“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born”
— Nikola Tesla

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer–say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep–it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly”
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“On the other hand, although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination”
— Albert Einstein

“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet”
— Franz Kafka

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Without great solitude no serious work is possible”
— Pablo Picasso

I found these excellent articles by Leo Babauta a few days ago: The No.1 Habit of Highly Creative People and The lost art of solitude. They are an excellent dive into the value of solitude and they provide also some excellent quotes, like the ones above.

Despise and deride it all you like, but the business card remains a growth market. How has this 17th century technology not just survived but continued to flourish? [...]
Bump was fast out of the gate, reporting 53 million users since its March 2009 launch, but a recent internal evaluation surprised its founders. The deep dive revealed that despite its design as a business product, it was primarily serving an after-hours function as a social tool.
— Bennett R. (2012) How Business Cards Survive in the Age of LinkedIn

“Surprised”? To find the survival of the business card surprising means not understanding human behaviour and interaction design as well.

Giving a card has many meanings: from the physicality of the card itself (have you ever played with one in your hand?) to the ritual of the handover (a strong social ritual), to the speed of doing that (handover, done!), to the visual design of the card itself (that’s a cool design!), to the collection part of it (did you ever flip through the cards you got after a day?).

If you want to “challenge” business cards with your product:

1. it needs to be faster, or as fast as.
   Test it. If I can give a business card and take your faster than your app, I already win.
2. it needs to be visually designed, branded, colorful, not just a line of data.
   You need to allow people to design their cards. There’s pride and “wow” in that.
3. it needs to create a sort of ritual.
   This is more subtle, but you need to avoid technicalities. Create some kind of gesture maybe. An interaction. Bump does this pretty well, but maybe something less awkward would be nice.

Notice that “having to install the app” already hits 1 pretty badly. Yes, it’s fun at the beginning to try the new app and see how it works, but when the novelty goes away, you’re going back to cards again.

Technology alone can’t help here. Promising that aggregating the cards afterward in a better way, organize the data, setup the reminders and the call isn’t enough to balance out the three factors above. Promising a better long-term outcome over a higher initial investment is something difficult as human beings, otherwise gyms would be the best business ever. ;)

Nothing surprising.

And yes, it’s again about Proximity Interactions.

Even if I was speaking mostly about design, I added some elements of business, strategy and change management as well, because I thought they were relevant.

I admit, this is a quite dense presentation, I would have probably taken out some topics in hindsight at least for UX Conference, trying to be more focused. However, on the plus side, from the feedback I got it was really successful and lots of people asked more. I probably need to do more workshop and less speeches in the future. :)

One method, two tools, three business tips. This is how I organized the presentation, in order to be not too unbalanced toward design, even if that was the focus, but also not being too high for more hands-on people.

One method

The most important part of Social Experience Design is that it can’t be done without a shift from traditional, deterministic thinking to the different Theory of Complexity thinking. This shift is critical because it’s the only way to deal with complex systems, such as people and social dynamics.

That’s why I talked again of the Dot Loop, because it contains all the factors that needs to be built-in in any design – well, in any company – to be really effective. The Dot Loop is an effective abstraction to deal with complex systems without a banalizing approach to them. Every successful company work that way – even, of course, probably they don’t call it Dot Loop, even if I’m starting hearing about it more often. :)

Two tools

The first tool is the Motivational Diamond, a very simple comparative visualizations that helps anyone working with social dynamics to focus on the four Relational Motivations (Competition, Excellence, Curiosity, Affection) and compare different services or parts of the service.

The second tool is the Social Usability and its Checklist, prepared to simplify the approach to it and provides an easy mnemonic. Social Usability works on four factors, that are Relations (the other), Identity (you), Communication (the channel between you and the other) and Emergence of Groups (all the emergent dynamics, again a complex system behavior).

Three business tips

These are very simple, but are also a very important part of a real change management process:

1. Be in-the-flow. This is critical in any good design tied to any change management process, but also for startups that are launching a new product: you have to understand that the day of your user is already
2. Be a double-pyramid business. This is a very important aspect, and might be an article by itself. Luckily it is: I wrote about the double-pyramid some time ago. This means that social businesses needs to engage in a different structure and find a balance between hierarchy and socialization, because the solution is in that balance and not in building a full hierarchic company or a full flat company.
3. Be a double double-pyramid business. Plus, you can’t be really a social business externally if you aren’t internally. You might have a unit that does customer service or social media operations, but if the whole company isn’t aligned, the users will get that, and the rewards are going to be lower (not zero, but lower).

The workshop

The extra part I prepared for Digital Accademia’s workshop regarded a couple of exercises to allow people focus a little more on how to use actively Relational Motivations and Social Usability.

I prepared two exercises to stimulate thinking and discussions:

• In pairs, draw a Motivational Diamond
  This is very interesting because it helps clarifying the four Relational Motivations by discussing it with a peer, and then the public discussions allow to clarify even more. As often happens in workshop, I learned something also this time: I have to clarify better that we are talking about traits that trigger relational aspects. For example, when we talk about “excellence” we aren’t talking about an excellent content, but about how we are promoting people’s excellence… and narcissism. :)
• In isolation, pick an item from the Social Usability Checklist and design an interface for it. Then, merge it with your partner to create a new UI with the two you prepared.
  I liked this one a lot because it shows how very simple solutions and interface can trigger more complex behaviours. One of the participants was worried because her solutions looked “too simple” but actually… that was the value of it! :)

A small joke

At UX Conference I was the last one of the day, so I had to think of something. That’s why I started with a small design practical joke… but I won’t tell what it was, and I removed it also from the presentation above. You’ll see the next time, maybe. ;)

Today there was a really well thought article by Joe Hewitt regarding AirPlay and the Apple TV. Here a few excerpts:

Not nearly enough of these analyses have talked about AirPlay. It’s clear to me that AirPlay would be so important to the Apple TV, you might as well call it AirPlay TV.

If I were an iOS developer, I’d start investing in AirPlay right now.
— Joe Hewitt (2011) AirPlay TV

Joe did an excellent summary. While I was noticing as well how little AirPlay was discussed and all its potential for both business and games, I never did a structured article as he did. It’s probably time. :)

For me, AirPlay has a huge potential, but let’s make a step back. The problem today is that most of the time there’s no proximity detection in our digital interaction.

Think about it: try to send a message to the person near you. You’re probably going to write an email and send it. That email then wirelessly connects to the WiFi access point, gets routed to a server somewhere maybe in the USA if you use a service like GMail, then there’s some server-to-server talk around the world and the email is sent back to the device. If it was a physical object, its gas consumption would be deemed as crazy, given that the person is right on your side.

Today, we don’t have any good tech to allow discovery and communication with a near device.

The one big technical hurdle for Apple to overcome is the unreliable WiFi connection between your iOS device and the TV.
— Joe Hewitt (2011) AirPlay TV

Or do we?

Well, it might not be perfect and it might not perform well enough, but Apple sneaked a really interesting piece of technology that, like AirPlay, looked nice but simple and got under most radars: AirDrop.

AirDrop is interesting because as Apple defines it works only on a few selected MacBooks, from 2008 onward, and there’s a reason for that: it requires a WiFi chipset (like the Broadcom BCM4322) that supports multiple streams. Why is this important? Because it needs to be able to stay connected to a WiFi network and at the same time use AirDrop. And it just works: you turn it on, drop a file, done. At a really impressive speed. I guess that the problem is power consumption, so AirDrop isn’t always on, a problem however that will disappear on a TV set, always powered.

I don’t know however if the answer is going to be AirPlay + AirDrop. There might be a problem of power consumption, given that even with iOS5 and iPhone 4S Apple requires you to connect to a power cord before syncing, but that’s might be just be something to avoid problems, given it’s syncing delicate data and AirPlay itself is WiFi.

What about the future?

It’s always very hard to make prediction, because there are lots of problems that involve also partnerships and politics between companies, but I’d like to think that:

1. One day I might walk into an office with an iPhone and start presenting without any cable, since I can do AirPlay to the projector, zero-configuration.
2. One day I could sit with a few friends on the couch and everyone could stream to the screen, zero-configuration.
3. One day I could send anything to a device that sits near to mine, zero-configuration.
4. One day, maybe, I might not even need any Apple device do do that, because everyone agreed on a standard.

I think that Proximity Interactions (PIx) are the near future of mobile. And these above are just the few things that could be possible with an AirPlay like solution, but proximity isn’t limited to that, think for example to NFC or what could be possible if we get a proximity technology that’s also able to get the position of the devices near you. But this is probably material for another topic.

But even with just this, it means that we don’t need “computer” anymore, just screens. A screen could be anywhere, without any controller, and just works. And I wouldn’t need to ask a WiFi password to stream something to some one near me, getting angry eyes from IT people from foreign companies.

And while this is somewhere Apple seems headed to, nothing avoids other companies to do the same. And this future scenario would be better with a lot of interoperability, since I don’t expect Apple to build things like projectors for meeting rooms. ;)

I really hope for a future with more Proximity Interactions, regardless of its form.

You probably saw already this kind of interaction on YouTube ads. It’s quite simple: after a few seconds in, you can skip the video.

It seems quite effective, given what Bruce Daisley, sales director of YouTube and display at Google, said:

According to YouTube, for standard pre-roll (no choice to skip), users spend 48% of time highly engaged with the ad content.
For skippable pre-rolls (choice to skip) that have been viewed through, users spend 85% of time highly engaged with the ad content, resulting in 75% more engagement when the choice to skip is offered.

This is very relevant, because it tells us a lot how a simple interaction can influence behaviour. My thinking is that to skip an ad you have to recognize it and you have to actively take an action, something that requires a different attentive status.

But what’s the business perspective? Well, if you are a business seeing that your video is “skipped” isn’t a really good metric, also because given the analysis above, it’s better if they skip. What if, then, we could add the same interaction, but in a way that gives the user the power to tell something to the brand, at the same interaction cost – one click?

The idea could be as simple as this:

As you can see, in both cases you are able to skip the video with one click. But with this second interface, you are able to give an actually useful feedback to the business, something that could translate to some nice actions to improve the advertisement, make it better, less intrusive and at the same time more effective.

With no added interaction costs: one click. :)

Scan the QR Code and the product automatically lands in your online cart. When the online purchase is done it will be delivered to your home right after you get home. People can relax more after work and in the weekends. “I like the way it’s exactly like shopping in the actual store”.
— Made by Cheil (video)

This is an excellent example of what I was explaining in the article Bridging the physical barrier. It addresses the three points you should follow to design things that bridge the physical barrier: understanding, simplicity and usefulness in a big way.

You enter in the subway and you see the new Tesco Virtual Store, it’s very simple to answer the question “what should I do”, and once you understand it you can take some of you time – that you would have lost anyway waiting – to select merchandise and add it to your cart. The delivery happens in a the same day, when you get home, it’s incredibly useful.

If you think about it, is has probably a better experience than most online stores as well, because it’s more physical, and it’s easier to “browse” products this way, even if they are less.

To summarize why this is a great design solution:

1. It’s unexpected (understanding).
2. It’s immersive (simplicity).
3. It’s easier than the competing solution (simplicity).
4. It’s a better use of your time right there (simplicity).
5. It’s useful for both the people and the business (usefulness).

Think also about the cost: I can’t say for sure from informations I found so far, but it looks like these are the standard backlit billboards, so this solution is as expensive as printing them and having them in the subway, a cost that you’d already have to make a good marketing campaign.

You notice also that… QR Codes don’t matter at all here. It’s a mere technical detail, because you aren’t using a general QR Code reader, but the Tesco / Homeplus application, that people will download gladly because they are waiting. This is a very different situation from the usual “I see a QR Code I wonder what’s that”, because the key element is the cart application (that I expect to be also a mobile shopping app) not the QR Code.

(thanks to Michele for the link)

In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. Most people—imagine this: you can’t draw very well, but even if you can draw very well, suppose you come in and you’ve got to put together animation or drawings and show it to a world-class, famous animator. Well, you don’t want to show something that is weak, or poor, so you want to hold off until you get it right. And the trick is to actually stop that behavior. We show it every day, when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it, every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative.

As I say, that’s not obvious to people, but starting down that path helped everything we did. Show it in its incomplete form. There’s another advantage and that is, when you’re done, you’re done. That might seem silly, except a lot of people work on something and they want to hold it and want to show it, say two weeks later, to get done. Only it’s never right. So they’re not done. So you need to go through this iterative process, and the trick was to do it more frequently to change the dynamics.

— Ed Catmull, Pixar

This is interesting because it’s a very simple and practical thing, but that when enforced — “the trick” — it triggers an incredible response in quality, creativity, self-esteem and morale.

Most of the workspaces I’ve seen with good dynamics exist because consciously or unconsciously have developed these kinds of “tricks” that are easily understood by new hires, with huge benefits.

I should probably start collecting more of these. :)

(thanks to Peter Uchytil)

When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
— Graham P. (2002) Taste for makers

It’s like I had this sentence in the back of my brain for years. Now I have a good citation for it. ;)

(via SwissMiss)

I’m going to present you something obvious. Why? I think it’s interesting exactly because it’s so obvious that usually nobody thinks about it, and it’s dismissed easily. But nonetheless, if you start thinking that this concept exists it can help you a lot in many problem-solving activities and you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

Everywhere.

Let’s start with some example. The computer modeled upon Von Neumann’s architecture is basically a black box with a CPU and a memory that processes an input an returns an output, iteratively. The user centered design process in the ISO 13407 standard is a four phases loop: specify context, specify requirements, design solutions, evaluate. The problem-solving approach of Action Research is split in three iterative phases: plan, action and result. Agile methodologies have the concept of sprint, where you start with a sprint planning, you do a few days of development and then you end with a retrospective. Looking at a different discipline, in biology many systems are based on the concept of stimulus, elaboration and reaction, where in an amoeba we have a chemical process while in a cat the whole loop is mediated by the nervous system. The embodied cognition explains that the process of knowing is a loop between behavioural interaction and perception, between the action on the environment caused by a motor system and the perception of that same environment by a sensory system (thanks Gian). In the nervous system you can easily see the same pattern again in each and every neuron, and within the neuron in every synapse and down to every chemical receptor. In cybernetics you have the analogous feedback concept.

Once you start, you can go on with many different examples from different disciplines just looking around you. Are you starting to see the pattern here?

The Dot Loop

From those examples you can notice some interesting common traits:

• they are all loops, no inherent ending
• they can be all synthesized in three phases
• they exist at very different levels, often one inside the other (think about a living being and its own cells).
• every loop is short, in its own context

Hence, we can abstract it and call it the Dot Loop: do, observe, think. This loop exists everywhere you see something that works.

Why is this important? For three reasons:

• It’s a baseline for processes: any process you are going to use or build needs to have those three levels, nothing less than those, like a dot in geometry.
• It’s a validator for processes: if the process you are looking or the one you are building is missing one of those steps, then something is either wrong or hidden behind something. If it’s hidden, it’s better to understand why and make it more explicit.
• It’s the minimal building block: you can’t have nothing less than this, but also if you have something right like this then you need to go deeper, because it’s not enough, it’s too abstract and needs to get practical. For example you can say that one phase is “Design”, but unless you know how you are going to do that (card sorting, wireframes, visual layouts, prototypes) then it’s too abstract to be useful.

It’s very interesting because it’s something that inside a process can be repeated multiple times at multiple levels. Think for example the sprint in the Scrum Agile process: at the top level you have the building of a software: the client asks something, the team builds it, and it gets released back to the client. But inside that very high level (and not very useful) explanation you have a lot of iterations, again matching the Dot Loop, and inside each one of those each user story is prepared, developed and accepted. Again a Dot Loop.

Notice also that the starting point isn’t fixed. You might think that a project starts with the Observe phase, or analysis. But from another point of view, the clients starts with a request, so it’s a Do phase. And usually you can go back the loop more and more, without being able to define a starting point.

Notice also that in every following iteration each phase can do different things: for example the Observation phase at the beginning could refer to the business scenario, in the middle could refer to user interaction testing and in the end it could be the feedback from the users.

The Dot Loops within Agile: Scrum

The Agile Manifesto explains the four core elements of the discipline: individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, responding to change. Even from this point of view, you see that a Dot Loop process intuitively matches Agile.

If we take the Scrum methodology alone we can get into some details and see that a single sprint is exactly a Dot Loop:

• the sprint planning: Think
• the sprint itself: Do
• the sprint review and retrospective: Observe

But also, if we look inside the Do phase, we notice that the developers are:

• designing the solution of each user story: Think
• coding the tests and the solution: Do
• testing the solution: Observe

It’s obvious now, right?

Of course, if you go even more in depth things start getting a whole more complicated, but if you are doing things right, you are still working in different Dot Loops at different abstraction levels. Jacopo Romei, an Agile coach friend of mine, modeled the agile process as a sequence of feedback loops in its Software Feedback Loop, I think that’s an interesting higher-level perspective.

Some other examples

But how can something so obvious be useful for you? You don’t have to be a business engineer to use this simple and basic concept. Managers, designers, developers, and many more can apply the Dot Loop to their own field.

Think about a company starting to deploy a new intranet. In a typical scenario, it’s going to choose the technology, building the service and then releasing it one day with a communication through mail. As you can see, it’s missing a critical step that’s easily spotted once you see this through the Dot Loop: there’s no feedback, no following Observe phase after the release and probably not even tests with final users during the development of the application.

Another good example is made when companies see the new world of social media and start to use them straight away, creating pages on Facebook, accounts on Twitter and starting to push content through them. Even if the loop goes on, it’s missing the Think phase in between, that would have aligned the company strategy with the correct communication.

Think about the typical waterfall model, that leads so often to mediocre products. This basically happens because it’s like making one single Dot Loop, instead that taking the output feedback from the Do part and analyzing it to perform a following new action. Even when the feedback is take into account, often it’s just “check if we reached our objectives” and nothing after that. Instead creating a virtuous cycle is the correct way to both solve problems and evolve existing solutions.

If you want to build or evolve a social network the biggest error is going to be to start developing it assuming a specific behaviour of the users, but this rarely happens. You need to plan a social network in a sequence of iterations where you check what’s going on and adapt each step to the community evolution that surely happens each time.

You probably don’t have to look around much to see companies and consultants that are proposing their own “magic” process. With the Dot Loop you can have a first insight if they are saying something worth listening, or not: is there a missing step in the process? Flawed. Is it not a loop? Flawed.  It stops with the three steps? Too shallow. It has these three steps, or more steps that could be synthesized in Do, Observe, Think and they go in-depth describing what they do in each one of them? Great. They probably have something. The technical term I use in consultancy for this is “bullshit detector”. ;)

Notice also that sometimes this knowledge can be hidden. I’ve seen once a company that was delivering high quality products, but its formal model was waterfall. In the end it was again a Dot Loop – very similar to agile – but placed inside a structured process that in the end was just a logical explanation, not a process by itself.

As you might guess, the list could go on a lot and every one of those problems could be avoided understanding the Dot Loop, since it’s the minimal possible process.

I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world.

What killed us was “one more thing.” We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said “finished,” and shipped the darn thing.

On WordPress.com we deploy code to production twenty or thirty times a day and anyone in the company can do it.
— Matt Mullenweg (2010) 1.0 is the loneliest number

I think that Matt made a good argument, and it’s a nice starting point to move a little beyond and asking the question: “Why?”.

Let’s take the “one more thing” part. That problem exists only if you don’t have a clear vision. If you are just adding features because those are useful. If this is your approach, then you must at some point draw a line and say “stop”, and that part is hard, mostly because of the community pressure (but the same happens inside a company).

So, why code to production in a web service app works? Because you can just release and see if the users like it or not. But, basically, it’s not a very different approach. Instead of putting features in a code base you are putting it in a production server. The only thing changed is that you have an instant, granular feedback.

That’s good. Very good.

But I think that it’s a great solution to the feedback problem, or in other means that just hides the problem I’m referring to: vision. If I have a clear vision in my mind of what a product should look like, you don’t have to “draw a line” anymore. You just have an idea and you work to create it. And that’s going to be the next release of your software, or your next announcement in a web service world.

Because you had a vision and you made it real.

Don’t think that this means that you need a Steve Jobs that decides everything, all in his hands. It could be a group of peers, or a community-driven process. At the same time, don’t forget that in any group or community natural leaders emerge to drive this process. A good leader is a catalyst, not a ruler.

So you’ll understand that the “1.0″ iPhone that Matt is referring to isn’t a “line drawn”, is a step-stone of a vision.

From my point of view, the released product is usually the simplest solution for that vision. Without the correct vision, you don’t have the correct needs, you don’t have the correct objectives, you don’t have the correct context, and you can’t ever design the simplest possible solution, because it doesn’t have any vision to satisfy, just a lot of partial simple designs on smaller pieces.