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.

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.

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…

…one gesture the iPhone uses today.

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

…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.

“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 someone else makes it work.”
“How much of it do you have to draw?”
“Well, it depends. In this case, I’m drawing every screen.”
“Every screen?! Man, that is crazy, that is so far out. I didn’t know people did that. Draw every screen. Man, that’s something. Why do you do it that way?”
“You know, I’m not sure.”
“It’s kinda like an architect. Like you’re drawing a building. But I thought, you know, people just programmed and whatnot and that’s all you had to do.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that would be cool.”