I’ve been thrashing through mockups the last few weeks, and was frustrated with my initial versions of form designs, they seemed to take a few reviews before they were at a good starting point I felt would be easy to use. A friend of mine Peter Grearson pointed me to Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski and it was fantastic.

The book is well structured, getting to the point with explanations, visual references, and references to previous studies, tests performed for the book and clearly stated when drawing on personal experience and preferences.  This is great as i tend to get frustrated with authors which rant their personal preferences but don’t cough up any concrete evidence that their opinion is remotely valid when tested against real people.

I’ve since gone back and touched up a few forms but really happy that most of the design decisions that i’d worked on were inline with the recommendations on those specific situations.

This book doesn’t tell you all forms should be designed “X” way. Its funny that the author answers this question with “it depends”.  Which when i first read the line, i thought; ‘you bastard, i’ve just bought this book and your not going to have an opinion at all’. But reading further on your provided with a number of example situations and research to backup which solution tested provided certain results. e.g. allowing you to assess if accuracy or speed (or a healthy balance of both) is more appropriate for your frame of reference.

Go check out the table of contents, read the first chapter if you want, but if you have to design a form, build a form, or in any way influence the creation of a form i highly recommend this book. It might just save me some time and pain filling out another crappy web form in the future, or even better save some lives in a hospital CRM system.

After reading a book on Buckminster fuller I came across this video it’s a full hour, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN_ODfUBGeY

Lean Thinking
Too many fascinating things to list, but an underlying principal of “doing more and more with less and less” for the benefit of man is fantastic, and it’s always great to change your frame of reference to zoom out a little more, for me I was relating the concepts to Lean Thinking as a vehicle of improving the quality of life for humanity, it’s the rudder at the back of the boat which can shift our overall direction.

Design Responsibility
At 1:09: 45 to 1:10 50, I really enjoyed his rant he gave to a class of architecture students, about the responsibility we have as designers. Specifically their concern with how pretty it looks, and asking them to stop concerning themselves with this and instead work on the function and in an economical way that its realizable, how pretty it looks will come out if you have solved the problem properly, like a rose is beautiful, or sunset, something we all know as experience designers. Put in the reference of “responsibility”, it makes me think of the alternative which means concerning yourself with aesthetics first is negligent.

Iterative and zooming out
My favorite part was at the end when he was talking about the dome being used for covering cities with a dome and its economic benefits, then transitioning to his next iteration of making cities obsolete by producing little black box’s that you could create your own ecosystem, offering quality of life that can be packed and carried away anywhere you want to go along with your paper dome that lasts years for shelter. The solutions come back to his big picture view of our earth as a spaceship, he is a futurist (or nutter) but we have this technology now, you can get free eBooks on creating your own bio sphere, they’re not yet compactable into a suitcase, but it is possible to be completely self sufficient.

It’s my random reference of inspiration this month but hope this prompts some new ideas by zooming out a little and changing your frame of reference, what’s the equivalent of spaceship earth in your company, group, industry, zooming out might help you find next year’s solution. By thinking lean and zooming out, is the problem you are trying to solve/improve really needing a long term plan to make obsolete?

When I started reading this book I had only just been introduced to the coined term Service Design. I was seeking to understand what was generally expected and what approach was generally taken in Service Design. 

To help me grasp the overall concepts and get an understanding of how other service designers approach their jobs, this book was great. It is beautifully designed, and presented, I was also pleased that the author approach writing the book as a service design project, and not an author/designer locked in a studio.

I had naturally been doing co-creative, user centered and visual approach to Customer Experience Management, so I was pleased to see some of this in the principals of service design thinking. Examining the title you should notice it says “This is service design thinking” and not “this is service design” which realizes that many professions are already doing service design thinking in their specific roles.

Fields of Service Design:

• Product Design
• Graphic Design
• Interaction Design
• Social Design
• Strategic Management
• Operations Management
• Design Ethnography

Defining service design, and service design thinking was also described in the book and it was interesting that there are allot of attempts, and not yet an agreed definition as service design is very young as a term.

A definition I liked from the book was:
“Service design is all about making the service you deliver useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable. “ (UK Design Council, 2010)

Also the 5 principals of Service Design Thinking:

1. User Centered
2. Co-creative
3. Sequencing
4. Evidencing
5. Holistic

Overall I would recommend this book for anybody wanting to understand and get started with service design.

To get others opinions I attended a book club in Melbourne which recently reviewed the book, one specific points was a few people felt co creation did not fit as a tool, and why it was also duplicated as a principal. It possibly should be left as a principal and removed as a tool.

Additionally the tools were extensive but didn’t go into specific details e.g. a process of how to use them, overall though we agreed this would have been difficult to achieve without the book being twice as long and it at least gave you direction to seek more information.

I asked the group: “on a scale of 0-10 how likely are you to recommend This is service design thinking to friends and colleagues”

The responses were:

2 x Promoters (9,10)
2 x Passive (7,8)
3 x Detractors (0-6)
Note: nobody marked less than 5. 

I also asked do you think its worth reading unanimously it was yes.

This is a simple story that reveals some truths on how we react to change. As the story unfolds you can relate and see in others how they are playing out the story in their own reactions to change.

This great thing about the story is that you could attempt to explain all the lessons literally but this tiny book would end up as a novel. Great work guys in succinctly getting the point across in so few words.

My take from the story is at the end of the story the character hem isn’t revealed as making it through the maze to the next cheese station (experiencing change), and rightly so sometimes people just don’t want to change, and no matter what you do you just can’t change their mind. Sometimes you need to let go of those wo don’t want to change.

Chris Anderson’s book “Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing” explores the history of free business models, showing its not a new concept created by the internet, and articulates a number of free business models which are used today.

An example of some of the content includes an explanation of each identified Free model:
Free 1: Direct Cross-Subsidies
Free 2: The Three-Party Market
Free 3: Freemium
Free 4: Nonmonetary Markets

What i like about this book is it explores the mindset how people react to free, one of the chapters is “The cost of zero cost” and Chris explains free and “behavioral economics” by drawing on work from Dan Ariely in “Predictably Irational”.
Basically zero is not another price point, its an emotional hot button, two experiments were conducted where two competing product were priced at 15cents and 1cent and participants asked to choose; 73percent chose the 15cent product and 27percent the 1 cent product. But when they dropped the price by 1 cent, and the products were now priced 14cents and $0 the customers reversed their preference.

So it doesn’t matter what the value of the product is, when its free we can we disregard the other choice, additionally people who may not have bothered paying at all sign up simply because its free when its free, we waste.

At work we recently changed our website setup price from $2000 setup to $0 (with $99 monthlies), the team accepted this and it was easy to see that by dropping our setup costs we could get more people onto the subscription. But it wasn’t until we started talking about releasing a new product that was actually ‘free setup and free monthlies’ and you pay for the premium edition did the team start to get worried. Some of the questions were, “but whats stopping clients using the software and never upgrading” and “that means we have users which are paying absolutely nothing”. Its an uncomfortable change for many people to go to the Free business model, where you relinquish control and embrace that users will wast the service simply because its free. But the payoffs can be great, by giving it away, if your product is good enough that you capture the audience and get mass adoption; you can now worry about how you monetize the use.

Want examples of profitable businesses that use free? Want to know more about how you can do it for your business? Go buy the book, I thought it was a really interesting read, it kept me thinking to the end, and now the next big thing I ship will be “Free”.

——————–
Rating: Loved it 5 Stars
Recommended to me by: Matthew Gay from REA Group
Title: Free How today’s smartest businesses profit by giving something for nothing
Turns traditional economics upside down ‘Guardian’
ISBN: 9781905211494
——————-

After reading purple cow, I was keen to see what was in store for linchpin, but was disappointed. I could see how people who follow the system by going to work and following the rules realllllllllly need this book and could be enlightened by the repetition of his message. But there are only so many ways i need to be told that the current employment and education system breeds followers before wanting to skip pages.

If you need a kick in the pants because you find yourself saying “I don’t have the authority to make change” or even get uncomfortable if somebody was to call you a genius then read this book, because Seth does articulate that everybody has the capacity to bring an indispensable ability to your work, just in too many words for my liking.

This was an amazing book, it had me quoting to friends and jotting down ideas on how I could apply the principals to my own team but importantly got great results when applied.

I’m writing this a few months out of reading it, and seeing the rewards. The book is a historical look into toyota lean manufacturing and the concepts and cultures that were observed in how Toyota works.

You look inside the culture and way of life of Toyota, not giving a cookbook of how to’s but you walk away with an in-depth understanding on the subject.

I found the stories were great and really stick in your head I.e the concept of “stop when there is a quality problem” (jidoka). This principal for Toyota started with Igi Toyoda where he built an automatic weaving loom that stopped when the thread broke so no material was wasted. A simple concept but we constantly overlook this in todays IT industry. (unless your agile and writing tests for your code) This was just one of many concepts which stuck with me.

I think what’s interesting is it’s universal application to production of any sort. I was able to apply the concepts to a web design team that produces between 15-30 bespoke realestate websites per month. As well as the support process for alterations to these sites which has upwards of 200 changes per month. I found the teams were working in their specialist areas with the customer being bounced around different departments with each department reporting on how efficient their piece of the puzzle was, but for every change of department there was a delay (muda or waste), which when you calculate all the waiting time to all the individual time, there was more waste than there was value creating time. Even worse the change requests, the time we spent doing (value creating time) was around 2 hours, and the time waiting (mud) was 2 weeks and we knew a lead time of 2 weeks 2 hrs was not acceptable to.

What do you do. I applied the concepts of lean manufacturing, realizing that the most importing thing is getting the product to the customer in the shortest period of time instead of how efficient The designers were at completing their portion of the request. The designer now called the client so we removed the admin staff from the process, and banned emails for requests that need communication (back and forth). Plus scrapped measuring developer time and only measured end to end time process as seen by the client. And finally put in place an automatic quality check (judoka) where we ask the client a customer loyalty question (nps) so the same day we deliver a service if there is an unhappy customer we can stop and fix the problem before another client is affected.

After 1 month of operation it dropped the turn around time 63% from 24 days to 9 days when compared to the same time the year before and with the same number of changes.

Now a few things which you need to fight. Your designers are now spending a portion of their day doing administration and customer service, they need cross skilling, time management and motivation that this is the best solution for the client. The knee jerk reaction would be to keep you high paid designers on design only, but if your customers are churning because it doesn’t work, then its not working.

Reading the toyota way put me on a fantastic learning curve for a web team leader, and showed that applying lean manufacturing to a web production house was possible and beneficial. It also opens your eyes to how young the digital industry is because whether you are building a boat, a phone, a website; there are approaches to working which seem to be overlooked in the IT industry today. It is like we’re to hi tech to look back into history for ideas.

Well thanks I learnt a lot.

A few more which are great also: