While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted - if only to  take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to help calibrate where the truth is.

For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around - first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.

That said, here’s some points not made often enough:

1. We have always had social networks. Call them families, tribes, clubs, cliques or even towns, cities and nations.  You could call throwing a party or telling stories by a fire “social media tools”. If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different. These tools may improve how we relate to each other, but at best it will improve upon something we as a species have always done. Never forget social networks are old. The best tools will come from people who recognize, and learn from, the rich 10,000+ year history of social networks.
2. There has always been word of mouth, back-channel, “authentic” media tools. In Gladatorial Rome, in Shakespearean England and in Revolutionary America, motivated individuals had ways to express their ideas and share them. Call it gossip, poems, paintings or pamphlets, there is a long history of individuals taking action to express opinions through non-official channels. The ease of using these channels changes over time, but they always exist because #1 always exists.  Of note, IRC predates some, but certainly not all, of the features twitter is heralded for introducing to the world.
3. The new media does not necessarily destroy the old. TV was supposed to kill radio - this was wrong. TV forced radio to change and in some ways improve. The web forced TV, newspapers and magazines to change, and they will likely survive forever in some form, focusing on things the web can not do well.  Its unusual for new thing to completely replace the old ones and when they do it takes years. Anyone who claims social media will eliminate standard PR or mass media is engaging in hype, as odds are better those things will change and learn, but never die. It’s wise to ask what each kind of media / marketing is good and bad for and work from there.
4. Social media consultants writing about social media have inherent biases. It’s difficult to take posts like this about social media seriously, as it’s written by someone from a social media consulting firm without an ounce of humility or perspective. It’s hard to come across as authentic if you promote a revolution that you personally stand to benefit the most from. Much writing about social media is PR people writing about the importance of PR - see a problem of authenticity here? When did PR, like advertisers, become a reliable source for what is authentic? How is SEO optimization, or similiar techniques for twitter, authentic? When a system becomes popular the greedy will game it and social media is no different. We should be worried when people with PR and advertising backgrounds or consulting firms are leading us in the ways of authenticity or integrity. The Twitter Book, from my publisher O’Reilly, takes a surprisingly reasonable, authentic and low-hype approach to social media I wish was more popular.
5. Signal to Noise is always the problem. I’m someone who would rather read 5 or 10 really good things every day, than skim through 50 or 100 mediocre ones. I find all social media frequently consists of people re-forwarding things they were forwarded that almost none of them appear to have read, as they believe they are rewarded for publishing frequently above all else. Using twitter and digg I often feel I’m in the minority since what’s popular is rarely what’s good.  If you are interested in quality, and not volume, than the size of your network matters less than the value of what’s in it. I’m more fascinated by how kottke.org and metafilter.org have kept such high signal to noise ratios for years than I am about most media tools I see.
6. All technologies cut both ways and social media will be no different. For all the upsides of any invention there are downsides and it takes time to sort out what they all are. Blogs and Twitter have made self promotion, and self-aggrandizement, acceptable in ways I’ve never seen before, and I’m guilty myself. Is it possible to write or publish without self promotion? I don’t know anymore. I suspect digital tools for social media may have the negative effect of making authentic communication harder, not easier to find, as more people, and corporations, hover right on the gray dividing line between authentic and corporate, or selfish and generous.
7. Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world. The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us. Look, we have trouble following brain dead simple concepts like The Golden Rule.  Millions starve to death not because we lack the food, but because of greed and lack of political will.  We will largely behave like idiots on blogs and on twitter because we behave that way in real life. Every technological revolution must contend with the fact that we bring our stupidity, selfishness and arrogance along for the ride with our generosity, wisdom and love (12for12k.org being a great positive example). This is true for any new technology we use, and invariably its this fact that plays itself out and ruins the current technological wave, setting up the frustrated landscape for the next one.  Democracy, steam power, electricity, telegraphs, telephones, televisions, the Internet, and the web have all been heralded as the arrival of Utopia, and although there has been progress in each wave, it seems there are things we want that technological change can not bring to us.
8. Always ask “What problem am I trying to solve?” The smartest thing to do with something new is to ask what is it you need it to do for you. Recognize  good marketing will not make up for bad products or incompetent services.  If your company is marketing itself well to customers, or your social life is fine, perhaps you don’t need a revolution and need something much simpler and more realistic from social media. Spend time figuring out what you need. If you want to experiment and see for yourself, that’s awesome, but know that’s what you’re doing. But above all use whatever media/communication tools or methods work for you, whether they are old or new, no matter what anyone says, including me.

If you liked this post, you might also like my general purpose essay, How to detect bullshit.

Update: @jmichelle posted a response, In defense of social media, on O’Reilly Radar. I responded in the comments.

Posted in Innovation, Web 2.0 / social software, politics, rant | 55 Comments »

Recently I’ve been playing tons of Gears Of War 2 for XBOX 360, because of it’s fantastic HORDE mode. I’m not a huge gamer. But find me:

1. A game/mode that has well designed UX
2. Is easy to learn, but hard to master, and fun to fail at
3. Has few annoyances (mandatory tutorials, non-skipable intros, etc.)
4. Has a team based, rather than purely competitive, mode

And I’m in. Great games, as rare as they are, are the perfect relief from long hours of writing. And if I can play with friends on the same team, all the better.

(image from Matt’s Journal)

Like real life projects, where you can can only survive by working together, the HORDE mode is based on co-operation. You can’t get very far without working as a team.

However this doesn’t stop many players from trying to do it all on their own. It’s funny, gut also sad, in HORDE to see players make the same mistakes again and again and again, just like in the workplace, for not recognizing they need a team strategy to win, not just solo tactics.

Here’s lessons from HORDE that apply to many project teams:

• team co-ordination > Individual talents .  Early on you can get by with how good you are alone. But as soon as things get intense, or you fall behind, working solo is a liability. Programmers and Managers who insist on doing everything themselves are set up to fail when that approach reaches it’s inevitable limit.
• Have a fallback position everyone knows. When everything is going to hell there is no time to make a plan. People are too stressed to think clearly anyway. This means you must have a fallback plan defined at the beginning. My friends and I call it the hiddy-hole - a spot where we will all fade back towards, that is defensible, easy to find, and likely to be where other teammates are.
• Over Communicate.  Talking matters. In Horde you have to share what you see, and take advantage of all the viewpoints. Teams that talk more last longer - it’s nearly a rule in Horde. If a minute into the game no one has spoken, it’s going to be a short game. Same goes for project management - teams that are good are sharing useful info with each other prevent things from going from.
• Stay together. The temptation in HORDE, and in life, is to seek your own glory. To go out away from the pack.  But as soon as the waves get hard enough you can’t do it alone and before you know it you’re dead because something snuck up behind you. If you stick together it’s surprise is less likely, and since you have two people dealing with it, survival odds are much higher.
• Watch your buddy’s back. One of the most interesting elements of Horde is when you’re wounded another player must come and revive you. The teams that last longer are the ones who make reviving other players a priority. It’s a reciprocal trust thing - someone has to do it first and if you don’t reciprocate they might not do it again.
• Develop a shorthand. The more you communicate the sooner you develop a shorthand. Novice players say things like “Lookout, it’s coming!” Without telling you where the bad guy is or what it is, which is useless.  He may as well just say “aaaaaaaahh!” You want an efficient shorthand that makes frequent communication efficient. “Butcher at 2′oclock from fallback”. Shorthand makes it easy for many people to communicate without burying people in noise.

Recently I’ve started playing Left 4 Dead with the same circle of friends - It’s been great so far. Also excellent team based, co-operative game design. Easy to learn, fun to play.

Are there any other XBOX 360 games with excellent co-op modes? Let me know.

Posted in Design, Management | 6 Comments »

In Oslo last week I stopped at the Nobel Peace Center. Among the exhibits was this one which had some clever hardware/software UI combos shown in the video below. Notice the sound the big switch makes:

Posted in Design | No Comments »

My essay from the new book Beautiful teams is up online.  It’s about my years on the Internet Explorer 4.0 team. And there’s a string interesting comments up already.

Why Ugly Teams win from Beautiful Teams.

If you dig the essay, check out the book.

Posted in Management, web browsers | 3 Comments »

Of all the stories in the web world, the story of the Opera web browser is one of the most interesting, and least frequently told when it comes to understanding innovation.

Today they’re celebrating their 15th year, and it’s clear they’re going strong, claim to have market share growth and still have a sense of humor.

They’re a fascinating story because in the early browser wars (’94-’00) they were the third horse, but they consistently took larger risks, made bigger bets on design changes, bet heaviest of all players on web standards,  and were the first of the major browsers to implement now standard features like tab browsing.  But they rarely got much credit for their innovations or their intensely progressive attitude then, or perhaps even now.

Why? Did they not innovative enough? or too much? Do they need to be in the U.S. to get more attention? Or are  there other issues? There are tons of lessons to be learned from the case study of Opera, both for the 90’s and for the present.

Until someone writes one, you can do a small, fun one of your own.

If you’re interested in UX design or understanding innovation, I highly recommend giving their latest release a spin: it will be the most interesting software you’ve installed in some time.

Download Opera 9.6

Related:

• Here’s my older review of Opera 9.02
• My other posts about web browser design, including reviews of major browsers
• I’ll be speaking at Opera next month and look forward to learning more from these folks

Posted in Design, Innovation, history, web browsers | 3 Comments »

Found this great post from Slate’s Moneybox via Brady @ O’Reilly.

I think Tufte would be happy.

You can and should play with the interactive map yourself.

Posted in Design, creative thinking | 1 Comment »

Microsoft recently announced the end of the product known as Encarata. Way back in the day Encarta was cool. It was one of the few things made in the CD-ROM era that, looking backwards, made sense (Yes, I owned a copy of both Art Gallery and Microsoft Dogs, and as idiotic as it seems now, the later actually got good reviews) - and was actually designed quite well.

It’ was also a curiously successful work of innovation by Microsoft on several counts. Few people remember, but Microsoft bet big on CD-ROMs and consumer software, and of those efforts, many of which flopped, Encarta was a gem.  In 1994 it demonstrated many of the things people had been promising PCs would be good for (multimedia, education, instant access to information, etc.). There were other encyclopedias, but (I don’t think) anyone else invested as much in the design and technology as Microsoft did.

Many forget, or were still in diapers, but in 1994, years before web design would be something you could say at a bar without people thinking you were into spiders, Encarta demonstrated much of what we call information architecture, interaction design and consumer aesthetics, all in one high profile consumer product. Many, many companies and software teams used Encarta as a reference for not only what was possible, but for what a good experience should be like. Microsoft didn’t invent many of the technologies involved, but the encapsulation of so many into a well designed experience is similar in some ways to the success of the i-pod.  Both are examples of innovation through superior user experience and integration of various technologies made mostly by other folks.

And most importantly, when Netscape and Internet Explorer began the browser wars, many of us looked at Encarta as an approximation of what a great web experience should feel like, with rich media, consumer appliance simplicity, and great search and navigation. In the hallways on the Internet Explorer team we had screenshots of some of the Encarta team’s work, among various other bits of software inspiration, up on the wall. It was definitely a reference used in designing features like Explorer bars,  Favorites & History.

Kudos to Bill Flora, Adrienne Odonnell, and Sheila Carter (who are listed here as the design team) and other folks who worked on this thing over the years.

Encarta also was one of the best product names Microsoft has ever had. Sure, that’s not saying much given how notorious MSFT is for lousy names, but like Excel (also a good name, at least it was in 1985, compared to Lotus 1-2-3) it somehow fit the vibe of the kind of thing the product was.

Can’t say I miss loading CDs into my PC (I can’t remember the last time I did that), but Encarta definitely deserves a notable place in the history of software design. They helped raise a bar many people still use today.

Posted in Design, Innovation, Microsoft, history | 2 Comments »

On Tue April 14th I’ll be doing a live webcast for UIE on Why designers fail and what to do about it. This will be the full 90 minute version of my talk, with some new twists and updates specially designed for this webcast, and it includes tactics and approaches to thinking about failure and how both to change your philosophy about experimentation, but also tactics for learning as much as you can from your failures, and failures of designers and creators throughout history.

For this 90 min live talk, a talk you can participate in from anywhere in the world, wearing only your underwear if you choose as I won’t be able to see you, for $129 - Here’s my promo video for the session, with audio voiceover, including a last slide that details the value you’ll get from tuning in.

Details and registration info here - Use my promo code BERKUN to get the discounted price of $99.

Posted in Design, On Tour, creative thinking | No Comments »

Tons of good stuff this week:

• The evolution of a project manager - Interesting take on the various levels of impact a project manager can have, from paper pusher to team leader (hat tip, Raven)
• Harry Beck: The Paris Connection - Some of you may know I worked on a book about the london subway system. Beck is the guy who designed the famous 1930s version of their map, the basic design that lives on today. It was news to me, but he also proposed a map for the Paris subway system (hat tip, Paul).
• 8 Brilliant Scientific Screw-ups - the problem with articles like these about accidental inovation is they overlook the important part. After the accident, all these people did tons of work to figure out why the accident happened, something few of us ever do.
  
• Wall of Deliverables - I love the idea of a place for designers to share prototypes and work for critiquing and exchanging ideas. Hopefully this will take off. It’s funny to me how most dialog in the design community is over text based email - for all our tech, we still mostly describe our designs with words instead of showing them.
• A Medical Madoff: Anesthesiologist Faked Data in 21 Studies: Scientific American - another reason to always ask basic questions about research that seems too good to be true.
  
• Mapping the Innovation Gap - This is the most important chart I’ve seen in months about understanding how innovation happens.
• Abraham Lincoln: A Two-Way Innovator - Nice article about how important problem defining can be.  Many creators I know can work either way, they might have a preference, but once they have an idea they like, or a problem they’re interested in, they don’t really care.
  
• BrokenPictureTelephone.com - The Game of Miscommunication - Home - If this doesn’t make you laugh you need to seek help.  Only gripe is registration is a bear and there’s no easy way to just invite 5 friends to play. This one about a tornado is one of my favorites.
  
• Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | Books | A.V. Club - Interesting website focused on writing reviews of books made into films. This review is about the watchmen (a book and film I liked in both forms).
  

Posted in Design, Innovation, humor, linkfest | 1 Comment »

A common problem experts, like user experience designers, have is working for an executive who has no idea what they do.

The trap is often the expert, in this case, a designer, is hired by the VP, but no one anticipates how many things need to change in the organization for the designer to be of use.  So the designer sits on the sidelines, frustrated, while the VP is happy since now s/he can say “We have a design expert on staff” even if that expert isn’t contributing much.

This situation is common, but it’s not a disaster. It just means you have to be your own advocate in making your contributions visible. Here’s a battle plan:

• Make small wins. Pick a few well chosen areas and people to work with, and make simple but clearly visible improvements to the work around you.  This will force responses from your peers and give you a sense of who is excited about what you can do, and who doesn’t care.
• Get a supporter. Of the people interested in your work, who has the best combination of influence and interest in your work? They are your ally and you need to cultivate their support. Start with sharing your goals and asking their advice. “I’d like to be involved earlier in the decision making process. How do you suggest I make this happen here?”  As a political outsider, you need insider support to have any chance of growing political capital.
• Find something small and specific to ask for. Anyone who does not know what you do has no reason to invest in you. Your relationship with them begins with you asking for something small and reasonable, and using it for the benefit of the entire team. Ask for a small amount of money, ask for a small amount of time from programmers, but ask. Offer something in return: higher quality, greater efficiency, higher profits. Something. When you get what you ask for, hit it out of the park - do an amazing job. You may only get one shot so make it good. Show the results and if everyone is positive ask for something a little bigger. Repeat.
• Use their language, not yours.  Stop using your domain language, and translate into the language of the people in power. This may mean learning about P&Ls, marketing plans, test regressions, or other terms, but speak their language and offer your value in their language. You are on their turf and should act accordingly. Think of yourself as a political Marine, adapting to the terrain you land in. If you can’t translate your work into terms they understand you will fail for that reason alone.
• Show an example from a company/team they admire.  If there is another project in your company where you role is well understood, use them as an example. Show how your counterparts in that organization interact, and how they benefit from it. If you can’t find an example in your company, look to other companies your VP admires.
• Worry about your peers first.  It’s hard to score points up the food chain without a good reputation at your own place in the org chart. It’s daft to take on the VP when the middle level managers don’t know who you are either, or worse, think of you as someone who complains all the time but adds no value. You might have a local manager who is well connected up the food chain:  if you can get a small amount of support from them, it will open doors you can not open yourself.
• Maybe the VP doesn’t need to know. VPs often have less power or influence than you think. There may be a team lead or group manager who is the true power source for your project. Think carefully about what power you need to be successful and who can grant it to you.  It’s likely someone more within reach in the org chart than the VP.  And of course, consider this: the best way to be introduced into the VPs power circle is by invitation. If your reputation for making big contributions precedes you, they may in fact seek you out, and not the other way around.

Also check out my free webcast this Thursday, March 19th, 10 am PST,  How Progress happens, which offers more tactics and inspiration on making change happen.

Posted in Design, Management, creative thinking | 4 Comments »

A few months ago I finally purchased a new cell phone, a Palm Centro, first in about 5 years. My review was positive, but as with most reviews, them come early in the life of using the thing, and you never get to hear what happens after months of of usage. So here’s a follow up review - Steve asked for one, so here it is (Hi Steve!).

In short: I still love this phone.

The good:

High ease of use, simple design, I love the keyboard (YMMV - see picture), it’s small enough to slide into any of my pockets and has decent to good battery life. There are various little UI design elements they got right, such as reply to a missed call with a txt message, a nice vibrate switch right on top of the phone (can switch it without taking it out of pocket), and an easily toggle-able flight mode for being on planes.

It has a handy pseudo-GPS feature, that uses cell-towers to triangulate position in google-maps. Works great. I use it all the time. It’s accurate to within 500-1000 feet which is enough to get a map I can figure out no matter where I am.

I rarely use the stylus that comes with the device - a finger works fine 90% of the time in all the UI I use.

The bad: There are a few minor complaints. Trying to be thorough here, but despite the list these things are minor. Rarely encountered or little impact.

• Minor performance issues. The phone can get lost when you have too many apps working - switching between them sometimes can be slow. In these moments it feels like the device needs more RAM.
• Web browser is adequate. I use it often and its fine. It’s definitely underpowered for large pages and it doesn’t handle this well. So if you happen to hit a complex 500kb table or something, the browser chokes - it will time itself out after 20 seconds or so, but it’s not fun. This is rare, but does happen if you’re doing heavy web browsing and end up on heavy duty pages. The close window button is too small to hit with a finger, so you need the stylus to kill the browser.
• The sync plug is a bear. It’s a strange plug, with a wide two pronged adapter. It’s impossible to get this thing out without a lot of force, and I’m always afraid I’m going to break it, which would make the phone impossible to sync. It is a durable plug, it’s just designed in a way that makes me nervous when I use it.
• PDF support is slow. There may be a better PDF viewer than the one I have, but the I have makes sleeping turtles look fast, and its UI is frustrating - feels like a bad port of a standalone viewer, not one designed for a small screen. It works, but is slow and annoying. I tried to read a restaurant menu through it once, scrolling around, trying to zoom in and out, and simply gave up.

So if you can’t wait for the Palm Pre, which looks pretty sharp, The Palm Centro (product info here) could be a good choice.

Posted in Design, Product reviews, creative thinking, mailbag | 2 Comments »

Recently Joel on Software posted about how to be a program manager and he lists UI design as one of the skills program managers should be responsible for. It’s no surprise that people who call themselves UI designers, such as the folks on on the interaction design mailing list, have taken notice and are mostly unhappy.

(Back story: The idea of program managers, roughly a sergeant level generalist who drives projects, is an idea I like.  It’s a job role Microsoft started in the late 1980s . It’s a job I had in the 90s).

Which gets to the question of should PMs do design.

The easy answer is yes, if they are good at it. Most are not. Most do not know this because they’ve never met an interaction designer, someone who does it professionally for a living. Simply because Fred is better at it than his peers, he assumes he is good. It’s not his fault exactly. Most computer science programs and business schools never talk to design schools. Certainly not about how much they need to learn from the other. And most program managers in the world are hired from computer science and business schools.

Anyway, the better teams at Microsoft figured this out over a decade ago. They did one of:

• Hired full time UI designers and usability engineers.  (In 2003, when I left, there were over 400 of these people employed at Microsoft).
• Created a special role called a UI PM, who was the PM good at design who led the UI work.
• Or both.

VPs that cared about ease of use invested in these assets, and just as important, built a culture around ease of use taking priority over other considerations.

However, in most cases the above investments had moderate impact on product quality because these people never receive sufficient power to overcome the other 20 PMs running around. Sometimes all the PMs are ignored anyway by the programmers but they are in denial about it, so it’s moot until that fight for power gets sorted out.

The program manager model is just one idea for diving up work. It’s a good model, but does have it’s problems. On larger teams it’s too easy for PMs to get lost in their egos and self-interests, each one fighting to make a great feature, inside of what becomes a mediocre product.  It’s also a role that depends on culture, you can’t just graft it on and expect it to work as it impacts everyone.

Program management works best on smaller teams, or in organizations where the PM can have significant power. Once you have 15 or 20 of them running around it gets hard to sort things out. Imagine 15 or 20 film directors trying to work on a film together. If you give them enough power, you don’t need many film directors. And if you don’t need many, it’s easier to find ones with all of the talents you want, including the ability to design user interfaces.

The bottom line: program managers are generalists

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter who makes the UI design decisions provided they are good and they ship.  If you’re a PM, your primary obligation is the quality of what goes out the door. If you have someone other than you available who is good at design, your top priority should be to get out of their way, just as you would for someone good at programming, testing, or any other role. Find other things to do to keep busy - I’m sure they exist. The value of the PM, or any manager, is their ability to fight for the best use of everyone’s time, including their own.

If ease of use is truly important in what you’re making, odds are it deserves the attention of a specialist or two who can dedicate their energy to it. If nothing else, they can teach you some of the stuff you don’t know you need to know. PMs can rarely dedicate their attention to anything, as their value is their ability to co-ordinate and lead.

The bestselling book I wrote about program management, Making Things happen, has several nice chapters about how to lead design and customer research, and advocates the above advice.

Posted in Design, Making things happen, Management, Microsoft | 5 Comments »