Noise Between Stations

  • Summary Summary: The Dip — Be the Best in the World

    Graph from Seth Godin's book The Dip plotting effort against reward. There's a small initial reward, a long hard slog, then a giant reward for being the best.

    The Dip by Seth Godin describes a personal approach to achievement by following a strategy of quality in a world of micromarkets. I’ve read the summary and have tried to further summarize it:

    1. You start by finding a micromarket where you can be the best in the world, whether it’s personal financial planning for new parents in Brooklyn or “gluten-free bialys available by overnight shipping.” What constitutes “best” and “the world” is in the eye of the customer, not you.
    2. Then you work long and hard to be the best in that micromarket, which will involve slogging through “the dip” where reward is low and effort is high.
    3. Along the way you need to be careful to “quit the stuff where you can’t be the best. That leaves you the resources to invest in getting through the Dip.”

    That’s the functional summary, you’ll have to read the book to be inspired.

  • Konigi Launched

    My friend Michael recently launched Konigi, a site for researching websites. It’s perfect for those times when you’re designing a feature and you want to review all the prior art. There’s screenshots and screencasts and a bunch of community features, but Michael has a lot more interesting things planned, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

    Konigi

  • Digital Service Design: A User Story, and An Overview

    Here’s a story of how someone might wind up needing this book, and a one-page overview of it all.

    Read this doc on Scribd: The Right Idea 02

  • Alignment Diagrams as Business Tools?

    The first book from Rosenfeld Media, Mental Models, is hot off the press (get 10% off with discount code FOSMEX10). I bought a copy this week, and was struck by how widely the alignment diagrams in the book could be used.

    In case you haven’t seen an alignment diagram, it basically groups similar mental concepts together and maps them to corresponding content or functions, listed underneath (click for a larger image).


    alignment diagram

    Just as strategy maps made a conceptually large and complex set of concepts easy to understand (and popular) by visualizing them all on one page, alignment diagrams does the same for what people are thinking and how to interact with them. The book culminates with a chapter on deriving structure and labels from the diagram, for example for a website. But it’s easy to imagine much broader applications, from organizational change planning to communications strategies.

  • Digital Service Design: A Book in Progress

    I recently went looking for and failed to find the book I think so many of us would appreciate and enjoy right now, one that captures the excitement, the emergent processes, and the innovative techniques for designing digital services, particularly for the Internet. There are great product development books, great Internet strategy books, and great books that describe the nuances of design and marketing and programming. But there’s nothing like a primer or a manual that helps the majority of people in the field grasp what the process is like to design a service the way the best Web 2.0 companies do it.

    That’s what I hope to create. I’ll post pages here, a few at a time. As always, your comments are appreciated.

    Read this doc on Scribd: The Right Idea 01

  • Is Play Important?

    Business design people talk a lot about the importance of play at work, the sort of improvisation that — because it is both fun and challenging — encourages us to persist at an activity by generating new ideas. Robin Marantz Henig’s recent essay in the New York Times, Taking Play Seriously, focuses on the scientific study of play. In short, play seems to help animals develop in important ways, but we’re not sure exactly how it helps us or if we can develop just as well without it.

    But here’s an interesting thought for us adults…

    …Bateson, a prominent play scholar who recognizes the quandary posed by equifinality, suggested that play is the best way to reach certain goals. Through play, an individual avoids what he called the lure of ‘‘false endpoints,’’ a problem-solving style more typical of harried adults than of playful youngsters. False endpoints are avoided through play, Bateson wrote, because players are having so much fun that they keep noodling away at a problem and might well arrive at something better than the first, good-enough solution.

    I’m definitely guilty of what the skeptics of play call “play ethos,” the reflexive, unexamined belief that play is an unmitigated good with a crucial, though vaguely defined, evolutionary function. Still, I hit a lot of false endpoints in the business world and can’t help but think we’d arrive at better solutions if everyone were just a wee bit more playful.

    Update: Here’s a story on NPR on play and the importance of self-regulation… “we’re often using it to surmount obstacles, to master cognitive and social skills, and to manage our emotions.“

  • Storyboarding Instead of Writing

    head first storyboard

    I’ve been doing a lot of “writing” lately, but in an attempt to emulate great, bestselling computer books that are highly visual and concise, I’ve been thinking about layout first and writing second, because we want to learn and not necessarily read. I’ve started mocking up the piece on index cards to get a feel for the flow of content. As it turns out I’m not the first to go this route…

    …pretty much every page of every Head First book first exists as a scribbly drawing on paper before it ever makes its way into page layout software. Same deal with my book. In fact, my entire book was written on paper in pencil before I ever laid out a single page electronically. That version of a Head First book is known as storyboards, or boards for short. The idea is that you sketch up the core visual elements of each page in the boards. And by steering clear of software layout tools with fancy visual effects, you’re forced to stick within the realm of concepts. No characters, no cute graphics, just core visual concepts and whatever your artistic ability can muster. It’s all about focus.

    Here’s some of the principles behind the Head First Formula:

    • Instead of repetition, use novelty to tell the brain something is important
    • Use pictures, because your brain is tuned for visuals, not text.
    • Place words within the pictures they describe (as opposed to somewhere else in the page, like a caption or in the body text)
    • Use redundancy, saying the same thing in different ways and with different media types, and multiple senses, to increase the chance that the content gets coded into more than one area of your brain.
    • Use concepts and pictures with at least some emotional content
    • Use a personalized, conversational style, because your brain is tuned to pay more attention when it believes you’re in a conversation than if it thinks you’re passively listening to a presentation.
    • Include many activities, because your brain is tuned to learn and remember more when you do things than when you read about things.
    • Use multiple learning styles, because you might prefer step-by-step procedures, while someone else wants to understand the big picture first, and someone else just wants to see an example.
    • Include content for both sides of your brain
    • Include stories and exercises that present more than one point of view
    • Include challenges, with exercises, and by asking questions that don’t always have a straight answer, because your brain is tuned to learn and remember when it has to work at something.
    • Use people. In stories, examples, pictures, etc., because, well, because you’re a person. And your brain pays more attention to people than it does to things.

    It’s about making books fun. In some ways, it’s about making adult’s books more like children’s books.

    Kathy Sierra expands on these ideas in the below interview. Some key points:

    • Make readers feel like “I Rule” — identify where people feel guilt and fear and alleviate it.
    • They used the Save The Cat screenwriting book
    • Don’t start at the beginning, chop off the first chapter (introductory stuff) and put that at the end. Then spend a lot of time on the new first chapter to suck people into the action right away.
    • Amazon reader reviews of Head First book are more about their experience with the book than the book itself. Also, they referred to authors by the first name instead of the last.

  • The Familiar Product That’s Always Surprising

    When one of my students started designing a product extension for Orbit gum, I didn’t get the appeal of Orbit (it’s huge among college students, but as I don’t own a TV I’m immune to the marketing). But lately my project manager at work keeps bringing it in, and each pack is a new flavor. “Chamomile?” “Mint mojito?” “Raspberry Mint?”

    It’s a product with a comfortable familiarity that keeps surprising us. I don’t think anyone online has yet captured that combination of necessary consistency that establishes meaning and usability with surprising, fun variations in the experience (not just the content).

    Orbit gum -- New Flavor!

  • Jan Chipchase’s Presentations are Online

    And they’re nice.

    decoratingphone-janchipchase2.jpg

  • Location-Aware Ads Have Arrived

    From the New York Times, In CBS Test, Mobile Ads Find Users…

    CBS plans to announce on Wednesday that it is trying one of the first serious experiments with cellphone advertising that is customized for a person’s location. Its CBS Mobile unit is teaming up with the social networking service Loopt, which allows its subscribers to track participating friends and family on their mobile phones.

  • The Failure of Failure

    Much has been written about the importance of failure in design. To improve things we need to try new approaches which sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Straight forward enough, at least to designers.

    But business managers won’t go near that. “Yes, I need to fail!” Bull-shit, you ain’t gonna hear that in many management offices. So I’ve been thinking about how to re-frame the word “failure”.

    “Iteration” is pretty good, but implies each pass is good and just keeps getting better. Michael Linton, CMO of Best Buy, has trials he calls “ready-fire-aim” activities. And I just thought of a new one:

    A try.

    This is riffing off two different words. One is “the ask” which is more commonly being used as a noun, meaning “the request” (annoyed the hell out of me for a while, but I’m adjusting). But mostly try is a riff on the rugby use of the word which refers to the major way of scoring points in that game, equivalent to a touchdown in American football.

    How might I use it? The sketch looks great, let’s make one in foam core and go for a try with some customers…

    It could be a wonderful evocation of cognitive dissonance, as it would simultaneously mean to make an effort as well as score!

  • Kevin Kelly on Eight Uncopyable Values

    Kevin Kelly established himself as an Internet pundit with true foresight with the 1998 New Rules for the New Economy which is still a classic, if showing a little age with its dot com bravura. Now he’s working on a new book piece by piece on his blog. The latest chapter examines the future of value online. In Better Than Free he posits:

    “When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
    When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
    When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
    Well, what can’t be copied?”

    His answer is eight uncopyable values, which he calls “generatives”:

    Immediacy — Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative asset.

    Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room — as if it were preformed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot.

    Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000.

    Authenticity — You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don’t need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted.

    Accessibility — Ownership often sucks… Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them.

    Embodiment — …PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good.

    Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators… But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators.

    Findability — …no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless.

  • Which Blogs Should I Read?

    Friends of mine in the industry who aren’t taken with blogs sometimes ask me which ones they should look at just to stay current. I looked through my RSS reader and picked the five I thought would be most helpful. They are

  • Do You Desire My Brand Characteristics?

    Years ago I told my friend Mary about a desirability testing technique developed at Microsoft using product reaction cards, and tonight she showed me a neat twist she put on it. After testing the design of an online social networking tool, she listed the words chosen by test participants alongside the words used to describe the brand characteristics of her client. Sometimes they matched, sometimes they clashed. Very interesting.

  • Maybe Mass Marketing Works After All

    When it comes to viral influence, does the influence of a select few “key influencers” matter more than “the rest of us”? Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research says no, as Clive Thompson writes in Is the Tipping Point Toast?” in Fast Company. Watts says:

    It [achieving marketing success through influentials] just doesn’t work. A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.