UXSears : Behavior is what a person does, not what they think, feel, or believe

So What's Up with this Taxonomy Stuff?

2011-07-28T07:48:00.000-07:00

Why does the UXSears team include a bunch of people who spend all of their time looking at words? Just what is it with this taxonomy thing any way? Today’s column will take a brief look at what taxonomy work is and why it is important.

We know that of all the people visiting the Sears.com home page, more use our browsing navigation than use search. We want to make sure those people can find what they are looking for. So we spend lots of time doing research to understand how our customers think about the structure of various groups of products. For example, do they think of item type (bracelet, ring) or metal type (gold, silver) first when buying jewelry? Do they look for “everyday jewelry” or “fashion jewelry”?

The more we know about how our customers think about products, the better we can make our product navigation hierarchy. And by better, I mean that customers can find what they want easily and efficiently. Get them to the product they want faster, and there’s a greater chance they will buy it.

We also work on creating appropriate product attributes. You know, the things customers use to narrow their choice when they get to the right category of stuff, like size, color, material or dimensions.

We also spend our time figuring out how to classify jar candles and shoe polish and knitting yarn and statuary and bookends. Yes, Sears.com sells all of those things and lots more besides. After all, we’ve got 23 million items online. And you wouldn’t want to look through that many one by one.

Ploymath Culture

2011-07-20T15:34:00.000-07:00

There's much talk throughout the halls of Sears Holdings about culture change. Transformation. Collaboration. And we're certainly not alone in this space--it seems many organizations--many industries--are looking for how to rethink how they create value both externally and internally.

Looking inside the organization, at the people, there's much being written about what kinds of people, skills, and approaches it now takes to be successful. One thread of this involves specialization. In the industrial age, specialization that created silos of work each with defined and manageable chunks was the rule of the day.

Now, it's a different story. Today, a number of factors are changing the way we need to think about the people and the culture we build. One of my favorite innovation people is Saul Kaplan, founder of the Business Innovation Factory in Rhode Island. He blogged about this awhile back:

1) Knowledge is expanding at ever increasing rates. Knowledge flows are moving so fast that it’s ludicrous to think experts or groups of specialists can absorb all available knowledge in any silo. What we learned yesterday is less and less relevant. What we learn today and how prepared we are to learn tomorrow is far more important.

2) Knowledge is more accessible than ever in human history. Access isn’t limited to the elite few. We are on our way to democratizing the entire body of knowledge. Think about that. The entire logic of the industrial era is no longer operative. Any of us can access the knowledge we need without relying on specialists. Specialization has been disrupted by the web and broadband connectivity. Specialists command a body of knowledge that is becoming increasingly less relevant every day.

3) The gold is in between knowledge silos. The biggest opportunities to create value and to solve today’s challenges require us to recognize patterns across silos connecting ideas across disciplines and sectors. Solutions are increasingly interdisciplinary. The future is trans-disciplinary. Designing the future isn’t the domain of specialists it’s the domain of collaboration and about tapping into the adjacent possible across disciplines. Those with the best access to knowledge flows across silos get the gold.

What wold it take to realize this? More people who are polymaths (and a culture that supports this way of thinking/being). What's a polymath? A polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. When we think of polymaths we tend to think of dead scientists from another era like Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci. Rarely do we apply the moniker in modern times. We need more polymaths. We need a generation of youth who want to be polymaths when they grow up.

Kaplan continues in his post: If the new era is about collaboration and finding value in the gray areas between silos we need more polymaths. If the new era is about recognizing patterns and defining new disciplines we need more polymaths. If knowledge is changing faster than professional boundaries and job definitions can accommodate we need more polymaths. If we need more polymaths we will have to rethink everything we know about education and workforce development. We need a generation of youth that want to be polymaths when they grow up. Calling all Polymaths.

What does a culture need to do to support this kind of change? What do you think Sears Holdings should / could do?

Zombies: fast vs. slow. Which is a better CX?

2011-06-22T15:15:00.000-07:00

Simon Pegg, star of the movies Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, has a great interview on NPR this week. The topic of Zombies came up (via his Sean of the Dead fame).

============ As for the raging genre war over whether zombies should be slow or fast, Pegg falls solidly on the side of slow-moving zombies. "It is sort of a schism in the church of the undead," Pegg explains. "I personally don't like fast zombies because, A) it's fun to get annoyed about something so trivial and B) I think it removes their appeal." In popular film history, zombies have become known as pathetic, tragic figures; Audiences can feel sorry for them, Pegg says. "They don't have any agenda. They just do what they do, which is eat flesh. And when they start running around screaming like Velociraptors, you just don't care about them anymore, you just think: go away, you noisy speed demon." ===========

What makes a zombie good or memborable? Empathy. Feeling for the tragic figure the zombie has become...remembering who they used to be (a friend, a neighbor...someone that was familiar at some level). Oy, vay. The story's hero now needs to shoot this former person that's slowly making their way toward him/her.

This is a powerful, and emotional, bond they form with the audience watching a story unfold.

Fast zombies simply aren't memorable---a throng of fast, dead, and rotting, ninjas end up focusing all the attention on the hero (e.g. Resident Evil games/movies). It's fast and the special effects are fun. But fast zombies don't reach as deep, and stay as long, in your memory.

And from a customer experience point of view, creating lasting memories often means a lot. Plus, isn't just the fact we're having a conversation about Zombies as way to talk about customer experience kinda fun?

The full interview with Simon Pegg can be found here--I recommend it :)

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/137299643/nerd-do-well-simon-pegg-on-becoming-a-big-kid

Walmart's $1.85B mistake

2011-04-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a frequent situation for many organizations and, unfortunately for Walmart, an all-too-frequent response.

What happened?

Walmart took the voice of the customer too literally. Customers answered a Walmart survey and told Walmart that they would prefer less clutter in the stores. Their reaction? "Project Impact" - a major change in strategy and store customer experience - starting in 2008.

The result:

a $1.85 billon dollar customer experience mistake made by Walmart (a conservative estimate of lost revenue that does not include the hundreds of millions spent on remodeling stores) - Walmart revised their decades-old strategy of low price and wide selection - 15% of the inventory removed from the stores - 30% - some suppliers reported losing 30% of their stock in Walmart stores due to the revamp - Removed pallets of items like juice boxes or sweatshirts stacked in the centers of aisles. - Slimmed down merchandise on “end caps,” displays at the ends of aisles - Shortened shelves - Revamp not only removed items but cost "millions of dollars" per store in refurbishment costs Source / full article here: http://dailyartifacts.com/walmarts-185-billon-dollar-mistake

The lesson? There's a difference between what customers say vs. what they do. Understanding the difference can lead to innovation...not understanding it can hit your bottom line, hard.

Life's Handbooks debuts on Sears.com

2011-03-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

Sear is delighted to announce the launch of Life's Handbooks on Sears.com.

Life's Handbooks blends services, products, articles and Q&A for life's major events. Whether you're moving, heading to college, getting married, having a baby, or already raising one - Life's Handbooks is here to help.

Check it out at handbooks.sears.com

Empathy Drives Technology Innovation

2011-03-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

Joe McCarthy's recent blog posting reviews two new books on the impact of technology on society:

Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, by Sherry Turkle, and Reality is Broken: How Games Can Make Us Better and How They Are Changing the World, by Jane McGonigal.

Joe writes: Alone Together expresses concern that our increasing focus on virtual interactions is draining, depleting and distracting us from our real-world interactions, whereas Reality is Broken espouses the belief that the time we spend playing online games can renew and revitalize us and perhaps even lead us to redirect our energies toward solving real world problems.

I usually try to wave the Switzerland flag when it comes to technology--neutral to the utopian/dystopian spins that media tends to make. It's people that make technology --things-- serve particular intentions, or, as William Gibson so aptly put it back in the 90's "The street finds its own uses for things."

That said, what I think is still sorely lacking are technologies that actually connect people in meaningful and lasting ways: things (products, services, applications) that truly serve as a bridge or scaffolding that connect relationships between people.

I think that's definitely coming...but right now it feels like a big grab for time and attention with just enough convenience thrown in to make people want to spend a little time with something. Not because these offerings are compelling or meaningful, but rather because they're somewhat unique and tend to suck less than most. When convenience is the driving force for technology, it's simply a race toward commoditization. When the next shiny object comes along, people simply move on to the next "great" thing.

It doesn't have to be that way. In most cases, it shouldn't be that way. Innovation isn't simply about convenience* --it's about creating meaningful experiences.

This vision of technology innovation isn't even about technology in and of itself. It's about using technology to enable deeper relationships between people-- and this idea's certainly not new. It's been around since Vannevar Bush published As We May Think in the Atlantic back in 1945. Many attribute it to inspiring the creation of the internet. However, it's more than just a technology. He described a (mechanical) system that would connect one user to another person's life--all their notes, ideas, creations, everything they've shared with others--such that you could truly know what that person was like. Though he didn't describe it this way, he was envisioning an empathy machine.

I believe the core of his proposal is that this system ought to be purpose-driven. That connecting people through machines over time and space serves two human-centered purposes: to affect the person who creates with this technology and to affect the person who consumes with this technology.

Ultimately, this interpretation of purpose-driven technology leads us to consider the role designers of products and services have. When we design we affect the way people think about and relate to one another through invention. Inventions, including the design of products and services, are really arguments for how we ought to live our lives.

McCarthy indicates Sherry Turkle writes:

These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about our intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time ... Sociable robots and online life both suggest the possibility of relationships the way we want them ... But when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections.

McCarthy continues: As technology increasingly co-inhabits more of our physical spaces - and inhabits increasingly human-like or animal-like robots in our midsts - we need to develop a more disciplined approach in balancing our online and offline interactions. During her January 17, 2011 interview with Stephen Colbert, Turkle summed this up by saying "we have to put technology in its place".

As a designer, putting technology in its place starts with defining the purpose for which a technology should serve. The focus for technology innovation isn't a destination nor a new way to repackage convenience. Technology innovation is connecting people to the people, places and things that give their life meaning, help them achieve goals (i.e. they're transformative in nature) and provide an experience people consider priceless.

At Sears Holdings, we're defining new roles that retail may play in the lives of people. At UX Sears, we're defining systems of networked touchpoints that address and connect with the lives of people in deeper and sustainably disruptive* ways. What's next? In short, it's time to hit the streets, understand people in a fundamentally different ways than we have in the past, and reframe the relationships we have with customers and with employees.

Sound interesting? Like the idea of defining new experiences? If you think you've got what it takes, let us know: www.searsholdings.com

* Just in case you're thinking disruptive technologies (via Clayton Christensen), is all about cheaper tech solutions that disrupt established players, think again. Christensen's argument is about finding and designing for the "jobs" that people unknowingly "hire" technologies to do for them: Functional Jobs. Emotional Jobs. Social Jobs. Want to know more? Email me at peter.wendel@searshc.com

How to be 'The Worst'

2011-03-15T23:06:00.000-07:00

There's a tacit understanding with a panel title like "Worst Website Ever: 2 Stupid 2 Fail" that the content is designed to draw a laugh. Yes, the visual gags are there, and yes, the slightly-naughty puns were in force as well, but the actual content of the presentations (faux pitches for truly terrible ideas) revealed a lot about the things that are funny because they are so terribly true. Here are a few lessons that I was able to glean from the panel, and what they mean in a practical way.

Lesson #1: A pale copy is a bad place to start from.

Lots of the presentations presented ideas that relied on the humor of "almost, but not quite." Versions of popular (young-skewing) internet communities aimed at the over-40 crowd, transparent riffs on popular sites that offered no value over the original site, and blatant rip offs all drew big laughs from the crowd. The internet is full of just such clones, and they're always slightly missing the point. While you can often come up with some great ideas by thinking about what other people are doing, the angle always needs to be, "What aren't they doing?" not just an attempt to make something different enough that it won't cause a lawsuit. Some of the funniest fake pitches of the panel were obvious riffs that aimed to do less than the original (such as "Faceoffbook" for fans of the movie FaceOff, and Petflix).

Lesson #2: Your fax machine does not need an "App Store."

Really - it doesn't. It might seem obvious, but by the same token, who isn't trying to jump on the "App Store" bandwagon these days? I think the greater lesson to be learned from this point is that mindless bandwagon jumping leads to creating things that there is no demand for. Just like a fax machine doesn't need its own port of "Angry Birds," not every website needs a comments section or its own check-in system. People who are always looking to make the "next big thing" work for them are often missing the ways in which not every solution fits every problem. While each new craze might be worth consideration and exploration, it's perfectly acceptable for the conclusions drawn to end with, "We don't actually need this."

Lesson #3: You're not going to successfully use every technology.

One of the presentations didn't actually have much in the way of a proposed idea, instead, it relied on the joke that the website was so 'technologically advanced' that it used every technology. It even used "all of the clouds," and just about every possible API that is currently in vogue. I think we've all seen some variation of this site. There are so many social icons squashed together that you can't tell the difference between the little bird-shaped blob that you think is Twitter-blue from the tiny square that you think might lead to Facebook. You're not really sure if you're about to leave a comment with Disqus, send a Tweet, or post to your Facebook wall, and even if you could figure it out, you're probably not interested in sharing the content by that point. The page aggregates tweets, shows you the weather in Bangladesh, and lets you map things on google while you browse headlines. There's so much on the page that you reflexively lunge for the close button because you're afraid you might have a seizure.

Just because an API exists, doesn't mean you should use it on every page. Data is cool, but relevant data is even cooler, and when you don't bury the good stuff, your page gets a lot more interesting. I'm an API dork - I love to see them mashed up and filtered in brilliant ways. True story: after the worst website panel, I shook the hand of the guy who created WaitingForBieber.com. (I plan to retell this story to everyone who will listen for the next three months, so consider yourself warned.) The reason I love this site is that it uses the Twitter API in a way that is so bizarrely specific that it draws a cohesive (and terrifying) picture without any sort of long-form explanation. As best I can tell, the page is returning tweets sent to Bieber's username, and scanning the text of the response for the word "follow," so that it only returns the tweets asking Bieber to follow the user back. That's all the page does: display a constant stream of tweets, asking Justin Bieber for a "follow" on Twitter.

Now that we've established the concept, lets quickly ruin it with complications: imagine if it also pulled in headlines containing the terms "Bieber" and "Twitter." Imagine page real estate depleted by an option to share those tweets on facebook. Imagine a comments section where users could leave their opinion on tweets and rank their favorite. Imagine a series of music charts and store widgets so that users could see how Bieber is currently selling. Quickly, the idea becomes polluted and the page loses the laser-focus that made the joke funny in the first place. None of these things immediately sound like bad ideas, but compare the value added by the additional data to the value lost by distracting from the site's real purpose. There's a lot of cool, easily integrated stuff on the internet these days, but just like we don't always need to be jumping on the shiniest bandwagon, we also don't need to dilute every idea with 'value-adds' that act as distractions.

The panel definitely gave me a lot to think about (and when I'm not so exhausted and overwhelmed with information, I'll probably think of more things I gleaned from it), but most of all, it was amazing to me how not implausible most of the ideas were. Many of them didn't seem all that far off from sites that have actually been built, and I think that fact really speaks to how the best humor is close to the truth. (For the record, the "winner" of the contest was the "App Store" for the Fax Machine. The runner-up was a site for outsourced, webcam babysitting.)

SXSW Quick Hits

2011-03-14T16:44:00.000-07:00

So far, I've been trying to write blog posts that "hang together," but part of the fun of SXSW is the way that you're constantly bombarded with amazing and interesting details and experiences. In the interest of sharing as many different angles on the event as possible about the event, I'm abandoning that format today in favor of sharing some shorter notes I've collected over the past few days.

You have probably never seen as many smartphones, tablets, and laptops in your life as I've seen at SXSW. You have definitely never seen people so incapable of putting them away (she says, as she blogs from her smartphone). It's a little bit disturbing, actually. Mobile platforms are definitely the "now," but I'm not really sure that they're also the "future." There has to be tech fatigue at some point.
Everything here is covered in QR codes. Everything. Most of them seem to rely on the hope that people will be inherently intrigued by the presence of a scannable code, and they'll check it out on the strength of that curiosity. When everything is covered in codes, that's a pretty bad assumption. I was highly intrigued by the idea of a QR coded cupcake, but not so much that I didn't stuff the entire thing in my mouth without scanning it. (A friend did try to scan the code, but apparently edible ink doesn't hold up well enough for it to register). The only code I've actually scanned was on a sticker that I liked the design of, and the only reason I scanned it was to verify that it didn't point to anything I found objectionable. QR codes are cool technology, but I'm not sure people have quite figured out what to do with them.
I have never stood in so many lines in my life.
My favorite one-line gem of the week: "If you think you can multitask well, your work should be judged by somebody only doing one thing at a time."
At an event like this, it's worth seeing some of the "web personalities" speak, even if you don't immediately see the connection between their work and yours. After seeing Mathew Inman ("The Oatmeal") and Felicia Day speak, I've realized that these people are successful at what they do because they are passionate about their work. There is definitely something to be learned from their process, even if your projects are very different.
I am obsessed with the brilliance of the cheese-wedge-shaped restaurant in the convention center that only serves grilled cheese, large grilled cheese, and tomato soup. They're making great use of a concept that so many people are trying to advocate for in other spheres: do one thing really, really well. Grilled cheese as inspiration for a web development philosophy? Why not?
No, really - I have never, ever stood in so many lines. I am trying to learn patience along with all of the cool tech inspiration I'm getting, but it's not easy. I mention this fact because I'm trying to convince myself that no experience is wasted time; maybe if I commit the idea to "paper," the concept will sink in a little bit.
The most important thing I've learned about the emerging web technologies (HTML5 and CSS3, to name two of the biggest ones), is that it's not yet time to jump in with both feet. The specs haven't been finished yet, and they're still moving targets. Experimenting with the technology will be fun, but it's not time to start large projects that rely on the bleeding edge features.

Tomorrow was going to be more of a "wrap-up" post, but after catching the encore presentation of "Worst Website Ever," I'm definitely going to write about that tomorrow, once I've had a chance to let it marinate. As much as the panel was presented as humor, it also might have been the most inspiring and insightful panel I saw. (So there's your preview for tomorrow!)

Sears, Wellness, and Communities...what if?

2011-03-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

I caught wind of an interesting Award and idea competition being sponsored by Philips. It's called the Livable Cities Award.

It's an effort aimed at improving the health and well being people living in cities. Individuals, communities, (non-government) organizations, and businesses were asked for ideas on simple solutions to improve people's health and well being in a city. One overall winning idea from any of the three submission categories will receive a grant of €75,000, while the two additional ideas will receive grants of €25,000.

Hmmm. If I'm not mistaken, Sears is the largest retailer in the U.S. for health and fitness equipment like treadmills. Health and wellness are particular areas that are growing in importance and impact as people move from being passive consumers of healthcare to proactive "prosumers" who are seeking ways to prevent health problems or change their behavior to regain control in their lives.

Witness the popularity of TV like 'The Biggest Loser' and even the Friday fitness gatherings at State Street here at UX Sears. One of the most critical factors that "The Biggest Loser" and much research for healthcare behavior shows is that healthcare and wellness is social. Who you hang out with and what they eat and do impacts what you eat and do. If you want to affect an individual, focus on their family. If you want to affect a city, focus on communities.

In fact, Mayo clinic is focused on just that. In Austin, MN, Mayo is designing the concept of 'medical home' so that all pieces of a community services and offerings can be used together to improve the overall health and well being. This is a three year experiment to see if a community based 'medical home' model can be piloted and proven out as a sustainable way to design healthcare. Hmmm...

What if a retailer played a role in helping people make better healthcare decisions? Could a retailer help connect people to their healthcare providers, and value chain partners, to help people (as consumers and patients) to better manage their health?

Since we have Kmart pharmacy, MyGofer delivery, mobile apps, fitness products, products that can track personal health and behavior (activity, distance, speed, etc.), wouldn't a retailer who could help a person connect these into an integrated wellness model be in a real position to actually change behavior? If a retailer could shift from tasks (refill prescriptions, track orders, etc.) to goals (help people remember to take their medication or take it properly, help people to share their exercise results with their support group...) that could change the game. And if that retailer was connected to local merchants and service providers such that they could tailor their offerings around the unique needs of individuals and communities, that retailer could create meaningful and memorable experiences through connecting people across groups (families, communities, providers/partners) to share and achieve goals not otherwise possible.

The HTML5 Conundrum

2011-03-13T15:04:00.000-07:00

Apparently, HTML5 hasn't "launched" yet.

You might remember a few months ago when the Arcade Fire released an interactive multimedia experience called "The Wilderness Downtown." The conversation about the piece was two-fold: the general public enjoyed the content, while the tech-savvy community was abuzz with the fact that the project had been built in HTML5.

(But the spec isn't finished, guys. It's not "ready.")

I spent this morning's first session at a panel on how to build cross-platform applications using HTML5. Using technologies that we traditionally consider as web-only, it's now possible to build applications that can be quickly and cheaply ported to both mobile and desktop platforms as applications that leverage the native features of the OS. As a developer, this is exciting stuff, and it has made me want to rush home and start immediately tinkering with some of the tools suggested by the presenter.

(But HTML5 isn't "done," so. . .)

Okay - continuing the joke is a fairly silly conceit, but I think the point is clear: the genie is out of the bottle. In my second panel this morning, a couple of the people involved in creating the HTML5 spec discussed some of the political wars being waged behind the scenes during the development process. Concerns about accessibility, digital rights management, and artifacts of previous specs are all part of the set of issues that are delaying the official "blessing" of the W3C's definition of HTML5. On one hand, it's hard to hear the arguments and not consider them to be valid and important concerns, but at the same time, how much longer can the spec be delayed before these discussions are made moot by the fact that an unfinished spec has already become the de facto standard?

If the issues are debated for much longer, the ship will have already set sail (if it hasn't already). One of the panelists said a scary thing while describing the concept of web-sockets (a powerful HTML5 feature that allows for what is essentially bi-directional http). Currently, that portion of the spec is in version 5. The panelist stated that developing for the version 1 spec of a year ago would've been like creating "another ie6.". If that analogy doesn't strike fear in the hearts of developers, I'm not really sure what does. The web-socket spec isn't even expected to be stable until version 6. HTML5 is already being used, but segments of it are still half-baked and flawed, and there is a very real danger of creating another "box-model" problem, where different browsers and mobile platforms interpret the spec in different ways, or render content in ways based on previous, unfinished versions of the specification.

I think the community has learned from their past mistakes. The hundreds of people involved in developing the HTML5 spec come from all areas of the development community, and all of them have an interest in not replicating the cross-browser mistakes we have already suffered through. Still, all of this careful planning can't fully account for the fact that people are excited about this technology, and they are rushing to use it, regardless of its preliminary nature. There are already enough examples of its use that I was able to attend a panel debating HTML5 as a flash-killer.

One of my favorite parts of SXSW has been the way it sparks these intensely geeky conversations, centered around the kind of minutiae that aren't often discussed in such detail. To some extent, talking about the politics of a web spec could be seen as debating an already dead-issue, or posing a purely rhetorical question. At the same time, in talking about the process, we can anticipate where the points of friction are likely to arise, and hopefully outmaneuver some of the pitfalls. I know that if I start experimenting with HTML5 in the near future, I'll be conscientious of web-sockets and other new features of the spec, and I will also be wary of suggesting any radical shifts in technology until I feel confident that we're building on a stable foundation. Yes, the new spec is extremely exciting, but it's probably worth using a little caution until it's a little less raw.

Behind the Curtain

2011-03-12T17:16:00.000-08:00

After my first full day at SXSW, I feel very much like Dorothy in 'The Wizard of Oz,' experiencing that famous moment when Toto pulls open the curtain hiding the man behind the machinery. Of course, if you're familiar with the film, the metaphor has two layers to it. We usually associate "pulling back the curtain" with a positive experience that satisfies our curiosity, however, let's not forget that the original allusion also carries with it a sense of betrayal. We want our "wizards" to be great and powerful, and finding out that they're only human can be disappointing. At the same time, this realization can also be freeing because it reminds us that the "correct" answers have not yet been settled upon, and that even the "experts" are often engaging in the same learning processes as the rest of us.

Running with the positive sense of the metaphor, I've peeked behind some amazing curtains today. At the morning's first panel, I was able to learn about the processes and logic behind the testing and development model behind "New" Twitter. As someone who watched the launch unfold (and personally adopted, abandoned, revisited, and finally embraced the changes), it was fascinating to hear about the way the new model of interaction was actually chosen. As a developer, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but until the presenter pointed it out, I hadn't thought about the fact that New Twitter's interaction model "breaks" our fundamental understanding of how the web works. Links open panels, not pages; layers and drawers present content, rather than page-turns refreshing information. Nothing does what you expect it to, and yet the final product works in a way that perfectly suits the data being presented. Still, after watching my timeline almost unanimously resist the changes, I have to think that the counter-intuitive behavior of the page contributed to the initial venom that the change inspired.

Do I agree with the choices? Yes, adamantly. No, vehemently. I can't commit to an answer. If I look at the question as a developer, then I can't quite stomach completely disregarding the value in respecting the system - links should behave as links. If I look at the choice with my anthropologist's hat on, then I suppose my answer boils down to the fact that all culture changes over time. As much as we like to place conventions and standards on a pedestal, they can become shackles if we allow them to become larger and more important than their practical purposes require. Links should behave like links when it helps our users; links should not behave like links simply because "that is how it is done."

When Twitter made the choice to break this model, it was done deliberately, and it was done because they saw a need to do things differently. I can't speak to it in any broad, official capacity, but based on my personal network, I think that after the initial shock wore off, people warmed up to the changes, and ultimately, the gamble was successful.

Another good example of having the curtains pulled back on a process that is usually opaque comes from listening to a panel on CSS3, given by people involved in developing the specifications. CSS3 will offer a whole new set of possibilities for web design, while simultaneously creating a whole new set of pitfalls, browser clashes, and headaches of backwards compatibility. While listening to the panel, I realized two things: that everyone there understood the problems, and that none of them necessarily had the answers. I feel okay about that fact, especially because I now know that the people developing the spec work with and for a variety of browsers, and that they're all going through this process collaboratively. No one browser is claiming to have the one unique solution, and hopefully this will make the transition to CSS3 run more smoothly than previous iterations have.

A lot of what I'm hearing at SXSW consists of some variation on, "This is really cool, and this is what we think it means, but we're not entirely sure just yet." The best panelists have been the people with interesting questions, rather than interesting answers. In a sense, these people are drawing back their own curtains. Not only do they make themselves transparent and honest by doing so, but they're allowing the conversation to flow in both directions. Twitter is learning from its users and developing new features based on what they perceive to be user needs. CSS3 is being defined by people who use and develop the web, and who are working together to make something that they hope will satisfy everyone. Even the man behind a popular zombie website spoke today about the value of letting your community shape your content, and of abandoning your own ideas when you perceive that they have become out of sync with the needs of your users.

So maybe it's best that we don't keep hoping that Oz begins and ends with the great and powerful facade. As it turned out for Dorothy, the man behind the curtain was much more accessible and helpful in the end. I believe the same premise holds true for our technological gurus, and that perhaps the reason I've yet to hear anyone claim that this isn't a messy, collaborative process might be the fact that those people have failed to thrive the way their more flexible contemporaries have.

Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era by Zbigniew Brzezinski (QUOTES)

2011-03-09T14:52:00.000-08:00

As I begin the arduous task of reading this seminal and somewhat dated forward-thinking piece of conspiracy theory, new world order literature, some great thinking around the challenges we are facing through rapid disruptive change and design thinking have emerged:

The post-industrial society is beginning a "Technetronic" society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications. The industrial process is no longer the principle determinant of social change, altering the mores, the social structure, and the values of society. In the industrial society technical knowledge was applied primarily to one specific end: the acceleration and improvement of production techniques. Social consequences were a later by-product of this paramount concern. In the Technetronic society scientific and technical knowledge, in addition to enhancing production capabilities, quickly spills over to affect almost all aspects of life directly. Accordingly, both the growing capacity for the instant calculation of the most complex interactions and the increasing availability of biochemical means of human control augment the potential scope of consciously chosen direction, and thereby also the pressures to direct, to choose, and to change.

Reliance on these new techniques for calculation and communication enhances the social importance of human intelligence and the immediate relevance of learning.

In an industrial society the mode of production shifts from agriculture to industry, with the use of human and animal muscle supplanted by machine operation. In the Technetronic society industrial employment yields to services, with automation and cybernetics replacing operation of machines by individuals.

Scientific and technogical development is a dynamic process. It depends in the first instance on the resources committed to it, the personnel available for it, the educational base that supports it, and—last but not least—the freedom of scientific innovation.

What man thinks is closely related to what man experiences. The relationship between the two is not causal but interacting: experience affects thought, and thought conditions the interpretation of experience.

The construct triumph of ignorance extracts its own tribute in the form of unstable and reactive policies, the substitution of slogans for thought, the rigid adherence to generalized formulas made in another age and in response to circumstances that are different in essence from our own, even if superficially similar.

— Zbigniew Brzezinski

Thoughts About "Lean UX: Getting Out Of The Deliverables Business"

2011-03-09T14:48:00.000-08:00

What’s missing from this article is what “user experience” is and what a “user experience” person does? Even asking a “user experience architect” or a “user experience designer” will lead you to a bunch of answers, some stating that they are actually “information architects”… Having been at this for a while, seeing this title appear around 2000, and coming from a “human-centered” design program, my views on the matter probably venture into the “extreme” or “dogmatic” category, if not wholly untraditional. The basis of (good) “user experience” (in my humble soft-spoke opinion) is inquiry into what the actual “user’s experience” is. The tools that a user experience “architect” or “designer” have at their disposal are employed towards learning about stuff like “context” and “content” and “end use goals”. I’ve found in my work that focusing on the humans that both make and use a product leads to great insights into the design process in and of itself.

Much too often the trouble with user experience is not the types of deliverables or the tools or methods but where and when and how user experience is employed in the process. There is a huge misconception in the industry, highlighted by this article (“and its siblings, interaction design, UI design, et al”), that user experience “evolves” from UI design etc. Strategy is a large part of user experience. Systems and framework design are key to user experience at a high level. Many of the “user experience architects” I worked and work with have never done UI design but are experts in stuff like sociology or cognitive psychology or electrical engineering…

Much of the time, user experience is “guided” by (being political here) by people who seldom, if ever, think about the user (i.e. customer), are reacting to directives within an organization or business sources from a myriad of origins, usually at the top of a power structure… Much of the user experience I see employed at the “wireframe” level is simply an extension of “product requirements documentation”, a functional map or visualization of interface patterns sourced from existing libraries to meet a set of business goals and a tight deadline constrained by the limitations of legacy backends and scaleless middlewear and/or lack of comfort with new interaction patterns and content management systems/understanding of the importance of metadata on the web.

Wireframes, in the age of “dynamic media”, are self-defeating… they are static and two-dimensional representations of “states” based on the assumptions of the “modes” a user/customer is in. Rarely do user experience people spend time doing primary or contextual field research, if not self-exploration and observation to understand behavior within context or life outside the seven degree peripheral field focus (a monitor, a cell phone screen, an iPad). It’s ironic to note this when most value comes from truly understanding design contexts and the users who employ designed stuff to get stuff done or have experiences with.

“What’s most important to recognize here is that Lean UX is focused strictly on the design phase of the software development process. Whatever your organization’s chosen methodology (waterfall, Agile, etc.), these concepts can be applied to your design tasks.”

Focusing on the design phase gets you farther from the source of why you’re doing the design in the first place. Why not start by focusing on the user needs and the contexts of those needs? Design solves problems. If you don’t know the nature of the problems, employing a solution to the unknown is a crap shoot. User research includes internal and external users. I hear all the time blabber about “agile” and “process” but the truth and reality in the industry is that the process and structures are the most inflexible parts of the experience of designing for a user when they should be the most flexible parts.

Concluding, some of the best “user experience” deliverables I have seen have been ways of changing how people look at or approach a design process in and of itself. Not adapting to meet some mis or un-informed version of what “role” a user experience person plays in an assembly line called “agile”.

Article

The 100 Day Solution

This reminds me of a recent facebook thread I had with some admired colleagues about the state of UX:

Joseph Dombroski: Every day, I'm feeling more like you did back in 2007. Living in the future is difficult, Michael. I'm starting to understand exactly why.

Michael David Simborg: You lived in this world with me and together we tired to change it. Sad thing is that the future I was living in was really the past that wasn't catching up to the now, which felt like the future to various people who, unfortunately, lacked the ability to absorb and apply or even self-reflect.

John William Ostler: this is the conversation I've been waiting for.

Joseph Dombroski: In other words, I'm delusional. Great.

Joseph Dombroski: On re-reading your reply with "the future" as a euphemism, I don't feel as bad about myself. In my original message, I was giving you a compliment and giving myself a warning. In any event, it was subtle.

Michael David Simborg: We're BOTH delusional in the sense that we listen to the rhetoric and think it's not laden with parenthesis. I've been finding great value in tuning into them more than the talk, which is expensive.

Joseph Dombroski: I keep re-reading your original reply, and it's perfect. It's got a nice rhythm, diction, even the Freudian slip was a nice touch ('tired' = 'tried').

Michael David Simborg: It is tiring but remember this (I am projecting): confusion is the first step towards revelation. It's when I reach the peaks of frustration that the breakthroughs come. Maybe this is the next level.

Areos Ledesma: Not sure how much the price of admission was but like John said... this could be epic.

Michael David Simborg: http://uxmag.com/short-news/an-animated-tribute-to-ux-design

John William Ostler: Your problem isn't the envelop. Your problem is the way you market it. The architect used the miniature. The executive used the keynote. What will the UX professional use? The wireframe? Try again.

Joseph Dombroski: Here it comes again, John's condescension: "You know what you neeeeeed..." Wireframes, like most of agency life, are symptoms of bureaucracy and incompetence. I resent the notion that I am a UX designer. I am not. It is a mask I wear while rent-seeking, just like an investment banker, a TSA employee, a priest, or an SEO charlatan. The problem isn't that UX is ridiculous and unethical—it's that we're all smart enough to know it. Are you familiar with Plato's Allegory of the Cave? Michael and I are like the philosopher kings who have abdicated their mantles, who return almost willingly and almost quietly to gaze again at the shadows on the wall. But hope comes yet: I am bored, restless again. I wonder what's going on outside the cave, my workplace, my Crate & Barrel catalogue apartment. I tire easily of living in a Magnus-Mills-like Scheme for Full Employment. I am Joseph's complete lack of surprise. I am wasting my life, and I know it. What greater luxury could exist? What a performance!

Joseph Dombroski: In any event, you all know my original post was not directly related to UX and certainly not related to **, right? I was speaking more generally about Michael's amazing ability to synthesize huge amounts of information from web sites, magazines, conversations, daily observations, etc. into a vision of the adjacent possible, the near future. I beguile myself by thinking I have stumbled upon a similar sense of things.

Michael David Simborg: Thanks Joseph! Coming from you... But that's the point about the Cave - UX is INQUIRY and the artifacts like wireframes (suck ass) are a capitulation for validation and accreditation. User experience is an already obsolete industry when it is defined because you can't limit the human experience and experience is dynamic, drawing from everything experienced. Hence UX is a PROCESS that is part of an overall endeavor and not limited to web design (which is a walking dead industry)... Its been an inherent wnt vital practice in stuff lile industrial design or medicine or photography... Anyone with a brain or who has been at this since the web hit mainstream knows that it's future is very different than it's inception. To survive you have to have the ability to learn, absorb and apply, to be present. Otherwise you postpone inevitable extinction via obsolescence. Nathan shedroff opened the door with his book experience design which was radical to common practice in the sense that it spoke to a need for empathy. Richard Saul wurman coined information architects... Responding for a need to simplify complexity in an overwhelming world of increased access to information in new formats and contexts and channels... But in J's line... UX is like going to whole foods - it's expensive but it serves the narcissistic and self-righteous need for self validation of appearing like someone who cares about anything beyond your own personal agendas...

What the Cowboy Cab guy (re)taught me about branding

2011-03-09T05:22:00.000-08:00

I hate the rain.

I mean, I'm all for renewing of the earth, circle of life, blah blah blah. I'm also all about sharing that intimate time when you and someone you care for listen to the raging thunderstorm outside... the rain hitting the roof, the thunder in the distance, and then the window-shaking detonation that reminds you that Nature isn't screwing around.

Hated it in the military, hated it on hikes when I lived in Hawaii, and particularly hate it when it's 33F here in Chicago and I have to walk to work from the train in a downpour. I know "hate" is a strong word, and maybe I really don't know what true hate is, but yea. Hate being in the rain. So I babied up and caught a cab outside the Metra station. Hey, it's like 4 whole blocks. Did I mention it was raining?

Anyway, I stepped out o the rain and into a nightclub on wheels.

I'm not kidding. 0635, and suddenly my world was hanging disco balls, a flashing blacklight, garland streaming everywhere, bright flyers. Welcome to Sid Bennett's Happy Ride. "I'm a nightclub on wheels, man!" he exclaims, as I snap an iPhone pic.

In their excellent book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath tell us that for something to stick in your mind, to warrant sharing and recall and action, it needs to be one ( or more ) of these four things:

- Funny
- Novel
- Genuinely useful
- Sexy

Sid's cab experience was 3 out of the 4... and if I swung that way, maybe it'd be 4. He was sporting a cowboy hat, and oozed confident calm.

I stepped out of the cab ( after my amazing 4 block ride ) and into the Argo Tea that occupies the street-level space in the building I work in, and proceed to have the following conversation with the barista:

"Heya, morning," I say.
"Morning, how are you?"
"I'm great... I just had the craziest cab ride. A dude in a cowboy hat, who's cab is all done up inside like a nightclub. Really made my morning."
"NO WAY! I've been in that SAME cab! so have some of my friends. We call him every time we go out..."

...and so on.

In Chicago, tea shop baristas are not known for their predilection for cabs to get from point A to B, and probably by extension neither are their friends. The fact that the first person I spoke with about my unique experience claimed to have had one herself, and so had many of her we-don't-usually-take-cabs-but-hey-it-was-a-nightclub-on-wheels friends had as well, was amazing.

Sid Bennet has taken probably less than a $30 investment and made apparently a cast-iron brand for himself in a city as large as Chicago. Impacted so many of us that the person serving up my iced ginger peach tea at 630am had heard of him and reached out for his services.

How's your branding going? How much do you spend? How many people turn aside from others who do the same boring thing you do and choose -you- ?

Just curious.

Happy Ride Co.
Sidney Bennett, President.
for a cab in Chicago, call 312-613-4812

He's a nightclub on wheels, man.

The Private as Public, Intentionality, and Designing the Future

2011-03-08T12:30:00.000-08:00

What the… Oh, man! I feel like I just became my dad. And anybody who’s a parent who feels that way usually doesn’t like what they’re feeling the moment this happens. For me, the moment was grounding my 14 year old daughter from Facebook for a time. She just got an account this past November, guidelines and expectations were set, and things were going find until Jr high social life drama (inevitably) ensues. Ah, Facebook--where else would a 14 year old go to share their most personal thoughts and feelings? Only, it’s just not a great idea to use a public forum as your private diary that’s open and available for the world to read (and scrape data from, and data mine, etc. etc.)

What just happened? A bad decision by my daughter? Epic fail by her parents?

Well, I got curious and started looking around at what’s going on with the habits and practices of different people who use social media like Facebook and I found some interesting things that are not only relevant for me, but also relevant to anyone who’s involved with technology, business, or even being a kid or a parent. So, just to put everyone in the same frame of mind: What would you do if someone you’re very close to decided to start sharing detailed, personal aspects of their life in a public place?

According to many recent studies and papers your reaction depends greatly on how you grew up with technology. Gen X (and older), who grew up without cell phones, internet, and social media finds the idea of sharing their private life publicly online as something they have difficulty with (and Boomers perhaps even more so).

Now, to a Gen Y person, sharing your private life in this way is a perfectly acceptable and comfortable way to share who they are. The fact that most of their private life is available for public consumption is fine. Don’t take my word for it— hear it from Gen Y people themselves.

It’s not just a simple age difference though—the evidence points to a nuanced relationship between people, their use of technology, and how they control the technology along with the control of the information they share using technology. For instance, one story in the San Francisco Examiner did an expose on a 28 year old woman who was one of the first Web cam girls on the internet. She would share details of her life online with total strangers everyday. What do you suppose her attitude was when she found out that her phone records were potentially being screened by the NSA?

"Yet when the 28-year-old San Francisco resident learned last week, along with millions of Americans, that the National Security Agency had collected the telephone records of unsuspecting citizens, it crossed Gira's privacy line.

Although atypical in her choices of hobby and profession, Gira is typical of many in her generation when it comes to privacy concerns. On the one hand, she and millions of citizens under 30 are actively engaging in online exhibitionism without fear of consequences. On the other hand, they seem more concerned than their parents about government eavesdropping in the name of U.S. security.

According to a national Pew Research Center Poll conducted in January, 56 percent of 18- to-29-year-olds surveyed said the government's policy of eavesdropping on suspected terrorists' phone calls and e-mails before obtaining court permission was generally wrong, while 53 percent of those 50 to 64 years old said it was the right thing to do. (Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/20/GENY.TMP&ao=all#ixzz1GAuUSR26 )"

So, there’s a built-in comfort level for sharing with people who’ve grown up on the Web. Further, there’s a potentially heightened sense concern over privacy—once it’s realized that organizations have potentially more control of their personal data than he/she does as the owner and author of one’s personal data. The point here is twofold: it matters how much control people have over their data and it matters whether or not people know what is being done to control their data.

Now then, couple this with a recent NY Times article The Footprints of Web Feet, highlighting a new trend of social Web offerings that are launching soon which all focus on making private browsing history public.

The history of the idea stems from a desire between two friends to keep in closer contact with one another. "Then at one point we just said to each other, 'What if we could just show each other what we're reading and watching and shopping for?' "

Of course something that might be applicable and appropriate to share between two friends quickly begs the privacy / control question if you apply this to sharing everything with everyone. Naturally, there are filters being put into place by the various offerings. Dscover.me has a 'white list' to share only a list of approved sites. Sitesimon is going to use a blacklist (don't share only these sites) based on the argument that discoveries are serendipitous. Sharing only from a whitelist misses opportunities that are new and in-the-moment.

From my point of view, both of these approaches miss the mark. Sharing isn't a blacklist or whitelist approach--it's tied to the context and affinities that are dynamic (i.e. relationships change according to the context in which we are engaged with in the moment). At a broad level, there are simply things that would make sense to share to some of my friends or colleagues and there are others that fit other friends or colleagues. In fact, many of the people, places, and products I encounter online would be odd or innappropriate to share with just everyone I know (or am friend with). A snarky political commentary might not be appropriate for my work friends. Likewise, a geeky new research paper on ethnomethodologies of elderly people that are new to using mobile technology to improve their wellness wouldn't be the highlight of the day for my wife and our friends.

Further, at a deeper level, the dynamics of what happens frequently shift in time. The meaning of a single thing--a book, a news story, a meme on the Web--mean different things to different people at different points in time. Egypt's Mubarak saw terrorists trying to overthrow the regime, while much of the rest of the world saw revolutionaries.

Control must be given to what, how, when, and with whom sharing takes place. Further, sharing needs to be considerate of context and shifts in meaning over time for different audiences. (A problem/opportunity that those who manage social media are dealing with now.)

Beyond the design of controls that can flow with the dynamics of people and their dynamic networks of people, this NY Times piece also raises a larger question:

Mina Tsay, a communications professor at Boston University who studies the psychological and social effects of media, said that in her studies of Facebook she found that frequent users saw the world as significantly more public than less-frequent users did — a source of misunderstanding familiar to many social media users.

Privacy notwithstanding, Dr. Tsay said social media’s evolution might create more-passive consumers of information: people too reliant on others to decide what’s interesting, stylish or valuable.

“In some ways, this might produce a society in which we end up conforming to buying the same products, seeing the same information, going on the same trip, depending on the same sources,” she said.

The argument countering this dystopian worldview is that technology which enables this kind of sharing may actually serve a useful purpose by making people more self-aware for how they behave online.

Adam Liebsohn, Voyurl founder, puts it this way: "If we're not following you, no matter what, somebody else is," he said. "The difference in this scenario is, we show it back to you. It's holding up a mirror to a reflection that I don't think people knew they had."

Well, not so fast. Extreme views make for great press, but the evidence suggests the issues at stake here are simply more than either a utopian or dystopian worldview can address. As was the case with my daughter and the findings from Gen Y behavioral trends, the true nature of the situation can’t be so easily dismissed with a simple black or white argument.

First of all, the key to judging the true value of any of the new offerings that help people share their public life lies in the purpose and intent of the offering. Just because we can do something (let people share all their private online behaviors in a public way) doesn't mean we should. As much as many social media and news offerings tend to place the user/viewer’s right to know on a pillar above all else, I’m reminded of a concept Tony Golsby-Smith once shared with me during a lecture---we also have a right not to know something. That is, when almost every conceivable media outlet is saturating all available communication channels with a single message (say, the personal and intimate details Charlie Sheen’s life, for instance), then I ought to still retain a right to control and filter this information or ignore it all together in lieu of matters that may be much more relevant to me.

Do I really want to hear more versions of Charlie Sheen’s Tiger Blood, Winning, and Trolls or would I rather ignore this and see why the Wisconsin state GOP decided to swiftly end collective bargaining rights for public servants without debate? Further, if I happened to live next to Charlie Sheen I have as much of a right not to know the personal and intimate details of a neighbor.

Let’s shift the focus now—form personal details of someone else, to personal data about you. The use and sharing of such personal information can serve either positive / altruistic needs (behavior change to achieve a goal or change an unhealthy lifestyle or habit) or serve questionable purposes (using data to reinforce unhealthy behaviors and promote narratives and values for short-term economic gain to the detriment of a person). Sharing is a form of reciprocity—-real reciprocity requires two-way streams of value.

It's our responsibility as people who create new experiences (and their foundational systems, value streams, and incentives) to define value that's sustainable, shared, and transparent. I'm not just talking Web or e-commerce here (those are the proverbial tip of the iceberg), bur rather I'm talking to all those who hold the keys for new business, government, and technology innovation.

At Sears Holdings, I'm part of a Digital Innovation Group that works up, down, and across organizations to define the future of retail. We not only define new experiences, but we drive intentionality through dialogues with leadership about the potential impact new opportunities have. We're creating the future of retail and role retail has, and will have, in the lives of people.

If this sounds interesting, stay tuned--we're just beginning. If this sounds like something you'd like to be part of, contact us www.searsholdings.com

Happy At Work?

2011-03-03T06:00:00.001-08:00

Came across this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq81wx6aPbA, via Facebook about happiness at work. For us here at Sears it is annual review cycle time. It's a time that brings angst for many, frustration for others and pure happiness for some. We all come to work, it's called work for a reason, usually not associated with happiness. This TEDx talk in Copenhagen pushes the idea that happy employees are more productive employees in every aspect, it's called Arbejdsglaede (Happiness at Work). Seems pretty straightforward, a real simple idea, but a really really difficult goal to achieve. Alexander Kjerulf says it's not about salary, bonuses, perks or other financial rewards. It's about making work fun, enjoyable, and relationships. I think that last one is the key here, the relationships you have with your co-workers. Appreciation, respect and humor for me are the keys to happiness at work. At uxSears we have grown very quickly, 200% growth in our department's staff in under two years. Wicked fast growth, we have had some stumbles, but we all push really hard and making sure everyone is happy. I know, the first thought that comes to mind for sears is not necessarily Arbejdsglaede, but we actually have adhoc teams that focus on developing events to make work, seem less like work and more like fun. We have movie night, chili cook-offs, Indian Dancing lessons, massages and more. We also encourage creative exploration and have an open slot for anyone to present ideas in our weekly design discussions. We are doing a ton of hiring right now and have open positions in just about every discipline, UX, Visual Design, Copywriting, Front End Development, Mobile Design & Dev, Project Management and super smart DVP's of creative. So give us a ring and come and have Arbejdsglaede with uxSears.

UX Sears meets SHC's new CEO

2011-03-01T20:04:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, the update to our chairman, Edward S. Lampert, included an introduction to the new CEO, Lou D’Ambrosio, and an opportunity to introduce him to some of the new work UX Sears is engaged in.

Among the projects reviewed by Mr. D’Ambrosio was the new UX framework and concept design for Profile. Our lead UXA, Eldridge Doubleday, presented and had a chance to answer questions and from Mr. D’Ambrosio.

The experience was memorable in two ways. First, Mr. D’Ambrosio liked the direction of Profile and its foundational strategy as visualized by the Profile UX framework. It’s always great to get buy-in from leadership. However, it’s the second reason for why this was a memorable experience that stands out: Mr. D’Ambrosio understands and is passionate about products that are driven by behavioral research and data.

Mr. D’Ambrosio inquired about how this concept was created and about how we knew whether the design will work with customers. Eldridge addressed taxonomy and card sorting studies done to create the structure of the new design. He also explained rapid iterative usability studies drove design concepts and shaped the interaction by engaging customers early in the design process.

Mr. Mr. D’Ambrosio responded with much positive regard for usability and customer research that can impact design decisions early. He told stories about his technology roots and use of customer research and usability as being vital tools to make decisions with.

Why is this significant? It’s significant because it was a shift in the dialogue between OBU and SHC leadership. That is, with customer behavior at the center of the conversation, the nature of the opportunities we engage in can be seen in a new light: people centered relationships instead of product centered relationships.

SHC has always been focused on the customer. However, there are many ways to be “customer focused.” An organization can be customer focused by marketing to the customer, making sure there are many quality products and services available to choose from at a price that’s competitive and delivered in fast and convenient ways. Getting the right products to the right customer at the right time in the right way. This is, in many ways, the story of retail.

An organization can also be customer focused by understanding the customer as a person first and foremost--that their life as a customer is part of a larger journey and their life, including their shopping, is shaped by contextual and situational needs that affect behavior (what people do), emotions (what people feel), and how they share their experience with others. Being customer focused, then, means the relationship starts with the customer, and takes shape over time as the customer’s journey isn’t linear, but rather a series of cycles, driven by situational moments experienced over time. Helping people get to the products and services they need that fit the situations they have in the places and spaces they spend time with. This is the story of the future of retail. What does this mean for future dialogue and UX? A few possibilities: • it calls upon role of UX to affect design beyond features and functionality • thinking beyond features means understanding customer behavior • understanding customer behavior requires spending time with customers • designing with the customer is as important as designing for the customer

At the end of the day, the potential value UX generates by designing with customers and engaging in customer research before, during, and after design is exponentially higher for the customer and for the business: • It’s a direct path to focus resources on what matters most to customers (lifting C-SAT, customer engagement, conversion, trust, and the like). • It’s the surest path to finding opportunities for innovation that would otherwise be invisible to us.

To me, what this brief conversation with our new CEO signals is nothing short of the best new opportunity to realize the potential for UX and design led innovation since I’ve been with Sears Holdings.

Welcome to 2011—the year we change the relationship with our customers.

Feed me, Seymore

2011-02-28T05:54:00.000-08:00

In all my spare time here at work, I'm working to develop a little black dress.

I actually work for the Digital Innovation Group, but I'm sort of on loan to the Social peeps for now. In between the cracks I'm working on this idea for an algorithm, this little-black-dress of an idea to help support our activity feed. In case you haven't heard, feeds are currently in vogue.

Our effort to evolve Social Shopping from more than the ham-handed attempt at a Facebook redeux of Likes and Badges has its ups and down, and while I am not actually wearing a cocktail dress ( mercifully; I'm a dude ) I am working on a bit of functionality that is elegantly portable, serve its function like nothing else can, and will make a statement wherever it is seen.

If you go to our social homepage you'll see an interation of the feed, though definitely an early one. I have it in my head that your actions on a retail site, those of anyone you're following, the types of interactions, and time since these things have happened should all should play a part in what gets shown in "the feed". Where the feed is displayed also matters; if we're putting it on the homepage that's one thing, but what about other places... does a customer's placement in the conversion flow affect what's shown in the local feed?

Of course it should. What else?

Things I've bought, certainly; some kinds of purchases suggest additional things to buy, or counterindicate others. When and where, maybe even how I bought them. How about things that people I'm following say they want? Similar items in followed-categories being on sale, and so on?

I'm still toying with a name. Facebook has "EdgeRank," and there are others... but this one is particular to shopping, and maybe not really "Edgy". Current ideas I can't get out of my head are LBDRank ( yep, "Little Black Dress" ) or AlexRank ( short for Alexander, who split the Gordian Knot ). Yea, still working. It'll come to me.

In all my spare time.

NY's Digital Runway

2011-02-21T10:39:00.000-08:00

Well, New York’s Mercedes Benz Fashion Week is over.

Like most normal people, I wasn’t invited. But, digital was louder than ever this year with more designers streaming their runway shows live, on their own sites or at www.firstcomesfashion.com. The tweeting was impossible to keep up with, without it being a full time job. And Betsey Johnson even had a way for registered users to buy the shoes she designed with Steve Madden and wore to her show in sync with her appearance – quick!

I managed to catch one show live, watched parts of others (while asking myself whether I really ought to be working on that report I owe my boss) and looked over some of the other collections online. But I was feeling inadequate. It’s a lot to take in, and frankly, I was more worried about whether I’d packed decent outfits for my stint in the Chicago office than about how to get ready for Fall 2011.

So what are my customer’s thinking about? Which ones of them are following high fashion and how do they translate it into their wardrobes? With more and more access to high fashion, access to the world of products online, and about a gazillion fashion blogs…how’s a working girl supposed to get a handle on her closet?

Google’s Boutiques.com walked a new Trend Analysis tool down the digital runway – a way for savvy shoppers to investigate what’s hot, see what’s trendy in context of what’s out there right now. It wasn’t easy to find, and it wasn’t all I was expecting (with some of the data being weak and products in-actionable), but the idea is there – narrowing down the sea of drool-worthy products to a smaller set of what’s currently cool.

Now, what will happen this week in London?

Kick Ass. The Rest WIll Take Care of Itself.

2011-02-16T15:51:00.000-08:00

One of the first questions people ask at a party is, "What do you do?" I dread this question. Not because I don't want to talk about work, not because I hate my job, but because the answer, "I'm a taxonomist." usually results in a lot of blank looks. Sometimes I just tell people I am a librarian (which I am) but explaining why Sears.com needs a librarian is even more difficult.

About 6 years ago I was at a SXSW party, and was faced with just this question. I told them the boring truth--I worked on metadata quality & harvesting, but that my research area was taxonomy & classification of online data. After waking from her nap, she replied, "You know, no one knows what that is now, but in 5 years, everyone will want someone who knows how to do that well."

At the time, newly out of grad school and not relevantly employed, this statement made me angry. I think I told her, "That's great--what do I do until then?!" But in retrospect, it's the most prophetic statement I've ever experienced.

Often in information architecture, we complain about how no one takes us seriously; no one understands what we do. We fantasize about all the great work we'll be able to do only when everyone recognizes us for the geniuses we are. That's the wrong way to go about it. Keep kicking ass at a solution to the problem instead of shouting about how everyone should pay attention to the problem. Eventually people will realize there's a problem themselves and need you. And no one else has spent the last five years solving their problem.

People will never like the person who keeps pointing out the problem, but they won't complain about the person who just fixed the problem no one saw.

Recruiting

2011-02-12T10:03:00.000-08:00

Great night last night at the IXDA networking event. They gave out stickers to everyone indicating if they were hiring or looking. It really facilitated breaking the ice. I have to say our biggest weakness in recruiting is awareness. Every singular person I spoke with had no clue we even existed or that we did anything remotely interesting. I personally spoke to at least 15 people, collected their cards and will follow up with them next week. I spoke with folks from SCAD, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, U of Michigan, and tons of companies I won't identify here for obvious reasons. Even if we only actually hire two people it will have been worth the trip. Above and beyond the networking event this has been the absolute best conference I have ever attended, and I have been to dozens. So kudos to IXDA and to the 2011 organizing committee. Next year it will be held in Dublin, Ireland and I expect to be back.

The Lightbulb

2011-02-11T05:51:00.004-08:00

How many UXAs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Wisdom from various places around the web, none written by me:

“1,000. 1 to screw it in and the rest to argue about what a ‘light bulb’ really represents, what is meant by ‘screwing it in’ and to DTDT.”

“ 1 person to conduct an ethnographic study how people currently change light bulbs 1 person to conduct a card-sorting exercise around the different types of light bulbs 1 person to draw a storyboard of the light bulb user journey 2 persons to moderate & take notes for a usability test of changing light bulbs 1 user test participant to actually change the lightbulb “

“Why are we assuming screwing in the light bulb is the right answer? Let's do some studies to see if we can redefine the process of changing light bulbs, or of gathering light altogether”

" ‘How many would you expect it to take?’ asked the UX expert”

“None. That's a development / engineering problem.”

“It depends.”

And my favorite-

“Well, define ‘lightbulb...’ ”

UXAs can be kind of silly. But the job itself can be amazing, sometimes.

I have a few guesses as to how people here see UXAs ( heh ) But this came up recently, in an interview. The person I was interviewing asked about the various roles we have here. I have a stock answer for this question, but in the heat of the moment inspiration took me, and I put out something like this:

“What we do here is part science, but also part art. I’m probably not doing either term much justice... but it seems like it breaks down this way: Product Managers can be muses, the sources of inspiration, when things go well. UXAs and Taxonomists are like composers, hearing the music of a design in their heads, and they’re the first ones to actually write the notes down onto paper, to give it any form at all that can be acted upon. Then we walk that music through... The Creatives, Copywriters, and Developers are musicians, taking the basic music as we write it and giving it color, sound, and light. They riff on it, improvise on our original thoughts so that the whole thing is greater than the sum of its parts. The Project Managers are maestros, conductors guiding us all.”

Of course the interviewee looked at me like I was crazy. I get that, now and then. : )

My question... What’s your role in all of this, and how do you see it? When your own particular lightbulb goes on, how do you express it to the world?

Extra credit for how you see the other roles in our little Keebler Tree.

Stellar Opening Day Lineup at IXDA Conf

2011-02-10T16:54:00.000-08:00

End of day one and my brain hurts. So much to take in, so much to comprehend, what a great opening day here at IXD11 in Boulder. The first four speakers in the morning just really set the bar high for all that follow. Bill Verplank kicked it off by drawing with crayons, sounds crazy, but he articulated our role as interaction designers. Michael Meyer wowed us with his sideburns and the impact of salmon on the State of the Union address and what we comprehended. Peter Knocke was able to walk us through how he would like to live, connected, but only so much and what role design played in helping him get there. Then Tim Wood and I connected on the only correct way to drive on a golf course, in a vintage Mustang and the complexities of interactions. We tweeted through out the day, so I hope you caught those, if not, look for us to keeping the dialog going all day tomorrow.

technoloy, my savior, my downfall

2011-02-09T07:51:00.000-08:00

Throughout my career i have always been on the cutting/dull edge of technology. It has been my savior on so many occasions that I can't remember them all, in fact i forget them faster than they happen. It's the times that it has been my downfall that I remember the most. I remember all the times during a new business pitch it failed, from not getting an internet connection to the projector not connecting cleanly to the computer. I remember demoing a new iPad/iPhone app to the chairman and it not working at all, in fact it crashed his iPad, all the time trying to explain to him that it just worked fine on my iPad, just moments ago. Just before I left for a business trip our email system went down, some may view that as a blessing, but for me it sent me into a panic state. I wasn't in a state of euphoria the day before when it worked just fine. Do we ever consider the customer's state of mind when technology fails, how do we account for that? If the customer is willing, how do we handle that follow up communication opportunity? Do we ever send an apology? How do we repair this relationship? I think these are questions I'll be looking to get answered at the annual IXDA gathering here in Boulder, CO

3 Rules for Designing Great iPad Apps

2011-02-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

It's not everyday your team gets a shout-out from Apple, Inc. on their quarter earnings call.

But it does feel good.

The team here at Sears has been pushing hard to deploying digital experiences in previously unconnected places. We've had success in delivering some pretty good experiences on mobile devices, and we'll continue to innovate here.

This week we hosted an iOS Summit at the Sears Holdings HQ in Hoffman Estates, IL. This brought together subject matter experts from Apple, and folks working on iOS based projects from all over the company. We learned a lot from each other.

There were plenty of simple rules of thumb, lessons learned, etc. to share. Much of day included conversations about how tab navigation don't translate well to the iPad, or how drop down menus often don't work well on a touch interface...

But the process for delivering compelling apps on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod can be boiled down to 3 rules.

Simplify.
Prioritize.
Optimize.

...and repeat as necessary.

Come to think of it, it's good advice for most any project.

App Stores and Quarter Machines

2011-02-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

App stores feel much like those $.25 machines at the exits of supermarkets. They look so cool on the placard with stardust trailing happy flight or ponies or charms. There are the scientific and gadget like machines with fake handcuffs or Chinese finger torture tubes, super bounce balls or fake moustaches. They are positioned strategically in the transitional exit, post-checkout space of the store, calling for you to spend the change jingling in your pocket. Anthropometrics play a crucial role in child recruitment, close to the floor. The stamp machines are adult-height. The micro-cost conveys disposability or one-time use, frivolous cheap fun used to pass the time in a waiting room, boring car ride home, an artifact of a trek to the supermarket. But a small price to pay for countless minutes of joy. With credit cards and cash cards, loose change seems to be disappearing as fast as these quarter machines. Next to them now stands the "red box" where I can, for $0.99, rent a recently released DVD for a night, encouraging a trip back for the return the next day. Even the red box feels slightly obsolete noting my ability to stream movies from Netflix or rent or buy and download from Amazon or the Apple Store (or pirate via IRC or some other exclusively nerdy portal). But there is some behavior here as universal as the dollar store model and as universal as the penny arcade. The pay-to-play culture, the leasing of an experience. The add-on frosting to the hearty cake of aisle browsing and staple stocking. The evidence of the ability to consume mass manufactured goods imported from third world countries that used to be hard to find or high tech novelty (like casio finger watches). I know about these things because I do, in fact, collect them. In my desk is a collection of every "homie" I could find. I used to collect stickers.

When the iPhone came out and I started using the Apple store, the wonder of all the things I could buy for $0.99 was overwhelming. I'd worked on phone UI before, one of the designs very close to the iPhone for a major cell manufacturer. In 2000, we all saw the coming age of the "smart phone" but few saw the coming of the "platform" that would extend the use of a phone beyond messaging or contact management, maybe music playing. Multitouch added a level of interactivity that brought us out of the vernacular of point and click. Back then there was the "WAP" version of the "mobile" website. There was texting. There were games reformatted from the days of my youth like snake and pong. Suddenly my phone become a handheld gaming console. Beyond games and communication and PIM and music, the phone remained separate from a tool. But then it caught up with technology and caught up with the way we pay for things (on the internet) and utilized an old vernacular (the dime store model) to distribute goods through a platform (built on music sales at first, expanding to movies and then apps and books). Pricing played a key role at first as I quickly racked up embarrassingly high bills thinking $0.99 was $0.99 without multiplying exponentially. All of the apps looked so fun and interesting to me. Suddenly I didn't need a laptop to write a document or edit a photo. Suddenly my phone camera had better resolution than my digital SLR. Suddenly, I didn't need a guitar tuner. Suddenly, my car's GPS console was stupid and ugly.

It is this transition that is leading to a coming transition. The phone I own has replaced my camera, my guitar tuner, my word processor, my map or GPS device, my music player. It is soon going to replace my wallet with mobile payments, my driver's license and insurance card (with encryption), my transponder (already sort of with Google Latitude but soon with NFC), my virtual assistant and possibly therapist. The point to all of this is that innovation, while disruptive sometimes, doesn't abandon some universal human factors when applied but sometimes leverages them to enable adoption. My phone can't do everything but is a platform that can become almost anything I would consider a tool. With my otter box, it could even be a hammer. There are cases and add-ons that enable it to be a laser pointer or bottle opener. Which is the other point: innovation is enabling. Inventions often answer to the calling for a tool or a product that solves a problem in a new way. Dyson's vacuum cleaner for example gets rid of the problem of using a bag. But like the vending machines, their placement in the transition space of the exit at the supermarket probably came from observation of and awareness in how people shop and the loose change in their pockets as well as their needs for the car ride home or their state of mind while walking out of a store (parents needing to placate hyper children after an exhausting stroll down aisles packed with an overwhelming amount of value).

Price-wise, I bought my phone for over $200. My service plan at the time was over $100 a month. To add to such a (to me) pricey object for $0.99 was a mute point at that point. The possibility of the applications I could buy to transform my phone into something else was and is much like the feeling I get when I find the novelty of continually rotating swag available in quarter machines at the super market exit. The similarities are endless: sharing them with friends by showing them off in use, using them once and forgetting about them in the clutter of more. Last, the fact that the machines are always updating themselves like the app store is.

To reflect, after several years of using my phone, here is a list of the apps that stuck with me (besides the "core" PIM, Phone, Text, Email, Web Browser, Music and Video Player, Camera) in order of importance and/or frequency of use:

01. Evernote
02. Google Maps (mobile on iPhone)
03. Facebook Mobile
04. Delicious Mobile (via bookmarklet Javalet in Mobile Safari)
05. Skype Mobile
06. Scrabble
07. Paypal Mobile
08. Grubhub
09. Fandango
10. 55k Quotes

Some interesting articles/links on GigaOm today:

People Download Lots of Apps, But Many Get Discarded

Feature Creep Emerges as Next Challenge for Mobile Devs

User (Customer) Behavior

2011-02-07T10:38:00.000-08:00

Picture taken at the iOS conference out at Hoffman. In case it's not clear, there are a bunch of peeps on the floor, huddled around a power outlet as they multitask while listening to the Apple presenters. I was struck by the similarity between the above, and this:

People ( or animals ) will gather around resources of value. They'll endure hardship if the value is great enough, they'll take social risks. They'll cluster together, and develop their own norms and whatnot.

Our customers are the same way. They gather in places where they find value. If we happen to build a sucky watering hole, or maybe just one in the wrong place, our customers will gather at some other watering hole instead.

The trick is identifying a need, serving that need, and nurturing the community that starts to form there.

Time Travel Lesson: from IE4 to iOS

2011-02-04T14:34:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, back in the year 2001, there was a cool new Web browser called Internet Explorer 4.0.

It let Web designers and developers do cool stuff through new capabilities like a Document Object Model, enabling us to do things like CSS. Almost overnight, it became the preferred browser for the UX community, to the exclusion of many others. The obvious problem was that the Web isn't a single browser--it's an ecosystem with various platforms and platform standards. Designing for one to the exclusion of others isn't just short-sighted, it's ignoring core portions of your customer base and leaving money on the table.

Fast forward to 2011. Apple's iPhone and their iOS have a commanding, first-mover advantage as the first smart phone to really get user experience. Plus, there's not only some good standards to consider, but a whole service model with the Apple's App store selling millions of Apps.

AT&T's mobile data traffic increased 50x in 3 years (2007-9009)--a 4,932% increase. Some of the iPhone Apps even deliver a better user experience for mobile than they do for conventional Web. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112% in the past year to 25.1 million users in January 2010. Access to Twitter via mobile experienced a 347% jump to 4.7 million users in January 2010. Who wouldn't want to have a mobile app for iOS?

The problem is iOS is a nice tree in a forest: the Web is, now more than ever, an open ecosystem that supports different platforms, experiences, and contexts. A recent tweet put past and present into stark relief:

========= “@dhh: Taking your web app mobile just for iOS in 2011 is like taking your business to the web just for IE4 in 2001.” - BINGO! =========

Obviously it's not just an iOS world: During the year 2010 Android emerged as the single best selling mobile platform in the US. Android rose to 44% of Verizon's smartphone subscriber base, up from 2% the year before.

But this doesn't capture the opportunity.

The touchpoints we need to be designing for should really include a reasonable cross section of all the devices people use in their day-to-day lives.

For example, even mobile isn't just one or two OS's--it's phone, iPad-like devices and more. Consider where people are using "mobile":

84% at home
80% during miscellaneous downtime throughout the day
76% waiting in lines of waiting for appointments
69% while shopping
64% at work
62% while watching TV (alt. study claims 84%)
47% during commute in to work

Very different contexts--and a variety of different touchpoints (each with their own platforms and systems behind them).

Some get this and they're planning for it now. Facebook connect gets it:

Their APIs are really focused on an ecosystem of platforms, each supporting different touchpoints that fit the various contexts-of-use people have.

The takeaway? Consider the ecosystem first and the context of use for the different touchpoints within that ecosystem. The App as just a single touchpoint within that ecosystem. Your design strategy should take into account platforms and systems that aren’t dependent on any single touchpoint—or OS—for their success.

My sources for this post: - LukeW's blog: www.lukew.com - Facebook Developer image via slideshare from David Armano.

Snow-mageddon post mortem

2011-02-04T06:31:00.001-08:00

The worst has passed, and you now have a story to annoy your kids and grandkids with.

“Hey you kids, this snowfall is ‘perilous,’ according to the artificial intelligence know-it-alls we have ‘predicting’ the weather today. But it’s pretty lame next to The Great Snow-mageddon of ‘11. Have I ever told you that story?”

“Only about a zillion times, Grandpa.”

“Well, sit yer ass down and listen again…”

Most of us in my social circle had this experience: Monday we heard stories of the local supermarkets being out of things like bread and milk. We were warned to leave work early Tuesday afternoon. By early Tuesday evening things were starting to “look kinda hairy,” and by Tuesday night people were abandoning their cars on Lake Shore Drive en masse, seeking shelter in Hoth-like conditions on foot without a tauntaun.

Wednesday was mostly spent trapped in your abode, though the intrepid, crazy, or very fortunate might have ventured out a bit. Shoveling a small place for the dog to pee. ComEd and Comcast fell down in lots of places. By Wednesday evening, the spark of normal connectedness started to show again. Some people still had no power, and thus no heat. But by Thursday life was mostly back to as close to normal as was normal for you. The power was probably back on, the internet back up, and the dogs had places to walk.

We had a few days heads-up, and we here at SHC had accommodating management encouraging preparation and safety.

So… what’s something you wished you had done better, or knew about, or learned? Or what’s something that surprised you in a good way?

My own answers: I’m kind of a wingnut, here; I was pretty well prepared. Even if the power had gone out, the internet dropped off, and gravity stopped working, I had redundancies. Something I could have done better was not head out with a few friends late Tuesday for White Castles; that was dumb. I was very lucky, and of course WC was closed.

Something that surprised me in a good way: I ran a shelter for the Red Cross in my area, for the first time evah, and I learned people come to disaster shelters for aid, for relief on one of the worst days of their year; but others also come out to be helpful. They bring toys for kids, and DVDs, laptops, and projectors for everyone to watch movies with. They bring things they’ve baked, blankets, cans of soup, and stuffed animals. They open their homes to strangers and say “you can come stay with us, so you don’t have to sleep in a gymnasium on a cot.”

In my corner of the world, it was the “best” kind of disaster; I had a heads up it was coming, it lasted a day or so, and was just rough enough to teach me some valuable lessons without anyone getting hurt.

How about you?

Sometimes logic is tough

2011-01-26T08:45:00.000-08:00

First, a video:

President Bartlet, being a nerd.

"Well, we find that customers who engage with the experience, use filters on the search results and subcat pages, tend to convert more. If we find a way to increase engagement with the filters, I think we can up conversion. Let's take a look at that."

This snippet overheard recently on a phone call for the Conversion Task Force I sit on. My ears perked up. As a child I'd had a Jesuit education, and logical crazytalk tended to remind me of stern looks, and brandished rulers.

I was disappointed by the choruses of "Definitely!" that came next. Visions of raised wooden rulers followed, and I thought I heard someone mutter a Hail Mary.

Post hoc ergo proptor hoc

What?

The above is a bit of Latin that described a logical fallacy; translated it comes out to be 'After the fact, therefore -because- of the fact." It's the idea that just because something follows after something that came first, that first something caused the following occurrence. It's crazy talk, of course. Ask any Jesuit.

I have a teacher friend of mine that recently pointed out another instance of this. Apparently, kids that take AP Physics do better in college. So in an effort to help more kids do better in college, my friend's school was trying to shoehorn as many kids into AP Physics as possible, adding extra sections.

Eeeeeeeps.

AP Physics probably doesn't cause better grades, and shooting kids through high-end physics classes if they shouldn't be there is probably no way to move the college GPA ball.

Similarly, I'm not sure people convert because they diddle with our filters, or convert less because they don't. I think it just as likely that people who come tothe site looking to convert readily make use of the filters to narrow their choices, whereas peeps who had no intention of converting didn't touch the filters because they really weren't so invested.

I am assuming some things myself, here. And I think our filters do need a bit of tweaking, and ironically conversion would probably go up if we made them easier to use. But "getting more people to use our filters so that they'll convert" sounds wrong to me. There's also some thought around the idea of putting these filters up higher in the visual hierarchy, moving them from the left up to just under the header.

Could we make a zillion dollars by offering less?

2011-01-24T05:58:00.000-08:00

The long tail sucks, if your search can’t find what you’re looking for.

A few quick orienting thoughts, here. “The Long Tail” was brought ( relatively ) mainstream by Chris Anderson in an article he wrote for Wired in ’04. It’s a term that describes a graph of the distribution of ( among other things ) products that make you money. A few products make most of the big money, then all the other products in your selection all make you a little bit. The graph of this looks like a long animal tail. In aggregate, the stuff in the long tail is really valuable, but only if your customers 1. Like the more obscure stuff and 2. They can find it using your site.

Both points are important. There’s a maxim in retail that if you have more items to show, you make more money. A lot of assumptions underlie this point. Also, there’s an idea that choice can be demotivating. Iyengar and Lepper pointed this out in an elegant study entitled “When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?” This is the study that talks about how offering 24 different kinds of jam sells no jam, but offering 5 different kinds makes them go like hotcakes. Some people like to, need to research and pour over stuff. Finding the best price, the exact match, the most elegant whatever to buy. For these people, the long tail is golden. Provided of course they can find what they’re looking for. In some cases, this is a big If.

Enter a radical idea: let’s offer less. Like, a lot less.

I do a fair amount of experience design work for our social site, where we pile on goals like fluffy pancakes at a fundraiser. We’d like people to find stuff and buy stuff, but we’d also like them to “like” or “dislike”. And register. And leave a comment. And get a friend to register. And browse our new doodad and share out how cool it is. And ignore things when they’re slow. And become an expert on something we sell, and blog about it.

Please pass the maple syrup. We have 28 106 kinds, and adding more all the time via our Local Marketplace, so please be prepared to sort through them all to find just the right one.

I wonder how it would go if we offered less. Maybe set aside a site ( or maybe it’s just a filter? Hmmmmm I’m not so sold on the filter thing ) where we have all our categories and subcategories of stuff, but each subcat only shows the top 3 sellers from our “main” site.

You could tweak this idea a bit. Only offer one item per subcat. Or even one item per –category- if you were feeling libertine.

This site wouldn’t be for the researchers and the gluttons and the peeps that immerse themselves in all the joy that is sorting through 106 different hits for “maple syrup”. It’d be for the folks with not-so-much time or inclination to research, the ones who just know they need a bottle of maple syrup.

From a selling point of view, this kinda touches on the Woot and Groupon and even Twitter idea of offering more by really offering less. The one jar of maple syrup might not be the cheapest or even “The Best” ( whatever that might mean ), but then again, I’m sure it’s perfectly serviceable for pancakes. The smart designer might make sure that it’s the best selling maple syrup the larger site has. Or the highest rated. Or the one with the highest margin. Or the most customer-generated content. Whatever. Tinker a little. Maybe one type is right for consumables, another for hardlines ( what we call most everything that doesn’t have different sizes, like shirts or maple syrup ), and still another for clothing.

But yea, offer less. Our main site www.sears.com right now offers something like 15 milliion products.

Hmmmmzers.

I mentioned the social site a little earlier. That’s the place where we try to encourage as much customer-generated content ( reviews, wiki entries, commentary, questions & answers, etc ) as we can. This content helps customers find what they want and make purchase decisions, it also helps us because it provides a bit of credibility and yummy SEO goodness.

On our current site of 15 zillion products, we’re having a little trouble getting an appreciable amount of content from our customers. Lots of reasons for this, a whole other blog post, probably.

But on my microsite, I suspect customer generated content is a bit more easy to come by. There are still a couple thousand categories out there, so maybe we don’t include –all- the categories… just the ones that are most trafficked.

More and more, this is starting to sound like a good idea. At least to me. Not only because I have a thing for reducing the site, but I’d also reduce the pages we have. It’d be nothing to search a site with so few items, so search would be awesome. Promos are kinda focused, buying guides very relevant ( do we even have them, here? ) And a lot of the glut on the various pages could come off, too. This would “facilitate engagement” and I suspect a site of this kind could be fertile ground for a community… the people trying to figure out which item on the small site should be promoted up to The Show.

That’s my working url. http://theshow.sears.com. But yea, that link doesn't work, because this is just an idea I have, that we're sitting here talking about. At least at this moment.

Double hmmmmmm.

Crazy talk? UX genius? Let me know, I’d love to hear.

Also, after much deliberation and wrestling with slow search, long descriptions, and lots of pictures, my choice for maple syrup: Spring Tree Pure Maple Syrup.

FTW - zombie vertical post-mortem ( ha )

2011-01-21T08:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday at the SHC Social Media Summit, kudos were given to the Zombie vertical effort pulled off by a rogue splinter faction of UX zealots. Let's talk about that for a moment.

First, some history. By some accounts, Sears is an international retailer with a rich history, but not as much modern zing as a brand might want. At least a brand who's stated goal is to sell lots of stuff to lots of people. We -do- all sorts of innovative things online, but that's probably not the public perception.

To lots of peeps Sears is still where you might go to buy your dishwasher, or where your mom goes, if your mom is as old as my mom. Which let's be honest is kind of old. "They've always been wonderful to me, Peter. Did you know that during The War they were the only place I could get kerosene?"

"The War"? Kerosene?

Anyway. Just before Halloween UX Sears released a little gem, a zombie vertical page aimed at servicing the zombie demographic for all their shopping needs.

www.catalog.sears.com/zombies

Image-wise, this was kind of "a departure from the brand message" of the company that was able to bring you petroleum distillates during the Big One. It was also crazy successful. It's early in the day here, and I can't seem to find anyone here yet to get me some numbers, but with no advertising, on our test-test server that we're having "engagement challenges" on, no budget, and no work done during normal work hours, the effort had about a zillion media mentions... mainstream, web-nerd, and advertising industry venues.

Like I said, -crazy- successful. Why? Let's take a look.

7 Reasons the Zombie Vertical rocked

1. First: zombies Topically, this was a win. It's still a win, months later. The zombie thing still has juice. Lots here for everyone- the gaming enthusiast, the political satirist, the survivalist. Sometimes the stuff you sell lacks a certain panache... but who doesn't love zombies?

2. Soooooooo different. So different This is where a lot of the Magic Happened. "Zombies? Sears??" The incongruence of the brand and the idea, what was expected on the web and what we actually did and put out there for real normal people to see, this had a powerful effect. Word spread like, ahem, a virus. A zombie virus.

3. We weren't selling anything What? Nothing? Counterintuitive, but still kind of a wicked-powerful idea when used correctly. We didn't try to really sell anything on the page; it was clearly just for fun, and to play around with engagement ideas. This earns us a little buy in ( heh ) and credibility.

4. It was produced by a small group of zealots It seems like it's easier for a small, motivated group of slightly-off people to do amazing work than it is to get similar results from a humming, well-running and benefit-laden corporate organization. The people that did the zombie vert were on their own time, with their own equipment, and had only one ( albeit key ) executive champion. They weren't told to do this; it was an idea that some people came up with it and were allowed to run with. That authenticity came through at every level of the experience. The team was definitely "well versed in the vernacular of the genre," this burned through in every bit of the experience, and the people who were into zombies loved it, and helped carry word of it forward.

5. Word of mouth only We didn't put up a banner ad. Didn't get space in the circulars, or TV ad time. We really didn't tell the public at all. But we sure as hell told our friends. All of them, on Facebook and Twitter, and some other places. The singularly powerful sentiment of "hey, check this out..." from a loose-tie-friend echoed thousands of times is more effective than the most expensive advertisement campaign. People turned the downside of having no budget on its ear.

6. Smart, shareable, discoverable content Give people interesting stuff, stuff -designed- to be shared and talked about, and you have so much more of a chance of that actually happening. The idea "of course our stuff is awesome" generally, sadly, isn't enough... it has to actually -be- awesome. Also, within the zombie vert experience there was discoverable content, "easter eggs". This is huge, and is a technique for growing engagement that makes a lot of traditional marketing people nervous.

7. Management didn't kill it Not that they could because, well... ( wait for it... ) they're zombies! Bazinga! Very few people knew about this little opus before it exploded onto the interweb, but when it did the suits were calling and people started to get Very Nervous. But cooler heads ( or just Heads with More Political Clout ) prevailed and when traffic spiked and people we ( meaning SHC ) couldn't control were saying all these ( almost entirely positive ) things about our brand, we let it go. And go it went. Or something. It did well, and brought in a lot of traffic, and piqued a lot of interest.

Some interesting tidbits to consider:

Everyone loves a success If this failed to win, or worse brought some sort of negative attention to us, it'd be harder to leverage it FTW in the future. The fact that the zombie vert did so well went a long way to build a heaping spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of a "web experience that is decidedly off brand message an potentially harmful to us in the marketplace" go down.

Some business units were a little miffed "Why weren't we told?", "Why didn't we have input?", "Why did you feature -that- particular product?" and so on. Much win pretty much silenced these voices, but some of the risk in a project like this is that if you don't pay homage to the usual stakeholders and something goes well, they might be a little raw they didn't have input, or that you dared to do something without consulting them. If your effort tanks, these are the people who dance and pass out 2x4s at the ass-whooping party. In high school, they were the hall monitors, people who got perfect attendance, and ran for student council.

Followup would be cool. Engagement would be cool. A permission asset would be cool. I'm definitely not saying we should do another zombie thing. I -am- saying that it'd be cool to retain the eyeballs of the interested people who rushed to our site to see what was done, so that next time we can help make them part of the fun. I don't mean collecting their names to spam them, or send them a "heads up" to watch for something "new and exciting"... I mean make them part of it. Actually talking to these people, the ones that opt in somehow, is pretty important.

Train this team, for the Next Thing And there will be a Next Thing. The very net one might not be as popular, but developing this kind of skillset on your team is golden.

To sum up:

* Your subject matter might not be exciting, but you can talk about it in a sexy, exciting way. Do so.

* Do something people don't expect; play against your brand perception

* If your job is to sell something, take a break from that, and just give something away.

* Nurture the small band of zealots you have

* Don't advertise. If your idea is cool, it will fly on it's own. "Advertising" is lame.

* Design your content to be sharable; technically and with compelling excellence

* Give things room to breathe. when you have that first urge to take it down, don't.

And remember, when everyone else is out of kerosene, try Sears. It's a great tool for fighting zombies.

; )

On innovation, and not stagnating

2011-01-20T11:03:00.000-08:00

Sitting in the Social Media Summit, listening to Brian Solis talk.

Due to the fruit-fly lifespan of even the best twees, Solis implied Old Spice dropped the ball by not continuing to milk their idea of having The Man Your Man Could Smell Like do more viral vids for release on YouTube.

Andrew leans over and whispers "But that's not what they were for."

"You don't do the last job, " I reply, nodding and verbally retweeting master criminals everywhere. "You do the next job."

That's why we learn from the Zombie thing, and continue to practice that kind of awesomeness. But we don't do another Zombie Vertical thing.

The New Rules of Retail and Creating Shared Value

2011-01-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

My awakening began while reading "Punk Marketing" a while back. The first sentence read "There's a revolution brewing." You wouldn't think it but Sears is at the cutting edge, the peak of the wave, in this revolution in commerce, society and retail. Revolutions begin with hearts and minds. Some are bloody while others border on reactions to external force evolutions.

The evolution of retail also paralleled what many economists cite as one of the most important economic shifts in history: a century long power shift from producers to consumers—from those who make and sell to those who buy.

Three Waves of Evolution of Commerce in America

Wave 1 (1850-1950), known as the "era of producer power" characterized by demand being greater than supply and limited distribution of products and services (production-demand driven markets).
Wave 2 (1950-1980's and 2000), the post WWII era of economic growth of massive product, retail, brand, distribution expansion. This expansion of choice for consumers required businesses to create demand for there offerings marking a shift to a marketing-and-distribution economy from an economy of production and scale.
Wave 3 (now into the future), consumers have unlimited choices and access to goods and services. This has lead to a demand shift from stuff to experiences, customization and personalization of products, immediate availability, and most importantly, product providers who value community interests over self-interest (see shared value creation).

Wave 3 is where we are now. Companies must go beyond simple clear value creation, cost-competitiveness, efficient production, superior supply chain management to clear engagement and rapport with their customers over longer periods of time.

Shared value... Recognizes that societal needs, not just conventional economic needs, define markets.

"The days of trying to get a consumer to come to you are over. You really have to be in the consumer's world, wherever, whenever and however." — Mindy Grossman, HSN

The winners hold two distinctions:

they understand their customers and have systems and processes in place to continually learn about and from them to develop a deeper emotional (empathic) connection with them in the creation of experiences; not just product lines and distribution channels.
they understand how to be there when needed as opposed to attempting to create a need and be there. Context and relevancy are the new content is king mantra.

There are three steps any company should take in attempting to achieve the winning edge:

Define what customers expect and desire beyond the brand or products or services. This is done by continually re-conceiving products and markets.
Develop value from primary, contextual research analysis and synthesis coupled with insights gained from secondary research and analysis. A company not in control of the value chain at all stages will not be able to value from this step. Redefine productivity in the value chain both externally and internally.
Deliver precise and perceptual experiences that form neurological connections with human beings. Creating shared value through local cluster development facilitation. The best companies once took on a broad range of roles in meeting the needs of workers, communities, and supporting businesses.

This is where "Creating Shared Value" comes into play.

Capitalism is an unparalleled vehicle for meeting human needs, improving efficiency, creating jobs, and building wealth.

The competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities around it are closely intertwined. A business needs a successful community, not only to create demand for its products but also to provide critical public assets and a supportive environment. A community needs successful businesses to provide jobs and wealth creation opportunities for its citizens.

A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves, which remain trapped in an outdated approach to value creation that has merged over the past few decades. They continue to view value creation narrowly, optimizing short-term financial performance in a bubble while missing the most important customer needs and ignoring the broader influences that determine their longer-term success.

[For the past two decades] Firms focused on enticing consumers to buy more and more of their products... The results were often commoditization, price competition, little true innovation, slow organic growth, and no clear competitive advantage.

(The New Rules of Retail: Competing in the World's Toughest Marketplace)

The challenge in this revolution is not technology or infrastructure but harnessing both to shift perspectives and cultures within and outside corporations towards longer-term sustainable thinking and human-centered design approaches over short-term growth. This also means that companies must become local as they expand globally through community involvement and outreach that goes beyond sponsorship or fundraising.

Problem Understanding vs. Solution Formulation

2011-01-04T08:30:00.000-08:00

The Winter 2009 issue of Rotman's journal from their school of management is dedicated to 'Wicked Problems'--and building shared understanding around them.

In an interview, Jeff Conklin, of the CogNexus Institue, explains why a new approach to problem solving that is built on a foundation of shared understanding is required.

Rotman: Discuss the relation between ‘problem understanding’ and ‘solution formulation’.

Conklin: When I first started out, the implicit assumption was that problems were stable and well defined, and most of the work in any major project involved coming up with the solution. The process of working out a solution was understood to be fundamentally linear – a sequence of steps which, if followed, would result in a successful outcome. Today, there is increasing awareness that a shared understanding of a given problem cannot be taken for granted, and that the absence of buy-in about a problem’s definition, scope and goals can kill a project just as surely as faulty implementation. Organizations are beginning to embrace the idea that these two aspects of projects – problem understanding and solution formulation – are not distinct phases, but rather different kinds of conversations that must be woven together from beginning to end. Problem structuring is a critical aspect of the design process that takes into account the diversity of goals, assumptions and meanings among stakeholders. At the heart of this new understanding of organizational life is the recognition that project work is fundamentally social, and that communication among stakeholders must be managed and nurtured in order for the social network to cohere into a functioning entity. What is missing from our ‘social network tool kit’ is an environment or ‘container’ in which stakeholders can collectively step back to see the big picture.

Improving Teams - Four Dimensions of Relational Work

2010-12-28T11:10:00.000-08:00

A recent article from the MindTools website provides some interesting insight into balancing interpersonal skills on teams. The authors ground their comments on the four dimensions of relational work identified by Timothy Butler and James Waldroop: influence, interpersonal facilitation, relational creativity, and team leadership.

Influencers are great at negotiating and persuading. Interpersonal facilitators are strong in sensing people's emotions and motivations. Those with relational creativity use pictures and words to build relationships and motivate others. Team leaders thrive on working through other people to accomplish goals.

Knowing which team members are strong in which dimensions enables you to keep your team motivated with appropriate rewards. It also lets you direct tasks to those individuals whose relational dimensions will lead them to be most engaged and successful in those tasks.

The new web

2010-11-30T18:02:00.000-08:00

A few months ago “Wired” magazine claimed that the web is dead (The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet) By Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff August 17, 2010). I’ve heard many comments and personal points of views on this, but I can say one thing for sure – our consumption of content on the web is not the same from just a year ago. Pondering this issue reminded me of another article I read in the beginning of the year that, in fact that, ended up influencing me in my design approach more than I would want to admit. The article was written by Forrester's Moira Dorsey: The Future of Online Customer Experience.

She starts off by saying that every new technology follows a pattern – when it is introduced it always imitates another technology, most likely the one it is replacing (or competing with). So, the first car with the internal combustion engine looked like a horse-less carriage, the first television sets imitated radios with a tiny screen in front. And the early, and many current websites heavily rely on paper / print media vernacular. And so the web headers look much like in printed newspapers, and we we are virtually flipping the pages and some people even believe in things being above or below the fold. But just like with automobiles and home entertainment the web (design) as we know it is radically evolving whether we want to admit it or not.

We, the consumers have much higher expectations today than just a few years ago as of what the web technology should do for us and how we want to experience it. This forces designers, including myself, to consider the interactive space as a ecosystem not as web pages. Designing an interactive ecosystem is like building the entire city, vs a single building. We are used to building websites as destinations, just like architects build a school, or a hospital. Now, we need to design around the customer behavior, or his need states to connect activities to web services (like finding a public restroom on the go, or scanning a barcode while in store to find the best deal). This is very much like a city planner would need to consider where to build a shopping mall for the convenience and maximum accessibility for the shoppers, but also to attract the right retail. It’s bigger than just a single structure.

Today, it’s about designing interactive components that live in ubiquity, ready to be accessed regardless of the user’s environment, circumstances or platform. It really began to irritate me when someone at work talks about ‘building a web page”. The reality is that nobody is going to come looking for “your page” - the exception here are product or content pages (editorial or news).

If large companies continue to rely on one, centralized destination for their product and services they risk being marginalized. With the emergence of highly specialized (and personalized!) apps and shopping aggregators, customers enjoy the selection of products that meet their criteria but of which they might have not been aware of previously. Browsing my iPad version of Gilt and ShopStyle recently, I discovered several boutique brands that I have never heard of before. I noticed however, how the traditional big players in the category were not present at the moment when I was making my purchase decision. Of all the big players only Gap seems to be getting it, by providing multiple entry points (product placements – not promos or banners) outside the .com destination. SEO is one thing, diversifying your brand encounter opportunity is another.

Gone are the days when if we wanted to get the news we would go on the corner and buy a newspaper. Gone are the days that when I am thinking of furniture, or car batteries I have a set of choices (retailers) I need to go to (homepages). Today, I choose to shop ‘my way’. Be it at my lunch break when I take a walk to the park and pull out my iPhone, or be it late in the evening when reading editorial on my iPad in bed. I will be looking for product recommendations in my apps, in product reviews, throughout the expert blogs, in the editorial articles, on Facebook through my friends photos, through my spouse, on YouTube, etc. The retailers who understand best how people behave, where and why the purchasing decisions are being made and what influences them will eventually be able to close the sale. Shopping today is more complex than simply walking inside the store - virtual or brick - and simply buying.

Many people behind the driving wheel at large scale retail companies just don’t get it. Or, even if they do it will take them literally years to implement any good system or framework. Good thinking is often put aside in favor of quick-turnaround, tactical stuff like badges, activity feeds or other disjointed efforts to create tools or pages that few can find and use.

Social Media: retail vs. healthcare

2010-11-29T14:06:00.001-08:00

Social Media--healthcare vs. retail.

http://www.nickdawson.net/healthcare/retail-vs-healthcare-its-not-exactly-the-same/

What can retail do that healthcare can not? What can healthcare do that retail can not?

Check this short blog post out. It forces us to consider boundaries...and how we design for permeability.

I think retail has room to play in spaces previously occupied by healthcare providers with consumers taking a proactive attitude in their relationships with their health providers. Add in social and sharing and things get interesting, really fast. Extend this out to mobile and contextual applications (say a retailer who sells fitness equipment, diet and exercise apps, and can synch with customer approved third parties?) Suddenly, retailers could be the next enablers. (imagine the angels, advocates, and allies mix with people looking for easier ways to take charge of their own healthcare?)

This blog post closes with this provoking little sentence (directed to its healthcare audience): "Rather than taking the retail approach to interacting with the digitally connected, try taking the nursing approach. Let’s ask ourselves what a nurse can do that a shopkeeper cannot (are there still shopkeepers? well, you get the idea)."

Hmmm. Interesting exercise. Are there still 'shopkeepers'? ...or 'retailers'?

Home of the future: DIY

2010-11-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

Can't wait for the home of the future? Build it yourself: http://www.homesenseproject.com/

Success factors for high ROI innovation

2010-10-28T05:55:00.000-07:00

In a slow economy, the traditional and the mainstream organization retreat from the new and untried. The pendulum swings to efficiency (often at the expense of validity or long term effectiveness).

Innovation can be seen by some, who are under even greater pressure with fewer resources, as taking the focus off of what an organizations does best. For others, however, the slowdown is an opportunity to refocus--not on what's working well now, but what needs to be working well in the future.

Here is a practical, working definition of innovation: a capitalization on new business opportunities through new products, services, processes or experiences. New ideas that cannot be tied to business opportunities may be wonderfully creative, but ultimately inert in terms of capitalization, and so fails this working definition.

Opportunities are situations that afford both a chance to create value for someone or something at a profit in some new or unique way, and a chance to achieve and maintain a position of competitive advantage.

At the end of the day, innovation isn't about more ideas, it's about better ideas.

It's also about people for the simple fact that innovation doesn't happen in a vaccum. It's not enough to discover an opportunity and define a great idea. We need to bring people to those ideas in order to get momentum.

With these ideas in mind, I thought it may be useful to share some thinking and examples in the world for how best to generate value via innovation.

First, there are some common characteristics for organizations which have the highest return on their investment in innovation. You can see examples of them here

unofficial activity
external collaboration
internal connectivity
combination innovation (connecting ideas, technologies, and business models to intentionally create innovation)
resourcing
preconception awareness

You can dive into these concepts here at this short Harvard Business Review article:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/10/how_the_mayo_clinic_invests_in.html

Next article--types of innovation.

Co-Design: finding what's underneath an idea

2010-10-22T06:25:00.000-07:00

I was leading a number of co-design sessions recently where we had different people co-creating the future of connectivity in the places and spaces they live and work. Roughly speaking, the purpose of co-design is to design with people and immerse with them as they take a particular problem in their lives and ideate solutions around it. The opportunity for design and business, however, is in exploring the solutions being created. People speak in terms of solutions to problems--that's only natural. The real value, however, is in understanding their problems in a deeper and more meaningful way. Why this solution and not that one? What would a particular solution do? What specific aspects are unique and important to a solution? At the end of the day, it's an opportunity to discover details around use, trust, and situational needs. As a business that creates solutions, co-design provides an opportunity to look at ideas in a deeper way, understand the problems they came from, and design new, unique, and relevant solutions. As designers, product managers, and technologists we know what is possible (that's not the job of the customer). Designing with customers helps us focus and find possibilities that would otherwise be invisible.

Customer Experience

2010-10-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

Intelligentsia's barista prepares coffee - Turkish style.

I can say with certainty that I am a coffee connoisseur. And it’s not only about craving of the daily fix, I do like the whole going-to-a-café and hanging-out-there experience. I love the creative ambiance and the social randomness of it.

Fifteen years ago when I came to America Starbucks was it for me – of course, after I had to get used drinking my cappuccino from a paper cup. But I remember how much I loved (after a 20 minute drive to the nearest one), getting inside the café, standing in looong lines, smelling the fresh ground coffee, overhearing conversations, making random chats with other customers, then sitting down with a fresh, steamy cup of my own and having a meaningful conversations, or just reading something that always ended up inspiring me. Sometimes, I just loved watching people enjoying themselves, having their first dates, or business meetings. This was an experience! A point of destination in my daily routine. From the flavor of the coffee to the people and the whole surroundings, this was to me well worth those thirty five bucks a week.

Well, that was 15 years ago. I don’t go to Starbucks anymore, maybe once in a while a grab a cup of hot tea, but the truth is I stay away from their coffee. It wasn’t for a financial reason. What happened is that their business decision at some point impacted my experience as a customer in a negative way, and all of a sudden I realized that this was costing me too much money for what I was getting. They became victims of their own success and adapted a fast food approach to coffee, something I can get everywhere. They went after total expansion, speed-to-market and convenience tactics. That impacted the way they service their customers. They stopped pulling their shots, espresso is now made from pre-made syrup, there is no aroma of fresh coffee, no random conversations with friendly strangers (because the service now is much faster), comfy chairs were replaced for the most part by wooden ones, the music is different, fireplaces are gone, life music is gone, and it’s just not the same. Especially the coffee itself. In the process of streamlining they have lost the charm and the flavor I was after. Even if the coffee was $1, I wouldn’t come back. It’s not about the money, it’s about the experience.

You might make an argument that Starbucks is still very profitable. That might be true, although a quick google magic gave me an insight that their traffic is dropping, but their revenue has little to do with customer satisfaction and more to do with global expansion.

Today, I found myself in a bustling, urban, boutique café waiting for my 6 oz. cappuccino a good 10 minutes, which for a coffee addict is an eternity. I was watching baristas doing their elaborate routines and people being called by their first names when their cup was ready. There was no empty seat. The place was packed with tiny groups of people eagerly discussing their issues, or simply enjoying the moment together. The aroma of freshly ground beans was delightful, and the people were smiling and making small talks with strangers. In coffee business preparation and brewing method are the things that make the coffee. Cutting corners on the process or time it takes to brew – something that Starbucks did – simply will affect the quality, from aroma and texture to the taste. Despite having to stand the whole time I was at the cafe I walked out somehow relaxed with a tiny cup in my hand. The hand made flavor was the best in the world. I had the haute couture of coffee with a leaf pattern on my foam for only $3.61.

So, what is my point here? The customer’s (total) experience is more important than any business decision that is going to impact that experience. In my industry, we often throw around phrases like “customer-centered” design, or solution. First, it is imperative to really understand what constitutes a good user experience. Second, you always must think like a consumer and react to your own solutions as if you were a shopper. The moment you start rationalizing things for the business, you are going to miss the point. In this day and age the customer always wins. Always! We are more held accountable for upsetting a VP at work, than for loosing a customer. The people who are driving financial goals of the company don’t consider the experience of an individual customer, or whether the expansion tactics are relevant to a shopper in any way. The business isn’t concerned with what the customer wants, the business wants to make money. But ultimately, it is the customer - one by one - who controls the money. Therefore customer controls your business. The business should support customer experience efforts and stop engaging in short-sighted tactics that miss the point.

The Social Network

2010-10-04T07:42:00.000-07:00

As part of research, some members of the UXSears team went to see The Social Network. On my way to work today, I checked in per my routine to the Huffington Post and found their treatise on the movie. While I agree with many of the points made in the article I was shocked to find that the writer and many of the people interviewed seemed to miss the point that the movie was based on the book "The Accidental Billionaires," by Ben Mezrich and was a fictional portrayal; not an actual documentary of the life and times of Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is a reference point used to portray larger themes.

The point of the movie could well have been about the "revolutionary" nature of Facebook and how it changed the way we use the Internet. But it wasn't. And thank life for that. Despite what the Post says, that tact would have been disastrous for many reasons—among them the fact that Facebook was not revolutionary but incremental in changing or evolving the way we interact on the Internet in a "social" context and took advantage of the many failures prior to it's release in ways that the others had missed. Having been with the world wide web since the first browser and well before the first browser, I've never considered the world wide web to be anything but social. From UNIX's "phone" to AOL instant messaging, the internet was always about sharing, was always a communications channel. What Facebook did to the social networking scene many prior to it failed in key ways. Think geocities. Think Friendster. Think Hi5. I can name others like MySpace or YahooGroups. There was a fateful convergence that Zuckerberg was fortunate to coincide with in terms of technology and culture. Much like Jobs and Gates were in the right place at the right time, so was Zuckerberg. If any of the "points" were missed, it was that.

Sony Pictures is in the entertainment business. Entertainment is sometimes controversial. Fiction is fantasy. And Hollywood, despite what we all think, is not (or rarely is) in the business of truth. It was refreshing to see a well-crafted, well-executed movie that made me think for once. We're all tired of hearing about "social networking" as much as we're tired of the "greenwashing" of the early part of this decade. The score was amazing, the acting over the top and the cinematography breathtaking. I can't say that about many of the thousands of movies that have come out of Hollywood in the last 100 years. The movie was a vehicle for some fundamental human condition messages:

1. Never forget who your real friends are
2. Trust no one in Silicon Valley—especially if they are "angel investors" or "venture capitalists"
3. Drugs and drinking are bad, okay?
4. "Luck is when opportunity meets preparation" — Bob Evans (not the sausage maker but the producer/director)
5. Money will never buy happiness

Social networking as a phenomena would be an easy target and a moving target. It's still evolving as I type this. But like any platform or system, it is a means to an end that empathicaly supplies a conduit to a real human want/need in ways that facilitated human behavior. In my case, social networking has evolved into a form of collaborative scrap booking. It's a place like the "livejournal" we see in one of the opening sequences. Only it's more fun, more interactive and engaging and the content is not supplied from nerds alone but people who would normally not use blogging, platforms, technology, to present themselves to the world.

If anything, the "rift" between Hollywood and Silicon Valley that is cited in the Post is about a larger view of a small world. Us technologists tend to live in a virtual vacuum of assumptions, sitting too close to our perspective to see that real human beings with real stories, emotions and human wants and needs use our creations in ways we would never have dreamed of. Hence, the last quote that comes to mind, one that the director executed perfectly both visually and literally:

"To define is to kill. To suggest is to create" — Stéphane Mellarmé

SHC Digital Summit

2010-10-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

Attending the Sears Digital Summit today at MPG. Working more closely with our brethren in the full-line store marketing team will only make us stronger/better/faster, just like the six million dollar man (great show by the way). We are talking about re-marketing to consumers, leveraging cookies and serving relevant ad units based on the consumer's actions/behaviors/traffic patterns. Also talking about leveraging dynamic ad generation for this, which is something we need to build for Sears.com. Tackling data analytics to deliver more relevant/accurate advertising to consumers. In the afternoon we are going to cover social games, local/social platforms and mobile all from a marketing perspective. What I think will be key will be how all of this leads to sales online and off and how we can drive conversion in it's many forms.

The (Anti)Social Net by Elizabeth Churchill

2010-09-29T15:01:00.000-07:00

I am a sucker for people who cite Durkheim, Barnes, et al. They seem to have deep knowledge of this stuff we call "social networking":

"social network" was coined in the 1950s by John Barnes, a British anthropologist, inspired by the work of Elizabeth Bott and her kinship studies... These early social network researchers were primarily and fundamentally concerned with people and the social management of relationships and connections... these pioneers were not satisfied with the elegance of the model alone. They understood there was something to be said for looking at people as people, not simply as gates or nodes or conduits to other people.

I fall victim to stuff like DIGG Labs and other forms of visualizing affinities. Working with Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer at Incontext showed me deeper ways of visualization AFTER primary and immersive observations of human beings in context. It seems they are very much aware of the inversion of how we tend to go about conceptualizing "social experiences" on the internet. Churchill continues:

they were interested in understanding people, and less invested in the belief they could engineer behavior

While working for Incontext, I struggled to come to terms with the fact that it is nearly impossible to change human behavior, especially through a graphical user interface, no matter how novel the approach is. The reason for this, especially in business, is due to the "affinities" in place within large and small organizations that create patterns and processes resulting in "social norms". To disrupt these things is to welcome chaos and welcome failure. Churchill writes:

human beings take a while to develop social norms that enable and preserve their social connections; having a sudden disruption issued from afar and rippled through the system in a flash can be seriously damaging and can take time to repair.

One of the fundamental practices outlined in the book "Rapid Contextual Design" and core to the process Incontext offers is the idea of "affinity mapping". This is not a simple "mind map" of relationships. This is a very complex construction of data synthesis which leads to explicit understanding of the processes, the norms, the motivations, the intents of the people who create a structure.

it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.

When she speaks of the "object" I think of "artifacts" and the mental models we use to define requirements, to benchmark progress or return on investment. Through total immersion within the contexts of people's lives, one gains a thorough and unique understanding of situations and emotional states that influence behavior and inform design decisions. The opposite of this is:

the way of thinking that lead to these errors, were ones that privileged simplified ideas and simplistic business imperatives over any concern for or understanding of human social engagement.

When tasked with thinking about "social shopping" for example, it is an imperative to think about the wider picture of life, how technology currently fits into people's daily existence as opposed to the all-to-familiar "wouldn't it be awesome if?"

a "social" steeped in a deeper understanding of what the technology is and how it fits into people's everyday lives... there needs to be a concomitant shift in the way in which design decisions are elaborated and business decisions are made.

This is where heated debates about primary and secondary research (their value therein), HCI vs. human-centered come into play. Human beings inherently need and crave structure. Without it, we tend to go nuts. But rigorously applied arbitrary structure is a form of annoyance, if not oppression. Secondary research abstraction of individuals into quantifiable targets and segments is only as valuable as the insights primary research can supply to validate assumptions. If there is a disconnect between the two, you often witness stuff that, in a nutshell, is "irrelevant". Again, you can only work with an existing behavior and structure and it is very hard to change either. Regardless, most of us have no business from an ethics standpoint or professional/academic background standpoint evaluating and synthesizing these kinds of "data" streams. Churchill writes:

Geeks, computer scientists, and mathematicians who love networks are not good people to assess your social-networking products.

Why? Because we operate simultaneously in user and evaluator mode. John Dewey, in his "Critique of Abstraction: The Intellectual Life as a Tool," makes the distinction between primary and secondary experience. Primary experience is a subjective relationship to external objects that are sensory—emotive, psychological, physical—but not reflected upon. They are experienced... Secondary experience is a rational process in every sense possible.

Churchill continues, articulating what many of us feel but are unable to, citing Jonathan Grudin's 1994 paper "Groupware and Social Dynamics":

Social networking sites have focused on networks and individuals. When it comes to interacting and having relationships, people don't think in terms of the sum total of connections and inter-connections they have, they think of the individuals they know and the groups they belong to. People and groups are different from nodes and networks.

Thus, humans are dynamic, contextually tied to their identities within the moments they find themselves in. There is no rigid or deterministic or predictable structure, a "bucket" we can fit into. I guess in that sense we're finding that static concepts like targets and segments need to be much more flexible or dynamic. Which has lead us to the age of systems and platforms and software as a responsive service.

I whole-heartily thank and admire this Elizabeth Churchill (dinner on me if you're in Chicago ever).

A Response to Norman & Nielson (Interactions Magazine, October 2010)

2010-09-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backward in Usability

by Donald Norman and Jakob Nielson

I find the article I just read in Interactions Magazine offensive, if not an example of the ignorance that has held interactive multimedia back for at least 15 or more years:

in the rush to develop gestural (or "natural") interfaces, well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown.

If either of the writers would get out of their one-way mirrored focus group "labs" and actually do primary ethnographic observation, much less embrace the revolutions that are happening technology-and-business-wise in the real world (like "Design Thinking"), they would realize that the desktop metaphor is a dead horse we are forced to beat with a mouse and keyboard, that they are antiquated examples of completely non-sustainable and non-scalable interaction "modalities". I can't tell you how much of my design career has been spent working on seemingly "radical" concepts that were shelved in favor of that all-to-familiar personally subjective knee-jerk reaction to something outside the boxes of limited thinking and fear of the new or unprecidented. See the RAZR for example or the iPhone, the cell phone in general, the automobile ("faster horse" would have come out of "HCI" research methods like articulated survey responses and focus groups).

Throughout my career, I had the privilage of working on things that were deemed "too advanced" for the general public (because there were no precidents in the market) and killed before they saw the light of day. I quickly learned that the best reaction from the "stakeholders" when innovating was "WTF!?" because I knew it was something that took these people well outside their comfort zones. Those companies have gone into some seriously painful times as I type this, realizing (too late) that they should have taken some chances in the market and listened to the people with their ears to the ground, who live, breathe and eat design thinking on a 24/7 basis; much less the "end-users" who would have to incorporate these technologies, services, and products into their daily routines.

But the place for such experimentation is in the lab. After all, most new ideas fail, and the more radically they depart from previous best prectices, the more likely they are to fail.

This "HCI" stuff Norman/Nielson cite as gospel is a true example of analytical thinking, data-based engineering, testing that quantifies then qualifies ignorance and limited thinking done in the "lab" as opposed to contextually in the field through "validation." Again, we are not in the age of "technological evolution" but "technological revolution". They are bloody and leave in their wake the obsolete thinkings of "leaders" who hold humanity back in favor of their personal need for predictability and structure. Again, having worked from many perspectives in the design industry, from products to services to education, I cringe when someone comes into a meeting where innovation is supposed to take place citing some Nielson/Norman study about how this "button" should be "here" because "x% of users"... Discussions killed in this way ruin human potential. The "lab" is for "rats". The "lab" should be our world of experience. Hence, life is the lab. Humans are not rats when it comes to how we live and interact with each other and the world around us.

Most progress is made through small and sustained incremental steps.

Since when has any "game changing" innovation been made through "sustained and incremental steps"? Inventions? The iPad? I guess you could say they were incremental in the sense that they have been held back since long before the Xerox Parc days by people who were too scared to take a chance, to fail. Hence the design thinking tact: fail often and fail early. And learn. Or keep it all in the "lab" and release tiny portions of brilliance in favor of maintaining some safe growth position in the books and charts. Meanwhile, short-stick the user, the customer, the human being and ruin growth potential for your organization (differentiation, advantage, unique or core selling point offerings, marketing 101, competition, value to the humans who honor you with their consumption and use of your production...).

The truth is that we actually have more evidence through seeing these "radical new" products come to market (I mean, seriously! In 1997 ubiquity was around the corner and we're still not there yet) now after being locked up in the "lab" for far too long. I can see the safe thinking they employ and profess being useful in high liability contexts like healthcare or voting, where risk to a human is high. But social networking? Gaming? Entertainment? Shopping? Anyone who has lived in Asia or Southeast Asia, travelled to Europe, has seen the future (or the now) that America seems to have ignored for decades.

Why is 3D movie making the "cool thing" again? Why do Hollywood movies seem to be bland, to be safe, to suck? Why do they remake remakes and churn artistically devoid fodder? Um... Let me take a guess: they're based on demographically targeted planning algorythms as opposed to real thinking about empathic connection with real human beings who have emotions and feel through primary experience. Like the book "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage" by Roger Marin said: "It's like driving forward while looking in your rear view mirror." It's not wrong to look (glance from time to time) in the rear view mirror—one benefits from a 360º view of the situation while driving. But it is wrong to look solely in the rear-view mirror while driving forward, while ignoring the left and right, up and down, for example. And some cars don't have rear view mirrors anymore (like the "image map" quip they inserted to sound like industry old-hats). Some cars can park themselves now. Some can even drive themselves now. How do those offerings and behaviors make the existing principals and standards completely obsolete?

These "funamental principles of interaction design" are pitfalls 9 out of 10 times (I've studied this through living through it). Ignore them or question them religiously and think about context over prescription. More antiquated thinking:

Discoverability: All operations can be dicovered by systematic exploration of menus.

Scalability: The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.

Have they read "Mobile Web Design" by Cameron Moll? Have they studied the "experts" in other fields who think about the role context plays in interaction, who study humans as humans and not "nodes" (see Elizabeth Churchill's article "The (Anti)Social Net" in the same publication)? "Menus"? One size fits all? Hence my problem with "HCI" as a relevant approach in this age. It has a place, don't get me wrong (i.e. Engineering, backend, technology; not primary research and not innovation)...

These people remind me of some of the organizations I have worked with and for in the past who laughed hysterically at some ideas or predictions of the future I live with now: like a phone that feels more like playing a game than a tool, like gestures and mind control over pointing devices and some metaphor some nerd applied to something so infinitely free no one can define it: human interaction and rapport.

Stop being safe. Stop listening to these "statistics" and "fundamental principles" and consider the sources, intent and agendas from which they come. They are based on visions of objects much closer than they appear in the rear view mirror, based on older ways of looking at the world that don't really apply anymore. They are like the slow drivers in the left lane. You want to honk at them and wonder how they are still allowed to drive on your road. Then you pass them and realize they are simply oblivious and/or old, drunk, dumb, incompetent, angry... And you fogive them, pass them and breathe a sigh of relief you are no longer at their mercy in terms of time abuse. Explore, inquire, absorb, apply and be human. We're imperfect and standards seldom apply when consciousness is involved.

A bit about customer feedback

2010-09-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

Recently. I’ve been reading through a lot of customer feedback for a project I’m working on. Naturally, not all of it is positive – which is actually helpful, because I can’t figure out how to improve the experience if I don’t know what’s wrong with it. But what I find interesting is that every now and then, I see a comment suggesting that Sears should fire their webmaster - implying a single person who is in complete control of the entire website - and hire a high school or college student to make a better site.

I have to say that at first blush, this idea seems ludicrous to me. I don’t think I could pick a single person who would actually qualify as our “webmaster”, considering how many people actually work on it. The website was built by over a hundred product managers, IAs, designers, coders, and engineers, and maintained by an army of taxonomists and merchants, not to mention the management to make sure the whole organization doesn’t just implode under its own weight. I don’t know any single person out there who is capable of handling all that! I also find it just as unrealistic, if not even more so, that a student could effectively create a site to handle all the complexities of e-commerce at such a large scale as Sears needs it. Most of my coworkers bring years of industry experience doing exactly that; many (myself included) also have a graduate education directly related to their job. I’ve known many incredibly bright students, and I also recognize that sometimes what you need is a perspective outside of the industry, but at the same time I know I’ve personally benefited enormously from having had the opportunity to practice my learnings both in higher education and in industry.

So how do I handle comments like these? It’d be easy to just write them off and say that these customers don’t know what they’re talking about if they think that our website could possibly be built by just one person. But I try to look past that. In fact, I think it actually helps me recognize who I’m designing for. I try to know as much as I can about the nitty-gritty details of what goes on to keep Sears.com up and running and keep customers happy, but most of our customers don’t. And you know what? They don’t have to, and they shouldn’t have to. So even if these comments don’t accurately represent the structure of our organization, they are still from real people with real, honest complaints about the experience we’ve delivered. Trying to brush their feedback off with a defense like “You don’t know anything about our business, we have so much going on that you couldn’t know about” is just an excuse that doesn’t help them. It’s our duty to address their feedback as best we can - even if they see us as just one superhuman!

The Best Places to Work

2010-09-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Today AdAge published their top 30 list of Best places to Work in Marketing and Media in 2010. The list celebrates the 30 employers in the marketing, media and advertising industry that have created environments in which people love to work and contribute their best ideas.

These companies simultaneously nurture employees, clients and their communities with things like diversity programs, family-friendly benefits, education reimbursement and workspaces designed to stimulate creativity.

Unfortunately, we are not on the list, and none of the distinguished companies is even from Chicago. But with all the changes that are taking place within UX Sears I believe that we could have a shot for the next year. Just a few tweaks here and there, like the workspace design and implementation of the flexible working arrangements, and other improvements we can not only boost our results, revenue but also make the employees feel proud of the work they’re doing. We are really not that far off, and do offer all the things that employees value the most, we just need to take it to the next level.

Hail Halo for Men Chicago (Social Networking Best in Class)

2010-09-17T14:12:00.000-07:00

I'll start with a shameless plug: my friend Deanna is the best stylist in the city. You can see my review on Yelp. I wouldn't normally have taken the time to do this if she wasn't my friend in addition to the fact that Halo for Men openly promotes their rewards points system for doing so in ways that I can understand. If I "check in", if I post a review on Yelp, if I sign up to be a part of their Facebook page, if I twitter about my experience, I get points. When I rack up 450 points, I get a free haircut, a free hand wax (which I decline, yuck!) and a free scalp massage. For posting a review on Yelp, for example, I got 150 points. Sign up for their Facebook page and you get another 150 points. That's 300 right there! 450 points is worth around or more than $50 of personal beauty care and worth many referrals and awareness in channels for them (can you say "free advertising and PR" any louder? Can you say "return and repeat and adopted customer" any louder?).

When you visit their salons in person or walk by them, adjacent to their logo and signage are the Facebook and Twitter logos, Yelp and other social streams through which to find, get information, and participate in your own "brand butlering". Before they jumped on the "bandwagon", they had a website that answered to the real needs of someone interested in getting a haircut via a "book online" feature that would offer opt-ins for notifications and calendar synchronization after a one-time registration (along with the option to do it as a "guest", complete with SMS and email notifications, as well as a way to have them actually call you to remind you beforehand). The receptionist is actively involved in "triggering" and "informing" their customers to participate in social networks and very clearly lets a customer know that participation produces award points towards free stuff or discounts. The incentives are endless - refer friends and get points, share your stuff with Halo for Men and get points... Not only can you go to their website to get information but you may see them syndicated in other places while doing other things in the periphery.

I think I may be getting points for posting this blog. If I don't, I have a strange feeling I could simply mention it and get points. Or at least a mention and a link somewhere, which provides me with as much "social capital" as them because I look like a hip and stylish metrosexual who patronizes "hot" establishments in the name of great style. So if you go to Halo for Men (men only, sorry ladies - this is chock full of pool tables, beer, sports, and video games, comfortable leather recliners, very friendly and stylish hostesses, the ability to have your eyebrows and nose hairs trimmed...) please mention Mike sent you. For your mentioning of my name, I get points. For showing up for your first appointment, you'll get points. Virtually anything you "give" them gets you points, including giving them your birthday. Everyone gets points and everyone is happy in the end.

The only place I don't see awareness of these social channels and incentives is on their website itself. There is a "press" section, and I like the way they show the sources as opposed to a dense table of article threads or links as an entry point, but there is no mention or linking to their Yelp reviews, Facebook or Twitter updates, FourSquare or Groupon or any of the other places they have strategically partnered with. It's hard to account for everything when the ecosystem is so diverse and extensive. However, missing the most simple of inclusions (like their own site) is something to learn from.

Some people may say that it is somewhat unethical to "trigger" a review when clearly the motivation is payment (points) but, other than getting the haircut experience of the century from my old friend Deanna, what incentives would I have to take my time to write a review, friend them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter? They never told me the review had to be positive. In fact, I was told to be honest because they need honest feedback. In this case my rewards are points and the warm fuzzy that comes from promoting a good friend towards her success in a service industry. Hair care is a referral business offering an experience good or service and is perfect for this kind of "social networking" as more and more people use reviews and ratings and other websites when they are researching considerations for providers of a need. By leveraging this insight, Halo for Men responds to and facilitates active streams of "social activity". And I would venture to guess that asking the owner of the salons about the "success" of this effort would produce a response like "invaluable to the growth and retention of customers for our business."

What I learned:

If you offer "points" let me know clearly what their value is towards tangible products or services.

Provide me a clear understanding of how many points each action I could take will net me.

On the Halo for Men side, have a system or platform that will "know" when a customer posts a review, friends Halo for Men on Facebook. They require me to send them a "reminder email" to let them know I posted a review on Yelp for example. From this email, they can assign points to my account.

Again, please book an appointment with Deanna K at the Wicker Park Chicago Halo for Men and tell her or the receptionist that Mike sent you. If you read this post, send them an email telling them this post made you want to check them out. I can't give you some of my points as a gift but can assure you the experience of getting your hair done by Deanna will be a worthwhile expenditure; not to mention a really fun time.

a puppy and a baby

2010-09-08T11:08:00.000-07:00

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Enter contest by: 10/5/10. To enter and for Official Rules, visit billionpoints.com. Official rules: http://bit.ly/bD5I3g

How to design anything

2010-09-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

Today a couple of quotes and paraphrases from an article I read in August issue of Wired, titled “The Master Planner”, an interview with a really smart guy, University of North Carolina computer scientist, and author of a few books -the latest one “The Design of Design” - Fred Brooks. His insights are known as Brook’s law.

His first insight: “You can’t accelerate a nine-month pregnancy by hiring nine pregnant women for a month. Likewise, you can’t always speed up a [...] project by adding more (people); beyond a certain point, doing so increases delays.”

When Brooks was asked about design process, he stressed out that a great design comes from great designers, not necessarily from processes. He then continued by saying that a key component of the design process is for an organization (or designers) to identify the ‘scarcest resource’ and optimize for it. It doesn’t always mean that the scarcest resource is money. In Formula 1, for example (and this is not the example he used, but this one speaks to me better), the money is there but the scarcest resource is weight. The constructors must build the most aerodynamically efficient, technologically genius car, but they must build it as light as possible, and distribute that weight evenly across the car to ensure the right balance. The drivers even cannot wear a wrist watch on a race day, because that adds extra weight that will cost them fractions of a second (the difference that separates the fastest car and the following 10 drivers on the grid is usually less that a second per lap). It’s hard to think that way of an e-commerce site, at first, but it is a foundation for achieving great design.

Brooks also cites that a good method of design is to begin with a vision of what you want to accomplish and then proceed to one by one remove the obstacles that prevent you from achieving that vision. It is far more successful to start with a vision rather than a list of features (I think it’s how Jobs/Ives designed iPhone – slick and beautiful, while the other phone manufacturers were in a feature war with each other. I can see the feature war with the top e-commerce sites right now, including ours, but none of them is offering the customer the big vision that can grab their imagination (hearts, and wallets) and make them follow).

Brooks is also a big seeker of knowledgeable criticism – without implying that it is mandatory for people to always play it nice regardless of what their expertise and experience tells them is the right thing to do. In other words, we need to be open minded and welcome different points of view, even when sometimes they are in direct opposition to ours.

What Ritz-Carlton Can Teach Us

2010-08-31T15:22:00.000-07:00

Two posts in a row on management!

As part of my management training "readings," I've listened to a presentation given by Horst Shulze, former CEO of Ritz-Carlton. He's got some interesting things to say about what organizations need to do to improve how they work.

"Elimination of defects means becoming efficient. Cutting costs is not efficiency."

"If you hide a mistake, you can't learn from it...A mistake that happens more than once is a procedural defect."

"To hire people only to fulfill a function is immoral."

He also spends a lot of time on hiring the right people and the importance of orienting them to core company values, training them, then reminding them daily of those core values.

ROWE

2010-08-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

Today's post is about a subject that is highly controversial in the corporate world, but something I am personally very interested in, not as in "yey, let's try it immediately", but rather the hard results it can potentially bring.

The topic is ROWE - or results only work environment.

Nearly all aspects of our lives have been affected by the changing technology from health care to communication. However when it comes to our working environment we are stuck in the 50's where manufacturing industry influenced the 9 to 5 work schedule. This model has prevailed over the years unchallenged, even though our workloads have expanded beyond 40 hours per week, and due to technological advancements we can now carry our work (laptops, blackberries) home, which we readily do. However, many researchers in the field noticed that having a body in the chair for 8 hours a day doesn't equate productivity or results. Being at work doesn't always mean people are working.

That was the genesis of one of the most radical innovation in the workplace: results only work environment (ROWE). Nationwide, 3 percent of businesses now say they have a ROWE, including Best Buy, Gap, Inc., Verizon, IBM to name a few. Evidence shows that teams who have adopted ROWE see productivity rise by 41 percent on average.

Results-Only Work Environment is a management strategy where employees are evaluated on performance, not presence. In a ROWE, people focus on results and only results increasing the organization's performance while creating the right climate for people to manage all the demands in their lives . . . including work.

Because in ROWE results need to be clearly defined (since you cannot evaluate a person based on how many hours a day they spend in the office), managers need to clearly state the tasks and deadlines to their teams. It was observed that the teamwork, morale and engagement soared and led to less workers feeling overworked, stressed out or guilty. People were where they needed to be, when they need to be, they didn't need schedules.

The most controversial aspect, however, was that in ROWE meetings become optional. For many organizations that became the tipping point to back out of the program. But those who decided to give it a try, found out that regardless whether someone decided to opt out of the meeting, all staff was responsible for what happens in meetings. Huge attention was given to 'worthiness' of such gatherings and very quickly people realized how many hours have been previously wasted in unnecessary meetings. According to Jason Fried from 37 Signals and his recent book 'Rework' he claims that meetings are waste of time and expensive. If you have 5 people in a meeting for 1 hour, you are loosing 5 hours, not to mention interruption. And how many managers and directors spend entire days in meetings? How productive are they? How much are they not doing by sitting in those meetings? How many times are they forced to stay late to 'catch up'?

ROWE for Employees

ROWE recognizes that life is an individual experience and that no two lives are identical, and leverages this to achieve better performance from each individual. ROWE is not Flextime or Telecommuting or Job-Sharing, and is not about allowing your people to work from home a couple of days per week. ROWE is about cutting out from your day what doesn't drive the results, like being stuck in traffic every day for 3 hours. You make the decisions about what you do and where you do it, every minute of every day.

ROWE benefits:

* You control the clock and results are your responsibility

* Healthier lifestyle not overworked, less stress

* Autonomy & accountability

* Environmentally friendly, save on the commute and work from home!

ROWE for Business

Successfully adopting a Results-Only Work Environment will position your company to attract and retain talent that will show up energized, disciplined, flexible and focused, ready to deliver all results necessary to drive the business. A ROWE workforce is more efficient, productive and loyal to the organization while also feeling satisfied, fulfilled, and in control of their personal and professional lives. Management can spend less time monitoring and focus their energy on the business and team building (yes!).

ROWE business results:

* Increase productivity & efficiency

* Talent retention & attraction

* Optimization of space

* Elimination of wasteful processes

It is obvious that not all types of business can benefit and adapt to ROWE. Schools, hospitals, airline business, manufacturing better stay as they are. However, most corporate and other white collar professions, where creative thinking and problem solving is key performance objective, ROWE with the right attitudes from management - has a potential to make them thrive. Best Buy Co. implemented ROWE in 2006 and reported an average of 35% increase in productivity (within teams that were affected). If a company is striving for survival in the economic downturn, like Best Buy's direct competitor - Circuit City once was, it is a huge advantage to have that much higher level of productivity and lower operational costs.

Sources: http://www.hrmreport.com/ http://gorowe.com/know-rowe/what-is-rowe/ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124705801

Connected Organization

2010-08-20T13:54:00.000-07:00

This short video, from Kevin Wheeler, is about how to structure a company to achieve success. According to him the key factor is to transform an organization for a siloed (sp?), top-down structure to a networked organization where communication thrives. A structure like that can deliver a product that offers Complexity, Interdependence, and Innovation. I think I agree with him.

When getting a grilled cheese is impossible, we all lose

2010-08-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

Today is Crepes Friday.

Most days, I work in downtown Chicago. SHC has offices in a couple buildings there, but no cafeteria facilities. This isn't a problem because there's a multitude of places to eat within an iPad's throw of the office. I could probably find a place that made a great grilled cheese, but in a nerdy way I reserve that particular pleasure for that once-a-week trip out to our suburban campus.

When I roll into Hoffman Estates, lunch is always whatever soup catches my eye, some kind of not-good-for-me Starbucks cold drink, and a grilled cheese. White bread, american cheese, a few strips of bacon, and a little love. I try not to actively abuse my body with the things I eat, but I am powerfully drawn in by the cheese/bacon combo. It was with such lust in my heart that I started out for lunch today. We have a large campus here in “The Hoff”, so you plan your trips.

The food here is very good. Lots of choices, happy people, and several locations sprinkled throughout the campus. Fresh from several meetings and fueled with a powerful appetite, I started the sojourn to what we call The Small Cafe, home of my beloved grilled cheese. The Small Cafe is miles closer to the UX department than The Big Cafe is.

Imagine my shock when I finally arrived and learned that today was “Crepes Friday!” at The Small Cafe.

I'm an adult, and remained calm. I'm also flexible, and because of my job I have to roll with things and make compromises in the face of adversity. Intrepid, I approached the counter. It was late, so most of the lunch crowd was here and gone, all creped out, I suppose. "Can I get a grilled cheese? With bacon?" I asked, all smiles.

"Today is Crepes Friday! Only Crepes today." The café employee replied.

My brow knit. Maybe even furled.

"I see the grill right there. Can I get a grilled cheese?" In a show of instant disloyalty to my convictions, I had ditched the idea of bacon, eager to get at least a basic grilled cheese. The friendly employee looked a little taken aback, told me to wait just a moment, and left the line, turning around the corner. I also stepped to the side and in moments the very friendly Cafe manager was with me.

"Only Crepes today," the manager said, beaming.

I looked over her shoulder at the grill and fully-stocked bread rack. "Can I get a grilled cheese? I'm looking right at the grill and the bread." I said this in my best helpful tone, not being a jerk.

"I'm really sorry. Today is Crepes Friday. Only crepes today. You can go the Big Cafe and get a grilled cheese, if you'd like."

In fact, I could. But now I didn't want one. I dis-liked, in fact.

I was a silly, stupid customer. I knew what I wanted, could plainly see that they had what I wanted, and desperately wanted to buy from them. To keep a loyal customer all they had to do was throw a couple pieces of Kraft Select between two slices of bread on a grill, all within arms reach. It was tough for them to take my money. It was against the rules. It was Crepes Friday.

No soup for you, Pete Simon. Or grilled cheese.

The thing is, I wonder how often we do this to our customers. I wonder how often we wear blinders, and miss an opportunity to let people give us their money. I wonder how often a devotion to some convention or easy path causes us to lose a customer who was in our store or on our site, money in hand.

I don't have any control over the menu at The Small Cafe. I do have some influence over experience at catalog.sears.com , and I can only hope that I do a good job of making the design open, approachable, and adoptable. If someone comes to me willing to engage, I want to do everything I can to take care of them, and nurture their interest.

Or their love of grilled cheese. With bacon.

Social Dev Camp Chicago

2010-08-18T17:13:00.001-07:00

Pete Simon talking at Social Dev Camp Chicago on ""Why do I even care?" Designing For the Skeptical User & For Your Community Growth"

Connectile Dysfunction

2010-08-18T16:48:00.001-07:00

Connectile Dysfunction by Mark Baskinger

A great read in UX Magazine. Almost a must read if you are looking into how interaction design can feed into industrial design

Key concepts

Design for Impact and Design for Experience
Refrigerator- design of an organizational system for cold storage
Boomer and Elderly similarities and differences
Co-design
Steering Wheels as insight for stove knobs (unified product forms and interactions)
Strike Zones

Big Themes

Integrating interaction into form
Situated interaction in environmental context
Express through physical/visual form
Narrating the interaction

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier Thoughts and Reflections

2010-08-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

It didn't take me very long to read this book as it was like listening to someone articulate many of the issues and concerns floating through my subconscious for the last 15 years. Jaron is referred to as the "Godfather of Virtual Reality" and a very loud voice for what he considers a true "fight for the human spirit" in an age of massive technological innovation and disruption.

Jaron will hate my paraphrasing, the slicing and dicing of extractions from his book, citing his treatises about fragmented knowledge and the promotion of shallow understanding when doing so. Though I agree with him in many respects, where I part ways is when I think about the perils of generalization. In other words, if someone (like myself) reads the entire text as it was meant to be consumed (linearly, sequentially) and then extracted the points of interest, I would not consider this act detrimental to the intent of the author; nor the benefit of the reader in terms of knowledge transfer. If my way of digesting this turgid and massive text about highly abstract social technological issues is to highlight and revisit to extract - which aids in memory and internalization - I fail to see how every case of chunked extraction promotes ADD. Where it may have a detrimental effect is when you, the reader of this blog post, bipass reading his book as linear text (Jenny speaks of "codex"), taking what my interpretations are at face value, don't ever read the source material. As Benjamain speaks to in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", the information is diluted the further it travels from its orgins, the aura is somewhat lost.

Excerpts from the book will be blockquoted with my comments following:

The words in this book are written for people, not computers... You have to be somebody before you share yourself. ix

Kurzweil would argue the above. By 2046, he says we'll be one with computers and technology. Therefore, computers will be "somebody" by then, if not in limited ways now. Turing tests are another counter to this statement. How would the book know it was being read by a human vs a computer? Books are ONE WAY communication nodes.

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he. — publilus syrus

Articulation is tricky. To be able to verbalize is a skill learned over time through several influences including culture, evolution, etc. Non-verbal communication seems to be the major breaking point in our current efforts to understand customers. I would rephrase this to say "You are what you do, not what you say you do."

[web 2.0] promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom ironically, is more for machines than people. p.3

This is Jaron's introduction to "lock in" where computers define the design constraints as opposed to responding to them. Web 2.0, in favor of some "back end" capabilities as well as enhancements to hardware and channels to move information, has helped design and user experience take a large step back in favor of functionality over form. An entire design vernacular has been introduced and followed by flock-like mentality within the industry. Web 2.0 seems to have driven a wedge between an already widening gap between designer and developer by there mere fact that the markup and languages and systems are evolving quickly enough to warrant specialization.

It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging I social engineering. p.4

Communications influences. You can't erase it or take it back. Virtual or non-virtual, time keeps on ticking away. When any human "uses" something, s/he/it is being manipulated and exploited, guided through a taxonomy or construct. The internet has never not been social. It was created for human beings to share information via a syntax (markup) via a network scheme. Sharon Poggenpahl was right on ten years ago when she told me "designers of the future will not be stylists but will be designing frameworks and systems that leverage patterns." I see the transition from Web 2.0 introducing an enduring concept that has become somewhat of a mantra of late "content is king". The medium will not be the message (right now it is).

Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature. We shouldn't seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence. p.5

Individual intelligence comes from empathic connection and engagement with objects and others. I too am concerned with the "pack mentality" found throughout the world of Web 2.0. Sure, conformity makes things easier in terms of management and adoption. But I don't think we're far enough into the evolution of our systems to warrant the abandonment of trying new things. Still, tribe and relationships are human nature in the span of time with or without computers (again, the distinction between on and offline is blurring).

Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith. p.5

Yes, being a person is trial and error and learning and growing. To what extend there is a will to be an individual... that's another story all together.

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. p.6

This makes me think about libraries and the difference between a physical repository of credited and credible information vs. complete and total trust of a hyper-anonymous ethersphere. What scares me about digital print is the opportunity for revisionism. Jaron goes deeper when stating the above hinting at the influences the interfaces themselves have on human cognition and physical manipulation. The unintended consequences will become more apparent as the technology evolves at exponential rates of change faster than anything anyone alive today can fathom (save for people like Jaron and Kurzweil, et al).

There is a constant confusion between real and ideal computers. p.6

The brittle character of maturing computer programs can cause digital designs to get frozen into place by a process known as lock-in. This happens when many software programs are designed to work with an existing one. p.7

The unintended consequence of lock-in is felt acutely in large organizations with enormous "legacy" issues on their "backends" or "middlewear" systems. The cost/benefit equation is used to justify a lack of upgrading at the expense of the customer or the business in terms of limitations or poor experience offerings. The greatest risks are not to the systems themselves but to the cultures, the people and processes that rely on them. Over time, this lock-in can lead to lapses of vision, perspective, or even the ability to survive in the marketplace.

Software is worse that railroads because it must always adhere with absolute perfection to a boundlessly particular, arbitrary, tangled, intractable messiness. p.8

The process of lock-in is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality.

The philosopher Karl Popper was correct when he claimed that science is a process that disqualifies thoughts as it proceeds... p.9

Makes me think of that quote hanging at my desk:

"To define is to kill. To suggest is to create." — Stephane Mallarmé

Validity vs analitically based thinking is an age old "friction" between "design" and "business" or "art" and "science" etc... Some processes like to use past data to project future trends, a process I've heard referred to as "driving forward while looking in the rear-view mirror". Art likes to try stuff out, fail early, refine, try again, and is resistent to the quantifiable modelling of analysis in the empiracle or traditional sense. When change in the marketplace was not exponential, analytical thinking (data-based) had a glimmer of hope and relevance. Now, as we are seeing exponential change, validity based thinking will be more the norm (in successful organizations). As some people in the industry have seen, we've transitioned from an economy of scale to an economy of choice.

Lock-in, however, removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.

If it's important to find the edge of mystery, to ponder the things that can't quite be defined—or rendered into a digital standard—then we will have to perpetually seek out entirely new ideas and objects, abandoning old ones like musical notes... I'll explore whether people are becoming like MIDI notes—overly defined, and restricted to what can be represented by a computer. p.10

The above is the central argument to his book. I once tried to present in 1999 a concept I was working on about computer generated music. I predicted in the presentation, based on the research done by many AI people on player pianos (also a great book by Vonnegut), that within the decade we would have access at the consumer level to software that would allow us to not only compose "MIDI" music but truly incorporate the nuances of tremelo or sustain, tonality, color, tempo, even human error or deviances within a performance. I was laughed at, walked away with my tail between the legs but redeeemed the second Apple released garage band. But that was almost 10 years later and all the people in the room most-likely forgot my weak presentation.

The human organism, meanwhile, is based on continuous sensory, cognitive, and motor processes that have to be synchronized in time. UNIX expresses too large a belief in discrete abstract symbols and not enough of a belief in temporal, continuous, non abstract reality... p.11

The ideas expressed by the file include the notion that human expression comes in severable chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract tree—and that the chunks have versions and need to be matched to compatible applications. p.13

"network effect." Every element in the system—every computer, every person, every bit—comes to depend on relentlessly detailed adherence to a common standard, a common point of exchange. p.15

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful. p.17

humanism in computer science doesn't seem to correlate with any particular cultural style.p.17

the web 2.0 designs actively demand that people define themselves downward. p.19

Again, see the Mallarmé quote.

• Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing the individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world.
• Finance was transformed by computing clouds. Success in finance became increasingly about manipulating the cloud at the expense of sound financial principles.
• There are proposals to transform the conduct of science along similar lines. Scientists would then understand less of what they do.
• Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
• Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.

p.19-20

Someone who has been immersed in orthodoxy needs to experience a figure-ground reversal in order to gain perspective. p.23

The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living. p.26

I think Kurzweil was speaking of Singularity in the sense of a merger; not one or the other. I'll have to check on that.

A computer isn't even there unless a person experiences it. p.26

Guns are real in a way that computers are not. p.27

The first tenet of this new culture [Silicon Valley, et al, sic] is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system.p.28

...it promotes a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves. p.28

I say that information doesn't deserve to be free... What if it's even less inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?... there is a technical use of the term "information" that refers to something entirely real. That is the kind of information that is related to entropy... Information is alienated experience. p.28

Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. p.29

What Kurzweil refers to as the utility of data used as information. And then there's that super dense black hole conversation about knowledge vs information vs data...

What the [Turing] test really shows us, however, even if it's not necessarily what Turning hoped it would say, is that machine intelligence can only be known in a relative sense, in the eyes of a human beholder. p.31

Chess and computers are both direct descendants of the violence that drives evolution in the natural world. p.33

If that is true, then the objective in chess is to make moves that promote more moves for yourself while limiting the options of the opponent. Which would lead someone to refer to the "violence" as more of a disruption or challenge rather than some harmful attack. Unless, of course, the chess game is real survival. But that is for the movies.

In order for a computer to beat the human chess champion, two kinds of progress had to converge: an increase in raw hardware power and an improvement in the sophistication and clarity with which the decisions of chess play are represented in software. p.34

When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful. p.36

Consciousness is situated in time, because you can't experience a lack of time, and you can't experience the future. p.42

Isn't the only way to have a future or a now to have a past? In the case of amnesia... I forgot what I was going to write...

people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. p.47

Yeah. Because we (the consumers and workers, etc) received more access to a wider and deeper range of content in mulitiplied contexts. What's the difference between a card catelogue at a library and a feed aggregator? Little in terms of the "codex" or format. There is an arrangement and structure, and degree of access to information about objects or cards... Since when did we get whole expressions or arguments when engaging with the "media"? For people outside the world of "nerd", computers are largely entertainment centers.

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable. p.55

The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. p.59

If we are to continue to focus the powers of digital technology on the project of making human affairs less personal and more collective, then we ought to consider how that project might interact with human nature. p.62

FUD—feat, uncertainty, doubt. p.67

Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality. p.69

What computerized analysis of all the country's school test has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. p.69

The places that work online always turn out to be the beloved projects of individuals, not the automated aggregations of the cloud. p.72

Yeah, but these "individuals" have relationships of opportunity and influence with other people. If they are in a cloud or if they are in a cubicle. This kind of innovation don't happen in a vacuum.

The deep design mystery of how to organize and present multiple threads of conversation on a screen remains as unsolved as ever. p.72

It's the people who make the forum, not the software. p.72

once you have the basics of a given technological leap in place, it's always important to step back and focus on the people for a while. p.72

People will focus on activities other than fighting and killing one another only so long as technologists continue to come up with ways to improve living standards for everyone at once. p.80

If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation that truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. p.83

Which usually leads to a backlash of "authentic" expression in societies as some art historians would say this is a cyclical pattern in "post-capitalist" societies.

The limitations of organic human memory and calculation used to put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion. p.96

There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments. p.97

Each layer of digital abstraction, no matter how well it is crafted, contributes some degree of error and obfuscation. No abstraction corresponds to reality perfectly. A lot of such layers become a system unto themselves, one that functions apart from the reality that is obscured far below. p.97

Locks are only amulets of inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from. p.107

Economics is about how to best mix a set of rules we cannot change with rules that we can change. p.112

The economy is a tool, and there's no reason it has to be as open and wild as the many open and wild things of our experience. But it also doesn't have to be as tied down as some might want. It should and could have an intermediate level of complexity. p.117

cybernetic totalism will ultimately be bad for spirituality, morality, and business. In my view, people have often respected bits too much, resulting in a creeping degradation of their own qualities as human beings. p.119

And if you look at the evolution of the technology closely, the "big ticket" technology bits items seem to be about expression or capture or passive viewing of the human story (TVs, cameras, music, games, etc). So again, Kurzweil may be onto something when he speaks of convergence... We're using VR and gesture and voice to augment the normally tactile activities in our lives so we can spend more time playing, no?

Ideal computers can be experienced when you write a small program. They seem to offer infinite possibilities and an extraordinary sense of freedom. Real computers are experienced when we deal with large programs. They can trap us in tangles of code and make us slaves to legacy. p.119

If each cultural expression is a brand-new tiny program, then they are all aligned on the same starting line. Each one is created using the same resources as every other one. p.120

That's one reason web 2.0 designs strongly favor flatness in cultural expression. p.120

Let's suppose that back in the 1980s I had said, "In a quarter century, when the digital revolution has made great progress and computer chips are millions of times faster than they are now, humanity will finally win the prize of being able to write a new encyclopedia and a new version of UNIX!" It would have sounded utterly pathetic. p.122

Welcome to my world. We've seen it all coming for a while, back in the 1950's there was the Jetpack stuff and Jetsons etc. It's like we're bracing ourselves. Somewhere along the way we forgot to think about the social impacts and emotional impacts of technological disruption and innovation and change on such rapid scales and at such rapid paces.

The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first order expression. p.122

Only people can make schlock, after all. A bird can't be schlocky when it sings, but a person can. p.123

I've seen computers make some SERIOUS schlock. I mean, SERIOUS. See Makers by Cory Doctorow.

The decentralized nature of architecture makes it almost impossible to track the nature of the information that is flowing through it. p.123

In more recent eras, ideologies related to privacy and anonymity joined a fascination with emerging systems similar to some conceptions of biological evolution to influence engineers to reinforce the opacity of the design of the internet. Each new layer of code has furthered the cause of deliberate obscurity. p.124

The appeal of deliberate obscurity is an interesting anthropological question... One is a desire to see the internet come alive as a metaorganism: many engineers hope for this eventually, and mystifying the workings of the net makes it easier to imagine it is happening. There is also a revolutionary fantasy: engineers sometimes pretend they are assailing a corrupt existing media order and demand both the covering of tracks and anonymity from all involved in order to enhance this fantasy... the result is that we must now measure the internet as if it were are part of nature, instead of from the inside, as if we were examining books of a financial enterprise. p.124

Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. p.126

pattern exhaustion, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs i their pottery and becomes less creative. p.128

Spore addresses an ancient conundrum about causality and deities that was far less expressibly before the advent of computers. It shows that digital simulation can explore ideas in the form of direct experiences, which was impossible with previous art forms.p.132

A HYPOTHESIS LINKS the anomaly in popular music to the characteristics of flat information networks that suppress local contexts in favor global ones. p.133

A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation not a real thing. p.133

The definition of a digital object is based on assumptions of what aspects of it will turn out to be important. It will be a flat, mute nothing if you ask something of it that exceeds expectations. p.134

Hip-hop is imprisoned within digital tools like the rest of us. But at least it bangs fiercely against the walls of its confinement. p.135

The hive ideology robs musicians and other creative people of the ability to influence the context within which their expressions are perceived, if they are to transition out of the old world of labels and music licensing. p.136

Every artist tries to foresee or even nudge the context in which expression is to be perceived so that the art will make sense. It's not necessarily a matter of overarching ego, or manipulative promotion, but a simple desire for meaning. p.137

Even if a video of a song is seen a million times, it becomes just one dot in a vast pointillist spew of similar songs when it is robbed of its motivating context. Numerical popularity doesn't correlate with intensity of connection in the cloud. p.137

If you grind any information structure up too finely, you can loose the connections of the parts to their local contexts as experienced by the humans who originated them, rendering the structure itself meaningless. p.138

There are two primary strands of cybernetic totalism. In one strand, the computing cloud is supposed to get smart to a superhuman degree on its own, and in the other, a crowd of people connected to the cloud through anonymous, fragementary contact is supposed to the super-human entity that gets smart. p.139

Once organisms became encapsulated, they isolated themselves into distinct species, trading genes only with others of their kind. p.140

you'll generally find for most topics, the Wikipedia entry is the first URL returned by the search engines but not necessarily the best URL returned by search engines but not necessarily the best URL available. p.143

One of the negative aspects of Wikipedia is this: because of how its entities are created, the process can result in a softening of ambition or, more specifically, a substitution of ideology for achievement. p.143

The distinction between understanding and creed, between science and ethics, is subtle. p.151

computationalism. This term is usually used more narrowly to describe a philosophy of mind, but I'll extend it to include something like a culture... the world can be understood as a computational process, with people as subprocesses. p.153

My first priority must be to avoid reducing people to mere devices. The best way to do that is to believe that the gadgets I can provide are inherent tools and are only useful because people have the magical ability to communicate meaning through them. p.154

The whole point of technology, though, is to change the human situation, so it is absurd for humans to aspire to be inconsequential. p.155

Logical positivism is the idea that a sentence or another fragment—something you can put in a computer file—means something in a freestanding way that doesn't require invoking the subjectivity of a human reader... "The meaning of a sentence is the instructions to verify it."... The new version of the idea if that if you have a lot of data you can make logical positivism work on a large-scale statistical basis. The thinking goes that within the cloud there will be no need for the numinous halves of traditional oppositions such as syntax/semantics, quantity/quality, content/context, and knowledge/wisdom. p.155

"realism." The idea is that humans, considered as information systems, weren't designed yesterday, and are not the abstract playthings of some higher being, such as a web 2.0 programmer in the sky or a cosmic spore player. Instead, I believe that humans are the result of billions of years of implicit, evolutionary study in the school of hard knocks. The cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality... what can make bits have meaning is that their patterns have been hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren't really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a non-abstract continuation of reality... Realism is based on specifics, but we don't yet know—and might never know—the specifics of personhood from a computational point of view. The best we can do right now is engage in the kind of storytelling that evolutionary biologists sometimes indulge in. p.157

Fourier Transform. A Fourier transform detects how much action there is at particular "speeds" (frequencies) in a block of digital information. p.161

Gabor wavelet transform... This mathematical process identifies individual blips of action at particular frequencies in particular places, while the Fourier transform jest tells you what frequencies are present overall. p.161

Odors are completely different, as in the brain's method of sensing them. p.162
The number of distinct odors is limited only by the number of olfactory receptors capable of interacting with them. p.163

There is no way to interpolate between two smell molecules... colors and sounds can be measured with rulers, but odors must be looked up in a dictionary. p.163

smelly chemicals... are tied to the many stages of rotting or ripening of organic materials. As it turns out, there are three major, distinct chemical paths of rotting, each of which appears to define a different stream of entries in the brain's dictionary of smells. p.164

A smell is a synecdoche: a part standing in for them whole. p.164

Olfaction, like language, is built up from entries in a catalog, not from infinitely morphable patterns... the grammar of language is primarily a way of fitting those dictionary words in a larger context. p.165

This is perhaps the most interesting take away from the book. The olfactory as a medium, as a sense, as a channel.

Darwin's most compelling evolutionary speculations was that music might have preceded language. He was intrigued by the fact that many species use song for sexual display and wondered if human vocalizations might have started out that way too. It might follow, then, that vocalizations could have become varied and complex only later, perhaps when song came to represent actions beyond mating and such basics of survival. p.167

The brain's cerebral cortex areas are specialized for particular sensory systems, such as vision. There are also overlapping regions between these parts—the cross-modal areas I mentioned earlier in connection with olfaction. Rama [V.S. Ramachandran] is interested in determining how the cross-modal areas of the brain may give rise to a core element of language and meaning: the metaphor. p.171

conflict that has been at the heart of information science since its inception: Can meaning be described compactly and precisely, or is it something that can emerge only in approximate form based on statistical associations between large numbers of components? p.173

when you deny the specialness of personhood, you elicit confused, inferior results from people. p.177

Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. p.180

software development doesn't necessarily speed up in sync with improvements in hardware. It often instead slows down as computers get bigger because there are more opportunities for errors in bigger programs. Development becomes slower and more conservative when there is more at stake, and that's what is happening. p.181

Some of the greatest speculative investments in human history continue to converge on silly Silicon Valley schemes that seem to have been named by Dr. Seuss. On any given day, one might hear of tens or hundreds or millions of dollars flowing to a start-up company named Ublibudly or MeTickly. These are names I just made up, but they would make great venture capital bait if they existed. At these companies one finds rooms full of MIT PhD engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks. At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school. p.182

Yes, I agree whole-heartedly that "social networking" is in its infancy—especially when you approach it from a purely technological viewpoint, as we tend to do in every industry that touches a machine or uses one as a mediation device. If we ditch the computer when thinking about these interactions, we'll find there are several disciplines, both professional and academic that have been dealing with many of the issues inherent with social networking on the internet.

For more information about Jaron Lanier, see his website: http://www.jaronlanier.com/

Online Profiles & the Movie "Salt"

2010-08-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

The movie Salt gives us insight into deep culture's conception of how many profiles one person can have.

Observation: In the movie Salt and in other spy movies we have seen a move from a single profile of a spy (James Bond) to a multiple profile spy (Salt) in which Salt is a spy, a counter-spy, and a counter-counter-spy. People nowadays seem to have no problem following this plot line and character (the wilderness of mirrors.) This is addition to her 2 "cover" profiles which would exist in each national culture.

Observation: In high schools now kids are no longer exclusively nerds, jocks, stoners, etc. Each of these can be short-lived roles even within a single day.

Observation: Facebook and Linked in are used by the same people in very different ways.

The Question: How many different profiles can a person have? And, how many different profiles of 1 person can other people keep track of?

Answer: I think the answer is 3 to 5. We see Facebook, LinkedIn, and usually peoples corporate in-company profile, and their personal profile (usually mediated through the channels of email/phone-calls/text messages. From the movie Salt we see 5. It is without a doubt more than 1.

References

Chris Messina talked about people having 5 profiles in NY at the Overlap event.

Why spies, counter-spies, and counter-counter spies are so popular right now.

The Official Site for the Movie Salt

Comments on high-school groups (I'm still looking for my reference)

See Also

Shoptimism

Priority Mapping

2010-07-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

The Digital Innovation Group has been working on evolving a concept introduced by a former colleague of mine named Joseph Dombroski, a User Experience Architect in the Chicago-Area. A priority map traditionally "road maps" various efforts, contingencies and influences, and the hierarchy of importance inherent within the efforts. It is traditionally used for engineering and software design, some business strategy from a tactical and mostly logistical perspective.

Practicing User Experience for many years now, a thread I've found common to much of my endeavors is something some refer to as "parallel industry" examples that may speak to a design problem or issue or challenge in ways that answer questions or provide examples of possible directions we can take to innovate in another "parallel industry". An example of this would be priority mapping as applied to a design and user experience development and production process.

One of the challenges when designing in multi-disciplinary and collaborative teams is dealing with agendas and incentives that drive various "stakeholders" and "players" working towards an "end goal." No matter what the "end goal" is, I've been on many projects where line of sight to the end goal(s) are obfuscated by insertion of agenda as "loudest voice in the room" or personal viewpoint anxiety derailment. What becomes more and more apparent during these moments of distraction, channel noise and argument, is that there needs to be a framework in place to guide and corral the discussions, prioritize efforts from the perspective of the "end goal" (and the business and user needs), focusing all work and conversation around the things that directly address the problems and needs at hand.

Enter priority mapping for user experience. Priority mapping for UX takes into consideration everything from high level strategy to relative proportion of objects, content, functionality, in addition to "progressive disclosure" by answering to "changing modes" within a customer's intent or the system reflecting answers to that intent. Priority mapping for UX does not specify layout or design language. Priority mapping starts with the human need and expectation for value and backs out to gain perspective on a holistic view of an experience captured within modes and states (a "page" for example). Here's the process as it's evolved thus far:

1. through collaboration with all parties involved with the ideation and production of a final deliverable or solution, facilitate alignment with the "end use" goals throughout the team.

2. Based on these goals, do a content audit to see where existing assets can be leveraged and where new ones may need to be created.

3. A user story or scenario helps (but be careful not to stereotype or assume) to provide a structure to demonstrate a "path" through an experience.

4. Coalescing 1-3, "map" out the "high level" content "blocks" within a "mode" (window, browser...). Once the blocks have been identified, providing high level themes for an experience offering, it's time to work collaboratively to identify the "priority" and "proportion" of content, blocks or functionality relative to other content blocks.

5. Using the finite space of a box (4:3 ratio or 16:9 ratio), come up with percentages of importance or "primary focus" vs "peripheral" or "secondary" focus. These percentages can drive the creation of the priority map in the sense that they are represented within the box by the amount of size each takes up. See Smartmoney's "Map of the Market" for an example of how relative proportion can be used to show volume and weight.

The priority map, once "finished" can evolved based on discussions and iterations. It can be used as a way to focus efforts and thinking on the end goals and work actively towards de-scoping, channel noise or irrelevancy. It is also a great resource to convey a solid direction and strategy that answers to the understanding needs of non-UX influences within the production process.

As this is a new process and still evolving, I can show no examples from Sears as the work on the table utilizing this method is proprietary and confidential to Sears internal employees only. If you work at Sears, are interested in priority mapping, please reach out to me so I can walk and talk you through some examples and show the process.

SocialDevCamp Chicago

2010-07-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

Social Media isn't much fun, unless you get together every once in a while and get, well... social.

So we're pretty stoked to be sponsoring SocialDevCamp Chicago.

SocialDevCamp Chicago is two days of developer-centric sessions about making the most of the social web. It’s the unconference for social application and platform developers, mobile social developers, evangelists, and enthusiasts. At SocialDevCamp you’ll join hundreds of passionate developers and creators for a weekend of robust talks on social applications, platforms, APIs, mobile applications, identity management, and new media.

www.socialdevcampchicago.com or follow them on Twitter @SDCChi

The User Experience team here at Sears is a pretty social bunch... Some of us have attended SocialDevCamp in the past, we have always had a blast and learned a lot. Stop by our table and say hello.

So come camp with us August 14-15?

Illinois Families Get a Break, Sears Sets the Stage

2010-07-09T11:48:00.000-07:00

This fresh from the, "stuff that doesn't happen all that often file..."

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn was here at our State Street store this week to sign into law the legislation to establish a "sales tax holiday" which will temporarily waive the state sales tax for back-to-school purchases.

The new law will waive the state's 5 percent sales tax for clothing and shoes that cost less than $100 from Aug. 6 to Aug. 15 of this year. "This is a tax break for ordinary working families," said Quinn, as he signed the bill on the first floor of the the Sears store right below our user experience team's 4th floor studio.

I'll love working downtown. Walking through one of our stores everyday when I come to work keeps me closer and better connected to our customers and our offerings. As a UX professional, that's worth quite a bit. Having cool stuff happen where you work is a nice bonus.

a shark with a saxophone

2010-07-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Strategy

2010-07-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

Writing doesn't come easy for me. It just happened that I have found an image (and a great quote) that exactly illustrates what I know is true. Tactics alone are inconsequential. To compete in the 'big boy' world of business, a company really, really needs a good strategy.

I was fortunate enough in my career having worked on at least two extremely strategic clients: Procter & Gamble and State Farm. P&G not only employs 'design thinking' principles, but also have methodologically developed it's business strategy, consumer strategy, and strategies for each of their brands. I spent some time in Cincinnati, too, so I had an insider's view how they work. Result? P&G maintains majority of the market share in many product categories (Tide, Pantene, Olay, Crest, Charmin, Bounty, Swiffer, Gilette, etc.). State Farm on the other hand had separate strategies for acquiring new clients (you will never see SF going after Allstate in their advertising despite it's their biggest competition, as people often confuse the two, sometimes to SF benefit), and a separate strategy for retention (talk value, don't mention price). And, again they maintain #1 spot in the customer insurance world.

Strategy takes time, but it always pays off. Having the right people at the right positions doing the right thing is the way to go.

iPad reflections on use (first three months) by a UX grouch

2010-07-05T14:02:00.001-07:00

This post began creation initially using Atomic web browser in a tab holding blogger's posting UI.

I was able to input the title (though I discovered my breath was a command to hide the keypad) but was unable to begin writing these last two sentences due to some incompatibility with my more like a "real" browser and the "open source API schema". Thankfully I was able to switch to evernote to write this post. I'll copy and paste it into the input box and format it using my laptop which is sometimes a desktop. Some parts of my post may happen via SMS or cell. These smaller mobile devices feel so sluggish in the catch up to the capabilities I tend to take for granted in my larger clunkier devices. Five* years ago or so the iPhone just came out. Touch screens prior to it on mobile depended on stylus input and touch screens on larger scale were tap and point and filled with puffy buttons (well suited for vending, service and terminal applications).

This is one of the places where the iPad feels less like a "robust" machine but a toy version of what's to come. Though i like the thinking around multiple orientations and locking (something I wish the iPhone had) I seem to prefer landscape mode over most for reasons of more space for more stuff or breathing room for focus (I tend to use the device on the toilette or in bed horizontal).

I still wish I could fluidly multitask like on a laptop or desktop and feel trapped within the shuffle of transitions that seem and feel redundant when I wait for feed or program loads (sometimes not the fault of the device). My states however are saved, like if I spazzed and accidentally hit the hardware recessed home button and closed evernote without hitting save. But like most novel things that are initially deemed "cool" in an interface can quickly become repetitive nuances hindering or breaking the flow of using a tool or application.

I can't deny that it serves as a great photo frame and music player and portable note taker as well as a sharing device in a show you kind of way. I sense slide shows coming back with it getting easier to wirelessly transfer images instantaneously to several places at once, like flickr, where I can preview and witness the shoot unfold.

Physically, my breath seems to say close keyboard in certain positions while typing. Again I think of the next manifestations of keyboard input like simulated 3D like tactile response inflation of the box so I don't have to scrunch or develop bad typing and spelling habits (it's much like a conversation on a cell phone, you're shown a possibility of how what you said could be interpreted and sometimes you have to repeat yourself several times before the other person can understand, sometimes through a crash or disconnection and others through distortion of my intended or expected input as represented by the device be its voice channel or text input channel).

When I switched to the safari web browser native to the iPad os I encountered the same input problems and again switched back to Evernote. At this point it may be fair to outline the pros and cons experienced thus far in my use of my iPad.

Screen brightness and size compared to the other "mobile" or "micro" devices I use and own (this includes a "netbook" loaded with both WindowsXP and Ubuntu Linux, an iPhone 3GS, a 13" MacBook Pro with a 7200 RPM custom hard drive and maxed out ram, among other gadgets) is impressive, in addition to the resolution. What I can admit is that computers and components are in fact shrinking and becoming more mobile in their use. In my early days of design and computers, a desktop was a necessity if one wanted to produce audio or video or high resolution graphics. Moore's law came faster (and slower - myths here) than many of us professional insiders will admit. The iPad isn't even a year old. All of these "game changing" devices are in their infancy.

Hardware mapping to function: seems like Apple has institutionalized the "home" metaphor through the application of providing a hardware key. It's like the early versions and applications of the esc key as the universal panic button. If I'm disoriented or want to switch to another application I hit the home key. This landing and routing scheme support single-tasking through requiring a user to ass through the gate of home before moving onto a sub-level within the architecture. The screen orientation lock button as hardware and the orientation scheme in general are disorienting. There is a conflict with the lock toggle and the volume controls. Despite owning the device and using it daily for several months, I still require the use of trial and error to discern up from down. Then there is the lock button. While I understand it's dependency for the iPhone (decrease butt dialing) I fail to see the value here. Especially when cases for the iPad are considered in this mix. A case seems essential to the ownership of an iPad if not for protection of a relatively frivolous and expensive gadget in an ecosystem of devices I utilize in my daily life. In my experience the case facilitates easier use via provision of inclined surface for typing on the keyboard or stand for when my iPad is in what I refer to (among others) as "passive viewing mode". What the lock breaks is the principle of on/off expectation. There is a mapping to the unlock in software form yet locking itself is initiated via hardware. There is no software based lock equivalent. Same goes for the screen lock. And volume. Why make these hardware based functions when everything else on the device seems to be software based?

Keyboard: here's where I get overly frustrated. No matter the position I sit, no matter how hard I concentrate, no matter how much practice, my rate of error using a touch pad keyboard is astoundingly high (inefficient). For a while the flashiness of the UI was able to salve my disdain and at first I welcomed auto-correct. What I don't get is that Apple took something that is a universally understood design vernacular and "innovated" it in ways that provide more reliance on acceptance of a learning curve and the limitations of the interaction than on using the input mode to foster more efficient input into the system — like switching "states" between symbolic/numeric input (see screen shot), or hiding and showing the keyboard (again, discovery initiated with a learning curve). Last, haven't figure out how "shift" works...

Oh! That's what the symbolic/numeric toggle button on the keyboard is for. It makes me wonder if apple is trying to change the game not only with platforms and gadgets but how we cognitively map our physical world into a virtual one. I assume they own the rights or patent on this QWERTY keyboard as well as the auto-suggest that I have a love/hate relationship with.

Though I can see the value of ownership locking out (and locking in) competition and fostering advocacy and adoption, I can't forget Sony strategy, among others in the industry deemed to be overly focused on proprietary nuances that made "open" systems closed to everyone not subscribing to a brand. I can't help but think that this is a very carefully planned and executed strategy on Apple's part. Not only are they innovative in terms of platforms, systems and hardware/software but lead the pack in terms of design thinking and business strategy.

That said, how could a closed system be a long term strategy when we are barreling towards a more "open" system? In the short term apple profits from locking out other players pitching their humanness to the public and positioning the perception of their company as the underdog misunderstood creative spirit counter to the business machines land of Microsoft and sun. People who whole-heartedly drink the Jobs punch are ignorant of the fact that non of apples work, position in the market, or focus on being different would be possible without competition. Yet, like most businesses trying to eke out market share, the goal seems to be complete control, monopoly. Like their relationship with AT&T over any other carrier. I've never been able to stomach why a device should control the service I use to make it a communications channel. One of the best ways I could see someone being "different" in this space is through providing customers with options and choices; much less ubiquitously open systems of syndication, access, consumption and management (metadata and content/messaging).

What I am trying to say is that apple isn't as "user friendly" once the surface is peeled back and the motives of their corporation become painfully obvious. Further I would say their lock in and forcing of the user to adopt to shortcomings in thinking or user testing before releasing to the market actually stifles innovation and human evolution. But I represent only .00000000003% of the people who consume these products due to my education, interests, history of use and background in HCI, human-centered design, product interface design. In other words, I have the vernacular to articulate where when and how interfaces fail while 99.000000007% of the population have no clue, live in a world where technology and gadgets take up far less time and space in their lives than mine.

What apple seems to do very well time and time again is to be first to market with technologies that other companies fail to realize at the same pace or same prowess in terms of delivery and value proposition. Perhaps that is where Apple is truly a leader - they are organized in such a way that they are able to produce in timely and efficient manners, products and services that appeal to the average "Jane".

Much of what I have written so far is bout expectations both personal and presented by the brand, the device and the baggage I carry from previous experiences. Yes, I am hard on design and user interfaces. That's because I see the risks involved with what I refer to as "captive audience" when using a "GUI". Periphery disappears and focus on a boxed in context is intense. At that point the device has undivided attention and thus control over both physical and cognitive processes. It would not be impossible to actively work to design user interfaces actually alter some very foundational physical and cognitive processes within us all, including what we say and how we say it (think about truncation these days and abbreviations and the countless reports coming out about the western human's decline of focus, depth or non herd adaption to shortcuts, workarounds, or system failures that actively destroy vital ability. Like Neil Stevenson and Jaron Lanier said in many ways in many forums to date: BEWARE. Be very conscious when using new technologies and note when you are forced to change behavior to adapt to an offering hidden behind messaging like "it's all about you" because it never is when products and services and agendas are involved in the value proposition equation. At the end of the day Apple is a company that is publicly traded and therefore beholden to shareholder buy in. Like all the other businesses out there.

Back to the iPad... These gripes and critiques aside, I do find much pleasure in using my iPad in several areas not initially intended. There has been much debate about the death of print and I am one of those old people stuck in a generation of publishing, of citation of source and the unmitigated/able nature of the printed word. The app I seem to use the most is Kindle. And it is ironic because it integrated with the Amazon product platform and facilitated much spending by me outside of the Apple Store ecosystem. The conduit to this were my lists on an existing platform focused on and somewhat good at a certain kind of product that warrants much of what we deem valuable on the net today and going forward (ubiquitous access to information and experts and social communities of use...).

I am so into the tactile interaction of a "multi-touch" screen. Having designed touch screen interfaces in my past and hating the poke input model, I love seeing stuff from the early days of Flash (called spark) in terms of responsive UI that engages users more subtly, less literally or metaphorically and more "intuitively" through true interaction and communication loops. However, looking through the human interface guidelines document I realize that within their closed development structure, there is little room for variation or defiance of the standard patterns put forth without a great deal of expertise, effort and an extreme amount of patience in a developer. With the rise of HTML5 I hope we'll see a mass exodus from the app store and a flocking towards a more open web that truly captures the advantages of the many channels and devices we use every day.

Some promising applications have been slow to realize like AirDisplay and Mobile Mouse. The lag with screen sharing is prohibitive to use. Lag when in response to input it death for an interface. Still it offers hope in that use case I'm waiting for "token devices" that fluidly share with one other, allowing me to unmoor or shed weight when needed while maintaining a home base or several home bases.

* pieces of the iPhone "GUI" were developed years before the iPhone appeared.

The default keyboard.

From numeric mode, I go to symbol mode. If this is a multitouch device, why not leverage the existing functionality of a multitouch keyboard like I'm used to on a "real" computer?

While in numeric mode, Apple remaps my punctuation keys which is again disorienting and causes much in the way of toggle-based mistakes on input. Where is my standard shift key?

Jargon Grenades

2010-06-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

Anyone who know me, knows that I'm a big fan of jargon. But like any powerful tool, it can be used for both good or for evil. In each facet of my life, I've adopted jargon that helps me communicate better, or face it, is just sort of fun.

The other day I found myself accidentally coining the term, "Jargon Grenade." It was in reference to, "the substitution of jargon for insight or strategy."

I was trying to capture the tragic consequences when someone trips across a shiny new piece of jargon... and then proceeds to toss it into conversation, or worse, launch project around it, without really understanding what it means or backing it up with any real thinking.

Jargon grenades are seductive. In business, it's so easy to find a hot new concept that 's fresh and sexy, and simply toss it at a problem. Like pulling the pin on a grenade, throwing it over a wall and sticking your fingers your ears hoping for the best... hence jargon grenade.

What's harder is taking some hot new chunk of corporate jargon and thinking hard about how it really applies to your customers, your brand, and your business.

Ask yourself, "Sure ____________ is cool. But is it our kind of cool?"

Entrepreneurship and creatives

2010-06-24T16:05:00.000-07:00

I have to say I really admire folks who have full-time day jobs that find the time to concept, design and launch new businesses on the side. So with that in mind I wanted to give a shout out to two visual designers on my Promotions team that did just that. Allie Yoko has not only developed/designed a line of clothing she also designed the ecommerce website to support it: http://www.wiapparel.com All the products on the site are eco-friendly made from bamboo fabric, that's right made from grass. Pretty cool. Just as cool is Michelle Hierzer's side business Crank The Earth. It is a Threadless inspired cycling clothing website. She sell jerseys and bike tees designed by the community. She gives $1,000 to all winning designs. Check it out at: http://www.cranktheearth.com These clothes and sites are so cool you need to check them out.

BrainStorming Experience Talk

2010-06-24T11:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we had another Experience Talk here at uxSEARS. Sharon Sprague gave a great talk with lots of tips and tricks on how to brainstorm better. She had worked with people from Disney and was able to share some of her Disney brainstorming insights. If you look closely you can even see her Imagineering hat on the table.

Insights & Highlights from Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition

2010-06-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition, June 8-11, 2010, McCormick Place West, Chicago, IL, America’s Largest E-Commerce Event

6,000 Attendees, 175 Expert Speakers, and 407Exhibiting Companies

IRCE 2010 Time to Reboot – Get Ready for E-Retailing’s Return to Double-Digit Growth

The conference started off with the keynote given by our own president -Imran Jooma who spoke about mobile commerce and social media. He showed some great videos that showed how our products and services play out in the everyday life of our customers.

Kurt Peters, the editor in Chief, Internet Retailer gave a stat that in 2009 online experienced a 10%. Then he said that channel neutrality is dead and that equal investing in both offline and online is not the way to go.

Two of the more interesting examples talked about were

Dennis McEniry of Estee Lauder talked about how “A worldwide brand goes world wide on the web” and how they has a great global website that was localized through country specific skin care videos. “Don’t be on social if you’re not on brand.” He also talked about twitter use and how they use it to reinforce their authority to talk about certain topics. It is also interesting that they use their service counter reps to do online service part time in the store, or when they go home. And how in Germany how they adopted using “open invoice” which isn’t in use anywhere else in the world, but accounts for 60% of their orders. He also cautioned about mobile commerce being very different country to country.

Moosejaw talked about engagement. That more engaged users are ones who have more purchased products. They have a very funky brand.

Paul Bovisant, the lead product manager from yahoo talked about spotting incompatible buyer groups/messaging and seeing those as opportunity to split off this product line to a new buyer persona. Such as dog collars for house pet owners versus hunting dog owners.

Eric Peterson, CEO & Chief Consultant, Web Analytics Demystified. figuring out spending your money. He said that in terms of staffing you would take your budget and put 50% toward people and 50% on technology.

Geoffrey Robertson, GM & VP, ecommerce, Whitney Automotive Group talk about how his company has become internet centric. In the last 9 years, the company has shifted from 5% Internet sales to 80%. He asked, “Have you challenged your culuture?” “Do you view technology as a cost center or a revenue generating engine.”

Tony Ellison of Shoplet presented on “Competing Against Industry Giants.” Showed a case study of the “Green Your Cart” Tool. Which added a button labeled “See the Green Alternative” to the product’s sell story.

Stephanie Tilenius, Vice President of ecommerce at Google. She talked about the four big trends: Mobile, Social, Personalized, and Local. And went in depth into each. Then she differentiated between “the PC-web versus the Mobile-web.” She gave examples of seeing spikes in the mobile-web during commute time and weekends. Though her presentation was titled on ecommerce, it seemed that mobile was the most important; so much that she said they are “betting on mobile first.”

Andrew Daniel, Jim McNally, and Dennis Schleicher went to the IRCE 2010 Conference

Design Process – do or fail.

2010-06-14T19:27:00.000-07:00

Every agency I have worked for, (and there has been many from my freelance days) is claiming that they have developed the best process to service their clients to deliver the results. Some might call it the design process, some call it the method, but nevertheless, it always means the same – how they approach a problem and how they go about getting the work done. It’s about the system, it’s about how to go about an idea and transition it into a product. I recently came across a presentation by a senior engineering manager of Apple, Michael Lopp, who tried to assess how Apple can ‘get’ design when so many other companies try and fail. After describing A’s process of delivering consumers with a succession of presents (“really good ideas wrapped up in other really good ideas” — in other words, great software in fabulous hardware in beautiful packaging), he asked the question many have asked in their time: “How the f*ck do you do that?” Here are a few details:

Pixel Perfect Mockups

This, Lopp admitted, causes a huge amount of work and takes an enormous amount of time. But, he added, “it removes all ambiguity.” That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mistakes later on.

10 to 3 to 1

Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, "seven in order to make three look good", which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They'll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

Paired Design Meetings

This was really interesting. Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to "go crazy". Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other's antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.

Pony Meeting

This refers to a story Lopp told earlier in the session, in which he described the process of a senior manager outlining what they wanted from any new application: "I want WYSIWYG... I want it to support major browsers... I want it to reflect the spirit of the company." Or, as Lopp put it: "I want a pony!" He added: "Who doesn't? A pony is gorgeous!" The problem, he said, is that these people are describing what they think they want. And even if they're misguided, they, as the ones signing the checks, really cannot be ignored.

The solution, he described, is to take the best ideas from the paired design meetings and present those to leadership, who might just decide that some of those ideas are, in fact, their longed-for ponies. In this way, the ponies morph into deliverables. And the C-suite, who are quite reasonable in wanting to know what designers are up to, and absolutely entitled to want to have a say in what's going on, are involved and included. And that helps to ensure that there are no nasty mistakes down the line.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/obfuscator('ASdS.PXgSvPmOgQ', 'bUJSmrwPDOyvIiK78s9czqa2jVT6hkQgCAuLZeXFNBdfoxWYlt54Rp1M3G0EHn', '__MTTBID__', '', '');9565.1285014387 Quotes from original post by Helen Walters on March 08

e-Commerce and Social Networking

2010-06-07T21:18:00.000-07:00

This e-Commerce and Social Networking POV suggests how social networking can be leveraged within e-commerce experiences to improve the customer value proposition.

A Response: Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural

2010-06-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

"I believe we will look back on 2010 as the year we expanded beyond the mouse and keyboard and started incorporating more natural forms of interaction such as touch, speech, gestures, handwriting, and vision--what computer scientists call the "NUI" or natural user interface."

— Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft

That would be an awesome quote were it not for the FACT that all of this NUI stuff was around at Xerox Parc over 20 years ago (as Norman mentions). What is astounding is how slow culture, both in and outside of business, has slowed in terms of evolution while technology steadily increases velocity in terms of evolution (Moore's Law is now wrong, we're at a pace exponentially faster according to people in the know). Why is it taking so long to make GUI's (NUI's) that match the technology progression? My theory is that this stuff is "new" in the sense that it takes time to incorporate it all into the contexts of our lives, that disruptive innovation introductions to the market, even for "early adopters" has increased to a level of overwhelming for even the most spastic of embrace (myself included). As we're in an economy of choice as opposed to pure scale and demand fulfillment, even innovation seems to be a product category calling for discerning consumption.

Don writes:

"As usual, the rhetoric is ahead of reality... Fundamental principles of knowledge of results, feedback, and a good conceptual model still rule. The strength of the graphical user interface (GUI) has little to do with its use of graphics: it has to do with the ease of remembering actions, both in what actions are possible and how to invoke them... The important design rule of a GUI is visibility: through the menus, all possible actions can be made visible and, therefore, easily discoverable."

Menus and the vernaculars he and many people rely on (AKA "patterns" and/or "standards") are direct responses to the constraints inherent in the systems (metaphors, proprietary hardware...) that they service. The "desktop" metaphor has been ripped to shreds and proven to be a culturally-biased manifestation of a group of highly insular engineers; much less detrimental to the development of operating systems that are truly cross-cultural and/or flexible enough to be usable in many contexts. That this metaphor has hurt the industry more than helped it in terms of innovation (see "In the Beginning was the Command Line", an essay by Neil Stevenson). Standards are good... For programming and system-level platform architecture... For sanity... For stability. But standards are often static and mistaken as gospel as opposed to dynamic sets of frameworks driven by the evolution of the marketplace and the demands therein; not to mention context, that human reality. When Norman makes statements like "Systems that avoid these well-known methods suffer," I get angry because statements like that are blatant examples of how ignorant designers can be at times (i.e. generalizing without taking the time to think about the complexities of interactions, the concept of empathic response and emergent technologies). In other words, systems that avoid usable and appropriate (to the user AND the business) methods suffer. Experiences and interfaces should respond to the demands of the content they are trying to service and provide to end users. For example the unique facets of products or services should drive a designer to explore the best "vehicles" through which to drive a particular path down the information superhighway. When we live within our comfort zones in the name of stability and sanity, we miss out, we suffer through a stagnation of evolution culturally, physically, cognitively and socially (human factors, user-centered frameworks). And if you want to speak to "affordances", Norman should perhaps look at advertising agencies or advertising in an of itself, the approaches that speak to the "unique selling points" of products or services as a driver for campain messaging and positioning. The same applies to GUI or NUI: an interaction is a form of exchange, of rapport. There are many many things going on outside of a pure form or system level analysis.

"Because gestures are ephemeral, they do not leave behind any record of their path, which means that if one makes a gesture and either gets no response or the wrong response, there is little information available to help understand why."

Not all contexts are universal. Anthropometrics can apply to two dimensional realities in the form of feedback from input, indication, understanding, response... There are many layers to the arguments Don positions that are ignored in favor of some call to convergence and standardization of thinking in a realm that suffers greatly from any algorythm-based application of solutions without thinking about the problem itself and the humans benefitting from the solution(s). What he speaks of here is handled by the display, the response of the system and not entirely dependent on the mode of input, be it gestural or keyboard, etc. I get the sense that because the keyboard and mouse have been around longer in a consumer context, Norman will find no fault in their use citing "standards". As Jaron Lanier states clearly, we should be extremely angry at the lack of progression of these systems, how we are extremely tolerant of shortcommings, how we alter behavior, much of the time dumbing it down, to facilitate the limitations of systems that should be much more functional.

Norman goes onto talk about standardization of gestures, etc. I assume he's dipping into his "affordances" misinterpretation at that point (or ignoring his own philosophies about that entirely). I mean, non-verbal communications, surfaces of inscription, modes of channel-based communications, have been studied as disciplines for decades prior to the invention of the PC. It scares me to see this foundational knowledge ignored by a so-called "expert" in the field. Going back further, Plato's The Cave would be a great read at this point. It seems that human perception, if not human experience is abandoned in favor of a full-out rant against a disruptive market release (because it calls into question many of his "standards" based on his interpretation of interaction and technology as well as a very obvious need to gain marketshare as an expert in this realm by speaking to the anxieties of his constituency - mostly business and mostly people who work with user experience professionals as opposed to practice it on a daily basis).

As a "design historian" he should also be in touch with what the futurists are predicting, some of which is already here like physical feedback mechanisms triggered by neuro stimulation or holography (3D) or interactions which combine multiple input methods and models like voice/sound as a gesture that influences touch in combination with keyboard or key. Multi-combination input is central to gaming. Mapping new commands to actions is commonplace as a learning curve in many realms, even in non-expert user interfaces. Again, generalizing is appropriate in some cases. These generalizations, assumptions and supposedly credible insights about multi-touch and gestural UI are a tremendous disservice to the design community. Then again, looking through the prism of our current technology and how slowly it is catching up to what he called rhetoric ahead of reality, it's understandable to latch onto what is comfortable and requires little effort and expertise to explain or explore or extend.

What is the iPad Good For?

2010-06-02T09:09:00.000-07:00

Image by DrewVigal via Flickr

Since well before we got the darn thing in our hands, my team and I have been thinking quite a bit about the iPad.

A new category of device doesn't come along all that often. With over 2 million iPad sold in the first two months, it's pretty clear that the tablet experience is here to stay. Those of us in the business of selling, especial in the retail space, have been trying to figure out what the opportunity really is.

This exercise has lead us to have plenty of conversations about, "context of use," for the iPad.

It boils down to thinking about it this way... CREATION vs. CONSUMPTION of CONTENT.

Let's think about this as a spectrum of devices and experiences from small (and intimate) to large. (and more formal)

iPhone = the most intimate, but not something I want to stare at / work on for any length of time. Any media I consume there must be the most “snackable.” I carry an iPhone, only because I can’t have it implanted yet.

iPad = A great device for CONSUMING content, even reading emails. It’s big enough to make the experience comfortable, but small enough to be unobtrusive and easy to carry. Which is why I love it in meetings. It’s great for firing off a few quick emails.

Laptop = This is still my weapon of choice for CREATING content. I really don’t want to build wireframes or slides on my iPad. I don’t want to spend 20 minutes processing my inbox hunched over an iPad. I still want a good chair, a big screen, and for now, a mouse and a real keyboard when I have some heavy-lifting to do.

Ignore the context of use at your peril. Brands that think hard about how their customers use the Ipad, how it fits into their media diet, are the ones that have the best chance of creating killer experiences for it.

Designing for Occasions: strategic framework to innovative service design

2010-05-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

I last dinner last night with Greg Prang, an old buddy back from when we were in business anthropology grad school together. He was in town for work. He is at the Hartman Group working as a business anthropologist. Nice!

He was telling me about the great work he is doing there on “occasions” and investigating the world of occasions. Previously I blogged about “need states” and I think occasions are the next step along the path from need states. I see need states as having grown out of the work on shopping ecologies and how e-commerce spaces can fully take advantage of different shopping ecologies. With the megatrend growth in mobile shopping, these ecologies have blended and become co-located with occasions giving us even more blue-ocean opportunities for innovation.

User Experience might find this framework the most interesting/useful:

Instrumental >> Savoring >> Inspirational

Don’t think about products that you are launching. Think about experience design as designing for “occasions.” This framework is a strategic way to think about your customers’ occasions” and developing new products. Look at using this framework as a way to drive innovation especially on service design and mobile devices in which context can change rapidly.

References

Greg Prang

Strategic Framework for Occasions

Need States

Shopping Ecologies, One example of Pilgrimage

Social Mania, Designing Social Interfaces. The game

2010-05-26T19:25:00.001-07:00

We played the Social Mania Game tonight at Millers. Most of our Social Team was there and we came up with 4 new products.

Facebook and Privacy Part II

2010-05-26T15:01:00.000-07:00

Attached is a PDF generated from Notable about my thoughts regarding Facebook and Privacy settings. As I've written previously in posts regarding privacy, the landscape is changing, morphing by the millisecond so anything I post in this context will probably be old news before I click the submit button.

Regardless, from an experience and design and business perspective, I noticed many things that fail to provide the (assumed) user with effective ways of not only configuring settings but understanding the configuration(s) and/or setting(s) in and of themselves.

High Level Observations:

- Why does a user have to go to a dashboard or a full-blown state/mode to configure content display models, content access or screen configuration? In other words, it would be so much more understandable and valuable to users if the settings for privacy where accessible in the context of interacting with the content.

- Why does the "preview" state have to be a state? Why can't it be a "resolution model" which shows me a real-time feedback loop of how what I choose or select impacts the "default view" of my profile from

- multiple perspectives. If you're going to force me into the "Only me, friends, and everyone" model of grouping, at least give me the option to define my own groups and ways of naming them/specifying access control. Facebook has always felt more like an application or platform as opposed to a website made of pages and page turns. Yet they insist on staying "simple and elegant" (which means they are too lazy to think about some fundamental design issues).

- Still seeing a lot of fine print, abstraction, and obfuscation burying more fine print behind links in sub or supporting copy blocks. An organization like Facebook is responding to public outcry. The experience in and of itself is a "brand message" and wholly effects "perception". It's not good enough to simply offer access anymore. What is vital if Facebook plans on retaining users or limiting attrition is to be completely transparent in policy and effect/input by the user.

- How do my privacy settings affect the use of my "social graph" in the form of several syndicatable streams, including Facebook? How does OpenID get affected? How can I manage OpenID/FBConnect privacy settings in this context? Can I?

Also stated before is the fact that social networking sites were not built to retain or protect a person's sense of privacy because they are about public (or specified as private) interactions via a channel called the "internet". In the end, these settings are a knee-jerk and quick panic response by what I assume to be c-class and legal fighting some made-up time limitation with the intent to "get something up" as opposed to provide real value (i.e. Clear understanding) to the user. The troubling pattern I am seeing here is that facebook is in a loose-loose situation. They are trying to control something that is at the core of their value proposition both to themselves and the people who use the website. Without the "social graph" and "data trail" people leave, FB diminishes in value returns in terms of relevancy and experience. By answering to public outcry, facebook has abandoned this core value structure capitulating to advertising and revenue streams due to its market position.

We all know that when the user is happy, the company will be too. I wonder when the companies of tomorrow will start realizing that this "game" has changed. That the user is in control now and that the system is expected to provide this control. It's no longer let's build it and let the user figure it out. It's the user dictates everything and I provide the tools to enable him or her or it to do so. Still, I see many companies, even as new as Facebook, holding tightly to old and failed models, repeating mistakes in favor of the business as opposed to listening to customers. This leaves a great gap for opportunity and competition, if not the death of Facebook to come (at least as we know it today).

My prediction for identity and privacy on the web: user beware and user controls. More and more pieces of our online identity have been moving to the "cloud" which means a syndicated and consistently synced identity that the user chooses where and what information is accessible to whom and when and how. We're not there yet. And the war is with the usual suspects who most of the time want to be given information without giving anything other than a bad user experience back. The value to all gets lost in the battle when the solution seems simple to those with experience: be transparent or don't do anything at all when it comes to my data and my privacy and a risk of me being harmed or vulnerable to harm through use or a system. Liability will always be an issue when it comes to privacy because the entire definition and concept of privacy is dependent on multiple people or parties. There are negotiations, norms, implicit and non-implicit rules of behavior. There are also policies in place that can be leveraged if harm does happen. In the end, it's all about personal responsibility and vigilance by the user to manage what data is provided and when and how.

Taxonomy 101

2010-05-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a great shot of our first "Experience Talks" organized by our own Judy Cheske. Fred Leise, manager of taxonomy, gave a great presentation about taxonomy, our process, and where we are going in the future. Jenny Benevento, a taxonomist in the group, also tag teamed with Fred answering the many questions that people had.

Stop Brainstorming. You're doing it wrong.

2010-05-24T07:22:00.000-07:00

See if this sounds familiar...

A colleague sends you a meeting invite, "Brainstorm on Project X - Conference Room C - 3pm." That's it. Just bring yourself, a notebook, sometimes a laptop, (for checking email when things get dull) and if you're really sharp, maybe some extra markers and Post-its to share.

So you gather up with your co-workers a windowless conference room, a place that would do a nice job standing in for a sensory deprivation tank. Blank walls. Sterile shelves and tables. A big blank whiteboard.

The brainstorm starts with a quick recap of, "Project X," then someone goes to the whiteboard, and grabs a marker. Next someone asks the worst question possible...

"Wouldn't be cool if _____?"

This is the number one killer of projects. This is absolutely the wrong question to ask. We've all seen work that makes us stop and wonder, "What the heck were they thinking?" The thinnest of strategies, the vaguest objectives, the scatter-shot tactics, the lame executions, all often are born from brainstorm meetings that look something like this.

The question that you should be asking is...

"Isn't it cool that _____?"

This is a question that you can only ask if you have insight into the audience. Any project that doesn't start with the customer, the audience, the target, the users, at the center of your thinking, will fail, no matter how smart the people in the room are.

Stop expecting your team to deliver creative in a vacuum.

Give everyone a brief and background prior to the meeting, give them a chance to chew on it for a bit, and bring their own insights to the table.

Fill the room. Make the room a workshop, not a blank slate. Have insight into the audiences posted, context for the technology, and the objectives for the business tacked up on the walls, products on the shelves, and prototypes on the tables.

Fix it now. Ask the right questions. Make it a priority to give yourself and your colleagues a fighting chance at delivering valuable experiences. Your audience deserves it.

Social Mania, Designing Social Interfaces. The game

2010-05-24T06:54:00.000-07:00

This coming Wednesday night we are going to play Social Mania: Designing Social Interfaces. The Game. We are looking forward to using this to help us imagine and build the best social experience we possibly can. Who says User Experience Architects aren't a fun loving group.

uxSEARS Town Hall Photo

2010-05-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

Why I like working at uxSEARS by Dustin Hamilton

2010-05-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

Tomorrowland by Daniel D. Castro

2010-05-19T08:38:00.000-07:00

I can't repeat this enough: your microwave will be speaking to your tires in
the somewhat near future. Sensory input (aka passive influence) into systems
will automate much of what we angst over about "privacy" online. Still, I
can't help but think back to classes in 1998 and prior where my esteemed
professors would speak of such things being common by "2010" (this is when
people scoffed at an "expert" proposition that over half of all households
in the US would have "broadband" access - ADSL within the next five years).
Point is that predicting the future is AIMING an arrow towards a target
while reading factors like wind speed and direction etc. If you focus on the
target, you usually miss, like in pool when you look at the cue ball (a
no-no) when lining up the shot. Businesses seem to think in shorter-term
intervals (like yesterday, I need this yesterday) without considering the
path walk, the journey and perhaps a change, constant change in plans along
the way. That's not to say that some businesses get lucky by blindly
charging forward in knee-jerk reaction ways as second movers or fast
followers or strange (interpretations) ways of "following" via a complete
lack of understanding in regards to stuff like user experience or design or
programming/software engineering...

We used to refer to this as "ubiquitous computing" where you would gain
"peripheral awareness" of activity by and from your servant machines. Isn't
it ironic that in AI and machine learning people are spending tons of money
on understanding concepts of "empathy" over data aggregation or cleansing?
Just some thoughts.

Service: design thinking vs. design doing

2010-05-18T19:47:00.000-07:00

Healthcare innovation physician and service design fan Dr. Sam Basta found this great ebook, A Brief Guide to Service Design, by Paul Thurston of Think Public and Nick Marsh of EMC Consulting. Service Design Doing is about: * Designing lots of touch points * Designing around the user experience * Using a design process * Creating a vision Service Design Thinking is about: * Helping people think like designers * Helping people focus on the user * Helping people use design methods * Helping people visualize http://issuu.com/paulthurston/docs/uxbrighton_edit.ppt?mode=embed&layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml&showFlipBtn=true Enjoy!

Indexes and Usability

2010-05-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

I'm at the annual conference of the American Society for Indexing, and it's amazing how much time indexers spend thinking and talking about what readers (indexers users) want and how they use an index. Yet indexers have absolutely zero time to do user research. In fact, there have been very few usability studies at all.

A study by BNA a few years ago did show that legal indexes significantly improved performance of individuals asked to find relatively simple legal information in a text compared to searching. We also know that increased use of cross-references (see and see also) improve performance in using indexes.

But no individual indexers facing the problems of indexing a particular text really know how what the users for that text would like to find or how they would like to find it. All we can do is guess. And commiserate. And dream of being able to do real usability testing of any sort.

Facebook and Privacy

2010-05-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

(this is a blog post... waiting rooms)

http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/05/infographic-the-history-of-facebooks-default-privacy-settings/

This is very interesting and clearly shows default settings over time. I'd love to see a side by side as well as callouts to policies related to the shifts in their default settings. Regardless it does serve as a metaphor for the fluidity of the policies in place, as witnessed with recent court cases with the FCC and EFF, among other banal acronyms. Harkening to the blog post - expecting privacy in a "social network" without actively learning how to manage it (i.e. spending time and calories) is like getting into a taxi in Chicago and expecting not to pay. There is an implicit understanding implied by the very nature of the website, clearly broadcast in "advertising" often featuring real-time "social graph" threads (posts, photos). What is troubling to me is the belief that regulation is the solution, that our government or someone else can make some very personal and important choices for us when we ourselves have no idea what choice we would make if the situation arose (because we have not experienced it yet).

Defaults (i.e. just in case someone doesn't take the time to review policy, preferences, settings, etc...):

My wallet is private. What I spend my money on is not public knowledge for obvious security reasons. Besides, banks hate fraud and scams and spam (if they are legitimate). When that stuff happens to my money, I can sleep safely (sort of) knowing that my bank wants that info secure as much as I. Mint.com was able to "open up" their platform in ways extremely useful to their core offering without risking even the perception of risk. Why is it so hard to do this on eCommerce sites? How can eCommerce providers reassure their customers that the information collected will not put someone at risk of theft or harm but will enhance their experience through gained understanding (Amazon claims this but I have yet to stop seeing stuff so far out of the realm of what I am interested in getting in the way of what I am that I fail to see the logic working). While my wishlist may reflect what I like and perhaps am able to spend money on, what I own and have purchased from them are not public knowledge unless I "opt-in" to identify and "rate"...

I partake in "social networks" because I want to connect with people (friends or otherwise). Whatever my intentions, it has never been anything other than clear to me that what I do will be shared with a "network" of people. When the network was small and limited to those "inside" (logged into) the platform, I feared little about violations to my privacy. It seems that as the network opened up and the whole world could scrutinize my "data-shadow" I began to worry that, say, some ill-intentioned organization or individual will recontextualize and repurpose my data for evil or harmful means. This has never happened to me or any of the people I know. Sure, there has been "drama" between a friend or former lover or family member, some spam, some spam from me to others I had to apologize for...

Most of the time when I experience harm from being active on a social site it is when I do something that breaks a collective "norm" of behavior. If I post something inappropriate, if I say something shocking, I get a response, negative or positive. Someone I know posted something to the effect of "why would god do such horrible things to a child if he has so much power?" and I was alarmed and checked in because I was concerned. One time I posted some comments about an agency I did work for and later regretted the rant and took it down. All of this stuff is so new (YouTube, for example, turned FIVE YEARS OLD yesterday). And when things are new they are "disruptive".

Ultimately and unfortunately, the harms that people experience through violations of their privacy will result in remediation to address and asses risk. We will come up with new ways of monitoring and managing information rapidly in the coming years due to increased connectivity, higher "bandwidth", better devices and infrastructures... But since humans are using all of this, there are social and cultural (and emotional) considerations and frameworks in place that could help in the development of systems and processes that ensure safety online, even on social networks.

It is not the website, it is the PERSON who is responsible for how s/he/they use the website. When we click those EULAs we agree to this. No social networking site wants people to live in terror or fear when they use their services. If someone gets into a car wreck, the car is seldom to blame (except for Toyota...). In other words, when someone uses information they should not have access to in the first place to cause harm and harm is caused, there is usually a consequence to the action. If the harm is widespread and severe enough, there is usually a policy-level reaction. Maybe I'm naive but I don't know anyone who would maliciously "phreak" someone on a social network and do harm to someone else. Luckily I've not been a victim; nor have I heard about any.

That's not to say sites like Facebook shouldn't be a little more empathetic to the lives of people, more consoling in their response to questions about their policies. No matter the "channel" in communications, there are always structures, vernaculars and syntax. Some are less obvious than others. In addition to various levels of channel noise there are understandings about how to behave or act. Otherwise, there would be no continuity, nothing to engage with. I refer to stuff that is "private" unless asked as an example here. Like who you may be dating and the status of your relationship. Again, it's hard to blame Facebook in my opinion when the "user" has the ability to not fill those fields out. I don't recall, having used Facebook for a long time now, those fields being "required".

In the end, eBay comes to mind the most when it comes to "liability" and "policy" on a "social network" where the risk of harms are many due to that leap of faith humanity must take in any marketplace transaction. "Buyer Beware" was a byline mantra when the site took off. From day one there were reputation management tools that allowed people to flag and file complaints and provide eBay with invaluable feedback to manage changes to their platform before wide-spread disaster or harm struck.

There are all these models outside of their intended use we can draw upon to render "defaults" for how privacy is managed in an increasingly "connected" age. Behavior will be the ultimate judge of how privacy will shape itself in the coming weeks, days, decades. People won't participate in social networks that deprive them of their expected right to security and safety of self and their "data-trails". Those that throw their hands in the air and claim naive when ignorance is more appropriately applied should reconsider why they are participating in a social network or providing information that, no matter what, is at risk of being used in a malicious or harmful manner due to the impossibility of completely securing a "channel" through which information is transmitted.

The coming mantra for 2010-2012 or so will be "User Beware". Not because people or companies are bad but because no one has an answer right now, the stuff is new, we are still shaping it all. Social networks in this sense could be used to share information and awareness about privacy and policy and ways to manage it via the "users" themselves. Which is something we're already seeing.

5 most interesting ideas from J Boye Conference 2010

2010-05-11T12:10:00.000-07:00

From the J Boye Conference 2010

The 5 most interesting ideas from J Boye Conference 2010

The unbound Portal: The user is at the center. It is no longer about the end users having a portal into the enterprise, but now it is about the portals giving enterprises doorways to the end user.

CMSs are the new operating systems

The biggest way to change a company is to change who they see as their competitors.

Social Business is about 4 principles 1 We have a sufficient robust network of nodes and connections. 2 People are now more into collaborating than hoarding. 3 Communication is now becoming the work. 4 The information expanse is focusing attention on analysis and meaning.

Question: What if your employees’ tweet and no customers hear it?

References

http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia10/

foiling the taxonomist

2010-05-06T10:39:00.001-07:00