Briggzay Blog

Designing for Parody

2008-02-01T04:43:00.000-08:00

People have struggled for years to find ways of explaining the product or "brand experience" and how it can be created. It's been explained by Pine and Gilmore as a theater with props (drawing with no doubt from Erving Goffman), as a mindshare, and in many other ways.

My personal constructionist view of brand is that the best brands are a combination of design and emergence in real communities, but i won't take the time right now to explain (perhaps a later post).

Perhaps the best way to analyze one's brand, though, is to gauge its ability to be parodied. For those of you who have a product or a business, unless it can be parodied in a video like this one (apologies in advance for the questionable content), your product probably doesn't have a strong enough brand. Where does your business or design fall on the 0-10 "parody-able index"?

As an example, the current version of BigTreeTop.com (a company i co-founded) achieves around a 1 or 2 on the index (low) - a problem we're working to solve by making much stronger, fearless statements about who we are.

Bloomington Startup Weekend

2008-01-28T15:37:00.001-08:00

For those of you anywhere in the Bloomington area, and who are interested in new ideas, do yourself a favor and consider joining in, or at least following along with the Bloomington Startup Weekend - an event taking place the weekend of February 8-10th here in Bloomington, IN. I will be joining the fun, looking forward to meeting lots of other folks, and perhaps kicking off a new venture (though i of course will be offering my help in getting it off the ground, bidding the startuppers adieu, then promptly jumping back into my PhD work and BigTreeTop.com).

If you are interested, get click here and register quickly, since as of the time of the writing of this post, there are only 22 spots (out of 70) left!

More information can be found here!

Interdisciplinarity

2008-01-18T15:05:00.000-08:00

From the introduction to Norber Wiener's Cybernetics - written in 1947:

Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower. A century ago, there may have been no Leibniz, but there was a Gauss, a Faraday, and a Darwin. Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist or a coleopterist. He will be filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and al its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy….

…There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.

It is these boundary regions which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor. If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, then physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologists ignorant of mathematics, and no further. If a physiologist who knows no mathematics works together with a mathematician who knows no physiology, the one will be unable to state his problem in terms that the other can manipulate, and the second will be unable to put the answers in any form that the first can understand. Dr. Rosenblueth has always insisted that a proper exploration of these blank spaces on the map of science could only be made by a team of scientists, each a specialist in his own field but each possessing a thoroughly sound and trained acquaintance with the fields of his neighbors; all in the habit of working together, of knowing one another's intellectual customs, and of recognizing the significance e of a colleague's new suggestion before it has taken on a full formal expression. The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he mus5t be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician for what he should look.
We have dreamed for years of an institution of independent scientists, working together in one of these backwoods of science, not as subordinates of some great executive officer, but joined by the desire, indeed by the spiritual necessity, to understand the region as a whole, and to lend one another the strength of that understanding.

For those of us who strive to uphold this standard, it is our constant and necessary challenge to be "qualified investigators", and to be keenly aware of other qualified investigators, whatever their pedigree.

Deloitte: Nearly Half of U.S. Consumers Frequently Create, Post Content Online

2008-01-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

In an upcoming report (posted in the Online Media Daily website), Deloitte & Touche, a well-respected global consulting firm, reports this compelling result. The implications of this number - and particularly of the 12-point annual jump - are staggering for small businesses. Consumer generated online content (videos, articles, photos, magazines, etc.) is on a trajectory to surpass professional media at some point.

With the increasing ease/low cost of online customer engagement tools, SMB's have a huge opportunity to ride this wave of participation to growth and profit - and HCI Designers are quickly going to have to become master tool makers, rather than the ones building the house.

Here's a link to the article:

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=73771&Nid=37950&p=393517

Beating the Wal-Mart Effect

2007-11-17T07:13:00.000-08:00

My wife and i spent a romantic Friday night watching The Corporation,

and Wal-Mart: The Hight Cost of Low Price,

and though we known it before, it became even more clear what the mission of BigTreeTop.com is, and that is to do our part to prevent two things:

The "Wal-Mart Effect" on small business (small businesses dying off as a result of large businesses moving into a community and exerting their pricing influence past where smaller businesses can compete), and
Corporatization of America (consumers and employees becoming less aware and less involved in the organizations that shape our lives)

These two things have exerted a heavy influence on SMB's in America for quite a while, and many have gone out of business by trying to beat big businesses at their own game. It's our idea that the game needs to change altogether - especially where SMB's are concerned. Here is a little graphic of the two forces i seem to see exerting influence on the SMB today. On the right is the still-dominant paradigm for business. On the left is the new paradigm we're proposing:

BigTreeTop's contribution to the solution is by starting with small and mid-sized businesses and organizations, to provide a platform that will help them to more easily adopt co-creative practices with their employees, customers, and business partners, by involving them in some decision making, story-telling, community and partnership-building and creation of value itself. We are sure it will have at least the following two effects on small business in local economies:

It will help to stave off the Wal-Mart effect on SMB's and their local economies by improving the advantages they already have over large businesses trying to exert their influence: real community, adaptability and customer loyalty beyond just product and service value
It will provide consumers with increased ownership of the success of their local businesses and economy

..and we are reasonably sure that it will have the following two effects on the big businesses in the national economy:

Large organizations will be forced to involve employees and customers in deeper co-creation as a source of real competitive advantage.
Deeper co-creative involvement of customers and employees in large organizations will lessen their ability to take part in unsustainable business practices.

What we're proposing is a pretty radical new way of thinking about organizations and their boundaries which suggests that, with the right platform and process in place, an organization which blurs its boundaries and emphasizes the deep involvement of its community of employees, customers and business partners will be more successful than an organization which does not. We think that SMB's and smaller non-profits can benefit more naturally from co-creation, since it merely magnifies what they do already - which is to be a part of a real-live community of people who are concerned not only about the cost value of a business's products and services, but about the business itself, its people and its existence within a local and national economy.

Reifying HCI (Part 2) - Personal Connections

2007-11-16T06:04:00.001-08:00

Personal connections are a key in any field - design, the academy, business. Everyone admits this publicly, but i've noticed a slight negative subtext in conversations where it became clear that folks still don't like the idea that "it's not what you know but who you know." This subtext betrays a feeling that, while folks know that personal connections are important, they still want to land the job or the deal or the publication completely on their own merit without having leveraged a connection to get it done.

This notion is complete hog-wash. The myth (except in a few edge cases) of the iconic, seminal designer or author is just that - a myth - that we hold dear because we want to think that we are important, special and unique. Except for a few edge cases, this is not the case. If i really were the iconic, seminal designer or author, i would have no need to feel negatively toward the notion of personal connections at all. In fact, those connections would be coming to me.

There is a rising need for personal connections, in my opinion, and it is due to 2 increasingly necessary things:

Trust (Digitization makes it increasingly easy to fake resumes, plagiarize work and purchase degrees. Trust is at a premium)
Character (Character is what ensures that a person will thrive in any environment - regardless of the changes around them - much more than will a skillset. See my previous post

about what VC's look for in a team)
The importance of these things - and the resulting importance of personal connections - occurred to me again yesterday as i sat in a meeting with the Managing Partner of a VC firm to discuss BigTreeTop. Her fund is in the Life Sciences, and therefore not a potential investor. She graciously offered, nonetheless, to take the time to give me her advice and perspective - which was the end result of a long line of personal connections that served, for her, as a guarantee of my reputation (whatever that is), and as a signification of my character. The string of connections goes back over 10 years, and includes former employers, family friends and colleagues. Without those connections, no amount of genius would have gotten me into her office, since her time is extremely valuable, and she wouldn't have known me from a hole in the wall.

For those of us in any profession (academic, business, interpretive dance), there are therefore a few imperatives that will serve to grow and keep connections that can later serve as a guarantee for those wondering if they should take the time to meet with us.

Be Genuinely Interested - Never, ever use people for their "connection value." The human brain can detect all but the most clever forms of sycophantry in an instant. Be genuinely interested in the people you meet. Find common ground and explore it - both as a connection opportunity and a chance to learn.
Keep Bridges - Never, ever burn a bridge from your end. When leaving an organization, don't leave them until you can leave on good terms. One of my former employers is now an investor in BigTreeTop, and another is funding work in the School of Informatics.
Connect with Fish of all Sizes - There is no such thing as "little fish who grow up to be big fish." People are connected along many different dimensions. I have seen many instances where the administrative assistant of a corporation is among the most influential in hiring decisions, by virtue of his or her direct, conversational access to the CEO.
Character is Key - With forward-thinking folks, character trumps skill every time. If your network knows that you have character (adaptability, integrity, etc), they will want to connect with you. If they aren't sure, they won't. Anyone can gain skills - and pretty quickly. Character is harder to come by - and therefore more imperative.

Erik Pukinskis, Skip the PhD

2007-11-06T18:02:00.001-08:00

Erik, if you're out there reading this, drop the silly PhD dream and fulfill your destiny at MC Hammer's "Dance Jam"!

http://www.dancejam.com/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/06/mc-hammers-dancejam-opens-its-doors-to-a-select-few/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/25/tv-coverage-for-dancejam-realius-and-gizmoz-at-techcrunch40/

ReifiyingHCI (part 1) - Investment in Team

2007-11-06T04:35:00.000-08:00

This series of posts will be a sort of ecclectic collection of thoughts and observations from my dual-life as an entrepreneur and academic. They will be posted in fairly random order, and in fairly random order of importance. Some of these observations and personal discoveries may be common knowledge to those of you reading this, but others may find them surprising. Here goes:

Having lived (on cans of tuna - no bread - for lunch) through the dot com crash of the early 2000's and watched first-hand the startup investment game, one of the things i always wondered about was how any investor - angel, venture, institutional - made such a large decision to invest millions of dollars in an unproven concept. There are of course a number of factors that go into the decision (investment horizons for their fund, the way a prospective investee fits into their existing portfolio of companies, acceptable rates of failure, etc), but perhaps the most interesting fact that i learned is that investment folks invest less in the concept than they do in the team that came up with it. In HCI/d education, we speak very little about the character, the personality and the charisma of the design team, but in fact the people with the most money to lose actually place the highest value on these things.

..and when considered for more than a second, this makes sense. Markets change. Economies change. Societies change. When an investor puts money into a venture, they are betting against a 3-5 year future which, in a society that is, according to Marshall McLuhan, moving at electric speed (very fast), is likely to be completely and unpredictably different in 3-5 years than it is today. Therefore the concept that an investor sees in front of them today is likely to be obsolete tomorrow. They expect this. Therefore the thing that is the most likely to provide a good return on their investment is the team that came up with the concept - and especially their energy, process and smarts to be able to keep coming up with more concepts to adapt to the rapidly changing environment.

In a fairly recent presentation, Idris Mootee, CEO of Idea Couture - a strategy/design firm, showed the following slide with the characteristics of highest importance to Angel and Venture Capital investors. From my talks so far with investors and entrepreneurs, it appears to be pretty accurate:

Some potential implications of this:

A hyper-efficient iterative design process that can communicate well to all stakeholders (including investors) is clearly more important the one or two good epiphanic designs.
Investors may want to understand your process. If they can see how you got to today, they can plot a trajectory to where you might be tomorrow, which is what they really care about.
Investors are more design-oriented than is obvious at first glance. They just speak a different language.
Trustworthiness is more important to investors than either sales potential or the entrepreneur's experience. People who don't have their ethical house in order probably will have a hard time surviving.
Choosing and managing a team is of primary importance when starting any organization

ReifiyingHCI (part 1)

2007-11-06T03:58:00.000-08:00

The process of starting a business has been extremely intense and interesting. It has forced me to learn about design and the reification of design (a.k.a. business) by drinking from the firehose of practice as well as from the water fountain of books. I would highly recommend the process to anyone who wants to learn at a rapid rate. Over the next few months, i will be blogging more about the process of starting BigTreeTop.com from an HCI/d perspective. I have been relatively quiet about our business until now because a) just about every spare moment is taken up with other academic and business activities, and b) i wanted to first, before writing, ensure that i had a good handle on what is smart - from an intellectual property perspective - to write about publicly (if i had my way, all IP would be out on the table for the world to kick around, but people better-versed than am i in the ways of current legal/business practice convinced me that this would have been a bad idea).

To my colleagues at IU Informatics: If i've been a bit distracted in classes and meetings over the course of the past 6 months, i hope that you won't take it personally. The thousands of tasks around getting an idea like BigTreeTop off the ground are pretty good at pushing themselves consistently to the forefront of one's consciousness, especially when paired with simultaneous PhD work. This will probably continue for a while longer, but my hope is that, in time, the effort will produce a living, breathing organization that that we can all use as a test bed for HCI/d research, as well as an experiment the result of which we can analyze and from which we can all learn.

I hope that the upcoming series of musings is interesting information for those of you currently studying HCI/d, for those of you now practicing it, and for those of you who have an idea that you would like to some day make a reality in the form of a real live organization.

Identity as Advertising

2007-10-23T03:31:00.000-07:00

This is also posted at (http://interactionculture.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/identity-as-advertising/)

Without getting into the deeper philosophical concept of identity as performance or sign, i find the recent news of MySpace founder Tom Andersen’s alleged age-shifting mildly amusing.

“Tom Anderson, the co-founder of MySpace and the first friend to anyone who creates a MySpace profile, isn’t really 32 like it says on his MySpace profile. His Wikipedia entry, which says he was born in 1975, is also incorrect. How old is he really? We first heard 40. We dug a little online and came up with nothing. But then we got a senior person at MySpace to talk to us about it off record at the Web 2.0 Summit last week: this person confirmed that he’s really “36 or 37″ and that MySpace has been trying to keep this quiet for some time.“
(Source: TechCrunch)

In considering identity, and its perhaps often fractured online nature, i had never given much thought to the idea that the identities of higher-profile folks would be knowingly and grossly manipulated as a branding move. As the first mega social networking success story, MySpace has been a lightning-rod in the past for the criticisms that people in social networks lie about their identity. It is usually treated as though dishonesty on MySpace is a violation of its intended use. The funny fact here is that every MySpace/user relationship begins at the outset with false identity when a 40-year old Tom Andersen, claiming to be 32, becomes everyone’s first friend, so perhaps it is the people who are truthful about their identity in MySpace who are transgressing its intended use.

Emerging Challenges for Brand

2007-09-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

I just posted this in another location as part of a discussion on the major challenges today for "Business Strategy and Brand." I thought it might be interesting for folks here to read it as well:

One way that brand is changing (has changed already, i think) is that the relationship between brand and the transitive property is changing as a result of increased connectivity and the rise of popularity systems like Google's pagerank.

Okay, now that was quite a loaded sentence, but i think it's pretty straightforward once we get past the overblown vocabulary and into the practical concepts.

Before the social web came along and before traditional advertising started its freefall, the 'transitive property' was used by companies in the form of celebrity endorsements of brand, because hey, if Bill Cosby likes Jello and I like Bill Cosby, then surely i will like and buy Jello (this is the transitive property).

So formerly the relationship was:
[brand] to [endorser] to [consumer]

or more concretely:

[Jello] to [Bill Cosby and one or two friends] to [me]

Now, with the advent of the social web (now people can massively connect with each other) and the rise of the core idea of Google pagerank (something is good if lots of people like it, and those people are in turn liked by a lot of other people who are in turn liked by a lot of other people, etc..), the new relationship is:

[brand] to [hundreds of connected authorities on the brand] to [me]

or more concretely:

[Jello] to [the Jello customer community] to [me]

..So, i'm predicting that a major part of the new concept of brand is the community itself, which both explicitly (by promoting the brand through word of mouth) and implicitly (by acting as a sort of 'brand pagerank' that give the brand authority just by virtue of their involvement with it) constitute a major part of the brand.

So-called "marketers" in this new world will therefore need to be community builders - not by inclusion only, but also by empowerment. Customer involvement (a noble idea in its day) will have to evolve into customer empowerment, which will allow the community to do its work in building a large part of a trusted, vibrant brand.

Tip for Job Seekers - Anticipate and Persist

2007-09-04T04:45:00.001-07:00

I was talking with a friend earlier in the week about his job search, and it occurred to me that there are two incredibly helpful things that he could do to set himself apart from %90 of the other applicants. Hopefully these help you too. Both of these ideas make the most sense when viewed from the perspective of the hiring manager or the company. You'll see what i mean in a minute:

Anticipate!
When seeking a job with a company, don't talk to them about ways that you can fit into their existing initiatives. Anticipate where the company is going and talk to them - even better: show them ways that you will be able to help them to get there. Key things to remember:

every healthy organization is trying to go somewhere better than where they are today
if the organization is not moving in a direction - or if your hiring manager isn't aware of that direction, you might want to think twice about working there
in healthy organizations, the most desirable and interesting hires are those who can help the organization to get to tomorrow's destination

Persist!
If you are reasonably sure that you are well-suited for a position, don't immediately take "no" for an answer. Healthy organizations that are moving in new directions need people who won't take immediate "no"s for answers in their daily work. Your interactions with a hiring manager may be a great first chance to show this ability.

I'll end this post with a story that shows the power of using these two principles:

In 1997 i interviewed with Ron, a Senior Technical writer at Walt Disney Imagineering for a contract position as an Assistant Technical writer with the Show Ride Engineering group. After what i thought was a very positive interview, i was later informed by the contract agency that Ron had passed on hiring me, stating that he thought i was not the right guy for the job. My immediate (and not much thought-out reaction, i must confess) was to ask the contract agency representative to call Ron back and let him know that i was sure that i was the right guy for the job. After a short negotiation she did so grudgingly, and called back, surprised that Ron had scheduled a second interview with me the next day.

From the first interview, i remembered that Ron had mentioned a new push to put all of Imagineering's technical documentation in web format for wireless access by the engineers. Though the job description was for a pure technical writer, when i went back to meet with Ron the second time, i mentioned that i had an interest in the digitization effort, and reminded him of my previous experience that might be of use.

Ron hired me on the spot, i ended up working there for a full year, and Ron and I became friends. He even offered at the end of my contract to write up a letter of personal recommendation. Toward the end of my tenure there Ron told me that the fact that i had the gumption to (respectfully) disagree with his opinion showed drive, personal self-knowledge, and that i had the gumption necessary to stand up to the political pressures in Imagineering.

I would say that these traits are desirable to any organization, and your first meeting/negotiation is a great place to display them.

Even if you Can Beat Facebook.. Maybe You Shouldn't

2007-09-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

There's been a bit of a flap recently in Britain, where it is reported that %70 of employers are banning or restricting access to social networking sites like Facebook.

It strikes me as odd that this occurs simultaneous to the new big focus in business on finding new sources of innovation.

Call me naive, but i can't help but think that if these companies made work more stimulating by proving a way for their employees to innovate at work through (digitally augmented) social means, that Facebook would not be a problem anymore. Heck, they might even do it via a plugin.

First Two BigTreeTop Idea Games Go Live!

2007-08-30T22:22:00.000-07:00

The first game was launched by one of our original testers Goods for Cooks - a great Bloomington cooking goods store. The game, brainchild of Andrew, one of the owners, provides GFC's customers with a chance to help determine the next proprietary coffee blend that they will be offering in the store. If you're a customer of GFC and want to give them some ideas or just vote on the ones that other people have posted, head over to the game before September 7th.

Mother Bear's Pizza - a famous Bloomington Pizza Parlor - has recently joined the BigTreeTop Alpha testing program, and jumped right in today with both feet, launching a "Best NEW Pizza Idea" game to better understand what types of pizzas their customers might really love. The top vote-getter will receive a free pizza. If you fancy yourself an expert on pizza (what red-blooded american doesn't?), post your idea and vote on the ideas you like before September 13th!

Both of these efforts represent exciting, small first steps by these two businesses who a) think that their customers are smart and b) want to involve them more intimately in shaping their business.

The idea game is part of an overall new methodology we're working on for businesses called CLIC (Community, Listen, Implement, Communicate). Different from the more traditional methodology that i might call RIB (Research, Implement, Broadcast - which chunks together a lot of things like design, development, etc - but you get the point), it claims that customers and businesses (as well as their local economies, in the long run) both create value by co-creating the business itself. This can help to solve a few problems simultaneously:

Advertising is less about broadcasting to people who may not want to listen
Advertising is more about communicating to people who actually care about the business
Figuring out what customers want is much easier if one is talking to them regularly

As you might imagine, there is much more to the CLIC methodology, as well as some unadvertised potential outcomes of the Goods for Cooks and Mother Bear's idea games (you'll have to participate to find out), but i will end this post here, with a pretty illustration, because illustrations are cool.

Supper Solutions - Great Grad Student Deal

2007-07-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

One of the BigTreeTop.com Alpha Testers is Supper Solutions - a local "meal assembly kitchen." For those of you not familiar with the concept (i wasn't), I think it is a fantastic idea for grad students (among other people), so i decided to try out two of their meals for myself and write about it here.

One of the biggest benefits is cost. For about $3.40 per meal, folks can drop by their kitchen and self-prepare 12 good healthy meals in about 1.5 - 2 hours that they can then bring home and freeze until it's time to eat. Each meal serves 2-3 people, so that's 36 meal servings. They also have an option where they will pre-prepare the meals for you ahead of time for pickup. This would bring the price up to about $4.16 per meal. If there is sufficient interest, Kirsten, the owner is considering offering delivery drop-off at INFO or Eigenmann for folks who don't have transportation.

To try this out fully, Esther and i recently visited Supper Solutions and prepared 2 meals for ourselves. We decided to try the Mexican Calzones and the Spicy Patong Pork. (this month's menu is online here)

Once at the Supper Solutions kitchen, the entire process of making the 2 meals, putting them in bags and affixing cooking instruction labels took about 10 minutes. The meal preparation stations were spotless and extremely well-organized, so it was extremely easy to do - even for those of us who are culinarily disadvantaged. While at Supper Solutions, we ran into our next door neighbor and one of Esther's co-workers who both raved about Supper Solutions. One, a local advertising professional, was visiting for the 3rd time, while the other, a doctor, is a long-time customer.

Once home, we decided to first try the Mexican Calzones for dinner. The directions are included right on the packaging (see first photo to the right). We popped it on a pan and into the toaster oven for 20 minutes, and they came out perfectly good. They were quite large and filling. Each one was pretty much a complete meal.

Two evenings later, we made the Spicy Patong Pork. Again the instructions were on the bag, and it was quite easy to make. After about 10 minutes preparation (briefly sauteeing the pork, adding the sauce and microwaving the pre-cooked rice), we had a complete meal of pork and brown rice. It was very very good (see last photo to the right).

If you are a busy grad student, do yourself a favor and look into this. It's great food, very economical, healthy, and will help to keep food expenses predictable each month. Besides, by buying from Supper Solutions, you'll be supporting a small local business who, as an early and enthusiastic support of BigTreeTop, is serious about co-creating value with their customers, not just padding their bottom line :)

Full disclosure: As an Alpha Tester of BigTreeTop.com, i have an emotional bias toward Supper Solutions, but not a financial one (they are not paying customers). Additionally, i should reveal that i am now chemically dependent on the Mexican Calzones, which are really good..

Here's their contact info:
Supper Solutions
2616 Walnut
Bloomington, IN 47401
812-333-8009

Email:
bloomington@suppersolutionsinc.com

Intersection:
In Walnut Station, Corner of S.Walnut and Country Club Road Next to Dominos Pizza

"Want" vs. "Should" Decisions - When People Choose the Broccoli over the Baby Ruth

2007-07-25T05:05:00.000-07:00

This is a replica of another blog post at http://btt.bigtreetop.com/blog/view?id=3&post=21, which is more business-oriented, but i think the concept has rather large HCI/d implications, so i'm posting it here as well.

Most people, when making decisions, have to choose between "want" and "should" decisions. But what makes a person choose one over the other?

A recent Harvard Business School Article Understanding the 'Want' vs. 'Should' Decision (link to Harvard Business School's website) helps to answer this. Based on a number of studies of purchasing and voting behavior, as well as some older work in Construal Level Theory, explained nicely in the paper Temporal Construal (link to pdf paper by Trope and Liberman). The studies show that the further away the implementation of a decision is (future or past), the more people will favor a ‘should’ decision over a ‘want’ one.

As a simple example, if someone asks me to decide on and eat immediately either Broccoli or a Baby Ruth candy bar, i am more likely to choose the candy bar, since it's what i want right now. If, on the other hand, a person asks me to decide right now what i will eat at a later time (or if they ask me later what i should have eaten previously), i am more likely to choose the broccoli. What this suggests is that the further away from the present the consequences of my decision are, the more likely i am to choose what i should do.

In the article, the authors state this this "should/want" factor is the reason that most grocery stores place their produce section directly at the front entrance, while the candy bars and trashy magazines appear at the cash registers - to ensure that when walking through the "should" section (healthy produce) shoppers are furthest from the point of consumption (which will probably happen at home, long after they leave the store), and simultaneously to ensure that when entering the "want" section (candy bars), shoppers are the closest to the point of consumption (which most likely will occur in the store or soon after leaving it).

This is an important consideration for HCI/d folks

1) If you are designing a "should" application (something that is more good for the user but less instantly-gratifying), or one that provides the user with "should" features, the further in advance a person makes the decision, the more likely they may be to choose your "should" service over a "want".

2) If you are providing a "want" service, you will need to ensure that your users make the decision as close as possible to the time of consumption - by offering quick setup of their account, express checkout, immediate delivery, etc.

3) It seems to me that offering both "wants" and "shoulds" as a complimentary mix might be a good idea for any design.

4) Since, according to the Trope/Liberman paper, Construal is also related not just to temporal distance, but also spatial, i wonder what this means for distributed communities (i.e., if i am chatting online with a person and can see that they are on the other side of the world, is my experience different than if i know that they are in the same town)

I'll be exploring this further, both in my academic research, and as part of BigTreeTop.com, where we present our users simultaneous "want" and "should" options - that we may want to present differently to maximize their use.

Here is a quote from Trope and Liberman's paper:

"CLT (Construal Level Theory) suggests that temporal distance affects preferences and judgments by changing the way individuals mentally represent future events. The greater the temporal distance from future events, the more likely are the events to be represented in terms of a few abstract and core features (highlevel construals) rather than in terms of more concrete and superficial features (low-level construals). Therefore, temporal distance changes judgments and decisions because in the distant future, compared with the near future, judgments and decisions are more likely to reflect the evaluative and informational implications of high-level construals than those of low-level construals."

American Revolution Decided by Rock-Paper-Scissors

2007-07-24T04:15:00.000-07:00

On July 4th my wife and I were watching a documentary on the American Revolution when i began to laugh out loud. Now there aren't many funny things about the revolution, but now there is one. It seems that the name of the French general who really turned the tide of the war was Comte de Rochambeau. Rochambeau is another name (Reaux, Sham, Beaux) for the game Rock Paper Scissors, which, for those of you who are uninitiated, is perhaps the most common way in America for settling simple disputes between two people.

I now have a permanent and vivid image in my mind of a flamboyant French general approaching the British lines, banging his right fist in his left open palm, deciding the fate of America.

New Blog for a While

2007-07-18T04:54:00.000-07:00

For the next few months, i'll be blogging primarily through another blog at http://btt.bigtreetop.com/blog/view?id=3. The content will orbit loosely around a few of my current areas of inquiry and endeavor:

1) How organizations (and even more specifically small businesses - since that is the current focus of BigTreeTop.com) can deeply involve the constituents of those organizations in substantive participation as a part of more sustainable strategic, operational and marketing practices.

2) The ways that computers can augment and/or enable these practices

3) The ways that consumers (for current lack of a better term) can contribute to local and national economic sustainability by deeper involvement in small businesses

4) How the academy and business can and need to form alliances that benefit the world

5) How strategy is sexy

Of Farmers and Environmentalists

2007-05-21T09:28:00.000-07:00

Christopher Bunn, a friend of mine from former grad school days is continuing to fight a long battle in central coastal California for the autonomy of the local farmers there. His family owns a lettuce farm, and though i must confess i still am under-informed about the plight of farmers in environmentally-charged areas, it sounds like a pretty tough battle.

Christopher's written/recorded a slew of great protest and political songs about this and other topics. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, the process is darn entertaining to listen to.

My favorites include

Southern Drawl Doll - about Hillary Clinton's (and most any politician's) propensity to change their accent to fit their constituency
Frogs on the Edge of the Ocean - about frog protection on the coast of California
Landwatch (what i learned as a kid) - about eminent domain land grabs

Bringing the Love Back

2007-05-21T05:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks to David Armano at Logic+Emotion for catching this video that aptly personifies the problems consumers are having with traditional advertising. As many of you know, a new company i'm currently starting is all about using some deep-rooted organizational, marketing and HCI (and even a little bit of economic) theory to create real conversations and relationships between local businesses and their customers, so that they can finally stop treating their customers like numbers. Enjoy:

I'm very much looking forward to launching www.bigtreetop.com to helping bring the love back. Soon.

..And if all goes well, i'll likely be presenting our idea, the theory behind it, preliminary research results and lessons learned in a colloqium in the Fall.

17 out of 20 (a.k.a. 'calling any psychologists)

2007-05-07T04:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a very very interesting informal experiment in aptitude, concentration and execution.

For about 5 years now, i've been playing basketball at least once a week with other players. Often, though, when thinking through a particularly difficult business or academic problem, i can think best alone on a basketball court with just a ball, a basket, and my thoughts. I am quite sure that this is due to the slight distraction that it provides, clearing the way for new perspectives to emerge on the problem at hand - similar to the way that focusing on an ocean vista can help in thinking about a weightly personal decision.

Over the last 5 years, i've played a game with myself during these thinking sessions to see how many foul shots in a row i can shoot. Since i've played a lot of sports in my life, this is more a mental exercise than a physical one. This is to say that, for the sake of analyzing yesterday's results of this experiment, the physical part of it can be almost completely removed where foul shots are concerned. They are not physically difficult, but instead require mental attentiveness.

Here is the part which is extremely interesting:

Over the last 5 years, i can recount anecdotally that hitting 5 foul shots in a row has occurred probably in the neighborhood of %25 of the time. This is to say that 1/4 of the times that i've played this game with myself, i've been able to hit 5 out of 5. Probably another %10 of the time i've been able to hit 10 out of 10. About once a year, i'm able to hit 20 out of 20. These statistics are probably pretty consistent with anyone who did not play organized basketball (and therefore did not do freethrow drills every day at practice) - who would have a higher percentage than i do.

Yesterday, to increase the challenge, i took the first foul shot with my eyes closed, expecting decreased results. This is to say that i stood at the line, prepared for the shot looking at the hoop, closed my eyes and took the shot. I hit the first 3 in a row. Then the next 4 (7 in a row). Then the next 2 (9 in a row). Then i missed a shot (9 out of 10). Deciding that this was worth testing, i kept shooting. When all was said and done, i had hit 17 out of 20 of the shots, with my eyes closed - something i'd rarely been able to do in 5 years with my eyes open. Due to time constraints, i then left, baffled. This was one of the best shooting percentages in 5 years - with my eyes closed. Hitting one of these shots could have been a fluke. But it is difficult to think that hitting this many in a row is a chance event.

My observations of the event:

i found myself preparing more thoroughly for the shot because i knew i had to if i wanted to have a prayer of putting each one through the hoop
on the shots i missed, i could actually tell how the shot was going to miss (left, right, short), even before opening my eyes, by feeling how the ball left my hand, and visualizing its flight
i was forced to completely visualize the shot before taking it
shooting the ball felt completely different with my eyes closed

Other observations:

anecdotally, i remember playing some of my best volleyball games in college and while trying to make the AVP tour (Association of Volleyball Professionals) when sick or slightly injured

My preliminary hypotheses:

for a person who has done a task frequently over a long period of time (but who knows the task pretty well), shutting down their primary skill can force them to shift to a secondary - but perhaps more powerful skill in accomplishing a task - occasionally with better results. In this case i had to rely on visualization much more heavily than in the past. In the past, a sickness or slight injury forced me to rely more on knowledge than strength to try and win a game.
latent, underutilized skills can lie dormant and unused in people until radical change forces their use
people don't automatically use their best skill or set of skills when accomplishing a task

What do you all think? Assuming yesterday's events were not a fluke, what are some possible causes? What does it mean for us as HCI Designers, business people, teachers, etc. as we design tools and environments that should enable employees, students and users to achieve the highest results?

Should we intentionally shake up people's routines in order to test/develop other skills?

* Note: i will be trying the experiment again later this week and posting the results.

Innovation in Business

2007-04-10T06:21:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are missing it, the business world is starting to embrace and even develop their own design stance, as a result of their awareness of the need to true innovation. One of the guys who has gotten lots of eyeballs of late is David Armano, a Creative VP at Digitas, who recently wrote an article for Business Week on "It's The Conversation Economy, Stupid."

I posted a similar concept back in November about the designer as novelist. http://briggzay.blogspot.com/2006/11/designer-linguist-not-novelist.html

David and the whole creative business culture are pushing hard to understand design as it plays out in the business world, and are coming along nicely, i think, given the immense challenge of marrying our modernistic industrial revolution ethos with more post-modern societal tendencies. In my experience, this is an exciting, challenging space.

The Rise of the Consumer

2006-12-11T14:20:00.000-08:00

Great video on YouTube about the rise of the powerful consumer here.

Civilicon Disobedience.

2006-12-04T20:25:00.000-08:00

I had a funny experience recently that just popped back into mind tonight, so i thought i'd share it with all of you. On a recent trip to Boston, i was picked up and treated to the best "taxi" ride ever in Jeremi Karnell's moxified new BMW SUV on our way to a MITX panel discussion. Immediately upon exiting the hotel garage, the automated voice navigation lady informed us in a sultry synthesized voice that "if possible, please make an illegal left-hand turn onto Huntington Avenue."

Hunh. Sivilicon Disobedience. I half expected her to suggest next: "if possible, please turn right and head toward Walden Pond. Live deliberately. It's only a few miles from here."

Designer - Linguist not Novelist

2006-11-06T16:12:00.000-08:00

At a presentation tonight by visiting professor Josh Tennenberg, a discussion arose about the "problematizing" of the role of designers in a world where design research seems to be finding more and more that the outsourcing of design to the end user (participatory design, experience co-creation, innovation democratization, etc) produces a better design.

My thoughts on this?

Glad you asked - or at least kept reading so far. As designers find themselves outsourcing design and innovation to the users themselves, they become no less "designerly." Instead, it is merely that the locus of the value that they add to the process shifts. This process of locus-shifting is not without historical precedent. Education itself has seen this shift occur, for example. Where once the educator was seen as the disseminator of knowledge and the students as the receivers, now a good educator is often a facilitator that creates the space in which students learn. Where in a monarchy, the ruler was seen as the maker of laws and the determiner of ethics, democracy attempts to create the space in which the people govern themselves. So i see that designers are no longer the designers of designs that consumers consume. Instead they are becoming the designers of the spaces in which consumers (though this name will need to change) can configure and create their own designs.

But there is something more. For the last few months, i have been working on understanding this "space-creating activity", continually conceiving of it as "creating a space" into which user/consumer creativity could pour. But this would merely make the designer a demolition man, blasting holes in the earth in hopes that people would then spontaneously construct mansions. This is as ludicrous as the theories of extreme anarchism, which seek to destroy government in hopes that a civilized society will spontaneously form.

No, the new designer is not a demolition man, but a linguist. Where once the designer acted as a novelist, striving to put together for an unskilled public just the perfect work of literature that would educate, entertain, embolden them, now the designer is a linguist, who creates for her skilled public the grammar, the language, that the user/consumer can easily learn, use and re-use to create their own works of art.

MITX Panel Discussion

2006-11-01T05:53:00.000-08:00

This Tuesday i participated in a panel discussion in Boston around the current research methods in the marketing space (event website here), at the request of One to One Interactive, who sponsored the event. The presentations and discussion was much too short to have any substantive dialogue, but some extremely interesting questions were raised by the industry-focused folks in the audience, and i came away with some thoughts, written here. Each of the 5 panelists presented 10 minutes of their own thinking, and the floor was then opened to 60 minutes of questions, moderated by Sandy Pentland.

There were a few things that struck me as interesting, noted here in short form:

Lowered Technological Barriers
The digitization of commerce and of marketing is lowering the bar for tracking and measurement. The more that consumer engagement is digitized, the easier it is to map those bits to other bits, and to try to gain semantic (what does it mean when a friend sends a piece of media to another friend) and structural (what does the sending of the media say about the structures that allow the sending to occur) meaning from the relationship between those bits. Dr. Carl Marci and his company Innerscope are doing some extremely interesting research on BioMeasures as indicators of what they call "engagement". I will be writing more on this in the coming weeks. S. Adam Brazel and his lab are also doing some very interesting work in eyetracking. The fact that this is economically feasible is a result of the capabilities and lowering cost of the enabling technologies.

The recent lowering of the barriers for end user participation has been significant. High School-age netizens now have better knowledge and easier tools with which to create their own media. As one small example, ~300,000 amateur flash artifacts have been created and uploaded to http://www.newgrounds.com/ an amateur multimedia community. This presents a unique opportunity and challenge for marketing folks concerned with the spread of the "brand" of a product or company. As the loci of media production become more dispersed (anyone can create media), and the channels for their distribution become greater (everyone has multiple channels through which they can share all or part or a modified version of that media), the complexity of the operational and of the analytical task of marketing through media channels becomes more and more complex.

Increased Connectivity/Fracturing of Attention
This is of course a long-touted trend, but it is nonetheless steadily coming. A person's (and therefore a population's) attention is becoming more and more fractured as they interact with the digital via mobile devices, computers, laptops, etc etc. For the field of marketing (which actually covers the processes from product ideation all the way to product support), this is a grand new challenge. What marketers commonly refer to as cross-channel marketing can be challenging to manage and to measure.

Humanities and Science
In a recent conversation with Jeff Bardzell , he pointed out the fact that the humanities are very good at asking questions, and at interpreting the answers, but that the hard sciences do the best job of actually answering the question. It was clear to me that all 40-or-so participants (both audience and panelists) in the MITX discussion were open to this view as well. In the discussion, i brought up the question of CGM (consumer-generated media) as a means of advertising. This area of inquiry is a good example of one that is difficult to explain without repeatedly crossing the (i think arbitrary and unnecessary) humanities/science rubicon.

My approach so far at looking at this has been a philosophical one (humanities) to understand the user, the aesthetic, and the experience (thanks to Jeff Bardzell for re-introducing me to my formative thinking in the humanities - and from that to generate some falsifiable hypotheses (science) about the user and network-level dynamics at work in the massive spread and extension of media like Numa Numa and the Star Wars Kid. I am currently considering the design of some studies that will examine CGM phenomena from a semiotic (humanities), network (science), and perhaps even pre-cognitive (science) perspective. My instincts tell me that these will generate some good analytical and perhaps even predictive knowledge. At the end, though, when all of the data is in, i will likely resort to a cultural (humanities) analysis of the results of my empirical research - especially as it pertains to the culture of business to consumer relations in which we currently find ourselves.

In conclusion, i think that there are huge opportunities for all willing to involve themselves in a multi-directional dialectic between business and the academy, humanities and the sciences in pursuit of understanding and productive use of some of the most powerful forces in our world today - media, end-users and businesses. I am very much enjoying the process of diving into this complicated but fruitful space.

Split Personality

2006-10-13T04:26:00.000-07:00

In any sort of project where functions of business, design and production are separated from each other (software, landscaping, architecture, music where Quincy Jones is concerned), there is an "interesting" tension between the business person, the designer and the producer. The epic battles that often occur between software designers and software coders is highlighted in Alan Cooper's book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, and i have seen similar struggles over and over throughout my career.

CEO of 25 million dollar publishing firm with a dollar-shaped twinkle in his eyes (otherwise brilliant business man and designer of sorts): Alright team, we've got an email list of 3000 people that are just champing at the bit to buy this video. Every one of them needs to make instant online payments via credit card through our system by Friday. This is the web. I love the speed of the web!

Web Team of the same 25 million dollar publishing firm with somewhat bleary eyes: Um, we don't have an online credit card payment processing system. This company has always worked on a subscription basis.

CEO: What? But [100 million dollar publishing firm's name omitted] processes credit cards online all the time. How hard can it be?

Web Team: It's not actually that "hard", it's just that the 3-4 day payment gateway approval process will put us at 1 day before launch before we can even test the system.

CEO: Great, so we'll be ready to take payments on Friday!

Web Team: Um, Ready to take test payments, perhaps, but when processing credit card transactions it's important to test at least..

CEO: - That's great. Make it so! (with thin star-trek reference)

Such struggles highlight 3 very different approaches to the same problem. In the above example, the business and design functions were both accomplished by the CEO.

As far as i can tell, one of the main sources of problems between the three in any given project is lack of cognitive capacity. It is a well-known fact that the human brain can only attend to a certain number of things at once. When dissention breaks out in a project, it seems to me, it is not so much that the business person cannot understand the point of view of the designer, or that the designer cannot comprehend the constraints of the producer. Rather, it is that any one of them cannot cognitively attend to the needs of more than one approach at one time. Given an extended period of time (and assuming that they have the core knowledge necessary to do so), the designer might be able to shift their attention and take on the role of the business person, or the business person that of the producer. What is virtually impossible, however, is for them to be effective in all roles simultaneously.

This fact has recently come to the fore of my mind as i continue work on a set of theories, tools and methodologies for SMB's (small to midsized businesses). In this work, i've simultaneously held all three roles for an extended period of time, and it's been quite a ride. My initial role was as part designer and part business person (the tools and methodologies are designed to be offered in the end as a business). Once that was started, the next step was to switch into producer role, in which i did some heavy research into the best digital frameworks and tools for production of the online platform that is part of the business. Next it was back to the designer role, where i worked to develop new tools that would serve the theoretical underpinnings of the concept. Simultaneously in the business role, i worked to ensure that the solution would still be marketable and profit-worthy, as well as theoretically sound. Finally, since some of the tools were best put into digital form, i entered hard-core producer role, creating an online enterprise application .

I've found, as a result of this sort of auto-ethnographic research, some interesting insights:

For the most part, my usual level of business, design and production abilities each diminished when combined simultaneously with another. The degree of diminishment (sp?) seems to positively correlate with the size of the project (i.e., at the beginning of the project when it was fairly small, combining the three roles caused almost no perceivable loss of effectiveness in any of them. This seems to suggest that this is related to cognitive capacity.
(more later)

I love Bloomington

2006-09-27T19:23:00.000-07:00

I had been wondering for a while at my own overweening love of Bloomington. I was puzzled by the little tear that oft forms in my eye while driving south on route 37 from Indianapolis, and at the beaming accounts that flow from my mouth during visits back home in Boston. It all seemed a bit inordinate. I mean, why do i gush at every chance to tell of the culture, the arts and the fresh produce? It seemed extreme. And why do i automatically tack on an extra %5 gratuity every time a restauranteur welcomes me to B-ton? It didn't make sense. And why do i skip along merrily from building to building on campus, even in (and perhaps especially in) heavy rainstorms? I mean, Bloomington is a great place - the culture, the geology, the University, the people, the food and the recreational possibilities. All of these things are good, but it just didn't seem to add up and explain my over-exuberance about living here. So i was lost for an explanation until now..

That little inexplicable spring in my step was immediately explained yesterday by a broadcast on WFIU radio, where it was revealed to me that - hold on to your spandex - Bloomington is not only my current home, but also the birthplace of David Lee Roth - the reigning King of high culture. Yep, read it and weep, Boston - you with your pitiful little Emersons, Poes, Morses, Franklins, Fiedlers and Adamses. I'm living in the eden that birthed the genius behind consummate American ballads like "Jump", "Hot for Teacher" and "Bad Habits." I'm breathing the same air that fueled a generational spandex conflagration.

HCI/d and NPD - Acronyms Ahoy!

2006-09-25T05:41:00.000-07:00

I'm currently doing an independent study with Dr. Thomas Hustad, a professor of Marketing in the Kelley School of Business. His extensive knowledge of the area has been extremely helpful in scoping a new area of research for me that occurs at the nexus of marketing, new product development(NPD), and overall business strategy, particularly as these things are increasingly facilitated on massive scales (or could be) via computer systems. For any hard-core HCI/d folks out there, i'd highly recommend taking at least a quick tour through the some of the NPD material that is out there. Essentially, the field of NPD covers the product life cycle from concept creation to launch, and even into later product-related activities which includesthings like customer relations management (CRM). For the HCI designer in practice, or for those of you headed into practice in the future, it is imperative to understand the hardcore business viewpoint on the business to product to consumer relationship.

What does an MBA-trained NPD person see when they look at a potential product? Where we as HCI/d professionals are trained in and tasked with understanding the user, the NPD professional (take for instance a product manager who is tasked with getting a quality product out the door) is trained in and tasked with understanding the financial, legal and logistical issues that make it possible (or not) to launch a quality product to these same users, but to still maintain legal compliance, company strategic objectives, product schedules and to still at the end of the day to return some money to the stockholders whose money is funding the entire endeavor.

For the HCI/d professional, it is important to understand the current NPD thinking for a few reasons:

1. In our current economy, unless you are designing a product only for your close circle of friends or for opensource distribution, product design is usually part of a larger, fairly standard business process. If we as HCI/d designers are not aware of this larger process, we risk designing amazing solutions that cannot make it to market where they can actually be a benefit to real users.

2. One of the struggles that has always faced NPD teams is innovation. Right now we are in a time of unprecedented online user participation. Wikis, Social Networking, Consumer Reviews, etc. etc. Since consumers are now becoming socialized to participate in an online context, HCI/d designers may be just the people to develop effective ways for lots of users to participate in product innovation. In the NPD literature, this has been written about in the last few years, but not done very well to this point. I'm currently reading Eric Von Hippel's book Democratizing Innovation - available for free online under a creative commons license, which takes a broad societal look at this idea. I think the HCI/d community can take a lead in this area if we step back a bit and think about the computer imaginative-(pdf download) idea that one very good way to bring thousands of people together to foster innovation may be through the Internet.

3. As HCI/d pracitioners, we can gain some valuable insights from the ways that business people get things done. There are always tradeoffs between idealism and pragmatism in any process. In my experience, excellent pragmatism is what makes good MBA grads into a great business leaders. This sort of pragmatism is absolutely necessary in business, since there is usually hard empirical accountability for one's actions. The excellent pragmatist is expert in efficiently considering many factors and making smart decisions that have positive outcomes.

4. As designers, we can bring new ideas - especially in the area of customer interactions - into this process that can perhaps foster breakthrough product developments, rather than just incremental ones. In an article entitled New Product Development as a Complex Adaptive System of Decisions this month's issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Ian P. McCarthy, Christos Tsinopoulos, Peter Allen, and Christen Rose-Anderssen introduce a complex adaptive system that, in their words:

..develops and presents propositions that predict how the configuration and organization of NPD decision-making agents will influence the potential for three mutually dependent CAS phenomena: nonlinearity, selforganization, and emergence. (from the abstract)

it also

..takes into account considers individual NPD processes to be capable of switching or toggling between different behaviors—linear to chaotic—to produce corresponding
innovation outputs that range from incremental to radical in accord with market expectations. (also from the abstract)

I am still working through the article, but what the publication of this article represents is a willingness of the field of NPD - and perhaps an eagerness on its part - to find new ways of stepping out of its linear, deterministic roots and into more organic means to understand and to improve New Product Development. I have seen similar shifts in the thinking of business strategy experts, who are even looking back at some older ideas like Stafford Beer's Viable System Model. At the IU School of Informatics, recent collaborations between the Complex Systems and HCI/d folks have shown a great deal of promise in the design of music recommendation systems, analysis of social networking, identification of shortcomings in traditional HCI in predicting large-scale computer-facilitated emergent user interactions, and other areas. Perhaps NPD will be another place we can help.

I'm still in the early stages of understanding the codified field of NPD. More to come in the near future.

Status Skills

2006-09-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

At TrendWatching.com, a site that i'd highly recommend to anyone interested in the consumer space, the September issue focuses on "Status Skills", there defined as:

"those skills that consumers are mastering to make the most of those same goods and services, bringing them status by being good at something, and the story telling that comes with it."

As with all of their content, this issue is chock-full of nice examples of Status Skills in action. Essentially, it refers to the art of empowering, and then leveraging the empowerment of, an increasingly particpatory consumer market.

The idea works like this:

1. Sell a consumer a product
2. Educate them on how to use the product (Give them Skills)
3. Offer further monetized education on how to use the product (Give them More Skills)
4. Create superusers of the product
5. Make the superusers the superstars in the user community (Give them Status)
6. (they allude to this but don't develop it very far) Allow the superusers to help you improve the product (Use their Skills)

I think it's brilliant if it's not exploited by companies for evil - and this whole movement is starting to get companies thinking about the fact that inviting consumers inside of the "castle walls" has the multi-positive result of a) creating greater customer loyalty, b) generating more word-of-mouth referrals, and c) gaining more valuable customer insights.

Since most of the companies referred to in these reports have thousands or millions of customers, this is an area where Informatics can provide a lot of guidance. One company that is already having success in this area is Powered.

On the Fly Wiki

2006-09-18T13:17:00.000-07:00

A company called SystemOne is preparing to launch a very interesting new product that finds semantic links between what a user is creating and content on the web, in emails, rss feeds, etc. I have yet to preview the s/w, but i wonder if this could be useful for researchers? Short review by Michael Arrington of Techcrunch here:

Marketing as HCI/d?

2006-09-15T04:40:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me today that the heavily-evident connections in the systems inside of my head are not easily made by those outside of my head (go figure). So for those of you who are wondering about the not-immediately-obvious connection between marketing and the field of Informatics/HCId, please allow me to explain.

The field of what i would call business-consumer relations has undergone some fairly large paradigm shifts over the last thousand-or-so years. To be clear, business-consumer relations, in my mind, includes fields otherwise known as product development, sales, marketing, pricing, customer relationship management, and a few others. Some of the major shifts within this area have occured along the lines of consumer knowledge, participation and entitlement.

1000 A.D. (private, local economies)

consumer knowledge of the product and of the business: HIGH - the vendor was often also the manufacturer, and the product was simple enough to understand (quality, design) immediately
consumer participation: HIGH - consumers were involved with the vendor/manufacturer personally, since they probably knew them as neighbors
entitlement: HIGH - if the product was defective, the vendor would see the customer around town daily. in addition, bad word-of-mouth would spread rapidly

1800 A.D. (industrial revolution)

consumer knowledge of the product and of the business: LOW - products became more complex as did the businesses that produced them. the distance between business increased
consumer participation: LOW - consumers were no longer involved with the businessowner personally, and became mere consumers
entitlement: LOW - businesses held most of the power. in addition to labor being subject to industry's whims, so was the consumer

1980 A.D (Duran Duran era)

consumer knowledge of the product and of the business: MEDIUM - the rise of Ralph Nader and Consumer reports helped to create educated consumers, now aware of the "man behind the curtain"
consumer participation: MEDIUM - consumers began to band together and "participate" in business by forming buying blocks, demanding safety standards, ethical business practices
entitlement: MEDIUM - consumers began to demand that businesses respect the consumer

2006 A.D (still the Duran Duran era, in my book)

consumer knowledge of the product and of the business: HIGH - massive internet information from both professional and amateur sources provides everyone with information about business practices and products
consumer participation: MEDIUM - businesses are now trying to find ways to actively involve consumers in the business, pursuing new methods such as WOM (word of mouth marketing), ECC (experience co-creation) and various other sundry acronyms
entitlement: HIGH -consumers have been mistreated and mislead for a long time, and they are now empowered by information and massive interconnectivity to demand good treatment from companies

So here's the HCI/d to business/consumer connection:

It is clear that we're living in an age of historically peculiar traits with respect to consumers and businesses. These include

massive consumer interconnectivity
massive amounts of publicly, instantly available information
massive consumer publication and participation

Any time the words "massive", "public" and "participation" co-occur, the antennae of HCI/d practitioners should start twitching. Connected computers (the Internet) is the first medium in history that allows for the facilitation of "massive public participation". As i see it, one of the great challenges ahead for HCI/d is to become expert in the creation of efficient spaces where consumer/business interactions can occur, creating value for both in a sustainable way. It will require continued research into group innovation, participatory strategies, value creation, complex systems and a host of other things. In my opinion, future gurus of HCI/d will not be the masters of adding %100 of the design value, but instead the masters of the design of interaction spaces (see Erik Stolterman's very fine ahead-of-its-time essay on conspiratorial design), where the users can then create their own value.

Marketing As Seduction

2006-09-13T06:40:00.000-07:00

Kathy Sierra, one of the oft-quoted "customer-centric" pundits, recently posted a blog about some of the myths surrounding marketing to geeks.

I have been doing some recent exploration into the attitudes and practices of businesses, and have found some interesting things going on:

Marketing as Conquests
For many years now, product development and to a greater extent marketing (these are fundamentally part of the same function, though they have been "siloized" in recent years) has gotten a bad rap as a coercive art, designed to create a need in the consumer that they didn't have before - to get them to buy something that they wouldn't have otherwise. To be fair to the general public, this is mostly true. One way to get at the underlying philosophy of a discipline is to analyze the vocabulary of its discourse. Sit in on a product development or marketing meeting, and you'll hear words like "targeting", "campaign", "segmentation", "launch", "positioning", "attrition". The last time i checked, these words have a longer history in military conquest than they do in the production of goods and services. Rome mounted many campaigns, all of which targeted, just about anyone in their way, with the goal of furthering the interests of his country. They never claimed to be fully customer-centered in their approach, except for the thinly-veiled claims that they were bringing order and infrastructure to the people they conquered.

The Dissonance
In many recent interviews with successful small and large business owners, i have seen a distinct dissonance between their vocabulary and tactics (there's another one of those words). Most all have spoken of their customers in fond terms, citing that they feel indebted to them, and that they honestly desire to make them happy. Despite these feelings, business owners strain within an inherited system that still sees the business and the consumer in an adversarial, almost martial relationship. It's a system they've inherited which has told them for decades that the best way to grow a business is to squeeze as much revenue per customer as possible, and that non-monetary value only goes one way - created by the company and given to the customer in the form of a good or service.

This sort of dissonance would certainly occur in the case of a wide-eyed suitor, madly in love with a beautiful woman, who was forced to act on the only source of romantic advice he could find - from the mouth of his good friend Ghengis Khan.

"You say you love her? Yes, this is good. Acquiring her will be easy. Find where she lives, then ride as fast as you can around the Great Wall of her defenses (drinking your horse's blood to get there faster). It will surprise and delight her that you have showed up unexpectedly, sneaking in through the back window of her house. Once inside, if you have correctly targeted her, she will be yours. While you are there, ask if she will refer you to a friend. Then take her back to your stronghold. She will feel pleased and popular since she is your 100th wife, and you will know this by giving her a satisfaction survey."

The Future?
In some sense, the current product development/marketing methodology (exaggerated a bit here for rhetorical fun and impact) is similar to that provided by Ghengis. The business owners i've been talking to have learned through decades of practice that the customer should be treated like a target, though they personally feel otherwise. Currently though, there is no good alternative system. Up until recently, this has sustained business, but with the advent of highly informed, connected customers who sometimes know more about a business than does their owner, old assumptions are being questioned, and business owners are wondering if there is a new methodology out there to guide their practice.

Information Filters

2006-09-07T07:36:00.000-07:00

In 1997, Steven Johnson wrote Interface Culture, an insightful book in which he points out the rise of media content like Bevis and Butthead, Mystery Science Theater and Talk Soup which, he points out, provide little if any original content. Instead, they are what he calls "parasitic media", which act as filters for an increasingly digitized world of information - helping to explain the behemoth machine of information that drives society. These forms, he argues, are similar in function to the Elizabethan novel that helped the populous to make sense of industrialization - a shift that must have been overwhelming - a machine that drove society, but that was too large to make immediate sense to the human mind. In a sense, this has always been the function of myth - to help so explain and filter the machines (loosely defined) of nature and society in terms more understandable to the human mind.

Since 1997, we have entered a new era of information filtering, where terms such as "folksonomy" and "wiki" suggest that the effects of mass human filtering is greater than the sum of its parts. Mathematicians and complexity theorists seem to suggest that it is the structure of these systems that is importantly causal in this sort of filtering - what seems to me to be a highly empirical/structuralist myth. Humanists seem to suggest that it is the intention of the actors of these systems that render these emergent interactions effective - the self-corrective mechanisms arising out of the statistically significant goodness of the majority of writers of wikipedia.

These are of course myths we're devising to explain a far more complex system than we can understand at the moment. I wonder what myths will supercede them?

Flash Debugging (code everywhere)

2006-09-07T06:35:00.000-07:00

I periodically receive questions about Flash from students and colleagues, so i thought that i'd post the answers online for all to see. Hopefully these posts won't merely be a fix to each individual problem, but will also give some sort of ideas for troubleshooting methodolgy when working in Flash.

In this problem, when running a movie, error messages were appearing as follows:

**Error** Scene=Scene 1, layer=button, frame=50:Line 1: Mouse events are permitted only for button instances on (press) {

Here is the way to diagnose such problems in Flash. The first step is to look closely at the error message:

**Error** Scene=Scene 1, layer=button, frame=50:Line 1: Mouse events are permitted only for button instances on (press) {

This tells us a lot. The first thing, is that we're reasonably sure that the problem here is on frame 50, line 1. So the first thing to do is to look at the code on frame 50. There we find two keyframes with code in it. The second one has the same code included in the error message:

on (press) { gotoAndPlay (10);}

Now, the error message says that "Mouse events are permitted only for button instances". But this code is on a frame. Here is the problem. Looking a little closer, we see that the event "on(press)" logically would be hard to apply to a frame, since there is nothing to press. So we can then take the code out and see if the error still exists. In this case, the error goes away, and the problem is solved. You actually had redundant code both on the timeline AND on the button in frame 50.

The overall thing to be careful in Flash is code in places where you don't want it. Flash allows you to put code on movieClips, timelines, and other places where certain types of code will not work. Therefore be careful. Best practice is to put ALL of your code on one layer in the timeline, and create event handlers that refer to clips on the stage. i.e., for a button with the instance name "myButton" on the stage, the code would be

myButton_mc.onPress = function () {
trace ("onPress called");
//put the code here to effect change in the movie
};

The error messages from the Flash IDE are generally fairly easy to follow, and can be used to logically deduce the problem. The first step is therefore to look closely and to see what it is telling you. The next step is to take a deep breath. Third, use the "trace" function liberally to try and get at the problem. Trace is your friend.