Process
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Google Labs Embedded in Gmail
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1 min read
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…
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Surowiecki on Toyota
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1 min read
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.…
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The Ten Distinguishing Properties of Wicked Problems
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2 min read
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.” There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem Wicked problems…
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In Tillie’s, Fort Greene, Brooklyn
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1 min read
“Hey Man†“Hey, how’s it going?†“Good good. You know, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve been watching what you’re doing and it looks wild. What is that?†“Oh, I’m sort of drawing a piece of software.†“Drawing it? Is that how you do it?†“Well ya, I draw what it’ll look like, and…
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I’m storyboarding away and working on a section about design concepts: examples and processes for making them. This write-up of the Chamr concept process is a good overview, and I’m looking for more in case you know of any. In a nutshell, the Adaptive Path team started with research, then expressed important principles and major…
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When Design Innovation Comes Down to Execution
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1 min read
Matt, formerly of Nokia, counters the notion that Apple alone has the best touch user interface ideas, but also that it’s not the idea that won that race, but execution… In recent months we’ve seen Nokia and Sony Ericsson show demos of their touch UIs. To which the response on many tech blogs has been…
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Agile with a capital/lowercase A
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2 min read
It looks like agile software development is having the same growing pains, expressed through semantics, as the design field (or the Design field). It’s the perceived misapplication of language that catches my eye… Jason Gorman argued that the meaning of Agile was ambiguous and was being inappropriately applied to a very wide range of approaches…
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Interview on the State of Information Architecture
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1 min read
I’m on my way to the IA Konferenz in Stuttgart this week where I plan to talk about the future of the web design profession by learning from other technology-related professions and projecting out the current trends. To preface that, Jan Jursa invited me to answer five questions on his blog, for example this one…
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Online Design Pattern Languages, 2nd Generation
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2 min read
It’s great to see design pattern libraries like Yahoo!’s getting a lot of attention these days. I’ve been working on planning one for a client recently and thinking a lot about what makes them successful. In short, I think the newer, popular ones are immediately useful, meaning you can directly insert the pattern into your…
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Bad News Should Travel Fast
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1 min read
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…
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A Tiny, Giant Shift to Design Thinking
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1 min read
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…
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Seeing the Real Difference Between Art and Design
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1 min read
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.…
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No-Knead Product Design
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1 min read
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…
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Toyota Lovefest
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1 min read
It must have been Toyota Week last week in the New York Times. In addition to the Toyota-in-America story, they published a front page magazine piece on Toyota’s “world domination“. What’s perhaps most revealing is the slideshow of their training program, a reminder of the discipline in their culture.
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For a limited time only you can download the full text of Finding the Right Job for Your Product by Clayton M. Christensen et al. The article itself isn’t revolutionary — they essentially mirror the transition that marketing research has undergone in moving from demographic to affinity customer segmentation. Christensen and his colleagues describe that…