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.

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.

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.

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.

Today, I saw a journalism exec argue stone-faced with the audience, almost indignant, basically implying that bloggers could not be “journalists”. (I’ll tell you that I’m no journalist, but other bloggers very much are.) He went on to imply that they had not received the proper training and didn’t have the proper experience. To prove his point, he made an attempt to draw all sorts of lines around what formally defines “a journalist”, it was actually quite painful to witness. While I appreciate that he and his colleagues had spent 25+ years understanding the world and explaining it us common folk, clearly the ground is shifting beneath his feet, (and the fact that his watchful eye was completely missing this obvious point sort of calls into question this time-tested journalistic prowess he was so adamant about.) This whole scene sort of led me to a little moment of clarity.

Here’s the thing, if you have to erect barriers around what you do, you are in deep trouble. If you have some romantic perception that you can’t be usurped or replaced by someone just because they haven’t travelled the same career gauntlet you have, you’re screwed. If you aren’t finding talent and inspiration from outside of your profession, your time is nigh. This goes for journalists, advertisers, managers, marketers, designers, engineers, beer brewers, ring masters, writers, photographers, sales people, politicians, and on and on.

We live in a world with ever-eroding barriers. There are smart people in the world who make fortunes out of upending your apple cart. Any of us should be so lucky to have someone from outside your industry that wants to try different things and potentially evolve a profession. If you’re good at what you do and you realize we live in an ever changing world, (I believe) you’ll ultimately adapt and survive. However, if you find yourself too busy to adapt because you’re too busy concocting arguments that someone hasn’t earned the right to eat your lunch, there’s a good chance your missing the fact that they already have.

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.

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.

Always Farming
I was reading this article that talked about a pretty interesting concept embedding in a game called Happy Farm. (The article is about a Chinese game but there’s also a Facebook app called Farmville and a few other knockoffs….farming seems to be the new shooting.) The gist of these games, which are massively popular at the moment, is that you have a virtual farm that you grow crops. It’s pretty simple and there’s a heavy fiddle factor around maintaining things. It sort of occupies your mind like Tetris or Minesweeper.

One of the things that makes this interaction interesting to me is that users can steal one another’s crops. The grounding concept behind the game is that it’s always on. When you’re away form your crops they grow, and you need to tend them. Sort of like a networked tamagotchi. The interesting interaction here is that if you’re not around tending your virtual farm, someone could nab your spinach.

This interaction is that makes MMPORGS like World of Warcraft pretty fascinating. Since you’re pitting real people against each other, anything can happen – you can’t design all of the foolish deviousness human opponents can create. If you were playing against the computer, that’s a rational device…playing against another player brings the fuzzy interactions that make the game interesting. I love how the simple act of making the experience open for multiple players takes something that would be very static and makes it quite dynamic. It’s a new flavor of immersion; if you’re into the game enough and you’re “AFK”, you might actually worry about someone stealing your crops and getting credit for it. That type of interaction adds this extra level of chance and richness to the experience, there’s the chance anything could happen.

Alternative Currencies

Continuing on the farming theme, many of these apps have a few ways to earn the crops you have. You can pay with time, waiting patiently for these cyber-sprouts to grow and slowly cultivating your empire. You can intervene and pay dollars and that allow you to grow crops faster. Or you can pay in effort – by taking quizzes or signing up for credit cards the game gives you some sort of currency or in-game tools in return.

Michael Arrington has sort of made a huge stink around this idea. He argues that paying through effort is a scam and it’s unfairly baiting users into all types of shady activity. Judging from his examples, he’s p right about the scam part, but the fact that you can pay through different means other than dollars is interesting. (In other gaming circles this buying in game currency rather than earning it is called ‘gold farming‘ – shocking amount of ‘farming’ going on here.)

I’m pretty interested in games that run internal economies. Lots of multiplayer games have this interaction and much like real life, money is one of the scarce good people compete for and use from trade with other goods. Most hard core gamers hate gold farming because it breaks their economy, goods aren’t scarce anymore when you can buy them in real life. This path to alternate currency is interesting because it doesn’t necessary throw an entire economy off, but it gives people an option in how they want to pay – time, money or effort. This is an interesting way to level the playing field and let the player chose which path is least scarce for them. For example, Tweens have more time than money, adults often more money than time (broad generalization, I know).

Pay For What You Get
OK, the final inspiration continues the thread around online currencies and economies. online multiplayer games usually have a two-stroke revenue engine. You pay for the software to play the game, and then you pay a subscription to play the game. It’s easy math to figure out these immersive models are big. money. Not only do you sell a $50 game, but each player drops $15 as long as they care to continue playing. To drive subscriptions, the games usually release minor patches to improve the game and major content releases (in another $50 shrink-wrapped boxes) to continue the experience.

Mike Masnik posted an article a few weeks ago talking about a pricing change to play an online DUngeons and Dragons game (yes, the exact one your thinking about). This change did away with the initial software fee and subsequent subscription in favor of allowing people to play for free and charging for certain features in the game.

The inspiring thing about this is that it orients the model around what the users really want. They want to play a game where tons of people are playing and wreaking havoc (that’s why they opted to play a massive multiplayer game in the first place….if it’s not massive, it’s not quite hat they’re looking for). ANyway, the other bit was how by removing the subscription fee, they actually “took the ceiling off of what people were willing to pay for the game”. There’s an interesting dynamic going on here, if you pay $15 you have an expectation of getting something. If you aren’t forced to pay, you’ll pay for what you want (and value what you receive). Additionally, if you take a break from playing the game for a few months, you don’t have a bagging feeling of getting charged for something you aren’t using. This segment is pretty hardcore games that switch between a few games, to keep things fresh. (The original article linked by Techdirt here.)

This balance is a pretty hard thing to pull off, and you sort of need an existing market. (Techdirt’s comments mention that the D&D brand equity really helps here.) Still, transparently pricing around exactly how consumers use your product seems so amazingly liberating. You’re now free to concentrate on how you can make them happier, and you just price against it, lots of the original complexity seems to fall away.

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.

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.

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 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.