Things inside my head

Photo

Mon, 28 May 2012 13:35:29 -0400

I think I wanna marry you...

Mon, 28 May 2012 13:33:43 -0400

THE BAR HAS BEEN RAISED BITCHES!!!

Experience Design is the New Branding

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:29:00 -0400

My second job as a web developer, way back in 1998, was working for a company that probably taught me more about how to do my job than any other place has. Ove Design is a branding and strategic design firm. It was there that I learned the concept of branding and what a companies brand is worth.

I also learned a lot about what makes a good company. 14 years later and I still rank Ove as one of the best places I have ever worked. The fact that they have been around for over 30 years is a testament to this.

To this day I always think about the value of branding and brand thinking. Every job I work on (now as an IA), I try to look at the bigger picture, how all of the parts fit together and what the overall voice of the client is and check those things against what I am doing to make sure they align.

Back when I was working at Ove, many companies had only a small website (which was probably their first website) and digital was really an afterthought. However today, the digital face of a company is often it’s most visible and visited. And so the connection between the online world and the offline world has never been more important. If the only thing you know about an online retailer, for example, is what you find out about them online, then that experience needs to extend to and connect with the products and services you receive from them offline.

To me experience design is not just about designing the experience of one facet of a connection or transaction, but about ensuring that the entire channel from start to finish is thought through. This makes experience designers ideal for creating brand experiences that really connect and resonate with people.

The biggest challenge experience design agencies face today is being given the keys to the kingdom, being allowed to suggest changes to a business beyond their domain. Someone who is doing this with great success today is Crispin Porter + Bogusky who convinced Domino’s that improving their product was vital to increasing sales. What ad agency could ever tell their client the reason sales suck is because their product sucks?

Branding agencies are asked all the time to consult beyond their domain of expertise. They might be asked to advise how the interior of a store looks or how a customer service team should respond to customers.

For experience designers the trust isn’t there yet. People don’t really know what an experience designer is. But with most experience designers working in digital, it’s a very natural place for end-to-end thinking to start.

How to fix airline flight delays

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:25:00 -0400

Flying in North America, especially in the US has become a bit of a joke lately. I can’t remember a flight that I have taken to the US in the last 2 years that didn’t delay me by at least 4 hours if not 20 or more. It’s not much better in Canada (with the one shining exception that is Porter Airlines who have delayed me a TOTAL of maybe 1 hour after 20 or so flights, and that was due to a thunderstorm). And there is no accountability. Airlines are legally responsible to you for NOTHING other than offering you a refund though in all fairness in nearly all situations they do try to eventually get you to your destination following the guidelines outlined in the infamous rule 240.

The worst scenario is when this happens between connecting flights leaving you stranded in some foreign city which is neither your home nor your destination. This is akin to a bus stopping at a diner in the middle of nowhere, halfway through a trip, and stating that they are more than happy to offer you a refund for the portion of the journey not completed and then driving off leaving you there to figure out how to get home.

The reason this happens is not too difficult to understand. First, airlines have no reason to change. They are all struggling financially and are looking for anyway they can to save a buck. Our free market system should root out the bad airlines because people should be voting with their dollars and deciding who stays in business and who does not. But this is where another problem lies. Airline tickets are not cheap and when people are looking at a list of tickets prices on say Kayak or Hipmunk, they usually buy the cheapest ticket on the list because it is saving them a LOT of money.

But people forget to calculate the potential cost of airline delays. Missing a connection to your destination may have the added cost of you staying the night at a hotel and paying to get to and from the hotel you have to pay for (or you can always sleep on the airport floor as one Delta attendant told me after refusing to pay for a hotel stay for me). It also means you miss out on the first night of your vacation, diminishing the enjoyment you get, never mind the stress, anger and frustration you experience.

So, how do we fix this? Simple. At the point of purchase, when people are voting with their dollars and looking at those high prices, each ticket should be displayed with a score that measures their ability to get you to your destination on time RIGHT BESIDE THE TICKET PRICE. For each airline, the score should display, as a percentage, the total number of flights that are delayed and cancelled as well as the average number of hours people are delayed by the airline.

As soon as people start taking into account the cost of delays, I can imagine that they will start re-evaluating which ticket really is the cheapest. Hopefully this will encourage airlines to get better at being on time or at least better at dealing with delays and cancellations.

All of this information is freely available online and so there is no real technical challenge to providing it. All that has to happen is that a booking site has to decide to provide it. And let me tell you, as soon as someone does, I will NEVER book a ticket anywhere else.

Know Your Audience

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:49:00 -0400

How is it, in an era where the internet is disrupting everything and digital is the new medium, that a company who published words and graphics printed in ink on slices of dead trees is thriving? Because they know their audience.

Penguin Books (and Puffin, Penguin’s children focused books) understand that the people who want to buy books don’t want digital copies. They want something they can hold in their hand. They like the feel of paper. They love looking at the artwork on the cover. They like being able to show it off to friends or have people glance over their shoulder when reading on the subway or at lunch.

Check out some of the incredibly beautiful work they have been doing:

Limited Edition Designer Classics featuring book covers designed by various famous artists and designers:

Treasure Island (by architect Frank Gehry)

James and the Giant Peach (by sculptor Antony Gormley)

The Secret Garden (by designer Lauren Child)

Penguin Threads, book jackets hand-stitched by a variety of artists

(see more by artist Jillian Tamaki)

Clothbound Editions

Kama Sutra (See more images at the illustrator’s, Malika Farve, site)

Penguin Ink Series

Graphic Deluxe Series

Final thought: Penguin profit jumps 8% in 2012 While a lot of this had to do with them doubling their ebook sales, the increase in the sale of books was the major driver of their increase in profits.

Why timesheets need to die! (or change)

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:02:00 -0500

I work in advertising. I don’t know of a single person who works in marketing or advertising who doesn’t do timesheets. I also don’t know of a single person who enjoys doing them. I think it’s time for companies to abolish them. Here’s why:

They will never be accurate. Unless you are someone who writes down every start and stop of work and every job you work on, your time sheets will not be accurate. When someone interrupts you for 5 minutes to talk about a job, should you put that in your time sheets? Should your timesheets reflect the momentum lost on the job you were working on from the interruption? These are questions for the ideal scenario. MOST people I know don’t have this problem because they are filling out time from the last four weeks and are hopelessly trying to remember what they did for several days 3 and a half weeks ago. In other words, most people’s timesheets are horribly inaccurate.
They don’t reflect what matters. We don’t sell our time, we sell our results. We should be working on finding away to price the value of those results, not the time it takes us to produce them.
They don’t reflect what we bill. Most companies will quote on work (based on erroneous timesheet data…see #1 above), then when the work is delivered, they will look at the timesheets and figure out what should have been billed based on time spent. Then they tell the client what that number should have been, but never charge them for it. Sometimes this gives an account manager some leverage to ask for more money in the future, but for the most part timesheets never actually affect the final bill.
They encourage people to work to time goals rather than client goals. When someone knows how many hours they have for a job, they tend to stick to them (or at least falsely report they did in their timesheets) regardless of how much (or little) work a job may need. This often leads to poor work being delivered because people ‘ran out of time’. It also keep focus on time goals rather than results. All people think about is that if their timesheets reflect a good work effort, then they will be rewarded–which is mostly true!

In all fairness I do see some value in timesheets. IF you can get good data, they help you estimate future work and avoid surprises. And when you get that rediculous client that demands to see the time applied to their account, you have something to produce. But if you cannot get employees to enter their time accurately, and you cannot get them to understand why they matter, then timesheets can only hurt you.

IMO, the best way to help with the timesheets problem is to make them DEAD simple.

Timesheets are a quick snap-shot and don’t need to be hyper-precise, so let employees round to the hour.
Drop all other information beyond beyond the job and the time.
Don’t track sick days, holidays, doctor appointments, etc. if you can avoid it.
Get rid of your crappy software RIGHT NOW. Write your own. KEEP IT SIMPLE.

And I think a healthy reminder to employees from time to time about how timesheets help the company get paid is a good idea too but it should come hand-in-hand with a reminder that results are ultimately what a company gets paid for.

Further proof that Apple is moving away from the Mac and towards simply building screens

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:08:49 -0500

Further proof that Apple is moving away from the Mac and towards simply building screens

Beyond the Apple TV (or why an Apple TV makes sense)

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:17:00 -0500

Apple gets it. It’s been a long time coming, but they are now about to change everything…again…massively. You got a sense of this when iCloud launched and when they shifted the MacOS to look more like iOS, but until today, I didn’t really see the bigger picture.

Mountain Lion makes it blindingly obvious that apple is no longer selling devices. They are selling an ecosystem. They are selling windows into your data. It explains why a TV suddenly makes sense.

Everyone thinks an Apple TV will be all about the interface or some cool new way to interact with the television. I agree that is a big part of it–-a television doesn’t work well with a keyboard, mouse or touchscreen, so they need something new. But people are forgetting that a TV with the coolest interface ever is useless without the desire to watch it. So, what’s going to be on there? Cable (does anybody watch cable TV anymore?) iTunes content? You can already get that through an AppleTV (the little black box).

So what’s going to be on an Apple TV? In short, everything you care about.

The TV is going to be your computer, just like your iPad is, just like your phone is, just like your MacBook and iMac are. They are all your computer because what makes your computer yours will not be on one single device. It will be on iCloud. The TV and iPhone and iPad and MacBook and iMac will all just be windows into the same data.

What’s really cool about this is this really frees any one device from being the centre of your digital life, which means that any one device could easily be used to control another. This means your iPhone can become your iPad’s remote, or your TV remote, or your MacBook can control your iPhone (make a phone call), or your AppleTV. All of them just sharing your data back and forth.

And ultimately what is happening here is that Apple is free to put a screen on anything. Perhaps your iPhone starts your car, or your car queues up a show on your media player when you get home, or your child does homework on your coffee table’s screen and then review it with you on the television.

It’s not the hardware (i.e. the ability to put the internet on your fridge) that makes this all possible, it is the removal of the data from any one device that makes this possible. And that is only possible if the OS on all devices supports that.

This is why Apple is so far ahead. With all of their OSs aligning and taking more and more advantage of iCloud, they are perfectly poised to make this happen. Many companies have bits and pieces of this vision, but no one else has this level of integration. No one else has your documents, apps, media, personal files, email, preferences, etc. as well as has your consumer electronic dollars being spent in their hardware. No one else has the big picture.

Images courtesy apple.com

"I just wonder how many people fall by the wayside because they can’t push their point home and..."

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:27:50 -0500

“I just wonder how many people fall by the wayside because they can’t push their point home and therefore don’t quite get what they want. Nobody respects you later for having been a nice guy and given up. You gotta get it. You have to get it now because you’re gonna wear what you got, basically. You can be very unpopular on the route, but if you’re right, all is forgiven.”

- Ridley Scott on pursuing his vision for the movie Alien, 2003 Director’s Commentary (via jted)

What's Missing From Social

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:52:07 -0500

While I am an avid user of many of the social platforms out there today, I have never really bought into the idea that these platforms were somehow an improvement on how people already communicate. They certainly have their strengths and place in the world. For example: I think Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with those who are less close to you–people who simply wish to skim your life; Twitter is perfect for sharing thoughts of yours with a large audience which is mostly made up of people you don’t even know; Linkedin is great for keeping in touch with every single work colleague you have ever encountered in your life…etc.

The clear trend that I see here is that all of these services only providing you with superficial connections to people. And what they are missing is that deeper connection. The ability to really share your life and experiences is a powerful and meaningful way with someone very close to you, like say a life-long best friend living abroad, or perhaps your kid who is away at school or summer camp.

I want to be able to express the true me–not to everybody, but to certain close people. It’s time for social to find a soul.

A breathtaking video of urban BASE jumping in Singapore.

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:40:00 -0500

A breathtaking video of urban BASE jumping in Singapore.

Whatever happened to the integrated agency?

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:53:03 -0500

Time and time again, I see big creative ideas (as well as bad ideas) generated by the old school advertising guys. I know that for the most part that is still where the big budgets are and it’s not that great ideas don’t come from the digital guys, but the vast majority of the time it’s digital folks executing banner ads or web site designs based on some larger campaign that came from the traditional guys.

The problem is not that we need to give more time to the digital guys or even to let them lead campaigns. The problem is that we need to stop seeing digital and tradition as two different things. We are all just a bunch of creative people coming up with great ideas. Whether or not they become a web site, a print piece, a TV ad or something completely different, it doesn’t matter.

This could have been a TV spot, a print campaign, turned into banner ads, or an entire campaign, instead, it’s just a video produced for YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMfSGt6rHos

theformofbeauty: newniceandfun: Seen at Paris-Photo,...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:22:08 -0500

theformofbeauty:

newniceandfun:

Seen at Paris-Photo, German-born, China-based Michael Wolf’s Tokyo Compression series, taken on the city’s subway, is literally breathtaking. Faces of Tokyo commuters are pressed up against condensation-soaked windows, creating small pools of mist as they breathe in and out, struggling for air.

How to save BlackBerry

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:17:11 -0400

Okay, so this is just a bit of rambling off the top of my head, but it occurred to me that there is a solution out there for RIM that might save the BlackBerry as well as open a door for another company. The solution is that Amazon needs to buy RIM. I hate to say it because it would be yet another example of a Canadian company going south of the border, but I think the partnership between the two will be mutually beneficial and give BlackBerry the biggest piece missing from it’s offerings: content.

When I look at what RIM’s biggest problem is, it is that people have stopped buying their product. (This is not entirely true-in many markets BlackBerry is still growing, but they have squandered their commanding lead.) Why? Because people want more from them.

After doing a very non-scientific survey of BB owners and non BB owners, many have simply said they will not buy a BB because they are behind in both hardware and software. But I would argue that there was a time where iPhone hardware was behind BB and yet people still went out and bought them in droves. The motivation IMO was the experience. People wanted to have a futuristic touch-screen device. People wanted something that was cool and exciting. And people wanted apps. But people have stayed with the iPhone and adopted Android because they have continued to offer more.

Apps are easy to port or copy and can be delivered as webpages are now (i.e. not through an ‘app store’). And the RIM hardware will catch up, as will the OS (with QNX next year). Apple have seen the long term plan and have realized that these devices (and the future devices that won’t be in our pockets, but around our houses, in our cars and eventually everywhere) are going to just be windows into a world of content: web pages, social feeds, music, video, magazines, books, etc. So really, whoever has access to the best content and the best experience accessing it are going to be the company that people want to buy their device from (just like how easy access to loads of apps helped make the iOS and Android platforms.)

Currently, there is an online content race happening. With Netflix splitting their DVD mail service off (genius if you ask me, for this reason), Amazon stepping up their offerings, Blockbuster, iTunes, Redbox, Hulu and more, you can bet that partnerships will develop between devices and content services. And as I mentioned before, those devices that come with access to great content will be more popular.

So, with the future of devices being content, there is still great hope for BlackBerry. How? They need content. And who has great literary, music and video content? Amazon. I think that a partnership between BlackBerry and Amazon would give BlackBerry an advantage that really only Apple currently has.

Amazon + BlackBerry = success.

Jesus, I ramble sometimes.

RIM and the new Torch

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:44:00 -0400

A lot of people ask me if I think the new Torch will be a good phone and if they should buy one. Personally, I have owned two BlackBerrys (not BlackBerries) and though I thought one was decent for its time (Pearl 8100) and the other is still excellent today (1st generation Bold), And though I feel that the new torch is going to be an excellent phone, I don’t think it’s going to be the phone that saves RIM. And the reason for that has nothing to do with the phone. In fact, I doubt there is a phone out there that could save RIM. It’s about the perception of the phone and RIM as a company.

RIM started out selling BlackBerrys to businesses and today that is still their largest user base. But people wonder how a PlayBook will fit in at work. And a lot of people wonder if a Torch is going to be as fun as an Android or Apple device for personal use. How I see this problem is that RIM is not doing a very good job of telling customers how they should perceive their products. I think they should trumpet their past successes in the business world and translate that to people’s personal lives. If a phone kicks ass for me at work, I’m more inclined to believe it will be a serious device for me in my personal live.

On the other side of the fence trust is quickly building in iOS and Android as business platforms–despite the fact that people are not as confident in those devices for business–simply because they do so much to support people’s personal lives. And now people can’t live without them, so it becomes natural for people to want to use them at work.

I really think that if RIM are going to succeed in turning the ship around and grabbing large portions of market share, they need to educate customers on what their phones can do. They already have the confidence of the business market and they should build on that and allow people to fall in love with the phone at work so that it will slowly creep into their personal lives. How to kill 7 hours on a flight: crush the powerpoint presentation, queue up several emails, then play angry birds and watch a movie.

Something Apple did really well when marketing the iPhone was to demonstrate that it can do a hell of a lot of things (there’s an app for that, this is going to change everything, so what do you want your iPhone to be today?) RIM has made a fatal assumption by thinking that everyone believes RIM can build a product like Apple or one of the many excellent Android devices. Touting the PlayBook as having Flash doesn’t really tell me what it can do and doesn’t convince me that BlackBerry has made a good product (though Flash Gordon by Queen was an awesome track).

One last example to hammer this point home (just to prove that Apple is not the only one who has this figured out): http://www.htc.com/www/tablets/htc-flyer/ The videos on this page make me want an HTC Flyer, but the PlayBook is a better product. The only reason I know that is because I poured through tonnes of reviews and comparisons and really looked at what the PlayBook can do. But why do I have to do the research? Why doesn’t RIM save me the trouble and just tell me, educate me and convince me that their products can do everything the other products can? Make me feel like their phone will empower me the way other smart phones do and THEN show me how it can do things my smart phone can’t.

P.S. Whoever it was at RIM who said the company needs to be renamed from RIM to BlackBerry deserves a raise.

Awesome web analytics and ad stats

Mon, 16 May 2011 14:29:43 -0400

Awesome web analytics and ad stats

It's been a while

Mon, 16 May 2011 14:29:02 -0400

It’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve been trying to figure some things out. I also started a new job which is slightly all-time consuming. But I’ve also been really trying to find a reason to write and for a long while, nothing seemed to be inspiring me. Recently, work has felt a lot like it did in 2001 when all the money fell out of the web and innovation went through the floor.

Web 2.0 was a bit of a revolution, but it’s not really anything tangible. Social’s pretty neat, but it’s kind of hard to get excited about getting $5 coupons on Facebook and I’m really feeling that the excitement of social is kind of past. Mobile is neat but to me it has yet to really transcend the web and transform our lives. And I guess at the end of the day I’m still waiting for the thing that’s truly going to give me the same high I had when I was first discovering the internet. I guess I’m still trying to figure this whole thing out.

But I was inspired by something recently. It was a simple idea that I found in a post on Smashing magazine (http://bit.ly/k5yU0R). Make something yourself. The thing is if you’re not inspired, then there has to be room for improvement. And while all of these digital platforms and ideas out there are not very exciting on their own, there must be millions of ways they can be combined and enhanced to do some truly amazing things.

And one of the best parts about making something for yourself is that YOU are the client. You are the person who benefits from what you make. And if it helps you, it’s probably going to help other people too.

We Are The Digital Kids: Ten Things I Have Learned

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:48:00 -0400

We Are The Digital Kids: Ten Things I Have Learned:

wearethedigitalkids:

Ten Things I Have Learned
Part of AIGA Talk in London
November 22, 2001

“1
YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you…

Highlights of getting into shape this summer

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:56:00 -0400

For 7 weeks now, I have been lifting weights, improving flexibility, speed and balance, playing beach volleyball, biking 7k each way to work (and all over the city) and eating better. It’s amazing what you can do in 7 weeks.

Daily bike rides to work leave me with a wicked tan
People whispering “He’s hardcode!” after I biked to work during one of our torrential downpours of the summer and arrived more wet than if I’d just climbed out of the lake
Having to add two additional holes to a belt to get it to fit
Being able to play with and carry my 2 year old for much longer
Being able to - for the first time in my life - touch my toes without hurting something
My fiancé calling my sexy and me believing her
Seeing my love handles almost gone this morning
Feeling proud to take off my shirt
Being called svelte by a friend who hadn’t seen me in over a year
Climbing stairs is no longer a chore
Faster reflexes saved a bottle of wine that otherwise would have smashed

Web 2.0 goes way beyond rounded boxes, icons that look like...

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:30:00 -0400

Web 2.0 goes way beyond rounded boxes, icons that look like bubbles and really nice gradations. It’s become more about online conversations. The sites where this is happening are like a great human conversation compilers in that they allow for people to connect in a infinite amount of ways, all through one place. They allow many-to-many conversations, many-to-one conversations, one-to-many conversations and one-to-one conversations. Many of these site also allow people to have conversations with their data. An example would be a site like Mint.com where users can manipulate their already existing financial information to show them better ways to spend, save and generally understand their money. All this really means that the scale at which people communicate with each other and with their online data is becoming so big, it is becoming the majority of how people use the internet. Conversely people are less and less passively surfing or reading online. We cannot predict how this will continue other than to know that it will continue to be more and more true and continue to evolve.

Web 3.0 to me is all about the data. All data. Everything from census polls to medical and scientific research to personal shopping habits to search engine results to traffic information to weather patterns to social media conversations to EVERYTHING. I am really excited about the time when this concept reaches critical mass. That’s when the internet will really take on meaning and power. That is when all of the stuff that everyone knows out there will start to be shared and compared and crunched and processed as one data set. That is when the internet becomes one giant computer for everything and everyone.

Depending on how open people are with their information, we will start to see all sorts of people creating mashups of seemingly unrelated information and displaying it in really interesting ways. A great example of software that’s built for this is Hans Rosling’s Gapminder which was picked up by Google in March of 2007. It’s freely available to use which makes it poised to take advantage of what I think is coming. The knowledge and learnings that will pour out of this data - if it’s handled right - will be astounding. The trends and correlations between things we can’t even begin to see now will open our eyes and, I believe, launch an age of discovery explosion.

I have always believed that information is gold. In the last few years I have had to revise that to “information is free, making sense of it is gold.”

Video via David Gillespie.