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.