Merlin Mann’s talk from the most recent Macworld, Toward Patterns for Creativity, is up on YouTube. He references two books that have been on my shopping list for some time.
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit
Update (5/3/09): King tells a good story. And there are no shortcuts (of course). His method: Shut out the world while working, and practice every day.
Adam Martin writes about the experience of watching a game development process crash and burn.
I’m linking to his story because, although his narrative takes place at NCSoft, the problems he diagnoses sound familiar. And I’ll leave it at that for now (at least until I write my own narrative.)
Update 1: Ok, since it’s hit the blogs: Amidst Grand Plans and $100 Million in Funding, Trion World Network Lays Off 20
Update 2: And here’s the company’s response: Trion CEO: Layoffs Were Business as Usual, No Projects Affected
Update 3: Ironically, I’m now contracting for NCsoft. I understand Adam’s points a bit better now that I’m “on the inside,” but I also think there’s much reason to hope that the company has turned a corner in a lot of ways, thanks to its new senior management team.
Goodness Blog recently asked its readers to “recommend a book that you have found particularly inspiring or meaningful to your development as a creative person.”
For me it’s Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. But it was a lot more than just a creativity booster: That book blew my 14-year-old mind. I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand a lot of what Hofstadter was up to, particularly in the later chapters, but that didn’t matter: Filled with puns, dialogues, drawings, staves, fables, and prints, the bulky volume, in its crinkly, clear-plastic library-issue bookcover, was my constant companion in the summer of 1980. And little by little, it transformed me from a kid who liked languages and classical music and mythology and mystery stories into a teenager who understood how those things are connected to each other – and how we, as conscious beings, are able to see and understand those connections.
Read it at Google Books
Buy it at Amazon
Yesterday, in trying to talk and think about a new entertainment service that we’ve been asked to create a variety of concepts for, I proposed a simple thought experiment.
Imagine that QVC.com existed before QVC, the television channel, did. And that, at some point after its initial, highly successful run as an online retailer, someone had the idea to take their “store” onto basic cable systems.
The question for QVC.com is this: How do you change a lean-forward, interactive experience so that it works in a traditionally lean-back, passive entertainment medium like television? What’s going to make it compelling? What’s going to make people want to watch – and buy – what QVC.com is now offering on their TVs? Is it the graphics and camera work? The hosts and co-hosts? The dialog with callers?
Framing the question like that really helped us think about what makes television so television-like, and online experiences so unlike television. And so far, we’ve had some very fruitful discussions.
While writing UXD Unbound I was looking around for examples of user-experience documents that utilize pen and paper rather than (or in addition to) Visio and OmniGraffle.
I didn’t find anything suitable at the time, but – by sheer coincidence – John Gruber linked to exactly what I was looking for a couple days later.
Below, an early version of the Vimeo profile page.
Kevin Fox is a user-experience designer who worked on the mail and calendar apps that that little company down in Mountain View puts out, before leaving to join FriendFeed last year. In a lengthy interview with Google Blogoscoped published earlier this month, he made the following remark:
[D]esign is really a collaborative process and even when there’s a single UI designer or experience designer on the project, a big part of their job is synthesizing the ideas and desires of the rest of the team.
Fox is exactly right. In fact, I’d say that the process of identifying, understanding, organizing, editing, and synthesizing what an interactive development team comes up with is where experienced UX designers add the most value.
The question is, how can a firm help user-experience specialists to fully inhabit that crucial role? And how does he or she deliver on that?
Unfortunately, it’s still common for the user-experience specialist’s role to be confined to the beginning of the development process. He or she works with a client or other stakeholder to understand their needs and desires, and then translates that understanding into an impressive number of documents–user flows, wireframes, etc.–that the rest of the team is meant to follow. It’s the well-known top-down approach, and like an architect designing a new building, the UXD is supposed to have accounted for every detail. Unlike an architect, however, who continues to be involved (and at a very deep level) throughout the building process, the user-experience designer isn’t typically allowed much of a role once his or her documentation is handed to the next person in the development chain.
Over the last decade I’ve started to develop an alternate approach. It’s not for every organization or every user-experience specialist, but it has led to some great successes even when implemented only partially. It’s easiest to describe as a series of steps or instructions I’d give to a UX designer or information architect who’s looking to really harness the power of the principles we value at Hex15, particularly improvisation and iterative design.
Repeat any or all of these steps as necessary – particularly the last few. In certain development methodologies, you deliver a chunk of code that works and almost immediately start hacking away at it to make it better. Whether you call that refactoring or kaizen, you do as much of it as the schedule–and the rest of team–allow you to. Because it works.
Sure, it won’t be easy to find a binder that’ll hold both the giant sticky notes and the little cocktail-napkin sketches, or the evidence of refactoring that got a process and an experience just right.
Really, though, the things that stand out in your work history are the things that have succeeded. I’d rather point to a sheaf of pencil sketches documenting the thinking behind a registration process that was responsible for a 30% increase in sign-ups than any number of meticulously crafted wireframes that didn’t move the needle at all. Wouldn’t you?
Mark Hurst’s “The top 8 mistakes in usability (and the companies investing in it”) flogs usability research when it’s misapplied, misguided, or misunderstood, and he lists some common pitfalls. The real takeaway, though, is his top-line summary:
[W]hen committing to customer-centered development (of a product, service, website, or whatever), it’s important to stay strategic, always try to improve the business, and listen to customers (as human beings, not as users of a tool).
The longer I do this kind of work, the more confirmation I get that it’s ultimately about understanding the relationship between customer and business, and how to help them achieve their respective goals in the context of their interaction. The rest is just execution.
A few weeks ago, Fake Steve Jobs wrote a lengthy post in response to Charles Cooper at News.com, explaining why Dell Computer will never bounce back the way Apple has over the last ten years.
The other thing people like Coop don’t understand when they do the “Apple rebounded, why can’t Dell?” argument is that Dell and Apple are not the same kind of beast. Dell is a company. Apple is not a company. Apple is an artist’s studio – and I’m the artist. Apple is the palette on which I do my work. Apple c’est moi, as Nabokov once wrote. Or was it Camus? I get them confused.
FSJ points out that Michael Dell profited from efficiencies in distribution and production that have since been erased by the Internet and China, respectively. He’s betting against a revival.
Dell is Gateway. Dell is Kaypro. Dell is Osborne Computer. It’s DEC and DG and Apollo. It’s a flower that bloomed and now must die. It’s roadkill. It’s mulch.
But then today comes the news that global ad giant WPP announced named Digitas Torrence Boone (left) to lead Project DaVinci, a marketing services agency whose first and only client will be Dell Computer.
Dell awarded its global account to WPP in December after a review. During an initial three-year term, Dell is expected to spend an estimated $4.5 billion on marketing worldwide. Since then, WPP has hired more than 500 staffers – roughly half its projected full-time staff – and set up offices in New York, Miami, San Francisco and Austin, Texas, near Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas.
Welcome to the big leagues, Torrence.
The problem is that unless Project DaVinci lives up to its namesake’s legacy and gets involved in designing Dell’s products instead of just hawking them, I wouldn’t expect the dial to move much. But no, they won’t be designing anything:
Boone, 38, will oversee the agency’s mandate to provide highly creative, results-orientated [sic] marketing that engages customers, enhances brand equity and, most importantly, creates value for its clients.
In other words, blah blah marketing boilerplate blah blah, for which WPP will bill Dell roughly $675m over the next three years. Nice work if you can get it.
Rob Glaser, founder and C.E.O. of RealNetworks, talked to the New York Times Magazine in November 2003 about the limitations of a closed iPod-iTunes ecosystem:
This is simply the latest instance of the company’s tendency, once again, to sacrifice commercial logic in the name of “ideology.” Not that Apple can’t maintain a business by catering to the high end and operating in a closed world. But maintaining market leadership, while easy when the field of competitors is small, will become impossible as rivals flood the market with their own innovations and an agnostic attitude about what works with what. “The history of the world,” [Glaser] says, “is that hybridization yields better results.” With Dell and others aiming a big push at the Christmas season, it’s even possible that Apple’s market share has peaked.
Nearly five years later, we know that Apple was just getting warmed up.
Now the company dominates two key parts of what used to be “the record business”: distribution (the iTunes Store) and playback (iPod and iPhone). Does this mean that “the history of the world” has been confounded by one Steve Jobs?
Not at all. In biological terms, hybridization (or crossbreeding) can indeed produce hardier creatures, but a mutt’s relative advantage is apparent only by comparison to its pure-bred cousins. The latter accumulate deleterious mutations along with the desirable characteristics that humans seek, so injecting a bit of the pedestrian every few generations can make up for an overabundance of inbreeding.
In nature, by contrast, specialization is key. Over time a species evolves to fit a specific ecological niche, and it changes as its environment changes (or else dies out). Crossbreeding tends to dilute those adaptations, resulting in an organism less likely to survive.
Steve Jobs understands nothing if not competition. In 2003, he took a look at an already crowded market for personal MP3 players and decided to change the rules. He created his own ecology that could encompass music, movies, and (soon for the iPhone) software, and he made it simple and attractive and desirable. And he won.
Innovative entrepreneurs like Jobs have no interest in letting their products vie against everyone else’s in the marketplace. Why play at that game when you can devise your own, charge admission for it, and take a cut of concessions to boot? Thomas Edison understood that, as did Walt Disney. No wonder the latter’s corporate descendants welcomed Steve into their boardroom.
Few people have the vision, the capital, and the intestinal fortitude to create their own vertically integrated industry from scratch. Steve Jobs bet big, and so far the upside has been tremendous. The question is, What’s he going to do next?
(via Daring Fireball)
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