Decision By Design

A piece I co-wrote with Ryan for Rotman magazine was just published in their winter issue. It’s called Decision By Design, I put a copy of the article up here here if you want to check it out.

It’s my first time writing for a magazine. Everyone in the process was really helpful and supportive, but it still turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. If you have a chance to read it, I’d love to know what you think.

The Perspective is the Strategy

So every time I drive anywhere in my car I have one continuing, consistent thought – I hate my GPS. I don’t hate it in a casual, mildly annoying way. I hate it in a deep, resentful, this-is-the-worst-UI-ever-manufactured sort of way. I hate the device not for the directions, but for the device experience. It’s poor, it’s clunky, and whoever built it never spent any time using it. I usually look at that little box hanging from a suction cup on my window and think, ‘mock me now, you’re days are over since Google released free GPS for the phone’.

It’s true, those GPS manufacturers are in a pretty bad place. TomTom, Garmin, and other GPS manufacturers had their share price free fall on Google’s free GPS announcement. Why would anyone pay for a device, if they could the same functionality in their phone for free?

I think there’s more than just paid vs. free. I think the difference lies in the difference in perspective a device company has from a service company. If you’re a device company your customer buys a ‘thing’. Once they buy that thing, they’re a cost to retain until they buy again; customer service, upgrades, anything. Garmin has changed nothing about my GPS since I bought it. In the three years we’ve owned that GPS Garmin has never evolved the experience. Sure they’ve fixed bugs, but I will never get a better experience until I buy another device.

It would be a completely different relationship if Garmin was a service company. A service mindset realizes that you only have a customer if you serve them. So beyond the service being free, Google will actually interact with the customers differently that Garmin. If I were to use a Google phone as a GPS, I have assurance that Google will constantly upgrade the service. They’ll be adding ads I’m sure, but I’d also expect them to improve screen flows and consistently refine the experience.

So when people talk about the dark days for physical GPS manufacturers, I don’t really think it’s a free vs. paid argument, I think it’s about how you serve your customer. I have a lot of confidence that if Garmin or any of those players really turned out a significantly better in-car GPS experience, they could hold on to their market share. That doesn’t mean adding photo albums, or fitness feaures…do you honestly think I’m going to go running with my car’s GPS? It means you have to be brilliant at the basics, that’s what people pay you for. Garmin sells a simple touchscreen device. They could deliver a software upgrade and overwhelm their entire customer base and make a big deal about it. If you’re a device company, you can’t see that. Upgrading the interface would just be foolish, you’ve already earned those customers. Something like that would just be a sunk cost.

Good luck guys. It’s going to be a long year.

Of Course…

I was inspired today by Christian Lindholm of Fjord Design (via Om Malik). The two were talking about how product design principles might inspire entrepreneurs. Lindholm said:

Most companies are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an “of course” reaction from their users.

If you really understand your customer and you’re aligned with what they want, shouldn’t they be looking at your offering and saying to themselves “of course”?

• Hey did you hear the new Google phone is a completely open architecture? Of course it is.
• Hey, you know my TV was broken on my Jet Blue flight. There wasn’t an open seat, so they gave me a discount voucher for my next ticket! Of course they did.
• You know, I wanted to go camping on the west coast but I didn’t want to lug my gear. Did you know REI rents camping gear? Of course they do.
• Man, the shoes from Zappos didn’t fit, but returning them was no hassle at all. Of course it wasn’t.

Each of those examples are actually extremely phenomenal in their own right, but in the context of their brand the acts become expected. It’s some sort of higher order of consumer connection. You only reach that place if you take the time to know your customer, know your market, and really know how to deliver.

That’s not “wow”, that’s thoughtful design, incredible focus, and lots of hard work.

Here’s the thing, organizations lust for “wow” moments because that’s how employees get recognized. Those moments build consensus and momentum. Everyone likes to win, so if you’ve got a “wow” on your hands you’ll have no problem funding people with passion for what you’re building. But little of this “wow” business really has much to do with the customer, it’s an internal (selfish) motivation. “Wow” moments are more about the company winning, the customer is just the means to that victory.

Now I don’t discount the ambition and the intention to amaze and delight your customers, I just think you should push for a more meaningful relationship. Your customer should be able to complete your sentences (and you, theirs). That’s doesn’t mean boring and predictable, it means caring about them more than you care about yourself.

“Wow” moments are actually sort of fleeting and superficial. “Wow” is a summer blockbuster movie that makes a mint in 3 weeks and is on DVD by Christmas. “Wow” is a big buzz at the CES convention in January and lackluster sales in the fall. You didn’t want that, right? Of course you don’t.

No License Required

Today, I had the privilege of attending the Boston AdClub’s annual Edge event. It’s one of those industry events when people come to network and get inspired by speakers and panels. Overall, it was a pretty inspiring event but there were a couple of moments when the train sort of skipped the tracks around people and the License to Practice. It probably is no shock this came from a journalist on one panel, and a digital advertising agency on another.

The basic crux of the License to Practice problem is that people have this assumption that you have to spend a certain amount of time in an industry to be recognized by that profession. While I generally think this holds up in disciplines that require certification (medical, legal, architectural, veterinary, financial) it’s a figment in any other industry. You see in all the certification situations I named (and several others), if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could actually hurt people. Architects could build faulty structures, doctors could do irreparable harm, and so on.

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Selective Amplification

Henry Jenkin’s article on Harvard’s Web Ecology project just blew me out of my chair. The study charts the Twitter activity related to Michael Jackson’s death, how people reported to each other, how fast, etc. You should check out the graph behind that link, 471 thousand people tweeted about his death over a four hour period (1.8M over 10 days). By the way, this was the same event that fooled Google as a spam event, so they blocked all requests.

Beyond the volume of people tweeting around MJ’s death, there is this graph that compares the Iran controversy to MJ, which is far more interesting to me. Roughly the same number of tweet over a 10 day period, distributed over a different area. You can see the difference between breaking news and a complex conversation, which os pretty cool. All this from 140 characters across millions of people…that just blows my mind.

Gaming Inspiration

(warning: heavy nerding ahead)

I usually find lots of inspiration from video games. I’m not a big gamer, but I’m fascinated with the space. Usually it’s less about the graphics or the game content, and more about the interactions that have been designed into the game. As games go, there seems to be a lot of really interesting things going on in massive-multiplayer games and web and phone-based games lately. Console games are sort of pushing each other deeper into this better graphics/extra gore niche. That’s mostly games for hardcore gamers. I’m more interested in what happens when there’s a wider cross-section of people just screwing around entertaining themselves.

I’ve seen a couple of interesting design/stratgey things lately, here’s my take on a few things I’ve seen. Hopefully you find some inspiration along the way.

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Strategy is an Act of Design

Strategy is an act of design….You can’t analyze your way to real strategy. You have to create it from data, guts, empathy, creativity, and a little thin air.
- Roger Martin

I love this quote, (full article here). I don’t think good strategies are always an entirely linear and rational act. We post-rationalize things so great businesses feel like they were ordained by some higher power, but that’s not how the world actually works.

Celebrating vs. Selling

Do you ever notice how much more meaningful advertising can be when they celebrate the human experience vs. sell you products? Celebrating the human experience removes the psychological barrier of “you just want to sell me something. You have nothing to lose by letting down your guard, stepping back and appreciating how lucky we all are, (some violin strings in the background don’t hurt either). If businesses can find a higher level of alignment than ‘buy my stuff, that’s a massive change. The catch is you have to mean it – it has to go beyond the commercial…that sort of higher purpose takes lost of vision and guts.

It’s potential over features.
It’s experience over function.

Inspiration: The World is Just Awesome (campaign by 72andSunny)

The Discovery Channel just extended it’s “the World is Awesome” campaign. The original spot was so popular, it’s even got a wikipedia entry. They could have made feature level claims around their content – we’re all in HD, most adventurous programming ever, 20% more shark week, etc. They used to have a whole campaign around ‘explore your world,’ putting the viewer more in the aggressor or adventurer postion. I love how they’ve taken a step back and decided to celebrate the world they cover with their viewer instead selling their viewer on the ‘value’ of their content.

Founder’s Journey

This Monday I had the pleasure of speaking at MIT in a class called The Founder’s Journey. Ken Zolot is running a really cool seminar class out of the engineering school that gives student a view into what it’s like to start a business (without having to slave through tons of pre-requisite classes in the business school).

I met Ken at IDEO’s Big Reset event this summer, and he asked me to give a similar/shorter talk to one I gave at TBR. It’s sort of a rambling run through human-centered design, identity, experiences, participation, T-Pain, Stonehenge, etc.

Even thought the slides don’t capture most of the details of the talk, you can check out the deck here. (I pulled the very few IDEO-related bits since that would compel someone to post the file to slideshare.net….which I don’t get, but whatevs.)

The Irony of Blogging

I find that when I write something I’m not really proud of, I usually write a lot more posts to bury my crappy post as fast as I can. But if I write something I think is pretty good, it’s a lot harder to follow. I end up worrying about what to write next and it usually screws up the flow of things.

The big irony in all this is that I guess I should be more excited when I write something terrible, because it means I just might push myself to try something or learn something I wouldn’t if I felt like the stakes are a little bit higher.

The funny thing about screwing up is that almost anything that follows will probably feel like a success.