Category: Business Main Categories

Thursday 8/21/2008
Business, Design, Writing

You loyal few RSS subscribers know that I’ve failed to post for quite a while. (I have no visitors.) Since taking my job at Belkin I’ve been struggling a bit for time and against the urge to post things that might be too Belkin-specific. So I’m toying with a few overlapping ideas; I want to know what you think of them.

1. Make posting easier. Take advantage of microblogging techniques and mobile software to make quick posts possible from anywhere.
2. Make my “read-later” list public. Things I find interesting enough to mark for later perusal might be of interest to others. Tagging might be useful in this data set.
3. Do some sprints. Choose a topic and make short daily posts about that topic for a specified period of time, maybe 30 days or 90 days. Possibilities include “Today’s UX winner and loser,” “Would be better if…,” “GenX grows up,” etc. These topics could have different visual designs, although I’ve done a lot of visual design wheel-spinning in the past.
4. Open up the topics. Hinted at above. It doesn’t have to be 100% design or user experience.
5. Loosen the filter. Even half-formed thoughts are fair game, if reasonably presented in an effort to engage.

My goal is to reinvigorate my blog by allowing shorter posts and a broader range of posts. My wish is that this will foster discussion, get some things out of my head where I can refer to them later, and help me be a better observer of my surroundings and influences. What do you think? Does this seem like a good approach? Any tips or ideas?

3 comments

Wednesday 1/9/2008
Business, Design

Trapped on Palm?

My Twitter question about money management alternatives for iPhone hasn’t exactly borne fruit, but there are buds on the tree. I’ve been a loyal but increasingly less-satisfied Palm user since the Palm III launched in 1998. All that is preventing me from ditching Palm OS and getting an iPhone is my personal finance workflow.

Maybe I’m a weirdo

I have enjoyed accounts that always balance, zero surprises, and an enhanced ability to understand and plan the movements of my money since I started using Ultrasoft Money and Microsoft Money together in mid-2000. I could (and can!) enter bank, ATM, credit card, even cash transactions into the Palm as they happen, syncing to Microsoft Money later. This works well enough that I tolerate a relatively cumbersome process to preserve this work flow even now that I am on a Mac at home. I open Missing Sync, turn off syncing, fire up Parallels, press the sync button on my cradle, then reverse the steps to sync my calendar, etc. Seven steps where one button press used to do.

Sure, there’s Quicken for Mac and Pocket Quicken, but everyone I know who has used Quicken on the Mac says that it is a festering pile, and each subsequent version is a higher pile with more festering than the previous. No thanks.

If only…

There are a number of up-and-coming personal finance packages for Mac, including Cha-Ching , Liquid Ledger (sold as packaged software at Apple stores), MoneyDance , iCash , Checkbook , and others. None of them support the entry of records on a mobile device.

This leaves a web-based solution. Names that get bandied about here include Mint , Wesabe , and the online banking offerings of Citi, Wells Fargo, WaMu, and Back of America. But none of these allows you to enter transactions as they happen.

Wesabe to the rescue…someday?

Actually, that isn’t strictly true. If you can find the "Create a Cash Account" button buried somewhere in Wesabe’s "upload" pages, you can create a cash account that will accept your input. That’s a start. This last bit of info was pointed out to me by Marc Hedlund, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Wesabe (@ wesabe on Twitter). Marc heard my call for an iPhone-capable money management option, and mentioned that "Wesabe does that." An enlightening email conversation ensued wherein he revealed:

• They plan to make it easier to find the cash account setup functionality.
• They are working on the capability to enter transactions against other accounts.
• Auto-upload of account information gleaned from your bank is about to get a lot better, with essentially automatic support even for accounts that don’t currently support auto-update. The timeline for this was "in about a month," and we were exchanging email on new year’s day, so mid-February is probably realistic.
• They are working on making the setup of their desktop uploaders even easier. The OS X uploader needs to be manually invoked or put in your list of login items, too high a hurdle for consumer-level goods.

This looks very promising. None of the above list has launched, of course, so it isn’t real. Yet. I made some additional suggestions and complaints:

• Offering a cash account by default, and having the capability to add transactions to other accounts on by default, would require no configuration by the user (they wouldn’t have to find the spot where you turn these features on) and would seem internally consistent.
• A way to suppress an account without losing its transactions from history would be worthwhile.
• The information hierarchy around transactions is a bit messy; social content (related to the tags you give merchants and individual transactions?) is mixed right in with data about the transaction, and needs a bit of separation, for example.

Yes, but what do I really need?

After reading my extended complaining (this is hard to find, this is odd, your homepage has no background color), Marc asked the critical question: "Other than upcoming transactions, are you missing anything in what we provide today, in order to drop what you’re using now?" Ah, good. I had to think about it a bit. What parts of Microsoft Money and Ultrasoft Money did I depend on, and what could I discard? This required some thought. My list:

• Reconciliation. With updates coming rapidly from the banks, etc., this is really just a way to answer questions like: What showed up that I didn’t know about? Did I enter something in the wrong account? Why is my balance not what I expect? Am I current as of this statement?
• Recurring transactions. I make heavy use of these in Money; they’re great for paychecks, subscriptions, rent, etc. With the caveat that if a payment requires my action (such as sending a check), I need a reminder, not an auto-entry.
• Offline capability (maybe).

Those are the must-haves. I have made use of, but can live without, the next tier of features:

• Splits. Paychecks especially go into a lot of different buckets (taxes, insurance, HCRA, some to savings, some to checking, etc.). I suppose I could fake that with little constellations of recurring transactions.
• Reminders for scheduled transactions.
• Loan accounts.
• 401(k), IRA, and other investment accounts.
• Debt reduction and other planning features. The math for debt reduction planning is so simple that this could be a bit of content rather than a tool. Allowing creation of recurring transactions/reminders from such a plan would be a great feature, if the recurring transaction interface is solid.

My bad

It turns out that they do splits with a clever modification to tags; you can add a dollar amount to a tag for a particular transaction. This is easier to use than the split interfaces in Money or Quicken. They have a demo video for this feature that shows it off nicely.

As this all wound down, I told Marc I would relate my ideas about transaction view. I had better get on that (in an upcoming post). Also, the unmentioned player here is Quicken Online and their recently-announced iPhone-capable mobile version. Watch this space.

2 comments

Sunday 11/11/2007
Business, Design

A new grocery store opened in my neighborhood last week. Fresh & Easy claims to provide high-quality food at “unbelievable” prices in a friendly, small-store format. They further claim caring for the environment and an emphasis on local sourcing of produce.

Our little slice of Los Angeles is grocery-starved, so Thursday’s hotly anticipated opening was well-attended. When we visited on Sunday we found that the produce and well-hyped prepared food shelves were nearly bare. The store was only moderately busy, so we plowed ahead in search of a few staples and to check out the selection.

Afterward, my wife claimed she sort of wished she had a blog because she felt like writing about how disappointed she was. I felt similarly; it seemed that the store lived up to little of its advanced billing.

• One row of produce with all produce wrapped in plastic.
• Many rows of the usual packaged goods (cereal, toothpaste, etc.) but with surprisingly limited selection in each category.
• Low shelves to create an open feeling but with rows ending too close to the edges of the store, creating congestion at the endcaps.
• Dairy and other products paired with organic equivalents, but with excessive price premiums for organic, and par or higher prices for the standard.
• 100% self-scan checkout, but with none of the visual or geographic cues that would help patrons unfamiliar with the store (as all are at this point) queue up efficiently or navigate the checkout system quickly. People were so confused just trying to choose a line that staff were stepping in to ring people up just to create a sense of order.
• The offer of “$5 off your first order of $20 or more” was marred by a (common) alcohol restriction and a (surprising) dairy sctrictre, making our $32 tab (how did we spend over $12 on dairy?) ineligible for the discount.
• And the “free reusable shopping bag, replaced for life?” A common medium-gauge plastic bag with thin handles, little better than the usual grocery-store plastic bag we hope to displace with reusable bags.

Truly forgettable.

What does this have to do with software design? Your product has to do what it says on the box.

The top claims your product makes are those captured in the name of the product. Fresh & Easy needs to be thoroughly both. If it is Fresh-ish and sort of Easy, you lose. In Fresh & Easy’s case, the produce was fresh, but this freshness was masked and made uncertain by overpackaging. The environmental message was further diminished by this overpackaging. And there was little ease navigating the poorly-laid out transverse aisles or the unfamiliar checkout. Never mind that customers take longer to check out when self-scanning, and feel personally responsible for system errors while scanning, both facts further diminishing any sense of ease.

The secondary claims made in advance of a sale are also important; it is with these claims that you hope to position your product, align it with the wishes of the customer. Follow-through is essential. The non-environmentally-friendly and frankly quite substandard “reusable bag,” the high prices, the narrow selection (you can have Yoplait or the store brand of yogurt, for example), and the complete lack of pleasant retail surprises all fly in the face of claims made on the Fresh & Easy website and the several direct mail pieces they sent to neighborhood residents in advance of the opening.

To my wife, this lack of breadth, of depth, and of the human touch smacks of cynicism befitting Fresh & Easy’s parent company, UK retail giant Tesco. We were prepared to give Fresh ‘n Easy the benefit of the doubt, but we have already tagged the store as “emergencies only.” And we’re already calling it “Fresh and Sleazy.”

2 comments

Tuesday 10/9/2007
Business, Design

I received an eVite today, the first in a long while. It was not a great experience.

Strike one: lack of context. The HTML email message was pretty, but nearly information-free: it contained the sender’s name, the name of the event, and a smattering of descriptive text (that the sender deliberately kept short). No location, no time, no date; for those I would have to click through to eVite.com.

Without at least the date I couldn’t assess the urgency of the message. Is it something I need to deal with right away? Can it wait until I get home and put my daughter to bed? Can it wait for a few days, maybe until the weekend? The most important information an invitation ordinarily carries is actually hidden! Furthermore, not all of the invite graphic is clickable; a faiir portion of it is not. Obligingly, I found a clickable portion and clicked through.

Strike two: poor prioritization. The most prominent elements in the page at eVite.com are the ones I care about the least. In order of apparent priority (what draws the eye first):

1. The main graphic for the invite
2. “Guest Options” links (mostly useless or out-of-place)
3. eVite logo and tabs
4. Two ads from the University of Phoenix
5. The guest list
6. “Reply here” box
7. A “New! Send to Phone” button
8. “Plan your next event”
9. “Free eVite Cards”
10. Footer navigation and administrivia
11. Information about the event, including venue, time, date, and blurb.

That’s right, the very reason I came to the page is the LEAST prominent segment of the page. For a moment there I didn’t even see it, and was ready to accuse eVite of completely fouling things up. As it is, they’ve taken the part of the experience that I care about the most, and shown that THEY care about it the least. This is backward.

Des Traynor points out that a quick way to evaluate the user-centeredness of a page is to grey out the portions that the user doesn’t care about, and see what you have left. Rather than do that, I’ll desaturate the page and highlight the parts I DO care about with big yellow boxes.

(I’ve obscured parts of the image that identify other folks.) There’s a lot there that I don’t need, and most of it is high on eVite’s priority list. The meat of the page, the main event, the reason this page exists at all accounts for (charitably) 28% of the real estate and much of it is de-emphasized.

Strike three: poor organization. eVite’s difficulties with the prioritization if the invite page probably mask other usability and appeal problems that appear there, mostly due to the “I give up” “Guest Options” box of links that appears to the left of the Guest List. Guest Options contains a jumble of links related to disparate user tasks and far-flung parts of the interface. “Invite more people” and “Remove me from guest list” are strongly conceptually associated with the Guest List, while “Send a free Evite eCard” and “Go to Carpool Page” are not (and are heralded elsewhere). None of these are “guest options” so much as additional or alternate functionality, and they should be treated in context with the content they seek to modify or operate on.

It will be difficult to put these functions in their proper places until the prioritization is fixed, but here are a few additional suggestions:

• “Send to Phone” and “Add to my Outlook Calendar” are most strongly related to the “When” portion of the invite. “Add to Calendar” is really only useful if I plan to attend or am a “maybe,” so making these options part of the reply form is another option.
• “Email me when Guests Reply” (what’s with The Bizarre capitalization?) appears as a link in “Guest Options” and as a check box on the reply form. The check box should be sufficient, although eVite has bloated this functionality by allowing you to further choose to watch only specific invitees.
• If we believe in direct manipulation, “Remove me from Guest List” probably should go with my entry on the guest list.
• “Go to Carpool Page” is a problem; it suggests that I’ll be taken away from the invite. Maybe I’ll lose my place? Already I am disinclined to click the link, although it may prove useful.

Strike four: print. The parts of the invite I am likely to want to print include the title, venue/date/time/blurb, host name and contact information, and (perhaps) the guest list. Using the “Print Page” just fires window.print(); , printing the entire page including the (useless on paper) tabs, “Guest Options” links, “send to phone” button, footer, ad banners, and reply form, with nary a print style sheet in sight. Easy to implement, sure, but NOT USEFUL. And a lightly-populated eVite prints on two pages with all of that needless content because the footer bloated with “partner sites.”

But wait, there is more.

1. The “Yes/No/Maybe” radio buttons in the reply form have unintended consequences. Selecting anything other than “Yes” disables the “I’m interested in carpooling” check box. But what if I am a “maybe” until I can get a ride? Trying to fake out the system by checking the box and THEN selecting “maybe” fires an annoying alert(); complaining that “You cannot participate in carpool if you select no or maybe.” Umm, thanks. Watch me! I’ll get a ride with someone, and we’ll point and laugh at the eVite carpool cops when they come to arrest me.
2. Out of curiosity I click on the “more info” link next to the “I’m interested in carpooling” checkbox. The page grows to include a little text telling me that I should continue clicking to learn more. isn’t that why I clicked “more info” in the first place? Weird.
3. Some of the ancillary functionality fires popups, and some of it takes me away from the invite. There seems to be no standard; “Invite More People” navigates away from the invite, and therefore away from the context I might need to choose people to invite (such as the Guest List, yeah?), while “Email me when Guests Reply” fires a popup that contains the guest list. I’ve given up trying to guess the reasoning behind these decisions.
4. “Add to my Outlook Calendar” fires the download of a VCS file. What if I use iCal? Google Calendar? Notes? Can I get an ICS, anyone?
5. It turns out that the “Go to Carpool Page” does take me away from the invite; it shows me a pretty map and has ABSOLUTELY NO CALL TO ACTION whatsoever until I notice that at the top there is a tiny message claiming that “You must reply ‘Yes’ to this invitation to join a carpool.” Thanks so much for your help.

Make no mistake, eVite is trying to do a lot on this page. But it does not appear that they have chosen carefully which of these things to emphasize and streamline for their users, nor have they chosen any particular facet of the experience to do particularly well. The overall flavor is that of an organization attempting to compete on the length of its feature list rather than the usefulness of any one core combination of those features.

I haven’t replied to the eVite yet, nor have I sent one of my own. If this episode is typical of the eVite experience, I’ll have more to write very soon.

No comments

Friday 9/28/2007
Business, Design

Jason Fried over at 37signals mentioned today that he gets a lot of questions about “growing the business”: why aren’t they, when will they, etc.

They don’t plan to. Not in the traditional sense, by hiring. What’s important here is that they have oriented their business, and especially their products, to succeed without requiring additional head count. This means:

• fostering self-service to minimize personnel required to do routine account service (billing, signup, cancellation, etc.),
• improving usability and intelligibility to minimize personnel required to perform technical support,
• measuring their ability to keep customer support workload down even as enrollment grows.

I happen to work for a major medical device manufacturer, and I don’t think I am revealing any secrets when I say that while we talk a good game about fostering self-service and making our products easier to use and just plain figure out, we’ve nearly doubled our sales force and our customer service head count has grown significantly. It is nice to “show commitment to customer service,” but this is an expensive way to do it. I suspect we and other manufacturers (and our customers) would be much better served by an orientation similar to that of the 37signals folks.

I suspect that the groups that conceive of, design, develop, and build our products do not work toward metrics that encourage the reduction of customer service load, except when it comes to specific problematic features of already-released products. As Joel Spolsky once put it, “you get what you measure.” We are getting a product every 18 months (metric: schedule) that does more than its predecessor (metric: can we sell it) and is more reliable (metric: returns per thousand units shipped), but isn’t necessarily easier to use, more appealing, more pleasurable to use, or requiring of less support.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. Were we to add the missing metrics and do nothing else, suddenly these products (which dominate their market) would be scoring very poorly internally. There would be great pressure to stop using the new, bad metrics, because they wouldn’t seem to have a relationship to revenue, which would probably remain high. But adding metrics such as total cost of support per thousand units shipped would solve the second problem : you can’t solve a problem (the first problem, the real problem) until you measure it, which is a form of admitting that it exists at all.

Were we to add the missing metrics and suffer a while with unhappy numbers, sooner or later people would start asking what could be done about them, and one or more of three basic responses would emerge:

1. Distort the system
2. Distort the numbers
3. Improve the system

Distortion of the system might occur were we to outsource a component of our support functions to lower its cost. Such a move would result in lower total support costs for any product shipped thereafter, but not because the product improved. Something to watch out for.

Doing away with the “faulty” metrics would be an extreme form of distorting the numbers. A more likely form would be to adjust what costs make it into total cost of support, or narrowing the timeframe over which that total is recorded and/or projected. Perhaps initial training costs wouldn’t be included, or only support costs in the second, third, and fourth years (once the less certain users shake out) might be tallied. In either case, we’d be back to denying the problem rather than measuring it.

Improve the system? Lets, please.

No comments

Saturday 7/21/2007
Business, Design

Getting to know your customers is both fashionable and a good idea. But if you work for a large corporation, you may find several obstacles to forming a direct relationship with customers. All is not lost; you can kick-start your customer research by looking within your company for evidence of user experience problems.

1. Technical Support : Customer support is an area of great expense for most companies. If you have a technical support or customer service staff, you have a rich source of customer complaints and difficulties. Most technical support groups keep track of how many calls they get about a particular issue so that they can decide what to focus on. Commonly, these groups are also aware of trends in customer concerns. Too often, this information is not adequately employed by the rest of the company to actually make improvements in products. Find out what the top issues are. They might be complaints, or they might be “educational calls,” questions users commonly have about how to use the product. Also ask how much such a call costs the company. If you can make a fix to the product (or its documentation) that reduces call volume, and you multiply that reduction by the cost per call, you’ll know how much savings that fix can the company. if that fix reduces the number of products returned, or reduces abandonment of your service, etc. then it has even greater power.
2. Training and Education : If your company provides training or education to its users, the trainers will know what parts of the product users have difficulty learning. Improving usability and intelligibility in these areas will improve customer satisfaction and make the trainer’s job easier. In addition, the trainers will be able to point out features that are difficult to explain. A feature that is hard to explain often hides a usability problem. Trainers will primarily be concerned with features and processes that the user employs during adoption, while they are setting up and getting to know a product. This is when most returns happen. Returns are costlier to the company than a failure to sell the product in the first place, so initiatives that lead to a reduction in returns have a direct impact on the bottom line.
3. Technical Writers : The folks who write your product’s documentation will also be able to point out features that are difficult to explain or procedures that seem needlessly complicated. Asking a technical writer “what about this product is hard to write about” is not likely to receive a good response (tech writers are a proud bunch), so an approach that focuses on their impressions of the product and the amount of time they spent investigating one or another feature is more likely to be successful.
4. Product Documentation : If this fails, read the documentation yourself. You may be able to detect passages that treat parts of the product too lightly, dive into excessive detail, or rely on convoluted explanations. Pay special attention to the “troubleshooting” section, if any. What would benefit from clarification in the interface, reduced user decision-making, improved information design, etc.? Are there troubleshooting operations that the system should be able to perform? Are there troubleshooting situations that arise from otherwise well-intentioned user action?
5. Field Sales Staff : Outside salespeople have a unique view of the customer. Their job is to uncover customer needs and match those needs to a product, ideally one that your company sells. They are extremely competitive and may know more about your products and the competition’s products than anyone else in the company. They are intimately familiar with customer needs, especially those that potential customers ask about. And they have a knack for collecting pre- and post-sales feedback on a product. Their assessment of customer need is largely based on what the customer says rather than what the customer does , so be careful. But getting to know the salespeople can also shorten your path to customers; the sales staff will be happy that you re taking an interest, they will probably think that customer will also be happy that you are taking an interest. There’s a strong chance that a salesperson will see getting you in front of a customer as a triple win: the salesperson can use you as an excuse to visit the customer and show the customer that the company is interested in them and their feedback; the customer gets an opportunity to explain their unique situation and feel that the company is hearing them and valuing their input; and you get direct insight into both a individual customer and the sales process.
6. In-House Sales Staff : Inside salespeople have another perspective on the customer; these folks are shepherding the most interested potential customers through the process of making a purchase. In addition to gathering all of the requisite customer and payment information, they must overcome last-minute nervousness and concerns raised by the buyer. The most common of these reveal product deficiencies, competitive weaknesses, or negative emotional components of the product experience.
7. Try It Yourself : Whether or not you have ready access to users you should become one, even temporarily. Give the product a thorough tire-kicking, making special note of things that seem odd or are not well-explained, operations that seem complicated, places where you don’t have all of the information you need to make a decision. Trying it yourself will give you direct insight into the situations your users face and help you smooth the rough edges of interactive and informational design.

No comments

Thursday 7/19/2007
Business

I once had a manager who would leap into action whenever I told him anything. Much of the time I wanted his advice or just wanted him to know what was going on, but it seemed that our every conversation resulted in marching off to another part of the company and shaking someone down for information, often prematurely. I wasn’t signaling what I wanted from the conversation, so he was falling back on his usual (and admirable) “go and do” attitude..

A simple adjustment made all of the difference. I began to preface my comments with one of three phrases:.

• ” You need to know… ” I’m letting you know of a future situation that might come up, or the status of a project, or something else that you need to know about but doesn’t require intervention.
• ” I need your advice. ” Please help me think about this problem so I may handle it well on my own.
• ” I need your help. ” There’s a conflict, blockage, or other difficulty that requires the services of a manager, please help.

This sort of thing is supposed to be common sense, but isn’t all that common.

Naturally, I made a poster: Managerial Phrenology (pdf) .

No comments

Thursday 6/7/2007
Business

I recently returned from our division’s National Sales Meeting, a week-long conference wherein the sales staff are pumped full of excitement about current and coming products, told the final results for the fiscal year, trained and role-played until they are worn down to little sales nubs, and then feted heavily to both thank them for our bonuses and get them ready to hit the pavement again.

I was a presenter at the conference, and have had significant contact with salespeople in Southern California. Even so, I was surprised by the obvious differences between the people I met there and the folks I work with and near back at the home office.

1. The salespeople measure. They have measurements for every milestone on the way to a sale, every result that signifies progress toward revenue. They are evaluated on how often they reach these milestones AND their effectiveness in converting this into revenue. Both activity and results are measured and compared, and the statistics are kept, visibly, daily or weekly (depending on the stat). Each measurement has a target, and rewards increase as targets are exceeded. meanwhile, I am sure that most of the people I work with do not have at hand such measurements with which they can evaluate the effectiveness of their work, certainly not metrics that can be updated weekly or daily. I don’t, so I’m going to make some.
2. The salespeople strive to be completely competent and look completely competent in all that they do. If something is not well-explained, well-presented, and logically sound, our salespeople notice. “That’s an F,” they say. They recognize that the appearance of correctness and confidence that they strive to project must be backed by logic and facts, and they stand for nothing less. It is not clear to me that everyone else in my division behaves with the same attention to detail, and I am sometimes embarrassed by how we represent ourselves to the public because of this.
3. The salespeople plan, rehearse, execute, and follow-up. They have a four-step approach to just about any customer-facing activity (where customer is quite broadly defined): they plan what they are going to do based on their goals for the interaction. They practice the skills necessary to effect that plan. They take a deep breath and go and do what they planned to do. Once this is done, they take a moment to objectively evaluate what happened, how they did, what they did well and what they should do differently. This seems like a no-brainer, but it is evident from the way some projects are run that the same mistakes are repeated again and again because this basic plan/prep/do/think is less common than it ought to be. It should be a matter of personal practice, of project team practice, and of corporate cross-functional practice at all levels, and it is clearly not.
4. The salespeople have a photobook. A photobook helps you identify other employees and can be a boon when you need to find or meet with someone you don’t know. The tiny uptick in recognizability can make a huge difference in that first moment. Many HR departments frown on photobooks, and it seems unlikely that a department- or division-wide photobook could be produced without strong objections. but the sales staff has leapt that barrier because of how much help it can be for them to know their fellows.
5. The salespeople are exceedingly competitive. Enough said.
6. The salespeople exact some sort of commitment, every time. Even in conversation with a potential customer who won’t buy, the salesperson tries to gently guide them to agree to something, be it a trial, later contact, acceptance of a brochure, something that keeps the relationship going. One salesman joked that he dated well in college because even if a woman told him no, he get them to agree that he could ask again the following week. Too often I’ve been to meetings where action items are not produced or are not assigned, where responsibility is not placed with a named individual, where complaints are made about the behavior or absence of a department rather than a person. This is the opposite of exacting a commitment.

While the slickness and jocularity of the sales staff sometimes bothers me, they are the most entrepreneurial and businesslike members of our division, and there is much to emulate. I’m going to start by measuring my activity and thinking about its effect of revenue, and by ensuring that I exact some commitment from every business interaction, be it from myself or others.

No comments

Tuesday 4/17/2007
Business

Uncle Barry pointed me to this BusinessWeek article about Microsoft Silverlight and asked:

I wonder if you have any insights into this Adobe/ Microsoft rivalry that’s brewing here…

My take:

It is fitting that Microsoft is going after online video; the animation capabilities of Flash are nearly forgotten. But online video sites like YouTube successful are successful because of ease, openness, and excellent browsing and social features. Weakness in any of these areas will reduce a new offering’s ability to match up with existing platforms. Historically, Microsoft has bet against users when it comes to openness and failed to make a strong showing in social features.

Since Flash is bundled with the majority of web browsers, a visitor to YouTube doesn’t have to do any work to prepare to watch video; they show up, see thumbnails, and are off and watching videos with no fuss. Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Real, and other existing plug-in video players have stalled partly because they require some user preparation (however slight) AND have a fairly high start-up latency (time to stream the first several frames plus time to start up the plug-in). Real has a reputation for installing unwanted crap on your system (they’ve gotten better). QuickTime (on Windows) comes with a needless tray icon/startup program that makes your computer boot a little less quickly. Windows Media Player gets chunkier with each release.

Both Adobe’s Apollo and Silverlight Microsoft’s feature DRM as a core component of the offering. This will be unpopular with consumers, as it tends to be overly restrictive . The music industry is starting to figure this out , albeit slowly. DRM is insisted upon by many (but not all) large content providers, so the places to innovate here are in paring back DRM requirements and making legally-defined fair use possible without forcing the consumer to circumvent the DRM scheme. I’m not sure either Microsoft nor Adobe are looking in this direction, since most content providers are decidedly not .

Social features also matter. At launch, the hype around Zune leant heavily on the idea that you could share tunes over WiFi with your neighbors. The receiver of your offered tune could play it three times, after which the music would be deleted from their player, but kept in a “journal” to allow them the chance to purchase it from a Microsoft-affiliated online store at a later date. This hasn’t worked out as well as hoped, partly because the anticipated network effect never arrived , and partly because the feature didn’t work very well (scroll down to point 9), not to mention that it underscored the DRM situation and might have contributed to some confusion in that area . The restrictions that inhere to DRM tend to restrict both social sharing of content and browsing.

Content authoring is another issue entirely, but a space worth watching. Both Microsoft and Adobe seem to be trying to ride the popularity of online and portable video by selling (for money or otherwise) tools at either end of the value stream: the authoring software and the player. This sort of play tends to lead to closed systems, generally considered unfriendly to consumers. Meanwhile, the buzz from NAB is that Apple’s Final Cut Studio is still winning the content-creation-tool race.

UPDATE: I completely sidestepped Barry’s original question having to do with brewing rivalry between Microsoft and Adobe. I don’t have contacts at either firm, so I can’t comment on any real rivalry, but I’m not sure Microsoft entertains rivalries so much as they try to be a solid second-mover into rapidly-growing areas, attempting to crush or cannibalize (or purchase) whoever is in the way, in a relatively dispassionate manner. They likely won’t make money on the Streamlight player unless there is a cut of related purchases in there someplace, but they can make money on content-creation tools, hence the side note about such tools above.

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Tuesday 1/17/2006
Business

I’ve been working to foster a work environment wherein ideas are explored a little before being shot down for risk-mitigation, feasibility, or lack-of-research reasons. We’ve sometimes had significant debates about the merit of a feature or service that never manage to include user needs. I want to make sure there is a user case for what we choose to do, and ensure that high value to the user outweighs risk at an appropriate level, so these debates have been dissatisfying at best. And about a year ago I weighed in on the topic in a pretty significant way. (Initials have been changed to protect the people involved.)

To: GM

I was thinking about this last night (not the actual question but the religious debate behind it). You’re sick of being challenged, and I’m sick of hearing the same pointless argument played out that fails to bring the story forward and never gets resolved. I will propose (next time it comes up in my presence) that we all never have this argument again.

He is basically saying “prove to me that X is a good idea.” Which is annoying, and in a way insulting, but also (in different terms, with a different manner) a best practice of innovative companies like Apple. The key difference being that at Apple thousands of good and bad ideas are competing to be heard, so the default answer simply has to be “no,” and the ideas that are truly good can eventually leap that no and get to yes. We do not have the intellectual stimulation and invitation to innovation here in which that type of method would work for us. We should foster such an environment, but we aren’t there yet, so in the short term we need to short-circuit this debate and make it a non-starter.

How? I don’t know.

But I have some ideas. “Prove to me that X is a good idea” is both part of the problem and part of the solution. CC correctly identifies poorly-defined product requirements from Marketing as an important failing. Marketing does need better contact with customers to determine product direction. But bound up in the “prove it” complaint is a lack of trust in the decisions made by Marketing. We need to address that lack of trust. CC seems to demand customer data to support every feature decision. But Marketing and Testing are different. Marketing uses information (not data) gathered from surveys, focus groups, industry research, the grapevine, etc. to inform judgment about what a product should be. But if people merely made what customers say they want, lots of interesting things that we now depend on might never have been made (such as the consumer-oriented desktop PC). Sometimes (often?) we have to lead the market in a direction we think it should go in. And it is not especially likely that customers will already be clamoring for that (although they might be clamoring for four or five other things that such a move would help solve).

The flip of “prove to me that X is a good idea” is “prove to me that X is a bad idea.” He says “where is the data that says that customers want us to build X,” knowing that there is no such data and that it would probably be really hard to get it in a timely manner in the current climate. Of course, hitting back with “no, you prove it’s a bad idea” is not fighting fair, and we have to fight fair to work together.

We need to address the real components of this debate: trust, fairness, mutual respect, mutual assumption that we have the best interests of the business and our customers in mind.

Development should be able to trust what they hear from Marketing about product direction, and Marketing should expect Development to push back, but there are right ways to push back, adaptive ways to push back to make the products better rather than simply killing their growth.

1. “Negotiating the requirements” for feasibility reasons (cost, schedule, implementability, other project drivers)
2. Prototype testing results might suggest a strategic or tactical shift due to revealed usability or usefulness concerns
3. End-game triage (“what low-priority features do we have to cut to make our launch date”)

I might have missed some. But one key here is that both sides must do their best to inform their judgment with the voice of the customer, not one side or the other. Neither of our guesses about customer needs are significantly more informed than the other, and to pretend otherwise is simply hubris. The other key here is compromise.

com*pro*mise n.

1.a. A settlement of differences in which each side makes concessions.

1.b. The result of such a settlement.

2. Something that combines qualities or elements of different things.

In a compromise, both parties give, and mutually arrive at a single solution that each can live with.

I’ve written too much. You can see where I am going with this. We need to end this debate and solve the felt issues behind it with real work that will improve the silence and move the story forward.

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Friday 1/28/2005
Business

Steve Pavlina (thanks, Douglas Wagoner) has an interesting post about living your values . His central assertion is that rather than dig up your values to then generate goals that are alighed with them, you should actually adjust your values to pull yourself into alignment with those goals so you can readily achieve them. Intetsting thought.

Trouble is, there are values and there are values. Certainly we can choose to value a characteristic or concept more than another, but it is likely that there will remain (even so!) some values that are simply core to our experience. How chameleonic should we strive to be in an effort to bend our value structure to satisfy goals?

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Thursday 1/27/2005
Business

Since I’ve been trying to become a more effective and organized employee/husband/guy (order depends on time of day), I’ve been reading a lot about systems of organization, business practice and philosophy, and the like. And nearly to a man, the authors of same claim that one must know one’s values.

Lucky me, Douglas Wagoner has thrown a binary-selection ranking algorithm at the task of sussing out just what you value. From a list of “value” words a mile long, he asks you to choose, then compare, as many or few values as you like via a series of online forms .

It is worth doing, but beware; if you choose too many values to rank, you’ll have a lot of binary selections to make, on the order of (n–1)! or some such. I chose 14 items and had to make 91 selections; (n–1)! sounds about right.

My results say a lot about me. Maybe. In a way I was surprised that the very popular choices “integrity,” “happiness,” “achievement,” or “financial independence” did not make my list. But I’m clearly busy enough with “creativity,” “brilliance,” and “attractiveness” to worry about things like that.

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Wednesday 10/27/2004
Business

Seth Godin’s post about CEO blogs (all the rage, it seems) got me thinking about a related problem I see in my new workplace. And it isn’t a CEO (necessarily) or a blog. But the five or six characteristics of a good CEO blog can easily be cross-applied.

A few times a week a message hits my inbox promising customer information, titled “Customer Update.” It invariably contains happytalk of a particular flavor:

“I am so glad that your product is in my life; I feel so much better and it is really great, thank you so much for being you…”

You guessed it; these are being broadcast around the firm for morale purposes rather than to inform people’s work in any meaningful way.

Is there candor ? No. The helpline hears directly of complaints and problems all the time, but these never make it to the “customer update” messages.

Is there urgency or timeliness ? No. The customer quotes are not dated, not requiring of action, not specific of problems or issues, not even related to past complaints having been resolved.

Is there pithiness ? In the sense that a pithy comment is precisely meaningful, forceful, and brief, the answer is also no. There is generally very little meaning beyond “you guys are great” or “good job; good product” in the missives. In the sense that a pithy green twig is filled with a fluffy, unsolid material, then sure, but that would be malapropism .

Is there controversy ? No. These messages are squeaky-clean and smell like roses.

And without any of the above five characteristics, is there utility ? Hardly. The work of a single employee is not informed or improved by these content-free morale-oriented messages. In fact, they are largely ignored. Many people I have spoken to have set up rules in their email clients that automatically bin these messages or shunt them to a folder someplace for later (non-)perusal. People are voting with their software not to be bothered by this fluff.

If there is indeed a morale problem, one that a well-meaning individual might misguidedly attempt to tackle by spreading this form of fluffy love via company-wide email, from where might it spring? And how should it be tackled? While I sometimes pretend to, I am aware that I do not have all of the answers. But I have some ideas about this.

Here comes the user experience hammer (I see a user experience nail!): we have insufficient contact with customers (as usual, as is common). And information gleaned from the contacts we do have is not effectively plowed back into the organization where people can see it. Do we need a Google Zeitgeist for customer service calls? Yes! Do we need to know if people are suddenly having trouble with adhesives because the weather is warm? Yes! Do we need to know that we’ve responded to problem X with solution Y and we are now seeing Z fewer calls about the problem per week? Yes! Etc.

Would it improve morale if people knew what the problems were, could act on them, and could see the results of their actions? Yes. It would.

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Monday 10/25/2004
Business

I’ve always liked being sneaky. It used to get me into tons of trouble, being sneaky, for what sneaky things can a kid in high school (or middle school, or elementary school) do that aren’t also frowned upon by the parental establishment? And there aren’t a heap of sneakiness opportunities in a relationship that won’t get you into trouble with the Other. Now that I’ve assumed the responsibilities of an adult this is even more true, and there aren’t any safety nets like being bailed out by my folks or being tried as a juvenile. What does that leave?

Work. One can be sneaky at work. In fact, one probably should be sneaky at work. Not sneaky at work in the sense of doing things that will get you summarily fired, like stealing equipment or sleeping your way through the steno pool or other obvious gaffes, but sneaky in ways that might get you fired or help your company or both.

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” — Howard Aiken

One of the problems with corporate culture: all the ramming. Especially the “it came from Senior Management,” BOHICA (Bend Over Here It Comes Again)-style directives that our horribly skewed American Corporate Culture is so fond of. Equally problematic are the low- and mid-level employees who decide that they have the answer and decide to do a little ramming, since their ramming is likely to be louder and closer to your cubicle, amybe a little harder to ignore.

But wait! you say. I do have the answer, you complain. Shall I be ignored? Will I never be allowed to spread my good thoughts? Never fear. There is an alternative to ramming. Be sneaky. Be quiet. Do little things, let them be known through the grapevine. Don’t promise anything, merely deliver. Set off information bombs in your organization. Make an internal work blog, or a wiki, or publicize on an invite-only email list interesting but neglected pieces of information, or work the network to gather info that should be gathered but isn’t, or… the possibilities are endless. And powerful. And they might get you fired. But the next employer will love you for the possibilities and know-how you bring.

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Wednesday 10/20/2004
Business

I was thinking about all of the things I need to do and want to
do and all of the people/projects who want a piece of me and somehow before I became whelmed an idea! burst forth. I’m kicking it around now; we’ll see if it amounts to anything.

I’ve been toying with GTD methods for a handful of weeks now, and I’d have to say that it is pretty good stuff, with the exception that with my long project list (40 work-related items or so at last count, and growing), I can easily get “wrapped around the axle” trying to figure out where I would best be spending my efforts. David Allen maintains that one should determine priority based on your informed and felt sense of the shifting landscape of priorities, but I can’t keep it from shifting in my head much less in the actual workplace. So I’m casting about for ideas, methods to remind myself of some important facet of the project landscape to inform my decisions about priority.

The idea is to make a massive venn diagram with all of the projects/initiatives overlapping where they naturally do, ideally to find out where the points of greatest convergence are and attack those areas first for maximum benefit. Ideally the knots will reveal the areas for greatest leverage, where effort will move the greatest number of initiatives at once. Sort of a project utilitarianism, perhaps.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Tuesday 10/19/2004
Business

As much as I am not a fan of the punditry of others, there are some good things happening over at Change This , an interesting “idea publishing” project. They’ve got an intriguing model: you propose to write a manifesto, site visitors give the nod (or not.), (or submit a written one) and then they read it, like it (or not.), and package in their (pretty nice) PDF format and put on their site and email newsletter, etc. (or so it seems). They also solicit manifesti from known thinkers. I’ve recently red a bit more Tom Peters , for example, and liked it, although he can get windy. Current read: How to Be Creative , by Hugh McLeod of gapingvoid fame.

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Monday 8/9/2004
Business

(By the way, I’m using “Textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ for the first time in this post. We’ll see how I like the resultant HTML.)

I’ve taken a new job, as mentioned before. This time I am to become the (first ever? for this organization) business owner of the interface of a variety of online and offline software. Which got me to thinking: where will my authority come from?

I’ve been the owner of the interface for smaller projects in smaller markets, with or without strong upper management support, with or without an organizational focus on the customer, with or without resources available (including time) to do some user testing, etc. And in any of these cases, sustainable authority has been somewhat hard to come by.

As I see it, authority can come from only a handful of sources. First, there is intellect. This has been my crutch for far too long; I’ve been limping along on intellect, and especially reading and reason well beyond what decency would permit. Sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of reluctance, sometimes out of stinginess. Intellect is good and useful, but cannot stand alone.

Second there is the borrowed authority of a superior. This can be an effective place from which to gain a bit of authority, but as with all things human, it is a political, fickle, temporary authority, and not to be leant upon.

Third, there is the customer. This is what we want, correct? The customer to anoint our efforts (and thereby ourselves) by purchasing our products and services, using our software, recommending us to friends? Yes, the customers are human, and the above caveats (political, fickle, temporary) apply. But seeking and measuring your authority at the customer closes the loop, irrespective (to whatever extent possible) of the vagaries of management and coworkers.

Those who train dogs, especially for service (police, rescue, assistive companionship, etc.), say that you cannot make a dog obey, you cannot assert yourself and take control. Rather you earn the respect and trust of the animal, and it chooses to obey. Not to liken customers too strongly to dogs, but in this narrow scope the comparison is apt; customers choose to follow your lead if you earn their respect, pay attention to their needs, ask them how you can help.

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Saturday 6/26/2004
Business

A lovely thread over at SpeakUp regarding public perception of the big brands (Microsoft, Coke, Nike, etc). It started with a question about Believing the Good in Brands , but after the initial post, quickly zeroed in on what I see as the core problem: Companies that make a lot of money constantly have to defend their brands because we view a noticable portion of their business practices with suspicion. But I cannot say it better than Matt Waggner did:

I think there’s a difference between a profit motive and having a culture of wealth-accumulation: our “robber barons” of old, the Rockefellers and Gettys of the world, at least saw schools, museums, libraries, parks, and the like as part of their legacy, but now, precious few companies or investors are willing to disadvantage themselves by depleting their liquid assets. When you ask “what company in their position *wouldn’t* act like Microsoft,” the answer is that you don’t get to be in that position without acting like a tool.

Well, that is awfully simplistic – there are some decent, and extremely wealthy, capitalists around, like Warren Buffett (whose argues for lower CEO pay: he earns $100K a year), George Soros (who promotes open societies and democracy in environments where he is unlikely to make any money), and James Sinegal (the CostCo CEO who enforces a “maximum profit %” in his stores, runs a union shop, and still outsells Sams Club). In fairness, I think we should look for these people, and support them where we can. If someone wants to call Microsoft or Starbucks out for destroying yet another company with their nonstop expansion, or Disney for their horrendous intellectual property practices, then fine: there’s so much bullshit now that if anyone’s noticed one company in specific, then they’re probably pretty damn bad.

There are dozens of little decisions that show a company’s character: I think the biggest influence on the relentless pursuit of the “bottom line” is the way publicly traded companies promote short-term growth over long-term growth. Stock options, quarterly reports, these things promote a “fast return” over a particular set of values, and, well, it shows in the great majority of US companies today. Those old guys are a lost breed, I guess.

Great stuff.

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Sunday 6/13/2004
Business

When I first came to work at my current long-term contract (scratch that, make that the second time), I immediately set up a wiki to capture and display thinking, planning, and progress on the very large project that I had been given. I had become somewhat enamored of wikis, both in their flexibility and in the excellent things that could be read on some of them (witness the venerable Portland Pattern Repository and its associated tangents; delve deep for the good stuff: search on JavaScript and poke around from there, for example).

It worked well for me, and later, when Nils came aboard, we used it together to jot down things we would need to know later, lists we didn’t want to forget but knew we would, our current thinking about a controversial topic, development wishlists, etc. We still use it, generally to great effect at the beginning of a project or release cycle, tapering quickly as we get deep into development when most of the decisions and hard work have been taken care of. But it isn’t yet the Tool of Magnificence(tm) that I had hoped for.

Why is that? A few reasons:

• Try as I might, I could never get any of my supervisors to consult it to get a sense of our progress. They were far mor interested in speaking directly with a human, which is understandable.
• The front page of a wiki cries out for significant maintenance and organization, since (for project work) it should lead the reader more or less directly to the expected content.
• A wiki is only as good as you make it. It can wither like a lemon tree subjected to sporadic and capricious watering. (I know of these things.)
• Most sufficiently clean wiki packages have difficulty handling blocks of code, images, and the like. Generally this is seen as a good thing, as the wiki’s job is to smooth the entry and cross-linkage of text, but there it is.
• One could easily spend far too much time refactoring a usefully large wiki.

Never mind the fact that when I first put up the wiki I had to host it on a public server outside the firewall and thus exposed the project to the prying eyes of any Tom, Dick, or Competitor that happened by. This has (long since) been remedied, and I knew better at the time. The wiki was great, but not great enough. Since it was populated solely by my content, it was really only useful to me and people who touched my duties in a direct manner (that sounds dirty).

These days, people are getting into the idea of using blogs and blog-like tools for project management, project notes, etc. Some notable people have even made commercial tools that move strongly in this direction, such as Basecamp , a blog/calendar/PM tool from the fine folks at 37Signals . I haven’t kicked it around yet, but I like the general idea. But!

A blog is great for capturing thoughts in time, including progress reports, notes about interactions, state of thought, milestones, difficulties, etc. A decent search engine leverages that usefulness by allowing you to reach back for something without knowing how far. But it is commonly the case that you’ve got to link this progress somehow to the artifacts produced (such as use cases, layouts, approvals, etc.) as well as somehow get all of the stuff related to whatever topic you’ve got your head jammed into in front of you so you can smell it, look it over. A blog is not so good at these things. You can spend days working on a polycategorization scheme to try to get there, but you’ll never have a sufficiently robust yet somehow easy-to-use structure.

Mind mapping software? Who said that? You - there with the smirk - out of the room.

It is becoming more and more plain that some combination of the blog and wiki technologies is in order. If you can safely link that to a repository of files, even better, since another thing every project needs is a single authoritative source of all of the text and images that are produced that aren’t code, all of those aforementioned artifacts. Flow sheets, requirements documents, IA diagrams, mockups, wireframes, blah blah blah. Good stuff, useful stuff, but so many pieces of hay surrounding the needly little scrap of info that you just know is in there, someplace, and needed yesterday.

eRoom? Surely you jest. Have you used eRoom? Out with you.

This is all coming up now because of additional work opportunities in the offing, and the relative lack at such locations of any coherent attempt to address any of the above issues. Seriously. So it is left, for the moment, for me to ruminate on. And Josh , Swiss Army Knife of developers that he is, to ruminate on in his own sweet way. I’d start with a “work blog,” just a simple self-capture of work dailies, but I wouldn’t be satisfied if I couldn’t somehow get my paper notes in there as well (a significant undertaking).

Ruminate ruminate ruminate. Chew chew chew.

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Sunday 6/6/2004
Business

It was only a matter of time, really, before SEO consultants (mostly Search Engine Optimization bottomfeeders) cobbled together a contest to promote their dubious wares.

<hucksterism>Want to fake your way to the top of search engine listings and hoodwink the masses for a brief moment? No need to actually write about or sell or be even strongly related to the topic people are interested in (such as Nigritude Ultramarine , which you plainly have nothing to do with), just pay us the cash and we’ll tell you what to do. Ride to riches on the backs of thousands of annoyed web searchers!</hucksterism>

How better to wipe the eye of the SEO folks than to go them one better, in an honest and straightforward manner? Anil Dash would like to, and by linking to his Nigritude Ultramarine post with the phrase “Nigritude Ultramarine,” you’d be helping him show that favorable, honestly-begotten linkage and scads of clean, relevant text are the truthful non-optimization.

Naturally, you wouldn’t want to speculate too wildly about the meaning of a phrase such as Nigritude Ultramarine , since to do so might result in unlucky thoughts.

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Friday 6/4/2004
Business

At work recently we’ve been tasked with finding out if/why our group is at all special. A consultant has appeared before us to point out his view of the dimensions along which a team might excel (tools, techniques, process, skills, attitude, or discipline). And we’ve been told that as a “shadow” IT group that wants to not be be squashed by the lumbering corporate IT organization, we had better figure out our case quickly.

The consultant brought with him a strong bias toward teams distinguishing themselves based on process. This is understandable simply in light of the fact that he is associated with the Center for Project Management, which would be necessarily focused on process issues. He attempted to impress upon us that in a presentation to managerial types, people variables (skills, attitude, discipline) would not be seen as distinguishing factors, since the value of the group could not then be seen to live on independently of the individuals who currently comprise it.

This is controversial. I suspect most team members believe that we excel primarily in attitude and discipline. There’s nothing unique about our tools, techniques, or skills, and our process remains quite poorly defined, overall. We’ve toyed with RUP, but discarded anything requiring a large number of artifacts or really much documentation at all (heresy, I know). And we are continually adjusting, trying new things, mucking about with how we do business.

I find a small amount of kinship in Agile methods, in that the focus is on continuous realignment with customer needs. We have clearly rejectd the old waterfall manner of development, but haven’t fully embraced UCD techniques or really any of the other popular alternatives.

I think the difference might be that we expect projects to be poorly defined, requirements to be generally crap, and so we take a consultative role in things we’re really not qualified to, primarily the definition of the goal itself. People ask us for a tool that does X, and we ask, “what do you want X done for?” People claim they need a web application that follows some use cases they’ve cobbled together, and we mangle those use cases (in the nicest possible way). Managers throw work over the wall, and we throw it right back, climbing over the wall to follow it. I suppose this is process, but it really springs from interest.

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Monday 5/24/2004
Business

While poking around this weekend I stubled across an interesting concept in the work of Alphachimp Studio . Among their many offerings (including fiber art!?) they list ” Graphic Facilitation ,” in which an illustrator(s) takes visually rich notes during a meeting that they are also involved in facilitating, in an effort to capture the salient points of a meeting, brainstorming session, etc. in real-time. From their website:

Graphic Facilitation allows participants to witness original content as it grows in front of their eyes. Models and metaphors are created in real-time with points and counterpoints from the audience incorporated as they occur. Systems thinking is made easier as context and connections are generated; metaphors and symbols emerge to deepen meaning and association.

Great stuff, definitely worth a look.

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Friday 5/21/2004
Business, Design

Boxes and Arrows continues to publish insightful and relevant articles. And the fact that two of my recent favorites just happen to include the words “Design Success” in their titles isn’t a factor, no siree.

Most recently, Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success details a method for performing stakeholder analysis , an exceedingly useful technique that helps one see clearly the political forces surrounding a project, and guides thinking about managing the players involved. Quite nice work, and worth a read whether you’re into building websites or not.

Less well written but equally valuable is Building a Vision of Design Success , underscores the oft-forgotten point that even in a redesign project, the definition of success must be thoroughly nailed down; the fact of re-designing is not enough. Management consultants would instruct one to “determine key success factors,” but more than that is required; Christina Wodtke points out that

A shared vision is born of collaborative conversations, articulated in a form that is digestible and memorable, and then internalized and personalized by every member of the team. The power of the shared vision is that it is shared�it is held within every member of the team (or organization) and thus needs no leader to carry it forward; every action of the team helps make the vision real.

I have been involved in several redesign projects of various sizes, and I can say with confidence that in every case there has been a distinct lack of vision, much less shared vision. And it is this lack that I hope to prevent in the future.

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