Product Marketing has the role of translating specific product features into more outbound messages.  They create messaging “marchitectures” (It’s a play on words, get it?) and frameworks where all of the features support a grander vision of the company story.  Great product marketing creates a narrative that puts the sales and marketing departments in a place to beat the competition.

It’s incredibly specialized and difficult work, when done properly.  A great story doesn’t come from thin air.  The “turn of the phrase” is a key skill that makes all the difference in the world.  It’s almost like writing lyrics for a song.  Coming up with that perfect phrase, the perfect rhyme, the perfect idea will make the difference between a hit and a dud.

Recently, I have been watching Mad Men.  Don Draper is the classic genius at product marketing and advertising.  He wants to control the conversation through messaging and storytelling.  When a company can control the conversation, they will win.  In fact, it’s not just a company that does this.  Politicians whole careers are based on their ability to control the conversation.

The turn of the phrase is so important.  I make the same wish every year over some issue, but I will make it one more time.  I wish our education system had REQUIRED classes on things that really matter.  Like:

1. Public Speaking and making compelling presentations
2. Managing a bank account
3. Creative problem solving
4. Business writing (like emails and memos)
5. Business Storytelling
6. Mentoring / Managing
7. Microsoft Office (PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Access)

I’ll make the wish again next year.  When you hear a good way of putting something, think about the elegance of it and how you can use it.  A good phrase is worth a thousand bullet points.

What is the point of a photo like this?  What does the photographer think they are accomplishing?  Couldn’t we live in a world where the photographer took candid photos of each kid in class?

Something like this makes me infinitely happier.

He looks normal here.  The other one, he looks like a psychopath.  Maybe not oo much UX in here.  Candids are better than staged photos.  How’s that?

I asked a candidate to look at a table we eating at in a restaurant.  I asked him, “What do you see that could be improved?”  He said, “Nothing.”  Bad answer.  His dial was up to about 3, not 11.

There were tons of issues to be improved including (but not limited to)

1. Napkins weren’t folded neatly
2. Utensils were crooked
3. Table actually rocked slightly if you leaned on it
4. Salt was not full
5. Scratches

To be great at UX you need to obsess about the details.  You need to see every tiny flaw and think “How would a world-class awesome version of this look?”  In a fancy expensive restaurant, you bet your ass they line up the fork and knife and fill the salt shaker.

When I look at a User Interface, I imagine myself as an extremely impatient, distracted and nit-picky user.  The worst case scenario.  Then all of the sudden, little annoyances that are really fine look like glaring screwups.  It doesn’t mean you need to fix every single thing before you ship, but you should strive for excellence.  I am proud if I can ship 70-80 of what I consider perfect.

Look around you right now.  If you had a staff of world-class people making everything perfect, where would they start, what would they do?  Could you do any of that?

What about your product or service?  If it was perfect, what would you change first?

My whole team (5 designers) use Macs.  They all have MacBook Pro laptops.  The tools we use are:

1. MS PowerPoint for storyboarding designs
2. MS Outlook for corporate email
3. Adobe CS5
4. Chrome/Firefox
1. Jira (Bug Tracker)
2. Wiki
3. Google Docs
5. MS Excel (rarely)

I truthfully have no idea why they use a Mac.  I am the only one who doesn’t.

Hardware
My Samsung Series 9 is lighter, sexier and faster than their MacBooks.  It has a solid state hard drive, lots of ram and a fast processor.  It doesn’t get hot.  It’s much lighter and truthfully, no one with a brain can say the MacBook Pro is sexier.  The series 9 is gorgeous.  It looks unique and is super strong. No scratched or dents even though I drop it often.  The only complaint I have is that the AC plug is cooler on the Mac, with it’s neat magnetic design.

PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook
There is no comparison; these are BETTER on Windows.  Seriously, Outlook on the Mac is way behind.  PowerPoint is much easier and more powerful on the PC.  I know some Mac users who run a virtual machine just so they can use the Windows version of MS Office.  Many plugins like SFDC for Outlook only work on the Windows, so basically the Mac versions are second-class citizens.

Adobe CS5
This is the same on both platforms.   Both work just fine.  I am excited to see CS6.  I think it comes out next month.

Everything in a Browser
Who cares?  They both work exactly the same.  I could be using Linux.  It doesn’t matter.  Chrome is chrome. Firefox is Firefox.  Oh but wait…What if you need to use Outlook Web Access?  Or if you want to use Microsoft Dynamics.  OWA works MUCH better with Internet Explorer and Dynamics is ONLY supported using IE.  You might say that is a mistake for them, but it is the way it is.  You can’t use IE on the Mac.  Personally, I hardly ever use IE, EXCEPT for when I am trying Dynamics or using OWA.  This is the thing, I need it once in a while.

Summary
I actually bought a Mac Mini for the house.  Specifically, I wanted to use Garage Band.  However, for work, there really is no reason I can see to use a Mac.  The PC is wildly superior for the programs I use.  Windows 7 works great. It works with everything.  I just don’t understand why the rest of my team sees it the other way.  I think they are succumbing to peer pressure from the engineering team.

Engineering
They all switched.  For them, I think this makes sense.  They are running PHP and mySQL.  This runs faster on the Mac.  So for them, logical.  For the design team…I don’t get it.

Comments
Feel free to comment, HOWEVER, please don’t say, “I use this other software and that’s why I use Mac.”  We don’t use that software.  All I am saying is that if you use the software I listed above, there is very little incentive to use Mac.

This week is a big change week for me.  Lot’s of things I had gotten used to are changing, especially at work.  New people are coming in and old people are leaving.  How will the new people be?  Will I miss the old people?  Or will I get used to them being gone in just a few weeks?

New people have optimism and energy and no baggage.  Old people had rapport and experience and institutional knowledge.  You very rarely get people with both.  Change creates a wide variety of emotions in people.  They go through the 5 stages of grief. (Kübler-Ross model)

1. Denial — “I feel fine.”; “This can’t be happening, not to me.”
2. Anger — “Why me? It’s not fair!”; “How can this happen to me?”; ‘”Who is to blame?”
3. Bargaining — “I’ll do anything for a few more years.”; “I will give my life savings if…”
4. Depression — “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?”; “I’m going to die soon so what’s the point?”; “I miss my loved one, why go on?”
5. Acceptance — “It’s going to be okay.”; “I can’t fight it, I may as well prepare for it.”

It’s interesting to me that change and grief go so hand-in-hand.  When you change part of your software or service, do people not go through these stages?  I think they do.  Right now, I am in the depression phase.  Am I really dealing with change? or with grief?  Am I sad to see people go?  Possibly.  It seems highly intertwined.

As always, it is important (in the craft of UX) to always be thinking about how something feels and how it makes others feel.  This is one that I want to keep an eye on.

1. My clothes don’t fit well.
2. The material was poor quality.
3. I didn’t look good.
4. I wanted to look nicer.

I really didn’t know where to start.  I didn’t have much fashion sense.  I found Trunk Club, which seemed compelling.  They do a skype with you and a consultant and send you a truck of clothes.  You keep what you want and send the rest back.  For some reason though, I never followed through with it.

Then a co-worker volunteered to go with me to the Stanford Mall and shop.  She had good fashion sense, so we gave it a go.  We went to Nordstroms and Macy’s.  I basically was a mannequin, but I did my job well.  I didn’t get impatient or frustrated.  This is impressive (to me) because it was a 5 hour marathon.

In the end, I spent about $2,000 on clothes which should last me (hopefully) a year.  Although I heard I might need to do it a little more frequently.  The clothes fit.  They are made of better materials.  I look good.  When I got back, I put my old clothes in a box for Goodwill.

OK, here is the UX part.  I feel so much better when I walk around.  I feel better when I see myself in the mirror.  My chest sticks out a little further.  My mind does not get distracted with thoughts of how I look.  I just feel more confident.

I didn’t expect this.  Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how the new clothes would affect me.  The end result for me was an significant change for the better.  I don’t think I am ready to shop for myself, but having the new clothes has been great.  This has been the first time in my life that I have done this.  Call it a mid-life crisis, but it seemed to work.  Also, it was cheaper than buying a sports car.

Press Enter to Exit.  It’s like Windows 95-Windows Vista: Press Start to Shut Down.

I don’t ask alot.  Just make sense.  They had buttons for Yes and No on the pad.  Why not say, “Exit Now? Press Yes”.  Bad Designer…bad!

You look at Apple products and this sort of precision and attention to detail is obvious.  Steve Jobs was a master at the details and he created a company that will carry on (hopefully) his legacy.  For Steve, there was very little gap between a perfect product and one that he was proud of.  100% for perfect and maybe 99% for proud. (Maybe not even that.)

For me, there is a gap.  If I wasn’t proud of the work we ship, I would be unhappy all of the time.  I don’t want to be miserable all of the time.  Therefore, I have a gap.  In any large product, you will have pieces that are awesome and others that are a little sketchy.  During the design phase and the execution phase, you aim for perfection.  You try to catch all of the details.  However, over time, the pressure to ship intensifies.

The key is understand if there are curves involved.  Do the curves change early or late?  Exponentially or linear?  Each organization is a little different on this score.  This may be a frustrating concept for people because it means the priorities and decision making rules change during the game.  I find this fact energizing in a way because it gives a little more fluidity to the situation and doesn’t allow people to become complacent in how decisions get made.

The chart above is inspired by Steve Jobs who wrote “Never Compromise!” on the whiteboard when they were designing the original Mac.  Eventually (18 months late on the project), he erased the message and said, “Real Artists Ship!”

If you are late for an appointment, you might drive quicker or a little less conservative.  You wouldn’t say you are a bad driver, but rather the situation demanded a modification of your behavior.  However, if you see a driver in front of you driving too fast or change lanes too quickly, you will think, “What a terrible driver!”  When faced with our own behavior, we take context into account.  In others, we hardly ever do.

A politician takes a stance on a particular issue.  After hearing from several experts, he changes his stance to one that is more consistent with the new learned facts.  His opponents call him a flip-flopper whose opinions will sway in the wind.  They will say the politician has no principles.  What seems to be perfectly normal behavior (learning and evolving your opinion) is ridiculed and considered a political weakness.  This is the same error as the driver, but with much more severe consequences.  Politicians are loathe to change their minds about anything.

An interesting experiment would be in the use of social media as a vehicle for customer complaints.  If a user has an error in the system, do they blame themselves or the system?   Let’s imagine they tweet that the error occurred.  Would the reader of the tweet attribute the error to the system or the operator of the system?  Does it make a difference if the reader considers themselves advanced or novice in the system?  I’d love to see an experiment on this.

This psychological effect is also different in different cultures.  In the United States, we are a highly individualistic society.  In eastern cultures, the “collective” is often more important. In those eastern societies, they commit this error far less frequently.

For further reading try Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.