successful innovation

...successful innovation—seeing invention through to adoption—isn’t just about managing technical breakthroughs; it’s about managing people’s expectations. Always. Credibly aligning technical progress with past promises is the central challenge confronting most innovators.

... innovators stink at managing expectations. They’re either overly optimistic or unduly pessimistic. They haven’t a clue what new costs their innovations will impose on potential users. They have no credible way to assess what needs will be most important to those users three years hence.

But the reason innovators should read these tales of technologies past is emphatically not to “learn from the lessons of history.” Rather, it’s to see how expectations have changed over time. What expectations were innovators trying to create? How fast are those expectations changing, compared to market conditions? Determining this “expectations calculus” is essential to managing innovation.

Michael Schrage, "Great Expectations: Successful innovators don't believe hype—but they don't ignore it, either," MIT Tecnology Review, Oct 2004.

the interface is the application

"To the user, the interface is the application." -- Alan Kay

http://students.cs.byu.edu/~butler/uidesign/uidesign.html

recognizing users' actual behavior is the way to prosper

"It's unfortunate that users now care less about websites, and mainly treat them as an undifferentiated pool of answers. But, that's the new Internet. As always, recognizing users' actual behavior is the way to prosper. "

Jakob Nielsen, "When Search Engines Become Answer Engines," Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, 16 Aug 2004:

'Design is a plan for action'

To quote Charles Eames, 'design is a plan for action'. In other words, design isn't necessarily about making something look better, it's about moving someone into action."

hillmancurtis.com/about, 29 July 2004

Holistic Design: PalmOne Tungsten T3 Case Study

Holistic Design: PalmOne Tungsten T3 Case Study

New Scientist

New Scientist: "Horvitz, whose development team created Microsoft's infamous Office Assistant with its animated paper clip, sees this as a pressing issue. 'As computers have got more powerful, people have come to expect them to behave more like collaborators and less like tools or appliances,' he says. "   Apologies are much cheaper and easier to implement, Tzeng says. "You don't have to understand how people really feel. Software designers just have to develop the attitude that the user is always right."

computers should be tools for creativity and learning

'We're running on fumes technologically today,' he says. 'The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about.'

But what about all those great things he invented? Aren't we getting any mileage from all that? Not nearly enough, Kay believes. For him, computers should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short. At Xerox PARC the aim of much of Kay's research was to develop systems to aid in education. But business, instead, has been the primary user of personal computers since their invention. And business, he says, 'is basically not interested in creative uses for computers.'

Fortune.com - Fast Forward - A PC Pioneer Decries the State of Computing:

Reassure Customers and Generate Repeat Purchases in E-Commerce (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Reassure Customers and Generate Repeat Purchases in E-Commerce (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) The best way for ecommerce sites to increase subsequent orders is to treat customers well after they place their initial order.

Reassure Customers and Generate Repeat Purchases in E-Commerce (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Reassure Customers and Generate Repeat Purchases in E-Commerce (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

adaptive path ? six design lessons from the apple store

adaptive path ? six design lessons from the apple store