Ian@work

Have an experience

Creating a retail store is very different than creating an experience.


Technorati Tags: free+city+supershop, retail

Winer v. Scoble

Dave Winer and Robert Scoble discuss innovation. Rather, Winer addresses innovation while Scoble occasionally confuses "innovative" with "cool" and "better". While the back and forth is interesting, the discussion bogs down because Winer's talking about big-picture innovation, while Scoble often focuses on incremental improvements as kinda, maybe, sorta innovation.

The real meat of the article is whether Microsoft can drive innovation and fight off irrelevance. Sorry, but improving Windows error messages isn't the kind of "innovation" that will save them.


Technorati Tags: innovation, wsj

Death of IA?

Yesterday I started a long post on the IA deathwatch, but as I wrote it my thoughts kept winding around to why information architecture is so difficult to sell to site owners. I regularly talk to Web designers and agencies that exclaim, "Nobody wants to pay for IA!"

That's not surprising, when you consider that at the not-so-bleeding edge of Web design (where most companies live) a lot of what is presented as IA hasn't changed in 10 years:

Designers have shown site owners a linear, hierarchical arrangement of information, instead of  illustrating relationships between users and the information they own and access. In one case, I ran across a firm that assigned creating site maps to the administrative assistant. That's not to say that some sites can't be adequately defined in this way, particularly if it's a micro site with limited content and interactivity, but too often this approach is applied to much more complex sites. It's part of the "start designing the home page and work our way down" mentality.

A more sophisticated approach to modeling processing and information pays off. It makes the user experience better. Happier users (people) are more likely to use the site, complete transactions -- if that's the goal -- and tell others. Those are the kinds of benefits that have to be explained, or better yet, demonstrated.

I've recently finished a couple of projects where IA has been an integral part of site development. One of the more satisfying aspects of both projects was the way our IA work drew site owners into the process and gave them, well, a sense of ownership. Rather than seeing a hierarchy followed by a homepage, they were drawn into a discussion about how people think about themselves, others, and the information they use. It turned an abstract process into something really tangible, and informed other discussions -- about functionality, look and feel -- in some valuable ways.

IA might change identities (per Bokardo), but if it does I hope that part of the change is making its function and outcome more obvious to the people who pay for it.

A more efficient me

My big concern right now is finding enough time in the day. Maybe that's why I'm drawn back to 43Folders, a site that reminds me of how to GTD.


Technorati Tags: gtd, 43folders, david+allen

Marketing Trends

Interested in where marketing is headed in the next 12-18 months?

The concept of "customer engagement" has deservedly taken some heat because it's so vaguely defined. However, Gallup has taken what seems like a reasonable stab at quantifying engagement.


Technorati Tags: customer+engagement, gallup

Oh, about joining in

MTV was a cultural influence. Was. Now, as this post clearly illustrates, it reaches far fewer people than YouTube and MySpace. Why? Two way communication matters more than content.

Here's an idea: You stand a better chance of influencing your industry if you converse and collaborate with the people (customers, vendors, journalists, etc.) in and around it, than if you broadcast your messages and content.


Technorati Tags: conversations, content, communication

"...messing with your brand"

The evolution of brand/customer relationships, on the Internet:

Brands talk to customers > customers talk back (sorta, when they feel like it) > customers talk about brands, to other customers > brands begin to get it, and join in

This post at Three Minds deals mainly with step three -- customer to customer communication. Customers are exchanging tips about DIY items created at Starbucks and McDonalds:

"Counter-culture and the public's desire to stand on equal footing with consumer brands are behind the trend-of-the-moment: how-to's on scamming major corporations."

I can be a cynic, too, but this statement misses the main point in its rush to point out that customers can be cheapskates. Customers who make Ghetto Lattes are taking online practices into retail settings -- in this case, creating their own mashups out of available products. It's a small way to inject some creativity into environments that are recognizably artificial, and turn brands that might otherwise feel out of scale into collaborators. And if that makes customers feel better about those brands, this kind of thing should be tacitly encouraged. Right?


Technorati Tags: starbucks, mcdonalds, three+minds, mashup, collaboration

Distill...

The more you try to do in a demo or presentation, the greater the probability that something will go wrong.

As an observer of numerous presentations I've noticed that often the biggest glitches often seem connected to content or demonstrations that are tangential to The Big Idea the presenter is trying to communicate. A little more rigor in the editing process might have saved the presenter embarrassment.

It's easy to fall in love with our ideas -- after all, they're our children, right? -- and let them slip into presentations when they're not essential to the main message. It's much harder to remain critical, particularly when a deadline looms, and ask whether a particular slide, demonstration, media clip or comment matters in the context of the overall presentation. Almost always, the right answer is to be critical, stay on point, distill the presentation to its essence, and not give yourself opportunities to obscure your message, or worse, overshadow it with a screw up.

More from Presentation Zen.

 
Technorati Tags: presentation, demo

Netflix Prize

Netflix wants to improve the accuracy of movie recommendations by 10%. What do they do? Hire consultants? Programmers? Team up with a university? No, in a new twist on the practice of crowdsourcing, they offer a $1 million grand prize to the first team to succeed.

An interesting idea that scored a publicity coup in the bargain.

More: Chris Anderson explains why more accurate DVD recommendations are worth $1 million.

Technorati Tags: Netflix, crowdsourcing

Defining Web 2.0

When the term Web 2.0 comes up in conversation I notice that it often is a placeholder for a not-very-well-defined set of principles and technologies. The net from this is that the discussions can be pretty nebulous.

Along comes Pew, which tries to be helpful and make sense of it all.


Technorati Tags: Web2.0