The February issue of Harvard Business Review has what I think is their first article dedicated to creating customer experience. CX has officially gone mainstream. The article by Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager hits most of the right notes (cross-disciplinary integration, listen to customer needs, employ different metrics), though downplays the role of product designers play in forming customer experiences.

They had it available as a free preview but it looks like that’s over, so now you have to pony up… A worthwhile read, however.

A new magazine and website have launched: Monocle. Based in London, it is headed by Wallpaper founder Tyler Brûlé. Dan Hill, author of the wonderful City of Sound blog, has left his job at BBC to go into start-up mode with Monocle. The design is fresh and different, in a classic kind of way, both in terms of the print and web versions.

A stand-out on the first “issue” of the web version is an interview by Tyler with the CEO of Lego, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp. It’s quite long, about 15 minutes, but a fascinating view/listen, and covers a broad range of topics. Lego is an interesting company with a storied history that has struggled to find its place in a high-tech world. It is heartening to hear Knudstorp talk about his vision and connecting that with the company legacy.

I’m not sure how I feel about the intended audience being “well-heeled, intelligent opinion leaders around the world.” Sounds rather elitest to me, and more concocted for attracting advertisers than actual readers. Still, the content is off to a strong start, and it covers business, design and culture, so of course I’m interested in it!

A couple of news items in the world of Mac applications that I wanted to alert you to, as they come from companies whose products I like a lot.

OmniPlan 

OmniGroup is my favorite software application company. I use most of their major products: OmniGraffle Pro (daily), OmniOutliner (hourly, + KGTD), and OmniDiskSweeper (every 6 months).

They recently released OmniPlan, a “light” project planning application. I’ve been using it in Beta form since last summer, and bought a personal copy for myself for use at work once it went 1.0. Visually it’s a huge improvement over MS Project (not a high bar), and is very fluid to work with. Like all Omni apps it is an interactive treat, inventive, intuitive, and strikes a balance between tightly focused features and depth of capability to make it a tool for the long-haul. It has some limitations (projects don’t link, and more importantly for me you can’t share resources across projects, and have to re-enter them each time). But overall it’s quick to work with, quick to make adjustments in, and, very importantly, highly effective at communicating the project plan and intent.

It costs $150.

Nisus Writer Pro 

Nisus Writer has been my word processor of choice for many years, and Nisus has just announced a Pro version as a step-up from their current Express version.

Why Nisus Writer? Because it focuses on writing, not trying to be a page layout application. It has a streamlined interface that is elegant to work with and visually pleasing and non-distracting. It doesn’t try to think for you. It is not bloated with features. In case such things matter to you, Seth Godin switched to Nisus a little while back.

Many people like it because of its multi-lingual capabilities and its very powerful find/replace feature. While I don’t use the former and am a rank amateur with the second, I appreciate the focus that Nisus puts on text and writing. Its visual presentation of the text itself is beautiful - the character rendering, the kerning and so on are all perfect (Word by comparison is surprisingly bad at this, particularly kerning).

Nisus can read/write .doc files, though its native format is RTF. However, currently it lacks the very useful reviewing/commenting capability of Word, which is probably a deal-breaker for many. At work I use Word because of this, but for writing that I do for myself, it’s Nisus all the way. If you’re serious about writing, you should give it a try.

Nisus Writer Express is just $45. Nisus Writer Pro’s price hasn’t been announced yet. It adds table of contents and index automation, more footnote/endnote capabilities, bookmarks and cross references, and other features.

(I’m not affiliated with either Omni or Nisus, just a happy user.)

I’m currently reading Max Boot’s humungous (600+ pages) War Made New. It’s a fascinating book, even for someone like myself who is largely anti-war. Its subtitle is Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Now. In some ways this is a little misleading, because what the book is really about is how technology in and of itself is rarely the deciding factor in battle. There are intriguing parallels to how technology is used in business.

The book is broken into multiple parts, each describing different “revolutions” in technologies:

1. The gunpowder revolution (guns and shot on land and sea)
2. The first industrial revolution (rifles, steam)
3. The second industiral revolution (tanks, aircraft, aircraft carriers)
4. The information revolution (professional armies, special forces, the current Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts)

Several battles are used to illustrate the turning points of each revolution, some of these are well-known, others are not.

What becomes clear over these 500 years is that acquisition and deployment of a technology is not enough to win. Again and again the prevailing side is outmatched in both men, equipment, and technological advancement, whether it be flintlocks, aircraft, canon on ships, tanks, or IT. Boot explodes some myths, such as that the Germans had superior tanks when they invaded France; in fact the French had the better tanks and more of them, but left most of them in Africa.

What makes the difference, including unfortunately for the Nazis, is usually one or more of several things:

1. Training and organization (“invisible systems” that enable execution)
2. Leadership that sees the opportunities of new tactics enabled by new technologies (sometimes these new tactics took decades to appear, technologies would normally be deployed in time-honored ways at first)
3. Bottoms up openness to risk-taking which is not bound by entrenched organizations, perspectives, and politics

Any of this sound familiar? (In additition to the obvious disruptive innovation analogies, it also makes me think of Nicholas G. Carr’s contentious article IT Doesn’t Matter.)

Boot has a lively writing style which keeps the book engaging, and he breaks it up into bit-size chunks of narrative that make it surprisingly easy to dip into. Battles are recreated in detail, and draw you into the situation. Boot’s focus is on strategy and tactics, not the gruesome blow-by-blow of the battlefield.

Minnesota Public Radio’s website has a whole section on “what is design?”, including a page of thoughts on the question that people have submitted. They are amazingly insightful and run a whole gamut of perspectives. Some are obviously from people in the design field, while others seem genuinely from non-designers. Really inspiring, actually, for someone such as myself in the design realm who sometimes gets a bit jaded.

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