Actionable insights and channel optimization through proprietary technologies — Is that really what you want to discuss? KPI’s and modified metrics? Sounds like great stuff if you are in optimizing mode, but are you looking to optimize or innovate and change? Is your product/service so good that you are squeezing the best .000001 out of an already out-of-this world amazing thing? Or is optimization is easier than the innovation and change that promise greater returns?

How about we really get into it?

How about we discuss the really difficult internal change that will help your business by 3x or 20x or 1000x. Here’s how it might work. I will show up on time and deliver you the truth. I won’t arrive with a presentation or laptop, but instead just a notebook and a pen — I will listen and ask a few questions along the way. I’ll help you determine if you have a product challenge, a customer experience challenge or an operational challenge. When the meeting ends we can look at your goal(s), and your challenges, and move towards making change.

But before we do that we need to get back to passion, to that day one excitement. To the reason you started the company, or took the job, or joined the cause. I want to unearth that day one vitality and help give it back to you, so you can give it back to your customers, supporters and constituents.

Or, we can discuss fonts, colors, LinkedIn integration and social media.

I’m free on Monday. What are you doing?

—Ian
@EATagency

In the early 90s I sang in rock band. We were very popular, had major label record interest and despite barely being able to play guitar I wrote most of the songs. How did I do this you ask? I had help, lots of help. Romas Banatis, knife maker extrordinaire was my muse. Romas would spend hours listening to me fumble through song parts. Sitting on milk crates next to one another, he would reconstruct my guitar parts with the patience of a saint and transform them from barely distinguishable notes into songs.

“You mean like this?”

“Faster or slower?”

“Play me that part again.”

The result was a few songs on the local radio, some great shows and a creative partnership that centered around communicating an idea through song.

You see, sometimes the person with clearest vision and the biggest inspiration lacks the creative and/or technical capability to create the thing. And that’s ok. The inability to do can be overcome with the ability to communicate. Clunky chords or crappy napkin sketches can get the job done just fine. What’s required is an inspirational communicator and a great listener capable of asking questions, plus an agreed upon language (design language, brainstorming language) that will help  move you both towards a known goal.

People like my friend Romas are creative extraction experts — they see (more often sense) the germ of an idea and dig and pull and polish until it shines. UX designers and strategists perform much the same task. They pull and push, dig and polish, pivot and trash – until they find something that resonates with business goals and users.

When incredibly solid ideas and clearly stated problems are on the table you either won the proverbial Business Problem Lottery or something is fishy in fluorescent light land. More often things are undefined, problems are symptomatic of deeper problems but there’s always the temptation of the quick fix, the predictable coda. Resist that – there is no there, there.

The solution need not be obtuse but does need to work in harmony with systems, staff and users. Client and agency need to sit on milk crates (sketch on whiteboards) and jam until the solution and the idea have a harmony, a rhythm and a progression. Sitting with stiff fingers until one or the other says – “That sounds nice, play that again.”

The agency may have the perfect solution day one, or the client may have half the problem solved before they hire outside help. But creating a song isn’t a race, a solution shouldn’t be either.

The Zone is a single, vast building. The rooms are of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house.

—William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Some projects resemble the sprawling, jury-rigged mazes that crop up along the outskirts of cities in the developing world—unplanned, unfriendly to outsiders, and somehow both precarious and entrenched.

When you build or redesign a product without first addressing the fundamental questions ‘Who is this for?’ and ‘What story does it tell?’ — welcome to shantytown. When you wireframe before auditing, you’re hammering corrugated tin to a structure with no foundation. When you plan social strategy before nailing down user personae, you’re digging a ditch when what you really need is plumbing.

Let’s not lose perspective—obviously, the real is exponentially worse than the metaphor here. A firstworldproblems hashtag wouldn’t quite cover the hysterics of comparing half-baked content strategy to life in a desperate third-world slum. But the fundamental flaws are the same—lack of leadership, disorganization, no time to strategize and no flexibility to iterate or improve—and we of all people have no excuse for replicating it. Like a violent storm (or, hell, a Burroughs novel) there’s beauty to the chaos of sprawl when seen at a great distance, but users are never at a distance—by definition they are in the thick (and the click) of things. Unless we assume their identity in the process, we’re the authors of their unhappiness.

Declarations vs. Invitations

“The Balanced Scorecard is recognised as the world’s leading management tool for enterprise performance management and strategy deployment.”

vs.

“It’s happening right now. You in?”

 

Declarations & Invitations

“The World’s #1 Project Management App”

&

“Last week 5,794 companies signed up for Basecamp to manage their projects. Today it’s your turn.”

 

Declarations vs. Interactions

“World’s Best Coffee”

vs.

“Chrome Maze“

If I were craftier, I’d embroider Conran’s Rule of Housework* on pillows and trade them to agencies around town for cases of Diet Sunkist (aka ‘Daddy’s medicine’). There’s nothing like a time limit to winnow away the detours and eliminate those moments of self-doubt that drag fresh mornings into late nights. There’s no time for the fussiness that makes designs labored and heavy, no time to get lost in theory. Simplicity is speed and limitations mean freedom from distraction. The pressure of deadlines may be inspirational or paralyzing, but boundaries will always put focus back on the fundamentals.

*“It expands to fill the time available plus half an hour.”

LeanUX NYC presentation – April 11th 2013

When you go home tonight, put your bag down, do your Mr. Rogers thing and change into house clothes. But this time, leave the boots on – or put boots on if you have to – either way you’ll need boots. Next, find some groovy music. I recommend Massive Attack or Bowery Electric, anything without a ton of lyrics, or that reminds you of high school or is in 3/4 time. Head to the bathroom and grab a few towels, place them on the kitchen floor near the drawers and cabinets.

Now open your silverware drawer. If you have one of those utility-shit-collecting-random-utensil drawers, open that too. Pull the drawer out until it’s just about to snap the rails. Now here comes the moment of faith. I want you to pull the drawers all the way out and dump them on the floor into individual towels. You’re going to see corks, crumbs, tablespoons, toothpicks, spoons, knives, a broken #4 candle, a ketchup packet and the thermometer that only reads in celsius. I told you to wear boots.

Congratulations, this is day one of a UX/CS project.

Project Steps:

Step one: Toss the crap out.

Step two: Figure out if the drawer location is correct based on the flow of your kitchen. If it isn’t currently in the right place, locate the appropriate drawer location – pull that drawer out and dump contents onto the floor. Repeat Step one.

Step three: Clean everything. Put things into piles. If a friend calls say you’re busy, “knee-deep in taxonomy, bro.”

Step four: Determine what needs to go back in the original drawer. If you had to empty other drawers, cinch up those towels and put them aside. These are out-of-scope projects you’ll need to address later.

Step five: Sketch out an insert tray that holds all the items in the orignal drawer. Get some cardboard, scissors and tape — mock-up and adjust until all the items fit and contain a hierarchy appropriate with usage.

Step six: Schedule a dinner party where everyone has to cook their own dish at your house. If they question you about the other towels and missing drawers, blame it on the landlord or your father-in-law. Watch how the drawer is used, take notes and after they leave adjust your mock-up.

Step seven: Make a final product keeping in mind future utensil purchases.

Step eight: Order take-out.

—Ian

Marketing team: “Our site is dated. We need to push the envelope and look more like our competitors.”

Erich Fromm: ”Equality, instead of being the condition for the development of each man’s peculiarity, means the extinction of individuality.”

Marketing team: ”Whatever Fromm, you are a strange bird.”

Erich Fromm: ”Indifference is what characterizes modern man’s relationship to himself and to others.”

Be bold. Be you.

-Ian

Our friend, and advisor, Doug Rushkoff talking about his new book Present Shock. Read a review of the book here. Buy it here.

When Vine made its big debut, my first thought was: Where are all the hacky jokes about 6-second sexts?

For sure Vine implemented a dick free zone but that curation seems to be the biggest story yet. If we have no inaugural narrative to begin our relationship with a platform, how can it go anywhere—genital or otherwise?

Do you remember the early days of Chatroulette? It promised to expand our world by incorporating the element of random chance into idle internet chat. That narrative was quickly hijacked by a barrel of masturbating monkeys, but the point is that Chatroulette would never have grown large enough to go so spectacularly off the rails if it hadn’t presented such a compelling story in the first place.

The case of Vine is about more than squandered lowbrow comedy. It gets at the heart of the challenge that Vine has yet to really overcome. What’s the story here? Who are the heroes of Vine? What is their journey? It begins with downloading the app. Then what?

If we haven’t even accounted for the lowest common denominator, how can we ever find the highest? Or is it the other way around?

(The exception that proves the rule):