I’m Back

For the few dozen of you who have followed me in the past, I apologize for not posting anything in the last five months. It turns out that Season Affective Disorder is real, and combined with depression, can really kick your ass. I have been wanting to write something for the last few months but just haven’t had the spark. All my creative mojo has been like listening to headphones muffled by a pillow – it’s there, but there’s no dynamic range. It’s flat and edgeless.

But I think I’ve turned the corner, at least for now. It’s spring, we’re back on daylight saving time, it’s getting warm here in the northeast (U.S.), and I even had to mow my lawn (ok, I had to mow down the onion grass in the front yard that was embarrassingly high). And I have a backlog of stuff to say (being depressed doesn’t mean you’re not thinking). Hopefully, in the next few posts:

• Corporate templates, version 2
• A plan and planning
• Prezi: wow v substance
• Brevity: skimming v condensing
• and many more

I hope you’ll stay tuned. In the meantime:

Real beautiful science. In the U.S. these days, some people seem to think real science (you know, the stuff most people don’t really understand) is suspect at best. These people often like to pick on NASA – an extraordinarily good investment – as somehow unnecessary (seemingly oblivious that they live in a world enabled by the science and technology that NASA helped create). This is real science not only helping understand and solve real global issues, but also revealing some beauty and art in the world we live on.

Design Victory: Type for Dyslectics

Great short article on Fast Company’s Co.Design about a typeface designed for people with dyslexia designed by someone with dyslexia. Talk about user-centered design.

The face is awkward-looking by traditional visual typographic criteria, but using Louis Sullivan’s Form Follows Function criteria, it seems like a masterpiece. The article said it best:

If it works, it works. And according to an independent study by the University of Twente in Boer’s native Netherlands, it does work.

Amen.

For your next presentation: if, for any given population, approximately 5–10% have some sort of dyslexia and another 7–10% have some sort of color deficiency; that’s potentially 20% of your audience that doesn’t see things the way you do, literally. I’m exaggerating a bit, but try to consider all the ways your audience is different from you and your worldview.

Your experience is your brand.

Irony: Wired magazine's iPad app keeps crashing.

Wired is in the magazine business. Or they were. But the second they released an iPad app, they also became a player in the app business, and the user experience business, and the "maintain your brand over more platforms" business.

Back when it worked (like three weeks ago), it was a good magazine app. Different content, optimized layouts, links and videos, etc. Print subscribers could download issues for free. Great.

But... Something happened, and now the Wired app is decidedly not wired. To use their own label, it's quickly approaching tired. It would be one thing if this were Vanity Fair, but this is Wired - aren't they supposed to be hip, cool, and tech savvy?

There's aother lesson here in brand: I'm pretty sure Wired didn't actually code this themselves, after all, they're in the magazine business. But it doesn't matter, it's still their name on the app, and their customers who are frustrated.

Social media responsibility

Just got about 30 RTs on my Facebook page from a business I like. Well, I did like them until they discovered they can automatically cross-post everything from Twitter to FB. We'll see if they figure out that just because you can do something doesn't always mean you should (the people who have posted variations of "please stop" on the business's wall might be an indication).

A very orange moon

I'm up at 3:30 am on Tuesday morning admiring the moon during a total lunar eclipse (during the winter solstice).

Monday was also the anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. Carl was a man who was so passionate about science that he inspired a generation of people to care about the physical sciences (a friend of mine says she had a crush on him, now she helps companies deal with their environmental impacts – coincidence?). Carl had an impact on me too, I vividly remember his visualization of the cosmic calendar, walking across a huge grid and kneeling by the last day in December, pointing to the last second of December 31st as the place that all of human memory resides. It is still powerful: if all of evolutionary history is the size of a football field, all of human history fits into the palm of your hand.

Carl didn’t use Powerpoint, but his impact still resonates 14 years after his death. Oh that our ideas could be so powerful.

Maine and emotions

I’ve been reasonably quiet online for the last five weeks in part because I’ve been on vacation, one week at a Delaware beach and another on the Maine coast. On my return from Maine, I sat through a presentation almost entirely devoid of emotion, and it got me thinking about the deep feelings the Maine coast elicited in me and why it seems so hard for many to bring that kind of emotion into their presentations.

The emotionless presentation in question was given by a man who cares deeply about the topic he was presenting, but that passion didn’t come out. And for me – someone who is usually not the most emotionally sensitive guy – the contrast was huge between the strong feelings I had on the Maine coast and the lack of feelings I had listening to this presentation.

I work with lots of engineering types, and it seems like many have gotten this idea in their heads that passion and emotion don’t belong in their presentations – that only well-structured facts and logic are how one creates a speech. And it shows. Again and again I see too-long slide decks that seem to reflect too much thinking about evidence and logic, and not enough on emotion and story-telling.

I’m not suggesting technical people turn into touchy-feely therapists (think Stuart Smalley), or insert fake emotion into their presentations at the expense of facts and evidence, but some honest positive emotion can make a big difference in getting your message through (think Al Gore). And like any skill, it takes practice (especially for those of us who see ourselves as technical experts, where emotion is a secondary skill at best).

Some quick thoughts, more later:

1) For a given presentation, what do you care about? (If you don’t know, or you don’t care, neither will your audience.)

2) Why do you care about it? It’s not necessary that your audience know this, but it helps if you do.

3) Look through your presentation. As you rehearse your delivery (you do practice, right?), do these things come through?

Thinking like a customer

A request. If you are a business owner and you own a website, and you sell products or services directly to consumers through a physical place (a store, a garage, a car wash, etc.):

Please post your hours of operation.

I am your customer. I like your service. In fact, I like it so much I will travel out of my way to patronize you (maybe a long way out of my way). You have done all the right things: you have enthusiastic employees, you fulfill you brand promise every time I interact with you, your service is outstanding, you have earned my trust and I am an advocate for your business among my friends and social network.

But here’s the thing, your website doesn’t tell me when you’re open. I will drive 20 minutes out of my way to take advantage of your service, but I need to know if you close at 5 or 6 or 6:30 – it makes a difference.

Challenging one’s assumptions is hard. The more you “know” something, the harder it is to imagine that other people (like your customers) don’t. But it’s important, because even the best businesses (like a great car wash I go that’s 20 minutes away) need to continually look at themselves through their customers’ eyes.

Thanksgiving surprise from the Heath brothers

It’s been a while, sorry for the absence. I got a great surprise in my inbox a few days ago from Chip and Dan Heath:

Hi Jeffrey, congrats, you are going to be receiving a free advance copy of our next book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. We “drew” your name randomly (and you were fighting the odds, by the way – fewer than 1 in 3 people who signed up will get the book, due to limited quantities).

Expect to see it in 2-3 weeks – and certainly before the Christmas holidays. Just wanted to let you know it’s on the way!

We hope you enjoy it, and thanks for staying interested in our work.

Happy Thanksgiving,
Chip & Dan

I’m not some totally wired netizen or important reviewer, just a designer working to improve the way people and companies present themselves, so this really did come as a surprise. And so when I do get it, and read it, I’ll be sure to blog on any thoughts or related ideas. In the meantime I’d just like to say thanks to Chip and Dan.

On the experience. I’m not naive. I assume Chip and Dan didn’t personally select every name, and it may be that I was just on the right side of the 1 in 3 odds, but the experience still matters to me. And isn’t that the point? Think about that the next time you are taking your latest idea (or presentation) to someone – what will the experience feel like to them?

• Will it seem like you listened to their concerns, their needs, their POV, and responded with something that acknowledged and spoke directly to those issues?
• Or will it seem like you took your methodology, your approach, your terminology and added their logo?
  

Little things go a long way in effecting experience. The Heath brothers could have sent out a less personal email, it could have come from the publisher instead of them, they could have just sent the book with no email – but then my experience would have been different.

One Little Thing

A little story about how one little thing makes a difference.

I am not a big TV tech guy. We watch TV, but are hopelessly non-digital, non-HD, non-Blu-Ray, etc. A month or two ago, our cable provider (a very large profitable company based nearby) sent us a nice note that said “if you’d like to keep watching your extended cable channels, you’ll need to get these little digital converter boxes for free, you luddites.” (Ok, they didn’t call us luddites.)

So I go online and get the boxes sent to us for self-installation. I’m fairly tech-savvy and figure that this will be pretty simple. The boxes came with good, clear instructions and setting them up was fairly straight-forward. So far so good.

I go online to activate the devices, and one out of three get turned on immediately. Still, no big deal, so I call the activation number and wait on hold for about 15 minutes. I’m ok with this – they let me know that their call volume is high, give me other options, so I’m patient and I wait. While I wait I look through their online FAQs and troubleshooting guide, but nothing about the situation at hand. I speak to a very friendly and helpful person who, after the requisite “is it turned on?” questions, activates both other boxes.

I think.

One of these boxes is larger and all the instructions clearly say “set your TV to channel 3” and “leave it be for 45 minutes while it loads your channels” and “it will turn itself off when it’s done.” So I eat, do some chores, come back. The box is still on, the TV is still nothing but static. I go online to see if this is normal. Back through the all FAQs etc., and find one that says: “if nothing happens after 45 minutes, try again.” So I do. And wait another hour. Still nothing but static. I call the support number again. This time I’m on hold for 30 minutes, maybe longer. When I finally get to a human being (also very nice), after I explain the situation (reset it 2 or 3 times, still no picture), the first thing she asks me is “is your TV on channel 3 or 4?” I switch to channel 4 and – wait for it – everything is working just fine. For all I know it was working just fine the first time, but in all my hunting I hadn’t seen one FAQ, instruction, troubleshooting answer, knowledgebase entry, or the like that said “try channel 4.”

I wondered if there had been something and I just overlooked it, so I went back to the site and hunted. Nope. I wondered if there was a hardware switch that I had overlooked. Nope. I looked back through all the simple instructions. Nothing there either.

This was not a huge big deal, just a minor annoyance. But my otherwise good experience (from getting the notice to ordering to setting up the hardware) was dramatically affected by one little thing (try channel 4). All the stuff I encountered was very helpful and explained very clearly what should happen and how do deal with certain known issues, but trying channel 4 wasn’t one of them.

If the company had included some additional tips online (the sort of thing I imagine is available to their call center staff), I could have been trying that at noon instead of 4:30, and my total experience would have been different.

One little thing.