“Lean startups operate by a different standard,” says Ries. “I suggest they define waste as ‘every activity that does not contribute to learning about customers’.”
Location-based data
The latest post over on GigaOm asserts this is the “year of location.” I’m pretty blah about that proposition. All the apps utilizing location now will be looked back on as incubators and test beds for the real use of location data.
Location in mobile products (phones of course but also in-car networks like the Ford Sync) is destined to become just another piece of data like the date and time, username and so forth. Its purpose is simply to refine the user’s context even further.
Location as we use it now is kind of … not useless, just very underdeveloped.
Superman: What a pain in the ass
Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, existed so Superman could live among his adopted species. He identified primarily as an ordinary human; that’s how he was raised, after all. But Kal-el’s bespectacled mortal identity served another purpose: It allowed him to be a hero without being a pain in the ass.
Alex Payne (twitter) posted a very insightful analysis of what he calls the “hero” in the team dynamic. You probably know the type, and Alex does quite a good job of explaining it concisely:
Every team I’ve ever worked on has had a hero. You’ve probably worked with one too: the guy or gal eager and willing to pull all-nighters, work weekends, and take over on-call duty when nobody else wants to.
Though Alex’s focus is on the issues with heroes in the context of a team of programmers, the lesson is still completely valid regardless of what business you’re in. The problem is that the emergence of a “hero” signifies a catastrophic failure of the system. There’s an interesting evolutionary parallel:
Mark Pagel and colleagues at the University of Reading, in England, studied 101 groups of plant and animal species and analyzed the lengths of branches in the evolutionary trees of thousands of species within these groups.
…
Dr Pagel said that the research shows speciation is the result of rare events in the environment, such as genetic mutations, a shift in climate, or a mountain range rising up. [Emphasis mine]
No one is hired to be a hero (at least, they shouldn’t be). They’re hired to fill an open niche in the team system. People become “heroes” at work because there’s a serious issue that needs to be fixed, and either selflessly (“My co-workers need me”) or selfishly (“This is going to make me look great!”) they decide to step in and take care of it without demanding, asking or apparently even expecting help from their team.
As Alex says, in an emergency, heroes are great. They pull us out of lakes, stop the bleeding, get people breathing again, or get a runaway project back on its rails. However, what makes a hero a hero is that they go away once the crisis is over. If the fireman who pulled you out of your pancaked car was in your kitchen the next morning fixing you toast and putting toothpaste on your toothbrush, he’s crossed the line from “hero” to “enabler of lazy behavior.” (Unless, of course, you’re into firemen catering to your every need, not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Likewise, if we have one team member constantly exerting superhuman efforts to keep the ship righted, then management needs to reassess exactly what they’re doing.
Real heroes walk away and fade back into the crowd. They don’t stick around to be patted on the back. Real heroes understand why Superman had Clark Kent.
Impatience
I just received a long-awaited response to an email regarding CrossFit classes for my kid. (She’s the only girl in my life who thinks the things I do are cool enough to emulate.)
I was baffled by how long it took to get this response. It seemed like forever ago I’d sent it. Then I scrolled down to my original message and saw I sent it yesterday around this time. However, between now and then I’d checked my email dozens of times at least (I’m counting push notifications here), and refreshed Twitter nearly as much. I forget sometimes with my text messages and iPhone and push notifications that checking one’s email once a day is standard practice for most people.
That’s okay though. I’ve long since come to terms with the fact I’m a weirdo. I’m a little concerned about my kid though; I fear she’s emulating that too.
BART’s personality
At today’s press conference at the Lake Merritt BART station in Oakland, Calif., where I made a token appearance, I met several very good folks. To Jim, Linton, Gail and Julie, thank you very much.
Meeting these people who do customer relations and public relations for a government agency that is (to put it mildly) heavily scrutinized was interesting. They’ve got a very tough job that I can identify with closely, given my employer.
They’re doing a lot of interesting things over there, marketing-wise. They’ve got a Twitter account, of course. But the neat thing (to me) is that it’s not just a bland stream of train delays, repair work, and so forth. They’re actually letting some personality through. I’m surprised, to be honest. Government agencies aren’t exactly known for their dynamic online personalities.
In addition, they’ve got MyBart.org, where they host contests, provide discounts to Bay Area businesses, and so forth.
This is striking to me especially because of how they are fulfilling so much of the advice given in Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
. Specifically, and maybe most importantly, they’re out where the customers are, and they’re talking with us, not at us. There’s no BART megaphone blaring information into our ears. They’ve managed to humanize a government agency. I’d be interested in hearing how this is working out for them in real, measurable terms.
“Blogs and social media behave like compound interest, so if you treat them like ‘campaigns,’ you lose all the benefits.”
Keeping Me Interested…
Today at work the ball got rolling on a potential partnership between us and the Oakland Raiders. This possibility has been floated around for awhile, but due to various circumstances out of many people’s control, we couldn’t get the right people talking.
Then, through a convoluted chain of events that involve some “nuances” of professional relationships in military culture, I had a sudden choice: just cancel the whole thing or give the green light to start charging ahead.
The number one factor in my decision to make phone calls to get things underway? The marketing rep was a genuinely nice person. Though I always enjoyed hearing from her (even when she was, essentially, pestering me about doing business with her), I never explicitly thought, “What a nice person.” When she called, she did several things right:
- She always said hello, and I could always tell she was smiling on the other end of the phone.
- She was modest and non-threatening.
- She was patient, and didn’t make up excuses for fast-tracking the project.
At the end of the day, I never felt like I was getting pitched something. I felt like a peer — someone who does my job in a different organization — was checking things out. She didn’t make me dread her phone calls or e-mails. That made all the difference, and it kept me interested in doing business with her.
It’s a good reminder that no matter the medium, people like it and are flattered by other people being interested in and respectful of them. At the very least, it’s certainly not going to hurt.
timoni:
Improving the air travel experience is something of a passion of mine, so when I saw Tyler Thompson’s boarding pass redesign, I was intrigued. His article is well-thought-out and provoking, but unfortunately his redesigns don’t address a lot of the practical issues that airline travelers and airlines have to deal with.
Tim Morgan discussed some of the obvious shortcomings in his summary here, and after talking with both him and James Yu I’ve taken a first pass at a practical boarding pass redesign. (Edit: I’ve also discussed another use case here.)
I had a few design constraints. First, no interesting typefaces or graphics: although they could vastly improve user experience, practically speaking, the machines that print boarding passes won’t be replaced soon. For this redesign, I stuck with one-weight Monaco. Likewise small gate maps of each airport would be ideal, but aren’t practical—so, that idea was scrapped, too.
Second, I constantly kept in mind that the ticket has at least two users, and usually three: both the traveler, who uses it as a reference, and also any TSA agent or airline employee that might need to inspect it.
For this example, I researched multiple airlines’ boarding passes to see what information needed to be included for all interested parties. I chose United Airlines as the airline here, mainly because I used them to travel home for the holidays this Christmas. With a lot of help from James, I’ve outlined checked-in, boarding-pass carrying airline traveler priorities as follows:
- Gate number
- Board time
- Boarding zone
- Seat number
- Departure time
And so:
You’ll see that the ticket reflects the priorities I just listed for passengers. For the TSA officials scanning this boarding pass, they’ll see the information they’re looking for up top, where the untrained quickly learn to find it: airline, flight number, and passenger name (in the same order as the passenger’s ID).
For airline officials, most of their internal indexing numbers are inside the grey box—it’s grey so that it’s easy for the other parties to ignore. So far as I can tell, airline-only information is usually a bunch of ID numbers. In this mockup, I’ve also included a lot of abbreviations that were present on several boarding pass examples, though in every example I found online, they were left blank. Maybe someone in the airline industry can explain their purpose.
Because I’m a sucker for plain English instructions, I’ve included the text “First leg to [airport code] | transfer at [airport code]” above the grey airline-only box. I’m not sure whether or not it’s feasible to put leg numbers on boarding passes, but if one could easily put one’s transfer tickets in order, it would make travel that much more pleasant.
The passenger gets their ticket at the check-in counter or self-check-in kiosk. If they’re printing out tickets at home the night before, or received them in the mail prior to flight, they won’t get a gate, in which case the gate number will have tiny instructions to check with an airline employee. In any case, once travelers know their gate and are going through security, they’ll focus on this:
TSA agents, on the other hand, will be focused on this, especially the top row:
And of course, should there be any problems at the gate, the agent will be focused on this, particularly the information in and above the grey box:
When the passenger is ready to board, they will care about this:
And when they are in the walkway, almost on the plane, they only have the right-hand ticket stub—which is fine, because they just care about this:
Though this redesign isn’t sexy, the important information will be obvious to whoever’s looking for it. TSA agents and airline agents are look at hundreds, if not thousands, of boarding passes a day, so despite the smaller type size, with this redesign they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for because the information they really need is grouped in a small and readable area.
For travelers, the benefits to this design are obvious. A lot of the changes I’ve made are similar to Thompsons’, but with a clearer information hierarchy and a more legible typeface.
Speaking of legible typefaces, this design is typographically sound and if printing machine support it, should look good in a wide variety of typefaces. Here’s the same redesign set in Helvetica Neue (normal and bold).
I kind of work in a PR echo chamber. That is, words like “branding”, “interaction”, “awareness” and “influencers” get tossed around without a lot of thought toward what that actually means. No doubt I’ve got some real pros in my professional life, but by and large these marketing catchphrases are impenetrable jargon. In my training as a military journalist, we’re taught to eschew insider lingo and five-dollar words (like “eschew” for example, or “suffice”) when a one-dollar word will suffice.
Fortunately a friend of mine is a very cynical developer at a very successful startup out here and, through a calculated campaign to make me feel like an idiot, made fun of me until I stopped using words like ”branding”, “interaction”, “awareness” and “influencers” in everyday conversation. Needless to say, the campaign was a resounding success. It made me realize how riddled with jargon and ideological constructs this profession is.
So when he linked this week-old post on the boom of self-proclaimed social media gurus, I knew he was obliquely, good-naturedly making fun of me. It’s true — this occupation is filled with BS artists, flim-flammers and confidence men. It’s enough to make a PR pro wonder if his whole life is a lie.
But here’s the deal: Public-facing organizations — MegaCorp., Inc., or startup, government or private sector — need professional communicators. It’s incumbent on those communicators to understand their audience, to build relationships and in turn understand why those relationships are good for business. This requisite deep understanding is going to generate some internal lingo. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but let’s leave the jargon between us.
Trust Agents
Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents has repeatedly shifted my perspective on what I thought I knew about social media.
I got the book on Audible audiobook tonight to listen to while I drank beer and folded laundry before heading back to work tomorrow. I’ve got to say, I really appreciate being taught something that I give a damn about.
Here’s a quick, in-progress laundry list of the things I’ve learned:
- If you want to be involved in social media in a professional context, you can’t hide in anonymity online, especially once you’ve reached any level of notoriety. If you want to be trusted, you’ve got to be out there in a “really real” capacity.
- You’ve got to make your own game. To me, this translates almost directly to creating original, innovative content that people give a damn about. And not just any people, either, but the people in the audience you want to influence.
- “Communities don’t want to be ‘managed,’ they want to be cared for.” This made me sit back in my chair. I’m applying for a LOT of community management positions. This quote crystallized for me what I was kind of sensing. “Community management” is a misnomer. You don’t “manage” users, you respond to their needs and build enthusiasm through interaction and personal connection. Enthusiasm builds word-of-mouth which builds greater business.
At any rate, looking forward to “reading” this whole book.
Finally, I can’t recommend strongly enough Audible.com. $15 a month gets you 2 books per month to listen to, which is a damn good deal.
