What do you want to contribute?

...when asked to spend time with an unknown and unproven young man seeking his way in the world, Drucker freely gave the better part of a day to mentor and give guidance. I had the honor of writing about that day in the foreword to The Daily Drucker, wherein I recount how Drucker altered the trajectory of my life by framing our discussion around one simple question: "What do you want to contribute?"

And therein we find the secret to Peter Drucker: He had a remarkable ability not just to give the right answers, but more important, to ask the right questions -- questions that would shift our entire frame of reference. Throughout his work runs a theme that highlights a fundamental shift, away from achievement -- jettisoning with the flick of his hand, as if he were waving away an irritating gnat, any consideration of the question of what you can "get" in this world -- to the question of contribution. Drucker's relentless discipline to say "no thank you" to invitations and inquiries stemmed from thinking always about how he could best contribute with his one lifetime.

Jim Collins, "Lessons From A Student Of Life," BusinessWeek, 28 Nov 2005, p. 106. (subscription required)

User

The problem is we don’t have good language. When I’m on Flickr I’m a photographer or a commenter. When I’m here I’m a writer or a blogger. When I’m on Craig’s List I’m a job seeker or a buyer or a seller. When I’m on MSN Search or Google I’m a “searcher.” When I’m on Memeorandum I’m a “reader.”

“User” just seems so unsatisfying. “Participant” is a lot closer. What do you think?

Robert Scoble, "I don’t just “use” the Internet, so why am I a user?" Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger, 10 Nov 2005

act despite uncertainty

Because uncertainty is inevitable, decisions can never be perfect. Often we believe that we can improve the decision by collecting more information, but in the process we lose opportunities. Skilled decision makers appear to know when to wait and when to act. Most important, they accept the need to act despite uncertainty.

Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, 1999, p. 276-277. Amazon

value in the act

Modeling is similar to planning-most of the value is in the act of modeling, not the model itself.

Scott W. Ambler, Agile Modeling, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002, p. 19.Amazon

"Aha!"

EVERY now and then, humanity wakes up, looks at itself in the mirror and realizes that it's been wasting a lot of effort doing things the old way just for the sake of tradition. From the caveman who first put a bunch of rolling logs under something heavy, to the genius who packed four times more orange juice onto a truck by condensing it first, history is filled with "Aha!" moments that propel society forward.

JVC had just such a moment when it looked at how people were using camcorders. "Let us get this straight," the corporate entity said (I'm paraphrasing here). "People buy tapes to put into their camcorders. They fill up a tape, then rewind it and play it into a computer - which takes a whole hour per tape - so that they can edit it and burn a DVD. Or maybe they buy one of those camcorders that record directly onto miniature DVD's, which are very expensive, hold only 20 minutes of video and can't easily be edited on a computer."

The "Aha!" moment came when JVC looked at the iPod. Why, JVC wondered, are we still recording onto tapes and discs, if we can record directly onto a tiny little hard drive like the iPod's? The camcorder could hold hours and hours of video, and you'd never have to buy another tape or specialized blank DVD.

....

But because the transfer-and-edit process is so confusing, the Everio G winds up suited for a very specific audience: people techno-shy enough to want the world's easiest-to-use camcorder, but techno-savvy enough for its awkward video-importing challenge. It may take JVC one more "Aha!" moment to realize and correct that contradiction.

David Pogue, "Aha! Video Straight to a Computer, NYTimes.com, 22 Sep 2005. via Tomalak

managed chaos

Shouldn't there be away to anticipate problems like those posed by bagels and toilets, and cut out all the trial and error? As frustrating as the "rework" is, says Lee [OXO's President], it's part of the design process, a necessary by product of experimentation. "You could design a process to catch everything, but then you're overprocessing," he says. "You kill creativity. You kill productivity. By definition, a culture like ours that drives innovation is managed chaos."

Chuck Salter, "OXO's Favorite Mistakes," Fast Company, Oct 2005, p. 66-67.

let go of safety in mediocrity

Nobody knows what they really want before they get it. Not consumers, not conference goers, not programmers, and certainly not clients. Delivering greatness requires you to let go of the safety in mediocrity where you just do as you’re told. (But sure, it’s also a gamble, so don’t come crying if you’re fired for trying — but do drop a note if it worked out ;))

David H. Hansson, "People don’t know how to ask for what they really want," Signal vs Noise, 37signals.com, 16 Sep 2005

team mind

This is the power of the team mind: to create new and unexpected solutions, options, and interpretations, drawing on the experience of all the team members to generate products that are beyond the capabilities of any of the individuals.

Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, 1999, p. 245. (Amazon)

Design Goals for MS Office 12

PressPass: What were the design goals of the new UI?

Larson-Green: We had four major design goals. The number one design goal was to make it easier for people to find and use the product features needed to get the results they wanted. As such, we set about rethinking the UI from the user’s perspective, which is “results-oriented,” rather than from the developer’s perspective, which tends to be “feature-oriented” or “command-oriented” – thereby enabling people to focus on what they want to do rather than on how they do it. We put those results in “galleries,” so for instance, instead of having to learn how to make something shadowed, or what the aspect ratio is or the percent gray, you just say, "Oh, I like that one," and you pick it, you click it and get it in your document. It’s more visual.

The second design principle was to streamline the UI to maximize the user’s workspace. That means having the UI generally be much less intrusive –without popping things up over the top of where you’re trying to work, without toolbars appearing because you inserted a picture, and without task panes coming up automatically. In addition to having the document be the most important thing on the screen, we wanted to make the user experience more predictable, with less guessing and auto features. In general, we wanted too make the UI more user-driven.

Another design principle was driven by the desire to make it easier for people to discover the capabilities that achieve a desired result. To accomplish this, we contextualized the new UI by taking all the things that were not about authoring documents and moving them out of the authoring space, and contextualizing all the things about authoring documents into tasks to create documents. In PowerPoint today, all the commands are available to you at all times at the same level. While there are advantages to that, when you have a couple of thousand commands, you have too many things on the screen at once, and the user experience is not really directed to what you’re trying to get done. By making it context-driven, only the more relevant features are visible, which also makes it easier for the user to understand what the product’s capabilities are.

A final design principle focused on designing for the full document life cycle. We’re starting to add more of these processes in Office that aren’t just about authoring documents, which are features supporting collaboration and work flow and document management processes for your corporation. Currently, there isn’t a good place in the UI to put that kind of functionality, so we are creating a place to put it.

"Q&A: Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office “12” Core Applications," Microsoft.com, 13 Sep 2005.

41 minute video showing the new office UI.

easier on the eyes

The previews of Windows and Office focused on their use of graphics to give consumers more ways to manage information on the computer screen.

That's a growing issue as software applications become more complex. For instance, the first version of Word had 100 commands. The 2003 version has more than 1,500 commands and 35 tool bars.

"We need to make it easier for people to visualize information that comes from different directions," Gates said.

The Office redesign is meant to make it easier on the eyes, with the myriad of menu boxes fading in and out of view depending on what tools are being used.

Microsoft designers developed the system by tracking -- with permission -- every keystroke of some Office users, Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, said in an interview.

Alex Veiga, "Microsoft: Office 12 to anticipate needs," BusinessWeek.com, 13 Sep 2005.

as convenient as the pencil

In looking back at Kodak's long road to the digital age, Sasson doesn't believe his employer ultimately was late to the game.

"As much as other people may have introduced cameras earlier, I submit those cameras probably were not very easy to use — or very good by image-quality standards," he said. "The mission is the same as George Eastman's: Take this very important art and turn it into something 'as convenient as the pencil.'"

Ben Dobbin, "Digital camera turns 30 — sort of," MSNBC.com, 9 Sep 2005

nano

It's amazing that the Nano even made it to the stage. The story of the Nano started nine months ago, when Jobs and his team took a look at the iPod Mini and decided they could make it better. On the face of it, that wouldn't appear to be a fantastically smart decision. The iPod Mini was and still is the best-selling MP3 player in the world, and Apple had introduced it only 11 months earlier. Jobs was proposing to fix something that decidedly was not broken. "Not very many companies are bold enough to shoot their best-selling product at the peak of its popularity," Gartner analyst Van Baker says. "That's what Apple just did." And it did that while staring right down the barrels of the holiday retail season.

It was a gutsy play, and it came from the gut: unlike almost any other high-tech company, Apple refuses to run its decisions by focus groups. But Jobs is a hardened gambler, and he doesn't scare easily. This is the guy who coolly poured millions of his own dollars into an unknown and direly unprofitable company called Pixar before anybody had even made a full-length computer-animated movie. "The more we started to talk about what this could be," Jobs says, "it wasn't long before I said, 'You know, what if we just bet our future on this? Is that possible?' And everybody immediately looked pretty scared. Including me."

"What's really been great for us is the iPod has been a chance to apply Apple's incredibly innovative engineering in an area where we don't have a 5%-operating-system-market-share glass ceiling," Jobs says. "And look at what's happened. That same innovation, that same engineering, that same talent applied where we don't run up against the fact that Microsoft got this monopoly, and boom! We have 75% market share."

Lev Grossman, "Stevie's Little Wonder," Time.com, 11 Sep. 2005

Experience design

Experience design, or “design for experience”is a name for enlarging scope to consider patterns of life, goals, activity, context, repeated use, learning, sharing, emotion, and more…while applying The Design Process.

Marc Rettig and Aradhana Goel, "Designing for Experience: Frameworks and Project Stories," Presentation given at Adaptive Path's User Experience Week 2005 in Washington, D.C. (via Putting People First)

teach them to see things

"I loved art school. I couldn't wait for Monday to come, couldn't wait for the weekend to be over. The PSDW (Pennsylvania School of Design for Women) was ahead of its times, I think. The instructors were'nt professional teachers; they were working artists. Children don't need instruction on how to put things down on paper. All they need to do is learn how to look and see. The important thing is just teaching them to see things. The more you do it, the more you see. I feel strongly about that."

Discription next to the Ella Peacock's painting "Girl with Read Scarf" at Museum of Utah Art & History, Aug 2005. Ella Peacock, "Girl with Red Scarf," BYU - Museum of Art, c. 1920's

The most typical perspective is that experts know more; they have more facts and rules at their disposal.... I have taken a different perspective: expertise is learning how to perceive. The knowledge and rules are incidental.

Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, 1999, p 168. (link to amazon) www.decisionmaking.com

"Seeing consists of the grasping of structural features rather than the ndiscriminate recording of detail."

Rudolf Arnheim

"All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible."

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, p. 92 (amazon link)

The interface is the product

The interface is the product. It’s the touchpoint between you and your customers. It’s the translator between two parties that often speak different languages. If you’re unable to control that touchpoint to a significant degree on your own then you’re putting your business in someone else’s hands.

Jason Fried, "The importance of having a designer on staff," Signal vs Noise, 37signals.com, 10 Aug 2005

Super computers for potato chips

Once the exclusive territory of nuclear weapons designers and code breakers, ultrafast computers are increasingly being used in everyday product design. Procter & Gamble used a supercomputer to study the airflow over its Pringles potato chips to help stop them from fluttering off the company's assembly lines.

John Markoff, "A New Arms Race to Build the World's Mightiest Computer," New York Times, 19 Aug 2005 via Tomalak's

personas are really conceptual models

The best personas are really conceptual models, which help you to digest the user research in a coherent way. They put a name and face to an observed pattern of behavior.

It’s easy to see the surface elements that we’ve used throughout history to separate and shallowly categorize one another — race, age, where we live, what we like to eat, and so forth. It’s much harder to uncover what binds us together: our shared goals, motivations, and behaviors. But to make sound personas, this is exactly what we must observe and record.

The differences between personas must be based on these deeper issues — what people do (actions or projected actions), and why they do them (goals and motivations) — and not as much on who people are. It’s not that knowing who people are isn’t important, it just isn’t as important for personas.

Dan Saffer, "Persona Non Grata," Adaptive Path, 17 Aug 2005 via Tomalak's

conflicting requirements

It is but one illustration of the complexity of space shuttles, and the dilemmas that complexity creates.

....

The reason, say experts and analysts, emerged from the first concepts of the shuttle, which were not practical but fantastic. It should be reusable. It should fly like a plane on reentry. It should carry huge payloads - such as satellites and pieces of space stations.

"It was given so many conflicting requirements that it wasn't going to be able to reach any of them," says Howard McCurdy, a NASA historian.

The technology to do it did not exist. So the shuttle emerged as a compromise, an inordinately complex machine that fulfilled all the functions adequately, but none perfectly.

Mark Sappenfield, "Shuttle launches into its final era," The Christian Science Monitor, 27 July 2005.

Steps to transform customer experience

Stated as simply as possible, but not simpler, there are four steps in transforming the customer experience within a business:

1. Listen to the business. 2. Listen to the customers. 3. Synthesize the two inputs. 4. Suggest improvements.

Mark Hurst, "Customer Experience in Four Steps, and a Whitepaper," goodexperience.com, 27 July 2005

Within our personas and scenarios, the people and their stories are not arbitrary. They are stories of the lives of our clientÂ?s current and potential customers, and they serve as comprehensive guides to how our clients should interact with those customers, in the moment or over a lifetime, to profit their business. Three years ago, personas and scenarios were Â?a process stepÂ? in our iterative, user-centered development process, whereas today they are the platform upon which many of our insights are communicated, and our solutions are modeled. Over the past few years, they have risen in importance and become a primary tool for communicating data analysis, strategic business frameworks, new product and service concepts, and cross-channel brand experiences....

....Customer-centric discussions, strategy and results continue to increase their prevalence in the boardrooms. Personas are a clear, comprehensive, human way to tell those stories.

Experience Planning Group, edited by Parrish Hanna, "Customer Storytelling at the Heart of Business Success," Boxes and Arrows, 17 Jul 2005.

patterns are a designer's rules of thumb

In a general sense, patterns are a designer's rules of thumb, the intuitive principles, often unspoken, that guide design work. And just as our innate knowledge of grammatical rules allows us to speak fluently and create well-formed sentences, an architect's innate sense of patterns allows him or her to design fluently, to create well-formed buildings.

Max Jacobson, Murray Silverstein, Barbara Winslow, Patterns of Home, Taunton Press, 1992, p. 4.

“Life is too short for a man to hold bitterness in his heart.”

The recent UCI Track Cycling World Championships held near Los Angeles included a display honoring [Marshall "Major"] Taylor. It featured one of his lightweight racing bikes and his defining statement: "Life is too short for a man to hold bitterness in his heart."

Brion O'Connor, "Major Injustice," Delta Sky, July 2005, p. 70.

slightly disruptive

Make the slightly disruptive mindset sustainable. Artists keep what they call a “morgue”-- it is a journal of images, ideas, and sketches they gathered from all sorts of sources. They are able to refer to the journal in the studio for inspiration and ideas. Record your thoughts and ideas in a journal. Add stimulation from other observations--magazine articles, images, and ideas. The goal is to break your pattern of thinking and look at the same things you do everyday through a different lens.

Geof Hammond, Slightly Disruptive, a Play Red Paper, 2005. (PDF)

Misquoted

USA Today's Kevin Maney has an interesting piece today about some well known and oft-repeated technology quotes that he says simply aren't true. Among those for which he finds no evidence or outright counter-information, are:

• "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, founder of IBM.
• "Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles Duell, U.S. Patent Commissioner, 1899.
• "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- Harry Warner, Warner Bros., as movies with sound made their debut in 1927.
• "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, 1981.

There is one well-known quote which turns out to be true: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." — Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment, in 1977. Now, next time you see one of these quotes, probably on somebody's PowerPoint presentation, you can call'em on it!

http://archives.trblogs.com/2005/07/not_what_you_th.trml http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2005-07-05-famous-quotes_x.htm

Let go

Google recognized that users maintain control, and to win they had to become users’ preferred choice.

....

The Web’s lesson is that we have to let go, to exert as little control as necessary. What are the fewest necessary rules that we can provide to shape the experience? Where do people, tools, and content come together? How do we let go in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to our business?

Peter Merholz, "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control," Adaptive Path, 21 Jun 2005

The Page Paradigm

On any given Web page, users will either...

- click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal,

- or click the Back button on their Web browser.

Mark Hurst, "The Page Paradigm," Good Experience Blog, 19 Feb 2004.

People don’t complain about paper when it can’t do something, but if software can’t do something then it’s “bad” or “useless” or “a waste” or “needs more features” or “crap” (yes, we’ve heard all of these things). That’s an impossible expectation to meet and a harmful assumption to make.

Jason Fried, "The right tool for the job," Signal vs. Noise Blog, 23 May 2005.

fuzzy concept

“There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.” - Ansel Adams

“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.” - George Sand (1804-1876), Pearls of Wisdomed. J. Agel and W. Glanze, 1987

As quoted in Bob Baxley, "Shared Vision :: Organization Synergy for Effective Design," Presentation for About, With, and For, Chicago, Illinois, Oct 2004

unimpeded by progress

"The fire service in the United States is a 200-year-old institution unimpeded by progress..."

Joshua Davis, "The Fire Rebels, Wired, June 2005, p 153.

brilliant and conceptually simple

Paniccia's team came up with an answer that was both brilliant and, for those familiar with silicon technology, conceptually simple. Etched into the Intel laser chip was a silicon waveguide channel in which light bounced back and forth, gaining in intensity. The researchers implanted electrodes on both sides of the channel. When they turned on a voltage between the electrodes, it created an electric field that herded the negatively charged electrons toward the positively charged electrode, effectively sweeping them out of the way. As a result, the photons were able to build up unhampered, until they produced a continuous laser beam.

Robert Service, "Intel's Breakthrough," MIT Technology Review, July 2005

it's a co-op

IBM wants to harness the power of this community, allowing members to work together in hardware, software and tuning, sharing the resulting breakthroughs. As with Linux IBM is looking to build service revenues here, in this case design and manufacturing service revenues.

I have said before that IBM is the leader in monetizing the open source model. But open source should not be confused with Linux. It's a business process, not an operating system, in which innovations are shared from a common pool, and costs are spread out among many different companies.

The short form. It's not communism, it's a co-op.

As hardware becomes software, and as Moore's Second Law bites, the open source business model is moving into the vacuum.

Dana Blankenhorn, "Could Apple loss be IBM's gain?" ZDNet Open Source Blog, 9 Jun 2005.

Optimistic

According to psychologist Martin Seligman, depressed people tend to be more realistic than optimistic ones. And the optimists, even when their good cheer is unwarranted, accomplish more. They do better in school, for example. As Seligman explained to Fortune magazine, the people most likely to succeed are those who combine "reasonable talent with the ability to keep going in the face of defeat."... People in Great Groups are simultaneously analytical and confident. As Alan Kay once observed, "The way to do good science is to be incredibly critical without being depressed." Great Groups don't lose hope in the face of complexity. The difficulty of the task adds to their joy.

Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, Perseus Books Group, 1998, p. 209-210.

It is about simplicity through design

The mobile industry is full of excitement about music. Nokia, SonyEricsson and Samsung are all making an assault on music with their latest models.

But converging all these functions that are now possible into one device opens up major design problems.

What the industry should be coming up with are more innovative ways to get at these functions, thinks Mr Jenson, in ways that understand the kinds of experiences people want. It is about simplicity through design.

....

The problem facing the technology industry is how to design devices that do what they are supposed to do, easily.

....

To him, design is not just about looks. It is about removing obstacles of use for everyone.

....

"From a software point of view they were very clever about acceleration. If you scrolled a little bit, it was obvious. Then when you scrolled faster, it got to the bottom.

"So you could go from top to bottom of 3,000 songs in 10 seconds. And no one really even noticed that - it was invisible design"

Essentially, it did so many things without the user having to think too much about it and knocked down barriers to getting at functions.

"The device basically became effortless. That didn't mean it had value, it just means it didn't suck."

....

"You don't want to carry eight batteries and eight screens. At the same time you don't want a device that is just horrible at everything. And how do you balance that? I am not sure what the answer is."

Jo Twist, "Designs on less complex mobiles," BBC News, 13 May 2005 via Tomalak.

at Least Sort Of

It takes two-megapixel photos (a first for a cellphone in the United States). It can scan in business cards, record 90-minute videos, play TV shows and even transcribe dictated speech.

Of course, what makes the Monty Python skit so funny is the infinite gulf between the simplicity of the "solutions" and the difficulty of executing them - and that's what makes the A800 a little silly, too. If you reread the previous paragraph but add "sort of" after every phrase, you'll get the idea.

....

The phone, which goes on sale tomorrow for $500 (less if you're opening a new Sprint account), also includes an alarm clock, calendar with audible reminders, MP3 music player and voice notes. And it can record one minute of a phone call, which is fantastic when somebody's giving you directions while you're driving.

The trouble is, all of these features saddle the poor little device with a complexity that will boggle even the veteran cell fan. You have to wade your way through a staggering 583 menu commands, along with far too many pointless "Are you sure?" confirmations, to find them all. Just looking up your own phone number requires eight button presses, for goodness' sake.

David Pogue, "The Cellphone That Does Everything Imaginable, at Least Sort Of," New York Times, 12 May 2005via Tomalak

a 'magical product' - the creation of a single mind

For the new Xbox project, Mr. Allard said his team had twice that time and aimed at conceiving a 'magical product' that was so well integrated it would seem the creation of a single mind.

Michel Marriott, "In Console Wars, Xbox Is Latest to Rearm," The New York Times, 13 May 2005.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -- Leonardo DaVinci

As quoted on www.folklore.org

restraint

Boxes and Arrows: In your opinion, what is one of the most usable sites out there today? Why?

Steve Krug: Completely predictable and boring answer, I?m afraid: Google. Someone asked me around the time of their IPO why Google is such a big deal, and I realized that I think it's because the people who created it were more interested in coming up with something useful than something they could market. They had a bright idea, and they created something that solves a real problem really well. Not perfect, but practical. And they're restrained. Like Jeff Hawkins with the Palm Pilot, they fought off feature creep really well. Microsoft seems to have brilliant people and they do great research, but they never seem to have great ideas and carry them out with restraint. They always seem to be looking for the ideal (but cumbersome and buggy) solution rather than something 'good enough' and workable. A lot of companies get suckered into trying to solve a huge problem (such as creating robot cars) when what most people really want and need is an adequate solution to a lesser problem (like power steering, or a robust, non-distracting navigation system, or maybe just road maps that are easier to fold up).

"Interview: Steve Krug," Boxes and Arrows, 2 May 2005

context assembly

I call this set of functions "context assembly," a phrase I picked up from Groove co-founder Jack Ozzie. When collaboration devolves to the common denominator of e-mail, every participant has to weave context around an otherwise chaotic stream of messages, and there's no canonical view. Context assembly in disposable shared spaces is the essence of Groove, and in that sense TimeDance was very Groove-like.

Unlike Groove, though, TimeDance had universal reach. I have never encountered a diverse group whose members were all willing and able to use Groove. Today, its entry barrier remains about where it was five years ago. For a Web-based application like TimeDance, though, the barrier is now even lower than it once was.

Jon Udell, "What TimeDance got right," InfoWorld, 27 Apr 2005

Hear the music

When Boyd saw them, he reacted as if he had been handed the Ten commandments. He sat sown and reverently turned the pages. Christie realized that Boyd had the ability to look at pages of numbers and visualize their meaning. He could look at what to most people would be a confusing jumble of arcane math and see an airplane with the variable of altitude, airspeed, temperature, angle of bank, and G-load. As Boyd sat at the table, his head moved and his shoulders rolled and his fist pulled back on the stick and he mumbled as he flew the numbers. He said to Christie, "The charts sing to me. I hear music when I read them."

....

Several days later the two men were driving to Andrews AFB outside Washington when Boyd went into one of his trances. He stopped talking and stared out the window. A few minutes later he snapped out of it, turned to Riccioni, and said, "Tiger, I'm plotting some E-M data and I need to know how to take a derivative of --"

"You're plotting E-M data?" Riccioni interrupted. "In your head?"

In the mathematics doctoral program at MIT, Riccioni had studied disciplines and schools and theorems that Boyd had never heard of. But Riccioni could not plot E-M data in his head. He could not visualize the charts. He could not hear the music.

, Boyd : The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, p. 146 & 241. (link is to Amazon)

Thinking Visually

At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry - famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," he recalls.

Steve Silberman, "Life After Darth," Wired, May 2005.

It's about experimenting and discovering

It's hard for corporations to understand that creativity is not just about succeeding. It's about experimenting and discovering./p>

Anna Muoio, "How Is Your Company Like a Giant Hairball?" Fast Company, Dec 1997/Jan 1998

what makes a good feature

For various reasons this doesn’t work: Big piles of hit and miss features, chosen thoughtlessly, is less desirable that small piles of good features, chosen carefully. Consider this: what makes a good feature? It’s not an abstract quality: goodness means a problem is solved for a user. If you don’t spend some time considering who these people are and what they’re doing, odds are slim you’ll find features that matter much: unless of course you’re building the browser exclusively for people that that look, smell and think like you do.

Scott Berkun, "How to build a better web browser," scottberkun.com, Dec 2004 via Tomalak's Realm

at the core of every game, there's timing, tensioning and strategy

The classic Atari games still show up on phones and other gadgets. Have you been surprised at how durable those games have been?

Bushnell: Actually not. I think that at the core of every game, there's timing, tensioning and strategy. In some ways, the old games are a little bit purer because they completely focused on those elements instead of production values.

If you have a tournament chess player, they will only play with one kind of chess set. They don't want pieces made of glass or intricately carved things. All those production values that make very pretty chess sets actually make the game harder to play. In some ways, if you focus on production values and you short-change rules and structure, you end up with a poorer game than something that's really simple.

David Becker, "The return of King Pong," CNET News.com, 15 Mar 2005

rarely able to verbalize what their real needs are

Touhey began looking for new ways to inject excitement into his products. "Consumers are rarely able to verbalize what their real needs and problems are," says Touhey, who had previously worked at Bayer as a product manager for Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold Medicine. "When a moderator in a focus group asked about problems people had with basketballs, the number one answer was probably grip. But once the conversation was steered toward inflation, every hand would shoot up. Everyone had a story." Spalding managers had been aware of inflation frustration for years, but little had been done to address the problem.

The idea that changed how Spalding approached inflation hassles occurred on Thanksgiving Day, in 1998. As Touhey watched his father get ready to carve the family turkey, the birds plastic pop-up ther-mometer gave him the idea for a minia-turized pump that would reside inside the ball when not in use. ....

Spalding continues to seek out new insightsand not just by watching ballers on the playground or weekend warriors on the diamond. "A colleague clipped an ar-ticle about Pull-Ups diapers, of all things, that talked about how the diaper holds uncomfortable wetness against the toddlers skin for five minutes so that the kid seeks out potty training," says Touhey. "It got us thinking on new tangents. How could touch and feel become a part of learning good techniques for throwing a ball? Maybe new materials could show a thermal handprint on a football, so you could see if youre throwing with the right grip."

Jeremy B. Dann, "Spalding: An Idea with Bounce," Technology Review.com, April 2005

False similarities

As any logician will tell you, reasoning by analogy is a very dangerous game for most mortals. False similarities can capture our imagination, restrict our vision, and seduce us into seeing things that do not exist.

Franklin C. Spinney, "Genghis John," Proceedings of the U. S. Naval Institute, July 1997, pp. 42-47

batting .300 or .350

Let's talk about serial innovators. What's the secret to success?

I don't know if there's a secret to success. I've had a great deal of success myself. I also have had my share of failure. To me, being a great innovator is like batting in baseball. If you're batting .300 or .350, you're doing pretty well. Most people, they never get a hit. I try to think very hard about what's ultimately going to happen. Ultimately, everything's going to be wireless. Ultimately, everything's going to be portable. I figured that out a long time ago.

The trick is once you see that long-term vision, you then ask yourself, how do I get there step by step? You can't just solve all the problems at once and bingo, you have an industry. No, you have to solve a whole bunch of those problems, and along the way you have to make money while you're doing it.

And so what steps do you do? Even though I thought all computers would be mobile computers at some point, we said we can't do the wireless piece. We could do a connected organizer, and bingo, we did that. You always have the future vision in place. That tells you what you have to do.

"Voices Of Innovation: Jeff Hawkins," BusinessWeek, 11 Oct 2004.

killing our ability to make astonishing things

Profit is every CEO's major focus. Research almost always benefits an entire industry more than any particular company. And research doesn't have immediate results.

Sometimes it doesn't have the results that CEOs want. You invent a product that has a longer life-cycle, that doesn't need constant refills or upgrades. Research is expensive and unpredictable. Things that today's business world frowns on.

New technology typically has a five-year development cycle. The U.S. technology business stopped being serious about research in 2000 and the results are showing now.

People have a little more money but there's nothing they want to buy. There's nothing that makes you say, 'Wow." Ten years ago I was seeing something interesting every month, but now we're touting bloated software and cute case designs as innovation.

The damage to HP and the U.S. technology industry at large may already be irreversible. If we start investing today and let our engineers play we might have something exciting to show people in 2010. That's a long time to wait for the next big wow.

To me, this rabid fixation on short-term profits is a bigger threat than outsourcing -- it is killing our ability to make astonishing things.

As Told to Michelle Delio, "Carly's Way," TechnologyReview.com, 4 Mar 2005

More functions, more disappointment

The smart design decisions Apple made to bring digital music to life (everything from iPod autosync to the FairPlay digital rights management, or DRM, technology that makes the iTunes Music Store possible) interfere with a killer photo experience. In fact, any device that attempts to handle multiple applications and interaction models will disappoint in at least one of them.

Portable devices must be simple because of their size, which means fewer buttons to do things and less screen real estate to handle options. Simplicity does not end with the device; the entire connected experience--device, application and service--must be simple. The iPod, iTunes and the iTunes Music Store are brilliant in their simplicity as a single music application.

Photos are a lean-forward activity that centers on the screen, whereas music is a mostly lean-back activity where sound is the critical component. Delivering a killer photo experience would require a complete redesign of the device, application and service to make it dead simple to take pictures, manipulate them, print them, put them in slide shows and share them.

It's impossible to do all core tasks equally well, even within a single application like music. That's why iPod's song selection is simpler and easier than its song-rating feature. The challenge is to anticipate and prioritize the tasks correctly. Conflicting priorities can lead to flawed consumer experiences--one of the biggest challenges facing devices such as the BlackBerry 7520 and the Audiovox SMT5600. The correct task prioritization depends on whether a consumer uses the device primarily as a phone or as an e-mail device.

Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff (Forrester Research), "Commentary: iPod Photo? Stick to music," CNET News.com 25 Feb 2005

The trick is knowing when to stop

With CG, you can produce infinite detail. The trick is knowing when to stop. "At a certain point, people look deformed, because the skin is realistic and all the folds are there." Bird says. "We struck a balance: We have eyebrow hair, but not nose hair."

"The 2005 Wired Rave Awards: Brad Bird for imagining The Incredibles," Wired, Mar 2005, p 84.

design is something that is best done slowly and carefully

AK Even if you’re designing for professional programmers, in the end your programming language is basically a user-interface design. You will get much better results regardless of what you’re trying to do if you think of it as a user-interface design. PARC is incorrectly credited with having invented the GUI. Of course, there were GUIs in the ’60s. But I think we did do one good thing that hadn’t been done before, and that was to realize the idea of change being eternal.

SF You never walk in the same river, otherwise known as Strachey streams.

AK The user interface, which is still the predominant approach today, is a user interface as the access to function. If the area is interesting, you eventually wind up with something that looks like the control panel of a nuclear reactor. So this is the agglutination of features.

SF Yes, a button on every pixel.

AK Corporate buyers often buy in terms of feature sets. But at PARC our idea was, since you never step in the same river twice, the number-one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment—something that’s explorable in various ways, something that is going to change over the lifetime of the user using this environment. New things are going to come on, and what does it mean for those new things to happen?

This means improvements not only in the applications but also in the user interface itself. Some of those ideas were quite manifest in the original Macintosh, but are much less manifest in the Macs of today—and of course never really made it to Microsoft. That just wasn’t their way of thinking about things, and I think a programming language is the same way. Even if the user is an absolute expert, able to remember almost everything, I’m always interested in the difference between what you might call stark meaning and adjustable meaning.

I did quite a bit of study on that over the years to understand the influence of having something that you can read. It’s known that our basic language mechanism for both reading and hearing has a fast and a slow process. The fast process has basically a surface phrasal-size nature, and then there’s a slower one. This is why jokes require pauses; the joke is actually a jump from one context to another, and the slower guy, who is dealing with the real meanings, has to catch up to it.

There have been many, many studies of this. This argues that the surface form of a language, whatever it is, has to be adjustable in some form.

SF As you probably know, recent research has looked at how different parts of the brain recognize and react to jokes. Physically, they are quite distinct.

AK Yes. All creativity is an extended form of a joke. Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in—the one that we think is reality.

In the ’60s, one of the primary goals of the computer science community was to arrive at an extensible language. As far as I know, only three ever actually worked, and the first Smalltalk was one of those three. Another very interesting one was done by Ned Irons, who invented the term syntax-directed compiler and did one of the first ones in the ’60s. He did a wonderful extensible language called Imp.

One of the things that people realized from these extensible languages is that there is the unfortunate difficulty of making the meta-system easy to use. Smalltalk-72 was actually used by children. You’re always extending the language without realizing it when you are making ordinary classes. The result of this was that you didn’t have to go into a more esoteric place like a compiler compiler—Yacc or something like that—to add some extension to the language.

But the flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

"A Conversation with Alan Kay," Programming Languages, Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005.

Fancy that

"Let's get inside the head of the Tide customer," he said. Using an array of cutting-edge research tools to learn how customers use media first, you can then develop ads that consumers will actually find interesting. Fancy that. Verklin took over management of five of P&G's top-10 brands on October 1. The self-described "media geek" has inherited the earth.

"Fast 50: #49 Media Maven, David Verklin," Fast Company, Mar 2005, p. 63.

enjoy the process, not the product

The number of ideas and designs that will ever see production is only a tiny fraction of those generated. Changes in clients and buyer tastes doom many. In a single day, a number are proven impractical for reasons of material, cost, or fabrication. The staff must leave the casualties behind and move on. Offering a prescription for happiness for designers, Bogner says, "You have to enjoy the process, not the product.

Phil Patton with Michael Graves Design Group, Michael Graves Designs: The Art of the Everyday Object, Melcher Media, 2004, p. 69.

we're only paid for breakthroughs

JENNINGS: And you say it keeps you on your toes, you have such a huge portion of the market — in all elements of technology. Is the tendency in the shop sometimes to think that we just can't be beaten?

GATES: No, in fact that's one thing I like about the Microsoft culture — is that we wake up everyday thinking about companies like Wang or Digital Equipment, or Compact, that were huge companies that did very well and they literally have disappeared. Got bought up, you know went into a direction that was a dead end for them. So we have that lesson and we are always saying to ourself — we have to innovate. We got to come up with that breakthrough. In fact the way software works — so long as you are using your existing software — you don't pay us anything at all. So we're only paid for breakthroughs. We have to make a new version of Windows or Office that you think is worth going out and buying.

Peter Jennings, "One-on-One with Bill Gates," ABC News, 16 Feb 2005.

Good design is clear thinking made visible

It was pleasing to hear Tufte call his fifth principle the most important. "Good design is clear thinking made visible," he says. Throughout the day, Tufte constantly poked fun at the cartoon icons and rainbow effects in many of the examples, noting that these embellishments were there to obscure the fact that the images contained little content.

....

"Only two industries refer to their customers as 'users'," he quipped, obviously disenchanted with his experiences with the computer industry and software interfaces. "The most common user activity of a web site is to flee as quickly as possible."

Eugene Eric Kim, "Tufte on Visualizing Information," ERCB, originally appeared on Dr Dobbs Journal Web Site in August, 1997.

Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible.

Jason Fried, "A little Tufte recap" Signal vs. Noise, 27 Aug 2004

when the goals are worth it to them

In my view, it’s not “relevance,” that’s lacking for this generation, it’s engagement. What’s the relevance of Pokémon, or Yu-Gi-Oh, or America’s Idol? The kids will master systems ten times more complex than algebra, understand systems ten times more complex than the simple economics we require of them, read far above their grade level – when the goals are worth it to them. On a recent BBC show “Child of our Time,” a 4-year-old, who was a master of the complex video game Halo 2, was being offered so-called “learning games” that were light-years below his level, to his total frustration and rage.

So how can and should they – and we – do this? As with games, we need to fund, experiment, and iterate. Can we afford it? Yes, because, ironically, creating engagement is not about those fancy, expensive, graphics, but rather about ideas. Sure, today’s video games have the best graphics ever, but the kids’ long-term engagement in a game depends much less on what they see, than on what they do and learn. In gamer terms, “gameplay” trumps “eye-candy” any day of the week.

Marc Prensky, “Engage Me or Enrage Me” What Today’s Learners Demand, www.marcprensky.com, Feb 2005.

You don't get a gazelle by breeding dinosaurs

All of this money spent in spite of the fact that more than half of all corporate mergers fail to create substantial returns for shareholders according to a study by A. T. Kearney, Inc. And, innovation guru, Gary Hamel, calls this the mating of dinosaurs and finds no correlation between size and profitability. "You don't get a gazelle by breeding dinosaurs," he concludes.

Joyce Wycoff, "Gazelles and Dinosaurs," Heads Up! on Organizational Innovation, 9 Feb 2005

uncreative destruction

About the best one can say is that she's no Ken Lay or Bernie Ebbers. But like many imperial CEOs, she embraced and perpetuated another kind of corruption that is damaging the American economy.

Call it "uncreative destruction," where the incentives and distortions in today's capital markets are wrecking jobs and companies.

Jon Talton, "Business falls out of love with Carly, but not her methods," Arizona Republic, 13 Feb 2005

It's not an issue of what technology you use

"It's not an issue of what technology you use," Ratib says, "but what you do with it."

Karen Epper Hoffman, "Of MRIs and iPods," TechnologyReview.com, 11 Feb 2005

It feels broken to them because they can't figure out how to use it

Some complaints turn out to be not failures, but features that are difficult to use, said Brian Moody, road test editor for Edmunds.com, the auto information site. Systems that combine many tasks into a single controller, like BMW's iDrive system, draw lots of complaints in Edmunds's online forums. "It feels broken to them because they can't figure out how to use it," Mr. Moody said. BMW says it takes an ordinary driver about a month to become comfortable with iDrive. To help new owners, the company suggests that they bring their cars back to the dealer after two weeks for an intensive training session.

Tim Moran, "What's Bugging the High-Tech Car?", New York Times, 6 Feb 2005.

growing desire for simplicity

What started out as one schoolboy's exercise in minimalism, with a nod to Google's back-to-basics obsession, has tapped into a growing desire for simplicity among ordinary computer users....

Firefox the browser is an impressive piece of software. It's easy to use, easy on the eyes, and safer than IE - partly because it's too new to have amassed a following of evil hackers. Firefox the phenomenon is something much bigger. It's a combination of innovations in engineering, developer politics, and consumer marketing.

The goal was modest: no bloat. Inspired by Google's simple interface, they set out to build a stripped-down, stand-alone browser, a refutation of the feature creep that had grounded Netscape. "Lots of Mozilla people didn't get it," Ross recalls. "They'd say, 'This is just the product we have now, but with less features.' Meanwhile, the Mozilla product at the time had about 10,000 options. You basically needed to know the secret handshake to get anything done. It sounds corny, but it was important to make something that Mom and Dad could use."

Josh McHugh, "The Firefox Explosion," Wired, Feb 2005

passwords should be impossible to remember and should never be written down

... authentication expert Richard E. Smith has observed, the logical conclusion of most “strong password” policies—don’t use names of family members or pets; don’t use birthdays or calendar dates; use randomized sequences of special characters; don’t use your password for more than one or two sites; change your passwords several times a year; don’t put your password(s) in your PDA or cell phone—is that passwords should be impossible to remember and should never be written down.

Michael Schrage, "The Password Is Fayleyure," Technology Review, Mar 2005

make you smile

The objects, however, manage to do what Graves has always wanted his buildings to do. When you look at his cooking implements, or at his chess set or Monopoly game or wall clocks, they seem exactly right. They look like the images we have always had of these familiar things but feel fresh at the same time. And almost all of them do something that is wonderful for any object to do, which is make you smile.

Paul Goldberger, "Scale and Whimsy," Metropolis Magazine, 1 May 2004

Also see: Linda Tischler, "A Design for Living," Fast Company, Aug 2004

We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves

"Music," he explained, "is different" from other intellectual property. Not Karl Marx different - this isn't latent communism. But neither is it just "a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread." The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. "We are just troubadours," Tweedy told me. "The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves."

Lawrence Lessig, "Why Wilco Is the Future of Music," Wired, Feb 2005.

The technology aspect needs to be stripped out

"Marketing is the key," Hirschhorn says. "The technology aspect needs to be stripped out of the equation. People need to understand that they can take their music with them, they can take it on the bus."

Eric Hellweg, "Gunning for iTunes," Technology Review, 25 Jan 2005

I could find patterns in it

I began by counting things. The very thing that had attracted me to the diary in the first place was also the thing that made it difficult to work with. I mean there's just so much. The diary is a long accumulation of workaday entries. And so I had to find some way to get control of the information so that I could find patterns in it.

Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, "Interviews with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: About Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Work on A Midwife's Tale," dohistory.org, Interviews done in 1991,1993 & 1994.

Passion vs Job

The Mac was more like a back-to-the-roots thing. Really the reason the Mac succeeded was the people were passionate and brilliant and motivated and devoted their lives to it. Whereas, the Lisa maybe had a little bit of that, but it was much more corporate, and a job, as opposed to a passion.

....

When you look at the last 20 years of PC development, are you surprised at how much has changed, or how little?

Both. On the hardware side, how much. Moore's Law predicted it, but then to actually see it play out in such a stunning fashion. I mean now the computer I'm using every day has literally 8,000 times the memory that the original Mac had. The hardware is so capable compared to that, it's almost like a dream. Whereas the software is where it's disappointing. The basic software since the Macintosh has evolved at a snail's pace and in some ways it's even gone backwards in usability.

The metaphor of the interface has hardly changed at all.

That's right. That's not because of a lack of possibilities. It has to do with the business dynamics of the industry--essentially Microsoft getting the monopoly and being anti-innovation and establishing an environment where innovation was crushed rather than rewarded. That's the PC industry the last 10 years.

....

How do you feel about the iPod being closed now?

The same way. I think Apple is making a blunder not licensing FairPlay. Ultimately, when you boil it down, it comes to respect for your customer. I think Apple is showing disrespect to the customers by locking them in.

Mac fans are often described as fanatic. What is the "cult of Mac"?

The cult of Mac, I think what it is...is essentially passion. It starts with the designers and the people in the company being passionate about what they're doing. It starts with the designers making something that they want for themselves more than anything else in the world, that's the single secret. As soon as you're making something you want more than anything else, you don't have to do research about the customers. You just look inside yourself. You run the risk of being wrong about it, but at least you make something that has integrity.

Maybe even a better word is love. You fill the product with love and then people will love it.

Scott Ard, Interview with Andy Hertzfeld, "How the Mac was born, and other tales," CNet, 11 Jan 2005