Interactive Voice Response

Bring me a rock

2011-09-30T10:19:00.001-07:00

"Bring me a rock" is an exercise in which a manager or client asks an analyst for a particular piece of work. The analyst runs off and does the work. The conversation looks like this:

Mgr: "Bring me a rock."
Analyst: Finds a rock and shows manager the rock.
Mgr: "Not this rock. I need a different rock."
Analyst: Finds another rocks and shows it to the manager.
Mgr: "No, this isn't the right rock either. Bring me another rock."

...and so on. This can end in any number of ways, but it usually doesn't end well unless the analyst is able to get the manager to explain his goals for acquiring and using the rock. I've written about one version of this pattern before, and called it generate me some alternatives.

I'm going through a bring-me-a-rock exercise right now that includes a strong element of the value-add demotivation technique. It's interesting, and it really helps to have models of these scenarios to help understand what's going on under the surface.

Counting points, or "stats are for losers"

2011-09-10T06:37:00.000-07:00

Sports fans are familiar with the phrase "Stats are for losers." If your favorite team got hammered last Sunday you can count on a few people jumping into a discussion with an argument about how the team "should have won because we outgained the other guys 500 yrds to 250 blah blah blah..." The simple rejoiner from the winning side is, "Stats are for losers."

I was thinking about this in the context of an agile project that was comparing its iteration point count with another team's. "Yeah, we got 25 points last iteration, the other guys only got 21." Agile practitioners know that if you're doing estimating correctly, the points are only measures of relative effort, comparable only to the team's effort within a release. They can't be used to compare to, for example, another team's point estimate. The team that was congratulating itself had delivered a design that was flawed (and they knew it) but didn't fix it once the flaw was pointed out, because it would have affected their point count.

Stats are for losers. Winning means delivering high quality product that is of value to the business, not having a high score on some arbitrary measure like points.

Spammed by an ex-favorite

2011-08-30T09:05:00.001-07:00

I've been deluged with junk mail recently. I'm pretty careful about where I send my email address. Then someone tipped me off to the privacy changes in LinkedIn. I started going through all the privacy settings and fixing them - it took a while to find them all. But I have them all set properly, and the spam has mostly stopped. I can't guarantee it was caused by LinkedIn, but circumstances suggest that it was.

LinkedIn, you aren't doing yourself any favors by exposing your customers to a bunch of crap. As I've asked before, when did "social media" come to mean "spam?"

Designing for freedom

2011-08-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

Writer Andrew Potter thinks that Steve Jobs is selling conformity to the masses, and his greatest success has been to market conformity as freedom. Potter sees Apple's products purely in terms of marketing success, and points to the famous 1984 TV ad as evidence of excellent branding and positioning statement.

Potter doesn't acknowledge that the success of consumer products often depends on the ability of the company to fulfill its brand promise. Apple's products are a marriage between great design, functionality, business model, and marketing. Jobs' great success hasn't been to sell a vision to hipsters, it's been to sell a vision to his employees that says, "We only create the best. 'Good enough' isn't acceptable here." Based on that vision, the designers, engineers, and marketers know what they need to do.

I was in the market for a laptop recently, and I looked at the various Wintel machines first. They all come with a little demo program that says, "Let me show you all the cool stuff you can do. But keep your hands off the machine, you'll see what I want you to see." The demos all sucked. Then I went to look at Macintosh laptops at the Apple Store. There are no demos. The machine itself is the demo. You get to drive. That's how Apple markets its products. For Potter, having the ability for a customer to drive is just freedom disguised as conformity.

A simple test for UX design sensibility

2011-07-25T18:49:00.001-07:00

A manager says "the customer understands x," where x is a concept, a complicated control on a UI, or a navigation path through a web site.

If you respond to that statement without a question and simply wait for the next requirement or instruction, you're a technician.
If you react to that statement with immediate, polite skepticism and ask how the manager knows that, you're a designer.

You're doing it wrong: American Airlines

2011-07-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

I've been writing about other peoples' experience with service failures lately, so it's time to post one of my own. I was flying back from Chicago yesterday after a business meeting. I got to the airport early, at 5:30pm, and noticed there was a flight to Raleigh-Durham that was boarding. I went to the counter at the gate and asked if I could step on the flight. The attendant snapped at me, "I'll have to check." She checked, and said "Yes, you can. It will be $50." Fifty dollars to step on a plane that was boarding, and I'd paid full fare for my ticket! Apparently the attendant was simply checking to see if I was a Platinum/Gold/Rewards blah blah member who merited some small free service. I said no thanks, and walked away.

My own flight was at 7:30pm, and after the obligatory delays, the attendant announced that the flight was ready to board. And, he added, they were looking for three people to step off the flight because they were overbooked. They were offering $300 to anyone who would agree to re-book the next day!

If they had allowed me to move to an earlier flight they would have had an extra seat. American Airline was willing to forego $300 to not allow me to move from the later flight to an earlier flight, and they earned a dissatisfied customer in the process. As a final, perfect note to their general incompetence, the attendant announced, "the bathroom on the plane is out of order, so customers are urged to use the airport facilities before they board."

And the management of AA probably doesn't understand why they're getting beat to death by Southwest Airlines and its culture of customer service.

Want to work on strategy? Don't call it strategy

2011-07-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

I used to work at a company that struggled with strategy, as many companies do. The leadership team would issue vague aspirations at the beginning of the year about producing software better, faster, and cheaper, and would forget about strategy until the next end-of-year planning cycle. However, there were strong ownership issues around strategy, and anyone outside the leadership team who used the word "strategy" found themselves with some explaining to do. The "strategy of no strategy" may sound like a zen-like approach to life but it's no way to run a company in a very competitive environment.

I decided that the way around this problem was to pull together some like-minded individuals and develop an innovation strategy, but simply not call it by that name. We would call it an "engagement approach" or "marketing meta-analysis" or something similarly vague that wouldn't hit any leader's hot button, but the content would contain a real strategy. We worked on it for a little while but the business sponsor of the effort left to pursue a developmental opportunity and was replaced by someone who wasn't with the program. I left the company a little while later.

I was reminded of this incident after reading Richard Rumelt's excellent The Perils of Bad Strategy. Rumelt's describes the hallmarks of bad strategy, including (1) failure to face the problem, (2) mistaking goals for strategy, (3) bad strategic objectives, and (4) fluff. The descriptions of each will be familiar to anyone who's seen bad corporate strategies. Highly recommended reading, but I wonder if any strategy-impaired leadership teams will recognize their own so-called strategies in the descriptions.

Stuck in DFW airport

2011-06-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

What happens when two videographers' flights are cancelled and get stuck over night in an airport with their video gear? They make a great video. I'm envious.

STUCK from Joe Ayala on Vimeo.

Then they post it on their account at Vimeo and very quickly a million people see it and start commenting on it. Companies really need to understand that their service failures can become public very quickly. Like the brilliant United Breaks Guitars video, a couple of talented media creators got some payback for their treatment from the airlines.

Remarks on Snakes in Suits

2011-06-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

Snakes in Suits, by Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, describe the behavior of psychopaths in corporate settings. Hare is a clinical psychologist who wrote a screening tool for psychopathy; Babiak is an I/O psychologist who does research on leadership in organizations. Together, they present a pretty convincing case that corporations, especially those undergoing a lot of changes, are excellent places for psychopaths to work and prosper. Many of the psychopath's traits, like superficial glibness, persuasiveness, feelings of importance, entitlement, and the ability to read people and manipulate them, are mistaken for leadership within organizations. Fascinating read, highly recommended.

Southwest understands customer focus

2011-06-07T08:52:00.001-07:00

Flying has become such a chore that I avoid it as much as possible. But sometimes it's not possible. When I have to fly, I fly Southwest. Everybody has heard about the big things Southwest does, like leaving and arriving on time, the high customer satisfaction scores, the profitability when all the other airlines are losing money, and on and on. But there are little things that are never mentioned because they don't really make a big deal about it.

Examples from my own experience. I was watching the queue at another gate as people were preparing to board. People shift restlessly in one place, look at the door to the gate, and try to occupy themselves before getting on. Boarding and exiting a plane can be a little stressful. A flight attendant appeared at the gate and made this announcement. "Folks, a young man on the incoming flight couldn't handle the turbulence, if you know what I mean. Right now, you don't want to get on that plane, believe me. But our crews are working to clean it up and we'll be boarding very shortly." At that moment a baby started crying. The attendant added, "I know just how you feel. That's how I felt when I saw that mess." Everyone in the queue and in the boarding area started laughing. No one was anxious about getting on the plane anymore, and everyone relaxed.

My own flight was delayed getting in and I had a tight connection. I wasn't worried about catching the plane because I knew Southwest would hold the plane until all the stragglers were on board. I had checked luggage so I wondered about my luggage. A customer in the seat in front of me was talking on his cell phone. "I made it, but there's no way the bags are going to make it." At that moment the flight attendant made this announcement. "We're going to hold this flight until all the bags from our connecting flights have been loaded, then we'll be on our way." Rather than creating the hassle of putting the bags on a later flight and letting customer service in the airport deal with it, Southwest chooses to hold a flight and get all the bags on the flight. Huge win.

How do they do this? They think about customers, and what customers worry about. They know that people want information about boarding and delays and bags and dozens of different things. So they arrange some of their processes for the benefit of customers and their needs for information. These incidents happen too often and too predictably to just be happy accidents. They are doing real experience design. They're training and inspiring (and probably rewarding) employees to do things right.

All companies pay lip service to being customer focused. Southwest really gets it, and it shows up on the bottom line.

Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us

2011-05-30T04:28:00.000-07:00

Emily Yellin's Your Call is (Not That) Important To Us is a fast, fun read about the customer service/call center business, with a little bit of IVR thrown in. The book does well when it describes the history of customer service. There are some insights into companies that try very hard to get it right, like FedEx and Zappos and Jet Blue. It doesn't do as well with the speech IVR material. She grants too much credibility to fringe players like the MIT profs who want to create "emotional" computers and the companies pushing interactive avatars.

One of the central observations in the book is that customer service doesn't occupy a very high place in the list of priorities at most companies. This I've seen many times in the companies I've worked for or consulted with. Personally, I'd love to work at a company that decides at the highest levels that customer service is a top priority. The challenges of getting customer service right are very hard, even with a lot of support from executives. Without that support, it's impossible.

Doctors or waiters?

2011-05-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

How would you describe your company's approach to customer service? Is it a waiter or a doctor? The waiter is friendly and engaging, and after some small talk, takes your order on a pad of paper and disappears for while. Eventually your order arrives, and if you got what you asked for in a timely manner and the quality is good, you're happy.

When you go to a doctor's office with a complaint, the doctor takes some time trying to understand the issue. He or she may order some tests or consult with others before producing a diagnosis and prescribing some treatments. If you respond to treatment and the malady disappears, you're happy.

Of course, there are different kinds of happy. The doctor has provided a different level of professional service than the waiter, who took some simple orders and was reasonably pleasant and efficient in the process. Not surprisingly, the doctor charges a lot more for his or her expertise than the waiter. Can you imagine a doctor listening to you describe your symptoms briefly, then pulling out a pad of paper with a friendly, "OK, now tell me what drugs you want." You'd think the doctor was a fraud. Doctors are trained to understand and diagnose health problems. They aren't order takers, they're problem solvers. Waiters take orders.

So, how would you describe your company? Doctor or waiter? Problem solver or order taker? If you're an IT shop, it makes a big difference to what you can charge your customers.

What if your company gets verbed

2011-05-23T05:17:00.001-07:00

Everyone knows what it means to xerox a printed page. A printed page is reproduced on a thermographic sheet of paper. It also implies less directly that the copy is highly accurate and done with a miminum of fuss. Likewise, Fedexing a package means shipping it to a location for delivery the next day. It also implies that the sender can be sure the package will arrive on time. If you're asked to Fedex something and you send it USPS and it doesn't get there overnight, you may find yourself in some trouble. Everyone is probably familiar with the verb "to google."

Verbs are the words for actions, and we can't do without them. To eat, to sleep, to talk, are all things that we have to name because the concepts they capture are so necessary to our lives that we have to call them something. Nouns come and go, especially company and product names. Xerox and Fedex created functions in the business world that have become so necessary that we can't imagine operating without them. In the 1970's the idea that you could ship a package anywhere and guarantee 24 hour delivery was considered ridiculous. Now we expect to be able to Fedex anything anywhere in 24 hours. Need to move 24,000 sea turtle eggs from the Florida gulf coast to the east coast ahead of an oil spill (or "BP'ed")? Just Fedex them.

These companies were rewarded for their status in the business world by having their company names verbed. Other companies may provide a service that fulfills the function, but the verb adopted to name the action comes from the company that invented and fulfilled the service.

So, if your company name was verbed by your customers, what would it mean? Would it mean providing a unique and necessary function with high reliability and outstanding customer service? Or would it mean something else? What would you want it to mean? Do this exercise. Come up with a definition of the intended meaning of your company's verbed name. If you can do that, you just wrote yourself a mission statement.

Whac A Mole ideation sessions

2011-03-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been in a brainstorming session where every idea that gets proposed is quickly beaten down by some of the participants? These are what I call "Whac A Mole" sessions, by analogy with the popular arcade game of the same name in which players score points for beating down mechanical moles as they pop up from their holes in the ground.

As we know, good initial brainstorming sessions try to generate a large quantity of high quality ideas, with judgment deferred on each idea until later rounds of refinement. That's a simplification of the ideation process, but you'd be amazed how quickly people join in with others to play whack a mole on new ideas.

Requirement: the Devil's Definition

2011-03-07T09:42:00.001-08:00

"Requirement (n): the absolute minimum amount of information necessary to get a developer to start writing code for a desired function."

A bit cynical, sure, but it captures the essense of a lot of "requirements" I see thrown around in project meetings. The assumption here by business people is that the sooner the developers start coding, the sooner they'll be finished. Another unspoken assumption is that the developers' time is a lot less valuable than the business person's. Experienced developers push back and ask for something resembling a so-called "SMART requirement." New developers just start hacking, with predictable results.

"We do that already"

2011-02-24T05:26:00.000-08:00

Ever had a great idea and pitched it to a gatekeeper only to hear the words, "We do that already?" Or, in another form, "We know that already." Pretty demotivating, isn't it? You stop pursuing the idea, only to learn later that your idea hasn't been investigated, no one is working on it, or someone started working on it after you made your pitch.

The gatekeeper has one or more reasons for their response. One, they may simply not understand what you are saying, and mistake your idea for an unrelated idea. Sometimes the gatekeeper may be making a snap decision about your standing or ability to pursue the idea. At worst, the gatekeeper is thinking, "That's a pretty good idea. I need to take this back to one of my people and have them look into it."

Keep in mind that responses to your ideas are just data that you should collect and analyze more fully. A response of "We're on that already" should be met with polite skepticism. Keep generating those ideas, and pitch them to a lot of people, and triangulate the responses. You may find that your gatekeepers don't know as much as they claim.

Funny thing about blogging...

2011-01-27T10:52:00.000-08:00

Funny thing about blogging, at least from my own experience, is that when I'm neck deep in the most interesting work and I have the most to write about, I never manage to write the stuff down. It's only during periods of relative calm, when I can reflect and document, or that I'm just working on familiar stuff, that I actually get around to it. This past month has been so new and required so many cycles that I barely have time to think, let alone write. All of this is just a way of explaining why the blog entries have slowed down so much.

Good luck to Borders

2011-01-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

I'm a reader, and I always liked Borders bookstore. I was delighted when it opened a store in Bloomington, Ill., where I used to live and work. So I was dismayed to learn that it may soon close its doors. I used to drive past the local Barnes and Noble to go to Borders in Chapel Hill, but the CD selection was so ordinary I stopped going.

As the article in the Atlantic points out, the original owners sold the chain, and Borders has been owned by a series of companies with no particular interest in or skill selling books. Successful businesses have a tendency to attract business people who are interested in profit and who believe that good managers can manage anything. That's wrong - domain knowledge counts for a lot, and passion counts for more.

Scrum pep talk

2010-12-15T06:45:00.000-08:00

I took two days of training for Scrum product owners. At the end of some excellent training the trainer said, "We're going to send you a certificate that says you're a certified Scrum product owner. Take that certificate and put it on the wall. It doesn't entitle you to tell anyone anything. It will be there to remind you that you don't know anything yet, you really don't. But it's your job to learn everything you can and put it into practice."

That's the kind of pep talk people need to hear when they get a "certification."

Listening to customers pays off - really

2010-12-03T05:44:00.000-08:00

People (like myself) who practice user-centered design spend an inordinate amount of time preaching to and pleading with various gatekeepers in companies to bring customers into the design process. There's always a dozen excuses why it can't be done: "too expensive," "the customers can't design," "they don't want to be bothered," etc. etc. etc. Sometimes I think the gatekeepers just don't want to know how unappealing/unusable/unwanted the company's products are.

So it's a pleasure to read stories where some young gun has put the advice into practice and is rewarded appropriately. This is so easy to do and so rewarding, yet so few companies do it well.

Japanese robot actress

2010-11-13T07:11:00.000-08:00

Here's a video of a Japanese robot actress that plays the part of a caregiver to a sick patient. I was in Japan in 1996 to attend the IROS robotics conference in Osaka. I had a chance to tour the robotics labs in Tokyo University. Many of the student projects involved creating humanoid robots, the idea being that the robots would be more readily accepted by their human owners if they appeared to be human. The robots were not very sophisticated at that time.

As the population of Japan grows older due to its declining birth rate, there is apparently an effort in Japan to create a variety of robots that can perform ordinary housekeeping tasks. The play mentioned in the clip is significant for addressing the not-unrealistic scenario that robots will soon become caregivers in Japanese homes.

Design anti-patterns: Automating the Horse

2010-11-08T06:42:00.000-08:00

This is one of the most ubiquitous of all design anti-patterns: the tendency of clients to try to automate a horse. It's more than a tendency, it's almost a corporate imperative. It works like this.

You're a contractor or internal project team that is charged with implementing a new automated system. Because you need some requirements, you meet with your business partner and start taking their requirements. You may also get to interview some of the people who are performing the current work manually. The interviews with managers and employees sound like this:

"OK, first I open my folder and take out a blank form. I start filling in this field and then that one from the emails I got since last night. Then I call a department to get the information for this field or that field. And then I pull out my manuals to look this field up..." And on and on. If you ask why someone is doing a particular thing the answer is "because I need to do it to figure out what to put in this field."

When you start presenting possible solutions you get pushed on from the sponsor to "make it look like the current process so people won't get confused." What they want you to do is automate their horse. The first attempts to automate transportation usually included a lot of features that were present in the original biological equivalents: reins and manes and saddles for riding on land, feathers and wings and beaks for moving through the air, etc. Progress was made when the designers stopped thoughtlessly recreating the biological features and started to exploit the advantages of the technology itself: wheels and combustion engines and rudders and so on.

It also helped when the designers remembered the goal for all this activity. If your goal is to build a mechanical horse for a rider, then you spend your time worrying about putting in features that perceptibly satisfy that goal. If the goal is to build a device capable of carrying a passenger from one place to another by whatever means necessary then you can throw out your assumptions about the goodness of the existing solution start looking for a solution with whatever materials are available.

So you have to get the higher level goals for the activities that you are discussing with your business group. And this is often hard to do if your business people already have an "automated horse" solution in mind. But you persist, and try to use the automation project as an opportunity to re-think and redesign some existing processes, using technology to offload a lot of unnecessary work from the human operators. When this works, it's a big win for everyone. If you can't do a redesign, you often are left with a mechanical horse.

Carolina Student Design Competition

2010-11-06T14:32:00.000-07:00

The official announcement of the first Carolina Student Design Competition has been posted. Students at universities in North and South Carolina are eligible to participate. Winners get prizes and the opportunity to present at next year's Innovate Carolina conference in Charlotte. I'm the coordinator, as mentioned in the announcement, so if anyone has questions, shoot me an email.

WSJ discovers speech IVR

2010-11-05T06:34:00.000-07:00

A story about speech IVRs appeared in a very unlikely place, the Wall Street Journal. The story emphasizes the importance of the sound of the voice as a driver of customer satisfaction, but there's really more to it than that. I think the sound of the voice is important, and have done research to show it, but customer satisfaction also depends on understanding why the customer is calling and providing the right functions in an intuitive manner. The Comments section really show more understanding of this than the author of the article. Thanks to Jenni McKienzie for forwarding this.

Digression: Bears are killing the Bulls

2010-11-03T16:22:00.000-07:00

I don't usually comment on nature stories, but this was too good to pass up. A photographer in Yellowstone park took some fantastic pictures of a bear chasing a half-cooked buffalo down a street.

It's kind of like a metaphor for the US economy for the past two years, the way the bears have been punishing the bulls. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Usability test report requirements

2010-10-25T05:33:00.000-07:00

I'm in a discussion with some colleagues about the requirements of a good usability test report. I don't get too wrapped up in the details of reports, since I'm usually the only one who reads the reports. I'm more concerned about the content of the presentation and discussion. I often don't send the report out in advance, since I've sometimes had project managers take the report and decline the meeting. It depends on who I'm dealing with. The content of the presentations contain the basic findings of a study, but the conclusions are written specifically for the audience. I try to connect the work to their own concerns, which are different by area: development, marketing, operations, finance, and so on. Sometimes the most valuable part of the exercise is the discussion following the presentation of results. It tends to surface a lot of the assumptions, attitudes, and opinions of the people receiving the report, and gives me a chance to respond to a lot of concerns.

The funniest requirement for a usability report was given to me by a previous manager, thankfully long departed. I finished a test and report and told the manager that I was going to set up a meeting with the project team to deliver the results. She said the project team didn't have time and that I should just send the report to them and skip the meeting. This team wasn't familiar with usability testing or usability reports so I said, "What if the project team has questions?" The manager replied, "Just write the report with enough detail so they won't have questions."

Official Google Blog: Goodbye to an old friend: 1-800-GOOG-411

2010-10-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

Google will shut down its speech reco application GOOG 411. I had written about this service before. I don't have a smartphone, and this was a handy service when you were away from your computer. Google rarely hesitates to pull the plug on a service that isn't meeting expectations, so I guess this is no exception. Thanks to Phillip Hunter for alerting me to this story.

Summary of HFES conference in SF

2010-10-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

I went to the excellent Human Factors and Ergonomics Society conference in San Francisco last week. The keynote address was delivered by pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Some of the talk was motivational, and some was specific to the human factors of the design of airline cockpit alerts, crew training, and performance under stress.

The emergency landing in the Hudson River in January 2009 was illustrated by a simulation showing a map of the area and an animated path of the aircraft from takeoff to landing. Overlaid on the screen was a clock, an altimeter, and some of the voice recordings between pilot and tower. Some interesting details that the speaker mentioned:

The entire incident until landing was less than four minutes. He formulated his plan in less than a minute.
There is an SOP for a situation in which both engines are lost, but it’s three printed pages long, obviously written for situations where the aircraft is at a high altitude. Some SOPs are printed, some are electronic, and pilots have to know where to look to get the right SOP.
He had never specifically trained to ditch a commercial aircraft in water. The only training he received was a theoretical classroom discussion about it years earlier.
He had never experienced a catastrophic equipment failure in 29 years of commercial flying.
He feels that he was relying on his experience, including his fighter pilot experience 29 years earlier, to land the aircraft.
He didn’t realize that he’d done everything correctly until the investigation into the crash concluded two months later.
He was unable to deploy the flaps as he wanted to due to a software misfeature that was known only to a few software engineers. This caused the plane to come in faster and at a steeper angle than he wanted. This caused more damage to the underside of the aircraft than was necessary, and contributed to an injury.
Airlines are reducing training to keep costs down. They train only to minimum FAA requirements and no more. He predicts that training shortfalls will become obvious only in the future and in exceptional circumstances. In other words, disasters will have to occur and data collected before changes will be made to training requirements.
Commercial flight simulators still do not train pilots in the scenario he experienced in Jan. 2009.

The conference was heavy on NextGen research for airline industry and the health care industry. I chaired a session on "Management perspectives on building UX departments," which generated a lot of good discussion. I took a tour of the Autodesk office. I even ran into some people from the rail industry from Australia. And, of course, San Francisco is an excellent city to visit.

HFES in September

2010-09-16T12:03:00.000-07:00

I'm going to the Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in fabulous San Francisco. I'm chairing a panel on How to Build a User Experience Group within your company. We'll have an All Star lineup and lots of good discussion.

I haven't been to HFES since 2006, so I'm really looking forward to getting back and seeing all my human factors colleagues again. Drop me a note if you're going to be there.

Strategic business metrics for UX designers

2010-09-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

I'll be presenting a session on the topic of strategic business metrics for UX designers at the TriUPA meeting on October 6, 6:30 - 8:30pm at Railinc Corp. in Cary. You can register on the TriUPA web site.

Computing ROI for usability activities

2010-09-07T06:24:00.000-07:00

Nearly everyone in the usability field is challenged at one time or another to justify their contribution to a project. UX practitioners hear this statement as a request for some sort of ROI study that presents data showing the unique contribution of usability to, for example, money saved or revenue generated. Since it's pretty hard to separate out the contributions of various players on a project, this usually is very hard to do.

Nevertheless, I was able, one time, to directly quantify UX contribution to cost savings for a call center I did some consulting work for. Callers were unable to correctly enter a policy number in the IVR to obtain automated information on an insurance policy. The problem was that the policy number had four fields, three of which were variable length, and some fields contained letters the A - F. Nearly all callers errored out and wound up in the call center. I and a developer wrote an algorithm that correctly parsed the callers' keypad input, I re-wrote the prompting and usability tested it, and we implemented it. Correct policy number input went from 10% to 90% immediately. Since call centers know their average handle time and the amount they spend per call, it was easy to show how much money was saved by our fix. We knew how much time we spent on the effort. We estimated savings to be $300,000/year due to our one-time fix. We even wrote a paper showing our calculations, and recommended that we be allowed to make similar fixes to the company's 40 other call centers.

This is a well and good, and should have led to an enormous cost savings across the entire company. Unfortunately, there was simply no one to execute this excellent recommendation. The 40 call centers all operated independently, so there was no single person, or even committee, to push for improvements to all call centers. The opportunity was lost because the developer and I simply didn't have enough standing within the company to push for changes.

Bottom line, ROI studies are great, but even if you have them they don't automatically lead to changes. Managers with a mandate to lower costs by some means other than layoffs are the ones who drive change. Sometimes they're harder to find than you might expect.

Carolina Student Design Competition

2010-08-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

How do aspiring product designers in the Carolinas win acclaim as innovative designers, not to mention prize money? By winning the first Carolinas Student Design Competition, sponsored by Carolinas PDMA. More details coming soon, but the contest winners will present their designs at the Innovate Carolina 2011 conference in Charlotte on April 15.

The Innovate Carolinas 2010 in April of this year at the UNC Kenan Flager School of Business was attended by over 120 professional product designers, product managers, executives, and university faculty. That's a pretty good audience for a winning college design team.

Build me a widget...

2010-08-21T16:18:00.000-07:00

Developers get a lot of requests from business people that sound like this: "Build me a widget (or a framework, or a proof of concept, etc.) that I can play with. It has to be flexible so I can tweak it myself and change stuff and maybe even show it to a customer." Implied but not stated, the request is also to go away but remain available if the business person needs significant changes. Business people don't realize that, from the developer's point of view, this is a very low-value request. They're asking the developer to do a great deal of work without having thought through the business case for the request. If the developer is experienced, he or she will have seen a lot of this sort of work just sit on a shelf unused.

If you're a developer, what kind of project would you rather work on? A project to build a product that could impress customers and generate a lot of revenue and gain you some recognition, or a project to build a big toy for a business person who may or may not figure out what to do with it at some unspecified future date? Business people could help themselves a great deal if they would do their part to think through a request for technology, and then engage developers early in the concept formation stage of product development.

10 most innovative business school courses

2010-08-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

Forbes.com published a list of the 10 most innovative business school courses. Any list like this is going to be a little arbitrary, but I was happy to see NCSU's Product Innovation Lab class listed as one of the ten. I finished that class in December, and it was the most effortful and unique class I've ever taken. (That's saying a lot, because I've been through three grad school programs.)

The article also mentioned the project my team completed, a video conferencing system for PT patients. It was based on Microsoft's Natal technology. It was a killer project, if I do say so myself.

Usability test sample size bibliography

2010-07-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

Jeff Sauro does an excellent job of detailing all of the work that's been done on the topic of sample sizes for usability testing. His bibliography is annotated and many of the entries have links to pdf files of the original papers. If anyone is interested they can go through the literature very easily. I'm happy to point out that I have a couple of entries on the list.

Voice test for autism

2010-07-20T17:15:00.001-07:00

This is interesting. Speech researchers claim to have invented a voice test for autism. From the article:

“This technology could help paediatricians screen children for ASD to determine if a referral to a specialist for a full diagnosis is required and get those children into earlier and more effective treatments,” ‘The Daily Telegraph’ quoted lead scientist Prof Steven Warren of Kansas University.

Very nice. I love to see speech research put to practical use.

Prepping for the NPDP test

2010-06-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

I'm doing a self-study course for the New Product Development Professional (NPDP) certification. There is no test prep material like there is for the PMP test. Fortunately, there's a reading list that's not too extensive and the books and articles are easily available if you have access to a good library. Many of the books and articles are real classics in the field.

Some people think certifications are a waste of time, but I've gotten a lot out of studying for them, and then trying to apply the knowledge.

Turning license plates into commercials

2010-06-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

I wonder if the speech IVR at the California DMV is going to have trouble with this one. California license plates may soon display ads and other commercial messages.

IVR: "What's you license plate number?"
Caller: Well, I'm not sure. If flashes and shows a movie of kids eating cereal, or something like that...
IVR: "Sorry, I missed that. What's the license plate number?"
Caller: I told you, it's just a bunch of pictures. Happy kids, parents, that sort of thing...
IVR: "Let's try one more time..."

...and so on. Seriously, though, wouldn't putting flashing messages on the backs of cars be just a little distracting?

Happy Father's Day

2010-06-20T07:53:00.000-07:00

Happy Father's Day, everyone. If you're a father, enjoy the day.

FYI, Ancestry.com is a great place to learn about your family history. You can search census records online, and it's always improving its service. They sometimes have specials that allow you free access for a couple of weeks. I've used this service before and was delighted with what I learned about my father's family.

Dolphin gets an iPad

2010-06-01T18:08:00.001-07:00

Merlin got an iPad...and the first thing he said was, "so long, and thanks for all the fish."

The anti-creativity checklist

2010-05-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

I found a nice little feature called The Anti-Creativity Checklist, a tongue in cheek presentation of typical responses to new ideas. It may seem strange, but a lot of people try to make their reputations by shooting down others' ideas rather than generating their own ideas.

Pronoun haiku

2010-05-03T13:33:00.000-07:00

A recent scientific study shows how the use of pronouns saves processing cycles in the brain.

And of course, if we didn't have pronouns no one could have written this excellent haiku:

I am he as you
are he as you are me and
we are all toge'er

Evil interfaces

2010-04-29T15:31:00.001-07:00

The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls out Facebook for its deliberate attempts to compromise its users' privacy. Good for EFF for taking the fight to Facebook.

I've complained before about mis-designed interfaces that are used to extract money from consumers. This sort of stuff gives interface designers a bad name.

Usability, Scott Adams style

2010-04-20T05:08:00.000-07:00

Here's another good strip about usability from Scott Adams. Some of his previous strips have described usability testing as well. It's interesting that he keeps working this topic.

They didn't give us good requirements

2010-04-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

"They didn't give us good requirements" is an explanation that I sometimes hear from IT people to explain why a certain system turned out to be unusable. "They" are the business people who were asking for the system in question. In fact, "giving requirements" is a fact of life in a lot of companies. Business people furnish requirements and IT people develop the applications.

The thing is, IT people complain often about people consulted too late or not at all on the purpose and function of new applications. Well, if you sit around and wait for someone to "give you requirements," you've assigned yourself a pretty junior position on a development team. If IT people would actively engage in helping to define the application purpose and scope in a positive way, business people would be more inclined to treat them as partners. And everyone would win.

Innovate Carolina 2010: review

2010-04-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

I attended the Innovate Carolina conference yesterday at the Kenan Flagler business school at UNC Chapel Hill. (Full disclosure: I was on the conference committee.) The sessions were excellent. The best part of a small conference like that is the chance to talk to the speakers and attendees. I collected cards from people I'll be talking business with in the next few weeks.

By the way, if anyone wants to work on next year's event, please contact me.

"Generate me some alternatives"

2010-04-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

Executives' requests for "design alternatives" has lead a lot of designers to engage in an elaborate ritual for the purpose of managing the executives. It works like this.

Execs make decisions. That's what they do. So rather than asking that a product be developed, they ask for "alternatives" so that they can make a decision. Because, as any exec will tell you, making decisions is the hard stuff, and that's what they get paid to do. Generating alternatives is the easy stuff, they believe. So it's up to the designers to generate a lot of alternatives and allow the execs to choose one.

Designers don't see things exactly that way. Designing a really good product is hard work. And once a great alternative is designed it's relatively easy to pick a good one out of competing alternatives. In fact, experienced designers regularly generate alternatives early in the design process as a way of expanding their own space of possible solutions. They'll then try to work the best features of each alternative into a final design.

Do you think the execs get to see these early concepts? Well, only if the designer is inexperienced or wants to see disaster strike. No, experienced designers will drive toward a good design from among several alternatives, then generate some relatively bad "alternatives" for a dog-and-pony show with the execs. Unless lightning strikes the d&p show, the good design is chosen from among the alternatives. Designers get their solution chosen, and the execs get to make a decision. Everyone goes home happy.

Remarks on Managing as Designing

2010-03-27T12:19:00.001-07:00

I was excited to find this book, Managing as Designing, because I think design skills can be put to good use in management and organizational design. Richard Boland and Fred Collopy edited this slim volume that contains contributions from authors who participated in a 2002 workshop. The participants came from business, sociology, architecture, dance, semiotics, economics, and history.

This is no how-to book. There's lots of theory. The various authors write comfortably within their own knowledge areas, but don't really help the reader make the translation from their own specialty to management. So, if you are wondering how semiotics can inform the management arena, you'd better be familiar with semiotics. I was delighted by the chapter on the application of interaction design to management, but I know the language of both pretty well. Otherwise, it was a tough go. Recommended if you like to stretch yourself.

Getting max impact from user testing

2010-03-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

Usability testing has traditionally answered questions about whether a given application or product is easy and satisfying to use. Questions about whether anyone would actually buy the product are usually left to sales and marketing. I tweaked my latest user test and it paid off in a big way. Rather than simply run a test of whether users could order a report online, I dug into the content of the report and had customers tell me if they understood the data, what data were missing, and what else they needed in order to do their jobs. The test ended up being a combined usability test and a needs analysis, something that hadn't been done previously on this product.

I've been dinged before because I didn't run a "textbook" usability test as described by an accepted guru. The thing is, usability testing is so flexible it can be used to answer any number of questions, and the questions in this case were around what customers needed and the actual marketability of the product. The responses were pretty decisive, and the direction of the development of the product is going to change drastically. That's not something that happens often by following textbook usability procedures.

ACC tournament roundup

2010-03-16T17:59:00.001-07:00

The ACC tournament is over and done, and it was the first time I got to see the rivalry up close. Almost everyone wore their school shirt to work on Friday. Depending on the shirt you wore people said, "Nice shirt," or "Ugly shirt" when they walked by. As an alum, I proudly wore my NCSU Wolfpack t-shirt, and some of those in red had a good deal of fun at the expense of the people who wore UNC powder blue. It was all in good humor.

What's a usability problem?

2010-03-14T07:50:00.001-07:00

This Dilbert comic strip raises an excellent question that usability people often talk about. What constitutes a usability problem? The PHM says, "...a user might need several steps to do something that should only take one." Out of context of the application, it's impossible to answer that question. If the application is a payment form on an e-commerce site, then this situation may affect conversion rates by some percentage and lead to lost sales. If it's a desktop application that is complex and only intended to be used by trained users, than perhaps it's not an issue. Often there's disagreement among usability people whether a usability issue is a genuine "bug" or not.

Interesting that the PHM brings this up, because historically we know he doesn't really understand engineering or usability very well. I wonder where Scott Adams encountered this topic.

Demotivation 2.0: secret leader list

2010-03-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

This article on talent management reminded me of an odd approach to leadership development I encountered a few years ago. The company I worked for announced it had created a "secret list" of the company's future leaders. The selected future leaders were to be informed of their status by their managers. The employees didn't know who was on the list, and it wasn't even known who in management knew who was on the list. These future leaders would be given special developmental opportunities and visibility with current leaders and other perquisites, also unstated.

There was some discussion in the ranks of who these secret future leaders might be, but the topic was quickly dropped since there was no other information passed on about it. One thing was very clear, though. If you weren't contacted and informed of your special status you were quite sure that you didn't have any opportunities to move up at this company. The company already had a well-earned reputation for a good-old-boy, insiders-only culture with few paths for career advancement, and this program seemed to solidly reinforce that image.

As someone with an interest in organizational design and leadership, I've often wondered about this program, who initiated it, and how it turned out. I've never heard of anything like it. I still can't imagine what good was expected to come out it. I do know that the possibility of promotion and visibility within the company is one of the most reliable tools managers have to motivate their direct reports, and that was taken out of their hands by the program.

Jamming applications into bad templates

2010-03-03T09:44:00.000-08:00

I've had a lot of conversations with business people and developers who want "templates" that will work for any application they develop. This is usually in the context of their wanting to cut out all "unnecessary" analysis and design work so a project can jump right into coding. I've tried to explain that jamming your application into an inappropriate template is harmful at worst, silly at best. I'd never found a really good example that I think makes the point, until I found this:

http://www.handerpants.com/

I may put these on my X-mas list.

Branded sounds

2010-03-02T16:24:00.001-08:00

A company I used to work for many years ago had a highly distinctive, memorable jingle that it used in all of its TV ads. I was doing full time IVR design at the time, and I realized that this jingle could be used as an earcon, a branded auditory icon for the company's many IVRs. I wrote up a proposal on auditory branding and gave a big pitch to one of the execs, explaining that with all the attention and money being spent on visual branding at the company, it would make sense to spend a little time thinking about auditory branding. I offered to lead the effort. The exec listened politely and nodded several times, but nothing ever came of it.

So, I was interested in this article about auditory ads and attention. Despite the breathless title, there is probably nothing in the actual research related to addiction. Rather, there are definite neurological correlates to memory and attention, which is probably what was being measured here. In fact, the research was conducted by a company that is selling its services, rather than by a science lab, so I have questions about the validity of the findings.

In any case, my ex-company's memorable ad jingle appears in the "Top 10" list. When you own a inimitable resource like this it pays to figure out a way to leverage it. There is certainly an idea here that should be followed up on.

Remarks on The Speed of Trust

2010-02-28T08:28:00.000-08:00

The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey is well-written, actionable advice on how to build your own credibility with others, and how to intelligently extend trust to others. There's a section on building trust in your own organization with external stakeholders. It's particularly timely as people have become deeply suspicious of institutions and of others. Recommended.

Business metrics for UX designers

2010-02-26T04:55:00.001-08:00

UX designers would do well to learn about business metrics. Business metrics had been a gaping hole in my own education until recently. Companies tend to measure what they think is important. If the stuff you do doesn't track to something the company is measuring then you need to find out why. It could be that the company isn't good at measuring stuff. It could also mean that what you're doing isn't going to get a lot of attention, which isn't a good thing in a slow economy.

I've been working on a paper that explains business metrics to UX designers. Some day soon I'll get it submitted somewhere.

Business model generation

2010-02-19T13:24:00.000-08:00

I sketch everything. Screens, call flows, processes, hierarchies, etc. It drives me crazy to be in a meeting and people are throwing ideas around and arguing and stating their points and not seeing the connections between things, and no one is trying to capture anything on a whiteboard. It so much easier to see the relationships between things when you write them on a board.

I was so delighted to find the book Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur. Here is a book that elevates the importance of sketching and group facilitation and design thinking to the highest importance in creating new business models. It has been out of print for a while but it's finally back. Highly recommended.

Innovate Carolina 2010

2010-02-13T07:37:00.001-08:00

The Carolinas Chapter of Product Development and Management Association is organizing the Innovate Carolina conference on April 10 at UNC Kenan Flagler Business School. I'll be there.

When did "social media" come to mean "spam?"

2010-02-08T12:57:00.000-08:00

I used to like to read and participate in some of the LinkedIn groups about design and human factors but lately it just all looks like "make money fast" schemes and diploma mills. Somebody sets up an account and joins about 50 groups and the spams every group with the same message once a month with a link to website that just screams Virus Central. If you look at the account there's never any information about the user and they have no Connections. Some group owners are good about kicking the spammers out, and other group owners don't seem to care.

In some cases, I think the spammers are just clueless individuals who read a poorly-written article about social media and have implementated the first idea that came into their heads.

Today's fire drill was, well, a fire drill

2010-02-03T13:49:00.000-08:00

Today's helpful tip from the Helpful Tip guy. This one's a little more subtle than my last helpful tip: don't throw frozen iguanas in the back seat of your station wagon. Anyway, today's tip is:

Don't operate a blowtorch near a smoke detector

If you do, the fire alarm will go off and the building will be evacuated, and everyone's work will be disrupted, and the fire department will arrive. So don't do that. Please.

Best user interface certification

2010-01-24T17:18:00.001-08:00

I see a lot of questions from user interface designers about the "best" certification for designers. Truth is, there isn't a highly regarded certification for UI designers. I know that a private company, Human Factors International, grants a "certified usability analyst" credential, but it looks to me like an entry-level certification. It doesn't account for experience or the ability to actually design a user interface, which is documented in a portfolio.

A better certification for designers is the PMP certification from the Project Management Institute. One of the knocks I hear against a lot of designers is that they don't know how to work projects. Studying for and passing the PMP test addresses that concern.

It's important for designers to understand how to navigate projects in order to deliver their service effectively. I worked a company that offered free PMP training and paid for its people to take the certification test. The company understood the importance of having all of its people know how to operate in projects. Unfortunately, my supervisor at the time didn't understand. "You can't take that training, it doesn't have anything to do with your job," I was told. I took the test some years later, and wished that I had done it earlier.

The Media Equation applied to sex toys

2010-01-15T09:43:00.000-08:00

This story is so annoying I hardly know where to start talking about it. Apparently an entrepeneur has decided that adding voice response to a life-size sex doll will encourage customers to emotionally bond with his product (and thus allow his company to charge a premium price). This is the worst application I've ever seen of some already pretty questionable research, e.g., The Media Equation and the like. And I thought Aiko was creepy.

Guerrilla usability on the LA freeway

2010-01-14T05:37:00.001-08:00

"Guerrilla usability methods" refers to cheap, lightweight usability techniques that can be used to quickly improve the design of a user interface without drawing too much attention to themselves (and therefore don't get shut down). This article, about an L.A. artist's effort to fix a confusing highway sign on an L.A. freeway, takes guerrilla usability to an absolute extreme. I'm in awe.

And I really like Good magazine, the non-technical design publication for people who love design. I get the print version, because the magazine even feels good in one's hands. I've blogged Good before. Highly recommended.

A business model based on technological escalation

2010-01-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about technological escalation, or a situation in which two agents in conflict improve their own technology in order to win. Think about police radar and radar detection units employed by drivers, or caller ID used by homeowners and ID blocking used by telemarketers. I read about an admissions officer at an Ivy League college who started her own consulting practice for teenagers (actually, their parents) who want inside information on admission criteria for Ivy League schools. You get the picture.

Some people seem to build their entire business model around supplying the latest and greatest technology to both sides of the conflict, e.g., black hat hackers who change into white hats when trying to get security consulting gigs with e-commerce companies.

I've been wondering whether technological escalation could be developed as an explicit business model. That is, you could look for conflict situations and ethically develop a series of products that sells to both sides. As long as you keep developing products that help one side or the other get an advantage, you're in business. More formally, you create a market that is modeled by the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and make sure that Nash equilibrium doesn't occur for very long.

Beware of falling iguanas

2010-01-07T17:31:00.000-08:00

This story about hibernating iguanas falling from trees is my favorite story of the year (so far). There's even a video. I used to live in South Florida, and some of the stories I tell on the place people just don't believe. I really have seen a lot of iguanas during my last couple of trips back there, so this doesn't surprise me at all. Tip: don't throw frozen iguanas in the back of your station wagon, because they'll wake up and jump on your back.

My last blog entry about Florida had something to do with finding an alligator in the kitchen, if I recall correctly.

Consistency <> Copying

2010-01-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

I told someone recently that I was working on a project to improve consistency among some web-based applications. Their response was, paraphrased, "It's boring when everything looks the same." And that's true, it is boring when everything looks the same. And even harmful, if the things that "look the same" behave in different ways or mean different things. Useful consistency comes from an agreed-upon set of rules for presentation and what that presentation means. If the layout of two pages are the same, it's done for a explicit reason. If the layouts are different, that's for an explicit reason.

I think I need to find another word besides "consistency," since nearly everyone I talk to understands it to mean "look the same."

A UI design treasure chest

2009-12-27T05:42:00.000-08:00

Here's a great UI/prototyping site that I stumbled upon. One kind soul took the time to collect links to all of the best UI and prototyping tools he could find. Browser templates, controls, icons...tons of stuff. Thanks very much to Henry Jones for this collection.

Happy Winter Solstice

2009-12-21T11:16:00.000-08:00

I don't observe a lot of the history-book holidays, like Presidents Day, Columbus Day, etc., but I do take note of the solstices and equinoxes. I guess it's my pagan heritage. Anyway, Happy Winter Solstice, and enjoy the shortest day. And an early Merry Christmas.

Graduation Day

2009-12-19T11:15:00.000-08:00

Today is graduation day at NCSU. I've completed the MBA program, so I'm done with scholastics, at least for a while. It was difficult at times, but rewarding. I'm glad I went through it, and I'm glad it's done. I'll probably drink some strong tea or coffee to celebrate.

Verizon's fund-raising scheme

2009-12-16T05:26:00.000-08:00

We tend to think of poor design as a lack of attention to detail or just plain incompetence. Verizon phones have a nasty design feature that was implemented solely to rip off their customers. Read here in this NYT article by David Pogue. Thanks to Philip Hunter for forwarding this.

Jumping on the bus

2009-12-10T05:48:00.000-08:00

A few years ago a friend of mine who lived in NY told me that whenever a bus in NY is involved in an accident a few people will jump on the bus and then claim to be injured. The idea, obviously, is to extract some money from the bus company for their so-called "injuries."

I thought about that scenario when I was reading the latest news about Tiger Woods' self-inflicted problems. There are probably a few bus jumpers in the crowd (9?), in addition to the genuine claimants.

Everyone has the same technology

2009-12-08T06:59:00.001-08:00

It's true. Everyone has the same technology, or access to the same technology. So why do some self service web sites and IVRs fly like champions with their customers, and why do so many fail? Well, of course part of the reason is the way the technology is designed. It's the way the pieces are put together. You would expect a designer to say something unprofound like that.

Part of it, the part that's neglected too often, is the governance around the web site or the IVR. It's the ongoing commitment by everyone involved to make the site as good as it can be, given the limitations of the technology. That means breaking down institutional barriers that prevent different teams from working together to improve service. It means putting the right metrics in place, metrics that actually drive organizational behavior. It means lots of things that need to happen after the site goes into production. There are too many widowed web sites and IVRs out there - stuff that got pushed into production and then forgotten.

I worked at a company that invested huge sums in developing self service applications, but did little follow up afterwards. After a big project was over all the experienced people were released to new projects. When the self service didn't meet expectations the management's reaction was almost always the same: "The technology is no good. Let's get better technology." It was almost impossible to engage managers in a discussion about their ongoing responsibilities for improving the performance of the self service systems. "That's the service area's problem. They'll deal."

It was very wasteful. And frustrating. Getting the most out of an existing self service application helps ensure a good ROI.

The original Free

2009-11-30T05:28:00.001-08:00

Chris Anderson's book Free: the Future of a Radical Price is getting a lot of buzz for its thesis that companies can make a lot of money by offering free digital products. As soon as I started hearing about this stuff I thought, "Someone has been reading Abbie Hoffman."

Hoffman was the original free-ster. He published under the name Free, and took "Barry Freed" as an alias when he was on the run from the law. His book Steal this Book was an underground classic. He was more than talk, though. He helped organize free stores in inner city neighborhoods that gathered cast off goods and gave them away to people in need.

He also was responsible for some of the greatest marketing gimmicks ever invented, not for the purpose of making some company a lot of money, but to bring attention to causes. During the Vietnam war he and his little tribe announced that they were gathering at the Pentagon and would levitate the entire building using witchcraft. The gathering there to participate in the ceremony was probably the first flash mob. He closed down the NYSE one day by throwing dollar bills into the pit from the balcony, causing traders to stop trading and start chasing the bills. During his trial for conspiracy to riot in Chicago he regularly lectured the judge in his Groucho Marxist voice: "In all my years as a defendant that's the most ridiculous ruling I ever heard."

In a sort of sad application of Free, Anderson and others have ripped off Hoffman's riffs and used them to market consumer products. His famous epigram, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life," from his 1968 book Revolution for the Hell of It, adorns countless greeting cards. As Stephen Colbert noted in his interview with Anderson, "So your book Free costs 26 dollars. Well done, my man." Colbert was being more than just a little ironic.

Reformatting RTP

2009-11-27T06:20:00.000-08:00

I've complained before about the layout of Research Triangle Park between Durham and Raleigh. It's too big and traffic intensive to encourage tech workers to meet each other and exchange ideas. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so, as there are plans to repurpose some of the land to encourage collaboration between companies and their knowledge workers.

This is a nice development. I've taken advantage of some of the activities mentioned in this article, including Techie Tuesday and the RTP-based NCSU MBA program. I'd love to see park do more to encourage techs to get together. Kudos to Rick Weddle and his staff for taking steps in that direction.

Remarks on Your Next Move

2009-11-19T15:10:00.001-08:00

I picked up Your Next Move: the Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions by Michael Watkins as I prepared to start my new position with a local company. Skimming it, it seemed to cover a lot of topics I was interested in: things you need to do first, how to categorize the state the company is in, etc. The book turned out to be an extended outline, with references to follow up in his other books. It was almost like reading an extended abstract for his other publications. I really needed a deep dive on some of the topics.

End of the job search

2009-11-12T05:07:00.000-08:00

The job hunt is over. I'll start my new position on Monday! It was as quick a search as could be expected, given the state of the economy. More details to follow, after I've had a chance to settle in.

I'll be managing the visual UI of the company's applications, so I'm out of the voice user interface business now. That presents a dilemma for me, since the name of the blog is "Interactive Voice Response." I'll need to re-brand the blog. Anyway, it's a good problem to have.

Transcending Products - Offering Experience Design & Strategy

2009-11-08T07:10:00.001-08:00

PDMA Carolinas Chapter is hosting an event this Thursday called "Transcending Products - Offering Experience Design & Strategy." You can register by visiting the web site.

Designer or consultant/ designer?

2009-11-01T06:16:00.001-08:00

A discussion with the manager of a design group at a local company prompted me to think about the difference between designers and consultant/designers. The manager said that he had some talented graphic designers that he basically kept away from business areas that required design services. Others in the design group or on the projects they worked on acted as the interface to the business areas. There are good, defensible reasons for that. Business people can suck up a lot of time from creatives, asking for concepts, mockups, and ideas, and then rejecting anything that is presented with indefensible requests for changes (see previous blog post on this subject). This can work well if the manager understands the value of the designers' abilities and their time, knows how to manage clients, and isn't simply trying to take credit for the group's work.

On the other hand, being able to lead engagements and work with business areas and clients is a valuable, transferable skill. Leaving the consulting part of a project to someone else, especially someone who doesn't understand or can't sell the value of design, can result in some very good design work being underutilized or ignored. I've seen the same thing with usability analysts who worked only at the direction of a project leader. They couldn't assert themselves in project situations or consulting engagements, and as a result their test results and recommendations were largely ignored.

Personally, I'd like to see every designer and usability pro be able to lead engagements and consult effectively with clients.

Design anti-patterns: the value-add de-motivation technique

2009-10-28T05:10:00.000-07:00

In a recent article, Marshall Goldsmith describes a scenario familiar to anyone who designs products or websites. A designer presents a new idea in a meeting that includes his or her manager. The manager pipes up with "improvements" to the designer's original idea. As Goldsmith asks, what does that do to the designer's commitment to the original idea?

I've seen this scenario occur literally dozens of times. In one case, a business analyst was developing a streamlined, iterative software development process for use by an IT department. Another analyst wrangled an invitation to the review sessions where the business analyst was presenting the new process. The invited analyst proceeded to shred the recommended process and, through argumentation and stubborness, inserted her own approach to software development into the process. When the new process was released the invited analyst cheerfully noted that she had gotten everything she wanted in changes to the process. However, the business analyst who had initiated the work and had intended to implement and steward the new process, was so demoralized by the experience that she left her role for another position in the company. The new software process was published but, with no one to steward it, it was never used by project teams in the IT department.

As Goldsmith points out, a lot of this behavior occurs because managers (or analysts) are trying to make themselves look good in front of others. "Looking good" implies that the culture supports and rewards that sort of behavior. The other factor here is that managers value concrete deliverables, whether designs, code, or published processes. There's less awareness of, and value placed on, intangibles like commitment, loyalty, and motivation. How can a manager "prove" that he or she increased his direct reports' commitment to their projects by some percentage in the last quarter? But commitment to a project can make or break the project. Managers need to understand that.

"Innovate violently!"

2009-10-26T05:20:00.001-07:00

"Innovate violently!" was poet Guillaume Apollinaire's advice to Picasso. And "innovate violently" he did. I went to the fabulous Picasso exhibit at the Nasher Museum in Durham last weekend. The exhibition shows how Picasso used printed language as part of his painting. It presents some of his poetry. It's great that we have a resource like the Nasher in town. The Picasso exhibit runs through January 3rd.

GMAT as selection criterion

2009-10-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

I took the GMAT four years ago, when I decided to return to school for an MBA. At the time I didn't think it was very important. I already had a lot of job experience and a lot of education, so I knew GMAT wasn't going to be a big factor in my application. I looked at a test prep book for a couple of days and took the test and scored mid 600s. That's not great, but it was good enough for what I needed.

Then I read this article that says the GMAT is being used as a selection criterion by employers who are trying to weed through all of their applications. No matter that the test wasn't designed for that purpose.

This trend is even worse than using personality tests for selection, and that's pretty bad. I wonder if some employers have simply given up on trying to interview people for their qualifications and fit and are looking only at the numbers.

Ally Bank: "We speak human"

2009-10-13T12:25:00.000-07:00

Ally Bank is a new pure-play internet bank. To introduce themselves to potential customers they purchased a 2 page ad in a recent Business Week:

"There are times when you just want to speak to a real, live person about your money. And at Ally Bank you can, anytime, 24/7. Just just push "0" to speak to a real live person. It's that easy. No complicated phone trees to navigate and no repeating yourself three times to a robot. We even publish our current wait times on our website. It's just the right thing to do."

With all of the financial turmoil and lost investments and failed banking institutions that have beset consumers recently, Ally Bank's pitch to new customers is this: avoid the stupid IVRs whenever you want and talk to a person. This is not a glowing recommendation for the speech IVR industry.

In fact, when it comes to bad IVRs, there is plenty of blame to go around. Companies that install IVRs as a front end to their call center go often go into projects with inflated expectations of what speech IVRs can reasonably do. Others do not, but don't feel that usability is very important and will settle for "good enough," however that is defined. Vendors will oversell the technology's ability to recognize speech, or put more emphasis on the technology than on design.

There are lots of reasons why speech IVRs fail. And there are now companies like Ally Bank that are exploiting consumers' dissatisfaction with telephone automation. I hope every company with a speech IVR will take notice.

Usability testing next week

2009-10-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

I'm working on contract to conduct usability testing of a nice, cutting-edge product that analyzes network traffic. If you're an administrator or network service analyst and would like to see and help test this product, let me know. $75/hr for a one hour (or less) test.

The smartest cities

2009-10-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

I live in the "smartest city in the U.S.," according to a website I'd never heard of before this week. I guess that's a good thing, but if our city (metropolitan area) were really smart I think we'd have better public transportation and better bike lanes and be more in touch with new urbanism and things that promote cities instead of sprawl. Research Triangle Park, located between Raleigh and Durham, is a monument to 1950's style suburban planning. Smarts isn't everything--planning and a sense of aesthetics is needed too.

Who needs MS Office...

2009-10-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

I love OpenOffice.org. You can download an office suite of tools that has the functionality of Microsoft Office for free. Don't want to pay for a version of Powerpoint or Excel for your laptop? Go to OpenOffice, get their free tools, and you can create and change those apps for free. Very nice.

"Doing" innovation: technique or org design?

2009-09-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

I've been answering questions lately about how you "do" innovation and "voice of the customer." What are techniques? How do you gather data? Convert the data into new product ideas?

Those are interesting questions, certainly, but there are a lot of resources out there that present valid frameworks and approaches for doing innovation. The trick, of course, is to be able to apply a framework or approach to a real situation in the messy real world of new product development.

An equally interesting and important question, and one I don't hear much, is "How do you need to change the organization to support innovation," rather than focussing on the individuals? Personally, I think that's the harder challenge, since it requires more organizational change and can take managers out of their comfort zones.

Look, sometimes all you need to do to get individuals to innovate is to give them some tools and get out of the way. But setting up and organization that can catch the ideas generated by its employees can be a real challenge. That's the other side of the innovation equation, and the one that's less talked about.

Is "networking" just a different name for something else

2009-09-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about this "networking" thing--the person-to-person kind. I think I've been doing a lot of it lately, although I'm not really clear on the definition. As far as I can tell, if you are working with people, doing your job successfully and people see it, and helping people when they need help, then you're networking. I think "networking" is just a fancy term for "doing the right thing" with respect to your business and personal relationships. Maybe there's more, but I'm missing it.

Appropriateness as a criterion for speech IVR

2009-09-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

Someone who is putting together a conference symposium on "the impact of speech technology on society" pinged me and a big bunch of other opiniated people on this topic and asked for input. My quick effort to be an IVR/speech industry forward-thinker follows.
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Where the IVR industry will go is away from homegrown, do-everything speech recognition systems running on a company's own platform to highly specific, appropriate applications running on hosted platforms. A lot of companies have spent a ton of money on speech development tools and handed them to IT people who figure that speech is like every other technology - you just hack on it until you get it right. When it doesn't work the companies blame the technology, and the IT department (or communications department) makes excuses.

Examples of highly specific, appropriate use applications are things like name capture and city and address capture. The applications that do this well are created by speech rec companies that understand what they are doing and design and test them for a long time, refining them for a long time. These small, self contained applications may be embedded in larger apps that may be DTMF only.

Hosting allows the speech vendor to gather an enormous amount of data from various companies' callers and use that data to improve their product. IT departments at individual companies don't have the resources or expertise to do that. Another specific, useful application is speech to text transcription. Again, a few speech vendors will succeed at doing this, but most companies don't have the resources.

The idea of speech recognition systems as giant, expensive opportunities to push an auditory brand at customers who call will go away.
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"Appropriateness" is really something that is hard to talk to companies about. Once they've made up their minds about speech, based on some conversations you weren't at, it's very hard to pull them back and get them to think about whether speech is an appropriate modality for the IVR app they want to develop. I've tried to engage a number of people at companies, pointing out that a three-item menu of easily discriminable labels is a lot easier to implement and use if done in DTMF. No sale. After the speech decision has been made then it's full steam ahead, and anyone who says otherwise is simply engaging in "analysis paralysis."

PDMA: Cultivating product development careers

2009-09-13T15:05:00.001-07:00

I went to an excellent panel discussion titled "Cultivating product development and management careers," hosted by PDMA Carolina Chapter. The panelists represented a wide range of companies. They had a lot of good advice for people trying to get into new product development, or those already doing NPD trying to move up.

After the panel discussion the panelists and attendees broke into groups and brainstormed on some of the topics that were raised during the panel discussion. Good event. Pictures of the event were posted online. Click on View CJ's Gallery, then select the product development careers gallery.

Remarks on The Management Myth

2009-09-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

The Management Myth, by Matthew Stewart, is a harsh look at the management consulting industry. Stewart, a philosopher by training, took a job with a management consulting firm created by former McKinsey associates. His book, which began as an article in The Atlantic three years ago, describes the history of management consulting starting with Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo and ending with gurus Tom Peters and Jim Collins.

It's tough reading if you're sold on the value of management consulting. The book is probably a lot more enjoyable if you've been on the receiving end of some new consultant-led management fad imposed from above by an unwary exec.

Fixing process problems in the UI

2009-09-04T04:37:00.001-07:00

Most experienced UI designers will have seen this at least once: a client asks for a new online self service application and insists "we really want a lot of people to use it." Hey, when a client cares about usability of the application you're designing, that's a good thing, right? When you do your up-front analysis you discover that their existing process for servicing customers is awkward and unsatisfying for its users. You point out, reasonably, that in order to create a good self service application, the client needs to tweak its service process. "No," you're told, "we can't do that. You have to work with what you have." And then the kicker: "Just think outside the box." The client rep you are working with either isn't in a position to change its process, or doesn't feel the need to. You're stuck automating a bad process, and your design spirals down into a series of design anti-patterns, workarounds, and random attempts to fix the workarounds. And everyone loses in this scenario: the client, the customers, and you for delivering a bad application.

Taking the PMP exam

2009-08-29T17:27:00.000-07:00

I completed the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification exam yesterday. It was 2:40 long, and I worked pretty quickly. It was a lot of work to prepare for it, and I'm happy to say I passed.

Marketing: focusing on the stuff that matters

2009-08-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

I would have loved to be in the meeting when the decision was made to photo-swap one man's head with that of another in this advertisment (You have to click on the image to see a link). I'm also surprised that someone caught the deception -- I usually ignore advertisments this bland and uninformative. Microsoft looks a little silly on this one.

Carrboro Creative Coworking

2009-08-22T06:03:00.001-07:00

Do you have an entrepreneurial idea but don't need the hassle of finding/renting/building the office space right away? Want or need interaction with other, like-minded entrepreneurs? Check out Carrboro Creative Coworking, a place where you can find energizing office space at a small cost without the administrative headache. I love this concept. The owners are offering incubator-ish space at a reasonable rate, and also using social networks to build community.

Digression: Remembering Kim Dae-Jung

2009-08-19T04:12:00.000-07:00

I was sad to see the news of the passing of Kim Dae-Jung, former president of South Korea. I admired him for his role in building democracy in South Korea, and his efforts to reconcile with North Korea.

I saw him speak at a political rally during the election campaign in 1987. I was an exchange student in Japan, and decided to travel to Pusan, South Korea to sightsee. Kim and his supporters were part of the opposition to the government candidate, Roh Tae Woo. I discovered that Kim was having a political rally, so went to see him speak. A student I met there translated for me. Kim talked about the need to restore relations with North Korea, saying that they weren't enemies, but friends and family. At the time this was a radical thing for a South Korean politician to say. I estimated that there were about 50,000 at the rally.

Kim lost the election that year as the opposition candidates split the reform vote, but he won the presidency 10 years later. His life reminds us that one person can make a difference for the better.

Remarks on Managing with Power

2009-08-15T07:41:00.001-07:00

Managing with Power (1992) is a classic text by Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford University. This is another one I wish I had read when it was first published. Pfeffer gives the reader a way to diagnose the sources of power in organizations and government. Great ideas don't move themselves through organizations, but require power and influence to see them implemented. He provides numerous case studies of companies where powerful decision makers either helped or hurt their organizations.

Great read, highly recommended. I'll read it again when I have a chance.

Google Voice

2009-08-10T09:19:00.000-07:00

I signed up for Google Voice a few days ago. Based on what I've seen so far, it has potential. You get a free phone number and a few services that you might find handy. Call routing to other phones based on incoming number ID, spam filtering on unwanted numbers, and speech to text that sends voice mails to email. I assume they're not using CSRs in call centers to provide the transcription. There's a free SMS feature but I haven't tried it yet. Pretty nice.

Even if you only use the free phone number, it's nice to have. You have complete phone number portability, since you can forward all calls to whichever phone you'd like. Don't care for your current mobile provider? Get a new one, and forward your calls there. Customers' switching costs are essentially zero now, as long as they don't abandon their current provider before the end of their contract.

Google has real plans for voice. This is another market they're going to fight over with Microsoft.

Service research: crossing the Valley of Death

2009-08-05T15:03:00.001-07:00

I was talking to an acquaintance recently about the research he was doing on service delivery. The company he was doing the work for had invested heavily in research on services. Part of his job was to apply the research to the way new services were developed within his company's own business units. This turned out to be very difficult, more so than he had expected.

"All the business units want are just some software tool, not the process behind the tool. Not a new approach to service." His team would deliver a software tool, then were placed in the position of having to support it -- not the place you want to be if you're trying to do leading edge research in a new field.

The scenario is familiar to scientists who perform basic research on products. The new service research was falling into the Valley of Death, the space between great ideas generated by research and the development and commercialization of the idea. A lot of what is written about the Valley of Death focuses on lack of funding to commercialize ideas, but there's more to it than that. There's a great deal of skill needed to take a genuinely new idea or prototype and guide it through an organization to a point where it is ready to be commercialized and marketed. That skill is rare.

Service researchers, being new to the commercialization game, are learning what the product R&D folks have experienced already: that great ideas for new services don't sell themselves. Someone needs to guide the prototype service through the Valley of Death. This idea is so new that you won't find much written about the commercialization of new service research.

That's where I'd like to be, generating new ideas for services out of a research framework for delivering service, and then helping to commercialize the idea. But no one out there is hiring those sorts of people, since there's no recognition that a role like that should exist.

United breaks guitars

2009-07-25T05:25:00.000-07:00

Time was when a consumer was abused by a company they had little recourse. Social networking sites have changed the game, and a bad service provider is subject to retaliation. Some companies are still waking up to that fact.

Case in point. United Airlines breaks a musician's guitar, then refuses to pay for the damage. The musician posts this brilliant song on YouTube about his experience with United, and the video gets 4 million hits in less than three weeks. User-generated content on sites like YouTube have helped chang the balance of power between companies and consumers, mostly for the better.

Spinvox: speech-to-human-to-text

2009-07-24T04:28:00.000-07:00

If you're a speech-to-text company trying to position yourself in the market as a technology leader, you don't like to see these kinds of news articles about your company. Employees of the company say that they were transcribing voice messages left by users. Spinvox's speech-to-text software is supposed to do it automatically. Thanks to Peter Nann for the pointer to this article.