Jason Mesut made quite a few waves this week with his presentation Truth and Dare - Out of the echochamber into the fire. It’s definitely worth your time so I recommend you click through and read it before you continue here. Ther’s a lot to like and a lot to think about.

Jason explicitly asks for feedback and counter-arguments, so I do want to address one slide in particular, shown below:

Now, I might be putting the puzzle together wrongly here, but since these slides came out right after I published a two-part series on Smashing Magazine called “Breaking Down Silos”, I’m going to assume h’s talking about those articles. If my assumption is wrong this is going to be really awkward, but oh well.

So, let’s look at why Jason is calling this concept “naive”. I wasn’t at the presentation, so all I have to go on is his bullet points.

Organisations are complex

Of course organizations are complex, and if anyone tries to argue otherwise they’ve never worked in one. But I never said that this is simple:

There are no shortcuts to breaking down silos. You can’t fix the environment if the organization doesn’t understand the problem. You can’t improve the development process if the right environment doesn’t exist to enable healthy guidelines. You have to climb the pyramid brick by brick to the ultimate goal: better software through true collaboration.

I don’t propose “7 steps to a happier you” in the article. I propose a process of understanding the problems and unique needs of the organization, followed by a tailored solution that takes those unique needs into consideration.

People are better in small groups

I absolutely agree, and that’s why prioritization at an organizational level needs to take this into account and empower small teams to do the work without interference. Her’s what I said in the article:

[Once strategic priorities are set], projects would move to small dedicated teams, which would have complete ownership of the design and implementation. The product council sets the priorities, not the details of implementation”Š””“Šthose are up to the teams themselves.

I go on to talk about the importance of autonomy and the meaning people find in their work when they work in these small groups.

Change takes too long

I don’t understand the argument here, so maybe this is one of those “voice-over required” points. But if the argument is that change takes too long so we shouldn’t even try, I don’t buy it. Her’s how I end the article, again acknowledging how difficult it is:

Building collaborative environments is not easy, because change management is not easy. But the positive outcomes of doing this far outweigh the pain of making it happen. You’ll end up with happy, creative teams that feel a sense of ownership over what they’re building and a sense of pride in its quality.

I’d also like to point out that I wasn’t being academic in these articles. Everything I wrote is based on principles we’ve tried and applied in real life in the organizations where I’ve worked. There’s always room for improvement and growth, but this wasn’t a theoretical exercise.

I know this doesn’t matter that much in the bigger scheme of things, and I admit that the only reason I’m even writing about it is a slight irritation with the word “naive”. But if Jason is indeed referring to my article (again, this is going to be really awkward if he’s not) I at least wanted to clarify my viewpoint.

So there that is.

Frank Chimero reflecting on Facebook’s advances in “frictionless sharing” of content:

Any physicist knows that it’s impossible to exist in a frictionless universe, and that friction hasn’t been diminished with Facebook’s sharing model so much as transferred the work of making sense of things from the one sharing to the audience.

I recently mentioned that reducing the effort needed to share and communicate with others might be inching us closer to a post-literate society. Frank’s remark adds another consideration: the reduced effort required to share information places the burden of understanding much more on the audience than on the person sharing.

“Frictionless” sharing of what song you are currently listening to sounds interesting at first, and then it just starts to sound creepy. But even if you can get beyond the creepiness factor you’re faced with the fact that it becomes the audience’s responsibility to make sense of that information. How interesting is knowing what song I’m listening to without an explanation why I’m listening to it and what it means to me?

At what point will all this lazy sharing result in lazy audiences who can’t be bothered to go hunting for the meaning in the information? At what point does the audience become mere “consumers” of content in the true sense of the word - “to destroy or expend by use” - and end up in a similar situation as the obese passengers on the Axiom?

Somehow my wife and I found our way to The Coffee Roasting Company at Lourensford Wine Estate on Saturday. We’ve never been there, and the experience was fantastic. I recently referenced an article on how architecture can be used to influence behavior, and this place is a prime example. The coffee shop is designed to encourage talking and not rushing.

You’re greeted with the almost-overwhelming smell of different coffees blending together. Next you notice the unpretentious, “we’re just here to brew good espresso” decor, followed by the rustic tables and stacks of well-read books about coffee scattered all over. This is how coffee should be enjoyed.

As my wife and I settle in to wait for our cappuccinos I pick up a book called Coffee by Claudia Roden. I read out loud to her:

In Turkey at one time, a man promised when he married never to let his wife go without coffee, and it was considered a legitimate cause for divorce if he neglected to do so. So important is coffee in Oriental life that it is common for beggars to ask for money to buy it. It is inconceivable that they should go without. Business and bargaining are always done over a cup of coffee served before the argument starts. Whether in a shop or a market stall it creates a bond and an obligation between buyer and seller.

The author goes on to say that coffee houses “required a certain leisure” since it took time to roast and prepare coffee, so people got accustomed to waiting and filling their time with conversation. As I read those words I think about something my dad brings up a lot. As a geographer he is very interested in “sense of place” and always encourages us to try to understand the soul of a town or a building. From Wikipedia:

Places said to have a strong “sense of place” have a strong identity and character that is deeply felt by local inhabitants and by many visitors. Sense of place is a social phenomenon that exists independently of any one individual’s perceptions or experiences, yet is dependent on human engagement for its existence. Such a feeling may be derived from the natural environment, but is more often made up of a mix of natural and cultural features in the landscape, and generally includes the people who occupy the place.

That’s what I felt as I sat there reading, drinking coffee with my wife, taking it all in. There is a strong sense of place not because of one single thing, but because of how the people, the smells, the architecture, and of course the coffee come together to create an undeniable identity.

What does this have to do with design? As my thoughts drifted I was reminded that all design has a sense of place - even web design. The interactions, typography, copy, images, etc., come together to create an experience. You can analyze a design in pieces, but you can only experience it as a whole.

We tend to break up the different functions of user experience design, and that’s fine. We need User Researchers, Information Architects, Content Strategists, Interaction Designers, Visual Designers, and [insert latest job title here] who specialize in what they do. But it’s fallacy to think that they can work in isolation as if each is building one piece of a puzzle that can merely be assembled once all is said and done.

For a design to have a strong and desirable sense of place a natural ebb and flow between the different aspects is essential (even if it’s all done by the same person). Turning a wireframe into a high-fidelity mockup isn’t a one-way activity - there will always be things to reconsider about the interaction or the content (or a multitude of other aspects). As I’ve written before, designing in isolation can be dangerous and very unsatisfactory for everyone involved.

I’ll add this: designing in a place like this is way better than designing in a cubicle. Creative spaces beget creativity.

Also, that coffee was amazing.

Here’s Mashable in an article with a title that sounds like it was created in a random buzzword generator: Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity:

Facebook felt constrained by the Like button because it was an implicit endorsement of content. Facebook wants users to share everything they are doing, whether it’s watching a show or hiking a trail, so it decided to create a way to “express lightweight activity.”

So in essence they’re saying that clicking the Like button is too much of a commitment; the action is too heavy. We need something a little more indifferent and “lightweight”.

With the Like button you already didn’t have to use words. With Facebook Open Graph you grant permission to an app once, and then it silently and passively starts broadcasting what you’re doing. No thinking required.

By continuing to reduce the effort needed to share and communicate with others we seem to inch ever closer to a post-literate society.  In his essay Like, the Post-Literate Society, James Shelly discusses this phenomenon and quotes Bruce W. Power:

What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless?

He goes on to say this:

Thus I ponder: do we become a post-literate society at the moment we manifest an incapacity to discuss our own potential status as such? If so, are we already there?

These are good questions on a day like today.

In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Sherry Turkle tells a story about having dinner in Paris with her daughter, Rebecca. While they are eating, Rebecca gets a call from a friend in Boston, asking if sh’s available for lunch. Rebecca simply answers that it won’t be possible, but that Friday could work. She doesn’t even tell her friend that sh’s currently in Paris. Sherry has mixed feelings about this:

I was wistful, worried that Rebecca was missing an experience I cherished in my youth: an undiluted Paris. My Paris came with the thrill of disconnection from everything I knew. My daughter’s Paris did not include this displacement.

I told me wife this story later that evening, and we started talking about our own tumultuous 30-day backpacking trip through Europe at a time when our relationship was”¦ well, let’s just say it was on less stable ground than it is now (remind me to tell you how we broke up on top of the Eiffel tower and got back together in Venice).

We talked about the truth in Sherry’s words - how being so utterly disconnected from the rest of the world played a big role in our ability to immerse ourselves in the newness and strangeness of the culture around us. We were only able to check email about once every 3-4 days. I can’t even imagine how I’d be able to go that long without email now, but back then it wasn’t a big deal. Less email = more time for walking through the streets of a new city.

Fast forward to today, and I am incredibly fortunate to travel for business reasonably often, but I must admit that it doesn’t fill me with the same excitement as that Europe backbacking trip did. And I think that’s partly because the constant connection means that I’m not really immersed in another culture, I’m just working from a different office.

Shelly comes to the following conclusion after her trip to Paris with her daughter:

Adolescents have always balanced connection and disconnection; we need to acknowledge the familiarity of our needs and the novelty of our circumstances. The Internet is more than old wine in new bottles; now we can always be elsewhere.

And that is perhaps the real issue here. If the Internet lets us be elsewhere any time we want, what point is there in physically moving ourselves across the world any more? Especially if we use the Internet to bring ourselves back to where we came from the minute we get there?

Alain de Botton recently tweeted:

The problem with the net: it prevents us from boredom and all its many advantages.

One of those advantages is the ability to sit in a restaurant in Paris and truly take it in without wondering what everyone else is up to. Even just sitting in your own back yard without wondering what everyone else is up to would probably already be a huge step in the right direction. Oh, the thinks you could think.

Her’s to being bored.

A couple of weeks ago our 2-year old daughter threw my wife’s phone in the swimming pool. The resulting journey through the Vodacom customer service labyrinth to replace the phone was frustrating, but it also gave me a new level of understanding and empathy for the immense challenges of providing customer service to hundreds of thousands of people.

This is an article about social media, customer support channels, and the principles every company should establish in their culture to serve their customers better. And (spoiler alert!) I do manage to get a new phone for my wife.

”Umm, So, Our Daughter Threw My Phone In The Pool”

What’s most surprising about getting a call about my wife’s phone suddenly finding itself at the bottom of our pool is how completely nonplussed I was about the whole thing. When you become a parent the kinds of things that upset you change significantly. I think I’ve discovered a pattern: if there is no blood involved, there’s really no reason to get upset. So after establishing that there was no blood involved, I proceeded to the next step - trying to replace the phone.

My wife had an LG Generic (or whatever it was called) on one of Vodacom’s cheapest plans, and the thing has been driving her nuts. She’s had her eye on my iPhone for a long time, so I decided to try to upgrade her. The problem is that I’m not eligible for an upgrade until the end of December. And that’s where this journey starts.

My first step was to walk into a Vodacom store to ask for assistance. This is pretty much the extent of the conversation that took place with the support representative:

Me: “Hi. My daughter threw my wife’s phone in the pool, so I’d like to get her an iPhone please.” Rep: “Your contract isn’t due for an upgrade until the end of December.” Me: “I understand that. I’m saying that my wife’s phone is now wet and doesn’t work any more, so I would like to give you more money by going onto a more expensive plan.” Rep: “It’s against policy to do an early upgrade. That’s why you should insure your phone.”

Imagine that conversation with a “Sucks to be you!” look on the representative’s face, and you’d have a really good idea of how it went down.

Having failed with the first point of contact, I took to Twitter:

The response was very quick, asking me to DM my number so that someone could call me. I sent my number, and a representative called me the next morning. I thought this was getting somewhere, and I was already starting to write this post in my head. My headline (“Social media works!”) needed some work, but it was going to be great.

But not so fast”¦ I told my story to the representative, who looked up the account and told me the same story: “Sorry, it’s against policy.” (At least this time someone was sorry about it). I threw out what would become my standard line throughout this process: “You realize I’m trying to give you more money, right?” But no luck. The conversation ended when the rep told me, “I will ask the upgrades department if there is anything we can do.” Translation: “You’ll never hear from us, ever again.”

After not hearing from the “upgrades department” I sent another DM, and got a call from another rep. Same story. Against policy. “You realize I’m trying to give you more money, right?” Sorry, against policy. I then took it to the next level and told the rep that I will be taking my business to MTN, convinced that this statement would trigger some script alarm somewhere and get me a free ticket to a ride up the “escalation path”. Not so much.

Rep: “Oh. Well that’s not good.” Me: “No, it’s not. Anything you want to do about that?” Rep: “Well, this is our policy. Can’t be changed.” Me: “You don’t want to tell someone that I’m about to take my business elsewhere?” Rep: “I’ll make a note in the system.”

At that point I gave up and decided to wait until I am eligible for an upgrade. That decision lasted about 3 days. I decided to give it one last shot, and tweeted Vodacom’s CEO:

And this is where the story gets boring, in a good way. Pieter Uys tweeted me back (in my first language, which means he looked at my profile and thought before responding). 4 hours later I got a call to say we can do the upgrade. End of story. No questions, no statements about policy. I can do the upgrade = happy customer + more money for Vodacom.

Your Call Is Not That Important To Us

Before moving on to the main point of this article I want to tell another quick story. I’ve been banking with ABSA all my life. I’ve also been unhappy with ABSA all my life, but that’s a story for another day. I recently mentioned ABSA on Twitter and linked to this post. The post got retweeted a few times, and then I got this:

That really interested me. Here is a bank (FNB) that monitors what people are saying about their competitors, and joins the conversation in relevant ways. Notice that he wasn’t pushy, he was merely getting in on the joke. I tweeted back:

I said this would be a short story, so I’ll just say this. One week later someone from FNB was sitting with me, filling out forms to transfer all my accounts from ABSA to FNB. They took care of the whole thing, I didn’t have to fill out a single form. All because of a tweet. And I’m pretty sure ABSA doesn’t even know (or care) that they lost another customer.

It’s All About The People

All customer support revolves around people, processes, and tools.

CRM and community tools like Salesforce, Get Satisfaction, and Twitter give support reps the means to communicate with customers. Processes set guidelines for what those interactions should be like. But all of that is useless unless the people doing the support understand and live out the culture of the organization. The ease of establishing that culture also depends a great deal on the support channel used.

Synchronous, 1:1 support like in-store interactions and phone support is expensive and extremely difficult to manage. Unless you’re Zappos and call yourself “a support company that happens to sell shoes”, most companies don’t have a deeply ingrained support culture. So it’s very hard to filter the right processes and culture through to the 1:1 support channels, since they are generally pretty far removed from “management”. They are therefore very rarely empowered to make decisions that might not follow policy, but would be the best thing for the customer (and the company).

I would argue that my early upgrade situation is a good example of this. That representative in the store should have been empowered to ignore policy and upgrade me on the spot. It’s not her fault that she’s not allowed to do that, it’s just the way it is.

On the other hand, asynchronous, 1:many support like live chat, online forums, and social media platforms are much cheaper, and I would argue also easier to manage from a support culture perspective. You’re able to set appropriate guidelines (more on that later), and in general the people who manage those channels have a much more direct path to different resolution scenarios (and therefore more decision-making power).

All this to say that I am not upset any more about my bad experiences in the store and initially on the phone. Because I recognize how incredibly difficult it is to nurture a true culture of customer-centric support. And to find that balance between empowering everyone in the company to break policy when they feel it’s needed, while still having enough process in place so you don’t give away control of your short-term and long-term business strategy.

I don’t have an immediate solution for this, but I want to write about it because I believe it’s a very real problem that a lot of companies are struggling with. Especially now that social media support channels are getting so much adoption.

Lessons In Customer Service

Even though I don’t have the perfect answer, I do want to spend a little time discussing some recommendations I have for better customer service, based on my recent experiences with FNB and Vodacom.

1. Understand what engagement really means

There is no substitute for authenticity. When Pick n Pay asks what I’m going to be doing today, it doesn’t feel like real engagement. Why would I want to tell a supermarket that? When Vodacom sends me the scripted answer “I heard about the problem you experienced”, that tells me they didn’t really take the time to think about the response when sending it (“Well, of course you heard about it, I sent you a tweet!”).

When FNB joins a conversation in a natural way, or when the CEO of Vodacom responds to me by name - that’s engagement. It’s such a simple rule: read, think, respond like a human.

2. Web governance is essential

Web governance “defines decision-making processes for the web, and sets policies and standards for web content, design, and technology””in a way that respects subject-matter expertise” (from Web Governance: Become An Agent of Change). Defining user-centered standards for every touch point with an organization is enormously important to those who want to succeed, and it’s not getting enough attention at all.

One part of web governance that needs more attention in particular is content strategy, which “plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content” (see The Discipline of Content Strategy for more). Among other things it defines the tone and language and underlying principles for talking to customers. Every company should do this before they open their Twitter account or create a Facebook page. (Btw, if you’re in South Africa and need help with stuff like this, talk to Kerry-Anne)

How you talk to your customers makes a huge difference to their experience, and if you don’t define a strategy for it, your community will define you and you’ll have no control over it. That’s not a good place to be.

3. Empower support representatives

I want to come back to this. As mentioned earlier, I recognize how difficult it is to walk the line between empowerment and total loss of control. But I think there are ways to test this out as a strategy without giving the whole house away.

Start with one specific department, call center, or representative. Allow them to make some decisions based on what they feel is right for the customer and the company, and see what happens. If they break some rules/policy, ask them why they did it, and follow up with the customer to see how they felt about the exchange.

This kind of empowerment isn’t a binary switch for the whole organization. Start small, test, and see if it might be possible to build a culture that encourages doing The Right Thing.

All’s Well That Ends Well

My story had a happy ending. But I know there are an enormous amount of customer support stories that don’t end that way. The rise of cheaper, more efficient channels for customer support can make experiences better not just for customers who engage in those channels, but for everyone. We can take the lessons from the asynchronous channels and apply them to the 1:1 interactions.

Be authentic, get in on the joke, and break some rules every once in a while. Because they did that, FNB has a new customer and Vodacom didn’t lose one. I think that makes it worth it.

When I lived in Australia there was an ad for Pizza Hut that ran about 5 times a day for over a month. It featured Dougie the delivery guy — always on time, always courteous, always immaculately dressed. As he hands over the pizza and gets his money, he asks, “So… how’s about a tip?”

The customer thinks for a bit, starts closing the door, and then says: “Work hard; be good to your mother.”

No, you’re right, it’s not a very funny ad. Nevertheless the words have stuck in my head for over a decade now. Because I realise that in life, as in business, these might be the only two non-negotiable rules we all need to adhere to in order to be successful at what we do. Work hard. Be good to your mother.

Work hard

I recently made the mistake of using the hasthag #leadership in a tweet. I immediately got 5 auto-follows, and they all fit the same profile:

• Their bios all had some version of the term “leadership coach” in it.
• They all had more than 20,000 followers, and they followed almost exactly the same number of people themselves. (This is, of course, because they auto-follow everyone who mentions the word “leadership”, and automatically unfollows that person if they don’t follow back in about 3-4 days)
• They all tweet excessively, usually through API’s that generate random “inspirational” quotes every few minutes.

They basically automated their social media presence, and fine, that works for them. But that doesn’t inspire me. Mitch Joel says the following in a brilliant post called Wanting Something:

In the end, the majority of the answer is not about the talent or the ability to pull a thought together, it’s about the commitment. The blank screen does not care… it’s agnostic. If you write, good for you. If you don’t, good for you. That being said, if you keep at it… If you use these platforms to think deeply about what you’re about and why you think your industry is the way it is, then slowly over time you’ll find your groove and your talent will shine.

Sadly, most people want it fast and easy. That’s good news for those who are truly committed to it, because they’re the ones who actually get what they want.

Or, as Dave Duarte says in The Ultimate Social Media Strategy is Not Having One:

Ultimately, social media is not just a set of technologies to be mastered, it is a cultural reality to be engaged with. It promises to expose the corrupt and reveal the extraordinary, and if nothing else it is guaranteed to keep us on our toes. It is chaotic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. So the best social media strategy, then, is not a strategy at all, it is to be purposeful, ethical, and transparent and let our communications and behaviours flow from that.

Those are the people I admire, and the ones I want to follow on Twitter and in life. The ones who show up every day, work hard to get better at what they do, and don’t look for shortcuts.

Be good to your mother

Well, not just your mother, but everyone around you. Be nice. There really is no excuse to be rude to people on Twitter or elsewhere on the web. But of course, you only have to spend 2 minutes reading comments on YouTube to give up the dream of a civil Internet forever.

In a great post on commenters online, Dmitri Fadeyev quotes the following Thomas More passage from Utopia:

Ther’s a rule in the Council that no resolution can be debated on the day that it’s first proposed. All discussion is postponed until the next well-attended meeting. Otherwise someon’s liable to say the first thing that comes into his head, and then start thinking up arguments to justify what he has said, instead of trying to decide what’s best for the community. That type of person is quite prepared to sacrifice the public to his own prestige, just because absurd as it may sound, h’s ashamed to admit that his first idea might have been wrong””when his first idea should have been to think before he spoke.

If only we could follow this rule before we reply/comment, the web would be such a nice neighborhood. Sure, it would probably be less interesting as well. And maybe I’m getting old, but I’d actually prefer nice at this point.

By the way, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticize where it’s appropriate. It just means we should be respectful when we do it. As Mike Monteiro says in Giving Better Design Feedback:

Good feedback is not synonymous with positive feedback. If something isn’t working for you, tell the design team as early as possible. Will they be hurt? Not if they are professionals. A good designer will argue for their solution, and then will know when to let go.

By all means, be respectful, but don’t hold back in order to spare an individual’s feelings. Taking criticism is part of the job description. The sooner they know, the sooner they can explore other paths.

So make this your motto for a week or two, and seek out those who do the same. Who knows, maybe a nice Internet is out there after all.

I like Google+. I like it because it’s clean and well-designed. I like it because it feels fresh - like moving into a new neighborhood after the one you came from got taken over by fake farms and endless profile picture changes. But most of all I like it because it’s quiet.

Since it’s in limited Beta it means it’s still mostly populated by early adopters. So I can interact with brands like Mashable and Smashing Magazine and feel like I’m part of the conversation - something you can’t really do on Twitter and Facebook with mass-brands like that.

This thing is going to be huge

But alas, this will probably not last. Sooner or later the floodgates will open, and before you know it the once pristine Google+ neighborhood will once again get overrun and fall prey to the meaningless graffiti that also transformed Facebook from social network to chaotic metaverse. Rocky Agrawal sums it perfectly in When Google Circles Collide:

[Google+] doesn’t do anything to solve the biggest problem with social networks today: increasing the signal to noise ratio.

So the masses will descend, and we’ll be back to hunting for pockets of information among the endless streams of data. I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

Well, maybe it won’t be such a big deal

I could be wrong. The smart money might actually be on betting that Google+ never even gets enough adoption to become the loud mess that Facebook is today. The reason for that lies in an article that made the rounds a few weeks ago, A Brief History Of The Corporation:

Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.

But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.

What does this mean? Google+ time has to be stolen from Facebook time. And good luck with that, Google. It’s all because we have this stupid thing called limited time:

Each new “well” of attention runs out sooner. Every human mind has been mined to capacity using attention-oil drilling technologies. To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources.

So that’s the real problem for Google. Theirs can’t be an acquisition strategy, because most people who are on a social network are already on Facebook. So it will have to be a migration strategy. As Dare Obasanjo put it:

For Google+ to be successful it means people will need to find enough utility in the site that it takes away from their usage of Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps even replaces one of these sites in their daily routine. So far it isn’t clear why any regular person would do this.

Google+ wants Circles to be the thing that convinces users to switch. They’re betting that enough users will want to share different things with different groups of people that they’re willing to give up their networks and start a new one. I just don’t think that’s a strong enough argument. Coming back to Agrawal’s point: the real problem is how to get better signal out of the noise of social networks. That’s a need that no one has filled yet.

There’s a parallel to the tablet market here. Trying to compete with the iPad is absolutely futile - you will lose. Instead, HP has a very smart strategy with their TouchPad:

HP acknowledged Appl’s dominance in the tablet market, but said Apple wasn’t its target with the TouchPad.

“We think ther’s a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs,” said Kerris. “This market is in it’s infancy and there is plenty of room for both of us to grow.”

They looked for a gap in the market, and they’re working actively to fill it. So it’s certainly not impossible that enough people migrate to Google+ for Metcalfe’s Law to kick in and we start to see some real network utility. But it’s going to be a tough sell unless they find that real gap in the market.

So which one is it?

Which way do I want it go? I’m on the fence. For now I’m enjoying the peace and quiet in the new neighborhood. But that can also get boring pretty quickly. So I want my cake and eat it too. I want Google+ to scale and at the same time figure out how to solve the signal to noise problem in social media. Is that too much to ask?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of humility in design. About a month ago David Gillis said the following in a great article for UX Magazine:

When it comes to designing experiences, cultivating a humble approach is absolutely essential. The sheer complexity of the design challenges we face demands open-mindedness - a willingness to test and modify assumptions, to make mistakes and be proven wrong.

Humility is about knowing what you don’t know, and when it comes to dynamic, interdependent, multi-platform systems, there are an awful lot of unknowns.

And then there’s this tweet by a good friend that’s been on my mind for a while now:

Ain’t that the truth.

But let’s also clarify: I’m talking about true humility here. Not the “Oh, I’m so humbled by your praise so let me retweet it to all my followers” humility. I’m talking about the humility that comes from realising that Design is about meeting user needs, that it’s a study of human behaviour so if any of us want to call ourselves experts at it we are sorely mistaken.

I didn’t think that a medieval monk could teach us much about design, but I recently stumbled on a quote by Thomas Kempis that brought this whole concept home for me:

A true understanding and humble estimate of oneself is the highest and most valuable of all lessons.

Should you see another person openly doing evil, or carrying out a wicked purpose, [or launch a really bad website,] do not on that account consider yourself better than him, for you cannot tell how long you will remain in a state of grace.

We are all frail; consider none more frail than yourself.

I don’t think this means we should stop being critical when we see bad design. But I do think it means we need to criticise with the aim to contribute to the design community, not break it down. If we learned anything from the Dustin Curtis “Dear American Airlines” story, it’s that we cannot possibly know why people make some of the design decisions they make.

So let’s help each other out, is all I’m saying. Because one day you might put a bad design out there, and all you’ll ask for then is a little advice and lots of grace.

Last week I delivered a new talk at a Cape Town SPIN meeting (the Software Process Improvement Network). While I was preparing for it I thought of a working title for my next talk:

A talk about preparing a presentation for a talk about preparing a presentation for a talk.

You see, I have a love/hate relationship with new talks. I love delivering a new talk, and I love getting feedback on what worked and what didn’t. I love making it better. And I hate pretty much every moment leading up to delivering it.

But this is, of course, the problem with the creative process.  It’s blood, sweat, and tears, most of the way. Rands recently wrote a post entitled A Hard Thing is Done by Figuring Out How to Start. He writes:

Those who do not understand creativity think it has a well-defined and measurable on/off switch, when in reality it’s a walking dial with many labels. One label reads “Morose and apathetic” and another reads “Unexpectedly totally cranking it out”. This dial sports shy, mischievous feet - yes, feet - that allow it to simply walk away the moment you aren’t paying attention, and each time it walks away, it finds a new place to hide.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life wondering where that damned dial is hiding.

He goes on to explain how random moments of discovery and seemingly useless tangents are all part of the preparation process, and that we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves when we’re struggling to get started. He closes with this:

W’re addicted to quick fixes, top ten lists, and four-hour work weeks, but the truth is - if it wasn’t hard, everyone would be doing it and a hard thing is never done by reading a list or a book or an article about doing it. A hard thing is done by figuring out how to start.

You’ve been spending a lot of time thinking the result is what matters. You have a bright and shiny goal in mind that is distracting you with its awesomeness. It is this allure of awesomeness that is the continued reason why you keep searching around your house looking for that mischievous walking dial.

My guarantee is that what is going to make this bright and shiny thing awesome isn’t finishing. It’s all the little, unexpected details you discover trying to start. It’s all the small pieces of unexplainable execution that will not only make it yours, but also continue to teach you how you get things done. And when you’re done, you’ll discover finishing, while cathartic, is just a good reason to go start something else.

I’ve absolutely found that to be true. My basic process for preparing a new talk is as follows:

• First, I spend weeks researching and saving articles to Delicious.
• Then I live in FreeMind for a few days, building the outline of the talk.
• I then proceed to tell myself I’m ready to roll, so I  spend another week or more getting all those thoughts onto slides.
• This is followed by several nights of bad sleep as I start seeing the holes in my thinking, and struggle to find the right words/pictures/length/style/order.
• And then, suddenly and without fail, about two nights before the talk, I hit Flow. That “mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.” Things suddenly fit, I spend 10 minutes re-ordering slides and it suddenly all makes sense. From that point on, the process is an absolute joy.

Why is Flow so hard to find? Or is it meant to be hard to find, because the creative process requires struggle as its fuel?

Whatever the reason, Rands helped me relax a little bit and panic less during the beginning phases of the creative process. Because all those starts, stops, and anxiety eventually come together to collide in the ultimate high that happens when things just… flow.