This is one of those posts. I really don’t know if I’m “right”, “wrong”, or somewhere in the middle but I’m writing it on instinct. It was over four years ago when I received my coveted box of IDEO Method Cards. I devoured them. I instantly fell in love with them. They’re so smart—they’re almost sexy.
And now I wonder if that’s an issue.
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Apr 16, 2008
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Amazing how refreshing a change of scenery is, isn’t it? I spent a good part of last week in Mexico City on business, and the warmth of the people, the refreshing business culture and the great food made it a memorable journey. It’s been a long time since I traveled outside of the United States and Canada and the trip brought back pleasant memories of traveling in the North Pacific, China and Southeast Asia too many years ago. It was also a firm, but friendly reminder of the assumptions that we can make about customers and research.
When you’re part of a department called Insight and Planning it’s probably a good idea to know what you stand for, and where your value lies. Even more importantly, you need to know how your capability helps your organization to offer a competitive point of differentiation.
Over the last year, we’ve been internally debating what it means to be insightful, and the result is this presentation. We’ve shown it to clients, peers and our own teams in what I’ll refer to as a “healthy” dialog. Over the last month, we’ve had it out in the wild on Slideshare as well where it’s been getting some healthy linkage. One of the really interesting outcomes has been the discussion about how often we abuse or misunderstand the term “insight.” More often than not, we’re confusing insights with ideas, or elevating “findings” to the status of insights. The risk with loose definitions is that you can’t really be clear about the value you provide - you’re just creating noise. As a team, we’ve got a lot of thinking rolled up in this deck, but the the bottom line is this: we have a clear view on what we think insight is, how we generate insight and how we communicate its value. Subject to change of course, but then that’s why we’re talking about it.
So what’s the value of insight to your business?
Mar 30, 2008
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Sites of the Week
The Information Architect/Interaction Design field is awash in web sites and discussion lists, though the former are (unfortunately) significantly more worthwhile than the latter. The lists are constantly filled with requests for ‘best practices’ around the simplest of interface issues (e.g., “Should I put my text above or to the left of a form field?”), seemingly endless debates on ‘what is IA?’ and, most recently, an impressively daft call—based solely on anecdotal evidence—for IAs to pursue accreditation. It is enough to make you ‘want to tear out (your) eyeballs,’ as one of my coworkers recently put it.
On the rare occasions that someone does offer up a solution they created for a project, responses typically range from “It’s not that great” to “How dare you suggest that’s the right answer for all users!” It makes for a nice distraction on a slow work day but the problem is that all the arguing is getting us nowhere. Debates only serve to pull IAs away from the real work to be done: improving customer experience online.
Jan 31, 2008
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Steve Portigal published a thought-provoking article about the failings of personas in ACM’s Interactions magazine earlier this month. His fundamental argument is that personas are more dangerous than useful because they “are misused to maintain a safe distance from the people we design for… manifesting contempt over understanding, and creating the façade of user centered-ness…”. If you want to read it, ask Steve to send you a copy – it’s a stimulating read.
When I first tried to write today’s blog post, I read the volumes of criticism and commentary from user experience heavyweights like Peter Merholz at Adaptive Path, and Jared Spool at User Interface Engineering. Then I tried to write my own clever and finely tuned rebuttal. After all, we’re proud to be recognized for creating and using excellent personas (at least, according to one source). I mean, if I believe in them, I have to defend some turf here, right?
I tried that (for about three hours yesterday), and it made for a really, really dull blog post. So let’s take a different approach.
Let’s pretend that personas are banned. What would we do?
Welcome to the second installment of “3 Quick Questions”, where we ask CM’ers to answer three “top of mind” questions of interest to our readers. If there’s a particular topic you’d like us to tackle, leave us a comment or drop us an email.
This week, I asked three of our information architects, Scott Anderson, Cameron Ley and Laurence Lue about their efforts to learn Flash, the implications for their work and (the age old question about the future of IA’s tools (which they handily avoid …).
After the jump: This isn’t Visio anymore, Toto.
This blog is meant to give readers an inside look at what we think it takes to build great experiences. It’s easy to point to beautiful sites we’ve designed for clients like Rolex or sexy microsites we’ve built for Mercedes and talk about the experience design methods and processes used there. And for sure, there is tons of value in sharing those stories with our readers.
But one area that we don’t hear a lot about when it comes to building compelling experiences is the art of building excellent and positive client relationships. Arguably, it’s more important than any process or method we use. Without it there is no foundation to do the best work possible.
Oct 23, 2007
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Heard in coffee shops across
Regardless of how you feel about his politics or his stand on the environment, you have to give the guy credit. In a feat of personal brand management, Gore has transformed himself from Ozone Al, the presidential “almost was” to the new Green Giant complete with his own Nobel Prize.
Also heard in some coffee shops across
After the jump: Finding your inconvenient truth …
Oct 19, 2007
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...We have a lot of smart, talented people working at Critical Mass and part of the Experience Matters mandate is to encourage them to talk about their work. In a series called “3 Quick Questions”, we’ll ask members of our brain trust to answer three “top of mind” questions of interest to our readers. If there’s a particular topic you’d like us to tackle, leave us a comment or drop us an email.
This week, I’ve asked two of our senior analysts, Patrick Glinski and Shaina Boone to talk about what key performance indicators (KPI’s) really are, and how Google Analytics is changing the web analytics game. Shaina also talks a little about her next big challenge.
Web Analytics - What inquiring minds want to know …
