In The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies Rebekah Campbell looks at the problem with lying in the context of entrepreneurship and creating products:

Peter maintains that telling lies is the No. 1 reason entrepreneurs fail. Not because telling lies makes you a bad person but because the act of lying plucks you from the present, preventing you from facing what is really going on in your world. Every time you overreport a metric, underreport a cost, are less than honest with a client or a member of your team, you create a false reality and you start living in it.

And it’s extremely difficult to get out of that reality once you’ve created it.

Steven Sinofsky wrote some excellent advice for product managers in his post Shipping is a Feature: Some Guiding Principles for People Who Build Things. I especially like this part:

A decision means to not do something, and to achieve clarity in your design. The classic way this used to come up (and still does) is the inevitable “make it an option”. You can’t decide should a new mouse wheel scroll or zoom? Should there be conversation view or inbox view? Should you AutoCorrect or not? Go ahead and add it to Preferences or Options.

But really the only correct path is to decide to have the feature or not. Putting in an option to enable it means it doesn’t exist. Putting in an option to disable means you are forever supporting two (then four, then eight) ways of doing something. Over time (or right away) your product has a muddled point of view, and then worse, people come to expect that everything new can also be turned off, changed, or otherwise ignored. While you can always make mistakes and/or change something later, you have to live with combinatorics or a combinatoric mindset forever.

The flip side of this is, of course, that the organization needs to agree that product managers have the autonomy to make these kinds of decisions.

In What If Doctors Could Finally Prescribe Behavior Change? Sean Duffy explains why behavior change is so difficult, particularly in healthcare:

Whether it’s for weight loss, smoking cessation, diabetes, or otherwise, the best research shows that meaningful behavior change outcomes require not just guidance from a trusted health professional, but also positive social support, easy-to-digest insights about their condition, a carefully orchestrated timeline, and a process that follows validated behavioral science protocols. That’s hard to squeeze into a phone call. Or a doctor’s visit, for that matter.

The good news is that this research is resulting in a new field called Digital Therapeutics, and despite quite a bit of snake oil out there, some apps are having success:

Another example is Jenna Tregarthen, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology and eating disorder specialist. She rallied a team of engineers, entrepreneurs, and fellow psychologists to develop Recovery Record, a digital therapy that helps patients gain control over their eating disorder by enabling them to self-monitor for destructive thoughts or actions, follow meal plans, achieve behavior goals, and message a therapist instantly when they need support.

We all know how destructive interruptions at work are, and how a constant pressure to always be online increases stress levels exponentially. The thing is, we can fix this problem. Clive Thompson asks Are You Checking Work Email in Bed? At the Dinner Table? On Vacation? and reports on a recent study to measure the effects of changing that behavior:

[Harvard professor Leslie] Perlow suggested they carve out periods of “predictable time off”—evening and weekend periods where team members would be out of bounds. Nobody was allowed to ping them. The rule would be strictly enforced, to ensure they could actually be free of that floating “What if someone’s contacting me?” feeling.

The results were immediate and powerful. The employees exhibited significantly lower stress levels. Time off actually rejuvenated them: More than half said they were excited to get to work in the morning, nearly double the number who said so before the policy change. And the proportion of consultants who said they were satisfied with their jobs leaped from 49 percent to 72 percent. Most remarkably, their weekly work hours actually shrank by 11 percent—without any loss in productivity. “What happens when you constrain time?” Lovich asks. “The low-value stuff goes away,” but the crucial work still gets done.

More of this in our workplaces, please.

Mat Honan’s Are Touchscreens Melting Your Kid’s Brain?¹ set off the latest in what has become a recurring tech theme over the past few years:

I’m perpetually distracted, staring into my hand, ignoring the people around me. Hit Refresh and get a reward, monkey. Feed the media and it will nourish you with @replies and Likes until you’re hungry and bleary and up way too late alone in bed, locked in the feedback loop. What will my daughter’s loop look like? I’m afraid to find out.

This has been a difficult topic for me for a long time. In 2012 I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine called A Dad’s Plea To Developers Of iPad Apps For Children, in which I aired some of my frustrations with apps for kids. That piece brought out a lot of anger, including a comment that I’ll never forget:

Wow really?? great parents here.. having a kid under 7 stare at a screen, really?? come on!! no kid under 7 should use an iPad for what?? play outside, play with your toys, your friends, read. People who have a 2yr old use an ipad/iphone, shouldn’t have kids in the first place! shame on you

I started writing a passionate reply, explaining our reasoning and the rules my wife and I have for screen time, but I ended up just dropping it. No one has ever changed their opinion based on a comment they read on a blog, so why bother.

Anyway, I digress. I tend to agree with Robert McGinley Myers’ response to Mat’s article. In Screens Aren’t Evil (which you should read in its entirety) he says:

But we need to get beyond worrying about whether “screens” are melting our kids’ brains. What we need to be conscious of is encouraging our kids, and ourselves, to engage in activities that enrich us. Sometimes that’s interacting with each other, sometimes that’s a hike in the forest, sometimes thats a great book, and sometimes that’s an incredible video game. It’s not the medium that matters, but what we take from it.

Now that’s a moderate stance I can get behind.

I love this quote from Suzanne Slatcher, who worked at Pixar in the early years. From the really interesting article Building The Next Pixar:

“Business is just an idea, like a movie,” says Slatcher. “What if we did this in this place at this time, in this style of packaging, with this choice of flavors? Would it work? There’s still a back and forth between creative and the audience, and you can’t be like ‘if I build it, they will come.’ No, we’re in a democratic world where everyone has opinions. If you’re making your cartoon and your joke’s not funny, it’s just not funny, it has to go. If people don’t like a flavor, they’re right, we’re not right.”

That last sentence is a key concept in product development as well. If people don’t like our “flavor” of product, they’re right and we’re wrong. We have to fix it, not try to convince them that they don’t “get it”.

I’m a big fan of sketching, and this post by Jacob Rader does a great job of explaining why it’s such an important part of the design process:

Sensemaking is the active conversation we have with the events that we encounter; it’s our ability to take in information, process it, and derive meaning and action from it.

Rather than focusing on the external, sketching provides us a sensemaking process for our own creative flux. When we’re presented with a problem our minds go to work to create this cloud of ideas, populating it with information and attempting to form connections. This facilitated sensemaking turns that abstract concoction into a concrete reality. This works because sketching forces us to make decisions and apply structure to our ideas. By externalizing we pass those fragments through a filter of our own experience creating a foundation to build our ideas from.

When we externalize the pieces of an idea through a sketch we’re making a testable “design move” which we’re able make judgements around. This positions us to make further moves that iteratively cycles and builds an idea.

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.

— Marshall McLuhan

In other news, Google Glass is on sale today.