Hot on the heels of Classifying Experiences, I thought I’d tackle a less challenging but possibly more volatile subject: Information Architects.

Yes. There are many different types of IAs doing a wide range of things. At the IA Summit, I was amazed by just how many similar, but completely different types of projects are being worked on:

• People specializing in nothing but Search
• Developing controlled vocabularies for enterprise knowledge management systems
• Integrating various knowledge management systems, post acquisition
• IA in the real world, designing for experiences
• IA for legal systems, where documentation is more important than the system being documented
• IA for large complex applications
• And yes, IA for small web apps

But, this is about classifying IAs (not the projects).

Attending SXSW and IA Summit back to back confirmed what I’ve observed online.

Peter Merholz referenced (a part of) this in his closing pleniary: there are the classic ‘fuddy duddy’, Library and Information Sciences Content IAs, and there are the West Coast, ‘hipster’ Application IAs. There’s also a newer breed of (mostly application-oriented) IAs growing out of the web design world. So, three pockets of people. Why is this worth mentioning? Except for the group in the middle, those at the extremes are unaware of each other, or what each group has to offer the other. Let me explain, by way of anecdote.

In 2002, Dan Brown wrote about Page Description Diagrams. At the time, we (Bright Corner) thought it was a great idea. We tried it on a project, with fair results. Another tool in the toolbox. Fast forward to SXSW 2005. As Information Architect on the Design Eye for the Idea Guy panel, D. Keith Robinson uses PDDs as a deliverable. Within weeks, the web design and development community is buzzing about PDDs. Suddenly they are exceedingly popular—something everyone wants to know more about. Many of these people give credit to Robinson for such a great idea. Few of them now using or talking about PDDS have ever heard of Dan Brown.

Let’s swing to the other end of the spectrum. At the IA Summit, I spoke with several very talented LIS / Content IAs who know very little about what the Web2.0 meme really entails, why Ruby on Rails is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or what great sites like TechCrunch and Ajaxian have to offer us.

And yes, there are plenty of people in the middle. Obviously Keith was reading Dan, and I saw a lot of faces at both conferences—Kevin Cheng, Thomas Vander Wal, Luke Wroblewsky, the Adaptive Path folks. But, I’d like to see more awareness/communication – more people crossing over, not necessarily in practice, but certainly in knowledge sharing.

So, here it is:

(By the way, for this model, I’m aiming for the middle, say 85% of us, and I’ve exempted the roles of Enterprise IA and Technical IA – those are very different.)

Thoughts?

I was at the Vancouver airport last week (coming back from the IA Summit) when I stumbled across this rather ‘interesting’ departure screen:

A closer look…

My laptop with an error screen, not so bad. When it’s the airport system… Let’s just say I feel a bit like Dorothy after she pulls back the curtain and discovers the truth about the Wizard.

Ok, on Friday I summarized my overall impression of this year’s SXSW Interactive conference. Here now are the details…

• Traditional Design and New Technology focused on what the digital medium can learn from traditional design. Unfortunately, many people mistook this isolated focus on aesthetics as a cry to throw override good interaction experiences with graphics. Folks, this is not the early 00s. Visual designers ‘get it’ –at least the ones as SXSW. I think Mark Boulton accurately summed it up when he said we are only at the very early arc of a maturing new medium. We tend judge ‘great’ looking sites in light of the technology constraints. But as those constraints fade away, what’s next? We haven’t fully realized how some design elements (not conventions) will plug into this new environment.
  
  In fairness to the audience, I think the panel went astray with their Penguin book covers example—citing the emotional appeal of the covers as something missing from the web. A product/interactive medium would have been a better choice; maybe something amazingly successful like the RAZR phone, as it is drop dead gorgeous and functional, achieving a level of emotional appeal unlike any preceding phone. With books, the cover is a presentation/packaging layer. The web is an interactive medium. If you’re going to introduce a book as an example, look to the pages between the covers—the real interaction point. This is where type selection, white space, line spacing, kerning, paper weight and brightness—all these unappreciated design elements enhance the experience on a visceral level. It’s this kind of design that’s still missing from the web.
  
  Maybe I’m off, but I didn’t read this as a throwback to the ‘I’m a graphic designer, and I’m going to make things looks pretty and not work for people’ era. This isn’t about turning web pages into brochureware. It’s about those elements still missing from the web—good typography for example—that just aren’t supported in a way that doesn’t compromise the experience. Yet. But when those things are supported… That was what I got out of this panel.
  
  On a related note…
  
  
• I’m glad the Design Eye guys took on craigslist —with success. Visual designers now have a ‘flagship’ project to point to when non-designers scream “you’ll clutter [it] with images, and heavy loadtimes.” Ryan Sims did an excellent job respecting the design constraint (32k page weight, no images) and made the best possible use of straight css styling—able to only really play with type and color. This for me was more an example of information design is usually reserved for menus, voting ballets, medical forms, and the like. I was glad to see a project that relied entirely on these specific design elements. Check out the before and after here.

• The most memorable session was probably Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users. I think anyone who attended is probably now walking around asking “is our company T-shirt worthy and ‘how can we get our users past the suck point’. I posted a bit about this the other day. And LukeW has some really good notes on this session.

• I for one was looking forward to Peter Morville’s introduction to Ambient Findability. I really haven’t had the time to read this new IA book, but figured I’d get a good synopsis here. Instead, he spent half the time catching people up on basic ideas from the original ‘polar bear’ Information Architecture book. When he did get into ambient findability, he introduced some sticky points that would have been nice discussion points, had time allowed.

• The concept of Everyware shed more concrete examples and condensed thinking around what Peter Morville is trying to introduce with Ambient Findability. Adam Greenfield presented some clear ideas around embedded devices, the everywhere internet, and how our lives might be in the near future. I got the impression he’s the kind of person who, when he lists five bullets, does so because there are precisely five bullets. Not six. Not four. Very well structured thoughts. Even so, I was wary of wading through such a heady thoughts in book format—until I leafed through his book of the same name: He presents ideas in little 1-3 pages nuggets, similar to one of my favorite marketing books Selling the Invisible. You can easily read an idea at time. Great format for presenting abstract, sometimes complex ideas to an attention deficit constrained generation. Recommended.

• Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps, was the most smoothly moderated panel I attended. Kudos to Jeffrey Veen for that one. While I was quite familiar with flickr, ODEO, and SixApart, I had never heard of Stamen Design. They are doing some really neat things around Data Visualization. We all walked out chatting about the visualization of traffic patterns based on cab drivers and the speeds at which they are moving.

• Similary, the What’s Hot in Web Apps, session was a nice showcase of some new web apps—meebo, YackPack, and Zimbra. I’ve already begun using Meebo, as it’s a nice bridge between the Bright Corner Yahoo IM tribe and Geniant’s MSN tribe. Zimbra blew me away with some slick features—like dragging a scheduled calendar event to the ‘travel zimlet’ and having it return flight information for before and after that meeting. Wow. And YackPack (a sort of audio email app), while not a replacement or evolution of email, does fulfill a uniquely unaddressed need—timeshifted group conversations.

• Tagging 2.0. This was a good, heady discussion. Basically, tagging is great for individuals filing away information, but is a mess when it comes to retrieval, especially where groups are involved. One memorable example cited how the same people tag things differently on flickr or del.icio.us. If we tag a photo of our cat, we tag it with the singular ‘cat’; an article about cats gets tagged as ‘cats’—how can we resolve these types of translations across platforms and contexts?
  
  Unfortunately, the focus was on the problems of not tagging things with the same (or similar) language. I am intrigued by Clay Shirky’s optimism around this inconsistent tagging, and how it can help educate and bridge the gaps in how we define or view the same information objects (think how del.icio.us shows you how others are tagging the same page). Thomas Vander Wal presented some beautiful (in their clarity and precision) models for understanding these issues. And Rashmi Sinha cut through the confusion with a simple, unquestionable cognitive model explaning for why tagging is the perfect solution for individuals marking information (check out her presentation)

• Building Buzz. What a waste of time. How difficult is to spread buzz for stupid videos (break.com), a porn/music site (burningangel), an edgy dating site (nerve.com), and f**ckedcompany.com.?

• Holistic Web Design was less about what the title would seem to indicate, and more like the ‘Design Eye’ series—5 very talented people taking on a site in need of help. In this case, Plazes. Check out the after version here… Kudos to the team for a job well done. It was nice to see friends—Garrett, Carl, and Eris at SXSW.

• Bruce Sterling was… as interesting as ever. File under: Poetic political technobabble rambling, but with redeeming nuggets of far reaching insight (though it’s hard to separate the useful from the just plain interesting). He was less animated than last year. Probably a result of living outside of the country… If you’ve never heard Sterling speak, do so.

• Demystifying the Mobile Web. Last time I got into the mobile web, it was a messy, immature platform. Looks like nothing has changed.

• The remixing business session was disappointing. While it was a good lineup of panelist, the discussion never veered beyond the same discussions happening in other rooms. I was expecting a different conversation, one that moved outside of the tech realm and mashups into how this is going to change other real business worlds, like Enterprise systems, manufacturing, my electric company, the grocery aorund the corner, etc. What about open source business? Co-creating service experiences (as opposed to products)? Will these models succeed? For all? For just certain markets? A paradigm shift? Just a different business model? An overthrow of 500 years of being framed by economic theory? Just a bunch of hype and nonsense? There were a lot of really interesting (though highly speculative) areas the conversation could have gone. Oh well.

• I was pleased to meet and finally hear Dirk Knemyer speak. He presented the basics of starting your own business. After 4.5 years of starting and running my own business, most of the content was familiar, either from direct or indirect interactions. What I did find valuable was how he structured all this knowledge. If you’re thinking of starting your own business, I’d highly recommend downloading his presentation. It’s a good (comprehensive) checklist of all the things to consider or do if you do go out on your own (pdf file).

• How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting. “Javascript is the new CSS” Web standards good. DOM scripting good. Yada, yada, yada. Until a comment from the audience pulled the rug out from my unquestioning idealism. I can’t exactly state the problem, as it was technical in nature, but apparently the ‘clean’ standards approach didn’t scale in one instance. When the team (web standards devotees apparently) changed the code to be less compliant, refresh times dropped from 15 seconds to 2. Hmm… That aside, the presentation was really good. Explaining DOM scripting using the familiar languages of CSS and, well, English was a great bridge to this foreign language.

• Harvard Psychologist Dan Gilbert spoke on How to do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times. I don’t know where to begin on this one, except to offer his ‘formula’:
  
  Expected Happiness = Odds of Gain X Value of Gain
  
  The probem of course is that we are really bad at estimating odds and even worse at estimating value. For more detailed notes, check out LukeW’s summary.

And there it is. Yes, it took me two weeks to get this summary up. No, I won’t be offering a similar summary of the sessions I attended at the IA Summit 2006. However, I do have plenty to say about what I heard or learned there… I’ll tackle these thoughts one at a time. Soon.

NOTE: There’s a LOT to say. I’ll split up my comments into two parts. This first post is a general summary/my impressions. In part II, I’ll offer brief thoughts on each of the sessions I attended.

So, where to start?

As many people have said before, SXSW Interactive is one conference that’s more about a community than the actual sessions. I’d say that for anyone who keeps up with the online conversations, there wasn’t a lot of depth to the information (a few exceptions, of course). Some things were hinted at but certainly not explored, except where panelists left time for questions. That said, it’s always helpful to hear things firsthand, from the authors—rushed reading doesn’t convey the nuances inherent in a firsthand presentation. And it’s always neat to find that the guy sitting next to you was a speaker in the last hour’s session. That happens a lot at SXSW. I was able to meet with several people whose ideas I respect a lot—Luke W, Peter Merholz, and Dirk Knemeyer, to name a few. I also met Nathan Smith (SonSpring) and some of the guys associated the godbit project —nice bunch of people.

As with last year’s conference, the most interesting tidbits were often in the Q&A time: I think it was David Heinemeier Hansson who challenged just how open Yahoo! (or any company for that matter) is being by merely opening up APIs. And I still remember the ‘way over my head’ microformats discussion that rounded out one of the 2005 panels.

A (Slight) Change In Focus
I was pleased to see a greater focus on emotion, experiences, and other ‘soft things’ related to designing for experiences. If 2005 was about blogging, web standards, and that new thing called AJAX, this year was more about DIY web apps (and businesses), Everyware, and what designers can learn from social and cognitive sciences.

“Ethnography” was mentioned several times. Kelly Goto mentioned her company’s lifestyle-oriented design.” Rashmi Sinha cut through the tagging mess with a clear and succinct model illustrating how tagging maps to our natural cognitive processes. Keith Robinson did research and strategy for his part on the Design Eye panel. The list goes on… And how many times did I hear people talk about the brain? (I must have heard at least three presenters say we have a ‘dumb brain’ that has yet to catch up with the times). Both Harvard Psychologist Daniel Gilbert (How to Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times) and Kathy Sierra (How to Create Passionate Users) used current brain research and learning theories to help explain why people behave the way they do. I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting, stupid brain and all.

Is 37Signals Framing the Conversation?
It is interesting to note that as more people are recognizing the importance of getting in the heads of your users, there is also a stigma associated spending time on research—one I’d attribute to the prevailing Getting Real philosophy. I felt at times as if this part of the process is something we are supposed to be ashamed of. Keith Robinson joked about the research deliverables (much appreciated by Paul Nixon) he created, commenting that ‘I guess we shouldn’t need to create these’. And Kelly Goto even half apologized for her focus on research—disclaiming that research wasn’t needed for all projects and that her goal is to draw some attention to this field.

My 2 cents: I’m a big fan of agile design I’m also a big fan of research. If you’re building a product for yourself, you’ve done the research and recognized an opportunity—if only by virtue of being the target audience. However, most companies don’t know what’s going on inside their customers’ heads. These companies need to pay a group to do research in order to learn what they don’t already know. And what to build. That’s reality.

In a similar reference to 37Signals, I had a chance to meet Peter Merholz, following the What Hot in Web Applications panel. He briefly commented on the size of the teams used to build some of the up and coming startups—YackPack, meebo, and Zimbra. With the possible exception of meebo, it’s definitely not a ‘small team’ approach. And funding was needed to get all of these apps to their current state.

A Better Conference
One comment shared by most people I spoke to, was the need for more technical tracks or ‘levels’ so people could select skill appropriate sessions. Most SXSWers are a pretty sharp bunch. Unfortunately, many of the panels aim for a safe, low common denominator, and miss out on the opportunity to have some really interesting (if lofty) conversations. Come on, this is one of those rare events where THE people shaping the web are all in one place—I’d like to see what happens when you open the floor for more dialogue, and less presenting.

All said, this is still one of the highlights of the year. And something I will return to again next year. If for nothing else than inspiring ideas and face time with the people whose thoughts I read on a daily basis. Plus, the carpool is nice time for good conversations we don’t normally get inside the office. In addition to solving all of the world’s problems, Jared and I had chance to share some choice tidbits from our vast iPod collections. He introduced me to a really good (if exceptional) Juliana Hatfield song. I got to torture him with Ken Nordine’s Colors.

More coming in Part II…

Is your product or service T-shirt worthy? Hold that thought.

First Things First
If you haven’t yet discovered the Creating Passionate Users blog, do so now. It’s chock full of really good, fun-to-read articles that cross a lot of different fields.

While I’ve read and even forwarded several good articles from this site, I didn’t really know anything about the authors, until last week. Hands down, Kathy Sierra’s How to Create Passionate Users was one of the best presentations at SXSWi 2006. I believe this was a 1 hour condensation of a 3.5 hour workshop she ran earlier in the week at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. If you can track done either podcast, do so. Though most of it won’t mean much if you don’t have the accompanying slides.

Some key phrases you’ll hear:

Getting users past the suck point

Help your users kick ass

And this little gem:

T-shirt-first development (This is the one I want to explore)

By the way, if these phrases sound a bit, err, un-businesslike.. great! Kathy Sierra has a knack for translating obtuse learning theories and insights from social sciences into simple statements that resonate with people (she is the co-creator of the bestselling Head First series from O’Reilly—practicing what she preaches). She makes the boring interesting. Take note, corporate speak.

Back to T-Shirt Worthiness.
By ‘T-shirt-first development,’ we have to answer: “Is our offering so vibrant, so exciting that people want to wear a t-shirt for our company?”

The example she used was sold out JAVA t-shirts at a developer’s conference. Obviously, there’s still a community there. And numerous examples abound. What branded t-shirts do you have in your closet? Firefox? Apple? Nike? Polo? That indie band you hope takes off? Even on the way back from the conference, Jared bought a t-shirt from Chuy’s Mexican food. A T-shirt for a restaurant.

Is My Company T-Shirt Worthy?
So, this led to some interesting conversations. Especially in light of our recent merger.

I would venture to say that Bright Corner was becoming T-shirt worthy, at least for our employees. When you have people leaving stable jobs, relocating, and taking pay cuts—all to work with a group of people—that’s pretty flattering. We’re not there with our new [combined] company. Yet. Which raised the question— “what keeps us from being t-shirt worthy?” I won’t share the details… but, this line of questioning led to a thought:

Being T-Shirt worthy (or not) is not a binary thing.

While being T-shirt worthy is pretty self-evident, there are degrees of not (yet) t-shirt worthiness. It’s really more of a continuum, moving from embarrassed (publicly) and frustrated (internally) to tolerant to satisfied to passionate (t-shirt worthy). Sort of like this:

While a lot of things have to change to move something into T-shirt worthiness, you do end up working on things in isolation. One of the first projects we started with is revamping the web site. For the record, we’ve only moved it from an embarrassed state to a tolerant one. For embarrassed, roll the clock back a few weeks at archive.org.

Why This Is Useful.
A lot of really great things are happening inside Geniant. On a lot of different fronts.

With regards to the web site, I needed a way to explain that the recent site refresh is nowhere near where we want to take things (passionate), nor where even the next revision will end up (satisfactory). This continuum makes sense of these changes— why we are not done. We now have a tool to explain where the changes are landing us each time.

Never Satisfied = Passionate?
By the way, I mentioned Bright Corner might have been T-shirt worthy. One surefire indication that we had passionate employees is that we were never satisfied with where we were, with doing things as usual, or resting on our laurels. If you’re never satisfied with something at your work, and you’re constantly working to make it better—especially on your own time—you’re probably at that passionate state. Your are intrinsically motivated to lead change.

Similarly, this middle spot (tolerant or satisfied) is the most dangerous and easiest place to settle. It’s also know as mediocrity. These are easy places to get stuck at. Which is why I am so excited about this new litmus test:

Are we t-shirt worthy yet?

It’s a dead simple question, with a simple yes or no answer. And we will all know yes when we’re there.

I’ve now encountered the same theme from several places: rest—and getting away from everything—is critical.

First, from the business world:

“So many managers and CEOs are consumed by the pressures of managing the present, which is really managing the past. It’s easy and it’s mind-numbing. I encourage people to set aside time, away from the office, to work on strategy. In India recently, I heard Bill Gates tell an audience that he takes a week, twice a year, to go off and think and read. You’ve got to have a quiet place to think and see what bubbles up. If you’re focused only on today, you aren’t inventing the future. This is a survival issue. The 21st century will reward managers and leaders who take time to rekindle their imaginations, stimulate creativity in others, and foster an environment that embeds innovation into the company’s culture.”

—Robert B. Tucker, in an interview Innovation points the way to growth (pdf file)

Secondly, from the spiritual world, as I received a copy of Pete Briscoe’s book Secrets from the Treadmill for Christmas:

“Sabbath Rest is a term foreign to our progressive thought. Yet we are drawn to such an idea, as though it were an exhibit in a museum, a masterwork we are not allowed to touch. We have rewritten God’s design for humanity, which inherently contains a time for rest, and then called the rewriting of His architecture God-pleasing.
Having lived most of my life in overdrive, I had reached a point of dryness and exhaustion. Wisdom dictated that I take a two-month leave from the pulpit—a sabbath rest. It was a decision that opened a fresh stream of thought into the desert of my life.”

—Pete Briscoe, Secrets from the Treadmill: Discover God’s Rest in the Busyness of Life

Now ask me if I’ve had time to read more than the first chapter…!

A Curious Conversation
While at SXSW, Garrett, Matt and I (mostly Garrett and Matt) got into an interesting conversation about the future of web-services and service based apps. The discussion floated around thin, smart, and thick clients, and whether the browser (which Matt commented was originally built as a document reader) is the right platform— moving forward —for these rich applications. Garrett argued that the browser has been adopted, and is constantly evolving. Matt wondered if we wouldn’t move forward more quickly with a new platform for web apps, which of course opens up discussions around (1) who should build this platform, and (2) who has the power (M$, cough) to get a new platform adopted.

The discussion went something like this: Desktop apps can offer richer UI experiences. Web-based apps offer social sharing and collaboration features, mashup potential, yada, yada anywhere and on any platform or device without installation or update issues.

A Deeper Conversation
All this brought to mind two separate presentations I’ve listened to lately (both freely available from IT Conversations), which give some depth to this discussion:

First, The Platform Revolution where “leading developer and business evangelists discuss and debate the very definition of the words ‘platform’ and ‘developer’ in a Web 2.0 world.”

→ Check out The Platform Revolution

While there’s no clear point to take away from this conversation, there are some nice little tidbits. One that struck me was Halsey Minor’s (CEO, Chairman, & Founder, Grand Central Communications) comment about Enterprise’s reluctance to embrace web services or web2.0 paradigms. He says:

“There are those people who are practical on one extreme and those people who are purist on the other extreme. The practical people don’t do anything because they see all the problems with any sort of new technology. The purist don’t ever do anything that works because they don’t realize how many practical people there are in the world that they have to deal with… We try to be practical purists. We know that this new architecture is coming but we also recognize that there are a lot of ideas from traditional, say, enterprise software that aren’t going to go away, like people want reliability, they want service level agreements, they want guarantees…”

This quote struck a cord. Since joining with Geniant, I’ve been exposed to the Enterprise side of things—and it’s appalling. The Enterprise level Software Apps I’ve encountered are in the dark ages—pre usability days! This is something you’ll probably see quite a few posts about in the upcoming months, starting with this one.

Second, Orchestrating the Stack is a more heavyweight presentation from the often dead-on technology strategist/analyst Geoffrey Moore.

→ Check out Orchestrating the Stack

If you don’t recognize the name, you’ve definitely used or encountered his ideas—most notably his ‘Crossing the Chasm’ model illustrating the technology adoption curve and the gap between early adopters and mainstream acceptance

In this presentation, Moore describes where the tech industry might be heading in this decade—not this year or next—but farther out in what he callas ‘horizon three’. He describes a technology stack that includes everyone from Microsoft and IBM to Intel and Cisco.

If you listen to this presentation, you’ll definitely need the slides, as he constantly refers to them. This is one presentation to listen to if you want a view of where things might be headed—a view that offers much more than the buzz and hype around Web2.0 apps. He makes some pretty interesting prognostications.

Enjoy!

It’s 2006. Experiences drive Technology. Not the other way around.

The explosion of new Web2.0 companies and services continues to produce steadily better interfaces at exponential rates. Not a week goes by that someone doesn’t figure out some new way to do something we couldn’t before. And if you can’t find the application that works exactly like you want it to, it’s not all that difficult to hobble it together with various libraries, components, and languages perfect for rapid prototyping. Or just use something like Ning! Whatever your interest in web technologies, it’s an exciting time.

Unfortunately, all of these advances seem to have been lost on enterprise applications.

Enterprise applications seem to be frozen in a time where technology still drives the experience. Out-of-the-box enterprise apps equals out-of-my-mind frustration. But how it got this way is understandable (and more importantly recoverable). In an effort to be all things to all people, packaged software implementations have competed by adding more and more features, with negative impact to the end user experience. We now have bloated, senseless apps that work in ways contrary to web application conventions and (more to the point) contrary to how people think and operate. I’ve only recently been thrown back into this world, via our recent alignment with Geniant, and subsequent conversations with friends working in these archaic environments. I have one friend in particular who works on payroll systems for the government – you don’t even want to ask what technologies they’re still using….

But enough complaining.

I see this as a huge opportunity. A chance to bring enterprise applications into the present and onto the next exciting phase of emotional and persuasive interfaces. Or whatever is next.

Partly spurred on Jeremy’s ‘makeover’ post (and Jared’s too!), and partly motivated by daily exposure to our newly adopted intranet (a certain popular software package), I’ve decided to describe how things could be. And provide a fruitful outlet for my frustration.

A not so simple survey
The following screenshot is [a section of] the page I landed on after completing a simple survey asking if I will be attending the next Q1 partner meeting:

First off, what’s with all the extra navigation? And why would I want to respond to the survey—didn’t I just do that? And would I really want to (in this context) export the results? No.

But I was curious about how many people would be in attendance, so I clicked on (yes, that’s a link!) “Show all responses”. Here’s what I got:

Does anyone find this useful?

I might be curious about who’s coming or not, but I’m not going to click on 70+ individual names to get that information. It would make more sense to get that kind of information within the context of ‘who responded Yes’ or ‘who responded No’. And why do I want to know when they modified their response? Seriously.

I backed up to the previous screen and clicked on “Show a graphical summary of responses” (“graphical response?”)

Ah, now this is useful. Most everyone will be coming. Now if only I could only view who won’t be able to make it…

So, that’s my context of use. 3 different screens that could really be consolidated to 1 simple screen. Too much irrelevant information. Unattractive design. Etc.

Here is my ‘overhauled’ version:

(Click to view full version)

This version:

• Emphasizes survey results through, visual cues, contrast and color
• Has an overall more appealing aesthetics
• Consolidates 3 (unnecessary) screens into one very effective screen
• Doesn’t significantly change the technology—just the presentation
• Removes unnecessary or distracting information (export function)
• Minimizes less important information (when survey was created)
• Hides some information until it is requested (eg details)
• Removes actions no longer applicable (responds to survey)

Oh yeah, in keeping with Jeremy’s theme, this only took me about 45 minutes to mock up.

Enjoy!

Those who watch the Superbowl.
Those who watch the commercials.
And those who do neither.

Whoever you are, enjoy the day!

I’ve been thinking a bit about Designers, Entrepreneurs, Managers, and Leaders. I guess it started with this passage:

“Artists are by nature entrepreneurs, they’re just not called that… They have the ability to visualize something that doesn’t exist, to look at a canvas and see a painting. Entrepreneurs do that. That’s what makes them different from businesspeople. Businesspeople are essentially administrators. Entrepreneurs are by definition visionaries. Entrepreneurs and artists are interchangeable in many ways.”

—Bill Strickland

Which led me to thinking about my last post (part observation, part personal reflection), describing how ‘designers envision unseen opportunities.’ Creating is part of my DNA. From new ideas to better processes and products—I design. So in that sense, I’d say that I have the “ability to visualize something that doesn’t exist,” as described in the quote above.

But I don’t think of myself as an entrepreneur. Why not? I’m not a risk taker, which is of course the other half of being an entrepreneur: It’s not just the ability to envision unseen opportunities, but the fortitude to take the risks necessary to make that vision reality. Entrepreneurs are not afraid to take risks. Me, I’m terrified. Granted I’ve taken a few, but in those cases the risks tended to be the safest of my options (I take that back, Bright Corner was the riskiest option, but definitely more exciting than the alternatives…). But, to my point, passion doesn’t always translate into performance.

So then I started thinking about other key personalities: Managers and Leaders.

Leaders “effect desired results by positively affecting others’ actions” (thanks Don for the definition!). Some leaders are visionaries. Very few are designers. Some will take strategic risks. But not all.

And managers? Well, let’s just say one of these four is not like the others. Like leaders, a good manager will rally the troops and motivate people to action. But unlike designers, entrepreneurs, or leaders, managers aren’t necessarily visionary (not that they can’t be). I’ll go ahead and say it—a good manager should not be visionary, at least not at the macro level. I’ve worked with some brilliant visionaries, and they need managers who can anchor their ideas. Or at least a snapshot of their idea at a particular point in time. Accordingly, the mark of a good manager is the ability to carry out orders. To manage people and processes to produce a desired outcome. This is necessary, for without managers (and good workers!) the visionary people would never complete anything. Trust me, I know, as I sit on about a dozen good ideas.

To bring this full circle round, is there something the designer has that the entrepreneur doesn’t? Yes. I think (and we are speaking in general terms here!) it might be the relentless focus on details and the ‘humanness’ of whatever is being designed. My first post was about the human focus that design-minded people bring to the table, and in future posts I’ll comment on more of these distinctions.

So where is this going? I’m not sure, except to explore the similarities and distinctions between Designers, Entrepreneurs, Leaders, and Managers, and to better understand my own strengths and weakness within an organization. Or perhaps this is to explain why there is so much distance between Managers and Designers…

Cheers!