The Books I'm Reading to Research My Book

I’ve added a new page that lists out some of the books that I’m using as background for the book that I’m working on myself. It’s pretty business-heavy and design-light, but that’s the way my book is too :)

If you’re curious or want to stock up on some heady reading material, check it out.

If you have other suggestions for things I should be reading, please let me know in a comment, I’m always looking out for good material.

Marty Neumeier on Wicked Problems

Marty Neumeier, author most recently ofThe Designful Company, gave a talk atAdaptive Path’s MX Conferenceon Tuesday. Nate Bolt posted some notes about it that included Neumeier talking about wicked problems, one of the areas I’ve been thinking about for a while also.

Bolt writes up the following from Neumeier’s talk, in response to a question about how to avoid bold dumb vision (as opposed to bold smart vision):

Ford had the bold vision of a ford pinto. They made the mistake of deciding their design vision instead of designing it.

That’s what happened with the Aeron chair. They wanted to make the best chair ever, and they threw out the style guide of all previous office chairs to do that. They made a prototype and tried it with potential customers, and they said “it’s sort of comfortable but it’s kind of weird. I don’t know if I would buy it.” Then they worked really hard on the comfort part of it, and then eventually people said “it’s really very weird but it’s super comfortable.” Then it takes off because it is different.

I worry about innovations that aren’t different enough, and the Pinto was maybe too different. Clairol “touch of yogurt” shampoo was going too far. You learn to spot a real innovation by it’s combination of being weird and good.That’s where the real art comes in, doesn’t it? Knowing the difference.

You protect against horrible innovation by prototyping.Test this out little by little. Either in the market or wherever. Stage-gate innovation is what we call it. Ventures do that by giving a little money, then a little more money. Businesses want to get into the market immediately, and they are impatient. So they take very small risks. That’s just me-too-ism. Anyone who can help prototype. Herman miller said “we’ve gone this far, let’s go one step further and keep trying it in the market place.

(Not to knock on Nate in any way as I know what it’s like to try and take notes while somebody’s presenting, but I just want to caveat what I’m about to write by saying that I don’t know for sure how accurately Nate’s notes capture what Neumeier said or intended, so I could be boxing ghosts here.)

I’m not quite sure what the first paragraph means without more context, but I take it to mean he’s drawing a distinction between a vision that is set from top-down and not tested out, versus one that is tested through a design process.

Undoubtedly Herman Miller did a lot of testing with the Aeron chair, and if Gladwell is to be believed (and I’m assuming Neumeier is familiar with Gladwell’s account - he gives a good talk here) it did indeed test poorly for aesthetics.

I have a hard time going along with the idea that the Pinto was more different from what was out there than the Aeron however. The Pinto looked like a small American car and was designed to compete with small Japanese cars during the fuel crisis. The AMC Pacer was way more different, and look how well that did, though it is something of a cult classic today. But that didn’t do AMC much good.

I agree with his statement about spotting innovation by its combination of weird and good, but then calling it an art rather defeats the next statement of testing out with prototypes — that isn’t really how art works.

Then things get a bit troubling. Yes, we want to reduce our risk by prototyping, and that does help. However, to hold up the Pinto and the Aeron as opposing examples seems a stretch. I’m sure the Pinto was focused-grouped too (though focus groups were very different back in those days).

Neumeier seems to be switching between saying you need to set an audacious vision and then stick with it, and that you need to prototype iteratively and get feedback incrementally that you then use to refine the design.

The Aeron was tested, but what did Herman Miller do? They didn’t change direction. They stuck with the plan and ploughed ahead. Perhaps partly becaused they’d invested several years of work into the chair (HM is famous for spending four or five years to design a task chair) and the architecture of the design was basically baked in. They could not take the weirdness out of the chair without drastically changing it.

So Herman Miller took a bet the farm risk, tested with prototypes, but they ignored the input, for whatever reason. Herman Miller had a “smart” hunch about how the chair would ultimately be received. They took a big risk that they knew what the fine line was between stupid and clever. They could easily have been wrong, and then case studies would be written about how they ignored focus group input and were too stubborn to change direction, so the chair was the biggest flop in their history.

The fact is, sometimes innovations succeed or fail through pure dumb luck. And we laud the ones that succeed in hindsight, but how many of us could have truly predicted them ahead of time, even if we prototyped the hell out of them?

How Google Pulls the Plug

Google pulled the plug on several products recently which were not doing so well, including competitors for Twitter and Second Life. Does Google have a similar intent as GE, where if they are not number one in their industry then they pull out? Things are probably not that draconian at Google, but an article on the NY Times sheds some light on how they choose what to continue and what to cancel:

When evaluating nascent projects, Google takes a hard look at interest — and in these cases, the interest simply wasn’t there.

“There’s no single equation that describes us, but we try to use data wherever possible,” said Jeff Huber, the company’s senior vice president of engineering. “What products have found an audience? Which ones are growing?”

All of the shuttered projects failed several of Google’s key tests for continued incubation: They were not especially popular with customers; they had difficulty attracting Google employees to develop them; they didn’t solve a big enough problem; or they failed to achieve internal performance targets known as “objectives and key results.”

The expected metrics of advertising revenue, uptake by users, and strategic fit are obvious enough. The one that I was struck by was the internal measure of whether employees were fired up about the product and flocked to it. Google’s employees thus have a Darwinian effect on what continues to be developed, with the assumption being that their interest level reflects a maximum potential interest level in the market.

I wouldn’t want to go so far and say that it’s an example of crowdsourcing (which only works effectively if there is a definitive, objective answer), but obviously Google pays attention to the group’s collective consensus about whether a product has legs.

This isn’t for everyone - it really depends on how well your staff’s interests align with your customers’. Ideally they are a very close match, but people get excited about products for lots of different reasons that have little to do with whether customers will want them. And if you are a smaller organization then you won’t have the scale of a large corporation and its bell-curve of perspectives on a particular product under development.

Nevertheless, it’s a metric worth considering when deciding whether to drown a puppy.

Related articles:

• NY Times: How Google Decides to Pull the Plug
•  Google’s Innovation Surplus

Here's an Idea: Let's Make Our Products Worse

How’s this for a strategy: when faced with declining customer base and disruptive competition, make your product worse.

That seems to have been the thinking at the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper for the last few years. Faced with disruptive threats that have hammered its subscription rates (people reading online, getting news from other sources) and classified ads revenue (Craigs list), they have gradually made the paper worse and worse. It is now at its slimmest and lightest (in every sense of the word) that I’ve ever seen it, and I used to deliver it in high school 20+ years ago. (For some reason I still remember the headline announcing when the Dow broke 2,000…)

In the last week they rolled out a new design of the paper which brightens it up and makes it more organized in some ways. But it unfortunately looks more like a small-town paper now, too. Why can’t San Francisco, one of the most influential cities in the country (especially now with the Democratic leadership) have a paper that matches its clout and innovative spirit in other areas? Considering that the Chronicle is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley and Web 2.0, their website comes across like a portal from 1999 that’s trying to be everything to everyone.

In terms of the physical paper, they have been consolidating and trimming sections. These are transparently more about penny pinching than improving the quality of the reader experience. The most ridiculous example is putting the Business section on the back of another section, so that it reads backwards. Since most stories split onto a page inside the section, this makes you go through a counter-intuitive process to find it.

The aesthetic and organizational changes are one thing, but they don’t get to the heart of the problem: the reporting and writing. With a few exceptions they are just not that great. I’ve never seen the Chronicle make a serious effort to, across the board, improve the quality of these core elements of the newspaper. There is almost zero investigative reporting, and the writing is generally not very engaging. A lot of use is made of AP feeds and articles from other papers. I mostly read the NY Times online because it is just much more interesting and enjoyable to read.

Look, these are tough times for newspapers, no doubt about it. Big operations like the Times have much more resources to invent new things. But since when in the Bay Area is being small and under-resourced seen as bad? It’s practically a badge of honor and means that you do interesting things in smart, nimble ways. The Huffington Post is the most innovative online news site, and they are tiny.

When faced with competitive disruption, do you keep digging the path you’ve been going on, or take a step back and re-assess what business you’re really in? The music companies finally seem to be coming around to this; instead of using concerts to promote albums (seeing albums as the main revenue source) they are now using singles to promote concerts (don’t rely on revenue from mp3s, but make revenue up through multiple other sources).

Newspapers need to do the same kind of rethinking.

Google on Innovating in a Downturn

Marissa Mayer has some words of wisdom from the Googleplex about being innovative in a downturn. My favorite quote is:

But there clearly are things that can be replicated [about Google’s culture], like having small teams, awarding a lot of ownership to those teams so you stretch and grow those people. Or really focusing on and demanding that innovation come from everyone and everywhere throughout the organization. One of the worst things you can do in a company is to have an R&D segment or an innovation group. Once you have some people whose job it is to innovate, everyone else stops innovating.

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