I want my iTunes to learn from my behaviour and adjust to my taste: notice the tracks I skip, or when I always increase volume during certain tracks, or stop using my computer during certain tracks, etc. How iTunes uses this information doesn’t need to, or actually shouldn’t be disclosed to users. It should just work. Like magic.

The software in which you can tweak every setting is so 90s. The software you can peek into and see how it works is so 80s. The software you can build yourself is so 70s. Our technology should be more advanced than that. More like magic.

Take another widespread achievement of human technology, the car. The DIY types might appreciate old cars in which you can open the hood when you encounter a problem. But the casual user doesn’t mind that nowadays the whole engine sits inside a moulded plastic case, controlled by numerous computers and sensors connected to it. It just works. At this level “how” is irrelevant. It’s like magic.

The question is, how to use the term user experience?

First of all, you can never use it alone. Never ever again. You are no more allowed to talk about user experience as is.

You can talk about the user experience of a company, or the user experience of a form field, or of the customer service at a bank, or of the steering wheel of a car, or of a web page. User experience is a term that you can use when you don’t want to talk about specifics: when you’re not referring only to the usability of the form field, not just the copy of the form label, not just the look of the field border, the fonts and the colours, nor just how the tab ordering has been programmed. When you do want to talk about all of these artifacts and how they combine to create a good experience for the users, you talk about user experience.

You can talk about the user experience of any level of detail. When discussing the user experience of a company it’s not just the product user interface, not just how the call center answers your call, not just how the packaging looks, not just how the marketing speaks to you, not just how the company handles your privacy, but all of these combined. It can include anything that affects how users experience stuff.

User experience is a short-hand for situations in which it would be too cumbersome or repetitive to list all the ingredients that go into creating a good end product.

Here’s a how-to example:

We’ll be designing the website of ABZ company by gathering customer needs, listing user requirements, creating inventories of important content, designing perfectly navigable wireframes and user flows, working in tandem with the development to create a highly usable interface, and perfecting the details to make sure our users will be so pleased they will send a link to all of their Facebook friends. Mary Johnsson will be handling the project management, and Alf Simons will be supervising the user experience of the website.

This is to say Mary Johnsson will be in charge of schedules, and Alf Simons will see through that the customer needs are actual needs of customers, the user requirements reflect what the users require, the content is relevant to users, the wireframes and the user flows look solid, usability of the interface has been checked, and no minor irritating detail has been left unfixed.

Does this feel like an acceptable definition of user experience? What do you think?

Three weeks ago I came to the UX Lx conference in Lisbon with one goal in mind: I wanted to find out if there’s a consensus on what User Experience is. My verdict after three long days of workshops, talks, coffee breaks, and beer towers: there isn’t. Nobody knows what UX means.

Actually, that’s wrong. Almost everybody is pretty sure of what UX is. The problem is that there’s no shared meaning for “user experience” and the opinions are varied enough to make the term vague, even irrelevant.

Taking a page from the amusing Eric Reiss and his Copywriting for the Web presentation, we (as the UX community, if there is one) have no shared reference for UX among us. We share common beliefs but not a common reference: we want to use our design powers to fix broken experiences and make the world better by creating new, good experiences. And because of these common beliefs, we slap the “UX” tag on basically any concrete activity that furthers our beliefs.

Not sure if this is a cause or a consequence of the above, but I feel there’s an aura of magic around UX.

This aura is good for the enthusiasm it creates in people: a junior pixel pusher can get energized when skinning buttons becomes user experience design. After all, the visual look of buttons is a highly relevant issue of user experience — one highly relevant issue, that is. A usability researcher is no more doing an interview after another, but they’re actually making observations about the the user experience. The vagueness of the term evokes a sense of whole, that makes the work of a peg feel all the more important, and thus rewarding.

And if you’re into the kind of marketing that promises heavens on earth with such clever wording, the advertiser will never get caught lying, “user experience” is a silver bullet for you. Just push out the next version of your product with a “now at least 27% better user experience” sticker on it.

But the magic aura of UX is also a bad thing. The fluff of the aura, and the self-confidence of UX practitioners, makes it difficult to discuss anything labeled “user experience”. The aura clouds progress, and slows down change, apart from cosmetic improvements in the details.

I have no idea what to suggest people do about this. Maybe we just need to let all voices be heard, and wait for a clear and shared definitions to appear in the long run.

So, if that was true, it seems inevitable that smart people from other professional fields should (and will) follow.

I’m waiting for the future bestseller, “Engineering the corporation” to hit the no 1 spot on Amazon.com business books chart. The über-engineers of our time tell how to apply the secrets of mechanical engineering to business, from human resources to the, by then, old-skool innovation lab. And strategy engineering? No respectable company should operate without that.

The “how to build hardware like software” discussion began already, so maybe the next high on the hype curve is not engineering, but building companies like software. Agile is there and everywhere already, but I’m sure the visionary work of programmers can be taken much further. And one year later, “The strategy algorithm” will take the top spot on Amazon.com. The (electronic) book will proclaim that UML modeling will be the next math, and will be taught to first graders alongside reading and writing. Organizations will abandon matrix and network models, and concentrate on reorganizing human resources in an object oriented fashion. Everyone will seek the one algorithm to rule them (or us) all.

But while these scenarios unfold, get the best out of design thinking, and enjoy it while it lasts.

Inspired by this article on the latest Intearctions magazine: Designing Interactions at Work: Applying Design to Discussions, Meetings and Relationships.

In a hierarchical organization orders come from above. The purpose of the organization is known and kept at the top. This is desirable, because knowledge is power. It doesn’t matter if those ranking low in the hierarchy do not share the purpose, because the worker bees are there only to do what they’re told.

The less hierarchical, and the more flat an organization wants to be, the more important it is that everyone in the organization shares the purpose of the organization, its reason for existence, its direction and its goals. A shared purpose allows the organization to work without the burden of hierarchy, as knowledgeable workers are trusted and empowered to make the small daily decisions that are needed for the organization to run efficiently.

Shared purpose is rare. Without shared purpose a flattened organization could become busy and without direction, or stagnated and without motivation. But for sure the organization will become inefficient. The inefficiency and lack of focus will cause the organization to splinter, effectively shifting the power back to the management, but — this is important — while at the same time reducing organizational transparency. In a hierarchical organization you always know which way is up, and from where the orders are coming in. In a flattened and splintered organization visibility is clouded and the direction of orders is not clear. This allows for far more intricate and sinister power games and organizational politics.

I still believe the flattening of organizations is the future, but it requires a real increase in shared purpose and empowerment. To create more value from the organization, and to reduce hierarchy for real, a strong sense of purpose needs to be instilled in the organization first, before reducing hierarchy.

Inspired by Sig’s post, E 2.0 – not joining the debate, but….

First of all: I’m a fan of Google Wave. I see huge potential in it. But does Wave have a chance of replacing email?

My 50 cent guess would be no.

No, because historically, world-shifting technologies are technologies, not applications. Pubsubhubbub can change the world. Wave can’t. Email protocols changed the world, Eudora or Pine didn’t.

Google has been at the receiving end of the hype wave before: No matter how revolutionary the “Google phone”, the open sourced Anrdoid, was (or felt like) when it was first hinted at, it hasn’t changed the world.

It’s a case of revolutionary systems versus revolutionery ecosystems. A revolutionary app is exciting, but often daunting for those who start using it. A revolutionary ecosystem is exciting for those who see the revolution coming, and often feels natural for those who start using it.

Google Wave is presented in a way of: “look at all the cool things you can do with this: you can turn an IM conversation into a wiki, merge emails into it, invite more people to collaborate, create embedded event invites and mashup maps and give directions to everyone! whoa!” How exciting! But after the excitement of receiving the rare invite fades, I’m left thinking “now what”.

To get the Wave going (oh, the endless puns possible with this product…), Google needs more than a few million signups. They need more than a potentially world-shifting new paradigm. They need more than all the useful features one can think of. They need their own “throw a sheep” app.

Let me explain: Facebook didn’t blow up because it was a potential major force in the shift how people use the internet (and a bridge for the masses into the real-time internet, some would say). It didn’t blow up because it was useful, quite the contrary: Facebook blew up because you could throw your friends with sheep. And you could send your vampires to bite your friends. Facebook provided an irresistible call to action, which some found hilarious, and clicked through, some were dumbfounded, and clicked through, and some were annoyed, if not totally pissed off, and swore to never enter that evil hole that was Facebook. And after a week they clicked through to see what the fuck made all their sane friends start throwing virtual farm animals at each other. (Now the same friends have moved on to the more civilized activity of looking after the said virtual animals on their virtual farms. Oh well.)

Google Wave lacks this irresistible call to action. The hopeful in me wants to add: “for now”. As stated, I am a Google fanboy, and I have utmost faith in that they can and will make Wave a success (although they do have a few lukewarmly received products: think Knol, Notebook, even Checkout or, even Android). Also, Google operates on a scale that makes it impossible to estimate their clout in these things.

I’ll leave you with this Steve Jobs quote on the super secretive pre-launch Segway, on which he prophesied: cities will be built around it. It’s easy to be very excited about something that feels completely new. Yet it is very difficult for something completely new to live up to the hype and take over the world.

On a recent issue of Interactions, Bruce Sterling has this to say about UX:

There is even “experience design,” which is surely the most imperial, most gaseous, most spectral form of design yet invented.

Experience design is closer in spirit to theater, poetry or even philosophy than it is to the older assembly line. What on earth isn’t “experience”? And what is not, in some sense, “interactive”? Experience designers are a tiny group of people with a radically universalized prospectus.

With all the focus on the approach, the philosophy, and broad visions, I feel there’s too little focus on the objective of design, achieving something for, and on behalf of, a client (and one might add, on behalf of humanity at large). Experience design is important, sure. And emotional design, a great way to create more engaging and compelling experiences. But to what end?

It’s way too easy to get lost in designing beauty for the hate of uglyness, designing usability for the sake of conforming to best practices, designing in fun for the sake of avoiding being boring, designing frameworks for the beauty of organization, or designing simplicity with the sole goal of reducing complexity, all the while forgetting that things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Design efforts almost invariably do make the end result better, but without a clear sight of the design objective, how do you know those four hours tweaking the button gradient made the result significantly better? How do you know that work spent delivered the most value? How do you know there wasn’t some other design task that would have made a tenfold times bigger impact on how the users view the result, and on the users’ willingness to provide your client with registration fees, attention, loyalty, high ratings, or some other currency of value?

Sometimes the most valuable design is not the “best” design, in terms of accepted practices, looks, ease of use, conformity to standards, or the used design philosophies’ position on the hype curve. The focus should be on the what instead of the how, the real value created by design, the work the designers deliver at the end of a project, and not so much on the work of the designers during a project.

In a client-vendor relationship, this struggle nearly always get framed as “the client against the user”. The vendor sides with the users, accusing the client of ignoring the needs of the users. The client accuses the vendor for ignoring the business constraints. The usual consequence is a compromise that isn’t valuable to the users, nor does it satisfy the client’s needs for business results.

But clients and vendors are not at opposing ends. In reality the choice between business or the users doesn’t exist. There is no competition between the two. The goal is common, and seeing this is a matter of agreeing to do a cost-benefit forecast of sorts. If there is zero value for users, if the users get nothing out of the client’s products, why would they spend a cent of their money or a second of their attention on the products? Even if the vendor designs the greatest user experience of the world, isn’t it worthless if the client cannot affort building and maintaining it?

Know the resources, find out what value (user benefits) can be built with the resources at hand, and estimate and track the value users give back to the client in return. Clients should be happy, and users should be happy (enough). If not, you don’t have a working business plan.

Even if I have been quiet, it’s hardly been for a lack of topics to write about. I’ve faced lots of challenges in the last months, some of them highly interesting, and some of them humbling, if not downright humiliating.

This post is a collection of thoughts, written in an effort to make some sense of the now. If you’re looking for me to make any kind of a clever point in this post, you might as well stop reading now.

So.

I’ll start with the more positive news: There’s now three of us working for my company! Juise joined in May, and has since been banging out ActionScript code non-stop, building the UI for a new application our startup client is putting together. I look forward to revealing more about this exciting project, when they decide to come out of stealth mode.

Expanding my enterprise a full 50% brought small, but completely unexpected changes in my work. Of course there’s now 50% more responsibility, but the unexpected part has been how much more I’ve felt the need to think about the future of my company, and where I want to take it. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it before, or that I would now really need to have a clear direction. One could describe it more as a wakup call, or as a kick in the pants, or in a more positive way — as gained momentum. Yet as of now, it’s all in my head.

I tend to take work, the hours of labor spent every day, very seriously. Sometimes maybe too seriously, but then again, I think it is very serious if work is not motivating and fulfilling. I feel a great responsibility (maybe a too big responsibility for my own good) for taking out half of the awake time of the people who make money for my company. Yes, we’re all getting paid for our efforts, but work is such a huge part of our lives, that not one hour of it should be less than energizing. Still quite a bit to be done in this respect.

Another challenge is finding a direction for our work. All three of us are pretty handy with ActionScript, so we could happily stay around serving clients who need something programmed in Flash. While this is what we’re going to continue doing as of now, I don’t see this as a viable long term plan.

There are some interesting avenues we’re exploring, including Unity 3D, tackling simple computer vision problems, and delving deeper into the world of industrial automation.

Yet I think the common denominator is not going to be found in any technology, or a specific industry, but using all of our capabilities for serving the end users. It doesn’t sound like much of a vision statement, now does it. But I do believe, that while there are thousands of well-meaning designers and developers with differing specializations, there are not enough people who really hold the end user benefit as the first priority in every twist and turn and detail.

Concentrating squarely on the user benefit is not dismissing business priorities at all, quite the contrary. Doing business is all about creating value, and benefit is value. The more value you create per effort, the bigger part of it you can keep as profit. How to reframe this in non-abstract, real-world language, and how to make something successful out of this, I do not yet know. The underlying idea can be seen as polishing the same old with new semantics, or as a transformative tool to alter how clients conduct their business. Up to you.

Then the humbling and humiliating part.

To put it in short, most of the work done last year resulted in disappointed clients. To say this in public is not something I do lightly, but I do believe in admitting rather than hiding your mistakes, and learning from them. I’ve learned the hard way that while people talk about business priorities, they act based on emotion and self interests. And that’s okay. That’s human. It’s what all of us do as people. I write it down as my mistake not knowing how to work with these realities of life.

I’ve learned that standing up to your beliefs and principles, and not bending over backwards when requested, can truly piss people off. Big time. I’m not sure what I should do about this; I don’t want to compromise my values, and I’m not seeking to deliberately piss off my clients either. I’m truly sorry for anyone who has been offended.

I have accumulated a feeling that there are two schools of vendors:

1. Those who do anything for clients to please them, even if it is harmful to the client’s business, and
2. Those who do anything to help the client succeed, even if it means doing the opposite of what the client is asking.

I know there are vendors who can pull the latter off, and there are clients who appreciate, even expect it. But boy does it feel like you need to be ready for a beating if you want to stay in the latter group.

I feel like I should have learned a lot more, but I haven’t. I’m still quite baffled how we ended up screwing our projects so badly, or how we ended up in projects that were destined to fail (you never really know which one is true). In either case, there should be more lessons to be learned.

We tend to think the approach with this tween engine is a bit different than with the competition, so I’m more than happy to hear any comments on it, your experiences using it, or problems you might have with it.

I don’t believe in the (current) desktop metaphor, I don’t believe in applications, I don’t believe in the need to save documents, and I think I’m losing my belief in the browser. Those are all things of the past. (I’ve written about dusty metaphors before.)

Therefore I don’t think Google should see the study result as a need to educate users about the definition of a browser or an application. Instead, Google should see this as an opportunity to create new definitions! If you’re going to teach 92% percent why something is the way it is and how it works, why not teach 100%? New definitions create new meaning, and new meanings create new thinking. Forget about the browser! Forget about applications! Find a name and an explanation for a platform of the future (like Wave?) in which there are just networked computers that are sometimes offline, in which data is accessed as needed without really “browsing” for anything, and in which there are no Save buttons, just a stream of history and an unlimited undo all the way to the first blank page of every document.

When you think of it, it’s not that far out.

It’s a tool which we have used in all of our Flash programming projects (proving its reusability value!), and it lets you route data from object to object while avoiding direct references. There’s nothing wrong with direct references as is, of course, quite the contrary. But when you need to work with the DisplayObject hierarchy in Flash, it is very convenient that you don’t have to make those direct, fixed references all through the hierarchy, but you can instead pass the data with messages.

We’ve also found out that by using Message Relay our code can reflect the problem domain more closely: instead of passing data through the object hierarchies, or through the event mechanism, we can create messages with meaningful names that represent events in the project’s problem domain.

For example, instead of firing an event such as “loginDialog.CLICK”, you can send a message with the topic “user requested registration”, making it easier to understand how the code maps to the problem it is trying to solve.

Anyway, if you’re a Flash developer, or know one, please pass on the link. Thanks!

1. Estimation accuracy
2. Velocity
3. Quality of output

Donkeys Three (Tres burros), originally uploaded by .

The first is the ability to estimate tasks accurately. By following how well the estimates of a programmer have held with actual time spent on tasks, you can determine a variance value. You can use the maximum variance (representing the worst estimates of a given programmer), an average variance, or something in between. Pick something that feels statistically significant to you. Check FogBugz’ Evidence-Based Scheduling for a good take on this.

Estimation accuracy tells much more than just about good time management. You can’t really make good estimates if you don’t know your tools. Nor can your estimates be constantly accurate, if you don’t have a grasp of the kinds of recurring problems you will encounter in programming projects.

Velocity is how much code the programmer can deliver in a given time (not really referring to velocity as it appears in agile terminology). I haven’t found any reliable ways for measuring or calculating this, but again, the more data you have of all of your programmers, the better idea of each programmers personal velocity you will have. While the speed at which a task is finished is concrete and measurable, you can’t really value the velocity without comparision. If something gets done in two weeks and nobody in the world has done it before, was that fast or slow?

Quality of output is the fuzziest of these three criteria. My unproven idea is that the best judges for the quality of code are the programmer’s peers, other programmers. The quality of code can be valued better when you have laid down some guidelines for the programmers to follow. These could be adhering to common coding style (use of spaces in code, newlines, parentheses, use of underscores, that kind of stuff), or keeping the code readable (meaningful member names, informative comments). It could also relate to more technical quality issues like good memory management, or on the other hand, not bloating the code with memory management routines when it’s irrelevant. There are numerous criteria that can be devised.

• Networked electronics — taking what I know about the web, web 2.0, social networks, non-social networks, social objects, feeds, APIs, computing on clouds, etc, and using that knowledge in the context of devices, or even more specifically, components of devices. And when use case ideas emerge, thinking about the user interfaces required to monitor/operate those devices and networks.
• Creating productivity applications — I’m still interested in project management tools and alternative ways of handling to-dos.
• Edge of possible — definitely staying on the “possible” side of that edge. Staying close to the edge for the enjoyment of tackling hard problems, but at the same time being pragmatic, and avoiding idealistic and unrealistic visions.

I spent quite some time finding images and writing a blog post, because I’m that excited about this geeky matter.. until I realized that sharing this works so much better in slideshow format. Using slides to replace text blog posts is an interesting experiment in itself, so this post serves two purposes. Enjoy. ;)

Spotify is growing strongly, and everybody seems to be talking about it. Spotify even made the news on Finnish national TV last week! It’s David Bowie’s music like water pouring down the internets, and if Mr. Bowie’s 2002 epiphany is to be believed, the aging 20th century music industry will exist no more after three years. Three years!

(See also music like water, as popularized by Gerd Leonhard.)

So what is the future of Spotify?

It is difficult to envision any other serious competitor for Spotify but Apple. I find it quite brave of the small Spotify to go against the big Apple in the music market — and they will go against each other, even if they do not yet compete directly. I’m not claiming to have any information on either company (I haven’t even done my research, really) so this is just speculation, mainly to entertain my tired brain after work.

Here are a couple of possible scenarios for what might lie in Spotify’s future:

Spotify might have been able to secure exclusive deals on music streaming with the major labels. This is quite a long shot, and if true, the sales team at Spotify should be crowned and bathed in honey and milk and saffron (does that combo actually work? anyone?). This would also imply that the cluelessness of the execs and licensing managers of the majors stretches far beyond the bounds of my imagination. On the other hand, they’ve been clueless before.

In the summer of 2001 I was in the middle of licensing my most successful musical work, Slusnik Luna’s single “Sun”. Everyone in the industry thought it was a good idea to maximize profit by splitting the copyright by territory. Basically the idea was, that instead of getting paid once for licensing the track to one record company for the whole world (or actually, for the “known universe and beyond”, as the contracts put it), it was better to sell the UK distribution license to one record company, GSA (Germany, Switzerland, Austria) to another company, Spain to a third, USA to a fourth company, and so on… And each company would pay a licensing fee; Individually not as big as if one company would have paid for the universal license, but in total the territorial licenses would add up to a bigger amount. Everyone thought that was the best deal for the artist.

May I remind you that this was the summer that the original Napster closed down, so it was not like MP3s or P2P networks were unknown at the time. But it never occurred to the record industry folks (and not in time for me either), that having the licensing rights distributed around the world based on physical territories would make it nearly impossible to sell the music online. That was, and to some extent still is, the reason why you cannot download everything on Emusic, why it took so long for iTunes to start selling outside the U.S., and why you have songs appearing and disappearing from Spotify.

So, in their quest for maximal short-term profit, the labels effectively cut off the possibility of online delivery (and related income) for a lot of artists. For years. In layman’s terms, pretty fucking stupid, considering this was done by people who should have an idea where their industry is going.

Which brings me back to the cluelessness of the record industry peeps and how that might have played a part in Spotify (possibly) getting an exclusive deal for music streaming. Like said, mad props to Spotify if they pulled that off.

An exclusive streaming license would put Spotify in a strong position, giving them a couple of years to grow their user base without worrying about direct competition. They could start building the Spotify ecosystem, experimenting with how to entwine streaming music in the social networks of users, or partnering with device manufacturers to create Spotified portable players, phones, and home stereos. All of this within a somewhat sheltered business environment.

But all things come to an end, and so do licensing deals.

If the above future scenario were true, I would be absolutely certain that Apple would not rest on their laurels and sit back, waiting for the streaming licenses to expire. No, they would be busy preparing their own offering, so when the licenses became available, Apple would be ready to roll.

The question then is, what would Spotify need to compete against a streaming service from Apple?

First, being the leader in the streaming music market wouldn’t be enough for Spotify. They would need to achieve such a critical mass during their period of exclusive streaming licenses, that they would succeed the popularity of the whole iTunes ecosystem. The iTunes ecosystem has a strong position not only because of the superb user experience and great marketing clout, but because of the “soft lock in” achieved by the combination of the iTunes software, the iTunes Store services, world’s largest mobile application marketplace, and of course the iPod devices. Considering these features of the environment Apple has created, it would be an unbelievable undertaking from a young company like Spotify to beat Apple in a few short years.

Should Spotify decide to compete by trying to create a more compelling ecosystem rather than trying to win by simply being more popular, it wouldn’t be much easier to find unique advantages for Spotify. With my current knowledge (and at this time in the evening) I can’t think of single way a possible Spotify ecosystem could provide significant value to its users. That said, months ago I didn’t see Facebook status updates providing significant value for users either, and turned out I was wrong. Without significant value for users, there would not be notable switching costs associated with users moving over to Apple’s offering. So if users were able to leave the ecosystem easily, the ecosystem wouldn’t be very valuable to Spotify, now would it?

Mobile being the Next Big Thing for the past few years (when will it really happen?), it’s again a market dominated by Apple. There are app stores for Android and S60 (kind of), but they are nothing compared to the success of the iPhone app store. Spotify has already demonstrated an iPhone app, but Apple can easily block that app from ever reaching the app store. For Apple it would actually be beneficial for S60 and other competitors to catch up just a little, so they would be better protected against someone, like Spotify, trying them for misusing a monopoly market position.

If Spotify is lacking exclusive streaming deals with labels, like it probably is, what prohibits Apple from wiping them out in a couple of months after Apple comes out with their own streaming offering? Just asking.

So, it looks like the only way for Spotify to thrive would be for Apple to not go into streaming. Why wouldn’t they?

I cannot think of many reasons. Maybe Apple, or their major label licensors, would fear that streaming would eat the iTunes download sales. Obviously majors are not against streaming, they have licensed their catalogues to Spotify after all. But if download sales are good on iTunes, why kill a milking cow?

If David is right, Apple has only three years to be a part of the future, where music flows like water. The streaming market will emerge, whether Apple goes into it or not, and eventually the streaming market will eat download sales, whether Apple offers streaming or not. Better get the streaming revenue as well as the downloads revenue, rather than let a competitor like Spotify take the market. How well Apple will maximize profit, is a question of timing really.

The investors of Spotify will most probably make huge profits eventually. But how well off Spotify the company will be in the music like water economy, I wouldn’t be too sure.

Struggle of Life, originally uploaded by Tipu Kibria.

There’s a constant struggle in the industry.

The corporate idea for survival is to maximize utilization by maintaining only minimum resources. For product companies this is mostly about cutting resources that are not providing value, in effect: firing people. This cost cutting is often done in a short-sighted manner, where resources are cut based on how much direct value they provide to the company. Human resources and research and development are very likely candidates for cost cuttings — in my opinion two of the most important functions of a product company.

Provider companies can also employ a strategy of selling more work than they have resources for. So the companies sell their services, then hire staff in a hurry to deliver those projects. If the project outlook gets worse, and the skills of specialized staff are not needed, the unnecessary staff gets fired. Unfortunately the sales pipeline visibility is rarely more than a few months, so people tend to get hired and fired quite erratically.

The workers’ idea for survival is to create and maintain a personal brand. Making sure you do your work well, keeping in touch with old colleagues, keeping and updating a list of references, and more and more often, changing your employer whenever something more interesting comes along.

This looks like a sweet combination, at least for the companies, doesn’t it: as the market for talent is more liquid, companies can more easily recruit top talent for interesting jobs — even if that talent is a little fickle. At the same time companies can maintain high utilization by cleaning out people who are not making money for the company and increasing the profits.

Yeah, but.

There are other, more long-term consequences. People lose trust in employers, because companies are not committed to their employees. The lack of commitment goes both ways, and as a consequence employees have little loyalty for the companies that employ them. People can and will commit highly, but only if it furthers their personal brand, and their professional and life goals.

Without mutual commitment between companies and employees, company culture deterioriates. In fact, it becomes very difficult to maintain a culture in an environment where people come and go, depending on the demands of the market or the capabilities of the sales team.

It also becomes difficult to maintain processes; and I’m talking about real, working processes, used in daily work, not the fancy process charts that providers often use to sell their services but which have little to no relevance to actual work. Processes enable you to repeat success whether you have access to your superstar employees or not. Processes can make your offering consistent, rather than being fully dependent on certain people. In short, processes are important to the financial bottom line.

It looks rather obvious to me, that for long-term success, and long-term leadership in a given field, a company needs to make sure it hires the best talent, but also spends the effort to keep the talent, developing them into superstars supported by a strong company culture and solid processes. Yet I rarely ever see this happening.

So the question remains: what happened to companions — employees and companies — watching each others back?

Feeds are the plumbing of web 2.0, and provide computers and people with all kinds of publish/subscribe possibilities. Seeing the value in subscribing to feeds about topics of personal interest is a no-brainer for most, as feeds allow you to keep tabs on stuff that you wouldn’t or couldn’t otherwise follow.

But — perhaps surprisingly to the most 2.0 geeks out there — I don’t think feeds have taken off too well inside businesses, although they could provide tremendous value as an information delivery mechanism.

The probable problem is that for feeds to be adopted inside businesses, enabling technology is not enough, but a culture change is needed. Everybody is used to cc:ing everyone else in all kinds of FYI stuff. Everybody is even more used to ignoring most if not all of those emails.

Organizations should forget that email mindset, and become publish/subscribe organizations, where anyone can get any (well, probably almost any) information by subscription. It will become the responsibility of the interested party to stay on top of things by subscribing, and people will have better control of the kind of information they need to do their work.

Perhaps the information publishers inside companies will even be encouraged to make their output more interesting, rather than emailing everybody 40-page documents to “check out quickly, just in case”.

Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see how a publish/subscribe model would change an organization. It definitely matches the networked organization model, but does it help or reinforce the problems of such organizations — such as concealing who has power inside an organization — remains to be seen.

1. I have 14 years of project work experience, and that experience has value.

2. Motivation for me comes from seeing that my work has an effect. If my work moves a project towards the final goal, I’m happy. If my work affects the life of someone for the better, even in the most microscopic ways, I’m ecstatic.

3. If I don’t see my work having any effect, I get really irritated. Too irritated. I always say about work that “it’s just work”, you shouldn’t ruin your life by thinking about work. But work without meaning is not “just work”. It’s constant, 24/7, nagging pain.

4. My communication and people skills need improvement. When I’m disappointed, I’m (usually) able to explain why I’m disappointed. Now I need to learn how to do that without sounding arrogant and pissed off about everything.

5. Presenting opinions strongly is not equal to presenting opinions convincingly.

6. Spending time on how even the smallest details are presented, is not necessarily waste of time.

7. Sometimes taking the time to let others discover things for themselves can be more beneficial than taking the shortcut and telling them straight how it is.

8. Consequently, I should learn to enjoy the breakthroughs of others more than the opportunity to say “I told you so”.

9. I tend to be childish, getting all cranky if people don’t acknowledge that I know, or that I knew something. That behaviour needs to change.

10. I need to listen to and trust my instincts more.

It’s been two and half weeks since I wrote something here.

In this time I have found out, that working in a client office, under such an NDA that restricts me even from discussing who I have met with, is enough to effectively block me from thinking aloud in this blog. Or at all. I start to doubt what are my thoughts, and what should contractually become the intellectual property of my client, and by extension their client.

Is this beneficial to anyone? I doubt that.

Is this the standard of working for developers and designers? Definitely.

I wonder how much a free flow of ideas (if not specific concepts or designs) would increase the output of those of us working in highly protected industries and projects…

Bumped on this bit in a discussion thread about user experience practices and agile processes:

Do architects design the buildings while the bricklayers are laying bricks? Would you fly in an airplane that was designed as it was built? Of course not. So why should complex systems be any different? Larry Marine

I’ll start with the second most important reason: It should be different because the user interfaces and web apps we’re mostly talking about in conjunction with user experience are evolving, dynamic things. The basic functionality of a modern airplane was designed tens of years ago, for buildings you can add a couple of zeros to that number. Even the modern details of an airplane were probably designed, and specifications locked years before starting constructing planes for clients.

What about a social networking site then? The “must have” functional details are changing every week, and you can’t really talk about an agreed framework of basic functionality.

Let’s take a car for another example. A car model is first designed, then built hundreds of thousands of times. This doesn’t mean the first prototypes of the car were not built while it was designed. And redesigned while it was built.

The beauty and curse of building “live” software is that you only build one copy. You design and then build. But you also build and then design more. It has versions and iterations, but unlike mass produced things like cars or airplanes, there’s (usually) only one product in use. If requirements change, you don’t start a new design process which ends with a locked spec, then start a new manufacturing process. No, you change the product live. And that’s why agile works for software design, but not necessarily for buildings and airplanes.

The first most important reason is, that in the heat of developing a cool new web app, it is often forgotten that unlike with an airplane, a mishap in the design doesn’t kill anyone. In fact, even the worst possible outcome of neglect is often insignificant, considering life at large.

When learning a new UI, choice creates anxiety. Anxiety creates a bad experience.

And to be honest, this isn’t true only for your parents. It goes the same way for everyone.

Sometimes people have a hard time seeing that. Some business school grads think I’m stupid. Clients don’t always see the value of a team that’s committed to their project not because of the paycheck, but because we chose to.

Being an entrepreneur allows me to excel at what I’m good at, work with the people I like to work with, and generally make this big part of life that is work more enjoyable.

If it were my choice, I would not have a TV. In fact, for the most part when I was living alone, I didn’t have one. Now that I’m sharing a flat, I do not get to make these decisions, which means I watch quite a bit of TV, even if I don’t want to. I just can’t resist the allure of the moving image……

Well, onwards.

I hope no one minds me using such delicate wording, but I think the current TV experience is fucked up. The digital TV we’re “enjoying” in Finland surely plays a big part in this assessment.

Minimalist Bang & Olufsen Home Theater, originally uploaded by ikatu_projects.

Here’s what I’ve seen happening to the TV experience:

• At least two remotes is the standard in every home. The TV remote is rarely used for anything but switching the TV power on and off.
• Switching channels has become slow.
• Previously problems in the TV signal transmission made the picture slightly fuzzy. Now the picture cuts off completely, or at minimum goes into an artsy mess of pixel vomit.
• Subtitles are not guaranteed to be displayed.
• Picture and sound are not guaranteed to be in sync.
• No matter what TV or digital receiver you have, it is too difficult to find settings for getting the aspect ratio of the picture right. If I could get one euro for every movie geek with a 4000+ € hi-fi home theatre setup and a video image that’s unnaturally stretched and probably also cropped at top and bottom, I would go and buy a soy latte with double espresso. Obviously having full HD resolution and 200Hz refresh rate is more important than seeing people on the screen in their natural proportions.
• If you really want to see a certain show, it is rather likely, that your digital receiver will start a software update on the moment you turn it on. It is even more likely the software update is made so, that you cannot watch TV while it’s updating, you cannot abort the update, and you don’t get any feedback as to how long the update might take.
• And when the update doesn’t help, taking your “video” (that’s DVR now, folks) to repairs, will most probably wipe out your whole collection of recorded shows.
• But hey, you got a slightly sharper image. So slightly though, that it’s nearly impossible to see the difference if you don’t have an old TV tube for comparison.
• Any improvement in image quality is offset by buying a flat screen TV, which most likely doesn’t really display any dark colors, and basically turns everything else into a pixelized flicker. Yes, the man in the store says that’s not true, and yes, your friends who paid thousands for top notch TVs a couple years back say that’s not true… but there’s a reason the refresh rates in the newest LCD TVs top at around 240 Hz.
• Having all this new technology added to the TV viewing setup certainly doesn’t make things easier. There’s an increasing number of user interfaces, but unfortunately not an increasing quality in UI design. Quite the contrary. Our particular digital receiver / DVR (Humax) is so bad, that I wonder how many of those boxes the engineers behind that shit-pile have tossed out their own windows, in frustration.

I’m not really as frustrated as it might sound, probably because I don’t really care about watching TV. I’m just amazed at how we’ve come to where we are with TV technology, and how fast the change has happened. Knowing so many great designers, and knowing there must be at least tens of thousands of brilliant designers out there in the world, I’m amazed at how it seems not a single one has been hired to design a TV or a set-top box.

As a side note, I would salute Samsung for the UIs in their digital TV products — unless I wouldn’t have seen how impossible it is to get a Samsung home media box to talk to a Samsung TV.

Continuing on the needs, wants, qualities, valuables journey, here’s an example of what focusing on valuable qualities could mean in practice.

Let’s take a TV manufacturer as an example. I’ll use Sony, as our home happens to be equipped with a Sony TV.

Consumers buy TVs to fulfill their need for home entertainment. Sony fulfills this need by manufacturing TVs.

The old/current way to create additional reasons for buying Sony TVs is to improve on the basic TV tuner functionality: Sony might add connectors for game consoles, or the ability to connect a camera and display a slideshow on the TV.

The new way for creating additional reasons could be based on, let’s say, the valuable quality of community. Sony could figure out how the TV could increase the community aspects of home entertainment, how the TV could bring together the family (some might add, “again”). Or maybe the idea would be to unite not the family members, but friends in separate locations. Anyone who has chatted with friends while watching TV knows how much more entertaining TV can get.