challenge.

  • Seeing the Real Difference Between Art and Design

    The Sartorialist blog has been a big hit, with each post getting dozens of comments. Why? On the surface it’s the usual blogger story: an individual with insight on a particular topic publishes quickly and honestly sans organizational overhead.

    To me, the Sartorialist does something else important. He delineates the difference between art and design. Many publications aimed at the fashion consumer, whether it be men’s magazines or even the New York Times, present clothes as art. I imagine the editors are fashionistas, and publish for (the taste and budgets of) other fashionistas. The Sartorialist on the other hand covers what people actually wear and so has something of agile in it, quickly revealing what people are and do. It’s field research with a point of view.

  • Want to Be An Expert? Practice for Ten Years

    In Daniel Coyle’s article on Russian tennis players we receive another interesting tidbit from the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. We already knew about the need for feedback, but this is the first I’ve heard of the Ten-Year Rule: “an intriguing finding dating to 1899, which shows that even the most talented individual requires a decade of committed practice before reaching world-class level.”

    That makes me feel better about all the skills I’m still struggling with.

    And if you’re looking to turn your child into a super athlete, the U.S. Olympic committee leverages the ten-year rule to provide advice on windows of optimal trainability.

  • Need Help Providing Internet Education to the Disadvantaged

    The skinny here is that I’d like to work on correcting the uneven access to Internet jobs (great jobs, btw) by providing education to the disadvantaged. By disadvantaged I mean — here in New York City — mainly blacks and Hispanics, but generally those with lower income. I’m not sure how organizations who provide such services identify customers in this segment. I’ve already got some plans in the works for an educational service, and a small but important component of it is figuring out how to make the education available more widely.

    Lately this has become a hotter topic in the blogosphere — with Kottke sparking a thread and Zeldman, Nick, Mike, and Anil supporting this point of view.

    Someone asked, Where are the barriers then? Here’s a few:
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  • No-Knead Product Design

    Lou dropped off a loaf of this amazing no-knead bread that’s all the rage among home cooks these days (recipe). It was and continues to be delicious, and as I munched through the crunchy exterior into the large crumb I pondered Lou’s search for a no-knead information architecture. My brain loves reducing complex processes to heuristics to make life simpler, so I’ve been looking for the equivalent for my job: no-knead product design. After chatting with some Overlappers tonight, here’s my first pass:
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  • Ken Bain’s Research on College Teachers

    Ken Bain came to Pratt last night to discuss his amazing research on teaching. Twenty years ago he and his colleagues worked to identify the best college teachers in America. They then examined how those teachers did research, planned courses, and taught classes. It’s all summed up in his excellent book, What the Best College Teachers Do.

    They found that all of these teachers thought of their work as paradigm-building, breaking down old models inside students’ minds and building up new ones. The importance of this is illustrated by a story in the book about physics students who, after they had taken the introductory course, still held an Aristotelian and not a Newtonian understanding of the world, much to the teachers’ dismay.

    Bain described three conditions for paradigm-building:

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  • How To Talk to Your Kids

    While this research says talking more and more encouragingly to your kids increases their IQ, this research says (I believe) when kids get to be about 5 years old then focused praise is better.

  • Web 2.0 & Web 1.5

    Have you ever upgraded software and then wish you hadn’t?

    That’s the feeling I get sometimes when using the new generation of rich user interface websites. Many are great, though some seem to be going over-the-top in a play for attention. We made some great strides with Web 1.5, simplifying the UI and increasing text size and amount of white space. And these apps sometimes still perform better than their Web 2.0 contenders. I tried Yahoo’s beta mail for a while then switched back to the less finicky classic version. Renkoo seems to have so much potential as an Evite-killer, but the slick interface made it harder and more error-prone to create an invite, so I’m sticking with Goovite.

    Until our design skills catch up with our technology, will we need to return to GOMS analysis?