Review of Free, by Chris Anderson (long)
24 January 2010
Review of Free, by Chris Anderson (2009, Hyperion).
“Innovation,“ in the broadest sense of the term, comes in different forms. Sure, there is product or technology innovation. But there is also process innovation, design innovation, organizational innovation, and business model innovation. It turns out that the latter—business model innovation—actually proves to be the most disruptive (if we want to talk about disruptive innovation). As Mark Johnson and colleagues conclude in a recent Harvard Business Review article [1]:
Truly transformative businesses are never exclusively about the discovery and commercialization of a great technology. Their success comes from enveloping the new technology in an appropriate, powerful business model.
But not all business models are created equal: some prove to disrupt more than others. In his book The Silver Lining [2], Scott Anthony argues that companies should embrace low-cost products and services to connect with budget conscious customers and fend off attacks from competitors. He advises us to “learn to love the low end,“ referring to business models that target under-served customers with lower budgets. He writes:
There is a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Companies that follow the tenets of disruptive innovation can dramatically increase their chances of reaching that fortune. (p. 147)
Anthony then presents a framework for large corporations to innovate the low-end of the market, where disruptive innovation occurs most.
Chris Anderson, author of the best seller The Long Tail, explores the lowest of the low-end business models there is in his latest book, Free. After all, there’s nothing more disruptive than offering something for free. Anderson explains early in his book:
Today, we know that the most disruptive way to enter a market is to vaporize the economics of existing business models. Charge nothing for a product that the incumbents depend on for their profits. The world will beat a path to your door and you can then sell them something else. (p. 43)
“Vaporize”—that’s a good word to describe the effect free can have on markets. And throughout the book, Anderson show that free is not only disruptive, but also that there’s a fortune to be made.
The Free Lunch Revisited
The concept of free isn’t new, Anderson reminds us right from the outset. We get free samples of food a deli; or, credit cards offer us the first year of card use for free; or, we may get 33% more laundry detergent free in a promotional offer. We already know about free.
Or, consider the loss leader model, the classic example of which is the story of Gillette razor blades. The Gillette figured out that they can make more money selling blades to customers over their lifetimes than with a one-time sale of the razor itself. So the razor is practically given away, thereby creating a much more valuable market to sell blades to.
Anderson carefully details these and other kinds of free that have been around for over a hundred years. While some of this feels familiar and obvious, his examples are fascinating. And, as usually, Anderson does a great job at packaging and explaining his ideas for ready consumption by the reader. It’s eye-opening to learn about just how many different forms free can have.
Free At Last?
In the new economy wrought on by the online, digital world, we’re experiencing a new kind of free. It’s precisely this new type of free that is a central thesis of the book. Anderson writes:
It the atoms economy, which is to say most of the stuff around us, things tend to get more expensive over time. But in the bits economy, which is the online world, things get cheaper. The atoms economy is inflationary, while the bits economy is deflationary.
The twentieth century was primarily an atoms economy. The twentyfirst century will be equally a bits economy. Anything free in the atoms economy must be paid for by something else, which is why so much traditional free feels like bait and switch—it’s you paying, one way or another. But free in the bits economy can be really free, with money often taken out of the equation altogether. People are rightly suspicious of free in the atoms economy, and rightly trusting of free in the bits economy. Intuitively, they understand the difference between the two economies, and why free works so well online. (p. 12)
Online there’s no “paying later“ effect. There really is such a thing as a free lunch, or so it would seem.
Note that free isn’t just about advertising. On the contrary, Anderson explores a range of ways that products and services can be free without advertisements. Sure, advertising keeps a lot things free—from TV to web services. But there’s more to free in the new digital economy, as Anderson sees it.
A centerpiece of this new paradigm is the “freemium” business model. This model is becoming increasingly popular, particularly with web-based services, where the basic service is given away for free while charging for a premium service. Think Flickr, LinkedIn, and Skype.
The freemium model isn’t just about giving away free samples. It’s not like getting just enough chocolate or perfume or whatever the manufacturer is giving away for a single use. Instead, with digital products, you pretty much can get the whole thing.
More importantly, the ratios of usage are reversed compared to freebies in the physical world. Anderson calls this reversal the 5-percent rule: 5 percent of users support all the rest.
In the freemium model, that means for every user who pays for the premium version of the site, nineteen others get the basic free version. The reason this works is that the cost of serving the nineteen is close enough to zero to call it nothing. (p. 27)
And that’s the real crux of the matter: treating something that approaches zero cost as if it were free. Storage space on computers is so inexpensive, for instance, providers should just give it away, or so Anderson would claim. That’s why Google’s Gmail accounts, for one, offer nearly 8 gigabytes of space to save emails for free. (The cost per gigabyte is currently measured in cents—somewhere between $0.15 – $0.20 per gigabyte—and falling). Anticipate the cheap, the author advises us.
Anderson doesn’t consider any of this a passing trend. Instead, he views free as the way of the future, particularly for digital products:
In the digital realm you can try to keep free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.
And this gravitational force can change entire industries. The newspaper and the music industries seem to be on the chopping block first. Others will follow.
Free Beer Tomorrow
In the end Anderson is a realist. He knows that somewhere, someone is paying for free services. In all of the models examined in his book, there is always someone funding it. There’s just a huge difference to previously models of free in how the costs are shared:
What’s changing, however, is that those costs are moving from the mostly “hidden“ (the small matter of the beer you must buy for that lunch) to the “distributed“ (somebody’s paying, but it’s probably not you; indeed, the costs may be so distributed that we individually don’t feel them at all.) (p. 217)
Consider Wikipedia. We all use it, and someone pays for it. Servers and electricity cost money, after all. Apart from a donation, your contribution to Wikipedia comes indirectly by supporting companies that support Wikipedia, like Sun or Google. So the costs get so distributed, they are essentially non-existent to a wide majority of the users of the service.
But Wait, There’s More
In Free, Anderson also debunks myths about Stewart Brand’s famous statement that “information wants to be free.” This is frequently misquoted and taken out of context. Brand never intended to imply that all content should simply be free. On the contrary, looking at what Brand originally said he implies the opposite:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
The first part—about information wanting to be expensive—is all but completely left out of most popular discussions of free content in the digital world. Yet it has important implications, particularly for companies trying to compete with free services.
And while free models can certainly be disruptive, Anderson also reminds us that introducing a free product doesn’t necessarily make that given market collapse. Premium brands have known this for a long time. Quality, satisfaction, brand loyalty, trust, credibility—these are also reasons that people are willing to pay more money for a product.
Kevin Kelly also explores similar factors in an insightful posting entitled “Better Than Free.“ [3] From his studies of the network economy, he identified eight types of qualities of products and services that trump free. He calls these “generatives,“ or attributes that must be grown and can’t be copied easily. Kelly’s generatives that are better than free are:
- Immediacy: Receiving products and services the moment they become available is something worth paying for. The opening night of a movie costs of lot more than a rental DVD of that same movie a year later.
- Personalization: Products that are custom made to your needs are generally worth more.
- Interpretation: Understanding information often comes at a price. As the old joke goes, the software may be free but the manual costs $10,000.
- Authenticity: Getting a certified original is worth paying for in many instances. People may be willing to pay for bug-free, reliable and warranted products, even though a comparable knock-off may be cheap or free.
- Accessibility: People are willing to pay for storage, access, and organization of their things, even in a completely free economy.
- Embodiment: The form in which a product or service is presented can make a big difference in its value. You may pay a considerable price to see your favorite band live although you own all of their music.
- Patronage: Some audiences may want to reward the work of artists, musicians, and authors, among others. Radiohead’s release of the album In Rainbows is one example. ArtistShare.com has based its entire business on this effect.
- Findability: Just because something is free doesn’t necessarily help people find it—in fact it may hinder people discovering it. Being found can be extremely valuable, as the folks in the SEO business are well aware.
While free can indeed vaporize markets, all hope is not lost. If the products you sell can be copied and re-distributed easily, Kelley would advise to start looking at one or more the about attributes as part your business model.
May I Have Your Attention, Please?
The twentieth century, Anderson argues, not only started to embrace the concept of free, it also saw the arrival of abundance. Everything from electronics to cars to information is now so abundant, we take it for granted. What’s more, the “Age of Abundance,” as Anderson calls it, has driven extraordinary social and economic change. Consider this example the author offers:
When I was a kid, hunger was one of the main problems of poverty in America. Today, it’s obesity. Something dramatic has changed in the world of agriculture in the past four decades—we got much better at growing food. A technology-driven revolution turned a scarce commodity into an abundant one. And in that story lie clues to what can happen when any major resource shifts from scarcity to abundance. (p. 45)
Citing Herbert Simon’s rule of economics, Anderson makes another key point in his book: “Every abundance creates a new scarcity.” This is the heart of “freeconomics,” as he affectionately calls it, and how we ultimately can find fortune with free. Namely, while treating the abundant things as if they are free, you must simultaneously find the resulting scarcity. That’s where the money is to be made.
In an information-rich world, the scarcity is attention. A person’s interest in a given matter is worth money. Attention, then, becomes the new currency. In this light, Anderson re-casts Stewart Brand’s quote (above) about information wanting to be free as such:
Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive. (p. 97)
Organizations looking to earn profits by providing information are advised to find the scarce information and capitalize on that.
Achtung, Baby!
The consequences of too much information are dire, results in a lack of focus and attention. Paul Hemp explores the relationship between attention and information overload in a recent Harvard Business Review article. [4] He writes:
So it’s a lot of stuff [i.e., information], but what precisely is the problem? Well, the chorus of whining (punctuated by my own discordant moans) apparently has some validity. Researchers say that the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives, combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every e-mail message, can deplete and demoralize you. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and expert on attention-deficit disorders, argues that the modern workplace induces what he calls “attention deficit trait,” with characteristics similar to those of the genetically based disorder. Author Linda Stone, who coined the term “continuous partial attention” to describe the mental state of today’s knowledge workers, says she’s now noticing, get this, “e-mail apnea”: the unconscious suspension of regular and steady breathing when people tackle their e-mail.
There are even claims that the relentless cascade of information lowers people’s intelligence. A few years ago, a study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard reported that the IQ scores of knowledge workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls fell from their normal level by an average of 10 points, twice the decline recorded for those smoking marijuana, several commentators wryly noted.
This doesn’t mean you can turn off Outlook and smoke a joint at work. But it does underlie a scarcity in an information-rich environment: your attention.
Hemp goes on to present some interesting statistics from a survey on Intel employees to demonstrate just how distracted people can get from information overload. For instance, knowledge workers average nearly 20 hours a week managing email. They may also turn to email 50 to 100 times per day. Sadly, though, employees consider only one in three emails to be necessary.
By Anderson’s logic in Free, companies looking to innovate the information industry would be better served solving those customer problems rather than offering more information.
Recommendation
Overall, Free is a detailed look at forward-looking business models, particularly in online, information-rich contexts. But Anderson doesn’t just touch on digital products. He looks everything from free silverware to free DVRs to free bikes. His sidebars on these and other topics are quite compelling. For instance: How can air travel be free? How can a university education be free? How can a car be free? Get Free to find out. It’s quite fascinating.
Free is well written and well researched. As expected, Anderson carefully dissects the free business model with surgical precision. Discussions include everything from the history of free (chapter 3) to the psychology of free (chapter 4) to explanations of “freeconomics” (chapters 11-16). This book should prove to be of interest to a broad audience—not just MBA-types in marketing positions or folks deciding on product price points. It’s recommended for anyone who designs, creates, and sells products, online and offline.
Quotes From The Book
“Therein lies the paradox of Free: People are making a lot of money charging nothing.“ (p. 3)
“Twentieth-first-century Free is different from twentieth-century Free. Somewhere in the transition from atoms to bits, a phenomenon that we thought we understood was transformed.“Free“ become Free…The older critics, who had grown up with twentieth-century Free, were rightly suspicious: Surely “free“ is nothing of the sort—we all pay sooner or later. Not only is it not new, but it’s the oldest marketing gimmick in the book. When you hear “free,“ reach for your wallet. The younger critics had a different response: “Duh!“ This is the Google Generation, and they’ve grown up online simply assuming that everything digital is free.” (p. 5)
“It’s as if our brains were wired to raise a flag every time we’re confronted with a price. This is the “is it worth it?” flag. If you charge a price, any price, we are forced to ask ourselves if we really want to open our wallets. But if the price is zero, that flag never goes up and the decision just got easier.” (p. 59)
“So from a consumer’s perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely difference business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that’s the difference between a great market and none at all” (p. 63)
“This is one of the negative implications of Free. People often don’t care as much about things they don’t pay for, and as a result they don’t think as much about how they consume them. Free can encourage gluttony, hoarding, thoughtless consumption, waste, guilt, and greed. We take stuff because it’s there, not necessarily because we want it. Charging a price, even a very low price, can encourage much more responsible behavior.” (p. 67)
“…Free is almost always a choice. If you don’t offer it explicitly, others will typically find a way to introduce it themselves. When the marginal cost of reproduction is zero, the barriers to Free are mostly psychological—fear of breaking the law, a sense of fairness, an individual’s calculation on the value of his or her time, perhaps a habit of paying or ignorance that a free version can be obtained. Sooner or later, most producers in the digital realm will find themselves competing with Free.“ (p. 72)
“The problem is a classic one in Free. It’s easier for the newcomers than for incumbents. That’s not just because the incumbents have a revenue stream that they’re in danger of cannibalizing. It’s also that they have a lot more users, and the costs of serving millions of customers can be astronomical.“ (p. 144)
“The way to compete with free is to move past the abundance to find the adjacent scarcity. If software is free, sell support. If phone calls are free, sell distant labor and talent that can be reached by those free calls (the Indian outsourcing model in a nutshell). If your skills are being turned into a commodity that can be done by software (hello, travel agents, stockbrokers, and realtors), then move upstream to more complicated problems that still require the human touch. Not only can you compete with Free in that instance, but the people who need these custom solutions are often the ones most willing to pay highly for them.“ (p. 231)
“Ten principles of abundance thinking:
- If it’s digital, sooner or later it’s going to be free.
- Atoms would like to be free, too, but they’re not so pushy about it.
- You can’t stop free.
- You can make money from free.
- Redefine your market.
- Round down. If something is heading to zero, free is just a matter of when, not if.
- Sooner or later you will compete with free.
- Embrace waste.
- Free make other things more valuable.
- Manage for abundance, not scarcity. “ (pp. 241-243)
[1] Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, Henning Kagermann, “Reinventing Your Business Model.” Harvard Business Review (Dec 2008).
[2] Scott Anthony, The Silvering Lining. Harvard Business Press, 2009.
[3] Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Free.“ Blog post part of The Technium (Jan 2008). http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php
[4] Paul Hemp, “Death by Information Overload.” Harvard Business Review (Sept 2009).
Concept Videos for Tablet Readers
3 January 2010
Luke Wroblewski posted three videos of concepts for tablet readers. I had already seen the Time/SI video, but not the others.
Sure, the Kindle has made leaps and bounds already, pushing with it a whole market of similar readers trying to catch up. But there is still a long way to go, I believe.
I was particularly stuck with the video from Bonnier demonstrating their Mag+ device. It’s worth checking out.
The thing I particularly like about this research is their starting point. The folks at Bonnier state right up front that it’s about understanding the overall information experience first. They say:
The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories.
From the video, it seems they’ve designed the concept with close attention to the details of offline reading experiences. For instance, they mention the importance of the physicality of offline magazines. Covers, for one, do more than just communicate a title–they are visual icons we identify with. So they’ve designed the notion of a “cover” into the device
Another thought I quite like is the notion of completedness, or knowing where you are in the magazine and how much more you have to go. Offline, we get a sense of this as we flip through magazines; that is, we can feel if we’re at the beginning or end of a publication. So the researchers added information about position in the magazine to the Mag+ reader to account for this.
Note that accounting for elements of offline reading experiences doesn’t necessarily mean reproducing them one-to-one. The researchers at Bonnier get this. For instance, they criticize the sometimes-seen interaction of turning pages by pulling the corner of the screen and then having the “page turn” animate. Instead, they prefer the more digital-medium-ready interaction of scrolling.
Assuming many of the concepts explored in the videos are realizable–from technical, business and experiential standpoints–the forms of reading experiences represented in these three video can change publishing as we know it. It’ll be interesting to follow how tablet readers develop in the next few years.
Don Norman on Ethnography and Innovation
23 December 2009
Don Norman has a provocative article on his site about ethnography and design research. See “Technology First, Needs Last“. He gets right to the point, summarizing his basic premise in the first sentence:
I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.
He goes on:
Myth: Use ethnographic observational studies to discover hidden, unmet needs. To achieve major conceptual breakthroughs, we should do ethnographic field study to understand the hidden unmet needs of our potential customers. Right or wrong? It all sounds logical: study people. Discover hidden, unmet needs. Fulfill those needs, and leap ahead of the competition, producing yet another wondrous advance.
[…]
But the real question is how much all this [design research] helps products? Very little. In fact, let me try to be even more provocative: although the deep and rich study of people’s lives is useful for incremental innovation, history shows that this is not how the brilliant, earth-shattering, revolutionary innovations come about.
He claims to have done some kind of investigation to arrive at this opinion:
I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen. New conceptual breakthroughs are invariably driven by the development of new technologies
Interestingly enough, I had just finished reading an article in the Harvard Business Review called “The Innovator’s DNA” (Dec 2009) by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen. After extensive research of top executives, the authors identify five key qualities that separate innovative leaders from the non-so-innovative leaders: associating, questioning, experimenting, and networking, and observing. Regarding the latter—observing—Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, has this to say:
Often the surprises that lead to new business ideas come from watching other people work and live their lives.
A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Proctor and Gamble, is generally seen as a leading innovator amongst executives. He writes about how direct observation of customer behavior has lead to greater innovation at P&G in his book The Game Changer:
P&G spends more time living with people in their homes, shopping with them in stores, and being part of their lives. This total immersion leads to richer consumer insights, which helps identify innovation opportunities that are often missed by traditional research.
You’ve probably heard short sound bites like this before. For sure, such snippets alone don’t disprove Norman’s thesis. But if you look around a little more, you’ll find other contradictory evidence.
For instance, Indi Young, author of Mental Models, also has a recent posting that is somewhat related to this topic. See “Support Intentions, Not Existing Workflows”. Indi concludes:
When you spend time with people who might become someone you produce a service or a product for, concentrate on finding these underlying intentions. Deliberately jump past the details of how they execute something currently and spend time instead asking them what’s behind this step. What are they trying to accomplish besides the step itself? Frequently, people haven’t really thought past the steps, and your conversation turns into more of a psychotherapy session, helping the person work through the underlying issues and describe them for you. When this happens, you know you’re on the right track. With the results of several conversations like this, you can guide your organization into areas you hadn’t previously considered or been consciously aware of. This direction leads to services and products that support what a person really intends to do and makes their life smoother. And that is a very attractive proposition to most of us.
More formally, consider the results of the study “Ideation for product innovation: What are the best methods?” by Robert Cooper and Scott Edgett (2008, Stage-Gate). Ethnography emerged as the #1 method to foster innovation and creativity in organizations. The authors write:
Ethnography is ranked #1 of all methods among users, with a strong effectiveness score of 6.8 out of 10. (For comparison, the average effectiveness score for all 18 methods is 5.6, with a standard deviation of 0.73; so a score of 6.8 is, relatively speaking, “strong.”) The method provides perhaps the greatest insights and depth of knowledge into users’ unmet and unarticulated needs, applications, and problems of all the ideation approaches we studied, according to users.
Finally, the work of Sarah Miller Caldicott really flies in the face of what Norman is trying to say. She is the author of the book Innovate Like Edison: The Five-Step System for Breakthrough Business Success, co-authored with Michael J. Gelb (Dutton Penguin, 2007), as well as the great-grandniece of Thomas Edison. She did a first-ever analysis of hundreds of thousands of documents in Edison’s collection in Menlo Park, NJ over the course of an intense three-year study.
Caldicott’s recent white paper for Strategyn is directly relevant to the debate of the effectiveness of needs versus technology: “Ideas first or needs-first: What would Edison say?”. In it she writes:
Edison learned a valuable lesson with this failure. He realized that his approach to innovation was somehow faulty. He began reshaping his efforts by redefining what success would need to look like for one of his inventions, and he decided that success was now going to be a function of utility; that is, a function of the ability to satisfy a customer need or a marketplace need. He said, “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
[…]
He recognized that simply bringing hundreds of ideas to market would result in many failures. Being a man who was focused on efficiency and success, failure was an unattractive proposition. Edison realized that by understanding customer needs first, he could invent useful products more efficiently than he could otherwise.
It would also appear that Edison did a type of ethnographic observation in inventing the light bulb:
Edison’s trained teams visited people in their homes and watched how they used their current lighting products— kerosene, whale oil, and gas. The goal was to figure out what consumption chain jobs to consider and how to address them. This process enabled Edison to gain insight into all these critical jobs. From there, Edison worked with numerous employee teams to develop products that would address the consumption chain jobs. Products like the electric circuit, the on-off wall switch, the fuse box, electric meters, and dynamos that could power the entire lighting system were all invented. Edison received over 40 patents for these inventions. Yes, Edison invented the lightbulb, but within three years he also invented the entire system of electrical power distribution, along with the world’s first central power station. That’s fast, even by modern standards.
Here again, Edison’s needs-first approach enabled him to identify a large market and guided his research and development efforts. He was able to come up with a revolutionary lighting solution and address all the consumption chain jobs required to bring this solution to market. Because he kept his focus on exactly what customers needed, he could hone his product development timetable and production timetable very efficiently.
Caldicott concludes:
If your company wants to take a page out of Edison’s innovation playbook, it should start by discarding ideas-first thinking and adopt an effective needs-first approach to innovation. This crucial lesson enabled Edison to pioneer the creation of six industries and lead the United States to a century of prosperity—a feat that has not been duplicated since.
Compare this to Norman’s contention about how Edison worked:
Edison launched his first phonograph company within months of his invention: he never questioned the need.
Overall, it seems other examinations of innovation have proven the exact opposite of what Norman claims in his article. There is indeed a wealth of evidence that people’s needs can and should precede technology. And frankly, Norman’s “examination” seems more of the back-of-the-napkin type with several errors.
But does Norman have a point? Well, I guess it’s always good for us design researchers to step back and question our own practices. But I think there are two key arguments that speak against Norman’s main point:
- First, there much more evidence from much more rigorous studies to suggest that ethnographic techniques and understanding people’s needs has preceded technical invention in the past.
- Second, Norman seems to forget that there are different types of innovation, not just product innovation. There’s also process innovation, organizational innovation, business model innovation, and strategy innovation. The equation isn’t as simple as: research needs, then develop technologies (or vice-versa), as Norman suggests.
I’d actually argue that it’s better to understand customer needs before creating the strategy that allows technologists to start working on a given technology or not. That is: needs > strategy > technology. So needs do precede technology.
Everett Rogers, author of Diffusions of Innovations—the “bible” in innovation diffusion literature—also indicates that needs identification precedes the entire innovation process. In Chapter 4, “The Generation of Innovation,” he outlines six phases, the first of which is “recognizing a problem or need.” He writes:
The innovation-development process often begins with recognition of a problem or need, which stimulates research and development activities designed to create an innovation to solve the problem or need. (p. 137)
And later, in the discussion on “compatibility” as a factor of adoption rates, he writes:
One indication of the compatibility of an innovation is the degree to which it meets a felt need. Change agents seek to determine the needs of their clients and then to recommend innovations that fulfill these needs. Determining felt needs is not a simple matter, however. Change agents must have a high degree of empathy and rapport with their clients in order to assess their needs accurately. Informal probing in interpersonal contacts with individual clients, client advisory committees to change agencies, and surveys of clients are sometimes used to determine needs for innovations. (p. 146)
So innovations that are conceived around user needs from the very beginning (i.e., BEFORE technology) have a higher chance of adoption and therefore a higher chance of success. Norman alludes to Roger’s work saying:
The path of diffusion of innovation has been well studied, well documented. Most radical innovations fail. Those that succeed can take decades before they are successful.
But that’s the point: innovators generally want to increase their chances of succeeding from the beginning, even if only marginally. Needs identification up front helps with that, at least according to Rogers (among others).
Perhaps a quote from Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation, can shed some light onto this whole debate. He says:
Successful innovators spend as much time understanding the people they are designing for, their beliefs, feelings, values, and needs, as they do the technologies they’re using to build innovations, and the book offers the fundamentals on how to do this. So, the superiority of your mousetrap is sure nice in an ivory-tower setting, but if people—customers—can’t see why it’s superior, then the superiority is just your opinion. And sadly, I don’t know anyone who has made millions solely on the superiority of their own opinion.
Ultimately, I believe it’s not an either-or question, nor is it a first-last question. It’s a question of balance. This is what the HBR article “The Innovators DNA” suggests as well as detailed studies like those of Sarah Miller Caldicott. But since technology already gets so much attention, Norman’s basic claim “technology first, needs last” is in the end a more harmful perspective than helpful.
Breadcrumb Navigation continued…
28 November 2009
I recently posted about breadcrumb trails. In a nutshell, breadcrumb trails have gotten a bad rap because, as navigation mechanisms, they aren’t really used that much. At least that’s what some studies have shown.
But we’re starting to see a new type of breadcrumb trail emerging, one that integrates with the main navigation of the site. I point to a couple of examples in that post (above).
Karen pointed a blog post out to me by Geoff Teehan, which in turn points to the Yahoo! Food site. The navigation here is a combination of tabs and breadcrumb trail.
The main navigation changes with your first selection, so you only get a Home tab plus the option(s) you picked. The home tab then provides access to all the top-level categories via a dynamic menu (fly-out menu). The selected node of the breadcrumb (one level down from the homepage) then has a static horiztonal local navigation beneath it.
The screen above shows how it works three levels down with the fly-out menu for the Home tab open. This provides a pretty extensible navigation scheme and can handle a deep IA. Overall, this provides a great deal of focus on the level and topic your are currently viewing, but also allows quick access to all other topics quickly without cluttering the page.
The only thing I was missing was a dynamic menu for all levels (i.e., for the second node in the above screen shot) so you can get to sub-options there too, not just for the Home tab.
Cory Doctorow on Copyright
24 November 2009
David Weinberger interviews Cory Doctorow on copyright and future of books in this podcast:
I pretty much agree with much of what Cory says. I have to admit, though, that I heard the interview at the end of long work day when my mind was already powering down, so I didn’t catch all the subtleties of what was said. Put your thinking caps on and have a listen for yourself.
I’ve had a passive interest in copyright, in general, for quite some time now. One point that Cory hints at, but doesn’t say explicitely, is that copyright law isn’t there to just protect the rights of the creator of a work. It also protects the public’s right to consume and use the copyrighted work. This is generally referred to as fair use. Of course, this isn’t to say anyone can redistribute a work freely as they wish, such as with a digital copy of book online. But it you purchase a work–digital or not–you should be the owner of that work. That’s fair.
Here’s a brief summary of the interview from Daniel Dennis Jones, the producer of the podcase at the Berkman Center:
While you’ll probably be able to find Makers, and Cory’s other books, at the most popular bookstores in the nation – you can also find most of his novels and non fictions books on the web as a free digital download – not only free as in beer, but under a creative commons license so you can feel free to download, remix, and redistribute! While some in the industry say free downloads kill profits, encourage piracy, and destroy respect for copyright – Cory effectively says, bring it on!
So it may have caught some of Cory’s followers by surprise when he came out in support of copyright at the National Reading Summit in Toronto last week. Wait, was he actually supporting the arguments of publishers who fear the death of their industry at the hands of millions of file sharing bibliophiles?
But while many in the publishing industry might argue for copyright restrictions to protect the future of the book from download happy readers, Cory is actually arguing for copyright as a means of protecting the existence of books from the hands of overly litigious publishers.
There is a distinction, he says, between the kind of licensing that publishers use to prevent readers from sharing, copying, or even permanently owning a text – and theview of copyright that would actually safeguard the rights of the reader. And what we learn from the publishing industry in this space can be used in film, music, software, and any other kind of digital media.
Breadcrumb Navigation
10 November 2009
Seeing Breadcrumb Navigation Examined (via The Hot Strudel) reminded me that I’d been meaning to write a post about breadcrumb trails for a while now. The post contains a quite survey of various uses of breadcrumbs. It’s worth a peek.
First of all, here’s what I conclude about breadcrumbs in DWN:
See:
Since then, however, I’ve been see new, innovative uses of breadcrumb trails. In particular, they can be part of the main navigation, as with WalMart:
Or, with the German site www.manufaktum.de the breadcrumb trail is the main navigation:
Unlike WalMart, Manufaktum also allows for direct access to other levels of the nodes of the hierarchy represented in the breadcrumb via a dynamic menu (aka fly-out menu), shown in the image above (open for Leuchten).
Overall, this provides both a great deal of focus to navigation–the breadcrumb shows a single path–but also provides access to the entire site from a single mechanism. Here the breadcrumb isn’t a supplemental type of navigation, but instead is recast as a primary navigation means.
So maybe breadcrumbs aren’t just quite dead yet. It really depends on how they are implemented. Perhaps we’ll see even more innovative uses of the mechanism in the future.
Follow-up Post – European Commission: Design as a driver of user-centred innovation II
31 October 2009
In April 2009 I posted about a European Commision looking at Design (with a capital D) as a driver of innovation. Charlotte Arwidi from this commission has now made public the results of a public survey on the report itself. See the full results of the survey here.
In a nutshell :
“91 percent of responding organisations consider that design is very important for the future competitiveness of the EU economy; 91 percent consider that initiatives in support of design should be taken at EU level.
96 percent think that initiatives in support of design should be an integral part of innovation policy in general, 74 percent think that design should be part of EU innovation policy.”
I’m not sure if the sampling of the survey is good, however. Seems there might have been a high degree of self-selection. So, yes–of course a very high percentage of people coming with a Design background will think that Design is an important part of EU innovation policy.
Still, there are some good take-aways from this latest survey. In particular, when asked about barriers to Design the questionnaire reveals:
“Respondents were asked about the most serious barriers to the better use of design in Europe. Multiple answers were possible. The most important barrier is considered the “lack of awareness and understanding of the potential of design among policy makers” (78 percent of organisations; 76 percent of private persons). The second most important barrier is considered the “lack of knowledge and tools to evaluate the rate of return on design investment” (64 percent of organisations; 62 percent of private persons). The third most important barrier is considered the “lack of awareness and understanding of the potential of design among potential design customers, i.e. private and public organisations”
The least frequently selected barriers are the “lack of designers/design companies with the right skills and/or capacity”, and the “lack of high quality design education in Europe”, indicating that there is not a lack of skilled designers in Europe. This conclusion is however partly contradicted by some respondents who suggest that Europe lacks designers with professional skills such as management, marketing and communication. This is described as a problem for designers in their communication with potential clients. Several respondents added that business managers, in particular in SMEs, do not understand design and that, due to this lack of understanding on both sides, designers and their potential customers “do not speak the same language”.”
Seems there are enough us out there with the appropriate skills, but Designers’ talents aren’t necessarily being used effectively. Hopefully, the commission can make a difference and bring awareness to the potential Design can offer innovation.
All of this, BTW, represents what I believe to be a paradigm shift in innovation. Organizations are shifting (or adding) focus from innovation through technology and operational efficiency to innovation via design and user experience. Let’s just hope Designers can capitalize on the opportunity and get their deserved place at the innovation table.
John Ferrara on Measuring Relevance
6 October 2009
John Ferrara is an expert in online search systems. His recent article in A List Part is one of the first ones I know of outside of the academic literature that takes a systematic look at relevance. See: Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision.
“Relevance” in information retrieval is an old concept. Each year since 1992, information scientists gather at the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) to test and evaluate retrieval methods on large collections of documents. This conference is considered an extension of the Cranfield Experiments, indexing studies started in the 1960s that are regarded as the beginnings of modern information retrieval.
The primary measures used then were recall and precision. Briefly, recall is a measure of whether a search system is returning all of the possible relevant documents, or completeness. Precision is a measure of whether only the most appropriate documents are returned, or exactness. Virtually all measures of search system relevance since then have relied on these two measures. But neither are easy to really measure, and there are no practical guides for doing so.
The problem is that recall and precision are system-centered measures. Tests really just look at whether the system is functioning sufficiently from a technical perspective. But as you start to unravel relevancy in a broader context, things quickly move away from simple binary measures: it’s not a yes-no question. For instance, you get grey areas like partial relevance–when only a part of document is relevant to a person’s information need.
In a previous post, I recount some of Tefko Saracevic’s extended concepts of relevance that include more human-centered aspects. In addition to recall and precision measures, which we can call Technical Relevance, he sees four other types of relevance. To summarize again briefly:
- “Topical or subject relevance: relation between the subject or topic expressed in a query, and topic or subject covered by retrieved texts, or more broadly, by texts in the systems file, or even in existence. It is assumed that both queries and texts can be identified as being about a topic or subject. Aboutness is the criterion by which topicality is inferred.
- Cognitive relevance or pertinence: relation between the state of knowledge and cognitive information need of a user, and texts retrieved, or in the file of a system, or even in existence. Cognitive correspondence, informativeness, novelty, information quality, and the like are criteria by which cognitive relevance is inferred.
- Situational relevance or utility: relation between the situation, task, or problem at hand, and texts retrieved by a systems or in the file of a system, or even in existence. Usefulness in decision making, appropriateness of information in resolution of a problem, reduction of uncertainty, and the like are criteria by which situational relevance is inferred.
- Motivational or affective relevance: relation between the intents, goals, and motivations of a user, and texts retrieved by a system or in the file of a system, or even in existence. Satisfaction, success, accomplishment, and the like are criteria for inferring motivational relevance.”
But, as John wisely points out in his opening, user experience designers most often have little to no control over search relevancy. Part of the problem, I think, is that relevance is invisible–to stakeholders, to engineers, to designers, and to users. It’s not something you can easily put your finger on. And so, discussions around it are limited to what you get out of the box from search providers or, worse, don’t happen at all.
I suspect most information retrieval experts will cringe after reading John’s article in A List Part. It has none of the academic hygiene established in the field over the past four decades, it makes unsupported claims, and it’s far too simple of a model.
That’s probably why I like it.
Measuring relevance is far too important to be locked up in the ivory towers of academia. Search is now everywhere, and it’s fundamental to our information seeking experiences online. John gives step-by-step details on how to go about getting some measure of system relevancy. It’s hands-on and practical. His approach relies on recall and precision, for sure, but doesn’t carry any of the baggage academic measures require.
I’d personally like to see this framework extended to include qualitative feedback from users, perhaps addressing aspects like situational relevance or affective relevancy as well as partial relevance. But John has put a stake in the ground with this article, filling a gaping hole in user experience design, I believe. Hopefully this will open more discussion on the topic. Bravo.
Article Of The Future
24 August 2009
Cell Press, a publication by Elsevier Science, has an interesting effort to re-invent what an online scientific article looks like. They’ve launch a very light beta with two different prototypes, and they’ve invited the scientific community to provide feedback on this. See the Article of the Future beta website.
The Cell Press Content Innovation Team states their goals:
“The project’s goal is to take full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques. We have developed prototypes for two articles from Cell to demonstrate initial concepts and get feedback from the scientific community.”
I quite like this effort. It reflects the importance of how information in presented, which in turn affect user’s interaction content.
The team’s name is also quite interesting: “Content Innovation Team.” All too often innovation efforts are focused on technology and functionality. For a large a publisher like Reed Elsevier it really makes sense to innovate content.
It seems like the folks at Cell (finally) realized that as they move away from offline content formats, they can’t just take a shovel-ware approach of dumping their data online. Data is stored, but information is experienced. And this experience can even affect the user’s understanding of the content and the insights they draw from the material. It’s not a trivial matter. It’s also not an easy problem to solve–don’t underestimate it.
I would also add that offline content should also be innovated. That is, now that Cell is moving online, what does that mean for its offline formats both in the near term and the long term? Online content could completely replace offline, but it could also complement it. After all, people still enjoy reading books and journals as hard-copies. For example, perhaps a very condensed print version of Cell with only abstract could be distributed to subscribers. With a short, unique code the user could then get the full text. Or maybe they could swipe in a barcode to call up the online version?
Review: The Innovator’s Guide to Growth
16 August 2009
The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, by Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield, and Elizabeth Altman. Harvard Business Press, 2008. http://www.innovatorsguidetogrowth.com
“Innovation” is a term that’s hard to define precisely. It can mean different things to different people at different times. Newness, invention, change, and creativity are generally associated with innovation. Still, as a field of inquiry its boundaries are blurred.
For companies looking to innovate their businesses, this vagueness presents challenges. How do you start innovating? How do you know when you’re innovating? How do you manage it? Or even more elusive: how do you measure the outcome of innovation? How do you calculate ROI? All of this begs the larger question, Is there even a process for consistently innovating?
Some people believe there isn’t any single method for companies to innovate. Scott Berkun, for one, author of The Myths of Innovation, has this to say to the common question, How do you systematize innovation?:
It’s as absurd a question as asking how to control weather or herd cats, because those approximate the lack of control and number of variables inherent in innovation. [1]
Berkun cites an interview with Steve Jobs in Business Week as an example [2]:
Business Week: How do you systematize innovation?
Steve Jobs: You don’t. You hire good people who will challenge each other every day to make the best products possible. That’s why you don’t see any big posters on the walls around here, stating our mission statement. Our corporate culture is simple.
“You don’t” is not the answer managers want to hear. (BTW, if Apple is not trying to innovate, they are doing a good job it!) Notice Jobs focuses on corporate culture instead. Innovation seems to come from within at Apple—it’s about the company’s attitude, ethos, and vision.
A key problem in systematizing innovation is the fact most attempts at innovation don’t succeed. Embarking on an endeavour that has more than a 50% chance of failing can hardly be considered a “system.” What’s more, innovations often have a long gestation period from first conception to becoming a viable business venture—sometimes decades. Bill Buxton refers to this as the “long nose of innovation” [3]. He writes:
The bulk of innovation behind the latest “wow” moment (multi-touch on the iPhone, for example) is low-amplitude and takes place over a long period—but well before the ‘new’ idea has become generally known, much less reached the tipping point.
But it really doesn’t make much business sense for companies cross their fingers and hope that one-in-a-thousand ideas develops into a viable solution.
Or does it?
Consider what’s going on at Whirlpool. A recent Business Week article outlines their program for letting thousands of ideas bubble up. [4] Each idea is then systematically reviewed by trained innovation experts with a formalized process. The i-box, or so it’s called, is a detailed score card used to evaluate innovative ideas.
Another key element in Whirlpool’s innovation program is the i-board—a 15 member panel that regularly reviews innovative ideas and funds them, as needed. Such a program takes a lot of commitment and lot of money—an estimated several million dollars a year in North America alone. But it pays off in the end: Whirlpool hopes to have $4 billion dollars in sales from its new innovations.
Whirlpool’s approach represents what’s called “green housing.” Essentially, green housing is about letting new ideas live as long as possible before either killing or supporting the idea. The company ?What If!, a consultancy in business creativity, describes green housing as follows:
Green housing is the behaviour that protects young ideas when they are at their most vulnerable, and nurtures them into healthy growth. It is an interactive behaviour that enables people to get the most out of their initial thinking by supporting each other’s ideas.
The reason green housing is so important is that creativity is rarely a sudden flash of inspiration leading to the perfect invention…We believe that green housing behaviour is at the heart of creativity in business. [4]
This makes sense. History is riddled with examples of innovations not being recognized as such on first sight. It took six years for the Wright brothers to sell an airplane commercially. Western Union turned down Alexander Graham Bell’s idea of the telephone. Yahoo! turned down Google when approached by Brin and Page at the end of the 90s. Even with a detailed scorecard, like Whirlpool’s i-box, recognizing the potential of an innovation very early in its lifecycle is difficult, if not impossible.
Still, most managers can’t place bets on every idea—even every great idea—that comes through the door. Nor can most companies fund an endless garden of inventions indefinitely. Businesses need more structure around the innovation process.
Enter The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.
If the outcome of innovation can’t be predicted consistently, the forces that shape and act against innovation can be. Perhaps this is splitting semantic hairs, but it’s an important distinction to understand before reading book. The authors explain:
Some managers believe there is no way to guide the innovation journey, because innovation is just random and unpredictable. If innovation is indeed a black box, the best that companies can do is let a thousand flowers bloom, in the hope that one of them sprouts into a substantial growth business. This is a bit like releasing a thousand monkeys into a room full of word processors and hoping they’ll produce Shakespeare. If you are lucky enough to have it happen once, you surely wouldn’t expect it to be repeatable.
Research over the past two decades has shown that many successful strategies for new growth actually adhere to a specific pattern. (p. 121).
And that’s what the Innovator’s Guide to Growth is really about: the observable, repeatable patterns of the innovation process. It’s a complete how-to book for managers looking to create growth through innovation. It takes the hit-or-miss approach out of the equation and provides a rational framework for understanding and managing innovation. And it’s based on years of experience observing and consulting companies on innovation from top experts in the field.
What’s more, the authors of The Innovator’s Guide to Growth also agree that innovation should come within. Ultimately, this is the book is about how companies can transform their organizations internally.
Disruptive innovations—in the Christensenian sense of the word—is a key lever to growth according to the authors. To recall, disruptive innovations are products, services, or approaches that transform existing markets or create new ones by trading off performance in favour of simplicity, convenience, affordability, or accessibility. This contrasts sustaining innovations, or innovations that maintain established performance improvement trajectories by offering demanding customers better performance. Disruptive innovations, on the other hand, change the competitive playing field fundamentally. The authors emphasize:
Our belief is that if you want to influence or shape a market in which you compete, sustaining strategies are the key to achieving your goal. But if you want to redefine a market, create a new one, or defend against attack from below, disruptive strategies are essential to success. (p. 5)
A brief note on terminology: In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen’s best-selling book from 1997, the author introduces what he called disruptive “technologies.” Here, he meant “technology” to mean “the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into to products and services of greater value” [6]. That is, he wasn’t only talking about hardware and capability—although those, too, could be disruptive. But “technology” is a loaded term that triggers specific associations, and many people misunderstood Christensen’s sense of the word: they assumed he was talking about hardware and capability. Later, in The Innovator’s Solution, the sequel to The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen changes the phrase to “disruptive innovations.”
Now, in The Innovator’s Guide to Growth we’re starting to see the phrase “disruptive strategies,” as evidenced in the quote in the preceding paragraph. This shift in focus—from “disruptive technology” to “disruptive innovation” to “disruptive strategy”—represents an important conclusion in The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: true disruption rarely comes from the features and functionality of a company’s offering. It’s not about technology, but instead business models: they are the key to disruption. As Mark Johnson and colleagues conclude in a recent Harvard Business Review article:
Truly transformative businesses are never exclusively about the discovery and commercialization of a great technology. Their success comes from enveloping the new technology in an appropriate, powerful business model. [7]
Keep in mind, too, that disruptive innovations aren’t the same as breakthrough innovations. Next generation mobile phones with faster transfer rates, 5-blade razors, the Airbus 380: these are all breakthroughs, but they are not disruptive. Ten-seat planes used as taxis, $25 mobile phones that only make calls, and online word processors with limited functionality that are free: these are disruptive. Simpler. Cheaper. More convenient.
In any example of a disruptive innovation you’ll see hard tradeoffs being made along one dimension in favour of another dimension. Mastering tradeoffs is therefore a key element in disruption. Sometimes, this means turning conventional wisdom on its head and, above all, breaking the rules. Disruptive offerings typical don’t compete along the traditional dimensions as the rest of the mainstream market.
The authors give several examples of these kinds of counterintuitive tradeoffs and rule-breaking that leads to disruption. They cite the following examples, among others:
- “Everyone in the mop category know that a map was a onetime purchase, until Procter & Gamble introduce Swiffer, whose consumable cloths now produce close to $1 billion in annual revenue.
- Everyone at Dow Corning knew that the company couldn’t afford to compete in the commodity end of its business, until its Xiameter distribution channel became a booming growth offering.
- Everyone in the music industry knew that people who had access to pirated music wouldn’t pay anything for MP3 files, until Apple’s iTunes showed how a well-designed, reasonably priced model that was tightly integrated with Apple’s iPod music player could thrive.” (p. 7-8)
This suggests looking at all of the assumptions that currently drive a mainstream market and reversing though assumptions to arrive at disruptive innovations.
The consequence of not making hard tradeoffs is what the authors call overshooting. In the pursuit of increased profits, companies naturally tend to pack more and more performance in their offerings. The result is that the average person over-served and, in the worse case, can’t use the product or service at all. But here is the dilemma: these companies have to add features and functionality, or sustaining innovations, to even compete in the market in the first place.
Consider the popular netbook. For about $300 you can easily surf the web and do basic word processing. Most people can get most of things done they need with the netbook. This is referred to as “good enough” design.
Sales of netbooks took off, and entrants into the laptop market disrupted that space. This disruption, however, was only temporary: market incumbents quickly—and seemingly easily—matched the “good enough” design and offered their own netbooks. Today, nearly all of the computer manufacturers offer netbooks. Still, the initial disruption put companies like ASUS onto the map of a crowded playing field.
The Flip digital video recorder is another example of “good enough” design. This device does essentially one thing: makes short videos. It’s small and convenient to use. A built-in USB connector allows you to upload videos to your computer within seconds after filming (and directly to YouTube, as well). And there’s only a few buttons, so the learning curve for nearly every function is about 2 minutes—without training and without the help of manual. The Flip is really defined by what it DOESN’T have: there are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, and no memory card.
Again, this approach works: the Flip Ultra has been the best-selling camcorder on Amazon since its release. And it gained about 13% of the video recorder market in its first year. As David Pogue, technology reviewer for the New York Times concludes about the Flip:
The lesson is one that the electronics industry seems to miss over and over again: that creeping feature-itis often impairs your product instead of improving it. In the Flip’s case, the size, shape, ruggedness, low price and one-button simplicity take it places where no real camcorder would go. [8]
But it’s not easy to disrupt, particularly for market incumbents. Disruptive innovation strategies require deep organizational transformation. This means making tough changes—in business models, strategies, and company culture. For most managers, it’s a real paradox: how do you maintain your current targets while starting low-end ventures that don’t have predictable returns? The Innovator’s Guide to Growth shows the way—or at least a way. The authors present a clear framework for guiding this transformation.
The authors outline three larger phases in building business innovation, reflected in the first three parts to the book:
- Indentify opportunities: Chapters 2-4 discuss customers and their activities. The authors show that segmentation is important, including identifying non-customers. Understanding jobs people are trying to get done is then the real first factor in identifying innovations.
- Formulate and shape ideas: In this section, the authors recommend to start by focusing on ideas that solve customers’ problems or unmet needs. But also look at competitors and how the ideas and company fit into the market.
- Build the business: The two chapters in this part focus on managing the innovation process internally, including how to form and manage innovation teams.
A fourth and final section of the book describes building the right capabilities for innovation, thus amplifying the internal transformation theme. The last two chapters discuss the institutionalization of innovation as well as implementing metrics to measure progress and success.
The Innovator’s Guide to Growth should appeal to a broad group of readers. But user experience designers, in particular, should find large parts of the books very familiar. There were many times in reading the book that I thought to myself “right on, brother” or “that’s obvious” but also “no duh.” It seems large part of innovation frameworks, such as the one outlined here, overlap with user-centered (UCD) design principles, particularly customer insight and indentifying opportunities. But shaping ideas and developing concepts are also something designers particularly good at.
UCD and innovation ultimately have the same goal: the creation of solutions that bring businesses value by solving customers’ problems. In other words, both ultimately want their innovations to be adopted.
UCD seems to focus on only part of the innovation equation, however. And really, this is a short-coming of the UCD movement in general: practitioners have, by and large, failed to tell business and system developers really what to do. This is where The Innovator’s Guide to Growth fits in: it’s not only about knowing your customers, their problems and creating solutions to address those problems, but also how to transform businesses to capitalize on innovations.
Beyond this book, there is a quickly growing body of literature around business innovation that has lots of commonalities with UCD methods. This presents a real chance for UCD and designers in general—to make a difference with our methods and perspectives and to gain status in the business world. Of course, there has been a dull rumble about “design thinking” in business literature, and there have been calls for business types to real on the left-brain thinking of creative types. But many business innovators and strategists really don’t know that the decades of UCD approaches even exist. And they are, in part, re-inventing their own methods.
We really need much more cross pollination between both sides, I believe. And it shouldn’t only be the turtle-necks reaching out to the suits: the business types should seek out designers to help them solve their business problems, particularly when talking about innovation.
A wealth of case stories make this book down-right interesting to read. Each chapter ends with tips and questions to help, making the material in the book more so practical. There are even checklists (such as the Disrupt-O-Meter on pages 155-157) and an accompanying website with downloadable spreadsheets and documents (www.innosight.com/resources). The FAQ at the end of the book is also quite practical.
The structure of the book promotes an enjoyable front-to-back reading, but the chapters can also be accessed individually and in any order. It’ll prove to be an invaluable reference source on any innovation manager’s desk. Anyone looking to implement a complete innovation program should own this book. But also, just about anyone in an organization looking to transform itself will get something from the Innovator’s Guide to Growth. It’s highly recommended.
[1] Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation. O’Reilly, 2007.
[2] “Voices of Innovation: Steve Jobs,” Business Week (Oct 2004): http://compuserve.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_41/b3903408.htm
[3] Bill Buxton, The Long Nose of Innovation,” Business Week (Jan 2008). http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2008/id2008012_297369.htm
[4] Jessie Scanion, “How Whirlpool Puts New Ideas Through the Wringer,” Business Week (Aug 2009). http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2009/id2009083_452757.htm
[5] What If?!, Sticky Wisdom. Capstone, 2002.
[6] Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Collins Business Essentials, 1997.
[7] Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, Henning Kagermann, “Reinventing Your Business Model.” Harvard Business Review (Dec 2008).
[8] David Pogue, “Camcorder Brings Zen To The Shoot,” New York Times (Mar 2008). http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/technology/personaltech/20pogue.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Subjective Factors in Information Seeking
11 August 2009
This article in JASIST caught my eye:
“The role of subjective factors in the information search process,” by Jacek Gwizdka (Rutgers), Irene Lopatovska (Pratt). Forthcoming.
“Subjective factors” are any and all of the feelings and perceptions users have while seeking information:
In this article, we refer to ratings that were self-reported by searchers as subjective factors. This broad term includes affective (e.g., positive and negative feelings), cognitive (e.g., perception of being lost), and evaluative (e.g., judgment of task difficulty) measures that reflected searchers’ perceptions of self and the search environment.
Not surprisingly, the authors show that stuff like emotions and subjective perceptions play an important role in searching for information online:
The findings confirm some previous results as well as extend them. For example, we found the link between objective search-task difficulty (e.g., the amount of time spent on the task, number of pages visited, etc.) and the perception of task difficulty; the link between the mood and search behavior and outcomes. All these findings are in line with previous research on the role of subjective factors in information seeking.
Our original findings suggest that better mood before and during the search correlates with better mood after the search, but also correlates with worse performance on the search task and lower satisfaction. We based our analysis on statistical correlations. The effects of controlled factors , and the relationships between variables with a strictly defined order in time allow us to talk about plausible causal effects. If causal relationships are verified, the finding implies that mood might be a major predictor of search outcomes (regardless of the task or the interface), and individual differences between the searchers (optimists vs. pessimists, searchers experiencing positive vs. negative affective states, etc.) might have a major effect on search outcomes. To a certain degree, this finding also questions the efforts to design pleasurable search experiences since feeling good during the search does not seem to translate into better search task outcomes. Due to the potential importance of these findings, they should be further investigated and validated.
Very interesting that mood plays affects success of a search outcome.
I’ve written and talked about the potential role emotions play in information seeking in the past. In fact, the authors cite my 2006 JASIST article: “I’m feeling lucky : The role of emotions in seeking information on the Web.” And I presented a model at the 2004 IA Summit in Austin called the Information Search Experience (ISX).
Or see a previous blog posting with an excerpt from Designing Web Navigation, where I also briefly mention emotions and information seeking.
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