Thoughts and essays from the guy who coined the word "blog."
Thanks to Livia Labate, you can listen to my closing plenary at the 2006 IA Summit [56.7 MB MP3]. It will help you if you follow along with the PDF of my slides.
I’m definitely proud of this talk, though I hate hearing all my “uh”s and “um”s. Definitely something to work on.
If you want to avoid the aspects of IA history that I dwell on and hop to the thesis, start around the 12:00 mark.
Technorati Tags: iasummit06
Adaptive Path recently started a blog (as Lane points out, it only took us 5 years!)
I just posted about how Steven Johnson, whom I’ve written about at various times on this site, has been an inspiration to me, and is our plenary speaker on the opening day of User Experience Week.
It’s been great fun planning User Experience Week this year. We’ve decided to spend some money to turn it into a must-attend event, with great folks like Steven, and Michael Bierut, as well as Adaptive Path favorites like Jared Spool.
Anyway, consider this a bit of self-promotion.
Yesterday I attended DCamp, a gathering comprised mostly of user interface researchers and designers. I lead a discussion on “Design for Appropriation,” inspired by a talk that took place at UC Berkeley, which I’ve written about before.
Our discussion was wide-ranging, and I didn’t take notes, so I can’t capture much of it. One of the most salient points was that there seems to be a cultural shift towards appropriation being acceptable, and Pete Stahl reminded us that most of us got into web design and development through browser-supported appropriation — the ability to “View Source.”
For me, the big question continues to be, “if we are designing things for our users/participants/customers/whathaveyou to appropriate, than what are we designing?” What is the *thing* that we point to and say, “I made that”?
I guess I’ve come away with two answers to the question. The first, and the easier answer, is that we are designing the frame, the container, the shell, within which users create and appropriate.
The second, and harder answer, is that it’s not about designing a thing, an artifact (even digital) at all. That that is a trap of legacy thinking. That we as designers need to think about how we design, or use design tools and methods, to address aspects that aren’t about the artifact. This puts me in the mind of Doblin’s Innovation Landscapes , which help remind me that the “offering” is only one part of considering the product, and that there are many other aspects (business model, processes, channel, customer experience, etc.) that designers should address.
The other major concept that I kept coming back to was trust, and how trust gets associated with transparency and authenticity. But it does so in a funny way. Users tend to place a lot of trust in systems that are transparent and appropriate-able (such as Flickr) because we see the mechanisms by which things work, and that gives us comfort. We also, though, have a lot of trust (in fact, all we have is trust) in systems that are utterly opaque, such as financial service firms — I don’t want Schwab’s systems to be appropriate-able.
As in the UC Berkeley conversation, I definitely come away from these discussions with more questions than answers. Suffice to say we design in interesting times.
Technorati Tags: design, dcamp, usergenerated, web 2.0
peterme readers sent in a few pointers following my last post where I asked about alternative corporate structures to encourage team coherence and creative output.
I think you’d enjoy ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins, which doesn’t so much focus on organisational models as on what to do to become and stay a great company. I think the model he develops (through pretty rigorous study) maps quite well with what you have been doing so far with Adaptive Path. Collins urges a focus on hiring the right people first, and being quite uncompromising in that regard. Well, I can’t really summarize the book that well, but Amazon of course a a short description that might tell you more.
and
From a Wikipedia entry on “libertarian socialism” and “mutualism” that references the Gore model(I had no idea…):
From this entry: “The model followed by the corporation WL Gore and Associates, inventor of Gore-Tex fabrics, is also similar to mutualism as there is no chain of command and salaries are determined collectively by the workers. It is important to note that Gore and Associates has never identified itself as anarchist.”
Following on to Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, mutualists, discussed in the same paragraph, I found this reference
“Values to Work: Employee Participation Meets Market Pressures at Mondragon” by George Cheney
From the book jacket – “Values at Work is an analysis of organizational dynamics with wide-ranging implications in an age of market globalization. It looks at the challenges businesses face to maintain people-oriented work systems while remaining successful in the larger economy. George Cheney revisits the famous Mondragn worker-owned-and-governed cooperatives in the Basque Country of Spain to examine how that collection of innovative and democratic businesses is responding to the broad trend of “marketization.”
and
In the book “In Search of Excellence”, authors Tom Peters and Robert Waterman address this
issue, though they don’t mention Gore and Associates (Peters mentions it in “A Passion for
Excellence”). In their analysis of “excellent companies” (3M, P&G, IBM et.al), they argue
against a focus on “organizational structure” as a panacea:“Peters and Waterman make the case that shared values are the differentiating factor that
sets extraordinary companies apart from the rest. Of course they address the other attributes
of organizations such as resources, structure and people; indeed, their work began as an
attempt to uncover the next great trend in organizational structure. Early in the process
however, the authors realized that as important as the structural issues undoubtedly are…
they are only a small part of the total issue of management effectiveness. The very word
“organizing,” for instance, begs the question, “Organize for what?”
and
I’ve found “Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace” to be a refreshing read on managing teams and workplaces for success. Great story.
Adaptive Path is feeling a few growing pains, which has lead me to look around for alternative models for organizational structure that lead to successful, creative, empowered teams. I found myself returning to W.L. Gore and Associates set up, most famously reported in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
The best article I’ve found comes from Workforce Management. Called “Small Groups, Big Ideas,” it discusses the strange structure at play, which includes no job titles, and no hierarchy, and the challenges such a set-up poses. Here is my favorite passage:
“It isn’t a company for everyone,” Brinton says. “It takes a special kind of person to be effective here–someone who is really passionate about sharing information, as opposed to controlling it. Someone who can handle a degree of ambiguity, as opposed to ‘Here’s my job and I only do these tasks.’ Someone who’s willing to lift his or her head up from the desk and see what the business’ real needs are.”
They were also the subject of a Fast Company piece a number of years back. Some choice nuggets:
“A project doesn’t move forward unless people buy into it. You cultivate followership by selling yourself, articulating your ideas, and developing a reputation for seeing things through.”
“It’s a process of giving away ownership of the idea to people who want to contribute and be a part of it. The project won’t go anywhere if you don’t let people run with it.”
“The idea is that employees are not accountable to the president of the company; they’re accountable to their colleagues.”
And they don’t shy away from discussing it publicly, as Gore’s corporate culture web page demonstrates.
If you know of either any deeper discussions of Gore’s organizational structure, or other interesting discussions of alternative models, I’d love it if you emailed them to me. (As I still have comments turned off on this blog). Email peterme AT peterme DOT com.
I’ve been remiss in letting folks know that I’m teaching a new Adaptive Path workshop in Chicago on May 17-18. I’ve been spending a lot of time developing “Beyond Usability 2.0: The Four Cornerstones of Successful Digital Product Design” (that’s a mouthful), with the goal to create an event that teaches the essential methods that every member of a product team should know (not just the designers).
Attendees will learn methods and principles for getting Company Insight, conducting User Research, designing Information Architecture, and developing Interaction Design. While the last two might seem like the purview of the design team, I believe that everyone should understand the basics of these methods, and the reality is that many non-designers have to practice information architecture and interaction design because no one else in their organization is stepping up to do so.
If you use the promotional code FOPM, you’ll receive 15% off the price.
I mean, look at all the bullet points we promise you on that workshop page!
You will learn how to:
Technorati Tags: adaptivepath, workshop
Long ago, at a Fray Day event, I met Ryan Freitas. I don’t remember what we talked about; I do remember his URL at the time — gangcandy.com. A name like that sticks.
Anyway, we drifted in and out of touch until late in 2004, when Adaptive Path brought him in to help out on some projects. We worked so well together, he decided to join the company, and for the last year or so has been a remarkable contributor to Adaptive Path’s development.
The one thing everyone at Adaptive Path has been hounding him about is to get himself out there more. He regales us with trenchant insights on our internal mailing lists and company discussions, but he hasn’t been sharing that wisdom with members of our wider community.
Thankfully, Ryan is now contributing to that as well. He’s just published his first essay for Adaptive Path, on his experiences designing the new blog search engine Sphere.
More importantly, though, he has a blog. He’s actually been posting to it for a little while. I call your attention to two posts: “Civility Doesn’t Scale,” where he calls into questions some of the design principles behind Wikipedia, and “making the future tangible,” which is related to my post on artifacts from the future.
Ryan, it’s great to see your voice out there, engaged in The Discourse. Now, keep at it!
(And, yes, I recognize the phrase “see your voice” is odd.)
First, go read Microsoft Software Will Let Times Readers Download Paper over on The New York Times site.
Then, after wiping your eyes of the tears inspired by laughing at such foolishness, come back here.
That article demonstrates so much of what is wrong with Big Media, and illuminates some idiocy on Microsoft’s part as well.
As I mentioned in my last post, big media is quite anxious about what digitization and networked distribution is happening to their industry. Media companies pretty much have three options:
This article demonstrates that, at least in part, The New York Times is resisting change. My jaw first dropped when reading this passage: “The software would allow The Times to replicate its look — fonts, typeface and layout — more closely than its Web site now does.”
Apart from a few designers, no one cares about The Times’ “look”. This is an explicit attempt to reclaim control over what has already been lost. I wager that any attempt to preserve the look online will lead to a loss of value — however many people utilize a service will not be made up for in the costs of developing it.
Continuing on in the article, you come across this gem: “Mr. Sulzberger said the software combined the portability of the print paper with the immediacy of the Internet. Readers can in effect turn the page electronically. There is also a gauge that tells them how much of the paper they have read and how much more is left.”
Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, clearly has no idea what the immediacy of the Internet really means. This passage looks at immediacy from strictly a publisher’s point of view — getting stuff out there faster. Immediacy of the internet from a user’s point of view means something very different — quickly getting to the thing I want. And the more the online experience replicates the offline experience, the harder such user-oriented immediacy becomes. Because user-oriented immediacy is about the atomization of a newspaper into its constituent articles, for ease of linking.
In the following paragraph, the design director comments “You can page through the entire paper in a natural and intuitive way.” Which is essentially his way of saying, “I, the designer, can control your experience with our content.” The readers will fight such attempts at control. They want to read news their way.
“Natural and intuitive” is also code for, “how we did it in the prior technological stage,” and if such thinking were valid, you’d be steering your car with reins, and your cell phone wouldn’t have storage for phone numbers, because it’s more “natural and intuitive” to punch in the number from memory. Hell, your cell phone would probably have a rotary dial.
What Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Gates don’t seem to understand, or, at least, are not acknowledging, is that it’s not about “newspapers” on the Internet. It’s about news. They’re stuck in this mindset that readers want to casually flip through an entire newspaper. In a world mediated by Google and the blogosphere, that is becoming less and less the point. I read so many articles from so many different sources that most of the time I can’t remember “where” I read something (apart from, “inside my feed reader”). (A recent example was the article that ripped apart Intel’s Viiv initiative; I was talking to a friend about it, and couldn’t for the life of me remember where I had read it, apart from “somewhere on the Web”. He reminded me that it was at the Washington Post.)
Technorati Tags: billgates, media, news, newyorktimes
One of the benefits of working at a services firm such as Adaptive Path is that you really get to have your fingers on the pulse of what is happening in business. For the first few years after starting our company in 2001, many of our projects were marketing-communication sites (i.e., brochureware), because even in a down economy, marketers have money.
That’s changed recently. We’re getting called by more product managers — companies in an upmarket seem keen on investing in new product capabilities.
A new trend has really made itself apparent. This morning I had a conversation with a representative from a public broadcasting station. Discussions with people working for media outlets are becoming common occurrences at Adaptive Path. And what’s clear is that The Media is made very anxious by the current media landscape.
Over the last month or so, we’ve received RFPs or other leads from: a national news channel; a national news magazine; a regional newspaper with national aspirations; and this public broadcasting station.
Each of them has had essentially the same question: What do we do? Many have realized all the opportunity they can with business as usual. And they’re seeing that users are linking in (through search results, through blogs) to single articles and bouncing out. And that they are increasingly using intermediaries such as blogs and feed readers. And that community and social media sites (like Wikipedia or Youtube) are starting to eat their lunch. Oh, and that Craigslist is taking away a key source of revenue.
I don’t have any glib answers. From what I can tell, the smart approaches for each of these companies has been different, depending on that organization. The only thing that does make sense is that these media companies have to be *of the Web*, not on the Web. (Okay, maybe one glib answer.) They have to embrace the principles of the sandbox, of web 2.0, of transparency and openness, of remixability and co-creation. But they are individually going to have to figure out what such principles mean for them.
I think it’s an exciting time to be in media. But that’s probably because I’m not in media.
Is the number of movies I’ve seen on this list.