Jared Spool on Gourmet Experiences on a Fast Food Budget

Jared Spool
Gourmet Experiences on a Fast Food Budget

Key Insights:

1. Mastery of tricks and techniques across your team are key to great designs. Having a big toolbox and mastery of the tools is the most important factor for great design.

2. Methodology and dogma are unimportant to great design. In fact, focus on these takes valuable attention away from what maters.

3. Rewarding people for failure encourages learning. Throw a big party with champagne and caviar. Spend three minutes making fun of the failure and twenty minutes explaining the lessons learned from the failure.

Notes

• A hamburger and a hotdog cost the same whether you do it on a fast food budget or design it to be a gourmet burger.
• This begs that question, what’s makes something gourmet?
• And how can we apply it to web design?
• You take them apart, and see what gets you there
• Meticulous Preparation
• How Do The Best Teams Create Great Designs?
• The teams with bad design didn’t have different goals than the teams with great stuff. They all have the objective to make great stuff.
• There is a spectrum… in the middle of this spectrum there is a Process
• Tricks
• Techniques
• Process
• Methodology
• Dogma
• Process: Some teams say “we don’t have a process”, but that’s not true. Any team that eventually produces something has some sort of process. They just aren’t paying attention to the process. (Like a cook who says she doesn’t have a recipe for making something. There is a recipe, it’s just not explicit/conscious.)
• This is fine when things are going well, but not good when things are not going well.
• Process: To the right on this spectrum there is Methodology.
• Dogma: And beyond Methodology is Dogma (unquestioned faiuther independent of any supporting evidence.) Lots of things we do become dogma: “It has to be Web 2.0”, “it has to have social media”.
• They had a theory, that those organizations with great experiences had some sort of dogma that they adhered to.
• But on the other side of Process there is Techniques.
• Many great recipes have a roux. (flour and oil over low heat.) By itself, it tastes terrible, but it makes many recipes great. The roux is useful in many instances. If you can do it well, then you can make the recipe well. It’s a technique. You have to be good at it, and to get good you have practice and maybe a little coaching.
• All the way at the left end is Tricks. Tricks aren’t always “right”, but they are effective. It’s easier to use the wrong tool to get the job done, than it is to go get the right tool.
• The Best Teams
• Don’t have a methodology or dogma
• The struggling teams often tried following a methodology without success
• Focus on increasing the techniques and tricks for each team member
• They were constantly exploring new tricks and techniques for their toolbox
• Struggling teams have limited techniques and tricks.
• University websites…
• Every department maintains it’s own websites. Each college, admissions, etc. So there is a different look and feel for each part. How do you resolve that?
• The standard answer is to use templates.
• But there is no evidence that templates result in quality design.
• It is an attempt at a methodology, and in some cases becomes dogma.
• Each page has it’s own purpose. The business school is different than the admissions which is different from the school of nursing.
• There only people who care if the pages look the same are the people who have responsibility for the university website.
• Students don’t care if a page looks different.
• Instead, focus on tricks and techniques.
• The Three Core UX Attributes For Great Experience Design
• Started with 150 different variables, studied hundrends of teams, only three attributes really matter.
• Vision
• Feedback
• Culture
• The Three Questions
• Vision: Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design five years from now?
• Vision turns out to be absolute key to success. It’s a stake on the horizon with a flag. If we can clearly see the flag, then we can instantly look and see if any baby step we take will take us closer or further from the flag. And everyone can see it.
• A really good vision is stuck in the sand, but we can move it. Then we just move towards the new location.
• Feedback: “In the last six weeks, have you spent more than two hours watching someone use either your design or a competitor’s design?
• The organizations where people spend significant time watching people use the design create significantly better designs.
• It needs to be everyone on the team.
• No longer do you have opinion wars, because now you actual experiences.
• Culture: “In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for a creating a major design failure?”
• When we have a design failure, we learn something.
• All the really important lessons in life come from failures.
• Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment calls.
• At Intuit they reward people. They throw a big party with champagne and caviar. The CEO makes a speech. They spend 3 minutes making fun of the people, and 20 minutes talking about the lessons learned.
• Organizations that are risk averse make crap.
• Five Second Page Tests
• A simple technique
• Can be done in less than 10 minutes
• Can use page mock-ups or real site
• Example: Buying a Notebook Computer
• You’re ready to buy a new notebook computer
• You consider a computer a big purchase
• How much technical support will you get if you experience problems?
• CDW: Technical support
• New Customers
• Existing Customers
• Create Login
• Rated: 2
• CDW: Customer Support
• Chat Support
• E-account
• Rated: 3
• Crutchfield: Technical Support
• Free technical support
• 30 day return policy
• Rated: 5
• Designers often intend pages to have a single purpose
• We use this technique when users complain that pages are too cluttered or confusing
• Identifies if pages quickly communicate their purpose
• Paper Prototype Testing
• Design is in flux
• Team needs to try ideas to get feedback quickly
• Team can participate in study
• They are at a point where they can make changes
• Good resource: Paper Prototyping (book)
• Quality Ingredients
• In and Out: Sells burgers, shakes, and fries.
• There is a secret menu. But they are all burgers, shakes, and fries.
• They have a machine that slices the potatoes into fries just seconds before cutting them.
• They have a butcher on site. The meat is freshly prepared.
• Inuit Inuksuk: Arrangements of rocks to show that someone had been this way before. Lets the solitary hunter traveling alone for weeks or months to know that they are not alone.
• The Amazon Product Review is like an inuksuk: it lets someone know whether people have been this way before. Not all Amazon reviews are technical in nature, many of them at an inuksuk: just to let you know that other people bought and liked this camera.
• This is also what having testimonials about.
• Colleges are now experimenting with having students blog about their college experiences.
• Colleges even have content for the parents: an inuksuk for the parent.
• Creative Approach
• At MIT, students submit CSS designs. They choose 365 a year, and the MIT homepage changes every day. The content is the same, it just moves around.
• Cooking Up Gourmet Experiences
• It’s not about the money you spend, or dogma or methodology.
• You need to focus on developing great tricks and techniques across your team.
• Don’t let methodologies and dogma boy you down.
• Look for opportunities for creative approaches.
• Website: http://www.uie.com
• Newsletter: UIEtips (free weekly newsletter)
• Blog: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks

Creating Great Products In an Uncertain World according to Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path (WebVisions 2009)

I'm a fan of Adaptive Path and their work, so I was excited to see this talk by Peter, who comes from Adaptive Path.

Key insights:

• Creating a "north star" is all important from a design perspective, because it is key that everyone can understand if their baby steps take them in the right direction or not.
• It's easier to move the north star as circumstances change if it has just the necessary amount of detail.
• Plan for "The Long Wow": your product experience should keep creating wow moments over time, not just all when the box is unwrapped.

Notes:

Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World

Peter Merholz

Adaptive Path

• Approached by O’Rielly to write a book.
• Media is a mess
• Craigslist took the classifieds
• Everyone took a piece of the ads
• Blogs are taking the readers
• Music is in metamorphosis
• iTunes is the #1 retailer
• Labels are loosing their grip
• Live Nation – focused on live events, not CDs
• Travel is turbulent
• The three top quality carriers are all low-fair airlines
• Predicting the future has never been easy, but it’s never been more difficult
• Predicting the future won’t work.
• Instead, seek approaches that will continue to work no matter which prediction come true.
• [Story about how Kodak invented not just a new film system, and not just a new camera, but a whole new customer experience. When Kodak has paid attention to customer experience, they have done well. When they lost focus, they stumble. Kodak: “you press the button, we do the rest”]
• The way a company builds things:
• Inside Out: Data à Logic à User interface
• But the way a user sees things:
• Outside In: User Interface à Logic à Data
• The customer really only sees only the user interface. Anything that happens inside of that, we don’t care about. It might as well be magic.
• Example: Google Calendar
• There were lots of other calendars out there.
• Google wanted to do something exceptional
• They created a vision
• Set out to build a calendar that works for you
• Fast, visually appealing, and joyous to use
• Drop dead simple to get information into the calendar
• More than boxes on a screen (reminders, invitations, etc.)
• Easy to share so you can see your whole life in one place
• Designed for the consumer world where not everyone has a calendar (or one on the same system)
• Open APIs
• Invitation for everyone
• This vision occupies a middle ground
• Not so highly level as to be useless (“A world class calendar”)
• Not so specific that every action has to be evaluated against dozens of requirements
• But provides guidance: if it takes 19 steps to get something into the calendar, that’s clearly not drop dead simple.
• Example: TiVo
• “It’s entertainment, stupid”
• Not “build a better VCR”, but make it easier, better to watch to TV.
• TiVO users would say “I can’t imagine going back to the old way of watching TV”
• Now vision is more cleaned up
• It is reliable
• It puts me in control
• Example: Flickr Vision
• We want to help people make their content available to the people who matter to them.
• We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.
• Does Your Experience Have a North Star?
• Focus on the lives of customers
• Companies tend to oversimplify their view of people
• 4 old ways of thinking
• At worst: “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash” (from The Cluetrain Manifesto)
• This is exactly how cell phone companies and cable companies treat people
• Homo Economicus: Highly rational, maximizes utility, quantity!
• But we’re not all Spock. We make emotional decisions.
• This leads to feature wars: our competitor did these 10 features, so we have to do those 10 features and then 2 more.
• Type A Personality: Task oriented, Goal Driven, Efficiency!
• Services like wasabi help people understand their relationship to money as compared to neighbors and peers. That’s a better goal than simply trying to make things most efficient.
• Sheep: Docile and gullible, Stories and messaging, Preferences!
• It’s really disrespectful
• Our customers are sharper than that
• Not all wrong, not really right.
• We are evolving our approaches.
• What’s been missing?
• The messy complexity of life
• People regularly mix and match products with little regard for “suggested use”
• We use products the way they serve us.
• They challenge social and cultural boundaries in unexpected ways.
• Picture of monk using cell phone
• Picture of Proposal written on highway overpass
• We want to understand people as people
• What’s missing?
• Emotions (people can’t bear to throw away their old, broken iPods because they had such an emotional attachment)
• Context (understanding the context in which customers really use their product)
• Meaning (people tie their identity to their product: I’m an iPhone user, an Android user, etc.)
• Do you understand your customers as people?
• Embrace the complexity: Use systems to support experiences
• Just expose the minimal amount of complexity to our customers that we have to
• Experiences cross boundaries
• Some dysfunctional companies forbid “watercooler” conversations, forcing employees to go through management chain.
• Iterative approaches
• More effective
• When we try to plan everything in advance…
• We don’t end up where we planned to be anyway
• Even if we do, we find out that isn’t where we need to be
• Prototyping and making
• Story of original Palm: put a block of wood in his shirt pocket to mimic the device. Pretended to enter data using a stylis.
• Story of mocking up a medical device using a film canister, paper clip, and magic marker to stimulate size and shape of device.
• Deep/wide collaboration
• Teams that are cross disciplinary are very helpful
• Example: the Target ClearRx system. A “safer drug delivery system” that encompasses a new pill bottle, a new type of label, a color coded system. It involved the bottle, the pharmacists, the marketing, the training team, the supply chain, software, a new labeling system. Contributed to a 14% increase in drug sales, and won many awards.
• Engage in design as an activity – develop an organization capacity for design
• 1: Design as aesthetics (a vodka bottle – it’s pretty)
• 2: Design as a distinct role (the guy who is the font geek)
• 3:
• 4: Design as a rock star (the power of design to save the day / good / profitable )
• 5: Design as an activity
• Design is an activity that an organization ambraces, that everyone can be involved in.
• Product owners, managers, developers, people with design in their title, strategic planners
• Benefits
• Idea fabricator
• Reframing the fuzz: the wall you run up against in the middle of your product
• The Long Wow: how you get customer loyalty
• How Do You Create Loyalty?
• Traditional answer: give them a loyalty card
• Meaning more means repeatedly creating notably great experiences.
• Notably great experiences are punctuated by a moment of “wow” when the product or service delights, anticipates the needs of, or…
• Peak-end rule
• People average the peak (best) experience as well as the most recent experience, and average the two.
• The Long Wow
• Product is a platform for delivery
• Plan for wow experiences over time
• Example: compare the pedometer that packs in all the features up front, or the Nike+ system that has no screen or UI, but lets you access the data via a web interface… so that the interface can be improved, it goes way beyond what the other pedometer can provide.
• “Powersong” capability of Nike+ : the song that helps you make that last half hour.
• Can set up contests to compete with your friends. You don’t have to run at the same time or place. “The last one to run 100 miles has to buy lunch”.
• Survey of 362 firms
• 95% say they are “customer focused”
• 80% say they deliver a “superior experience”
• 8% of companies’ customers agree that the firms deliver a superior experience

How to raise online reputation: Notes from Tara Hunt's presentation on Making Whuffie (WebVisions 2009)

This was one of the better presentations at WebVisions. I felt like it had some pretty concrete actions to take.

Best takeaway: By putting myself out there for feedback on my company, the many benefits include gaining more followers, learning what my customers want, being able to engage in a discussion. I gain more by listening than by talking.

Making Whuffie
Tara Hunt

Blog: http://www.horsepigcow.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/missrogue
Book: http://www.thewhuffiefactor.com

• Dunbar number: 120-150 – the number of people we can really know at any point in time
• Will: based on tribes and communities
• As a result of the internet / we b 2.0 / facebook+myspace+blogs the dunbar number is raising
• This doesn’t leave room for the one way messages of corporations / advertising
• Some companies greeted enthusiastically, some companies are barfed upon
• Cory Doctorow / BoingBoing
• DOWN and OUT in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
• In the science fiction future of Cory, instead of money, there is something that he called whuffie
• Roughly equivalent to social capital: reputation, access to resources, favors added up (reprocity), followers, levels of trust
• High whuffie score = good reputation
• You can buy stuff with your whuffie
• But… not really fictional or futuristic. It’s here and now.
• It’s how we decide to friend people on Facebook (based on looking at existing friend relationships)
• To raise your whuffie, you need to establish relationships and credibility
• 5 ways to raise your whuffie
• 1. Turning the bullhorn around: instead of just speaking, listen
• (Will: I wonder what would happen if I solicited input on HP printers and HP website)
• The silence will smack down your whuffie
• 8 ways to turn the bullhorn around
• 1. Get advice from experts, but design for the needs of the novice
• 2. Respond to ALL feedback, even when you have to say “no thanks”
• 3. Don’t take negative feedback personally: people want a better experience, they want to keep using your product/website, they are taking the time to give you feedback to make things better
• 4. Give people credit:
• mention contributions in blog posts, tweets, or videos.
• Name a product or feature after the contributor (or let them name it)
• Send journalists their way
• Send a gift certificate or special coupon code
• Schwag and schtuff
• Upgrade their account
• Give the contributor more responsibility
• 5. Point out and explain changes as you make them
• 6. Make small, continuous improvements
• 7. Go out to find your feedback
• Use Google Alerts, Radiant6, or similar tools to seek feedback
• 8. Ignore the haters (“Don’t feed the trolls”)
• 2. Become part of the community you serve
• Figure out who it is you serve
• What problem are you solving? For whom?
• Join the community… not for market resource, not to sell them something… to learn what makes them happen. And why they would give a damn.
• 3. Create truly amazing customer experiences
• Create love, joy, and laughter.
• We can design for them.
• Automagic: a user experience so seamless that it feels like magic just occurred.
• http://lilgrams.com
• Tag: “Automagically share your baby’s memories”
• GrowthGRam, StoryGram, FoodGram, WordGram
• Automagicness starts with sign: can signin with Twitter account or Facebook connect.
• You can sync up with your social network accounts
• And then pick people in those accounts who should receive notifications
• Estimates dates from EXIF data, and combines with child’s age to guess:
• First father’s day
• First solid food
• Etc.
• Quicken for iPhone
• Automagic spending update
• Automagic account update
• Automagic ATM finder
• Tripit
• “The best way to organize and share your travel plans”
• You forward your confirmation email, from any airline or travel service, and Tripit creates a uniform itinerary, accessible via web, print, or iPhone.
• 4. Throwing sheep: fun, lightweight activities that encourage participation, but don’t really do much else.
• FB: poking, “I like this”, twitter: nudging, virtual gifting, kudos.
• Makes it an easy way for people to participate, get comfortable
• Example: Dopplr:
• Personal velocity meter (silly and fun – people were twittering about it)
• Carbon footprint
• 5. lighten up: the ability to inject fun into the most serious & professional interactions
• Examples:
• funny 404 page errors
• 4. embrace the chaos
• The fear mongers: legal, public relations/corporate communications, IT
• Understand the need for security… but need to balance it with the need for openness… because that is what people are demanding. We are in a new era of building trust
• Benefits of embracing the chaos
• You’ll be better prepared for the unexpected
• You’ll join in the conversation that is already happening and be welcomed for this move
• It will bring the opportunity for collaboration
• It will make your ideas stronger that way
• In the old days, you had one chance to get the message just right
• Today, you have multiple conversations and iterations to build that message with your customers and audience
• Whuffie is part of the gift economy. You don’t hoard it, you give it away.
• What can you give away that won’t leave you broke?
• #5: embrace your higher purpose
• Do well by doing good: in the core of what you are doing, you are giving back.
• Example: Stonyfield Farms: makes good yogurt, but does good things for the world by doing it. Sustainable production, organic.
• Craiglist
• Think customer-centrically
• Take off your marketing hat, your finance hat, and step into your customers hat. What can you do for them?
• Look at the “not customer-centric” slide on slideshare
• Customer-centric is:
• You send customers to other websites
• You measure how many people refer their friends to you as success
• When budgets get tightened, you tighten operational costs (not design, customer support, etc.)
• Your only customer service policy is to do right by the customer
• Your customers are doing things with your product you never dreamed and are posting videos.
• Influencers are adding you as friends on social networks
• You work with your competitors towards better customer experiences for all
• Making new things accessible to people:
• Blogger (enabled amateur journalists)
• YouTube (enabled amateur videographers/actors)
• Flickr (enabled amateur photographers)
• http://Akoha.com: Pay It Forward Mission Card
• If you combine all of these five whuffie factors, you will become whuffie rich
• Leads to better word of mouth, repeat sales, customer loyalty
• Which leads to increase sales and profits
• Discussion…
• Q: How to staff up to participate in this?
• A: It’s everybody’s job. At zappos, everyone is empowered to be social. It’s not one person’s job, not one department’s job. It doesn’t mean spending five hours on twitter, it means being ambient.
• The big companies spend a hell of a lot of time internally focused. They spend so much time in meeting talking about stuff that doesn’t matter instead of going to barcamps, tweetups, or webvisions conferences.
• Q: You can’t have a top down mandate to achieve something like the Southwest airlines safety rap. So how do you achieve it?
• A: You can’t mandate it. You have to cultivate the culture. That takes time, it requires hiring the right amount of people, and it takes time to apply across the board.

Notes from Makin' Bac'n: From Idea to Web Startup in 21 Days (WebVisions 2009)

Makin' Bac'n: From Idea to Web Startup in 21 days

http://www.bacn.com

Scott Kveton & Jason Glaspey

This was my favorite talk of the WebVisions 2009 conference. Fun, interesting, applicable.

Top three highlights

• Using a combination of open source and free tools (detailed below), they were to go from domain name to full website in 2 weeks, including fully functional store and checkout process.
• Their operations costs for all web/phone infrastructure are $84/month
• They’re having lots of fun, and people of all kinds are contributing just for the fun of it, like the Playboy bunny who took photos of herself wearing an “I love bacon” T-shirt.

Full Notes

• Started blog called bacondesk
• My first online order of bacon from BaconFreak.com
• “Bacon is like meat candy” ™
• He had an affiliate program
• It was clear they were getting about 1,000 orders a week. At about $100 an order, it was clear this was a business
• Decided to have a Bacon Meetup
• Listed on Upcoming.com
• At Christmas, everybody gave me bacon gifts
• 3 guys…
• We’re going to make money from day 1
• We’re going to launch in a month
• We’re going to have fun
• Confirmed plans between the week of Christmas and new year’s.
• Wanted to launch by Master Bacon, on January 21^st.
• Forced themselves into a 3 week process
• Bacn.com (the “o” is really, really expensive)
• Recipes drive organic traffic and sales
• Bacon is a shelf stable product when cured. Then shipping isn’t a problem.
• Where are we going to get our bacon, and what’s it going to be?
• Decided on 3 suppliers… the suppliers were saying “we’ve got people who have moved out of our distribution area, and now they want bacon”
• Have instructional cards on how to cook and store bacon
• Fulfillment isn’t that tough
• U.S. Postal service gives you free boxes. Just go to their website, and they’ll send you hundreds of boxes to your house.
• Website
• Used a basic content management system, plugged into Google checkout. Do 3-4 hours of work each evening, plus Saturdays.
• Hired local guy to do design.
• Didn’t get design until 2 days before the launch
• Fully functional website in 5 days
• Twirl.cc: is a url shortener. Leveraged the code to do bacn.me to create a bacon url shortener. Can impose a big bacon picture across the website. Picked up mashables story, lots of promotion.
• Blog lets them take bacon related content (have you seen the bacon 747?) and put it on the site really quickly, drives more and more organic traffic.
• Used twitter to solicit people for photo shoot
• Made bacon tshirts, gave shirts plus PBR away to people whose photos they could use
• Budget: To get to launch…buy domain name, plus everything else, was $15,000. the biggest chunk was the domain name. Bacn.com was about $5,000. Bacon.com was $750,000.
• Used all open source for everything…
• Djenko
• Wordpress
• IntenseDebate…great commenting system for Wordpress
• UserVoice: really easy to get feedback. Don’t need to login.
• Found out really quick: bacon lovers are really big dudes. Offer 4x and 5x sizes.
• Total operating cost is about $80/month: fax, hosting bill, etc.
• Cool group bacon photo was actually a photoshopped picture…all people wearing bacon shirts lined up on wall. Pictures were taken individually, then photoshopped together.
• T-shirts are their biggest product. They licensed the design of existing bacon t-shirts from individuals / small other businesses.
• They don’t do any Google adwords revenue, instead they do all affiliate revenue with sites that are bacon focused. They offer 10%, but it is only on purchases, not clicks or views.
• The vast majority of users don’t like to be referred to another website for payment. So Google Checkout is a major deterent. Having to sign up for a Google account is a major turnoff. But didn’t spend time up front to delay launch. Could launch quickly using Google checkout.
• Having their own product…
• Bacn sausage
• Bacn hamburger
• They are the only online distributor for these products
• Q: Did you need to get legal support?
• A: The company runs as an LLC. The company never opens or handles the bacon. They don’t need to worry about handling the bacon. There aren’t a lot of legal ramifications, other than those that are the usual ones.
• Q: How do you manage inventory?
• A: Turnaround from suppliers is just a couple of days. So only hold a little inventory. USPS has priority mail…can ship bacon anywhere in U.S. for 2 days for just $9.80.
• Q: How did you find out that people didn’t like Google checkout?
• A: From UserVoice. Someone mentioned it, so then offered it as a choice people could pick “Would like other options for checkout”, surprised by number of votes for it.
• Use crazy egg to make heatmaps of site
• Comprehensive list of equipment
• Craigslist for equipment
• Friends for models
• IntenseDebates for comments
• WordPress for blog
• GoogleCheckout
• Endicia for postage: prints label and postage all together. Works with custom label design.
• UserVoice for feedback.
• Mimeo for video
• Django content management
• Even does packing slips and manages inventory
• Mycorporation.com to incorporate. Used LLC, but would do it again as a C corp.
• Use google adword keyword service to assess market size per month
• Use videos to do education: how to make bacon with a grill bacon. Has a splash page, but it isn’t primarily an advertisement.

7 Ways to Find the Time to Blog

Tac Anderson recently wrote that one of the keys to increasing blog readership is to post 3 times a day or more. So how does one find the time for this level of participation? Tac has a few good tips on reducing the time involved. But thinking about it made me remember a a blog entry I wrote in 2007 in respond to the question of "How does a dad with three preschool age kids and a full-time job find the time to post?" I think these ideas apply not only to blogging, but also to any form of social media participation, whether it is Twitter, discussion forums, or anything else. The trick is is that social media shouldn't be another extra hour or two on your day, but it should in some way replace or complement activities you are already doing.

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After a friend recently posted about trying to find the time to blog, I got to thinking: How do I find the time to blog?

After some thinking, I came up with a few principles. In some ways, I'm the worst person to give advice, because my frequency of posting is terrible compared to any decent blogger. On the other hand, I'm the father of 3 children under the age of 4 (doing attachment parenting no less) and I work full time, so if I can find the time to post, then anyone can.

First, make sure that you know why you're blogging. If you don't know, the issue may not be a lack of time, but a lack of clarity or motivation. Rebecca Blood's articles and references on blogging and book, The Weblog Handbook, are useful if you are just finding your voice. Once you know why you're blogging, the following tips may help you find the time to actually get those blog posts going.

1. Repurpose: If you are an information worker of any kind or a student, you're probably already doing research, generating reports, analyzing information. If you can find a way to take your initial work and repurpose it for use in two places, then you can generate content for your blog with only a little additional work. Be aware that depending on your employment contract, work policy, and employment laws, there could be all sorts of issues about who owns your work, the confidentiality of your work, and a slew of other issues. On the other hand, judging from recent Wired magazine articles, many companies are now opening up and encouraging transparency in all its forms, including blogging. Research this ahead of time so that you're doing the correct legal and ethical thing.
2. Substitute: You probably already bookmark websites, send emails about interesting articles or thoughts to friends and you may even write the occasional letter or holiday newsletter to family and friends. All of these are material that could be published on your blog. When you publish your bookmarks on your blog, not only do you benefit, but so do your readers. Blog instead of bookmarking, blog instead of emailing, blog instead of writing a letter, blog instead of publishing.
3. Get creative: Take the creativity advice of Gifford Pinchot III, and always keep index cards or a quarto on you. The time when you have a creative idea to post is most likely not when you are in front of a computer. So grab that handy pen and paper, outline your post, and it'll be quick and easy to post when you next sit in front of a computer.
4. Scratch an itch: My own blog originated from my desire to keep track of books that I had read. As I borrowed more books to read (instead of buying), I found it difficult to keep track of books and authors I liked. That make it difficult to decide what books to read next. I could have simply kept a lot on my computer, but how much more fun to share it with everyone. Now using my blog helps me do something I already wanted to do, and that's true even if no one ever reads it. The epilogue to MIT's open source book has an interesting discussion of the open source principle applied to writing:
   
   "While every writer will tell you they write for themselves, this is more a statement of principle than an actual description of process—a piece of writing, whether a textbook or a novel, needs an audience to succeed. A programmer who claims to writes code for him or herself, on the other hand, is often telling the literal truth: “This tool is for me to use. Additional users are nice, but not necessary.”
   
   If you can manage to write and simultaneously create value for yourself through your writing, then you have a double motivation to write.
5. Eliminate barriers: If posting on your blog requires you to jump over a dozen hurdles, you won't do it. Eliminate barriers, and you'll find that even five minutes can be enough to start an interesting post. Use simple blog software with a WYSIWYG editor so you aren't spending time messing with HTML. Keep a browser window open to your blog editor at all times, so it is always easy to get to. Start a post, even if you won't have time to finish it now, and keep the edit window open. You'll come back to it later when you do have time.
6. Have modest expectations: I'm sure I could have made this a "top ten" list, but seven items came easily, and still fulfilled the purpose of the post.
7. Set a goal: E set the goal of posting at least once a week, and while she may have missed one week somewhere in there, for the last two months, her blog has had plenty of fresh, interesting articles. Way to go!

Update (4/12/2007): Here are several other resources about finding or making the time to blog:

• Technological Winter offers similar ideas and some new ones in Six tips to find the time to post.
• A VC in NY writes about finding the right time of day in When Do You Find The Time To Blog?
• Blogsite.com offers some useful ideas about substituting blog postings for other kinds of output in Can't Find the Time to Post?

Expectations Create Negative Survey Bias

Research from Stanford School of Business Professor Itamar Simonson and coauthor Chezy Ofir at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, points out that telling customers they will be surveyed, or asking them about their expectations ahead of time creates significantly more negative feedback. A quote from the article:

The researchers found that people who expect to evaluate are decidedly more negative. They also discovered that merely asking people to state their expectations before they receive a service made people morenegative—even though their predispositions may have been quite positive. For example, people who are asked if they think they will like a movie before seeing it will be statistically more negative than people who were never asked that question.

Simonson and Ofir studied the responses of customers who had called for service at a major computer hardware and software company. The researchers divided the customers into four groups. Participants in the first group were told a technician would service their problems and that they would subsequently be asked about the service, such as whether the tech was on time, whether the employee was polite, and whether he or she solved the problem. A second group was not told there would be an evaluation, but the customers were asked to state their expectations, such as how long they thought it would take for a tech to arrive. A third group was told both: to state their expectations and to expect a survey. Members of a control group knew nothing but were later polled.

The result: People who expected to evaluate were significantly more negative than members of the control group. The same was true of the group asked to state their expectations ahead of time. Interestingly, the group that was the most dissatisfied was the one that was asked their expectations and also warned about a survey.

This has serious implications for customer satisfaction surveys, but also for product research groups. Showing product prototypes to customers in a research setting is a context in which participants will frequently both be asked about their expectations and expect a survey. The effect can be research that "finds" problems that aren't really problems:

The researchers warn that while marketers must stay on top of customer desires and complaints, they must also be aware of the effects the mere expectation of filling out a survey can have on how customers view their experience. "It may not be realistic," says Simonson. "They may be chronically more negative, pointing out problems that are not problems to the average consumer," he says. "You want people who are representative of the marketplace."

This suggests that if you have any opportunity for analysis that doesn't rely on surveys, but instead relies on behavior, the results are likely to be more accurate. Social media buzz, word of mouth, and collective intelligence applications based on behavior may all be more accurate than survey responses.

Notes From Making Sense of User-Centered Design and Agile by Lane Halley and Jeff Patton

I attended the May 2009 CHIFOO presentation today on the subject of what happens when design meets Agile development processes. Here are my rough notes from the meeting.

The speakers were:

Lane Halley (lane at cooper dot com)
Cooper
principal design consultant, and teacher at Cooper U

Jeff Patton (patton at acm dot org)
designing and developing using Agile
2007 award winner for Agile Alliance’s award

If you are familiar with Agile, you may want to skip to the 2nd section.

• What is Agile?
• Common myths: no planning, no up front design, no documentation, no handoff, self-managed teams, a fad that will go away soon, undisciplined, only works with small teams, an excuse for poor quality.
• Software development has always been difficult.
• There’s a long history. Standish Group’s Chaos reports still report most projects fail or finish challenged.
• Agile’s strongest themes in response to years of failure in death march projects following waterfall-style processes.
• Agile ideas germinated during the 1980s and 1990s.
• 1986: Brook’s “No Silver Bullet” describes iterative and incremental development.
• 1995: Schwaber and Sutherland document Scrum
• 1997: Cockburn describes Crystal Methodologies.
• 2000: Beck publishes Extreme Programming (formerly at Tecktronics)
• These “lightweight” development processes had an image problem. à People with tough problems wanted strong processes, not lightweight processes.
• Around this time, we start to see the design community and the agile community start to butt heads.
• The term “agile” coined by lightweight process reps
• Feb 2001: Agile Manifesto created, a common set of values among methodologies. Created by 17 representatives of different lightweight processes.
• Since then, attracted other groups, such as lean development.
• Manifesto for Agile Development
• Link to it: http://www.agilemanifesto.org
• Four values
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
• “While there is value in the itoms on the right, we value the items on the left more.
• For some, these were mom and apple pie statements.
• See also the 12 principles in the manifesto.
• Agile values motivate agile process
• Agile success is measured through value alignment, not process compliance.
• You can follow almost any process, and it can be agile, if your core values are agile.
• What has emerged is a common process framework
• Today Scrum dominates as the simple agile process framework of choice
• Scrum describes only 3 simple roles:
• The Product Owner: Describes that the product should be, and is ultimately responsible for its success
• The Team: Everyone responsible for constructing the product
• The Scrum Master: Makes sure the process is working, and all roles are collaborating effectively. Not responsible for making the product finish on time (that’s the product owner and the team), they just focus on making sure the process is working smoothly.
• Scrum process framework (sometimes called the snowman diagram)
• Product owner identified a potential product idea
• Product owner supported by others creates the product backlog
• In sprint planning the product owner and team plan the next sprint or iteration
• The team works towards the iteration/sprint goals in a 1-4 week timebox
• The team keeps progress visible with burndown charts and task boards
• In the daily planning meeting / daily scrum, the team synchronizes daily in a short morning standup meeting
• In a product review the product owner and team gather to review the results of the last sprint and reflect on how the product and process could improve
• Today’s agile processes mix and match techniques from many agile methods: user stories, product backlog, planning poker, burndown chart, task board, test driven development, refactoring.
• The scrum mantra “inspect and adapt” applies to the product and the process.
• Agile process is tailored to the organization and team within the organization
• Venture funded startup versus Large internal IT organization.
• Mature consumer product companies versus venture startups.
• Small collocated teams versus large distributed teams.
• Everyone implements differently. Each implementation is a specific vertical implementation of process that works (or is intended to work) for the specific business environment. Since adaption is a key value, even if they started with the same process, the processes would evolve to become tailored.
• Bringing UCD (user centered design) design techniques and Agile together
• Some aspects of Agile cause frustration
• Agile lacks tools to define business and customer needs and measure product success
• An agile “product owner” may not accurately represent the user needs. It’s hard for one person to represent all the needs.
• It’s hard to see the “big picture” when you’re building incrementally
• Finding the right level of design documentation

(WEH: Isn’t it just common sense that if you see a gap, then you create a solution to that gap?)

• There are best practices to overcome all these problems
• Common ground: Interaction designers share many values with agile practioners:
• Desire to build successful products
• Focus on providing what people value
• “user stories” instead of “features”.
• Agile work styles have many benefits
• Agile is about shared responsibility
• Agile is about effective communication: you write things down to achieve clarity and because it will be useful, not just for the sake of writing documentation. [WEH: Using a wiki encourages this behavior.]
• Agile helps you fail quickly
• Agile is a more humane way to work: everything is done at a sustainable pace. Have retrospective, measure the rate at which work can happen.
• Agile processes lead to good partnerships
• No edicts: a user story is an invitation to a conversation, not an edict of what will happen.
• …
• Two different sets of expertise when Interaction Designer and Developers get together
• Ingrid, interaction designer
• HCI degree
• Works on paper
• Dave, Developer
• CS degree
• Ruby, Pivotal Tracker
• Ingrid: focuses on the probable: what might we do?
• Dave: focuses on the possible: what can be done?
• Designer and developer need to be able to talk about both the big picture as well as the nitty details
• If you’re a designer
• Be a facilitator: Help people collaborate and evolve ideas in the room together. Don’t go off and develop a vision on your own. You need to bring everyone along with you.
• Have conversations, not directives
• Use visual communication: More time on whiteboards, sticky notes, paper. Less time on heavy weight design documents.
• Help the team understand user needs, behaviors, and attitudes. You are the specialist in this, so you need to help other people. Again, not dictate the solution, but give them the tools to arrive at the solution themselves.
• Question from audience: when can you challenge the developer?
• Answer: you can challenge on what is possible. Your role is to prioritize what is really important. Where do we need to push the development boundary of what is possible, versus we can we live with it?
• If you’re a developer
• You are not the user. (Unless you are those guys at 37 signals and what you are building is a tool that you will use yourself.) We need to have a shared understanding that it is not us, and a shared understanding of who it is, not an idiosyncratic personal view of who the user might be.
• Look for the common case
• Learn design principles and patterns
• Ask the questions “who is this for?” and “what problem does this solve?”
• Changing role of interaction design
• Before:
• interaction design is a specialized role
• interaction design done at the beginning of the process
• With agile:
• Interaction design integrated in agile process
• Interaction designers participate in new ways
• Front end UI development alongside developers
• Work with product owner to articulate and validate the product concept
• More frequently, seeing interaction designers as a hybrid role…
• Interaction designers become product owners
• Interaction designers become coders who implement the UI front end
• The role of the interaction designer
• Facilitate brainstorm sessions where everyone on the team can contribute ideas and jointly understand the implications of design decisions
• Quickly iterate through different design solutions as low-fidelity sketches to help developers save time and make good decisions
• Be the team member responsible for user experience.
• Patterns for Success
• Put UX in the navigator’s seat
• UX is an important part of the product owner team
• Become a design facilitator
• Do just enough research and design to get started
• Research, model, and design up front, but lightly
• Plan for continual ongoing user contact for research and validation
• (Prioritize the target users: “of the 12 users we eventually want to target, we’ll start with these 3”
• Focus on the big picture
• Identify and communicate the overall story of the interface so you can work on smaller parts while maintaining context
• Be able to answer the questions of “Why are we in business?”, “What is this software for?” Be able to describe the context. What does this product do, and how does it do it, so that the users can accomplish what they need to accomplish? They take just enough time to see, they evolve it as they see more, and they help everyone else to see it.
• Designers need to be able to operate with a low-fidelity big picture
• Use good UX practices to support product development
• Use parallel track development to stay ahead and follow behind
• In iteration N
• Support iteration N development
• be working on design for iteration N+1
• gather user input for iteration N+2 features
• validate iteration N-1 features by putting the live product in front of the customer
• See Miller’s Case Study of Customer Input for a successful product: http://www.agileproductdesign.com/useful_papers/miller_customer_input_in_agile_product.pdf
• Buy design time with complex engineering stories (give the developers some tough problems to solve, so that the designers have time to work on other stuff. It’s balancing of resources, not just narrow focused on business priority.
• Use RITE to iterate UI before development (you can iterate UI with paper prototypes, mock up tools, etc – so that what goes into development is known good UI.)
• Prototype in low fidelity. Use paper if you can. Use code if you need to. Use the right level of fidelity. Start low, and move high only as needed.
• Treat prototype as specification. Don’t add more documentation for the sake of documentation. Have a discussion about the prototype if needed.
• Engage users continuously
• Cultivate a user group for continuous feedback.
• A pool of people I can go too, to show prototypes, get feedback. My pool is big enough that I don’t go back to the same person all the time. I should cycle through so that I am not testing with the same people, not more often than every couple of months.
• Commit to regularly visiting, listening to, and collaborating with your users.
• Leverage user time for multiple activities.
• Example of bad case: you may have user research people who are different from your design people. This should be merged. Leverage the time to its fullest extent.
• Questions and Answer session
• What is the ideal seating arrangement?
• Ambient communication is very important because there is less formal communication. The people who work together should sit together. Information flow is a property to be tuned. Information moves like heat through the room. Organize people in pods, or in big large tables.
• Any successful teams that are not collocated?
• Thoughtworks has development in Hong Kong and US. They rotate staff between locations on a regular basis. A couple of weeks each month.
• Cross country Healthcare: Brought team of engineers from India into the US for a year. Colocated India and Florida engineers for a year, then moved the engineers back.
• Have constant phone connections.
• Have video cameras.
• How do we engage with clients (we’re an agency)
• Ideally you would want the client to participate to the extent that they can. Join you at your location.
• Look at “innovation games”, a process to facilitate this kind of involvement.
• Develop with the client a communication plan: how much do we communicate, what are the checkpoints?
• But how far do you invite them in? You are making them breakfast, they don’t want to see you making sausage. (there will be some hard tradeoffs.)
• But the more you engage, the more they want to get involved. The more they get involved, the more changes they make. In the end, they will usually be happy with something simpler and less expensive to build.